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Welcome to the D&D miniseries! I wanted to kick this off with a look into the mechanical heart of D&D, but I didn't really know what that meant. So I asked my friend Tristan! Designer of the award winning game Shanty Hunters and author of the Molten Sulfur blog, Tristan now spends his time as a designer on Nations & Cannons, a hack of D&D set in the American Revolutionary War.
Tristan brought on a mechanized design principle underpinning D&D, the Adventuring Day, which says the game should be balanced for parties to go through 6-8 combat encounters between each long rest. It’s an interesting idea... even though absolutely no one in the known universe actually plays D&D like that. So where’d it come from? And how do you approach it as a designer?
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From the Dice Exploder blog: D&D Is A Comedy Game
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Transcript
Sam: Hello, and welcome to another episode of dice Exploder. Each week we take a tabletop RPG mechanic hold it's face betwixt our hands and ask if it's ready for what comes next. My name is Sam Dunnewold and my cohost this week is Tristan Zimmerman.
Before we get into today's episode dissects floater, season four is running a pledge drive right now on BackerKit. You can go there. You can support the show. We're doing a backer curated episode where you're going to be able to vote on what mechanic the show covers. You can buy secret unreleased game that I've designed, and if we've raised enough money, I'm going to finally let my dad join the dice Exploder discord. If you've got money head there now the more we raised the longer the season's going to be. Thank you. I really appreciate it.
But today, this episode marks the start of a little mini series here on dice Exploder all about Dungeons and dragons, and I knew I wanted to kick things off with a look into the mechanical foundations of the game, but, uh, I wasn't exactly sure what I meant by that. So I went and asked my friend Tristan.
Tristan is the award winning game designer, best known for Shanty Hunters and RPG about singing and collecting magical sea shanties in 1880. He's also the guy behind the Molten Sulfur blog, where he posts about real world history and folklore, and how to file the serial numbers off those things and use them in your own campaigns. I particularly liked his post from a few months ago about Akbar's Hunt.
Tristan also works as a designer for Nations and Canons by Flagbearer Games, a Dungeons and dragons fifth edition hack designed to tell stories set in the real life American revolutionary war, which means he spent a lot of time thinking about what makes D and D tick.
And the mechanic Tristin brought on today is The Adventuring Day, a basic design principle of D and D fifth edition: the idea that the game should be balanced for parties to go through roughly six to eight combat encounters between each long rest.
It's an interesting idea, even though absolutely no one in the known universe actually plays D and D like that. So where did it come from and how do you approach this as a DM and as a designer of fifth edition adventures? Plus I get Tristin to give me an answer to a question at the heart of this whole series. What is it about D and D that survives when you reskin it as a revolutionary war game?
The adventuring date is a compelling, and I think it formative lens through which to see the game. So come try it out with us. Here is Triston Zimmerman with the adventuring day. Tristan, thanks so much for being here on Dice Explorer.
Tristan: Genuinely a delight to be here, Sam.
Sam: It's our like, what, every four years, get together and talk about the current state of RPGs.
Tristan: So, because you bring that up, I have to tell this story on the air.
So every few years, Sam and I would bump into each other at Gen Con, and it was never like planned or anything, we would just bump into each other, and one of the things we would always catch up on is What have you been playing? What have you been running? And invariably, whatever Sam had been playing and running, like, what he was excited about at that moment, was the stuff that I would get really excited about in the interim between the next meetup. Like, not necessarily in a, like, oh, Sam said it was good so I gotta get into it, though if I had any brains it would be that. But just like, oh, Sam's got really good taste, and then I have independently arrived at being excited about the thing that Sam was excited about. So,
Sam: I'm a trendsetter, baby! Yeah!
Tristan: and, consistently ahead of the curve.
Sam: It's funny that you say that because I think of a life changing sentence for me was at one of those meetings with you, catching up, and you saying I think one LARP a year is good for the soul. And, and like, that that was one of the main things that got me into like, try LARPing for the first time.
And like, one of the things I don't have time for on Dice Exploder, but I really want to do more of, is do a whole miniseries like this one on LARPing. Because I think that's what I'm really excited about right now. so everyone get ready, we're all gonna be LARPing in four years.
Tristan: Yeah.
Sam: Alright, but today I've brought you in to talk about The Behemoth, about Dungeons Dragons, baby! So, I wanna hear from you, what is Dungeons Dragons to you? Like, what is this game actually?
Tristan: So Dungeons and Dragons is a lot of things, right? And it's different things to different people. But. For the purposes of the mechanic that we're here to talk about today, the adventuring day, Dungeons Dragons is, at its heart, mechanically, a game about spending finite resources to overcome obstacles.
So these resources are things like spell slots, and hit points, and hit dice, and magic item charges. And you only have so many of them, but they tend to replenish every day. And if you spend them too fast you run out and maybe you die. But if you spend them too slow, you kind of don't accomplish anything because you're not able to overcome any obstacles.
All of which means that for this game, there is a rate of spending finite resources that makes the game work. Not spending them so fast that you die, not spending them so slow that nothing happens. And that rate is called the adventuring day, and in my experience, the majority of people running Dungeons Dragons don't even really know that this mechanic exists, let alone that it impacts everything.
First off just to like say the mechanic explicitly, the mechanic is that the game assumes that a party is having six to eight level appropriate combat encounters between long rests when they get all their resources back. Sure it can be fewer if they are tougher encounters, it could be more encounters if some of them aren't really combat encounters and therefore aren't gonna really tax your resources.
But the adventuring day winds up touching just about everything in the game that has a number in it. How many spell slots do you have at which levels? That is based on the core assumption that you are going to go six to eight combats before you get your spell slots back. How many hit points do you have? Well, should be enough hit points that you can survive six to eight combats. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And also for the monsters, right? Everything in the monster stat block is based around the core assumption of, whoa, whoa, this is not the only goblin they're going to encounter today. They're going to encounter them in groups six to eight times, so that's how tough a goblin is. It's absolutely everything.
But of course nobody is doing six to eight encounters per long rest. That's just not a thing that people are doing, and even in the fiction that D& D is ostensibly modeling, Conan's and your Foffard's, like, people aren't doing six to eight combat encounters per long rest, like, it's just, it's not a thing. It's, it's,
Sam: it's like, why would you want to do six tiny encounters when you could do one big cinematic set piece? Like the entire genre, like the Dungeons Dragons movie is tentpoled on big, climactic set pieces. And this is like the opposite of that.
Tristan: Well, I'll tell you why, Sam. I'm glad you asked. This is, as far as I can tell, a legacy from the early days of D& D when it was just a core assumption of the experience that the party was going to go down into a dungeon and was going to try to get as far in the dungeon as they could before they ran out of resources and decided, you know what, we're done pushing our luck, let's go back to town.
And then when you get back to the dungeon next time, the dungeon has changed because the kobolds have said, you know what no, we're getting out of here, like, this is dangerous. And so whatever treasure you didn't get from the kobolds last time, they took with them. You didn't get it because you didn't push your luck, but now some orcs have moved into the vacant space.
So, so the idea of, you know, push your luck as far as you can actually really was a very fun experience that really worked with this you have so many finite resources do you want to spend them now? Do you want to hoard them for later? Right? Like this core thing. it, then it had all of these knock on effects that were kind of necessary for that experience. A finite number of spell slots, the idea that hit points decrease over time. All these, these core assumptions that if you were to build Dungeons Dragons without these knock on effects, it doesn't feel like D& D anymore. and people who play D& D will say, you know what? This just, it's not my jam.
So even though these mechanics are, in my opinion, not actually yielding the play experience that people are actually going for in most cases, because some people are still playing that sort of push your luck dungeon thing and that can be really fun when well implemented, but people might be better served for their player experience with a different sort of mechanic. But it's necessarily not going to feel like D& D. It's just going to be different and people are going to be weirded out by it. So we're stuck with it, right?
Sam: it's so interesting. First of all, D& D as a press your luck game, I again feel like, oh, my brain is exploding. Like, I want to play the game that is actually made for that, and designed for that. Cause it D& D has so many rules, that it's like, the most complicated press your luck game, like, that has ever been made, right? Like, why are we not just like, playing Blackjack, and doing dungeon delves based on the couple of cards that we're flipping? Like, it feels like you could get a satisfying experience with a lot simpler of a game.
But I also, I think it's really interesting that we're essentially all playing the game that is just the knock on effects that you're talking about without the original intention, we're just living in and swimming in the knock on effects mechanically.
Tristan: Yeah, I totally agree. And like that's not necessarily bad, because if you're having fun at the table, then congratulations, you're doing it right. And clearly we are all still having fun, right?
Like, I, about six months ago I wrapped up 13th Age campaign that I was running, and 13th Age functionally is a Dungeons Dragons, right?
But like, I'm over here kvetching about like, oh, you know, we're just living in the follow on effects, but also, clearly I'm enjoying living in the following on. So, you know, it's, it's clearly not the end of the world.
But yeah, if you were to design Dungeons Dragons from the ground up today with what we know about game design, you would just design a very different experience.
Sam: Yeah, it's actually interesting to me how like, I've had this whole theory of like, the D& D people are playing is the races and the classes and the aesthetics. But I think, like, D& D more specifically is tradition and ritual. Like it's, something that people are playing D& D for is the history that you feel like you're tapping into when you play D& D and the cool, weird, little arcane dice, like why do we need all these different randomizers when a D6 is gonna get the job done? Because it's cool, and because this is what people have been doing for 50 years, and that feels like an important part of what Dungeons Dragons is, also.
Tristan: Yeah I mean, I, definitely agree. And your point about D& D as aesthetic, and to be clear, like, what is D& D? Like, there's not a single objective answer. Obviously, we're all grown ups. We all recognize that. But all of these races and classes and character options honestly are, in my opinion, one of the reasons why D& D remains a very good introduction to the hobby.
Even though rules are complicated and overwrought and all this, when I was 14 and I got my hands on my first player's handbook, I was able to flip through it and look at all these overwrought character options and get excited about them because they are things that I could understand and I could pick from, like, choosing your class is basically a pick list with colorful options.
And you can imagine it and you, can use these, colorful choices as a springboard for your imagination in ways that something that a lot of rules light games that I feel like us in the indie sphere, we often like, you know, oh, you're just trying, you know, role playing games for the first time. Like, why don't you try Fiasco? Like they don't necessarily trigger the imagination in quite the same way.
And actually, total tangent when I get this question now, like, oh, what should I play first? My answer is Monster of the Week. Monster of the Week is a lot less complicated than Dungeons Dragons, but it has that same, like, oh, all of these very colorful things that I intuitively understand because I have seen Supernatural or The X Files or whatever, and, you know, 10, 000 different playbooks that I can pick from, and it has the same aesthetic of colorful choice that really speaks to someone who's just getting into the hobby.
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Sam: Let's go back to the history actually a little bit. Because what we have in 5th edition is the end point of this evolution we're kind of talking about, but other editions along the way and other games along the way have tried to keep this D& D thing but solve the problem of like, what are you doing with this adventuring day in different ways?
And you've brought in some cool examples there and I'd love to hear more about them.
Tristan: Yeah, so I mean, if you're talking about the Adventuring Day in Dungeons and Dragons, you have to talk about the fourth edition of the game which coincidentally was the version of the game that was out when we were in college which I'm sure impacts some emotions. But , when it was being pitched, right, when it was in the process of coming out it was pitched in large part as a solution to what they were calling at the time the 15 minute workday. Where you go into the dungeon, the cleric blows all his spells in the first combat, and then you leave the dungeon and take a long rest and come back the next day.
And so 4th edition D& D really tried to take a lot of the resources that regenerate every day and keep the resources, but make them regenerate at the end of every fight.
And there were some exception to this. Every character had a handful of special powers that they could only use once a day, but for the most part, things were coming back, every encounter, every combat.
And that generated a lot of pushback. From a lot of people who said, oh, this feels like an MMO with its cooldown timers. And there were a number of reasons why Fourth Edition didn't have the impact that some folks might have hoped it had. I understand that Ben Riggs, author of Slaying the Dragon, Taming the Dragon,
Sam: slaying the dragon.
Tristan: thank you really good book about the end of the, first edition into the second edition D& D days but he's working on a sequel about what happened with fourth edition, because fourth edition was contentious.
And one of the big things was that it tried to move away from the adventuring day, qua adventuring day, but even fourth edition had a mechanic behind the mechanics that locked it to the adventuring day, and that was a mechanic called Healing Surges, which was something totally new that every time your character was healed, whether, you know, by a cleric spell or you take a second wind in combat or whatever, you had to spend a certain number of these healing surges. And when you were out of healing surges, you were out of healing of any kind. And the healing surges replenished every day.
And so even with this valiant effort to get away from the adventuring day, they still couldn't quite get away from the adventuring day, because you still had a hard limit on how long the day could be when you ran out of healing.
Sam: Yeah, and like, it feels like what they were trying to do is take a bunch of 15 minute workdays and stack them together so you didn't have to like, justify going back to town every time, and then like, maybe at the end of your full eight hour shift of 15 minute workdays, then your healing surges would run out.
But I'll tell ya, I ran a 4e campaign in college and And we did one cinematic, climactic fight, a session and just blew all of our daily abilities in it. And Healing Surge, I've never, I DMed 4E for years, and I have never seen someone run out of Healing Surges, because no one fucking gives a shit, like, just, no one would ever get to the end of the, real adventure day that was baked in there, people are still not playing it the way that it's built,
Tristan: remember adventuring with a mutual friend of ours. And I was, was running this campaign where we would have one fight every session, like, that was just what worked with the flow of how long the sessions were and so forth, you know, we'd do a bunch of stuff that wasn't fighting, of course, but and just given the narrative flow of, of the campaign, every session was a different day, and I thought, in my youthful foolishness, I thought I was not telegraphing that, but let me tell you, the players figured it out pretty fast.
And I remember this, this mutual friend of ours at one point saying, Boy, it sure is convenient that violence can only happen once per day. Anyway, I use all my daily powers. and, yeah!
Sam: yeah, just Even when they tried to cover it up, there was this clash of the way the game is played, and the way the game was built.
Tristan: Yeah, and I think one really interesting window into this mechanic is in 13th Age. I mentioned previously that I just six months ago I wrapped up long 13th Age campaign. Super fun, really recommend the system. It's a blast.
And 13th Age still has the adventuring day, but the end of the day, when everybody's finite resources get replenished, the end of the day, when everybody's finite resources get replenished. is no longer tied to the sun. It's no longer tied to when you lay your head down to rest. It is after four level appropriate encounters.
So, do you want to get all your resources back? Okay, get through four level appropriate encounters. And there is a mechanic where the players can say, you know what, we would like to get them back early, but you have to accept, like, really terrible consequences, like the rules in the rulebook, and I don't know, the second edition is on Kickstarter as we are having this conversation, so maybe second edition will handle this differently.
But, the rules were basically like, sure, you can get all your stuff back anytime you want, but the GM should just declare that whatever the party has been attempting to do is a dismal failure. Like, oh, sorry, you were here to save the Duke. Like, the Duke is dead. The Duke was torn apart on live TV by bats. Like, you got the worst outcome because you didn't ration finite resources through to the end.
And it totally works, right? And very neatly solves the issue of, hey, some of my characters feel way more powerful than others because they have more of these, replenishing resources and they're just blowing them all at once. It solves all kinds of problems around the adventuring day.
But it does admittedly generate new problems because the get through four winds up feeling very artificial in a lot of cases, because I'm not one of those GMs who's like, okay, I have written out this grand story of what we're gonna do here, everybody strap in for my Tolkien novel that I'm gonna tell you.
Like, yeah, I don't know when there's gonna be natural breaks in the story. It could be after four encounters, it could be after two, it could be after eight, I don't know. You guys tell me what you're gonna do. You guys tell me how you're responding to this complicated situation.
So, we would often get into situations where a really natural place to put the reset moment has to go unused, and then, you know, they get into a new dungeon or adventure location, and they get into a fight, and they complete it, and then they regenerate all their powers. And it, like, It totally works mechanically, but it did feel weird narratively.
Sam: Well, I can imagine a party being like, Oh man, on our last encounter before the reset, and we know in the next room is enemy we've been chasing after for months. We better go kill some goblins first. We better go like find some fight to get into that's level appropriate so we can go into that final confrontation fully refreshed.
Tristan: God, I didn't even think of that possibility. Mercifully, I have very good players. They would never do something like that. But if they were feeling that, like, I'm trying to imagine if somebody, you know, at the other end of the table said, Hey Tristan, let me lay out the rationale that Sam just laid out. Is there any chance there's some skeletons around here that we could beat up? Like, I'm not sure what I would say in response, like, obviously we would, like, totally step out of character, let's have a grown up conversation about this,
Sam: I would have a conversation with my group that's like you don't get it. Let's play with other people. Like, like it does feel like one of those problems that would be a Okay, this is not what we're all here to do. Like, we understand the spirit of the rules, let's stick to the spirit of the rules. But also, I want the mechanical incentives to be aligned with my incentives, like, as a person who's interested in engaging with the fiction, right?
Tristan: Totally. But anyway, 13th age really did take the
adventuring day in a very interesting direction.
Sam: That is so interesting and such a compelling different take on this thing, but it also, its execution really points back to why is this a thing in the first place? Why can't wizards just cast as many rope tricks and feather falls and magic missiles as they want? Like, why do we limit this stuff instead of just letting people do their cool stuff?
Like, that feels like it would be more in line with the way Dungeons Dragons is actually played, and I don't know that there's a good answer. Like, is there a good answer? Do you have one?
Tristan: Well, I'm thinking here of non D& D fantasy games that I've run. You know, I ran a long term fantasy campaign using Fate, which was super duper fun. In hindsight, fate is a bad fit for that sort of thing. good people Green Ronin sure did their absolute best putting together Fate conversion fantasy. It's called the Fate Freeport Companion. It's the one I used. Boy, they did their absolute best trying to square that circle.
But like, in general you know, you wind up with a very different experience. I'm thinking also of a, of A Dungeon World campaign that I ran, and like, in Dungeon World and other PBTA type games, yeah, you can use the move as often as it makes sense in the fiction that you would use the move and, that's great, right? And it produces a really fun experience, but it doesn't feel like D& D.
It feels different, and if what you want is that D& D feel, if you have been playing Dungeons Dragons for 30 years, like, yeah, you know that other systems exist, and when you want that other feeling, you go to one of those other systems, and if you're going to play D& D, you'll want to play D& D.
Yeah.
Sam: Okay. So other systems though, I want to go back to the idea of D and D as a press your luck game, and the way other systems have kind of played with that and riffed on that. Like Errant is a game that took that press your luck thing and really ran with it, right? It created dungeon turns and exploration turns and brought that press your luck feeling very much to the forefront mechanically, in a way I think is really successful and cool and like, makes me want to try those games more to get that experience.
Tristan: Yeah, and, you know, there's a lot of OSR games that use things like dungeon turns, and, the adventuring day ceases to be a problem to be solved and becomes a delightful thing to be enthusiastically embraced. It turns out that when you use something for the thing that it was intended for, often you get good outcomes.
Sam: Yeah. Yeah. and so NSR, NewSR, whatever you want to call it kind of games, are iterating on this further, right? So you, you want to talk about how you see that happening?
Tristan: Yeah, so, inasmuch as it is useful to draw a distinction between the OSR and the NSR which like, hey, all categories are artificial, whatever. New SR games are often kind of doing their own things. And you can't, at this juncture, you can't necessarily point to like a specific trend in design because they're doing really interesting other trends.
Two I'll point at is Morkborg. Morkborg keeps the adventuring day, but really reduces its importance, right? There's kind of just enough replenishing of, of finite resources when the sun goes down to say like, oh, yeah, this is a Dungeons and Dragons, but not enough to really impact play.
Sam: Listen, if you make it to the next encounter in Murkborg, then like that's a fucking win, right? Like the, the long rest is surviving one more encounter.
Tristan: And then another example is Ultraviolet Grasslands, a game I absolutely adore. I've already run one long campaign of Ultraviolet Grasslands. I am starting another one. And Ultraviolet Grasslands doesn't really have an adventuring day, A, because it's primary mode of keeping time is not the day, but the week, because it's a long term travelogue style game.
But also because the primary renewable resource is money. And like, not in a like, oh, you know, you can spend money to buy healing potions. Like, no, everything in Ultraviolet Grasslands runs on cash, right? While you are traveling across the eponymous Ultraviolet Grasslands, you are constantly having to do things to make money because everything costs money, and that's including things like, hey, I have been poisoned. Like, how do I not be poisoned? You spend a certain amount of cash in order to get some antidotes. I would like to level up now, please. How do I go about doing that? Blow a bunch of cash on XP.
So it's no longer about replenishing your finite resources at the bell. You replenish your finite resources by generating the finite resource of money.
Sam: I love that model as it's almost not a press your luck thing It's a like you have to hold on until you've reached the goal of the reset.
Tristan: Yes.
and then because you are resetting from another finite resource, like, you have reset and now you have to do the whole thing all over
Sam: and and thus the loop begins again. Yeah. Okay, and and Gumshoe is also in here So tell me about Gumshoe and how it handles finite resources.
Tristan: Yeah, so Gumshoe and a lot of design over the past few years has been in the Gumshoe space with Shanty Hunters and now with upcoming Ballad Hunters. Gumshoe is a lot more explicit than D& D about being about finite replenishing resources, right? Gumshoe just slaps that right on the front, you have points, you will spend these points down, and let me tell you when these points will come back. This set of points comes back at the end of every session, and this set of points comes back at the end of every adventure, and go with God.
And one of the, outcomes of being so much more explicit about, hey, this is a game about spending finite points that replenish, is that the moments of replenishment feel remarkably natural. There's none of this like, oh, well, 15 minute adventuring day, so we get our replenishment. There's none of this, like, well, uh, at the end of four encounters all my stuff comes back, whenever that happens to be. Like, no, it always feels very natural that when I sit down to the table, I have a full bank of this kind of point. And with this other kind of point, I'm gonna get them back when we are in the breathing room between having solved this mystery and moving on to the next mystery. Because gumshoe games are all about investigations and
Sam: Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Tristan: But on the other hand I have definitely met players who bounce off the explicitness of gumshoe point replenishment. It doesn't feel like a simulation of reality to them. Because it is entirely artificial and unapologetic about that.
Sam: There is something really he heh, magical about the fact that all your spells come back at dawn. Like, tying the Dungeons Dragons adventuring day mechanic into the fiction of the world feels really good. That is the thing that it feels like has people really attached to this thing, in my opinion.
Tristan: Yeah, totally. You know, one of the, the first things that I've learned as an axiom as a designer was nobody plays Dungeons Dragons. Everybody plays Dungeons Dragons except, right, and I think you're dead right. The fact that everyone is playing Dungeons Dragons except we don't do encumbrance, we don't do this, we don't do that, we do this other thing.
But everybody plays Dungeons Dragons with spells coming back at daybreak. That is, I mean, that's what economists call a revealed preference
Sam: so that feels like a great into asking you about some of the work that you're doing now. Can you just describe, like, what kinds of material you're working on these days?
Tristan: Yeah, so these days I am very fortunate in that I am working for Flagbearer Games on their flagship game Nations and Cannons, which is a Tabletop role playing games set in the Revolutionary War, not the Revolutionary War plus vampires, not the Revolutionary War but its conspiracies, like, nope, the actual, historical, real Revolutionary War.
And Nations and Canons uses 5th edition D& D rules. Now obviously it has to make some changes. There's no wizard class. There are a couple of classes that have access to spells. Spells have been reworked as gambits which ways of codifying things like, you know, two great examples of gambits. One is oh, you are able to hollow out a log and turn it into a cannon that can only fire once. Or, hey, I cast the dead drop gambit. Great. You are able to find a dead drop associated with your side. You can look inside it. It has some supplies within it. You can leave a message in there. Someone from your side will be by within the next week to get your message. And so it's still doing a lot of the same things that D& D spells do, just in a way that is appropriate for a fundamentally historical setting.
But why is Nations and Canons using 5th edition D& D, you might ask? It's
Sam: I, I was going to ask that, yeah.
Tristan: It's a very common question. Every time Nations and Canons gets some press, folks swarm the comments asking, but why? And honestly, Flagbearer has a really good reason for it, which is that big chunk of Flagbearer's target audience is educational. Right?
The goal isn't necessarily, I mean, the goal is put out a good game that is fun to play, like, it absolutely is that, but it is also put out a game that can be used as an educational teaching tool about the American Revolution, and in particular about, the American Revolution in a way where a lot of the weird jingoism has been stripped out of it. American history for all Americans, not just, you know, A certain subset of Americans that tends to really like the revolution for some reason.
And, okay, if you're using this as a teaching tool, if you're using this ata museum or a historic site, if you're using this at an after school program for the school history club, you need to meet people where they are. And where are they? They're in 5th edition D& D, that's where the vast majority of the market is.
If you have a high school history club that meets after the bell, probably someone in that club has played 5th edition D& D. So you make a game that somebody in the history club can teach to everyone else. And it makes the game much more accessible, it makes the game a lot easier to get into, because even though D& D is a, very complicated game, at least by the standards that are, popular today in the market it is a game that there exists so much information online about like, how do you do the rules? How do you learn the game? There's so much GMing advice that like, yeah, D& D is just the way into people's hearts and minds and homes and, and so forth.
And another of the, core target audience is grognards, not in the RPG sense of grognards, but in the, like, military history sense of grognards, the sorts of people who are like, why, yes, what I do want to do with my weekend is, is show up to the local historic site and watch the reenactors, like, those people too, there's, a non trivial amount of overlap with RPG gamers. But the fastest way to get to those people is also through 5e D& D because that's what they're likeliest to know.
So yeah, that's why Nations and Canons is D& D.
Sam: I don't want to dwell on this point, but I do want to push back and say that the counter argument is you could design a game that is simple enough and accessible enough that no one needs to have engaged with another game to pull this out? Like, you can imagine the game I made with Jason Morningstar came out last month, that is just answering a few questions that feels really accessible that I sat down and played with my parents who do not play RPGs and it only took an hour, and like, that game feels like a more accessible game to me for the after school history club.
But! no one's gonna hear about that fucking game. Like, D& D feels like, for all the reasons you mentioned you can glob onto the marketing of D& D to bring people in in the way that you are talking about, and I totally see the value in that, but I do, I do question whether learning D& D is the most accessible way for a short experience for people to learn something about the Revolutionary War.
Tristan: I, like, I totally get where you're coming from but I'm also, I'm gonna push back on your pushback because RPGs are so much of an oral tradition,
Sam: Mm hmm.
Tristan: How many people got into RPGs with a group of people where no one in the group had ever played a session before? I know I didn't. I think it's very much in the minority.
And even today, of course the world is a little different now, reframe the question, for people who are getting into RPGs today, how often are they sitting down for their first game and no one at the table has ever listened to a single episode of an actual play that was playing D& D, right? So much of how do you play a role playing game, like, what are the sorts of things that I'm expected to do here is learned from people who have done it before.
And yeah, and this is, this is just something that I, I very strongly believe that folks who have been playing RPGs for a long time have internalized all this knowledge about, like, how do you play one of these weird games that it can be hard, I think, for us to step outside of our own heads. You know, I'm thinking of the last time I played with my parents, right?
Who do not play these sorts of things. You know, if I had told my dad, like, if he was like, okay, so what can I do? And I'm like, you can do anything. Okay, what does that mean? Right? Like, he doesn't know. And also, it's not even true. You can't actually do anything. So, yeah, like, from the perspective of D& D as an oral tradition,
Sam: I totally get that, but also, the first roleplaying game I ever played was a mock union bargaining in the fourth grade. Right? Like, and like, I did mock trial in the 6th grade, to learn about how civics worked, and most of the people in that class were not at all interested in playing Dungeons Dragons and did a great job.
And, I think you're absolutely right that like, the facilitator who runs that after school club who's familiar with D& D is much more likely to both find the game about the Revolutionary War that's based on D& D and bring it in and feel comfortable doing it. But I also think like once you're actually at the table, I think You can design specific on rails bespoke experiences that are gonna teach the thing that you want to teach without having to do D& D.
But I, yeah, like, I, I totally see the merits of, of what y'all are doing also. Like, I, I really don't want to, like, shit on that either, you know? I just think that, like, a friend of mine, my, the DM of the D& D group that I was in recently works for a voting rights organization, and went out to like a fundraising event, and designed a bespoke LARP for potential funders to walk through what it's like to vote as different kinds of people, right? And so if you're a person who has less access to money and time, then you might burn out on trying to vote quicker and never get to the polls and actually vote. And that was sort of the point of the game.
And imagine trying to do that with Dungeons and Dragons. Like that's not that, you know, like that, that's not the right game for the space and I think that's the thing that I'm trying to get at is there is this other option, but I totally see the ways in which using D& D for this purpose comes with a lot of advantages too.
We're completely off track here so, so that's what you do. So how are you thinking about the adventuring day in the fucking Revolutionary War?
Tristan: So a huge amount of, what I've been doing for Nations and Canons has been working on a collection of adventures. That should be coming out here hopefully not too far from when this, this episode drops. And these adventures are all set in real history, right? Like, you guys are, are spies and skirmishers and saboteurs thrust into the siege of Boston in, you know, 1775 to 1776 or, or whatever.
And real history does not look like the adventuring day. Like, it just doesn't. You can, you know, we, tried to, one adventure in the book that just has the real combat meat grinder in it that some kinds of players really dig and, you know, that's the Battle of Trenton and we did the Battle of Trenton as, four combats in a row because that's what some people want.
But like there's an adventure about dismantling a Hessian spy ring during the winter at Valleyforge. And that adventure lasts three months, and there are not six to eight combat encounters in it. So, if getting your powers back is tied to when you go to sleep, like, what do you do?
And honestly, the answer is often that you gotta get creative about it. So, in the Valley Forge example what we did was we said, alright it's Valley Forge, it's cold, and you're starving. So, for the first half of the adventure, at the end of every scene go ahead and roll me a constitution save, and if you fail, then bad news, you're in a bad way, and you're gonna start to suffer some kind of progressive consequences that will get worse as you fail more and more of these saves, but the first consequence that hits you is you can no longer gain the benefit of a long rest. So, as long as one player fails that roll, the first roll, then the party as a whole is not able to reset its resources through the whole of the adventure. And it works, right?
And then there are other adventures where we just kind of have to say, all right, fuck it! Like, they're just gonna go into every encounter really powerful, and we've just got to remember that.
Admittedly, because Nations and Canons is low spells, and spells are kind of the biggest example of the adventuring day, it's not as big a deal in Nations and Camps, but it's still definitely a thing.
And sometimes you've just got to say, you know what, there is no good reason for us to tell the players, hey, you're here, it's Saratoga, the Battle of Saratoga in scare quotes is really two battles separated by almost three weeks. Like, yeah, you can't take a long rest in those three weeks. Like, there's no justification for it. So. Okay, the interesting spy things that you are doing around the Battle of Saratoga, we're just always gonna assume that you're rolling in with full resources.
One of the things that we do in multiple adventures is we make sure that events happen back to back to back to back, right? This thing where you're, going out and saving this, cool spy, from being discovered, like, we could set this at any point in this adventure, but we're gonna set it the day before this other thing happens so you've gotta work through the night and then things kick off in the morning so you don't have a chance to sleep.
And, yeah, if you're designing adventures in the 5e space, in the D& D space, it's just something you have to work within if you want to produce adventures that deliver satisfying results at the table.
Sam: Is there a reason that you feel like you're not able to just say, you know, the Battle of Saratoga is like these two different battles with three weeks in the middle. Those three weeks are really stressful, no long rests. Is there a reason that you don't want to just like cut to the heart of the matter, just that people will get mad about it?
Tristan: So, what a fabulous question. The short answer is, yes, people will get mad at it, but the longer answer is 5e D& D often supports a very simulationist style of play, a style of play that, where the rules are just kind of laws of physics for the way the world operates.
And a lot of players really lean into that, right? Players in the real world who are actually playing games very often do see these rules as like, look, these are laws of physics, and from a laws of physics perspective, it's definitely going to feel arbitrary, unfair, and cruel if you just tell people, Hey here's a made up reason I pulled out of my butt for why you can't get a long rest.
Which is very interesting for me as a designer because the design space that I'm used to operating in is one where you talk to your players person to person, right? You just say, Hey guys, you're going to have a lot less fun if you can take a long rest here. So no long rest in this adventure.
And in this particular design space, you have to design with teenagers in mind. And I think I'm going to shock a lot of people listening when I tell them that teenagers are often very bad about being honest with their feelings. And so you have to a design in a way that doesn't rely on everybody being a grown up and being transparent about what they want out of things.
So you know, you gotta come up with simulationist reasons or, or ditch it. And you don't always have to do it, but if you're relying on the players being honest with their friends, the people that they spend all this time playing with, who hopefully they like a lot and enjoy the company of, relying on them being honest with each other, often you're gonna be letting them down, because they're not at that point.
Sam: yeah.
So, if you had it your way, like, you were going to remake 5e in your image, what would happen to the adventuring day? Do you think this is a fundamental part of D& D and we should all go to the OSR route and like, play other games if we don't want to deal with this thing? Would you get rid of it and try to lean into the more day by day have all your full powers thing that is the way d and d is actually played? Would you do something else?
Tristan: Boy, what an interesting question. Um. Part of what makes D& D D& D is that it strives to be all things to all people. Right? It doesn't necessarily always succeed at this. But it strives to be a dungeon crawler. It strives to be a vehicle for political machinations. It strives to be a vehicle for exploration of the wilds, right? It strives to do all these things.
And am just not accustomed All right, cut all of that. That was garbage.
Sam: No, I think there's something interesting there. Like, I think that's an important part of d and d. Like the kind of last subject that we have here in the outline that I'm really interested in what this whole d and d series that I've been recording here is like, what the fuck is Dungeons and Dragons cause it's this dungeon crawler thing but most people don't play it that way and like the people who do play it that way are now like playing different games but those games are maybe also just D& D or at least it's children like, what the hell is D& D?
And I think D and d trying to be all things to all people is a good answer to that question. Like d and d is trying to be a lifestyle brand more than a game at this point. Like that's how it feels to me especially as a, a magic the gathering player who like has seen what Wizards of the Coast has been doing there for a decade now, and how they're starting to do the same stuff with d and d it.
feels to me like D& D is trying to be all things to all people, and if you cut this adventuring day thing out, then the game would stop being one of the important things that it is to a certain subset of people, at least.
And it's hard to articulate that, but it does feel really important. It feels important to the legacy of the game, the tradition and ritual that we were talking about before. It feels important to the grognards who are still playing D& D the way that they've always played D& D. It feels like, a heart of the game, and if you tore it out, even if it was for the better of your table, or made for a quote unquote better game, that you would lose something that makes D& D D& D, and that would be a problem.
Tristan: Yeah, I mean, it, so, I definitely agree with all that and it would certainly be a problem, financially, for multinational corporation that owns D,
Sam: mean, even, they take one chip out of it with 4e, and the masses revolt, right? Like, yeah.
Tristan: but there is one thing that to me is very important to what D& D is that flows out of the adventuring day. It's one of these, unavoidable consequences of it. Maybe, also maybe not. And, This isn't unique to D& D, but it is particular to D& D. that Dungeons Dragons has precise and verbose and comprehensive rules for violence and spellcasting.
And has, for every other way that you could interact with the world or solve problems, the rules are so vague that they are better termed guidelines.
And what winds up coming out of that is a very specific sort of story, where when the story is in a beat that involves casting spells or doing violence, the story is highly predictable, almost prescriptive, but for everything else, the story could go anywhere. Because there's really not any rules for it beyond like, I dunno, roll a d20, look at some numbers on your character sheet and add them to the roll. Higher is better.
And it winds up, it winds up creating these sorts of stories which are wild and unpredictable.
Sam: Mm, mm
Tristan: The, whole trope of like, you know, oh, once your game prep reaches the players, like, who knows what the players are going to do, those wacky players, D& D really leans into that and incentivizes it mechanically, because who knows where it's going to go?
And again, I'm not saying that this is unique to D& D, like, you can get this sort of experience with lots of trad games, especially older trad games, but it's a really fun kind of story, right? There's a reason why folks who started with D& D, like me, are still playing role playing games because it's a fun kind of story and to me that that is what survives of D& D when you finish re skinning it and turning it into a revolutionary war game, right? Like that is something that lies at the heart of the Dungeons and Dragons experience is the dichotomy in the sorts of stories that it tells.
Sam: tristan, thanks so much for coming on Dice Exploder.
Tristan: Thank you so much for having me. It's been a real delight to get to jibber jabber about game design.
Sam: Well, I'll I'll see you at Gen Con in four years.
Tristan: Yes, absolutely, looking forward to it.
Sam: Remember that dice Exploder is crowdfunding this fourth season that you're listening to right now, it's a pledge drive. It's on backer kit. There's a link in the show notes. You can go there right now support the show.
Thanks to Tristin for coming on, you can find his blog, molten sulfur@moltensulfur.com. That's also where you can find links to his games, including Shanty Hunters.
As always, you can find me on socials at S Dunnewold or on the Dice Exploder discord.
Our logo was designed by sporgory. Our theme song is sunset bridge by purely gray and our ad music is Lily pads by my boy, Travis tesmer. And thanks to you for listening. See you next time.