The Revision

by Rich Redman

If you're on our site, you know that Dungeons & Dragons was revised to version 3.5, and the books released (officially) on 7/18/03. In fact, you're probably surprised how quiet we've been on the subject. Well, it's been awhile since we posted an opinion piece, and this seems like the perfect topic.

Bias

Let's be clear right off the bat: Three of the four Mechanics worked at Wizards of the Coast, in RPG R&D, during the revision. I was on the revision team with Andy Collins (PH) and Skip Williams (MM). JD sat surrounded by Ed Stark, Jeff Grubb, Skip Williams, and Andy Collins during the revision process. So we have some personal investment in the revision. Then there are the facts that I work for Wizards of the Coast again (sort of), and as freelance designers we need the occasional assignment from Wizards of the Coast to keep paying our bills. On the other hand, we got laid off before the revision was complete and work continued in our absence, so our egos and careers aren't dependent on the success of 3.5.

The Team

The revision team consisted of Andy Collins, a respected designer and long-time member of RPG R&D, Skip Williams, one of the original 3.0 designers, myself, and Ed Stark, creative director for RPG R&D and a designer with vast experience in the RPG field. However, we didn't work in a vacuum. One of the huge advantages Wizards of the Coast has is that all those designers work with others like Bruce Cordell, James Wyatt, David Noonan, Jeff Grubb, Chris Perkins, Charles Ryan, and Rich Baker. Plus there are editors like Michele Slavicsek and Gwen Kestrel, managing editor Kim Mohan, and of course the department boss Bill Slavicsek. That's a lot of talent concentrated in a small part of one building!

Of the remaining original 3.0 designers, Jonathan Tweet was working on miniatures and still made time to provide his invaluable experience to us when we had questions. Monte Cook of course had his own company, Malhavoc Press, and we saw him on a regular basis during the revision. I'm not sure if he realized that some of the questions we asked during the weekly comics lunch in downtown Renton were related to the revision process, but I remember Andy and I asking them.

The Process

It's been said that 3.5 was planned from the start of 3.0. I certainly remember discussing doing "some kind of update or revision" way back when I was working on Diablo II: To Hell and Back (with a spiral-bound, black and white, photocopy of the 3.0 PH and a spreadsheet with some monsters in it). What mystifies me is that some people think planning for a revision is a bad thing. The alternative is assuming the product would die before reaching a revision, so isn't it better to have confidence and plan to support the product line? Many of the people involved with the original business plan for D&D are also pursuing opportunities outside Wizards of the Coast (how's that for euphemism), but saying that version 3.5 would have been different if they still worked at the company is like saying that reading this opinion piece keeps tigers away. Do you see a tiger? Then it must be working! In fact, you almost never want the original authors involved with a revision. When you write something, you believe in what you're doing. You have confidence in your choices. It's incredibly difficult to revise your own work.

Ed Stark chose an almost entirely new team for the revision. He approached me to revise the Dungeon Master's Guide. I knew that Andy Collins would revise the Player's Handbook, and that Skip Williams would revise the Monster Manual. The whole idea scared the heck out of me! I mean, it's the DMG for gosh sake! I've been playing D&D longer than the DMG existed. It's the holy of holies, and Ed wanted me to mess with it! I've known Jonathan Tweet, Monte Cook, and Skip Williams long enough to know they're not perfect, but being given responsibility for revising their work . . . well, I didn't think I was worthy. You have to understand that when I worked in RPG R&D, I got a schedule for an entire year showing all my projects. I had months to worry and fret over the revision before I actually started work. Ed and Andy coaxed me into doing it, and were very encouraging of my initial ideas. Gradually I gained confidence.

Originally, the 3.0 DMG was supposed to be a catalogue or dictionary of rules. Most of what you needed to play was in the PH, and the Adventure Game introduced people to their roles as players and DM. By the time of the revision, production on the Adventure Game had stopped. While there was some discussion of creating another adventure game, one of the key points of revising the DMG had to be making it more user-friendly for beginning GMs. I thought reorganizing the book could resolve most of that, and when I presented my outline for the revised DMG, everyone agreed.

Then began a long process of reviewing material where we knew there were issues. We knew we wanted to review magic item functions and pricing. Originally, the magic item chapter was written and then rules for creating and pricing items were created, tinkering with them to try to recreate the prices already set in the book. We knew we wanted more information about prestige class design. Prestige classes were a late addition to the 3.0 DMG, and we'd had three years of experience designing them since then. We wanted to add mundane items to the treasure tables and still have them produce the same average value of treasure. There were other concerns, like trying to get the DMG information on powerful races to match Savage Species, but they were smaller. I started a series of meetings with Andy Collins, Skip Williams, and Ed Stark to review magic item prices and started badgering Jonathan Tweet with questions about why the DMG worked the ways it did.

As I worked on the DMG (and other projects) Andy was further along in revising the PH. So I attended meetings where we brutally criticized his work, dissecting it in detail, demanding he justify every little change, and arguing about whether a change belonged in 3.5, or in a later edition. He faced Ed, Skip, myself, and sometimes David Noonan, James Wyatt, Rich Baker, and others while in the hot seat. Heck, several times Stephen Radney-McFarland attended to represent the RPGA! Again, this was a huge advantage for Wizards of the Coast because it had this pool of talented designers who were not involved in the daily business of the revision and who came to these torture sessions with fresh eyes. Andy handled it professionally and with great equanimity, but I could see that it took its toll. I expected to go through the same thing, and only hoped I would handle it as well.

Then came September 2002, and the lay-offs. I still had two weeks on my schedule to work on the DMG. Andy had considerably less, but he'd already spent more time on the PH. I really don't know how far along Skip was with the MM. Most of my work was done, though I felt bad about leaving it unfinished. It wasn't the only project I had to leave incomplete. That's just the way things are. Circumstances change, plans should change to reflect the new circumstances, and you move on. You don't have to like it, but neither do you have to dwell on it.

Design continued after I left. For legal reasons, I could not be involved in it (you can't lay someone off and then contract them to do the work they were doing when you were paying them full benefits). When I first came to Wizards of the Coast, I managed the Customer Service Team. One of the things I learned, and drilled into my customer service reps, was to trust other people to do their jobs. If we ever had actual evidence of incompetence or malfeasance, I would have acted on it, but that never happened. For better or for worse, Wizards of the Coast was a place where you focused on fixing the problem, not on whose fault the problem was. When I moved over to R&D, Mike Selinker was my boss and he reinforced that principle: Worry about being good at your job and don't worry about how someone else does his job. Occasionally, when someone else's work impacted mine, or mine impacted someone else's, Mike and I would chat behind close doors. We never, ever, discussed anyone else's work in public and we didn't second-guess people we knew were competent designers. So if you read this far expecting to hear me bad-mouth the work done after I left, I have to disappoint you. There are some changes made after I left that I question, it's true. That's the most you'll hear me say, however. I, like you, can post my questions to the message boards and can expect a designer to answer them. Of course, I can also ask at the weekly comics lunch, or just walk downstairs and ask. I won't, though, until I've had a chance to play and see them in use.

Did we go too far?

Arguing about this is a lot like arguing about Challenge Ratings (CRs). Everyone has a different experience and everyone has an opinion. I've heard people argue that specters are too easy and don't deserve their CR, and I've seen how Skip Williams runs encounters with specters and think their CR might not be high enough! No matter what I say, some people will believe that version 3.5 went too far and made too many changes. I'm not entirely sure what my opinion is on this one. I lean toward far enough but not too far, largely because I know about a lot of changes that Andy, Skip, and I discarded because they clearly went too far.

I do not believe that it is possible to revise D&D and not retroactively alter someone's campaign or character. Sure, you can clarify rules and fix typos, but that's not a revision. That's the kind of changes made between the first and second printings of the PH. Any revision is going to have that retroactive effect on someone. Somewhere out there is a character based on the 3.0 grappling rules that will be affected by the revision. Somewhere out there is a campaign based on the economics of magic items as presented in 3.0 that will be affected by the revision. While I certainly sympathize with anyone whose campaign or character is altered (mine certainly have to be), I think that's part of playing a living, growing game.

Let me discuss some specifics, so you can have some idea of what we argued about, sometimes for months:

• Metamagic feats: In all the play we saw, very few players used metamagic feats. We did, but we designed the game. Fewer still GMs used them with their NPCs. Andy proposed a system for revising them, but in the end we decided it was too big a change without enough playtesting.
• Spell lists: The rules for specialist wizards in 3.0 reflected the fact that some schools of magic simply had more spells than others. Some, like Evocation, were simply more useful in combat than others (and the hypothetical "base line" campaign assumes combat). To balance that, specialists had to be forced to make certain choices. It was completely artificial and forced characters to be created a certain way in order to balance the game. Andy decided to expand the spell lists so that we could free up the choices made when specializing. In the process, he often altered existing spells so that their effectiveness, based on three years of experience, more accurately reflected their level.
• Facing: Jonathan insisted throughout design and development of 3.0 that we didn't want monsters to have a front and a back. It was too much to track, and many commercially available miniatures (granted, not everyone uses them) don't have an obvious front and back (picture a dragon facing one way with its neck twisted around to look behind it, and decide which way it's facing). Effectively, they faced in all directions simultaneously. Over three years, we realized that giving a creature a width and a length gave it a facing! More problems became apparent. For instance, if a long creature changes facing ninety-degrees, some part of it leaves a threatened square. Should that provoke an attack of opportunity? How does a rectangular creature fit diagonally on a square grid? From what point in the rectangle do you measure reach? Making creatures "round" solved those issues. It was a bold move, and Skip knew it risked going too far, but we thought it solved too many issues not to do.

The Opinion

As if everything leading up to this were completely factual and objective.

Now the process is over, the books are out, and customers seem divided into two camps. The first camp feels that version 3.5 is nothing but a blatant attempt to sell the same game to the same customers a second time. Kind of like releasing a special edition DVD six months after initially releasing the film…and if you didn't rush out to buy every version of Fellowship of the Ring, you know someone who did. The other camp is basically everyone else, including those who believe Wizards of the Coast's message that you can keep playing D&D without buying version 3.5.

Do you need it?

No, you don't, and you know you don't. Wizards of the Coast gave third-party companies information about changes to 3.5 in advance. There is already product out there that uses 3.5, and has less than a page of conversion notes (most can get away with a short paragraph). There is concrete, physical evidence in front of the consumer right now showing that no one has to buy version 3.5.

Do you want it?

Boy, I sure did. I worked on it. I understood the reasoning behind the changes. I agreed that we were making the rulebooks closer to the way the game was actually played. When I first started looking at the 3.0 rules, they made me want to play D&D. I feel the same way about 3.5: I want to play D&D. I hope they make you feel the same way.

Closing

I worked on version 3.5, and I think it's a good update to the game. I won't speculate on the timing of its release because I don't like idle speculation. I think the changes are appropriate, and I think that as you play products that use version 3.5, you'll agree. I think it's obvious that you can keep right on playing without buying version 3.5, and I look forward to seeing you across the gaming table.

Your Turn

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