Hi cohost! Sleep is eluding me so you get a roulette spin of the “ramble on a subject for a little bit while in bed” wheel to help me relax my brain towards nap time, or at least try to. Apologies for weird typos or non sequiturs, I’ll come back and fix those after sleep.
(I won’t come back and fix those after sleep, I know my vocabulary and I don’t believe sleepy me is going to have any gamer moments that need addressing)
Today’s roulette result is “RPG hot take” and so I have found one! Are you ready?
“I think games should encourage occasional encounters and setpieces outside the comfort level of the player characters. I don’t mean “easier” fights either, which is a pacing tool I’ve seen recommended. I mean games should encourage DMs to deliberately and judiciously pit the players against opposition more capable than they are, and I think if a game is so tightly balanced that any deviation away from evenly-matched breaks the game, that’s bad, actually, and the designer should be ashamed.”
Slightly less dramatic but no less honest, I think that if a game is built on strict competition bands, where players challenging outside their “tier” is impossible, that game had better have either an incredibly robust selection of opposition within each tier, equivalently strong creation tools, or an appropriately generic framework to abstract challenge.
One of the things that D&D 4 was incorrectly accused of, D&D 5 and Skyrim and elder scrolls online are accurately accused of, and many DM’s I have played with engage in consciously or un- is the “treadmill effect”, also known to me as the Kamen Rider Kabuto effect, where the actual challenge of a campaign enters at a static plateau and remains at that approximate level, barely fluctuating at all, until the campaign climax. Character power increases are met with equivalent opposition upgrades, the tools players need to combat new enemy types are never far away from their reach, and tensions remain fairly constant outside of perhaps scripted scenes and initial encounters. This is bad. The players having a 65% chance to defeat each enemy without losing more than 14% of their resources, every time, as a standard, is walking on a treadmill commenting on how nice the gym is this time of year.
“Why do you call it Kabuto effect, isn’t that one of the highest regarded rider seasons, isn’t kabuto a good rider” listen I chose my association very carefully: kabuto is a season with immaculate choreography, brilliant effects, amazing kinetic interactions, deeply moving character moments, actors who gave excellent performances, top tier suit, power and monster design, and a story as flat as a level-checking competition in the middle of slabsville, Nebraska. I don’t believe that every character has to have a “thematically complete arc”, though that’s a different rant, but the narrative tension of Kabuto outside of those character interactions distills to a very Skyrim “if you haven’t fucked up your stats, monsters should always die in 3 hits” approach. Souji Tendo believes he was chosen by heaven, he’s sincere about it, and the entire show is the world backing him up on that belief.
Souji Tendo will never know the thrill of a license level 2 lancer team deploying against a Tier 2 Spec Ops squad led by an enemy lancer built using player rules.
The loop of most ARPG's like Diablo is that you will replace your pants every few hours. You can see the traditional power curve at its worst with the gear system for Divinity Original Sin 2, and if you build a gear-focused system around a strict power-curve you're going to progress-gate what should be dynamic fuck around and find out encounters. Larion would improve on this a lot with Baldur's Gate 3, but the roughness of their design methodology is still evident as they really got carried away with making magic items that mostly follow ARPG design conventions.
If your players are still throwing out pairs of pants well past the 5th session, you might have a problem. Dungeon World handles this through making magic items not enhance stats, but provide the player new actions often with both new benefits and consequences. Many game systems build crafting as this expensive and time-consuming non-venture that you would only participate in via hirelings or during time-skips between major arcs. Few look at items and go "hey, what if the options you have with this get more interesting", because we're still stuck in part with bigger number = more powerful as a hyper fixation.
This ramble got way out of hand so I'm putting in a break.
Modern D&D almost gets away from this, I think Baldur's Gate 3 is the most refined example of a CRPG where having an AC over 20 is actually kind of tough and if you pull it off you are borderline untouchable. In a normal tabletop game, the GM would have to work around this. In my neck of the woods the "uncrackable high AC character" often trades everything for that defensive bonus, and it comes down to theater of the mind threat generation modeling to make that kind of build work out. It's very funny when the invincible wall of platemail is shoved out of the way and ignored, but this speaks to a deeper problem: being hit in combat is viewed as a failure state.
When I was designing my own RPG, I built in a two-tier heath pool split between a smaller initial healthbar called Stamina, and then your regular healthbar. I also went about using a complicated dynamic upcast system that used mana points, so you had the unfortunate problem of needing to spin a few plates on the admin front. This however did lend itself to one thing that helps defeat the five-minute adventuring day, as Stamina restores from 0 to full so long as 3 minutes (3 rounds) pass between encounters. The idea is that your health pool is your 'real' HP, and it incentivized players to be more aggressive or experiment more in combat.
Dynamic injury systems aren't easy to make, but the one I built effectively operates as a tally of how many times you went from full Stamina to 0 hitpoints (sort of like how Edge of the Empire handles it). Gradually the stats you have which give you all of your +1's and what-not tick down from the score you built your character with, to 0. Once it hits -1 in any attribute, it's progressively more likely that character game-over's for good. Magical healing focused on sustaining players in combat, and the Medicine skill had a progression in the dynamic class system that let dedicated medics remove those -1's and save characters who go down a lot easier. Everything was point buy, so choosing to have a default +1 in an attribute was in part knowing your fall-down buffer was effectively 3 (unlucky) strikes if that attribute was hit.
There was a lot more to how the system operated, but this kind of emphasis resulted in making the player party members "sticky". Rerolling a character is a pain in the ass, and you'll make mistakes or pick fights you might not be prepared for, and that can be fine in the end. Optimization mattered a lot less than doing your in-character research and preparation, in its most refined forms I had encounters structured around a three-phase approach of Detecting/Researching, Positioning/Shaping, and Attacking/Bypassing phases. The structuring between "Fights" and "Scenes" was important too, as a Fight is a very structured kind of scenario where grid paper comes out, but a Scene can be handled completely in the theater of the mind or with representative thematic positioning. Dynamic narrative Combat could happen in Scenes, and Mechanical non-combat Narrative encounters could happen in Fights.
A lot of the game had designated and in-built improvisation rules that could add bonuses or penalties to rolls, complete with player and GM point pools which could introduce elements into a scene. EG, if the party is progressing quickly through some content, the GM could introduce a complication as an action -- very much borrowed from the global GM rules proposed in Dungeon World. This idea of the game being built around the interplay of players and GM making opposing maneuvers both in the setting and on the table helps moderate what can be often adversarial without specification (D&D isn't built for the GM to have a 'win' state, but some can look at it this way because it isn't declared). The GM's 'goal' is expressly stated that they're building out a story first, and their encounters should fit into that story.
I think Dungeon World handles a lot of how it deals with power so-so, after enough play sessions characters can get pretty bloated and it has a retirement system inbuilt that lets you 'start over'. Because of how it handles XP, this loop can hit past 5 or 6 sessions, making Dungeon World's coolest abilities rare as its best moments are typically handled in one-shots. Because of this your thinking has to change a lot, I've struggled to idea craft a full Level 1 to 10 campaign in DW. Part of it is that its items legitimately do not have much to augment, so certain characters will be squishy forever and will die rather quickly as the resolution system kind of favors having high HP and Armor if you play for long enough. This means that a few +1's can become insanely important... but the game is designed such that you shouldn't build in any gear upgrades that can help extend player lifespan.
So DW has a longevity problem, and my opinion is to simply limit how you use that system into a tightly structured premise that can finish narratively before the players start hitting these walls. In place of tiered mechanical bonuses, structure can help build out way more interesting gameplay. Power creep is inevitably a problem in basically every Tabletop RPG I can think of, but the solution is neither "make +1's so important that +2 and +3 are different animals and the jump is rarer than a decent McDonald's hamburger", nor is it "make +1's so minor and routine as to be ignorable". Instead, dynamic interactions and a solidly made baseline can make even unimportant small encounters have a lot of interplay. The problem is always that the GM has to think about what the encounter's goal is, and the players need to be willing to engage with that kind of ever-moving design.
When I set out to build my own system I went about dynamic bonuses and penalties, and using a 'degrees of success' system to help make rolling high with low bonuses way more possible, but also environmentally dependent. That makes for a high complexity environment that not all players or GM's are suited for. To the credit of ARPG's, they can be predictable and comfortable for certain types of players. If you're constantly just eyeballing new numbers that go up as the thing you like to focus on, a lot of the mechanics fall into the background. The treadmill design isn't always bad, but it is something that requires the right social context when you're doing something on the dynamic play-field of the Tabletop which comes complete with IRL interactions and complications. Tiered power-level scaled encounters and gear can be done well enough by algorithmic increases, but your party should ideally be into having that kind of structured approach.
There's something to be said about how a videogame is so structured it often needs to have these designed barriers so a game can hit a Publisher's "playtime requirement", how long a game goes and pads itself out can be a problem with economic incentives. ARPG's handle this problem by making a lot of circular treadmills, you're rarely not spinning some kind of plate in a game like Path of Exile, creating opportunities to tie progression in the game to some kind of monetary opportunity. But in the context of a non-profit privately played tabletop game though? It's quite silly when "Donald the Blacksmith" (Level 8) represents the penultimate challenge and your success depends on if or if not your sword is also Level 8. That's stupid.
