Enough Classes

On my closed blog, The Higher Path [available through Patreon], I addressed how the general discussion of D&D on the internet fails to intrinsically address the game's design flaws.  More often than not, the rush to give opinions about subject material such as rangers and alignment is apt to produce a lot of tribal flag-waving, without effort to draw conclusions.  We either use, or do not use, alignment, and we're ready as a community to argue endlessly about it ... but useful, concrete evidence of alignment's use or non-use remains absent from the discussion.  This is true of virtually every discussion related to D&D, and roleplaying in general.

Consider alignment as a convenient example, as the lines are already drawn in that conflict.  My personal take is that alignment is not necessary.  It is irrelevant to me what it adds to the game; but it was plainly clear, from those early days when I tried alignment, what it detracted from the game.  On the whole, we spent far more time discussing and debating the specifics of the rule than we spent using it.  Players automatically moved to circumvent the rule, universally.  Game time was lost in discord and argument.  Preparation time was wasted attempting to define alignment ~ and no matter what definition was offered, players would view the results with resentment.  Consensus was not possible.

And so, no matter what alignment added, the price was too high.  So I ditched it.  Players, I said, could do what they wanted, within the game's limits.  Immediately, consensus.  Resentment evaporated.  Game time progressed towards more fruitful discussions.  There were no longer any restrictions on attitude and character that required circumventions.  Debates on character evil/good evaporated.  New players entering the game, expecting to find alignment, adapted almost immediately the absence of the rule.

Those who argue for the value of alignment, or any other rule, never seem to address the behaviour of the players to that rule.  Never mind if there ought to be some penalty for some behaviour ... if the penalty compromises the pleasure and momentum of the game, we are penalizing the wrong thing.  We ought to have learned that lesson from social experiments like Prohibition and the War on Drugs, both of which have been exhaustive, non-productive, disastrous failures of policy and intention, based on the premise that there "ought to be some penalty" for this sort of behaviour, as imposed by people who do not partake.

As another example, consider the ever-present motivation that has existed, since very early in the game's history, to expand the number of classes that players can play.  In every case that I've seen, there are two arguments that are always made to justify the existence of the new class:

1) that, logically, persons of this profession are defined differently in an historical or literary sense, such as sorcerors, warlocks and witches.

2) the presence of the profession is commensurate with the underlying culture and motif of D&D, particularly in literature that is filled with such things as chevaliers and barbarians.

This is followed by some elaboration of how the character class would be interesting to play, and how it offers a new experience for the player.  However, what is not included is any discussion of how this might usefully change the game milieu, or generally advance the players' participation beyond the limitations of the new class's most obvious application.  A "fighter" covers a vast multiplicity of individual behaviours, essentially every form of possible application of combat and military training used to solve problems ~ whereas a barbarian is essentially a stereotype of one sort of combatant, with limited knowledge and cultural expectations built in.  "Magic user" defines any person that uses magic, obviously; subdivisions don't add to the game's structure or player behaviour, except to flagrantly subdivide the magical schematic in order to specialize the field to where, hopefully, emasculated forms of the original will have less power complimented by further stereotypical applications to character behaviour.

Is this really the point of the game?  To transform general freedoms of action in order to stipulate what sort of player actions "appropriately" fit a descriminate, prejudiced perception of what's expected of a player ... all the while selling the notion that more choice is more freedom.  There is no freedom in choice once the choice is made.

That only encourages boredom with narrower character concepts, promoting increased flipping of player from character class to character class, sabotaging the game's appeal towards masterfully building something unique and personal over the length of the campaign.  Instead, we give you something unique at the Start, and then tell YOU that your job is to live up to IT.  Character classes as shackles.  Gawd.  What a concept.

This conclusion will have been lost on some, so let's be clear.  When I want to run a character in your game, am I defined by what I do, or am I defined by what I want?  Is my personality based on the assigned conditions of my character class, or is it based on my ongoing, session-to-session actions?  The way the game has gone for more classes, it sounds to me like I'm supposed to believe the former.  That I am a sorceror because my character sheet says I am one.  But I think I am a mage, who uses magic to solve problems in ways that I invent, not in the way that my character class invents.  And I think that the way I act, and what I do, ought to be up to ME, and not what the class description says, or what the DM says.  And I feel that the game's design ought to stop putting me in cultural boxes and just get the hell out of my way.

I don't get excited by my character's class.  I like that it offers me certain tools, that I can work with ... but what I choose to "be" will be my choice, and not the game's.  So thank you, just let me pick some spells or a weapon, because that's what I need.  I don't need stereotypes.  I need points to jump off from.

The essentials of this game are that the DM is going to describe what I see, and then I'm going to cope with that.  There are shackles enough, thank you.  I can only run so fast and hit so often.  I am only as exceptional as the dice and my experience allows.  I am only as clever as my brain lets me be.  I don't need rules on my behaviour, my beliefs, my morality, my literary responsibilities or additional boundaries on what my character class "stands for."  The genius of the original fighter was that it didn't stand for anything.  It's a shame that this lesson was not extended to all the other classes.  If it had been, we'd have enjoyed less stupid fights at the game table for ridding the game of all that, too.

The Scholar

I've always thought that if there was going to be a new character class, it should be something truly different.  Not just another fighter or spellcaster, not another version of the thief, but a concept utterly divorced from previous templates.

And because I've never thought of such a deviation, I've never proposed a new character class ~ though that is a major sport of RPG bloggers everywhere.  It isn't possible to go down a long blogroll on a site without finding someone who has recently written about a new character class.

This said, I might have an idea.

I hesitate, of course.  I don't want to make this sort of thing a habit.  But I suppose once every 40 years is okay ...

I am imagining a character class with no combat ability, no spells, no special physical capabilities, no role-playing or conversational talents ... very little, in fact, that might provide any real help in a fight.  And while there would be a facet of the character that would provide some healing benefit, none of that would be magical and virtually none of it would apply to restoring hit points.

But, lots of knowledge.  Lots and lots.  The character class would be "Scholar," an individual who possessed a ton of academic knowledge, not "practical" knowledge.  A scholar could conceivably be a physician, an engineer, a merchant, a politician or an historian (these being sage fields), but such things would not instantly apply to the most difficult of skills.  A 1st level would not be a full-blown professional, no.  But I think there would be a larger number of sage studies to draw on, and more sage points gained than other classes.  Because, basically, knowledge is all the character would possess.

There would be very little weapon training, no ability to wear armor and no special powers.  The combat table would be the mage's, with comparable weapons, and little else to keep them alive.  Experience needed to go up a level would be low, however, perhaps lower than the thief, which would fast-track the sage abilities.  Hp, d6 (because I'll give this one small benefit over the mage/illusionist).  It would be a tough row to hoe (though a scholar could tell you how to hoe it).

Basically, the other characters would be needed to keep the scholar alive.  But in the games I play, that would be seen as a feature, not a bug.  A scholar would be a great henchman.

And a very different sort of character.  With a different outlook, and different goals.  Someone who might step up and do their part in a fight, but wouldn't need to base their character's aspirations on raw physical and mental power.

Might be interesting.

Character Class II: Cooler and Meaner

I firmly believe that images like this have seriously fucked
up our capability of seeing these classes as larger than the wooden
depictions that have been shoved down our throats from the
beginning of this game.  While praising them, we've failed to
see how the discourse has been limited by an insistence of
seeing these classes as a bunch of cool mary-sues, with clean
clothes, hairdos, special effects, movie-star looks and with
weapons constantly at the ready. Do you have any idea how
hard it is to find fantasy art that does not depict characters
in this frame of reference?  It is like the way the film
Pleasantville scoffs as the manner of depicting the 50s
and 60s on television.

I don't know what I can say about character classes that hasn't been said.  I'm discovering that the subject is a trigger for me.  I was ready to hack and slash three people who made innocuous comments, because at first read I took their position as anti-class.  I wonder where that came from?

Yet obviously the subject is of great interest to people, grist for the mill as it were ... so I'll try and say something.

Much of the problem seems to be combat.  G.B. Veras' comment about "sneaky fighters" and "burly fighters" for example, or Slick's identification of the fighter as good at wrestling and axes ... but I don't call these out to cut into these guys.  This is how we all tend to talk about the classes.  The mage "throws" spells and the thief backstabs.

While of course the descriptive fits in those moments of direst threat, I don't see any of these classes in the light of what they do when they fight.  They have more character than that.

Take the fighter for instance; we have an ex-fighter, probably someone who's spent time on the brute squad or taking a small part in a battle before reaching 1st level.  This is someone who can talk to soldiers, who can appreciate the life of a guard and who sees the importance of town gates and shaking down citizens.  It isn't just what the fighter does, it's what the fighter sees ~ that peace and order is maintained through force ... a force that may need to be applied gently or not.  Fighters looking at a tower will automatically envision how to take it down or how to defend it; the fighter will gently move the illusionist or druid to the other side of the walk, putting body and responsibility between them and strangers ... and thinking, "Why does the druid never understand they should walk on the inside?"

It's a mindset.  The fighting is a small part of that mindset; something that has to be done but isn't defining of who or what the fighter is.  A dumbass fighter, a kid, a punk, wants to start a fight in a bar; an older fighter calmly steps over to the table with the louts, takes the beer out of the one fellow's hand and puts it down firmly on the table.  "I think it's time for you four to leave.  There are folks here just out for a good night."

That's not "lawful."  That's sensible.  Where's the percentage in tearing apart a bar?  There's no money here, there's a police force outside and it's just dumb for an adventurer who knows where there are fights that will yield a thousand gold.

I don't think players, in their modular perception of movie filler scenes, comprehend the background to each of these classes.  How does the druid become a druid, do you think?  What sorts of troublesome efforts has a cleric endured to encourage a seminary or lamasary to condone their use of clerical magic?  How many times has this mage been humiliated as a child, as Master Igran chose to dump yet another bowl of porridge overtop his student's head as punishment?  The road to class proficiency isn't an easy one.  It changes children in the way it makes adults, forcing perspective, prejudice and most of all patience into the psyche.

Take away the class set-up and we get mongrels, blank slates who are full of skills and cheesy backstories, but nothing to suggest how that individual acquired this hodgepodge of game functions.  I'm not ready to sacrifice the class myself; the class helps organize the larger picture behind the character ... it tempers how this character comes from a family of sailors, while that one came from a family of farmers.  Likewise, it helps paint how this elf thinks as opposed to that elf (because I don't think every elf thinks alike), particularly if this elf then came from a seaside town, while that one was born in a glorious elven city.

Most of all, perhaps this is a deeper reason why I have a problem with classes like barbarian, cavalier, tinker, healer or acrobat.  Let's take them quickly, one by one.

A barbarian is a fighter from a wildland.  That's easily understood, and while I can see why a barbarian might be stronger on average, why does this translate into being better with a weapon?  Surely the heightened training of a civilized fighter is a counterbalance to the barbarian's grit and enthusiasm.  I love Conan; but I don't view him as automatically more deadly than D'Artagnan, Lancelot or Robin Hood.  Any of these could give Conan a run for his money, and do as much damage ... so why make special rules for this kind of fighter?  Isn't Conan just a 22nd level fighter with a 19 strength and the normal number of multiple attacks per round?

Mentioning Lancelot brings us to the cavalier ... but the same arguments apply.  Why should a first level cavalier have any special fighting abilities based on the concept of a horse-soldier?  Aren't we already covering the better horsemaster by running a character with greater dexterity or strength, who chooses to ride a horse well?  Lancelot is clearly covered in the paladin ... so why create a subclass of paladin, which is already a subclass of the fighter?  Besides, all paladins are given horses ... so isn't a cavalier just a paladin that decides to use the horse a lot?  The class adds no unique backstory at all ... it just doesn't work.

The tinker makes things, invents things, specializing in hydraulics, chemistry, kinetics and a whole lot of other things that are so simple in the 14th century that literally anyone who was prepared to screw around with such things could build them.  I have a source here that tells me tinkers are always gnomes.  Why?  Don't humans build things?  Hold on ... I think they do.  How does this nonsense not explode the brain of the designer?  My larger point, however, is that a tinker is a profession, not a class ... and ought to be defined by the class it is a part of, just as a fighter might be a sailor, a farmer or a prospector.  A mage who tinkers would be interested in energy, a fighter who tinkers would be interested in fortification or ballistics, a druid that tinkers would be interested in biology, etcetera.  The very notion suggests the designer doesn't understand that modern "engineering" is not just one profession, but hundreds.  And not interchangeable, not once you've been poisoned by the field you're in.  I just don't think that "tinker" is definitive enough.

"Healer" ... hm.  The less said about this, the better.  This class has spells, so it's not a doctor.  It has no religious responsibility, but it can still "detect evil."  Why?  And why detect magic, haste, invisibility, speak with dead and blade barrier?  What do any of these things have to do with healing?  The concept is so rooted in corporate motivation to distance themselves from religion in an era of satanic accusations from a now-defunct moral majority that I can only shake my head at those who can look at this mishmash with the necessary cognitive dissonance.  If we must separate out the skills from the theology, can we at least: 1) not make the ability based on spells; 2) explain the class in terms of the Knights Hospitaller, which would at least be adventure fuel; 3) create completely new abilities that don't overlap with clerics!  For my money, a Knight Hospitaller is properly a human cleric/paladin, but if we MUST make a class to satisfy Mrs. Grundy, can we please for the love of green fucking apples make a gawddamned effort?

And the acrobat.  This I've saved for last.  This, at least, does suggest a very specific background.  And the 14th century had jugglers, gleemen, fools, jesters, bards and troupes of gymnasts. Such things have existed since the weakest cro-magnon man in the tribe discovered that enough food could be gotten by balancing a club on the end of the nose.  But does the acrobat in the book reflect this?  Nope.  In fact, it plays into the worst racist stereotypes that groups like gypsies, who were prevalent in this profession in the middle ages, were all thieves and cretinous persons.  We don't make the acrobat a sub-class of the bard, where it belongs, but a subclass of the thief.  And that is where it goes wrong.  It strips the camp & nomadic life of the performer (which continued to be more important than the profession itself) out of the class and replaces it with the medieval equivalent of the 20th century catburglar.  Cheese.

Perhaps I've gotten something across here; I doubt it.  This last few days I've gained an insight that many people don't seem to see what the class does for the game, far, far apart from the position a particular class takes on the battlefield.  That's pretty sad, given how many times I've been accused of being a roll-player ~ and here I am making a role-playing argument.

I don't think people seem to have the first understanding of what role-playing is.

Class Distinction

Over at B/X Blackrazor, JB makes some solid points about Class Proliferation that you should read.  There are multiple points he makes that I can't agree with, but none of those happen to be about the proliferation part of his post, so they're not important.  There is this little thing he missed, however, and I am inclined to write about it.

Admittedly, I had not been playing with the Little Brown Books very long when I encountered AD&D in 1979; about three months.  I asked for and was given the DMG, PH and MM for Christmas that year, so I moved onto AD&D almost as soon as I started playing.  I can't remember anyone who wasn't thrilled with the expansion; everyone in my circle immediately made the jump without hesitation ... I didn't hear a voice arguing OD&D over AD&D until the internet happened.

We loved the new classes.  All of them.  They brought in new ideas and new concepts, a rush of spells, characters that we all wanted to try and absolutely a rush for the thief, assassin, monk, druid, ranger and paladin.  We argued what was better, but of the ten fully designed classes there was no one in my circle between 1979 and 1983 did not want to try every class, nor one that we considered "didn't belong" or not worth playing.  Our only issue was that the bard was the worst possible design imaginable; we loved the idea of the bard, we wanted the bard, we tried desperately to play the bard ... but the character as written just sucked.

And then, the Unearthed Arcana.

I have it in my hands.  I bought it, of course.  This is the same copy I bought in '83.  The book wasn't bound as well as the original three, so that even though I've hardly used this book compared to the others, it is falling apart.  I remember reading the cavalier, the barbarian and the thief-acrobat and feeling a wave of utter repulsion and disgust for all three.  I talked it over with my players and explained that no, none of those classes would EVER be available in my world ~ and they haven't.

Right off the top, we were given long descriptions of what cavaliers and barbarians believed, or were willing to accept as characters, apart from what they did or what powers they had.  At 19 I could see plainly the dirty double-shuffle at work.  We'll let you have these extra fighting powers, but we're going to fuck you up the ass if you don't use them how we say.  And what powers are we talking about?

Thumping.

Yes, that's right kiddies, if your character wants to thump harder, do more damage, become a one-trick pony, we've got the answer for you ~ right this way to making your character as two-dimensional as it could possibly be.

The cavalier thumped from horseback and the barbarian thumped on foot.  We're not talking any NEW abilities or ideas, just the same ones ... only more so.  We could see clearly the kind of player these were catering to: players who bitched and whined that they couldn't hit harder, or in the case of the acrobat, that they could flip and jump and crawl around behind things better.

In other words, we made specialized classes that would enable these people to do the only things they really, truly wanted to do, better, and in exchange we took away powers they didn't feel like using anyway.  And that they called "balance."

Don't care about picking pockets and finding traps?  No worries!  You don't need to do that shit if you're an Acrobat!  Is all that ranger wilderness stuff boring to you?  Don't be down!  Be an Archer!  Does religion and all the accompanying character that goes along with that worry you?  Don't fret!  You can be a Healer!

With each new incarnation, do we get new ideas?  New character personalities?  No, we get cardboard cutouts that super-specialize in absolutely one skill only, to the point where as a DM you're ready to vomit.  Oh look, the Archer is getting out his arrows again.  The Healer is hanging back and doing fuck all while everyone else fights.  The Acrobat is inventing impossible ways to get out of fights.  Gee, I sure am glad all these classes were allowed to proliferate.

I'm ready to run by 5th level Kitten Tower Guard class.

I said in '83 that this class bullshit was going to be the death of good play, and yeah.  Here it is.  We invented a game concept purely for the purpose of selling out to a particular kind of wooden player and the result was munchkinism, skill lists and buys, wizard schools and ... well, you've seen it.

I'd accept double the classes that I use now, if they were distinct classes.  Not just a lot of one thing that another class also has and does less of.  And not a situation where two different classes do effectively the same thing by different methods, like magical healers and physicians.  I don't care how the character does something; I want the thing they do to be utterly unique, where they are the only class that does this phenomenally important and critical thing that the game desperately needs.

Since 1979, I haven't seen one such class.  Not one.  They're all derivatives of AD&D's 11 ... counting the bard.  And sorry, JB.  That goes for elven, dwarven and halfling "adventurers," too.  It's still just a fighter or a skill derivation of other classes.  I just don't see them as their own thing after you scour away the "we'll tell you how to think like a blank" motif that goes along with painting character classes as races.

Racism

This is a risky post to write.  I will start by saying that I don't consider myself a racist.  Yet I came of age in the 1970s, when much of the cultural dialogue about racism held that everyone ~ due to the unfortunate osmosis of culture and media ~ was, to some extent, racist whether they liked it or not.  It was bred into us, hammered into us and preached into us.  However much a white liberal might identify as non-racist, this does not rid us of a dialogue that reaches into our mind as we interact with others of another race.  I will be forever trapped by these thoughts, "Express yourself kindly, speak softly and considerately ... and do all that can be done to assure this person that you, in no way, am treating them differently from anyone else."

Thoughts I would never have speaking with a white person.  Aye, there's the rub.  I've been inculcated with that pollutant; I can only assure myself that I would never support a racist agenda, that I would not deny an individual their rights based on their race and I would not hesitate to lend my support to someone on the basis of race.  We fight racism by being conscious of it; but it is not a fight we win.

To a lesser degree, I can make the exact same argument about culture.  I'm Canadian. I have belief systems and ideals that are regulated by that culture and that were installed in me as a child.  The pollutant of nationalism is rife in my mind also ... though not to the degree of racism.  For many, the two are conveniently intertwined; but as I fight one, I fight the other.  Come live in Canada, come work here.  I welcome you.

For me, race and culture have become pariahs in the global identity because of those who would exploit them for power or for gain.  There are two ways of exploiting either: a) create fear, attack them, gather others who hate them, encourage violence and sell the products that hatred craves; b) create fear, defend them, gather others who will defend them, encourage violence and the products that solidarity craves.

A Russian, living in a Russian neighborhood, spreads fear that others hate Russians, so that Russians must stick together, encouraging us all to believe only Russians, to think like Russians, to have faith in Russians ~ and to believe that everyone who is not a Russian is an enemy.

I grew up hearing that.  I've heard gays talk that way, I've heard union workers talk that way, I've heard Canadians talk that way ... and I've heard a lot of people in the media talk that way.  It is just as racist and nationalist to rabidly defend a thing as it is to rabidly hate a thing.

Okay.  D&D.

Part of the appeal of free-form character systems is that the player is not driven to BE a thing.  Classes ~ and particularly "races as classes" ~ encourage us to buy into a product that we should rightly feel has that familiar pollutant we've encountered before.  Those who sell that product can only see the convenience of it: "See?  Being an elf gives you limitations; and limitations give you boundaries.  You know where you're coming from; it's easier to build a 'character' from that."

It's easier to build a cardboard character from that.  I, me, this writer, am not a collection of limitations and my pushing those limitations.  I have things I believe that are not related to what I do, where I came from, what I am, or what I want to be.  Those things were collected over time and ~ to be truthful ~ a great many of them were gained in the face of being told, "You can't do that" and "Oh, you're just trying to get attention."  Those are the watch-phrases of anyone who has boundaries and pushes boundaries.  We're told what to believe; and we're told that if we try to believe something else, we're either lying to others or lying to ourselves.

I don't want to encourage my players to see "fighter" or any class as a limitation or as something to transcend.  I'll take my own case: I'm a writer.  That is not a limitation.  As an identity, it is what I say it is.  My writing is what I want it to be.  If I want it to be something else tomorrow, that is not "pushing a boundary."  Every kind of writer I could ever want to be is well within the field of what I am.

Were I a soldier, and self-identified as a soldier, I feel pretty much that I'd describe it the same way.  I've known a lot of soldiers and I never hear any of them speak of the life or the mindset as a limitation.  I feel that most people who appreciate and obtain an identity in their profession can identify the same way.  A profession is not a limit.  It is a freedom to act.

A race, on the other hand, IS a limit.  I can be any sort of white man I want, sure ... but what does that mean, "Be a white man?"  White man isn't a profession.  It is a color.  It's a surface template.  It's not a process, it's not an ideology.  It's an obsession with a particular abstract effort at sorting me from others.  It means no more to me than the sort of hair follicles I have, the size of my pores or the width of my eyeball.  When I look at the back of my hand, the only thing that's interesting about it is the number of scars and cuts that accumulated over decades of cooking and heavy labor ... things I did.  I don't give a damn about the hands themselves ... except that it's convenient for writing that I still have all my fingers and that I've learned to ignore my arthritis.

We think of character classes as limits because we habitually slot what we do into the same category as what we are or where we're from.  That's a mistake of our upbringing.  We were abused by people with professions long, long before we began to understand anything about those professions.  The teacher, the doctor, the police officer, the sports star, the performer ... these were all fronts to us as children, just things people decided to be.  We saw them as surfaces, just like the color of my skin and the flag I saluted when I sang its anthem.  Many of us still see them as surfaces, when we're pulled over, when we see our hero do a car commercial, when the doctor is arrested and pushed into a squad car.  We have a terrible, awful habit of seeing everyone except ourselves as surfaces, just as though the soldier is a different race than we are or that the feminist is from a different country.  That's easy for us; that doesn't challenge what we think or what we believe; we don't want to see deeper.  Hell, most of us don't even want to BE deeper.

But a profession is not a race.  It is not a nationality.  Being a druid, a bard, a ranger or an illusionist is an opportunity, not a limitation.  I can appreciate how a lot of people can't see that, given their limitations as people.  It seems obvious to me.

Let the Thief Do It

I've heard this sort of thing hundreds of times and this is no reflection on JB ... but he repeated the theory for this post he posted yesterday, motivating me to write this post.

"... if we look at D&D as a 'successful' concept in tabletop RPGs, we can see that at least part of its appeal is how it draws the party together in cooperation for a common objective. And the way it does this is pretty darn simple: while there is 'strength in numbers' (to spread the attrition around), the limitations of each individual class (or, in the positive, the powers and capabilities of each class) provides an incentive to work together to solve the conflicts and problems being thrown at the PCs in their quest for treasure. Mechanically, they're semi-forced to get along with each other, because survival ... and success ... becomes much more difficult without cooperation."

Is that really the case?  Or is it just that we've heard this propounded so often that we take it for granted as something that sounds true?

For a moment, let's deconstruct those "capabilities of each class."  The first two that occur to me is the cleric/healer's ability to bestow healing points on a party and the thief/rogue's willingness to scout ahead.

I'll discuss these forthwith ... but first let me say there's nothing the mage offers that the party technically "needs."  It is nice to have those spells, and certainly the mage can end a fight quickly, but at lower levels a mage is just as likely to be pretty nigh useless in a fight.  But, yes, the mage does offer some informational talents, defining a magic item, comprehending languages, detecting magic and malevolence ... but if we think about it, these are short cuts to things the party is going to find out about eventually, without the mage.  And before the gentle reader chides me that it is better to find out soon than later, please hear me out.

That healing power that's offered means a lot less in the early versions of the game.  A 7th level cleric in 1979 AD&D was able to offer a total maximum of 25 hit points per day, through two spells: cure light wounds and cure serious wounds.  The average was only 14.5.  If the cleric in the party were another fighter, that fighter would easily have more than 25 hit points at 7th level ... which means that another fighter would soak up more hit points than a cleric could heal.  Statistically, the cleric's heal was more or less the difference between what the cleric could soak up at 7th and what a fighter would have.  The only difference is that it could be targeted to other people who got in trouble ~ but it wasn't actually needed.

And as far as scouting ahead ... most of what made this practical was that the thief was forced to do without armor, so that at least one member of the party wasn't crashing around in metal plates and chains.  In truth, in most situations, any elven fighter willing to sacrifice armor class could have done almost as well as a thief ~ and would have survived being discovered better if it comes down to that.

Here is the thing, however.  Because the module-makers and designers KNEW there were going to be thieves, mages and clerics, they designed the environment specifically to take advantage of those skills.  If you get rid of traps, there's no need for the find traps skill, or for renewing someone's hit points to make them battle-ready because some arrow trap sapped 5 hit points from the fighter.  If you get rid of the endless stream of languages, or runes and glyphs, or make the magic items recognizable, or simply get rid of scores of other "make work" features that we expect to find in every dungeon, the truth is that these other classes may have style and character, but they're not actually a "necessity."

I don't think that JB is wrong; in D&D, the player characters ARE semi-forced to get along with each other for survival ... but not for the reasons he proposes.

By creating these make-work processes for the various classes, D&D dupes the players into thinking they need Fred for his healing and Gary for his stealth.  That's let's Harold keep his armor and it lets him gripe that he's down hit points, as he knows Fred is there for him.  If there was no Fred or Gary, Harold wouldn't lazily rely on them.  And if there was no Harold, Fred and Gary would know they'd have to do their own fighting ... which would suck.

It isn't so much that four fighters in a world that wasn't tailor made for other class abilities couldn't get along ... it's that if they were four fighters, they'd squabble and bitch about whose turn it was to shuck off their armor and scout ahead.  They'd hold constant pissing contests about which was the toughest fighter and who did the best in the last fight, with three of them mocking the lowest of the four for having the least kills and for constantly tripping over his 20-sided fumbles.

A fighter can comfortably hang back while "his bitch" scouts ahead, waiting for "doc" to patch him up ... while the thief can hang back while his bitch fights off the orcs.  It isn't what each member of the party does.  It's about what each member of the party lets the other character do.

JB's post talks about how the superhero genre doesn't produce this effect:

"Supers tend to be fairly capable individuals, able to handle whole swaths of mooks and villains on their own, only being held back by individual flaws ... But for a team of heroes, such flaws rarely come up, because it would tend to throw one hero under the bus while her teammates heroically soldier on. Instead, the tendency is to simply throw one Giant Big Bad Threat at the team that requires the full might of the team to overcome: an Uber-Villain or a Villain Team (one foe for each hero!) or a Humongous Natural Disaster."

Effectively, we have to assign players roles in the fight so they know what to do ... because a typical group of players are unable to assign themselves tasks like grown ups.  This is why the army invented sargeants; because a group of extremely capable soldiers, left to themselves, won't get anything done.

I hadn't seen it before, but the class structure creates a series of jobs for each player to do.  Yes, true, another player or class could do those jobs.  The 7th level druid could (as the rules originally went) transform into a mouse for every single scouting ahead mission, which was certainly a lot more stealthy than a thief ~ but even though I ran such druids, this never happened.  Presumedly, because it wasn't the druid's job.

Admittedly, this isn't where I thought I'd end up.  I thought I was going to explode this myth of players working together because they were different classes ... and instead I've strengthened the idea that they have to be different classes.  Not because it helps the players work together, but because players don't like to work together.

If anyone has some memories of 3rd Edition, where builds tended to make players the same, where the problem of "who's turn is it?" came up a lot, I'd love to hear about it.

Somewhere, there's a party busy rewriting their characters while jabbering about seeing a
movie that opens next weekend.

Non-Fighter Training and More

The following is an answer to Vlad Malkav's three questions in the previous post.  Starting with the training of non-fighter characters.

I'll be addressing the matter from the original starting-age tables in the DMG, back from 1977.  I don't know what other age tables exist or what numbers they give, but I have always felt the original numbers were well designed and rational, for the classes they were supposed to represent, at least as far as humans are concerned.  I treat every races' lifespan as the same as humans, as this makes sense for history in my game. I don't need any elves around talking about their personal friendship with Julius Caesar.

A fighter starts with a minimum age of 16 (15+1d4).  This suggests that there is little mental prowess that is necessary, which fits with our conception of history.  Boys have always entered armies as young as 12; just look at juvenile combatants in Syria, Zaire and Afghanistan right now.  The principle requirement for a medieval-concept fighter is a weapon, some experience in using it and comprehension of the battlefield through observation.  A 16-year-old fighter is believable.

However, the paladin begins 1st level at a minimum of 18 years while a cleric or druid starts at 19.  Again, there is a 4 year window (the paladin is 17+1d4), but the key point here is the 2-year difference between paladin and fighter.  What is that two years spent doing?  What slows the cleric or druid down three years?

The latter seems plain.  They have to learn spells, gain an understanding of either the secular or non-secular world and in general obtain a certain clarity where it comes to their professions.  With the paladin, the question is one of faith.  The paladin needs to become more mature in order to comprehend how the world works (and how the paladin fits in it).  This can't be gained by just more fighting.  We can imagine the paladin becoming a fighter first, but then the character needs to "drop out" of the daily grind of living and acquire insight through prayer, contemplation, study, ordinary labor (to gain perspective and humility) and in all likelihood a great deal of time spent alone.

This can't be bought or taught, except in the most cursory of terms.  The paladin must be the sort of person able to "see" the way clear to being a paladin.  Thus the necessary wisdom and intelligence as well as strength and constitution.  The high charisma is then gained because, through humility and comprehension, the paladin has gained a greater understanding of what people need and what they want to hear.  The paladin is empathic.

When we roll up a character, we're seeing the result of this training, the accumulation of the stats that we're setting down.  The matter is settled at the beginning of the game.  We roll a 17 and slot it in under charisma without a thought for how that charisma is acquired.  It simply is ~ and the tendency is to think it is a natural, born-in-the-womb trait.  Actually, it is an indication that this character spent those extra years profitably.  An ordinary fighter with a 14 charisma, not so much.

So to "train" a paladin would be to make a fighter the way I described in the previous post, then let go.  After a few years (if we sent off a 16-year-old to be a paladin, could take as long as 5 years before the reunion occurred), we'd get the revised fighter back or we'd get a fighter that failed.  It wouldn't be up to us.

Similarly, the cleric or druid would probably interrupt the fighter track before becoming a 1st level fighter (less proficiencies, a THAC0 that upgrades more slowly, very little interest in fighter-based knowledge), just enough to gain the requisite combat abilities for the class, before ditching anything more to spend years either in a seminary or in the wild.  Again, both would be a matter of time, not expense.  The seminary might cost a stipend, but that wouldn't make the time go by faster.  The same follows for the druid, who would likely follow a teacher but the skills gained have little or nothing to do with combat.

The thief also begins at 19 (18+1d4).  The thief's combat abilities are different, less trained and more streetwise in technique.  But we can still assume that a greater thief could train a would-be ordinary person to obtain their first level, like Fagin in Oliver Twist.  The thief track could work almost exactly like the fighter, except that a non-fighter would be the instructor.  Thus I created the sage skill disciplinarianship - about which I've written nothing, until now.  That's because, like the fighter, I had absolutely no idea how it would work until 1:30 AM in the morning last night.

The assassin starts with a minimum age of 21 (20+1d4).  There is no disciplinarianship for assassins because I don't see an assassins' school as a concept.  Murder, or killing as we like to say, is taught in the army; and with my recent change of seeing the assassin as a fighter and not a thief, we need to see the principle combat training/sage ability knowledge for that assassin coming out of the fighter instruction that we've postulated.  However, like the paladin, the assassin is someone who drops out.  Not to become more pious, but more likely because they don't get along with others.  With a higher strength, intelligence and dexterity than ordinary fighters (again, the ability stat prerequisites), they learn more quickly, get bored, leave before they gain their necessary 1,200 experience and begin living a misanthropic lifestyle.  They do mercenary jobs, pick up knowledge from thieves on the streets and gain a natural aptitude for killing more effectively and coldly.  We can argue that the assassin takes less experience to get to second than a fighter does because it takes perhaps 1,700 x.p. for the assassin to gain their 1st level.  I'm don't know for sure.  All of this postulation needs the creation of firm guidelines for what each 100 x.p. gained produces.  I don't need to do that at this time, so it can wait.

The ranger also starts with a minimum age of 21, like the assassin.  The high intelligence, wisdom, strength and constitution all assume this time was spent hardening the ranger to the wilderness.  Less interested in how nature works and more interested in how to survive it, we can presume rangers also manage their fighter training handily before departing from the urban environment for the wilderness, where they are happy as individuals.  There they accumulate another 500 x.p. surviving, getting to know specific environments, acquiring ranger sage abilities (most of which are exactly like a fighter's) until reaching an age where they accumulate the skills, hit points and hardiness to be a first level ranger.

The monk begins at age 22 (21+1d4).  Like the paladin, the monk has meditated.  Unlike the paladin, the combat training is wholly unique and intrinsically different from that as a fighter.  More of the combat training is managed through precision and repetition, so that is must be gained like a cleric learning spells in a seminary.  It can't be gained through casual combat as a non-leveled individual.  It is rigorous and requires total commitment.  The monk begins somewhere in their early teens and doesn't appear at all in the real world until they have become a 1st level.  Therefore, one doesn't encounter a non-level monk anywhere but a dojo or a monastery ~ where, we might suppose, there are many students with partial monk abilities that could be a formidable challenge for even a high level party (a hundred "part-monks," with the skills I've recently proposed, would be strangely dangerous, even if they had few hit points).  Naturally, all the monks in any particular school would be following a specific "path" in the "way" of the school's design.  This school would be full of "claw"-trained monks while that school would all be "tranquility"-trained monks.

This leaves the mage and the illusionist.  The mage's minimum age is 26 (24+2d8).  Because a bell-curve results from the two dice used to determine age, however, only a very few mages would be that young. Most mages would start as 1st levels between 32 to 34.  The illusionist's minimum age is 31 (30+1d6).  A slightly worse average.

This suggests the training to accumulate cantrips and spells is exhaustive and time-consuming.  In a typical campaign, therefore, training an ordinary NPC from scratch to become a mage would be impractical.  Considering the response I received from the post I wrote about jumping time ahead, I don't think this plan will interest most players.  Who wants to wait around for a 15-year-old to enter a magic academy to reach the unlucky age of 40 before hitting 1st level as a mage?

Okay, let's put that down for now.

Part 2

Vlad asks about my civilization technology concept from 2015.  In brief, for those not familiar, this is the idea that more densely populated parts of the world would have a higher tech level than parts less urbanized.  The tech level measure is based on D&D equivalents to the video game Civilization by Sid Meier.

The explanation for why more people would be leveled in a higher tech region is simple: there are more teachers.  A given teacher should be able to teach more than one protege: most of the time training and learning is spent in repetition and practice, meaning that a single teacher is only needed for 10-15% of a student's actual learning window.  One teacher, then, can manage up to 8 students, rotating between them, getting rid of students who require too much time when the full complement is being educated.  A teacher with less students can manage more time for hard-to-teach individuals.

In a dense culture, teachers are everywhere and there are plenty of would-be students.  This enables the creation of mass-production schools that would be impractical in largely rural cultures (where there aren't the teachers and fewer students).  This allows for the greater number of leveled persons, as the experience gained would be fruitful and not lost to an x.p. ceiling, as I proposed in the previous post.

Vlad's second question regarding tech cultures is about where does the experience come from?  I rush to point out that the 30 Years' War post describes a war taking place in the highest tech areas possible for my world.  Virtually everything in the heart of Europe has a tech between 15 and 18.  Remember, the tech is based on population density alone.  All those city states are very densely populated ~ and all of those city states (Ulm, Mulhouse, Pisa, Milan, Augsburg, Florence, Padua, Nuremberg) were rife with war, uprisings, rebellions, religious clashes in the streets and ~ like the modern era ~ excessive crime.  By no means does an educated population indicate a calm, peaceful population.  Given our humanity's propensity for fighting over ideas, an education actually gives us a lot more to fight about.

Therefore, a technology-rich region might shield themselves from harm on the outside, but everyone inside already has all the available tech and are more than willing to use it.  As well, population density tends to fit the agricultural richness of a river valley, so if our country is well off and educated, the chances are the other country across the river will be also.  Finally, we know that greater technology massively increases the potential for devastation and destruction, rather than decreasing it.  The evidence of the 30 Years' War indicates this was as true in the 17th century as it is now.

True, they were using muskets and gunpowder.  But they didn't have magic, and a high tech culture would have much more magic than a low-tech culture.  The paradigm holds.

Thank you again, Vlad, for such good questions.  For the general reader, Vlad lives in that part of the world that was knee-deep in the 30 Years' War.  Without giving the exact location, he's well-acquainted with the city-states of Alsace, those of Wurttemberg and the upper valley of the Rhine.  He's close enough to walk to places that I would give my i-teeth to visit.

Lucky bastard.

This Paladin Thing

Moments when I'm drenched with cold water:

"The best explanation [for changing systems] I can really give is simply that I, and my players found it so much fun because the rules don't fight you when you try to roleplay, but they seem to support you far more. I'm not talking about the mechanics, the roll d20 to hit, d whatever to damage, I mean those background rules that are so easily overlooked or forgotten - a prime example being the paladin. 2nd edition straightjackets a paladin, punishing him for arbitrary, yet hardcoded into the rules, deeds. 5e simply points out that your neutral evil paladin may aspire to be a lawful good hero but hasn't attained the standards expected of him by his God. One system punishes the imagination, the other prompts it and myself and all my players have leafed through the books and found stuff that has sent our minds racing!"

The above is taken from a warm, genuine comment left by William Jones yesterday, giving an explanation of his path towards a better campaign.  It reminds me how far removed my contentious, rebellious iconoclastic nature is from the average role-player, particularly in how willing I was at the start of my gaming to smash things that were dictatorial in their design.

Around the time I began playing D&D, I was also reading Hermann Hesse.  I don't know how many readers here have heard of him; he was very popular in the 1970s, particularly among those chafing against the boundaries of societies and rules, who were seeking an explanation for solitude in the unhappy ennui of the deep Cold War.  I was only 15 or 16, I didn't really get that until later - as a young man, I was merely interested in explanations for my boundless anger.

Dear reader, you think I am terrible today!  I am so much calmer it is difficult for me to grasp sometimes - but then I find the following description and I am compelled to smile:

"Tegularius was a willful, moody person who refused to fit into his society. Every so often he would display the liveliness of his intellect. When highly stimulated he could be entrancing; his mordant wit sparkled and he overwhelmed everyone with the audacity and richness of his sometimes somber inspirations. But basically he was incurable, for he did not want to be cured; he cared nothing for co-ordination and a place in the scheme of things. He loved nothing but his freedom, his perpetual student status, and preferred spending his whole life as the unpredictable and obstinate loner, the gifted fool and nihilist, to following the path of subordination to the hierarchy and thus attaining peace. He cared nothing for peace, had no regard for the hierarchy, hardly minded reproof and isolation. Certainly he was a most inconvenient and indigestible component in a community whose idea was harmony and orderliness. But because of this very troublesomeness and indigestibility he was, in the midst of such a limpid and prearranged little world, a constant source of vital unrest, a reproach, an admonition and warning, a spur to new, bold, forbidden, intrepid ideas, an unruly, stubborn sheep in the herd."

- Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

There I am. I find myself reading these words for the first time in more than two decades and there isn't a thing there that isn't still - fundamentally - true.  Except, perhaps, a better perspective on the whole mess.  Not quite enough perspective, however, and that is why I describe William's comment on paladins as cold water.

Can anyone imagine the contentious lout Tegularius accepting any of that crap about what paladins are entitled to do or believe?

This paladin thing.  I just don't know.  The fanciful idea of knights being upstanding, stalwart protectors of the faith just goes on and on.  Despite evidence to show that the crusaders, upon which is based the classic paladin 'look,' were butcherous, drunken gang lords with the right blood.  Despite the brutal, castrating domination of the Teutons, Hospitallers and Knights Templar over their respective lands.  Clearly, the explanation for 'lawful good' is in the phrase, "The only good Maltese is a dead Maltese, and that's the law."

It all has something to do with Don Quixote, jouster, sword fighter, beating recipient, deluded nut-job.  Mad Dreamers are popular, difficult to understand but easy to like, while representing some weird compulsion to simultaneously admire their vision while recognizing its idiocy.  The original creators of the paladin heaped all this power on top of the basic fighter skills with the rationale, "We will make it almost impossible for this character to act free-handed, period."  They then foisted this balance on the role-players at the time and - somehow - the argument of balance has retained its legitimacy to this day.

I contend that DMs hate paladins.  The bonuses to save and armour class and the immunity to disease and evil, plus the tank-horse, are only the beginning.  There's nothing worse than a correctly behaved paladin, barking orders at other players, refusing to take part in adventure hooks, the endless bleating, bleating, bleating for a holy sword that absolutely no one wants the paladin to have . . . it all adds up to a motivation on the DM's part (subconsciously or otherwise) to kick that puppy at the first opportunity.  The paladin's place in the game is, let me see, what was the line?  ". . . a willful, moody person who refused to fit into his society."  Hesse was right.  Paladins are loathsome critters.

Yet what DM wants to say to a party, "I've eliminated the Paladin option"?  Players dream of paladins, of the day when they will finally roll both a 17 and a natural 18 in the creation of their characters (or whatever the hell the numbers are for 5e), so they can PROUDLY write the words, "First-Level Paladin" at the top of their character sheets.

There the dance begins.  The first act opens as the character consciously discovers that the paladin can't win every battle while walking on water carrying Jesus in a baby carrier.  Those first agonizing battles where the paladin gets slapped around like a bitch by a few goblins - goblins! - who know how to use weapons.  That first horrifying disbelief that the villagers aren't willing to hand over their animals and all that they own just because the *!PALADIN!* (insert triumphal music here) "needs" them.  The astonishment when the rest of the party soon sickens of the paladin's goose-stepping around in jackboots, petulantly dominating every parley with the words, "I'm a Paladin!  Need I say more?"

When the sweetest, most generous and experienced players are somehow transformed into the worst insufferable bastards by the mere adoption of a character class, you know there is something wrong with the game's philosophy.  What DM doesn't lie in wait like a snake in the grass, waiting for the moment this detestable prig makes the tiniest error, justifying a flat, across-the-board removal of all the paladin's powers in order to smack down the player's pomposity?

That, unfortunately, only initiates Act Two, in which the paladin grieves endlessly and monotonously for his or her lost powers, dragging the whole campaign into a grim, solemn death march to return the license to be an utter douche-bag to the character everyone has long-since agreed to despise.  More campaigns, I feel, have died on the way back to a paladin's powers than have died from edition-death.

It isn't that the powers are too much - they're really not.  Nor is it that the paladin really needs a set of rules to follow.  I've been playing since my first campaign without any dictatorial rules about paladin behaviour; I've never found it over-balances the game.

The real issue, I think, may be that a paladin is hard to get.  Actually, its quite easy, if the character is willing to do without the constitution and the strength.  But characters won't choose a paladin unless they also get high rolls in those two abilities, so that paladins on the whole tend to be characters with a lot of high level stats.  Those characters tend to be jerks anyway - but there is something about being a paladin that seems permissive of bad, self-righteous, magniloquent behaviour.

Here is my suggestion.  Rather than insisting that the paladin act according to the dictates of some god or cultural rule-making, simply issue everyone else in the party an 'anti-paladin' bat.  Let the players all know that when the paladin acts like a fucking tit, the magic in their bats gives them both initiative and an automatic hit, which causes the paladin's nervous system to shut down irrevocably for five bliss-following rounds.

That ought to shut them up.

The Gap Beneath First Level

Yesterday's post provides the groundwork for solving two questions that have nagged at me since I began with AD&D - how does an non-player character upgrade from ordinary person to 'man-at-arms' and how does a man-at-arms upgrade to a 1st level fighter?

It's no wonder that later editions did their best to gut the structure put blithely in place back in '79. Let me recount for those of you who have long since forgotten how it used to be.  These are all considered zero level:

• Sedentary female, 1-3 hp.  I assume this describes the average princess.
• Sedentary male, 1-4 hp.
• Active female, 1-4 hp.  In other words, a woman who participates will take as much damage as a male that sits on his ass.  Her attack die is at least one better.
• Active male, 2-5 hp.
• Laboring female, 2-5 hp.  Says right on the page that a carpenter does not labour as hard as a farmer.
• Laboring male, 2-7 hp.
• Man-at-arms (regular soldier), 4-7 hp.

The man-at-arms reference is from p. 30; the rest from p. 88.  The numbers given are supposed to fit into a system where monsters with hit die are neither 'zero-level' or 'levelled' . . . because that makes everything as clear as mud.  Let me, however, make these additions:

• One hit die monster, 1-8 hp.
• Human bandit, 1-6 hp. (from the Monster Manual)
• First level mage/illusionist, 1-4 hp.
• First level thief/assassin, 1-6 hp,
• First level cleric/druid, 1-8 hp.
• First level fighter/paladin, 1-10 hp.

Those are the traditional numbers.  If played exactly as written, 30% of first level fighters will have less hit points than a regular soldier.  The average mage has less hp than an active male - mages aren't active?  Do they think those spells are easy to cast?  And what the fuck is that bandit number?  A piece of flotsam that got ignored when the DMG was written (the MM was published two years earlier).

The numbers make no sense . . . yet I admit, I stuck with them for twenty-eight years.  I am nothing if not stubborn.  I stuck with them because most of the details could be glossed over, because I gave leveled characters the benefit of rolling in the upper half of their range, because I ignored the numbers of ordinary citizens and because I turned a blind eye to the mess, futzing with the numbers during the game in order to produce representations I could live with.  I did it without thinking because I had begun doing it back in 1980, the way everyone did it because we had to.  I didn't fix the mess until, with age, I began feeling that futzing around during play was wasting my time and annoying me.

I had to get rid of that zero-level bullshit.  There is no such thing in my present world. Creatures, regardless of race of form, have hit dice, period.  The number of hit points vary, so that a sprite can still have 1d4 hp while an orc has 1d8 hp, due to their mass, but their hit die remains the same. Additional hit points for levelled training is universal.  I do not care if you're a kobald, a hobgoblin or a hill giant - if the creature is a 1st level thief, it adds 1d6 hp.  It does not add more because you're bigger - training is training.

Up until recently, however, I was still stuck with this common citizen versus regular soldier problem.  Increasing the number of hit points for the latter was easy; as I wrote yesterday, combat experience could logically increase an individual's overall hit points.  But since it's never been explained how the training/experience/upgrade from Frick the Farmer to Frick the 1st level Fighter is accomplished, it's remained something glossed over and futzed with during my campaign.

This is something that matters to the players.  They pick up a girl in an adventure, they decide they like her and they want her attributes.  A sweet roll turns up and the party adopts her, deciding she should have a sword and some armor.  She hasn't done any fighting before, but the die roll indicates she's game so she joins the party as a follower.  She holds a torch in the dungeons, binds a few wounds, fetching bottles of holy water and flasks of oil from a backpack.  A couple goblins corner her in a big fight and she manages to kill both of them, even though she's only got 5 hit points and a THACO of 21.  Now the party really likes her.  Her morale improves and she continues to be lucky. When the party speaks of Jonida, it is with great affection - and they want to know how Jonida can become 1st level.

Good question.

I consider it a very good thing that my online players (from the campaign that seems like it must be dead) browbeat me into sage training for fighters, thieves, assassins, monks and bards, because creating a knowledge study called 'Training' is an ingenious way to solve the problem.  It frees the whole process from the eternal straight-jacket of character level (there are far too many aspects of the game that have been restrained by that one mechanic).  An individual accumulates knowledge in teaching others to be soldiers, in turn to be fighters - without needing to a dazzlingly high level.

Moreover, the knowledge eliminates the need for another mechanic intended to keep it rare and difficult to obtain - the mechanic of money.  1,500 g.p. per level per week?  Page 86 is easily the most inept, absurd, mean-spirited, clumsy page that has ever been included in a game manual.  I cannot stress that enough.  Consider Numbskull Gygax's system for punishing players that do not play their characters appropriately, by increasing the number of weeks of training a character must spend money on in order to improve to the next level:

"Clerics who refuse to help or heal or do not remain faithful to their deity, fighters who hang back from combat or attempt to steal, or fail to boldly lead, magic-users who seek to engage in melee or ignore magic items they could employ in crucial situations, thieves who boldly engage in frontal attacks or refrain from acquisition of an extra bit of treasure when the opportunity presents itself, 'cautious' character who do not pull their own weight - these are all clear examples of a POOR rating."

I did not add the caps at the end - those are there to truly emphasize the disgust Gygax the Hardhead feels about mages who show bravery or thieves that fail to act like moneygrubbing worms, clerics who are not slaves to the party or fighters who cautiously consider the odds before acting as everyone's shield.  Punish them!  Punish those fuckers for not obeying the Default Principles of Petty Play!

Sigh.  But I digress.

One last aside, though.  I'd love a psychiatrist with experience at the game to take those megalomaniac I-will-tell-others-how-to-play-this-game paragraphs apart and put together an evaluation of the Great God EGG.  What a miserable, mewling muck-fucker he must have been.  But of course, I'm no Wayne or Garth who got to meet him, crying that I'm not worthy.

Where was I?  Oh, yes, training.

I see training - particular combat training - as dirt cheap.  Most soldiers are going to get it in the field of battle, in actual combat, being worthy of their salt by living.  Many cultures, however, did exercise combatants, teaching them weapons, traditions, ideals, improving their morale for the confrontations they would face.  Mercenaries and new conscripts were never front line soldiers because they would break early in battle.  Better to build a dojo, a daily routine of practice and guidance mixed with meditation and festivity.  The party can raise their charge Jonida from 5 hp to 7 hp, improve her morale further and ready her for becoming 1st level.

Which means that first level fighter cannot have 1-10 hp.  No one would take the time to drill a conscript with 1 BU (see previous post) for weeks in order to improve that individual's hit points not-at-all!  Then to give them more training or time or effort to see that they become a fighter of the first rank?  Ridiculous.

I'm going to leave this post here.  I'll be applying myself to fighter sage abilities as soon as I finish the druid - which looks like it will take another 3 weeks.  I'm making good progress.

I'd like to know - is the problem considered at all in later editions, 3.5, 4e or 5e?  I really don't have any idea.  Do those editions even have zero-level or non-level characters?

Dex vs. Con

As long as we're talking about hit points.

Having watched as many people as I have making up characters, I have certainly noticed there is a tendency to ignore the constitution bonus in favour of dexterity.  I thought it might be interesting to investigate that.

A high dexterity improves your armor class, making it harder to hit you.  Presumably, this will cause you to live longer.  It also provides a bonus to initiative and hitting with a missile weapon.  I do not dismiss these; they're good reasons to pick dexterity over constitution.

The first table on the right shows the percentage chance of being hit either twice or three times in two or three rounds of combat, respectively.  Comparing one dexterity against another, the improvement is not that great.  A 15 dexterity is only a 20% improvement over a dexterity without bonuses (dexterities with penalties have been left out).  An 18 dexterity, however, is a 250% improvement - which is rather startling.  An unarmored character with a 14 dexterity could expect to go only 3 or 4 attacks before being hit twice, more likely 3 than 4.  A similar character with an 18 dexterity could expect to go eight attacks before getting that second hit.

If we presume the same spear used in this post, and we are presuming an attack against a player character, that second hit is important.  A character with 7 or more hit points can easily take one hit, but that 2nd hit could put a character with 12 hit points or less into the negatives.  Avoiding that second hit is critical.

Things get even better where it comes to being hit three times.  The spear does an average of 10.5 damage over three rounds, which will put a thief or a cleric into serious trouble.  Take note that the table above also demonstrates the improvement of armor over the unarmored - but that was always obvious.  The point here is to compare dexterity with constitution.

Bringing us to this table on the left.  Here are the chances of two or three successful spear hits dropping a defending number of hit points to zero.  The list includes up to a fighter rolling maximum on a d10, with an 18 constitution.

Take special note of the difference in two sword thrusts 'killing' (I use negatives, so it doesn't quite) a 10 hp defender vs and 11 hp defender.  The addition of a single hit point drops the likelihood of death to less than half!  In the short term at least, putting that 15 under your constitution can double your survival rate.  A 16 can multiply it by better than 500%.

This is short term, however.  The next column shows how quickly this improvement evaporates.  The reason for the difference has to do with the bell curve on 2d6 dropping sharply above 8 damage, while the bell curve on 3d6 doesn't begin to drop sharply until above 11.

That's why a 15 constitution isn't much use to a thief or a mage (2 hits will probably kill anyway), but middling help to a cleric and tremendous help to a fighter.  It isn't just the size of the bonus, it is the size of the dice under the bonus.

Therefore, if you are running a low hit-point character, put that stat under dexterity.  If you're running a fighter or a cleric, put it under constitution.  The armor will handle the attack chance against you - that hit point benefit will be better for you, since you're not likely to get hit more than three times in 10 rounds of combat anyway (presuming you're not fighting something bigger).

Ah well.  Just thinking aloud.

The Paradox of Choice

I'm sorry to keep doing this to you people out there who haven't the opportunity to see these videos wherever you may happen to be, but lately I've just been feeling very visual, I've been seeking out lecture videos on youtube (which is a marvelous, time-consuming exercise) and its terribly convenient to be able to point out to people, "See, I'm not crazy, really brilliant people think so too!"

A fellow asked me recently why it was that I was driven to create this complicated environment for my players, in depth and elaborate in the extreme, but I continued to embrace the sort of clumsy cardboard framework of character classes.

I explained that the reason for this had a lot to do with choice.

It is generally believed by the friendly fuckwits at WOTC, and the many, many fools who frolic there, that increasing 'choice' into the fabric of the game cannot help but improve the game.  This is a natural extension of a lot of different sociological factors that began with the Me Decade of the 1970s and carried forward into marketing and so on ... an ever accelerating process which is loosely connected to the subject we've been talking about the past few days, that being market research.  Generally, market research was designed to identify what people wanted, so that markets could then produce those wants and therefore target people's needs in a way that would make them very happy.  The introduction of 3.0 and 3.5, concentrating as it did upon many classes and many races, along with skill sets that offered hundreds of ways in which to fabricate a character for YOU personally, was a natural extension of something that was exploding in the marketing culture.

(Here you thought D&D was an 'underground' phenomenon.  Shame on you)

This has backfired.  Of course, I don't expect you to believe me that it's backfired, so let me have Barry Schwartz explain it to you:



In general, for those who can't hear the video, Schwartz makes two fundamental points.  The first is that having choices - a great many choices - produces paralysis.  People feel, particularly where they have little or nothing to base a choice upon, that they are almost certain to make the wrong choice.  This has the consequence of making them feel inadequate in the face of change, causing them to either make choices for the sake of just getting past making the choice (and being disappointed) or of making no choice at all.  In D&D, this is commonly expressed in farming the choice out to someone at the table, usually the DM, who has far more experience than the player.  Depending upon the DM, this can be either a good thing or a bad thing, but the principle issue is that it isn't the player making the choice.

Schwartz's other point is that increased number of choices causes individuals to concentrate more upon the choices they did not make rather than the ones they did.  So the character who, as part of the creation of their character, has decided upon the skill of making armor, discovers too late that fishing would have been more useful and valuable given the campaign they're in, and are therefore dissatisfied with their choice to the point where they blame their own shortcomings.  This is a much bigger problem than most campaigns realize, as the words "I've been fucking stupid," are somewhat anathema to the game, producing players who are sullen and unhappy with the characters they had the freedom to create.

I would argue, for anyone familiar with the original class system, and familiar with the later skill-choice system, that their memories of the game are that people in general, particularly less experienced players, are much less happy with the characters they ran in 3.5 than characters in earlier game-systems.

Look at the elements of human nature.  We as people are almost entirely unable to choose who we are.  The skill sets we have when we reach the age of 18 are largely those things which our families happened to know.  If your father was not a great cook, you're probably not much good in the kitchen.  If your mother was wild about fishing, and took you into the woods to fish every summer, you probably know quite a lot about fishing.  For the most part, you're just not familiar with things that haven't been dangled in front of you, and this is even more true of someone growing up three generations ahead of you, who did not have access to most modern media.

So who you are and what you know is something you simply have as you become a young adult, and except for some envy issues you probably have about friends who get given cars by their rich parents, you're probably content that you know how to play hockey or basketball or curling or what have you.  Yes, you may not know how to sail, but you're not bitter about it when you first encounter a sailboat.  You never got the chance to learn.  It's not your fault.

So if the game includes a powerful restriction on who you are - i.e., a rigorous class structure of fighter or mage or thief - you're prepared to live with that.  Moreover, every fighter is the same, every mage is close to the same (the hard part is choosing spells) and every thief is the same.  You're not punished for not picking the "right" elements of the fighter that lets you fight differently from other fighters.  And once you're used to fighters, a fairly shallow learning curve, you're comfortable playing them.

The world, on the other hand, for you in reality, is a wide open vista.  You don't want to live in a cage.  You want a big, massive, complicated world because that is the world you live with everyday.  Having a million choices in the world is more comfortable for you, because the world actually offers you a million choices.  Yes, sometimes you'll make the wrong choice, but since you're not identifying your personality on the choices you make in the world, you're more comfortable when you make the wrong choice.

So in general, it is better to make the character creation process more stale and predictable, because your players will be happier.  And it makes more sense to make the actual game world more elaborate and complex, because your players will be happier.  Those players who are familiar with the variety of choices, who have parsed them out in depth, will grumble about the lack of their choices, but the base line for ALL your players will be improved.

Schwartz is talking to an audience in the hope of making the whole world understand this entirely proveable concept against their gut instinct, which is making all of us - daily - less happy.  But for your world to improve on the basis of his argument, the only person who needs to believe this is YOU.

I really liked this one: