Does the gear make the hero?

[Talakeal]

So I have been designing a homebrew system for a number of years now, which will hopefully be ready for a public release within the next few month (fingers crossed).

Mechanically the system somewhat resembles a point buy version of e6 3.5.

I ran into an interesting problem. If a player specializes in a single "role" they will typically "max out" their character about 80% of the way through progression. At that point, rather than broadening their character as I had hoped, the players simply start using their remaining building points to craft magic items which give them a boost in their primary area.

This works mechanically, but the end result is the only difference between a very experienced hero and an epic hero is a pile of magic gear. To me this just seems wrong thematically.

My players insist it is ok because "That's how WoW handles max level advancement." IMO being compared to WoW is not a compliment...

So what do you think? Does the gear make the man? Are you really a "hero" if anyone could grab your stuff and accomplish the same things? What do you think I should do about it?

[The Rose Dragon]

Depends on the hero! Can you imagine Green Lantern without his ring? Iron Man without his armor? Batman without his utility belt and his bat-shark repellent (OK, maybe you can imagine that last one)?

On the other hand, there are characters who have a small number of items worth talking about, like Hercules and his Nemean Lion cloak, or King Arthur with his magic scabbard (he also has a magic spear at some point, and I think he has a shield of some sort, but not sure).

And at the other end, there are heroes like Superman, the Hulk and Bruce Lee, whose use of equipment is almost incidental (like when the Hulk starts bashing you into the concrete with a jet plane).

So, all of these characters are entirely valid, and any level of reliance on external sources of power is acceptable. There is nothing wrong with having bling bling as your superpower.

[BWR]

This (http://www.cad-comic.com/cad/20100222)comes to mind.


Depends on the hero! Can you imagine Green Lantern without his ring? Iron Man without his armor? Batman without his utility belt and his bat-shark repellent (OK, maybe you can imagine that last one)?
GL: I believe that has happened at times
IM: Iron Man 3
B: I'm pretty sure this has happened too.

Basically, we read about the heroes we like not just because of their cool gear but because of who they are. If a character is defined entirely by his gear, it's the gear the story is about, not the character. Sure, without that gear ever, it wouldn't be the same, but for good stories gear should at best be an important, perhaps even critical aspect, but never the defining aspect of a character. If you want to play a game like WoW (or most MMOs, really) where mechanics are everything and actual roleplaying (and even story) is incidental, fine.
But if you want to have fun stories about characters, you might want to seriously evaluate how much of an impact gear makes. Lots of systems do expect a certain amount of gear at various power levels to make sure things work, but this isn't the only way.

Settings like Legend of the Five Rings can have some very nifty gear but it is perfectly possible to advance to the most powerful tiers both mechanically and politically and have the same gear as when you started out. Alternatively, as in a game I am about to run, the characters can start out with better gear than most people see in their lifetime but they have a lot of expectations on their shoulders tied to the history of their equipment.

But finally, it comes down to play-style. You seem to have had a run of bad luck with your players (is this the old group back together or a new one?). If mechanics are important in a game, there will always be the temptation to work the system so as to be good at something, and gear is just another aspect of it, usually more easily acquired and changed than skills and abilities.

[Nerd-o-rama]

Mythological/fantasy heroes often have a signature relic or magic item - Roland's Horn, Arthur's Excalibur, Perseus's enormous monty haul pile of parental favoritism - but not always.

From a game design standpoint, if I were you I'd put a cap either on number of "epic magic items" that can be crafted (probably one) to prevent proliferation, or put a hard cap on ability advancement of around where a hero without a particular item can get to prevent hyperspecialization and encourage some variety. The latter is more or less how Mutants & Masterminds (my favorite point-buy system ever) works - you've got a hard cap on your damage/toughness/defenses/saves. Whether you hit it with raw strength or your fancy cosmic ring is a matter of flavor (and saving a few points to be put into other areas - Devices are discounted because they can be stolen or broken more easily than an all-natural superhero can be depowered).

[Autolykos]

At least your players seem to be good at exposing design flaws. What this progression tells me is that crafted magic items are too expensive XP-wise for their usefulness (or your players are extremely stingy with XP for crafting). Ideally, the items should be balanced so the players will craft them alongside the character development, and not afterwards. If your players are conscious of "wasting" XP on items that will soon be obsolete, you could make them upgradeable or allow XP to be recovered/recycled in some way when crafting a new item.
They may also hope to buy the items they need in Ye Olde Magic Shoppe (or collect them the true murderhobo way, from the cold dead hands of their former owners) and save on XP that way. If that's the issue, you could add XP cost for "binding" the item to the user instead of (or in addition to) crafting XP. Shadowrun does this for magic items, and it does a pretty good job of fitting character power to item power.

EDIT: What would be a design/balance flaw in any RPG purely built for fun is probably working as intended in WoW. They are putting the need to painfully grind for rare magic items mostly on characters in which the players have invested much, so they are less likely to quit while being kept busy with cheap repetitive content, compared to someone who just started. It's the typical Skinner Box Design you find in MMOs and a sound monetization strategy, but it has absolutely no place in pen&paper games.

[Waar]

As far as I'm concerned gear and inherent superpowers are (almost) functionally identical, and while a hero being defined due to these is fully possible, the skill, wits, courage etc. of the hero are often just as character defining (it is not just your powers that are important, but also how you use them :smallwink:)

Another option is to not consider gear a part of your character, but instead tools that pales in comparison to the skill that you wield them with. (with superior/magical gear more powerfull, but strictly optional)

For instance the later of these results in the SAGA edition jedi, most likely using the same gear at level 7 as at level 20 (at level 7 the jedi gets to build his/her own lightsaber, which is sligtly better than the one they get at level one :smalltongue:)

[kyoryu]

It's just a matter of what you choose to focus on. "Gear = hero" is fine. "Hero = hero, gear is secondary at best" is fine. Just pick one and make sure the game is consistent about it.

Or don't be consistent. Have multiple classes, some based on gear, others not.

There's plenty of examples in fiction of both types. There's realism arguments for either path. There's plenty of interesting gameplay down either road. I don't see one as being inherently better than the other.

Gear offers a couple of interesting gameplay options that inherent powers don't, related to breakage and whatnot. It also offers the option of swapping gear situationally, and changing your abilities - especially if you design the game in such a way that gear offers different mechanical options in combat rather than just having numerical ratings that are applied to generally available actions.


It's the typical Skinner Box Design you find in MMOs and a sound monetization strategy, but it has absolutely no place in pen&paper games.

... you do realize that the initial instance of this model is random treasure drops in early versions of D&D, right?

[Fighter1000]

I don't much like systems where the power of a character is more dependent on their equipment than their actual abilities/qualities/attributes.
I prefer systems where even a plain old longsword wielded by a lowly city guard can still be a threat if you're not careful. Those are the ones that feel the most right to me.
But, if you want to play World of Warcraft on the tabletop, be my guest. However, you're probably better off playing actual World of Warcraft or Skyrim than playing a tabletop roleplaying. Cuz roleplaying is not about stats.

[Bulhakov]

Another route I might suggest is having gear level up with the character.

Earthdawn has a magic item system my players and I quite enjoyed - basically, a magical item grows in power as heroic deeds (or side quests) are performed related to the item (though XP expenditure is still needed).

[TheStranger]

Talakeal, your players are fast becoming legendary. However, I don't know that you can blame them for this one. If there are points to be spent, it makes all kinds of sense for them to spend them on getting better.

Personally, I don't think characters should be defined by their gear. I think the only alternative, though, is to not make gear available using the same resource pool (character points in this case) as other methods of character advancement.

But as has been mentioned, characters with signature gear aren't exactly unknown. One option would be to allow "signature item" as a one-time purchasable ability, then have an ability tree to improve the item. At least that way there's some characterization happening, rather than the christmas tree effect you get with WoW (and D&D).

[TheCountAlucard]

Skills to use the gear are pretty important too. A street sam with a monofilament whip, but not the skills to use it, is more likely to slice HIMSELF in half than an enemy. A decker needs his deck, obviously, but without the skills to back it up, it might as well be a brick. A rigger is gonna need drones, but a drone without a rigger is clunky and clumsy.

[navar100]

Tony Stark

Bruce Wayne

[erikun]

There are systems where gear does not make a character more powerful, or at least not that much more powerful. The fact that they're putting XP points into magical equipment indicates to me that either the system focuses too much on combat, meaning that out-of-combat situations are either minor or handled easily anyways, or that equipment is powerful enough to warrant the XP spending.

For out-of-combat situations, it mainly depends on the sort of game you're putting together. If you are strongly tied to the D&D system, then most of your meaningful encounters will probably be combat and so it shouldn't be surprised that characters focus on being better at combat. If the system is more like WoD or Shadowrun, combat becomes less of a priority in favor of things you can do which don't get you into combat.

For equipment purposes, it depends on what you can get with your equipment. If your best equipment is an iron dragon-slayer lance that is effective against fae and dragons, then people will put a lot different priority on it than if the best equipment is a +2 double-damage lance. Especially if the campaign doesn't have frequent fae or dragon encounters.

[TheYell]

I ran into an interesting problem. If a player specializes in a single "role" they will typically "max out" their character about 80% of the way through progression. At that point, rather than broadening their character as I had hoped, the players simply start using their remaining building points to craft magic items which give them a boost in their primary area.


Just what did you want them to do, more specifically?

[Talakeal]

Just what did you want them to do, more specifically?

Its not a matter of "want". Rather than hyper specialize in a single role they can do literally anything. Take up a secondary combat role, boost their secondary or tertiary attributes, pick up non combat skills, whatever.

[Jerthanis]

Its not a matter of "want". Rather than hyper specialize in a single role they can do literally anything. Take up a secondary combat role, boost their secondary or tertiary attributes, pick up non combat skills, whatever.

It seems to me that the issue really comes down to you having X levels of advancement that can happen in terms of a specific field, and only Y are available without magic items. Instead of having a specific number of points (X - Y) you hope they spend elsewhere, why not give X+A points, and have only X advancement in any specific field, regardless of magic items? That way you might have a guy with gauntlets that give him superstrength, or a guy who just happens to be superstrong, but both can then also get something in addition to their focus, rather than just hoping they lose focus once natural advancement ceases.

[Talakeal]

It seems to me that the issue really comes down to you having X levels of advancement that can happen in terms of a specific field, and only Y are available without magic items. Instead of having a specific number of points (X - Y) you hope they spend elsewhere, why not give X+A points, and have only X advancement in any specific field, regardless of magic items? That way you might have a guy with gauntlets that give him superstrength, or a guy who just happens to be superstrong, but both can then also get something in addition to their focus, rather than just hoping they lose focus once natural advancement ceases.

Its not a superhero game.

That said, it is technically possible for a character with superhuman strength, but that character would need a supernatural explanation for it, which would follow the same mechanics as a magic item.

[erikun]

Its not a matter of "want". Rather than hyper specialize in a single role they can do literally anything. Take up a secondary combat role, boost their secondary or tertiary attributes, pick up non combat skills, whatever.
Then don't allow them to hyperspecialize. Either make it too prohibitively expensive to do so practically, or just disallow the specialization to such a degree.

[Autolykos]

... you do realize that the initial instance of this model is random treasure drops in early versions of D&D, right?
This gets kinda long and OT, so I spoiler it:
It becomes a problem once the player needs X item for his build, but lots of others will drop that he doesn't need, forcing him to do the same grind again and again. And mostly, he can't even trade them because there are only a few items that are considered "useful" at all (which are always in short supply), and most drops don't have a place in any build.
You won't rerun the same dungeon crawl in p&p anyway, and characters usually don't need one specific item (if they do, they can talk things out with the GM). The randomization in D&D was a kinda meh design choice back then, but at least didn't hurt when it put some variation in the treasure (mixing coins, gems, jewelry, etc). No GM I know ever used it for anything important. That's not what I'm criticizing in WoW, and you know it. My issue is wasting people's time on repetitive chores to keep sucking out their money, while holding them hostage with previous investments and guild friends.

Rather than hyper specialize in a single role they can do literally anything. Take up a secondary combat role, boost their secondary or tertiary attributes, pick up non combat skills, whatever.Not gonna happen when specialization is the optimal way to build characters, at least not with players that care about optimization. If you want to discourage narrow builds, get away from the "quadratic" (or even linear) character growth typical for D&D, and use diminishing returns instead. Suddenly, picking up the basics of a new skill will make your character much stronger than adding a little to a high skill (and is probably cheaper to boot). At least if that skill fills another niche that's either not yet taken by another character or can be helped by adding another rookie to it.
Spreading out on multiple attributes is something you avoid like the plague in D&D-esque systems, and the various "X stat to Y" boni allow you to do that to a ridiculous extent. If you don't like it, make all stats useful for most roles and get rid of any way to replace them.
And finally, if you want your players to invest in non-combat roles, make avoiding combat worthwhile. If all they get for avoiding combat is less treasure and XP, they won't. Do away with XP for killing stuff, encourage placing treasure/objectives separately from monsters (this is more of a DM thing than a rules thing) and make the non-combat options as diverse and interesting as the combat ones.
You don't have to go the whole hog (old-school dungeon crawls can be fun, too), but these hints will probably steer you in the right direction.
Finally, I repeat my advice to take a good look at Shadowrun. It does a lot of these things right. I only played 3rd Ed myself, but the others should not be that different in these regards.

[Xiander]

It seems to me that the issue really comes down to you having X levels of advancement that can happen in terms of a specific field, and only Y are available without magic items. Instead of having a specific number of points (X - Y) you hope they spend elsewhere, why not give X+A points, and have only X advancement in any specific field, regardless of magic items? That way you might have a guy with gauntlets that give him superstrength, or a guy who just happens to be superstrong, but both can then also get something in addition to their focus, rather than just hoping they lose focus once natural advancement ceases.


Its not a superhero game.

That said, it is technically possible for a character with superhuman strength, but that character would need a supernatural explanation for it, which would follow the same mechanics as a magic item.

This misses the point of what Jerthanis wrote. I will try to formulate it in a different way.

Since I don't know the exact mechanics of your system i will use a 1-10 scale in my example. A caracters proficiency within a certain role will be somewhere between 1 (mostly useless) and ten (The best possible without cheating).

If increasing a characters statistics can only bring you to 8, but reaching 10 is possible by getting the right magic items, the system can be said encourage the use of character-points to craft magic items (Given that specializing in a certain role is desirable). This is true no matter what sort of game it is.

To remove the viability of using magic items to hyper specialize there are a couple of options you can take:

1) Make it impossible to use character points to craft magic items. (Either by removing the option of crafting, by making it so that crafting and character points do not interact or by any other method you can come up with.)

2) Make it so that 10 can be reached with or without magic items. To achieve this, you could design magic items to not give static bonuses to skills or abilities, but instead have a different effect on the game, be imaginative. Alternatively you could make magic items not stack with certain other options, giving players the option to choose between being awesome because of raw skill or being awesome because they wield the MasterSword.

3) Design the game so that hyper-specialization does not pay of. Someone else already mentioned diminishing returns, which is the easiest way to encourage branching out. If players get to choose between either going from 9 to 10 in one skill or going from 1 to 5 in another skill, they will be tempted to consider broadening their skillset.

[Talakeal]

There absolutely are diminishing returns. But I don't think it matters.

I have a feeling that even if I made it cost 100 points for +1 damage vs. 1 point for +1 to armor, the "striker" will still buy the damage, and vice versa for the "defender".

Also, I have played shadow run. The campaign didn't last long, but I actually think that was the game with the most player specialization. I don't remember the details as to why (did it have the same thing WoD has where it costs a linear cost to buy skills at creation but an exponential cost to raise them with XP?), but everyone in the party was INSANELY specialized, far more than I have ever seen in any game.

[erikun]

Part of that may be the player, part of that may be the system. I mean, I've had players who absolutely refuse to play anything that isn't a D&Dish combat machine. It doesn't matter how expensive it is or how irrelevant hitting stuff is, they'll still put all their points into melee on the off-chance that they need to viciously kill something.

How often is this a valid solution, though? I mean, how often is the crippling over-specialization an actual crippling over-specialization and not just a minor inconvenience? Also, there are games where the system itself prevents such specialization. A version of Fate requires a pyramid-requirement for higher level skills, thus outright restricting such specialization in a single area. Dogs in the Vineyard make the type of resolution pretty much up to the characters, thus making specializing in combat almost pointless (and quite likely lethal for the character doing so).

Not that your system should necessarily do so, but just pointing out that it can. You could do the pyramid-style concept for leveling skills in a character, thus preventing someone from maxing out combat skills and leaving everything else alone. Or you could tie non-combat abilities to combat abilities, forcing such a character to level everything anyways.


Getting a bit off-topic, but Shadowrun characters do tend to be very specialized. They also tend to stay well away from combat, at least the healthy ones do. Your fully augmented Street Samurai may be able to kill anything up to tanks that it comes across, but that's because nearly anything it comes across could kill it in a turn or two as well. A Street Samurai is capable of cutting through tanks precisely because if the entire situation goes to pot, the party will need to do so to make a speedy escape.

[Rhynn]

Then don't allow them to hyperspecialize. Either make it too prohibitively expensive to do so practically, or just disallow the specialization to such a degree.

This is usually a good idea, IMO. In GURPS, increasing your physical skills past a certain level gets ridiculously expensive. You could be spending 24 or 32 points to get a +1 increase in a single skill; that's enough to learn 10-20 new skills at decent, useful levels, or 6-8 new skills at professional levels.


Also, I have played shadow run. The campaign didn't last long, but I actually think that was the game with the most player specialization. I don't remember the details as to why (did it have the same thing WoD has where it costs a linear cost to buy skills at creation but an exponential cost to raise them with XP?), but everyone in the party was INSANELY specialized, far more than I have ever seen in any game.

Yeah, Shadowrun is a terrible example. That game has ridiculous amounts of specialization. The first time I played in a mixed group, I made a street-level hacker with maybe 10 dice in the best pools, and the party face had something like 32 dice for most social interactions. I didn't even feel like playing after that.

[Autolykos]

Shadowrun has specialized roles, but it no character can get away with focusing on one thing only in the typical tank/batman/healer/skillmonkey way. At least in the games I played anyone who did that wouldn't last long. A character who can't pull his weight in stealth and combat is a serious liability for the team. They can do it "their" way, but they can't get away with ignoring it completely. In our group we always said that some skills should be pre-printed on any character sheet (namely Athletics, Stealth, Etiquette, Pistols, Unarmed). Deckers try to avoid it sometimes, and that seems the main reason people find them to work badly in teams (at least after they wrap their heads around the hacking rules, which are kinda clunky).

It may also be a GM issue though. Overspecialized teams tend to work fine in theory, but when the drek hits the fan they will often be unable to adapt to unexpected situations. You only get overspecialization if the GM lets the players get away with it.

One of my most fun (and probably most useful) characters was pretty much an allrounder. He started as tech-whiz, but had a bunch of points and money left over, so I put some in combat-/senseware and bought a cheap cyberdeck. He made an adequate second-line fighter and support/backup decker. Mages can also fill pretty much any role in a pinch if they have a good collection of spells. My raccoon shaman did that quite often.

[Talakeal]

The system actually works pretty well as far as "balance" goes. It becomes more and more costly to improve a skill, and once you reach the peak of human potential it requires supernatural aid to improve it further, which is extremely expensive. Mechanically it works, and encourages slightly broader characters, but allows specialists to exist.

I have the option in the game to spend XP on supernatural abilities, either over the course of play or during character generation. This allows players to make characters with magical origins such as Hercules, artificers who craft all sorts of crazy gear, or a character with a single heirloom item far beyond what is normally available to their level.

However, if a character wants to specialize in one thing at the exclusion of all else, which I find most do, they will need to max out BOTH the natural and supernatural sides of their character, and for most characters magical artifacts are the simplest way to do this.

The problem is a thematic one, the difference between a high level focused swordsman and a max level focused swordsman is not in skill but in gear, and if the two fought naked (with standard swords) they would be perfectly equal. This just kind of bugs me.

Also, it is not always combat focus. Indeed, for several characters the threat of death in combat is the only thing keeping them at all well rounded, otherwise they would be 100% skill monkeys, crafters, or social characters.

[tasw]

So I have been designing a homebrew system for a number of years now, which will hopefully be ready for a public release within the next few month (fingers crossed).

Mechanically the system somewhat resembles a point buy version of e6 3.5.

I ran into an interesting problem. If a player specializes in a single "role" they will typically "max out" their character about 80% of the way through progression. At that point, rather than broadening their character as I had hoped, the players simply start using their remaining building points to craft magic items which give them a boost in their primary area.

This works mechanically, but the end result is the only difference between a very experienced hero and an epic hero is a pile of magic gear. To me this just seems wrong thematically.

My players insist it is ok because "That's how WoW handles max level advancement." IMO being compared to WoW is not a compliment...

So what do you think? Does the gear make the man? Are you really a "hero" if anyone could grab your stuff and accomplish the same things? What do you think I should do about it?

I agree with your WoW comparison.

Make the amount of magical items or spells you can benefit from equal to half your CON mod and you solve lots of those problems.... actually lots of the problems of 3e period.

[Talakeal]

I agree with your WoW comparison.

Make the amount of magical items or spells you can benefit from equal to half your CON mod and you solve lots of those problems.... actually lots of the problems of 3e period.

I have already done that (although I use charisma).

The thing is that if a character uses their own XP to craft an item it bypasses this restriction, as they are literally putting part of their own soul into an item and it is a permanent loss. (Unlike 3.5 XP is most certainly not a river in my system. You get a set amount per adventure regardless of your "CR") This allows for "artificer" characters who primarily derive their power from items.

[TubaMortim]

An alternative approach:

Make the craftable magic items not +5 to weapon, +5 to shield and +5 to boots&gloves. Give them a special power/ability/spell instead.

For example, your melee player won't be playing "fully +5 fighter", but eg. "the blind-fighting warrior who has an artifact of magical darkness". Or "the warrior whose combat style utilizes a cape of blinking".