So, for the most part, I’ve left RPGs alone, except as reading material. I gave up on actually playing them, except as an occasional experiment, and I kept thinking that it just wasn’t going to happen ever again.
I also should note that, while I have followed (and own) all of the versions of D&D so that I could follow along with what was happening in the RPG gaming community, I stopped playing D&D actively well over a decade ago (closer to fifteen years, really). I just didn’t find class-based systems fun, and I had a real problem with … well, you know. All of the classic problems that people have with D&D. I liked skill-based systems, and customizing characters, and hybrid characters who could do a little bit of everything, and so forth. So I love RPG's, in a general sort of sense, but I'm not surrounded by others who do ...
Fast forward to a few weeks ago.
I’d become frustrated with Descent recently, from the perspective of putting time into a campaign system which was fun, yet felt as if perhaps wasn’t necessarily evenly supported on both sides of the table. My friends and I would discuss whether or not it was worthwhile to invest our time in long, epic Descent campaigns when the outcome felt (for the most part) pre-written.
I kept reading how 4th edition D&D re-wrote a lot of its mechanics to play much like a grid-based tactical miniatures game. Indeed, when I looked at the various stuff online, it read like a more options-laden version of Descent. Instead of a few skills to choose from, you had hundreds (albeit many different versions and tweaks of similar skills, and some growing out of others). The more I read, the more intrigued I became.
I recently decided that I wanted to test-drive the new 4th edition of D&D as an experiment for my boardgaming friends. I prepped them, telling them that I wanted to do this as a roleplaying-light session, with not much emphasis on the “acting” stuff, and mostly on the boardgamey stuff. I wanted to do this as a one-shot experiment. Let’s see if we like it, okay? If it fails, we never talk about it again! One day, one afternoon, that’s all we’re risking, and we’ll see what happens.
So I wanted to give it the best possible shot at success. I spent a lot of time making boardgame-style components, including
- wet-erase game mats containing only the final modifiers for people’s characters, and spaces to use tokens for book-keeping on things like HitPoints, healing surges, and action points. No pencils needed!
- customized “Power Cards” containing all rules and final modifiers for people’s characters. I used “Grandpa’s Power Cards” off ENworld as my starting point, and they rock! All the rules, PLUS spots to write in your final modifiers, so that at the end of the day you simply look down, see that you need to roll a d20 and add 7. Simple, fast, clean. Then I sleeved ‘em, ‘cause sleeves make things pretty!
- individualized “cheat sheets” with all specialty rules and finicky bits in easy-to-look-up format
- magnetic-backed “Initiative markers” on wet-erase foamcore, to track turn sequence on a large whiteboard
- wet-erase wooden discs as miniatures stand-ins for any miniatures I didn’t own
The whole idea was to get away from character sheets, formulas, calculations, and rules-lookups. The whole point was to make things simple, approachable, fast, and fun.
I e-mailed a document which I titled “Learn to Play D&D in 8 pages of 12-point font” to all of my players a week ahead of time, hoping that some of them would read it and get the system under their belt. It read like boardgame rules, in that it was fairly densely written, but if you read and memorized every sentence, you probably would never have to crack a book during a session.
Then, when people showed up, I handed them their game-mat, which had only the finalized modifiers written in wet-erasable marker in the appropriate section, as well as their miniature, and their power cards. They spent some time reading their individual cards, learning which Powers did what, and basically settling down.
Sure enough, one guy was late. He was the same guy who hadn’t even glanced at the rules summary. He was also the guy who had never played any D&D before in his life. He was my “control” in the experiment, because anything he learned to do he was going to learn on the fly, simply by playing, in the moment, right here and now! (and a little tired and stressed, at that!)
As the game started, we spent a good deal of time laughing at ourselves, and poking fun at the fact that we were playing D&D at our age. Indeed, I joined in and encouraged the venting, knowing that we needed to get it out of our system if we were to have any hope of moving beyond it.
Which turned out to be a good thing … because we did move beyond it.
Very quickly, the newbies began to grasp the basics of the 3 types of actions. The quickly started to maximize their own turns, utilizing their positions to the best of their abilities. The first few rounds took a little while as everybody had to go through the mechanics, but eventually things sped up, and then slowed down again as we entered a new plateau – coordination. People were no longer content simply doing their own thing, because they understood that! They already were starting to see the potential of working off what other people were doing.
(note: anybody who tells you that combat was taking a long time in their test-drive of a 4th edition session probably was having to look everything up each-and-every time … whereas the Power Cards sped things up to the point where people could get their entire turn over with in seconds, if they wanted to).
By the second or third encounter, they had every single mechanic down cold, and things were ticking along very quickly. The newbie was providing innovative and entertaining uses for Ghost Sound, desperately trying to gain some sort of advantage in combat from what should have been a meager little apprentice trick. The other characters were finding new and interesting ways to use their skills, playing off one another, and basically chewing their way through the rules, their opponents, and the encounters.
Around this time, two of the players had allergy reactions, so I gave them some generic allergy stuff, which they both said made them both very drowsy. The newbie wizard (the guy who had been late and hadn’t read the rules primer ahead of time) was so drowsy that I think he actually nodded off for 5 minutes!
But something else interesting happened, too. The players had amongst them a fellow who was already playing in a 4th edition campaign, and who had insisted on bringing his own character customized the way he liked it (which makes sense). He knew the game, and wanted to tweak his guy ‘just so’. However, about two thirds of the way through the game, in a particularly hairy situation, the other players were actually helping him coordinate his turn more effectively, make better use of his actions, and basically helping him grasp some of the more fiddly possibilities (to the benefit of the party in general and the dying hero in particular). What they failed to recognize (but which I picked up on right away) was that here they were – a group of newbies with just a few hours of playtime under their belt – and they were helping a fellow who had already been actively playing in a 4th edition campaign see possibilities that he hadn’t seen before.
This tells me that there is something pretty interesting going on here.
When you simplify things, and get rid of the clutter (like character sheets, and extraneous calculations, and looking up stuff in the rulebooks) you can skip straight to the fast-learning portion of the day, and without breaking a sweat tap into the gamer skillset that draws each one of us to the table. By making “boardgame” style accoutrements and paraphernalia, we’d done more than simply make the game pretty and add chrome. We’d done more than just sped up the combats (which we did!) or sped up the game in general (which we did!).
We streamlined the user-interface, and got the players directly into the game. Quickly, easily, and efficiently. So efficiently that they began to gain parity with the veteran gamer.
And in the end, the experiment worked.
I told everybody not to make a decision on the spot. To go home and think about it for a few days.
After 48 hours had passed, I sent out an e-mail, asking if people wanted to commit to the idea of starting up a D&D campaign, based on their personal tastes, their experiences with that single exposure, and their schedules. I wanted people to do it via e-mail, after a small break, so that they could be free from peer pressure, and say what they really felt, whether they had fun or not, and so forth.
Every one of our 5 heroes wants to start a campaign. Everybody. Even the fellow who had never played before, arrived late, never read the primer, and was doped up on allergy meds had enough fun and found it easy enough that he wants in for more!
I think that this is really interesting.
I’ve never had a success rate like this with another RPG. I don’t usually get a success rate like this with most boardgames, either!
I think that making lots of “boardgamey” style components, and taking away a lot of the clutter, really sped things up, simplified things, and made things so much more straightforward that it just got straight to the meat of the matter. Indeed, comments were made to the effect that they couldn’t see the game working without such accoutrements (oh, sure, intellectually they could see it, but why would you?!)
So if anybody out there is curious about starting up again in the silly world of fantasy RPG’s, I say this to you …
… go for it!
Take some time. Prep for it. As an old-school gamer who loves his finicky little Excel spreadsheets and his math, I had to put all of that away and kill a few of my sacred cows. Instead, take the time to make it pretty. Make the Power cards! (have I emphasized that enough, yet?!) Make the components. Get it out there on the table, and you’ll never have to crack a book again.
I know that some people have balked at the new 4th edition. I won’t begrudge them their opinion. I know that some people have said that they tried it and didn't like it, for various reasons. I know that some people in the Descent forum made various comments about combat length, etc. I'm not here to debate the relative merits of one game over another, of one system over another, or of one version over another.
But I’m here to tell you that our little story was a success. A resounding success.
4th Edition worked for a bunch of boardgaming, Descent-loving, and in some cases D&D-hating newbies.
But we knew enough to make the best use of what boardgaming had taught us. Even an old-school RPG warhorse like myself can be taught new tricks.
And boy did it work well!
Posted Fri Aug 22,2008 08:40 am
