Author Archives: David Hartlage

RPG Design: How a Roleplaying Game like D&D Could Make Rounds Play Better

Retreat phase

Side initiative makes running away from a fight easier. In games like original D&D with side initiative, DMs could add deadly foes to their dungeons without fearing that players would get locked in a fight they couldn’t win. The party could run and likely escape. Defeated monsters could also run and possibly escape. In modern D&D, when monsters flee, the session typically stalls on a prolonged chase where the party still kills every foe.

Even without side initiative, a modern game could capture the same benefits by adding a retreat rule that switches the game’s usual turn order to side initiative. Retreat would work like this: At the end of a round, either side can declare a retreat and act together before the other side gets their actions. This enables the same sort of coordinated retreat that side initiative allowed. A full implementation of this idea might need a rule to prevent players from declaring a retreat and instead coordinating an attack.

Dialog phase

In movies, comic books, and tales by the fire, fight scenes often pause to the villain can explain their plan, offer to rule the empire side-by-side, or to just gloat. Meanwhile, heroes explain the mistakes that will lead to the villain’s fall. Roleplaying games need a dialog phase between rounds that gives characters a way to pause the action for roleplaying talk without anyone wondering why someone would waste six seconds talking while everyone else takes swings.

Making conditions land simultaneously

In D&D and games like it, effects and conditions end at different times, often at the end of another creature’s turn. Meanwhile, I struggle to keep track of what ends when. Judging from my years of playing, I’m not alone.

Could a roleplaying game reduce the burden of tracking when conditions expire by simply grouping the ends and save-to-ends at the end of each round? Such a rule would help everyone track when a particular effect expires.

However, such a process would create a problem: If a creature imposes a condition, then its actual duration depends on how early in the round the creature acts. So, if a creature acts last and the conditions they impose expire at the end of a round, then those effects expire immediately.

If the conditions triggered during a round all take effect at the same time, then this duration problem disappears. To explain how that might work, remember that all the action in a round happens during the same six-second span—effectively simultaneously. Back in 1979, AD&D counted six seconds as simultaneous. If traded attacks came in the same segment, they hit at once, and the attackers took damage together, potentially killing both at once. AD&D segments spanned the same six seconds as fifth-edition rounds.

What if we count all the conditions triggered during a round as starting simultaneously at the beginning of the next round. Who can say when something like poison takes effect anyway? Then every effect spans the same amount of time and neatly expires or triggers a save at the end of a round. The memory demands become simpler.

More games than AD&D allowed this sort of simultaneous effect. Burning Wheel resolves every combatant’s action before applying all the results at once. Possible results include wounded, killed, unbalanced, or knocked prone. For a game like D&D, I would impose damage the moment it lands, to reduce bookkeeping. Winning initiative still gives an edge.

This feels like a big change in play, and one that not everyone can embrace. But perhaps it would play well. D&D’s designers once suspected that innovations like cyclic initiative and advantage/disadvantage might prove too big for the game, but players embraced both changes.

Making the Most of Cyclic Turn Order in Games Like D&D and Pathfinder

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My post Turns and Turn Order Are the Worst, so Why Do Roleplaying Games Make Us Spend So Much Time Deliberating Them? compared the two most common methods for setting turn order, player-driven and cyclic, and weighed their merits and flaws. This post shares suggestions for making cyclic turn orders play better.

Dungeons & Dragons and closely related games like Pathfinder and Shadowdark use cyclic initiative where a set a turn order is set at the start of a fight and combatants cycle through the same order throughout the battle.

Initiative tents

The two best methods for tracking cyclic use cards folded into tents. Such tents enable two methods with different strengths. One technique only puts numbers on the tents, the other uses names and numbers.

To use numbers only, create a set of tents numbered from 1 up. When initiative starts, everyone compares numbers and take the card the matches their place in the order. The highest takes 1, second highest 2, and so on. The DM takes cards for the monsters’ place in the order. Everyone shows their number at their spot at the table so others can see their place. The technique always uses the same numbered tents, so it skips the need to write anything. This method doesn’t work with games like Pathfinder where a Delay action can change the initiative order.
To use names and numbers, each player puts their character name on a card. When initiative starts, the players roll and write their scores on their card. Someone collects the cards, and lines them up in initiative order where everyone can see. I drape these cards on my DM screen, but this technique also lets someone other than the game master track initiative. I delegate sorting the cards to a player.

These tracking methods make the initiative order visible to everyone. When players can see the tents and initiative order, they can see when their turn is coming and plan their actions. This speeds play. Plus, the visible initiative invites players to remind less-attentive people of their turns. It prevents GMs from accidentally skipping someone’s turn.

Pre-rolling initiative

Combat runs better when exploration or interaction flips immediately to attack rolls without the minutes of bookkeeping required to set an initiative order. To avoid postponing the action, try rolling initiative in advance, either at the end of the last fight or at the start of a session. Pre-rolling works best with names and numbers on initiative tents.

At the start of the session, while everyone unpacks their dice and chats, I typically have players pre-roll initiative for a few fights. These initiative rolls build anticipation for the session to come and fit easily in the pregame chatter. Players write their scores on initiative tents. Before the next fight starts, I delegate the task of sorting the tents. If a player wants to use Alert, the person sorting organizes the swap.

Delay adds flexibility and complexity

Unlike conferring with allies to arrange when everyone takes a turn, Ready and Delay feel like battle strategies characters might take in a split second of mayhem.

Roleplaying games with combat rules need something like the Ready action to cope with the way one creature’s turn freezes time for every other creature. Strangely, many games omit such a rule and either rely on game masters to improvise one or on players to never abuse total cover by not giving foes a sporting chance to shoot back.

Fourth edition D&D and Pathfinder also include a Delay action. In a way, this action gives players a more powerful way to tinker with the turn order than games like Draw Steel and Daggerheart, because unlike those games where the game master can intrude between two characters’ turns, Delay allows characters to coordinate actions without monsters getting turns in between. Delay also brings a price, because characters who delay fall back in initiative and keep the later place. Such tradeoffs make interesting tactical choices.

The fifth edition design team opted for a simpler game when they dropped the Delay action. The game plays fine without it, but players lose flexibility to change the turn order in a way that seems natural.

Although Delaying seems simple, it requires intricate rules. In D&D, many effects trigger at the start or end of a creature’s turn, so fourth edition needed rules summarized by this text: “You can’t Delay to avoid negative consequences that would happen on your turn or to extend beneficial effects that would end on your turn.” The fifth edition designers opted to skip all that baggage.

For an easy house rule, allow players to delay at the start of initiative before their character acts. This adds no rules complications while still creating tactical options. Delaying at the start of combat might allow the rogue to flank after the fighter moves adjacent to a foe and sets up a sneak attack.

For the players who enjoy the tactical intricacies brought by the full Delay action, groups can import the delay rules from fourth edition D&D. Here are the rules the fifth edition designers wished to avoid.

Delay

By choosing to delay, you take no action and then act normally on whatever initiative count you decide to act. When you delay, you voluntarily reduce your own initiative result for the rest of the combat. When your new, lower initiative count comes up later in the same round, you can act normally. You can specify this new initiative result or just wait until sometime later in the round and act then, thus fixing your new initiative count at that point.

You never get back the time you spend waiting to see what’s going to happen. You also can’t interrupt anyone else’s action (as you can with a readied action).

Your initiative result becomes the count on which you took the delayed action. If you come to your next action and have not yet performed an action, you don’t get to take a delayed action (though you can delay again).

If you take a delayed action in the next round, before your regular turn comes up, your initiative count rises to that new point in the order of battle, and you do not get your regular action that round.

When you Delay, any persistent damage or other negative effects that normally occur at the start or end of your turn occur immediately when you use the Delay action. Any beneficial effects that would end at any point during your turn also end. You can’t Delay to avoid negative consequences that would happen on your turn or to extend beneficial effects that would end on your turn.

Making the Best of Roleplaying Games Like Draw Steel and Daggerheart With Player-Driven Turn Orders

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The post Turns and Turn Order Are the Worst, so Why Do Roleplaying Games Make Us Spend So Much Time Deliberating Them? compared the two most common methods for setting turn order, player-driven and cyclic, and weighed their merits and flaws. This post shares suggestions for making player-driven turn orders play better.

Daggerheart and Draw Steel both feature advice for managing their particular versions of player-driven turn orders.

In Draw Steel, players decide which of their characters goes next. The game master chooses a monster to take a turn after each player’s turn. The rule book suggests, “To help track when creatures have already acted in the current round, each creature can have a coin, token or card they flip over on the table, or some kind of flag they set on their virtual tabletop token, once they’ve taken a turn.” (I like how Draw Steel refers to players at the table as creatures.)

This system helps, but players often forget to flip their cards. You want to see everyone’s turn status at a glance, but the scattered cards require a survey of the entire table. Also, this method does nothing to help GMs track which of their creatures have gone. As an improvement, Teos “Alphastream” Abadía created a GM’s screen display with cards representing each combatant. As players and monsters go, he flips down their card. “Because players will often look at the Director (GM), they see the state of battle. This worked well in play. It helped all of us have a better grasp of who was left and decide who should go.”

Tom Christy at d20Play runs games using a virtual tabletop where players can enter their initiative numbers. The VTT’s initiative tracker works with numbers, so numbers substitute for cards. He has players planning their turns enter an initiative of 0 to show that they’re unready to act. When they become ready to go, they enter 1. When they want to go immediately, they enter 2. He turns off the VTT’s automatic initiative sorting and arranges the order himself, dragging high numbers to the top to signal a turn, and then sliding creatures who act down into the next round. Tom explains his method to me in this video.

Daggerheart takes player-driven turn order further by letting players choose to allow one PC to take multiple turns in a row. For groups that prefer “structured player turns,” Daggerheart suggests players use tokens to represent the number of turns they can take, limiting everyone to three turns until everyone gets three.

Even if players choose not to limit turns this way, having a visual count of the number of turns each player takes helps show who needs spotlight time. Some game masters recommend that instead of counting down using tokens, gamers try counting up by taking tokens. Put a supply of turn tokens in the middle of the table. When players take a turn, they take a token from this pool and line it up at their place at the table so the other players can see how much time everyone has spent in the spotlight.

With player-driven turns, the biggest delays come from the moments when no one sees a reason to jump ahead of the other players. For any game with a player-driven turn order, choose a default order based on seating around the table. If no one sees an opportunity to go, just go around the table to the next person due a turn. A default turn sequence limits discussion and keeps things simple for new players and players who just want to take orderly turns. This avoids the situation where everyone tries to politely defer to the other players.

Turns and Turn Order Are the Worst, so Why Do Roleplaying Games Make Us Spend So Much Time Deliberating Them?

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What rates as the most exciting phrase spoken in a Dungeons & Dragons game? “Roll for initiative.” What rates as the most unwelcome task? After those three words, the minutes of bookkeeping required to set the initiative order. Instead of riding the excitement of an attack, the chore drains the energy from the game.

Rather than seeking ways to minimize this delay, the 2024 D&D design team extended it. Just about every 2024 game includes a character with the Alert feat, which postpones the start of each fight with another minute of talk about who wants to swap initiative. In a wild west shootout, Black Bart reaches for his revolver, his gang raises weapons, and then the heroes take a time out to discuss who should have the quickest draw today.

To avoid stalling games just as a fight begins, some DMs have players roll initiative for the next encounter at the end of each encounter, but the Alert feat hampers this trick.

To be fair, some gamers do enjoy wringing every advantage from initiative order, but most players just want the action to start. Often, the decision of who goes next hardly matters. That can prolong the discussion as everyone politely offers the initiative to anyone else.

The trouble with talking about who goes next

The Alert feat highlights two problems with encouraging discussion about who goes next.

The extra deliberation slows play when the game should give a sense of fast action.
Talking about who goes next distracts from the game world to spotlight turn order—one of the most awkward abstractions in any RPG.

Aside from the effects of injury and the notion that everyone easily rests while spending eight hours sleeping on cold stone in a murder hole, turns rate as most unrealistic thing in D&D. The weirdness goes way deeper than how the game stops time for a discussion of who has the fastest draw today.

Turns knot time in ridiculous ways

In six seconds of actual fighting, everyone acts at the same time. But in a D&D round, turns serve as a simple but unrealistic way to make sense of six seconds. The compromise knots time in ridiculous ways. The last creature to take a turn in a round ostensibly acts in the same six seconds as the first, but typically many creatures have moved. With fifth edition’s six-second rounds, one character can end their six-second turn next to a character about to start their turn and therefore six seconds in the past. If they pass a relay baton, the baton jumps six seconds back in time. If enough characters share the same six seconds running with the baton, the object outraces a jet. Want to get the most from a Wand of Magic Missiles? Just pass it between party members and let everyone fire during the same round. Turn a Horn of Blasting into a six-second barrage!

Games like early versions of D&D, Shadowdark, and Shadow of the Weird Wizard all lack a Ready action. This simplicity exposes another awkward problem with turns: Combatants normally stay frozen in time until their turn arrives. D&D’s Blink spell only brings an advantage because foes are usually not ready to interrupt the blinker’s turn. In a chase, the distance between creatures yo-yos by 60-some feet as everyone trades turns.

Players most often exploit this unreal situation by only emerging from total cover during their turns. Imagine the party must cross a field scattered with boulders to reach a wall protected by 100 archers. In a game without a Ready action, the party can move out in plain sight, and as long as everyone ends their turn in total cover behind a boulder, then they can cross without the archers ever getting a shot. Sure, game masters can improvise a way to bring common sense, but the rules as written still fail.

Adding complexity to simulate simultaneous turns

When fourth edition D&D introduced the Ready action, D&D gained a formal rule that closed this loophole. Ready actions made turns knottier and the game more complicated, but they proved essential.

To add some of sense of turns being simultaneous, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons had people declare their actions at the start of a turn, move first, and then attack. Based on this big picture, DMs might rule that characters couldn’t reuse the same magic item during a turn, and also rule that the archers could attack when the party broke cover. But declaring actions proved cumbersome and often the changing battlefield invalidated the players’ intentions. Third edition lead designer Jonathan Tweet explains, “Eventually what you ended up doing is you had to tell the DM what you were doing every round twice.” Many tables ignored the process. Nonetheless, on the 2014 Dungeon Master’s Guide presents declaring actions as an optional initiative variant (p.270).

Who goes next

For the awkward necessity of turns to function, games need rules about who goes first and who goes next. D&D started simple. The group with the highest roll on a d6 went first. But soon these rules became complicated. First to account for things like weapon size in the name of realism, and in recent years, to emphasize tactical options or storytelling.

Modern games typically decide who goes next using one of two broad approaches:

Player-driven turn order. Games like Draw Steel, Daggerheart, and even original D&D let players decide who among the party goes next, so players can decide on the strongest order of actions. This encourages teamwork.
Cyclic turn order. Games like fifth edition D&D and Shadowdark set a turn order, and then cycle through the same order throughout the battle. This approach avoids weighing combat with ongoing decisions about who goes next, so combat moves quicker.

Side initiative

The idea of allowing players to decide the order PCs take action dates to original D&D.

Original D&D used side initiative where each group of allies took their turns together. While the player’s side has initiative, they decided how to order their character’s turns. Side initiative features the simplicity of nothing to track except who has already acted. And since players set the order for their side, they could orchestrate action combinations.

Games like Shadow of the Weird Wizard and the Cosmere Roleplaying Game use a variant of side initiative where the monsters always go first, but where players can spend one of their actions to go before the monsters. This skips an initiative roll and gives players control over when they act. The method starts each round with an engaging decision over whether to go first or to hold back and do more.

The best feature of side initiative is subtle. Side initiative (with help from early D&D’s lack of opportunity attacks) made running away from a fight much easier. When a side started their turn, they gained a chance to plan and execute an orderly retreat without any enemies interfering until everyone acted. Unlike modern D&D, where DMs typically serve fights contrived to ensure players win, early D&D’s random monsters often landed groups in deadly fights where running was the winning strategy.

To recapture some of the original game’s speed and simplicity, the fifth edition design team considered side initiative, but especially at low levels, the side that acted first gained a deadly advantage. Low level characters lack enough hit points to survive an entire round of enemy attacks. At higher levels, side initiative can turn still battles into one-sided romps when powerful spells shut down foes and attack combinations pile damage. Sure, an occasional batch of high initiative rolls can bring the same swings, but not consistently. (Side initiative appears as a variant on page 270 of the 2014 DMG.)

Players decide who goes next

Modern games with player-driven initiative typically give game masters rules for when the monsters can intrude on the turn order. So, in Daggerheart, the monsters take a turn after a player rolls with Fear. In Draw Steel, a monster goes after each player. Either way, these methods improve on side initiative by avoiding one-sided victories won because an entire side took their turns before their foes made a single action.

When players choose when characters take turns, they can make teamwork into a fun advantage where PCs get to flaunt their strengths. The caster can fireball before any allies rush into melee. The tank can rush to block charging monsters and give the rogue an opening to sneak attack. The healer can deliver a cure just in time to keep everyone fighting.

Player-driven turn orders can also foster the sort of dramatic moments common in cinema. Countless action movies set up a situation where the villain prepares a killing blow, and then gets shot when hero’s unseen ally suddenly appears. The situation counts as cliché, but we love it anyway. Systems where players can jump into initiative at any moment promote similar dramatic reversals.

Cinematic, player-driven turn order

Daggerheart takes player-driven turn order further by letting players choose to allow one PC to take multiple turns in a row. This enables the sort of sequencing common in movie battles where multiple combatants like the Avengers face off with multiple foes. The editing highlights one hero trading blows with an enemy, showing the upward beats that make for heroic moments and building tension whenever evil gains an edge (when the player rolls with Fear and the villain acts). Scenes like this rarely cut from character to character with each attack; they keep focus on a single hero until a dramatic moment prompts a cut away.

Of course, Daggerheart still plays as a game, so the optimal strategy in a fight may be to let your side’s best attacker take all the turns and make all the attacks while everyone else stands around and poses. I’ve seen movie fights like that too.

When I played fights in Daggerheart, my characters would sometimes chase foes to the edges of the map, finish them, and wind up too far away from the rest of the fight for me to feel good about asking someone to give up attacks just so I could move back. Unlike in a movie, nothing happens off camera.

Analyzing turn orders to create a narrative feels more like the judgments filmmakers make in an editing bay than like the split-second choices fighters make in combat. Perhaps the cinematic version of player-driven initiative in Daggerheart works best for players performing for an audience rather than for players making their own thrills in the moment at the table.

Weighing the merits of player-driver turn orders

How much does player-driven turn order multiply the flaws of the Alert feat by delaying the real fun of taking action? How much does it add teamwork and drama?

Player-driven turn orders add the most friction when no one sees a particular reason to jump ahead of one of their friends. Players don’t care who goes, so they act like the overly polite Goofy Gophers. “After you. No. I insist. After you.”

Player-driven turn orders play best when they enable the sort of choices a character might make in a battle: Delaying for a split second so an ally can open an advantage. Readying an attack for when a foe leaves cover.

Some of my favorite D&D sessions came when I competed in the fourth edition D&D Championship tournaments. The rules for changing turn orders offered two options: Delay and Ready. My teammates and I used those options to order turns in our favor and loved the tactical options. Besides the urgency of limited time, two factors helped us orchestrate actions without wasting time:

D&D’s cyclic initiative made changing the turn order an option rather than a constant necessity.
Before the tournaments, we practiced with the characters, so we knew the other PCs well enough to share similar opinions on who should act.

Recent games like Draw Steel and Daggerheart favor the flexibility of player-driven turn orders, but fourth edition’s take on cyclic initiative brings a better mix of play speed with decisions close to the ones combatants might make in a fight. The 13th Age roleplaying game by Jonathan Tweet and fourth edition designer Rob Heinsoo uses the fourth edition system. This game’s latest edition declares, “Jonathan introduced cyclic initiative in F20 gaming 25 years ago and we are never going back.” I understand why.

5 Tropes that Make Exciting Stories But Ruin D&D Games

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Stories like those in movies and books thrive on setbacks. Everyone relishes a tale where disaster complicates the heroes’ predicament, leaving them facing seemingly impossible odds. Perhaps a trusted ally betrays the heroes or they become trapped and imprisoned.

Gamers love when sessions deliver similar twists, so dungeon masters feel tempted to set up matching situations. What if the characters must use their wits to escape the dungeon? What if merchant who hired the party is the true villain? All dungeon masters set up similar situations at least once, and we all learn that some setbacks that make exciting fiction just make angry players.Here are five story tropes that game masters should never try to reproduce at the game table.

1. Taking the characters captive

In adventure fiction, heroes get captured regularly. So DMs dream up similar stories, and then try to force a capture despite the players’ determination to never get taken alive.

To engineer a capture, DMs need to hide an encounter’s threat to the players, block the characters’ attempts to flee, beat any signs of an unexpected rally, and so on. During all this, if the players see signs of the DM bending the odds to thwart their characters’ escape, they feel railroaded. DMs can’t plan for a capture.

D&D players will embrace threats that they understand and that choose to face. But if a dungeon master surprises the party with an unwinnable encounter, then the players will rightly see the situation as unfair and refuse to buy-in. Never surprise characters with threats they cannot either defeat or avoid.

Setting up the party for capture means setting up exactly the sort of encounter that players find unfair. (The same dynamic of using your power as a DM to ensure the players take a loss reappears through the rest of this list.)

Players will accept escape scenarios in two situations:

With new characters at the start of a campaign. In this premise, the group starts as prisoners and escapes during their first adventures. Nobody feels like they played through an unfair loss. Instead, they just play a challenging opening hand.
When the players rush into danger despite knowing that they face difficult odds, predictably get beaten in battle, and then their foes choose to capture rather than kill. Here, the capture gives the DM a chance to make the escape scenario into an alternative to a total-party kill.

2. Having someone the party trusted betray them

In fiction, a seemingly trusted ally who betrays the heroes makes a compelling third-act twist, the sort of complication that increases tension. But setting up a similar reversal in a D&D game hurts the game. In the typical setup, someone hires the party for a job that seems worthwhile, but in the end the group learns that they were duped by an evil patron. This can go two ways:

If the players start by using Insight or a spell like detect thoughts to discover the patron’s sinister motives, then the adventure ends in a scene where the group decides whether to murder the guy.
If the players assume the patron is trustworthy, then when they learn of their betrayal, they feel like dupes. Instead of enjoying the thrill of a twist, everyone just feels foolish.

Either way, the players learn to avoid future betrayals by refusing to trust anyone else they meet. This toxic dynamic makes the DM’s job harder because every potential ally seems untrustworthy and every adventure hook earns distrust.

Instead, tempt the heroes into accepting help from an ally who they know they can’t trust, but nonetheless offers something helpful.

3. Taking the characters’ gear

Players hate losing their characters’ gear. As a DM, have you ever tried to set up a perfectly reasonable situation like a social gathering or a diplomatic conference where in any plausible world the guests must surrender their weapons at the door? While the requirement makes perfect sense, in play, it leads to a fight or to frustrated characters turning away.

In D&D we call equipment treasure and reward success with it. Enough of a D&D character’s power and identity comes from their gear to make many players ready to sacrifice a character’s life before losing their equipment.

In D&D’s early days, some gamers coached DMs to deal with excess treasure by having thieves steal it as the characters slept. But despite spells like Leomund’s Secret Chest that seem designed to thwart thievery, no players enjoyed a D&D game that expected keeping a protective eye on gear. In fun games, the careful adventurers know how to keep their gear safe even if their players get careless.

In situations where the players should reasonably leave their gear behind, contrive ways for the party to smuggle it or otherwise keep it close at hand. Even if a party get taken captive according to the rules set by item 1, have their captors leave the equipment in a place the party can reach early in their escape.

4. Planning for a villain’s escape

Every DM loves a recurring villain. But to establish one, you need to introduce the villains and then somehow invalidate the players’ decision to murder them. D&D characters are so good at murder that escaping from a group of adventurers always proves nearly impossible without help from the dungeon master. And any such help will strike the players as a setup intended to deal an unfair loss to the party.

Instead, make your recurring villains into a group with multiple scoundrels. If one beats the odds and manages to escape an encounter with the party, promote him, but if he dies create another to take his place. When Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created Hydra in 1965, they turned the inevitable defeats suffered by comic book villains a threat. “Cut off one head, two more shall take its place.”

5. Having the players hunted

While filming for original Star Wars movie, Mark Hamill noticed their scene came right after the escape from the trash compactor. He said to Harrison Ford, “Shouldn’t my hair be all wet and matted?” Ford turned to him and said, “Hey, kid, it ain’t that kind of movie.”

In some roleplaying games, players expect to play cat and mouse with the heroes running scared, but D&D ain’t that kind of game. In D&D, running in fear feels like a loss. At best, an adventure where players must keep hiding and fleeing from an overwhelming threat feels like a frustrating string of losses. At worst, the characters make a hero’s stand and the adventure ends in a total-party kill. Either way, players feel like targets for the DM’s power trip.

The common thread

All these tropes share a common element: To create them at the table, the DM must contrive a way for the players to lose. To set up the twist, the characters must lose a fight or be tricked by an NPC.

Sometimes losses come naturally from play. For instance, players can lose because they made a bad choice or because they suffered a string of bad rolls. But when DMs use their power to arrange a loss, players will see the manipulation as unfair.

Players of some roleplaying games expect to lose. In Paranoia, the fun and humor comes from betrayal and a computer that does every character dirty. In Call of Cthulhu, the fun comes from a heroic struggle against insurmountable odds and an uncaring universe.

D&D ain’t that kind of game. D&D players relish overcoming obstacles and winning as a team. That doesn’t mean that DMs should set up players to win against paper tigers. Players want to feel like they overcame difficult obstacles using their own ingenuity and the power their characters’ bring. Notching a win that the DM arranged just feels empty.

So you can still include monsters that the party (probably) can’t beat just as your dungeon can include walls that the party (probably) can’t get past. The challenge becomes finding a different way past the obstacle, and that provides players the same pleasure as scoring a win in combat.

5 Situations That Tempt Every Dungeon Master to Railroad Their Players

D&D 2024 Ignored One of Fifth Edition’s Original Goals, Losing Something We All Still Want in D&D

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Before creating the 2014 version of Dungeon & Dragons, lead designer Mike Mearls set goals for the new, fifth edition. He wanted the update to play fast. “You should be able to play a complete adventure in an hour. Not a single encounter, not a character creation session, but a complete scenario that would strike any reasonable player as an adventure with a beginning, middle, and end.”

Whether fifth edition landed the 1-hour goal depends on how slight an adventure can count as complete. Designer Shawn Merwin gained a reputation for writing 1-hour “mini-adventures” or “episodes” for Adventurers League. Typically, these scenarios featured a single obstacle such as a fight. Whether or not fifth edition reached the high bar for speed of play, gamers switching from fourth edition loved how much faster the new game played. Only the original game played faster.

However, at least since Mearls left the D&D team in 2019, the game’s designers stopped emphasizing speed of play in their D&D design work.

A quick speed of play stems from countless tough choices to avoid mechanics that seem fun and only slow play a little. Starting with the release of Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything in 2020, the designers began welcoming character abilities that slowed play. For evidence, compare two similar abilities: The Bardic Inspiration feature from the 2014 Player’s Handbook and Flash of Genius from Tasha’s.

Bardic Inspiration lets a bard give a creature a Bardic Inspiration die. When the inspired player needs a boost to a D20 test, they can roll the die and “add the number rolled to the d20, potentially turning the failure into a success.” The person making the test controls when to roll the die. No discussion needed.

The design of Bardic Inspiration seems a bit awkward. Why not just let the bard interrupt with a word of encouragement when someone rolls a near miss? Because the feature’s designer considered speed of play and opted to avoid interruptions.

The artificer’s Flash of Genius feature offers a similar boost to a roll. “When you or another creature you can see within 30 feet of you makes an ability check or a saving throw, you can use your reaction to add your Intelligence modifier to the roll.” The difference seems slight, but now many rolls become a topic for discussion. Every time a player makes a roll that seems almost good enough, they share the number with the artificer and jointly consider whether the roll merits using Flash of Genius. One such interruption hardly slows play, but add a few and the wait between your turns lengthens a couple of minutes.

Now add a cleric using Tasha’s twilight domain to the turn order. While using the Twilight Sanctuary domain feature, the cleric can give creatures who end their turn within 30 feet temporary hit points equal to 1d6 plus cleric level. Now every character’s turn ends with a reminder to add temps and with an extra die roll. If the ability just skipped the roll, then it would play a little faster, but the designer ignored speed of play.

Taken alone, these class features just add minor delays, but they show a key point: Small delays that occur frequently add up to a significantly slower game. Taken alone, a d6 roll to add hit points takes a few seconds. Multiplied by every turn, it takes minutes.Although the fourth edition earned a reputation for slow play, the team tried to streamline play. For example, they noticed that characters who make multiple attacks in series tended to slow the game. Each attack started with a choice of target followed by its own to-hit and damage rolls. Instead of attacks made in series, fourth edition favored powers like Thicket of Blades where players could roll every attack at once along with one damage roll. These powers skipped saving throws too. Fast!

In a typical D&D game, no game mechanic happens more frequently than the process of making an attack, so faster attacks mean shorter waits between turns. This led the 2014 design team to make average damage the standard for monster attacks. Fewer damage rolls means a faster game. Designer Monte Cook once said, “If you can look at something that happens 20, 30, 50 times during a game session, and eliminate that or decrease it hugely, you’re going to make the game run faster, more smoothly. That idea is now a big part of my game designer toolbox.”

Clearly, the designers of D&D 2024 update ignored such considerations when they created Weapon Mastery. Now with Weapon Mastery, push starts a discussion of where foes should land, nick means choosing a second target and tallying their damage, topple adds another saving throw, and so on. Alone, none of these steps take long. Together, every turn drags a bit longer until players start pulling out their phones to pass the time between turns.

As a goal for fifth edition, Mike Mearls aimed for a game where “character complexity doesn’t spill on to the table and slow the game down. It’s OK for someone to have a complex character. It’s irritating if that character takes significantly longer to resolve typical actions.”

Some gamers defend the extra time devoted to making Weapon Mastery attacks by arguing that many spells take even more time to resolve. While many spells take time, many spellcasting turns go faster than the fighter’s. I favor wizards and spend most of my turns concentrating and rolling a single cantrip attack. Even when a wizard launches a fireball that affects an average of 3 targets, the player rolls damage as the DM rolls three saves at once. The process goes faster than a fighter who targets three foes with an extra attack and a bonus action attack. The player makes three separate attack rolls, three damage rolls, and perhaps forces a couple saves. Every step requires more discussion than, “Take 8 damage.”

The challenge of creating a fast game matches the challenge of eating healthy at the buffet. Designers face countless tempting, flavorful design ideas that just add a few seconds to an attack, no more than 30 seconds to a turn. Just one treat can’t hurt. The team behind D&D 2024 faced an extra challenge because management insisted on an update with enough new character features to entice players to replace their old books. No one sells cauliflower at a carnival.

Is the candy worth the slower game?

Checks Versus Attack Rolls: Every Aspiring RPG Designer (and Some Veterans) Should Read This

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One of the great innovations of roleplaying game design came in 1977 when Steve Perrin and his Runequest design friends realized the advantage of using the same mechanic for attacks and skill checks. One core mechanic replaced the jumble of different mechanics that D&D used to determine if an attack landed, if a lock opened, if a secret door was spotted, and so on. Core mechanics brought a simplicity and consistency that makes RPGs easier to learn and play. Now even D&D follows Runequest’s example. Attacks work almost exactly like ability checks and saving throws.

But do roleplaying games play better when attack rolls work differently from other ability or skill checks? After all, D&D characters tend to make far more attack rolls than ability checks. And unlike most attack rolls, single ability checks open doors—literally and figuratively, and steer the course of an adventure.

Some newer games break the pattern of making checks and attacks the same. In Draw Steel attack rolls and ability checks differ, mainly because checks can fail, but attacks always succeed enough to do damage. The attack roll determines the amount of damage dealt. Even in D&D, attack rolls and ability checks work a bit differently. A natural-20 attack always hits and scores a critical, but the king disregards your natural-20 Persuasion roll. He still won’t give you his crown.

Treating attack rolls and ability tests differently recognizes that the two types of checks differ in key ways.

Frequent rolls even out highs and lows

A d20 roll yields extreme numbers like 1 and 20 as frequently as middle numbers, creating unpredictable results and adding excitement. D&D swingy d20 attack rolls play well because players make far more attack rolls than other tests. The high number of attack rolls tends to even out the random swings of each roll. Characters sometimes miss, but they hit often and still contribute to the fight.

For ability checks, that d20 roll creates a different dynamic where the roll of the die weighs much more than the +5 attribute bonus of the most exceptional characters. In D&D worlds, the mighty barbarian fails to open a pickle jar, and then hands it to the pencil-necked wizard who easily opens the lid. Such outcomes feel wrong. (See Why D&D’s d20 Tests Make Experts Look Inept and How to Make the Best of It.)

Depending on your distaste for a game like D&D that adds surprises at the price of making experts look inept by routinely letting them fail easy checks, the game might play better with something like a 3d6 roll for resolving ability checks. D&D has a precedent for checks based on a bell-curve die roll. Before D&D added ability check mechanics, some gamers used this house rule: You succeed if a 3d6 roll totals less than your relevant ability score. So a PC with an ability score 11 succeeded half the time, while someone with a 17 almost always succeeded. You can quibble about aspects of this mechanic, but it made high and low scores decisive enough for these traits to show in play. A similar mechanic would never work for to-hit rolls. Characters would virtually always hit, making attack rolls perfunctory. In 2004, the third-edition Unearthed Arcana book proposed a rule variant substituting a 3d6 roll for the d20. “The bell curve variant rewards bonuses relatively more and the die roll relatively less.” A D&D-like system might find an ideal compromise by using d20 attacks and either 3d6 or 2d10 ability checks. Such a compromise would lose the elegance of a single core mechanic, but original D&D used different mechanics for everything and the game thrived, so perhaps we could adapt to two.

Rolls where nothing happens

Repeating the same attack can be fun. Even a missed attack only brings momentary disappointment; the game speeds on to another turn. In contrast, an ability check that fails may create an inconclusive result that invites another try, perhaps starting a tiresome series of attempts that go nowhere and stall the game. Many newer games try to break such patterns. “In Daggerheart, every time you roll the dice, the scene changes in some way. There is no such thing as a roll where ‘nothing happens,’ because the fiction should constantly be evolving based on the successes and failures of the characters.

“A ‘failure’ should never mean that a character simply doesn’t get what they want, especially when that would result in a moment of inaction. Every action the players take should yield an active outcome—something that changes the situation they’re in.”

D&D assumes that ability checks work using the same principles as attacks, so as with an attack, a character can keep trying the same check. For both attacks and checks, circumstances might force a character to stop trying, but otherwise players keep rolling until they get the result they want. One check just represents one attempt of what could be many, and the outcome of a roll might be that nothing happens. Roll again and hope for a 20. The process can become so tiresome that third edition invented the “take 20” rule to skip to any mathematical inevitability.

Checks that focus on intent

D&D-style games tend to treat checks and attack rolls as the indifferent physics of the game world. Imagine an omnipresent DM rolling a DC 1 dexterity check every time a creature crosses the room. (With a swingy d20 roll, that means someone like me with a -1 Dexterity modifier fails to cross 1-in-20 rooms.) Intentions, drama, and fun hardly matter. Creatures can climb half their speed, making checks every turn, until they reach the top or fall to their death.

Games like Burning Wheel break the pattern retries by making checks start with a player declaring what they intend to accomplish, and then letting a roll decisively answer whether the character succeeds at their intent. “A player shall roll once for an applicable test and shall not roll again unless conditions legitimately and drastically change.” To reach a decisive answer, the difficulty of the check depends on intent. So a test to see if a character can pick a lock becomes harder if the character wants to work quietly, and harder still if they want to finish quickly before the guards return.

This attention to intent lets a failed check result in more natural consequences than a temporary failure and “I want to take another Utilize action to try again.” Instead, something behind the door hears the tampering and opens the door. Or the guards come into view the moment the lock pops. Either way, instead of stalling at a locked door, the game races ahead. Even if the check only reveals that the character fails to open the lock, the result is decisive and the players learn the lock surpasses their skills. Instead of trying again, they must find another route. Maybe just ring the bell and bluff. The story continues.

Such decisive checks assume that the character makes their best effort to succeed under the circumstances. You can’t try picking the lock with your non-dominant hand first, so that you gain a second attempt using your dominant hand. You can’t get a second attempt by oiling the lock. Your rogue almost certainly knows more about picking locks than you; they already tried the oil.

Focusing on intent also enables one check to apply for an entire task. Burning Wheel calls this the “Let it Ride” rule. Especially with that swingy d20, a series of checks nearly guarantees a failure. The expert climber falls and the master sneak breaks wind. Letting it ride means that one roll decides whether a character reaches their intended goal unless conditions drastically change.

You might protest that a good DM can run checks this way in D&D. Exactly. That’s the brilliance of focusing on intent and letting checks give decisive results. Even though the D&D rules steer toward a different style of play, DMs can opt for a decisive approach that works better.

Degrees of success and failure

Except for critical hits and a few powers with effects that get worse “if the saving throw fails by 5 or more,” D&D tests never show degrees of success or failure. D&D started without crits and only includes them now because players love them. Few players realize that crits hurt their characters more than monsters. Monsters typically die in three rounds. If they take a crit, that makes two. PCs may take hundreds of hits and numerous crits over their career. One crit could end a long run. Fumbles used to be as common a D&D house rule as crits, but when gamers realized that the skilled warriors with multiple attacks also rolled the most natural ones, fumbles fell from favor. D&D co-creator Gary Gygax knew crits and fumbles hurt PCs more than monsters and fought to keep them out of the game.

Other games have check mechanics that do show success and failure. For example, Fate includes a range of 11 adjectives from “terrible” to “legendary” describing degrees. Many gamers love the storytelling potential of a range of potential outcomes. The challenge of such mechanics comes when game masters keep facing the task of inventing the benefits of a “superb” success and the consequences of a “poor” failure. Also, as a player who enjoys the tactical decisions of combat, I favor games where I know the potential results of my attack rolls and rarely wonder what the game master might invent.

Most RPGs with a big combat pillar tend to tabulate the possible outcomes of good and bad attack rolls. A strong attack can always deal extra damage. In the heyday of critical hits and fumbles, games included grisly tables of potential outcomes and characters took to tying weapons to their hands to avoid all the dropped swords. None of this benefited the fighters who made most of the attacks or the PCs in general, who suffered from every monsters’ limb-severing crit.

If ability checks with degrees of success and failure tax the creativity of game masters, and if crits and fumbles punish PCs more than their foes, then how can degree of success and failure work?

Daggerheart stands out for letting bad attack rolls hurt attackers, but only with mild and indirect consequences: Initiative passes to the players’ foes and the game master gains Fear points to boost monsters. The Hope and Fear points that come from good and bad combat rolls just power characters and their foes.

For most play styles, fumbles on to-hit rolls don’t work. Pathfinder 2 includes critical successes and failures for both ability checks and saves, but the game skips fumbles for attack rolls. This stands as an instance where different rules apply to different types of checks. Modern games where players can fumble attacks either tend not to feature combat or tend to have characters that make equal numbers of attack rolls.

Pathfinder tries to ease the GM’s creative load by specifying the results of critical success and failure for most saves and actions. For instance, a critical success on a save might mean that you take no damage instead of half. And a critical failure on an attempt to pick a lock means you break your tools. Nonetheless, without factoring intent into the consequences, Pathfinder has limited possibilities for outcomes. How many times will the rogue break a lockpick before they just start packing 20 extras?

Decisive checks that factor intent work better because they lead to more natural consequences and because they never stall the game with inconclusive results and a pile of broken lock picks.

Different mechanics

Draw Steel shows a state-of-the art example of attack rolls and ability checks that use different mechanics. Ability checks show decisive answers with degrees of success. Bad failures bring complications that raise tension. Attack rolls skip fumble results, but include degrees of success that replace separate damage rolls. This streamlines the attacks in a D&D-style game, and cutting perhaps 20 seconds from each of a hundred attack rolls made during a session leads to a faster pace. As for the advantages of a 3d6 bell curve versus a d20 swing, Draw Steel splits the difference with a 2d10 triangle.

Is D&D Best When Corporate Isn’t Paying Attention? The Suits Are Paying Attention Now

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D&D is best when its corporate owner isn’t paying attention. When I asked who deserved credit for that observation, it proved too widespread and too old to name a source. The D&D team started sharing the notion soon after 1985, when D&D’s co-creator Gary Gygax lost control of publisher TSR and non-gamers started managing the game. Since then, when the suits steered D&D’s creative direction, the game suffered, but when they ignored it, it thrived. Corporate attention has risen and fallen over the game’s 50-year history, leading to a cycle of highs and lows.

Many gamers fell in love with D&D with its second edition, but the release stands as a creative low. Sure, the second edition designers loved the game and fought to make the release as good as possible, but TSR’s management stifled their ability to improve on the rules. Lead designer David “Zeb” Cook recalled, “We had to convince management that [second edition] was a good idea because they’re going, ‘That’s our Core Business right there and you’re talking about rewriting it.’ Fear starts to appear in their eyes. ‘We have a whole warehouse full of product. If you do this, what’s going to happen to all that product?’”

“There were all kinds of changes that we would have made if we had been given a free hand to make them—an awful lot of what ultimately happened in the third edition,” said second-edition designer Steve Winter said. “We heard so many times, ‘Why did you keep armor classes going down instead of going up?’ People somehow thought that that idea had never occurred to us. We had tons of ideas that we would have loved to do, but we still had a fairly narrow mandate that whatever was in print should still be largely compatible with the second edition.”

A game outside of management’s scrutiny, the 1992 edition of Gamma World, benefited from the design team’s innovations. “We basically said, take all these ideas that we couldn’t do and incorporate them into Gamma World and make it as streamlined as possible,” explained Steve Winter. Gamma World featured many innovations that corporate blocked from reaching the second edition.

Ascending armor class
Skills called skills
Attribute checks
Attribute modifiers similar to those that would appear in 3rd edition
Health and Mental Defense saves that resemble 3rd edition’s Fortitude and Will saves

(See The Dungeons & Dragons Books that Secretly Previewed Each New Edition.)

Management also made the decision to remove demons and devils. “That didn’t work because, oh my goodness, they’re the best monsters ever” Designer Wolfgang Baur said, only slightly in jest. “Every hero wants to take on and defeat them.” The game steered away from anything that might alarm concerned parents. See D&D’s Biggest Controversies Ranked—1. D&D Becomes a Target of the Satanic Panic.

During D&D’s second edition era, parts of the D&D product line also gained freedom and creative energy from management’s inattention. The Planescape campaign setting makes a perfect example. The setting met widespread critical acclaim. For example, in Pyramid issue 8, Scott Haring wrote, “Normally, I start a review off slowly…forget that noise. I’ll cut to the chase—Planescape is the finest game world ever produced for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Period.” He concluded, “Planescape is a revolutionary product, a breakthrough for TSR. If you think you’ve ‘graduated’ from AD&D, that you’ve evolved past it, go back and take a look at Planescape. This is the game world that will get you playing AD&D again.”

Planescape’s lead designer, Zeb Cook, started the setting from minimal instructions summarized in Slaying the Dragon by D&D historian Ben Riggs. “Do the planes. Have a base location as a setting. And do factions.” The idea for factions came from the bestselling Vampire: The Masquerade game. “The vagueness gave [Zeb Cook] license. He could do almost anything and play anywhere in the D&D cosmos.”

Soon after the setting’s release, Cook left TSR, but follow-up products continued to gain from a lack of oversight. “Fortunately for the Planescape team, upper management was very hands-off with Planescape, even after it won the Origins Award, and we could get as weird as we wanted,” recalled designer Colin McComb. “Now that I think about it, it’s possible Creative Director Andria Hayday and David Wise (who would be promoted to the manager for the whole department) managed to shield us from the Eye of Sauron—getting us the resources we needed while keeping management from paying too much attention to us.”

Despite Planescape’s creative success, the line failed to make money for TSR. None of TSR’s products made enough money, so by 1997 the company neared bankruptcy. Wizards of the Coast (WotC) purchased TSR and saved D&D from being auctioned piecemeal by the courts. Peter Adkison, WotC’s CEO and a D&D fan, led D&D to a new high.

Adkison became deeply involved in D&D, attending third edition design meetings and earning a designer credit in the rule books. But Adkison approached the game as a fan and game designer. “Coming into 1990…I was spending so much time on D&D that I decided, along with many of my friends, to start a gaming company—Wizards of the Coast.” When the third-edition design team struggled to agree on a direction for the new edition, Adkison set one from a gamer’s perspective. “I was filled with trepidation. I was assuming responsibility for something very important to, literally, millions of fans around the world. If I made the wrong decisions, a lot of gamers would be very disappointed.” He feared disappointing gamers rather than stockholders.

Adkison set a good direction for the game, and the designers released an edition that delighted existing players and won new enthusiasts. “Fan response was immediate and overwhelmingly positive,” wrote Adkison.

The 2003 release of a 3.5 rules update brought D&D to another low. By then, Peter Adkison had left Wizards of the Coast. Most D&D players now owned third-edition books, so sales slowed. Corporate management looked for a way to boost D&D revenue. Based on his insider knowledge, game designer Monte Cook concludes that management sped the release of D&D 3.5 to just three years after third edition’s debut and that “the amount of change in the books was artificially increased beyond what was needed to force the player base to buy all new rule books.”

The update’s designers succeeded at making improvements, so when Paizo developed their Pathfinder game, they built on 3.5. Still, the sudden release hurt D&D overall. “The changes in 3.5 are so pervasive, and some of them so subtle, that any mastery people had achieved is gone. ‘Oh come on, Monte,’ one might reply, ‘the changes aren’t that bad.’ I’m not even talking about ‘good’ or ‘bad’ here. The problem is that there are just enough changes that a player has to question everything. Even if fireball didn’t really change, after you’ve had to re-learn how wall of force, flame arrow, and polymorph work, how can you be sure? Welcome to the game sessions where you’ve got to look everything up again.”

At the time, D&D players enjoyed a surging number of third-party, D&D-compatible products that filled game store shelves. The release of 3.5 instantly made those books incompatible. Game stores suffered from stocks of nearly worthless products. Most of the publishers went out of business. Everyone lost.

While the D&D team developed the game‘s fourth edition for a 2008 release, Harbro management brought big ideas for an edition could increase the game’s profitability. “Some of the people who ran WotC were really jealous of World of Warcraft’s subscription model and so a whole bunch of the things that happened at Wizards of the Coast at that time were based on trying to get people to pay money every month,” lead designer Rob Heinsoo said. Management also hoped a new edition would break ties to the Open Gaming License, stopping other publishers from profiting from D&D compatibility without paying for a license.

The millions of people playing World of Warcraft seemed to far outnumber those playing D&D. “When we made the fourth edition, one of the earliest design goals given to us by the management was that it should be more familiar to people who were coming in having played World of Warcraft and other digital games. We were supposed to be more approachable.” So the new edition focused on the elements that made the D&D fun and especially appealing to fans of online fantasy games.

Designer Mike Mearls recalled that the team felt that “building a player character was the real thing that drove people to play the games. You wanted to choose your feats, your prestige classes and whatnot.” Rob Heinsoo focused on adding an irresistible hook. “The solution James Wyatt, Andy Collins, and I were excited about was to give every PC an ongoing series of choices of interesting powers. Every combat round you have an interesting choice of which power or powers to use.”

While the ultimate design offered many virtues, it failed to interest enough D&D fans. Mike Mearls later wrote, “No one at Wizards ever woke up one day and said, ‘Let’s get rid of all our fans and replace them.’ That was never the intent. With fourth edition, there were good intentions. The game is very solid, there are a lot of people who play it and enjoy it, but you do get those people that say ‘hey, this feels like an MMO, this feels like a board game.’” (For the full story of fourth edition, see The Threat that Nearly Killed Dungeons & Dragons—Twice.)

By the time the D&D team started on a fifth edition, corporate no longer gave the tabletop game as much scrutiny. After all, the fourth edition had become a financial disappointment and the tabletop RPG market had declined since 2005. Years of annual layoffs had eliminated most of the fourth-edition team. “While we didn’t talk about it in public, the business goal was to make a game that could keep people happy so that D&D could grow via video games and licensing,” fifth-edition lead Mike Mearls wrote later. “We ended up laying off or re-assigning several of the designers and editors after the game launched.”

The focus on video games and licensing brought freedom to the fifth-edition team. Instead of taking orders from upper management, the design team relied on feedback from the fans. Between the edition’s announcement in 2012 and its release in 2014, the D&D team offered a series of open playtest packets, collected feedback from 170,000 players, and then let the fans help guide the design.

Fifth edition became a hit. While every other edition of the game brought a surge of sales that quickly fell after existing players bought in, fifth edition sales climbed year after year. During Hasbro’s investor calls, the company now routinely boasted of D&D’s growth and profitability. Before the fifth edition, D&D only rated a mention once.

But over eight years, sales inevitably cooled, and in the corporate world, a steady profit is a disappointment. In 2022, Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks and Wizards of the Coast CEO Cynthia Williams appeared in a presentation for investors. Williams touted D&D’s popularity but described the game as “under monetized.” Wizards aimed to do a better job of gaining income from the game, bringing more earnings to stockholders. Corporate scrutiny returned.

WotC’s lawyers found a way to potentially invalidate the OGL that allowed publishers to profit from D&D-comparable products without giving WotC a cut. Incensed D&D fans forced the company to kill the plan. (See D&D’s Biggest Controversies Ranked—3. Wizards of the Coast Attempts To Revoke the Current Open Gaming License.)

Unlike D&D 3.5, I suspect something more noble than a cash grab led to the release of D&D’s 2024 update. In a 2020 article on diversity, the team wrote that in the six years since fifth edition’s release “making D&D as welcoming and inclusive as possible has moved to the forefront of our priorities.” D&D needed a new Player’s Handbook that dropped racial ability score modifiers and reflected the priority. As a bonus, the team could also make refinements based on years of play. (For my prediction of an upcoming update, see D&D‘s Ongoing Updates and How a Priority Could Lead to New Core Books.) The 2024 books include many improvements that I love.

Despite the good intentions, the 2024 update suggests Hasbro’s corporate influence, and I think the meddling left us with a weaker game than the D&D team might have created if left alone.

Watch the videos promoting the update to fans. The designers rarely mention all the welcome refinements and corrections to the existing rules. Instead, they boast of additions that never appeared on anyone’s wish list of essential updates.

They show new benefits player characters gain. The scale of these boosts goes beyond shoring up weaker classes, adding new candy like features that will “frustrate” DMs and a new weapon mastery system certain to slow play.
They showcase the bastion system—a game within a game that lets players farm more boons for their characters. Since 1974, D&D has sporadically included stronghold rules, but players rarely use them.
They tout the new crafting system that lets characters manufacture their own loot. When Chris Perkins pitched the crafting system, he cautioned that it appears in the Dungeon Master’s Guide because “this is unlocked by the dungeon master. The dungeon master determines whether or not the materials are available, whether or not the characters can build these items.” Perkins knows if characters with nowhere else to spend their gold can manufacture items like wands and enspelled gear, they will derail any campaign. The book offers no advice to DMs on managing crafting, so this system feels like a trap rushed into the book.

Because few gamers asked for many of the advertised changes, I suspect the push to make them came from corporate. The most unnecessary and weakest additions to the 2024 version of the game seem like they came from a meeting where a marketing executive stood at a white board with a marker, turned to face the D&D design team, and then demanded that they pitch new goodies that would sell the 2024 books to players who already have the 2014 books. Years from now, I may write a post that includes quotes from those designers talking about just such a meeting.

For Years AD&D Rounds Lasted Six Times Longer Than D&D Rounds and Only Gary Gygax Thought It Made Sense

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When gamers imagine an attack in a game like Dungeons & Dragons, they picture a wind up and sword swing, perhaps one second of motion. So two combatants only need a few seconds to trade blows, even with extra attacks. But in the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook (1978) Gary Gygax wrote that a combat round lasted a full minute, surprising gamers used to the 10-second rounds in the D&D Basic Set (1977). AD&D’s 1-minute round originated with the original D&D release (1974). Nonetheless, minute-long rounds failed to match our imagination. Rather than making battles “fast and furious” like Gary claimed in the little, brown books, the time scale suited underwater ballet.Gary brought 1-minute rounds from the Chainmail miniature rules, where armies needed minutes to mount attacks. By keeping the same time scale, a clash of armies on a sand table could zoom into D&D fights where battlefield champions faced off. Another early roleplaying game, Chivalry & Sorcery (1977), shows even more interest in fitting individual combat within warring armies on a battlefield. After 15 pages of rules in minuscule 5-point type for staging wars at 25mm scale, the game finally covers single characters. “There are 2 combat turns in every 5-minute game turn.” The game’s 2-and-a-half-minute rounds last almost as long as a boxing round. Most weapons allow three attacks or “blows” per round. C&S archers armed with bows can fire once every 75 seconds. Do archers craft their own arrows between shots?

In “Bows,” published in The Dragon issue 39, William Fawcett wrote, “A trained Mongol horse archer could fire from three to five arrows per minute, and longbowmen have been attributed with volleys of six or more arrows per minute.” D&D archers firing twice a minute never came close.

Miniature warfare aside, surely Gary liked how nicely a minute fit with the 10-minute turns used during a dungeon crawl. Every modern D&D player has finished an epic fight that spanned hours of real time, realized the showdown only lasted 60 seconds in game, and then felt shocked. In original D&D, a fight could easily take less real time than game time. As the lone author of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Gary stuck with his preference for 1-minute rounds.

In The Dragon issue 24, dated April 1979, Gary tried to bridge the gap between gamers’ imaginations and his 1-minute combat round. “If the participants picture the melee as somewhat analogous to a boxing match they will have a correct grasp of the rationale used in designing the melee system. During the course of a melee round there is movement, there are many attacks which do not score, and each to-hit dice roll indicates that there is an opening which may or may not allow a telling attack.” His Dungeon Master’s Guide (p.61 and p.71) mounts a similar defense of the counter-intuitive duration.

Warlock in the Spartan Simulation Gaming Journal #9 August 1975

Despite the explanation, most gamers favored much shorter rounds, as did newer roleplaying games. TSR’s own Metamorphis Alpha (1976) used 10-second rounds—nobody thought pulling the trigger on a laser pistol might take 60 seconds. Widely circulated house rules like Warlock (1975) from Caltech also settled on 10-second rounds.

Steve Jackson and Steve Perrin brought their experience battling with blunt weapons in the Society for Creative Anachronism to the combat rules they designed. Jackson’s Melee (1977) opted for 5-second rounds, while Perrin’s popular house rules The Perrin Conventions went with 10 seconds. Perrin’s Runequest (12-second rounds) would advertise a combat system “Based upon 12 years of actual hand-to-hand combat by the author while in the SCA.”

J. Eric Holmes editor of the D&D Basic Set (1977) came from a gaming community that favored the Warlock rules and its 10-second rounds. He surely saw Metamorphis Alpha too. In his manuscript for the Basic Set, he writes, “Each round consists of an exchange of two blows with ordinary weapons,” so his version of a round matches the popular conception. Naturally, he selected 10-second rounds for his presentation of D&D. Gary either overlooked the change to shorter rounds or chose not to object. TSR kept printing versions of basic D&D until the Dungeons & Dragons Rules Cyclopedia ended the line in 1991. The 10-second round stayed in every version.

Meanwhile, the designers of second-edition AD&D (1989) dutifully stuck with 1-minute rounds even though that meant writing a quarter-page defense in the edition’s Player’s Handbook. “An action that might be ridiculously easy under normal circumstances could become an undertaking of heroic scale when attempted in the middle of a furious, heroic battle.” As an example, the text spends four paragraphs describing the lengthy process of spending a minute drinking a potion. Apparently, potions must go into a backpack and not into handy little pockets.

Third-edition D&D (2000) dropped the AD&D brand and gave designers a chance to abandon the 1-minute round in favor of something intuitive. “It could have been a 6-second round or a 12-second round,” lead designer Jonathan Tweet recalled in a discussion. “How long does it really take to get a potion out of your backpack?”

“We were talking about how much you can accomplish in a round, what you can do with an action, and there was some contention between Jonathan, Skip [Williams], and I about what you could actually realistically do,” designer Monte Cook said. “We had a stopwatch and Jonathan had to mime all the different actions that were in the Player’s Handbook and see whether he could accomplish them within a round.” The team settled on the 6-second rounds that the fifth-edition game still uses.

Unless gamers quibble about realism and the stopwatch timing of a 30-foot move, a round’s duration seldom matters. Both D&D and AD&D played fine despite the sixfold difference in time scale. However, game time matters when players need to figure out what non-combat activities characters can accomplish in six seconds. And for that, a longer round probably plays better. For GURPS, Steve Jackson opted for 1-second rounds, which hardly allows time for anything other than emptying magazines and hacking like a lumberjack. Gary picked 1-minute rounds because it played well alongside warring armies and dungeon crawls.

Although the third-edition designers took pains to find a time span that seemed realistic, modern versions of D&D favor allowing characters to accomplish an unrealistic amount in 6 seconds because it adds fun. Could anyone really make multiple attacks, move, react, and also drink a potion in a 6-second span? D&D 2024 heroes can because players liked drinking potions as a bonus action. Not so long ago, similar characters needed a full minute just for the drink. Of course, no one swallowed that either.

Fifth-Edition D&D’s Original Lead Designer Calls Out the Game’s “Secret Error” That Remains Today

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In fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons, characters and monsters calculate the difficulty class (DC) number needed to save against their spells and powers using the same formula: 8 + proficiency bonus + ability score modifier. That means a 7th-level wizard and a CR-7 mind flayer, both with Intelligence 19 and a +3 proficiency bonus, both force their foes to make a DC 15 save against spells like fireball and powers like mind blast. But according to the designer who led the creation of fifth edition, the monsters were never intended to use the same formula as characters, making the uniformity a “secret error in fifth edition.”

The design strategy of using the same math for both monsters and PCs traces to D&D’s third edition, where characters and creatures shared the same rules foundation. This brought some benefits: In theory, designers could create consistent monsters by plugging attributes like size, type, target challenge rating, and so on into formulas to get the creature’s statistics. Monsters and characters could share customization options like feats and class levels. Third edition sets an effective character level (ECL) for some monsters. The ECL matched the creature’s power to a particular level of PC. A player could play a monstrous PC by just treating it as a typical character of the effective level, and then leveling up from there.

This symmetry suffered drawbacks too. In a discussion, third-edition designer Monte Cook says, “We had to make NPCs and particularly monsters work exactly like player characters. I get it. I understand why that’s cool and why that’s important, but boy that became cumbersome. You could look at some high-level monster and go through his skills and just say, ‘Oh, mistake.’ I’m not thrilled with the fact that I created a game where it was so easy to pick nits.”

Most monsters only survive about three rounds, so unless players love monstrous PCs and DMs enjoy customizing creatures with class levels, the cumbersome math rarely pays off. Worse, the math may result in monsters that prove less fun to battle during its typical three rounds in play. This sort of shared formula became the fifth edition’s secret error.

In a post on Bluesky, fifth-edition lead designer Mike Mearls explained that monsters were not supposed to include their proficiency bonus when calculating the DCs needed to save against their powers. “Monsters were supposed to have DCs…based on their flavor and design.” Monster designers would simply choose saving throw DCs that matched the creature’s lore, while making the creature an exciting foe for the level of character it typically faced. By locking save DCs to a strict formula, designers lost the flexibility to choose the best numbers for fun and flavor.

At lower levels and lower challenge ratings, using the save DC calculation for characters and monsters works well enough, but at higher levels, the steady rise of save DCs that add proficiency bonuses as high as +9 creates trouble. DCs become so high that only characters both proficient at the save and with a high ability score bonus enjoy a realistic chance of success. In a high-level party, that math dooms about two-thirds of the characters to failure. Against a mind flayer’s DC 15 save, a typical party of Intelligence 8 and 10 PCs must hope some of the heroes stand out of the mind blast’s 60-foot cone.

The climactic encounter of Phandelver and Below shows how this dynamic can lead many parties to a total party kill. (This example includes minor spoilers.) The showdown pits a single CR 15 monster against a party of 12th-level characters. According to the 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide, this encounter rates as somewhere between low and medium difficulty. The saving throw math says something else. The creature’s CR leads to a +5 proficiency bonus backed with a +6 ability score bonus, setting a DC 19 save. The monster’s mind blast power targets creatures of its choice within 60 feet of it. Targets who fail an Intelligence save take damage and become stunned for 1 minute. Typical 12th-level wizards and artificers make that save about 55% of the time; druids and rogues make it about 30% of the time, and everyone else gets a slim 1-in-10 or 1-in-20 chance of success. Some groups need luck for just one character to escape the blast without cartoon stars circling their head. Stunned characters can redo the save every turn, but the barbarian and everyone else who dumped Intelligence still needs to hope for a natural 20—and to hope the monster doesn’t recharge mind blast on a 5 or 6.

The scarcity of characters with good Intelligence saves and the brutality of the stunned condition makes this example particularly harsh, but the dynamics hold true even for Dexterity and Constitution saves. As levels increase, saving throws for characters who lack proficiency swing toward impossible.

How does a mistake like that happen? “Earlier this year I was at a game design talk, and while mingling with other designers, someone asked about the hardest part of design. Every single person gave the same answer—communication and coordination.”

Some members of the fifth-edition design team likely preferred to make characters and monsters share the same formula for calculating saving throw DCs. Perhaps some on the team still favor this consistency. But even if they all agree on the secret error, after 10 years of fifth edition, it’s too late to change.

As a house-rule remedy for fifth edition’s secret error, Mearls suggests adding the proficiency bonus to all a character’s saves rather than just the few with class-assigned proficiency. Obviously, this rates as a major change at the game’s foundation, but it would make fifth edition play more like D&D’s early editions where every character improved at every save as they added levels.

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Author Archives: David Hartlage

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