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This is an ongoing series in which I highlight what I think were the best D&D-related blogs each month. This is the article for January 2013. The criteria for this honor is:

1. The blog must be on the WotC Blog site.
2. It cannot be made by a featured or staff blogger (the point is to highlight blogs that might otherwise go unnoticed).
3. It cannot be made in the blogs for a specific group.
4. It must pertain to D&D (of any edition).
5. It must be in English.
6. It must not be reposted from or pushing content on another site.
7. It must tickle my fancy.

Note, you really should check out the featured blogs. You can see the current Featured Blogs here and the Staff Blogs here.

While we remain in playtest phase, I'm segregating playtest reports into a separate list.  Please take a look at the great work of these Heroes of Blogging, Chroniclers of Blogging, and Heroes of Playtesting!

HEROES OF BLOGGING

• DM Nel experiments with advantage.
• Doctor Necrotic resolves to build a campaign world  and approaches Forgotten Realms.
• dulsi reviews the Midgard Bestiary (4e).
• Ferlin plays family style.
• Glucosyo makes a roller monster.
• Grimli ranks the five RPGs that changed everything for him.
• Hartlage identifies growing miniatures and spells that ruin adventures , wins, and channels a little Arneson.
• Kezzek builds races and layers for kids. 
• Kill MementoMori optimizes (4e) a half-orc rogue.
• Mr Bamboo reviews Shadowbane.
• Mr Miscellany slays fandumb and never misses a chance.
• Orzel analyzes the armored core.
• Pojo72 begins an adventure and thinks about 4e.
• RangerEd observes the playtest.
• Rhenny has another idea for skill tricks.
• Tim Swain creates a D&D campaign .

CHRONICLERS OF BLOGGING

• David Given chronicles Lair Assault.
• Khilkhameth chronicles the Red Order.
• Madicequeen chronicles Undermountain.
• Mind3ras3R chronicles Menzoberranzan.
• Snyderart chronicles Sanctuary Saga.

HEROES OF PLAYTESTING

• Rhenny.

See more at Unearthed Wrecana!

In the most recent (as of the date of this post) Legends & Lore article, Mearls explained what "Advanced Rules" might contain.  In that article, he listed seventeen possible Advanced Rules.  In another thread, Rils asked people to describe which of these options they might use.  I thought that would make a great poll so I made one.

Please note, the poll only allows limited characters.  I present Mearls' options in the order he did so in the article and tried to describe each option as accurately as possible given the limited number of characters I could use.  I urge you to read the article before voting (the link is provided above) and vote based on your best understanding of what Mearls meant by each option.

The poll is open only to people who are logged in.  You may vote for as many options as you like, but you can only vote one time.  The poll will be open until the end of February 2013.  Enjoy!!

Feel free to comment below or continue the discussion on the related discussion thread.

In a recent Legends & Lore article, Mike Mearls wrote the following:

"Simplify combat by removing extraneous options. We have 14 options in the rules now. The basic game needs only attack, cast a spell, disengage, hide, hustle, search, and use an item. I'd like the core rules boiled down to about 16 pages, not counting class-specific material."

Getting all the rules condensed to sixteen pages, and having that skeleton be strong enough to support a more advanced version of the game, is a tall order. However, since the playtest was announced, I realize I have been making several suggestions that can help keep the core rules balanced, short, and strong. I have gathered those suggestions here.


INITIATIVE
Abilities need to be relatively equal in utility. This allows you to design classes the rely on one Ability without worrying whether ability dependence makes them unbalanced. One of the problems with the current playtest is that some Abilities -- Dexterity and Wisdom, particularly -- are far and away better than other Abilities, while others -- Strength and Intelligence -- are far and away worse. To make the Abilities easier, without impinging on word count, I have suggested the following two new design guidelines:

Initiative: You determine the order in which characters act by a d20 rolled by each player prior to combat beginning. This die is modified by the Ability most appropriate to that encounter. For instance, in an ambush, the ambushers may use Dexterity to get the jump on their enemies, while the ambushees may use Wisdom to detect the ambush in time to react. In a social encounter gone wrong, you may use Charisma, while in a fight that begins with everyone in sticky mud, Strength may be used.

ABILITY SAVES
Saving throws against effects should also be spread across the abilities as follows:

Strength: Effects that affect movement, such as slow spells, hindering traps, etc.
Constitution: Area effects with physical consequences, such as poison gas and fireball.
Dexterity: Targeted effects with physical consequences, such as arrow traps and lightning bolt.
Intelligence: Effects that cause confusion, such as maze or riddle contests.
Wisdom: Effects that deceive, such as phantasmal force or moral quandaries.
Charisma: Effects that coerce, such as dominate or psychic traps.

These guidelines would be throughout the game design, but should also be placed in a description of the Abilities.


ARMOR
Armor needs to be simple to rule, but still provide meaningful choices. I propose the following armor rule:

Wearing Armor: You cannot use armor unless the lower of your Strength or Constitution scores is one less than the AC value of the armor or greater. Your AC may not exceed 20 due to AC and dexterity bonuses.

Armor
None, AC 10
Padded, AC 11
Leather, AC 12
Hide, AC 13
Scale, AC 14
Chain, AC 15
Plate, AC 17

Wielding Shields: You can use your shield as a reaction to give you cover to one attack. A small shield provides 25% cover, a medium shield provides 50% cover, and a large shield provides 75% cover. When you use the Dodge action, you also gain cover from your shield for all attacks until the beginning of your next turn.

Note that shields do not grant an AC bonus in this proposal. This keeps the range of AC fairly limited and is consistent with the playtest's goal of bounded accuracy. Alternately, a shield can also grant a +1 AC bonus regardless of size.


MELEE WEAPONS
Like armor, weapon rules need to offer simple, concise, but meaningful choices. In my opinion, balance is also maintained when the damage output of any given weapon style is about equal. I have identified three melee weapon styles: two-weapon, weapon-and-shield, and two-handed. Here are the melee weapon rules I propose:

There are three sizes of weapons and three damage types:

Size	Damage	Bludgeoning	Piercing	Slashing
Simple	d4	Club	Dirk	Dagger
Standard	d8	Mace	Spear	Sword
Great	d10	Greatclub	Greatspear	Greatsword

Small: You can wield a small weapon or shield in the other hand. When you hit and have a light weapon in both hands, you inflict the damage of both.
Standard: You can wield a shield in your other hand.
Great: This weapon requires two hands to wield.

More complicated melee weapons can be included in the expanded rule set.

RACES
The designers have indicated that they are pretty happy with races as they stand. I am not going to propose that they be changed significantly. (Though I do change the human slightly, as it is well acknowledged to be overpowered.)  Rather, I think a framework can be laid so that a more advanced module could be introduced for customizing races even further by distinguishing between race and culture. Below are the current racial traits divided between inherent benefits and cultural benefits (I've also included gnome and orc):

DWARF
Inherent
Speed: -5 feet
Vision: Low-light
Resistance: Poison
Subrace Ability Bonus
Cultural
Stonecunning
Weapon Training
Langauge: Dwarven 
Subrace Trait: Toughness or Armor Mastery

ELF
Inherent
Vision: Low-light
Rest: Trance
Resistance: Charm
Subrace Ability Bonus
Cultural
Keen Senses
Weapon training
Language: Elven
Subrace Trait: Speed +5'&Grace or Cantrip

GNOME
Inherent
Size: Small
Speed: -5 feet
Vision: Low-light
Resistance: Illusions
Subrace Ability Bonus
Cultural
Craftsmanship skills
Weapon Training
Langauge: Gnome
Subrace Trait: Speak with burrowers/Minor Illusion

HALFLING
Inherent
Size: Small
Speed -5'
Lucky
Subrace Ability
Culture
Nimble
Weapon training 
Language: Halfling 
Subrace Trait: Fearless or Stealthy

HUMAN
Inherent
+1 to two Abilities
Cultural
+1 to one inherently raised Ability

ORC
Inherent
Resistance: Ongoing damage
Subrace Ability Bonus
Subcultural Trait: Rages based on sub culture
Cultural
Athleticism
Weapon Training
Langauge: Orc

Then the following can be included in the more advanced game:

Raised by Another: Unless you are raised by humans, you may replace the cultural abilities associated with your race with the cultural abilities associated with the race that raised you and the subrace trait with the subrace trait of the subrace that raised you. If you are a non-human raised by humans, you loses all cultural traits, including any subrace trait. Instead, you raise the Ability score of the Ability associated with your subrace by an additional point.

In addition, human subcultures can be introduced using the Raised by Another rule for various terrains or subcultures.

ENCUMBERANCE
Encumberance has always been of two minds. On the one hand, a large segment of the comsumership utterly ignores these rules. On the other hand, those who do not ignore them want them to be relatively realistic. I think the appropriate goal shoudl be to make them realistic and easy to ignore. Community member Haldrik found an interesting article about appropriate loads for soldiers in combat. Using this data, I came up with the following suggestion for encumberance:

Medium characters are unencumbered if they carry weight equal to or less than five times their Strength score in pounds. If they carry between five and ten times their Strength Score they are encumbered, which means they suffer disadvantage on all Ability checks (but not attacks) and cannot move more then ten feet. If they carry between ten and 20 times their Strength score in pounds, they are can take no actions or reactions and can move no more than 5 feet. If they carry more than 20 times their Strength score in pounds, they are stunned (and may take crushing damage at the DM's discretion).

Small characters can carry three-quarters the weight their medium counterparts can carry. Supine creatures (like beasts and oozes) can carry triple their upright counterpart's weight. For each size category above medium, a character can lift eight times the weight their medium counterparts can. For each size category smaller than small, a character can lift one-half the weight their medium counterpart can.

In order to accomplish this, the weights of armor listed in the playtest packet should probably be halved. Light weapons should weigh one pound, one-handed weapons should weigh 2 lbs. and two-handed weapons should weigh 4 lbs.

This system works well with the system of encumberance I devised for 4e almost two years ago (which was based on a system I designed for 3e).

MOUNTED COMBAT
Here are some basic rules I devised for mounted combat.

Mounted combat: When a character is mounted on a willing creature with Intelligence of 6 or lower, the mount loses all actions.  The mount and rider move as one, with the rider using the mount's speed.  The rider can also use its action to order its mount to use one of its attacks.  The mount and rider are separate targets for an attack and maintain separate defenses and hit points.  If the rider is unable to take actions at the begining of his turn, he will fall from the mount and the mount regains its actions, taking its place in the initiative right after its former rider.  The rider must use one hand to remain mounted, unless the rider makes a 15 DC Dexterity Check as part of the action requiring two hands.  On a failure, the character falls off the mount and the action does not occur.

Intelligent Mounts: When a character is mounted on a creature with an Intelligence of 7 or greater, the creature maintains its own actions and place in the initiative order and remains a NPC in control of the DM (unless the rules state otherwise).  The rider is considered to be in a grab with the mount and as long as the mount does not fight the grab, the rider moves whenever the mount moves. The rider must use one hand to remain mounted, unless the rider makes a 15 DC Dexterity Check as part of the action requiring two hands.  On a failure, the character falls off the mount and the action does not occur.

See more at Unearthed Wrecana! 

This is the tenth of my ten-part series of articles, in which I look at the Design & Development articles released in the early part of Fourth Edition. This article examines the articles penned by Andy Collins. Please feel free to add comments below, or in the related discussion thread.

Andy Collins was one of the lead designers for Fourth Edition, alongside Heinsoo and Wyatt. At the time of these articles, his title was "system design and development manager".  He co-authored Player's Handbook v.3.5, Races of Eberron, and Dungeon Master's Guide II.

Here are the other articles in the D&D Before series:

TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Introduction
2. Mike Mearls and Jeremy Crawford
3. James Wyatt
4. Rob Heinsoo
5. Peter Schaefer and Matthew Sernett
6. Bruce R. Cordell 
7. Chris Sims 
8. Rich Baker and Logan Bonner
9. Stephen Radney-McFarland
10. Andy Collins

Andy Collins authored three articles for the 4e Design & Development series: Feats, Magic Item Levels, and Death and Dying. Let's examine each of these three articles...

Feats, by Andy Collins
Summary: The first article deals with the importance of feats. Here is what Collins had to say about the design team's approach to feats in Fourth Edition:

After some discussion, we came to see feats as the “fine-tuning” that your character performed after defining his role (via your choice of class) and his build (via your power selections). Feats would let characters further specialize in their roles and builds, as well as to differentiate themselves from other characters with similar power selections.

They would accomplish these goals with simple, basic functionality, rather than complicated conditional benefits or entirely new powers that you’d have to track alongside those of your class.

The key to feat design in fourth edition was two-fold. First, the feats would be used to "fine-tune" characters, making minor boosts. Second, the feats would be low-powered, offering static bonuses rather than new powers.

Evaluation: Fourth edition tried valiantly, but, in my opinion, failed to deliver on what was promised. On the first ground, feats quickly became more than ways to fine-tune a character. The "feat tax" was born because feats were used as a way to include not-so-stealthy errata. Weapon and implement specialization and focus was needed to keep pace with the edition's ever-escalating numbers.

On the second ground, "feat powers" quickly began to proliferate.  The Compendium lists 222 separate feat powers. Nearly half of them are "channel divinity" powers reserved to divine characters and of much more limited utility than other powers.  But the other half are standard powers available to a variety of races and classes.

Result: I'm not even sure the promise was well-considered. A character gets 17 feats over the course of its career. That is a lot of fine-tuning. Fine-tuning is fiddly and Fourth Edition is chock-full of fiddly bits. Choosing a feat is an effort and if the effort is not orth it, it feels like a chore.  Sorting through hundreds of feats is a chore unless the payoff is very worth it. So feats slowly became worth the effort and in the process ceased to be ways to "fine-tune" a character.

Conclusion: In Next, feats seem to be intended to be more meaningful. A feat does not give a small bonus or a conditional benefit.  You get fewer of them but they mean more. Feats help you define your character and give you options probably as useful as powers were in 4e.




Magic Item Levels, by Andy Collins
Summary: Nominally about magic item levels, what this article really touches upon is DM control.  Here is the salient passage from Collins' article (emphasis in the original):

Fourth Edition D&D ... explicitly link[s] a magic item's level to its price. For example, all 9th-level magic items now cost the same number of gp to craft or to purchase. This makes it even easier to gauge a magic item's appropriateness for your game at a glance.

* * *

Ultimately, assigning levels to magic items sends a message to players and DMs: Here's when this item is most appropriate for your game. Once that information is in your hands, of course, it's up to you to use it as best befits your game!

Magic item levels were thus intended to be a tool for DMs to help craft the campaign.

Evaluation: It did not work.  4e kept three features from 3e that would ensure that magic items remained almost entirely within the player's domain. First, magic items were found in the Players' Handbook.  Anything found in the Players' Handbook is going to be presumed to be within the players' purview. Second, at least three categories of magic items (neck, weapon, armor) were required for players to maintain. Players would want to control the items they are required to possess in order to meet math benchmarks. Finally, and most importantly, the wealth-by-level expectations meant that players had money they expected to spend, and there's nothing to spend it on other than magic items.

Result: Magic items were not in the DM's control in any practical sense. Players expected some control over magic items, either by selecting items themselves, being able to easily covert items to what they want via rituals, or by giving their DMs wish lists. Either way, the promise of DM control over magic items was an illusion.

Conclusion: The playtest appears to be eliminating at least two of the three assumptions. No magic items are assumed necessary for the game math. No wealth-by-level tables are found in the playtest. By eliminating the necessity of items and the capacity of players to anticipate wealth levels that would allow them to buuld characters anticipating possession of specific items, the DM truly has regained control of magic item distribution.  We do not yet know where the magic items will appear in the initial release. But the pattern indicates that magic items are likely to be found in a bok for DMs rather than for players.




Death and Dying, by Andy Collins
Summary: In this article, Collins discusses the frequency of mortality in the game. Collins identified four criteria that the "negative hp" system had to meet: (i) simplicity, (ii) playability, (iii) fun, and (iv) believability.  Here is how he summarized these criteria:

For all their other flaws, negative hit points are pretty easy to use, and they work well with the existing hit-point system.... In ideal situations, negative hit points create fun tension at the table, and they’re reasonably believable, at least within the heroic fantasy milieu of D&D, where characters are supposed to get the stuffing beaten out of them on a regular basis without serious consequences.

Evaluation: The reason the old"negative ten" rule had to be discarded was because as hit points incresed by level, so did the damage that monsters would inflict. At higher levels, games would become more fatal because high-level monsters who knocked a PC into negative hit points would almost always do enough to exceed the negatie ten barrier.

Result: Very few people, in my experience, followed negative hit points anymore.  Since the negative threshold always scaled to prevent you from getting knocked past it, most people I know would simply note your were in negative numbers and start using death saving throws to mark when you died.  In someways this indicated that the death and dying mechanic were insufficiently simple, playable, or fun.  It was a chore to track negative hp when your death was more likely to be a result of a failed death save.

Conclusion: The playtest is returning to the negative hp rule, but tying the specific threshold to a fixed number that goes up once a level and only goes up if your Constitution score goes up.  I have a feeling this rule is a placeholder as it makes little sense. Monster damage still increases faster than your threshold so, again, fights get more fatal as you increase in level. It's more unintuitive than a simple -10.  I personally would prefer to drop the negative hp rules and use death saving throws exclusively (possibly by making them a Constitution saving throw).  But time will tell.




Overview: Collins is a difficult man to peg down based on this Design and Development articles. Each article details a legitimate issue with the game -- character customization, DM control, and death rules -- but the game didn't end up accomplishing what the design and development articles claimed they intended to accomplish. Somehow, what Collins felt they were doing was not what the game actually ended up doing. I chalk this up to the law of unintended consequences. The designers set themselves up with some complex inter-related goals. They just did not work out as intended.  Perhaps this is a cautionary tale for future (and present) developers.

And that concludes the D&D Before series.  I hope you enjoyed it!

See more at Unearthed Wrecana!

This is the ninth of my ten-part series of articles, in which I look at the Design & Development articles released in the early part of Fourth Edition. This article examines the articles penned by Stephen Radney-MacFarland. Please feel free to add comments below, or in the related discussion thread.

Stephen Radney-MacFarland worked (uncredited) on the 4e Monster Manual, Players Handbook, and Adventurers Vault 2. He authored a half-dozen of so magazine articles and the Save My Game series of articles from 4e's commencement until the series ended a year ago (which was well after he had been sacked by Wizards and began working for Paizo). But what really shaped this designer was the six years he worked as with the Organized Play group, specifically, Living Greyhawk, during the Third Edition era.  During this time, he had to draft dozens of adventures, making him one of the few people with a real eye and ear for adventure design, as evidenced by his masterful adaptation to Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan to Fourth Edition, republished last month in Dungeon 209.

Here are the other articles in the D&D Before series:

TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Introduction
2. Mike Mearls and Jeremy Crawford
3. James Wyatt
4. Rob Heinsoo
5. Peter Schaefer and Matthew Sernett
6. Bruce R. Cordell 
7. Chris Sims 
8. Rich Baker and Logan Bonner
9. Stephen Radney-McFarland
10. Andy Collins

Stephen Radney-MacFarland authored three articles for the 4e Design & Development series: The Importance of Terrain, Traps!, and Paladin Smites. Let's examine each of these three articles...

The Importance of Terrain, by Stephen Radney-MacFarland
Summary: This article introduces the new emphasis that Fourth Edition would place on terrain.  Radney-MacFarland describes the benefit of this emphasis as follows:

[A] canny use of terrain can transform good encounters into great ones. One of the goals of the 4th Edition Dungeon Master's Guide is to help the Dungeon Master perform just such transformations, which includes providing a bunch of evocative terrain types and advice on their placement and use.

The emphasis on terrain was part of a larger emphasis on the use of the grid.  While all editions permitted the use of the grid, and often used the nomenclature of grid-based wargaming (such as inches to measure distance), Fourth Edition's emphasis on powers that pulled, pushed, slid, and shifted characters X number of squares brought that emphasis to an entirely new level.  This was also part of a larger effort to make D&D a more tactically minded system, which would emphasis teamwork to overcome obstacles.

Evaluation: Terrain went through many manifestations in Fourth, starting in the DMG2, with the introduction of Terrain Powers. This subject is of particular interest to me as it was the subject of the first article I ever sold to Wizards.  The shift from terrain to terrain powers was made necessary by a sad trend in Fourth Edition combat: it was slow.  Although not universally experienced, many players reported that combat took a long time to resolve.  And terrain, as presented in the game's initial release, served only to further slow things down.  That is because terrain served only to hamper and hinder. It slowed you, grabbed you, maybe immobilized or restrained you.  Occasionally, it would damage you, but that moved terrain into the realm of traps, which I'll discuss below.

Terrain powers replaced these hindrances with options.  Terrain powers allowed you to take a situational action like pulling the rug out from under someone, or swinging on a chandelier. These option could help speed up combat by giving people something to do that was better than an at-will power, but not quite as good as an encounter power.

Result: The terrain as originally presented turned out to be a hindrance to the game as much as it was a hindrance in-game to the PCs and NPCs. The concept ended up getting reworked. In addition, the chess-like nature of Fourth Edition combat turned off a lot of players who did not like the heavy reliance on the grid... causing me to devise my own house rules for gridless D&D called SARN-FU.  While I laud the developers for bringing terrain into the forefront in a way that it had not previously, the over-reliance on grids and the use of terrain, initially, simply as a tool to further hinder and delay combat, proved to be a mistake.

Conclusion: Not a lot has been written abut terrain in the playtest.  Here's the best I can find, from a Rule of Three article from April 24, 2012:

[W]e also want to empower the DM by providing lots of different ways for the DM to alter the rules of the game to best fit the kind of campaign and gaming group he or she has. ... It could also focus on bending, breaking, and changing rules during game play. (Does it seem like that difficult terrain should be even more difficult than usual? Here's how to alter the properties of difficult terrain for this instance to best fit the situation.

It does not seem as though a lot of thought has been placed on terrain. The term "more difficult than usual" indicates the developers are once again seeing terrain is simply a hindrance, rather than an opportunity.  If that continues, Next will fall into the same "trap" as Fourth Edition did -- using terrain to create a slog.  I would suggest that terrain be looked at as a tool for improvisation more than just sticky grass.


Traps!, by Stephen Radney-MacFarland
Summary: This article represents a shift in the way traps were to be used in the new edition. Radney MacFarland writes, in relevant part, as follows:

Instead of trying to anticipate these flashes through design, we give you, the DM, the ability to react to player insight with a host of tools and general DCs that allow you to say "Yes, you can do that, and here's how." We think this is a better approach than shutting down good ideas from the players for interesting story and challenge resolution, simply because you lack the tools to interpret their actions. After all, you should have the ability to make the changes on the fly that reward interesting ideas and good play.

What the author appears to be pointing out here is that traps will have two new features.  First, traps are meant to be used during combat, and are considered, in many ways, a new type of creature.  They received an XP value commensurate to a creature, and this would be used to determine encounter building.  Also, traps could be found in Elite and Solo varieties.

Second, you don't need to be a rogue to foil a trap, though rogues would be the best at foiling traps.  This meant that traps came with a little section called "Countermeasures" that offered suggestions on how someone might foil a trap.

Evaluation: Trap design did not change very much.  The DCs for skill checks did change as the designers rejiggered the math midway through the edition, but the basic design philosophy did not.  I spent a lot of time studying trap design in 4e, and, in my Dungeontech series I created seven articles worth of traps (). I think it was great that traps received this level of attention.  The problem, however, was that the resulting traps were often of limited utility. It often felt contrived as to why a trap would appear during combat.  I have noticed over time, that traps were used less and less frequently. Most of the traps being used were in the form of obstacles (basically a form of super-terrain) because those were the easiest to justify. Traps became a less prevalent part of D&D, replaced by the skill challenge as the mechanic to represent puzzles presented out-of-combat.

Result: This was a sea change in the way traps had been presented.  In prior editions, traps had two uses: (i) a puzzle for players to ferret out through role-play, or (ii) a spotlight for the rogue to give him a chance to shine. While you could have traps in combat in prior editions, it was not encouraged.  And the most famous of trap-based dungeons -- Tomb of Horrors, Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan, Ghost Tower of Inverness, and Pharaoh (of the Desert of Desolation series) -- did not use traps in such a manner.  In pre-4e D&D, in fact, traps were iconic as puzzles.  Many groups I met felt that if you had to rely on the rogue's ability to disarm a trap (or, as AD&D put it "Find/Remove Trap"), you had failed in your roleplay.

It caused a lot of consternation and complaint and, in my opinion, was one of the reasons people complained that D&D felt too much like a wargame and did not "feel like D&D".  I can understand that consternation. Fourth Edition was very concentrated on having mechanics for everything.  Very little was left to pure roleplay. If you had a puzzle, you needed a list of skills that allowed you to surpass it. This is especially true when traps got XP like a creature. You rarely got full XP for talking your way past a creature, and thus, you rarely got full XP for roleplaying past a puzzle.

A diversion on Terrain and Traps: Let's take a diversion to explore how Radney-MacFarland used traps in his Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan adaptation.  (Spoilers abound!) First, we notice how he adapted the poison gas that pervades the dungeon to encourage movement, not to hamper it.  As was in the original dungeon, the poison served to prevent characters from resting. However, most of the traps and terrain still serve to slow people down. All the doors require a standard action to open. The mud in rooms 3 and 4, slime in room 5, rubble in room 6, flooded squares in room 14, stone block in room 21, ramp in room 26, all serve to slow people down (presumably to force characters to lose healing surges to the poison).

Some of the traps are not eve intended to be used during combat. The sleep gas in room 7 and the rush of water in room 12 occur before combat and the water trench in room 11 occurs after. The crushing jaws trap (room 17), sliding coffer trap (room 19), sandbox trap (room 24), millstone trap (room 27), and obsidian disk trap (room 32) have nothing to do with combat.

The classic pelota ball trap is really more of a skill challenge (though delightfully redesigned by Radney-MacFarland as a trap). 

None of the traps in the Hidden Shrine adventure operates the way the Traps article recommends.  They are not part of combat encounters. They are encounters themselves that do not follow the usual rules for combat.  They offer a different type of strategy.  It seems to me that Radney-MacFarland learned this lesson over the career of Fourth Edtion.  (I learned that lesson myself.)

Conclusion: We have very little indication as to how traps will be presented in Next. The remove-trap skill is unlikely to disappear. But I am equally doubtful that Next will follow 4e's example where traps are concerned.  There is a concerted push towards old-school style gaming, and the most iconic manifestation of that is that puzzles are solved by the players, not the characters.  The DM as a puzzlemaster, I believe, is destined to return.


Paladin Smites, by Stephen Radney-MacFarland
Summary: The final article by Radney-MacFarland, while nominally about the paladion's smite, is, in fact, really a subtle way to introduce the concept of signature mechanics.  Radney-MacFarland describes the smite mechanic as follows:

In 4th Edition, D&D smites really come into their own. Now a subset of the paladin's renewable (read, encounter-recharge) powers, smites allow a paladin to deliver a powerful blow with the character's weapon of choice, while layering on some divine effect (and I mean that in both meanings of the word) on allies or enemies. A divine defender, much of the paladin's smites are all about kicking the crap out of those they find anathema while ensuring that foes who want to hurt enemies have a harder time at it.

In truth, the smite became the way to distinguish the paladin from other defenders and from other divine characters. "Smite" is really just a code for "what makes a paladin unique".  Each class -- except perhaps controllers -- got this sort of mechanic in one form or another.  Barbarians got rages. Wardens got forms. Fighters got stances. This was incorporated as part of the AEDU system of powers.

Evaluation: The 4e designers really latched onto the idea of signature powers in a big way.  Each subsequent class released accentuated the powers that made that class unique from any other. Assassins' shrouds, invoker's summonings, etc. In many ways, the signature power really identified the signature design of 4e classes.

Result: A lot of the signature powers felt sort of gimmicky. The person who plays a warden in my campaign has a habit of shouting "Wonder Twin powers activate" when she activates one of her warden's form powers.  While they did serve to help differentiate characters (and thus serves as a useful counter to the critics who claim all classes play alike), it often did so in what felt like an arbitrary or clumsy fashion.

Conclusion: The "signature power" is being toned down in Next to a very great extent. Here's the most recent description of the paladin from the 11/26 Legends & Lore article Class Design Concepts by Mike Mearls:

The paladin's base weapon abilities might be equal to the fighter's, but the fighter has a class-specific ability (or abilities) that make it stronger with weapons. The paladin also has spells, though at a reduced power level in comparison to a cleric. The paladin's unique abilities, and the true source of the class's power, come from the power a paladin gains by swearing allegiance to a specific alignment. A lawful good paladin protects the weak and drives back the forces of darkness. A paladin of this alignment can lay on hands, project an aura of protection, smite evil foes, and detect the presence of unholy creatures. A chaotic evil anti-paladin might have the ability to sense weakness, ravage enemies with unholy power, and exert an aura that steals vitality from other creatures. A lawful evil anti-paladin might have the power to dominate other creatures, forcing them into slavery as it subverts law into tyranny. The paladin you create might mix and match some of these abilities, depending on your character's alignment and ethos.

I note the word smite is only described as one of several identifying powers, and only for the lawful good paladin. If a paladin gets a smite power, I don't expect it to be a defining power for the paladin. Rather, the paladin, as paladins of years past, get a variety of powers.

However, while there may not be a signature "power", I do note in class design, the penchant for giving classes a signature "mechanic".  In the most recent packet, rogues get skill dice, fighters get martial damage dice.  Spellcasters get unique spell lists while martial characters get maneuver lists. The signature power is being replaced witht he signature mechanic in an effort to go back to prior editions where the use of subsystems were used to offer differentiation.


Overview: Radney-MacFarland is an earnest developer with a real skill for drafting adventures. In Fourth Edition, his description of traps and terrain attempted to bring these encounter-buildign tools to the forefront. However, he did not anticipate how the other changes to the system would work together to make the changes to traps and terrain antithetical to game play.  In Fourth Edition, combat fluidity became necessity and terrain as originally envisioned hampered combat speed without a commensurate increase in fun. This resulted in the development of terrain powers at first and then a slow shelving of terrain and traps as a feature of most encounters. In the next edition, we will likely return to terrain and traps being a minimal, ad hoc, or mechanicless feature of encounter design.

Next week we will conclude the D&D Before series with an analysis of the articles of Andy Collins!

See more at Unearthed Wrecana!

This is an ongoing series in which I highlight what I think were the best D&D-related blogs each month. This is the article for December 2012. The criteria for this honor is:

1. The blog must be on the WotC Blog site.
2. It cannot be made by a featured or staff blogger (the point is to highlight blogs that might otherwise go unnoticed).
3. It cannot be made in the blogs for a specific group.
4. It must pertain to D&D (of any edition).
5. It must be in English.
6. It must not be reposted from or pushing content on another site.
7. It must tickle my fancy.

Note, you really should check out the featured blogs. You can see the current Featured Blogs here and the Staff Blogs here.

While we remain in playtest phase, I'm segregating playtest reports into a separate list.  Please take a look at the great work of these Heroes of Blogging, Chroniclers of Blogging, and Heroes of Playtesting!

HEROES OF BLOGGING

• abanathie fixes skills , resurrects a character, house-rules a fighter, and argues fighters vs. wizards.
• alakai.i.walters proposes alternative wizard progression and concentration.
• Alynn tackles skill dice.
• arderkrag adventures with weapons and without limits.
• Alan Kellogg has a lot to say.
• bly7229 is not happy with the next rogue, looks back at 4e, takes on DM fiat and DM/PLayer behavior, and examines goblin roguish skills.
  
• CondorDMaDnD2ed blogs about Dungeon Masters.
• Dan Tracker has mostly evil common minis and renews as a DM.
• Darth_Jerrod stays the same.
• David Givens adventurizes the Hobbit.
• Doctor Necrotic compromises on races.
• hartlage evolves the skill challenge into the obstacle course, interacts with LFR and updates elemental minis.
  
• MechaPilot offers an alternative human racial trait.
• Rhenny observes the playtest and defends bounded accuracy.
• Rolandredjack makes masterwork and less than good weapons.
• Solarandraste profiles herself.
• TimothyConnolly goes a third time, makes the most of Nevada, becomes wise, resources the resources, brings the Circle of Eight, crits, crosses over in the meanwhile with time on his side, and looks back and ahead.
  
• Urtikor experiences the ultimate sandbox.
• VacantPsalm designs homebrew psionics and prosaic rules, and psionic votes.

CHRONICLERS OF BLOGGING

• David Givens chronicles Encounters and the Hobbit.
• Khilkhameth chronicles the Red Order.
• Sabdoor chronicles a Transmuter.
• TheSleepingGod chronicles Night of the Straw Men.

HEROES OF PLAYTESTING

• Rhenny
• The Mask of Ice.

See more at Unearthed Wrecana!

This is the eighth of my ten-part series of articles, in which I look at the Design & Development articles released in the early part of Fourth Edition. This article examines the articles penned by Richard Baker and Logan Bonner. Please feel free to add comments below, or in the related discussion thread.

Richard Baker is the creator of worlds.  During his 20 year tenure at Wizards, he worked on possibly every major campaign world they created.  In 4e, he is credited with the Manual of the Planes, and the primary world building books for Gamma World, Dark Sun, and Eberron (as well as Martial Power 2). He authored the Nerathi Legends series of Dragon articles, detailing the known world on the Material Plane of 4e's Core World.  He also penned three Realmslore articles. 

During Third Edition, he worked on ten Forgotten Realms supplements, and also designed possibly the most famous of all Third Edition adventures: Red Hand of Doom.  During Second Edition, he worked on four Dark Sun supplements.  He has also written a dozen novels, and is well known for his work on D&D's board games, as well as his work on the Avalon Hill strategy games.  It is not an understatement to say that Rich Baker is a luminary in the RPG design world.

Logan Bonner is the crunch to Rich Baker's fluff. He was the lead designer for Arcane Power and was editor of Player's Handbook 2, claiming to be the main developer of the bard class in 4e.  He authored most of the Monster Manual Updates articles, and this was after he was laid off by WotC in 2009. One of the first books he worked on was Dungeonscape, one of the last books published for 3e.  He has written numerous adventures, including King of the Trollhaunt Warrens and The Slaying Stone. Remarkably, Wizards of the Coast was his first employer in the RPG industry, hiring him shortly after he graduated from college.

Here are the other articles in the D&D Before series:

TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Introduction
2. Mike Mearls and Jeremy Crawford
3. James Wyatt
4. Rob Heinsoo
5. Peter Schaefer and Matthew Sernett
6. Bruce R. Cordell 
7. Chris Sims 
8. Rich Baker and Logan Bonner
9. Stephen Radney-McFarland
10. Andy Collins

Rich Baker authored two articles for the 4e Design & Development series: Points of Light and Cosmology. Logan Bonner also authored two articles: Critical Hits and Magic Item Slots. Let's examine each of these three articles...

Points of Light, by Rich Baker
Summary: In this article, Baker sets forth the concept of the Core World in Fourth Edition.  Unlike First and Third Edition, which used Greyhawk as its default settings, or BECMI, which used the Known World/Mystara, Fourth Edition created a new, but mostly unformed campaign setting which was usually called simply "The Core World".  The Core World was intended to be a generic setting with just enough back story to allow new DMs and players to easily insert themselves into it.  Here is how Baker described the new conceit in a single line:

[O]ne of the new key conceits about the D&D world is simply this: Civilized folk live in small, isolated points of light scattered across a big, dark, dangerous world.

The article goes on to identify the primary features of such a world: (i) travel is treacherous; (ii) communities are isolated; (iii) civilization is dying (i.e., ruins abound); (iv) there is little official authority.  It is a dark and scary and dying world and each community is a small point of light in a dark world.

Evaluation: This is a difficult campaign setting to wrap your head around and an even more difficult one to maintain over the life of an edition. Having a default world meant that all the adventures and all the modules set within it fit together like a giant jigsaw puzzle. And every adventure was launched from a different "point of light". Which quickly made the world feel large, inhabited, and less unsafe than intended. By the end of the edition, fans had mapped out most of the Nentir Vale and determined where each of the major adventures fit.  (Click on the map above for a larger view.)  The Chaos Scar introduced Restwell Keep and what appears for most intents, to be a bona fide king. Harkenwold was a small nestled community of villages that seemed, for the most part, peaceful and even prospering.  The Nentir Vale was a pleasant place to visit, but it was, in the end, too small.  The map above reveals the entire playing area to be about 150 miles east-west and 100 miles north-south, or an area only about the size of the States of Maryland and Delaware.

The world had to grow, so Rich Baker, the father of Nerath, expanded the world through his Nerathi Legends series of articles.  He also indirectly introduced a world map of Nerath with his board game, Conquest of Nerath.  (You can see the world map -- in the form of the game board -- here; The Nentir Valley is part of the Nerath region in the upper left-hand corner of the board.)  Nerath was just beginning to feel like a real campaign world when he was let go by Wizards of the Coast last December, and the campaign setting now feels unfinished, a project deprived of what seemed to be great promise.

Result: The developers of the Next seem to be going for a "generic" game world. Rather than develop a specific world, they will use the game to show how it can be introduced into a variety of settings. Examples in the playtests are taken from Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, and even the "real world" of mythology. Although Forgotten Realms is slated to be the first campaign setting to be released, it is by no means a "default setting". Rather the game will be a tool for DMs to implement in any world they choose. It has yet to be seen how published adventures will fit into this schema.

Conclusion: I would very much like Wizards to retain Rich Baker as a freelancer to design an entire campaign setting series -- Campaign Sourcebook and Player's Guide -- for the World of Nerath in the Next edition. Next's philosophy if inclusiveness would be well-served by allowing Rich Baker to finish what he started, and to present to us a full-fledged, fully-developed World of Nerath.

Cosmology, by Rich Baker
Summary: If Nerath is the material plane of Fourth Edition, the World Axis is its outer planes.  And Rich Baker developed this as well, introducing an entire cosmology for the new edition.  Here is how he described it:

Secret worlds and invisible domains surround the world of the Dungeons & Dragons game. Godly dominions, elemental chaos, shadow kingdoms, and faerie realms are all part of the world. Most mortals know little of these things, but heroes are a different matter. Heroes often find that adventure calls them to distant and strange dimensions indeed.

The article goes on to describe the four biggest changes to the cosmology: (i) the consolidation of most of the outer planes into the dominions of the Astral Sea; (ii) the consolidation of most of the inner planes (and Limbo and the Abyss) into the Elemental Chaos; (iii) the elevation of the obscure Plane of Faerie into the Feywild; and (iv) the introduction of the Shadowfell. The primary goal of the new cosmology was to make each plane a location where adventures could occur and to consolidate a lot of the obscure and weird planes (Quasielemental Plane of Ooze, for example) that existed solely for the purpose of completeness' sake.

Evaluation: The cosmology remained very consistent throughout the edition and served the purpose well. Each of the planes described were versatile enough to serve as a backdrop for an infinite number of adventures. The cosmology was sensible. It was accessible.  Most importantly, it was very easy to understand and explain to a newcomer to the game. However, it left fans of the Great Wheel feeling abandoned.

Result: The World Axis is not going to be the default cosmology in the Next edition. However, it appears that neither will the Great Wheel. Instead, the goal appears to be a plug-n-play approach that allows a DM to use whatever planes he likes in whatever configuration he chooses. In the article "The Fair Folk", James Wyatt writes as follows:

I suspect that the best place for the Feywild is right where Faerie lived in 3rd Edition: in a discussion of alternative approaches to cosmology. If you want to build a campaign where fey creatures are really important, where characters who enter a ring of toadstools can find themselves transported to a different realm where time passes differently, then the Feywild or Faerie is a great tool to help you do that. If you just want to throw a nymph into your game from time to time, you don't really need the Feywild.

Each DM can decide whether the Grey Waste exists as a separate plane, as a dominion in the Astral Sea, or not at all. Each DM can arrange these planes in a great ring around the material plane, as two cast oceans in the cosmos, or in any configuration they like. In truth there should be no problem here as all of the planes in the Great Wheel easily fits into the World Axis:



Conclusion: I will be forever grateful to Rich Baker for developing the World Axis cosmology and showing gamers a way to design  fantasy cosmology for D&D that does not rely on slavish adherence to concepts of alignment to distinguish them. The World Axis, and its Dawn War, Shard of Pure Evil, and the other elements that made those planes exciting and adventurous locales will always hold a plac ein my heart and I hope it is always included as an option in D&D. However, I am also very excited by Wyatt's proposal of an entirely modular planar system that allows DMs to make whatever cosmology they desire. To me, this means that the opportunities created by the introduction of the World Axis are making the game more open, less calcified. That can only be a good thing in my opinion.


Critical Hits, by Logan Bonner
Summary: Bonner's first article details what can only be described as an inconsequential rules change: critical hits become practically synonymous with natural 20. In Third Edition, you had to engage in a supplemental roll called a "confirmation" roll before you got the added benefit of that natural 20. In Fourth Edition, a single roll determines the crit. Sure, it's great to eliminate the superfluous critical confirmation that might slow the game down, but why is this a big deal?  Well, it also raises a separate design issue.  As Bonner obliquely stated:

In playtest, it does seem like critical hits come up more often. The subtitle of this article is stolen from Chris Tulach, who sings a bit of, "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Crit-mas" whenever the natural 20s come out to play. Fortunately, hit points are higher, especially at low levels, so there's a bigger buffer to keep those crits from killing people too quickly. It still feels great to roll one, but the fight goes on.

The key phrase is boldfaced and underlined: hit point inflation.  This was a big departure from prior editions, in which a first-level character could usually be felled by a single blow.  Now all creatures, NPCs and PCs alike are nto going to die from one lucky strike, even if it is a critical hit. 

Evaluation: Large hit points remained a feature of the game.  truly, it would have been almost impossible to eliminate it.  Near the end, monsters began to be designed with fewer hp and higher damage values, but never would you be able to take out a non-minion with a lucky crit -- and a minion could be taken out with virtually no luck whatsoever.

Result:  Hit point inflation also helped to inflate the length of combat.  When every NPC (other than minions) needed a good three to five hits to be taken down, and you have five or more creatures in the combat, well, you can do the math.  This caused many complaints.

Conclusion: The Next design team is certainly struggling with the fragility of low-level characters.  Should a fighter be felled by a single critical hit?  Should a 1st level wizard be able to laugh off a goblin's crossbow bolt?  People have very strong opinions on this and they don't agree with each other in the slightest.  You don't have to be a Fourth Edition fan to want your character to have a better than even chance to survive a goblin attack.  You don't have to be a grognard to want a dark and dangerous world in which combat is a last resort, not the raison d'etre of the game.  



Magic Item Slots, by Logan Bonner
Summary: In this article, Bonner tackles the infamous Christmas Tree effect. In Third Edition, the combination of set body slots and a predetermined wealth-by-level chart resulted in Character Optimization forums where players were told to fill every available body slot with the most cost-effective item. This was often described as making characters seem like Christmas Trees (at least when detect magic is cast upon them). As Bonner explains, Fourth Edition sought to lessen the Christmas Tree effect:

One of our goals in 4th Edition was to reduce characters’ reliance on magic items. The most important portion of this goal involved removing a lot of the magic items that were essential just so your character could feel effective, like stat-boosting items, amulets of natural armor, and the like. We also felt like these items weren't as exciting as magic items should be, yet characters depended on them heavily to feel adequate in proportion to their level. We felt that the cool stuff a character can do should come from that character’s abilities, not his gear.

Thus, in Fourth edition, although there were still wealth-by-level guidelines and body slots, the "reliance" on them would be lessened by making only three categories of "Primary Items" that you would have to gain to stay at expected power levels: a magic weapon, magic armor, and a magic neck-slot item. Even casters would need a magic implement/holy symbol and magic cloth armor.

Evaluation: This rule held out strongly through the edition, so strongly, that weapliments had to be shoehorned into concepts that made little sense.  Psionicists were required to carry "ki focuses", fueling their mighty monk talents by carrying around a treasured notebook. Many players began taking advantage of optional "inherent bonus" rules that let theplayers and Dms get the required numerical bonuses without obsessing over magic item wish lists.  (They still had to acquire ever-increasing levels of masterwork armor, and weapons if they wanted those numerical damage bonuses on critical hits.)

Result: The Christmas Tree effect went nowhere.  Character Optimization did not eve stumble.  As long as characters had assumed wealth levels, that wealth would be spent on magic items to fill the slots.  Characters might only have needed three +X items, but everybody also carried catstep boots, iron armbands, coifs of the mindiron and other items designed to maximize those non-numerical body slots.  Sure, it was easier to ensure you were numerically sound, but the Christmas Tree effect was seemingly here to stay.

Conclusion: In the article, Magic Items in D&D Next, Mike Mearls writes the following:

To make magic items more interesting, we've done a few things. To start with, we've removed any assumptions that the system math makes about magic items. In other words, we have created a system where magic items simply make you more powerful. A 9th-level fighter doesn't "need" a suit of +1 armor, a +2 weapon, and an item that grants +2 to Strength in order to match that class's expected power. 

In essence, Next is trying to kill the Christmas Tree by eliminating body slots and, most importantly, by eliminating wealth-by-character charts. The story is firmly in the hands of the DM who doles out magic items as he sees fit. Without the expectation of bonuses, the DM can just hand out items as unique elements, for flavor or story purposes, not because it is expected or necessary to the game math.  On the contrary, since the game will assume no items are handed out, the DM is, in some ways, discouraged from handing out too many items, lest he unbalance the challenge of the game.


Overview: Baker and Bonner are very different designers.  Baker is storyteller, a novelist, the midwife of the World Axis and Nentir Vale.  Comparing his vault of works through his two decades on the D&D line to Wyatt's efforts to craft a generic background D&D world for Next is absurdly unfair. However I cannot help myself. I wish Baker's wisdom and guidance could be offered to the Next design team in their world-building enterprise. I desperately hope that the World Axis si not relegated to the dustbin of history but is given a chance to be fully developed and stand aside its brethren Forgotten Realms, Eberron, Dark Sun, Birthright, and other in the pantheon of D&D campaign settings.

Bonner is the pre-eminent mechanic.  His articles deal with the rules: hit points, critical hits, and magic item slots. However, I think the topic he wrote about were, mostly handled poorly in Next.  They tried to address bona fide problems -- PC fragility and Christmas Trees -- in hamfisted and ultimately unsatisfying ways.  I feel that the Next development team is truly working on this problems, learning from Bonner's mistakes, and crafting a more nuanced holistic approach to the mechanics.  It is still too early to tell whether this new approach will work, but I have faith that it will succeed better than hit point inflation and primary items did.

Next week (technically, next year) we will examine the articles of Stephen Radney-MacFarland, as he covers an area of personal interest to me: terrain and traps!

See more at Unearthed Wrecana!

This is the seventh of my ten-part series of articles, in which I look at the Design & Development articles released in the early part of Fourth Edition. This article examines the articles penned by Chris Sims.  Please feel free to add coments below, or in the related discussion thread.

Chris Sims is credited with two hard-cover supplements -- Martial Power and Monster Manual 2 -- and three adventures: Demon Queen's Enclave, Death's Reach, and Seekers of the Ashen Crown.  He has six Dungeon articles and authored the "Playing Races" and "Roll vs. Role" series of articles in Dragon (as well as many others).  

Here are the other articles in the D&D Before series:

TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Introduction
2. Mike Mearls and Jeremy Crawford
3. James Wyatt
4. Rob Heinsoo
5. Peter Schaefer and Matthew Sernett
6. Bruce R. Cordell 
7. Chris Sims 
8. Rich Baker and Logan Bonner
9. Stephen Radney-McFarland
10. Andy Collins

Chris Sims authored four articles for the 4e Design & Development series.  As he has sole credit for all four articles, he is the most prolific of the Design & Development authors on D&D Next.  However, he has said that he was "neck deep in 3E rules while much of the department was working on an entirely new rules set".  That may be why Chris Sims seems to concentrate more on the story of Fourth Edition, then on the numbers. The articles he penned were Demons & Devils, Zombies, Zombies Part 2, and Halflings. Let's examine each of these three articles...

Demons & Devils, by Chris Sims
Summary: In this article, Sims discusses a small but significant change in the cosmology from 3e to 4e -- the differentiation of demons and devils.  Here is what Sims has to say about the subject:

What does a clearer distinction between the two major species of fiends mean for your game? If you need a devious fiend that cares about souls and works on long-term schemes, use a devil. However, wholesale slaughter, pointless suffering, and terrifying devastation call for a demon. A villain or even a player character might bargain with devils, but those who conjure demons do so only to wreak havoc on their enemies. In short, the unambiguous division of the fiends is another way 4th Edition makes the game easier to design for and to play.

Prior to Fourth Edition, the distinction between demon and devil was almost purely based on alignment. Devils were lawful. Demons were chaotic. Fourth Edition preserved this behavioral distinction (even as it eliminated the lawful evil alignment) by putting some meat on the bones. Devils were connivers and soul-barterers. Demons were nihilistic monsters. This gave the two outsider races a much clearer distinction.

Evaluation: Overall, the demon-devil distinction was kept consistent throughout the edition.  This did cause some issues.  Succubi had to be moved from nihilistic demons to conniving devils. Overall, Fourth Edition made a very clear distinction between demons and devils. 

There were some inconsistencies, in my opinion, and it usually involved the demon lords.  If demons were to be nihilistic monsters, then the demon lords should be leading the charge in annihilating existence. And some of them are. Demogorgon, Juiblex, all seem intent on simply eradicating existence. But other demon lords, specifically Orcus appear much more interested in converting reality into something new.  (Some demon lords turn out to be fallen and corrupted gods -- it is unclear where Grazz't, Baphomet and Lolth fall into the spectrum.)  Also, the book Demonoicon reintroduced the Obyriths to the cosmology, as entities form an alternate world who had introduced the hard of Pure Evil to the World Axis, thus creating the Abyss. Some of these Obyriths -- Pazuzu, the Queen of Chaos, et al. -- were not really demon lords, and were working their own agenda. So to that extent the strict delineation between devils and demons, from a philosophical standpoint, was never entirely clear.

Result: The distinction between demons and devuls is one of the kernels of discontent between fans of the World Axis (4e) and the Great Wheel (pre-4e) cosmologies.  Many people are unhappy about the change in succubi from demon to devil. Personally, I love the distinction and I find it much more meaningful than the simple distinction based on alignment, with a dash of Blood War thrown in.

Conclusion: The Playtest crew appear to be downplaying both the Blood War of the Great Wheel, and the strict distinction between tyranny and nihilism that characterized the fiends of the World Axis. Here is what James Wyatt had to say about the distinction between demons and devils in his article "Soldiers in the Blood War":

Demons and devils are fiends, and they are two different forms of evil incarnate. Being evil, they both tempt, they both lie, they both destroy-that's what evil creatures do. It's hard to make broad generalizations about what demons and devils do differently, because there are exceptions on both sides. Most often, the differentiation happens at a more granular level-it's easy to say that this archdevil has different goals and a different way of pursuing them than that demon prince, or even than this other archdevil.

"They both tempt". Not 4e demons, no. "They both destroy". Not 4e devils, no.  Overall, the playtest approach to fiends appears to be simply to keep everything as vague as possible and allow individual DMs decide whether they want a Blood War or philosophical division between demons and devils. I suppose, since I'm free to select the World Axis cosmology, I should be content with this solution.  Instead, I have concerns.

The philosophical divide in 4e accompanied a distinct difference in how these creatures were built.  Devils tended to be built as soldiers with reliable attacks that worked well in groups, or as tempters with plenty of charm and illusion attacks. Demons were creatures of destruction.  Their attacks tended to tear up the terrain around them and were not coordinated.  The way Wyatt describes fiends, I imagine that it may be difficult to tell them apart, mechanically.  If so, I will miss the clear design guidance that the philosophical divide gave to the fiends.


Zombies, by Chris Sims
Summary:  The first of Sims' two articles on zombies discusses a little bit about the flavor of a zombie and a little bit about the differences in monster design between Third and Fourth editions.  Here's the kernel of Sims' objectives in 4e monster design:

At appropriate levels, a fight against zombies should look more like a horror movie scene. Protagonists have to maneuver to keep away from the possibility of devastating damage while trying to cut their way through a relentless wall of dead flesh. The players get a thrill when a zombie goes down to massive damage, and the DM gets the satisfaction of using a monster that lives up to popular expectations.

Sims goes on to discuss two major mechanical changes between the editions: (i)  zombies are vulnerable once more to critical hits (a sore point for many who played a rogue in Third Edition); and (ii) clerics' turn undead inflicts damage, rather than trivializing an encounter.

In essence, the article is using zombies as a vehicle to discuss how class powers have been made more uniform.  Rogue powers are no longer dependent on the species of the target, and turn undead is going to work like every other Fourth Edition power as a combination of damage and conditions.

Evaluation: Fourth edition remained remarkably consistent in its approach here.  Rogues never met up with creatures who were immune to their sneak attack damage or were immune to critical hits. Even as Encounters rewrote the cleric, the turn undead (and the avengers' related abjure undead) powers remained spells (with the Channel Divinity feature) that inflicted a combination of damage and conditions.

Result: Weirdly, the playtest seems to be splitting the baby here.  With regard to critical hits and sneak attacks  Next is keeping 4e's approach.  Creatures are not being given immunity to critical hits or sneak attack.  Rogues are equally effective against oozes, zombies, and plants.  Turn undead, however, is trying something a bit more old school. No longer a clerical prayer as it was in 4e, it is once a gain a class feature. And, like prior editions, turn undead has a complicated subsystem used to determine whether a cleric has destroyed or turned undead.  (However, this is a less complicated subsystem than 3e used.)  

Conclusion: The zombie article is a bit of a mixed bag. In the end, it primarily is discussing the uniformity of powers, specifically how a rogue's sneak attack is no longer dependent on its target, and how the cleric's turn undead power was turned into a "Channel Divinity" power.  The rogue change stayed, but the clerical change has been reverted.  To me, this is consistent with Next's philosophy of keeping what was popular and throwing out what wasn't, regardless of whether it made mechanical sense. I note particularly that every cleric gets to Turn/Rebuke Undead, no matter their domain.  Turn Undead, at least as seen in the most recent packet, is back to clunky subsystems and old-school arcanity.


Zombies Part 2, by Chris Sims
Summary: This article is much more about monster design than the prior article.

Defeating these exotic zombies is all the more satisfying, the possibility of horrible death all the more threatening, given their terrifying abilities. They set a great precedent for the zombie category's future expansion, and the prospect of even more terrifying fun.

Primarily, Sims introduced the zombie variants  including the "chillborn zombie", the "corruption zombie" and the "gravehound zombie".  This is a way fo introducing one of 4e's creature design aspects which is that any variation in a creature required a whole new stat block, that new stat block required a new name (preferably with a compound word adjective) and would appear in the Compendium.  

Evaluation:   There are, all told, over 50 zombie variations in the online Compendium. There are thousands of creatures in the Compendium overall.  Monster bloat was becoming rampant.  4e eventually introduced monster themes in the DMG2.  However, they never made it into the Compendium or the Monster Builder, so they weren't easily accessible to DMs creating their own monster.  Also, they weren't used very often in Dungeon adventures -- even if they were, the themed creatures would get their own stat block which would itself end up in the Compendium.  So the whole thing resulted in a huge amount of bloat and a lot of difficulty for DMs sifting through the material for the right monster for their campaigns.

Result: As for how zombie species will be handled, here is how James Wyatt, in his article "The Walking Dead", describes the design behind zombies in the playtest:

Zombies are relentless. Anything but disciplined soldiers, they shamble in whatever direction they're pointed, pummeling any enemy in their path. They can follow very simple orders and distinguish friends from foes, but that's about the best you can ask from a zombie.

Not much to go on there. Will there be zombie variants for gnoll zombies, chillborn zombies, and charnal zombies? We don't know.  There's so little we know about monster design.  However, I would hope that whatever Wizards does, it does not go down the path of the horrific monster bloat of 4e.

Conclusion: Sims' discussion of zombie variants was an interesting experiment.  In my opinion, the experiment failed.  Full stat blocks for every creature variation led to enormous amounts of bloat. I hope that Next's emphasis on simplicity makes such bloat unnecessary.  Moreover, any digital tools that Next introduces must be able to handle things like templates and themes.  Otherwise the designers are wasting their time with either digital tools and/or themes and templates.


Halflings, by Chris Sims
Summary: The article describes some changes made to the halfling in Next.  The changes were essentially two: halflings grew a foot, and halflings became associated with rivers.  Chris Sims summarized the article as follows:

The popular halfling of 3rd Edition is only slightly re-imagined so the race’s mechanical elements make the story elements true. Halflings are still Small, even though they are not 3rd Edition’s versions—in which halflings are the size of 3- or 4-year old humans. They still make great rogues, but they also make good rangers. A few new aspects, such as a tweak to Charisma and a slight influence over luck, in addition to making halfling warlocks viable, reinforce the halfling as a lucky, loveable protagonist. A halfling can also be a hard-to-kill enemy sharp of tongue and blade.

Evaluation: growing halflings by a foot seemed to cause no angst whatsoever because there were so few halflings depicted throughout 4e's development and when they were, you hardly ever got a sense of perspective.  So if your halfling was 2' 8" tall (literally, half the size of a man) rather than 3' 8" tall, nobody was really going to care.  After all, 4e was the edition that most emphasized the ability to reflavor.  So reflavoring your halfling a foot shorter was of absolutely no consequence to anybody.  (Halflings were also given slightly pointed ears -- I have no idea why.)

The river-going halfling idea also got very little traction, and was basically dropped. What river-trading halfling NPCs did we ever see?  There were two articles on halflings in Dragon during 4e's run.  Dragon 381 had a nominal reference to a halfling's river-folk ways, but the mechanics inside the article had nothing to do with rivers.  Dragon 392 offered no mention of rivers or river culture at all.  Dragon 412 had an entire article dedicated to ships and no mention of the halflings who were supposedly master of the riverboat.

Result: The halfling is likely to get a reconception from prior editions.  Here is what Jon Schindehette had to say about the aesthetic of halflings in his article, "Short People":

What was the issue about the halfling that haunted me? They were exactly what they were described to be . . . halflings, or half humans. I had the tendency to call them micro humans, and the biggest problem with them was the fact that I always had to tell the illustrator to put something in the image that gave them scale—otherwise they just looked like humans. SO frustrating!

In 2000, the iconic Third Edition character Lidda defined the halfling for millions of D&D players.  She kicked ass, and wasn't "cute" in a Ralph Bakshi way. But she was simply a short perfectly proportioned human. Schindehette seems to be going for a more hobbitty version of the halfling, plump, large-headed, a bit comical.

Conclusion: Personally, I sympathize with Jon Schidehette. I thought Lidda was uninspired. And I got tired of seeing halflings have to pose next to human skulls, human doors, or other human things so you knew you were looking at humans.  look at the picture that accompanied Sims' article.  Are those halflings on a ship with a normal barrel and crocodile, or are those two half-elves on a barrel-themed barge next to a dire crocodile?  I have no idea.  However, people seem to be torn on the lean half-sized human vs. the pudgy Bagginses hobbits. We'll just ave to see which vision wins out.  Perhaps we're looking at two subraces of halfling!


Overview: Sims seems to have been tasked with detailing some of the most inoffensive changes between 3e and 4e.  This is probably because, as he said, he was mostly still involved in 3e as 4e was developed. The articles he offered simply describe some of the necessary changes resulting from the game design assumptions described in prior articles. The distinction between demons and devils were required by the loss of alignment as an easy (though ultimately unhelpful) delineation between the fiends. The change to sneak attack was popular, and frankly, anything would be better than 3e's overly complicated turn undead rules. The aesthetic changes to halflings and the new approach to monster variants were interesting, but nobody could know what they meant until the full game saw release. None of these changes (with the exception of the change to the rogue) seems to have stuck. Fiends are again becoming distinguishable only in which side of the Blood War they find themselves on, clerics are getting complicated turn undead rules, halflings are losing height and gaining girth, and monsters are getting streamlined.  If these article represent Sims' input into the game (and they might not), that influence was transient at best.

Next week we will examine the articles of Rich Baker and Logan Bonner as they tackle 4e's new cosmology and the Christmas Tree effect, just in time for the holidays!

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This is the sixth of my ten-part series of articles, in which I look at the Design & Development articles released in the early part of Fourth Edition. This article examines the articles penned by Chris Sims.  Please feel free to add coments below, or in the related discussion thread.

Bruce Cordell is listed as one of the designers of D&D Next.    

Here are the other articles in the D&D Before series:

TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Introduction
2. Mike Mearls and Jeremy Crawford
3. James Wyatt
4. Rob Heinsoo
5. Peter Schaefer and Matthew Sernett
6. Bruce R. Cordell 
7. Chris Sims 
8. Rich Baker and Logan Bonner
9. Stephen Radney-McFarland  
10. Andy Collins

Bruce Cordell authored three articles for the 4e Design & Development series.  The articles he penned were Elves, Wizards and Wizard Implements, and Forgotten Realms (co-authored w/Phil Athans). Let's examine each of these three articles...

Elves, by Bruce Cordell
Summary: This article, revealing no mechanics at all, details how elves would be approrached in Fourth Edition.  What is notable of the article is not so much what it says, but what it omits.  

Elves are described as "wild, free forest-dwellers, guarding their lands with stealth and deadly arrows from high boughs."  Pretty standard fare for fantasy elves. But, in D&D, there was always a second facet of elves, known as the "grey elf" or "high elf".  This elf who lives in a tower, using his increased longevity to study arcane lore and become a master of magic. What this article omitted was that the eladrin would also be included as a new second race, given the ability to fey step at will and fill the niche of the scholar elf.

Evaluation: The elf and eladrin always remained separate.  However, the distinction was lessened when Essentials introduced the idea of "variable ability bonuses".  When Fourth Edition was first released, every race gained a +2 bonus to two ability scores.  Withthe release of Essentials, the races were changed so that you had a choice of stats to improve with racial bonuses.  Originally, elves could only improve Dexterity and Wisdom, which accentuated the wild woodsman aspect of the race.  But midway throught he edition, elves could choose to improve Intelligence instead of Wisdom.  But Dexterity and Intelligence were also the two abilties that the eladrin could originally improve.  (In Essentials, the Eladrin could choose to improve Charisma instead of Dextrity.) 

This change meant the elf was reclaiming territory that once belonged to the eladrin.  The divide between elfin races was diminishing. The elf was expanding to re-introduce the idea of the high elf.

Result: Pigeon-holing the race was not a great move.  It limited the race's usefulness and led to introduction of new an unique races.  I think people really appreciated when you could have variable racial stats.  Essentials got a lot of flak, but variable racial abilities was not one of the changes that many people objected to. This indicates to me that the original design choice -- as illustrated by the narrow definition of "elf" presented in thsi article -- was reconsidered midway through the edition.

Conclusion: The elf is not limited to the wood/wild elf concept in the playtest.  The most recent iteration of the playtest offers two subraces for the elf: wood elf and high elf.  And the eladrin has yet to be revealed.  In fact, it has yet to be revealed i the eladrin will indeed be revealed. All we have seen in this quote from James Wyatt's article, "Fairest of them All!":

If the Feywild becomes an optional element of the D&D cosmology, designed for use by DMs who want to make heavy use of the fey in their campaigns, it's easy to relocate the eladrin from Arborea into the Feywild, tone down their strong chaotic good alignment, and have something that looks very much like what we've presented in 4E.

So we still don't even know if the Feywild will be included as an optional element, much less whether the eladrin race will make an appearance!  That speaks volumes as to the change in approach between Cordell's article and today.

Wizards and Wizard Implements, by Bruce Cordell
Summary: This article introduces a new innovation to Fourth Edition: the implement.  Here is what Cordell says about the new mechanic.

What sets wizards apart from others who wield arcane magic are wizards’ unique implements. Most people recognize the three most common tools associated with wizardcraft: the orb, staff, and wand.

What is remarkable about the article is that it offers almost no mechanics.  There is no mention of the bonus an orb gives or why you might want to carry a wand.  It includes only evocative images and story elements.

Evaluation: The implement, despite what the article states, is not really what sets the wizard apart from others who weild arcane magic.  Artificers and sorcerers also weilded staves.  Artificers, bards, and warlocks weilded wands.  And lots of non-arcane classes got to wield orbs, staves, and wands.  So, this article did not accurately state how an implement would make wizards unique.

Result: Despite the inaccuracies of the article, the implement was a welcome addition to the game that served several purposes.  First, mathematically, it gave the game a vehicle for providing the ever-escalating accuracy and damage bonuses need to ensure the math would work.  Second, narratively, it was a great way to allow a spellcaster to distinguish himsef from other casters.  An "orbizard" felt a lot different from a "wandizard".  Third, it was a much better resource mechanic than material spell components of prior editions, using less bookkeeping and shopping.  Fourth, it was iconic.  What was Harry Potter wihtout his wand or Gandalf without his staff?

Conclusion: The playtest has done away with implements in the current edition.  It has also done away with spell components , except insofar as they are used for rituals.  Partly, this is because implements were simply a way for casters to improve their attack rolls to keep up with the weapon-users. With bounded accuracy, there's no need for a body slot to keep the treadmill moving.  Also, with NADs being dropped in favor of saving throw, awarding bonuses to DCs can become quickly unbalancing.  I will miss the implement.  I thought it was a great innovation, but I do not see it making it into the next edition fo D&D.  Rather, the ideas may be cannibalized into minor magic items, such as a wand of accuracy or staff of defense.


Forgotten Realms, by Philip Athans and Bruce Cordell
Summary: This article may expose the rawest of nerves of all the edition warring that occurred with the release of Fourth Edition: the Spellplague.  Bruce Cordell describes it thusly:

At first glance, the century leap forward is the most shocking part of the new FORGOTTEN REALMS setting. It is a jaw-dropping change. But it wasn’t a decision made lightly. In fact, it was felt something drastic had to happen in order to breathe new life into a shared world whose well-trampled edges were quickly approaching.

The article reads like a medical text explaining to a patient why their leg had to be amputated. "I'm sorry, Joe, but that thigh was Gangr(e)en(wood)ous and Drizzting with pus.  It had to go.  The idea was that the Realms had too much history, too many high-powered NPCs, and no room for PCs to roam.

Of particular note is that Philip Athans was the Realm author chosen for this inglorious task.  Ed Greenwood, the Realms' creator, is nowhere to be found.  And even though Greenwood always put ont he best face possible about the change (and did contibute material for the Campaign Setting), the lack of his intimate involvment speaks volumes.

Evaluation: Perhaps Greenwood said it best when he wrote "So many of the supporting cast I wanted to tell more stories about were dead and gone, lost to the almost-century of time 'jumped' between the 3rd edition Realms and the 4th edition Realms."  Which sort of contradicts the article's statement that there were no more stories to tell or adventures to run.  And even thought he idea was to make room for PCs to be world-spanning heroes, neither Drizz't nor Elminster actually perished in the Spellplague.  There they were, a century on, still making headlines and killing villains.

Result: Cordell was right to describe the Spellplague as "jaw-dropping".  This was the Realms-shaking event to dwarf all prior Realms-shaking events.  This article -- and the subsequent releases -- unleashed a hellstorm of Realmsfan fury the likes we may never see again in our (or Greenwood's) lifetime. It divided the fanbase. It gave grognards a rallying cry to show how Fourth Edition was a poisonous money-grab. Fans felt betrayed. DMs felt lost. Players felt abandoned.  While there is a significant core of people who love how the Spellplague rewrote the Realms and opened it up to new stories, I think it is generally acknowledged that the Spellplague did much more harm than good.

Conclusion: The Realms is going through a much different transofrmation and the Spellplague has made that endeavor all the more treacherous.  At GenCon, the company announced that they were takign it slow with Forgotten Realms.  It will be the first camapign setting released and it would not be the "default campaign setting" as Greyhawk was to 3e.  The company was compiling a "Forgotten Realms Bible" that would have all the ifnormation, particularly visual infromation about every region in the Realms.  The undertaking, given the Realms are nearly fifty years old., is massive.  

As for a release, the current indications are that the company will give people plenty fo options to decide for themselves what time period they choose to play in.  Before or after the Time of Troubles?  Before or after the Spellplague?  You decide, and, apparently, you will be given the tools to play in any era.  Inclusiveness, not triage, seems to be the word of the day.



Overview: I find Bruce Cordell's articles a refreshing air.  He was given responsibility for revealing three of the most radical changes in Next -- eladrin (obliquely), implements, and Forgotten Realms.  Unlike the mathematically oriented articles we have been reading, these articles offer no mechanics.  They offer us story.  Oh, how I missed story.

But, remarkably, every article topic Cordell discusses has been roundly rejected in the playtest.  Eladrin?  Nowhere to be found, with only a possibility of a possibility that it will be brought back, and the gray elves his article shot in the head?  They've been resurrected and placed back into a position of prominence in the playtest packets.  Implements?  Gone.  No mention or whiff of them and, mechanically, there's absolutely no need to include them in the first place. Spellplague? Ha! While Wizards hasn't exactly retconned the Spellplague away, they do appear intent on ensuring that the century before the Spellplague is always available and kept current for the fans of pre-Spellplague Forgotten Realms to enjoy.  

And yes, Bruce Cordell is one of the designers of Next, while other developers whose mechanical ideas are being continued into Next are not. Why?  Well, one reason may be that the authorship of an article is not necessarily an indication of ownership of that idea.  Cordell may have been assigned to write the articles that killed (albeit temporarily) high elves, spell component bags, and pre-Spellplague Forgotten Realms, but that doesn't mean those were his ideas or that he should shoulder the blame for their rejection by the community.  But I think there is a more important reason: story.

Cordell's articles do not focus on mechanics.  When he sells an idea he sells it as an idea.  He did not feel the need to explain that elves exude an aura of perceptiveness.  He did not have to discuss why implements are important to allow casters to receive the enhancement bonuses to attack and damage the game asusmes.  No, he justified each approach using narrative reasons.  And the playtest has shown itself to be all about the narrative.  Cordell is writer's writer.  He seeks out story, he elicits story, and he describes story.  That's what the playtest has been about and that, in my opinion, is why he is listed as a developer of Next when others have moved on or been passed over.

Next week we will examine the articles of Chris Sims, the most prolific author of Design & Development articles for 4e.

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This is the fifth of my ten-part series of articles, in which I look at the Design & Development articles released in the early part of Fourth Edition. This article examines the articles penned by Peter Schaefer and Matthew Sernett.  Please feel free to add coments below, or in the related discussion thread.

Peter Schaefer described his tenure at Wizards as "full-time, non-stop D&D rules mechanics". In the Monsters! Monsters! article, he also said "getting the math right is my job." I could not find Schaefer credited on any hardcover releases. Schaefer has 16 Dragon and 4 Dungeon articles to his credit. Before Wizards, he worked at White Wolf Game Studios, working on their award-winning and well-regarded Exalted game line.  White Wolf is not known for its tight mechanics, but is known for its compelling storylines (so assigning him to the math seems a bit odd).  

Matthew Sernett is credited as a co-author of five separate 4e supplements, including Halls of Undermountain, Mordenkainen's Magnificent Emporium, Neverwinter Campaign Setting, Monster Vault, and Player's Handbook: Races: Tieflings. Matthew Sernett has 21 Dragon and 10 Dungeon articles during the 4e era.  Matthew Sernett was also editor-in-chief of the magazines for eleven issues when 3e was first released, and worked for Paizo when the magazines were transfered to them.  He is credited with a boatload of 3e books, including Tome of Magic, Book of Nine Swords, and Divine Power.

Here are the other articles in the D&D Before series:

TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Introduction
2. Mike Mearls and Jeremy Crawford
3. James Wyatt
4. Rob Heinsoo
5. Peter Schaefer and Matthew Sernett
6. Bruce R. Cordell
7. Chris Sims 
8. Rich Baker and Logan Bonner
9. Stephen Radney-McFarland
10. Andy Collins

Peter Schaefer authored two articles for the 4e Design & Development series: Monsters! Monsters!, which he co-authored with Rob Heinsoo, and Elite Bullette.  Matthew Sernett authored one article: The Core Mechanic. Let's examine each of these three articles...

Monsters! Monsters!, by Rob Heinsoo and Peter Schaefer
Summary: As with the other Rob Heinsoo articles we've seen, this article is primarily concerned with mechanics.  Specifically, this article is explaining a change in design philosophy from Third Edition.  Heinsoo describes the philosophy shift as follows:

Fourth Edition's design started from the foundation that the PCs deserve more attention than monsters. Monsters generally appear on-stage for half or three-quarters of an encounter, whereas PCs have contracts for multiple levels. So we reversed direction compared to 3rd Edition and decided that everyone in D&D who is not a PC can be handled using simpler mechanics.

In the article, Heinsoo explains that this shift had its roots in his work for the Miniatures game, in which a monster's stat block had to fit on a single card, with only a few signature powers to make a monster feel unique. So to do this, they implemented a variety of approaches.  Most of the monster's stats were dependent on its level rather than its origin or type.  Monsters received signature abilities (such as the bugbear's "predatory eye") so related creatures would actually feel related. A creature received only a limited number of abilities. Few traits would require a DM to look beyond the stat block to understand. They introduced the monster role (solo, elite, etc.) so creature could be fought individually without being a slog.  (That aspect is detailed further in the "Elite Bullette" article described next.)

The two article authors then went on to discuss the benefits of this approach: shorter design time, a greater flexibility in crafting monsters that "felt right", and designing monsters in groups that have synergies.  The end of the article also talks about the new "recharge" mechanic for monster powers to replace the old "x times a day" mechanic.

Evaluation: Monster design went through a lot of revisions over its length. Sadly, it does not appear that Schaefer "got the math right". Monster defenses and hit points have been revised multiple times and even at the end of the game's tenure, people were complaining that monster hps were too high and their damage was to low.  "Slog" is a common word used to describe 4e combat and numerous threads in the forums popped up asking for other people's advice on how to get combat to flow more smoothly.  However, Wizards never went back to designing monsters like PCs. Stat block remained limited to a handful of powers with little need to look beyond the stat block to determine their meaning.

Result: The Next design team has claimed that they intend to keep a lot of 4e's monster design. Stat blocks are designed to contain all the information you need, so you do not have to refer to other books to run the creatures.  Monsters, so far, seem to have a limited number of powers.  It does appear that hit points, at least, are intended to be based on the level of the creature, rather than on its origin or type.  Other defenses, however, will be more organically developed.

Next seems to deviate, partly, from 4e in one respect. With bounded accuracy, the designers have indicated that NPCs could be designed using PC rules.  But they are also designed as monsters.

Finally, the designers still can't seem to get the math right.  A common complaint for most of the playtests has simply been a continuation of the complaints about the math in 4e: combat is either a cakewalk or a slog.  Monsters are too deadly or too easy.  There seems to be a serious difficulty in finding that sweet spot.

Conclusion: I am a huge fan of the theory of 4e monster design.  I remember with dread spending hours adding templates and rejiggering skills of monsters I was crafting for a campaign.  It was crazy and I hated it.  4e was a breath of fresh air.  We haven't seen behind the screen at Next monster design, but the developers are making all the right noises of keeping design elegant and simple.  The trick, however, is getting the math right.  One would think that bounded accuracy would make it easier to accomplish it, but, to date, I haven't seen that to be true.  let's hope they get it right before the game is published.


Elite Bullette, by Peter Schaefer
Summary: This article introduces players to the idea of a monster's secondary role.  Fourth edition introduced the concept of a monster that is "elite" or "solo".  Schaefer described the new concept as follows: 

Elite monsters represent a greater challenge: They count as two monsters of their level for encounter building and rewards. Elite monsters have the word “elite” preceding their level and role.

Schaefer then goes on to describe some of the things an elite creature gets that "standard" creatures do not: more attacks, more escapes, more hit points.  Overall, the article is sparse, giving a rather unhelpful example of combat against a bullette.

Evaluation: The game never abandoned the concept of the elite and solo monsters, though the design philosophy did change over time, for reasons discussed below.  At first the game thought you could just grant the elite one new power, double hp, add some defenses, give it an action point, and then call it a day.  Later, the guidelines became more complex, more organic.

Result: Elites and solos were made necessary by the ½-level bonus.  Because monster defenses were tied to level, you couldn't throw two 12th level creatures at a 6h level party.  That creatures would have defense so high it rarely got hit, and attacks so high it would rarely miss.  You had to make a 6th level elite creature instead.  So this isn't really an "innovation" per se, so much as a necessary reaction to the steep power scale that 4e imparted to PCs.

Another problem with the elite and solos is that they contributed to the feeling that 4e combat often resulted in being a slog.  Often, people would complain that elites and solos were nothing more than "big bags of hp".  They had a handful of powers which they used over and over, and all the players could do was beat it down until it ran out of gas.  This often felt boring.  

Given you were fighting fewer NPCs, there was less opportunity for terrain to come into play.  The players could quickly surround an elite or solo to prevent it from using terrain.  Or, if you had a lockdown artist in the party, the lockdown just had to overcome the high defenses of an elite/solo once and then use some power that prevented the creature from moving around -- or in the case of sleep -- turned it unconscious.  Then it was just a matter of beating the helpless solo into submission.  Many people came up with house rules to "fix" the solo and elite.  My well-regarded solution was Piecework Creatures.

Please note I am not including a discussion of minions here, just as Schaefer did not mention them in his article.  Although minions are also a sort of secondary role, they involve a completely different set of design assumptions.

In the end, a DM was often compelled to add more creatures to an elite or solo fight, which meant you couldn't really have a combat against a single creature.

Conclusion: The playtest has gotten rid of the ½-level bonus and thus the need for solos and elites.  By keeping progression tied to hit points, you can once again throw the 12th level creature alone at the 6th level party.  However, the danger inherent in the lockdown artist remains.  If a single spell or maneuver can keep that creature from moving around, the creature loses its challenging aspect.  Moreover, solos and elites were specifically given multiple attacks so they attacked as often as multiple creatures.  A 12th level creature won't have extra attacks necessarily and thus may not in fact be able to challenge a four-man team.  Monster design still seems to be in flux in playtest.  I do hope the designers consider how encounter design changes when using a single eighth level monster against four 2nd level PCs versus using four eight level monsters against four 8th level PCs.


The Core Mechanic, by Matthew Sernett
Summary: Sernett's single article in the Design and Development series is more of a primer about the uniformity of mechanics in Fourth Edition.  He writes:

Grab a d20. Roll high.

That’s the basic rule of 4th Edition just as it was in 3rd Edition, but the new edition puts that mechanic more solidly in the core of the game than ever.

Sernett then briefly goes on to explain how this changes the dynamic from Third to Fourth.  He introduces the conversion of the Fortitude, Reflex and Will saves into Fortitude, Reflex, and Will defenses.  The goal is simplicity.  As he writes:

What we mean when we talk about streamlining the system is this: making design decisions that make learning and using the game less difficult, while keeping the system just as robust. And making it more fun as the result.

Evaluation: Roll d20, go high was a pretty apparent feature of Fourth.  I liked it.  I thought it did allow for ease of learning the system and made it much easier to design things.  It also set up a simple rule: the attacker always rolls.  No longer did we need to worry about whether the wizard was making a touch attack or if the target had to make a reflex save.  The wizard casts, so he rolls the dice.  If you are attacked, you knew your attacker rolled the dice.  Elegant and easy to apply.

Result: However, there were two criticisms of the Non-AC Defenses (or "NADs").  In Third Edition, the saves were determined by one Ability: either Constitution, Dexterity, or Wisdom.  This had received criticism for making some Abilities disproportionately useful.  Dexterity and Wisdom, especially, were considered "Killer Abs" because they were also used to modify some of the most important Skills.  In Fourth, this was changed so that each defense was modified by the higher of two Abilities (called Ability Pillars): Fortitude used Strength and Constitution, Reflexes used Intelligence and Dexterity, and Will used Charisma and Wisdom.  In theory, this made all the Abilities more useful, which was true.  However, it also meant that every class pretty much had three dump stats, and any class that required you to use both Abilities in an Ability Pillar was roundly decried as problematic.  It also helped contribute to a feeling that the Ability scores were somewhat interchangeable and arbitrary.

Conclusion: Next is doing away with the Pillars.  It's also doing away with NADs.  While I understand the loss of the Pillars, a noble experiment that didn't quite achieve the result it needed, I don't like the loss of NADs.  The concept, as far as I can tell, is that the saving throw mechanic allowed magic to "feel" different because it used a different resolution system.  With weapons, the attacker rolls, but with magic, the victim rolls to resist the magic.  Frankly, I think magic feels plenty different merely since you can blast people with lightning.



Overview: What I get from the Schaefer and Sernett articles are two top-notch designers and editors whose talents were being wasted on math exercises.  These developers had great credentials in writing compelling stories and they were relegated to "getting the math right".  Moreover, they didn't get the math right!  The math -- particularly as it relates to monsters -- had to be changed about half-way through the edition.  This is a follow-up to my overview of Heinsoo, but I am seeing a definite trend here of an obsession with numbers that in the end tended to get in the way of story elements in design.  Please note that I am not saying 4e lacked story.  I've DMed the entirety of 4e and I have had no issue putting story into my game.  I am talking about story in design.

Games have a narrative.  That's what draws you into the game, what allows you to immerse yourself in the minutia of attack bonuses and pushes and dazes.  The game has to bring out that narrative.  One of the most frequent crticisms of 4e at the beginning of the run, as uttered by even its most ardent fans, is how dry the rulebooks felt at initial release.  4e is the only edition in which I can say I felt the DMG2 was a better written book than the DMG1.  And I think a part of the reason is the team was so driven to concentrate on mechanics (even if they weren't necessarily up to the task) that they lost sight of the narrative and the story they wanted the game to tell.  This leads to dry technical manuals when you should have evocative story guides.  To paraphrase the old saw about real estate being all about "location, location, location", RPG design is all about "narration, narration, narration".  Next forgets this at its peril.

Next week we will examine the articles of Bruce R. Cordell, another member of the D&D Next design team.

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