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.

Pramas and the Olympians

In my "free" time I've been boning up on my ancient Greek mythology. I had an idea for a skirmish miniatures game set in the Age of Heroes. The idea is that the captain of your warband is a hero like Achilles or Perseus. You play a series of battles with other heroes and monsters and try to win enough glory to become a demigod like Heracles. Not sure I'll do anything with the idea, but it's simmering on the back burner.

In my research I ran across a reference to some novels by Gene Wolfe set an ancient Greece. I'm reading the first one, Soldier of the Mist, right now. It's about a Roman mercenary named Latro who fought for the Persians during their invasion of Greece. He receives a head wound which causes the loss of his short term memory. By the morning he forgets the events of the previous day. He thus keeps a journal and that supposedly provides the text of the novel. The premise is reminiscent of the movie Memento, but the book came out long before the film (1986).

I'm about halfway through and enjoying the book quite a bit. Due to his head wound, Latro can see the spiritual world that lies hidden from most mortals, so he has many encounters with gods and spirits. Wolfe evokes the beliefs and superstitions of the ancient Greeks vividly and I'd recommend it to gamers looking for a good portrayal of day to day polytheism. He stresses the idea that gods are strange beings and hard to understand. Their actions may help you, but showing mercy to mortals is an alien idea to them.

My only complaint is that Wolfe chose to use the literal translations of all the place names in ancient Greece. This is certainly evocative and reads well, and it would not bother someone who doesn't know much about the history of the period. I have read a fair bit about the Persian invasion of Greece, however, and the naming conventions are throwing me. I had to figure out that the "Rope Makers" are Spartans and "Thought" is Athens, for example. I was overjoyed to discover a glossary in the back, but it was no help in that regard. It would have been nice if at least the glossary clued you in on the more common names. Overall though, this is good stuff and I look forward to finishing it and moving on to the sequel, Soldier of Arete. You can get both in one trade paperback called Latro in the Mist.

Time Flies But Aeroplanes Crash

Weeks have been flying by of late. That's good for the work week, but it also means weekends go by in a flash.

Friday I was feeling cruddy so I stayed in. Saturday and Sunday were similar: work during the day and then dinner out. Last night we got together with two friends of mine from high school, Elizabeth and Geoff, who I only recently discovered lived in Seattle. I've gotten together with them for lunch but we hadn't done the full family meet up. They had us over to their beautiful house in Magnolia and I introduced them to Nicole and Kate and met their five kids. It's been really nice to rekindle that friendship and get to know each other again as adults. Tonight we went out to the Saffron Grill with Nicole's brother and his girlfriend, which was also nice. I could drink that chai endlessly.

Working on the weekend, which I do pretty much every weekend, can be a drag when it's just administration, scheduling, contracting, and other such bullshit. This weekend I got to spend most of my time doing -- gasp -- game design. Yeah, the reason I got into this in the first place. I am designing a new RPG and I had a productive couple of days building out the framework and core mechanics. I'm quite pleased with what I've done so far. The concepts are coming together quickly, probably because I've the last couple of years thinking about what I want from this type of game. I'm afraid I can't talk about what the game is just yet, but you may seen announcement before Xmas.

And now the weekend is over already. Ah well.

4E and New Players

Note: I want to be clear up front that this is not a review of 4E in general. I am critiquing it as a vehicle for introducing new players into roleplaying. I am not saying it's a bad game or that you are a bad person if you like it. Nor does this bear upon Green Ronin's plans to potentially support 4E with product. That's a whole other discussion (the gist of which is, if it makes sense, we'll do it).

D&D occupies a unique place in the RPG ecosystem. It was the first RPG and created the entire category it continues to dominate. It also tends to be the entry point for most people into the hobby. While there have been some alternate avenues, most notably Vampire: The Masquerade, most roleplayers get their start with D&D. Despite this D&D has a checkered history in attracting new players since the days of the original Basic Set. TSR and WotC after them have had acquisition strategies that were either confused or ineffective. When I heard that 4E was going to radically rebuild D&D, my biggest hope was that the new iteration would be good acquisition game. The hobby needs more roleplayers, plain and simple, and I hoped 4E might help deliver them.

My assessment after having the books for a few weeks: it fails.

I say this because ultimately the new Player's Handbook is not a viable entry point for most new players. Now I know there are some entry products coming down the pipe, but to my mind a new player should be able to read the PHB and learn how to play the game. Entry sets come and go and stores may or may not have them in stock, but the Player's Handbook will always be there. It is the cornerstone of the line, the book that sells better than all others. It should be approachable and friendly to new players.

The 4E PHB, however, has some issues. Let's take a look at them in detail.

No Sales Text: I remember when we got in the 3E PHBs at WotC. I immediately flipped mine over to read the back cover text. I was appalled that it made no attempt to sell D&D. It basically said, "Hey, it's the new edition of D&D." Imagine my surprise to find 4E repeating this same error. Most of the back cover is empty. There are two short paragraphs of text and again they do not even try to sell the game. They don't explain what a roleplaying game is or why it's fun. It is apparently assumed that anyone looking at this book already knows that. You can tell someone that the book "provides everything players need to create and run heroic characters through legendary dungeons of dread," but that means nothing to folks new to roleplaying.

The Great Wall: Chapter 1 does have a reasonable, if short, intro to the game. Then the book gets into character creation. It's a little hinky that the races chapter has a bunch of powers in it when they haven't been explained yet, but I can see why they are there. The trouble starts in Chapter 4: Classes. This chapter is a killer. Since each class has 80-90 powers and all of them are nested here, this chapter is enormous and daunting. It is 125 pages, or almost as long as the entire 1st edition PHB. I've been gaming since I was 10 years old and my eyes glazed over the first time I tried to make it though Chapter 4. The powers soon started blending together. Also, a huge number of them use the [w] notation and this is explained nowhere in this chapter. You don't find out what it means until Chapter 7: Equipment, in fact.

No Newb Class: In every previous edition of D&D there has been at least one easy-to-play class that you could start people off with, fighter being the classic choice. 4E gives an equal number of powers to all classes, which means that playing any of them is like running a spellcaster in previous editions. There are at least some suggested builds for each class, so that's something but playing a 4E character for the first time still requires a more decision making than I think is advisable for new gamers

Not Enough Examples: Good rulebooks should have a lot of examples. You might think a rule is clear when you write it, but it often isn't as crystal as you believe. There are very few examples in the PHB until the combat chapter and even that really needs more. There is no character creation example that follows through the entire process and no extended combat example. Showing a new player how it all comes together is key, so leaving these out is a mistake.

Poor Reference Tools: This is a 320 page book and it has a 1 page index. Not helpful. Nor does it have a glossary of terms. Oh, and all those powers in Chapter 4? There's no alphabetical list of those with page numbers so you can look them up by name. All of this is bad enough for experienced players but it's deadly for newbies.

Core Experience Is Hardcore: All the preceding could have been mitigated to some degree if the core experience was easy to get into. Unfortunately, 4E is for hardcore gamers, not casual players. It seeks to provide a robust system for tactical combat and in so doing it makes the game fairly unapproachable. Or to put it more simply: the game is too damn complicated. There are powers and feats and class abilities (which can be like feats or like powers!), there are multiple temporary modifiers that need to be remembered and tracked, and there are ultimately too many choices for new players to make. I learned (ironically enough, when I was working at WotC) that limiting options is often better for new players, as offering too much choice can paralyze them.

What is perhaps most perplexing about these choices on WotC's part is that their new publishing plan involves releasing one big hardback book per month. That being the case, they could have easily pushed the more complicated elements into the supplements and made the core game a whole lot more approachable. That would have given the hardcore gamers what they want, while not pushing away the newbies and the casual gamers.


Now I understand 4E is selling well and this is no surprise. We are talking about a new edition of D&D here. It's a brand so powerful that even WotC's godawful marketing campaign for 4E couldn't make this a non-event in the world of nerdery. Only a tiny fraction of the people buying the books are new players though. The vast majority of them are current or lapsed gamers. They want to check out the new edition of this classic game and see if it's for them. The real test will come a year from now, when the newness will have worn off. Then we'll see if 4E really sticks.

I am sure, however, that WotC will end up with a healthy audience for 4E. Will it succeed in really bringing in new players though? That I am much less certain of. I do not think the PHB is the introduction to D&D is should have been. Titles like the Basic Set may help somewhat, but it's likely that true acquisition will continue to come from existing gamers introducing others to the hobby. That's a shame because I think 4E had a real chance to bring in the new blood the RPG industry desperately needs.

Husker Dungeons

There's an old Husker Du song in which Grant Hart screams, "What do I want? What'll make me happy?"

Lately I've been pondering this in relation to D&D. The game and I go back a long way. I started playing when I was 10 years old and this began a journey that led me into hobby gaming and ultimately to a life of game design, writing, and publishing. So while I can and do play many other games, I find that I like having at least a little D&D in my life. The game has had its up and downs over the years, but it has a core that continues to appeal.

I've been trying to figure which of the many games called D&D is the one I really want though. D&D has a certain gestalt that it's hard to pin down exactly. When I look over the various iterations of the game, there are things I don't like about each one. Each version seems to fix some problems while creating new ones. I had hoped that 4E would learn some lessons from 3E. It has but the direction it seems to have taken isn't the way I would have gone. While I will certainly give it a shot and GR may indeed publish some stuff for it, I don't consider it likely that it'll become my D&D game of choice (though again, I reserve final judgment until I see the actual rules). Paizo is doing some interesting stuff with Pathfinder but it is going down an evolutionary route that again isn't quite what I'm looking for. And GR's own True20 wasn't meant to be a D&D replacement in the first place.

Grant Hart's answer in that song is, "Nothing! Nothing! Nothing!" I'm trying not to be that cynical.

Now I have, off and on, been tinkering with a rule set that tries to capture what it is about D&D that I like. I'm sure that's a surprise to no one; it's what designers do if you give them half a chance. The thing is that I don't have time to go writing a new game while working two jobs unless I'm going to do something with it. And let's be frank, does the world need my interpretation of D&D? This is ground so well-plowed that it's turned into mud. So I tinker a bit and then I put it away. It doesn't make any sense to pursue it, and yet I find myself thinking about it on the bus and making notes when I get home. I suppose I either need to find a way for it make sense as a published product or just forget about it. At the moment I am, as the Replacements would say, "stuck in the middle."