The Leaders are the only ones to determine if a significant encounter must take place, according to where they are taking the story, the Characters’ health condition, the progression of the scenario, and the available gaming time. As much as possible, combats should remain special moments, since making them too frequent can quickly render them bland and repetitive. This is why every Leader should try to think about the way each such encounter can serve the story being told. (Book 2:Travels, 182)
In reading through the bestiary for the Shadows of Esteren game I came across the above quote and it resonated strongly with me. I had long adopted a version of the idea in my 4E campaigns, and strongly advocate its use if you find combat takes too long in 4E. But what about the future of DnD?
Currently the future of DnD seems to be driven by the “old school” mentality of having a lot of fights as the main mechanism for gaining XP. Sure pre-3E versions had treasure as a big deal, but the main avenue to loot was killing stuff, so the net effect was the same. However DnD has slowly been moving away from that idea, a bit 2 steps forward, 1step back, but away still.
In 2E we have XP awarded for using class features and skills, in 3E XP was codified and tied to CR making it a more useful measure of encounter difficulty. 4E took 3E’s improvements to encounter design and improved them further in particular by creating a concrete means of placing difficulty on non-combat and non-trap based challenges. (That improvement is there regardless of the issues around skill challenges.) So where should Next go?
Firstly it is important that Next continues to avoid the trap of “killing stuff” as the only way of earning experience as befits the history and evolution of the game. The first step to this is keeping with 4E’s experience system of having XP for challenges regardless of if those challenges are combat challenges or other types of challenge. There are a number of ways of managing this, and my personal preference is actually to adopt a system I have seen in “indie” games, where XP is tied to the state of the story. The advantage of having XP tied to story state is that you don’t need a Next version of the skill challenges of 4E and you can still keep XP for monsters, traps and hazards.
The real advantage of moving to a story state based system harkens back to the initial quote from Shadows of Esteren. With a story based system you assign XP to the stages of the story (perhaps with values for successful and unsuccessful completion) and then it matters less what happens in that stage of the story. This means that you can focus on having important battles rather just having battles so that XP is earnt (you know like how most MMOs go). It doesn’t require that the underlying xp structure for combat/trap/hazard be changed at all, the elements of the story that depend on the players overcoming that sort of challenge use those systems exactly as presented. What it does is give a way of placing XP value on the parts of the story that 4E turned into skill challenges without having to adopt the skill challenge mechanic of 4E.
In addition moving to a story stage based xp system helps with building modules that are not simple dungeon crawls. A dungeon crawl is a story where each room is essentially a scene, its a very simple story in the grand scheme of things but it is still a story. However what about if you want to run a political intrigue game with maybe only one fight against the bad guy at the end? The traditional “kill stuff” approach to XP works very badly, but a story stage xp system allows you to place importance on learning different things as the players progress through the investigation. This allows a lot more flexibility in the development in stories inside the one system, which is an important feature of the core of a modular system.
A good example of where this change would be of great benefit is when you look at the Living Campaigns. Living Campaigns have an XP budget for adventures that after X adventures allows a character to earn sufficient XP to gain a level. Living Forgotten Realms required 3 adventures on average for example to level, so the standard for a module became 3-4 encounters that awarded xp plus an RP scene maybe 2 RP scenes. Those encounters had to have 1 skill challenge and at least 2 combats. Predictably the modules become very predictable in format, experienced players quickly learnt how to pace themselves through adventures and the trick for authors became messing with “when is the tough fight” and putting in “non-xp” challenges and so on. Yes this could have been varied, however the fact that a skill challenge was worth about 1/4 of a normal fight had a strong impact on what could be done. This is where story based design opens up a lot of possibilities, simply by making the RPelement as important as the combat element. Now you can have modules with no combat that are worth as much XP as modules with just combat.
Why does this matter? Well combat in Next is fast, you are looking at the possibility of having 2 or more combats in the time it took to do one in 4E, but modules shouldn’t need to double the number of combats just to tell a story. Having more time for RP is good. These are RP games after all. So bringing RP based elements to the same standing as combat based ones is a desirable goal for the game because it frees up the design of adventures to go into places that DnD has always been able to go but has suffered in mechanical terms from doing so, where the mechanics are mostly XP rewards.