School’s Out Week: 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons

We’re a day late and a dollar short on this post. Please excuse us; it’s been that sort of week.

I can think of no better way to close out the School’s Out Week than by turning our attentions towards what many consider the poster boy for “what went wrong”: 4th Edition D&D. I’ve had time to weigh the pros and cons of the latest incarnation of the venerable roleplaying title due to my recent (and highly unforeseen) involvement with the title.

A few weeks ago, one of my Labyrinth Lord players announced that he’d be orchestrating the D&D Encounters program at our FLGS and he kindly invited me to attend. He was well aware of the fact that I’m firmly in the school of “less is more” and that 4E is really not my “go to” edition for D&D (he said, understating the subject), but left the offer open. When the next Wednesday rolled around, I stopped by to make sure he had enough players to go through with the matter. Having experienced what it takes to get a group of gamers going, I wanted him to succeed and if that meant having to sit in so he’d have enough guys to run, I was willing to do so. And that’s exactly what happened due to some miscommunication with the store about scheduled start times and dates. Thus, Mike took up the role of Brandis the human paladin and set forth to defeat the darkness (literally).

My previous experience with 4th edition was the singular playtest my group ran of D&D Gamma World some months ago. This time, I’d be on the other side of the DM’s screen. Out of respect, I kept my mouth shut and my mind open and did my best to treat it as a roleplaying game and not a miniatures battle game. The results were mixed.

First off, let me say I’m not here today to tear down 4E. I realize that I have no axe to grind anymore, if ever, with WotC. I’ve developed a lot of sympathy for the guys down in the design trenches and have the sneaking suspicion that they’re not really happy with the direction things have taken and would much rather be paid to take the game in another direction. Since a steady RPG design gig is a rare bird, I don’t blame them and might do the same thing in their position.

Also, any criticism that follows is not directed to Dave, who has taken up the challenge of running the Encounters sessions (which is a really bad choice for a name because it sounds too much like the swingers’ group that meets weekly at the A-Frame). He’s running the program they sent him and is inhibited by the material. I also respect anyone who is out there running a game rather than sitting at home bitching about the fact they’re not.

After sitting through two Encounters sessions, I’m ready to speak openly about my experience with 4E. It isn’t much different from the impression I got when running D&D Gamma World and is one I’ve seen repeated in several places. Ultimately, when the books are put away and the chip bowl has been emptied, 4th Edition D&D is a decent skirmish miniatures game. When paired with the weekly, two-hour long Encounters program, it becomes even more engaging. The players have a set goal and know that they’ll be headed home once it’s finished, not unlike putting aside two hours to watch a movie. I can honestly say that I’ve enjoyed the past two weeks.

The Encounters program is obviously geared toward a specific type of gamer, one with limited time and perhaps lacking the means or social skills to cultivate a group on their own. Each session starts with a little light roleplaying that is essentially a guise to determine what this week’s goal is. Are we to defend the orphanage? Kill the bandit chief? Maybe pursue the sinister gnome who ran down the alley into the obvious ambush? Once that’s out of the way, the tactical map is put down, the counters are placed, and the dice start rolling. When the last body hits the ground, you pack up and head on home.

This isn’t a bad way to approach 4E and it is much more enjoyable to me than I suspect participating in an ongoing 4E campaign would be. There is no investment needed other than a small block of time each week. My character is pre-generated and all his powers are neatly written on the back of the laminated character card, so I don’t have to drop a dime on confusing rulebooks (which one is official this week?) or power cards (I’m not spending another $10 because I want to play a warlock this time). I sit down, chuck some dice, and go home. Of course, the downfall to this is that I’m not invested in my character any more than I’d be with my race car piece in a game of Monopoly. This takes me to my real difficulty with 4E.

I cannot lose myself in the game the way I can with older editions. This is not the fault of the DM or the adventure, but the rules themselves. The rules in 4E, especially their dependency on creating unambiguous rulings, never disappear into the background for me. I can occasionally erect a thin veneer of roleplaying, but this comes crumbling down the first time I’ve got to start counting adjacent adversaries to see how big of a bonus I get to attack. The most recent WTF moment that threw me completely out of the moment came when I suggested that, rather than expend some out our limited healing surges to recoup after a fight, we return to the chapel we had just come from and ask the priests there if they could drop some of their heavenly mojo on us. That was when I was told that magical healing in 4E is tied to your character’s healing surges and even potions deduct from them. Huh?

For me, 4E simply misses the boat when it comes divorcing oneself from reality and reveling in the shared delusion of roleplaying. I’ve always been a fan of “fluff” over “crunch,” so 4E is like eating a cotton candy cone filled with nails, screws, and broken glass for me; just when I’m trying to enjoy the sweetness, I bite into something that ruins the experience. But also like cotton candy, it’s best when sampled infrequently and in small portions.

School’s Out Week: Star Was (D6)

In the world of old school D&D, popular sentiment is that the game is intended to be an open “sandbox” affair, a place where the players are free to choose their own destinies. The dice fall as they may, the death count can grow impressive, and the characters are working-class stiffs who possess the possibility of becoming heroes—so long as the dice and good fortune go their way.

West End Games’ Star Wars is about as antipodal to that school of thought as you can get. The players are heroes with a capital “H”, the adventures are laid out long before the group gathers, and the game master is instructed to regularly fudge the dice to make sure the players stay on that track so as to ensure the story reaches its intended climax. That makes the school of thought behind Star Wars “far, far away” from that which is prevalent in the OSR.

But is this necessarily a bad thing? When it comes to D&D, my mind set is similar to that of my old school mon frères. D&D is meant to be played as a wide-open game of exploration, with story coming from the events as they occur. The nascent possibility of heroic exploits and the renown that accompanies such trumps that of built-in heroism and nigh-superhuman accomplishments. But this outlook doesn’t work with all roleplaying games and can be in fact detrimental to some of them.

Star Wars is one such case. It is a game that was designed not to ape a particular genre, such as D&D was intended to do, but to recreate a very specific series of stories and the world(s) in which they occur. With an intent like that, a narrower focus is naturally needed. This is not to say that you can’t run an open sandbox campaign set in the Star Wars universe, but why pound round pegs into square holes when a more generic sci-fi rules system would work better?

Players approach the Star Wars universe with certain preconceived notions. After all, in many cases, Star Wars is as close as one gets to a lingua franca or common religion amongst gamers. No matter what our backgrounds or ages, the 20th Century Fox fanfare and those scrolling words hits a shared nerve, carrying us immediately to a specific time and place even if we couldn’t necessarily pinpoint that location on a star map or timeline. They’re going to expect to encounter Wookiees and Jawas, to shoot bounty hunters and race speeder bikes, and to swing across chasms and duel with lightsabers. Any game master who doesn’t meet those expectations is shortchanging his players (and probably shouldn't be playing Star Wars to start). And thus, there is a need for at least a narrow-gauge railroad to the campaign.

This has been on my mind a lot lately because I’m now running a Star Wars game. Some weeks ago, I realized that the Stonehell sequel will likely occupy my summer and I was not looking forward to working on the book AND running my Labyrinth Lord game at the same time. I’ve been getting close to the fantasy saturation point and I needed something to cleanse my palette. Since summer is traditionally the time for sprawling, no-brainer movie blockbusters, I figured why not spend this summer with the biggest blockbuster of them all? My players happily agreed to put Watchfires & Thrones on the backburner and to tread the myriad worlds of George Lucas’ universe. But, as an old saw goes, you can take the boy out of the old school, but you can’t take the old school out of the boy.

One of the nagging problems with Star Wars or any other licensed roleplaying game is that the players are aware that no matter what they do or accomplish, they are never really the big damn heroes of the setting. Somewhere out there are NPCs more renowned and respected than they’ll ever be, because only one person can ever blow up the Death Star (OK, maybe two people) or defeat Voldemort or be the chosen vampire slayer. The players are forever second banana to that person’s exploits. I simply couldn’t have that. I can make concessions, but not if there’s a way around them and I luckily had an idea to do so. Enter “A New New Hope.”

The premise of my summer Star Wars campaign is that the events of the first movie (and you know what I mean by “first”) didn’t happen. Rather than take up the campaign after the Battle of Yavin, which is the usual default time for most D6 Star Wars games, this story begins just prior to that first title crawl. The PCs have just stolen the Death Star plans from a secret Imperial R&D facility and must now get them safely into Alliance hands. How’s that for an opener? In just the first session I managed to squeeze in a speeder chase, a planet consisting of both icy glaciers and rivers of lava, exploding starships, Darth Vader, salvaged droids, and, as a nod to the fact that this isn’t a sandbox setting, a speeding mag-rail train (I’m so meta sometimes). But I run a loose railroad and although the players are all bound for Pittsburg (figuratively speaking); at least they get to choose what route they're going to take to get there.

School’s Out Week: Dungeon Crawl Classics

I’m going to start off S.O.W. by talking about Goodman Games’ upcoming Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG. That’s a bit of cheat because, while DCC is based on the d20 mechanic, its design DNA falls much closer to that of “old school” games than it does to later versions of D&D. Nevertheless, the elements of 3.5 are obvious to all with even the slightest familiarity with them.

In the interest of complete disclosure, I obviously have some connection with Goodman Games through the Dungeon Alphabet and I maintain a good relationship with Joseph Goodman. And while I’ve not been asked to sign any NDAs, I’ll avoid getting into specifics regarding the DCC system as I’m not sure what Joseph wants revealed at this stage and the rules continue to be improved and modified while playtesting continues. I’ve been involved with the later stages of DCC’s development in a tertiary fashion, helping to playtest the system and contributing suggestions as to how to improve it.

Let's get down to it in plain terms: I predict that DCC is going to turn heads when it becomes available for open playtesting and after being commercially released. You heard it here first. Joseph and Harley Stroh had a luxury in developing DCC that Gygax and Arneson did not have: a preexisting rules base to work with. “Big deal,” you might say. “So did Monte Cook, Jonathan Tweet, and Skip Williams.” The difference here is that Cook, Tweet, and Williams were looking to redesign D&D. Goodman and Stroh aren’t.

DCC’s strongest selling point for old school gamers is that Joseph and Harley went to the same source material that inspired Gygax and Arneson and sought ways to use the existing game system to recreate the feel, look, and expectations of the classic pulp sword & sorcery tales. Everything from cover design to the way magic works in DCC draws from those stories—and it does so very, very successfully. This is not “You’re Conan and I’m Gandalf. We team up to fight Dracula.”[1] This is “You’re Kane and I’m the Gray Mouser. We team up to storm the Tower of the Elephant, steal the jewels of the Overlord of Lankhmar, fight the priests of Cthulhu, and engage in pacts with the Lords of Chaos to do so.”

Now this is great for us old-timers, but what about those players that came along in the post 2nd edition epoch? How are they going to react? I won’t lie: There is going to be some acclimation required. The lack of skills and feats in DCC and the lower abilities scores on average means that you can’t grab a Pathfinder adventure and expect to run it "as is" with DCC. But the good news is that those players who are used to the “kewl powerz” bells and whistles from later editions aren’t going to be disappointed. They’ll still be able to play a mighty warrior capable of doing outlandish actions in battle. Players with a penchant for wizards and clerics are undoubtedly going to go ape over a magic system that allows spellcasters to employ magic more often and with more spectacular effects than even 4th edition provides for. DCC just may very well hit the elusive sweet spot the appeals to both old and new gamers alike. That’s no bullshit, people.

Are there tradeoffs to this melding of styles, preferences, and expectations? Of course there are. As Rob Conley mentioned in the comments of a recent Grognardia post regarding DCC, spellcasting is table-intensive, which might not be to everyone’s liking, but neither is it insurmountable. There are also various charts to add color to battles and help adjudicate some of the crazier events that occur in combat. These are again subject to game master preference, but if the final layout of the book is well done, accessibility and placement should help speed their implementation. And no matter what, there are going to be those who bitch about having to buy special dice just to play.

Like any roleplaying game, Dungeon Crawl Classics’ success at the gaming table is going to rely on the referee running it and the players participating in it. The rules place a lot of emphasis on becoming familiar with the "old ways" and the inspirational sources that birthed the game. Hopefully this will encourage players and judges to either dust off their copies of the pulp classics or to pick them up and read them for the first time. Even if they don’t, Goodman Games is currently working on several adventure scenarios (two of which will be available in the Free RPG Day release) that almost literally drip with pulpy goodness. The ones that I’ve had the pleasure of playtesting with my group featured supernaturally mutated beast-men, hideous subterranean gods, cursed tombs, chaotic towers, lumbering brass constructs, treacherous double-dealings, and sorcerers bound by infernal pacts with the hoary hosts of Chaos. And that, my friends, is heady stuff when using rules especially designed to foster that kind of atmosphere and gaming mindset. Even if you have no interest in any fantasy roleplaying game published after 1981 or so, I suspect that you'll find things to lift from DCC for your own games. It's just that good.