You know that you can’t post about roleplaying without me making some comment or another.

So here it is:

The roleplaying ‘industry’, such as it was, pretty much coincided with AD&D 2E. Here’s my reasoning –

D&D was a lovely and simple hobby-game, with at most 5 boxes and some published adventures.
AD&D 1E comprised about a dozen books.

AD&D 2E had… two core books, not less than 7 Monster Manual 3-ring-binder supplements, a “Complete” book for each of the 8 classes and the 6 races, plus supplements ad infinitum, adventures, campaign guides and a billion and one other books.

And then they went and rereleased most of it.

That’s a lot of books.

D&D 3E looked like it was going the same way, but 3.5E was much more “back to basics”, and 4E, while it’s still early days, looks to be focussing more on giving options for what’s already there, rather than adding thousands of new classes.

Get diving, because the possibilities are endless, whether you play D&D or White Wolf’s Storyteller system, or one of the thousands of other RP systems out there. The only limit is your imagination.

1989 was when I started GMing D&D campaigns. I remember being ecstatic about the simplification that was seemingly prevalent in these fantastic revised rules. Gone was the horror or the “floating 20″ attack roll. Gone was the pain and anguish of the insanely complex random encounter charts. Gone was the ridiculously low level-limits for what were then called “demi-humans” (that’s elves and dwarves et al to anyone not conversant in old-school D&D nomenclature). Suddenly huge vistas of opportunity were opened – the Bard class was no longer *utterly* impossible to get into, for example. Monsters were all laid out in an easy to understand format that made it simple to pull one out of the manual and insert it into a game session.

The turning point for me as far as AD&D 2E was concerned, and the point when I recognised that is was “going downhill” was with the release of one book. Innocently called “The Complete Bard”, it paved the way for D&D 3E, but was the ultimate doom of AD&D2E.

Why, you might ask?

It’s simple, really. Prior to The Complete Bard had been released books for Fighters, Wizards, Thieves and Clerics. These books expanded on those classes in simple incremental ways, and introduced the concept of “Kits”, which were a bolt-on package of abilities in addition to the core abilities of the class. The Complete Bard took it a HUGE step further. The Kits for Bards were not bolt-ons. They were complete replacements for the core abilities of the class. To anyone D&D3E-savvy, they were like Prestige Classes that you had to take at level 1. One Bard Kit in particular always sticks in my mind, because it almost destroyed a long-running campaign of mine – The Blade. This was a bard only by association. He didn’t use a musical instrument – his performances were done with his weapons, and he utterly blurred the line between the Bard and Fighter. Suddenly half-elves were catapulted into the stratosphere as the character of choice, because the Fighter/Bard multiclass, when the Bard had the Blade Kit, became an almost unstoppable machine of death, which a lowly fighter could never hope to compete with.

I remember, when my gaming group got their hands on a copy of The Complete Bard, one of my first comments was “This is not a Bard any more… this is a whole new class.”

Pretty soon the whole game was turning that way, with expanded rules options for any number of things, from combat tricks to new magic systems. It stopped being about the 8 classes and became about the infinite number of ways you could tweak your character to become far more than you should reasonably be.

But there were only a handful of books ever released on how to be a good GM. It was a case of “learn as you play” more often than not.

By the time Wizards bought out TSR in the mid-90s, the AD&D2E ruleset was indescribably complex. It was possible for someone to create an obscure, yet hugely overpowered character. Need I say Svirfneblin? There was a race that was vastly superior to any other that had ever been published (capped Armour Class by about 6th level, regardless of class), with absolutely no drawbacks whatsoever. It was unsustainable. It was a house of cards, and while the bottom layer was pretty stable, it had balconies, a helipad and so many extras that shouldn’t exist on a house of cards that I can see, with hindsight, that it was inevitable that the game system would collapse. With the increasingly prevalent use of the internet and computing, there was more and more demand for a simplified ruleset. One that was consistent, and balanced, with structure, and where it was possible to easily see what impacted what else.

I rejoiced at 3E. Here was a game system that was recognisably D&D, where “choice” was the watchword. Each choice would provide an advantage to the character in some way, but dependent on the choice made, it might be detrimental in others.

It wasn’t perfect, as anyone who ever tried to play a character race with a Level Adjustment will be painfully aware, but it was a whole hell of a lot easier to understand than the house of cards, and it was simple to create additional options to slot into the existing game.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again – 3.5E is the pinnacle of sophistication for the D&D game. It is capable of anything. It can be morphed into anything – if you don’t believe me, dear reader, I direct your attention to d20 Modern and Mutants & Masterminds (the latter being far more successful than the former). Here we have the same core game system and rules, each about 75-85% compatible with the D&D game (and therefore simple to integrate should the desire strike you), but one a setting based around adventures in the modern world, and the other all about Superheroes.

I had a lot of fun once with a jedi in a D&D campaign, thanks to the Star Wars d20 rules.

A point of clarity – I use the word “sophistication” very cautiously. D&D3.5E is sophisticated because it is so flexible – at its core, it is a simple system, but with nigh-infinite applicability – but also because once you start wrapping a genre around the core game, it can get very complex (in the scientific meaning of the term, which is not the same as complicated). But because everything that exists in the game-world uses the same set of rules, it is also internally consistent. There are aspects of it that are over-complicated (skills springs immediately to mind), and that can be reworked into more sensible structures, but as a whole, and as a game-system that has been *released*, it is the most flexible RP system I have ever seen *that doesn’t need a calculator to create a character*.

I loved, and still love, 3.5E. It has its faults, and some of them are glaring ones, but it comes very close to perfection when you have a group of players who want *every* possible choice to be open to them.

4E has thrown a lot of that away. 4E is D&D as it would have been written in 1974 if such a thing as professional roleplaying game designers had existed back then. It’s simple. A lot simpler than 3.5E, because a lot of the choices have been pared away. It has the advantage that every character, every time they act, has a choice to make. And “I swing my sword at the orc” is *rarely* the optimal one. Every time a character levels up, the player has a choice to make. It might be “which if these two powers do I choose?”, or it might be something that drives the character’s destiny forward in some strange way that hasn’t been at all obvious to date. I said that 3.5E was all about choices, and it is, but those are all class-based choices, really. All based around “what class optimises me?” or “what makes me better at being a wizard?”. 4E has drawn it back a step, and it’s now “what cool option can I pick that will enable me to function better in the party during our next encounter?”

D&D4E is the modern-day equivalent of the old red box (that being the first D&D purchase I ever made… except for the fact that I actually stole it from a cousin of mine). It’s that easy to pick up and play with. But it’s not as capable a gaming system as 3.5E in that it doesn’t allow much in the way of customisation of your character outside its core class role – A Fighter will almost always be best off acting as a Tank. A Ranger or a Rogue should dance around the battlefield and dish out insane quantities of damage – DPS, to us MMOers. A Wizard is all about affecting the entire battlefield. In 3.5E it was possible to make a character who could do all of those things, but he simply wouldn’t excel at any of them.

I have literally dozens of 3.5E books, sold to me by WotC, and I don’t regret a single one of them. I have the majority of the current 4E releases, too, and I don’t actually regret any of those, either. I’m running a weekly 4E game, and enjoying it a lot, especially watching my players learn a little bit more about what they’re capable of every single day – can they bluff the trolls into letting them into the lair? Would a dragon finish them off? Can they sneak past a carefully prepared ambush?

I’m certainly not extolling the virtues of either game-system over the other, because to me, as a player, as a GM and as someone who has an intense interest in how game systems are constructed, I can see what both are trying to achieve, and they both do it very well. Far better than any previous versions of the game.

But I do worry that 4E is catering to what I think of as “instant gratification gaming”. It takes minutes, at most, to create a 4E character. Awesome. I take longer than that designing costumes in City of Heroes. Your new 4E D&D character can immediately get on and do stuff. His abilities are mostly usable all the time, or at least once per encounter (well, there are the awesomely-powerful dailies, but he probably won’t actually use them that often), and from one game-session to the next, or even from one game-day to the next, he is clearly defined, and follows a clear and steady progression as you level him up. In contrast, 3.5E allowed for some insanely detailed planning. It always seemed to me that if you plan a character in that much depth, spent that much time considering the options, adjusting the details, then you have a little bit more invested in that character. A little more desire to see the character grow a little further, and succeed a little more. You’ve *built* the character. 4E lets you throw a character together. I can guarantee that with even the most rudimentary consideration as you throw it together, then it will be a viable and useful character.

“Instant Gratification Gaming” – the curse of the online world as far as RPGs are concerned… but also a way to expand the player base. Easier game = easier to teach = easier to get into. That’s got to be good for the RPG hobby as a whole.

I will point out, though, that I’m not lambasting 4E. As I said, I like it as a game. I can clearly see the MMO influences in it (most easily spotted in the “Class Roles”), and it really does ‘work’ as a game. But everything in it is all about “what can be used in an encounter”. Gone are the heady days of building a character with abilities that are useful out of fights. It’s a step back to basics, and I think it loses out because of it. It certainly fits the bill as being a game designed to have “mass-market appeal”, and to be attractive to MMOers, but it feels like a step too far.

It works, but to bastardise the writing of L. Frank Baum – “We’re not playing D&D anymore, Toto.”

I have previously described D&D4E in these terms:

“It is an awesome, incredibly well-detailed, balanced, artfully constructed *miniatures game*.”

I’ve not seen anything, yet, to make me change that opinion. I’m currently running a Paragon-level (11th atm) adventure with my regular gaming group.

During the last few sessions of my 3.5E game, I stole some of the 4E rules that I really love – Passive Perception, Defences rather than saves, and they performed flawlessly. Once I’m comfortable with the 4E ruleset, I’m going to take the time to write up what I think of as “3.75E”, which will be a set of guidelines for using the best bits of 4E and shoehorning them into 3.5E.