Farewell To a 4end

Running Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay for the past few months made me realize something: I don't like Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition.

Actually, that's not exactly right. I had some fun with 4E and I won't say I never will again. But it doesn't do the kind of fantasy game that really appeals to me. As I've said before, 4E is a game of high-powered, ass-kicking heroes that carry so many magic items their teeth glow. That's fun - for a while, at least - but it quickly gets old for me. I like my fantasy games to be a bit grittier, and by "a bit", I mean a lot.

I spent nearly a year playing 4E, and most of that time was eaten up by running fights. I know there are people out there who swear 4E combat runs faster than any other edition, but that certainly wasn't the case for us. Fights took hours. They always felt fun at first, but I got bored with them in short order, whether I was running them or participating as a player. In fact, when I think about memorable fights I've played in the past couple of years, only one of them happened in 4E, and it was one where the DM was handwaving a lot of things. The fights that stick out in my memory happened in games like WFRP and Rolemaster (which suggests I really need to play more games that have detailed crit charts, but that's a subject for another time).

There are a lot of things to like about 4E. I like the way they evened the playing field between magic-using and fighting classes. I like the way they simplified skills. I like the concept of the Feywild. I like the idea of ritual magic (though in play, we practically never used them). There are a lot of changes that 4E made that I thought were good ones. But when the system is built entirely around combat, and I find combat boring, that's a problem.

(Plus, a lot of the artwork is terrible. It's actually a step back from the previous edition's artwork, which is just weird. I mean, look at the pic I posted up top. I know art's not everything, but dammit, it is important to me. I need visual aids to help me imagine the action, and when those aids look like half-assed comic art from the 90s, well... that's not good.)

Anyway, the point is this: I sold my "non-core" D&D 4E books not long after we stopped playing last year. Today I sold the rest of them.

But hey, the good news is that RuneQuest II is pretty damned good.

Gamma Gamma Hey

I've seen a good deal of buzz around Wizards of the Coast's upcoming D&D "red box", which apparently attempts to simplify 4e for new players and will follow a release strategy similar to that used by TSR with the Mentzer-penned version of basic D&D.

This October, Wizards of the Coast is releasing a "D&D Genre Setting" boxed set for Gamma World, using the 4e system. Oh, and there will be booster packs of randomized Mutation and Tech cards.

Let the wailing and gnashing of teeth begin!

But hey, it's nice to see the boxed set making its long-delayed comeback, right? And between these boxed sets and the impending release of Dark Sun, it sure looks like WotC is trying hard to win over fans of the TSR era.

(Honestly, I'm not sure what to make of this announcement. On the one hand, if you were ever going to make a game with randomized player abilities on cards, Gamma World would be the one with which to do it. I will admit it appeals to my love of randomness. On the other hand, I have never been a fan of "booster packs". I also wonder how, and if, this card-based character generation would integrate with the D&D Insider online tools.)

New School Sandbox

Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition's default feel of over-the-top magical superbadasses hitting monsters in the face with big glowing things isn't necessarily my preferred style of fantasy - I tend to go for the mucky stuff like Warhammer Fantasy, A Song of Ice and Fire or Dragon Warriors - but lately I have been finding myself getting into it again. And by "getting into it" I mean doing something more than playing it every week, which is what I have been doing for about a year now.

I find myself thinking about running 4e again a lot lately. I mean, I actually took a test to see if I could qualify as a RPGA "Herald" Dungeon Master yesterday afternoon. Now, I didn't pass (yet), and I was mostly doing it in the hopes of being able to grab the RPGA-exclusive revamp of The Village of Hommlet, but the effort is there.

One thing I was thinking about was that the encounter-design structure of 4e makes it hard to do a traditional, Wilderlands-style "sandbox" (or "hexcrawl") campaign. You know, one where the characters are plunked into a detailed area with lots of site-based adventures from which they can pick and choose. On the surface, it seems like D&D 4e makes that difficult, since encounters are constructed specifically for your characters, based on experience level. But it's always been possible in sandbox play for players to wander into things way above (or below) their characters' ability to handle. I mean, yes, you're going to get your butts kicked if you decide to take on an Exarch of Orcus at 5th level. How is that any different from the way D&D worked in the past? You take your risks.

Now, another stumbling block is the absence of any sandbox-style setting supplements or adventures for 4e. (There are rumors that Wizards' upcoming Revenge of the Giants super-module is going to be site-based, but that was supposed to be a boxed set, too, and that's looking less and less likely as time goes by.) But if you take a look at the Dungeon Delve hardcover, you've got tons of mini-adventure sites for a variety of different levels. Just lay a hex grid over a map of the Nentir Vale and place the delves where you want them. Combine your new sandbox Vale map with the published modules, the DMG, and Dungeon PDF magazines, and there's a whole mess of trouble waiting for your wandering PCs.

Yeah, I want to give this a try.

Sword & 4thery

I've been thinking about sword & sorcery again lately, having recently purchased the RPG.net darling Barbarians of Lemuria from Lulu and the decidedly nasty new comic Viking from my local shop (which doesn't have any sorcery, but gets me in the S&S mood anyway). This, in turn, got me thinking about injecting more of the genre's flavor into the game of high-magic asskickery known as D&D 4th edition.

Soon I was reacquainting myself with Bob Bledsaw's Wilderlands of High Fantasy setting, which, despite the name, is more of a S&S-flavored pulp fantasy mashup than "high fantasy" in tone. I am a proud owner of all of Necromancer Games' d20-based Wilderlands material. Though I don't plan on running D&D 3rd edition ever again, I will probably hang on to those books (and especially the Wilderlands boxed set) until I keel over.

Anyway, I was flipping through the Player's Guide to the Wilderlands the other day with an eye towards using it with a system other than 3rd edition, and I actually think it'd be easy to use 4th edition for it without eliminating any of 4e's core elements, since the Wilderlands setting is chock-full of weird D&Disms in the first place (having been designed for that game, after all).

The 4e classes, really, fit just fine. Sure, having a bunch of friendly spellcasters running around with the fighter-types isn't very S&S at all, but as I said, I think the Wilderlands are more about putting a Frazetta veneer over D&D than anything else. If you wanted to make things more true to the genre, you'd probably want to dump a few of the newer, crazier classes - like the swordmage or artificer - but if you can have a crashed Soviet MiG in the mountains, I guess you can have a guy who shoots acid out of his sword.

Even "non-traditional" 4e races like tieflings and dragonborn are a surprisingly easy fit. The existing Wilderlands history already includes references to "Orichalan dragon-lords". Dragonborn are easily recast as a former servitor race of the Orichalans, or maybe even as degenerate descendants of the dragon-lords themselves.

Likewise, the Wilderlands already include an entire region to the south controlled by infernal powers and a shadowy race called the "demonborn". Using the 4e stats for tieflings, you have an easy stand-in for the demonborn, who are pretty much overpowered as written in the Wilderlands Player's Guide anyway. Or you could just use tieflings as-is and tie their backstory in with the demonborn.

You would need to write up a new Amazon race for 4e, though. Making a race that doesn't use much armor is tricky in any system, but at least there's already the beastmaster ranger build, so it'd be easy to have the archetypal Frazetta spearwoman, complete with smilodon friend.

I have a feeling that adapting the Wilderlands gods would be as simple as reassigning the various Channel Divinity feats from the 4e deity to Thor or Armadad Bog or what have you. There are already plenty of them between the 4e PHB and the Forgotten Realms Player's Guide, with more coming in Divine Power.

It... could... work!

A Revolutionary New Approach

I don't really buy modules for D&D anymore, but this kind of paradigm shift in product diversification bodes well for the future of the hobby. Kudos to Goodman Games!

It's oddly heartwarming to see the skank-riffic art of Clyde Caldwell make its triumphant return to D&D.

Seriously, though, I appreciate Joseph Goodman's willingness to poke fun at his own products, and I like the attitude of Goodman Games a lot. Their Dungeon Denizens book for 4e has been getting a lot of use in our campaign, and I'm looking forward to flipping through their new print magazine, Level Up.

I Want My Monkey-Man

The cover of D&D 4th edition's latest hardcover, Player's Handbook 2, says it introduces "primal heroes", and yet there is no sasquatch player race detailed within.

There is also no writeup for the yeti. The yeren does not get the player race treatment. Entries for almas, yowie, and orang-pendek are likewise absent.

This was Wizards of the Coast's big chance to introduce bigfoot adventurers into the game, and they blew it. "Primal heroes" my ass - we got rules for wolfmen, catmen, rockmen, angelmen, orcmen, and freakin' gnomes, but no gigantopithecines?! Preposterous!

Obviously, it's now up to me to provide D&D players and DMs with the character race for which they've been clamoring... eventually. Or, y'know, not.

Magic Items Are Dumb

The biggest thing that bothers me about D&D - any edition - is the prevalence of magic items. They're bland, they're too common, they don't feel magical... anybody who's been playing the game for a while has heard these criticisms. In fact, they've probably voiced them at one point or another.

Magic items served as a way to mechanically differentiate your character in early editions of the game, when one 5th level fighter was much the same as another. Dragon magazine would publish multiple articles decrying "Monty Haul" DMs that handed out magic items like candy corn on Halloween. Yet every NPC in the published modules and campaign settings was bristling with the things.

The "game balance"-focused design 3rd edition made things even worse by hardwiring magic items into its expectations for characters of a certain level, so that if for some reason you didn't have the "expected" items by the time you hit a certain level, you were going to get creamed by the encounters that had been designed for you.

I like 4th edition plenty, but where it really dropped the ball was on magic items. Early previews and hype coming out of Wizards of the Coast promised that the days of carrying around six different magic swords were over, but really, all the game did was make it more obvious how many points of bonuses you were supposed to have by the time you hit a certain level. Also, the game made it even easier for characters to create their own magic items. This is sort of good, because it means that you're no longer just hoping the DM gives you the "right" items - you can just make them yourself. This is also sort of dumb, because the real solution would have been to just make the characters competent enough that they wouldn't need piles of magic items.

I currently play a wizard in a weekly 4th edition game, and I guess it's neat that our characters can pretty much get whatever they need when we need it, but it seems really flavorless and boring to just say "my wizard spends 3000 gp and makes a sword +2" or whatever. I understand that the 4th edition designers were just trying to make it easier for players and DMs to do what they had already been doing for years, but really, I think the "D&D adventurers are magic item Christmas trees" trope is one that should have ended up in the junk heap along with "fire and forget" spellcasting. I can get behind the idea of a character with a magic sword, or magic boots, or a magic shield. I'm less interested in a character that has all three.

What A Thoul Believes

As promised/threatened, the D&D 4th edition stats for your basic thoul:

THOUL

Thouls resemble bloated hobgoblins, though there is a distinct trollish character to their stooped posture and scowling faces. Their lumpy skin is a deathly pale green, and their fingers are tipped with dirty claws similar to a ghoul's.

Thouls are often found alongside their more disciplined hobgoblin brethren. The mixture of harsh training and torture at the hands of the hobgoblins, combined with the influence of their own trollish and ghoulish heritage, leaves thouls bestial and merciless.

Thoul Level 5 Soldier
Medium natural humanoid XP 200
Initiative +6 Senses Perception +6; darkvision
HP 68; Bloodied 34
Regeneration 5 (if the thoul takes acid or fire damage, regeneration does not function until the end of its next turn)
AC 21; Fortitude 20, Reflex 17, Will 16
Speed 8

Battleaxe (standard; at-will) * Weapon
+12 vs AC; 1d10 + 4 damage

Ghoulish Claws (standard; at-will)
+12 vs AC; 1d6 + 4 damage
and the target is immobilized (save ends).

Staggering Blow (standard; encounter)
+12 vs AC; 3d8 + 4 damage
Target must be immobilized, stunned, or unconscious. If successful, target is stunned.

Alignment Evil Languages Common, goblin
Skills Athletics +11, endurance +11
Str 18 (+6) Dex 15 (+4) Wis 15 (+4)
Con 20 (+7) Int 8 (+1) Cha 12 (+3)
Equipment Scale armor, battleaxe

THOUL TACTICS
A thoul takes advantage of its speed to paralyze vulnerable targets with its ghoulish claws. Once a victim is immobilized, the thoul tries to finish it off with a staggering blow.

THOUL LORE
A character knows the following information with a successful Nature check.

DC 15: Thouls are magical crossbreeds of ghouls, hobgoblins, and trolls that possess the ability to regenerate and cause paralysis.

DC 20: Thouls are not undead, and reproduce naturally. They are often found alongside (and mistreated by) their hobgoblin kin.

DC 25: Thouls were created by twisted arcane experiments centuries ago by parties unknown.

I used the DDI Monster Builder for figuring out the basic math, and it's really little more than a modified ghoul, but I think it came out okay for my first try at 4th edition monster design. The Rules Cyclopedia mentions that "there can be thoul spellcasters", so perhaps I'll try one of those next.

World Of Thoul

Another thing D&D 4th edition needs: thouls.

Thouls: half-troll, half-hobgoblin, half-ghoul. Yes, that is three halves. Thouls don't care about fractions. You wouldn't either, if you looked like a hobgoblin, regenerated like a troll, and paralyzed people like a ghoul.

The story goes that the thoul got its start with a typographical error in "Temple of the Frog", a mini-module contained in the original D&D supplement, Blackmoor. Apparently it was supposed to say "ghoul", but the T is right there next to the G, and just like that, the thoul was born.

The thoul got an official entry in the Moldvay-penned Basic Rules in 1981, and popped up again in Mentzer's 1983 "red box" set and 1991's Rules Cyclopedia hardcover. Thouls graduated to AD&D 2nd edition in the Monstrous Compendium: Mystara Appendix, and most recently showed up in the third-party D&D 3.5 accessory Dave Arneson's Blackmoor.

Anyway, as far as I can tell, the poor thoul has never gotten much love in terms of detail. Gygax never wrote about them, to my knowledge, so we'll never know if their hide is deep russet or burnt umber, or if they prefer tunics of dirty brown or mustard, or how many thouls in a given settlement will be leaders with an extra hit die, or whatever. All we know is that they're a "magical crossbreed" (so I guess they weren't born from a typical troll-hobgoblin-ghoul menage a trois), they're not undead, they "reproduce normally", and that they usually hang out with hobgoblins. (Incidentally, another old favorite of mine, the carnivorous ape, also was usually found with hobgoblins, and also has mysteriously disappeared. Clearly, hanging out with hobgoblins is hazardous.)

Anyway, that's the thoul: 150% monster, 150% awesome. So look out, skanky Clyde Caldwell princess lady. Thouls can paralyze people, they reproduce normally, and they're a-comin' for you.

Now I just need to get to work on statting these guys up.

(Apologies to Scott over at World of Thool for the pun.)

What D&D Does

As much as I often feel like D&D isn't suitable for modelling any kind of fantasy other than itself, I'm starting to move beyond complaining about it. In fact, I'm starting to think that trying to drag D&D too far from its roots in "dungeon-crawling/treasure-grabbing" gaming is probably a mistake.

(Yes, I am aware that there are a lot of people who play entire sessions of high-intrigue, character-driven D&D with nary a single instance of monster-killing or stuff-taking. I think that's admirable, but I don't really think that's what the system was designed for.)

AD&D 2nd edition's greatest strength was in its deeply detailed and unique settings. Unfortunately, the system operating all these settings was a slightly tweaked version of Gygax's convention-focused 1st edition of AD&D. The system was built for "Fantasy Fucking Vietnam"-style gaming, which is fine until you try to use it for psychic dominatrix cage fighters struggling against corrupt life-sucking sorcerers on a desert planet. The ideas were awesome, but the system just couldn't take the strain of trying to be all types of fantasy to all people.

The endless options available for 3rd edition, especially when taking third-party material into account, made it technically possible to tinker with the system pretty heavily to match the feel you wanted. Still, doing so was often kludgy. 3rd edition gave you the transparency and the tools to twist D&D into nearly any shape, but doing it felt like banging a square peg into a round hole.

4th edition, as I've discussed before, really focused its design on kicking ass and taking... well, stuff. The honesty of this iteration of the game has really opened my eyes to the potential strengths of D&D's own idiosyncratic take on fantasy. After all, if I want something grittier, more folkloric, or more story-oriented, there are a number of other RPGs I can pick up and play (well, providing I can find players or game masters, but that's another story).

I wonder if this is part of the reason that some people have gotten miffed about D&D's newly narrowed focus. I think that for a lot of people, D&D is the only RPG they'll consider playing, so when they see that it's difficult to make 4th edition do things other than magic-rich, combat-heavy delving, they feel like the designers have placed constraints on the game. I see it as the game going back to being honest about what it's meant to do.

Of course, that doesn't stop me from wanting to bolt new stuff onto 4th edition...

The Road Not Taken

I've been looking at my D&D Rules Cyclopedia again, and thinking about things that were apparently intended to be a part of the game, but that I've never done - either as a player or as a GM. So, here's a short wishlist of stuff I want to do in a fantasy game at some point:

1. Build a stronghold and attract followers

2. Explore a dungeon with a bunch of expendable hirelings

3. Become an Immortal

4. Find/fight something incongruously high-tech

Sadly, as fun as D&D 4th edition is, I doubt that they're going to be covering any of those things any time soon. (Actually, none of this stuff has really been a part of the game since 2nd edition at the latest.)

Hirelings and henchmen have been dropped because the entire combat system has been so heavily revamped since the early days that they're really not necessary, mechanically speaking. Even though I find the idea of having an entourage appealing, in practice, they'd probably just slow down 4e combat, and that would be a mistake. Still, I can't shake the image of traveling adventurers accompanied by a bunch of loyal followers, money-grubbing mercs, and/or cannon fodder.

The high-tech weirdo stuff was never a huge part of the game, popping up mostly in the bizarre module Expedition to the Barrier Peaks or in Judges Guild's Wilderlands of High Fantasy setting. Still, Barrier Peaks was fondly remembered by my older brother Chris, and his account of fighting a mind flayer in a crashed spaceship is one of my most vivid memories of early-80s "D&D story time". There's an appeal to playing a sword-and-sorcery style barbarian armed with a lasergun, I think. Call it Custom Van Fantasy.

On a game design level, I do feel that there is plenty of room for stronghold building, domain management, and even the idea of ascending to Immortal status in 4e, though. I mean, there's already a "tier" system in place, where characters progress from Heroic, to Paragon, and then to Epic. That's thematically reminiscent of the old Basic-Expert-Companion-Master-Immortal progression, and you can become a Demigod at 4e's final (Epic) tier. The Paragon tier, as written, seems focused on planar exploration, but I would be very happy if somebody would publish a supplement allowing for an endgame more in line with the original game. I'd like to think I'm not alone there.

Big F***ing Fantasy Heroes

You know, there has been a lot of talk recently about a shift in tone over the various editions of that most popular of fantasy games, Dungeons & Dragons - an "old school" vs. "new school" sort of dichotomy.

The latest iteration of D&D, 4th edition, places its emphasis squarely on tactics, action, and flashy powers. In 4th edition, your character is a highly competent professional badass even at first level, skilled at chopping down foes and/or blowing shit up. You are, to quote Brick Top from Snatch, Muhammad "I'm Hard" Brucelee. "Big Damn Heroes" has become a shorthand for describing this approach, and it's a pretty useful one.

In the original version of D&D and its AD&D descendants, you were a lot more likely to be a loser at first level. Combat could be exceedingly deadly if you weren't careful, or if you just plain rolled poorly. If you wanted to make it to second level, you hired a bunch of goons as cannon fodder, tiptoed through the dungeon in fear, and ran away a lot. The game was designed by hardcore wargamers, who more often than not had a decent grasp of historical strategy and combat tactics. Somebody on RPG.net described the feel of early D&D as "Fantasy Fucking Vietnam", and again, that's not too far from the truth in my (admittedly limited) experience.

Now, I am not here to say one approach is objectively better than the other. As fun and as popular as the new game is, there has been a pretty sizable backlash against D&D 4th edition - which, as far as the mechanics go, really codifies what I would argue has been a slow but inexorable shift in tone from survivalist dungeon crawling to technicolor epic asskickery. In fact, I'd argue that the newest edition of the game finally allows your character to do some things that a lot of people expected the game to allow in the first place - and the artwork of much of the old material would have given you the impression that it did.

(I mean, check out that shit to the left. I'm still waiting for the Complete Wizards With Frickin' Lasers supplement.)

At any rate, a lot of people have decided to go back to earlier, more familiar editions of the game, or to take a new look at old books they'd never gotten a chance to until these heady days of cheap PDFs and open gaming licenses. I think that is laudable. There are a lot of cool old games out there that deserve to be played, and while I don't think I'd ever run the original version of D&D, I have played a bit of it, and I can confirm that it really does shine in the hands of a capable DM with a lot of time set aside for rules tinkering and world building.

But you know what? I'd be even happier if people would dust off other fantasy RPGs of yesterday and give them some new shine. So, coming up: a review of a new re-release of an old game that I feel really deserved it.