Party Roles: Joining the Five Man Band

One thing that I am very passionate about in the context of the RPG in general is a sense of the role in role-playing.  In short, I believe in the context of the role-playing game that every character should have a story role that they can fill and no other character can.  This can vary from context to context, in some games this is class balance, in others it is a variety of character backgrounds, in others, it is a matter of ensuring that all necessary skills are represented.  Regardless of methods, I believe that it is important for a game.  Today, I'd like to talk about why I find party balance important, a few observed methods that do it well and then talk about an experiment I want to run using TVTropes as a game resource.

I come to gaming with skills from a lot of places.  My passion for party balance comes from my experience in improv theater.  In improv, one of the most important facets is focus sharing, making sure that scenes shift between participants, allowing different people to be the center of attention for different parts of a scene.  This not only ensures investment on the part of all participants, but is also good for the progress of a scene. Shifts in focus allow shifts in power between character, which allows different character objectives to be resolved consecutively until the scene resolves. In the RPG, I feel that this is partially met by a sense of party balance, ensuring that shifts in narrative focus allow everyone to participate.  

I've seen this done in a number of different ways.  The classic version is the D&D class system, in which the four classes fill different roles within narratives and meet different challenges.  Got Undead?  Bring up the Cleric.  Got a Trap? Bring up the Thief.  This works reasonably well, but is terribly limiting in the kinds of stories that you can tell.  Other systems have taken very different approaches that I find interesting.  In Werewolf the apocalypse, the auspice system divides characters into social roles with the understanding that a given pack of werewolves is best served with one from each auspice, a warrior, a bard, a judge, a mystic and a trickster.  

One system I find interesting comes from Mongoose's version of Traveller.  In their system, at the end of character creation, depending on the kind of story that the game is going to be, the players get to divide up a suite of skills that are relevant to the story.  For a game that's about piloting a ship around, you get to make sure you have a navigator, a pilot, an engineer, a sensors person, etc.  It's useful, because it recognizes that these are frequent story challenges that different party members need to be able to complete.  In the system, you go around the table and pick skills one by one until all the skills have been divided.  It aims for minimal overlap while making sure that every challenge is meetable.  

Now, while I'm a big fan of it, I don't think that respecting party balance means that you can't have some degree of overlap.  I think that in systems that are open ended enough, you can engineer party balance in other ways.  I've threatened to run the all bard game(and D&D5's bard mechanics make that much more possible) of D&D for quite some time.  Similarity and difference can be relative between games.  The most important thing is that everyone feels they have a place at the table.  That there are ways to share focus that mean everyone gets to participate.

So, my experiment.  The next game I run, I am going to encourage people not just to choose a character class, etc.  But to actually choose a role in the TVTropes Five Man Band.  Having a sense of not just how the character fits into game challenges but into the party's social roles may help.  Or it may go completely off the rails.  It wouldn't be an experiment if I knew exactly how it would go.  But I think it's worth a try.

D&Deconstruction Part V: Specific Beats General

One of the design principles that seems to be at the heart of D&D is summed up in one of the rules they present: Specific Beats General.  Within the rule system, if a specific power, spell or ability says to do things one way and the general rule says to do things another way, the specific power is correct.  While this seems simple, it points to something that brings me pretty high hopes for D&D5 in the longer term: Expandability.  

There are a lot of built in ways that D&D5 can add content to the game that provides specific variations on the simple general themes.  Classes have archetypes that can be expanded in a fairly unlimited fashion.  Why not a rogue-acrobat archetype, or a rogue-duelist archetype.  New Backgrounds can easily be created by combining any two skills.  Intimidation and Investigation?  You were in law enforcement. Animal Handling and Arcana?  Your parents ran an owlbear farm.  Deception and Survival? You were in the hunger games.  Any combination can become a new background.  Existing backgrounds have variants that allow extra expandability.

This increased possibility of variation means that D&D5 will hopefully take a lot longer to get to the point of publishing pointless new classes or prestige classes that have no point.  And the principle of specific beats general has allowed for the creation of some variations that already break the mold in interesting ways.  The Paladin class is one of my favorites so far.  They've added two significant Paladin variations, neither of which is lawful good, but both of which are definitely holy warriors.  One is a paladin in service to the druidic religion, focused on doing good within nature.  One is a paladin in service to vengeance, driven by revenge to remove the greater evil.  These variations represent a focus on the specific over the general in a way that betokens the possibility of actual adaptability when it comes to the game.  And that says to me that there is room to grow.  D&D5 can add variation without making the existing obsolete.

Like the rule philosophy as stated, this is more than simply the introduction of new material, it seems to be a change in how things are being written.  Specific exceptions are no longer being written into general rules.  Specific exceptions are written into specific rules, with the general rules kept general and straightforward.  This should hopefully alleviate some of the issue of colliding specifics that can cause significant confusion and represents a significant change in design philosophy that I find refreshing.

I could go on about all the different things I find interesting in the new edition.  Short rests.  Changes in movement rules and attacks of opportunity.  Sneak attack.  Variable Magic Systems.  But all of them come down to this.  D&D5 feels like a lot of thought and care went into it.  From what I have heard about the playtesting, significant changes happened over the course of development that led to the game that was released.  Truly, only playing the game will tell how these changes really work, but I am hopeful, and that is refreshing.

D&Deconstruction Part IV: Advantage In

D&D has always been a very precise game.  Being blind gives you an exactly 50% miss chance.  Being behind cover adds exactly +4 to your AC, unless it's only partial cover, which adds only +2.  The Total defense action adds +4 to your AC, unless you have more than 5 ranks in tumble, in which case it adds +6 to your AC.  Dropping prone means a -4 to your AC, except against ranged attacks, where it's a +4 to your AC. All of these bonuses and penalties are very precise and fiddly and while they are generally balanced, they are really hard to run on the fly without years of experience.  And they are often hard to explain to new players why exactly they should stand exactly here and act in exactly this way to help achieve results.

D&D5 has replaced most of these nitpicky bonuses and penalties with advantage and disadvantage.  For advantage and disadvantage, the rule is simple.  You roll two twenty sided dice instead of one.  If you have advantage, then you pick the better one.  If you have disadvantage, you pick the worse one.  If you have things that grant both advantage and disadvantage, you roll as normal.  

This development simplifies a lot of things and while I could definitely have talked about this in relation to my first point about randomness, I think this has the most potential impact when it comes to running games.  No longer do you have to pore over books to find what the balanced level of benefit or penalty for a given situation is, you can instead simply give advantage or disadvantage based on a given change in circumstances.  

One of the biggest problems with D&D has always been that it's been hard to justify situational modifiers because of the strictly balanced set of bonuses and penalties at the heart of the game.  The addition of advantage and disadvantage changes that.  And what's great is that advantage doesn't let character exceed their current ability, it just smooths out the bell curve of success, making them less likely to fail.  

D&Deconstruction Part III: The Third Kind of Heat

Backgrounds are a game changer.  Literally.  They allow a much wider variation in character than nearly any other aspect of D&D5.  While they may seem to be merely an addition of flavor to characters, they actually add something incredibly significant to the creation of the adventuring parties.

So, in 3.X, there was really only one way to gain proficiency with a given skill, to have it 'in class'.  Some skills were specific to a single class, some available to a select few, some fairly broadly available, but nearly every skill had limited access of some sort.   The most egregious example of this was trapfinding.  Not only was disable device only available to rogues, but trapfinding dictated that even if other classes took levels of disable device, they couldn't use it on magical traps.  This led to the problem of every party essentially needing a rogue.  So even if nobody really wanted to play one, in order to have a party that could meet all available challenges, one person would be forced to play a rogue.  Pathfinder got around this a little bit with traits, but those were an optional, underpowered system that also suffered from excessive specificity(I want the extra bump in Knowledge(history), but I'm not a scholar of ruins).

Backgrounds make skills much more adaptable.  Backgrounds exist that include many different skills, allowing the selection of skill proficiencies that match the character not the character class.  Plus, they are not limited by character class.  A soldier background can be used to make a wizard, a bard or a monk, not just a fighter.  An entertainer background gives an intersting spin on a warlock or a cleric.  By selecting a background and a class, a player can choose what skills their character has.  This means that challenges are no longer just focused on what the character class is, but on who the character is.

In Mongoose's traveller, at the end of character creation, there's a point where players divvy up a set of relevant skills, making sure that they aren't deficient in the required tasks to run their chosen spaceship(You mean nobody knows how to navigate?!).  D&D allows that to be done as part of character creation in a more free-flowing way.  It's easy to tweak a background or skill choice in order to make sure the regular bases are covered without forcing players into undesired classes in order to fill a party need.

And ultimately, it's an orthogonal system.  A pair of axes along which a character can be built where neither depends on the other for their value.  A soldier wizard will be different from a hermit wizard will be different from a charlatan wizard, both mechanically and in terms of personality.  It takes away the "standard fighter" option and allows for much greater variation.  In short.  I love it.

D&Deconstruction Part II: Personality Goes a Long Way

One of my favorite nitpicks about 4th edition was the weird simplification of the alignment system.  Instead of a two axis system of law vs. chaos, good vs. evil that allowed for nine alignments, they reduced the total to five: good, evil, lawful good, chaotic evil, neutral.  I've gone through thoughts about this.  Does that mean that evil is inherently lawful or inherently chaotic?  Is this supposed to be on a single scale?   Regardless of whatever they were thinking when they made that choice, I hated it.

Now, this isn't my love song to the alignment system.  I think it's far too limited a system and one that is far too reified within the world.  To quote Barley Stonemug when he was accused by a Paladin of being evil "What does that even mean?"  No, while I've made my peace with the alignment system as a heuristic system that can guide character choices, this entry is about the inclusion of personality.

D&D5 adds a number of specific personality aspects to the game.  Every character has a number of specific characteristics tied to who they are.  Personality traits are behavioral quirks the character might have. "And there was Jimmy Two Times, who got that nickname because he said everything twice."  Ideals are higher or lower purposes, a refinement of the alignment system that says more specifically what the character is out to achieve.  "For as long as I can remember I always wanted to be a gangster...To be a gangster was to own the world." Bonds are ties a character has to individuals and organizations that drive them. " I know there are women, like my best friends, who would have gotten out of there the minute their boyfriend gave them a gun to hide. But I didn't."  Flaws are things that get a character in trouble. "You mean, let me understand this cause, ya know maybe it's me, I'm a little fucked up maybe, but I'm funny how, I mean funny like I'm a clown, I amuse you? I make you laugh, I'm here to fuckin' amuse you? What do you mean funny, funny how? How am I funny?"

Now, these aren't new to role playing.  You've always had characters with personalities.  But putting that on the character sheet, making space for it is new to D&D.  And they've gone further than that.  These personality aspects are tied to a new system, Inspiration!  You can get inspiration for good role-playing, forwarding the story by playing out your character.  Then later on, you can spend that inspiration to gain advantage on a roll.  It's a sort of limited drama point system, but importantly, it's based on actually playing a character.

In my mind, this owes a lot to Dungeon World.  One flippant way of expressing my interest in D&D5 is that it takes the parts of D&D that Pathfinder and Dungeon World improved and recombines them.  Dungeon World spent a lot of energy on defining the role playing aspects of your character, including goals and bonds, and D&D5 seems to have taken that and run with it.  Here's hoping it works. Of course, that's not the biggest thing they've done to add character to the game.  Next time, I'll talk about backgrounds.

D&Deconstruction Part I: So That's a Total of +13?

The question of numerical representation and randomness is one that is deeply embedded in gaming. Gary Gygax worked for an insurance company before writing D&D, reviewing actuarial tables and that sense of both the need to calculate an individual's relevant statistics and a sense of the chance of random occurrence are easily visible from the first RPG to the present day.

And D&D has often been the worst.  Sometimes, it's just a weird way in which they choose to represent the math.  The THAC0 tables from Advanced Dungeons and Dragons are the butt of many jokes, but they're just a pivot table away from being the same as base attack bonus.  Sometimes, it's a lot of fiddly bonuses that when put together allow a distinct unbalancing.

This became very bad indeed in the 3.X versions of the game. The perceived need for continuous improvement and potential advantage made it so that the optimizing of characters left a significant gulf between the specialist and the non-specialist.  Additionally, the continuous improvement meant that encounter levels were drastically important to design because encounters much above the party's level were impossible in the best circumstances and encounters much below the party's level were laughable.  There even developed folklore around the issue "There's a 20 on every die" indicates the common 5% chance of success in a task for which a character is not optimized.

D&D5 has a much smaller window of proficiency.  The least competent character at a given task will have at worst a -1(level 1 character, no proficiency, ability score of 8).  The most competent character will have at best a +17 for a skill(expertise multiplier of +6 proficiency bonus, ability score of 20) or +11 for an attack (max +6 proficiency, max 20 ability).  An Ooze has an AC of 8  An Adult Red Dragon has an AC of 19.  So, even the least competent character with an unfamiliar weapon can hit the most intimidating monster with enough luck.  Most first level characters will have at least a +2 to hit using the weapon in their starting equipment.  Which gives a 15 percent chance to hit that Red Dragon.  But there's a chance for even the most competent character has only a 60 percent chance of hitting with a specific attack against an adult red dragon(probably more, given the possibility of a magic weapon, but assuming they max out at +5, even then, there's only an 85 percent chance).

This has a lot of possible implications for running D&D5.  In the past, I've run into encounter design issues based on scalability.  An encounter that is challenging to the skill of one character is impossible for any other. At the other end of the scale, once characters reach a certain level, earlier challenges simply do not register on their radar.  With the narrowed proficiency window, encounters are more challenging and doable at the same time.

Finally, the lack of higher math necessary to calculate bonuses and penalties for a given attack mean things will run more smoothly.  I've seen people resort to using makeshift spreadsheets to calculate their attacks in Pathfinder.  The 10-15 seconds of calculation really add up in game time, so losing that is in my mind a good thing.

Overall, we'll see, but at the very least, I can see where they were going with this and hopefully the design intention will show through.

D&Deconstruction: Introduction

5th edition marked a weird point in my life. While I have been gaming for decades, it was the first time that I was excited about the release of a new edition of Dungeons and Dragons.  AD&D came out before I started gaming(using the red box back in 1988).  When Second Edition came out, I was unaware of its release.  I was a kid and not clued into the ins and outs of publishing.  Third Edition hit during a period when D&D was far from my mind.  I was into storytelling games and 3.0 was not what I was looking for.  By the time Fourth rolled around, I was excited about 3.5 and 3.75[Pathfinder] and didn't have a need to replace them.  I hadn't yet hit the disillusion with Pathfinder that I now have and Fourth edition was in my opinion a move in the wrong direction, a focus entirely on the tactical over the fantastic.  I ended up with a copy of it due to a shipping mistake, but only played once.  So Fifth edition is the first edition of D&D that I have been excited about at the start.

And I am really excited about it.  I've turned into a bit of an evangelist.  And there are enough parts that I want to break them down into separate entries and talk about why each of them excites me as much as it does.  And so I will.  This will be a multi-part review of the system.

Part I. So That's a Total of +13?

A deconstruction of the change in bonuses and the ways it affects skill checks overall.  

Part II. Personality Goes a Long Way

My paean to the inclusion of character in the game.

Part III. The Third Kind of Heat

Backgrounds add a lot to the game, I talk about it here.

Part IV. Advantage In

The system of advantage and disadvantage changes the game, I hope for the better.

Part V. Specific Beats General

The general shift in rules philosophy and expansion and what I hope they herald.

So, look here for more.  At this point, this is more a review of the Player's Handbook and the Basic Rules, things may change with the introduction of the Monster Manual and the Dungeon Master's Guide, but I'll talk about that separately if it does.  

But let me leave it at this.  I've been looking for something that recreates the gaming experiences of my youth. The wonder of a +1 hand axe, the drama of fighting a gelatinous gube.  A few games have touched on parts of that.  My first impression is that D&D5 might hit on all cylinders.  Let me tell you why.