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This where you can read David Noonan's thoughts on a variety of topics.

The Gish: Gish lovers (and those who are, um, gish-curious), I've got your back.

Terminology Note: When I say "gish," I'm not referring specifically to githyanki fighter/wizards. Nor am I talking about a really good Smashing Pumpkins album, Gish. I'm talking more generally about characters who are capable melee combatants and reasonably good arcane spellcasters, too.

One of the things I'm working on is some character-building pieces to support the archetype. And as I write, I wonder, "I'm not sure the gish needs the help. He might be OK with just our crazy new multiclassing rules."

Multiclassing: New multiclassing rules, you ask. Yep, we've got 'em. Multiclass characters are running at a couple of our internal playtest tables right now. Early results are promising, but we're talking about only a couple of characters, so we haven't seen broad proof of concept yet.

It's easy to critique 3e multiclassing, but it's also important to remember that they represent a massive, double-quantum leap from multiclass/dual-class rules in 1e/2e. We really like the configurability and freedom of 3e multiclassing, the way it's extensible even when you add new classes to the mix, and how it respects (to a degree, anyway) the changing whimsy of players as their characters evolve.

But it's got some problems--and in particular, it doesn't tackle the gish very well. There's the arcane spell failure problem, which takes some levels of the spellsword PrC, a little mithral, and some twilight enhancement to take care of. But beyond that, the low caster level can be just crippling for the fighter/wizard who wants to blast the bad guys into oblivion, rather than use his spellbook as a really good utility belt.

So that's one big problem--the caster level situation. In 3e, we've cemented over that with some prestige classes and feats. But there's another problem: Your journey through the "Valley of Multi-Ineffectiveness." For the gish, it's hard to truly be, well, gishy at low levels before you've figured out a reasonable answer to the armor problem. You can't really wade into melee like a fighter, because you're gonna get creamed. So you have to take an "I'm basically a wizard for now" or "I'm basically a fighter for now." That works, but you're just biding your time until you get to play the character you want to play.

And for the gish's cousin, the wizard/cleric, his "Valley of Multi-Ineffectiveness" isn't quite as deep, but it lasts a little longer--until he qualifies for mystic theurge, anyway.

So the improvement we're seeking from the multiclass system is something that solves some specific math problems (the caster level thing) and some specific career-path problems (letting you feel like a blend of classes from the get-go).

The Gish, Today: So what does this mean for our gish PCs at the playtest tables? Well, from very early levels, he's weariing armor, stabbing dudes, and casting spells. He's not as good at stabbing as the fighter, nor as good at casting as the wizard. But he's viable at both. In theory.

In theory? Well, like I said, the gish characters don't have a lot of mileage on them yet. And creating hybrid characters involves a careful balancing act. Multiclass characters can't be optimal at a focused task (because that horns in the turf for the single-class character) and they can't be weaksauce (because then you've sold the multiclass character a false bill of goods and he doesn't actually get to use the breadth of his abilities). There's a middle ground between "optimal" and "weaksauce" that I'll call "viable." But it's not exactly a wide spot of ground.

Finding that viable middle ground isn't a problem unique to 4e. The 3e designers (myself included) took lots of shots at it; the bard, the mystic theurge, and the eldritch knight are all somewhere on the optimal-viable-weaksauce continuum. And any WoW shaman, druid, or paladin knows firsthand the sorts of continual rebalancing they've undergone as Blizzard tries to keep their hybrid classes in the middle of that continuum.

But I really want to get the gish right. I owe it to Dar, the very first D&D character I ever made up. If you see him on the Isle of Dread, tell him I'm still looking out for him.

Hmmm. Another long post. I might be too long-winded to make a good blogger.

Incidentally, full-on blogging from we designer guys is only a few weeks away, according to the big brain that is Gleemax. He's fueled by caprice and whimsy, so take that estimate with a grain of salt. But at some point, you'll probably tune into this blog and find that Gleemax has assimilated it. Then you'll be able to leave me comments, etc.

--Dave.
Mood: Elf needs food, badly.
Music: Zero 7, Simple Things

World of Warcraft: In message board traffic, I see a lot of comparisons between D&D and WoW. It's a discussion that fascinates me. As a guy whose job it is to pay attention to how gamers think, I live for situations when people draw connections between two games like that. Especially because it says as much about the observer as it does about the two games.

Here's what I can add to the discussion: I can tell you who's actually playing WoW. Among the guys who are writing the D&D game right now--which is about a dozen of us, give or take--it's a sure bet that everyone has played World of Warcraft. Oh, wait, maybe not Rich Baker--but he's played a fair amount of City of Heroes. Some tried it, declared it a busman's holiday, and moved on. Others got up into the 50 or 60s.

But I'm the only one on the RPG side of the office with a level 70 character. And I'm also the guy around here that waves his RP freak flag the highest. I'm Mr. Social Challenge. I'm the guy who assigns his players backstory homework assignments. So anyone with preconceptions about WoW fans who play D&D...all I ask is that you adjust those preconceptions to include me.

I'm an unabashed fan of the game. If you told me two and a half years ago that I'd play one computer game to the almost total exclusion of all others for the next three years, I'd stop buying you beers and get you home before you threw up on something. Yet that's what happened, and I'm not quitting anytime soon.

I could talk about Warcraft's gameplay, story, and all that. (Executive summary: I think it's really good.) But part of the reason I've stuck with it is that when Warcraft arrived, I had a one-year-old kid. Now I've got two young kids, and while I have a fair amount of free time in my life, it's almost all in a quiet house after 9 p.m. Warcraft is a pretty good game, given that constraint. That's why I run a West Coast guild devoted to late-night raiding and PvP. It's when I'm available.

This "lifestyle constraint" is why you can bet that when we get a digital game table for D&D, I'm going to be dual-booting my trusty Mac late at night. The computer aspects of 4e aren't for everyone. But us late-night, stuck-at-home guys are going to appreciate it.

And for those of you with young kids of your own, it's fun to read "Goodnight Thoon" to your toddlers instead of "Goodnight Moon." Hmmm, I could see a whole line of D&D-themed board books. But Not The Displacer Beast, anyone?

Daily Work: This morning, I'm working on playtest material for a future iteration of the playtest. I'm going to work those groups pretty hard, I can tell you that. To repeat our answer to the "How do I playtest?" question:

1) Get yourself a stable group of D&D players. They don't have to be experts or anything. But when we send you stuff, you're gonna need to actually play it.

2) Get hooked up with D&D Insider, and watch that space like a hawk. When we need tables, you'll see it posted there first.

Mood: Coffee, will you marry me?
Music: Michael Franti & Spearhead, Everyone Deserves Music

Thursday Night D&D: What the heck, let's tighten up the feedback loop on this whole "Dave's playtest game" thing. Logan's playtest report is up on D&D Insider. It cheered me greatly to see that message-board cries of "Warlocks are in! Gnomes are in!" were immediately followed by by message-board cries of "Not necessarily, dude."

Digression About Info Flow: For race and class stuff specifically, I believe the current plan is that we stay mum until the relevant preview books come out this winter. So mum's the word there.

I saw a reasonable criticism of the playtest reports here. It's a fair cop: Why don't we give you straight 4e playtests without including elements that may or may not make the cut for the PH/MM/DMG? You get two responses from me on that score. First, most of our internal playtest tables are doing exactly that--straight 4e goodness, often starting brand new at 1st level. Only a few tables went the "faithful reinterpretation" route that my table did. Second, one of the things we test is the away-from-table design process. How hard was it for Logan to crank out a reasonable chaos gnome, for example? Was his assessment of its balance accurate? Did he have enough design space to work with? See, those are pretty nifty questions. We live for stuff like that.

One other thing: D&D Insider is going to give you playtest reports from a lot of the other tables. My guys are just prolific, I suppose.

Back to the Thursday Night Game: You've read a bit about Castle Smoulderthorn. Well, last night was the final session in that adventure (although the campaign will certainly continue). And it started out with a huge social challenge: The PCs find themselves in the sanctum sanctorum with a lich (probably a tough encounter all by himself) and a blue dragon (definitely a climax encounter). I'll cut out a lot of backstory by simply saying that the dragon has been attacking the castle to get to the PCs inside it and the lich isn't sure why either the dragon or the PCs are attacking his floating castle--but he's not happy about it. So a combination negotiation/debate/trial thing happened.

...And out comes a new iteration of our social challenge rules. We extracted a ton of useful data out of the test, and I'll probably spend the rest of the morning typing that up for my colleagues and messing with some the rules. But I can share some broad outlines with you.

1) I had perfect attendance at my table last night: 7 PCs, plus the dragon, plus the lich. A truly participatory social challenge at a table that big is going to be chaotic no matter how you structure it. Or at least you can't come up with rules that muzzle my players.

2) There was a lot of variety in both the mechanical techniques used (the checks/rolls/etc.) and the actual table dialogue. That's a pretty high priority, so it was good to see it emerge in actual play. But my table is predisposed to show those behaviors, so I can't see anything more definite than "it's a good system for people who throw themselves into that play style wholeheartedly."

3) The system we were testing involves skill checks (big surprise, huh?). One of the things I found fascinating was that some players preferred to deliver their dialogue, then roll the skill check and report the result. Others preferred to roll the skill check first, then deliver dialogue that matched their result (good or bad). The system works either way, so I might just make it explicit that you can "roll, then talk" or "talk, then roll."

4) There is a totally valid D&D playstyle that haaaaates the idea of social interactions being resolved with a die roll. This system should work for that playstyle, too, once you flip a few switches. That just isn't the playstyle we were testing last night.

The upshot? We had about 20 minutes of great dialogue at the table, then the lich was sufficiently convinced that the dragon was dangerously insane that he cautiously aided the PCs in attacking the dragon. Of course the lich turned on the PCs as the dragon fight was winding down. But the social challenge mattered, because the PCs were able to fight the dragon (with a little help), then fight the lich. That sure beats fighting dragon + lich.

Mood: Logan is a smartass.
Music: Erykah Badu, Baduizm

Daily Work: More work on an adventure for the next round of playtesting. Nothing like getting out the old graph paper to remind me that, "Hey, this isn't so different after all."

(Cue that inexplicably French guy saying, "Ze game remains ze same! Ze GAME reMAINS ze SAME!")

For this playtest adventure, there's no radically new state of the art in adventure design--at least, not that I've thought of yet. But it's just a lot easier to do the stuff that we usually identify as the hallmarks of artful adventure design: a wide variety of encounters, a dynamic environment, interesting bad guys. Oh, and cool loot. Can't forget that.

And you can bet that I'm going to throw some noncombat challenges in there. I'm still fired up about last week's social challenges--and the framework for noncombat encounters that makes 'em possible.

Wanna help? Give me some structural elements appropriate for a low- to mid-level adventure. Tell me your favorite monsters, sure, but realize that I'm fairly constrained there by some specific demands of the playtest. But if you really want "chasms," "rivers of lava," "peristaltic tube-hallways"--that's stuff I can get in play for playtest pretty quickly. Tell me about your favorite traps. Give me a tense negotiation situation.

And (here's a big one I've been thinking about a lot) give me a cool hazard/obstacle that tests both the characters and the players--something you've got to think your way through. Especially if it's something we can put under time pressure or dudes-are-shooting-at-us pressure, that's solid gold. I want the player thinking to be organic--none of this "you must solve this sudoku to get through the door" stuff.

Post your ideas here. I realize that what I'm asking for is pretty vague, but I'll browse that thread and use it to dress up the adventure. So have fun.

Warcraft: Speaking of fun, I had a great night raiding Karazhan last night. And in some ways, I think that being a guild master is like being a DM. It's a fair amount of work, sure. But every now and then, you get the George Peppard moment. You get to lean back, take a puff from a (probably imaginary) cigar, and say, "I love it when a plan comes together."

Last night, we worked our way through the middle part of Karazhan. And time after time, when something went awry, the ten of us corrected nicely--usually before the raid leaders had a chance to say a word. I was tanking with my druid, and in the Illhoof fight (which is a really straightforward tanking assignment), I felt myself leaning back at the end with a big grin on my face, just watching everyone else "click" like a well-oiled machine. OK, bad metaphor. Suffice it to say I love my guild, and I love it when a plan comes together.

Back to D&D: Those are some of my happiest moments of DMing, too--when my players are talking to each other in character, trying to decide what to do next or just chewing the scenery a bit. Being a DM keeps me busy, but every now and then I get to be a bit of a spectator. When you look up over the edge of the screen and see smiling, laughing faces, then it doesn't matter whether your encounter was perfectly balanced or whether the rewards were just right. Your real life friends are having real life fun. And you made that happen, Mr. DM.

Like I said: I love it when a plan comes together.

Gamer Memes Are Everywhere: Over the weekend, my 4-year-old son discovered the Magic Tree House books. Do you suppose it's a coincidence that if you read them in order, Pirates Past Noon comes right before Night of the Ninjas? It's the age-old conflict played out yet again, even in books for the kindergarten set. And the books' premise--that Morgan Le Fey is actually a friendly librarian--well, I must have missed that part in the original Mallory.

Thank goodness D&D never takes such liberties with cherished myth and folklore, huh?

Mood: You ain't takin' me on no damn plane, Hannibal.
Music: Gomez, How We Operate

--Dave.