Jonathan Tweet

D&D 3E, Over the Edge, Everway, Ars Magica, Omega World, Grandmother Fish

You'll know Jonathan Tweet from Ars Magica, for being the lead designer on D&D 3rd Edition, and for co-designing 13th Age, amongst many other things. This column is part of the D&D/RPG History series.

The Road to 3E

EVERWAY Then and Now

Years before I worked on D&D 3rd Ed, Wizards of the Coast hired me not to work on D&D but to compete with it. The result, my 1995 RPG EVERWAY, a daring artistic innovation that, for various reasons, never got off the ground. Now EVERWAY is back from a new publisher with a new format selling on a new platform and playing to a changed audience. The Kickstarter for the Silver Anniversary Edition...

Feb 10, 2021 24

Helper Classes

At Wizards one year, I gave a short lecture to the RPG R&D crew about why clerics are impossible to balance. Since most of their power (healing) helps other characters, it’s power that doesn’t feel cool. To help the cleric feel cool, it needs a double-helping of power, and that’s what we gave it. In theory, one way to balance the cleric is to re-write every class so that a good deal of its...

Jan 13, 2021 68

Andrew Finch’s Monsters by Level

One unsung hero of D&D game design is Andrew Finch. He had a lot of roles at Wizards over the years, and he was involved in D&D playtesting and design as early as I was. To my mind, his biggest single advance was his table of monster stats by level. The table went against our general design guidelines, and it was just what the game needed. It also helped us see the awkwardness that comes with...

Sep 1, 2020 11

Monsters in the Miniatures Handbook

The other day, I was looking up the nothic in the Miniatures Handbook (2003), and I was happy to be reminded of all the other worthwhile monsters we put in that book. Whereas the core three rulebooks were mostly devoted to translating traditional content into the new edition, the MH was a chance for us designers to add new things to the game that were worth including, such as the swift action...

Jun 25, 2020 19

Alignment in D&D

Alignment is, on some level, the beating heart of Dungeons & Dragons. On the other hand, it’s sort of a stupid rule. It’s like the hit point rules in that it makes for a good game experience, especially if you don’t think about it too hard. Just as Magic: the Gathering has the five colors that transcend any world or story, so alignment is a universal cosmic truth from one D&D world to the...

May 1, 2020 375

Multiclassing in D&D 3rd Edition

My best friend Rob Heinsoo was the lead designer on 4th Ed, and one of his jobs was to fix things that 3rd Ed hadn’t fixed. Multiclassing was on that list of systems that needed work. At one point when playing 3rd Ed, Rob was running a 3rd level barbarian-fighter-ranger. Given the way multiclassing worked, why not?

Mar 19, 2020 198

The Road to 3E

Jonathan Tweet: Third Edition and Per-Day Spells

On the Third Edition design team, we were tasked with rationalizing the game system, but there were some big elements of the system that we didn’t question. We inherited a system in which spellcasters get better in three ways at a time as they level up; they get more spells per day, higher-level spells, and more damage with spells of a given level. In retrospect, that problem is easy to see...

Feb 24, 2020 105

The Road to 3E

D&D 3E Design: The Unbalanced Cleric

What do you call a D&D cleric who can’t heal? A 1st-level 1970s cleric. The original first-level cleric could turn undead but had no spells. Skip Williams says that the original conception of the cleric was sort of a Van Helsing figure, someone who bought the wolvesbane, belladonna, and garlic on the equipment list and who contended with the undead. The original cleric couldn’t cast cure light...

Jan 27, 2020 115

The Road to 3E

Diversity in D&D Third Edition

With 3rd Ed, our main goal was to return D&D to its roots, such as with Greyhawk deities and the return of half-orcs. By staying true to the feel of D&D, we helped the gaming audience accept the sweeping changes that we made to the rules system.

Dec 5, 2019 683

The Road to 3E

3E and the Feel of D&D

For 3rd Edition Dungeons & Dragons, the big picture was to return the game to its roots, reversing the direction that 2nd Edition had taken in making the game more generic. The plan was to strongly support the idea that the characters were D&D characters in a D&D world. We emphasized adventuring and in particular dungeoneering, both with the rules and with the adventure path modules. We...

Nov 8, 2019 270

The Road to 3E

Jonathan Tweet: Streamlining Third Edition

The D&D 3rd Ed project was part big-picture vision and part a collection of individual decisions about rules, terms, and characters. In terms of rules, a lot of what we did amounted to streamlining.

Oct 16, 2019 106

The Road to 3E

Jonathan Tweet: Legacy of Ars Magica

Ars Magica had an obscure origin, but it had long-lasting effects. We did a number of influential support products that influenced 1990s game design, and it launched the careers of five of us who were part of the Ars Magica crew. Over the years, I had bought a ton of roleplaying games, and I was almost universally disappointed by how difficult it was to get a new roleplaying game off the...

Oct 2, 2019 17

The Road to 3E

Jonathan Tweet: On The Origins of Ars Magica

By the time I started college in 1987, I was a die-hard Chaosium fan, and I taught my new college friends RuneQuest and Call of Cthulhu. These friends and I talked a lot about roleplaying games and game design, and we tried to figure out how to create the best possible games.

Sep 9, 2019 25

The Road to 3E

Jonathan Tweet: My Life with the Open Gaming License

In 1978 at age 12, I bought my second roleplaying game, Metamorphosis Alpha (MA) by Jim Ward. That’s the day I became a fan of the Open Gaming License and the d20 logo. Or at least I would have been a fan if someone had gone back in time and told me about them.

Aug 17, 2019 33

The Road to 3E

Jonathan Tweet: Prologue to Third Edition

The story of Third Edition D&D starts, perhaps, with Peter Adkison reading 2nd Edition AD&D (1989) and being sorely disappointed. For one thing, he felt the new system left several underlying problems in place, so players didn’t get much benefit from the effort it took to switch to a new system. For another, 2nd Ed stripped away all the charm and character of 1st Ed. No more half-orcs, arcane sigils, monks, or assassins. Demons and devils were renamed to avoid the ire of superstitious parents. The new AD&D was tamed and genericized.