Just as the Essentials Player’s Book rushed you pell-mell into a solo adventure (in the fighter’s case, before you even had time to grab your sword) the DM’s book rushes you right into running an encounter. There are only 2 pages of text before the adventure begins. Of those two pages, half a page are credits, a quarter page is ads for other D&D Essentials products, and the other page or so is “What is a DM”? text and DM advice. There is no table of contents, here or in the Player’s Book! That’s what I call GETTING THE SHOW ON THE ROAD. There are also no indexes in either book, which is a bit of a problem if a DM forgets, for instance, where to find the difference between a turn and a round.

The DM advice is solid. I can imagine it setting the right tone for a n00b DM. “It’s not a competition!” “Don’t play favorites!” “Be fair!” Imagine if my DMs had followed that advice in my Junior High D&D games. OMG THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN SO AWESOME

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That’s it for the Player’s book. I’ll look at the DM book tomorrow, but before I go, here are my final thoughts:

I didn’t mention this before, but the player’s and DM’s books don’t carry the Elmore art. They have a modern reimagining of the same scene by Ralph Horsley. The art is more cartoonish and less Vallejovian, but it’s still a lone sword-and-shield fighter vs. a red dragon over a crack full of loot. There are no red-dragon knees, sadly, and the dragon seems short of eyes as well. But there are ewers. Lots of ewers. That’s what’s important.

How does this player’s book compare to the Mentzer one? It tries to accomplish less, but what it does is done about as well.

The Mentzer player’s book is 64 pages. It contains an introductory solo adventure which explains the game concepts, as well as a longer solo dungeon crawl. It also has full writeups up to level 3 for the 7 classes (fighter, wizard, rogue, cleric, elf, halfling, and dwarf) and an equipment section. Finally, it includes the basic combat rules.

The Essentials player’s book is 32 pages – half as long. Its introductory solo adventure is about as good as the Mentzer one (although I miss Aleena and Bargle). Rather than a full dungeon crawl, it provides a mini-skill challenge and a single encounter. There are no standard class writeups: as an artifact of completing the adventure, players end up with a complete level 1 character. There is apparently a dungeon crawl – moved to the DM’s book; rules for levelling up to 2, in the DM’s book, and basic combat rules, in the DM’s book. There’s no equipment section, and I’m not sure there will be one in the DM’s book. That’s something I do miss. I do love shopping for equipment. For me, poring over weapon and equipment lists is somehow caught up in the whole heroic power fantasy.

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In my haste to Choose My blue-skinned cleric’s Own Adventure, I skipped this interesting passage from the beginning of the player’s book, explaining the concept of an RPG:

If you’ve ever played Neverwinter Nights, Final Fantasy, The Legend of Zelda, World of Warcraft, Dragon Age, or games like those, you already have some idea of what the Dungeons and Dragons game is about.

The collection of games is interesting. It would be a daunting task to assemble a list of RPG video games that are a) well-known to 12 year olds and b) likely to stay so for the entire period that D&D Essentials stays in print. I think WOTC did about as well as could be expected. Neverwinter Nights makes sense, because it’s actually a D&D property, and rumor has it that Wizards is going to license a new 4e Neverwinter game. Final Fantasy, Legend of Zelda, and Warcraft are blue-chip RPGs that will probably continue long after the race of Man has passed from the earth. Dragon Age is the biggest risk: it’s only at game 1 of the series. Still, I love Dragon Age and I’m glad to see it make its way onto the list.

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Essentials starter-set halflings and humans ROLL to see what extra languages they know. That’s more old-school than old-school. Even in first edition, characters had a choice about what their extra language would be. (By the way, did you know that 1e dwarves could never learn more than 2 extra languages, regardless of intelligence?)

Roll a d6 to see which extra language you know.

1 Deep Speech (the language of horrible monsters of the deep earth)
2 Draconic (the language of dragons)
3 Dwarven
4 Elven
5 Goblin
6 Primordial (the language of elemental creatures)

For some reason I love this chart. I’m sure it’s just a Starter Set rule, made to avoid having new players make uninformed choices, and that in later books, extra languages will be chosen by the player. But some strange Tarzan of my soul lets out a bloodthirsty victory howl whenever character elements are chosen by a die roll.

Also, Deep Speech is identified as the language of creatures of the “deep earth”. Outer-planes monsters really do get around. They’re in outer space between the stars; in dungeons under our feet; outside reality itself. I guess that for D&D characters, the easiest way to reach them is to venture into a dungeon. In real life, we have access to spaceships! Go NASA! Bring us back some colors out of space!

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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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