Play with a purpose - filler content in streams and actual plays, looking at RPG Blender

Recently I've been watching some RPG Blender actual play of Exalted 3E and I've noticed something about a few episodes or scenes - there was basically little of note happening in them! You could summarise entire scenes or hour long episodes down in a sentence or two and not lose much. As someone that is also a part of an actual play group I think there is something to be learned here.

It's time to talk about optimising air time!

Disclaimers

There are a few important disclaimers to get out of the way before we start.

First of all, I understand this was a fan project and should be judged accordingly. I am thankful for the effort the cast has put into entertaining us with their stories, but there will be some criticism of the podcast present.

Secondly, any criticism made against the characters portrayed or how the game played out should not be held as criticism or insults of the game master or the players. Not everyone is perfect and sometimes something doesn’t work out or falls flat in execution. It’s important to keep the art separate from the artist and focus on the former without being disrespectful to the latter.

Thirdly, since I’m also a part of an RPG Actual Play Podcast that features Exalted games, I might be biased towards one interpretation and way of handling things in Exalted that might not agree with how others view and play the game, that’s to be expected. That and some might see criticising other podcasts a conflict of interest or something, so here is your disclaimer.

With that out of the way...

The offenders - idle chat, planning, combat and downtime

So here is an overview of the kind of situations I noticed are just "filler" in the episode, in a sense that you could cut them down or out without losing much of the story.

In Season 1 Episode 1 Welcome To Nexus the second half of the episode boils down to "buy supplies, go down a sewer pipe, dodge molten metal that barely does harm to you, find some tracks and follow them". This takes a good half an hour to get through. Sure, part of it is due to the group being new to the system (they only ever played a one-shot of the system, and Exalted 3E is a bit of a dense game), but the other part is everyone in the party interacting with the same tracks (looking at them, smelling them, tasting them) while mostly chatting idly and repeating what the GM told them.

In Season 1 Episode 11 Freedom For Arvia the second half of the episode consists almost entirely of the group planning what to do next, going over their options for where to turn in their quest basically.

Season 1 Episode 8, 9 and 10 are almost entirely made out of one extended fight.

In Season 1 Episode 13 Perchance to Dream the players describe how they spend a week of downtime, day after day, which boils down to "get paid, do a research in a library, talk about the dream they are having, steal some things, tail someone and do some training".

So let's go over the concepts one by one.

The idle chatter is a bit of a difficult one to avoid. You want your players to be talking to one another and engage with what is being presented, since that is a step up from players being rather passive and not filling the airtime. But on the other hand, if they are already good about creating enough content, you don't want everyone commenting on everything that's going on. If someone is focused on finding a trail, the spotlight is on them to lead the group to follow them. It's their time to shine and have the spotlight! Heck, Exalted 3E even incentivises you with a Role Bonus - you get XP for letting others have a spotlight and being cool according to their character concept:

Over-planning is one of those problems a number of more modern RPGs try to solve. It's a hard habit to break - players want to make optimal decisions and they want to anticipate problems that might arise, but that not only leads to overly-cautious play, but also a lot of air time devoted to chatting about the things you're going to do rather than doing them. Heck, in our Princes of the Universe game those things would even end in a deadlock because players couldn't agree on what to do, or didn't like what others wanted to do. It fostered an attitude of "just do what you want, since the group is more likely to forgive you after the fact since they won't care anymore than agree to let you do it in the first place"...

But at any rate, this kind of planning and deliberation not only takes a good deal of time in the game, it's also not that terribly engaging in comparison to the players actually doing something. It would be much more productive to develop some trust between the players and the GM and speed things along. Players shouldn't deliberate too much on what to do next, and the GM shouldn't punish them for acting without considering everything. Heck, it's more entertaining when not everything goes the way the players wanted and there is some obstacle to overcome, but those shouldn't be seen as a punishment but as a cool action scene you get to do.

Combat being slow is unfortunately the staple of Exalted 3E and many other systems, so it's kind of unavoidable. Heck, in one of our own episodes we spend like, 3 hours doing a fight that amounted to like one or two cool situations. There is a good deal of back and forth in Exalted combat, which is not helped by players being able to "stunt" their defence (cinematically describing how they counter an attack to get a boost to their defense). In a pre-recorded game, ideally you'd edit out a lot of the pauses, rolls, rules lookups and all that, but it can be a bit of a problem for streamed games.

Unfortunately, there isn't a great time saver to be had here unless you'd switch out what game you're using, which might not be the option for every group. Save that, maybe you could try optimising your game to speed things up a little. Maybe limiting the amount of combatants in a fight, maybe cutting down on some stunting (like, assume everyone gets a stunt so people don't have to describe how they parry a sword with their sword for the 20th time), etc.

Downtime, on the other hand, is something that can use a good deal of streamlining. Players should come into it with a purpose - what they want to accomplish. Based on that, everyone could get a scene where they do just that and focus on that being a cool moment, rather than switch between one player and the next every minute as they incrementally do what they set out to do. Give them some time slots. Heck, give the players a heads up that they will be doing a downtime and ask them to come up with interesting things they'd like to do ahead of the session so you'd come into this freeform time knowing what cool stuff will be going down!

Part of the downtime in RPG Blender that make it a little longer was also down to calling for some rolls that didn't need them. The big goal of that session was figuring out a vision the characters were having - where in the world is it located. That was accomplished by paying for a library access and two characters bunkering down to study it over the course of multiple rolls. The thing is, this was basically a start of a new quest for them, so from the narrative perspective, the players couldn't fail to find the location otherwise the entire quest couldn't begin. This makes it so strange why they were rolling to do the research, other than it taking up some time...

How other games streamline this

It's one thing to talk about some lofty theory on what to do and another to point out some systems that are already solving these issues. So let's talk about Fellowship!

Lesson one - supplies. In Fellowship you don't generally buy gear, your character comes with a gear list you pick from during character creation. The game knows you're an adventurer, so you have the basic supplies that don't matter for the story (something to sleep on, clothes, all that jazz). If you need a piece of gear to solve a problem (like a climbing rope, a ladder, some consumable tool, etc.) that's covered under Useful Gear:

So bam - no shopping is needed, if you want to come prepared make sure you have Useful items, no need to plan anything specific. Easy peasy, squeezed lemons.

Lesson two - working together. In Exalted, if multiple people are working together, first person rolls a check and the number of successes are added as dice to the next person's roll. Also, since this is Exalted, both of them will be stunting to describe how they are helping and so on and so on. That's like twice the amount of descriptions and rolls than you need. In Fellowship that's Bond That Bind Us:

People declare they are doing the same thing together, only one of them rolls, but adds an extra die to the roll and everything's easy. You don't have multiple people doing the same roll, but cooperation is still useful. Easy!

Lesson three - failing forward and investigation. Fellowship very much wants your game to progress, even if it is through failure. So when you are examining some clues or doing some research, you will always learn something, even if it backfires in some way. This ensures there is no gridlock in the game because the players roll badly and fail to get the clue they need to unlock the next step of the quest. This is done through Look Closely:

And of course, if you have other people helping you with the research, you use The Bonds That Bind Us so only one person rolls even if multiple people are contributing and so on. It's more efficient!

Lesson four - combat. In Fellowship, the combat isn't turn by turn, but more flowing. The spotlight is on you, you continue rolling until you fail and get into trouble, then the spotlight goes to someone else. If you're not saved from your consequences by the time the spotlight comes back to you, you have to deal with it yourself, usually by taking the hit. This basically means there will be less moving the combat beat by beat from player to player, but having more action scenes going down one after the other.

Lesson five - downtime. In Fellowship, this is a structured activity called A Little Downtime:

This covers doing research, training, having some other cool moments over the course of time passing and so on. It usually takes only minutes though, after which the group accomplishes what they need so they can get to their next objective. Sometimes to deal with a situation you have to "spend" enough scenes of the Downtime addressing the issue. It's still simple and efficient (and ties very neatly into a long rest, healing up, changing gear and how the BBEG progresses their evil plans, but that's a story for another time when we discuss Fellowship in more detail).

Conclusions

When you're creating an RPG stream or an actual play, you want to come into the game and every scene with a direction and a purpose. You want to entertain your audience and respect their time. Chatter for the sense of chatter shouldn't exist - you want to have scenes that further the plot, explore the characters, entertain, world build, etc.

And if you can pick games that streamline the game, or at least steal some good ideas from them to help you with your game, all the better ;).

Too many NPCs - the importance scale

A lot of players love getting attached to random NPCs, all of your Boblin the Goblins. Some games encourage that friend recruiting loop. However, once you get over a certain number of allies, they turn from potentially interesting people into faces in the crowd. It might be good to prepare for that ahead of time.

The one, the only, Boblin the Goblin!

Our group has played a lot of games across a lot of systems. Like many groups, we tend to hoard NPCs and add anyone with a name to our "friends pile". In our biggest game, Princes of the Universe, we had like 50 named important NPC alliess that were on PC's level (on top of a number of lesser named mooks). Unfortunately, as we realised, that number is too big for players to handle, and 95% of them pretty much remained as background characters nobody cared about as the same 3-4 NPCs were always at the forefront.

More recently, we started playing a lot of Fellowship. It's a flexible fantasy game where you can solve your problems in many ways, Undertale or Steven Universe hugs included. The system also encourages you to recruit a lot of a lot of NPCs since you can use them as boosts in future conflicts. At the same time the game expects you to keep track of those NPCs, their health and stats, as wel as how many friendship levels you have with them and what statements are tied to them. It can become a lot to keep track of when you can easily recruit a few Boblins each session.

Friendship acquired! Onto my sheet you go!

It's probably better to accept that most NPCs the players recruit won't be too important and anticipate that both from GM prep perspective, as well as game design perspective. If some NPC turns out to be more impactful, they can be fleshed out more between sessions and upgraded to a more prominent status.

From a game design perspective, you could have important NPCs with full stats and relationships, and minor NPCs that go together on a roster you can "spend" them from to get some appropriate bonus some limited number of times before they move on or fade from importance. Sure, nothing is stopping you from forming a small army of those NPCs, but that would probably fall under different rules than individual companions.

Even your roster of core NPCs will probably be small. From our experience players usually tend to care about one or two key NPCs at a time, and then having a few more in well-defined roles ("these are my two pet wargs", "here are my parents that I begrudgingly interact with as a teen") but are rarely important to draw too much attention to.

Of course this doesn't have to be a hard rule, I'm mostly sharing the observations we had while playing our games.

Conclusions

Players tend to recruit a lot of NPC allies, but often those allies tend not to contribute much to the party or the game afterwards. It's good to be able to place NPCs on an importance scale and handle them accordinly. Players will usually only focus on one or two NPC friends, while others will just become background. It's good for games to also be able to distinguish between important NPCs and the less important ones and don't treat both of them with the same granularity.

Burglars attract locked doors - how character builds shape the game

Burglars want to burgle

My group and I have been playing some Fellowship recently. One of our characters was the Heir, a noble face of the group. Usually our GM plays most NPCs very respectfully since we don't like being mean to one another. However, when the Heir took a Move called "How Dare You", things had to change.

How Dare You lets the Hair do some cool stuff, but in order to trigger the Move, they have to be insulted to their face. This now meant that in order to facilitate the player being able to use their cool new Move, the GM had to have the NPCs insult them semi-regularly, not to be mean, but to let them use How Dare You and shine when they do it. This is a simple example of how character classes, builds and so on should shape the game.

Letting your players shine

One advice I don't see often brought up in books is the idea that you should help your players shine by tailoring the adventure to what their characters are good at. Sure, you hear it in the large sense of having player-driven games, but less so for sprinkling something for the characters to ace.

When you have a burglar character in your game, you want to give them locked doors to unlock more often than if you had a party without a burglar. If you have a character that invested heavily in linguistics, you want languages to be an important part of the game. If you have an Heir that has some cool Moves for when they get insulted, you want to insult them.

Introducing new struggles

Just as some powers may introduce cool new ways for a character to shine, there are also character builds that may introduce new struggles into the game. A Fellowship Remnant can take the Move Boogeyman that's all about being a horror to anyone that's not in the light:

When a player takes that Move, they essentially communicate to the GM that light is now an important part of the game, and whether some encounter takes place at day or night can make a large amount of difference to them. This Move can be rather powerful, so there may be some push and pull between the GM and the Remnant as to whether the situation favours them or not, and how they can manipulate the environment to their advantage.

Similarly, the Heir may take Parry! Counter! Thrust!, which will make them really strong at one on one melee duels:

Now the player will want to engage in more duels, while the GM will want to push against that a bit to make it harder for them to get into duels than if they didn't have that Move so as not to make things too easy.

Of course, you do want Boogeyman and Parry! Counter! Thrust! to trigger every now and then to once again let the players shine, but because they are so strong you don't want them to be a default for every encounter, hence why the GM ought to do some pushback against them every now and then for the players to get their way.

Being mindful of their foibles

Just as various characters have their strong suites, they also have their foibles one should be mindful of when GMing. For example, if you want to stump Fellowship's Swamp Ogres, challenge them with fire:

Other foibles and weaknesses might be less explicit - maybe the party doesn't have a burglar, so presenting them with a locked door is enough to create an issue for them. Maybe a character doesn't have any strengths when it comes to talking with people, so you might want to Put Them On The Spot in some situation where they have to talk their way out of a situation.

Of course, you don't want to do this all the time. Being challenged with a weakness should be a way for the character to shine or maybe for someone else to step in and take the spotlight, it shouldn't be an excuse to do some arms race.

Keeping it all in mind

One of our takeaways from realising the above concepts in our Fellowship games was that it would be useful for the GM to have a handy spreadsheet listing everything the players need to shine, what struggles they are engaging in, as well as how to stump them as needed.

Of course some idealised version of a GM would always remember such things, but we are all human and everyone needs help sometimes managing their mental loads with handy references.

Conclusions

Keep in mind (or on a reference sheet) ways various characters in your games want to shine, what struggles they bring with them to the game, and how to stump a given character as needed. Refer to those things often, give your players opportunities and challenge them as appropriate to get the most out of the game you're playing.

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.

Storytelling with money in RPGs

Recently while browsing /r/RPGdesign I stumbled on a post describing someone's monetary system in their work-in-progress RPG. It was rather bland - "100 copper is 1 silver, 100 silver is 1 gold", plus some stuff about who gets to use what kind of coin and so on. Then I thought to myself - I have a Master of Science in Cryptocurrency, I can put some interesting ideas together from various things I've read in the past. Well, here they are - a few ideas to adding some storytelling flavour to your game with money.

Coinage and taxation as political means

Anyone can create their own currency, but governments (and similar institutions of power) have a way of also forcing that money to circulate. By simply having the government print their own currency as well as require taxes to be collected specifically in that currency you can force the entire population to work towards the government's goals without having to coordinate everything.

If you want to maintain an army, pay them in those coins. If you want to build a monument, pay those workers. If you need to store grain, pay for the grain. Whatever the government Wants is where the money enters the system. Then by that invisible hand of the market everyone has to align themselves with that Want in order to pay their taxes.

If you pay the military, you will have people that feed them, clothe them, make their weapons. Those in turn will require other people to supply grain, cloth, iron and so on.

You could then tell some stories by twisting this formula. Maybe some region doesn't have many coins so everyone is desperate to sell their wares for cheap to get their dues before the taxes are due. Maybe the priorities shift and suddenly you have masons that are out of the job once the castle is done. Maybe you have the land be recently conquered and there is a frenzy to exchange the old currency for the new and re-establish oneself - something some merchants might want to capitalise on if they still do trading with the old rulers of the land.

This one might be subtle, but it serves as a nice shandification of your world.

Shandification of Fallout

("What do they eat?")

Multiple currencies and mercantile campaigns

Something that might not be for every group, but if you're into mercantile campaigns you might dig this - put multiple currencies in your world with no fixed exchange rate. This can be especially good for a campaign that involves a lot of travelling and trading - having currencies be worth different amounts based on the location and the political situation.

Maybe you have Dwarf Silver and Elven Silver that would be worth $1 in their home countries, $0.50 in one another's kingdoms, $0.90 in the human realm, but everything would also fluctuate by ~20% each season. This could encourage the players to plan ahead before they travel as to whether they want to keep cash in coin that might not be worth as much, or buy some goods for trade that should keep their value. Again, not for everyone, but something for people that love spreadsheets.

Then you can try spicing things up by letting players try doing market speculation akin to Spice and Wolf:

Spice and Wolf - an anime about fantasy capitalism

Maybe they earned a large cache of coins from a kingdom that's down on its luck. Now they would be invested in making that kingdom prosper in order to turn their profit into a small fortune. Or maybe they would just hype up the return of a king to power to drive up the demand for that currency only to dump it. Or maybe they buy war bonds of a losing army only to turn that around - it worked for Timothy Dexter...

This could be your party, for good or ill...

Best look at Suns of Gold for a neat way to fluctuate the value of goods and so on, which can apply to currencies as well.

Fiat and political control

In Exalted the most powerful kingdom of the land, the Realm, uses money as means of political control. Their money is based on jade, one of the magical elements of that world that's useful for making artefacts, magic, etc. However, most people will never handle a jade coin - instead, they use fiat banknotes issued by the Realm that are backed by jade. It's even a crime for a non-noble to be using actual jade coins.

By doing this the Realm makes itself indispensable - all the money is backed by it, and if you rebel against it, that will make your money worth less due to the shaken confidence. If you print your own money, that will be treason, if you try using a hard currency that will be a crime, so you have to play along.

Now you can start twisting the formula - what if the government turned a bit incompetent and started printing away the banknotes without the jade to back it? That's some way to get rich for a brief before the system becomes unsustainable in the long-term with fractional reserve banking.

What if jade was a key ingredients for running all magic and magical weapons? Then suddenly the government can start rationing how much power anyone can hold. You can't start a magitech rebellion if you don't have that key raw material to build your army since it was confiscated.

What if you still had to pay taxes in actual jade? That would mean it would have to be extracted from somewhere, bought from abroad or you'd need to go conquer some new lands to get some. Now you have a struggle for driving the big picture conflict.

So how do you rebel against someone that inflicts such control over your life? That's up for the players to tell you!

Moneyless societies

Not everyone in history used money or even barter (shocking, I know. Read Debt: The First 5000 Years to learn more). Now how would players interact with such societies?

First could be a smaller community that operates on doing favours for one another. One day I catch some fish so I give you some, other day your turnips are ready so you'll give me one, etc. The players might come into such village or town and be delighted that they don't need to pay for their food or lodging, only to find the next day the locals ask them for something of theirs - a broche, shoes, etc. Maybe they don't even realise that when someone says "that's a fine bow you have there" they mean "I would like you to give me the bow". Could be an interesting situation to throw your party into to see how they interact with a culture they might not understand.

Another one comes from our Crew Expendable campaign - what if the players found themselves on a planet that's true, functioning communism. Maybe one that uses money for trading with passing merchants, but also one where you can't bribe people because money has no meaning for them. I actually had one player try bribing a government official to let them skip a customs lockdown only for that to fail miserably since of course all the capitalist traders would try bribing them and not understanding their culture...

When you owe a bank a billion dollars...

There is another aspect to money that's not evident when you look at the small picture - money is deeply political. As the saying goes - "If you owe the bank $100 that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem.". The same can be true in your world.

You could have a kingdom that always pays its debts to whoever runs the iron bank, and one that's constantly in debt. When they go to war, you might expect the bank to side with the kingdom that has always paid back, but in reality they stand to gain a lot more by supporting the one that's their debtor. If that kingdom falls, they lose all that money. If it wins, they can exert their power to get that money back.

Similarly, if the ruler gives the power to print the money to a bank, they might be bowing down to them soon enough ("Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws!"). Or maybe the trust in money comes from the royal lineage that's in decline so now the rich are scrambling to find a way to secure their position in the future - either by preserving the bloodline, or by changing their allegiances.

You can create a good deal of political intrigue by just focusing on who owed who how much, whether that's money or favours. After all, the creditor will want to make sure their investment gets repaid...

Choke on your gold

This one comes from a weird source. Back in the day in Poland someone released Play Dirty booklet. Then the same company released a few more booklets in the same series (but spoilet alert - John Wick did not write those, instead they were written by Ignacy Trzewiczek, a polish board game designer). In one of those books, he described a scenario for one of his Neuroshima campaigns (basically different take on Fallout): the players find a hoard of treasure that's immensely valuable (in that world old-world artefacts were valuable, so the treasure was a complete collection of Playboy magazines). The catch it - it's worth so much they will be hunted by everyone and not able to cash out their ill-gotten gains unless they find someone fabulously wealthy to buy it off of them. As soon as anyone would catch a whiff of this kind of wealth, they would be gunned down by raiders, bounty hunters, thieves, you name it.

So this is another way of storytelling with money - give players something so valuable they choke on it. Give them a priceless artefact they can't find anyone with enough gold to buy it, a shiny ship they can't pawn off,  nor crew fully, etc. and challenge them to go nuts with it.

Working poor and #iHunt

As I already touched in "The game is not about that - iHunt, money, and mechanic as a metaphor" - lack of money can also be a statement for your game. It could be that money is only important in rough income brackets like in World of Darkness, or maybe it's only useful as a resource like in Fellowship, or it could be like #iHunt. In that game, you will always be a working poor. You will be doing gigs killing monsters and bringing in some dough, but money is fickle and it never sticks - there are always more debts to pay, more expenses that keep appearing, and you will be back to being broke and in debt in no time. Some might find that stressful, but because the game never tracks your money, it's liberating - you will always be broke, so don't worry. Life will always kick you when you're down, but you will always get back on your feet. It's an interesting twist on the idea of money in games, and it's also a good statement for the game.

Conclusions

There is a lot you can bring into an RPG world or session if you look at money more than just a way of keeping track of players' coffers. It can be a volatile tool, drenched in politics, influence and greed. If those stories work for your table or game - tell them!

Related posts:

• Ships, Shares and Startups - for an interesting way of handling a spaceship like a startup in RPGs
• The game is not about that - iHunt, money, and mechanic as a metaphor - a discussion on a game about being working poor and mechanics focusing on what's important

See also:

• Spice and Wolf - for interesting mercantile-focused anime
• Suns of Gold - best sourcebook for running a trader game
• Debt: The First 5000 Years - for exploration of how money systems worked in the past
• Money as Debt - for an interesting view of how modern money works

Homunculus characters, stat readjustment and character change in RPGs

My group and I play a lot of games with interesting mechanics. Lately, we've been trying Cortex, a modular RPG system where you can tailor the engine to your game needs. One part of the system you can plug into your game are Trait Statements - some statement that focuses and refines a trait for the character that's meant to be challenged in the course of the game. So for example, you can have a Perception trait at D10 with a Statement "Trust No One" attached to it. This would tell you about the character's worldview. Mechanically more importantly, you are supposed to challenge these Statements to get a bonus to a roll and to change your character. So if say, you decide that you can trust someone, you would roll 3D10 instead of 1D10 for that roll, but then you would have to either change the Statement, or change the die associated with the trait, either turning into "Perception D8 Trust No One (and a bonus to something else)", or "Perception D10 I Can Count On Others".

While this mechanic in itself is all well and good, from playing various games over the years, I'm yet to see anyone embrace such character changes / sideways growth as a part of their gaming experience. Let me elaborate.

Homunculus character

More often than not in my experience, when someone makes a character for an RPG they come out as a homunculus, a small version of what the character will be later in the story. When you make a warrior that's all about being honourable and just, they start out as a honourable and just warrior with weak stats, and over the course of the game, they grow into being a honourable and just warrior with strong stats and minor tweaks here and there. If you want to play a crafter, you build a crafter and invest in them being a crafter, etc. Rarely do you see a shift from one to another, or from one fundamental set of beliefs to the next.

Medieval art and homunculus baby Jesus - "perfectly formed and unchaned"

Sure, you could come into a game with a blank slate of a character and form them as they grow. From what I heard this was especially prevalent in oldschool RPGs where most level 1 characters of a given class were about the same, a lot of them wouldn't survive the meat grinder and you wouldn't care about their backstory if they would just die one session later. This kind of attitude is literally related to the term "grognard" in its original meaning.

Similarly, you could build a character and aim for them to have a character arc where they go from a naive child to a grizzled grognard and then to a quiet farmer, but unless you are playing something like Chuubo's where you can literally create an arc for your character, it might be hard to execute.

From my experience, you generally see homunculus characters - a fully formed idea of what the character will be like, with minor wiggle room for the details. If you want to play someone else, you generally don't shift your character from one thing to another using mechanics like the above, you just make a new character.

Similar mechanics

Cortex is not the only game that has mechanics for such character shifts.

In Star Trek Adventures every character has a set of Values, which basically reflect their moral centre. Things like "The Needs of the Many Outweigh the Needs of the Few, or the One", "Holds Everyone to the Highest Standards", "Duty above all else", etc. Those are used to either challenge the characters and make the situation more complicated because of their beliefs, or to let the character challenge that value and change their worldview based on that experience.

This of course is very much keeping with the themes of Star Trek and character development. However, in the game it can feel like you should make characters that don't believe what they should be believing, and your reward for having that character growth is a simple stat readjustment. I've heard a player be frustrated with the game expecting them not to make a character the way they want them to act and constantly questioning what they believe in, and perhaps giving a mechanic to what otherwise might be organic character growth is having the opposite effect (reminds me of Freakonomics...).

In City of Mist your character is built out of themes. Things like "trained boxer", "man of steel", "diviner", "the guy with a van". These themes accrue "fades and cracks" over the course of the game if they are neglected. If you don't show up to your boxing practice, solve problems with guns or generally make that part of your character not important, you will eventually have to replace that themebook for another to reflect what has taken its place in your character's life. While this can be an interesting flow of a story, especially when replacing your themes can turn you fully superhuman or fully mundane with some serious repercussions for either, if the players are too loss-averse or make their characters just right, they might not engage with this mechanic at all.

Many Powered by the Apocalypse games we came across feature an interesting character option for late-game levelling - "make a new character". This is example from The Veil:

In most games this feels a bit strange, but there is perhaps one game where an option like this works - The Sprawl:

The Sprawl is a Cyberpunk game, which comes with its genre expectations of character life being rather cheap and expendable. Since this character level up option costs additionally a good chunk of money, you can see it as "your character gets to retire", rather than being a given for any character. It's something you work extra hard towards.

How we handle these things

I hope our group is not alone in this, but seeing as True Friend needed to be a merit it might not be universal, but we have a relaxed attitude to character building. If you need to tweak your character, just do it, it's fine. If you want to do a complete rewrite of a character for new mechanics, the GM will usually agree (we've done that once in Heaven for Everyone after a new supplement with a new character splats came out). If you want to make a new character because the old one doesn't play that well, pretty much the same applies (we've done that in a yet unpublished Humblewood game).

Couple that with us generally knowing what kind of characters we want to play (and GM being pretty much always on-board with whatever the players come up with), we rarely engage in any of those mechanics. We have character growth and changes as a part of playing our characters in the world (for example in The Living Years demigod Atrus didn't want to form a religion around himself not to impose his worldview onto foreign people, but since they came to him for guidance and after being reassured by one of the NPCs he trusts it's fine, he changed his character's outlook organically).

So perhaps it would be good to make such kind of attitudes something acceptable in more games without necessarily needing to put in mechanics around retiring an old character and making a new one...

Conclusions

A number of games feature mechanics for tweaking your character's stats and worldview. Often, however, these might not be all that useful to the players if they already made the characters exactly the way they want to play them. It's good to give the players options to tweak their characters to better suit their games as they get some hands-on experience with how they play, but making entire mechanics around it might be a bit much...

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...

Problem of Crafting solving every problem

Technology and the industrial revolution have been an unprecedented boon to the global standard of living. With them, we escaped the Malthusian trap and have achieved things that were inconceivable before. However, what would applying a similar scale of progress do in an RPG?

In our Princes of the Universe Exalted game we explored a high-scale, high-power game that involved a character that hyper-specialised in Crafting. By mid-Season 2, they were able to create basically a post-scarcity utopia city in the middle of the desert, complete with climate control, automatic food dispensers, crafting facilities, Big Brother-style AI, etc. Basically, everyone could live your entire life there in luxury and not have to lift a finger, everything was provided for them. Things only escalated from there.

After awhile a lot of problems could just be hand waved away with Crafting. Resource shortages? Throw automated mining at a mountain. Food problems? Automated farms. Money problems? Start selling perfectly crafted luxury items and dominate each and every market out there. Military problems? Create automated drones, power armour, a fleet of airships, etc.

While in Exalted if you wanted to focus on the minutia of Crafting it would boil down to a lot of rolling, in systems like Godbound (which Princes of Universe eventually adopted) such large-scale changes are ingrained into its Dominion system. Heck, in vanilla Godbound you can even make new worshippers to boost yourself even further...

Solving every problem

But back to the topic at hand. Just like technology has solved basically every problem that plagued our civilisations in the past, so too can high-end Crafting solve pretty much every problem a system might have. This is pretty similar to the Quadratic Wizards Problem (where in games like D&D warriors' powers grow linearly, while wizards' power grows quadratically and inevitably they dominate everything) - if there is no balancing factor, Crafting can make anyone else obsolete. A warrior might train a hundred elite monks, but a Crafter might bring a machine gun to a knife fight.

Moreover, if anything can be solved with Crafting, you can run into the Paradox of Plenty - if you don't need people to extract natural resources, till the fields, make things, etc., what good are they?

Sure, you can have them create art, engage in science and philosophy and do everything else that's not manual labour. That can work if you don't push automation too far, but I'm yet to see an RPG where the art output of a nation would be a factor (sounds like a pretty neat concept).

In the end the only thing that's the limit is the setting. In Exalted, pretty much the only thing you couldn't automate was prayers - you needed actual souls for those to work. This was ultimately the use for humans in our game - to generate worship for the demigod player characters.

It takes something from the man

While in real life having a post-scarcity fully automation powered society would be an undeniable good, in RPGs it can "take something from the man" (or the setting) so to say. It takes away a lot of the strife from the setting - you don't have to choose whether sending people to war would mean your civilisation would starve if they didn't return for the harvest, or whether to farm cash crops to pay for a civic project, or food crops to feed the populous. If a single character can solve any problem with Crafting / technology, characters that are not Crafting-focused feel inferior in comparison, and if Crafting can start making other player characters obsolete, the game can just feel bad to play.

This touches on the idea of hard magic systems, where while magic can be awesome, it also needs to have some limits, and it's those limits that make the magic system interesting.

For example, in Godbound, a lot of the high-end Artefact creation requires the use of Celestial Shards, parts of the Engines that run reality. Obtaining them is always an ordeal, and using them essentially always means you are letting the broken world stay broken rather than try fixing it. Similarly, every player character has access to the same ability to change the world with Dominion even if they are not a Crafter, so you don't feel like you're that lesser at fixing problems with your powers.

Technology as corruption

In most games, especially scifi ones, players will almost never not want to get their hands on some cool gadgets, shiny toys or useful gear. Whether that's through looting places or making their own if they can, they will want to get some tech. However, some settings have introduced a counterbalance to the wonders of technology.

The Fading Suns universe is built on the remains of a post scarcity corporate techno utopia. However, the current setting is a space feudal empire built around the Universal Church, whose central doctrine is that technology makes your soul impure and leads to the stars fading. While PCs will fall under the various factions that are given indulgences to use technology for the good of the people (an inquisitor using a spaceship will save more souls than it they couldn't use a spaceship for example), a lot of the setting will carry a stigma attached to the excessive use of technology. So while you could build be more machine than man and run robotic farms, you will be shunned by the peasants you displaced and the church might extradite you all the while keeping a close eye on what other heresy you might be committing.

This kind of thing would of course require some buy-in from the players and a balanced touch from the GM not to be a party pooper, but it can provide an excuse why you can't just rely on technology to solve all your problems in the setting.

Modern thinking

Another interesting topic relating to Crafting and technology solving a lot of problems is that it is a very modern way of thinking. We know where technological progress leads, so we may want our characters to start pushing the setting towards modernity by inventing / reinventing even such simple concepts as basic sanitation or an assembly line. However, we have to remember that sometimes it took forever for new technologies to be created. The first steam engine was first described in the 1st century AD, but it still took 17 centuries for the Industrial Revolution to start. It's fine to work within what the setting is and not having to push it to modernity.

Conclusions

If taken to extremes, Crafting, innovation and technology in RPGs can be setting-changing. On one hand that can be a pretty awesome feeling of bringing a world from the dark ages to a post-scarcity society as a result of one's character's actions, but on the other hand it can detract from the game if people wanted to engage in the sword and sandal fantasy rather than going into scifi territories. 

You can try addressing the problem by choosing a system that balanced Crafting vs other professions or sets some limits on what is possible. Alternatively, you can actively try avoiding the problem by choosing not to have a focused Crafter in your game (we did that with The Living Years, where it was the more challenging way to play, and our motto almost became "if we only took Artifice...").

Like with anything, it's good to talk about your game's vision before the game starts. If you want to turn the setting from fantasy to scifi and people are onboard, go for it. If a game starts getting exponential and snowballing because of Crafting or something similar and you don't want to do that, you can ask people not to do that, etc.

Winning the game in Session 0 with Learning and Teaching...

The Criminal Class - Rogues, Night Caste and their ilk

Many RPGs let you play character types that can only be described by our modern sensibilities as "criminal" or "outcast", whether it's talking about characters that are thieves, assassins, necromancers or something else. This can create an attitude problem, especially when the rest of the party sees themselves as "righteous", or the world doesn't see the "criminal hero" as a "hero".

Scoundrel amongst heroes - the Night Caste

In the base game of Exalted the players play Solars, returning heroes of the world in the vein of Gilgamesh and Hercules. The character "classes" are named after the stations of the sun. The Dawns are the generals and warriors. Zeniths are the priests and leaders. Twilight are sorcerers and scholars. Eclipses are the diplomats. All of them you can see as heroes to be glorified, praised and love by all of their people, getting along and being praised by their fellows. And then you have the last Caste - the Night Caste, the assassins and spies - doesn't sound like something you can trust or be friends with.

Sure, the Night Caste are very valuable when you want to get things done and they compliment the rest of the Castes pretty well, but as far as RPG mentality goes, they feel different.

First of all, they appear less trustworthy than other party members because they are sneaky. They can steal from you, sabotage you, backstab you, lie to your face, etc., that's what they are good at. If you are a paranoid player, you will be paranoid about them, and that's never good.

Secondly, by their nature of being assassins and so on, most of the things they excel at they will try doing alone. This gives them a lot of opportunity to do things without oversight and often give them free reign to call some shots or get the first pick of whatever they steal. They can negotiate with your enemies, steal the best treasure, keep secrets to themselves and so on that the other party members wouldn't be privy to. This again breed more paranoia.

Thirdly, they can be hard to balance encounter-wise and fun-wise. An assassin is supposed to kill people, so if they infiltrate the base of the BBEG, they might want to kill that BBEG by themselves. If they are able to, the rest of the party doesn't get to do some cool fight. If they can't, they might feel like they can't have fun their way. So it's a hard balancing act on how strong they should be vs opponents that might be designed to take most of the party to beat.

Fourthly, if they are too good, they can negate the need for a lot of encounters. We had this problem in Heaven for Everyone - we had a character that cranked Stealth to such a ridiculous degree they could infiltrate whatever they wanted, get all the information they need and sneak out without leaving a trace and avoiding all human and even supernatural guards. We joked that they could just sneak their way to figure out who's the person at the tippe top of a conspiracy pyramid, kill that one person and solve the entire campaign by themselves, but that wouldn't be fun. So we opted not to do that so everyone can have fun.

Fifthly, a lot of what they do is "villain-coded". A Night Caste is all about doing things sneakily, and a lot of activities that require being sneaky are often also shady - running a criminal underground, stealing, assassinations, kidnapping people, espionage, blackmail, stalking, etc. all have negative associations to them, even if they are used for "good" in big quotations. All of these fall under what a Night Caste could easily do, but if they do engage in them they are seen as the bad guys, and perhaps rightfully so.

And finally, these kind of characters are not something you typically glorify - a famous spy is an oxymoron. Sure, in-universe it might not be uncommon, but it still would take a perspective shift for the players at the table to glorify someone running a secret stasi-esque police and a criminal underground silencing dissidents and killing people for future-crimes against the state, in comparison to a Twilight that makes pretty music. All of these sound like something a villain would do from our, modern day perspective, and defending it often is a Thermian Argument.

While a Night Caste might not be the most common go-to when discussing the problem of a criminal RPG class, it is perhaps one of the more fully realised because of the high character agency and power level in Exalted. I've had some experience with that - even in a group of five larger than life narcissists a hero that was all about human sacrifice did not trust me because my character was capable of shady dealings...

A killer is a killer

Going down to more D&D-like things, another similar attitude was perhaps well encompassed by a recent video from All Things DnD:

A paladin and an assassin are one and the same...

Beyond the usual fears of a sneaky character wanting to steal from the party, the characters can argue about the morality of their professions, the honour they possess and so on while at the core of things most if not all D&D characters are killers. This is not through the fault of their own, but by the focus of the game - a combat-focused game like D&D informs the combat-focused characters that play it.

Whether you're a warrior, a paladin, an assassin or the like, in D&D, you kill. One might kill for glory, another for a deity, and yet another for money, but they all kill. To hold that one is immoral while others aren't above one character class can feel bad to play. Sure, most of the time the player opted to play that class on their own "so they should accept its downsides", but it can still be demoralising when other characters boast about how heroic they are or how everyone welcomes them with open arms while potentially shunning the rogue because they are clearly criminal. If they get past that and are all treated like "adventurers" then the situation can graduate upwards to being a Night Caste problem...

Dark magic, evil races, taboo things

In a similar vein you can run into similar type of hang-ups from different kinds of characters. Obviously necromancers, warlocks, orcs, tieflings, or any characters that by default fall on the "evil" side of the alignment chart can be similarly discriminated against by the setting or other players at the table. All such hang-ups should be cleared up before the game starts so everyone would know what they are getting into, how will the game world react to their characters, how will the other players react, etc.

One time we played a game of Godbound in a zombie post-apocalypse setting with one of the characters being a demigod of death. We forgot to discuss how the people of the setting and the PCs from the land that got ravaged by zombies would treat someone that will raise more undead as their main powerset, so we had an argument about it during the game before realising that it would be a really shitty thing to do to tell a player that they couldn't use a large part of their power set due to a hang-up like that mid-game. It was an important lesson to learn.

A pirate is a pirate

On a flip side, sometimes you have to acknowledge when the players are criminals.

A few months back I was looking into running a Stars Without Number campaign. Someone suggested I ran The Pirates of Drinax, one of the more well known campaigns from Traveller. In it, the party is given letters of marque by the king of Drinax so they can be privateers helping restore the kingdom to its former glory.

However, all things considered, it just means the party is a bunch of pirates. The kingdom might have some history, but it's been reduced to a single floating palace. The party will be raiding ships passing by, taking over planets, etc. The only difference between what they are doing and piracy is some descendant of a ruler putting their name on it. Until the actual kingdom is rebuilt, those letters of marque mean nothing.

It's good to call things by what they are so that the players won't be surprised when someone hunts them down like pirates down the line or they get the idea that maybe they should be in charge in this new kingdom. As long as everyone's onboard, have fun!

The same applies to all other potentially criminal or evil activities, like usurping a throne of a kingdom in D&D, or aiding the BBEG...

Conclusions

Before you start playing with "a criminal class" PC in a party that features "good" or "righteous" PCs, it's best to talk with one another about how the characters might be perceived in the setting, the GM or by other PCs. As long as everyone's onboard with how things will be handled, that should be fine. Just remember to stick to it - if you agree that an assassin will be treated like any other adventurer, don't complain about them doing their assassin business (provided they don't betray the party's trust more than other PCs, etc.).

Similarly, it's important for game designers to put extra consideration when introducing "a criminal class" into their game and how they should be treated. Ideally you'd write it broad enough that you could use that same class or character option in a more positive manner, or maybe just let anyone "minor" in the sneaky, subversive arts without making any one class specifically "the criminal class" - warriors could turn into ninjas, diplomats could turn into criminal bosses, sorcerers could turn necromancers and so on so anyone would have the potential to see themselves in heroic or villainous light as needed.

Gaming and solving the fun out of RPG systems

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

RPG mechanics as math problems

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

oWoD Automated Fire

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

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

DOGS Growth

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

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

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

Mouse Guard and optimal combat

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

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

FOO (First Order Optimal) Strategy

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

Cortex and marginally useful SFXs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Honourable mention - Exalted, Paranoia Combat

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

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

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

Gaming mechanics for profit

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

Chronicles of Darkness - punch me in the face for XP

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

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

DOGS - Growth vs Consequences optimisation

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

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

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

Mouse Guard and farming Checks

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusions

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

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

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

Related Articles:

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