Why Revise?

The question that every D&D blogger has looked at since January is, "what do I hope for in D&D Next?"

Everyone has had a few months now to calm down after the announcement of D&D Next. A few groups have gotten to sample the first public iteration of the rules at conventions or playtest them at home. No one's allowed to openly discuss the nitty-gritty yet, but those NDA restrictions will be relaxed before long, I expect.

I'm going to devote this week to looking at what a new edition of D&D means: the history of new editions, why revision is necessary, the relationship between players and publishers, and the effect of a new edition on players, campaigns, and the gaming community.

Every new edition seeks to fix problems in the previous edition. Whatever those problems are, they need to be big. Fans don't like switching from edition X to edition X+1. A transition can be exciting and it can energize a flagging campaign, but it's also laborious, expensive, and divisive. If the revision doesn't tackle big issues, then it's not worth the players' time, expense, and effort.

The key here—and I'm going to return to this notion more than once—is that those problems tend to bother game designers more than they bother players. Players get accustomed to the game's idiosyncrasies, rough spots, and breakdowns. Some players even come to like them. R&D's tolerance for component failure is lower than the playing public's, for a host of reasons. (Of course, sales play a role, too. I'll delve into that a bit more on Wednesday.)

Let's take a short stroll through past editions and consider each version's problems that the next iteration tried to fix.

OD&D was idiosyncratic and hard to follow. The rulebooks were disorganized, vague, incomplete, and pretty thoroughly amateurish. At the same time, and sometimes for the same reasons, they were also charming and irresistible.

In 1977, TSR published the "blue box" edition, also known as the Holmes edition (after J. Eric Holmes, the book's editor). This wasn't really a revision or an edition change. Instead, it was a cleaned up version of the original three little books organized and presented in a way that made more sense. The blue box played a big role in the explosive growth of the game in the late '70s, because a person could pick up this set and actually understand how to play the game.

That same year saw the release of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Unlike the Holmes box, AD&D was a new game. Its aim was to bring a higher degree of detail and unity to the "do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" attitude that prevailed in the early years of D&D. The increased detail was obvious, but revisions to the game's rules and math were less obvious. The fact that AD&D was functionally a separate game and not just a more detailed version of D&D was never clearly spelled out, so the changes caused a lot of confusion. Even worse, the first book released was the Monster Manual instead of the Players Handbook or Dungeon Masters Guide. Those titles followed in 1978 and 79, respectively. Without the PHB and DMG to put the Monster Manual in context, players naturally assumed that MM was fully compatible with the 1974 and 1977 rules. Plenty of people mixed D&D and AD&D for years, stumbling over the contradictions with varying degrees of patience, without ever grasping that the books weren't meant to be mixed that way.  

The D&D Basic and Expert sets appeared in 1981. Although these looked like a redesign of OD&D/Holmes, Basic/Expert D&D (B/X or BECMI, as it's now known) wasn't simply another clean-up. It more properly stands on its own as a separate game, and in that light, it is the longest-lasting version of D&D. It received numerous polishes and different presentations, but the rules survived with only minor tweaks from 1981 until TSR closed its doors in 1997. This edition has been reincarnated, still largely unchanged, in a host of retroclones such as Labyrinth Lord and Lamentations of the Flame Princess.

In 1989, TSR published AD&D 2nd Edition. We set out to do for AD&D what Holmes had done for OD&D, though it was a much taller order. The goal was to make the game more coherent, eliminate contradictions between the original books and their expansions, and organize all of it in a rational way. 

Third Edition, published in 2000, was the most sweeping revision so far. 2nd Edition AD&D was far more coherent than its predecessor had been, but it still wasn't robust enough to handle all the expansions and evolutions that were eventually hung on it. 3rd Edition sought to address those weaknesses by building a powerful framework that could be stressed any number of ways without breaking. For the most part, it accomplished that goal admirably, and more. Some adjustments were made in 2003, creating version 3.5. But eventually, much of the clarity and playability of this wonderfully rational system was obscured beneath a welter of expansions and optional books that grew increasingly baroque and rococo, qualities that are marvelous in sculpture but not as desirable in RPG design. Once again, the game needed a good dose of unification and consolidation. 

In 2008, 4th Edition dropped. The 3rd edition framework had sustained, without breaking, considerably more growth and modification than any previous edition, but it was groaning under the weight. A radically different, more compartmentalized approach might bear that weight better. In my opinion, 4th Edition was a glorious experiment that succeeded technically. Unfortunately, its breaks from the past were too severe for many fans, who didn't pick up the new banner. However admirable the system might be, it couldn't rise above the dysfunctional relationship between publisher and player (about which I'll say more later this week). 

That brings us up to now and the first glimmerings of D&D Next. WotC has already announced at least one of the reasons for DDN--to repair the schism caused by 4th Edition. Its full goals will become more apparent as the development and playtesting calendar advances.

Throughout all these cycles of decay and revision, a common thread has been a steady increase in complexity.  OD&D, Holmes D&D, and Basic D&D were mechanically simple games. The rules of AD&D weren't much more complex than D&D's, but AD&D was more challenging to play. The challenge came from the wealth of corner cases covered in the rules. Thanks to its chattily vague tone and the  general disorganization of the rulebooks, AD&D felt more complex than it really was. 

Second Edition has gained a reputation for being a simpler game that shifted emphasis away from the rules and onto the story. In fact, 2E had more rules than 1st Edition, a net increase in complexity. Much of what had been offered as advice in 1E, along with concepts that most people had added as home rules, were codified into official rules in 2E. Because the books were better organized and the rules more clearly explained, the complexity seemed less instead of more, to most people at least.

The foundational rules of 3rd Edition--the d20 system--were more elegant than anything D&D had seen in the past. The result could have been a simpler game, but it wasn't. Players were offered such a bewildering array of options that the only way many people could move forward was to ignore most of them. (That's the subject for this week's Howling Tower blog over at Kobold Quarterly.) 

Fourth Edition took a different course but ultimately laid on the same tack. You could argue, with some merit, that 4E is the most elegant version of D&D since 1981's B/X. As with 3E, that elegance is largely swamped by the overwhelming array of choices the player needs to make before rolling the first die.

So from D&D to AD&D and back to D&D again, the game has marched from simply confusing, to simple, to steadily more complex. The nature of that complexity has changed substantially. In the '70s and '80s, AD&D suffered from mechanical complexity. With the advent of 3E, most of the mechanical problems were smoothed out and replaced with a new type of complexity: option fatigue. That's the topic over at Kobold Quarterly.