My D&D Selfie

I wasn't sure what pic to use for my #DnDSelfie until I came across this picture, which is sorta perfect, given both my smartphone cover and situation: this was taken in 2013 right after the office party Batgirl threw for me when I left my 18 year career with Wizards/TSR and Dungeons and Dragons behind to try something new.

D&D Selfie 2013

And yeah, the #DnDSelfie tag awesomely demonstrates that the stereotype of #DnD players as socially incompetent male nerds is TIRED and OVER. Huzzah! That said, I just rewatched the SNL clip. I gotta say, I admire the passion & joy these guys have; they got no fucks to give about conforming

Origin of the Far Realm in D&D

Cover art by Jeff Easly.

I was hired by TSR in 1995. Within a month, I was tasked to "Write a D&D adventure that supports all our new Player's Option materials." Oh, and one that would have a couple double-sided poster maps and lots of punch-out creature tokens. The only other thing already established was the name: The Gates Of Firestorm Peak. (A title suggested by Roger Moore, I believe)

Prior to this, my writing CV was a few sections in a Spacemaster supplement, and probably a hundred new creatures in a Rolemaster bestiary. (Oh, and thousands of lines of code, including lots of descriptive elements, in various MUDs and MUSHes). But I was up for the challenge!

Though I was slightly worried that creating a Player's Option D&D adventure would pigeon-hole the material too narrowly. So I adopted an adventure format that was aimed primarily at anyone who had regular D&D rules, plus a few additional considerations for those using D&D Player's Option material for each encounter. That ended up working really well. Most of the people who bought and played this didn't use Player's Option rules. The few bullet points appended at the end of each entry for Player's Option aficionados didn't bother anyone.

Which is to say, I was freed from having to focus on the rules, meaning I could design an adventure that was exciting to play, within an all-new environment that was a fusion of regular fantasy tropes with concepts a bit further afield: Lovecraftian concepts combined with Lamarkian ones, in particular.

Cover art by Fred Fields.

Somewhere in that stew of things becoming weirder and weirder as I designed toward the center of the mountain, the Vast Gate came into being. Crafted by Elder Elves during a previous epoch for exploration, it was eventually hidden away when they realized that their portal leading to a place outside of time had worked all too well. The place beyond time was the Far Realm, and to the sensibilities of those from a dimension of just three spatial and one temporal dimension, it was a place of horror.

My next project, The Illithiad, allowed me to further flesh out my notion of the Far Realm, and what better creatures to do that with than illithids? So in the lore text, I floated the rumor of how an ancient magical craft capable of traveling outside of time, crewed by sorcerers, found its own way beyond the edges of the cosmos, encountering the Far Realm for mere moments, before falling back into regular space and time. Humans on the craft were normal at first, but each and every one of them was soon revealed as being infected by an illithid larva, thus forming the first illithids a long, long time ago.

Over almost twenty years of design work, I continued to scatter bits and pieces of the Far Realm into D&D. The culmination of it all, at least for me, was my Abolethic Sovereignty Trilogy which brings the Far Realm front and center by the trilogy's end. Elves once again had a part to play, primarily by my half-elf protagonist Raidon Kane who battled both personal and cosmic horrors, as well as an ancient clan of elves in watchtowers all along the border of reality, guarding against incursion from a realm not their own.

Your Best Game Ever

A tool book for tabletop roleplayers. No matter what game you play or how long you’ve been playing–have your best game ever!

Your Best Game Ever is not your typical RPG sourcebook. It’s not a book with adventures, spells, creatures, or magic items. It’s not a book for characters at all, but a book for players! If you play or run roleplaying games, this book is for you. Inside this gorgeous hardcover book, suitable for your coffee table or your gaming table, you will find advice and suggestions for enhancing your RPG experience at the table and away from it. This is an insider’s look at everything that goes into the hobby—finding a group, making a character, running a game, creating adventures, finding all the right ideas, hosting a game…and that’s just for starters. 

If that sounds even slightly intriguing, check it out here. 

Or watch Shanna explain here:

Words of Power: Fantasy-themed organized play at your local game store

As many of you know, I have an 18-year history of writing Dungeons & Dragons. Things like The Sunless Citadel, Return to the Tomb of Horrors, and Gates of Firestorm Peak. So you know that I love me some fantasy settings and epic quests.

Which is why I am so excited that even as I write this, my 6-week adventure series Words of Power is potentially available right now as something you can play at your friendly local game store.

What is Words of Power? A 6 session adventure — a "season" — designed to be played over six weeks. Words of Power features the simple-to-learn Cypher System (the underlying rule system for Numenera and The Strange). The epic fantasy setting is one you'd recognize from much of my previous game material: here, wizards and dragons are real. Player characters must find and liberate five Words of Power: one from a dragon, one from a tomb, one from a fey lord, and two from a wizard’s library. Once assembled, the Words of Power can be used to return the Lich King’s undead army to dust before he conquers all the kingdoms of humanity.

In Session 1, the players create player characters (PCs) and learn about the game, including the general setting of the fantasy world where this season takes place. They also play a short encounter, answering a call from the Warden of Shadowbridge Keep to help stem a rising darkness.

If you want to know more about MCG's organized play program, called Cypher Play, check out the information provided here: montecookgames.com/monte-cook-game-announces-organized-play

If you want to play, check to see if your nearest friendly local game store is offering it. If not, direct them here to sign up: cypherplay.montecookgames.com

(Note: It's possible that I'm a little late in reporting the availability of Words of Power. But if you're store is not already doing it, they can start anytime while the season is still available at MCG!)

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Strange

Wanna know why I risked leaving my ~18 year gig writing Dungeons & Dragons to join Monte Cook Games, LLC and write The Strange?

Listen:

52: The Bruce Cordell Gambit, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Strange

Farewell Wizards and Thank You

It’s with mixed emotions that I announce the end of my 18-year run at Wizards (and TSR before that). I gave my notice last week and will be leaving the company.

Art by Arnie Swekel for "The Illithiad"

This isn’t an easy departure for me, both because of my long history with Wizards, and my recent good luck to be a member of the 5E Dungeons & Dragons design team. I’m thrilled to be part of 5E, and proud of what we accomplished: a kick-ass set of D&D rules. The team is on track to carry D&D Next to wide success.

Overall, my years at Wizards have allowed me to work alongside and learn from talented, creative, and innovative game designers, novel authors, and editors (professional editors, my friends, are worth their weight in platinum). Every project and novel was a chance for me to learn something new and hone my skills. Wizards granted me the opportunity to indulge myself telling stories, then gave me the ability to share those stories with the world.

Likewise, working at Wizards allowed me to develop fantastic relationships and enduring friendships. Everyone at Wizards is a superstar, both those presently employed and all those who’ve left before me. I hope that my future adventures will allow me to team up with many of them again for more forays into the dungeon.

But ultimately, every story ends so that new ones can begin. I’m looking forward to discovering what those stories will be.

UPDATE 2015: Since this post continues to draw traffic, let me add that I accepted a job with MonteCookGames (MCG) just a month after leaving Wizards. Together Monte and I wrote The Strange RPG (plus a ton of other stuff since then).

UPDATE 2018: I'm still at MCG! Last year saw the first novel I've written since leaving Wizards published by Angry Robot called Myth of the Maker. And literally the day before almost dying, I wrapped up the design on Numenera Destiny, the new companion corebook that expands Numenera into a two-corebook game. Moving forward from here are more Numenera 2 related projects that will likely see me through the rest of the year. (Though I also got to try my hand at some Invisible Sun design). In 2019, I'll be moving on to begin design on the updated Cypher System Rulebook and The Stars Are Fire science fiction extravaganza! 

And The Winners Are . . .

A few weeks ago I announced a contest to give away one of my novels performed by John Pruden available on Audible.com (three Abolethic books, and two Sword of Gods books). 

Well, that contest has run its course, and the three winners have been selected! The winners are as follows:

Ken Hart (@KenofGhastria on Twitter) gets an audio copy of Plague of Spells!

Doug Hopkins (@combatadvantage on Twitter) gets an audio copy of Sword of the Gods (Book 1)!

Randall Newnham (@coffeeswiller on Twitter) gets an audio copy of Plague of Spells!

I'd like to thank everyone who entered for your interest in these books. 

Last Thoughts About JD

JD Sparks, my friend of 30 years, passed away a few weeks ago. Last weekend was his memorial. Everyone got a chance to share some stories. I was especially grateful to meet many of JD's family and other friends, and hear what they had to say.

Here are a few stories about my friend.

I met JD in 9th grade, in a shop class of all places. Back then, he went by Jay. He, Monte (the other kid I met in shop class who liked D&D) and I spent a lot of time in class not paying attention. Instead, we goofed off and played games, like one called Global Thermonuclear Destruction on a map JD had drawn on graph paper. We used the 6 sides of No. 2 Lead Pencils for our dice, possibly also JD’s invention. A much better way to pass the hour than listening to our teacher explain how to sand wood and rivet leather.

The three of us soon moved on to the good stuff--Dungeons & Dragons! In one of our first games (played in my parent’s basement of course), JD’s character gained a –1 penalty to his attacks. He decided that meant that he should act unpredictably. At a bridge over an endless abyss, his character pushed mine over the edge, exclaiming, "I'm cursed!" Though JD went on to become one of the strongest gamemasters I’ve ever had the pleasure to play with, the “I’m cursed!” story remains one of my favorites.

Our group of goof-off D&D players soon grew to include myself, JD, Monte Cook, Richard Bue, Bob Baxter, and Bret Holien. We called ourselves the Hong Kong Cavaliers (and still do). Back in high school when we weren’t playing D&D or some other RPG, spending quarters at the arcade, or reading comic books, we were doing a school-sponsored forensic activity. That meant debate, and for JD and myself, Oratory.

Oratory required that you write an 8 minute speech each year, memorize it, then practice it so well that you could give it like a pro. By our senior year, JD and I traded top places across South Dakota and western Minnesota each weekend. JD could recite from memory the beginning few paragraphs of all our strongest competitors’ orations. And he could still do so TO THIS DAY.

(Bob Baxter and I were debate partners, and we ended up winning the SD state debate tournament our senior year, but that's another story.)

We Hong Kong Cavaliers remained friends all this time, and in the 30 years since I became friends with JD, I’ve gotten to hang out with him several times even though we've never lived in the same state since High School. Last year I organized a semi-regular D&D game with JD and the rest of the Hong Kong Cavaliers thanks to the magic of Google Hangouts. We all got to laugh as, once more, as JD “put up his defenses!” This time around, though, I was the gamemaster, so JD didn’t get a chance to push my character off any high ledges.

Even more often than we played D&D, JD, Torah Cottrill, and I played online video games over the last several years, especially City of Heroes and Guild Wars 2. JD loved those games, and sometimes we ended up in one of those imaginary lands two or even three times a week. If you had a question about how to craft a sword, where to find the best quests, or where the toughest levels were, JD knew it. And he also was such a gracious friend that he got joy out of stocking the guild vault with goodies that the rest of us could use.

JD was a giving, loving, and talented man. I haven’t even touched on his amazing artistic talent, though Torah and I have several of his pieces framed in our home. Whenever I see them, I think of him. He made the world a better place for the 45 years he was part of it. He touched all of us with his art, his humor and wit, and the way he managed to keep a positive attitude when all the world sometimes seemed against him.

He will be missed more than I can say.

How I do Google+ RPG Hangouts

I've tried many things with G+ RPGing, trying to get just the right mix of interaction and utility around the virtual "table." A friend recently asked me what I'd settled on.

Some people swear by 3rd party add-ons, including the excellent folks at .  (UPDATE: Since I wrote that last bit, I'm afraid Tabletop Forge is no longer your best bet, as they've gone away.)

However, I discovered that for my needs, less is more.  

Here's what works best for me:

Ahead of time, I gather art references, as available for a particular dungeon or session for the adventure in question, and put them in SkyDrive (Microsoft's free cloud stoarge service), which allows you to link individual pics via a public URL. (Dropbox and other services offer similar public links.)

I don't use minis, virtual or otherwise, but I do rely on sketching while describing settings and RPG battles; as a DM, I use pseudo Theatre of the Mind, with sketches as an aid.

I make such sketches on white board at my back while I play. Sometimes I cheat and use one at the office where I work, but I bought one at the store for around $18 for my home. I use the whiteboard to sketch the adventurer's progress in a dungeon (or other) setting, careful to make it large enough that A) it's visible through the g+ interace, and B) I can easily add general monster and PC placement if it becomes necessary to understand how a fight is progressing.

During play, everyone rolls their own dice, which requires trust  I suppose, but allows people to use the dice they love, and doesn't require me to force everyone to go through a dice emulator.

As play proceeds, I drop URLs of interesting pics (that I've uploaded to Skydrive, which creates public links), poems, or other pieces of text into the chat window.

I do use the Lower Third add-on, which some of my players also use, which is a great place to add the character's name and class, and even a picture.

This all seems to work like a charm! Even for casual gaming with my old high school friends who aren't game professionals.

I've gotten fancy in the past by logging in with a second computer/phone so that I could display a map on that, but frankly, the amount of juggling that required was a pain--the white board solution is, like Russian pencils in space, more robust.

I hope this inspires you to try a few g+ hangout games if you've been thinking about doing so. Good luck!

#SFWApro

The Advantage of Rolling Dice

Advantage (and disadvantage) debuted in the May 24th D&D playtest as a game mechanic simulating a creature having an edge (or a hindrance) to an attack, task, or other effort. Prior to the playtest release, the design team experimented with several methods of achieving advantage/disadvantage. Each had their strengths and weaknesses.

Ultimately we decided we wanted to test an aggressive version with the initial rules: When you have advantage on an attack or other suitable d20 roll, roll twice and use the higher result. (Or, roll twice and take the lower result if you have disadvantage.)

One of the potential drawbacks we worried about was the mechanic’s novelty. Was it too wild a twist on player expectations? And, possibly too significant an actual mathematical bonus (or penalty)?

On the other hand, possible strengths of the mechanic include the very same two points: it’s a novel, exciting way to model having some kind of an edge (or hindrance), and the effect is big and meaty enough to really matter when it does apply.

An even more important strength of the roll-twice method is to reduce on-the-fly math at the table. A numerical mechanic requires a player to add at least 3 numbers together with each roll: the roll result + an already-calculated attack bonus (or ability modifier) + the advantage bonus (a +2 or +3, say). Everyone can do this sort of math of course, but each additional number that’s added or subtracted makes the calculation slower, and over the course of play, slows the game. Math is hard.

Finally, an obvious strength of the current advantage system is simply that it’s fun to roll dice.

Now the playtest is out. Those of you running Caves of Chaos and the pregenerated characters are using the mechanic. A surprisingly high number of you (our survey pros tell us) filled out and returned the survey included with the release (thank you). We were excited to see a greater than 70% approval rating for the current mechanic.

Of course it’s early days, and this is a playtest after all. We already know we need to tweak advantage/disadvantage a bit. At the very least, we need to very carefully think about appropriate places to apply it, and more importantly, places where its application is just a bad idea. In fact, that later point is important. While dice rolling is fun, too much dice rolling isn’t.

For instance, consider a spell that could inflict blanket disadvantage to a creature for a minute. What if that creature has a claw/claw/bite attack routine? Is suddenly becomes too many dice to ask the DM to roll. Imagine if that same spell applied to a group of monsters for a minute. Even worse. Likewise, awarding blanket advantage to monsters encountered in large numbers can also quickly become a pain.

Going forward, a design and development rule of thumb might be something like (what Rodney Thompson said to me over the cube wall between our desks): a player or creature should (generally speaking) expend an action to gain advantage or bestow disadvantage. I couldn’t agree more. In your playtests, try that as a guiding principle, and see how it works out.

Ranger Design Goals

High level goals for ranger design for the next edition of D&D? Here they are! (or, here they were at any rate).

1. The Ranger is a Wilderness Hunter and Tracker

Rangers are at home in the uncharted wilds, whether those wilds be darkling forests, mountain badlands, or sunless deeps.

   In their guise as trackers, rangers are both stealthy and alert. They’re able to track a falcon on a cloudy day and find useful herbs. They are wary of potential trails, or ambushes.

   In their guise as hunters, rangers can choose to focus on an individual quarry, whereupon their hunter’s instincts kick in, allowing them to strike with enhanced lethal force.

2. The Ranger is a Warrior

Rangers wear light armor appropriate for stalking prey, and are adept with martial weapons. Having learned many hard lessons in the wild, rangers are tougher than other people, and better able to withstand hurts. Many rangers focus on a particular combat style, traditionally two weapon fighting or archery, and do so via an appropriate theme.  

3. The Ranger is a Protector

Rangers revere nature, and are often called to protect individual trees or creatures, groves or packs, or fey creatures. However, rangers can protect creatures who are out of place in the wilderness, serving not only as a guide, but also as a personal defender against threats both natural and unnatural.

4. Rangers are Friends With Wild Creatures

Natural beasts are generally well disposed toward rangers and vice versa, as reflected in a ranger’s natural ability to befriend animals. Rangers have the option to form a deeper bond with a given animal by gaining its trust and loyalty, allowing it to aid the ranger as a scout, informant, or provide some other useful service. With each new animal a ranger bonds with, the ranger’s understanding and appreciation of the natural world grows.

5. Additional Notes

A ranger who wants to be really good at two-weapon fighting or archery does so by choosing the themes suggested for the ranger (tempest or archer). And a ranger who wants a companion animal that’s a competent combat ally chooses the beastmaster theme.

The Spy Who Fireballed Me

The release of the playtest and blogs such as Wizard with a License to Kill [link] and Backgrounds and Themes [link] generated forum discussions, feedback, and questions about backgrounds and themes. Many of the questions asked about our current approach to how skills deliver backgrounds and themes deliver feats.

First, I’m gratified that some people noticed the  pregenerated character sheet note beneath the Background and Theme columns, and decided to try it out. Apparently they played a game with a more “old school feel” with great success. Already our goal of providing modular play is proving amenable.

However, most of you did use the backgrounds and themes provided. So to help answer some of the questions about them, I’d like you to introduce you to the human wizard named Seren. Seren has the Spy background (not that she’s told anyone), and the Magic User theme.

A background is something Seren, and all other characters, comes to the table with—her background is who she was, and still is. All the skills and the single trait provided by a background are delivered immediately upon selection, regardless of level. Which means the “handler” trait (could potentially be) provided by the Spy background is immediately useful to Seren. Every so often, a mysterious contact (the “handler”) answers Seren’s questions, when she can find him. Other times he approaches Seren with tantalizing information that leads her on new adventures. (For instance, her handler recently left a cryptic note about something called “The Sundering.”) In addition to her handler, Seren’s Spy background might provide her skills such as Bluff, Disguise, and Decipher Script, all of which make her slightly better at doing things she could’ve attempted without training (but when you’re a Spy, every little bit helps).

As earlier noted, Seren also has the Magic User theme. A theme reflects the manner in which she (and other characters) interact with the world. So as she gains experience and knowledge, her theme grows with her, adding to her expertise over time. As the rules iteration currently stand, a theme is how a character gains feats. Like earlier editions, feats offered by a theme come at specified levels. Currently, we’ve set the default for feat acquisition at character levels 1, 3, 5, and so on. Which means that Seren, when portrayed as a 5th level D&D character, has 3 feats. Her 1st level feat gives her two extra minor spells, her third level feat gives her a familiar (Seren likes ravens), and her 5th level feat gives her a flourish with a favorite spell. In Seren’s case, it’s fireball, baby!

Race and class do not provide skills or feats in the current rules iteration. Skills (and 1 trait) are provided in a story package called background, and feats (and a level progression) are provided in a story package called theme. If you want to run a game using skills and feats but let players pick and choose their own mix, you’d use the same framework. But the guidelines we’d provide for such a ‘total customization option’ would tell you to encourage your players to create with their own background that matched the skills they chose, and their own theme to explain the feats.

And so Seren infiltrates a mysterious temple using a disguise to impersonate a priest, her raven to provide additional intel, her training in deception to fool those who question her presence, and finally her flourish with fireball when, on the brink of discovery, she launches an explosive distraction to make good on her escape.

Paladin Design Goals

Paladins have a long history in D&D. For many, the image of the Paladin in Hell from the 1st Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Players Handbook remains a favorite. Anyone can see immediately from the illustration that a paladin is a warrior at home in heavy armor, and capable of wielding a sword and shield. And by the nature of the hellish foes the paladin faces, it’s clear that not only does the paladin oppose evil, but in pursuit of that calling, the paladin is apparently fearless.

        The design team has iterated a few times on the paladin class, but we wanted to step back and present to you our broader design goals that meet the class criteria of being recognizable to D&D players, unique from other classes, and resonate in some fashion with an archetypical story.

        The following design goals are generally listed in importance to the character, though we feel they’re all important for shaping a paladin. As you’ll notice, I’ve actually slipped a few hints of mechanical design in with the broader design goal, which serve more as examples than as anything we’ve definitely fixed on.

1. The Paladin is a Champion of a Divine Calling

A paladin follows a personal code that is a reflection of the deity, and often even more significantly, a moral alignment. Though many paladins are lawful good, the particular virtues a paladin reveres can reflect nearly any moral attitude or divine calling (though such adherence means that a paladin is at least lawful). A paladin’s codes also usually point her toward an ascetic lifestyle, which speaks to a paladin’s selfless nature in pursuit of her calling.

2. A Paladin Can See and Smite Evil

A paladin knows when something twisted and unholy is near. While unable to unerringly zero in on a specific threat merely by walking past a structure infested with evil, a paladin knows something is wrong. Regardless of a given creature’s actual nature, a paladin can judge it unworthy, and smite it with divine power energizing her sword blow.

3. A Paladin is a Fearless and Selfless Warrior

The paladin is a warrior, nearly as skilled as a fighter and typically armed with heavy armor and a sword, and utterly without fear. When a paladin fights, it is not only to impose her code on the unworthy and slay threats to her divine calling, but also to protect her allies. More so than the fighter, the paladin is willing (and able) to sacrifice her own safety to ensure the safety of her companions. To this end, a paladin aspires to find a blessed sword of unequaled power: a holy avenger.

4. A Paladin Has Divine Abilities and Spells

As a servant of a higher calling and deity, a paladin can call on a variety of divine abilities, including the ability to heal allies with a touch (“lay on hands”), turn undead, cast a limited number of divine spells, and call a mount. In each case, the paladin’s divine ability diverges from similar abilities a cleric might have, speaking to the paladin’s strengths. For example, when a paladin calls a mount, that mount might inspire the normal mounts of the paladin’s allies, granting them speed and endurance while they travel together. When a paladin turns undead, she can also turn demons, devils, and other unholy creatures. And when a paladin lays on hands, the healing may also relieve malign conditions and spent stamina.

Goblins Care Only About Your Axe

(It took a bit of digging to find this--I pulled it up from the Wayback Machine!)

I’ve played a lot of D&D lately. But even when using rules prone to design iteration, one thing has remained constant throughout: When I swing my axe at a goblin neck, the goblin’s going down if I hit.

That’s true whether the fight occurs in the theater of the mind (TotM), in TotM with the aid of scratch paper to show general position, in a hybrid TotM-minis system, or with minis on a grid.

As was pointed out by my previous blog about the grid vs. imagination and the discussions it engendered, the system surrounding my goblin combat can dramatically change many other elements of the fight. The foremost difference is the amount of table time the fight takes to resolve overall, and the amount of tactical decision-making the environment provides my axe-wielding goblin killer.

The tension between these two elements is real, and it can’t be swept under the rug. Narratively speaking, sometimes it’s simply too much effort to break out the minis and gridded terrain map to deal with two goblin guards at a cave mouth. The “story” of the situation isn’t really about tactics, unless the DM specifically changes the encounter to make it so. Indeed, two guards at a doorway (and other “low power” encounters) are precisely the sort of encounters that grid-only combat tends to weed out of the game. Because the DM and adventure designer know it’s not worth the effort to break out minis for a simple interaction with two goblin guards (or even five goblin guards), the encounter either goes away entirely, or it faces pressure to become part of some other, larger encounter. This means that players, when they see minis on the table, always know it’s going to be some kind of fight, regardless of anything else.

Other times, the story is about tactics. I do want to exactly know where the vampire lord is in relation to the acid pit, the windows through which afternoon sunlight slashes, the vampire’s dominated spell-casting thralls, and her various spawn slinking through an advancing line of rolling mist. Pushing or being pushed 5 feet can make the difference between winning and losing this fight, depending on whether I’ve been pushed into the acid, or if I can push the vampire into the sunlight.

Based on the poll we conducted on my last grid-focused blog, a majority of you agrees that different encounters have different needs when it comes to encounter rules. That’s cool, because we feel the same way. Assuming we move forward with this line of thinking, we’ll end up with a core conflict resolution system that can encompass both TotM and the grid. Imagine a combat system not too different from previous editions that relied almost solely on the use of the grid, but tweaked so that it works seamlessly for those fights where minis are not used or expected.

This means, to answer one line of questions raised in the grid discussions, that switching between TotM and the grid must be easy and seamless, both for groups that prefer to switch between modes, and for groups who want to primarily stick to one or the other conflict resolution system. It’s not our job to pick a winner or loser in any sort of false “grid vs. TotM” contest, and thereby create a sub-group of D&D players who don’t have the rules support they deserve. Instead, it’s our job to create a straightforward environment where both styles of play prosper and can be used.

For instance, if a fighter uses an ability that seems to make sense on the grid, we should design that same ability to also be useful in the TotM. In a fight that takes place next to a curtain of green slime, even in TotM, it’s not as important how far I can push a foe with an ability as it is important that I can push a foe at all. If my “hack and shove maneuver” results in the goblin stumbling backward, then, regardless of distance in feet or whether this happens on the grid or in the players’ imaginations, the goblin has just discovered that green slime is not its friend.

Goblins Care Only About Your Axe

My axe kills goblins dead, regardless of the underlying game mechanics. 

"Goblins Care Only About Your Axe" is my latest D&D Next blog, where I touch on potential tension between describing fights wholly in the imagination for one combat, and using minis on a battle-grid in the next combat.

Variations on a Monstrous Theme

If you’re a publisher with a stable of game-designers on payroll, an easy way to create variation for a monster is to write up one or two alternate versions of that monster. For example, were I to write up a vampire monster manual entry, I’d start by creating the basic expression of the vampire. A vampire that fulfills the “vampire Platonic ideal” that most anyone might look at, and say, “Yup, that’s a vampire.”

However, thanks to decades of novels, television shows, anime, comics, and games that feature vampires, we know many variations are possible. So, in writing my hypothetical vampire Monster Manual entry, after I designed the vampire noted above, I’d also create a couple full-fledged vampire variations, with full stats. One would probably be the more “fragile” vampire spawn, who enjoys only a subset of the vampire’s strengths, and for whom a stake in the heart does more than render them dead, but might turn them instantly to ash. On the the other end of the scale, I’d write up the “vampire lord” that encompassed the idea of the far more powerful vampire elder who, thanks to a thousand (or several thousand) years of undeath, has achieved several orders more kick-ass-itude than the already powerful standard vampire.

The question is, how do I create such variations? One way is to apply a few levels of a player character class. This has the advantage of handing a very robust toolbox to DMs and game designers, a toolbox that leverages the strengths of a very detailed and multi-faceted system already used by players to create different characters.

This system also has its drawbacks. While using character creation rules for monsters provides a massive toolbox of options, it also invokes a time-intensive process for monster design where finished monsters can objectively be judged, thanks to the expectations created by our own rules, to be “right” or “wrong,” regardless of how fun and exciting that monster plays at the table. This precision for precision’s sake also creates a raft of anxiety on the part of conscientious Dungeon Masters and game designers who, of course, want to follow the rules of monster creation.

       

So what then?

       

Many things, actually. In fact, the more tools we throw into the mix, the better, as long as we dispense with the idea that monsters can “right” or “wrong.” Instead, judge monsters on how interesting, fun, and challenging they are to encounter in a game of D&D. Many monsters that are precisely “right” according to numerically absolute creation rules fail the ‘interesting, fun, and challenging” test.

       

Using the “is it fun and interesting?” criteria, we’ve got a ton of ways to alter monsters at our disposal. The first is writing hard-coded variations right into the Monster Manual entry. Another method we’re experimenting with is to include a mini-theme or two in some Monster Manual entries, where appropriate, that the DM could apply on the fly to a given monster. Such a theme wouldn’t be transformative enough for a monster to require a completely new statblock, but adding the indicated power to some subset of the monsters encountered would be enough to keep players on their toes. For instance, a mini-theme in the bugbear entry might be “bugbear strangler” which provides a method for DMs to give some subset of bugbears an ability to garrote a foe. The same mini-theme would indicate such a bugbear might be worth 25 XP more than a regular bugbear. A mini-theme for an orc might give it a ‘vicious finale’ attack that gives an orc a free last attack when it’s dropped. And so on.

       

Finally, I could imagine a section in the DMG, and related section in other more specific setting books, that would provide a whole slew of mini-themes, templates, and other methods to give Dungeon Masters robust and encompassing methods for varying any monster, or building new ones. Either way, hijacking some subset of character creation rules for monster inspiration (I’m looking at you themes and backgrounds[BRC2] ) remains a gold mine. For example, a vampire with the avenger theme.... wow. The story that sparks in my brain makes me want to start working on my campaign this very insta