Failures and fatalities - why Dungeons & Dragons is awful for Actual Plays, looking at Dimension 20

Recently, I've watched Dimension 20's Fantasy High Season 1, and the show's first two episodes really encapsulate why Dungeons & Dragons is awful for Actual Plays.

Some disclaimers and qualifiers before I get further. I'm not hating on Dimension 20 (I've seen a few of their shows and I do enjoy them for what they are), the people involved (I've enjoyed their performance through that show), or saying that you shouldn't play D&D (although there are so many better options...). I'm focusing precisely on Dungeons & Dragons as a framework for a gaming performance in the format of a video or audio Actual Play. I'm also speaking as someone that has 5 years of doing their own Actual Plays and as someone that has watched a few APs in their time.

So without further ado, let's talk about Fantasy High (spoiler warning for various episodes of the series, as well as some Escape from the Bloodkeep).

Fantasy High

Fantasy High is a show about a group of adventurers going to an adventuring academy, a fantasy high school where you learn how to be an adventurer, filled with all of the D&D races and classes. A pretty okay setup that gets elevated by the amount of colourful characters that populate the school and the nearby town. From an ice-cream djinn, through a chill werewolf guidance councillor, down to anarcho-socialist halfling family. The player characters are also a colourful cast - you have spoiled rich son of a pirate, a gentle half orc barbarian that doesn't want to hurt anyone, a rebellious tiefling bard going through some issues after her horns recently came in and her dad learned he has been cucked, etc. All in all, the characters are really interesting, the performance through the entire show has been great, I could listen to these things all day with glee. That is, if it wasn't for the second half.

Dimension 20 has a formula for their shows. You usually have two kinds of episode formats that keep alternating - a free form roleplaying with some light checks and conflicts, and then the big set piece fights. They are gorgeous to look at, featuring large customised areas, a lot of unique minis and so on:

The craft on display is phenomenal, there is no denying that. Dimension 20 has taken the D&D formula of "minis fighting" and made the best version of that I have seen. However, it still doesn't solve the issue of this being D&D that we're talking about. So let's set the scene:

It's episode 2 of Fantasy High. All the PCs got into detention for one reason or another. You could run it as your stereotypical "detention bad, the teacher running it is a warden, everything sucks", but no, Dimension 20 is better than that (heck, they even work with sensitivity consultants, kudos to them!), and the guidance councillor starts encouraging the PCs to talk about their feelings, whether they have trouble at home, etc. It's a tiny one minute of a show, but it showed potential, especially when one of the characters started opening up about their issue at home (it was the tiefling, now living alone with her mother who she's on a war path with since she won't tell her anything about her real father). But just as that's about to happen, we hear screams from the cafeteria and it's off to fight we go!

In the cafeteria we find a large cream corn monster, a possessed lunch lady, and a bunch of animated corn cobs, and we have ourselves a level 1 adventurer fight. What follows is a series of mishaps, bad rolls and just a lot of what could go wrong does go wrong. The tiefling gets knocked out cold at the start of the fight, and through the rest of the encounter, that player sits there and stews, unable to contribute anything but quips about how people should throw her body around (I don't hold anything against the player there, it did look frustrating!). A few others, including a swashbuckling jock son of a pirate repeatedly have problems climbing the tables and lose a good deal of health and turns because of that. Enemies start multiplying to the point they murder two player characters (and they do fail their death saving throws and actually die). A prissy elven wizard is reduced to bludgeoning the lunchlady to death with a magical spatula and her scepter (the lunchlady has been the tiefling's freshly adopted role model, since she was going through a rebellious spell and respected a blue collar worker for being the only honest person in the school), with her dying words telling the elf to remember that she killer her with her own hands.

I'm going to leave out the number of times people have been going in and out of many of the cream monster's buttholes, and just skip to the end where the heroes manage to defeat it. Since this is a show that's built on the characters that were just introduced and two of them have died, the GM has to pull out a deus ex resurrection to put the show back on the road. Not to make it consequence-free however, they have the quirky principal of the school (if Dumbledore was a bit more peppy but also a D&D character) murder the soft-spoken guidance councillor with a gun before committing a suicide and using a phoenix egg to resurrect the two PCs - a life for a life. At this moment the tiefling player still upset about having to sit in the time-out through the encounter wants to also commit suicide to bring back the lunchlady, but since they are unconscious they don't get their wish.

So all of that fight was a big clusterfuck, pretty much all due to D&D's rules. So let's start breaking things down.

Failures of D&D

Character death vs character-driven show

Dimension 20 is a pretty character-driven show. One of its core appears is that you can count on there being a cast of colourful characters at the table, portrayed by some very talented people, and through the show you get to have some of their problems, arcs and so on come to the forefront. For example, initially I disliked one of the PCs being your stereotypical born-again-bible-thumping-christian-coded girl that worshipped the Corn God. It felt too much like the proselytising type trope at the outset. However, through the serie she started reflecting on her life after having a brief death experience and realising the Corn God is a bit of a douche-bro and can't answer the problem of evil. Later she realises she has been raised in a fundamental family, been part of a religious extremist cult and discovers herself anew. It's really great.

D&D, however, is not a game that promotes that. Rules as written, the characters can die pretty much during any fight and you're not really meant to get too attached to them. Heck, one of the reason why "grognard" is associated with the game is because it's kind of like going to a ruthless war - what's the point of getting attached to the new level 1 guy if he's going to bite the dust during the first fight. Nobody cares about your backstory until you're level 3 and can survive an encounter with a rat.

Sure, that can be okay to play if you're into that, and the more recent editions of the game have softened the danger a little bit, but trying to do a character-centric game in D&D is still a liability if you don't fudge things or have some convenient way of bringing the characters back.

And for those that think that a story without the stake of character death is meaningless or the like - watch any popular movie. You know going into like, any Marvel movie that no character there will randomly die without a proper payoff and definitely not before their arc is over. You know Thor won't be Ragnarok'ed and will be there for the next movie. You still get invested.

Incompetence, coolness and stunting

D&D is awful when it comes to character competency due to its linear rolls. Chances are whatever you try doing at level 1 you will fail. It's not a game that wants you to be a cool badass, it's a game that wants to watch you faceplant into the floor whenever you try something.

Part of it is its approach to how it handles cool actions. When you declare that you will do something cool, like swinging down a chandelier and leaping from one table to the next before backflipping over the enemy to stab them in the back, the game expects your GM to make you roll to see if you pull it off and tell you "no" if you fail a roll. If you do the most boring action though ("I move forward and attack"), you don't have to roll anything special.

The thing is, you do want the characters to show off how cool they are. It makes the game more interesting, and definitely more fun to listen to! So don't penalise them, don't make them roll and fail, heck, give them bonuses for being cool! That's one of the things I enjoyed about Exalted - stunting. Basically, the cooler you described your action the bigger bonus you got. A lot of the players in Fantasy High could easily do really cool stunts and the game would've been even more cool for it (as it stands, it's only so cool with a pirate jock riding a hellbeast motocycle onto a stone golem to do a cool stunt on its back's half-pipe to throw it into a pit of acid...).

Rolls are boring, damage is mostly meaningless

When playing D&D, you spend a lot of time rolling dice, especially in combat. Add situations where those rolls get more complicated, such as with the use of inspiration (and if you take a shot each time someone on the show gets an inspiration you will get pretty drunk...), and you spend a lot of time rolling your math rocks.

Sure, this is fun when you're actually doing it yourself, but for a viewer, the rolls are only interesting if they are high-stakes, or someone ends up rolling a botch or a crit. Sooner than later individual rolls stop mattering, since a character suffering 5 points of damage out of their 80HP pool is just noise.

Once again, Dimension 20 does the best with what they have. They put visuals up to illustrate people's health as it changes and make the process as engaging as possible, which is commendable, but such edits are someone's job there. It would be quite a bit of extra work for anyone that is not doing this as a full-time job.

Similarly, when you're hoping to get a good story out of dice rolls like these, you also tend to have a low "signal-to-noise ratio" so to say. It takes a lot of time rolling, tallying numbers and so on to move the action one step. We had some bad games like that in the past (a 4 hour session with a 3 hour fight that was mostly rolling and not much interesting stuff going on until the end), and these days for our podcast we tend to go for lighter systems to avoid precisely such problems.

In general, it's much more interesting to play a game like D&D than to actually watch the game being played - passive vs active engagement and all that. You will have to put in a lot more work to get some interesting content.

Fights and rolls create funny moments, not interesting stories

A good RPG system helps you create interesting stories and character moments. Unfortunately, D&D combat isn't that great for it. Sure, it can create funny moments, and sometimes cool moments, but they are rarely interesting stories, despite how much time you're devoting to it.

For perhaps the best illustration of it, I'll have to turn to Dimension 20's other show, Escape from the Bloodkeep. It's a show where the PCs are knockoff evil characters from knockoff Lord of the Rings fighting the heroes. Many times in that show the Witch-king of Angmar would face off against Samwise Gamgee, who was armed only with a frying pan and a whole heap of enthusiasm. The thing is, the hobbit had such high stats that he would routinely stand his ground against the Witch-king and batter him pretty handily with that frying pan, turning their fights into some slapstick Bugs Bunny skit, all because the Witch-King couldn't kill this one halfing. Was it funny? Yes. Was it an interesting story? Not really. It was slapstick. Unfortunately, that's about as much as D&D gives you.

Sure, everyone has an awesome story about how one roll change the course of their game's history, or how they rolled an impossible roll and just dominated some situation. However, those are often stories about a single cool moment, not big interesting stories. Sure, it can be a fun entertainment to see your enemy roll nat 20 and then you matching it with your own nat 20 and the table exploding with emotions, but it's kind of like action for action's sake in a movie - entertainment without a deeper meaning.

Sitting in the death roll penalty box

Many times during the Fantasy High run the characters ended up at death's door, having to roll their death saving throws and not getting to do much. Again, the worst offender was Episode 2 where the tiefling player pretty much had to sit out the entire fight in the penalty box just because they got KOd early and nobody could heal her. You could see and hear the player's frustration with the system and being an unconscious deadweight in the corner of the room. Again, I don't fault the player for any of that - it's the system that creates these scenarios.

When you play a game, you don't want to have to sit and do nothing. Being forced to skip your turns is one of the least fun things because you don't even get to have to focus on coming up with strategies on how to not lose. And if you are doing a show professionally and have some actual actors on your show, you don't want them to sit by the table and not act out their character. It's not fun for them, and you're paying them some good money to sit and do nothing.

Ideally, you'd have a system where characters don't go down that easily and can always contribute something. Fellowship does that pretty well for example - it takes a lot of beating to put someone down (most of the game focuses instead on a death by a thousand cuts, so you know it's coming), and even if you are badly hurt you still have pretty good odds at doing something to contribute to the game.

Regularly scheduled murderhobos

D&D is a game that's focused on combat and murdering enemies. Countless people have pointed out the problematic colonial issues with that, and how Gygax essentially says Paladins would be okay with the Sand Creek Massacre. So how do you square that with a fantasy 50s americana setting of Fantasy High? The answer apparently is - you don't.

While you can gloss over killing of corn cuties and other monsters, the things get problematic when you are fighting humanoid NPCs, especially when they are a part of the same school the PCs go to. Unfortunately, Dimension 20 being a D&D show and one with an episode structure of there being a fight every second episode, there are some times when things get really iffy if you think about them.

In Episode 3 the PCs learn of Johnny Spells, a greaser teen that likes to hit on high school girls despite not going to the school. They get some cryptic message telling them to investigate him to try finding some lost girls. At the end of the episode they find him in his greaser joint with his buddies doing some aggressive dance routines. Overall, the character came off as a cross between someone cool and kind of creepy, but it's never really been established by that point that he was a scumbag or anything.

But oh no, the clock is ticking and it's almost the end of the talking and investigation episode, and you know what that means, it's time to start your regularly scheduled fight. The format must remain unchanged, and a lot of people have put in a lot of hard work to make some cool minis, so instead of confronting Johnny and trying to figure out what his deal is, or even getting the magic mcguffin they came in here for, the team decides to steal the mcguffin and the keys to Johnny's car and book it.

Episode 4 is a street race fight, where the PCs fight Johnny and his gang that are trying to get his car back. This being D&D of course involves a good deal of violence, since the mechanics inform the playstyle. So the PCs murder a group of teens after stealing their ride really for no reason at all, other than this is a Dimension 20 show and the episode number is even, so we have to fight.

And again, I'm not saying that Dimension 20 did a bad job at making the fight itself entertaining to watch, or that the minis weren't cool to look at, it's just that the script being so rigid and you having to have a fight every second episode will inevitably lead to the PCs being murderhobos. I would love to instead see a system where you have different resolution systems so you can have competitions that aren't just murdering each other. Or a system or setting where it's okay to fight one another since the people don't get murdered at the end (make it like a campy Transformers episode or something, where people shoot one another but that's okay, there will be there to shoot one another many times more). But no, this is D&D and violence is always an option.

Sure, you could argue that in that world it's okay to murder people, but late in the season the characters do go to jail for murdering people and the police do explicitly say it's not okay, so the text of the show doesn't support that argument.

So if you're planning on running a game where you don't murder everything as a way of resolving your conflicts by default, D&D doesn't have much to offer in this regard.

It's there to sell you toys

D&D is not only a game about fighting, it's also a game with deep roots in miniature wargaming that's owned by Hasbro, a toy company. If I was a cynic I would say that chances are a game pushed by a toy company will want to sell you toys, and I might not be far off. There are so many miniatures you can buy for the game it's crazy, and when you see a show like Dimension 20 playing with their cool minis your brain might go "boy, I want some of that plastic tosh to play with! Let me get my wallet!".

Luckily, I haven't seen Dimension 20 try to push their own line of minis in the merch store, but I'd kind of be weary of promoting a game in good conscious that kind of encourages you to buy overpriced plastic and a lot of books to be able to play "like the cool kids on TV".

This also means you can't really run D&D as an audio-only podcast without making it really dull to listen to or cutting a lot of boring content out. Not everyone has the budget to set up cameras for the crew, buy minis, paint them well, do some action shots during the fight and so on. Even running it virtually in some third party program to create a virtual arena you still have to have a good enough computer to record and render everything. This creates a much higher startup cost for anyone wanting to run the game than something that can be comfortably played in the theatre of the mind.

And again, this is more of a deeper discussion about whether it's okay to support a game that is not free of controversy and possibly creates a pressure for the show's audience to buy its merch through peer pressure of sorts. But that's a bit beyond our today's discussion.

The flip side

Of course, things can't really be clear cut. While D&D is really an awful game for an Actual Play when looked through its mechanics, that might not really be that important. D&D does being in a lot of eyes to the show because it's popular and people know it. A lot of people won't tune in to the show to see the Dimension 20 crew, they will tune in to see a high-production D&D unfortunately. So it's up to the show producers to weigh in the drawbacks of using a system they have to struggle with the benefits of a large audience and possibly a large corporation to boost their visibility.

Conclusions

Dimension 20 is probably the Actual Play with the highest production value I have seen. It executes its premise and works very hard within its constraints to bring perhaps the best version of what it sets out to do. It is unfortunate though, that what they have to work with is D&D.

D&D from a mechanical standpoint is a liability for any Actual Play show. It limits what kind of stories you can tell (everyone must be a murderhobo or an accessory to murderhobos), has a tendency of killing characters off prematurely, puts players in a timeout box when they do avoid death, and is something you have to have a good setup to record your minis, play areas and so on so your viewers don't get lost in the action.

In return the game rewards you with nothing but its BRAND. Sure, that might be good enough for a lot of people, but personally I'd love to see some more indie games getting the love and attention.

Of course, playing the game yourself is different from doing it as a performance. It is a different kind of engagement since you are in control of the action, rather than just witnessing what's happening. You can still enjoy a game even if it's not a good fit for an Actual Play.

And hey, if anyone from Dimension 20 want a pitch for a cool game, why not copy our Fellowship game in the Transformers universe. It's another Hasbro product, and it would be cool to see what you do by taking the existing toys and modding the heck out of them. The game can support someone playing Tripticon, a giant godzilla, while someone else is a tiny Mini-Con on their shoulder. Now design your show around that and it would be a spectacle just to see what your players could do with their cool, transforming, modded toys! ;)

Make this a game Dimension 20, I know it will be awesome!

And if you're in the mood for something with similar vibes to Fantasy High that doesn't use D&D, I remember enjoying the Offseason Monsterhearts episodes from the Arms of the Tide podcast, using the Monsterhearts RPG.

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...

Meat and potatoes of RPG powers

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

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

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

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

City of Mist - heavy on the stats

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

Stars Without Number's Specialist Focus,

a good example of a bland power.

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

Power Tag questions and answers

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

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

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

Chronicles of Darkness - when quantity turns to quality

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

Nothing can stop a Tasked vampire! Exceptional success!

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

Magic - mostly powers, few stats

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

Even a simple Alarm spell adds something unique to the game

Stats vs powers

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

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

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

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

Languages in RPGs are never fun

A lot of RPGs, from Dungeons and Dragons, through Chronicles of Darkness to Stars Without Number just to name a handful, feature a language mechanic of some sort. Unfortunately, those mechanics usually don't add much to the game.

How languages usually play out

The main problem with the language mechanics is that they usually clash with two unspoken rules of role play games - keep the plot moving (aka, don't grind the game to a halt because the players can't figure something or don't have something they need, the idea behind concepts like fail forward), and don't be exclusionary to the characters.

Here is how from my experience the language situation usually plays out in-game:

First option - everyone speaks some common language or use some sort of babel fish-like device. Everyone can understand everyone else, the language mechanics are ignored because nobody put their points into it. The plot must move forward, and this is the simplest way of doing it.

Second option - one character translates for everyone. This often ends up being like the first option, except with the added step of one character actually having the correct language skill. You don't want to exclude most of the party from some important NPC, plot or other things, but you also don't want to waste double the time of the linguist in question actually repeating everything being said for the sake of brevity.

Third option - an NPC conveniently knows your language. If the entire party ends up not knowing the local language, the GM will usually introduce an NPC that conveniently knows the party's language to soften the penalty. At best they have their own agenda and will twist the truth to suit their needs (the players won't have any meta knowledge of what the other NPCs would be saying anyway after all...), but at worst they act like an in-between for the party and we go back to option two and one...

Fourth option - language is a barrier. If you don't speak the local language, expect to have to think on your feet. At its worst, this can potentially derail an adventure if at least one PC decide they are bored trying to speak to the locals, start using their goblin brain and start some violence just for the fun of it. Barring that, the GM and the players would have to be clever in how they advance the plot with this approach.

No game is really stuck with one of these options permanently. The situation can shift from one town/country/planet to the next and change as the plot demands it.

All in all, it seems languages mostly exist to punish the players, rather than be a new cool tool for them to use. There might, however, be a few interesting ways to make the situation more interesting.

Interesting ideas for languages

Here are some interesting ideas for using the language mechanics that might spice up some games.

The first and perhaps simplest approach to languages would be to make them a soft punishment, rather than a hard punishment. Everyone could communicate and interact with NPCs just fine, but if you didn't have a given language skill, you would suffer some penalties to all of your social rolls. This is perhaps a simple mechanic, but at least it makes the language skill useful for those that want to take them, without making them a hard punishment to impose on everyone.

On a similar note, as discussed last time, in our game of Fellowship we had a player use the Angel playbook that created an air breathing mermaid problem for our game. That character had explicit powers for being able to be understood by every alien, animal and the like, which meant other characters did not have that universal ability to communicate as was the staple for all of our other games. This shifted our game from option one, to option two essentially, with the Angel being the translator for everyone. However, there is an interesting twist to this playbook - the Angel can only be understood by everyone, they themselves cannot by default understand everyone else. That is, without an extra piece of gear - the Ancient Dictionary. This lets them understand every language, but they can only use this gear if they have time to carefully consult it. This in turn can give the GM opportunities to add twists to the situations - the player can communicate freely when there is no danger, but as soon as there is a time limit and the action picks up, it changes the rules of engagement. Suddenly if you need to decipher some ancient ruins, you can't do it automatically. This perhaps is a neat way of transitioning between how big of an obstacle a language barrier can be.

Another way languages could be an interesting mechanics would be taking a page from Cultist Simulator and how it handled languages.

Cultist Simulator, where languages are a stepping stone to the dark arts

Cultist Simulator is a game about, among other things, learning the dark arts. Those unfortunately are not taught in a cultist school, so you have to consult the books. Old books, ancient books, foul books. The problem with these is that first you have to acquire them through potentially illegal means, and then they are often written in old and obscure languages. You have to translate those text before you can study them, and that takes language skills. The first basic ones like Latin and Greek you can pick up from some tutors and books from your local antiquarian, but eventually you stumble onto dead languages that you have to acquire by finding a Rosetta Stone of sorts (which would let you, say, learn Egyptian by knowing Greek already), and even further still you have to use those ancient languages to speak with spirits to learn even more primordial languages.

As such, the pursuit of languages itself is a project that you use to further your other knowledge. You could build entire campaigns around it. In more practical terms, those kinds of languages would be used as tools in character downtime, rather than being something active that comes up during a chat with an NPC. You could similarly use this during encounters - if characters find an old tome or stumble on an old library without the necessary linguistic knowledge to understand them, they couldn't use the knowledge right there and then, but they could either acquire a tome for later translation, or have to go back once they learn the languages themselves. Alternatively, they could get help from some other linguist, but the NPCs might start asking questions before long if the book they have to translate has a human face on it... Better learn those old tongues yourself and keep a lower profile!

If you want to further complicate the task of learning a language, take a book from Heaven's Vault and make the PCs have to acquire multiple manuscripts in order to even start learning the language ;).

Conclusions

Languages are often a binary system in RPGs - either the players are punished hard by not knowing them, or there is a way to avoid the issue of languages altogether. As simple as those options are, I unfortunately can't think of any system that has iterated much on this approach...