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...

Violence is always an option - a look at player interactions

Sometimes when you play a tabletop RPG, your character may want another character to do or not do something they are dead set on. How do you convince that character to follow your preferred course of action? If you were just playing a pure simulation game, you'd be able to convince them socially, devise some sort of intellectual scheme for them to see your way, or physically stop them. However, many games and players shun the social and mental approaches - "I don't want my character to be mind controlled", "you should roleplay social interactions", "the system doesn't have a roll for making someone change their mind", etc. This, however, leaves you with one approach that will always work. Violence is always an option...

Now of course, threatening another player's character physically is usually seen as bad form, but at the same time if no other option is available to you, a physically stronger character will have better odds of getting their way, whether that means beating another character up, restraining them, or outright killing them. You just need to establish yourself as a credible threat - even if an orc barbarian fails their intimidation roll, it doesn't mean they won't follow through with their threats later. Heck, in one of our old Exalted game of Princes of the Universe, we had a player character (Killer Queen) that on multiple occasions has threatened the party with a button that would release a demon they used as their personal Evangelion to rampage through our city. Luckily it never came to that, but the PCs did fear what Killer Queen could do to us if we crossed her... It was fun!

Killer Queen, in a nutshell ;)

This puts non-combat characters at a disadvantage. If you are a social character and you can't do "social attacks" on other characters, you can't do much. If you are an intellectual character and you can't devise things to match what other characters are doing (build a player-killer mech, enact a convoluted scheme to get your way, etc.), you can't do much. Combat characters always have the option of using violence.

We had a situation like that happen in our recent Godbound game of Evicting Epistle. One of our PCs, Matiel the Pirate Queen, decided to arm a group of NPCs not aligned with our factions with Godwalker Jaegers. Another PC, Thaa, was very much opposed to that. However, while Thaa had a lot of influence as the Godbound of nature and networks, she was physically the weakest of the party and could not match up to Matiel. Since the game of Godbound has zero rules for "social combat" or any sort of mental influence that is not straight up mind control (which the other PC could shrug off almost effortlessly), there was no way for Thaa to stop Matiel. When the NPCs ended up being antagonistic towards us after getting the Jaegers and causing our game to end, Thaa's player asked our GM to always remind her to play a combat character in games like these, so she'd always be able to get her way. Of course, that was meant jokingly, but it's not untrue...

Unfortunately, there isn't much that can be done about the situation unless the RPGs themselves accommodate non-combat player conflict resolutions and players embrace these outcomes as binding. Exalted did have an interesting mechanic for that in form of Intimacies. Those were things and relationships the characters cared about that could be altered by other characters. While you might not be able to use them to stop someone right there and then, you could make them care about things that were important to you and thus making them align with you in the long run. It would also take the buy-in from other players to play into the Intimacies and not just dismiss them as "my character wouldn't care about that", "don't mind control me" or "whatever, I'll do what I want anyway", etc.

Alternatively, you could introduce a PC v PC conflict resolution engine that's entirely flat - you wouldn't get an advantage on it whether you're strong, smart or charismatic, and it would abstract various ways PCs could sway one another in their respective fields. This would only apply when PCs are in conflict with one another. This would be fair to the players, but perhaps not to the characters.

Conclusions

There will always be conflict between characters at the party, and if one kind of conflict is more useful / stronger / more acceptable, whichever character dominates that field will be able to get away with a lot if left unchecked. It would be nice for systems to have a robust conflict resolution method that could be used by any sort of character in the system without a significant disadvantage...

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.

Make every roll impactful

Efficiency in a tabletop system is a nice thing to have. The more systems I try with my group, the more I'm bothered by rolls that don't affect the story on their own - either ones that you need to chain together, or ones that don't carry consequences with them.

Chain rolls

When my group started looking into playing some Exalted vs the World of Darkness, I started getting flashbacks to my old days of playing Vampire the Masquerade and the old mechanics that are still in that system. Of them, the most pertinent to our discussion today are the attack rolls.

To attack someone in Vampire the Masquerade, you roll your Dexterity and say, Melee. If you succeed, you take however many successes over 1 you got, add your Strength and the damage of the weapon you are using, and roll that again. That is the amount of damage you do. Now the enemy makes their soak roll and subtracts the successes from your attack roll. So you roll three times in order to get the result you want (you can also start adding the cost-benefit analysis of various manoeuvres like "if I strafe with my assault weapon and get +10 to hit but +2 difficulty, is that a net gain for me?" but let's keep it simple...).

Now, let's compare that to Vampire the Requiem. You roll Strength + Melee - your opponent's Defence. The amount of successes you roll is how much damage you do. Done. In one roll you accomplish everything you used to in three rolls.

This type of rule design can really speed up how you resolve each action in combat without lowering the depth of character builds. You can still make glass cannons, soak tank and what have you.

Try, try again

A thief walks up to a lock. They roll to pick the lock, and they fail. They roll again, and they fail. Someone else from the party decides to give that same lock a try, they roll, and they fail. Then the thief rolls again, succeeds and the party moves on.

A lot of you could probably think back to something like this happening in your game, probably even the exact same scenario. It's an example of a roll that's not impactful if you fail it. Sure, if you only had one chance to pick that lock, that would be something, but if you're picking a lock that's the only way through to continue your adventure, failure is not really an option.

There are two ways of addressing this issue - either ignore the roll entirely if the characters are skilled and equipped enough for it to not be a challenge, or think of some meaningful consequences for failed rolls.

The first approach can be found for example in the Vampire the Masquerade games - if your dice pool for a roll exceeds the difficulty of the roll, you automatically succeed at the roll (under certain conditions). Even if your system doesn't support it, you can usually tell when some roll is beneath your player's character - just roll with the fiction and move on.

The second approach is very prominent in the Powered by the Apocalypse systems like Fellowship. Each time you fail a roll, either there are set consequences to be had, or the GM can use Cuts against you. Maybe they'll "Show signs of an approaching threat" - you made noise and attracted the guards to your location, or "Use up or take away their resources" - your lock pics gear breaks and now you have to batter the door down, etc.

At any rate, you want the roll to be important, whether it succeeds or fails. If it's not important, it's not necessary.

Conclusions

If you can help it, try making every roll in your game be meaningful and impactful. Sure, sometimes it's fun to ace a roll you're really good at, but you can just as easily narrate how awesome you are when you auto succeed. Try giving your rolls weight for failure beyond "nothing changes" - that outcome is the most boring of them all.

Running in place in Godbound

My group and I have played Godbound for a long while now. One thing we noticed while playing this game is that while this game features a fair bit of progression, a lot of it ends up just being running in place or falling behind. This might be a bit emblematic of a few other RPGs.

Basic Attack Bonus vs Armour Class, Health vs Damage, Effort vs Effort

A very emblematic problem of running in place in Godbound can be seen in Basic Attack Bonus vs enemy Armour Class. Every level you add +1 to your BAB, meaning it is easier for you to hit your enemies. However, as you naturally progress through the game, you will be encountering enemies with lower and lower AC. So you might start off with BAB of +1 attacking an enemy with AC of 9 (total +10 to hit) and end the game with BAB of +10 and enemies with AC of 0 (again, total of +10 to hit).

This perhaps ties to the inherent problems with D20 systems - the variance of a roll is really too big, so you can only have a "sort of fair" dice results in the middle of the scale. Rolling +5 to hit feels fundamentally different from +10 or +15, so you can't let the players move too far off the middle of the scale without running into really un-fun scenarios ("both me and the enemy only hit once every 5 rolls, wee...").

It's a similar deal when you're talking about Health vs Damage Output - you scale in how much HP you have, and enemies get more attacks, more Straight Damage and so on. You might be getting stronger, but enemies hit harder too to keep up...

Same deal with the Effort economy - you can power more Gifts the higher level you are, but the main enemies you are facing will usually have a similarly higher Effort pool to wear you down with.

Inverse growth of magical competency

In Godbound, you have a lot of Gifts that let you do some cool things - mind control people, become invisible, etc. However, how competent the character is at doing those things is outside of their control really because they never get to roll - the roll is always made as a Saving Throw by the enemies.

Say, you are the sneakiest sneak thief of all the land. You have a Fact of being from a sneaky race, and another Fact about being a sneaky thief. You have the Word of Deception and you hit your Dexterity cap of 18. How good are you at sneaking? Well, if you use Walking Ghost, enemies roll a Spirit Save and that's how sneaky you are.

Now, what if you were a Godbound of bells and whistles, clad in full plate armour and coming from a race of sentient accordions? Well, if you happen to have the Word of Deception and use Walking Ghost - it's still your enemies' Spirit Save.

There is no way to become more competent at sneaking by your enemies, other than the shifting definition of a "Worthy Foe" (which is based on your level vs enemy hit points). However, as the game would naturally go up in scale, you wouldn't be facing off the same mortal guards with a crappy Spirit Save, but instead progressing towards some supernatural critters with way better Saves.

Non-magical competency might work a bit better, but usually that would involve taking a Fact to get +4 to roll or upping one of your Attributes for a simpler Attribute Check roll.

This means as the game progresses, you are getting proportionally worse and worse at being competent in what you do (in relation to the stronger threats you are facing) and there is no way to boost that.

Falling behind on the treadmill

While it might be bad to be running in place, it can feel even worse when you begin to fall behind because you decide to focus elsewhere. Say, if you are a non-combat character you might be so-so at kicking butt early on, but if you decide to continue focus on building a character that's not meant for combat, you might find it impossible to keep up when the bigger baddies show up.

The game seems to be focused on characters being at least somewhat combat-oriented, with a lot of options for maxing out damage, avoiding damage, or dealing damage in a new way. However, if you go against an opponent that dishes out a lot of hurt and you can't negate that damage like the rest of your party, you might go down in one or two rounds.

If you don't scale at a similar pace in combat as the rest of your Pantheon or the enemies you are facing off against, it can feel pretty bad to fall behind...

Actual character growth - versatility

One area in Godbound where some actual growth happens is the character versatility. Every level you buy more Gifts, which usually means you can use them more readily and more often, allowing you to overcome a more diverse range of problems. This might not translate well into combat, but gets really handy for everything else.

Conclusions

My GM often says something to the effect of "There is no difference between Level 1 and Level 20 dungeon diving in Dungeons and Dragons - the numbers just keep getting bigger", and that seems to pretty much hold true for Godbound as well. The player characters' numbers are getting bigger, the enemy numbers are getting bigger, the scale might be grander, but the game is mostly the same.

Mechanics inform the playstyle

My group and I tend to play a lot of different RPGs and get exposed to a lot of different ways of handling the same design problems. How do you represent health? What do you roll for deception? How do you handle combat? How do you differentiate between different character types? How do you handle XP? How a given system handles these things and how much space is devoted to various things informs what game you will be playing.

Combat vs talking and the Edge system from Savage Worlds

We started running our Ravenloft game (Conspiracy at Krezk) using Savage Worlds system, mostly to test the waters before we delved deep with Savage Rifts and Rifts vs Star Wars. We aimed to create some more down-to-earth characters that aren't just some combat-focused adventurers. We hoped to find a lot of interesting options due to the large amount of books in the Savage Worlds roster and the system's popularity for making an interesting range of characters. As it turns out, a lot of the areas I wanted to take my character were severely limited.

In Savage Worlds, the system revolves around Skills and Edges. The first just inform what die you roll. The second are some more unique perks your character can take to augment a given playstyle.

I was thinking about making a character that could talk well to people. The options for that were being Attractive, being Very Attractive, being a Noble, or being Charismatic. All except Noble just give you +2 to roll, which is the blandest thing you can get from an Edge.

Now, what are my options if I want to be a combat character? Block, Improved Block, Brawler, Bruiser, Combat Reflexes, Counterattack, Improved Counterattack, Dodge, Improved Dodge, Elan, Extraction, Improved Extraction, First Strike, Improved First Strike, Florentine, Frenzy, Improved Frenzy, Giant Killer, Hard to Kill, Harder to Kill, Improvisational Fighter, Killer Instinct, Level Headed, Improved Level Headed, Marksman, Martial Artist, Improved Martial Artist, Nerves of Steel, Improved Nerves of Steel, No Mercy, Quick Draw, Rock and Roll, Steady Hands, Sweep, Improved Sweep, Trademark Weapon, Improved Trademark Weapon and Two-Fisted.

Similarly, there is a lot of emphasis and page count devoted to armour, weapons, combat vehicles, combat manoeuvres, healing, movement rate, as well as different monsters and burst templates you can apply. Talking to people is 1 page in this 161 page book.

Unsurprisingly, the system was only useful when we engaged in combat and didn't do much for us in other situations. After a few sessions our characters that didn't want to specialise in combat have ran out of Edges to buy that would be meaningful to them. In the end, this wasn't the best engine for the game we were trying to run - one focused around mysteries, exploring the unknown and people getting in over their heads. For that, we had to switch to...

The Lovecraftian horror of Chronicles of Darkness

Chronicles of Darkness is the second edition to the New World of Darkness line, which itself is a successor to the Old World of Darkness line. While the old systems used to be very min-maxy, the new one is less so.

We switched from Savage Worlds into Chronicles of Darkness after one season of our game and the game turned from being an eclectic group of adventurers into a more Lovecraftian tale. The Humanity system forced us to deal with facing off against horrors, dealing with slow erosion of mental sanity, dealing with lingering wounds and so on. On the flip side we also had characters that could persuade people by leaving themselves vulnerable to favours, foster a network of contacts among the militia, or even a character that just built themselves a safe library to study the occult. And all of that felt great!

All of these were natively supported by the system. While in Savage Worlds we most likely wouldn't be using any of these since the rules did not cover them, in Chronicles of Darkness we embraced them since they were right there, and our playstyle changed.

Violence as language in Broken Worlds

Broken Worlds is an RPG set in the Kill Six Billion Demons world. The system is heavily inspired by the Wuxia genre of fiction, and as such, the game revolves around martial arts and thus combat. We gave this game a try and the expectation pretty much matched reality - it was a system where you were expected to engage in combat, let your fists do the talking and communicate via violence. So if you'd go in and expect to have an adventure in the vein of Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky, you would be in the right place. If, however, you'd try to use this system for say, our above example of a more down-to-earth Lovecraftian story with mystery and intrigue, you would be sorely disappointed.

Monopoly and selfishness

Mechanics inform not only the playstyle in RPGs, but the same could be said about board games. And what better example to use than Monopoly:

In Monopoly, the rules incentivise you to be ruthless and cut-throat to win. Even if a player is a nice person in real life, when you start the game, you will inevitably turn into a jerk, because that's how you win. Mechanics inform the playstyle.

Conclusions 

The mechanics of a system inform the playstyle of the players. A system with a heavy emphasis and page count dedicated to combat will inevitably work better if you focus on said combat. If you want your players to engage with your story using something other than their weapons, you should use a system that incentivises non-combat solutions. While you can always pull the "just roleplay it out" card, everyone will often try to resort to the path of least resistance and go with the listed mechanics with predictable outcomes rather than more nebulous "I think this should work but the rules don't say anything about it".

If you are a game designer, keep those things in mind - don't just grab one system of mechanics and expect it to make your game play the way you intended. Look at what you want the players to experience and roleplay while they play your game and then either find a system that caters to that, or make one yourself.

Dexterity is King

While playing various RPGs, you sometimes see tropes and patterns emerge. We recently started playing Exalted vs the World of Darkness (a "fan" expansion for Old World of Darkness from a former Exalted and 20th edition oWoD writer), and coming back from playing a fair share of Chronicles of Darkness, we were reminded of an old trope - Dexterity is King.

Dexterity is King means that among all stats a character has, one of them is clearly more important than others. That one stat is usually Dexterity. Here are some examples of why that might be.

Godbound

Godbound is an OSR-based system that uses the well known stats of Strength, Constitution, Dexterity, Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma. You can use any of those stats for rolling checks ("roll vs Charisma to try to persuade someone") and two stats always contribute to a saving throw. However, when it comes to combat, you only use the first three stats.

Constitution gives you HP, and that's all it does. Strength and Dexterity are used when you attack something. If you are doing melee, you use Strength, and if you do ranged, you use Dexterity. Your to-hit is determined by the attribute used, your damage modifier is also determined by the attribute used. In that regard, they are interchangeable. However, on top of that, Dexterity is also used to determine your Armour Class, something that's useful for any combat character.

With all of that, if you are going strictly for optimal play, why wouldn't you always take max Dexterity and dump Strength? Being able to not only hit things at a range but also get better armour while you're at it is clearly a better option. Of course, flavouring your character and the choice of Words will encourage you to pick the other option, but usually you'll never make Dexterity your dump stat in Godbound.

Stars Without Number - Int is king too!

Stars Without Number (looking at the Revised Edition here) is another OSR-based system from the same author. Unsurprisingly, Dexterity is also King here - it still modifies your Armour Class, is used by ranged weapons, etc. On top of that it modifies your Initiative, and can be used for a variety of spaceship rolls.

The system does have a few things going for it though - melee weapons have an additional Shock amount of damage they inflict even on a miss, and there are a few Foci around you can use to make yourself quite viable as a melee or hand-to-hand combatant in a scifi setting with plasma guns.

While running a game in SWN, we came across another interesting quirk however - Intelligence can be King too. My specific character was a True AI and was very starship-focused. As it turned out, the system around using spaceships was built around the concept that some characters might not have Dexterity since they could lack a humanoid, physical body (such as a Virtual Intelligence that is the ship, or an AI that gets plugged into the ship). So now pretty much every starship-related roll can be made with Intelligence - piloting, gunnery, star navigation, ECM jamming, etc. On top of that, True AI use Intelligence modifier to get more Processing (power points used to power their "magic"). Int became such a dominant attribute that I developed a 6 level plan for my character to increase it by 4 ranks just to get that extra +1, which was a more optimal strategy than increasing my skills.

Mouse Guard - Attack is King

Mouse Guard is an RPG set in the comic book setting sharing the same name. In this system, the conflict resolution revolves around picking a series of actions to carry out against your opponent. You can Attack, Defend, Manoeuvre or Feint. Attack trumps Feint, Feint trumps Defend, and the other combinations carry out either independently or based on the difference between successes. Attack and Manoeuvre don't have any hard counters. Manoeuvre lets you gain some advantage over your next action, while Attack directly helps you resolve a conflict.

As such, after playing through an entire season of Mouse Guard, we came to the conclusion that you should "never not be Attacking" - it helps you achieve your goal directly, do it fast (which is always good - you don't want to take too long and be attacked more yourself), and there is no way to directly counter it. If the system even had one hard counter to Attack, this wouldn't be the case, but alas.

Old World of Darkness - Dex for everything

Old World of Darkness, even with its 20th anniversary editions, still uses Dexterity for everything. Rolling to-hit, whether it's with a gun, a thrown rock, a sword or with a fist, is a Dexterity roll with an appropriate skill. Block, Dodge, Parry? That's also Dexterity! Bite, Claw, Disarm, Kick, Sweep? All Dex! Initiative? Dex plus Wits. Moreover, after you roll to-hit, your successes carry over to become damage dice, so even if you are using a Sword that does Strength +2 damage, you can basically add half of your Dexterity on top of that. Since the system is also very minmaxy, if you are not starting the game with Dexterity 4 or 5, you are doing yourself a disservice!

Chronicles of Darkness - the king is mostly dead

With the release of the New World of Darkness, or later the Chronicles of Darkness, we finally have a system where Dexterity has been reigned in. In this system a lot of other stats have been given more usefulness. When you roll to-hit, you use Strength for melee or unarmed, and Dexterity only for ranged. Your to-hit roll is also your damage roll, so there is no weird carry-over. Your Defence is the lower of your Dexterity or Wits plus Athletics skill, so even if you don't have high Dex you can compensate. Initiative is Dexterity and Composure, while Speed is Strength and Dexterity. Your Stamina determines your hit points.

All in all, the many uses for Attributes allow you to build some very interesting characters without making them entirely useless - you can have a high Dexterity character that is hard to hit, but you'll probably be sacrificing Willpower or Stamina. You can have a character that doesn't have any Dexterity but can still brawl like a boss. Or you can have a tank that compensates for his lack of Dexterity, Wits or Strength by hitting the gym to get more Athletics to raise their Defence. And with the system being much more forgiving on the XP costs, you can easily tailor your build to match what is needed.

Conclusions

When designing an RPG system, you should avoid putting too much power into a single attribute or other gameplay element. The game is much more enjoyable when there are multiple "good solutions" rather than one "right solution".

Too strong for fun, too good to be useful, and the paradox of power

RPGs are often an empowerment fantasy - a game where you take on roles of heroes or characters that are larger than life. You want to feel mighty, and often want to the "the strongest there ever was", or at least strive to. However, achieving that goal might be less fun than you think.

Our group has been playing Godbound for a long while. It's a game where you play high-power demigods (think higher-end comicbook heroes like Thor or Superman). A few months back we were excited to dig into a new expansion for that system called Lexicon of the Throne, which introduced a lot of new Words (superpower themes like "god of cities", or "god of war") to build your characters. One of the better Words out there is the Word of Dragons, letting you essentially play Smaug.

This is your PC

Now, a lot of Words in Godbound are pretty powerful, letting you go toe to toe with the biggest baddies around and reshape the world to your whim. However, there are two powers in the Word of Dragons that essentially break a part of the game - Breath of Death and Legion's Bane. The first power lets you decimate large armies with your dragon breath of choice, be it fire, shrapnel or liquid LSD. The second is pretty self-explanatory, you can kill large armies with ease, to the point you can wipe entire groups of mooks without even rolling. So once again, you are Smaug, your enemies are Lake-town:

And my breath - death!

Now, with such awesome power, it must be amazing to play as the Dragon, right? Well, not when it comes to actually using those two powers. Pretty much as soon as you take them, they become meaningless, and here is why.

Godbound operates on OSR rules, but condenses a lot of numbers down, so you don't do individual D&D-like hit points in damage, but entire hit dice. A typical Godbound can output about 4 hit dice of damage to an enemy, which usually has 15HD of health on the low end to 50 on the high end. Sometimes you can output as much as 10HD of damage to enemies that are particularly weak to your powers - a Godbound of Bow can kill armies, a Godbound of Artifice can kill constructs, etc. Those are some good numbers to pull.

Breath of Death can pull upwards of, on average, 90 damage if you're top level Godbound. And that's average - you could technically roll a perfect roll and do 180 damage, AoE, to mobs. There isn't really a grouping of mobs that could survive that hit. Again, you are Smaug, they are Lake-town.

(For those that know Godbound and wonder how this is possible - Breath of Death does 1d6 damage per level, triple to mobs, and is AoE. By rules presented in Godbound, AoE attacks against mobs do straight damage, so you are doing 1d6 x 3 straight damage per level.)

Legion's Bane is a much more direct power, pretty much boiling down to "if the mooks are weak enough, you automatically hit them and kill them outright, all of them". As my GM put it in one of our sessions - "you punch someone, and everyone in the three mile radius of the same socioeconomic status explode". To weaker mobs, you are One Punch Man, and the groups is one enemy for you.

Pretty much taking the Word of the Dragon makes you the designated "mob slayer" of the party. So this must be an awesome power, right? Well, sort of the opposite. Once you take the power to one punch kill mobs, mobs become pretty meaningless in the game, so putting them into the fight on the GM part is also rather pointless. Now the game turned from something like Dynasty Warrior, where you would have to cleave through enemies that might overwhelm you in the right combination, into One Punch Man, where the only meaning you can derive comes from reflecting on the power you have.

Now, that sort of reflection can be interesting, but the game has to be geared to allow for such self-analysis. Godbound doesn't have any explicit tools or prompts for things like that, but the genre it occupies (games of mythical heroes) might be implying that theme - you should be talking about morality, philosophy and so on in light of your god-like powers.

All in all, while having powers that let you specialise and be awesome at something, getting powers that make a part of the game so inconsequential they become meaningless might be detrimental overall. There are things out there that are too good to be useful in RPGs.

Contact - one of the best worst RPGs you'll never play

While back my gaming group have been considering giving CONTACT - Tactical Alien Defense Role-Playing Game a shot. We were initially really enthusiastic about it since the game has had a lot of good things going for it. Unfortunately, after looking into it and familiarising ourselves with the system for awhile, we decided it wouldn't be a good game for us. Below are some of the reasons why you should give Contact a try, and the core reasons why we didn't decide on playing it.

The Good

Contact is basically X-COM the game. You play the role of an OMEGA operative hoping to fight off an alien invasion by shooting aliens and researching their tech to shoot aliens more effectively. Between skirmishes you will also be managing an entire base of operations to help you get an edge over the invaders.

Characters are created using a point build system. You pay for your attributes, your skills, as well as special traits ("I'm very educated", "I'm a junkie", etc.), biomods, gear and so on. Everything comes from the same pool of points, but you also have some restrictions on how many points you can spend on what so you don't end up with unbalanced builds.

The same character creation process is also used for making more unusual characters - you can play as an alien, a full blown robot, and you even use the same approach to making dog companions if you're a dog handler character. The system is very neat and looks rather balanced.

You can start the game as a low-tech tachikoma

It seems that the game is focused on the players having a larger roster of characters, just like in X-com. To maintain and balance that, we have the Base Management Simulation component. It basically boils down to the players managing a budget of a base - hiring staff, building new buildings and upgrading them. While it might sound daunting, it is really streamlined and should be approachable for a lot of groups (then again, I enjoy spreadsheets in space, so take it with a grain of salt ;) ). Each mission feeds funds into BMS on top of a monthly budget, so the players should have plenty of funds to make their base their own and outfit their troops with some good gear.

Now, the best gear in the game is initially locked off. While the players have access to futuristic tech like robots, lasers and cybernetic implants, there is another level of gear they can unlock over the course of the game. This is accomplished through Research Projects. Just like in X-com, the players gather some alien bits and bobs, hire some researchers and in the next fiscal quarter they too can be angels of death clad in power armour. The game doesn't feature a research tree, but the available projects should feel rewarding to the group without feeling repetitive.

You too could be this awesome!

So with the characters ready and geared up, the military industrial complex humming along and the research lab going, the players should be in for some great fun, right? Well, not exactly...

The Bad

Let's say you want to shoot an alien with a burst from your slag gun. How complicated can that be you might ask? Well...

You take your weapon you want to use, check its firing mode to determine how many Action Points you have to spend to use it. You take your skill with using the weapon, apply weapon's quality (good guns are easier to shoot), your damage modifier, add some situational modifiers (light level, size of opponent, etc.). Determine the distance to the target and apply distance penalty. If the enemy is behind cover, apply twice the percentage of their body that is behind cover as a negative modifier. If you are aiming, apply a modifier based on the limb you're targeting. That's roughly your to-hit chance. You roll your die and you hit! Congrats, now let's figure out the damage you do...

You used AP ammo, so you do Ballistic Damage. The target has Ballistic Armour, but luckily you ignore half of it thanks to AP ammo. You take the Armour amount and subtract that amount from your Ballistic Damage. Whatever is left is applied as Damage, after you reduce it by 10% because AP ammo. Whatever was soaked by Ballistic Armour gets converted to Bashing Impact Damage, but luckily enough, the enemy also has Impact Amour! We subtract that Armour value from the Damage. We have some more Impact Damage still remaining, but luckily our body is resilient against this damage - we subtract our Mass score from the Damage - whatever gets subtracted is converted to Fatigue. Apply the remaining overflow Damage.

Now, do this all over again for every other bullet in the burst! Oh, and by the way - with each bullet fired apply a negative modifier based on the difference between weapon's minimum strength requirements and character's Strength. Oh, and only the first bullet in a burst is aimed, so for other ones roll a random location.

If a character takes too much damage their limbs can get crippled and you get some extra effects. If you hit the same location again the limb can get re-crippled. With wounds piling on you get negative modifiers to hit based on those wounds and your Pain Tolerance. The same goes for Fatigue and E. Tolerance. Oh and shotguns have a spread cone.

Congrats, after a few paragraphs you have finished playing one character's action. Now repeat this for every character and enemy, multiply that by the length of the encounter and you have one session's worth of math. Now repeat this every session from day one until the aliens are stopped. This was so tedious I spend a few weeks trying to streamline it with the use of Google Sheets and those still needed an operations manual.

This is the main reason why Contact may be one of the best worst RPGs you will never play - the game is a faithful conversion of the X-COM game into the RPG format that expects you to simulate with dice and spreadsheets what the PC would simulate for you in the background. I know perhaps one or two people that would tolerate this and could bear through this complexity, but I wouldn't want to subject less hardcore members of our group to this.

Now, there is another major gripe with an X-COM style game and that is the variety of encoutners you could have in the game. Contact is focused on sessions that boil down to "go shoot aliens". Whether you're dealing with a crashed UFO, aliens invading a city, some bigger crashed UFO, an alien base or what have you - bullets will be flying and aliens will be dying. Sure, you can have a beach episode where the characters are just interacting. You can have a session where the characters are negotiating with the locals, but there is only so much you can progress the campaign before you go shoot the aliens again for their loot and corpses. So while the Base Management Simulation encourages you to have a longer running game, you will be running the same types of missions on repeat. Variety is good for longevity (as discussed before), and this game doesn't seem to have it.

The most interesting scenarios we could've think of to run with this game were either "a private 80's style corporation finds a Stargate and they explore alien worlds to loot and sell the R&D to fund themselves while trying to keep the military from snooping around", or "a private military corporation is sitting in the Middle East while the aliens are invading. The local powers are engaged in a Syria-like conflict with multiple groups being influenced by multiple foreign powers. Try not to take sides in the conflict while you have to trade arms for alien crash sites and scrap.". While either of those would make for a more compelling game, they would probably still not have enough varied content to carry a longer game.

Conclusions

Contact is a game with a number of great systems. The character generation appears to be balanced between normal humans, full on robots and aliens. The Base Management Simulation and Research Projects are a cool concept that gives the players an overarching goal and rewards to work towards.

At the same time, the game is too simulation-heavy to be enjoyable. The combat has so many variables it can take a long time to properly execute a single round, let alone a larger engagement. The game concept itself doesn't lend itself to a long campaign either - the system appears to be focused on one type of story being played in many variations.

Overall, I would recommend checking Contact for the Base Management Simulation metagame alone if it's a component you're interested in adding to your game. However, I can't recommend it as a game as is due to its overly complicated mechanics.