The Next Ten Levels

I have a game group that is six players plus me, the DM. Because of schedules and geography, I rarely get all six in a single game. For the last story arc, we agreed that every character had other important things they could be doing, so there wasn’t a need to explain anyone’s absence from a particular session. We would do a recap at the beginning of each session anyway, so people were mostly able to follow along. It worked, though it wasn’t a great solution.

The players are on the verge of paragon tier, and when the current storyline wraps up, the characters will be able to pursue whatever objectives they wish. I want to make sure that there is more continuity from one session to the next, so I came up with an idea that sounds great in my head, which means my players are going to hate it.

First I would place the players into three pairs. Mahelo and Rolen, the sorcerer and the ranger, would be one; they are played by two roommates. Zeelatar and Slammer, the runepriest and the paladin, would be a second; they are played by a husband and wife. Brie and Riot, the warlord and the cleric, would be the third; no relation between the players, but the two characters are closely tied together in backstory and actual events in the campaign.

Within these pairs, the players would have to come up with a single goal that they want their characters to accomplish and that would naturally lead them to work together. The goals could be as simple or elaborate as they like, and they would be free to invent whatever story elements they like. They should be the sort of goals that would reasonably take an entire tier to accomplish.

Then I would mix them up into different pairs. I’m thinking Mahelo-Zeelatar, Slammer-Riot, Rolen-Brie. We would repeat the process, coming up with entirely different goals. At the end, every character will have two goals they want to accomplish in the next ten levels, and two buddies who will help them do it. That way we can always be advancing the story no matter who is or isn’t at the table that day, and nobody will ever miss out on events that would have been pertinent to their character’s objectives.

Like I said, it sounds great in my head.

D&D Next

I’ve been reading a little about the next edition of D&D, the best overview of which I found here.  I need to float some of my own thoughts out on the matter.

First of all, I find that I agree with much of what Wizards has stated are their goals in developing a new edition, with regards to two things in particular.

The Brand

One, there is an effort to preserve what I would call the “shared culture” of Dungeons & Dragons.  Much has changed over the editions, but it remains true that if you grew up on 2nd Edition, for instance, and were suddenly thrown into a 4e encounter, it would still feel like D&D, and the same will have to be true of the next edition for it to have any chance of success.  This is paramount.  This is what D&D is as a brand.  It certainly needs to be the focus of every designer and every playtester.

The Product

Two, I like the talk I hear about “modules” as rule sets that can be layered on the core rules.  This is less about the brand and more about the product.  As a game, D&D is a marriage of Role Playing Game and Tactical War Game.  It certainly isn’t one or the other, it’s both.  Personally, I lean toward the min/max-ed, tactical, rules lawyering style of play, but I certainly don’t expect or even hope for Wizards to cater to me and and that style in the core game.  The goal of the core game should be to create a sort of forum where players like me can team up with the storyteller types (or any other type, there are countless ones) and have fun.  If I want to min-max or be a tactician, there’ll be modules for that.  (I hold out hope for rules so simple they don’t require lawyering).

Those are the fundamentals, and with the info we have gotten from Wizards thus far, I feel pretty positive about a new edition.  There’s just one crucial component I’d like to hear more about.

Delivery

I take it for granted that there will be books, books in electronic format, and online-only content.  But what will be the relative importance of each?  And how will players translate what’s in those source materials into an actual game session?  I for one would like to see a much more robust web-based component.  For a few sessions now I have been running monsters exclusively from the Compendium on Wizards’ website using my laptop, even though I own all of the books that those monsters were published in.  A couple of my players built their characters in the web-based Character Builder without even referring to a PHB, and I still routinely use the old offline version of it for my purposes.  The next edition will be facing the reality that the web is the cheapest and most efficient way to get content to the players, and the game will have to be designed with that in mind.