Scattered Thoughts on Rime of the Frostmaiden, and One of My Big Complaints About 5e

The newest tent-pole product from Wizards of the Coast, Rime of the Frostmaiden, is out and the reactions to it have been. . . rather mixed.  Some of that, I think, has to do with what I perceive as a growing, if diffuse, dissatisfaction with the direction of 5e and 5e products generally over the last year or so.  But I was scrolling through Sly Flourish a/k/a Mike Shea's Twitter feed last night, and he posted this:

I shouldn’t have to fix the first encounter of a $50 hardback adventure. #dnd

— SlyFlourish.com (@SlyFlourish) September 16, 2020

What he was pointing to is that the first major fight has an opponent who is going to be really challenging for 1st and 2nd level PCs, set up by potential side quests with equally challenging encounters for those same first level PCs (there is also a discussion, along with Justin Alexander, about how railroad-y and bizarre the lead in is).

In response, Sly Flourish got the response that basically always seems to come up whenever someone notes that an encounter is going to be very challenging, which is that "you as the DM are not obligated to only use balanced encounters!"  This response is unhelpful, to the point of being borderline trollish, but it also, I think, misses the point of what is really going on within the design of 5e that creates these problems.  Because this sort of thing (alongside how the rest mechanics are broken) is my biggest complaint with 5e.

From a game mechanical point of view, I think the engine that is driving the problem here is that 5e combat is very swingy.  Because bounded accuracy reduces the range of bonuses that are in play, much more of the outcome is determined by the dice roll.  Others have referred to this as the "chaos plateau," and it is a feature of all d20 games to a certain extent, but I think 5e, certainly among more recent editions of D&D, is the most chaotic.  As a result, you can run the same encounter with the same sides multiple times and get wildly different results, depending on how the dice land in a particular iteration.

Again, this is a feature that is hard-coded into 5e via bounded accuracy.  But it really manifests itself at low levels, because low level characters lack the pool of hit points to absorb the consequences of bad die rolls.  In my experience, there really is no such thing as a "medium danger" combat encounter at low levels in 5e, because any fight is only a few good (from the monster's point of view) dice rolls away from being very deadly.  Once you get to higher levels, characters can ride out the bad rolls long enough for most fights to revert to the mean outcomes, so combat becomes more predictable.  But at low levels, almost every fight is basically a crap shoot.

As a DM, I hate that.  Not because I believe I am somehow obligated to provide a perfectly curated experience for the players, i.e. a "balanced encounter."  There is nothing wrong at all with throwing very difficult challenges at players and seeing how they do.  But I as a DM want that to be a considered, motivated choice on my part, one that fits into my broader session goals.  Having what I think is going to be a set-up encounter turn into a TPK (often very quickly) derails my whole session plan.  For example, I ran Waterdeep: Dragon Heist with my group, and the first encounter is with some Kenkus in a warehouse.  A round and a half of combat in, and it becomes abundantly clear that this is going to be a TPK.  So, I pulled the plug on the fight, and had everyone get captured and eventually escape.  Now, was it a big deal at the end of the day?  Not really.  But I had to scramble to save the adventure path in session #1, and I would rather not have to spin plates right from the get-go.

It is likely that many people will read this and say "gee, I/my group didn't have any problems with the Kenkus in the warehouse."  And that's my point.  It's pretty clear to me that the designers were not trying to put some super-tough encounter in the beginning; it just so happens that the dice were bad for my group in that particular encounter.  On the flip side, my players crushed the later encounter in the sewers, clearly designed to be a tough chapter ender, with a bunch of excellent dice rolls.  So, it's not that the encounters are "unbalanced," it's that they can't really be predictably balanced, because the variance in the outcomes is so wide.

Also, you have to situate this in the context of running an adventure path-based game.  It is one thing to have high variance combat outcomes when you are playing a grindhouse-style game like Dungeon Crawl Classics, or other intentionally high lethality games (see, for example, my recent review of Forbidden Lands).  Everyone knows the score, and bad dice rolls leading to bad outcomes is kinda part of the fun.  But when you sit down to run a long, story-based campaign, having the thing derail early on from a not-that-consequential fight is totally contrary to what you are all trying to do.  If I spent a couple of weeks hyping up and getting buy-in for Waterdeep: Dragon Heist and its city-based premise, had everyone go through a full Session Zero to design interesting characters, and then had said to my players an hour and a half into our first session, "well, your characters are all dead from these random Kenkus.  What do you want to play next week?" my players would have justifiably looked at me like "WTF, Mike?"  They, and me too, were in this for the long haul, as promised by the product itself.  Having high variance early combat outcomes is contrary to what people are buying into when the sit down to play the adventure paths WotC is making.

All of which is compounded when, as it seems here, the designers on Rime of the Frostmaiden decided to ratchet up the difficulty intentionally.  Now, instead of having unpredictable outcomes, you have unpredictable outcomes weighted against the players.  Again, I am sure that some groups will do just fine, and maybe not even notice what the big deal was.  But for other groups, maybe most groups, it will be a meat-grinder, because all low level 5e play can turn into a meat-grinder at basically any moment.  And while I know that this adventure path is pitched as being a difficult challenge, TPKing the party at the first major fight seems counter-productive if everyone is there to sit down and play through the whole thing.  I suppose you could pitch it as a grindhouse style game where players are going to lose multiple characters a la the classic Call of Cthulhu adventure paths, but you can't even really promise that, either, as you are only a couple of good dice rolls away from wiping the floor with your enemies, and everything becomes much more consistently survivable around 4th level or so in general in 5e.

At the risk of engaging in edition warring, I have to say that this whole issue is one of the major reasons I prefer 13th Age to 5e.  First off, 1st level 13th Age characters are much more durable than 5e characters simply by having more starting HP (high teens or twenties).  As a result, you avoid much of the particularized problems of low level 5e play altogether.  But, more to the point, I find the underlying encounter math of 13th Age to be far more predictable than 5e.  If the encounter table in the 13th Age rulebook says that a particular fight is going to be a moderate challenge for a particular party, it is very unlikely to be a shock TPK (if anything, the table leans on the side of fights being a little too easy, especially if you use the slightly but consistently underpowered monsters in the corebook).  I feel more confident in the encounters I run in 13th Age because I have a pretty good idea how it is going to go, whereas with 5e I am often more in the mode of "well, hope this doesn't wipe out my players."  I prefer the control 13th Age give me as a GM.     

Thoughts on GMing, Part 3--Forbidden Lands, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the OSR (Kinda)

If you engage even a little bit in the online ttrpg scene, you will encounter the term "OSR."  I have struggled with the Discourse around the OSR, because it has been hard to figure out precisely what it is and what it stands for.  There is even disagreement over what "OSR" stands for--does it mean "Old School Roleplaying" or "Old School Renaissance"?

Maybe in part because of this ambiguity, nothing that I have encountered from from the OSR has really grabbed me.  There is a segment of the OSR that in embodies an aesthetic position, trying to recreate the feel and look (often through the art style) of late 70s/early 80s ttrpgs, more specifically D&D.  Probably the best example of this is Goodman Games' Dungeon Crawl Classics, with its Errol Otis art and focus on short character life spans, but there is also the more horror-oriented and sex-forward Lamentations of the Flame Princess.  These games do a very good job at doing what it is trying to do--I fully acknowledge the craft of both DCC and LofFP--but playing them left me cold.  That style and aesthetic was not the feel of D&D that I remember from first getting into the  hobby, as I am a child of 2nd Edition AD&D, Forgotten Realms, and Dragonlance, all of which come after the early-80s touchstones of the DCC and LotFP aesthetic.  So it didn't work for me on the level of nostalgia, and it doesn't really work for me on its own merits.

Then there are the games that are very self-consciously about the mechanics of early editions of D&D.  Gotta say, I have even less interest here.  It's not that those rule systems are bad or necessarily unplayable, but there is so much good design out there going in every conceivable direction that I don't really see the point of locking into a forty-five year old design as a core commitment.  

Finally, there are a set of ideas about the play experience.  The best articulation of this game-play focus is expressed by Ben Milton in a compilation called the "Principia Apocrypha":

"The more of the following a campaign has, the more old school it is: high lethality, an open world, a lack of pre-written plot, an emphasis on creative problem solving, an exploration-centered reward system (usually XP for treasure), a disregard for 'encounter balance,' and the use of random tables to generate world elements that surprise both players and referees. Also, a strong do-it-yourself attitude and a willingness to share your work and use the creativity of others in your game."

This is all very interesting, but none of these ideas never particularly fired me up and got me excited about running or playing in that context.

That is, until I found Forbidden Lands, by emerging Swedish juggernaut Free League (Fria Ligan) Publishing.  Ben Riggs of the Plot Points podcast called the Forbidden Lands the "perfect rpg product," and that seemed crazy when I first heard him say it, but I get where he is coming from.  

I mostly want to talk about the mechanics, because that where I think the game really shines, but I want to say a few things about the lore and setting.  First off, the trailer video that Free League put together is pretty close to being the perfect introduction to a setting.  Check this out:

Evocative, atmospheric, moody, informative without being overly long and expository--that video is great.  Beyond the trailer, the setting walks the line between providing familiar fantasy RPG tropes (so it is accessible) and being distinctive and unique (providing a compelling reason to check it out).  It also walks the line between fun-dark and obnoxious-dark.  Here, I think there is something to the fact that this comes out of Sweden, and is the product of Swedish fantasy writers.  I don't have deep experience with the Swedish fantasy scene, but Forbidden Lands feels different from English-language dark fantasy like Warhammer, and I like this version much better.

But the setting and lore of Forbidden Lands can be swapped out for other fantasy tropes without too much trouble (as, to be fair, the game acknowledges).  The real magic is in the mechanics.  Forbidden Lands is a gritty, survival-oriented wilderness exploration game at its heart.  The boxed set (itself an old-school touch) contains a hex map showing the land forms of the titular Forbidden Lands, and a set of stickers for placing down cities, towns, dungeon ruins, and other examples of what the game calls "adventure sites."  But, in between the adventure sites, the PCs go from hex to hex, deal with potential random encounters, and have to maintain their supplies.  There are very clear systems for handling pathfinding, foraging for food and water, hunting, making camp, even sleeping.

These sorts of systems are not new--early D&D products like the "BECMI" Expert set had similar systems.  But Forbidden Lands puts a subtle twist on each of these elements, reducing the grind and fiddly-ness for the players and GM, grind and fiddly-ness which caused those mechanics to go out of fashion in the first place.  For example, instead of counting individual units of resources like rations and water and torches (and arrows, too), those resources are expressed as a die--d6, d8, d10, or d12.  Every time you have to eat or take a drink or light a torch, you roll the die; on a 1 or 2, you step down to the next lowest die type (i.e. d10 to d8).  Roll a 1 or 2 when your resources are at d6, and you are out of the resource.  Not only does this cut down on book-keeping, but it adds a dramatic tension to resource consumption--failures increase the chances of future failures in a downward spiral, and the more operationally-minded PCs will not be tempted to (or able to) tediously micromanage away resource scarcity.  

While in exploration mode, the GM is encouraged to let events play out according to a well-designed set of random tables.  What sorts of random encounters to do the PCs come across?  What animals are available to hunt?  What happens when they camp at night?  No need at all for the GM to prep any of that--let the tables decide.  The key feature here is that the random tables and systems-oriented, player driven action removes responsibility from the GM to craft a curated game experience for the benefit of the players.  As the manifesto quoted above says well, I think, the outcomes of play are a surprise both for the players and the GM, in a way that doesn't happen in a more standard GMing experience.  Also, and I think this is a key feature of Forbidden Lands, exploration mode in Forbidden Lands requires literally no GM prep.  Between random encounters and the various (mis-) adventures of wilderness travel, it is possible for a GM to run an entire satisfying session with zero prepared, and not feel like he or she has to be constantly improvising and keeping the plates spinning.    

But Forbidden Lands departs slightly from the old-school formula by mixing the procedural elements in with modular adventure sites.  If the players and/or the GM get bored of wandering through the wilderness, the GM just plops down an adventure site and play focuses there.  But, even here, the models we are provided in the core rulebook and in the expansion materials (I currently own the Bitter Reach campaign and the Crypt of the Mellified Mage adventure set, but there is also the Raven's Purge campaign as well) show off sand-box style design, with competing factions and goals that the PCs can insert themselves into.  "The Vale of the Dead" in the boxed set could easily have been a rather boring paint-by-numbers dungeon crawl against a giant, but instead it has four or five different competing groups that can be allied with, and/or played off against each other.  And each adventure site is set up with a rumor that is given to the PCs, which is a great touch for world building, but also allows the GM to situate these adventure sites into a broader narrative without forcing players into a narrative railroad (the Bitter Reach campaign is especially excellent at creating a overarching story while maintaining a truly open format).  And it should be noted that there are robust random tables for generating adventure sites, though I would suggest rolling up the site prior to the session.

All of this is layered over Free League's "Year Zero" game engine.  Forbidden Lands is likely the most complex and mechanics-driven of the Year Zero games, but the underlying dice pool system is easy to learn and easy to teach.  The heart of Year Zero is the push mechanic--you basically have two chances to succeed on every check, but going to the second roll is going to cause some consequences for the PC.  In Forbidden Lands, the consequences of pushing rolls is damage to your equipment and/or to your character.  That might seem awfully punitive, especially as a PC is going to have only a handful of points before the character is "broken" and really bad things happen, but in return every point of damage from pushing rolls nets the PC a willpower point.  Since Willpower points are the currency that powers most Talents (including all spellcasting), this creates an interesting feedback loop, in which players are incentivized to put their own characters through the wringer in order to do more powerful things.  It also incentivizes PCs, especially spellcasters, to get "stuck in" to the other elements of game play, so that they can generate Willpower points to power their magic.  So, in good old-school fashion, PCs in Forbidden Lands are in for a rough ride; unlike other old-school games, much of pain is going to be self-inflicted.

I'm still not super interested in most of the OSR games.  But I am all-in on Forbidden Lands.  For me, it takes the best ideas from that play style--especially the random tables and open sandbox-style play--and presents them in a thoroughly modern, innovative format.  If you, like me, are or have been an OSR skeptic, this would be the place I would start to maybe change your mind.