Action Point Mistakes

In the game I am currently DMing, I decided to use Action Points. In previous games I had tried them and used the variants found in Unearthed Arcana. I found them to be massively overpowered and wanted to change them to something that PCs could use to keep from dying. So I made the following ways to spend them:

1) A single point adds a d6 to a roll.
2) Two points can be used to recover a spent ability like a spell slot.
3) Three points can be used to negate a critical. A critical instead becomes a normal hit.
4) Four points makes a save.

The point of these changes was to increase the survivability of the players, but in retrospect I feel they were a mistake. The ability to spend 2 points to recover an ability proved to be a problem because not every daily usage class ability is even. Extremely powerful use per day powers could be whipped out too regularly. Once the cleric gained Heal he was essentially unkillable as long as he had Action Points. He could make any save that would take his ability to cast a spell and he could cast a Heal if he took a lot of damage. The only way for him to be beaten was to really kill him in a single round.

Also the characters essentially became immune to save or die abilities. It was my intention that these kind of powers not decimate the characters with a few bad rolls, but these horrible abilities essentially became a non threat. Spell casters became much less of a threat than melee types.

So in retrospect I would not use this system again. I had the following idea that I think I may try next time I run a game. You can add 1d6 to a roll by spending 1 point. After that if you wish you can add another 1d6 by spending 2 points. And then another with 4, 8, 16, and so on. Of course, I would probably use this in conjunction with changes to death effects that I mentioned in a previous post.

One of many concerns about 4e...

Disclaimer: I haven't actually played 4e yet---just read the core books and FR Campaign Setting/Player's Handbook.
I think you all know about my views on 4e, so I will not go into them here on Will's Blog---except for this one point.
Teleportation...
I am not sure how/why this happened, but 4e seems to allow virtually EVERYONE access to some type of teleportation. So many feats/powers/PC Paths provide teleportation abilities that it is daunting.
Firstly---from a role playing aspect---it really stretches the willing suspension of disbelief. I have always held that Teleportation is related to magic---but when it gets lumped in with mundane abilities and classes, it looses its flavor. If a fighter in full plate can teleport 3 squares in a turn... it just seems a bit silly.
Second---I think it would turn roll-playing combat into a logistical nightmare. If everyone can teleport, then having toe-to-toe encounters gets less likely (which would be a shame both for flavor and expediency of combat). Also---when PC's and DM's have many, many options for movement---combat can get veeeerrryyy sloooowwww. 'Hmm maybe I will move here and attack, or jump over there and attack, or over there... Hmm...'
Anyway---as I have said I haven't actually sat down for a session of 4e, and the reality may be very different---but this is one issue with 4e that really stuck out for me as odd and poor game mechanics.

Resource Management

It may sound a little strange, but one major aspect of D&D is resource management. When you engage in battle you use spells and other powers and lose hit points. During the battle you have to decide what abilities you want to use. Many of these abilities when used can not be used again, like a spell slot. After the battle you have to decide what you want to do based on what abilities you still have access to. This whole resource management aspect is a major part of D&D. So it is important to examine how this resource managment affects the game. What does it add to play? What does it take away?

Typically adventures are broken down into periods between long rests. A long rest is basically a full night's sleep. Each period between long rests is typically broken down into encounters. So there are basically 3 types of resources: resources you regain after resting for the night, resources you regain after an encounter, and resources that when used are gone permanently. One of the great limitations in the design of 3.5 that was carried on to 3.75 was ignoring resources you regain after an encounter. This one a major design improvement added in 4.0 and using that aspect in previous editions could be a great improvement. Technically there are also resources that are handled over multiple days like hit points, ability scores that have been damaged, disease effects, rare class/item abilities that are used on a per week/fortnight/month/et cetera basis rather than a daily basis. But for the most part the three categories I mentioned are good for examining resource use.

So why do we have daily resources? Wouldn't it be nice to start every encounter with full resources. You would never have to leave a dungeon right before confronting the horrible cult leader about to sacrifice the innocent girl because you used up resources on the minions. Hard encounters at the end wouldn't be harder because you had a hard time dealing with previous encounters. But what do we give up? If every encounter is met by the players with the smae resources they will all have to be closer in difficulty. The minions and the cult leader will have to be roughly equal in difficulty since the players will hit them with the same resources. You would lose the ability to whip out some super special ability for hard fights, or even some moderately special ability. For some out of combat abilities it would get silly. For example, knock and teleport. If you had those without any daily limit locks and travel would instantly become a non-issue. So it is clear that having daily limits on abilities is a good thing.

So I mentioned above that I thought resources that recover after an encounter were a good idea. What are the advantages and disadvantages? The advantage is having resources you can use in an encounter without having to worry about saving them. For example, you have a wizard who either blows his abilities on an easy encounter because otherwise he would not be doing anything or he simply does nothing. If you have many encounters lined up for whatever reason, most likely plot reasons, resource users like casters tend to have trouble. It would be useful for all classes to have meaningful things they can do in an encounter without having to worry about gimping themselves later on.

One of the disadvantages of encounter based resources that I touched on earlier is that they don't work well for non-combat powers. Fourth edition solved this by completely separating out combat and non-combat powers. And non-combat powers all use permanent resources instead of daily resources. Non-combat powers can't be used in combat and encounter powers can only be used onve every 5 minutes. This, in my mind, is horrible. It limits things significantly. The use of a non-combat power could easily be a part of combat like casting Knock on a locked door or setting or some sort of defensive ward as warriors hold off a orde of goblins. And the use of encounter powers outside of combat is also limited. What if I want to use an ice spell to cool a red hot floor so I can pass. Well, unless your at-will power is cold, you can't do this either.

So recognizing that encounter based resource work well for some things but not for everything, how would I try and make 3.5 better. I would try to include limited encounter based powers. For example, you could split a wizards spells into a class that recovers after every encounter and a class that is used up. Or maybe you could have some percentage of a wizards spell be recovered after every encounter. You could recover 50% of all the combat slots you used. One concern is that this tends to make spell casters much better by removing some of the limitations, but this change wouldn't make them more powerful within a combat, just more useful across multiple combats.

Another issue is healing. Healing is kind of both combat and non-combat so how do you handle it. Well, realistically most 3.5 D&D parties will stock up on cure light wounds and even lesser restoration wands and will solve between combat healing. Only low level parties are limited by healing, and in this case they are massively over-limited. A kobold gets a lucky shot in and your group has to retreat and abandon those kidnapped townsfolk. In my mind it would be fine to say that a cleric can fully heal you between combats. In medium to high level games characters can do that with wands anyway. In low level games it makes continuing past more than one or two encounters possible.

In fourth edition, they introduced the concept of 'milestones'. You get a milestone for every two encounters you complete. In my mind this is potentially a very useful mechanism that was only minorly used in 4.0. What if you introduced this mechanism into 3.5 and said that characters could spend milestones to regain certain abilities. Maybe a caster could recover their level in spell levels for each milestone. A Barbarian could get back a rage at the cost of a milestone. I think a mechanism like this would be a good way to even out the parties power level between encounters and allow them to go longer without being forced to engage in a plot disrupting break while still having the basic limitations that are in place.

Since resource management is such a big topic in D&D I will probably write more on this subject later and may flesh out a 'Milestone Reward' system that would award spell casters with more durability and would reward non-spell casters with something like special stunts they could perform.

Encumbrance

One of the least actually tracked things on a character sheet is encumbrance. In D&D, a character is limited to carry a certain amount of gear based on their strength. Carry too much gear and you start suffering from penalties. In practice what happens is this is largely ignored except for perhaps character creation or when the character wants to haul away something especially large. Eventually the players will acquire Bags of Holding and the whole encumbrance issue is ignored. Fourth edition is particularly good about this and allows bags of holding to be very easily created at low levels.

Encumbrance is a kind of book-keeping thing that computers are actually very good at. It is interesting to look at how computer games have handled this. Games basically use the idea of 'slots' or 'weight' with the majority seeming to lean towards slots. Some games do away with carrying limitations altogether and characters can carry as much as they want without limit. When 'weight' is used it magnifies the importance of strength and penalizes weak characters in often unplanned ways. For example, a strong character can carry plenty of magic potions while a weak wizardly type can't. Another way to model encumbrance was slots. Each item could take one or more slots. When items took multiple slots the effort of encumbrance also became one of moving items around to maximize space.

Inventory management is typically not one of the more enjoyable aspects of the game. So should you play with encumbrance at all? Should you make it so that your players quickly obtain magic items that nullify the issue of encumbrance? Or should you track every pound so that when a character loses strength from some effect then are also hindered in terms of movement?

The reason I was thinking about encumbrance is because it is can be greatly improved by a computer progam managing it. Otherwise it is too much a pain in the ass. Often what happens is that players don't even keep track of who is holding what. When character X is swept away by a river they all assume that he wasn't carrying any treasure at all. When Y is hit by a Ray of Enfeeblement you either spend a few minutes figureing out what they are actually carrying and how much it ways or you just skip it due to the hassle. Another hassle is figuring out how much stuff weighs. If you figure encumbrance precisely you have to put a weight to every objet the characters might pick up. How much does a silver crown weigh? How much does a platinum sceptre weigh?

But it is worth tracking at all? Or should you just give the players unlimited carrying capacity either by just ruling it or by letting them have bags of holding? What does encumbrance add?

One thing is that it limits what they carry. I have noticed that many players carry around two sets of armor. One as a set they can sleep in, their 'pajamas'. Also players will often gather the weapons of fallen foes. They just defeated 20 well-armed warriors and they will want to collect and sell their gear. Using encumbrance helps to limit this craziness. Encumbrance also comes into play with strength draining effects. If you can produce numbers easily it is cool to say that a character becomes encumbered, but can avoid a penalty by tossing away his bag of treasure. More precise encumbrance tracking also leads to knowing who carries what. Often in combat the players will suddenly want to pull outsome potion or scroll, but may not have divided stuff up. Or if a player if forced to abandon equipment you need to know what he had and what the others had. Encumbrance can also be a plot point. I remember in one adventure my party discovered a vast treasure trove in a hidden valley. It was so vast that we couldn't carry it away. We ended spending a great deal of it on teleports to get it all out. We ending up leaving the copper and silver since it just wasn't worth it.

Some day I would like to whip up some javascript to handle encumbrance easily. If I had this I would still want items like bags of holding in my game, but I would set it up so that item retrieval from such a bag was time consuming. That way the character could make choices about what was going to be available in battle without having to worry about total encumbrance so much. Without this though, I don't see too many problems with the 4th edition answer to encumbrance, easy to obtain bags of holding that let you draw out anything easily.

Death

Fierce battles are a standard part of RPGs. These battles are often difficult in order to make the game fun and challenging. In order to add the element of danger and risk it is possible for the characters to lose, and typically losing means death.

In 3.5 D&D, you can die from hit point damage or from "instant death" effects that typically involve a saving throw. Death from hit point damage occurs when you are at -10 hit points. At low levels this means that death is rare because most hit will not drop you over 10 hit points. Also large area of effect attacks are rare and will not tend to finish off the dead. But as you reach mid levels, area of effect attacks and hits that do over 10 points of damage are common and death from hit point damage becomes common. Once dead you can be brought back by a 9th level cleric via Raise Dead. It costs a lot of money and the raised character loses a level. It is a fairly significant penalty. Eventually at 17th level a cleric can use True Ressurection that brings a character back without level loss, although the money cost is still significant. One of the basic game effects is that as characters become more powerful they also tend to die more. At low levels death is a serious thing, while at high levels it becomes less serious, but much more common since damages go up and often monsters have to kill a character in order to take them out of the battle since healing can easily bring back fallen but non-dead characters.

In Paizo's 3.75 attempts are made to make dying a little more difficult as well as making the penalty for death less severe. Instead of -10, a character dies at -10 or negative their constitution, whichever is less. This makes it a little harder to die, but not by a huge amount. The more substantial change is the essential removal of the death penalty. Instead of losing a level the character gains negative levels. These negative levels can be then removed by further spells. The effect is that while casting the spells to bring someone backs get slightly harder and more expensive the huge penalty for dying is gone.

In 4.0, they make dying much harder to do and much easier to come back from. Instead of dying at -10 or negative your constitution you die at negative half your hit points. But this is balanced out by the fact the healing, while easier to get in 4.0, is much more limited. In 3.5 a cleric can hit a dying character with a Heal spell and bring them to full. In 4.0 healing is based on percentages and most heals heal you a straight 25% of your health. Also while a high level 3.5 healer can pump out very large amounts of healing, in 4.0 there are more limits on the number of heals you use during an encounter and a total cap of how much healing a character can receive. In 4.0 it is possible to be out of the combat without being dead as compared to 3.5 where those brought to negatives are extremely easy to bring up with a little bit of healing. Another key aspect of 4.0 is that save or die effects are largely removed. Effects like this still exist, but are replaced with the effects that allow multiple saving throws. For example, a medusa's gaze only has a 12.5% chance to turn you to stone even if you do the equivalent of failing your 3.5 save. And you also get 3 rounds to try and save yourself from this gradual effect. Being brought back from the dead is also fairly easy in 4.0. Any character can get the spell to raise the dead, although some get it more easily than others, and you do not need a cleric. It costs money, but there is no experience loss.

Hero System does not really deal with death. You can die, but getting knocked out is much more likely. But Hero is much more of a toolkit than a fully balanced game and whether a character is allowed to create a healing power or even a raising power can drastically effect how the game plays out.

In MMORPGs, death is common. It is typically easy to die and any penalty is very minor. In World of Warcraft, hitting 0 health means death. No negative buffer, such a buffer would be meaningless given the prevalance of healing in that game. Death involves having to run back and taking some damagae to your equipment. However, the game is designed so that for most of the interesting encounters death takes you out of the battle.

In fiction, death is rare. Because there is no real risk like in a game, the heroes don't tend to die. In the few cases they do die and come back, it is never an easy or simple process and typically the story revolves around it.

So what is the purpose of death in a RPG? Well, it is a tactical element. It is a way to remove a character from battle. It is also a penalty for losing. Your character's life is what you risk when you go and adventure. It can also be a story element. In general I think death has one major positive effect in the game and one major negative effect. The positive effect is removal from combat. Characters being taken out of combat makes combat more dangerous and more interesting. It gives the sense that you are losing or that the battle is close. The negative effect is mainly a story effect. If death is essentially a fine you have to pay it loses meaning. It also has effects on the game world. It being brought back from the dead is just a matter of cash won't the rich constantly be bringing themselves back? Murder mysteries and assassinations need special interventions to make them interesting or else they will be solved with a simple spell. In terms of modeling fiction easy resurrection is a total failure.

So how should death be handled? Im my opinion, it should possible to be taken out of combat, but it should be very difficult to actually die. Resurrection should not be something easy or trivial. Fourth edition D&D does this pretty well. It allows for a condition that is out of combat but not dead. In 3.5 and 3.75 this condition is there for low levels, but quickly disappears as injuries drop you to death more easily and heal spells can easily pull you out of this condition. In these editions you have to be killed in order to really take you out of combat. You reach a situation where as DM you are forced to make monsters attack unconscious characters because those characters can so easily be brought back up with healing. Both 3.75 and 4.0 both made dying harder and resurrection easier. But in my mind you really only need to do one of these things. If dying is rare, ressurection can be rare also, or if resurrection is easy then dying can happen all the time. I favor the first case.

To fix the issue of frequent death one possible solution is to extend the out of combat but not dead state. One way is to extend the range you can have negative hit points like what 3.75 did. But with save or die effects and large heals this is only a minor patch. Another possibility is to introduce a kind of near death condition. Once a character has lost all their hit points or been hit by a save or die spell they could enter a near death state. Maybe in this state healing has much less effect and can really only prevent death. Or maybe once you are given positive hit points you must still spend a certain number of rounds stunned or nauseous before you can fully act again. If it required 3 rounds of no actions and 3 rounds of only a move action before a character could participate in combat again, you would have the aspect of a character being taken out of battle without them actually being killed. This mechanic could then be toyed with by other mechanics. You could have spells that specifically removed this near death condition. You could have feats that allowed you to recover from it quicker or maybe allowed you to survive in it longer than normal.

Once dying becomes hard, you can make resurrection more difficult and more of a story element. You could require resurrection to include a trip into the underworld to bring back the dead. Perhaps the characters must fight an underworld guardian in order to free their friends soul. Very Greek mythology. Or maybe to bring a soul back you must perform some sacrifice, perhaps a life given willingly or some pledge to complete a quest. A kind of holy justice motif. Or you could have something more horror movie-ish. When you bring back the dead you rip a hole between the world of the living and dead and resurrection will also spawn undead, perhaps powerful undead. As such resurrection would normally be completely forbidden and not something you could just pick up at your local church.

ALTERNATE RULES FOR 3.5 and 3.75
When you are at negative hit points you are unconscious and you lose 1 per round until you are at negative half your total hit points. If you are healed magically, someone with the Heal skill spends a full round and makes a check, or if anyone spends 3 full rounds tending you you stop losing hit points. If you reach negative half your total hit points, you get a single fort save (DC ??). If you fail you are dead. If you make the save you are alive but comatose. Any damage will instantly kill you.

Once you go below 0 hit points you gain the condition Half Dead. If your hit points are made positive you spend 3 rounds stunned and 3 rounds nauseous. Only spells and effects that specifically remove Half Dead will shorten the duration of this stunning and nausea. Once you hit negative half your hit points, if you make your save you are Near Death. Near Death is like Half Dead, but requires 10 rounds of stunned and 10 rounds of nausea. If a character is Half Dead or Near Death with positive hit points and they go negative and then positive again they total rounds of stunned of nauseous get reset, but never reduced.

All "save or die" abilities are changed so that they have a damage with them. A successful save indicates that you take the damage. A failed save indicates that you are reduced to 0 hit points regardless of your total and then immediately take the damage. All "save or death-like-effect" abilities like being turned to stone, have an intermediate effect. The intermediate effect takes affect after the first failed save. The character has one round suffering the intermediate effect and then they get to make another save. If they fail again they take the full effect.

All spell effects that bring characters back from the dead no longer cause level loss, but act as a summoning spell four levels higher that either summons undead or other-worldly guardians that as hostile to the caster. Or the caster and perhaps some other are effected by a Quest/Geas spell as determined by the DM. Raised characters start in a Near Death state.

Balance

I am guessing that one of the big goals of 4th edition was balance. With so many people making new classes, feats, spells, and so on and with the marketing model based on that, it became very difficult to maintain balance in third edition. So much so in fact that the Paizo 3.75 greatly enhanced the base class to keep up with all these new super classes that were out there. With 4th edition classes are much easier to compare.

But why is balance important? In a game like World of Warcraft balance is vital because you have PvP. It is also important because you want to have an even spread of classes and not to overload on one class. These issues DO NOT apply to D&D. The chief issue of balance for a D&D game is one character hogging the spotlight all the time. However, having the spotlight sometimes is fine.

As I noted in my previous post it is easier to balance across multiple encounters than within each encounter. Rogues may eclipse a fighter in damage, but against constructs the fighter eclipses the rogue. Both may do more damage than the archer, but against a flying foe the archer shines. The rogue may be virtually powerless against undead although the cleric may shine in this situation. In 4th edition the goal of making every character useful in every situation and every character having a similar playstyle actually makes the the issue of balance much more important because the more powerful character will most likely be more powerful in every situation.

The approach is balance taken by fourth edition was to make all the classes have the same number of powers. So now when you balance something you can directly compare individual powers. Comparing a 3.5 fighter to a 3.5 mage is hard because their is no way to easily compare them. But comparing two 4.0 powers isn't that difficult. When something that isn't balanced comes up it is more likely to be a specific ability and not a suite of abilities. This seems like a reasonable approach. But it actually makes balance much more important and much harder to do.

If you can make precise comparisons, then one abilitiy is actually going to be better. If you can't make comparisons it is because you can't actually compare. If you can't really compare two things they are so different that one can't be clearly considered better. It is hard to compare mage spells, warrior power attack, and rogue sneak attack because they are all very different and useful in different situations and that is good in my opinion.

Balance in a pen & paper game than a MMORPG because you can balance across the life of the campaign and not on a per encounter basis. A DM is also a live agent that can also tweak things to create more balance. MMORPGs don't have the luxury of having some intelligence come in and modify the world. In a pen & paper game with a DM, if a character is weaker you can place items that will help their particular abilities. If one character dominates the stage you can easily craft a situation where their abilities will take a backstage.

So I think the elimination of playstyle differences in D&D in order to achieve balance and usefulness in all situations for everyone is a flawed idea. Making D&D like a MMORPG because MMORPGs are popular ignores some of the great strengths that D&D has over these games. In my mind a DM is always going to be the true arbitor of balance and the rules will take a backseat.

Of course, it is nice when the rules are fairly balanced and a DM shouldn't have to do major rules modifications to achieve balance. Crap like 'Greenbound Summoning' from the Forgotten Realms rules is obviously broken and should have never been included. But you shouldn't rip apart a game for balance reasons.

Everyone Useful?

One shift in D&D from 3.5 to 4.0 is the idea of having everyone be useful. In 3.5 some characters aren't very useful in many situations. The classic example is a rogue. Many creatures such as elementals, constructs, undead, oozes, and so on are immune to the rogue's major offensive power, sneak attack. So when battling these things rogues aren't very useful, but in other situations where a rogue can bring his sneak attack into play they can do devastating damage. There are numerous examples of this and in general many characters will have situations they excel in and situations they do poorly in based on their character abilities.

In 4th edition they worked to make everyone useful all the time. There will still be times when some characters do better, but things are much more uniform and even. They might have been modelling this off of MMORPGs. In a MMORPG groups tend to be ever changing. Who you do a dungeon with depends on who is available at that time. If you know that a certain class would not be useful in a dungeon you would make the decision to not include people of that class. Imagine if you had a D&D dungeon that was full of undead but you picked characters like an MMORPG. You would never include a rogue in the party because they would be useless. Therefore, in a MMORPG you have to have every character be useful in every situation.

With pen & paper D&D games things are different. You have the same people every time. If there is a rogue in the party who isn't useful in one circumstance, it is okay because you know that in other circumstances they will be really useful.

So does having someone be useless in a fight add anything to the game? The 4th edition designers seemed to think it didn't. Lets look at what they did to sneak attack, the rogue ability that is so often useless in 3.5. They decreased the damage substantially, but they had it work on everything. So the rogue now never has his primary damage power completely disable, but he also loses those battles where he shines. Gone are the battles when the rogue is dishing out crazy amounts of damage. Making someone useless in some situations helps to balance out situations where they shine. And having battles where a specific character can shine is a good thing, but everyone should have their chance to shine. If you make it so everyone is useful all the time you also have to make it so that no one person can really ever stand out.

Ironically, by shifting the game to where everyone is useful in every encounter they made balance much more of an issue. If you aren't going to have battles where you shine or where you lag behind then instead of being balanced across multiple encounters you have to be balanced within every encounter. So balance becomes much more important and harder to do well.

Magic Items

The role of magic items has a lot of range. When I first started reading fantasy fiction I was struck by the power of the Sauron's One Ring and Elric's Stormbringer. But now when I play World of Warcraft with my twenty or so epic items it is different. I analyse each item drop to see if it would give me a slight boost.

Magic items in fiction and magic items in games are very different. Typically magic items in fiction are important and powerful. There are reasons for this. Authors don't want to linger over every item a hero might possess since they aren't really important to the story. The items that are important to the story tend to be powerful and mysterious since they are story elements. Also, in a story the protagonist is typically separated out by innate traits and not by a laundry list of magic items. This is a stark contrast to a game like World of Warcraft where a character is measured by the quality of his magical equipment.

Magic items in games evolved from their depiction in fiction but are now very different. As steps in this process I would say 1st and 2nd edition D&D is one step, 3rd and 3.5 are another step, 4th another step, with World of Warcraft a final step far removed from fiction. I will also mention Hero System which is kind of a sideways step that has some failings.

In the first editions of D&D magic items could be not be created. They were extremely powerful and often dwarfed the normal abilities of a character. Your character was often defined by what items they possessed and you had little control over what items these were, but you did have more of a feel that items were important and mysterious. But a character would usually have several items and they would not tend to be plot points and this begins the drift from fiction.

The third edition allowed for the creation of magic items. It also shifted power from items to the characters making characters less a list of items and more a list of abilities. But these two things removed the power and mystique of magic items. Another important factor was that the level range spread from maybe 1 to 12 to 1 to 20 and magic items became a factor in advancement and balance. A 16th level warrior with an 18 strength has +20 to hit and +4 to damage. The same warrior with a +4 weapon and a +6 belt of giant strength has +27 to hit and +11 to damage. So access to magic items became a significant balancing factor. A party with items might be able to face a certain dragon, but without them they would be slaughtered. So access to items becomes important.

Fourth edition made magic items even easier to create. It also made them less powerful and mysterious and more part of the equipment you needed in order to stay balanced with the kind of encounters you would face. In fourth edition magic item creation is so easy that characters will quickly have a magic item in every possible slot. The whole slot mechanism which actually started in 1st edition was designed to prevent characters from wielding a ridiculous number of items, notably amulets and rings.

World of Warcraft has items that have exact stats and you fill a certain number of slots with them. They can often make you powerful, but the mystique of the One Ring or Stormbringer is long gone.

Hero System has a very different take on magical items. Powers are represented by points and making a power into an item is a disadvantage on that power. Typically people don't 'acquire' power through items but rather create items with experience points. This is generally meant to model a super hero comic where Superman doesn't carry around Batman's utility belt.

So what is the right way to handle magic items? Should players have a magic item in every slot? Should they require these items in order to keep up with the challenges? How can we preserve magic items with flavor? Should every item have flavor and a story or is character with +1 armor, a +1 weapon, a +1 ring of protection, a +1 cloak of resistence, and a +1 amulet of natural armor a fine thing?

I think special magic items are cool. It is interesting if you give items neat little effects or interesting backstories. Having a +2 sword is okay, but what if one had that sword also bestow the Quick Draw feat. What would even be cooler is if you described it as a Sword of Bone that could merge with your body and would be drawn from your flesh whenever you needed it. It would go from being something that just affects your stats to a cool story point. Adding a little bit of flavor isn't too hard. For crafted items it gets more complex, but you can find ways to include flavor. Even mass produced item you can try to add flavor. For example, does every orc have a +1 magical axe, maybe the axes were fortified by the blood of an angel. If enough of the weapons are destroyed you can reclaim the angels blood and do something special with it. Or maybe each +1 ring is a wire fragment of some greater item. Or maybe just a plot point where all sorts of standard gear are marked with the mark of a famous spell forge that might come into play later.

So I am in favor of having magic items be interesting and not just standardized gear. Unfortunately in D&D the game is balanced so that you require items. Also NPC's also require items and characters frequently end up with piles of minorly enchanted junk. Fourth edition has alleviated this somewhat by balancing enemies so that they have innate bonuses that balance with the assumed magic items of the player characters, but that also means that characters and non-characters follow fundamentally different rules.

Also, crafted items are harder to customize since if you let players do it you have to worry about balance issues more. I will write another blog entry on item crafting and how you can add more flavor to it.

One possible way to change magic items is with non-positional slots. The slot mechanism descends from common sense. You can't wear more than one pair of boots. But it is more than just that since you can't wear magic boots with those magic socks. So the idea between slots is you can use a certain number of items and each item must be of a different type. But what if you had a system where you could use 3 magic items. You could have a wand and a pair of rings or a sword, shield, and armor. With this limitation magic items could be more powerful and more interesting. They could also have multiple effects. For example, when you grasp your druidic scimitar it covers your arm with bark giving you an effective +1 natural armor. Instead of having a +1 scimitar and a +1 amulet of natural armor you have something that does the same thing but is much neater and you don't have to worry about your neat item freeing up slots so the player can load up on items. A simple way to do this is to say that a character has 11 magic item slots (normally: weapon, shield, armor, gloves, belt, feet, head, neck, 2 rings, cape) and each normal item takes 1 slot. Then you can design items that take multiple slots. Or you could link it to level with access to more items as you go up. Artificer characters could have a power that simply allows them to use more items. Need a story reason behind this? Each magic item has an aura that interferes with other items so wearing to many interfering auras disable the magic item. You could have items that spefically didn't take slots. So a character wouldn't be wasting a valuable slot with a flavor item like a magic ring that keeps bugs away.

Another idea would be items that consume each other. The basic idea is that some or all items are crafted not just to have magical powers but to absorb them. Each time you have one of your items absorb another you mark down the value of the item absorbed. When the value is enough to upgrade your item you get to upgrade it. This idea has also been mentioned inside dragon with items being able to gain experience.

In a later blog post will give more ideas for non-positional magic item slot rules.

Statement of Purpose

Recently Wizards of the Coast released the fourth edition of D&D. I bought the core rulebooks immediately and what I found was very different than the 3.5 edition that I am currently DMing. I made the decision to keep my campaign using 3.5 and I suspect my campaign is going to go at least another year. Fourth edition took many drastic steps some of which are laudible while others... not so much. In general the game design appears to have been heavily influenced by MMORPGs. Since pen & paper RPGs and computer RPGs are fundementally different I think some of these changes are questionable. In response to unhappiness with fourth edition the company Paizo released what they called 3.75. This edition was essentially 3.5 with a lot of fixes.

I am an avid gamer and enjoy both pen & paper and computer RPGs of both the solo and online multiplayer variety. My first major game was D&D and I played both 1st and 2nd edition. Disatisfaction with the rulesets of D&D and a love of the superhero genre led me to the Hero systems game Champions. I GMed and played Champions for many years. But I also continued to play D&D because it was still very popular and easy to find people for. Eventually Wizards of the Coast released a 3rd edition of D&D and it was a vast improvement. It was soon followed by 3.5 which cleaned up many design mistakes that crept into 3.0. I have been both playing and GMing 3.5 for many years. I also tried the world of MMORPGs and ended up being a World of Warcraft player.

So the recent release of new D&D editions in combination with my own gaming background and my current DMing duties has gotten me thinking about game design. The purpose of this blog will be to jot down some of my ideas about game design. I will try and examine most issues from five perspectives: 3.5 D&D, 4 D&D, Hero System, World of Warcraft, and also from a fiction modeling perspective. Which gaming mechanism models books, movies, comics and so on well.