This Petard Has My Name On It: Fixing D&D 5th Edition
Before I begin, I want to point out that, while this piece is on something I’m broadly passionate about, it is about a hobbyist topic which is something of a frivolity. There are serious things in the world that need our attention – please do us a favor and consider donating to eSims for Gaza, as this allows the people who live there to contact the outside world.
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Picture taken and uploaded to Wikimedia commons by Turn2538, used under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license.
I make no secret that I’m not the biggest fan of Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition. I got started on playing D&D back in high school, and I’m closer to forty than thirty at the moment. Almost by definition, clean-shavenness aside, I am a graybeard.
Now, I don’t romanticize the edition that I got started on. I’m not trying to return to a prelapsarian version of the game. I actually feel that the things I’ve been playing lately – mostly World of Darkness and Powered by the Apocalypse, with some others mixed in there – is simply better. I gave 5E a shot, and it wasn’t for me. I decided to give my books to my nephew who likes monsters, and move on with my life.
But – ah, dear reader! – where did this petard come from? And why, oh why, does it have “property of Cameron Summers” etched upon it?
My brother has asked me to run a game for him and his son.
So the question is, how do I run this game I will admit that I dislike, and which offers none of the tools I’m used to using?
What do I change, on my side of the screen, to make the experience fun for everyone involved? That lets the kid have a “D&D experience” like I did back when I was younger?
What do I pull, from what source, to make it enjoyable?
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The AD&D cover. I’m going to throw out there that while I’ve got some problems with how Hasbro has been managing the game, it meant a lot to me when I was younger, and I think it meant a lot to the people who made it — Margaret Killjoy had a great oral history of it on her podcast earlier this summer.
A caveat before I begin: while I hate when my students write something like “in this paper I will…” before jumping into things – why write about your paper instead of writing your paper? – I know also that most people who read articles about Dungeons and Dragons on the internet sort of vaguely look at the article after reading the headline and then either leave mean comments wherever they found it or tell stories in those same comments about how once they spent six hours trying to seduce a fish (not a fish-person, like...a big catfish or something) instead of following the intricately-crafted story that that their friend spent time planning and putting together.
So, in short: this piece is intended as a survival guide for people roped into running this game who would otherwise refuse. If anyone other than my brother asked me to do this, I would politely decline. But since I’ve been asked in the way I have, I’ll agree enthusiastically. It is not advocating that Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition is the be-all, end-all of tabletop gaming. I’ll be honest: I’m not sure I consider it to be part of the hobby anymore; it’s sort of its own thing, siloed off and unconnected. But it’s the entry point for a lot of people, so here I am, acting the carnie barker, and promising all the monsters you can want.
While a lot of this can be chalked up to Hasbro and the way that the game is promoted, I would say that more of it can be chalked up to the way that the game is designed. However, they claim it has a certain measure of modularity, so I’m going to tear out the (extremely few) facilitator-facing mechanics and replace them with what I want to be there, because I don’t want to write a branching story only to have it be derailed half an hour in because I didn’t anticipate that the people involved would become fascinated with a side character that I made up on the fly.
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The X-Card
By John Stavropoulos, used under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license.
Originally, this was invented by John Stavropolous for use in convention play back in 2013, and has become a fairly standard bit of kit for indie games since. The idea is simple: you take a card, you place it in the middle of the table, and if we get to something that makes a player feel emotionally unsafe – not a bad roll, but a choice made by another player at the table – you tap it. You don’t have to explain why it made you feel bad or anything, just point to the particular element. We rewind, we do something else (maybe after a brief bio-break) instead.
I know some people don’t like this kind of tool, but look, at least some of the people at the table are actual children. I normally run horror games when I run, I want to give them an out if they need one.
The point here is to make sure that everyone involved in the game is consenting to be there, not out of a desire to just go along to get along, but out of a desire to participate in the story that we’re all creating. Hell, despite my reservations about the system, I was given ample opportunity to step out, but I want to share this hobby with people, so…yeah, I’m on board too.
I want everyone else to be.
Situation clocks
This began as a health tracker for the game, but it’s turned into so much more.
This mechanic, like many I’m bringing in, comes from the Powered by Apocalypse line of games – that’s “line” as in “lineage” not “line” as in “line of products”, springing like a swarm of locusts out of Vincent and Meguey Baker’s Apocalypse World, and refined more heavily in Blades in the Dark. (Incidentally, Meguey Baker was diagnosed with cancer last year, and here is a DriveThruRPG bundle dedicated to helping cover her medical expenses.)
Situation clocks are simple: they’re a count-down. You draw a circle, you divide it into four, or six, or eight, or twelve segments, depending on how complicated a process is, and you decide what happens when the clock fills and what conditions lead to it filling.
Let’s say that Character A is chasing Character B on horseback. You make a four-segment clock, and decide that Character A rolling higher than Character B fills the clock. You can decide that each segment filled leads to a particular reaction from Character B – leading to obstacles and penalties that Character A has to deal with.
This is, admittedly, a fairly basic tool, and one can look at various things – death saves, among others – as being a species of the same thing. Treating it as a Situation Clock, however, allows for what a lot of people refer to as “automation” of the story. We can set up a twelve-segment clock at the start of a game, and decide that when the clock fills, the city is attacked by a dragon, and you can write a brief list of triggers (things that fill the clock) and omens (“triggers,” I believe, is in the literature; I’m pulling out “omens” as a term for my own use), signs that something is coming that appear at certain points in the clock’s filling. You can even set up racing clocks – if the first clock fills before the second, you get one outcome, and the opposite if another fills, as well as a third, special, outcome if they both reach completion at the same time.
This is, I think, one of the more interesting things in the indie design space: you can use it to create a “cybernetic” approach, in the classic sense, of having multiple feedback systems going at once, and interacting.
There’s some argument about whether they should be made public – I think that it’s dependent on the effect that you want. A public clock will lead to a greater feeling of anxiety from the players, while a private one would not.
I’m including this because... look, one of the bugbears (hah) of the traditional RPG facilitator is planning. You have to have a response planned out for everything, and you simply can’t. An approach that allows you to adjust on the fly without uprooting everything is the way to go, especially with players who have never tried this kind of game before.
Fronts
Look, a lot of this is going to be in the DNA of anything I work on, but I’m not playing this game in a house with children in it, much less with children. It would be like watching an R-rated movie.
A Front, like a Clock, is another Apocalypse Engine tool. Generally speaking, a Front is a threat, something that can cause danger to the player characters, and it’s defined by what it “wants” to do and what it can do. I put “wants” in quotation marks, because a Front can be something that has no actual agency, only the appearance of agency: we can say that a dry woodland wants to burst into flame, but we cannot actually claim that it has desires and makes choices – simply that, given the opportunity, a fire sparked will spread.
Generally speaking, having a Front in front of you is a way of keeping track of the threats and factors that might come into play – as well as to keep in mind how they might effect things when they are brought into play. Consider this example: we have a political story – a conflict between two sides. On one side there’s the nobility, defined by their desire to maintain the status quo, the ability to levee taxes, greater material wealth and a greater ability to do violence in the open; on the other side there’s the peasantry, defined by their desire to upend the status quo, the ability to withhold surpluses, to abduct an enemy official, and ultimately to become a mob (though there are costs to that last one). Maybe there are minor factions – smugglers who conflict with the law but make their money off of certain goods being illegal; a local church that is supposed to side with the peasants but does love all that charitable spending; a mad wizard who just wants to be left alone – each with their own wants and capabilities.
Add on to each one a list of names and personalities, pick a stat block for their foot soldiers and maybe a miniboss, and connect it to the clocks mentioned previously (twelve-step clock for the peasants mobbing up; a ten-step clock for the noble crackdown; six step clock for the high priest having a crisis of faith and switching sides; a four-step clock for the smugglers kidnapping a big name on one side or the other) and you have a story that will tick along – the only thing you really need to make sure here is that it ticking along is tied to the actions of the characters.
It shouldn’t necessarily be obvious to the players, but you should make sure that their actions have consequences.
My reasoning is that, much like the prior section – regarding clocks – this has to do with the way that D&D is normally played and the dysfunctional play culture that grew up around it. Oftentimes, the facilitator is told to act as if they’re going to be presenting a dramatic story, only to be cast as the straight man in an amateur comedy act. The reason is that the play culture of Dungeons and Dragons is dysfunctional: the “normal” players (i.e., non-facilitators) are often put in a position where they are implicitly expected to spoil the facilitators plan.
So – to paraphrase Terry Pratchett – the trick is not to plan but to steer. To do this, you need tools for it.
Paint the Scene
I am begging you to play this game. I am begging someone else to run it for me.
Originally found in Carved From Brindlewood games, as far as I’m aware, “Paint the Scene” is a procedure I’ve had a lot of experience with in the past few months as I’ve been running Public Access, their analog horror game (I’m very excited for the new version they’re rolling out, that they’re calling the “Skinny Jeans” edition, as well as its smaller, meaner sister game, Pizza Time.)
In Paint the Scene, the facilitator describes a location in broad terms, and then invites everyone present to contribute some detail that they think would be a good addition, and then that is added to the fiction of the game. It becomes a persistent fact about that location.
So, in the context of a traditional fantasy game, we might say, “you enter the Great Hall of the local lord – there’s a dais at one end with a throne upon it, and guards line the walls. What detail do you pick out that makes you suspect that his grip on power is not as strong as he wishes visitors to believe?”
This is a simple, off-the-top-of-my-head kind of example, but it’s meant to showcase how this mechanic can be lifted out of its original context and deployed elsewhere. This has a number of effects that I’m quite happy with. Foremost among these are that it invited player involvement with and ownership over the setting and game: you introduced this element, and it’s there. That’s your creativity at work, bud. Alongside this, it encourages persistent engagement, which is useful in the age of ubiquitous screens: you can’t put on a youtube video, are you nuts? We need your input on this.
However, from a ludo-narratological (retch) standpoint, it also has a really useful effect: it allows me to simply tell the players what the feeling of the scene is, and allows me to take their feedback about how to make that work for them. The goal here isn’t for me to be the tyrant or – as many facilitators I’ve had have said, the “god” of this world – it’s for me to emotionally effect the players in a way that’s commensurate with the experience we’ve all agreed to have.
The Map Crawl
Okay, I don’t know where I got this one – I think it’s from a much older game than any I’ve played. Instead of starting out with the region in which the game is happening mapped out, I’ll have a sheet of graph paper and a notepad where I’ve filled out a 1 - 10, 1 - 12, 1 - 20, or 1 – 36 table with various terrain features. Each square on the map includes one feature, and when they scout ahead or travel there, I roll and fill it in with an appropriate symbol.
This recreates the feeling of exploration in an old computer game, where you’re wandering off into the dark and is perfect for wilderness adventures. The important thing here is simply to have a small amount of variety and to improvise based on the information that comes up. Because I’m making the list, it becomes a lot easier to set a particular tone and make it what I’m looking for. I think that the randomness is a great feature (and it’s fun to roll dice. There’s a sensory pleasure in hearing them clatter.) However, the players expect that some amount of curation will be going on with the experience, and so it’s important to give particular thought to how these things work.
Finally, there are two interventions I’m still thinking about and I’m not as sure about using.
No Facilitator Rolls
My introduction to this was Monte Cook’s Numenera — which, I’ll admit, I was initially cold on. I tend to be with his work, though more often than not it blossoms into a deep love and fascination once I get my feet beneath me. See: Invisible Sun.
Okay, look, I’m probably not going to do this, because I don’t want to alter anything player facing, but – despite what I said about how it’s fun to roll dice – it seems to me that the best way to remove the sense of opposition between facilitator and player is to not be put in a position where you have to compare dice results.
You can easily do combat where the player rolls both attack and defense (replace the monster’s attack bonus with an “attack stat” equal to 8+ or 10+bonus), and make everything else a similarly just a difficulty that they have to beat. This is the approach favored in a number of systems, both indie and more traditional.
The soft version of this is only to roll on randomization tables, instead of just kicking it from your head. I think, under ideal circumstances (well, ideal except for running D&D), this is how it would work.
Rework Social Rolls
I’ve always been a bit skeptical of how social rolls – deception, persuasion, intimidation – work in tabletop games. It seems that you shouldn’t be able to just stack up bonuses and turn a “no” into a “yes” with no real challenge.
So – and this is a player-facing change, but I might go ahead and do it – all of these require a bit of investigation and cold reading beforehand. Now, the player characters must know what the target character wants (for persuasion) or is afraid of (for intimidation) for any of this to work. Deception functions as a way to grease the wheels for the other two – convincing the target of the connection or equivalency that the other two would need to function.
The reason I’m interested in this is that social rules have never been done in a way that really seems satisfying to me – it’s possible that something like Good Society, being about just social situations might be able to do it – and I want to err away from the “number big so I win” approach that pervades this space.
Requiring some kind of argument and connection to who the character is, I believe, would help with that. There are a number of other things that might fit into it, but I think that’s going to be all I say on the matter at this stage.
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As mentioned previously, my purpose here is not to say “5E can do all of what these other games do” – it can’t, and that’s why I’ve got to steal these mechanics for a game I agreed to run. My hope, actually, is that other people might try out these mechanics in their game, and then maybe see that these other games, despite being different from what they’re used to, are actually a lot of fun: after all, if you like Paint the Scene, you’d love the Brindlewood mystery-solving mechanic. If you like how clocks work, wait until you see the Blades heist mechanics. If you like Fronts, I can’t help but think that you’d love the other ways that Apocalypse World makes tracking the world fun.
When you get down to it, roleplaying games are a kind of folk art. They need to grow and change through the folk process, with everyone who plays trying something different and occasionally just writing it down. This sort of thing is how that works, and I’d like to invite you to try it out. If I’m very lucky, incorporating these disparate mechanics myself will making running 5E a lot more fun for me, as well as for my players. We’ll find out together!
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