There are perils in knowing too much about RPGs. I tend to take RPGs more seriously than most people. Not more serious in the sense of curing cancer or feeding my family, but more serious in the sense of an RPGs being an expressive art form. I don't say that pretentiously, in fact, I have a fairly serious axe to grind with some corners of the RPG industry I would consider a little pretentious. What I mean is that RPG design and play is a form of communication and a skillfull endeavor that speaks to the human spirit. Game-as-art is very different than novel-as-art, although it has some aspects in common with poetics and drama.

It is simply this: when somebody says something about RPGs, my mind looks through a quarter century of gaming experience involving dozens of games (probably a dozen or more superhero RPGs alone), my own attempts at design, and conclusions hashed out in many, many RPG forum discussions. My worldview, on the subject of RPGs, is complex, and I can no more set aside my understanding of RPGs than a jazz pianist can set aside their sensitivity to music. To me, the world of RPGs is full of so much information that it is a language unto itself.

When I speak to someone to whom RPGs are "this game D&D I started playing a couple of years ago," there is a definite risk that I or this person may aggravate the other. I try not to be excessively philosophic when speaking with someone whose interest is obviously more casual. There are only a few people in this world, relatively speaking, who know their Vance from their Anderson, their Villains & Vigilantes from their Mutants & Masterminds, their steampunk from their Victoriana. Rather than dwell in frustration, however, I always strive to help receptive souls discover a wider world, a place outside their usual Friday group or the local gaming store. Some RPG writers are among the most creative people you could know, and to experience their art is to experience their mind.

So, bravo! Though I occasionally find myself in the serious category, the fact is that I love RPGs and consider them some of the most fun things on Earth.

pawsplay

I special ordered Fantasy Craft through my FLGS. In light of my current economic downturn, I have been holding off on purchasing a lot of RPG books I don't intend to actually use in a game for a while. However, I decided to make the plunge for Fantasy Craft. For one thing, it is an underexposed game that would probably appeal to a lot of people who have never heard of it, so I feel like I should support the publisher now, when they can appreciate it, rather than later, when the book has descended into the doldrums of slow-moving RPG stock. I anticipate it will be a good read. Also, it has a generous OGC declaration, something I feel should be vigorously supported as the RPG industry transitions into a number of different business channels.

So why Fantasy Craft? Probably my strongest motivation is to see how well it would do for a baroque fantasy game, in the vein of Talislanta, the Dying Earth, or high fantastic Britain. The emphasis on skills and non-combat capabilities is a draw, too. Although I really like Pathfinder, some of my campaign ideas have been relegated to being possible GURPS or Hero projects due to their lack of hacking-and-looting.

From a creator standpoint, Fantasy Craft seems to represent a distinct and possibly interesting variation of the 3e engine that retains a high level of interface compatability with other 3e games, while running on a very different kind of fuel. If, indeed, it looks like a good system for running domains, playing out intrigue, and slaying giant monsters, in addition to the usual hack-and-slash and looting, I may adopt it for my first published fantasy setting, a non-traditional, baroque fantasy world with a strong amount of emphasis on culture, social station, and weird magic. As an additional benefit, I think it will be an important publishing resource going forward, as the creators seemed to have come up with some good innovcations that could be used in whole or in part in other projects.

I am a little skeptical of Fantasy Craft as the basis for a realistical game, given some of its fairly artificial constraints, but that will be something I can only discover by reading and testing.

pawsplay

NPC gear is a problem for me. It was ingrained into my mind as a young gamer that magical items were magical, hence, rare. AD&D agreed with me; once upon a time it was notable that most death knights carried a magical sword. This works fine in most cases. By awarding the occasional, valuable piece of equipment, each PC gets a turn to get something cool. The problem arises in high level games.

Suppose you wanted to create a troll champion, a steel-clad monster with an enormous maul. He is the sort of character that wades through a platoon of dwarves, flattening them left and right. If you follow the guidelines in 3e, 3.5, or Pathfinder, you will discover that at CR 15, he should have a magical weapon. However, you didn't really conceive of him as having a magical weapon, or even much magical gear. While in theory, as a mighty warrior, he should be entitled to a share of loot that would give him a few magic items, his main threat should be his sheer might. So a dilemma arises. Do I provide less gear, preserving the image of a brutal war-hulk, clad in simple but durable armor and carrying a steel sledge, knowing that his attack and defense numbers will sit a bit low, or do I give in and give him a magical weapon, armor, and maybe a ring? If he has less valuable gear, do I make up the difference in treasure? Or does the lower treasure make up for the slightly easier difficulty? In a magical world, does it make sense for such a beast's master to not provide it at least a magical trinket or two?

pawsplay

Why do electronic downloads need to be cheap? To sell someone a book, you need merely convince someone it is worth the money for the convenience of being able able to read it at any time. To sell someone a PDF, you must convince someone that your book is good enough that its creator deserves to be rewarded for their labors. While there is certainly an ethical argument to be made there, this point is mainly important because of casual infringement. You will never dissuade premeditated crime, and you can ask any reasonable thing of your loyalists. But to sell to a disinterested stranger, you must show them, "This book has value and should be preserved in this world." The legalistic argument is but one, and has limited persuasive power to some. That is why the price point of the digital product is lower than for a physical product.

A PDF must compete against a number of other options: illegal piracy, a different PDF that costs less, other free things on the Internet worth reading, their own labors and activities, etc. The price point of a physical book remains higher than than that of a PDF as long as a book remains of superior value to the typical customer.

pawsplay

I started playing D&D in 1983 after being previously exposed to an AD&D Monster Manual at a church camp. I saw the Elmore and Easley illustrations and was instantly hooked. Despite some inconsistent formative epxeriences with DMs, I went on to become a lifelong gamer. Apart from a brief period of time around 1997 in which I started to wonder if tabletop games had a point and spent much of my time drinking margaritas and attending dance clubs instead, I have been pretty steady at it.

Thinking about games in the mid 1980s is a trip on a time machine. The world has changed. I have changed. The kind of person I was then could not exist now. The 1980s were a time when you could stick Dervishes into a fantasy game and make vague references to grim desert gods without people thinking too much about the possible offense to Muslims (and history teachers... dervishes???). The Cold War was still going on. A computer program was a fragile, exotic creature that lived on a "floppy disk" and had to be zealously protected. Characters in fantasy art looked like characters in fantasy movies, who curiously resembled rock bands. The US could still reliably depend on other countries to exploit for a product as cheap as you could possibly imagine. It was the general wisdom that female gamers were both rare and aberrant; even people who approved of the notion might be uncertain where you would find them, apart from colleges.

There is no question that classic games suffered from low production values. They were poorly written, poorly edited, and poorly produced, and that remained the case until about 1982. In 1982, however, RPGs invaded Toys R Us. I used to beg my parents to take me a to mythical gaming store in town, since Toys R Us would not carry lead-based miniature figures. I blithely ignored the fact that virtually all gaming products were recommend for people much older than me.

The modern world is very different. Self-publishing skills, the computer, political and historical awareness, and so on are all considered basic skills for a game designer, which has become an actual (part-time) vocation. I think in the modern era, a "dervish," that is, desert nomad of the Bedouin type, would not see the light of day, due to the religious insensitivity and cultural ignorance rolled up into that one concept. It might occur to people to research devishes, and it might occur to a writer that their readers might Google or Wikipedia them. Clumsy text manipulation is no excuse in an era where Microsoft Word can lay out passable two-column pages. Artwork can be easily obtained from semi-professional artists posting their work on the Internet, for hire, cheap.

In many ways, the gaudy old boxed set, with its "fantasy" cover fonts and its product the loving labor of a few overworked hobbyists, is the Vaudeville of modern gaming. People will no longer pay for skilled but creaky and ultimately provincial acts when they can see modern theater, music shows broadcast on cable, TV, and DVDs (now, Blu-Ray). The most successful Vaudeville acts were able to translate their skills into mass entertainment. Now mass entertainers must translate their skills into a world of customized media content.

I can see a place for a $60 boxed set in today's world: in the hands of the discerning connoiseur. The new D&D basic sets, with their glossy rulebooks and their prepackaged, prepainted minis, are not destined to be successful. The successful gateway drug, like a successful collectible card trading game, should begin with a thoughtless $15 purchase and should be accessible to a young teenager and a friend. The feathered hair of a rock star is no longer the standard in fantasy art, replaced by the bulky shoulder plates of the MMORPG avatar. Nonetheless, fantasy games should be unafraid to be what they are.

pawsplay

RPG Talk - The Role-Playing Game (RPG) Wiki

The Iconic Bestiary: Classics of Fantasy, is a monster sourcebook aimed at players and publishers alike. The book details a number of creatures who approximate the role and style of certain monsters ommitted from the SRD because of their strong association with the D&D trademark. Read more

pawsplay

IANAL. YMMV. Some thoughts speaking as a creator and a reader and a philosopher:

"Intellectual property" is properly understood as a metaphor. What is owned is not the ideas themselves, but a right or franchise to profiting from them.

Copyright in the US does not protect:

In short, games. The specific text may be copyrighted, and the game may contain patents or trademarks, but nothing that is purely an idea can be copyrighted. Copyright, indeed, was created in order to advance the propogation and promulgation of ideas:

In short, infringing a copyright is not "theft." It is infringement, and is covered under a separate set of laws. Infringement is different in many ways:

- If I infringe a work, I do not deprive someone else of it.
- Once a work has been copied and made freely available at no cost, there is no way its value can be restored to its owner.
- Infringing means depriving an owner of a royalty; theft means causing at least some small measure of harm.
- A copyrighted work has no value to its owner alone. An object has no value to anyone else but its current possessor. Consider the difference in value between the copyright of a book and the value of the book itself.

So in viewing IP rights with regard to rpg publishers, I would say the principle struggle is, on the one hand, to assure proper royalties and attributions are made to creators, while on the other hand, their works are able to be readily used and enjoyed. Certainly, a publisher is entitled to be recompensed for the development cost of a book. But just certainly, the public should not be deprived of access to out-of-print but interesting works simply because the copyright holder does not wish to see them distributed. Copyright allows the copyright holder to control and profit from their work. Copyright law does not permit the government to censor works as a proxy, any more than it is permitted to censor works for any other reasons.

No mandate, suggestion, or intimation should be derived from the above opinions as to the rightness of any particular action with regard to a copyrighted work.

I truly believe that creative works are the great flower of civilization, and I think we should strive in every way to see those works increased and multiplied.

pawsplay

Early indications are that the 4e third party business is not what was hoped for. That is not a scientific measurement, just my impression from a handful of industry posts, off-handed comments on fora, and the visible lack of 4e products coming down the pipes. One Bad Egg has closed shop, while the Skarka has posted recently asking what the people really want. So what the heck is the deali-o? Allow me to speculate.

4e Does Not Lend Itself to Third Party Expansions

This has been touched on here and there. Bottom line: it's hard to offer the same value WotC can. Mechanics are hard to write. Some stuff is easy, and therefore trivial. New powers, new feats, and so forth can be drafted all day by someone with the right kind of imagination. Naturally, this puts them in direct competition with all the other creative types who can do the same thing. On the other hand, designing a coherent, balanced, fun class with its own unique style is a formidable challenge which involves, among other things, designing dozens of powers whose utility hinges on the other powers. Putting out even one or two 4e classes could consume nearly the entire creative output of a small operation for weeks at a time. And when you've finally created your masterpiece... very few people will care, because it's not in the Wizards character builder, and hence off the radar for the typical player.

Fun in a Box Versus Fun Outside the Box

Let's look at the 4e versus 3.5 Pathfinder split in practical terms. Now it's probably safe to say that in most major respects, the 4e and 3e crowds are similar, and it's important to keep in mind that a lot of players play both. But insofar as there is difference, it's important to think about what the nature of the difference. For the most part, your archetypal 4e player is looking for a mechanically streamlined system, the ability to throw some materials together and start playing quickly, a mostly tabletop-oriented experience that does not delve into grand sagas, and generally less math and less material related to the situation at hand. In short, the 4e crowd, on the whole is not composed of tinkerers but of people who are looking to play a game. In consideration of what I said above about 4e players and third party extensions, it should be occuring to you that at this point, new classes that cannot be easily "plugged in" to existing web tools, modules, and the like is going to be extraordinarily unattractive. New mechanical systems are unwanted; instead, players are looking at inventive ways to write up abilities that can basically fit on a notecard and make one monster or PC build stand out. In contrast, the biggest spending 3e players probably purchased a variety of d20 and OGL products ranging from books on Experts to town building to historical campaign settings to plain old monster books. 3e players, raised on a diet of late 90s RPGs, multiple campaign settings, and a highly modular core D&D system, are used to thinking of D&D as a game which allows different play styles and experiences. Mechanical complexity is the price paid for customizability, expandability, and basic versatility.

Loss of Consumer Loyalty

3e was like the second, well, third, coming, for a lot of players. It "fixed" D&D in a number of respects, and while some AD&D players were probably the hardest converts, many appreciated the changes. More importantly, a virtual army of former D&D players returned to the fold. The resurrection of D&D was a consumer event. Along with the rebranding, the OGL came with a promise of greater hobbyist involvement, more engagement with new and imaginative writers outside the halls of Wizards, and a sense of welcome. d20 did not exactly conquer the world, but it colonized and altered the landscape in important ones. Some spun off games, like Mutants & Masterminds and Spycraft, have become virtually their own phenomena.

Then 4e came along. It came too sudden and too soon for a lot of people who still viewed 3e as a system evolving and developing. The end of the OGL and the clumsily constructed GSL ticked off open gaming enthusiasts as well as loyal and enthusiastic third party publishers who felt pushed out of an industry they helped nurture. Wizards went a decade back in time by pulling PDF products on thin justification, including many OOP products coveted by collectors and fans. A subscription system married gamers to an ongoing financial relationship with WotC in order to continue to play D&D. Traditionally, D&D was a product that helped GMs design their own games, not a product created for consumption. Subcription services basically implied a dependence by the fans on WotC for more inspirational material, rather than the converse.

Many, many people were thrilled with 4e. Most of the rest did not suddenly become haters but did become, shall we say, less happy with WotC. So who split? People who felt a loyalty to some version of D&D but no longer associated Wizards with the game they enjoyed. Creative, forward thinking hobbyists and creators. Tinkerers who enjoyed 3e's sufficient complexity and modular capabilities. History and mythology geeks. AD&D setting loyalists who opposed setting changes. In short, the changeover alienated a substantial portion, if not a majority, of the people who had fed the plant up until them. The publishers interested in doing 4e stuff are a fraction of the cultural treasury that made 3e walk, run, and dance. Even people who play and enjoy 4e are not motivated to become 4e developers, any more than someone who enjoys Monopoly is motivated to become a Monopoly developer. The people who essentially made 4e possible have, for the most part, rejected it. What passes for a mainstream market in games would play any version of D&D which is well designed, which by a reasonable set of criteria 4e certainly is. But the people who constitute the gaming hobby, the writers of today and tomorrow and the day after, the people who say, "What would happen if you changed X?", the people who catalog FR deities or invent their own pantheons, the people who, above all else, play games besides D&D, are deeply divided.

The Economy

The economy never helps, but we've gone from an economic surplus fueling every hobby imaginable, even to the point of indirectly funding vanity projects, to a new situation where a product that isn't earning black is probably causing pain to its publishers. The PDF market for d20 was small, slim, and agile, but 4e products tend to be, as noted above, labor intensive if they are worth doing, and the bar for production values is much higher in the post-d20 world.

The Bottom Line

Considering the challenges facing meaningful development of 4e expansions, the lack of engagement by hobbyist designers, the loss of consumer loyalty to the WotC D&D line, and the economy, the real question is not, "Why is 4e third party support so halting?" but why so many people were surprised. There is still a market for 4e products, but the market is very different than the d20 market was. Consumers want and need different things with 4e, and if it isn't, at some level, a ready-to-use consummable, the market is just very small. If there is a future for 3PP in the new world, it is probably going to require greater engagement with Wizards, and on their terms.

pawsplay

I had the great privilege of being both within the genesis of Dawning Star for d20 Future, and outside it. I was brought on as a technical advisor. Primary, my job was to nitpick. You know how when you are watching a sci-fi show or movie, every once in a while, they drop a real howler? My role was basically to be that audience and halt any silliness before it saw print. While my opinions were sometimes felt in the final version of things, I did not write Operation Quick Launch. In fact, I mainly served as a second set of eyes for the editor, lasering in on scientific inaccuracies and occasionally making observations about campaign design or my impression of a game mechanic. The whole process was, as I often imagine RPG design work to be, collaborative, and it was in various email conversations that ideas about the game backstory were hammered out, hammered on, and ultimately put into words by the writers. For all that I participated in the discussions, Dawning Star was simply enough, not my baby.

Despite that, I take a great deal of pride in the final form it took. Apart from the joy of seeing a great team in action, I took my limited role seriously, and I think the game it became owed a lot to the care taken by Justin to uphold the highest standards. Thus a pinch hit by a rambling, semi-pro RPG columnist and occasional writer gave the game a little extra in the science department. While my comments may not have transformed the product in a dramatic way, I helped put a little polish on a fine product.

Ultimately, I think we all became pretty invested in the success of the project. Blue Devil Games put out a product that exceeded the production values of many games by bigger companies with bigger staffs. The product remains a notable success in the fairly barren and dismal d20 Modern sector. The game was not simply liked, but also admired, and acquired a loyal following of fans. In many cases, people hungered for answers to questions about the setting that had not actually been answered, even in design discussions.

d20 Modern dried up and blew away. Really, it never received the resources, development, or attention it needed to evolve. While D&D 3e became D&D 3.5, d20 Modern languished in developmental limbo. The d20 license was targeted for termination by WotC, and ultimately, WotC abandoned open gaming and the OGL itself. And yet, every so often, someone will ask...

What is going on with Dawning Star these days?

And I, personally, do not know. Maybe something. Maybe nothing. I know that the game mattered a lot more to me than d20 Modern itself ever did. There are not too many d20 settings you could point to and say, "This would work great as a GURPS game" or as a Hero System game or whatever. But I think Dawning Star has that level of interest built into it. The quality of writing and setting development, the engaged approach to using the d20 rules, the attention to basic scientific detail, the awareness of different action-adventure genres, the sense of fun, and even the distinctive and breathtaking visual style of the graphics all came together to create something that really sparked the imagination.

pawsplay

Wizards of the Coast gave birth to a wondrous beast, then, in true fairy-tale fashion, abandoned it, only to have the creature fostered by others. Wizards cannot truly revoke the OGL, at least, not without some kind of legal precedings that would spell the end of their existence as an entity. The original license was granted to the gaming world in general. Since then, it has replicated, each license imitating its parent, all clones of a document copyrighted to a parent who no longer loves or nurtures the thing.

There are several consequences to this decision. Obviously, the abandonment has led to a lack of an obvious industry leader. As a result, Paizo has taken the role as the publisher of the Pathfinder RPG as the unofficial banner carrier for the third edition D&D rules as a living, breathing system. The community is necessarily fan-based and democratized, since there is very little in the way of brand support behind new projects. The OGL functions, in many ways, as a shibboleth of independent designers working in a third edition language. It imparts no uniformity, imposes no laws, and most importantly, lends little aura of connectedness to the gaming industry. The Pathfinder license has resources behind it, and hence legitamacy. Pathfinder is a brand on which a castle may be built.

The second consequence is the increasingly complicated and tortuous sharing of OGC. What was once assumed to be a viral process has become tangled by rather rigid copyright declaration requirements. To summarize, every OGL product needs a copyright declaration, which includes its own copyright plus a copy of the copyright declaration of every product whose OGC it "uses." While this produces a pleasant way to track a product's lineage, it means that an OGL work, as a whole, has a declaration. Works that draw on several sources will generate an increasingly byzantine declaration. Even if I reproduce only a single original feat from Generic Publishing's Book of Feats, I reproduce the copyright declaration of every OGL work the book draws on, as a requirement of the license.

At one time, this process could be midwifed by Wizards. In the Monster Manual II, two OGC creatures appear: the Scorpionfolk and the Razor Boar, both created by Necromancer Games. However, if you look carefully, you will find that these creatures were not licensed under the OGL. Surprised? Confused? Well, the OGL declaration at the back of the book lists no copyright for those two creatures. Therefore, I can only assume Wizards of the Coast received the rights to use and modify the text in a separate agreement or license, including the right to relicense the material as OGC.

If, in fact, you wish to create a product that is mostly open, as opposed to one that merely supplements other works, it would probably behoove you to contact the original copyright holder and work out some arrangement to license the material rather than yoink it directly with the OGL. If mutally acceptable, there is no reason your agreement could not include a mention of their copyright in the Copyright Declaration. Of course, you would then have to be very careful they were the originators of the material you are contributing.

Wittingly or not, Wizards built in some interesting complications to making second or third generation OGL products.

pawsplay

In the course of a long-time gamer's life, the gamer is likely to experience the opposing forces of nostalgia and desire for novelty. We yearn for the innocent past, and embrace even the campiest objects if they remind us of those experiences. Conversely, wordliness leads us to seek new experiences, to be broadened, and to escape the hum-drum of the familiar. I suspect these are the basic forces, working in tandem, that have led to the "retro-gaming" movement. Like post-punk and like post-modern comic books, it would be difficult to describe any particular set of aesthetics that defines the milieu as a whole. Rather, the commonality lies in the texts to which these later creators and re-interpreters are responding.

Rather than identifying with the retro-gaming movement, I have chosen a different path to fulfill my needs for the dynamic as well as the familiar. While the mantle of the old school gamer has been largely claimed by retro-gamers and never-convert grogards, there remains a substantial zone for players who are interested in growth as gamers and creators but who also prize some of the aesthetics that drew them into gaming in the first place. Rather than wallowing in nostalgia or playing with surface text, I have tried to identify what, individually and collectively, were the sensory, social, and aesthetic experiences that drew me into gaming.

On a tangible level, I have to say that I love dice. I love looking at them, touching them, collecting them, and acquiring them. While the use of multiple polyhedrals is about as old school as you can get, I have to confess I relish any opportunity to break out the dicebag. I was probably 18 before I realized that Crown Royal bags came from bottles of liquor. I also love miniatures. Before the computer age and the dawn of customizable avatars, miniatures were an area where non-artists like myself could express themselves visually and revel in the spectacle of play. I might as well add maps and graph paper. There is something thrilling about wilderness maps in hexes dotted with little icons, and my youngest gaming years were filled with hours of arranging tunnels and countries on little maps. A few books or GM screens with exciting graphics is useful. While I have moved on from Mountain Dew, a Cherry Coke, glass of iced tea, or seltzer water still provides a fine beverage to consume. Character sheets... how I love the gleam of black and white graphical design, or conversely, the look of faux parchment.

Socially, I loved delving into an imaginary world for hours at a time with friends. We joked, hung out, and occasionally argued. For myself, gaming was very much tied up in my experience as a teenager. As an adult, I still crave regular communion on nerdly matters as well as uninterrupted "game time." While having children has complicated matters, this remains a priority in my general happiness.

Aesthetically, I like the use of images to suggest an imaginary world. For all that it is "useless," good gaming artwork is, to an extent, the game. While the design and writing itself supply the game mechanics, without an imaginary world, you are not going to get much game. Thus, artwork, writing, and loads of not directly relevant information is an important part of a game. I love both fantasy and supers. I enjoy historical games, but when I play one, I want it to be really historical. I like a variety of game mechanics. What I am interested in is the final elegance. Levels, in D&D, mark your progress as a monster-bashing, treasure-seeking adventurer, while dice pools in WEG's old Star Wars offered a "go ahead and try it" attitude sadly lacking in many other action-based games. GURPS provides a general framework for thousands of years of history and dozens of distinct genres, as well as your own strange ideas. Hero System plays well on a hex map, but can move beyond the map when needed, as well. I like a game book that is a good read as well as a good manual, a teaching text as well as a reference, and as pleasurable as useful. I like a book to have the personality of an author living inside it. Books by committee are rarely my favorite, although I value strong design and editing teams.

In many ways, I have gotten far afield from my roots. GURPS, D6 Star Wars and DC Heroes seduced me away from bags of polyhedral dice, while "modern" games like Hero System 4e, Vampire, and Teenagers From Outer Space taught me I could dispense with a map. While some indie presses lovingly pack their books with color graphics or at least the occasional quarter page B&W piece, many seem to have moved more toward a "how much art do you need to play?" design choice. Gaming had been harder and harder to schedule for a long time, and as a 20-year-old, I noticed I didn't game very much and briefly wondered if my gaming days were over, and if indeed I missed it. Many of my college peers grew up and moved on, though I am still in touch with some. The modern game is frequently more the result of "design meetings" than authorial vision, although there are some breakout products liek Mutants & Masterminds which bear the stamp of personal genius. If you want to hear an author speaking the language of games, most often, that means an indie press or garage press outfit.

But I have arrived. I am now a happier gamer than I have been in a while. I now try to keep a number of games handy, with a high priority on games that involve toys or visual graphics, whether it's the bag-o-dice I use for Pathfinder or the slick superhero graphics of M&M or the lushness of a full color GURPS supplement. I have a (mostly) weekly game that I try to keep regularly, pausing only for a few months every so often for a new baby, and as I escape from graduate school, I'm hoping to do a con or two in the future. In terms of design, I have bookcases now full of variety and novelty. I have Pathfinder for that campaign-as-power-climb experience, GURPS for character-driven realistic or dramatic games, Hero for blow-by-blow high action games or high-powered superheroes, and even Runequest when I want to kick it old school, with all-too-mortal adventurers risking their lives on the throw of a percentile. I have mostly unburdened myself of awkward or difficult to play games, apart from a handful of oddities kept for educational purposes, like the bogglingly unusuable Fantasy Wargaming (1981) or a printing of V&V revised in all its quirky glory. Star Wars Saga? Fun, but I just didn't like it, gone. Hero System 4e? I like 5e, but 4e had some good points, so now I own both. GURPS 4e? Great game, love it. Ars Magica? How do you get players to learn the system? Gone.

I think a lot of gamers could gain a lot by looking past the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia, by pausing in their quest for the next new thing, to instead look at the core of their gaming experience. I think by being honest with ourselves about what we like, we avoid the trap of thinking we are too mature to hunt kobolds for silver pieces or too cool to play an emo-fest like Vampire, when in fact there is a lot of good gaming to be had if you look beyond labels. Certainly, as strange and quirky as it was, and as dated as the graphics are now, you could take Basic D&D and show it to a new gamer and they would see there is a fun game there (though not necessarily to everyone's taste). There is nothing wrong with taking an OOP game and playing it for what it's worth, or conversely, taking something new and making it newer yet, if it will get you the experience you are looking for on game night. Gaming is very much about experiences, and labeling yourself or others really stands in the way of experiencing the power of an improvisational, partially chance-driven game that helps you tell stories about imaginary people doing amazing things. Certainly, the never-ending search for The Perfect Game is doomed to end in failure and dissatisfaction.

pawsplay

1974: D&D published
1986: GURPS published
2004: GURPS 4e released
2008: D&D 4e published

From 1974 to about 1984 marked a first wave of game design. Although that period is usually associated with D&D, AD&D, and a host of clones and fantasy settings, it was also a time of wild improvisation and a number of departures of from the traditional fantasy wargaming model. By 1986, however, the fantasy wargaming had largely prevailed in the market, while numerous games departed notably from D&D-style game mechanics, focusing more on genre and media emulation. GURPS was, at that point, a state of the art. However, games like Ars Magica (1987) and Amber (1991) took the RPG world in new directions, culminating in the publication in 1991 of Vampire: The Masquerade, a "storytelling" game. From that time forward, RPGs were redefined as a broader genre of game encompassing not only the early fantasy wargaming style (barely departed from miniature gaming) but a new dramatic style based on poetics and psychology. RPGs remained, however, the same in that they were a shared narrative driven by special resolution mechanics. By the 21st century, GURPS and D&D are both living fossils, games built firmly in the fantasy wargaming tradition, for all that they are from time to time pressed into service as a framework for storytelling adventures. To clarify, by fantasy wargaming I do not mean boardgame play, but rather exactly that which was defined by the original D&D game: unlimited choices in an imaginary environment. GURPS has traditionally tried to simulate, especially reality but also as needed the tropes of adventure film and fiction (known in GURPS speak as the cinematic style). D&D has traditionally focused on tactical play, exploration, surprise, and power fantasies.

With D&D 3e, D&D for the first time embraced a unified core mechanic, an innovation embraced not only by GURPS in 1987 but by such diverse games as Call of Cthulhu, Talislanta, and DC Heroes. It also codified Skills (from the Rules Cyclopedia) and Non-Weapon Proficiences (from AD&D) into a more general system of Feats and Skills. In short, D&D recreated the GURPS Advantage and Skill system, after a fashion. Meanwhile, built in limitations on PCs were stripped away in favor of player choice. 4e returned D&D to its somewhat more familiar class-and-race format, but the essence of choice remained, and especially, the emphasis on unified mechanics. Moroever, player choice was channeled into explicit "builds" within classes in order to make PC creation more formulaic, more friendly, more logical, and more balanced.

GURPS began as a toolkit, little more than a set of tools for running combat, exploration, social encounters, and information gathering, with the assumption that any number of worlds could be built onto such a foundation. Bit by bit, GURPS expanded to become more generic. 3e finally made the attempt to unify GURPS, uniting all Advantages into a single source, the Compendium. With 4e, it became more universal, with a philosophy that embraced the practicalities of gaming and an increased friendiness to less realistic games. Something else happened with 3e. In addition to the realization that GMs could find some use for premade, or at least preworked, examples of campaigns, Steve Jackson Games realized there was a thirst for tools for players to make PCs more easily, while still preserving player choice. Templates began with a trickle, but by the end of 3e's developmental cycle, they were everywhere in a flood. Finally, players could say, "I want to play X," and they could simply write down X and proceed to customize from there. In this way, GURPS remained GURPS in that any aspect could be tweaked, but it at last joined the ranks of "classed games."

Simply put, White Wolf tested and proved the concept that players were looking for archetypes, while at the same time had a desire for ways to make their characters unique. This drove the Vampire: The Masquerade lifecycle and reached a level of elegance in the new World of Darkness line. At this point, players can create almost wholly unique creations without going beyond some basic choices offered in the core setting books. Vampire was originally based on skills and powers (in the form of Disciplines). Merits and Drawbacks were reluctantly introduced later in the Old World of Darkness line, then eventually embraced. In the New World and Darkness, Merits and Skills are the bread and butter of character customization.

So not only has D&D become GURPS, but GURPS has become D&D. The New World of Darkness is both GURPS and D&D, which in turn are also the World of Darkness.

Class and race, template and race, Order and Clan. Feats, skills, and powers; Advantages, Skills, and powers; Merits, skills, and Disciplines. The same evolution has shaped the Hero System, D6, Runequest, and even The Dying Earth. While every game is free to experiment, certain design elements have become relatively constant. I conclude that RPG design has truly become an art, with a body of technical, artistic, and philosphical knowledge that influence it, a culture that participates in it, and creators who nourish it with original insights.

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I think I have hit on one of the major differences between D&D 3e and 4e, from my standpoint. 4e is more boardgame. Imagine, for a moment, you are playing Monopoly, and the available pieces are the train, the hat, and the little dog. Imagine if each piece was given a special power. For instance, the train might be able to ride for free on trains while doubling rent for those who land on their trains. The allows you to take $50 from each player every time you pass Go. The little dog moves one more space than rolled on the dice. Each piece is now unique and in some way thematic. The train has abilities related to trains, the hat allows you to "pass the hat" and the dog is highly mobile.

Now let us look at cinematic versus realistic game systems. In a realistic game, you have only what powers you actually have. In a cinematic game, you have whatever powers you need to do cool movie stuff. For instance, in AD&D, a fighter has little in the way of abilities, since they are largely defined by being good at using a weapon and having a wide variety of weapon and armor proficiencies. In Torg, by contrast, a character might use a Martyr card to succeed at any one task at the cost of their life. That's not a "real" ability. However, it makes sense in context.

D&D 3e has a mixture of realistic/simulitide and cinematic/dramatic powers and rules. Actually, all versions do, from the beginning; hit pionts are abstract and ultimately based on the dramatic concept that more powerful characters and creatures should outlive less powerful and notable ones. Ultimately, all powers, whether simulatory or dramatic, were based on game world reality, what is sometimes called the Simulationationist goal. D&D was a game of both realistic elements and dramatic elements based on fantasy, mythology, and modern poetic tastes.

D&D 4e is a different beast. 4e assigns characters powers based heavily on dramatic rules. Wizard spells still represent a simualtion of a wizard spell, but most of a fighter's powers are based on dramatic combat moves, not on supposed actual skills. Healing surges are another dramatic power, even more removed from simulation than basic hit points. Another consideration in 4e is distinctiveness. Roles, which existed informally to some extent already, became a goal in themselves as a short and simple path to niche protection. Power sources ensured each character type had a distinctive style within a role. Character builts became a way to customize class, making each class distinct from the other but also allowing players to differentiate a character in a particular way. In the end, it does not matter what is "real." What matters is that a power is thematic, distinct, and balanced. How, exactly, a character pushes someone or grants a +1 is not intensively examined. It is up to the players to provide that narration but it's not even truly necessary. In short, many 4e abilities do not simulate anything at all. They provide some dramatic simulation, but they do not refer to any particular reality. The results of these powers, however, do.

Thinking back to the Monopoly example, the purpose of abilities in 4e is to make each PC a unique play experience. And just as we don't worry about whether the train runs on tracks or whether the dog has something to eat, the mechanics in 4e are not given any more underlying reality than is necessary to provide their context within the rules. 4e has become more boardgame. The essence of boardgame is, "Rules are what they are."

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RPG Talk wiki has a new featured article: the D&D supplement, Elder Evils. Your contributions are welcome! Or just stop by to check it out.

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RPG Talk is now over 500 articles strong, but it still needs lots of help. Maybe you have some thoughts on what to do with the displacer beast article currently gracing the front page.

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