Mike Shea has an interesting article about running mystery/investigation games. Running a mystery game is famously difficult, and Mike has a lot of great advice: don’t kill player involvement by dead-ending all their efforts. Don’t slavishly follow the letter of the module. Don’t bury the clues. And finally, change the mystery as needed.

If PCs seem to be spending all of their time in one line of investigation while the real answer lies somewhere completely different, we are well within our power and authority to move the clues. … Maybe NPCs begin to learn things they hadn’t known or the map is hidden in a completely different part of the mansion after all.

This last piece of DM advice is something which I’ve done many times before, and which makes total sense to me as a DM, but I’d like to add a note of caution as a player.

For a DM, it’s just good sense to rewrite the story; the players need never know, and everyone ends up having a better time. But as a player, I find myself quixotically kicking against this kind of good sense. As a player, I don’t want to solve a mystery because the DM moved the clues under my nose. On the other hand, I don’t want to waste a lot of time because the DM put the clues in the wrong place, either.

Here’s the thing: from my player’s perspective, sometimes it’s OK to move the clues and sometimes it’s not. Here’s my advice as a D&D player to DMs running mystery games:

Don’t let us players rewrite the mystery – unless our version is better

Even though you as the DM are constantly making up bits of the world for us, you are still capable of feeling suspension of disbelief yourself – and that’s important to maintain. At its best, DMing feels like channeling a world with a reality of its own. If the murder took place in the conservatory, it took place in the conservatory, even if we’re wasting our time investigating the billiard room – because, even though this statement sounds insane, “that’s how it really happened.” Once you’ve fixed something into the history of your game world, don’t excise it lightly. As a player, I want the game world to have reality and weight to it. I want to make some good choices and some bad choices, and look back with hindsight and know the difference. As a player, I want to take your world seriously, so make sure you do too.

There’s an exception to the “no rewrites” rule: one of us players might have a theory, or you might later come up with an idea, that’s better than your original plan. Now’s the time to rewrite history! The murder took place in the billiard room after all, because it makes more sense that way! Maybe I reminded you that Lord Wolfson loves to play billiards, so, now that you think of it, the billiards room would be a more logical place for the deadly confrontation. Retcon your story and change your plot, not for our convenience but because, now that you think of it, “that’s how it really happened.”

Honor our important choices, not our unimportant ones

Over the course of an investigation, PCs make a lot of significant choices. We might decide that the butler is on our side, and anyone who disagrees with the butler’s testimony is clearly lying. We might gamble on a risky Intimidation attempt, which might anger a key suspect or elicit new clues. The paladin might even decide that it’s dishonorable to read a gentleman’s letters, and burn a lot of key evidence unread. As a DM, you should honor those big choices, even if they make the investigation much easier or harder than you expected.

On the other hand, we also make a lot of insignificant choices. If you ask us which guest bedroom we are searching, we might say, “Uuh… the first one.” We might never visit the greenhouse because you forgot to mention to us that there’s a greenhouse. These are non-choices. Feel free to move the clue from the third to the first guest bedroom, or from the greenhouse to the ballroom.

Don’t figure out all the details beforehand

Let’s say the manor has 20 rooms and there are three important clues. Do we poor players really have to grind our way through a search of up to 17 meaningless rooms before we find a clue?

Here’s a reality-bending trick that doesn’t get my player hackles up:

Leave a lot of investigation details vague. Maybe you’ve decided that the chambermaid has a clue. You don’t need to key the chambermaid on the map. She might be in the second room we investigate, or the first, according to the dictates of pacing.

Maybe you haven’t thought at all about what’s in the stables, or what’s in town. If we investigate the stables, or start interrogating every shop owner in town, you as DM have carte blanche to make up clues: the more clues the better. It’s fine that these clues didn’t exist until we looked for them, because you’re not rewriting the mystery for us; you’re just filling in blank spaces in the map. That’s exactly what we expect from our DM.

So our group decides to search the stables, for which you prepared nothing. OK, you think, what’s in the stables? Let’s see, the victim arrived at the manor last night, so it makes sense that there’s an extra horse in the stables. And the stablehand would have seen the victim, and fed the horse. What’s in the saddlebags? Maybe a letter from Lord Wolfson to the victim? Maybe you roll a die to see whether that letter exists. Go ahead, you’re the DM.

What’s in town? Maybe we notice that the inn is called “The Wolf’s Arms.” “That must have some connection to Lord Wolfson,” I say, and we start coming up with a theory implicating the landlord. But the landlord wasn’t involved, and you as DM don’t need to retroactively involve him. Sometimes we’ll hit dead ends, and that’s OK.

provide interesting dead ends

Just as not every dead end in a dungeon has a secret door, not every area in an investigation yields a clue. Sometimes there are areas that don’t further the investigation.

But remember, you’re the DM of a living world, not just a mystery puzzle. Every area in the world can be interesting, even the places that have nothing to do with the mystery.

If you’re running a one-shot and trying to shepherd it to its conclusion by 10 PM, you might just want to say “You investigate the Wolf’s Arms Inn and find nothing to connect it to the murder.” But if you’re running a long-term campaign with no time pressure, then offer us a chance at some interesting new decisions: a fight, a quest – even a new mystery. Hey, we might find the second mystery more engaging than the first.

This might seem like a lot of improv pressure at the game table. After spending hours developing a mystery adventure, you’re supposed to come up with a new mystery, on the spot, in the, what, thirty seconds you have to think while we chatter about our crackpot innkeeper-did-it theory? Well, keep in mind you don’t need to come up with a solution to a new mystery right away, just a premise. And don’t worry, thirty seconds should be plenty of time.

To test this theory, I brought up the stopwatch feature on my phone. Let’s say the PCs start poking around in the Wolf’s Arms inn, which you haven’t prepared at all. I’m giving myself 30 seconds to come up with and develop a new tavern-based mystery as far as I can. At the end of the 30 seconds, I’ll write down what I come up with. I’ll try to do this four or five times.

The innkeeper doesn’t know anything about the murder, but….. three, two, one, go!

This never comes up in D&D gameplay, but I have a theory that most D&D games take place under a sun that’s dimmer and more orange than ours.

This has to do with D&D’s place in the Dying Earth sci-fi genre. D&D was largely inspired by Jack Vance, especially the Dying Earth stories, in which a far-future Earth lived its last days under a dying red sun. In this world, civilizations had risen and fallen millions of times, and there were ruins everywhere you looked.

For contrast, look at our world. Spinning along merrily under a young yellow sun is our brand new civilization. We’re the first Earthlings to surpass D&D’s renaissance-level technology, and we’ve only got a few centuries of high technology under our belts. We’re only a few thousand years removed from humanity’s first mastery of bronze and iron.

Your average D&D world is somewhere between our living and Vance’s dying Earth. It’s in a Renaissance-technology dark age, and it lives among the ruins of more magically and technologically advanced empires. Lots of them. Many campaigns have their own lore about human and humanoid empires, and lots of editions have hints of aeons where other creatures ruled the world – dragons, demons, giants, yuan-ti, aboleth, the Queen of Chaos, all in turn. Archaological sites are not rare. In fact, there’s an undisturbed dungeon, a relic of a past age, just outside the PCs’ starting town.

Your average D&D world has been around for a while. It’s possible that its best days are behind it. If you travel into its future for a few millenia, you’ll get to Dark Sun’s red-tinged wasteland. If you travel into the past? who knows, you might end up in d20 Modern, under a garish yellow sun.

Goblins: Interrogating goblins by torture seems to be creepily prevalent in D&D games. Anyway, it’s not necessary, because goblins will always tell you everything when threatened with torture, no Intimidate check necessary. They’ll mix in 20% malicious lies, but they’d do that under torture as well.

Hobgoblins: Hobs will inform you of their name, rank, and serial number, and then try to escape or commit suicide as soon as possible. They can withstand torture very well, but they will enthusiastically betray their superiors if you convince them that their efforts are unappreciated.

Bugbears: Bugbears are vicious, unfeeling brutes. By “unfeeling” I mean “they don’t have pain receptors.” However, they are easily bribed.

Orcs: If you try to torture orcs, or even tie them up, they will get so mad that the pulsing vein in their forehead will burst and they will die.

Gnolls: Stressed gnolls undergo frenzied visions of following Yeenoghu and ripping people limb from limb. In this state, they slaver foam, snap their teeth, and giggle curses. They don’t give information.

Elves: Elves enter a trance state much like the gnolls do, except theirs involve dancing in magical glades instead of running down panicked humans. Instead of slavering foam, they murmur, “More tea?” and “Sindural shall play the aulos while Mistral distributes the mystic crumb cakes.” But elves will tell you anything during pillow talk.

Half elves: Half elves never have secrets worth knowing.

Dwarves: Dwarves have high pain tolerance and unending reservoirs of stubbornness and hatred. However, they love beautiful things. Instead of torturing them physically, make them watch as you hit a dwarf-made ewer with a hammer.

Halflings: Torture is unnecessary to get information out of halflings. Just engage them in friendly small talk. They will accidentally reveal 1d4 secrets per hour, from closely-guarded pie recipes to secret tunnels into the castle.

Humans: Torture might work on humans, but you probably shouldn’t do it. Because torture is evil.

I’ve talked before about why 10th level spells exist in the game world’s past but not its present. Here are some appropriately overpowered 10th-level wizard spells.

Because every such spell is lost to history (most 10th-level spell users having destroyed their own civilizations), each spell must be researched based on tantalizing clues from forbidden books. An easy Wisdom check reveals that this is a bad idea.

10th-level spells are more the purview of villainous NPCs than PCs. I bet that they can be cast with lower-level spell slots, if cast in a suitably long and interruptable ritual.

10th-level spells:

Animate all dead. Area: the world.

Detect Great Old One’s Thoughts. Your brain explodes. Everyone within 1000 miles is subject to a Feeblemind spell.

Disaster. Range: 5 miles. Everything is destroyed and everyone is killed within a 1 mile radius. Caster’s choice of meteor strike, inferno, volcano, chasm, plague, tarrasque, etc. There may be unintended lingering side effects (deadly ash, tarrasque, plague, etc)

Erase person. Range: 400 feet. Kill one person and destroy their body and gear, no save. Everyone except for the caster instantly forgets the person ever existed. Their deeds are re-ascribed to others. People with close relationships to the erased person get a saving throw after 1 week of being confused by inconsistent memories.

Immortality. The spell all the liches are searching for. Warning: may attract liches.

Mordenkainen’s dimensional domain. Warps space so that an area of up to a 20-mile radius is moved into a pocket dimension, accessible only by rules set by the caster (only through a specific wardrobe, appears one day every 100 years, etc). Don’t bring a bag of holding into this domain.

Planar blink. Duration: one hour. Every turn, you may teleport anywhere you’ve scried or visited on any plane, or you can teleport to a random location on a plane you’ve heard of but never visited, or you can teleport to a random location on a random plane. Besides the classic planes, you can visit alternate timelines, other D&D campaigns and game systems, and the theoretical dimension where game-players control your actions, so you can kill the guy controlling you.

Power word: damn. The target dies and goes to hell. They get a saving throw after a year. Even if they return, they’ll be pretty traumatized.

Soul swap. Touch someone. You permanently swap bodies, no save. You each keep your game stats but trade appearance and age.

Trans-galactic jaunt. The caster and 10 friends can survive comfortably in space and fly at 1 light-year per hour. They can finally explore the vast seas between stars and discover that, however a big deal they might be on their planet, they’re level 1 in cosmic terms.

And finally, the real reason level-10 spell research is a bad idea:

Detect 10th level spell research. The one wizard in the multiverse who knows this spell also knows Planar blink and Erase person.

Looking at fifth edition Basic’s pared-down, classic-heavy spell list, I thought, “What if these were all the widely known spells in the whole campaign world? What kind of game world is implied by the missing spells?”

Let’s say that, when PCs level up, they can automatically learn spells only from the Basic list. Everything in the Players Handbook, and in all future splatbooks, exists somewhere in the world, but it’s hidden in some way. Wish is scribed in a moldering book in the dungeons of an empire past; Rary’s Mnemonic Enhancer is known only by the lich that was once Rary; the one guy who knows Wall of Fire lives inside a fiery labyrinth; and no one knows Explosive Runes at all, and a PC wizard will have to invest research time to learn it. Capturing a wizard’s spellbook is an exciting opportunity to find an otherwise unobtainable spell. Rare cleric spells are taught in hidden monasteries or granted in dreams by angels.

To me, this sounds good in theory, and it will work or not depending on the completeness of the Basic spell list. What’s the implied setting of this “Fifth Age” D&D world? Is its evocation- and healing-heavy spell list robust enough to outfit the majority of NPCs?

I’ll compare the spell list, rather arbitrarily, with magic-user and cleric spell lists in the 1e PHB. What spells are missing from the Fifth Age that existed in the influential implied setting of 1e Greyhawk?

I’ve organized the missing spells into a few categories:

Mechanical spells: I’m going to ignore 1e spells that operate on the game rules. Some missing 1e spells rely on on game mechanics that have changed: Read Magic and Write aren’t needed in 5e because the spellcasting rules have changed. Some spells add numbers to other numbers: 1e Strength makes people stronger, but it doesn’t change the possibilities open to characters. The NPCs can live without these just fine.

Marginal spells: Many of the 1e-only spells were never really very popular: Ventriloquism, Shatter, and Feign Death, for instance, were not really central to most people’s D&D experience, and their absence or rarity doesn’t make much of a dent on the implied setting. Others are variations or upgrades of more famous spells: while D&D needs Charm Person, it doesn’t rely on the existence of Charm Person AND Friends. There are dozens of spells like this that are quite appropriate as rare spells. Their existence is a rich source of exciting, or in some cases, puzzling treasure for spellcasters. “I’m the only person in the world who knows Feign Death! Now what do I do with it?”

Combat spells: 5e Basic has Magic Missile, Fireball, Lightning Bolt, Chain Lightning, and lots more classic direct-damage spells. Missing 1e combat spells include Flame Arrow, Enlarge, Otiluke’s Freezing Sphere, Fear, Cloudkill, and others. At some point, it doesn’t matter whether you blow up guys with a fireball or an iceball. The 5e Basic combat spell selection is more than adequate.

Construction spells: A surprising number of high-level 1e spells allow you to modify contructions, make temporary shelters, or trick out/trap out your castle: for instance, magic mouth, continual light, rope trick, Leomund’s tiny hut, dig, explosive runes, wall of fire, wall of ice, transmute rock to mud, wall of force, wall of iron, symbol, move earth. This tells us that 1e wizards had really nice fortresses and so did the monarchs they favored. For construction, 5e Basic has Wall of Stone. What does that tell us about the Fifth Age? Wizards may be able to summon curtain walls, but anything more complicated than that and they need to hire dwarven engineers. Wizards have no access to comfy extra-dimensional spaces (except Maze and Banishment, which are rarely comfy). As for furnishing lairs: no Continual Light, no traps, and no defenses except for Arcane Lock and Antimagic Field. Wizard towers are filled with guttering torches and patrolled by living guards, just like everyone else’s towers.

Summoning spells: 1e has Find Familiar, the Monster Summoning spells, Conjure Animal, Conjure Elemental, and Gate. Basic has Gate. None of my groups have made a big deal about summoning so I honestly don’t know if this matters to me.

Divination spells: There are some pretty powerful divination spells in 5e Basic (Arcane Eye, Locate Person, Divination, Commune) and the only defense is the high-level Antimagic Field. In this world, spying is easy and the only defense is counterspying. On the other hand, there’s no Know Alignment or Detect Lie. Scheming grand viziers can rest easy. Doppelgangers and succubi, however, might have to watch out for True Seeing.

No Water Breathing: It’s hard to explore the ocean. If you manage to research a Water Breathing spell, or find Kwalish’s Surprisingly Roomy Submarine, you’ll be able to loot underwater dungeons with no rivals except for monsters and merpeople. Barring that, no one knows what’s in the depths. Godzilla? Dreaming Chthulhu?

No Polymorph or Disguise Self: The abilities to magically change form, or even to disguise your form, are unknown to the arcane disciplines of 5e Basic. The thief reigns supreme as con artist. The best the wizard can do is turn invisible and cast Major Image.

No Animate Dead: For some reason, no one will teach you the Animate Dead spell. It’s like they don’t trust you or something. This one is a bit of a problem for the implied setting, because while PCs don’t really need access to Animate Dead, it’s hard to imagine a campaign world without a bunch of active necromancers stirring up bones.

High level spells: High level spells are rare in any campaign setting because high-level casters are rare. Still, the following absences are interesting: no one in the kingdom can necessarily control weather and guarantee good crops. Maybe some legendary druid can, if you can find her. (And no one can cast Create Food and Drink if the crops fail). Enchant Item and Permanency aren’t taught at wizard college; you’ll have to do your own magic-item research or find treasure in dungeons. You can’t make a backup of yourself with Clone: you might find this cool but peculiar spell as a strange relic of ancient technology in a dungeon. And high-level wizards can’t necessarily cast Wish once per day. They’ll need to find rings, lamps, and other relics, and hoard their wishes carefully.

What’s there: This description makes 5e Basic sound like a low-magic game, but plenty of spells are still being thrown around. What magical abilities are common? All sorts of ailments can be cured, including death. Clerics (but not wizards) can speak with the dead and conduct tours to the Ethereal and Astral Plane. Apart from their propensities to set everything on fire, wizards might be most feared for their ability to Charm, Suggest, and Dominate all and sundry. Long-distance teleportation is difficult (you need to be 15th level) but the air is thick with Flying fifth-level wizards.

In the transition from second edition D&D to third edition, lots of rules were re-examined. For instance, why do clerics only have seven spell levels while wizards get nine?

In older versions of D&D, clerics were half-casters, half-fighters. In OD&D, for instance, clerics didn’t get a spell till second level, and they topped out with fifth-level spells and 15 total spell slots, while wizards had twice as many spell slots and sixth-level spells.

The 3e designers decided that clerics were full casters and should get level 9 spells. In the long run, that would lead to complaints that clerics were now as overpowered as wizards: maybe both should have been capped at 7th level spells! In the short term, it meant that the 3e designers had to write a bunch of new level 8 and 9 cleric spells. That was a tall order, considering that the level 7 spells let you spawn natural disasters, resurrect people, and summon Asmodeus. Where do you go from there?

The designers used a couple of strategies: 1) promote 7th level spells to higher levels; 2) move spells over from the wizard spell list; 3) create super-powered versions of existing spells; and 4) actually make up new spells. Let’s go over all the new spells.

SPELLS PROMOTED FROM LEVEL 7:

Earthquake and Firestorm moved to level 8: These spells indiscriminately kill lots of people in a huge area. Don’t worry, the mass-slaughter gap in the level 7 spell list was replaced with a new spell, Mass Inflict Serious Wounds.
Symbol of Death and Symbol of Insanity moved to level 8: Actually, 2nd edition has one tidy wizard spell, Symbol, with lots of options, and a more limited clerical version. 3e divided the wizard spell up into 8 spells from levels 5 to 8 and made it available to both classes. I prefer a single spell to spell list bloat, but fine.
Astral Projection and Gate moved to level 9: These ultimate planar travel spells let you go visit Zeus if you want, or make Zeus come to you, and deserve to be bumped up to level 9.
Energy Drain moved to level 9: In 2e, this was actually the reverse of the level 7 spell Restoration. In 3e, Restoration was left at 7 but the reverse was moved to 9 (because people hate energy drain).

SPELLS COPIED FROM THE WIZARD LIST

Antimagic Field copied from wizard 8 to cleric 8: Because both magical disciplines should be able to build annoying trick dungeons. It would be cool if the wizard version only cancelled divine spells and the cleric version only cancelled arcane spells, but alas, I was not consulted.
Summon Monster VIII, Summon Monster IX: The 2e Monster Summoning spell chain, seven spells, was expanded to 9 spells and copied to the cleric list. This whole series has always felt to me like spell bloat, never more than in 3e.

“GREATER” VERSIONS OF EXISTING SPELLS

Create Greater Undead, level 8: Skeletons and zombies? Peh! This spell lets you raise shadows, wraiths, spectres, and devourers. How often has your 2e cleric lamented, “Oh for a devourer to call my own!” Prayers answered!
Cure/Inflict Critical Wounds, Mass, level 8, and Heal, Mass, level 9: In 3e, the traditional Cure Wounds spells were given out earlier, and the high-level gaps were filled by “Mass” versions of each spell that let you cure the whole party at once.
Dimensional Lock, level 8: This is a puzzler. 2e and 3e both have the sixth-level spell Forbiddance. As far as I can tell, Dimensional Lock is a less powerful version of this lower level spell – smaller area, more limited duration, and it doesn’t damage your enemies. It seems like it should be a 4th-level spell.
Planar Ally, Greater and Spell Immunity, Greater, level 8: You get more hit dice on your yugoloth and more spell levels in your /ignore list.
True Resurrection, level 9: First there was Raise Dead. Then Raise Dead Fully in the Greyhawk supplement, renamed Resurrection in AD&D. 3e added True Resurrection, which you can cast on some random guy you never met who died ten years ago. So right now I could cast it on Richard Pryor or Pat Morita, if I had a spare diamond worth 25,000 GP.

ACTUALLY NEW SPELLS

OK, here it is, the meat of the matter: the all-original 3e cleric spells! Was it worth the addition of two extra spell levels? Let’s find out!

Level 8: 2 new spells!
Cloak of Chaos/Shield of Law/Holy Aura/Unholy Aura: I’m counting this as a single spell, though it’s listed four times, one for each cardinal alignment. This gives you buffs against attackers of the opposite alignment: mostly boring stat boosts to AC and saves and stuff, but attackers also get one cute themed debuff: confusion for Cloak of Chaos, for instance. This isn’t a very exciting spell, but considering all the save or die spells in 3e, the bonus to saving throws might be important in some bizarre theoretical metagame.
Discern Location: This lets you find a guy, like, “Where did Pat Morita go after I resurrected him?”

Verdict: New level 8 spells: not that great.

Level 9: 5 new spells!
Etherealness: Previous editions let you travel to the Astral Plane but there was no spell that took you to the Ethereal Plane. How did players of previous editions steal all the Leomund’s Secret Chests?
Implosion: This spell lets you kill a guy every six seconds. OK, that seems like a true level 9 spell!
Miracle: The divine version of Wish is cool because you’re humbly asking your god for something, not casting a spell and feeling entitled to it. It’s arguably the only religious spell in the entire cleric spell list. I can imagine a cleric variant who got this spell at level 1, and no other spells.
Soul Bind: This permutation of the earlier-edition Trap the Soul is necessary to counter the new True Resurrection spell. It makes True Resurrection impossible on a specific dead guy. So you could cast it on Pat Morita if you’d really prefer I spent my 25k diamond resurrecting Richard Pryor.
Storm of Vengeance: You’d think this would be an upgrade of the level 8 Fire Storm, but like Dimensional Lock, it’s something of a downgrade. Fire Storm does 17d6 or more damage to everyone in one round. Storm of Vengeance has a big list of fiddly effects over the course of 10 rounds, some of which are situationally useful (like deafening people, creating concealment) but the damage output is lower. What Storm of Vengeance really has going for it is area. It covers something like 16,000 5-foot squares. So if your enemies are standing really far away from each other, you can probably still deafen them.

Verdict: New 9th level spells: Some are decent! Implosion and Miracle seem appropriately hefty.

In the player-creation process as detailed in the 1e Players Handbook, you roll your stats, choose race/class/alignment, and then “establish your character,” which means 1) making up a name, 2) writing a will, 3) renting an apartment, 4) buying equipment, 5) meeting the other PCs, and 6) acquiring hirelings. In my new-school experience, 2) and 3) never happen, but I’m totally on board with them. Here’s the passage from the PHB:

ESTABLISHING THE CHARACTER

By determining abilities, race, class, alignment, and hit points you have created your character. Next you must name him or her, and possibly give some family background (and name a next of kin as heir to the possessions of the character if he or she should meet an untimely death) to personify the character. Having done all that, your Dungeon Master will introduce your character to the campaign setting. In all likelihood, whether the locale is a village, town, or city, your character will have to acquaint himself or herself with the territory.

The first step will often be getting into the place i.e. a gate guard demanding to know what business you have in the town or city. Thereafter it will be necessary to locate a safe and reasonably priced place in which to lodge – typically an inn of some sort, but perhaps a rented cot, a loft or even chambers at a hostel. Since the location selected will have to serve as base and depot, it must be relatively safe from intrusion or burglary. Once a headquarters has been found, your character can set about learning the lay of the land, and attempt to find the trade establishments needed to supply the desired equipment for adventuring. Perhaps it will also be necessary to locate where other player characters reside in order to engage in joint expeditions.

In any event, your character created, personified, and established will be ready to adventure once equipment is purchased and relations with other player characters are settled. If player characters are not immediately available, or if they are not co-operative, it is advisable that men-at-arms be hired. Hirelings of this sort, as well as henchmen (q.v.), are detailed in the sections entitled HIRELINGS and HENCHMEN.

Fiddling with D&D logistics like that is a strangely soothing activity. I’d be fine if “choose next of kin” and “pay for lodging, secure it from burglars” were as classic parts of character creation as “buy equipment” and “meet other PCs in tavern.”

(This style of D&D reminds me of The Three Musketeers. It’s a very AD&D book. The characters are greedy: the name for the era’s gold coin, “pistole,” occurs more than 100 times in the book. In Chapter 1, d’Artagnan enters the gates of Paris and rents a garret. Next, he locates the other player characters (by dueling with them). Finally, he engages a hireling (on credit). There’s even a chapter called “Searching for Equipment.”)

I think there was an early, unofficial D&D character sheet that had a blank for “next of kin”. A good start, but not far enough. If this stuff is really part of character creation, the official D&D character sheet should also have spaces for Street Address and Rent. Is the 5e character sheet finalized?

In OD&D, there’s a phase of the game that’s never mentioned in the rulebook, but still exists: the DM’s turn.

Remember that D&D’s direct predecessor was Chainmail, in which players alternated turns. D&D is a different type of game, but it might have taken Gygax and Arneson a little time to realize how different. Some traditional ideas, like opponents alternating turns, still linger. I think that if you imagine that the DM and the players alternate turns, it makes some troublesome terminology and some confusing passages make more sense.

In The Underworld and Wilderness Adventures:

Movement is in segments of approximately ten minutes. Thus it takes ten minutes to move approximately two moves – 120 feet for a fully-armored character. Two moves constitute a turn, except in flight/pursuit situations where the moves/turn will be doubled (and no mapping allowed) … At the end of every turn the referee will roll a six-sided die to see if a “wandering monster” has been encountered.

What? What’s a move, and why do you get two (or more) per turn? Why not just say, as does AD&D, that you move so far in a turn, and you check for wandering monsters after two turns?

And what about this passage about wilderness travel:

Turns: Each move will constitute one day. Each day is considered a turn. … Wandering monsters: At the end of each day (turn) the referee will check to see if a monster has been encountered.

Why does a day need to be considered a turn? Why not just call it a day? After all, “turn” is already the term for 10 minutes in the dungeon. Why redefine it?

It’s because D&D is a game, and a game needs turns. In a game, at the end of your turn, you cede control to the next player… in this case, the DM.

During the players’ turn, the players initiate all the actions. They open doors. They enter hexes. The DM can still react, of course, possibly with deadly effect. Traps might be sprung. An entire battle (at ten rounds to the turn), with the players and the DM’s monsters alternating actions, might take place, all during the players’ turn. But generally the players are walking around and messing with static monsters on a map.

At the end of the players’ turn, the DM gets to do some initiating. Both inside and outside, the term “turn” is defined by monster checks. In other words, after the players have a chance to move, the DM has the opportunity to introduce “wandering monsters” – moving monsters which force the players to react for a change. If we step back and think of D&D as a board game, and the DM and the players as adversaries (and many passages in OD&D suggest that they are!), we might imagine D&D as an asymetric game, sort of like Descent, in which the “Overlord” is explicitly give a turn and limited agency to play evil tricks on the players, or maybe like Dungeon World with its advancing evil fronts.

The “turn” becomes less and less important in later editions, but it’s emphasized several times in OD&D. And I can see how it can be useful. In later editions, the DM is often expected to play a pretty reactive roll. After designing the adventure, the DM sometimes does little more than run monsters and adjudicate traps and puzzles. But it’s useful to explicitly give the DM a turn every once in a while, after, say, ten minutes of dungeon exploration, or a day of overland travel, to check for wandering monsters; take a minute to think about what the bad guys are up to; or think of new challenges to throw at the players.

Lots of questions were raised by WOTC’s vague promise of a “program” for third-party D&D publishers. Will there be something like 3e’s open-source-style OGL license? Something like 4e’s limited and revocable GSL? An “app store” model where products must be approved by WOTC?

To me, one key piece of evidence suggests that pretty much everything in the free “Basic D&D” PDF will be open content, making Basic D&D the 5e equivalent of the d20 SRD.

A preamble first: The d20 OGL license pretty much gave away the store. Most of the PHB is in there, apart from character creation, leveling, and a handful of iconic and original D&D monsters: beholder, gauth, carrion crawler, displacer beast, githyanki, githzerai, kuo-toa, mind flayer, slaad, umber hulk, and yuan-ti. There’s really no point in 5e trying to protect any OGL monsters, since they’re already basically free content. But WOTC probably doesn’t want to give away anything ELSE to Pathfinder and other competitors. So if there’s ever a 5e OGL-type open license, we’d expect it to exclude the beholder, gauth, carrion crawler, etc.

OK, here’s my evidence for Basic being released under an open license. In last week’s live Q&A, Mike Mearls listed a bunch of the “iconic monsters” in the Basic PDF. He read a pretty big list: chimera, centaurs, orcs, ghosts, giants, mages, acolytes, warriors, mummies, ogres, skeletons, ochre jellies, dragons, giant spiders. Notice anything missing? How about any monsters from D&D’s non-OGL list: beholder, gauth, carrion crawler, displacer beast, githyanki, githzerai, kuo-toa, mind flayer, slaad, umber hulk, and yuan-ti?

Apart from dragons, the beholder is arguably D&D’s most iconic monster – it’s the 5e Monster Manual monster – so its absence from Basic’s list of “iconic D&D monsters” is striking. Its absence really makes sense only if everything in Basic has to be open content.

I don’t necessarily think that 5e will use the OGL itself. There might be more carefully-worded protections against competitors. But I do think that the license will be free; it won’t require WOTC approval like the 4e GSL; and it won’t be arbitrarily revokable without cause like the GSL.

There’s one problem with my theory. I doubt the 5e license will be MORE permissive than the OGL. We know that Basic will include character creation information, and character creation and leveling hasn’t been released under any previous license.

I bet that character creation/leveling details will included in Basic but be specifically excluded from the license. That would be pretty easy to do. For instance, in the 4e Player’s Handbook, the character creation info and leveling details are all in Chapter 2, “Making Characters.” The 5e Basic equivalent of the “Making Characters” chapter might be specifically excluded from the new license. Everything else in Basic will, I predict, be fair game for use by third party publishers.

How sure am I in my hunch? Sure enough that I’m going to prepare my next D&D publishing project for 5e.