The Ups and Downs of Playing These Games for Decades

 

Well the #1 Up is that I'm still around to play them and a close second is that I have friends I have known since the 80's that I still play with regularly - that's important.

At times though the years catch up and I get to feeling a little cranky when I see something praised as a brilliant new innovation that has been around for most of those same decades. Over the past year or so one of the highlights has been "Shadowdark has you roll to cast spells"-OK? And? People constantly praise games for innovation that they didn't innovate.

I realize a lot of people came into D&D specifically and RPGs in general with 5E but c'mon: we've had "rolling to cast spells" in games for 40+ years. Fantasy Hero (85) had it, GURPS (86) had it, Shadowrun (89) had it and if you want a more D&D-descended game Dungeon Crawl Classics has had it since 2012! I don't expect every teenager who starts playing D&D to know the complete history of RPGs but you'd think that somewhere in the online discussion around this stuff there would be some ancient guardians of knowledge who would emerge and share some enlightenment but maybe there are fewer of us out there than I realized. 

So yes a downside is that very little these days seems innovative. When I read a new set of rules I can quite often start picking out where certain mechanics came from. It doesn't make a game bad - there are a lot of good mechanics out there that work very well in an RPG and deserve to see more playing time. I'm always happy to see something I liked in an earlier system make a return in a new one. 

The counterpart of this is when you see an online discussion lamenting how a game works and someone mentions how they think it could work better and, well, yeah - it used to work that way and then they changed it. For whatever reason. There was a long discussion on EN World recently about high level play in 5E D&D - mainly about how it's so uncommon - and it was mentioned that high level characters had too many options and one solution was that it would be better if lower level abilities were replaced by higher level abilities as one leveled up rather than everything being additive and just piling up. 

<sigh>

Just tell me you never played 4th edition D&D - at least not for long - as this is one of the things 4E does, Starting at 13th level you replace attack powers instead of adding them. Since the game runs up to 30th level that is starting at not even the halfway point of the leveling process and yes it does solve a lot of the "pile-up" problem. If you want to make high level play work in a D&D type game 4E did a ton of good work on that. But a lot of people decided they didn't like that version - mostly without playing any of it in my experience  - and so some of the really smart, innovative, mechanics go unnoticed 10+ years later.

I suppose one of my main points with all of this is that it's worthwhile to read other RPGs, even if you aren't running or playing them at the moment, to see how other people are doing things. You may see something that can be stolen for a game that you are running.

• Take Advantage/Disadvantage from 5E D&D. This is a tremendously useful concept for a looser/more casual RPG and gets rid of almost all of those wonderful lists of modifiers we used to see in older editions. It has shown up in a ton of games over the past decade and I think it could be used in more. Any game that has long lists of +1 for this and -1 for that ... ask yourself "do we really need that level of precision? Is it actually precision or just the illusion of that? What would we lose by taking another approach?" 
• Besides Advantage there is 4E D&Ds approach of +/-2 or +/-5 for all modifier scenarios. A lesser condition or situation = a +/-2 and a major condition or situation = +/-5 and that's it - there are no more levels to it. Limited visibility? then it's a -2. Full darkness? It's a -5. No need to refer to charts for specific modifiers - that's it. 
• Now for a bit more granularity consider mixing those two options. Minor advantages or complications = +/-2 to a roll and for a Major situation you could go to Advantage/Disadvantage. I haven't tried it this way but it might work better for some games. 

 I suppose that's an "up" - I've seen a lot of cool innovations with mechanics over the years. It's a "down" when so many newer players are unaware of them. 

• If you think rolling for spells is a cool idea try "no levels". Traveller was the first game I played that had no levels and it was pretty damn revolutionary to see it in action the first time.
• Traveller was also the first game I played with a skill system - remember early D&D did not use skills - and that was mind-blowing as well.
• In the early days Champions was the first game I played where you didn't roll for stats. Nowadays point-buy stats are pretty common but Champions with point-buy for everything - again no classes here but points for stats/skills/powers - was again revolutionary. This was also the first place I saw advantages and disadvantages for characters. This was not rolling multiple dice but could be seen today as the forerunner of Feats in D&D terms. From having a code of honor to  missing a limb to going berserk when injured it was a new way to codify a character beyond stats or skills or class abilities and make yours unique.
• The FASA Star Trek RPG was not the first but was probably the biggest game to use Action Points. Early D&D really only accounted for move, attack, or cast a spell as things you could do in a round. Champions kind of had it's own system for all of the things one could do in a round, and Snapshot was the first AP system I know of but it was a separate boardgame-type optional add-on to Traveller that not everyone had or used. Star Trek built it into the game for resolving personal combat and I loved it. Opening a door might cost 1AP, drawing a weapon 1AP, movement might be 1 AP per square, applying first aid might be multiple AP ... basically everything you could do in a round had an AP cost and every character/NPC had an AP allowance, typically based on Dexterity. it was pretty easy to adjudicate costs if something unusual came up. if you needed to arm and load a photon torpedo in the middle of a gun battle in the torpedo room maybe that's 6AP or 10AP - the GM could make a call there based on other costs and the situation. How is this relevant to today? You think Pathfinder 2E's 3 actions per round with variable action costs came from nowhere? That's a 3AP/round system in action. 

This doesn't even touch on so many other "firsts" over the years - the first dice pool systems, the first fate point mechanics giving players some control over die rolls, the first time we saw templates for characters, the first abstracted chase systems ... there are a lot of games from 30-40 years ago that have directly influenced what's popular today.

The last thing to note in my rambling notes on longevity is that over the years you will see both rules and settings show up again and again and again and something to keep in mind is that games are not technology - the newest is not always the best and a new edition is not automatically superior to what has come before. Many times you will find improvements mixed with unnecessary changes. Another thing to remember is that you don't have to play the latest and greatest version of an RPG - or any tabletop game. 

Rules-wise I started with Holmes Basic D&D. After that you get Moldvay B/X, Mentzer BECMI, the Rules Compendium if you want to count it as a separate edition from BECMI - that's 3-4 editions of a relatively simple early version of D&D in slightly more than a decade. Then we have 5-ish versions of what was AD&D. Plus Pathfinder 1E & 2E. Plus all of the OSR stuff like Labyrinth Lord and Black Hack and OSE and the rest. Plus offshoots like DCC. There are 15 versions of D&D type gaming rules just with what I have mentioned here. The companies that own them are not going to stop putting out new versions and other people are not going to stop riffing on those versions with their own versions.

Traveller has at least 5 versions of Marc Miller Traveler, a couple of Mongoose Traveller editions, plus a GURPS version or two, plus a d20 version. Roughly ten editions of Traveller. I doubt we have seen the last.

Champions has become the Hero System and we're on the 6th version of that unless you want to count the "completes" as a new edition in which case we're up to 7. Down the road I'm sure we will see another. At least these are fairly consistent and compatible with each other.

Shadowrun is a fairly niche game and we're on a 6th edition of that. You'd think something like that could settle out for a long edition run but like most games someone new comes in, wants to put their stamp on it, and decides to put out a new edition where you will no doubt see some innovations and a bunch of unneeded and likely unrequested changes that will not be playtested nearly enough leading to ridiculous levels of errata and FAQs. 

That's another takeaway from all of this time I have spent - there is never enough playtesting. Many times I expect there is near-zero playtesting based on how quickly people find broken or nonsensical things in RPG rulebooks. A designer playing with his home group is not "playtesting" at anything approaching useful levels because they are right there to explain. Let people learn it cold, straight from your draft rulebook - and I mean multiple groups - and then you're getting somewhere.

Then we get into IP games - we've seen at least 5 versions of Star Trek - Heritage, FASA, Last Unicorn, Decipher, and Modiphius and they are all dramatically different from each other. Considering FASA and Modiphius both have second editions I suppose we are up to 7 total editions.  That's a lot for one setting but Star Trek has been adding new material for most of the last 40+ years so maybe there is some need for it but I'm pretty sure you could do everything one might expect to do in a Star Trek game using FASA or Last Unicorn's rules. New aliens, new spaceships, sure - but are they really doing anything significantly different in the newer shows and movies?

With Star Wars we have 2 West End Games d6 editions, 3 WOTC d20 versions, and one (kinda) version with FFG. Again, these are radically different mechanical takes but having played them all I can say - they all work. It really comes down to personal preference for feel and what kind of support you want for a given era or type of campaign though lord knows given that it's Star Wars there is a vast array of fan-created material for all of that across all versions. 

Lord of the Rings has what, two editions with Iron Crown, a Decipher edition, and then One Ring with Cubicle 7, One Ring 2E with Free League, and a 5E sidestep edition with both? So around 7 different versions? I've never felt compelled to run a LOTR campaign but I know the people that love one of these systems really love them and often continue playing them after an edition change. I mean ... it's not like the lore changed so if edition x works for you and your players why not? 

Them there are the superhero licenses - we've had these for 40 years as well, mainly Marvel and DC, and a lot of them have been good. A few of them have been terrible so again, newness and a name brand are absolutely no guarantee of quality. I won't enumerate all of the versions here but superhero games tend to be pretty innovative when it comes to mechanics because they push all of the boundaries of a roleplaying game both physically and dramatically. If you want a universe-spanning campaign with time travel, soap opera drama, and ridiculous physical and mental powers along with all of the stupid technology and magic you can think of this is where you come. They're not all good, but a lot of them are and a lot of them are also really interesting even just to read - but if you get the chance try a few test scenarios at least, just to see what they can do.

I'm not even getting into things like Conan, Babylon 5, Ninja Turtles, Robotech, Battlestar Galactica, Call of Cthulu, James Bond, and other former or potential licensees here. There are a ton and they can get really niche-y - we're getting a new Invincible RPG I see. I wonder what it's going to do that you couldn't do in an existing superhero game? I guess we will see.

Again, and especially with licensed games, there will always be a new version sooner or later. Someone will come along and think they have unlocked the secret to making money with a property in the RPG space but I can promise you two things:

• It will have a limited lifespan. The deal only lasts so long or the licensing fees will increase and the publisher will have to let it go. Even if it's published in-house - looking at you here new Marvel RPG - the odds are that it will not make enough money to be worth the hassle and the line will be cancelled and eventually handed off to an outside team that will try to do it once again. So my advice is to just hope that it lasts long enough to crank out all of the supporting material you could possible want or need before it ends. 
• When it ends, all of those wonderful PDFs will become unavailable to buy. because of the way licensing an IP works that's just how it is. Can you buy any of the d20 Star Wars material from WOTC these days? No. They didn't really do PDFs then but a lot of their odder D&D material is available - because they own it. The MWP Marvel stuff was all available in PDF - until a little while after they announced the end of the license - and then it wasn't. SO if a new version of one of these IP games comes out and you like it then grab it as it does because it gets trickier later. 
  
  Also many times the physical books get a lot more expensive too. Not always, but quite a bit of the time it will cost more to acquire them once it's out of print than before.

Finally there are the settings. RPG companies love to reprint setting material. Presumably it sells well but also I suspect it's because most of the work is already done. All they have to do is update the timeline if it has one that has advanced - and/or update the metaplot if it has one of those - and look, here's a book that's ready to go, barring art - and they will probably reuse some of that too. Should we be upset about that? Probably not but that means you end up buying a lot of material that you already own if you stick with a game for a long time.

Take the Forgotten Realms as an example. We have had:

• An AD&D 1E box set
• An AD&D 2E box set
• A 3E hardcover book
• Two 4E hardcover books
• A 5E hardcover book ... kind of ... and then other campaign material spread across multiple adventure books ... it's messy here.

Sure, there is some timeline advancement here so there is a layer of new history and current events added on with each one, and there are usually some new edition game mechanics included as well, but a huge chunk of each of these is pretty much what you got in the prior version. 

Do you want it? Well, if you're a fan of the setting, probably.

Do you need it? Well, how much of that new stuff actually affects your campaign? Some of the mechanics, maybe. The change to which obscure god is now worshipped in Narfell? Which new continent has arisen or sunken or teleported in from a moon for this edition? The current order of battle for the Mulmaster Beholder Corps? Eh, probably not. 

But with every new edition of a game a setting update will be published. In fact, you will probably get a basic overview of the setting in the main rulebook and then a separate setting book with the full story on it. I mean, would be real new edition of  Shadowrun without a "Seattle 20xx" book incrementing the last one by 10-20 years? 

Yes this is very much like buying a movie on VHS, DVD, Blu-Ray, 4K Blu-Ray, and whatever 8K or 16K comes next ignoring side trips like Laserdisc, or a digital copy. It's the same content, possibly even the same special features, as what you bought 20+ years ago with some updates that don't really change what you are watching. It may be prettier but it's unlikely to surprise you. Vader is still Luke's dad (spoiler). 

Sometimes they break things here too. A lot of people hated the 4E changes to the Forgotten Realms. A lot of people hated the Rebellion in Megatraveller splitting up the Imperium. A lot of people then hated the next edition with Traveller the New Era making the setting a sort of interstellar post-apocalyptic thing while also changing all of the rules mechanics at the same time. This did not help GDW. The GURPS version avoided it by ignoring it for one version and dropping back hundreds of years in the next. I believe Mongoose has also gone with the approach that "we are a separate timeline where none of that stuff you hated ever happened" and it seems to be working out for them.

To me it seems that the best long term solution for setting stability after the top choice of "make your own" is "pick one that you already like, pick a version of it or a time period in it that you like, and stick with that - regardless of rules changes". it will save you a lot of time and churn over the years.

Anyway that's more than enough rambling for today. I've been digging into games and systems a lot lately which spurred this epic monologue and I'm sure that drive will continue for a while longer. It's an interesting time in the hobby and it feels like changes are in the wind. I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes. 

Encounter Balance in Modern D&D and Tales of the Valiant

I've never been too concerned with "encounter balance" as in most editions the guidance and numbers given for it are terrible. In my experience 4E did a pretty decent job at providing something useful but that's the only one I liked. I haven't been worrying about it much with the current game but now I feel like the group is verging on having too easy of a time with a lot of the dungeon and then suddenly ending up in a life and death struggle when they hit a certain area or combination of inhabitants. 

I'm running Temple of Elemental Evil but the characters are from Tales of the Valiant. So the old school encounter setups are somewhat offset by them having old school numbers in the party and then being characters in a post-5E system and having much greater individual power than an AD&D character, slightly balanced out by using late/post-5E monsters with more interesting capabilities as the opposition most of the time. I mean, in the end they will most likely win but I do want them to work for it. 

Given the way my players are flattening a lot of the opposition now I am paying more attention to how the various CR's in an area add up and I intend to do some tweaking for some of them - mainly the big temples as they should be some epic, memorable, fights and they should involve some actual elementals which are surprisingly sparse in some areas. Between the various monster books, some allegedly solid encounter guidelines, a big dungeon map, and the 3D printer, I can drop all kinds of elemental evil on them. But ...

What is "balance" when it comes to a dungeon-crawling D&D game? Is there a solid way to define that? How about ...

• 0 characters drop = easy encounter
• 1 character drops = challenging encounter
• 2+ characters drop = hard encounter?

I mean words and descriptors get tossed around with this stuff without any real definition but the focus on systems like this is on math. ToV's system is this for 5th to 10th levels, which is where we will be living for most of this game:

• Half of total PC levels in the party is your "Benchmark"
  (so this is 15-20 for me depending on who shows up)
• Add up total monster CR in an encounter:
• Total > Benchmark = "difficult or dangerous" encounter
• Total < Benchmark= "Less challenging" battle
  (So going by this a total CR of 10 would be easy, 15 would be average, and 20 would be challenging)
• Maximum single monster CR = average party level x 1.5
• Minimum monster CR = 1/2

Now to be fair they do mention adjusting these to better fit your own party and there is a handy chart with average level in the left-hand column going from 1-20 and the top row covering number of PCs from 3-7 and then the cross reference gives you the Challenging Benchmark. 

As far as adjusting for my game I decided to count them as one level higher due to magic items in the party and figured I would start with a 6 character party as my target. That means my Min CR is 1 and my Max CR is 9 and my Benchmark is 18. To try this out I threw two Young Green Dragons at them on the return trip from Verbobonc as that made some kind of sense for the region. That's two CR 8 critters for a 16 total. We only had 5 characters for that session  which made the Benchmark CR 15 so we were right there. 

The party knew something was up as they heard traffic on the road had dwindled over the past week.  They spotted something up in the air as they traveled and made for the ruined keep that marks the halfway point between Hommlet and the city. They determined that it was a dragon about the time they reached the keep and that's when the second dragon stepped out from behind a tower. 

The fight lasted 5 rounds which is probably fine. The fighter charged one, caught the breath weapon, then caught it again when the other one landed nearby and that was it for him - down. The wizard hit them with a Slow spell and that really reduced the melee output as it means even if they have multiattack - they do - they can only make one attack per round so instead of a claw/claw/bite they get a claw or a bite. I think the first one dropped round 3 or early round 4 and the second one was attempting to flee on round 5 when it got fireballed by the wizard (wand) and blew its save. 

Going by their method and my own method mentioned up there I'd say this was in the "challenging" ballpark. One character down, most of the party damaged in some way, they had to use at least one potent spell followed by a powerful wand ... sounds like "challenging" is a good description. 

The party mix in this case was fighter, cleric, ranger, wizard, mechanist. Typically we would have a bard and/or a paladin in there too but not this time. I have seen discussion online that having a second healer in the party really amps up the difficulty in challenging them and I do concur with that - between a full cleric, a paladin who can heal here and there, and a bard that can give out the option to use healing surges during combat they do tend to be very resilient. I will watch the specific party mix  to see if I notice any patterns developing.

I will say I do find this kind of thing fairly tedious. I lean much more towards the "natural world" kind of approach where asking around, looking for rumors, and doing research will tell you what kinds of things live in an area and then knowing that some of those are extremely dangerous will guide your decisions. The world is the world and your characters are living in it - it doesn't level up or down with them. 

If I were to take this way too seriously and actively recalculate each possible encounter every session for the number of players I had it would rapidly drain significant fun from the run. So I won't ever be doing that. These things may work alright as guidelines but don't take them too seriously. All of the math presumes that each creature has been given a CR that accurately reflects the danger they pose to a party. Given the variation one could have in a typical group I think that's optimistic at best and misleading much of the time. If everyone in the party has fire resistance then that red dragon is somewhat less threatening than if no one does. There are ranges give for things like damage output and hit points at each CR but having lived with these kinds of frameworks for 25-ish years now I remain skeptical. That said I will give it a chance, keep trying it out, and see what I find.

This did not go well for our greatsword guy

The Tales of the Valiant Temple of Elemental Evil Campaign Details

 

Well we are 22 sessions into the campaign now and the party is at 5th level. That's despite using individual per-session XP. One character is lower but he's only showing up about every third session so that's how it goes. I wanted to share some thoughts about how the game is going.

First up - how we run: We get together on Saturday nights and run about six hours. Now the first hour or so is eating and catching up so we actually play more like 4-5 hours. We play in-person, sitting around a table, moving miniatures on a battlemat when useful, typically rolling real dice. 

This campaign started in July of 2024 and while the goal is "weekly" we do have occasional skips when the DM (me) has other obligations but I've made this a priority so I keep those to a minimum. I have things 2 out of the next 3 weekends so we will likely only have two sessions in March. If a player can't make it we just play short. With 8 players though, "short" means 5 or 6 players most sessions - we almost always have one or two out - and it's very rare that we cancel a game due to lack of players. I'd say we would have to drop under 4 available to really consider that and it almost never comes up. We did have a long pause at the end of the year when I lost my dad but we've been rolling pretty steadily since then.

People ask about keeping a game going for the long term and honestly it's not that hard to find the plan: commit to running a game and stick to it. Now actually executing it can be challenging, but it has to start with that commitment from the person running the game. Individual players will miss here and there but if the GM is available then things can happen. I probably have enough on this to make a whole new post so let's leave it there for now.

As far as the system we chose for this one I am very happy with Tales of the Valiant. It feels like 5E+. My players are also very happy with it and they too feel like it's a step up from 5th in both the mechanics and what their characters can do within the framework of the rules. I have used 2014 Monster Manual monsters, new monsters from the adventure itself, a whole bunch of creatures from the Monster Vault (the ToV monster book) and a few from Kobold Press' Tome of Beasts series. It's seamless. That said I like the newer critters better as far as having interesting options before and during a fight so I use them most of the time.

For the adventure we are playing through well it's the TOEE - it's a big old-school dungeon with traps and secret doors and exploitable fragmentation amongst the enemy factions. Now are my players exploiting this division in the ranks? No ... but they could if they wanted to. Hommlet makes for a nice base area where we have had quite a bit of interaction with the locals and the wizard is planning to build a tower himself and supplant Burne as the official resident mage*. Nulb has not seen as much action but I suspect some see it as a future opportunity while others are probably looking to make it the target of some kind of war crime as a warning to the Temple, Hommlett, Verbobonc, or possibly all three - time will tell. 

One of the other fun things about this adventure is dusting off my wandering monster skills. traveling the countryside near Hommlett? Random encounter checks! Pushing through various temple dungeon levels? Random encounter checks! Taking the road to Verbobonc? Random encounter checks! It has been fun using the tables provided in the adventure and tuning them up to keep things both thematic and at least somewhat challenging. 

That leads into my one concern about the whole thing and that's that my party is very strong in a fight - and there are theoretically 8 of them. Now this is an old-school module and was not rewritten into 5E's encounter balancing numbers based on a 4-person party so it is meaner - if the old one had 8 bugbears in a room on the first dungeon level then the new one has 8 of them there as well. BUT ... they wipe the floor with most of the things they encounter unless it's a very nasty batch. They have old-school numbers with new-school power levels so it's not quite as even as I had hoped.

I did some of this to myself by giving them more access to magic items than just "what they find in the dungeon" via a traveling merchant I used to use in the old 3E Return to the Temple campaign and also by being able to go to Verbobonc to seek out magic item crafters and a bit of a market. Most of it is checking for a few random items when they seek them but ToV does have rules for crafting - as did 3E and 4E - so I want to give them some options to play in this area. Even then, the strongest items have come straight out of the adventure itself so it's not -all- my fault.

The two hairiest fights so far happened when a)they pulled the inhabitants of 4 rooms all at once by making noise at a bad time and b) the fight for the Water Temple which had multiple lighter creatures and a juggernaut fighting in melee while some clerics stayed back and cast at them. A serious fight means that usually the greatsword-wielding fighter (no shield) drops, then the paladin may or may not go down, then the ranger switches to melee and the cleric wades in with his staff of striking and the wizard and bard start pulling out the big spells like haste or fireball.

Part of the challenge here is that even though I went through beforehand and figured up all of the XP available in the adventure my party ended up going in through a side entrance and punching their way into the dungeon starting in the middle instead of starting at the top and working their way down like most people would - theoretically at least. So they were immediately in some tougher encounters than I had expected but I pulled no punches and their larger numbers helped them power through. We've had no permanent deaths though we have come close a few times.

Seeing that I began to realize that I may need to do some tweaking. Really, I started doing this from the beginning and it takes three paths:

• I started using later monster designs right from the start. These are generally better than the early 5E "bag of hit points" style monsters and have started to find their way back to 4Es ways of making things interesting. With the Monster Vault pretty much replacing the Monster Manual 1 for 1 I have a good supply of opposition.
• As they have pushed into the temple dungeon proper I am keeping in mind that this is more of an organized facility than a random set of monster lairs - noises and alarms will draw a response. One of the signature features of the temple is the competition among the 4 temples and the ways players can exploit the factionalism to avoid being overwhelmed. Well, my players do not seem concerned about being overwhelmed and are not at all concerned with infiltration or deception thus far so I'm going to play it as more of a rivalry between the elements than open conflict. That should lead to some challenging escalations as they plunge ahead.
• I have also, somewhat reluctantly, started digging into the encounter design math given for ToV. I find most of these systems terrible as they fail under scrutiny almost immediately. 3E was bad pretty much from the start, as was 5th edition. 4E's encounter design was the best in my experience but even it was not always great. An overland trip to Verbobonc gave me the chance to try it our with some wandering encounters on the road, culminating with a pair of dragons and ... I am withholding judgement for now. I want to see how it works in the dungeon environment and it really only aims at a "challenging" encounter with some guidance as to harder or easier around a calculated benchmark. I am somewhat skeptical that a thing like a dragon can be reduced down to a single numerical rating when it comes to danger factor but I will give it a try.

Bottom line we are playing regularly and consistently, my players are having fun, some memorable characters are developing, it's a classic D&D  module, and I am enjoying it quite a bit myself. I can see that it may be quite a challenge to keep things interesting for another 5 or 6 levels but I am looking at that as a positive. Barring some unforeseen complications I expect we will finish this adventure this year, probably this summer or fall. I have given some thought to what might come after but for now I am going to aim to finish this one up right.

* Of course he also refers to the other PCs as his "minions" and ranks them, offering the occasional opportunity to move up in his rankings so it is in character.