Mouseferatu
Hero
Lots of folks have been talking about they’d like to see in a hypothetical 5th edition, whenever it may appear. More of this sort of content, less of that; more focus here, less there; include these races, not those. And, of course, there’s the question as to whether 5E will appear in hardcopy form, or whether it’ll be entirely an electronic rules set.
I’m not here to answer any of that. I haven’t the foggiest idea, any more than anyone else, as to what the future holds for D&D. But I have been thinking a lot about this recently, and I’ve come to a pretty strong conclusion regarding what I want to see.
Not in terms of content or focus, mind you. Not even in terms of physical vs. electronic format. No, what I’ve been thinking about is presentation.
I’ve been thinking about all the complaints I’ve heard about D&D throughout the many years, and throughout the editions; about some of what WotC has said and done recently; about whether or not RPGs can even hope to compete against other forms of interactive entertainment in the day and age. And what I’ve decided is that presentation is something that every edition of D&D has gotten wrong—every edition save one.
With all love and respect to the guys I worked with on both 3E and 4E, I’ve come to believe that BECMI—or, for those not familiar with the lingo, the series of boxed sets comprised of the Basic, Expert, Companion, Master, and Immortals rules—is the only edition/version of D&D that really got presentation right.
Oh, there have been nods in that direction. 3E tried a couple of different introductory sets. 4E has both an intro set and the Essentials line, which is a little closer to what I’m talking about. But they’re still not close.
(Just to be clear, before I go on, I’m not talking hard numbers or sales figures. I have no real idea what actually sells on shelves. I’m talking about what I think is best for the game itself; if I’m right, then hopefully better sales would follow, but I don’t pretend to know that for certain.)
So what is it that I think was so much better about BECMI? As I said, the presentation itself. The “Red Box” basic set was very much an introductory product. It contained only the most essential bare-bones rules (or at least, it didn’t go too far beyond them). Players could easily sit down and figure out how to play after only a few minutes of studying the rulebook. Sure, they might get a few details wrong, but these are things they could iron out during play; they’d at least have a pretty close approximation of the genuine game experience.
Couldn’t the same be said of the 3E or 4E intro sets? Well, to an extent, yes. But the difference is that the Red Box was also a game unto itself. True, you had only a limited selection of options—only a handful of classes, only a handful of spells for magic-users or clerics, only a handful of monsters, only a few levels of advancement, and a play experience that was (by the available rules) limited primarily to dungeon crawls and the like. It was restricted, yes, but it was still a full-fledged game. You could play for quite some time with just the Red Box. You could create multiple characters, and go through it multiple times. You could purchase a selection of adventures and use them with just that game.
This is arguably not the case with the 3E and 4E intro sets. They don’t provide nearly as wide an array of tools. They provide (roughly) only a couple of adventures’-worth of play experience. The 4E intro set contains a “pick-a-path”-style of character creation that is brilliant when it comes to teaching newcomers what it means to create a character—but it doesn’t contain a rules set for people who want to create characters without going through that particular process.
In other words, it’s clearly an intro, not a game unto itself. Nothing wrong with that, since that’s all it claims to be—but I don’t think it’s as effective as an actual basic game.
But even if they were equivalent—the 3E and 4E basic sets with the BECMI Red Box—the comparison would break down after that. With 3E and 4E, it’s a two-step process: Finish with the basic, dive headlong into the multi-hundred-page books that comprise the core of the “real” game. Frankly, it’s daunting. I’ve seen quite a few potential players turned off by the sheer volume. (And yes, we all know that a newcomer doesn’t really have to know more than a small portion of what’s out there—but that doesn’t make it appear any less massive to someone who doesn’t really know better. The psychological benefit of having the different levels of complexity parceled out, and the difference that makes in the overall difficulty of absorbing the rules, cannot be overstated.)
BECMI continued to parcel it out. Each subsequent box contained a collection of higher levels, of new options for players and DMs. New spells, new magic items, new monsters, sure; but also knew types of play. The Expert set introduced wilderness play and sea travel, for instance. The Companion set got into strongholds. Each set built on what came before, both in terms of expanding existing options and adding entirely new ones.
And each was small, relatively focused. The game was built in a sufficiently piecemeal fashion that it could expand as the skill and the needs of the group expanded.
Again, later editions have made some nods in these directions. In 4E, for instance, the Player’s Handbook 3 classes are more complex to play than the PH2 and PH1 classes; and some of the Essentials classes are simpler even than those in PH1. But again, these are only steps, and not—or so I feel—really sufficient to match the elegant simplicity of the BECMI progression.
I understand the reluctance to have a step-by-step progression of this sort. After all, most RPGs don’t. Most of them throw you right in with the main rules. But let’s be honest; most of them also aren’t nearly as mechanical as D&D. (I’m not putting this forth as a positive or a negative; simply a truth.) D&D is very crunchy; it always has been, though the precise levels have certainly fluctuated from edition to edition. It’s a lot to absorb; for a newcomer to RPGs, especially today when they have MMOs as an alternative, it can very easily appear to be more trouble than it’s worth.
I keep pointing out the nods that 4E has made in this direction, but I also need to point out somewhere I think 4E actually made things harder on the newcomer. Every prior edition has offered classes that play very differently; some were complex, but some were incredibly easy. In BECMI through 2E, if you had a newcomer to the game, you have him or her a fighter, or maybe a thief. Why? Because they were a whole lot simpler to play than a mage/wizard or a cleric. People who got to know the rules and wanted more complexity moved on to other classes; people who were comfortable with the existing level of complexity stayed where they were.
Fighters and rogues got a bit more complex with 3E, but the general pattern still held; they were much easier classes to play.
With 4E? Not so much. I understand the desire to give all the classes “cool toys” in the form of maneuver/power equivalents to spells. I really do, and when 4E came out, I applauded it. I still applaud the motivation behind it. Why should more tactical/mechanical-minded players be limited to spellcasters? Why should the martial classes be relegated to a small selection of options that amounts to “I swing, I hit, I do damage”? I get all that, I really do.
But they also lost an advantage by doing so (one which I think I’ve touched on before): There simply were no “beginner classes” any longer. In core 4E, there were no classes that were simple to play, without the requirement of making multiple tactical decisions every round. (Yes, I know that some are still simpler than others—archer rangers are easier than wizards—but these are matters of slight degree, not overall play style. They’re certainly not comparable to the differences between classes in older editions.) Essentials ameliorates this problem to an extent—some of the new classes, particularly the martial variants, really are much simpler than core D&D classes—but I’m not sure it’s enough.
Why not? Back to that magic word: Presentation. No matter how well Wizards markets Essentials, it’s always going to be seen—at least by a large portion of the market—as a supplement to “real” 4E. Plus, while it rolls the complexity problem back to where it was in 1E through 3E, it still doesn’t push it back to where I’d like to see it: BECMI.
So, what does all this mean? It means that, for a hypothetical 5E, I’d like to see a partial return to the BECMI presentation.
It doesn’t have to be that precise division of boxes. Maybe it’ll be four sets. Maybe it’ll be three, based on the tiers of play in 4E. I don’t know.
What I know is this:
The first set should be a basic game. It should contain the core rules. It should contain an array of simple classes. It should focus on the easier play styles—perhaps urban and dungeon. And it should cover only the first few levels of play. (Or at most, the first tier.)
Additional sets would add higher levels. They’d add higher-level options (such as paragon paths or prestige classes). They’d add additional classes, those that are more complex to play. They’d add new play options—wilderness, planar, political. Exactly as the BECMI boxes did.
And yes, that means there would be some simple classes (akin to the old-edition fighter and thief, or perhaps the Essentials fighter sub-types), and more complex ones (akin to the old-edition spellcasters, or the 4E core classes). They wouldn’t be mixed into one book; they’d be presented as exactly what they are: More complex options for more experienced players.
(It seems, at least based on the first boxed set, that the Dragon Age game is doing just this. I'm looking forward to further sets, to see if the pattern continues.)
This is not just for the benefit of beginners, mind you. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I know that in every D&D group I’ve ever been in, there’s been a pretty wide range of preference in terms of tactical and mathematical complexity. I’ve seen players—some new to the game, but some multi-year veterans—who just don’t want to choose spells/powers every round. They’d much rather play something more akin to the 1E fighter, the 2E thief, or the 4E slayer. People who want a simpler game have it; people who want a more complex game have that, too. And newcomers to the game don’t have a daunting wall of text and pages to wade through, multiple dozens of choices to make. They have a game that’s still immersive, but which they can begin playing in minutes rather than hours.
I truly believe it’ll make for a better game. And as D&D and other RPGs continue to have to compete with “plug-n-play” experiences such as MMOs and certain board games, I honestly wonder if the game can survive without such a system of tiered complexity.
I’m not here to answer any of that. I haven’t the foggiest idea, any more than anyone else, as to what the future holds for D&D. But I have been thinking a lot about this recently, and I’ve come to a pretty strong conclusion regarding what I want to see.
Not in terms of content or focus, mind you. Not even in terms of physical vs. electronic format. No, what I’ve been thinking about is presentation.
I’ve been thinking about all the complaints I’ve heard about D&D throughout the many years, and throughout the editions; about some of what WotC has said and done recently; about whether or not RPGs can even hope to compete against other forms of interactive entertainment in the day and age. And what I’ve decided is that presentation is something that every edition of D&D has gotten wrong—every edition save one.
With all love and respect to the guys I worked with on both 3E and 4E, I’ve come to believe that BECMI—or, for those not familiar with the lingo, the series of boxed sets comprised of the Basic, Expert, Companion, Master, and Immortals rules—is the only edition/version of D&D that really got presentation right.
Oh, there have been nods in that direction. 3E tried a couple of different introductory sets. 4E has both an intro set and the Essentials line, which is a little closer to what I’m talking about. But they’re still not close.
(Just to be clear, before I go on, I’m not talking hard numbers or sales figures. I have no real idea what actually sells on shelves. I’m talking about what I think is best for the game itself; if I’m right, then hopefully better sales would follow, but I don’t pretend to know that for certain.)
So what is it that I think was so much better about BECMI? As I said, the presentation itself. The “Red Box” basic set was very much an introductory product. It contained only the most essential bare-bones rules (or at least, it didn’t go too far beyond them). Players could easily sit down and figure out how to play after only a few minutes of studying the rulebook. Sure, they might get a few details wrong, but these are things they could iron out during play; they’d at least have a pretty close approximation of the genuine game experience.
Couldn’t the same be said of the 3E or 4E intro sets? Well, to an extent, yes. But the difference is that the Red Box was also a game unto itself. True, you had only a limited selection of options—only a handful of classes, only a handful of spells for magic-users or clerics, only a handful of monsters, only a few levels of advancement, and a play experience that was (by the available rules) limited primarily to dungeon crawls and the like. It was restricted, yes, but it was still a full-fledged game. You could play for quite some time with just the Red Box. You could create multiple characters, and go through it multiple times. You could purchase a selection of adventures and use them with just that game.
This is arguably not the case with the 3E and 4E intro sets. They don’t provide nearly as wide an array of tools. They provide (roughly) only a couple of adventures’-worth of play experience. The 4E intro set contains a “pick-a-path”-style of character creation that is brilliant when it comes to teaching newcomers what it means to create a character—but it doesn’t contain a rules set for people who want to create characters without going through that particular process.
In other words, it’s clearly an intro, not a game unto itself. Nothing wrong with that, since that’s all it claims to be—but I don’t think it’s as effective as an actual basic game.
But even if they were equivalent—the 3E and 4E basic sets with the BECMI Red Box—the comparison would break down after that. With 3E and 4E, it’s a two-step process: Finish with the basic, dive headlong into the multi-hundred-page books that comprise the core of the “real” game. Frankly, it’s daunting. I’ve seen quite a few potential players turned off by the sheer volume. (And yes, we all know that a newcomer doesn’t really have to know more than a small portion of what’s out there—but that doesn’t make it appear any less massive to someone who doesn’t really know better. The psychological benefit of having the different levels of complexity parceled out, and the difference that makes in the overall difficulty of absorbing the rules, cannot be overstated.)
BECMI continued to parcel it out. Each subsequent box contained a collection of higher levels, of new options for players and DMs. New spells, new magic items, new monsters, sure; but also knew types of play. The Expert set introduced wilderness play and sea travel, for instance. The Companion set got into strongholds. Each set built on what came before, both in terms of expanding existing options and adding entirely new ones.
And each was small, relatively focused. The game was built in a sufficiently piecemeal fashion that it could expand as the skill and the needs of the group expanded.
Again, later editions have made some nods in these directions. In 4E, for instance, the Player’s Handbook 3 classes are more complex to play than the PH2 and PH1 classes; and some of the Essentials classes are simpler even than those in PH1. But again, these are only steps, and not—or so I feel—really sufficient to match the elegant simplicity of the BECMI progression.
I understand the reluctance to have a step-by-step progression of this sort. After all, most RPGs don’t. Most of them throw you right in with the main rules. But let’s be honest; most of them also aren’t nearly as mechanical as D&D. (I’m not putting this forth as a positive or a negative; simply a truth.) D&D is very crunchy; it always has been, though the precise levels have certainly fluctuated from edition to edition. It’s a lot to absorb; for a newcomer to RPGs, especially today when they have MMOs as an alternative, it can very easily appear to be more trouble than it’s worth.
I keep pointing out the nods that 4E has made in this direction, but I also need to point out somewhere I think 4E actually made things harder on the newcomer. Every prior edition has offered classes that play very differently; some were complex, but some were incredibly easy. In BECMI through 2E, if you had a newcomer to the game, you have him or her a fighter, or maybe a thief. Why? Because they were a whole lot simpler to play than a mage/wizard or a cleric. People who got to know the rules and wanted more complexity moved on to other classes; people who were comfortable with the existing level of complexity stayed where they were.
Fighters and rogues got a bit more complex with 3E, but the general pattern still held; they were much easier classes to play.
With 4E? Not so much. I understand the desire to give all the classes “cool toys” in the form of maneuver/power equivalents to spells. I really do, and when 4E came out, I applauded it. I still applaud the motivation behind it. Why should more tactical/mechanical-minded players be limited to spellcasters? Why should the martial classes be relegated to a small selection of options that amounts to “I swing, I hit, I do damage”? I get all that, I really do.
But they also lost an advantage by doing so (one which I think I’ve touched on before): There simply were no “beginner classes” any longer. In core 4E, there were no classes that were simple to play, without the requirement of making multiple tactical decisions every round. (Yes, I know that some are still simpler than others—archer rangers are easier than wizards—but these are matters of slight degree, not overall play style. They’re certainly not comparable to the differences between classes in older editions.) Essentials ameliorates this problem to an extent—some of the new classes, particularly the martial variants, really are much simpler than core D&D classes—but I’m not sure it’s enough.
Why not? Back to that magic word: Presentation. No matter how well Wizards markets Essentials, it’s always going to be seen—at least by a large portion of the market—as a supplement to “real” 4E. Plus, while it rolls the complexity problem back to where it was in 1E through 3E, it still doesn’t push it back to where I’d like to see it: BECMI.
So, what does all this mean? It means that, for a hypothetical 5E, I’d like to see a partial return to the BECMI presentation.
It doesn’t have to be that precise division of boxes. Maybe it’ll be four sets. Maybe it’ll be three, based on the tiers of play in 4E. I don’t know.
What I know is this:
The first set should be a basic game. It should contain the core rules. It should contain an array of simple classes. It should focus on the easier play styles—perhaps urban and dungeon. And it should cover only the first few levels of play. (Or at most, the first tier.)
Additional sets would add higher levels. They’d add higher-level options (such as paragon paths or prestige classes). They’d add additional classes, those that are more complex to play. They’d add new play options—wilderness, planar, political. Exactly as the BECMI boxes did.
And yes, that means there would be some simple classes (akin to the old-edition fighter and thief, or perhaps the Essentials fighter sub-types), and more complex ones (akin to the old-edition spellcasters, or the 4E core classes). They wouldn’t be mixed into one book; they’d be presented as exactly what they are: More complex options for more experienced players.
(It seems, at least based on the first boxed set, that the Dragon Age game is doing just this. I'm looking forward to further sets, to see if the pattern continues.)
This is not just for the benefit of beginners, mind you. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I know that in every D&D group I’ve ever been in, there’s been a pretty wide range of preference in terms of tactical and mathematical complexity. I’ve seen players—some new to the game, but some multi-year veterans—who just don’t want to choose spells/powers every round. They’d much rather play something more akin to the 1E fighter, the 2E thief, or the 4E slayer. People who want a simpler game have it; people who want a more complex game have that, too. And newcomers to the game don’t have a daunting wall of text and pages to wade through, multiple dozens of choices to make. They have a game that’s still immersive, but which they can begin playing in minutes rather than hours.
I truly believe it’ll make for a better game. And as D&D and other RPGs continue to have to compete with “plug-n-play” experiences such as MMOs and certain board games, I honestly wonder if the game can survive without such a system of tiered complexity.
