Chris Perkin’s penultimate article came down last week, which bothers me. As soon as I find an article on Wizard’s site that’s worth reading, it goes away. It’s like Leverage all over again.
I was going to link to his top ten pieces of advice for DMs last week, but at the bottom of the article he posted a poll asking readers which piece was the most important, and it took a week for the poll to close:
It’s things like this that finally restore my faith in the game. After all the excitement in the comments section of these articles for racial prerequisites (“You were born wrong, so no options for you!”), campaign settings (“I’m tired of having a unique, dynamic world. I want the same one everybody else has.”) and so forth, I’m pleased to see that D&D players (or at least the ones that read this article) find these as their top priorities:
- Don’t be a jerk.
- Make it fun.
- Be awesome about it.
- Screw with the rules when the rules don’t do what you want.
- Have a character, not a box of stats.
Or, in other words:
- Law #0
- Law #0
- Law #0, but louder
- Law #0 mixed with Law #1
- Role-play more. (…that should be a law, actually)
I was actually prepared to write some vitriolic response to the poll (in the same way that I’m prepared for my players ditching the campaign story to have their characters create an underwater utopia, or losing my shoes in a tornado), so it’s nice to see that all I had to do was write an “I told you so.”
The question in my mind is: why isn’t stuff like this already in the rulebooks, spelled out for players? It reminds me of this post, which I think sums up my own frustration with a lot of traditional games’ texts.
Example 1: Whatever Perkins found out about the deficiencies of the encounter rules and whatever he did to fix them should make it into the next printing.
Example 2: If people are forgetting to RP, that means that there aren’t sufficient rules to support RP, or it’s not compelling for the players to engage those rules. It’s a failure of design. Instead of exhorting people to “please, please remember this is a role-playing game!” they should be looking to remedy that with new rules and advice in the next printing.
I hope the people who are writing the Next core rulebooks understand this. Everything you need to have fun and play the game the way it’s intended should just be there. This blog and Perkins’ column are wonderful resources, but they shouldn’t be required reading to play a decent game of D&D.
We might have to disagree here. Perkins explicitly said to design encounters that are fun regardless of the rules. What he did to fix them was to read his group, find out what they like, and deliver it. The rulebook does not explicitly say “But sometimes things happen, so disregard this section entirely.”, and I don’t think that’s a deficiency.
The rules are there to provide a framework and balance for people to have fun at a table, and the encounter design rules provide that framework and balance. If you don’t want that framework or that balance and instead want to freestyle it (or use your own framework and balance), you can do what you want while ignoring the encounter design rules. The system supports that.
I’m not going to respond on Example 2, because I’m fairly certain I can’t do it with civility.
Regarding Example 2, I suppose I owe you this: Why system matters (a brief example).