Review of Dungeons and Dragons v3.5
From Blackmoor to Chainmail to Dungeons and Dragons to Advanced Dungeons and Dragons and back again. The entire D&D line has returned to its wargaming roots with its new skirmish-level fantasy miniatures battles game, Dungeons and Dragons 3.5.
Why would someone want to start skirmish-level fantasy wargaming with D&D v3.5 instead of another, established skirmish-level fantasy wargame?
Personalization of characters.
Unlike other fantasy wargames currently on the market, each D&D player controls only one miniature. As this "player character" is the only warrior (or adventurer) that the player controls, the game is designed to give the player a lot of flexibility in creating and maintaining the character. For instance, if there are two players who both select wizards, even with the few spells known by a starting character, both wizards might have two completely different spell lists.
The rules also add various skills and feats to further personalize a character. Skills are basic abilities a character learns and can improve upon as the game goes on. All player characters have several skills, even if they aren't improved when starting a character. Feats are basically special features one can buy for a character. A character either has a specific feat or he doesn't.
When playing the game in a series of connected games as in a campaign, which D&D emphasizes, these player characters receive experience points (XP) for killing opponents and completing tasks (which might be things like not killing an opponent but rather convincing the opponent to leave a village alone). Once a player character's XP exceeds a threshold, they "go up a level". Going up a level has a positive effect on a player character: their hit points improve, their attack skills improve, and they gain more points to increase their skills (and possibly increasing their feats as well). Additionally, they can change character types (classes) at this point, allowing one to play a wizard that is also a thief.
Basically, the rules allow each player to customize their chosen miniature (to some extent) exactly how they want the mini to be.
Cheaper to get into for "player characters".
The players who control only one miniature get into the game much easier than nearly any skirmish-level fantasy game on the market. They only need to buy a copy of the Player's Handbook and one miniature. The downside to this is one player has to buy nearly everything else in the game line, but we'll get to that in a bit.
Emphasis on teamwork between players.
As mentioned earlier, each player controls only one miniature. The good news is everyone is on a team (the adventuring party) -- well, everyone but one player called the "dungeon master" (DM). The DM sets up the challenges and controls all the opponents the other players will face. There are guidelines in the Dungeon Master's Guide about how to create a "balanced" group of opponents for the others to fight. Sometimes the challenges that the DM sets up aren't a group of opponents to fight but an obstacle to overcome, like a trapped hallway the adventuring party must pass through or even a rooftop chase in a medieval city at night.
Established fan base.
Dungeons and Dragons has a huge fan base that is readily buying this new set of rules, not realizing that they're buying a wargame. In previous versions of the game, there was an emphasis on combat. However, the combat featured in the first and second edition rules actually didn't require miniatures -- the various players could use their imaginations to describe the characters, creatures, and environment around them, perhaps quickly sketching the boundaries of the battle area on a sheet of graph paper. When the third edition came around in 2000, the game rules switched from this no-miniatures-needed game to one with an emphasis on facing, reach, and playing on a grid mat, like WizKid's HeroClix.
Now, with the newest edition of D&D, everything is geared towards miniatures wargaming. There are several instances in the combat section where measurement is no longer measured in game-scale feet or yards. Instead, the rules look at how many squares (one-inch squares) is between combatants. With the reliance on the square grid, movement has changed from "move to wherever you want to within your movement allowance" to the numbers of squares a character can cross, moving like a king piece in chess.
In short, all the gamers who purchased the earlier non-miniature wargaming versions of D&D are going to purchase this version so they can "stay current" with the rules. That's several tens of thousands new wargamers.
Emphasis on non-combat related scenarios.
Unlike most other wargames on the market, D&D also has several non-combat related scenarios available. An entire gaming session could be taken up by player characters interacting with (i.e. "not killing") other non-player characters. Various tasks may need to be completed that do not require actual bloodshed. Players may find it easy to create personalities for their player characters through these non-combat scenarios, again increasing the personalization of the player character.
This may or may not be a good thing.
Why is this not a good entry-level wargame for most?
Character creation time for all players.
As illustrated above, the personalization and customization of each player character takes a lot more time than in other miniature gaming systems. In Mage Knight, as soon as you get the miniature you want, you have the entire character. In Mordheim, you pick and choose characters with pre-arranged stats from a "warband" list. It could take an entire four-hours long game session to create one player character in D&D's system. If that's not bad, the DM has to come up with stats for all of the major opponents the player characters will be facing.
Prohibitive cost for "dungeon master" player.
Unlike the other players, the one taking the role of DM has to buy all three core books -- the Player's Handbook, the Dungeon Master's Guide, and the Monster Manual. That's ninety dollars for the DM as opposed to thirty for each player.
But that's not all! The DM also has to buy all the miniatures to represent the opponents the player characters are going to face. In order for the game to have the epic feel that is portrayed in the rulebooks, the DM is going to need to have a large range of miniatures. Thinking of having the adventuring party fight a necromancer and a bunch of skeletons? You'll need enough skeletons to meet the "encounter level". If you have four player characters at starting level, that's only four skeletons. But if the player characters have advanced to fourth level, you'll need a dozen skeleton models. But, because different combats are strung together in series to make up an adventure, and different adventures are strung together to make a campaign, it's going to be boring for the players to face skeletons day after day. The DM is going to need to purchase lots and lots and lots of different miniatures.
Out-of-game expectations.
In addition to the huge cost the DM player must pay upfront and continually pay to keep buying new miniatures, the DM player must also invest a great deal of time outside the game. The DM player will be in charge of the bookkeeping -- determining who killed what, how many XP each kill was worth, keeping track of the stats of every other non-player character in the game. Where the players have only one miniature to paint, the DM has dozens.
But most importantly, there aren't a group of scenarios in the books (only "plot seeds"). This means the DM must create every scenario that the players will send their player characters through. If the DM doesn't have any time for this, he can always go out and purchase one of the many pre-made wargaming scenarios published by Wizards of the Coast and other game companies. (But again, the DM will have to take the time to read through the purchased scenario and determine if he has enough miniatures for the upcoming battle night.)
Complex rules for combat could slow down gameplay.
Most other wargames are very simple, compared to D&D's combat system. Mordheim uses a 1d6 roll, checked on a chart to determine if an attack hits, then another to determine if the attack wounds, then possibly three additional rolls -- a critical hit roll, an armor save roll, then a damage roll. All this fits on one sheet of paper, graphs included. There's even some room left over for artwork on the page.
D&D uses one roll to see if an attack hits, but you've got to calculate each character's melee attack with every weapon first, modify it by various effects based on what's happening in the game -- charges, attacks of opportunity, harmful and helpful spells, feats, and many other possible variant attacks -- and roll it against a target number based on the opponent's armor, dexterity, feats, variables from spells, lighting, cover, and several other items that may interfere with your attack. If successful, the target takes damage as determined by the weapon type, after a possible critical threat/hit roll and a possible save roll for magical attacks. The combat section in the new Player's Handbook is almost 30 pages long.
Although D&D does attempt to make combat more realistic with all of the added combat variables, the many variables means determining exactly what each character needs to hit will make D&D combat slower than many other fantasy miniature-battles game.
Changing to some classes don't make a lot of sense.
The reasoning behind why they allow characters to change type is rather simple -- if you only control and shape one player character, why not be able to shape it into the type of character you want? However, some of the choices don't make sense. For instance, it is possible to be a swashbuckling fighter then suddenly become a barbarian. Other prestige classes listed in other sources have similar problems -- suddenly a player character is a member of a secret society or was a spy or some other event that requires a brief rewrite of a character's history. But then, any class change can be vetoed by the DM.
It's really the DM against everyone.
Unlike nearly every other wargame, the players are united against a single opponent who doesn't have everything on display. There really is no mechanism for keeping the DM honest. During the game, he can see where all the player-controlled miniatures are on the board, but the players won't know exactly where the DM-controlled miniatures are -- were another a group of goblins always supposed to sneak up to the player characters, or did the DM just decide to add the opponents there? Were the archers in the forest hiding there all along or were they just added because the player characters killed the orc raiding party too quickly? While all the players have to roll all their rolls in front of everyone, it is recommended that the DM keep some of his rolls secret.
Stuck on the grid.
Instead of measuring and mapping the movement of miniatures using a straight-edged ruler, the square grid means that everyone is standing exactly five feet from center to center. Tactical maneuvering is nearly lost as the miniatures must move from square to square like a king in chess. Subtle positioning of miniatures a quarter of an inch in one direction or another in other game systems can mean a lot -- just outside of a weapon's range, being placed just within cover, being moved to a spot where a miniature is considered hidden. By forcing all characters to be stuck on a grid, a lot of the tactics of placement has vanished.
This leads to a strange dichotomy in the combat section: when hitting a target, D&D wants to include a lot of variables to make combat more realistic; when determining placement in a combat situation, D&D wants to remove a lot of variables to make combat more abstract. Creatures are now square, even long narrow creatures, like horses or centaurs. Because of the new grid rules, eight miniatures could now surround a horse-sized creature instead of six. A much better solution would be to completely abandon the grid and just rely on base-to-base contact to determine which miniatures could battle which.
The bit at the end which means it's the conclusion.
So, should you buy the new wargame on the market? Assuming you really want to play a wargame where you control only one character, are stuck on a grid, and don't mind dumping a sizable financial hardship on one of your friends, go ahead. With what's in the Player's Handbook, you'll be able to create several different characters, only needing to buy and paint a new miniature every so often. There will be plenty of people at your local gaming store with whom you'd be able to play the game with -- not only will the regular wargamers want to try out this new game, but you'll have several other new previously-non-wargamers entering the hobby from the role-playing game side to play against/with.
Just get someone else to be the DM.
Why would someone want to start skirmish-level fantasy wargaming with D&D v3.5 instead of another, established skirmish-level fantasy wargame?
Personalization of characters.
Unlike other fantasy wargames currently on the market, each D&D player controls only one miniature. As this "player character" is the only warrior (or adventurer) that the player controls, the game is designed to give the player a lot of flexibility in creating and maintaining the character. For instance, if there are two players who both select wizards, even with the few spells known by a starting character, both wizards might have two completely different spell lists.
The rules also add various skills and feats to further personalize a character. Skills are basic abilities a character learns and can improve upon as the game goes on. All player characters have several skills, even if they aren't improved when starting a character. Feats are basically special features one can buy for a character. A character either has a specific feat or he doesn't.
When playing the game in a series of connected games as in a campaign, which D&D emphasizes, these player characters receive experience points (XP) for killing opponents and completing tasks (which might be things like not killing an opponent but rather convincing the opponent to leave a village alone). Once a player character's XP exceeds a threshold, they "go up a level". Going up a level has a positive effect on a player character: their hit points improve, their attack skills improve, and they gain more points to increase their skills (and possibly increasing their feats as well). Additionally, they can change character types (classes) at this point, allowing one to play a wizard that is also a thief.
Basically, the rules allow each player to customize their chosen miniature (to some extent) exactly how they want the mini to be.
Cheaper to get into for "player characters".
The players who control only one miniature get into the game much easier than nearly any skirmish-level fantasy game on the market. They only need to buy a copy of the Player's Handbook and one miniature. The downside to this is one player has to buy nearly everything else in the game line, but we'll get to that in a bit.
Emphasis on teamwork between players.
As mentioned earlier, each player controls only one miniature. The good news is everyone is on a team (the adventuring party) -- well, everyone but one player called the "dungeon master" (DM). The DM sets up the challenges and controls all the opponents the other players will face. There are guidelines in the Dungeon Master's Guide about how to create a "balanced" group of opponents for the others to fight. Sometimes the challenges that the DM sets up aren't a group of opponents to fight but an obstacle to overcome, like a trapped hallway the adventuring party must pass through or even a rooftop chase in a medieval city at night.
Established fan base.
Dungeons and Dragons has a huge fan base that is readily buying this new set of rules, not realizing that they're buying a wargame. In previous versions of the game, there was an emphasis on combat. However, the combat featured in the first and second edition rules actually didn't require miniatures -- the various players could use their imaginations to describe the characters, creatures, and environment around them, perhaps quickly sketching the boundaries of the battle area on a sheet of graph paper. When the third edition came around in 2000, the game rules switched from this no-miniatures-needed game to one with an emphasis on facing, reach, and playing on a grid mat, like WizKid's HeroClix.
Now, with the newest edition of D&D, everything is geared towards miniatures wargaming. There are several instances in the combat section where measurement is no longer measured in game-scale feet or yards. Instead, the rules look at how many squares (one-inch squares) is between combatants. With the reliance on the square grid, movement has changed from "move to wherever you want to within your movement allowance" to the numbers of squares a character can cross, moving like a king piece in chess.
In short, all the gamers who purchased the earlier non-miniature wargaming versions of D&D are going to purchase this version so they can "stay current" with the rules. That's several tens of thousands new wargamers.
Emphasis on non-combat related scenarios.
Unlike most other wargames on the market, D&D also has several non-combat related scenarios available. An entire gaming session could be taken up by player characters interacting with (i.e. "not killing") other non-player characters. Various tasks may need to be completed that do not require actual bloodshed. Players may find it easy to create personalities for their player characters through these non-combat scenarios, again increasing the personalization of the player character.
This may or may not be a good thing.
Why is this not a good entry-level wargame for most?
Character creation time for all players.
As illustrated above, the personalization and customization of each player character takes a lot more time than in other miniature gaming systems. In Mage Knight, as soon as you get the miniature you want, you have the entire character. In Mordheim, you pick and choose characters with pre-arranged stats from a "warband" list. It could take an entire four-hours long game session to create one player character in D&D's system. If that's not bad, the DM has to come up with stats for all of the major opponents the player characters will be facing.
Prohibitive cost for "dungeon master" player.
Unlike the other players, the one taking the role of DM has to buy all three core books -- the Player's Handbook, the Dungeon Master's Guide, and the Monster Manual. That's ninety dollars for the DM as opposed to thirty for each player.
But that's not all! The DM also has to buy all the miniatures to represent the opponents the player characters are going to face. In order for the game to have the epic feel that is portrayed in the rulebooks, the DM is going to need to have a large range of miniatures. Thinking of having the adventuring party fight a necromancer and a bunch of skeletons? You'll need enough skeletons to meet the "encounter level". If you have four player characters at starting level, that's only four skeletons. But if the player characters have advanced to fourth level, you'll need a dozen skeleton models. But, because different combats are strung together in series to make up an adventure, and different adventures are strung together to make a campaign, it's going to be boring for the players to face skeletons day after day. The DM is going to need to purchase lots and lots and lots of different miniatures.
Out-of-game expectations.
In addition to the huge cost the DM player must pay upfront and continually pay to keep buying new miniatures, the DM player must also invest a great deal of time outside the game. The DM player will be in charge of the bookkeeping -- determining who killed what, how many XP each kill was worth, keeping track of the stats of every other non-player character in the game. Where the players have only one miniature to paint, the DM has dozens.
But most importantly, there aren't a group of scenarios in the books (only "plot seeds"). This means the DM must create every scenario that the players will send their player characters through. If the DM doesn't have any time for this, he can always go out and purchase one of the many pre-made wargaming scenarios published by Wizards of the Coast and other game companies. (But again, the DM will have to take the time to read through the purchased scenario and determine if he has enough miniatures for the upcoming battle night.)
Complex rules for combat could slow down gameplay.
Most other wargames are very simple, compared to D&D's combat system. Mordheim uses a 1d6 roll, checked on a chart to determine if an attack hits, then another to determine if the attack wounds, then possibly three additional rolls -- a critical hit roll, an armor save roll, then a damage roll. All this fits on one sheet of paper, graphs included. There's even some room left over for artwork on the page.
D&D uses one roll to see if an attack hits, but you've got to calculate each character's melee attack with every weapon first, modify it by various effects based on what's happening in the game -- charges, attacks of opportunity, harmful and helpful spells, feats, and many other possible variant attacks -- and roll it against a target number based on the opponent's armor, dexterity, feats, variables from spells, lighting, cover, and several other items that may interfere with your attack. If successful, the target takes damage as determined by the weapon type, after a possible critical threat/hit roll and a possible save roll for magical attacks. The combat section in the new Player's Handbook is almost 30 pages long.
Although D&D does attempt to make combat more realistic with all of the added combat variables, the many variables means determining exactly what each character needs to hit will make D&D combat slower than many other fantasy miniature-battles game.
Changing to some classes don't make a lot of sense.
The reasoning behind why they allow characters to change type is rather simple -- if you only control and shape one player character, why not be able to shape it into the type of character you want? However, some of the choices don't make sense. For instance, it is possible to be a swashbuckling fighter then suddenly become a barbarian. Other prestige classes listed in other sources have similar problems -- suddenly a player character is a member of a secret society or was a spy or some other event that requires a brief rewrite of a character's history. But then, any class change can be vetoed by the DM.
It's really the DM against everyone.
Unlike nearly every other wargame, the players are united against a single opponent who doesn't have everything on display. There really is no mechanism for keeping the DM honest. During the game, he can see where all the player-controlled miniatures are on the board, but the players won't know exactly where the DM-controlled miniatures are -- were another a group of goblins always supposed to sneak up to the player characters, or did the DM just decide to add the opponents there? Were the archers in the forest hiding there all along or were they just added because the player characters killed the orc raiding party too quickly? While all the players have to roll all their rolls in front of everyone, it is recommended that the DM keep some of his rolls secret.
Stuck on the grid.
Instead of measuring and mapping the movement of miniatures using a straight-edged ruler, the square grid means that everyone is standing exactly five feet from center to center. Tactical maneuvering is nearly lost as the miniatures must move from square to square like a king in chess. Subtle positioning of miniatures a quarter of an inch in one direction or another in other game systems can mean a lot -- just outside of a weapon's range, being placed just within cover, being moved to a spot where a miniature is considered hidden. By forcing all characters to be stuck on a grid, a lot of the tactics of placement has vanished.
This leads to a strange dichotomy in the combat section: when hitting a target, D&D wants to include a lot of variables to make combat more realistic; when determining placement in a combat situation, D&D wants to remove a lot of variables to make combat more abstract. Creatures are now square, even long narrow creatures, like horses or centaurs. Because of the new grid rules, eight miniatures could now surround a horse-sized creature instead of six. A much better solution would be to completely abandon the grid and just rely on base-to-base contact to determine which miniatures could battle which.
The bit at the end which means it's the conclusion.
So, should you buy the new wargame on the market? Assuming you really want to play a wargame where you control only one character, are stuck on a grid, and don't mind dumping a sizable financial hardship on one of your friends, go ahead. With what's in the Player's Handbook, you'll be able to create several different characters, only needing to buy and paint a new miniature every so often. There will be plenty of people at your local gaming store with whom you'd be able to play the game with -- not only will the regular wargamers want to try out this new game, but you'll have several other new previously-non-wargamers entering the hobby from the role-playing game side to play against/with.
Just get someone else to be the DM.
