I will make no apologies for my own preferences. I started role-playing in the era of Moldvay’s Basic Set, Cook’s Expert Set, and 1st edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (with the original covers). The illustrations that fire my imagination when I think of D&D — the illustrations that allow me to effortlessly slip the shackles of reality and enable me to be there — are those of Dave Trampier, Erol Otus, Jim Roslof, Darlene Pekul, and Russ Nicholson. Whereas later editions were increasingly dominated by commercial art and comic book art, the classic editions were populated with art that was original and even visionary. It was art that was as creative and liberating as the game it depicted. The artists I mentioned above were responsible for the look of D&D when it was at the pinnacle of its popularity. This is something worth considering.

If Wizards of the Coast really wants to recapture the true spirit of D&D, they would be well advised to choose their artists carefully from amongst those who have a personal interest in fantasy art, and not merely a financial one. This is an excellent opportunity to provide work for many artists who may be outside the mainstream, but who are exactly right for this frankly eccentric hobby. Another option would be to select illustrations from every edition to represent the D&D that encompasses all previous editions (with perhaps some new illustrations as well). And if neither of those options are acceptable, then I would plead for an edition with no illustrations rather than the soulless corporate hackwork that characterized the last two editions.

(It is worth mentioning that, according to EN World, “The Forgotten Realms will be supported from the start, and a video game art studio from China has been hired to fully detail the Realms.” If outsourcing the art to sweatshops in totalitarian nations is to be the strategy for D&D Next in general, then Wizards of the Coast doesn’t deserve custodianship of D&D. Human rights matter.)

* It is highly advisable that the original title be retained insofar as the edition is known officially as ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS (with all capital letters as it was spelled and enforced by its original publisher, TSR). Changing the title (by dropping the word “Advanced,” for instance) creates confusion and doubt. The game was not then, nor is it now, referred to as Dungeons & Dragons, 1st edition or otherwise (and that reopens and exacerbates yet another can of carrion crawlers regarding the issue of edition numbering). If the title has been changed, gamers will ask, what else has been altered? This will diminish the appeal for those who are interested in a true reprint of the content. D&D Next may be just Dungeons & Dragons (or whatever they decide to call it), but AD&D is ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS. If you respect the history of D&D, don’t try to rewrite that history. Most role-playing gamers have long memories.

In order for this dynamic to work, it is necessary for the dice to be rolled in the open. That is to say, the dice ought to be rolled in full view of the players and the GM. Certain kinds of rolls would still be made secretly by the GM, such as a percentage chance of a certain event or encounter happening or when a player character attempts a skill for which success is not readily discernible (e.g. searching for a secret door or detecting a trap), but rolls that represent a contest between characters or a character and the environment should be visible to all participants in the situation.

One problem this alleviates is distrust by the players. If a player can see the GM’s roll, he or she knows that the GM is not fudging rolls for the players’ benefit or detriment. Although some GMs are suspected of fudging rolls in favor of their NPCs or monsters, I suspect many more are actually guilty of fudging rolls in favor of the players because they do not wish to be too harsh. I suspect this because I was one of those GMs in my early days in the hobby. Mollycoddling players does them no good in the long run. You may think you are helping them, but in actuality you deprive them of the true taste of victory when they succeed if you withhold the bitterness of defeat when they fail. You are also obstructing their growth as gamers.

Any given dice-rolling tradition is probably as old as any other. Some GMs roll in the open; some roll in secret; some let the players roll, but never tell them the target number; some even roll for the players, too. Different groups have different needs. My needs, both as a GM and a player, require that I get to roll dice and let them fall where they may.

The first term could almost be considered gamer jargon for its ubiquity in the hobby, and that term is mêlée (or melee as it usually occurs in gaming material written in English). Melee in gaming is synonymous with hand-to-hand, as in “melee combat” or “melee weapons,” but melee in the real world means something rather different.

melee noun

a confused struggle; especially : a hand-to-hand fight among several people

 

“melee.” Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. 2011.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/melee (8 March 2011).

The first thing to note is that melee is a noun, not an adjective despite its common usage as such in gaming. One could just as inaccurately refer to “brawl combat” or “donnybrook weapons.”

The second thing to note is that melee is not synonymous with hand-to-hand, which is what is really meant when gamers refer to melee combat. A melee is specifically “a confused struggle,” which could conceivably include the use of ranged weapons, but, more to the point, is confused. A melee is a chaotic clash of combatants, especially “among several people” and usually among large numbers of them, as in brawls or actual battles. A melee, then, is not a generic term for a hand-to-hand combat situation. A melee is a free-for-all. A duel with swords is a form of hand-to-hand combat, but is it a melee? Is a boxing match a melee? Is a karate competition a melee? The answer, of course, is no. If the intention is to express the idea of hand-to-hand, then hand-to-hand is the term that ought to be used.

The misuse of melee was inherited by Fudge from a tradition that extends to the earliest days of role-playing and beyond (probably to its war game antecedents). For that it can be forgiven, although I prefer to use the correct terminology in my own writing. It’s self-explanatory and friendly to newcomers. Everyone knows what “hand-to-hand” means. As an adjective, it has the added benefit of being grammatically correct in its common usage in gaming.

The next two terms are not a peculiarity to role-playing in general, but to Fudge itself: gifts and faults. In other games they are known by other names, such as advantages and disadvantages (and many more). Gifts and faults seem easy to understand, so what is the problem?

Gifts are less problematic than faults, but nitpickers like me question the appropriateness of calling certain things “gifts,” such as Patron or Reputation as Hero (to use two examples from the rules). Having a patron or an heroic reputation is an asset, not a gift. “Gift” implies a natural ability, such as Ambidexterity or Keen Senses. “Advantage,” in my opinion, is a better term for the general purpose it is intended to serve. It isn’t perfect (after all, isn’t a high attribute an advantage, too?), but it errs on the side of inclusiveness.

Faults suffer from a greater misfortune, which is acknowledged in the rules: “There are heroic faults, too: a code of honor and inability to tell a lie restrict your actions significantly, but are not signs of flawed personality.” Why, then, call them faults? They are restrictive, certainly, but they are not faults (except, perhaps, from the point of view of an amoral onlooker). If anything, they are signs of good character. “Disadvantage” is a preferable term for those things, good or bad, that limit a character’s full range of actions.

I understand why gifts and faults were substituted for advantages and disadvantages. Fudge has something of a kinship with GURPS, which uses the latter, and a bit of differentiation was probably desired. Nonetheless, the terms are not trademarked and the concepts are not copyrighted. If “attributes” and “skills” are fair game, “advantages” and “disadvantages” ought to be embraced for their superiority in accurately describing what we actually mean.

I know this is considered trifling to some, but lexicology is one of my hobbies. To each his or her own.

Peace.

What would be served by including more rule books, you might ask, except for increasing the cost of the game? Apart from the fact that in most board games the cost of the rulebook is negligible (the infamous exceptions being games such as Advanced Squad Leader or Star Fleet Battles), the obvious benefit is that everyone can learn to play at the same time, rather than waiting for one person to learn the rules and teach it to everyone else. This is especially helpful if there is more than one rule book aficionado in the group. The other benefit is that everyone can look up rules at the same time when a question arises during play. Yet another benefit is that players are free to consult the rules without drawing attention to the fact, thereby answering their own questions without tipping their hand (a factor not to be underestimated in serious strategy games).

It is true there are game companies that routinely provide free PDF versions of their rule books online (e.g. Columbia Games), and I applaud them, but there are still many gamers who do not have Internet access or even computers, believe it or not. This significant fact ought not to be ignored by publishers of board games and war games. These customers, after all, are not being lured away by the computer game industry and they deserve to be catered to, not dismissed. Most rule books are a few pages of black & white print. Just throw a few more in the box! Your customers will be happier, and happy customers are loyal customers.

Additionally, many players are content to let someone else teach them the rules, usually the person who bought the game. If it were made easier for all the players to read the rules by providing more copies, then casual players may come to feel less intimidated by rule books and become buyers of games themselves. This, of course, helps both the hobby and the industry. I am calling upon all publishers of games to create a new standard: one rule book for each player in every boxed game. That’s all I ask.

Some may balk at the notion of skills taken at face value. They want precise rules governing the use of any skill. They want rules about range, duration, frequency, extent, effort, efficiency, etc. They want to know precisely how well a skill is executed upon a Fair result, or a Good result, or any other result. They want to know exactly what their characters can and cannot do when they use that skill. It all misses the point.

What is the point of trying to pin down the “objective” nature of a Great result when one doesn’t even possess that skill in reality? What game designer can claim to be an expert on every skill or area of knowledge? With the exception of very few games (early The Morrow Project is the only one that comes to mind), no player is expected to know a character’s skill well enough that he or she can describe every action accurately and in detail. (One of my favorite Call of Cthulhu experiences certainly would not have been possible. I played a motion picture director/producer, one friend played my character’s doctor and longtime chum, and another friend played a jazz trumpet player from New Orleans. I’m not a filmmaker, my first friend isn’t a doctor, and my second friend plays piano, not trumpet — and he isn’t from New Orleans.) If we all had to be qualified in reality to play the characters we portray in a game, then role-playing would have died swiftly and quietly in the night a long time ago.

This, then, is my defense of a list of skills with real world definitions that the casual reader can understand, rather than an itemization of bonuses, penalties, timetables, restrictions, and prerequisites. If the skill is listed on a character sheet, the player should know instantly what it means unless the player doesn’t know what the word means in the real world. That is why my skill list has brief definitions. (And the Big Chart has no definitions.) There are a few exceptions, but they are infrequent and brief enough to be easily memorized, and they are entirely logical.

That being said, I still haven’t defined the martial arts skills, but rest assured they will be easy to understand, easy to remember, and they will make sense — as soon as I can get around to it…

Simplicity is on the side of separation. Linkage, on the other hand, demands complexity. The first step in establishing a link is categorizing all skills. It seems the easiest possible way to do this is to decide which attribute governs each skill, but therein lies the thorniest of problems. How can one say that Agility alone governs a skill in Running? What about Strength? What about Endurance? Who is to say that Intelligence alone governs a skill in Drawing? Perhaps the creative aspect of Spirit or Soul is involved. Perhaps the skill is largely owed to Perceptiveness or Manual Dexterity? In response one may argue that the solution is to create new skill categories composed of combinations of skills, as in Basic Role-Playing. Categories such as Fine Manipulation combine Intelligence and Dexterity. Unless each attribute is used the same number of times, however, one or two attributes will dominate the skill categories (usually Dexterity and Intelligence or their equivalents), and players will min-max with wild abandon. It’s not so much that most players are power gamers, but that the temptation to take advantage of the system is just too great. The mere presence of a linkage not only enables min-maxing, but actively encourages it. (And this, incidentally, leads to the original and most compelling argument in favor of separation as made by the author of Fudge, Steffan O’Sullivan, in his Recent Thoughts comments).

The next step in establishing a link would be deciding how the attribute and skill actually interact. Do attributes confer a bonus or penalty to purchasing skill levels or as a modifier in action resolution? Do unskilled actions default to a governing attribute or skill category? The problem with this approach is skill inflation. Either no skill can be taken at face value (which defeats one of the basic design principles of Fudge) because it may be raised or lowered by an attribute, or no unskilled action can be counted on to be justifiably inferior to an action by someone possessing the skill at a moderate level. In any event, what you see is not necessarily what you get and thus another layer of murkiness complicates the game.

In the real world, all of the factors involved in connecting whatever attributes we possess with whatever skills we have learned are complicated beyond any enumeration or comprehension. Instead of trying in vain to simulate something so complex, why not use common sense? If a character has many academic skills, why not assign an appropriate level in the appropriate attribute? In terms of skill acquisition, why should a character who is a mathematical genius receive a bonus to acquiring skills in Writing or History for example? One kind of mental excellence does not necessarily translate to another, and the same goes for any other attribute. The attributes used by a hockey player do not necessarily translate into the same advantage for learning flamenco dancing just because hockey and flamenco are both physical in nature.

The Fudge solution is elegant. I resisted it upon my first reading of Fudge years ago, but I came to realize that it solved one of the worst banes of game design, and it did so by relying on a common sense approach. For that reason, I will maintain the separation in my own games. I may design or run games that have attributes and no skills, skills and no attributes, plain traits, or separated attributes and skills, but I’ll never again resort to the legacy of linkage when it comes to Fudge.

In Deliberate Obfuscation in Gaming, I touched upon the undesired effects of gamer jargon on gaming itself as I see it. Fudge is, I believe, the exemplar of how role-playing ought to be introduced to prospective players. In Fudge, all traits are spelled out, values are described with adjectives rather than numbers, and most terms use plain language rather than arcane terminology. There are very few exceptions, the primary one being the convention of using dice notation, which in the case of Fudge means referring to 4dF for example (where 4 is the number of dice rolled and dF is the type of dice rolled, i.e. “roll 4 Fudge dice”).

If I have any misgivings about the way Fudge deals with jargon, it is that it failed to go further. Admittedly, anyone who has ever played a role-playing game knows what is meant by GM, PC, and NPC (that’s game master, player character, and non-player character to those who haven’t), but it would have been nice if those terms could have been discarded along with all the other unnecessary trappings.

“GM” or “game master” is the non-trademarked descendant of “DM” or “Dungeon Master” (of Dungeons & Dragons fame). As such, it is burdened with some of the same negative connotations that have been associated with Dungeons & Dragons (rightly or wrongly) over the years, e.g. the GM as infallible expert; the GM as the opponent of the players; the GM as liar (E. Gary Gygax’s famous advice to DMs about ignoring unfavorable dice rolls made behind the DM screen or rolling dice for the sake of creating suspense come to mind); and, of course, the GM as omnipotent god, or rather, megalomaniac. The abuses by some game participants with the ostentatious title of “game master” have inevitably led to the flight of some players from gaming altogether, and the defection of others to computer “role-playing” games and story games. Consider how different things might be if “GM” had never meant “game master,” but rather “game moderator.” “Moderator” far more accurately conveys the duties involved — preparing (and sometimes writing) the scenario, organizing the event or session, setting the scenes and describing situations, applying (and being aware of) relevant rules, arbitrating conflicts, ensuring participation opportunities for all players, and faithfully playing the roles of the characters encountered by those of the players. There is nothing in the term “moderator” to encourage or even suggest the despotic behavior adopted by some GMs. As far as newcomers to role-playing are concerned, “moderator” is a more accessible and self-explanatory term, and perhaps a wee bit more mature, too. It promotes not only clarity in gaming, but better playing as well.

“PC” is far more widely associated with “personal computer” and “political correctness” than the gaming term “player character.” For the sake of clarity, might it not be better simply to use the term “player character” and dispense with the initialism? Otherwise, if something is supposed to apply equally to PCs and NPCs alike, does one then refer to Cs? In most cases, it is sufficient merely to refer to “characters.” Too Much Character, an article from the Authors’ Guidelines of Steve Jackson Games recommends avoiding even the term “character” as much as possible, suggesting the use of terms such as “adventurer” or “explorer” or others more appropriate to the genre. This is advice well taken, although I think “character” and even “player character” have usefulness especially in the writing of generic rules. One must take care, however, to distinguish between “player character” and “player,” as many role-players are aware.

“NPC” carries neither gaming nor non-gaming baggage. It is purely functional. “NPC” means “non-player character” and there can be nothing confusing about that. Or can there? Is the GM not a player? Or is the GM merely a referee? (It depends on one’s style of gaming, I suppose.) Is “GM character” preferable and does it make a difference if it stands for “game master character” or “game moderator character”? Is “moderator character” acceptable? Those are all poor alternatives. If we wish to promote clarity, what is the best way to express the term even to newcomers? If we accept the use of plain language as the best means of promoting clarity, then perhaps we can co-opt terms outside the hobby (just as “role-playing” was, incidentally). Perhaps “supporting character” might be used, or “extra” in the case of characters of minimal importance, or “antagonist” in the case of hostile characters. We already use terms such as “patron,” “contact,” and “dependent” in many role-playing games, and Dungeons & Dragons made frequent mention of “henchman” and “hireling.” None of these terms, however, seem to convey quite the same meaning as “non-player character,” which may, in the end, be the least bad generic term for characters played by the moderator.

I usually avoid the PC/NPC problem by referring to “characters” when a rule affects both types equally, and, when it does not, to terms specific to the genre or situation. As a last resort, I use “player character” or “non-player character” rather than “PC” or “NPC.” Regrettably, “GM” may be too firmly entrenched to be dislodged in the near future, and I continue to use it in my Fudge writing since it is prevalent in the original rules, but in my own usage it shall always stand for “game moderator” and I would like to see “GM” eventually replaced by “moderator” throughout the gaming hobby and industry.

The big issue, of course, is the traditional barrier to newcomers entering the hobby. I started role-playing in the early 1980s when the role-playing hobby was entering the zenith of its popularity. At that time, there were several factors that made the hobby very attractive to me. First, I was fascinated by the concept of playing a game that was essentially a regulated and cerebral form of my favorite activity as a child: playing make-believe. The second factor that attracted me to role-playing, once I became exposed to it, was its arcane terminology. If one could refer to a creature’s AC and HD, or cite a spell’s requirements for somatic components, or mention alignment or level, it made one feel clever. I was suddenly no longer just a miserable adolescent misfit, but an enlightened member of a secret brotherhood privy to obscure knowledge. It was satisfying to know a code that was incomprehensible to others.

As much as I initially enjoyed that aspect of the hobby, I must confess that its existence delayed my enjoyment of it. Before I knew what role-playing was, my brother had begged our parents to buy him the Monster Manual because he liked the pictures. For my brother in particular, this book was a dream come true: page after page of illustrations of one exotic creature after another. We could understand most of the descriptions, of course, but the list of statistics beneath each heading was a mystery indeed. I would read them with no comprehension at all of AC: 6 or Treasure Type: D or Damage: 2-12. What on earth? These things mean nothing whatsoever to an ordinary person.

After I had started playing Dungeons & Dragons, I would see articles about Traveller in White Dwarf and puzzle over streams of numbers that accompanied character names, such as 759C6B. Although I consider the hexadecimalization of character attributes interesting now, at the time it was nothing but a deterrent even to investigating the possibility of playing Traveller, especially since it was only available in shrinkwrapped little black books and box sets at the time, thus preventing any elucidation.

For a subculture in search of self-identification and the presentation of an aura of high intellect and obscure knowledge, gamer jargon seemed to serve a purpose. In reality, it further isolated gamers from the mainstream, made them objects of ridicule, made it more difficult to comprehend for newcomers who might wish to learn more about role-playing, and generally served no useful purpose.

I think the new wave of role-playing games ought to embrace an aesthetic and moral principle long promoted by the Fudge role-playing game: Make things easily understandable in plain language. Where jargon cannot be eliminated, minimize it. The emphasis, after all, ought to be role-playing, not drafting legal documents. Deliberate obfuscation in gaming only hinders the hobby.

Why, you may ask, would I be interested in the fourth edition of a game that I started boycotting when its second edition was released? The only glimmer of interest it holds for me is the involvement of Mike Mearls, some of whose work was originally known to me in this incarnation. Mearls is a sharp game designer, original thinker, and a very funny satirist. I am happy he is making a living doing what he loves, but I lament the misuse of his considerable powers, which would be better served (as far as I am selfishly concerned, if not his finances) in creating unique games and supplements for those games. That being said, his involvement in the project lends it some potential validity, which is why I would like to learn a little more about it. When the new edition is released, I will take a closer look for curiosity’s sake.