4e: Technical Seams
Every single time I hear people describing the wording of a 5th edition magical spell or a 5th edition character ability I feel like I’m listening to the fall of an empire and it’s because there was something that the game had solved and was good at that 5th edition seems to have wanted to throw the hell away. That is technically written rules.
Each edition of Dungeons & Dragons has brought with it its own way to express rules. While my experience of 1st edition is pretty limited, I know that almost every section has a bespoke rule of some sort. In 2nd edition, there are similarly a host of similar effects that are expressed differently, particularly in spells and magical items. In 3rd edition, there was a deliberate, centralised choice to set the rules sensibly to a standard difficulty class; the system which gives the term ‘DC.’ Even in 3rd edition, though, there were a wealth of bespoke rules, with many spells referencing unique approaches to presenting their effects, and the turning system being a completely unique system.
I am by no means an expert on the 5th edition of Dungeons & Dragons. I have looked at some of how the rules are worded, and paid attention to, mostly, rules conversations around the strange or mistaken wording on some spell or another. I am only familiar with 5th edition inasmuch as I know that there are problems that were once solved, that are now unsolved, and they owe their existence to a meaningful choice in how the game wanted to express its rules.
There was a rules system that had a clear, decisive attitude towards giving rules which are technically clear, precise, and engineered to express rules that are meant to reliably interact. That edition is 4th edition. Importantly, for it, and for every system that wants to borrow from it, though, is that 4th edition’s technical writing is part of what makes it work at all… but that its technical writing is itself, less tight than you might think.
When I’m talking about technical writing, what I mean is writing that is deliberately structured to convey clear, consistent meaning in every context. Hypothetically, this is meant to be a kind of objectivity; that is, there is no need for an individual to interpret what a spell or power does, because they have a standardised language that operates reasonably.
This includes both a grammar – the way sentences are structured and the priority they put in the information they convey – and a particular vocabulary. This is sometimes known as a lexicon and it can be expressed clearly in a glossary.
In 3rd edition, it was possible for a monster to be moved, pushed, bull-rushed, but also for each of those terms to have a vague meaning. What’s more, the vagueness of those mechanics meant that interacting with those things is just as much of a problem. A character could be heavy and hard to move with one spell that cared about weight, but not hard to move with a special ability. The haziness of these abilities meant they were less common, in order to diminish the amount of rulings there were about them. After all, every new thing could be an exception to an ability. If you were going to protect players from having their minds messed with, you had to do it with blanket terminology like ‘mind altering effects,’ which also meant that there was a reading of Magic Circle Against Evil that suggested it was possible to have it turn off being drunk.
This isn’t to say that the 4th edition rules are entirely programmatic, but rather that they rest their game rules on a layer of clear, programmatic language. There is a section in the book for managing judgment-call based things. There are definitely subjective moments in the game, and room for subjective experiences. There’s a passage in the Dungeon Master’s Guide, under ‘Additional Rules’ (it’s part of the combat rules), on page 42, where there’s the text:
Your presence as the Dungeon Master is what makes D&D such a great game. You make it possible for the players to try anything they can imagine. That means it’s your job to resolve unusual actions when the players try them.
And from there, there’s a page about making subjective calls and a toolkit for making the ones that should work reasonably well. It has an example, explaining with a character trying things and how a Dungeonmaster can adjudicate that. That is to say, it’s not that 4th edition exists in a totally static universe where perfectly spherical entities bump against one another, but that the most rudimentary operations of the game rules are meant to handle themselves. For the most part, when you understand this rudimentary game language, and you’re confident in the glossary, then running the game is fluid.
A place I normally point to for a game with an extremely technically worded, human-manageable complex ruleset is Magic: The Gathering. In that ruleset, the rules do have pretty clear, and obvious ways to describe what they’re doing, with a push in recent years to ensure that cards explain themselves as readily and as clearly as they can. But consider these two wordings:
When this creature is blocked, it gets +2/+2 until end of turn.
and
If this creature is blocked, it gets +2/+2 until end of turn.
Now, if you’re playing the game, you can reasonably what happens if this creature gets blocked. It gets bigger. But the thing is, in the technical wording side of things, the second wording doesn’t do anything. Literally, this is not how a modern magic card would be worded. ‘If’ is used to signify rules clauses that replace things.
Now, if you’re familiar with the intense rules structures of the Magic: The Gathering rulebook, any TTRPG looks loose. In Magic: The Gathering, there’s best practices for how the text should be presented on a card, not just a ruleset but also a style guide. That’s the thing that means it’s not just got rules on what the cards say to do what they do, but also what they ever put on a card to make it clear. And Dungeons & Dragons isn’t just about explaining rules, it’s about explaining rules so you can explain those rules. A lot of Dungeons & Dragons has to be written to a lower standard of technical writing than Magic: The Gathering.
Important to this whole conversation though is that the language used, and the glossary, was not static at the start of the game’s lifespan. It evolved over time, and there are layers of standardisation that show the point in that lifespan the game introduced them. What’s more, there are also threads of sourcing that can provide deeper information about the way 4th edition’s largely homogenised language still demonstrates specific signifiers of their origins.
There’s a reason almost all the power sources are adjectives and the one that first appeared in a web supplement, shadow isn’t. Dragon Magazine is a great source to point to for a bunch of rules where they just weren’t being written with the same technical tightness. This is a real awkward thing too, because there are some classes which rely on those web support elements to be worth playing. The Cavalier has a ‘variant’ in Dragon magazine that’s meant to be an equal interesting choice you can make freely, but the gap between the two choices is ridiculous. One gives you a summonable magical mount you can upgrade with feats and magical items, and the other is a modest improvement to travel speed for any non-magical mounts you have.
This also shows in how the Cavalier is itself, kinda weak at base. That makes sense, it’s built out of the Essentials rulesets, and you can see it in how its abilities are worded. The Essentials saw a major change in the lexicon and grammar. There are more niche effects, but also fewer uses of specific contexts; for example, you won’t find a feat that does something when you’re charged by a bloodied opponent. Essentials had at least one good aim: Make the rules you have to remember more even and general.
One of the most interesting things about this game is that there are things the rules can do, but haven’t done. There is what we call ‘unexplored design space’ in 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons. The game has things it’s never tried but it has rules structures set up to let you try. Do you want to do a triggered action that’s a move action? The rules can accommodate it. Is it worth trying? Don’t know, but it’s still design space.
The concern that 4th edition rules were static or confusing isn’t necessarily untrue. After all, you know how you feel about your characters and how you feel playing them. But I do think that the assertion that it ‘felt bad’ can be accommodated by improving your interface. I think power cards would improve the experience for a lot of people – helping you track things being expended or not, and just giving you a nice clear reference, visually, for the thing you want to do.
Finally, you may yearn for what 4th edition did. You may wish you could play a game like that, or make one like it. In that case, I beg you: Please.
Please.
Recognise that technical writing is a skill and either work hard on consistent wording, or hire an editor to get you there.
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