If one tuned into D&D circa 2012 or so when design of the shiny new edition was in full swing, there was one term that was absolutely everywhere: Modules.
If you search through old AMAs, interviews, or design chats, you’ll see it everywhere. And these aren’t adventure modules they are talking about… no, these are rules modules. The 5th Edition of D&D was supposed to be a modular game. Didn’t like the combat rules? Plug in the tactical combat module. Want more rules for social encounters? Exploration? Encounter powers? Weapon Speed? All of those were yet more modules planned for the game.
[On a bit of a side note, here is one of those old AMA’s I dug up when refreshing my memory about what they’d said there could be modules for, and it’s a bit of a lark to read now]
The designers had clearly foreseen that there were going to be these opposed groups that wanted different things out of the game, and they’d cooked up a solution. They clearly foresaw some of the very things that are still being bickered about endlessly to this day, and their solution was modular design.
The thing is… it was a good idea. They should have that.
What We Could Have Had
Imagine a world in which we’d actually gotten a Tactical Combat Module and an Encounter Power Module in the first few years of 5e. How many Reddit threads full of bickering about martials we could delete on the spot, since both people that wanted more complicated martials and those that didn’t could find what they wanted just by plugging the right module for them.
We are seeing the game that was supposed to be the base game. The game that modules would have plugged into. And that game is full of gaping holes where they were supposed to go. Questions marks that haunt the foundations of it after 10+ years and a half-hearted system update.
5e has brushed the modular concept over the years. If you squint, you could call the Sidekick rules the promised Henchmen rules. If you really squint, you could call the Tomb of Annihilation an Hexcrawl Exploration Module. If you’re completely hammered and looking through someone else’s glasses you could call what we got in XGE or Eberron Crafting Module.
But these always fall very short of what the people that want those modules would actually want, because, simply put, they were not actually designed as modules for people that wanted to dive into those rules. They were squeezed into a book that was for ‘everyone’ and designed to not be too scary or waste too many pages for people that didn’t want them.
It’s a pale imitation of what could have been.
The Magic of Modularity
Let me ask a question… which is a better feedback to get: a hundred responses that ‘this is okay’, or fifty replies that ‘I love this’ and fifty replies that ‘I hate this’?
If you’re a 3rd party content creator writing an add-on book, the first response is probably 0 sales, and the second response is 50 sales a few haters that will leave angry comments on your posts. In case the math isn’t obvious, 50 > 0, and the rest doesn’t really matter.
The magic of modularity is that you can write rules for people that want those rules, and you can be as indulgent as the people that want the rules want you to be, without having to worry about the people that don’t want the feature you're adding in the first place.
Modules are opt-in complexity. That’s right, this post was a sequel all along.
Opt-in complexity through modularity is at the heart of what 5e was designed around. Don’t take it from, take it from the bloke that made the game:
So that’s really where modularity can come in. We can make the core for the guy who really doesn’t care about combat and is pretty happy because the rules are straightforward. Then the guy who wants rich, tactical combat in battles, he can say “I want complexity.” That way, a game defaults to being simple all around, and you can pick which parts you want to add rules to. I just drop in the depth I want as I go.
-Mike Mearls, 2012, in an interview for critical-hits.com
So what am I getting here? Well, that’s simple:
Abandon Universal Rules, Embrace Modularity
If you play in Adventurer’s League, this section is, regrettably, not for you. You’re stuck with a square peg being hammered into a round hole. You have my condolences, and I’d suggest learning to DM so you can escape your fate.
But for the rest of you, here’s a piece of advice from someone that hears about hundreds of games each year: ya’ll aren’t playing the same game anyway as it is, let go of the idea that you should be.
Plug in the rules that expand on the part of the game you like. Discard the ones you don’t. Do you want martials to have encounter powers? Add them. Do you want to make it so you can only long rest in a safe town? Do that! I didn’t even need to link a module for that, you can just… do that.
Do you want crafting rules? Add them, there are a bunch out there (see, I can do more than just self promotion in these!). And, if you don’t want them, don’t. Remember, that’s the magic of modularity. You having the rules you want, and you not having to give a shit about the rules you don’t want.
But don’t say ““5e is not made for crafting items. It's an adventure simulator, not a blacksmith simulator” (to quote a random redditor), because 5e is made for whatever the DM wants to plug in and use—and sometimes an adventurer is also a blacksmith, and you need module rules for that. With one small step into the embrace of modularity, 5e is made for whatever the hell you want it to be… literally—that’s how they designed it, remember.
Some will read all this, and say ‘this isn’t an argument for modularity, it’s an argument to abandon 5e and play this other game!’; and that’s a kind of modularity to be certain. I’m not going to say you shouldn’t do that by any means… but I think it misses the point. This isn’t really about 5e, beyond that its the example I’m using. It’s about TTRPGs. Because all of them—not just 5e—benefit from thinking in modular design.
I’ll use the example of the game I always use as an example when I need something to reference other than 5e… Lancer. I like Lancer, but you know what I would have liked a lot more when I played Lancer? A module that turned the part where you were not in the mech into a game with more guidance than ‘you do you, buddy’. A module that brought in loot and gear progression (pretty sure they did actually make that at some point).
If I knew more about Lancer and played it more (and there was a market for it) I’d have probably started writing modules for it.
There is almost no such thing as a TTRPG which cannot be further improved by modular design. It’s just that 5e is a particularly good example because it has a huge host of people playing that want different things, and a lot of 3rd party support capable of making modules.
Well, that and that it has so, so many modules it needs.
A Modular Future
Perhaps Wizards of the Coast will rediscover modularity in the future—somehow I doubt they are reading this blog, but they may stumble onto the old notes for D&D Next, who knows. It would certainly be a good step for D&D 2024, and one that could have probably gone a long way in making it something more universally adopted than it was.
But I’m not exactly going to hold my breath, rather I will point you in the direction of 3rd parties as the ones that hold the keys to a modular future. Not because I told them to, but because it's what they’ve been doing all along, regardless if they realized they were fulfilling the vision of nascent 5e or not.
Obviously I’ve tossed a few hats into that ring—the crafting system, the battle system… These are things explicitly designed to be the sort of modules 5e was supposed to have—but most major 3rd party books offer some subsystem. Modular design makes good hooks. It’s a way to add something to the game people can add to their game if they want to, without knocking things over in the existing rules.
If in all of the oncoming modular future you don’t see that one system you wanted? Well, there’s always room for another module, after all. Feel free to leave a comment with what you’d like to see, what you’ve made to fill a void you felt, or what your favorite piece of module content is.
