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A few quick notes before I get back to packing.

1. The most exciting news is that the game I spent the last year plus working on, the Dragon Age RPG, is out in stores this week. It's a classic style boxed set and it looks like it's going to do really well for us. Look for it in a game store near you.

I must also tip my hat to our partners at BioWare, whose Dragon Age: Origins computer game has sold over 3.2 million copies to date. There's a company that knows how to launch a property and make a great game.

2. I will be at Dundracon in San Ramon, CA this weekend. We won't have a booth (Endgame, one of my favorite game stores in the world, will be selling our stuff there), but I'll be around doing some seminars and playing games. I believe I'll be on the panel at the following seminars: Alternate Histories for Gaming, What's Cool, and Where Is the Hobby Going. I may also be on one in which old timers reminisce about coloring our dice with crayons and the like, but I'm not sure if I'm old enough to qualify at 40. Maybe Ken St. Andre will call me a whippersnapper.

3. I had thought I might head home to the Boston area for PAX East. After I left Flying Lab, I had to reconsider in light of new financial realities. Now it turns out that Wil Wheaton is doing the keynote, so I wish I had kept to my original plan. I still hope Wil has a wicked pissah time.

4. The forecast says chilly with a high chance of feijoada, churrasco, caipirinha.

5. Winter is almost over. And yet, it's still coming.

6. A note for readers of chrispramas.com. I was recently informed by Blogger that they are disabling the ftp option for blog updates, which is what I use. It is unclear if I can continue using Blogger with this URL, and I'm not keen on having one of theirs. I mirror this blog on Livejournal and Facebook though. If this site seems moribund to you, look over at http://freeport-pirate.livejournal.com or find me on Facebook. If that's not enough, I'm also on Twitter as @Pramas.

Randomness in Dragon Age

Last week Dragon Age, the game I've been working on for the last year, had its electronic debut. It's at print now (just got the printer proofs today, in fact) and will be in stores in January but you can buy the PDF version right now. This has naturally led to a lot of commentary on the usual gaming message boards.

So my biggest goal for this first Dragon Age release was to create an intro product like the industry hasn't seen since D&D's famed red box from the 80s. I was thus quite careful about what went into Set 1 and what didn't. I wanted this to be as attractive as possible to people who had never roleplayed. Thus it looks like a game (it comes in a box), it comes with the dice you need, and it includes two modest, 64 page books. I was simply not going to put a 300 page hardback in front of newbs and hope they'd read it. Nor did I want to create an intro product that was disposable. I didn't want to say, "Spend $30 on this and then you can spend $100 on the real game." So Set 1 is Dragon Age. It's the core of the game we'll be building on and it's designed to be approachable and easy to learn.

Some long time gamers have expressed surprise at seeing that there are a couple of random elements in the character creation process. Surely we've moved past such antiquity methods, they argue. The randomness largely shows up in two places: generating your abilities and gaining some background benefits. The latter is trivial so I'm going to concentrate my comments on abilities. So why is that I decided to go with a random method for generating abilities? Four reasons.

First, I wanted to make this process easy for new players. Generating abilities is the second step of the process. If you are a newb making your first character, your understanding of the game is shaky at best. I didn't want to ask them to assign stats at this stage. It is much faster and much easier to have them roll some dice.

Second, getting those dice out early in the process serves to engage people. You are making a character and rolling dice makes it feel like you are really doing something. Rolling 3d6 and adding the results together is the key mechanism of the game. This method begins drilling the importance of the 3d6 roll right at the start.

Third, when BioWare approached us about doing a pen & paper RPG for Dragon Age, one of their goals was to play up the old school nature of the Dragon Age property. It's no secret that the roots of Dragon Age: Origins lay in the earliest days of tabletop roleplaying. While I was not looking to design a retro clone, I did want Dragon Age to have a certain old school feel. To me rolling for abilities strikes the right chord. This is why many people still refer to "rolling up" new characters, even when playing systems that don't use random stat generation.

Fourth, rolling random abilities can actually lead to interesting characters in a way that other methods do not. You may not have planned for your warrior to be particularly smart, but if you roll a high Cunning, it may suggest a different and fun way to play the character.

Now all of that is fair enough, some folks say, but why not include an optional rule for non-random ability generation? Here's why. Early on I decided that I did not want Set 1 to include a bunch of optional rules. Every optional rule is another choice that has to be made, and again I did not feel this was friendly to the new players. I'm comfortable putting optional rules in follow-up products because anyone who buys them will have enough experience with the system to make more informed decisions.

Set 2 will include a non-random option, but to prove I'm not a big meanie who is going to make you have badwrongfun, here's a simple method you can use in the interim. Your abilities start at 0 and you get 10 points to buy them up. No ability can be greater than 3. Why not 4, you may ask, when the random table goes to 4? Well, on the table it's a rare result. You have a less than 1% chance to rolling an 18 on 3d6. If you could simply buy a 4, that would become the standard not the exception.

I hope that answers everyone's questions. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got proofs to get back to.