RPG betrayals and the meta game of friendship - the finale of the Crown of Candy

Recently, I've been watching some Dimension 20's Crown of Candy series, which was a somewhat ruthless game reminiscent of Game of Thrones wrapped in a sentient food aesthetic. Spoiler warning for the series - at the end of the series when the players won their decisive victory, they were faced with a dilemma - do they keep their fragile alliance, or do they backstab one another to have it all. This was an interesting example of the meta game of friendship you build around the table I'd like to discuss today.

The Crown of Candy trailer

Trust, friendships and bleed at the table

As discussed before, different tables will have a different level of trust built up over time of playing together for a while. If you're playing with randos online, chances are someone might turn out to be an asshole and backstab everyone at a drop of a hat. If you have a stable game going, usually you learn not to do that and respect one another's characters (unless everyone is into playing a backstab game of course, then all bets are off).

Along with that, you build friendships with the people you play, bonding over the many adventures you had together.

Every now and then, you also can experience bleed - mixing in-game and out-of-game feelings, grudges, etc. If someone hurt your character, you can feel personally hurt. It comes with the territory of being really invested in a game and a character.

Those three factors contribute to the meta game of friendship - when you play an RPG, you're not only playing the game, but also engaging with your fellow players at the table at the same time. Because of this, you tend to avoid doing something that might upset the other players, even if it would fit the narrative to do so (at least not without checking in with them first). If you don't, you might "win" something in the game, but lose someone's trust or friendship that would carry over to your future games.

This is kind of reminiscent of GeekNights' "Practical Game Theory" panel where they discuss threats and trust - if you play a game repeatedly, you can make credible threats that will affect the games you're playing. If you always punish anyone that messes with you to ensure they don't win even if you lose, eventually they will learn not to mess with you:

So the trust and betrayal in RPG would work similarly to game theory - by cooperating everyone gains something, but if you betray someone you break their trust and everyone is worse off in the long-term.

The Crown of Candy situation

The dilemma at the end of the Crown of Candy was like this - On one side you had Queen Saccharina, played by Emily Axford, daughter of King Amethar from his first marriage, abandoned by her mother at a church orphanage due to her magical prowess (non-cleric magic in the setting was heretical). She later became a queen of outlaws living at the edge of Candian society. After joining the game, she was crowned the Queen of Candia (after her father lost his claim to the throne), obtained a hatchling dragon and let it feed on the hearts of the priests to let it grow to an adult size by the time of the final battle. On the other side you had Princess Ruby, played by Siobhan Thompson, was a rogue princess, twin to Emily's previous character, Princess Jet, and half-sister to Saccharina. She didn't approve of Saccharina's ways and knew what kind of future her reign might bring.

Those two players were given an option to backstab one another at the end of the game. Ruby knew Saccharina would upend the status quo and go on a crusade to eradicate much of the church, and would probably be unfit to rule Candia. Saccharina was advised that the nobles look down on her due to her upbringing and would gladly kill her now that they don't need her to retake Candia.

So did either of them do it?

Watching the video, I had no doubt of the outcome. Siobhan and Emily have played through 5 series together, everyone at the table has been nice to each other, they have faced many hardships together in this series, playing inseparable twins that schemed together. They wouldn't backstab each other's characters, especially given that this was the end of the series - there was nothing for them to gain beyond a different epilogue. And yeah, shocking nobody, they decided to trust one another and have a happy ending together.

Last minute betrayal would certainly make for a shocking moment in the show, but would probably cause some strife between the caste members and some longer-term distrust. Sure, they are professionals, but if you watch the behind the scenes of the series they are jokingly dissing on the GM for backstabbing and killing their characters a few times in the series.

Backstabs in other actual plays

Thinking about it, I haven't really seen that many other actual plays that have the characters backstabbing one another. I've watched a number of other Dimension 20 shows, as well as various games by Arms of the Tide, A Pair of Dice Lost, RPG Clinic, etc. and played a lot of games on our very own podcast - Sponsored by Nobody. Sure, we had a number of "a character does whatever they want disregarding what others think" moments in Evicting Epistle, Princes of the Universe, Conspiracy at Krezk, etc. However, only one series had a genuine betrayal.

In Princes of the Universe (spoilers), there was one situation that was almost that, and one that was a full-on "I'm the bad guy". The first one was when the party managed to find the Eye of Autochthon, an ancient relict of nigh-infinite power. They wanted to use it to wake up a titan, but not before everyone had a mexican standoff to make sure nobody else would steal it and use it for their own goals. My character was a Night Caste (a hero-thief essentially) and was the only one that could actually steal it without anyone having a counter to his powers, so the GM asked me if I do it. In the end I decided not to, since it would turn the game into PVP, and being 1v4 had really poor odds. Plus it would be an asshole thing to do.

The other situation came at the end of the whole game, where after fighting the Scarlet Empress, the ruler of the world, the party was faced with a secret foe that was pulling the strings all along. During that fight, one of the PCs, Longhorn Desertwolf, turned on the rest of the party and was revealed to have been working for that foe all along. The reason why that twist worked though was because of how that character entered the story.

See, while getting the Eye of Autochthon, the party went to a weird proto-dimension that was all weird and wonky. They met alternative versions of themselves from another part of the multiverse. One of the PCs, Longhorn Seawolf, was already on a hit list for two other PCs due to letting a number of their children die in a fight, so it was only a matter of time before he'd be killed. So instead, we decided to trade our Seawolf for their Desertwolf to solve the issue of a character needing to be gotten rid of and also to give the player a similar character they could wrap the series with. None of the NPCs believed what happened, but they learned not to question our crazy antics a long time ago. But at the end of the series it turned out they were right - we did inadvertently trade an ally for a wolf in sheep's clothing that turned out to be orchestrated by the big bad evil guy. So that betrayal and backstab felt alright, especially since in the end we managed to kick both of their asses and win. If Desertwolf would've turned out to be victorious, I know of one or two players that would've flipped the table and not forgiven it - it would've felt that the last two or so years the game was running was a complete waste.

So lesson learned - if you want to have someone betray and backstab the party, they should probably lose to make the game less unsatisfying...

Conclusions

While one character betraying another might be an interesting twist in a TV show, it's usually unsatisfying in an RPG if you're talking about two PCs. Unless the game is set up from the get-go to support it, or the player explicitly allow for such an ending to their character, it can be more damaging to the long-term relationships between the players than it is worth.

Crown of Thunders and incorporating player ideas into the game

RPGs are an inherently collaborative medium. Often the GM will be put in the position of the authority to shape the world and direct how it responds to players' actions, but that doesn't strictly need to be the case. In Fellowship there is a clear distinction in who can Command Lore about various things, usually giving Players the control over the lore surrounding their people (so an Elf character Commands who elves are in the setting, whether they are pixies, aliens or what have you). While this approach might not be useful in all games (such as games with established lore, like Star Wars), you can still incorporate the players' creativity in how the world works on a smaller level.

In our lengthy Princes of the Universe Exalted campaign we ran into an interesting situation. My character wanted to unite the setting's dysfunctional bureaucratic heaven to work for our characters. To that end, I suggested the character would go on a quest to find an artefact, the Crown of Thunders, and use it as a symbol to rally the bickering gods. The Crown had an important symbolic meaning to the gods and the Exalts, but it wasn't a concrete "this crown makes you a ruler of the heaven and solves your issue" thing. As such, some other players dismissed the idea, but the GM rolled with it without hesitation, and even the various NPCs started reinforcing the idea soon after. It was a nice way of approaching problem solving in RPGs - a player's idea becomes a solution to the problem by the dint of player suggesting it as a solution.

Sol Invictus giving Queen Merela the Crown of Thunders
and establishing the Creation Ruling Mandate

While this might be a no-brainer for some people, it's an approach that I don't see mentioned in too many RPGs or adventure modules - you should be aiming to use players' ideas on how things should work in your game. They might miss hints or clues on how some adventure wants them to approach a problem, not know some part of the setting their character might know, or in general not be in the same mindset as the GM. That shouldn't stop them from suggesting how things should be. You don't need to roll with every single thing, but it's definitely a good conversation starter.

As Fellowship hints, the GM is there to create problems for the players to solve. If they were to create solutions, you would either run into GM-PCs that have the foresight given to them by reading the script, or else they might be forcing the players to figure out their moon logic to solve a problem the way they envisioned. Either solution wouldn't be good. Since you can't expect the players to come up with the same ideas as the GM, then of course you need to allow for some leeway in how things can be solved, how the world will react and so on.

You should be leaning into those ideas as a GM - not only asking your players what they want to do, but also what they want to accomplish with their actions. There is a difference between "I want to beat the guard up" and "I want to beat the guard up to rally the common people to storm the bastille with me" - one sounds like the combat is the end-point, while in the others the violence is a means to an end that might not be clear if it's not spelled out explicitly.

By talking about the desired outcomes you can set the correct expectations and let the players know if their actions won't have the desired outcome. It's best to be up-front about such things than to let players go goblin brain down a dead end. Sometimes that can be a "no", sometimes that can be a compromise ("if you beat this guard, that will work in your favour for convincing the people to rise up"), and sometimes it can lead to some different ideas being worked out ("maybe if you rally the people first and come in as a mob, the guards will actually join your just cause?").

Conclusions

Try  to incorporate your player ideas into the game - you are here to create the story together, and it's good when the world conforms narratively to the player actions and ideas (whether that's reinforcing it, or fighting back against it in a satisfying way ("hey, would you want the system to try crushing you and throwing you in jail for daring to fight the guard to show how the government will oppress you, making your character a martyr?")). Just saying something "won't work" without offering some alternatives isn't as fun as championing even some wacky ideas.

The velvet rope of perceived limits in RPG sessions

Recently in our Star Wars Fellowship game we had a session filled with some roleplay encounters. We talked with a clone trooper conspiracy theorist that believed the Clone Wars were perpetrated by a shadowy presence, a phantom menace, working behind the scenes of both sides of the war. We had a vision of a possible future where we talked in some mummified ally. Finally, we learned why the Big Bad Evil Guy is carrying out his plan of destroying all life in the galaxy. While all of them were interesting scenes that were pure roleplay (like so many people argue you should just roleplay social encounters), talking them over after the session we realised they were hampered a bit by some perceived boundaries mostly made out of the players being too polite to force their way through and not wanting to resort to mechanical rolls to deal with not to lose that flow of conversation. In essence, we were stopped by velvet ropes that prevented the players from taking reign of those scenes.

Velvet ropes of perceived limits

The velvet ropes are the perceived limits of what players think they can do in a given scenario that in actually are soft boundaries - thing they can go around or overcome with some determination. They can be easily mistaken for walls or invisible walls - limits that cannot be overcomed that the GM communicates clearly ("this scenario is about investigating a murder on the Orient Express, you can't just leave the train at the first stop and not come back"), or indirectly ("you try to leave Barovia through the Mist, but you are turned back around"). Both velvet ropes and walls can also come from the system or player's assumption about the game or the system ("in Fellowship the BBEG will never win", "I don't see a rule for stealing someone else's things, I guess I can't do that...").

The biggest issues velvet ropes bring to the game is that at first glance they might appear as invisible walls to the players, and crossing them feels like a slight transgression. Because of that, if things aren't communicated clearly, the players will cut themselves out of exploring a given path the GM would welcome them exploring.

In our examples, the conspiracy theorist clone trooper couldn't be reasoned with, because he was filled with paranoia and conviction. That didn't mean they couldn't be convinced to join the party, stand down or the like, but just talking to him would just make him go in circles. At the same time, in Fellowship, NPC's Stats are only truths if they are undamaged. So you could talk them through things or even punch them, damaging their "I cannot be reasoned with" Stat and make him be able to be reasoned with. That, however, would require the player to stop talking with them and decide to change the reality of the fiction with rolls, which in the flow of the moment can be hard to remember.

In the future vision, the NPC jedi had a hazy recollection of the past and where he was in the "now" of the future. He gave the PC indirect answers - "where are we?", "I don't know, I think we're on a planet, it feels wet...". The player perceived that as an invisible wall, while the GM didn't intend it to be some unknowable truth that he was on Kamino. The player could've pushed the narrative, trying to use his own jedi investigative skills or talk the NPC through focusing to realise where he was and what was going on by rolling an investigative or social roll. But because the player decided to stick with the fiction and just roleplay talking the situation out, those velvet ropes didn't get crossed and the scene felt like a bit of an exposition from someone in a fugue state.

Finally, the talk with the BBEG was all about learning about his motivation and discovering the secret of his plan to wipe out all life in the galaxy to end all suffering. Because his motivation came more from grief of all the suffering he has witnessed as a wartime doctor and was fuelled by evil spirits that feed on suffering rather, you couldn't easily reason him out of that mindset. Doing so would in the terms of the system amount to a social conflict, which would be very dangerous to a solo player. However not engaging with the system meant that once again, the players could not change the mind of someone in a conversation because of those velvet ropes. The BBEG needs to remain irrational for the game to move forward, so you can't just roleplay him changing his mind, but at the same time if you want to change his mind the system has provisions for that, Moves you can use to start accomplishing that.

Overcoming the velvet ropes

The velvet ropes can be overcome, but they require a bit of mental reconditioning. Similarly to how big elephants can be tied down with small ropes, we need to realise that sometimes a perceived wall is as strong of a deterrent as a real wall. The GMs ought to be a bit clearer in communicating what is really a wall, the players need to condition themselves to challenge things that aren't walls, and we all need to learn to weave between roleplaying and using Moves / rolls more regularly when we want to accomplish something that is being softly denied with the velvet ropes.

We may often feel crossing those boundaries would be improper, impolite, or transgressive in some other way. We need to unlearn that while still maintaining friendlyness and respect around the table.

Velvet ropes are one of the reasons you can't just leave all social interactions out to pure roleplay - you need some rules the players can always call on to accomplish what they want and fall back on a concrete outcome. Without those, they may be stuck going in circles trying to reason with someone that can't be reasoned with.

Conclusions

Velvet ropes are weak boundaries and challenges meant to gently dissuade characters from crossing them without applying some conviction. They are not meant to be hard boundaries like walls of the game, but they may often feel like that to some players. It is important to communicate the difference between those at the table and encourage players to push against and cross those ropes to get what they really want out of a scene. Knowing you have some tools like mechanics to push aside those velvet ropes when they get in the way is also a way to help players not get stuck.

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...

Equivalent Dice Theorems of RPGs

My group and I have played a good amount of PbtA games (Fellowship, Legacy, Dungeon World, etc.). After getting used to them we did a one shot game of iHunt, which used the FATE system. During the session my GM remarked how FATE is making him roll again to set our difficulty and how he got used to not having to do that in PbtA. This got me thinking - "was that roll even necessary?", which lead me down a math rabbit hole...

Lets back up and start from beginning.

FATE dice rolls

The FATE system uses FATE dice, an alternative set of D6s that can roll +1, 0 and -1:

FATE Dice

To figure out how much you rolled, you take four FATE Dice, roll them, add their results together and add whatever skill modifier your character has. Then that is either compared to a static number determined by the GM for a "passive opposition", or another roll with modifiers for an "active opposition".

The second situation was what my GM remarked about, and when you think about it - you really don't need to have more than one side rolling dice in this system.

FATE Dice are a bit different from the standard dice - their average roll is a "0", and you have both positive and negative 1s on it. The dice is symmetrical - it doesn't matter if you roll a FATE dice or its opposite, the result is the same.

So if you wanted to avoid the GM having to ever roll dice, you would just make the player roll 8 FATE Dice and give them a passive opposition instead and it would be exactly the same roll (4 GM dice turn into the player rolling 4 opposite dice, which in this system is the same as normal dice, therefore 4+4=8 dice total roll).

This got me thinking - could something similar be done in other systems?

Equivalent dice and rolls

After thinking about it, turns out you can do something similar. Here is a more formal explanation of what that entails if you like math, but to summarise it based on D6s:

Rolling a D6 and rolling "7-D6" is the same - you get the same results. Based on this you can turn any versus roll into a single roll by one side that uses all the dice vs a static number.

If you subtract the average of 3.5 from every side of the D6, you get a symmetrical die D6Sym with sides {-2.5, -1.5, -0.5, 0.5, 1.5, 2.5}. Based on that, rolling a D6 and rolling "3.5+D6Sym" is the same. While this doesn't help much by itself, it allows you to easily make a statistical analysis of rolls involving multiple dice (since the average will always be 0, so you can easily compare these binomial distributions).

Based on the last one, I did some programming to figure out the statistics of rolling various amounts of dice...

Dice roll statistics

This part is probably the hardest to understand. Basically, it boils down to this:

The goal was to figure out rolling how many dice is "good enough" - when you don't need to roll more dice to get "random enough" results.

The more dice you roll, the closer the results is to a binomial distribution, but there are some diminishing returns. After you roll about 3-4 dice the results don't get much better.

Size of the dice rolled doesn't change things that much beyond making the results more granular. Rolling 5D4 is comparable to rolling 5D12.

So where does this all lead us?

Conclusions

When designing a system, you don't really need to roll a lot of dice - rolling more than 3-4 gets a bit excessive and doesn't improve the probabilities of the roll too much.

When you have a versus roll, you only need to have one side of the conflict roll, while the other would provide a static difficulty. The exact math of a roll can be a little complicated, but it's mostly fixed for any given amount of dice.

If you don't want to roll a lot of dice, you can instead roll fewer but bigger dice to get a granular enough result (again providing you're rolling those 3-4 dice).

So after all that, I can say that the GM never needs to roll dice in FATE - the 4 FATE dice the player rolls should be good enough of randomness in most situations. The rest would be taken care of by a static difficulty for them to beat based on how challenging the enemy is.

The same principles could be applied to a lot of systems. Maybe not something that involves a lot of dice manipulation and tricks like CORTEX, but others - maybe. There is definitely room for some systems designed from the ground-up to minimise the amount of rolls you make (similarly to how Chronicles of Darkness limited the amount of chain rolls).

Related articles:

• Make every roll impactful

Related links:

• Central Limit Theorem
• Reddit threads 1 & 2

Meat and potatoes of RPG powers

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

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

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

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

City of Mist - heavy on the stats

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

Stars Without Number's Specialist Focus,

a good example of a bland power.

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

Power Tag questions and answers

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

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

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

Chronicles of Darkness - when quantity turns to quality

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

Nothing can stop a Tasked vampire! Exceptional success!

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

Magic - mostly powers, few stats

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

Even a simple Alarm spell adds something unique to the game

Stats vs powers

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

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

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

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

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...