Filling the grid: races, classes, and roles

The fourth edition of D&D really cemented the old D&D roles by explicitly labeling them and putting them front and center in the game. No longer did a party require a cleric, since a warlord could fulfill the same party role, albeit in a slightly different way. Though, in third edition, a regular supply of wands of cure light wounds also provided plenty of healing if someone had the Use Magic Device skill.

Now, these combat roles have been around since the dawn of the game, and they were even explicitly discussed in the third edition of the game to some extent, though they were also mixed with non-combat roles. They can be broader or narrower, but here's one stab at the list:

Combat: Defense, Offence, Healing, Buffing, Battlefield Control
Exploration: Perception, traps, doors, scouting/stealth, tracking, orienteering, nighttime watches, nature lore
Interaction: Lies and knavery, Diplomacy, Intimidation, Information Gathering, setting lore

Rule of Law: Church of the Wisdom Kings

The best D&D world I've played in is, of course, the homebrew one I made with two good friend a few years ago. I don't want to catalogue all of its greatness here, but the way we created the setting was amazingly good. I'll use the Church of the Wisdom Kings as the best example of our collective world building.

Originally, we wanted a morally clear orc-killing game. Knowing me and my friends, we drifted from the original goal a bit, but were all pretty happy with where we ended up. The way we did it though was pretty fun and ensured that everyone could have a say in the setting. That's because we made it all up.

The basic rule: whatever you introduce, you get to define.

More problems for D&D Next?

The D&D Next design team just lost Monte Cook. Enworld has a bit of coverage here.

I'm not sure how well this bodes for things to come. We can only speculate, but it makes me a little fearful for the hobby.

If D&D goes down the drain, RPGs will still survive. But the flagship brings new people in, and if sales for the new edition go poorly, I'm not sure that Hasbro/Wizards will release the brand into anyone else's hands, which could mean D&D would go dormant (or just die). That'd be quite a blow.

That said, I'm still optimistic for some of the new developments they've mentioned, and the upcoming playtest.

I just can't quite shake the feeling that some of this 'modular' discussion for the new edition is going to be some crazy marketing ploy. Hard to fault a company for wanting to make money. And at least with the third edition OGL (and the ability to hoard some rule books), the game will never really be dead and gone.

Forgotten Innovations: Character Points

AD&D character points were the last in the line of extravagant excess that TSR unleashed before Wizards of the Coast took control of the game.

In my forced exile from gaming, I've been known to read a few forums now and then. I used to enjoy reading some of the speculationa about D&D Next, but now they mostly seem pretty similar. And a lot of people are requesting innovations that showed up much earlier in the life of the game.

One of these forgotten innovations is character points from 2nd Edition. Now, second edition is often maligned as the dark ages of D&D. TSR went broke, and the game suffered from an excess of options. This is particularly true with the Player's Option line (including the Dungeon Master's Option: High Level Campaigns).

Man, wouldn't it be sweet if feats were broken down according to usefulness and quality so that each one could just be bought with a pool of points?

Anonymous forum poster that I'm paraphrasing, you've stumbled upon one of the so-called excessive options of 2nd Edition. Each class and race had options that could be purchased with character points. Want to be able to get weapon specialization as a Ranger? Want to access some wizard spells as a cleric? Want a signature spell as a wizard? All of this (and more) was available with character points.

Now, this was probably somewhat broken because they can be combined in an astounding array of bad ways. This sort of imbalance could be alleviated now with a large playtest of dedicated nerds, the type of thing the internet currently allows and Wizards of the Coast is trying for. The modern CharOp boards would have a field day finding all the brokenness that character points allowed. Heck, I found some awesome combinations back in the day.

Martial Archetypes and Classes in D&D

Martial classes have never really been my favorite in D&D. If I'm playing a fantasy game, I'd prefer to be slightly more fantastic than a simple warrior. But that's just me. In recent memory, I've played a "lazy" warlord in a "hobbit" game (Frondo Maggins, a do-nothing hobbit with a heart of gold), and a half-orc assassin in service to the wizards' guild in a more serious game. I'm not sure why these classes, as a whole, don't appeal to me that much. I guess I just prefer casters.

I'm not sure how dull it was to play fighters in earlier editions. I understand the criticism that fighters just whump things, but in earlier editions there were still rules (and house rules) for disarming, overbearing, grappling, and other maneuvers. Once you hit Combat and Tactics in second edition there were plenty of martial options to use, and compared to wizards they were probably relatively balanced. Maybe I'll give it a try once I get back to civilization.

As I read over some old and new iterations of the game (just bought a copy of Adventurer Conqueror King recently, I'll review that later), I'm struck by the recent discussions of how difficult it is to make a fighter class. This is because the fighter is a really broad archetype. In a game with many different classes though (instead of just one customizeable Warrior class), I think we could use about four warriors and four(ish) experts. I've got a clearer picture of the martial warriors than the experts though.

My D&D

My introduction to D&D came a bit too late for me to be a true grognard. Hopefully no one will blame me for being born well after the first edition books came out. But my brother got Heroquest for Christmas one year, and we played the junk out of that game. Wore the skulls off the dice, in fact. We even had the original Elf and Barbarian quest packs, which were far too difficult for us to actually complete, even with all the treasures from the basic game.

I think it was in October of the next year that I got the black box. It was definitely for my birthday, and the box came out in 1991, so I either got it that year or the next. I even remember exchanging it at Toys R Us because I though it was defective and missing the adventure or something.

Lingering Innovations: Warlocks and Witches (And Sorcerers)

Going back to Second Edition again, its pretty easy to find the precursors to the Sorcerer and Warlock class in the Player's Option: Spells and Magic book. I'm strongly in favor of the Wizard, Sorcerer, and Warlock being core classes in the new D&D. I'm concerned, however, that an emphasis on the four 'core' classes might lead to the downplay of non vancian wizards.

For the first two decades of its existence, D&D hasn't been too keen on accepting alternative magic styles. The rules give us casters who memorize (or later prepare) their spells for the day, and that's basically true until a few innovations in second edition, like the runecaster from the Vikings sourcebook (later redone as a Totem-Sister in Elves of Evermeet and again as a runecaster in Giantcraft). We saw a couple alternatives like the Sha'ir and Ghul Lord from the Al-Qadim line and the later Shaman product, but the core of spellcasting in D&D has always been fire-and-forget magic.

Spells and Magic focuses, like so much of second edition, on world building. There's a wealth of character options there, but it didn't seem to occur to the authors that one might mix and match their channellers (sorcerers?) with the magic systems for witches and warlocks or alienists (basically infernal pack and star pact warlocks). The assumption is that the wizard class works one way in any campaign world, but providing distinct mechanisms for arcane magic (and similarly for divine magic) as distinct classes seems like the plan. It even now has a bit of a history in D&D.

Now, channelers don't quite equate to the modern D&D sorcerer, but that's a relatively minor difference. Technically, they could be studious scholars who channel powerful forces too. What I'd still like to see in future editions, however, are options so that one could create a campaign setting so that we have magic users who use these distinct types of magic (or possibly more). This is what my friends and I did in our Rule of Law setting. There were two arcane caster classes, so they represent different magical factions in the game. But that was the essence of the extravagance that was second edition: world building.

Revising Rituals for Dark Sun 4e

One of my the benefits of playing a table-top RPG is the infinite customizability. Since a human is in charge of things, you're not bound by pre-determined rules, pre-planned adventures, or anything else some game designer dreamed up. House rules are king.

Over the last two editions of D&D, the rules have been more and more formalized, and the math more balanced. This leads, however, so some difficulties in customization. Admittedly, the major difficulty is remembering that the rules are malleable in the first place. The second is finding the right level of customization.

One of my proudest achievements in the last D&D game I ran was customizing the 4e ritual system for my dark sun game. Not any DS campaign, but specifically my game. Here's an example ritual I gave out:

Clerics vs Priests of a Specific Mythoi

I'm a pretty strong believer that the rules of any D&D campaign should be tied to the setting. Any rules-set that Wizards comes up with for the 5th edition (or a retro-clone, or any other rules set) implies some kind of default setting with its take on magic and the magical classes. The very way that classes are designed has setting implications.

But the implementation of magical archetypes is a bit more likely to change than physical ones. Al-Qadim redoes wizardry as elemental and genie based magic, just like Dark Sun uses elemental clerics and templars priests alongside defiler and preserver wizards. Since deities are almost certainly likely to change, each setting yearns for a way to customize the priestly class(es), at least in some small way. Priests of a Specific Mythoi were the way second edition handled this. (I'll get into wizarding ways another time.)

By altering weapon/armor restrictions and spells granted (via the Spheres of Influence spell lists) it was really easy to customize priesthoods. The sphere system was somewhat balanced too, as one could just swap a few spheres here and there. Granted powers, of course, were easily abusable but most DMs have enough sense not to let something too overpowering into the game. So second edition had an endless array of distinct priests for distinct religions. And it was pretty awesome. Specialty priests might be one of those extravagant excesses that second edition is fameous for though, so I can see the point of view that wants a smaller number of well-defined classes.

This level of customization was lost after second edition, never to be seen since (or before the system first arrived with the first edition Dragonlance Adventures book). The downside is that people are likely to spend hours designing every potential religion in their home campaign rather than just the ones that need to be portrayed. It also makes constructing a spell-list potentially unweildly.  Since priests (both PC and NPC) were free to choose from any spell their deity granted, that might require consulting lists of a dozen different spheres.

Instead of an infinitely customizeable priest class, can you create a cleric class that is broad enough to encompass knights-templar and cloth-casters? Apparently the designers think so. Or at least they got poll results that suggest people might want one really broad cleric or two distinct classes. Assuming we're going to end up with a core set of classes similar to that found in First, second, and third edition (or even 4th where everything is core), I'd prefer more than two in a generic rules-set. I'd love to see a completely customizeable priest class as well, but I think four priestly classes can cover most priest archetypes from the start. Having four basic priestly classes in the game also goes a bit beyond stereotypical western fantasy as well.

Spells by Level Table

In thinking about the imbalance between classes, the casters are rightly considered as overshadowing the warriors as they advance in level. The scales tip somewhere around 6th or 7th level. Certainly by 9th or 10th level casters with their 5th level spells can begin to overcome all sorts of mundane obstacles that fighters and thieves can't be compared.

This is even why some people play a variant where level advancement stops at 6th level in the 3.5 system: you keep playing and gaining feats and such, but your raw power tops out around the point where a fighter can still overpower a wizard with a bit of luck and planning (or vice versa).

There's even a new phrase that's been bandied about recently: linear fighter, quadradic wizard. This comes about because of two factors: wizards gain more spells at each level, and those spells also gain power as the wizard gains levels. Fighters, on the other hand, have a relatively linear progression of feats and extra attacks which don't scale to the same degree.

So this seems relatively fixeable by taking a closer look at the spell tables for wizards, and capping spell power at each level. I'll focus on the spell advancement here, rather than limiting fireball to 5d6 damage (at least as a third level spell, 4th level fireball might do 7d6 damage).

So what if we found an advancement chart that looked more like this one:

Level	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9
1	1
2	2
3	2	1
4	2	2
5	2	2	1
6	2	2	2
7	2	2	2	1
8	2	2	2	2
9	2	2	2	2	1
10	2	2	2	2	2
11	2	2	2	2	2	1
12	2	2	2	2	2	2
13	2	2	2	2	2	2	1
14	2	2	2	2	2	2	2
15	2	2	2	2	2	2	2	1
16	2	2	2	2	2	2	2	2
17	2	2	2	2	2	2	2	2	1
18	2	2	2	2	2	2	2	2	2
19	2	2	2	2	2	2	2	2	3
20	2	2	2	2	2	2	2	2	4

Clearly the idea here--gaining one new spell of the highest level--lose a bit of elegance at 19th level when you need a number higher than two in the chart. Each new character level brings the wizard a new spell, so a system like this still lets a spellcaster advance in power. Its just not to the same extent as other editions where the caster has 5+ spells of each of the first five spell levels. A 20th level magic user in first edition AD&D has 32 spells, an illusionist has 30 and a cleric has a whopping 49 (though only the magic user can use spells past 7th level). And this is in the era before clerics had spells that would let them fight as well as a fighter. Third edition wizards have 36 spells at 20th level which are evenly spread out.  Of course, the table would have to be modified for Sorcerers and Bards who are stronger and weaker casters respectively.

If this was the only change you made to a D&D game before 4th edition, I think it would stall that tipping point to some extent. Wizards would still be playing the resource management game at higher levels, where the thieve's ability to detect traps, open locks, and climb walls might make wizards think twice about wasting spell slots on low-level spells like find traps, knock, and spider climb.

Of course, earlier editions had other restrictions to help reign in wizards, including spell components, lengthy spell memorization times, and slow casting times which could result in wizards losing their spells before they were able to get them off. In 3rd editions, without reigning in scroll creation, a system like this wouldn't help as much there. Its not perfect, but something to consider for a reimagined or re-designed older edition of the game.