Living Around D&D

by Rob Heinsoo

1st-Level Gamer: Original D&D

I got into D&D in 1974 by ordering the original three booklets in the brown box from a wargaming catalog. I was ten years old, living in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and I was the only person I knew who had read Lord of the Rings, much less heard of Dungeons & Dragons.

The D&D combat rules went over my head. I'd never seen a twenty-sided die (or any other die that didn't have six sides), so I jury-rigged a melee system based on the hand-to-hand combat rules from The Wargame, a book of Napoleonic miniatures rules my dad had picked up for me at the Fort Leavenworth book store. Incomplete understanding didn't lessen D&D's impact -- I was hooked on roleplaying games for life.

A few dungeon levels later, my family moved to Oregon, and I'd figured out the D&D rules, though I still hadn't encountered a d20. That changed when I tried running a dungeon for a couple grad school-age gamers who balked at drawing random numbers out of a blue plastic Chitty Chitty Bang Bang cup. After recovering from the embarrassment, I branched out from D&D into most of the other early RPGs: Boot Hill, Metamorphosis Alpha, Monsters! Monsters!, Bunnies and Burrows, Knights of the Round Table from Lou Zocchi, and The Arduin Grimoire (more on Arduin later). I didn't make a huge distinction between RPGs and wargames in those days, and my RPG-related thoughts were equally influenced by constant playing of Melee/Wizard, Ogre, the Starguard miniatures game, and a somewhat god-mode fantasy miniatures game I'd created to use all my favorite minis at the same time.

Mid-Level Adventures: AD&D

By the time AD&D came out, I had tinkered with enough game systems that I was impatient with AD&D's claim to be the un-modifiable system everyone should be playing with. I was more interested in other rpgs -- I only ran AD&D once.

I did play AD&D quite a bit while I was in high school, in a campaign with college friends. The DM was named Joe, I think he still runs games in Eugene, Oregon. Back then, he was running modules involving temples and giants. Joe had a particular talent for enabling the spellcasting members of the party to rival the monsters as threats to the PCs' survival.

Missing an Edition

I skimmed through the 2nd Edition AD&D rulebook and decided I liked the games I was already interested in a lot more. I didn't see 2nd Edition AD&D as an improvement over Runequest or Champions, so I gave it a miss.

Now skip ahead many years via many other non-D&D game systems.

The Real Good Thing: 3rd Edition

Third Edition brought me back to D&D. I playtested 3E as part of Jonathan Tweet's Wednesday-night gaming group. By this time, 1999, I'd worked at a few game companies. Playing 3E, I was ecstatic that D&D had surfaced ahead of the other RPGs I'd loved. This new edition of D&D didn't hurt my head. It was fun and "good for thinking." I could appreciate the design decisions behind the most important features of the game.

Jonathan's Wednesday-night game turned into the best RPG campaign of my life, and I was privy to his thoughts as the 3rd Edition rules coalesced into their final form. Before the process was complete, in early 2000, I got hired onto the D&D Worlds Team at Wizards of the Coast. I was at less of a disadvantage than most new employees because I knew only the 3rd Edition system, not the 2nd Edition that everyone else was having trouble forgetting.

I didn't work on D&D for long. I moved over to the card side of Wizards' R&D department, where I worked on several trading card games before drifting back into the D&D orbit as part of the Chainmail minis team. From there I ended up running the D&D Miniatures line and designed Three-Dragon Ante in my spare time. I'd been playing 3E and then 3.5 all along, as well as running my own idiosyncratic D&D campaign.

And that leads us into my final topic -- other than the 3E Players Handbook, the D&D book that has had the most influence on the way I think about D&D is The Arduin Grimoire. So much so that the homebrew 3E campaign I ran for years was set in my own version of Arduin. And my 4th Edition campaign is headed in the same direction.

The Arduin Whaaa?

Back in the days when Greyhawk, Blackmoor, and Eldritch Wizardry were stapled-together booklets published by TSR and full of strange, variant rules for D&D, Dave Hargrave's stapled-together Arduin Grimoire was full of even stranger variant rules. Highlights included long lists of random special abilities for dozens of character classes, dangerous critical hit and fumble tables, ridiculous monsters like the Kill Kittens, a gazetteer to the 666 levels of the Abyss, and bizarrely evocative character classes like Star-Powered Mages.

The Arduin Grimoire and its follow-ups (Welcome to Skull Tower, The Runes of Doom) never claimed to be D&D supplements. Instead, Hargrave and his fans said that Arduin was its own game. But you couldn't play Arduin without using concepts, rules, character classes, and mechanics inherited from D&D.

It wasn't Arduin's mechanics that made an impression on me. As solid game design, Arduin didn't have all that much to offer. But as inspiration for lifting your own fantasy roleplaying game way above the ordinary, Arduin rocked. It shaped my concept of how cool D&D should be.

My current homebrew Arduin is an interdimensional city ruled by representatives of twelve major races whose roles in the city government are determined every three years by lottery. If the dwarves land the Nexus Diplomacy post while the drow (they prefer to be known as the Silver Folk) are in charge of Urban Defense, you know everyone's going to be in for a rough three years.

Meanwhile, out in the hinterlands, my Arduinian dungeons are terrifying supernatural eruptions that spiral in toward the city, growing stronger and deeper the farther they travel. If a dungeon survives long enough to surface inside the city, it becomes a permanent feature of the landscape. The citizens only have to look up at Skull Tower's red eye sockets to know just how bad that can be, so adventurers are treated as somewhat valuable members of society, so long as they stick to their job of depopulating and looting dungeons and don't get too involved in city politics.

Do these ideas in my campaign have anything to do with the text and background details of Dave Hargrave's Arduin? No, not as far as I know. Nor have the rules and mechanics inside the various Arduin books penetrated the 4th Edition D&D rules system. But the spirit of wild possibilities that animated the Arduin rules has influenced my design perspective while working on 4th Edition. We don't have whacky tables of random abilities for each grouping of character classes, but we have powers and abilities for each class and race that I'm not going to need to doctor up to fit into my home campaign.

About the Author

Rob Heinsoo was born in the Year of the Dragon. His new game, Inn-Fighting, goes on sale October 15.

The Ties that Bind

By Andy Collins

In August of 1981, my life changed forever because of a birthday present from my Uncle Ralph. I certainly didn't expect it at the time (nor, I'm sure, did Uncle Ralph), but it's safe to say that no single object has ever affected the course of my lifetime as much as that 9"x12" cardboard box with a picture of adventurers busting in on a dragon defending its piles of gold.

Months went by before the first time I actually played the game. Not only was I unaware of anyone else who played, I'd never even heard of it (or of roleplaying games in general) before opening up that box. Frankly, a youth of Monopoly and Risk just doesn't prepare you for Dungeons & Dragons. But I was already a diehard fantasy fan, having devoured The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings while classmates were still struggling on spelling tests. So I kept coming back to that little blue rulebook, trying to figure out how you could have a game without a board or playing pieces.

Finally, I just decided that we'd stumble through and figure it out as we went along. So one Saturday I sat down to roll up characters with my brother Greg and our friend Kurt, and I led them through the Keep on the Borderlands. Those old character sheets have long-since crumbled to dust, but many of the names still linger in my memory -- Bard (the character's name, not his class…we didn't have the Player's Handbook yet), Garn, Pentegarn, Lester, Krylla … these heroes and many more braved tunnels full of orcs, hobgoblins, kobolds, skeletons, and -- of course -- a maze with a minotaur.

I remember that the adventure's rumor chart provided a (false) clue to the characters indicating that the goblins' shout of "bree-yark" meant "Hey, Rube!" which, to a 10-year-old in Olympia, Washington, was just as alien a phrase as it had been in the original Goblin language.

I remember the characters running into a (way out of their league) black dragon somewhere in the wilderness, which they managed to kill by strangling it with to a rope wrapped around its neck by the two talking ravens they'd encountered earlier … well, it all made sense to us at the time.

Most of all, I remember nine hours of the day disappearing without any of us becoming bored, or getting hungry, or maybe even leaving the room at all. Whatever we'd stumbled through was enough to hook me (and my brother) for good.

Kurt played a few more times with us, but ultimately the game didn't stick to him the way it did to us. We don't hold it against him. But then, we also don't see him on a monthly basis like we do many of our other childhood friends who still play D&D with us.

Yeah, that's right -- I still game with folks who started playing with me 20 years ago (or more). That's one of the benefits of folks staying relatively close to home (and, I'd like to believe, of me running a kick-ass game). Greg, obviously, has been in my game since the beginning -- that's more than 26 years now. Brent joined us when we were in 5th grade together (late 1982). Greg recruited Viet and Marc in '83 or '84. I met Dennis in German class in 1987, and Kevin and Scott in '88 or so. (Until I joined WotC eight years later, they were "the new guys.")

While in college I had to make do with an entirely new group of gamers, but one of them followed me back home. Now I run a game for Neil, his childhood buddy Brian, his sister Lindsay, and her husband Mike. (That's right -- in this game, the woman brings her SO along, rather than the other way round. That's progress!)

Over the past eleven years, I've been fortunate enough to work around a whole pile of gamers, so the group's continued to grow steadily. Joe joined us shortly after I started at Wizards in 1996, and Chris not long after that. Jesse was bold enough to join us in '98 or so; at the time, he was a lowly editorial assistant with Dragon Magazine, but I like to think that our little group gave him the confidence to later become my boss. James Wyatt is the latest co-worker to join my now super-sized group (currently spanning three separate monthly games).

I met Gwendolyn through another D&D game. Of course, now she plays in my group as well. She's not the only significant other who games regularly with us these days -- we've come a long way since grade school -- so we also welcome Adrienne and Amber to our sessions.

Obviously, not every player from the old days is still around. Along the way we also had the pleasure of gaming with Charlie, Garon, Kyle, Michael (whose grandfather vouched for us when the Motel 6 in Spokane wouldn't rent to high-schoolers in town for our very first game convention), Dan (who crumpled up his character sheet and threw it across the room when the medusa petrified him -- but keep in mind he was only 10 or 11 at the time), Ken (the undisputed master of the deck of many things), and Robert ("Uh-oh, purple worm!"). Over the years, they drifted away socially, psychologically, or just geographically from the core group, but the group itself survived.

We’ve played Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms, Dark Sun and Dragonlance, Planescape and Ravenloft. They've delved into just about every dark hole in the ground from the Tomb of Horrors to the Slave Pits of the Undercity. They've battled barbarians and beholders, destroyed demons by the dozen to steal the Wand of Orcus, eviscerated evil elves in Erelhei-Cinlu, and ganked giants of every flavor.

It didn't matter what the game was called -- Basic, Expert, Companion, Master, Advanced, 2nd Edition, 2nd-with-Player's-Option-books, 3rd Edition, 3.5, "Andy's D&D/Alternity hybrid that nobody quite understands but let's keep playing anyway" -- it was always D&D, and it was always good.

(OK, except for that D&D Immortals boxed set. I think it was kind of metallic gold, but I've suppressed most of my memories of it. What was up with that thing, anyway?)

And now, we're playing 4th Edition. It's still D&D, and it's definitely good.

Twenty-six years ago, a simple cardboard box held my future inside. I'd like to think that next year a copy of the Player's Handbook will hold a similar secret for some lucky 10- or 12-year-old and that a quarter-century later, he or she might pen an essay just like this one.

I look forward to reading those words (or perhaps having them beamed directly into my cerebral cortex -- who knows?). I'll be 62 by then -- but of course, I'll still be running D&D games for all my friends!

About the Author

Andy Collins served on the Fourth Edition D&D design team for two years before assuming his current role as Manager of Dungeons & Dragons Mechanical Design & Development (or MD&DMD&D for short). His professional credits include development (Magic Item Compendium, Unearthed Arcana), design (Draconomicon, Gamma World campaign setting for Alternity), and editing (Dark•Matter campaign setting, Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil). He currently runs two different D&D campaigns and plays in a third.

No School Like the Old School

By James Wyatt

There's something about a new edition of D&D that stirs up a sense of nostalgia about the old ones. Not so much about the mechanics of the old editions -- I, for one, have no desire to return to the days when you couldn't play D&D without reference to attack tables, or THAC0 for that matter. I think it's more about remembering the feelings we had while we played D&D back in the old days.

I started playing D&D in 1979, the summer before I started 6th grade. I still remember the time my buddy's magic-user and my ranger took on Yeenoghu (no DM involved; we shared the responsibility of running the demon prince and his hordes of gnolls). The image of the magic-user blasting Yeenoghu with spell after spell while I stood atop an ever-increasing pile of gnoll bodies has stuck with me through all those years.

I remember the smell of the room in the public library where we played sometimes in high school, and the weird, adapted combat tables we used when we played in some room on the campus of Cornell University -- in middle school. I remember my first exposure to 2nd Edition, which I had previously resolved not to buy, and how quickly I was won over by the new look and the new rules.

I started working at Wizards of the Coast a few months before the launch of 3rd Edition. That was an exciting time, though also a bit frantic as we all pitched in to get the books out the door in time. This is when I start thinking about the nostalgia factor. People were running 3E playtests using old adventures like Against the Giants and Tomb of Horrors. I dug out The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth and used it for a game.

As I worked on 4th Edition, I did a lot of looking back to the old days. When we talked about ability scores, I went back to look at how the first Player's Handbook defined them. We shared a lot of laughs around the department looking back at how absurd the old psionics rules were and had great fun explaining to one of our younger editors first how THAC0 worked and then how much of an improvement it was over the previous edition's combat tables. As lead designer of the Monster Manual, I frequently looked back at old MMs to see the original design of monsters and how they'd changed over the years.

One of the adventures I kept pulling out was I1: Dwellers of the Forbidden City. I have fond -- I won't say memories, because I don't remember running it, although the pages of notes stuck between its covers clearly indicate that I did, probably not long after its release in 1981. I have fond impressions of that adventure, probably mostly because it marked the first appearance of yuan-ti.

So one day in a department meeting when we were talking about adventure design, I had a brainstorm. We were discussing what I thought was a really interesting idea -- an adventure product that detailed a site in exhaustive detail and then gave PCs a wide variety of reasons to enter the site and goals to pursue inside. In some ways, Expedition to Castle Ravenloft is that kind of product -- you can go into the castle many times, with different aims in mind, and things will change each time.

But it occurred to me that the Forbidden City in which those first yuan-ti dwelled would make a great site for such an adventure. That's really what the first adventure was -- it had a main storyline (retrieve the stolen caravan goods and kill the wizard responsible), but then the last two pages of the adventure were other quests that could send you into the city and other ideas for adventures you might have inside. With several different entrances to the city, three main groups of residents, and mini-dungeons within the ruins, the Forbidden City was ripe for that kind of adventure.

So when the department launched into an intensive three-week playtest period in the summer of 2007, I pulled out I1 and got to work. I had grand visions but not nearly enough time to implement them. It turned out that three weeks of gaming on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons was not enough to pull off the mini-campaign I had hoped to do. Nevertheless, it held promise, and when I get a full-fledged 4th Edition campaign going in the fall, I'll be pulling out the old adventure again.

There's no school like the old school. The old editions of the game have a lot to teach us about the sheer fun of the game, as well as examples of game mechanics and adventure design to steer far away from. (I haven't, for example, pulled out EX1: Dungeonland -- the first of two adventures based on Alice in Wonderland -- for inspiration.)

About the Author

James Wyatt is the Lead Story Designer for D&D and one of the lead designers of D&D 4th Edition. In over seven years at Wizards of the Coast, he has authored or co-authored award-winning adventures and settings including the Eberron Campaign Setting, City of the Spider Queen, and Oriental Adventures. His more recent work includes Expedition to Castle Ravenloft, Cormyr: The Tearing of the Weave, and The Forge of War. His second Eberron novel, Storm Dragon, released in September.