Un-Downgrading Backgrounds

So, of course, Backgrounds were completely garbaged in the change to 5.5e. In terms of interestingness, in terms of roleplaying hooks, in terms of everything good that matters: 2024 (5.5e) Backgrounds are strictly a bad and terrible downgrade from 2014 (5.0e) Backgrounds. Part of the downgrade is part and parcel of 5.5e having disposed of the Trait/Ideal/Bond/Flaw system entirely; part of it is that each Background came with a roleplay-based ability, not just More Numbers -- example, the Noble background's Position of Privilege feature:

[...P]eople are inclined to think the best of you. You are welcome in high society, and people assume you have the right to be wherever you are. The common folk make every effort to accommodate you and avoid your displeasure, and other people of high birth treat you as a member of the same social sphere. You can secure an audience with a local noble if you need to.

That's way cooler than 5.5e's Noble background, which gives you the Skilled feat. (Woo. Three skill or tool proficiencies. I cannot restrain my exuberance.)

How do we fix it?

First instinct is to throw away the 5.5e Background system almost entirely, just say use 5.0e Backgrounds instead (maybe mix in the ability-scores-from-Background from 5.5e). But Origin feats are actually an okay thing to have from a homebrewing perspective (most -- all? -- of the feats I've homebrewed are Origin feats).

My second instinct, which I would and will probably go with, is to make the special feature of each 5.0e Background available as an Origin Feat, which may be taken as the Origin Feat associated with that Background in place of the listed feat.

In fact, more precisely: The Feature of any 5.0e Background is now an Origin Feat of the same name as the Feature; you may choose that Origin Feat in lieu of the feat listed for the 5.5e version of that Background, or for any other Background that it makes sense with.

Something like:

Acolyte: Shelter of the Faithful (Acolyte) or Magic Initiate (cleric)
Artisan: Guild Membership (Guild Artisan) or Crafter
Charlatan: False Identity (Charlatan) or Skilled
Criminal: Criminal Contact (Criminal) or Bad Reputation (Sailor) or Alert
Entertainer: By Popular Demand (Entertainer) or Musician
Farmer: Tough
Guard: Watcher's Eye (Guard) or Alert
Guide: Wanderer (Outlander) or Rustic Hospitality (Folk Hero) or Magic Initiate (druid)
Hermit: Discovery (Hermit, PHB) or Wanderer (Outlander, PHB) or Healer
Merchant: Guild Membership (Guild Artisan) or Lucky
Noble: Position of Privilege (Noble) or Retainers (Noble) or Skilled
Sage: Researcher (Sage) or Discovery (Hermit) or Magic Initiate (wizard)
Sailor: Ship's Passage (Sailor) or Bad Reputation (Sailor) or Tavern Brawler
Scribe: Skilled
Soldier: Military Rank (Soldier) or Savage Attacker
Wayfarer: City Secrets (Urchin) or Lucky

The 5.5e Origin Feats are of course somewhat more powerful, on the whole, than the 5.0 Background Features, which may present a bit of a hurdle in terms of anybody actually making this decision. Maybe count two upgraded-Background-Features as one regular Origin Feat (which are in turn maybe about half the strength of a General Feat)? Or maybe give upgraded-Background-Features a +1 to an Ability Score like a General Feat has? Neither of these possibilities is without flaw.

(And also we'll gently suggest that players pick up Traits/Ideals/Bonds/Flaws from 5.0e, as a matter of put it somewhere near your written background, though that's more training wheels for roleplaying than anything experienced players desperately need.)

Representation!

So Paizo famously has a policy that you can safely assume any given Pathfinder NPC is bisexual, unless the text specifically says otherwise. Which is good for a couple of reasons. (I have used this for mechanical advantage -- unnatural lust has a clause that the target gets a +4 bonus if they wouldn't normally be attracted to the subtarget, and I successfully argued that it should work same-gender-wise because the target should by Paizo decree not get this bonus just because the target and the subtarget were same gender. That spell, of course, has its own issues otherwise, and probably wouldn't be allowed at my table today, on the basis of my "no depictions of sexual assault" rule nowadays.)

They're mostly about representation, but my policy has something of a different aim. The policy in my setting is the very similar "90% of NPCs are bi". This isn't about representation, it's about making sure all players have maximum romance options if they want it. Which, representation is good, but the other thing is more important to me.

I have for a very long time publicly been of the opinion that I don't care about representation for social justice reasons, I like it because I'm bored to tears of straight white male stories. This is similar: I don't care about representation for social justice reasons, I just want PCs to be able to do whatever they want and not be forestalled by trivial niceties like NPCs aren't attracted to their gender.

If representation were actively at war with something I cared about, would I still do representation, or would I do the thing I care about? Good question! Luckily nothing good is at war with representation.

I'm exploring this policy now, because since instituting it, I have grown more aware of some dynamics of gender and sexual attraction. Specifically, there are a fair number of genders left out of attraction to by bisexuality, and sexuality isn't everything there is about attraction (and sexuality ought be much less important in a TTRPG than romance). So, let us revise! "90% of NPCs are pansexual, panromantic, or both." I could go with just 90% of NPCs are panromantic and leave sex out entirely, which would be fair, but sexuality does come up occasionally.

Ohhey, but wait: representation is at war with something I care about! Aroace people exist. Ok. They're in that 10% with the straights and the gays and whatnot, and otherwise I don't care.

The Four Mary Sue Races

The Drow. Drizzt Do'Urden. Synonymous with Mary Sue.

But "Mary Sue" isn't actually quite exactly what I'm talking about, despite the title of this post.

I want to throw in the word "edgelord", but that only has aspects of what I'm talking about.

But between "Mary Sue" and "edgelord", we're about 78% of the way there, so maybe you'll be able to figure out what I mean.

The four races are Drow, Tiefling, Dragonborn, and Warforged.

I suppose "edgelord" applies mostly to Drow and Tiefling. But all four are... if you want to play a character for whom their race is the primary focus, you play one of these? (Or maybe a Half-Orc or a Dwarf, I guess.)

Newbies and noobs like to play these races and tell inferior stories with them -- but that's not right, that comes off as much more judgemental than I'm actually inclined to be here.

(I'm talking as someone who's currently playing one Drow and one Warforged, and not long ago played a Tiefling, so I'm not actually inclined to be very judgey at all here. Although the Tiefling-ness of Dr. Blelyj was secondary, Keyla the Paladin of Bahamut keeps being annoyed and infuriated when people keep bringing up her Drow-ness, and Tanner's Knife is attempting to craft himself into a more perfect organic meatbag through Fleshwarper levels, so the race isn't the primary focus of any of these characters like it is for the kind of characters I'm almost-but-not-quite-criticizing.)

"Fan favorite" may be a word to throw around in this context, too.

The point I'm gradually angling towards is this: in 3.5, none of these races were Player's Handbook races. Two (Tiefling and Drow) were Monster Manual, two were other splatbooks. Two came saddled with level adjustment (unless you consult yet more splatbooks for Lesser Planetouched and I think there was some sort of Lesser Drow variant floating around at one point).

In Pathfinder, Dragonborn and Warforged were not available for non-SRD reasons, and Tiefling and Drow were eventually made slightly more playable by virtue of being a bit more race points rather than having LA.

In 4e, Dragonborn and Tiefling were Player's Handbook, Warforged and Drow were Monster Manual. (These choices bumped previous PHb classics like Gnomes to later PHbs -- somebody in development said "which is more central to D&D, Dragonborn/Tiefling or Gnome?" and was answered "Dragonborn/Tiefling".)

In 5e, three were Player's Handbook and the last (Warforged) was recently Unearthed Arcana'd. At long last you can play a Drizzt clone right out of the box without pulling from any books other than PHb.

The point I'm making is this: Over the course of 3.5 to 5e, the design philosophy has shifted. Put deprecatingly, we're shifting towards being more fanservicey; put less deprecatingly, we're shifting towards letting players play what they want without restriction.

(Or it could just be that nobody publishing 3.5 yet realized just how popular these four races would eventually become. Although Drizzt first appeared in 1988 -- early 2e -- so there should have been some clue there.)

I'm not really making any deep point here, just pointing in the general direction of a vague observation.

Thoughts on 3.5e vs 4e

Originally posted on my other blog on this day (August 14th) in 2010, early in the 3.5e v 4e edition war.

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A few weeks ago, I had an opportunity to play in a 4th edition game of Dungeons & Dragons for the first time. There are some things that are clear improvements, some things that are not improvements but I can see why they did it, and some things that are just bafflingly ill-conceived. What follows is not a complete list of my thoughts on 4e, that would take much too long, but it is a brief catalogue of the sorts of thoughts I'm having.

An Example Of A Thing That Is A Clear Improvement
It may just be that my fighter was built for battlefield control, and everything I picked has some effect to move people around, but combat in 4e is much more dynamic and interesting than in 3.5e, where most fights were just slugging matches, standing in one place and beating on each other until one participant goes down. There are creatures designed specifically to move about and keep the battlefield dynamic, but only if the DM picks those creatures and only if he chooses to use them as designed (rarer than you might think). There are similar creatures in 4e (we fought some frogs that kept grabbing us with their tongues from halfway across the battlefield and pulling us to them), and there are still lots of creatures that do no such thing, but now the power of effective battlefield movement abilities is in the hands of the players, too. This does a lot to make fights refreshingly dynamic.

An Example Of A Thing That Is Not An Improvement But I Can See Why They Did It
In 3.5e, defenses worked like this: You had three kinds of Armor Class (AC), and three kinds of save.
Your regular AC was basically 10 + your armor + your dexterity, and to hit you with a regular physical attack, a foe had to roll a 20-sided die (1d20) + base attack bonus from class + bonus from his weapon + his strength or dexterity. If his attack roll beat your AC, he hit you and proceeded to roll for damage.
Your Touch AC was 10 + your dexterity, for things like spells which bypass armor entirely (and spellcasters correspondingly didn't get weapon boni, so they would roll only 1d20 + base attack bonus from class + strength or dexterity).
The third kind of AC was Flat-Footed, which happens if you're unprepared to defend yourself or duck out of the way, and is only 10 + your armor
The three kinds of save were Will (d20 + your base save from class + wisdom), Reflex (d20 + base save + dexterity), and Fortitude (d20 + base save + constitution). There are some spells and effects you don't even have to hit with, such as gaseous clouds or mind-control, so they called for a save instead. In a save, the attacker's stats determine the difficulty, and the defender rolls. If the defender succeeds, he has resisted or dodged and can avoid some or all of the effect. (This is the source of the old "Jesus Saves. Everyone Else Takes Full Damage." shirt that's been floating around for awhile.)

In 4e, they've changed all that. Now, they've eliminated saves, and you simply have four kinds of defenses: AC (10 + armor), Will (10 + wisdom), Reflex (10 + dexterity), and Fortitude (10 + constitution). An attacker has to roll d20 + some stat + any other boni, and if he succeeds, you take the effect or the damage, and if he misses, you don't. Much simpler. Also makes much less sense.

Consider, as an example, a creature with venomous fangs. In a world that makes sense, this creature needs to hit you, puncture your armor, and then overcome your body's natural resistance. In 3.5e, this was perfectly represented: it had to successfully bite you (overcome your AC, which includes your dexterity and your armor), and then you got a fortitude save. In 4e, it only has to beat your fortitude (in which case it has ignored your armor and your dexterity), your reflexes (and ignore your armor and your constitution), or your AC (and ignore your dexterity and your constitution).

Effectively, they've gone from a very strong simulationist design ethic to a strong gamist one, which is movement in exactly the wrong direction. The rules are disassociated from in-character reasoning. This may be what people mean when they say 4e is more like an MMORPG than like real D&D. I can see why they did this particular thing, insofar as they've streamlined the process, reduced the number of rolls you need to make and numbers you need to keep track of, and generally made it more newbie-friendly. That doesn't make it a good change.

An Example Of A Thing That Is Bafflingly Ill-Conceived
One criticism I come across whenever people who are used to playing 4e switch to 3.5e is that there are a number of effects where, if you get hit and you fail your save, you're just out of the fight for several rounds with no recourse. This is definitely an obstacle to fun, but 4e's attempt at a "solution" is even worse.

In 3.5e, if you get hit by, say, a ghoul, it does damage, and you also make a fortitude save to resist its paralyzing touch. If you fail the save, you are paralyzed (unable to do anything) for 2-5 rounds. The ghoul immediately rolls 1d4 + 1, and then you're just out of the action for that many rounds. This is obviously no fun if it happens to you, you're just sitting out of the action and might as well go make yourself a sammich for several rounds. Undesirable.

In 4e, if you get hit by an attack that paralyzes (if it beats whichever kind of defenses the game deems most relevant), you're similarly paralyzed. Except instead of being for a number of turns determined when you get paralyzed, you roll 1d20 on your turn each round (this is what 4e calls a "save"). If you roll better than a 10, the paralysis ends and you can act on your next turn. If you roll lower than a 10, you try again on your next turn. So the paralysis winds up lasting anywhere from 1 round to until after the combat has ended, depending solely on your d20 and not having anything to do with your character's qualities. The most hale fighter is just as likely to successfully cease to be paralyzed as the sickliest bard. Okay, sure, how long an effect lasts has nothing to do with your character's stats in 3.5e, either, but 4e's "solution" is still a poor excuse for "keeping the player involved".

Several rounds of "Roll to save with no effect on the outcome other than providing the die. Okay, you failed. Next person's turn." is no better than "Okay, go eat a sammich for a number of rounds with no effect on how many", and I don't know why people seem to think it is. It may even be worse, because you don't even get a sammich. It's definitely more frustrating, because at least in 3.5e you know there's a hard cap on how long you're out of the fight, and you know in advance exactly how long you'll be out.

EDIT
I remembered a better example of a bafflingly ill-conceived change. To wit: in all previous editions of D&D that I'm aware of, there was a two-axis morality/alignment system: one axis was good/neutral/evil, the other was lawful/neutral/chaotic. This allows for nine possibilities (lawful good, good, chaotic good, lawful, neutral, chaotic, lawful evil, evil, chaotic evil). It also has the benefit of being immediately intuitive to almost anyone who encounters it.

4e "simplified" this by reducing it to lawful good, good, unaligned, evil, chaotic evil. But this is one of those instances where more options, because they were arrayed in that sensible grid, is actually easier to deal with and easier to fit a character to. Moreover, they deleted both my favourite alignments (chaotic good and lawful evil), leaving only boring choices. Yes, you can still play a chaotic good or lawful evil character and just call him good, unaligned, or evil, but that just doesn't have the same force to me.
/EDIT

An Example Of A Thing I'm Not Sure Is Good Or Bad
In 3.5e, dedicated spellcasters had a long list of spells to keep track of which were replenished once a day, most melee combatants got to do exactly the same thing every round (with some per-day powers such as, say, the paladin's Smite Evil, or the barbarian's Rage).

In 4e, everybody gets a list of At Will powers (usable as many times as you want), a list of Encounter powers (usable once per fight), and a list of Daily powers (usable once per day). I'm not clear on how spellcasters work now, but it seems to be basically the same story.

In 3.5e, everybody had basically the same role - doing damage to the enemy. They did this in various ways (beating on them with a stick, spells, sneak attack, whatever), and once in a long while you got somebody whose job it was to heal or buff his buddies or debuff the foes, but basically it was all the same task.

In 4e, they've explicitly separated the roles out into Striker, Defender, Controller, et cetera. One guy's job is only to do damage, the next guy's job is only to put the foes where they need to be and keep them from attacking his allies, the third guy's job is to heal, and so on.

So they changed it from everybody doing the same thing in different ways to everybody doing different things the same way. This is a change, but it seems to balance out to neither a positive nor a negative direction.

An Example Of A Thing Where I'm Not Sure Who To Blame
The creatures in this adventure were hard. Particularly some ghouls that clustered way too close in tight quarters that made it nearly impossible to deal with them, although the DM did admit they were supposed to stun one party member at a time and drag them off, which probably would have made the fight oddly easier. We also accidentally skipped over most of the roleplaying component of the adventure and straight to the combat, and it may have been designed with us having some NPC backup in mind, so my experience may not have been working as intended.

So I'm not sure to what extent we experienced this adventure as designed, and I'm not sure how closely this adventure adhered to Wizards of the Coast's design philosophy in the first place. But if we did and it does, then it means WOTC has really embraced the bad encounter philosophy that was rampant in 3.5e but never officially endorsed until now.

In 3.5e, you were supposed to be able to get through something like four or more encounters before you'd expended all your daily resources (such as the wizard's spells) and had to rest for the night. Many DMs wound up, in the interest of providing a "challenge", making all encounters of the sort where you have to use 100% of your daily resources and take an 8-hour rest after each one. This slows down the game to an interminable crawl, among other problems. If WOTC has now embraced this all-insane-challenges-all-the-time idea, that's a bad thing. But I don't have enough information to know whether they have or not.

Summary
All in all, the more I think about 4e, the more I think it's a marked step down in quality. All the same, when I consider the idea of playing more, on a visceral level, the prospect of more 3.5e sounds a little daunting and the prospect of more 4e sounds a little fun. So I guess they're doing something right. Unless it's just that I've not yet been exposed to enough 4e to be sick of it and I've played enough 3.5e that it's starting to wear on me, which is plausible.

EDIT: It turned out yes, I simply hadn't been exposed to enough 4e to get sick of it. It only took a couple more sessions to get sick of it; give me 3.5e or nothing henceforth!

On Fifth Edition And Why It'll Suck

I don't actually think Fifth Edition will suck. I do, however, think that I won't enjoy it.

This is specifically a 3.5e blog, so probably you can tell which edition of D&D I prefer. Everything 3e and earlier is too unrefined and clumsy. 4e is too much of a departure from what I find fun. Pathfinder makes too many changes and too few improvements and isn't as backwards-compatible as it pretends to be.

So maybe you're wondering what I think of about 5e. (Actually, probably you aren't, but I'm going to shove them down you anyway.) I haven't taken advantage of any opportunities to playtest 5e, and what little I gather from the people who have tried it (they having signed NDAs and thus not talking very much) is that it's modular and at least one of the modules is "like 3.5e".

To which I say: if I want to play 3.5e (which I do), I'll just keep playing 3.5e. 5e needs to give me something new to make me learn all the new rules and switch to a barren new edition, beyond merely being like 3.5e.

And the only thing I don't like about 3.5e? Unbalanced classes.

One of the biggest things I like about 3.5e? The vast number of options available in supplements and splatbooks.

Any new edition loses that benefit, so for me to want to play it, it'll need to fix the class balance problem so well as to make it worth it.

Give me something that's basically 3.5e with perfectly balanced classes, and maybe I'll switch. (PF improved class balance very slightly, but pretty much left the tiers and all the attendant problems intact.) Try to give me anything else, and it's not worth it.

Buuuuuut at least it'll give the internet a new thing to complain about for the next decade.