System Depth and Published Material

When a player is building a character, I generally go through the same steps with them every time, or suggest that they go through the steps on their own if they’re sufficiently well-versed in the system:

1. Decide what character they want to play. This includes personality, general role in a group, some backstory, and so forth.
2. If the description from step (1) contains any in-game terms like the character’s class, feats, skills, etc., repeat step (1) until it doesn’t.
3. Open a rulebook and start using D&D to build the character.

New players (that is, players new to D&D) don’t have a problem with this. They aren’t weighed down by in-game terms, information about what classes are good at what, predispositions toward how a certain class should act or which character ideas are powerful, and all that other stuff that gets in the way of building a character. Instead they just get an idea for what they want because they aren’t stuck with their concepts of what D&D can and can’t do.

Experienced players are actually just as good. They know what D&D is capable of, namely almost anything. They don’t mind playing a sub-par class, because that’s the class that fits the character they want and they trust the DM to not hammer them for their choice. They don’t think of characters as class-first (or, in the case of Monte Cook’s terrible, terrible opinion, race-first) because all classes have enough variance for plenty of character, especially once they start reskinning.

It’s the players in the middle that are the problem. They have just enough knowledge to be dangerous. They know that certain classes are good and others are not, usually favoring casters. They know what energy types they should use, what monsters they can expect, what powers are good, what position they should occupy in a party and on the battlefield, and so forth. They tend to think of characters as bundles of stats first and personalities second, and they have a hard time building characters without divorcing them from the rules that make them work. *

So what causes this? I think there’s an inherent need to look at a set of options and find a “best”, an option you can pick for maximum benefit and minimum hassle. We look for the best apartment in a town, for the best brand of mustard, for the best car to fit our lifestyle. This (I’m convinced) is why the Yankees have so many fans outside of New York, because it feels good to cheer a team you know is going to win more often than not. People gravitate to the “best” options, and it’s hard to consciously separate from that.

This gets harder and harder as more choices appear. It’s usually not that hard to pick Brand A or Brand B cola when they’re both offered at once, but when Brands C through J join the mix it’s much harder to narrow things down to a single option. It’s much quicker if you can reject half of them out of hand for one reason or another. If you can cut out Brands F through J because they’re diet colas, you’ve gone from ten choices to five and life is much easier.

It was kind of a roundabout way of getting here, but I think that one of D&D’s advantages is also one of its problems, that there’s so much information and so many choices. When presented with twenty classes, the player who can immediately reject the twelve weakest is left with eight options that are slightly above the curve of the game. When presented with a hundred feats, a player can get themselves a much smaller list by merely rejecting twenty that are duplicated or improved by a better feat.

To an experienced player, the amount of information isn’t a problem. More options is just that, more ways to build the character you want. But to new players it’s a bit intimidating to see the sheer volume of published information at their disposal, and intermediate players drop most of it almost subconsciously because it doesn’t result in the bundle of stats they want.

This gets back to the idea of the article I referenced last time, that long-running series are big time sinks for anybody who wants to get into them. People are becoming more and more accepting of marathon media consumption, but we’re still not at the point where the average gamer can look at ten rulebooks on a shelf and process them all in an afternoon. Reading a single rulebook cover-to-cover is too daunting a task for many players, much less retaining it at will for actual gameplay.

The 4th Edition Player’s Handbook has 198,243 words (I counted). That’s sixteen more words than Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Reading, processing, and retaining the PHB1 isn’t simple, and that’s just the first third of the Core Rulebooks for one edition. Even the smaller, post-Essentials books come close to 100K words (longer than Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets). That’s a lot of information to process for somebody at any experience level.

Perhaps in response to this, I’ve seen some games that fit entirely inside one rulebook. Sometimes this works, but more for shorter diversions than for a long-term campaign. A small system that can be extended to a big game tends to be somewhat hands-off about it, relying on the GM and players to do the extension. In the hands of a good group, this works great. With a…less good group or a sufficiently bad leader, the gaps in the system become clear, characters and NPCs end up all looking the same, and the players effectively become unpaid designers trying to write additions to the system that fit the game they want to play.

There’s no universal solution for this. Designers like writing new material, companies like releasing new material, and players like reading new material. GMs who ignore big systems in favor of smaller systems miss out on just as much as GMs who do the opposite, perhaps more if local players are only interested in the big names. Players who ignore half of the system, looking for only the best options, miss out on some great opportunities, but players who try to use it all end up lost in the sheer number of options presented.

The best idea I have is to talk with your players. If it looks like they’re in that intermediate mode where their characters are powerful but lack personality, suggest that they intentionally try something less powerful next time. If they’re avoiding a certain complicated mechanic, offer to go over it with them so you all learn it. If they want to play a new campaign, propose that you try a different, simpler system. And encourage them to ask question if they don’t understand something, in the same way that you should ask them if they’re doing something you don’t understand. No single person can be expected to consume and retain the rules for an entire system, but the answer isn’t to ignore half the game out of hand.

* — I realized after writing this paragraph that it sounded a little like a GNS analysis. That is, new players are narrativists who just make a character, intermediate players are stats-first gamists who play to win, and experienced players are simulationists who can make the system fit any character or world. That’s not even a little true. I’ve seen plenty of gamists who build a character based entirely around a powerful character idea, but I’ve seen plenty more who think of the character they want before they even consider their role in a party much less their class or feat tree. Players of all types fall into this general progression of experience.