Review: Level Up (Advanced 5th Edition)

There is a set of people out there for whom Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition (hereafter, for simplicity, "LU") from EN Publishing is exactly what they have been waiting for--for several years now.  If you are a D&D 5e player that is starting to (or have been for some time) chaffing at the limitations and restrictions in the game system as presented (particularly in terms of character creation and mechanical support for non-combat activities), but you otherwise like playing 5e and are not really interested in checking out a whole new game and structure, then LU is an extremely compelling product.  And even if you are not (and I am not exactly in that particular space), it's impossible not to see and be impressed with the game design craft at work here.

The initial challenge in approaching LU is to understand exactly what it is, something that didn't really become clear to me until I got the PDF copies of the three core books in my hands [Note: as of this writing, it is only available to Kickstarter backers, of which I was one].  The simplest way to explain what is going on here is that LU takes D&D 5e, strips it down to the skeleton (dice mechanics, action economy--things like that), and then rebuilds it from scratch.  While nothing you will see is unrecognizable for people who have played d20 games, I was not expecting the scope of the changes LU makes to the 5e paradigm (I think, in part, because the EN Publishing people made a strategic choice to undersell how much work they were doing--more on that in a bit).  Not only is it a different, albeit recognizably so, game from 5e, it is very clearly designed to be used on its own, as a replacement to the 5e rulebooks as opposed to a supplement to them (and, like D&D, LU consists of three core books--the Adventurer's Guide, the GM-focused Trials & Treasure, and Monstrous Menagerie).  LU is not a set of house rules to 5e, nor is it an expansion in the mode of something like Xanathar's Guide to Everything, but instead its own game.  The best comparison of the relationship between 5e and LU is between Pathfinder 1st Edition and D&D 3.5, and even that might undersell it.

In fact, there are so many changes that summarizing all of them would be tedious and unproductive.  But I think the changes can be grouped into two major buckets, with a couple of other interesting single shot ideas that are worth talking about.  Major idea #1 of LU is to make good on the (IMO, wholly unfulfilled) promise of 3 pillars of play in D&D 5e--combat, exploration, and social/roleplay.  To that end, Trials & Treasure has a lengthy section providing mechanical support, with examples and random tables, for non-combat, environmental-based encounters.  There is also a robust set of journey rules, similar to those found in the now out-of-print Adventures in Middle Earth (in turn based on The One Ring rpg).  And while I love the AiME/The One Ring journey rules, I think LU's version is better in that it contemplates a wider variety of non-combat challenges.  There are puzzles and lore-based challenges and weather and a whole host of different ways for all PCs to engage with the exploration portion of the game, all of which is simply not present in 5e as written.  And no one can say that the exploration mechanics are a throw-away or something tacked-on, as Trials & Treasure devotes about 120 pages to these new mechanics.

The social pillar is less mechanically engaged, but there are some actual rules (including rules for awarding XP!) for social encounters along with advice on how to run them.  But LU approaches the social dimension in a slightly different way, bringing back the once ubiquitous but now somewhat out-of-fashion stronghold and domain management rules.  There is also a Prestige rating, measuring how well known a particular PC is, which provides concrete mechanical hooks for the standard "unknown wanderer to world-renowned hero" arc of most fantasy campaigns.  Critically, every PC has class-related abilities that interact with both the social dimension and the exploration piece, making them a central part of play as opposed to an afterthought or something only specialized characters interact with.  For example, the 1st level Cleric selects a "Sacred Call" ability which provides circumstantial social advantages, while at 3rd level the Cleric selects a "Sign of Faith" which is an ability that provides meaningful, if cabined, advantages while traveling.

This transitions into the second big-picture change in LU--all of the classes are rebuilt and redesigned.  Part of this redesign is adding class abilities tied to the exploration and social pillars, as mentioned above.  But it is more than that, and the changes can be seen most clearly in the martial classes.  Martial classes now have access to combat maneuvers, which are divided up into "combat traditions" (think different kinds of martial arts in the real world) that unlock progressively more powerful abilities along a fairly simple tree.  There are also a short list of maneuvers that are now available to all characters, fleshing out the combat turn.  Most of the discrete class abilities given to martial characters in 5e are wrapped up into the maneuver system, giving martial characters more options to choose from at each level.

Indeed, choice is a consistent theme of all of the revised classes is LU. In many places where 5e simply assigns a particular ability at a particular level, LU provides options.  It's not nearly the breadth of options found in the feat system in Pathfinder 2nd edition; instead, there are usually three or four specific options for a particular level.  As a result, it sits in a middle place between 5e and Pathfinder 2e on the character creation complexity scale, a place that I think is going to be a sweet spot for many people who are looking to ratchet up the character creation mini-game.  My one comment here is that, given that there is increased choice at all levels, I wonder whether including the 5e sub-class system was the right choice.  I get that it helps establish a theme for PCs within the broader class concept, but much of that work is being taken up with the individualized abilities that classes get at most levels, so some of that work is duplicative and maybe a bit more complex than is necessary.  On the flip side, the design for the subclasses in LU is broader and more archetypical than especially the post-PHB 5e subclasses, which often goes in the direction of rather specific character concepts.  I like this better, and the subclasses are well-designed and easy to adapt to almost any possible setting one might be inclined to use. 

A couple of other quick notes on character building.   The game mechanical construct of "race" in 5e is replaced with Heritage (which might be called "species" in a sci-fi context) and Culture, allowing for greater character diversity and avoiding essentialism.  Along those lines, Background is now the character creation piece that provides ability score bonuses and penalties.  This is a small change, but an elegant one and one that makes perfect sense in world--if you were raised as a scholar, it stands to reason to get an Intelligence bonus.  I am less sold on renaming some of the core classes (Barbarian is now "Berserker," Monk is now "Adept," Paladin is now "Herald").  The thinking, I suspect, is to expand the conceptual space encompassed by those classes, but honestly I found it to be more confusing than helpful.  Those names are so ingrained in the collective consciousness of D&D players that re-wiring the brain takes some doing.  A small thing, ultimately, but something that I kept tripping over.     

One last point on character creation--and this is maybe my favorite addition in LU--every PC now has a Destiny, which provides a core character motivation, a way in which the PC gains Inspiration (as opposed to the unstructured and arbitrary "good roleplaying" from 5e, which I hate), a particular way the PC can spend Inspiration to do something thematic for the character, and a grand quest to fulfill the Destiny which provides a special character ability.  It's simple, easy to expand with new Destinies, provides a concrete roleplaying anchor for a new character, and gives them a reason to do things in the world and interact with it.  Love it, 10/10.

On the miscellaneous side, it's worth talking about the Fatigue and Strife system.  I've complained on a couple of occasions about the Short/Long Rest mechanics in 5e, and in order to maintain compatibility those rules are ported over to LU.  However, some of the dimensions I don't like are mitigated by the "Roughing It" sidebar on Page 425 of the Adventurer's Guide that specifically ties full heal-ups to being able to rest in favorable conditions--unless you have a bedroll, are not cold, are not in the rain, etc., you only get half the normal Hit Dice back after a night's sleep.  But the real punch is in the Fatigue (which replaces 5e Exhaustion) and Strife rules, which represent physical and mental strain, respectively.  Those conditions can only be recovered in a "haven," defined as a home or other ideal location for recovery.  And Fatigue and Strife are no joke--the last level of Fatigue means the PC will just die at a story-appropriate time as determined by the GM, and max level of Strife causes permanent mental conditions with concrete game mechanical effects.  This walks the line of creating real opportunities for attrition-based play, without completely gimping a PC's combat effectiveness.  You also gain a level of Fatigue the first time in an fight you fall unconscious, providing a real if perhaps modest penalty for going to 0 HP and avoiding the consequence-free rebounding from the brink of death to being fine that characterizes the 5e death and healing rules.

The problem with all of this, to the extent it is a problem, is that LU is really a package.  Because the pieces interact with each other and fit together pretty tightly, it's not optimized to be a tool-kit of ideas that you can drop into an existing 5e game.  For example, you might think to just add the journey rules to an existing 5e campaign.  You could do that, but the journey rules are designed around the PCs having all the exploration-oriented class abilities.  And if you add those elements, you might as well rebuild all the PCs around the LU class model, in which case you might as well just take on the whole package.  Likewise, because of the way LU redistributes the pieces of what 5e groups under "race," if you want to use the Heritage/Culture system you also have to use the LU Backgrounds, or at the very least re-work the existing 5e Backgrounds to provide ability score modifiers.  The changes that LU makes to the 5e system are pervasive and extensive (I haven't even mentioned that they have redesigned most of the core spells), pushing you at every turn toward adopting it wholesale.  Honestly, probably the most modular portion of the whole project is the redesigned monsters, all of which are both recognizably similar to the stock 5e versions and yet more interesting and dynamic in play.  

Which leads to what I think is ultimately the big question with LU.  This is a project targeted at existing 5e players and DMs, and one of the core marketing pitches for LU is that everything is compatible with existing 5e materials like adventure paths and supplemental material.  And that is true, in the sense that the stats that you will find for opponents in existing published material mean the same things in LU, so there is no direct conversion needed.  But that presentation undersells, I think deliberately, what LU is and what it is trying to do.  Which, ultimately, is to be its own game, albeit one that is backwards compatible with 5e.  As someone who has gotten burned out and frustrated with 5e, and especially with the apparent unwillingness of Wizards of the Coast to do anything interesting or creative with the game for many years running now, this is not a problem for me.  I have no problem moving on from 5e with only casual picking over the carcass for bits and pieces to integrate.  But I wonder whether LU will be a bridge too far for many people in its target audience.  Yes it is compatible and yes many of the core elements are the same, but LU is otherwise very different from 5e.  Given the "stickiness" of the 5e fanbase to changing games, I wonder if this will find its audience.  There are vague hints of a revised set of the 5e core rulebooks in 2024 for the 50th anniversary of D&D, but whatever that looks like I doubt it will be as well done, thoughtful, or as expansive as LU.  It would be a shame if this product doesn't find a home because it looks like too big a change.

There are also some minor quibbles.  I mentioned the changing the class names thing previously.  There are places where they went a little too hard in the direction of edge-case, fiddly rules for my tastes--for example, the Fatigue rule I quoted above is slightly wrong, as you can recover the Level 1 Fatigued condition without resting in a haven, but not any higher levels of Fatigued.  Right now, the PDFs are in a Beta version, and are in need of some smoothing over.  

But, at the end of the day, LU is an outstanding product that is worth putting in the work.  It keeps most if not all of the things about 5e that work well, and it improves the rest of it in basically every way.  While I liked what I saw from Pathfinder 2nd Edition, I think LU also has many of the advantages of that game with less fiddly-ness and complexity.  If given a choice between starting a campaign in 5e, Pathfinder 2e, or LU, I would choose LU.  If I have time over the holidays, I think I'm going to dust off the materials for my old campaign world and convert it over to LU, which would fit it perfectly.  If you were not a Kickstarter backer, and this package is remotely appealing to you, I would strongly recommend keeping an eye out for its general release.  It's a really, really impressive piece of work.

Interested in a 5e Alternative? Try 13th Age!

The fine folks at Pelgrane Press released a 19 page "Quickstart" guide to 13th Age today, which you can get for free here.  I have said before that 13th Age is my favorite of the various D&D-derived d20 fantasy games out there ("F20" in the parlance of 13th Age), so anything that draws attention to the game is good in my book.  Plus, it seems like folks are starting to poke their heads around for alternatives to 5e for a variety of reasons, and so the timing of the release seems fortuitous.  There is also a Humble Bundle full of 13th Age goodness, that I would get except I have all this stuff already.  

However, in reading the document, it seems to me that someone who only knows 5e might be a little confused looking at the Quickstart guide, because it assumes you know some things that you may not.  So, in a gentle effort to assist, here are some things that might be helpful to someone coming in to this Quickstart from 5e:

1.  The Basics are the Same, with One Big Exception.  When 13th Age says that it is a "d20" game, what the means is when a PC or NPC is trying to accomplish some task, the player or GM rolls a d20, adds some sort of modifier based on a character ability, and tries to get equal to or above a target number.  So, when you see on the pre-generated character's character sheets a "+6 vs. AC" for the Half-Elf Fighter, that means you are going to roll a d20, add 6, and then compare the total to the AC of the target.  In other words, just like 5e.  

The big difference is that there is no general Advantage and Disadvantage mechanic, so you are almost always rolling one d20 for checks (I say almost, because the Barbarian's Rage mechanic grants the equivalent of Advantage to attack rolls--see the "Hell-Blood Fury" power on the Hellsinger pre-gen).  The Advantage and Disadvantage mechanic in 5e covers two big categories of situations--character abilities (i.e. "when you do X, you get Advantage/impose Disadvantage on your target") and situational modifiers (i.e. "when you are in situation X [say, in darkness], you have Disadvantage on attack rolls").  13th Age handles the former, in general, via numerical bonuses or penalties.  So, if you look on the Half-Elf Fighter's character sheet, you will see the "Threatening" Class Ability, which imposes a -4 penalty to enemies trying to disengage from the Fighter; in 5e, that would probably be handled with Disadvantage.  As to the latter, 13th Age, encourages the GM to ignore situational modifiers in favor of faster, more streamlined play.  But if the GM really insists on using situational modifiers, he or she can slap a +2 or -2 on the roll and move things along.

One thing this means is that 13th Age has a little bit more in the way of on-the-fly math than 5e.  It is nothing on the scale of some of the other F20 games that one could play (D&D 3.5/Pathfinder 1st Edition and D&D 4e come to mind), but it is noticeable in comparing the two games and how they play.  The truth is that Advantage/Disadvantage is a really clever mechanic (albeit a bit too "swingy" IMO), and so this is probably a net negative for 13th Age, but I don't think it is enough of a negative to outweigh the positives.   

2.  Player Input into the Story of the Game.  13th Age comes out of a school of game design that involves the players in a collaborative process with the GM of building the world.  Probably the easiest place to see this is on Page 7 of the Quickstart, which discusses the "One Unique Thing" concept.  Here, the player gets to define something about their character that is Unique, and then it becomes true in the context of the campaign.  So for example, one of the uniques provided on Page 7 is "I'm the only halfling acrobat to escape from the Diabolist's Circus of Hell."  If a player were to pick that unique, then the rules assume there is such a thing as the Diabolist's Circus of Hell in that particular campaign, and the GM should at least give a thought to what that is, how in interacts with the world, etc.  A similar thing can happen with Backgrounds--if the players opt for more complex Background choices like "Captain of the Dwarven Mountain Rangers," then the "Dwarven Mountain Rangers" are an organization in the world.

Another place to see this is on Pages 14-16, with a discussion of the Montage mechanic.  Rather than the GM describing the PCs travelling between the starting point of the adventure and the main location of action, the players come up with the events that occur on the journey, as well as the solutions to those problems in a free-form roleplaying format.

This really gets kicked into overdrive, though, with the Icon mechanics.  The sample adventure that the Quickstart points you toward--Wade Rockett's Crown of Axis--does not have a pre-set antagonist.  Instead, the antagonist is determined by which Icon relationships the players take and which ones are active for that particular adventure.  As discussed in the Quickstart, the GM could even have no pre-set story, and just use the Icon rolls as the basis for improvising an adventure on the fly.

This model is not the default style of play for 5e.  It's true that there is nothing in 5e that would stop a group from running their games this way, but there is also nothing in 5e that would suggest that you can or should run it this way.  Moreover, the published adventure paths for 5e from Wizards of the Coast presume a much more "bright line" distinction between the players and the DM--the DM creates and governs the world, and the players play in the world that is created.  As a result, this style of play is likely going to be a bit of a shock to the system for 5e veterans, both on the player side and the DM/GM side.  GM's might feel like part of their authority or creative freedom is being usurped by the players, and players might feel uncomfortable or unsure about being able to basically say things into existence.  Moreover, the idea of giving players narrative agency is so foundational to 13th Age's DNA that taking it out likely removes any real reason to consider the game.

For those that are hesitant, I would strongly encourage you to give this style of play a try.  It might feel a little strange at first, but my experience is that it greatly increases player engagement and lowers GM task loading.  I use this style, and Montages in particular, in basically every game I run.  It's really good and really fun for everyone at the table--trust me.

3.  Healing and Rests.  It would be easy to skim over the "Healing and Damage" section on Page 14 from a 5e perspective and think "OK, recoveries are basically Hit Dice, and a full heal-up is a Long Rest."  Not quite.

In 13th Age, all healing comes from spending a recovery and rolling the recovery dice to determine how many HP you get back.  What spells and potions do is act as a trigger that allows the PC to spend the recovery out of their pool.  If you look at the Forgeborn Cleric pre-gen, the "Heal" spell allows the target of the spell to spend a recovery during the fight--the spell itself doesn't actually provide any HP.  Healing Potions (Page 17 of the Quickstart) do provide some bonus HP, but the core of it is drink the potion, spend a recovery, get a recovery's worth of HP back.  Without those triggers, you are limited to the Rally action (which you can always use once per fight, and then you get a 50% change to use again) or waiting until after combat where you can spend recoveries freely (this takes the place of the 5e "Short Rest" mechanic, as is assumed to occur after every fight).

In other words, recoveries are not a way to heal your PC they way Hit Dice are in 5e; they are the way to heal your PC.  Even the rare cases where some power or spells lets a PC heal using a "free recovery" (i.e. it doesn't cost a recovery from the pool), you still roll the recovery dice to determine how much healing happens.  Note also the rule for what happens when you try to heal if you are out of recoveries--the amount of HP recovered is halved, and the PC takes a -1 to all attacks and defenses.  All of this shakes out to generally providing more healing for low level characters than 5e, but putting a limit on the total amount of healing that can be provided to any one character.

Likewise, it is true that mechanically a Long Rest and Full Heal-Up are the same, in the sense that it is a complete reset of all HP and class abilities.  However, the timing when a Full Heal-Up occurs is fundamentally in the hands of GM, with the default being after four combat encounters/the length of one game session.  This is true no matter how much in-game time passes between the battles--if the PCs are on a long wilderness journey that takes 30 days, then they can't get a full reset for 30 days.  I'm not going to pretend to be unbiased here--I think 13th Age's system is significantly better than 5e's Long Rest mechanic.  Having the PCs completely heal after 24 hours, as is the case in 5e, makes it very hard to do challenging, attrition-based adventures that last longer than that 24 hour time frame.  This places the GM in a conundrum between in-world adventure pacing and in session adventure pacing, while 13th Age makes the two the same.

Also note the death and dying mechanics, which are just different enough from 5e to be annoying and easy to miss--the threshold to succeed on a death and dying roll is 16 (not 10 as in 5e), but you only need 1 success to spend a recovery (and thus be out of the dying state), and it is four failures (not three) before you are actually dead.

4.  Spells and Ranges.  Spells in 5e that do damage are divided into spells that require a spell attack roll (against AC) to hit, and spells that automatically hit but allow the target to make a saving throw.  In 13th Age, basically all spells require the equivalent of a spell attack roll.  Instead of targeting AC, most spells target one of the other two defense stats in 13th Age--Physical Defense or Mental Defense.  But, with that exception, spells work exactly like weapon attacks.  On the flip side, "saves" are used in 13th Age only to end ongoing effects, whether in the form of conditions or ongoing damage (see Page 13).  Saves are not tied to any attributes, and are (generally) unmodified d20 rolls.

The other thing to note is how spells interact with the movement and range mechanics.  By default, 13th Age does not use a grid, unlike 5e which very much defaults to grid-based movement and ranges (notwithstanding the fact that it implies otherwise in the rules text).  Enemies are either nearby or far away (one move or two moves to get to them, respectively), and spell ranges are similarly delineated as touch, nearby targets, or far away targets.  There is also no calculation of cones or cubes for multi-target spells; instead, you target a random number of enemies at a certain range band and you have to roll separate attacks for each.  This is much more loosey-goosey than 5e--if you look at the spellbook for the Wizard at the end of the pre-gen file (Page 52), you'll see that Lightning Bolt targets "1d3+1 nearby enemies in a group or in a (rough) line."

The last big thing to note about spells is that they have varying recharge timers.  On that same Wizard spellbook page, you will see that Acid Arrow, Blur, Charm Person and the Utility Spell can be used "Daily" (which really means once until a Full Heal-Up), which is the same as spell slot spells in 5e.  Note that, on your Daily spells, you may use each of them only one time each, as opposed to mixing and matching when spending spell slots in 5e.  Whereas Magic Missile is "At Will," and thus works like a 5e Cantrip that can be used an unlimited number of times.  There are also "per battle" spells, like Heal and Spirits of the Righteous on the Cleric sheet, which as the name implies reset at the end of a fight (and so are kinda like Warlock spell slots that recharge on a Short Rest).  Unlike 5e, these recharge timers are tied to the spell, not the class feature, and so a spell caster can mix and match between spells with varying recharges when preparing their spell load-out.

5.  The Escalation Die.  It's easy to gloss over the Escalation Die (Page 14) but it is a key part of 13th Age.  Every round of combat after the first, the PCs get a cumulative +1 to all of their attacks (which includes spell attacks).  What this means is that the PCs get better at fighting the longer the combat goes on, which means that it makes sense for players to wait until later in combat to pull out their "big guns" like Daily spells.  I would suggest, if you are running 13th Age, simply telling your players about this from the beginning, as the system is designed around making those sorts of strategic decisions.

Seriously, 13th Age is really great.  If you are a 5e player and looking to try a fantasy ttrpg that is familiar but with a different feel, you really should give 13th Age a shot.        

Some Random House Rules for 5e D&D

I tend to run games pretty close to Rules as Written.  Part of that is because I like many different kinds of games, and I like to see the ways in which their design translates into the play experience.  But the bigger part of it is that I'm not incredibly interested in being a game designer, and I don't feel like that should be part of my job description as a GM/DM--I'm paying you for this game so I don't have to do the design work.

The exception to this seems to be D&D 5e.  I don't view myself as a 5e Hater.  I like a lot of what the game does.  But there are a handful of things that really bug me about the rules, things that reflect some (I think) weird and kinda inexplicable design choices.  But because I like the game, I want to try to fix what I see as problems, without throwing up my hands and going down the road of "5e Bad."

To that end, I figured I would put out some of my house rules for 5e that I have been working on, along with a explanation of my thought process.  There are four of them--the Rest rules, XP, low levels, and Inspiration.  

Rest Mechanics

Let's lay out the basic problem with the rest mechanics as written in the Players Handbook.  PCs can take a Short Rest or a Long Rest, and every class ability in the game that requires a recharge refreshes on either a Short Rest or a Long Rest.  Because the Short/Long Rest system is so deeply grounded in all player-facing mechanics, it is extremely difficult to change around the actual mechanic itself without rebuilding the class mechanics completely.  For example, if you have a Warlock in the party, the effectiveness of the Warlock visa ve the other classes is heavily dependent on  there being opportunities for Short Rests, as the Warlock's more limited spell selection is balanced around the idea that spell slots refresh on a Short Rest as opposed to a Long Rest for the other spellcasting classes.  Meanwhile, we are told that encounters are balanced around the idea of six to eight "medium" difficulty encounters between Long Rest, and two encounters between Short Rest (so encounter, encounter, Short Rest, encounter, encounter, Short Rest, encounter, encounter, Long Rest).  To activate a Short Rest, the PCs must take one hour of in-game time to rest, while a Long Rest requires eight hours of sleep by the PCs in-game.

The interface between the last two elements means that there is an expectation that PCs will engage with six to eight encounters in a 24 hour period.  That makes some sense in a pure dungeon crawl scenario, but its hard to justify in most other story contexts.  In an urban exploration scenario or a wilderness travel scenario, it's pretty easy for the PCs to take rests between every encounter (at least Short Rests), which means that the PCs will be at or near full strength for every encounter.  Which requires the DM to throw tougher challenges at the PCs, which makes combat more swingy, more unpredictable, and more of that "rocket tag" phenomenon that was a big issue in previous editions.  

So, what do you do to solve this problem?  One idea is to borrow from the rest mechanics for 13th Age.  Whereas 5e requires you to take a particular amount of time to rest (one hour/eight hours of sleep) to trigger the recovery, 13th Age ties recovery directly to the number of encounters completed.  In 13th Age, this is balanced around the idea of a Quick Rest (the 13th Age version of a Short Rest) after every encounter and a Full Heal Up (i.e. Long Rest) after three to four encounters.  This way, the PCs never get out of sync with the encounter balance guidelines built into the game.  If you were to import this over the 5e, you would simply say that PCs get a Short Rest after every two encounters (no matter how much time passes in between encounters) and a Long Rest after six.

The objection to this approach is that it makes rests an entirely dissociated mechanic.  You are keeping the rest economy consistent with the gamist encounter design principles, but there is no consistent thing happening in the world that is triggering the recovery of PC resources--no consistent amount of time passing, no consistent PC action.  The degree to which this bothers you is a matter of personal taste.  It never really bothered me running 13th Age, but I see why people object to it on principle.  It also removes any sort of tactical thinking on the part of the players with regard to rests, as they just happen automatically.

On the other side, there is the "gritty realism" approach described in the Dungeon Masters Guide, which requires eight hours of sleep for a Short Rest and 7 days of rest for a Long Rest.  My problem here is with the 7 days for a Long Rest, as I think it creates a new set of pacing problems for stories.  If the PCs have to stop cold their adventuring for an entire week to heal up, it's hard to maintain any sense of tension and urgency.  And if you as the DM contrive to prevent the PCs from taking Long Rests in the name of maintaining tension and urgency, I think players will eventually become resentful, as at the end of the day 5e is about using your cool character abilities.

The final approach I've seen is in Cubicle 7's wonderful (but, at least for now, out of print) Adventures in Middle Earth, which is built on the 5e chassis.  AiME keeps the basic time lengths for rests, but adds the restriction that a Long Rest can only occur in places where the PCs have "safety, comfort, and tranquility."  In other words, no Long Rests in the wilderness, or in dungeons, because those environments are unsafe/uncomfortable/disturbing.  In other words, you can basically only take a Long Rest in a protected place like an inn, or (in Middle Earth terms) some place like Rivendell or Lothlorien.  I like this a lot, and it makes perfect sense (and is very thematic) for Middle Earth stories, but I think it is also a little too punishing for most standard 5e campaigns to say no long rests at all during wilderness journeys.

So, taking all of that together, here are my Rest rules.  

• A Short Rest is eight hours of sleep, as per the gritty realism rules;
• A Long Rest requires: 
• 48 hours of uninterrupted rest or
• 24 hours of uninterrupted rest if the PCs are in a place with "safety, comfort, and tranquility" as per AiME--their homes, an inn, a castle of a friendly noble, etc. 

What I like about this scheme is that it incentivizes players to look for places of safety, without making it completely impossible to get Long Rests in a wilderness or other unfriendly environment.  It has the advantage of being very easy to explain in-game--it's not hard to see why resting in a place of comfort and security is more refreshing than camping in the wilderness.  It also keeps things moving in-game--"you've rescued the daughter of the local baron and returned her to her family.  After a day off to recover while taking advantage of the hospitality of the baron, you are off to continue your quest for the Crown of MacGuffin.  Reset to full health and spells."  Finally, I think this hits a good middle point between the base rules on one hand and the "gritty realism" or AiME rules on the other.  

One quick note--I would allow a Ranger to make a Survival Check to create a "place of safety" in the wilderness in their favored terrain as part of the Natural Explorer class feature.

Experience Points

There are two basic problems with XP in 5e.  First, RAW, the only thing you get XP for is killing things, which strongly incentivizes "murder hobo" play and disincentivizes the other "pillars of play" that are much talked about in 5e but not really mechanically supported.  Second, while 5e is better about this than previous editions, counting out XP from different enemies defeated by the PCs is a pain in the ass for the DM, with little obvious upside to anyone.

On the flip side, many folks (including the Adventurer's League, 5e's organized play campaign) have abandoned XP altogether and have gone with a story milestone approach, in which PCs gain levels after progressing through a pre-set amount of story content (FWIW, 13th Age works this way as well).  Story milestones are, in my opinion, lazy design, as they don't really reward anything other than showing up to play the game.

So, here I would borrow some ideas from other fantasy games.  This particular scheme is based on Dungeon World via Adam Koebel, and it happens to be similar to the approach used in Forbidden Lands (which I reviewed here).  At the end of the session, the DM asks each player six questions about what their PC did during the session.  For every question that the player answers "yes," the PC gets 1 XP.  The questions are:

• Did you overcome a challenging enemy? 
• Did you gain a magic item or other significant treasure?
• Did you discover a new location, secret, or piece of interesting lore?
• Did you gain a valuable NPC ally?
• Did you express a unique element of your Race, Class, or Background?
• Did you express your Bonds, Flaws, Ideals, or Alignment in a way that complicated your life?

The first four questions are group oriented (i.e. the PC doesn't have to overcome the challenging enemy alone to get credit), while the last two are more individual.  You can only get one XP per category per session--so, if you defeat two challenging enemies in a session, you still only get 1 XP.

To advance to a level, PCs must acquire XP equal to their current level + 6.  Once they hit that mark, those XP are "spent" and the PC level's up, with any left-over carrying over as a head-start on future advancement.  I find that the simplest way to handle things, but if you wanted to keep the D&D standard of constantly increasing XP, you could easily do that (i.e., Level 2 requires 7 total XP, Level 3 requires 15 XP, Level 4 requires 24 XP, etc.).  "Current level + 6" is also a flexible metric that the DM can tweak to control the speed of advancement.  One note here is that because you can only get 1 XP per category per session, if your sessions are short, the PCs will gain XP faster relative to story elements, so it might make sense to increase the thresholds in that case.

I think this system does two things.  First, it rewards, and thus incentivizes, a wide variety of player behavior and play situations.  A tense diplomatic negotiation with zero combat and heavy RP can earn just as much XP as a kick-in-the-door dungeon crawl.  Second, it allows the DM to completely abandon the tedious task of adding up all the XP from all the monsters and then dividing it by the number of players, especially if the DM is doing that with an eye to maintaining some kind of advancement pacing.  The questions take 5 minutes at the end of the session, the numbers are small and easy to keep track of, and players know exactly what the need to do to gain XP.

1st and 2nd Level

As I previewed here, I don't like low-level 5e play very much.  Bounded accuracy means that you can use the same spectrum of enemies at 3rd level than you can at first, except that fights at 3rd level are more fun and more consistent than they are at 1st.  Plus, a PC doesn't get the full scope of character abilities until (depending on the class) 3rd level.  To be fair, everyone from Mearls on down says that 1st and 2nd level are basically the D&D version of a video game tutorial, except that the rules don't really reflect that if you look at how much XP, and thus how many fights, it takes to go through those levels.  *Shakes Fist at the Sky.*

So, I would handle 1st and 2nd level the following way.  If I was playing with an experienced group of 5e players, I would skip it altogether and have them make 3rd level characters.  If I was dealing with people new to 5e, I would start at first level, but make the first two sessions explicitly tutorial by setting the XP threshold for advancement at 1 XP, and awarding 1 XP if the PCs did any of the things on the normal XP list.  So, a campaign would basically have two tutorial sessions to slowly on-board the new D&D players to the game and their characters, and then when they get to session 3/level 3 the real game begins.  I would also allow unlimited class rebuilds through the end of 3rd level for new players, so that a player is not stuck with a suite of options they don't really like.  So, if a new player who starts with a wild magic Sorcerer and then decides after a couple of sessions they don't like the Sorcerer or wild magic mechanics, I would let them just pick something else at any time before hitting 4th level.

Inspiration

Last one is inspiration.  My problem with Inspiration is that I hate mechanics that empower/require the DM/GM to grade a player's roleplaying and give some benefit based on that grade.  I think it is disempowering to players, while putting the DM in a weird power position--after all, the players don't get to grade how well the DM is roleplaying the NPCs.  In addition, if the concern is getting PCs to role-play at all and/or making Ideals/Bonds/Flaws meaningful, the XP mechanics I sketched out takes care of that problem while putting the judging in the hands of the players themselves.

The simplest thing to do here is just cut Inspiration out altogether, which is what I normally do, as PCs in 5e are pretty robust for the most part and don't really need the free Advantage.  Instead, I would port over a variant of the "Fight in Spirit" rule from 13th Age.  When a PCs is unconscious or otherwise unavailable during a combat round, on what would be their turn (in addition to rolling Death Saves, if necessary), the player of the unconscious PC can narrate how they are or have bolstered one of the other PCs in their current situation.  The bolstered PC then gets a floating Advantage that they must use sometime in that encounter or it is lost.  An out-of-action player can only bolster a particular PC once per encounter, but if they are out of action for multiple rounds they can bolster multiple PCs.

What I like about this rule and the original "Fight in Spirit" rule is that it keeps players of unconscious or otherwise non-participating PCs engaged in what is going on at the table.  Rolling a Death Save takes a few seconds, and otherwise their turn is skipped.  Now, they have something to do.  It also somewhat cushions the death-spiral that tends to occur when one PC drops in a combat. 

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 Theory, Part 1--Quest, Rules-Light Games, and GM Restraints

This was going to be a review of Quest, the new hotness in the tabletop RPG scene in the last month or so.  Quest is a game that takes a number of big swings, biggest of which is having the designer announce that their goal was to "overtake D&D" as the ttrpg fantasy leader.  And, having reviewed the rules (which are mostly available under a Creative Commons License), I came pretty quickly to the conclusion that Quest is a game that very effectively and skillfully creates a play experience that I am not particularly interested in.  It's here, on the level of goals, on the level of what this game is trying to do and why it is trying to do it, that I think Quest is incredibly interesting, notwithstanding my personal tastes.  And so, rather than review Quest in the normal way, I would like to use it as a jumping off point to talk about the design theory that it embodies.

The first thing you see immediately in looking at Quest is how rules light it is.  There are no attributes and no skills, and all checks are resolved using a single die roll that is read according to a fixed chart that is reminiscent of Powered by the Apocalypse games, with added "critical success and failure" levels tacked on to either end.  There are classes and a list of powers that drive play, but that's more or less it--the combat rules in the CC License doc is, by a generous count, two pages long with lots of white space between the columns.  I wracked my brain to think of a lighter game system than Quest, and the only thing I could come up with John Harper's Lasers and Feelings.  It truly pegs the meter on the light-weight side.

What interests me about this is what the designer, TC Sottek, is saying about ttrpgs by and through Quest.  If you make a game this light, and you say that your goal is to overtake D&D, what you are saying is that you think the overwhelming majority of that rules structure in D&D is unnecessary and should, or at least could, be discarded.  What's interesting about this claim is that, at least to some degree, the designers of 5th Edition D&D agree, or at least identify with the sentiment behind it.  Here's what Mike Mearls said about the design goals of 5th Edition:

“D&D’s 3.5 and 4th editions were very much driven by an anxiety about controlling the experience of the game, leaving as little as possible to chance,” Mearls explained in a Twitter thread. “The designers aimed for consistency of play from campaign to campaign, and table to table. The fear was that an obnoxious player or DM would ruin the game, and that would drive people away from it. The thinking was that if we made things as procedural as possible, people would just follow the rules and have fun regardless of who they played with.” . . .

“With fifth edition,” Mearls explained, “We assumed that the DM was there to have a good time, put on an engaging performance, and keep the group interested, excited, and happy. It’s a huge change, because we no longer expect you to turn to the book for an answer. We expect the DM to do that.”

The design team referred to the goal as “DM empowerment.” The phrase may be misleading, because the goal of DM empowerment is not to tickle a DM’s power fantasies. DM empowerment lets DMs fill gaps in the rules—and sometimes override the rules with their own judgement. DM empowerment lets your wizard use spells outside of combat, among other things.

In other words, having a robust rules-set, and especially having a robust set of rules that bind the GM, hamstrings the ability of the GM to run the game, tell a fun story, and have a good time at the table.  And there is no question that the wrong sort of rules can be an impediment to all of those things.  But, as I think about my experience of running games of late, and looking at some systems that push in the opposite direction, I think this line of thinking is misguided.  I don't think fewer rules and more "DM empowerment" leads to a better play experience, perhaps counter-intuitively especially for the GM.

What do I mean by that?  Let's start with the experience of playing a board game.  In this context, it doesn't matter whether it is a competitive board game like Monopoly or Twilight Imperium, or a cooperative style game like Pandemic or Gloomhaven--the basic experience of play is that each person is trying to achieve the best outcome possible as seen from the perspective of the posture that the game puts them in, within the constraints imposed by the rules.  So, if I am a player in Twilight Imperium, I am attempting to achieve ten Victory Points (or 14, if we are all masochists) for my Faction before any other Faction gets ten VP, according to the structures the game establishes for how VP are earned in play.  Getting the best outcome I can under the rules is where the "game" part of playing a game lies, and is where the fun of the game is found, distinct from the social enjoyment and other externalities of playing a board game.

Now apply that to a tabletop RPG.  The same basic framework, at least at this extremely high level of generality, works for the players of a ttrpg--I want to succeed at my objectives as I define them, within the constraints of the rules, limited perhaps only by the (often unspoken) caveat that I must work and play well with my fellow players.  But, for the GM, it doesn't translate at all.  If a GM approached his or her job the way you are supposed to approach a game of Twilight Imperium, the game would break down almost immediately.  This is because, in large measure, the GM is wholly unconstrained in terms of what game play elements he or she can introduce into the narrative of the game.  "Rocks falls, everyone dies," is a cliche of GM dickery, but it's not against the rules.

On the other hand, this unconstrained ability of the GM to introduce narrative elements is the thing that makes ttprgs so interesting, and is the thing that can't be replicated in other game forms.  You don't need a fixed scenario, because you have a live person behind the screen that can react dynamically to what happens as the game goes forward.  If you constrain that freedom of action of the GM too much, then you might as well play Gloomhaven, and let the GM have the fun of being a player.  There is, and their needs to be, a power imbalance in ttrpgs, at least those that use a GM.  

[As an aside, I think this discussion of power imbalance is separate from the important conversation about safety at the ttrpg table.  It is certainly the case that GMs can use the inherent power imbalance as part of creating an abusive situation, but even GMs are perfectly respectful to the players at all times still have a measure of power that the players don't have.  I think this is important to say, because Quest puts the safety issues at the forefront of its presentation, and nothing I am saying here is a criticism of those efforts.]

So, the GM needs the freedom to design the world, but you don't want the GM to be a jerk and blow up the play experience by trying to "win" in the normal way.  What do you do?  Well, in a sense, the GM plays with his or her hands behind the back, crafting an play experience that is not about "winning" in the normal way, but one that rides the line of challenging the players while keeping the game going.  That is, or at least can be, a very fun experience for the GM on its own merits.  But it is not really the same experience as "playing a game" in the way that playing Twilight Imperium is, or even the experience of being a player in a ttrpg is.  Rather than think about "playing the game," the GM in this context is more of a "story concierge" for the rest of the table.  Notice the way Mearls frames it: "We assumed that the DM was there to have a good time, put on an engaging performance, and keep the group interested, excited, and happy."  Other than "have a good time," which is undefined here, all of the other elements are player-facing and service oriented--the job of the GM is to do stuff for the players, not for himself or herself.

Again, being a "story concierge" can be a lot of fun.  But so is playing a game.  And while you don't want to constrain the GM's freedom of action altogether, one way to maintain the experience of playing the game for the GM is to constrain the GM's freedom of action in certain respects.  Yes, the GM can decide which monsters to put into an encounter (constrained by story concierge considerations), but once that decision is made the way the monsters play in the fight is constrained by the rules.  I tie my hand behind my back by only selecting level-appropriate enemies to oppose the PCs, but having done so I now do everything within the rules to play those enemies for maximum challenge.  Once the pieces are on the board, it is a game between the GM and the players in the context of the particular combat.  And that's fun.

All of which filters back to why I think the Mearls quote is wrong-headed.  Not all restrictions on the freedom of action of the GM are good, but the good ones create space to allow the GM to "let loose" and play a game.  Conversely, taking away all of the restrictions and giving the GM unlimited creative freedom force the GM into 24/7 story concierge mode.  If you want to say that the way 3rd and 4th edition tried to constrain GM freedom of action via rules didn't work, then I get that.  But I think the idea that restrictions on the GM imposed via rules are a bad thing to be avoided in toto is one I can't agree with.  Restricting the GM with rules can make the game more fun, especially for the GM, because it makes it more like a game.  

But that of course leads to the question of what sort of constraints on the GM are good ones, ones that make the game fun for the GM will still holding on to enough narrative freedom to make the game work.  There are many examples across the different game systems, but in the next post I want to talk about three of them that I really like and I think are really interesting--Modiphius's 2d20 system (Conan, Star Trek Adventures, and Infinity are the games in that series I am familiar with), Torg and Torg: Eternity (more specifically the Drama Deck), and the neo-OSR experience of Forbidden Lands.  

Fantasy Religions Primer, Part II--Eberron

For those not familiar with Eberron, it is the creation of Keith Baker, and was submitted to Wizards of the Coast as part of an open call for new D&D campaign settings.  It was first published in 2004 for 3.5e, republished for 4e, and has now come out in the form of Eberron: Rising from the Last War.  This is exciting news for me, because for my money, Eberron has by far the most interesting religious system of any WotC campaign setting, and it's not particularly close.  In particular, it highlights, and then addresses, a couple of basic issues that any fantasy religion must grapple with.

1.  Religion Is Not the Same as "The Gods."  So, let's begin at the beginning.  There are definitely people who will disagree with what I am about to say, but I would define "religion" (both in the real world, and in a fantasy world) to mean "a system or structure that promotes a metaphysical idea or set of ideas that inform the way a member of the system or structure views the world."  Said another way, religions have three parts (1) some claim or set of claims about the world that transcends simple materialism (20th Century theologian Paul Tillich called this an "Ultimate Concern"); (2) some organizing principle for people who hold the claim; and (3) some way in which that claim impacts the lives of the those hold it.

Notice that none of those three elements require or necessarily involve some belief in a god or gods.  The gods or some single god may provide that source of Ultimate Concern, but it doesn't have to be that way.  Religious systems do not have to be grounded in deities, but instead in some other set of principles or ideas.  Buddhism, for example, isn't necessarily concerned with divine entities (depending on the sect of Buddhism).  More controversially, I would argue that many comprehensive philosophical and political systems, like Marxism or Fascism (or, if you want to be even edgier, Capitalism), are religions that either officially reject the existence of divine entities, or are indifferent to their existence.

Generally, fantasy religions are hyper-focused on gods and goddesses, and assume that "religion" is co-equal with "the gods."  Eberron, however, is not like that, and takes a much broader view of what religion is and can be.  Depending on how you group them, there are eight different "religions" in Eberron--the Sovereign Host (including the Dark Six), the Church of the Silver Flame, the Blood of Vol, the Cults of the Dragon Below, the Path of Light, the Undying Court, the Keepers of the Past, and the various druidic sects.  Of these, only the Sovereign Host is focused on the gods and worship of the gods.  While the others might recognize the existence of the gods in some general way (especially the Church of the Silver Flame), they are all organized around very different "Ultimate Concerns" than the gods and doing their will.  In some cases (such as the Cults of the Dragon Below and the Undying Court), the focus is on veneration of powerful beings, but beings that are not "gods" in the way that the Sovereign Host are understood as "gods."  For the others, the Ultimate Concern is more in the direction of a philosophical principle or principles, without much reference at all to the gods.

This works in the context of Eberron in large measure because of the nature of the gods of the Sovereign Host, about which more in a bit.  But I think the bigger point is that Eberron provides a more varied set of religious ideas for the players to interact with.  Because the religions of Eberron line up with philosophies or ideas instead of simply "[Blank], the god/goddess of [Blank]," there is more room for players to interact with these structures.  Even some of the darker religions, like the Blood of Vol, can have reasons for non-evil PCs to be a part of them (more on them later).

2.  The Sovereign Host, Epistomology and Hinduism.  In the last post about the religion of Critical Role's Exandria, I talked about the impact that direct access to knowledge of the divine has on the religious structure of a fantasy society.  Eberron is well aware of this dynamic, and goes in the other direction than the one taken by Exandria by closing off this channel of direct knowledge.  You cannot speak directly to the deities of the Sovereign Host, period.  As a result, it is an open question in the setting whether or not the deities of the Sovereign Host really exist at all.

In something like the Forgotten Realms, atheism would be a kind of mental disorder.  Going to the wayback machine, during the "Avatar Crisis" in FR, the gods and goddess were walking around, talking to folks, getting into fights, etc.  Saying "I don't believe in Bane" is sort of like saying "I don't believe Donald Trump actually exists"--it's nonsensical.  In Eberron, atheism is a completely valid worldview, as there can never be the sort of direct interaction with a discrete divine entity like "Bane" that you see in the FR.  The most fervent believers in the Sovereign Host never promise that Dol Dorn is going to show up in some tangible form and do things.

Even more interesting is the fact that the theology of the Sovereign Host complicates the entire notion of "believing" in the Sovereign Host.  A key tenet of the Sovereign Host's faith is the "Doctrine of Universal Sovereignty"--"As is the world, so are the gods. As are the gods, so is the world."  In other words, when something is born in the world, it is not simply that Arawai blesses that event, but that it is a manifestation of Arawai.  To a believer in the Sovereign Host, saying that you "don't believe" in Arawai is to say that you "don't believe" in things being born, which they would say (rightly, at least accepting these premises) is nonsensical.  To what extent the distinction between "Arawai" and "things being born" is a "real" distinction, or whether Arawai is simply a personification of the natural function of things being born, probably doesn't matter all that much, including to believers in the Sovereign Host.

On the flip side, the "Doctrine of the Universal Host" states that the different members of the Sovereign Host are, to some degree, different expressions of the unitary principle of the Host itself (one of the formulations is "the Host is the name, the gods are the letters of that name").  This is really interesting on a number of levels, especially as the Sovereign Host has the rival "Dark Six" of evil deities.  Presumably those entities are also a manifestation of this universal principle as well, though, I am not aware of any canon discussion of this point.  This is in keeping with broader themes in Eberron that good and evil are not hermetically separated in the way they are in Tolkein and his somewhat Manichean derivatives.

I hesitate to say this, because I am not deeply familiar with this tradition, but the Sovereign Host religion strikes me as a lot like Hinduism.  Hinduism has a multiplicity of deities, but unlike, say, the Greek pantheon, there is assertion that there is a fundamental unity to these divine principles.  From a game perspective, this allows you to have the simplicity and accessibility of polytheism ("I worship the sun god Dol Arrah"), while having a more interesting and philosophically coherent metaphysics "behind that" if you care about that sort of thing.   

3.  The Catholic Church problem.  D&D, and most of the fantasy genre, draws inspiration from medieval Western Europe.  And medieval Western Europe is incomprehensible without the Roman Catholic Church, the most powerful and most influential single organization in medieval Western European society.  And this is a problem for the fantasy genre, because most of fantasy worlds do not have any institution, let alone a religious institution, that takes the place of the Roman Catholic Church.  They replace the religious dimensions of the RCC with their fantasy religion, which is fine, but that still leaves the social and cultural dimensions of the RCC without any analog.  This leaves something of a "church sized hole" in these quasi-medieval societies.

Now, this can be fixed--Midgard does a good job of hearkening back to pre-Christian religious traditions and models as a baseline for an alternate medieval history.  But one way or the other, it needs to be addressed, and the easiest way to address it is to create a religious institution that fits into a similar social and cultural space as the Roman Catholic Church.  In Eberron, that institution is the Church of the Silver Flame.

Now, I am aware that Eberron inventor Keith Baker has been very insistent that the Church of the Silver Flame is not a Catholic Church expy.  And he's right, in the sense that the beliefs of the Church of the Silver Flame are dissimilar to the beliefs of the Roman Catholic Church (Baker analogizes the CSF to the Jedi Order from Star Wars, and while I'm not sure that totally works, it's closer than the theology of the RCC).  But socially and culturally, the Church of the Silver Flame is a clear RCC equivalent.  For one thing, it has a very tight organizational structure, with a hierarchy of levels of leadership (a hierarchy and levels of leadership that, it should be said, use all of the same terminology as the Roman Catholic Church).  Most people have some sense of what a bishop is, what templars are, etc.  Those things feel very consistent with the medieval-ish fantasy of D&D, but are actually somewhat hard to work into D&D in any logical way without having all of the rest of the monotheistic superstructure that gives rise to those elements.

Fantasy settings tend not to go for full monotheism.  Some of that has to do with a fear of making it too on-the-nose to real world religions and risk offending people.  But I think the bigger problem is a game problem--monotheism is premised on the idea that there is only one divine principle that actually exists, which runs against the idea of lots of antagonist factions with Real Ultimate Power that the heroes need to defeat.  You can make those factions some variation of fallen angels or Satan--that's what Tolkien more or less did for Middle Earth with Morgoth and Sauron.  Or you could go in the dualist direction and have a good god and an evil god.  If you are looking for inspiration there, Zoroastrianism is a real good source to mine, as it is somewhere in between the dualism and fallen angels choices and has all sorts of cool angels and demons from its mythology.

The Church of the Silver Flame avoids this problem by making the object of veneration, the Silver Flame, not a god.  The Silver Flame is a created entity, originally formed from the souls of powerful entities of good, the couatls.  It then takes on a modern form through the effort of a human hero, Tira Miron, who joins with the Flame to trap a demon lord who would destroy the earth.  The result is that, as Baker says, there is basically no similarities between the Church of the Silver Flame and medieval Catholicism in terms of the the content of belief, but there is strong parallelism in terms of the structure.  Both have a singular focus of veneration, both have a central person who is the clear founder of the faith, both have a strong moral narrative that orders the lives of believers.  Because all the "buildings" of medieval Catholicism are still preserved, you can port over stories and conflicts from the real world into Eberron without creating anachronisms and incongruities.  All you have to do is change the stuff inside the buildings.

In other words, the Church of the Silver Flame lets you do monotheism without actually having to do monotheism and take on all of the metaphysical problems monotheism creates for a fantasy adventure world.  It's a brilliant solution to a challenging problem.  I would have said the Church of the Silver Flame is my favorite part of the Eberron religious landscape, but I keeping going back and forth between it and the other side of the coin--the Blood of Vol. 

4.  Let's Talk About the Afterlife and the Blood of Vol.  In the Forgotten Realms, when you die, you go to a purgatorial space called the Fugue Plain, where you will eventually get picked up by your deity and taken to the home of said deity.  Thereafter, you will exist in that space in a manner consistent with your deity and home plane's basic ethos--if you worship a Lawful Good god, you end up in the Lawful Good plane (the Seven Heavens, I think) and have an eternal Lawful Good lifestyle with your Lawful Good patron.

This is fine, and there are some interesting things in there about what happens if you betray your god or are just a lousy worshiper (you soul gets plastered into a wall that protects the city of the dead, and you eventually disintegrate into nothingness).  But, I think it is kinda boring.  And it opens the door to weird sorts of Pascal's Wagers--if I like the idea of frolicking in glades for eternity, it is rational for me to worship the deity whose afterlife is in the frolicking in glades plane.  It makes the afterlife a transactional consumer product, as opposed to an act of faith.

In Eberron, when you die, your soul goes to Dolurrh, the plane of the underworld.  Dolurrh is similar to the underworld described in the Odyssey--a grey place, where you just exist without particular meaning and purpose.  Eventually, you just kinda fade away into nothingness, as you lose any desire to continue to exist.

Now, two things about Dolurrh jump out at me.  First, it provides an excellent explanation for why Raise Dead and Resurrection spells work the way they do according to the D&D rules.  The longer your soul is in Dolurrh, the less "real" you are, and so the harder it is to pull you back.

More importantly, that afterlife sucks.  And everyone in Eberron understands that this outcome sucks.  As a result, many of the religions of Eberron explicitly react to this basic, objective fact that the afterlife is terrible.  In the Silver Flame faith, the idea is that after you fade away, some measure of your vital essence is incorporated into the Silver Flame, and so you live on in a de-personalized way, strengthening the great project.  One of the two major religious traditions of the elves preserves ancestors (or, at least, important ancestors) in an essentially undead state so that they don't have to go to Dolurrh.

But, the best reaction to the reality of death in Eberron is the Blood of Vol.  The Blood of Vol teaches that there is divinity within you, waiting to be unlocked.  This divinity allows you to transcend and skip Dolurrh, if only you follow the teachings of the faith.  In light of the nature of Dolurrh, this is seems a pretty attractive possibility, and it makes complete sense to me why people in-universe would be attracted to the faith.  Now, the catch is that the Blood of Vol is actually run by a cabal of intelligent undead.  And the mysterious leader of the Blood of Vol is trying to make herself un-undead in order to harness her massive dormant powers.  But, even here, the faith has a logical explanation--becoming an intelligent undead, while dooming yourself to a pale shadow of the divinity possible under the faith, is still way better than Dolurrh.  Those intelligent undead, according to Blood of Vol teachings, are martyrs who have voluntarily sacrificed potential transcendence in order to guide and help the rest of the faithful.

Make no mistake, the Blood of Vol is very clearly a "bad guy" religion.  But it is a bad guy religion that has a pitch that seems utterly plausible, even relatively compelling, in light of how lousy Dolurrh is.  It seems to me completely logical why someone might sign up for the Blood of Vol, and even accept the idea that the head of your congregation is a vampire ("I admire so much that Count Dracula was willing to take on the burden of undeath to lead and teach all of us.  Poor guy.  I'm glad to offer him some of my blood as a token of my appreciation.")  While most "bad guy" fantasy religions struggle to explain why anyone would follow them other than for naked power opportunities, it makes perfect sense why regular, non-megalomaniacal people would be devoted followers of the Blood of Vol.  And, because that's true, it creates interesting moral and ethical challenges--sure, the vampire boss is a clear black hat, but his minions are just folks looking for something to believe in that will save them from a slow fading away after death.

The fact that, at the end of the day, it's a scam doesn't undermine this complexity and nuance.  Indeed, the Blood of Vol reminds me very much of a certain real world religion that has itself been accused of being a scam, which I shall not name due to its noted litigious nature.  And, as demonstrated by the significant numbers of people who are part of that faith, the fact that you might be a scam doesn't stop people from believing in your teachings.

*****
So, bottom line--Eberron's religious system is awesome, by far the best and most interesting of the official D&D settings.  It has great conceptual diversity, it smartly addresses some of the pitfalls of trying to match up the medieval source material and D&D-isms, and it provides interesting, "gameable" ideas for using religion in the campaign.  There is lots of other good stuff about Eberron, but its take on religion is the highlight for me.

Fantasy Religions Primer, Part I--The Religion of Critical Role

The great Matt Colville had a stream a while back in which he designed (or began to design) a pantheon of deities for his campaign setting, which got me thinking about fantasy religions and what makes them good or not.  So I'm going to give more thoughts about that in this post, but before I get into that, I want to begin with how Colville began his stream.  Colville made the claim that you don't actually need a fully developed pantheon of deities or a complex religious system for a fantasy game, especially D&D or one of its variants.  After all, the game mechanical component for clerics is a set of wholly abstract "domains"--all you really need to do as a cleric is select the "Light" domain, and you never have to worry about the gods or worship or whatever (that's exactly how 13th Age tells you to handle it, by the way).

Colville is 100% right.  If fantasy religions are not something that the DM/GM is interested in, it can be completely hand-waived away.  There are a ton of things that are just hand-waived in fantasy worlds--here's a great series on all of the problems of D&D economies, for example--and it can absolutely be done with religion, as 13th Age proves.  Or, in some cases an even easier solution than hand-waving is to just pick something "off the shelf" and stick it in the campaign.  That's what Matt Mercer did when designing his campaign world for Critical Role--all the gods are from the 4e default pantheon, plus Sarenrae from Pathfinder/Golarion (I noticed he got rid of the proper names for those gods and goddesses in the Tal'Dorei campaign book, presumably for copyright reasons, but I have to say I like the titles they came up with better than the original names).  The fact that Mercer didn't come up with the Raven Queen didn't in any way lessen the storytelling he was able to do around the Raven Queen.  World builders, especially folks starting out, can easily get into the trap of thinking they have to build everything from scratch, making the task seem overwhelming.  Instead, I think the way to go is to work on what is interesting to you and then just borrow the rest from someplace else, or just ignore it and move on.

So, you don't need to think deeply about fantasy religions and how they would function.  But some people are really into religions as an aspect of world building, and I am one of those people.  When I am not writing about D&D, I am writing about real-world religious issues, and faith is a big part of my life, so it is not surprising that this is an area of interest for me.  When I get a chance to play (as opposed to running the game, which is most of the time), I tend to play clerics or paladins, and I am one of those players who does care about the temple rituals and mechanics of the fictional faith, not just the domain and cool powers my character gets.  And while Colville is right that much of the world building surrounding religion is really for the benefit of the world builder and not the players/the game, you should do the things that are fun for you, and fun for me is thinking about how to make the fantasy religion seem as "real" as possible.

So, this series is going to take a look at fantasy religions, how they work, and some things to think about when you are designing a fantasy religion or implementing a pre-existing one into a campaign.  To make things a little more comprehensible, I'm going to focus on five fantasy religions as exemplars--the religious system of Exandria as described by Matt Mercer in Critical Role, the "Faerunian pantheon" for the Forgotten Realms (set forth, most recently, in The Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide) and the religions of Eberron, both by Wizards of the Coast; the gods and religions of Midgard by Kobold Press; and the OG of religious presentation, Glorantha.  I could have picked others, either inside or outside of the greater D&D sphere, but I went with those because the Forgotten Realms is the default campaign world for D&D 5e, and thus the Faerunian pantheon is the default religious system for people playing the most popular tabletop RPG, Critical Role is the most public vehicle for D&D and shows how religions can be used in the context of actual game play, and the other three are, in my judgment, particularly interesting and/or outstanding implementations of fantasy religions.

But, to begin, I want to talk about Critical Role and how Mercer uses gods and religion in his world.  Note that I'm going to try to avoid spoilers as much as possible, but some of these discussions require some generalize spoilers of broad show themes.  I am also far, far behind on Season Two of Critical Role, so if Mercer has changed things up in his presentation of religion, I will likely miss all of that--this is primarily coming from Season One.

As mentioned above, Mercer borrowed the "Dawn War" pantheon from 4e and dropped them into Exandria.  The Dawn War pantheon itself is a mix of deities from previous D&D sources (Moradin, Corellon, Pelor, Bane, Lolth, etc.) with a handful of new entities to fill gaps (like the Raven Queen).  The Dawn War gods and goddesses are perfectly serviceable on their own, but ultimately they are just names on a piece of paper.  What is interesting about the Exandria deities is how they fit into the world and how religion functions for people in the context of the world.

The general presentation is that each deity is worshiped in the context of its own, more or less self-contained religion.  Pike, as a cleric of The Everlight (Sarenrae), is part of a church of the Everlight that is dedicated only to the Everlight.  Pike's religion is different from the religion of Lady Kima, who is part of the Church of the Platinum Dragon (Bahamut), with different rituals, edicts, organizational structure, etc.  Now, because the ethos of the Everlight and the ethos of the Platinum Dragon are similar, or at least not in direct conflict most of the time, these two religious institutions can cooperate and co-exist, as we see in a place like Vassalheim.  This is because, in part, it seems pretty clear that the members of the Church of the Everlight accept the idea that the Platinum Dragon exists as a separate divine entity, and visa versa.  Some folks are on Team Everlight, and some folks are on Team Platinum Dragon, and while I would imagine that folks on Team Everlight would prefer that more folks got on board with Team Everlight, the existence of folks worshiping the Platinum Dragon does not raise any internal theological problems for the Church of Everlight.  Likewise, while the worshipers of the Betrayer Gods are bad and opposed by the Church of the Everlight, everyone accepts that the Betrayer Gods actually exist, and are broadly speaking peers to entities like the Everlight in terms of power and scope.

The usual critique raised with a set-up like this is that it doesn't reflect how polytheism functioned in actual historical cultures, and that's true.  But Exandria's religious system as portrayed in the show is not polytheism.  The closest real world technical term is "henotheism," though even there Exandria's system doesn't perfectly line up with the real-world examples usually offered for henotheism because many of those examples (Hinduism of the Vedas, for example) teach that all of the different gods are ultimately different manifestations of the same unitary principle (whereas, again, it seems pretty clear that the Everlight and the Platinum Dragon are "objectively" different entities).  Actually the closest, if controversial, parallel to Exandria's religion is the way pre-exilic Judaism talks about the God of Israel.  If you read the Book of Exodus without the later, definitively monotheist pre-suppositions of later Judaism, the most neutral interpretation is that the God of Israel is a particular deity for a discrete group of people, one who is better and more awesome than the gods of Egypt, but that the gods of Egypt are real entities with real power.  Exandria's deities lack the hard-edged exclusivism of the God of Israel of Exodus (at least, in general), but the concept is basically the same.

So, there are some parallels to what Mercer is doing to the real world.  But, much more to the point, this system makes a great deal of sense as a fantasy religious system for a D&D game, both from the point of view of the logic of people in the fictional world and from a meta-game perspective of real people sitting down to a table to play D&D.

From the meta-game perspective, the primary advantage is that religion in Exandria more or less works the way religion works in the real world now, or at least in the broadly pluralistic West.  If you live in the 21st Century West, you are familiar with a religious framework in which people are members of one of a set of discrete religions, each of which has a singular focus of worship, doctrine, organizational structure, and ethos.  Notwithstanding the real distinctions between those religions, by and large they are able to co-exist and work together around broadly similar goals--Episcopalians and Presbyterians and Jews go to different houses of worship, but otherwise generally get along fine and have at least compatible world-views.  That sociology of religion is the result of a complex series of ideas and events, all of which entirely anachronistic if projected back onto a quasi-medieval or quasi-ancient world.  But, so what?  It's familiar to the people sitting down to play the game, and doesn't require them to take onboard anything about how actual religions work in the real world outside of their generalized experience.  And if the DM and the players don't really care all that much about religious questions all that much anyway, then you are not adding any unnecessary mental work to anyone.

But there is also in-game logic to this system.  First, the Dawn War pantheon is particularly well-suited for this sort of set up, because the different gods and goddesses are both broadly defined and somewhat overlapping.  In doing so, it avoids the problem of explaining why non-adventurers would ever be members of a particular god's church.  Consider the deity Bane as portrayed in the Forgotten Realms campaign setting.  Bane is the god of tyranny and hatred, and (at least at one point--I'm not up on current Realms canon) was the exclusive religion of the city of Zhentil Keep.  Now, clerics of Bane make perfect sense, both from an in-world sense and from a story sense, as they are part of a powerful organization that believes it should rule everything in the name of a god who should rule everything.  But imagine being a shopkeeper living in Zhentil Keep--how does worshiping Bane benefit you or impact your life?  You could imagine buying into a kind of quasi-nationalism or manifest destiny idea--we are going to rule everything in the name of our god, and I am part of that larger struggle.  But manifest destiny doesn't put food on the table or insure that childbirth will be safe or any of the other real-world tasks that occupy the bulk of people's lives.  If the religion of Bane is only about tyranny and hatred, it doesn't really speak much to the day-to-day experience of an ordinary person.  And if ordinary people would never join your church, then it isn't much of a church.  These narrow faiths work better as cults, consisting of only dedicated elite worshipers.

By contrast, the non-Betrayer Gods in Exandria mostly cover a wide set of abstract ideas.  The Platinum Dragon is about justice and a certain vision of order and stability; so is Erathis the Lawbearer, and Moradin the Allhammer.  Those visions are probably different, but all of them could be the basis for a vision of society and social order, and so you could imagine any of them being a respectable religion for the Exandrian equivalent of the dutiful, upwardly mobile bourgeoisie.  Likewise, farmers might follow the Dawnfather or the Wildmother or maybe even the Archeart.  The only rather narrow portfolio among the Prime Deities is the Raven Queen, and even there life and death is fundamental to the experience and world view of people, so it would have broad applicability.  The point is that these religions are broad enough to encompass regular people doing regular things, and thus they make sense for regular people to belong to.  And the evil Betrayer Gods like Bane are more like cults, which makes sense in light of their more narrow focuses.  Many folks will not care about any of this, but to me this adds verisimilitude to the setting--a place where people live, as opposed to simply a platform for adventurers.

The other reason this structure makes sense in the context of a D&D campaign setting is that it takes into account the radically different religious epistomology of a fantasy world.  All real world religions must grapple with limitations on knowledge of the divine--how do we know about God/the gods?  In a D&D world, this complex question becomes much simpler, because you can just ask the gods direct questions and have at least the possibility of getting direct answers.  The level of mystery surrounding divine things is radically reduced, at least so long as you retain the default D&D assumptions about things like planar travel, spells like Contact Other Plane, and the like (which is why, as we will see, Eberron and Midgard both charge those default assumptions in order to preserve the elements of mystery).

Sure, the gods seem to intentionally give limited or incomplete information to worshipers--the folks on Lady Kima's team that went into Kraghammer probably would have benefited from more detailed intelligence from the Platinum Dragon beforehand.  But the fact that you can go to the gods and ask them questions suggests that religions in such a world will have more concrete, consistent information about the nature of the gods.  If there was some church somewhere that taught that the Everlight and the Platinum Dragon were actually the same entity, Pike could definitively clear up the matter directly with the Everlight when she spoke to her on the Island of Renewal.  Splinter movements, doctrinal drift, schisms, heresies--all of those things that are common in real-world religions would be much, much less common in a world where powerful religious leaders can just submit disputed questions directly to the source.

Likewise, being a low or mid-level cleric in Exandria (or any other fantasy world where you can talk to the gods directly) is much more like working for the government than it is being a part of the religion as we know it.  If you are a mid-level official in the bureaucracy, you are not directly communicating with the President on a daily basis, but you know that it is possible to ask the leader a question and get a concrete direct answer, even if you must do so through proxies.  In fact, in D&D worlds like Exandria, it is actually easier to do that than it would be in the real world, as the deity can functionally see everything that is going on and talk to multiple people at once.  So, you don't necessarily need to go "up the chain of command" to get your answer, and it would be much harder for the "telephone game" problem to crop up (someone accidentally or intentionally distorting the message that gets passed down from the leader).

This means, in turn, that religions would be much more consistent from place to place and culture to culture.  It makes sense that the worship of the Prime Deities is more or less the same across continents, especially where you have one central locus of religious worship and authority that has endured and maintained continuity from when the gods walked the land, Vassalheim.  But, again, Vassalheim displays a relationship between the gods that is more like the World Council of Churches than like a classic polytheistic pantheon--an alliance of essentially independent organizations as opposed to an interconnected and inter-related set of cults.  This center of gravity for religious practice would reduce cultural differences and drift, because there would be a singular, "objective" reference point for the proper way to follow the Everlight, the Platinum Dragon, et al. 

The bottom line is I think Critical Role's presentation of religion is one of the most sensible and "realistic" presentations of fantasy religion assuming you are working from all of the baseline D&D assumptions.  "Fantasy World Council of Churches" is probably what you would end up getting if the gods were directly accessible, you had an array of multi-cultural, semi-overlapping deities, and long-term continuity of practice and worship.  If you are looking for a model for how to run religion in a campaign world that uses all of the D&D-isms, particularly if you and your players don't want to invest much time or mental bandwidth in the religious system, what Mercer has done is a great place to begin.  It's a great example of "leaning in" to the rules material in building your setting, as opposed to trying to jam a historic model into a fantasy world.