RPG system: Dungeons & Dragons
I’ve been gaming for a long time, and tried out a lot of different game systems. Dungeons and Dragons was probably the first. I’m not quite sure, since I was about seven years old and I didn’t get any dice, but the guy who ran games for me had all the old second edition AD&D (Advanced Dungeons and Dragons) books. So I presume that’s what he ran.
I didn’t have any of the books, but I was hooked on role-playing from day one, and I told my own stories for kids at school or on the bus, playing entirely without character sheets or dice. It was 100% narrative. When I was about ten years old, some of the kids that I met at school and played these games with introduced me to actual rulebooks and I got into real D&D. Palladium Books’ Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Rifts and Robotech came next, then White Wolf’s Vampire: The Masquerade and Werewolf: The Apocalypse.
At that age, I played whatever everyone else was playing, with whatever books we had. Games were pretty unstructured, fell apart often, and you could get a Vorpal sword if you gave the Dungeon Master the cookie from your lunch. Everyone I knew was into Rifts and White Wolf’s stuff, so that carried me through high school and into college.
But you just never get over Dungeons and Dragons. It’s a classic. I was raised on Lord of the Rings and Conan, and I eventually dove back into D&D. third edition came out about then, with some pretty drastic evolution in game system that made it a little more digestible, and which brought D&D into my groups’ core gaming for a little while.
We started playing D&D version 3.5 because that’s what was out at the time, and I didn’t really have any problems with it. But mostly my group was into the World of Darkness. It was about the kind of stories we wanted to tell, and my players just weren’t looking for epic fantasy quests. We mostly ran finite campaigns, anyway, rather than open-ended ongoing ones. I liked to come up with a story, tell it, enjoy a climactic ending, and then play something totally new. When we finished a fantasy game, the next one would be sci-fi, just for a change of pace.
So for a while, Dungeons and Dragons was out of the mix again. Then one of my players bought the fourth edition D&D rulebook and wanted to try it out. It appealed to his very tactical play style, and he gave us a pitch, talking us into trying it out. I know that a lot of people have some serious hate for fourth edition D&D, but we ended up stealing some major ideas from it for our own homebrew of house rules.
My personal experience went like this: I like playing fighters. I want to be the big guy that chops up lots of crap with his sword. But playing a fighter was never really as satisfying as I hoped in D&D. The role-playing was always fine — because that’s entirely up to me — but when my turn came around in combat, my options were pretty much just hacking at something with my sword. I know there’s Bull Rush, and if I got the feat, then I could do a Power Attack. But those things weren’t always useful, or I didn’t know how to use them, or else my stats didn’t support the combo of powers. And so my turn just came down to hitting something with my sword.
Next turn? Hit something with my sword again. Not a lot else, certainly not enough to make me feel dynamic and excited in a fight.
Whatever else you might say about D&D fourth edition, it gave everyone more attack options. Suddenly even my first-level fighter had two choices of what attack to use each round, plus some encounter and daily abilities for variety. And there was still Bull Rushing, Power Attack, and all that. It made me feel like I had just as many different things to contribute as the party’s rogue or wizard. We all had the same number of special abilities — it was just the difference between wielding a sword or a wand or a druid’s badger on a stick
BESM — an anime-inspired RPG system that I’ll write about soon — was built with a mechanism for special attacks, but they were just one of a zillion optional rules. We loved the attack variety in fouth edition D&D, though, so we brought the idea into BESM. Everyone got a couple of basic special attacks — a sword swing that put a bleed on the enemy, and another that forced them back to make some space, for example — and then one more major encounter-level attack that might deal some extra damage and be spreading so that it could hit two adjacent targets.
It worked out wonderfully! It put the focus on building fun attacks to do what each player wanted for their character, rather than trying to select the “perfect” weapon, that one sword with the lowest difficulty and highest damage. Even in White Wolf, we now look more to the combat maneuvers available to us to keep things fresh. We haven’t played fourth edition Dungeons and Dragons in years, but it jolted us out of some stagnant thinking and improved our games.
D&D has a fifth edition now, and the next time my group is ready for some epic fantasy, we’ll give the new system a whirl. I’ve heard they stripped out the pages and pages of special abilities. The system is more streamlined now and I can see the point of that — fourth edition could get pretty ponderous at times — but to be honest, I think I’ll miss them.
Fourth edition gave us something wonderful, and maybe fifth will, too. We’ll give it a try, and see what it offers to make my first-level fighter feel special.
