D&D – Weird 8

On Providing Choice to the PCs

I started my 5th Edition D&D campaign last week and am very excited for it. It’s been a while (well, two years) since I started a new campaign, but, more importantly, I’ve invited a bunch of close friends to join me weekly on Roll20, with shorter hours (more on this later), which will make it very easy to keep going on a regular basis. With a consistent gaming schedule, I find I can focus my efforts on prepping and running the game instead of worrying about whether enough players will show.

But for me, running a campaign isn’t just about gaming. It’s about taking an opportunity to flex my storytelling muscles at the same time I’m having fun in a game. I can’t help but use the opportunity for running a game to find the story components and engage with those as much as possible. And it’s even more important in a game like D&D, where the story elements aren’t as pronounced as, say, in a Dungeon World, Fiasco, or FATE game (which are more rooted in story out of the gate).

So if I’m taking the effort to learn and explore storytelling in my 5th edition game, there’s no better place to start than at the beginning. And having just begun my game, I want to identify all the places I can get the team working on these elements, and it starts with PC introductions. But it’s not enough just to make the PCs’ various histories important to the game’s present — you need to make it matter with choice. Choice is one of the fundamental aspects of storytelling in that it fundamentally creates characters — when characters make a choice, they show their true colors and instincts. And the harder the choice, the more interesting the story. Does Luke join Darth? Does Frodo keep the Ring? Does Neo take the red or blue pill? Without choice, story is nothing.

For the first session, I came up with a list of choices for each PC (one each) to make that will inform their own personalities and loyalties. Each choice had something to do with the old world versus the new world. In the campaign introduction, the group has been recruited by Lord Silverhand of Waterdeep, but the PCs also have their own factions and other personal allegiances — will they turn their back on their old world connections or move forward into their new futures? Will they accept their new responsibilities blindly or do they second guess why they’ve been hired? How will they approach this new mission in light of their personal backgrounds? These are all interesting choices that give color to characters.

The best games and campaigns are rooted in choice. One of the most classic RPG campaigns of all time — Masks of Nyarlathotep for Call of Cthulhu — opens by giving the PCs multiple choices on how to approach the game with a large handful of clues and information. Out of the gate the PCs have agency to determine their own direction in the game and I believe this set of choices (which ultimately follows the group throughout the game) helps cement the campaign as one of the all-time greats.

As a game master, it’s your job to set the tone of your game — the earlier, the better. Yes, we’re playing out of the box 5th edition D&D, but we’re also playing in my game, and I like stories, the bigger, the better. I don’t want to just crawl through the dungeons or wilderness and not give opportunity to let the story be about the characters and their choices. Just giving the PCs these introductory choices — just one quick choice along with one scene bringing them into the world — set the tone and gave each player something to latch onto. I think it was a good start.

I’m interested in all the ways we can actively bring storytelling elements into our RPGs. What other ways can we allow players and PCs to make choices?

Stranger Things is Honest in its Love of the 80s and D&D

Finished watching Stranger Things. Loved it, but I’m pretty much the ideal audience. It’s not for everyone, but like True Detective Season 1, it rises above and entertains better than most.

But hey, some people are sticklers and parse everything out, looking for every possible fault before deciding from on high whether something is good or bad. Some people need to make their opinion bigger and more important than the art they are commenting on. Here, cruising along in the 21st century, everybody thinks they know better than artists who pour everything they have into a project.

Me? I want to be entertained. But more importantly I want to be entertained honestly. I want to see clarity of vision, risk taking, and art with boundaries. I want to see love and passion for a project, brought to life with care and creativity. And while I loath both laziness and complacency, I mostly hate those who compromise a vision because they refuse to be honest. With themselves. With their characters. With their audience.

You may find fault in Stranger Things because it’s not perfect. You may not like it because you can’t relate to the characters. You may think its horror-SF trappings cliche and dated. And that’s fine. Good for you.

But I liked Stranger Things. A lot. Because it was written for me, and not just 12-years-old and playing D&D in the early 80s me, who is basically a composite of many of the main characters. But also the me who is a father who loves his child and would do anything for her. And also the fanboy me who likes to be entertained.

And finally for the writer-me, who wants people with my upbringing and interests to be successful and create more cool stuff. The show is honest with its characters, its setting, and, most importantly, its audience. It gives us everything it’s got and asks for little in return. So yeah, I liked Stranger Things. A lot.

I hope you do too.

The D&D TV Show was Horrid but Necessary

For a brief minute in my ADHD-rattled, socially-awkward childhood, things actually seemed to come together. Sixth grade for me was a last great height of childhood innocence and fun before the truly disapproving and unhappy adolescence (heralded by arriving at middle school) sucked the wind of out my sails, and one of the main components of all that fun was all the great role-playing materials I got to play with during that time.

The years of 1982-1983 were a time of tremendous growth for the tabletop RPG industry, and I was lucky enough to bathe in all of its nerdly glory. I had all the AD&D books, many of the adventures, and played regularly with a few of my friends (though most of my time was still relegated to sitting alone in my room, rolling up characters and creating dungeons). There was a peak moment where I had all the toys and wonders of childhood (which still included Legos and Star Wars figures), as well as stacks and stacks of AD&D books, dice and modules, all at my command. Reagan’s economy was in full swing and my upper middle class family had disposable income that gave me access to all the new RPGs starting to come out of TSR, games with crazy cool names like Top Secret, Gamma World, and Gangbusters.

Imagine my surprise, when, much to my delight, a D&D television show was announced in the summer of 1983, right as I was unknowingly transferring from child to adolescent. How cool is that? A TV show based on my favorite game! Things could not get any better.

In hindsight, maybe the baby unicorn should have been a tipoff

Of course, as we all know, the D&D TV show, which ran for three seasons and had 27 episodes, was pretty much crap. And I rediscovered how total crap the show was recently when I borrowed the entire TV series from the local library and sat down to watch it with my 10 year old daughter, hoping that a) the show was much better than I remember it, and b) her blossoming tastes in TV would be more open to liking this ancient relic than my cynical old man soul would (she does, after all, like The Phantom Menace — clearly I’ve failed somewhere). Neither, unfortunately, came to pass.

Because, quite frankly, the show doesn’t hold up to any discrete sense of viewership, especially now, in our golden age of TV. Even 30+ years ago, it was clear that the TV show was written around the structure necessary for a TV show: 22 minute format, standard characters with simple characteristics, and the need for neat and tidy resolution at the end of every show. And there was no dungeon delving, no tavern introductions, no inventory management, and every character had only one (just one!) magic item that allowed them to navigate whatever conundrum the Dungeon Master allowed the group to get into.

Oh yes, this is perhaps the strangest component of the show — the Dungeon Master is an actual character in the show! Just to quickly reprise the premise of the show (which is covered in the 30 second series introduction but otherwise never examined in detail): six kids go on the Dungeons & Dragons amusement park ride, which magically transports them into the realm of the Dungeon Master, where they are transmuted into different characters in an attempt to get back home. They each get one magic item and are put in various classes (Ranger, Barbarian…), and the DM shows up every episode as they fight Tiamat and Venger, the main villain, in whatever wackiness the DM throws at them.

Not someone I would allow my children to “play make believe” with

Back in the 1980s, we quickly realized that the D&D TV show was a scam. Sure, it was great that our favorite hobby was now a national TV show, but there was very little in common between the two. Sure, we watched it because that’s what we all did back then — watch as much TV as possible. But there was always a nagging sense of loss opportunity after every show when, after Uni the Unicorn gets lost, or Presto the Magician pulls something wacky from his hat, that kids who knew nothing about D&D would come away with the wrong understand of the show.

So now, after my daughter gave up on the show for more exciting territory (who knew there was a new Inspector Gadget TV show?), we returned the DVDs to the library and moved on down the path of memory lane. But something about the D&D TV show stuck in my head, and it wasn’t the world map that supposedly portrayed a world where these six adventurers are presumably still stuck.

I’m guessing the missing booklet is still in someone’s bathroom To-Read pile

Fact is, regardless of the quality of the show, the D&D TV show was totally necessary in the early 80s to exploit the growing interest in table-top RPGs, and while we don’t really know the impact it had (positive or not) on the hobby, certainly there must be some people who it helped bring to the table. Well, it does actually seem that a lot of people really, really liked the show, and there must be a thread between sitting a 10 year old down in front of the TV and his (or hers, but probably his) asking his parents to buy the Basic Ruleset. Remember that the 1980s weren’t a very friendly time for RPGs, and for D&D in particular. So having a TV show based on the game was a bit risky (and, strangely, risque too) and probably even fueled a bit of the backlash.

But here we are, so many decades later, with D&D still strong, and the not-aging gracefully show still available for a trip or two down memory lane. And yes, it’s bad. Not horrible, but not anywhere near the quality of TV that we’ve grown accustomed to. Yet with all the sophistication and violence in our TV shows today, it’s nice to know there’s still some easy way to introduce younger children to the hobby. Whether you pick it up at your library or cheap on Amazon, the Dungeons and Dragons show is a fascinating view into where we’ve come from.

D&D Comes Full Circle

Sometime in the winter of 1980-81, I played Dungeons and Dragons for the first time. I was in fourth grade and Ronald Reagan had just been elected to president. My friend Greg has an older brother who had started playing this crazy fantasy game, and we sat down and tried to figure out what all the Roman numerals meant in the adventure scenario as we fought monsters and collected treasure. It was so easy back then to just jump in and game — you had your character, some basic stats, a couple pieces of equipment, and you just played. Yes, there were a couple charts, but overall it was just easy and fun and you could really play with just the game book, some pencils, paper, dice, and, of course, your friends.

I was hooked for life.

My parents bought me the red dragon boxed set (the one with chits instead of dice – lame), and over the next few years I began collecting RPGs: first the AD&D books and modules, then other games (including Star Frontiers and Marvel Super Heroes), and I even wrote my first RPG: TimeLords. For these first ten years or so (including heading off to college), I played D&D off and on. I ran a short campaign in college, played the Warhammer RPG briefly there as well, and even ran a 2ed AD&D game for kids when I worked as a summer camp counselor in the early 90s.

Eventually, though, I just stopped caring about D&D. I would play it every couple of years at a convention (usually with 1st ed stalwarts), but other RPGs and genres became far more interesting. Superheroes, science fiction and of course the Cthulhu mythos all became much more intriguing worlds to game in — at some point I even hacked together a time travel campaign for GURPS using multiple sourcebooks, which I would never try these days. (Using GURPS, that is; clearly I still have a thing for time travel games.)

The last game of D&D I played was around four years ago when our high school gaming group reunited to play 4th edition. My entire experience with that trainwreck of a game system can be summed up with me attempting to read the flavor text from the spell card and being told in no uncertain terms from my fellow gamers to “shut the fuck up and just tell us what you’re doing.” The complexities and time it takes to move through 4th ed combat inspired, it seems, impatience with the actual role-playing part of the game.

So it was with slight trepidation when, 2.5 years ago (has it really been that long?) my gaming group at the time playtested D&D 5th edition (which was called D&D Prime at the time, I believe). Sure, of course I’ll play, nothing to lose here. We played through B1, the original scenario, and I sat down at the table to be handed a dwarven cleric and a beer.

I was immediately overwhelmed by how simple the game had become. It was like I had been transported 30 years into the past and suddenly I could just play. It’s like the game had circled back around and found me at 9 years old, except that now I have much higher standards to what constitutes a good and fun role-playing game. And yet, this game was good. This game was fun.

Flash forward to just a couple weeks ago and my 9 year old daughter was harassing me to play D&D. Last summer, when she had seen this video on girls playing D&D with boys, she shouted “I want to play D&D!” Since then, every couple of months she had asked to play, and I had continually put her off. Finally, realizing that a) WotC has posted the D&D rules online for free, and b) what the hell was I waiting for?, I got us playing D&D for the first time just two weeks ago.

The results could not be more amazing. Fifth edition is so easy to learn and run that I really have to give it up for WotC, who has done an amazing job at fully rebooting the game. Firstly, giving away a streamlined version of the rules online for free shows they understand how to market games and interact with their customers in the 21st century. Basically, anyone who wants to play D&D just needs the requisite pencil, paper, dice and friends (plus the free rules) to get started. This is a gateway game, folks, and they’re treating it that way.

Second, the rules have *finally* been streamlined to remove so much of the chart-referring, page number memorizing days of old that you sense a full understanding of how RPGs have changed in the last decade. All high rolls are good, all low rolls are bad (not the case with 1st-4th eds); a monster’s armor class is the number you need to roll higher than to hit them (goodbye THAC0!) — these are a couple examples of how much easier the game is to play.

And finally, and perhaps most importantly, the game has really made it easy for the old-school gamers (like myself), to feel right at home with a game world that can be fleshed out as you play. For starters, during character generation, the game helps build out PC backgrounds that not only provide context and history in categories such as Ideals and Flaws, but also tacks on game-world applications to these: character bonuses, special equipment and world-building opportunities (which guild do you belong to?) all help create verisimilitude out of the gate. But the game is also incredibly fun once you get into it. The ease of gameplay lets both players and DM focus on doing cool stuff and not having to refer back to the gamebook all the time.

This is incredibly important for first timers like my 9 year old, (and eventually her friends) who has never played RPGs before. If we tried to play 4th edition or some other new RPG that is more complex or awkward than it needs to be (Star Wars: Edge of the Empire, I’m looking at you), her first interaction with RPGs would just result in confusion and frustration. But with such an easy method for creating fleshed-out characters, with a fun and easy to understand game system, and with some excitement and passion for having a good time, my daughter was hooked.

Just like I was 33 years ago.

It seems far easier for a company with intellectual property, especially something as iconic and old as D&D, to lose sight of what originally made that IP special (*cough* George Lucas *cough*). Greed, ego and laziness can all get in the way of doing the hard work it takes to continually keep the IP fresh and evolving. This is what happened with 4th edition — changing the game system to hook in the “video game kids” is a good concept on paper (and I’m sure was a great pitch to the executives), but it lost sight of what the game really was about. Instead of making the game an easy way for kids to enter a world of fantasy role-playing, they made it about leveling-up your powers and reading really small text from cards.

With this new edition, though, they finally got it right. You should check it out.