LINE OF SIGHT

Full Circle, Part 1

Writing the new Dungeon Master's Guide was the highlight of my career, so far. When I learned to play D&D, it was from some acquaintances, many of whom were older than me. They used the little brown-box set. The first D&D product that I ever bought myself, much later, was the 1st Edition DMG (the B. Dalton's was out of Player's Handbooks and Monster Manuals). I was 11 years old.

I remember it vividly, and read it from cover to cover. I didn't understand all of it, but that only made it more fascinating. I knew what hit points were, for example (from playing the game) but I didn't know what Hit Dice were. I wanted to start my own campaign right away, so I took the monsters that were in the back of the DMG and gave them all hit points on my own. My very first game design.

Years later, I was working in the game industry. I'd worked for ICE, freelanced a bit, and then went to work for TSR. TSR got bought, and suddenly I was in Renton, Washington, at Wizards of the Coast. During my time at TSR, I got to know Zeb Cook, who had done 2nd Edition, and that was great, but by the time I came along (around 1994), they were already tossing around the words "Third Edition." When we suddenly became Wizards, it was clear that the new edition was just over the next hill.

Sort of.

It should come as no surprise that the development for 3rd Edition lasted a long time. Around Christmas of 1997, Bill Slavicsek, the director of RPG R&D at Wizards, selected a team consisting of Skip Williams, Rich Baker, and myself. We were told to come up with all the rules together, and then one of us would write the Player's Handbook, one of us the DMG, and one would write the Monster Manual. (I hoped for the DMG, but more on that later.) Skip and Rich were no strangers to tinkering with D&D -- they'd already worked on the Player's Option books together. I was told that I was put on the team because I could make the books read well, I had a good knowledge of what other companies were doing in game design, and because I was known for "out there" sorts of ideas. I expected to be the "radical one" on the team, with Rich and particularly Skip -- the "Sage" himself -- reining me in.

Except that it didn't happen. When we had our initial meetings (both Thomas Reid, Creative Director of D&D at the time, and Peter Adkison, then CEO of Wizards, were a part of a lot of these meetings -- particularly Peter) I would throw out whatever wacky idea came to my head. "Let's put half-orcs back in!" I'd say. "Let's have skills rather than proficiencies." I expected to be shouted down, with good explanations about how that "wouldn't be good for the game" for some reason that I had never thought of before. Except that nobody did.

This was suddenly the most creative experience I'd had at TSR/Wizards. We really were changing things. I was expecting a sort of "reorganization and updating" of 2nd Edition. But we were really doing a whole new game here.

Cool.

What followed was literally a yearlong meeting. Sometime during that year, Jonathan Tweet joined our ranks, and shortly thereafter Rich Baker left us to take a position in management. (Jonathan was at first abashed at how much we were changing, but it didn't take long for him to join in and, in fact, propose some of the most drastic changes of all.) We all got together every day, for hours at a time to discuss the topic of the day. A topic might be "weapons," or perhaps "wizards," or something like that. We'd discuss ideas that we'd had over years of playing and designing. We'd tell old campaign stories, discuss what other games did with similar topics, and what players had told us over the years at conventions. We would create huge tables on dry erase boards to compare one class or one race to another mathematically. We would spend an afternoon figuring who is the better melee combatant, the barbarian with the axe, the fighter with the sword and shield, the fighter with two weapons, or the monk, just using averages (it's the fighter with the sword and shield, if you're curious).

By the time a year and a half had passed, we had written-mostly together-an entire Player's Handbook and a bit of the DMG. But we threw practically all of that out -- the rules were evolving fast and furious. What we had been calling "C skills" (as opposed to A and B skills) became "Heroic Feats," and finally, just "feats." The spirit master went away, and the sorcerer appeared. Multiclassing was out, and then back in. Gnomes were killed, and then raised.

Eventually, however, we really needed to start to get words down on paper that weren't going to go away. In early 1999 Jonathan started writing the actual text of the Player's Handbook. But there were still so many topics still to discuss! 8th and 9th level spells for clerics! Spells to make the druid viable! Familiars that improved as you went up levels! Jonathan wrote, and Skip and I discussed, with Jonathan joining in as much as he could. Jonathan didn't get much writing in, and that came as no surprise. The game was still in flux.

Nevertheless, with nothing even close to a finished draft of the PH, and dozens of crucial topics still on the table, the DMG had to get started. And I was going to write it.

I'd come full circle.

~Monte Cook

Continued in Part 2 next week.