A puzzle from the 1978 AD&D 1st Edition Monster Manual

This is about creature intelligence in original AD&D. Others have noted these foibles before, but I wanted to note down my take.

The game's intelligence system itself isn't implausible.

"Non-intelligent" creatures have Int 0. Fish, amphibians, reptiles, invertebrates, and plants.

"Animal intelligence" is Int 1. This is most mammals and birds.

A few select mammals are "semi-intelligent", having Int 2-4. Badgers, bears, boars, buffalo, cattle, giant goats, dogs, big cats, mules, and so on.

"Low intelligence" is Int 5-7. Creatures with low intelligence include apes, baboons, owlbears, shambling mounds, almost all the 'evil humanoid' types, and whales.

"Average (human) intelligence" is Int 8-10. Beasts with average intelligence include blink dogs, giant eagles, pegasi, and winter wolves.

And so on.

The first problem of course is that you can easily roll a player character with low intelligence who is outsmarted by most apes and cetaceans.

The second problem is the discrepancies in the book.

I have no idea why wild boar, cattle, and mules are in a higher intelligence category than warthogs, giraffes, and horses.

Giant lynxes and ice toads are as smart as people and have their own language (or in the case of ice toads, "their own weird language").

Dolphins have an intelligence of "Very" (Int 11-12, above baseline human) and are lawful good. I suspect this is a direct outcome of a '70s zeitgeist that envisioned dolphins as supernaturally wise (from before it was widely known what b*st*rds they can be).

The third problem is an ethical one, and is exemplified by the giant beaver and giant owl, both of whose alignment is neutral.

Giant beavers have Low to Average intelligence - likely to be smarter than some of the PCs. They are definitely sapient: they may be willing to trade for "coins or other valuables", and can sometimes be hired to build dam-like structures (e.g. bridges). The final lines of their entry: "Their hides are worth from 500 to 2,000 gold pieces each. Giant beaver kits of under 8 hit points can be subdued, captured, and sold in the market for from 100 to 200 gold pieces per hit point."

Giant owls are Very Intelligent - likely to be smarter than many of the PCs. They too are definitely sapient: they speak their own language, "are intelligent and will sometimes befriend other creatures". The game notes how many eggs and hatchlings will be found in their nests. Their eggs are worth 1000 gp and their young 2000 gp "on the open market".

Hmm.

Well... a lot of the assumed tone in early D&D is that of picaresque rogues sword-and-sorcerering their way through the world in search of coin. So...

Is this acceptable? Frankly, no. Unless your morals are preposterously anthropocentric, this is encouragement of murder, kidnapping, organ trafficking, and slavery.

There are a few obvious ways to fix this.

Most simply, you could reduce giant beaver/owl intelligence to that of an ape, and remove their sapient capabilities.

Equally, have them charmingly sapient but remove the gross stuff, in the same way that you don't attach a price to, say, leprechaun skins.

You could keep it but replace references to selling on the "open market" with sale "to evil beings", although that does raise some further questions.

One twist would be to have it so that only a few certain individuals are naturally uplifted (you would want this to happen from birth, and make them easily visually distinguishable, and probably make it widely known). Those individuals would likely still object to the exploitation of their non-sapient brethren and sistren, but at least it becomes a political or cultural problem rather than an ethical one.

Final thoughts

My tone here has been negative, but the AD&D Monster Manual was a formative read for me decades ago and I still have a soft spot for it. I think the big implicit ethical question is actually the worst problem with the book, and once fixed, the remainder of the text is highly usable for gameplay or inspiration.

Early impressions of Diablo IV --- Thoughts on ARPG vs TTRPG

Let's consider some general design principles for traditional role-playing games and modern action games.

Traditional role-playing games deeply involve meaningful choices (with meaningful consequences and no clear best choice), a wide range of possible choices, information as a resource, verisimilitude, and meaningful character development. These are commonalities at the root of almost every traditional RPG.

Action games revolve around fast adrenaline-pumping action, a very short action-reward cycle, semi-random rewards, and rapid character development.

These design principles are at odds with each other, in that weighty choices demand time spent on consideration, and information as a resource slows play even as it broadens it.

It's possible (although difficult) to implement traditional RPG principles as a video game - for example, the Divinity and Dragon Age games.

Diablo 4 is an upcoming action role-playing game (ARPG). I played the open beta through a couple of times, having poured a lot of time into Diablo, Diablo 2, and Diablo 3 over the years.

Diablo 3 was a slash-em-up which really embodied the action game design principles I outlined above, and stepped further away from the traditional role-playing game principles than either of its predecessors. This is despite the advances in technology and the greater budget available for its design, making it clear that turning the Diablo franchise into more action, less RPG was a deliberate design choice.

My tone probably establishes that this is not my preferred style of play for any kind of RPG. So how does Diablo 4 stack up?

The 25-word review is that it continues in the Diablo 3 vein of pure action game while deliberately (perplexingly) draping a thin veneer of traditional role-playing game over itself. The long review follows.

In-world choices

Diablo 3 did not offer choices. Diablo 4 does - literally fake ones, in that as far as I can tell they don't have consequences in the game. (I am mad about the Rite of Passage ritual.) There are no real choices to be made that have impact on the world. There are no time-sensitive quests, apart from 'world events' meant to encourage playing the game as a MMORPG. Key NPCs cannot die and enemies ignore them. If there's a little minigame to save NPCs, well of course THOSE NPCs can die and be targeted by enemies.

The story kind of plays itself. For example, I let the NPC Iosef kill all the cultist villagers by himself, just to see if he could. He could. The cultists didn't even try to target him, of course.

Gameplay choices

Some surface elements, like potions and skill respec costs, are walked back slightly from D3 style towards D2 style - that is, from action role-playing game game towards traditional role-playing game.

But most things still don't matter. You can unsocket items, respec skills, refine and un-refine crafting materials, etc, for little to no cost. Your character dying does nothing but reduce the durability of your equipment.

Narrative / structure

The game has a linear narrative. The dialogue is middle of the road. The plot has the modern preoccupation with surprise twists, but delivered only minutes (at best) after the initial information was given, so that the twist has no weight whatsoever.

Inexplicably, D4 has a LOT of narrative, dialogue, and cutscenes, all of which are completely at odds with the gameplay style of doing everything as fast as possible. This is the point that left me with the most confusion. Were the devs unaware of what kind of game they were making? Or did they think these narrative trappings are what makes a game an RPG? It was actually quite jarring: it's hard to take the grim, dark narrative seriously when NPC villagers are teleporting from place to place, ignoring the demons fighting on the screen, and a stranger named XXDogLover <Tongue clan> is pestering you to trade.

Verisimilitude

Diablo 4 feels very 'video gamey', for want of a better word. There is more or less no consideration given to verisimilitude, only to making the game play as fast and continuously as possible. Things phase in and out of existence or teleport around as necessary to make gameplay faster. NPCs follow you on quests and stand blankly in the middle of fights, unharmed and unreacting, sometimes chatting (this is partly a limitation of the format, but it's not impossible to give them dynamic behaviour).

The world map seems to want to be a continent, but judging by the actual time it takes to walk around it, is less than 5 km wide. Everything feels like World of Warcraft.

The MMORPG elements are firmly on display - you are forced to share the world with other concurrent players. They too appear to phase in and out of the server instance in order to smooth your gameplay experience.

Events appear out of thin air. Everything is announced: 'Event joined', 'dungeon complete' or 'cellar complete', 'You have reached your destination'. There is a big button to 'Reset dungeons'. The map just tells you in advance what the big reward for completing a dungeon is going to be when you hover over it on the map(!!!)

Information as a resource

You are told everything you need to know to accomplish something. You have map markers, and in many cases the closer you get to them, the more they zoom in(!) until they point exactly to where you need to go.

For crafting, you're given a complete list of all the ingredients and what they mean and do before you ever find them. I think that speaks volumes.

Combat

Combat is really all the game is and has, of course. This is not a criticism: Diablo 4 is an action game, after all. The tactical combat is mostly like D3, but avoiding enemy attacks feels somewhat more important (at least as the rogue and druid I played). You're given a dedicated dodge skill.

Meaningful character development

I mentioned having to pay a (tiny) cost to respec your skills, i.e., completely rewrite your character from the ground up. Very much an ARPG.

Writing

The descriptive text badly needs a copy-edit. This ingredient fluff text somehow uses FOUR qualifiers in just ten words: "Only mostly toxic in spite of its beauty, but still [...]"

The fluff is belied by the crunch (which from an RPG lens is very bad design). In the crafting system, 'Crushed beast bones' are "Found by killing beasts and animals [...] wild creatures". Except you notably do not ever get them by killing the foxes, deer, rats, etc, which wander the overworld. I'm pretty sure deer have bones. Interestingly, they did think about this for the 'Demon's heart', where the fluff text goes out of its way to explain why every little Fallen doesn't drop one.

Setting / style

There's a stylistic mixture of grim, bloody tone and cartoonish, childlike design. For example, you can harvest chunks of metallic iron from big blocky columns standing proud of the ground. But you will also find impaled bodies everywhere.

This version of Diablo has far more influence from specifically Christian motifs than previous ones did. They leaned HARD into it; so much that I am generally curious if the designers were looking for specifically Christian themes (rather than fantasy religious themes), and if so, why.

Gameplay loop / action-reward cycle

Absolutely everything in the game is a tiny quest and grants you a tiny reward. In practise it feels like nothing really matters. After a while as quest text constantly pops up and disappears, you have to pay attention to even notice it. If you're playing as fast as the game wants you to, you will complete the tiny quest before you have time to read it. Fortunately there are no meaningful choices offered, so this does not matter.

You'll get quest updates for every little thing - opening doors, unlocking waypoints, getting closer to the right spot on the map, etc. The quests are D3 style, very small and quick, such as 'slay this miniboss' ones that pop up when you get to a site. The rewards are correspondingly too meager to care about, and you get them automatically. Compare the D2 RPG-style system: six big, chunky quests per act. You had to go find things instead of the text telling you exactly what to do then finding the right symbol on the map and teleporting towards it. And the rewards were large and you had to go seek them out: Cain's identification, imbuement, the Horadric Cube, etc.

In D4, gear basically doesn't matter for at least the first dozen hours of play: just scan for green numbers and click to equip it without reading. Time spent comparison shopping is wasted compared to fighting things for more loot and experience. We only get 25 levels in the beta, but presumably it's like D3, where the specifics of gear just doesn't matter until the endgame (beyond the end of the campaign) where you spend most of your time. Compare D2, where you would sometimes switch your entire play style when you got an early unique item, buy new gear to support that item, and only reluctantly retire it many levels later.

I found only a few small secrets in the game. If there are big ones which you'd be proud to find, they're either beyond the scope of the beta or well hidden.

Modern meta-gameplay elements

Like D3, there are tons of unlockable cosmetics to (non-meaningfully) customise your character.

Like D3, there are achievements ('challenges'), some of them infuriatingly only attainable in the beta.

Like D3, rather than trying to make gold wealth relevant, Diablo 4 has meta-currencies for all the actually useful stuff. I counted literally fifteen different meta-currencies and meta-progression systems before I gave up. XP and bonus XP, levels, tiers, combo points, challenges, aspects, emblems, titles, renown, potion charges, skill points, obols, max obols, paragon points, etc etc. Very video gamey.

There's a crafting system, of course, because it's the year 2023. Like D3, crafting materials stack infinitely rather than taking up inventory space.

You choose your own difficulty. Everything about the world is relative to your power level, with enemies scaling up with you. You can't save something and come back to stomp it. I tried to get somewhere where I was seriously outmatched but couldn't get more than a 2 level disadvantage.

Bugs and annoyances

It's a beta, things may get ironed out.

• I had one crash requiring a restart for my graphics card to start working.
• I saw some animation errors when you approach a quest object from the 'wrong' angle and end up e.g. kneeling down and simultaneously gliding across the map.
• If there's something to do in town and it requires a loading screen, you lose your town portal. You can also lose progress in other quests when this happens.
• I found the loading screens pretty annoying, especially for a game where you have to teleport yourself all over the map constantly.
• Having stools you can accidentally sit in (and take a while and an additional click to get up from) while you're trying to get around seems like an obstacle to the extremely fast play experience they're trying to create; I'm surprised that made it as far as beta.

Summary

All in all, Diablo 4 builds directly on Diablo 3's foundations. Those who know what the implications of the D3 'treasure goblin' are for gameplay and tone will understand what I mean when I note that D4 features treasure goblins too.

There's lots to like, of course. The monster designs are compelling, the visual effects impressive, and the soundtrack stunning. The game is meticulously inclusive. There's incremental character improvement, adrenaline pumping action, and a strong multiplayer focus. There's a few good narrative beats - the vision of Tristram and the soulstone, from way back in D1, got me right in the nostalgia. I enjoyed clearing out the enemy occupants in a stronghold to turn it back into a friendly encampment, like in a Far Cry or Soulsborne game.

Overall, not much of a fantasy RPG, but a compelling action game.

Hints at an Upcoming Fantasy TTRPG Project

If you happened to be designing a life path system for DnD 5e, with say 300 steps, then you might determine the following.

The average ability score is 12.24 using roll-4-drop-lowest. Picking an ancestry usually gives you an overall +3, or a +0.5 per ability, for 12.74 total.

If each character has six steps on their life path to determine their background, then each step must give them about +3.75 ability score.

There are about 25 meaningfully different tool proficiencies, so if every other life path step offers a tool proficiency, each tool will be represented 6 times in a set of 300 steps.

Similarly, there are 18 skills, so by having life path steps typically offer choices between several different skill proficiencies, each skill can be represented at least 15 times in a set of 300 steps.

Common languages can be represented ~12 times and unusual languages ~8 times in 300 steps.

A character starting their life path should be at least teenaged, and a character starting play should be an adult, so six life steps should each confer at least 1 year of age on average (adjusted for ancestries with different lifespans and ages of majority).

Finally, something you might notice while writing 300 meaningful situations a character could find themselves in on their way to level 1 is that the 5e SRD list of tool proficiencies is quite incomplete. You would probably want to add at least miner's equipment, and you would be tempted to add tools for needlework, more specific metalworking crafts, and animal processing like butchery, chandlery, and soapmaking. You would certainly add more features relating to service roles!

Melee combat abstractions: Time

Games necessarily use abstractions. Abstractions are neither good nor bad, although there can be good or bad implementations, and when choosing levels of abstraction for different elements, there can be good or bad choices.

Some things true of pre-modern armed combat which might not be obvious to everyone are:

1. When combatants are in reach/measure, strikes can be delivered very fast, and 
2. Combatants can spend a lot of time out of reach/measure, sizing each other up.

Many tabletop game designs get this backwards. There is almost never an incentive to stay just out of fighting range. And strikes in reach are either

1. Modelled individually, in which case the system almost always permits too few of them; or
2. Modelled abstractly/collectively, which usually works better.

But in both cases, game systems tend to neglect the necessary corollaries.

What do I mean by that?

Strikes modelled individually

Go and watch a video of HEMA sparring or historical fencing and count the attempted strikes. For a competent fighter using plausible weapons and trying to defend at the same time, you will see upward of two strikes per second. For a skilled fighter using a quick weapon like a one-handed sword, you will easily see four per second.

GURPS at least comes close to getting this right (depending on choice of rulesets). But its one-second-action time scale is still not fine-grained enough to properly model individual strikes!

Strikes modelled abstractly/collectively

A lot of games use one resolution mechanism (like an attack roll) to model a section of combat, summing up a series of attempted strikes.

Games like modern DnD and its various clones and pseudoclones claim to do this: one attack (or two or three, for skilled fighters) in six seconds represents a more complex section of combat. The claim doesn't hold up, though.

If an attack roll represents a series of attempted strikes, there are at least four important corollaries, which apply even to unskilled combatants:

1. It must be possible for on-hit effects like poison or sundering to be delivered multiple times per turn, even for an unskilled combatant;
   
2. It must be possible to (sometimes) hit multiple different foes in one turn, and increasingly likely for larger power disparities;
3. At a point in battle where a character finds themself in front of multiple helpless foes and no other threat, it must be possible to stab all of them - certainly at least six per turn;
   
4. Where a magical item or something similar delivers an effect on an object it hits, it should do so numerous times for every attack roll, to represent all the parries.
   

In general none of these are true for 5e and comparable rule sets.

(As an aside, the one attack roll representing numerous attempted hits clearly doesn't apply to ranged attacks, where one piece of ammunition is consumed per shot; there are other bigger problems with timing there, at least in modern DnD, where a windlass crossbow can somehow be shot and spanned in six seconds but throwing two throwing knives that are already in your hands takes twelve seconds.)

Is there a solution?

At least three that I can see. You can have an even more abstract set of rules so that none of these things even come up. You can change to a preposterously fine-grained time resolution. Or you can model multiple strikes with a single resolution mechanism but take pains to get all the corollary rules right.

I personally favour the last option. Abstract semi-tactical combat is fun. But it's really common in fantasy gaming to have a blade-breaking sword, or be faced with magically incapacitated foes, or be playing an extremely skilled fighter against a very large number of very weak foes. These kinds of cases should be supported!

Kickstarter ending soon, and design thoughts

There are just 24 hours left on my first Kickstarter: A Fistful Of Curiosities.

Something I discovered in working on this project is that certain elements are always useful for small self-consistent curiosities.

Those elements boil down to: reasons for the thing to (still) exist, ways in which the thing is discoverable, and something to make player characters interested in the thing.

A weird medieval fantasy setting in turn shapes what those elements will tend to look like. In particular, for the ten curiosities I'm publishing, there are:

• 4 instances of undead creatures
• 6 instances of old location-based sorcery
• 4 instances of huge monsters
• 5 instances of dwellings
• 4 instances of natural terrain features
• 4 instances of catastrophes
• 5 instances of cyclical or continual processes
• 4 instances of old foreboding stonework