It’s time for another Ask Angry Mailbag. That’s where I answer a bunch of reader-submitted questions. Are you a reader who wants to submit a question for answery? Send it to ask.angry@angry.games. Just remember to get to the point, to leave out the extraneous crap, and to tell me explicitly what to call you.

Lord Basement Lord asks…

A lot of people start [Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition] player characters at 3rd level rather than 1st level. For a table of people well-versed in the system they’re playing, is there any benefit to starting at 1st level?

Thank you for your question, Lord Basement Lord! And I mean that sincerely. You gave me clear permission to use the name you supplied, asked a question in two concise sentences, and didn’t tack any paragraphs of extraneous bullshit context on the end. Nice work!

Yes, Lordy B. Lord, there are benefits to starting play at 1st level even if you have expert players. And I’m gonna tell you what they are — and explain why I start pretty much every campaign I run at 1st level — in just a moment. But I need you — and everyone reading — to understand that all I’m doing is listing the benefits. I ain’t making a case here or trying to persuade anyone. So hopefully, no one will feel like they have to explain why I’m wrong in the comments.

As I said, Redundant Basement Lord, I start all my games at 1st level. I do so pretty much regardless of the system I’m running. And the reason I’ve given in the past is that modern roleplaying game characters are such a complicated fucking mess of traits, talents, special abilities, skills, conditional rules, and modifiers that most people can’t keep track of all the shit for even a modestly-leveled character. Thus, starting at 1st level limits the crap people have to keep track of. By the time they add new things to the sheet, they’ve had time to get down a lot of stuff that’s already there.

It’s a cognitive load thing. And people just don’t recognize how big an issue cognitive load is. While I forgive delusional gamers who always think they’re galaxy-brained geniuses unfettered by the limitations that every other human brain on the planet struggles with, I can’t forgive the game designers for not taking this shit seriously.

In theory, a player should know their character well enough that there should be a near-zero delay between “what does your character do now” and “I do this thing.” Players who complain that “combat keeps changing so it’s impossible to plan ahead” are wrong. You shouldn’t have to plan ahead. You should be able to decide almost immediately what to do. And they can’t because they’re struggling to keep straight the number of options in their head. And it ain’t just about optimizing the next action. It’s also about keeping conditional modifiers — “when you roll a 1 on this kind of roll, you can do this” — and reactions — “when you see this thing happen in game, you can do that” — and so on. Not to mention temporary effects and conditions that arise in play.

If you have to reference your character sheet at all, that means there’s too much to keep in your human working memory. And if you insist your working memory can handle it, I’ll get my stopwatch so you can prove it.

If it sounds like I’m dubious of sufficiently experienced as a qualifier for playing a higher-level character, that’s because I am. If you can’t tell me every ability, spell, and modifier on your 3rd level character sheet — without looking — and summarize how each thing works — conceptually at least — you ain’t sufficiently experienced to play it. Sorry.

That said, I don’t think there’s really any point in worrying about this. See, the 5E designers were hoping people would see the first two levels as optional, but they fucked up the execution by making their whole game at every level put too much cognitive load on players. And that ain’t unique to 5E either. It’s been that way since 3rd edition — AKA the best edition — decided it was best to differentiate characters by the stuff on the sheet rather than through play.

And spellcasters have always been stuck with cognitive overload. Though one of the genius aspects of Vancian spellcasting was requiring players to keep only a small subset of their spellcasting options in working memory during actual play.

But I digress…

5E’s designers said, clearly, that they intended the first two levels of play to be totally skippable apprentice levels. That’s why some classes receive their iconic, defining features at 2nd or 3rd level to coincide with the graduation from the Academy of Paladins or with selecting their postgraduate specialty at Warthogs School of Magecraft. So I can’t fault anyone for skipping them. And really, 5E’s over-bloated character design means it doesn’t matter whether you start at 1st or 3rd or 5th level; it’s still too damned much.

That said, I want to turn the tables for a sec and ask why players object to starting at 1st level. Except I don’t have to ask. I’ve heard all the arguments. I’ve heard 1st level characters are too limited and the game’s too swingy and it doesn’t feel like real D&D because sweet spot or some horseshit like that. And I don’t buy any of them. After running various flavors of D&D and many other RPGs for approaching four decades now — and as someone who insists on starting at 1st level and who has therefore run more 1st level games than most GMs out there — I can tell you I see no evidence for any of that shit.

Do you know what I think? I think it’s about feelings. Not gamefeel, but actual, emotional fee-fees. “Why should I, an experienced gamer who knows what I’m doing, have to start at 1st level every time?”

I think there’s this weird-ass idea that starting at 1st level is akin to replaying a video game’s tutorial slowly, methodically, and religiously even though you’ve hundred-percented the game ten times already. Which, by the way, I also do. But I won’t claim that’s sane or well-reasoned behavior.

I reject the idea that 1st level is baby’s first level. I don’t see it as a tutorial. Honestly, to me, it’s a proving ground. “If you can’t play the game at 1st level, you don’t deserve it at 10th level.” And this ain’t about gatekeeping. It ain’t about earning your fun. And it sure as hell ain’t about “if you can’t survive 1st level, you don’t deserve to keep playing” because, these days, a lobotomized hamster could survive what passes for a 1st level challenge in modern D&D.

This is about mentality. And expectations.

My roleplaying games are about defining your character through play. About building a character organically. And about earning your victories. I don’t give a crap what’s on your character sheet; I care what you do when the dice hit the table.

People who make a big thing about not starting at 1st level are generally people who won’t like what I’m running. They’re not usually interested in earning every line on the character sheet and building a character by playing it.

I ain’t saying it’s a test of mettle. It’s just a thematic message about the games I run. When I force people to start at 1st level, I’m saying, “In this world and in my game, you are no one until you make yourself someone. That’s how it be.”

But that ain’t all… but the next thing’s kind of a finer point.

As a Game Master, you can’t ever forget that neither the game mechanics on the character sheet nor the mechanical game elements you include are what make your game interesting. If you can’t build an engaging, interesting, and fun game at 1st level — when you’re basically stuck with jumped-up peasants dealing with cellars full of dire rats — you’re relying too much on the mechanics and spectacle. You need to focus on the world and its inhabitants.

Skipping the low levels is kind of like skipping the first act of the story. Not just narratively, but in mindset. A good story — one that lasts six months or a year or longer — needs to pace itself. Religiously forcing yourself — and your players — to start at 1st level makes you do that. And it reminds you that it’s you — and not the mechanics — that make the game interesting.

So there are narrative and thematic benefits to starting at 1st level. Starting there provides clear — but nonverbal — communication about campaign expectations. And starting at 1st level constrains you in ways that keep your skills and creativity sharp. If you don’t care about that shit, skip 1st level. But I don’t ever skip it lightly.

That said, if 5E’s designers had included a clearly marked and labeled Apprentice level that really was designed as a pre-1st level tutorial and they’d executed it properly, I’d feel fine skipping that with non-newbies. I’ll let you noodle how and why that’s different and what executed properly actually means.

Steven asks…

I have a player who is conducting research to discover information about a disease/cure. They have the tools, the starting point, and the knowledge to ultimately come up with a solution but it will take time. I don’t want it to be just arbitrary dice rolls (that’s boring). I also don’t want this player being stuck in a research lab for months while the world burns around them (that takes them out of the action).

I may be too late in fixing this issue now but I’m curious how you might have handled this yourself/would have avoided this altogether.

[The e-mail continues, but my reading of it did not.]

Do you know what’s boring, Stephen? Unnecessary paragraphs. Even little ones. Why the hell would you bother describing your proposed solution anyway? Are you asking me how I would have handled this shit or do you want my opinion on how you’re handling it?

At least you flagged the point in your e-mail where the extraneous bullshit started so I knew when to stop reading. But did you know there’s a way in most e-mail clients to flag paragraphs as unnecessary, extraneous bullshit? On a Windows PC, just highlight the crap and then press the Del key.

You have a character who has all the tools, resources, and knowledge they need to solve a problem and now they’ve just got to put in the hours in the lab. Well, you’re right that resolving it with a multitude of arbitrary die rolls would be boring. Do you know why? Because you designed a boring problem.

The situation’s boring because the player’s got no choices to make and nothing to figure out. There’s no game to play. And no game mechanics can fix that.

People keep asking me to define Push-Button Play, which I slag on a lot. Well, this right here’s Push-Button Play. The character has the skills and tools they need and success is down to a die roll. The player has no choice and no say. All they can do is declare the action and wait to see the result.

I’m gonna give you the benefit of the doubt, Steven. I assume there was some interesting gameplay that got the characters to this point. That they ended up with all the resources and knowledge after extensive amounts of gameplay adventuring and acquiring samples and all that crap. And now they’re at the final step of seeing how well the characters put all that shit together. But without really knowing how you structured all the resource acquisition crap, it’s hard for me to say whether there’s a value in rolling even one die roll.

Did you build your campaign so the players had to gather the resources and information through their adventures? Did the amount and quality of the resources they gathered depend on their actions? Does the quality of the resources affect in any way the odds of their successfully crafting the cure? What are the possible outcomes? If the cure takes too long to develop, will there be a gradually growing body count? Will the players be forced to confront that information? “Okay, the corpse pile is this big; now roll for today’s progress… still not done, huh? Well, I’ll update you on the corpse count tomorrow.”

In short, is there anything about the die roll to make the cure that could have been different if the players had handled things differently? Could they have taken actions that would have made it more likely, now, to formulate a better or faster cure? Can the players say, “If only we’d just done this differently, we’d have saved more lives?”

If you can’t honestly say yes — and not “hypothetically yes because if they’d had a really clever idea I’d have pulled something out of my ass” — if all the players did was check off boxes on a checklist and now it’s down to rolling a check, don’t waste time on dice. Just say, “You go into the lab for three days! Behold, you have crafted the cure! Good job! You saved the lives!”

If the players — not the characters, the players with their skills and their brains — have no power to affect the outcome — and they never did — any game mechanic’s just an arbitrary crapshoot. Skip it, skip the in-world time, hand them the cure, then move on.

Otherwise, if this really is the culmination of a complex series of the players’ choices and interactions, and if they can pinpoint the things they could have done better, then rolling dice isn’t arbitrary, it’s the outcome they earned. And rolling a die for progress every day until it’s done while delivering awful updates about how bad shit’s going is the way to do it. And if the druid’s out of the action for a few days and the other players are doing minor things to help keep things under control in the interim — things that can affect the outcome — that’s fine too.

That said, don’t ever design any challenge that requires one single player to win by not playing the game for weeks or months of game time! Why would you ever do that? A few days of a split party while one character completes an ongoing and desperately needed task is fine provided nothing too interesting happens to the rest of the party. But not weeks or months! Come on, Steven.

Someone Who Can’t Follow Simple Instructions asks…

You make a point of allowing yourself to be bored and to daydream in Better Narration Through Visualization: A Lifestyle Guide. I’m curious about whether you’ve seen any research about how “focused” your boredom/daydreaming needs to be to work as an imagination/visualization aid. While dedicated time is good, is being bored at work worth it from the research you’ve seen? I have aspects of my job where it’s automatic enough that I listen to podcasts and can function perfectly well, but is the focus even that work requires enough to spoil the benefits of daydreaming?

Lacking explicit permission to use your name or handle, I’m forced to make up a suitable appellation and so, I dub thee Dingleberry. That’s far more polite than what I called you in my first draft. That said, don’t look up the word dingleberry because it’s also not that polite.

As I noted in the sidebar of the article that preceded Better Narration Through Visualization: A Lifestyle Guide, Game Mastering Makes No Sense, I ain’t a research monkey and this ain’t an academic paper. So I strongly recommend that any of you who want to know what the research says, do the legwork and check it out. That’s the best way to get a good, convincing answer. Otherwise, you’re at the mercy of some internet asshole’s uncited hearsay.

That ain’t me saying, “Don’t ask” or “Leave me alone,” by the way. I get that you’re just curious about what I might have gleaned in my delving into the subject. I’m just saying that I ain’t going to give you more than a surface-level answer as it mostly pertains to pretend elf games and I ain’t going to try to convince you I know what I’m talking about. Feel free to dive into the topic yourself. It’s interesting.

First, the research on multitasking — dividing your attention between two tasks like podcasts and work — is clear, categorical, and firm: multitasking sucks. It’s the worst way to do anything. No one’s good at it. It’s something that you either suck at or you suck at slightly less. So if a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth your full attention and focus. And focus takes effort when you’re doing something very familiar. The problem is, that autopilot thing makes you slower, more error-prone, and more prone to inattentional blindness. That’s one of several reasons why car accidents are more common when people drive on familiar roads even after balancing for hours driven in familiar and unfamiliar places.

In my opinion, therefore, the work time you spend being bored or daydreaming doesn’t count. And I’m only giving my opinion of how it pertains to your visualizing and game mastering skills here. I ain’t judging how you handle your job. That’s between you and your employer.

Hell, I’m even going to let you have the I can divide my attention and function perfectly well lie. That’s just my little gift to you, Dingleberry. And hopefully, it’ll soften the blow of my next paragraph.

By asking this question, you’re missing the point of Visualization: A Lifestyle Guide so damned hard, I’m pretty sure you deliberately turned around and ran away from the point as fast as your little legs would carry you. The point is we — all of us modern humans — have trained ourselves to be un1`able to handle boredom and crave stimulation and we’ve ruined our ability to focus on just one thing. And that’s really hurt our creative imagination.

Look at what you’re asking. “Is it okay, Angry, to not focus on just one task — work — because it’s boring and use that time to do my assigned daydreaming homework so I don’t have to set aside exclusive time later?”

I want you to break your addiction to stimulation. To force yourself, first, to focus on the task before you even if it’s boring. And you have to force yourself because boredom hurts while you’re detoxing. Then, when you can handle both focus and boredom, give yourself fifteen dedicated minutes of nonstimulation to let your atrophied brain remember what imagination feels like.

I can’t tell you that your job’s worth your full attention and focus; that one’s on you. But I can tell you that if your game mastering skills are worth building, you’ll give them fifteen wholly quiet and unstimulated minutes a day. At the very least, you’ll decree that it’s worth focusing wholly on being totally unfocussed for that.

But wait, there’s more! Dingleberry also asks…

Also, you show some disdain for Social Combat as a concept in The Tao of Dice. Why is that and what would you do instead?

First, let me be absolutely and definitively clear about what I mean by Social Combat system. It’s an abstraction. A way of modeling a conversation with game mechanics. And that may sound good until you really dig into what it means.

Roleplaying games’ Combat Engines are abstract ways of modeling battles with game mechanics. And they’re nothing like actual combat at all. That’s fine because most roleplaying gamers aren’t trained combatants and they’re not playing roleplaying games to hone their combat arts. So it’s okay that roleplaying games boil combat down to abstract actions and simple choices anyone can make without actual knowledge of combat situations.

Social Combat systems — seen represented in games like Legend of the Five Rings, A Song of Ice and Fire, and Burning Wheel and creeping bit by bit into the mechanics of modern and mainstream roleplaying games — Social Combat systems do the same thing for social interactions. In such games, players don’t decide what their characters say and then use the game’s mechanics to determine how effectively the characters say it and how well it’s received. Instead, without any reference to the actual words coming out of the character’s mouth — even say a simple narrative description like, “my character tries to play on the merchant’s sympathy with a lie about his sick mother” — instead, players choose abstract actions like Small Talk or Debate or Convince and play dice games to deal damage to social hit points or reputation. The outcomes are determined in abstract ways.

Did you ever play Pipe Dream? It was an arcade game wherein you had to arrange random pipe segments to connect spouts and drains before the viscous goo — called Flooz, I shit you not — sprayed out the end. And in 2007, Bioshock decided to use it as a way to represent the character’s hacking skill. When you wanted to sabotage a vending machine or take control of a drone or gun turret, you had to play a little Pipe Dream minigame.

Social Combat systems are like that. Instead of trying to play an actual conversation, you’ve got to play a minigame with game mechanics to win.

Metaphorically. Not literally.

The consequence is those systems don’t model the full length, breadth, and depth of human social communication but rather focus on easy-to-make mechanical choices and simulated outcomes in broad strokes. The alternative is a system wherein players play out — or narratively describe — the conversation which the Game Master then translates into game mechanics weighted by the character’s social skills. Thus, you get a much richer, deeper experience.

Obviously — I hope it’s frigging obvious anyway — I prefer the latter. For what I hope are obvious reasons.

Now, some have argued that such a system requires players to be at least decent social communicators. And that’s true. Players at my table do need to bring their own social skills to the table, though they need not be any level of interaction expert to win my social challenges. There’s a difference between a Challenge and Difficulty after all.

People have asked me — quite fairly, I might add — what the difference is between requiring the players to bring their social skills and expecting the players to play out combat using their actual real-world swordsmanship skills.

The difference is that tabletop roleplaying games are social games. They’re played through social interaction. They’re played by talking. And thus, the one thing tabletop roleplaying games can absolutely and effectively handle is social interaction. By the nature of the game itself, it isn’t just possible to include social interaction, it’s expected.

Imagine you joined a martial arts or medieval sword fighting club. Imagine how you’d react if, at the first meeting, they showed you a giant chess board on which you were expected to move. Imagine they presented you with a bunch of abstract combat simulation rules about where and when you could move. Imagine if they said you had to stay on the grid and you were only able to make one of eight different attacks or defensive actions. And imagine if the outcomes were determined by a game of Rock-Paper-Scissors. That’d be weird as hell, right?

Social Combat systems do the same for tabletop games. They turn the one thing you know the game is about — the one thing you know the game’s going to test by its very nature — and turn that into a pile of abstract and restrictive game mechanical nonsense.

Tabletop roleplaying games are so good for social interaction and development that therapists and social workers have started using them to help people who have trouble socializing for various reasons improve their social skills. It’s a cooperative, collaborative game. You can’t play it without interacting socially. So you might as well train and reward that shit.

Some still argue tabletop roleplaying games have no business testing — or requiring — social skills. As someone who’s tried to play games with players with no social skills, I call bullshit on that. Social skills are required.

Some will argue that roleplaying games should be inclusive and that they shouldn’t exclude people who struggle with social interactions. But I can’t think of anything more inclusive to people who struggle with social interactions than a game that aids in social skill development to such a degree they’re used as therapy tools.

In the end, a game’s got to test something or else it’s not a game. Games must present challenges and obstacles. And while tabletop roleplaying games are pretty good at testing critical thinking, resource management, and strategic thinking, they’re uniquely suited to test and challenge social skills. Throwing that out’s like throwing the punching out of boxing.

That’s why I think Social Combat systems aren’t just crappy game systems, but also wrongheaded and misguided. I don’t just dislike or disdain them, I think they actively make roleplaying games — and the people who play them — worse games and worse people.

How’s that for a hot take?