AMA: Richard Baker, author of lots of stuff!

[NiClerigo]

By the way, Birthright is your creation, and much better than the Forgotten Realms in my opinion.

 

[Orius]

I just want to say that the World Builder's Guidebook is one of the best D&D products I ever bought. I've had it for 20 years, and it's gotten some pretty heavy use in all that time, including the hex mapping paper. It's looking downright battered these days, but I got my money's worth out of it, and I've got a bunch of handwritten notes in there that customize or expand on things.

 

[Ricochet]

I just want to say that the World Builder's Guidebook is one of the best D&D products I ever bought. I've had it for 20 years, and it's gotten some pretty heavy use in all that time, including the hex mapping paper. It's looking downright battered these days, but I got my money's worth out of it, and I've got a bunch of handwritten notes in there that customize or expand on things.

Holy cow, that was a Richard Baker product? Just this evening I was sifting through old notes and maps and found several grids from that book scribbled to pieces by my hand! I still have the book too, and use it at times, though infrequently nowadays. Another wonderful product.

 

[JeffB]

Thanks, Jeff! Kind of you to say so.

You know, the idea of just publishing a nice sandboxy adventure along the lines of Phandelver never crossed my mind. I've been looking at things like Primeval Thule adventures, but your idea definitely has merit. I'm going to think on that for a bit!


Rich

Alight!

I will PM you my address for the Royalty Checks

Thanks Rich, hope you folks are able to get some produced. I have almost zero use for the big AP adventures and a real need for things like Phandelver or small self contained adventures like in the days of yore (and like the Lost Tower of Vlondor(?) I purchased from Sasquatch in the 13th Age format)

 

[Rich Baker]

I love the Gammaworld D&D 4e rules. I still play that game despite not playing any other 4e, I think it's arguably the best version of those rules. What inspired you folks to do the dual class/race thing instead of skill based or class based race and class?

Hi, Darjr -- Mostly it was about building a good random character gen system and fitting it into a tight space limit. We felt that the iconic Gamma World experience from back in the day was rolling on mutation tables with no idea what you would get. Also: Early in our design work we realized that mutation sets made better and more intuitive correlations to "roles" than an artificial concept like character class would -- in other words, if you rolled up a big rocky guy, you'd expect him to be tough and you'd expect him to tank for the party. So, rather than try to teach someone about a non-obvious concept like "fighter" or "rogue" we decided to encode that in the mutation sets, simplifying and streamlining the game.


Rich

 

[Rich Baker]

Big fan of your Dark Sun work. I have a couple questions about it:

1) Obviously, some of the changes had to be made, as dictated by the 4th edition design theory. Were there changes made that you would not have made if it was your choice, or were there things kept the same that yo wanted to change?

2) If you were to do Dark Sun for 5th edition, what would you do that you didn't do for 4th?

Hi, Fergug --

I was actually pretty happy with 4e for Dark Sun. If there was anything that didn't go quite the way I wanted, I would have to say it was the implementation of defiling magic and preserving magic. We couldn't capture the idea that a defiler had a real edge over a preserver by advancing faster or generating powerful magical effects more easily, an idea that is really hard-coded in the lore of the Dark Sun setting--instead we set it up so a defiler had to hurt his allies to get his advantage, which is not the way it was in the books. We also had to keep psionic wild talents under control.

I'm not sure I would do things much differently for a Dark Sun 5e--I was pretty happy with how the 4e version turned out. I think I would keep the idea of "themes" with a signature ability useful in combat, and basically make Dark Sun backgrounds bigger and sexier than core 5e backgrounds. (We did something a lot like this for our Primeval Thule Campaign Setting.) Also, I think we'd want to take another look at the gear, metal-poor weapons, etc. I'm a little bummed out by how simple 5e weapons are and I wish they came with more interesting characteristics.


Rich

 

[Rich Baker]

Agreed Lost Mine of Phandelver was great. I loved Birthright... do you think that WotC will ever open it up for the DM's Guild?

No idea, Zed (may I call you Zed?) I think Wizards has little to lose by opening up more of the old worlds to fan development through the DM's Guild, but I am not part of the collective any more.


Rich

 

[Rich Baker]

Hi Rich,

thanks a lot for the answer! Take this as my personal experiences/opinions, I'm sure other people differ (and A.NET has a lot of great ideas for some of these issues):

- I like that the step-difficulty with dice as modifiers and that a single roll produces different type of successes. I don't care that much if it's roll-under or over if that continues to be the case, I have become a huge fan of a single roll giving more than a binary result (like in games based on Apocalypse World).
- I never liked that Skill Points were tied to Int, it made it way too important.
- I like the races (a lot actually), but the classes reminded me a little too much of DnD in space. I like the idea of giving discounts to certain skills to specialize, but maybe they could be "narrower" instead of so open ended.
- I find character advancement very slow/uninteresting. I'm not sure what's the exact issue, if it's that raising ranks is too expensive, characters get too few skill points, skill ranks are too separated between each other... Or maybe a little of everything. This is my main problem with Alternity.
- Characters that use psionics/fx usually ended too low on other skills. I think I would collapse the skill list a little (I love how varied it is, but there may be a little too many).
- I enjoy a lot the damage/armor/health rules (although I think I'm a minority here). Maybe something to reduce a little the spiral of death as characters start getting injured would be nice.

That's what I can come up with on top of my head right now. I'll give it another thought when I get home and I can sit with the books.

Regards!
Vicente

Good suggestions. I have come to really appreciate the way the skill lists work in 4e and 5e as compared to 3e or Pathfinder (mostly because I am playing in a 3.5 game at home, and it drives me nuts that I don't have the skill points to be good at a group of closely associated things like hide-move silent, or balance-tumble-jump, etc.) And micromanaging skill point assignments is something I kind of don't want to do anymore.


Rich

 

[Rich Baker]

Rich, thanks for being here. My question is about Aduria in Birthright: can you give us an overview of it? Ed Stark said that it was like an exotic South America without the Aztec or Mayan influences; and all I find are fan creations. I'd love to know more about it. Thanks!

Hi, Nicolas --

OK, the very short version, because it was 20 years ago and I no longer have any of the notes . . . Aduria was sort of South America-shaped with a Mediterranean in the middle, about where the Amazon basin would be. The northern shores near Cerilia were mostly barren desert. Beyond the deserts were a number of realms that were basically former Anuirean colonies/survivor states. Some of the original ethnic homelands for races found in Cerilia were scattered around in that area, too (many of them emigrated out of Aduria in the years before Deismaar). We had some rough ideas of a Persian-like cultural group in Aduria, a genie-influenced cultural group, and (off on the western coast) a Celtic-like culture. That's about all I remember--other than the fact that we were told at one point to put Eleanor of Aquitaine in the middle of it.


Rich

 

[Rich Baker]

I just want to say that the World Builder's Guidebook is one of the best D&D products I ever bought. I've had it for 20 years, and it's gotten some pretty heavy use in all that time, including the hex mapping paper. It's looking downright battered these days, but I got my money's worth out of it, and I've got a bunch of handwritten notes in there that customize or expand on things.

Thanks, Orius! I had a lot of fun working on World Builder's. As it turns out I had a good mix of geography and history in my college days, so I was able to make good use of my interests to create random-generation systems that produced somewhat "realistic" results. I used to think of material like that for D&D as "rainy day activities," things you could do with D&D when your friends weren't around. Now there's the internet.


Rich