Just came across this page (http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/dnd/20030705a) at the WOTC site. Thought some of you fellows may find it interesting.
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It's finally here -- the much-anticipated revision of the core D&D rules. Now that you can thumb through the new Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, and Monster Manual to your heart's content, let the design team lead you on a behind-the-scenes tour of how the books came together. Read exclusive firsthand accounts of the debates and decisions that mattered most.
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Monster Manual Design Notes
By Rich Baker
My work on the Monster Manual started first thing in September of 2002. I assumed design lead duties after our reorganization, and picked up where Skip Williams had left off work. Skip handled a lot of the groundwork for the Monster Manual, including the Base Attack/Grapple line entries for every creature, the collection of 3rd Edition Monster Manual errata and corrections, the first draft of the How to Build a Monster material, and a number of other minor changes.
At about the time I became actively involved with the Monster Manual, we decided that the revisions should be pushed more aggressively, so the first thing I did was examine the book in its entirety and think hard about what it ought to do. I made a number of organizational changes to help the book's presentation of information. With the addition of the monster creation material, the front matter of the Monster Manual had crept up to nearly 50 pages of stuff before you even got to the first monster! I rebuilt that material as later chapters in the book so that the reader would get to the monsters right away. We observed that the complicated "gang entries" of statistic blocks in multiple columns was difficult to navigate and often resulted in a monster's description landing on a different page than its statistics (or illustration), so we broke up many of the gang entries into sequential entries. We found that we were repeating many pieces of information in each monster with our Monster Manual II format, so we moved most of the critical definitions to the Glossary in the back of the book to make it easier for the DM to quickly find definitions of what the undead type does, how incorporeality works, and so on.
Then, we looked at what the entries were lacking. Bill Slavicsek, director of RPG R&D, asked me to consider the notion of adding high-powered, scarier versions of some common monsters -- something that would put a little fear and excitement back into the players. So, we created more than two dozen advanced monsters, such as the mummy lord, the dread wraith, and the aboleth mage. (I had a lot of help with this. Jennifer Clarke Wilkes, David Eckelberry, James Wyatt, Andrew Finch, and Mike Donais contributed a number of these guys for me.) We wanted to make the Monster Manual more player-friendly, so we added "As Characters" information to a number of monsters that might be used as PCs in wide-open games. Finally, we wanted to take some steps toward making our most complex monsters more usable for novice DMs, so we added "Tactics Round-by-Round" sections to a half-dozen of our toughest monsters.
In addition to these organizational issues, we also had some honest-to-gosh game design to do. After carefully examining the Monster Manual and looking over our monster design standards, I decided to push for a streamlined, unified system of monster skill point and feat acquisition. The 3.0 version of this system created a lot of troubles for playing monsters as characters, and made it very hard to design monsters and get them right. I discussed the proposition with the rest of the design team, and we decided to go ahead with the work. So, we wound up "re-SPFing" every monster in the book. ("SPFing" being our term for redoing a monster's skill points and feats to 3.5 standards.) This also gave us a good opportunity to make better use of the new skills, feats, and synergies in the revised Player's Handbook.
We also handled a lot of tactical design issues, such as the individual characteristics of a number of monsters. For example, demons and devils in 3.0 had glass "jaws" -- they didn't have the hit points needed for their CRs. They also were hard to run, because many of them had dozens of spell-like abilities. Dave Eckelberry and Andrew Finch tackled the job of redoing the demons and devils so they would be tougher, cooler, and easier to run. The delver's AC was too low for its CR and description. Mummy rot lacked the scare-power it had in previous editions. Damage reduction was often not significant for a monster, and really existed only as a bragging point between outsiders. Some of the illustrations weren't exactly what we wanted to show folks for 3rd Edition, and just didn't come far enough from the 2nd Edition look. We handled a great number of relatively minor changes like this. A lot of creatures in the 3.0 Monster Manual were converted more or less directly from 2nd Edition, and we gave them a more thorough and rigorous examination this time around.
Overall, you'll find that the new Monster Manual includes dozens of new monsters, presents more information with a better organization, provides a number of cool new tools for the DM and player, and rebalances the game to provide a better, more scalable set of threats for your D&D game.
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The Ranger Design Notes
By Andy Collins
Perhaps the most important element of the Player's Handbook revision was addressing inequalities between the various classes. Though opinions on the topic varied wildly, there was a general agreement that some of the classes needed significant help to bring them up to par with the other classes. The class that generated the greatest call for revision was the ranger.
Thanks in large part to its strong association with popular heroes such as Aragorn, Robin Hood, and Drizzt Do'Urden, the ranger occupies a special place in the hearts of many D&D players. The image of a hardy, self-sufficient wilderness warrior is a strong one, and the class has a long history in D&D. But despite having some cool abilities in 3rd Edition, the latest incarnation of the class failed to capture fully the imaginations and hearts of the players. Worse yet, it felt to many like the barbarian's weak cousin, as that class had much more potently captured the image described above. Something had to be done about this.
I started by examining the class's characteristics to determine what role the ranger was trying to fulfill in a typical group of adventurers. With his d10 Hit Die, good base attack bonus, and good Fortitude saves, he looked a lot like the fighter, suggesting that he was intended to serve primarily as a combatant. Though proficient with both light and medium armor as well as shields, the ranger's default protection was light armor, as anything heavier denied access to his two-weapon fighting ability. This tactic also precluded common use of a shield. In effect, the typical ranger was trying to stand next to the fighter, but with an AC anywhere from 4 to 6 points lower. Worse yet, the ranger's default combat style carried with it a -2 penalty to attacks and a reliance on lighter weapons, meaning the ranger dealt out less damage on average than a typical fighter unless fighting a favored enemy. In effect, the role of "tough warrior of the wilderness" was filled not by the ranger, but by the barbarian, who had better hit points, AC, and damage-dealing capability.
The ranger also had a decent skill selection, with 4 skill points to spend at each level and a lengthy list of class skills. However, one of these skill points was "taken" every level to enable another class feature (since the Track feat required a good Wilderness Lore skill modifier to function well), meaning the character had only 3 discretionary points to spend. With useful and/or symbolic skills such as Animal Empathy, Climb, Handle Animal, Hide, Intuit Direction, Knowledge (nature), Listen, Move Silently, Search, and Spot all vying for the character's attention, most rangers simply didn't have the skill points to properly fill the role of "skilled hunter and stalker" as described in the Player's Handbook. Even with the addition of the ranger's minor spellcasting ability, the class just couldn't keep up with the other classes in terms of overall contribution to the party's success.
In the end, I decided that the class had to move away from being a front-line fighter -- a role already competently filled by the fighter, paladin, and barbarian -- and toward being a skilled skirmisher -- a role currently occupied by only the rogue and monk.
I started with the Hit Die. For most players, the d10 Hit Die sends a clear signal that "this class is about melee combat." While the ranger is a competent warrior, I think many players overestimate his abilities in front-line combat due to that Hit Die. In dropping it to d8, we aimed to change the default view of the ranger from front-line fighter to skirmisher (much like the monk). That said, the loss of hit points isn't as severe as it would appear -- it's really a perception shift more than a reality shift. Over the course of 20 levels, an average ranger will have only a mere 21 fewer hit points than a fighter or paladin with the same Constitution. At any given level, that's only about 12 to 18 percent deficit (and the higher the Constitution score, the lower the percentage difference). In part to make up for that loss, we gave the ranger a good Reflex save. This not only meant the ranger would be losing fewer hit points to most magical attacks than the fighter (thanks to more successful Reflex saves), but it also established the ranger's saves as different from any other class.
In conjunction with that change, we wanted to give the ranger who chose to avoid melee combat another option. To accomplish this, we added a second "fighting style" track -- archery -- to parallel the ranger's two-weapon fighting style. This also achieved a goal of making the "bow-hunting ranger" a more common (and viable) character archetype. The fighting style also shifted to 2nd level, to reduce the front-loaded nature of the class.
Another significant shift came with skills. At 4 points per level, the ranger competed on even terms with the barbarian, but couldn't hope to compare to the rogue. Increasing this number to 6 per level, while simultaneously reducing the number of skills the ranger wanted to spend points on (by folding Intuit Direction into the Wilderness Lore skill, later renamed Survival, and by making Animal Empathy a class feature), meant that rangers could cover the skills necessary to be a true hunter. It also reduced the ranger's incentive to multiclass with rogue for extra skill points.
After the major changes were done, I rounded out the class with a few other details. He lost medium armor proficiency, since most rangers weren't interested in wearing medium armor anyway. With a high Reflex save, many rangers would be interested in picking up a couple levels of rogue for evasion. To reduce the frequency of this "no-brainer" decision, the ranger picked up evasion as a 9th-level class feature. His favored enemy bonus increased, making it a more significant part of his abilities, and also became more flexible, allowing a ranger to select and improve on his ability to fight tough opponents at higher levels. Finally, the ranger spell list picked up a few more spells, making that ability more attractive for use.
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Assassins, Magic Items, and Monsters Design Notes
By Gwendolyn F.M. Kestrel
Assassin
A dark figure stealthily maneuvers along the top of the castle wall and sneaks shadow-quiet into the Chamberlain's bedroom.
Thunk! The assassin's bulky backpack knocks over an oil lamp. It crashes to the floor, awakening the Chamberlain.
"Guards! Guards!"
Why would an assassin carry a bulky backpack? His cumbersome spellbook.
James Wyatt was the first one to point out to me the spellbook-toting assassin. With the unanimous approval of the department, I made the assassin a spontaneous caster.
Magic Items
Pricing magic items is something I've grown quite comfortable doing through large amounts of practice. The rules have generally stayed the same between versions 3.0 and 3.5, but the framework of the game around them changed.
Rich Redman did a splendid job of initially repricing items to conform with changes to spells and also to rebalance items' costs with their usefulness. For instance, the fly spell changed significantly --shorter duration, lesser speed, and decreased maneuverability. A new spell, overland flight, now occupies the long-duration flying niche, requiring development of magic items such as winged boots and flying carpets. I continued Rich's process of magic item repricing, and also got to add in a number of other items. Some, like the metamagic rods, were developed from existing products. Others were ones I created such as the robe of bones.
While the rules for pricing items remain the same as those in the previous version, we've worked to clarify them and make them more accessible. With a view to that end, I created the DMG's Table 7-32: Summary of Magic Item Creation Costs. Its simple, graphical format should be a good aid to players making new items.
We also learned that many gamers find creating magic items too big an investment of their character's time. The creation cost in gold and experience points are reasonable in any campaign, but some settings are so dynamic that item-creating characters lacked the time to make anything worthwhile. In 3rd Edition, while creating magic items, "[the caster] cannot take a day off." Folks will be happy to read the revised Creating Magic Items section on pages 282-283: "The caster works for 8 hours each day. He cannot rush the process by working longer each day. But the days need not be consecutive, and the caster can use the rest of his time as he sees fit. A character who takes a break from item creation to adventure should keep track of how many days of work remain on that item."
Monsters' Level Adjustments
Savage Species broke ground on playing monsters as characters and integrating level adjustments and effective character level (ECL) into play. Monster Manual entries for critters likely to be played as characters include a detailed As Character section.
Further, we included level adjustments in the Monster Manual. Over the course of several meetings, I worked with the designers to finalize a list of which monsters would receive what level adjustment. We established criteria to guide our use of them in the book. We wanted to include numbers for species likely to be played as character or desired as cohorts. The creatures had to be reasonably understood without much additional work on the part of the DM. The critters needed to be intelligent (Int >2) and have opposable thumbs. It also meant restricting the ECL totals to less than 20 to ensure nonepic playability.
Monsters' Feats and Skills
"Grrr! Argh!"
Somewhat late in the whole revision development process, Rich Baker hit upon a brilliant way of synching up monsters and characters, making the way they acquire feats and skills harmonious. "Yipee!" Of course, that meant that he, Jennifer Clarke Wilkes, and I had to update every single monster. "Grrr! Argh!" Ah, so much work -- but quite worthwhile in the end.
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Copyfitting Design Notes
By Kim Mohan
When the design and editing phases of a product are finished, the manuscript goes to a managing editor to get its final preparation for being typeset.
In my role as managing editor for the revised D&D core rulebooks, one of the most important jobs I performed was copyfitting -- the art/science of creating a book that contains all the information that needs to be in it and takes up the exact number of pages the book is meant to have. The designers and editors try to be careful about producing a manuscript that contains more or less the "right" number of words, and under normal circumstances it's not too difficult to make a book fit its page count properly: I dump the manuscript into a layout based on the same page design the finished books will use, so I can tell with a high degree of precision how many pages the text takes up. After factoring in the space needed for maps, diagrams, and illustrations, I know whether the book uses all the pages it's supposed to use. If the contents add up to more than the page count, we start looking for ways to trim the text. If the book looks like it's running short, we figure out how to stretch it, which could involve crafting some new text. The goal is to turn over just the right amount of text to the graphic production specialists.
Getting the version 3.5 books to come out to the right number of pages turned out to be not unlike trying to put 10 pounds of stuff in the proverbial 5-pound bag. Even though each book is 320 pages, significantly bigger than its predecessor, we still had a tough time cramming everything we wanted to say into that much space. The Dungeon Master's Guide was the toughest of the three, because the manuscript that came to me was several thousand words longer than the available page space would hold. How did we deal with the problem?
First, I went to David Noonan, and we identified a few "variant" sidebars that we could probably get along without. Fortunately, these were not painful cuts to make, and they didn't impact any of the rest of the book. (I remember Dave saying something like, "We knew all this stuff wasn't going to get in anyway.") The manuscript had a section in Chapter 3 about the other planes of existence, as well as a section in Chapter 5 about the D&D cosmology. I was able to save a few pages' worth of room by moving the Chapter 3 stuff to Chapter 5 and consolidating the two pieces of information.
By nipping and clipping and trimming wherever we could, we got the Dungeon Master's Guide to fit without touching the "meat" of the book -- we never considered cutting back on the number of new prestige classes, for instance, nor did we even dream of pulling out some magic items to save a little space. Then, after we had whittled the text down as much as possible, we got the fit to work out by electing to reprint only some of the illustrations that the original book contained. As a result, the new DMG is jam-packed with new and refurbished rules and advice; it has 64 more pages than the original, but I'd guess that new information takes up something like 90 or 100 pages of the book.
Copyfitting the Monster Manual was two jobs in one. The book is lavishly illustrated, of course -- but the last 52 pages (Chapters 2 through 7) don't have any art. It was quite a challenge to get each of those five chapters to fit neatly into a certain number of pages, but it worked out: Chapter 2 takes up exactly 18 pages, Chapter 3 is exactly 6 pages, and so on.
The second Monster Manual copyfitting job was figuring how Chapter 1: Monsters A to Z was going to fit in the 260 pages of the book that are available for it (not counting the last 52 and the first 8). This chapter contains 201 illustrations of monsters plus about 215 pages of text, meaning that, on average, each illustration ended up occupying a little less than 1/4 page. The numbers seemed to indicate that we could get all the text in the book without having to reduce any illustrations to the size of a postage stamp (which we wouldn't have done anyway), and that's pretty much the way it turned out.
The Player's Handbook went together a little more easily than either of the other two books, partly because it's structurally identical to the original book (same number of chapters, same chapter titles) and partly because it's "only" 32 pages larger than its predecessor. We did have a problem that popped up late in the game, though: When I turned over Chapter 10 of the book for typesetting, the text was thoroughly edited and very tightly composed -- no "fluff," as we say. I figured that text would fill exactly 12 pages with no illustrations, and that's just the way it looked when the typesetters put the text into their layout. Then I realized that I had forgotten to account for a diagram that needed to appear on page 176 -- so it suddenly became necessary to find about three dozen "expendable" lines of text in that chapter to make room for the diagram. I asked Andy Collins to take a look at the material and try to locate some places where we could trim a few words or a sentence without doing damage to the content -- and he managed to find exactly the right number of lines. It's one of the maxims of the editing profession that any piece of text can be made shorter if necessary, and I guess Andy proved the truth of that saying . . . but I think it would have been downright impossible to make room for two diagrams!
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Intelligent Items Design Notes
By David Noonan
Weapons with a mind of their own have long been a staple of sword-and-sorcery tales ("Hellooooo, Elric"). But almost no one was using them in 3rd Edition D&D.
Diagnosing the Problem
Two years of D&D play convinced us that intelligent weapons were vanishingly rare, despite the rule in the 3rd Edition Dungeon Master's Guide that said 15% of magic weapons were intelligent. Nobody was actually using that rule. Even we weren't using that rule in our games, and we wrote the book. The RPGA wasn't really using intelligent weapons at all. This section of the DMG was basically gathering dust.
Another problem: The system was based entirely on the roll of the dice. You rolled to set the brains of your magic sword, you rolled to see which powers you got, and you rolled for alignment. Worse, the power tables had an escalating feature: If you rolled high, you got to skip ahead to a table with more powerful abilities.
Don't get me wrong -- I love escalating die tables. But in this case, they weren't appropriate because the cost for the item had already been set. You could potentially get a sword with teleport, heal and disintegrate for only 10,000 gp. No DM is going to let such a weapon into the game, obviously. But the DM has no guidance for less obscene cases. You have a talking sword with three primary abilities, worth 25,000 gp according to the table. What powers are appropriate? What's too little? What's too much? The DM has nothing to go on beyond educated guesswork.
Knowing What You Want
After a lot of discussions with DMs, we knew we wanted to keep intelligent items relatively rare. They're effectively secondary characters that go everywhere the PCs go, but you don't want the talking sword taking the spotlight away from a living, breathing player at your gaming table. If every PC in the party has one or more talking magic items, that's a recipe for cacophony that'll bring the game grinding to a halt.
We also knew that players and DMs generally like designing their own magic items, and they appreciate the structure of the pricing formulas we've established for other items. We wanted to extend the "build it yourself, and pay for it yourself" philosophy.
Finally, we knew we wanted intelligent items to behave more like the creatures that they were.
Reassembling the Pieces
First, we kissed that "15% of weapons are intelligent" rule goodbye. The new rule says what we want it to: "In general, less than 1% of magic items have intelligence. Use them sparingly in your campaign." We also broadened the focus from magic weapons to magic items in general. Stormbringer-style magic swords probably will still be the most common intelligent items, but even spellcasters who rarely draw weapons can possess intelligent items.
Then we tore apart the tables and established an "a la carte" pricing structure. Now you pay for the brains of your intelligent item, and you pay for each power it has. That makes it easy for the DM to design an intelligent item that fits into the economy and power level of the ongoing campaign.
Because we wanted intelligent items to feel a little more like creatures, we gave them a power that normal magic items don't have: the power to take actions on their own. It's a subtle power, and I think people might miss its importance on a first reading. Actions are the fundamental currency in the D&D game -- the one thing no character can ever get enough of. Intelligent items effectively activate themselves when appropriate. A paladin can run around the battlefield smiting her foes while her magic sword heals her, checks on her allies with a status spell, and casts dimensional anchor so the demon can't flee back to the Abyss. The sword can do all of that without the paladin taking any actions to activate those powers. The whole point is that the sword is intelligent, after all, so it uses its powers whenever circumstances are right.
What Didn't We Do?
Along the way, we tried a number of new rules that didn't work out. We tried replacing the Item Ego system with a formula based on the market price of the intelligent item. In theory, it ought to work, because all of the aspects of an item that add to Ego also add to cost. But in practice, the only formulas that gave us similar results to the Item Ego table looked like calculus car-wrecks. They were all so complicated that consulting the table was faster than plugging numbers into the formula.
We also tried integrating the intelligent item's purpose with a dedicated power and a dedicated curse. The idea was that a specific purpose (for instance, slay servants of Erythnul) should have a specific power attached to it (maybe some kind of continuous area-effect regeneration, calm emotions, and some other healing powers) and a specific curse that the item would use if its owner misbehaved (like wracking pains whenever someone within a mile suffers a violent death). It's a promising notion, but we soon realized that a good list of linked purposes, powers, and curses would take up too much space -- especially for a bit of the rules we wanted to remain relatively rare.
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Internal Reviews Design Notes
By Ed Stark
As the Design Manager for Dungeons & Dragons, I have been fortunate enough to work alongside the designers, editors, and other Wizards staff members who created both the 3rd Edition of D&D and the "3.5 upgrade." I worked with all the people who worked directly on these projects and I like to think I helped them all achieve their goals for these two important works.
One of the most grueling parts of the whole process was the internal review. External playtesters and internal online discussions are exacting enough -- there's nothing like throwing your work out to be picked at by hundreds of interested people -- but our internal review process for the 3.5 revisions included several steps where the entire RPG R&D group, plus interested parties from around the company, sat in a room and went through the rules chapter by chapter. I have a copy of an early version of the v.3.5 Player's Handbook, for example, that has Post-It(R) notes on literally every page.
During these meetings, we discussed questions, potential problems, and ideas for improvement. My job was to take notes and keep the meetings moving -- it's hard not to bog down on individual issues when you have a bunch of creative, assertive designers all in the same room. I found this a big challenge, but fortunately the v.3.5 designers (particularly Andy Collins, David Noonan, and Rich Baker, who had to sit and listen and occasionally defend during these meetings) did a great job of staying on track. These internal review meetings were not the only way we reviewed the books, but they were perhaps the most intense design meetings I've ever been a part of. I'm glad we had them, but if you look closely at any of the designers, you can probably still see the scars.
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Making the Monster Manual More User-Friendly Design Notes
By Skip Williams
When considering revisions for the Monster Manual, one word leapt to the forefront for us: Utility.
Three years of playing the 3rd edition D&D game ourselves, plus many hours talking with dedicated fans of the game, convinced us that players and DMs need a monster book that not only has all the information they need, but makes that information easy to find.
The first thing we did was look for ways to make the all-important main statistic block more useful. So, we added a base attack and grapple bonus for all the monsters. Base attack numbers can be useful when modifying a monster, and it's essential for creatures that have the power attack feat. Grappling occurs fairly often in the new game and calculating a monster's grapple bonus can be a pain to do on the fly, so we've done the work for you. In the same vein, we've split the attacks entry into separate lines for the attack and full attack actions; you also can use the attack line when a monster makes an attack of opportunity.
After three years of pushing miniature figures around on grids, we realized that our old face/reach numbers were a little off, especially for creatures with rectangular faces (which didn't work very well in a game system that doesn't have any rules for facing). Now, creatures have a space entry with the same depth and width. You no longer have to worry about which way a "long" creature is facing during a battle, and you'll find there is much less fussing with figures that are too big for their space entries.
You'll discover many similar changes throughout the book, all aimed at making the game easier to play and to understand. Some of these are superficial, but they reflect the way people actually play the game. For example, we've discarded the old term "type modifier" for the term "subtype" because nobody every used the former term. We originally chose "type modifier" because we thought it was more accurate than "subtype." Our reasoning seemed sound to us at the time, but we've bowed to the wisdom of the players.
Speaking of subtypes, we've expanded the list slightly. For example, there's now an extraplanar subtype. The rules speak of "extraplanar" creatures often, and now there's a subtype to go with the term. Creatures that share fairly long lists of similar abilities, such as tanar'ri, baatezu, and guardinals, have their own subtypes.
No portion of the Monster Manual remained entirely untouched. We have altered several existing monster special abilities and we've added some new ones, too. We've cleaned up the language for the ubiquitous improved grab ability, for example, bringing this ability in line with the clarifications we had already made in the D&D FAQ. In some cases, we found that special abilities worked well, but that we had been too liberal in giving them out. Perhaps the best example is the powerful blindsight ability, which is the bane of spellcasters and rogues everywhere. Blindsight is still in the same, but many creatures with exceptionally keen senses now have the similar but slightly less potent blindsense ability instead.
Not all the changes to the Monster Manual are so sweeping. We went looking for creatures that just didn't see to work right and went to working making them more playable. For example, the bebilith was a favorite with DMs in our neck of the woods for its ability to destroy armor. Everyone in our local campaigns developed a genuine dread of the bebilith. Still, we knew (in our hearts) that bebiliths were tearing apart armor -- especially expensive magical armor -- just a little too often. Bebiliths can still rend armor, but now they do so as a special rend attack that merely damages the stuff. If your fighter goes toe to toe with a bebilith, you still have to watch out for your armor, but you won't be feeling an uncomfortable breeze around your skivvies quite so soon. (This change to the bebilith wouldn't have been possible without the new Player's Handbook rules for sundering magical equipment.)
Other monsters got more extensive facelifts. For example, we found that the lycanthrope template usually proved difficult to apply, and lycanthropic player characters were a real pain for DMs and players alike because of the way we applied the extra Hit Dice from the template. We set about streamlining the template so that it works the same way no matter what base creature you use or what level character contracts lycanthropy. (Think of the new lycanthrope template as multiclassing as some kind of animal.) We also opened up the template to giants and added a sample giant lycanthrope, a hill giant/dire wereboar.
All the foregoing is just a taste of the improvements we've made to the Monster Manual. We think you'll find them useful.
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It's finally here -- the much-anticipated revision of the core D&D rules. Now that you can thumb through the new Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, and Monster Manual to your heart's content, let the design team lead you on a behind-the-scenes tour of how the books came together. Read exclusive firsthand accounts of the debates and decisions that mattered most.
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Monster Manual Design Notes
By Rich Baker
My work on the Monster Manual started first thing in September of 2002. I assumed design lead duties after our reorganization, and picked up where Skip Williams had left off work. Skip handled a lot of the groundwork for the Monster Manual, including the Base Attack/Grapple line entries for every creature, the collection of 3rd Edition Monster Manual errata and corrections, the first draft of the How to Build a Monster material, and a number of other minor changes.
At about the time I became actively involved with the Monster Manual, we decided that the revisions should be pushed more aggressively, so the first thing I did was examine the book in its entirety and think hard about what it ought to do. I made a number of organizational changes to help the book's presentation of information. With the addition of the monster creation material, the front matter of the Monster Manual had crept up to nearly 50 pages of stuff before you even got to the first monster! I rebuilt that material as later chapters in the book so that the reader would get to the monsters right away. We observed that the complicated "gang entries" of statistic blocks in multiple columns was difficult to navigate and often resulted in a monster's description landing on a different page than its statistics (or illustration), so we broke up many of the gang entries into sequential entries. We found that we were repeating many pieces of information in each monster with our Monster Manual II format, so we moved most of the critical definitions to the Glossary in the back of the book to make it easier for the DM to quickly find definitions of what the undead type does, how incorporeality works, and so on.
Then, we looked at what the entries were lacking. Bill Slavicsek, director of RPG R&D, asked me to consider the notion of adding high-powered, scarier versions of some common monsters -- something that would put a little fear and excitement back into the players. So, we created more than two dozen advanced monsters, such as the mummy lord, the dread wraith, and the aboleth mage. (I had a lot of help with this. Jennifer Clarke Wilkes, David Eckelberry, James Wyatt, Andrew Finch, and Mike Donais contributed a number of these guys for me.) We wanted to make the Monster Manual more player-friendly, so we added "As Characters" information to a number of monsters that might be used as PCs in wide-open games. Finally, we wanted to take some steps toward making our most complex monsters more usable for novice DMs, so we added "Tactics Round-by-Round" sections to a half-dozen of our toughest monsters.
In addition to these organizational issues, we also had some honest-to-gosh game design to do. After carefully examining the Monster Manual and looking over our monster design standards, I decided to push for a streamlined, unified system of monster skill point and feat acquisition. The 3.0 version of this system created a lot of troubles for playing monsters as characters, and made it very hard to design monsters and get them right. I discussed the proposition with the rest of the design team, and we decided to go ahead with the work. So, we wound up "re-SPFing" every monster in the book. ("SPFing" being our term for redoing a monster's skill points and feats to 3.5 standards.) This also gave us a good opportunity to make better use of the new skills, feats, and synergies in the revised Player's Handbook.
We also handled a lot of tactical design issues, such as the individual characteristics of a number of monsters. For example, demons and devils in 3.0 had glass "jaws" -- they didn't have the hit points needed for their CRs. They also were hard to run, because many of them had dozens of spell-like abilities. Dave Eckelberry and Andrew Finch tackled the job of redoing the demons and devils so they would be tougher, cooler, and easier to run. The delver's AC was too low for its CR and description. Mummy rot lacked the scare-power it had in previous editions. Damage reduction was often not significant for a monster, and really existed only as a bragging point between outsiders. Some of the illustrations weren't exactly what we wanted to show folks for 3rd Edition, and just didn't come far enough from the 2nd Edition look. We handled a great number of relatively minor changes like this. A lot of creatures in the 3.0 Monster Manual were converted more or less directly from 2nd Edition, and we gave them a more thorough and rigorous examination this time around.
Overall, you'll find that the new Monster Manual includes dozens of new monsters, presents more information with a better organization, provides a number of cool new tools for the DM and player, and rebalances the game to provide a better, more scalable set of threats for your D&D game.
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The Ranger Design Notes
By Andy Collins
Perhaps the most important element of the Player's Handbook revision was addressing inequalities between the various classes. Though opinions on the topic varied wildly, there was a general agreement that some of the classes needed significant help to bring them up to par with the other classes. The class that generated the greatest call for revision was the ranger.
Thanks in large part to its strong association with popular heroes such as Aragorn, Robin Hood, and Drizzt Do'Urden, the ranger occupies a special place in the hearts of many D&D players. The image of a hardy, self-sufficient wilderness warrior is a strong one, and the class has a long history in D&D. But despite having some cool abilities in 3rd Edition, the latest incarnation of the class failed to capture fully the imaginations and hearts of the players. Worse yet, it felt to many like the barbarian's weak cousin, as that class had much more potently captured the image described above. Something had to be done about this.
I started by examining the class's characteristics to determine what role the ranger was trying to fulfill in a typical group of adventurers. With his d10 Hit Die, good base attack bonus, and good Fortitude saves, he looked a lot like the fighter, suggesting that he was intended to serve primarily as a combatant. Though proficient with both light and medium armor as well as shields, the ranger's default protection was light armor, as anything heavier denied access to his two-weapon fighting ability. This tactic also precluded common use of a shield. In effect, the typical ranger was trying to stand next to the fighter, but with an AC anywhere from 4 to 6 points lower. Worse yet, the ranger's default combat style carried with it a -2 penalty to attacks and a reliance on lighter weapons, meaning the ranger dealt out less damage on average than a typical fighter unless fighting a favored enemy. In effect, the role of "tough warrior of the wilderness" was filled not by the ranger, but by the barbarian, who had better hit points, AC, and damage-dealing capability.
The ranger also had a decent skill selection, with 4 skill points to spend at each level and a lengthy list of class skills. However, one of these skill points was "taken" every level to enable another class feature (since the Track feat required a good Wilderness Lore skill modifier to function well), meaning the character had only 3 discretionary points to spend. With useful and/or symbolic skills such as Animal Empathy, Climb, Handle Animal, Hide, Intuit Direction, Knowledge (nature), Listen, Move Silently, Search, and Spot all vying for the character's attention, most rangers simply didn't have the skill points to properly fill the role of "skilled hunter and stalker" as described in the Player's Handbook. Even with the addition of the ranger's minor spellcasting ability, the class just couldn't keep up with the other classes in terms of overall contribution to the party's success.
In the end, I decided that the class had to move away from being a front-line fighter -- a role already competently filled by the fighter, paladin, and barbarian -- and toward being a skilled skirmisher -- a role currently occupied by only the rogue and monk.
I started with the Hit Die. For most players, the d10 Hit Die sends a clear signal that "this class is about melee combat." While the ranger is a competent warrior, I think many players overestimate his abilities in front-line combat due to that Hit Die. In dropping it to d8, we aimed to change the default view of the ranger from front-line fighter to skirmisher (much like the monk). That said, the loss of hit points isn't as severe as it would appear -- it's really a perception shift more than a reality shift. Over the course of 20 levels, an average ranger will have only a mere 21 fewer hit points than a fighter or paladin with the same Constitution. At any given level, that's only about 12 to 18 percent deficit (and the higher the Constitution score, the lower the percentage difference). In part to make up for that loss, we gave the ranger a good Reflex save. This not only meant the ranger would be losing fewer hit points to most magical attacks than the fighter (thanks to more successful Reflex saves), but it also established the ranger's saves as different from any other class.
In conjunction with that change, we wanted to give the ranger who chose to avoid melee combat another option. To accomplish this, we added a second "fighting style" track -- archery -- to parallel the ranger's two-weapon fighting style. This also achieved a goal of making the "bow-hunting ranger" a more common (and viable) character archetype. The fighting style also shifted to 2nd level, to reduce the front-loaded nature of the class.
Another significant shift came with skills. At 4 points per level, the ranger competed on even terms with the barbarian, but couldn't hope to compare to the rogue. Increasing this number to 6 per level, while simultaneously reducing the number of skills the ranger wanted to spend points on (by folding Intuit Direction into the Wilderness Lore skill, later renamed Survival, and by making Animal Empathy a class feature), meant that rangers could cover the skills necessary to be a true hunter. It also reduced the ranger's incentive to multiclass with rogue for extra skill points.
After the major changes were done, I rounded out the class with a few other details. He lost medium armor proficiency, since most rangers weren't interested in wearing medium armor anyway. With a high Reflex save, many rangers would be interested in picking up a couple levels of rogue for evasion. To reduce the frequency of this "no-brainer" decision, the ranger picked up evasion as a 9th-level class feature. His favored enemy bonus increased, making it a more significant part of his abilities, and also became more flexible, allowing a ranger to select and improve on his ability to fight tough opponents at higher levels. Finally, the ranger spell list picked up a few more spells, making that ability more attractive for use.
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Assassins, Magic Items, and Monsters Design Notes
By Gwendolyn F.M. Kestrel
Assassin
A dark figure stealthily maneuvers along the top of the castle wall and sneaks shadow-quiet into the Chamberlain's bedroom.
Thunk! The assassin's bulky backpack knocks over an oil lamp. It crashes to the floor, awakening the Chamberlain.
"Guards! Guards!"
Why would an assassin carry a bulky backpack? His cumbersome spellbook.
James Wyatt was the first one to point out to me the spellbook-toting assassin. With the unanimous approval of the department, I made the assassin a spontaneous caster.
Magic Items
Pricing magic items is something I've grown quite comfortable doing through large amounts of practice. The rules have generally stayed the same between versions 3.0 and 3.5, but the framework of the game around them changed.
Rich Redman did a splendid job of initially repricing items to conform with changes to spells and also to rebalance items' costs with their usefulness. For instance, the fly spell changed significantly --shorter duration, lesser speed, and decreased maneuverability. A new spell, overland flight, now occupies the long-duration flying niche, requiring development of magic items such as winged boots and flying carpets. I continued Rich's process of magic item repricing, and also got to add in a number of other items. Some, like the metamagic rods, were developed from existing products. Others were ones I created such as the robe of bones.
While the rules for pricing items remain the same as those in the previous version, we've worked to clarify them and make them more accessible. With a view to that end, I created the DMG's Table 7-32: Summary of Magic Item Creation Costs. Its simple, graphical format should be a good aid to players making new items.
We also learned that many gamers find creating magic items too big an investment of their character's time. The creation cost in gold and experience points are reasonable in any campaign, but some settings are so dynamic that item-creating characters lacked the time to make anything worthwhile. In 3rd Edition, while creating magic items, "[the caster] cannot take a day off." Folks will be happy to read the revised Creating Magic Items section on pages 282-283: "The caster works for 8 hours each day. He cannot rush the process by working longer each day. But the days need not be consecutive, and the caster can use the rest of his time as he sees fit. A character who takes a break from item creation to adventure should keep track of how many days of work remain on that item."
Monsters' Level Adjustments
Savage Species broke ground on playing monsters as characters and integrating level adjustments and effective character level (ECL) into play. Monster Manual entries for critters likely to be played as characters include a detailed As Character section.
Further, we included level adjustments in the Monster Manual. Over the course of several meetings, I worked with the designers to finalize a list of which monsters would receive what level adjustment. We established criteria to guide our use of them in the book. We wanted to include numbers for species likely to be played as character or desired as cohorts. The creatures had to be reasonably understood without much additional work on the part of the DM. The critters needed to be intelligent (Int >2) and have opposable thumbs. It also meant restricting the ECL totals to less than 20 to ensure nonepic playability.
Monsters' Feats and Skills
"Grrr! Argh!"
Somewhat late in the whole revision development process, Rich Baker hit upon a brilliant way of synching up monsters and characters, making the way they acquire feats and skills harmonious. "Yipee!" Of course, that meant that he, Jennifer Clarke Wilkes, and I had to update every single monster. "Grrr! Argh!" Ah, so much work -- but quite worthwhile in the end.
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Copyfitting Design Notes
By Kim Mohan
When the design and editing phases of a product are finished, the manuscript goes to a managing editor to get its final preparation for being typeset.
In my role as managing editor for the revised D&D core rulebooks, one of the most important jobs I performed was copyfitting -- the art/science of creating a book that contains all the information that needs to be in it and takes up the exact number of pages the book is meant to have. The designers and editors try to be careful about producing a manuscript that contains more or less the "right" number of words, and under normal circumstances it's not too difficult to make a book fit its page count properly: I dump the manuscript into a layout based on the same page design the finished books will use, so I can tell with a high degree of precision how many pages the text takes up. After factoring in the space needed for maps, diagrams, and illustrations, I know whether the book uses all the pages it's supposed to use. If the contents add up to more than the page count, we start looking for ways to trim the text. If the book looks like it's running short, we figure out how to stretch it, which could involve crafting some new text. The goal is to turn over just the right amount of text to the graphic production specialists.
Getting the version 3.5 books to come out to the right number of pages turned out to be not unlike trying to put 10 pounds of stuff in the proverbial 5-pound bag. Even though each book is 320 pages, significantly bigger than its predecessor, we still had a tough time cramming everything we wanted to say into that much space. The Dungeon Master's Guide was the toughest of the three, because the manuscript that came to me was several thousand words longer than the available page space would hold. How did we deal with the problem?
First, I went to David Noonan, and we identified a few "variant" sidebars that we could probably get along without. Fortunately, these were not painful cuts to make, and they didn't impact any of the rest of the book. (I remember Dave saying something like, "We knew all this stuff wasn't going to get in anyway.") The manuscript had a section in Chapter 3 about the other planes of existence, as well as a section in Chapter 5 about the D&D cosmology. I was able to save a few pages' worth of room by moving the Chapter 3 stuff to Chapter 5 and consolidating the two pieces of information.
By nipping and clipping and trimming wherever we could, we got the Dungeon Master's Guide to fit without touching the "meat" of the book -- we never considered cutting back on the number of new prestige classes, for instance, nor did we even dream of pulling out some magic items to save a little space. Then, after we had whittled the text down as much as possible, we got the fit to work out by electing to reprint only some of the illustrations that the original book contained. As a result, the new DMG is jam-packed with new and refurbished rules and advice; it has 64 more pages than the original, but I'd guess that new information takes up something like 90 or 100 pages of the book.
Copyfitting the Monster Manual was two jobs in one. The book is lavishly illustrated, of course -- but the last 52 pages (Chapters 2 through 7) don't have any art. It was quite a challenge to get each of those five chapters to fit neatly into a certain number of pages, but it worked out: Chapter 2 takes up exactly 18 pages, Chapter 3 is exactly 6 pages, and so on.
The second Monster Manual copyfitting job was figuring how Chapter 1: Monsters A to Z was going to fit in the 260 pages of the book that are available for it (not counting the last 52 and the first 8). This chapter contains 201 illustrations of monsters plus about 215 pages of text, meaning that, on average, each illustration ended up occupying a little less than 1/4 page. The numbers seemed to indicate that we could get all the text in the book without having to reduce any illustrations to the size of a postage stamp (which we wouldn't have done anyway), and that's pretty much the way it turned out.
The Player's Handbook went together a little more easily than either of the other two books, partly because it's structurally identical to the original book (same number of chapters, same chapter titles) and partly because it's "only" 32 pages larger than its predecessor. We did have a problem that popped up late in the game, though: When I turned over Chapter 10 of the book for typesetting, the text was thoroughly edited and very tightly composed -- no "fluff," as we say. I figured that text would fill exactly 12 pages with no illustrations, and that's just the way it looked when the typesetters put the text into their layout. Then I realized that I had forgotten to account for a diagram that needed to appear on page 176 -- so it suddenly became necessary to find about three dozen "expendable" lines of text in that chapter to make room for the diagram. I asked Andy Collins to take a look at the material and try to locate some places where we could trim a few words or a sentence without doing damage to the content -- and he managed to find exactly the right number of lines. It's one of the maxims of the editing profession that any piece of text can be made shorter if necessary, and I guess Andy proved the truth of that saying . . . but I think it would have been downright impossible to make room for two diagrams!
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Intelligent Items Design Notes
By David Noonan
Weapons with a mind of their own have long been a staple of sword-and-sorcery tales ("Hellooooo, Elric"). But almost no one was using them in 3rd Edition D&D.
Diagnosing the Problem
Two years of D&D play convinced us that intelligent weapons were vanishingly rare, despite the rule in the 3rd Edition Dungeon Master's Guide that said 15% of magic weapons were intelligent. Nobody was actually using that rule. Even we weren't using that rule in our games, and we wrote the book. The RPGA wasn't really using intelligent weapons at all. This section of the DMG was basically gathering dust.
Another problem: The system was based entirely on the roll of the dice. You rolled to set the brains of your magic sword, you rolled to see which powers you got, and you rolled for alignment. Worse, the power tables had an escalating feature: If you rolled high, you got to skip ahead to a table with more powerful abilities.
Don't get me wrong -- I love escalating die tables. But in this case, they weren't appropriate because the cost for the item had already been set. You could potentially get a sword with teleport, heal and disintegrate for only 10,000 gp. No DM is going to let such a weapon into the game, obviously. But the DM has no guidance for less obscene cases. You have a talking sword with three primary abilities, worth 25,000 gp according to the table. What powers are appropriate? What's too little? What's too much? The DM has nothing to go on beyond educated guesswork.
Knowing What You Want
After a lot of discussions with DMs, we knew we wanted to keep intelligent items relatively rare. They're effectively secondary characters that go everywhere the PCs go, but you don't want the talking sword taking the spotlight away from a living, breathing player at your gaming table. If every PC in the party has one or more talking magic items, that's a recipe for cacophony that'll bring the game grinding to a halt.
We also knew that players and DMs generally like designing their own magic items, and they appreciate the structure of the pricing formulas we've established for other items. We wanted to extend the "build it yourself, and pay for it yourself" philosophy.
Finally, we knew we wanted intelligent items to behave more like the creatures that they were.
Reassembling the Pieces
First, we kissed that "15% of weapons are intelligent" rule goodbye. The new rule says what we want it to: "In general, less than 1% of magic items have intelligence. Use them sparingly in your campaign." We also broadened the focus from magic weapons to magic items in general. Stormbringer-style magic swords probably will still be the most common intelligent items, but even spellcasters who rarely draw weapons can possess intelligent items.
Then we tore apart the tables and established an "a la carte" pricing structure. Now you pay for the brains of your intelligent item, and you pay for each power it has. That makes it easy for the DM to design an intelligent item that fits into the economy and power level of the ongoing campaign.
Because we wanted intelligent items to feel a little more like creatures, we gave them a power that normal magic items don't have: the power to take actions on their own. It's a subtle power, and I think people might miss its importance on a first reading. Actions are the fundamental currency in the D&D game -- the one thing no character can ever get enough of. Intelligent items effectively activate themselves when appropriate. A paladin can run around the battlefield smiting her foes while her magic sword heals her, checks on her allies with a status spell, and casts dimensional anchor so the demon can't flee back to the Abyss. The sword can do all of that without the paladin taking any actions to activate those powers. The whole point is that the sword is intelligent, after all, so it uses its powers whenever circumstances are right.
What Didn't We Do?
Along the way, we tried a number of new rules that didn't work out. We tried replacing the Item Ego system with a formula based on the market price of the intelligent item. In theory, it ought to work, because all of the aspects of an item that add to Ego also add to cost. But in practice, the only formulas that gave us similar results to the Item Ego table looked like calculus car-wrecks. They were all so complicated that consulting the table was faster than plugging numbers into the formula.
We also tried integrating the intelligent item's purpose with a dedicated power and a dedicated curse. The idea was that a specific purpose (for instance, slay servants of Erythnul) should have a specific power attached to it (maybe some kind of continuous area-effect regeneration, calm emotions, and some other healing powers) and a specific curse that the item would use if its owner misbehaved (like wracking pains whenever someone within a mile suffers a violent death). It's a promising notion, but we soon realized that a good list of linked purposes, powers, and curses would take up too much space -- especially for a bit of the rules we wanted to remain relatively rare.
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Internal Reviews Design Notes
By Ed Stark
As the Design Manager for Dungeons & Dragons, I have been fortunate enough to work alongside the designers, editors, and other Wizards staff members who created both the 3rd Edition of D&D and the "3.5 upgrade." I worked with all the people who worked directly on these projects and I like to think I helped them all achieve their goals for these two important works.
One of the most grueling parts of the whole process was the internal review. External playtesters and internal online discussions are exacting enough -- there's nothing like throwing your work out to be picked at by hundreds of interested people -- but our internal review process for the 3.5 revisions included several steps where the entire RPG R&D group, plus interested parties from around the company, sat in a room and went through the rules chapter by chapter. I have a copy of an early version of the v.3.5 Player's Handbook, for example, that has Post-It(R) notes on literally every page.
During these meetings, we discussed questions, potential problems, and ideas for improvement. My job was to take notes and keep the meetings moving -- it's hard not to bog down on individual issues when you have a bunch of creative, assertive designers all in the same room. I found this a big challenge, but fortunately the v.3.5 designers (particularly Andy Collins, David Noonan, and Rich Baker, who had to sit and listen and occasionally defend during these meetings) did a great job of staying on track. These internal review meetings were not the only way we reviewed the books, but they were perhaps the most intense design meetings I've ever been a part of. I'm glad we had them, but if you look closely at any of the designers, you can probably still see the scars.
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Making the Monster Manual More User-Friendly Design Notes
By Skip Williams
When considering revisions for the Monster Manual, one word leapt to the forefront for us: Utility.
Three years of playing the 3rd edition D&D game ourselves, plus many hours talking with dedicated fans of the game, convinced us that players and DMs need a monster book that not only has all the information they need, but makes that information easy to find.
The first thing we did was look for ways to make the all-important main statistic block more useful. So, we added a base attack and grapple bonus for all the monsters. Base attack numbers can be useful when modifying a monster, and it's essential for creatures that have the power attack feat. Grappling occurs fairly often in the new game and calculating a monster's grapple bonus can be a pain to do on the fly, so we've done the work for you. In the same vein, we've split the attacks entry into separate lines for the attack and full attack actions; you also can use the attack line when a monster makes an attack of opportunity.
After three years of pushing miniature figures around on grids, we realized that our old face/reach numbers were a little off, especially for creatures with rectangular faces (which didn't work very well in a game system that doesn't have any rules for facing). Now, creatures have a space entry with the same depth and width. You no longer have to worry about which way a "long" creature is facing during a battle, and you'll find there is much less fussing with figures that are too big for their space entries.
You'll discover many similar changes throughout the book, all aimed at making the game easier to play and to understand. Some of these are superficial, but they reflect the way people actually play the game. For example, we've discarded the old term "type modifier" for the term "subtype" because nobody every used the former term. We originally chose "type modifier" because we thought it was more accurate than "subtype." Our reasoning seemed sound to us at the time, but we've bowed to the wisdom of the players.
Speaking of subtypes, we've expanded the list slightly. For example, there's now an extraplanar subtype. The rules speak of "extraplanar" creatures often, and now there's a subtype to go with the term. Creatures that share fairly long lists of similar abilities, such as tanar'ri, baatezu, and guardinals, have their own subtypes.
No portion of the Monster Manual remained entirely untouched. We have altered several existing monster special abilities and we've added some new ones, too. We've cleaned up the language for the ubiquitous improved grab ability, for example, bringing this ability in line with the clarifications we had already made in the D&D FAQ. In some cases, we found that special abilities worked well, but that we had been too liberal in giving them out. Perhaps the best example is the powerful blindsight ability, which is the bane of spellcasters and rogues everywhere. Blindsight is still in the same, but many creatures with exceptionally keen senses now have the similar but slightly less potent blindsense ability instead.
Not all the changes to the Monster Manual are so sweeping. We went looking for creatures that just didn't see to work right and went to working making them more playable. For example, the bebilith was a favorite with DMs in our neck of the woods for its ability to destroy armor. Everyone in our local campaigns developed a genuine dread of the bebilith. Still, we knew (in our hearts) that bebiliths were tearing apart armor -- especially expensive magical armor -- just a little too often. Bebiliths can still rend armor, but now they do so as a special rend attack that merely damages the stuff. If your fighter goes toe to toe with a bebilith, you still have to watch out for your armor, but you won't be feeling an uncomfortable breeze around your skivvies quite so soon. (This change to the bebilith wouldn't have been possible without the new Player's Handbook rules for sundering magical equipment.)
Other monsters got more extensive facelifts. For example, we found that the lycanthrope template usually proved difficult to apply, and lycanthropic player characters were a real pain for DMs and players alike because of the way we applied the extra Hit Dice from the template. We set about streamlining the template so that it works the same way no matter what base creature you use or what level character contracts lycanthropy. (Think of the new lycanthrope template as multiclassing as some kind of animal.) We also opened up the template to giants and added a sample giant lycanthrope, a hill giant/dire wereboar.
All the foregoing is just a taste of the improvements we've made to the Monster Manual. We think you'll find them useful.
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