Dungeons and Discourse Third Edition: The dialectic continues

After more work than any sane person would ever spend on a philosophy role-playing game, the Third Edition of Dungeons and Discourse is ready. You may download it here:

Rulebook as .pdf plus basic character sheet (link)
Rulebook as .doc plus basic character sheet (link)
Advanced character sheet (requires NBOS Character Sheet Viewer, link)

Changes are many but the ones I can think of at the moment are the following:

– New spells like Dedekind Cut, No-Ghost Theorem, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Cloak, and Kurzweil’s Exponential Crescendo, and Infinite Egress.

– Plus player-suggested spells like Armor Fati, Summon Dire C. Elegans, Summon Invisible Dragon, Summon Bonum, and Descartes’ Rapier.

– Revamped prestige class system. Instead of the somewhat complicated and anaemic prestige classes of the Second Edition, prestige classes have been made more accessible and folded into books. Want your Logician to subspecialize in computer programming? Read a copy of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. Want to your normally hard-headed Empiricist to flirt with Taoism? Pick up the Tao Te Ching. 21 books to choose from.

– Threw away the Righteouness statistic and replaced it with Merit and Virtue. Merit is a set point to which your Virtue always slowly returns, Virtue is a state characteristic which rises and falls based on your most recent actions. In order to stay ethical you’ll have to worry about both.

– Creatures no longer have different physical and mental hit points. Everyone has a single hit point statistic, but damage can be inflicted either physically or mentally. Some creatures have bonuses against one type of damage or another, and other creatures, like Platonic Forms and P-Zombies, lack physical or mental substance and so are completely immune to that form of damage.

– Combat is much easier, with an official shift from keeping track of everyone’s speed, range, and position on a giant grid to the simple front row/back row system that we everyone ended up using during the last campaign. All spells and combat techniques have been updated to take account of this and this has also allowed serious simplification of the Speed statistic.

– Got rid of the five complicated “spell slots” you had to worry about and replaced them with a single Will statistic. You want to cast spells? Expend Will points. It’s that easy.

– The currency of Sophia has switched from gold to benthamite, a magical substance made of pure utility. A lot of the economic gobbledygook of the previous version has also been combined into a single statistic called Oikonomia.

– Items have been reworked, most weapons have been removed, and geasa have been separated off into to their own section for pennants and rings. More interesting choices around Euclidean polygon use. The arrow system is now potentially sort of functional.

– No-longer-quite-as-awful design includes front cover and character sheet produced by an NBOS program.

– Rulebook contains the campaign log and music from the flagship campaign for the Second Edition, King Under The Mountain, in the back.

Please let me know if there are any typos, obvious glaring balance problems, spells/classes/mechanics that are referenced and then don’t exist/were never explained, or things you really don’t like. The comments to this post would be better than email.

The long-term plan is to convert the rulebook into a wiki, which can then get edited on the fly whenever a glaring balance problem comes up during a game and which random netizens who stumble across the concept are more likely to read than a .pdf file. I am pretty resigned to having to do this myself, but if anyone else is really up for thankless data transfer work, it is totally yours.

The flagship campaign for the new edition is Fermat’s Last Stand, a continuation of the story in the last one. It begins…soon. I need to finalize a couple of the songs, figure out how I’m going to conduct one or two more things, and then ask for volunteers. Please do not volunteer now. Volunteer when I ask. This will probably be within a week.