All of the sections of the Essentials Starter choose-your-own-adventure are sorted by class, except for Section 42, which comes in between two cleric passages. Section 42 is the section you flip to if, at any time during the adventure, you try to do an “other” option (for instance, do something other than fighting the goblins).

If you were playing a normal session of the Dungeons and Dragons game, you could explain what you want to do, and the Dungeon Master (DM) could decide whether it can work and what you need to roll and make it work. […] In the context of this solo adventure, though, you don’t have a DM. […] Hold onto that idea, though.

The number 42 is resonant to 4th edition fans for two reasons. For one thing, pretty much every D&D fan has read Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. For another thing, 42 is the page in the Dungeon Master’s Guide that DMs flip to when characters try to do something not handled by the normal rules. It’s headed “Actions the Rules Don’t Cover” and has a useful chart of difficulty DCs and damage per level. (Rather, it was once a useful chart, pre-errata.)

Could the oddly-placed Section 42 be a reference to Page 42? Or am I grassy-knolling it up here?

More Red Box thoughts…

Hey guys! I’ve decided to bump my monday Mazes and Monsters retro-clone because I am having so much fun liveblogging the D&D starter set. Mazes and Monsters will return next Monday!

The cleric path through Starter Essentials set has to take a confusing detour that all of the other classes avoid: the winding sideroad of Weapon and Implement Dependency.

“You should write down two different attack modifiers: one if you’re attacking with a weapon, and one if you’re channeling power through the holy symbol you carry (which is called an implement). Your weapon attack bonus is your Wisdom modifier +2. Your implement attack bonus is the same as your Wisdom modifier.”

OK, so with my implement, I get a +4 bonus, and with my mace, I get +6, right? Not according to the graphic showing the cleric’s character sheet. According to the fake-handwriting font, the cleric has a sword all of a sudden, and it has a +8 bonus.

This is probably a cut-and-paste error: the fighter has a +8 sword stat-block. The cleric should have a +6 mace. I’d complain about this mistake confusing the kids, but honestly, I don’t think it’ll do that much harm. This is a SOLO GAME. You can PLAY WHATEVER CLASS YOU WANT. Who’s ever going to play the cleric?

There’s also the possibility that this is not a printing mistake at all: maybe this is secretly a used copy of the Starter Set. Maybe some jerk kid wrote in these crazy erroneous numbers in my copy of the book. If so, I hope the kid drew a sweet character portrait somewhere in the book. Other people’s character portraits are hilarious.

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Playing through the character-creation section of the Essentials starter set, the Cleric is the only character who doesn’t get a chance to make an attack in the first round of the first combat. My noble cleric (skin: gold and red in vertical stripes; eyes: tan with white irises; hair: blonde) uses a minor action to heal the dwarf merchant, a move action to stand up (which doesn’t seem quite fair, because the rogue used a single move action to stand up, slip out of the wagon, and sneak up behind a goblin) and then had to trade a standard action for a minor action to “pull a mace from your belt so it’s ready for use on your next turn”.

Oh well. At least as the cleric, you actually have a mace on your belt. The fighter apparently came into town with no weapons at all. The fighter “pulls a weapon from the wagon and run towards the nearest goblin.”

Really, that’s just another way the cleric got screwed. I bet the cleric paid for that mace. The fighter just showed up empty-handed and grabbed a free weapon from the wagon. I bet he keeps it, too.

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The Cleric section of the Essentials starter set comes with a sidebar explaining the gods of D&D. The typical gods are “Pelor the sun god, Kord the storm god, Bahamut the champion of justice, Erathis the god of civilization, Avandra the god of change, the Raven queen (god of death), and several others”. The raven queen gets parentheses, lucky girl. I guess it’s because her name starts with “the”, and “the Raven queen the god of death” just looks peculiar.

The sidebar finishes with the message that the specific deity your character worships isn’t important. “Play within your own comfort zone.” WOTC is still gun-shy after all the ridiculous satanism and occult accusations of the 80s.

Hey, wait a minute. On closer inspection, the sidebar doesn’t say “the specific deity YOUR CHARACTER worships isn’t important.” It says “the specific deity YOU worship.” WOTC is a bunch of lousy atheists!

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The rogue path through the Essentials choose-your-own-adventure, like that of the fighter, suggests that you can die during character creation. “If the goblin hits you enough times before you manage to land a blow, it could knock you unconscious. If your current hit points fall to 0 or lower, go to page 44.” Maybe the rogue was mortal at some point during the editing process, but as printed, the rogue cannot be knocked to 0 HP.

The fighter can be knocked down to 0 HP, because if he attacks a goblin and misses, he enters a loop which he can only exit by hitting the goblin. During this loop, the goblin makes attacks. The rogue, on the other hand, never enters this loop. The rogue makes two attacks, after which, hit or miss, the goblins flee.

Damn, it feels good to be a gangsta! You don’t have to face the bleached-bone specter of your own mortality. Not during character creation, anyway.

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The choose-your-own-adventure openings for the Essentials Starter classes are inconsistently pedantic about move actions. When the PC’s wagon is attacked by goblins, the wizard needs to use a move action to stand up. The fighter, though, can spend his first move action to “run towards the nearest goblin”. Was the fighter already standing up inside the wagon?

This is probably a good thing to gloss over for beginning players. Let’s just concentrate on using a move action for moving: let’s not spend a lot of time on alternate uses for move actions, like getting up from a prone position. Besides, the fighter probably WAS standing up in the wagon, the big doofus.

Hilarious! I bet they wanted everyone to use their move actions as a starting example, but the wizard doesn’t really want to run towards the goblins and endanger him or herself, so instead they just stand up. Also, wizards are too smart and lazy to stand up in a wagon!

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There’s a mistake in the Wizard section of the Essentials character-creation. A starting wizard has a +4 Intelligence modifier (or +3 if a dwarf). When introducing AC, the rules say “Your AC is 10 + your Intelligence modifier.” Then, in fake-handwriting font, the book shows your armor class, written on your character sheet, as 15. That’s probably going to confuse some n00b trying to follow the math. Oh well. I’m sure that the n00b will come up with some cockamamy rationale for it, which rule misunderstanding will become a crazy house rule, which will set the kid’s feet on a path which lead to greatness as a game designer. Either that or this is the mistake that will ruin the American educational system.

I bet the person who was writing up the AC forgot that for some reason they had decided to give out bad character creation advice and so gave the wizard a reasonable AC of 15 under the assumption that ANY reasonable wizard would have an Intelligence of 20 instead of a mediocre 18 or EVEN MORE mediocre 16!

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The big difference between the wizard and the fighter path through the initial Essentials starter adventure is that the wizard has a lot more power choices to make. This will be true throughout the career of the class, so I think it’s neat that they made the wizard section extra complicated.

In a nice bit of Choose Your Own Adventure design, the wizard battle lasts exactly two rounds. Each round, the wizard chooses between two different at-will attack powers. At the end of the fight, the wizard has used two – exactly two – attack powers. And that’s it: the wizard has chosen all of his at-will powers for the game.

The wizard also has something else to experience that the fighter doesn’t have to deal with: enemies with hit points. The fighter hacked down some minions and called it a day. The wizard, on the other hand, can choose to fight minions or shoot (and be shot at by) a goblin archer with real hit points and real variable damage. Neither the wizard nor the goblin archer will have time to die during the two-round combat, but the wizard learns something the fighter doesn’t: he’s not the only badass in the room.

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The choose-your-own-adventure used for character creation/rules walkthrough is quite well-executed. You’re on a wagon with a dwarf merchant. Your embryonic, any-color hero is ambushed by goblins. Based on how you react, the game recommends a character class to you. You make choices first, and then learn mechanics.

Your four potential character classes all lead through the same goblin battle. If you’re like me, you’ll try all the classes; and furthermore, you’ll read all the text blocks to see the options you didn’t choose. Luckily, the options are sequenced by character class, so reading the book in order doesn’t give you a confusing mess; it gives you, in order, the slightly-branching but easy-to-follow stories of a fighter, wizard, rogue, and cleric each fighting goblins.

The adventures for the different classes each have to provide much of the same game information, so there is a lot of repeated text; but there are a few surprising differences for each class.

Before we get to the classes, though, the game asks us some role-playing questions. “Think for a moment about what your character hopes to achieve. […] Are you setting out on a life of adventure on purpose – or about to stumble into one by accident? Are you heading to the town to see someone you know, or perhaps to pay your last respects to a relative who has died?”

I think my character hopes to achieve fame and fortune as a merchant prince. He needs trade goods, so he’s hoping his merchant companion will have a tragic accident on the road. He doesn’t have the guts to murder the merchant in cold blood, but maybe if there’s a fight… weapons can slip…

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The Essentials Players Book, like the 1983 Mentzer Player’s Book, starts with a solo adventure that teaches the basic D&D concepts. One difference is that in Mentzer, you play a male human fighter – a lovable, goofy, dumb fighter. In Essentials you can build any of the 4 main D&D classes: fighter, wizard, cleric, and rogue. But that choice comes later. First you choose your gender, race, and appearance.

“Your hero can be a human, an elf, a dwarf, or a halfling […]. Your character can be male or female, and can have whatever color skin, hair, and eyes you can imagine.”

Wow, I feel like I’m drinking from the firehose of narrative power! My character will forever define my unique spirit! I think I’ll be an elf with ebony skin and violet eyes!

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