Power Inflation in RPGs

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

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

Arms race ruining fun

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

"Narrated D&D Story:

How I Accidentally Triggered A Cold War

Between The Dungeon Master And The Party"

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

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

Avoiding Power Inflation

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

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

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

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

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

What else could be out there?

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusions

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

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

Problem of Crafting solving every problem

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

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

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

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

Solving every problem

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

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

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

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

It takes something from the man

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

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

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

Technology as corruption

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

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

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

Modern thinking

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

Conclusions

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

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

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

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

The Criminal Class - Rogues, Night Caste and their ilk

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

Scoundrel amongst heroes - the Night Caste

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A killer is a killer

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

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

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

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

Dark magic, evil races, taboo things

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

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

A pirate is a pirate

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusions

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

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

Congenials - an Exalted Podcast Review

I’ve spent the last few months listening through a few of the Exalted RPG Podcasts / Actual Plays and I figured I’d share my thoughts on them with you. There is a good deal one can learn from them, whether you’re making your own actual plays or just gaming in general.

In today's episode, I will cover Congenials by Sponsored By Nobody.

Disclaimers

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

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

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

Thirdly, I’ve been a part of this podcasting group (but not this specific game) both when those episodes were being recorded and since. I intend to go into this review as objectively as I can, but you should be aware of the potential bias at play. Here is your disclaimer.

Finally, there will be some spoilers for the show, it would be rather hard to discuss some things without that...

Overview and minor things

Congenials is an Exalted actual play hosted by @Tavelgorge and part of the Sponsored By Nobody podcast. It was made up of the same GM that ran Princes of the Universe Exalted game, as well as fans of that podcast as players (some of which are starting their own podcast, PodPodCastCast). It features a shifting cast of 7 Exalts, almost all of which from a different splat.

The game’s system is GM’s very own homebrew hack of Godbound - Godbound Conversion of Exalted.

The series takes the form of an audio-only podcast with 2-4 hour episodes with minor editing, recorded over the Internet. The cast consists of casual RPG fans (so no voice actors or improv artists this time).

Player Characters

The game features seven PCs that come and go:

Sola Bright Light, a Zenith Solar priestess.
Mocking White Wind, a New Moon Lunar.
Mirage of Ideal Destinations, a Sidereal Chosen of Journeys.
Magister Invil, a Getimian scholar.
Heroism Advancing Algorithm (HAAL), an Orichalcum Achemical from Classlat.
Multitudinous Mask, a Changing Moon Lunar, very spider-like.
Hunter of Shades, a Liminal.

The party’s theme for this game was twofold:

• They are monster hunters
• They are nice people (which is an important contrast to the Princes of the Universe game…)

General Plot

The game starts with the group of Exalts hunting monsters in Kingdom of Halta, the Chanta region in the North-East of Creation. The local area has been attacked by Kaiju, large augmented monsters. After slaying a few of these beasts, the group discovers the mastermind behind this - an Exigent of Kaiju that’s unleashing those monsters on the world for heroes to rise up and earn their glory fighting them. The group strikes a deal with him to use his powers to help train Solars and work with the Cult of the Illuminated.

Meanwhile, the Autochtonian nation of Classlat has completed Project Razor and established a colony in the nearby area. They are looking for resources to send back to the Land of Brass and Shadow and are establishing relationships with the Kingdom of Halta, as well as the local Fairfolk. It’s soon revealed, however, that the Fae have made deal with the Guild to enslave Classlat. To that end, the Fae have reached into the Wyld and brought Aradd the Hunter, an ancient Behemoth to get through their defences.

During the second Season the Exalts look for ways to deal with this threat, seeking help from the Jadeborn, confronting the Guild in Nexus, using the Rathess Observatory, and finally enlisting the aid of an ancient Sphinx of the South to stand a chance at defeating Aradd before he can get to Classlat.

Highlights

Variety of Exalts, no Solar problems

After listening to Swallows of the South, ExalTwitch, Demon City Slickers and even Princes of the Universe, with a total of 20 Solar PCs between them with a sporadic sprinkle of one-off non-Solar PC guests, it was a breath of fresh air to have a diverse group of PC Exalt types.

A large part of the podcast focused on the Alchemical HAAL, his culture and enclave of his people. Secondary to that were the stories of a Sidereal and a Getimian, both being rather novel and unique. Tertiary we saw a glimpse at what a Liminal might be up to, some Lunar shenanigans, and a minor Solar business.

Very notably, the game also didn’t fall into the typical trappings of a Solar-focused game - there was no Wyld Hunt, there was no Realm invading the place, there were no Sidereals out to hunt the PCs, etc.

So if you’re done watching any of the other Exalted podcasts that I listed and want a breath of fresh air to get a palette cleanser on Solar stuff, this series is a good place to go.

Autochtonia and HAAL

Since one of the player characters was an Alchemical the game had an opportunity to explore the concepts associated with them - the Autochtonian culture, the industrial aesthetics, the purveying propaganda, the concepts of 1984 mixed with communism and everything that’s usually quite alien to Exalted and Creation. Both the GM and the player portraying Heroism Advancing Algorithm nailed that portrayal, making it both the highlight of the series as well as the centre focus of much of the campaign. It is clear both of them were very familiar with the source material and had fun depicting that culture.

Morality of monsters

One fun part of RPGs is being able to explore worlds and cultures that are different and alien to our own. Congenials offered its own interesting twist when dealing with the Exigent of Kaiju.

In our world a person making giant monsters and unleashing them onto the world would be really bad. However, Creation is a different place. It’s a land of capital H Heroes. Those heroes don’t rise up without a challenge, and they need to forge their legend, so what better way than engineering opportunities for that to happen?

Enter the Exigent of Kaiju, an Exalt who took on the task of creating monsters so that heroes might rise up to defeat them. The PCs were just such heroes, rising up to protect Halta from kaijus disrupting trade, killing people, etc. When they finally tracked down where those monsters are coming from and why they were made it became an interesting engagement for the players and the characters - they had to make a judgement whether this is something they want to allow to continue and if so - how to make the best use of it.

Garfield Minus Garfield

Season 1 Episode 6 is a very unique episode. Since this game was recorded online, by accident this episode did not record audio from the players, which resulted in almost an hour and a half of just the GM describing things, reacting to players, etc. It could’ve been a disaster to redo or a lost episode instead turned out to be an okay listen in the spirit of Garfield Minus Garfield. The GM is expressive enough that you can infer most of the context and still enjoy the show. Congenials Minus Congenials!

Everyone is Magister

Born out of the joke that Magister the Getimian is full of spiders constantly chattering inside of him and telling him to do awful things, the Congenials decided to run a more joke episode of Everyone is John. Suddenly, the character of Magister was controlled by The Ebon Dragon, The Perfect Magister, Grand Defensive Buttress Engineer, Edumaster, Old Cat Lady Magister and The Perfect of Paragon.

That episode went off the rails pretty quick as I’d guess any Everyone is John did, but even more so because the characters are living demigods. So you have cities being conquered, major NPCs being killed like chums, multiple second circle demons being summoned and bound in service of an Old Cat Lady, etc.

The episode was a fun if silly romp!

Opulence of Yu-Shan

Yu-Shan, the city of the gods, could be portrayed in a few ways in Exalted. The GM had some fun playing up its opulence as the golden metropolis when it came to describing how life has been treating Mirage the Sidereal. It’s a fun contrast hearing about how he’s moving up in the world into a giant palatial estate with a host of servants and hand-bedazzled butterflies, meanwhile in Creation people are struggling to get by. It was similarly a bit of a fun scene when the other PCs went to Yu-Shan by themselves and visited Mirage’s estate. There was much judgement and condescension, but in a fun way.

Criticism

No show is without its flaws, and so we should turn to what Congenials has committed. Not as an attack on the show or its creators, but as a learning experience on how everyone could improve...

Some character duds

As with all RPGs, some character concepts or portrayals work better on paper than in practice. Congenials was unfortunately no exception.

I would like to once again remind that a critique of characters and their actions should not reflect on the players portraying those characters. Everyone makes mistakes, sometimes we try playing a character one way that comes off different from what we had in mind, etc. With that out of the way…

I personally wasn’t fond of the character of Mocking White Wind, the Lunar, for a few reasons. First of all, I think the player operated on a lower Level of Trust than the rest of the party and the GM. In the very first episode the group transported a stash of magical materials they acquired into Chanta. They rented a secure storage room and deposited their precious bits. Unsatisfied with that however, Mocking spent the next half an hour or more working his way through a Lunar spy network to work out a deal for a more secure holding spot in exchange for clearing a manse out. It played out overly paranoid and felt like a waste of time in the grand scheme of things because the GM wasn’t going to have anyone try to steal their stuff - he never does that. The character had a similar level of distrust permeate the rest of the series, setting up extra fortified ways of capturing people, etc.

Secondly, the character came off as rather condescending and moralising, judging people and telling them what not to do and what’s good and bad. Sure, that’s what Exalts do, but it can be stressful to even listen to. He wanted to completely shut down the concept of the Exigent of Kaiju and all of his work, and tried to lecture a Guild Acquirer about how she could be starting a war by trying to enslave people in the Classlat Enclave. It all rang a bit hollow and a bit annoying to listen to. Understandably, that sort of thing could be a tough balancing act to pull off between having a strong moral code and being a moralising prick. Unfortunately, this one didn’t stick the landing.

The other Lunar of the group, Mask, was also a bit of a problem. His introduction was basically V for Vendetta speech, which got promptly interrupted and diffused by another character noticing his name being a part of Mask’s long name, which made that already failing bit flop. After that he played a bit of a self-absorbed loner, but one that wanted to have a say on everything, which seems to fall under one of those RPG tropes of a dark brooding character with an edgy backstory. In general, I didn’t enjoy this character either.

And finally, we have two characters that make you want to say “and they were there too”, those being Sola Bright Light and Hunter of Shades. Both of those characters were introduced and contributed to some fights and solving some problems, but you would often forget they were there. Sola had one bit with her cult that was interesting (we’ll get to that soon), and Hunter had his character introduction which gave him a goal to achieve (kill the Perfect of Paragon), but other than those I couldn’t tell you much more about what they did. Part of it could be because of how often they appeared in the story (4 episodes for Sola, only in Season 1, and 8 for Hunter, only in Season 2), part of it could be because not everyone likes to take centre stage, so it’s understandable if some characters don’t leave a mark.

Dragon King plot elephants

Dragon Kings in the Exalted world can be a bit of a plot elephant - drawing a lot of attention to themselves when introduced and possibly being a fountain of exposition when introduced - something you can’t ignore and have to address. Mai, an ancient spirit of a Dragon King was such an elephant - quickly acting as a sycophant to Sola, talking about the First Age, the Usurpation, undermining Autochtonian teaching by telling what Autochton was really like, etc. It’s hard to argue with such Dragon Kings, especially as played by this GM, as they present everything they talk about as facts and first hands accounts very convincingly.

What’s worse is that Mai’s plotline just gets dropped soon after they’re introduced because Sola’s player stopped appearing in the show.

Mediocre audio quality

Since the game was run online and featured eight different people each on their own computer, the audio quality varied a lot from person to person. Unfortunately, the final product had an overall mediocre audio quality - you could hear a number of notification pings being recorded, people talked over one another a bit (at one point the GM muted himself in the game but not on the recording and proceeded to talk with someone about the game while two PCs were talking at the same time), etc. As much as I enjoyed the character of HAAL, the enjoyment was always dampened by a poor audio quality unfortunately.

Out of all Exalted podcasts I’ve covered so far, this one had the poorest audio quality.

Journey quick travel

The old problem of Exalted being a gigantic world while at the same time having many means of quick travelling and skipping through it also made its way to Congenials. It was further compounded by having a Sidereal Chosen of Journeys as one of the main PCs, meaning most of the travel by the group could be done at a rapid pace while avoiding all the problems in between. So while something like ExalTwitch condensed a journey of 4000 miles into a scene swipe, Congenials were doing something similar but also their characters didn’t experience much of the downtime.

Ignoring cult problems

This one has been a personal gripe of mine for a while now. In games like Exalted or Godbound where the PCs have their own cults, they often end up being neglected by their patrons or becoming caricatures of how people behave, rather than being an important part of that character.

Sola was a high priestess in her village before she Exalted. After killing the village’s former god, the villagers decided to worship her instead and followed her from the West into the deep North-East that is Halta. They were quite a lot out of their comfort zone almost living in a squaller, but their main problem was a lack of direction. When presented with this problem characters like HAAL started helping the village out and offering them some guidance but Sola didn’t engage with them or express what she wants out of them at all. It was a bit disappointing, and at least the PCs called her out on it a bit.

The problem probably comes from a few things.

Firstly, the Godbound system that this homebrew was based on really rewarded characters for having a cult. You not only gained more Dominion (power to change the world), but you could also turn it into an army or a big power in the world. Opting not to have a cult was a bad choice in almost all situations.

Secondly, it can also be a problem to play a character with a cult. Some players might like the idea on paper, but when push comes to shove it could be something the player might not be comfortable or enjoy dealing with.

Unfortunately, Sola did not appear in the game after the episode when she interacted with her cult, so that thread was dropped without a conclusion.

Conclusions

Congenials was an interesting Exalted podcast that unfortunately is dragged down by its audio quality. It’s pretty much the only Exalted Actual Play that focused predominantly on non-Solar characters and breaking away from Solar-related tropes. With cherry picking the right players from the ones that played the game, you could have a pretty good set of characters for an interesting continuation of the story. It’s unfortunate that probably won’t happen, but some of the players from the Congenials cast have started their own PodPodCastCast.

Now, onto listening to the other Sponsored By Nobody Exalted podcasts...

Related links:

• Congenials episode synopsis

Equivalent Dice Theorems of RPGs

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

Lets back up and start from beginning.

FATE dice rolls

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

FATE Dice

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

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

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

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

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

Equivalent dice and rolls

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

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

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

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

Dice roll statistics

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

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

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

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

So where does this all lead us?

Conclusions

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

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

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

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

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

Related articles:

• Make every roll impactful

Related links:

• Central Limit Theorem
• Reddit threads 1 & 2

Demon City Slickers - an Exalted Podcast Review

I’ve spent the last few months listening through a few of the Exalted RPG Podcasts / Actual Plays and I figured I’d share my thoughts on them with you. There is a good deal one can learn from them, whether you’re making your own actual plays or just gaming in general.

In today's episode, I will cover Demon City Slickers.

Disclaimers

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

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

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

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

Finally, there will be some spoilers for the show, it would be rather hard to discuss some things without that...

Overview and minor things

Demon City Slickers is an Exalted actual play hosted by @WhatUpDemonCity. It is a comparatively short actual play that met an abrupt end due to the GM studying abroad and not wanting to support OPP. The game features a cast of four players, with one of them being introduced to replace a vacancy left by another.

The series takes the form of an audio-only podcast with 30-60 minute episodes with minor editing.

From what I understand the cast consists of students that mainly got into podcasting thanks to Swallows of the South, this being their first production.

Player Characters

The game features four PCs:

Mel (m), also known as “Harmonious Melody of the Seven Winds of Each of the Three Seas, Each of the Seven Winds Having Seven Individual Melodies Of Their Own Which Each Sound Simultaneously As The Wind Blows”, a Zenith musician and a sword master who sold his soul to a demon.

Kulak (m), a giant of a Dawn Caste, former pirate turned bodyguard for hire.

Kleefin (f), a dirty forest girl Zenith Caste with a familiar, Steely Dan, a giant fire breathing ostrich.

Leela (f), a sneaky sorcerer / alchemist with a Sidereal handler, Waterfall of Hidden Magics, aka Magi.

General Plot

In South-West of Creation, the city of Se'Arah Ayn is under Realm occupation. The PCs are hired to investigate a slaughter at a local Immaculate Dojo and find themselves in the crossfire of the local demon cults trying to vye for power before the Wyld Hunt makes its way to clean up the town. During the conflict, a mysterious Abyssal with a demonic artefact daiklave appears to further complicate matters…

With eight proper episodes and three flashback episodes, that’s all the plot there was.

Highlights

Filled with determination

During the various episodes the GM mentioned that this podcast is a student production, as well as discussing various problems caused by them going to study abroad and so on. In general, it seems making the podcast takes some determination on the part of the GM and the players, and that should always be celebrated. Even if the show might’ve been a bit rough around the edges, hopefully this drive to express oneself will continue to drive the team forward and into bettering themselves as the time goes on.

Extra editing and custom sounds

It was quite noticeable from the start that the show featured some music and sounds that were added as a part of post-processing. I believe the GM also mentioned that some of that music is custom made by him or his brother, which is an extra touch. While during the run of Demon City Slickers the effects could get a bit overbearing at times, a much more subtle use of the same editing used during Dollywood City Slickers showed more potential. Interesting idea, needs a bit more polish to be great.

Good content warnings

Similar to Swallows, this podcast featured some pretty good content warnings for an episode featuring a burning building. The crew also went an extra mile to create an episode summary for those that didn’t want to listen to the normal episode due to the content. Nice and considerate.

Shoutouts to other podcasts

Even being an upstart podcast, Demon City Slickers did give shoutouts to various other podcasts during its runtime. It was a nice thing for them to do.

Lowest point in Exalted

I think that out of all Exalted podcasts I’ve listened to or been a part of, Demon City Slickers might’ve hit the lowest point for the PCs I’ve witnessed. It’s the end of Episode 4, and the characters are dealing with a fallout of a fire at the police station. During the initial explosion one of the PCs, Kleefin, disappeared (because the player had to drop out). Their familiar, the talking ostrich Steely Dan, barely made it out alive, they were limping. Kulak had a major tie to Kleefin, so they were distraught. They also have gone into the burning building to fight the perpetrators going around killing people and they have outed themselves as a Solar. After letting Steely Dan rest his broken leg on Kulak’s boat, the PCs went to interrogate someone they had captured. After the investigation some mysterious figure warned them not to stick their noses where they don’t belong. When they came back, the boat was being investigated by the Realm police and was basically impounded with Steely Dan there. Mel had to lie through his teeth not to implicate them, gaining some considerable Limit in the process. At the end of the day, the party was penniless, because Kleefen was the character with the money. They were also homeless, because they used to live on Kulak’s boat. On top of that, Kulak has lost an important friend and soon all of his past acquaintances would rat him out for being a Solar. They were also jobless, since they pretty much botched their last assignment of investigating the Dojo. If that wasn’t enough, in a few days the Wyld Hunt would show up at their doorstep, looking for an Anathema to kill. So Mel and Kulak decided to make a shelter in the swamp for the night. They failed the roll and just decided to sleep in an old hollowed out tree.

I don’t think I’ve seen any other Exalted characters being brought so low as these two due to just a conflagration of bad things happening at once. It was a really great moment.

Standing up to OPP

Just like Swallows of the South called OPP on some shady things that came to light, so too did Demon City Slickers take a stand against the company. Heck, they did that in their first episode. As always, it’s a commendable stance.

Criticism

No show is without its flaws, and so we should turn to what Demon City Slickers has committed. Not as an attack on the show or its creators, but as a learning experience on how everyone could improve...

Tambourine-assisted rolls

In episode 1, the team decided to roll their dice into a Tambourine for an extra flair. The experience listening to that was comparable to ExalTwitch using glass beads in glass jars for Essence, a very jarring experience. The microphone picked up on the sharp sounds so well the episode was really painful to listen to. Luckily, that idea didn’t make it past episode 1, otherwise this show would’ve been unlistenable…

Post-processing and audio balancing

While the idea of adding music during post-processing was interesting, the execution was a bit spotty at times. The music volume usually ended up a bit too high, distracting from the dialogue. This was especially noticeable when it was combined with a heavy voice modulation in Episode 4. The modulation by itself made the character barely comprehensible, while adding music on top of it made me miss their dialogue entirely. I only learned what they were talking about during the next episode recap.

Mid-episode “ad break”

This one was a weird choice - with one hour episodes the podcast decided to put in some “ad breaks” and talk about things one would usually mention before or after the episode - shout-outs, calls to action, etc. It broke the rhythm of the play a bit unfortunately…

Anachronisms and not taking things seriously

Part of enjoying Exalted is the sword and sandal mythical setting. Unfortunately, that enjoyment can be ruined by bringing things up that don’t really belong in that world, like “a police investigation”, “cab service”, “a god-given right”, “a burrito fast food joint”, or NPCs named “Jerry” and “Smith”. It didn’t help that a good deal of the game revolved around “the police”...

On top of things, there is taking things lightly, and then there is giving mouth-to-mouth and a funeral to some long-dead fish in a fishing warehouse while looking for clues. It’s right up there with Swallows opening the game up with Godwin ripping his pants and possibly soiling himself after some job of cleaning gutters.

But, understandably, sometimes jokes don’t land and that’s the reality of things. I think the show has improved since those incidents…

The missing PC

It was an unfortunate event that Kleefin’s player had to leave the show, and thus Kleefin had to be written up. However, similarly to Swallows, the problem was further aggravated by one of the remaining PCs having an important tie to them and bringing it up a number of times in the coming episode or two. It’s definitely a problematic part of any show where the cast changes without much warning, but bringing attention to it won’t help the situation unfortunately…

Abyssals are common knowledge, but Infernals are a novelty

The game’s primary antagonist was an Abyssal. The fact that they are an Abyssal and what that entails seems to have been a common knowledge among many NPCs (even though that Abyssal seems to have been a new figure in town) - the various cult leaders knew about Abyssals, a random demon knew about them, the PCs seem to know about them too. At the same time, a demon bringing up that Infernals are a thing was treated as a surprise reveal. The difference between how those two splats were handled was a bit jarring.

Conclusions

While it’s unfortunate Demon City Slickers ended rather abruptly, the podcast itself seems to be moving in a good direction. Their most recent project, Dollywood City Slickers, showed that the podcast is improving, so hopefully we will see more fun content from them in the future. As it stands, their Exalted podcast was an okay foray into the game with one or two standout moments.

Related links:

• Demon City Slickers episode synopsis

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.