Mike’s given us a look at the larger picture of the different types of abilities in D&D Next. To sum up:

• The simplest character is just a class and race. They roll their stats for everything, generally without extra bonuses. They get class abilities and racial abilities and that’s it. The only customization are the choices presented by the class and the stats the player chooses to increase.
• Players who want a more complex character can use feats instead of ability increases. Optionally, they can choose a specialty to plan a path of feats to take.
• GMs can choose to let players take backgrounds and gain skills. Skills add to ability rolls, so the DM will either have to change DCs or accept that their characters are now more powerful. Backgrounds also grant proficiencies that reflect the character can do something that might require training, as well as areas of knowledge and other benefits.

My first reaction was that the simplest option sounded really boring compared to the others. Which doesn’t make much sense, I’ve played games where characters don’t even have numbers to increase (Fiasco) and had an amazing time.

Which brings up the larger point here: it seems like there’s a laser-like focus on making classes and not as much thought to how the game actually plays.

This may be because it’s easier to write classes than write about how to play a game, but look at the topics of Legends and Lore recently, or the contents of the latest playtest packet: something like 3/4 of it is cool player powers (in the form of classes, races, backgrounds, feats, spells, equipment, magic items, and so on).

Historically, D&D doesn’t need all of it, but it can work with it. A class can be anything from a few abilities in AD&D to a dozen pages of specific in powers in 4E.

The amazing things about D&D (and RPGs in general) isn’t just the cool abilities. If we were more interested in just combining cool abilities it’d be a lot easier to play Magic.¹ 1. And probably worth a lot more money to Wizards of the Coast, too. D&D is about play: about the freedom of imagination and interacting with another human being. Rules add a structure to that and provide a way to pass on useful procedures, but the key is the conversation between people.

The focus on adding more abilities now (or finetuning those that exist) is kind of a bummer. It means that the design team currently has more to say about what number to add to a d20 than how to play an RPG. The How To Play section of the playtest doc and the GM document have been given fairly little love. Aside from adjusting the numbers and reflecting whatever skills mean in this packet, they’re largely the same as the first iteration a year ago. The current direction makes D&D Next look more like a set of numbers with which you can play D&D than an actual manual on how to play D&D.

Some of that will probably come through as we get closer to release. The target audience right now already knows D&D, so they can afford to leave the document somewhat bare on how to actually play. Ultimately, though, it limits the audience of D&D to people who know how to play D&D and just want a new set of numbers to apply to that.

Their goal appears to be to make a Rorschach test of D&D: everyone who looks at it should see their own favorite edition or style of play.

The problem there is when you try to explain to a new person what D&D is. Do you tell them about the butterfly you see and they may be completely lost—without prior knowledge of what to look for, it’s just blobs of numbers.

Rorschach D&D, if it succeeds, might be a real hit with existing D&D players. After all, if you have any interest in D&D, this will look like the kind of D&D you like. The trouble is, how many of those people don’t already have a “home” edition that they prefer? If I look at Next and see all the elements of Moldvay that I love… why not just go play Moldvay?

As a personal preference, I can’t see this doing much for me. Most of the time when I get into a new game I do so because it has some ideas I wouldn’t have thought of myself, which in turn inspires me to make more cool stuff. If a game sets out to be what I already expect (and have a whole lot of choices to get to that point) I’m not sure why I’d be excited for it.

Next still has time to hit that mark, and maybe it will. While right now it’s full of the tools to play a variety of styles of D&D, nothing in the text actually helps you play those styles. If the game had a clear vision of what it wanted to be it doesn’t have to tell you much about how to play in that style—it’ll be an emergent property of the game design. But with a Rorschach game, if they want to help people see the butterfly (or the dead dog head) they need to provide some way to figure out what all these tools are for.

Mike’s looking at feats again, asking what a feat is, anyway?

The answer, apparently, is a +1 stat bonus:

The new idea for feats in Next is to allow the player to either choose some new ability or increase a stat by 1. Before we talk about the actual design, let’s look at how we got here.

Mike’s analysis boils down to: feats are fiddly. They’re a way to fine-tune your character. They reflect that your wizard is just a little more skilled in combat, or your fighter is just a bit more knowledgable.

This isn’t a bad thing, until you try to make a game that does everything. Some people just don’t need to reflect that their character is a little more diplomatic than their stats would suggest. Some people really don’t care about feats.

The answer that Next is using is to make feats optional. You get a feat or you increase a stat by 1, your choice, and those options should be equally good.

That seems like a strange answer to me. Faced with the feedback that feats are more than most players want to deal with, they could have made them a bigger clearer choice, with more good options—something like how the various class powers work in 4E (where you couldn’t really go too wrong). Or they could have done away with them entirely and focused on making non-mechanical choices matter. If my character is the son of a diplomat, do I really need a diplomacy skill bonus, or is it enough for that fact to have an important role in the game?

The answer they’ve ended up with is the middle ground: feats are still there, but if you don’t choose one you get a stat bonus instead.

I’m not a huge fan of this approach. I appreciate the ideal—provide a default to avoid analysis paralysis—but this implementation seems a little weak.

Increasing a stat is, depending on the current score, either a complete no-op (nothing changes) or a slight increase in power (+1 modifier bonus) without any particularly interesting outcomes. A +1 modifier amounts to a 5% increase in success on a d20 roll against a fixed difficulty, which isn’t much. Even when it does make a difference, it’s purely a numerical advantage—it doesn’t give the character new opportunities, abilities, or ties to the game.

In short, it’s not something that I’d be excited to get at any given level. For anyone who’s not too excited by numbers it’s back to culling over the hundreds of feats.

Specialties mitigate this by providing default choices, which is a pretty sensible idea, and probably one that could be emphasized more. Right now the number of choices to make a character is large unless you take the default. Just speaking for myself, I tend to not take defaults in RPGs—they’re all about creation, right? Moving each class from having one recommended background+specialty+gear to having two or three suggestions for each might make it simpler. This would be a little like character creation in Apocalypse World: here’s the choices you need to make, pick one for each. People who don’t really care will just go down the list. The average player will make a few custom choices in a few minutes. The player who really wants to customize will have to do a little work to change things up, but that’s probably what they want anyway—a chance to really dig in and mess with the system.

Next keeps on layering on decision points where you can choose the kind of game you want, like the choice between the default specialty for your class (which is really just another set of defaults), or another specialty (which is a set of defaults), or making your own specialty. The goal here seems to be to help you make the game you want, but it’s not quite getting that free-wheeling open-ness of early D&D. Instead of being a minimal toolset from which you have to make something, it’s a bunch of pre-made things that you choose between.

I’m not sure what to make of that. On the one hand, it makes me fairly uninterested to play. If I wanted to craft my own thing, I’d play early D&D, or find a game that already does what I want and build on that. This feels like choose-your-own-adventure version of a system that emphasizes building what you want on top of it. On the other hand, this is a stealthy way of getting people to find out what kind of D&D they want. Everyone comes to play D&D, then through character creation they have to figure out what D&D actually means for them. Sure, that may mean not using a lot of the book, but it’s an interesting concept.

I’m not sure how it’ll make for a marketable game, but I guess we’ll see.

Mike’s been talking about tiers in D&D again. So I’ve dug up a Samuel Beckett quote for the title and dug through a lot of games, let’s talk tiers.

What we’re calling tiers might also be considered ‘sets’ (as in BECMI) or even different games. The idea for Next is to have three distinct styles of play that vary in focus, complexity, and length. Here’s Mike:

The basic idea here—flagging different ways of playing D&D and calling out how to get to each of them—is fantastic. It’s embraces the fact that different editions of D&D have had entirely different approaches to what adventurers do and how they do it. The stumbling point may be in the progression.

The three proposed tiers tell a pretty definite story: characters start as apprentices, become adventurers, and eventually become major celebrities. By default you spend two sessions as apprentices, 24 sessions as adventurers, and 12 sessions as “legacies.”

On the one hand, this is a great progression. It tickles the same itch as Adventurer Conquerer King, where the sheer increase in scope and power is a real draw of play. It’s exciting to go from a lowly apprentice to a major celebrity.

The only issue is one that’s haunted D&D over time: what do you do when you really just want to play lowly apprentices? What if you really don’t want to have to deal with the progression of more complex rules? What if you just want to keep kicking around dungeons?

There’s a lot of concepts bundled up in these three tiers. There’s system complexity, ranging from decidedly introductory to unabashedly complex. There’s the place of the characters within the world, from lowly to high. There’s speed fo advancement and number of abilities. There’s actual mathematical numbers. Putting those all together says something about what D&D Next is.

It does have some interesting emergent properties, though. Once place in the fictional world is related to level NPCs start to have to fit the same curve. If adventurers are level 3-15, how good at bargaining does the average shopkeep have to be to not get fleeced on every deal? That assumes that there’s some kind of character ability for haggling, which Next is definitely leaning towards with how skills work right now. Currently the difference in skill between a 3rd level and 15th level bargainer would be on the order of +5, which means that a shopkeep has to have a save or DC on par with a 15th level character to be able to stand a chance of not getting ripped off all the time in a world of adventurers.

The same thing can show up with royalty (what level is a king?), religion (what level is a high priest?), or any other hierarchical organization. A presumed level advancement says things about the world of D&D.

I think that’s great. Sure, it means we have to think about what level the shopkeep is, but it’s a very classic D&D thing. And, more importantly, it’s a solid statement of what D&D is. It’s not a wishy-washy “make it what you want.” It says “D&D characters gain considerably in power and status as they level up.”

The part that excites me less is the implied escalation in complexity. If I want weak characters my  game is less complex; if I want to play powerful characters my game is more complex. This doesn’t have to be the case—take Burning Wheel and With Great Power as examples—but in Next they’re baked together. Mike doesn’t mention that escalation in complexity much this week, so hopefully it’s something they’re revising.

Assuming an escalation in power and position in D&D Next is a great chance to see what Next will actually do. While I’m not too excited about having to play a more complex game just to play more powerful characters, the basic idea of a world of tiers is wonderfully D&D.

Since Mike’s post is mostly a run down of the changes in the latest playtest packet, I’m going to follow the same format, focusing on the new classes.

Druid

This take on the druid is interesting. Actually, the idea of the druid in generally is interesting—it’s a class that means some very specific things to people, and blending them all together tends to just muddy the water.

Historically, D&D druids haven’t always had shapeshifting. The idea of the druid as a shapeshifter is a more recent invention, but one that has become the defining feature of the class to many people. To quote my friend Stras: “Shapeshifting is awesome. It’s the literal enablement of that idea that when someone pisses you the hell off, you don’t just give them the finger, you get two tons heavy, roar like a grizzly, and rip them a new one. Also some people like being kittens. Or ponies. I don’t judge.”

Shapeshifting is one of those sticky mental ideas that can be all you need to hear about a class. The freedom from our static mortal forms is an enticing idea not just as a powerful tool, but the sheer wish fulfillment of not being beholden to biology.

With that in mind, this druid’s shapeshifting is maybe a little locked down. At first level if I focus on shapeshifting I can turn into a hound or a bear twice per day for a few hours at a time. That is kind of a bare-minimum freedom-from-form. I can slip the surly bonds of biology, but only to a couple of other prescribed forms. Every couple of levels past that up to 10th I get new forms, adding up to:

• Hound
• Bear
• Rodent
• Great Cat
• Steed
• Fish
• Dire Beast (i.e. “Dire” + another form)
• Bird of Prey
• Behemoth (a.k.a. dinosaur)
• Enhanced Form (i.e. another form plus an enhancement chosen from a list)

On the one hand, this list covers the bases—you’ve got domesticated animals, wild animals, fish, birds, reptiles, and small animals. On the other, since each of these forms is given exact stats, it feels a bit more like just choosing an alternate set of numbers than really becoming something wild.

The problem with shapeshifting is that the defining factor of it is freedom from shape, which is a powerful ability to grant at low levels. That either leaves the ability significantly limited or only available at higher levels. Next is in a bit of a corner here: one answer would be to allow more free-form shifting but add a downside to it, but the design direction seems to be that all class abilities are unambiguous benefits. Another answer might be to use “freeform shapeshfiting” as the baseline for first level, but that would lose some of the audience they’re aiming for—it wouldn’t fit in well with the poor-shmucks-in-a-death-dungeon genre.

With those constraints this is a pretty solid implementation. The stats are easy enough to read and swap, you don’t have to pick through the entire monster manual for the write up of a given creature—its very workable and still delivers some of the promise of losing your form.

The other druid abilities are fairly stock. Some spells (and the option to focus on them), reduced aging, taking on a different appearance. A few abilities are so focused that they seem like they’ll either be a huge deal or completely ignored, like Evergreen: if you’re playing a long term game of kingdom management the reduced aging is a huge deal, otherwise it might not even be worth writing down. There’s nothing wrong with abilities like this, but if the goal is to give each class something interesting at each level they might need rethinking (or at least another option).

Paladin

When I first saw ‘oaths’ as a class ability I was filled with ideas. The idea of the paladin as the oath-swearer is powerful and interesting, and I imagined the things a paladin swears to having power (and restriction).¹ 1. Yes, I was probably influenced by the Dungeon World paladin here. Oaths are actually just ways of including paladins of different alignment (always lawful, but potentially good, neutral, or evil). The paladin starts with some spells, a decent attack bonus, the ability to use Charisma for all saves, and a 1/day ability where the exact effects are chosen based on oath—good paladins do extra damage, heal, or drive off undead.

This is kind of an oddity for the paladin class historically: it actually looks less interesting than being just a fighter or just a cleric. Compared to the fighter you get a couple of spells per day and a 1/day ability, but lose out on combat maneuvers. Compared to a cleric you get a better attack bonus and some different divine abilities, but lose out on one spell per day and seriously lose out on long-term spell advancement. I’m at a loss for what a paladin actually does that’s any different from what a fighter does or what a cleric does. Their only really unique abilities are detecting planar creatures at will and using Charisma for all their saves, which are sadly reactionary abilities.

The paladin’s mount is given a complete stat block which can be a bit of a beast to wrestle with in play—the paladin’s player has basically opted in to running two characters at once when mounted. The one standout here is the bit about summoning a mount:

This stuff hits me square in the playstyle. It’s entirely within the fiction of the game, it provokes a reaction from the players (“so what is this ritual you’re doing like?”), it gives the DM a tool for building adventures. Sure, the payoff is running two characters at once for middling mechanical benefit, but the process of getting there is cool.

All together the paladin class doesn’t do much for me. It’s a second-rate spell caster that has very little in the way of active abilities. The only things that set the paladin apart from a fighter or cleric are mostly passive.

Ranger

The ranger is another class where one of the abilities it’s most known for can have some serious problems. The idea of a favored enemy sounds cool at first—of course the hunting tracking ranger is going to be good at hunting something in particular—but in practice it can be a bit of a pain.

Consider a ranger with favored enemy (goblinoids), where the favored enemy ability basically gives them +x vs. goblinoids. This basically creates two states for the ranger: either they’re fighting goblinoids, in which case they’re at the top of their game (possibly better than other classes?). Or they’re fighting non-goblinoids, in which case they’re second-best (or worse). The change between these states isn’t based on anything the ranger actually does, it’s just down to the world they live in. If goblinoids are in season this ranger is awesome, otherwise their biggest ability doesn’t do much. A DM choice switches the ranger between being cool or not cool.

All of that is why this favored enemy implementation is pretty slick: instead of getting a bonus vs. <your favored enemy> the ranger gets abilities that help them fight creatures of a certain type based on what those creatures do. Dragons have fear effects, so dragon-hunting rangers resist fear. Humanoids tend to attack in numbers, so a goblin-hunting ranger can move more easily through dense combats. Instead of the favored enemy bonus being directly against a type of creature, its against the type of things that creature does. That way if dragons aren’t on the menu today the ranger still can use all their dragon-hunting training.² 2. Tangentially, the idea of a first level character who hunts dragons is interesting. It tends to peg the game as a little more heroic—your character could start the game having already killed dragons. I probably wouldn’t use it for my games.

Beyond the favored enemy the class is a little flat. They get paladin-scale spellcasting, tracking, and a fighter-level attack bonus to start with. They pick up a few other non-favored-enemy abilities, though the only one worth mentioning is the oddly-detailed camouflage. The ranger gets this ability at level 5 (which means stuff that helps you kill dragons comes before the ability to cover yourself with mud and sticks) and it’s one of those weird abilities that doesn’t seem like an ability:

While Mike tackles three different topics in his post, there’s a theme to it: complexity.

The first venue for complexity is spells—particularly the complexity of choosing which spells to prepare. The different rules for preparing spells are practically a microcosm for how D&D has changed over time. In early D&D, choosing the right spell was essentially key to playing a wizard—a strategic choice that could make the difference between being a human pin cushion and the party’s MVP. Fast forward to 3rd Edition and preparing spells was more or less a balance for a little extra flexibility, since if you just wanted to fling some magic missiles you could play a sorcerer and skip the whole ordeal. By 4th preparing spells was a minor class ability that allowed the swapping of powers, more a nod to the concept than a core conceit.

The degree to which picking spells is a challenge to the player helps define what the game is. Moldvay focused on tactical and strategic choices to get into and out of a dungeon while maximizing profit, so spells are a real test of player planning. 3rd Edition focused on making the game consistent and broad, so preparing spells is one more balance of power. 4th Edition focused on cool abilities and complex balanced combats, so preparing spells was minimized to allow consistent battles.

The case in 4th edition is particularly interesting in contrast to early editions. In Moldvay the sleep spell can effectively bypass a battle with a little luck an planning, and this is utterly all right—if you’re maximizing profit from a dungeon you don’t want to fight any more than needed. In 4th edition putting together a fight was a non-trivial investment of the GM’s time, so player abilities tended to be unable to bypass them.

Next is striking for a middle ground, with each spell being fairly narrow, but with some flexibility around what spells are prepared. The wizard doesn’t have to commit to spells so directly, so the strategic planning is diminished. Mike gives the example of fog cloud—if the wizard doesn’t have much flexibility in preparation it needs to be a broadly useful spell, but when the wizard is able to swap spells more freely it can be more focused.

For once it’s a clean statement of what Next does: it’s not as much about the careful planning of an AD&D wizard, but preparing spells is more than a holdover. Choosing what spells prepare is complex in that choosing just the right spells can be rewarding, but everyone has a fallback.

If spells are the wizard’s tools, the Next wizard gets only a few specialized tools, but can dig deeper into the tool box if they need something else.

This balance of complexity plays over to class abilities too. Practically there’s a limit to how many abilities you can pile into a character before they become too much to manage, so D&D Next classes will always get something cool at each level but that cool thing may just be an improvement to an ability they already have.

Really, there’s not a lot to say about this. It’s a solid design decision, one that’s existed in many other games (including 4th Edition). It may be interesting to balance—it’s easy to end up with a situation where generalists are punished—but the D&D team are good designers, they’ll work around it. The other challenge is to make improving something you have as interesting as getting something new, but again that’s a matter of implementation—the D&D team should be up to it.

The last section of Mike’s post is maybe the most interesting:

The idea of designing levels of complexity is great, and I’d talked about it before. The interesting bit that struck me when it came up this time: why does D&D need to be a complex game?

I can guess at a few reasons, which may or may not be accurate or good justifications:

• Players expect/want it
• More complexity == more places to supplement
• Complexity is required to fully present whatever vision(s) of D&D they’re aiming for

If we drop the idea that D&D has to be complex—if none of these justifications hold—then the goal is not to make a beginner-friendly facade, but to make D&D itself straightforward and easy to use. This has certainly been the case at times in D&D’s history, where a simple booklet was all you needed to play.

Hopefully this has all been thought out and complexity really is a necessary part of D&D Next. They’re investing a lot of time in managing complexity, which is wonderful if that complexity is needed, but a waste of time if the easier solution is to just make a simpler game.

The direction of D&D Next is to expand ‘story’ not ‘mechanics’:

I knew when I read this that I was going to have a hell of a time writing this response. The false dichotomy there glares at me: why can’t mechanics and rules be one-in-the-same, or at least complementary?

That’s not the real core of Mike’s post though. The core here is D&D as a common language:

I’ve got a shameful admission to make: when you say “5th-level wizard” I have no clue what you mean.

Sure, “wizard” I’ve got. There are touches of Gandalf and Harry Potter and Dr. Strange and Rincewind in there, but thanks to years of playing D&D I tend to focus on a spellbook, making stuff blow up, arcane secrets and study.

“5th-level,” though, I’ve got no clue about that. In a general, non-D&D context it makes no sense at all—at best it reminds me of arguing with my best friend in high school about if Final Fantasy and Dragonball Z ‘levels’ meant the same thing (and therefore how Cloud and Picolo compare). With D&D as context I’ve got a vague idea that they’re not as weak as 1st level, but not as strong as 10th, and even that is stupid—a significant number of incarnations of D&D didn’t have 10th level (or even 5th). I can’t tell you what spells they’re likely to have, or how many they have, or what they do within the fiction of the game.

What’s even worse, I don’t think I could tell you what a 5th-level Dungeon World wizard looks like. I really have no clue what a 5th level D&D or DW wizard can do. I think they might be able to do fireball in DW but not in Pathfinder, but that’s pretty much pure speculation.

Basically, if you say “5th-level wizard” like it means something I’m going to be confused.

I don’t think I’m alone in this. Even if I did have a clear vision of what a 5th-level wizard is, it’s almost certainly tied to one edition or another. Using 3rd level as an example (since Moldvay is the handiest PDF for me as I write this and it doesn’t go to 5th level for PCs), let’s take a look. A 3rd level Moldvay wizard¹ can use their shiny new 2nd level spell slot to detect evil intentions and objects, but otherwise can’t do any more damage than they could at 2nd level. 1. Okay, not a wizard, a magic-user, if we want to be technical. A 3rd level d20 wizard can throw an acid arrow that is basically two magic missiles in a row, but can’t (and will never, without multiclassing) detect evil.

This isn’t to say that one or the other of those is wrong. I just imagine these two wizards meeting in a bar and the Moldvay wizard being utterly amazed that his friend can shoot an arrow of acid from his fingers which apparently requires the same amount of arcane proficiency as detecting evil. They’re two different definitions of what being a 3rd-level wizard is.

D&D has meant so many things to so many people it’s tough to call it a language. Consider Dragonborn—to some D&D players they’ve been a core part of Dungeons & Dragons for as long as they’ve played, to some they’re a modern abomination.

It seems to me that any given version of D&D is a common language to those who play it, but across versions it’s more like a family of languages: moving from one to another is easier than going someplace entirely different, but you can’t speak one and expect someone who speak’s another to get your exact meaning.

These languages are not entirely based on the numbers we write down and add and subtract and so on. They’re based on the system in the larger sense. It’s easy to consider the “game” to be just the math, but it goes far beyond that—the tone, presentation, art, procedures, even culture around the game. Mike suggest that “the most resonant elements arise from outside the game, in the myths and stories that we’re all exposed to,” but those elements are as much a part of the game as the math. Just because they’re not numbers doesn’t mean they’re less systematic in how they convey how to play the game. See, for example, the infamous Appendix N: the collection of fantasy works included as “inspirations” by Gary Gygax in AD&D. That appendix is as much a part of the system of AD&D as the names and abilities of the classes.

To think of ‘rules’ and ‘story’ works against creating a common language for D&D. For Next to really make a mark it has to be a complete system, not just math or ‘story’ or ‘elements outside the game.’

Most of Mike’s Legends and Lore post is about roles in D&D Next: how do you handle specialized characters and general situations?

The underlying issue is this: suppose you’ve got a band of adventurers where one character (let’s call her the fighter) is better in combat than everyone else. How do you still make combat interesting for everyone?

D&D Next appears to be taking the approach of making the difference between “highly skilled” and “just passable” fairly low:

It sounds like, for general abilities like fighting or everything else, all the classes are expected to be in the same arena, more or less. Sure, the rogue may be more likely to sneak through the palace undetected, but everyone has a shot.

This approach does a great job of leveling the playing field. If the goal is to make no one class essential this does a great job of making sure that, say, not having a fighter doesn’t mean combat will be a lost cause.

The danger is that, without consequences of failure, this can lead to a lot of pointless re-rolls. If there’s a hidden door that can only be detected with a DC 18 check but nobody has much of a bonus, the incentive is to just sit there saying “I look for a door” again and again until the right number is rolled. If a beastly monster is tough to hit, having no skilled combatants won’t make it flee-worthy, but might make the fight a real slog. There are a number of ways around this, mostly around adding consequences to rolls, but without those flattened DCs make everything possible, which encourages players angling for rerolls.

Other games have taken other approaches to make the differences in ability between character abilities interesting.

The classic is to just make some things only really possible with certain classes. You just don’t find traps in Moldvay without a thief, and you’re going to have a hell of a time in combat without a fighter. This does put some constraints on player choice, but it makes those choices really matter.

Another option, seen in games like Apocalypse World, is to give different classes different potential (or guaranteed) outcomes. For example: maybe everyone has a shot at sneaking past just about anything, but only the rogue gets the mechanical guarantee that in the worst case they’ll be cornered (everyone else might fail and be discovered). While any class may be able to hit in combat, the fighter gets extra control over how/when they hit (or get extra damage, as Next fighters already do).

Alternately, making competence based on use effectively removes this issue. Instead of deciding what areas to allocate your characters’ abilities to, make each character’s abilities evolve based on use, as in Burning Wheel. Instead of the game designers having to guarantee that every party without a thief can still sneak but every thief can sneak better, simply say that anyone who sneaks eventually becomes better at sneaking. Anyone who attacks in combat gets better at attacking.

I tend to prefer each of these approaches over flattening the range of DCs. A flat range is effective in allowing any choice or configuration to be viable, but at the cost of making the choices that go into that configuration less meaningful. If everyone has a shot at succeeding and can try as often as they like, being more likely to succeed doesn’t mean much.

The other side of this are what Mike calles “specialized abilities” like healing or spells. These tend to be more or less binary: you are by nature a healer and heal as well as any other healer, or you are not a healer and don’t heal at all. (There’s some wiggle room here for the half-healer.)

The first thing that comes to mind here is World of Warcraft. The idea that you can take a shaman or priest or druid on your raid and still get equivalent healing is a bedrock concept of WoW. It’s also one that has always been hotly debated. From patch to patch and group to group there have always been classes that are considered not ‘real’ healers because they can’t do what another class can do. Attempting this level of balance just invites nit picking on the effective healing of different classes. It may be worth it though, if Wizards is interested in the MMO-playing contingent.

The end goal here—balance—seems to be regarded as important by the community feedback Wizards is getting, but the other option is to just say damn the consequences, we’re going to make each class fun to play and fun together but not balanced.

This isn’t a new idea for RPGs. Many games have embraced having characters of differing power levels (Ars Magica, Buffy). It isn’t even a new idea for games in general: asymmetric competitive play has been alive and well since the earliest war games. Having everybody within the same spectrum of power, with equivalent specialties, is not something that’s not always been essential to D&D.

It’s a matter of resources and feedback. Right now Wizards is (presumably) getting data that people care about balance (or are concerned about it) and they’re therefore addressing it. Hopefully they’re controlling for the matter of feedback and audience—I’d guess it’s easier to nitpick balance in a survey form, and the people answering this survey are likely to be the hardcore. With that data, balance must seem like a worthwhile goal. How they get there, though, is open.

I’m a hopeless early adopter. Around a year ago I backed the Pebble watch. As a backer, I got it for $100, and it’s now available to everyone for $150. It’s essentially an extra screen and input device for your iOS or Android device that also happens to tell the time. There are reviews all over the place so I’m going to give a quick overview of general thoughts and then try to look at this thing as a tabletop gamer (and game designer).

The main things you’ll use the Pebble for (if you’re like me): controlling your Rdio on your phone, getting notifications, telling time, striking up conversations with nerds, declining calls from unknown numbers.

Of those, the easiest to explain is the clock: you can have the Pebble display the time in a number of formats or even write your own watchface with an SDK.

Controlling Rdio (or any other audio app) requires some interaction, which is actually where the Pebble shines for me. When you select the Music app on the Pebble the time is reduced to a tiny banner at the top of the screen and the body is taken over with information about the current track. You can pause/play, skip forward, or skip back using the Pebble’s chunky physical buttons. This is actually (unexpectedly) one of my favorite features. I’ve been trying out a lot of music and stations on Rdio and waking up my iPhone to bring up on-screen controls is a pain. Having a physical button is delightfully retro and far more usable. It’s especially good for desk listening—when someone needs my attention it’s much quicker to pause with the Pebble than the on-screen iPhone controls (even the lock screen or multitasking music controls).

The notification story is where things get a little more complex and I have to talk about my config: I’m on a jailbroken iPhone 5. Because I’m jailbroken I can install a little applet that pushes any notifications I want¹ to the Pebble. 1. Okay, not any notification. The notification has to be set to display on the phone’s home screen. I don’t think this distinction will matter to much of anyone. If I didn’t have that I’d only receive phone, message, and mail notifications which would be far less useful.

Of the notifications, only phone calls provide any kind of action to be taken on the Pebble: you can decline or accept the call using the aforementioned wonderful buttons. Declining is the only one of these options that’s really practical, but I decline far more calls than I accept, so I’m happy with it.

This call wraps around to the Pebble’s make-or-break issue: how much the phone will support the Pebble. Pebble itself is getting regular software updates that are painful and fix problems/add features at a wonderful rate. The problem is, unless Pebble can do more to interact with notifications on the stock OS, it’s profoundly limited. Pebble’s killer feature is in the hands of the phone OS.

If I could clear a notification from the Pebble, or easily select which notifications go to the Pebble and how they are handled, with a stock OS, Pebble could be a killer. As-is it’s more of a power user toy.

In an ideal world, Pebble would retain more notifications (currently you can only see the most recent) and where appropriate those notifications would have actions associated with them—like archiving an email or dismissing a social network update. A lot of that is in the hands of the phone OS, not Pebble.

That’s Pebble in a nutshell, so what about using it as a gamer? Particularly a tabletop gamer?

It’s easy to dream of apps (which will be available for Pebble at a future date) that help with tabletop games, but the possibilities are fairly limited by the screen and input options. You won’t be viewing an entire character sheet on it. Rolling dice is surely possible, but might actually be slower than pulling out the phone the Pebble is paired with. More limited functions, like a Magic life counter or army-lock-in device for Avalon Hill Dune, might be a good fit but are hardly a justification for a $150 device. They might not even be as good as lower tech methods. An initiative tracker is another easy target, with a paired phone app, but it’s hard to imagine it being as quick and flexible as notecards or paper.

In general phone (and tablet) tools for tabletop games have been slow to take off (with the exception of entirely-digital ports of boardgames) and I don’t think the Pebble changes in that.

The opportunities for gaming in a broader sense are a little better. The idea of making LARP tools for Pebble or digitizing con metagames like Assassins have some potential, but the Pebble is only really an enhancer here. It’s certainly cooler and less intrusive to, say, get a LARP update to your wrist or find out you’ve been ‘killed’ on your watch, but it requires a rock-solid phone implementation that doesn’t exist yet.

There’s potential here, but the phone’s base app has to be there to support it, which hasn’t happened yet. Even if it does, to the best of my knowledge the hardcore tabletop gamer/Pebble owner crossover market is one person at this point, so it’ll be a while before this becomes a real option.

I do think that Pebble has an awesome niche for tabletop gamers though. It’s actually the same general killer feature of the form factor as a whole: getting information with less obstruction.

The question of devices at a gaming table come up often. Especially troublesome to some people is the interuption factor of, say, a player pulling out their phone in the middle of a D&D fight.² 2. I actually think this isn’t as big a deal as some make it out to be. The average gaming session is longer than the average movie and when I’m not in a theater I check my phone in the middle of most movies. Demanding that everyone at the table stays entirely involved for hours is unreasonable to begin with. Let the focus flow. Checking a watch is much less of an interruption than pulling out a phone, and less likely to lead to a complete change of attention. My experience so far with gaming has been I can keep up with what’s happening on my phone with a simple look at my rest instead of pulling a device out of my pocket (or leaving it on the table) which is pretty slick. It makes the constant interruptions of digital life feel less like interruptions.

That’s where I think the Pebble can actually be particularly useful to tabletop gamers, as it lets you stay more involved at the table.

Of course just turning off your phone does that too. The Pebble isn’t an essential device by any means, but it’s a nice little addition.

When my Pebble’s battery died one afternoon³ I found going back to using the on-screen music controls and not seeing new information on my wrist quite a letdown. 3. The battery is estimated at 7 days. I got 5. The new firmware released today is supposed to improve iOS-paired battery life. Even 5 days is acceptable to me—the only reason it died was because I wanted to push it as far as I could. That was when I realized I felt like my $100 was well-spent: my digital life felt a little more clumsy without it.

This is another one of those big crazy ideas that I throw out their based on the best data I can have and some speculation. I don’t think I’m the first person to come up with this idea, and therefor the fact that it hasn’t been done probably means there are factors that smarter people have identified that I haven’t. I’m throwing it out here because I like at least considering the big crazy risks that don’t scare me because it’s not my money, but which the actual people who could do this would be gambling their livelihoods with. Here’s the big idea: open source D&D.

The obvious response is “they already did that and look how it turned out.” But what I’m getting at goes a little deeper. Let’s talk open source.

Open source software “promotes free redistribution and access to an end product’s design and implementation details.” [Wikipedia] d20 technically meets this, though it is interesting to consider what the “design and implementation” details are of a tabletop game. Really, the d20 SRD is the end product, not the design and implementation details. That may be beside the point though, as it’s the lowest-level description of the game, and trying to map software to tabletop is at best an interesting thought experiment.

Open source software is “typically created as a collaborative effort in which programmers improve upon the code and share the changes within the community.” [Wikipedia] This is the point where d20 diverges from typical open source software. Any successful open source project has multiple collaborators behind them, the largest have entire non-profit organizations dedicated to the further development of the software. It’s not uncommon for software giants like Google to take a stewardship role of an open source project, like Chromium.

d20, for all the flood of projects around it, had very little reintegration. While technically the OGL is “sticky” (content based on OGL’ed content is automatically OGL’ed) I can find no concrete record of Wizards of the Coast ever using OGL content created by another party in their books. This doesn’t mean it didn’t happen—I feel like I’ve heard stories or at least one such integration—just that it didn’t happen much.

This is all just to set the foundation: D&D 3E was technically open, but didn’t leverage the community or use a collaborative public effort. So what if D&D was open like open source software?

Concretely, the idea I’m considering is: what if Wizards of the Coast took the current text of D&D Next and set up a non-profit organization to steward the text?

There are of course some challenges. What would it be called? How would text be developed in a way similar to software? How would changes be decided?

The first thing that comes to mind if the chaos of hundreds of fans all suggesting their own conflicting changes. While this seems intractable, it’s nothing the open source community hasn’t had to deal with before. The first solution is distributed version control. Without getting too technical, the idea is to make the source (in this case, the text of D&D Next) available in such a way that everyone can make their own versioned copy. Instead of everyone everywhere all trying to change the same copy of the text, everyone has their own copy. The copy controlled by the non-profit would be considered the canonical version, and would take selected changes from other people. Wizards could them publish the canonical version, at some determined time, as D&D.

How do you select what changes to take? Through the mess of open source design and democracy. Along with the non-profit Wizards could set up a board of directors. These folks (hopefully luminaries in D&D) would have the final call on what makes it into the canonical version, and would have permission to delegate that decision. With that power allocated, it would be up to the community how it wants to decide what changes to make to the canonical version. I’d expect the process to end up looking a little like python’s PEPs: documents about what should be done created and discussed by the community that eventually become plans of action for what changes are to be made. The changes can then be made by whomever.

Developing text like software would be trickier, but even open source projects maintain documentation. The process could, in theory, be a lot like wikipedia. Text could be marked as needing specific kinds of attention and updates that fix issues would be accepted like anything else. The text would probably be stored in some kind of markup or markdown to make it easy to edit, track, and display.

That’s the process, but what would it be called? That’s a tough decision. It could be anything from “D&D” to a specific flavor of D&D (“D&D Community Edition” or something) to a new term like “d20″ was when 3E launched. All of those have varying returns for Wizards of the Coast.

Which brings us around to why. As a fan of open source and free culture of course I like this, but why would a huge company like it?

Because it plays to their strengths. Wizards of the Coast is a strong company in many ways, but right now they’re not playing to their strengths. The best way for a company to compete is by doing things that they’re better suited for than anyone else. Wizards is, within the gaming field, uniquely positioned in three areas: production quality, community, and name recognition. Basically, they’ve got a bigger budget and stronger art team than just about anyone else, and they own the biggest name in roleplaying games, which comes with a connection to the most fans. That isn’t to say that Wizards of the Coast isn’t good at design—look at Ravenloft or Lords of Waterdeep. They are, however, putting most of their awesome design skills towards chasing whatever the community wants. They’re spending hundreds (thousands?) of hours of design time in an effort to give the community exactly what they want. Why not instead let the community hash out the design work

Moving the core rules to the community would put Wizards of the Coast in a very strong position. They would have a core rule system designed by the exact community they want which they could then publish and support better than anyone else. Instead of spending their resources trying to find out what the D&D crowd at large wants, they’d let the crowd design the game they want supported, and then pour their resources into supporting it. This is part of where what they call it matters: even if the text is completely open and community driven, Wizards could reserve the name, so that only their version is called Dungeons and Dragons (this is, after all, one of their biggest resources: the brand).

Even if they did soften their grip on the name, no other company has the reach and production quality Wizards has. Only Paizo can really challenge them in that arena, but they’ll be hemmed in by their own hardcore fans. Wizards could then focus on producing the best material for the game the community wants, instead of focusing on divining what the community wants. Their version of the core rules would be better presented than any other. Their supplements could be sold in more places, with higher quality and lower cost, than any other publisher.

It would also free up Wizards’ R&D department to expand their line. Options like maintaining multiple editions become possible. They’d still be designing stuff for the open source system (and, through having members in the non-profit, steering the design), but they’d be leveraging the fans—one of their greatest resources—to make the core game.

The really interesting point comes with distributed version control. Wizards of the Coast would publish the nice physical books with layout and art of the core rules developed by the community, using their scale and design power to make theirs the de facto standard. With distributed version control, Wizards could also make money off everyone else’s versions of D&D. If Wizards teamed up with Lulu to provide specialized print-on-demand for D&D rulesets they could provide a boutique product to people who modify the D&D rules (i.e. most everyone who plays D&D). Any DM with the time and interest could, with their local versioned copy of the rules, tweak things to their liking. Wizards would then offer a service where any properly formatted text based on the canonical version could be printed, on demand, with Wizards’ art, in a number of formats.

This idea was originally floated by John Stavropoulos a while ago, but the implications are huge. Every homebrewing DM would benefit as they could order up a custom rulebook of just their rules, with their picks of art from the Wizards art collection, for their home game. Playing Ebberon but with reduced HP and no clerics? Make a few changes to the source and pay a few bucks to get your own custom D&D books. With the Wizards’ budget behind it they could even make it easier, so not everyone who wants to make their own custom version has to learn git (or any other distributed version control). There are already online print-on-demand photo books that offer drag-and-drop design—make the same thing for D&D. To not undermine the official rules they could force specialized branding on the front, where you have to name your version of D&D. Add terms of service that prohibit reselling too, if they’re really concerned.

By acting as a boutique homebrew print-on-demand publisher Wizards would be leveraging what they can do that no one else can: use the D&D branding and community, plus partner on a corporate scale.

In a way, Wizards would be playing Apple to a D&D Unix. Just like Mac OS is based on (BSD) Unix but adds value with visual polish and ease of access, Wizards’ D&D would be a polished clean version of something powerful and community-based.

It wouldn’t be easy to pull off. Open source development is, at times, chaotic and messy and rough. The bargain for Wizards would be in allocating their resources to what they’re good at, instead of pouring resources into design where the guiding principle appears to be “do what the community wants.” There would be, most likely, at least one fork¹ that went contrary to the image Wizards wants to portray. 1. A fork is an offshoot from an open source project. It amounts to one or more people saying they want to take this free and open thing in a different direction than the official maintainers want. The Book of Erotic Fantasy is the kind of thing I’m thinking of. The development would likely scare off at least one vocal group of fans.

Are those risks worth it? I’m not in a position to decide, but I could make a case for it. D&D is currently eating up years of time and resources to discern the desires of a community that would (and has) designed the games they want. The D&D design team seem like smart folks, and their talents are currently being squandered on chasing the whims of a community that thinks they can do better. An open source D&D would let Wizards do what they do best.

The big topic of Mike’s post is the role of non-combat healing and the essential-ness of having a healer. It’s essentially a reverse from the earlier ideal that a cleric should not be a requirement for play.

Like a few other recent changes, it’s a shift to a clear ideal of what D&D is, but with the promise of huge flexibility for the DM to do whatever they want. I have all my normal concerns about how shifting, say, the need for healing is a fundamental change with many repercussions, and that making such a big change seem like a simple dial to turn won’t work out well. But instead let’s take another look at the why of healing and damage.

HP (and healing) are generally thought of as how much damage, and therefore how many fights, you can take before you’re dead. That’s completely accurate, but it’s not the whole story. There are two functions to HP that get all twisted up in one thing.

HP is both a measure of how close to death you are and an indication of how long you can stay in a fight. In D&D these have typically been intertwined, but really they’re two different things: the length of the battle and the outcome of the battle. The potential divide between these often shows up in typical forum threads/blog posts/letter columns like how to have player characters taken hostage, or how to add morale rules. Practically lots of players hit a point where it seems to make sense that someone might be no longer able to fight, but still alive.

Since healing addresses both of these factors of HP, it’s a hard thing to design in modern D&D. The idea that characters could be both ready to fight and close to death doesn’t fit into this healing system.

I think this is where a lot of the challenges that Mike talks about come from. The survey data is so split because different people are seeing different aspects of HP and healing. The long term attrition of HP not refilling means that battles become shorter (as the make-or-break point of low HP gets closer).

There are quite a few ways to work around this, but few of them have any history with D&D.

Morale systems (as found in OD&D) add an end to combat other than running out of HP. When put into a tough situation (as defined by the system and, in some cases, the GM’s judgement) some characters may have to make some kind of roll to keep fighting. This tends to work well for NPCs (maybe owing to its roots in war games), but crosses some boundaries for player characters that may not fit all play styles. The idea that the rules an say that your character isn’t willing to fight while you (the player) still are doesn’t fit well for everyone.

Fatigue (for example, in The One Ring) is another option. Implementations are often somewhat like morale, but turned into a physical aspect of your character: when your fatigue gets you you’re too tired to keep fighting, not unwilling. This neatly sidesteps some issues with morale and allows the length of a battle to be reset by healing of fatigue, while the outcome of the battle might depend on healing wounds. A player character who’s fatigue reaches the break point is either unwilling to fight or dead, depending on the wounds they’ve suffered.

Shadow Chasers, a precursor to d20 Modern, instead tracked what amounted to two HP scores. One was easy to refill, the other hard. Damage first went to the easily-refillable pool, then the other pool. While this didn’t really change the fight-to-the-death instinct, it did provide a point of no return that prompted some reconsideration. It also made some more sense within the game—the easily-fillable pool is stamina, the other is actual wounds.

The approach D&D Next is taking (healing mostly in the hands of the cleric) is workable and classic. Even with the intertwined goals of reflecting how hard something is to defeat and what that defeat means, it’ll be as functional as it’s been in all the various incarnations of D&D that use it. There’s an opportunity here to push some boundaries, but that might not be what D&D Next need.