The Grand Campaign, Dungeon Master Gear, Fourth Edition D&D, and Other Reactions From the Comment Section

I’m ready for another trip into the comment section.

The Grand Campaign

My post on the grand campaign prompted a couple of commenters to tell of their long-running grand campaigns. Michael “Chgowiz” Shorten’s game has run more than 10 years. Rick Stump’s Seaward campaign has run 38 years and currently hosts 24 player characters and many more henchmen and hirelings. “With every player running multiple PCs and multiple adventures going on concurrently yes—strict time keeping is essential!” Rick has blogged about Seaward since 2013. Michael and Rick’s message: Passionate game masters still run grand campaigns. You can too.

Gary Gygax made the days characters needed to naturally heal seem like a key reason for a campaign calendar. Characters would spend days between adventures slowly recuperating. But Dan makes an good point, “Every game I’ve played in or run, there has been at least one PC with access to healing magic, so in between adventures he or she would just memorize as many healing spells as possible and rapidly bring the whole party to full or nearly-full hit points.

I’ve never seen a character sidelined for days of natural healing either. I suspect natural healing played a bigger part in Greyhawk for three reasons:

  • Few players chose to play clerics.
  • With no extra spells for high wisdom, and no spells until second level, the original clerics gained less healing magic.
  • Characters who adventured together also competed as rivals for the best treasure. In early D&D, characters raided dungeons for loot and players kept score in gold pieces. Outside of the dungeon, clerics might not heal rivals, and they certainly would not heal anyone who didn’t first make a generous donation to the church.

To gain the pace of a grand campaign where real time passes in pace with campaign time and an adventurer’s career can span years, Simon N. runs fifth edition with a house rule where a long rest takes a week.

Dungeon Master Tools

Chris asks, “Have you looked at ArcKnight for their spell effects? My only complaint there is they don’t have a way to pop them out so you have to cut them.

ArcKnight sells flat-plastic, spell effect templates. When I first saw these templates, the cones didn’t match the proportions set by fifth-edition rules. Now the templates fit the spell descriptions. I especially like the templates for ongoing effects like Cloudkill and Ice Storm, because their art adds scenery to the battle map. The templates come in exhaustive—but pricey—sets for clerics, wizards, and druids. I feel no need for line templates, or separate templates for, say, every 20-foot-radius effect. I would buy a less-expensive generic set with the common circles, cones, and squares.

ArcKnight sells 1-inch grids marked on transparent sheets. (Sorry, Sly Flourish.) This product overlays a grid on an unmarked map.

In Some New Favorite Dungeon Masters’ Tools, I wrote about my attempt to shape conical spell templates from wire. My templates proved usable, but too flexible. Matthew Lynn offered some advice for shaping templates that I’m ready to try. From a hobby shop, he purchased a brass rod about as thick as a coat hanger. Then he shaped it with bending plyers and connected the ends with heat shrink tubing.

The Joy of Figuring Things Out

In a post on figuring things out, I suggested that fourth edition’s designers emphasized character skill over player skill. Tom challenged my statement. “I’m confused about what, exactly, in the core 4E books (a mechanic or piece of advice) emphasizes character skill over player skill that isn’t already present in third edition or earlier.

To be fair, nothing in 4E blocks a style focused on player skill. As Tom noted, the section on puzzles in the fourth edition Dungeon Master’s Guide explained how to challenge players. Still, the edition’s emphasis on skill challenges and set-piece combats leans on character skill. We know the designers wanted this emphasis because their author guidelines for Dungeon told authors to favor tests of character skill and to avoid challenges aimed toward players.

In response to the same post, The Grymlorde™ offered a good perspective on puzzles. “I like to think of puzzles more like doorways to secret levels, side-quests, and Easter eggs. You can get through the adventure without having to solve the puzzles but you miss out on the best treasure, the best experience, the “truth” and so on. The worst puzzles are the ones where the adventure fails if you fail to solve the puzzle. Which means that the mandatory puzzle must be fairly easy to solve so that everyone has a good chance of finishing the adventure because some people are really good at solving puzzles (e.g. my wife) and others are terrible at it (me).” One question: If you’re married to The Grymlorde™, what do you call him at breakfast?

Linear Adventures

Even as I defended linear adventures, I praised The Howling Void by Teos Abadia for fitting many choices into the constraints of a convention time slot. In a comment, Teos gave more insight into his design. “The theme of my adventure was elemental air, and that element is all about chaos. I set to capture that swirling chaos through a multitude of options combined with foes that moved.

The downside is that there are some really fun encounters the party will never see. And, when they are having a great time, the players know they missed out on some fun. DMs certainly commented that they had to prep more rooms than they will actually run. One upside is that the DM can run this several times and still feel like every run is fresh and different.

Was it worth it? I think so. I won’t use this approach every time, but I think some adventures should work this way to keep players on their toes, to have a strong feeling of player action and choice mattering, and to break away from a linear style. Programs like AL are stronger when they include different approaches from time to time.

Lately, all the Adventurers League scenarios that I’ve played have flaunted an obvious lack of choices. Most still ranked as good-to-excellent adventures, but I have missed Teos’s flair for succeeding with different approaches.

Encouraging Role Playing

My post on encouraging players to role play, led several readers to contribute advice, so I suggest visiting that post’s comment section.

A few posters wanted to emphasize that role playing doesn’t require voice acting. A silly voice can distract from a serious character. Sometimes a character’s actions, decisions, and even silence can reveal role playing. That said, subtle depictions of character tend to get lost at the game table.

Someone with the handle 1958fury, who may also answer to Christine, commented on my tips for encouraging role playing. “I especially like this bit:

“‘Beyond this sound but conventional advice, many DMs suggested ways to pressure uncomfortable or uninterested players to role play. Don’t do that.’

“Thank you for that. I see that suggestion given a lot, and it drives me nuts. I’m shy, and I usually have to play with the same group for a while before I break out of my shell. Being put on the spot too much early on is a sure way to keep me from returning to your table.

Fourth Edition

When I wrote the story behind fourth edition, commenters like Marty from Raging Owlbear challenged my take on the business conditions at Hasbro leading to the edition. These comments made a fair request for more information.

Ryan Dancey led the D&D team through the third-edition boom and Wizards of the Coast’s first years as a Hasbro subsidiary. He wrote about Hasbro brand strategy and how it could apply to D&D. “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.

Core brands would have included Magic the Gathering, while D&D ranked as non-core.

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 and 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.

It would have been very easy for [Hasbro head of boy’s toys Brian] 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.

To players who love and understand D&D, the perspective of a corporate, D&D-outsider can seem out of touch. Such executives might only know D&D as the game that lost players in the steam tunnels under Michigan State. Perhaps some wondered if players needed to dress up to play.

Dancey‘s best-case strategy parallels the one that kicked off fifth edition, with freelancers supplementing a tiny team of staff designers, and with as many staff working on branding and licensing as on the tabletop game.

Michael Benensky wrote, “You are not coming off as a 4E hater. Generally it irks me when people tear down 4E since I think it was the best edition.

I wrote a series about the business decisions that fed fourth edition’s design and why the design failed to pay off. Then I posted it on the Internet—a place not known for measured reactions. Folks who loved 4E and those who rejected it both liked the posts’ evenhanded stance. I count that as a win.

5 thoughts on “The Grand Campaign, Dungeon Master Gear, Fourth Edition D&D, and Other Reactions From the Comment Section

  1. Michael Benensky

    I liked your followup on the 4E story. It was very informative and interesting. The references were also good reads. Even though now I play 5E exclusively. I still think 4E was simpler and better. It was much more DM friendly. That is since I believe 5E brought back some of D&D clunky bits that are considered sacred cows like Vancian magic. I am used to it now and its complexity does not bother me.

    Reply
  2. Simon N

    >> Simon N. runs fifth edition with a house rule where a long rest takes a week.<<

    Just started running Swords & Wizardry (north of the 5e campaign area, same Wilderlands setting) and I plan to use 1 week for spell recovery there too! I think it will solve a lot of issues around D&D magic in the campaign setting, eg it makes a lot more sense for clerics in town to refuse to give free healing.

    Reply
    1. Simon N

      Just an update to note I quickly shelved that idea! Turns out that OD&D casters need daily recovery for balance, whereas 5e casters work great taking a week to recover spells while the Fighter takes a week to recover hp & hd.

      Reply
  3. Blake

    In “Why Fourth Edition Seemed Like the Savior Dungeons & Dragons Needed” you said:

    ” the game needed to qualify as a core game brand at Wizards of the Coast, now owned by Hasbro. D&D needed to match its best-ever year of sales in 2000″

    Yet, in this article, you quoted Dancey: “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.”

    Was D&D cut an extraordinary amount of slack, or did 3.0 actually pull down 50+ million in it’s first year? A feat that, even with inflation, the entire industry was still falling short of in 2017 at just $35 mil?

    Reply
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