Most of this material is not completed to our satisfaction. The kinks are not worked out, and the final editting pass has not been performed. Sigh.
The Book of Gears
Cooperative Storytelling is essentially all about artifice. The stories we create are created, the shared narrative is an illusion which fills our mind and pushes us forward. So it is no surprise that creating things within that narrative is so very contentious. Building a house in the game or creating an illusion in the story is a
An illusion is something that isn't real inside a story that isn't real. Forging a sword is creating something within a tale that is being created around it. These actions, while very integral to the source material upon which our cooperative storytelling games are based, are yet one more step removed from reality when contrasted with the old standards of pretending to be a knight who kills imaginary dragons to save fictitious princesses.
So it seems not at all surprising in retrospect that the rules we have used to represent the creation of stuff within the game world have historically been extremely unsatisfactory. Creating things takes time, which is a problematic concern in a game where time passages narratively. That means that the time a character spends nailing boards together for his dream house may be spent in a montage that ends in subtitles reading "six months later" and it may happen interspersed with a rollicking adventure where seconds count and the hammering essentially never gets done.
The result has been that previous editions have attempted to put additional or alternate costs on crafting of all sorts. From Constitution points to years off your life to XP, D&D has experimented with about a dozen different rubrics by which characters could trade one part of their character for more magic items. In almost all cases this allowed players to trade things they weren't using anyway for powerful artifacts that allowed them to conquer worlds, although in a few cases the flip side showed up made item creation so crappy that people seriously didn't do it at all. Needless to say, this has been unsatisfying, and it is our intention to help remedy these problems.
The rules presented here present a different take entirely. Creating magic items is something that takes only time, and adventures can be expected to be completed without ever doing it at all…
Character Advancement: Power and Wealth.
"Assuming that I make the use of most of our spells, I should be able to advance a circle of magic every week or so, which essentially means that the optimum solution to this difficulty to simply scare up minor tangential difficulties in the woods for two months so that I can go back in time and solve this problem retroactively."
While we're talking about magical items, we really have to talk about XP at the same time. And that's not just because the DMG asks us to pay small amounts of XP to create them. D&D is based on two kinds of advancement: XP and GP. Both of them have failed, because we're actually playing a cooperative storytelling game and not Diablo multiplayer. We know that a high level guy can whack low level stuff again and again at virtually no risk, and that this can be repeated endlessly for levels. We know that people can take off downtime to just plain farm to get GP endlessly. Seriously, "XP Grind" is extremely boring and players should not be exposed to it under any circumstances.
Noone wants to hear about the time you threw a cloud kill into a Satyr tavern and then teleported home so that you could try out the new spells that appeared in your book because you just dinged to 10th level. That's a story that is dumb, and the current rules pretty much expect you to do it over and over again. If we're going to have a rational system for magic items, we can't have it work that way.
XP: Beer Me.
"Boil an Anthill: Go Up One Level."
The rubrics for challenge and advancement as depicted in the DMG have to go. We've looked at them from every direction, and they don't work. At all. And no, I'm not talking about the classic problems like the variable difficulty inherent in fighting a giant scorpion (an interesting intellectual exercise for a 4th level horse archer or a brutal melee slugfest for a 14th level swordsman). That's a real problem, but we are talking about the basic structure of fighting monsters of increasing CR, getting increased piles of XP, and moving on with your life. That's got to end.
Here's why: according to the DMG you are supposed to face about 4 equal-level challenges per day of adventuring. Further, going by the XP chart, your 4-person party will go up a level every time you defeat 13.3 of those encounters – which is less than 4 days worth of encounters according to the first idea. So if you adventure "like you're supposed to" – you'll go up 2 levels a week. And of course, if you encounter less than 4 enemies a day, spell-slot characters like Wizards and Druids are crazy good. Essentially, this means that D&D characters go from 1st level to 20th level in half the time as it takes to bring a pregnancy to term.
Indeed, D&D society is essentially impossible. Not because Wizards are producing expensive items with their minds or because high level Clerics can raise the dead – but because the character advancement posited in the DMG is so fast that it is literally impossible for anyone to keep tabs on what the society even is. High level characters are the military, economic, and social powerbases of the world. And they apparently rise from nothing in… about 2½ months. That means that if a peasant goes home to plant his crops, then when he gets back to the city with his harvest in the fall the city will have seen the rise of a group of hearty adventurers who attempt to conquer the world and achieve godhood four times while he's gone. The city will have been conquered by a horde of Dao and sucked into the Elemental Plane of Earth and then returned to the prime material as a group of escaped Dao slaves achieved their freedom and themselves became powerful plane hopping adventurers who graduated to the Epic landscape. Then a team of renegade soldiers from the Dao army will have run off into the countryside and survived in the Spider Woods long enough to return with the Spear of Ankhut to return the city to the Dao Sultan in exchange for a gravy train of concubines and wishes. Then a squad of frustrated concubines will have turned on their masters and engaged in a web of intrigue culminating in the poisoning of the Dao Sultan with Barghest Bile and ultimately turned the city into a matriarchal magocracy run by ex-concubine sorceresses. So when the peasant returns with his harvest of wheat, he returns to… a black edifice of magical stone done up in Arabian styles and bedecked with weaponry from Olympus that is all controlled by epically subtle and powerful wizards who are themselves the masters of a setting created from the fallout of the destruction of a setting that is itself the fallout of the destruction of a setting that was in turn created out of the destruction of the setting that our peasant walked away from with a bag of grain come planting time last year.
And while purely intellectual exercises in a universe that is essentially a giant lava lamp of crazy can be interesting, satisfying storytelling is impossible. If the players can't make lasting impact, the game has no meaning. And if players are seriously going from 1st to 20th in a single season, lasting impact of any kind is absurd to even contemplate. It behooves players and DMs to come to a consensus about how they want their campaign to be structured. There is no single best way to handle character advancement in a cooperative storytelling game, and there are a lot of ways to really piss off the other players at the table if you aren't all on the same page to begin with.
Reach for the Stars: Character Advancement
All classic fantasy adventures take place in D&D terms somewhere between 1st and 10th level. Seriously. Conan is like 3rd level, Theseus is about 3rd level too. Adventures for 13th level in literature of any kind are hard to come by and generally involve wearing capes or being a god. However, D&D is not a game about modeling tales of legendary knights, skilled samurai, or barbarian chiefs – it is a game about adventuring in the world of D&D. And in D&D, characters do become 20th level, at which point they either become honorary Olympians or join the Justice League. Within that context, character advancement should follow a few basic principles:
- Stagnant Characters are frustrating. That is, in a game which offers so much potential for advancement, it is frustrating to be in the position where you don't actually get to do any of it. Sure, in a game like Shadowrun there's no disappointment to be had from not being able to achieve godhood and in a game like Champions you don't need to advance your character at all to have a good time. But D&D is a leveled system and not getting those levels makes us sad.
- Advancement of Characters shouldn't destroy the setting. If you're playing a "pirate game" then you shouldn't get to the point where there is no longer a purpose served in piracy as long as you still play that game. Furthermore, you shouldn't be adverse to downtime on the grounds that waiting a month or two for a storm to go by will leave your enemies driving air cars powered by t-rexes on bicycles.
- Players should be able to play with their toys. Too often, a character will get a shiny new trick only to go up in level and have no further use for it long before he has had a chance to actually use it. And that defeats the entire purpose of leveling up in the first place.
- Characters should not be rewarded for doing stupid crap. Seriously. Your goal is to rescue the princess, so what should you do? Rescue the princess, or… run around the compound she's being held in punching out the baron's attack dogs? An army is heading for your city, should you sneak in and kill the enemy general or should you try to wrestle the army's horses one at a time?
This leads us to several conclusions of varying palatability:
Wealth By Level Has Got to Go.
This hurts a lot of people, but it's true. If you can turn a pile of silver into increases to your natural armor bonus, the setting is going to be destroyed. Quite literally, and with crowbars. Fantasy settings are filled with bridges made of opal and castles faced with blue ice that sty forever cold and stuff. This fantastic scenery is awesome, and it contributes to the feel of fantasy that should permeate the cooperative stories we tell within a D&D game. If player character power is determined by "wealth" in any directly measurable fashion, you can bank on PCs ripping all the expensive facing off the castles they conquer – and then we all lose.
See, it's pragmatic and even sort of reasonable to rip the marble off the Great Pyramid at Giza and use it to build fancy houses in Cairo. But for all the future generations, it sucks. There really is a correlation here: if we don't allow people to trade blocks of marble for extra spells per day and more powerfully magical swords, then people will leave our pyramids alone. Otherwise, future generations will look at another unfaced ziggurat and wonder what wonders the ancient battlefields possessed before vandals came and destroyed our fantasy world.
Encounter XP Has Got to Go.
XP rewards are a form of incentive towards heroic behavior. The problem is that individual challenges don't make things more heroic, they just make things more time consuming. By parting out XP per encounter rather than per quest the game is actually discouraging intelligent play. Avoiding difficulties is supposed to get you XP according to the DMG but we all know that doesn't actually happen in any game or published module.
Adventurers respond very rapidly to incentives. If you give incentives for painstakingly stabbing minotaur after minotaur in the face the players will do that. If you incentivize running past the horde of minotaurs and rescuing the princess the players will do that instead. So if the XP comes from quest completion, players will complete quests. If XP comes from Final Fantasy style XP dancing in the woods – the players will do that instead. Since one of them makes for awesome stories, and the other is a rote repetition of the worst kind of World of Warcraft nonsense, we know what has to be done.
- A Little Note on XP Costs
I know that you're probably thinking "If XP rewards are handed out in a less per-diem manner, doesn't that mean that XP costs would be more noticeable and even actually have meaning?" And of course the answer is "yes"…. Sort of.
The problem with XP costs isn't just that they don't really cost anything "in the long run" (which they don't), the problem is that they are bad for the game. Like Age increases before them, an XP cost is essentially running up a credit card bill. You get whatever it is that you were buying with the XP cost now, and you pay later (by death from old age or not going up in level when you otherwise would). That's never balanced, because there's no guaranty that the character in question will still be being played when that credit card comes due.
So even though staggering XP gains out longer as suggested in this book would make XP costs more meaningful than the hoax they are in the basic rules, we still strongly aadvise you to do away with them in your home games as we have in ours.
Strategies of Advancement
Having determined the core problems with advancement in the manner described in the DMG, let's talk about some of the ways you could do it that might be satisfying. Like the handling of alignment and necromancy that we're talked of in the past, there really is no right answer – it really depends upon what your group wants to do.
Steady State 1: Serial Heroism
"We have another mission for you…
Let's face it: in a lot of fictional source material, the characters don't really change between their adventures at all. In fact, that's kind of the point of a lot of stories. The hero is the one fixed point and the story is just the fixed character reacting to different situations. You read about Conan or Hercules fighting the Moon Men or the Ice Jarls, but you don't really read the story set after Hercules got a laser gun and grew wings. Even the books where Conan is an old man rarely reference specific events from previous books.
In the serial heroism campaign, characters begin play at the level that depicts their abilities appropriately. Characters have signature equipment and a collection of levels and skills that are integral to their character. Over the course of the adventure, the characters may well find new equipment and learn special crap and be blessed by Nymph Pools and whatever – but at the beginning of the next adventure they will be back to exactly the same place they were last time. Even characters getting married or having limbs whacked off doesn't have any effect on the next episode.
There are a lot of ways to explain this. Adventurers spend money profligately and put equipment into bat caves and bequeath magic swords to temples and favored wenches. Major wounds can be healed, and we all know how rarely things work out between men and women – especially when one is a halfling rogue and the other is a giant iguana. You can either begin each episode by coming up with an amusing off-the-cuff answer to why you begin the next adventure just like you began the last one or you can just ignore it the way Saturday morning cartoons do. It's not a big problem.
There are a lot of advantages to this sort of thing. If the characters already do what they are supposed to (generally about level 6 or so with a couple of standard magic items and an artifact), then advancement of any kind just makes the character less like himself. He Man didn't become a better show when Prince Adam got a plane – it just lost focus. But there are pitfalls as well. Certainly it is the case that games like World of Warcraft or Everquest can be remarkably unsatisfying precisely because no real accomplishment can occur. It is a fine line between a character not changing and a character's actions not mattering – walking that line is sometimes quite difficult. Certainly, before such a sweeping change is implemented, very frank discussions must be had between players and the DM. The game is essentially now a series of once off adventures that happen to have the same characters in them.
In the Serial Heroism game the character's core abilities are the same in every tale. That can be mythic. Like the Robin Hood songs. But it can also be retarded. Like the Smurfs.
Steady State 2: Trophy Hunting
"So… where are we putting the giant penny?"
Characters like Conan and He-Man are pretty much the same between issues or episodes. But what of characters like Angel and Buffy who really do pick up and use equipment found in previous episodes? This is also a very plausible setup of "nearly steady state" storytelling with limited character development. The character stays relatively recognizable one adventure to another. Chapter after chapter goes by without the player ever growing wings, learning to fly, shooting laser eye beams or in any other way having obviously gained a level of Bard. Important plot points and devices are referenced in later installments, allowing the characters to use the Doom Glaive after they took it off the cooling body of Bruc Avec Pitié both immediately in that adventure and subsequently in later adventures as well. While in the true Serial the characters would have destroyed the Doom Glaive at the end of the adventure, in the Trophy Hunting model it stays in the Bat Cave only until it is needed for a later adventure.
In this model of steady state dynamics, the players gradually increase in power – though they do so in an asymmetric fashion that is not level dependent. This means that the amount of Ogres that the party can successfully dispatch will increase considerably over time. But it won't increase dramatically and the players may never be able to take on a really hardcore monster like a Cranium Rat Swarm or a Pit Fiend.
In this model then, it is expected that even the idea of "Wealth by Level" be tossed in the trash. The players are literally gaining as many as infinity magic items per level because by and large they aren't going up levels at all, while magic items are accumulating slowly. Characters can bathe in magic puddles that increase their stats or find statues that transform into giant frogs; but this can also happen pretty slowly and still be fine because players aren't being forced into situations where they necessarily face higher leveled opposition all the time.
Rapid Advancement: Level a Session
"That was last week. This week I am a master of fire."
It is entirely plausible to play a game where the characters go up a level every adventure or even every session. While this sort of rapid advancement scenario is often dismissed as "munchkin", it actually does capture the feel of many stand-alone books and movies quite well. There are a lot of stories like The Wheel of Time or The Matrix which are actually ruined by having sequels at all – they are much better as a single progression where the characters begin as youngsters who don't even know about the major Evil that threatens the world and progress briskly into becoming world straddling badasses who control reality with willpower alone.
In this set up it is highly recommended that the DM hand out magic items like candy. After all, while the players are fighting hill giants today, they'll be up against a swarm of bloodfiend locusts next week and a rogue deva the week after that. The players will need new swag to face their new enemies just as they'll need new class abilities.
Many players feel that this sort of play environment is simple minded, but really nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, players have no chance to get acquainted with their new abilities before they are laden with even newer abilities. With only a single adventure to make use of each new level of powers it is entirely possible that the Wizard will never get a chance to use one or even both of the shiny new spells he picks up each level. Indeed, since both the characters and the opposition is coming up with more power and options each week, the game is actually really hard.
And that ironically, is the most major drawback of this gaming style. Some of the players who gravitate the most towards this advancement system are actually the least able to successfully juggle a new class level and two new magic items every week. Sure, there are difficulties to be had in this scenario when players miss a session or three (nothing says "suck" like finding out that Fighter's girlfriend the sorceress cohort is actually a more powerful magician than you are). But that can be worked around in a number of ways: the DMG suggests giving out experience bonuses to people who fall behind until they catch up in level and that works well enough. Of course, to actually make use of that you'd have to chuck the idea of not being able to level more than once per session – which makes characters even more confusing – but there you go.
Attenuating Advancement: Diminished Returns.
"You youngsters have no concept of how difficult it was to get the Doom Glaive."
If one considers advancement at face value: a direct method to prevent adventuring from becoming "stale", then it is entirely reasonable to question its inclusion in the game at all. After all, a sixth level party could very plausibly encounter a manticore, a summoning ooze, a dragon, a war party of ogres, a troll, an evil wizard, a dinosaur, a nymph, a mud salad, a nerra facechanger, a medusa, a circle of myconid, a cathedral protected by a stained glass golem, a cadre of yak folk, an infestation of ash rats, a room full of hammerers, a spawn of Kyuss, or a dreadful cleric with some orcish minions. Or whatever. The point is, you could very plausibly face different opposition every week until half the players move out of town before you ever run out of monsters to fight. The staleness then, comes not at the hands of the players in any case, but for the DM. After all, once the DM has thrown the adventure where an ancient cathedral of Pelor has been taken over by an evil group of Yak Folk who have bound a Janni and forced her to tell them the secret password that allows them to break into the inner cloister without having the stained glass tear itself out of the wall and attack them in order to conduct a foul ritual to transform the daughter of the old king into a medusa and set up some zombie ogres to protect themselves while the mighty ritual commences – that leaves some of the DM's favorite monsters used up out of that level. More importantly however, the players are presenting essentially the same skill set so long as their skill set doesn't change – meaning that the DM can become bored finding challenges for the PCs unless the PCs demonstrably change over time.
Be that as it may, the fact is that higher level characters with more magical swag have more abilities than do lower level characters and quite definitely present a face to team monster with more attachments on their Swiss Army knives.
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Why a Revision to the Crafting Rules?
An overhaul to the Craft rules may sound fairly unbalancing, as the current Craft rules were created to prevent characters from making a lot of money and potentially destabilizing their games with an influx of magic items. Unfortunately, like Level Allowance, the heavy nerfing to Crafting resulted in a lot of characters simply becoming unviable, a lot of very dumb things happening all around, and it still doesn't actually stop characters from breaking the game if they really want to. If the party is made out of Elves, they can simply set a single skill rank on fire and announce that they're going to spend 100 years farming, making trained Profession (Farmer) checks every week. That'll get them about 6 gp a week for the next 5,200 weeks – for a total of 31,200 gp at first level before they even start adventuring. And as elves, they can honestly just spend 200 years farming or spend some real skill ranks on that to get even more money.
If the DM is willing to simply let players roll dice, have downtime, and purchase magic items of unlimited power, the game is already broken on first principles at first level using the PHB alone. If the DM wants to keep sanity going at all, then something in that equation is going to have to go. Probably everything in that equation should go. As discussed in the Dungeonomicon, there is an inherent limit to what players could reasonably be expected to be able to purchase with pieces of gold, so to a very real extent crafting for money is simply multiplying the amount of low-level equipment you have – it doesn't particularly get you more powerful equipment. And of course there's no reason for players to be able to do all of this 9 to 5 working without having on-camera adventures. An adventure where you are running a silk factory and will make a bunch of money as soon as you can stop the goblin syndicate from extorting all your profits is pretty much the same as the adventure where you run off into a dungeon, fight the goblins, and take the money they stole from the silk merchants home in a sack.
So the nerfs on Crafting just aren't necessary. But what actually needs to change?
- Valuable Raw Materials Aren't Valuable: This is a part of the rules that makes me cry. Since the amount of value you make each day is based on the difficulty of working the material and not on the value of said material, there is no way for a goldsmith to stay in business. Gold is very easy to work and therefore the DC to work it is very low, and therefore a goldsmith makes very little in the way of finished product each week. A five pound gold candle holder is roughly four ounces and fits into the palm of your hand, but it'll take a master goldsmith (+10 Craft Bonus) almost a year to finish one (500 gp value, at DC 5 = 50 weeks).
- The Costs of Materials are WHAT? Remember that five pound gold candle holder? It's worth 500 gp and therefore requires 167 gp worth of materials to make it. But it's worth 250 gp just as a lump of gold. So you can buy things as raw materials and sell them as trade goods and make lots of money. The reverse happens when you make complex or finely worked items. A masterwork sword is made out of pretty much the same materials as a normal sword and is much more expensive because it's better made. But because the higher quality crafting will make it sell for more down the line, the cost of the materials goes up by a 100 gp. Where does that money go? What are you getting for 2 pounds of gold? Sure, maybe you get some better coal or something, but really, that doesn't even begin to cover it.
- Field Fortifications Cannot Happen: Even the simplest of traps (such as a bucket with some acid in it balanced on a partially open door) has a cost that is very high – in the hundreds of gp. That means even the most gifted craftsman is going to take weeks to boobytrap a room or lay down some field fortifications. When longbowmen want to hammer some stakes into the ground to protect themselves from the knight stampede that's going to come when the battle starts, the Craft rules essentially tell them that they can't do it. Which for those of us who have seen Henry V, seems unlikely.
- Risky and Illegal Trades are Pointless: Some products are expensive because producing them is risky (poison, flower arrangements from the Bane Mires). Some products are expensive because their production and sale is in some manner restricted by the authorities (shrunken dwarf heads, disrespectful puppets of the king). In the real world, people produce these things because they can charge inflated prices because of the risk. It's a gamble, where sometimes you make big money and sometimes you get killed by hydras or agents of King Ronard. But with craft times directly dependent upon resale value, these crafts are gambles where sometimes you make the same amount of money you would have making night stands, and sometimes you get killed by your own poison or Clerics of Torm.
Dangerous Locations: When the Floor has a CR
It is an undeniable truth that hunting goblins in a dank warren filled with dead falls and snares is both more exciting and more dangerous than hunting the same goblins in an open field. However, it must be stressed that the way 3rd edition D&D has traditionally dealt with this – to give CRs to individual traps as if they were enemy monsters in their own right – is both unsatisfying and unplayable. The fact is that you probably are never going to tell a story about the time your party was shot at by an arrow trap, it just isn't interesting in the same way that overcoming an evil necromancer or slaying a greedy dragon is.
And why is that? It's essentially because an arrow trap is not an encounter, it's an attack. Just a single salvo in an ongoing battle between you and the dungeon, not a battle in and of itself. And when looked at in that manner, the problem becomes obvious: a glyph of warding is a single spell. Overcoming it is like making your saving throw against the same Cleric's hold person, it's simply wildly inappropriate to stop the action and play the battle complete music at that point.
So what do we do about it? Well, just as one does not stop and record a victory every time you bypass a summoned monster or overcome an opponent's thrown javelin, we shouldn't be worrying about the CR of individual traps. No, we should be concerned only with the CR of areas that have traps in them. For one thing, this means that we don't have to have endless arguments over whether people should get the XP for bypassing the symbol of pain on the door if they came in through the floor. For another, the act of avoiding that stupid argument really helps to encourage characters to play things a bit smarter and not simply run through the "Hallway of Leveling" where they go up a level every thirteen traps and get to 20th level in less than 150 doors.
Location CRs: Quality and Quantity
"Why check the door? Maybe because there was a trap on every single other door in this entire complex?!"
To a limited extent an area can become more dangerous by making traps more ubiquitous. We say a "limited" extent because there is a profound sense of diminishing returns when the chance of encountering a trap equals one. Our classic example is the Citadel of Fire, the castle that is the home of the Efreeti King. It's on fire. Every square is on fire. Every door is on fire. And if you go there, you'll be on fire. To an extent, that means that the kind of dangerous area that you might have seen in the Lizard Temple when you were 4th level is now every square on the battlemat. That's… bad. But it's not unconquerably bad. It doesn't take a whole lot of Fire Resistance to survive in that kind of environment, and you don't have to be amazingly high level to get your grubby mitts on that kind of fire resistance. The fact that every single doorknob and chair is on fire in the Citadel essentially just means "Only Adventurers with Fire Resistance can Adventure here" or even "You must be at least as tall as this sign to attack the Citadel."
And the effect would be pretty much the same if you just had to wade through a moat of Fire. There are literally dozens of rooms in the Citadel of Fire that are on fire without this increasing the difficulty of your assault in any way. And that's OK. In fact, people would be slightly offended if large amounts of the Citadel of Fire were not in fact on fire, which would be the logical way to do it if you were handing out XP or construction costs on a per flaming room basis. It adds to the immersion to have some relatively homogenous fantasy environments.
Practically speaking, this means that by the time you have put in enough of a single type of difficulty that the players will not plausibly be able to complete their quest without taking appropriate precautions, the CR of the location shouldn't rise any more by adding more of the same difficulty. And that goes for more than just places being on fire. If there are enough pressure plates linked to arrows that the PCs aren't going to get through alive without the Rogue taking 20 on her Search checks, throwing in some more arrow traps (or tripwires, or anything else that the Rogue can find and bypass by just taking the time to search thoroughly) doesn't make the area any more difficult. A cave at the bottom of the sea isn't any more difficult when it's completely full of water than when it's mostly full of water – you still need water breathing just to get there.
WWMD? Disabling Traps.
"A paperclip can be a wondrous thing. More times than I can remember, one of these has gotten me out of a tight spot."
The Disable Device Skill is extremely powerful and amazingly bizarre. You don't need it to bypass a trap, there are dungeons full of Kuo Toans who have no more Disable Device than you do who bypass traps every day. What Disable Device does do is allow you to interfere with the mechanisms of mechanical and magical devices such that they don't get in your stuff when you don't have access to the special catch or magic word or whatever it is that you're supposed to have. In short, any fool can press an off switch or simply not step on an on-switch; Disable Device allows you to shut things down without access to those things.
Once you have found a trap with the Spot skill, it requires no skill roll at all to simply walk around it. If you discover a pressure plate, you can normally expect to simply step or jump over it without even making a Disable Device check. What Disable Device let's you do is set the plate to not trigger if you do walk on it. Often that's pretty pointless, but sometimes it's pretty useful, especially if you're up against a "trap" that is a siege defense or hostile spell (such that its normal deactivation trigger is far away). Remember however, that you can still activate traps by any of a number of means without actually being in harm's way. Summoned monsters, tossed barrels and the ubiquitous 10' pole have been used by generations of adventurers to activate traps from 10' or more away. Again, that totally works and requires zero ranks in disable device. However, sometimes you don't want a trap to go off at all or a trap can go off virtually limitless numbers of times – that's where disable device comes in.
So what counts as a device? Well… everything. Every mechanical or magical effect is a device. A Wall of Force is a device as is a giant stone block that is set to fall down on a foolish intruder who breaks a trip wire. A character with sufficient Disable Device can successfully turn off any magical effect or prevent virtually any cause and effect chain from occurring. You can stop an avalanche (DC 15) even after it has begun (DC 35). You can remove any permanent magic effect, even curses like Cause Blindness (DC 32). What you can't do is disable instantaneous effects. Flesh to Stone, therefore, is out of bounds for disabling, as is Wall of Stone. Sorry, once an instantaneous effect has gone off, there's nothing left to disable.
How does that work? I have no frickin idea. Rogues, Thief Acrobats, Ninjas, and Gadgeteers are capable of simply turning off Geasa and there's no physical explanation for how it is that they do it. The fact is that most of the devices in D&D are beyond my understanding. I don't know how a symbol of death works, I don't know how the magical energies stay in place for weeks or years until activated, so I don't know how a Ninja goes about making those magical energies dissipate harmlessly without entering the kill zone. I do know that he can do it, and if required I can make something up that sounds cool. That's a DM's job, after all.
- Item Spotlight: Bag of Flour
The bag of flour can be used to disable any rune or sigil without meaningful risk. A magical rune can only detonate if it is uncovered. So if you throw some flour on it, the symbol can't ever explode and is now completely safe. You may want to put the flour on the end of a pole because moving your hand close to a rune may trigger it before the flour lands.
I live here: Setting off Traps.
"How did those gnolls run through that hallway if the whole thing collapses when people are in it?
The common conceit of trap placement is that they automatically go off against player characters who don't find them and automatically don't go off against Team Monster. Needless to say, that's ridiculous, and it actually harms the game when you implement it. While there are magical traps that are virtually guaranteed to go off against certain kinds of creatures and are nonetheless bypassable with something as simple as a command word, those are not PC/NPC selective. A command word bypassed Symbol will go off against any creature that doesn't say the magic word. That means that creatures without language capabilities like bears holding sharks or remorhazz will set those traps exactly as PCs who don't know any better would. It also means that any player character in the correct position can simply listen for the command words that Goblins use when safely passing over the danger zone and use it themselves. The base DC is only 15 so the challenge here is actually getting into position to observe enemies bypassing magical traps rather than the replication of the technique itself. The bypass words on magical symbols are pretty forgiving, they can be spoken by blink dogs, Sahuagin and Xorn without serious risk of misunderstanding.
But what of other traps? Mechanical traps go off mechanically, which means that to make them go off you have to do something to make it go off. And that means that there is a chance that even someone who doesn't have a clue what they are doing might simply happen to not set off the trap. Life is filled with Mr. McGoos and if there is any path to walk across an area without setting off a pressure plate there is a chance that people will happen to do so. And yet, if there isn't a way to move past a trap, there's a whole area that the residents of an area have to avoid altogether (or just be immune to the effect of the trap). Here are some common trap triggers:
- Opening a Door This is a common and fun one because unless someone decides to go through the wall (and sometimes even then) the trap will go off any time the door is opened. This can either be placed on "fake" doors that the occupants have no intention of ever opening, or it can be put on doors that are used frequently if there is a separate switch to deactivate the trap (be sure to get buzzed in). The important part about this is that an opening trigger will go off any time the door is opened normally. If you cut a hole in the middle of the door and squeeze through it, you're probably safe. After all, the door itself is acting as a switch in this case, methods of entrance that don't literally involve turning that hinge often don't involve pulling the switch.
- Tripping a Wire Strings and wires can be strung in walkways at anything from ground to eye level. A trip wire sets off a trap when it is broken or pulled upon, and thus won't go off at all if creatures shorter than the wire run underneath it (barring polearms and the like). A tripwire lower to the ground is more likely to be randomly stepped over than is a higher tripwire, but less likely to be seen. Several trip wires can be run in tandem across a walkway to virtually guaranty that a passerby will sever them, but in doing so they become a lot more visible. In general, a trip wire can go off 25% of the time when someone moves through its space and have a spot DC of 20, go off 50% of the time and have a spot DC of 15, or go off 100% of the time and have a spot DC of only 10. A trip wire can be severed without triggering the trap by holding both ends of the wire and slicing out the middle – but this requires a Disable Device check (DC 20). Failure triggers the trap. A tripwire can be triggered from range by throwing a chair at the problem, or with an arrow (against projectile weapons a tripwire has an AC of 13, against a larger object such as a barrel or a couple of cabbages tied together the AC is negligible).
- Pressing a Plate Bizarrely complex mechanisms can be hidden inside of walls and a pressure plate is as good a manner as any to get those mechanisms up and working. I seriously don't have any idea what the mechanical pieces under the floor look like, and neither do you. And that's generally OK. Mostly players won't respond to pressure plates by breaking the floor or walls open to get at the clockwork (though that is a viable option), mostly players will gamely accept whatever fate the pressure plate has in store for them. Without tearing up the scenery, characters can disable a pressure plate with a Disable Device check (generally DC 20, though more awesome plates exist). Pressure plates can be disguised as regular floor and are often quite difficult to spot (DC 16-30). A pressure plate can be as small as a single out of place brick or floorboard and may go off quite rarely (1-5 times out of 20 when someone moves through the space), this has the advantage that characters "in the know" can step over it (though enemies are presented with the same option). Alternately, pressure plates can cover entire squares, being triggered automatically if any creature heavier than a specific cutoff enters the square. In any case, characters can fly over a pressure plate or climb along the wall and simply never activate it.
- Getting Stabbed The old ones are the good ones, and many a trap has been simply to put pointy bits on areas that a character might step on, touch, or fall into. One can with exaggerated care simply step over such things, but in the heat of battle this may be pretty difficult. A single caltrop or blade is rather unlikely for someone to step on (a 1 on a d20 unless the character is crawling or otherwise stepping on more of the square than one might expect), and can be quite difficult to find unless one is specifically looking for it (DC 18 to spot). An area covered with spikes, caltrops, or blades is generally pretty obvious (DC 5 to spot), but it is generally assumed that anyone who moves into a covered square will step on one unless they take some sort of precautions. Caltrop covered terrain is difficult terrain, and characters who move through it at faster than a ½ speed walk are going to step on something they'd rather not unless they make a Reflex Save (DC 20). Characters standing in an area covered with caltrops or the like are denied their Dex bonus to AC unless they have 5 ranks in Balance or allow themselves to step on something every time they are attacked.
- Offending a Glyph Magical runes have at times been implied to have the power to determine a character's alignment, their level, their class, even what they've eaten recently. That's not good for anyone, and we cannot suggest that it be allowed. So here's what Runes do: first, they are constantly taking 20 on a Listen check. That means that you need to make a Stealth check DC 21 to sneak past one. It also means that they will generally speaking hear a command word to turn off or turn on. A Magic Rune can also have a detection spell imbedded in them, which last until the rune triggers. So a rune might be set to go off as soon as a source of "Good" was brought to within 10 feet of the Rune. A Rune might also simply be set to go off whenever any creature moves through its area while it is active (being activated and deactivated with command words set when the rune is). The parameters of a rune can be determined with a DC 20 + Spell Level Knowledge Arcana check.
Facing the Architect: The CR of Locations
When you adventure in a dangerous or exotic location you are essentially encountering the architect of that location. Each trap, obstacle, and danger of the region can be looked at as the contingent spells and attacks of the force that put that together. Sometimes a devious maze is engineered by a mad architect or fabricated by an elusive wizard and this is in fact literally true. Other times the Forest of Dread is just really dangerous on its own lookout and the only "architect" involved is just the DM.
The importance here is that an individual firetrap isn't really an encounter. It's a single attack, and a pretty ineffective one at that. When the wizard tries to soften you up with his explosive runes, that's a lot like the same wizard softening you up by conjuring some celestial badgers and sending them around the corner to engage your forces.
So while we definitely do not suggest doing something dumb like giving out XP for each trap bypassed, we do encourage you to consider the traps in an area to collectively be an opponent. An opponent that spends a lot of time hiding and taking opportunistic attacks. The Kobold Warrens, for example, have a number of trip wires set to launch crossbow bolts at anyone tall enough to pass through them. In an ideal world, the trip wires would be fairly visible, but in the heat of battle characters may feel compelled to chase after kobolds through the strings.
Structuring Encounters in a Day
Challenge Ratings have a real utility as a DM, but do not substitute for having a decent idea of what your party is capable of. We're going to go back to the Giant Scorpion a few times, because it's a very poignant example, but we could just as easily be talking about Fairies or Elementals. The Monstrous Scorpion comes in a variety of CRs based on its size and overall awesomeness. Don't be fooled: in reality a monstrous scorpion is essentially of identical difficulty regardless of size based entirely upon what the players are capable of tactically. The Monstrous Scorpion has no intelligence, no ranged attacks, and no interesting abilities – it's just a biological construct that happens to be exceptionally tough in its one-dimensional way. If you can simply get to longish range (or fly) and use ranged attacks, you win. It'll take a while, but you will win. It doesn't really matter what level you are, or how strong your ranged attacks are, victory will be yours. On the other hand, if the Scorpion is presented as a closet troll, it'll mess you right up.
What the CR grants you as DM then is a basic idea of how much "resources" an encounter is liable to use up. The Scorpion, for example, will use up a lot of arrows and not a small amount of time. It probably won't cause any damage if the players play it smart, but it will drag things out for a bit. Higher CRs will take a bite out of the arrows of higher level parties and so on. Still, the fact is that in no way will facing an appropriately CRed monster use up the 20% of your resources specified by the DMG. Not at any level. What kinds of resources will be used up will depend upon the types of opposition:
- Traps: Trapped locations of an appropriate CR are generally speaking time sinks more than anything else. At levels 1-6, the characters will normally Search regions that are known to contain traps, which reduces the character's speed through the area to 5' per 6 seconds (about ½ MPH or 0.9 KPH).
So even though we're looking to completely toss the idea that players should actually get anything for necessarily killing "Ogre Thug #2" that doesn't mean that he shouldn't be there.
As player characters become higher level they can take on more opposition. This does not necessarily mean they should be confronted with more powerful opposition, but they should certainly encounter more of it. A Lunar Ravager and a Sand Giant are basically two large sized men with funny colored skin and a bad attitude. The fact that one is massively more powerful than the other is a staple of the DnD system, but doesn't make an extremely exciting story. Having just looked up the stats of a Lunar Ravager and a Sand Giant I am confident that defeating a Sand Giant is a more difficult feat – though of course it is not a more impressive feat since as previously described both opponents are just 3 meter tall dudes with funny colored skin and a sword. Taking on 45 bug bears, which is something the stronger party could easily accomplish is however much more impressive than defeating 15 gnolls, as would be a light romp for the party who might otherwise face the Lunar Ravager.
It is therefore important to note that parties should generally speaking not run into level appropriate opposition until quite late in an adventure. It's fine for a boss to be a True Fiend, Wizard, or Androsphix who is 2 or 3 CRs higher than the average character level in the party, but the vast majority of opposition should be several levels lower and a crap tonne more numerous than the PCs. This isn't just because this sort of thing keeps cleaving and fireballs as reasonably viable tactics, but because high level combats really do involve lots of participants on both sides of the combat kicked out of the battle from time to time and if there's only one enemy it gets really anticlimactic.
What's that Noise?! Playing at Low Level
There is a reason that the XP charts in the DMG completely fudge character levels 1-3. That is because those levels genuinely don't have a good consistent rubric for how powerful things are. There are damn few first level PCs that wouldn't go down if they took a lucky crit from a kobold's small light crossbow, and a first level Wizard has a pretty reasonable chance of taking down an orcish warrior by hitting him with a club. At first through third level, combat really is anyone's game and it is strongly advisable that the PCs outnumber their foes in the majority of confrontations at this level of conflict.
The TPK (Total Party Kill) is a very real concern for 2nd level characters, because the success or failure of actions is so very random. A run of bad luck can quite plausibly wipe out even a well-played low level team of adventurers quite easily and it is recommended that DMs use discrete encounters at these low levels in order to minimize the effects of having characters getting dropped by allowing the remaining characters to consistently revive fallen comrades.
The Rigors of Command: Playing at High Levels
A high level party isn't really "adventuring" in the traditional sense any more, or at least they probably shouldn't be. Instead, they are playing a whole different game – a strategic game. Characters who make it into the Epic landscape can in fact become gods according to long standing D&D tradition. Along the way it behooves you to conquer and administer stuff in order to propel yourself to victory.
More detail will be gone into in the Tome of Virtue, as the high level world is a really strange place. Almost all the source material from Arthur and Beowulf to Theseus and Ulysses involves characters who are somewhere between 1st and 6th level in D&D terminology. Stories which involve a 10th level adventure are extremely rare. Perseus killed Medusa (CR 7), and Bellerophon killed Chimera (also CR 7), but they both pulled some fancy equipment and cheesy tactics to pull it off (Bellerophon seriously had a flying mount that was faster than Chimera and shot arrows at the beast until it died).
If one insists upon continuing with powerful characters in an adventuring role, there is a primary conceit which must be embraced: all adventures must be timed adventures. A 14th level Wizard can, with sufficient preparation, kill any challenge in D&D without exception. And while sitting around planning the perfect murder of a red dragon or the perfect heist of a major artifact is interesting as an intellectual exercise, there is no way that represents an "adventure" in the way we use that word to describe 4th level characters breaking into pantries and stabbing people in the face for money.
Illusion Magic: I Don't Believe This Crap
Illusion magic has the distinguishing characteristic of being either the most powerful school of magic, or the least – entirely at the whims of your playgroup. Illusions can be used as distractions, threats, enticements, concealment, modes of communication, prisons, attacks, disguises, false targets, entertainments, misdirections, religious inspiration, incitements to riot, madness provokers, commercial fraud, redecoration, time wasters, limited-use ability wasters (like prepared spells, scroll spells, or use-per-day spell-like abilities), or traps (in conjunction with dangerous terrain, monsters, substances, events, or magical effects). And that's just using the 1st level spell silent image.
People just don't expect their senses to lead them wrong, even in a world where people know that illusions exist. I mean, if a wall of fire suddenly pops up out of nowhere, it's actually more likely to actually be a real damaging wall made out of magical fire than it is to be an illusion of the same thing. And truthfully, who wants to pop a hand in to check? Not me either.
What this means is that illusions are incredibly powerful because they allow such perfect forgeries of the real world. The downside of this is that lots of DMs try to counter the efforts of creative players by using a particularly harsh interpretation of the Disbelief rules in order to nerf illusions out of existence. It works like this: by the rules, you get a Will save vs. an illusion if you "interact" with it. DMs looking to throw salt in an illusionist's game usually allow that to mean "in the same square as an illusion" or "looking at it." You also automatically make a save if you have "proof that an illusion isn't real." What that means is anyone's guess, because in DnD even the most unlikely circumstances could quite plausibly occur without illusionary influence. A silent orc moving through the grass might be a silent image of an orc, an orc in a silence effect, an incorporeal orc, or just an orc who happens to be really sneaky. Once you disbelieved the illusion, you suddenly got to see through its like it was transparent.
Usually, DMs looking to punish illusionists will give multiple saves per turn, and then at some point just say that the target has automatically disbelieved the illusion, and this is possible only because the rules regarding illusions were written in the style of previous editions of DnD called "Rule 0" where playing a pick-up game of DnD involved a few hours of discussion about how the DM handled most effects. The current edition of DnD (3.X) mostly did away with this because it sucks up valuable game time to have arguments about DnD rules and it was the worst part of playing the game; however, illusions were never fully overhauled, so we are still stuck with this noise.
Potential effects of illusions are also hotly debated. Some genius at WotC has laid down the law and said that the various image and illusion spells don't cause darkness, but that doesn't stop them from creating opaque mist or smoke or dust, obscuring objects, or even autumn leaves that drift around a person's head and float away from his touch, effectively blinding a person from dangers as well as complete darkness. Additionally, there are DM vs Player wars where DMs try to interpret the "single object, creature, or force" line to mean "no more than one person or a monster in the illusion" and players respond with things like "its an illusion of a single force that summoned many monsters like the spell summon monster or gate" or "its one object connected by many invisible threads." Other DMs and players are convinced that you control all visual information in the Area of Effect, while others agree but say things like "you can't trap a creature in a bubble with visual information on the inside that mimics the world except for some key creatures/object/terrain/effects, but people outside see him as normal because his image is on the outside of bubble."
In the end, it's a mess because the current rules can be made to do amazing things by creative people, but those amazing things break the level system and that means that DMs are forced to punish players for their creativity, thus hurting everyone. That being said, here are some playable rules regarding illusions that won't cause you to stab out your own eyes.
Magic Items: Swag That You Brag About
"No… This is a knife."
Any man on the street with a few nasty scars and good tale or two can call himself an adventurer, but there are a few true tests that can determine the difference between a talented liar and the kind of person who considers fighting dragons a slow day at the office. It's not demonstrable skills, or nerve, or even a history of past accomplishments. It's magic items.
I know that this sounds counterintuitive, but work it out for a second. Put a fighting guy with just better than average stats, some class features, and some HD out on the front line, and what do you have? Basically, you have a giant, which means "NPC ". Without a magic weapon to bypass DR, good armor to avoid being clobbered, healing magic to recover for the next fight, and crazy extra effects to surprise an enemy like dimension dooring with the Cloak of the Montebank or reflecting a spell with a Ring of Spell Turning, you just don't have enough mojo to call yourself a PC. Monsters have bigger raw stats and better recharge times on their abilities, so if you don't have something extra you aren't going to be able to compete.
Magic items are the true test of the adventurer because they say "I'm trying to grow my power asymmetrically and I'm willing to do it by stealing it from other people who are also growing their power asymmetrically." Anyone can fire a bow at a manticore in flight, but only an adventurer is so concerned with power that he'll track that manticore to its lair and risk getting boxed in by a family of manticores just for the opportunity to root through its dropping on the off chance some would-be hero got eaten by the thing and a magical trinket or two survived passing through its innards.
Some would called that "greedy", but in fact that's "hardcore." Real adventurers are willing and able to risk their life on just the hope that their efforts will bring magical loot.... and its worth it. The more magical loot one gains, the more able an adventurer is to survive the next terrible risk that might offer magical loot. Heck, just holding onto any reasonable-sized pile of magical loot means that one is t
