If you follow my blog, you will have noticed that I have expressed a lot of pessimism on the subject of MMORPGs this year, and in the last months of 2011. I expressed my belief that the story-driven gamplay of SWTOR would lead to problems with a lack of longevity of the game. I talked about how the fact that MMORPGs are so similar to each other leads to an increasingly fast hype-release-disappointment cycle. And I questioned whether any new game, even if it has some good new ideas like Guild Wars 2, could still "save" the MMORPG genre from a slow decline. Today it seems I was somewhat ahead of the curve: The pessimism is spreading and is becoming mainstream.

I've been playing Dungeons & Dragons for over 30 years now, on and off. I frequently switched to other systems, and frequently returned to D&D. I love Dungeons & Dragons. And I am deeply worried about the direction it is heading and its future.

It is possible that the period I had the most fun with D&D was around 1st or 2nd edition. I was at university, and D&D was my main hobby, with which I spent many hours every weekend and some evenings. I was young, and didn't have all the worries of a middle-aged man yet. Compared to that my current 4th edition D&D campaign has severe drawbacks: We can only play for around 4 hours every two weeks, sometimes less. And me living in a foreign country means I have to DM the campaign in a language I don't master completely. And my carefree university days are certainly over.

I wonder how many people are in similar situations, where the D&D they are playing now is not the D&D of their high school / college / university days. And I wonder how many of them blame the rules of D&D for having changed, not realizing that it is THEM who have changed much more. There is a huge "edition war" raging on the D&D forums, with a lot of nostalgia for 1st and 2nd edition AD&D rules.

I've seen exactly the same with MMORPGs. Some people still believe that Everquest is the best MMORPG ever (and then offer various excuses why they aren't playing it). Some people earnestly believe that Blizzard is paying millions of dollars to a huge development team tasked to make World of Warcraft worse with every single patch and expansion. Even single-player games are said to get worse with every sequel.

Isn't all that blaming our games for the changes that happened in our head? As Heraclit said, you can't step into the same river twice, a saying which got transformed into "you can't cross the same river twice", with the idea being that the river changes all the time and is never twice "the same". Any game experience we have now is influenced by our previous experiences, and by the other circumstances we live in.

I can't just tell my group that we are switching back to 2nd edition D&D rules (or the D&D Next rules which evoke it), and somehow magically get the fun experience back I had during my university days. In fact it is likely that if I reverted to such an old school rules system, the fun would actually be less than with a more modern system. Rules systems evolve with the players, with the times, not against them. A lot of the 1st edition D&D rules today appear as strange as the naked corpse runs, level loss at death, or forced grouping of the original Everquest would appear to a MMORPG player of today.

Nostalgia is a powerful force, but as you can't actually turn back time, it is also a powerful trap. You give the players what they say they wanted, and find out that it wasn't actually in your power to give them their youth back. You end up with trying to sell an outdated rules system very few people actually want to play. And you end up destroying alternative streams of income, like D&D Insider, which is very useful for 4th edition, but would be much less so for D&D Next. As I said, I am worried about the future of Dungeons & Dragons. I see the path they are heading down, and I feel that path is a mistake.

What is a role-playing game? While a complete definition would be hard to find, we can at least make one empirical observation: In the large majority of games which call themselves role-playing games there is a series of combat sequences, embedded in something like a story or a world. That is as true for let’s say World of Warcraft as it is for Dungeons & Dragons. And because of RPGs having a combat part and a non-combat part, there is a fundamental conflict about what the relative weight of each of these parts should be. The main problem many people have with 4^th edition D&D is that the combat part appears heavier than in previous editions and the non-combat part lighter. So how can we fix 4^th edition, other than reverting to previous rule editions, which is what D&D Next is doing?

The 4th edition of Dungeons & Dragons is a game which is significantly different from earlier editions of D&D. And with the "5th" edition of D&D Next going back to how the game was before 4th edition, Wizard of the Coast will end up with two very distinctive and separate groups of customers: Those who hated 4th edition, didn't buy it, kept playing 3.5, and who are now all cheering and probably will be buying D&D Next. And another group who loved 4th edition, and who won't be buying D&D Next, because it isn't the tactical game they want. If D&D Next succeeds to bring back the customers WotC lost with 4th edition, it only does so by losing them the customers they gained with 4th edition.

In hindsight I think the problem was calling 4E just "Dungeons & Dragons", implying that it was the same game, just further "patched". It would have been better if they had called it "Dungeons & Dragons Tactics", to indicate that it is in fact a somewhat different game, with a lot more focus on tactical combat. They could have then accorded the title of the official "Dungeons & Dragons" to the game now being called D&D Next.

Making 4th edition was a bold move. It took a very traditional brand and changed it into something very different. People react negatively not because 4E is a bad game, but because they just don't recognize it as being D&D any more. If 4E had carried another name and not claimed to be the one and only Dungeons & Dragons, maybe we could have avoided the edition wars. Now Wizards of the Coast is getting cold feet and trying to reverse course, getting back to a more traditional game. Which in itself again is not a bad game, but now you get the people who think 4E is "Dungeons & Dragons" shouting that D&D Next is not the Dungeons & Dragons they know.

I really think "Dungeons & Dragons Tactics" would have been a better name for 4th edition to avoid this split of the customer base.

The level 1 wizard in the D&D Next playtest has a constitution of 14, resulting in him having 16 hit points. In 1st edition AD&D a level 1 wizard with a constitution of 14 would have had between 1 and 4 hit points (rolled randomly, although we used house rules that gave him 4 points at level 1). A level 1 wizard in 4th edition D&D would have 24 hit points. Compared to these big differences in hit points, the damage numbers that for example an arrow does aren't all that much different in the different editions. You could kill a 1st edition wizard with 1 arrow, but you need several arrows to kill a 4E wizard. As a result combat in 4th edition D&D takes more rounds than combat in previous editions, and D&D Next is trying to shorten it somewhat again.

Living in a world where pretty much everybody has attention deficit disorder, many people discussing D&D think that combat which is shorter is automatically better. I do believe that it is good for a DM to keep the time for 1 combat round short, which means managing the flow of combat well, being well prepared with monster cards and initiative riders, and not having to look up rules in the middle of combat all the time. I do not believe that a combat having less rounds is better than a combat having more rounds.

My reason for my preference for combat with a certain minimum number of rounds stems from my knowledge of math and statistics. Most people can calculate that if they have a character with a 50% chance to hit a monster and they do 2d6 damage, they will on average deal 3.5 damage per round. What they might not be aware is that for an "average" to have any meaning, you need a sufficiently large sample size. Imagine that character with the 50% hit chance and 2d6 damage facing a monster with 10 hit points. You "average" calculation only tells you that it will take 3 rounds on average to kill that monster. In reality the result is far more volatile: You could kill the monster with one hit in the first round, or you could take 6 rounds or more of low dice rolls.

MMORPGs, who did a lot to speed up combat, usually work with a to hit chance above 90%. But D&D, and that is true for all editions of it, usually uses around 50% to hit chance in the majority of fights. If you plan for fights with only a few rounds of combat, that creates a lot of volatility. In my campaign we had a fight of the 6 player characters killing 10 rats (MMO joke), in which one character rolled only misses for 6 rounds, and another hit only once, in spite of a 50% hit chance. Fortunately we have so many player characters in my campaign, which reduces statistical volatility, but if you run with a group of 4 or less such a streak of bad luck might well wipe your group. Then the DM gets into the uncomfortable position of having to decide whether he should let the group die just because of a streak of bad luck, or whether he should start fudging dice or coming up with a deus ex machina miracle save.

Of course I don't want the group having fights with 20 rounds of combat. I think in 4E some high level monsters have a bit too many hit points, which then got errataed downwards with the D&D Essentials material. But the D&D Next adventure has a lot of fights in which a character can one-shot a typical monster like an orc or hobgoblin. And those are the fights in which a few lucky or unlucky rolls can take the combat all the way from total party kill to being far too easy to be enjoyable. I find combat which is a bit slower but less random, less statistically volatile, is better.

I've been playing D&D Next against myself, as my regular group isn't signed up for the beta test. That actually isn't a bad method to test a rules system, as you can concentrate on the rules without rule-independent factors like story and roleplaying getting in the way. It also gives me the opportunity to try the "mean DM": What would happen if I played the monsters to the maximum of their written abilities without factoring in "artificial stupidity" for reasons of fairness or story?

In D&D Next that approach yields a surprising result right in the first encounters of the playtest material, where the group is fighting a bunch of kobolds: The kobolds run past the fighter and gank the wizard. It turns out that the fighter in D&D Next only has half the necessary features of a "tank" role: He has the good defenses and health, but he is missing any form of aggro control ("taunt").

In 4th edition a front-line fighter has two ways to protect the wizard in the back: He has what other games would call a "zone of control", that is he can make opportunity attacks on an enemy running through the squares next to him. And he can "mark" one enemy, forcing that enemy to attack him or suffer penalties and opportunity attacks. All these rules of aggro control are gone in D&D Next. There is absolutely no penalty for the kobolds to completely ignore the fighter and go for the softer targets.

In a way that reminded me of PvP in World of Warcraft, of which I didn't play much. But for some time I did some PvP with my tank spec warrior, complete with shield and spell reflection abilities. And I quickly learned that enemies tended to ignore me as long as there were other targets around. I wasn't perceived as much of a threat, nor as easy target to kill, so the enemy rather went for somebody else. Which suited me just fine, although as approach to PvP going as tank was somewhat unconventional.

But while I didn't mind that on an Alterac Valley battlefield with 79 anonymous strangers, I don't like it as a rule system for my D&D group. It basically forces me as a DM to fudge. I need to introduce "artificial stupidity" into the behavior of the monsters, so they don't ignore the fighter. I so hope that WotC still changes the fighter to something a bit more effective as a tank.

I can't help it. When I read a dozen blogs expressing exactly the same sentiment, I have to ask myself whether that sort of group think is justified, or whether there is another possible interpretation of the same facts. In this case the facts are that a lot of game developers lost their jobs lately. Bioware laid off an unspecified number of SWTOR developers (and started talking about server mergers), and 38 Studios fired everybody. And the common sentiment I hear is what a shame that is. Dare I ask: Why?

If you think about it, the theory behind the sentiment is that a game developer is an innocent victim of layoffs. For that to be true, 100% of the responsibility of the success or failure of a game development studio must lie in the hands of the upper management. For example it was revealed that 38 Studios would have had to sell 3 million copies of Kingdoms of Amalur to survive, but sold 1.2 million. So the general conclusion is that Curt Schilling is an idiot, because selling 3 million copies of Amalur was impossible from the start, and the people he employed are now suffering from the consequences of his illusions of grandeur.

Skyrim sold 3.4 million copies in the first 2 days, Diablo 3 sold 3.5 million copies on the first day (plus handed out 1.2 million free copies for WoW annual pass holders). For me there is a logical conclusion from that: Either 38 Studios should have been able to sell 3 million copies of Kingdoms of Amalur because they made a great game, or they shouldn't have started making a $112 million MMORPG in the first place. Either you play with the big boys, then 3 million copies sold doesn't appear all that impossible; or you don't play with the big boys, but then your chances of pulling off a successful triple-A MMORPG are nil as well. Curt Schilling may well be an extremely bad businessman, but it appears that his major flaw was to overestimate the ability of his team to produce a smash hit. Can we really say that his team is 100% innocent of that? Can we not imagine an alternate reality in which the game developers at 38 Studios were all so great that they made a game nearly as good as Skyrim or Diablo 3, selling 3 million copies? At the very least we need to admit that we don't have enough data to judge on that, before all coming out in support of the supposedly innocent victims. As I said earlier, I do believe that the quality of Copernicus has nothing to do with the bankruptcy, because you can't be judged on the success or failure of a game that isn't even released yet. So it is totally possible that the 38 Studios case is mostly the fault of management. But then I'm not sure why we would all be crying about the demise of Copernicus, because if we think it is normal that Kingdom of Amalur is just an "okay, but not great" game, then why would we believe Copernicus to be much better? $112 million is an awfully large price tag for a flythrough video and three screenshots.

The sentiment of the innocent developer being laid off for no fault of his own is even harder to maintain in the case of Star Wars: The Old Republic. Bioware admitted losing 400,000 out of 1.7 million subscribers, which as a percentage is a greater loss than WoW going from its peak to its current number of subscribers. And SWTOR lost those subscribers in a much shorter time. Plus there are some doubts whether the number of remaining subscribers isn't padded by Bioware handing out free months of gameplay. In short: SWTOR isn't doing that great, and the company reacts by cutting costs, which means laying off people. But the people being laid off are those who made the game that isn't doing so great. Are we saying here that the game developers have absolutely no influence over the quality of the game they are making?

I get pictures in my mind of Ford workers producing cars on an assembly line. In such a production process it is possible that the Ford worker has close to no influence whatsoever on the quality of the produced car. Are game developers assembly line workers? Or do we believe that if we read a review saying that some video game characters animation is wooden, the guy having written that animation simply didn't do a very good job? Is there absolutely no way of there being some justification in a management decision of "you made a game that wasn't good enough, you're fired!"?

As I said, these are just contrarian questions. Open questions at that. I don't claim to have an answer on the degree of responsibility of the game developers over the success of their games. It just appears somewhat weird to me to assume that the degree is zero.

Yesterday the public beta of D&D Next, the 5th edition of Dungeons & Dragons, started. There is a partial NDA, which prohibits me from sharing the playtest materials, but allows me to voice my opinion on D&D Next, which is what I’ll do here. Of course the first thing to remark is that a beta test of a pen & paper game is inherently strange. As the people I normally play with aren’t signed up for the beta, I can only “play” D&D Next with myself. Which maybe actually isn’t the worst thing to do, because in a pen & paper game the overall experience very much depends on the players, while the rule-system only plays a minor role. But even weirder than beta-testing a pen & paper game in the first place is the nature of D&D Next.

To explain, let’s make a detour to Everquest, which as it happens also plans a future edition called “Next”. The Wikipedia entry for Everquest Next cites the developer’s intentions “to return to a style of gameplay more like the original EverQuest”. So what would you think if Everquest Next had level loss on death, naked corpse runs, 15 minute forced breaks for meditation between fights, forced grouping, 20 minutes waits for boats, and all the other features of the original Everquest? You’d probably wonder why the game is called “Next”, and not “Previous”.

D&D Next is very much a D&D Previous. It rolls back most of the innovation Dungeons & Dragons had with the 4th edition and reverts to a mix of rules which much more resembles previous editions of D&D. Gone are the powers for players and monsters, gone is the tactical combat and the battle maps, gone is the concept of all character classes having equal amounts of options in combat. There are promises that some of these things might be reintroduced as optional, but they are gone from the base rules.

What we are back to is spell-casters with X spells per day, and character classes without spells just using their basic melee or ranged attack most of the time. That is somewhat softened by spell-casters having minor spells they can cast without limits, so they don’t run out of things to do, and all classes gaining “benefits” with levels which increase their options. Nevertheless the class balance of 4th edition, where a fighter had as many powers as a wizard, is gone. Non-caster classes like fighters are back to a more or less constant damage output, whatever the length of the fight. Casters are back to the situation of being powerful in shorter fights, and then “running out of spells”, albeit not completely anymore, because they now have minor spells as their own form of “basic attack”.

What I like even less is that monsters are back to not having powers either. That is, there are a lot of vanilla monsters which just have an armor class, hit points, and a simple attack dealing some damage. In 4th edition the fight against different monsters of the same level could be very different, because they had different powers. In D&D next the fight against different vanilla monsters of the same level will feel more similar.

What is undoubtedly true, and presumably the wished-for effect, is that D&D Next feels a lot more like “classic D&D”, while 4th edition was a huge step away from “classic”. Wizards of the Coast got a lot of flak for 4th edition being so very different, and they “listened to their customers” and went back to how it was before. I believe that to be a horrible mistake. Their competitors Paizo will be laughing all the way to the bank. WotC released 3rd edition and 3.5 under an open gaming license, which enabled Paizo to launch a rather successful game system called Pathfinder, which is basically an improved D&D 3.5. Now Wizards of the Coast with D&D Next is doing more or less the same, releasing a rule system which will appeal more to the fans of 3rd edition and even earlier editions, while leaving the fans of 4th edition standing in the rain. Why would somebody want to spend a lot of money on buying D&D Next rulebooks, if he can have a very similar game experience with either the old pre-4E D&D rulebooks or Paizo’s Pathfinder rulebooks he already owns?

D&D Next is not at all backward compatible with 4th edition. It would be very easy to convert adventures or other game materials from 1st, 2nd, or 3rd edition D&D to D&D Next or vice versa. In fact the playtest adventure is an old adventure from 1979. But it would be very hard to use either 4E game materials for D&D Next or the other way around. I don’t know in how much optional rulebooks for D&D Next will be able to change that, I don’t think you can easily graft a more tactical combat system onto the D&D Next base rules without creating two very different versions of D&D Next. As I subscribed to D&D Insider for the support the website gives for my 4th edition dungeon mastering, I am somewhat worried whether that support will stop with the release of D&D Next.

In making D&D Next “classic”, Wizards of the Coast created a rule system which is basically a rehash of previous rules. Even if that ends up being a “best of”, it mostly remains old rules, not unlike what a group of players using old rulebooks and some house rules could have cooked up on their own. The only “innovation” I could find was a new rule for combat advantage using the best of two dice instead of a +2 bonus. There is a good reason for not calling the new system 5th edition, because it feels more like 3.75.

Pen & paper rule-systems are different from MMORPGs in that nobody prevents you from playing previous editions if you want to. While I personally like 4th edition better than previous editions of Dungeons & Dragons, I would be totally okay with Wizards of the Coast reprinting old rulebooks, maybe with some errata or even added optional rules. But I don’t see the need to create a D&D Next rule-system which isn't much different from what is already there. I would have wished for a true 5th edition which is forward-looking, introducing a lot of new things, instead of backward-looking and basically reverting D&D to how it was in the “good old times”. I believe that nostalgia is a trap for game design, as it wasn't the old rule-system which made the good old times so good, but other factors like youth. You can’t bring the 80s back by making a new D&D rulebook with the rules from the 80s. I have some ideas how the flaws of 4th edition could have been addressed without reverting to what D&D was before, but I guess I’ll keep that for a separate post.

So in summary I am very disappointed with what I've seen up to now from D&D Next. I simply don’t see anything “Next” about it, it appears very much as a “D&D Previous” to me. And as there is already a ton of old rulebooks for D&D, I don’t see the need to make yet another version of D&D which isn't much different from 2nd or 3rd edition. I’ve been playing D&D since the 80s, and this will be the first time that I will NOT make the move to the new edition when it comes out. It would be a move back, not forward.

Imagine you have a character in a MMORPG who just hit the level cap. You enter a dungeon with a group, somebody in the group inspects you, and he points out to you that the gear you are wearing is bad. He says you could have bought better gear for very little gold in the auction house, as well as enchantments / gems to improve that gear further. How would you feel? Pretty stupid and a bit ashamed probably. Years of games like WoW has "taught" us that it is our duty to get the best gear possible by means like crafting or the auction house *before* trying to get better gear through loot. The auction house is part of the game, and not using it is like deliberately playing badly, like not using one of your best spells.

That attitude works for World of Warcraft, because in the WoW AH you can only get "okay" gear for reasonable prices. Diablo 3 is very different. My monk is level 24 and has 30k gold, and he just bought a legendary orange weapon on the auction house for 10k gold which is basically a best-in-slot item. By playing the auction house as part of the game, it turns out that the auction house is the optimal way to equip your character. Found loot is worse, and crafted loot is ridiculously bad for its cost. The most intelligent strategy in Diablo 3 is to stay the hell away from crafting, vendor your blue items, sell your yellow items on the AH cheaply, and use your money to completely equip yourself in yellow and orange gear from the auction house. And that is before the real money AH goes live.

The difference between World of Warcraft and Diablo 3 regarding the AH is that in WoW all the good gear is bind on equip or bind on pickup. You can't sell the WoW purples nobody in your raid needed, or the gear you don't need any more because you found an upgrade. In Diablo 3 you can. When my monk doesn't need that legendary weapon any more, I'll sell it on the AH again. Probably for less than I bought it for, because deflation is rampant. Unlike CCP, Blizzard obviously didn't hire an economist to make sure their in-game economy made any sense.

Now I could arbitrarily decide that the auction house is not part of the game of Diablo 3 and not use it. But then like Rohan I will be left wondering "Will later difficulty modes be balanced around people purchasing AH gear?". I mean, I could probably play the game perfectly well without using my healing spell, or without using potions, or without using the right mouse button. But there is something inherently stupid about having to make up your own rules for handicapping yourself so as to balance the game.

If the auction house is part of the game of Diablo 3, and that part of the game unbalances the rest, I would say that Diablo 3 overall is a badly balanced game. If I were an achiever, which I am not very much, I would feel at the same time compelled to maximize my character's power through the use of the auction house, and feel that this optimization by AH diminishes my achievement of beating the game at this or that difficulty level. Regardless of whether I used farmed gold or real money to buy my optimum gear.

As you might have noticed this week my thoughts revolve around story-telling in games. Or you didn't notice, because up to now I mostly wrote about story-telling in D&D, and nobody reads my D&D posts. Anyway, I was reading a post from Green Armadillo on Diablo III, and the following phrase struck me as very poignant: "In some ways, it reminds me of SWTOR - you are definitely experiencing someone else's story, between the heavy involvement of NPC's and the relatively non-customizeable player characters, but the story experience and production values have been excellent."

I wasn't a big fan of the story in SWTOR. It sure was excellently told, but I felt railroaded, because whatever decisions I took, the story proceeded the same way. Diablo III doesn't even pretend to give you any choices. Furthermore I find it very hard to care about the story of my monk, who is a sanctimonious prick; his dialogues with his templar follower are cringe-worthy. The hints on future story developments (Belial's secret identity, my monks secret ancestry) are so thick, that there are hardly any surprises left. And as Green Armadillo says, it is someone else's story. Why should I care about it?

Now of course the difference is biggest if I compare that to pen & paper games. But even other computer games, like Skyrim, do a better job of making me feel as if I am playing my own story, and not that of someone else. Or at least they tell a story which is I find it easier to identify with, with characters that are believable and not unfeeling robots without any human weaknesses. If the story is one where I wouldn't have wanted to read the book, turning that story into something more or less interactive doesn't make it any better, as long as there is no way to change the story.

I wonder if certain games wouldn't be better off with no story at all. If the game design demands that I play through the same content several times, having a story which is always the same being retold repeatedly isn't really much good. Repeating content is about collecting more loot, about your character getting stronger, and it is that "story" of character progress you care about, not the canned events and dialogues. Why aren't NPCs talking to me about my shiny new armor instead?

Yesterday I was talking about the importance of improvisation in story-telling in pen & paper role-playing games. You want the final story to result from the interaction between the DM and the players, and no be something which is imposed by the DM on the players. Now that improvisation is relatively easy as long as the story is about role-playing, about dialogue between players and NPCs. It gets harder when we come to combat. And, as many reviewers of 4th edition D&D remarked, it is harder in 4th edition D&D than in previous editions.

As I mentioned before, combat is 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons is a rather excellent tactical squad-based wargame. Much of the Player's Handbook, including the class descriptions, are all about the rules for this tactical wargame. Character classes are more than anything else defined by the powers they have, and these powers are nearly all combat actions. While you could theoretically run a combat-free campaign in 4th edition, you would probably prefer a very different rule system for such a campaign. 4th edition D&D is designed to have about 10 battles per level, although you can reduce that number a bit by the use of skill challenges and quest xp for roleplaying. Thus a typical adventure, a typical story in 4E is very much driven forward by its combat encounters.

Unfortunately combat encounters lend themselves a lot less to improvisation than roleplaying encounters. You can't just put any number of whatever monsters on your dry-erase map, add a few bits of terrain features and expect the combat encounter to work well. Because just like in a computer RPG, balance is extremely important to make combat fun: If the mobs are too hard, the players get wiped and/or frustrated; if the mobs are too easy, combat gets boring. To get the balance right, and to make combat more interesting by the use of terrain features and monster special abilities, requires a good deal of preparation. That is why in an official written adventure module the majority of pages describes combat encounters, with monster tactics, terrain features, and the like.

But if you have an adventure like that, with a defined series of balanced encounters, then how do deal with improvisation and ideas of your players? Do you allow the actions of your players to unbalance your combat encounters, making them either too easy or too hard? For example there is a very good reason why "never split the party" is an official D&D marketing slogan: If your group decides to split up and half of the group stumbles into a combat encounter designed for a full group, you are in serious trouble. Do you modify the encounter and make it beatable by half the group (while the other half of your players are snoring around the table)? Or do you kill off half of the group, forcing them to roll new characters? There isn't really a good solution for situations like these. (Personally I'd go for running the encounter as written, probably killing the characters, so as to not encourage stupid behavior like this.)

Thus a common approach of many DMs is to limit improvisation to the roleplaying part of the game, and to not actually allow the players too much freedom where combat encounters are concerned. If your players go north instead of south, the combat encounter that was planned for the south simply gets moved to the north, as long as that still makes any sense for the story. The players might be able to skip certain encounters, but the DM will do his utmost to ensure the players at least go through the combat encounters that are important for the story. DM improvisation then goes from a pure "anything goes" approach of interactive story-telling to a much more restrictive "getting things back on track" approach. It takes quite a bit of skill from a DM to make that not appear forced.

Sometimes you just have to abandon a large chunk of prepared story with several combat encounters, because what the players did simply don't fit with the prepared story any more. In my DM bag I have an "emergency envelope" with a generic combat encounter which can be used if the players just completely walk away from the adventure I had prepared. That either serves to lead them back to the adventure, or at least to fill the time of that play session, so I can prepare something else for the next session. I would like my virtual world to have a lot of freedom, and not a linear story that is forced upon the players. And sometimes throwing away a prepared adventure and combat encounters is the price I am willing to pay to achieve that freedom.

When I mentioned story hooks in my post about playing D&D modules as written, I got a reader asking whether I could discuss the ongoing story with my players. I thought about the question, and the best answer I can give is that the reason I can't discuss the story too much is that I don't *know* the story. And as this isn't much of an answer, I think I have to elaborate on story-telling in D&D a bit.

Computer games have stories which are either fixed, or have a limited "tree" of possible developments based on player decisions. Pen & paper roleplaying games don't work like that, although if you are unlucky you might stumble upon an inexperienced DM who tries to run his game like that. The best description that I can give of the stories in my adventures and campaigns is that I know how the story will develop if the players either do nothing, or just play along with the suggestions of the NPCs. Let's call this the "base story".

I know this base story not only for the current adventure, but also for the next 3 or so adventures I am planning to play. That enables me to add story hooks for future adventures into my current adventure. I can have characters or items appear in the current story which aren't important right then, but will become important later, in another adventure. And I can have players meet NPCs they already know from previous sessions, which makes the world appear more "persistent", to use an MMO term.

But this base story is not known to the players in advance, and is not fixed in stone. For example in my previous session I had a story hook for a future adventure by having the players meet some Vistani. And the reaction of one player told me that he already knew the upcoming adventure, which then prompted me to change it around. I also start out my game sessions by having the players recap the previous session, and their version of the story which happened tells me which aspects of the story they found interesting, and allows me to elaborate on those.

The most important way for the base story to get altered into something else is that the players do something which wasn't foreseen in the base story. Many years ago I ran an adventure where the story played out in a castle, room by room, having been written as a story development from bottom to top. Only the first challenge was to get into the castle in the first place, and the players had some means of magical flight and promptly entered the castle on the top floor, going through the rooms from top to bottom. Things like that require some improvisation from the DM to still make a story that works. Ultimately in a game of D&D, anything can happen. We've had adventures where the story foresaw a meeting between players and an NPC in a tavern, which ended with the players burning down the tavern and then being on the run from the city watch. The final story as played results from the interaction between the DM and the players, involves a lot of improvised theater, and is often quite different from the base story that was planned.

I think it is best for a DM not to prepare the story of his adventures or campaign in too much detail. You want to know your base story, so that you can prepare something. But you also need to be prepared to throw that base story out of the window and improvise something else if the actions of the players require it.