The Good Folk

The Fair Folk, the Kindly Ones, the Robin Goodfellows and Pucks often get short shrift in AD&D. There are few representations of the capricious and dangerous faerie for us to use. One of the primary engines behind this lack is the designation of elves as a player race. Elves are the primary folkloric inhabitants of this space: almost-men who dwell in Annwn or some equally removed-but-present otherworld where they may dance with you until you die, or keep you away from your home for a thousand years and return you to a land vastly changed from the one you recall. But the elves of D&D are a different breed. They're closer to Tolkien, who's elves were themselves already one step removed from the dangerous faerie folk. D&D elves are even farther down the road towards "regular everyday people" of a different branch than that. They retain some of their mystery due to their alienness (and in the 10th Age, the xenophobic tribes of wood elves willing to protect the lives of trees, with whom they often have long conversations, at the expense of nearly any intruder or trespasser) but they are far from the terrifying figures of legend.

What do we have in our Monster Manuals that can return the Fair Folk to their rightful place? 4th Edition tried to do this by incorporating an Annwn into the basic cosmology of their worlds (the Faewild or somesuch vomitous sounding garbage) and making Formori and gnomes into the archetypical Goodly Ones. For us, though, the trick is to pick on the other incarnations of Celtic myth that are left behind: pixies, atomies, sprites, griggs, the D&D leprechaun, etc. In the 10th Age I've done this by making these creatures strongly inimical or at the very least uncaringly capricious. Pixies in particular have had a massive overhaul, transforming them into barrow-dwelling death spirits who wear armor carved from bone and cavort amongst men with the intention of racking up stories to tell to enrich their legendary names back home. These death-spirits are highly feared tricksters who can range from CE to CG and many of whom dwell firmly in the CN(E) category.

The notion of the Fair Folk is one that has powerful cultural anchors, even if they are not squarely medieval. Anything that has cultural resonance extending back into the middle ages is a good candidate for inclusion in a D&D game (save the overriding monotheistic belief system, which sort of squashes the neopagan revival of D&D's many warring gods), so I've done my best to rehabilitate this trope into the 10th Age. It shouldn't be, after all, all that hard to do considering most of the fairy-tale creatures that belong to Annwn can appear human (like the legendary elves) and have a bevy more inbuilt powers (like the legendary inhabitants also did). It merely serves for us to subtly tweak their behavior and cultures so they are less like the cobbler's elves of happy-go-lucky legend and more like the dangerous spirits from which they sprang.

The Ever Changing Appendix N

I've been thinking recently about the sea-change in pen and paper attitudes that marks the difference between the old, hard, "realistic" games from the 70s and the newer, shinier, "fun" games from the now. Since the OSR blogosphere is abuzz with additions to, discoveries in, and reviews of things from Appendix N, my thoughts recently turned to what exactly is going on here in the pen and paper world. Games have certainly changed, and they have changed because the people who play them have changed. Gygax was 36 when he and Arneson released the first edition of Dungeons and Dragons (or so my rapid and poor calculation skills tell me). He certainly wasn't in high school, and he already had a lifelong dedication to wargaming.

But that's not the big difference. The difference between games of today and games of yesteryear are their Appendix N. What sources do they draw on? What the are they trying to be, trying to emulate? What's the feel that inspired them? It's different now than it used to be, in large part because the intended audience of D&D keeps getting younger. Like a cigarette company, Hasboro wants to hook 'em young, hook 'em strong, and keep 'em stringing along. TSR had bad penetration into the very young demographics, probably because of the language of their books and the relatively strenuous weight placed on simulation.

Flash, not substance

The mainstream rpg market, the one dominated by games like Paizo's Pathfinder and WotC's D&D, has changed a lot from the roots of the hobby. Where once most gamers would have been content with a photocopied manual made in their local library and purchased through the mail, the format of the books has become of greater and greater import to the people buying them. We want books that look good and have lots of pictures, presumably because our imaginations are no longer working on overtime, so we need to have illustrations on every page to remind us what our own particular fantasy worlds look like.

This is really an aspect of the DIY problem spilling over into book design. D&D, like most modern well-known and mainstream pnp games, isn't about coming up with your own stuff anymore but rather purchasing stuff that you find in a store. The shiny pages, the full-page artwork, and the strange layouts are themselves a selling point now with the content taking second place. The encyclopedic style of late-stage TSR  has been supplanted by a very simple and easy-to-read method of writing.

As the writing of the books has gotten less complex their layouts have taken up the slack. They are now shining examples of overdesign. Yes indeed! I said it once and I'll say it again! They have less content and more glamor than any books that came before them. Paizo is perhaps slightly less guilty of this (their Pathfinder book is as gigantic a paperweight as I've ever seen and I confess that I couldn't be bothered to read it thoroughly as I despise 3.x in all its incarnations) but WotC has taken this design schema to heart and so have many lesser companies following WotC's wagon train.

This World's Got Character

I think I've hit upon one of the core issues I have with what I've been calling the Player Entitlement method of playing roleplaying games. That is, those people who believe that because they are players they deserve all manner of special treatment from the GM and from the setting itself. My problem is that there is, in all games, a character that you don't necessarily see or realize: the setting.

The setting is as much a character as any PC, and more than that it is the GM's character. The game must make room for the setting that the GM wants and, in a way, the GM is the most important player. Without the players of the PCs, the game would stop... for a while, until new players could be found. Without the GM, the game is gone. No one can play it, because each GM is in a sense the incarnation, the game-made-flesh. They carry inside them the dream-seed that is the setting and in some cases they are walking bundles of house-rules tailored just for you.

Picking Pockets

Pockets, as we know them, did not exist until the 17th century. Before this, the things we call pockets were actually worn on the outside and were generally known as purses. This can be become extremely difficult to tell your players when there is a thief skill called "pick pockets." But don't worry! You can still be saved! Look at the online etymology dictionary and explain everything to your players in these terms:

pocket (n.)

mid-14c., "bag, pouch, small sack," from Anglo-Fr. pokete (13c.), dim. of O.N.Fr. poque "bag," from Frank. *pokka "bag," from Gmc. *puk- (see poke (n.)). Meaning "small bag worn on the person, especially one sewn into a garment" is from early 15c. Mining sense is attested from 1850; military sense of "area held by troops surrounded by the enemy" is from 1918. The verb, with implications of dishonesty, is from 1630s. Pocket-knife is first recorded 1727; pocket-money is attested from 1630s. Pocket veto attested from 1842, Amer.Eng.

So there you have it; honor preserved, and historical accuracy (or historical verisimilitude if you want to be precise) achieved.

Now that we're on the subject, we can talk about thieves in AD&D. They've got something strange going on, some confluence of two different philosophies about playing smashed together. AD&D 2e was the the turning point, the crux that lies between player skill and character skill. It deals with a little of one and a little of the other. Go much further back and your games are all player skill. Go one iteration ahead and your games are all character skill. Only in 2e are we stuck in the balanced limbo where some of both is required.

Canned D&D

The first feedback I received on the Adventurers' Guide was that player's don't want to read more than one page of setting material. Bundled right along with this revelation was the fact that any DM who writes a setting manual of any kind is suspect, that they are automatically placed into a dangerous category of nutjob who probably won't run a good game. To me, this is bizarre; it led me to think about the way that D&D has changed since I started playing it, which is a topic that seems to get a frequent workout here.

The assumption that home-made D&D settings are somehow inferior to the boxed products seems to underlie that statement. Let's not even begin to try to unpack the sadness of the claim that reading a book is too much work for someone who wants to play a roleplaying game; the inherent contradiction there must rest for another time. But really, it brings home a shock that I've experienced all over the internet: people simply don't like homebrewed material. It looks like D&D has gone from something you make to something you buy, which is a true loss for the community. The same clearly can't be said about the OSR, so there's some hope yet, I suppose.

These waters are wide but shallow

A lot of players that grew up using 3.x and 4e have a real problem when coming back to 2e. I've noticed it repeatedly, and its very persistent across the board. Even one of my longtime regulars was once of this mindset before his complete and ultimate conversion to AD&D (I believe at my own hands). It's a strange hang-up that has to do with player choice and freedom and character creation, and I believe I can explain its root causes and the types of character it actually winds up creating.

I feel like I might be flogging a dead (or at the very least dying) horse here to state it, but 3.x and 4e are, (as 5e will be also, I'm sure) the product of a player's revolution. To protect themselves from bad DMs the players established ground rules about what they would allow and what they wouldn't. The chief and most noxious of those rules is that player choice means everything, and what the player wants goes; after all, the game is about fun, right?

The problem that I'm talking about specifically is the lack of creativity in character creation. Players of the later editions have come to identify creativity with playing monstrous races and picking strange classes. It's an easy sign of creativity if you are allowed to be a race that is rarely played (say, gnolls) and a class that is extremely specific (say, magical chef). These "concepts" dominate play in the modern systems. Elves, dwarves, etc. are often derided as being boring or even, in one case that I speak of from life, un-fantastical.

Every Table is Sacred

A few days ago I broke my silence on the Wizards of the Coast website concerning D&DNext. The question posed by the developers was one concerning the new feats in 5e and namely whether or not they should have roleplaying effects, combat effects, or exploration effects or all three. I was irritated at the very way the question is posed, and I posted a response that suggested that new abilities should make sense in totality; if someone can breathe fire, it makes sense to allow a ruling that says their fire breath also sets things on fire, boils water, etc.

I received a lot of positive responses... but amongst those, I was soundly schooled by a nameless lizard-avatared woman about why rulings were bad. She put forward the argument that rules should be ironclad and stay the same from table to table. The game system must be our baseline, and only from there, with a complete and comprehensive all-encompassing ruleset mapped out should individual tables modify them. I couldn't disagree more.

Tee Arr Yew Ess Tee

There can be no pen and paper roleplaying game without a game master. This is a dictum that, aside from a few games (that I would classify as collective story telling and not games at all), has held true throughout time. Players, you need to trust your game master. There's no game without him; he needs the leeway to make the game function and shouldn't be hamstrung by your trust issues.

That having been said, game master: you must be worthy of trust. I've addressed the poisonous Player's Rights movement that has informed so many of the modern pen and paper rules, but so far I've not actually spoken about the key issue that lies at the very root: the lack of trust between player and game-master that so permeates modern roleplaying games. Where does this lack of trust stem from? It is most likely not a flaw on the part of players, to be fair. So who do we have to blame for this virulent movement? Why, none other than the abusive GMs that put the fear into people so badly that they felt they had to design rules to protect themselves!

Luckily, there are ways to tell if you're an abusive GM; you can change, I promise, and you won't even have to have a player-held intervention.*

Encountering Balance

There's a mania going around about balancing encounters. Its poisonous grip has slithered around 3.x and 4e alike, and I'm sure it will make it into 5e as well. We are told that encounters need to be fair, survivable, carefully crafted to allow players to use their resources but not difficult enough to kill them. This is a common thread in a lot of modern pen and paper games, presumably to give the Game Master some idea of around what the players can handle without having the floor totally mopped by their foes. However, I would argue that, like many modern pnp conceits, this is actually a result of the vague player's bill of rights that I have discussed on many occasions; namely, in this case, the right to have fair encounters.

Steve Winter mentioned this problem somewhat in his discussion on dragons and on another secondary discussion on encounters, but I'd like to take it in a slightly different direction and trace the benefits of both systems so that we can compare what each method does (fair vs. unfair) and leave the reader to choose for themselves which they prefer. Clearly, I'm going to be in the Winter camp as I agree with Steve on almost every subject; it was his notes in the 2e DMG that taught me how to be a DM, after all. That doesn't mean I can't attempt to list their perks semi-objectively, though.


Let's begin with the fair and balanced encounter. We all know this one, as it is in vogue right now. The fair encounter promises the illusion of threat, which is an important element in any roleplaying game. Perceiving danger is integral to the function of not only what we call "roleplaying games," but any game in which you engage in the role of a character; video games more commonly qualified as action games, etc. Perceiving a danger to your character is part of the fun!

By that same token, this could be a danger to your game. If the threat to your players is simply illusion (i.e., the encounters are so well balanced that only by a series of awful dice-rolls or idiotic tactics could they lose) they may realize this. Indeed, they may realize this just from being familiar with the system. The problem here is, of course, that once the players know that encounters are balanced and are not going to be too hard, they'll know there is a set solution. "If we just arrange our tactics a certain way," they say, "We can definitely win."

This turns combat from a risky endeavor into a puzzle. That's fine, if that's the game you're looking for, but I have never thought of D&D as primarily a puzzle-game. This reduces the adrenaline and fear of combat, ensuring that players are going to survive if only they find the correct solution to their problems. As long as the tactics they choose are the ones that are "correct," they will almost certainly be victorious.

I suppose this can be fun. Who am I to say it can't? That's not the way I want to play D&D though. This seems like a strange way to approach the game, which I see as a reflection of events truly occurring in the fantasy setting of your choice. That sounds insane, I know, but bear with me on this. Maybe I'll even write about it further in another article. Here it goes: perception, as far as I am concerned, is reality. Whatever I perceive is what is real. The seat of perception is generally relegated to the senses, but in the case of imagination we can pretend to sense things that we do not. If we collectively imagine a place, is it not then, in some sense, extant?

And with that fresh in mind, we can look at the other approach. Under this rubric, one does not decide whether or not the PCs can "handle" a fight; rather, whatever makes sense for the region and adventure is present. It matters little if the PCs are level one and fighting ogres, or if they are level 10 and fighting goblins in terms of balance. Balanced encounters, in this mode, are simply not even a question.

The reason for this, of course, is because unlike a video game wherein you must approach problems from a limited number of starting points, in a real pen and paper game you are not forced to approach anything from a particular direction.

Let's take an example: Level 1 party is aware of a group of ogres they want to kill. In a video game, they would have to choose one of the developer approved approaches to getting rid of them. In that sense, the fight would most certainly be "unfair," since there might be one or two possible solutions to allow the party to overcome the ogres.

However, in a pen and paper game the level 1 party has an infinite variety of options. They could hire men to help them, trick the ogres into a narrow defile and rain boulders onto them, dupe them into fighting each other, bait some trolls to come down and destroy them, etc. The game is no longer about finding the right solution, but rather about working with the information you have to solve problems using any tools that could potentially exists in the gameworld.

This is, in my mind, a truer expression of the benefits of pen and paper than the carefully tallied fights designed to waste your resources and make your dead heart feel alive.

I yearn to be different

After some cursory thought and introspection, I've developed a theory on the differences between the way characters are handled in later editions and how that separates them from the earlier methods of character creation (and running your character). Here, I present these thoughts in rough and unfinished form: My thesis for consideration is that earlier editions of D&D (and earlier roleplaying games in general) tend to ask you to define your character in terms of who they are while modern editions of D&D (and other roleplaying games that have followed, or perhaps inspired, this trend) ask you to define your character based on what they can do.

This may seem like a fatuous division. After all, what is the difference? Let us examine the consequences of who they are style thinking. For ease of use we can coin the terms existential (who they are) and agency-based (what they can do) just to make what we're talking about a little easier to digest and perhaps fill the conversation with complicated jargon to confuse outsiders. Anyhow! Existential thinking in character creation does not ask you, necessarily, to find rules reflections in who your character is. More important than his statistics and skills is his past and personality, and in older roleplaying games it should be a very sparse past indeed.

The Rulebound Watchmaker

I've mentioned my dislike for the logic that belies the 3.x and 4e rules repeatedly here, but I've never really addressed the heart of the matter. Now, there are people who will tell me that I'm wrong because it is the job of the DM to make the game function and, regardless of what WotC publishes, a good DM will make it work. I take umbrage at that, since the books that WotC release not only train the new generations of DMs, they also train the new generation of players to expect the types of treatment that WotC prefers for their games. Specifically, the underlying presumption that I've grown to truly dislike is that the campaign world is a clockwork mechanism where things react within narrow realms of predictability.

Now, this has its roots in the battle between Enlightenment Theism and Democritian Atomism. On the one hand, we have the belief that the universe is ordered, sensible, and predictable. This is a mechanical view of existence. By the mechanical view, we can predict all things in nature as long as we know enough about the circumstances. At its most reductionist, this is a completely fatalistic system. Determine the exact mechanical starting point of the universe and one can then extrapolate every piece of history that will follow.