An Intervention

I need to talk to you, yes you, the tabletop gaming bloggers. You're my friends, my mentors, my inspiration but I right now I need you to listen. The relationship you have with Wizards of the Coast and Dungeons and Dragons, it's not healthy, and it's not right, they're abusing you and you need to realize it.

Dungeons and Dragons is successful I won't deny that, it's dashing and still looks good even now, I know it's got lots of fans and lots of players, but you the blogging community it treats like crap. Ever since 4th edition came out I've heard about Wizards sending out legal notices to it's most adamant fans as they post material just trying to drum up some enthusiasm. They've brought out a sub standard product that even the most enthusiastic of you is starting to question the wisdom of, and now they've yanked all the PDF's away from you, even the old editions which are out of print now, and they do this while one of the original founders a man that started this great hobby lies in a hospital bed!

I've been hearing about your frustration, your dissatisfaction, your reminiscence about the "old days" when DnD loved it's fans, you're obviously not happy but still you return to them whenever they make a paltry attempt at reconciliation with another sub-standard supplement. Wizards doesn't deserve fans like you, and it's becoming more and more apparent that they don't want your loyalty and your encouragement.

Look at how Paizo and White Wolf are treating their fans, and their fans aren't half as loyal as you are to DnD. Those companies would bend over backwards to have fans as loyal as you.

And don't give me that crap about how they're just misunderstood, that pulling PDF's is just a sly marketing move. That's BS and you know it, if they actually gave a crap about you guys then they would have announced an alternative source for digital material AS THEY PULLED THEM. They didn't.

So please, take a good long look at the relationship you have with DnD and decide where you stand because frankly I'm sick of seeing this cycle of abuse played over and over again across the internet. Dungeons and Dragons is not the only Role Playing product out there and the sooner you and Wizards of the Coast realize this the better it will be for us all.

Understanding Exalted

I get the distinct impression that D&D players don't like Exalted which might have more than a little to do with the fact that I know 90% of Exalted players hate D&D with every ounce of their black little hearts. But why is this?

I think anyone who reads this blog will be familiar with Dungeons and Dragons, but maybe not Exalted. Both are Tabletop RPG's and both are fantasy but from there the similarities end. I'll try to lay out some of the differences in the two games.

D&D is somewhat of a generic system, meaning that it's rules are designed to be used in any number of fantasy settings. However certain core elements of D&D such as Elves, Dwarves, Orcs and the like take their origins from JRR Tolkeen. Thus every fantasy setting using D&D's system will always be Tolkeen-based.

The exalted system is derived from White Wolf's Storyteller but is specifically designed for the Exalted setting, it is not generic. Exalted is not Tolkeen Based it does include Elves, Dwarves and Goblins but they're rooted in the actual mythologies of such creatures. Elves for example are a combination of Celtic Fae Creatures and Arabian Djinn, and goblins are their servants. There are no Character Races, in exalted. Race is an issue very much like it is in real life, simple mutations of humankind, some of these are natural and some very unnatural. For the purposes of making a character though nothing changes, you simply decide you want your character to be a particular race and stat him accordingly.

D&D is a level-based system. This isn't an official term but in a nut shell it means that it develops characters in "levels" which are basically broad platforms of character development. They allow players to easily understand what they need to accomplish a given task. IE: "To learn the spell that burns people up I need to be Level 8."

Exalted is a point-based system which means the character's stats, skills and the like have a value in points. To develop these traits you spend the appropriate amount of points and develop them individually. This allows for an increased degree of customizability and a more constant development of one's character.

However the biggest difference between D&D and Exalted is context. In Dungeons and Dragons the Player Characters are better than the average person because they've gained levels, which is too abstract to quantitatively explain within a setting or a story. This often means that world around the PC's becomes a "higher level" as quickly as they do in order to keep challenging them. Which from a gameplay perspective is fine but starts to break down when applied to a narrative.

Exalted on the other hand put's the power level of the players in context to the rest of the world setting. Most character to start are vastly more capable than the average person in the world setting because the gods have chosen them to be champions for them. This can be daunting to GM's because the average encounter that would challenge a normal person or PC is often child's play to an Exalt. Balance comes through a more etheric concept involving indirect consequences of one's actions. An example of this would be in that your character could certainly show his power and beat up someone to take over his house, but then everyone in town would know it and while they might not be able to fight you individually but they can make your stay unpleasant or call in someone who can kick his butt.

This difference in context is what I think makes Exalted unappealing to D&D players. Exalted makes no bones about the PC's being extraordinarily powerful and able to do extremely epic things. At first glance it comes across as a power-gamer's wet dream and the power gamer gets a very bad rap because they're the player that exploits the mechanics to be untouchable which makes things unfun for everyone else.

D&D on the other hand is disdained by Exalted players for being overly focused on combat mechanics, and unable to quantify what the players can do within the narrative and setting. To Exalted players this disconnect between the story and the resolution mechanics impedes immersion which in turn limits the capacity to role-play.

Honestly though I'm just an Exalted player starting to venture into a blogging community full of D&D players and not quite understanding why more Dungeons and Dragons people haven't tried it, and if they had, what exactly turned them off?

Setting out to Break D&D 4.0 - Instead it Breaks Me

It seems like the vast majority of gaming bloggers around are D&D players, so they constantly discuss the merits of D&D 4.0 and for some incomprehensible reason they seem to like it. Some might say D&D is an "acquired taste" but I think it's more like if you've only eaten gruel all your life when the makers of gruel brought out porridge you might need to take a few weeks to get used to the texture but now that everyone is eating porridge instead of gruel you've come to like it. Me on the other hand... I was eating home-grown vegtables since I was a toddler have been dining on roast beef for the past 3 years and now I'm feeding my very own cow fermented corn to create kobe beef... and for some reason everyone is going on about this new porridge called Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition.

Actually I'm wrong. Porridge is the wrong analogy for what D&D 4e is to me, it's actually pablum. Elements of real RPG pureed into a paste that can be fed to infants because they're incapable of chewing anything with substance. Lately among role-players there's been circulating an arguement that strong game mechanics are incompatable with strong narration. D&D 4e certainly does nothing to invalidate that arguement, that is if you believe that it has strong mechanics; I don't. What Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition does have is extensive mechanics, however these mechanics are entirely geared towards killing things with dice, everything else is an afterthought and a poorly realized one at that.

My distaste for D&D is no secret, I've been a staunch critic of it since Hasbro bought Wizards and they released D20. I vowed that I would not even accept a D20 product on my hard drive as a PDF even if it were given to me by a friend for free. (Yes illegal and irrelevant because I kept my vow all through 3rd edition.) However the industry seems to be coming back from the D20 OGL that afflicted it and I don't see the new one effecting it in the same way so I thought maybe it was time to bury the hatchet, after all; gaming is my favorite hobby and Dungeons and Dragons is the original from which all others have spawned. So I put aside my original distaste for the overall product and decided to give it a try and use and abuse it in ways that no one else really would.

I've not played many actual sessions of D&D truth be told, currently in my 13 years of gaming the count is up to 4 and a half (the half being made a character and did a 10 minute prelude but never actually played beyond that). But one session that I remember having some fun while simultaneously being annoyed at was a session where I got to play a 2nd level Bard in 3rd edition that was loaded up with skills. The scenario was that we had come upon a small town that was being terrorized by a necromancer (the cues being a dismayed populace and a really big graveyard) this of course was to lead to our group venturing through the sewers through hoards of skeletons raised from the ancestors of these poor townsfolk, smashing their bones to dust, killing the vile necromancer that animated them and then taking any grave goods that might have been collected in the process as our own.

I decided to take a different approach. I felt that it was obvious that the town council must be corrupt to let the people of this town be terrorized so, and that these people needed to be free from such tyranny. I describe carefully how I as a 2nd Level Bard would go to the neighboring monastery and explain to the Paladins there about how the council of this town was letting such a horrible thing occur. I requested that these paladins help me expel this corrupt council and help me with installing a more benevolent one, in exchange I would set up a tithe from the town taxes to send to the monastery as a protection fee, and probably end up being mayor in the process.

As a Bard I had the means to do this easily, my social skills were well up to the task because D&D didn't really have a way to counter good social skill rolls. So I was about to become mayor of this town get tax money for doing so as a 2nd level bard before the rest of the group had even decided which entrance to take into the sewers.

One of the players however was insistent that what I was doing could not be possible because I was only 2nd Level, and that was stuff that higher level characters did. The DM too was balking, not because he could find fault in my plan but that it would thoroughly derail the game which was barely even starting, so in good grace I acquiesced to their requests and went into the dungeon and fumbled around as bards are known to do, the next session I found other things to do that weren't D&D and that was fine with everyone. But the niggling thought remained with me long afterwards:

Can a well-played social character break the game?

I believed it could because Charisma is the only social ability and by-and-large considered a dump stat by D&D aficionados. Plus there were really no rules governing what a person swayed by force of personality would do.

There's a web-video circulating where during a game of D&D one of the PC's meets a girl. The conversation between the DM and the player goes like this:

PC: "Will she have sex with me?"

GM: "Um... roll your Charisma."

PC: *Rolls coming up 18* "Sweet!" *Then in a singsong voice of triumph declares:* "18-plus-four. That means I SCORE!"

Me... I've actually slept with women in real life, so I figure I can put together a bit stronger rationalization than that, and if I'm packing a character with a character with +15 to his Diplomacy skill I should be unstoppable. With those two things on my side I'll be ruling the world in under 5 sessions barring the DM doesn't have a panic attack and ban me from the game before the 3rd one.

So when the Players Guide 2 came out I borrowed it from a friend and attempted to make that uber-social bard that would break the game. My strategy was build a character with as high a Charisma as I could get, get a high Wisdom to counter other characters like myself, pump lots of points into diplomacy, and bluff and then find out what point the system broke down where I could convince kings and emperors to do my bidding.

To the game's credit, it doesn't break like I thought it does. I managed to make my bard have a diplomacy bonus of +17 at first level, but skill base is determined directly by level - meaning high-level characters will resist a low level character's Bluff attempt, and diplomacy has no hard and fast rules for resistance which means after I abuse it more than twice the DM can just assign a difficulty of 50 and I'm derailed. Not that buying the DM beers and using some sound rationale can't get past that, but it's not the game breaking results that I was looking for. However this does reveal a deeper problem which I find much more disturbing... single focus gameplay.

99% of all the mechanics in D&D are geared towards you killing something. Now I'm not some liberal pacifist gamer that believes killing is wrong or anything but if I want to kill things with my fancy avatar I'll go play an MMOG! When I want to actually play a character and triumph through cunning or fail from lack of it I turn to tabletop games. Unfortunately Wizards of the Coast doesn't believe gamers like me exist, because there is no room for cunning or nuance in D&D's mechanics. Charisma is not a social stat, it is a combat stat that emphasizes feints and ways of killing your opponent by talking at them.

For example: The bard spell Fast Friends on Pg 69 of the Players Guide 2 says you leave your opponent in Reverie for a round but all this does is make them skip their attack. No social implications at all just a combat effect... Or Blunder on the same page it Hazes your Enemy's mind, something that would have all sorts of creative applications, but the effect once again strictly combat.

All this reminds me of an old game called Warhammer Quest which I wouldn't define as a role-playing game but more of a wargame/board game hybrid. You placed down tiles to represent the dungeon you marched through encountering monsters along the way until you killed the boss and got the loot. Then you left the dungeon and rolled to see if you went to a village a town or a city, the difference in the three was how easy it was to find buyers for your special loot. Then once you'd sold your loot and bought training for your next level you'd go back to squashing monsters in the next dungeon. This was a fun game and I enjoyed it immensely but it was not a role-playing experience, it wasn't trying to be.

Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition has that same single focus on fighting things in tight quarters and it really seems like the times between the dungeon fighting is just supposed to be glossed over so that the players can go back to their regular Vitamin D deficient lifestyles. This seems wrong to me because D&D has spawned some extremely rich fantasy settings; why have a Forgotten Realms setting when the game is obviously only meant for you to be crawling through it's sewers smashing at rats like a cameraman filming Dirty Jobs? Why create these rich vast vistas of gameplay opportunity if the only way you can effect them is by fighting off the randomly spawning threats that pop up within them?

Why would D&D give me a corrupt town if it never meant for me to become it's mayor?