13 True Ways (13th Age)

When I got 13th Age last year, I thought it was pretty slick: a combo of 3rd and 4th edition which seems quite playable, easier than either of its parent editions, and has some neat notions (gimmicks?) to help things along (Icons and PC relationships with them, the escalation die, simplified and story-based backgrounds).

But I just preordered 13 True Ways and got the PDF. Now there's more than one class that appeals to me. For the record, its: Wizard from the first book, Battle Captain, Monk, Necromancer, Druid, and Occultist from 13 True Ways). By the by, I still think "Occultist" is kind of a stupid name and wasn't expecting much from the class, but its a class designed for one character which I totally like. As in: there's one crazy chosen-by-fate psychic/karma weaver out there, and you're it.

Some of the story-elements of 13 True Ways didn't look compelling for my first read-through, but I could be more easily convinced to play this baby: either as a player or behind the screen.

Interestingly, I think the set of classes also has now reached my "sweet spot" of 12-20 (15 to be exact). There's something about this level of granularity that speaks to me: certainly more complex than it needs to be, but enough distinct options that I feel I have a crucial choice to make in terms of class. With just the base game... maybe I could consider a Bard or Barbarian? Or Sorcerer? Maybe... But a few more options and I'm considering things that aren't casters (Battle Captain and Monk). This is good. 

Themes in RPGs

Since I've been thinking about Oriental Adventures lately (particularly this post), I'm mulling over how different OSR type games and different RPGs in general handle different genres of fiction.

Recent D&D, since around the time of Dragonlance in the latter days of AD&D 1st Edition, has been very focused on High Fantasy: dirt-farmers becoming heroes that save the kingdom or even the world. The grognards will tell you that older D&D was Sword and Sorcery: you're mostly in it for gold and glory things are more Conan-style with the strange weirdness of Lovecraft and Clark thrown in. Though few OSR games capture that sort of feeling for me except Astonishing Swordsmen and Sorcerers of Hyperboria or the Conan d20 game. A Song of Fire and Ice / Game of Thrones, thus far, began a bit more in the Sword and Sorcery realm, but is turning more High Fantasy. But we don't really have the Wuxia or Chambara sorts of elements in many fantasy games.

One of the things I yearned for after reading Oriental Adventures was to implement the Honor system in lieu of alignment for a D&D game. OA Honor reminds me to an extent of the World of Darkness morality type system (Station in Al-Qadim pales in comparison), and that seems eminently usable and easier for players to grasp than a nebulous alignment system. Of course, the themes of duty vs conscience and preserving face are ripe with conflicted story possibilities.

On the Wuxia end of things, I like the idea of a corrupt and/or distant bureaucracy, where past tragedies call out for revenge and justice can only be found in the acts of individual heroes.

I have a hankering to run an Al-Qadim game still, based on the Ruined Kingdoms where the characters are trying to found a new city, and have been reading the Arabian Nights now. I have an actual enjoyable translation rather than the old drivel of the Victorian era. And I hope to distil some of that into sets of recurrent themes and tropes that could be put into a game similar to some of the ideas of Wuxia, Sword and Sorcery, and Chambara.

I don't necessarily see all these as incompatible, but it is too much, perhaps, to roll into one game. Which is a damned shame if true. But I'll be damned if I don't consider adding this into whatever games I may run next. Furthermore, I think this is one of those areas where players can and should be consulted. There's nothing to say that my Al-Qadim game couldn't be influenced by Wuxia themes rather than Arabian Nights ones. But I think the idea of having a few stylistic guidelines for your campaign (and changing them up for the next one) can really help in personalizing a module or crafting the next adventure.

Oriental Adventures (also) got it wrong (But Al-Qadim got it right)

Though I just posted about how Oriental Adventures did classes right, it also has some failures we can learn from. Chief among these are the broader compatibility and conceptual familiarity (or exoticism).

First, on the compatibility issue. While it is refreshing that OA doesn't need a generic fighter or thief, it isn't entirely clear why everything "western" was excluded. That isn't to say that you couldn't have an eastern adventurer in a western setting or vice versa, but why are there no indigenous thieves? Is the idea of a thief too foreign to the world of Oriental Adventures? And what is the point of the Wu Jen? They're just a magic-user basically with a slightly different flavor. As a part of the broader D&D world, it isn't clear why a few things couldn't have been recycled. Put it another way, why did OA have to be so different? (I realize this may contradict my previous post a little, but there's something to be said for simple design and it is simpler to use what you've already got.)

This brings up the issue of conceptual familiarity or exoticism. While most people probably knew what a Samurai and Ninja were, every other class gets an exotic name as well. Shukenja, Sohei, Bushi, Kensai, Yakuza, Wu Jen... It feels like its starting to get a little much, when Weaponmaster or Magic-User/Wizard/Sorcerer might have helped a little. I think we see a better balance in Al-Qadim (i.e. Arabian Adventures) where we see some of the subclasses (i.e. kits) have transparent names (Desert Rider, Corsair, Elemental Mage, Sorcerer, Mystic, Beggar-Thief, Merchant-Rogue, Barber, Holy Slayer, Mercenary Barbarian, Pragmatist, Ethoist, Moralist) and only a few have Arabian names (Askar, Faris, Hakima, Matrud, Sha'ir, Mamluk, Rawun, Kahin, Sa'luk). Its about half-and-half, and then you can add in their "outlander" kits (Outland Warrior, Outland Priest, and Ajami; ajami is the wizard while outland rogues are sa`louk). While it is considerably more options than OA/Kara-Tur, half of the AA/Al-Qadim are named in a relatively transparent and familiar way. There's no additional work to figure out what a Barber or Desert Rider are, and relatively little to figure out Corsairs or Pragmatists.

Another thing Oriental Adventures got wrong is the races. Gone are the Elves, Dwarves, and Hobbits we know and love. In are spirit folk, animalistic spirit-folk with strange names, and some sort of dwarf-like creature. Al-Qadim took a different approach: the setting is inclusive, racial hatreds are gone, but things are still human-focused. This lets people play elves or dwarves. Or goblins, kobolds, ogres, etc. in the City of Delights boxed set; if Al-Qadim had been released after the Complete Book of Humanoids, that little bit would probably have been included in the main book itself.

Oriental Adventures loses out on the familiar races because of this, and doesn't get much to make up for it. Dark Sun, according to legend, originally would have been bereft of the standard D&D races too. I think Dark Sun is more powerful for including the basic races and turning their archetypes around, plus they still included a few new/crazy things (Half-Giants, Thri-kreen, and later Aarakocra and Pterrans and Dray). In a fantasy Japan or China (or Mongolia or Tibet or India or...), is there no room for the elves and dwarves?

I suspect that Tolkien and later fantasy gives us an idea what elves and dwarves and hobbits and orcs are. And that may be one reason why Gnomes have been a strange addition to D&D: they're not clearly portrayed in some of the canonical fantasy fiction. So a stronger OA would have, perhaps, found a place for Elves and Dwarves in a fantasy Asia. This is what OA got wrong, perhaps. It is too different from normal D&D, both in terms of some of the mechanical aspects which perhaps didn't need to be changed, and some conceptual elements which were excised or exoticized rather than form a natural bridge.

On the much maligned AD&D 2nd Edition

I apparently started this long ago, but finishing a PhD and moving to the Middle East left me unblogging for quite some time. I'll leave this as is and try to finish what I started. 

With the new D&D Next playtest packet, I've been avoiding the forums and what I presume is the vast amounts of nerdrage over the new packet. My first thought was disappointment because of the loss of options: Clerics and Rogues really lost a lot of options and there was no sexy new bard to make up for it (though the druid and barbarian may have decent updates). Anyway, I did some reading about 2nd edition, and came to a few conclusions.

1) Second edition is maligned because it is transitional and unfairly gets criticisms that should (also) go with other editions.
2) Second edition is misremembered: things that people complain about in third edition didn't apply in second edition (and earlier).
3) Second edition is really three distinct versions: core, complete, and options.

I'm going to focus on the first and third aspect here, but mostly the third.

The grognards hate second edition because they feel their particular version (original, b/x, becmi, AD&D 1st) achieved perfection in the 70s and nothing that happened once TSR's mid-80s problems hit is valid. Let's face it: grognards don't even like things like Oriental Adventures (see the comments here and here) or Unearthed Arcana by-and-large, and the modules from the late 70s and early 80s are considered the best. Grognards forget that adventures changed midway through AD&D 1st edition. So any grognard criticism is largely going to be that 2nd edition isn't their edition of the game. But it is a legitimate continuation of what was happening in that version of the game. It is pretty obvious that you can convert second edition materials easily to earlier editions of the game than third or fourth edition stuff.

Now, the core 2nd edition books (the big 3 plus Tome of Magic and Legends and Lore) actually make a pretty coherent little system, and in that respect they're just a clean-up of the first edition AD&D rules, with a bit of sanitization to help avoid the Satanism stigma. So gone were assassins and half-orcs and devils and demons. But in were the specialty priests, specialist wizards, playable bards, and such. Interestingly, also gone was the rule that gp=xp. I think this falls in the realm of sanitization too, because xp for treasure induces the murderhobo style of play, rather than heroic parties. Though xp for gp was an optional rule. But by and large, 2nd edition started out as a cleaned up and sanitized version of the game. You can criticize it for lacking Gary's tone, but I think even Gary would have bowed to sanitization and ditched monks, assassins, renamed devils/demons, etc. He wouldn't have been happy, be he probably would have done it (and done it somewhat tongue-in-cheek). When I go back and look at the early edition stuff, I wish it had as much variety as is presented here. Specialist wizards and a couple priest variants would really help tempt me to play a real old-school game.

Next, comes second edition complete, with all the complete handbooks. This is the start of the splat-bloat, but this is nothing that other games and companies weren't doing either. From a business stand point, TSR needed people to buy more products, so calling them T$R is just a naïve lamentation about capitalism. This started to have more "broken" shit, but a lot of it was still solid. I think some of the problem is when new complete books came out, you could only integrate that material with new characters. Unlike third or 4th edition where you could take some feats/powers/spells, the new stuff in second edition generally required a new/redesigned character.

Finally the option books came out with character-points, spell points, proficiency points, and all other kinds of points. I think Combat & Tactics and Spells & Magic were fairly solid. But people forget that these are collections of optional rules. You didn't need subabilities or to use those point-based character creation methods. You could just use the new schools of magic, new priest classes, or critical hit charts. So while those books may have some crazy shit in them, you weren't instructed to use all of that.

When people hear 2nd edition, they start thinking of the end of the run, 1995+ rather than the beginning, which is the opposite of 1st edition. When people think of first edition, they're actively excluding Unearthed Arcana, Oriental Adventures, Dragonlance Adventures, and the like. Third and 4th edition have the same splat-bloat as second did, so there's really no grounds for criticism there: the bladesinger from Complete book of Elves can't be much worse than the junk that came out in 3.5 or twinstrike for the 4e ranger.

In Essenece, I think second edition gets the flack for a number of things that were happening in RPGs at the time.  First, a trend towards story and heroism that started in the mid to late 80s. We certainly see it with Vampire but it seems the trend is apparent in dragon magazine. Second, the addition of options and rules to the game, which started with first edition AD&D (Many OSR folk don't like races distinct from classes, monks and other sub classes, or Psionics) and continued with Unearthed Arcana.  These two really do go together: a more complex story demands more character options, in a sense. You see this trend in the Options books where they tried to revitalize the game with insights from other games (point-based design). 

Oriental Adventures got it right

Now that D&D 5th Edition is about to come out, I've been musing a bit more about what would make a better game. I just bought the PDFs of Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperboria (AS&SH) and it kind of hit me that there are a number of different classes in the original game and retroclones, but Oriental Adventures hit on a core rightness that other versions of the game haven't. Maybe it was a comment that veteran players tend to prefer the basic 4 classes and get a deeper experience from them, but since the addition of the Paladin and Ranger and so forth, something is off. Here's the quote itself:

Utilizing only the four principal character classes is recommended when introducing young or inexperienced players to AS&SH. A game with but these four classes is also easier for a novice referee to manage. Furthermore, veteran gamers oft deem the four principal classes as more gratifying compared with a dozen or more subclasses; indeed, the classes of fighter, magician, cleric, and thief suitably cover the gamut of archetypes portrayed by such literary sword-and-sorcery masters as R. E. Howard and F. Leiber.  (AS&SH p16)

They're all redundant classes, other than the basic four. An illusionist is a focused but lesser magic-user in the same way that an assassin is a lesser thief and the paladin/ranger are fighters with a little something different. The paladin and ranger seem to be more iconic because they actually do something a little different than the fighter, whereas illusionist and assassin are more focused (and possibly lesser) versions of the basic class. Druids are apparently distinct enough from clerics to have caught on.

The subclasses of older editions have been copied and recopied in retroclones, but there's very little that distinguishes them from their basic versions at times. I've particularly noticed this in the magic-using classes and fighter. AS&SH has illusionists, necromancers, and pyromancers but they're basically just magic-users with a specialization. Third Edition added the sorcerer, which was a nice change. Maybe this is why I like the Wizard-Sorcerer-Warlock trio for magician classes since they actually cast spells differently, and can support their own sub-classes or specialties (based on school specialization, bloodline, or pact). They feel like classes, not just like variant wizards (as necromancers or illusionists do).

DnD Previous: Once more back to 2nd Edition

So this happened: http://www.wizards.com/dnd/Article.aspx?x=dnd/4ll/20130902

Mearls said that subclasses are going to be the next big thing. It isn't really clear, however, what the subclasses for paladin, ranger, barbarian, monk or bard will be though because they really should be subclasses of fighter, rogue, cleric, or mage themselves.

My worst fear when they started bring this up was that they'd roll wizard, warlock, and sorcerer into one magic-user class. Why is this a bad idea? The classes have nothing in common other than using magic.

A wizard, by definition in the game, is a scholar-mage. A wizard gains power through studying and forcing his mind to comprehend and manipulate magic via practice and rote memorization. Anyone with enough intelligence and dedication can cast spells like a wizard. A wizard probably is knowledgeable about things like the planes of existence, spellcraft, magical beasts, or lost legends because he is studious.

A sorcerer, conversely, has been designed as someone who innately manipulates magic. No amount of study helps them, they just experience and practice and possibly attune their bloodline further. They are not dependent on intelligence at all. A sorcerer shouldn't have bonus knowledge skills related to magical things necessarily, but instead might be adept at hiding or obviating his powers, knowing folk lore and safe houses and knowing the sorts of things that a noble or peasant would know.

A warlock makes a pact with some entity who grants magical power. The warlock may need to be canny and smart, but dumb warlocks could also make a pact presumably. In which case perhaps being persuasive or magnetic would grant the warlock a patron's notice, but even that might not be required. A warlock might need a high constitution to withstand his patron's mighty touch. Like the sorcerer, a warlock doesn't need to know anything about how magic works to use his granted powers.

The three spellcasters described above, not to mention a runecaster or artificer or whatnot, don't even share a list of skills they might know. So it's not appropriate for the mage class to grant skills. All it would be granting is spellcasting style, which itself might grant more options (school specialties for wizards, bloodlines for sorcerers, pacts for warlocks). This doesn't seem like the right level of granularity. Wizards, warlocks, and sorcerers could still share a spell list (and should) if they are distinct classes.

This design decision seems like we're moving back to the world of second edition kits, and is going to be the new bloat in rules options. The raging nerd and grognard inside me wants to go back to second edition, add in ascending armor class, and change proficiencies a bit along with spell slots for the casters and call it 5th edition.

Perhaps I'll come to terms with this eventually, but I really hate a few of the implications or ramifications here. First, psion will be a type of mage. This feels wrong and not like D&D. Second, I really wish there were a shaman and mystic/shukenja option for clerics. Non-western religions should be included, not just a class drawn from western monotheism and classical paganism. This doesn't seem likely given the current version of the cleric. Third, as mentioned earlier, most of the classes are only classes now by weight of tradition. Barbarians, bards, druids, monks, paladins, and rangers are rather narrow archetypes compared to the big 4. I cannot imagine we would ever see as many bard or druid or paladin subclasses as we will fighter or rogue types.

This saddens me, because I did enjoy the playtest games I did this summer. I like the bounded accuracy/flatter math concept, which lets lower level creatures be used more often. I like advantage as a simple mechanic for bonuses and penalties. I enjoyed the feel of the game, even if a few things needed to be reworked.

I had been thinking that one of my next goals in life might be to publish a D&D article or adventure. But maybe it will be an OSR thing. I didn't like the direction Pathfinder took with classes (though I do like some aspects of that system too). I'm not sure I like how 5e is turning out with this announcement. I guess time will tell, maybe the next packet will give me something to be happier about.

Missed Opportunities in D&D Next

So, apparently at GenCon they announced that they're pretty well happy with the playtest feedback for the game, so most of the design is done now. Presumably lots of development to do still to get the math right, add in some missing options, etc. That strikes me as a little odd, given that we just got this packet recently and haven't given feedback on this version. I don't think this is all one big marketing ploy, but I guess they don't expect to be making many changes to what we've got now.

I largely like some of the changes they've made. Fighters now get lores, and they acknowledge that some classes/builds should have skills (i.e. expertise dice) including knight-type fighters. After being disappointed that there was a loss of options from the previous packet (particularly in the cleric and rogue), I saw there were some other quite nice options and a lot of the stuff does look like an improvement. I still wish monks had a maneuver system instead of lame ki powers and that there were a few more races included so we could easily run Planescape or Al-Qadim. That said, I think there are a few changes that really should have been made, and I'm afraid we won't see them in the next edition right away.