D&D Coded and Pulp-pilled

My Misadventures in Table-Top Gaming, a Game Designer's Manifesto

I was first introduced to table top gaming at the age of 16, five years after getting heavily invested in Magic: The Gathering. Obviously, I was familiar with the concept given how close the two hobbies are to each other, but the natural order of the two games made one more difficult to get started with than the other. Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition was my first foray into what is easily the geekiest of hobbies. For my teenage mind, it was awesome. A social experience built around making a powerful character? Perfect. I had been bullied for most of my childhood, and this was a good outlet to not feel so powerless. I'll get to why that's not a great, sustainable way to enjoy a hobby in a little bit.

I fell in love with the mechanical side of the game. Finding ways to get the numbers as high and reliable as possible became part of the passion for the hobby. Limit testing was natural to me. At first, it was a matter of seeing how much I could pack into a single sheet. The results were utterly stupid – like surreal, stupid ass, bullshit. But at the time it was fun for me. It was never anything that I intended to use as a player character, but rather a background thing for a setting that was at the time very badly formed from typical fantasy world cliches, in the tradition of overpowered setting dominating characters everywhere.

Over the years since, I've grown as a writer and a gaming theorist and gone far from those roots. That setting has been incorporated as part of the history of my current project's lore, but the overwhelming mechanical aspect is long gone. And as a writer who still loves tabletop RPGs, I've grown dissatisfied with the options that are out there. When I think about characters for the setting, I want them to be something that can convert to a game version. Sometimes I even want to be able to use a character sheet when thinking through scenes that I want to use in my stories. But what's out there doesn't deliver, it either gives way too much, or strangles the options.

By the numbers...

When I started as a player, I was guilty of forcing too much into a character at a micro-level. The-Op, or “Theoretical Optimization” caught my attention right away. For the uninitiated (lucky you), The-Op is where hobbyists that obsess over the crunch of the game focus on twisting level, feat, and item combinations to make the most disgustingly overpowered thing possible at any given level...to the exclusion of making an interesting character to roleplay. There's a place for this – don't get me wrong. In groups that focus on dungeon-crawls and treat D&D as something a lot more akin to a roguelike or an MMO, The-Op can be perfectly fine as long as the entire group is in on the nonsense.

The group I was in, however, was not one of those groups. We were always focused more on the story and on big personalities than we were on the numbers. But because my brain was on a different wavelength, it really just led to me being quiet most of the time and waiting through the best parts of the game to get to where what I was doing would shine. I was also the only one that cared about that particular kind of shine. My first and longest-running character was a quiet, irritable assassin that was your stereotypical edgy, antisocial loner. Unfortunately, this was in a game with bombastic, over-the-top characters like a flamboyant sorcerer, a deranged lich, various political figures, and yes, even a talking crocodile in a top hat. The game was fun for me, but playing that character style, not so much. Over the next couple of years, I tried to get away from that, but that led to a different problem...

Option bloat...

If there's one thing that D&D does really well, it's to provide players with choices. There are dozens of races, classes, prestige classes. There are hundreds of feats, items, and variants. Let alone when you got into the options of playing as monsters or monster-adjacent races. The combinations are endless. My interest as a player shifted to “I want to make something entertaining, but still over-performing”. Things like a lizardfolk thug that somehow wound up being turned into a cyborg with random things installed in his body up to and including the kitchen sink, a sorcerer that existed as a dissenting voice to a scene-chewing dictator, or a Richard Dawkins inspired half-ogre magic denier with a talking triceratops for a pet. They were a lot more fun to play, but because of the nature of the inspiration source for the character, they were not sustainable ideas.

The options, and indeed my obsession with those options, led to a string of one-or-two note characters. For the most part, this wasn't awful as a player because at the time, our group was doing mostly one-shot campaigns that would cover one short story arc over a few sessions before stalling out. It became easy to make disposable characters without having a lot of thought behind them. They were going to be throwaways anyhow, so why put a lot of effort into making something well-rounded that can be interesting in the long term? This lasted with me as a player for a long time, and to an extent, it still does when I think about playing in a D&D campaign.

I think the most fun that I had with any character in this time was one where my choice of a character race was taken away when we did a game with an adjacent group of friends. The kobold druid, Tooth, that came from that was an absolute blast. Talking in the third person, ingrained delusions of grandeur, a weird blend of cowardice and overconfidence. Tooth was an adventure in absurdity, and he never would have happened if I was allowed to fall into the trap of the systemic option bloat.

D&D Coded...

This doesn't stick with just D&D, though. Over the years we adapted to D&D 3.5, and eventually drifted into Pathfinder, before moving on to D&D 5e in the last few years. The problems I've run into as a player have been rooted in this style of gaming. Pathfinder is very much a D&D Coded game, being an answer to the shift away from 3.5E for the Wizards of the Coast standard into 4th Edition's bordering on being a pen and paper MMO. There's still a lot of fun to mined from it, but it's only really fun when the entire group is on the same page.

It's fundamental flaw, however, is the nature of character progression. It's a fantasy game, at its heart. The foundation of the game calls to mind mythology, Tolkein-style epic fantasy, and over-the-top blockbuster style action. And intrinsic to that is having a vision of the fantasy that you want your character to project. And yet for the most part, that vision involves specific things that you want your character to be able to do, things that define the type of character that they are, that are level locked because of the structure of the system.

This is fine for combat classes. You can swing a weapon or shoot a bow at level 1. You get that narrative element right away. But for mages? You want to play a necromancer, but it's level 5 before you get even the underwhelming skeleton or zombie from animate dead. Depending on your group, that could mean taking anywhere from a month to two or three before your necromancer actually starts living the part, and it also means a month where the character claiming to be a necromancer looks like a total joke, with nothing to rationalize why after all of that time, they can finally do the thing that is intrinsically important to the archetype. Blaster mages can barely match a firework at the start. Illusionists look like stage-magicians. It goes on and on.

And so too, does the inverse of this problem. Mages quickly outpace combat classes in terms of options once those vital, character-defining abilities come online. Low level fighters outshine everything a mage can muster and don't die from taking a single poorly timed attack from an enemy. Past level 5-10? Mages are raising undead goon squads, nuking entire zones of the battlefield, flying overhead, changing into monster forms, turning enemies into mind-controlled allies...and fighters are rolling slightly more attacks and slightly higher damage. One vision of fantasy becomes realized, and the other becomes stale and repetitive.

And depending on your gaming group, this could take far longer to course-correct. Our group, for example, would fluctuate from having a specific direction we were going in, clearing through adventures and achieving goals, and then spending multiple sessions dicking around in cities or on ships just having weird in-character conversations that went nowhere. In games that are equal parts Game of Thrones and Seinfeld, having your vision of fantasy level-locked gets frustrating in a hurry.

Worse yet, the number inflation becomes immersion breaking. Even a high level character shouldn't be able to stare across the field of battle at a horde of two dozen goblins, let alone a few hundred, and know that they can't be hit, or that they can soak any damage that does get through with impunity while erasing an entire town's worth of enemies. The same holds true for ecologies of more dangerous monsters. Ecosystems, even magical ones, can only sustain so much, and for a setting to produce enough monsters to challenge higher leveled parties it has to break any sort of ecological sense. I look back on iconic D&D settings that I loved the ideas of in my younger years, like Dragonlance, and I think to myself “Everything should have gone extinct under the ecological weight of all of those dragons”. And while we're on that subject, how in the hell is a human with a longsword supposed to be a legitimate threat to a dragon with a torso the size of a strip mall?

And do I even need to bring up objective morality? D&D's built-in alignment system is atrocious for character development. Morals and ethics are good things for characters to have, but to project any sort of objective concept of good and evil into a game's mechanics is to stagnate gameplay. Give your character a moral code because you want to, not because his class requires him to be Lawful Good. Worse yet, having spells and curses that force an alignment change are damaging to gameplay, reducing a potentially complex shift in a character's behavior to a one-note “You're evil now, do cartoonish supervillainy”.

Call and Response...

I've tried other systems over the years, too, that weren't based in D&D tradition. Smaller publishers have gone into the waters to try to answer some of the same issues that I've been frustrated with, with varying results. I think we tried half a dozen systems over the years, which may not sound like a lot, but with how much is involved in learning to even basically function in these games, it's way too much effort. We attempted GURPS at one point, and if I thought D&D suffered from option bloat, I was grossly unprepared for that. There is an inherent flaw in any system that tries to address every possible type of game that could be played without any intent on those games being played at the same time, but still tries to present them all in a single sourcebook. A system cannot support high fantasy and science fiction as completely separate entities without becoming a mind-bending mess. Can a system do both of these things? We're getting closer to where I'm headed.

But the problem inherent in this is, they are all a response to the problems in the D&D coding of the genre, but none of them get rid of all of the inherent problems. Mechanics either get clunky and cumbersome to use in real play, or become oversimplified and lose structure. But because of the nature of high fantasy, the option bloat and the epic scaling feels forced and frankly obnoxious. Why use a janky system that doesn't have a real flow, or have to flip past 798 pages of blandly written mechanics to get to the next part of relevant content?

My favorite among the tabletop RPG alternatives, without question, has been White Wolf's Storyteller system, in every incarnation. The singular focus as a personal horror game brings things closer to where I'd want to be: everything feels more dangerous, everything can be a potential threat to your characters, and even if the ultimate vision of fantasy might not be available from the start, you still have the whispers of what you want to define what your character can do. This is especially true because you know what you're going to be playing from the start, you're either a vampire, or a werewolf, or a mage, etc, and everything else is pure flavor. Character generation is actually guided and logical, built on a foundation of making a fully-fleshed out, logically consistent concept. And better still, the character creation process itself encourages and develops setting integration of the character by imbuing elements like allies and contacts that root the character to other people in the setting. Of all of the systems that I've tried, this feels the furthest removed from the D&D coding of the format, and it is so much stronger for it.

Pulp Pilled...

Over the years, I've tried adapting my setting work to the various iterations of the D20 System based games, and to Storyteller with mixed results. Storyteller works best for urban horror themed games. The deeply personal structure is great, but when you open it up to a grander scale, it starts to feel...off. At this stage, the setting that I've spent the last 15 years or so working on has elements of urban horror, but it has a much stronger resemblance in tone to the tropes of pulp fantasy and sci-fi. These things get a bit lost in the format of the World of Darkness, even though there's a strong kinship. Storyteller is great, very adaptable, and has a lot of potential to handle the material well, but since it isn't open content it would essentially require me to submit my ideas to White Wolf (and whichever of their numerous sub-publishers are active at any given time) if I ever want to publish it.

D20 has the Open Game License options, which are wonderful and have allowed so many to publish under their banner, but in order to pull that off, I'd still be staring down an absurd amount of bloat simply by nature of how the class and race mechanics work. I've tried, believe me. When I started homebrewing content, it was in the era where they'd publish a prestige class (a 5-10 level add-on class with prerequisites to enter that had a very specific flavor attached). I fully developed a few, and had a list of probably 20-30 more in the starting stages. At one point, I had even developed an alternate spellcasting system to replace Vancian, leveled spells that I called “Threaded Spellcasting” inspired by the Epic Spells mechanics from WotC's Epic Level Handbook, wherein you would develop your own spell combinations from base mechanics. I legitimately cannot estimate how many hours I spent in my 20s trying to make this system work. Simply put, I'd have to strip away everything but the die roll mechanic in order for it to function the way that I want it to, and that just wasn't worth it. At that point, it's not the D20 system anymore.

So now I've decided to start from scratch. Again. Maybe it's a flawed goal, maybe it's a pointless endeavor. Odds are good that outside of my friend group, no one will ever play this thing. I've decided that I'm actually alright with that, because this is also something I'll be using to help develop and in a sense, write the novels that the setting was originally intended to support. Ultimately, what follows is still a response to what D&D represents in the hobby field, not because D&D is the best, but because it's the measuring stick by which all other tabletop RPGs have to be judged.

I want to create a game that better handles the pulp roots of Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, and Philip K. Dick. Games where warriors can co-exist with mages without feeling bland or ineffective, and vice versa. Games where otherworldly horror feels right at home alongside cybernetics and dragons. Games where monsters feel like monsters no matter how long the campaign has run and how strong the characters have become, but you have to be clever to survive. Games where you start with your vision of fantasy for your character from the get-go and slowly, logically progress to the pinnacle of those visions.

See, tabletop RPGs are only fun when you can get that visceral satisfaction of having your vision for your character realized, whatever that may be. Delaying the gratification just leaves more room for players losing interest. When you look to pulp, characters don't really grow the way that they do in high fantasy. They get more refined, sure, but they don't experience seemingly random bursts of ability evolution outside of external forces. It's not rewarding to cosplay a necromancer until you actually are a necromancer, it's rewarding to play a necromancer. It's also not rewarding to play a fighter that “makes an attack roll”, when everyone else at the table is using multiple abilities to achieve more complicated results. Characters should get better at what they already do, and if they learn to do something else, it should feel like a significant add-on without altering what they intrinsically are.

Everything about the character should inform what the character can do, and should guide the player in developing how the character does it, and you shouldn't have to have weird little abilities tacked on that you'll never think about again because they aren't something you see your character doing. Special abilities should have context. Are spells cast on the fly, or do they involve a deep ritual process? Is your melee combatant a duelist carefully using their skill to best opponents, or do they cleave wildly across the battlefield? Method informs character, but it should never limit character. While there's bound to be a preferred approach, there should always be other options. Sure, that evoker hurls flames at a whim, but more than likely, they know a thing or two about how to set up a room for a scrying ritual.

This also helps restrict how far out of hand a character's powers can go. It keeps it grounded. It keeps it personal. That's something that is missing in a lot of fantasy gaming. Sword and sorcery has a place in pulp circles, but Vancian style magic and exponential growth feels weird from a writer's standpoint. You know what your character is from the start, and they feel like what you want them to be, and progression throughout play simply adds versatility, it adds spice, it fleshes out the base concept and adds details that bring that character to life without obscuring the core concept.

This also allows you to hyperspecialize in your main vision, putting everything into being the best swordsman, or tank, or necromancer, or mech pilot that you can be. Or you can cultivate a versatile, well rounded character that can thrive in a variety of scenarios. And best of all, no matter which route you can go in, you'll have a system that gives you those hits of dopamine to reward you for the experience in a social environment with your friends who are getting the same thing.

And this tracks with the source inspiration. Fighters should be able to dabble in magic without needing fifteen different ways of doing it without even looking at the third party visions of how to do it better. Why create variants on a class that is already structured and balanced to do one thing well, where adding an entirely different core concept might add flavor, but just muddies the idea of action economy and diminishes the character's primary function? A swordsman should still be able to feel like a master swordsman, even if he does learn how to throw a bolt of lightning from time to time.

One of the biggest goals I'm currently staring down is removing the gamist element of defeating a monster through brute force. In pulp, especially, monsters are otherworldly, epic things that are far beyond a mortal's depth. They're not human, so why would you expect to fight them as if they were? You shouldn't be able to just hack down a dragon with a sword when you aren't even the size of one of the dragon's digits. You should have to think about your approach. The same goes for smaller supernatural threats. Mythological creatures have fabled weaknesses for a reason, and understanding those weaknesses should be the only way to survive. And if you have a 50-ft giant to deal with? Maybe you've got a mech on loan from the high tech culture that can go toe to toe with it, after all.

Mechanics should guide narratives, and dice rolls should not necessarily dictate outcomes. Decisions should define the game, and the characters. While the dice might help determine how successful something should be, why burden your game with endless attack rolls against cannon fodder enemies, when you can roll one die to determine how long it takes to get through it, and narrate accordingly? A pulp style RPG should be streamlined so that you can have these classic tropes and still focus on the high spots in the narrative without getting bogged down in minutiae. Save the tedium for moments of significance.

My vision is to take the concepts that I've enjoyed from these other systems, and condense everything. Special abilities should feel special, and form the iconic core of the character. Their background should be demonstrably shown in their skills and talents. Their life before the game begins should be built into what they have access to during play. And their personal aptitudes should magnify all of these traits and the impact that they have on the game in scope, not in raw numbers. Reduce most confrontations to a single die roll, do a quick calculation, and then move on. Keep it simple, keep it elegant, and keep it fun. Let the white-knuckle moments enhance high tension scenarios that are the culmination of the story, the way they should be.