Destination Innovation
October 11th, 2010
Hello and welcome once again to Dark Designs. This is Explorer Week (as though you didn’t know!), and so I thought I’d take a minute to talk about blazing a trail through virgin ground, design space-wise, that is. You see, a key part of game design is innovating (especially here at Necromancers of the Northwest, as you’ll see below). Ultimately, our main focus when making a new product is to find some way to really improve the game, to take it somewhere it’s never gone before (whether that product is a .pdf supplement or just another article, though I’ll admit this is more the case with the former than the latter).
What do I mean by that, precisely? Well, let’s take Liber Vampyr as an example. Liber Vampyr, for those of you not familiar (in which case you might want to consider downloading it for free) was our first .pdf supplement, and it focused (not surprisingly, if you consider the name) on vampires, and, more specifically, on allowing PCs to play vampires…better. Why? Well, because we felt that, prior to Liber Vampyr, there just wasn’t enough support for vampire fans.
I could go on about the specifics of why we felt that way and what we did to fix it (and, in fact, had to catch myself before I did so—I really love talking about Liber Vampyr, as I consider it a resounding success, even if there were a few mistakes we’ve learned not to repeat (I’m looking at you, Revenant Ascetic)), but I already did that in another article, and I’m sure no one wants it all rehashed yet again.
Similarly, The Book of Beginnings was all about re-envisioning character creation. We rejected the longstanding battle of die-rolling versus point-buy in favor of three new systems (all right, fair enough, astrological character creation really still falls under “rolling,” but it was still fun and flavorful). Even Into the Armory, a book that was basically just a collection of random magic (and not-so-magic) items, was built with a specific goal in mind of making it easier for players to do over-the-top, cinematically coolthings.
Now, you might be asking how someone can do any kind of design without exploring some virgin territory. After all, if you don’t do anything new, it’s not really design, it’s just plagiarism, right? Well, yes and no. For example, suppose I wanted to whip up a new spell, themed as a necromancer using his touch to decay his opponent’s body. It might look something like this:
Shriveling Touch
School necromancy [evil]; Level sorcerer/wizard 1
Casting Time 1 standard action
Components V, S
Range touch
Target living creature or object touched
Duration instantaneous
Saving Throw none; Spell Resistance yes
With a successful melee touch attack, you deal 1d6 points of negative energy damage per caster level (maximum 5d6). When delivering the attack, you gain a +3 bonus on attack rolls if the opponent is wearing light or no armor (because that will reveal more skin, making it easier to make contact).
Is this innovative? I certainly hope not, since it’s just a tweaked version of shocking grasp, and frankly it’s barely even been tweaked. It changed schools to Necromancy, its damage changed from electricity to negative energy, and I changed the bonus from metal armor or weapons (which doesn’t fit anymore) to a bonus on light or no armor (with an admittedly weak excuse, but I needed it for the example, after all, and it’s not like this is a real spell. No, seriously, I mean it. It’s not real. If you’re a DM, and your player is trying to get you to let him use Shriveling Touch, you should probably say no. Spells like this are some of the worst offenders for power creep, especially because most of the people who make them also have a bad habit of making them even more powerful than the base spell, or class feature, or whatever).
“But Alex,” you say, “it’s still innovative. After all, no spell like that existed before. You just made it up, you created something new.” While there will always be a sense in which that is technically true, I would argue that, on a fundamental level, there is absolutely nothing new about shriveling touch. Everything it does is done byshocking grasp, the only difference is what kind of energy is being used to do the damage (and, for purists, the difference in school can—and probably will—be exploited by those who want to optimize their character and, for whatever reason—there’s always one or two—want shocking grasp as a necromancy spell). Does this take the game somewhere new? Does it allow players (or DMs, or whoever) to do anything they couldn’t before? Not really.
As an aside, the complaint that I always get about Liber Vampyr is that it’s not innovative enough. The examples that are usually brought up are the fact that the classes mirror three existing classes, and that most of the blood powers replicate spells in some way or another. Though some of this is true (for example, the revenant ascetic, as a class, is a slightly watered-down monk whose only innovation is that he gains access to blood powers, though I would argue that the revenant warrior is only a ‘fighter clone’ if barbarians are as well. Additionally, while a lot of the blood powers which replicate spell effects do so with some flavorful twists—detect blood, vampiric detect thoughts, vampiric nightmare, andnightmare assassin all spring to mind – it’s true that several, especially in the Tyranny family, simply directly replicate spells), neither the classes nor the actual blood powers are supposed to be all that innovative. The innovative part of the book was the cruomancy system: the way in which one gained access to those blood powers. It’s possible we’ll go back some day and make a Liber Vampyr II (most likely with a better title), and we’ll be sure to include more innovation in the blood powers and classes themselves. But for our introduction to cruomancy (which we, at least, thought was pretty radical, getting spell slots by killing people) we wanted to ease people in a little bit.
In order to really be innovative, a new design has to do, or allow players or DMs to do, something that previously they couldn’t, or else allow them to do it in a very new way. For example, some of you might remember Complete Arcane, a Wizards of the Coast sourcebook back in the heady days of 3.5. Like most of the “Complete” series, it had a moderate level of innovation, with one or two really new things and a lot of rehashed stuff. The warlock, a class which allowed arcane spellcasting as an at-will ability instead of using the Vancian system, was incredibly innovative. The wu-jen, a class which shuffled around the schools of magic into elemental groupings, was not so much.
And, of course, you can look forward to future innovations from us here at Necromancers of the Northwest. In addition to those in our .pdf supplements, you can also expect innovation as often as possible in our articles, such as the Races with Class articles in From the Workshop, the Einherjar template, death and inherited curses, necromancy in fourth edition, and the like. Right now we’ve got something really cool in the works, but, unfortunately, that’ll have to be a topic for another time.
Is next week good for you? Around the same time? Good. Because if you like spells or spellcasters, and enjoy fun and innovative things, you're not going to want to miss it. In the meantime, go out and try something new.