Dungeons and Dragons has always been both my favourite and least favourite roleplaying game. When I roleplay, I like to focus on characters, stories and settings — I find that games with complex or in-your-face mechanics disrupt the game that I am trying to play.
D&D is certainly a game that is heavy on mechanics. From characters having jobs that determine their mechanical contributions in combat (classes), to magical weapons and armour that need to be described in terms of their mechanical contribution (longsword +1, +2 vs Giants), many of the things that one would hope could be used to add depth to characters, settings or stories are reduced to something mechanical by the game.
So it’s easy to see why it’s the least favourite.
The flip side of that coin is that nearly everybody who roleplays knows how to play Dungeons and Dragons. Until I reached my teen years, I was unaware that there were other roleplaying games out there — I thought there was just Basic, Advanced and the (then brand new) 2nd Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons games. Most other gamers seem to be cut from the same background.
As a result, if you want a game where everybody already knows the mechanics and they can fade into the background, Dungeons & Dragons will often be the game of choice. Even the least intrusive of resolution mechanics needs to be understood and remembered. The player learning a new mechanic will necessarily be more oriented towards how that mechanic works than will the player who has been playing games with that mechanic for over a decade.
Based on this principle — that a mechanic that is pushed in your face goes unnoticed if you’ve been wearing it on your face for twenty years — Dungeons and Dragons works well for a light-on-the-mechanics game. Lay down a few house rules at the start, and then let the mechanics work in the “background”.
Sixteen months ago, when I began to plan for my current game, I chose Dungeons & Dragons because it was — it always is — “easiest” for a new game with new players. Today, I wonder if it was a mistake. These were truly new players. They had never roleplayed before, period. And I was picking up the fourth edition of Dungeons and Dragons, having not played since the second edition of the game.
I have managed to keep the mechanics in the background (as much as that is possible) thus far. Roll a d20 for everything but damage. Tell me the result, and all that. But as my players move towards higher levels, it becomes harder to keep track of the various bonuses and all that. So, I’m planning the next session to be mechanics-heavy.
As in, it’s time that we all understood the way this game resolves conflict.
Combat-heavy. Skill challenge heavy. Saving throws. Miniatures. The whole thing.
The biggest challenge in this session is not designing it, however, but figuring out how I explain how it works. D&D 4E (and 3 and 3.5? I don’t know, as I’ve never played) is supposed to be an improvement on my beloved 2E in two ways: it is streamlined (hence easier to understand) and balanced.
I don’t care for balance — but that’s a story for another time.
Streamlined is easy enough. You always roll a d20 when you are trying something. Then you add your modifiers, and see if you have reached your target score. Higher scores are always better. Higher rolls are always better.
But consider the simple “roll to hit”:
2nd edition – Player rolls
ADDS magical bonus.
ADDS attribute bonus (strength for melee, dexterity for range)
tells DM
DM ADDS target AC
DM compares to THAC0 table.
4th edition – Player rolls
ADDS magical bonus.
ADDS attribute bonus (must check power to determine)
ADDS feat bonus (if applicable to this attack)
ADDS half level
ADDS bonus from magical effects (possibly multiple)
SUBTRACTS penalty from magical effects (possibly multiple)
tells DM
DM compares to target AC.
While some might object to the addition and subtraction of magical penalties being listed in 4E but not in 2E, consider that in second edition most of these spells are low level and rarely used. How often was a Bless spell actually cast in second edition? In fourth edition, these now stack — there are often many effects in play at once. Also, as they have become central abilities to many classes, they are included as part of most of the powers for those classes.
The streamlining of combat has complicated it. High AC (target) scores have required a huge increase in bonuses in order to determine success. In the old system, the target lowered as you gained in level, meaning that there are fewer bonuses to track.
Streamlining is meant to remove complexity. High rolls and high scores are always good, while low rolls and low scores are always bad. This is meant to remove confusion.
I think that the game designers have failed on this front. My eight-year-old self had no problem with low rolls for saves and high rolls to hit. He had no problem wanting a lot of hit points and a low armour class.
My thirty-something self loses track of all the effects in play during combat. I find it far more complicated to determine whether or not an attack hits today than I did twenty years ago.
And that’s not a sign of simplicity.
If you liked this, you might also like Fourth edition: The other side of the screen
My understanding is that 4e assumes that from mid to high levels, you’re going to be using a laptop to do the calculations.
The trick is that 4e isn’t streamlined 2nd edition, it’s streamlined 3e. 3e simplified the core mechanic and then the rules that were central to the system proliferated because a unified mechanic made many subsystems “cheap” to handle. The simplification over 2e just allowed the system to become complicated in other areas.
4e is a reaction to 3e that didn’t really consider any other edition. As a result, I find that 4e is indeed simpler than 3e in the areas the designers aimed for, but paradoxically it’s more complicated than 2e in nearly every way. They squandered the “breathing room” that the unified mechanic afforded the system so much that 2e runs faster and smoother even with it’s diversity of resolution mechanics.
@curgoth Really? Where does your understanding originate? April Fool’s? Does Wizards of the Coast sell/give away such software, or are the players expected to design their own?
Were I designing a game, and identified this as one of my assumptions, I would go back to the drawing board …
@d7 I have never actually played 3E, so had not considered this. That said, I would have thought the power explosion in 4E would complicate the game over 3E, not simplify it.
If that change was actually a simplifying feature, perhaps I should be happy that I never played 3E.
Wizards does in fact have a subscription based service that include a character generator, virtual game board and virtual minis, and online versions of the books. They talked about it a lot during the lead up to 4e. The idea that it’s expected at higher levels is something I’ve picked up from various gaming blogs.
@curgoth wow. So they designed the game to force you to subscribe to their service in order to play it at high level?
When did Apple buy Wizards of the Coast?
The explosion of powers is an attempt to address the age-old complaint that “fighters are boring in combat when all they can do is swing a sword over and over again.” This was exacerbated in 3e, since 3e emphasised customisable character-advancement so much but there was very little for fighters to customise beyond choice of weapon and a handful of feats.
The punchline of course, being that fighters were boring like that only in the hands of people who couldn’t think beyond combat, so they made 4e combat more complicated to give those people something to do without leaving the warm embrace of the combat system. (It’s simpler than 3e in that all powers work pretty much the same, and the differences are minor mechanical variations with different paintjobs that don’t have any enforceable implications for the fiction.)
This stuff is why you’ll hear a lot of people respond to criticisms of 4e with “but it’s so much better than 3e!” They will respond this way even if the criticism is independent of any comparison, or if it’s in comparison to an edition other than 3e. There’s a very strong belief out there that the editions have only ever improved on each other, rather than what they’ve actually done: wandered in different directions that suit different playstyles.
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