The Long Read is a series of posts that began life as Twitter threads, in which I read through an RPG text for the first time and write about my thoughts and reactions to it in real time. You can read all the other posts in this series here. Patrons get access to these posts a week before they hit the blog.

Today I’m looking at Daggerheart, the new game from Critical Role and Darrington Press. It’s been in “closed beta” for a few weeks and has just launched its “open beta”¹ so this seems like a very good time to take a look at the quickstart for the game. As with all of these posts, this isn’t a “review” in any meaningful way. I’m only spending a few hours reading the text and I’m not playing it. I’m interested in looking at how readers approach texts and how we can present information to on-board new players in the best way possible. During this process I’m likely to make mistakes, miss things, and just plain get things wrong. I may also make predictions about how things are likely to work that turn out to be way off base. That’s all fine and part of the process.

I always like to start by thinking about what I already know about a text or what assumptions I’m bringing to the table before I start reading. I know that this is being produced by Darrington Press and Critical Role, and my hunch is that this system will replace D&D 5e in the next season of Critical Role. It makes a lot of sense for an entertainment company to cut ties to Hasbro and to own every part of their own production, and running a “house game” feels like a logical next step.

To that end, I think I can make some predictions about what we’re going to find in this game based on that assumption. Critical Role’s audience has come to expect a game that looks a certain way in play. Moving away from 5e – and moving their audience away from 5e – will be much easier if the game they move to at least looks a little bit like what they’re familiar with. I think we’re going to find a light modern trad game, with a simple resolution mechanism that probably involves rolling a die, adding modifiers, and comparing to a target number, plus lots of character options and a fairly in-depth character creation process. I think it’s going to be built around grid-based combat, and will encourage you to use minis and terrain – visual elements that will look good both on the table at home and in a streamed game.

Other than that I don’t actually know anything about the game, so the best thing to do now is to simply dive right in. 

The open beta splash page tells us that this is “designed for long-term campaign play and rich character progression”. I think we’re going to be looking at characters with levels that unlock new abilities. Interestingly it also mentions “picking cards” and rolling “Hope and Fear” dice, so it seems like my assumptions about how the system is likely to work may be wrong. And that’s a good thing! I hope they’ve done something new and different rather than replicating D&D.

There’s a character creator on the digital platform Nexus, which I’ll likely play around with for a Naming The Faceless post in the coming weeks but that I’m not going to look at today.

I’m immediately happy to see that the game provides videos to help onboard new players. I’ve been very vocal about the fact that different players approach learning games in different ways, and I think the ideal way of presenting a new game is through a combination of well-sequenced text (in multiple versions – pedagogical, reference, etc), examples of play in text plus in visual/aural actual play, “editorialised” actual play (i.e. something like the old Geek and Sundry show Tabletop that attempted to actively teach the game while it was being played), and instructional videos. Most publishers don’t have the resources to produce all of this, but Critical Role absolutely do. They have also built their company around actual play, so it would be a real missed trick to fail to produce videos to support this release.

That said, I’m not going to watch them right now because while I think producing them alongside text is the ideal way to teach new games, I don’t actually learn well from video content myself. So I’m just going to stick to the PDFs, and trust that they’ve done a good job with the videos. Maybe I’ll come back to them if I find myself stuck on anything. That means that the first step is to head to DriveThruRPG and grab the playtest materials (which are weirdly not linked to on the Open Beta page – the link just goes to the main DTRPG site).

The download contains five files:

• _START_HERE.pdf
• DH_v1-2_Playtest_Manuscript.pdf
• DH_v1-2_quickstart_Adventure.pdf
• GM_Materials.zip
• Player_Materials.zip

It’s nice to see a clearly-labeled “START HERE” file, which I assume is going to give us an overview of what’s in the other files and what order we should approach them in. It will probably repeat the marketing material from the Open Beta splash page, too.

That START HERE document is just one page and, strangely, it doesn’t mention the Playtest Manuscript. Instead it directs us to the QuickStart Adventure as “a great place to begin”. 

This approach is one that I really like. Rather than expecting anyone to read the rulebook, get everyone to the table and teach the game through a well-designed introductory adventure. (This is something I’m still working on for A Dungeon Game). 

After the QuickStart we’re also directed to the GM folder – which contains “all of the sheets you’ll want to reference for character creation, campaign maps, […] and a folder with every card in the game.” The Player materials contains “a folder for each class [with[ all of the […] play materials you will need”. We’re told that there are instructions covering which materials you need from Levels 1 to 10. I’m counting this as one correct prediction – we’ve got character levels and classes.

I’m going to start by looking at the introductory adventure, as recommended. I want to see how it introduces mechanisms and game rules and how it’s structured. We’re told that it’s a 3-hour adventure. In my experience “adventure length” is a very difficult think to accurately predict, because every group is different, and it’s largely just a marketing thing. I’m interested to see if this game is structured in such a way that they can more accurately predict how long a given adventure will take to play.

There are a couple of interesting things on this materials list. The game uses the standard set of polyhedral dice that you’d expect in a D&D-alike, which isn’t a surprise. What’s interesting is the need for players to also have additional d12s of different colours, as well as multiple tokens for GMs and players. I assume these are the Hope and Fear dice the marketing page made reference to.

The quickstart throws us in immediately, with a section of boxed read-aloud text for the GM to read to the players to get things started. It’s at this point that the players are given brief descriptions of the pre-generated characters and asked to pick one. 

The actual adventure pitch is very straightforward. You’ve been given a carriage and a map, plus a mysterious package, and told to deliver it. “You all work as caravan guards” is up there alongside “you meet in a tavern” as a classic way of starting a first adventure, and I actually prefer it to the tavern scenario because it immediately gives you a reason for all of these characters to be together and a goal to work towards. Interestingly here, one of the characters – Marlowe Fairwind, who we’re told “must be played during this adventure” – is the one who has brought the others together and is presented as the de facto leader. Each player is handed a four page character packet to go with their character, and I’ll be interested to look at Marlowe’s and see if her player is given any additional information about what’s going on here.

The pre-generated characters themselves do some more work to reinforce the idea that this is a very D&D-derived game. We’ve got race² and class happening here: a Loreborne Elf Sorcerer, Underborne Ribbet Rogue, Highborne Human Warrior, Wanderborne Giant Guardian, and Wildbone Katari Ranger. I’m assuming that “Highborne”, “Wanderborne”, “Loreborne”, etc. serve some of the same purpose as character backgrounds in other games, but we’ll see.

The next 20 pages of the Quickstart Adventure reproduce the four page character packets for each PC. There’s some interesting stuff going on on these, and we can glean some information about the mechanisms of the system from them. I’m just going to look at the first one – Marlowe Fairwind – in detail, and then jump forward to the rest of the Quickstart.

“Loreborne Elf Sorcerer” tells us this character’s Community, Ancestry, and Class. We’re also given her Subclass – that is, she’s a “Primal Origin Sorcerer”. So far this is all pretty standard stuff. This first sheet also gives us a breakdown of some of the core mechanisms of the game. Players roll two d12s – one representing Hope and one representing Fear. They add them together, plus any modifiers, and tell the GM the result. So far that’s as predicted. The quirk here is that the result is also impacted by which die rolled highest. If your Hope die rolled highest, you mark a Hope on your character sheet. It looks like this is a meta-currency that allows players to “aid future rolls”. When you “roll with Fear” (i.e. your Fear die is the highest), the GM takes a Fear point. This is another meta-currency that allows them to “instigate or accentuate challenges in the scene”.

The interesting stuff here, and the point where it diverges from D&D the most so far and brings in some design sensibilities from PbTA/BoB-style games, is in the questions and connections. The sheet asks the player to answer a question about their character’s place in the adventure – for Marlowe it’s “Why do you think King Emeris trusts you more than anyone else to deliver this package?” – and we’re then asked to create connections between the party. We’re given a set of relationships and asked to assign each of them to another PC.

The second page of this packet is the character sheet itself. It immediately reminds me of a D&D character sheet visually, and we can definitely see more of that DNA in the mechanisms.

We’ve got six stats which broadly map to physical and mental attributes – Agility, Strength, and Finesse being physical, Instinct, Presence, and Knowledge being mental. I quite like the splitting apart of Dexterity into Agility and Finesse in lieu of a Constitution-style stat.

On the left of the page we can see some influence from Forged In The Dark-style games. The main things that jump out at me from that school of design are the Stress track, plus the abstracted Gold (i.e. we’re not collecting individual coins with specific values as in classic D&D but are instead saying “you’ve got bags full of gold”).

To jump back to the first page of this pack for a second, because I skipped over this earlier, we’re told that Marlowe “has the experiences “Royal Mage” and “Not On My Watch” which she will be able to utilize in play when they apply. Looking at this page we can see them written under the heading “Experience” alongside a couple of modifiers. I assume that these will modify action rolls when appropriate, but I wonder also if relying on these lets you mark experience towards advancement in the same way that Blades In The Dark and many PbTA games have XP “triggers”. I can’t see anything like an experience or advancement track on this page, though, and I strongly suspect that advancement will be tied to story beats and milestones rather than individual actions.

The next page is what I’ve seen described as the “side car” – a quick reference sheet designed to be placed beneath your character sheet that explains each section and gives us some more insight into the way this system works. 

The Experience section is described as “narrative tags that you create to reflect what your character is skilled in”. When they apply to any given scene you can spend Hope to add their value to a roll as a modifier.

The HP/Stress section is also described. Rather than taking an amount of damage to hit points equal to whatever your enemy rolled you instead have damage thresholds. If the damage falls inside one of your thresholds, you mark a set amount of hit points. I expect that this exists to reduce the “swinginess” of enemy damage, thus reducing character vulnerability and keeping PCs alive for longer. It’s a nice change to the system if you want to run a heroic fantasy game where player characters get into fights a lot but aren’t in any real danger of dying, which is very much the kind of game that lends itself to streaming.

The stress track exists to soak up damage that’s so small it falls below your lowest damage threshold. Instead of taking hit point damage you mark a stress, and when your stress track is full you mark one hit point. If you ever mark your last hit point you must make a “death move”, and I’m interested to see how these differ from 5e’s death saves. (Observant readers will know that I actually really like these sorts of systems, which is why I wrote Scars for A Dungeon Game).

The next page of this pack is the character’s “level 1 loadout”³, a set of abilities on cards that you begin play with. I know that some of the Critical Role cast have been using playing cards to keep track of their various character abilities for a while at this point, so I’m not surprised to find it here. It certainly looks better on a stream than having players hunting through books and sheets of paper looking for rules text, and as a player it’s much easier to know which abilities you have access to when they’re right there on the table in front of you. It also opens up the option of doing things like flipping the card upside down to indicate that it’s been used and can’t be used again, or placing tokens on cards to power spells. It’s board game/CCG tech that’s been adopted to RPG needs, and I think that’s a smart decision for this style of game.

As I said earlier I’m going to skip past the rest of the pre-generated characters and get to the rest of the Quickstart. It begins in earnest on page 22, which gives us 17 pages for the adventure. That’s pretty short, and seems in line with the claim of it being a 3 hour session.

The next section is a little disappointing if I’m being honest. I’d hoped that this QuickStart would each the game through play, and that it would be structured in a way that introduces mechanisms in encounters as and when you need them. That may still be the case, but before we actually get into the meat of the adventure we’re given a “Teaching the Game” section. This is a lot of read-aloud boxed text for the GM that requires you to literally teach the players the game before you actually start playing. I think this is a bit of a missed opportunity – a quick start should be aimed at getting people playing as quickly as possible, and delivering a lot of rules content up front is (in my view) a good way to get players to zone out. This section goes on for 5 pages, and includes giving the players a short break while the GM reads another section of rules to themselves about how to set difficulties of rolls (static DCs, as expected), how to use Fear tokens, how to run combat, and how to read a stat block.

This is a lot to take in when you’re sitting at the table with your group waiting for you to finish so that they can actually play the game, and it seems at odds with the stated aim of streamlining play. If we were going to make the GM read up on the rules before running the game I think we would have been better served by having them do that reading in their own time and at their own pace without the pressure of an expectant group sitting at the table.

That said, there are a few additional rules introduced in this section that are interesting. We’ve already learned about “rolling with Hope” and “rolling with Fear”, which is determined by whether your Fear or Hope die is the highest when you make a roll. This has an impact on the outcome of your roll that introduces some PbTA-style mixed success into the equation. The outcomes are:

• Success with Hope is a full success
• Success with Fear introduces a complication or consequence. A mixed success.
• Failure with Hope is a soft failure, but “things don’t go as badly as they could”. The GM “makes a move in line with the fiction, and then [turns] things back to the rest of the table”.
• Failure with Fear is a miss. “The situation goes very badly”. The GM gets to “make a move and […] probably raise the stakes to highlights the consequences”.

This is very much PbTA, including the language about “making moves in line with the fiction”. The game also features critical successes on top of this, which occur when you roll doubles. It doesn’t actually matter what number you roll when this happens. Even if the roll would normally be a failure, doubles turn it into a critical success. You get what you wanted, mark a Hope, and clear a stress. You also deal maximum damage if you’re attacking. Critical successes are pretty impactful here.

This system of comparing dice and looking for matches to interpret the result reminds me a lot of the way Ironsworn does things. It’s not identical, and Ironsworn itself draws on the language of PbTA games so it’s also not surprising. It also reminds me a little of the Genesys System.

One thing that does surprise me here is how combat works. There’s no grid, and it instead revolves around an “action tracker” and combat ranges. Individual weapons have attack ranges that they work within – we’ve already seen some on the character sheets, though I didn’t comment on them earlier. When players make an action roll during combat they place a token on the action tracker. It sounds like players can do as many things as they want until they roll a failure or roll with Fear, at which point the GM uses a move to spend the tokens on the tracker to activate enemies. This is a really interesting way of doing things and I think it’s designed specifically with fast, seamless, streamed play in mind. Rolling initiative and keeping track of who’s up next doesn’t actually take that long but it can kill the pace of a performed game, and this does away with it. I assume players can freely take turns in combat, which kills any “oh it’s my turn and I don’t know what to do” moments, though I haven’t actually got to a full explanation of how it works yet so I could be wrong.

The game also uses advantage and disadvantage. Rather than rolling twice and taking the best (or worst) result, you instead roll 1d6 and either add it or subtract it to your roll. If the GM has advantage it works the traditional way with 2d20, and I’m now realising that I haven’t seen anything about when or how the GM rolls dice yet. It sounds like on the GM side of things it’s a much more traditional d20 + modifier vs. target number system, and that the 2d12 Duality Dice system is only used for non-GM players. Maybe this will turn out to be wrong, but I’m very interested in this asymmetry between how GMs and other players interact with the mechanism of the game if this is the case.

We get some more clarity about combat, too. GMs can spend tokens on the action tracker to activate enemies and give them a turn, but each enemy only gets to activate once per GM move. So when the GM takes a turn in combat they can use as many enemies as they have tokens for once, and then things go back to the players. If I’m right about players being able to take as many actions as they want until they roll a failure (or a success with Fear) then this seems designed to make fights largely winnable by PCs, which seems in line with the way damage and hit points work, too.

We do get some guidance for how Fear works here, too, which is very useful. It looks like this:

I like that the GM can always spend Fear to give themselves advantage on a roll or to deal more damage in combat, and that enemies have specific Fear moves. One thing I wish this also had was some guidance about what a “GM move” looks like, though maybe (hopefully) that’s contained in the core rules or the GM packet that I haven’t yet looked at. “Interrupting a scene with a GM move” also puts me in mind of Cypher System’s GM Intrusions.

Jumping back to rolling dice again (this is the nature of reading this thing in order and reacting to it as I go), we get some clarity about how GMs do that. As I expected it’s d20 + the adversary’s attack modifier vs. a target number, which is dictated by the PC’s Evasion value. 

We also get some guidance about ranges for people who want to play with grids and minis, which is useful. Melee is what you’d expect, Very Close is 5-10 feet, Close is 10-30 feet, and Far is 30-100 feet. Characters can move anywhere in close range when making an action roll, and if they want to go further than that then they need to make an Agility roll to see if they succeed – with failure handing control back to the GM for a moment.

After we’re done with the rules we move onto the “narrative overview”, which provides a breakdown of the “Acts” that the adventure is split into. There are five of them for what is seemingly a very linear adventure – which is fine for an introductory module that’s presumably going to try and get us to interact with all the different rules in the game within a few hours. 

When we get into the meat of the adventure itself, it looks quite a lot like a traditional D&D-style adventure. There are big chunks of boxed text and an expectation about how encounters are going to play out. Hidden in and amongst that though are some hints at a more narrative, PbTA-inspired means of play. One section prompts the players to contribute to worldbuilding, for example:

Here we get exposed to the idea of Daggerheart having “GM Principles”, this one being “Ask Questions and Incorporate the Answers”. Then we get straight into rolling dice, with some light guidance for what a “GM Move” might look like.

I know that when I was first picking up PbTA games I got quite confused by this terminology. PCs have explicit Moves on their play sheets that do specific things, but often GMs are given a set of principles and some suggestions without any explicit, set-in-stone Moves that they can use. Because the terminology used the same word to describe two similar but different things, I struggled to understand exactly what I was being instructed to do as the GM. Here I’m definitely feeling the urge to look at a list of GM Moves for situations like this, and I again hope that the core rulebook has some firm guidance.

This one encounter – finding a wagon and interacting with some flying wolves – is the entirety of “Act One”.

Act Two takes place in the same location, with the PCs exploring the ruined wagon and learning some things about what’s happened before being ambushed as they begin to wrap up. As with a lot of traditional adventures, this ambush is written in a way that definitely involves combat.

I think there’s an interesting tension here between what I’ll call High Player Agency narrative gaming and a game that wants you to interact with combat and have fights. There’s no opportunity or allowance in the text for the PCs to choose not to fight and to instead try and talk to these people or find out what’s going on. The GM announces that they’re taking out the action tracker and we move into combat in the same way that Matt Mercer will often say “roll initiative!” on Critical Role. It’s a style of play I used to be very much into and one that I’ve moved away from in recent years, so it’s interesting to me to see it written so explicitly here. (To be very clear, this isn’t really a criticism. Part of looking at games is meeting them where they are and understanding that what they’re doing might not be for me. There’s a lot to like in Daggerheart so far, but this specific aspect of play where players are pushed into combat is something I don’t really enjoy anymore).

The combat ends when it ends (“when all adversaries are defeated”). We’re then told to encourage the PCs to “describe a montage of the remaining travel time to Hush”. This leads us into Act Three, which gives us another set of planned encounters. I’m so removed from modern 5e-esque play culture that I don’t know if this is what adventures look like now – skipping the slower travel stuff to get straight to the GM’s planned encounters – or whether this is just a concession to the format of trying to write a 3 hour quickstart adventure.

This section lets the players do some roleplaying and interact with some NPCs, and it also gives us more of the shared worldbuilding prompts that we’ve seen before.

The rest of the adventure continues along these lines, with specific people to speak to and a couple of combats. We’re introduced to the rules for Short Rests that allow PCs to tend to their wound, clear stress, or repair their armour, and we meet some enemies with group attacks. We’re also introduced to the idea of encounters having their own Fear moves that give the GM specific things to do. This one adds more enemies to the battle, which is an interesting twist. There’s also a fun counter on the final encounter which marks the completion of a ritual. It ticks down every time the player defeat an enemy, ticks up every time an important NPC is injured, and the encounter doesn’t end until the counter hits 0. There’s also a cool enemy ability that interacts with the counter. This is a really cool piece of encounter design, though I do wonder about the utility of these enemies outside of this specific encounter. I wonder if this game is going to have anything like a generic bestiary, or whether GMs are encouraged to create unique adversaries for each adventure? The latter is very cool in theory but does create some work for GMs in terms of session prep, and I wonder how that would impact GM enjoyment. (Of course, maybe these are just cool enemies created for this published adventure and GMs will also be given access to a more traditional bestiary as well).

I mentioned earlier that I’m interested in how Death Moves work. Unfortunately the quick start doesn’t actually teach us that. Players who mark their last hit point instead fall unconscious until they’re healed or until the danger passes. I’ll have to look to the main rulebook for Death Moves.

My initial impressions of the quickstart are that I think Daggerheart is doing some interesting things, and that it’s clear that it’s been built in a way that lends itself to being performed on stream – the streamlining of combat (especially with regard to initiative), simplification of hit points, and the attempt to share some of the workload of building the world between everyone at the table while also still allowing GMs to prep things and plan “story arcs” (which, while it’s not a way I like to play, is definitely important for the Critical Role style of game).

Since this is getting very long, and since the core rulebook is nearly 400 pages long, I’m going to stop here. I may look at the core rulebook in more depth in a later post, especially as I’m interested to learn more about how some parts of it work – especially Death Moves.

All in all I’m pretty impressed with Daggerheart initially. It feels to me like it sits in a similar space to a game like 13th Age, which I also really like and which I think does a lot of things that modern 5e players who were introduced via Critical Role wish that game was doing. I’m interested to see where this goes and how it develops.

1. There’s a whole rant in how I feel about tabletop games replicating the language – and often alongside the language, the culture and practices – of video games, but that’s for another time. ︎
2. I suspect we’ll find that this game uses a term other than “race”, but we haven’t been exposed to it yet. I hope that we’ll also see a diversion from any ideas of bioessentialism in the way these races are presented. ︎
3. See 1. ︎

This article was posted to Patreon two weeks early. Thank you to everyone who supports this sort of work financially.

The aim of the Towards Formal Adventures project (which I haven’t worked on for a while but am keen to get back to) is to define and categorise different formal modes of writing adventures. In my reading, one of the things I’m realising is that a lot of the conventions of adventure writing come down to little more than the house styles of individual publishers. (I am very explicitly talking about writing for publication, here. None of this should be a concern when constructing material for your home games).

The very traditional format of adventure/encounter writing that we see in modern modules in Fifth Edition, Pathfinder 2, etc. goes back to some of the very earliest modules published by TSR. It was refined over the life of the game and really became codified during Paizo’s stewardship of Dungeon magazine. Changes to the format since WoTC took the magazine back and Paizo started publishing Pathfinder have been largely cosmetic. Modern minimal OSR-style adventures are largely a reaction to this often-overwritten format, and the “bullet point” dungeon style that’s so ubiquitous today has really been driven by the rise in popularity of Necrotic Gnome’s Old School Essentials and their house style.

This post isn’t intended to be a comprehensive study of styles of writing adventures (though that’s something I’m interested in working on when I have the time and is very much a part of Towards Formal Adventures) so I’ll stop the overview and just get to what I intend to talk about, which is that the way in which you construct an adventure and present it on the page is very much determined by the system you’re writing for. That’s not to say that it’s inherent to the system in any way – Pathfinder 2 encounters don’t require tons of background information and what is often micro-fiction aimed at the GM in order to be playable – but because the first party publishers include this stuff, the audience comes to expect it. The way modules are presented – the amount of information provided, the level of “hand-holding” given to GMs (in terms of presenting potential solutions to problems and accounting for them in the test, etc.), the level of detail given to background information, and the like – all have a direct impact on player[1] expectations and thus on playstyles.

This is something I discovered first-hand when I was writing Filthy Peasants! for MCDM’s Arcadia magazine. After a long time away from writing or playing 5e I’d forgotten a lot of the assumptions of play, and I was very surprised to find that I wasn’t providing anywhere near enough information in my encounters for GMs to be able to effectively run them. (I don’t know how much I’m able to talk about specific playtest feedback when I was working on that adventure, so you’ll just have to trust me on this one.) On the flipside, after spending a year or more running nothing but OSR adventures, I found the amount of information presented to me when I was running Abomination Vaults in Pathfinder 2E to be almost overwhelming and difficult to run, even though I grew up playing AD&D 2e and 3.5 and had at one point been completely used to this style of adventure.

So, as I work on a sequel adventure to Filthy Peasants! that I plan to publish both for Fifth Edition and a handful of other systems, I’ve started to think once more about the varying levels of information required. And the time has finally come for me to write about it.

I’ve attempted to write a variation on this article so many times that at this point I’ve lost count. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for about a year and a half at this point, but every time I’ve tried to write it it’s seemed like a monumental task.

The first version of this post was an attempt to key a small dungeon in multiple styles, including:

• Wee Warriors ‘Palace of the Vampire Queen’
• Late 1970s TSR B-series
• 1980s TSR B-series
• Dark Sun flipbook adventures
• Paizo house style
• 4th edition ‘Delve’ format
• 5th edition house style
• OSE bullet dungeons
• Mörk Borg house style

In the second attempt I took a pair of encounters from Palace Of The Vampire Queen and aimed to rewrite them in the above styles. [2] This seemed a more approachable way into the topic, though it still ended up being a massive task – mainly because it required me to invent a ton of things in order to be able to rewrite the encounters. But today I’ve realised that I can simply work backwards – starting with an extant encounter from a trad game and revising it into a handful of different house styles to demonstrate how the expectations of the system as dictated by their first party publishers in published work impact the way in which we think about and write encounters.

The Encounter

Step one is to identify an encounter to use.[3] I’ve picked one from the most recent Pathfinder 2 adventure path, Season Of Ghosts, since this best represents the way encounters are currently being presented in trad modules. This encounter comes from pages 32-33 of The Summer That Never Was, published in October 2023 and written by Sen H.H.S.

Here’s the full text of the encounter, in case that image ever disappears:

Encounters in Pathfinder adventures (for the most part) are as standardised and codified as a stat block. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn that the prototypical encounter structure is laid out clearly in their style guide for adventure writers.[4] As I stated earlier, this structure has remained largely unchanged for close to 20 years, and it closely resembles the one found in first-party Fifth Edition adventures until recently. Nearly every encounter you read in a Paizo adventure will follow this format. Let’s break down what’s happening.

1. Encounter Title & Threat Level

Very simple stuff, this. What is this encounter called, and how dangerous is it?

2. Read Aloud/Boxed Text

This is the bit you read to players when they first enter the room or trigger the encounter. It contains sensory information and an overview of the space. In an ideal world it will contain everything that’s immediately obvious to PCs when they enter the room, though this isn’t always the case. (A good example of this not being the case is found in the next encounter in this adventure, C2. Pantry Prison on page 33, where the boxed text makes no mention of the 12 prisoners in the room).

Occasionally this section is preceded by GM-facing text calling out some specifics that will impact PCs before they actually enter the room or engage with the encounter – perhaps calling out that the doors to the room are locked, for example.

3. Background Info/Explanatory Info

I’ve often said that some modern trad adventures function both as gameable modules and as pieces of fiction for GMs to read as part of their prep. This is where that stuff happens. This is essentially flavour text that lends some context to the encounter but, in my experience of running Abomination Vaults last year, often doesn’t actually come up in play. You do still need to read it, though, as sometimes there is relevant information about the encounter (again demonstrated in the encounter that follows this one, where this section is used to give the DC for a saving throw required of PCs who linger in the room [5]).

This section often forms the bulk of an encounter’s text.

4. Creatures/Hazards

This is where you’ll find out who or what is in the room for the players to interact with. In a lot of ways this is where the “diorama” part of “diorama encounters” lives. Here you’ll find combat tactics, methods for disabling traps and hazards, information about whether creatures are immediately visible in the room, and the line “they fight to the death”.

5. Statblocks

Self-explanatory really. If a creature is new to the adventure, you’ll find the stat block here. If they’re found in one of the Pathfinder Bestiaries, you’ll be given a page reference. You’re also always given their Initiative stat and modifier, plus their level.

6. Post-Encounter Info

Again, quite self-explanatory. This is used for treasure that can be found by searching the room or looting a body, other rewards (such as XP for meeting story goals, financial (or otherwise) rewards offered by NPCs if you retrieve something found here for them), and occasionally narrative consequences that result from things that could take place here.

Fifth Edition

Going into this article I expected that I wouldn’t need to look at Fifth Edition, because the adventure format there has been very similar to Pathfinder for a very long time. But in the interest of being thorough I had a look through Keys From The Golden Vault and while the format is still similar, there are a couple of changes that I think are worth mentioning. Here’s an encounter from Keys From The Golden Vault as a point of comparison.

It’s still structurally quite similar, but instead of reserving the bold terms at the start of paragraphs for discrete sections (i.e. Creatures, Rewards, etc.) we’ve adding them at the start of each paragraph so we can quickly scan and find what we need.[6] Turning the Pathfinder encounter into a Fifth Edition encounter would really just be a matter of adding some key terms, and removing the stat block. So we’d end up with text that looks something like this (not included the boxed text, which can remain the same):

Old School Essentials

This is where we really start having to do some work. Old School Essentials (OSE) is perhaps the most famous proponent of the “bullet-point dungeons” style of writing encounters. Let’s have a look at an encounter from Gavin Norman’s The Hole In The Oak, see if we can identify a structure to it, and then try to fit our encounter into it.

Straight away we can see a huge difference here. Boxed text is gone, replaced with brief notes about key things in the room. Immediately we also see OSE’s very distinct syntax, too. We’re told what the thing is (followed by further details in parenthesis).

Following the room description, we have subheaders for each thing in the room that players might feasibly be drawn to. Each one has bullet points following it giving us more information about that things (whether it’s an NPC, a cupboard, or whatever). Interestingly, there’s no information hierarchy within the bullet points, though there’s an effort to make it scannable with the addition of bolded terms at the start of each point.

Stat blocks live inside the section where they’re relevant, and are reproduced in full (much easier when your stat blocks don’t take up a full page as in crunchier games). Things like “post-combat” information – like the items carried by Ramius the faun – as well as combat tactics also live under their specific entries rather than being a discrete section of the encounter as a whole. So as well as rewriting our Pathfinder encounter, we’re also going to have to do some restructuring to make it fit.

OSE’s format isn’t quite as consistent as Pathfinder and 5e, which makes our task a little harder, but that’s fine. Some other room entries in The Hole In The Oak also contain bullet points immediately after the room description telling us about exits, which we’re likely going to have to make use of.

Let’s start with the boxed text, which we’re going to reduce to both bullet points and “interactable elements” within the room. Here’s a reminder of what we’re working with:

The once finely lacquered wooden walls of this room bear evidence of violence, covered now with gouges and scrapes. The front counter of the teahouse is a mess of broken pots, bottles, and cups. A table has been turned on its side, along with whatever dishes were on it at the time. Another table still stands in the southeast corner, this one strangely well placed and set, as if expecting guests. Stairs lead up to an upstairs balcony to the northeast. Steps lead up two feet to an upraised wooden platform running along the northern wall, where several sliding doors stand closed save for the northwest corner, in which two unlit stoves sit in an alcove near a smaller wooden door

First, let’s break this down into its constituent parts.

• The lacquered wooden walls covered in gouges and scrapes
• The front counter covered in a mess of broken pots, bottles, and cups
• The overturned table
• The table that isn’t overturned
• The stairs up to the balcony
• Another small set of stairs to an upraised wooden platform along the northern wall
• Several sliding doors doors on the northern wall
• Two unlit stoves in the northwest corner near a smaller wooden door

A quick scan of the rest of The Hole In The Oak tells me these short lists that open each room usually deal only with the flooring, the walls, the roof, and the source of light in the room. Anything else gets a subheader in the room entry itself. This isn’t consistent across every room, however, and those where the walls, floor, and ceiling are all made of the same substance and we aren’t told the source of light tend to include information that might be under a subheader in other entries (e.g. room 12 on page 12). I’d prefer to work with as much of our original encounter as possible rather than inventing new things, so we’re going to ignore the floor and ceiling and a light source in this room and will add in a few of the other elements from our list to this initial descriptive text. This will have the result of keeping the encounter entry itself as short as possible. 

Our descriptive text might look something like this:

Then we can follow this with our exits:

• North: Several sliding doors on the wall.
• Northeast: Stairs lead up to an upstairs balcony.
• Northwest: Small wooden door in an alcove near the stove.

That leaves us with two elements to include – the giant toad, and the treasure. We could possibly include some information about the NPC in an adjoining room, too. All of these can live under subheaders of their own. Entries for creatures all seem to get a Reaction bullet point, so we’ll add that in for Warty. The result is that our full encounter now looks like this:

This is much more transformative than the conversion from Pathfinder 2 to 5th Edition. One thing we’re missing here is the details about the contents of the uncovered Last Will & Testament. In the Pathfinder version we’re directed to a page later in the book which gives us much more information about the contents of the will and how PCs can go about using it to claim ownership of the teahouse. This involves a Skill challenge to understand a reference in the will, and requires the PCs travelling to another location in the module and recovering some items.

We have two options for how to deal with this. The first is to add the contents of the will to this room entry. We’d give it a subheader and include the stipulations of the will (“recover the two pearls I’ve thrown into Fumeiyoshi’s eyes”) here, then include the pearls in the other room entry and expect that GMs and PCs will figure out the meaning for themselves. Or we could include this information in the front matter of the adventure.  (OSE adventures list all treasure in the module at the beginning of the book, and The Hole In The Oak has a section titled “Unanswered Mysteries” that talks about some of the things players might find that don’t have an explanation in the text. We could include a section about the will here). My instinct is to include the information exactly where we need it, so I think we should add an additional subheader in this room entry that looks a little like this:

I also think it’s worth looking at how this would appear on the page in a printed product that uses the OSE house style, too. Here’s my best approximation of that.

Once we look at the encounter in this format, I think we can identify a couple of things where the format itself might dictate what we would write were we to design this encounter with the OSE format in mind in the first place. I’m thinking especially of the “Set Table” and “Front Counter” entries here.

The “Set Table” is given quite a lot of text in the original encounter, but most of the information we’re given is GM-facing. Players don’t really have any way to discover the reasons why this table hasn’t been overturned and destroyed, or why it’s been set so formally. The much sparser OSE format doesn’t really want us to write paragraphs of text explaining things like this, so if we were to write this room with OSE in mind in the first place there’s a good chance that we’d simply do away with it.

If we didn’t do away with it, then we’d probably want to add to it instead. It looks very strange on the page with just one descriptive sentence, so we’d perhaps want to add a couple of elements here that could provide some of the context we’re lacking once we strip out the GM-facing text – maybe an un-sent invitation to the NPCs in an envelope on the table, or something of that nature. We might also want to add the overturned table here, presenting it instead as a pair of tables where one has been overturned and the other is still set for a meal. [^9]

The “Front Counter” entry has to be here, because it contains something important for the players to find and so we need to draw attention to it. But again, because of the nature of the format it looks a little strange on the page with just one element describing it, so we’d probably want to add some more elements here.

I think this is a particularly interesting consequence of the bullet-point format. Ostensibly it allows us to write less, to get straight to the “gameable” information, but actually it can be the case that we need to write more about the things that we choose to highlight to avoid it seeming strange and underdeveloped, which is a direct result of the way the text is presented on the page. We don’t actually need any more information about the Front Counter than the original description provides us, because the important thing about it is what the players can discover in it, but the format encourages us to overwrite it at least a little in order to fill the space.

Mörk Borg

Let’s now look at another “bullet-point” format, that found in the Mörk Borg adventure Rotblack Sludge. There are a few extant first party Mörk Borg adventures, short dungeons found in the supplements Feretory and Heretic as well as the vinyl album adventure Putrescence Regnant, and the way they’re presented does vary somewhat.

It’s not really accurate to say that Mörk Borg has a “house style” in the same was as Old School Essentials does. But Rotblack Sludge is the adventure that appears in the core rulebook, making it the first module that prospective writers will see, and its layout has informed the layout of many third party adventures (including my own). I suspect that comparing it directly to OSE will be an interesting exercise, because while some things will be very familiar there are a couple of important differences that will again influence the way we write encounters for it. Let’s take a look at a page from Rotblack Sludge and see what’s going on.

Much of what’s going on in this layout is self-evident, and obviously bears many similarities to the OSE format. There are a couple of changes, though, that I have found worth bearing in mind when writing for Mörk Borg and that I think will have an impact on how our reworked Pathfinder encounter will look once we put it into this format.

Rotblack Sludge has a two column layout throughout, with one main column and a sidebar containing additional information. The flow of information is much more standardised than in the OSE format, with all  entries following this structure:

• Room/Encounter title
• Sensory information (what does the space smell like, what can we hear (even if it’s from a different room, etc)
• What’s immediately obvious to players, and what does it do.
• What are the exits, and where do they go?

This is the DNA of all of the entries in this adventure, and some rooms don’t contain anything more than this. Beyond this, most of what’s contained in the main column is the result of interacting with things in the room. The very bottom of the second room entry in our example contains a black text box that I refer to as the “highlight box”, providing additional information to GMs that may be useful when running the room.

Not every room entry in this adventure uses the sidebar for additional context or information (some of them are filled instead with spot art). The sidebar is generally used to provide information about living creatures inside the room – who they are, what they’re doing here, and how they’re expressed in the mechanical framework of the game (i.e. their stat block). This space gives a little bit of breathing room for writers to provide additional context for NPCs etc. without cluttering up the main room entry.

Let’s go back to our Pathfinder encounter and see how we’ll fit it into this form. I suspect that we’ll be able to use a lot of the work we did for the OSE version, but that we’ll also want to pull some of the discarded information back in. We’ll start with the main “DNA” section first.

The first thing we need to add is the sensory information. This is the sort of thing I’d expect to be able to pull from the Pathfinder boxed text, but there actually isn’t anything there:

Luckily we don’t need much. Some of the entries in Rotblack Sludge say as little as “Stale smell”, as an example. Since a giant toad lives here, I think we can get away with something like “Animal smell”.

Then we hit our bullet points – three or four things that are immediately obvious to the PCs, plus our exits. Here we should be able to draw from the work we did in the OSE conversion. We’ll also want to make sure that we mention Warty the giant toad here, too. I think our main bullet points will look something like this:

• Warty, the giant toad dwells here. He is usually found sleeping near the stairs leading up to the balcony, but attacks if he is woken by intruders.
• Finely-lacquered walls bear signs of violence.
• Front counter is a mess of broken pots, bottles, and cups.
• Overturned table on its side. Another table still stands, set as though expecting guests. [^10]

Our exits are nice and easy and can largely be lifted from our OSE version, though we need to add in some links to adjoining rooms:

• North: Low wooden platform with several sliding doors to the private banquet hall on the wall.
• Northeast: Stairs lead up to an upstairs balcony.
• Northwest: Small wooden door to the pantry prison in an alcove near the stove.
• South: Double doors lead outside. [^11]

The next step is to decide what goes into the text that follows. The obvious choice is the front counter and the hidden papers and again we’re going to pull directly from the source text editing, it a little for brevity.

There’s now a choice about whether or not we include the details of the contents of the will in the main body text or in the sidebar. My instinct is to put it into the sidebar to avoid cluttering up the main column, so we’ll do that. This may change once I put the whole entry into an approximation of the Rotblack Sludge layout and see how it actually appears on the page, but for now I’m going to use the end of this entry to add a highlight box telling GMs how to react to noises in this room. To save you scrolling, here’s the source text:

The highlight box text should be relatively brief, so we’ll condense this a lot.

This is longer than any of the highlight text in Rotblack Sludge, and I went back and forth on whether to include the NPC’s speech in it or not. My decision to include was driven by asking the question, “what does this achieve?” The highlight text in Rotblack Sludge tells us that the guards hear any noise, and we can assume that this draws their attention and they come to investigate. In this case we’re told explicitly in the Pathfinder source text that the NPC doesn’t investigate. If we’re highlighting that the NPC hears what’s going on the GM it follows that something should happen as a result of this, so I chose to retain the speech. This alerts players to the existence of an NPC in an adjoining room, which should have a material impact on any sort of combat encounter occurring here even if the NPC doesn’t get directly involved.

With that done, let’s look at the sidebar. We already know what we’re going to include here – stats for Warty, and information about the contents of the will. We could probably include Mo Douqiu’s speech in Warty’s section, reducing the highlight bar to a simple instruction that the NPC hears any combat here but deigns to investigate, but that feels like splitting one piece of information over two places in the text and I don’t like it.

Let’s start with Warty’s entry. The NPC entries in Rotblack Sludge tend to provide a little bit more than just stats, so we can pull some of Warty’s motivations and actions from the source text into this.

Then, for the will, we can take what we wrote for OSE and put it into the sidebar:

Let’s take a look at what that looks like in situ. The minimap on this page is from my adventure The Vermilion Throne. That adventure mimics the layout of Rotblack Sludge, so it was very easy for me to simply flow the text of this example into that document. I could have spent time making a minimap for the Pathfinder adventure I’m using for this example, but the actual content of the map is much less important here than the space it takes up on the page.

As we can see here, this encounter takes up quite a lot of space on the page and doesn’t leave much space for a second room entry beneath it. This is definitely a consideration when writing for this format. It lends itself to brevity and to encounters with only one or two moving parts. As I write a lot of Mörk Borg adventures and use layout that looks like this quite regularly in them, it’s definitely something I bear in mind when designing things for this system.[^13]

Conclusions

It’s hard to sum up something like this in a neat little box, since I’m not well-placed to assess how effectively or not I’ve demonstrated my point. My central thesis is that the way in which we write adventures for commercial publication is necessarily coloured by the system we intend to write for. Even before we consider any qualities specific to the system itself (by which I mean things like the system’s setting (implied or explicit), density of rules, etc.) our creative decisions will be driven by customer expectations based entirely around aesthetic concerns of how Text On The Page is presented. The way we construct encounters, the way we organise information while writing, can (and, if we wish to produce commercially viable Products, should) be informed by the expectations that players are going to bring with them when approaching our text.

How much any given third party publisher cares about producing a Commercially Viable Product is going to change from person to person and – in my case – from project to project. Just within my work for Mörk Borg I’ve written adventures like The Vermilion Throne that hew very closely to the “expected” format and adventures like A Waning Light that eschew it entirely, doing away with bullet points and sentence fragments and presenting the module entirely in prose. In both cases these were very intentional, considered decisions that I made before a single word was set to paper, and I hope that this article goes some way towards demonstrating why such “pre-production” considerations are important (or, if not important, at least worth keeping in mind).

If you’re a publisher of – or intend to be a publisher of – a game that’s supplemented by adventure modules, I think it’s also worth considering whether you want to establish a “house style” and structured form for your modules, or whether you want each work to stand on its own. The first party adventures for Troika!, for example, are much less codified in their form.[^14] The writing is prosaic, and individual area entries – even within the same book – don’t seem to have a strict structure beyond making sure that the most obvious things are detailed first. In Troika!’s case the form each module takes suits the content of the module itself, rather than writers working within a fixed framework. Similarly, there isn’t yet any form for adventures for my own A Dungeon Game, though this is something I intend to develop as I work more on the game and produce more supplements for it.

If you do decide that you will adopt a house style, I think it’s worth ensuring that it’s consistent both within individual books and across an entire line. This is something that the likes of Paizo do very well – presumably as a result of having originally been magazine publishers – versus something like Old School Essentials which clearly intends for a fixed structure to be in place even if it’s sometimes inconsistent in applying it.

I could go on and on here, but I’ll bring this to a close as I’ve just broken 7000 words. If you’ve got this far, thank you for reading. I’d be very interested to hear your thoughts on this.

Footnotes

[^1]: “Player” here means everyone at the table, both GMs and those running characters.

[^2]: If you’re a Detritus subscriber, I’ve attached the partial drafts of those two posts to the bottom of *this* post so that you can take a look at them. Some of the language in those posts may end up being cannibalised for this one.

[^3]: This is actually one of the hardest parts of this exercise, because there’s often a fundamental difference in ethos between “modern trad” adventure writing and OSR-style writing. Adventures for games like Pathfinder 2 and Fifth Edition generally have discrete encounters that function as set pieces, with the PCs walking into a room right as something is occurring and the text giving us the details of what that is. This is much less common in OSR-style texts, which tend to present a location and the people in it along with some details about who they are and what they want, and then leave what they’re actually *doing* to the result of things like reaction rolls. That said, it’s not the case that these sorts of “diorama” encounters are entirely absent from OSR adventures, and as we explore other house styles in the rest of this article I’ve made an attempt to find encounters that function in a similar way.

[^4]: While I’ve done some freelance writing for Paizo (all of it unreleased at the time of this article) and have seen some of their style and design guides I’ve never seen the one given to adventure writers, so I could be wrong about this.

[^5]: I originally intended to use encounter C2 for this article, but it felt a little small to really demonstrate what I’m trying to demonstrate here since it’s essentially just a prison cell with some prisoners inside it. I did consider using both encounters together, but I didn’t want to reproduce more of the adventure text than was absolutely necessary.

[^6]: This reminds me a lot of the way Monster Manual entries have been presented throughout Fifth Edition, and has prompted some thoughts about “encounters as stat blocks” that I’ll likely explore in a future article.

[^7]: This addition comes from the Giant Toad stat block on Archives of Nethys, which I included because one descriptive sentence didn’t feel enough (though the weeping liquid is no longer poison, since I’m using an OSE stat block).

[^8]: Stats taken from the OSE SRD 

[^9]: I had this realisation when coming back to this post to finish it off after a few days away, but I’m currently trying to work through a migraine and so I didn’t have the energy to rewrite chunks of the post and re-make the sample layout to account for it. If nothing else, though, this demonstrates the value of editing and rewriting. Nobody writes perfect first drafts, no matter how good you think you might be. You’ll also see that I took this observation into the Mörk Borg version that ends the post.

[^10]: See reference 9.

[^11]: Also omitted from the OSE version because I forgot about them.

[^12]: It’s outside the scope of this article to go into the decisions I make when I convert monsters between systems, but if there’s interest I may do a similar type of post talking about that specifically.

[^13]: One consideration I often keep in mind is that each exit to a room will take up one or two lines on the page. As a result, it’s becoming increasingly rare that I write rooms with four or more exits when writing for Mörk Borg.

[^14]: I had intended to use Troika! as an example in this piece, but quickly realised there isn’t really a firm “house structure” to attempt to replicate.

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I’ve been thinking about “meta-currencies” in roleplaying games – those resources that allow players to interact directly with the mechanisms of a game without really having any reflection in the fictional world. I’ve also been thinking about how often people talk about wanting their games (especially dungeon fantasy games) to have more ways for characters to influence social encounters.

Most OSR-style games have some sort of Reaction Roll mechanism in place, whereby the GM makes a roll (often in secret) to determine the initial attitude of NPCs and creatures first encountered by the players. This is less common in “modern trad”-style games like Fifth Edition and Pathfinder 2, though something similar can usually be found squirreled away in appendices of optional rules (or in the 5e Dungeon Masters’ Guide, the book that everyone owns but nobody reads).

One easy way to increase player agency in social situations is to simply combine extant meta-currencies with the system’s rules for determining NPC attitudes. Here is a brief rundown of some popular systems (by which I mean “the first few books I pulled off my shelf while writing this”), looking at their meta-currencies (if any) and their reaction rules (if any) and how they can be combined to give players a little more control at the table.

Mörk Borg – Omens

We’ll start with the system that needs the least effort to make this work. Omens are technically an optional rule in Mörk Borg, but in my experience everyone uses them. Classes (also an optional rule) have a set number of Omens, and classless characters get d2 Omens. They refresh at the start of each day. Omens can be used to:

• deal maximum damage with an attack
• reroll a dice roll (yours or someone else’s)
• lower damage dealt to you by d6
• neutralize a Crit or Fumble
• lower one test’s DR by -4

The relevant part here is the second entry, “reroll a dice roll (yours or someone else’s). Mörk Borg uses a reaction table based heavily on Holmes/Moldvay Basic that looks like this:

For reference, since I’ll mention it a few more times in this post, here’s Holmes’ reaction table:

It’s not indicated whether the GM or the players should roll this check (I roll it in secret as the GM simply because that’s the way I learned to do it when playing older editions of D&D) but it doesn’t really matter. What seems self-evident to me here is that there’s no reason why players couldn’t use an Omen to force me to reroll this if they meet someone who becomes immediately hostile (or to reroll it themselves, if you have players roll for reactions).

Pathfinder 2e

Pathfinder 2nd Edition is almost the polar opposite of a game like Mörk Borg, but all the mechanisms for making this work exist in it (sort of).

NPC attitudes in Pathfinder 2 are Conditions with specific implications in game terms. Characters can attempt to make a Request (a game term) of Friendly NPCs but not of Unfriendly ones, for example. Players already have mechanisms for changing these attitudes on a fictional level with the Diplomacy skill, by Making An Impression. That looks like this:

But we’re not talking about character abilities to interact with NPCs on a fictional level here, we’re talking about players having the option to change the initial state of an NPC before any “in game” interaction takes place. We’re letting players put their thumb on the scale.

Pathfinder 2 has five distinct NPC attitudes:

• Helpful
• Friendly
• Indifferent
• Unfriendly
• Hostile

They are, incidentally, almost identical to the reactions in Holmes. I can’t find any rules within PF2 for setting the initial attitude of NPCs, though it’s possible that they exist. Most adventures that I’ve read tend to dictate the initial attitude of NPCs, and I think it’s probably expected that the GM will simply make a decision.

For our purposes we need this to be random, so we’re going to introduce reaction rolls back into PF2. On initially meeting an NPC whose attitude is unclear, the GM rolls 2d6 to select their initial attitude with the following results:

2d6
2 – Hostile
3-5 – Unfriendly
6-8 – Indifferent
9-11 – Friendly
12 – Helpful

(Side note here to say that I honestly didn’t expect Pathfinder 2’s attitudes to map so perfectly onto the Holmes reaction table. I love finding the DNA of the earliest editions of the D&D in modern versions of the genre.)

Now that we’ve got a mechanism for determining the initial reactions, how do we let players influence it? That’s where PF2 already has us covered in the form of Hero Points. Here’s how they work:

We literally don’t need to change anything here. The GM rolls for an initial NPC attitude and, if the players don’t like it, one of them can spend a Hero Point to force a reroll. Done.

D&D Fifth Edition

Of course I’m going to talk about 5e.

As with Pathfinder 2, much of what I want to do here already exists in the game. (Fifth Edition actually has a lot of procedures hidden in the DMG that make the game feel much closer to an older style of play, and I’ve been intending to write a “how to make dungeon crawling work properly in 5e” post for a while. One day that will happen.)

As with Pathfinder 2, the initial attitude of NPCs is left to DM fiat. Here’s what the DMG tells us about starting attitudes:

This section then goes on to talk about how characters can change these attitudes during play – again, not what we’re interested in here.

The categories are much less granular, with only three results instead of five, but we can use the same table as Pathfinder 2 (and Holmes) by simply collapsing the top and bottom results – i.e. “Hostile” and “Unfriendly” get rolled into “Hostile”, and “Friendly” and “Helpful” become “Friendly”. So our table looks like this:

This is, in fact, identical to the reaction table from OD&D, which looks like this:

Fifth Edition also has Hero Points as an optional rule in the DMG. They look like this:

A player can spend a hero point whenever he or she makes an attack roll, an ability check, or a saving throw. The player can spend the hero point after the roll is made but before any of its results are applied. Spending the hero point allows the player to roll a d6 and add it to the d20, possibly turning a failure into a success. A player can spend only 1 hero point per roll.

In addition, whenever a character fails a death saving throw, the player can spend one hero point to turn the failure into a success.

All we need to do here is to say that in addition to using them on attack rolls, ability checks, or saving throws, a player can also spend a hero point after the GM makes a reaction roll. It requires the GM to actually tell players what the result of the roll was (or to at least ask “do you want to make me reroll that?”), but that’s fine.

Other Games

My instinct is to keep pulling games off my shelf and making this work in them, but frankly I don’t want to keep writing the same thing over and over again. Some games (like the three I’ve looked at here) will already have the means to make this work built into them, while others will take a little wrangling, but at its heart it’s very simple. You just need two things:

1. A means to randomise the initial attitude of NPCs and monsters. As demonstrated, the reaction table from Holmes Basic has been getting the job done since 1977, and that’s really only a slightly more granular version of the OD&D table that’s having its 50th birthday as I write this.
2. A metacurrency that lets players alter the result of rolls before the effects are actually applied to the fiction.

Where games already have an extant metacurrency it’s very easy, as demonstrated, to rule that it now applies to reaction rolls. (Really you should let it apply to everything, because that’s fun. I let my Mörk Borg group apply it to initiative rolls and to checks for Miseries.I also let my A Dungeon Gameplayers exert themselves on initiative rolls, which isn’t identical to what we’re talking about here but sits in the same philosophical space).

Where games don’t have a built-in metacurrency it’s fairly easy to add one, and you’ll often find that they have something else that might serve the same purpose. Dungeon Crawl Classics doesn’t have a metacurrency (or reaction rolls), but characters do have Luck points. Players can be asked to make Luck checks to dictate the outcome of situations, and they can also “burn” Luck points to influence the outcome of rolls. You could easily say that a player who wants to change an initial reaction roll should either make a Luck check to automatically have a beneficial result, or else burn a Luck point to force the GM to reroll. You could even be entirely transparent with the result of the roll and allow players to burn as many Luck points as required to get the result they want (though since Luck is also used in the rest of the game this blurs the line between “over the table” metacurrency used by players and an actual in-game resource that characters rely on).

This is a transcript of a Twitter long read thread. It was made available to Patrons a week before being posted publicly here. Supporting me on Patreon starts at as little as £2 a month and gets you access to posts like this one, sneak peaks at works in progress, early drafts, essays about the craft and art of writing RPGs, and much more!

At some point in 2022, I forget when exactly, Hachette announced they would be producing a D&D magazine as part of their Partworks line aimed at introducing new players to the game. It was initially going to be just 4 issues as a trial to test the market.

Onboarding new players and teaching games is something I’m hugely interested in, and so I signed up for the trial to see how this was being approached in the magazine format. Jump to November 2022 and I had only ever received a single issue – issue 2.

I forgot about it after this, frankly, but last month I received two parcels. The first contained issues 1 & 2 (now with a different cover) and the second containined issues 3-6. So now seems a very good time to finally dig into these things and take a look at what’s going on in them.

If you haven’t seen me do these sorts of threads before, you can check out my others here.

This isn’t a review in any meaningful sense. It’s me looking at a product and talking about it in real time. (Yes, I’ve precomposed the thread so that I can post a transcript of it, but it’s still “live” reactions). Here I’m looking specifically at what this magazine does to teach the game to new players and to onboard people who may be new to roleplaying in general.

I’m interested in Games As Products, so I’m probably going to talk about this from a productisation perspective as well. My interest in this stuff is very much motivated by my desire to do the best job I can at introducing new players to my own game, A Dungeon Game (available free here).

I’m also going into this intending to be very critical, in both a positive and negative sense. This is a big, commercial product, aimed at introducing players to the biggest RPG in the world, with the biggest budget and the most resources. If anybody can get this right, it’s Hachette and WoTC. This isn’t a “5e sucks” thread – I like 5e and frankly I’m not interested in slinging shit around, I’ve got better things to do with my time. If this magazine does things well, or does things I think I and other indie designers can learn from, I’m absolutely going to highlight them. But the flipside of that is that I’m also going to talk frankly about things I *don’t* think it does well or places where I think it could be doing things better. Often I think looking at how something doesn’t work is more useful than looking at what things do well (which is why it’s just as important for fiction writers to read bad books as it is for them to read masterpieces).

As always, everything I say here is going to be entirely coloured by my own philosophies on games and games texts, my own likes and dislikes, and my own experiences as both a player and a game designer. You’re free to disagree with me, but if you’re a dickhead about it I’ll block you immediately.

If you get something out of this thread and want to help support me, you can join my Patreon or you can throw money at me via Ko-Fi. Any money this specific thread makes me will probably go towards another month of this magazine so I can look at how it develops.

A note before we start. Traditionally these threads create a lot of notifications for me, so I tend not to interact with people while I’m writing them until I’m done. Because of the “live” nature of them I also often make mistakes. That’s just part of the process. Please be patient with it.

So, let’s talk assumptions etc. before we jump in. I’m very familiar with D&D 5e but haven’t kept up with releases over the past year or two. I’m also going to assume this is aimed at people who don’t know anything about the game, and I’m going to try and read it from that perspective.

Starter Sets and beginner boxes often simplify rules, and I suspect we might see some of that in the early issues of Adventurer. It wouldn’t surprise me to see concepts be introduced in a basic, stripped-down form and later expanded upon to get closer to how they’re presented in the core rulebooks.

One assumption I’m making, that may prove to be wrong, is that some of the text here might not match the current edition of the game. We all know there’s a new edition coming next year, and I have a suspicion that Adventurer might contain some of that content. But we’ll see.

I’m also interested to see how this gets stretched out in a magazine format. The goal on its face is to introduce the game to people, but the goal of any individual issue of a magazine is actually to sell the *next* issue. In an ideal world you subscribe every single month, forever. So I’m curious to see what that looks like here.

Okay. Let’s jump in. Issue 1. We’ll take it a step at a time, looking at the cover and back cover (i.e. what’s visible without opening the plastic) before we open it up and see what’s inside. (I opened it already just for the purposes of taking photos but let’s pretend I didn’t).

I think the front cover of issue 1 is really interesting because in a lot of ways it tells us what the magazine wants us to think are the important parts of the game. It’s what sets your initial expectations, as someone who potentially knows nothing about what’s inside. So let’s take it step by step.

First, that subtitle: “Learn. Play. Explore.” This is going to teach us the game and it’s going to get us playing. I expect that I’ll be able to sit down and play this game with just this issue in my hand. We’ve got a set of dice, too, so I presumably don’t need anything extra.

Something I’ve come across when introducing new players who lack genre literacy in heroic fantasy to D&D specifically is that they struggle to visualise events in the game because they have no frame of reference for it. It’s easy to say “the Lord Of The Rings films exist and everyone’s seen them” but I don’t think most 5e games look much like the events in those films – especially if you run a more traditional dungeon-based game.

So the illustration here really interests me, because I think it’s evocative of a different film that most people have seen and are familiar with that in my mind is much more representative of what a D&D game looks like. This picture of a group of adventurers fighting hoards of skeletal soldiers reminds me very strongly of Pirates Of The Carribbean.

In the side banner we have a few things. The first is that there’s a “new and exclusive adventure” in this issue. We can “learn the lore”, “become a dungeon master”, and treat ourselves to some “expert D&D play tips”. We also have a red circle (hidden by the dice box initially) telling us that we’re going to learn the combat rules.

There’s some interesting managing of different sets of expectations going on here. We’re trying to appeal to a broad audience, from those who know nothing about the game to people who know what it is but are put off by the perceived complexity of it – whether that’s in there being lots of “lore” to remember, or the hurdle of actually knowing how to run a game. This issue is promising to fix all of that.

When we flip the thing over we see advertising materials for the next few issues. This is basically just “here are the toys we’re going to give you”. A dice tray, a DM screen, a binder to store your issues in, and a “dice jail”. The dice jail especially is, I think, aimed at people who have existing familiarity not just with D&D but with specific actual play streams of the game.

Interestingly issue 2 comes with both another set of dice and “your exclusive adventure map”. Now I’m wondering if this issue actually contains a playable adventure (I assume we’re going to be playing on a grid, which means the map is a core part of the adventure). If it doesn’t then that feels like a real miss for issue 1. But we’ll see.

Inside the bag we get not just the first issue but also a set of pregenerated characters and a small booklet titled “Introduction To Combat”. The character sheet doesn’t actually look simplified at all, which is really interesting.

Opening up the main book, we get a good introduction that tells us exactly what this product is and what to expect. Initially I thought that this ToC didn’t have page numbers but of course it does – each section is numbered individually, because we’re going to be pulling this apart and putting it in a binder (assuming we subscribe for long enough to actually get the binder and, presumably, the section dividers that come with it). So if we want to read about the “Structure of Play” we’re directed to page 3 of the Sage Advice section rather than page 3 of the magazine itself.

Issue 1 is split into 3 sections, plus the adventure. We’ve got “Sage Advice” (a term D&D has been using in publications at least as early as issue 31 Dragon of magazine in November 1979), which contains an overview of what the game is and a section explaining the role of the DM; Character Creation; and “Lore” (my least favourite word in gaming/fiction). Future issues will presumably expand on these section (and possibly add additional sections? Who knows).

It’s really nice to see that Will Doyle (@beholderpie) wrote the adventure in this issue. His name won’t mean anything to a new player, obviously, but it makes me feel confident that it’s going to be pretty good.

The Overview section opens with the always-contentions “what is an RPG?” section. A product like this absolutely needs it, and here they’ve taken the smart option of writing “what is *this* RPG?” rather than a description of the hobby as a whole. This is a pretty solid introduction to the basics of D&D without overwhelming anybody. It keeps things short and sweet.

(Obviously a lot of the work indie designers, and myself specifically, do is involved in making sure that people are aware there’s more to RPGs than D&D but I don’t think we can fault a D&D product for not doing that.)

I’m obviously not about to share photos of every single page, so from here on out I’ll just comment on interesting things.

This is, I think, the first missed opportunity. Personally I think the goal should be to get players moving as quickly as possible. Good starter sets have figured out how to do that, and I think a magazine format is an ideal place to do it. You want to capitalise on a reader’s initial excitement while it’s still fresh. Obviously a reader probably isn’t sitting reading this with their friends anxiously waiting to start playing, but you want to give the impression that you could still play if that were the case.

There’s an argument to be made that what we’re doing here is building a rulebook in sections. This isn’t really a starter set. But that’s the purpose it’s marketed as serving, so I do think some thought should have gone into getting people moving quickly. The first 20 pages of this magazine are overviews, and once you actually get to the encounter you’re then guided to read the additional “Introduction To Combat” section before you can play.

This magazine actually quite neatly illustrates something I (and others) have talked about for a while, which is that RPG texts are often trying to serve multiple purposes at the same time. They need to be a pedagogical text, a reference text, and something that inspires your imagination and makes you want to play. That’s hard to do in a single book (and it’s why Ironsworn Starforged works so well, because Shawn recognised this and produced multiple different texts aimed at doing all of these things separately), and it’s proving difficult to do here in this magazine format as well.

In theory the “pull out the pages and reorder this book” format we’re seeing here makes this task easier, because you can sequence the text initially in a way that onboards players quickly (pedagogy) and then have people reorder the text themselves to create a reference manual they’ll use once they know how to play. That, unfortunately, isn’t what we’re seeing in D&D Adventurer.

Anyway. I’ve jumped ahead here, so let’s continue working through this issue.

From this section it looks like each issue will provide a single encounter from one larger adventure, which certainly makes sense as a way to spread out the content and maximise revenues but seems incredibly frustrating if you’re a player who just wants to get on with the game. We’ll see how this develops.

Obviously we’re all familiar with the traditional set of polyhedral dice, and D&D Adventurer comes with a set of 7 (1d4, 1d6, 1d8, 2d10/1d%, 1d12, 1d20). I think it’s really interesting that the decision was made to include percentile dice, since they’re really not used very often in 5e. And if I’m a new player reading this section about dice, I’m probably wondering why I have two dice of the same size in my set that are numbered slightly differently.

Presumably we get a 7 dice set because it’s very easy for Hachette to source them in branded tins in massive quantities, and that’s not the case if you only want a set of 6. It’s an entirely commercial/financial decision, but it’s one that has ramifications (albeit small ones) when the text doesn’t quite match up.

This is where I start to enter nitpick territory, but I think any product aimed at onboarding new players deserves to be nitpicked because absolutely anything can be a stumbling block. Take, for example, this text, which refers to “stat blocks”. Imagine you’re a new player with no context or genre literacy. What’s a stat block? How do I find out the answer to that question? There’s no index here, no way for me to find out what this piece of text means by consulting the magazine I’m holding in my hand. It’s a small, probably fleeting moment of frustration, but these things add up and if you have too many of them you’ll eventually bounce off. If I’m a writer interested in making a text that’s approachble and welcoming for new players (which I am), I want to minimise these moments of friction.

Part of onboarding new players to complex games involves reassuring them that it’s not actually as difficult as you might have convinced yourself it is. That can be true of anything, from rules mastery to doing silly voices for NPCs. I like that Adventurer has taken the time to reassure DMs that this is actually just a goofy game and it doesn’t actually matter if you’re terrible at voices. I’m also interested to see how they expand on this in future issues (and that’s where they get you with this sort of publishing model. Commercially, this section is doing exactly what it needs to do).

That reassurance is also carried through to the following pages, where DMs are told that they don’t need to memorize or even read all of the rules before play starts. It’s also super interesting that the magazine tells us to refer to the magazine for rules questions rather than the core rulebooks. We haven’t actually been told that D&D exists as a complete game you can already buy anywhere at this point (though we were directed to DnD Beyond earlier).

I guess there are some competing commercial interests here. Wizards Of The Coast want to sell D&D books, obviously, while Hachette want to sell copies of this magazine. Hachette certainly doesn’t benefit from directing readers to WoTC’s books, so it’s not surprising that there’s no mention of the books here. We’ve had some reference to other D&D products in talking about campaign settings and “decades of D&D lore”, but nowhere have we shown players how to find out more about that. I wonder if we’re going to see WoTC moving to a more digital, DnD Beyond-based model for rules text (i.e. phasing out physical books), or whether it’s simply the case that this magazine is intended to stand alone. (I obviously don’t know what sort of financial arrangements exist to produce products like this, either, so there are probably other considerations here that I know nothing about).

One thing I’m picking up on here that doesn’t surprise me but that is a little disappointing is that the text is assuming a base level of knowledge that I don’t think the (assumed) target audience will necessarily have. Take this section, for example.

The concept of what “a balanced party” means hasn’t actually been explained here or anywhere else, so what does this sidebar achieve? It’s introducing a partial concept without any elucidation, which creates uncertainty and questions for a player that they don’t have immediate answers to. This can be a stumbling block and, as we’ve already touched on, too many of them can become a real problem that sees players drop off without actually playing the game. Personally I would be avoiding things like this.

Similarly, confusion can be caused by not paying close attention to the terminology we use when talking about things, especially when we’re discussing terms that have actual meaning in the game rules. Take this, for example:

This is just a simple editing issue, where the term “skills” is used in place of “ability scores”. This wouldn’t be a problem if the game didn’t also have rules elements called Skills, but it does. Again, just a small potential stumbling block, but an important one.

Similarly, we’re in danger of overloading players with information before they know what they’re looking at. Do we really need this explanation of Ability Modifiers and how they’re calculated in Issue 1?

I think we would have been much better served here with just introducing the things you really need to know in order to play in issue 1, and bringing this extra stuff in later. Realistically, new players don’t need to know what the difference between Strength 12 and 13 is. They just need to know that they get a +1 bonus as a result of it. We could either add to the complexity of information in later issues, or else sequence this issue so that this stuff comes later, after you’re up and running and have played for a bit.

We’re told a little later in the Character Creation overview that the campaign presented in Adventurer will carry characters to 5th level. Since the first ability score increase comes at 4th level, it feels to me like that would be a better place in the sequence of the magazine as a whole to talk about how ability scores and modifiers are linked. Provide the information when it’s needed, and then give people the ability to reference it later after the fact.

We’re already simplifying things elsewhere – presenting only 4 Species (Human, Lightfoot Halfling, Hill Dwarf, Wood Elf) and 4 Classes (Fighter, Rogue, Wizard, Cleric) – so simplifying the rules to make learning them easier seems like an obvious option. (I realise I keep banging this drum and I’m sorry if it’s getting old).

Reaching the end of both the Overview and Character Creation sections in this issue, I’m not fully convinced that someone new to the game would really know how to actually play this thing or even what play looks like. Looking at the “Introduction To Combat” book, there *is* a small example of play, but a) it’s geared explicitly around combat and b) it’s sort of implied that only the DM should read this book. I think the Overview section especially would have been better served by dedicating some space to an example of play to show what all these moving parts look like in context.

Section 3, Lore, gives us a two page introduction to Phandalin, which is going to be the starting point for the first adventure and the base for the overall campaign. If we look back to my three form model for what RPG texts need to do, one of those things is to inspire players and make them want to engage with the game. I don’t think this brief section achieves that, and that’s more of a problem with RPG writing as a form than with this magazine specifically.

Without providing a photo of it (because that would just be reproducing the text entirely), what we get here is a fairly dry overview of Phandalin in the manner of RPG gazetteers going back 50 years. It’s a frontier town built on the ruins of an older settlement. It was a thriving town that was destroyed by orcs hundreds of years ago. Now it’s being reclaimed by settlers drawn by stories of gold and platinum in the mountains, but it explicitly hasn’t experienced a gold rush. There are a few small businesses. And that’s it.

I guess I’m just not personally very inspired by this. The only reason players would want to visit the place is because there are rumours of gold to be had, which is a perfectly adequate adventure hook. What I think it’s missing is a real hook to make it stand out as an interesting location in its own right. Even just dialing up the gold rush aspect would be more interesting, I think. It’s also the fact that the sidebar of “Nearby Landmarks” doesn’t really provide much that makes me, as a player, say “oh wow that sounds really intriguing, I want to find a way to go there”.

It’s very possible that I’m being overly critical here, but it just feels a little bland to me. The adventure we’re about to start looking at is, presumably, going to inject some drama into this place, but the players don’t get to see that until they’re sitting down at the table ready to play. It would be nice for the text that they read beforehand to get them excited to do that.

The adventure itself (described as an Encounter rather than an adventure) takes up just over 4 pages, with the remaining space given over to stat blocks and a couple of magic items. It’s mostly a combat encounter, with the innkeeper and his patrons help captive above the inn by a group of cranium rats attempting to dig up an ancient tomb buried in the cellar. It’s the classic “rats in the cellar of an inn” opening adventure that’s been subverted in an interesting way by making the rats intelligent cranium rats, but unfortunately I think it’s hampered by a lack of space.

The room keys for the inn are incredibly sparse. This is the kind of very terse room entry that I actually prefer to see in adventures that I run, and you see this very limited information (that asks the DM to do a lot of the work to bring it to life) in OSR adventures. I think this would be great if that was the style of play we were introducing here, but this is a 5e product aimed at new players and I think a little more hand-holding (even just through a little more boxed text to describe the rooms) might be helpful here, and a little guidance to the DM as to how to actually run this thing.

There’s an interesting change to the 5e combat rules buried in the “Introduction To Combat” section about the way damage works. In the section headed “Average Damage”, it reads as though we now see players rolling for enemy damage when they’re struck in combat (and being given the option to instead choose the average result) rather than having DMs roll. Maybe this is a change that occurred in recent 5e books that I haven’t read, rather than something new to this magazine? This is something that’s been happening in other games for a long time, but it’s really fascinating to see it come to D&D. It seems like a small thing but it’s actually a very big shift in the role of the DM and the power dynamic between DM and player here. (Please don’t chime in with “DMs are also players”, we all know that, and we all know why I’m making a distinction between the roles here.)

The stat blocks for the monsters in the encounter aren’t simplified in any way (aside from omitting CR and XP values), but since they’re low level creatures they’re already quite straightforward. They’re also annotated to point out the pertinent things for a new DM, and we’re assured that future issues will explain stat blocks in more detail.

Where I’ve been critical of this lack of simplifying rules earlier in the magazine (and the failure to simplify the character sheets), here I think it’s probably fine? All the important bits are highlighted, and it does a good job of indicating “there’s more for you to learn here, but don’t worry about it yet”.

There’s not much more for me to say about this issue, really. I think it’s a mixed bag in a lot of ways. I’m not wholly confident that players who are entirely new to D&D or RPGs as a whole will feel confident knowing what they’re doing when they sit down to play, and the adventure isn’t given enough space to provide the tools and guidance a new DM might need to run it. I think if I were putting together something similar I’d cut out a lot of the Character Creation section and replace that with things like examples of play and guidance to the DM, alongside simplified character sheets and a breakdown of what everything on those sheets means so that players fully understand what they’re looking at.

I’m definitely interested to see how this develops over the future issues, and I fully intend to look at Issue 2 in depth. I was planning to do that as part of this thread but it’s got very long and I wasn’t anticipating how much time it would take to look at a relatively short text! Let me know if you’d actually be interested in seeing me dig into that in a thread like this.

You can check out other threads like this one here.

And if you’re interested in having me consult on your rulebook, drop me an email at chris@loottheroom.uk and let’s talk about what I can do for you.

Thanks for your time and attention.

Lots has been written about Jaquaysing the dungeon, often in the abstract. We talk about “increasing player choice”, non-linear exploration, meaningful decisions, etc. For a lot of us it’s become something we just do out of habit or out of feeling like it’s the “correct” way to design a dungeon. We’ll add loops, multiple entrances, shortcuts to deeper levels, and just trust that it makes the dungeon “better”.

Last night I ran my fourth session of The Isle, and so far this whole campaign has been a fantastic example of how much Jacquaysing a dungeon adds to a game. I want to talk about something specific that happened last night and how it’s going to impact the game going forward, but here’s a quick rundown of some other things that have happened to lead us to this point.

• In session 1 the group didn’t want to break the seal under the monastery that is the “entrance” to the dungeon, so they explored and looked for another way in. They found a shaft in a rock outcropping that lead them to the 2nd level of the dungeon (though they didn’t know that at the time).
• In session 2 they decided to us the “correct” entrance and see if they could fill in the blanks on their map. They realised that they had gone deeper the first time.

Session 3 was largely exploring more of the first level, and last night was where things got really interesting from a mapping/Jacquaysing point of view. The session began with them traversing a very deep pit that they’d put off crossing in previous sessions because it represented a commitment to exploring. Previously they’d been able to get back to the entrance to the dungeon very easily, but this skeleton-filled pit was a real obstacle. They decided this time that it was time to do it.

The group immediately got separated, with one member on the far side of the pit being chased by skeletons and another member plus hirelings on the “safe” side. Monette fled, running through a new section of the dungeon that she was unable to map and trying to find a way to loop back around to the south side of the pit. She was unable to do that, but she did find a secret door hiding a slime-coated staircase that headed down.

Earlier in the adventure they had located a carving of a door on a wall, with no actual doorway present. Donny had a trinket in his possession, granted at character creation, that simply read “Faerie Folk Lockpick” with no additional information. He decided to use it on the carved doorway and see what happened.

When I looked at my map, this doorway lined up with the secret room that Monette was hiding out in. There was no passage there but I thought, fuck it, this is cool, and I allowed the lockpick to open a path between the two rooms that Donny and the hirelings could run down. The passage sealed itself shut again and the lockpick burned up, never to be used again, but the group was reuinted.

This left the group with a decision to make – head back the way Monette had come, mapping and exploring and hoping not to run into the skeletons that were chasing her, or head down the stairs to the second level. Because they’ve been mapping, they know that there’s an exit in the northwest corner of the second level that they’ve previously used to enter the dungeon. Their theory was they by heading down the stairs and then travelling northwest, they’d eventually fill in the blanks on their map and find that exit.

Sounds good, right? Except for one thing – the stairs don’t lead to the second floor of the dungeon. They lead to the third floor. And the group don’t know this. So now they’re deeper in the dungeon than they have any right to be, heading northwest to an exit that isn’t there. What lies in the area they’re heading towards is something much weirder and scarier, that they’re definitely unprepared for.

One thing we often forget is that the GM should be allowed to have fun, too. People will very often say “the GM is a player too!” but that thought doesn’t really go any further than that, and in fact is often used to deny the fact that the GM and the players controlling individual characters have different roles and different modes of play.

Watching this group crawl through the third level of the dungeon, heading steadily northwest to eventually clear the fog off their partial map and find the exit they believe is there, all while I know something that they don’t (i.e. they’re not on the level they think they’re on) is *fun* for me.

Some might call this “adversarial GMing” or “lying to your players”. I call it “allowing me to enjoy some narrative tension”. Hitchcock talked about this sort of thing with regard to cinema in his AFI Master seminar, and while film analysis and conventions aren’t hugely relevant to organic play, this is something I’m thinking about right now. He said:

Obviously I’m not going to put my thumb on the scales and start manipulating what happens in play to make it more satisfying for me, but I’m still getting to enjoy this little bit of tension while it’s going on. At some point they’re going to get to where they believe the exit is and they’re going to realise they’re in entirely the wrong place, and then we’ll all be on the same page again.

This isn’t a gotcha moment. I didn’t set this up to trick anyone. This arose naturally through play, as a result of the combination of the dungeon design and the fact that the players have been drawing their own maps. I’ve written before about how having players draw their own maps increases mystery because they don’t know where the bounds are. This also wouldn’t have been possible without that surface entrance to the second level of the dungeon, which found before they ever explored the first level.

Sometimes “common wisdom” is shit, and it’s always good to examine the things we’re told about writing/design/play/whatever to see if they bear any fruit. In this case I was really happy to see that these principles of dungeon design that we so often repeat really do lead to exciting, meaningful moments in play. I’ve had good experiences with Jacquaysed dungeons before, but this is the first time a session has really made me sit back and think about how much better this campaign just became as a result of it.

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Oral Traditions in Gaming

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This was originally posted to Detritus, a monthly subscription where I share lots of work in progress pieces, thoughts on the craft of writing, and other behind the scenes work. You can support the project on Patreon or through Ko-Fi.

This is a mirror of this Twitter thread, which was written in real time as I read 4th Edition D&D. It hasn’t been edited in any way. You can pick up Fourth Edition from DriveThruRPG. You can also leave a tip at Ko-Fi if you like this kind of content and want to see more of it. I post these tweet mirrors to Detritus at least a week before they go live on Loot The Room. This post isn’t affiliated with or sponsored by Wizards of the Coast in any way, though the DTRPG link above uses an affiliate code. Thanks for reading.

Sitting down with the D&D 4e Player’s Handbook to read it for the first time. This will be a very long thread that will last a few hours.

This isn’t a review, this is me looking at a game for the first time and reacting to it. I may misunderstand things or get things wrong and that’s okay. I’m interested both in reading lots of games and in exploring the ways in which people approach new texts. I will talk about the things I like and don’t like. If I don’t like things you love, that’s fine. Don’t be a dick about it.

I may also phrase things as questions. 99% of the time these are rhetorical.

With that out of the way, let’s dive in! Here’s what I know about 4e going into this: weirdly, not a lot?

I’ve played every edition of D&D extensively but skipped 4e. I started with 2e in the early 90s and graduated to 3e and 3.5 when they were released. I got back into RPGs after years away in ~2015 with 5e. The 2e I played as a kid was actually a weird blend of B/X, AD&D, and 2e using whatever books we could lay hands on, and in the past few years I’ve been playing a lot of B/X and OD&D plus retroclones. So my experience of D&D as a holistic thing is large and varied. But 4e specifically? Not so much. I was very active on the WoTC forums towards the end of 3.5 and I remember staff at the time saying “there are no plans for a new edition”.

And then 4e got announced. And Dragon & Dungeon magazines got cancelled and rolled into D&D Insider. And everyone was big mad. Including me

So I was honestly already primed to not like it.

My memory of what exactly happened next is hazy because it was 2007/2008 and it’s all a bit of a blur, but I bought the Races & Classes preview supplement.

I don’t remember exactly why I bounced off it but I know I did. I think that I didn’t realise this wasn’t the full Player’s Handbook, that it was just a preview, and I was annoyed that it only contained a handful of classes and that the rest were going to be in another book. Looking at it now this is unambiguously a preview and not the full thing so I’m not sure where my confusion came from, but whatever happened I bounced off it. This was the only 4e book I bought. I do clearly remember it arriving and me being annoyed, and throwing it on a shelf and immediately ordering the first volume of Rise Of The Runelords and deciding I was going to play Pathfinder from now on instead. In the years since I’ve heard lots of things about 4e, both good and bad. People either love it or hate it. I’ve heard it’s more like a board game, that it’s “an MMO in a book”, that the way monsters work is great, that the Delve format for adventures is either good or bad. But I know nothing concrete.

Today we’ll change that. (For the record I’m still salty about losing Dragon and Dungeon magazines)

The contents page is interesting. The Combat chapter looks to be the biggest at first glance but it’s actually only about 30 pages long. The ‘Adventuring’ chapter is only 7 pages, though.

I’ve heard people call 4e a skirmish game before and that’s how this reads.

There’s a lot of familiar stuff here but there are things I have no real context for. I assume a Paragon Path is like a Prestige Class, but maybe I’m wrong.

There’s also no magic chapter (unless that’s Rituals?) That’s interesting. I’m used to a PHB being mostly spells. But the Rituals chapter is only 4 pages long.

This is… Really fascinating. This art style is such a huge departure from 3e and I think I love it.

There’s a “what is a roleplaying game” section which is fine, it’s D&D, the expectation that people new to RPGs will start here is objectively sound. The section repeats itself a lot though. It could be half as long and just as effective.

Troika! still has the best one. I do remember loving ‘points of light’ as a central conceit for the campaign world and that hasn’t changed.

“[Settlements appear] as a point of light in the widespread darkness, a haven […] in the wilderness that covers the world” is a really good, evocative sentence. “Monsters […] prowl in the dark places between the points of light.”

Seriously, you’re selling me on this setting even though you haven’t actually told me anything specific about it yet. The History of D&D section claims 4e “firmly established D&D for the next decade” which is hilarious given that 4e came out in 2008 and D&D Next happened in 2012. I guess 5e didn’t officially drop until 2014 but that’s still only 6 years. I don’t know what the launch of 5e looked like but knowing how mad people were about the short life of 3.5 I can’t imagine they were happy about a 6 year edition.

The book has referred to characters as being “like the protagonists of a novel or a movie” a few times already. That’s not phrasing I remember from 3e or earlier (though it may be there) and I think that’s an interesting shift in attitude. I grew up knowing that my character’s life was tenuous and that a poor decision or bad roll of the dice could mean curtains and it’s still how I play a lot of games today. But generally you expect a protagonist to survive the story, and I think that expectation has carried to modern 5e play culture.

This isn’t a criticism. They’re just different play styles, nothing more. I’m just interested to see it here and I wonder where that shift happened. This is a decent summary of what it means to be a DM in D&D. Nice and clear.

I’m trying to force myself not to skim anything here because I know D&D as a concept so well and it’s hard. My brain is going “you already know all this” but I want to be sure I don’t miss anything crucial to 4e that doesn’t exist in other editions. We get an example of play and it’s…fine? It uses pretty natural language that mostly sounds like how people play, which is good, and it introduces the concept of Perception checks, the DM making decisions based on secret information, and Initiative.

I feel like it could be better, but I’m not sure how exactly. I’m glad it’s there before we’ve interacted with any rules text though. We get the core mechanic – d20 plus modifiers Vs a target number, roll equal to or higher – and “three basic rules”.

I really like the framing of character powers as “little ways of breaking the rules”

The other rules are “specific bests general” and “always round down”, if anybody is curious

This just got difficult.

Chapter 2 is making characters. I’m very used to character creation being stats first, and IIRC 3e still worked that way. It’s interesting that we go Race and Class first before ability scores here. I think that marks a shift in the philosophy of these games

Speaking of shifts in philosophy, here’s a passage that butts head first into a lot of current sensibilities about the games we play and the kinds of stories we tell.

We’re only on page 14, but the change to the way characters are made (i.e. stats being less important), the emphasis on characters as protagonists, and the inclusion of Eladrin, Dragonborn, and Tiefling as core races tells me that this is a D&D that wants to change things. It’s not just doing the same things that have always been done simply because “that’s what D&D looks like”. I’m not surprised that opinions on this are so divided. Explicit character roles are new to me. Saying “this character class can stand in for this class to create a balanced party” is interesting. It’s obviously a game that cares about ‘balance’ and optimisation. They’re things that eventually drove me away from 3.5 and PF so I’m interested to see how I respond to the rest of this.

I’m also interested to finally learn about the Warlord that people talk about so often. We’ve got our first mention of attack, at-will, and daily powers in a sidebar here. I’m beginning to wonder if the reason there’s no spell list is because spells have become Wizard powers, so that every class functions in the same mechanical way? I don’t really have a basis for that assumption other than that the game obviously cares about ‘balance’ and at-will powers made me think of cantrips, and this is the conclusion my brain jumped to.

We’re on to ability scores after a brief description of the four character roles. It does a good job of explaining what each ability is for and how they’re important to new classes.

I’m reading about defenses – the 4e term for Saves, I guess – and it strikes me that this is only making sense because I have the context of all the other editions of D&D to draw from. When I read “Fortitude defense” I know what it means because I played 3e. I wonder how jarring this new term would be without any context? There’s a page reference given, but this is one of those moments where I think rulebooks should embrace redundancy of information. Yes, I can turn to page 275 to learn about Fortitude defense, but tell me more here.

Similarly, we’re told that sometimes we add Dex or Intelligence to our Armour class and that term is in bold, but there’s no page reference given and it isn’t explained further. I know what it means, it’s common parlance in RPGs, but the book opens with a “what is an RPG?” section.

Obviously this book is 15 years old but… Let’s do more to onboard new players smoothly. We’re given 3 options for generating ability scores: standard array, point buy, and rolling. The section on rolling definitely has an air of “we know some of you are going to do it so here it is but we don’t want you to” and this feels like the first concession to old players. I think I’d respect it more if it simply didn’t entertain the idea of rolling for stats, to be honest. And I say that as someone who hates point buy and will always roll for stats if given the choice. The text mentions to RPGA and tells us we can’t roll for stats for a character we’re going to use in an RPGA game.

Every character begins play with 100gp to buy equipment. Hello, attempts at game balance.

“D&D is a roleplaying game but not necessarily an exercise in improvisational theatre” is a sentence I adore. It welcomes new players, tells them it’s okay to just want to roll dice and hit things if that’s where they get their fun, and removes any burden of being good at acting. That’s a sentence I wish had carried over to 5e.

There’s definitely a section of modern play culture that has forgotten it or was never told it in the first place. The Alignment section is weird. It’s halfway between alignment as it was (i.e. it represents your relationship to universal forces of chaos and law and not your outlook on society) and alignment as it is (i.e. nobody cares about it). It’s completely optional, only contains Good, Lawful Good, Evil, Chaotic Evil, and Unaligned, and it’s prescribed that PCs must be Good or Lawful Good if they choose an alignment.

This again feels like a concession to older players who would absolutely lose their shit if a D&D didn’t contain alignment, even though it really does feel like the writers expect and almost encourage you to ignore it. We get a few pages about deities and developing your character’s personality and background that I don’t find particularly inspiring. I like that the background section is short and says “hey, this is fun to consider but what’s more important is what your character does in play”.

After this it’s another, longer, explanation of the core mechanic, and then the three main types of interactions with that mechanic – ability checks, skill checks, attack rolls – in detail. The language is casual and clear and does a good job of explaining everything. What we see here is the first step towards 5e’s Proficiency Bonus. The Base Attack Bonus in 3.x varied depending on your class but here it always includes half your level. I’ve said before that I bounced off BAB initially coming from 2e to 3e. I don’t know why, but I did.

4e is immediately easier for me to understand, though of course I’m coming to it with 20 years more experience of these games than I had when 3e released.

Holy shit, how many levels does this game have?!

At 11th and 21st level we get to pick a Paragon Path or an Epic Destiny. I don’t know what they are, but we’ll learn about them in chapter 4. It also looks like we gain new powers at most levels and that we always get a choice, which I like. IMO one of 5e’s biggest sins is “dead levels” with no choice.

I obviously haven’t seen the powers yet but “you can take each power only once (you can’t choose the same power multiple times)” tells me there’s going to be lots of choice and I like that. I could well be way off base here but that phrasing makes me think of generic systems where you essentially build your own class. Obviously we have classes here and are going to be picking powers from those lists but I like the idea that they might be very customisable. We also learn new feats at every even numbered level.

It sounds like characters are going to have a lot to do here. I’m thinking back to how short the Adventuring and Combat chapters are and how brief the rules explanation at the front of this book is and it seems like 4e is really mechanically simple? I get the impression that the complexity is going to happen within individual powers. I obviously could be wrong but if I’m right about that I think I really like that? There’s no need to learn a super crunchy system, you just learn what your character can do and all the unique ways you get to break the rules.

Let’s see if I’m right. I also like that retraining is built in to levelling up. Every time you level you can replace a single feat, power, or skill that you previously selected. Retraining baked into the rules is something I liked about PF2 as well. Sometimes you’re not happy with choices you made that turn out to never get used etc. and some GMs can be dicks about it. It’s nice to just have changing your mind as an option in the book. We now have an answer to the question I posed here and the answer is 30 levels, split over 3 tiers: heroic, paragon, and epic.

30 levels. Wow.

It’s fun that the three tiers are defined in some part by the kinds of dragons you might fight, and the kinds of dungeons you explore. D&D being true to its name. Here’s more evidence of that drive towards ‘balance’ that I’ve been picking up on. Everyone advances at the same rate and has the same number of feats and powers, regardless of class.

Earlier during the character creation there was a brief passage that said “now fill out the rest of your character sheet. The calculations you need are in page 30”.

This is page 30.

The calculations you need to complete the character sheet aren’t actually on this page. Each step directs you to another page in the book.

This is another example of rules as reference text Vs rules text intended to be read in sequence. I think character creation in most games would benefit from very clear step by step instructions that tell you exactly what to do and don’t make you flip through pages. If I’m trying to make a character here, this is a lot of page flipping to things I haven’t read yet. (I will say that the character sheet diagram is still better than the one on Pathfinder 2)

Chapter 3 is Races. I may not read each race in detail here. I’ll comment on anything interesting that sticks out to me though. Of immediate interest is that Speed is measured exclusively in squares. This is a game that demands a grid and minis or tokens. I’ve found the first part of the text where I’m reading it and I don’t know what it means and don’t know where to find the answer. The terms ‘bloodied’ and ‘healing surge’ haven’t been explained yet.

What’s interesting is that I already know what ‘Bloodied’ is just through cultural osmosis. And I can make an educated guess at what healing surge is (my guess is that it’s a power characters can use to heal themselves in combat). But yeah. If I’m a new player trying to pick a race to build a character, the first section of information about this race talks about things I have no context for.

There’s an index and I could look it up, obviously, but I don’t think I should have to? Once again we’re back to my point about rules as reference vs. rules to be read, and about the benefit of quick starts and starter sets.

I actually bought the 4e quickstart with Keep On The Shadowfell last week so maybe I’ll compare it to this some time next week. Anyway.

“Play a Dragonborn if you want to look like a dragon” is the most honest sentence I’ve ever read in a rules text.

We see the same thing with the dwarf, where it says, “when an attack would knock you prone, you can immediately make a saving throw to avoid falling prone”. This is the first time the words ‘saving throw’ appear in the text, and we’ve ostensibly already learned about the core mechanic and the three types of rolls.

I like that each race only takes up two pages, and I like that we get three example adventurers of each race. Lidda & Tordek, two of the 3e iconic characters, make brief appearances. I’m very curious to know why it’s just those two and not e.g. Regdar or Mialee. Maybe the others show up as example characters in the classes section, or maybe it’s just a little nod to the old edition and nobody felt the urge to take it further.

The introduction to the Classes section gives us a breakdown of what mechanical elements a class has. One of them is how many Healing Surges you can spend in a day, so I think I might be right about what they are. Still no explanation though. We also get a sentence that brings back horrible memories of the 3e forums: “The next section of a class entry describes each class build in more detail. […] The build you choose (if you choose one) suggests what abilities you should prioritize”. I’ve never been a powergamer or a min-maxer. I just don’t get any enjoyment from figuring out “optimal” character options and planning character advancement ahead of time. If you do that’s cool, but it’s not for me and it’s one of the things that made me put 3.5/PF down. Having it explicitly called out as a thing you can do in the game text says that this game maybe isn’t for me. But we’ll press on, because so far I do like what I see and an emphasis on ‘builds’ is largely a table culture thing anyway. The final part of a character is Powers. “The longest section of a class description contains full descriptions of all the class’s […] powers, as well as its utility powers.”

I suspect this is where we’ll find spells. Which… Don’t exist using that terminology in 4e. This is a strange experience so far because so much of it is familiar as being D&D but little things like that are completely different. There’s lots of “referring to new concepts that haven’t been introduced yet” going on in this chapter.

Paragon paths sound cool, like a second class on top of your normal class. But the concept of spending action points to take extra actions in combat is just thrown in there. We move on now to the different types of powers (at will, encounter, daily) explained in more detail. I like that daily powers always have some effect even if they fail. Having an ability you can only use once fail and do nothing would suck so mitigating that is nice. The section about how to read a power is good, and I think it was smart to use a relatively high level wizard spell as the example because that has completely answered any lingering questions I had about how spells work. They work just like other powers. The keywords on powers are nice, and the explanation of how they interact with the rest of the rules is very good. Pathfinder 2 does the same thing but doesn’t explain them very well (it just says e.g. “this has the Concentration tag” and leaves you to figure out what that means)

So far I’m very impressed with how clearly this is written. The Implement keyword is interesting and I’m really curious to see how this works in practice. Hopefully I’ll remember to look up a power with this keyword when I get to them.

This section – How to read powers – is the longest continuous section of the book so far. I think it would really benefit from ending with a sample power printed in full so you can look at all this information in context, but that’s a minor quibble.

The next section lists all the classes with their powers, so it’s not like I have to wait ages to see a real power on the page. Class entries follow the same format as races, with a boxed section listing traits and key information right up front. It’s familiar and easy to follow after the races. The identical formatting for races and classes is a nice mirror for the idea that all characters interact with game mechanisms in exactly the same way and as I’m reading it I really like it. This is all really easy to parse. If they could have fit every class onto a two page spread like the races that would make it even better but that is asking the impossible really. Immediate answer to the Implement question I had earlier, which is nice. It’s cool that the bonus is implement-specific rather than power-specific. I wonder if there’s a variety of implements or if in practice it’s just a static bonus?

It looks like at level one you know both Turn Undead and Divine Fortune under the umbrella of “Channel Divinity” and that you can use one per encounter. You can learn other uses for Channel Divinity with a divinity feat. The sentence “The Channel Divinity class feature encompasses multiple powers, two of which are presented below” really tripped me up for a minute because it read to me like you get to pick one of these and that there’s a longer list somewhere that I’m not being directed to. After reading the whole section a few times I’m pretty sure it’s just referring to clerics learning new uses from gaining feats, but I definitely stumbled here.

This is the first time in the book that unclear writing has caused me issues.

Anyway, Turn Undead. I like when Turn Undead can potentially destroy low level undead outright based on cleric level, and this can’t do that. Maybe we can gain a better version at a higher level? I do like that it has an effect even when it misses, though.

Something 4e has solved simply by turning spells into powers is removing the confusion of caster level vs. spell level. Your spells are just powers and their level is the character level you can gain them at. It’s actually annoying that 5e undid this change, because it’s good. Spell level distinct from caster level but using the same terminology sucks and I’ll die on this hill. I’m not going to read through lists of powers because that’s just not a particularly useful or enjoyable use of my time, much like how I usually don’t read through spell lists.

What I am going to do is skip forward and read the Warlord because I’ve heard a lot about it. (A quick note here to say that I really like the Pit Fighter paragon path for Fighters.)

Also it looks like the Paladin shares Channel Divinity with the cleric but has different uses of it, which explains (but doesn’t forgive) that weird wording that trips me up earlier. Yeah okay the Warlord is cool and I see why people like it. On first read, and without looking at any powers yet, it feels somewhere between a battle master fighter and a bard (if we’re talking in 5e terms even though this game obviously predates 5e). I’d play a Warlord for sure

Wizards are fun as well. I like that you choose whether to specialise in wands, orbs, or staffs at level one. That really stands out from other editions of D&D that are more about schools of magic (which makes sense when spells have been turned into powers)

Wizard powers do work slightly differently to other classes in that you select two daily powers but can only actually use one of them. So you still have that classic wizard thing of having to prepare spells and decide what to use, but under 4e’s mechanical framework. I like it.

You get Ghost Sound, Light, Mage Hand, and Prestidigitation as cantrips that you can cast as at-will powers at first level, a little clutch of classic utility spells. And you also have some other classics to choose from as at-will powers, like Magic Missile and Ray of Frost.

Looking at the spell list, they’ve done a good job of porting classic D&D spells over to 4e. And you still get Fireball at 5th level, as is tradition.

Oh shit one of the paragon paths is blood magic, and I love blood magic as a trope. It’s a big surprise to see something like that in the core book.

After wizards we get into Epic Destinies and learn about levels 21-30. We’re told that this “describes your character’s exit from the world at large”. It’s cool that there’s an explicit end game to this edition. I do wish the “Destiny Quest” was described more thoroughly in this book rather than the Dungeon Master’s Guide, since it seems like it’s something the game is aimed at and wants you to engage with. We do get some brief examples of what to expect, though. Epic level play isn’t something that’s ever really appealed to me and I think that’s because I’m used to the end game being domain play. Epic levels become a bit like playing superheroes for me and that’s not something I’m into, but I do see why people enjoy it.

I do wonder where that shift from domain play to epic levels happened. I’d guess somewhere during 2e, but maybe it was 3e? I’m unsure. After all of this we move to the section on skills, and we get back into some mechanical rules stuff. Take 10 (do something slowly with no pressure and assume you rolled a 10+modifiers) exists in 4e but Take 20 is gone. We also get passive checks, where you’re assumed to be taking 10 for opposed checks when you’re not actively using a skill. This obviously carried forward into 5e with Passive Perception etc

Skill Challenges are something that I get the impression are a very popular feature of 4e that a lot of people still use in 5e and other games. It is infuriating that the rules for them aren’t in the PHB at all. They’re hinted at, and you’re instructed to buy the DMG for them. The next chapter is Feats, followed by multiclassing rules. It’s interesting that multiclassing is just taking a feat which then allows you to take feats from the class you’re dipping into, and that the multiclass feats themselves also have a benefit so it’s not wasted.

Balance. Even magic items use the same format as powers. I’m willing to bet that monster stat blocks look similar as well.

Of course there’s no way to know because there are no monsters in this book, because of my old favourite “the 3 core book model”. Magic items work in slots – arms, feet, hands, head, neck. I’ve seen people refer to 4e as feeling like a video game and this, I think, is the place where that’s most apparent. I don’t have any feelings either way about this, to be honest. (I missed rings and waist slots but whatever, it’s not important)

The fact that magic items are in the PHB and have very fixed pricing for both buying and selling them tells me the game expects you to have lots of items. Is this a looter shooter TTRPG? Maybe. The combat rules are not hugely dissimilar to 5e (or more accurately, I suppose, 5e combat isn’t hugely dissimilar to 4e). There’s nothing here that’s surprising or that I feel any real need to comment on. We do get an explanation about Action Points, which let you take additional actions and also trigger some feats and paragon powers. You gain one at the start of every session, after an extended rest, and after reaching a milestone. 5e has got rid of these and has largely replaced them with Inspiration. I like them a lot. Pathfinder 2 styles them as Hero Points and uses them for rerolls, and I really enjoy them. Using them for extra action is nice and I like it. We finally learn about healing surges, which can be used once per combat and as many times as you like up to your healing surge max during short rests. The heal you 25% of your max HP.

5e replaced this with rolling hit dice and doesn’t let everybody just do it during combat. I understand the need for it to be a fixed value in a game like 4e, and I also understand why 5e went back to rolling. I think I prefer it being tied to hit dice, as a matter of personal preference. I also like the way healing surges interact with death saving throws. I think I’d possibly house rule that into 5e if I were to play it again (although obviously 25% of max HP is a much better heal than rolling 1HD)

The final chapter is rituals, which are (largely) utility spells that take extended amounts of time to be cast. Stuff like enchanting items, animal messenger, locating secret doors, etc.

And that’s it. That’s all of 4e. For a game that people talk about as being super crunchy, it’s actually very simple. Most of the complexity comes from individual powers and so it doesn’t feel like it’s overwhelming to learn. I like that.

I definitely understand why people were so annoyed that the original plan was the release the DMG and monster manual months after the PHB, because right now I can’t actually play this game. I don’t know how to award XP, I don’t know what monsters look like, I don’t know what traps and hazards look like, and I have absolutely no basis on which to start building those things. And that’s very annoying.

I actually really like what I’ve just read, I’d like to play it, but I literally can’t. And all it would have taken would be another 10-20 pages in the PHB with some sample monsters and sample traps, maybe a one page dungeon as an introductory adventure.

Every time I read a 3 core book trad game I make this complaint and I’m not going to stop. Put everything people need to play in one book, and then build on that with supplements. Anyway. I enjoyed that, I’m glad I read it, and at some point I’m definitely going to run it. First I’ll need to check out the DMG and MM, though. And I’ll be looking at the quickstart and Keep On The Shadowfell in the near future to see how that goes about onboarding players.

If you’ve stuck with me this far I appreciate it. If you’ve enjoyed this thread, I always appreciate donations of coffee (Ko-Fi.com/chrisbissette)

Thank you for your time and attention. 

(I came back to this thread a little later as I read the Monster Manual and Dungeon Master’s Guide. Rather than post those tweets as an individual post, I’m attaching them here.)

Tacking this on here. I’m going to dig into the Monster Manual and Dungeon Master’s Guide as well. I’m not going to go as in depth on twitter as I did with the Player’s Handbook but I do feel like I’m missing a big chunk of the game having only read that.

This is immediately one of the best sections in any DMG I’ve ever read. When I play I am definitely a combination Instigator/Watcher depending on my mood.

So one of the reasons the PHB felt so light on rules is that a ton of what I’d expect to find in there – rules for flying, mounted combat, strange terrain etc – are all in the DMG. There is a lot of really good advice about how to run the game in the first couple of chapters of this book, though. I’ve heard people say the 4e DMG is valuable even if you don’t run D&D and they’re not wrong. I’ve finally got some stuff about monsters. The monster roles are really interesting and a good way of building encounters, and I like the symmetry between monster roles and character roles. Specific solo monsters designed to function like groups of 5 monsters is a really nice touch, too. The big solo enemy is a fun concept that often falls flat at the table. Obviously without playing the game and seeing stats I don’t know how well this worked but in theory I like it

This copy of the DMG is pre-owned and I just found this slip of paper from Gencon UK inside it marking the Encounter XP budgets tables.

4e does something that makes complete sense that isn’t repeated in many other games for reasons I don’t understand, and that’s (basically) matching monster power to character power. Monster level = character level and so 5 level 7 monsters is a good challenge for 5 7th level PCs. The encounter templates using different combinations of monster roles are really good, too. Honestly if this section and a handful of monsters was in the PHB you’d be good to go. I often see people complain that D&D spends so much time on rules for combat and doesn’t have mechanisms for anything else and the Skill Challenges seem like a good response to that. The example given, of PCs trying to convince a Duke of their trustworthiness, is a good example of social conflict interacting with mechanisms. The more I read of 4e the more I’m seeing how much Pathfinder 2 drew from it. Look how similar the format for hazards is in both games, for example

There’s a little chapter about artefacts, with some samples. The Hand and Eye of Vecna are here – unsurprisingly, since Vecna is in the pantheon – but I’m surprised the see the Axe of the Dwarvish Lords here. I have good memories of running that campaign in 2e

Monster design steps starts with “Choose the monster’s level”, as it should. I’ll never figure out why the 5e DMG fucked this up so badly by making calculating CR the last step. Random enckuntera are the last thing before we hit Fallcrest and the Nentir Vale, which I’m looking forward to reading.

All I’ll say is that any procedure for random enckunters that doesn’t account for surprise, distance, and reactions is rubbish. I take back everything good I said about 4e, there’s no Black Pudding in the monster manual

(another thing the game gets right is monster stat blocks being short and easy to parse, and putting monster ability scores at the bottom where they belong because you very rarely need them)

If you’ve enjoyed this post or found it useful I always appreciate tips on Ko-Fi.