Libertad
Legend
Gaming Den Thread Compilation
D&D Wiki Compilation
Web Archive link of 0.51 version, 2008
AwesomeTomes PDF compilation
I will be reviewing the 0.7 version published July 11th, 2010, for being the most up to date document.
What We Do Here is Go Back…
Back, back, back, back, back, back, back to the year 2000. The Y2K Bug's plans for world chaos were averted, the International Space Station became fully operational, and Dungeons & Dragons saw the release of a new edition in the post-TSR era. Beyond just a change in corporate ownership, this new edition also saw a significant change in game design towards a more unified, simulationist take on heroic medieval fantasy via the incorporation of game mechanics into once-narrative elements. PCs, NPCs, and monsters were largely built using the same core set of rules, a universal skill system unlocked features to all characters once the product of specific classes, and intricate rules for item crafting, Professions, and demographic/population generation for settlements sought to emulate the feel of a living, changing world outside of adventures proper.
While 3rd Edition D&D soon proved to be popular, it was hardly a well-designed system. The game was apparently never playtested at high levels, Ivory Tower Game Design intentionally made certain options worse than others while not communicating this to readers in order to "reward mastery of the game," and the large amount of feats, prestige classes, and more turned character creation into a labyrinthine system full of trap options and unexpected synergies originally designed in isolation that could unbalance games. Not only this, but certain rules were sufficiently buried in the text that they went overlooked by most readers, but their discovery can fundamentally change how the game is played. One such rule is that prepared arcane casters are able to leave spell slots open, letting them "fill in" the open slots during the adventuring day via a 15 minute cooldown period.
This gave rise to a thriving Character Optimization culture of min-maxers. Although it was certainly a motivation for some, they didn't necessarily want to break the game or make their PCs the designated protagonists. Many found joy in perusing the many sourcebooks for effective options and combinations to share with the wider online community.
Fast-forward to 2006. James Rolfe, aka the Angry Video Game Nerd, blew up in popularity on YouTube, serving as the trend-setter for the Caustic Critic reviewing style in online gaming and nerd media, emphasizing vulgarity and exaggerated emotions for entertainment value. Half a decade into actual play, many gamers were more aware of 3rd Edition's flaws, and Internet forums were rife with homebrew fixes. One particular piece of homebrew was known as the Tome series, written by Frank Trollman and Keith Kaczmarek. The Tomes achieved a cult following in some 3.X min-max circles for its lengthy effort into re-designing major aspects of the system, with the stated goal of improving upon the game's flaws wholesale. Said following coalesced on a forum known as the Gaming Den, with Frank Trollman in particular becoming a fixture of the community. Although the Tomes had on-and-off updates over the next 4 years, it more or less remains in a permanently unfinished state due to creative differences between the two authors.
So what does the prelude about early 2000s Internet culture and YouTube reviewers have to do with D&D homebrew? Well, it's practically impossible to separate the art from the artist (Frank Trollman in particular) due their big egos and hostile nature to practically everything in tabletop not written by them. It continually seeps into their work and writing style, and not pointing that out as their modus operandi can end up missing important context at times and why they arrived at certain conclusions in their own game design. The Caustic Critic style was adopted in their own analysis of gaming products, with the Gaming Den at large adopting a "Drunken Reviews" series being an obvious tribute to James Rolfe. But unlike Rolf, it didn't end at satirical rage.
The ideal Caustic Critic knows when to "turn off" their persona, and even those skilled at it can cross the line from "good-natured ribbing" to "vindictive meanness." For example, the Spoony One disavowed an earlier Final Fantasy review due to his incessant gay jokes over effeminate features in JRPG protagonists, while Linkara made an apology in a follow-up video when he came off as too dismissive and mean-spirited of a fictional character's attempted suicide.
Frank and Keith never had an "off switch," couldn't take any sort of criticism themselves, and encouraged their fanbase to go on harassment campaigns to other forums by personally attacking posters who didn't uncritically accept their own views on game design. This led to the formation of an insular fanbase and cult of personality that ended up seeing the Gaming Den's regulars banned from virtually every online gaming forum. This effective self-isolation was chiefly due to anti-social behavior, but also unironic elitism in believing that their heavily-houseruled 3.5 games were the only ones worthy of merit in the tabletop fandom. In a way, this very same ego and unwillingness to admit fault had a deleterious effect on Frank and K's own game design, both in the later iterations of the Tomes and other homebrew, to say nothing of sealing their fate in never getting work in the gaming industry.
While the Frank & K Tomes do contain interesting and thoughtful ideas, it is still ultimately a subjective project that ends up leaving in place other equally "broken" aspects of 3rd Edition. Because like all other gamers, Frank, K, and the fanbase that arose around them, have their own subjective desires of what they want out of an ideal game, and what parts they can more easily ignore for suspension of disbelief for the purposes of ultimately telling a good story. And the Tomes are also a cautionary tale, of how even the minds that produced great things can eventually become incapable of replicating future successes.
So, what exactly are the Tome authors' (and by extension the Gaming Den's) design philosophy? There's no singular manifesto, and the Tomes don't explicitly spell this out given that their personal takes on game design are presented as universal, self-evident truths. But I'm familiar enough with their forums that I believe I can summarise much of it as thus:
- Game mechanics must be followed to the letter, irrespective of the spirit of the rules. Edge cases and implicit outcomes that aren't clearly spelled out are a fault of the system, and in and of themselves are enough to make a system a badly-designed failure.
- Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition must be balanced against the standards of highly-optimized primary spellcasters making use of particular game-breaking exploits. Case in point, using Planar Binding and Candles of Invocation to entrap noble efreeti and djinnis into getting multiple castings of the Wish spell as early as 9th level, which is the lynchpin of what the Tome authors call the Wish Economy.
- Favoritism of players in the social contract. The Gaming Den's ideal view of a Dungeon Master is akin to that of a physics engine in a video game: their primary role is to manage the objective mechanics in the game world, de-empasizing their nature as judge and arbiter of the rules. They encourage the removal of as many elements that can be left to DM Fiat as possible, for fear of such power being abused.
- Avoidance of "Magical Tea Party," a term that refers to any element of an RPG that is improvised or doesn't make use of explicit rules in the system. While it ties into the above, the term is so frequently used on the Den as to be an independent section.
- Rules as a physics engine, where the underlying mechanics of gameplay can persist independently of player and DM input. Events that occur during downtime and between adventures must abide by game mechanics and not be handwaved. This is done for the ultimate purpose of presenting a world that is greater than the people sitting at the table. In practical terms, players and DMs rolling dice in isolation outside of game night to generate outcomes are viewed as either a legitimate exploit of the rules, or nigh-mandatory in order to assure that the next adventure starts in a way that is believable to the group. For example, let's say that the town's silver dragon guardian is poisoned and can only be cured by an exotic herb. Well, the DM better roll the dragon a Fortitude save to see if the adventure the DM desires can even be run!
- Selective realism, where certain elements that break suspension of disbelief in the game must be re-designed in such a way as to solve the contradiction. For example, if the stats for a real-world animal in the game don't line up with modern understanding of real-world zoology, then the stats should either be redesigned or the DM comes up with an in-universe explanation of why it's "not like other animals." In practical terms, Frank & K inconsistently apply this based on their own subjective suspension of disbelief, where they can handwave away elements they don't care about but then treat unrealistic rules concerning subjects they care about as a failure of the system.
- Anti-social behavior on the part of players and Dungeon Masters should be dealt with via in-game retribution rather than via out-of-character discussion. If someone at the gaming table is acting like an anti-social weirdo and cannot be punished "in-game," that is a failure of the system and not a failure of the offender at the table. In practical terms, the Gaming Den has encouraged passive-aggressive gaming for their own benefits, such as giving tips to posters who want to ruin a campaign they're currently in to make a point, usually about pulling off a rules exploit that can break the game.
Thoughts: While I am trying to be diplomatic, there are very good reasons why much of the above ethos has not been adopted by the wider gaming public, nor would they actually survive first contact at the average gaming table. It also reflects a weakness in obfuscated communication, as the Tome authors view their fixes as an objective improvement rather than a subjective taste in gaming style. They often don't bother explaining their design goals in detail or why they view certain default rules as bad, much less what makes the Tomes stand apart from other D&D retroclones besides going "we're the only competent designers in the entire industry" or "our Fighters don't suck." But going forward, this above summary gives us a better look at how Frank and Keith set out to "fix D&D" and by what standards they seek to measure themselves and others.
Chapter 1, Basics
The Frank & K Tomes originally consisted of 4 separate threads themed strongly around certain related subject matter: the Tome of Necromancy, Tome of Fiends, Dungeonomicon, and Races of War. The most current version of the Tomes combines all 4 threads (plus supplementary material) into 1 PDF with chapters formatted by subject, which is what we're covering in this review. The Tomes as they stand are not a self-contained product: they make heavy use and reference of the core D20 System rules. There are signs that they were intended to eventually be stand-alone, as the Basics chapter repeats quite a bit of material from the corebooks. Several basic mechanics are absent from the Tomes, such as the different types of modifiers (racial, insight, circumstance, etc). The only difference I can spot is that a caster with a 44-45 in their relevant score only gains 4 bonus 1st level spell slots and not 5 as they do in the default 3rd Edition.
Thoughts: This is not the only time the Tomes would repeat information from the core rules while also making changes and additions. This is counter-intuitive, for as the PHB/DMG/MM plus supplements are still needed to run a Tome game, there's no convenient list in one place of what's changed and what is the same. Relatedly, while most Tome content is core-friendly, there's quite a bit of material that references a wide range of non-core sourcebooks in order to get the most use out of it, which makes this ruleset unfriendly to beginner players, those on a budget, and people who don't want to have to juggle a half-dozen sourcebooks to run a session.
Chapter 2, Character Creation
Another very short chapter, this pretty much repeats what already exists in the Player's Handbook and 3.5 SRD. The biggest change is the discussion of feats: the Tome series recognizes that most feats in 3.5 aren't worth it, so instead they break up feats into four categories: [Combat], [Skill], [Metamagic], and [General]. They're covered in their own chapter, but generally speaking they more closely follow the 5th Edition module of giving you multiple things rather than one, but the amount of goodies they give are contingent on your Base Attack Bonus (Combat), ranks in a particular skill (Skill), or the highest level spell that you can cast (Metamagic). General feats are pretty much the same as in base 3.5. Additionally, while cross-class skill rank limits are still in place, 1 skill point buys you one rank, be it a class or cross-class skill.
Thoughts: Not much to say here, but I do like the "1 point is 1 rank" for cross-class skills, as that was always a nightmare to calculate or reverse-engineer for designing NPCs. What is most surprising is seeing the nine alignments copied wholesale, for the Tome authors have some very strong criticisms of alignment as a concept and even write up various alternatives in a chapter of its own and for the Paladin class in particular.
Chapter 3, Races
Image from DesignForce
This chapter isn't a wholesale restructuring of race as a mechanic, instead creating versions of popular Unusual Races without Level Adjustments, such as drow and aasimar. The authors explain that there's a "pro-prettiness bias" in the game, where humanoids of the more monstrous and evil varieties get saddled with Level Adjustments and role-play restrictions in spite of not being that unbalanced in comparison to humans, halflings, etc.
For those unfamiliar, Level Adjustment was a penalty imposed on Player Characters belonging to more powerful races, treating them as X levels higher than they actually are for the purposes of encounter design and experience point progression. It was an unpopular rule and also treated as more of an art than a science by the designers, causing some rather wonky results.
The LA +0 variants are highly similar to the ones in the 3.5 rules, but with more unbalanced and powerful stuff stripped out, and the weaker races given some goodies to compensate. For example, the aasimar loses energy resistances, the drow does not have Spell Resistance, the goblin gets Mounted Combat as a bonus feat, and orcs are outright immune to ingested poisons. Another notable aspect is that all but one of the Unusual Races get two favored classes instead of 1; the Feytouched only gets Bard.
There is one set of flavor text that leaves my head scratching:
I've seen Death to Smoochy, but I don't understand the Robin Williams reference. I feel like I'm missing some kind of pop-culture in-joke or it's just the authors being quirky.
While reasonable advice, this is something that the Tome authors do contradict themselves on, due to their overall aversion to "DM Empowerment" being used to arbitrarily ban things.
Powerful Races covers playable rules for creatures that are leagues above your standard human/elf/etc, such as giants to illithids. While playable monsters have existed in the fandom dating back to OD&D, 3rd Edition opened the floodgates to all manner of options with their 2003 Savage Species sourcebook. But much like Monte Cook's Ivory Tower Game Design, monstrous PC rules were deliberately underpowered in order to discourage players from selecting them over the standard races. Again without actually communicating this design goal to people buying the book. I've personally seen the discrepancy in actual play, and suffice to say many people who wanted to do the Monster Mash were clamoring for actually balanced rules.
So how do the Tomes handle this? Well, the rules are actually unfinished, with an in-depth method being teased for a Tome of Tiamat that never saw the light of day. The first method is to treat a monster as a character of its Challenge Rating +1, and acknowledges that this method is "fast and easy" but cannot account for edge cases and monsters with unconventional powers. The second method looks at the monster's Hit Die (HD) and Base Attack Bonus (BAB) which is compared with its Challenge Rating (CR), and then converted to values in line with the CR and their closest approximate character class. The section rounds out with several sample conversions of low to middle-level humanoids and giants.
Thoughts: While an improvement over Savage Species, the Tome authors' acknowledgement of its unfinished nature means that a DM will still need to do a lot of work themselves in eyeballing appropriate abilities. Another factor working against the adoption of this rule is that the Challenge Rating system is an art, not a science, and the game designers even admitted that they were just "winging it" in assigning such Ratings to NPCs and monsters. The sample conversions are all non-magical melee brutes that are pretty much interchangeable in roles, so we don't have outlines on how Frank and Keith would use these rules for more exotic options such as illithids and nagas.
Chapter 4, Alignment
Ah, the most-argued element of Dungeons & Dragons by far. It's inevitable that people as strongly opinionated as the Tome authors would have their own take on it, and devote an entire chapter nonetheless!
This chapter is split into four major parts: covering undead and necromancy and their interactions with alignment, what qualifies someone as evil in one's campaign, the same but for good alignment, and the unclear contradictory nature of Law/Chaos. Each section presents its own "Moral/Ethics Option" for presentation, and the implications it has for the rules and the campaign. For necromancy, it posits the question of whether the practice in and of itself is merely extremely dangerous, or actually warps the personality and values of its users. In one example, unintelligent undead are basically rotting computers awaiting inputs from its necroprogrammer, while in the other example they have an instinctual drive to maximize suffering with their every action. The authors do make exceptions, such as encouraging vampires to still have free will while struggling against the negative energy suffusing their souls, while the Deathwatch spell shouldn't have the [Evil] tag because it's not using Negative Energy and merely tells the caster the living state (or lack thereof) of other creatures.
How Black Is the Night? and To Triumph Over Evil take a look at the Evil and Good alignments from a broad perspective. The Moral Options present Implications and Pit Falls to the various takes, and how they can alter the themes and feel of a campaign. Notably in regards to Evil, it mostly focuses on "how evil is Evil?" with the Moral Options rating them from comic relief Saturday Morning Cartoons all the way up to "sadist who only lives to make the world a worse place."
The focus on Good, by contrast, instead focuses on what "isn't Good." For example, it talks about how being overtly religious and "holy" isn't good in and of itself due to the myriad amount of deities in a setting, so Ur-Priests (who steal divine magic from the gods) shouldn't be Evil in the authors' view in and of itself. It also talks about how the Christian concept of redemption is a riskier gambit in D&D settings, as alignment has the backdrop of extraplanar forces waging war and people will be skeptical of potential opportunistic turncoats. Finally, the authors talk about Paladins, and how they aren't so much "exemplars of Good and Law" so much as good-aligned people who have an additional set of restrictions that are more akin to personal moral codes. Thus, failure to live up to them by non-paladins doesn't necessarily make them "less good." The authors do bring up the Baby Orc Dilemma and its contentious nature, but dismiss it as "not important" yet fail to explain why, which is a cop-out and thus begs the question of why bring it up at all?
Finally, we cover Law and Chaos. The authors talk about how the definitions are not really mutually exclusive, asserting that the PHB definitions can let the same characters be logically argued to be both "ultimate Law" and "ultimate Chaos" via the use of broad adjectives. Therefore, the Tomes posit 4 different Ethics Options: one where Law/Chaos primarily reflects one's ability to coordinate levels of personal organization, differing levels of sanity, being the cosmic manifestation of a social construct where your alignment is based on the values of the society's traditions in which you live, and varying levels of willingness to adhere to a consistent set of ethics. The authors do have their personal biases, notably in taking a dim view of the sanity/insanity and societal construct examples, with particular bile being reserved for the sanity/insanity one later on in the text.
While phrased as a supposedly progressive stance against ableism, I can vouch that the Tome authors (Frank Trollman in particular) don't practice what they preach. The "retard" slur is used as an insult 3 other times in this book, and the Gaming Den did much of the same during their verbal-abuse-disguised-as-criticism posts online. I don't believe that the slur is in vogue on the forums anymore due to general social progression, but it is a bit jarring to see the authors waiver later on with this in the same book.
Furthermore, the Tomes make the suggestion of freeing up alignment restrictions on the Law/Chaos axis for several classes, noting that they don't have sufficient in-universe explanations. Particularly for the Barbarian, Bard, and Monk. Regarding Paladins, the Tomes suggest keeping them Lawful Good if you go for the "my word is my bond" approach, but otherwise let them be any Good alignment as they prioritize being good/not doing evil first and foremost.
Thoughts: The authors do a good job of highlighting the fundamental flaws of the alignment system, and while they do highlight suggested alternate definitions so that the gaming table's on the same page, they don't make any suggestions to de-emphasize or rid the system of it entirely besides lifting Law/Chaos restrictions for certain classes. The authors note that there's no real easy question to answer when it comes to portrayal of morality, particularly in regards to actions vs intent or why certain forms of theft and murder by adventurers are "non-evil" but evil when bandits and monsters do the same. And when talking about the default Paladin's code of conduct and how impractical it can be, they don't really talk about ways to make it a more playable character for broader campaign types or when a code-breaking ruling by the DM is sensible vs. nonsensible. As Paladin Code of Conduct is the most commonly-debated and misused set of alignment-based rules, I think that this is the biggest missing aspect of the chapter.
Thoughts So Far: I do like the LA 0 version of humanoid monster races and the discussion of how alignment is less objective than it appears. I do feel that the repetition of basic rules from the Core Books is a detraction, particularly when mixed with subtle changes that aren't overtly called out in the text. We do start seeing the seeds of unclear design decisions in the text, where the authors expect the reader to intuitively understand certain design decisions, most notably in dismissing the Baby Orc Dilemma as an "unimportant" conversation point for morality. I would've liked to see fuller systems for playable monsters or an alternative consistent moral system, but I imagine that such tasks would effectively be projects of their own.
Join us next time as we cover Character Base Classes, both new and redesigned!
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