On Preparation vs. Improv

The biggest thing I noticed from the games we played this Christmas, is that to change the style of the game, we would need to build adventures in advance. I don't think that is necessary to play - the fact is, DD4 is an excellent miniatures war game, and one of the things that makes it work so well is that it is very easy to set up a combat encounter. You take a map, you add up an appropriate group of monsters, you write down stats and roll initiative and play. It's easy to set up - the encounters themselves are fairly easy to play (at least we've been doing it long enough that it's not too hard to run) - if you choose a decent array of monsters and an interesting map, the fights themselves are usually relatively challenging and fun... I admit - I played war games before I played D&D, and have always liked those kinds of games as much as anything - I could do that forever without minding it in the least. It really is a robust system - part of what makes it easy to work with is the fact that, once you've played a bit, there's not a lot of difference between 3rd and 12th level games. There's not a lot of difference in the flavor or mechanics of playing higher level characters - you have a little more variety in your powers (and the monsters' powers), the fights last a bit longer, but you basically do the same things. All of which means you can keep playing, at whatever level you want, without really changing much.

The problem is that that is leaving out an awful lot of what makes D&D D&D. Most of the character development stuff, the role playing, the world building - the sense of a narrative, of continuity from encounter to encounter. Combat D&D is fun - but it feels like you are playing it out of a box, every time - years of playing the same characters, and they still feel more like game pieces than people. Not to mention the fact that we are leaving out whole chunks of the game itself - I mean, that last adventure is the first time, I think, any one of us has used a ritual!

One thing our attempts to change things around shows, I think, is that to make a more varied campaign, to create a strong narrative sense (which, ultimately, is probably the most important element in the full D&D experience), you have to set up the adventure in advance. We need to build dungeons. They could be dungeon crawls, outdoor adventures, towns, even just series' of combat encounters - but they need to be linked before the fact, the seams and connections have to be built. I don't think this is too hard to do - it just has to be done. I think a lot of the pieces for something like this are there already - rivalries with NPCs, encounters with a couple likely factions - Drow, Githyanki, giants and trolls - which might be working together or could be rivals themselves... Some of the relationships are already there - though to play them effectively, we do need to plan out how they work. That was the biggest problem with the things I tried to do - I didn't quite know where things should go. Actions should have consequences, but I had no idea what sort of consequences should come from any kind of action.

That's one thing we would need. Another is a bit more attention to the environment - obstacles and traps and whatnot, not to mention simple things like distance, time, etc. Moving from place to place, what kinds of challenges emerge - I think I can imagine what sort of things would do this. Like in the encounters we placed - if we played the process of getting from the river crossing with the giants to the cave with the Githyanki (follow the river? follow the giants? follow a road?), we could have worked in a number of things - more obstacles, traps, more encounters, as well as keeping closer watch on things like healing, daily powers and so on. I can imagine, after the fact, how all that could have been turned into a campaign - the trick now is to imagine how to turn it into a campaign before we play.

One more thing - I think the designers of the game meant it to work like this. I think they designed the game to work out of the box, to be scalable, modular, to allow players to use it strictly as a miniatures game. They also gave rules that you can use to do something else with - I can't say, even now, how well they work... Of course, earlier versions were built even more explicitly around the idea that someone would be preparing adventures ahead of time and running them - I suppose that hasn't changed. Just that the miniatures game has been built into the game at its core.