We realize that you might be tired by now by the fact that the roleplaying section of the Big Bad Blog seems to do nothing but talk about the fourth edition of Dungeons and Dragons.

However, it is, for the moment, all we are playing.

Over the past four months, your blogger has had his first opportunity to play in the Fourth Edition as a PC, rather than a DM. Truth be told, this is the first real 4E experience for us. As a DM, we used the 4E mechanics for conflict resolution, but the game itself was imagined independent of the system.

For this new game, however, the DM has only ever played 4E – no other roleplaying experience was present. The adventure we have been playing was published by Wizards of the Coast. There are few to no house rules.

It is fourth edition in, pretty much, its purest form.

Which means that it is my duty as a blogger to give you my take on how the game feels from this side of the screen.

It can feel old school

In the introductory portion of the game, I was surprised by how light the mechanics felt. With a first-time DM and a relatively inexperienced group of players (aside from myself) feeling out the first few steps of a new game, I was expecting that all the annoying attributes of a combat-oriented mechanic bearing down on my play.

That did not happen at all.

Perhaps I should not be surprised. It is still a role playing game, and the introductory bits in which the players are meeting each other and feeling each other (and the NPCs) out is instinctively role-heavy. It’s hard for a mechanic to get in the way.

And as inexperienced as the group might be, they are pretty fantastic. The problems occur when the mechanics get heavy and the group’s inexperience shows as they have difficulty navigating the world of dice, bonuses, penalties, and so on. I probably should have expected this part of the game to go well.

But I was nervous. It went well, anyways. The group become a party, and some cohesion is slowly forming.

The introductory sessions felt like an old fashioned D&D game.

It can really bog down

In most games, there’s a point in the combat sequence where the fight is over, but the combat is ongoing. There is no longer any suspense about who is going to win. There is no longer any strategy that needs to be executed in order to win. It becomes a dice game.

Move around the table, rolling a d20, until (as a group) you have rolled 15 or better five times.

Boring, at least to me. Once upon a time it would not have been. I’m pretty sure I sat in my room alone rolling dice for an entire evening several times during my childhood. But I got over it, and it’s certainly not how I would choose to spend an afternoon with friends today.

It’s a dead period, with no roleplaying going on, little interaction between the players (we’re all intently looking at the board), and no movement in the story.

Roll.

Roll.

Roll.

Whether it’s the nature of 4E, the relative inexperience around the game table, or I had just forgot this part of the roleplaying game, I don’t know. But it bores the hell out of me.

On top of that is the never-ending dungeon which is a stack of fights, one on top of another. Thanks to the good designers of Wizards of the Coast, our group has now spent two entire sessions exploring this particular dungeon – by which I mean fighting zombies, goblins and zombie goblins (by which I mean rolling dice) – with nary a moment designed to flex those gaming muscles in which we play our roles.

I have come to enjoy the combat in fourth edition. It is interesting in and of itself (until it bogs down at the end), and I wish the bad guys would just do the decent thing and die (or surrender). But there is such a thing as too much of a good thing.

While I am willing to write this off as just being a poorly written adventure in this respect, it is hard to look at the structure of the game – the mix of encounter and daily powers, number of healing surges, and so on – and not imagine that the game designers did not anticipate this very situation.

It’s a super hero game

So the fourth edition has strengths and weaknesses, as any game does. But the strangest thing about it is that it is not a fantasy roleplaying game, but a super hero game.

This is not an original Big Bad Blog thought, but I have no idea where I read that previously or who should be credited with this observation.

The game works best when thought of as a superhero game in a fantasy context. It does not lend itself to a gritty style of fantasy. It is not your Tolkienesque high fantasy. As with any RPG, you could conceivably stuff it into one of those boxes, but it wasn’t made for it. It is decidedly not the Dungeons and Dragons I grew up with, where the PCs are a small band of adventurers doing the best they can in a fantastic and dangerous world.

No. We have super powers, every one of us. Even at first level, we have super powers. My character background does not read like any background I have written or read for and D&D game before – it reads more like a superhero origin story.

Here’s an Eladrin. He gets in a bit of trouble. Then a radioactive spider bit him, and now he’s suddenly Spidereladrin.

Not really – my character is much closer to Nightcrawler than he is to Spiderman, but he is a superhero (not an adventurer), as are the other members of his party. His history does read more like an origin story than a background, and his decisions are inherently coloured by the fact that he is otherworldly and special, rather than just a guy with a sword.

Again, this is neither good nor bad, but it is definitely different.

It is easy to see how old school D&D folk like me get very bent out of shape over this edition of the game. When I think of D&D – when I go out to play D&D – I get a certain set of expectations in my mind. These expectations are wide-ranging, but they certainly don’t involve a Marvel Superheroes story set against a Tolkien backdrop.

It’s like that scene in Return of the King (the movie version) where Legolas does his crazy elephant-slide thing. Legolas here is not the character from the books brought to life on the big screen, but instead some re-imagined super-powered version of the same.

And that’s what you get when you play 4E.

So whoever originally pointed this out, thank you. I’d probably be a lot more frustrated if you didn’t write about gaming.

Photo by your very own Mr. Topp. Available larger here.

I noticed over the weekend that somebody had searched, found, and read the post Streamlined for Complexity here at the Big Bad Blog, in which we discussed how the way in which Fourth Edition Dungeons & Dragons had been streamlined actually created more complexity.

Until a couple of weeks ago, however, I did not properly appreciate the problem.

It was not until recently that I had played Fourth Edition as a player, and not as the DM. As a DM, I am fairly prone to modifying and ignoring rules — I am particularly fond of speeding up combat, and have a general aversion to grids and combats that take more than five rounds.

So while not necessarily surprised, your blogger was still a little bit astounded when, in one fight scene, an enemy combatant had a curse, three shrouds and a mark on him. Additional conditions that were also, at some point, simultaneously affecting this enemy were that he was slowed, granted combat advantage, and was bloodied.

That is six different effects. Currently the group is using coloured post-it notes to denote such conditions, and the Big Bad at the end of the encounter was a rainbow floating about the map.

All the characters, for the record, are still first level. What’s going to happen when we get to higher levels and begin to find ourselves with an array of powers with ongoing effects? This time it was one bad guy and a half dozen effects (mostly doled out by two players). They were not too difficult to track. When it becomes twenty effects spread across several enemies, how will we keep track of it? When will the post-it notes give out?

All I know is that they will.

It has been suggested previously that it is an expectation to require a laptop for gameplay at high levels — but beyond the Dungeons & Dragons subscription service, what is there to track these things during combat?

We can all come prepared with our standard adjustments, but it is these non-standard conditions that cause a problem. Are there computer programs out there to manage these? Established systems for tracking them?

Our rainbow bad-guy was the subject of many jokes and laughs at the last session. I can only imagine that constant repetition and magnification of the issue will make the jokes seem a lot less funny.

NB: The Big Bad Blog would normally do some research and attempt to give solutions to the problems we encounter, instead of just whining. But we are pretty low on Internet right now, so we are whining instead. Or as we prefer to call it Stating the Problem. Which means that we will, hopefully, have a follow-up post about solutions to this at some point. If we remember.

My gaming group is getting a little bit of a boost. One of my players has decided to try out being a DM, which means that a new D&D game is being launched, and I recently had the opportunity to roll up my first 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons character.

Perhaps it’s the nature of the beast, but I always seem to really enjoy playing the characters that I create — at least since I reached this “adulthood” stage of life. And because I have this little corner of the Internet, I thought I might write Mr Topp’s Guide to Character Creation.

Treat the steps below with caution. While they are generally the order in which your blogger does things, sometimes steps need to be revisited and reconsidered later. In particular, step two and three are interchangeable, and are repeated (in step four) until they are settled and in sync — although they should never lose sight of the decision made in the first step.

Step One: Find a part of the game that you want to explore

Perhaps this is easy for you.

If you’re a longtime gamer, as I am, you probably remember making characters when you were a kid. You wanted to have the Fireball spell. Or get to have a Mount by virtue of being a Paladin. Or you just got the latest Complete Guide to some class or other, and wanted to try out the Spy kit, or the Gladiator kit.

When I hit my teenage years, however, this stopped being rewarding. A “new” character class (or a twist on an old one) simply did not make characters interesting anymore. As a result, I started to play blank slates — characters that were jack-of-all-trades, or just fit into the party, and counted on random “growth” and interaction with the world in the game to make them come to life.

This was mostly unsuccessful. Over a ten year period, playing a character I liked became something rare and accidental. I decided that I did not like playing PCs, and should only GM.

And then along came the Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game. I read the novels. I read the rulebook. I re-read the novels. I played in a campaign, ran a short-lived game, and played in numerous one-shots. It is a game I enjoy very much.

But there was a part I did not understand. The power called Logrus Mastery.

When a friend decided that he was running a game based around the Courts of Chaos, that seemed to be my opportunity. I created a character around the idea of Logrus Mastery — he was an exploratory vessel for a part of the game that I did not understand, but wanted to.

And I rediscovered that childhood joy in playing something new. I rediscovered the power of discovery in playing a character. And it was good.

Today, it is the first thing I decide about my character — in terms of the game, what am I looking at? What am I exploring? What part of the game am I trying to experience?

In this new game, I have chosen — quite generally — the incorporation of fey into the game. It has always been there, somewhere, in the background. But in fourth edition it really comes alive. The fey races — Eladrin and Gnomes — have special racial powers built around their fey nature. The Feywild — Fairy-land, if you will — has been expanded as a real and reachable place. And Warlocks can have pacts with fey creatures, from which their powers originate.

All of this explores something not available in the D&D games of my youth, and the central theme to my character concept involves exploring this in the game. A PC steeped in the Feywild gives me a starting point, and grants a heavy focus to the entire character creation process.

Step Two: How does my character get to their starting point?

This step is, essentially, the character’s background and history.

This is a standard part of character creation, but for some reason it tends to be treated as an afterthought. Not here. We are all shaped by our experiences — I, for instance, am not a set of my skills and abilities. Five points of fencing, seven points of blogging, and so on. I am a sum of my experiences — my schooling, my parents, my teachers. Where I have lived, what I have lived through.

Once you have fleshed out your character, these choices are limited. But when your only limitation is the overriding character concept (see step one), you have a lot of freedom to define who your character is before the sum of their experiences has been limited by what is written on a character sheet.

Like most long-time roleplayers, I have seen (and written) all sorts of character backgrounds, from short novels to single paragraphs. What works best for me is to have a very lightly mapped out history, with more detail as it gets closer to the game.

For instance, in this game, there is a sentence or two about my character’s family. A paragraph about his life up until recently, and then about a page on the events that lead him to where he is at the start of the game. Excepting some early-in-life character-shaping event, this seems to work well.

Step Three: How does my character interact with their environment?

Once we have the basic drive of the character — and probably a good idea of what they’re going to look like once skills have been assigned and powers chosen — my next consideration is how they interact with their environment.

Are they bold? Quiet? Arrogant? Confident? Proud? Humble?

How will they react to those monsters, characters and dilemmas they are likely to face in the game?

Most importantly, can I, as the player, find something inside myself that can be drawn upon to behave in the appropriate fashion? It seems to me that I have moments in which I behave — or would like to behave — in a manner that would fit any of the characteristics I would place here. Chances are you do too, but be aware of them right now. If you decide to be a proud character, but normally deflect praise yourself, be aware of this when creating the character.

It is the differences, personality-wise, between you and the character that make them an interesting person to play and explore. The alternative is to play yourself with superpowers — there is nothing wrong with that approach, but make it a decision and not an inevitability.

Step Four: Stir

Here we take our steps two and three, and revisit them. Adjust them until they fit together.

The character’s past ought to either inform the manner in which they interact with their environment, or be consistent with it. In other words, there should be an event (or events) which lead towards their behaviour, or the character’s story needs to be consistent with that form of interaction all along.

For instance, if you want to fulfill your commuting fantasy about pushing your fellow jerk commuters down the stairs, your character will probably be short-tempered and violent. They might have a past that involves being imprisoned, living on the street and fighting for cash (consistency), or have suffered a recent trauma (event). They likely should not have had a happy childhood with good relationships and had top grades in school.

People do “just snap”, but there ought to be a trigger. Do not count on encountering a proper trigger in the course of the game, unless you have already agreed such a thing with the GM, and decided what it would be.

Step Five: Put your character into the game’s framework

Only now do we turn to rulebooks and character sheets. Create your character based on what you have already decided.

While there will likely be a few painful choices — two things that both fit the character as written, where only one can be chosen: where to spend the last few points, what skill gets the last slot — most decisions will be made by your character concept (Step One), with the peripherals informed by your character history (Step Two). Your circus-raised Sorcerer, for example, is more likely to know acrobatics than history.

Step Four: Development

No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.

All of the above is designed to give you an interesting person to drop into the midst of a game that somebody else is designing. What happens from there is anybody’s guess.

In the majority of games, the events in-game are supposed to be the defining moments of a character’s life. Unless you’re playing retired superheroes who are called to action one last time, this is likely to be the case in the game that you are playing.

And there’s something about experiencing life-defining moments. They change you.

And so they will change your character as the game progresses.

Think of the four Hobbits in the Lord of the Rings. Merry and Pippin go through profound changes over the course of the story. Sam and Frodo, on the other hand, are more stalwart and bent to the purposes they have been assigned at the beginning of the story. But they are also much changed by the adventure. Their future selves are quite different to the Hobbits who were plucked from the Shire by adventure.

There is little point in trying to plan it out. Certainly, your character can have goals, but how reaching (or failing to reach, or being sidetracked) will change them is difficult to guess. The events with the most impact to the character do not have to be those most important to the story: A friend in danger can turn a reticent hero into the one leading the charge. Wielding a flaming sword could change the character’s own self-image, and alter their approach to dangerous situations.

Whatever happens, let it happen. Your character might continue to be interesting long into the future.

Top photo by Steve Barry.
Bottom photo by Lydia.

Previously on the Big Bad Blog, I have complained about the complexity of the 4E D&D system. In the comments to that article, one of our regular contributors mentioned that 4E had a built-in assumption that a laptop would be used at higher levels and that Wizards of the Coast had a subscription service that would (presumably) be of assistance in these matters.

As it so happens, one of my players happened to take out a subscription to said service — better known as D&D Insider, giving your blogger a chance to take a quick tour of the service and share some initial impressions with you.

Keep in mind that this is not a full review of the site — we’ve had it up on a laptop screen for all of one session, and done some poking around in it. There’s plenty of stuff that we (rightly or wrongly) are assuming to be bells and whistles. That said, we would like to share the results of our initial three hour tour.

The first impression

My first impression of the site was, I must say, not impressive. Might have been the quote on the front page when I first arrived:

Min/Max your Min/Maxing

Everybody does it, yes — we all try to tweak our character’s stats for best performance in the game. But many of us also recognize that the more we view our characters as a vehicle for combat, the further we get from roleplaying, and the closer we get to a game that is based entirely on combat.

To be fair, the message is only one of several that get shown on that front screen, a significant number of players have turned the Min/Max into an art, and the tools provided can help those who wish they were better at it. But I still get an icky feeling when Min/Maxing becomes the purpose of the exercise.

What’s Inside

There are many pieces within D&D Insider, including access to Dragon and Dungeon magazines. While there might be other pieces that you (or I) might find interesting, what we’re looking at here are those things that look like they might be of use in my own games.

The Compendium

Easily the most beautiful part of having a subscription is access to the Compendium — a searchable database of every feat, power, race and class contained within a Wizards of the Coast publication.

The Character Sheet

There are two aspects here — the character builder, which I have not used but is the functionality referred to in the Min/Max advertisement. It is probably safe to assume that I would see its utility, but not necessarily like the way it impacts the process of character creation. We might look at this some other time.

The second part is the Character Sheet viewer. This is the wonderful creature alluded to by curgoth in my previous post — all the calculations are done for the player, no need for complicated number wrangling … all taken care of by the laptop.

Players in my game are using a variety of home-made sheets and filled-in print outs of the official character sheet. The player with the Insider subscription is the only one who always knows what their final number is after they’ve rolled the die.

The Monster Guide

You’ll notice I left monsters out of the compendium. That is because they’re all in the Monster Guide. This lists every monster published for 4E, allows the DM to add monsters of their own creation, and allows the DM to edit monster stats, powers, et cetera to their own liking.

Why it’s the best thing since sliced bread

I must say that, after taking a poke around, it is tempting to get a subscription myself and I would recommend it to others.

First, there’s simple cost. The average rulebook runs about $25, and a subscription is $71 per year. Fourth edition was released approximately two years ago, and counting only editions of the Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide and Monster Manual (the “core” books), there are already six books.

If you are somebody who would have all of these, you would have access to all those rules for less money with a subscription. As well as having access to all the additional information that is available in the numerous supplements. And a laptop is much easier to carry than a backpack full of hardcover roleplaying books, as we all know too well.

Second, it is easier than playing 4E with the books. Want to use a power written on your character sheet, but need to take a look at the power’s details first? No more flipping through the Player’s Handbook looking for the right page, only to find out it’s not there and repeat your flipping feat with the Martial Power rulebook. And no more forgetting to add half your level to your rolls, or updating your new Strength bonus across every single place that your strength modifier is used. It just happens automatically.

Most important is that it puts every power, feat, ritual and monster in the game at your fingertips. You literally need to do little more than just type the name of the monster in, and the stats appear on your screen. The modified stats, if you have modified them.

It is quite simply an incredibly useful resource.

How it could be better

Just because something is useful does not mean that it could not be better. The compendium requires you to be online (although the character sheets and monster guide do not), meaning that if something is NOT on a character sheet to reference, and you have no access to the Internet, you are cut off from the game. More facilities to save bits to a local machine would be welcome.

As would mobile applications. I am shocked that there is no D&D Insider iPhone app. It would be great to get all the books, papers and computers off the table, and allow everybody with a smart phone (ie, everybody) to have their character sheets and rulebooks. Games feel different when there are barriers (ie, laptop screens) between the players.

Why it’s an awful idea

As great a resource as D&D Insider is, however, it is still a concept that I do not like.

First and foremost, it’s a subscription, rather software that can be owned (and updated). What is going to happen when the 5th edition of Dungeons and Dragons is released? Will those who are depending on their D&D Insider subscription be suddenly unable to play?

As an online resource, the tools at D&D Insider only exist for the duration of time that Wizards of the Coast choose to offer them. The price can increase, the service can be withdrawn. I can grab my old 2nd Edition D&D books and run a game just as easily as I did fifteen years ago. I expect to become dependent on an online service to run 4E — which means that in fifteen years, it will be a system that cannot be played.

But that is secondary — more important is what this says about the relationship between the players and the game.

Were somebody to arrive at my house tonight, with dice, paper, pencil, and imagination, we could play any number of roleplaying games. I can play 2nd Edition D&D, Mage, and a number of other games without need for the books during the session and only a Player’s Handbook (or equivalent) between them. I don’t need a book at all to handle a one-off in 2E or Mage.

Alternatively, my imaginary guest and I could drop the between-sessions book and dice requirements altogether, and play Amber.

This is what makes the tabletop roleplaying game so fantastic. You can use all sorts of bells and whistles — miniatures and maps, supplements, props, store-bought adventures — but you do not have to. In the end it comes down to you, your imagination, and the character you are playing.

On Sunday afternoon we sat around the table. People were diving through their rulebooks, miniatures covered the table, and a laptop was diving through the compendium looking at powers. People were crunching numbers to figure out whether the 12 they rolled was a 12, 16, or 21.

I remember sitting in Julian Stevenson’s basement, playing my Elf pirate. There was lots of prep work involved between sessions. I re-wrote my character sheet every time. I updated my hit points, my THAC0, and anything else that needed updating.

I remember playing a Mage in Allan Roberts’ game. I remember pouring through the Player’s Handbook and Tome of Magic every time I gained a level and got to add new spells. Choosing them carefully. Spell lists with little check marks beside them to represent the number of times I had memorized each of them.

I remember sitting in Dave McKay’s attic, playing my Paladin. In those days, I would never go to play D&D without my Player’s Handbook (or Unearthed Arcana, if I remember correctly) in my backpack. But I cannot remember opening a book once the game got away — in Dave’s attic, or any of those others, though I am sure it occasionally happened. Those tables conveniently grouped in the appendix were simply too accessible and useful to be ignored, after all.

Instead, these games involved plots, descriptions, dice, maps, paper, pencils, and a lot of imagination.

The rules provided the guidelines to set up the sessions — the start point. Once you knew what die to roll in what scenario, even the tables at the back became useless once play was underway.

On Sunday, I saw how indispensable a D&D Insider subscription is going to prove to my 4E game. There will, without doubt, be an open laptop at every session from here on out — and it makes me sad.

It is not necessary to constantly check the rulebook or do arithmetic in order to roleplay; but it is if you want to play the latest version of Dungeons & Dragons.

That an internet resource can prove to be such a key in-game tool simply illustrates that the system itself too-often interferes with the actual playing of the game.