Category Archives: Role-playing game design

Speed factor, weapon armor class adjustments, and skill challenges

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(Part 3 of a series, which begins with Evolution of the skill challenge.)

The first edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons included lots of rules that no one uses: weapon speed factor, weapon armor class adjustments. A little of that tradition lived on in the first year of fourth edition. No one played skill challenges exactly as written in the first fourth edition Dungeon Master’s Guide. At the very least, you did not start skill challenges by rolling for initiative.

According to the book, the Dungeon Master announces a skill challenge, the players roll initiative, and then take turns deciding on a skill to use and inventing a reason why that skill might apply to the situation. No one may pass a turn.

In short, everyone interrupts the D&D game and starts playing a storytelling game.

At Gen Con 2012, Robin D. Laws, one of the authors of the 4E Dungeon Master’s Guide 2, held a panel discussion on story advice. The Tome Show podcast recorded this panel as episode 201. When giving advice on running skill challenges, Robin Laws gives a succinct description of the original skill challenge.

“What I found myself doing when I was running 4E was putting a lot more onus on the players to describe what they were doing and make it much more of a narrative world-building than just here’s these particular obstacles that you have to overcome.
“‘You go on an arduous journey. Each of you contributes in a significant way as you’re going through the desert, and some of you wind up in a disadvantageous position. So tell me what it is you do to contribute to the survival of the party.’ And then I go around the table round-robin style and everyone would have to think of something cool and defining that they might have done.”

This flips the normal play style of D&D. Normally players encounter obstacles, and then find ways to overcome them. Now the players participate in the world building, inventing complications that their skills can overcome. I’m not saying this is wrong for a game. The market is full of storytelling games where players cooperate to tell stories, a process that can include taking turns inventing complications. This sort of collaborate storytelling may even be the preferred style of play for some D&D groups, though I have to wonder why those groups would choose to play D&D over a game that better suits their interests. I argue that for a lot of D&D players, this style did not feel like D&D very much anymore, and that is why skill challenges evolved over the course of fourth edition.

Robin’s description of the players’ role in the skill challenge is particularly interesting. He says players search for “cool and defining” things they could do. That could be fun, but challenges never play out that way. Most players just search their sheets for their best skills and try to imagine ways to justify using them. I suppose under Robin’s coaching, or with a game that encourages that play style, players might seek out cool and defining things. Unlike D&D, story games can encourage that play style mechanically. For example, story games often have mechanics where you define you characters by simply listing their unique and interesting aspects. This might be as simple as coming up with as list of adjectives or keywords describing your character.

Neither D&D’s tradition nor the skill challenge mechanic encourages players to overcome the challenge by inventing cool and defining actions for their character. D&D’s mechanics encourage players to look for their highest skill bonus, and then concoct an excuse to use it. I am certain that both Robin Laws and I both agree that this strategy makes D&D less fun than it can be.

He prefers a game where players share more of the narration, world-building role. Many fun games support that that style of play, but D&D is not one of those games. (Robin mentions that his HeroQuest game inspires the way he runs skill challenges.)

When I play D&D, I want to immerse myself in the game world and think of ways to overcome obstacles. My actions might involve skill checks, by they often do not.

Less then three months after the 4E release, Mike Mearls began his Ruling Skill Challenges column. He writes, “In many ways, the R&D department at Wizards of the Coast has undergone the same growing pains and learning experiences with skill challenges, much as DMs all over the world have.” The column starts a  process of recasting the skill challenge, making it fit better with the usual D&D play style.

Next: The Dungeon Master’s Guide 2 remakes the skill challenge

The skill challenge: good intentions, half baked

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(Part 2 of a series, which begins with Evolution of the skill challenge.)

The forth edition rules make the encounter the central activity of the Dungeons & Dragons game. The Dungeon Master’s Guide says, “Encounters are the exciting part of the D&D game,” (p.22) and encourages dungeon masters to shorten the intervals between encounters. “Move the PCs quickly from encounter to encounter, and on to the fun!” (p.105)

Page 105 includes more revealing advice. “As much as possible, fast-forward through the parts of an adventure that aren’t fun.  An encounter with two guards at the city gate isn’t fun.  Tell the players they get through the gate without much trouble and move on to the fun.  Niggling details about food supplies and encumbrance usually aren’t fun, so don’t sweat them, and let the players get to the adventure and on to the fun.  Long treks through endless corridors in the ancient dwarven stronghold beneath the mountains aren’t fun.”

Personally, I think that two of those activities do seem fun—especially the trek through the dwarven stronghold. I think the passage reveals something about how the 4E designers disastrously misread some of the audience for the fourth edition game, but that’s a topic for another post.

More to the point, the passage lists the sorts of interaction and exploration that skill challenges try to turn into encounters.

The 4E designers recognized that D&D includes more than combat, so they needed a game activity that gave players an opportunity to use skills and that held the same weight as the game’s core activity, the encounter. I imagine the 4E designers filling a white board with goals like these:

  • Skill challenges should be worth experience points to give them importance equal to a combat encounter.
  • Skill challenges need a difficulty and mechanical rigor similar to a combat encounter.
  • Skill challenge mechanic should enable every player to participate, not just the players with obvious skills.

The last goal reverses the early class balance of the game, in a good way. Through most of D&D history, some characters fared poorly in combat, but got a chance to shine in exploration and role playing. In the original game, thieves were not particularly useful in a fight, but fights were short and the players spent most of their time exploring, so the thief enjoyed plenty of time in the spotlight. In 4E, the rogue ranks as one of the most effective classes in combat, but every other class gets an equal chance to shine outside of combat.

The original skill challenge rules have players rolling initiative and taking turns. To make sure that everyone has a chance to contribute on their turn, players take the role of inventing circumstances where their characters can contribute. The turn structure ensures that everyone must contribute. You cannot pass a turn. “Characters must make a check on their turns using one of the identified, primary skills or they must use a different skill, if they can come up with a way to use it to contribute to the challenge.” (p.74)  This often leads to strained justifications for skill checks.

“Does the chieftain like acrobatics?  By using acrobats and interpretive dance, perhaps I can convince him not to attack the village.”

As the name suggests, skill challenges focus on skills, not on the players’ problem-solving abilities. As I wrote in Player skill without player frustration, 4E attempted to eliminate frustration by emphasizing skill checks and skill challenges over concrete obstacles and over players’ problem solving skills. When every obstacle has a DC and multiple skills, then no one gets frustrated. If you find a locked door, you can pick the lock with thievery, or break the door with strength.

The designers saw another benefit of focusing on skills. Social skills such as diplomacy, bluff, and intimidate allow players who feel uncomfortable with play-acting to contribute without stepping out of their comfort zone. As a DM, I’ve encountered plenty of players who freeze up when I encourage them to speak as their character. I think they miss a fun aspect of the game, but I don’t force it. Nonetheless, I insist players say more than, “I diplomacize the king and I roll….”

Next: Speed factor, weapon armor class adjustments, and skill challenges

Evolution of the skill challenge

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When Dungeons & Dragons fourth edition came out, I found a lot to like, and one thing I hated: the skill challenge mechanic—not the underlying idea of giving non-combat activities center stage, but the rules framework of the original skill challenge. As originally presented, the skill challenge seemed like an element from a story game awkwardly forced into D&D. I’m not saying that story game elements are wrong for another game, but they do not fit with the D&D game that I want to play.

Other fourth edition players may not have shared my dislike for the original skill challenge, but the mechanic certainly puzzled them. Less then three months after the 4E release, Mike Mearls began his Ruling Skill Challenges column. He writes, “In many ways, the R&D department at Wizards of the Coast has undergone the same growing pains and learning experiences with skill challenges, much as DMs all over the world have.” This column began a process of recasting the skill challenge into something that fit more comfortably into a classic D&D game. Aside from the underlying numbers, this process never changed the underlying rules for skill challenges—though it did ignore some.

Based on the new advice, I learned to run skill challenges that stayed true to the rules, but that felt more like classic D&D. I found that I could enjoy skill challenges and I think my players liked them more too. Nonetheless, the original skill challenge rules and the original format for describing skill challenges remained, and that foundation made running them well a bit harder.

In my upcoming series of posts, I will write about the original skill challenge, how the skill challenge evolved, and how something like a skill challenge might best appear in a future iteration of D&D.

Two Problems that Provoked Bounded Accuracy

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One of the key design features of D&D Next is something the designers call bounded accuracy. Bounded accuracy reins in the steady escalation of bonuses to checks and attacks that characters received in earlier editions. I love bounded accuracy.

To explain my affection, I want to consider two problems with (nearly) unbounded accuracy in the third and fourth edition.

Third and fourth edition both assumed a steep and steady increase of plusses to your skill numbers as your character advanced. This rewarded you with a sense of accomplishment as you saw your character improve, but the increases led to problems at higher levels.

In third edition, at each level, characters received an allotment of points to improve selected skills. If you reached high level, and concentrated your improvements on the same skills, you gained huge bonuses to those skills.

The huge bonuses created a dilemma for dungeon masters and authors trying to set DCs for high level adventures. You could set very high DCs that challenged players who specialized in a skill. These DCs were impossibly high for non-specialists, so if the party lacked a specialist in a particular skill, the task became flat out impossible. Alternately, you could set low enough DCs to give non-specialists a chance, but these DCs grant the specialists an automatic success.  (Again, by specialists, I just mean a character who concentrates skill improvements on the same skill, not a super-optimized character.)

Third edition assumes that the DM will justify the sky-high DCs required to challenge high-level specialists by describing obstacles of legendary proportions. At first level, the rogue must climb a rough dungeon wall; by 20th level, he must climb a glass-smooth wall covered in wet slime—in an earthquake. At first level, you must negotiate with the mayor; by twentieth level, he’s king. And you killed his dog.

In the skill section of the third edition Epic Level Handbook, the epic-level obstacles become absurd. Here we find the DC for balancing on clouds, sweet talking hostile creatures into sacrificing their lives for you, and so on. I understand that some folks enjoy playing characters as mythic, godlike creatures, but to me, that game doesn’t seem like D&D anymore. Given the rarity of epic play, I suspect I stand with the majority.

Fourth edition tried to resolve the problem of high-level DCs becoming either impossible for typical characters or automatic for specialists. The system grants every character a flat, half-level bonus to checks. Now skilled characters maintained a flat +5 bonus when compared to their peers. Everyone enjoyed steady increases, but no one fell too far behind. This approach fixed the math, but when you compare characters of different levels, it defies logic and breaks your suspension of disbelief.

By level 10, a wizard with an 8 strength, gains the same ability to smash down a wooden door as an first-level character with an 18 strength.

“Wow, Wiz, have you been working out?”

“Thanks for noticing. My strength will be 9 soon.”

Of course, Wiz never gets a chance to show off his new prowess, because those DC 16 wooden doors have all been replaced by level-appropriate, DC 20 barred doors.

In truth, the players never really advance because they stand on a treadmill.

You can see the treadmill on page 126 of the 4e Rules Compendium in the “Difficulty Class By Level” table. Using this table, your character no longer gets better at easy checks, she just faces higher DCs. That table makes Living Forgotten Realms adventures work across entire tiers.

Fourth edition is inconsistent about whether the rising DCs in the “Difficulty Class By Level” table represent increasingly legendary barriers in the game world. For example, the DCs for breaking doors rise as the doors become sturdier. But social skills tend to be pegged to the DC-by-level table. (The system just assumes you killed the king’s dog.) The Living Forgotten Realms adventures used for organized play mostly abandon any attempt to flavor the rising DCs as increasingly legendary challenges. The challenges never change, just the DCs.

By reining in the scale of skill bonuses as character’s advance, D&D Next solves both problems. The system does not reward players with the same magnitude of improvements as their character’s advances, but the small improvements are real improvements, not steps on a treadmill.

While bounded accuracy solves problems, characters still need to stand out from their peers. A specialist should stand out and enjoy a chance to shine. The current ability bonuses are too small to achieve this. You can read my opinion on ability bonuses and checks here.

In D&D Next, ability modifiers are too small for the ability check mechanic

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Imagine the scene: Fastfeet the Rogue and Joe Average need to cross a rickety rope bridge before kobolds have time to drop a bolder from the cliffs above. Fastfeet, with dexterity 20, stands as the quickest halfling alive. Joe Average. with dexterity 10, has a hopelessly mundane, non-D&D name. Let’s call him J’oe. Better.

The wobbly bridge has rotting and missing planks, so crossing it without slowing requires a dexterity check. The DM decides that the crossing counts as an EASY check: DC 10. No problem thinks Fastfeet, I’m optimized to have the highest possible dexterity. I just can’t roll a 1…or a 2, or 3, or 4. Hmmm, I may as well try diplomacy.

Fastfeet, the quickest halfling alive, still suffers a 20% chance of missing an EASY check. Despite being the quickest possible character, Fastfeet only gains an extra 25 percentage points in his chance over J’oe average.

The problem stems from the mere +5 that a 20 characteristic adds to the check. The D20 roll swamps it. This leads to two problems:

  • Exceptional characters do not noticeably stand out. Whether your character has a poor or a great characteristic, every ability check pretty much feels like a coin flip. This becomes particularly noticeable with checks that encourage everyone at the table to try. That’s when everyone puzzles over an ancient map fragment, the resident sage says she will try a history check, and everyone chimes in, “I’ll try too.” Most times, the expert character gets no chance to shine, because her numerical bonus barely exceeds anyone else’s. The success goes to the person who happened to roll a 19.
  • Even when an exceptional character attempts something easy, the outcome remains unpredictable, as in Fastfeet’s case.

I asked Mike Mearls about this issue, and he said that the DM could simply rule that a easy check is an automatic success for characters of advanced ability. The advice patches over bad math with DM fiat. As a DM, I would make that ruling, because the system’s rotten foundation forces it. I would rather see math that works.

You may think that I’m overlooking the skills that address my problem with the math. Forget skills. D&D next has no skill checks or ability checks, only checks. Unlike earlier editions, skills no longer provide a system for determining success, so for example, the skill descriptions no longer include rules for resolution. Skills represent a small number of areas where extraordinary focus and training might help your character make checks.  Skills stand as an optional rule for granting a bonus to a limited number of checks. Most checks rely entirely on ability modifiers.

This means that Fastfeet’s +5 won’t get any better. No athletics or balance skill exists to improve the odds. Even if one did, most characters only get 3 skills.

In 3rd and 4th edition, the DM typically asks for skill checks rather than ability checks. Fastfeet probably has acrobatics skill, granting another +4 or +5 to the check. Suddenly that easy check becomes easy.

Third and fourth edition assumed checks would be skill checks, so both the skill and ability contributed bonuses. Next assumes ability checks. Skills add an unusual bonus rather than an inevitable addition.

I think this simplification makes for a better game. In addition to the virtue of simplicity, an over-reliance on skills tends to encourage players to solve problems by looking at their skill list, rather than thinking about other things their character could do in the game world.

I like the new approach, but in D&D next, the system’s numbers still seem to assume characters always get a skill bonus stacked with an ability bonus. In practice, a first level character gets a maximum bonus of +5 to a typical check. Little mathematical difference exists between a character with extraordinary ability and one with average ability. In third and fourth edition, a level 1 character like Fastfeet saw a bonus closer to +9 or +10, big enough to make a practical difference.

The solution seems obvious. For checks, the ability modifier must double, to +1 for each ability score point over 10. Now Fastfeet enjoys a +10 to dex checks, appropriate for the quickest halfling alive and consistent with the bonus typical in earlier editions.
Obviously, Fastfeet cannot also enjoy a +10 on his bow attacks. The original modifier scale must remain as combat modifiers, separate from ability check modifiers.  The two scales introduce a small, necessary complexity.

On the other hand, calculating ability modifiers becomes easier. A character with 15 dexterity has a +5 ability modifier. As an added bonus, odd-numbered ability scores gain significance in the game. Suddenly 15 really is better than 14.

I realize this change bucks the history of ability modifiers established in 3rd edition, but I can trump that with an earlier precedent.  Check page B60 of the Moldvay basic set from 1981. “To perform a difficult task, the player should roll the ability score or less on 1d20.” The mechanic flips the numbers, asking for a low roll, but your ability score has the same numerical effect as the modifiers I suggest. In the late 70s, I saw this mechanic used frequently. So the change qualifies as old school and it fixes the system. Seems like a win.

Still not convinced? Consider this. Over the course of an adventure, an exceptionally-strong fighter might make a hundred attack rolls. The +5 attack modifier she gains from her 18(00), I mean 20, strength improves them all. She dominates the battlefield. Over the course of the same adventure, the smooth talker with a 20 charisma may get 8 diplomacy checks, tops. Over the course of so few rolls, the 1-20 spread of the die buries the mere +5. The diplomacy skill can help. Still the most charming person you ever meet, in game terms, seems little better than the half orc who picks his nose as he negotiates with the elf king. The player who optimized the smooth talker hardly gets a chance to shine.

Immersive vs. Gamey in D&D Next, the score is 1-1

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When I first started playing Dungeons & Dragons, people would tell me that the game interested them, but that felt intimidated by all the rules. No problem, I explained, you can play without knowing any of the rules. You play a character, like a mighty fighter. The dungeon master describes the situation, and you just imagine what your fighter would do. If a goblin attacks, just say, I hit him with my axe.

The concept pleased me. As a player, you could immerse yourself in being your character without thinking of the rules. At some point in our D&D history, we all enjoyed this style of play, so as the orc bore down on us, we raised our shield and drew our sword. Where instead of studying our list of powers, we think, if I can cut the rope holding that chandelier, I can bring it down on that brute’s head.

We still sometimes frown on the practice of letting the artifice of the game stand in the way of playing in character. You have heard of metagaming. If the DM drops a battle grid on the table, you know a fight will come, but don’t start buffing yourself. Your character suspects nothing.

Then action points appeared with Eberron. We all loved them, even though managing action points forced you out of your character’s head.

With the fourth edition, the designers set a goal of giving each class interesting things to do during combat. Why should only spellcasters gain the fun of managing resources when we can invent resources like daily martial powers and Hunter’s Quarries?  Every player can join the supposed fun. This opened a flood gate.

You could no longer play D&D by simply immersing yourself in your character. The game added too many constructs that lacked any relationship to the game world. Playing your fighter now required an understanding of things like marks and an entire economy of encounter and daily powers that had everything to do with the rules and nothing to do with the game world.  Playing a ranger meant laying down a Hunter’s Quarry that represented nothing but a floating damage bonus.

Most commonly, these sorts of game mechanics are called dissociated mechanics, and some deeper analysis of them exists elsewhere.

The problem with these mechanics extends beyond just the game’s learning curve. They tax anyone who prefers to play by immersing themselves into character. You can no longer enjoy the game inside the head of Roid the fighter, who likes to hit things with an axe. The game forces you to make decisions that you cannot possibly make in character. Why cannot Roid reuse that daily power again today? He has no idea. When can he spend an action point? What’s an action point to Roid?

Let me be clear about two things:

  • I am happy to think about the rules of D&D as I play D&D. However, I dislike when the rules prevent me from making my character’s decisions in character, from immersing myself in the game world.
  • Rules for things like hit points do not count as dissociated mechanics.  Hit points exist as an abstraction of something in the game world, namely your character’s health, fatigue, and morale.

Many players feel perfectly comfortable with dissociated mechanics as long as, looking back, they can explain them as part of the story. So what if an action point represents nothing in the game world–it represents something in the story. To this mindset, perhaps action points are like that surge of energy that brings Rocky off the mat at the end of the final movie bout. Why does Rocky only get that surge in the final fight? He always saves his action point until the end. (You can see the scene where Paulie coaches Rocky to save his action point in the director’s cut.)

I realize that plenty of players feel perfectly content playing the game as a game, and could care less what Rocky or Roid thinks. But why create game rules that interfere with the enjoyment of folks who prefer to dive into their character’s head? Until late in the 3.5 edition, such rules found no place in the D&D tradition. D&D should excel at immersion for the players seeking it.

By the time D&D Essentials reached the market, the game’s designers seemed to have learned a couple of lessons: (1) Not everyone wants to play a character complicated by things like resource management.  (2) You can invent fun abilities for classes such as rogue and ranger without resorting to dissociated mechanics.

Have the designers forgotten lesson number 2?

I want to turn your attention to two mechanics that appear in the D&D next playtest documents. One is unjustly accused of being dissociated, the other guilty as charged.

First I’ll consider the fighter’s combat superiority feat with its expertise die.

As I see it, the expertise die represents a moment of time and attention that the fighter can spend to achieve something extra on the battlefield. The fighter’s round takes the same six seconds as anyone else’s, but his expertise and training slows down the action, making him able to accomplish more. Perhaps the fighter spends an extra instant drawing a bead on an enemy, parrying a blow that would strike an ally, or tripping a foe already unbalanced by a blow.

As such, the expertise die represents something “real” in the imaginary world, and not some meta-game abstraction.

When I first considered this model, I remained bothered by the Deadly Strike maneuver.  When you hit, you may spend an expertise damage to deal extra damage. I imagined a fighter spending an extra instant winding up to deliver a powerful blow. If he missed, through the benevolence of the rules, he somehow regains that instant to use for something else. The do-over feels like an intervention by the game rules to prevent a player from feeling bad about wasting an expertise die. In character, how could the fighter possible explain the spent and regained moment?

But I realize my first interpretation is wrong. The six-second round represents a lot of time in a battle. The combatants do not actually take turns winding up and swinging like batters in a baseball game. Instead the fighter dodges and weaves, parries and feints, tests his opponents and searches for vulnerabilities. He does not waste time doing an extra wind up before he hits, or at least not before he knows he will hit. Perhaps the blow lands and the fighter spends an instant to wrench his blade or to slam an elbow into his enemy’s gut. Perhaps the fighter spots an opening and takes a moment to wind back for a powerful blow because he already knows his blow will land.

A thread on Wizards’ D&D Next forums considers the gamey aspects of combat superiority in overwhelming detail. Much of the discussion dwells on teasing apart the protect maneuver. Can a fighter decide to jump in and block an attack after a roll determines a hit? I’m sympathetic to the concern, but I’m comfortable with Protect for a couple of reasons:

The dice rolling and other business between beginning an attack and writing down the damage ranks as the one of the biggest abstractions in D&D. The timing of that business hardly matches action in the game world. Your successful to-hit roll simply poses a threat that can still be countered.

  • The fighter’s ability to spot a likely hit and block it seems as natural as, say, a basketball defender’s ability to block a likely basket.
  • I feel like I can use the Protect maneuver without breaking character. “I see the orc wind up for a killing blow on the wizard. I slam my shield into the way and shout, `Not today, you fiend!’”

The expertise die works as a mechanic sufficiently grounded in the game world. The designers deserve kudos for it.

The rogue’s Knack mechanic, on the other hand, exists as pure metagaming. Why does a first-level rogue gain the Knack advantage on a maximum of two checks per day? Nothing in the game world leads to that limit. It exists purely as an artifice of the game, a way to prevent the rogue from gaining too much screen time in the story of the day’s adventure. The Knack mechanic’s appearance is particularly discouraging because it seems like such a gratuitous soiling of a core class. I’m bracing for the likelihood of a warlord class loaded with dissociated mechanics, but this is the rogue. Surely the designers can invent a non-dissociated mechanic that reinforces skill mastery and expresses the rogue’s talent for skills.