Should players get free Merits according to the narrative? Pondering various Storyteller systems

My group and I have played a lot of various Storyteller systems - Vampire the Masquerade, Vampire the Requiem 1st, 2nd and MET editions, Mage the Awakening, Werewolf the Forsaken, Exalted, Exalted vs World of Darkness, etc. One thing that I always enjoyed about the systems were how they handled and codified the weird character quirks and the externals of what a character is - the Merits, Flaws, Backgrounds, etc. It felt really unique back in the day being able to start a game as a character that is filthy rich, influential, or perhaps hunted down like a dog.

However, when the systems moved away from "GM may I get another dot" into letting players buy certain things with XP (as discussed last time), one big question arose - should the players pay for the various Merits they acquired during play (wealth, allies, artefacts, etc.)?

(if you're familiar with how these systems work, feel free to skip the next three sections)

oWoD - GM may I get a dot?

Let's start with how things started. In the Old World of Darkness game like like Vampire the Masquerade players could pick Backgrounds, Merits and Flaws at character creation. Backgrounds were things that didn't fit into Skills, Attributes and supernatural powers of a character. Often they would be things external to the physical person, like their wealth, allies, political influence, fame, etc. They could also be character traits that were hard to express otherwise, like a measure of Vampire's blood potency, Mage's memories from past lives, etc. To confuse things further, Merits were kind of also that, but as an optional rule and usually at a fixed price rather than 5 dot scale. These would cover being able to keep track of exact time, having an eidetic memory, having someone owe you a favour, being a really big person, etc. Flaws on the other hand were negative things that would hamper the character and gave you more freebie points, like being blind, hunted by someone, having an enemy, being averse to violence and so on. People often would min-max taking a maximum amount of Flaws to build their perfect character.

All of those things you could buy / pick at character creation and only change later through roleplay. You couldn't spend XP to learn more languages or to increase your wealth in V20 (some other systems handled languages differently, but that's a different story) - those could only be awarded by the GM as a result of the narrative.

In practice, people would rarely go back to those and update them. "We found a new guardian angel? Cool! I wasn't told to put them as a Mentor so I won't! Even if I did it wouldn't change anything, I can just call them, right?". If someone did want to update some Background, they would have to do the "GM may I?" thing and arbitrarily get a "yay" or "nay". You pretty much never got new Merits, and you'd usually shed Flaws connected to having an enemy after killing them, etc.

Because things were so wishy-washy, you didn't have people specialise in these things since you couldn't rely on the GM approving your point increases, so you mostly stuck to what you had at character generation. Things changed, however, with the next iteration of the system.

nWoD - everything is a Merit you can buy! (some limitations apply)

In the New World of Darkness (aka 1st edition of Chronicles of Darkness) the system got way more streamlined. You didn't have Flaws, you only had Merits that also covered Backgrounds. So you could be wealthy, influential, know telepathy, kung-fu, etc. all under the system of a Merit. Best of all, you could buy a lot of them with XP after character creation! The ones you couldn't buy were tied to rather innate things about the character - you couldn't grow an extra half a meter to take the Giant Merit, nor suddenly develop Eidetic Memory (unless you were a cool Vampire, then you had a separate Merit in Covenant Book Ordo Dracul "Mind of Devouring Worm" that was basically Eidetic Memory, but that's another story).

Now people could want to spend their XP on Merits since they often offered some interesting mechanical benefits - Fighting Styles augmented how you would engage in combat, Striking Looks helped you with social stuff, etc.

Things worked similarly in Exalted 3rd Edition, with an added exception of "Story Merits" - Merits that you couldn't purchase with XP after character generation. They could instead be awarded or advanced by the GM though roleplay and social influence. Those were things like Allies, Contacts, Mentor, Artifact, etc. Otherwise, you could still buy some Merits, like faster reflexes, languages, etc.

There was only one caveat to the base system in nWoD - if you spend XP on something and you lost it, that XP would be gone too. That was addressed in the final iteration of the system.

CofD - Sanctity of Merits and more mechanics!

In the 2nd edition of the system, all the game lines introduced the Sanctity of Merits rule, which refunded you XP you'd spend purchasing any Merit you lost. So if you buy a loyal retainer Alfred and he gets killed, you would get all that precious XP back and be able to spend it on something else.

I think by now also all Merits had some mechanical benefit to them. Status used to be a nebulous pull in an organisation, and now it turned into a bonus to social and an ability to block other Merits. Mentors had specific areas of expertise they could help with. The list goes on.

So finally you could have a character that specialises in Merits be not only very effective in a game, but also rest assured they wouldn't be downgraded to useless just because someone blew up the tower housing their home, people, place of business, etc.

So now we come to the crux of our problem.

The problem - narrative Merits

So the problem arises when you introduce Merits that can be earned via a narrative. Things like Resources, Mentor, Allies, Contacts, Status, Artefact, etc. How do you handle them?

When a character wins a hundred million dollars in a lottery because they cheated with their future-sight, does that justify them catapulting from Resources 0 to Resources 5 (granting them like, 10 sessions worth of XP)? If someone robs them afterwards and they go back to Resources 0, does that give them those XP points back even though they didn't earn them? Or probably the most important variant - if you kill someone with a cool artefact weapon and take it as your own, does that suddenly drain XP from you to make you purchase it, or do you get it for free? Is it magically protected from being stolen back if you purchased it at character generation in comparison to getting it later?

It is a tough question. Let's examine things one by one with some examples.

More money more problems - Resources

Your character hit it big. They won a lottery, robbed a bank or what have you. Now they want to convert that into more permanent, long-term wealth for their character.

Turn those rags into riches!

In stories usually that's the character's end goal and you don't linger on what happens next. If real life is anything to go by, chance are a sudden influx of money will revert itself back to zero sooner than later. That makes sense - it takes a bit more than just raw cash to produce more cash in the future. Heck, even some countries have problems with this:

Nauru, wealth based on guano quickly ran out

Even if you don't have to deal with people trying to rob you or con you, it can still be an issue. Doubly so when you're dealing with illegal funds you get from robbing a bank. Turning that into clean money and then into a legitimate income is an adventure in itself.

Money laundering, it can get complicated

Resources are also often tied with one's standard of living and include a nice place to live, a good bank, credit score, knowing how much money you can toss around without going broke.

Heck, capitalising on your success and turning it into long-term wealth is a big thing in pro athlete scene. A lot of those people tend to earn a lot of money but end up going broke soon after they stop bringing in their income. The smart ones, like Conor McGregor or LeBron James leverage their cash and position to start businesses and so on.

So that's why I don't think getting an influx of cash should instantly translate to getting wealth / Resources on a character sheet. It takes effort and attention to grow those. Chronicles of Darkness did have a useful alternative for that influx of money though - Cash as a gear you can use!

Cash - for when you get that influx of money

Also, if you could turn money into Resources without spending XP, someone with Resources 5 could easily fund a few characters with Resources 2-3 without noticing a significant drop in their reserves. Why wouldn't every group do it in Session 1?

Not everyone gets to be the Mega Rich Light-Bending Guy,

not without a heavy investment of XP!

Mentors - it's a fine day for learning

Mentors are people that have interest in character's long-term growth and success. Some characters start their story with one, like Zuko and Iroh, others earn the privilege of learning from them during the series, like Goku and Roshi, Kami, Kai, Whis, etc. (man that monkey had a lot of teachers!).

So when you find a suitable Mentor that should be that, onto the character sheet they go, right? Well, it depends on what the role of the person is in the story.

On one hand you have rather transitory characters that exist to teach the character a lesson, some secret technique, etc. Aang had a good number of them. He chilled with most of them for an episode or two and moved on. Those kind of characters wouldn't necessitate being put on the character sheet - they are a means to spending XP on something else - a martial arts form or the like. You have a small adventure with them, this lets you spend your XP and usually you're done until you want to learn something else.

On the other hand, you have Mentors that stick around and offer support to the character over a longer period of time, not only showing them the ropes of how to do something, but also being invested in their success and maybe long-term education. Sometimes they guide the character's morality and stick their neck out to save them.

Old man Bruce from Batman Beyond,

teaches, judges and provides the cool gadgets

(to live through his pupil)

Those kind of characters usually take a bit more to be convinced to train someone and sometimes even when they want to teach the character it's not that easy. Take Shifu from Kung Fu Panda for example. Initially he resents teaching Po, eventually does so anyway but fails miserably, and only after discovering how to teach his pupil does he manage to get through to him, with dumplings:

A teacher learns how to teach their student

There is also the trope with Mentors about learning "the secret technique". Usually only the worthy characters that have proven themselves are trusted enough to learn their master's final lessons. You have that with Shifu, Oogway and Tai Lung, where the student is denied the Dragon Scroll for not being worthy of it. Or heck, even in Asterix: The Secret of the Magic Potion Getafix withholds the final ingredient to make the magic potion from his student because he didn't respect the ways of the druids (and also was manipulated by the bad guy):

Missing the secret ingredient!

So spending XP on a Mentor would mean more than "this person will train you" - it means you did the legwork and have proven yourself to someone enough that they get invested in you and your success (and they learned how to teach you and get to you properly). Like sure, a lot of that might be better expressed through some kind of Social Links but in lieu of that, you have a commitment of XP.

This is further exacerbated if there are mechanics involved to having a Mentor. In Chronicles of Darkness a Mentor can do some amazing rolls for you and even be your sugar daddy. Suddenly being able to throw five private jets at the party because they got to know the recluse billionaire might be a bit much (they are probably antisocial and wouldn't want to hang out with a whole party of adventurers in the same room ;) ).

Similar reasoning might be applied to Allies and Retainers - an Ally might work with the group because they trust one person that actually put in the leg work, but not the whole group. A Retainer works for one person and isn't everyone's gofer.

Woof of Wall Street - your Ally might stick a neck out for you and smuggle money,

doing the same for a coworker is another matter entirely...

So okay, where does that leave us? I think we're mostly down to magic swords!

Characters and their signature items - artefacts!

A number of characters in popular media come with some signature gear. Sometimes things are rather mundane, like Indiana Jones' whip and fedora, and sometimes they are much more intricate and unique, like Sword of Light:

A fighter with their signature weapon!

Lesser gear comes and goes and there isn't much need to spend XP on them. But let's look at some more important magical items.

One category is items used for pretty straightforward powering up. They don't serve an important narrative in themselves, and eventually you even forget they are there. Demon's Blood Talismans for example weren't part of Lina's original kit, but after acquiring them to be able to cast some more powerful magic they mostly just became a background item.

Perhaps a more well known example might be Sokka crafting his meteor sword:

Sharpen your blades and your skills!

For the character, crafting the sword was a culmination of a bout of training with a swordmaster. In game terms you could express this as spending some XP on skills, fighting technique, etc. and adding a signature weapon to the character that would be either a good piece of gear or some minor artefact.

Sometimes characters pick up a magic item and wield it pretty easily pretty fast (like Thor and Stormbreaker in Endgame, probably since that movie was so long already...), but sometimes it is a process. In Book of Boba Fett we see Din struggle mastering the Darksaber:

Heavy is the edgelordiest blade...

Which might be a good basis for a mastery of an artefact being tied to spending time and XP on it.

Even if you get artefacts for free in Exalted, that's just the start of your journey. Many of them come with so called Evocations - special powers you gradually unlock by investing XP into them that someone wielding it for the first time wouldn't have access to.

Of course, things get a bit more complicated when you have a system for making artefacts also built into the system that is separate from the regular XP system, which is again the case with Exalted. The crafter spending their resources making some cool blade for the fighter would justify not spending XP on it, but if you want to treat it the same as someone who did buy a similar artefact at character creation and if they both end up getting destroyed and Sanctity of Merits kicks in, who gets how much XP? This can get a bit more complicated if you had to pay XP regardless and a crafter just facilitates you getting the kind of artefact you want?

Conclusions

In at least some instances it makes sense for characters having to "pay" for the windfall they receive as a part of a narrative. It keeps things consistent when it comes to Sanctity of Merits, and it keeps the numbers fair between the players (loss aversion and being jealous someone got something for free that you paid for can be an ugly thing). Things get a bit more complicated when dealing with artefacts and characters that can make them on the regular.

If you like your mentors,

here is a Mentor Tierlist

by Overly Sarcastic Productions

Just roleplay becoming a millionaire - a problem with Storyteller Backgrounds

Recently our group had a discussion about the progression of earning new dots in Backgrounds in an Old World of Darkness campaign we've been playing. He's been trying to beef up security in his Dragon Nest (magical lair from EvWoD), bolster his Resources by robbing some ATMs and strengthen the bonds with his demonic advisor. But because all of these interactions have been rather subtle, neither the GM nor other players noticed this until it was brought up recently that these things haven't budged on his character sheet. Unlike everything else that can be bought with XP, this one part of the character sheet falls under "just roleplay it out and GM should award you some points", which falls under the unguided realm of "mother may I" which doesn't ever seem to be a good part of an RPG. Let's go over the problem in more detail.

Hey GM, is this enough for Resources 2?

What are Backgrounds?

Backgrounds, also sometimes called Merits, are parts of the character in the Storytelling System that are mostly extrinsic to the character. They are things like income, fame, people that work for you, how influential you are in the region, how powerful of a mentor is guiding you, etc. Unlike D&D, in the Storytelling System your character can start being a rich, influential political figure if you spend your points right, which can be pretty fun.

The problem is that in some of the Storytelling Systems, like Vampire the Masquerade after character creation raising existing or getting new Backgrounds cannot be done with XP, unlike everything else. Instead, they are raised as a consequence of the narrative and roleplaying.

While this isn't universal (Chronicles of Darkness let you buy any Merit with XP and Exalted lets you buy some Merits with XP), it can certainly be annoying.

Just roleplay it out!

I personally dislike any system that tells the players or the GM to just roleplay any broad part of the game out without any guidelines or rules. They always leave things wishy-washy and even if the GM wants to be conductive to the players advancing their things, it often feels arbitrary. How do you gaige of a player has sufficiently roleplayed becoming a millionaire to raise their income? How do you balance one player nagging the GM consistently to get those Backgrounds they want vs a player that is less forward about what they want? Should a player that can make money out of thin air just be given the money Background another player invested a good part of their starting character points into? If a player wants to roleplay getting some powerful artefact as a Background, should they just be allowed to? How do you roleplay learning Mandarin for five years if the in-game sessions happen day-to-day?

This is kind of like when character's social influence is left entirely to roleplay - the option is never as useful as the concrete option of violence. If you have the XP to up your proficiency in a skill like Melee, you as the player are in control of the character getting more competent and that has a tangible application on the session - your numbers go up, you are numerically better. You can't rely on having that same agency if your GM doesn't facilitate you getting the Backgrounds you want (even leaving aside some more hostile GMs that don't want you to get them, even well meaning GMs may forget to set the scene you need or you may fumble meeting a potential Mentor / Contact / Ally, etc.).

Just spend the XP!

Seeing how the New World of Darkness solved this issue in 2004, I'm surprised this approach hasn't been backported to the 20th anniversary edition in 2011. Just letting the players spend XP to buy points in Backgrounds would address this issue and give players the agency to push for their character improving things external to themselves. As always, you'd want to also tie the system into Sanctity of Merits (a system from Chronicles of Darkness where if you lose something you spent XP on, you get refunded that XP) not to make players lose their investments and feel bad about it.

Of course, one can argue whether or not some particular Backgrounds (such as Mentor, money, artefacts, etc.) should cost XP if sometimes players can happen upon them, but that's a bigger topic for another day...

Problems with character Cults in RPGs

In our group, we enjoy playing a good deal of demigod games with character Cults, ranging from Exalted (1, 2), through Godbound (1, 2), and to a smaller extent even Chronicles of Darkness could fall under this umbrella (in CRMB one of the PCs runs a masonic society which basically is a Cult to their supernatural self). While a demigod Cult is pretty much a staple of the genre and something that can be pretty interesting if done well, they often bring some issues whenever they appear.

Roles of cults in RPGs

As a baseline, Cults in RPGs generally come with some mechanical benefits to the player. In Exalted they give you some free Willpower, in Chronicles of Darkness they give you some free Merits, in the New Gods of Mankind they are key to getting faith to power your miracles, and in Godbound Cults give you more Dominion to change the world and come with some other benefits.

Beyond the mechanical, Cults are an expression of the demigod PC and their beliefs on how people should behave. Swallows of the South's Godwin was a musician, so his cults were his groupies. In Princes of the Universe, the Royal was all about being a merchant prince and trade, so his cult focused on heavy capitalism, paying taxes and accruing as much wealth as you could to get a high score when you die. In the same series the Majestic was a narcissistic scholar and his cult focused on people becoming educated. He was also heavily themed after mesoamerican themes of Exalted, which meant a lot of human sacrifices. But since only the best would do for him, the sacrifices had to be of the best examplars of his cult and willing because Majestic was against slavery.

Similarly, Cults are a way for the players to shape their world - to introduce a new religion into the world and possibly affect a large number of NPCs. Similarly, the Cults are often a resource the PC can tap into to engage the world more broadly - if you have a kingdom that worships you, you can rally troops from it and send that army to conquer other territories for you after all.

There are some problems that appear when you start dealing with the Cults in practice however...

Possession of NPCs

In demigod games we ran we often ran into this situation - a new mortal NPC is introduced, they join our society, and then comes the question of who will "own them" (so to say) by which Cult they will join. After that the PCs can get possessive over the NPCs that are their worshippers, and those NPCs rarely interact with PCs that are not their chosen deity.

For example, in Princes of the Universe a young girl named Conna is one of the last survivors from Wanderer's village. Early in the series the Majestic takes her under his wing to educate her properly and so on, later making her an important figure in his cult. Pretty much from that point she doesn't interact with anyone else anymore, and later Majestic basically refers to her as his adopted child. Similar patterns also appear in The Living Years where various mummified saints are raised from the dead and become worshippers of the Litch King and not interact much with other PCs, despite one of them being a devout of the faith they were the saints of, etc.

It's perhaps a bit subtle at times, since in a lot of situations you will have certain PCs and NPCs gravitate closer together and you may have NPCs that don't interact with anyone but one PC in general, but an NPC becoming someone's worshipper is certainly a strong indication to other players to not mess with them because they "belong" to that player.

On a larger scale, the same principle applies whenever the players visit a new location. Since some systems like Godbound punish you for divvying up a population between characters (Cult scale is exponential, but breakdown is linear. A Scale 1 Cult is 1000 people, a Scale 2 town is 100k people, but you can either get one Scale 2 Cult out of it, or two Scale 1 Cults, and combining two Scale 1 Cults from two places doesn't give you a Scale 2 Cult), meaning you often have to pick who owns what new town you visit or save. It starts to feel very transactional, especially when players start expecting towns to convert to their religion after saving them.

On a similar note...

Transactional worship

Growing your Cult in games like Godbound is generally a reward for completing some major quest. You liberate a town from some evil monster that has been plaguing it, and now the people give you praise. Because having a bigger Cult means you get a mechanical benefit, you sort of expect that as a reward or at least an option when you enter a new location. This makes the whole process feel a bit transactional, since even if you try being selfless you might get worshippers regardless due to them being so grateful, etc. This can feel even worse if you realise your character can be essentially uprooting an existing culture and replacing it with their own in the process.

That was an important character arc for Atrus in The Living Years - he was an outsider to the kingdom of Ancalia and the world of Arcem as a whole and he was really conscious about starting a cult of his own and imposing his ideas on the people that were foreign to him. For similar reasons in Evicting Epistle (a setting where the world was destroyed in the future so people went back to the past to conquer it anew since they didn't have anything left in their time) I couldn't justify playing a character from the future to avoid these kind of themes, and the themes of colonialism. It would be really hard to avoid a hyper-tech future demigod interacting with prehistoric proto-humans without some form of "need to uplift these 'savages'".

Religion defining the NPCs

A character can appear in the story and later join one of the PC Cults, or they can be introduced as someone from the Cult outright. In the second case especially (although not exclusively) the NPC's involvement in the Cult tends to define their personality. Godwin's groupies exist only as his fans with a little bit of individual mannerisms sprinkled on top. In CRMB every member of the masonic Cult tends to act in a similar, scheming way. etc.

Sure, sometimes when you create disposable NPCs, they tend to be one note, but unfortunately it seems with NPCs that are a part of a PC Cult that note tends to gravitate on what religion they subscribe to. This can make them a bit less interesting than if one would build characters first and then figure out if they'd follow any of the Cults.

In a similar vein, it is also rather easy to portray these Cults as a homogeneous group of people, rather than a collection of individuals. They tend to be characterised as a collective, display uniform traits and generally just be that one-note character from the previous paragraph smeared across a larger group.

Of course, this can come down to how much time and effort one wants to devote to fleshing out the characters. There is nothing stopping you from adding more depth and nuance to Cults and its members, but it takes that little bit extra effort over going with the flow of the least resistance and using stereotypes when describing the NPCs.

Mechanics influence characters

As discussed before, the mechanics of a game inform the playstyle of the characters, and the same can be said for Cults. I've noticed this especially with Godbound - in this system the characters can either be a demigod with a cult, or a free divinity that doesn't have worshippers to suit your playstyle. However, mechanically, having a cult more often than not is a better choice - you get more Dominion out of it, you get a neat Faction you can use to do your large-scale bidding, and generally have more stuff to interact with. Mechanically, the game is rewarding you for having a Cult, which means almost every character in the game will end up having a Cult (in our multiple campaigns using the system, totalling to about 15 characters, only one PC didn't have a cult - Adina from The Living Years, and that was only because I ended up insisting she wouldn't get one if it couldn't be a part of the religion she followed herself). This in turn changes the sort of characters you play - you won't want to play someone who is selfless and doesn't accept people worshipping them because that would put you at an advantage, so you make a character that would want the worship.

One solution - make it all cosmetic

One possible solution to a number of the listed problems would be to make the Cults a cosmetic thing to a character, rather than something that has mechanical benefits. A narcissist demigod that demands adulation can still make a Cult because that suits the character, while someone that doesn't feel the need won't feel bad for missing out on the mechanical benefits. Now because Cults stop being such a dominant thing every player has to focus on, the NPCs are under less pressure to pick a side and they can remain their own people. Being praised as "the town's hero" for saving it feels a bit less of a commitment than having the town worship you as their deity of choice.

Conclusions

Character Cults can be a really interesting part of a demigod game. They can serve as an extension or a compliment of any character, a way for them to express themselves on a large scale. However, it is very easy to fall into traps of defining NPCs by the religion they follow, and to get territorial and transactional about individual and group NPCs and which bucket they will fall into. When the system promotes having Cults, you also tend to see characters more skewed in that direction, changing what kind of PCs you see in those games.

Ideally, you would focus on making NPCs defined people first and then putting them in a Cult if they fit, and you would have a system where choosing to have or not to have a Cult would be balanced to encourage making characters that fit what the players want to play, rather than rewarding one kind of characters.

Gaming and solving the fun out of RPG systems

Over the last few years my group and I have played a number of systems that had mechanics you could game to get XP or other advantages, or had some of their mechanics boil down to a solvable math problem. Both of those situations ended up detracting from the experience, either drawing more attention to themselves rather to the game being played, or just being bland mechanics.

RPG mechanics as math problems

The first category of mechanics are essentially math problems - mechanics that for any given situation have a correct solution on what to do to maximise your outcome.

oWoD Automated Fire

First one of these is Automatic Fire from Vampire the Masquerade:

This attack basically gives you a lot of extra dice to a roll, but makes the roll Difficulty higher. It's basically a move you want to use either when you need a hail mary, or the Difficulty is already so low it doesn't matter much. For other scenarios, whether or not to use this move would require running the numbers, but there is still a definitive yes or no answer to whether using it is a good move or not. Figuring it out for certain however requires some complicated math of using your AnyDice-fu.

DOGS Growth

DOGS presented a similar math problem to its players when it came to Growth.

DOGS is a system in which you have stats that take form of multiple dice of a given size - "3D4", "4D6", etc. When you undergo Growth, you get to either increase the number of dice for a given stat, or increase the size of those dice - so from "3D4" you can go into either "4D4" or "3D6". Turns out there is an optimal way of progressing through those dice to get the best result on average:

So for example, 3D6 gives you on average 0.5 higher roll than 4D4, while 5D8 is better than 7D4 by 5 whole points on average. The game doesn't explain those concepts to the players and it's simple and abstract enough that these things shouldn't matter, but for a problem-solving player it's a solvable mechanic.

Mouse Guard and optimal combat

Mouse Guard is a system with its own little combat / conflict engine that relies on picking actions (Attack, Defend, Feint and Manoeuvre) and seeing how they interact with one another. Attack lowers opponent's Disposition (HP essentially), Defend heals your Disposition, Manoeuvre is a way to get an advantage on next rolls, while a Feint is like an Attack with caveats - if played against an Attack, Feint does nothing, but if played against a Defend, Defend does nothing.

During our first game of Mouse Guard we soon learned that this setup creates a simple First Order Optimal Strategy - just always Attack. Attack vs Attack or Defend gets you closer to resolving the conflict, Attack trumps Feint, and Manoeuvre often isn't useful enough to trump dealing damage to an opponent. Attack, Attack, Attack!

FOO (First Order Optimal) Strategy

Towards the end of the game this has ended up being such a simple and optimal strategy that for our next game of Mouse Guard we had to switch the rules to give Attack a hard counter not to devolve every conflict of any type into "press A to win if you press it faster than your enemy".

Cortex and marginally useful SFXs

Recently our group picked up the modular system Cortex. We only played a few sessions of it so far, but one thing that stood out to me was how "starchy" (boring) some of its special powers were.

First of all, Cortex is another mixed-die system that puts a big emphasis on making pool of dice and manipulating your dice. So if you're Iron Man, you can have say, Eccentric Billionaire at D10, Ganius Scientist at D12 and Mk1 Iron Man Suit at D6 and roll those all together to do something.

On top of that, one module you can use in Cortex are Power SFX (special effects). Those are some extra powers your character can use that are tied to a Power Set that can alter the game a bit. So for example you can be Tony Stark with Iron Man Power Set, and one of your SFX could be "Immunity" where you spend a Power Point to negate a specific attack, simple enough.

However, a lot of those SFX are boring dice manipulators. For example - Focus lets you take two dice and turn them into one bigger die. Boost lets you shut down one power to increase the die on another die. Dangerous gives you an extra small die to roll, but changes the size of other dice. Multipower lets you use more than one dice from a given pool but they all are decreased a step or more. Versatile lets you split one die into two or more smaller dice. The list goes on.

I've ran some numbers and a lot of these powers are marginally useful. Say, turning 3D8 into 2D8+2D6 with Versatile gives you an average roll that's 0.42 higher, but gives you 0.45 smaller Effect and 0.2 more Hitches. Without going into what those are, those numbers are marginally useful. Sometimes the numbers increase marginally, sometimes they decrease, but from what I've seen it's not a big effect overall.

Unfortunately to get those numbers I had to spend a few hours programming and debugging a Cortex dice simulator. It's hard to make an informed decision as to whether a power is useful or not without a chart, and trying to play a game well that's filled with unknowable probabilities would just be the case of blind luck.

One way or another - the stat-focused SFX and similar mechanics can be one of two things - either boring because they don't change much about the roll, or having an optimal way to play it, in which case you're not engaging with the mechanics, you're solving a math problem. Either way the mechanics become irrelevant because they're either "use them always", "don't bother with them ever", or "use them under specific circumstances". Since Cortex is based on complex math with no glaringly obvious answer, I honestly can't be bothered to use these SFX.

Honourable mention - Exalted, Paranoia Combat

Honourable mention in this category should also go to Exalted. I won't elaborate much on it since this section is already getting long, but there are two things that are worth mentioning that make this epic game of sword and sandal capital H Heroes boring: Paranoia Combat and Minuscule Incremental Charms.

Paranoia Combat was a strategy from 2nd edition Exalted where the optimal way of winning the Rocket Tag combat was to turtle up and play in the most boring way possible.

Minuscule Incremental Charms were special powers you could buy with XP that would give you just small bonuses to rolls or change tiny things that were rather boring in themselves. Things like Triumph-Forged God-Body that gave you double-9s on Athletic rolls instead of double-10s, or Wyld-Forging Focus that started wyld-shaping at a higher phase. All of those were such small tweaks that they might not be worth the mental load, and weighing their effect vs XP cost would be a small math problem in itself.

Gaming mechanics for profit

Most RPG mechanics that you can game for profit I've come across were focused on being able to farm XP, or at least streamline the way you earn XP. While not a problem in itself (who cares if the party got more XP if they're having fun doing it - you're not competing with anyone), it can start to become a problem when it draws too much attention away from doing things in the game and having fun and onto "brrrr the number goes up"

Chronicles of Darkness - punch me in the face for XP

I've covered this one before in the "Punch me in the face for XP - the failure of CoD beats system" article, so I won't repeat much here. Basically, in Chronicles of Darkness you can basically earn XP by being beaten up a bit at the start of every scene, and some systems like Mage the Awakening 2nd Edition even call out a similar way to farm magic XP.

In a similar vein, the systems also let you earn XP by a number of other ways, like turning fails into botches. This can create some animosity between players when someone is invested in some scene going well, while other players are there to mess things up just to farm up some extra XP - "I failed to impress this character, I opt to botch it instead and make them hate us. Too bad they knew something about your lost sister, guess we'll never find what they knew!".

DOGS - Growth vs Consequences optimisation

Another entry for DOGS, this time about maximising the rate at which your character growths, as opposed to optimising how they grow.

DOGS is a system where you Grow when you suffer Consequences as a result of a conflict you had. To become stronger, you have to get into conflicts, get beaten up a bit, etc. However, Consequences can also have lasting effects if they are bad enough - if you roll too high on them, you may even have to step down your stats, essentially netting you zero, or potentially giving you some net negative sessions. Once again, there is a mathematically optimal way of playing:

Which is basically to get a 3D4 Consequence - it has the best chances of being a net gain. You get such small Consequences by essentially keeping non-violent in conflicts, which to an extent is a "mechanic as a metaphor" for the system.

Mouse Guard and farming Checks

Mouse Guard is a system where you grow your character by practice - aka the more you use a skill, the better you get essentially. As with any such system, the first way of farming it is by doing things all the time, which can encourage you to hog the spotlight. This can be a bit of a problem, but then there is more.

The game is broken up into two parts - the GM turn and the players' turn. During the GM's turn (which lasts about half of the session, not "a turn"...) you can earn "Checks", which you spend during the players' turn to do things and make rolls. You earn those Checks by using your Traits against yourself ("I am Small, therefore I have problems lifting this large log!"). You can use a Trait against yourself once per roll, which means the more you act and roll on GM's turn, the more Checks you can earn to act more during the players' turn.

Moreover, during a conflict you can easily earn a lot of Checks if you play in a very boring way. Essentially, during a conflict you pick actions to take - Attack, Defend, Feint and Manoeuvre. When you Defend, you essentially try to recover your HP. Since the conflict only ends when one of the party's HP goes down to zero, if you turtle up you will be rolling for a long time, letting you earn Checks for every roll. In a lot of cases you can also earn a lot more Checks during a fight under specific circumstances - breaking a tie in enemy's favour or giving an enemy more dice in a vs conflict. So if you play like a turtling asshole and have enough dice, you can in theory earn a lot of Checks.

This strategy has one counter though, Feinting makes you unable to roll Defend. You can try anticipating it though by throwing an Attack that trumps Feint into the mix to make your opponent have to Defend and recover. It's not perfect, but it can work...

While that turtle Defence is an extreme example, I have played in some sessions where a less extreme form of Check farming was involved, which later resulted in pretty neat things being accomplished during the players' turn.

Conclusions

There are a number of games out there that rely on math obscurity to give a sense of depth or agency. However, solving the game mechanic from a mathematical sense is only so fun, and once solved the complexity is replaced with an optimal way to play the game, which isn't fun. Making the math behind it harder is not making the choices more meaningful, just the decisions harder to make informed. Try pruning such mechanics from your game if possible.

Similarly, there are games that can be exploited by players to gain some disproportionate amount of XP and what have you that detract from the game by rewarding boring play.

Or in other words - if you are designing a new game system, try asking a math nerd or a game developer to break it. They might do the math and show you how balanced your system can be, and you can guide your players to playing the game well with that math as well.

Related Articles:

• Categories of XP Systems
• Meat and potatoes of RPG powers
• Manage your game's mental load
• Punch me in the face for XP - the failure of CoD beats system
• Net negative sessions

Manage your game's mental load

A concept I don't see discussed often when it comes to RPGs is that of a "mental load". To put it simply, there is a limit to how many things a human mind can keep track of, and the same is true for RPGs. Once that limit is reached, you tend to either forget things you should be doing, or slow down considerably. Ideally, you want your game to work under that limit, where you can reach the flow state.

Lets break things down into a few categories.

First of all, complicated rules take up a lot of our mental limit. Remembering all the rules for something like Contact would take a lot of effort, so you're most likely be going over it step by step each time you engage in combat. Fewer special cases, exceptions and so on are much less strenuous on the players and GMs alike.

Secondly, more rules means more mental strain, understandably. You can either start off with a system that has a lot of rules for everything, or gradually build up as PCs gain more powers and abilities (which often come with their own little special rules as discussed last time). An example of that from our group would be Exalted, where after a few seasons of Princes of the Universe our character sheets turned into character booklets, with everyone having too many incremental charms to use effectively. This problem was solved when we switched to Godbound where powers were bigger in scope, but smaller in number.

Just one of many of Exalted's charm trees.

Most of those nodes are incremental powers, a small rule to remember...

On a similar note, letting players have limited access to a really large pool of powers can also lead to choice paralysis and increased mental load. A good example of this would be the power Brilliant Invention from Godbound. It's a power that lets you mimic any Lesser Gift from almost any Word. That's over 300 different Gifts you can conjure at a moment's notice - good luck trying to remember the best thing to use for any given situation off the top of your head (then again, 90% of the time you just use Purity of Brilliant Law with this one and call it a day)...

You can use 60% of all Gifts.

Hope you remember them all!

Thirdly, GMs have to juggle more things than players, so it's easier for them to reach their limit. When it comes to NPCs, you ideally want them to be much simpler than PCs. Fellowship handles this pretty well - NPCs only have one to two powers that also serve as their HP. They are much simpler than PCs that take up at least two pages of stats, powers and what have you. It's much easier on the GMs.

Fourthly, context switching can help to compartmentalise the rules and alleviate the mental load. While trying to say, hold 50 different powers in mind at one time can be hard, having 5 distinct and separate game systems each with 10 different powers can be much simpler. You don't need to remember rules for investigation or hacking during a shootout, and bulk trading rules don't apply during space combat. Being able to switch context and only consider a smaller subset of rules and powers can let you handle bigger things. For example, in our Stars Without Number game we use the Suns of Gold expansion that features a big trading system. It's not the easiest thing to use, but since when we are doing the trading there isn't anything else going on, everyone can focus on just this one thing and it flows pretty smoothly.

Fifthly, game aides can help a lot. It's much easier to remember rules when you've trimmed off all the fat and put them on a simple cheatsheet. Having all the rules you need for something on one sheet is ideal - you can context switch to that single page whenever you need to use those rules and follow along to make sure you're not missing anything. For example, while playing Mage the Awakening, having a printout of the Spellcasting Quick Reference pages really made the magic flow, rather than getting bogged down whenever we'd try to engage with the core system of the game.

Page 3 of 4 of MtA's Spellcasting Quick Reference

Sixthly, changing numbers doesn't increase the load. As discussed last time, RPGs usually have powers that come with their own little rules, and stats, which just alter the numbers you roll. Changing the stats doesn't really change your mental load for dealing with them (unless you have to deal with some weird dice mechanics). So if you want to balance your own mental load in a point buy system like Chronicles of Darkness, you can do so by buying powers when things are too simple, and stats when you are reaching your own limits. It can be an interesting way to balance the system without hampering character growth.

So all in all, there are many ways a game can manage the mental load of their players - by keeping its rules simple, avoiding too many small extra rules, keeping things simple for the GM, segmenting systems from one another, providing concise game aides, and letting you buy into more powers or stats to adjust your own load.

Meat and potatoes of RPG powers

When it comes to character progression in RPGs, you generally rely on two kinds of upgrades - boosts to stats, and new powers. The first one is simple, you get your +X to some rolls, HP or other things you need. These are your potatoes of the mix - a bit bland, but filling, they get the job done.

The second is a bit more complicated, with each power having its own little rule or condition attached to it. These are your Moves in Fellowship, Charms or even Merits in Exalted, or Foci in Stars Without Number. Those are the meat of things usually - something flavourful and interesting.

However, sometimes those powers are very bland, amounting to nothing more than a to-roll bonus under certain circumstances, essentially turning into conditional stat bonuses. It's important to keep this difference in mind when designing an RPG.

To illustrate this point a bit more, let's talk about some examples.

City of Mist - heavy on the stats

Our first kind of powers are essentially stat boosters - something that modifies some specific roll for your character. They can give flat bonuses to rolls, change the odds of a roll, give some conditional re-roll, or something to that effect.

Stars Without Number's Specialist Focus,

a good example of a bland power.

One of the more prominent examples of a game that is heavy on the stat powers that I've come across is City of Mist. It's a Powered by the Apocalypse game about being a super-powered person in a mysterious city. You build your character by choosing their themes (Mythos - magical powers, and Logos - mundane experiences) and picking power tags from those themes. For example, if you had a Divination Mythos, you could pick "Sense minute earth tremors" and "can hear a pin drop".

Power Tag questions and answers

Now, knowing that this is essentially a Powered by the Apocalypse game about being superheroes, one would expect the characters to have some cool, unique powers to play with. But no, most of the system is just the core moves everyone has access to. If you want to attack someone, you "Hit With All You've Got", roll your dice, and then add +1 for every tag that's appropriate. So if you have "fast as lightning", "predict a foe's next move", "see in complete darkness" and they apply to the situation, you roll with a +3.

The powers you have don't change what you can do, only reflavour how you do it. Someone with an Adaptation Mythos could throw lightnings, one with Mobility Mythos would strike fast, while one with Training Logos would punch them like a boxer, but the roll and the rules are the same in either case. Almost every power you get in the game is just a conditional +1 stat.

There are some other mechanics at play in the game of course, how if you specialise in one Move you can roll well and have some more interesting Dynamite effects, how your powers define who you are and if you neglect some aspects of yourself you get a replacement Mythos / Logos, etc. The core of the game, however, relies on powers that give you just stats.

Chronicles of Darkness - when quantity turns to quality

One asterisk that one could perhaps add to stat-heavy powers is that sometimes given a large enough shift in the stat, the game could feel vastly different. For example, in our Creepy Rashomon Marine Buffet game of Vampire the Requiem, my character had a Dynasty Membership Merit that let them become Tasked and give them an 8-again quality on rolls (basically - you could snowball your successes a lot easier, meaning you were more likely to get exceptional successes). This combined with some high dice pools meant that for a very specific goal my character turned into a hyper-focused, hyper-efficient machine akin to T-1000...

Nothing can stop a Tasked vampire! Exceptional success!

So eventually, given a power that shifts the probabilities of your rolls a lot, or otherwise helps your rolls a lot, even a bland stat boost power can feel amazing for a time.

Magic - mostly powers, few stats

While I couldn't think of a system that relies mostly on unique powers without much in the way of stats, one aspect of games that usually falls in this category is the magic system. Even in D&D a good number of spells each come with their own rules and special systems unique to that spell, and spells themselves take up about 1/3rd of the Player's Handbook.

Even a simple Alarm spell adds something unique to the game

Stats vs powers

So, on one hand of the spectrum we have bonuses to stats (numerical increases or other special but simple modifiers, rerolls, etc.), and on the other we have powers that each come with their unique rules attached. One is not better than the other, however.

Stat powers are easy to add and test. You can predict what changing a stat by +1 would do to a roll.

Powers that come with their own mechanic have to not only be tested by themselves, but also against and in combination with other mechanics and powers. Each is a special use case and an exception, possibly bloating the game (how many "harm someone" or "heal someone" spells do you really need?). Adding more and more special rules can also be a burden when you have to remember to use them, unless they are well segregated into their niches (you don't need to think about special hacking rules during a shootout, and your battle spells aren't needed during a conversation).

Ideally, you'd want a complimentary mix of both in your system - powers that rely on stats to perform better and better, and stats that are varied enough to cover the basic rules without having to resort to powers for everything. Chronicles of Darkness lines are a pretty good example of this.

Don't punish players for defining their relationships - implications of True Friend

One night before playing with our group, the GM and I had a discussion about Vampire the Requiem that made its way onto discussing the True Friend merit and what it implied.

For those that don't know, True Friend is a merit in Vampire the Requiem 2nd edition that gives the PC a person that they can truly trust. Someone that will under almost no circumstances betray them, one that cannot be killed by the GM for "plot reasons", etc.

While in itself it's a bit of an innocuous merit, its very existence seems to imply a thing or two about how some GMs might be treating their PCs and their relationships.

A lot of the design that went on between Vampire the Masquerade, Vampire the Requiem 1st edition and now the 2nd edition is focused on addressing various issues that came up from actual play. The systems did away with creating multi-splat characters (no more Abominations!), addressed minmaxing, heck, it even massaged out small niggles with things like Sanctity of Merits.

This implies that True Friend was probably a reaction to some GMs crossing the line a few times too many, stuffing PC's loved ones in the fridge or making them betray the PC for the sake of a twist that wasn't even a good story. This of course disproportionately targets players that have gone out of their way to build a backstory, fill it with people their character cares about, engage with the NPCs and get invested in them, etc. In other words - it mostly punishes people that might care to get the most invested in the world, vs "Joe the Orphan" that has no family, no one to care about, etc.

So here is my request to all GMs that care:

1. Talk with your players about potential boundaries and what are they comfortable with happening to their character. Some players might be on-board with being betrayed and stabbed in the back, but others won't.
2. Foster trust in your group. Respect what the players are putting forward, and talk with them if something doesn't fit - don't just kill off some player's NPC because they don't fit in with the story.
3. Be mindful when you aim to kill off or hurt NPCs important to the players. It might not sit well with everyone if they are not on-board with it.
4. Don't punish your players for getting invested in your story, your world and your NPCs. You want them to get invested, so you should reward that behaviour, not punish it.

The Goblin Brain in RPGs

Every now and then, each tabletop RPG group will come up with a solution to an issue so bizarre and appalling that will leave the GM gobsmacked in horror or in laughter. Not sure if there is a proper term for this, but my group calls it the Goblin Brain.

Goblin Brain

Goblins don't think like people. They are ruthless, direct, and have no moral qualms about anything. Finding the simplest, most direct solution to a problem, consequences be damned, is the way of the Goblin, and this frame of mind is the Goblin Brain.

There are many stories out there about Goblin Brain's way of thinking, some are even cannon to the RPG sourcebooks. Let me tell you a few of them.

Puffin Forest's goblin brain in action - a student figuring out a peculiar way to solve an issue...

Heists, fire and heads on sticks

Recently, my group has decided to play a one shot using San Jenaro Co-op's The Roleplayer's Guide To Heists preview. We were playing a scenario about stealing a priceless movie reel from a cinema event. The theatre was heavily guarded by mob goons, the display was under constant surveillance by 4 guards, under a bulletproof glass dome and secured by an electronic security system that locks the entire room down instantly. We had only two players playing the game, so we had to punch way above our pay grade in order to have a chance of pulling off this hit.

In preparation for this scenario, our Goblin Brains kicked in. Some of our plans included burning the place down, chloroforming the entire room, kidnapping people, killing all the guards and anyone else who might be in the room, locking the cinema down and smoking people to death, etc. All very direct and horrible methods of solving the issue. In the end, we figured out some less gruesome way of solving the issue, but some fire was still involved...

We glanced at another scenario in the preview - one where you have to steal a space shuttle. After figuring out that pretending to be the astronauts with visors down would be suspicious the Goblin Brains kicked back in and said "what if we kill them, put their heads on a stick and walk in their suits holding their heads up so nobody would notice?". That's when we knew we had to stop ;) .

Exalted and Dragonblooded Breeding Camps

Exalted is a game about playing mythic sword and sandal heroes. There are two main types of Exalted heroes in the setting, Celestial Exalted (Solars, Lunars, Sidereals) which are directly empowered by gods, and Terrestrial Exalted, aka the Dragonblooded, which derive their power from the five elements and a strong lineage. The former have a fixed, limited number to them, the latter don't - hence why they are called the Ten Thousand Dragons.

So, how do you make an army of Dragonblooded, heroes that are born from a strong lineage? Well, the Goblin Brain kicks in and your answer is "breeding camps!" - make the strong blood multiply and create more Dragonblooded this way. You can bet this idea came about soon after the first Exalted book was published and has remained an infamous meme in the community ever since...

Vampire the Requiem and the Hungarian Marriage

In Vampire the Requiem there is a vampiric Covenant called Ordo Dracul. They are essentially transhumanist vampires looking for ways of overcoming their vampiric weaknesses. Rites of the Dragon even describes how two weaknesses are pitted against one weakness to overcome it. With this practice, they have developed the Coils of the Dragon, rituals that transform the vampiric bodies. In the 1st edition specifically, under the Coil of Blood you had the power "Perspicacious Blood", which let you gain more blood points than you drank from someone else (you get 3 points per 2 blood you drink from a mortal, or 2 per 1 for vampire blood). The power is simple enough, letting you feed more efficiently, but then the Goblin Brain kicks in...

In the Ordo Dracul book the writers describe a practice known as the Hungarian Marriage. You would have a pair of vampires with the power feeding from one another to produce infinite blood points. However, those that know their Requiem already realise there are two problems with this - Vinculum and blood addiction. Blood addiction means that a vampire drinking other vampire blood gets addicted to the sensation and may crave it more and more. Vinculum on the other hand is a blood bond forming in someone that has drank from the same vampire repeatedly, making them a thrall to the vampire. This would result in a lot of strong, conflicting feelings in those two vampires that may cause problems to a lot of other people around them. Needless to say, this practice can be severely punished, such as by throwing the two "lovers" in a metal coffin into the sea while they remain awake and able to feed off one another in perpetuity...

Slave worship and making your own followers

Once again in Exalted - in the setting, gods derive their power and wealth from being venerated. The bigger the god's cult the more prominent figure they become and the more money they have to bribe other celestial bureaucrats with. On the flip side, a god that doesn't get any prayers loses power and can even go insane.

Here is where the entrepreneurial Guild comes in. As any world-spanning merchant organisation it seems, they deal with slaves. So their Goblin Brain says - what simpler way of making easy money than to sell the gods the service of being worshipped by the slaves? Coincidentally, a player's Goblin Brain might also chip in analysing how much money can you make laundering prayers and conclude that a person worshipping for a whole day produces more wealth than one working all day, hence all the economy is a sham.

On a similar note, in our Godbound game, Evicting Epistle, we had a god of Artifice and Fertility. Since in that system you get more Dominion points each month based on the amount of people that worship your character, the simplest Goblin Brain solution was to make more followers. So the character went ahead and created a race of Units, smallest creatures capable of having a soul and producing worship, then putting them in a life-sustaining cell where they could worship them all day, every day for the rest of their lives. The cells were self-replicating too!

Rick and Morty's Microverse Battery, used as a literal prototype document for the Units' enclosure

I could be going on and on about more Goblin Brain examples, but I think you get the point by now...

Conclusions

When players come up with the most blunt, straightforward solution to a problem that would be appalling to a normal human being, you know they were thinking with their Goblin Brain. It can be fun to theorise, sometimes it can be fun to actually carry out, but keep in mind that a Goblin Brain might not be thematically fitting for all sorts of games. 

Unstable combat systems - taking wargaming out of RPGs

As everyone knows, D&D has roots in wargaming. Combat is an important part of D&D as well as many other RPGs. However, after playing a lot of different games, it seems most of them suffer from an "unstable combat system".

What do I mean by unstable? Balancing encounters usually feels like trying to balance a ball on top of a hill - it tends to fall one way or the other with ease, while keeping it in balance is a feat. In RPG terms, you either end up throwing something way too easy at the players and they end up roflstomping it, or the encounter is too hard and the player characters end up dying. Ideally, you want the characters to pull through but at a cost.

For example, in our most recent Godbound game, Evicting Epistle, in 24 sessions of playing we had about 2 good encounters - one army v army, and one 3v1 brawl. A lot of other battles were either PCs wiping the floor with the enemies, or running with their tails between their legs not to get murdered.

So what issues contribute to a combat system being unstable?

High numbers with high variance

Humans are not machines, they have problems conceptualising large numbers and doing two digit arithmetic on the fly. How much longer a 65HP character will survive against an opponent that deals 8 damage than a 47HP one? Hard to tell when you have to make up an encounter on the spot.

This issue gets compounded when there is a high variance between the results (the possible range of numbers and how probable they are to appear). If an enemy does 1D10 damage, you can kill your 50HP character in 5 hits, or 10, or 37, etc. One or two bad rolls and you are out of there, or you can still be around 20 crappy rolls later, who knows? Prey to your luck deity of choice.

Having low, somewhat predictable numbers is generally better. For example, in Fellowship, characters usually have 5 levels of health and possibly a few points of armour and healing items. Enemies usually deal 1 damage. You can roughly prepare an encounter based on such small numbers easily, and players can see ahead of time if their actions will expose them to the danger of getting taken out or not.

Similarly, in Chronicles of Darkness, health and damage output of characters is usually in single digits, so you know that "this enemy that can deal 5 damage" will kill you in about two successful hits. The variance is a bit higher, but the outcomes are usually somewhat predictable and still small enough to wrap your head around.

Action economy and focusing

A lot of RPG combat revolves around everyone taking turns to perform actions. Usually the side that can take more actions (by say, having more characters) is at an advantage. If you compound this by focusing many actions against a single character (remember to always "cap the pointy hat" and go for the wizard...), you can start unbalancing the action economy more and more by removing characters from the equation. This feels particularly cheap if used against PCs since it's a cheap yet effective tactic, and it feels as if the GM has a gripe with them in particular.

In general, a lot of Powered by the Apocalypse avoid this issue by making the enemies act when a PC fails. This means enemies don't have an action economy at all, so there isn't much to unbalance, beyond figuring out how much health / damage the players have in total vs how much health / damage the enemies have, in aggregate. Five players have five times the health to soak with after all!

High lethality

Another contributing factor to unstable combat is the high lethality of said system. If a character or enemy can go down in one or two hits, you are not only throwing the action economy out of balance, but you can potentially upset a lot of players by killing their characters unceremoniously.

Sure, some systems can embrace and run with it. Cyberpunk's firefights usually were one hit one death scenarios where the players knew what they sign up for whenever they drew their guns. 

If you move away from "losing combat means losing a character" systems, you can open up new roleplaying opportunities - perhaps the PCs get captured / put in prison and now they have to escape, instead of just rolling up new characters.

AoE and force multipliers

Area of Effect damage dealing abilities and other force multipliers can further throw things out of whack. Instead of fighting 1-on-1 you have to deal with someone potentially hitting a group of enemies and applying the same damage multiple times. Suddenly the you have someone taking on 5 enemies and killing them off while the rest of the group gangs up on the remaining straggler.

I have ranted about this before, how in Godbound you can have a character that wipes out entire armies with a single attack, but most of the characters there can tap into an AoE smite that becomes quite powerful at higher levels. Not only that, but you can easily bring a small army with you to combat and have them attack everyone, etc.

Setup time and iterating

A perhaps less obvious factor contributing to unbalanced combat is how much time it takes to set up and how easily you can iterate on it. This somewhat ties to asymmetric character complexity. If it takes 10-20 minutes to prepare an encounter and it's over in 5 minutes, something's probably wrong. Same if it goes on for two hours, then it becomes a slog.

Ideally, you'd figure out what worked for a given encounter and try iterating on it as time goes on - "3 guards weren't a challenge, maybe 5 will work better next time". However, if your next encounter uses completely different set of enemies that rely on completely different mechanics ("2 beholders!"), you may not get to iterate on the encounters too much.

If this gets compounded, you may not get too many encounters per session due to how long they take, and you may not iterate on the same encounters too much due to wildly disparate enemies, you may never perfect your encounters.

Fellowship generally has an easy time with this - most enemies have the same amount of health points and their powers mostly differ in flavour. So encounter to encounter a similar amount of enemies will usually be a similar challenge, and encounters themselves take a few minutes to set up at most, so you can easily iterate and tweak things to get pretty much what you'd expect out of it.

Combat vs non-combat PCs

Party composition can also affect combat stability. If you have some PCs that are very combat-focused and some that are very much the opposite, it's hard to have combat encounters that challenge one group and don't outright kill the next. This is further exaggerated if characters can grow to multiply their effectiveness, while others fall behind on the treadmill.

Godbound and Stars Without Number have pretty much been like that for us - having one or two characters that are all about combat, and then inevitably you'd have someone that can't hit enemies and does nominal amount of damage, getting frustrated in the process.

On the other hand, Fellowship once again shines by making playbooks that always have some offensive capabilities, as well as having a system that is versatile enough for everyone to be able to contribute ("I may not be able to kill them, but I can run around screaming to distract them while someone else takes them down!").

Conclusions

To make a somewhat stable combat system for an RPG, you generally want to:

1. Operate on small numbers for health and damage that are easy to comprehend
2. Keep damage somewhat predictable
3. Minimise the effect of action economy on balance
4. Manage the lethality of combat
5. Avoid AoE attacks
6. Make encounters quick to set up and somewhat consistent (be it point-wise, challenge-wise or something else)
7. Give options for everyone to contribute or do something meaningful, even if they didn't build the character for combat

Now, not all of those are always necessary and sometimes you will want to create some conscious exceptions, but they are good to keep in mind when designing a fun combat system.

Wargames might be all about besting your opponent and winning at all cost, but that may not always make for a good tabletop combat. You want to challenge your players, not outright kill their characters.