Mike McArtor writes about stuff

So to head off any misconceptions of WTF I meant in my post yesterday let me clarify a few things. I figure some of my points are pretty straightforward, so let me talk about the others.

I hope we can legitimately play without map or minis.

I said, “The last time this was actually legitimately possible was in the ’90s.” D&D got its start as an add-on to a wargame and it’s never really shaken off those roots. You could play Basic D&D, 1e, and 2e pretty well without a map and minis, but 3e really turned up the tactical aspect of the game. 4e, of course, really blew that out of the water. So I hope 5e goes back to the earliest iterations of the game and makes it legitimately possible to run an entire campaign with just the books, paper, pencils, dice, and imagination.

From what Mearls hinted at I’m guessing that will be possible, but only time will tell.

I hope I can use it to tell at least one of the stories I want to tell, with minimal modifications.

I don’t really have any stories I can tell with D&D right now. As I wrote about in Story Papers a couple weeks ago, I’m just not into epic fantasy anymore. Not that D&D is necessarily epic fantasy but it is its own brand of fantasy. I’m not opposed to those kinds of stories, I just don’t have any to tell right now myself. But I’d be remiss to not want other people to tell those kinds of stories, so I’ve already included two worlds in the Ingressa specifically for D&D-type stories (Dar Hamaak and the world of the Obsidian Queen), with a third on the way.

In order to tell the stories I want to tell I either have to use a different system or modify an existing one. I’m running a game with GURPS right now. I like the char-gen for the game but running it is even more persnickety than D&D3e and a lot more than 4e. I’d like to tell my stories with a story game, but to do that Ann and I need to work on making Rule of Three capable of maintaining a long-term campaign. Until we figure out how to do that, I’ll have to use a more robust engine. It’s possible I could use 5e, depending on how flexible it is, which brings up the next heading, below.

The main problem with using D&D is that the rules as written break a lot of stories. Since I’m mostly interested right now in telling horror, science-fiction, or steam opera stories, the high fantasy of D&D just doesn’t work without pretty extreme modifications. You have to eliminate or hamper magic, and that radically throws off the balance in the game. I suppose you could reconcept the powers in the game, using the belief that “sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” (haha, out of habit I capitalized the “magic” in there on my first pass). But what do you do if you want to tell a steam opera, a mystery, or a horror story?

Well, let’s say I wanted to tell a story that I could conceivably with D&D, but even then I’d want to include other elements, which brings me to…

I hope the game allows (dare I dream, encourages?) the inclusion of non-fantasy elements.

At the very least, I hope the game doesn’t break with the addition of firearms, since it’s impossible really to escape from them in the Ingressa. A lot of the Ingressa is also powered by technology at least as advanced as steam-tech, but it also has a fair amount of Age of Sails tech as well as pre-modern, modern, and futuristic science fiction stuff. I’m not interested in telling stories in any other universe right now, after I’ve spent so many resources getting the Ingressa as large and detailed as it it is, so if I can’t tell a story in the Ingressa with a game system I just won’t use that system.

So my hope for 5e is that, if I like the system and want to use it, that I can add to it (and, somewhat less importantly, remove what doesn’t fit) what I need to so I can tell stories with it in the Ingressa.

And so I guess I should clarify the next point a little bit as well…

I hope I get to playtest it. :3

Let me put a little emphasis on the “play” in playtest. I don’t have the time to run another game right now, so I hope someone who does invites me to join in as a player. I’m not sure what the playtest rules will be, so even if I am invited to a game I don’t know that I’d be able to say one way or another.