NeoGrognard

Both Gen Con and PAX are in the can, and unsurprisingly my crazy prediction that Wizards of the Coast would announce AD&D did not see the light of day. There were rumors of an announcement, hastily aborted at Gen Con, but those rumors may have been spewed by big mouth jerks spouting off alcohol-induced attempts at divination. Trust me, I know that there are many things said when the sauce is involved.

Now that doesn’t mean they are not working on a new version of the game. It seems like they’re working on a bunch of new versions of the game. I’ll get to that, but let’s start with a truism about RPGs that will make every messageboard-lurking teeth gnashers and topic-fetish troll scream at once like a chorus James T. Kirks blowing their loads at the same time they do the top-camera shot enemy fist-clenching curse. The only thing that stops a new edition is the complete and utter failure of the game in question and sometimes even that’s not enough.

Chances are you’ve read Mike Mearls’s Legends and Lore columns on the Wizard’s website. I have to admit, I’ve been really puzzled by them. Frankly, they read like a countdown to a new edition with the last sentence of every other paragraph stripped off. Each week he tackles some aspect of the D&D rules (specific or broadly philosophical), and speaks often in goal-oriented language of the architect or middle management while dancing like a poet or a mad scientist desperately seeking to obscure the true object of his work, as if to dodge a cuckold or a gang of bobbies.

“Hey, fad’er, can a shadowdancer hide in plain sight so well that even he can’t find himself? Eh, eh? How about that, fad’er?”

Don’t get me wrong, if you design games (especially tabletop RPGs, and double so for those based on the “blah, blah, blah, you fucking know”) some of the questions he asks and pontificates upon are things that always wander around your noggin. They are things you discuss over beers, BBQ, or between bouts of bullshitting. They are things you argue about while waiting for yet another meeting to start. They are the “why didn’t I ask that chick out in High School” questions of game design. Fun little heartbreaking fantasies, but utterly pointless in most situations.

While WotC is not afraid to fiddle with rules in the search of better answer and more satisfying play experiences (that may be an understatement), Mike’s recent fixation with the skill system seems to question the system as a whole. Mike is so fixated with the skill system that he brought in Monte to help (they are old and dear friends) with surprising results. Now I say surprising because the game has something like the thing that Monte proposes. It has since 3e. It’s called taking 10, expanded in 4e with the idea of passive skill checks.

If DCs go up with level and skills go up with levels, and there are easy, moderate and hard DC assumptions, couldn’t you just easily whip up a chart with the DC of these automatic succeed thresholds and call it good? Wouldn’t the scaling be the equivalent of calling them things like novice, journeyman, expert, master, grandmaster or (the strangely titled, considering the scope of the proposed system) impossible. In other words, don’t we have that technology? The only thing you have to do is to take out the part of take 10 that says you can use it only when you are in a rush, in an encounter, or involved in a skill challenge. Except for the rushed part, those reasons are rather arbitrary anyhow. If a skill challenge allows a character day’ of study in a library why couldn’t he take 10. If a rogue is invisible all through a combat encounter, why couldn’t she take 10s on her Thievery to open that complicated lock? Those two barriers are just lazy design that only serve to cut off interesting and narrative design space in the guise of making it easier for the DM not to screw up. Trust me. DMs screw up and learn from it. It’s not a bad thing.

I’ll just sidestep the notion of automatic failure brought up in the article…at least one attached to the same system. Such mechanics that are do not occur naturally at the extremes of the system always seem counter to the fantasy genre to me, which these days involves the possibility of action movie feats of derring-do. The lack of hard boundaries (though the possibility for catastrophic failure when soft boundaries are approached) is one of the many things that make tabletop RPGs superior (IMO, at least) to computer RPGs. Personally, I’m not going out of my way to saddle an RPG skill system with hard blocks. When it comes to skills, it’s all carrots and sticks. Leave the blinders at home.

In the end, I found myself puzzled by the pie-in-the-sky language of the article, and the need to discover solutions that I believe are already in the system. Is Wizards getting many complaints about the system? Is it broken? Does it not work correctly? I’m way out of the loop, but I’m not under that impression.

Sometimes you have to go for a rules overhaul. I’m currently engaging in that very endeavor over on the Paizo website. Big surprise, that most cursed of skills—Stealth—doesn’t work as well as we would like. Through our FAQ system, we’ve received many nagging questions about Stealth. We got a good number of George Carlin’s Class Clown-like conundrums. Eventually when we get too many, we need to make changes. We decided to do that the Paizo way, and have an open playtest. We then shifted though a spectrum of responses. Some were brilliant other were crazy (I’m looking at you, Spicer…facing, sheesh!), ironed out the rough edges, and we are giving it another shot in the very near future. When that’s done we will have a better, more playable skill.

Sure, there will be grumbles. My years in this gig have taught me that someone always complains, usually loudly and on the internet. Others will wonder why we changed in the first place because they’ve been playing it “right” for all those years, which I personally doubt, but hey, I don’t know how we really played 1e all those years. Lucky for them we don’t have the power to reach back into time and rip our all the words that currently live in their book. They’ll just have to learn the hard lesson that you don’t need validation to game on like shambling curmudgeonly grognard. In fact, validation is typically counter to that lifestyle. Like a lich, your immortality is fueled by negative energy and hate. All joking aside, its table-top RPGs, bitches. No one can ever make you upgrade with a mandatory patch. Unless you are invested in organized play. The strange thing is that if you listen to the echo chamber of some messageboards, you get the impression that most gamers don’t want to buy another product ever again, which is understandable in the current economy, at least until said company slows down its product release, and then complaints of the exact opposite ring about those virtual halls.

Ah, but I digress; let’s talk about that little pickle later.

My point is, while game designers are always looking to improve their game, and have to do because that’s their job and the fan base constantly demands it, they must do so in the context of the current product reality. One of the trickiest parts of the Pathfinder Stealth changes has been to make the right changes without disrupting both the current game and the current product it lives in. In other words, we need the skill to work, and work like players think it should work, and make then make those changes while limiting the disruption to the products that skill lives in that it touches (which is a lot of products).

It wasn’t easy, and we still have another round of playtesting to go. But the point is when you are in the midst of an edition cycle, there is plenty of work to do, and musing about a future that is nowhere on your schedule. It is the stuff for the ether, of spoke words and half-baked internal messageboard chat. The Legends and Lore musings about skills, how they can be adjudicated, and what does it mean on both sides of the screen are and endeavor that is quite a number of magnitudes higher than that. One of the criticisms that can absolutely be leveled on the Stealth playtest (and sometimes new rules for the Pathfinder game in general) is that sometimes we don’t go far enough in our desire to tear out the wires and start anew. However, here is the thing about Pathfinder. Its success has many facets, one of them is the fact that it doesn’t tear out the wires, and when it does it is careful to pick the right wires, and to gauge what the existing fan base will stand by getting their input.

Give the questionnaires at the end of every Legends and Lore column, and the creation of the D&D skirmish-style board game open playtest, it seems that Wizards now sees the point of that too. Which is a good thing, but toward what ends? With the release of the D&D board games, Heroes of Neverwinter (a D&D Facebook game…yeah, yeah, I know you don’t play Facebook games because you are an elite gamer…congrat-the-fuck-ulations), and the D&D skirmish-style board game playtest, it seems like D&D the brand is flailing around to find D&D the audience it wants. Their solution is not to make the best D&D, but to make the best D&Ds. Another company tried this too, in another time, with some different market assumptions. They found success for a while, but they ultimately failed. We’ll talk about that later. Hopefully later this week if I can get my rear in gear again.