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

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

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

Cure Cancer Powers

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

Cure anything!

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

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

Drag one location somewhere else.

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

Some other powers that for us fell into these categories:

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

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

Cure Cancer Powers in practical games

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

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

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

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

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

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

A different take - Godbound's Miracles and Changes

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

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

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

Solutions attract problems

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

Conclusions

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

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

Power Inflation in RPGs

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

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

Arms race ruining fun

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

"Narrated D&D Story:

How I Accidentally Triggered A Cold War

Between The Dungeon Master And The Party"

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

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

Avoiding Power Inflation

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

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

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

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

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

What else could be out there?

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusions

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

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

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...

Rainbow shields, damage of the gaps, prescribed and ad lib skills

In a lot of RPGs, players have skills, stats or whatever you want to call them that are well defined. Things like Medicine, Nature, Insight, etc. in D&D, or Occult, Drive, Larceny in Chronicles of Darkness. Then there are some games that are more flexible where the players are asked to fill in their own ad lib skills and stats - games like DOGS, Godbound or Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine, where you can pretty much write anything in as a stat - "Memory of my dead brother", "Fastest gun in the west", or "underwater basket weaving".

The problem with the latter is the fuzzy boarders each such statement creates about when a given skill should be used, when it shouldn't apply, and avoiding skills that are too broad or too narrow.

Broad vs narrow skill applications

There are RPGs out there that like to break skills down to minutia. In Burning Wheel there are a lot of skills - under Carpentry alone you have Fence Building, Ditch Digging, Carving, Carpentry, Rude Carpentry, Cooping (making barrels), Boatwright, Shipwright, Cartwright and a few more. This creates a sort of Air-Breathing Mermaid Problem, where the game basically forces the GM's hand to say "sorry, you only have Carpentry, you can't carve and decorate what you build and you can't seem to know how to make a barrel". It can also create traps if characters specialise in some skill that doesn't come up that often - "I know you're a master Cooper, but no matter how great that barrel you make will be it still won't help you sail the sea, you need Boatwright for that".

You can run into similar problems in games where players can define their own ad lib skills, but those also sway in the other direction - they can be too broadly applicable. You could have players put ranks into "underwater basket weaving" only for that to come in handy once or twice in the entire game, while someone else makes a stat called "fast" and they want to use it all the time - "I shoot him, but like, fast", "I read, fast", "I sleep, fast", etc. The boarders where such player-defined skills apply are fuzzy - you can't really tell them that because there is some other skill that also works for the situation theirs might not apply. Moreover, players will often skew the problem in their favour just so they can use their best skills - "I make a basket under water and it's so well crafted I can use it as a raft with a sail to navigate the rough sea. It's all baskets, just different shapes."

City of Mist tried addressing this problem by classifying its tags into "specific" and "broad". Most tags on a character sheet should be specific - only letting the character use them in specific, limited scenarios. One tag could be broad - applicable in wide variety of situations.

Rainbow shields and damage of the gaps

While playing Exalted / Godbound with my group we would often reference a "rainbow shield" defence - a power to negate any kind of incoming damage, no matter whether it's physical, magical, fire, electricity, etc. A system that would allow for such widely-applicable defence to exist wouldn't be too fun to play really. Exalted 2nd edition suffered from something like that from what I heard - someone created an optimal way of playing the game called "paranoia combat" that's all about using perfect defence against the high-lethality rocket-tag and outlast your opponent.

In our first round of playing Godbound we ended up being too generous with defences, letting the players counter most attacks with most power sets - "I use Artifice to instantly build a wall around myself to deflect the incoming blow!". As we later found out, Godbound was not intended to work like that - any given Word should only counter a very narrow range of powers that are thematically linked to it. You could use Sea to counter a Fire power, but not say, Sword.

However, the game had a different problem, one which I'll call "damage of the gaps". The system did not have a specified, finite list of damage types. A number of powers did either give you things you could be immune to, or let you specify said immunity - for example, if you had the Word of Fire you had "an invincible defence against flame and smoke". But since "smoke" was ill-defined, we had an argument about whether that Word would apply against chemical fumes and poisonous gasses. Similarly, in the Ancalia expansion introduced an Incendiary Court - fire-golem-like creatures from outside of reality that while clearly having fire-based attacks nonetheless came with a note that their "flaming powers are not wholly of natural fire, and so enemies with invincible defences against fire still take half damage from them". This was probably to prevent players circumventing a big boss fight entirely, but still felt like a weird way to make a power less useful.

In a similar vein you could start splitting hairs on many things - if you are immune to mental attacks and someone uses music or mean words on you, does that count? Where does mental damage end and emotional damage begin? Is a psychic blow magic, mental or physical? Is a laser attack fire, sunlight, or neither? Can I make some very snowflake-y Word that has its own damage type that none of the statted enemies have defence against?

Because the game had no finite and well-defined list of damage types, you either have to make one yourself before the game starts, or possibly have to argue about this kind of damage of the gaps...

Conclusions

While being able to get creative with skills and powers can be fun, having things that are well-defined and concise can help everyone at the table know when something is applicable and avoid the problems of things being either too narrowly or too broadly useful.

Net negative sessions

Recently in our group we have have played with some "Dice pool and mOral predicament based Generic roleplaying System", or DOGS, a more setting-agnostic version of Dogs in the Vineyard. After the session, the characters have regressed to be weaker than they started, and all due to how the system handles character advancement. So I figured I'd discuss this topic.

Now, character deaths are outside of the scope of this blog post. While they usually also result in a net negative session, they occupy a somewhat different category of issues. Losing a character means you reset back to a starting character, losing XP means you can regress below a starting character.

DOGS and gambling with your XP

Advancement in DOGS works like this - when you are in a conflict, you spend your dice back and forth. When you are forced to spend 3 or more dice at the same time (due to being hit by a strong attack), you get Hit and take Consequence dice. The number of those dice is equal to the number of dice you had to spend at one go, and the type of dice depends on the type of conflict you are in (for example D4s for stuff like talking, D6 for chasing, D8 for beating someone up, and D10 for trying to kill someone). At the end of the conflict, you roll all of your Consequence dice. If you rolled any 1s, you experience Growth (your character improves), but if the total of the two highest dice exceeds 7, you get Long-Term Consequence (your character degrades, or worse).

If you're rolling D4s, it's generally not too bad - you are more likely to roll at least one "1" than have a pair of 4s, but as soon as you hit the D6 territory, the odds are against you! We had some players that hit both Growth and Consequences at the same time a few sessions in a row (meaning they were shifting dice from one place to another), and a session where two characters just suffered Consequences and nobody advanced one bit.

Sure, showing character's lateral growth can be interesting to an extent and somewhat thematic, but tying character progression to a random dice roll feels like a system is asking you to game it.

New World of Darkness and losing dots

New World of Darkness differs from its successor, the Chronicles of Darkness, in one crucial way - it has linear XP cost, rather than flat XP cost. Due to that, it's a very minmaxy system. It also lacks a very neat system - the Sanctity of Merits.

In nWoD, you can invest your XP into things external to your character - Merits in forms of Retainers, Contacts, etc. A 5 dot Retainer can cost you 30XP, and you can earn 1-4XP per session roughly. So that's about 8 sessions invested in one (very powerful but still mortal) person. If they happen to get into a firefight trying to protect your character and die, that's a large investment down the drain. At least with Sanctity of Merits you'd get the XP back, but that concept hasn't been invented until the CoD system.

Similarly, your character can lose their Morality due to being exposed to trauma or the supernatural. You start at Morality 7, but if you lose it and try to buy that 7th dot back, the linear XP cost will set you back 21XP for that single dot. You are out 6+ sessions worth of XP to get back where you started.

In Chronicles of Darkness, flat XP costs means you don't lose too much, and Sanctity of Merits refund you any Merits you lose. At worst you might lose about 1 session's worth of progress due to Morality loss, which isn't too bad.

Conclusions

People are pretty loss averse. The pain of losing something outweighs the joy of gaining an identical thing. Having your character suffer a setback that reverts their progress back multiple sessions can be an unpleasant experience, especially if you measure yourself against other players that didn't suffer the same adversity.

Related topics:

• Categories of XP Systems

The Goblin Brain in RPGs

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

Goblin Brain

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

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

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

Heists, fire and heads on sticks

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

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

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

Exalted and Dragonblooded Breeding Camps

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

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

Vampire the Requiem and the Hungarian Marriage

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

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

Slave worship and making your own followers

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusions

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

Flat shared XP and Geist's Beats per minute

In the past we have discussed a few topics related to what I'd like to bring up today - how Chronicles of Darkness improved the game experience with small tweaks, how it almost fixed minmaxing, how it failed with some Beat systems, and the general discussion of various ways of handing XP in RPGs.

With that in mind, today I heard Geist The Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition was doing away with the choice between Individual and Group Beats you could use in Chronicles of Darkness, instead making Group Beats the only option.

I don't have the PDF, so I'm going off what was mentioned here...

Personally, I think it's a good idea, but the reason for this needs a bit more explanation.

Beats mechanics

In Chronicles of Darkness, XP is awarded to the players in form of Beats. Five Beats make 1 XP. Those are earned in a number of ways - you can get a Beat for fulfilling your aspirations, for dealing with trauma, botching a roll, getting beaten up, and dealing with something that shakes your character's Integrity. All in all, whenever your character faces an important or pivotal moment in a scene, you earn a Beat.

Of course, the system can be gained a bit. You can build characters more for farming Beats, and if you play them right, you can get double the amount of XP other players do, which just can breed resentment at the table - never a good thing.

It becomes less pronounced when you just use the Shared Beats system, but that creates another problem...

Beats per minute

Under the Shared Beats system, whenever a player earns a Beat, it gets put into a shared pool. At the end of the session, you take the Beats and divy them up between all players equally. Everyone advances at the same pace and everyone's fine, right?

Well, there is a small issue with that. Tabletop games are a shared past time - you share the story and the time between a group of friends. However, the groups can be small or big, and that can affect the Shared Beats.

In any game session, you will usually have the flow of the game focus on and spotlight different characters at a different time. With how the Beat system is structured, if your character is in the spotlight you will usually get about a Beat or two per scene. However, it's usually harder to have scenes with multiple characters where everyone gets a Beat, unless you are fighting or facing off some horror (unless everyone starts to have the same encounters, same aspirations and so on, which detracts a bit from the individualism of the characters).

In other words, if this was a TV show, the more characters you have, the less spotlight each gets, and the less character development that is happening. Every session you will usually get a similar amount of story points (and thus Beats) no matter the amount of characters, but the more characters you have the more you have to divide the Shared Beats pool.

This is a similar issue to one discussed under "XP by practice" - there are only so many actions you can take in a scene, so many scenes in a session, so the more players you have the fewer XP you get.

Geist's solution

The solution to this issue is fairly straightforward - don't scale the XP to the number of players, make it more flat. Whether you scale it to "5 Beats and everyone gets 1 XP" (same as Individual Beats), or tweak the number a bit to hit some sweet spot, it's still going to be more enjoyable than "punishing" larger groups of players. This way if you have a scene where only one character is present, working away on their plans or dealing with a personal moment, you can take more time and focus on what's going on than trying to fit some time quota to make sure everyone had time to gain their Beats.

Honestly, I had this idea for this solution and this blog post for awhile, and I'm glad it was put into the system.

Conclusions

Geist's approach to dividing Beats / XP flatly between all the players at the table, without adjusting for character count is an interesting one. It alleviates the pressure to increase the game's "Beats per minute" to compensate for larger number of players at the table, while still keeping a similar per-session character progression for everyone involved.

This puts the game more in-line with systems like Broken Worlds or Fellowship.

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

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

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

This is your PC

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

And my breath - death!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Punch me in the face for XP - the failure of CoD beats system

Chronicles of Darkness is a pretty great series of games. It fixed a lot of things that were wrong with the oWoD and nWoD series and added a few interesting elements of its own as well. However, one thing I'm finding less and less fun the more I play is the beats system. While it seems fun at first, it starts to incentivise the wrong things after awhile. So today, let's talk about beat farming!

Beats - the small XPs

Beats system in CoD is a replacement of the traditional World of Darkness XP system. Both of them are radically different from systems like D&D - you don't get XP for killing enemies, but for things like accomplishing goals, roleplaying, or in general - having life experiences.

In the first edition of the New World of Darkness, you would gain XP at the end of the session or story based on things like "has your character learned anything?", "did you roleplay them in an entertaining or appropriate way?", "did you perform a heroic act?", etc.

Those were a bit hard to judge at times and often felt a bit contrived. "What did I learn today? Um, let me spin the Wheel of Morality real quick and come up with something". Worst yet - the system can also feel like a further downer after a session that might've not gelled as much. I remember feeling quite shitty after playing in a session that wasn't that great to begin with and the GM sternly proclaiming at the end everyone got the minimal, 1XP. Everything else about that game has since faded from my memory, but that one thing still feels bad...

But luckily, CoD is here to solve that problem with beats! Now each XP is broken down into 5 beats, and you accrue those beats through the game through a number of concrete ways. You get a beat when you accomplish a goal you set for yourself, when you complete a condition, when you get a dramatic failure, when you risk a breaking point (essentially losing sanity or humanity), or even when you get beaten up.

All of those conditions are concrete - it is clear when they are supposed to happen and you can proudly exclaim that you are getting that beat and why. The system is much neater and feels better. However, as anything that's driven by the actions of the PCs, it can get exploited a bit...

Beat farming - stopping the game to get your numbers up

Beat farming in CoD is perhaps the last vestige of minmaxing left from the older editions of the system. You can only get one beat from a given category of beat conditions per scene, but given that you have 3-5 scenes in a session, you can rack up quite the number of beats easily.

Generally, there are a few concrete ways you can reliably get beats in the game. First two are dramatic failures and Inspired cycling. You build your character up so they have at least one very crappy roll (1-2 dice max), and then at least one roll they can use often they are very good at. Usually for the last you combine high dice number with Professional Training 2 (9-again), or Trained Observer (9-again or 8-again).

Then each scene proceed to use your weak skill until you fail, upgrading that into a dramatic failure (giving you a beat), and then using your strong skill to get an exceptional success. While exceptional successes don't get you a beat straight away, the rules state that if that check doesn't have a specific exceptional success bonus, the character should get a beneficial condition. You opt to get Inspired, a condition that you can cash in for a willpower point, a beat, and an exceptional success on 3 successes instead of 5. This means whenever you roll your strong skill, you spend a willpower point (giving you extra 3 dice), spend the Inspired condition (getting that willpower back) and fingers crossed - you get that condition back again instantly. Rinse both each scene for 2 beats per scene.

In Mage the Awakening, I'm not sure whether by design or by accident, whenever a character completes an Aspiration (their short or long term goal), they get a new Aspiration. Moreover, higher-end Mages have more and more "Obsessions" - long-term Aspirations focused on supernatural things. You can cash both an Aspiration and an Obsession each scene for a beat and an "arcane beat" (beat you can only spend on magic stuff). This can start derailing the characters into "my current aspiration is to go to where the next scene is and do what we were planning to do anyway" and "I want to learn more about the particular supernatural creature we're currently investigating". This stops being conductive to "emergent gameplay" and just becomes a race to get more and more beats...

Moreover, Mages can also farm Arcane Beats by resolving conditions imposed by spells. The book even explicitly states that farming beats this way is normal. In a sidebar section called "The Beat Goes On..." we read - "At this point, you may be wondering what’s stopping you from loading up on Condition-causing spells in a relatively safe environment, resolving them all, and earning Beats by the bucket load? The honest answer is “nothing, mages do it all the time.”...". This means if you have a Mage with Fate 2 in your party, you can cast Exceptional Luck each scene, giving everyone in the party a beneficial condition they can use and gain a beat that way.

Finally, at the end of a scene, you can just punch each other in the face and get a beat (at least if you're mortal - supernaturals might have to cut one another up for it). If you take damage in your last three health boxes, you get a beat. For an average person, you need about 5 points of bashing damage, which heals after 75 minutes - most often enough for a scene change. Punch each other in the face each scene and farm those precious beats...

So if you're hard-core, each scene you can get a beat for damage, dramatic failure, fulfilling a condition and fulfilling an aspiration rather easily. That's a beat shy of a full XP each scene, so you might end up with about 4XP at the end of a session - which is an insane amount (1XP is healthy for a normal session). Would the game be fun though? Heck no...

Mechanics distracting from the game

Discovering an exploit in a game can be fun. It makes you feel smart for noticing the various mechanics that make something up, you go through the rush of research as you dig deeper into the problem and finally you have the sense of mastery as you figure out the most optimal way of abusing the exploit. It is fun, but that's not what Chronicles of Darkness, or RPGs in general are about.

Sure, you can have a group that's all about deriving fun from breaking a game and exploiting the mechanics, do that by all means. You can similarly enjoy the Ivory Tower Game Design, but after awhile it feels like a system that punishes sub-optimal play.

Recently my group and I have switched systems in one of our game from Savage Worlds to Chronicles of Darkness. A new player joined us that didn't have experience with CoD. We had fun with the session, but by the end I came out of that session with 6 beats, and the other players had only 3 beats a piece. I am by no means a better player than them, nor was my character a more important part of that story. The only difference was I knew how to farm beats and I made a character that allowed me to farm beats. Since we're all loss-averse by nature, seeing someone get twice as many beats was most likely not a pleasant experience. We started using group beats since that point...

In a different session, one of our players cared about a particular NPC - they were tied to their backstory and so on. When my character failed a roll related to helping that NPC investigate their missing father however, I decided to cash it in for a dramatic failure and a beat, much to the dismay of the other player. The failure was not important to my character, but it was going against what the party wanted to accomplish. If we continued on this path for a longer game, we'd probably all start screwing the party over with dramatic failures sooner or later. Luckily it was a shorter game and we learned our lessons.

Cut the beats

Honestly, I feel if the beat system was cut entirely from CoD, the system might be better for it.

Say, if the players and the GM agreed to say, give everyone 1-2 full XP per session, that might be a good pace. Aspirations wouldn't give beats, but would be a way to communicate with the GM and the rest of the party what you as the player want out of a given session. Conditions already either give you a bonus when you "cash them in", or get rid of a penalty if they're negative once you get rid of them. Getting beaten up and surviving means you survived a fun action scene and either continue your story, or have some new enemy to beat up in the future. Risking a breaking point is a dramatic enough moment that it is interesting on its own, and finally for dramatic failures - perhaps the GM could offer you a Doylist choice with some kickback if they believe a botch would add to the story. Some of them could give you Willpower - another important resource in the game, or perhaps a reroll you could cash in in the future. Either of those options would be meaningful, but not important enough to heavily encourage the players to derail the game for their own benefit.

So all in all, the beats system in Chronicles of Darkness is an interesting tool, but when taken to its "rational conclusion" - it starts to break down. It's possible the game might be more enjoyable if we weren't chasing that proverbial carrot at any given opportunity...

How Chronicles of Darkness almost fixed minmaxing

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

World of Darkness and minmaxing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chronicles of Darkness and minmaxing

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

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

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

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

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

Beats, Botches, Conditions and minmaxing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusions

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