Ask for Little

As a Dungeon Master (DM) I have been perplexed about something for a while. Back in my proto role-playing days, if you played a game system you read the whole book from cover to cover. It wasn't just an excuse to understand all the rules, but to also understand the world you might be playing in. Reading Shadowrun vs AD&D player's handbook you get two totally distinct feels for their setting. Player handbooks give a taste of the kind of adventures you might be in. Furthermore how your player character (PC) might interact with the setting, what their needs, wants and goals might be.

Character Generation is a Game

Today, I was reading Chris McDowall's blog. He is the creator of Into the Odd, and Bastionland. His blog post, Running a Minimalist Game exposed a self-imposed blind spot of mine. Specifically this paragraph:

"No, don't worry about reading any rules before we play. Yeah we'll do character creation right there on the night, nothing needed ahead of time. The setting? Aaah it's this big city called Bastion and it's weird but we'll discover that as we go". 

 If you have played D&D 5e, Pathfinder or pretty much most non OSR inspired role-playing games you need to realize something. For a new player, being able to create a character the night of a game is a rather hard task, even with the help of a patient DM or player, it takes a long time. To make things worse a lot of knowledge, understanding and experience is needed to make a competent character.

This is problematic for multiple reasons. I don't believe all characters must be hyper-optimized, however the optimization level needs to match the rest of the party. Otherwise it imbalances the party, which in turn imbalances encounters. As a DM, if that imbalance is not considered and mitigated two possible outcomes will occur.

Either the non optimized player will feel useless or not very good about their character not carrying their weight. Or, the PC might die because they can't handle the purpose of the encounter itself. This problem doesn't just occur in combat encounters, but it also bleeds through social interactions. Social interaction optimization is a thing, and if done well, it can break not just party balance but the entire feel of the game. 

Of course, all of this is dependent on the DM, the severity of optimization or lack thereof, and ultimately on the players themselves. I am not a big believer in defining what "fun" is for role-playing games. However, in my experience, severe imbalances almost always make the game less enjoyable. 

The point is, character creation in current games is not easy. It's a lengthy process that requires intimate knowledge. To acquire knowledge you must read all the materials provided to you. Usually that material is ever increasing, as new books get published, either giving extra features, subclasses, feats and spells. For people like yours truly, that's part of the fun, reading new books, understanding new possibilities and evaluating the overall effectiveness of each change. The changes they produce to the existing character creation landscape. 

The truth is, complex character generation is a detraction from the game. It's ironic that there is a separate game within the game of D&D. Making a character is a game in itself. If that game is played wrongly you might not have as much fun in the actual game. Which is a pretty huge problem. Once again the DM can help mitigate this, however this means the DM is working against the game rules to make it work. Not with them.

My Blind Spot

In the introduction, I mentioned my surprise that players do not read the Player's Handbook. Upon some introspection after reading Chris' blog, I realized that the games of old, specifically Original D&D and D&D B/X that was not necessary. It was almost assumed that the Referee had to be aware, but for the most part the players could just roll six times, make some basic decisions and move on to playing. Character generation was pretty simple, and quick.

There are a lot of reasons why simple character generation leads to a better tabletop game, but let's cover that in another post.

D&D Killed D&D

As a monk you shouldn't have chosen a Half-Orc. Monks wants Wisdom and Dexterity. None of their attribute boosts help. All the other benefits Half-Orcs get are wasted. Your charisma also too high and a waste, put it to an 8, raise your Dexterity to a 15 instead.

That was the start of a five minute conversation about why one player's monk wasn't performing. As a DM, I had to intervene and stop the conversation, mainly because the Monk player was getting increasingly agitated.  The irony of course is that nothing that was said was factually wrong from an optimization standpoint. To make things worse, other classes, like Fighters end up making better Monks, than Monks after Tasha's Cauldron of Everything.

The Pillars of D&D

Theoretically, D&D 5e is based on three pillars. The concept is introduced early in the Player's Handbook (PhB), page 7, and was the primary focus of D&D 5e's design.

Adventurers can try to do anything their players can imagine, but it can be helpful to talk about their activities in three broad categories: exploration, social interaction, and combat.

What's is interesting is that character creation, especially if you count spells, and combat take up the majority of the book. How much space is dedicated on exploration rules? Or social interactions? Don't just take my word for it, let's see what the PhB itself says about it

The rules in chapters 7 and 8 support exploration and social interaction, as do many class features in chapter 3 and personality traits in chapter 4. 

Chapter 7 describes ability score modifiers, skills checks, skill contest checks, and saving throws. A total of six pages.  It is fair to say that exploration and social interactions might require some skill checks, climbing up a mountain, talking to a guard could easily be skill checks.

Chapter 8 deals with time, movement, the environment, social interactions, resting and between adventure topics. Also, six pages total. Social interaction, one of the three pillars gets half a page.

What about chapter 3 and 4? Class features give at best nominal support  to exploration and social interaction. We can nitpick this. Some feature do alter what you might or might not have to roll for exploration or social interaction. However, do you consider skill such as Bardic Inspiration as something that supports exploration or social interaction? Abstractly it can modify skill rolls. It gives a boost to a roll. 

Rolling dice with modifiers does not make social interactions and exploration two of the main pillars of the game. This can be further felt by the small amount of pages dedicated two both of them. They should be  2/3 of the Player's Handbook.

Excessive? Perhaps, the problem is there. If you think of all your fond memories of D&D, 5e or not, what you will realize is that the DM made the game fun, about exploration, inside jokes, social interactions, adventure despite the rules.

D&D wasn't always like this. As it mutated and evolved through the fifty years of its existence it lost its way. Gary Gygax is partially to blame on this, the downfall started with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. His need to have a unified set of rules was the first death of D&D. I will end this post with an expert of Dragon Magazine, issue 26, written by Gary.

Because D&D allowed such freedom, because the work itself said so, because the initial batch of DMs were so imaginative and creative, because the rules were incomplete, vague and often ambiguous, D&D has turned into a non-game.

--snip--

There are few grey areas in AD&D, and there will be no question in the mind of participants as to what the game is and is all about. There is form and structure to AD&D, and any variation of these integral portions of the game will obviously make it something else. 

 ...and this is why I am writing my own role-playing game.