Monthly Archives: August 2011

The Clickable Map

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Ok, so this is the overland map for the video game, Dragon Age:As you might expect, you click on one of the little squares to go there. The images in the icons have meanings (town, dungeon and so on – that one in the upper right is “make camp”) but the base idea is pretty simple. Predictably, there are a few other twists: the map changes over time for one, and when you click to go from point A to point B, there’s a chance you may have an encounter along the way.

There are similar maps within cities and such, and it works pretty well, but what I want to really look at is how this interacts with tabletop play. See, I think there’s an instinctive resistance to this kind of model in play because it’s so obviously and (seemingly) arbitrarily restrictive. We treasure our broad, open ended maps with the idea that if that spot right there is of particular interest to us, then by god that’s what we can set out for.

The problem is that, in practice, things end up looking a lot like this map. There are points of interest the players are aware of, and more of them are revealed over time, and those are where they go too and from, encountering things along the way. The only real difference is on those occasions where the players might actually “pick a spot” that doesn’t already have an icon, but when that happens, there are two possible outcomes:

1. The GM already has something prepped, so effectively it’s a hidden icon.

2. The GM needs to make something up, effectively creating a new icon.

I like both options. Stuff like that is why you have a GM and not just a computer.

And, heck, it’s not like this is unprecedented. Replace every icon on that map with a number and you have the map from pretty much every adventure ever. The difference between that and the video game is sleight of hand, and I wonder if we might be better off dispensing with it.

Anyway, this is obviously not applicable for all games. If you are actually interested in hard core exploration with full on Oregon Trail dysentery and inventory management, then obviously you want an open map because you’re in it for the _process_. But for the rest of us, perhaps acknowledging the role of structure can help free us up to focus on whichever part of play we’re actually interested in.

Deus Ex-ing it up

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Played some Deus Ex: Human Revolution this weekend. Startlingly fun game, especially noting that I’ve never played the original or the (badly panned) sequel. Very interestign game to look at in terms of its relationship with tabletop for two reasons, one abstract one one nerdishly specific.

Thr abstract one is something that’s held up as one of the great strengths of the game: That almost any problem has multiple possible solutions. Faced with a goal (get in and get something) you can sneak, climb, hack, fight or god knows what else to get the job done. HOW you do it matters less than the fact that you actually do it.

It’s a great idea, though it’s much stronger for solo roleplay than traditional group play. One thing it depends on is thae idea that there are areas where the character is stronger than others, and by making the right choices he can play to his strengths. With a group, the expetation is that the weaknesses of one character will be compensated by the strengths of another, so you don’t want to offer challenges that play to only one character’s strengths. As such, the explicit range of approach variety DE:HR provides may be excessive for tabletop, but if you can look at your group as a whole, you might be able to find a way to assess their aggregate strength and weaknesss and build options that way.

The second point is one which warms my little nerd heart. The hacking system looks like it could easily have come out of any of the past century’s cyberpunk games, with their pseudo-network maps and their disposable viruses. These sytems, I shoudl add, pretty much universally sucked.

However, the model translates to the video game medium much better than it has any right to. Gaming is full of old systems which were cumbersome on paper but which can come to life with automation, and this is probably the most visible example I can think of. I’ve made my character a super hacker almost entirely for the sheer joy of playing the hacking minigame.

Anyway, good game. Definitely scratching some of my Bioware itches, while still bringing something new to the table. I’m enjoying it enough to see about maybe playing the first sometime.

Reading Fudge Dice

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It should come as no surprise that I’m quite fond of fudge dice, and I’ve put a lot of thought into the different things that can be done with their three outcomes. I’ve shifted things on several different axes, and I’ve failed as often as I’ve succeeded, but it’s a fun area to play in.

One idea that I’m quite fond of is less about altering the dice or how they’re rolled and more about what that mean. Specifically, you can get a lot of mileage out of separating the dice from the outcome.

To illustrate what that means, consider that on a normal df roll, you are judging an outcome, generally based on die roll plus whatever skill is in use as well as any other bonuses or penalties. The final outcome is expressed as a number or an adjective (or both) and that’s what’s used as a basis for narration.

Now, as gamers we have always implicitly understood that there can be some separation between the dice and the outcome, specifically in situations where the dice roll badly but the roll is a success or vice versa. What I propose here is to make the distinction a little bit more explicit, and make the roll itself as important to the narration as the outcome.

To do this requires a little thought about what the die roll means. Most often, we think of it as representing the role of luck in an activity, but that doesn’t hold up under any real scrutiny. Luck maybe part of our lives, but it’s usually something we consider as part of what happens to us, less about what we do. If we miss a target, it’s because we need to get _better_, not luckier.

So instead, consider the dice to represent all the other factors that the system hasn’t already accounted for. Distractions, coincidences, a good nights sleep and anything else. Think of all the reasons you succeed and fail and – unless you’re a terrible egoist – those external factors will become obvious.

With that in mind, the dice represent the “swing” of the world at large. For narrow results (-1 to +1) nothing of any real note happened. You tried, you succeeded or failed, that’s just the way things go.

For slightly broader results (-2 or +2) something went right or wrong. Someone gave you directions. The wind was at your back. The wind _wasn’t_ at your back. The lighting was off. THere’s something you can point to and say “That helped” or “Man, that got in my way”.

Rarer results (-3 or +3) represent rare strokes of luck or bad luck. Coincidence falls for or against you. The librarian just happens to be and expert on the topic in question. The supplies you need were destroyed in a freak fire. Your opponent slipped on a patch of oil. You take a nail in one of your tires.

By this thinking, critical results (-4 or +4) are just a logical extension of this model. They’re the truly preposterous strokes of luck, good and bad, that turn a situation around.

With this in mind, you can combine this information with the outcome (which won’t be changed) to be able to describe action in terms of “success because” or even “success in spite of” to get a better picture of how a given even transpired.

This combines interestingly with aspects. If you do a dice-flipping bonus (that is, invoke to turn a die to a +) then you need to describe how the aspect is changing the situation, maybe turning a drawback into an advantage. That’s very colorful, but also makes using aspects more work.

If you just go with the +2 bonus, this has the nice effect of making your efforts look more heroic. When you spend to get a +7, it’s awesome, but bland. It’s cooler to my mind if you also take into account that you had to do it while the floor is shaking (rolled a -2).

Either way, if you use an invocation for a reroll, this makes the story of the reroll much clearer, since it has now translated into a problem which has been overcome or worked around.

This also has some interesting interaction with bonuses, penalties and uncertainty. In this model, you can legitimately have someone roll fewer dice to simulate “lab conditions”. In fact, if you think of that as pre-setting those dice to zero, then you could actually just fold penalties right into the dice.

Now, be aware this only really works if you take a light hand with bonuses and penalties, but doing so makes them much more concrete and makes them feel more toothy while actually making them a bit more normalizing. Consider – if you’re rolling with a -2 penalty, you could generate anything from -6 to +2. If two of the dice a pre-flipped to -2, then the roll will be somewhere from -4 to 0. Now, some people might miss the more extreme outcomes, but I’d wager that the latter case will _feel_ more like the penalty mattered – both narratively as well as mechanically.

(as a bonus, you might allow aspect rerolls to “clear” a penalty, if you can come up with a justification for it, since a reroll represents a change of situation)

PAX – More Bitter Envy

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I am not at PAX, nor am I at PAX dev. This kind of sucks. I mean, it sucks a little bit less than not being at Gencon because it’s at least _possible_ for me to go the Gencon without punching a huge hole in my life, but all the same? Sucks.

In fairness, much of this grumpiness stems from how awesome PAX East was. Yeah, I know PAX is primarily a video game con, but as I gushed at length, it was one of the best all-purpose gaming (and really general celebration of the tribe) cons I’ve been to, and in my mind, PAX offers more of the same.

Anyway, if you’re going to be going, you should know two things:

1) I hate you.

2) Take some time to swing by Games on Demand. You can find out more here and here, but what you really need to know is that it’s free and it’s the place to get any amount of awesome gaming in. You know those rooms where they set up all the consoles so you can just walk in and play cool stuff, old and new? Imagine it like that, only with Pen & Paper RPGs. As with other walk-in rooms, it’s just as suitable for someone curious to check out one thing as it is for the person who wants to spend the whole con soaking in this particular brand of nerdery.

Now, here’s where I admit an ulterior motive. The PAX guys run a tight ship, and they only include programs if people use them. If Games on Demand does not see much traffic, then the PAX planners will probably decide that next time around they’ll use the space for something else. I can’t blame them for that, but I wouldn’t want to see it happen for several reasons. Yes, G.O.D. is awesome, but that’s almost secondary.

See, one of the things I liked about the PAX vibe was that there were lots of people there who were willing to consider RPGs a normal part of things without viewing themselves as RPG gamers. That’s incredibly healthy and reassuring, and it’s something I’d like to see get the opportunity to grow, and things like this are how it happens.

And, more selfishly, if it’s a success, there’s more of a chance we’ll see it at PAX East.

Anyway, if you’re not at PAX this week, feel free to join me in my bitterness. If you are, please feel free to ignore my death rays of envy and have as awesome a time as possible.

What Else Compels are Good For

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One of the curious issues I have with Aspects these days is that I almost never compel them. Not because I don’t bring their negative implications into play, but because my players are sufficiently enthusiastic about playing up the negative side themselves that I don’t even need to bother.

It’s a good problem to have. I can easily swap to a pile of fate points in the middle of the table for them to draw out of as appropriate, but I tend not to do so because those few occasions where I offer a classic compel tend to be fun and memorable, and I don’t want to lose that.

The problem, of course, is that this experience is not universal. A lot of people have encountered a lot of different problems with compels, and these problems are wide ranging enough that there’s no one solution. They are either too much power for the GM or too much power for the players, depending who you ask. They’re too restrictive, or too open ended, also depending who you ask. This has always made them a bit rough to write about because if you speak to one set of concerns, you inflame another. This is why I’ve steadily fallen into the pattern of talking about what I consider good or rewarding practices rather than seeking to solve specific problems.

So with that in mind, there are two things that go on around compels that I’m not sure get enough airtime, and which offer a slightly different perspective on things.

The first is something my players make clear to me on a regular basis, and that is that a compel is really the GM offering you an opportunity that isn’t immediately visible to you. That is to say, the GM has a slightly different perspective on what’s going on – maybe she has more information a broader perspective or whatever – and that means she will occasionally look at a situation or choice and go “Wow, that speaks _directly_ to this thing my player finds cool” and calls the player’s attention to it with a compel. The assumption is that if the player had seen this opportunity, they would have already taken it (and that assumes a certain type of player-GM relationship). If the player has seen it and declines, then all is well and good, but the GM’s done her job.

Obviously, this is harder to do if you’re doing all hard compels all the time, and I tend to treat these compels as soft (that is to say, can be declined freely).

The second is that a compel can zoom the camera in on a moment, ideally a moment of choice. If the player is faced with a choice, the compel flags it as something significant, that it’s a choice that means something for the character. Not every choice is necessarily this important, and some might merit hard compels and others soft, but the bottom line is that the compel is a spotlight, and it’s worth using to shine on things worth seeing.

A Noun is a Person Place or Thing

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I love the Discworld novels. They’re fantastic, and I enjoy the heck out of them, but like many fans I am partial to a particular subset of them. In my case, I’m a huge fan of the City Watch books. Nothing else comes close (except perhaps the Moist von Lipwig stuff, which I’m willing to acknowledge as a fair second). Now, there are many reasons I love these books, but there’s a particular element about them which I think is very relevant to setting design.

See, I should also note that I’m a big fan of cities. I have purchased city books for games I will never play because I’m always fascinated to see how people present cities and urban adventures. I am, by and large, disappointed. The bulk of city products tend to be a handful of really interesting pages about the shape of the city, then piles and piles of pages that turn the city into some sort of above-ground dungeon.

Now, thankfully, this is less common with more modern products (and as noted, the recently released Neverwinter Campaign setting is not half bad) but what’s gotten me thinking is the difference in how Ankh-Morpork (the city of the City Watch novels) is presented. Certainly, there are a handful of places (The Unseen University, the Watch House, the Opera House, the river Ankh, Guildhouses and so on) but the city is primarily defined by trends and people.

Now, people are kind of an obvious part of things, albeit one that is often undeserved in setting design. It is possible to design a setting that is almost entirely characters, but it’s trickier to do it in a way that preserves player agency. That is, there is a strong tendency for a character-based setting to become about the NPCs rather than the PCs. This is where the Forgotten Realm soften go wrong, and it’s where Amber often (but not always) went right by firmly tying the characters to the setting NPCs.

Trends are a little more interesting, because they apply to people and to places equally. They’re the answer to broad, semi-specific question – where would a high class scribe work? How do people on the street respond to a mugging? Things like that. I can answer those questiosn about Ankh-Morpork because they’re the parts that get detailed in the books much more than the specific drilldown of street addresses.

The thing is, most good city books have this information, but they tend to present it in a very different manner. They provide raw data from which a savvy reader might be able to extract trends, but only rarely do they make that leap of abstraction themselves.

Now, I’m a firm believer that one of the most useful things a published setting can do is let the GM answer when a player wonders “What’s here?” It’s a good, often relevant question, and I’ve seen a few products that have sustained the level of detail to actually be able to answer it explicitly (The Birthright campaign setting for one, the old Thieves of Tharbad city book for MERP for another) without being ENTIRELY overwhelming, but it’s a lot of work.

The alternative would seem to be to arm the GM with the understanding to know the answer, or to create an answer that is consistent with the greater whole. But how do you convey that without a series of bestselling novels? The answer, I think, demands experimentation.

(Oh, and we will be getting back to prep in 4e, but let’s just say that one is a many-headed beast)

4 on 1

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I had the unexpected pleasure of playing in a first edition AD&D game this past weekend. It was a long-standing game that my brother in law participates in, and they had an opening. This was pretty much the classic AD&D game in just about every way imaginable. They’d looked at other editions, played a little third, but stuck to first as adjusted by elements from dragon magazine and a few house rules. They were sufficiently committed to this that they had their own modified PHB, which was basically a scanned PHB with all the classes, spells and such inserted into it, and several players had printed and bound copies of it (I used the PDF – iPad FTW).

The DM did a clever thing where I was effectively a ghost helping the party out because my body was deeper in the dungeon, allowing me to establish rapport with the party before actually joining, so it’s a bit less of a “You meet a guy on the road” sort of situation. Unfortunately, the pacing of things was such that despite the very long session. We did not actually reach my body, so while I had fun, it was mostly observing and making wry comments (which I enjoy). But it also really created an opportunity to think about the game and contrast it with my 4e experience in a way that has only really been hypothetical for me until now. It’s been long enough since I really played 1e that I was doing a lot off old memories.

It was pretty interesting, because it really highlighted to me a lot of the things 4e (and, to be fair, 3e) did right, but it also cast into relief the bits that were missing that were very clearly part of the groups enjoyment of the game.

First and foremost, man, 4e makes the actual moving around and fighting better. There are several reasons for this, but the one I really want to call out is clarity. There were a lot of situations where figuring out what someone could do was sufficiently involved as to really bog things down, especially with regard to movement. This was particularly highlighted by one of the more RP-oriented players very clearly getting frustrated by her inability to engage in the fight the way the more twinked out guys were. (The fact that this was addressed with Manly Explanation likely did not help).

4e also really keeps fights more dynamic. Things took a kind of dull turn when the Big Climactic enemy cleric got silenced and cornered. It was a reminder about some of the insta-win elements of magic, but more, it made me think what a shame that there was no real push/pull/slide to keep things moving.

Where things were more telling was on the borders of the fight. Planning for an encounter and using spells and trickery to overcome a fight were really big focuses. The group made heavy use of Haste & Invisibility to make the fights into these terrifying blitzkriegs that were twice as much time spent prepping as fighting. Not necessarily as satisfying as fights, but definitely scratching a problem-solving itch. The ability to make a fight unfair through clever planning is very rewarding and not particularly supported in 4e.

There was also a lot of use of out-of combat magic, things like animating enemy corpses or using the item spell. This was most interesting to me because it was clear that some of it (healing, identifying stuff) was pretty much just exercises in bookkeeping, but other stuff (like item or enemy zombies) was cool stuff that the players felt it was cool that they were able to do.

There was really no more or less roleplaying than there would have been in 4e. The scenario only gave itself to that so much (Old temple, overrrun by Yuan-Ti) but the system really didn’t speak to that. Outside of the fight, the amount of RP really came down to the player’s interest in it.

There were also small things. The use of the vs. Armor Type table made weapons selection a little more interesting, though I’m not sure it’s addition is worth the tradeoff of complexity. Chargen was also interesting: creating a level 10 1e character using only paper? SO MUCH EASIER than 4e.

Now, this comparison has all been useful to me so far, and offers interesting insights into the two games for me. I think it partly underscored why encounter powers are a cognitive problem for some players while daily’s aren’t. 1e is FULL of once per day kind of abilities, so that’s part of the logic, but narrative time is a different method of thinking. On some level, I think that if encounter powers were framed slightly differently – perhaps in terms of needing a few minutes rest to recharge – they’d probably have more traction.

But what was also telling was that there were definitely two big elements that clearly were part of the fun for at least some of the players, but which are not necessarily things I’m inclined to support.

The first was related to system mastery. There was a very clear range of powers within the group, even though everyone was at similar levels. Some characters just had better powers, better gear and (not coincidentally) a better understanding of the rules that allowed them to exploit that (and yes, this included a guy with psionics). Worse, there was clearly some self-perpetuation of this. It was pretty clear in the dynamic that the most badass guys had first dibs on loot because making them more badass was “good for the party”. I don’t blame the guys for this – there’s a solid tactical argument for it – but that’s not the kind of arrangement I’d want to encourage.

A corollary of this was that it had clear balance issues. The big fight included enemies who were clearly tuned to be a threat to the party as a whole, which meant that they were keyed off the most powerful members of the party. Upshot being those powerful guys got their awesome on, and everyone else got to kind of play a supporting role. I admit I was watching that fight and I am not sure that my character would have been able to contribute at all, had I been corporeal.

For players who thrive on this element of the game, 4e must feel like castration – system mastery (and magical gear) can only pull you so far ahead of your peers. I can completely understand why that would be frustrating, but that’s definitely not my bag. I’ll play along – I’ll have to to be effective – but it’s a necessity more than something I’d enjoy. It also reminds me of the statement made early in 4e that it’s less about the choices you make in chargen than it is about the choices you make in a fight. Looking at that now, that statement really holds up.

Anyway, the second element is a little more mixed, that of preparation. Now, I actually like the idea of prepping for a fight, arranging to bushwhack guys and generally benefitting from my own cleverness, but I think there’s a balancing act. While there were a few bits of trickery and strategy, there was a lot more brute force application of “I Win” spells like Haste & Silence (to say nothing of the illusions) which feels a little bit less rewarding, but at the same time is utterly necessary because the DM needs to prepare for the possibility. There’s sort of a vicious circle/arms race element to it. I actually remember this being an issue in 3e as well, but it’s really noticeable how profound it is in this case.

But at the same time, this is perhaps the most interesting question to take back to 4e. Is there a way to support prep that’s rewarding but not so overwhelming?

I think the answer is a clear yes, esp since I can think of two different ways to do it. But that’s probably fodder for another day.

4e Skills

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Mike Mearls wrote one of those great articles that so typical of him that reveals that as much awesome 4e stuff we see, it’s just the tip of the iceberg of his understanding of the game. It’s about skills, and you should go read it if you haven’t.

Since I show my love through graffiti, I’m going to suggest that the idea is really, really good, but I’d tweak it a little bit in play. For those too lazy to go read, Mike proposes that skill ranks be broken down into a descriptive ladder:

Novice

Journeyman

Expert

Master

Grandmaster

Impossible

And that the DM should use those guidelines for setting difficulties, such as “It would take an expert climber to go over this wall”. If you have the skill at a level higher than expert, you don’t bother to roll, you just succeed. If you have it lower than Expert, its out of your league. If you have it at expert, then you roll against a DC of 15 to see if you succeed.

This is pretty slick, and because it explicitly removes the “+ half your level” element of the skill rolls, it makes skill difficulties feel more coherent (rather than requiring EPIC WALLS to challenge climbing at level 25). Mike also slips in a nice trick whereby player cleverness and planning can change the difficulty category of the check rather than give themselves a modifier to the roll. Very slick.

Admittedly, there are no guidelines for how to determine character expertise, but that’s a two line rule – Everyone’s a novice at everything, everything you’re trained in you’re a journeyman at. Each feat bumps it one step. If you want to support epic chars being awesome at everything, then characters get an-across-the-board bump at 10 and 20. There, done.

Anyway, I want to call it out as a nice tweak on things, but also as one destined to disappear. If Mike could convince the Character builder to support ideas like this, I would be SHOCKED (and utterly delighted). But I’m intrigued because – unlike most web mods – it’s not impossible that it could be supported. I’m going to keep one eye on this, just to see.

Zooming In On Neverwinter

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There is a writing technique that is commonly used when writing about a physical thing. The author starts from a very high level view, sketching a brief picture of the broader context, then steadily zooms in on the scene until focus is at the level of whatever’s being written about. Lots of novels start out this way, zoomed out to the empire or nation then slowly narrowing in on our farmboy protagonist or the like.

It’s also the default mode for many setting books, and I gotta say, the Neverwinter Campaign Setting book has really left me wondering about it’s use as a technique in setting books, because it very nearly poisoned my impression of what is otherwise a pretty solid book.

The rub is that NWCS is a Forgotten Realms book. It’s presented as more of a free-standing thing, but there’s some smoke and mirrors going on there. The first ten pages of the book are basically a summary of everything I dislike about the Forgotten Realms, a mix of contextless proper nouns and uninteresting background elements given special focus because there was clearly a novel or other tie-in related to them. It’s pretty bad, and I was willing to press on because so many people had so many good things to say about this book.

I’m glad I did. Not to say what follows is flawless, but people are right to be excited because NWCS has done some things very well indeed. Every time it steps away from the Forgotten Realms at large and focuses on play in its own context it becomes a stronger product.

Now, it’s worth noting that this is basically a city book. There’s more stuff in it, but it’s really all the material for a heroic tier, city based campaign. Cities are one of my favorite things in games, and I had been wary. The previous city from WOTC – Gloomwrought in the Shadowfell boxed set – had erred too far on the side of gamey-ness for my tastes. It was interesting, but the city felt like an excuse for colorful encounters.

That may seem like enough, but I admit I kind of feel that this is what dungeon’s are for. Cities (or, more broadly, campaign elements that players keep coming back to) need more of an internal dynamic, a sense of how they self-sustain and behave when the adventurers aren’t looking. Gloomwrought lacked that, but Neverwinter seems to have hit the right balance for 4e. It still streamline’s some details, but there’s a sense that the mundane considerations of a city (like where food comes from and how trade happens) are actually in play.

More tellingly, I think I could happily run Neverwinter without ever using any of the adventure material in it. I wouldn’t, because they’re good (sometimes great) because of the amount of time and effort put into laying out the factions in play and making them playable. If anything, I could have happily taken more material like that, but I think there’s enough.

(Also, the factions benefit from the explicit Heroic level range of the setting. It means you don’t have to come up with strange logic to explain how one faction has a bunch of level 5 guys and another has a level 25 patron, but both of them are players in the context of the city.)

Still, all this pales next to 4e finally doing something that has been lacking from many games – tying chargen directly into the adventure. This is accomplished by introducing character themes which are a) mechanically more potent than themes we’ve seen before and b) explicitly hooked into the campaign book.

For example, if you take the Noble theme, the adventure in the book dealing with intrigue among the nobility has a special sidebar about tying this adventure into that character. Basically, this is the closest thing a published adventure can do to writing things for specific players, and it’s an idea that’s been a long time coming. The rest of the book could be crap, and I’d still celebrate it for this addition to the technology.

It makes me a little sad as a writer, though. This is one of those ideas that you could really go crazy with in a third party product, but since third party themes won’t have character builder support, there’s no real point to it. Still, that sadness is the refrain of 4e – not much to be done about it.

Anyway, the book is worth a read, and it’s good enough that it could probably be used for something other than 4e. Just be prepared to just sort of blah blah blah over some stuff if you’re not already steeped in Forgotten Realms lore.

Zooming in on Neverwinter

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There is a writing technique that is commonly used when writing about a physical thing. The author starts from a very high level view, sketching a brief picture of the broader context, then steadily zooms in on the scene until focus is at the level of whatever’s being written about. Lots of novels start out this way, zoomed out to the empire or nation then slowly narrowing in on our farmboy protagonist or the like.

It’s also the default mode for many setting books, and I gotta say, the Neverwinter Campaign Setting book has really left me wondering about it’s use as a technique in setting books, because it very nearly poisoned my impression of what is otherwise a pretty solid book.

The rub is that NWCS is a Forgotten Realms book. It’s presented as more of a free-standing thing, but there’s some smoke and mirrors going on there. The first ten pages of the book are basically a summary of everything I dislike about the Forgotten Realms, a mix of contextless proper nouns and uninteresting background elements given special focus because there was clearly a novel or other tie-in related to them. It’s pretty bad, and I was willing to press on because so many people had so many good things to say about this book.

I’m glad I did. Not to say what follows is flawless, but people are right to be excited because NWCS has done some things very well indeed. Every time it steps away from the Forgotten Realms at large and focuses on play in its own context it becomes a stronger product.

Now, it’s worth noting that this is basically a city book. There’s more stuff in it, but it’s really all the material for a heroic tier, city based campaign. Cities are one of my favorite things in games, and I had been wary. The previous city from WOTC – Gloomwrought in the Shadowfell boxed set – had erred too far on the side of gamey-ness for my tastes. It was interesting, but the city felt like an excuse for colorful encounters.

That may seem like enough, but I admit I kind of feel that this is what dungeon’s are for. Cities (or, more broadly, campaign elements that players keep coming back to) need more of an internal dynamic, a sense of how they self-sustain and behave when the adventurers aren’t looking. Gloomwrought lacked that, but Neverwinter seems to have hit the right balance for 4e. It still streamline’s some details, but there’s a sense that the mundane considerations of a city (like where food comes from and how trade happens) are actually in play.

More tellingly, I think I could happily run Neverwinter without ever using any of the adventure material in it. I wouldn’t, because they’re good (sometimes great) because of the amount of time and effort put into laying out the factions in play and making them playable. If anything, I could have happily taken more material like that, but I think there’s enough.

(Also, the factions benefit from the explicit Heroic level range of the setting. It means you don’t have to come up with strange logic to explain how one faction has a bunch of level 5 guys and another has a level 25 patron, but both of them are players in the context of the city.)

Still, all this pales next to 4e finally doing something that has been lacking from many games – tying chargen directly into the adventure. This is accomplished by introducing character themes which are a) mechanically more potent than themes we’ve seen before and b) explicitly hooked into the campaign book.

For example, if you take the Noble theme, the adventure in the book dealign with intrigue among the nobility has a special sidebar about tying this adventure into that character. Basically, this is the closest thing a published adventure can do to writing things for specific players, and it’s an idea that’s been a long time coming. The rest of the book could be crap, and I’d still celebrate it for this addition to the technology.

It makes me a little sad as a writer, though. This is one of those ideas that you could really go crazy with in a third party product, but since third party themes won’t have character builder support, there’s no real point to it. Still, that sadness is the refrain of 4e – not much to be done about it.

Anyway, the book is worth a read, and it’s good enough that it could probably be used for something other than 4e. Just be prepared to just sort of blah blah blah over some stuff if you’re not already steeped in Forgotten Realms lore.