Dungeons & Dragons
The seminal FRPG

Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) is generally regarded as the first FRPG (and the first RPG, for that matter). I’ve never played D&D – but (as mentioned above), AD&D – “1½th edition D&D” – was one of the games I played at university and afterwards. D&D, Second Edition, passed me by… I’d already moved on to Ars Magica. But many gamers deserted the system at this time – it omitted popular character classes (such as Barbarian and Monk) and added very little.

More recently, TSR, Inc., D&D’s original publishers, found themselves in financial troubles, and were bought by Wizards of the Coast, one-time publishers of Ars Magica. And Wizards have now released D&D, Third Edition.

While I was in London, UK, last year (2001), I “went mad” and bought three D&D 3E core rulebooks:

• Players Handbook (PH)
• Monster Manual (MM)
• Creature Collection (CC)

Obviously I was feeling somewhat nostalgic, but, moreover, I was considerably impressed by the quality of the Wizards’ rulebooks. The MM’s illustrations are particularly impressive, very much in the style of Russ Nicholson (who provided many of the illustrations for the AD&D Fiend Factory [FF]) or Todd “Spawn” McFarlane – it’s great to see monsters such as the umber hulk as credible and fearsome creatures. The MM 3E features many of the creatures from the AD&D MM and, I think, the FF (I’ll have to dig out my old rulebooks to check!), plus some new(er) ones.

The PH seems quite familiar… then you notice changes, some subtle, some more radical, and all (at first reading) improvements over AD&D. D&D is now “Based on the original … rules created by E. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson” with the 3E rules credited to the design team of Monte Cook, Jonathon Tweet (one of the original designers of Ars Magica!), and Skip Williams. The influence of games such as Ars Magica is clear. The authors have stripped down the rules and rebuilt many – for example, better armour is now represented, more intuitively, by a numerically higher armor class (AC).

Some players found the original’s spell memorization system (based on Jack Vance’s Dying Earth stories) rather irritating. It’s still there, for the Wizard character class, but you can now play a different kind of magic user, a Sorcerer, whose magic is innate and who can choose the spell they cast as they cast it. Sorcerers and Wizards both benefit from being able to cast many “zeroth”-level spells, such as Light, which are called cantrips.

While D&D is still geared towards simple dungeon bashing, all in all, the new game is very good. I’ve since acquired the Dungeon Master’s Guide and Deities and Demigods, and started DMing again… with my (now) eleven-year-old sons and their friends.

The CC (published for Sword and Sorcery Studios by White Wolf Publishing, Inc.) was somewhat disappointing, however. A majority of the creatures are unimaginative variations of “standard” monsters: it’s less impressive next to the new MM than the FF was next to the AD&D MM – like the CC, the FF was based on public contributions, many from the pages of Games Workshop’s White Dwarf magazine (before it became an extended advertisement for GW’s own games).

The more impressive CC entries include the Unhallowed, a class of powerful undead, tragic figures unwilling to die, and the Ratmen, or Slitheren (nothing to do with Harry Potter!), an interesting variation on the Skaven from Warhammer. (Are there any other games with such creatures? The common literary inspiration is probably Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser novel, The Swords of Lankhmar (1968).) I like the ratmen so much, I now also have the Vigil Watch: Warrens of the Ratmen sourcebook!

(On another note, it’s strange that this OGL D&D supplement is published by White Wolf, another one-time publisher of Ars Magica.)

But the most significant thing about the CC is that it is the first publication under the Open Game License (OGL). Wizards have set up the Open Gaming Foundation (OGF) on the model of the Open Software Foundation (OSF; now part of The Open Group), and are licensing the D20 System, based on the D&D rules, but, in principle, extensible to any kind of RPG. (Maybe we’ll see creatures such as awk, chmod, and sed in future CCs!)

There’s a host of d20 gaming material available now. One that demands particular mention is Dragon Lords of Melniboné, Chaosium’s d20 version of its Stormbringer FRPG, based on Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melniboné sequence.