D&D: Working the Rules

Last time, I wrote about how gameplay is enacted as a negotiation at the table, with the rules serving as one component of the common grounding for negotiation, a means of abstracting tedious or low-player knowledge negotiations, and furthermore as a wagering game that is fun in and of itself. I was planning to write a follow-up about that last part, but before I could, Wizards of the Coast announced the next Dungeons and Dragons, with generally favorable articles in The New York Times and Forbes. Most interestingly, they’re inviting participation from the community to design and playtest the new edition. While I haven’t yet decided if I want to formally be part of the process, it seems like a good time to throw in my two cents.

The last edition change, from 3.5 to 4e, was a little bit of a disaster. While I thought it was a major step forward, many players didn’t like the how all the classes in the new edition had the same core structure (at-will, encounter, daily, and utility powers) compared to simple fighters and complex spellcasters, the mandatory use of a battlemat, the length of combat, or just the aesthetics of the books and character sheets. While some of the complaints were fundamentally off-base, D&D4e is not an MMO, it is not ‘dumbed down’, and it is just as viable to roleplay in as any other edition of D&D, and other complaints were corrected by Essentials classes and new math for monsters, the damage had been done. The D&D community split into 4e players, a solid core of 3.5/Pathfinder fans, and the new Old School Rules movement, which leveraged digital distribution and a vibrant community to create cleaned up versions of the first editions of D&D.

Wizards claims that 5e will reunite the scattered fans and become the One Edition to Rule Them All. Personally, I’m doubtful. People have diverse tastes, and the only common ground is that they like what they already know. I’m also not sure how much participation the community will have, or even if the community actually knows what it wants (A common joke in the RPG industry is that to make a successful game, you should look at what RPG.net says and then do the exact opposite). All I know is that right now the geekier corners of the internet are exploding with speculation, demands, and manifestos. So without further delay, this is what I think about rules, and how to write good ones for D&D.

Pretty much every RPG relies on some random element, usually dice, for a core task resolution mechanic. The exact details of this resolution mechanic aren’t particularly important, you can use XdY+modifier vs a target number, percentile roll under, dice pools, or pretty much anything that can be imagined, but at the end of the day the player will declare some action, with probability P between 0 and 1 of success.

Finding the right P is an important part of game design. Too low, and plays will miss frequently, leading to a high whiff factor. Too high, and players will be rolling simply to see if they fail, which is irritating. Casinos are the experts in balancing probabilities and payoffs, ensuring enough winning to keep players hooked, while the law of averages drains their pockets. Personally, I find a chance of success at p=0.6 for an average task is most satisfying (coincidentally, this is what D&D 4e uses). Easy tasks can go up to about p=0.85, and hard task should be p=0.4, with extremely difficult or desperate tasks at p=0.2.

But rolling and trying to get above an 8 isn’t a game that’s likely to hold a person’s attention for long. So what else is there? I’m going to refer to Greg Costikyan classic essay, “I have no words and I must design”, which you really should read in full.

The thing that makes a game a game is the need to make decisions. Consider Chess: it has few of the aspects that make games appealing -- no simulation elements, no roleplaying, and damn little color. What it's got is the need to make decisions. The rules are tightly constrained, the objectives clear, and victory requires you to think several moves ahead. Excellence in decision making is what brings success.

Negotiation is fun, but decision making is also fun. The rules tell us what kind of decisions can be made, what the option space is, and what outcomes are. And to describe what makes rules fun, or good, I’m going to have to pull in a couple of other theories.

The first one is the Paradox of Choice, which I’ll use to talk about building a character. Having too few options makes us unhappy for obvious reasons-we are constrained from doing what we want to do. Having too many options also makes us unhappy, as the energy involved in coming to a decision outweighs the benefits gain by making the best decision. We become obsessed with alternatives and missed opportunities. In a competitive environment, like a game, the feeling like you’re not making good choices is equivalent to feeling like you’re lost, like you’re losing. It’s not fun.

With that in mind, D&D4e (and 3.5 before it) simply has too many options. At first level, the player has 44 classes, 50 races, hundreds of backgrounds, themes, feats, and powers. In play, every turn a player has a choice of the two At-Will powers, one encounter, one daily, and perhaps a power or two gained from class or background. This is about the limit of most people’s working memories (conventional wisdom is that most people can remember about seven things, so that’s your powers, your HP, and the general state of the game).

At 30^th level, this elegant structure has totally imploded. A character has 20 feats, selected out of a list of over 2300, 12 core attack powers select from a list of hundreds, and perhaps a couple dozen more miscellaneous class abilities and magic items chosen from a list of thousands. If you’ve grown organically into that 30^th level character, you might understand its full capabilities, but most players are overwhelmed.

And worst of all, there’s not much too clearly evaluate many of these choices. Powers can play very differently, but there are lots of powers of the form “deal 2[weapon]+stat damage and push 1 square”, or the like. Now, I like the power system introduced in 4e, I think it goes a long way towards distinguishing different characters of the same class, and one class from another, but the power system needs to be toned down so that even a high level character doesn’t have more than 12 total. As for feats and magic items, they need to be seriously curtailed. Group similar feats into Themes, or Packages, or Kits, and give each character a choice of one. Magic items that simply fix the game’s math should be combined with the character’s intrinsic skill. Instead, magic items should be singular, rare, and synergize with the characters. A warrior will have a weapon of legend, a mage might have a staff that defends the user on its own, a rogue might have a Ring of Invisibility. Either way, I’d like it if even top level characters have no more than three magic items, and each one was a significant part of the character.

The second theory is the OODA loop, developed by fighter pilot John Boyd. OODA (observe, orient, decide, act) is the process by which people make decisions in a strategic or tactical game. You observe the enemy and try and figure out what their capabilities are, using your past experience you orient yourself, make a decision, and execute. In warfare, the trick is to get inside the enemy’s OODA loop, to move with the chaos of combat and direct it at your enemy until they make a mistake that can be capitalized on.

What a player observes is what the DM shows and tells them: A description of the monsters, where they are on the battlefield, how they move and act. But in D&D 4e, and other grid based systems, this description has two parts, the verbal side of what the GM says, and the visual side of what the map looks like. And if the rules and GM are not well coordinate, the descriptions will begin to diverge. Players will be constantly switching from a verbal-negotiation cognitive frame to a visual-puzzle solving cognitive frame.

There are good reasons to represent combat on a grid with some kind of figurines. People are usually fairly skilled in visual puzzle solving. It allows decisions to be very finely grained-precisely how far to move, where to drop that fireball, which rewards players that are using tactical maneuvers to their advantage. Without a map, players have to hold the entire encounter in their heads, and with about 10 combatants on the board (the player, 4 allies, 5 enemies) that can get tricky, especially when people begin to disagree about who was where.

But the downside of using a map is that it focuses attention on this visual puzzle, diminishing attention on the verbal aspect of the game, or to use the phrase of gamers, “immersive roleplaying”. I used to think that this was a silly complaint, but thinking about players having to switch between cognitive systems, it makes sense. Most of us are lousy multitaskers. WotC design Mike Mearls has indicated the next edition will be grid-optional. “The new edition is being conceived of as a modular, flexible system, easily customized to individual preferences. Just like a player makes his character, the Dungeon Master can make his ruleset. He might say ‘I’m going to run a military campaign, it’s going to be a lot of fighting’… so he’d use the combat chapter, drop in miniatures rules, and include the martial arts optional rules.” It’ll be interesting to see how this modularity works out in practice.

Finally, there’s one other issue I want to bring up: pacing and flow. Flow, in games studies, is the sensation of full immersion in the activity, and of playful challenge. One of the major complaints against D&D 4e is that the fights take too long, a critique which I agree with. The length of a fight depends on the total number of rounds, and the time it takes each player to take their action. In my experience, a fight in 4e lasts about 5 rounds. On the one hand, this seems like a good number—it prevents fights from being decided in the opening action, and gives the players time to recover from bad luck.

The problem is that it’s slow. I haven’t taken a stopwatch to my group, but it seems to take about two minutes for a person to take their turn. Multiply by six people (five players + GM) and five rounds, and you have an hour long fight. I think turns could be speeded up by reducing the complexity of the decisions that people have to make, even in 4e there’s too much referring to the character sheet for rarely used powers, and reducing the number of dice rolls. It takes about 10 seconds to find, roll, and do the math on a single die. Powers with multiple attacks and multiple damage dice, which are pretty common, can easily take two minutes just to crank through. Thinking and remembering also add time, every situational modifier bestowed by a power or position adds another few seconds to the turn, and few minutes to the fight. Interrupt actions are even worse. I like big set-piece battles, and the interactivity of 4e turns, but they’re not suited for every situation. It’ll be interesting to see what the designers come up with to speed up play. This is really my biggest open question.

I’ll close with a quote from John Boyd, “The second O, orientation –the repository of our genetic heritage, cultural tradition, and previous experiences –is the most important part of the O-O-D-A loop since it shapes the way we observe, the way we decide, the way we act.” D&D has nearly 40 years of history. Pretending to be elves and casting magic missile on the darkness and unearthing horrors and then running away are part of our gaming DNA. The biggest reason why 4e failed was not that it was poorly marketed, but that it required a different orientation from gamers, one that they didn’t want to learn. Hopefully, people wiser than me are figuring out what the D&D player’s orientation is, and designing rules that work with it, instead of fighting against it. If they can do that, everything else from the modular rules, to tactical depth, to combat speed, will fall into place.

D&D: Negotiating for Fun

D&D designer Monte Cook has been posting some interesting, if somewhat incomplete articles about the game design process about running the game, mostly focusing on the opposition between complete rules—a kind of fantasy physics—and DM adjudication. Working off of his ideas, I would like to develop my own theory of what pen-and-paper RPGs are actually about, and how we might go about improving gaming. But first, Monte Cook:

What's the Dungeon Master's real role? I've asked people that before, and to my dismay, I sometimes get back answers like, "He rolls for the monsters." I say "dismay" because the DM is so much more than that.

Others would argue that the DM's role is to act as a sort of mechanic, tending to the machinery of the game. The game system codifies and systematizes so much that there is little need for adjudication on the DM's part, only the occasional interpretation. This has been true for so long that the D&D culture has changed slightly, to the point where many think of DM arbitration as a bad thing. If the DM needs to make a judgment call, either something has gone terribly wrong with the game or the DM is overstepping his bounds.

Still others might claim that the DM is a storyteller. While being a Dungeon Master is a wildly creative enterprise, the idea of "DM as storyteller" gives me pause because, in truth, the entire group is the storyteller. The DM creates a world and characters and plots, but the story doesn't get told until everyone at the table gets involved.

I've always liked to look at the DM as the conduit between the players and the fantasy world. He is their eyes and ears, describing what they see, and he is the arbiter of what they can and cannot do to affect the (unreal) world around them.

Maybe the DM is all of these things.

I share Monte’s dismay that the idea the DM simply “rolls for the monsters”, or that RPGs are about story-telling. Neither of those conceptions fit my experiences of what RPGs are. It’s true that the DM rolls for the monsters and maintains the mechanics of the game, but this doesn’t begin to approach the creativity of everything a DM actually does: from building the history of the world, to deciding what NPCs will say and do, or even selecting the monsters and obstacles ahead. Only the most rigorous, by-the-word-of-the-module DM could be considered a ‘game mechanic’ in the sense that Monte means.

Storytelling has also seemed to me a partial definition of what an RPG is. Yes, there are stories in RPGs, but compared to traditional literature, their plots and language aren’t particularly compelling or well developed. There’s a reason why hell is being trapped next to a nerd who won’t stop telling you about his D&D campaign. People do shared storytelling all the time; look at campers telling ghost stories around a campfire, or just a group of friends sharing anecdotes. But compare that to how action and narrative (who’s talking, what are they talking about) work at a campfire and at a game table, and there’s very little overlap. The biggest difference is that RPGs have rules. Even “Narrative” games, like Sorcerer and Dogs in the Vineyard, include a conflict resolution system based on the nature of the characters, and what is important in the story.

So now that I’ve laid out what RPGs aren’t, what are they? Anthropologist Annemarie Mol suggests that we should look at what actually happens at the game table to determine what games are. “It is possible to say that in practices objects are enacted. This suggests that activities take place—but leaves actors vague. It also suggests that in the act, and only then and there, something is—being enacted” (Mol, 2002, The Body Multiple). What follows is a fictional, but representative, transcription of a game session. (a better scholar would have actual data, but I’m several hundred miles from my game group.)


DM: The cavern path ends suddenly at a crevasse. The pit crosses the entire cave, plunging down into the inky depths below. You think you hear water running at the bottom, but it might just be echoes from the deep. What do you do?

Rogue: Can I jump across?

DM: The distance is a bit over 15’. You could probably make this long-jump, if you got a running start on a level field, weren’t carrying anything, and had a good night’s rest before. As it stands, with the uneven footing and the way your muscles ache after a day of exploring, it’s rather chancy. ((The GM privately knows that the Rogue needs to roll a 12 or above to succeed)).

Rogue: No thanks, I’m not jumping over a bottomless bit on anything other than a certainty.

Wizard: Can I use the Levitate Spell to float across?

DM: Did you prepare it?

Wizard: No, but you’ve let me use rare utility spells before without preparing them.

DM: True, but without that Water Breathing spell, you would’ve had to wait all day to check out the sunken wreck. Besides, you could have bought a scroll of Levitate back in town. The Mage’s Guild is there for a reason.

Wizard: Okay, fine.

Fighter: What do the stones on either side of the crevasse look like?

DM: They’re the eroded limestone of most of this cave, rough, and somewhat slick with moisture and
slime.

Fighter: So, lots of little holes and bits jutting out?

DM: Yes.

Fighter: Well, before I became an adventurer, I was a dwarf miner, so I know a lot about carpentry and bracing underground. That goblin outpost we took out back there had some bunk beds, so can we take the beds apart and use the plants to build a bridge?

DM: Hmm, I guess so, but that’ll take a few hours and make a lot of noise, do you want to risk it?

Cleric: I still have plenty of healing left, so we can handle a wandering encounter or two.

Group: Let’s do it!



So, what is going on here? You see a back and forth between the GM and the players, requests for information, various plans proposed, deemed unacceptable, and finally, a plan that succeeds. In essence, the shape of what is being enacted here is not a story, but a negotiation.

RPGs are a leisure activity, they’re supposed to be fun. Negotiating is often fun and exciting, but it can also be dull or frustrating. Negotiations fail when one or more of the parties are being unreasonable, and refuse to come to a compromise, and situations become boring when they are repeated ad nausea. The points of the rules in a RPG are to constrain negotiations, such that the parties are forced to be reasonable, and to provide a way to resolve common negotiations quickly.

Consider a standard RPG scenario, a hero trying to kill a monster with his or her sword. In a purely negotiated mode, the options of “you miss” and “you kill it” are not very exciting, and it’s easy for both parties to get deadlocked. The requests for further information (what kind of armor is the monster wearing), and bringing in further details to justify their position (I carry the legendary blade of my ancestors, this monster has many hearts and does not die easily) are up to the judgment calls of possibly unreasonable GMs or players, and for something that comes up frequently, reiterating all the details is time consuming, and rewards people who can spend five minutes describing how “my flashing riposte from en quarte shatters the foe’s guard, as I drive home with the ensorcelled point of my elf-crafted rapier etc. etc.” The rules condense this whole negotiation into “roll dice, compare to target number, succeed or fail.” It is fast and it gives fair and consistent results.

Now, return to what makes a game fun. This is ultimately highly subjective, but pretty much every RPG is based around a number (hitpoints), and the idea that the game is over when that number reaches zero. In every encounter, you’re wagering your character against the chance of death and the rewards of victory. It’s like roulette, or poker, but with your character as the stakes. Good games you plenty of options for changing the stakes, for deciding how much you’re willing to wager on this spin of the dice, and whether the resources you’re using now might be better saved for later. For example, in D&D 4e any given attack can be a standard At-Will, a more significant Encounter power, or an awesome Daily. The amount of offensive firepower a party uses is balanced against their willingness to take damage, and their endurance in hit points and healing surges. Yet, many powers reset at the end of the encounter or the end of the day, meaning that losing a wager doesn’t permanently weaken your character, as say, single use magic-items might. Good rules make this process of wagering resources to achieve outcomes exciting and decision-provoking.

A strong set of rules also supports negotiations outside the narrow framework of a combat encounter, by differentiating characters, and giving them narrative resources to draw upon (like our dwarf ex-miner). This kind of negotiation is often what people mean when they talk about “real roleplaying”, and what it means is the mutual enactment of a negotiation about a set of characters, their histories and personalities, and the world that they inhabit. The common GMing adage to never say no, but rather say “Yes, but…” is another facet of a negotiated world. Saying “No” closes down the negotiation, saying “Yes, but…” continues the game. Good rules allow for fun and interesting negotiations, bad rules foreclose them.

From a more distant level, the story of a given campaign is also a negotiation—defined as “the navigation of a series of obstacles” as opposed to a “dialog between two or more parties.” This is the nature of the game, of what is actually enacted at the table. Traditional games are very much about a series of victories and set-backs, indie games might have a broader set of outcomes, but a problem-solving orientation is at the core of RPGs.

And finally, there is the meta-negotiation about what a given game contains, what it is about, and what goes on at the table. Players bring their characters, with some number of ‘hooks’ to link into the game. The GM creates a world, and a plot that hopefully engages the players. Everybody must come to an agreement about what counts as acceptable table behavior, or else the game will fail.

In short, the rules of the game serve as the fulcrum between negotiating and wagering activities. The art of playing RPGs is the art of being a good negotiator; both by achieving your own ends and helping others achieve theirs. The art of game design is to create a fun system of wagering that does not infringe upon negotiation.