Dungeons, Dragons, and the Joy of Being Bad

With a three-word phrase I will repel everyone who doesn’t need to read this article.

Dungeons & Dragons.

Still here? Great. Strap in for alpha nerdery. My magic mirror just corrected that to ‘herders.’ I’m not sure whether that’s ironic.

Dungeons & Dragons is due for its fifth edition, which is actually its seventh edition or something, and to make matters more complicated they’re taking cues from Prince of Persia and Thief and Star Trek and Godzilla to just call the new edition “Dungeons & Dragons.” I usually feel about the same way about this sort of number-eclipsing shenanigans as Yahtzee, but considering the up-till-recently alternative name was “D&D Next,” I think we’re moving in the correct direction. At least this title doesn’t give me bad flashbacks to Pepsi Max or New Coke or LSD Extreme.

Forget I said that last one. Straight edge! Anyway.

I suspect (and having mentioned Yahtzee once note how Croshavian my syntax has become, wait for the scatalogia to flow any minute now) the idea behind this return-to-roots naming is to evoke nostalgia. We’re hearkening back to a simpler time when we just said Coke rather than Coke Classic, a day before all D&D players possessed three separate shelves of splatbooks and the number of editions surpassed a Troll’s ability to count. (For those of you playing along at home, Trolls have a very rudimentary counting system: one, two, many, lots.) Maybe we just want to say screw you to future genre historians. Either way, D&D the New Hotness is coming.

I’ve seen a range of responses to this. Excitement, sticker shock ($150 is a lot for three core books), gibbering terror, boredom—and confusion. “Meh. Isn’t everyone playing Pathfinder now?”

Me, I’m interested and hopeful. But to explain why I’m going to have to introduce you to what D&D means, has always meant, to me—to something it does better than any contender.

D&D, for me, was never the best fantasy action tactics game, though 4E made a pretty solid claim on being that. D&D was never the best pulp adventure game—that was old school West End Games Star Wars. It was never the best game for powergaming madness (which was probably RIFTS.). It was never the most elegant game, and in recent years a crop of indie games from Dread to Fate Core to Dogs in the Vineyard have made it fall even further behind.

This is the point where you may think I’m about to make a nostalgia play. “It’s about escaping from my middle TN high school with a few friends and a two liter of Mountain Dew.” No again. (That was what I had SWd6 and the old school White Wolf games for.)

D&D was always the best system for simulating people who are really bad at doing stuff.

See, D&D has a twenty level progression that’s so engrained in players’ consciousnesses that it will never change. (Though never say never!) High level players are unstoppable juggernauts; tenth level characters are the equivalent of most of our Lord of the Rings heroes. Fifth level characters are pretty badass. And first level?

Well. I’ve seen first level characters get trampled in crowds. A first level wizard has four hit

points, which makes a fistfight a potentially lethal exchange. Hell, with 4HP you can conceivably get murdered by a house cat. As for magic, you get three weak spells a day. The fighter may have twice as many hit points as the wizard, but that’s still not much. Aragon you ain’t. As a first level party you are playing the guys from The Hangover in a Conan the Barbarian universe.

This makes it incredibly easy for a GM to construct adventures where the players cannot win by main force. Each fight is dangerous. Being stuck in a jail cell is an obstacle. If the stakes get high, our characters have to get smart. Low level D&D characters are hard core. “The princess is locked up in the castle. She’ll be executed at sunrise. We have a sword, a spider climb spell, a few rocks, some rusty chain mail, it’s dark, and we’re wearing sunglasses.” “Let’s hit it.” Players have limited resources and ply those limited resources in increasingly horrible situations.

Even better: since there are plenty of resources (monsters, traps, challenges, equipment, etc.) that are “level-appropriate” for characters of high level, you can keep throwing seemingly insuperable foes against your players at almost any level, for almost any reason. Players hack together solutions to kill dragons at level three, to unseat kings with a well-placed Feather Fall, to sneak out of a cordon by holding their breath & hopping inside a portable hole. D&D does “we’re boned” moments better than any other system. You and all your friends spend a few nights a week pratfalling through a fantasy world.

Which was why, in my opinion, the last edition of D&D (Fourth Edition or 4E) didn’t measure up. 4E was an exquisitely balanced combat game with a crunchy statistical backbone. Even first level characters could execute interesting and powerful maneuvers. A first level game with the right GM could feel truly epic. After Warlording an ally into position for a killing blow, I’ve become a master of the battlefield.

And that ain’t D&D. At least, not to me. 4E is a well-oiled machine. Your party does what it’s good at, and it’s always facing enemies designed to test it in new exciting ways. 4E characters. are built to face level-appropriate encounters; encounters that aren’t tuned properly get boring. 4E characters don’t have to rig lotteries to collect enough gold for spell components, or poke wizards with pointy sticks to distract them, or con a cave full of goblins into attacking another cave full of goblins. They don’t wake up drunk, naked, weaponless in the town jail; they don’t run out of spells and decide to distract the ogre by throwing pies at him, or try to communicate with someone in a foreign language they don’t speak and accidentally end up saying, “Don’t get up–my pants are on fire!” 4E was badass, but it wasn’t hardcore.

So now I’m playing a D&D 5 game. My friend Vlad is running the pre-gen adventure. And damn if I don’t feel like I’m playing D&D again. Our characters are drunken, borderline competent fools running around a medieval city trying to stay alive by hook and by crook. We’re taking orders from someone named ULFGAR RAVENCLOAK. We almost died in a stampeding crowd. We are really bad at basically everything we do. We mock box text. We disobey direct orders. We’ve rigged together an extortion-and-commodities trading business.

It’s great.

And damn if the system isn’t more flexible and elegant than it used to be! I’m playing a Barbarian Librarian, which combination of skill sets used to be pretty near impossible to implement. The game has learned something and returned to its roots at once.

There are better games for playing big damn heroes. But if you want to experience the fun of being *bad*, not in the 80s slang sense but in the sense that, say hippos are bad at flying… You might want to give this new version of DUNGEONS & DRAGONS a shot.