The Name of the Game

I originally thought I had until the first week of June to get this out, but some stores have jumped the gun and delivered/shelved early, and the internet is saturated with pirated copies. You know what I'm talking about. Dungeons & Dragons. 4th Edition.

With 4E on the horizon, the choice to switch or stick with 3.x (or even AD&D!) has been brought to many game tables. The argument has been raging for over a year on forums around the world, with each new snippet of official information being released sparking a dozen new debates on each board. Some people praise the mechanics; others condemn its redesigned themes. What's important is to remember that it's a game, and that means it should be about fun.

And that means it's going to be as fun as you let it. After all, finding a stick that looks like a gun can be fun; there aren't many things you can mechanically do with a stick, and its implied "themes" (when it's just a stick) are fairly limited. But it's a tool in your imaginative hands, for doing whatever you want.

Mechanics are hardly the most important thing about a game, unless they're both strict and complex. While chess would be very hard to enjoy if every piece behaved differently under variant rules, that's not the case, so everyone follows fairly similar rules, with negligible changes based on household or tournament. But Dungeons & Dragons is a wholly different animal compared to chess. Any given edition has rules that span volumes of manuals and magazines. D&D is complex. One might argue that it's more cumbersome to stick with an older edition plagued by layers of errata and third-party materials, than it is to start with a fresh set of rules, but that isn't the argument for here, and I don't think that should be the argument for your table, either.

The argument should be, "can we get something fun out of this?" If you can use the rules on Powers, if you like the way the new classes are organized, if you like the thematic elements of the new races and monsters, and your group agrees, it might be a worthwhile investment to get a group copy to pillage for ideas. The same can be said of any other roleplaying game system. Take Shadowrun, for example. Those are some involved rules! But a few of them might appeal to your or your group. While I was in the reality-survival phase of my DMing, my favorite Shadowrun concept was 10HP for all characters, no matter what. Oddly enough, a few D&D players agreed with me about that, and we adapted our rules to accomodate the HP range and played reality-survival-fantasy. (I got sick of that after both playing and running it for a little over a year, and ever since have supported straight-up fantasy, with survival elements for thematic purposes/dramatic situations only.)

One of the biggest complaints (from DMs) seems to be the 6-hour rest, at the end of which all temporary conditions are removed and all HP is restored. Some time after my bout with realism, I more or less began handwaving away whatever held my group back from continuing the adventure. They loved (1) not having to track little details across sessions that were sometimes months apart and (2) having fairly even footing at the beginning of each session. Everyone was always able to participate. Now it's in the rules. My advice if you want to slow down characters' recovery? Don't mess with the HP restoration. Add a "long-term injury" tracker. Maybe treat them like feats. "Shot in the leg" is a speed -2 penalty that lasts until three milestones are passed. "Stabbed in the lungs" is speed -1, CON -2 that lasts until six. I strongly advise against making tables for these things. Write down what injuries you make up so you can be consistent if you use that injury again, but try to improvise based on how the game is flowing. As amusing as it might be to roll a 1, consult the chart, and say, "laser enters eye, exits back of skull," you're going to lose the narrative control and future variety that improvisation provides.

By the way, it's totally an ancient egyptian laser beam in the example above.
(Third bullet in the list.)