Basic Set with Character Generation

This is something of a cross-post from a discussion at ENWorld. Once again there's been a discussion of "how to simplify the new player experience" that usually turns into calls to use pre-generated PCs, or templates or stock packages, etc. I rather strongly disagree with that, and here's why:

A lot of the addictive goodness in D&D comes from playing your own, personalized, unique character. The new player experience simply must have that element. The way they pick a character really has to be the same core process that the rest of us use, so they can cleanly interface with the rest of the rules after they play the first time.

To me, that means that the core process itself has to get whittled down. After a lot of thought, I have a campaign that does this:
- 4 core races
- 4 core classes
- No skill points (see Unearthed Arcana)
- Only class bonus feats (i.e., none at 1st level)
- Spontaneous divine casters (see Unearthed Arcana)
- Fixed starting spell lists for spellcasters (in 3 flavors)

Therefore, 1st-level character generation looks like this, for all players:
- Roll abilities & arrange
- Pick race & class, roll hit points
- Spellcasters choose starting faction (spellbook)
- Buy equipment (from one-page basic list)

I think that's easy enough for first-time players, but it's not any different for expert players in my campaign. If you want expanded options, those are all pushed to higher levels: new spell selections, fighter feats start at 2nd level, etc. If you have expert players and that's not enough for them, start them at higher level, to whatever point the number of options match their taste.

A really important thing to remember is that D&D's hugest growth came in the 1978-1984 era when they had the "Basic Blue Set", limited to levels 1-3, and was intended to directly connect with the larger AD&D ruleset that was coming out at the same time. For some reason, TSR/WOTC has avoided that ever since, and IMO it's the biggest ongoing mistake the company ever made.


To recap: Player choices are great; just push some of the choices to higher levels. Start new players at first level, and expert players at higher levels if so desired. 3E has too many of the choices front-loaded at first level.

Castles!

I've been doing some extra reading on historical castles lately. I've hit on a wonderful architectural book: "Castles: Their Construction and History" by Sidney Toy. It's got almost 200 detailed maps and floor plans, so it's about the best resource for nearly game-ready historical maps that I can think of. Here's a few random thoughts:

Porting a small amount of magic into a historical milieu wouldn't change things a whole lot. Within a few pages of medieval siege chronicles, there's several references to what could be considered the belief in magic in the first place:
- "Among the engines of the crusaders there was one which threw enormous stones with unusual force. It did great execution among those on the battlements and the enemy's attacks on it had no effect. The Turks then brought up two witches and set them on the wall in order that they might curse it; but a missile from the engine struck and killed both the witches as well as three other women who were with them." (Siege of Jerusalem, 1099; p. 146).
- "The fleet, having erected on their galleys a tall siege tower and other engines, all covered with raw hides, made a vigorous attack on the Tower of Flies. Those in the tower, assisted by the citizens who came to their aid, responded with equal energy; they threw Greek fire on the siege tower, and on the other machines of their foes, and by this means destroyed them, and so the attack from this side failed." (Siege of Acre, 1189-1192; p. 147)
- "Greek fire, having the property of spreading in all directions, was thrown from the engines of the Saracens on the Crusaders to their great terror and consternation." (p. 143)

These last two quotes force me to think of replacing historical Greek fire (poorly understood by the Crusaders, and something of a mystery even to this day) with one or two wizards casting fireballs, and having much the same effect.

The other thing that occurs to me, is that even if some amount of flying magic or creatures are a concern in the setting, the likely technological response would be to simply halt castle evolution at the stage of strong square and round keeps, as seen in the 10th and 11th centuries. (That is, the evolution of large curtain walls and bailey complexes in the 12th and 13th and later centuries might be arrested.) In other words, the presence of some amount of magic and fantastic creatures might itself serve to retard certain technological progress beyond a low-middle-ages level.

Software Tool for 3E: OGCombatWin

I just completed a tool that I was aching for over a long time. What it does is automatically simulate several thousand combats in 3E D&D with any monster you enter, and evaluate what level of NPC fighter would be evenly matched against it. I'm using this as a super-fast starting point for CR evaluations of new (or advanced or modified) monsters. OGCombatWin only evaluates raw attacks (melee or ranged), against as many opponents as you'd like. It doesn't handle any spells, magic, or special abilities, so you'll still need to evaluate or playtest to come up with hard CR numbers (usually more devaluation is needed at higher levels).

In fact, I've found this incredibly fun to play around with, and I'm finding it to be a really useful tool for exploring how the 3E CR system fits together. One thing I've been really surprised by is how well the x2 monsters = +2 EL rule works -- it's not perfect, but it's close to correct a whole lot more than I originally would have guessed. Try it out, it's kind of fun! (I also provide all the source code if you want to see it or improve it.)

http://www.superdan.net/software/

Playtest Party Stats

Recently I've been doing some playtests for a potential reduced d20 System game. Among the things I worked up is a nice page of standard statistics for NPC parties of levels 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, and 12. I've found this pretty useful -- you might check it out under "Standard Party Statistics" located here: http://www.superdan.net/dnddocs.html

Preferred Ruleset

I keep thinking about starting a few new D&D games from scratch, and I go back and forth about which ruleset to use. Frankly, I have a complete block on the issue, and I totally can't settle on being happy with any one ruleset anymore. It's kind of like a torture. :) Here's what it seems to boil down to -- consider the classic D&D division into material for Players, Judges, and Monsters (i.e., PHB, DMG, MM; or in OD&D, original Volumes 1, 2, and 3):

3E is Best for Players. I think the designers of 3E really took a huge leap forward with the mechanics for player-character creation. Frankly, I love the system and feel totally spoiled by it. I really like having a clean and unified chart for ability scores. I love the unified XP chart and simple, open, additive multiclassing (personally, I would reduce things down to the four core classes, and let multiclassing take care of all the combinative options). I love the feat system to death (although I think there are generally too many feats to manage in play -- I'd reduce it to class bonus feats only to make it manageable, very easily done).

3E has all kinds of potential for game-mastery, being reducible to a very small number of races and classes, with multitudes of combinations available via the feat and multiclassing options. One thing I don't like is the fiddly skill-point system (I'd cut it out or use UA's simplified variant). As an aside, I'm coming to the opinion that any point-based character system feels fussy and broken to me (such as for abilities, skills, spell resorvoirs, psionics, magic item creation, etc.)

OD&D is Best for Judges & Monsters. But that said, trying to actually run a game of 3E is a huge complicated mess for me. Resolving everyone's individual initiative order, laying out battlemaps for every fight, all the combat options and action types and AOOs and complex spells, opposed skill checks for everything, etc., is a big crushing time sink. I would so much rather use OD&D's simple system for surprise, initiative, searching, and combat.

The first thing I'm coming around to is that the worst mistake the 3E designers may have made is to make the monster mechanics fully an extended superset of the PC mechanics. If the players just have one PC each, but the DM preps and runs scores of monsters per session, it really makes sense to have different resolution fidelity (think level-of-detail) to make things easier for the DM. All prior versions of D&D did that, but 3E booted the idea as insufficient. Monster statistics now run a full page each in official adventures; many DMs personally find they can fudge details, but there's no agreed-upon standard for what goes and what stays. There's really no advantage to tracking all the skills, feats, languages, ability scores, hit point adjustments, damage bonuses, save modifiers, etc. for every single monster (how often would players truly notice any difference?) The worst case-study is when the designers decided that the rules implied that independent grapple scores had to be tracked for every single monster and inserted them as yet another new line in the 3.5 MM (an alternative would be to create a simple system based solely on Hit Dice, or just match primary attack scores, etc.).

My preference for monsters would be a version like OD&D where everything has a integral number of Hit Dice, attacks, and damage dice (i.e., no bother distinguishing between different damage die types, ranges, or plus-modifiers; just 1 or 2 or 3 dice of damage, the end).

A side note is how much better the treasure system is in OD&D/AD&D. In 3E, every monster has a standard treasure amount commensurate with its Challenge Rating. That's a huge mistake narratively, because it makes treasure-finding predictable and flat in each encounter. The OD&D/AD&D system has a fairly low "% in lair" chance that must be rolled for each monster (one of just 5 key statistics for each monster type), and if successful, then it's likely that a large amount of treasure appears. While commonly overlooked in AD&D, what that means is that treasure troves occur more rarely, but are larger, and hence a much bigger exciting event when they are discovered. A comparison can be made to a sport like football or soccer (or any casino game), where the scores happen but rarely, and the fans go absolutely wild when they actually do occur. 3E totally overlooked that aspect of the game when the designers normalized treasure appearance.

And the final thing is that even though I like regularized attack bonuses and getting rid of attack and saving throw tables -- I think the actual core mechanic of the d20 System isn't good enough for me. If I look at OD&D/AD&D, what it's very close to is a "Target 20" system as I call it, where a d20 is rolled, bonuses added, and success is any result of 20 or above. I think it's simpler and faster to adjudicate.

Example #1, D&D "d20 System": 10th-level fighter attacks a red dragon. He rolls a 19, adds 15 for his attack bonus (total 34), then compares to the dragon's AC of 32 (technically a subtraction operation), indicating a hit.

Example #2, OD&D, "Target 20" Mechanic: 10th-level fighter attacks a red dragon. He rolls a 12, adds 10 for his level, plus 2 for the dragon's AC. The result is clearly over 20, so a hit is scored.

Notice how in the second case the numbers involved are all lower, and the operation is purely additive. Having ACs look like 5 or 2 is much easier to deal with than 15 or 18 or 32 or up (carries happen less often). Performing saving throws the same way means no DCs ever need to be recorded (special attacks didn't generally scale up in OD&D/AD&D vs. saving throws; in special cases you might note a bonus or penalty to the save, but that's a definite minority of cases). When the 3E designers created the roll-vs-DC system, they instantly doubled the number of statistics that had to be tracked by the DM, because every single spell and special attack then needed a DC target recorded for it.

I could say the same about effects like poison and energy draining. Previously they were simple, straightforward, and very dangerous (yes, save-or-die). In 3E they're fiddly, fussy, complicated, and kind of forgettable (the effect of most poison types is so minimal you wonder why anyone goes to the trouble of procuring them in-game).

So there you have it. I'm completely torn between the fantastic developmental leap between 3E's excellent system for a Players, and OD&D/AD&D's much more streamlined system for Judges and Monsters to run the actual action. The pain is in realizing that the 3E designers had one-third of a complete genius-level epiphany, and kind of dropped the ball on the remaining two-thirds. Every time I feel myself leaning towards one system, I find myself totally unable to let go of the advantages of the other system. I'm not sure if I'll ever be able to resolve this dilemma at this point. I guess my fantasy would be if 4E D&D came out, it was OGC, based on 3E's Player system with four core classes, and an immensely reduced resolution fidelity for its Judges and Monsters behind the screen. I can't conceivably imagine that there's any hope for that, however.

The Helmet Rule

OD&D has 5 pieces of armor on the equipment list -- plate, chain, leather, shield, and helmet. An oversight is that the last item has no specified effect on your defensive status. AD&D tried to correct for this by adding an extremely cumbersome rule about the chance-to-hit-someones-head (involving an additional d6 roll for every attack, blech; 1E DMG p. 28), but we'll try to avoid that here.

The Helmet Rule
If no suit of armor is worn, a helmet gives a 1 point bonus to AC (up to AC 7). If a suit of armor is worn, then a helmet is also required or else a 1 point penalty to AC is applied.

Encumbrance

Encumbrance is one of those fiddly bits in D&D that no one really enjoys (and lots of people just ignore once the game is in progress). It's not something that really needs to be "fixed" in OD&D (it's as simple there as in any published ruleset), but nontheless, while falling asleep last night, a somewhat better way of handling things occured to me. In short, you should just use a coarser unit, one which makes the numbers easier to count mentally, and only have to deal with them when it makes a direct difference on gameplay.

Encumbrance
Calculating encumbrance can alternatively be done using the old English unit of the "stone" (that is, 14 pounds). For D&D, let's say that 1 "stone" = 150 coins weight. For example, a grown man weighs about 12 stone. Conversions for gear are as follows:

Plate -- 5 stone
Chain -- 3
Leather -- 2
Shield -- 1
Weapon, heavy -- 1
Weapon, light -- 1 per 3 carried
Misc. Equipment -- 1 (total)

Heavy weapons include the pole arm, halberd, pike, two-handed sword, morning star, flail, and battle axe. Light weapons include the sword, mace, hand axe, and bow -- or items like a helmet, small sack of coins, large chalice, etc. Tiny items are counted only if a character carries a large number of them; such gear as a dagger, potion, scroll, jewelry, etc. can be counted at 1 stone per 6 items, if so desired. Obviously, every 150 coins of treasure adds 1 stone (a backpack or large sack can carry 2 stone worth). Conversions for movement categories follow:

12" Move -- up to 5 stone weight
9" Move -- up to 7
6" Move -- up to 10
3" Move -- up to 20

It should be fairly easy to remember the 5-10-20 stone weight maximum categories (for movement rates of 12", 6", and 3").


Design Notes: Encumbrance
This alternative system feeds off of a particular thesis of mine regarding measurement systems. Sometimes I hear proponents of the Metric system complain about old-style Imperial units with comments like: "They don't make any sense; they're not based on units of 10". I claim that these are two separate considerations. Yes, the Metric system is ideally suited for making simple translations, and excellent for use in the sciences when your scales may need frequent conversions.

But the Imperial units "make sense" to a greater degree in that they're intrinsically scaled to people, and are more intuitive if you need to quickly and roughly estimate things on the fly. For example: a "foot" is about the length your foot. A "hand" is the size of your hand. A "league" is about how far you can walk in an hour. Temperature of 0 degrees fahrenheit is very cold (about where blood can freeze), 50 degrees temperate, 100 degress very hot (about where blood is in a living person). And, one "stone" is about the amount of weight that will get your attention when you try to carry it.

Of course, we have the additional benefit in D&D that Imperial units serve to further conjure the flavor of a medieval and "old-timey" campaign setting. They're very human-scaled and specifically pre-scientific. And most importantly, they highlight that the statistics used in any game should be scaled to the actual play of that game.

(One final note for 3E players -- using the "per stone" encumbrance system, you could simply use the total stone-weight carried as the character's skill Check Penalty, and it comes out just the same as the load categories the d20 System! Now, this is for average-Str PC's; perhaps you can let the Str bonus ignore the first number of stone weight units.)