Finally, A New Post

I'm horrified to see that I haven't howled from the tower since January 27. I believe that I have a decent excuse, though. I've been sequestered while writing the premier 5th Edition D&D adventures -- Hoard of the Dragon Queen and The Rise of Tiamat, collectively titled Tyranny of Dragons -- along with Wolfgang Baur and Alexander Winter. Until recently, we weren't allowed to talk about what we were doing. Even if we had been, every word I wrote for the last many months went into those adventures. Writing for other purposes, like blogging, could only endanger the deadlines, so everything else got shelved.

But now the adventures are written and I can move on to other things. I still don't have much time for personal writing -- more on that to come -- but at last I can talk about Tyranny of Dragons.

And I have, over at KoboldPress.com, in some of the Tiamat Tuesday postings. My entries are "Maintaining Focus," "Tiers of Tiamat," "Closing In On the Cult," and "So You're Running Tyranny of Dragons." Wolfgang, Marc Radle, and Guido Kuip also chime in with essays about the Cult of the Dragon and about the illustrations and maps in the adventures. If you're looking for direction on what to expect from Tyranny of Dragons, Tiamat Tuesday is the best place to start.

In other news, I'm headed to GenCon again this year, for the first time in . . . wow, it must be over 10 years. I attended a few of the early Indianapolis GenCons, but I stopped going after the year when I spent nearly the entire show sealed away in a side room playing Terrible Swift Sword with a group of fellow TSR alumni. We had a great time, but we realized that we didn't need to travel to Indianapolis, stay in dreary hotels, and struggle against constant crowds to play TSS for four days. We could have just as easily spent a long weekend at someone's house in Wisconsin or Washington, where we'd have been more comfortable and saved a bunch of money. I never went back after that year.

But here it is 2014, there's a fantastic new edition of D&D, and I have the honor of coauthoring the premier adventure for it. I'll be spending much of my time in the Kobold Press booth, discussing Tyranny of Dragons (and 5E) with anyone who's interested and signing copies for anyone who wants theirs besmudged with my scribble. If you're in the neighborhood, stop by and chat.

I'll also be sitting on a seminar panel: either "When the Kobolds Met Tiamat" at noon on Friday, or "Storytelling in the Realms" at 4 p.m. on Friday. I suspect it will be the first of those, or maybe it will be both, but I won't know for sure until I get to the convention. I'll also be interviewed on the official Gencon podcast at 10:30 a.m. on Saturday. Listen live if you want to hear all the scatology that will be bleeped out in the download version.

Finally, with Tyranny of Dragons put to bed, I'm now devoting my 12-hour days to Necromancer Games's 5E Kickstarter. But that's a topic for after Gencon. I hope to see plenty of you in Indianapolis.

The First Paladin

Yesterday evening, I was invited to sit in on the filming of a new episode of The First Paladin, Peter Adkison's video series about his Chaldea campaign. The group is using the D&D Next playtest rules for the campaign, and they wanted to update their characters from the 1st iteration of the rules to the current, 3rd iteration. My contribution was walking them through that process and answering questions.

If you haven't watched any of the First Paladin vidcasts, check out a few. The campaign is highly political. That's not to say there's no fighting, because there's plenty of action. Instead of dealing with monsters and dungeons, the story revolves around the machinations of the ruling Swartout family. The Baron of Gaunt sits an uneasy throne and faces schemes from every direction, particularly from his own family. Fun stuff.

Keeping Your Balance on the Power Curve

The Legends & Lore column by Mike Mearls on Oct. 8 concerning magic items in D&D Next has set off a predictable flurry of online ... hmmm, let's call it "conversation and debate."

The debate is not just over how magic items should fit into D&D. It goes straight to the mathematical heart of D&D and raises fundamental questions about how the game should work.

The argument boils down to this. If magical bonuses are "balanced" across the system, then they become wired into the game's math so that magical accessories become mandatory if characters are to keep pace with the power curve set by monsters. If those bonuses aren't wired into the math, then even a small magical bonus boosts characters ahead of the monster/NPC power curve and upsets the balance of "level-appropriate" encounters.

The problem as I see it is that those positions assume there are only two ways to deal with the power curve: You either define it rigidly as 3X and 4E did, or you ignore it and punt the problem into the DM's lap, as the original, 1st, and 2nd editions did.

I say a third option deserves a look. That's to develop a simple, reliable way to assess actual character power that looks beyond character level. The rigid systems currently in use assume that all level X characters are equivalent in power. Actually, they don't assume it; they are engineered toward the goal of ensuring it. Every level X character is forced to be equivalent to every other, or so goes the theory.

In practice, it doesn't work. Players rebel against uniformity. There are those who always look for means to pull ahead of the pack, and in a complex system like D&D, ways are bound to be found. Others make suboptimal choices, intentionally or unintentionally, that put them behind. Some DMs give away too much magic juice and others don't give enough. Once the rulebooks leave the warehouse, it's beyond the publisher's ability to control.

So the Average Power of a level X character is a statistical datum that has little bearing on the Actual Power of a specific character. Very few level X characters sit on the average. For a host of inescapable and desirable reasons, most will be some degree stronger or weaker than the arithmetic mean. In a group of five characters, those variations can average everything back toward the center or they can cumulatively create a whopping gap between expectation and reality.

If character level is an inadequate gauge of PC power, that doesn't mean the alternative is having no gauge  The alternative should be to develop a tool that is adequate -- a way to measure a character's effective level as opposed to its XP level, if you will.

I haven't developed such a system nor do I intend to, but I can illustrate how it would be used.

• Speary Mason is a level 5 fighter. He has Str 12 and no magic weapon or armor, making him slightly below average for a level 5 fighter. His EL (effective level) is 4. 
• Bill Guisarme is also a level 5 fighter, but he has Str 18 and a guisarme-voulge +1. He kills things faster than an average level 5 fighter would, so Bill's EL weighs in at 6. 
• Lance Wielder is another level 5 fighter, but Lance has a girdle of awesome muscles, a warhammer +3/+5 vs. creatures with bones, and a pair of Can't Touch This dancing pants. Beefed up with all that magic, Lance operates at EL 8 -- three ranks above his level.

When the DM designs an encounter for these three characters, she knows that 18 ranks of foes, not 15, will give a balanced fight, and that those foes should average around EL 6. The fact that all three PCs are level 5 is irrelevant. They could just as well be level 3 or level 8. What matters is that they function as a group of three characters at approximately EL 6.

The needed component is the system that lets DMs and players assess the real power of a character, accounting for level, ability scores, and magic. It should be easy enough to use so people will actually use it, but it doesn't need to be simplistic. The calculation needs adjustment only when something changes, as when characters go up a level or "inherit" a significant magic item. Effective Level would be more dynamic than character levels but only slightly so.

The benefit, which I see as huge, is that it cuts the wires binding together the XP tables, treasure tables, and monster tables. DMs can be as stingy or as generous as they like with magic swords and girdles, and they won't upset anything. Each campaign can establish its own power gradient unfettered by an official curve that depends on levels alone for gauging power. Whether I equip everyone with vorpal swords and pet dragons, or with bearskin diapers and t-rex jawbones, I'll still be able to put together a balanced, challenging encounter. Whether I want to is another story entirely; at least I'll have the tool.

A Brief History of Attack Bonuses

The subject of the bonuses that characters earn for leveling up is a contentious one (in my experience, anyway). I believe that's because it goes directly to the heart of what a D&D character is at its most fundamental: a list of numbers and situation-based alterations to the rules. The arguments center on whether the benefits of gaining levels are too much, too little, or just right.

There's a sense that these bonuses have escalated across editions, and that's generally true, but only in certain regards. It's not true in one aspect that may surprise people -- attack bonuses.

I've graphed the "automatic" attack bonuses that fighters gained in early editions of the game (OD&D in 1974, AD&D in 1979, and D&D Basic/Expert in 1981) along with 4th Edition (2008). These comparisons are necessarily rough because of the game's evolution, but they're still important.

Before showing the graphs and drawing conclusions, I'll lay out some of the ground rules.

The modifiers that are taken into account are the bonuses from the attacker's level, from Strength, from magic weapons, and from the expertise feat that is considered so essential in 4E. Fourth Edition has a regimented scale for magic weapons and Strength increases, unlike earlier editions that left these things in the hands of the DM and the random treasure tables. In early editions, Strength rarely changed after character creation. When it did, it was an exceptional occurrence. The amount of magic weaponry in the hands of early adventurers could vary wildly from campaign to campaign. Those scales are based on my experience as player, designer, and publisher.

The D&D B/X graph covers levels 1-15; OD&D and AD&D cover levels 1-20; and 4E covers levels 1-30. These are the levels included in the rulebooks. You can argue whether all of these levels really are playable, but the rulebooks claim that they are, and I'll take them at their word for this comparison.

With all of that out of the way, here are the graphs. Note that these are additive graphs; each line adds its values to the line below it, so that the top line on the graph shows the total value of all modifiers.

Original D&D (1974)

Advanced D&D (1979)

D&D Basic/Expert (1981)

D&D 4th Edition (2008)

Finally, here's a graph that plots the four totals against each other. This one's not additive; each line is the top line from the preceding four graphs.

Four Editions Compared

What these graphs show is that in all four of these D&D editions, a fighter's attack bonus increases at approximately the same pace and is approximately equal to his level throughout his adventuring career. The exception is the low-level 4E fighter, who starts with an advantage thanks to the handling of Strength bonuses in 4E (and 3E, which isn't covered here, obviously). That initial advantage wanes as the character advances.

These are only the basics, of course. Fourth Edition injects the all-important class powers, which can boost  the attack roll when it really matters. That's a somewhat different class of inflation, however, and I don't think it negates the importance of the progressions shown on these charts.

From my perspective, none of this is the real point. As interesting as this analysis is, it's not an end in itself. Instead, it lays the foundation for a much bigger question: Is there a better way to reward characters and players for gaining levels? That's a topic for later in the week.

Steve

P.S.: A quick note on why I chose these editions to compare. 4E is obvious. 2nd Ed. AD&D was omitted because it's basically identical to 1st Ed. Both OD&D and B/X were included because they employ different progressions from AD&D, and OD&D offers no bonus for high Strength. I find it interesting that in the end, those differences turn out to be more superficial than they appear. 3E doesn't appear for the simple reason that all my 3E manuals are packed away in boxes at the back of the storage room, and I didn't feel like digging them out.

A New Front in the Edition War?

Shawn Merwin raised an interesting point today in his Critical Hits blog, "How the Internet Changed a Game." I'd like to expand on it a bit.

D&D Next has set itself two noteworthy goals. The first is to offer something to fans of every D&D edition and get them all to sit down at the same table in one big Dungeons & Dragons inn. The second is to harness the power of fandom and the internet to help build that inn, through public playtesting and open feedback.

Both of those goals are challenging. The first is ultimately the responsibility of the very capable design team. The second places enormous power in the hands of a collective with the capacity to be energetic, enthusiastic, and effective -- but also vindictive, vicious, and downright malicious.

In the months leading up to 4E's release, online forums lit up like a Ukrainian geiger counter with hate for the concept, the art, the cosmology -- for anything new at all, in some cases. Those reactions were met by counter-hate against the haters, and Edition War III was on. (Depending on how you count them, I suppose.) Once the core books were published, the situation only got worse.

It’s fair to say that WotC did a poor job of managing expectations, reactions, and the raging arguments that erupted. But that failure didn't cause the problem. The great irony in the current divided state of D&D fandom is that while WotC created a schism with 4E, as every new edition of D&D inevitably does, it was overzealous, overreacting fans who turned that schism into a religious war complete with fanatics sworn to persecute and destroy the infidels. The validity of someone's opinion doesn't seem to matter; if you can't win an argument with facts, then you can at least drive away your opponents by being louder, more vehement, and more obnoxious.

Most grownups manage their disappointment without spitting on strangers and spray-painting hate onto public buildings. Away from the internet, that type of reaction is considered sociopathic. On the internet, it's commonplace, almost accepted.

As noted above, more than a little responsibility for the fractured state of D&D fandom can be laid at WotC’s doorstep, but the edition warriors can’t duck their share of the blame. To let them do so allows the same sort of dishonesty that lets the wife beater claim “she made me hit her.” No one stood to gain by turning the D&D community against itself; everyone had something to lose, including the people who stirred the pot with the biggest spoons.

Where does that leave us? With this: The next iteration of D&D has given itself the goal of reuniting as many players as possible in the town inn, regardless of whether their currently preferred edition is 4th, 3rd, 2nd, 1st, original, B/X, Pathfinder, or one of the many old-school retro-clones. D&D Next is not going to appeal to everyone, and plenty of people will stick with whichever previous version they know and love. But wouldn't it be grand if those who don’t come to the reunion would at least adopt a live-and-let-live attitude toward those who do and refrain from actively seeking to burn down the inn?

Steve