Embracing Absurdity

Embracing Absurdity: Where I am in Role-Playing Now

In 1993, I began role-playing at my friend’s kitchen table. The game was “The All New, Easy to Master Dungeons & Dragons Game”. We were escaping Zanzer Tem’s dungeon, I was a dwarf (that was my class). My friend had a large collection of AD&D and BD&D stuff, such as the Rule’s Cyclopedia and many of the Mystara supplements. We went through the Keep of the Borderlands and White Plume Mountain before ending up in the Hollow World. Elsewhere, I began my own campaign using a box set called “The Haunted Tower” set in this place called Thunder Rift. It was a great time.

However, even then we were waking up to how limited Basic D&D was. As we expanded our game group, we eventually discovered Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2^nd edition, and its wealth of options. I could be a Dwarven Cleric, or a LG Paladin! Fighters got exceptional strength! There were these things called “kits”. Most of those characters converted to 2^nd edition, and we never looked back. Of course, it wasn’t so clear-cut; there was a large area of optional classes we homebrewed, mish-mashed rules from the RC, and 1e and 2e books, and a heavy dose of Final Fantasy inspired ideas. Plus, every cliché about 13 year olds playing D&D? We did them. However, by 1995, we were firmly using 2^nd edition as the backbone for those ideas, not Basic.

As the years moved on, I found the things that drew me to AD&D drove me nuts. Why were demi-humans limited in class choice, and possible level? Why did Paladins require ONLY LG? Why were Druids so hard to play? Why were fighters the only class that got an exceptional ability? The games we played with grow more and more house-ruled, especially as Player’s Options introduced rule-patches and new ideas that didn’t always move smoothly. By 1999, I was ready for a change. Several of us has tried writing our own systems, and I was part way through my “revised” Player’s Handbook  project when 3e was announced.

3e was not the Godsend it sounds like it should be. In college it got some play, but house-ruled 2e remained stubbornly our game-du-jour until 3.5 came out in 2003. After that, 3e became the official ruleset of D&D, but always with some reservations from some. Too many ingrained habits remained. We were older too, and less tolerant of finicky rules. 3.5 promised streamlining, but it’s very rules-heavy approach created new problems. Exceptional Strength might have been strange, but at least it was easy to adjust; creating high level NPCs and monster s was a 3e DM’s nightmare. High level play broke down worse than 2e’s, and that was saying something! Prestige classes, builds, and optional class abilities made the simple act of char-gen a “do it before you come” event. By 2008, I was again worn out; despite several successful games played and run.

4e, like 3e before it, promised clearer rules, simpler mechanics, and balanced encounters. After 6 months though, it was NOT what we wanted. Little came of it, and it was universally dropped amongst the group. We strolled back to 3.5, willing to handle its warts when another savior came; Pathfinder: 3.5 Evolved.

Pathfinder was great, in theory. It was solid, better balanced than 3.5 and much closer to our brand of D&D than 4e was. A couple of games came out of it, but external conflicts not related to game drew them to a close. In the process, I came to a stunning revelation; I couldn’t tell you with certainty what my PC was capable of anymore without his character sheet and the core book to cross-reference. There was too many finicky bit; talents and spell-like abilities; plus there were 3e, 3.5 and PF variants of rules floating in my brain. In the end, PF was not the panacea for what ailed me.

The walk-back continued when for a few games we again went back to 2e. I never thought I’d do it. I had reviled its absurdities for over a decade. I would never go back to the land of Thac0 and decreasing AC and Exceptional Strength and differing XP charts. But looking again with fresh eyes, the absurdities look quaint; almost charming. A fighter was a collection perfectly picked feats and prestige levels; he was a dude with a sword. Even with Thac0 math, combat moved quickly and smoothly. PCs asked to do innovative things rather than fall back to feat lists and power-cards. I could gen up a high level NPC in a half-hour tops. Conflicting schedules killed my experiment, but it opened my eyes again to the quirkly fun of 2e.

It’s worth noting here in the narrative why the quirkiness began to appeal. I had spent a decade amongst halfling monks, half-orc barbarians, warforged artificers, drow warlocks, goliath druids, and other strange new characters. Each was an amazing step forward in D&D. I DMed Eberron for many years with its eccentric quirks like lightning rails and dino-riding halflings. However, after that I found myself craving the traditional fantasy of my youth. Dwarves were vaguely Scottish and greedy drunks; elves were mages, and there were no races based on planar beings, golems, plants, or such. I spent a long time avoiding Tolkien and embracing the stranger races and classes; I was one of the few DMs who for a long time had anthropomorphic turtles as a PC race! Eventually though, the freakshow wore itself out. I wanted classic tropes back. Halflings were great thieves, but not wizards. Humanity alone sought Paladinhood. I was even willing to re-embrace the much hated level limit restriction (with some adjustments). I wanted Tolkien back.

It is here that my journey rests at where it began. I rediscovered on a whim the simplistic joy of Basic D&D. I didn’t believe I could ever go back to elves being a class (and all fighter/mages) and only seven or so classes, but there I was, re-reading each page of my Rule’s Cyclopedia (acquired much later after Basic and 2e were distant memories) with renewed appreciation. It’s not perfect (thieves are woefully underpowered, for example) but its inherently good, simple, and classic. That is where I am today; simple, good, classic. I don’t want a huge character sheet of feats, skill points, and so on. I want rules that are clean and easy to use, with few fiddly bits to bust on in combat. And I want the classic archetypes represented. I want goblins and liches and chromatic dragons. I am demoned out, and I want Chthulu to take a holiday. Give me orcs and giants.

My love of the RC is only matched by its modern cousin; Basic Fantasy RPG; a variant/clone of Basic with some modern flourishes (like upwards AC and race/class split) that is as close to how I’d write a custom D&D as I’ll ever find. Honestly, if I could find players for either; I’d run them in a heartbeat. I also have D&D Next to look forward to; with its promise of old-school goodness. Until then, I’ll sit here and dream of questing through Thunder Rift again, slaying kobolds and gaining XP. Hand me those 3d6, I’m calling the Elf…

Its been nearly a week, and I've had time to digest the new D&D announcement. My first reaction was "not again" but slowly reading responses from everyone has led me to believe its actually being built with me in mind. Let me explain.

I played AD&D 2nd Edition, Basic D&D, Third Edition, 3.5, and 4e before settling to Pathfinder and a brief fling in 2e again. I like each separately, and each has something I like, something I don't. Even 4e, which I found nearly unplayable, had good ideas (if lacking execution.) It seems WotC heard me and is trying to make a game that appeals to each of these editions. They might win me, depending on how they learned their lessons.

As for what I want out of this new D&D, I can sum it up simply: I want a game that is generally easy to prep for (no hour long NPC shopping). I want classes that have some customization but doesn't require long hours and multiple books/builders to create a PC. I want unique mechanics for classes: and I want Vancian/Memorization back. Really, if they can give me a game with Basic's general simplicity, AD&D's classes and options, 3e's upwards AC and save categories, and 4e's eye toward world-building, it will be good.

In the end, we'll have to see. I have plan to run the playtest docs when it comes, and I'll keep this blog right now to talk about new information, as well as how it will effect Enderia.

You can find updated scoops at http://www.enworld.org/index.php?page=dnd5e

Fifth Edition Confirmed: WotC wants your Input

Charting the Course for D&D: Your Voice, Your Game

Legends & Lore

Mike Mearls

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s you may have read in the New York Times, it’s an exciting time for Dungeons & Dragons. We are happy to announce today that we are developing the next iteration of D&D, and will be looking to the legions of D&D fans to help shape the future of the game along with us.
Our mission is to ensure that D&D enters its next 40 years as a vibrant, growing, and exciting game. By listening to the needs of the D&D community, we can meet this goal. As part of our increased efforts to engage with the player-base, we launched a series of weekly articles in early 2011, including Rule of Three and Legends & Lore, to give you a voice in our work. We’ve listened to both praise and criticism from all D&D fans, regardless of their edition of choice, and we’ll continue to do so.
That is why we are excited to share with you that starting in Spring 2012, we will be taking this process one step further and conducting ongoing open playtests with the gaming community to gather feedback on the new iteration of the game as we develop it. With your feedback and involvement, we can make D&D better than ever. We seek to build a foundation for the long-term health and growth of D&D, one rooted in the vital traits that make D&D unique and special. We want a game that rises above differences of play styles, campaign settings, and editions, one that takes the fundamental essence of D&D and brings it to the forefront of the game. In short, we want a game that is as simple or complex as you please, its action focused on combat, intrigue, and exploration as you desire. We want a game that is unmistakably D&D, but one that can easily become your D&D, the game that you want to run and play.
D&D is more than just a set of rules for fantasy gaming. It launched an entire gaming genre and played a pivotal role in creating the entirety of the gaming industry, both analog and digital. The game has lived and thrived because it has awoken a spark of creation, visions of daring adventure, wondrous vistas, and untold horrors that pull us all together as a community of RPG fans. It is the countless players and DMs who have brought it to life over the years. The game is at its best when it is yours.
For that reason, we want your participation. The goals we have set for ourselves are by no means trivial or easy. By involving you in this process, we can build a set of D&D rules that incorporate the wants and desires of D&D gamers around the world. We want to create a flexible game, rich with options for players and DMs to embrace or reject as they see fit, a game that brings D&D fans together rather than serves as one more category to splinter us apart.
We have begun obtaining feedback from a limited Friends & Family playtest consisting of internal employees and their gaming groups and soon we will be expanding that group to consist of members from our existing body of playtesters. Then at the D&D Experience convention in late January, Wizards of the Coast will conduct a special playtest of ideas currently in development. The D&D Experience will be moving to Gen Con in 2013, so as a convention special this year, we will be offering show attendees a first-look at a draft of the new set of rules. Then beginning sometime in the spring, we will begin open playtesting. Through our web site, we will release a growing set of rules, classes, monsters and other materials for your study and feedback. We seek to reach as many people as possible, from the gamer who just started with D&D last week to the gaming group that has been together since the early-1970s. For this process to work, we want to give a voice to all D&D fans and players of all previous editions of the game.
The next year is going to be an exciting one. There is a lot of work to be done, and I’m hoping you have the time, energy, and inclination to pitch in. We sure hope you do, as we seek to make gaming history by shaping the future of D&D, together. If you would like to sign up today to be notified when the playtest is beginning and how you can participate, click here:

*Your email address will be used by Wizards solely for the purpose of notifying you about the D&D playtest and is subject to our Privacy Policy.

In the meantime, you can share your opinions, talk with other gamers and stay in touch with D&D game designers by joining the official group page at: http://community.wizards.com/dndnext.

WotC, DDI, 4E, and Hasbro: Some History (from Enworld)

In the - now very long - discussion of Ryan Dancey's latest EN World column which expands on his opinions in the recentEscapist articles about the past, present, and future of D&D, Ryan makes a few detailed replies throughout the thread. Since it's such a long thread, I've pulledthis particularly interesting one out (see below). There are a couple of others, foundhere and here.

After Vince Calouri was pushed out of Wizards of the Coast he was replaced by Chuck Heubner. Chuck basically had to manage Wizards on the downslope from the Pokemon salad days. Hasbro has been through many boom & bust cycles in the toy business and they have a standard response when it happens: cut headcount and reduce overhead. Since Wizards was de facto the only part of the business that had not been rolled up into Hasbro proper it was not insulated by the successes of other things at Hasbro like GI Joe or Transformers.

While this was happening there was a big internal fight for control over the CCG business within Hasbro. Brian Goldner who was at the time the head of the Boys Toys (i.e. half the company) division of Hasbro thought that the company was missing a huge window of opportunity to follow up Pokemon with a series of mass-market CCGs linked to Hasbro's core brands GI Joe and Transformers. These battles resulted in things being escalated all the way to the C-Suite and the Hasbro Board, where Brian lost the fight and Wizards retained the exclusive ability within Hasbro to make CCGs. The downside for Wizards is that they were forced to do things with the Duelmaster brand that they did not want to do, and it never got the traction in the US that Wizards thought it could achieve. (In Japan, by contrast, it became a huge best-seller).

Chuck left after two years and Loren Greenwood, who had been the long time VP of Sales, replaced him in 2004. He was also a visible proponent of the idea that Wizards, and not Boys Toys, should set Hasbro's CCG strategy. Thus when Brian was named COO of the whole company in 2006 and CEO in 2008, Loren had a big problem on his hands. Loren guided the company through the post 3.5e crash of the TRPG market, the loss of the Pokemon franchise, and the unwinding of the Wizards retail strategy. All of this was pretty bitter fruit for hm since he'd been instrumental in building up much of what had to then be torn down. The combination of all these things led to Loren's exit and his replacement by Greg Leeds, who is the current CEO of Wizards.

Sometime around 2005ish, Hasbro made an internal decision to divide its businesses into two categories. Core brands, which had more than $50 million in annual sales, and had a growth path towards $100 million annual sales, and Non-Core brands, which didn't.

Under Goldner, the Core Brands would be the tentpoles of the company. They would be exploited across a range of media with an eye towards major motion pictures, following the path Transformers had blazed. Goldner saw what happened to Marvel when they re-oriented their company from a publisher of comic books to a brand building factory (their market capitalization increased by something like 2 billion dollars). He wanted to replicate that at Hasbro.

Core Brands would get the financing they requested for development of their businesses (within reason). Non-Core brands would not. They would be allowed to rise & fall with the overall toy market on their own merits without a lot of marketing or development support. In fact, many Non-Core brands would simply be mothballed - allowed to go dormant for some number of years until the company was ready to take them down off the shelf and try to revive them for a new generation of kids.

At the point of the original Hasbro/Wizards merger a fateful decision was made that laid the groundwork for what happened once Greg took over. Instead of focusing Hasbro on the idea that Wizards of the Coast was a single brand, each of the lines of business in Wizards got broken out and reported to Hasbro as a separate entity. This was driven in large part by the fact that the acquisition agreement specified a substantial post-acquisition purchase price adjustment for Wizards' shareholders on the basis of the sales of non-Magic CCGs (i.e. Pokemon).

This came back to haunt Wizards when Hasbro's new Core/Non-Core strategy came into focus. Instead of being able to say "We're a $100+ million brand, keep funding us as we desire", each of the business units inside Wizards had to make that case separately. So the first thing that happened was the contraction you saw when Wizards dropped new game development and became the "D&D and Magic" company. Magic has no problem hitting the "Core" brand bar, but D&D does. It's really a $25-30 million business, especially since Wizards isn't given credit for the licensing revenue of the D&D computer games.

It would have been very easy for Goldner et al to tell Wizards "you're done with D&D, put it on a shelf and we'll bring it back 10 years from now as a multi-media property managed from Rhode Island". There's no way that the D&D business circa 2006 could have supported the kind of staff and overhead that it was used to. Best case would have been a very small staff dedicated to just managing the brand and maybe handling some freelance pool doing minimal adventure content. So this was an existential issue (like "do we exist or not") for the part of Wizards that was connected to D&D. That's something between 50 and 75 people.

Sometime around 2006, the D&D team made a big presentation to the Hasbro senior management on how they could take D&D up to the $50 million level and potentially keep growing it. The core of that plan was a synergistic relationship between the tabletop game and what came to be known as DDI. At the time Hasbro didn't have the rights to do an MMO for D&D, so DDI was the next best thing. The Wizards team produced figures showing that there were millions of people playing D&D and that if they could move a moderate fraction of those people to DDI, they would achieve their revenue goals. Then DDI could be expanded over time and if/when Hasbro recovered the video gaming rights, it could be used as a platform to launch a true D&D MMO, which could take them over $100 million/year.

The DDI pitch was that the 4th Edition would be designed so that it would work best when played with DDI. DDI had a big VTT component of its design that would be the driver of this move to get folks to hybridize their tabletop game with digital tools. Unfortunately, a tragedy struck the DDI team and it never really recovered. The VTT wasn't ready when 4e launched, and the explicit link between 4e and DDI that had been proposed to Hasbro's execs never materialized. The team did a yoeman's effort to make 4e work anyway while the VTT evolved, but they simply couldn't hit the numbers they'd promised selling books alone. The marketplace backlash to 4e didn't help either.

Greg wasn't in the hot seat long enough to really take the blame for the 4e/DDI plan, and Wizards just hired a new exec to be in charge of Sales & Marketing, and Bill Slavicsek who headed RPG R&D left last summer, so the team that committed those numbers to Hasbro are gone. The team that's there now probably doesn't have a blank sheet of paper and an open checkbook, but they also don't have to answer to Hasbro for the promises of the prior regime.

As to their next move? Only time will tell.

The State of Dungeons & Dragons: Future

The State of Dungeons & Dragons: Future

Interesting idea on what D&D will look like (repost)

Welcome to Enderia

Welcome to Enderia

This is a game blog, where I can collect ideas and submit game-related (and sometimes non-gaming) rants and articles. I hope to use it for a place to rant, rave, and inspire.