Solving the problems of D&D: a Rambling

So I was browsing some forums today, and came across a discussion about if the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons or the successor to third edition Pathfinder better corrects the flaws in the 3.5 edition of Dungeons & Dragons. The fact that this thread had started recently struck me as a bit odd, especially as it seems like nobody can agree on most of the flaws, or even how many there are.

The only real flaw most people can agree on is that the game was unbalanced, with a lot of theoretical optimisation having been done to work out that the Monk class was generally underpowered and that the eleven extra combat Feats gained from being a Fighter didn't stack up to the hundreds of spells known by wizards and clerics.

However after that the agreement seems to stop. Was the skill system a problem, or was throwing it out in 4e a bad move? Was the problem that classes had too many abilities to remember, or too few? And somewhat crucially, would it be better to make characters balanced at the higher or lower end of the 3.5 extremes.

Possibly the two most popular successors to that edition to date, both D&D5e and Pathfinder seemed to fly to opposite ends of the spectrum. They both retained the race-class structure that people have come to expect from D&D, but Pathfinder acted more as a bugfix and reworking, bringing weaker classes closer to the extremes of the Wizard and Cleric, even if they never reached it, kept every ounce of complexity, and even today exists as an edition that is essentially compatible with the game that came before it. Meanwhile D&D5e attempted to streamline everything while keeping in everything players seemed to want, and brought the power ceiling down closer to the bards of 3.5.

The result was two different games, even outside the direct rules. While they both decided to rely on adventures over character options in order to sell more books Pathfinder set itself in an entirely new setting which they could add to freely and present as they saw fit, while D&D5e presented itself as 'generic fantasy' and has set most of it's adventures in the somewhat divisive Forgotten Realms, with it's public library of established lore and characters. While neither setting is strictly better or worse than the other, and neither would be near my first choice if I was to run D&D again, I personally think Pathfinder's move of including a default setting built for the game to solve a major problem I have always had with D&D, that it is not the generic fantasy it presents itself as.

The exact kind of fantasy has changed over the years, but D&D has never been able to do every sort of fantasy. Mainly because the genre is so broad, it's like trying to make a game that allows you to play every kind of science fiction, even generic systems don't actually make it over this hurdle. GURPS is gritty, Fate is pulpy, you get the idea.

So D&D instead has been relatively rooted in the heroic fantasy genre, with more high fantasy being added as the editions have gone by. Originally most of your party would have been warriors, because that was needed to keep the nerd or two you brought along alive until it was fireball time. But in modern D&D the assumption is that most members of the part will be able to use magic, literally every character class either uses it was standard or gets rituals or spells as part of a subclass, and the often-used feats give characters the ability to dabble in spells or rituals. However the core expectation of what your characters will do is still going out into the wilderness and cleaning ruins of any treasure and green skinned humanoids you can find. While you can run courtly intrigue in D&D characters will begin to look redundant, with their twenty or thirty abilities designed solely for combat or avoiding traps.

I suppose my point is that, as long as D&D allows you to go into a dungeon, fight some orcs, and steal a dragon's treasure, then as long as everybody has fun there's no such thing as a problem. Therefore the fact that 5e's skill system is essentially nonexistant or that Pathfinder has six different spells that do 'turn into creature' and powerful casters is irrelevant, both games have players who feel that whatever class they play allows them to have fun and contribute to going into the dungeon, fighting the orc, and stealing the dragon's treasure. Any differences are therefore just differences, and they can only become problems when a player decides they stop them from having fun.

If you don't want to go into a dungeon, fight some orcs, and steal a dragons treasure, then the fact that D&D can't do that is not a problem. This is the reason why that there is more than one game on the market, there's no one single system that does everything brilliantly. The solution is either to research and buy a system that does it, or you can adjust a system you like, which might be D&D, to do it enough that your group will have fun.

So yeah, there is no problem with any edition of D&D or it's various spinoffs as long as everybody has fun. I have a personal preference for Lamentations of the Flame Princess, but that won't stop me from enjoying 3.5 as long as I don't feel like my character is useless.

I wasn't planning to resume posting on here for another month, as Christmas is coming up and I'm going to be busy for a couple of weeks, but I guess this means I'm updating again. I'll try to come up with a schedule in the next week and a bit, I've got some GMing thoughts and some more general gaming thoughts I want to share, and even a couple of reviews of some games in my collection I'm considering putting up (nothing new, I'm planning to stick to older stuff and pdfs mainly for budget purposes).

Games and Special Dice: a pondering

First off, I'm sorry for not posting for a couple of months, first university work was more than I'd anticipated and then my group decided Thursday was the best day to meet (which means I shall be moving my The Calm GM series, not certain which day that). But I'm now putting a bottom limit of one new post a week, even if I have to spend the entirety of Sunday evening writing it.


Now why make a post about this? It's certainly a weird topic. Well the reason is simple, I've been hypocritical for about the past year on whether or not games with special dice are a bad thing, and wanted to drill down and give the reasons why.


To start off, I've only played two games which require special dice not in the standard D&D set (d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, d20, and d%), those being Edge of the Empire from Fantasy Flight Games and Fate (or FATE to use the old stylising) from Evil Hat Productions. The thing is, whenever I get onto the subject of the new FFG Star Wars gamed I find myself coming back to one key complaint, and that being 'why do I have to use these special dice to play the game?'


For those who don't know, the FFG Star Wars games have many types of special dice, including two d6s, two d6s, and three d12s. It then throws in a the need for a couple of d10s occasionally, which is lucky because the pot of them I have for playing White Wolf games is wondering why they never get used. The basic idea of the game is that, before you make a roll, you use your Attributes, Skills, and the GM's whim to combine good dice and bad dice to form a dice pool to roll, and then hope you get more good stuff symbols than bad stuff symbols.


The game itself is actually quite fun. There's nothing better than the thrill you get from having your droid hacker changing his memory to pass the blame for the crime onto the guy who not only officially owns you but also always plays an 'assassin' (although I'll save my hate for 'assassins' for another post). Don't worry about the mind wipe, mine kept a backup of his memory on the ship (and my ultimate goal was to transfer my program/consciousness to the ship, because who doesn't love sentient starships?). Sure it bogged down combat a lot, but to nowhere near the slowness of D&D 5e in my experience. The problem was that the special dice added little to the game except the time where I tried to turn a swoop bike into a folding swoop bike so it wouldn't block the hallway and instead turned into the galaxy's first sentient swoop bike, but the game would have been just as fun using two different colours of d10.


Fate on the other hand I've owned and run, and love to bits. The narrative mechanics are simple enough that I can see how they'd be used in play, the Fate Point economy allows the games to have unexpected twists and turns as players start to run low, the system is simple and yet still appealing (no matter what build we use, it being Fate Core, FAE, or even The Dresden Files or Spirit of the Century), and the one type of special dice shared with FUDGE (a lovely game, but not one I would run by choice) I'm completely fine with, so why do I like them here when I don't in Edge of the Empire?


Well the fact is, when I first discovered Fudge Dice I hated them. 'Why do I need special dice to play this game' I wondered, looking through the pdf. But over about a year the mechanics of Fate grew on me, and I realised that I could easily use the dice for other games. Maybe I want to randomly decide if something is positive or negative. If I say that a blank face is 1, a minus sign is 2, and a plus sign is 3, they can work as improvised d3s. And maybe sometimes I just need to roll a d3-2.


But the real thing that made me accept Fudge Dice was the simple fact that I wanted to run Fate. It had been about a year since I had first looked at the book and investigated it on forums, and I not only wanted to run the game but also saw suggestions for alternatives for Fate Dice (most of which appear in Evil Hat's Fate System Toolkit, a book I adore), and so wasn't feeling like I had to buy a set.


So the simple reason I like Fate but dislike Edge of the Empire for using special dice? It's actually because I could have run Fate without paying the writers of the game a single penny. I did, I actually own several Fate books and love every one, but the simple difference is the cost to start running a game. Assuming you want to use physical books and the special dice Fate costs either £17 from my FLGS, or £30, depending on if you want FAE or Fate Core. Drop the special dice and it costs no more than £17 to play Fate Core, or whatever you want to pay for the pdf.


Compare to the new Star Wars games. Assuming I just want to try it out it costs £25 for the starter set, which will give me just enough dice to play. Assuming I actually want to play the full game, make my own characters and run my own adventures I have to shell out £43 for the rulebook (sure, it is a nice rulebook) plus £14 for 14 dice (so £1 a die, about twice as expensive as standard cheapy dice I use for most games and about half as much as a Fate Die per die), but realistically I'm going to be wanting at least two packs for when players raise their skills above three ranks.


To put in in perspective, for the cost to buy the basic materials I need for Edge of the Empire (£57) I could buy not only the Fate Core book (£17), but also the two latest Fate Worlds volumes (£16), and still have the money left to pick up a copy of The Secrets of Cats (if I ever get the chance to pick up a physical copy), and still have a pound left to get a bottle of fizz.


It's entirely the fact that I could sit around for months reading a pdf of Fate Core I spent £0.00 for on DriveThruRPG, and then buy the core rulebook for a reasonable price that made me buy my first pack of Fate Dice (and they are lovely dice). It's that that's made me spent hours planning settings to run with Fate, that that made me spend £15 pounds on a book I accidentally got for free (I seemed to get Venture City Stories on the day before it got replaced by Venture City). It's nothing to do with the quality of the game, it's the simple fact that I already had plans for the dice.

The Calm GM: Preparing Your Campaign

So I'm going to be covering more abstract elements, such as theme and style, in another series so I can justify bringing in my experience writing both games and stories. I'm planning on concentrating on more concrete advice here.

So, how do you prepare a campaign? The question is that it depends on how you run a game, and there's no way to know that until you say. For that reason it is generally better to over prepare rather than underprepare. While some people I know can run a game with nothing more than a blank battlemap and the corerulebook, that requires a lot of skill and a very specific type of game.

Now, first you'll need to decide what kind of campaign you want to play. If you're going to be running a published adventure path, or even just published adventures at any point, read it over two or three times before running it, so you know it well enough to improvise descriptions and additional events during the game.

On the other hand, creating your own game requires a lot more work. While exact details will very on the exact system and setting you want to use, there are some things that remain constant. From here on I will use the words 'campaign' and 'game' interchangeably, as is common in the groups I play in.

One of the first things to do is to consider the world you will be using, whether a published one or one of your own design. Many companies provide detailed settings for their games, whether it's the fantastic world of Greyhawk or the hidden supernatural world of Urban Fantasy games like The Dresden Files. Consider what makes the world you are using unique, and how the PCs fit into it, because this will be important in later steps.

In addition some people like to name their campaigns, for me it's a matter of implanting focus to the story I'm developing. Do not feel like you're required to do this, either now or at all, many people don't while others like to design the story and then give it a title.

For the sake of example I will be using a game for the Fate system, specifically the Under the Table setting that blends Arthurian Mythology and gangster fiction. In general the world is the same as ours but with the occasional magical touches of the fair folk leaking in. Players take the roll of members of the King's Men, the biggest crime syndicate in town. I like to name my campaigns, and while this one began with the title 'All the King's Men' it quickly changed to 'The Last Laugh' due to a shift towards a more cynical storyline.

The next thing to do is to decide what the focus of the game is, and where the PCs should be aiming to end up. In ye olde days of yore before anybody had set foot in the Forgotten Realms most games worked on a standard focus and goal: there is dangerous monsters out in the wilderness and dungeons, and you are going to beat them to get treasure to buy land. If this sort of game appeals you that's fine, but these days the narrative game, fuelled by an ongoing mystery or conflict is popular, and I will be focusing on that in this article because it compromises the majority of my experience.

If you don't want a narrative game, if you want one focused on exploration, or a sandbox game, or whatever you want, that's fine. As long as everybody, including you, is having fun there is no wrong way to run a game. Feel free to focus on developing your setting or NPCs more than your plot.

If you want a game focused on the setting, what are the big points of your setting. I don't mean the world, I mean the region, the city or the piece of countryside where you plan to set your game. Make sure you have a couple of current or impending conflicts for the PCs to get involved in. If your campaign is going to move around a lot, pick some recurring elements, whether it's allies, villains, or issues.

For a story driven campaign, see if you can come up with a rely loose plot. If it takes more than three points to explain you should probably simplify it, so as not to encourage you to railroad down the line as no plot survives contact with the enemyPlayer Characters. It's okay if at this point it's as simple as 'PCs arrive in city, important person is murdered, PCs find people behind this and other events and defeat them'.

For 'All the King's Men' all I knew is that I wanted the PCs to become major players in the King's Men, possibly members of Arthur's inner circle, by the end of the campaign, after starting as a low level but trusted crew. I wanted a plot focused game, and the plot here is that classic tragedy plot 'great man rises and them falls', just applied to an entire group.

The next thing is to determine what conflicts exist, as these will be your main plot drivers. It doesn't matter if it's really vague at this point, because in a minute we'll be digging down and fleshing out the conflict.

Under the table has a few conflicts I could have picked for 'All the King's Men', the one between the King's Men and the Knights Temperance, as well as that between Eliot Merlin and Mayor Morgan Lafayette, but I wanted something that the PCs could be involved in from the start. I decided upon a gang war, the small time arms dealers the Feral Hounds have somehow started branching out, getting a lot more money, and the PCs are called in when they start trying to steal the secrets of sangreal from the King's Men and take away their effective monopoly.

Now we start to determine the important parts of the conflict, who the major players are and what their goals are. Here you can add in a few twists if you want, major players who seem minor, players  working for another side, and outside forces manipulating the conflict for their own ends.

So who were the major players in this war with the Feral Hounds? Obviously Arthur and Merlin were going to be important eventually, but as the conflict was going to begin while the players were low ranking I decided to start on their level. I began with two members of the Feral Hounds who would be recurring opponents, one for the early game and one all the way through it. For the early game I created Christian Kew, a big brute who used to work under the last leader, and is now heading the current version of Feral Hounds. Christian isn't complex, he just wants money and power, and is willing to pick a fight with the King's Men to gain that power, but at the end of the day he's a thug in a nice suit (and a magic knife or two up his sleeve). However, I needed an antagonist who could hound the PCs without ending up in jail or hospital, and so I created Emily Spur, a woman who while a good shot with a sniper rifle is more at home in the planning room than on a raid. I also decided that, as a twist, Emily was part of the Knights Temperance working undercover, able to pull some strings and escape the courts, as if either the Hounds or the King's men destroy themselves in this war it makes their jobs a little easier, and I decided that the whole gang war was just another front in their conflict with the King's Men. It was at this point that I changed the name, as it was obvious that the plot could not end until either organisation had taken a decent hit, and decided that that this couldn't happen until after the Feral Hounds had been dealt with and the PCs had risen to a higher rank in the King's Men.

After that you can keep digging down until you're happy with your cast of characters and everybody's motivations. The final step is to simply prepare the game statistics for the first session, which depends on your system and I recommend asking for advice on one of the forums you can find around the internet.

Next Thursday prepare for quick thinking, as I go over when you should roll the dice, and when you should apply a quick ruling and move on.

Design Desk: My first Fate magic system.

Well, more GM advice will be posted on Thursday, not because I'm out of ideas but because I need time to organise what exactly I'm going to talk about and whether to go for something abstract and related to preparation or something for actually in-game. Once a week is probably all I'll be able to manage once term starts anyway, so giving myself a specific day will make getting them out easier.

So, for a second series of posts, I thought I'd explain my design process and give some homebrew content by design things as I write the article. I do plan to do other posts on some of my bigger projects, especially the science fiction setting/system I'm currently working on, but I've got nothing past early alpha yet. Also, as I'm an engineer and not a particularly good game designer I can't promise that any rules or setting information I publish here will be of high quality, at least for alpha and beta drafts I'm just looking for 'good enough'.

Now that was a long introduction, I promise I'll have a shorter one next time.

Anyway, I thought I might have a go at designing something for one of my favourite roleplaying games, Fate Core. Normally I'd write this in somewhere between half and hour and 2-3 hours and then post it on a forum for feedback, but I'm actually underwhelmed with some of the offerings for magic in Fate Core. While when using FAE I'm fine with just having magic be the fluff surrounding how you're Cleverly Overcoming the problem, refluffing Shoot in a standard Fate Core game just doesn't feel right to me. The Fate System Toolkit does present two great systems for summoning beings, Storm Summoners and Voidcalling, so I'm not going to be covering that in this system, but there's nothing I like in the way of magic as it appears in most roleplaying games. So what do I want? I'm going to be focusing on the below:

1. Magic is just another way of solving problems, a thief might jump across a pit with his Athletics skill while the mage creates a force field across it.
2. Magic should be able to attack and defend against harm, and serve as an alternative to Fight or Shoot.
3. Different traditions should behave differently.
4. Magicians should be able to have abilities beyond the basic.

Now, the first two are easy enough to solve. Fate does not have a set skill list, the theory is that each group will customise the standard one or come up with a new one to fit the setting, so we can just add a Sorcery skill to the list (I could also use an existing skill, but I'm not for personal reasons). The Sorcery skill can use all four basic actions, Overcome, Create an Advantage, Attack, and Defend. This does make it slightly more powerful than some of the other skills, especially Shoot as attacking with magic also allows you to target people in other zones, so we should limit it somewhat.

This is where item number 3 is useful. Each magical tradition is different, so why don't we have each of them working with one type of 'thing'. We might have Suncallers who can only magically control fire, great for burning down the door but rubbish at crossing the pit, while druids use magic that manipulates plants and bodies and traditional clerical magic can only enhance 'people'. Make a character use an aspect to say what kind of magic they can use, and prohibit anybody from knowing multiple types. I don't want any hard rules for this, as it's the kind of thing that will vary from table to table, and while one group may be fine with Nekomancers (they work with undead cats), another might want to stick to serious schools of magic. In a game like D&D I could never stick to having caster types be so freeform, but specifying more than this works really well in Fate, as it allows the magic system to be comparable to the standard crafting and martial arts systems.

But now we come onto 4, and we need to assign the basic capabilities of any caster. We know that each caster can only use one 'thing', whatever it is, but we've not established what they can do with it. So here's the deal: a character can normally only do with magic what a person could do with their hands. This magic doesn't destroy armies, but it can burn down a house, create a weapon, or attack one person with an attack. Now it might occasionally do things faster or more efficiently, but it can't do something that can't be done another way.

But now we get onto the special stuff people have. One of the reasons I decided to go with making magic it's own skill over any of the other options I could have done, like making it an extra set of aspects or a stunt tree, is so I could do this easily. The stunts can be taken for the Sorcery skill and represent two things: advanced training and unique spells. So if you want to be particularly good at burning down doors, you can be. Things like attacking multiple people with one action would also require a stunt.

Finally, people can take unique spells that are outside the normal abilities of their tradition. There's no limit to the number of special spells, but each is a stunt. So your Suncaller might be able to turn coal into diamonds or cool the surrounding area. While these won't have the raw power of 'advanced training' stunts, each is a new option that a smart player could exploit.

So here's how you play a spellcaster in this system:

1. Take an Aspect detailing what you use magic on.
2. Take ranks in the Sorcery skill, and roll it whenever you use magic.
3. Take stunts to represent advanced training or special spells.

I don't think there will be another one of these for a while, it depends on how long it takes me to come up with another thing to homebrew.

The Calm GM: Starting Your Game

So, for various reasons I've decided to start a series of blog posts on advice for new GMs. I can't promise that the advice is exceptional or that it'll apply to everyone who reads it, but it's what I picked up both as a starting GM and from watching other GMs. What I can promise is that there will be no swearing, censored or otherwise, as I want to focus on giving advice over being particularly entertaining, although I hope I'll achieve the second as well.

So where shall I begin? I thought I'd begin at the beginning, where every GM must, because it applies to almost everyone and is an easy to grasp concept. So the first thing you should do is to be certain that you want to run a game. Nothing dooms a game to being poor more than not wanting to run it, as I found out when running a game of Shadowrun 5th Edition, and you want to provide the best game possible, not only for your players but also for yourself.

However, if you're here then you probably already want to run a game. Maybe you have a group of people who already want to play with you, maybe you are planning to present your idea at the next game night so it won't be yet more Ticket to Ride, for the purposes of this article it's unimportant, but there are two ideas I wish to introduce now.

You do not have to run the game your players want.
Your players are not obliged to play in a game they do not want to play in.

The idea behind these is simple, even if your players have only ever played Dungeons & Dragons before, and don't want to play anything else, you to not have to run D&D; and a player who is not happy with your game has the right to either voice their concerns or get up and leave. If a player does leave your game do not feel hurt, just understand that it's not what they're looking for, and you can always invite them back if your next game is more in line with their interests.

However, the key to running a game is compromise. Before playing your first session, ideally before you even make your characters, you should have at least a short discussion with your players over what you want the game to be and what they want, and attempt to come to a compromise. It doesn't matter how cool our idea is, if the players do not want to play in steampunk World War 1 then they are not likely to enjoy themselves. Sometimes players will enjoy a campaign that they didn't want to play, but you can never know that before the game begins.

Another important thing to do is to prepare your game, and you'll want at least a basic idea of what you want to focus on and how you want to run it. There's no wrong style, I've seen:

• Games where the PCs are adventuring dungeons for wealth and power and a dragon might always be around the corner from your level 1 dwarf.
• Games focused on the plot, where the PCs have to act quickly and on little information, or London will be doomed.
• Games focused on the world, where there may be an ongoing plot but the core activity is exploring the setting provided by the GM.
• Games where the PCs drive the plot forward by their interactions with the world.
• Games in the style of a certain genre, film, book, or other piece of media.
• Games run from a published adventure or campaign.

As well as many other styles I am sure that I don't have the slightest clue about. However, talking about focus and style is a long topic, and one best saved for another time, but once you've decided and prepared your first session you're ready to start gaming.

So I suppose I should do focus and style next, seeing as I've started talking about it, but I might talk about preparing for your sessions instead, it feels like it'll be more useful to those actually struggling. I'll see, but the next piece of advice should be up within a week.