Spend XP to cure cancer and be a good person - expensive fluff charms in EvWoD

Our group tends to play big games like Godbound or Exalted where the players get to shape the world to their whims and even when we're not doing that we enjoy games like Fellowship where you are having a large, positive impact on the world by saving it from an evil Overlord or an Empire. We enjoy being able to improve fictional worlds for the better by more direct actions than "slay some monsters". But then when we find cool powers in various systems that let us cure cancer or the like, they never feel as fun as they ought to. Let's figure out why...

Cure cancer or feed the hungry, decisions decisions...

Cure Cancer Powers

So what do I mean by "Cure Cancer Powers"? Basically, any power the character can have that would have a large impact on the world the game takes place in, but will rarely have any tangible effects on the session-to-session gameplay. Take Wholeness-Restoring Meditation from Exalted vs World of Darkness for example:

Cure anything!

Spend a few hours, cure anyone of any debilitating ailment. You would be hailed as a miracle worker and you could change the lives of hundreds of people each year. But how often this would come up in a game you're playing as something important? Maybe once or twice you save some key NPCs and get some good reputation for being such a good surgeon, but in a normal session of being a vampire hunting hero it probably wouldn't come up all that often in comparison to say, being able to punch holes in vampires on the regular.

You could also expand this category into "powers that are narratively cool but rarely useful". For example, Neighborhood Relocation Scheme lets you magically drag one part of the local geography somewhere else:

Drag one location somewhere else.

The power can be really useful in a very specific situation ("Let's break everyone out of Alcatraz by dragging the island onto the shore so they don't drown!"), isn't as universally, unequivocally good as curing cancer, but it still will only come up so often in a game in comparison to being able to punch holes in vampires.

Some other powers that for us fell into these categories:

• Tiger Warrior Training Technique / Legendary Scholar's Curriculum - supercharged teaching, letting you train people to be world leading experts in science or black belt martial artists in a week. Very useful for supercharging some key NPCs, would only be a background thing otherwise.
• You Can Be More - turn mortals into Mages after a very difficult roll - again, uplifts some key NPCs.
• Faultless Ceremony - bless a ceremony with good fortune - thematic, but very nebulous as to how it would impact a game.
• Ceasing to Exist Approach - turn yourself into someone completely different for a time - very useful, but at the same time it requires a lot of upkeep and you can't really just be someone completely removed from the group without hogging a bit too much spotlight.
• Smooth Transition - give people painless deaths - very thematic, but how often would you do this in a regular game?
• The King and the Kingdom: The Thousand and First Hell - create your own pocket realm of existence - very thematic and can serve as a neat mobile base of operation, but at the same time it's mostly creating a walled-garden for yourself really...

Have a look at them yourself if you'd like to get into more details, Exalted vs World of Darkness is available for free!

Cure Cancer Powers in practical games

These kind of powers came up a few times in our games. Most recently, in our upcoming EvWoD game, City of the Bull God, we had our veteran GM Devon play End of Sadness, an Infernal Exalted (hell-themed hero essentially). The core of his character was built around Latter-Day Devil Implants, a charm that lets him graft helltech implants onto people and turn them into Fomori (demon-possessed people). However, he built his character to be benevolent, so while normally Fomori would be monsters, while they work for him they are immune to all the bad effects of being a monster. Then to further refine them, he took Verdant Emptiness Endowment, which let him grant wishes to people once a year each. This would let him remove any and all inherent problems the Fomori would have (such as mental derangements caused by being possessed by an evil spirit, physical deformities, etc.).

The intended loop for the character was to find disenfranchised people that wanted to heal something they wouldn't be able to otherwise (not in an "exploit the weak" kind of way, nor "throw off the disability" way either, but finding people that would seek out this kind of treatment themselves), then working with them for a few years to stabilise them and then letting them go better than ever. It's probably one of the more benevolent ways an Infernal can interact with a person (who can very easily be cruel tyrants).

After one season of the game and investing about 27 XP into this one loop (about half of the generous XP our GM has given us), these Powers and the loop came up a total of about twice. First time in S01E02 when End of Sadness explicitly wanted to show off his character loop and cured one person of her sickness, and a second time in S01E04 when he brought some Fomori dogs to a fight. Beyond that everything else was fluff about how his followers look and operate.

The worst part was that the player noticed that they essentially built themselves a fancy walled garden out of XP and very situational powers that don't bring them joy. Sure, they and the GM could contrive a way for those powers to come into play but that would be pretty obvious to everyone and not make anyone feel better.

A much simpler example of similar Cure Cancer Power usage was in our Heaven for Everyone game, S01E12, where one player decided to buy Instant Treatment Methodology charm that let them do very fast medical treatments and decided to break into a children's hospital to cure everyone there overnight. Really cool thing to do once, not necessarily worth spending 2-3 session's worth of XP to say you've done it.

Another example from City of the Bull God - I played a superpowered university professor Rigel Star. My initial idea for the character was to take Legendary Scholar's Curriculum to be able to churn through dozens of students per week, condensing their entire university learning into days and even taking in underprivileged youths to give them all that education for free to help lift them into a higher position in society. Ultimately however, I decided not to take it because it would be all fluff and nothing actionable in a game where we explore strange supernatural occurrences in Boleskine House, stop evil vampires from preying on people and go to the hollow earth to go back in time to fight nazi mages and werewolves.

A different take - Godbound's Miracles and Changes

Godbound had a different approach to this problem. While sure, some powers could be seen as Cure Cancer Powers (such as Birth Blessing that can cure infertility and give people really healthy children), most ways you would use to improve the world were universally accessible under Dominion Changes. Every player would gather Dominion over time and they could spend it to change the world for the better based on their divine portfolio. So if you were a Godbound of Health, you could cure cancer in a given kingdom, if you had the power of Knowledge you could make everyone in the world literate, while having the power of Sky you could give everyone angel wings.

The system also solved the problem of "powers that are only sometimes useful" by the use of Miracles. While you could buy some specific powers when levelling up, you had access to your entire divine portfolio in a limited fashion. You would have to pay a little bit extra and deal with some other minor constraints but you could, say, feed an entire town with Cornucopian Blessing to address an ongoing famine in the short term.

Of course these approaches might not be universally applicable, I understand that. You could also argue that spending XP on something makes it an important sacrifice - being generous means a lot more when you spend something you have in short supply than when it doesn't inconvenience you. But at the end of the day we're here to have fun together in an RPG, not play "my character shoots themselves in the foot to show what a selfless person they are".

Solutions attract problems

Of course, sometimes when a player picks a power they are signalling to the GM that they want to be using it regularly. In an ideal world, such solutions would attract problems - if you have the ability to sneak really well, you want to use that to solve problems, so the GM could give you more opportunities to sneak. So if you have invested in the power to cure any ailment suddenly a good deal of NPCs start having such problems the character can fix. It doesn't have to be a wave of magical cancer everywhere, but old scars, small persistent pains and aches, some family member struggling with a chronic condition, etc. Suddenly you have social leverage to use on people (even if you act selflessly, never turn anyone away and don't ask for payment not to be an asshole that prays on people, they can still feel in your debt). Of course sometimes it might be harder to figure out how to work such Cancer Curing Powers into a game - there are only so many situations being able to train black belt martial arts master by the dozen could realistically solve without turning into some kind of wuxia action flick about making a dojo city to fight against another evil dojo army...

Conclusions

While people do want to play good and selfless characters (of course not in every game), making them spend their limited character resources away from things that would be useful regularly and into niche powers that make their characters really good, helpless and selfless people can give players a buyer's remorse. Some of it could be addressed by tailoring what appears in a session to give the players a chance to highlight the cool and expensive powers their character has, but that could feel a bit pandering if done too much.

In general, it might be better for games to be consciously designed with this problem in mind.

Power Inflation in RPGs

For a few years my group had some fun playing a few games of  Godbound, a demigod OSR RPG. It was a game letting you play level 20 D&D characters and beyond pretty much off the bat, but with much streamlined rules. It was pretty fun at first, but since the game is very much focused on combat, you could notice a problem that in other games might've been obscured by complex mechanics - Godbound had a Power Inflation problem.

Basically, in Godbound and probably most RPGs, your character will grow in power as they gain XP, gather loot and so on. Their HP, damage output, etc. will increase and you will feel good because "bigger numbers are more better". However, at the same time, the game has to compensate for the extra power you gained. Now fighting low-level enemies feels too easy, so the GM has to throw bigger and meaner things at you, with more HP and higher damage output to challenge you. If you haven't noticed, nothing has changed with the level up - your numbers have increased, but enemy numbers have also increased, you still take a comparable amount of hits / turns to kill them, but now the numbers are bigger. This is basically Inflation, as you have entered a treadmill where you run in place...

Arms race ruining fun

Another aspect of the Power Inflation that might be even more explicitly worse would be an arms race between the players and the GM. Basically, if you have a rather open-ended character creation system that's vast enough, you can find some really broken combinations of spells, abilities or what have you that would let you punch way above your weight class. In response, the GM would have to throw even more challenging enemies at you, or possibly also resort to using some dirty tricks, broken combos or some other shenanigans to keep up "to challenge the party". This path pretty much leads to frustration if left unchecked:

"Narrated D&D Story:

How I Accidentally Triggered A Cold War

Between The Dungeon Master And The Party"

Basically, RPGs are supposed to be a collaborative storytelling tools that help both the GM and the players tell interesting stories, not a war gaming competition to see who can be the strongest. Sure, if that's the group's jam, go for it, but more often than not it's one or two players powergaming, while others might be left behind the power curve, making balancing combat harder than it would usually be. This is not to mention how much enjoyment players that aren't combat-focused would get out of sessions like these, or being told that they can't even hit the enemies.

One way or the other, it circles back to the same Power Inflation problem - combat gets too easy or too complicated, the other side of the table compensates and we're back to square one - combat taking X amount of hits / turns, except the numbers are bigger and the process is more complex. If one side overcompensates, then you have to get back to balancing things. This can get especially problematic when you have unstable combat systems (ones where it's hard to land the balance where you intend, often resulting in things being too easy or too hard).

Avoiding Power Inflation

Unfortunately, it's a bit hard to avoid Power Inflation in games.

Modules might sidestep the issue by giving you fixed enemies to encounter. This fixes the GM side of things to an extent, meaning it's up to the players to be the balancing factor - either doing some more prepwork if the going gets tough, or taking on a bigger challenge if things get too easy. If someone brings an OP build, they are ruining their own fun, which might not be that big of an issue. That being said, this assumes the module is well-balanced, which is a big problem in itself (although you'd expect some hard balancing work being done by the authors that were paid to make these, but that might be a pipe dream in the industry...).

Shorter games might not suffer from this issue as much, because the Inflation doesn't have time to set in, but this mostly avoids the issue by not engaging in character progression.

Similarly, there are games out there that have really slow progression system, like Star Trek Adventures. In that example you start as a fully capable characters on the level as Picard or Spock and you only get to directly increase your attributes every 6+ sessions. Even those increases are not that big, meaning the Power Inflation from levelling is glacial, and since you're expected to have a roster of secondary characters to use on adventures, the GM can expect the player characters to be competent and play their enemies accordingly.

This sort of approach practically means you don't level your character. You can shift their attributes and other things about them about more, but that's mostly it. Some games like Fellowship or other Powered by the Apocalypse also don't see much in the vein of character's power growth over the course of the game.

What else could be out there?

While the previously mentioned are about the only ways I've seen games avoid Power Inflation, but one could think of a few more that I haven't encountered in the wild.

You could have a game that's about players creating their own encounters in the spirit of Monster Hunter and "lets grind this for resources". This way it's up to the players to pick their own battles, prepare for them, get the rewards they want and so on. Add some time pressure in the vein of Kingdom Death: Monster and you have pressure on players to optimise getting as much from any given encounter as they can, so they are incentivised to push themselves to the limit and battle the meanest set of enemies they can survive. It would probably make the game very focused on that one loop unfortunately, and you're basically reinventing Kingdom Death:Monster...

A different approach would be to move the Power Inflation focus away from stats and onto a "scale factor". So say, a rookie warrior would be fighting with "+2 to hit Scale 1" and fighting "Scale 1 rats", resolve things as normal. Eventually they level up but instead of increasing their to-hit, you bump their Scale up. Eventually you are a veteran warrior with "+2 to hit Scale 10" and fighting "Scale 10 demon". If you want some growth, you could reset the "+x" each time you go up a Scale and then focus on buying it back.

This perhaps makes the Power Inflation very explicit, but allows game designers to laser-focus on refining the engagement at any Scale, because the Scale is only a set dressing. You could perhaps compare this to something like Dragonball - after awhile, the character power level is meaningless, but every arc you find a new villain that's stronger than the heroes, and then you have to train to get strong enough to beat them, etc. Everything is cyclical, you just move the reference power level sliding scale higher and higher to always have the characters in view. Every now and then show the players how weak lower Scale enemies are and introduce a big bad that's a higher Scale than them to show them they have a new challenge to beat and you have something to work with...

Of course, this might get into the criticism I sometimes hear about universal RPGs, where there isn't a difference between two snails fighting and two gods fighting, everything's still the same mechanically. You want those to feel different, but how you do that without over-complicating the mechanics and over-inflating the numbers...

Conclusions

Power Inflation in RPGs is a tricky problem to handle. On one hand, you expect your character to grow over the course of the game and become more capable, but on the other hand, you always want to be challenged on your adventures, so the enemies have to grow alongside you. Even if you over-focus on something to be the best at it, the GM only has to compensate harder to give you the challenge when it's needed.

It's hard to address the issue of Power Inflation without removing character advancement in its entirety, or making it really flat. Ideally, you'd have a system that deals with the issue and gives the GM the tools to balance things for their party, but that might be easier said than done...

Agree on your game's vision before you start playing

Over the years, my group has learned that it's important to nail one thing down before a game starts - its vision, an agreed vision of what the game is about, what are the core assumptions, etc. Having something like that in place can help a lot when it comes to keeping the game focused.

A game's vision can be something very simple. In our Fellowship - The Deeps it started off as "we want to play a Fellowship game about sailing the ocean". This informed the setting - an archipelago with plenty of water to go about, the characters - all having to have a reason to be on the boat together, etc. Later, as characters got fleshed out the concept evolved further - the game was also about an Heir opposing an evil ruler Overlord to dethrone them and take their place, and other characters whose goals would align with that objective.

The vision will also help you figure out what the game is not about. In the Deeps, we weren't going to turn our sailing ship into a flying ship, because that would go against our goal of sailing the ocean and having ocean adventures. In Heaven For Everyone, our goal was to:

1. Play teenage demigods in the 80s
2. Have no clue what's going on
3. Focus on family life and school life
4. Try to be good people
5. Have our actions have consequences

With such clear goals, you could fall back on them whenever you'd want to do something drastic with your character. Would it be useful for a character to run away from their family and ditch school not to be bogged down? Sure, but that goes against the game's vision, so you won't do it. Would it be easy to declare yourself a living god-king and kill all the other supernaturals? Yes, but that's not what the game is about. Should the GM introduce a character that knows what's going on and explains everything to the players? Probably not, because we're meant to not have a clue of what's going on - it's part of the fun.

Making the vision does not mean you have to reveal everything the game is about. For our Conspiracy at Krezk game, we as players decided to be in the dark as to what would be the mystery of the game, so the GM kept us in the dark about those things. We still agreed what some other constraints about the game were (something along the lines of "you live in Krezk, you want what's best for the town, you're 'adventurers', so you'll put yourself in trouble because it needs to be done, etc."), but we had fun experiencing the mysteries slowly revealing themselves over time.

Of course, your game's vision is not set in stone - over time you ought to revisit it and maybe change it as it suits your game. Maybe some assumptions didn't make sense, or maybe you've gotten all the fun you could've had out of these ideas. For example, after a dozen episodes of Heaven for Everyone, we're pretty much done with our characters doing bits of school life, and we'll probably be transitioning that into some other scenarios, like internships or what have you. Your visions are your game's guiding compass, but it's okay to change course if that's what you want to do consciously.

Our group also has a few good examples of when we didn't nail down a vision in mind and things went a bit awry.

For our Fellowship of Cybertron game the GM wanted us "to be Autobots that fought in the Great War", but didn't state that clearly enough, so our party consisted of two Decepticons, an unaligned character and one Autobot. One character slept through most of the war, one was on a colony for the entirety of it, one was made not so long ago, and only one had some deeper connection with the war. We still had fun in the game and the GM still ran it, but for the follow-up season he made sure to clearly state and enforce the vision.

In our Godbound: Living Years game, we had two characters that were nobles. One of them wanted to restore the land of Ancalia that has been devastated by a zombie plague and give ownership of it back to the mortal nobles, while the other wanted to rule the land himself and do away with a lot of the old ways. The two character concepts were often at odds with one another through the entire game since neither of those goals were clearly stated before the game started, and both character concepts were very focused on bending the setting to their vision. It caused a lot of tension in the party and was very stressful to play through.

So if you are starting a game, consider sitting down together and deciding on what your game's vision will be. Once everyone has agreed on what it is through whatever means, it might be easier to keep the game focused and have something to point to when deciding if a character or story idea fits with the game.

Hopefully this will help you avoid having that one loner evil character in a game where you're all supposed to be heroic good people ;).

Related posts:

• The Doylist choices in role play games

The Air-Breathing Mermaid Problem

Every now and then when playing RPGs you stumble upon a mechanic that solves a problem you didn't know you had. This situation is called the Air-Breathing Mermaid Problem, based on a meme that goes something like this:

A game has mermaids, they are introduced in the core book. The entire book makes you believe mermaids can breathe both air and water - there is nothing to contradict this assumption. However, when a supplement comes, you suddenly discover that you have a new power that lets mermaids breathe air. You were just given a solution to a problem you didn't know you had.

The same problem can manifest itself in different ways. You could have a poorly checked book that only lists offhand penalties to using a weapon in an ambidextrous merit that removes said penalties, or come from a specific character focus that brings a mechanic to a focus that would otherwise have been glossed over by the GM.

In our recent game of Fellowship, we had a character playing the Angel playbook. One of the core powers of that playbook, is that it can speak with the language of all things, and with some equipment, it can also understand any spoken language. Since our game is about exploring space and talking with aliens, was it not for this move, it would be a default that we can communicate with the aliens through some sort of babel fish or what have you, but with the powers that playbook introduces, either only that player can talk to most aliens, they translate for everyone and we mostly ignore that rule, or we ignore that rule and everyone can speak freely.

While this example is pretty specific, it could be similarly applied to any system that features a way to learn languages - if one player invests heavily into being a polyglot, it can either punish everyone else for not speaking the language, or punish the linguist for wasting so many points on languages.

In most other situations, it's rather uncommon to come across the Air-Breathing Mermaid Problem, but it could be a good design decision to try avoiding small mechanics and extra powers that solve very specific problems. Sure, being ambidextrous can be fun, but are offhand penalties important enough to warrant their own exceptions to the rule? Is it important that a mermaid can't breathe air? If the answer is no, maybe it's best not to solve problems nobody is having...

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.

Asymmetric character complexity - cardboard cutout NPC stats

A lot of RPGs use the same complexity when describing NPC stats as they do PC stats. It's understandable - you spend a lot of time developing and polishing how PC-facing mechanics work, you write up a lot of cool powers and so on, so why wouldn't you use the same system for your NPCs? On the other hand, there is such a thing as information overload...

Godbound and simplified powers

In Godbound, the players control demigod PCs, complete with a suite of divine Words containing many Gifts. The PCs use these powers to up their damage output, do some cool stunts, synergies and what have you. By mid-game you can easily have 15 different Gifts bound to you and have access to some 15 more, taking a few pages of possible things you can do.

A page like this times three,

that's a rough approximation of the amount

of different things every Godbound PC can do

In contrast, NPCs can usually be described in one paragraph with a few key stats:

Typical Godbound NPC

Some more important NPCs also have access to a handful of divine miracles, but those are usually more limited.

To balance the challenge between PCs having access to a lot of powers and NPCs being a lot more simple, the game just gives the NPCs higher stats. While a PC might use a gift to get low AC, a gift to do 1d10 damage, and another one to attack twice, an NPC just gets low AC, two attacks and a high damage instead. All of the complexity and word count that would normally go into a set of gifts get instead distilled into raw stats. This way the GM doesn't need to internalise 10 different powers, instead they can just hand-wave "this NPCs has powers to support their stats".

What this design approach does is it allows the GM to much quickly introduce new NPCs and throw challenges at the PCs without having to keep too many powers in their head and forgetting half of them.

Similarly, scaling encounters up into battling armies just means giving the enemies more HP and more attacks per round. This way you can introduce 10 or 1000 enemies at once just as easily and not have to worry about tracking individual stats and positions.

Fellowship and simple threats

Fellowship (and many other Powered by the Apocalypse games) follow similar philosophy, only they take it even further. While a player character might have a a few pages of moves they can do, five different stats to roll and a bag of equipment, the NPCs might not even roll, instead being very reactive with what they do.

A PC wizard

An NPC wizard

This can further reduce the complexity of any encounter. Bigger groups of enemies are also rather simple - they just gain one extra stat and one new mechanic.

And honestly, even with this level of simplicity, you can still have interesting encounters and give your enemies unique powers to challenge the players with.

Conclusions

Complexity can be a fun thing, but it can also be a burden. It's fun to have options as a PC to what you can do, so you do want extra complexity on that side of the table. However, if you are a GM and you have to juggle many NPCs and enemies at once, you ideally want something simpler instead so you don't get lost. This way everyone around the table generally operates at a similar information load - players can keep a lot of intricate details about their PCs on their sheets and in their heads, and the GM can instead commit to managing a number of NPCs by themselves. Expecting one person to potentially deal with the same information load as 5 other people can be daunting.

How Chronicles of Darkness almost fixed minmaxing

The various World of Darkness games have a long history in the RPG community. The games have been around since 1991 and always had a strong following - not competing directly with D&D, but instead going for a more modern gothic horror settings with various staples of modern horror movies - Vampires, Werewolves, Mages and so on. Also for a long while they were pretty much a heaven for minmaxing. The most recent edition (Chronicles of Darkness) however, managed to largely solve this issue.

World of Darkness and minmaxing

World of Darkness (the old games, Vampire the Masquarade, etc.) had a very appealing character building and progression system. It was essentially a point buy system - you would have a budget of dots to spend on given categories and you could make your character within those boundaries however you liked. So if you had 7 dots to spend on your Physical Attributes, you could max out Strength and get your Stamina very high, but you would have very low Dexterity. Having 13 dots to distribute in your Knowledge Abilities you could be a PHD in Science and world's greatest surgeon at the same time, but you might know nothing about Law, Occult or Computers. You could also make yourself a generalist, having some basic knowledge across all fields but specialising in nothing.

You also had a few freebie points to spend at the end of the character generation, either taking Merits, or buying up more points in Attributes, Abilities and Advantages. If you really wanted to be the world's greatest hacker, surgeon, lawyer and politician in the same combination, you could invest in those dots.

The system was pretty straightforward and elegant - you didn't have any random rolls during character creation, you started off roughly at peak mortal level of competency and you could make your character however you wanted...

Unfortunately, there were ways to build a character optimally, and I'm not talking about "let's build a murderer so he survives longer".

See, after the character is created, you start earning XP. You don't level in this game, but instead can spend those XPs directly to raise your stats. So you can go from Strength 3, to Strength 4 to 5, etc. Again - very elegant approach, much more organic than hitting level milestones and so on. You're constantly improving yourself.

The main crux is that the higher the stat, the more it costs. Attributes cost current rating x4, so Strength 1->2 costs 4XP, while Strength 4->5 costs 16XP. Abilities cost current rating x2, Disciplines cost x5 or x7.

In other words, if you only focus on starting the game with a few very high stats you will be possibly hundred or more XP worth of dots ahead of a character that is an all-rounder. And this is a game where getting 5XP or more in a session is somewhat rare.

This pretty much meant a lot of characters were hyper-specialised early on and comedically incompetent in other areas. Not necessarily the best choice for a game more focused on more grounded narrative.

Chronicles of Darkness and minmaxing

World of Darkness came and went with its Time of Judgement. After a decade of a metaplot, the series got a reboot in a much less metanarrative-heavy setting called at the time the New World of Darkness. The new line of books focused on being more streamlined, chipping away some stranger bits and keeping the core more focused. Overall, it was a very good reboot, and the mechanics also got a small update.

For our discussion - the freebie points were gone, so you no longer had as wide of an option to push the minmaxing limits, and now the cost of the last dot of any given stat cost you double to further curb minmaxing. However, the old problem still persisted - generalists were punished, while specialised characters still got way ahead.

In comes Chronicles of Darkness, the second edition of nWoD. Not as large of a reboot as last time, but it was still a redesign of a few core mechanical concepts of the game. Something you didn't know you wanted until you got it. Once again, more streamlining and this time - the problem of minmaxing was almost solved.

You once again built your character a dot at a time, this time with no extra cost for the last dot. No freebie points, just a normal distribution of dots. Then, when you get into the game, you notice that one big difference - all of the XP costs are flat. Strength 1->2 costs 4XP, Strength 4->5 also costs 4XP. The costs are flat across the board. Since you didn't get any freebie points, every character has the same amount of dots in the various categories. This means the system is finally fair and even no matter what you do, right?

Well, there is a new, small problem - Beats.

Beats, Botches, Conditions and minmaxing

Beats are a really cool concept, certainly a welcome addition Chronicles of Darkness has introduced. Basically, each time the character fulfils an aspiration, or get into a really big fight, etc. they get a beat. You get five beats, you get one XP. Simple and fun.

Since you don't have to spend as much XP to push your stats to that final level, you get a lot less XP per session - one full XP is a generally good session, as opposed to about 4XP in the previous edition.

You get beats for a lot of activities - fulfilling your goals, getting beaten up, at the end of a session, etc. However, you also get them for taking "a dramatic failure" (a botch), or when a condition is resolved. Those two relate directly to dice rolling.

Another change Chronicles of Darkness introduced was that players had control over when they botch and not. The players don't just getting a bad roll and botch straight away (minus chance rolls, but those are infrequent). Instead, whenever the character fails a roll, the player can opt to turn that failure into a dramatic failure and get a beat that way. This gives the players a nice agency of when they really don't want to screw up badly and when they can risk it.Very neat.

On the opposite end, when a player rolls very well. When they roll an exceptional success, they get a condition - basically a short-term advantage they can use. Often, the players will get an Inspired Condition, which they can spend to make a roll turn into an Exceptional Success easier. That counts as resolving that condition, which means they get a beat. From our play, this also often ends up triggering the exceptional success and chaining into another Inspired Condition, giving players a perpetual way of generating beats.

Now, there is a small limit - you can only get a beat from any given source once per scene, so you can't just botch 5 times over and get an XP. You can, however, botch 5 times in 5 different scenes and get that.

So how is this minmaxing? Well, whether your roll fails or gets an exceptional success is heavily dependant on how many dice the character has in the given roll. If they have very few dice, corresponding to low dot amounts, they will fail more often, giving them a chance to take a dramatic failure more often. If they have a lot of dice in a roll, they are more likely to achieve an exceptional success, take the Inspired condition, resolve it on a similar roll, get another exceptional success and keep chaining it.

At either extreme, you get more opportunities to get more beats, therefore advance more. If you're average, you will often succeed, but not enough to trigger an exceptional success. So a minmaxed character will be able to both roll very poorly and very well, while a generalist will be stuck at being mediocre and neither getting the dramatic failure and a beat, nor the exceptional success and the condition resulting in a beat.

Overall, it's not really that bad in-game - you will usually have a way of getting beats one way or another, and introducing group beats means you don't feel like you fall behind other players. It's definitely an improvement over the previous editions!

Conclusions

World of Darkness and New World of Darkness gave a high XP-equivalent advantage to minmaxing characters as opposed to ones that spread their dots around. New World of Darkness curbed that a bit, but it wasn't until Chronicles of Darkness where that problem was largely solved. However, the last edition introduced new ways of gaining more XP that favour minmaxed characters. CoD is still a notable improvement over the previous editions, however.