The rationale in accusing 4th Edition of being a pariah is multi-layered and mostly unfounded. For many, the parakeet had fallen dead in its cage years ago. What’s distressing to me is that most of it has nothing to do with the system itself. Like the aforementioned politician, if 4th Edition was independent or a system married to an organization not compelled by factors out of its control to act against its better interest, it would have been lauded for its modern design. The failures of 4th Edition are not rooted in its mechanics but in the politics surrounding it.

Let me analyze the history of the system and offer some obvious and perhaps controversial statements based on experience and on the opinions offered by people are whose opinions I trust. The division within the community had nothing to do with the rules themselves—with the MMO-style presentation or the simplicity of its structure. It was rooted entirely within the fanatical fan bases of 3rd party companies who themselves were being alienated by the very company that helped them become a success. Ignoring accusations or false assumptions of rivalry imagine what would have occurred if, in 2008, WOTC had offered the 4th Edition rules with a more moderate system license and offered it in January when it was originally promised to 3rd party companies, allowing them the opportunity to develop products in time for GenCon that year. This would also assume another stipulation that WOTC would then renew certain contracts and not lock said companies out of DDI, and then later not revise the rules three times. Without Pathfinder, would the mass of disgruntled fans have finally embraced 4th Edition?

This utopia of robe-wearing hippies frolicking in tall grass didn’t occur, but the parting of 3rd party companies only began because of schizophrenic communications and hemorrhaging staff within WOTC. Two rules errata, a clumsy online service, no digital storefront, and the release of Essentials which divided the fan base further (despite me actually liking it) exasperated people’s opinion of this soon unpopular rule set.

However, the rules themselves were solid. Yes, a few things needed to be tweaked, but don’t look at 3.0—err, 3.5 as the holy grail of adamantium-forged rules. Was 4th Edition perfect? I found the restrictions of defining encounters abrasive to more role playing-centered campaigns. I thought Essentials was a far superior character-creation system over the intimidating 30-page character classes of classic 4E, but its timing was atrocious. There were not nearly enough conditions to cover every possible effect you could impose on an opponent. And I hated hated hated skill challenges and how 4th Edition handled treasure. That being said, there are many things I hope people don’t forget when moving into 5th Edition. It would be foolish to disregard everything learned from the previous system.

Take defense values. Having Fortitude, Reflex, and Will operate the same as AC was ingenious. The balancing of character classes at every level was another. I know readers will get upset at me praising the power system, but presenting abilities in bullet form is simply easier than clumping it together in a paragraph, something Pathfinder still hasn’t addressed. As a GM/DM, I will also state unequivocally that monsters were better in 4th Edition than in any other D&D related system. So many games are built for the players, assuming the game runner will simply abide by the thankless job of spending hours between sessions designing or adapting monsters for our heroes. Creating unique and interesting monster for 4th Edition was easy and I didn’t have to flip back and forth between books to do it. I always said that 4th Edition was more popular with GMs but less popular with players, but there are more players than GMs so the minority lost out.

In all the talk regarding 5th Edition, there has been little to no dialogue addressing the politics around this new system. Unless this is addressed and repaired, nothing 5th Edition offers mechanically will appease those that abandoned it. This will involve offering olive branches to 3rd party publishers, readdressing the application of online content, and creating a network which allows WOTC, 3rd party publisher, and all their respective fan bases to comingle (with or without conflict is optional). It has almost nothing to do with the rules themselves. I would also go about saying it would be a step backwards in the development of the “perfect” system if it ignored all the great contributions of 4th Edition.

So that is my plea…don’t erase 4th Edition from history. Learn what worked and what didn’t and restrain the compulsion to erase its mark from memory.

It’s Alien 3; not Highlander 2.

Dear Wizards:

I’ll attempt to word this letter in a fashion that promotes compromise and expresses my understanding of the situation. It  starts with the declaration that Wizards of the Coast are not obliged to follow anything mentioned here. They don’t owe anyone, and I am neither demanding action nor contending that what I request must be followed. I am suggesting a course of action that will benefit all parties involved.

On Friday, February 25th, I received a phone call from a writer experienced in 4th Edition wishing to produce his product. He had previously been tied to another major publisher that had recently dropped its 4th Edition lineup in favor of Paizo’s Pathfinder which they claim had been growing in sales to the extent of surpassing their 4th Edition products. This is not an isolated incident but only the latest symptom, following in the wake of similar announcements from Mongoose and Goodman Games. For all intents and purposes, despite declarations from fanboys on both sides about whether Pathfinder or D&D is the better seller, it is now glaringly obvious that from the 3rd party publisher outlook, the winner has been decided.

This wasn’t always the case. It’s important to mention that I am not threatening to cut my ties with the mother company. If DEM fails to make an impression with its 4th Edition lineup, we won’t be abandoning it in favor of Pathfinder. Most likely, if our 4th Edition products prove to disappoint, it may be the end of products from the DEM universe. This is not a threat; it’s simple fact of life and investment. Dias Ex Machina made its name with 4th Edition D&D. We already created an Amethyst 3.5 in 2008. We switched it to follow 4th Edition; stepping back to 3.75 feels…exactly that.

I am offering suggestions to make the 4th Edition D&D multiverse a welcoming place for 3rd party publishers, most involving D&D’s online presence. This is not like the days of the OGL, where companies could access and copy the entire rules system, a la Linux. Third party companies need to reference original WOTC products. This encourages sales. Additionally, more 3rd party products increase D&D penetration in the marketplace. It may not be a significant increase, but the investment is negligible, making a return virtually guaranteed. You wouldn’t even have to offer these to every publisher, only to those you believe have reached a certain level of quality—perhaps companies that are producing truly original products over those only offering variations on elements already created.

It’s important to know that 3rd party companies can keep up with the pace if you dare them to. Changing the rules through an errata is not as damaging as you might think. As a metaphor, I would offer that a 3rd party product (at least Amethyst) was a car using WOTC roads. WOTC can change the laws and the limits, where and how fast you can go, but we don’t have to rebuild our car. The problem is WOTC uses an express lane and refuses to open to those following them.

So here are my proposals:

TALK ABOUT US
Simply put, with the many blogs and official press releases WOTC issues, reserve a section to mention the products being released by third-party companies. This could include the many newsletters and online articles dealing official WOTC products. This would not be a one-time occurrence but a recurring practice so that players will know these products and companies are ever-present in the community. Currently, WOTC has a single page mentioning 3rd party companies and one forum group called GSL. We would like something prevalent and dedicated one blogger a week, one page in a newsletter, maybe even space in an issue of Dragon. You would be surprised the amount of free content 3rd party publishers would offer in exchange for a bit of free advertising.

SUPPORT US
In the many products released by WOTC, they put aside space for advertisements. Although you would imagine costs would be astronomical, offering a discount or a single gratis communal page dedicated to everyone (like those small market advertisers at the back of a Road & Track) could work wonders. Banner ads on the website would never come to pass, but allowing some advertisement, side by side with D&D, could muster up considerable leverage in convincing third-party companies that they are under your umbrella, not standing beside you in the rain.

REWARD US
Although there are perhaps dozens of products that may not reach your level of quality, if one does come about, acknowledge them. Perhaps even special awards dedicated to only 3rd party products. You could offer accolades for artwork, layout, writing and originality. You won’t even need to make plaques; a simple GIF would suffice.

SELL US
File this under improbable, but opening an online store is something Wizards still insists on not creating. They offer DDI as the compromise. But selling 3rd party PDFs via the official Wizard site would not only promote our products but also offer revenue for WOTC. If you think this is unprecedented, it is important to know that Amethyst Foundations (a 4th Edition 3rd party book) is available for sale (and does sell) on Paizo’s online store. If Paizo can sell a 3rd party D&D product, why won’t the creators of D&D. There is revenue there to be had.

DISTRIBUTE US
The DDI is the single biggest feature that sets 4th Edition apart from the rest of the RPG community, allowing up-to-date content a finger-tap away. Trying to get 3rd party content into Character Builder has been a poster-protest since the debut of the controversial application, something that WOTC has never been receptive to. They have come close, with the frank answer being that even though they are not against the idea, WOTC is not sure how to implement it. Meaning they could if they spent a large amount of money on programmers to enable the system and still keep it secure…ergo, they won’t do it. I am not talking about Character Builder; however, I am talking about all the other aspects of DDI, the exclusive content. Allow 3rd party products to post artwork, classes, and monsters. It would be part of DDI content and showcase the products offered by 3rd party companies.

TALK TO US
The last proposal is to keep us 3rd party companies in the loop. With the exception of the first GSL license update, there has not been a single email sent mass to the companies signed under the GSL. There has been no attempt to keep them—us—informed of future products and changes in the rule structure. We are not told about rule updates until after they have gone up. We had no warning about the potential rule changes coming with Essentials. We are not made aware of the coming products; if we were, we could make an effort to support those very same product lines.

As long as you require, by word of GSL, to reference your products without copying information within them, then consumers must own those books to use ours. It’s a symbiotic relationship, not unlike the clownfish swimming around an anemone. All we’re asking is to open that umbrella just a teeny bit more to allow us the same protection, show us that we’re connected, not holding on for dear life.

Hoping and Optimistic (as they are different)
Chris Dias
Dias Ex Machina Games

I’ve spoken at length about the differing atmosphere that has gravitated around 4th Edition D&D compared to its predecessor. There is an increased intolerance with deviating from accepted D&D principles. Knee-jerk reactions from certain designers created a false atmosphere of paranoia about the GSL. Then WOTC’s inconsistent communications and shifting philosophies didn’t help matters either. To make a situation more convoluted, there’s a growing segment of gamers that insist that the success of a product is based on its capacity to include an online element, either an interactive character builder or a pervasive online environment. The GSL prevents companies from using the SRD in any online form, including a character builder. Lone Wolf got around this temporarily, a work around DEM had been secretly working with, but the recent development by WOTC to shift the entire Character Builder to on online-only system closed the book on that. WOTC has not made any attempt to allow 3rd party products on D&D online, despite many requests. It’s a strange and difficult environment to be a 3rd party 4E D&D game company. At least the game didn’t go through a radical change in rules like 3.0/3.5 did…

…no, wait…

In fact, what Wizard of the Coast did was nearly as frustrating. They released several errata over several years, and then released Essentials, promoted as an alternate approach to D&D without replacing the old 4th Edition rules. All this would be have been nice and good…except that most the rules that they changed with Essentials found itself into the errata. So is this late 2010 set of rules an unofficial 4.5 D&D? When I ask that, I refer to the rules, and not the Essential lineup itself. For that, we would have to look at the differences between the new 4E rules and the old 4E from 2008, and then compares those to the differences between 3.0 and 3.5 D&D from nearly a decade ago.

As for 4th Edition, missing rules and clumsy wording notwithstanding, what actually changed? The races were altered with the new concept that each race has a variable attribute modifier. Instead of an elf gaining a +2 to Dexterity and Wisdom, now he gains Dexterity with an option to select a +2 to either Intelligence or Wisdom. Humans also gain a racial power as well. If we look at combat, we’ll notice a few more changes. Looking at the DMG, we see altered mount rules, improved skill challenges, and entirely new tables for creating monsters. Notice the radical change in the look of monsters in Monster Manual 3 compared to the previous two. They are tougher, with higher ACs and more devastating attacks.

So does this make a 4.5, even if disregarding Essentials? It would be only the opinion of one person if I said yes or no. However I can make one confession and that is that it’s still frustrating for game designers. For Amethyst, we’ve already found the Wizard errata conflicting with rules or concepts that we had accepted as gospel. Those mount rules for example resulted in outdating our Kannos Kavalier. All of our monsters were made under the previous system. We don’t necessarily have to update our races…but we are.

So here goes another Amethyst errata, out now as this article goes online. Beyond the technical glitches we fixed with the first errata, we are now addressing the shifting mechanics of the system we mated ourselves to. The classes are all receiving a tweak; all the race traits are being revised. Because of the popularity of our vehicles, the rules regarding them are also being updated. It’s the cost of playing in this sandbox, especially when the wizard running the box changes the sand.

At least we were able to incorporate these changes during the writing of our second book, Evolution. The races are being reprinted there as well, reflecting the new philosophy. And in order the match the WOTC model point-by-point, Evolution is also rereleasing the original techan classes of Amethyst Foundations for use with D&D Essentials. Like Wizard’s rhetoric continually reminds us, this is not replacing the techan classes of the Foundations book, only offering an alternate build for those wanting a simpler character experience. We imagine that as long as WOTC continues to support both product lines, we’ll continue to do so as well.

You can find Amethyst’s 2.0 Errata here.

http://www.diasexmachina.com/AmethystErrata2.0.pdf

Chris

On numerous occasions I’ve been asked about what is the most difficult aspect of writing 4th Edition. I offered a few general answers from ensuring that all the powers balance with each other to adapting Amethyst to the evolving nature of the 4th Edition rules (a common gripe I’ve cited). However, I believe the answer must be the specific wording required for the new edition of D&D. With 3.5, you were given considerable leeway on how you worded abilities. This was because in comparison, 4th Edition is much more precise and defined—a needed requisite for a number-crunching dungeon crawl.

Moving from one edition to another (Amethyst D20 to Amethyst Foundations), I have to admit now being somewhat unprepared for these new demands. It was two months before Amethyst reached print when I realized that no one associated with the product (from layout, to editor, to writer) had noticed that whenever we wrote “next turn” we had written “next round”. A quick find and replace fixed that (though a few managed to still slip through).

Most powers list their effects to lasting until the end of player’s next turn, though some list the beginning. You can’t say “beginning” though; you have to say “start”. This seems like a minor quibble. What about punctuation? Races and classes are not capitalized, but feats and skills are. But this is rooted in the somewhat confusing nature of the English language. You capitalize specifics, but not general terms. As an example, you would not capitalize dog unless it was part of Swiss Mountain Dog. So even though athletics is not capitalized, the skill is. When listing a power’s range or effect, the first word is in bold, but the rest are not. Do you use an action or do you spend an action? These are important distinctions to remember. It matters. By keeping your wording consistent, you can ease the transition from a first party product to a third party product. This can be difficult, especially if you’re moving into unpaved ground like Amethyst did last year.

You don’t push back a target, a target is pushed. You don’t add 15 ongoing damage, it’s ongoing 15 damage. Do you say “make a saving throw” or just “make a save?” That last one can throw off us old players. When you have a power that targets multiple creatures, you don’t say “all targets in burst”; you must say “each target in burst.” And what about those creatures? You can list allies or enemies if the power enables you to distinguish, but you can’t replace creatures with say, opponents, monsters or people. And when you list it as a burst or a blast, you have to list that, even though it would appear obvious that was the case.

As a holdover from the old days, you have to be careful about those stacking bonuses. Remember a bonus without a type can stack with any other bonus without a type unless the two bonuses originate from the same source. Identical specified bonuses do not stack (like feat bonuses or armor bonuses). Using that logic, you could make someone’s brain explode by saying that a +2 cumulative bonus would stack with anything but itself, even though the word cumulative means it would stack with itself. Can a stackable bonus be stackable with another stackable bonus? The game introduces terms like “power bonus” and “feat bonus”, but can you invent your own? None of the rules say no, but you should have a good reason.

Never forget that characters gain or grant benefits from powers, features, and feats. They are never given, offered, gotten, obtained, received, or collected. You don’t save from an effect; you save from a condition. An effect does not last for the rest of the encounter, only until the end of one. A power may not be reset, but sometimes it is not expended. Powers do not last for another turn, they persist. You don’t make a skill roll; you make a skill check, though when I ask my players, I always say, “Roll Athletics.” I could go on forever…

Targets are not in adjacent squares; they are adjacent targets. You don’t reroll attacks so much as you repeat them. I should stop.

It may seem I am ranting about the annoyances of these specific expressions, but truthfully this is important stuff and it took me some time to catch all the little tricks. Even now, my editor and I are discussing issues regarding moving and marking. If you lost ability if you move, do you lose it if you are pushed? How would you word that? Would you say, “If you are moved/are moved…” or would you word it as, “if you leave your current square…?” You can’t say “move from your current square.” It has to be “leave”, as move implies you must be the one to move your character. Remember that you provoke an opportunity for leaving a square, never when entering it, and certainly not when you pass through it.

Marking has been a big one of late. Sure, you can say “you mark a target,” and that’s easy. The marshal, on the other hand, can shift the focus of the mark to another ally—a similar ability seen with the 4E bard. Now the bard uses an ability called Misdirected Mark which is worded, “the target is marked by an ally within 5 squares of you until the end of your next turn.” By saying “marked by an ally” you avoid the issue of the fighter’s combat challenge ability, which specifies that he be the one that mark the target. Even though the bard is using the power, the effect is worded so that from a rules perspective the fighter is still counted having done it. Amethyst Foundations was written before PHB2, so when the marshal’s similar power came out, it said the same thing…but it didn’t. We used words like “the source of the mark”, which says the same thing…but not exactly as the bard says it. As we moved into Evolution, we included many abilities involving marked opponents. I wanted to ensure our abilities that utilize marked targets didn’t insist that the marking be done by the character. You can’t just say “marked targets” because that could mean all targets marked by all players. We tried “marked target (where you are the attention of the mark)” to “marked target (where you are the target’s focus)” and later settled on “your marked targets,” but even this does not match the exact wording of similar powers in D&D. Do you keep them, knowing full well they say the same thing and can be clearly understood…or do you change it?

In the end, you change it fit D&D staple lingo and hope players understand what you are implying.

And don’t forget…you make a ranged basic attack, not a basic ranged attack.

I still make that mistake.

Chris

And now I return with the final part of my experience with D&D Essentials.

I have a problem with Doritos.

…Yes, Doritos.

Whenever I walk into a 7/11 (or specifically, the snack aisle at the Real Canadian Superstore), I stand there like Solo in Carbonite (with my hands by my shoulders, grabbing an invisible wall) pondering what brand of chips to purchase.  I take longer than any of my friends as I constantly change my mind and consider the long term enjoyment of the selections before me.  I’m apprehensive that my decision will come with regret.  Will I buy Ranch and discover later I really wanted Zesty Nacho, or worse, Pringles?  Very often, the final decision is based on time and not preference.  I ultimately grab one almost at random.  When I related the initial paragraphs of this article to a coworker, he agreed, adding that when he plays Everquest2, he is laden with dozens of spells he hardly uses.  Most have specific applications that never emerge but others, he simply forgets about.  He added that despite the initial satisfaction felt about having so many spells, he now feels that EQ2 offers too much.  I’m in the same boat dealing with Dragon Age.  I have taskbar with a dozen powers.  I don’t know what half of them do.  When I enter combat, I simply start clicking right to left and repeat until I run out of energy.

Are the eighty-plus powers offered to the average 4E class simply too many?  When playing a cleric or a wizard, this is a condition you accept and embrace but does a fighter really require this much variety?  Most fighters just want to hit monsters until gold comes out.   My players mention that often.  If so, then why did they recoil so vehemently towards Essentials when I brought it up?  I mean it, the conversation became so elevated, I was 30 seconds from ending the session and sending them home.  This brings up the most important issue with Essentials, the schism.  With 4th Edition, the rules around powers were received so poorly by certain segments of the fan base that they simply jumped ship.   As for companies, it had nothing to do with the system.  It involved the delays and stipulations with the GSL.  I would postulate that Pathfinder wouldn’t exist if 4E was released publically like the old 3.5 system with the OGL and SRD.  Is the demographic of 3.5 players that didn’t approve of 4^th Edition really that significant?  It reminds me of the conversation I recently had with Michael Evans of Neuroglyph Games, where we both expressed curiosity over the existence of Essentials.  We agreed that the number of people playing massive multiplayer online role playing games far outweighs the number of players keeping with 3.5 (or 3.75) that are simply waiting for a better version of 4E in order to abscond from their current system.  If someone has put cash on the barrelhead for Pathfinder, I find it difficult to believe that they would simply uproot their divergent support for Paizo and jump across the chasm back to D&D.

To aggravate the situation further, Essentials now runs the risk of splitting the industry again.  3.5 players that haven’t moved on probably won’t, because they like their system and remember better times when the industry was united and 640K of ram was enough memory (too soon?).  Followers of Pathfinder are united under one banner and 4E players were united under theirs until recently.  Now Essentials is coming off as the upstart duke with a thimble of regal blood making a play for the throne.  It is dividing the market yet again.  We are now presented with two groups–the traditionalists and the essentialists.  I would speculate that WOTC didn’t believe such a schism would occur or if it did, it would not affect their business.  Initially, I would have disagreed, but after reading Essentials, I had changed my mind.  After witnessing my players’ almost irrational response to Essentials, I am back to disagreement.  A schism is developing, and I don’t why.  The specific word I would use is “shouldn’t”.  A schism shouldn’t happen, yet it is.

Despite what Bilbo would have my other players believe, Essentials does not actually change 4^th Edition.  In my view, it only offers certain players a simpler, more direct path.  One aspect that I have noticed that I think few people have commented on is that at no point does it say you have to abandon the traditional rules set.  You don’t.  If you have a group with traditional characters, one player can adopt an Essentials class without the entire group being forced to follow.   The Essentials character simply won’t be fidgeting through a dozen powers every turn.

Bilbo and another (I’ll name Tarzan), both accused Essentials of going backwards—of making 4E look like 3.5, which if anything  is mathematically improper.  I made the declaration that if Essentials had been presented originally as 4E in 2008, we would love it.  Tarzan denied this emphatically, saying he would not have enjoyed it.  Some people have issues with speculating on a situation that demands the ignoring of present information .  This speculation is based on the assumption that original the 4E system would not have existed at all.  I believe the fans would have embraced Essentials whole heartedly and in greater numbers than those that took in the original 4E.  Alas, we cannot turn back time (wabac machine in the shop).  D&D is dividing again and there appears little anyone can do to suppress this seemingly unreasonable fate.

Do I like Essentials?  I think I do…as a game designer, the classes are easier to write.  I think it takes the strengths of both 3.5 and 4E and melds them into a system that is still 100% compatible with 4E but incorporating strengths lost with the transition.  But as a GM, it doesn’t affect my life, other than speeding up combat even more.  It removes the power fidgeting I have noticed in my group (two members still insist on having an open PHB in front of them for referring to their powers).  It is possible to make an edition that lacks valuable features from its predecessors.  Electronic games are famous for this.  This is not to say that Essentials is BETTER.  I think it files a niche.  Would I use it?  As a player, I totally would.  But I am a GM with a different mindset.  Would I add it into Amethyst?

Why yes we are.

Next book.

Essentials is simply a variant character creation system using the same framework as 4E.  This is not like the Gamma World, which takes the core experience and deviates significantly from the base system.  With Ultramodern4, our next line up, we are doing something similar to Essentials, but U4 is the psychological mirror to that.  Where Essentials makes the experience easier but more rigid, Ultramodern4 adds an additional level of complexity to character generation, increasing diversity and allowing players more customization options than even the founding Fourth Edition did.

We’ll see if it works.

Chris

And now I return with part 2 of my experience with D&D Essentials.

Let’s be honest, 4.0 has its flaws.  I can concede that point (I admitted to the flaws of 3.0 in a previous post).  I have issues.  You have issues.  I, for one, dislike roles (obvious when you see the dual roles in Amethyst).  I don’t like the idea of all fighters being defenders, or them needing to use strength at all times (later books offered solutions to these issues).  Fourth Edition was not about unlimited freedom.   When critics pointed out to me about D&D was encouraging “yes”, I shot back by saying that “yes” and “no” were interchangeable based on the wording of a question– that the rules of a game consist of bullet-point instances of “no”.

And dammit, I LIKE saying no.  It’s one of the cherished powers of the GM.  One recent game had my players in a desert with no food or water.  One of them (ironically Bilbo, mentioned in the previous post) had the money for a magic haversack that supplied food and water for everyone.  I said he couldn’t buy one.  He asked why.  I gave him some reason but…I didn’t need to.  I just said no.  No.  Just say it.  Scream it.  NO!   Cleans you out.  And 4^th Edition says no all the time; it just doesn’t appear so.  If you were playing a Lord of the Rings game, would you automatically allow a player to create a tiefling?

Nnnnnooo…  Love saying that.

And this brings up the matter of psychology.  I have a player in my current game that controls a stalker (a techan ranger for those that don’t own Amethyst).  He uses the same powers all the time.  He rarely deviates.  Another player, controlling a warlord, is in a similar boat.  Whenever anyone creates a ranger, they select Twin Strike.  No exceptions.  It’s one of the most powerful at-wills in the entire 4E line and clearly the most powerful in the original PHB.  So there is a claim that Essentials limits diversity.   But all it really does is emphasize one specific build.  There are two fighter classes in the Heroes of the Fallen Lands, each geared to a specific design intent.   Players that elect for the most powerful abilities shouldn’t worry about not having options, especially if you are given the most powerful selections for free.

Consider RSTLNE.  Remember your Wheel of Fortune.  In the final round, the contestant was given a choice to select 5 consonants and a vowel.  Fairly soon, these contestants had done their research and came to the conclusion that those letters, RSTLNE, had statistically the higher chances of paying off (on a side note, later research concluded that H was more commonly used than R).  Eventually, the wizards behind the Wheel decided to offer those letters on gratis.  Every finalist was automatically given RSTLNE.  The puzzles were made larger to accommodate, and the contestant was asked to pick three more consonants with another vowel.  Of course, these four letters ended being exactly the same as well, but that’s beside the point.  The issue is choice can sometimes be an illusion if the option is obvious.  Complaining about the members of my game group, it almost appeared they preferred rejecting the bad choice over being forced to take the best one.  There are a few other issues at work here.

An experiment some years ago offered people the opportunity to acquire a piece of artwork.  After a set time, they were given a choice to exchange it.  Another group was given a choice of several pieces and after a set time, was also allowed to exchange it for another.  By the end of the experiment, the group that was offered the options at the inset disliked their decisions more frequently.  They changed their mind more often, taking less pleasure in both the initial decision and the later one.  The group given only one tended to keep it despite being allowed to return it.  They also often took greater pleasure in the original acquisition than members of the other segment.

Want another interesting anecdote?  Many many years ago, Betty Crocker Foods had asked a sampling of mothers and wives if they would purchase ready to bake cakes.  The package contained all the ingredients required.  All that was required by the cook was water and an oven.  The women surveyed expressed overwhelming approval at the idea but when marketed, they refused buy it.  Crocker brought in a psychoanalyst to find out why.  It came down to the guilt of making something without contributing to it.  The cooks wanted to believe that they were participating in the creation.  So the solution appeared simple…add an egg.  By removing an ingredient from the box and requiring the cook to add it overcame this guilt and the product sold like gangbusters for decades.

Perhaps this is also an issue relating to our situation.  Do players only want the illusion of choice just so they feel like they’re contributing?   Give players the instruction to select a power, despite one being the overwhelmingly popular choice.  These two situations appear to enforce opposite views.  Fourth Edition has a strength in that it offers you choices, even though most people select the same one, but it also has a weakness by offering too many options, thus paralyzing some people and rendering others unsure or unhappy about the decisions they made.

Which brings up my problem with Doritos.

Darn…ran out of space…will have to finish this next week.

Chris

My group hates Essentials.

Full disclosure.

I’m not saying I hate Essentials, but my players are obviously not impressed.  We argued recently.  Voices were actually raised.  This article is not so much a review of the Essentials line, as I’ve only read through one book and part of another.  I have neither cracked open the Red Box nor made a character with this new system.  I will instead attempt to offer an opinion on what I’ve learned and tender a commentary on why Essentials exists and what it may and can do to the industry, good and/or bad.

Back when the original Amethyst 3.5 was released (yeah, I’m plugging again, bear with me), sixty days before the release of 4E D&D, there was considerably antagonism from me and my group towards it.  One player, referred ever-always as Bilbo, liked the new approach and convinced his friends, including me, that we should adopt it.  Bilbo explained the system, helped us make characters, and staged several encounters.  We embraced 4E soon after and the rest fell into footnote.  Just over two years later, we now find Essentials before us.

What is Essentials?  Let me cleave through the minions and answer truthfully.  Essentials is an attempt by WOTC to merge beloved elements of the old 3.5 into the current 4E setup, essentially (heh) creating a bridge system that allows 4^th Edition to play like 4^th Edition but resemble 3^rd Edition on how it does it.  The claims that it changes the mechanics of 4^th Edition are undeniable false.  The rules have been updated via numerous errata but you can find those for free.  Most of them deal with clarifications and missing information.  With the exception of a few elements, the Essentials Rules Compendium is simply the recent updated rules for 4E presented in digest form.  If you went through the trouble of updating your PHB like myself (by the way, don’t do that—it makes a mess), you basically have the compendium (there are a few other changes like updated rules for skill challenges, but these are minor).  All I am saying is that if you want to play Essentials and you’ve played 4E (owning the original books), you DON’T need the Red Box or the Rules Compendium.  Acquiring one of the class books and/or monster manual will be more than enough.

Speaking of the errata, this is a rather difficult subject.  The last update amended mount rules, which utterly destroyed one of Amethyst’s lifepaths and paragon paths.   They have revised charging and clarified certain powers.  The recent update rewrote the humans and offered variant attribute modifiers for the other races.  Despite some of these sweeping changes, I will give WOTC credit.  These updates are free and none of them have altered the game so much as to make it incompatible with earlier versions of 4E (mount exception accepted).  We couldn’t say that for the previous 3^rd Edition.  Back then, WOTC released all new books, made us pay for them, and to pour peroxide on the whole affair, made it incompatible with its predecessor.  The release of an errata is a precedent Dias Ex Machina can follow.  If they release an update, then we can as well (we recently announced a free update that will revise Amethyst races to follow the current paradigm of D&D).

So if little changed in retrospect, what’s the big deal?  Well, if you played 3^rd Edition as much as I did, you’ll immediately notice the elements of 3^rd Edition that were brought forward into Essentials.  Clerics regain domains for one.  Even through only two are presented in the Heroes of Fallen Lands book, the option is there for adding dozens more.  Wizards regain their spellbook and schools of magic.  This brings the best of both worlds into the class.  You still gain encounter and daily powers, only now you keep gaining new ones instead of swapping them.  You are limited on the number of encounter spells in an encounter and daily spells in a day by a table that looks remarkably similar to one seen in the original 3.5 book.

Yes, the revision that people declared would pacify 4^th Edition made the cleric and wizard MORE complicated.  So what gives?

It’s the other classes that became the concern.  With the fighter and rogue, you only gain one encounter attack power and no daily attack powers.  As you progress, you gain more uses of the mentioned single encounter power.  The fighter power, by the way, mimics a design used in Ultramodern4.  In U4, I have numerous daily powers that don’t require an attack roll.  They activate on a trigger that requires you hit with another attack.  This is a brilliant solution to the complaints that daily powers are a mixed bag.  So with the fighter ability, you only activate the power if you hit, so it’s never wasted.  With stances that duplicate at-will powers, a traditional 1^st level 4.0 fighter and an Essentials 1^st level fighter are very close in variety and nearly identical in damage potential.  The original fighter has an encounter that could miss but also daily (that could also miss).  The Essentials fighter has a higher average damage output because of features like Heroic Slayer (adding your Dexterity along with your Strength for damage rolls) but looses that amazing, yet haphazard, daily power.

It’s when those fighters progress where things get troublesome.  Both variations gain a choice of utility powers (so that hasn’t changed) but the Essentials fighter no longer gains powers.  He simply gains more uses of his encounter power along with general features that all fighters gain.  Meanwhile, the traditional fighter selects up to 4 encounter and daily powers, swapping them around after 10^th level.  So the fighter and rogue definitely have limited customization past 1^st level.  There is no denying that…but is limited freedom actually a criticism?

More on that next time…

…You didn’t think I could cover all of this in a 1000 words did you?

Stay tuned…next time I bring up psychology, Betty Crocker, and Wheel of Fortune.

Chris

4Th Edition Modern.

My fanatical push to complete Amethyst that year was directly connected with the possibility that 4th Edition would emerge as our primary competition.  Then the economy started to sag, dogs and cats started living together, and Amethyst was delayed until 2009.  The facts around 4th Edition Modern turned into rumors, than into conjecture.  As Amethyst was pushed further back to 2010, I realized I was competing with a non-existent product.  At some point in the intervening two years, someone at Wizards had closed the book on 4th Edition Modern, if it ever existed at all.

(Deadpan) Oh, lucky me.

Some suspected that the lack of significant returns from the original D20 Modern was the reason for this.  Other people accused the 4E system itself as being incompatible with modern or science fiction games.  Amethyst was the first, a bridge setting merging science fiction into fantasy while separating the two elements on mechanical as well as philosophical grounds.  This allowed DEM to develop technology based rules without riding the crutch of fantasy.  We had to overcome the challenges of circumventing high firearm damage outputs as well as squeezing in enhancement.  So how do you do it?

The first issue dealt with damage output.  An arrow carries significant energy due to its speed and mass.  A bullet travels much faster and carries more energy despite being smaller.  A bullet can do more damage to a target due to its velocity along with side effects like hydrostatic shock.  An arrow can inflict more damage in certain situations because of different forces at work, namely the deceleration rates between a bullet and an arrow, flexional energy, torsional vibration, etc (long story).  Still, a bullet’s speed overcomes its deficiency in mass, allowing it to do more harm than an arrow.  But how much more?

Historical fact—bullets didn’t replace arrows because they were faster, deadlier, and/or more accurate and it was several centuries after their introduction before they could overcome the arrow on these matters.  Simply put, it’s easier for one trained man to build fifty pistols than it is to train fifty men to use a bow.  With that out of the way, let’s address damage.  Since “modern” bullets have the potential for more damage, I have seen huge damage outputs by homebrew firearms (a pistol doing 2d8, for example, a rifle doing 3d8) to explain this.  These homebrew mechanics are referencing one point.  An arrow inflicts 1d8 damage.  Thus a rifle bullet doing arbitrarily three times more damage should do 3d8 (not fabricated, I saw homebrew damage listings this high).  This fails to take into account the range of weapon damage in D&D.  The next damage scale from 1d8 is 1d10 (or 2d4 is you want to get technical).  What does 1d10?  A greatsword.  So this argument contends that a trained human fighter with the strength of a pubescent gorilla, wielding a twenty pound chunk of sharpened steel will only do a third the damage of a rifle bullet.  It’s a matter of scale.  If a greatsword does 1d10 and an arrow does 1d8, it doesn’t matter how much more a rifle bullet inflicts.  If it does not do the damage of the greatsword, it remains at 1d8 (let’s keep autofire out of the discussion for now).  When dealing with a high caliber weapon that can take off limbs, then yes, those can do 1d10 or 1d12.

I have seen homebrew rules that constructed workarounds to make their high damage firearms function, all of which contained mechanical flaws.   If William Wallace’s flail, which crushed the skull of Mornay in Braveheart (I looked it up), does 2d6, then no two-handed firearm should do more.  All’s fair.  Of course, you can forget all the science and decide that firearms have to inflict damage in scale with melee weapons in 4E for no other sake than game balance.

Onto opportunity attacks.  D&D made the uniform rule that all ranged attacks prompt opportunity attacks.  I can agree with this on several levels, with one exception.  I would remove such a condition with pistols.  So if you create a Ranger from the PHB and give him two pistols a’la Woo, then those ranged attacks would not prompt an opportunity attack.  Heck, in adjacent squares, I would even allow them to be used a melee weapons.

Probably the one rule I was most concerned over and the one no one ever complained about was movement.  Only when running at full speed can your accuracy with ranged weapons be hampered.  When it comes to pistols (one-handed small arms), then this rule still applies.  But if you look at modern military training, this is not encouraged.  Further reinforced with first person shooters (one of our primary influences regarding our modern rules), if you stop, your reticle narrows and your accuracy improves.  Not ignoring this basic fact, we implemented such movement penalties into Amethyst when dealing with two-handed small arms and heavy weapons.  If you move more than one square, you suffer a penalty to attack until the beginning of your next turn, meaning you can shoot first and then move to avoid the penalty.  Heavy weapons are stricter and offer a greater penalty while super heavy weapons (a new addition coming in the next book) must be planted in the ground before they can be fired.

It would be an obvious comparison that if you wanted to include firearms into a fantasy that the ranger would be the preferred choice.  However this does limit you in your role.  Firstly, a ranger shoehorns you into the Hard Boiled attitude (most people won’t complain).  Perhaps you may want to try something else.  A rogue can turn into a Ghost Recon-styled character with no fuss…but that’s still a striker.  Yes, the Amethyst stalker is a glorified ranger with a secondary build allowing long range sniper powers, but we needed to expand on that.  The grounder was the answer.  The grounder is not striker.  He is a defender/controller (yes, two roles, let’s move on).  As defender, even though he doesn’t mark (something I still insist is not mandatory), he can impede enemies from approaching allies.  As for being a controller, the grounder is equipped with dozens of area affect powers that inflict controller-like powers.  Overwatch, Stacking Burst, Standing Barrage—all these powers use firearms to mimic wizard-like powers.

Here are some final ideas to consider.   You can create powered armor by simply combining the effects of multiple magic items into armor and adding their costs.  Enhancement can come from acquiring more advanced weapons (bullets to railguns to lasers to plasma).  You can create massive weapons that inflict incredible amounts of damage by limiting their use to ranged basic attacks.

These were the biggest anchors which Amethyst sat upon, the same anchors I’m utilizing for our upcoming Ultramodern4.  By ensuring a solid foundation (see what I did there), we can reach beyond into more fringe rules WOTC may never have thought of.  Since Amethyst proved solid mechanically (the powers had a few bugs but we’re working them out), Ultramodern4 can tackle other ideas, like cybernetics, computer hacking, giant robots and aircraft, the latter two of which are being folded back into Amethyst for its second book.

Yeah, you heard right.  Giant robots.  Check the image.  That’s the Angel Amarok, detailed in the Amethyst: Factions.

Addendum:  I know I mentioned that first person shooters were an inspiration when designing our firearms.  Since people accused D&D of mimicking an MMO, I figured the game comparisons were still valid.

Chris

Call it a desire for logical answers or a simple love of science and the fictions around it.  Eventually I stopped following her faith.  The transition to rejecting religion en-masse took longer.  Despite the obvious pagan undertones of most fantasies, one thing D&D does not preach is a rejection of faith or a refutation of divine creation.  Even though a number of fantasy settings exist that don’t subscribe to divinity or use theology to explain their setting, Dungeons & Dragons is not one of them.  Through nearly every edition, the roots of the setting were deeply ingrained in the foundations of divinity.

Recently, Trask discussed religion and how it interacts with D&D.  He spoke of the death of faith.  He wondered why the faithful regard their deity as a simple weapon pusher–a pimp of power.  You subscribe to it like a mailing list and as long as you tolerate an annoying amount of spam, you can smite enemies in holy fire.  Fair trade.  If you play a character that has faith, said faith should have ramifications and complications.  This is not a distant god but an active one.  It demands servitude, and punishment doesn’t necessarily have to come from the hands of another mortal.  Your deity will smite you directly, avoiding any subtlety in the act.  I had made identical observations as Trask.  However, I came to a far different result…kill your gods.

My problem deals with the Douglas Adams’ argument.  Proof denies faith for without faith a god is nothing (slightly modified quote).  Neal Gaimen commented on this as well in American Gods–the personification of Odin explained that every human was a honeybee with a miniscule amount of honey, and gods fed on the honey of the masses underneath them (honey equating faith).  However, in a world where god/s exists without simple belief, a world with undeniable proof that can’t be discounted scientifically, there is no need for faith.  (When I mention undeniable proof, I don’t mean a setting sun or a rolling river—observable events that can be and have been explained by science.  I refer to the blotting of the sun and the stopping of clouds.  You know…the biblical stuff.)

I contend that settings like D&D that possess both faith and an overabundance of miracles (up to and including faith-bullets) is a farce–a world that can’t hold up to its own internal logic.  I find settings where gods require faith and show no proof of their existence far more realistic.  It was for this and many other reasons why I took divinity out of Amethyst.  This is a setting placed on our real Earth, which offers up obvious complications.  In the 3.5 version of the game (released in 2008, 30 days before 4E—awkward), we allowed divine classes by redefining them as tapping an obscure power some people claimed as divine.  Characters used such power without the need of being religious.  I later considered this a dodge.  I had an issue over allowing the proof of god/s in a setting, especially with it being on Earth.  I had received some criticism for this, as it limited class options in a system supposedly encouraging player freedom.  Thankfully, I took Dark Sun’s duplication (not imitation) of this setting point as vindication (Dark Sun took clerics out for different reasons).

If we allow a priest to have divine powers and a cleric to have divine powers, this forces a proof of god in the setting.  We could say, “Your faith gives you power, not your god.”  Unfortunately, that’s still heretical in the eyes of many religions.  We’re not smoothing the waters by allowing it without condition.  You can spend years reading books to cast a spell or you could just “believe” really, really hard.  I wanted to enforce the idea that WE, the human race, are still the same from modern-day. The issues over religion and faith are unchanged.  I wanted it to be a mirror of our real world, which means divine power is delegated to holy books and bad Kirk Cameron films.

Therefore, I would encourage one of two options.  Either you deal with the power of gods directly with consequences and commitments ever-present, as Trask suggests, or you allow faith to remain as it now.  Disputable miracles.  Blind fanaticism.  Corrupted spiritual leaders.  I would never admit to be the killer of faith.  We don’t require the parting of the Red Sea or someone leaping fire from his fingers like Colwyn from Krull (that’s right, I just made a Krull reference).  People find their symbols in clouds, coffee cream, and on grilled cheese sandwiches.  Most of the conflicts in our world come from the confused misinterpretations of holy books.  What fun is there in a setting if a god could just shout to the masses as a booming voice of heaven for what it desires?

I look at the deities in D&D and consider them vastly inadequate.  Theology was crafted to explain a universe the people within it didn’t understand.  Deities weaved the threads of fate.  They controlled the stars.  They commanded nature.  They offered blessings or sapped a land of its strength.  They snaked their fingers into the lives of all mortals, absolving them of their actions (forced by the hand of the divine).  By their decree, they could beckon the end times, taking away all the lives they created.  Gods release us from the concerns of free will, allowing us to thank or blame them for all events in the world.  Without these testaments, gods are undeserving of our faith.

I know it may seem I am preaching an agnostic view upon your own game worlds.  I am not, well, not entirely.  But, by giving people divine power, we are saying that agnosticism and atheism is wrong.  Must all fantasy worlds be forged from the hand of god?  If you want clerics in your setting and wish to keep deities ambivalent, you can always spin the theological view of them and have the cleric PC an aberration, proclaimed by the temple/church as sacrilegious.  The cleric is a title in class only, as he may have no insight on the origin of his power.  He may be hunted under charge of being a heathen, a demon, or better still…
“A witch!  Burn the witch!  Burn her!”
And I end with Monty Python.  Good day.

Chris

Dias Ex Machina Games

An interviewer once asked me what got me into role-playing games.  I answered quickly and thus truthfully…being fat.  Even when I molted the pounds in the late 90s, any chance of a social life had vanished the instant I created my first homebrew rule.

So let’s set the Way-Back-Machine to the early 1980s (my age revealed more so by the subtle Tron reference I just gave).  I had succumbed to the temptations of the dark dungeons promised by Jack Chick and his gospel (Google it…I’ll wait).  It began with the red box D&D Basic Set.  Being young and always confused, my group had mangled the rules to such an extent that we were casting death spells every round, killing red dragons like they were monkeys on the receiving end of a bone club.
Strangely enough, D&D didn’t last long in my circle.  After a few years, we had moved onto other systems, Star Frontiers and Gamma World.  Regular campaigning had to wait until the adoption of Palladium Robotech.  That unfortunately lasted most of high school, why I have no idea.  D&D always kept in geostationary, parked above everything we did.  Occasionally, we would divert into a module but never for more than a few months.  The first long-term campaign didn’t emerge until I found my regular group in a space-based GURPS game called Pathfinder.  Created eight years before Whedon’s Firefly for those who check, Pathfinder marked the first time I seriously dove into a wholly fabricated setting with no relation to an existing one.  This game ran for two and a half years before collapsing under player conflict.  As a result, I bowed out of gaming until 2002, when a Pathfinder player encouraged me to return to D&D.  Amethyst was the result of this.

You had to know this was eventually going to turn into self-promotion.  I’ll avoid the link for the moment and explain myself.  Amethyst (later known as Amethyst Foundations) was an example of the type of games 3.0/3.5 was encouraging.  I had created a setting different from the canon world presented in the core rulebooks.  With the release of the Open Gaming License, companies around the world embraced a thought unheard of until then–that we could all freely use the same system, and it was D&D no less.  It didn’t take long before everyone and their idiot-savant brother was releasing their own variant settings along with new rules and mechanical alterations.  We were introduced to Kingdoms of Kalamar and Midnight.  Even D&D principal Monte Cook offered his own variant rules with Arcana Unearthed.

And let’s be honest, 3rd Edition D&D wasn’t a great system.  It was brilliant at the time, but there were huge Canyonero-sized flaws in the core structure (addressed recently under Paizo).  I once created a ninja at 15th level with six attacks that couldn’t do more than 10 points of damage a hit.  Our group went up against golems with DR10/adamantine.  My friend was a Half-dragon samurai that did less damage a round than I did.  He killed a sixteen-headed hydra in one round with great cleave.

Balanced.

Regardless of its vulnerability to power gaming, these rules became the lingua franca (Google, I’ll wait again) for nearly all role-playing game companies.  All bets were off.  We could do what we wanted.  We did so. Apparently, this stopped two years ago.

I didn’t get the memo.

It may sound inflammatory, but it has been two years since the release.  A lot of critics and commentators are wondering when these new third party developers will attempt to take the risks these previous companies had founded their reputation on.  I am not implying it’s mandatory, but looking upon the store shelf of my local gaming saloon, very little stands out amongst the forgotten  and discontinued titles from the previous generation.

Part of this blame could fall upon the limitations of the stricter Game System License, but I personally don’t buy it.  For one, the GSL never stated that a rule couldn’t be removed, just not altered.  They defined a definition, so create new ones.  You could add definitions to existing entries, which proved immensely useful in my applications.
So where are the games?  Well, some of these older companies jumped ship.  They returned to their houserule systems or kept with their 3rd Edition foundations.  This left emerging companies to stake a claim.  I half-expected a land run of speeding carriages and conestogas ridden hard by desperate people with red flags firmly in their grips.  Turns out bowling alleys by the start line was enough for most of them.

The constant shift of direction from the wizards didn’t help either.  Three erratas.  Rules revised.  A steady power creep with each  book.  Then came the design philosophy.  Some games (some…not mentioning anyone specific) were criticized for actually breaking from the mold formed by the paragons above.  So perhaps these third party companies could step from under the shadow, but it’s probably best that they don’t.  I never liked drawing within the lines.  I rarely ever ran a game from a published source.

As I wrap up this initial post, I wonder about some of the ways game developers could break from the accepted bible, stepping away from the altar so to speak.  Can we have a class that has two roles?  Could there be a rule that actually changes a class, shifting the attack attribute of a fighter from Strength to Dexterity?  Could we use healing surges to inflict damage?  Can a paragon path be generic and not tied to a class?  Why can’t certain powers automatically reset upon reaching a milestone?  Could there be attack powers that inflict no damage?  Could you create a class with only utility powers?  I wonder if we could work in a way to make every daily power automatically hit and have the concept not be broken.

For those still waiting for self-promotion, I’ve done every one of those.