Category Archives: Dungeons & Dragons

What’s the difference between Arcane magic and Divine magic?

Familiar as I am with 3rd edition, I know there’s definitely a structure that says Arcane magic is the slightly more powerful one, and that Divine magic is easier and more convenient to use out of the box, but that’s the perspective from one extremely bleeding edge level of power that I never really got to play with. My experience of wizards and clerics in 3rd edition were always characters who did that and something else, in order to keep their power level meaningfully contained. Basically, I liked a wizard with a sword or a cleric with a pet rather than just taking my Busted Spellcaster Classes straight.

Until 4th edition approached and rebuilt every power source with a specific holistic vision for the shared traits of powers, Arcane magic and Divine magic existed as parts of a continuum that shaped your vision of the world at large. And the machinery of the game was designed to get people involved at one point and you were meant to grow as a player while you did.

What, then, was the difference?

Sure, let’s call it that, why not. That’s not going to be completely incomprehensible.

The skill challenge represents one of the many pieces of 4th Edition D&D technology that was underappreciated in its time and misunderstood in hindsight. The Skill Challenge was a tool that let the DM run a non-combat encounter with the same kind of group engagement that the game’s combat system normally demanded; it has a failure state represented by eventual failures, but it also serves to let players platform their own choices and express how they do things. Skill Challenges in the simplest form are ‘the group needs to succeed on X possible checks before they fail N possible checks.’ The system isn’t necessarily all that groundbreaking, but the Dungeon Master’s Guide bothered to explicate a bunch of useful, good ideas about their execution.

There are ideas you might realise are fiction first and fail forward in the 4th edition D&D Dungeon Master’s Guide, but they’re not called that, and people don’t seem to remember what these books were like. What skill challenges let you do was explicitly call for a moment when many people are trying things at the same time, and get to negotiate the fiction of what that means, what kinds of things people are doing, and how their skillsets are expressed. It’s a great system, and I wish more people were familiar with skill challenges, especially in how they do something D&D does well (induce and encourage all players to engage with simple rules tools) and patches something it doesn’t tend to do well (encourage spaces of free creative expression).

Back in 3rd edition Dungeons And Dragons there were a lot of problems in character building, but I dedicate special attention to those that pushed players making reasonable, desireable choices into things that made the game strain. It was super easy to make an overpowered cleric or druid if you just looked at what they could do. It was easy to snap the game in half with the Spelldancer, just doing what the class suggested you do. It was easy to buy into a class fantasy that stranded you unable to confront the challenges the game had.

And if you wanted to pick up a boyfriend in-game, there was an obvious and available way that kinda made the game buckle a bit — just take the feat Leadership.

Ability scores in Dungeons & Dragons are one of the game’s many mechanical systems that float atop a liquid surface of questionable justifications. They’re a perfectly serviceable set of dials to use to define a character, they do a job and they create a lot of thematic hooks you can use, but also, under the hood, they are not sensible at all, and part of where they get unsensible is where you try to treat them as strictly representational depictions of a coherent measurable reality.

Which is a problem.

Hey, do you wanna be agile, hostile, and mobile in 3.5 and play a character whose primary and major ability is engaging in melee combat and not casting spells?

Let’s talk about the Supermount!

The Book of Vile Darkness is not a book for players. On the fourth page, it lists Hide This Book!, which states that the book should be treated as if it were a published adventure, that it should inform and add to player experience, but never be treated like other player option books.

Let’s ignore this and talk about the Soul Eater, a prestige class that requires you to be Evil and which is contained only in the Book of Vile Darkness.

It’s a well-worn meme that in the context of the Dungeons And Dragons moral framework, that Warlocks and Paladins are different only in that one has an employer, and one has a sugar daddy. Notably, before you giggle too much, recognise that of the two, the Warlock’s the one with a contract, but the Paladin’s the one with a code of conduct.

No, don’t worry, this isn’t going to be a treatise on how the Warlock in 4th edition has balance problems, or how they have probably one of the most stolen powers in the game, or how the Paladin does most of what I want a Warlock to do, no no. Not even bringing up that the divine characters have their power sources expanded with personalities and ideologies and characterisation and all that, while the Warlock gets maybe try elementals? I’m not bitter.

This is about being a Warlock in 4th edition.

Content Warning: I talk about drugs a little bit, in broad and general terms!

Hey, have we already spoken about the monster system in 4th Ed D&D?

Back in 3rd edition, D&D used what we called the ‘challenge rating’ system, a system that treated each monster as a sort of amorphous blob with a generic personality and the option to pick its own feats and do a lot of possible things. It was a system that I’ve talked about somewhat negatively.

But people say that 4e D&D was ‘only good for tactical combat,’ which I don’t agree with, but I can understand the feeling when you consider it was the first time that it made the combat system kinda work (and obligatory ‘ew there were math problems in the first monster manual’ yep, and they found them and addressed it, thanks).

Part of how it worked was that rather than treat monsters as if they were all generic spots on a continuum, monsters were balanced based on general formulas of things they could do and ways they could be represented, and part of that was recognising that some types of monster were best suited to particular types of role.

Hey kid, wanna read some dirty books?

D&D is a game of nerds, and therefore there is always some degree to which it will reflect the vision of the kinds of nerds that made it. By default, there is an idea of power that lends itself towards the obvious, with mighty barbarians and fighty fighters plunging onwards into the fray, but it almost seems too obvious that a game that for thirty years was seen as the domain of the kind of dorks who boasted about their test scores just so happened to land the majority of the powerhouse play options in the lap of the characters visually represented by being physically unathletic and carrying a big book everywhere.

In a game full of busted stuff, it’s well known that in D&D 3.5 the most busted stuff comes from the host known as the ‘full spellcasters’ – characters whose power derives directly from their spellcasting as the primary thing they do, and who get nine levels of casting spread out over seventeen levels, eighteen if you suck and pick a sorcerer. And amongst those, the typical top tier are the Wizard, the Cleric, and the Druid.

The Archivist is the rare example of a character class presented in the 3.5 D&D expansions books that manages to not just exist alongside those three, but in a way, exceed them.