The Inside Scoop on Gaming

Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook

Introduction:

I had heard many good things about the new 3rd Ed rules and was very curious to see what they had done to improve such a venerable system as D&D, so I borrowed a friend’s PHB and set into analyzing it. TSR and D&D have been solid publishers of quality work for ages, and with all the praise 3rd Ed was getting I had to take a look. The following review is based primarily on a chapter-by-chapter analysis of the quality of organization, detail, quality of information, and ease of understanding. Since most mass-produced RPGs are intended to be played by people 10 years and older, I have taken extra efforts to view the manual as both a new player and an experienced player.

Initial Thoughts:

From the first glance, the book appears to be of high quality with its hardbound cover styled to look like a wizard’s jeweled tome (in case you have not seen it yet). However, the cover initially tuned my enthusiasm down a notch due to its predictable appearance. The cover does not convey the excitement one thinks of when talk of dragons and warriors are mentioned. Getting passed the cover and skimming through the pages improves the impression considerably as the manual consists of glossy, high-quality paper with beautifully bordered pages, intricate sketches, and an overall mood that catches the flavor of a fantasy game or story.

Starting out is obviously the table of content, which for most books would be a very much overlooked subject, but this one bugged me somehow. All of the chapters were in order and, as far as I cared, the page numbers were correct, but overall it was relatively difficult to read due to the hand drawn lines that faded in and out of the print. Also, the columns seemed cramped and when viewed with tired eyes, seemed to blend together. One nice feature and a flaw, was that each table used in the manual also had an entry. The flaw was that it made the topics look too long and convoluted. Perhaps the layout manager could have spread the tables list on to an other page.

The last minor complaint about layout was the lack of a highly visible color for use on the section headings. Had the designers given the section headings a bolder color of blue it would be easier to find the topic you were looking for. Instead, the headings and topics tend to fade into the black text of the rules.

Beyond the Beginning: Chapter 1 Character Attributes

The book opens directly to the character creation chapter with a brief introduction to the concepts and standards within the book. From there you are propelled into the character abilities section and a flood of charts that suffer from poor borders and often-unclear purposes (such as table 1-1 which does not seem to apply to anything being discussed on either of the facing pages and has no clear use defined).

Though potentially confusing, attribute tables include some interesting information to help see how your character compares to other races’ and creatures’ averages.

Chapter 2: Races

An integral part of the Dungeons and Dragons appeal is the ability to play characters of different species. Each species or race, is provided with a brief description (too brief?) and an explanation of their unique abilities, bonuses, and traits in D&D terms. I was particularly disappointed with the illustration of the female races. The female elf and half-orc were too cartoonish for my tastes, and I would have preferred a more lifelike first image of all of the races. A nice touch is how the book helps players draft character sketches by illustrating how each race differs in facial and bone structures.

Chapter 3: Character Classes

Dungeons & Dragons allows the player to choose their general character’s occupation and life path through Classes (called character templates or arch-types in other games). Classes, if viewed on an individual basis, are very restrictive in that they state (without actually saying so) that a warrior can do X and Y, but not A through W. On the other hand, D&D allows multi-class characters. This is similar to a veteran soldier returning home to work as an accountant. Though somewhat frustrating and complex to manage, it is fairly realistic. This is the chapter that truly defines how your character interacts to the game world.

Beginning characters may choose from the predefined classes of Barbarian, Bard, Cleric, Druid, Fighter, Monk, Paladin, Ranger, Rogue, Sorcerer, and Wizard which all have their strengths and weaknesses. The warrior classes (Barbarian, Fighter, Paladin, & Ranger) are the toughest of the classes for purposes of face-to-face combat and ability to take damage (they get the largest hit dice which determines hit points). Though not well justified, the Priests are the second toughest class of characters (rogues by their nature should have been second toughest as they are more prone to street fights then a priest, though there were historical references to militant priests in medieval Europe, which I suspect is where this came from) followed by Rogues, and finally the ineffective Wizard/Sorcerer. On the other hand, warriors are not as useful in non-combat situations as the other classes due to their combat oriented design.

Just as the race section did, the classes are explained effectively with just enough information to get you going. I suspect that they will be coming out with hundreds of dollars of supplemental books to help fill in details just as they did with the previous edition. The tables’ lack of borders and lack of vivid headings becomes somewhat problematic here, as one table seems to blend with others and text is hard to follow.

Chapter 4: Skills

Skills work somewhat oddly. A character can choose any skill that is allowed to his or her race and class and spends a number of Skill points (determined by level, intelligence, race, and class) on what ever skill they wanted then add the character’s level and other modifiers. This means that many characters begin play with very few skills at an extremely low rating. Though this is not unheard of in real life, what doesn’t make sense is that the character adds his/her level to the skill eliminating much of the process of improving a skill over time. Essentially, I could take my 10th level fighter, who has never studied math, and choose the Astro-Physics skill (just for example) and poof, I now have an 11 or higher skill depending on too many factors. Though I am sure that this level increase was intended to reflect the character’s overall life experience with solving problems and dealing with situations, it does not come close to being an accurate depiction on how people truly learn. Instead, if they gave a general skill bonus of +1 per four levels or so, and increased the skill points earned each level, it would be much more accurate.

The process of finding whether your character successfully performed a skill is rather easy, consisting of 1d20 plus the character’s skill level and modifiers versus the Difficulty Class. Just as the other sections, each skill is effectively described. However, I was surprised by the limited number of skills presented.

Chapter 5: Feats

Feats are what other games might call advantages and are intended to make your character more unique. Once again the lack of clear borders makes the list of feats blend together. Would it have hurt them to put a dark line around the tables? A significant number of feats apply directly to combat and others to various crafts and character class specific roles. Though an interesting idea they add an extra level of complexity and provoked thoughts of “what’s the point”. Are feats really necessary to play the game effectively? Well, no, but they do ad flavor to your character. Many of the feats presented look awfully familiar to those bonuses presented in 2nd Edition’s Class supplemental books, which just reeks of regurgitated material.

Chapter 6: Description

This chapter covers many important, though potentially uninteresting points of the game and characters such Alignment, Religion, and character personality and background. Seeing as these parts of a character are rather important to how the character views and interacts with the game world, I would have figured this should have been placed before Skills and Feats. After all, how can you pick your skills and feats if you don’t have an idea of where your character came from or what he/she believes?

By this point, the general information about a character has been defined, but what does it all mean and what ELSE must I do to start playing? So far, a beginning player might be overwhelmed by the amount of information they have to sift through to make their first character. Would it have killed Wizards of the Coast to organize the manual into two sections for basics and advanced rules? I mean damn, the book takes 94 pages (minus pictures) to tell me about my choices of characters and what I need to do to make one. You would also think that they would have put in some background information on the world that I was supposed to be venturing into.

Chapter 7: Equipment

The equipment section opens with a brief but effective look at wealth and the basics of economy. Though not as detailed as it could have been, this is also an area that the Game Master needs to tweak and personalize for his game.

The weapons list is plagued by the same lack of bold structure that has affected all of the other tables, but I’ll drop that point from here on. The nice thing is the number of weapons a character can choose from. It seems odd that for a game that is named for a single die, the D20, that D&D would use so many different dice for weapon damage. Weapons use multiples of the d4, d6, d8, d10, and d12. What complicates things further is that each weapon can cause a critical threat based on differing attack rolls. What’s worse is that each critical hit causes different damage bonuses depending on the weapon used. Would it have been so hard to make one universal critical hit rule?

Armor has been nicely organized by weight categories: light, medium, and heavy. According to the rules, armor increases a character’s Armor Class, which makes the character harder to hit and thus cause damage to the character. At the same time as adding protection, armor affects a characters speed of movement, several skills, spell casting, and limits the bonuses given due to high dexterity. Illustrations of the armor help to get an idea of what your character may look like in the armor. The illustrations are based on a highly stylized fashion rather then on historical representation, but there is no flaw there.

The truly nice feature about the equipment section was the basic equipment packages that had been preconstructed to help speed the purchasing process and helps get the play started. In addition to weapons and armor is a plethora of side gear and class specific tools that a character may choose from.

Chapter 8: Combat

After 115 pages we finally get to the meat of most D&D encounters, the fighting! The chapter starts with a rather boring, but effective depiction of combat in D&D then breaks combat down into its parts. One of the problems with this section is its less than fluid structure. Many of the vague ideas are poorly explained such as attacks of opportunity, actions in combat, and even movement in combat. Why did they make things seem so complex? What they have done is taken very simple, straightforward concepts and added too many words and special terms. Instead of saying things like, “A character may move up to five feet and attack in one round”. Instead, they printed, “With a normal melee weapon, you can strike any enemy within five feet. (Enemies within 5 feet are considered adjacent to you.)” Now you can read this several ways such as “magic weapons can attack beyond 5 feet, but not normal ones,” or “you can hit more than one enemy if they are within 5 feet.” I’m not saying that what they meant to say was wrong or that they were incorrect, but that they could have broken the language down for younger, less experienced players to make the meaning more clear. This is a recurring problem throughout the manual. With better organization and editing they may have been able to pump in more content and cut this nearly three hundred page book down considerably.

Aside from formatting problems, the combat system suffers from concepts that don’t make sense. Most predominant is Armor Class. In D&D, AC is used to determine if a character is hit sufficiently to take damage. What AC implies is that wearing armor makes a character HARDER to hit by increasing the odds of not hitting. Then, on the off chance you do “hit” a fully armored character the amount of damage that character can take is the same as the unarmored character. Make sense? No! Armor performs one function (other than looking cool) it reduces damage from an attack. D&D already had a system in place to make this realistic, but they didn’t use it. Instead of using an all encompassing attack roll they should have made the attack roll determine if the defending character was truly hit. Then use the damage dice to determine if the attack penetrated the character’s armor. But wait, this means that characters will take less damage if they wear heavy armor! Does that mean that fighters will become invincible? Using the existing damage system, yes they could.

But now lets add a shield to the fighter and bam, the character’s AC jumps up to two points, big deal! I want to block that attack that just came in on my shield side. What good is this extra weight if I can’t do anything with it? This points out D&D’s passive defense nature. In an active system, the player would roll to try to block an attack, but D&D just increases the character’s AC, and thus the chances of “missing” the character. According to the rules, a character can reduce his/her attack ability (-4) to increase their AC by 2. Again, big deal! In most cases, it would be better to just attack and hope to disable your enemy. Instead, the character could declare a block or parry, using some skill based modifier to try to deflect the attack. This seems much more true to life then just saying that adding a shield adds X regardless of your skill level.

This brings me to my next unclear subject of hit points. According to the manual hit points “measure how hard you are to kill”. Since hit points are modified by a character’s constitution, it is assumed that HP are based off of a character’s health, but they are not. In fact, characters with the same Constitution score and level can have drastically different hit points due to their class. What is it about magic users that makes them less healthy or easier to kill then priests? You would figure that a character that is hard to kill is either very lucky or very skilled, but D&D does not illustrate this. Does this mean that fighters are more skilled then wizards? Well, in one aspect yes. In melee and matters of hand-to-hand combat a fighter is much more skilled then a wizard, but what about magic? Magic also causes damage just as weapons do. If HP represented skill, then a wizard should have more HP versus magic then a fighter. Obviously, a magic user should be harder to kill with magic shouldn’t he?

Ah, but wait, there are saving throws. A magic user’s save versus magical attacks is better than a fighter’s. But what are those saving throws anyway? What do they represent? The Fortitude save represents the character’s ability to withstand severe physical trauma. Reflexes represent luck and speed of action to avoid a situation. Will represents the character’s strength of mind. All of these saving throws could have been based on the character’s attributes alone with no need to add yet another score to keep track of. Fortitude is physical thus should be based on strength and constitution, Reflex is dexterity, and Will is intelligence and wisdom. Have they not heard of K.I.S.S.?

Most of the other sections make sense and seem to be geared more for reference then as actual rules. A nice touch is the Coup de Grace (pronounced “grah”), which basically says if a character is unable or unwilling to defend him/her self against a lethal attack, then the character dies. This was one of the problems with 2nd Edition rules if you followed the book to the letter. There are some problems with cover which relate to the previous points about Armor Class, but they are consistent with the rules as presented.

Chapter 9: Adventuring

This chapter is unusually short, but for good reason. Rather then coving interesting subjects as its title might suggest, instead it covers those miscellaneous rules such as movement over time and carrying capacity. The most important part of the chapter is the Experience and Levels section, which I would have overlooked had I not been reviewing it. This is probably the most important part of the rules from a player’s point of view as it tells how a character can improve. I am surprised that this had not been covered under a different section such as classes, though it seems appropriately placed based on its subject matter.

Chapter 10/11: Magic/Spells

Of all things, a chapter that makes sense! The organization of each section seems to follow some.. sort.. of logic! Fascinating (lifts one eyebrow). I can’t say enough good things about this section as there are excellent answers to all of my questions, spells upon spells to choose, excellent organization, spell schools and thorough explanations. The only real fault is the lack of clear formatting as mentioned too many times.

Summary

After looking at all of these chapters I feel a sense of, of… well, shame. Shame on WotC for making so few changes. Dungeons & Dragons is a main stay in the gaming industry and the loyal players fear change. In this case they should have feared the lack of change. There are some very important improvements in the rules, but this publication is possibly more flawed then the previous D&D. The publishers have repackaged the same thing that TSR had done, but made enough changes to make it “new”. None of the changes that were made really changed the game with the exception of introducing Feats and a new skills section. Forgive me for saying this, but the editor and page layout managers should be shot! The whole book with the exception of magic and spells were too cramped with topics that didn’t really belong where they were. The lack of a Basic section could easily scare off new players as many of the rules were not necessary to play the game effectively. Too many rules, too little time is what I hear too often from players. And really, who wants to have to brows through 274 pages to create a character for a single game anyway? On top of that, many rules were not explained well, and had many been left in an advanced section, could have been ignored. I expect a lot of criticism for these comments, but common!

Here is the low down summary and recommendation. If you do not own the book and only play once in a while, don’t bother buying this one. If you have the old 2nd Edition books, keep them. They are nearly as good as the 3rd edition and have much prettier pictures. Lastly, if you have never played role playing games before (though I doubt you would be reading this), the D&D books are excellent. What do you mean, excellent? First off, the D20 system is being butchered and put into almost any other genre of games out there. Also, due to the extremely large library of publications due out for D&D both old any new, there is no other system out there that can cover the territory that TSR and now WotC can. After all, how many players did not begin playing RPGs with D&D, maybe 15%?

After reading this, if you have any interest check out www.sunderedepoch.com Opinions are welcome.

D&D 3ed Edition