Milestone Recovery, my houserules

My latest houserule is as follows:

For every two combat encounters played through the players receive 1 Milestone. A Milestone can be spent to recover your level in hit points, heal 1 point of ability damage to every stat, and to recover 1/4 (rounded down) of daily abilities. Spells recovered are spell that you have already used and you do not get to select new spells. You can not go over what you would normally have and any going over your normal allotment is lost. The exception is spells. If you would recover a spell slot, you may choose to recover a lower level spell slot instead.

You may spend two Milestones to recover twice your hit points, heal 2 points of ability damage, and recover 1/2 (rounded down) of your daily abilities. Four Milestones recovers four times your hit points, 4 points of ability damage and all your daily abilities.

Milestones can be spent at any time. This includes in combat during another persons turn. For example, say that you are struck and reduced to -12 hit points. You may spend a Milestone and gain enough hit points to survivce. Or say that you are at -3 and stable for several rounds and you decide that you need to get back up. You can spend a Milestone, instantly heal and be ready to fight again.

Pros: This reduces the need for players to constantly retreat and rest. Many plots can be undermined by the players constantly being forced to leave and rest. Any kind of plot with urgency that involves multiple enocunters benefits greatly from this 'resting without resting' idea. Or any kind of plot that involves the players surviving some kind of gauntlet also benefits. It also gives the players more options and the ability to pull out more resources when needed. This system also doesn't sacrifice the whole resource management aspect of the game, just extends it.

Cons: The gives the players an extra reward for fighting encounters and may steer players towards fighting more battles that they could have otherwise avoided. Instead of confronting the enemy they might run back to a room of minions in order to get a Milestone. It also introduces the idea of fighting more battles in order to recover a specific needed ability. For example, the players teleport into a dungeon, fight some bad guy, but then need to fight more encounters to get the teleport spell back so they can leave. Also, players can do more out of combat type spells if they are fighting that day and that is a little weird. Being able to identify more items because you had several fights is odd.

The future: I initially envisioned this as getting 4 milestones every 4 encounters, but in making these rules I wanted to apply to 4th edition also where you might run more encounters. I also wanted it to be possible for players to run out of resources despite the Milestones even though it would be much harder. So I think I might change this to getting a 1/3 Milestone every 2 encounters which would be equivalent to a full rest every 6 encounters. The reason I started with a full rest every 8 encounters was to minimize any disruption to my game and get a sense of how this playtested.

Skill Points or a Bonus to Level

A long time ago at a gaming table far away, there were two kinds of systems. There was D&D which was thought of as a 'class' based system. Your abilities were defined by what class you were and howyou progressed through that class. In response to this rigidity there were 'skill' based systems. Skill based systems allowed you to buy whatever set of skills you wanted giving you more flexibility in terms of how you built your character. As game design evolved very few systems were completely class or skill based. D&D added 'proficiencies' and then in 3rd edition had a full-fledged point based skill system that was influenced by class.

The traits of a skill system were that you had a set of skill points that you could spend on skills and this skill spending was very separate from any kind of 'level' or 'class' notion. Third edition embraced this entirely although it gave a 'class' feel by giving different classes access to different sets of skills with out of class skills costing more. Fourth edition, however, took a step away from this system and became very level focussed. I think that one of the reasons for this was that skill selection was actually the most complex part of character creation. So in fourth edition you either have a skill or not. The growth of the skill is based on your level and not any points you decide to put in it.

So what is better, having a point system where characters can move around points and have greater flexibility or to have a flat bonus which is much simpler and requires less tracking. Well, let's take a quick look at how people spend their skills in 3rd edition. Most simple choose a set of skills and keep those at the maximum possible. Typically spreading out leads to situations where your skill can not really keep up and be meaningful. Skill difficulty rolls tend to be geared towards a character that has maxed out his skill. Also since many skills are used by the party as a whole, like a knowledge skill or a search skill, the only useful skill will be the highest one in the party. Of course, many skills are individual based such as Concentration, Tumble, and Climb for example.

Another thing to consider is that in 3rd edition some skills have diminishing returns at high levels. For example, if you have 16 points in Tumble you can tumble past two opponents without having to roll. If you have 23 points in Concentration you can defensively cast any spells. Appraisal is another example. But some skills require extremely high levels in order to be useful and don't have much use if you only have a few points, notably Use Magic Device.

So one thing that should be mentioned when talking about skills is rogues. First and second edition D&D mainly had the rogue as a utility character that dealt with dungeon hazards like traps and locks. They were the only ones that posessed several key skills. One unforunate thing is these editions was that they sucked at these skills at low levels and when they started to get good at them they were far surpassed by simple spells. In 3rd edition, with a full skill system rogues became the 'skill' characters (whereas wizards and clerics were spell characters and fighters were feat characters). Now rogues have evolved. Sneak attack can make them a potentially powerful role in combat. Rogues changed from a character focussed on dungeon hazards to a damage dealing role since many of the skills they have became less of a focus. Locked doors could be chopped down with an admantium axe or opened with a knock spell. Stealth was best achieved through spells. Although not D&D, I remember playing Neverwinter Nights as a rogue with my friend playing a barbarian. It took too long to deal with traps so they barbarian would just run through them all and them rest on the other side.

Anyway, most of my posts here have always sided on the side increased flexibility, but in this case I think I might lean towards either having a skill or not with no skill points. I used to love skill points because you could use them to customize your character, and I still feel that skill selection should be a part of your character development, but there are many other factors that give you much more power to customize your character. And frankly I feel that the headache of counting skill points outweighs the benefits of having fine control of your skills since most people just max out their skills.

Ok, so some quick problems with the 4th edition skill system are that picking up new skills becomes much harder and so does picking up new languages. The way 4th edition handled this was to make new skill acquisition and new language acquisition based on feats. The issue with this is that for the most part you will want to use your feats for other things. It is true that 4th edition feats tend to be much less powerful than 3rd edition feats, but I suspect that feats will climb in power as splat books come out and few characters will want to use them for feat acquistion.

XP Based on Level, a Failed Experiment

So one thing that 3rd edition introduced that was completely new was experience point bonuses based on the comparison of your level to the difficultly of foes you defeated. Both 3.75 and 4.0 both did away with it.

The reason it was introduced was because they wanted to give you an extra big reward for defeating things higher than your level and reduce the award for fighting weak things. Well the end effect was the same as having higher level monsters worth more and lower level monsters worth less and having sucessive levels take lots more experience.

One additional effect that some people liked was that a certain level of foe awarded no experience. So characters couldn't slaughter a herd of pigs to gain levels. Of course, this wasn't really a problem (like it would be in a MMORPG). DMs decide when and where to give experience. If a battle is completely one sided it should not be run as an encounter and if it is not run as an encounter you should not get XP. It should be handwaved away. For example, "On the road to Camelot, you encounter a handful of brigands, but hey have neither the skill nor equipment to challenge you and you disperse them with ease." Or perhaps, "Your band finds the orc village and demolishes it. The battle is so easy for you that you gain nothing from it but a handful of coins."

This shows one of the dangers of treating a pen & paper game too much like an MMORPG. You introduce unneeded complexity that is only necessary for an MMORPG that could easily handle the complexity behind the scenes.

Milestones in 3rd Edition, a Quick Fix

Okay, 3rd edition resource management is geared to have 4 meaningful encounters before being forced to rest. But guess what, a lot of times this shits on your plot. You have some sort of dramatic situation like saving a princess before she is sacrificed, but the players fight 4 encounters before the final battle to defeat the badguy and save the princess. So they leave to rest or they get their asses handed to tham because they have nothing left...

Well, since the game is geared to having 4 encounters then a rest, one solution is to give the players a free rest if they complete 4 encounters without forcing them to actually rest within the game story. Of course, this would get a little weird since battle #4 would be fought with very few resources and battle #5 would be fought with full power. But it is easy to even things out.

Ok, so here is the idea. Every encounter they earn a Milestone. Each milestone can be spent to recover 1/4 (rounded down) of the resources they would get from sleeping. Two milestones could get you 1/2 (rounded down) and 4 Milestones could give you full recovery. You could also spend those Milestones within a combat, maybe to save yourself. This would help alleviate the problem I mentioned in the previous paragraph since people would be spending Milestones in an uneven way.

One issue with this is spells. How do you handle clerics and wizards and those that have to choose a set of spells at the beginning of the day? Well one option is to allow them to choose any spells they could normally choose when resting. Another option is to only allow them to recover spells that they used. A third is to allow them to have any spell that they had memorized. The difference between the last two options is that if a wizard has a fireball memorized and has not yet cast he could not get another fireball in the first case, but could in the second.

So if you allowed in combat spending of Milestones there would be a danger. Spell selection is often a time-consuming process and high-level casters going through their list or even going through a pile of splatbooks to find the right spell for a situation could kill the pace of combat. But the idea of suddenly marshalling your resources and getting a few hit points back instead of dying or suddenly pulling a needed spell out in a dire situation does seem cool. So you could place limits on the selection such as the second option I mentioned above.

So one interesting question is do you allow them to go over? If a character has 4-4 spells and they use them up so that they have 3-1 and they then spend 2 Milestones do they go to 4-3 or 5-3? If you allowed this they would potentially be able to save up a lot spells and then go crazy in some battles. But is this really against what casters do anyway? It just extends it. Personally I would allow it only I playtested this system a little more...

Okay, a quick summary of what you get when you rest:
-You heal your level in hit points
-You heal 1 ability damage to each stat
-You regain your spells
-You regain any abilities with daily uses (like Barbarian Rage)

Save versus Attack Roll

One very interesting thing they did in 4th edition was to remove 'saving throws' and replace them with stat based attack rolls. So in 3rd you are comparing 1d20 + Base Save (as determined by class levels) + Stat Bonus + Random Feat and Magical Bonuses to 10 + Level Based Difficulty (spell level or half HD, actual very similar) + Stat Bonus + Feats and Magical Bonuses. So each factor has something on the other side that corresponds so you have the typical 1d20 > 10 roll. So instead of having the defender roll the 50% to be affected (with all other things being equal) you have the attacked do it. So to have the 4th edition attack roll behavior you add 10 to each saving throw, call it a defense and subtract 10 from every DC and have the attacker roll d20 and add in the DC.

One reason people might not like this is because it takes away the rolling of the dice. Players tend to like to roll dice. It gives them a feeling of involvement. When I GMed Champions we had many attacks that did around 10d6 damage. It became time-consuming counting up those dice and that was one major factor slowing down combat. So I made a handy little dice rolling application to speed the game, but my players weren't into it. They wanted to roll dice because it made them feel like they were in control of their fate. Most players attribute their rolls to either themselves or their dice and rarely to random probability. "I can't hit this guy!" "This die fails every time I need to make a save!" It sounds silly, but imagine playing the games craps where instead of rolling the dice you just read a display. It would be a very different experience and it would take away the illusion of control.

So if players like rolling dice and converting between +10 and +1d20 is easy you could easily switch to a system where players rolled all the dice. When they attacked they would roll an attack roll. When they were attacked by a monster they would roll a defense roll. When casting a spell they would roll a spell attack roll when being hit with one they would roll a save. The problem, you have to track player numbers and monster numbers in a slightly different way. But these numbers don't actually mix too much. A player tracks the numbers on his character sheet and a DM tracks numbers on monster statistics. Conversion is ridiculously simple since it is just subtract ten and add a d20 or vice versa.

One additional advantage I see to this is action points and die manipulation abilities. If you have action points that add a d6 to a roll or some luck ability that allows you to reroll then this allows those powers to be much more flexible.

PROS:
-Greater feeling of control
-Greater power and flexibility for 'die manipulation' type abilities

CONS:
-Two different ways to handle players versus monsters

So I guess this comes down to how hard it is to convert between adding 10 and adding d20. I don't think it would be much of an issue, because it happens when you are figuring out what to write down on your character sheet. If you got to rewrite the rules you could phrase things in terms of everything being an opposed roll where you add a bonus. Then, when you make the roll players add a d20 and monsters add 10.

Keeping Track of Things

Information can be stored in many ways and how you handle it is based on how you are going to use it. So in 3rd edition D&D you have basically 6 important numbers that you need to track. Your Armor Class, your three saves, you bonus to hit, and your damage. There are lots of ways to write this information down on your character sheet, and I've come across a few that I like that make things go easier.

First, I think breaking down a bonus is a good idea. It is always good to know what factors make your AC 24. THis will allow you to easily know how other factors will affect you. Does the +4 Deflection bonus from a spell add a full +4. You can search for what items you have that are affecting your AC or you could just check your AC line. So here is some possible AC information

AC: 25 (+1 Size, +4 Dex (+6 Limited by Armor), +2 Deflection from Magic Ring, +7 Magical Armor, +1 Natural Armor from Magical Necklace)

This makes it easy to see how other factors can affect your AC. Also you can put in things that may not affect your AC, but would if other factors changed. For example, say you have +3 Chain Mail and Bracers of Armor +3. The amor wouldn't help against Incorporeal attacks, but the bracers would. Another issue is named bonuses, you can explicitly say what bonuses have what names which makes stacking determinations easier. If you have all these factors listed out it is easier to see what your AC will be at any point. The same thing can be done with saves, and saves tend to be simpler.

I like to do hit and damage a little differently. I like the table design with each row being a different weapon and the columns being, Hit Bonus, Damage, Critical Info, and so on. I would probably add a 'break down' column to break down the hit and damage bonuses like I mentioned above for AC.

I used this (without the breakdown) for a long time. But I had a Dragonbane weapon, so I added another row for my main weapon that was "--Versus Dragons" so I didn't need to refigure things all the time. This was a really good strategy and I used this line of my table a lot more than a line for my backup handaxe or bow. So it is also good for people with options. For example, adding a line for "--Smiting" is useful. Or maybe you sometimes use a weapon one-handed or two-handed. If you have Power Attack you might want to put down your favorite power attack choices. If you regularly get certain magical buffs you might want to have a line that represents your bonuses when you have that buff. You could go overboard and you don't really want a huge table that you have to scroll through, but a mid or high level character should probably have at least 5 lines that represent the most common attack scenarios. This will reduce the math you have to do each time you attack and can help speed up the game.

Anyway, the general idea is that you want to arrange your characters information in such a way that it makes play easy. Doing this can make managing your character much easier. Remember that it is fine to repeat information in multiple places as long as things are clear and you prevent conflicting information.

Golden Ratio

No, I don't mean (a+b)/a=a/b. I mean the ratio of how many hit points a character has versus how much damage is done versus how much healing is done per round. You could think of this on a party basis or on a character basis. For ease, let's call the three numbers, H (hit points), D (damage taken), and R (recovering hit points). Balancing these factors has a lot of impact on the feel of the game.

Okay, let's look at H versus D. If H is much higher than D you have combats that will go on a long time. If R is also high dropping something will be difficult since after a long time a combatant can easily heal up all that damage. So if H > D then R will have to go down and healing becomes less important. On the other hand if D is higher then combats will be fast and combatants will easily be dropped so R must compensate. This leads to very swingy combat where large heals are crucial so without steady healing combatants will drop like flies.

Okay, now let's compare D versus R. If R > D then you have a situation where healing can outpace damage. It becomes difficult to drop a foe so it must be possible to drop a foe before they can get healed. So the H has to go down. Conversely when D > R, healing essentially just slows down D and it is still a race to see how runs out of hit points first instead of who runs out of healing.

So H versus R isn't too complex. When H > R you have unimportant healers and when R > H you have important healers.

So one issue is in a battle, what resource are you draining? Are you trying to reduce the number of hit points of your foe, to consume all their healing, kill them between heals, or simply have your damage outperform their healing?

Another thing to consider is that these values H,D,R may be different for characters and monsters. For example, monsters may not have the ability to heal and will instead have high hit points while players would have this ability giving the players an edge.

Let's look quickly at World of Warcraft cause many of these ideas and represented in that game. In this game for the characters R >H, meaning that healing is very important. A character with no healer backing him will die fairly quickly. Characters die because they either run out of healing resources, die too fast to be healed, or when D >R and they simply take too much damage for the high levels of healing to match. For monsters it is different, monsters in WoW tend to not be able to heal and often have very high hit points. So it is a struggle to slowly grind down a huge pool of monster hit points while using healing to keep your characters alive.

So how does D&D work? How does it change over levels? How did they change things in 4th edition? Let's look at why characters die:
1) They run out of healing resources
2) They are killed between heals
3) They take damage until they die and heals are only able to slow this process down

Case #1: Running out of healing resources.
Theoretically, D&D is structured so that this is rarely a reason for dying. You should be able to fight 4 encounters and all resources are daily and not encounter resources. So the only time you are supposed to run out of healing resources is when you have used up a lot in previous battles. Now anyone who has actually played 3rd edition D&D at moderate to high levels knows that this really isn't true. Battles can often consume you healing resources. At low levels this happens because you have very limited healing resources and at high levels you often have to churn out so much healing that you can quickly exhaust what you can do. What will typically happen is that one battle won't consume all your healing resources, but enough so that further battles are difficult because you simply don't have those resources.

Case #2: Killed between heals.
Typically you have only one or two healer characters and they may not be able to heal you or reach you for a heal. A lot of damage or a tactical situation can easily make this a possibility. This is possible because D > H and characters often face foes that can kill them in just a few rounds.

Case#3: Damage Taken Outpaces Heals
This also happens, but as healing becomes powerful it typically combines with case #1. You use up all your most powerful heals and your weak heals can't keep up. This situation increases as you gain levels since your weak heals can't keep pace with enemy damage while your strong heals can easily keep up.

So how do you want characters to fail? Which of these situations should be claiming characters lives? Well, in past posts I have always wanted to choose flexibility, and this is no different. You want to have players die because of all three of these situations. So in a way D&D is doing okay, but here is one thing I would change. I would make healing resources more encounter based that would help eliminate the vast divergence between battles where you have plenty of healing resources and those where you don't. Actually weakening the in combat healing, but making it so that you didn't need to worry so much about conserving resources would be useful in my mind. But you also want daily based resources as well. A lot of this has been mulled over in previous posts. This way battles can be about running down or outpacing healing resources without crippling the parties abilities to continue after the battle.

So where did 4th edition go? Well, they made the observation that only a few characters could heal and healing ending up dominating their actions. Those who could do a decent job healing alos were forced to do nothing but heal. Wizards also seemed to feel that healing was not fun job. So they made everyone capable of healing and somewhat reduced the importance of healing. I have not gotten a chance yet to play much 4th edition so I can't really say for certain how healing plays out but I am guessing that it shifts people dying from case #2 to case #1. It is fairly easy to heal significant amounts, but no healing remotely compares to the high level healing of 3rd edition. But the number of heals is fairly limited. Each character can use a healing surge once. Leader characters can allow a sizeable increase in healing, but resource wise I am guessing they can not keep up with damage. So R goes down and D goes down as well. So it becomes more about grinding up hit points faster than the other guy then round to round super-heals.

So is this good? Well, yes if you want healing to take more of a backseat role. So if you feel like you want this the steps of reducing the power of healing as well as reducing the specialized role of healer is probably what you want to do.

Some other approaches to the reduction of the healing role were used in the game Age of Conan. You could make all healing something that a healer does only a few times in combat. Then they would be able to do other stuff. For example, a healer would cast his heal spell. For the next 3 rounds everybody would heal 10 points, but additional castings of this spell would do nothing. Another technique was tying healing to damage. Certain characters healed their allies in an amount based on the damage they did. Another possible technique is using the encounter based mana points I mentioned in a previous post. Healers couldn't heal every turn since some turns would be spent getting mana back. The only problem with this is that healers wouldn't be able to cast non-healing spells while regenerating mana for healing.

Unified Powers Mechanic

So one of the major changes in the 4.0 rules is the creation of a single power mechanic. Every class has the same kind of number of encounter and daily powers. Each has a couple additional powers beyond these that give the class flavor. This differs from 3rd edition where there are different power mechanics. Spell casters have spells, barbarians have rages, fighters and rogues tend to have no limit on the powers they use.

So is a switching to a single mechanic a good thing? What are the advantages and disadvantages?

First I want to take a quick look at World of Warcraft. This MMORPG has essentially 3 power mechanics. They have a 'mana point' system where you recover mana points when not using them and you spend mana points to perform actions. They also have a 'rage' system where you acquire rage by doing and taking damage. You then spend rage like you would mana. The third system is 'combo' points. Certain classes have powers that cause targets to accumulate 'combo' points. These classes also have 'finishing moves' whose effects vary based on the number of combo points applied. In addition to these mechanisms all three systems include the notion of a cooldown. Once you use an ability you have to wait a certain amount of time before you use another ability and a certain amount of time before you use that particularly ability. D&D has seen some hints of cooldowns and mana points, but unfortunately I have seen very little use of rage or combo point mechanics.

So World of Warcraft, a much more balance conscious game than D&D, has managed to maintain multiple power mechanics so have differing systems isn't inherently unbalanced or anything. But obviously how these mechanics are designed can have a large impact.

One issue about the power mechanics in 3rd edition is encounter durability. Fighters and rogues generally have no abilities that are used up during an encounter. They just take damage that is fairly easy to heal between combats. Wizards and clerics, however, have no abilities that aren't used up during an encounter. Typically you run into a situation where a party has to decide whether to push on and the fighters and rogues are fine to push on, but the spell casters are begging to stop. This isn't horrible, but it is a notable outcome out these varying power mechanics.

Let's look at melee versus spells in another way. (I am ignoring other resourced effects because they essentially are like spells for the most part.) Imagine a 2D graph with the y-axis being how useful you and the x-axis being encounters. Melee fighters would be like a flat horizontal line. They have about the same use in each encounter. Spell casters would a a spikey line. For some encounters they would be more useful and for others they might be less useful. This isn't really a problem in my mind. If you get to shine sometimes and take a backseat other times it is okay, but what will often happen is that the spell casters will 'blow their wad'. They will be more focussed on being effective than on nebulous resource management issues. They will want to do useful things every round. So the graph will then have the spell casters well above the melee for early encounters and then well below it for later encounters. But at this crossing point the spell casters will want to take an extended rest.

I am kind of all over the place in this post, but I want to get back to the idea of a single unified mechanics for powers. I think it has advantages and disadvantegs. It makes your game less complex, but often complexity in the mechanics of a game makes the game interesting. Many D&D players actually enjoy the complexity of the game. But an overly complex game is also bad and can easily become slow and the pace suffers.

I think the problem with the single mechanic of fourth edition is that it is so frelling boring and simplistic. An interesting and flexible mechanic would have been great, but the universal mechanic is the so mindless. You have X powers you can each use once per encounter and Y powers that you can each use once per day. Each class actually builds on this a little built. Wizards actually get a little bit of choice, some abilities allow you to recover powers, but the fundamental mechanic is just ridiculously simple.

So I actually think a universal mechanic isn't necessarily bad, but it should be one that has more flexibility. Here is an example of one. You have 'points'. Using an ability costs a certain number of points. Different abilities cost a different number of points. You recover point either at the end of an encounter or at the end of the day. This gives you a lot more flexibility to have different classes handle the system differently. To go back to the warcraft example, wizards could recover points every round while a warrior might get a point every time he hits or is hit.

This post kind of mentally wandered, but I guess I just wanted to make the point in the first sentence of the preceding paragrah.

Durations!

One thing that 3rd edition simplified and 4th edition got rid of was durations. In 1st and 2nd edition each spell had a unique duration and a unique range. In 3rd edition that got rid of these fairly meaningless distinctions and basically gave spells one of four duration (round/level, minute/level, 10 minutes/level, and hour/level) and one of three ranges (close, medium, long). Fourth edition wanted to be even simpler and removed durations completely. Fourth edition replaced durations with several things. One is that most beneficial effects only last a single round. Negative effects last until the victim makes a saving throw. And some effects are maintained by spending a minor action maintaining them. Certain abilties like a 'stance' just gives a benefit the entire encounter.

So clearly 4th edition went to some effort to remove the tracking of durations. But is it worth it? The notion was that tracking durations was something extra you had to track in combat and that slowed things down. I use a javascript intiative tracking tool to track durations. It makes things extremely easy, but it also demonstrates some things. Any minute per level spell basically lasts the entire combat. The 10 minutes per level spells last for several combat and the hour per level spells effectively last the whole day of adventuring. And at a certain level the round per level spells usually last the entire combat. So what calls do I need to make. Because of my tracking tool tracking durations is easy. So the calls I need to make are whether a spell that they cast is still on for a later fight. Frankly I don't see these calls as particularly difficult to make.

So although I actually like the systems fourth edition uses to replace durations, I don't see durations as such a horrible thing. The only thing that irks me is one round buffs in 4th edition, but I suppose this forces coordination and teamwork since your buff only affects your allies and you want them to use their best attacks during that one round.

Residuum and Magic Item Crafting

The idea of crafting magic items has slowly evolved from 1st edition D&D. Originally, it was very ill defind and basically left to the DM. I remember having my wizard collect various bits of magical creatures he fought. It was a lot of fun to later forge rings of fire resistence from hell hound tongues I had gathered. In fact, this was the funnest item creation that I can remember in a game and I have had thoughts about how to bring more of this kind of thing into the game. Right now, magic item creation seems to be more focussed on reading through a boatload of supplements and dumping a pile of gold. Most of this reason for this is expediency. If you want your characters to be able to create items and not have that be the focus of the story it is easy to get into this situation.

Anyway, 3rd edition introduced crafting. You spent experience and gold in order to create items. I assume the idea behind experience was because they wanted item creation to involve a serious sacrifice, but as game experience showed that gold acquisition was the real limiting factor the whole experience thing was tossed out by both 3.75 and 4.0.

One thing I really don't like about crafting is that it can get flavorless. You simply expend time and money and you have an item. The alternative is that you add some requirements like possessing an outfitted laboratory or being able to buy rare ingredients. This is much cooler in my mind, but can often place unplanned limitations of item creation that is often required for balanced play.

So what do I like and dislike in various rules? I think abandoning experience costs is fine. I like the fact that 4.0 allows you to craft items quickly. Taking months to craft an item in 3rd could get irritating and limiting in terms of plot. I like the whole notion of Alchemical Reagents, Mystic Salves, Rare Herbs, Sanctified Incense, and Residuum introduced by 4.0. I liked the idea of deconstructing magic items in order to acquire their essence for use in crafting other items. Of course that may be cause I play World of Warcraft where this is common practice. Speaking of Warcraft it has a fairly nice crafting system where you need to purchase or acquire a list of rare materials and this can often be difficult or time-consuming. Unfortunately, such a system does not translate well in a pen & paper game.

The game Ars Magica used to have a system where you could find raw magic. Since the game was based around powerful wizards who could just conjure up gold the whole raw magic system was basically the treasure they could receive. I really like this idea. It combines well with a more fiction based concept of forging magic items from rare materials like a dragon's hide. Frankly, dragon's hide just being plate mail a druid can wear in 3.5 is kind of disappointing. It also is like the MMORPG way where some monsters may drop magical materials useful in crafting.

So going back to my old wizard who collected body parts of various monsters. I would institute a system where Residuum could be gathered from defeated foes or could be taken as treasure from interesting places. For example, if your adventure takes you into the heart of a volcanno you might be able to collect some of the primal energy of the volcanno to use in crafting items. This Residuum could also be 'typed', meaning that you would record where you got it. This typed Residuum could possibly have a greater effect when creating a magic item. Blood from a doppleganger might be more useful crafting a hat of disguise. Or the types of Residuum could have unforeseen effects on the item you created, to help turn items into possible story elements and interesting game effects. For example, suppose you craft your +3 Sword from the bones of demons, perhaps the sword retains some demonic properties and unnerves animals and children or something or maybe it drinks it the blood that it spills always remaining clean.

One effect from this is that more things will drop treasure. Sometimes it doesn't make sense for a creature to have treasure and a long string of these can cause the players to be unusually poor. But if Residuum can be taken from every creature then monsters always supply some form of reward. One danger in this is the possibility of killing massive numbers of weak creatures in order to harvest Residuum, but this could also theoretically be a story element. If you can gain 1gp of Residuum by murdering a farmer this opens the reason for bad guys to really be very bad....

Another part of item creation in 3.5 is feats. I think the dizzying array of feats required is kind of annoying. In one game I replaced these feats with 3 feats in a chain. If you have the first you could make items up to a certain powerf level and subsequent feats allowed you to create better items. I felt like this worked much better than having crafters who could make wands but not rings. But the total removal of feat requirements is fine by me also.

Varying requirements was something also removed by 4th edition. In 3rd edition to create a ring of feather fall you needed to be able to cast feather fall. Fourth edition did away with this. Anyone could craft anything. Frankly I like the requirements. It makes the act of creation seem more story like and less like buying something at a shop. You need to actually do something or have some power to create an item.

One thing I tried in the past was to have a skill roll involved in magic item creation, but I wasn't crazy about how it turned out. The expenditure of materials made it too much of a big risk and players became very cautious.

So that is what I like and dislike. I might make a more full-fledged system later on.

Skill Reduction

I remember the first time I realized that more skills wasn't necessarily better. I was looking at a Rolemaster expansion that adding 'skiing' as a skill. I realized that no one would ever take this because there were so many other skills that were more important and despite the number of skills growing the number of skill points did not. Defining skiing as a skill simply made it so people couldn't ski.

So both 3.75 and 4.0 D&D have reduced the number of skills. I want to quickly recap what they did and maybe make a few comments about what they did.

3.75
1) Combine Jump, Tumble, and Balance into a new skill Acrobatics
2) Combine Concentration and Spellcraft
3) Combine Forgery, Dechiper Script, and Speak Languages into a new skill Linguistics
4) Combine Gather Information with Diplomacy
5) Combine Hide and Move Silently into a new skill Stealth
6) Combine Listen, Spot, and Search into a new skill Perception
7) Combine Open Lock and Disable Device
8) Remove Rope Use

4.0
1) Combine Tumble, Balance, Escape Artist into a new skill Acrobatics
2) Combine Climb, Jump, Swim into a new skill Athletics
3) Combine Listen, Spot, and Search into a new skill Perception
4) Combine Hide and Move Silently into a new skill Stealth
5) Combine Disable Device, Open Lock, and Sleight of Hand into a new skill Thievery
6) Added Endurance
7) Turn Gather Information into Streetwise
8) Turn Sense Motive into Insight
9) Turn Knowledges into 4 Fixed Skills: Arcana, Religion, Dungeoneering, Nature and merge in Survival and Handle Animal
10) Remove Appraise, Concentration, Craft, Decipher Script, Disguise, Forgery, Perform, Profession, Spellcraft, Use Magic Device, Use Rope
11) Speak Languages and Ride moved into Feat mechanics

So the two systems share some changes. Both consolidate skills into Stealth and Perception. Both turned Open Locks and Disable Device into a single skill. But fourth edition went much farther. Part of this is because they removed many game mechanics like disrupting a spell or using a magical device that you normally wouldn't be able to use. They also got rid of the 'open' skills like Knowledge and Profession. These skills had a specific component i.e. Knowledge Engineering or Profession Blacksmith. This makes them a little harder to handle because written adventures can't really take these into account well. They are more for open-ended games where a character wants to be good at something. But for something like a defined skill challenge these don't fit in. For example, you are trying to get some information from a blacksmith and a character wants to use their Profession Blacksmithing to form a bond with the blacksmith. This is perfectly reasonable, but it is difficult to write the skill challenge or even balance the skill challenege unless you know what skills a character possesses. Having open-ended skills is an entry point for chaos!

So are open-ended skills bad? I don't really think so. I think they add flavor, but they should always be neat little additions instead of game required skills. In D&D Knowledge (Arcana), Knowledge (Religion), Knowledge (Planes), and so on became standards. I don't think there should be standard skills like these. These skills should be moved into full-fledged skills like in fourth edition. But this doesn't mean you shouldn't have the open-ended skills also. Instead of having Craft, Profession, Knowledge, and Perform I would just have a single skill called Extra and then the player could have the skill be anything like Blacksmith, Story Teller, or Sailor. These skills could be rolled in special situations and could be used as assisting skills for other tasks. For example a Blacksmithing roll might give you +2 open your roll for knowledge about iron golems.

Tanking! Brilliance in 4th Edition!

So one very nice element they added in 4th edition was the notion of tanking. Tanking is the act of one character who is harder to kill via armor class, hit points, and so on, taking the brunt of the enemy attack. Traditionally in D&D this means simply getting in front of the spell casters making it so monsters would have to go around to attack them. MMORPGs changed this concept. This built in the idea the tanks had special powers that caused monsters to focus on them. Complex mechanics grew up around a character keeping a monster attacking him. This basic mechanic has been enormously successful in MMORPGs and is a major element of the teamwork involved.

Fourth edition copied this concept and brought tanking to the world of D&D with the 'Defender' role. These classes were given at will powers that allowed them to focus on a target. This target would then suffer some consequence for not attacking the character. Also in the ability lists of these classes are special skills used to control the battle field so that they are the primary focus of attacks. Of course ironically, due to the armor rules and hit points number, the need for a tanking class is actually diminished.

Anyway, I think this is a great piece of game design and it was a good idea to incorporate it into 4th edition. Simple ways to add it to 3rd are to simply add 'Combat Challenge' and 'Divine Challenge' to the abilities of fighters and paladins. Of course these classes have several other abilities that focus on this aspect, but even just these two abilites would be useful.

Quick Thoughts on Encounter Based Spell Limitations

Here is one idea I had for a spell system. These ideas are pretty rough and would need to be refined. They are essentially inspired by the idea of encounter powers and rituals, but lean more towards third edition D&D.

So each spell caster has a certain number of spells points. Let's say they have the number of spell points needed to cast their highest level spell. Let's use a 12th level caster as an example. He has 6 spell points. Casting a spell requires it's level in spell points. Every round of fighting he recovers half his total spell points. In our example this would be 3 points. The effect is that he could cast a 6th level spell right off and then constantly be casting 3rd levels spells, but to cast another spell above 3rd he would have to either not cast or to cast a 1st or 2nd level spell. You could even adjust this by changing the recharge rate up or down. This is a potential way to limit spell casting inside of combat and would allow encounter based resource limitations instead of daily limitations.

So what effects on game balance would this have? Well, you could say that spell casters would be much more powerful because they wouldn't have to hold anything in reserve for other battles. They could cut loose. Or you could say that they would be much weaker because they wouldn't be able to casts the same amount of spells in a battle as they normally would. They can't simply pull out all their big guns immediately. So at some point I would like to try and experiment with this. You could try modifications like having the mage's base level of spell points being half their maximum castable spell level and they have to spend 'charging' actions to artificially raise this number.

Okay, so two aspects kind of screw this up. One is healing. Players would be able to heal like crazy between fights and be full up. Well, in 3rd edition between combat healing is something the rules seem a little schizophrenic on. Sometimes it seems like they are trying to vastly limit between combat healing like having a ring of regeneration require 15th level to craft and give you points by the hour. But the preferred method of out of combat healing seems to be Wands of Cure Light Wounds and Wands of Lesser Restoration. These two easily crafted, fairly cheap wands basically make out of combat healing a non-issue after you hit mid levels. In fact, between combat healing goes from a major limiting factor to a non-issue incredibly quickly. Fourth edition gives you much more healing and allows easy healing out of combat, but it does have a daily limit and this effectively is much more of a limit than a sack full of wands.

So let's just say that we don't need to really limit out of combat healing. But what about non-combat spells. If you have unlimited access to spells like Knock or Teleport, that is going to have drastic impacts on your game. So you could have some kind of daily spell points as well and you would mark of non-combat spells off of this resource. This, of course, requires you to figure out what is a non-combat spell and this can get a little difficult. What about dimension door? This whole resource, of course, doesn't need to be as tighly monitored as combat resources and can be done relatively loosely. Also, if you introduce this option you can say that certain spells require encounter based points and daily points. Maybe your highest level spells require both types.

Now some people may be thinking, "ZOMG, tracking 2 numbers!!!" Yeah, you do have to track a couple more numbers, but I don't think that it would be particularly bundersome since the normal system makes you track the contents of a list. For a 20th level caster you are technically tracking 9 numbers. Also, it is a tool to get away from the beast of Vancian magic and move the strategy for spell casters from a spell slot selection game that can take quite a while before you are playing to more of a strategy based thing where you make decisions based on planning for the next rounds.

Good Versus Evil and Law Versus Chaos

The D&D Game was greatly impacted by the popular fantasy authors of the time when D&D was first being developed. Among those are Tolkien and Moorcock. Tolkien's fantasy revolved around a colossal war between forces that were unmistakably good and those that were unmistakably bad. Moorcock's stories focussed on a similar conflict between forces of law and forces of chaos. Law and chaos was kind of a re-imagined good and evil that allowed in some moral ambiguity. Just because Elric worshipped a chaos god did not necessarily make him a bad guy. D&D reflected these authors by having an alignment system. They incorporated both Good versus Evil and Law versus Chaos building a kind of crazy set of alignments and matching cosmology. This was spread throughout the game and many abilities and spells focussed on this. And because so mechanics focussed on this divide it forced certain questions to be asked.

Is a merchant who swindles people evil? Can a paladin detect that? If he is evil is it okay to kill him? It is okay to kill goblin women and children because they are evil? Can a goblin child really be considered evil? Is evil a learned behavior? Is it right or wrong to scan a town for evil and then kill anyone who is evil? You should be able to ignore complex moral issues when you play D&D, but the mechanics actually force you to consider them. Fiction has the luxury of glossing over these issues, but in an RPG you have less control of how things progress and can be forced into these questions by the actions of players.

When a person picks an alignment it often too much about class requirements and how alignment based magical abilities will effect him. Personality of a character doesn't really need any sort of alignment axis in order to be defined or developed.

So fourth edition reduced the dizzying array of alignments to 5: Lawful Good, Good, Evil, Chaotic Evil, and Unaligned. But who cares? There aren't any alignment based effects so alignment has no effect and has become something that only affects army formation in the miniatures game. They essentially removed this element from the game, and put in some vestige to keep fans from complaining.

Personally I am not necessarily for or against the inclusion of alignment. I don't like 3rd edition alignment because so much of the game forces it's use and I don't like fourth edition because it removes it as an option.

So what would I do? Since 'good versus evil' is often a fantasy element and is tied to so much of the source material I would keep alignments with a Good, Evil, and Unaligned. You don't really need more. Some people may argue that their characters outlook can only be characterized by Lawful Neutral or Chaotic Good, but who cares. Roleplay your character how you want, the alignments only matter for alignment based magical effects. Everyone is Unaligned excepts characters who have divine power. Their alignment is based on the alignment of their deity. Angelic creatures are good while Devils, Demons, Slaads, and so on are Evil. Undead are also all evil. All alignment based powers treat everyone as neutral. This greatly reduces the power of many spells and abilities like Smite as they become anti-undead, anti-demon abilities. This makes evil a fundamental force of the universe and not a moral puzzle. You can even have interesting elements like Evil characters that are actually good like a demon who feels compassion like Angel the vampire or a character like Elric of Melnibone who draws power from Chaos but mainly does battle with the powers of Chaos. You can also have clerics of a good god who are corrupt.

Tracking and Bookkeeping

One of the great difficulties of D&D is that you have to track a lot of data. Tracking initiative and then tracking multiple conditions, buffs, battlefield effects each with their own effects, stacking behavior, and durations. So many times I have seen people trying to figure out what armor class they hit after figuring in a stack of conditions, buffs, and debuffs.

This is obviously difficult and a hassle. So how to fix it? There are essentially two approaches. One, make everything easier. Or two, develop clever ways to track things. Fourth edition took the first approach to an extreme. The Paizo edition didn't do much in this regard, but did do a couple things to make it easier like only allowing 3 buffs to work. (No more buffing marathons where players spend 30 minutes figuring out what they are going to do to buff themselves)

I think one thing about 4th edition is that it has been over-simplified. The designers wanted everything to be easy so they built extremely standardized mechanics. In my opinion the better way to handle complexity would have been to find better ways to manage it instead of tossing it out. With the increasing presence of laptops and other computing devices at the gaming table you have the opportunity to manage things via a program. Even without that, there are ways to handle things with tracking practices, cards and tokens, and so on.

Several years ago I wrote a java applet to handle initiative. A friend then built a javascript version that had some nice features and was more usable. I now use that to track initiative. This tool has made handling initiative much easier, but I have heard of other tricks to make this easier such as using a stack of cards. Another thing that happens in my games is that when the players begin to cast buff spells one person lists all the beneficial effects on a blackboard. That way it is easier to calculate the effects of those multiple buffs.

I would have liked to see more of an effort by Wizards of the Coast to create better ways to handle complexity with various tools and techniques than to simply remove as much complexity as possible from the game. If I were working at Wizards I would propose a simple set of web-based tools that would help every game, like an initiative, condition, and encumbrance trackers. You could offer these free and advertise on the site.

Wizards is the company the made it's way in the world by developing card games where all sorts of tracking information is contained in where and how you place a card and what tokens you place on it, so I would think they could aim some of that experience at managing D&D.

Cursed Items and Item Identification

Another piece of the game removed by 4th edition D&D is cursed items. The Paizo 3.75 followed suit and removed cursed items from the game. Both editions also made item identification much easier. These two topics are inextricably linked. Cursed items typically come from using a magic item without having first identified it. So the danger of cursed items relates directly to how easy it is to identify items. The whole subject relates to how mysterious and powerful items are (a subject I talked about in a previous post).

So do cursed items add anything to the game? A long time ago the way characters handled magical treasure was to equip it and see what happens. In this world magic items were a little more mysterious, back before these items moved into the Player's Handbook. Sometimes these items would be cursed and the players would have to suffer the effects. With changes in the game players act differently. They tend to not use magic items unless identified. A lot of this is because they would have to swap out a known good effect for an unknown effect. Also there is a basic level of caution that has developed. But are cursed items fun? Do they model fiction well? I think curses can be fun, but they tend to be very negative for a very innocent action of wielding a weapon or slipping on a ring. Fiction has an assortment of curses, but they tend not to simply be objects that are crappy that you have to use. Typically they are much more sinister and story driven. So in essence, a weapon that appears to be a +3 sword but then is actually a -3 sword that you can't not use isn't that much fun. But a +3 sword that hungers for the blood of your friends that will make you have a 1 in 10 chance of attacking an adjacent ally can be pretty cool. How about a magical stone that also shows up on your person and seems to attract undead enemies. Cursed items, in my mind, require even more thought than normal magic items, but they can be fun and arbitrarily removing them from the game is a mistake since it is something that limits the game.

To make cursed items possible you have to make identifying either hard or imprecise. Identification tends to make life easier. If you have ever run a game where every time you ask a player's armor class they respond with something like "not including any magical bonuses from these boots and that ring..." you know that it is covenient. Also identification lets characters use their treasure. Many times in 3.5 characters will pick up treasure that could immediately be useful. This can be plot based. Every cultist has a ring of electrical resistence to handle a trap later on. But in most cases characters will just toss unidentified items in a bag and won't use them until the next adventure. So keeping item identification easy is a good thing in my mind.

So making item identification imprecise seems a possibility. Both 3.75 and 4.0 have tied item identification to a skill instead of a spell. I think this is great because it makes it easy to do and it is something you could do in the middle of an adventure. Another reason why this is good it because you can assign a difficultly to things. For example, in the case above a simple normal roll can tell the basic properties of an item, but maybe a very high roll would be required to tell you if an item is cursed. This way you could not only have cursed items, but items could always remain mysterious because they would never be fully identified.