Now’s not the time for a comprehensive rundown of what makes 3rd Edition (and its better but worse 3.5 patch) such a problem.  But there’s a really nasty strand of system-within-a-system rules that need a swift kick to the crotch: Sundering, Tripping, Disarming and Grappling, I’m calling you out.

These rules represent a classic How Not To Build A System situation.  They work not only off of a different set of combat statistics, they also work independently of each other.  They all work in roughly the same way as each other, but they all use different feats and skills that do little or nothing to help the others.  What’s that mean to an average player.  It means if I, as a DM, build an NPC who’s really good at grappling, unless you’ve made your character good at it as well, I’m going to succeed.  I.E. I can build an NPC good at nothing save screwing the party over. Whee!

Any of the skills above are really hard for a player to pull off at all without a special feat.  Want to disarm? Well, someone’s getting a free attack on you for trying…unless you take a feat.  Ok, if you stop there, things aren’t too bad.  But then you can start taking feats to give bonuses to disarming checks.  So now, when I try to disarm from you, not only has the in-game failsafe (that free attack) been removed, but you get bonuses to pull it off.  Now, we’ve created a separate progression path to become good at Disarming, one where a mediocre fighter can be very, very good at something, even against a much better fighter.  Put another way, D&D has given a cheap way for characters to be made more dangerous than people who should be better than them.  Game balance, have a nice nap.

It gets worse.

The repercussions of all of these rules within rules are nasty and debilitating.  If you disarm with a bare hand, winning a disarm check means you now hold your opponent’s weapon.  And since you’ve put some skills into being better at this, there is now no effective way for the opponent to get his weapon back.  Since most characters – PC and NPC – tend to have a favored weapon, one they’ve been built around using, the effect is more than just delaying or slightly weakening them.  They’ve been effectively removed from the fight.

It’s even more of a mess when you start looking at things like tripping and grappling.  Now only can you give bonus points to tripping and only to tripping, you can take feats that allow you to get extra, free attacks if you successfully trip.  So a character built to trip not only has an easier time to tripping, but gets a bunch of free damage out of it too.  All for the price of a handful of feats.  Bonus: D&D inexplicably makes getting back up not only burn a valuable move action, but also provokes another free attack to anyone within range.  So if you stat a character out for tripping, surround a target, then knock them down, you’ve set that character up to be the target of 5 or 6 free attacks.  I know.  I’ve used this technique myself.  The same can be said of grappling, which prevents a character from doing much of anything without rolling a successful grapple check; a check that, once again, one character is likely statted out to win the majority of the time.

These rules are bad news no matter who uses them.  I’ve used them as a DM and unfairly trashed people with them, and I’ve had players use them and unbalance otherwise well built encounters.  There are creatures in the monster manual who are only difficult to fight because they engage in this kind of side-rule-system combat.

They’re rules that could be softened relatively easily, too.  Why make getting up both take a move action and provoke free attacks?  Why not give a tripped character the choice: get up fast but get hit, or get up slow and be safe?  And with grappling, why not just have it immobilize a character and give a negative to their attacks instead of taking them out of the fight and subjecting them to free crushing damage?  And why in Cthulu’s name would you give anyone a system that trivializes the breaking of powerful, magic weapons?

4th Edition has clarified and simplified a lot of these rules, which is good. A few weeks ago, when I was researching how grappling rules work, I found an article written by one of the game’s designers.  The rules were so complicated that the designer of the system had to edit and strike-through at least a third of what he had written to correct it.  If that’s not the mark of an insane rule system, I don’t know what is.

Beyond it being a really good time, one of the things I love about running role playing games (you know, like Dungeons and Dragons and all that other nerdy tabletop stuff) is that it’s this great, abstracted storytelling style that works as a mirror to my more serious writing.  You don’t have to worry about language or grammar.  The subtleties of plot development are less important.  Nothing that happens is recorded verbatim, so minor missteps are easy to wash away or simply forget.  What you’re left with is the broad narrative structure, some character development and a lot of big emotions.  It’s a great way of learning about yourself as a storyteller.

I’m coming to the end of a major section of a campaign we’ve been running for a while, and over the past few weeks I’ve felt this really significant shift in it.  Things were kind of working, but I was struggling to build and sustain momentum.  It had been a long time since we’d played these characters and while nothing I was doing was wrong, it wasn’t taking on a life of its own.  Then, about four weeks ago, it went from feeling like pushing a boulder uphill to trying desperately to keep up with it as it barreled down the other side.

That feeling of frustration, of things technically, intellectually working without the spark of life is basically what I feel, in some form or another, when I do anything short form.  Things work, I like the ideas, and maybe I even really like the story.  But it never has its own momentum.  It’s always me turning the gears and stepping on the pedal.  In a shorter story, there’s never time for all that potential energy to turn suddenly kinetic.

What changed in my campaign? Nothing, exactly.  I just reached critical mass with everything we’d built to that point.  At some point in a long story, if you’re doing things right, you cross this threshold.  To that point, you’re running around, establishing the setting, introducing characters, building subplots and moving pieces into place.  It’s a lot of work, and even when things work, there’s still this sense of things moving only where they’re pushed.  Then you hit a point where everything is connected in just the right way, where any change in the web causes vibrations throughout the rest.  If something happens in this plot, the things it does to this character over here, on the other side of the map, forces them into action.  That cascades out to three other things, and before you know it the whole damn structure is shaking.

At that point, you’re not pushing things anymore.  They’re pushing you.  Whereas before you needed to get things carefully in place, orchestrating the whole situation, now all you need to do is pick up a rock and throw it.  You aim for the place where it’ll do the most damage, and then hold on tight.

If you’ve ever watched Babylon 5, you can see what I mean.  Up through the end of season 2 it’s good.  At times, it’s really good.  But somewhere in the middle of season 3, things go insane.  No one in the story can move without knocking ten other things over.  Every single story impacts on the rest. That’s what you get with a carefully planned, long form story.  You get to reach critical mass, and the whole way you tell the story changes.  You’re still writing the thing, but it starts feeling more like aiming a fire hose than pumping water out of a well.  It’s pretty incredible.

Do I need to roll a 20 sided die to realize that?  Nah, not really.  But seeing the whole campaign take on a fatalistic life of its own is a nice, clear distillation of where my interests and instincts lead me as a writer.  The rush I feel when all the guns are in place and I can start pulling triggers has a lot to do with why I feel so compelled to write.  It’s something I notice when I write, but separated from struggling over word choice it’s easier to see that, yeah, what I really want to work on is stuff where I have enough room to build a story that takes on a life of its own.

I didn’t go to college for anything writing related, but with all the drinking and swearing and unruly behavior that comes with gaming, it’s kind of the same thing