The D&D Essentials wizard starts with a choice of implement:

Under “Equipment and Magic Items”, write one of these three kinds of implements: orb, staff, or wand. Implements are special items that wizards use to focus magic power into their spells. Your choice doesn’t have any game effect – it just has to do with what your wizard looks like.

I’d read that Essentials wizard builds are based on schools of magic, not on the implement they use, but somehow I hadn’t thought about the corollary: the choice of orb, staff, or wand is unimportant for these wizards. All things being equal, it’s cosmetic, as this passage suggests. It also multiplies by three the variety of implement treasures that a wizard can find and use. Great! Now if only Essentials also got rid of Weapon Focus, Weapon Expertise, and other feats that prevent fighters from using whatever magic weapons they can get their hands on, it would be fun for the DM to give out treasure again.

Agreed, I always resent the presence of those types of feats while greedily taking them. If there was a real benefit to remaining flexibile with weapon choices, it might mean that taking weapon focus or expertise is an interesting choice that increases your power while meaningfully restricting your choices, but for now, those feats are kind of no brainers.

On the other hand, it would be easy to house rule those feats to make them apply to all weapons without any real negative game effects!

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The Essentials starter set teaches skills by requiring a handful of successful skill checks before the PC finds a goblin lair. They’re all directed towards that goal, except one:

The goblin’s injuries are quire severe. You can let it die in peace, or you can attempt another Heal check to try to save it. If it survives, it will certainly remember your kindness, but it might still fall into a life of evil. You can decide how to treat the goblins. If you try a Heal check, you need a 15 or better to keep it alive.

Either way, you need to follow the goblin’s directions to the goblin’s lair without alerting the other goblins to your approach. Go to 83.

This is the first, but not the last, time that a beginning D&D player will deal with the question “what do we do with the prisoners?” The choice is presented as gently as possible: “let it die in peace” is different from “watch its helpless eyes brim with tears as you plunge your pitiless sword through its ribs,” but it comes out to the same thing: a dead goblin.

This Heal check is the first skill check that, succeed or fail, provides no benefit to the PC. If you just care about winning the game, it’s irrelevant. It only matters if you’re roleplaying. I’m glad it’s in the adventure.

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There are a couple of “gotchas” in the Essentials Starter Set choose-your-own-adventure – non-heroic options that lead you only to a reprimand. If, during the goblin attack, you choose to hide, the game tells you that “hiding from danger is not the sort of thing that most characters in heroic fantasy do!”. If, during the alignment section, you choose evil, you’re told that evil characters can “disrupt the adventuring party and, frankly, make other players angry at you.” If you opt not to accept the merchant’s request to recover his goods from the goblin, you’re reminded that

When you’re playing in a group, your Dungeon Master will often present adventure “hooks” to you very much like this situation. The DM has an adventure planned, and is looking for a way to draw you into the adventure, to get you to the dungeon where the adventure will unfold. If you willfully walk away from those hooks, you’re making the game less fun for everyone, including yourself.

Each of these admonitions puts me in mind of times I violated these rules. I’ve played cowards who flee adventure. I’ve played in evil parties. I’ve gone off the rails. Each of these has led to some great game sessions.

This is a starter set, though, and these three pieces of advice are totally appropriate here. Playing cowards, villains, and disruptive characters can be fun, but that’s something to explore after you’ve played some straight-ahead adventures. First things first: let’s save the world.

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Part 2 of the Essentials Starter choose-your-own-adventure starts with some read-aloud text (or read-silently text, I suppose, in the context of a solo adventure):

The whinny of a horse catches your ear, and as you look around for the source of the sound, you see a rider at the crest of a low hill, a few hundred yards away. The rider seems to be human, but as the goblins flee he shakes his fist in frustration. His jet-black horse rears and whinnies again, and the rider’s red cloak billows behind him in the wind. Then the horse gallops off towards the southwest, into the Moon Hills.

This ham-handed caricature of a stock villain is exactly the tone to hit for a D&D adventure. This guy is awesome. Give the beginning players their fist-shaking, scenery-chewing villains! Give them their rearing, jet-black horses! Give them, if possible, speeches like “I’ll get you yet, do-gooders!” (PLEASE let that happen later in the adventure)

As melodramatic, overwritten flavor text goes, this passage is really top-notch. I actually did feel engaged. I saw the cloak billowing in the wind. I saw the impotent fist-shake. I saw the crescent moon behind the rider – although that wasn’t actually described. I just got confused because of the Moon Hills.

Who do you think that cloaked rider is, anyway? I hope it’s Bargle!

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All of the sections of the Essentials Starter choose-your-own-adventure are sorted by class, except for Section 42, which comes in between two cleric passages. Section 42 is the section you flip to if, at any time during the adventure, you try to do an “other” option (for instance, do something other than fighting the goblins).

If you were playing a normal session of the Dungeons and Dragons game, you could explain what you want to do, and the Dungeon Master (DM) could decide whether it can work and what you need to roll and make it work. […] In the context of this solo adventure, though, you don’t have a DM. […] Hold onto that idea, though.

The number 42 is resonant to 4th edition fans for two reasons. For one thing, pretty much every D&D fan has read Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. For another thing, 42 is the page in the Dungeon Master’s Guide that DMs flip to when characters try to do something not handled by the normal rules. It’s headed “Actions the Rules Don’t Cover” and has a useful chart of difficulty DCs and damage per level. (Rather, it was once a useful chart, pre-errata.)

Could the oddly-placed Section 42 be a reference to Page 42? Or am I grassy-knolling it up here?

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Hey guys! I’ve decided to bump my monday Mazes and Monsters retro-clone because I am having so much fun liveblogging the D&D starter set. Mazes and Monsters will return next Monday!

The cleric path through Starter Essentials set has to take a confusing detour that all of the other classes avoid: the winding sideroad of Weapon and Implement Dependency.

“You should write down two different attack modifiers: one if you’re attacking with a weapon, and one if you’re channeling power through the holy symbol you carry (which is called an implement). Your weapon attack bonus is your Wisdom modifier +2. Your implement attack bonus is the same as your Wisdom modifier.”

OK, so with my implement, I get a +4 bonus, and with my mace, I get +6, right? Not according to the graphic showing the cleric’s character sheet. According to the fake-handwriting font, the cleric has a sword all of a sudden, and it has a +8 bonus.

This is probably a cut-and-paste error: the fighter has a +8 sword stat-block. The cleric should have a +6 mace. I’d complain about this mistake confusing the kids, but honestly, I don’t think it’ll do that much harm. This is a SOLO GAME. You can PLAY WHATEVER CLASS YOU WANT. Who’s ever going to play the cleric?

There’s also the possibility that this is not a printing mistake at all: maybe this is secretly a used copy of the Starter Set. Maybe some jerk kid wrote in these crazy erroneous numbers in my copy of the book. If so, I hope the kid drew a sweet character portrait somewhere in the book. Other people’s character portraits are hilarious.

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Playing through the character-creation section of the Essentials starter set, the Cleric is the only character who doesn’t get a chance to make an attack in the first round of the first combat. My noble cleric (skin: gold and red in vertical stripes; eyes: tan with white irises; hair: blonde) uses a minor action to heal the dwarf merchant, a move action to stand up (which doesn’t seem quite fair, because the rogue used a single move action to stand up, slip out of the wagon, and sneak up behind a goblin) and then had to trade a standard action for a minor action to “pull a mace from your belt so it’s ready for use on your next turn”.

Oh well. At least as the cleric, you actually have a mace on your belt. The fighter apparently came into town with no weapons at all. The fighter “pulls a weapon from the wagon and run towards the nearest goblin.”

Really, that’s just another way the cleric got screwed. I bet the cleric paid for that mace. The fighter just showed up empty-handed and grabbed a free weapon from the wagon. I bet he keeps it, too.

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The Cleric section of the Essentials starter set comes with a sidebar explaining the gods of D&D. The typical gods are “Pelor the sun god, Kord the storm god, Bahamut the champion of justice, Erathis the god of civilization, Avandra the god of change, the Raven queen (god of death), and several others”. The raven queen gets parentheses, lucky girl. I guess it’s because her name starts with “the”, and “the Raven queen the god of death” just looks peculiar.

The sidebar finishes with the message that the specific deity your character worships isn’t important. “Play within your own comfort zone.” WOTC is still gun-shy after all the ridiculous satanism and occult accusations of the 80s.

Hey, wait a minute. On closer inspection, the sidebar doesn’t say “the specific deity YOUR CHARACTER worships isn’t important.” It says “the specific deity YOU worship.” WOTC is a bunch of lousy atheists!

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The rogue path through the Essentials choose-your-own-adventure, like that of the fighter, suggests that you can die during character creation. “If the goblin hits you enough times before you manage to land a blow, it could knock you unconscious. If your current hit points fall to 0 or lower, go to page 44.” Maybe the rogue was mortal at some point during the editing process, but as printed, the rogue cannot be knocked to 0 HP.

The fighter can be knocked down to 0 HP, because if he attacks a goblin and misses, he enters a loop which he can only exit by hitting the goblin. During this loop, the goblin makes attacks. The rogue, on the other hand, never enters this loop. The rogue makes two attacks, after which, hit or miss, the goblins flee.

Damn, it feels good to be a gangsta! You don’t have to face the bleached-bone specter of your own mortality. Not during character creation, anyway.

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The choose-your-own-adventure openings for the Essentials Starter classes are inconsistently pedantic about move actions. When the PC’s wagon is attacked by goblins, the wizard needs to use a move action to stand up. The fighter, though, can spend his first move action to “run towards the nearest goblin”. Was the fighter already standing up inside the wagon?

This is probably a good thing to gloss over for beginning players. Let’s just concentrate on using a move action for moving: let’s not spend a lot of time on alternate uses for move actions, like getting up from a prone position. Besides, the fighter probably WAS standing up in the wagon, the big doofus.

Hilarious! I bet they wanted everyone to use their move actions as a starting example, but the wizard doesn’t really want to run towards the goblins and endanger him or herself, so instead they just stand up. Also, wizards are too smart and lazy to stand up in a wagon!

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