You probably have heard the news about #dndnext by now — the impending Fifth Edition of Dungeons and Dragons.
Of course, there are all sorts of rumors flying around, but probably the most interesting thing that’s come out of the media hubbub is this bit from Monte Cook:
…imagine a game where one player has a simple character sheet that has just a few things noted on it, and the player next to him has all sorts of skills, feats, and special abilities. And yet they can still play the game together and everything remains relatively balanced. Your 1E-loving friend can play in your 3E-style game and not have to deal with all the options he or she doesn’t want or need. Or vice versa. It’s all up to you to decide.
If they can pull this off, I think, this has the potential to be one of the most engaging iterations of D&D yet, but not exactly for the reason described. Mr. Cook couches this in terms of supporting differences in complexity, but I think that a better lens to view this through is differing levels of engagement.
Here is a story:
When I was in college, I ran a game of Dungeons and Dragons in the Eberron Campaign Setting, which is heavily informed by pulp adventure and film noir — it’s the kind of setting in which nobody’s true motives are fully apparent, and fights and scenes are meant to be cinematic. By far it was one of the best games I have ever GM’d, or at least, that is what my players said. But like many games, through the compounding interest of procrastination and busyness, it came to an end.
A few years later, I ran a sequel to that game, with a One Year Later, Lupin the Third-like jumpstart in which the PCs of old got together for “Just one more adventure,” teaming up with some new PCs (and their players). Once again, it was great — as if the previous campaign had never ended — and I felt at the time at every session that we were just on the whole way through.
So it was a surprise to me when, after half a year of sessions, I learned the following:
- Many of my players felt that it was one of the best campaigns I’ve ever run.
- A few players either disliked or were uninvested in the campaign, but did not want to be vocal about it.
- The opinion of the latter group was not apparent to the former group for several months, yet it was not hugely disruptive to the game.
It took me awhile to work out what happened here exactly, but if you think about it, what the actual at-the-table play of D&D asks of you, minimally, is pretty basic:
- Pick some actions.
- Roll some dice.
- Track consumed resources.
All the other stuff, the interesting stuff — the politics and NPCs and arguments in our shared world — were, you know, nice to interact with, but if you at least did the above, then you were committed enough to the game that the system just kept chugging along. Nothing broke or stopped working, as long as you could roll some dice and occasionally determine if you were dead.
When I think about several of the other game systems I’ve run, I realize that for many of them, I have thought: You know, if someone doesn’t pull their weight in this system, the whole thing falls apart. And this makes me think that a key facet of the longevity of D&D as a game is that the default mode of play supports people of different commitment levels at the table — Writes Ten Pages Of Backstory Girl and Too Busy To Make His Own Character Guy can both sit at a table and almost be playing different games, but their experiences are compatible via the core of the game.
The next edition of D&D appears to have taken this lesson one step further, allowing different commitment levels away from the table as well: If one person can create and manage their character in thirty minutes, and another can spend hours customizing, then all of a sudden the accessibility of the game increases dramatically.
This perhaps doesn’t sound all that revolutionary, but I must admit that if more games were wielding this sort of technology, my busy and time-strapped gaming group would be able to squeeze in a lot more games.
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That’s a great bit of reflection! I’ve long agreed with the concept, but I like your words for it better than any I’d come up with. Expect me to swipe, er, cite.
I am not going to be saying a lot about the new edition of D&D, because I hate frittering away energy on hypotheticals that never work out anyway. But I do want to say a little bit about the stuff Monte and Mike are saying about modular, scaling sorts of options.
To wit, I disbelieve.
Or, perhaps, I’m open to being convinced, but I am very deeply skeptical. There are a bunch of games that offer optional levels of detail and depth, and they all share some features. When you add detail, you have to crank up the total number of points/building resources in use, because there’s more to cover. And characters built in greater detail aren’t just their low-rez cousins zoomed in. They’re different, having different mixes of weaknesses and gaps as well as strengths.
GURPS provides a good demonstration, since with their bang skills approach (with skills like Science!) they actually do have quite a good low-rez alternative to their usual level of detail. Short form: you can’t mix and match well. Bang-skill characters perform differently, and running for them requires modifying a bunch of NPC stuff too.
Big Eyes, Small Mouth demonstrates the same thing on an even starker scale. The original Tri-Stat level of detail, or lack thereof, simply doesn’t work the same way as the versions with options.
If they were talking about building D&D with the idea of options to be set at the start of a campaign, or even to be adjusted between sessions, I’d believe it. But widely varying detail in play, and it doesn’t end up just hosing someone at one end or the other? I’ll need a lot of persuading on that one, and in particular, seeing it work in the hands of DMs who aren’t part of the game design team.
what the actual at-the-table play of D&D asks of you, minimally, is pretty basic:
Pick some actions.
Roll some dice.
Track consumed resources.
All the other stuff, the interesting stuff….
I’ll hazard a guess that for some of the meh players, “pick some actions” *was* the interesting stuff.
If one person can create and manage their character in thirty minutes, and another can spend hours customizing, then all of a sudden the accessibility of the game increases dramatically.
Don’t we have that now? Presumably the GM is invested enough to be familiar with the char-gen system to help even a new guy make a serviceable party member in that time?
I have to agree with Bruce on the “how do we make this accessible to DMs outside the playtest groups?” question. I find that so much of what makes games work is individual-group social contract that I tend to give the side-eye to games designed for long-term play that just assume social contract will work.
That’s a great bit of reflection!
Thanks!
To wit, I disbelieve.
I must admit that I am less skeptical, but a lot of this is from my software development background suggesting to me how they might make it work. Conceptually, I think, you make a core, boring game that is correctly balanced; then, it’s a matter of making everything talk to it.
As you point out, getting the subsystems to perform differently yet not be boring is probably a non-trivial task. But I suspect that since the power level of D&D characters is pretty staid by comparison to the more gonzo characters in extensible point-buy systems, this is an achievable goal at low character levels — but still hard!
Don’t we have that now?
We do on the small scale. But for example, I’ve learned over the years that over 50% of my gaming group much prefers at-the-table play over away-from-the-table play, which means that I can’t expect them to do things like level up, read rules, and so on, if it’s not at the session itself.
Yet, they still want to feel like they own their characters. If the 5E design team can figure out a way for the detail-heavy people to be excited, and for the at-the-table people to be excited, that would be a pretty significant benefit, at least for me.
I find that so much of what makes games work is individual-group social contract that I tend to give the side-eye to games designed for long-term play that just assume social contract will work.
I totally agree and sympathize with this, but I must admit that one thing that D&D has always done well, I think, is to establish a common social contract that (mostly) allows players to traverse from one group to another.
This certainly doesn’t necessarily lead to the optimal play experience, but it’s nice for me to establish the D&D social contract as a baseline when I’m trying to recruit new players for other games.
Is D&D really “supporting” these different modes of play if, as you state in your post, that group #2 (no matter how small) essentially told you that they were not having fun?
And is “sitting around, disinterested, waiting to roll dice when needed” really a mode of play? Doesn’t every game pretty much support that (“pick actions, roll dice, track resources” describes almost all games), in as much as it can be considered a mode needing support?
I think what Monte lays out is unrealistic, if not genuinely unobtainable. Bruce’s assessment above is spot on. Even in the 3e and 4e I’ve played, different levels of engagement resulted in players with differing ability to impact the game’s fiction. The minute that happens, the game breaks.
Is D&D really “supporting” these different modes of play…?
The point of my story is less to say “Wow, D&D supports disinterested players!” than it is to say, “Huh, I am surprised to realize that some players being disinterested didn’t impact everyone else’s fun.” It’s not that I’m suggesting that malaise is a valid mode of play or something — it’s that you can bring different stuff to the table and the game still works, even to the extreme of “different stuff” being “I only care when we roll some dice.” And that’s because the core actions of the game scale well with high and low levels of engagement.
Perhaps we are disagreeing on the definition of “works,” though; maybe “doesn’t break” is better, in that you don’t actively disrupt everyone else’s fun. Awhile ago I wrote about a Leverage game that didn’t work out for my group, and the biggest thing I noticed there is that the terms of the game really want you to be coming up with Assets and Flashbacks on the fly and involving the other team members/players. When this doesn’t happen for even one person, other people stop having fun.
I contrast this with the average failure mode of D&D, which is just that you are inattentive until your turn comes up in combat, without adversely impacting my enthusiasm for spouting witty in-combat lines. Sure, this is non-optimal, but it doesn’t stop me from doing what I find enjoyable in the game.
That’s an interesting perspective. But I have a question: if people are not having fun playing the game, wouldn’t you want to know?
We get together to have fun. I hope that the people I’m playing with are also having fun. If they are not, I’d like to know about it, so that we can figure out how we can all have fun. Shouldn’t a well designed game actually be dependent on the excitement and engagement of the players, rather than just asking a bar minimum from them so that it doesn’t disrupt the play of others?