I’ve been thinking a lot about D&D 4th Ed. lately, and not just because of the interview today. I’ve been reading the preview books sent out by Wizards of the Coast. They’re total rip-offs, price-wise, but they’re chok-a-block with the kind of content I love. One of the statements made by designer James Wyatt in the Races and Classes book seemed to fit perfectly with a frustration I have about grouping in Massive games.

He was discussing the new focus on mutiple enemies in encounters. In 3rd edition (to make a quick aside) combat was balanced so that a party of four level x characters took on a single opponent of level X. If you wanted multiple critters in a fight, you’d either need to throw weaker creatures at the PCs, or make it a ‘tougher-than-normal’ fight. This lead to encounters designed by pros in recent years which feature ‘weak’ monsters with crazily unfair advantages; heavy DR at low levels, for example. In 4th edition, the assumption is that a given encounter is a number of critters equal to the number of Player Characters. This will make for much more interesting experiences, and allows for some interesting mixing and matching as well.

The overall focus here, said Mr. Wyatt, was to “challenge the party, not the player”. As an example to illustrate this, he pointed to a scenario where a monster with a unique damage reduction (like cold iron) would attack the party, and only one PC had the tool required to take it on. This would lead to the one-man-band, with the other PCs playing backup parts to the properly-equipped character. 4E is going to be all about every PC making a contribution, every round.

You might be wondering how I’m jumping this thread to MMOGs. After all, most games do just that; no one character class is specially equipped to handle a threat in most games. You’re probably going to want the holy Trinity on hand but beyond certain high-end dungeons/instances, most games don’t demand overly specific party builds. What most do require, though, is a very specific number of people. Lots of folks have complained about this, talking about alternatives for high end content and the specificity of raid events.

What I want is that kind of scalability at every level of the game. In short, I want a challenge for the party I have, not the party the designers want me to have. Again, I understand needing a semi-balanced party, but why penalize players for being one or two people short of a full group? Why not allow duos to take on dungeons? Why not allow scaling for three players, or ‘ten-man’ zones for five?  If you feel the need to compensate players for commensurate risks, I guess I can understand that … but why not make a dungeon ‘as dangerous’ as it would be for the full group, but tune it to a smaller number?

I’m not talking about soloing here - I think many companies have grasped the finer points of soloing and are doing a pretty good job with that passtime. What I’m talking about are the husband and wife teams, the dad with his two kids, the trio of high school chums - why can’t they have the daring adventures so common to these games? Why do they have to fall back on content technically designed for one person to handle alone?

During the discussion this month about cheating the blogosphere has grappled with the issue of designer ownership of the game; they are the ultimate gods of these tiny worlds. Within the confines of that chess game, though, wouldn’t it be nice to decide how many other chess pieces you need to have a decent chance at checkmate?