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.
Personally, as a GM, this is not the experience I've had with Godbound. When you know your players can obliterate mobs, you need to begin planning encounters around the fact that they are able to do this. Do you want your mobs to survive? Stick a leader with Protection in among them to blunt the Dragon's breath. Additionally, your criticism of the game seems to revolve mostly around the combat, however combat isn't the entirety of what Godbound is about. In fact, the real meat of the game is altering the world around you and the conflicts that arise from doing so. Sometimes this will come in the form of a powerful local leader wielding ancient magics to try and stop you, but it can also come in the form of the people you're supposedly trying to help not enjoying the fact that you're disrupting their local customs. Sure, the Dragon can crown themselves kind and incinerate any army that tries to stop them, but that doesn't actually solve the problem of people not liking you. In fact, it's the very thing that causes heroes to rise up and slay dragons
ReplyDeleteIf I understood him correctly, he isn't going against xombat altogether, simply against the aspect of some gifts being "game breakingly powerful". We had a similar notion in my group regarding "lord of all which falls", since it make rival archers worse than irrelevant, thus rwmoving any reason to use them in combat.
DeleteWhat's good about being powerful enough to completely destroy a game aspect?
You mentioned giving protection to some mobs, which is a good start, but on the long term this might be like everyone everywhere needs to get a hold of kryptonite just to make the story interesting.
I think what he argues for is that godbounds should be powerful, but never strong enough to mitigate the list of intresting game aspects.
I don't know what this facination with everyone always comparing superheroes to any RPG where you play a god. Superheroes are not gods. Thor in the movies is not a god vs Thor in the comics, who is. Superman is not a god. Take away the yellow sun and he is a regular alien (no he isn't human).
ReplyDeleteIf you want to compare RPG Gods to something in the movies then compare them to godlike beings like Ego-The living Planet or Galactus
Like with all fictional taxonomy, there is no clear lines delineating a god from a classical hero from a modern superhero. It's just like the taxonomy of a dragon vs wyrm vs serpent is made up.
DeleteModern superheroes share the similar space as ancient gods - they are tales of the given culture about people that are larger than life, idealised and idolised. Some people wear thor's hammer around their neck, some wear superman's sigil on their shirts, it's a modern equivalent.
Anything can be a god, no matter their actual power. Pharaohs were considered gods, and yet they were normal people all things considered.
Power-wise, you also have a spectrum. You can have humans worshipped as gods, superhumans and classical heroes that are still rather mortal, demigods, gods, titans, elder gods, cosmic gods, the list goes on.
RPG-wise, it's usually hard to play anything beyond a demi-god, someone that has superhuman powers but is still relatably human in wants, needs and foibles. Ego might be fun to go against, but try GMing for 3 Egos at a table...