You know, I really wish Blogger had a word count function. It would be nice to see how much verbiage it is exactly that I've been dedicating to this ongoing screed against D&D. I certainly didn't plan on it going on for this long. I'm almost getting tired of it. However I did resolve to myself that if I was gonna do this I was gonna do it properly, and thus we must press on.
Today I'd like to talk about the competence of the characters.
It's a fairly standard setup in any game that has levels or indeed any pretence at progression. The PCs start pretty useless, and improve over time to the point where they finally become mighty warriors of legend.
But WHY is it that a character has to start being so utterly useless? The glaring example of this to me is of course the 2nd edition D&D Wizard. You start out with 1 spell per day and D4 hitpoints. Typically this of course means 1 hit point if you roll anything like me, but that's hardly the point. The point is that you'll have something like Magic Missile, which let's you attack for D4 damage ONCE PER DAY. So you get up, encounter a hostile rat or something and cast your spell. Which, naturally fails to kill the rat, because having a creature that's twelve inches long including it's tail have more HP than a fully grown adult human makes perfect sense. Then you are of course required to run away and go back to bed, or die. You could I suppose try fighting the rat in hand to hand combat, but that's probably not a good idea as you tend to die horribly if you get hit with a stiff breeze, let alone a hostile rodent. Not to mention the fact that although you're smart enough to tap into the elemental energies of creation itself (albeit once per day) you're not actually smart enough to work out how to even pick up a sword, let alone point it at something.
My point here isn't that all PCs should start out super powered. Progression is after all part of the fun of any level based game. But you should be reasonably competent for the immediate tasks at hand. It's not really game balance to have the spellcasters hide in the corner for the first half of the game, then take over completely once they can actually cast Fireball a couple of times. Nor is it particularly fun for a player to create a character who is supposed to specialize in some particular field, only to find out they're actually useless at it until they hit level 4.
The key to making any game good is the principle of Doing Stuff. All the players should at least FEEL as if they have something to do, something useful to contribute. Not only in the sense of helping the party out and progressing the adventure, but also in performing the sort of tasks and actions that each player interested in doing. Fighters should at some point be fighting, Thieves should have a bit of sneaking and stealing. Spellcasters should be casting spells and seeking out arcane knowledge and Rangers should probably go and have a bath or something.
Obviously you can't do everything at once, but the last thing you want is for one of your players to be stuck hiding at the back with nothing to do. How succesfully this is achieved will obviously depend on the party, the DM, the adventure in hand and the overarching plot, setting and themes of the game. Getting it just right is extremely difficult.
Getting back to the point of competence however, whilst everyone needs something to do they do also need to have a reasonable shot at doing it. A chance of failure should of course be present, as there's no reward without an element of risk, but the whole point of heroic fantasy is surely that the player characters are, well, HEROES. They are better than the average man on the street in some fashion. They should start out kinda mediocre sure, but with at least something that sets above your standard mud grubbing peasant. Rather than starting as being crap and slowly working up kinda average, start at average at least.
Looking at it from an in world perspective, the level one character actually makes less sense. A typical way to start a party on an adventure is to have them hired by some good guy to investigate the dark doings of some bad guy. But why would you ever actually pay money for a pack of walking liabilities? I wouldn't hire a guy with D4 hit points to go down to the shops and back lest he somehow kill himself with a loaf of bread or something. And if you are a puny wizard who can only cast one or two ineffectual spells a day, why would you ever go outside? You may wish to seek adventure, sure. But what kind of idiot goes out looking for it before they're ready? You wait until you can cast Fireball, and THEN you start poking around dungeons, surely?
Obviously you can still use party uselessness well in games. Maybe the party are just a band of hapless peasants caught up in some terrible happening or other. Maybe the High Priest is actively hiring clueless idiots to go poke around in the dungeons because he fully expects them to get horribly killed. These are all valid plot hooks after all. But starting as a hapless idiot really doesn't fit with a class based system in my opinion. Not that I think class based systems fit with much anyway. But if you're starting as a gimp, then you really should be improving based on what you're encountering and doing in game, not based on a table in a book.
Basically, I can't really think of many stories where the protagonists start as level 1. Sure, there are many where they start low level, but it always feels more like level 3-5 low rather than level 1. The hero always has some sort of edge after all. The first few levels of a character, where they're actually learning to fight or whatever are, lets face it, at most presented as a montage.
That would actually be a good way of generating characters, now that I think about it. I've previously mentioned how I like the idea of starting a character out as a blank template, and then plugging in various stat adjustments and abilities to arrive at the finished product. Why not attach story elements to the options available at character generation? So rather than just adding plus 2 Strength you could say Worked At The Docks. Instead of taking a level in Magical Aptitude (Fire) you add in the clause Manifested During Puberty. Thus stories begin to accumulate around the Character, and by the time your done you have a whole background almost involuntarily.
We're all here for having adventures after all. So why don't we just cut out the buggering about, and skip straight to the stage where we're really ready to have them. That way when the party all die horribly it really means that the enemy was dangerous, rather than that they were just lame.
No comments:
Post a Comment