Don’t worry, nWoD. The magic isn’t dead! It’s just resting!

There were some threads going around about how skill challenges were horribly broken when you look at the numbers. Your average level 1 character is looking at a +8 to +11 bonus on a trained skill linked to a primary stat. The default DC for skill challenges at that level is 20, and the easiest challenge involves accumulating four successes before two failures. The math just doesn’t look good for the PCs.

In terms of practical experience, Evan ran his game last night, and we went through a skill challenge. I’d say that with the right tweaking, skill challenges are in fact quite a bit of fun. I mean, I used Endurance as part of a social challenge, for God’s sake. How awesome is that?

Yes, it’s a shame that it requires special attention. There’s no denying that. It makes me sad to think that there are DMs out there who will throw the idea out altogether, or foist ridiculously hard challenges on the players.

In particular, this is really easy to fix, and the DM has a lot of options, to the point where I’m not sure it’s worth getting bent out of shape as long as you’re willing to take those steps. For example, via EnWorld, Keith Baker has a post up about how he handles skill challenges, and there are many great ideas in there.

Even if you set that aside, I’m not a huge fan of d20, but the math in this system is very, very simple. A DM could vary DCs on the fly, hand out bonuses, and make adjustments to future DCs on the fly and have a reasonably good idea of the outcome. That’s really neat.

Once I have enough information about my own players’ skills, I will try my hand at designing a skill challenge. Until then, I am tentatively OK with skill challenges, and I’m relieved to see that Mearls, et al, are looking into it.

Well, blog, we’ve finally arrived at this point. I have my first substantive complaint about 4th Edition. Here it is: level 1 is a corner case in this system, which can easily lead to a high whiff-factor, particularly for spellcasters. A DM’s gotta be careful or else they can get pretty frustrated.

The melee advantage

Melee characters get a bunch of advantages that make them more likely to hit. Combat Advantage is a big one. Charging is another advantage.

And even though AC is higher than other defenses, fighters have an inherent +1 to hit. Rogues with daggers are extremely accurate, and have sneak attack damage to compensate for the 1d4. And so on.

Warlocks do have the +1 to hit anyone to whom they’re closer than anyone else. That means that warlocks should be hunting down artillery and skirmishers, and that seems like it works. But that’s not going to do much for defensive clerics or wizards who are only rolling +3 or +4 against enemies with Reflex defenses of 14.

Ain’t no magic items

Magic weapons and implements make it easier for PCs to hit, but at level one, PCs don’t have these. Many starting casters might only rolling with +3 vs. Reflex. After hitting level 2 and getting a +1 item, this brings him up to +5. That’s great, but level 1 can be kind of a slog when you’re missing a lot.

Ain’t no level -2 monsters

The DMG encourages you to throw varying levels of monsters at your players. Depending on monster type and level, you can bias an encounter to give one class or another its time to shine.

This is a great idea, but there’s a catch: you can’t really do this at level 1. You can only go up, and for the most part, this means higher defenses, often on a 1:1 basis.

HALP

A smart DM looks at what his PC are good at and balances encounters with this in mind. As an example, terrain can cut both ways! Terrain favorable to the PCs suggests that the monsters could be slightly more difficult, and a challenging map implies that perhaps the monsters shouldn’t be so hard.

It also pays to look at the sorts of defenses monsters have. Goblins have low Will. Kobolds have low Fortitude. Zombies have low Reflex and low Will. If you pick the right monsters, the casters have the same chance of hitting as the melee characters, which typically varies between 45% and 60%. This isn’t the worst possible to-hit chance ever.

Another thing worth mentioning is that a character driven game where the PCs are not highly optimized is going to require a different level of challenge compared to a group that relishes throwing their tricked out characters into a variety of tactical situations. In the former case, it’s much easier to justify monsters making suboptimal tactical choices in the name of flavor and roleplaying. In the latter case, the players are more than likely expecting you to go all out.

And if there’s some level 4 monster you’re dying to pit against your PCs, 4e’s monster math really is dead easy, to the point where I feel bad even complaining about this. It’s trivial to adjust monsters’ difficulty when you can just shave off a couple of points here and there, even for a level 1 monster.

Of course, you might want an encounter to be hard. If every fight is the same difficulty, you don’t get those cool fights where the PCs run roughshod over the enemy, nor do you get the ones where the PCs go all out. Even if it’s hard, everyone should feel effective. If they’re not doing well, they should feel it’s because they didn’t make the right choices, not because they only have a 35% chance of hitting.

As kind of a meta-point, in the end, the DM is the best judge of what’s too easy or too hard for his party. You should decide what’s hard based on the at-the-table play, what you know about the characters, and what you know about the players. If they’re not having fun, then it’s worth figuring out why and correcting that.

So what happens now?

The bad new is that I probably won’t post anything until this weekend.

The good news is that I’ll more than likely have some material from the setting I’m working on that I am happy to share. I had a little jolt of inspiration while laying in bed this morning, and I have a decent amount of material to work with. I also have a draft or two laying around that could be polished into some kind of post.

In the meantime, you should go check out Wizards’ site, if only to look at the article about kobolds as well as the D&DI Compendium, which apparently went up today. Short version: the kobolds bit is awesome, and the Compendium is pretty good for version 1.

However, the D&D monkey is on my back, and it must be satisfied by at least a couple more months of obsession. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing: by then, I believe Hunter will be out and I could perhaps maybe kind of possibly run it.

You see, I noticed that the lowest level spider in the Monster Manual happens to be level 4. As I recall, there were plenty of level 1 vermin in the 3.5 Monster Manual. I decided to create a fairly simple spider with a mild poison.

At first I was winging it as far as the numbers are concerned because I feel pretty confident about what level 1 characters’ attack bonuses and defenses are. It turns out the numbers I was using matched up with the default recommendations, at least for the most part!

I’ll talk a bit more about it after the jump.

Giant Spider – Level 1 Skirmisher

Medium natural beast (spider) – XP 100

Initiative +5  Senses Perception +5; tremorsense 5

HP 43  Bloodied 21

AC 15; Fortitude 12; Reflex 14; Will 11

Resist 5 poison

Speed 6, climb 6 (spider climb)

Poisonous Bite (standard, at-will) * Poison:

+6 vs. AC; 1d6+3. Against a slowed or immobilized target: 1d6+5.

Secondary: +3 vs. Fort; target is slowed (save ends).

Web (encounter, recharge 6):

+4 vs. Reflex; target is immobilized (save ends).

Alignment Unaligned, Languages —

Skills Athletics +9, Stealth +9

For his senses and movement, I copied those from another spider. Skills were fairly simple, too: most level 1 monsters have skill checks comparable to level 1 characters, and I saw no reason to depart from that.

I haven’t made up my mind about his bite damage. In the context of his poison ability, it seems like he could be a bit strong. Then again, his overall abilities seem pretty comparable to what some of the other level 1 skirmishers can do, so I’m content to leave it for now. The “recharge 6″ on his Web ability is there for fun. I haven’t envisioned how exactly he shoots webs.

Ability scores were maybe the toughest part, here. They don’t determine to-hit or damage. Outside of bonuses to defenses, skills, and initiative, I’m not really sure what they do. I didn’t like how high his Will and Fortitude defenses were, though, so I kept them down despite what the books said. I like that starting melee characters can easily beat his AC if they work together, and casters with attacks vs. Will or Fortitude (cleric, warlock, wizard) should be able to hit him fairly easily.

Of course, as a consequence, I gave him 5 extra hit points so he can get in some nice Poisonous Bite attacks.

I haven’t decided about his tactics, exactly. I see him mainly as trying to nail down one weak guy, biting his target into unconsciousness, and then dragging it off. Those of you with low AC beware: he wants to put you in his mouth!

I had fun making this little guy. It took me all of 20 minutes, if that long, and that’s mainly because I kept fussing over him, mainly about the bite damage.

WordPress’ default editor is actually rather nice. What annoys me is the page refresh after every Ctrl-S. I tried BlogDesk and the inability to create headings outside of editing HTML was irritating me. Now I am trying Zoundry Raven. It’s nice, but it also has bugs.

So, uh, bear with me.

This got me thinking about a post I’ve half-written a couple of times since I started this blog: the frequent comparison of D&D 4th Edition to a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game. I’m mainly going to talk about World of Warcraft, here: World of Warcraft is one of the most— if not the most— popular MMOs out there, so it’s sort of pointless to discuss most other MMOs in any detail.

What? No

At the risk of incriminating myself, I’ll admit that for a while I couldn’t figure the comparison between D&D 4th Edition and the likes of WoW. Having played WoW for a year or two myself and having played D&D and tabletop roleplaying games for nearly a decade (god damn), I honestly didn’t see it. Seriously. Since then, I’ve realized what people were talking about. First, though, let me walk you through my reasoning.

The biggest point in my mind was this: look at pretty much any conceit from WoW and you can trace it back to D&D. Levels, hit points, classes with roles, and dungeon crawling for loot all date before Ultima Online was a twinkle in anyone’s eye. Sure, MMOs took this stuff and ran with it. But any accusation that, of all games, Dungeons and Dragons is ripping off games like World of Warcraft is ludicrous in this context.

I had mixed thoughts about the point that a less complicated game would make a game more accessible to the MMO crowd. Setting aside that that’s something of a tautology, MMOs aren’t particularly simple games. Look at World of Warcraft, and how stats interplay with criticals, mana, parrying, dodging, and so on. Look at the sheer number of abilities your average character in WoW acquires over time, and look at the level of expertise many instances required, at least at one time in WoW’s history. World of Warcraft thrives on the concept of rules mastery, and the level of complexity a computer affords you means that there are some very complex systems at work.

There were some more specific comparisons that I thought were closer to the mark. You can disenchant magic items in D&D 4th Edition, and I’ll buy that that came from MMOs like World of Warcraft. Naming each of the class roles and making them more explicit is another thing that also came from MMOs— D&D never had a big focus on explicitly calling out a class’ role in the party until fairly recently, and there were definitely some character builds that could easily get you killed.

I still found the comparison unconvincing. How many traits must D&D and MMOs not share before it’s inaccurate to say they’re similar? And given how inseparably linked they are in terms of history and gameplay concepts, what does that comparison mean, really? It’s not unlike comparing, say, Warhammer and World of Warcraft. It don’t make no goddamn sense!

Yeah all right fine

Recently, though, I came around to a very strong point, through my own thoughts and then from reading the article above: MMOs developed the concept of every class’ mechanics being roughly the same and that each class should have a set of abilities. The underlying mechanics of mana versus rage are different, to be sure, but a mage and a warrior operate on roughly the same terms: some abilities are interrupts, some have cooldowns, they cost varying amounts mana or rage, and so on.

In AD&D 2nd Edition, fighters hit things. 3rd Edition improved this somewhat by introducing feats. But if you make (an admittedly crude) comparison between the number of feats that grant a fighter new abilities and the number of spells in D&D, you’ll see that spellcasters clearly have a wider variety of Interesting Things to do.

4th Edition is much more inline with MMOs. You get a new ability every even level. Everyone gets a minimum number of abilities they can use, and the rules governing the acquisition and use of those abilities are largely the same.

I think that this is a great idea, personally. In my opinion, previous editions were deeply flawed because they didn’t offer players of each class a guarantee that they would have something fun to do. I’d never play a fighter in 2nd Edition, and it sucked to have to ration my fun as a spellcaster.

Pathfinder seems to take some steps in the direction of giving everyone something interesting to do, and I don’t think it worked out very well. Ironically, I think they became like MMOs in another way: they gave too many abilities such that each class had a whole lot more attendant baggage and rules mastery.

Who cares, though?

This brings me to a meta-point here, which is the implication that being similar to MMOs is inherently a bad thing. Here I can see where people are coming from. MMOs are generally very repetitive: you kill a lot of things in succession, hope what you need drops, and maybe there’s a quest reward in it for you, too. Since the world doesn’t change much because that’s expensive and involves potentially obsoleting a bunch of old work, MMOs are also fairly static. They feel really fake in a very obvious way.

The thing is, I’m a pragmatist. A mechanic or gameplay concept is what it is: if it works well for MMORPGs and tabletop RPGs, then it works well! Everyone wins! I don’t think the provenance matters. OK, sure, we’re dealing with the Internet, so the rules of debate are different: you’re entitled to your own facts as well as your own opinion, guilt by association, anonymity, et cetera. But if the game is fun, it’s fun. Can’t we just leave it at that?

Now, in the context of 4th Edition, it’s too soon to render a verdict on it. My opinion so far is very positive, but that’s subject to change— I was really excited about 3.5e for a while, too, until I learned more about it. But it’s that last point above is what I keep coming back to: ultimately, if you’re still a party of adventurers going on quests, crawling through dungeons, killing monsters, getting loot, leveling up, and it’s fun, it’s D&D.

This got me thinking about a post I’ve half-written a couple of times since I started this blog: the frequent comparison of D&D 4th Edition to a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game. I’m mainly going to talk about World of Warcraft, here: World of Warcraft is one of the most— if not the most— popular MMOs out there, so it’s sort of pointless to discuss most other MMOs in any detail.

What? No

At the risk of incriminating myself, I’ll admit that for a while I couldn’t figure the comparison between D&D 4th Edition and the likes of WoW. Having played WoW for a year or two myself and having played D&D and tabletop roleplaying games for nearly a decade (god damn), I honestly didn’t see it. Seriously. Since then, I’ve realized what people were talking about. First, though, let me walk you through my reasoning.

The biggest point in my mind was this: look at pretty much any conceit from WoW and you can trace it back to D&D. Levels, hit points, classes with roles, and dungeon crawling for loot all date before Ultima Online was a twinkle in anyone’s eye. Sure, MMOs took this stuff and ran with it. But any accusation that, of all games, Dungeons and Dragons is ripping off games like World of Warcraft is ludicrous in this context.

I had mixed thoughts about the point that a less complicated game would make a game more accessible to the MMO crowd. Setting aside that that’s something of a tautology, MMOs aren’t particularly simple games. Look at World of Warcraft, and how stats interplay with criticals, mana, parrying, dodging, and so on. Look at the sheer number of abilities your average character in WoW acquires over time, and look at the level of expertise many instances required, at least at one time in WoW’s history. World of Warcraft thrives on the concept of rules mastery, and the level of complexity a computer affords you means that there are some very complex systems at work.

There were some more specific comparisons that I thought were closer to the mark. You can disenchant magic items in D&D 4th Edition, and I’ll buy that that came from MMOs like World of Warcraft. Naming each of the class roles and making them more explicit is another thing that also came from MMOs— D&D never had a big focus on explicitly calling out a class’ role in the party until fairly recently, and there were definitely some character builds that could easily get you killed.

I still found the comparison unconvincing. How many traits must D&D and MMOs not share before it’s inaccurate to say they’re similar? And given how inseparably linked they are in terms of history and gameplay concepts, what does that comparison mean, really? It’s not unlike comparing, say, Warhammer and World of Warcraft. It don’t make no goddamn sense!

Yeah all right fine

Recently, though, I came around to a very strong point, through my own thoughts and then from reading the article above: MMOs developed the concept of every class’ mechanics being roughly the same and that each class should have a set of abilities. The underlying mechanics of mana versus rage are different, to be sure, but a mage and a warrior operate on roughly the same terms: some abilities are interrupts, some have cooldowns, they cost varying amounts mana or rage, and so on.

In AD&D 2nd Edition, fighters hit things. 3rd Edition improved this somewhat by introducing feats. But if you make (an admittedly crude) comparison between the number of feats that grant a fighter new abilities and the number of spells in D&D, you’ll see that spellcasters clearly have a wider variety of Interesting Things to do.

4th Edition is much more inline with MMOs. You get a new ability every even level. Everyone gets a minimum number of abilities they can use, and the rules governing the acquisition and use of those abilities are largely the same.

I think that this is a great idea, personally. In my opinion, previous editions were deeply flawed because they didn’t offer players of each class a guarantee that they would have something fun to do. I’d never play a fighter in 2nd Edition, and it sucked to have to ration my fun as a spellcaster.

Pathfinder seems to take some steps in the direction of giving everyone something interesting to do, and I don’t think it worked out very well. Ironically, I think they became like MMOs in another way: they gave too many abilities such that each class had a whole lot more attendant baggage and rules mastery.

Who cares, though?

This brings me to a meta-point here, which is the implication that being similar to MMOs is inherently a bad thing. Here I can see where people are coming from. MMOs are generally very repetitive: you kill a lot of things in succession, hope what you need drops, and maybe there’s a quest reward in it for you, too. Since the world doesn’t change much because that’s expensive and involves potentially obsoleting a bunch of old work, MMOs are also fairly static. They feel really fake in a very obvious way.

The thing is, I’m a pragmatist. A mechanic or gameplay concept is what it is: if it works well for MMORPGs and tabletop RPGs, then it works well! Everyone wins! I don’t think the provenance matters. OK, sure, we’re dealing with the Internet, so the rules of debate are different: you’re entitled to your own facts as well as your own opinion, guilt by association, anonymity, et cetera. But if the game is fun, it’s fun. Can’t we just leave it at that?

Now, in the context of 4th Edition, it’s too soon to render a verdict on it. My opinion so far is very positive, but that’s subject to change— I was really excited about 3.5e for a while, too, until I learned more about it. But it’s that last point above is what I keep coming back to: ultimately, if you’re still a party of adventurers going on quests, crawling through dungeons, killing monsters, getting loot, leveling up, and it’s fun, it’s D&D.

His solution is a matrix of long-term influences that characters can have on one another, with two major outcomes. It’s pretty neat, and I suggest you read it. I’m tempted to do something similar when I get my act together and start running a long-term game.

While this was in the context of D&D, you really could use it anywhere. I could definitely see this being useful in a Vampire: the Requiem game, for example.