AICN Tabletop! A Ton Of Stuff About D&D Next! This Week's RPG Kickstarters! And More!

Robert J. Schwalb: I’d probably say we’re about halfway. 

Robert J. Schwalb: But that number is a moving number, right? The core of the game’s done.

Bruce Cordell: The core of the game’s done, it’s just the writing’s about halfway.

Robert J. Schwalb: Actually, it was by total accident. I was out of college and thinking about doing fiction and there was an open call for a D20 book. I pitched a book and they bought the book and it’s been a snowball effect ever since. So I kind of wound up in the game industry and it turned out I really liked it. It’s worked out well for me.

 

Bruce Cordell: What was that book?

 

Robert J. Schwalb: QUINTESSENTIAL WITCH. It was not a very good book, but it was a great learning experience. It was an 80,000 words and I’d never written anything that size before. It was good. So I moved onto Green Ronin Publishing where I worked on UNHOLY WARRIOR’S HANDBOOK, BOOK OF FIENDS. The GRIMM roleplaying game came out sort of around the same time. Then I became Line Developer for Green Ronin and worked on WARHAMMER FANTASY ROLEPLAYING, and then I jumped ship and started working on D&D at Wizards of the Coast. I’ve been there ever since.

Robert J. Schwalb: Toward the end of 3.5. My first book was TOME OF MAGIC.

 

Bruce Cordell: Back when I was working at Wizards and Rob started freelancing, I had in my head a list of A, B, C, and D freelancers I wanted to work with. There was really only one A freelancer and that was Rob Schwalb.

 

Robert J. Schwalb: D’awww!

 

Bruce Cordell: He was always the best writer. It was wonderful to put him on full time.

 

Robert J. Schwalb: You’re so sweet.

 

Bruce Cordell: I’m just saying.

 

Robert J. Schwalb: And very gentle.

Bruce Cordell: I got into the industry...I had a couple of freelance assignments and, to be honest, it was my friend Monte Cook who said “You should try and write some stuff.” [This is important later. –Abs] He said this for several years. Finally, I put in a couple of things for Iron Crown Enterprises for the SPACE MASTER VOL 2. But then I was also doing multi-user MUDs and MUSHes in the early 90s. I was working at a biotech institute and we had all these computers, so I was able to teach myself to teach myself how to program these MUDs and MUSHes, Multi-User Dungeons and Multi-User Shared Hallucinations [basically text-based MMOs for you youngsters out there – Abs] TSR said, “Hey, we want to produce a D&D MUD!”

I put in my name, went out for an interview, and they hired me to write a Multi-User Dungeon. But then when I got out there, they said, “Naw, we’re not going to do that.” I said, “I just fucking quit my job in biotech!” So they said “We’ll put you in print.” So first thing they put me on was GATES OF FIRESTORM PEAK.

Bruce Cordell: Yep. Second Edition, Third Edition...

Bruce Cordell: I would say a lot of the modularity comes from the idea that you can evoke any previous edition with the right set of rules combinations. If you want to use feats, if you don’t want to use feats, if you want to use skills, if you don’t want to use skills. And the plan is for the Dungeon Master’s Guide to have more explicit modules and those things end up presented to the playtest community.

 

Robert J. Schwalb: And largely I think that’s due to the fact that our focus up until this point has been to really nail down the core. Get the core engine so it sings and works exactly the way we want it to work and make sure that all the numbers are right. Once we have a solid foundation, we can then build whatever pieces we want. And we’ll be rigorous about the approach we take about evolving those mechanisms, but it’s not something we need to throw out the public through playtest because we know once we have the foundation, we know what dials to turn and what buttons to push to make sure those pieces all work together. And we’re starting to see how those module units will come into play with the direction that feats have taken and our ability check resolution and how skills are going to start feeding back in.

Robert J. Schwalb: D&D is a game that’s steeped in tradition and the methods by which we understand how to play the game kind of feed back into the language game we’re playing when we talk about D&D. So any kind of radical departures from those mechanisms changes the way we talk about that game. Now obviously something like getting rid of THAC0, for example, was probably the best thing to happen to D&D. Now if you say THAC0 to someone who comes into D&D post 3rd Edition, they don’t know what you’re talking about. And that causes a sort of language fuzz. Certainly you can get someone to come in and say “I have a brilliant vision for how D&D should play and will radically overhaul this game.” So what happens is they blow up D&D. We saw – as much as I love 4th Edition – 4e did just that. “We’re going to radically redesign D&D” and it blew it up and now we have a language problem. Because what I think about D&D is no longer true to these people who play D&D.

Robert J. Schwalb: The deeper you delve into D&D lore, you find a lot of those terms appear in the game. People say, “I can’t believe ‘at-will’ is a term.” Well actually, ‘at-will’ has been in the game since the beginning. “So and so can cast Pyrotechnics at-will”. It says in the 1st Edition Monster Manual. That kind of terminology was always there, but I think the difference is how it was formalized into jargon. It was the only way to communicate through the tech-speak of the game rather than talking about, like, “I just want to open the door.”

Robert J. Schwalb: And that’s very true. I play the “This is D&D” card. You can only play it so many times before it loses its thing. It hits a really good point. I think a lot of people saw with 4e, for me, I’m going to pull the “This is D&D” card and that’s what happened. I think it’s been one of the goals from the very start to try to reconcile and bridge that gulf between people who like the 4e style tactical gameplay and people who want the more narrative-based system and to try to make everyone happy and use the same language again.

Bruce Cordell: It’s trying to bring the narrative story back into the D&D experience. It’s what made D&D the game it was. The edition [4th Edition – Abs], for all its wonder tactical options, that very tactical concentration robbed the play experience but honestly the design side as well – because we were locked into that two-page spread for adventure design. It kind of pushed out that narrative that 5th Edition is going to recapture. We’re going to bring, like you said, all those wonderful options for fun little story and fun little exploration and getting away from that fighting everything... Because the moment you put minis down on the grid and say, “Here’s your position, what do you do?” “Well, I guess I’m fighting.” Want to get away from that.

Bruce Cordell: Certainly set-pieces...there will be set-pieces in 5th Edition. There’s certainly no reason you can’t have the two-page spread, but that shouldn’t be the rule. In 4th Edition, that sort of became the rule for whatever reason because the character powers kind of leant itself to that. All the powers were combat-oriented. For the most part. There were Utility Powers, but even the Utility Powers had a combat application.

Robert J. Schwalb: I think what 4th Edition does really well is it simulates that really cool combat encounter that you had in 1st, 2nd, or 3rd Edition where all sorts of things are going on. It does that really well. It doesn’t do a fight with three or four kobolds well at all. And you want that level of detail when you’re doing the big set-piece fight with the villain riding the Dracolich and the army of undead and the terrain can be an obstacle that’s actually attacking you and doing all sorts of cool stuff. And those kinds of fights, you want them to go on for an hour. You want to dig your nails in and you’re terrified. You have no idea what’s going to happen. But then, the other part of D&D is that I just want to murder a bunch of goblins and move onto the next area. So, I think what happened, because it treats every fight with that level of importance, it became a poor choice to choose non-combat utility powers. So there became certain powers that were just guaranteed. Tumble, for example, is a power that I think every Rogue on the planet has because it lets you move without any opportunity attack. But if you took something like you get to re-roll your Thievery check if you fail, no one’s going to take that because you never really use that in a fight. Because powers translate into success-fail in a combat encounter, all these RP-type powers fell out of the game and became clutter.

 

In the D&D Next design, we’ve try to move away from putting those same things in the same bucket. So class design will speak to different styles  of gameplay – exploration, roleplay, and combat – but they’re not going to choose between, “I want to take this roleplay option” and then screw my buddies because I chose a poor-mechanical option. So I think a lot of the design direction we’ve gone so far is to try to isolate those things. You might have a benefit that pops in at some level that gives you an exploration benefit and a combat benefit.

Bruce Cordell: I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve retooled the wizard, the warlock. I mean, I can’t. Over the last two years, twenty times? I don’t know. We each have certain classes we tend to come back and work on. We do a lot of different iterations on many different fronts. Spells, classes, feats, you name it.

 

Robert J. Schwalb: I think that right now, the direction we’ve been going has been hitting the numbers we’ve been looking for. So we’re in a period of refinement rather than system design. I think the core engine is pretty much where the Powers That Be want it. Like Bruce said, I’ve got like 30 versions of Fighter on my desktop.

Bruce Cordell: That’s right.

Bruce Cordell: I’m leaving Wizards because there are a lot of opportunities, a lot of possibilities that I’d like to explore. I really couldn’t do that at Wizards for a variety of reasons. And by leaving Wizards after eighteen years, even more opportunities have opened up out of the blue and I’m going to pursue those. I guess by next month this time or earlier, people will probably know what I’ll be doing. But until those things are solidified, I don’t want to say anything about it.