Star Trek Saturday - Voyaging Online

Just to throw something different out there, here's an update from the world of Star Trek Online:

At the end of last month’s State of the Game there was a poll that asked the following question: “Which Trek series’ ships, characters, species, and stories, would you most like to see more of in a future STO Expansion?”

Here are the results of that poll as of today:

Enterprise – 409
The Original Series – 198
The Next Generation – 371
Deep Space Nine – 474
Voyager – 1,216
You have overwhelming voted for more Star Trek: Voyager. 

Argh ... the worst of the various Trek series is suddenly the guiding light for the game that covers all of them. I'd prefer to see this as more than 50% of fans who voted saying "anything but Voyager" but I don;t think they will take my interpretation of it. I would expect TOS to come in fairly low as quite a bit of it is in the show already, and there's a fair amount of TNG and DS9 in there too. However, I would rather they mine every last scrap of cool from those shows than start paying more attention to Voyager.

To be fair the article does address the difficulties of mixing Delta Quadrant stuff in with the traditional Trek material they already have and I kind of like the approach they are contemplating. I do think it would be strange to have a playable faction in an MMO RPG that is completely cut off and separated from the existing factions in the game, and I can't think of another game that has tried that. If they find a way to do it right though I would at least give it a look.

40K Friday - A Complete Lack of Content

Remember when you could detail guard troopers like you did marines?

We've played exactly zero 40K around here for the last few weeks. What little time we've had has been spent with RPG's, mostly D&D, and the armies of the 41st millennium have been taking a break. Once the D&D situation is sorted out I expect we will be rolling the d6's again. The new Marine Codex will certainly give me a reason to set up some games. So 40K Fridays are just on leave, not gone altogether.

A2, A3, and A4 - More Thoughts on Nexting Them

A2 - If A1 was a raid on an enemy outpost, A2 is ... a raid on an enemy outpost. It's bigger and there are more guards, but there is still a fortified upper level and then a secret dungeon level where the link to the next adventure can be found.

The upper level seems to make the assumption that the entire party will be sneaking around looking for the dungeon entrance. I've never had parties that could do this for long, nor did they want to. If I remind them that this is like the death star part of Star Wars it might help but even that may be asking a lot.

The lower level is a mix of clever and ridiculous - not that unusual for AD&D dungeons but people are supposed to live and work here? I like some of the traps but I dislike some of the monsters and forced situations that are included here.

I'm not a huge fan of phantoms and haunts and some of the "haunted visions" that are included in this one. I think they distract from the main point of the adventure by trying to tell some kind of history of the fort, but it's not like this is a some famous landmark - it's a nameless ruin in the wastelands that are the Pomarj. No one cares about its backstory.

There's also a tremendous focus on one enemy character that the PC's won;t even meet until the very end. We get Markessa's this and Markessa's that - but she doesn't have any real presence in the place outside of her little suite of rooms. I would probably plant some seeds to at least drop her name ahead of the final confrontation but there's not much of that kind of thing in the adventure as written.

On this one I am torn - I can see it playing out like a lot of action movies and being cool as a whole but I'm not that thrilled about the parts that make it up. I think some small tweaks to the dungeon level could put it over the finish line for me. I think playing through some of the journey to the fort could make a difference too, introducing the boys to a little hexcrawling along the way.

A3 is a raid on an entire city. This has to be one of the earlier mapped towns in a D&D product and I didn't remember there being as much information in there as I am seeing now. Basically there's a cave sequence that leads to the hidden city, there's exploring the city itself to locate the enemy, then there's another small dungeon leading to the final confrontation.

The cave sequence is fairly short but has an ending that's, well, you don't get stuff like that in published adventures any more and I kind of like it.

The city itself is detailed enough that I could see it being a lot of fun, maybe the best part of the adventure. It's enemy territory but it is a city, not a fortress, so there's room to walk around and talk to people. I like the potential here.

The dungeon is small, much smaller than A1 or A2. The finale can go two ways - you can use the tournament ending and railroad them right into A4, or you can let the dice and the chips fall in a climactic battle with the slave lords themselves. I think that's the way to do it but I see two issues with it:

First, it's not like there are billboards up around the city with the names and faces of the lords on them, so your players are going to confront them without it necessarily being personal. I think that's a missed opportunity and I'm going to have to think about how to rectify it.

Second, letting the fight happen at the end of A3 likely eliminates the bulk of A4 as a usable adventure. The premise of A4 is that the PC's are captured and have to escape from the Slave Lords. I would absolutely hate that forced ending as a player so I'm not going to do it to mine. I think the second half of A4 could be used as the big escape sequence (following our movie analogy above) from the city.

A1 I already knew fairly well. A2 I have never run or played and my interest levels were dropping as I finished it. A3 completely renewed this, and A4, even cut in half, could make a decent ending to the story. I admit there's a part of me that says forget these, let's just run Isle of Dread and let them wander around an island sandbox.

Say they finish up the Keep at 4th, then A1 at 5th, A2 at 6th, A3/4 at 7th-8th depending on how things work out, this would work right into the G series which is where I want to go.

Alternatively I could go Isle of Dread which probably has 2-3 levels in it, then White Plume Mountain, maybe Ghost Tower, and maybe Lost City and then into the giants

Yes, I am interested in taking a "classics" tour for this run.

Then of course there is the option to go with the Temple of Elemental Evil, pulling it back from our 4E game into Next. Might have to discuss that one with the boys. The big issues with that and with some of the other options is that I don't have a full monster list or any kind of monster mechanics now for Next. I have full monster lists for the Caves, the Isle, and the Slavers. There's something to be said for using the tools you've been given.

I'm still thinking Greyhawk for the setting. I don;t really want to drop this plot into my homebrew world, and while I think there's a place for it in the Realms, probably around the Moonsea, it's really part of Greyhawk's lore and that's where it feels the most "right" to me.

Assuming we can manage an adventure/level per month then working into the G series puts us into next year and into the possible release window for Next which would work out nicely.

Now to get the operation on schedule!

Converting A1

So ... good ol' Slave Pits ... I had forgotten how linear a dungeon could be. The only time I ran this was in 3rd Edition and between the Basilisks, the troll-in-the-box and his assassin friend, and the immune-to-a-bunch-of-stuff insect men it was nearly a TPK At the time I blamed it on the conversion that I was using but there is some crazy stuff in this adventure in any edition.

Re-reading it with an eye towards Next I don't think it will be too difficult to manage, With the monsters already converted the bulk of the work is done.- Half-Orc Cleric Assassin? Yep, it's in there. I don't have multiclassing rules for characters but sure enough I have a set of multiclassed monsters - All that's left is adjudicating some of the stuff they are sure to try, and the simple methods in next of using ability checks is flexible enough to accommodate almost anything on the fly. I'm going to resist the temptation to over-plan this and rule these on the fly. Which is pretty much what we did back when this was new so it feels appropriate.

Setting-wise I'm still leaning towards Greyhawk - if I'm going to run an AD&D module in a somewhat retro system, why not use the AD&D setting? I did look over some ideas people have had for placing these adventures in the Realms but it just feels wrong.

Magic items may be a problem as not all of them exist in Next right now. There aren't a ton of them in the adventure, but this is one area I will have to detail ahead of time. Rings of protection and potions of healing are easy enough but rings of spell storing and rings of shooting stars are a little trickier. I'm going to look at Basic and at AD&D and try to come up with workable versions rather than changing them out for something else completely.

Gold is also a potential problem - there is a large amount of coin to be found in this module. Take out the leader and there is 5000 gp sitting right there in a box. This is mainly a byproduct of the original gp = xp system. That said I've never been all that afraid of letting the characters have extra cash in settings where they can't buy magic items. Either they blow it on something like gilded plate armor or they save it for their future castle, and both choices help tie them to the game world.

Finally, I'm a little concerned about running it as-is because there are some large groups of monsters in some places in here and I don't see us running 8-9 PC's - like we might have in the old days - unless we pick up some additional players. I'm going to start off assuming I can run it with the numbers as written and adjust if it proves to be too much.  

I also have to give the slave lord in this one a name. Any ideas?

Next Angst

Looks like we did get some details from Gen Con. Article here if you're interested.

We played some more Next over the weekend, basically the Apprentices are thrashing the goblin lair in the caves of chaos. They're level 2 now and feeling a little bolder than at level 1. It's a lot of fun to watch them become experts on the area and the mechanics as they spend more time with both.

Schedule conflicts did keep us from playing as much as we wanted and this brought things to a head. Red and Blaster are both tired of playing and "never getting anywhere". The highest level they have reached in any version of D&D is 3rd and they've been playing for a few years now. Some of this is my fault as I've been using them as guinea pigs for different games, but their interest levels jump around quite a bit too. That said, they are asking to concentrate on one game so they can make real progress in it and I agree that it's time to do that. With school starting back up next week schedules should settle into a routine so it's a good time to do that.

Challenges: Red is a senior and has a job and is in a bunch of extracurricular stuff (including being the school mascot) and usually has a girlfriend at any given time. Blaster is starting high school and is in marching band and isn't with us every day of the week. Who is younger and isn't as tied up but will likely be seeing an uptick in homework as he enters middle school. With those first two it means fall Fridays are booked, weeknights are busy, and weekends are tricky at times. Oh, and Twilight is learning to drive, but that's a different problem...

Since I'm already running a game for the grown-ups that's a chunk of my time taken up, and Lady Blacksteel and I try to have some kind of a social life too so schedules are complicated. I've told both Red and Blaster to make a serious effort to find some players at their high schools - there are pockets of us everywhere, and they don't have to hide like they used to. The LGS is on my radar as well. They have some group running old school D&D one night a week but we may have to do something on our own up there to really stir the pot.

So then, what to play? If we're going to play one game every week/two weeks then it needs to be something we all like. Now they like Marvel/Deadlands/Shadowrun/M&M/Star Wars but they're asking for D&D. Over the last couple of years we've played Basic, Advanced Labyrinth Lord, 4E, Pathfinder Beginner Box, and Next and they have asked about AD&D 1 & 2 and 3E. So yeah, not a ton of focus there.

• Apprentice Who thinks 4E takes too long so that's probably out. Plus he's right to a degree, and if we end up trying it on a weeknight that's going to be a challenge given the limited time available. 
• Red likes the way his characters are working in Next.
• Blaster keeps looking at the wall of 3E stuff on my shelves and asks about Pathfinder or 3rd Edition.
• Red and Blaster both like 4E too but realize the time is a problem and that losing Who is not as much fun as including him

There's a lot of 4E stuff yet unexplored - The original WOTC "adventure path" of Keep on the Shadowfell etc., the Dungeon Scales of War path, the Dungeon Chaos Scar path, Neverwinter, and a bunch of other one-offs, plus our converted ToEE game. I'd love to spend more time with it but that seems less likely right now, for this anyway. I still have the grown-up game regardless.

3.5/Pathfinder - there's no lack of material here either and battles aren't as time-consuming so it could work in a 2-3 hour weekly session. I'm considering it.

That really leaves Next as the looming choice - all three of them like it and it plays fairly fast, more like Basic than 4E. With the announcement that there is only one more packet coming my interest momentarily dropped away - why waste time on it now? We can play something else and wait for the official release. Then I got to looking at the available material for it and realized I could probably string together a campaign out of this stuff. I see three paths forward:

• Convert Stonehell to it and intersperse it with my own stuff - the most old school option and while it would take some work it shouldn't be too extreme. This would use my homebrew "Dragonport" world I've been using for our Basic type adventuring.
• The recent packets have included conversions for the monsters in the Slave Lords hardcover. Now I don't have this particular collection but I have the 4 original modules and I have never run  anything past A1. This would push a lot of buttons for me - running an old adventure series for the first time, running the boys through an old-school adventure, possibly introducing them to Greyhawk - oh yeah this could be fun, and it would easily lead into the G series and then the D series down the road.
• Going in the opposite direction there is a series of adventures coming out as part of "The Sundering" event for the Forgotten Realms. The first one is "Murder in Baldur's Gate" (top of the post) and there are supposed to be 5 total. The boys like the Realms, especially Blaster who has been reading a lot of the novels. The downside is that I suspect they are heavily plotted and I'm not sure I want to be that tied to a possible railroad. It's cool that it has stats for 3.5, 4E, and Next all included but I'm really just looking at the Next option at this point.

Right now I'm leaning towards the Slavers series. It's minimal work, I could bring in a setting I haven't touched in a few years, and it has long term potential. I'm going to re-read all four of them, plus "The Slavers" from Second Edition to see both what I can do with it and to see if the XP numbers and the treasure make any kind of sense. I can go free-form and just level them up when it makes sense but if I can make the math work then I'd rather do that - it helps keep the old school feel a little bit more. Instead of using the "A0" provided in the book we're just going to finish out the Caves of Chaos and they should be level 3-4, ready to start chasing slavers. 

I'm hoping this promised September packet is bulked up a bit. I can pull this off but it would be nice to see some additional magic items and their plans on monster advancement, etc. DM-side stuff. 

It's a little strange - all these books on my shelves and we're going to end up playing a game that's not even published yet. At least it's free, unlike some other Betas. Assuming we make this a weeknight game then we will still have some weekend time for superheroes etc. 

Motivational Monday

Noise from Gen Con - Only One More Next Playtest Packet

The word is that there will be one more packet in September, then we're done. Furious discussion here.

Also, this:

That's from ENWorld's Morrus' Twitter feed, and that would be a giant game of Attack Squadron, the upcoming Trek game that uses the X-Wing miniatures rules. I think that's pretty cool.

Magic Systems

Because it had the WIld Mage, that's why

Confession: D&D's magic system is not my favorite. It works, and I'm comfortable with it, but there are other games that do a lot more with magic than any edition of D&D. Barking Alien had a post or two on this that sparked a fair amount of discussion and I wanted to expand on some of my comments there.

Magic is one of the distinguishing features of a fantasy game and to me there are two main elements of interest: mechanics and feel. Rather than go into a bunch of theory I'l talk about some specific games.

I'll use D&D as the baseline for my comparison - because it was the baseline for me. Mechanically magic is limited but 100% reliable: spells always go off, magic items always work. There are saving throws, but even then there is often some negative effect applied. At first this was fine but in comparison to to other approaches it doesn't feel especially "magical". It can feel more like science or superpowers at times

Example: a wand of fireballs typically has 50 charges. A 50 charge limitation is not much of a limitation in Champions, and that wand will always work and will always inflict some kind of damage unless you use it on a foe that's highly resistant to fire, specifically.

Now this saves a lot of player aggravation but magic in books and movies is often portrayed as risky business, not an infinitely-repeatable formula. It is also often shown as being draining or tiring to the magic-user - not so in D&D. Magical items are typically rare and wondrous, perhaps a relic of a past age - a wand of fireballs is something a medium level wizard can crank out every month if he wants.

Also in some sources wizardy types are portrayed as having more than just a spell list - they can sense magic, see things others can't see, and know arcane lore that others have no need to know. In the later versions of D&D you can give them some knowledge:arcane type skills but the closes they come to the rest of it is Read Magic and Detect Magic, which mechanically are the same as every other spell. They can't automatically see "magic" or tell that an item is magical just by touching it.

All that said I'm perfectly fine with D&D as-is, because at this point D&D is just expected to work a certain way and the tolerance for change is pretty narrow. Still, sometimes I'm in the mood for a different flavor of magic.

The first system I recall that felt really different to me was GURPS Magic. Now I had been exposed to Fantasy Hero and WFRP 1E before I ever played GURPS but those didn't register the way it did. Here was a system where magic was not going to wipe out an army but had far more utility type effects built in. Spells were learned as a special type of skill which meant even a starting wizard could have many of them and there was a chance they wouldn't work! Casting limits were determined by your skill and by your ability to handle the energy physically - go too far and it started causing fatigue! Go even farther and it could cause serious damage! Mechanically it fit with the rest of the game, and it felt like a completely different approach than D&D - wizards had broader abilities but  less powerful spells at an individual level and it felt much more personal. It also played more like art than science to me. Beyond the general "main" GURPS magic system there was room for different approaches such as Unlimited Mana. Magic items were also less powerful and less common than in most D&D campaigns.

Warhammer FRP, second edition, coming years later, had another great system. In Warhammer magic is inherently dangerous, tapping in to the power of chaos which has temptations similar to that of the Dark Side, and far more corrupting to those who succumb. It is tolerated as a necessary tool to fight the real threats coming from Chaos directly but it is not sure and not safe.In this system skill and experience help but there is always a chance that the winds of magic (flowing from the chaos wastes at the north and south poles of the world) will blow the wrong way at the wrong time and bad things will happen. Smaller effects are fairly safe but screwing up something big can result in anything from a physical mutation to daemonic possession. It's a "grim world of perilous adventure" and the magic system feels like it springs directly from that world.

Sure, there's a chance your wizard may go insane but there's enough mind-bending stuff in the world that everyone else has a pretty good chance of losing it too if they go poking into ruins and tomes of forbidden lore. They might also end up maimed, mutated, or dead as well so the risks are a part of the lifestyle. It's a pretty fair cross between D&D and Call of Cthulu. Notably, magic items are closer to D&D style - most are potent and many are permanent, though you're not going to be cranking out magic swords or fireball wands in this game.

Beyond the mechanics there is a lot of atmosphere tied to magic as well - much of it is secret, there is always more to learn, and there is a price for learning it too quickly. Plus if word gets out that a PC is delving too deeply into the secrets of chaos it's a pretty good bet there will be witchunters on his trail, something unlikely to happen to magic types in most other fantasy games.

Finally the other game I wanted to mention came out in between those first two - Shadowrun. Playing a magic type in Shadowrun feels more complete than any other game I have played.  Sure, they know spells, and they are often quite potent, but they are so much more. Summoning elementals or spirits is built right in to the mechanics and explained very well in the "fluff". Basic spellcasting works about like a skill and is not a sure thing all of the time. Casters have to resist fatigue similar to GURPS and can push themselves into taking physical damage if they go to far. They can create temporary magical effects tied to an item. They can use items as a focus to increase their casting power. There are permanent items but the powerful ones are fairly rare and typically only good to the magically aware.

Spirits are a big part of the game and are far more than meatshields. Summoning a spirit lets you use them for that of course, but they can also be asked to perform various services, used for combat effects (like armor),  or even be used to power spells! The whole spirit/elemental subsystem is very well done and makes it feel like an integral part of how magic works.

The biggest differentiation for me though is astral space. Being magically active automatically ties you to the astral plane. You can feel magic and if you "asense" you can see into the astral plane and see what a magical person/place/object is and gain some information about them. You can see a spell or a spirit coming. If seeing isn't enough you can fully shift over to the astral plane, basically moving to another layer of reality to deal with threats that way. It's a cool concept and it works well within the game and it feels "right" for what mages are about in this universe. Mages are aware of and vulnerable/exposed to things that mundanes never have to deal with, and it makes the whole system something special.

There are other little touches as well - centering, initiation, lodges, totems, "background count", and all of the little things that mages can dig into.

And that's only one type of character in the game!

Getting back to D&D, I have mostly played clerics in my limited playing time, and for them I think the D&D system works just fine - calling on your personal relationship with a deity to power magical effects, well, it should be pretty reliable. For wizard types though I lean more towards introducing some risks and that's probably why I favor the Wild Mage. They were big in second edition and there was some crazy stuff they could pull off (and some horrible accidents too). I think there was a prestige class for them in 3E but I never saw one in play and that seems like a reduction anyway - let me play it from 1st level! They came back in 4E as a type of sorcerer and while not as over the top as the 2E versions they still have that random element that I enjoy so much. I hope they will make a return in some expansion for Next to help keep things lively. It's not always about mechanics, sometimes it's just about feel.

The Star Wars Model of Campaign Design

So I did something like this once before and I've been thinking about it again, but this time with a different model. I'll try to use a similar format too. Note that this is based more on the universe than it is the movies themselves.

So, principles of a Star Wars-modeled campaign:

1) The Universe is Known: Some games feature a lot of exploration. This one does not. This actually fits a lot of fantasy campaigns pretty well, from the Forgotten Realms to Warhammer's Old World. The big picture geography is well documented, but one can easily find pockets of "unknown" here and there and some areas are "far too remote" for decent people to care about anyway.

2) Monolithic Stability: Someone is In Charge - of almost everything! Sometimes it's the good guys, sometimes it's the bad, but most of the time most things are controlled mostly by one entity. One of the driving forces of the campaign is to change this.

I'm sure this is all completely fine, nothing underhanded here at all, nope

3) The Pendulum:

• A creeping threat to the existing order is discovered. This is where the game begins.
• This order begins to fray as the threat grows and factions begin to disagree on how to deal with it. Heroes adventure and important figures on both sides are identified.
• Open conflict breaks out and this conflict may go on for years. Heroes and villains do a lot of leveling up during this conflict.
• The old order collapses and a a new one rises. PC's may directly cause this.
• The purge - allies and power players of the old order are hunted down as the new order consolidates power. Heroes pay back old foes or go out in a blaze of glory.
• The interim - Things appear to stabilize. Surviving high level PC's retire or go into exile. 
• The next generation - descendants or allies of the old order begin to gather power and make plans to overturn the new order, beginning the cycle all over again. Roll up your new characters.

4) Generations, Lineage, and Legacy: There's a lot of attention paid to redemption and revenge. Characters may have intertwined family histories or religious affiliations. Enemies may be related as well. There is a little more demanded of the players here when it comes to linking up their characters than in a typical D&D game but hopefully that's what they are looking for. There is plenty of room for diversity in character types, they just need to have some connections. This game will spend a fair amount of time on relationships, so your role players should love it. For your action junkies - well there is a war on...

Once again level based games give a nice built-in progress clock for what needs to be happening in the universe. This is another "finite" campaign in many ways, as there is a planned end point for the game (we won! - or-  we lost!), but it has a huge connection to the next one (or the previous one) that makes them almost a continuous campaign.

There's plenty of room for players to control their own destiny within these larger events, even taking control of some of them as high level characters are going to be leaders in a wartime situation without having to ask for it. 

Also, it doesn't really matter which side they are on! If they go Old Order heck, give them a chance to stop the change - perhaps only to have their NPC leader turn out to be the biggest threat of all! If they don't manage to make the change (hi Mr. Windu!), well, the survivors get to set the seeds for the next generation to carry on the fight. If they go New Order, well, let's hope they win so they can all retire to desk jobs by the time they become the Old Order again.

Among published settings for D&D, well, Eberron is the direct aftermath of a war, possibly headed for another one, and Greyhawk has had a few too.

I haven't deliberately run a game like this yet but I think it has a lot of potential. I'm laying a little ground work for something like this in my 4E Red Hand of Doom campaign as there is a 4E campaign that follows up on the events of this adventure a generation or more later. I didn't plot it out ahead of time but there is the potential there for the future. 

Monster Modularity

Not appearing in this post

Moving back and forth among different versions of D&D as I have been doing lately got me to thinking about which parts of the various editions have been more or less fun and more or less work to run. One of the big factors is how monsters (and NPC's) are presented for use.

You know, I cannot find a picture of a Basic D&D Goblin - so here's the closest thing I could find

Basic (and the various clones): "Here's your monster" - you get a statblock and not much other detail. Is that AC 5 from chainmail? Is it from studded leather and a shield with a Dex bonus? What weapons do they use? Well, that's all pretty much up to the DM, though sometimes published adventures note this kind of information. The only notes on different variations or advancement are usually things like "the leader fights as a bugbear" or something similar. This does keep monster info short and sweet but it does ask a novice DM to add some details on the fly and monsters can get kind of routine after fighting them a few times. I suspect one of the reasons there are so many humanoid monster types in D&D is because that's where variety came form in the earlier editions - we didn't need 6 types of actual goblin because we moved on to xvarts and orcs and hobgoblins and norkers and gnolls and flinds and bugbears and the rest as we leveled up.

Basic Switches: Well you can adjust the weapons and armor but that really only applies to humanoid type creatures. Magic items work similarly. Some of them can use spells and that can provide some variety. That's really about it. One troll is pretty much like another.

AD&D: "Advanced here's your monster" - There's more detail in some places and there is typically more of a breakdown of weapons used for humanoid type monsters but special types are still pretty much limited to "chief fights as a bugbear with bodyguards who fight as hobgoblins" type notes. The DMG has some notes on shamans and witch doctors for the humanoid races (which allowed for MU and Cleric levels on them) but this is not included in the MM and they never seemed to show up a whole lot in published adventures. Other creatures, even ones like giants, have almost no information on weapons and armor, leaders, or class levels. (This is probably one reason the weapons vs. armor type modifiers saw so little use - when armor type is not a standard part of a monster description it's not really worth the extra hassle.)

PC races like elves and dwarves do have more detail in their entries, from weapons and armor breakdowns to class levels for leaders and other types. I know I never really needed them because my players didn't typically fight these types but it gave a good model for what kinds of options could be added.

1E Switches: weapons & armor, magic items, the occasional alignment switch, spell changes, and the occasional hit dice bump is about it. So basically gear, spells, and maybe level. Again, one troll is pretty much like another other than throwing the odd magic item on one here and there or bumping up his hit dice - "This is a really big troll so he has 9HD instead of 6+6."

A lot of 2E's art was cool - this is one of my least favorites. Compared to tramp's illo above this is a step back

AD&D 2E: "More info, same stats" - With 2E we see some significant improvements, at least form the perspective of someone actually trying to run a game. Creatures who wear armor have their "armored up" AC listed, followed by their natural AC in parentheses. There is a specific "combat" subsection below the statblock that describes the weapons, armor, and tactics of each creature. Special types are now listed as "leader with 2 HD, AC5 and fights with a battle axe". Some of these notes were already present for humanoid types but others like giants benefit greatly from all of these updates as a DM has more to work with both when prepping and when adjudicating on the fly.

2E Switches: Pretty much the same as 1E, and gear and spells really only apply to certain types of monsters. Even though the Non-Weapon Proficiency system was added to the game, it wasn't added to the monsters - they would have needed stats. Again, one troll is much like another, other than taking entirely different types of troll. There were a few more options like that.


Now all 3 versions above are pretty similar mechanics-wise and the same kinds of things tend to come up:

• Players go to loot the bodies - what kind of gear do they have? DM gets to decide on the fly
• Goblins in the caves of chaos work a certain way. Goblins in a different area may be completely different. Wandering encounter goblins may be different from both of those.
• Special types and leaders are not super easy to run on the fly as they often refer to other monster entries and require spell selection and gear selection
• Players get into some kind of contest of strength - how strong is a goblin? a hobgoblin? an orc? We did know the strength of an ogre and the various giant types, but what about a dragon?

These can all be overcome but there were definite "open items" that a lot of DM's would like to solve.

As far as looting I know I mostly used the "wing it" approach if I had not decided ahead of time. Monsters of the same type in different areas may have completely valid reasons for being different, but it's nice if you can reward the players for learning about the world and then trying to apply those lessons as the travel. If your goblin tribes all operate in completely different ways then you can't really reward the players for paying attention as there's no carryover. I know by the time I was running 2E I put a lot of monsters on index cards and kept a file handy for play. This let my room notes consist of things like "10 regular goblins, a leader and a shaman" when it came to the creatures, and all of their details were on cards. This gave me a little more variation among a monster type, say within a goblin lair, but it did tend to standardize each of those sub-types across multiple encounters, giving the player some idea of what to expect if they attacked a goblin lair.

The stat question didn't come up a lot but when it did it was a pain. At one point we got into a situation where a character on a horse was trying to drag down an orc chieftain (a 3HD monster in AD&D) and we got way too bogged down in the whole which is stronger question. Creative players will get you into situations like that and having a number to point to trims the argument time down quite a bit.

The larger picture with the monsters in these versions is that there aren't a lot of switches a DM can flip to modify them. On one level you can do anything you want to them but there aren't really many mechanics around it. Without some kind of mechanical hook a lot of DM's may not think of a fun way to modify them, and a lot of players may hesitate to try tactics based on mechanical assumptions because they have no way to figure ahead of time whether it has any chance of success (like lassoing the orc chief above). Mechanics don't just define a creature, they also define the way a creature can act and be acted upon by the players within the normal game system and it makes a difference. 

Forward progress at last

So now we get to 3rd edition "D&D meets the Hero system" - suddenly monsters are built in the same way as characters. It's a tremendous change in the mechanics and at first I could see no downside to it. Look at the elements you can adjust as a DM: ability scores, type, size, hit dice, skills, feats, class levels, templates (I loved templates) plus the familiar gear and spell options from before. Now there was no reason to just have a band of ogres - now one of them could be an advanced ogre zombie with 3 levels of barbarian, and another could have levels in sorcerer or cleric! It was all designed to work together, the numbers all matched, and (say what you will about challenge ratings) there was a serious attempt at making it easy to rank these things on a common scale.

Early on I was all over this. Going from having only a few tweak switches to having around 10 was a blast. Some of this was tricky to do in play so that was rarely done, but I used my same index card file system for running the game - do the math once, save it, print it to a card and you have that monster statblock forever. Plus now the players had many more ways to interact with a creature from the expanded combat actions (Bull Rush! Disarm! Sunder!) to skills to stat contests and I saw quite a bit of it, especially early on.

The downside came later - sure I had the feats and spells noted ahead of time on my monster cards but in the heat of battle I had to actually use them. What does that feat do again? What's the DC for this disarm attempt? What does this spell do? When would he cast this? Why did I give him this? It could get pretty bad. My monster cards became somewhat less standardized as I allowed room for notes on specific maneuvers and tactics for monster X. I printed out spell cards so I could keep them next to the monster cards in play, which helped as long as I could keep them all organized. Improvising actually became tougher as there was so much more to keep track of when one adjusted the monster away from the book stats. At a certain level of complexity, the system becomes an obstacle to improvisation, and on some level each monster was now as complex to run as a typical player character so running ten or more of them tends to slow down the game. I did love having the options though.

I know by the end of my time as a 3E DM I was enjoying it a lot less. Prep time was up as I needed to figure out how each monster worked in advance. Published adventures were even worse in this regard as at least if I built a monster I was familiar with what I intended it to do. With a published adventure I had no inside knowledge. There was a fair amount of rock/scissors/paper in them as one creature might be appallingly vulnerable to a particular kind of attack but if his buddy stood next to him or cast a particular spell on him then it was completely mitigated. It's tough to figure this stuff out in the middle of a battle so I felt like I needed to do my homework to give the players a good fight. The geography, personalities, and plot weren't an issue - it was mainly the fight mechanics. While there were a ton of options, it took a lot of preparation to get the most out of them. This started to turn it from fun into work, and that's a bad place to be. I don't totally blame the game here, as a certain amount of it is tied to the Way I Want The Game to Be, but the mechanics were definitely a factor.

3E Switches: ability scores, type, size, hit dice, skills, feats, class levels, templates, gear, and spell options. No two trolls need ever be alike! Feats, class levels, and templates were especially fun to apply.

Then we come to 4E: "Monsters on a card" - Monsters in 4E are built to overcome the problems I described above as apparently it wasn't just me that was having them. The single biggest change is that monsters are no longer built just like a player character, rejecting that concept from 3E and going back to the idea that monsters are their own thing much as Basic/1E/2E did. This approach gives a pretty good balance of usable options vs. complexity.

4E switches: level, role, size, type, powers, templates, themes (ability scores, skills, gear). Not only could you modify a troll, odds were there was a rockthrower troll, a berserker troll, a frostbrother troll - you had more options to begin with!

The introduction of a standard leveling process made bumping monsters up and -down- in power quite a bit easier. This expanded the range in which a monster could be used by quite a bit. Feats and spells are gone, built into powers as needed. Ability scores are present but don't matter as much except when players get creative. Gear is there mostly as a loot list as powers define the numbers and effects, the gear is mainly color.

Role is an overlooked innovation. Sure, it's easy to tell that the goblin with a bow should stay back and shoot, but what about something with levels of cleric? Depending on spell choice he could be a bruiser in melee or he could be intended to stand back and throw holds, heals, and flame strikes. If I see a monster labelled as "artillery" then I know right there what he's supposed to do. Same with 'leader", "brute" and the rest. Even if I have done no prep work at all, I can read the role and know where they need to go on the battlemat

The other big innovation was that everything needed to run the monster is in the statblock - no need to look up feats or spells or even weapons - it's all right there. That's a huge win when it comes time to prep and run a game. Some of it is presentation but a lot of it is also concept - monster powers don't need a full spell-type writeup - they just need the mechanical effects described and some descriptors applied and that's enough for something that has a lifespan of less than one minute of game time in most cases. It's going to be difficult to go to any system that is combat-heavy and does not have this kind of utility built in to the opposition system.

Next: The playtest version of D&D looks a lot like an AD&D monster with the lessons of 4E built in. Basic stats are included but "traits" are listed as discrete entries for things that look a lot like 4E powers and "actions" are listed for attacks and special moves which I think looks promising so far. There does seem to be an effort to keep the standard of not needing to reference outside material to run a monster in combat and that's an item I will be watching closely.

Switches: let's wait and see.

So what's the point of all this? Well, more options is usually better, but maybe not to an infinite degree. I still feel like the early editions were easy enough to manage but could have used some more options once the system evolved to support them. Right now I'd say we're seeing that with Next. We've maxed out on complexity with 3E and curved back around towards simplicity. What would I like to see?

• Monster "level" is an easy way to fine tune a group of beasties. let's keep that.
• Ability scores are fine as a "lesser" switch. The PC's won't notice them most of the time unless you really exaggerate it for effect, like a goblin with 18 strength. I like having them in the description to cover oddball actions even if I leave them unchanged
• Templates - these are great and need to be in every edition of D&D
• Feats/Spells/Powers - I'd rather these were just rolled into the monster description itself, part of their attack or trait or powers or whatever. One thing, not a bunch of different things. Don't make me look them up
• Skills - I'm torn on these as they do allow for more individuality between monsters, but they are also a level of overhead I may not need. I can live without them
• I'd like to see role included as an element of monster descriptions but I know a lot of people hate it as a 4E thing so I don't expect it to appear in Next. It does sort of depend on a standardized method of monster building and I'm not sure we will see that in next anyway.

In case you can't tell I'm fine with not building them the same way as PC's. The lifespan of a PC can be years, the lifespan of most monsters is a fraction of an evening - it makes a lot of sense to have different approaches for the two. 

The other big change is technology. For my Mutants and Masterminds games I don't even print out my opposition stats any more - I build them in HeroLab and then use its tactical console to run my combats. I have full access to their stats and can mark damage or conditions on them and track initiative all in the PC. It was my personal pilot program and it has worked very well. With basic thru 2E I don't really feel the need for PC assistance but with 3E/Pathfinder I think it removes a lot of those headaches I mentioned of looking up feats and spells and skill DC's by putting them a click away.

A dragon was challenging to run effectively in 3E as it had a lot of abilities and spells to track. See the blue text above with the spells and feats? Forget what "Shatter Defenses" does or worse yet, have a player arguing with you about what it does? -click-

Oh look, it's right there, the complete text, and it even lists the source so someone else can look it up if they have time. This is a huge win for actually running a game as complex as 3E/Pathfinder with all of the options in full effect. I've only used this one (Pathfinder Combat Manager) a little so far but I was blown away when I first saw it. With 4E I don't see the need as strongly as all of the details are right there in the statblock but if you run these other editions I would strongly recommend it

I suppose one final point might be this: A lot of us have been playing this game a long time. Every edition has some things you can do to customize your monsters, so do it! Don't be afraid to adjust the standards and surprise your players. Maybe this time the Steading is not a barbecue joint for oversized rednecks but maybe it's the home of a new spiritual movement among hill giant kind and they all have some monk or cleric abilities? Maybe they've joined a serpent cult and have some poison-related powers? The game is supposed to be about adventure and part of that is facing danger and exploring the unknown. If the players know everything already (even when playing 1st level characters) then take some steps to change that. Hopefully it will add some energy to the game and put them back enough to wake them back up. If you're starting a new game, well there's no better way to let them know this campaign is different from the last than by obviously and extensively changing up the opposition. 

I've done this constantly in my 4E Red Hand of Doom conversion. Since it was written for 3.5 the monster levels and types and numbers don't really match up that well for 4E so I change them. Very few of the creatures my party have faced are "stock". Almost all of them have their level adjusted, some have their gear tweaked, and many have some power adjustments. Quite a few of these changes are to keep the flavor similar to what it was for 3.5 but others are just things I like or things that seem to be a better fit. It's pretty liberating and it ensures I am familiar with what each beastie can do. Once I'm happy with it I print out the stats and keep them at hand for the game. With or without a computer, and regardless of edition, it's an option in every DM's toolkit, one I've come to like quite a bit.