Did the meaning of GMPC change?

[Talakeal]

I have always thought it meant a player character which is run by the GM.


A few months back, I told someone that in my system, it isn't a great idea to spend all of your build points buying endgame equipment on a starting character, because you are creating incentives for powerful villains to rob you or kill and take your stuff, as you have equipment that is valuable to them, but lack the personal power or connections to defend it. His response was that my setting is stupid because "legions of GMPCs will fall from the sky to punish you for making the wrong character."

I thought this was a one off hyperbole, but recently I saw someone saying they don't like Vampire: The Masquarade because the published setting has "too many GMPCs in it".


Did the definition shift while I wasn't looking? Does GMPC now mean any powerful NPC, or any NPC the GM uses to railroad the players, or an NPC who is a published part of the setting? Or is it something else?

[Satinavian]

It means a character run by the DM like a PC.

And there is a very strong connotation of that meaning an NPC being treated inappropriately as a PC. Getting the spotlight and solving the problems, accompanying the party all the time and taking the challenges away from the PC. Even worse, for many people it means an NPC treated like an unfairly favored PC.

In the case of the V:TM complaints it is exactly that : Many NPCs are written as if they were PCs of the authors. And many official campaigns have basically NPCs as protagonists and the actual PCs as bystanders.


As for the initial use from the other forum user, you have to ask them, what they means. I would guess it was just some insult playing on the unfairness angle.

[Kurald Galain]

I have always thought it meant a player character which is run by the GM.
It usually means a Mary Sue character.

Often, he is vastly more powerful than anyone else, gets special/personal gear when nobody else does, accompanies the PCs even when they don't want him to, and solves problems without giving the party a chance to do anything. Fun (?) for the DM, not so much for anyone else. E.g. the character Gandalf in DM of the Rings (https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=612).

[Lalliman]

Your understanding of the term is correct. But words get bastardized and misappropriated all the time. In your examples, people are using it to mean powerful NPCs who have more agency than the player characters by virtue of having a well-established place in the setting. I can see how someone might call that a GMPC for lack of a better word. Such characters are not a generally-agreed-upon faux pas like true GMPCs, but they are divisive. Some people think that having a lot of those is good worldbuilding. Others think they're an incursion against the agency and importance of the player characters.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

Many NPCs are written as if they were PCs of the authors. And many official campaigns have basically NPCs as protagonists and the actual PCs as bystanders.

Our DM: "This character is not going to die, she's too important for the story."

Us: "So, we should just put her on the front line?"

(She did survive, but she spent a lot of that time surviving away from us.)

[Fable Wright]

Given Talakeal's storied history of players, I came here expecting to see him being accused of a background NPC turning into a GMPC after a few good turns of luck when the players suffered misfortune.

With that said, I agree with the other posters in this thread. GMPC's literal meaning is an NPC played as a PC. However, bear in mind that the intangible concepts that people are gesturing at when they call setting NPCs 'GMPCs' are three major factors that are traditionally associated with PCs exclusively: High degrees of agency; personal power; and alliance to PCs.

Elminster is an NPC that often falls into this camp. He is a Good GuyTM that is fighting evil people to make life better for everyone. So the players cannot kill him or view him as an antagonist. He also has a high degree of agency, allowing him to do anything that needs to be done in the setting. Finally, he has the personal power greater than the median power level in the setting—in other words, at or above PC power level.

If Elminster were villainous, he would be a perfect end boss for PCs (he's mucking up the world and no one else can or is stopping him). If Elminster were weaker than the party, then he needs their support to do his job and he's basically a perfect questgiver, identifying what needs to be done and providing incentives, but not personally resolving the problem. If Elminster was as strong as he is but had no ability to act due to outstanding issues, then he's a perfect Big Good, and the PC plot might be to find a way to free his hands in order to resolve a threat beyond their personal power as a resolution they've fought for and earned.

However, all three factors are in place, giving him a narrative status that is traditionally held only by PCs. And he is run by the GM. Thus, the terminology associated with him is as a GMPC within the setting. This is the World of Darkness issue. When you have nominally-allied Elders that have a free hand instead of bound up and unable to act because of politics, run by the GM? That triggers the instincts many PCs have when there's a GMPC in the group, and so they get the GMPC label.


Your understanding of the term is correct. But words get bastardized and misappropriated all the time. In your examples, people are using it to mean powerful NPCs who have more agency than the player characters by virtue of having a well-established place in the setting. I can see how someone might call that a GMPC for lack of a better word. Such characters are not a generally-agreed-upon faux pas like true GMPCs, but they are divisive. Some people think that having a lot of those is good worldbuilding. Others think they're an incursion against the agency and importance of the player characters.

The latter group is correct. Free agents with a lot of personal power remaining free agents for more than 5 years should not normally happen. Most should start or join causes and existing power structures that impose limits on what they can feasibly do, because the benefits of doing so are enormous. Those that refuse are long-term wildcards, and those get assassinated by the powers that be to make plans go smoother if they keep meddling in random events. Most people in the real world do not have the degree of agency that triggers the 'GMPC' instinct, and this is a trend throughout history. The exceptions are pointed at by the 'Great Men' theory of history, and that list is short despite millenia of history.

[ngilop]

If a player can spend build points at character creation on something like equipment, or abilities..


then by definition those cannot be END GAME items.


Why do you feel the need to punish players for using the system you created in an intelligent way?

[Talakeal]

Why do you feel the need to punish players for using the system you created in an intelligent way?

Maybe if you need to dismiss the obvious downsides of your build as “punishments” it wasn’t that intelligent of a build in the first place?

[gatorized]

Every NPC is a GMPC. They're all controlled by the GM. The "player" part of the acronym can be discarded; either we don't count the GM as a player, so it's inaccurate, or we do, and it's redundant (since "player" is already included in the definition of GM in that case). They're just GMCs.

I would replace the term GMPC as it's normally used - a powerful character that exists only to make the player characters look like **** by comparison, to shift the balance of narrative control and agency away from the players, and to ruin the players' fun any time they do anything the GM doesn't like - with something else. I like to call them "Tyrannical Power Trip Characters" (TPTCs). This way we don't have the implication that the character is someone who follows the party around as an ally; since that isn't necessarily the case for all GMPCs, the "player character" part of the acronym isn't accurate.

[gatorized]

Maybe if you need to dismiss the obvious downsides of your build as “punishments” it wasn’t that intelligent of a build in the first place?

Why did you make those downsides part of the system?

[ngilop]

Maybe if you need to dismiss the obvious downsides of your build as “punishments” it wasn’t that intelligent of a build in the first place?

Except.


that is not a downside of the build


that is just DM fiat becuase they were petty enough to jerk over the player for spending their character build points in a way the DM was not expecting.

Even though the same DM put those as available options at character creation.


So again, if you can JUST START MAKING A CHARACTER and purchase said items/abilities they are NOT end game items nor end game abilities

you are just being salty and needlessly punitive for reasons that are trivial and oppressive just to get players to do what you want them to do.

[icefractal]

Eh, I can see both sides of that one really. On one hand, having NPCs auto-counter the PCs sucks, and generally players want to be the ones with the smart plan rather than the victims of it.

But on the other hand, how satisfying is any victory in a world where everyone else is holding the idiot ball? Like, I don't think NPCs need to be using optimal tactics, but if they just forget that like, magic exists, it's going to feel dumb.

Example - the TO thing (and it's fine in a TO context, but I've seen people try to pass it off as PO) of "bootstrap your ascension with a Candle of Invocation which you buy for 8400 gp". If these things can rocket you to "NI Wishes" status then who the **** is making and selling them for a pittance? People with absolutely no knowledge of other planes (and yet they know Gate), and also no knowledge of other people having done this process? It's a bit silly, frankly.


As for end-game-ness -
I think again this depends on the system. In Hero system, for example, there aren't end-game powers. Even in a setting with a steep power curve, the same powers are available and there isn't much that can't be done (albeit weaker) on a lower-end point budget.

Now let's say this is Champions (superheroes) and you make a hero called "TeleCom" who can astral project all over the planet, reporting on what all the villains are doing, and sabotaging them as best he can at nearly zero risk (because destroying a projection doesn't hurt him). But he has a public identity and buys absolutely nothing to make him more secure, just living in a normal apartment under his real name with no Danger Sense or anything. Do you think supervillains should just ... ignore that? Not go grab him while he's astral projecting even though they could easily do so? Because "you can afford to astral project on a 'noob hero' budget (by spending all of it), so it must have no downsides for a noob hero to utilize"?

[Mechalich]

I would replace the term GMPC as it's normally used - a powerful character that exists only to make the player characters look like **** by comparison, to shift the balance of narrative control and agency away from the players, and to ruin the players' fun any time they do anything the GM doesn't like - with something else. I like to call them "Tyrannical Power Trip Characters" (TPTCs). This way we don't have the implication that the character is someone who follows the party around as an ally; since that isn't necessarily the case for all GMPCs, the "player character" part of the acronym isn't accurate.

In many cases the GMPC is a character who is intended to have a supervisory role who ends up doing the job themselves. This is partly a problem of adapting social dynamics from the real world - where the power of systems overwhelms personal power - to a fictional world where personal power is the only thing that matters. This can be a hard problem - is your boss is inherently better at everything your team does than you, why aren't they doing your job? In single author fiction there are various workarounds in place - in LotR the answer to 'why can't Gandalf fight Sauron' is quite simply: 'because god said so' - but these can be unsatisfying in games, especially if the players are well-informed as to what the capabilities of such characters are. Elminster's general passion for sitting on his but smoking a lot becomes a lot less acceptable after a player runs a high-level wizard or two and realizes just how much of reality they can reshape in their off-hours.

[Batcathat]

Eh, I can see both sides of that one really. On one hand, having NPCs auto-counter the PCs sucks, and generally players want to be the ones with the smart plan rather than the victims of it.

But on the other hand, how satisfying is any victory in a world where everyone else is holding the idiot ball? Like, I don't think NPCs need to be using optimal tactics, but if they just forget that like, magic exists, it's going to feel dumb.

Yeah, this. It could be compared to something like kryptonite in Superman comics. It would be unrealistic if every villain used it all the time, but it would also be unrealistic if no villain ever took advantage of his one glaring weakness.

As for the "end game items" thing, it seems a bit odd of characters can have those from the start, but if they do it makes sense that they might be targeted over them. (Not in the sense of "teams of assassins show up every time you go outside", but on occasion).

In my experience, the term "GMPC" can cover a pretty wide range of characters and behaviors, but no, not every powerful character.

[Talakeal]

Except.

that is not a downside of the build

that is just DM fiat because they were petty enough to jerk over the player for spending their character build points in a way the DM was not expecting.

Even though the same DM put those as available options at character creation.

you are just being salty and needlessly punitive for reasons that are trivial and oppressive just to get players to do what you want them to do.

This is a probably a topic for a wholly different thread, but it's weird how a lot of munchkins tie so much of their own self-worth into their munchkining, and take it as a personal insult to their intelligence when other people point out the flaws in their build.

Like, my friend Bob always makes one dimensional characters, and then throws a fit if you use common sense counters to them. Like, for example, he creates mages with rock bottom strength, and then considers grappling to be "cheating". And he uses the exact same circular logic: You are only grappling me to punish me for outsmarting you and making the perfect build. And then if you point out the obvious gap in the logic, that if it was truly a perfect build it wouldn't be countered so easily by a simple tactic like grappling. But, of course, if he admitted it wasn't a perfect build, not only would that be admitting that grappling is a legitimate tactic rather than bullying, but it is also admitting that maybe he isn't the smartest person at the table in the first place.


So again, if you can JUST START MAKING A CHARACTER and purchase said items/abilities they are NOT end game items nor end game abilities

Do you have a point here besides pedantry? Would you prefer I had said "stacking merits which allow a character to prematurely access lots of equipment which would otherwise not be available until the late stages of the game?"


Why did you make those downsides part of the system?

Every character is going to have areas that they excel in and areas the struggle in. The game would be pretty bland and uninteresting if that wasn't the case IMO.

The more you focus a character in one area, the more their strengths, and their weaknesses, become apparent. And this isn't a bad thing!

It only becomes a problem when either A: The character's weaknesses are so glaring that the entire setting has to hold the idiot-ball to avoid exploiting them or B: the player begins to feel like they are entitled to all the strengths of a min-maxxed character, but if any of the weaknesses that go along with it, then the GM is somehow picking on them.



As for the specific downsides to equipment-based builds, that is just common sense. If you have a bunch of big flashy hardware, you are going to attract a lot of attention, and if you aren't able to protect your cool stuff, people are just going to take it from you. Like, imagine IRL if you owned some state of the art piece of multi-billion-dollar military hardware; either the government or some gang is almost certainly going to take notice and steal / confiscate it from you quickly, that's just how the world works.

[Kurald Galain]

Eh, I can see both sides of that one really. On one hand, having NPCs auto-counter the PCs sucks, and generally players want to be the ones with the smart plan rather than the victims of it.
But just because an NPC is more powerful than the party doesn't make him a GMPC.

The acronym is deliberate: it's a PC (player character) that's controlled by the GM. It's not a non-player character; it's one of the protagonists. Not a neutral party, not an antagonist, but the focus of the story. And that should be the PC's job.

[Vyke]

I have always thought it meant a player character which is run by the GM.

A bit removed

Did the definition shift while I wasn't looking? Does GMPC now mean any powerful NPC, or any NPC the GM uses to railroad the players, or an NPC who is a published part of the setting? Or is it something else?

You are correct in your first assumption. It's literally a PC character also played by the GM who progresses and is involved as a PC, gains XP a share of trasure, etc. Anything else is just an NPC, good, bad, powerful, weak, published, GM created, whatever.

Other people might have co-opted the term since for "generically powerful character"... but that's just a misunderstanding of what the term originally meant.... probably because GMPCs are almost* always terrible ideas.

*The almost is to cover my back when someone inevitably has a anecdote about how, when they did it, it worked great. I've never seen it be a good idea.

[Witty Username]

Well I have two thoughts, one on the root problem - one on the complaint itself, one on the GMPC stuff and its use/misuse.

For the complaint itself, this feels weird to me since it is comes of as less punishing more the world responding to the character as something that exists within it, but it is a matter of opinion. I would ask if the player would be angry if he had Nazgul after him if he decided to start with the one ring, or something similar but its not a big deal.

On GMPC, it is when the GM plays a character at the table that is indistinguishable from a member of the party, as far as I am aware. It has a bad rep because of improper use, I would argue it is a tool in the box for specific uses, usually when the game expects a support role no one wants to play or you have a small group but those are going to be few and far between.

[KorvinStarmast]

Elminster is an NPC that often falls into this camp. He is a Good GuyTM that is fighting evil people to make life better for everyone. He's a BBGG for an Evil party, though. :smallyuk: The heck with Vecna Must Die, how about an Elminster Must Die campaign! For that I might break tradition and play an evil PC. :smallcool:


Free agents with a lot of personal power remaining free agents for more than 5 years should not normally happen. Most should start or join causes and existing power structures that impose limits on what they can feasibly do, because the benefits of doing so are enormous.
Good point.

Those that refuse are long-term wildcards, and those get assassinated by the powers that be to make plans go smoother if they keep meddling in random events. Most people in the real world do not have the degree of agency that triggers the 'GMPC' instinct, and this is a trend throughout history. The exceptions are pointed at by the 'Great Men' theory of history, and that list is short despite millennia of history. Fair enough.

If a player can spend build points at character creation on something like equipment, or abilities..


then by definition those cannot be END GAME items.

Why do you feel the need to punish players for using the system you created in an intelligent way? Are you a player in his campaign?

Maybe if you need to dismiss the obvious downsides of your build as “punishments” it wasn’t that intelligent of a build in the first place? Are you two having a private conversation on a separate topic?

Why did you make those downsides part of the system? Nice, it would appear that table drama comes to the forum. (Or did I miss a different thread?)

Except.

that is not a downside of the build

that is just DM fiat becuase they were petty enough to jerk over the player for spending their character build points in a way the DM was not expecting.

Even though the same DM put those as available options at character creation.

So again, if you can JUST START MAKING A CHARACTER and purchase said items/abilities they are NOT end game items nor end game abilities

you are just being salty and needlessly punitive for reasons that are trivial and oppressive just to get players to do what you want them to do. Yeah, this may need its own thread.

This is a probably a topic for a wholly different thread, but it's weird how a lot of munchkins tie so much of their own self-worth into their munchkining, and take it as a personal insult to their intelligence when other people point out the flaws in their build. That response is not on Dale Carnegie's list of How to Win Friends and Influence People.


As for the specific downsides to equipment-based builds, that is just common sense. If you have a bunch of big flashy hardware, you are going to attract a lot of attention, and if you aren't able to protect your cool stuff, people are just going to take it from you. Like, imagine IRL if you owned some state of the art piece of multi-billion-dollar military hardware; either the government or some gang is almost certainly going to take notice and steal / confiscate it from you quickly, that's just how the world works. Is that how your game world works? Are your players all aware of that setting assumption?

[Morgaln]

You are correct in your first assumption. It's literally a PC character also played by the GM who progresses and is involved as a PC, gains XP a share of trasure, etc. Anything else is just an NPC, good, bad, powerful, weak, published, GM created, whatever.

Other people might have co-opted the term since for "generically powerful character"... but that's just a misunderstanding of what the term originally meant.... probably because GMPCs are almost* always terrible ideas.

*The almost is to cover my back when someone inevitably has a anecdote about how, when they did it, it worked great. I've never seen it be a good idea.

I could provide that anecdote, but it isn't really relevant. The way I ran said GMPC was basically as an NPC that accompanied the party and levelled alongside them. Which is the only way a GMPC can work, and even then it can be iffy.



This is a probably a topic for a wholly different thread, but it's weird how a lot of munchkins tie so much of their own self-worth into their munchkining, and take it as a personal insult to their intelligence when other people point out the flaws in their build.

Like, my friend Bob always makes one dimensional characters, and then throws a fit if you use common sense counters to them. Like, for example, he creates mages with rock bottom strength, and then considers grappling to be "cheating". And he uses the exact same circular logic: You are only grappling me to punish me for outsmarting you and making the perfect build. And then if you point out the obvious gap in the logic, that if it was truly a perfect build it wouldn't be countered so easily by a simple tactic like grappling. But, of course, if he admitted it wasn't a perfect build, not only would that be admitting that grappling is a legitimate tactic rather than bullying, but it is also admitting that maybe he isn't the smartest person at the table in the first place.



Do you have a point here besides pedantry? Would you prefer I had said "stacking merits which allow a character to prematurely access lots of equipment which would otherwise not be available until the late stages of the game?"



Every character is going to have areas that they excel in and areas the struggle in. The game would be pretty bland and uninteresting if that wasn't the case IMO.

The more you focus a character in one area, the more their strengths, and their weaknesses, become apparent. And this isn't a bad thing!

It only becomes a problem when either A: The character's weaknesses are so glaring that the entire setting has to hold the idiot-ball to avoid exploiting them or B: the player begins to feel like they are entitled to all the strengths of a min-maxxed character, but if any of the weaknesses that go along with it, then the GM is somehow picking on them.



As for the specific downsides to equipment-based builds, that is just common sense. If you have a bunch of big flashy hardware, you are going to attract a lot of attention, and if you aren't able to protect your cool stuff, people are just going to take it from you. Like, imagine IRL if you owned some state of the art piece of multi-billion-dollar military hardware; either the government or some gang is almost certainly going to take notice and steal / confiscate it from you quickly, that's just how the world works.


I agree that min-maxing has the effects you describe; invariably, you'll have to give up some aspect of your character in order to boost another to the max. It's the trade-off of the game. This is where the party comes in play; characters should have different strength in order to shore up the weaknesses of the others.

However, it sounds like you're saying "if you make an equipment-based build, I'll use level-inappropriate encounters to take it from you." Otherwise, if equipment-based is a viable build and comparable in power to other builds, the character should have no problem defending their equipment from those who would take it, just like any other character should be able to defend their belongings from thieves.

Don't get me wrong, someone trying to steal the equipment because it is rare and valuable is absolutely an interesting storyline, and for equipment-based characters, forcing them to cope without their equipment for a limited time can make for great creativity and roleplaying opportunities, possibly a fun heist story to get it back (I don't think your group would appreciate that, though). But just having someone take it who the party has no hope to beat is a **** move. Especially since it is a permanent loss for the character, so it isn't equivalent to using grapple on a wizard in a single battle.

Also, irl, government is only going to confiscate your equipment if it is illegal for you to own it. And gangs aren't flocking towards rich people trying to beat them up for everything they own. That is not how the world works. Not that fantasy worlds work anything like our current world either, so the comparison isn't especially useful in the first place.

[Reversefigure4]

I'd say your system doesn't match it's intent. If you can spend all your opening character points on equipment, but it comes with no plot protection and can and will be easily removed from the character with no form of narrative or plot protection, then the system isn't working as intended. It shouldn't allow that spend in the first place.

Most superhero system I've seen make Batman out of a small amount of points providing him billions of dollars (because wealth isn't that valuable in supers) and a bunch of equipment. It expressly comes with narrative protection - if the Batmobile is stolen as a part of the plot, Batman gets a hero point. If the Batmobile is blown up, Batman builds another one off-screen at no character point cost - he's already spent those points.

[Atranen]

Except.


that is not a downside of the build


that is just DM fiat becuase they were petty enough to jerk over the player for spending their character build points in a way the DM was not expecting.

Even though the same DM put those as available options at character creation.


As for the specific downsides to equipment-based builds, that is just common sense. If you have a bunch of big flashy hardware, you are going to attract a lot of attention, and if you aren't able to protect your cool stuff, people are just going to take it from you. Like, imagine IRL if you owned some state of the art piece of multi-billion-dollar military hardware; either the government or some gang is almost certainly going to take notice and steal / confiscate it from you quickly, that's just how the world works.

It sounds like there is a disconnect about what one gets out of build points. For the record, I'm sympathetic to 'your gear is in high demand and therefore people will target you'. If the players learned that a 1st level character of opposite alignment had access to an artifact, they'd relieve them of it, no questions asked.

But, perhaps this hasn't been expressed to the players? Or they are anticipating a different kind of game, where your gear is YOURS, more part of the character than a thing the character has? Some people prefer that, especially for a more 'heroic fantasy' than a 'gritty realism' kind of game.


Most superhero system I've seen make Batman out of a small amount of points providing him billions of dollars (because wealth isn't that valuable in supers) and a bunch of equipment. It expressly comes with narrative protection - if the Batmobile is stolen as a part of the plot, Batman gets a hero point. If the Batmobile is blown up, Batman builds another one off-screen at no character point cost - he's already spent those points.

I'd have to see more details about how Talakeal's system works. I don't have much interest in these supers mechanics, but it sounds like that's what the player is expecting.

[Talakeal]

Are you a player in his campaign?
Are you two having a private conversation on a separate topic?
Nice, it would appear that table drama comes to the forum. (Or did I miss a different thread?)


I am not sure why he is so passionate about this, he isn't a player in my game. I assume he maybe has had a bad experience with a GM in the past and is projecting that GM onto me?

The initial quote about "GMPCs raining from the sky" to relieve a high wealth character of their equipment was not actually an example of my game, it was from a different thread earlier this year where I critiqued someones build, and I told him that he was basically playing what D&D would call a level 1 commoner with the WBL of an entire level 20 party, and that while he might be OP with access to all of his equipment, he is virtually helpless without it, and from an RP perspective he is going to paint a huge target on his back as every power hungry and amoral person who learns about him is going to be drooling over the prospect of a score with such a high ratio of reward to risk.

I don't think Nglipop participated in that thread, but maybe he did and I just don't recall it.


But, perhaps this hasn't been expressed to the players? Or they are anticipating a different kind of game, where your gear is YOURS, more part of the character than a thing the character has? Some people prefer that, especially for a more 'heroic fantasy' than a 'gritty realism' kind of game.

I'd have to see more details about how Talakeal's system works. I don't have much interest in these supers mechanics, but it sounds like that's what the player is expecting.

Perhaps.

My system doesn't have plot armor on your gear, and purchasing powers through equipment is slightly cheaper than purchasing the same power innately to make up for the fact that you might not always have access to it.

I generally don't have a problem with giving a PC reasonable plot armor for their gear, but at a certain point it starts to strain plausibility. When you spend virtually 100% of your building points on high end artifacts, it kind of feels like taking advantage of the GM's good nature.

[Anymage]

You are correct in your first assumption. It's literally a PC character also played by the GM who progresses and is involved as a PC, gains XP a share of trasure, etc. Anything else is just an NPC, good, bad, powerful, weak, published, GM created, whatever.

Other people might have co-opted the term since for "generically powerful character"... but that's just a misunderstanding of what the term originally meant.... probably because GMPCs are almost* always terrible ideas.

The line between "I'm running a PC who's a self-insert fantasy that the rest of the PCs are expected to follow around and watch" and "the PCs get to watch my plot between NPCs who are much cooler and more powerful than them" is microscopically thin. I can see how major NPCs in a metaplot driven setting could be called DMPCs, just due to how language drifts.


Do you have a point here besides pedantry? Would you prefer I had said "stacking merits which allow a character to prematurely access lots of equipment which would otherwise not be available until the late stages of the game?"
...
As for the specific downsides to equipment-based builds, that is just common sense. If you have a bunch of big flashy hardware, you are going to attract a lot of attention, and if you aren't able to protect your cool stuff, people are just going to take it from you. Like, imagine IRL if you owned some state of the art piece of multi-billion-dollar military hardware; either the government or some gang is almost certainly going to take notice and steal / confiscate it from you quickly, that's just how the world works.

This is not the first time I've heard you mention how characters investing all their points into gear has become a sticking point for your game. Even if averaged over all possible circumstances you could argue that super powerful artifact X was worth Y character build points, allowing a character to buy The One Ring at character generation does two things. First it tends to create unbalanced encounters where either you crush the competition or wind up crushed in turn. Second it tends to cause the campaign to center around the artifact and its bearer. (The latter might change if the artifact is stolen and/or its bearer killed, but that just means a significant tonal shift.) Those might work if everybody signs up for that sort of campaign willingly, but are going to be messy if any player can make such a declaration just by picking an accessible build and nothing stops multiple players from making the same sort of decision.

So since letting players sink the lion's share of their build points into artifacts is complicated in both the Doylist sense of unbalancing encounters and in the Watsonian sense of explaining how those characters got and held onto their artifacts before the campaign even began, I see no reason why you keep insisting on soft banning them by bringing down complications from powerful NPCs instead of just straight up not allowing them instead.

[BRC]

I'd have to see more details about how Talakeal's system works. I don't have much interest in these supers mechanics, but it sounds like that's what the player is expecting.

A lot depends on the system's inbuilt assumptions


In an open form superhero game like HERO or Mutants and Masterminds, "Character Points" are supposed to represent the overall power level of the character.
The default assumption is that your character is like Superman, with all your powers being innante and unconditional.

So buying powers as equipment gets you a discount, because now you can be disarmed of that power, or be otherwise limited in it's use (In systems I've seen, there's two or more levels of Equipment. Stuff like a magic ring or clothing is low profile and difficult to remove, vs a weapon that can be ripped out of your hand in combat). similarly, if you lose your gear you can get it back, because 'Has gear" is part of the character's baseline state.

The important point with such systems is that it treats all powers, innate and equipment based, as roughly the same type of thing. An Equipment Power is just an Innate Power with a limitation on it.



Now, this is different from point buy systems like, say, Shadowrun (At least back when I played it) that treat Starting Equipment and Resources as one of the things you spend character creation points on, because unlike Superhero systems, Equipment is a specific TYPE of character capability. It's impossible to build a character with an equivalent innate capability to "Owns a Helicopter", for example. In that sort of system, if you want to be able to do certain stuff (like have a helicopter) you have no choice but to put your points into "Having stuff".



Now, as for this:



As for the specific downsides to equipment-based builds, that is just common sense. If you have a bunch of big flashy hardware, you are going to attract a lot of attention, and if you aren't able to protect your cool stuff, people are just going to take it from you. Like, imagine IRL if you owned some state of the art piece of multi-billion-dollar military hardware; either the government or some gang is almost certainly going to take notice and steal / confiscate it from you quickly, that's just how the world works.

I see what you're saying, but I don't love it from a gameplay perspective. There's a difference between "Certain builds have certain weaknesses" and "Certain builds will be actively punished"


A character who gets most of their power from their equipment comes with certain innate weaknesses. For example, if the party is captured and disarmed, they lose much of their power until they can get their gear back. That's innate to getting your power from gear.


But saying "Well, because your Fancy Stuff can be taken from you, the setting will now punish you for having Fancy Stuff as everybody will try to come take it from you" feels like it's a narrative punishment for equipment based builds. There's certainly room for that sort of gameplay (Magic based builds in a setting where society gets very 'Burn the witch' around magic users), but I wouldn't automatically build it in as a "Common Sense" assumption.

To use your example above, if somebody has a state of the art piece of military hardware, my assumption is that they are not some random person who happened to stumble upon it and just hasn't had it taken away yet, but that they're confident in their ability to keep it. If they've had it for a while, there must be a reason they've been able to keep it, and if they just got it, they wouldn't have done so if they didn't think it would get taken away again.

[MonochromeTiger]

GMPC is, as others have pointed out, just a player character played by the GM. That in itself isn't actually a bad or toxic thing, I've had GMs who had a GMPC without it being a spotlight hogging monstrosity that made the rest of the party unimportant. In fact most GMPCs I've seen had the opposite where they faded into the background most of the time and only interacted when it was an opportunity to boost engagement and importance of one of the other party members.

The term has some of the same stigma as playing an Evil character, it's been done badly often enough that people think of the horror stories first and as such bringing it up at all brings those horror stories to mind instead of anything else. It ceases to matter that it can be done well, instead the general feeling is that if it's being done at all it will go horribly wrong. Part of that stigma is that the term is inevitably muddied by mixing it with similar but different terms, powerful NPCs aren't automatically GMPCs but if all someone knows of the term is the negative stereotype of "powerful character under GM control that the GM is using to get the story they want" suddenly everything the PCs can't beat in a straight fight is a "GMPC."

NPCs that deprive players characters of agency aren't automatically GMPCs but they are bad GMing and bad narrative design. NPCs powerful enough to tell the player characters no aren't automatically GMPCs but they are something to use sparingly to avoid making the players feel like they're being kept on the rails with the threat of their characters being punished. Most of the things mentioned in the thread so far are issues with the GM or the scenario design not allowing the PCs to have any actual value rather than issues with GMPCs.

That said in the case you bring up there's a really simple answer to avoid most of that. If you can start the game buying "end game equipment" and you're punished for doing that by having high level NPCs come and beat you up for it/steal it then buying "end game equipment" shouldn't have been allowed in the first place. That isn't giving options and measuring it against risk that's waving an option in front of someone then punishing them for taking it.

Just make anything meant for end game content off limits starting out, don't let them buy it, don't put a cost on it that can be reached by a brand new starting character, or just keep it on a separate list or have a level requirement or something. That limits players to options that are actually balanced with the rest of the party by something other than "GM decided you shouldn't have it after all so they took it from you and now you're actually behind all the people who still have their build points value in abilities and equipment." GMs threatening retribution for taking something they offered isn't a method of balance it's an act of spite.

[Talakeal]

The line between "I'm running a PC who's a self-insert fantasy that the rest of the PCs are expected to follow around and watch" and "the PCs get to watch my plot between NPCs who are much cooler and more powerful than them" is microscopically thin. I can see how major NPCs in a metaplot driven setting could be called NPCs, just due to how language drifts.

This is not the first time I've heard you mention how characters investing all their points into gear has become a sticking point for your game. Even if averaged over all possible circumstances you could argue that super powerful artifact X was worth Y character build points, allowing a character to buy The One Ring at character generation does two things. First it tends to create unbalanced encounters where either you crush the competition or wind up crushed in turn. Second it tends to cause the campaign to center around the artifact and its bearer. (The latter might change if the artifact is stolen and/or its bearer killed, but that just means a significant tonal shift.) Those might work if everybody signs up for that sort of campaign willingly, but are going to be messy if any player can make such a declaration just by picking an accessible build and nothing stops multiple players from making the same sort of decision.

So since letting players sink the lion's share of their build points into artifacts is complicated in both the Doylist sense of unbalancing encounters and in the Watsonian sense of explaining how those characters got and held onto their artifacts before the campaign even began, I see no reason why you keep insisting on soft banning them by bringing down complications from powerful NPCs instead of just straight up not allowing them instead.

Putting all of your eggs into one basket is always risky. It doesn't matter what it is. In this example, its equipment. With Bob, it is usually dumping all of his physical stats. With Dave, it is usually dumping all of his mental stats. For me, its usually dumping all of my social stats.

The issue has never actually come up in my home games, the issue mostly occurs on forum discussions where people seem to be equate pointing out the weaknesses of their one-trick build as somehow being equivalent to being petty about them "outsmarting you".

The reason why its a "soft ban" is because the exact point where it becomes a problem is different for every table. I can't say, in a vacuum, precisely what percentage of a character build devoted to a single resource as a whole becomes problematic without looking at the rest of the character, the skill level and temperament of the player, the rest of the party (both in and out of character), the style, experience, and temperament of the GM, and the tone / theme of the campaign. For one table, 10% might be too much, but another table might be able to pull off 50% or more.


Just make anything meant for end game content off limits starting out, don't let them buy it, don't put a cost on it that can be reached by a brand new starting character, or just keep it on a separate list or have a level requirement or something. That limits players to options that are actually balanced with the rest of the party by something other than "GM decided you shouldn't have it after all so they took it from you and now you're actually behind all the people who still have their build points value in abilities and equipment." GMs threatening retribution for taking something they offered isn't a method of balance it's an act of spite.

IMO there should be a conversation between the player and the GM.

For example, if a PC wants to play a vampire, you need to have a conversation about how big of a weakness sunlight is going to be. In an ordinary campaign, not being able to go out in the sunlight is dang near suicide. But maybe the player has a plan to get around it. Or maybe the GM is willing to warp the narrative so that nothing important ever happens during the day. But for critical weaknesses like that, there needs to be a conversation.

But the problem arises when, for whatever reason, having that conversation itself as seen as an act of aggression and calling the player out for "outsmarting the GM" or w/e.

[BRC]

The reason why its a "soft ban" is because the exact point where it becomes a problem is different for every table. I can't say, in a vacuum, precisely what percentage of a character build devoted to a single resource as a whole becomes problematic without looking at the rest of the character, the skill level and temperament of the player, the rest of the party (both in and out of character), the style, experience, and temperament of the GM, and the tone / theme of the campaign. For one table, 10% might be too much, but another table might be able to pull off 50% or more.

While you're correct in that it needs to be viewed holistically, in my eyes it comes down to "How common will there be situations that make this character useless", judged in the context of the intended nature of the campaign.



For something like "This character is useless without their magic sword", if the campaign is mostly about fighting undead hordes, that's a pretty rare weakness. Yeah they might get temporarily disarmed on occasion, but if an ally steps in and gets them their sword back, their back in action. If the campaign involves a lot of going places where a magic greatsword isn't welcome, that's a different story.


It should also be noted that there's a difference between a SITUATION rendering a character useless, and a character having a tactical weakness. Bob the Wizard With No Strength has a Tactical Weakness, but unless they're put into a fight against the Grappling Hordes of Grapplenamos, they're not rendered useless by the situation. It's up to the player to keep their tactical weaknesses in mind and play appropriately. If grappling shuts you down, be sure to keep your distance from potential grapplers, or have some countermeasure in place (Say, stick near an ally who can bail you out).


The general agreement I believe in is that the GM is supposed to avoid situations that render a PC useless, because doing so represents Unfun behavior. In exchange, the Players shouldn't try to weaponize this against the GM.

For Bob the Wizard, "Entering the Antimagic Citadel" would be a situation that makes him unable to participate. The GM should therefore not create the scenario such that the PC's need to go into the Antimagic Citadel. In exchange, the Players should play confident that the GM won't send them into the Antimagic Citadel, but play like it's very much a possibility. They shouldn't, say, Corner a fleeing enemy such that it's only options are to get caught or enter the Antimagic Citadel because they know the GM won't make them go in there.


When it comes to character creation, the question is, is the Player building a character who is so specialized that they become useless in situations that don't play to that specialization, such that the arrangement flips from "Don't put me in a situation that makes me useless" to "Exclusively send me into scenarios that play to my explicit strengths". Chris the Zombiesmasher is useless against anything but Undead, therefore the campaign must become exclusively about fighting undead, otherwise Chris can't do anything.

[MonochromeTiger]

It should also be noted that there's a difference between a SITUATION rendering a character useless, and a character having a tactical weakness. Bob the Wizard With No Strength has a Tactical Weakness, but unless they're put into a fight against the Grappling Hordes of Grapplenamos, they're not rendered useless by the situation. It's up to the player to keep their tactical weaknesses in mind and play appropriately. If grappling shuts you down, be sure to keep your distance from potential grapplers, or have some countermeasure in place (Say, stick near an ally who can bail you out).


The general agreement I believe in is that the GM is supposed to avoid situations that render a PC useless, because doing so represents Unfun behavior. In exchange, the Players shouldn't try to weaponize this against the GM.

For Bob the Wizard, "Entering the Antimagic Citadel" would be a situation that makes him unable to participate. The GM should therefore not create the scenario such that the PC's need to go into the Antimagic Citadel. In exchange, the Players should play confident that the GM won't send them into the Antimagic Citadel, but play like it's very much a possibility. They shouldn't, say, Corner a fleeing enemy such that it's only options are to get caught or enter the Antimagic Citadel because they know the GM won't make them go in there.


To add to this slightly, there are ways these situations can happen without it being a big obvious thing. Having characters that are good at using their greatsword then fitting a few enemies into every single encounter that are somehow immune to that greatsword's damage type is an example. Having every fight involve enemies immediately seizing on the idea of grappling the low strength Wizard every single time is another.

People generally do not respond well to scenarios that directly counter them and render them useless. They also generally don't respond well to suddenly finding that every encounter, or just a high number of encounters, suddenly hone in on their weakness even when they don't have a reason to know it.

There are ways to have a scenario where a character's weaknesses are on display and make it fun but those ways only work if you have two things. First is player buy in, second is that there needs to be some way they can still contribute.

[Reversefigure4]

A similarly, if you lose your gear you can get it back, because 'Has gear" is part of the character's baseline state.



Just want to emphasize this point, because it's critical. You can temporarily remove green lanterns ring as a challenge for him to overcome, which is why he gets a points discount, but you can't take it away permanently. Narrative plot protection provides him with a replacement ring if the old one is shattered into 1000 pieces, because Green Lantern is a character that has a ring.

It sounds like in Talakeals system, you can spend your points on having a magical artifact, or being a tough fighter who can beat up guys and take their magical artefacts. But once the artifact is gone, you'll never get it, or the points you spent on it, back again. And the GM openly makes it known that tough guy beating you up for it is the expected outcome. So buying equipment might be ok, but "too much" equipment will screw your character because the GM will remove it and your build points aren't refunded.

[VampiricLongbow]

The hobby has grown a lot over the last few years. Many newer GMs do not see the inherent danger of inserting a PC, with full PC agency, into a game being run by the same person who oversees the entire game world. There has definitely been a group of people who have fought to cleanse the concept of its stigma. I, as always, remain skeptical.

For me, it is pretty much always better to have an explicit NPC joining the party rather than a PC with full agency & demand for equal screen time.

[gbaji]

My system doesn't have plot armor on your gear, and purchasing powers through equipment is slightly cheaper than purchasing the same power innately to make up for the fact that you might not always have access to it.

I generally don't have a problem with giving a PC reasonable plot armor for their gear, but at a certain point it starts to strain plausibility. When you spend virtually 100% of your building points on high end artifacts, it kind of feels like taking advantage of the GM's good nature.

I think ths issue here is the question: What do charcter points represent? In most games this represents what the character "is". For example, in Champions, you can take a disadvantage on the purchase price of a power, if it's in a focus (object) that can be taken. But having it "taken" is always temporary. Those points were paid, so you have the item. It's only ever taken away, confiscated, whatever, for a scene or series of scenes at most. The assumption is that the object comes back to you (or is rebuilt) once there is sufficient time/whatever for this to happen. It's only ever a plot event in an adventure, and never a permanent loss to the character itself.

This is why some games have different rules for what you can buy with character points versus what can be done with in-game consumables (which could include money, but also rare alchemetical materials, tomes, whatever). Those are more like the items folks obtain while adventuring. Usually, these are handed out by the GM during the course of play, and should be somewhat balanced to the base power level of the character anyway.

If your game has some mechanics that allow for character points to be spent on what are otherwise "takeable" stuff (ie: items that aren't somehow bound to the person, or just extensions of them, and can't be really stolen), then you really should have some sort of ratio/limit on how much can be built using character ponits. So you have X total character points, and no item (or maybe combination of items) can be held that accounts for more than Y total points (or equivalent). This should ensure that no item held by the character is so much more powerful than the character themselves, that they can't reasonably hold on to it (and frankly, it should mean that items made by a beginning level character should be no more powerful than items made by any other random beginning level character, and probably not be of much interest to anyone who's already a lot more powerful).

Allowing players to basically multiply their character points via spending them on making powerful artifacts on roll up, creates the risk of extreme munchinism. And even the threat you are using become a brinksmanship bit. The player is putting the GM into the position of either allowing the overly powerful character to stand *or* taking the items, and thus making the character useless. He's literally challenging you to have go to that extreme or let him keep the power. That's just never going to end well IMO.

Put mathmatical limits on what power artifacts can be created based on the actual character points that are spent on the actual character build. That will force a reasonable power level ratio and probably fix the problem.

[icefractal]

I think ths issue here is the question: What do charcter points represent? In most games this represents what the character "is". For example, in Champions, you can take a disadvantage on the purchase price of a power, if it's in a focus (object) that can be taken. But having it "taken" is always temporary. Those points were paid, so you have the item. It's only ever taken away, confiscated, whatever, for a scene or series of scenes at most. Although there is something equivalent in Hero system - the Independent disadvantage. It's a very large one (-2, so potentially a 66% discount but in practice more likely 50% because it'll already have Focus), and what it means is the abilities bought with it can be permanently lost, no refund.

Notably, they got rid of it in the latest edition, because it was quite hard to balance - either it gets used and the character is now permanently behind the curve, or it doesn't and was just free points.



The latter group is correct. Free agents with a lot of personal power remaining free agents for more than 5 years should not normally happen. Most should start or join causes and existing power structures that impose limits on what they can feasibly do, because the benefits of doing so are enormous. Those that refuse are long-term wildcards, and those get assassinated by the powers that be to make plans go smoother if they keep meddling in random events. Well ... IDK. Does this apply to the PCs? Because personally, I would find "for a couple years you can be one of the few free agents in the world, then you've gotta join the system (and apparently not be allowed to do much) or be eliminated" more constraining / demoralizing than "there are other free agents who may be more powerful than you".

And while "the PCs are explicitly special" can be fine as a premise, it's not the *only* good premise.

[MonochromeTiger]

Although there is something equivalent in Hero system - the Independent disadvantage. It's a very large one (-2, so potentially a 66% discount but in practice more likely 50% because it'll already have Focus), and what it means is the abilities bought with it can be permanently lost, no refund.

Notably, they got rid of it in the latest edition, because it was quite hard to balance - either it gets used and the character is now permanently behind the curve, or it doesn't and was just free points.

That is kind of the issue with the entire thing. It sounds like something that will work on paper then the moment it's implemented you've got someone who, entirely rules legal, is running around punching way above their weight with items putting them ahead of everyone else. Trying to counter it just swings them from overpowered to dead weight because while everyone else has their innate strengths and weaknesses "the item guy" only had one strength and it was the items that just got destroyed/stolen/depowered.

It ends up being much easier to deal with and safer for avoiding party imbalance to just not give the option. It's rarely if ever worth it, and when it is it's something the entire party has to be on board for since either everyone is doing it or someone is getting shown up whether that's because the items gave an advantage or the loss of the items left them way behind the rest.

All of that is before the potential for GM vs player drama that comes with attempts to depower/steal an item that the character was built with/around. Even if the player was aware of the possibility and agreed to it that doesn't change the point that if they want to preserve their character and not be nerfed below the rest of the party they're put into direct competition with the GM and that can very easily spiral into hostility.

[Slipjig]

Other people might have co-opted the term since for "generically powerful character"... but that's just a misunderstanding of what the term originally meant.... probably because GMPCs are almost* always terrible ideas.

I can think a GM-controlled party member is actually fine, so long as it follows two rules: 1) it must fill an actual gap in the party composition (e.g. nobody wanted to play the healer), and 2) the character should NEVER offer solutions to problems. MAYBE a nudge or a clue if the players are genuinely stuck, but the DMPC should never be "calling the plays" in combat or solving the puzzle (unless it's something purely mechanical, like "make a medicine check"). Have them be quippy, strong, and dumb.

As for the term in general, it is most useful to denote when a GM has created a campaign where an NPC is clearly the protagonist, and the PCs are clearly side characters. Now you can ABSOLUTELY tell a compelling story about "the little people" surrounded by much more powerful entities, so long as the story you are telling is actually focused around those people. But it's easy for GMs to get excited about their world-building and set up a campaign where the camera spends most of it's time focused on the Big Bad and the Big Good, and the players are basically on a theme park ride where none of their decisions matter. This is especially a risk if they've already written a big chunk of their campaign prior to character creation.

But, TL;DR: yes, Talakeal's player was completely misusing the term.

[KorvinStarmast]

The initial quote about "GMPCs raining from the sky" to relieve a high wealth character of their equipment was not actually an example of my game, it was from a different thread earlier this year where I critiqued someones build, and I told him that he was basically playing what D&D would call a level 1 commoner with the WBL of an entire level 20 party, and that while he might be OP with access to all of his equipment, he is virtually helpless without it, and from an RP perspective he is going to paint a huge target on his back as every power hungry and amoral person who learns about him is going to be drooling over the prospect of a score with such a high ratio of reward to risk.
Thanks for clarifying that. :smallsmile:

GMPC is, as others have pointed out, just a player character played by the GM. That in itself isn't actually a bad or toxic thing, I've had GMs who had a GMPC without it being a spotlight hogging monstrosity that made the rest of the party unimportant.
I have seen it done well a few times also.

I can think a GM-controlled party member is actually fine, so long as it follows two rules: 1) it must an actual gap in the party composition (e.g. nobody wanted to play the healer), and 2) the character should NEVER offer solutions to problems. MAYBE a nudge or a clue if the players are genuinely stuck, but the DMPC should never be "calling the plays" in combat or solving the puzzle (unless it's something purely mechanical, like "make a medicine check"). Have them be quippy, strong, and dumb. Good suggestions. +1

[Fable Wright]

Putting all of your eggs into one basket is always risky. It doesn't matter what it is. In this example, its equipment. With Bob, it is usually dumping all of his physical stats. With Dave, it is usually dumping all of his mental stats. For me, its usually dumping all of my social stats.

The issue has never actually come up in my home games, the issue mostly occurs on forum discussions where people seem to be equate pointing out the weaknesses of their one-trick build as somehow being equivalent to being petty about them "outsmarting you".

The reason why its a "soft ban" is because the exact point where it becomes a problem is different for every table. I can't say, in a vacuum, precisely what percentage of a character build devoted to a single resource as a whole becomes problematic without looking at the rest of the character, the skill level and temperament of the player, the rest of the party (both in and out of character), the style, experience, and temperament of the GM, and the tone / theme of the campaign. For one table, 10% might be too much, but another table might be able to pull off 50% or more.

Did not intend to weigh in on this, but please correct me if I'm wrong.

The advantage of high-level gear, for a player in this system, sounds manifold. (1) The gear is purchased at a discount relative to the original ability. (2) Being gear, it may not require specialty skills to invest in, allowing you to skimp on intermediate purchases and further save points. (3) If 'XP is a river' is in play, where someone has low baseline abilities but good gear advances quicker than someone with good baseline abilities but poor gear, then starting with the equipment seems like a natural choice. I do not know if I entirely follow your logic of 'multi-billion dollar equipment will immediately get robbed'. If a local gang relieves you of your extremely powerful artifacts, what are they going to do with it? Either they make use of it, bringing down local attention (and the government can and will confiscate the equipment if they're aware of it). Or they reveal it to the kinds of people who trade in big ticket items, who may find it cheaper to just kill the gang and keep the loot for themselves. A couple less-experienced and thus lower-leveled gangs will probably try, but they can probably, you know, be taken out by the multitude of big ticket items.

Adventurers, if they start with the loot, do presumably own it in a manner the regional government recognizes, by inheritance or whatever other means. The government will not try to repossess it because that risks setting a precedent that will cause all people with equivalent equipment to avoid that government, and they lose the support/defense of end-game adventurers. And the big sharks in the criminal world or arms dealers or whathaveyou will not want to target the PC unduly because the people who have that gear do not usually loan it out, and unless you're sure of who the backers are, you don't make enemies you can't afford to have (and people capable of loaning out multi-billion dollar hardware are often make for those kinds of enemies).

I can understand the player's frustration. He took the words in your write-up at face value, and made his entire build around the assumptions (or lack thereof) listed in the text. The solution is to just mention risks in the descriptions of abilities at some point. If you have, in your write-up, a brief description of physical appearance—Minimum strength: Your arms are thin, and your disposition frail. Many wild animals will regard you as sick or injured, and will prioritize pinning you to the ground so your pack abandons you. And Nearly Minimum strength: Foes with a degree of intelligence can easily recognize you as a mage; restraining you will be a priority for those whom it will be an option.

If you mention in your equipment-gatekeeping sections that 'Unless your Reputation is at X level, obvious use of this level of equipment will cause rumors to spread, and powerful individuals may seek you out expecting to meet a new peer or an old enemy. If those individuals are unscrupulous, they may attempt to rob you if you do not have sufficient backing by the powers that be.' Then the player will not risk having a build that he has invested multiple hours into falling into a 'gotcha!' by the GM, he will have been informed about the risk at the start of the process.

You want your setting to be run on what you view to be common sense. That's great! Keep doing that. But a lot of players come in with a different set of expectations, from video games or more game-ist settings like GURPS where if you spend the points, you're guaranteed to get the gear back if it's temporarily disarmed or disabled. Common sense is, I'm afraid, not nearly as common as the name would imply. The only place a new player might learn about setting expectations and what frame of common sense the world works under is the character creation documents. Adding brief snippets of setting assumptions into them would likely do worlds of good to reduce friction. :smallsmile:


Well ... IDK. Does this apply to the PCs? Because personally, I would find "for a couple years you can be one of the few free agents in the world, then you've gotta join the system (and apparently not be allowed to do much) or be eliminated" more constraining / demoralizing than "there are other free agents who may be more powerful than you".

And while "the PCs are explicitly special" can be fine as a premise, it's not the *only* good premise.

Do you have to join the system? No, but usually a character's goals and wants are best achieved by the system. What does your party Wizard want to do with his life? If it's research, then he could repeatedly go on repeated life and death adventures and then sell the loot at a fraction of its value to buy the materials needed for spell development... or he could join the Mage's Guild, have them provide funding for the rest of his life, in exchange for sharing his work after he completes it and following the Mage Guild's political stance. If he disagrees with that political stance, another kingdom probably has a guild more to his liking.

Does your Fighter want to be a Duchess? If so, she's now a whole political faction. Either she has a backing king she needs to keep appeased, or she's running an independent Dukedom and the moment she commits too many of her resources anywhere, her duchy is at risk of being invaded and permanently taken away by every other faction at the edge of her territory.

If you want to fight for the rest of your life, join/start a mercenary company. You've got people to look over, and feeding them and taking care of them needs constant jobs and has people you can't cross. If you just want to live like a king, become a high-paid royal guard and live in luxury in exchange for keeping the royal family safe. Just can't make the king look bad or abandon them.

What on earth does your PC want to do with their life that isn't best achieved by working within the system?

[icefractal]

GMPC is, as others have pointed out, just a player character played by the GM. That in itself isn't actually a bad or toxic thing, I've had GMs who had a GMPC without it being a spotlight hogging monstrosity that made the rest of the party unimportant. In fact most GMPCs I've seen had the opposite where they faded into the background most of the time and only interacted when it was an opportunity to boost engagement and importance of one of the other party members.Yeah - for all the cautions against it, I've seen GMPCs a few times (and long-term NPCs that could potentially be considered GMPCs) several more, without it being a problem.

Funnily enough, the one campaign I'm in where the GM does have a tendency to over-hype certain NPCs to the point that we're all annoyed by it, they also have a GMPC, and the GMPC isn't the problem. That character is on par with the PCs, doesn't overshadow them, doesn't get narrative favor, and we (at least AFAIK) basically like him. It's the Elminster-type NPCs (very powerful ones who are nominally "good guys" but seem to mostly exist to show off) who cause problems.



What on earth does your PC want to do with their life that isn't best achieved by working within the system?Well, from your previous statement, it seemed like you equated "working within the system" to "not having agency", so ... have agency, I guess. Like - sure, I'd join a mage's guild if that meant, say, sharing spell research results, spending a bit of my time teaching or collaborating, not attacking other members without a formal declaration of grievances, etc. But if it means "no, you can't go stop this dragon from burning your favorite city, you have guild business to attend to" or "I know you dislike Mardak the Enslaver, but he's a guild member, so your hands are tied, gotta let him take over the world"? Then screw that guild, I'll do it myself.

However, now that I think on it - doesn't this "powers that be" thing really just kick the can slightly further down the road? Instead of "why doesn't Elminster help with this?" it's "why don't the powers that be help with this?"

Incidentally, my personal solution for that is "don't use plots that threaten the entire world until the PCs are legitimately among the world's strongest, at least in the ways that matter for this plot". Which admittedly could be because the prior best candidates have already been destroyed.

[MonochromeTiger]

Do you have to join the system? No, but usually a character's goals and wants are best achieved by the system.

That's very subjective. There are certainly goals that might be aided by joining an established group but that isn't the same as being the best way to achieve them, far less so for wants which might involve stipulations that making yourself beholden to an organization directly prevents.


What does your party Wizard want to do with his life? If it's research, then he could repeatedly go on repeated life and death adventures and then sell the loot at a fraction of its value to buy the materials needed for spell development... or he could join the Mage's Guild, have them provide funding for the rest of his life, in exchange for sharing his work after he completes it and following the Mage Guild's political stance. If he disagrees with that political stance, another kingdom probably has a guild more to his liking.

Or he can establish something himself with no one ordering him around or dictating a political position he needs to keep in line with. He could use the money from some of those life and death adventures and his 20+ Int to set up a means of getting those materials on a more reliable and renewable basis without signing on with people who can then order him around. He could decide that those life and death adventures are more enjoyable than being cooped up in a room doing nothing but research (ostensibly for other people since he's going to be so busy on that he likely never even uses those spells) and that the adventures were a big factor in inspiring him on what to research.


Does your Fighter want to be a Duchess? If so, she's now a whole political faction. Either she has a backing king she needs to keep appeased, or she's running an independent Dukedom and the moment she commits too many of her resources anywhere, her duchy is at risk of being invaded and permanently taken away by every other faction at the edge of her territory.

Or because she's a powerful adventurer she could settle further away than right at the edge of her nearest neighbors making her not part of an existing country or sharing a border with one that's so hostile and quick to annex its neighbors. She could, in fact, be the expansionist aggressor others have to watch for. Plenty of things really.


If you want to fight for the rest of your life, join/start a mercenary company. You've got people to look over, and feeding them and taking care of them needs constant jobs and has people you can't cross. If you just want to live like a king, become a high-paid royal guard and live in luxury in exchange for keeping the royal family safe. Just can't make the king look bad or abandon them.

Or just fight for the rest of your life and live in luxury off the vast amounts of gold that adventuring has got you. Neither of those require joining or forming an organization or taking a job from a king. Neither needs you to go out of your way to take responsibility for others or swear yourself into service.


What on earth does your PC want to do with their life that isn't best achieved by working within the system?

Not act like they have to go from adventuring to "you're working for someone now" to survive? Not pretend it's impossible to be a free agent for any length of time just because the same factions that were around the entire time they've been doing it so far are still around when they're higher level? The only one of your scenarios that even requires setting down roots is the one that's specifically about a Fighter wanting to become a Duchess for whatever reason, which actually does require joining or establishing a political structure for the title to mean something; even that doesn't actually say they can't set things up to allow them to wander and adventure occasionally without it blowing up if they look away for two seconds. Everything else is just deciding that what's basically a superhuman needs to give up their autonomy for the rest of their life to accomplish things they've likely already got the means and the funds by that point to do on their own.

Generally there's no rule or story element in RPGs that says "oh you hit 20, time to pick a faction or you'll be assassinated in your sleep for wandering around solving problems, don't ask why it hasn't happened at any point before now when you can wipe the floor with almost anyone trying it." Working within the system is always a choice for an RPG character, not a requirement for success and not even necessarily something that makes life easier. There's even an entire third of the classic alignment chart that would find consigning themselves to someone else's rules something to be avoided at best and last I checked they didn't have any rules saying "you aren't allowed to have or accomplish longterm goals."

[Fable Wright]

Well, from your previous statement, it seemed like you equated "working within the system" to "not having agency", so ... have agency, I guess.

There's the disconnect. I'm not saying that your NPCs have no agency. I'm saying that they need to have sufficiently restricted agency that the GM can justify them not showing up unprompted.

If the GM wants there to be a dragon attack on your former Wizard's favorite city, everyone in that city will defend it. Including the wizard. What you could say is that the dragon is preventing magical communications from leaving the city, and your former wizard is away on guild business. The PCs can break the communications block and send a message to deal with the dragon attack if they're not personally powerful enough to kill the dragon.

If Mardak the Enslaver is within the guild, the former-PC wizard may strongly suspect that there's shenanigans at play, but unilaterally acting to crush Mardak the Enslaver without sufficient evidence may cause a civil war within the Wizard's Guild, which would have a far higher death toll than Mardak the Enslaver ever did. Or maybe Mardak the Enslaver has backers higher in the Mage's Guild that could kill your wizard if they acted unilaterally. If the current, not-former PCs were able to get evidence to allow your former wizard to act with a free hand, sure, he can kill Mardak the Enslaver with one hand tied behind his back, and if the guild is on his side, there's no civil war or backers out to kill your wizard in justified revenge.

The former PC cannot resolve the situation on his own, because his obligations tie his hands. The PCs have the agency to ignore the former PC, and bring the evidence to, say, another higher power if you don't like the way the GM is playing your former PC. The current PCs' choices matter because the former PC has some reason to not steal their spotlight.


Or he can establish something himself with no one ordering him around or dictating a political position he needs to keep in line with. He could use the money from some of those life and death adventures and his 20+ Int to set up a means of getting those materials on a more reliable and renewable basis without signing on with people who can then order him around. He could decide that those life and death adventures are more enjoyable than being cooped up in a room doing nothing but research (ostensibly for other people since he's going to be so busy on that he likely never even uses those spells) and that the adventures were a big factor in inspiring him on what to research.

Cool, same principle as a mercenary company. The wizard is making his own company and needs to manage supply lines to source raw materials, train and equip workers under him, get revenue from sales of the finished products, and now has an obligation to the thing he created so the GM can tie him down when the plot needs current PCs. If he does life and death adventures constantly for many years without support, then he rolls a nat 1 sooner or later and dies. Five years at an adventure every month on average? It's bound to happen sooner or later.


Or because she's a powerful adventurer she could settle further away than right at the edge of her nearest neighbors making her not part of an existing country or sharing a border with one that's so hostile and quick to annex its neighbors. She could, in fact, be the expansionist aggressor others have to watch for. Plenty of things really.

That is assuming that there is, in fact, unclaimed and fertile lands that are entirely free for the taking and do not risk expansionist aggression. If you're settling in places where people aren't living already, then you've got the former PC needing to address the problem of why people haven't been living there... and then keep other people from ruining the nice thing she's set up or stealing it now that there's something worth having at the edge of the world. There's enough problems to tie her down and let the PCs do what they need to do.


Or just fight for the rest of your life and live in luxury off the vast amounts of gold that adventuring has got you. Neither of those require joining or forming an organization or taking a job from a king. Neither needs you to go out of your way to take responsibility for others or swear yourself into service.

'Fight for the rest of your life' usually ends up with a short life. If you're living modestly in the middle of nowhere off your vast fortunes, then you're probably getting a hobby (a tavern or bar is traditional) that you invest your time in, and acts as a tie that reduces the amount you adventure. Maybe dulls your skills from your prime.


Generally there's no rule or story element in RPGs that says "oh you hit 20, time to pick a faction or you'll be assassinated in your sleep for wandering around solving problems, don't ask why it hasn't happened at any point before now when you can wipe the floor with almost anyone trying it." Working within the system is always a choice for an RPG character, not a requirement for success and not even necessarily something that makes life easier. There's even an entire third of the classic alignment chart that would find consigning themselves to someone else's rules something to be avoided at best and last I checked they didn't have any rules saying "you aren't allowed to have or accomplish longterm goals."

...I feel like we're speaking past each other.

From a narrative sense: If there are former adventurers wandering around solving everyone's problems, why do you need new PCs to do any jobs? Why does the next generation of adventurers matter at all?

From a real-world sense: Depending on your perspective, the highest level characters in the world are likely special forces members. If you were to see on the news that the members of Seal Team 6 who took out Osama Bin Laden decided to start wandering around and 'solving problems' of their own volition in, like, Laos or China, I suspect that that would be what one might call an 'international incident' or 'US-funded terrorism' and people the world over would, you know. Put in a lot of effort to make that stop. If on the other hand they ran for elected position in the US, they would likely win, and be able to agitate for change within the US to accomplish their objectives.

Addressing the Law vs Chaos angle: If you build an organization to accomplish your goals, because you hate the idea of bosses and being bound by rules, you're instead at the mercy of realpolitik. That is a series of constraints on your actions, whether you like it or not. The GM can use that to restrict your agency as an NPC at high levels. I don't care if you're a Xaositect and refuse to play by other peoples' rules, realpolitik is a system of consequences for actions that govern your decision-making.

From a bird's eye view: Players' long-term goals can and should be accomplished at high levels. Whether they join the system by building an organization to support them, join an organization, or try to make their own path, they have agency, restricted or not, and their long-time goal can and should be achieved... but it's the kind of thing that they should not be able to complete and move onto the next one, and the next one, until they remake the world in their image. If that happens, what's the point of PCs? In order to continue the setting, they need to commit to an ending in the postgame. Their agency is tied up in making a permanent change to the setting and putting a lifetime of effort into making it stick. That is why it's restricted enough for new PCs to matter.

[GeoffWatson]

You original position was "Join a faction (with massive loss of agency) or be assassinated."
If you meant something else, why not say that first?

[MonochromeTiger]

There's the disconnect. I'm not saying that your NPCs have no agency. I'm saying that they need to have sufficiently restricted agency that the GM can justify them not showing up unprompted.

Which can be done in any number of other ways without ending every campaign with "alright your characters all run off to join a faction that then prevents them from ever showing up on screen as anything but a cameo ever again."


If the GM wants there to be a dragon attack on your former Wizard's favorite city, everyone in that city will defend it. Including the wizard. What you could say is that the dragon is preventing magical communications from leaving the city, and your former wizard is away on guild business. The PCs can break the communications block and send a message to deal with the dragon attack if they're not personally powerful enough to kill the dragon.

If Mardak the Enslaver is within the guild, the former-PC wizard may strongly suspect that there's shenanigans at play, but unilaterally acting to crush Mardak the Enslaver without sufficient evidence may cause a civil war within the Wizard's Guild, which would have a far higher death toll than Mardak the Enslaver ever did. Or maybe Mardak the Enslaver has backers higher in the Mage's Guild that could kill your wizard if they acted unilaterally. If the current, not-former PCs were able to get evidence to allow your former wizard to act with a free hand, sure, he can kill Mardak the Enslaver with one hand tied behind his back, and if the guild is on his side, there's no civil war or backers out to kill your wizard in justified revenge.

The former PC cannot resolve the situation on his own, because his obligations tie his hands. The PCs have the agency to ignore the former PC, and bring the evidence to, say, another higher power if you don't like the way the GM is playing your former PC. The current PCs' choices matter because the former PC has some reason to not steal their spotlight.

If all it is is an excuse to get former characters offscreen then just don't have them on screen. You've basically narrowed that down to "they have a faction or politics holding them back" to the exclusion of any other option, at which point you could've had the exact same result from "they're busy with something else." Either way you've rendered the character a non-factor and I know plenty of players who would rather not have the character come up at all than have them sit there saying "sorry, can't help cause I've got guild business or I decided to be a bodyguard instead."


...I feel like we're speaking past each other.

That's one way of saying we completely disagree, sure. There are more options for a character staying out of things after a campaign is over than "they joined a faction/they're too powerful so other powerful things say no" and "they're dead."


From a narrative sense: If there are former adventurers wandering around solving everyone's problems, why do you need new PCs to do any jobs? Why does the next generation of adventurers matter at all?

From a narrative sense why is "they're obligated not to do this" superior to "they're doing this entirely separate important thing"? Both push the character out of the spotlight and allow the current player characters to matter and be important.


From a real-world sense: Depending on your perspective, the highest level characters in the world are likely special forces members. If you were to see on the news that the members of Seal Team 6 who took out Osama Bin Laden decided to start wandering around and 'solving problems' of their own volition in, like, Laos or China, I suspect that that would be what one might call an 'international incident' or 'US-funded terrorism' and people the world over would, you know. Put in a lot of effort to make that stop. If on the other hand they ran for elected position in the US, they would likely win, and be able to agitate for change within the US to accomplish their objectives.

This may shock you but real world special forces aren't working in a setting where world shattering threats, city razing dragons, and magical/alien abominations are a thing on a semi-regular basis. When you've got 5 different Evil-Gods-of-Blowing-Up-Everything-Nice-and-Happy active in the setting you generally don't shuffle the people who have proven they can deal with them off to jail or switch them to obligatory politics or turn away the people who just showed up and seem to be on the same career path.


Addressing the Law vs Chaos angle: If you build an organization to accomplish your goals, because you hate the idea of bosses and being bound by rules, you're instead at the mercy of realpolitik. That is a series of constraints on your actions, whether you like it or not. The GM can use that to restrict your agency as an NPC at high levels. I don't care if you're a Xaositect and refuse to play by other peoples' rules, realpolitik is a system of consequences for actions that govern your decision-making.

"Here are the brave heroes who literally saved the world a few months back. They're under house arrest, which we can totally enforce despite relying entirely on them to solve the threat, and if they ever go off to do anything else without 5 different written agreements they're in trouble." Yeah that's definitely more logical for keeping Chaotic alignments down than "well there's more than one world ending threat going on, you handle yours they handle theirs and as long as neither of you lose everyone's happy."


From a bird's eye view: Players' long-term goals can and should be accomplished at high levels. Whether they join the system by building an organization to support them, join an organization, or try to make their own path, they have agency, restricted or not, and their long-time goal can and should be achieved... but it's the kind of thing that they should not be able to complete and move onto the next one, and the next one, until they remake the world in their image. If that happens, what's the point of PCs? In order to continue the setting, they need to commit to an ending in the postgame. Their agency is tied up in making a permanent change to the setting and putting a lifetime of effort into making it stick. That is why it's restricted enough for new PCs to matter.

If you're that worried about the idea of former PCs and current PCs coexisting in the same setting then don't have them coexist in the same setting. Just say the campaigns aren't connected and move on. Or you can let your players come up with their own reasons their former characters aren't involved that isn't just "well I decided they're too tied down with social obligations to take care of the thing that's going to blow up those social obligations if it finishes."

Yes there does need to be something in place for shared timeline campaigns so that the first party doesn't just deal with every threat before it gets big enough for new characters to even matter. That doesn't mean limiting character agency is an absolute requirement, it definitely doesn't justify your original conclusion of "they join up with a faction or they die", nor does your later claim of "the best way for them to meet their goals is to work within the system." Never mind the fact that many of those characters would immediately realize "wait, all my obligations/supposed consequences for my actions are dead anyway if somebody summons an evil god/magic-nukes the continent/causes an unending army of demons to pour into the world" and get involved. It's not resolving the problem of why they don't get involved it's just changing it to "wait they stayed out of a situation this important for that?"

[Fable Wright]

You original position was "Join a faction (with massive loss of agency) or be assassinated."
If you meant something else, why not say that first?

Because communication is hard?

My original thesis statement was: "Most should start or join causes and existing power structures that impose limits on what they can feasibly do, because the benefits of doing so are enormous. Those that refuse are long-term wildcards, and those get assassinated by the powers that be to make plans go smoother if they keep meddling in random events."

I did not realize that 'limits on what they can feasibly do' was a 'massive loss of agency' in the eyes of a number of posters. Creating and maintaining a business reduces your agency because you are no longer inclined to do things that risk the success of your business, and thus reduce your narrative agency, even if it's personally fulfilling, accomplishes your goal(s), and overall increases your position of power in the world. Even being your own boss, your agency is reduced. The loss of agency from making and running a startup was, I had thought, implied by my wording to be equivalent to the reduction of agency that a PC would gain from joining an existing power structure. You are a Big Deal. You've earned respect and political power to match personal power. Accepting this means that there's a few things you can't do anymore, but the benefits far outweigh the costs. Those who actively refuse to hold any accountability and go out into the world to change it are like the aforementioned rogue Seal team. People will try to stop them if they're interfering in other countries. People will mostly ignore them if they decide to affect change in Antartica.

How was I supposed to know that people would (appear to) be interpreting this as "become a cog in the machine or die"?


That's one way of saying we completely disagree, sure. There are more options for a character staying out of things after a campaign is over than "they joined a faction/they're too powerful so other powerful things say no" and "they're dead."

Setting disagreements aside, I'm reading your points. I feel like several of the things you've said do not contradict my points whatsoever. Some things massively misrepresent my opinion. And, as indicated above, the words I think I'm saying may not be the words that other people are reading.

My current understanding of your point, which may be flawed, is that it is frankly ridiculous that previous characters would surrender enough agency at the end of a campaign that they would not immediately drop everything to defend the setting in which they live, just so that a new set of player characters can deal with the world-ending threat on their own. My understanding is that you believe that my opinion is that immediately after the campaign end, heroes should either die or surrender enough agency such that the world can be threatened all over again and the old heroes can't do anything about it.

Is this accurate?

If so, we're in perfect agreement. If there's a world-ending threat that's known about and believed, everyone and their mother should be helping. The wizard that joined the mage's guild should be mobilizing it for war. The duchess should be implementing a full conscription, damn the consequences. The retired adventurer in his pub should take out his sword and get to the stabbing.

What should not occur is that, when there's a village in the western wilderness threatened by the desert orcs rising from the sand, someone can just cast a Sending to the former-PC wizard saying "hey, can you teleport over here and wipe these guys out?"

Because that's the Elminster problem. He has zero obligation to anyone or anything except the laissez-faire Mystra. He has no check on his agency from being like "sure, sounds like a good use of an afternoon" and obviating the need for a plot. It doesn't matter if the desert orcs are an isolated incident, he has no reason to not drop everything and help. The wizard might not be able to help because he's in the middle of trying to shut down efforts to investigate the Hell Dimensions due to risk of that opening a planar breach. The duchess might be on the opposite side of the kingdom. The retired adventurer is nowhere nearby and couldn't get there in time. Each of their agency is reduced to the point where the world still needs local heroes.

(I am thoroughly of the opinion that the vast majority of adventures shouldn't be threatening the world at all. More localized stakes matter more to the players, and the players can fail without ruining the setting, rather than victory being a guarantee because of the absurdity of the stakes. All I ask is a reason for people to say "I cannot drop everything to help with this localized event." That is the loss of agency I seek for post-game adventurers... and more on topic, for every powerful NPCs in the setting. This transition should usually happen within five years of making it to the big time.)


From a narrative sense why is "they're obligated not to do this" superior to "they're doing this entirely separate important thing"? Both push the character out of the spotlight and allow the current player characters to matter and be important.

Both represent an equivalent loss of agency. There is no preference to either. If they're busy single-handedly holding back the Frost Wyrms of the Northern Wastes, that's a great way to reduce their agency for subsequent stories. Because they have a task they're working on, they're too busy to help out with more local threats.


This may shock you but real world special forces aren't working in a setting where world shattering threats, city razing dragons, and magical/alien abominations are a thing on a semi-regular basis. When you've got 5 different Evil-Gods-of-Blowing-Up-Everything-Nice-and-Happy active in the setting you generally don't shuffle the people who have proven they can deal with them off to jail or switch them to obligatory politics or turn away the people who just showed up and seem to be on the same career path.

Unrelated to my main point, during the Cold War, we lived in a setting where city-razing nukes were a real thing, the end of the world in nuclear Armageddon was a constant worry, and new and horrifying weapons of war (see Agent Orange) were a thing on a semi-regular basis. Special forces were pretty useful. Them going rogue could also cause the end of the world. I fully agree, you don't move your special forces into obligatory politics, that's just silly. But those special forces don't really return home and do armed intervention on labor disputes while these things are going on, and so have sufficiently reduced agency that your starter-level characters can have their plot about dealing with the Pinkertons without wondering why they're doing it as opposed to wandering Green Berets.


If you're that worried about the idea of former PCs and current PCs coexisting in the same setting then don't have them coexist in the same setting. Just say the campaigns aren't connected and move on. Or you can let your players come up with their own reasons their former characters aren't involved that isn't just "well I decided they're too tied down with social obligations to take care of the thing that's going to blow up those social obligations if it finishes."

Perfect! So we're in agreement, then? My ultimate point was that the setting writers should not impose characters at the level of former PCs with a free hand to act on the setting. If we're in agreement that NPCs of that variety can cause problems for GMs, and the cleanest solution is to either have them not in the setting or not have the degree of freedom that allows them to do PC stuff, then we're on the same page. Maybe not for the same reasons, but we have the same ultimate conclusion.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

I don't have much to add, I'd just like to retell a GMPC story that I probably read somewhere on this forum to begin with.

Two young players, just starting out with the hobby, were looking for a game. An older DM (probably a friend of an older brother or something) took them up on the offer.

So they arrived for the game, and their PCs met up with a character of the DM, who told them where the dungeon was and then went with them. Two players is rather small for a party, so not really a red flag so far. Some support could be nice. Then they realized that this guy was higher level than them, with nicer gear, and that the dungeon they were doing was full of stuff that was deadly to the actual PCs, but just about solo-able by the DM's character. So they ended up basically looking on as the DM overcame his own challenges. The main treasure in the dungeon turned out to be a magic sword that the DM's character took and then both the character and the DM left.

It turned out the DM was an Adventurers League player. He had been eyeing this specific magic weapon for his character, but hadn't found anyone running the module it was in so he could get it. So he had decided that if he found himself two spectators he could solo the dungeon and it was close enough to a real game that it would count, in his mind anyway.



I think what's different about the remarks in the opening post is not really in the type of character, but how the characters are used. The classic DMPC is used like in this story, it's a DM playing with himself. As an extention of that, any NPC that can be seen as part of the spotlight stealing squad could be counted as this kind of DMPC, depending on personal taste. A cool villain with a backstory and a monologue before the final battle is great, but there is a point, which is different for everyone, where it starts sounding like the DM speeching to himself, to just revel in how cool his villain is. At that point the problem at the table is the same, the players feel like they're spectators more than they are players.

The example from the opening post where you shouldn't pick high level gear because powerful NPCs will steal it are closer to the classic railroad tracks, in a not too narrow definition of those. You technically have a lot of freedom, but you must stay within these lines or the story won't work. Railroad tracks like that in and of themselves aren't bad, they're vital even. Every game needs some limits somewhere. Though in this case you might consider stating it as a character creating rule, "don't spend all your points on high level gear because it destroys the balance between you guys both now and at higher levels" rather than a feature of the world. If the enforcing is done by NPCs more powerful and/or more interesting (to the DM) than the PCs, I guess those railroad employees could count as DMPCs. As RPG characters they aren't really in a different class than the spotlight stealers. But their function is entirely different, so I would personally hesitate to call them DMPCs. They are a bit far removed from the classic type of "playing with yourself"-style DMPC.

[MonochromeTiger]

How was I supposed to know that people would (appear to) be interpreting this as "become a cog in the machine or die"?

You did kind of present it as an absolute that the time in which a free agent can remain a free agent was finite then follow it up with the elaboration that the right choice was, and should be, that they join up with a faction.


Setting disagreements aside, I'm reading your points. I feel like several of the things you've said do not contradict my points whatsoever. Some things massively misrepresent my opinion. And, as indicated above, the words I think I'm saying may not be the words that other people are reading.

Which is possible.


My current understanding of your point, which may be flawed, is that it is frankly ridiculous that previous characters would surrender enough agency at the end of a campaign that they would not immediately drop everything to defend the setting in which they live, just so that a new set of player characters can deal with the world-ending threat on their own. My understanding is that you believe that my opinion is that immediately after the campaign end, heroes should either die or surrender enough agency such that the world can be threatened all over again and the old heroes can't do anything about it.

Is this accurate?

My objection is less with the need for older characters to be "off screen" enough for a newer campaign in the same setting to be relevant and more with the way you chose to present it. As I said above your original post and the followups all went with a structure that heavily implied post campaign options are "you go from adventurer who can take on world ending threats to basically doing a day job or you die." While we both agree that older characters need reasons not to intervene my personal objection was that I interpreted your words as an absolute statement on the nature of those reasons and considered it overly restrictive/reductive of what a character could do. Specifically every character's motivations post campaign boiling down to "my boss says I can't, sorry" or "well if I do this the authorities I can most likely overpower and the communities who should adore me for saving the world will be upset for reasons" with the alternative of being to die offscreen just to make space. It also felt incapable of actually explaining why any such character would go along with it. The same reasons it confused me why it was being presented in a way that came across as "this will happen" also confused me about why any characters would care when the choice is between potentially letting the world explode or dropping their job for a while.


If so, we're in perfect agreement. If there's a world-ending threat that's known about and believed, everyone and their mother should be helping. The wizard that joined the mage's guild should be mobilizing it for war. The duchess should be implementing a full conscription, damn the consequences. The retired adventurer in his pub should take out his sword and get to the stabbing.

What should not occur is that, when there's a village in the western wilderness threatened by the desert orcs rising from the sand, someone can just cast a Sending to the former-PC wizard saying "hey, can you teleport over here and wipe these guys out?"

Because that's the Elminster problem. He has zero obligation to anyone or anything except the laissez-faire Mystra. He has no check on his agency from being like "sure, sounds like a good use of an afternoon" and obviating the need for a plot. It doesn't matter if the desert orcs are an isolated incident, he has no reason to not drop everything and help. The wizard might not be able to help because he's in the middle of trying to shut down efforts to investigate the Hell Dimensions due to risk of that opening a planar breach. The duchess might be on the opposite side of the kingdom. The retired adventurer is nowhere nearby and couldn't get there in time. Each of their agency is reduced to the point where the world still needs local heroes.

(I am thoroughly of the opinion that the vast majority of adventures shouldn't be threatening the world at all. More localized stakes matter more to the players, and the players can fail without ruining the setting, rather than victory being a guarantee because of the absurdity of the stakes. All I ask is a reason for people to say "I cannot drop everything to help with this localized event." That is the loss of agency I seek for post-game adventurers... and more on topic, for every powerful NPCs in the setting. This transition should usually happen within five years of making it to the big time.)



Both represent an equivalent loss of agency. There is no preference to either. If they're busy single-handedly holding back the Frost Wyrms of the Northern Wastes, that's a great way to reduce their agency for subsequent stories. Because they have a task they're working on, they're too busy to help out with more local threats.

And this is again where my disagreement on the specific context came in. There are different levels to what constitutes a loss of agency. I'm fine with a character not appearing in the story or being just a cameo being considered a loss of agency. The character can still be doing important things and thus not be reduced to their actions being dictated to them by some higher power they've arbitrarily signed themselves up with despite needing to. I'm less accepting of total loss of agency, where even the appearance of autonomy is stripped from a character because not only are they irrelevant to the current story (which is fine, you don't need every character in the same setting on screen to know they were around and had an impact) but they're beholden to another power enough that even the appearance of them making their own decisions vanishes. They'd go from characters that players have poured a considerable amount of their time into to useless decorations, which is why I brought up that I know many players who would rather their past characters aren't brought up at all than have them show up and their excuse for not helping be that their boss said they need to do something else.

For the world ending threats thing, yes not every adventure needs ridiculously high stakes, but it's what many long form campaigns and pre-made adventures go with. Groups can, and in my opinion should, have some lower stakes adventures even if only to keep the world from looking like Tiamat is getting summoned every Tuesday and Giants are trying to ignite super-volcanoes every Thursday. But that said, if you're going to commit to running a campaign where the threat is that the world ends I don't see why "the setting would be ruined" is a reason not to follow through. It's kind of the same issue as the previous campaign's characters being mentioned, not every game in the same setting needs perfect continuity with every other game in the same setting. Usually if they do try for it there's inevitable plot holes and issues if it's a living official setting because those ignore the player characters entirely and if they bother to mention pre-made adventures they pick a single result for anything that happened that could completely contradict what any given player group did. For player made settings you're less likely to run into those conflicts but then you're even more likely to run into the issue you object to with high stakes where the GM and players will likely be much more defensive of the setting and unlikely to accept that they can just play an iteration where it didn't go boom.


*Snipping history part* I fully agree, you don't move your special forces into obligatory politics, that's just silly. But those special forces don't really return home and do armed intervention on labor disputes while these things are going on, and so have sufficiently reduced agency that your starter-level characters can have their plot about dealing with the Pinkertons without wondering why they're doing it as opposed to wandering Green Berets.

But that is still mixing two things, it's both a difference in power (and by extent of just how much actual agency is lost in reducing it to "they got told no") and a difference in the scale of the threat that even warrants them. Using my example earlier, most fantasy based games your characters at high levels are basically demi-gods. Maybe not in terms of actual power scale for the setting as a whole but compared to the vast majority of people including most rulers and their forces trying to tell a Dragon what to do is likely preferable to barring the way of an end game player character (though I admit there are systems where that isn't the case and power caps at a much earlier point). Special forces are definitely more skilled and better trained than an average person, especially one who has likely never even held a weapon, but they are still slightly comparable to normal soldiers and even civilians with weapons training. Being in a war where the other side could launch nukes but didn't or special weapons were used but a preventative measure was used in time or they were in a different location is also on a different threat level than personally going in to fight what is basically the antropomorphization of those nukes with a sword.

There are definitely some RPGs where it's more grounded and realistic and special forces is the high point for power. In those I absolutely agree it would make no sense for the characters to come home and immediately start acting like the local police or vigilantes, though in my experience most former soldiers who actually saw combat aren't all that happy about the idea of going into a combat situation again in general. But considerably more go for fantasy settings and player character power fantasies (with very few bothering to acknowledge how traumatic adventures would actually be for somebody living through them) where fantasy heroes don't typically put up their sword and say "yeah one is enough for me next massive disaster I'm just sleeping in instead."

We are still agreed they shouldn't just go around doing the guards' jobs for them, rescuing kittens stuck in trees, and stopping every threat before it's game-worthy. We're mostly just disagreed on the reasons we jump to for why they don't.




Perfect! So we're in agreement, then? My ultimate point was that the setting writers should not impose characters at the level of former PCs with a free hand to act on the setting.

I do agree with that, they shouldn't be imposed on players.


If we're in agreement that NPCs of that variety can cause problems for GMs, and the cleanest solution is to either have them not in the setting

This is what I feel is the best answer for some cases, but I'm also used to groups that are perfectly willing to accept the answer of "this may be the same setting but we're not having past characters show up because it would just complicate things."


or not have the degree of freedom that allows them to do PC stuff,

And this is where I again have minor disagreement. If you're going to include them anyway, despite the simple option not to, the different levels of loss of agency should be understood. Basically, I'd argue there's a difference between not doing the same PC stuff as the current party and not being allowed to do PC stuff at all. Just not having it come up in the first place is preferable because then you don't need to come up with an excuse for non-interference but if one has to be made it shouldn't take that much more effort to acknowledge that the character should still be able to do things even if it's not the same things as the group.


then we're on the same page. Maybe not for the same reasons, but we have the same ultimate conclusion.

Agreed.

Though getting off from the discussion again the Elminster problem is actually slightly worse than just being around and not helping with adventures. The way Ed Greenwood has Elminster (and a few other super-Wizards of the setting, and by extent super-Wizards from several other WotC official settings since they're all gradually twisted to align somewhat with Forgotten Realms) is that they are involved in the success of adventurers. Greenwood routinely mentions Chosen of Mystra being ordered to go in ahead of adventurers and leave behind magic items and scrolls and spellbooks for them to find. The Elminster problem isn't just "why is this character here and why hasn't he solved the problem already" but "why is this character here and why are they being used as Greenwood's official reason for some of our loot, thus actively and intentionally intervening in the adventure, instead of solving the problem".

Or put differently, Elminster being around and solving problems offscreen I'd be fine with. He can be busy, he's not omniscient (and neither is Mystra or she wouldn't get killed and replaced so often), and there's never a guarantee he's not trying to handle something else while the adventure is going on. Him being around and directly stated by the setting's creator to be constantly getting involved in even the most minor adventurer's lives is much less reasonable.

[Fable Wright]

You did kind of present it as an absolute that the time in which a free agent can remain a free agent was finite then follow it up with the elaboration that the right choice was, and should be, that they join up with a faction.

Or create a faction. I don't know why people think I'm saying 'join up or die' when every time I mention the topic I discuss people starting something new, whether a business or a new political faction or a new kingdom from nothing. Most meaningful change happens when you have large numbers of people work together; many PCs would make such organizations from scratch. Why would you stay a wandering vagrant for more than five years when you could instead be the head of an organization?


My objection is less with the need for older characters to be "off screen" enough for a newer campaign in the same setting to be relevant and more with the way you chose to present it. As I said above your original post and the followups all went with a structure that heavily implied post campaign options are "you go from adventurer who can take on world ending threats to basically doing a day job or you die."

This may be the disconnect. I'm not threatening high level characters with a day job or death, but there's a pretty fundamental problem:

You saved the world. There's no longer major threats around, you've cleaned up the last of the bad guy's forces, and there's nothing that requires your specific brand of skills that no one else can provide. It'll be years before some kind of new major event comes along.

What now? You're a veteran. Are you settling into retirement? Taking on a day job? Living off the funds you acquired during your adventures? Becoming an activist? Pursuing higher education? Pursuing a hobby? Now that the crisis is over, what do you want to pursue?

If your hobby in peacetime is to try and overthrow corrupt nobles and change the world through force of arms without having a political backer, then yeah, I think it's pretty reasonable to assume that various kingdoms are going to want you gone.

If you don't have a day job or hobby, what are you doing with your life? You had the focus and drive to save the world, and now you're just... doing the equivalent of sitting at home staring at a phone, waiting for someone to call and say that there's an adventure for you? That's about the saddest end for a high-level character I can think of, on top of robbing the next generation of adventurers of their opportunities.


While we both agree that older characters need reasons not to intervene my personal objection was that I interpreted your words as an absolute statement on the nature of those reasons and considered it overly restrictive/reductive of what a character could do. Specifically every character's motivations post campaign boiling down to "my boss says I can't, sorry" or "well if I do this the authorities I can most likely overpower and the communities who should adore me for saving the world will be upset for reasons" with the alternative of being to die offscreen just to make space. It also felt incapable of actually explaining why any such character would go along with it. The same reasons it confused me why it was being presented in a way that came across as "this will happen" also confused me about why any characters would care when the choice is between potentially letting the world explode or dropping their job for a while.

And this is again where my disagreement on the specific context came in. There are different levels to what constitutes a loss of agency. I'm fine with a character not appearing in the story or being just a cameo being considered a loss of agency. The character can still be doing important things and thus not be reduced to their actions being dictated to them by some higher power they've arbitrarily signed themselves up with despite needing to. I'm less accepting of total loss of agency, where even the appearance of autonomy is stripped from a character because not only are they irrelevant to the current story (which is fine, you don't need every character in the same setting on screen to know they were around and had an impact) but they're beholden to another power enough that even the appearance of them making their own decisions vanishes. They'd go from characters that players have poured a considerable amount of their time into to useless decorations, which is why I brought up that I know many players who would rather their past characters aren't brought up at all than have them show up and their excuse for not helping be that their boss said they need to do something else.

I had thought it was clear that it was a non-exhaustive list. I don't know why it was construed as 'accept a total loss of agency' when one of the examples was a duchess—a title of immense political power, and clearly able to resolve pretty much any problem within their sphere of influence darn near immediately, at the cost of not being able to act outside of that sphere. I don't know how a reduction of agency (people will march against me if I try to impose my will beyond the duchy's borders, when duchies are usually like 25-50% of kingdom size) in exchange for near-unlimited power within the remaining agency (you can do pretty much anything within your own duchy, lead coalition armies in wars, become a power player on the global stage) is construed as a bad deal or near total loss of agency. I don't know how that caused the impression that they were beholden to a higher power or were turned into a useless decoration.

I maintain that the shift away from 'life and death adventuring' to 'day job' will happen because peacetime is a thing and the idea that PCs will just do nothing with their peacetime is... frankly baffling. They're still people, right?


And this is where I again have minor disagreement. If you're going to include them anyway, despite the simple option not to, the different levels of loss of agency should be understood. Basically, I'd argue there's a difference between not doing the same PC stuff as the current party and not being allowed to do PC stuff at all. Just not having it come up in the first place is preferable because then you don't need to come up with an excuse for non-interference but if one has to be made it shouldn't take that much more effort to acknowledge that the character should still be able to do things even if it's not the same things as the group.

And that's fine! If your character regularly disappears for months on end in foreign continents, they're not interfering. If your character is busy holding off a constant threat, that's fine. They're all loss of narrative agency, in that they've taken on tasks and responsibilities that mean they don't have the freedom to just drop everything like the PCs and say "yeah, I'm going to commit to this adventure for weeks or months 'cause I have nothing better to do and it sounds interesting". That's all I was trying to convey.

[icefractal]

I had thought it was clear that it was a non-exhaustive list. I don't know why it was construed as 'accept a total loss of agency' when one of the examples was a duchess—a title of immense political power, and clearly able to resolve pretty much any problem within their sphere of influence darn near immediately, at the cost of not being able to act outside of that sphere.The original quote I was responding to was this:

The latter group is correct. Free agents with a lot of personal power remaining free agents for more than 5 years should not normally happen. Most should start or join causes and existing power structures that impose limits on what they can feasibly do, because the benefits of doing so are enormous. Those that refuse are long-term wildcards, and those get assassinated by the powers that be to make plans go smoother if they keep meddling in random events.Which sounded like, to me, like substantial restrictions. It also posits the existence of "powers that be" who have the ability to assassinate anyone who causes problems for them (but aren't themselves 'free agents', not even the leadership?)

Also, while I'm not against former PCs existing in the world, it's something I've rarely seen and not what I was talking about. My thinking is:
1) Unless "the PCs are explicitly special" is part of the premise, the PCs are not unique in their relationship to the world.
2) If none of the powerful characters that exist is a free agent, that implies it's probably not possible for my PC to be one in the future.
3) I find that dispiriting whether or not that 'future' will ever happen 'on-camera' or not. Sure, it doesn't matter to gameplay right at the moment, but neither does the presence of Elminster-like NPCs.

[Talakeal]

So maybe my initial analogy about the government confiscating military hardware wasn't quite right.

Let's give three scenarios:

1: You are on vacation in Mexico. You decide to spend the night in a small sketchy town where the local law enforcement has been driven out by the cartels. You pull up in a Lamborghini, wearing an expensive suit, with a gold watch on your wrist, and start flashing around a wallet full of hundred dollar bills.

2: You are a private citizen who is stockpiling a multi-billion dollar arsenal of military surplus supplies. As this is illegal in most first world nations, you are doing so in a small, unstable, third world country, which has an unstable government and borders, and a history of revolution and wars with its neighbors. Your weapons stockpile is worth more than the entire armory of the nation's government, but you don't have anyone particularly impressive guarding it.

3: You are an ordinary citizen in a large nation such as the United States, Britain, or China. You find a crashed alien spacecraft, and inside is a dangerous and unknown artifact with military applications, say a disintegration beam, or a personal force-field generator, an anti-gravity belt, or a short range teleporter. You make no secret of your discovery, and openly show off your alien technology.


Now, ignoring game rules, and based solely on the fiction and narrative, would you expect to be allowed to keep your property in peace?

[Reversefigure4]

Now, ignoring game rules, and based solely on the fiction and narrative, would you expect to be allowed to keep your property in peace?

Yes, these are all examples of people making stupid decisions that are likely to result in robbery.

But you can't ignore the games rules - and the nature of the fact that it's a game - when you're the one creating them. In a game, I'd absolutely expect a GM to question the player behaviour and point out the risks. If the game is set in Cartel Town, I'd expect the GM to point out the risks at character creation of being Mr Rich Lamborghini (a character that might be quite reasonable in another campaign).

If both the game rules and the GM allow you to make a character that's 90% equipment, then the game should support that style of play, not immediately rob the character of 90% of their build for the player making what looks like a reasonable decision on the surface. In your case you're both creator and GM, so you need to either fix the rules, or shadow-ban such characters by openly telling the player "A high level NPC will kill you for your stuff, so you can't build this character".

[Talakeal]

If both the game rules and the GM allow you to make a character that's 90% equipment, then the game should support that style of play, not immediately rob the character of 90% of their build for the player making what looks like a reasonable decision on the surface. In your case you're both creator and GM, so you need to either fix the rules, or shadow-ban such characters by openly telling the player "A high level NPC will kill you for your stuff, so you can't build this character".

Yep.

IMO, any character that that spends the majority of their resources on a single thing is going to struggle, but the problem with a hard ban is exactly where that line lies really depends on the build in question, who is playing it, and the table as a whole.

As for warning the PC, that is exactly what I did, which prompted the whole "GMPCs falling from the sky" bit.

[BRC]

So maybe my initial analogy about the government confiscating military hardware wasn't quite right.

Let's give three scenarios:

1: You are on vacation in Mexico. You decide to spend the night in a small sketchy town where the local law enforcement has been driven out by the cartels. You pull up in a Lamborghini, wearing an expensive suit, with a gold watch on your wrist, and start flashing around a wallet full of hundred dollar bills.

2: You are a private citizen who is stockpiling a multi-billion dollar arsenal of military surplus supplies. As this is illegal in most first world nations, you are doing so in a small, unstable, third world country, which has an unstable government and borders, and a history of revolution and wars with its neighbors. Your weapons stockpile is worth more than the entire armory of the nation's government, but you don't have anyone particularly impressive guarding it.

3: You are an ordinary citizen in a large nation such as the United States, Britain, or China. You find a crashed alien spacecraft, and inside is a dangerous and unknown artifact with military applications, say a disintegration beam, or a personal force-field generator, an anti-gravity belt, or a short range teleporter. You make no secret of your discovery, and openly show off your alien technology.


Now, ignoring game rules, and based solely on the fiction and narrative, would you expect to be allowed to keep your property in peace?

In real life? No

In fiction, that depends.


I feel like a good model here is Iron Man.

Iron Man has a very expensive, very powerful suit of armor.

Sometimes, the government tries to take it away from him.

Sometimes, Villains try to steal it from him.


But, there are lots of stories where neither of those things happen. They're expected, but they're not obligatory, and there are plenty of in-universe reasons why there are Iron Man stories besides "Somebody tries to take the Iron Man armor away from Tony". Tony Stark has a lot of lawyers, Tony Stark regularly saves the world. Tony Stark hangs out with Captain America, Thor, and various flavors of Hulk and is therefore probably not somebody you especially want to mess with. Tony Stark's armor probably won't work for anybody Tony Stark doesn't want it to work for.


That is to say, if you want to do a story where the character with shiny stuff has to defend that shiny stuff from having it taken away, you CAN do that, but you don't HAVE to do that, and you certainly don't have to do it constantly. If a PC starts crossing your personal "Shiny Stuff" Threshold, you can ask the player to either agree to stories where they need to defend their stuff, or provide a reason why they don't have to (It only works for them, they have powerful connections, it's an ancestral weapon and stealing those from a living heir is a good way to get yourself Haunted, whatever).

[Fable Wright]

The original quote I was responding to was this:
Which sounded like, to me, like substantial restrictions. It also posits the existence of "powers that be" who have the ability to assassinate anyone who causes problems for them (but aren't themselves 'free agents', not even the leadership?)

Also, while I'm not against former PCs existing in the world, it's something I've rarely seen and not what I was talking about. My thinking is:
1) Unless "the PCs are explicitly special" is part of the premise, the PCs are not unique in their relationship to the world.
2) If none of the powerful characters that exist is a free agent, that implies it's probably not possible for my PC to be one in the future.
3) I find that dispiriting whether or not that 'future' will ever happen 'on-camera' or not. Sure, it doesn't matter to gameplay right at the moment, but neither does the presence of Elminster-like NPCs.

I think I can see your point. As I said, communication is hard. To clarify my point:
1. I do not consider the king of a country as a free agent. If he is too willful, he is kept in check by the barons below him. His actions are restrained by his position.
2. The Lich-Lord of the Northern Wastes, who had been in seclusion for centuries and now rouses from his studies, is a free agent. He is accountable to no one and nothing and will inflict his will on the world unless stopped.
3. The commander of the Orc Horde is not a free agent, as he must keep his men happy lest they abandon him.
4. Gandalf is a free agent, as he is valued for his advice but free to come and go as he pleases without permanent settlement into a power structure.
5. Indiana Jones is not a free agent, as he can lose his tenure if he crosses the university. He'll still go on pulp adventures, but he does have obligations to his students and institution.
6. Your average PC party is a free agent, because they can and will do anything.

Eberron is a campaign setting is an illustrative example. Merrix d'Cannith is a born genius, with the support of one pillar of a powerful economic oligopoly behind him, able to build anything he wants. He's stuck in a war for succession to consolidate the oligopoly. You could be him, a man with the genius to invent technology to change the world.

Jaela Daran is an 18th level Cleric within Flamekeep, able to perform miracles beyond the ken of nearly anyone else in the setting, but if she leaves she only keeps her powers as though she was level 3. As a member of the Silver Flame, you could eventually become her peer in power, unbound to a location, but bound to the tenets of your faith.

Oalian the Greatpine is a 20th level Druid. He's also a tree. Godlike power, but he doesn't exactly move much. He can really use adventurers to handle wandering for him.

Mordain, the Fleshweaver is a 20th level Transmuter Wizard. He carved out a territory in the monster-run country of Droaam before it was even a nation, now known as the Forest of Flesh. He is a recluse and does not leave much, but the twisted results of his experiments inspire fear and wonder in those who hear of him.

Erandis Vol is a 16th-level Sorcerer Lich. She keeps her name and existence secret, pretending to be a pirate queen, for if her true nature were known she would be the target of the wrath of the Dragons of Argonnessen, who desired to eliminate her bloodline.

King Kaius the Third is a 12th-level Fighter Vampire, who needs to keep his true nature hidden as he tries to wean his country away from trucking with the Undead. He is a master of the blade and near-unkillable, but heavy is the crown and his duty to his people.

There is nothing stopping you from reaching their level. They are tied down by existing burdens. But you are free to be anything. Because there aren't many of them, and because they're all restrained in their actions, it's clear that you can aspire to be on their level without them obviating plot.

If there's a 12th+ level NPC in every hamlet in your setting and all their hands are tied, then yeah. I can see how you'd be frustrated if the setting design was such that their hands were universally tied.


1: You are on vacation in Mexico. You decide to spend the night in a small sketchy town where the local law enforcement has been driven out by the cartels. You pull up in a Lamborghini, wearing an expensive suit, with a gold watch on your wrist, and start flashing around a wallet full of hundred dollar bills.

Obviously you're held for ransom. You have no clear defenses.


2: You are a private citizen who is stockpiling a multi-billion dollar arsenal of military surplus supplies. As this is illegal in most first world nations, you are doing so in a small, unstable, third world country, which has an unstable government and borders, and a history of revolution and wars with its neighbors. Your weapons stockpile is worth more than the entire armory of the nation's government, but you don't have anyone particularly impressive guarding it.

Situation unclear. You were able to obtain this arsenal without it collapsing. Given how these countries usually work, you probably have an understanding with the current administration if you were able to stockpile this much. After a changing of the guard, sure, they'll try to take it, but until then you can probably share that arsenal with a bunch of peasants or your contacts in the ousted government to defend your equipment and launch a counter-revolution.


3: You are an ordinary citizen in a large nation such as the United States, Britain, or China. You find a crashed alien spacecraft, and inside is a dangerous and unknown artifact with military applications, say a disintegration beam, or a personal force-field generator, an anti-gravity belt, or a short range teleporter. You make no secret of your discovery, and openly show off your alien technology.

In China, you are disappeared and your equipment taken.

In Britain or the USA, depends on the story's theme. Are we working on comics logic? If so, yes, you keep your Green Lantern Ring, Hal Jordan. This is a standard backstory.
If this is X-Files? The FBI will show up to investigate and you will probably get a valuable lesson about why alien technology is alien as they clean up the mess from its misuse.
If this is World of Darkness, welcome to the secret world, I'm about to cover up your Masquerade breach and explain the ins and outs of the splat.
If this is Delta Green, you will be liquidated and your assets seized.
If this is the real world, people will most likely think it's a video edit, and after it's conclusively demonstrated the world goes absolutely nuts over the realization that aliens are real. Depending on your lawyers and the publicity, it could go any number of ways; we do not have precedent to determine how the world would react.

I need the setting book's setting, theme, and tone to tell me how this goes.


Now, ignoring game rules, and based solely on the fiction and narrative, would you expect to be allowed to keep your property in peace?

In peace? Good lord, no, you're an adventurer. Keep it? Given that this is a fiction with a narrative... for points 2 and 3? Yeah, kinda? I rather do expect that depending on the setting's themes, I get pretty good odds to keep it through the rest of the story. With the understanding that character generation usually has guardrails to prevent illegal/overly disruptive builds, I'd feel justified in believing that I'd keep them.

[icefractal]

As for warning the PC, that is exactly what I did, which prompted the whole "GMPCs falling from the sky" bit.As expected, yeah. I think that with your particular group of players, there's an argument to be made that there shouldn't be any "more power but with a downside" choices, because they'll want to make the downside moot and get angry if they can't.

[gbaji]

On the subject of actual GMPCs (which, yeah, the player the OP mentioned was using incorrectly). They *can* be run properly, but are really dangerous and tricky to pull off. If it's just a GM running his own character as a PC, that's always dangerous. There is a massive temptation for the GM to hand out loot and cool stuff just to make his own character more cool and powerful (and yeah, this is where most of the bad rap for this comes from). That's just silliness that most people outgrew in like grade school (mostly).

I play regularly in a game where we trade off GMing duties, and with a long running setting, so whomever is GMing already has characters (and likely somewhat powerful characters) already in the setting. However, we generally don't allow this. One of our GMs did it one time, on one adventure, and only because it was a really high power level adventure, and we needed a really powerful healer, and he was the only person who had one. We probably could have gimiped along (lots of people have passable healing in RQ), but the GMPC actually helped (and didn't really detract from the game, since the rest of the group was chock full of powerful folks already). I also trust that GM. My one actual concern as a player in that game was that if he felt we needed this character, we were going to be in for a rough ride.

I have run the occasional traditional GMPC (ie: not an actual character, but a powerful/useful PC running with the group). I find myself having to be very very careful doing this though. I once ran what was basically a minor knowledge priest, and he was basically just a guide, and provided useful info gathering stuff for an otherwise low to mid level group (he was absolutely wimpy himself too, so not at all overpowering the group, just "useful"). I suppose you could say that he kinda operated as a set of rails to the adventure, since they were basically acting as his bodyguards, while he was exploring and looking for stuff (and getting into trouble). But the whole point to that adventure was as an intro kind of "here's this area, and what's here, and some hints as to what's going on", and was just a launching point for future adventures in the kingdom they were traveling in. That one didn't present any real problems, and the adventure ran well.

The one that was tricker was a much more powerful NPC. The PCs were quite powerful as well, but this guy was powerful and had some ancient artifact armor and weapons. What made it work was that he was very friendly and well known to the group. Long story, but he was a troll warrior, and he had to recover some ancient hero stuff to gain a position in his culture, but another trol had "cheated" to get one piece of the stash, and taken control and was causing problems, so the adventurers helped the more friendly guy take the whole rest of it (which was a tough enough adventure on its own), and then challenge and take out the other guy. Now, they were helping him lead the otherwise dissident trolls to a new homeland (conveniently located in a nice area with lots of evil/chaos things to fight, and which was not at all near the PCs kingdom, nor the friendly elven lands either). It was "tricky" because he was already decently skilled and powerful *and* had some quite powerful items. It wasn't that he was overwhelming in melee combat, but had tons of magic that made him just really tough to defeat (and could just chuck out powerful spells like candy). So I found myself having to spread out combats to ensure it wasn't just him taking on opponents while everyone else sat on their thumbs. Had to make sure everone had stuff to do and fight. I focused the adventure more on exploring and discovering and less on combat (though there were quite a few of those too). In this case, it was more of a running story arc involving the trolls and problems with them, and them building allies with them, and helping them to get things straightened out in a way that worked for everyone, so having a re-occuring NPC made sense.

I think it was less of a problem in this game, because it's not uncommon to have significant differences in character power in a given party anyway, so as a GM you have to learn tricks to make that work. I just applied the same tricks using this NPC as well. But it still required a very careful balance to make sure he wasn't overshadowing the PCs in the adventure, and I found myself constantly having to think a bit harder as to how to set up an encounter to make that work well. It's an interesting balancing act to make the NPC contribute to the group, and occasionally having the right spell/power to help them succeed in an encounter, while not having it be "NPC saved our bacon. Then saved us again. Then again, and again... blah blah blah". On the plus side, I felt completely ok with having him be swallowed by the Purple Worm (artifact level armor, duh). Don't get me wrong, he wasn't the only one by the end of the fight (quite a few of this pretty powerful group had sufficient protective spells and/or magic armor to survive for some time), but I think he was the first. Yes. I put a purple worm in my RQ game. Don't judge me!


But it was enough of a pain and difficult blancing act that I intentionally chose *not* to do this with a later NPC they were working with on a big long quest/storyarc thing. In that adventure, the party had discovered a plot that spaned a couple of continents and an evil chaos deity planting his flag in Sanctuary (yes, we imported Thieves World stuff into our RQ game). They had to figure out what was going on, and discovered that there was a hero figure who would periodically rise to power and take the mantle/responsiblity to quiet some evil thing under the city (cause hey, lots of nasty stuff lies under that city anyway). The last hero rose about a thousand years ago, and had found the mcguffin needed, but then went off to some distant land and never returned. So the party had to track down that hero's path and set the new hero on said path to recover the item and fix the problem in his city. All good. Except the "new hero", who was supposed to come in and quell this evil thing in Sanctuary was Tempus, who, for anyone who's read the books, is a) a complete badass, and b) not a nice guy (except sometimes, and only to people he kinda likes for some reason). I considered having them both track down the info and then run in the actual adventure to recover the mcguffin. But in this case, given the NPC was *not* that friendly to them (they were literally foisting this on him, and he was only going along with it because his god was literally also dropping this on his head), and even more powerful/skilled then the troll guy (and I'd actualy run that adventure relatively recently as really a filler thing), and he literally has his own followers on hand to accompany him on his quest, I just couldn't see any way this would go other than "PCs follow this guy who totally overshadows them in every way, and stands around while he and his followers do stuff". There was literally no reason to put the players through this, so I just called handing Tempus the info he needed and sending him off with a nice "have fun storming the castle" sendoff, sufficient for their part. And then moved them on to the next part of the larger story arc (lots of moving parts on this one, and this was really more of a side "fix things here, so that if we fail somewhere else, it'll be harder for the bad guys to recover" sort of thing).

I think that was the right call in this case. Normally, I would not shy away from a longish quest to "recover the ancient item needed to do <something plot critical>". But it really felt like this would just be a slog for the players. I originally really wanted to run it, thinking it would be interesting, but after running the troll thing, realized that there would be serious problems here and it would be even more difficult to manage. It made me spend a lot more time thinking through how I would pull it off, and the more I thought about it, the more I realized it both wasn't worth it, and was not really necessary. Nothing wrong with having an NPC go off and handle his own problems once the party finished with their part. And the party would have been more or less window dressing. In the game setting we're in, there are literally a handful of melee types on the entire plane even in the same realm as someone like Tempus (at least how I stated him, which as a more or less immortal warrior in a skill based game, means "really ridiculously skilled"). Troll guy in the previous example was more or less a normal "high skilled, but still in the normal range" guy, with some powerful magic items that made him really hard to kill. That was manageable. This was not. There was just no way to realistically balance the adventure to make it work.


So yeah. It's possible to do this. Just really really tricky, and as a GM you can never be quite 100% certain how your players really feel about it. So good idea to do this either very rarely, or not at all. That doesn't mean you can't have powerful semi-friendy and/or neutral NPCs, and have your players encounter them (and even get their butts kicked by them if need be). Using those powerful NPCs as plot devices/tools in an adventure works great. But having NPCs actually travel with the party while they are on an adventure is a whole different ballgame IMO.


Oh. As to powerful PCs who retire? There's a number of ways to handle that. Part of it is, well, they are retired. Another method is to make the adventures less about "who is the best and most powerful hero in the kingdom who can save the day?" and more "who is right here, right now, currently on this adventure and therefore has to do what needs to be done to save the day?". Most of the time, the bad guys don't take out advertisements explaining their plots to the world, so that every hero in the world can come and try to stop them. It's not that difficult to tailor an adventure so that a group of <whatever appropriate level> PCs are following along, learning about something, following the bread crumbs, and only maybe discover what the bbeg is up to when they are already way out in the field on the adventure, and are already in the correct time/place to try to stop it. At that point, what are they supposed to do? Head back home, and then ask more powerful people to try to do it instead?

This is obviously more doable in a game system/setting where easy travel magic is rare though. And you can certainly use the retired PCs as patrons for other PCs if you want. They are "helping save the world", but training a new crop of heroes, and sending them out to risk their lives doing heroic things (and maybe taking a percentage off the top). Why not? Or they can just live out their days on a farm or something, or running their business, or just living a safe comfortable life. There's also a matter of "this is why we're on the adventure". Sure, there's a bit of meta playing involved here, but at the end of the day, I somewhat assume that PCs are of the mindset that they *want* to solve the problem in front of them themselves. If they were the types to just hand the adventure over to the proper authorities to deal with, then they wouldn't be adventures. So, usually, most PCs aren't going to run home to get mom and dad to solve their problems for them, even if they have the ability to do this.

And this does not preclude running a series of adventures where parties of different makeup and power level participate in different parts of a larger plot/scheme/arc. If you are running an ongoing campaign with players running a variety of different characters in the same setting, it's quite possible for the players to decide to run different characters in different adventures as desired. So the C team could stumble accross something on one adventure, and hand if off to others (maybe you have some kind of adventures guild set up in the setting?). Then the B team does some more follow up adventuring, and discovers yet more stuff, and realizes that some really powerful big bad is pulling the strings to all of this stuff. Now, the A team comes in, and goes off to deal with the big bad guy. That's certainly doable. One of the rules we set for our campagin is that the GM is absolutely allowed to tell the players what sort off power level range the characters should be for a given adventure. Usually, it's something like "beginning folks", to "mid level folks", to "powerful folks", and finally "OMG super hero folks!" (where the really uber powerful characters who would curb stomp most adventures may decide to show up). And there can be a fair amount of overlap in those power ranges as well, so this is less of a disjointed series of adventures than it might seem at first glance, with some of the PCs in one adventure having also participated in some of the previous ones, but others not.

Eh. It works out just fine. But yeah, a lot of it does require a fair degree of trust between the players and the GM. Trust by the players that the GM isn't going to toss them into an adventure well out of their league, and trust by the GM that the players aren't going to always call for reiinforcements the moment they think things are slightly dicey. Well, unless the GM tells them to do this, which is usually demarked by a "Ok. New adventure to follow up on the last one, this time you'll need to bring characters in <insert power level here>". Which, again, loops us back to players trusting the GM. Is there a bit of metagaming in there? Sure. Does it make campaign settings like this work? Absolutely.

[Talakeal]

I feel like a good model here is Iron Man.

Iron Man has a very expensive, very powerful suit of armor.

Sometimes, the government tries to take it away from him.

Sometimes, Villains try to steal it from him.


But, there are lots of stories where neither of those things happen. They're expected, but they're not obligatory, and there are plenty of in-universe reasons why there are Iron Man stories besides "Somebody tries to take the Iron Man armor away from Tony". Tony Stark has a lot of lawyers, Tony Stark regularly saves the world. Tony Stark hangs out with Captain America, Thor, and various flavors of Hulk and is therefore probably not somebody you especially want to mess with. Tony Stark's armor probably won't work for anybody Tony Stark doesn't want it to work for.

Sure! And those are all great reasons why a high level character can keep all of their toys. But a starting character who spent all of their points on equipment?

"Big man in a suit of armor. That that off, and what is he?"

"Puny. Feeble. Frail. Pathetic. Asthmetic. Borderline mentally handicapped. And smells kind of funky."

[JNAProductions]

Sure! And those are all great reasons why a high level character can keep all of their toys. But a starting character who spent all of their points on equipment?

"Big man in a suit of armor. That that off, and what is he?"

"Puny. Feeble. Frail. Pathetic. Asthmetic. Borderline mentally handicapped. And smells kind of funky."

If you don't like that as an option, why is it an option?

Even if you were running another system, you are the GM. You can say no.
But considering it's literally your own system, make that not an option.

[Talakeal]

If you don't like that as an option, why is it an option?

Even if you were running another system, you are the GM. You can say no.
But considering it's literally your own system, make that not an option.

Pretty sure I already answered this question twice already.

The line where a character's weaknesses become insurmountable is not some hard line that can be set in stone. It really depends on what the player wants from the game, their skill at running the character, and how that character interacts with the rest of the table and with the style of game that the GM is running. A player might even be intentionally playing a less than optimal character as a challenge!

[KorvinStarmast]

Because communication is hard?

My original thesis statement was: "Most should start or join causes and existing power structures that impose limits on what they can feasibly do, because the benefits of doing so are enormous. Those that refuse are long-term wildcards, and those get assassinated by the powers that be to make plans go smoother if they keep meddling in random events."

I did not realize that 'limits on what they can feasibly do' was a 'massive loss of agency' in the eyes of a number of posters. Welcome to this part of the TTRPG world. Some people take the concept of agency to odd extremes.

What you posted made sense to me.

[KorvinStarmast]

I don't have much to add, I'd just like to retell a GMPC story that I probably read somewhere on this forum to begin with.

Two young players, just starting out with the hobby, were looking for a game. An older DM (probably a friend of an older brother or something) took them up on the offer.

So they arrived for the game, and their PCs met up with a character of the DM, who told them where the dungeon was and then went with them. Two players is rather small for a party, so not really a red flag so far. Some support could be nice. Then they realized that this guy was higher level than them, with nicer gear, and that the dungeon they were doing was full of stuff that was deadly to the actual PCs, but just about solo-able by the DM's character. So they ended up basically looking on as the DM overcame his own challenges. The main treasure in the dungeon turned out to be a magic sword that the DM's character took and then both the character and the DM left.

It turned out the DM was an Adventurers League player. He had been eyeing this specific magic weapon for his character, but hadn't found anyone running the module it was in so he could get it. So he had decided that if he found himself two spectators he could solo the dungeon and it was close enough to a real game that it would count, in his mind anyway. Brilliant (other than taking advantage of a couple of noobs, which was a jerk move).


So maybe my initial analogy about the government confiscating military hardware wasn't quite right.

Let's give three scenarios:

1: You are on vacation in Mexico. You decide to spend the night in a small sketchy town where the local law enforcement has been driven out by the cartels. You pull up in a Lamborghini, wearing an expensive suit, with a gold watch on your wrist, and start flashing around a wallet full of hundred dollar bills.
That's not real life, what game are you playing: Grand Theft Auto, Sinaloa?


2: You are a private citizen who is stockpiling a multi-billion dollar arsenal of military surplus supplies. As this is illegal in most first world nations, you are doing so in a small, unstable, third world country, which has an unstable government and borders, and a history of revolution and wars with its neighbors. Your weapons stockpile is worth more than the entire armory of the nation's government, but you don't have anyone particularly impressive guarding it. Even Hollywood B Movie script writers aren't this bad at setting up an adventure.


3: You are an ordinary citizen in a large nation such as the United States, Britain, or China. You find a crashed alien spacecraft, and inside is a dangerous and unknown artifact with military applications, say a disintegration beam, or a personal force-field generator, an anti-gravity belt, or a short range teleporter. You make no secret of your discovery, and openly show off your alien technology.
That makes one a fool, at best.

[JNAProductions]

Pretty sure I already answered this question twice already.

The line where a character's weaknesses become insurmountable is not some hard line that can be set in stone. It really depends on what the player wants from the game, their skill at running the character, and how that character interacts with the rest of the table and with the style of game that the GM is running. A player might even be intentionally playing a less than optimal character as a challenge!

You didn't answer it very well. Sure, the line isn't 100% solid... But when you have a player who's clearly past it, why wouldn't you do SOMETHING about it?

[MonochromeTiger]

Pretty sure I already answered this question twice already.

The line where a character's weaknesses become insurmountable is not some hard line that can be set in stone.

When "character weakness" is "the GM will literally target you and take away all your stuff leaving your character either dead or indefinitely weakened compared to the entire rest of the party" it's kind of difficult to still call it a weakness and not just call it being punished for taking something the GM didn't want you to take.


It really depends on what the player wants from the game, their skill at running the character, and how that character interacts with the rest of the table and with the style of game that the GM is running. A player might even be intentionally playing a less than optimal character as a challenge!

I notice this tends to be a go to answer in these threads. When someone notices something seems like it can go horribly wrong very quickly and asks why it's even included if it's so easy for it to hurt whoever chooses it the response comes back to "maybe players want to be hurt."

Sure, somewhere out there might be a player like that, but they absolutely weren't the target audience for this option when the entire reason the threat of having all these "endgame items" taken away came up was as a potential way of shutting down someone putting all their build points into those items to get an advantage. It all came up with a specific reasoning being mentioned and when people bring up how that sounds absolutely horrible for various reasons and that it would be much easier to just remove the option if it's that much of a problem it's instead redirected to "well I shouldn't get rid of it. What if there's a masochist who really wants to be in constant danger of being useless and going from overpowered to a burden on the party?"

And that scenario is kind of one of the reasons why putting points into something that can be easily taken away (especially something taken away by the reasoning of "nope it's powerful people will absolutely know they have it and come for it") either they keep it and thus keep the advantage over other players in the party causing an imbalance in one direction or they lose it and that just causes an imbalance in the other direction. There's a reason why when someone has a decent level of system mastery building too far above their party or too far below it are both problematic; it's because invalidating the rest of the group and making something that can barely contribute, if it contributes at all, both drag down the group as a whole and having that as an intentional choice is just committing to making the rest of the party deal with it.

There are players who give themselves flaws to make the game more challenging. There are players who will absolutely accept some risk being attached to their character in exchange for some benefits. I think you may be overestimating how many of the players who would see your "end game items at character creation" scenario as appealing are in either of those categories instead of just thinking it looks powerful. And when those players have it taken away from them because "well it makes sense in the story" they either need to be very committed to the story and have their take on it line up with yours or they're just going to get upset that they were punished for taking an option that was intentionally left open to them.

You have Bob in your group. Someone who, as characterized in your many horror stories, would absolutely be the kind of person to try grabbing every item they can just to be more powerful right away. Surely with that obvious example in your regular group you can see the garbage fire waiting to happen from just leaving that in as a standard option?

Even if you are absolutely set on keeping it in you could still easily relegate it to an optional list of purchases for starting build points. Just have it off to the side with some header text saying "because of the nature of the content in this list and the narrative weight in favor of it being taken away after use GMs are advised to restrict access unless the player in question is capable of handling the problems it may cause them and fully understands the risks to their character." There, it's still in so you have it as an option for those theoretical players who want to make their lives harder but it's no longer something every single player who thinks two plus two equals overpowered with no consequences can get it.

[Reversefigure4]

Sure! And those are all great reasons why a high level character can keep all of their toys. But a starting character who spent all of their points on equipment?

"Big man in a suit of armor. That that off, and what is he?"

"Puny. Feeble. Frail. Pathetic. Asthmetic. Borderline mentally handicapped. And smells kind of funky."

Being Tony Stark comes with the inherent ability to defend the Iron Man suit. He's not some guy who tripped over it in an alley, he's a brilliant engineer and billionaire who created the thing himself. There are plenty of stories about people trying to take the suit from him legally and illegally, but no stories with Tony is effortlessly beaten and then his character is completely useless forever.

But there are examples of characters who have just stumbled over the thing though - Green Lantern Kyle Rainer, a nobody artist drinking in a bar, is literally given his ring with the instruction "you will have to do". But since the ring doesn't work for anyone who picks it up - a narrative conceit precisely designed to prevent some villain immediately killing him for it - we get the story of a fledgling hero developing. Blue Beetle Jaime Reyes, mere nobody student, stumbles across an alien warsuit... But fortunately, it comes with it's own AI that rapidly teaches him how to defend himself with it.

Why does heart of darkness allow starting PCs to take equipment that is of such extreme value that high level NPCs will immediately inevitably descend and rob you of it, yet it comes with no ability to actually aid you in defending yourself? It's a narrative and mechanical trap designed to punish your players for not reading the GMs mind about how much was too much equipment.

[Mechalich]

There are players who give themselves flaws to make the game more challenging. There are players who will absolutely accept some risk being attached to their character in exchange for some benefits. I think you may be overestimating how many of the players who would see your "end game items at character creation" scenario as appealing are in either of those categories instead of just thinking it looks powerful. And when those players have it taken away from them because "well it makes sense in the story" they either need to be very committed to the story and have their take on it line up with yours or they're just going to get upset that they were punished for taking an option that was intentionally left open to them.

I'd add that, even when Player X is okay with playing an unreasonably weak build for whatever reason, TTRPG play is a group enterprise, and if Player X's character isn't going to be able to pull their weight in whatever the core gameplay scenarios are (combat, investigation, exploration, whatever), then players W, Y, Z need to be consulted as well because a dead weight character impacts the party they are a part of as well. The GM needs to balance player builds not only on an individual level, but also on a group level. In fact, as has been mentioned in this thread, one of the appropriate uses for a GMPC is to fill a hole in the party composition (often but not always, the healer) due to the group size being less than ideal.

[Talakeal]

You didn't answer it very well. Sure, the line isn't 100% solid... But when you have a player who's clearly past it, why wouldn't you do SOMETHING about it?

Are you talking about as a system designer or a GM?

As a system designer, you can't really work with fuzzy lines.

IMO even if I set a hard line that is clearly passed the point of reason, I imagine most players would see that line as a goal to achieve, and go out of their way to shoot for it, and then blame the game for tricking them into making a bad character.


As a GM, what can I do besides tell the player that their character is too disruptive (both mechanically and narratively)? Which, if you aren't paying attention, is exactly what I did to provoke the salt barrage about GMPCs raining from the sky.


Being Tony Stark comes with the inherent ability to defend the Iron Man suit. He's not some guy who tripped over it in an alley, he's a brilliant engineer and billionaire who created the thing himself. There are plenty of stories about people trying to take the suit from him legally and illegally, but no stories with Tony is effortlessly beaten and then his character is completely useless forever.

Of course not, the Iron Man suit has nothing on the protective value of plot armor!


But there are examples of characters who have just stumbled over the thing though - Green Lantern Kyle Rainer, a nobody artist drinking in a bar, is literally given his ring with the instruction "you will have to do". But since the ring doesn't work for anyone who picks it up - a narrative conceit precisely designed to prevent some villain immediately killing him for it - we get the story of a fledgling hero developing. Blue Beetle Jaime Reyes, mere nobody student, stumbles across an alien warsuit... But fortunately, it comes with it's own AI that rapidly teaches him how to defend himself with it.

The issue here is progression. Blue Beetle starts out more or less as strong as he will ever get, and he is already more than a match for the people who try and take the scarab from him.

But RPGs don't work that way, they have a zero to hero scale, where a level 20 guy without magic items is still stronger than a level 1 guy with magic items. Its just the nature of the medium.


Why does heart of darkness allow starting PCs to take equipment that is of such extreme value that high level NPCs will immediately inevitably descend and rob you of it, yet it comes with no ability to actually aid you in defending yourself? It's a narrative and mechanical trap designed to punish your players for not reading the GMs mind about how much was too much equipment.

Why does D&D allow you to make a wizard with an 18 strength and an 8 intelligence who spends his starting gold on full plate he isn't proficient in and his starting feat on skill focus basketweaving?

I just don't think it's a rule set's job to protect players from themselves, even if it were somehow possible to analyze every possible build and every possible table and arrange a ban list accordingly.


It's a narrative and mechanical trap designed to punish your players for not reading the GMs mind about how much was too much equipment.

Again, this assumes a hard line rather than a gradual spectrum.

The more points you spend on equipment, the weaker you are without it, and the more incentive people have to take it.


It's a narrative and mechanical trap designed to punish your players for not reading the GMs mind about how much was too much equipment.

Did you actually mean designed?

Because, I don't know, that seems like a pretty crappy trap if I flat out tell players the risks of making such a character before the game even starts.


When "character weakness" is "the GM will literally target you and take away all your stuff leaving your character either dead or indefinitely weakened compared to the entire rest of the party" it's kind of difficult to still call it a weakness and not just call it being punished for taking something the GM didn't want you to take.

Don't you think that is kind of a double standard?

As someone said upthread, if the PCs learned that there was a level 1 commoner of the opposite alignment walking around with a million gold worth of magic items, do you think for a second they wouldn't target them?

I would never hold it against PCs if they acted with a modicum of tactical acumen and rational self-interest.

If the PCs hunt werewolves, I don't take it personally if they bring silver weapons.
If the PCs fight a frost giant who takes half damage from cold and double from fire, I don't take it personally if they use fireball instead of cone of cold.
If the PCs fight a fighter, I don't take it personally if they target his will saves.
If the PCs fight a mage, I don't take it personally if they target his fortitude saves.
I don't take it personally if they focus fire on striker with 10 AC and +30 attack bonus before attacking a defender with 30 AC and +4 attack bonus.
And I don't take it personally if the NPC has a powerful artifact and the PCs attempt to destroy or steal it rather than allowing him to use it against them.

Why then, if an NPC does these same things, does it imply that the GM is punishing you for some slight that occurred during character building (or, as some posters have asserted, that you are just spiteful because they outsmarted you)?


Sure, somewhere out there might be a player like that, but they absolutely weren't the target audience for this option when the entire reason the threat of having all these "endgame items" taken away came up was as a potential way of shutting down someone putting all their build points into those items to get an advantage. It all came up with a specific reasoning being mentioned and when people bring up how that sounds absolutely horrible for various reasons and that it would be much easier to just remove the option if it's that much of a problem it's instead redirected to "well I shouldn't get rid of it. What if there's a masochist who really wants to be in constant danger of being useless and going from overpowered to a burden on the party?"

And that scenario is kind of one of the reasons why putting points into something that can be easily taken away (especially something taken away by the reasoning of "nope it's powerful people will absolutely know they have it and come for it") either they keep it and thus keep the advantage over other players in the party causing an imbalance in one direction or they lose it and that just causes an imbalance in the other direction. There's a reason why when someone has a decent level of system mastery building too far above their party or too far below it are both problematic; it's because invalidating the rest of the group and making something that can barely contribute, if it contributes at all, both drag down the group as a whole and having that as an intentional choice is just committing to making the rest of the party deal with it.

There are players who give themselves flaws to make the game more challenging. There are players who will absolutely accept some risk being attached to their character in exchange for some benefits. I think you may be overestimating how many of the players who would see your "end game items at character creation" scenario as appealing are in either of those categories instead of just thinking it looks powerful. And when those players have it taken away from them because "well it makes sense in the story" they either need to be very committed to the story and have their take on it line up with yours or they're just going to get upset that they were punished for taking an option that was intentionally left open to them.

You have Bob in your group. Someone who, as characterized in your many horror stories, would absolutely be the kind of person to try grabbing every item they can just to be more powerful right away. Surely with that obvious example in your regular group you can see the garbage fire waiting to happen from just leaving that in as a standard option?

I can't speak for anyone but myself, but personally I don't take any character trait or exceptional score, good or bad, if I don't want it to come up.

The idea that flaws are supposed to be ignored and used solely as a source of free points is, imo, anethema to the whole concept of an RPG.


Even if you are absolutely set on keeping it in you could still easily relegate it to an optional list of purchases for starting build points. Just have it off to the side with some header text saying "because of the nature of the content in this list and the narrative weight in favor of it being taken away after use GMs are advised to restrict access unless the player in question is capable of handling the problems it may cause them and fully understands the risks to their character." There, it's still in so you have it as an option for those theoretical players who want to make their lives harder but it's no longer something every single player who thinks two plus two equals overpowered with no consequences can get it.

First off, I don't really like marking things as optional because too many power tripping GM's (and adversarial forum optimizers) tend to dismiss optional material out of hand rather than looking on it as a case by case basis.

But that's a pretty weak reason.

The second, imo stronger, reason is because it is a spectrum rather than a binary. Having one or two pieces of heirloom equipment won't really disrupt the game too much. Even starting out with Excalibur won't break the system. It only becomes an issue when you take it in excess.

But this isn't a problem exclusively with equipment; any trait taken to the extreme can be disruptive to the mechanics or the narrative. The problem isn't just that the character has too much equipment, but that they dumped literally everything else to get them there.

[Reversefigure4]

As a GM, what can I do besides tell the player that their character is too disruptive (both mechanically and narratively)? Which, if you aren't paying attention, is exactly what I did to provoke the salt barrage about GMPCs raining from the sky.

Why does D&D allow you to make a wizard with an 18 strength and an 8 intelligence who spends his starting gold on full plate he isn't proficient in and his starting feat on skill focus basketweaving?
---
Did you actually mean designed?

Because, I don't know, that seems like a pretty crappy trap if I flat out tell players the risks of making such a character before the game even starts.

But... YOU are the system designer. You control whether or not such a build is possible at all within the system! Why put it in as an offered choice then self-regulate as the GM via powerful NPCs showing up to curbstomp any character who uses that option?

Every version of DnD I've seen - which isn't all of them, admittedly - openly has player advice right there in the Wizard second, usually along the lines of "Wizards should prioritize Intelligence, which they need to cast their spells. Wizards cannot wear armour, so Dexterity is useful to (blah, blah)".

Does Heart of Darkness actively state "players should not spend more than 10% of their starting character points on equipment, and if they do so the GM is encouraged to have powerful npcs rob them of it"? (It's not necessary to -write- it IF you openly tell them that as the GM... Unless you're publishing or open playtesting the system, as you are, and rely on other GMs to read your mind and know that NPC robbery is the expected response.)

[Fable Wright]

Are you talking about as a system designer or a GM?

As a system designer, you can't really work with fuzzy lines.

IMO even if I set a hard line that is clearly passed the point of reason, I imagine most players would see that line as a goal to achieve, and go out of their way to shoot for it, and then blame the game for tricking them into making a bad character.


As a GM, what can I do besides tell the player that their character is too disruptive (both mechanically and narratively)? Which, if you aren't paying attention, is exactly what I did to provoke the salt barrage about GMPCs raining from the sky.

I have a question for you.

Which would you prefer?

1. The GM says "build whatever you like from the core book." You build a character completely dumping social stats. After you spend hours working on the character and do a final check before the session, the GM tells you "This is a political thriller in which you will need to navigate a network of alliances between noble houses. I do not recommend playing a non-Social build."

Your original concept is now something you will likely never get to play. You need to come up with a new concept from scratch on an accelerated timetable because the GM did a gotcha when you thought you were done.

2. The GM tells you "this campaign is going to be about navigating a network of alliances between noble houses; bear that in mind as you build your characters."

I know, personally, that in scenario one I would be rather salty. Information that would have been useful, and is not intrinsically obvious (yes, it's obvious to you, but see half this thread not agreeing with you about that assumption; it's reasonable to expect that players might be in the same boat) was withheld until after it wasted work. Were I particularly attached to the character, I may mutter something disparaging about enemies materializing from beyond the scope of the adventure solely to ruin my build in particular.

Let us assume that you want to reduce this level of salt in the future. You have two sets of tools available to do so—system designer and GM sets of tools.

As a system designer, you can set minimum ability requirements to make use of equipment. Someone with a poor IQ might not be able to use that alien teleporter. Someone without enough strength might not be able to use a bulky ray gun. This is a way to ensure that the people who exclusively spec into valuable equipment fulfill baseline competence. You could include descriptive text for ability scores that hint at the themes that your game is going for to communicate to players that doing as Bob does will have negative consequences. Your setting is not necessarily decoupled from your crunch—games like Exalted or World of Darkness are setting as much as mechanics, and are well received. Including those setting assumptions along with numeric crunch will make a world of difference. You could also include, say, warnings about taking gear access perks.

Pathfinder 2e includes a very nifty mechanic for GMs, in fact. Some gear, class features, and so on are tagged as [Uncommon] or [Rare], meaning that the GM must approve them before they can be taken. This is a way to include fuzzy lines. Some GMs will wave in any Uncommon things players request. Some GMs will wave in anything. And some will talk with their players about expectations and caveats if they take certain [Uncommon] or [Rare] items. This offloads the setting of fuzzy lines to the table side of the RPG, but lets the player know that those lines exist.

This can, for example, let a player know that they need to speak with you early in the process about taking a bunch of high end gear, because said gear is tagged as [Rare] and require express permission. It reduces wasted work, and so improves player experience without altering the fundamental math of your game.

As a GM, you can write a blurb of setting expectations. How NPCs might react based on your appearances and the difficulties you'll face for being low-social, low-physical, or low-mental, depending on how low you go. Let the player know what they're in for. You can let them know that NPCs will target valuable equipment if they think that the player is too weak to hold onto it. You can let them know the costs of too high a magic score (if there is one) for your level.

The players might view these as bars to shoot for. If so, great! You gave them advance warning about the difficulties ahead of time, and they signed on. They shouldn't complain anymore. It was in the setting description. Or the players may use this as a reason to diversify their bases if you list the advantages of doing so. The big thing is that it allows players to make an informed choice. When players are working blind, they can and will gravitate towards min-maxing. If you instead had a bit about how a specific culture views different feats of strength, they might design their character for the purposes of, perhaps, fitting in with that group well as a member from that culture. Or an outcast from that culture. The more the players know about how you view the world, and how the people in the setting will view them, the more they can flesh out the mechanics to match the fluff.

What's the harm in trying?

[Batcathat]

But... YOU are the system designer. You control whether or not such a build is possible at all within the system! Why put it in as an offered choice then self-regulate as the GM via powerful NPCs showing up to curbstomp any character who uses that option?

I'd say there's a pretty big difference between, "picking option X means powerful NPC will show up and curbstomp you for it" and "picking option X means powerful NPC might be interested in taking it from you" and the situation at hand seems more like the latter.

[Satinavian]

I'd say there's a pretty big difference between, "picking option X means powerful NPC will show up and curbstomp you for it" and "picking option X means powerful NPC might be interested in taking it from you" and the situation at hand seems more like the latter.
IIRC as presented in the first thread it was more like option one with the powerful NPCs somehow being able to sense the strong equippment somehow and taking action pretty much at the start of the game. That is why there was so much backlash.

[Fable Wright]

Did not realize that the rules you were referring to were in your signature, Talakeal. Couple of things.

1. Your organization could be improved. Mana is introduced on page 118, but Inspiration is mentioned on page 111 as modifying rolls in the same manner as Mana before the idea that mana can affect rolls is even introduced. Your spells start on page 463, the metamagics fundamental to using them are on 535, and the rules for casting spells and determining what the keywords mean are on page 273, and it took me forever to find the difficulty to Resist Magic (the only recourse against a number of save-or-die effects) on page 141. You do not have a sidebar in the PDF. You do not mention or hyperlink where people can look up values. This makes finding things a pain.

2. Your system is nearly tailor-made to churn out min-maxed characters. A starting character has 100 points. It takes 80 to reach 'ordinary human' in all stats. Despite that, you can build a character that can easily throw out a few multi-target Hastes each round at a high chance of not spending mana each turn if you select the appropriate items buried in the book. Strength doesn't even have a skill it's associated with and is an obvious dump stat. You could have encouraged characters to stick closer to the baseline by costing more points to go from a +5 to a +10; or return fewer points from going down from a 3 to a 1 than a 5 to a 3. However, not only is everything linear, everything is also tied to a d20 roll with values going up by +1s at a time. The difference between 5 strength and 1 strength just doesn't matter 80% of the time at a d20+5 vs a d20+1; why bother putting strength to a 2 instead of getting a +5 bonus on a skill you know you're going to use? (Which is Resolve. You have save-or-die spells that can be removed by a flat DC 20. Obstinate and Primary Skill (Resolve) feel nearly required.) Churning out characters with a bunch of background advantages and awful stats seems like a design goal, not a bug of the system. If you want people to have the sliders anywhere other than '1' or '10', you really need to have some incentive, somewhere to take, like, 3 strength as opposed to 1, or 7 Dexterity as opposed to 5. Required thresholds to use an item are clunky but effective. Concrete threshold bonuses like Intelligence has would work. When you're spending two points to get +1 to intelligence rolls and an alternating +3 or +5 (averaging out to greater than a +5 bonus to a skill per two points, given the number of skills Intelligence impacts) to your skills, yeah, it's a good investment.

2.5 Moreover, the presentation (spend 100 points appropriately however you like) turns the process of character building into a knapsack problem, and that's frankly overwhelming unless you treat it as an optimization exercise. There's a reason that Shadowrun, in 5th edition, moved its famous character-building minigame from 'here is a bunch of XP to spend at the start, go nuts' to the Priority system, and that change was well-received despite the many, many flaws of that edition. If you want to reduce min-maxing, do a system like that which encourages quality waste. If your points can't all be spent with maximal efficiency due to bucketing, then people will round out characters to fit a mental picture after their core concerns are covered with the 'wasted' points.

3. Item Man could have just opted to make all of his relics Symbiotic. No one can rob him anymore. Hell, people might not be aware of them anymore. Why did you not just inform him of this apparent option as opposed to saying "you're going to get robbed"?

4. For those wondering, yes, losing all your items means you get a full refund of character points. Meaning that this crippled, half-demented man may, after getting robbed, spontaneously grow smart, well-groomed, handsome and strong the moment he was shaken down.

5. You have a lot of history of the setting in the setting portion, but not a lot of 'Playing a character from X region'. Personally I find the latter a lot more helpful as a roleplaying aid.

I rescind my advice about setting expectations. There are too many systemic issues with the game as presented to resolve or mitigate the min-maxing issue without substantive rework. The Setting portion of the book would drown out most or all common setting expectation information, you're already giving players a 600 page book to leaf through to figure out what they're doing, and have no recommended packages that I found while browsing to use as a starting point.

My best advice would be to start by just making a set of base templates. Maybe one from each Warlord's domain, and/or one for each archetype. Give them a certain level of base stats; a certain number of points to only be spent on stats (maybe this pool can only get stats up to a 7, where bonus points later can get it higher); add a certain number of points to only be spent on qualities (possibly specific sets of qualities); and a certain number of 'flex' points that can be spent without the aforementioned restrictions. Their total points can (probably should) go above 100 and possibly vary template to template to encourage 'wasting' points. It'll help newer players get a starting point for their builds, put people on relatively even playing fields, reduce min-maxed abominations, and give you an avenue to add more personalized flavor into the setting.

Sidenote: There is a lot of pressure on the characters to get their initial build points right, because you sure can't patch up holes over the course of an adventure. Receiving less than one Medium Quality every month at the recommended rate, and no catch-up mechanics designed to help players shore up weaknesses at lower cost than advancing their strengths, really encourages the worst kinds of min-maxing. As far as point-buy systems go, I really am not a fan.

[MonochromeTiger]

As a GM, what can I do besides tell the player that their character is too disruptive (both mechanically and narratively)? Which, if you aren't paying attention, is exactly what I did to provoke the salt barrage about GMPCs raining from the sky.

Actually act on the fact that it's disruptive instead of just allowing it with a warning, especially since you seem to imply in this very post that the "warning" part might not even occur. You're the GM. You can ban things when they are clearly going to cause a problem with your GMing style and your players can then make a choice of if they want to play in a campaign with those restrictions or not.


Why does D&D allow you to make a wizard with an 18 strength and an 8 intelligence who spends his starting gold on full plate he isn't proficient in and his starting feat on skill focus basketweaving?

I just don't think it's a rule set's job to protect players from themselves, even if it were somehow possible to analyze every possible build and every possible table and arrange a ban list accordingly.

It's possible to intentionally build a character that is objectively bad. That said generally rule systems do at least try to put in some guide lines to say what is a good or bad idea and the GM and other players are perfectly within their rights to object to or reject a character that can't contribute properly to the game. It isn't uncommon, and in fact is highly advisable, to discuss limits and work out the tone and themes of a campaign ahead of time so someone doesn't make something completely out of line with them and disrupt things. Common sense measures like talking things out usually prevent someone throwing a str18 int8 wizard into a high combat campaign where they're going to get torn apart in melee trying to punch a monster to death with all the HP of a wet napkin, or a barbarian murder hobo with 8 int and charisma being thrown into a low/no combat game focused on court intrigue where the player spends all their time either bored with nothing to do or actively ruining things for the rest of the group.


Again, this assumes a hard line rather than a gradual spectrum.

The more points you spend on equipment, the weaker you are without it, and the more incentive people have to take it.

Which since you're focused on the people wanting to take it being so much more powerful they could just stroll in and do so means "I have an arbitrary line you can't cross without me taking it all away." That does kind of shift it from spectrum back to hard line. If you have that arbitrary line already why not just make it a line you can't cross at all so the problem never comes up instead of a line where crossing results in the GM targeting someone.


Don't you think that is kind of a double standard?

No? You are playing with your group not against them. As GM balance is on you and the players both and the encounters that happen are entirely on you. You are creating encounters for your players to deal with, you are not creating player characters for your encounters to deal with. If there's something clearly unbalanced enough that you feel the only way of balancing it out is to personally intervene then it should not have made it past the concept stage of character creation before taking a stance.


As someone said upthread, if the PCs learned that there was a level 1 commoner of the opposite alignment walking around with a million gold worth of magic items, do you think for a second they wouldn't target them?

I think it's a terrible example to go "it's okay for me to have my player characters mugged for having something I could easily have told them they can't have, don't worry I could also randomly give them an easy target to mug it's totally the same."

One is them doing something you disapprove of which is entirely possible for you to just say no to at any point in the process, something you clearly object to enough that you've given the ultimatum "if you do this powerful NPCs will notice and come to take it away." The other is you putting an encounter in front of them for the specific purposes of claiming the scenario is even.


I would never hold it against PCs if they acted with a modicum of tactical acumen and rational self-interest.

If the PCs hunt werewolves, I don't take it personally if they bring silver weapons.
If the PCs fight a frost giant who takes half damage from cold and double from fire, I don't take it personally if they use fireball instead of cone of cold.
If the PCs fight a fighter, I don't take it personally if they target his will saves.
If the PCs fight a mage, I don't take it personally if they target his fortitude saves.
I don't take it personally if they focus fire on striker with 10 AC and +30 attack bonus before attacking a defender with 30 AC and +4 attack bonus.
And I don't take it personally if the NPC has a powerful artifact and the PCs attempt to destroy or steal it rather than allowing him to use it against them.

Why then, if an NPC does these same things, does it imply that the GM is punishing you for some slight that occurred during character building (or, as some posters have asserted, that you are just spiteful because they outsmarted you)?

Why is doing this punishing them? Gee, could be because that is literally what the entire situation is about. You were concerned about the balance of something and the only measure you could come up with was that if they take it too far you step in and have it taken from them. That isn't "NPCs acting with a modicum of tactical acumen and rational self interest" that's the players doing something you're worried isn't balanced and instead of just cutting out options that give too much of an advantage and avoiding the situation completely you're just leaving an open threat of "take it too far and I take away your toys."

As GM I don't think it's likely that you will throw in a "level 1 commoner with a million gold worth of magic items just wandering around" to show that it's a thing that happens. This isn't a situation that makes sense, just like your earlier examples to try saying they wouldn't have things for long all have an absurd amount of handwaving and intentional weaknesses just to happen. Every scenario where this matters just raises the question how did they get all this and keep it this long in the first place if there's some powerful NPCs just waiting in the wings to swoop in and take everything.

I am not claiming that someone taking an option you left in to get strong fast is "outsmarting you." As far as I can see nobody in this thread has and since I don't know which thread that claim came from (if it even came directly from this forum) and the more it gets brought up the more it reads to me like somebody upset you and it's a sticking point. What I am saying is you know this is a balance issue and the method you're choosing to take care of it is possibly the most conflict causing way I can think of, and that should be obvious.

You want them not to abuse it. You can easily say they just aren't able to or not present the option in the first place. You are instead saying "yeah you can but then I can just have you beat up and your stuff taken then you just wasted those build points." You proceed to defend not just taking the option where the inevitable result is GM/player conflict because someone somewhere might want it for some reason or even restricting it to people who a GM is sure can navigate it successfully.


I can't speak for anyone but myself, but personally I don't take any character trait or exceptional score, good or bad, if I don't want it to come up.

The idea that flaws are supposed to be ignored and used solely as a source of free points is, imo, anethema to the whole concept of an RPG.

There's an entire (far too large in my opinion) group of players who just get tunnel vision on the strengths and then get upset when the flaws come up. You play with one who you have a considerable amount of your time on the forum dedicated to recounting horror stories about. The fact that this thread entirely centers around discussion on a punishment for taking this option too far shows it was a point of concern and that you are wary of it happening enough to acknowledge it will at some point.

None of this is new to you yet you're centering your reasoning on what you would do (or at least what you claim you would do) as a player when there is obvious counter evidence that you are not by any means the only type of player.


First off, I don't really like marking things as optional because too many power tripping GM's (and adversarial forum optimizers) tend to dismiss optional material out of hand rather than looking on it as a case by case basis.

You're not exactly avoiding the adversarial part by bringing it up at every opportunity. Every time it comes up it's just displaying negative bias toward anyone opposed to the conclusion you've reached.

You're also not really avoiding the power tripping GM part by having a situation where you will literally have NPCs come out of nowhere to rob someone specifically for taking an option you insist remain rules legal despite finding flawed enough to have this extreme retribution baked into it.


But that's a pretty weak reason.

The second, imo stronger, reason is because it is a spectrum rather than a binary. Having one or two pieces of heirloom equipment won't really disrupt the game too much. Even starting out with Excalibur won't break the system. It only becomes an issue when you take it in excess.

But this isn't a problem exclusively with equipment; any trait taken to the extreme can be disruptive to the mechanics or the narrative. The problem isn't just that the character has too much equipment, but that they dumped literally everything else to get them there.

Then put in a limit to how many can be taken at a time. Really. This is not hard. Your objection is with it being taken too far, you have options to keep it from being taken too far other than creating a player vs GM situation. Using those options is not unfairly restricting people, it's preventing entirely unnecessary problems.

Have a minimum amount of points that must be spent on other things.
Have a limit to how many items can be taken at character creation or a limit of X items per level or point threshold.
Limit the amount of items on the list and don't allow duplicates.
Don't have a list that punches above its weight in the first place then expect people who are motivated by personal power not to go straight for it.
Limit it to players who won't cause problems instead of randomly switching arguments to "well power tripping GMs" while simultaneously discussing the option for GMs to just come in and take away the players' stuff being an approved method of intervening if they think something is off.
Discuss how you are uncomfortable with the potential abuse of the options with your players and establish a reasonable limitation agreed on between you and the group.

You keep pulling out more reasons to leave something in that some of us are genuinely trying to tell you will cause issues and which you can clearly already see scenarios where those problems happen coming up. Instead of questioning the validity of those defenses, which as far as I can tell exist solely to justify not dropping something no matter how many problems it might cause, you're coming down against every method of mitigation mentioned that isn't "yeah the players have it coming take their stuff and if it causes a fight it's their fault for taking that thing you could've kept from being less bad."

Edit:


3. Item Man could have just opted to make all of his relics Symbiotic. No one can rob him anymore. Hell, people might not be aware of them anymore. Why did you not just inform him of this apparent option as opposed to saying "you're going to get robbed"?

4. For those wondering, yes, losing all your items means you get a full refund of character points. Meaning that this crippled, half-demented man may, after getting robbed, spontaneously grow smart, well-groomed, handsome and strong the moment he was shaken down.


Wow. Both of these honestly make it feel even worse.

First the built in counter to this entire scenario, unless the robbery also includes amputating built in items off the character somehow? All that means even the one highly questionable balancing method against it can just be flat out shut down by the rules, and given the stance against removing anything it would be kind of hypocritical to remove that but keep the thing that causes the problem in the first place.

Then if the points are just refunded on losing the item and this genuinely is just an overly complicated and adversarial way of the GM saying "no, don't like that, remake the character" just makes the question of "why allow it in the first place" even more glaring.

[Vahnavoi]

There is an under-examined and under-appreciated facet to this:

It is completely normal for games to get harder in response to a player doing well.

Consider Tetris. What happens when you clear enough lines? Blocks start falling faster, making the game harder.

Consider Snake. What happens when you get the apple? The snake gets longer, leaving less room to maneuver, making the game harder.

Consider Phobia. What happens when you kill an alien? The game spawns more aliens. And it will keep spawning more aliens faster and faster until the player eventually and inevitably gets overwhelmed.

Why do games do this kind of thing? To keep play from getting stale. As a player becomes more skilled in a game, a game will go from challenging to trivial and then boring, if the game does not adjust itself upwards.

Items bought at character creation can have the same sort of dynamic. Talakeal can just say it's a difficulty toggle, where going all-in on a particular type of strategy will see opponents employ relevant counter-strategies more often.

This doesn't have to be limited to items; inherent abilities aren't permanent either when characters can die. The entire discussion about permanent versus expendable resources is a red herring. A game can give a player more than one possible strategy to choose from and then leave it up to the player to figure which are the good ones. They don't have to all be balanced against one another from the outset. Being able to lose is part of player agency, and being able to lose the game at character creation is a result of player agency during character creation. If this is undesireable, the solution is to cut back on the character-creation minigame before doing anything else.

Fundamentally, as it often is with Talakeal's players and people giving him feedback, the issue is that they want to win but it's dubious if they actually want to play the kind of game Talakeal's trying to make. So their go-to strategy is to complain about the rules or the referee until a ruling is made in their favor. The exact meaning of "GMPC" is not relevant, the point of using a negatively-loaded term such as that is to just make Talakeal feel like he's doing something wrong from the outset.

[King of Nowhere]

Did not realize that the rules you were referring to were in your signature, Talakeal. Couple of things.



wow... somebody actually went and read through all that stuff.

you make a strong case that the rules as written do actually encourage minmaxing to the extreme, and it would explain why talekeal often complains about it.
it reminds me of icewind dale, where you similarly had no additional costs for pushing a stat upwards. i made a half orc monk whose stats were 20 18 18 1 18 1. everyone in the party had a charisma of 3, except for the paladin who got all the social skills. which is fine in a videogame where you don't expect to care about roleplaying.

[Telok]

wow... somebody actually went and read through all that stuff.

Several of us have. Its a fairly normal point buy fantasy game with bundled setting. It does not actually promote minmax any more than any other point buy game. Strength isn't even a big dump stat, maybe as much or a little less than in any random D&D version.

[Fable Wright]

Several of us have. Its a fairly normal point buy fantasy game with bundled setting. It does not actually promote minmax any more than any other point buy game. Strength isn't even a big dump stat, maybe as much or a little less than in any random D&D version.

I'd argue that it really does.

GURPS, as a counter-argument, looks much the same on the surface, but due to its 3d6 roll-under and well-defined and explained use of the bell curve, it's easy to pin down how you will perform under a wide variety of circumstances, giving you concrete goals to shoot for. The huge d20 swing in Talakeal's game means that investing towards hitting baseline competence means investing until you succeed on a nat 1, which is a much higher degree of investment required to reach your character goals. GURPS centering the stats on the human average, rather than making you pay the bulk of your starting points to reach human normal, incentivizes staying close to average. Because decreasing stats is a Flaw, and usually you have a cap on the Flaws you can take, you have meaningful decisions made when you opt to dump stats, rather than a meaningful investment into functioning like a normal human. GURPS is already notorious for being a very min-maxy game where the GM needs to take strict control of what's allowed, what's not, and various combinations; this doesn't even have the rails in place that GURPS does to reduce character skew.

Mutants and Masterminds is a D20 point-buy game, but it also has much more concrete caps on character abilities based on the power points available in the setting. You're capped pretty harshly on what you can invest by the level at which you operate at, and this hard cap and ordinary-human baseline means that there's a degree of enforced quality waste that you can use to round out characters outside of core competencies.

Point-buy games are inherently biased towards ridiculously min/max skews unless the game designer is cognizant of this and puts in guard rails to reduce that skew. Talakeal has not done so after years of iteration and bafflement as to why the structural incentives his games provide cause players to skew towards min-maxed characters.

[King of Nowhere]

Several of us have. Its a fairly normal point buy fantasy game with bundled setting. It does not actually promote minmax any more than any other point buy game. Strength isn't even a big dump stat, maybe as much or a little less than in any random D&D version.

strenght is a dump stat in d&d?
ok, for wizards it is. aside from that, a lot of characters beat up other people for a living, and str is their main. even when it's not, you need a smidgen of it if you want to be able to move around while wearing an armor. or if you want to be able to carry that loot back to a shop once you defeat the monsters. sure, you can just stove all the loot inside a bag of holding - which you won't be able to afford if you can't carry loot with you long enough to be able to buy the bag of holding.
yes, there's several classes that don't need str, but the same goes for half the stats too. and it's not like charisma, where aside from the party's face everyone else could have a 3 in it and live happily regardless. even wisdom is a bigger dump stat, sure, you'd like to have a decent will save, but if you're a fighter chances are your will save will suck anyway, and is it really effective to invest in a stat just to increase one single saving throw? much better to spend some money to get an item that will make you immune to the nastiest effects, and tank the stat otherwise.


but back on track, most games with point buy have increased costs the more resources you invest in the same stat - like in d&d upping a stat above 14 costs double, and then triple, so you have to really pay for your natural 18. And, in any game i'm aware of you can't buy a +20 to something at level 1, like you can apparently do in talekeal system - i remember a thread about how everyone in his party bought a higher will save than his, and it was something like a +20 at level 1.
I'm not going to read 600 pages just to better argue in a gaming forum, but from what I gleam it really does seem like this system does incentivize the hardest kind of minmaxing.

[Talakeal]

Did not realize that the rules you were referring to were in your signature, Talakeal. Couple of things.

Thanks for taking the time to look it over and give me feedback! I really appreciate it, even if it isn't entirely complimentary!


1. Your organization could be improved. Mana is introduced on page 118, but Inspiration is mentioned on page 111 as modifying rolls in the same manner as Mana before the idea that mana can affect rolls is even introduced. Your spells start on page 463, the metamagics fundamental to using them are on 535, and the rules for casting spells and determining what the keywords mean are on page 273, and it took me forever to find the difficulty to Resist Magic (the only recourse against a number of save-or-die effects) on page 141. You do not have a sidebar in the PDF. You do not mention or hyperlink where people can look up values. This makes finding things a pain.

This is an ongoing discussion between my editor and I.

Presenting things so that if you read the book front to book you never get a concept that won't be explained until later is a laudable goal, but so is having a system of organization that allows you to look stuff up easily as a reference book. They are at odds, and I try and satisfy both, but often lean toward the latter.

Inspiration coming before mana is specifically something I have thought about changing before, and I have considered even putting the description of modifying rolls in inspiration instead of mana before.

Likewise, yes, I have thought very strongly about moving the magic chapter to be before the bestiary and closer to the rules for spell-casting and will likely do it at some point.

Once I get the PDF finalized and stop moving things around, it will absolutely have sidebars and hyperlinks!


2. Your system is nearly tailor-made to churn out min-maxed characters. A starting character has 100 points. It takes 80 to reach 'ordinary human' in all stats. Despite that, you can build a character that can easily throw out a few multi-target Hastes each round at a high chance of not spending mana each turn if you select the appropriate items buried in the book. Strength doesn't even have a skill it's associated with and is an obvious dump stat. You could have encouraged characters to stick closer to the baseline by costing more points to go from a +5 to a +10; or return fewer points from going down from a 3 to a 1 than a 5 to a 3. However, not only is everything linear, everything is also tied to a d20 roll with values going up by +1s at a time. The difference between 5 strength and 1 strength just doesn't matter 80% of the time at a d20+5 vs a d20+1; why bother putting strength to a 2 instead of getting a +5 bonus on a skill you know you're going to use? (Which is Resolve. You have save-or-die spells that can be removed by a flat DC 20. Obstinate and Primary Skill (Resolve) feel nearly required.) Churning out characters with a bunch of background advantages and awful stats seems like a design goal, not a bug of the system. If you want people to have the sliders anywhere other than '1' or '10', you really need to have some incentive, somewhere to take, like, 3 strength as opposed to 1, or 7 Dexterity as opposed to 5. Required thresholds to use an item are clunky but effective. Concrete threshold bonuses like Intelligence has would work. When you're spending two points to get +1 to intelligence rolls and an alternating +3 or +5 (averaging out to greater than a +5 bonus to a skill per two points, given the number of skills Intelligence impacts) to your skills, yeah, it's a good investment.

Things are not as linear as they might at first look.

For example, the difference between needing a 19 to hit and a 20 to hit might only by 5 percentage points, but it is also doubling your damage.

Likewise, proficiency provides a +3 to once skill for 1 level (which is 1 cp), and then +2 for the second level (also one CP), and then you can raise it with prodigy for +1 (also 1 CP) until fifteen. Past fifteen, you need artifacts or mutations, which a +1 for 2CP) and then beyond 20 you need Legendary Skill which scales from +1 for 4 CP to +5 for 4 CP over time.

Resolve, Fortitude, and Acrobatics are all valuable defensive skills, and they are a boon to all characters. But, they are rare enough, that you don't need to max them out at the start of the game; doing so just leaves you weaker overall. As I mention down-thread, I once had a party who all maxxed out their resolve scores at start, and then didn't actually come up against anything which requires resolve, and instead were just kind of under-powered, and then whined at the GM when they came upon a fortitude based encounter.

Haste is absolutely a problem spell, and it is one that I keep tinkering with, and will likely change several more times before the end.

Strength is tied to might and encumbrance. A character with a 1 might won't be able to carry their gear, and is super vulnerable to enemy combat maneuvers. As I mention below, Bob frequently makes characters with a 3 strength, and then inevitably gets grappled and then whines that I am punishing him for making a powerful character and claims that combat maneuvers are "cheat codes for the GM".


2.5 Moreover, the presentation (spend 100 points appropriately however you like) turns the process of character building into a knapsack problem, and that's frankly overwhelming unless you treat it as an optimization exercise. There's a reason that Shadowrun, in 5th edition, moved its famous character-building minigame from 'here is a bunch of XP to spend at the start, go nuts' to the Priority system, and that change was well-received despite the many, many flaws of that edition. If you want to reduce min-maxing, do a system like that which encourages quality waste. If your points can't all be spent with maximal efficiency due to bucketing, then people will round out characters to fit a mental picture after their core concerns are covered with the 'wasted' points.

That's one way to look at it. I prefer free form personally. But then again, I approach character creation with a concept first.


3. Item Man could have just opted to make all of his relics Symbiotic. No one can rob him anymore. Hell, people might not be aware of them anymore. Why did you not just inform him of this apparent option as opposed to saying "you're going to get robbed"?

Symbiotic items did come up in our discussion.

The thing about symbiotic items is that while yes, they do detour casually thievery, someone who has the means to actually overcome your character also has the means to simply kill you and harvest the ambrosia from your corpse.


4. For those wondering, yes, losing all your items means you get a full refund of character points. Meaning that this crippled, half-demented man may, after getting robbed, spontaneously grow smart, well-groomed, handsome and strong the moment he was shaken down.

"Instantly" is a significant overstatement. You get 1 extra CP each session until your lost merits have been fully refunded.



5. You have a lot of history of the setting in the setting portion, but not a lot of 'Playing a character from X region'. Personally I find the latter a lot more helpful as a role-playing aid.

That's a good idea. I generally assume that setting info is mostly for the GM, and wrote it with a GM mining it for scenario hooks in mind, but maybe writing a more character focused one is a good incentive to get people to read it.



My best advice would be to start by just making a set of base templates. Maybe one from each Warlord's domain, and/or one for each archetype. Give them a certain level of base stats; a certain number of points to only be spent on stats (maybe this pool can only get stats up to a 7, where bonus points later can get it higher); add a certain number of points to only be spent on qualities (possibly specific sets of qualities); and a certain number of 'flex' points that can be spent without the aforementioned restrictions. Their total points can (probably should) go above 100 and possibly vary template to template to encourage 'wasting' points. It'll help newer players get a starting point for their builds, put people on relatively even playing fields, reduce min-maxed abominations, and give you an avenue to add more personalized flavor into the setting.

I definitely plan on making sample characters available, but putting them in an already huge core book is not imo a good idea. While they might help new players, I find that they are just wasted space for veteran players. I know I curse all of the starting packages in the D&D PHBs every time I am trying to find something.

Or are you talking about actually rewriting the game to be a class-based system? Because, while there is definitely an appeal to that, it is totally anathema to what I am trying to do.



Sidenote: There is a lot of pressure on the characters to get their initial build points right, because you sure can't patch up holes over the course of an adventure. Receiving less than one Medium Quality every month at the recommended rate, and no catch-up mechanics designed to help players shore up weaknesses at lower cost than advancing their strengths, really encourages the worst kinds of min-maxing.

Alchemy can allow you to rebuild virtually any facet of your character. Its not particularly cheap or fast, but its a lot better than what most RPGs provide.

Skill proficiencies are cheap and easy to pick up, and serve well to broaden a character.

Another thing that might not be at first apparent is that your base attribute scores are never used in isolation, they only modify other scores. And it is *much* cheaper to purchase increases to attribute scores than it is to raise all its dependent scores individually. This also serves to help characters broaden out rather than specializing.


But again, the whole idea of "min-max" is to maximize the things you want and minimize the things you don't. Scaling costs are there to discourage min-maxxing, and that is exactly the problem here. People want to maximize their characters, but then get mad and feel the GM is picking on them when they get bitten in the butt by all of the facets of their character that they have minimized. Its really a self-created problem, and your suggestions seem to be making it worse rather than mitigating it.


IIRC as presented in the first thread it was more like option one with the powerful NPCs somehow being able to sense the strong equippment somehow and taking action pretty much at the start of the game. That is why there was so much backlash.

It was a bit of an extreme situation, yeah.

In short:

In my system seers and mediums can sense magic. The more powerful the magic, and the more powerful the medium, the further away they can sense it.

He was using his artifacts to cast spells of incredible power, what D&D would consider like 13th-14th level spells, which means that every medium on the planet knows precisely where he is any time he casts a spell.

At that point, any interested party might be curious about how some unknown is casting globe-shattering spells, and see that it is through a vast array of artifacts, more than have ever been gathered in one place in the history of the world.

Add on to this that the guy using them has 1s in every stat, and requires such powerful magic to survive in his day to day life, means that he has to be casting these spells constantly, and thus everyone knows where he is at all time.

And it is only a matter of time before one of the world's many villains decides to relieve him of said vast array of artifacts.


It was an (imo) silly and disruptive build that was only legal under a very specific interpretation of the rules, basically an attempt to make HoD Pun-Pun.


Every scenario where this matters just raises the question how did they get all this and keep it this long in the first place if there's some powerful NPCs just waiting in the wings to swoop in and take everything.

The usual answer is something akin to Wolverine: Escaped military experiment with no memories and a whole bunch of experimental technology.


but back on track, most games with point buy have increased costs the more resources you invest in the same stat - like in d&d upping a stat above 14 costs double, and then triple, so you have to really pay for your natural 18.

The costs for increasing your scores do start to ramp up at the high levels.


And, in any game i'm aware of you can't buy a +20 to something at level 1, like you can apparently do in Talakeal's system.

You can, but its really costly. Past +15 the curve starts getting really steep, especially for a new character.


I remember a thread about how everyone in his party bought a higher will save than his, and it was something like a +20 at level 1.

Indeed they did.

And you know how that played out? The GM didn't have anything in the first mission that targeted will, and instead we fought giant spiders that targeted fortitude. We got our butt's kicked (although not quite a TPK), and everyone whined that the GM was picking on them.


Which is really how min-max always goes, the players have a great time when their maximum scores come up, but when they don't they suffer and then whine about how unfair the GM is for actually having their weaknesses matter.


I'd argue that it really does.

GURPS, as a counter-argument, looks much the same on the surface, but due to its 3d6 roll-under and well-defined and explained use of the bell curve, it's easy to pin down how you will perform under a wide variety of circumstances, giving you concrete goals to shoot for. The huge d20 swing in Talakeal's game means that investing towards hitting baseline competence means investing until you succeed on a nat 1, which is a much higher degree of investment required to reach your character goals. GURPS centering the stats on the human average, rather than making you pay the bulk of your starting points to reach human normal, incentivizes staying close to average. Because decreasing stats is a Flaw, and usually you have a cap on the Flaws you can take, you have meaningful decisions made when you opt to dump stats, rather than a meaningful investment into functioning like a normal human. GURPS is already notorious for being a very min-maxy game where the GM needs to take strict control of what's allowed, what's not, and various combinations; this doesn't even have the rails in place that GURPS does to reduce character skew.

Mutants and Masterminds is a D20 point-buy game, but it also has much more concrete caps on character abilities based on the power points available in the setting. You're capped pretty harshly on what you can invest by the level at which you operate at, and this hard cap and ordinary-human baseline means that there's a degree of enforced quality waste that you can use to round out characters outside of core competencies.

Point-buy games are inherently biased towards ridiculously min/max skews unless the game designer is cognizant of this and puts in guard rails to reduce that skew. Talakeal has not done so after years of iteration and bafflement as to why the structural incentives his games provide cause players to skew towards min-maxed characters.

This isn't wrong.

Freedom in character creation is a goal of my system, and I intentionally leave out such guard rails.

The thing is though, most character's balance out their strengths and their weaknesses. A "min-maxxed" character is not one who always performs well, it is one who performs exceptionally in certain circumstances and poorly in others.

And that is fine if that is the player's choice; if they want to play a stereotypical dumb-jock who excels in combat but is more often than not the butt of the joke outside of it, that's really cool!

It's only when you come to the game with the attitude that your weaknesses should never come up and that the GM is somehow picking on you if they do that it becomes toxic*.

And then you sometimes get the weird circular logic about deciding that the reason the GM is picking on you is because they are punishing you for making a superior character, even though the character is only superior if you discount their flaws, which of course the GM should be, except they won't because they are punishing you for making a superior character...

*Although inter-party dynamics and building for the group are a whole other tub of snakes that are very relevant here, but also kind of tangential.


snip.


snip.

Thank you for the support!


Actually act on the fact that it's disruptive instead of just allowing it with a warning, especially since you seem to imply in this very post that the "warning" part might not even occur. You're the GM. You can ban things when they are clearly going to cause a problem with your GMing style and your players can then make a choice of if they want to play in a campaign with those restrictions or not.

Ok.

But this wasn't for an actual game, it was someone asking me to critique a character build.

And I told them that it would be very disruptive in a normal game as they are extremely OP with their gear and extremely UP without it, and it would not be able to survive in the world without plot armor as it was are running around with the wealth of several kingdoms on its back and no way to hide or protect it from the world's various villains.

Which brought on the "GMPCs raining from the sky" comment.

The conversation degenerated rapidly from there.


It's possible to intentionally build a character that is objectively bad. That said generally rule systems do at least try to put in some guide lines to say what is a good or bad idea and the GM and other players are perfectly within their rights to object to or reject a character that can't contribute properly to the game. It isn't uncommon, and in fact is highly advisable, to discuss limits and work out the tone and themes of a campaign ahead of time so someone doesn't make something completely out of line with them and disrupt things. Common sense measures like talking things out usually prevent someone throwing a str18 int8 wizard into a high combat campaign where they're going to get torn apart in melee trying to punch a monster to death with all the HP of a wet napkin, or a barbarian murder hobo with 8 int and charisma being thrown into a low/no combat game focused on court intrigue where the player spends all their time either bored with nothing to do or actively ruining things for the rest of the group.

Agreed.


Which since you're focused on the people wanting to take it being so much more powerful they could just stroll in and do so means "I have an arbitrary line you can't cross without me taking it all away." That does kind of shift it from spectrum back to hard line. If you have that arbitrary line already why not just make it a line you can't cross at all so the problem never comes up instead of a line where crossing results in the GM targeting someone.

Right. But where that line is depends on a whole lot of factors involving the player, the GM, and the rest of the table. Not something that (IMO) can or should be dictated by the Game Designer from afar.

In character, it really depends on how careful the character is about hiding and protecting their wealth as to whether or not trying to track down and rob them is worth the trouble, but of course the more wealth they have the more extreme that might be.

And, of course, many GM's are willing to bend the narrative for the sake of the player, myself included, but exactly how far they are willing to bend it will vary from GM to GM and campaign to campaign.


No? You are playing with your group not against them. As GM balance is on you and the players both and the encounters that happen are entirely on you. You are creating encounters for your players to deal with, you are not creating player characters for your encounters to deal with. If there's something clearly unbalanced enough that you feel the only way of balancing it out is to personally intervene then it should not have made it past the concept stage of character creation before taking a stance.

I think it's a terrible example to go "it's okay for me to have my player characters mugged for having something I could easily have told them they can't have, don't worry I could also randomly give them an easy target to mug it's totally the same."

One is them doing something you disapprove of which is entirely possible for you to just say no to at any point in the process, something you clearly object to enough that you've given the ultimatum "if you do this powerful NPCs will notice and come to take it away." The other is you putting an encounter in front of them for the specific purposes of claiming the scenario is even.

Why is doing this punishing them? Gee, could be because that is literally what the entire situation is about. You were concerned about the balance of something and the only measure you could come up with was that if they take it too far you step in and have it taken from them. That isn't "NPCs acting with a modicum of tactical acumen and rational self interest" that's the players doing something you're worried isn't balanced and instead of just cutting out options that give too much of an advantage and avoiding the situation completely you're just leaving an open threat of "take it too far and I take away your toys."[/B][/I]

Ok. I think we are coming into this conversation with two wildly different preconceptions.

First, you seem to be coming at this from a more gamist bent where a GM's highest priority is to present the players with balanced encounters and the player's highest priority is too overcome those encounters.

Whereas I am coming at this from a more simulationist bent where I think the GM's highest priority is to create an interesting world for the PCs to explore and the player's highest priority is making decisions in character.

Second, you seem to be of the impression that I am saying "You character is too powerful for me to defeat using "level appropriate means" so I am going to be pull high level encounters out of my butt in an effort to kill you.

Whereas what I am (trying) to say is that there are plenty of powerful and evil people in the world who have no compunctions about killing you and taking your stuff, and if you come to their attention, they are going to decide to do so if the risk vs. reward ratio is high enough.


Honestly, its a lot like my conversation about railroading; most people accuse the GM is warping the narrative to screw over their characters when what they actually mean is the GM is running the setting impartially and won't warp it far enough in their favor.


To use an (intentionally extreme and hyperbolic example):

We are playing a game set in the world of The Hobbit.

Player A makes a character who shares a name with the GM's ex-wife. The GM, not wanting to be reminded of her constantly, decides in the first session Smaug flies down out of blue and incinerates her.

Player B makes a character whose goal is too urinate on every dragon in middle earth. The first session, he barges in through the front gates of the Lonely Mountain, waltzes into Smaug's lair, awakens the dragon by whizzing on his nose, and is promptly incinerated.


I don't think any reasonable person would say the player was at fault in scenario A, and I don't think any reasonable person would say the GM was at fault in scenario B.



So then, we have my regular player Bob. He generally plays fey magic users who dump stat all of their physical attributes. He then uses the exact same argument (The GM is punishing me for making too powerful a character) if at any point the enemies: Grapple him. Use poison. Use iron weapons. Cast dispel magic. Steal / sunder / disarm his wand or spell book. The cause is different, but the argument is exactly the same.



I am not claiming that someone taking an option you left in to get strong fast is "outsmarting you." As far as I can see nobody in this thread has and since I don't know which thread that claim came from (if it even came directly from this forum) and the more it gets brought up the more it reads to me like somebody upset you and it's a sticking point. What I am saying is you know this is a balance issue and the method you're choosing to take care of it is possibly the most conflict causing way I can think of, and that should be obvious.

Nglipop said I was "punishing players for using the system in an intelligent way". The argument in the original thread (which I really did not intent to rehash here, but Nglipop really kind of got my goat) went down a very similar path. Bob's go to response when one of his character's many weaknesses comes up is "you are just punishing me for outsmarting you", much like his default excuse when taking advantage of his fellow players is "you are just punishing me for being good with money".

So yeah, I guess it is a bit of a sore spot for me.


You want them not to abuse it. You can easily say they just aren't able to or not present the option in the first place. You are instead saying "yeah you can but then I can just have you beat up and your stuff taken then you just wasted those build points." You proceed to defend not just taking the option where the inevitable result is GM/player conflict because someone somewhere might want it for some reason or even restricting it to people who a GM is sure can navigate it successfully.

There's an entire (far too large in my opinion) group of players who just get tunnel vision on the strengths and then get upset when the flaws come up. You play with one who you have a considerable amount of your time on the forum dedicated to recounting horror stories about. The fact that this thread entirely centers around discussion on a punishment for taking this option too far shows it was a point of concern and that you are wary of it happening enough to acknowledge it will at some point.

None of this is new to you yet you're centering your reasoning on what you would do (or at least what you claim you would do) as a player when there is obvious counter evidence that you are not by any means the only type of player.

I don't feel like the existence of a certain subsect of problem players should ruin it for the rest of us.

The idea that you should remove options for everyone because some people will try and abuse them is anathema to me.

I would much rather have a rule set that allows people freedom to tailor the game for themselves, even if some people are going to ruin it for themselves by doing so.


You're not exactly avoiding the adversarial part by bringing it up at every opportunity. Every time it comes up it's just displaying negative bias toward anyone opposed to the conclusion you've reached.

I don't think you and I are talking about the same thing.

I am talking about people who tell people they are "doing the game wrong" for using optional stuff and refusing to even discuss it with them. I have similar issues with "canon-police" when talking about fiction.

I don't think that has happened in a thread I have been part of in years, and I think this is the first time I have brought it up in quite a while, but it still has left a bad taste in my mouth.


You're also not really avoiding the power tripping GM part by having a situation where you will literally have NPCs come out of nowhere to rob someone specifically for taking an option you insist remain rules legal despite finding flawed enough to have this extreme retribution baked into it.

Nobody is "coming out of nowhere". That is a straw-man.

I am talking about established villains in the campaign world who become aware of the PC and come to the conclusion that robbing them is the best course of action organically throughout the course of the campaign.

The downside of resource based merits is that people can steal them, yes. But it is hardly "extreme retribution" unless taken to extreme levels. I have had players take plenty of resource based merits over the years without any issue. If a player did try and take it to extreme levels, I feel like we could have a conversation about whether or not the character is appropriate and then proceed from there without anyone needing to ban anything or having anyone "appear from nowhere".


Although, as an aside. Do you think the constitution attribute should exist in game? Because, imo, giving yourself a minimum constitution score has a lot more "extreme retribution" banked into it than heirlooms do, but I have never heard anyone propose removing it from the game.


Discuss how you are uncomfortable with the potential abuse of the options with your players and establish a reasonable limitation agreed on between you and the group.

This is what I do.

What I don't want to do is abuse my authority as system designer and establish a hard limit for anyone and everyone because of some arbitrary line that works for my table.

[Anymage]

The idea that you should remove options for everyone because some people will try and abuse them is anathema to me.

I would much rather have a rule set that allows people freedom to tailor the game for themselves, even if some people are going to ruin it for themselves by doing so.

Strong disagreement on this core element. In theory a game that can cover a broad range of power levels allows the group to tune their game to whatever power level they like. In practice, though, at best it means that the group requires a high level of system mastery and a lot of self-imposed bans to fit within the right power window. Otherwise it means a high chance of accidental imbalance* and/or extra work being piled on the DMs shoulders. Both of which make for extra hassle and raises questions of why to use this system as opposed to any other.

*(Or worse, if one player is better at optimizing and/or more plugged into the optimization community, intentional imbalance. That's again hard to work around, especially if you want to avoid having your fixes come across as too heavy handed. Heavy handed fiat fixes may not be literal DMPCs, but feed into the same frustration of feeling like the PCs are just observers in someone else's story. The strengths of wide potential wind up not existing while the flaws of the idea quickly compound.)

[Fable Wright]

Thanks for taking the time to look it over and give me feedback! I really appreciate it, even if it isn't entirely complimentary!

Thank you for taking feedback with grace!


This is an ongoing discussion between my editor and I.

Presenting things so that if you read the book front to book you never get a concept that won't be explained until later is a laudable goal, but so is having a system of organization that allows you to look stuff up easily as a reference book. They are at odds, and I try and satisfy both, but often lean toward the latter.

For what it's worth, as someone who was trying to reference different sections: If you're distributing the game as a PDF, you want to make the bookmark tab robust, and you probably want subheaders smaller than chapters that you can refer to. Having a quick page link to Chapter 9: Metamagic when you mention the concept is a good thing. Inspiration mentioning mana being used to shift rolls would be less painful if it mentioned that it was going to be in the same section down the line. The organization of the book is unclear from the perspective of a new person wandering through and trying to figure out the interior organization logic.

If you're open to suggestions, please put 'mechanics of spellcasting' as Chapter 8, including the rules for casting and list of metamagic; before spells at chapter 9. Having spells reference metamagic effects constantly before they're introduced is very painful, and not needing to memorize page numbers to hop between for the process of casting a spell, metamagic options to modify DC, and effects of the spells themselves would be a godsend for learning the mechanics quickly.


Things are not as linear as they might at first look.

For example, the difference between needing a 19 to hit and a 20 to hit might only by 5 percentage points, but it is also doubling your damage.

You are correct, but the converse is true far more often. The difference between a 20 to hit and a 22 to hit are pretty much the same. The difference between a 20 and a 25 to hit are 5% and 4%. Moreover, to my understanding, if you can only succeed on a 20 and you roll a 19, the average player will simply use a point of mana to trigger the exploding 20, given how rarely the circumstances come up and the low impact mana has if you're not reliant on a Convinction ability. A +1 doesn't do a lot in a hail mary scenario. More than that: It's a hail mary scenario. Why are you taking an action that will succeed only 5-10% of the time, instead of doing something productive that you can succeed at?

Conversely, consider the scenario in which you're a mage casting a spell with a +18 to cast and DC 20. You, wanting to cast spells regularly, took the artifact to refund one mana per successful cast, making any non-failed spell 'free'. You're only failing on a nat 1, and you're failing on a nat 1 pretty much all the time because of negatively-exploding 1s. You're spending a mana either way to negate that scenario. (If you can't use mana to trigger exploding 20s/negate exploding 1s, you really need to explain that in the Inspiration/Mana section, it's very unclear; if that is the case, substitute uses of destiny instead of mana.) No real reason to hit +19 aside from starting to hit the 23 milestone, since you're in the same boat either way. However, if you're in the situation where you went down to a +17 to cast, you're suddenly doubling your odds of needing to spend mana, effectively halving the number of spells you can cast that adventure. You're pretty well incentivized people to reach that +18, no? A +18 will give you four times the spells over the course of the adventure that a +14 will.

Given how much more powerful the difficulty 25 spells are than difficulty 20, the target goal for many characters will be to hit that +23. And what do you know? Occult 10, +5 Heirloom, +5 Primary Skill, +1 Prodigy, +1 Legendary, and +1 Occult from an item will get you there. The cost is large, no question, but it's the level you need to reach to be able to do consistently cool things. It is legal to reach during chargen. You have incentivized reaching that milestone fairly heavily, and moving a 20% chance of failure down to a 5% chance of failure is worth that cost.

Hence the reason why I say that your system, more than others, incentivizes min-maxing. Sacrificing a 95% to an 80% in order to boost your 5% chance up to a 20% chance is a fool's game—you're not usually going to put yourself in situations where your 20% comes up, because why are you going to intentionally set yourself up for failure four times out of five?

This binary nature of scenarios in which those low stats come into play ("Well, you targeted my Strength, knowing that I sacrificed it, so I guess I won't do anything this encounter") means that the negative experiences stick out more, being the outlier events. You have a higher chance of Celerity or Contingency metamagics bailing you out of a scenario than two more points of Strength.

Bob may be feeling frustrated because in order to achieve what he views as baseline competence (what I assume to be +23 casting stat) he was required to make a sacrifice, and targeting the weakness he had to include for baseline proficiency may feel like bad manners to him. 'Tis a matter of perspective.

An easy way to reduce this issue? Lower the cap on what spells you can cast at chargen. If you physically cannot cast a spell with a difficulty greater than 15 + 5* Anima, suddenly you feel less pressure to hit a 23 and are more incentivized to spread out your skills.


Resolve, Fortitude, and Acrobatics are all valuable defensive skills, and they are a boon to all characters. But, they are rare enough, that you don't need to max them out at the start of the game; doing so just leaves you weaker overall. As I mention down-thread, I once had a party who all maxxed out their resolve scores at start, and then didn't actually come up against anything which requires resolve, and instead were just kind of under-powered, and then whined at the GM when they came upon a fortitude based encounter.

This... feels like bad design. I can't think of another way to say it. Either you permanently weaken yourself to reduce the threat of a rare event, or you're vulnerable to instant death by bad event. Either way, you lose.

Imagine playing a video game. "Did you put any points into diving? No? Then you die when you come up for air from this flooding hideout. What, it hasn't come up at all so far? Why is that my problem?"

If I ran into the situation you described, as a game designer, the takeaway I would have is 'Resolve needs to be associated with many common actions".


That's one way to look at it. I prefer free form personally. But then again, I approach character creation with a concept first.

*deep breath*

You have a dense setting section, designed almost exclusively for GM use.
You do not have hooks for a player to build around.
What a player sees when browsing is a dense mish-mash of a setting that includes Atlantis, Merlin, King Arthur, the Titanomachy, and the Norse Gotterdammerung and a long history lesson.

As a player, what am I supposed to hang my hat on here? Are we playing an ancient greek game where I'm playing a demigod? Is this a kitchen soup setting? Is this a down to earth Greece where I play a mystery cult member? Am I an Arthurian Knight? Am I an agent of the Titans rebelling against the gods in the name of Prometheus? Is this a viking adventure? None of my pre-existing concepts factors into this setting very well.

What a player with my real life mental flaws has for anchoring myself in the book is the tools that I can interact with. The information that one gets from spells, merits, and so forth.

I read the description of Priest, and I am incentivized to check out the section of gods so that I can take advantage of Bless, and now can build a character around that theme. I look at the spell list, and build my character around one school of magic.

Please, please be aware that people can and will derive a character from the mechanics (and likely are, based on how you described your group) and that you should bear that in mind when designing the game.


"Instantly" is a significant overstatement. You get 1 extra CP each session until your lost merits have been fully refunded.

Pardon?


If a relic is permanently lost or destroyed, the character should be
refunded the cost of the merit. If a relic then comes into the
possession of another player character, that character must purchase
the relic merit

You don't even mention that there is a section in the book dedicated to explaining how refunds work. The average reader would simply assume that a refund occurs immediately. You know, like most refunds do in real life.


Or are you talking about actually rewriting the game to be a class-based system? Because, while there is definitely an appeal to that, it is totally anathema to what I am trying to do.

Neither. The starting point would be including optional packages that give you more points than the base 100, at the cost of loss of flexibility. You may have, for instance, a Spellsword archetype that has 'free' points in physical stats at the cost of an upper bound on magical stats they can achieve, and a minimum number of points invested in their baseline stats.

Character package: Imperial Templar

Starting Agility: 4
Starting Charisma: 4
Starting Dexterity: 5
Starting Endurance: 6
Starting Intelligence: 4
Starting Perception: 3
Starting Strength: 6
Starting Willpower: 6
[Value: 76 points; discounted value for package: 60 points, let's say]

Points that must be spent raising those starting stats: 16
Points that must be spent on a specific subset of starting qualities: 12
Points that may be spent on anything: 12

Character Package: Marhanna Buddha-Touched

Starting Agility: 2
Starting Charisma: 4
Starting Dexterity: 2
Starting Endurance: 3
Starting Intelligence: 4
Starting Perception: 3
Starting Strength: 2
Starting Willpower: 6
Starting Enlightenment: 6
[Value: 64 points; discounted value for package: 54 points. Smaller discount because more flexibility in what you can take.]
Points that must be spent raising non-Enlightenment starting stats: 10
Points that must be spent on a specific subset of starting qualities or Enlightenment: 16
Points that may be spent on anything: 20

An incentive to reward people for playing within a theme, with the reward being more points allocated to things they wouldn't normally buy (but might like). As a bonus hook, it gives them a concrete part of the setting to investigate and build a concept around if they did not have one ready to go. You can make a number of these, playtest them, and see what does or doesn't work, and how they affect player behavior and the variety of player builds.


But again, the whole idea of "min-max" is to maximize the things you want and minimize the things you don't. Scaling costs are there to discourage min-maxxing, and that is exactly the problem here. People want to maximize their characters, but then get mad and feel the GM is picking on them when they get bitten in the butt by all of the facets of their character that they have minimized. Its really a self-created problem, and your suggestions seem to be making it worse rather than mitigating it.

You have, in fact, described what happens when players branch out to invest in a defense that doesn't come up (Resolve). They are generally underpowered and perform poorly. If the choice is between spreading one's self too thin through investing in multiple attributes that never come up, or just accept that you will fail in those cases and focus on the one part of the adventure you do control (active abilities)... then yes, you are encouraging people to min-max.


What I don't want to do is abuse my authority as system designer and establish a hard limit for anyone and everyone because of some arbitrary line that works for my table.

:confused:

...Do you view the adventures at your table as playtests? Seeing what works well, what works poorly, and use that to improve the overall quality of your game? When players complain, do you view that as an opportunity to realize that there may be flaws in the system, consider what the root causes are, and iterate for a better result? If so, anomalous and disruptive player builds are the kind of thing that should absolutely make it back into the system.

[King of Nowhere]

Strong disagreement on this core element. In theory a game that can cover a broad range of power levels allows the group to tune their game to whatever power level they like. In practice, though, at best it means that the group requires a high level of system mastery and a lot of self-imposed bans to fit within the right power window. Otherwise it means a high chance of accidental imbalance* and/or extra work being piled on the DMs shoulders. Both of which make for extra hassle and raises questions of why to use this system as opposed to any other.

)

What you say is true, but it does not negate the benefits of being able to fine tune. And if one do have the system mastery required, and a measure of trust with his group, the game with more power levels allow for much more freedom.
There's a reason a lot of people are sticking with 3.5, especially those with the system mastery to make it work.
I do believe nowadays there is too much focus on making a game that everyone can play with minimal investment. No, thanks. Some people like having to put effort into things and being rewarded for it

[Ignimortis]

Don't you think that is kind of a double standard?

As someone said upthread, if the PCs learned that there was a level 1 commoner of the opposite alignment walking around with a million gold worth of magic items, do you think for a second they wouldn't target them?

I would never hold it against PCs if they acted with a modicum of tactical acumen and rational self-interest.

If the PCs hunt werewolves, I don't take it personally if they bring silver weapons.
If the PCs fight a frost giant who takes half damage from cold and double from fire, I don't take it personally if they use fireball instead of cone of cold.
If the PCs fight a fighter, I don't take it personally if they target his will saves.
If the PCs fight a mage, I don't take it personally if they target his fortitude saves.
I don't take it personally if they focus fire on striker with 10 AC and +30 attack bonus before attacking a defender with 30 AC and +4 attack bonus.
And I don't take it personally if the NPC has a powerful artifact and the PCs attempt to destroy or steal it rather than allowing him to use it against them.

Why then, if an NPC does these same things, does it imply that the GM is punishing you for some slight that occurred during character building (or, as some posters have asserted, that you are just spiteful because they outsmarted you)?
It is a double standard. And yet it helps the game more often than it harms it. Here's a couple reasons why:
1) PCs only need to lose once, while NPCs are, generally, dime a dozen. Encountering an enemy who tailors their tactics to PCs weaknesses should be a rare occasion, because for most systems it means the fight is inherently far more dangerous or even deadly than average.
2) PCs usually only get to do some of these things with extra preparation and information about who they'll be facing. You generally don't carry around a silver weapon for werewolves only, unless you expect to face werewolves often.
3) If they get to do some of those things, then either the game is designed with a glaring hole (why exactly are PCs allowed to attack the 10 AC striker before a 30 AC defender? does the defender do anything to warrant, or better yet, force the PCs to attack them instead? if not...why are they a defender in the first place?), or they have indeed "outsmarted" the system and found a way to ignore what the game does to force them into taking a harder route.

As to "why shouldn't the GM do those things" - why don't level 20 evil dark lords personally snuff out burgeoning heroes while they're level 5 and have claimed their first victory over a local henchman? Probably because that wouldn't make for a good game nor a good story.

Granted, there are limits to that, and NPCs shouldn't just be pinatas that occasionally throw out a basic attack. But GMs generally don't play to win - unlike the majority of players, who most certainly do to a certain extent. And, well, that's usually fine. PCs should get to get away with things, most of the time.

That being said, I wouldn't take any of those things personally. Now, my fun for the session might be ruined if I spend the majority of it in CC or otherwise being unable to contribute anything of value, but it's not a slight against me and I'd understand that (speaking from experience here). A different player, though (say, me from five years ago?) - might very well take it as a targeted action. That's just how people are, I'm afraid.

[Kish]

PCs are not NPCs. Asking "Don't you think that is kind of a double standard?" with that implied "and therefore bad" strikes me as an explanation for oh, so many problems running a game. Yes of course it's a double standard, as it should be.

Presumably, in your examples, the werewolves aren't having fun when the PCs pull out silver weapons. The frost giants aren't having fun when they're on fire. And so on. But that doesn't matter, because they're not actually able to have fun at all and, unless the fight broke out after an unplanned communication breakdown, they were created to be killed. And I certainly hope you recognize that none of the previous sentence applies to the PCs.

[Batcathat]

PCs are not NPCs. Asking "Don't you think that is kind of a double standard?" with that implied "and therefore bad" strikes me as an explanation for oh, so many problems running a game. Yes of course it's a double standard, as it should be.

Presumably, in your examples, the werewolves aren't having fun when the PCs pull out silver weapons. The frost giants aren't having fun when they're on fire. And so on. But that doesn't matter, because they're not actually able to have fun at all and, unless the fight broke out after an unplanned communication breakdown, they were created to be killed. And I certainly hope you recognize that none of the previous sentence applies to the PCs.

On the other hand, while double standards aren't a problem in the sense of the NPCs feeling bad about it, it can bad for the suspension of disbelief if it's too obvious. If all the werewolf hunters in the land knows to bring silver weapons, except when they fight the werewolf PC, that would probably bother me, at least (even if the werewolf PC was my character). Yes, of course the PCs are special, they are the literal center of the universe they inhabit, but I prefer it when it's not very noticeable.

[Anymage]

What you say is true, but it does not negate the benefits of being able to fine tune. And if one do have the system mastery required, and a measure of trust with his group, the game with more power levels allow for much more freedom.
There's a reason a lot of people are sticking with 3.5, especially those with the system mastery to make it work.
I do believe nowadays there is too much focus on making a game that everyone can play with minimal investment. No, thanks. Some people like having to put effort into things and being rewarded for it

Pulling such a thing off requires tapping into the wide amount of systemic meta-knowledge that exists, a group who can be trusted to both have and apply a significant level of system familiarity, active bans (that in limit how much of the game space can be used at a particular table), and/or heavy handed GMing to keep such a thing from flying off the rails. Not to mention how the more work that's placed on the GM's shoulders, the smaller the pool of candidates either willing to or able to actually run it well. (Assuming that the "heavy handed GMing" category is not well liked, since it taps into the same feelings of being a spectator in someone else's game that DMPCs tend to evoke.)

Most relevantly, I dislike the argument that a good enough GM can compensate for systemic weaknesses because that ignores the impact of the rest of the table. A good set of players can make an imbalanced or even outright bad system work by limiting the extremes of their characters and being happy to pass around the spotlight. The one group we know of running HoD is rather infamously not a good group. Fable Wright covered how guardrails could help tone things down and help mitigate for less than ideal players. Talakeal's insistence that the game should have maximal open endedness on the assumption that parties will self-regulate flies rather in the face of regular evidence.


1) PCs only need to lose once, while NPCs are, generally, dime a dozen. Encountering an enemy who tailors their tactics to PCs weaknesses should be a rare occasion, because for most systems it means the fight is inherently far more dangerous or even deadly than average.
...
As to "why shouldn't the GM do those things" - why don't level 20 evil dark lords personally snuff out burgeoning heroes while they're level 5 and have claimed their first victory over a local henchman? Probably because that wouldn't make for a good game nor a good story.

On top of this, the most effective tactics in most conflicts involve an overwhelming surprise attack. Assassinations and ambushes are very effective for a reason. However, having a competent enemy ambush troublesome PCs is basically just adding a few extra steps to "rocks fall, everybody dies". Which tends not to be liked by players for good reasons.

Basically agreeing with you that what make for good and effective tactics often make for very bad stories/games, and that the value as a story/game often takes priority.

[King of Nowhere]

Most relevantly, I dislike the argument that a good enough GM can compensate for systemic weaknesses because that ignores the impact of the rest of the table.

while i reinstate that I agree with most of your points, this one is a misrepresentation of my stance. I am not saying that a good party can compensate for systemic weakness, because that would imply that a system such as 3.x is weak and bad, and "compensating" means you can get at most at the same level of other systems.
it is not the case. what i claim is that such a system is difficult, but awesome (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DifficultButAwesome). Except, the tvtrope page refers generally to characters, but I claim that it's the whole game system that can be like that; it performs poorly in the hands of beginners, but once you are skilled with it it's more fun than a system that puts guardrails.
Sure, you need the right group, and you need people with high system mastery - or at least, you need some people with high system mastery and everyone else to trust them and their decisions. But since I am lucky to have one such group, I would not change gaming style.
Conversely, modern systems tend to emphatize "easy to learn" and "less hurdles for casual players", because most players are casual, and the producers would like to increase sales. However, such an approach does frustrate some of us who like to invest some energy in system mastery and would like to do cool things (notice: cool does not necessarily mean overpowered) with it.


The one group we know of running HoD is rather infamously not a good group. Fable Wright covered how guardrails could help tone things down and help mitigate for less than ideal players. Talakeal's insistence that the game should have maximal open endedness on the assumption that parties will self-regulate flies rather in the face of regular evidence.

yes, i was talking in general. as i said, not many parties will handle an open system with success. talekeal's party least of all. I agree it's the wrong system for them, or at least for bob.

[Vahnavoi]

Don't you think that is kind of a double standard?

As someone said upthread, if the PCs learned that there was a level 1 commoner of the opposite alignment walking around with a million gold worth of magic items, do you think for a second they wouldn't target them?

I would never hold it against PCs if they acted with a modicum of tactical acumen and rational self-interest.

If the PCs hunt werewolves, I don't take it personally if they bring silver weapons.
If the PCs fight a frost giant who takes half damage from cold and double from fire, I don't take it personally if they use fireball instead of cone of cold.
If the PCs fight a fighter, I don't take it personally if they target his will saves.
If the PCs fight a mage, I don't take it personally if they target his fortitude saves.
I don't take it personally if they focus fire on striker with 10 AC and +30 attack bonus before attacking a defender with 30 AC and +4 attack bonus.
And I don't take it personally if the NPC has a powerful artifact and the PCs attempt to destroy or steal it rather than allowing him to use it against them.

Why then, if an NPC does these same things, does it imply that the GM is punishing you for some slight that occurred during character building (or, as some posters have asserted, that you are just spiteful because they outsmarted you)?

You're looking at the issue from the viewpoint of an opposing player in a symmetric game: anything their characters can do to your characters is fair game, and vice versa.

Your players, and a lot the people responding to you here, are looking at the issue from the viewpoint of players in asymmetric game where their characters have greater worth than the game master's, for various reasons.

For what it's worth, it's perfectly possible to make it clear for a game that player characters have no special dispensation compared to game master's when it comes to tactics. Whether you and your system accomplish this is what's dubious.

[gatorized]

You don't want to take the players' items because of muh realism. You want to take them because you hate the idea of players being effective and beating you - you believe you're competing with them. None of us were born yesterday, and you're not clever or subtle. The only person you're fooling is yourself.

[Talakeal]

You don't want to take the players' items because of muh realism. You want to take them because you hate the idea of players being effective and beating you - you believe you're competing with them. None of us were born yesterday, and you're not clever or subtle. The only person you're fooling is yourself.

Out of curiosity, what does "being effective and beating you" even mean in this context? In my games, the PCs win >99.5% of all fights; I want them to see the campaign through to completion, achieve their goals, and triumph over their enemies. Heck, I actually hate when the PCs die more than the player's do because I tend to grow really attached to their characters and want to find out how their stories ends.

Keep in mind, this was not actually a player in an actual game. This was someone showing me a build that spent close to 100% of its starting character points on wealth, and required a magical ritual that was detectable from any point on the planet to even get out of bed in the morning. Then he asked me if I thought it was a good character, and I said no, because you are letting every villain in the setting know exactly where you are, and it would take insane levels of plot-armor to justify any one of them not coming and claiming your gigantic trove of artifacts for themselves.

If their character is "too strong" I don't need to rob or kill them, I can just throw stronger enemies at them until I find the balance point I am looking for. The only thing that would actually stop me from doing so is your derided "muh realism" because it doesn't make sense for the world to contain that many powerful monsters in such close proximity.

Now, if there is an extreme gap in power levels between PCs, I might have to step in and do something because it's not fun for the other players; if they constantly do nothing and risk death because they can't keep up with the power gamer in the group, but that doesn't really fit into your "GM vs. PC" narrative either, and I can't recall it ever actually happening.


If you're open to suggestions, please put 'mechanics of spellcasting' as Chapter 8, including the rules for casting and list of metamagic; before spells at chapter 9. Having spells reference metamagic effects constantly before they're introduced is very painful, and not needing to memorize page numbers to hop between for the process of casting a spell, metamagic options to modify DC, and effects of the spells themselves would be a godsend for learning the mechanics quickly.

I am thinking about swapping chapter eight and nine right now. Not sure about whether or not to move six and seven; the problem is that Chapter Six contains the rules for everything supernatural, and it makes sense for Chapter Seven to follow up on the rules for spirtis, and Chapter Nine to follow up on the rules for spellcasting.


You are correct, but the converse is true far more often. The difference between a 20 to hit and a 22 to hit are pretty much the same. The difference between a 20 and a 25 to hit are 5% and 4%. Moreover, to my understanding, if you can only succeed on a 20 and you roll a 19, the average player will simply use a point of mana to trigger the exploding 20, given how rarely the circumstances come up and the low impact mana has if you're not reliant on a Convinction ability. A +1 doesn't do a lot in a hail mary scenario. More than that: It's a hail mary scenario. Why are you taking an action that will succeed only 5-10% of the time, instead of doing something productive that you can succeed at?

The player can never be sure of what difficulties they will come across on their adventures until they are in the field, so sitting around doing white board math about percentages and builds doesn't really help in character building as you are missing the critical X factor. Likewise, just because you aren't confident in your 20% score, doesn't mean a test can't be forced on you. You may well find yourself in a situation where you need to swim despite not putting points into athletics or solve a puzzle despite not putting points into reason.

And the big one's are the defensive stats. Any enemy who needs a 20 vs. a 19 to hit you is literally doing half the damage over the course of the fight. That adds up.


If you can't use mana to trigger exploding 20s/negate exploding 1s, you really need to explain that in the Inspiration/Mana section, it's very unclear; if that is the case, substitute uses of destiny instead of mana.

I have to say, your level of system mastery is very impressive despite only having first seen the rules ~24 hours ago at the time of your posting, so please don't take this as a criticism, but you are missing a lot of subtle things that are spelled out.

The rules for fortune dice do explicitly say that mana doesn't cause or prevent them. It also states that only the actual number shown on the dice before any adjustments or modifiers can cause fortune, which implicitly states it. But, I suppose it won't hurt to add a redundant section to the mana rules, so I will do so, thanks for the feedback!

But yeah, you can use destiny instead. As to whether or not that's worth doing rather than just letting the failure stand...


Given how much more powerful the difficulty 25 spells are than difficulty 20, the target goal for many characters will be to hit that +23. And what do you know? Occult 10, +5 Heirloom, +5 Primary Skill, +1 Prodigy, +1 Legendary, and +1 Occult from an item will get you there. The cost is large, no question, but it's the level you need to reach to be able to do consistently cool things. It is legal to reach during chargen. You have incentivized reaching that milestone fairly heavily, and moving a 20% chance of failure down to a 5% chance of failure is worth that cost.

A couple of things:

First, your roll has to exceed the difficulty, not meet it.

Second, this comes across to me as fairly arbitrary. I don't see why the DC 25 spells are particularly better compared to DC 20 spells than any other jump difficulty, or why 95% success rather is deemed to be the acceptable failure rate, especially when you factor in critical success rates and the ability to modify rolls with destiny and mana.

Third, you are likely going to be modifying spells with situational metamagics, which means that the difficulties you see listed in the book are not what the actual difficulties are going to be in the field. Likewise, you may well be receiving situational bonuses or penalties, especially if you have an ally supporting you with things like cantrips, performance, or leadership.

Finally, a +23 at the start is a pretty extreme investment; its roughly 1/3 of your total character points in a single skill! You are going to have to have a lot of weaknesses to buy that off. Even Bob thought that was excessive. I generally find anything more than +16 or so to be unnecessary; as you really don't want to start buying skills at premium costs until you have spare points to burn IMO.


Hence the reason why I say that your system, more than others, incentivizes min-maxing. Sacrificing a 95% to an 80% in order to boost your 5% chance up to a 20% chance is a fool's game—you're not usually going to put yourself in situations where your 20% comes up, because why are you going to intentionally set yourself up for failure four times out of five?

Could you please elaborate on this? Maybe give a few examples? I am having trouble parsing what you are even trying to say here.


This... feels like bad design. I can't think of another way to say it. Either you permanently weaken yourself to reduce the threat of a rare event, or you're vulnerable to instant death by bad event. Either way, you lose.

Imagine playing a video game. "Did you put any points into diving? No? Then you die when you come up for air from this flooding hideout. What, it hasn't come up at all so far? Why is that my problem?"

If I ran into the situation you described, as a game designer, the takeaway I would have is "Resolve needs to be associated with many common actions".

If it is bad design, it is bad design that is pretty much universal amongst RPG.

Any failed roll can potentially lead to a character's death, and it is impossible to make an omnicompetent character who always succeeds at everything.

Generally speaking, of the three "defensive skills" acrobatics is the most useful but the least dire, resolve is the least useful but most dire, and fortitude is somewhere between the two. This doesn't make one inferior or superior to the others, and over the course of the game they are all roughly equally likely to save a character's life.

As with most things in Heart of Darkness, it doesn't really matter overall if you want to specialize in one or dabble in all of them. What does, however, matter is party synergy. It's generally better to have a mixture of strengths and weaknesses so that the entire party isn't completely wiped out any time you came up against their shared weakness.


You don't even mention that there is a section in the book dedicated to explaining how refunds work. The average reader would simply assume that a refund occurs immediately. You know, like most refunds do in real life.

The beginning of the section on traits has rules for what happens if they are lost over play.

I think that asking for a book to link back to the description of a rule every time that rule is mentioned lest the "average reader assume it works like real life" is an impossibly high bar for any RPG book to meet, but in this case I can reword the merits so that it is a bit more clear.

Of course, even if the refund was immediate, there are no rules in the game for actually spending character points mid-session, so they still wouldn't "instantly change" unless people were making up house rules, they would instead just have a lot of unspent character points.


You have a dense setting section, designed almost exclusively for GM use.
You do not have hooks for a player to build around.
What a player sees when browsing is a dense mish-mash of a setting that includes Atlantis, Merlin, King Arthur, the Titanomachy, and the Norse Gotterdammerung and a long history lesson.

As a player, what am I supposed to hang my hat on here? Are we playing an ancient greek game where I'm playing a demigod? Is this a kitchen soup setting? Is this a down to earth Greece where I play a mystery cult member? Am I an Arthurian Knight? Am I an agent of the Titans rebelling against the gods in the name of Prometheus? Is this a viking adventure? None of my pre-existing concepts factors into this setting very well.

What a player with my real life mental flaws has for anchoring myself in the book is the tools that I can interact with. The information that one gets from spells, merits, and so forth.

I read the description of Priest, and I am incentivized to check out the section of gods so that I can take advantage of Bless, and now can build a character around that theme. I look at the spell list, and build my character around one school of magic.

Please, please be aware that people can and will derive a character from the mechanics (and likely are, based on how you described your group) and that you should bear that in mind when designing the game.


By default, the setting is a mash-up of weird western and Arthurian romance, loosely inspired by The Dark Tower.

But the world is vast enough that it has room for any real life (or fictional for that matter) culture or mythology.

It never really occurred to me that players would look at the setting and try and work backward to make a character who fit in though, in my experience normally players come in with a character concept based on some other piece of media (I want to be like Dante from Devil May Cry, I want to be like Lina from Slayers, I want to be like San from Princess Mononoke, I want to be like Rogue from X-Men, I want to be like Madmartigan from Willow, etc.) and then backport that into the system.


Neither. The starting point would be including optional packages that give you more points than the base 100, at the cost of loss of flexibility. You may have, for instance, a Spellsword archetype that has 'free' points in physical stats at the cost of an upper bound on magical stats they can achieve, and a minimum number of points invested in their baseline stats.

Character package: Imperial Templar

Starting Agility: 4
Starting Charisma: 4
Starting Dexterity: 5
Starting Endurance: 6
Starting Intelligence: 4
Starting Perception: 3
Starting Strength: 6
Starting Willpower: 6
[Value: 76 points; discounted value for package: 60 points, let's say]

Points that must be spent raising those starting stats: 16
Points that must be spent on a specific subset of starting qualities: 12
Points that may be spent on anything: 12

Character Package: Marhanna Buddha-Touched

Starting Agility: 2
Starting Charisma: 4
Starting Dexterity: 2
Starting Endurance: 3
Starting Intelligence: 4
Starting Perception: 3
Starting Strength: 2
Starting Willpower: 6
Starting Enlightenment: 6
[Value: 64 points; discounted value for package: 54 points. Smaller discount because more flexibility in what you can take.]
Points that must be spent raising non-Enlightenment starting stats: 10
Points that must be spent on a specific subset of starting qualities or Enlightenment: 16
Points that may be spent on anything: 20

An incentive to reward people for playing within a theme, with the reward being more points allocated to things they wouldn't normally buy (but might like). As a bonus hook, it gives them a concrete part of the setting to investigate and build a concept around if they did not have one ready to go. You can make a number of these, playtest them, and see what does or doesn't work, and how they affect player behavior and the variety of player builds.

So, my first instinct is, this is really really cool. It kind of reminds me of the character packs for Warhammer Quest or Heroquest, and I immediately started thinking of all the cool character packets I could create for my setting. I love this idea!

But, upon actually thinking about it, I don't really think they actually add anything mechanically.

Pretty much every character I have ever made or seen at my table could be built using one of those two sample packages you posted; at best they would just be raising a dump stat or two by a couple of points at no cost.

And I don't think the incentive of a couple of extra character points is going to dissuade someone who was already planning on giving themselves straight 1s and every flaw in the book in order to buy 100+ points of artifacts and heirlooms right off the bat like the guy whose comment partially inspired this thread.

I feel like stuff like this has a better place in something like Blades in the Dark where each character has a playbook rather than Heart of Darkness where anyone can attempt anything.

But I really do like the idea of sample characters that are tied into the world, and I really do think I will make up a bunch, I just don't think they will be in the core book.


You have, in fact, described what happens when players branch out to invest in a defense that doesn't come up (Resolve). They are generally underpowered and perform poorly. If the choice is between spreading one's self too thin through investing in multiple attributes that never come up, or just accept that you will fail in those cases and focus on the one part of the adventure you do control (active abilities)... then yes, you are encouraging people to min-max.

Even though that results in near guaranteed death every time?


...Do you view the adventures at your table as playtests? Seeing what works well, what works poorly, and use that to improve the overall quality of your game? When players complain, do you view that as an opportunity to realize that there may be flaws in the system, consider what the root causes are, and iterate for a better result? If so, anomalous and disruptive player builds are the kind of thing that should absolutely make it back into the system.

Sometimes it's hard to distinguish the player problems from systemic problems. For example, when we play D&D, we have pretty much all of the same problems that we do with HoD, often worse because I can't tweak a clearly broken rule.

But we haven't ever had an "anomalous disruptive build" at my table. My players can be munchkins, but they are firmly in the realm of "Practical Optimization" rather than "Theoretical Optimization".

Honestly, I am not sure if there really is much of a reason for a playtest to try and deal with Pun-Pun or Chain Gated Solars or Simulacrum Chains, because in a real actual game the GM is either just going to say "No." or run with it and embrace the wackiness.

Of course, I suppose this can go too far the other way, as I am often told that the reason 3E is so broken is because everyone went into it with the assumptions of healbot clerics, tanky fighters, blaster wizards, and skill-monkey rogues and never saw how broken the game could be if you went against type.


1) PCs only need to lose once, while NPCs are, generally, dime a dozen. Encountering an enemy who tailors their tactics to PCs weaknesses should be a rare occasion, because for most systems it means the fight is inherently far more dangerous or even deadly than average.

Indeed. Of course, I could also throw the ball back into the player's court and ask them why they consider characters with crippling and easily exploitable weaknesses to be a winning move when this is clearly the most likely outcome.


3) If they get to do some of those things, then either the game is designed with a glaring hole (why exactly are PCs allowed to attack the 10 AC striker before a 30 AC defender? does the defender do anything to warrant, or better yet, force the PCs to attack them instead? if not...why are they a defender in the first place?), or they have indeed "outsmarted" the system and found a way to ignore what the game does to force them into taking a harder route.

Generally, because they didn't bother investing any resources in making the defender "stickier" and are instead relying on the tactic of browbeating the GM into going easy on them.

Like I said above, it's a weird circular logic that AFAICT boils down to "I am powerful because you can't target my weaknesses, and you can't target my weaknesses without admitting that you are only doing it because I am powerful!".


PCs are not NPCs. Asking "Don't you think that is kind of a double standard?" with that implied "and therefore bad" strikes me as an explanation for oh, so many problems running a game. Yes of course it's a double standard, as it should be.

Presumably, in your examples, the werewolves aren't having fun when the PCs pull out silver weapons. The frost giants aren't having fun when they're on fire. And so on. But that doesn't matter, because they're not actually able to have fun at all and, unless the fight broke out after an unplanned communication breakdown, they were created to be killed. And I certainly hope you recognize that none of the previous sentence applies to the PCs.

I look at things from a simulationist perspective first; the players should be RPing their characters and the GM should be RPing the NPCs, and everyone should be acting according to their in character knowledge and motivation.

Obviously there are gamist concerns as well, but the players shouldn't be bringing in builds that require the NPCs to hold the idiot ball for them to survive (nor should the GM be setting up scenarios which require the NPCs hold the idiot ball for the PCs to survive.


From a purely gamist point of view, the idea that one can only have fun while they are winning and demanding the other person let you win is pretty immature and unreasonable. Games need to incentivize players to get better at them, and there needs to be a chance of failure, otherwise they aren't games.

The idea that a character's weaknesses can't ever be targeted is anathema to game balance, as at that point flaws are just free points. Heck, if taken to the logical extreme, the best defense becomes LACK of defense, as it is much easier to hit the guy with AC 40 than it is to hit the guy with AC 10 whom you have agreed not to target because doing so would be picking on the player.


Like, imagine you were playing chess, and your opponent used the same strategy every game, and every game you countered the strategy and defeated them. How absurd would it be if their response was "You are only countering my strategy because you are mad that I am better at chess than you are!".


You're looking at the issue from the viewpoint of an opposing player in a symmetric game: anything their characters can do to your characters is fair game, and vice versa.

Your players, and a lot the people responding to you here, are looking at the issue from the viewpoint of players in asymmetric game where their characters have greater worth than the game master's, for various reasons.

For what it's worth, it's perfectly possible to make it clear for a game that player characters have no special dispensation compared to game master's when it comes to tactics. Whether you and your system accomplish this is what's dubious.

Can you give me some examples of what this actually looks like on a systemic level?

I guess a few RPGs have "scripts" for the monsters to follow, but aside from that, what would a game system that gives one side different tactical dispensations actually look like?

[Fable Wright]

The player can never be sure of what difficulties they will come across on their adventures until they are in the field, so sitting around doing white board math about percentages and builds doesn't really help in character building as you are missing the critical X factor. Likewise, just because you aren't confident in your 20% score, doesn't mean a test can't be forced on you. You may well find yourself in a situation where you need to swim despite not putting points into athletics or solve a puzzle despite not putting points into reason.

And the big one's are the defensive stats. Any enemy who needs a 20 vs. a 19 to hit you is literally doing half the damage over the course of the fight. That adds up.

The players can be sure of certain difficulties—the ones for active abilities. If they aim to be able to reliably hit 30 in Cooking, they will know that they can reliably refresh Inspiration/Ecstasy. (Why are meals easier to get and don't have the scaling DC like Perform? I really do not know, but it's the superior investment decision.) If they hit 25 for spells, they can reliably do a two-target level 20 spell, or a save-or-die.

If you are in a situation where you need to swim—not everyone is going to invest in Athletics. The party as a whole is not going to expect everyone to pass that check, so the party will already be investing in contingency plans. Likewise, you only need one person to solve a puzzle. Characters together strong.

Moreover—let's go back to the Resolve adventure example. If you invested in pumping that 20% up to a 40%, and proceeded to never encounter a situation where that value matters—you look kinda foolish, don't you? You wasted points on something that never comes up. If you invested in Resolve and only get Fortitude or Evasion challenges—same thing. If you invested in none of them, instead focusing on being good at something you're certain you will do—you will outperform the people who made those defensive investments on the regular, at the cost of the one niche scenario that might not even come up, being worse.


I have to say, your level of system mastery is very impressive despite only having first seen the rules ~24 hours ago at the time of your posting, so please don't take this as a criticism, but you are missing a lot of subtle things that are spelled out.

The rules for fortune dice do explicitly say that mana doesn't cause or prevent them. It also states that only the actual number shown on the dice before any adjustments or modifiers can cause fortune, which implicitly states it. But, I suppose it won't hurt to add a redundant section to the mana rules, so I will do so, thanks for the feedback!

I jump around a lot in books and search for relevant terms when I find them; if you have common rules for something, I find it's useful to indicate tags in the description. If [Fortune] was listed in the description of Mana and Inspiration/Ecstasy, then I would know that to get the full rules on those interactions, I'd need to look for the place where [Fortune] first comes up. It's a very helpful tool. :smallsmile:


A couple of things:

First, your roll has to exceed the difficulty, not meet it.

Second, this comes across to me as fairly arbitrary. I don't see why the DC 25 spells are particularly better compared to DC 20 spells than any other jump difficulty, or why 95% success rather is deemed to be the acceptable failure rate, especially when you factor in critical success rates and the ability to modify rolls with destiny and mana.

Alright, let me explain my reasoning.

DC 25 is the level at which you have placed your save-or-die spells. Slumber, Stasis, Maze, Root or Banished as a couple examples for the schools that I've followed most closely. Being able to reliably cast spells at this levels means that you have the potential to instantly remove from combat individual monsters that have not specced into Resolve, rather than simply reducing the difficulty. Moreover, level 20 is the level of spell that you have pegged as worth 'one action' in a combat scenario. Haste is the most obvious example—spend one action, and ally receives one action. Blink, you spend one action, negate one enemy action. Sleep forces an enemy to spend one round waking up for one turn of the user. The Multi modification of magic allows one to double the output of these, allowing one caster action to be worth two ally-actions or negate two enemy-actions. I admit there are some exceptions, like Halt being able to get four targets at this level instead of two—but it seemed like a reliable pattern for expecting where a school jumps in power.

The level 30 spells' jump in power are in spells like Phase, Walk Between Walls, Acceleration, Turn Back the Clock, or Body of Earth with a few above-average combat spells like Enthrall. The commonality between the first set of spells is that they add new ways of resolving problems that were otherwise not addressable—they enable alternative solutions, rather than being best-in-class tools for what they already do. In other words, the level 25 spells threshold is all but guaranteed to be useful, whereas the 30 spells are a situational investment that is a lower priority.

95% is the desired success rate because, as mentioned, it's half the failure rate of 90%, and a quarter of the failure rate of 80%. You can't reliably push lower than 95% failure, so that's where the exponential decrease in failure rates drops off.

Critical success rates were in my initial estimation*, contrarily, utterly pointless when considering spells. It would be one thing if the critical success occurred 10 higher than the DC, as in Pathfinder 2e—or even 15 higher than the DC. Because critical success only occurs at +20 above, you'll either need a natural 20 to achieve it, or 20 higher than the DC. The benefit for casting a [Renewal] spell at 20 higher than the DC is to add a single instance of metamagic (bearing in mind that the highest single-cost effect is +15, and is required to cast a spell in the first place on a particular target) meaning that the highest benefit you'd get is a +10 level effect, and at that point, just add 10 to the DC and be done with it.

*Note: My initial assertions occurred under the incomplete reading of Staff of Power before I realized that it applied to one spell, rather than all spells of a school. That's just me not reading the text fully. I maintain, however, that the 95% accuracy is still important—if you have a Staff of Power keyed to Haste, Halt, or Sleep, something that's going to be consistently useful all mission... you cannot afford to Fumble the spell, and that means you want to minimize the amount of Destiny you waste on rerolls so that you can cast your staple spell at will. On the other hand, needing to hit a 30 to refund the mana for a cantrip, ah. Implies an even greater need for modifier.


Third, you are likely going to be modifying spells with situational metamagics, which means that the difficulties you see listed in the book are not what the actual difficulties are going to be in the field. Likewise, you may well be receiving situational bonuses or penalties, especially if you have an ally supporting you with things like cantrips, performance, or leadership.

Sure. The goal is to reach a level in which, in standard situations, you have the unavoidable 5% failure chance and no more. If you're usually suffering a -2 situational penalty, adjust the target goal by 2. If it's a circumstance that randomly came up, that's fine, see if your ally Inspirations will support you, and if not that's life.


Finally, a +23 at the start is a pretty extreme investment; its roughly 1/3 of your total character points in a single skill! You are going to have to have a lot of weaknesses to buy that off. Even Bob thought that was excessive. I generally find anything more than +16 or so to be unnecessary; as you really don't want to start buying skills at premium costs until you have spare points to burn IMO.

Sure do have a number of weaknesses. Those weaknesses may or may not ever come up. If I'm in a party that specced into Resolve, and I'm the only one who didn't, and we face several missions with no Resolve encounters, who's the fool? Likewise Fortitude or Evasion. I am guaranteed to get returns for 1/3rd of my character points, which is more than can be said for investing in defensive skills.


Could you please elaborate on this? Maybe give a few examples? I am having trouble parsing what you are even trying to say here.

Let us say I took your advice. I have a choice between getting the +23 in, say, Chronomancy, and getting a +20 in Chronomancy and +3 more Fortitude, Resolve, and Evasion. Which would be better? Do I get better returns from investing in my primary skill, or for those defensive skills?

If I invest in Chronomancy, there's the possibility of me having quite good odds at having a permanent Acceleration up. Turn it into a ritual, burn a character point to keep it forever. Now if I'm in a situation where, say, a drake were to hit me with a breath weapon, I could try to Evade it... or cast a Celerity Haste on myself to make earthworks blocking the line of effect... or I could attempt to put that drake into Stasis before the attack goes off... or any number of ways to prevent the drawback with my primary skill.

If I instead invest in Conjuration, I simply have some number of Contingent Blink spells (for that is what I would choose with my Staff of Power) to negate attacks against me, never worrying about the drake's breath weapon in the first place.

Would the investment that doubles the number of Contingent Blinks I can lay over the course of the adventure be a better investment than increasing my odds of a surprise Evasion save? Or would it be better to have slightly increased odds for the scenarios in which I'm out of Blinks for the mission?


If it is bad design, it is bad design that is pretty much universal amongst RPG.

Any failed roll can potentially lead to a character's death, and it is impossible to make an omnicompetent character who always succeeds at everything.

Generally speaking, of the three "defensive skills" acrobatics is the most useful but the least dire, resolve is the least useful but most dire, and fortitude is somewhere between the two. This doesn't make one inferior or superior to the others, and over the course of the game they are all roughly equally likely to save a character's life.

Ah, no, that's where you are mistaken.

In class-based games, your defenses are free. Simply by leveling, you get a chance to succeed. You do not sacrifice something by having your Will save go up by +1 when you level. If you argue that Dungeons and Dragons still has investment that you can fail to have (IE, you can dump your Wisdom to increase other scores in point buy)... it has another system of diminishing returns, such that you are incentivized to have Con 14 and Wis 14 rather than Con 16 and Wis 10 to defend your Fort/Will, respectively. It encourages diversification on top of giving bonuses that don't cost you anything.

My favorite example of a non-class-based game handling this is Unknown Armies. Your defenses against certain failed rolls are something inherent to your character—everyone has 10 basic abilities, ranging between 20% and 60% effectiveness. (Abilities that matter to your character are gained through a point buy style system.) Based on your character's experiences over time, where those values are shift—when your Connect, your basic empathy, is tested, you tend to become more violent, and you gain more resistance to instances of violence-based trauma and increased skill in inflicting violence... at the cost of being less able to defend yourself from the trauma of powerlessness as your friends leave you or your newfound violence fails to achieve its goals.

It's bad design endemic to many point buy games that you must sacrifice your active skills to be better at Defensive skills that may or may not come up... and most realize this, compensating by doing their best to bundle defensive investment into something the players are very likely to invest in anyways and minimizing the degree to which they can be sacrificed. To whit, GURPS starts characters at human-average stats; reducing a stat below this like is a flaw that counts against a cap. Thus, when they tie their defenses to a character's stats, they can be reasonably sure of a range of investment values.

The burden of defensive investment is much higher on point-buy games than level-based games.


It never really occurred to me that players would look at the setting and try and work backward to make a character who fit in though, in my experience normally players come in with a character concept based on some other piece of media (I want to be like Dante from Devil May Cry, I want to be like Lina from Slayers, I want to be like San from Princess Mononoke, I want to be like Rogue from X-Men, I want to be like Madmartigan from Willow, etc.) and then backport that into the system.

Have you seen characters built for games like Exalted? Most of them start from the setting and figure out how they are involved with it, because the expansive nature of the world. Likewise defined settings like Eberron. If you have a kitchen sink, then all have is what other people bring in; but there's a substantial number of players who work backwards from the setting. :smallsmile:


So, my first instinct is, this is really really cool. It kind of reminds me of the character packs for Warhammer Quest or Heroquest, and I immediately started thinking of all the cool character packets I could create for my setting. I love this idea!

But, upon actually thinking about it, I don't really think they actually add anything mechanically.

Pretty much every character I have ever made or seen at my table could be built using one of those two sample packages you posted; at best they would just be raising a dump stat or two by a couple of points at no cost.

And I don't think the incentive of a couple of extra character points is going to dissuade someone who was already planning on giving themselves straight 1s and every flaw in the book in order to buy 100+ points of artifacts and heirlooms right off the bat like the guy whose comment partially inspired this thread.

Ah, here's where the disconnect is. The issue you're facing is partially mechanical, but mostly based on patterns of human behavior.

If a player is excited about a game, but doesn't have a concept already in mind, then they will start from something in the material they read. The goal of these brief write-ups is to change the behavior of new readers: When exposed to the write-up, they are likely to take inspiration from the package and build off of them (free points!) and thus build around a theme.

In the situation where the player rolled up with stats that were all 1s, if he were at all like me, then he did not have a starting point. Instead, he eventually came around to a theme of heavy artifact investment after realizing that they were stat-independent and the costs associated with starting stats.

I think the best way to describe the goal is, simply, guardrails.

If you have guardrails on a cliff in a national park, or an elevated catwalk in an industrial factory, then they're not going to stop someone from leaping over the edge if that's what their mind is set on. But it will deter the casual foot pedestrian from walking too close to the edge and losing balance. Deterrence, rather than prevention.

To be honest, were I designing this, the goal would be to see how these sample packages went over with the players, and potentially phase out the entirely freeform point buy. But that's antithetical to your goals. Regardless of long-term motive, what this does do is encourage newbies to try something with less odds of falling on their face, getting them through a few sessions to understand setting details, being more tied into the world, understanding broadly that a Templar will be strong in arm and will while Buddha-Touched only really share a commonality in their willpower and enlightenment so when you mention them in play, they can go "oh! I recognize that!"

And if every character could be built with one of the two packages... just further restrict the list of Merits that the Templar can use with their dedicated points. If the list is Obstinate, Meditation, Priest, Swift, Strong Arm, Strong Back, Ka, and Sturdy, then there's a lot of builds you can't do with it.

The goal should be that most characters fit into a template... because most characters have not been problematic. It helps ground them to the setting by engaging with fluff with a bribe in the form of a few extra character points to dump stats, and you can tweak how expansive or how limited the packages' options are based off of how they play.


Even though that results in near guaranteed death every time?

Yes.

"You have a 60% chance to suffer a near-guaranteed death" is not meaningfully different from "you have an 85% chance to suffer near-guaranteed death." You are still, more likely than not, going to simply die. If not you, then your teammate. If it's a question of a 30% chance of near-guaranteed death instead of a 55% chance of near-guaranteed death, it's not that much better: If I am in that scenario twice over the course of my career, I have greater odds of dying than not. Save-or-die leads to binary and poor gaming experiences and should be avoided on the systemic level.

The better way to defend against the scenario is to prevent it from occurring in the first place. Grapple the faerie. Have a contingency to launch a magic missile at the wizard and maybe disrupt the casting with environmental penalties.

On a broader scale... this is just Pascal's Wager in miniature.

In real life, I would not pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to a cult to safeguard my eternal soul on the off chance that their beliefs were correct, and doing so might save me from eternal damnation. Paying high costs up front to avoid a potential future downside can be a highly illogical phenomenon. Where is the line on cost? What must the odds of the downside be before it's not worth it? Odds are I'll be in the same boat regardless.

I will reiterate, again, that I started this discussion with "Of course I invest points in Resolve" before you countered with "the last time a party did that they got no return on that investment, sucked, and complained". Either I dump it for maximizing other things, or I invest and the GM laughs as he doesn't include it at all. Is there a winning move between those two? Does partially investing and then getting screwed by the d20 feel better than either of the other extremes? At the very least, in the first case, I'm guaranteed to have a few fun moments with my active skills.


Sometimes it's hard to distinguish the player problems from systemic problems. For example, when we play D&D, we have pretty much all of the same problems that we do with HoD, often worse because I can't tweak a clearly broken rule.

But we haven't ever had an "anomalous disruptive build" at my table. My players can be munchkins, but they are firmly in the realm of "Practical Optimization" rather than "Theoretical Optimization".

You have, it was the one-stats-with-massive-gear character.


Honestly, I am not sure if there really is much of a reason for a playtest to try and deal with Pun-Pun or Chain Gated Solars or Simulacrum Chains, because in a real actual game the GM is either just going to say "No." or run with it and embrace the wackiness.

If you pointed out to the designers of the game that Chain Gated Solars, Simulacrum Chains, or Pun-Pun were a thing during playtesting, before publishing, they would close the loophole. Your game is still in active playtest. Why do you let them persist? There are a very great many games that do not have Pun-Pun, Chain-Gated Solars, or Simulacrum chains and are rather well-received. The existence of those TO builds is to the active detriment of the system as a whole. The playtest feedback is "this is possible, patch it out".

[MonochromeTiger]

It was a bit of an extreme situation, yeah.

In short:

In my system seers and mediums can sense magic. The more powerful the magic, and the more powerful the medium, the further away they can sense it.

He was using his artifacts to cast spells of incredible power, what D&D would consider like 13th-14th level spells, which means that every medium on the planet knows precisely where he is any time he casts a spell.

At that point, any interested party might be curious about how some unknown is casting globe-shattering spells, and see that it is through a vast array of artifacts, more than have ever been gathered in one place in the history of the world.

Add on to this that the guy using them has 1s in every stat, and requires such powerful magic to survive in his day to day life, means that he has to be casting these spells constantly, and thus everyone knows where he is at all time.

And it is only a matter of time before one of the world's many villains decides to relieve him of said vast array of artifacts.


It was an (imo) silly and disruptive build that was only legal under a very specific interpretation of the rules, basically an attempt to make HoD Pun-Pun.

So extreme minmaxing was the impetus for this entire discussion. As you point out later the obvious conclusion of even trying this in a game is usually the GM saying "no" because it's clearly overpowered and broken and dependent on very loose RaW interpretations. Sadly there are any number of GMs out there who do just go with "well the rules allow it" which is why guidelines or optional sections with warnings are something I keep bringing up.


The usual answer is something akin to Wolverine: Escaped military experiment with no memories and a whole bunch of experimental technology.

A Wolverine comparison is a bit flawed here. Both come with forces chasing them for reasons they aren't even aware of but Wolverine is Superhero fiction and comes with reasons for him to be able to handle those forces when they show up or bounce back quickly when he can't. You're instead running with a setting and GMing approach where if the player in question ran into the forces after them the result is going to be pretty one sided against them.


Ok.

But this wasn't for an actual game, it was someone asking me to critique a character build.

And I told them that it would be very disruptive in a normal game as they are extremely OP with their gear and extremely UP without it, and it would not be able to survive in the world without plot armor as it was are running around with the wealth of several kingdoms on its back and no way to hide or protect it from the world's various villains.

Which brought on the "GMPCs raining from the sky" comment.

The conversation degenerated rapidly from there.

I understand that it wasn't in the actual game, but you are the system designer and the only person that comes to mind as actually regularly running your system as a GM. When you present a likely outcome for something that is a statement of intent that can then be read into both how your system operates (get too strong and the named NPCs will slap you down) and your games (allow lots of items but then have them taken away instead of putting a limit on it). You bring up later in the response that you do talk these things out and try to set limits but what the lack of in-rules limitations conveys is that, yes, those kinds of builds are completely legal; by then responding that the setting will prevent an element you consider disruptive it comes across as having a hidden punishment for minmaxing as the intended result.


Ok. I think we are coming into this conversation with two wildly different preconceptions.

First, you seem to be coming at this from a more gamist bent where a GM's highest priority is to present the players with balanced encounters and the player's highest priority is too overcome those encounters.

Whereas I am coming at this from a more simulationist bent where I think the GM's highest priority is to create an interesting world for the PCs to explore and the player's highest priority is making decisions in character.

Actually your stated reasoning of people with lots of magic use and items showing up like a miniature star in the senses of all the major powers of the setting does make me question some things from a story perspective as well. For one how exactly are any of the big name villains who would do all this casual theft not either being targeted and hunted down for being such obvious threats when any real display of their power would let people pinpoint them like this? For another how have those same villains not thoroughly reduced their own numbers by targeting each other to prevent their own resources from being stolen or themselves from getting backstabbed the moment they look vulnerable?

Even without the obvious animosity that would come from "more magic used = easier to find" when that kind of thing is possible you'd still get situations where a bunch of different evil opportunists coming in to grab the loot would run into each other and contest the theft. Or where, even if it's just one or two, they would realize "huh, they managed to get this powerful stuff that might make them a problem later" and outright kill the party before that can happen. The issue with that last part is, and I will mention this again later, that is punishing the party for how one person built their character.

Technically all of it is punishing for how the character was built. The story and the game do not exist separately, they affect each other. If you throw terrible encounter design at a situation because the story said so then you end up with a bad game experience. If you trash a story element because a game mechanic was put together in a flawed way then you end up with a bad story experience. They feed into each other in a way where negative points in one can very easily cause negative points in another.


Second, you seem to be of the impression that I am saying "You character is too powerful for me to defeat using "level appropriate means" so I am going to be pull high level encounters out of my butt in an effort to kill you.

Whereas what I am (trying) to say is that there are plenty of powerful and evil people in the world who have no compunctions about killing you and taking your stuff, and if you come to their attention, they are going to decide to do so if the risk vs. reward ratio is high enough. [QUOTE]

But you also have a story element entirely about making it so if they carry and use strong things regularly they are more likely to both come to those evil people's attention and be targeted by them. It ends up being a method of countering someone who punches above their weight anyway even if it's story/setting detail instead of a GM choice backed by mechanics (even though it still is a GM choice since it's on the GM to make such decisions on how the setting and story react to the players).

The result is the same even if the reasoning is that it's what your setting story says would probably happen.

[QUOTE]Honestly, its a lot like my conversation about railroading; most people accuse the GM is warping the narrative to screw over their characters when what they actually mean is the GM is running the setting impartially and won't warp it far enough in their favor.


To use an (intentionally extreme and hyperbolic example):

We are playing a game set in the world of The Hobbit.

Player A makes a character who shares a name with the GM's ex-wife. The GM, not wanting to be reminded of her constantly, decides in the first session Smaug flies down out of blue and incinerates her.

Player B makes a character whose goal is too urinate on every dragon in middle earth. The first session, he barges in through the front gates of the Lonely Mountain, waltzes into Smaug's lair, awakens the dragon by whizzing on his nose, and is promptly incinerated.


I don't think any reasonable person would say the player was at fault in scenario A, and I don't think any reasonable person would say the GM was at fault in scenario B.

I know you're using intentional extreme hyperbole but you're using it to make a point about an actual topic, and it is still along the lines of the actual issue in question.

Scenario A would be the GM taking an out of game issue in game, which like taking an in game issue out of game is a big warning sign and problem that should really raise questions about why they'd bother playing together again. It would be the GM being pointlessly cruel for things beyond the player's control simply because the players are there to take it out on. So yes the player is faultless.

But scenario B? Session one the player can state a goal, they can even try to act on reaching that goal, but the GM is still the one deciding that they get all the way to Moria, right up to Smaug, and pee on his nose in order to provoke him in that session without any intervening incidents along the way. Or to put it a different way, the Gm, as the person setting the encounters and pacing the campaign, heard their goal and went "yeah sure lets have them go die, I'll even clear the path so they get there immediately while the rest of the party is actually getting set up for the real adventure which will be much longer and more difficult." Is the player faultless for taking the action when it's available to them? No. Is the GM faultless for facilitating that action they knew would raise so many issues? No.

Neither exists in a vacuum, the person interacting with the world or the person showing the world and how it interacts with them.


So then, we have my regular player Bob. He generally plays fey magic users who dump stat all of their physical attributes. He then uses the exact same argument (The GM is punishing me for making too powerful a character) if at any point the enemies: Grapple him. Use poison. Use iron weapons. Cast dispel magic. Steal / sunder / disarm his wand or spell book. The cause is different, but the argument is exactly the same.

First, "I'm being punished for being too powerful" isn't quite the same argument as railroading. The fact that Bob routinely gets into that kind of argument then just goes right back to making things that are, by his words, "too powerful" just shows that there is an issue between him as a player and you as a GM which probably needs to be sorted out (and given your past mentions of his attitude that issue is very likely that your two playstyles are so incompatible it's amazing it hasn't resulted in more than just forum horror stories).

Second, if you are specifically countering a player by focusing on their weaknesses all the time that is targeting them. If they're going to be targeted and put into a situation specifically meant to shut them down over a build choice then that makes having that build choice in the first place into something that sets off hostility. That then makes it a valid question why a build you'd object that much to is left as an option.


Nglipop said I was "punishing players for using the system in an intelligent way". The argument in the original thread (which I really did not intent to rehash here, but Nglipop really kind of got my goat) went down a very similar path. Bob's go to response when one of his character's many weaknesses comes up is "you are just punishing me for outsmarting you", much like his default excuse when taking advantage of his fellow players is "you are just punishing me for being good with money".

So yeah, I guess it is a bit of a sore spot for me.

I know I keep bringing it up all the time but why exactly are you still playing with a guy who you just admitted "takes advantage of his fellow players" so much he has a standard excuse to getting caught?


I don't feel like the existence of a certain subsect of problem players should ruin it for the rest of us.

The idea that you should remove options for everyone because some people will try and abuse them is anathema to me.

I would much rather have a rule set that allows people freedom to tailor the game for themselves, even if some people are going to ruin it for themselves by doing so.

Fair as a design goal but you will get some pushback from people who want a clear structure to build their game along.


Nobody is "coming out of nowhere". That is a straw-man.

I am talking about established villains in the campaign world who become aware of the PC and come to the conclusion that robbing them is the best course of action organically throughout the course of the campaign.

"Established villains in the campaign world" conveniently noticing and spying on them specifically to take their stuff just because they happen to have stuff (especially when that's their first real interaction) isn't really different, from a player perspective, from "NPC came out of nowhere." The point that they suddenly took an interest just for the purpose of depowering that character isn't made better just by pointing out, no, that wasn't a random NPC it was a character in the setting who wasn't relevant to this specific campaign's story until this happened. All that changes is the GM chose a named character to do it, and given the named villains are likely powerful and evil enough that "they came in and stole the item guy's stuff" seems weirdly arbitrary and restrained it leaves the question of why they didn't just kill the party while they're there which would absolutely be randomly punishing the party for how one player chose to build.

The simplest solution is to never have the situation come up, and the simplest way to do that is to have rules in place to prevent it becoming that much of a problem in the first place instead of saying options aren't restricted but having a setting point that actually acts as a worse restriction after the fact.


Although, as an aside. Do you think the constitution attribute should exist in game? Because, imo, giving yourself a minimum constitution score has a lot more "extreme retribution" banked into it than heirlooms do, but I have never heard anyone propose removing it from the game.

That is definitely an aside since it's nowhere near the same issue. Yes, players can screw themselves over by using a point buy system to give themselves minimal Constitution (or other stats tied to health and survivability) and it should definitely be advised against simply because it's such a clearly bad idea that they'll probably die the first time they get into a combat situation. That's personally something I see as a flaw of point buy systems and some of the weird min-maxing ideas that always accompany them more than anything, but it's not the same situation as the item/heirloom option and is generally so objectively and obviously self destructive that the only ways I see it happening are either a complete lack of understanding of how the system's rules work or intentional trolling.

Health variation from stats is pretty standard, there are systems where it's flawed but overall it usually works and basic common sense usually prevents someone from running around with 1-2 Constitution just to boost their other stats they'll die too quickly to use. If you invest heavily in constitution you'll end up with lots of health but everything else will be a bit worse as a consequence, that health may be taken from your character in a fight but you'll be in no different a position than anyone else in the party. You may actually be in a better position than the rest of the party simply because you've got the spare health to tank your way through it. It could still be disruptive or boring if you have nothing going for you except health but then that leads to the same solution, discuss what's wrong or why there are problems and work with the party and GM to fix it. None of that is setting dependent, it's all in clear mechanics, the danger involved in minimizing Constitution is purely on the player with the clear result of less health to survive off of.

Item investment meanwhile is a very different issue, it's tying a significant swing in power to something that is purely external. "The item guy" is basically building their character entirely around having those items, if the item is lost so is a significant percentage of their power and ability to contribute and unlike lost hp it can't just be quickly recovered, it's also an impact on their character concept if they built that way for story reasons instead of purely for the power of it. In allowing the option without any limitation or restriction there is a case to be made that you're leaving taking those items away forcibly as the only balancing method left which then runs into issues of it being a targeted retribution against the player.

The swing from overpowered and disruptive for it to underpowered and disruptive for it is even worse if the item is stolen instead of destroyed because then the item is still out there somewhere and can be used against the party. In balancing the item guy only by taking away after the fact when they've proven themselves overpowered not only are they weakened in a way that (by how Fable Wright pointed out and your response elaborated on) the rest of the party has to put up with for an extended period of time but the "established villains of the campaign world" now have a few more toys to play with and are actively aware of the party.

Or to summarize, messing around with Constitution is mostly going to result in a player punishing themselves, messing around with "my character is a ton of items and also this useless guy who carries them from fight to fight" style builds is punishing the party as a whole whether they keep it all or lose it all.

To add to all that this specific scenario that the whole thread is spawned from is due to a detail of your chosen setting. That means a restriction is in place in your official content despite there being no actual rule for it, and thus so it can be claimed there isn't a "real" restriction. A more honest comparison of the issue to Constitution would be saying "well the rules have no set minimum or maximum but the setting has all these named dragons hanging around that detect people who are really frail or really strong and decide to come eat them if they think the risk/reward ratio is worth it." That still fails to address the difference in how an external resource is being targeted vs a built in resource common to everyone, but it would somewhat elaborate on the issue that you set things up in a way that does sort of encourage a hostile response against the player character whenever the GM isn't satisfied with how the game is going.


This is what I do.

What I don't want to do is abuse my authority as system designer and establish a hard limit for anyone and everyone because of some arbitrary line that works for my table.

As a system designer there is however a point to keeping overall balance in mind. Others have brought up the point already but the looser the guidelines and restrictions the more balance concerns are going to come up, and if you do get HoD fully published "it's really easy to be underpowered or overpowered" does kind of come back to bite its success. Having been there to a degree, one thing that I can't stress enough is that you can't always rely on people who play with the rules you make putting much effort into balancing for themselves (especially now when some of the most popular systems are aiming for everything being as simple as possible to just start quickly and not think about it).


You don't want to take the players' items because of muh realism. You want to take them because you hate the idea of players being effective and beating you - you believe you're competing with them. None of us were born yesterday, and you're not clever or subtle. The only person you're fooling is yourself.

That is quite a bit of motive being attributed for very little information. I'll admit I disagree with Talakeal's methods and some of the decisions they make but honestly if it was down to "I can't stand players winning" then he wouldn't be playing with people like Bob whose entire thing is wanting to win as hard as possible even if it's at the expense of the rest of the group.

[Keltest]

That is quite a bit of motive being attributed for very little information. I'll admit I disagree with Talakeal's methods and some of the decisions they make but honestly if it was down to "I can't stand players winning" then he wouldn't be playing with people like Bob whose entire thing is wanting to win as hard as possible even if it's at the expense of the rest of the group.

As near as I can tell, Talakeal is not playing with Bob because he likes Bob as a player or enjoys his playstyle, and indeed its hard to tell if they even get along on a personal level outside the game. The popular opinion is that Talakeal should have ditched Bob a long time ago. So while your logic is not wrong, it failed to take into account some of the data.

[Vahnavoi]

Can you give me some examples of what this actually looks like on a systemic level?

I guess a few RPGs have "scripts" for the monsters to follow, but aside from that, what would a game system that gives one side different tactical dispensations actually look like?

Anything Powered by the Apocalypse serves as an example. Only the player characters have full character sheets and well-defined moves they can take to influence events in the game. Non-player characters usually don't have independent statistics or moves at all - this means how the game master decides actions for them is fundamentally different from how players decide actions for the player characters.

For an example that might be more familiar to you: 3.5 D&D has massive list of character options for both players and game masters. These overlap significantly, but the game master's side is typically greater. This means that while it is possible to make scenarios where the player party is symmetric with their opponents, having access to exact same tactics, strategies and resources (with the most obvious case of this being the mirror match, where player party is pitted against another similar party), it's also possible to make scenarios where all opponents are of different quality and have to use different tactics as a result (say, a scenario where all the opponents are NPC class humanoids).

Another example which has come up several times in this discussion but perhaps not examined as well as it should: asymmetric information between a game master and their players. Most importantly, the idea that players are limited by fog of war (not knowing amount and location of their opponents) but the game master isn't (knowing exactly how many players there are and where their characters are,.etc.).

There's a lot that can be done on a system's side to either increase information available to players or decrease information available to the game master. This is relevant on the discussion on which character creation options are good or not. Specifically, when we have a case such as someone spending all their points on equipment that can be stolen, we can ask: without you, as the game designer, outright telling them, can the player know their items are liable to be stolen? How difficult is it to realize, using information available to the player, that this is not great strategy?

Because on one hand, we have a system where another player could transparently and obviously make a thief build to counter the item build. In a symmetric game, such information is obvious sign that maybe the item build is not that hot. Compare with, say, Pokemon, which is build around Rock-Paper-Scissors and where it is basic player knowledge that no matter which type you pick, there is a countering type, and you can expect an opposing player to make use of it.

On another hand, we have a system where player characters and non-player characters are nothing alike and fog-of-war hides the actual game scenario. This asymmetry means the player can only see benefits of the item build. They literally cannot conclude that their items would be liable to be stolen before some game event reveals this possibility. Compare this with a random game of Civilization, where you don't know which other civilizations are in play or how close they are to you. The first few turns might decide who wins or loses, but you cannot know this before-the-fact.

[Talakeal]

You have, it was the one-stats-with-massive-gear character.

That was not someone who was going to play in my games, it was someone I was talking to on the forum.

I actually doubt many people would actually submit a TO character for an actual game, because they know they are likely to be shot down and mocked by the rest of the group if they try, so its kind of something you see more online. I have had dozens of players over as many years try my system, nobody has actually tried to make a TO character; heck I don't think I have ever seen anyone try and actually play a TO character at any table in any system, despite the fact that they get quite a bit of discussion time online.


If you pointed out to the designers of the game that Chain Gated Solars, Simulacrum Chains, or Pun-Pun were a thing during playtesting, before publishing, they would close the loophole. Your game is still in active playtest. Why do you let them persist? There are a very great many games that do not have Pun-Pun, Chain-Gated Solars, or Simulacrum chains and are rather well-received. The existence of those TO builds is to the active detriment of the system as a whole. The playtest feedback is "this is possible, patch it out".

Perhaps. I certainly would fix it if it came to my attention.

I am just kind of musing about how TO exploits might actually do more harm than good, as in my experience nobody actually tries to use them at the table, but they generate a lot of online discussion about the game.


On a broader scale... this is just Pascal's Wager in miniature.

In real life, I would not pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to a cult to safeguard my eternal soul on the off chance that their beliefs were correct, and doing so might save me from eternal damnation. Paying high costs up front to avoid a potential future downside can be a highly illogical phenomenon. Where is the line on cost? What must the odds of the downside be before it's not worth it? Odds are I'll be in the same boat regardless.


Maybe let's try comparing it to insurance or wearing your seat belt rather than things which I can't respond to without violating forum rules :)


I will reiterate, again, that I started this discussion with "Of course I invest points in Resolve" before you countered with "the last time a party did that they got no return on that investment, sucked, and complained". Either I dump it for maximizing other things, or I invest and the GM laughs as he doesn't include it at all. Is there a winning move between those two? Does partially investing and then getting screwed by the d20 feel better than either of the other extremes? At the very least, in the first case, I'm guaranteed to have a few fun moments with my active skills.

Its more about party synergy. Having everyone focus on the same defense is a bad move. If you have a variety of focused defenses, you are better equipped to handle the variety of challenges you will inevitably face.

The party got spanked not because they were focused in resolve, but because they all dumped fortitude, and they happened to come up against poison using giant spiders rather than something that required resolve.

The "winning move" is to have party synergy so that while given characters might fluctuate in effectiveness from fight to fight (which gives everyone a chance to shine!) you are unlikely to come up against an encounter where the entire party is weak and you risk a campaign ending TPK.

[Fable Wright]

Perhaps. I certainly would fix it if it came to my attention.

I am just kind of musing about how TO exploits might actually do more harm than good, as in my experience nobody actually tries to use them at the table, but they generate a lot of online discussion about the game.

This is the incorrect perspective.

The games that people discuss theoretical optimization tricks for are games that are already popular for unrelated reasons but which have problematic elements to them. Exalted 2e has an infamous exploit called 'Creation Slaying Oblivion Kick' in which you can simultaneously kill everyone in Creation. People talk about it to complain at times, and it has achieved awareness among the fanbase.

Ars Magica 5e allows you to create a character that can kill all humans on the planet to much the same effect (Base effect: Kill human; Range: Symbol to target Adam or Noah; Target: Bloodline; you have now ended human life on earth).

Both are broken and bad for the system. You have not heard of the Ars Magica exploit because the game is not talked about much online, and exploits do not generate buzz to draw people in. What discussions are there do not mention this exploit. Therefore, it is not the broken shenanigans that draw and generate online discussions. Meanwhile, while the Ars Magica example is problematic for those people who are aware of it... but is still in the system, and GMs may run into issues of new players, you know. Just exterminating a single royal line by targeting the common ancestor rather than everyone.


Maybe let's try comparing it to insurance or wearing your seat belt rather than things which I can't respond to without violating forum rules :)

Wearing your seatbelt is an invalid analogy. That is a near-zero-cost, moderate odds, high upside option.

Insurance is likewise an invalid analogy. The cost scales with the odds of the event occurring and the magnitude of damage. A number of very smart people will put some numbers together based on the value of the asset being protected and the odds of it occurring. This is a flat cost regardless of whether the odds of Resolve being tested in the campaign are high or low, rather than scaling in any way.

This is more akin to paying, say, 4% of your salary each year for pills to reduce the risk of a heart attack. (Obstinate + Sagacious x2.) What are your odds of potential heart attack? You don't know. How effectively will the pills prevent it? Unclear. They reduce the risk by a lot, but don't prevent it. Would suck if you paid and still died, lawl. You do know that this 4%, if you weren't spending on your pills, would be making your life a lot better on a daily basis (Heirloom +4 on a skill that you will definitely use). Do you bring it up to 8% of your salary to also decrease your odds of diabetes? Do you pay 4% for yourself, and your wife pays 4% of her salary for the heart pills? Or does one of you invest and the other not, because as long as one of you survives maybe you can be brought to the hospital?

For someone making 50 grand a year, that's $2,000 a year on pills that might do nothin'. Is that really worthwhile between your landlord, your car, your food, and what entertainment budget you have?

It's a tough and uncomfortable call that you insist that the players make every time they make a character.


Its more about party synergy. Having everyone focus on the same defense is a bad move. If you have a variety of focused defenses, you are better equipped to handle the variety of challenges you will inevitably face.

The party got spanked not because they were focused in resolve, but because they all dumped fortitude, and they happened to come up against poison using giant spiders rather than something that required resolve.

The "winning move" is to have party synergy so that while given characters might fluctuate in effectiveness from fight to fight (which gives everyone a chance to shine!) you are unlikely to come up against an encounter where the entire party is weak and you risk a campaign ending TPK.

...No, that's not at all how this works.

If my character has an 80% chance of failing if I encounter a Resolve check, and as you indicated, a failure means almost certain death, then in a Resolve-testing scenario I'm still likely to die. If there is no way to force the aggro of the Resolve-testing effects, and if it's an AoE resolve effect, then everyone who fails to make the bar suffers almost certain death. If it's one person who did not dump Resolve surviving and everyone else falling down, you still have a scenario where it's one character vs a threat meant to take on the whole party.

With that said, the things I was actually interested in further discussing did not get a response, so I may just be bowing out here. Best of luck with however you take this going forward.

[King of Nowhere]

Its more about party synergy. Having everyone focus on the same defense is a bad move. If you have a variety of focused defenses, you are better equipped to handle the variety of challenges you will inevitably face.

The party got spanked not because they were focused in resolve, but because they all dumped fortitude, and they happened to come up against poison using giant spiders rather than something that required resolve.

The "winning move" is to have party synergy so that while given characters might fluctuate in effectiveness from fight to fight (which gives everyone a chance to shine!) you are unlikely to come up against an encounter where the entire party is weak and you risk a campaign ending TPK.

nah, that's not how optimization works. if you do that, it means you could have an encounter that kills half the party - and the fact that the other half has good defences won't matter too much.

no, high optimization is about dumping stuff and then making sure it's not relevant. it generally focuses on the offensive because in a game similar to d&d there are so many avenues of attack, it's too expensive - if even possible - to cover them all.
so, perhaps you dump all your defences in favor of attack and scouting, to make sure that you always go first and you kill the opponent before they can take advantage of your low defence. your crappy defences won't be relevant because the opponent does not get to attack.
maybe you dump armor class because you use various stealth to avoid being attacked in the first place.
maybe you dump your will save, because you know you will get a few buff spells that will make you immune to most everything that could go wrong by failing a will save.
maybe you can only protect yourself from one type of danger, but you have enough divinations that you always know in advance which danger you'll face.
how well that works depends on many factors, including player skill and dm permissivity. but really, against dumb opponents it should work practically every time. the only thing that can counter those tactics is smart, prepared opponents.

sure, in an ideal world you would love to have layered defences. your opponent can't see you, but even if he could, you have high armor, and even if he still manages to hit, you have lots of hit points... but in an rpg, you have limited build resources. you rarely can afford a full layered defence. so you invest in one layer, and you try to strategize around it.

[Vahnavoi]

@Fable Wright & King of Nowhere:

Both of you are wrong about what kind of a party dynamic Talakeal wants, and as a result, wrong about what would be optimal.

What Talakeal wants is equivalent to Pokemon party dynamics, where each character stands for a single 'mon. Every character has their own checks and counters, which means switching opponents in the heat of battle is regular and often necessary. No single character can cover all their bases, so each individual is reliant on other party members having traits different from them to succeed. It is the party and its tactics, not individual characters and their tactics, that require optimization.

In this paradigm, everybody focusing on Resolve at the cost of other defenses is equivalent to a everybody choosing to play an Electric type. They'll be very surprised pikachus when they're predictably countered by a single Ground type.

Furhermore, in this paradigm, there is no such thing as single optimal character, or single optimal strategy. Instead, there are a number of viable characters and strategies that have to come together as a group to actually be effective in play.

We can discuss whether Talakeal's system supports this kind of play and what would need to be altered to make it do so, but simply telling Talakeal "that's not how it works" is neither correct nor useful.

However, we can just as well observe Talakeal himself has other design goals that contradict this desire for particular strategic landscape. In Pokemon, there is a single trainer who oversees the strategy for the entire team. Without a comparable player role serving as team captain for the player characters, team building is made in to a co-ordination problem that gets more difficult for every player added. This is not helped by Talakeal's idea that each individual player should make their character based on a high concept. This is a bad way to play a team game. And of course, Talakeal's player suck as team players anyway.

Instead, when the operative unit in the game is supposed to be a team, or a party, it is the party that should be ground concept, and every character selected to benefit the party's concept. Unlimited freedom for individual players does not make sense here.

[icefractal]

However, in Pokemon, the fact that there's one human controller for six Pokemon means that "Pikachu was pretty much useless this battle" is fine and not a problem. Even if it happens for several fights in a row, no big deal.

And, IDK, maybe I'd feel this way in a TTRPG too, if we were doing like a dozen fights a session (which sounds quite excessive if the fights are anything like D&D). But when I'm only playing one character, and there are, say, 1-3 fights in most sessions, and sessions for a particular campaign happen once every 2-3 weeks ...

Nope - not the kind of experience I'm interested in. "Yeah you just sat around for an hour being stun-locked this time, but simply wait a couple weeks, six at the outside, and you'll be able to do something useful in combat!" ... that sounds lousy. Totally / mostly being shut out of combat is something I'd consider a major problem with a character if it happened remotely regularly (unless the character was intended to suck at combat, obviously). So yeah, I'm going to try to avoid that situation, and "the team is still tactically effective though" is not really saving it.

[Vahnavoi]

@icefractal: one part of being a team player is being able to feel joy at the team's successes. Hanging one's sense of accomplishment on one's individual performance is silly, because the expectation that every individual gets to shine in a team game is silly.

All other negative aspects you mention have little to do with team versus individual dynamic and are mostly about pacing of a game. Individual-centric games will feel like crap too if you can get eliminated in the first few rounds and then have to wait for obscenely long times to get back in the game. But why are you presuming such pacing?

You are also conflating being eliminated with being useless. Taking one for the team is a legitimate tactic in a team game. Pikachu's sole function might be as suicide lead, meaning them getting KO'd is part of a succesful team strategy, rather than something to avoid. A team member's worth is in their contribution to the team's overall strategy, not how many turns they personally spend on the field. So stop making remarks about how much "being shut out of combat" sucks without specifying why a character is getting shut out.

[Satinavian]

Its more about party synergy. Having everyone focus on the same defense is a bad move. If you have a variety of focused defenses, you are better equipped to handle the variety of challenges you will inevitably face.

The party got spanked not because they were focused in resolve, but because they all dumped fortitude, and they happened to come up against poison using giant spiders rather than something that required resolve.

The "winning move" is to have party synergy so that while given characters might fluctuate in effectiveness from fight to fight (which gives everyone a chance to shine!) you are unlikely to come up against an encounter where the entire party is weak and you risk a campaign ending TPK.Well, no. if each specializes in a different defense and dumps the rest, that means that each time an enemy is focused on one of them, they can easily take out 2/3rd of the party and then bring in superior numbers to the last one standing.

But going back to character building : If i were to decide how much to invest in defense, is there even a benefit in punmping a single of them and ignore the rest ? Doesn't seem so. It would mean that i am vulnerable in at least two thirds of situations. Actually even more, as any mixed group of enemies or enemies that have mnore than one kind of attack will target my weak points. So the single punped defense stat won't make me particularly safe and i nedd a strategy that avoids being hit anyway. And if i have one of those, i can put the points for the single defense elsewhere without soling much.

So, concentrating on asingle defense is out. What is better, investing in all defenses or investing in none ? Well, investing in all defenses would keep one safe. But how much does that cost ? Can i do that and still have my main abilities elsewhere ? If not, then i am basically a tank without aggro management, as in : worthless. But if i don't have to compromise much to get to reasonable defense across the board (not particularly hgh defense, just enough to be not considered a weakness), i should probably do so on most characters. To make sure that not every character has the exact same defenses here, there might be smaller synergies by e.g. involving attributes. But i would still not expect too much differences.

But if an all around defense is so costly that it becomes the main ability of a character, yes, i would assume that most people just dump all defenses instead of concentrating on one of them. Unless they don't know what to do with their points.


This is why most point buy systems make aquiring moderate defenses quite cheap, some even automatic. And high defenses quite costly, often giving diminishing return or even apply caps.


If you really want your party to distribute among themself which defense to concentrate on, you must implement a method for someone with high defense to cover for the others. But that would be very gamey for most kind of attacks. While it kinda makes sense that the courageous character rallyies their allies and dispells any fear gripping them, it is way more of a stretch if the immune characters somehow negates the poison the others fell for just by being so sturdy and while busy fighting.


Also for most players having your character killed because of a poor defense is as bad as having a TPK (unless revival magic is available). Players are invested in their own charakters and far less in the group or the adventure. So they don't care much if a portion of the group that had different builds survives or not. The story of their character is over. And misery loves company anyway.

[GloatingSwine]

It is a double standard. And yet it helps the game more often than it harms it. Here's a couple reasons why:
1) PCs only need to lose once, while NPCs are, generally, dime a dozen. Encountering an enemy who tailors their tactics to PCs weaknesses should be a rare occasion, because for most systems it means the fight is inherently far more dangerous or even deadly than average.


This is something that needs thinking about in game design. The same thing is different when the player does it than when it happens to them.

If, for instance, there was a 1% chance of instantly killing the enemy when the player attacked, they probably wouldn't think much about it. Happens sometimes, whatever.

If there was a 1% chance of the player instantly being killed when any enemy attacked they would dedicate their entire approach to the game around avoiding that happening.

[Ignimortis]

This is something that needs thinking about in game design. The same thing is different when the player does it than when it happens to them.

If, for instance, there was a 1% chance of instantly killing the enemy when the player attacked, they probably wouldn't think much about it. Happens sometimes, whatever.

If there was a 1% chance of the player instantly being killed when any enemy attacked they would dedicate their entire approach to the game around avoiding that happening.

Exactly. The first ability is actually incredibly lackluster unless super cheap or you can deliver a dozen hits in a turn (and that doesn't kill the target by itself somehow). Even when it works, it's not going to be special unless stars align just so - your first hit ends up killing a very powerful target, for instance.

The second ability is something you would want at least some defense against, and neglecting blocking that altogether is likely to bite you in the bum rather quickly. Not "session 1 death" quickly, but within the span of 10 sessions, with an average of 5 attacks targeted at you per session, you'd have a 40% of having died instantly to that. Double the amount of attacks or sessions, and it's more likely that you've died to it than not.

[King of Nowhere]

@Fable Wright & King of Nowhere:

Both of you are wrong about what kind of a party dynamic Talakeal wants, and as a result, wrong about what would be optimal.

I know what talekeal wants. I was just pointing out how his whole logical argument "minmaxing is bad because it leaves you with weak defences" is flawed, because minmaxing - done competently - is about using your strenghts to make sure your weaknesses are never relevant. his whole argument of "characters should try to be well-rounded" does not work, it may just as easily produce lackluster characters with meh defence and offence everywhere.


@icefractal: one part of being a team player is being able to feel joy at the team's successes. Hanging one's sense of accomplishment on one's individual performance is silly, because the expectation that every individual gets to shine in a team game is silly.

putting "team player" and "bob" in the same sentence is a good example of oximoron :smalltongue:

[Vahnavoi]

If there was a 1% chance of the player instantly being killed when any enemy attacked they would dedicate their entire approach to the game around avoiding that happening.

This is provably false. There are a lot of games where the player has functionally much bigger than 1% of dying each exchange, many versions of D&D included (especially at low levels). Yet, players don't distort their entire playstyles to avoid exchanges for the simple reason that most systems transparently don't let them.

That's not the only reason, but it's the most relevant for white room math. There isn't enough appreciation in this thread for the idea that a perfect strategy for a game might not have 100% victory rate.

[GloatingSwine]

This is provably false. There are a lot of games where the player has functionally much bigger than 1% of dying each exchange, many versions of D&D included (especially at low levels). Yet, players don't distort their entire playstyles to avoid exchanges for the simple reason that most systems transparently don't let them.

That's not the only reason, but it's the most relevant for white room math. There isn't enough appreciation in this thread for the idea that a perfect strategy for a game might not have 100% victory rate.

You're concentrating too much on the specifics of the example rather than the point the example makes of how risk vs. reward calculations mean the same per-instance chance of something happening is very different depending on the number of times it will have a chance to happen to a given individual and the level of investment in the individual it is happening to.

(But even then, if you played a game of D&D and rolled a D100 for instant death with no saves or takebacks any time any entity was successfully attacked, you'd soon see a change in your players' behaviour to prioritise strategies which denied the possibilty of attacks being rolled on them to the greatest degree the system would allow and away from HP and healing as a mechanism for survival, whereas no change in the strategy of NPCs or monsters would be nearly as impactful because they are only expected to be fought once anyway.)

[PhoenixPhyre]

Personally, I find “save or die” effects, along with “hard control” (the total stun-type effects that say ‘no, you don’t play for now’) to be hard to get right.

My general policy as a game designer is that single-roll hard control or death can be ok when in player hands (the dm always has more monsters and they’re more or less disposable) but can easily become a dominating strategy—it’s the win button you always reach for first. So they’re delicate to balance.

Those effects are rarely, IMO, valuable or fun when used against the PCs. If for no other reason than it warps the game as others have said. No single roll should, on its own, take an otherwise ok PC out. It’s ok if it takes a few failed attempts with possible counter play. Something like the 5e basilisk, where petrification happens only on 2 consecutive failed saves, with the first giving a debuff instead is ok IMO. But generally debuffs are better/more fun against the PCs than hard control. 5e’s slow spell is one of my favorites for that. Annoying, sure. But not ‘you don’t play’.

[Vahnavoi]

I'm well aware of how cumulative probability works, and well aware of how asymmetry between players works. The argument still sucks, because it presumes the path to mitigating one sort of cumulative probability is the path towards overall better strategy, a determination which cannot be made in a vacuum. For example, your case for D&D presumes that the actions taken to decrease incoming attacks at the cost of HP and healing won't be offset by the attacks that do get through being more likely to one-shot a character. But it's not possible to make that determination without giving concrete values to healing and HP lost.

So just because some characters are expected to make a roll once, and others are expected to make it several times, is not sufficient in a complex game to determine that they would have different strategies.

[Fable Wright]

@Fable Wright & King of Nowhere:

Both of you are wrong about what kind of a party dynamic Talakeal wants, and as a result, wrong about what would be optimal.

What Talakeal wants is equivalent to Pokemon party dynamics, where each character stands for a single 'mon. Every character has their own checks and counters, which means switching opponents in the heat of battle is regular and often necessary. No single character can cover all their bases, so each individual is reliant on other party members having traits different from them to succeed. It is the party and its tactics, not individual characters and their tactics, that require optimization.

In this paradigm, everybody focusing on Resolve at the cost of other defenses is equivalent to a everybody choosing to play an Electric type. They'll be very surprised pikachus when they're predictably countered by a single Ground type.

Unrelated to your argument: Monotype is quite a fun format, and Electric monotype teams don't exactly instantly fold to Ground. Rotom-Wash covers ground weakness well with water coverage on top of Levitate, Toxic Zapdos can break special ground walls, and Scarf Xurkitree given a safe switch can absolutely clean up a weakened Ground team with Energy Ball. Against standard parties, they can be absurdly difficult to beat for many types between Tapu Koko and Alolan Raichu providing speed control and devastating offenses. (Note: I last played monotype in Sun/Moon; advice no longer up to date.)

With that having been said: Your assertion makes sense only in the circumstances where the player(s) can dictate aggro, usually at some cost (IE losing a turn to switch-ins, or the tank taunts as an action, or whathaveyou).

Such abilities simply do not exist within the system. Riposte (the AoO equivalent) cannot even disrupt spellcasting. Grapple can impose a -4 penalty, maximum, on spellcasting, making me retroactively baffled as to why Bob is so frustrated by it. (Seriously, I expected it to prevent casting at all, but instead it only gives a -4 penalty on Implement-requiring actions like spellcasting?! It is not hard to render a low-Resolve attacker unconscious at a -4 penalty if you spec for it! Bob, not only are you a munchkin, you are incompetent at it!) If a monster, for whatever reason, doesn't require an Implement to use its Resolve-targeting action, they can just... target someone on the backline and there's nothing you can do about it. No Charisma ability to taunt, no ability to grapple to shut down casting, no AoOs that can disrupt abilities other than movement.

[icefractal]

You are also conflating being eliminated with being useless. Taking one for the team is a legitimate tactic in a team game. Pikachu's sole function might be as suicide lead, meaning them getting KO'd is part of a succesful team strategy, rather than something to avoid. A team member's worth is in their contribution to the team's overall strategy, not how many turns they personally spend on the field. So stop making remarks about how much "being shut out of combat" sucks without specifying why a character is getting shut out.Eh, quantitative differences becomes qualitative difference, and all that.

Video game combat is orders of magnitude faster, and that means that a lot of things can be enjoyable in a video game context but not in a TTRPG (and for that matter, got any examples of multiplayer games where one actual player's role is often 'be a suicide lead'?). "Just wait around for a few minutes" is very different than "just wait around for a few hours".

And as far as "be happy in the team's results, not what you personally did" ... the results are all fictional. The journey is a lot more important than the destination, because nobody outside the table gives a **** about what you accomplished IC. I mean sure, it's nice to have a good outcome IC, but it's not going to make up for a poor experience OOC.

[Talakeal]

With that said, the things I was actually interested in further discussing did not get a response, so I may just be bowing out here. Best of luck with however you take this going forward.

Oh no, please don't do that!

I was intending to write a longer post, but something came up IRL and I just hit submit, assuming I would come back to it later. I was very much looking forward to discussing some other things with you. If there is something specific I don't address, feel free to poke me about it!

Also, I got your PM. That character looks fairly reasonable, actually pretty similar to what Bob is playing right now except for illusion instead of chronomancy, perform instead of domestic, and expression instead of technology and medical.

The only issue I foresee you running into is not being able to access the materials required to make earthworks or booby traps, and I don't think you have enough mana to get you out of *every* potential bit of trouble. But that is just a first impression, I will look at it in more detail later.



Why are meals easier to get and don't have the scaling DC like Perform? I really do not know, but it's the superior investment decision.

The answer is because I changed how perform worked at some point and didn't go back and change cooking to account for it.

Still, I am not sure I would say its the superior decision unless you are having *really* long adventures or you are spamming cooking checks (which might be something that needs looking into).


If you are in a situation where you need to swim—not everyone is going to invest in Athletics. The party as a whole is not going to expect everyone to pass that check, so the party will already be investing in contingency plans. Likewise, you only need one person to solve a puzzle. Characters together strong.

In general, yes, absolutely. The idea that group synergy is the true power gaming is foundational to the system.

But for athletics specifically, that tends to be one of those skills that benefits everyone and should probably be spread around as it deals with individual movement and positioning.


Moreover—let's go back to the Resolve adventure example. If you invested in pumping that 20% up to a 40%, and proceeded to never encounter a situation where that value matters—you look kinda foolish, don't you? You wasted points on something that never comes up. If you invested in Resolve and only get Fortitude or Evasion challenges—same thing. If you invested in none of them, instead focusing on being good at something you're certain you will do—you will outperform the people who made those defensive investments on the regular, at the cost of the one niche scenario that might not even come up, being worse.

This makes sense in a one-shot, but over the course of an actual campaign you are certain to be subjected to every form of attack multiple times.



Alright, let me explain my reasoning.

DC 25 is the level at which you have placed your save-or-die spells. Slumber, Stasis, Maze, Root or Banished as a couple examples for the schools that I've followed most closely. Being able to reliably cast spells at this levels means that you have the potential to instantly remove from combat individual monsters that have not specced into Resolve, rather than simply reducing the difficulty. Moreover, level 20 is the level of spell that you have pegged as worth 'one action' in a combat scenario. Haste is the most obvious example—spend one action, and ally receives one action. Blink, you spend one action, negate one enemy action. Sleep forces an enemy to spend one round waking up for one turn of the user. The Multi modification of magic allows one to double the output of these, allowing one caster action to be worth two ally-actions or negate two enemy-actions. I admit there are some exceptions, like Halt being able to get four targets at this level instead of two—but it seemed like a reliable pattern for expecting where a school jumps in power.

The level 30 spells' jump in power are in spells like Phase, Walk Between Walls, Acceleration, Turn Back the Clock, or Body of Earth with a few above-average combat spells like Enthrall. The commonality between the first set of spells is that they add new ways of resolving problems that were otherwise not addressable—they enable alternative solutions, rather than being best-in-class tools for what they already do. In other words, the level 25 spells threshold is all but guaranteed to be useful, whereas the 30 spells are a situational investment that is a lower priority.

95% is the desired success rate because, as mentioned, it's half the failure rate of 90%, and a quarter of the failure rate of 80%. You can't reliably push lower than 95% failure, so that's where the exponential decrease in failure rates drops off.

Critical success rates were in my initial estimation*, contrarily, utterly pointless when considering spells. It would be one thing if the critical success occurred 10 higher than the DC, as in Pathfinder 2e—or even 15 higher than the DC. Because critical success only occurs at +20 above, you'll either need a natural 20 to achieve it, or 20 higher than the DC. The benefit for casting a [Renewal] spell at 20 higher than the DC is to add a single instance of metamagic (bearing in mind that the highest single-cost effect is +15, and is required to cast a spell in the first place on a particular target) meaning that the highest benefit you'd get is a +10 level effect, and at that point, just add 10 to the DC and be done with it.


I agree with pretty much all of this, although I do think you are failing to take into account the need for situational metamagics like piercing, amplify, reaching, seeking, or maximize that might be needed to make your spells stick on any given target.

Overall though, this just really makes me nostalgic for when I was first creating this system, and Bob was both less grumpy and less busy, and we would spend the whole afternoon sitting around discussing the philosophy of spell design!


Let us say I took your advice. I have a choice between getting the +23 in, say, Chronomancy, and getting a +20 in Chronomancy and +3 more Fortitude, Resolve, and Evasion. Which would be better? Do I get better returns from investing in my primary skill, or for those defensive skills?

If I invest in Chronomancy, there's the possibility of me having quite good odds at having a permanent Acceleration up. Turn it into a ritual, burn a character point to keep it forever. Now if I'm in a situation where, say, a drake were to hit me with a breath weapon, I could try to Evade it... or cast a Celerity Haste on myself to make earthworks blocking the line of effect... or I could attempt to put that drake into Stasis before the attack goes off... or any number of ways to prevent the drawback with my primary skill.

If I instead invest in Conjuration, I simply have some number of Contingent Blink spells (for that is what I would choose with my Staff of Power) to negate attacks against me, never worrying about the drake's breath weapon in the first place.

Would the investment that doubles the number of Contingent Blinks I can lay over the course of the adventure be a better investment than increasing my odds of a surprise Evasion save? Or would it be better to have slightly increased odds for the scenarios in which I'm out of Blinks for the mission?

Cool. Sounds like you have a plan.

Trying to actively protect yourself from threats is a great challenge for a player, and if you can pull it off, you deserve the extra power from min-maxxing imo.

What's not acceptable, again imo, is acting entitled to the extra power without putting in the effort, and instead demanding that the NPCs hold the idiot ball to provide you with plot armor so that your weaknesses never come up.

For the record, I generally feel the same way you do when I PC, and like to have my fate in my own hands. But its a lot easier to act competent and unbothered by adversity when making a character in a white room scenario than it is when a streak of bad rolls or bad decisions have left one in a bad state.


Ah, no, that's where you are mistaken.

In class-based games, your defenses are free. Simply by leveling, you get a chance to succeed. You do not sacrifice something by having your Will save go up by +1 when you level. If you argue that Dungeons and Dragons still has investment that you can fail to have (IE, you can dump your Wisdom to increase other scores in point buy)... it has another system of diminishing returns, such that you are incentivized to have Con 14 and Wis 14 rather than Con 16 and Wis 10 to defend your Fort/Will, respectively. It encourages diversification on top of giving bonuses that don't cost you anything.

I (mostly) disagree.

In D&D (it varies from edition to edition, let's say 5E) when you level up you gain HP, one of your major saves, and one of your minor saved. Aside from that (and maybe an occasional defensive class feature) all other defenses are static; your AC and 4/6 saves don't improve at all unless you choose to improve them with feats or magic items, and doing so does indeed cost you offensive power.

And, as you point out, you can indeed dump your defensive stats (WIS, CON, DEX) in favor of more offensive stats (INT, STR, maybe CHA) and will never get this choice back unless you spend feats or magic items trying to balance yourself out.



My favorite example of a non-class-based game handling this is Unknown Armies. Your defenses against certain failed rolls are something inherent to your character—everyone has 10 basic abilities, ranging between 20% and 60% effectiveness. (Abilities that matter to your character are gained through a point buy style system.) Based on your character's experiences over time, where those values are shift—when your Connect, your basic empathy, is tested, you tend to become more violent, and you gain more resistance to instances of violence-based trauma and increased skill in inflicting violence... at the cost of being less able to defend yourself from the trauma of powerlessness as your friends leave you or your newfound violence fails to achieve its goals.

Sounds interesting. I have heard of Unknown Armies, but I know literally nothing about it, not even the genre. Maybe I should look into it.


It's bad design endemic to many point buy games that you must sacrifice your active skills to be better at Defensive skills that may or may not come up... and most realize this, compensating by doing their best to bundle defensive investment into something the players are very likely to invest in anyways and minimizing the degree to which they can be sacrificed. To whit, GURPS starts characters at human-average stats; reducing a stat below this like is a flaw that counts against a cap. Thus, when they tie their defenses to a character's stats, they can be reasonably sure of a range of investment values.

The burden of defensive investment is much higher on point-buy games than level-based games.

Did we ever decide if scaling costs were a good thing or a bad thing?

On one hand, they de-incentivize min-maxxed builds, but on the other, they more strongly punish them if you ignore the incentives and min-max anyway.

On a related note, in HoD generally you get atleast double the value out of raising one of your base attributes that you would increasing all of its key scores individually, and every attribute (except maybe Endurance) has both offensive and defensive benefits. What does this do for min-maxxing?


So extreme minmaxing was the impetus for this entire discussion. As you point out later the obvious conclusion of even trying this in a game is usually the GM saying "no" because it's clearly overpowered and broken and dependent on very loose RaW interpretations. Sadly there are any number of GMs out there who do just go with "well the rules allow it" which is why guidelines or optional sections with warnings are something I keep bringing up.

Yeah. I see where you are coming from.

Its hard to know who I am writing the book for when the spectrum includes the "Well the rules allow it" GM and the "No optional rules, period!" GMs on either side.


A Wolverine comparison is a bit flawed here. Both come with forces chasing them for reasons they aren't even aware of but Wolverine is Superhero fiction and comes with reasons for him to be able to handle those forces when they show up or bounce back quickly when he can't. You're instead running with a setting and GMing approach where if the player in question ran into the forces after them the result is going to be pretty one sided against them.

I agree.

When introducing a character like this, it is important to talk with the GM about how much plot-armor you need vs. how much he or she is willing to give you.


I understand that it wasn't in the actual game, but you are the system designer and the only person that comes to mind as actually regularly running your system as a GM. When you present a likely outcome for something that is a statement of intent that can then be read into both how your system operates (get too strong and the named NPCs will slap you down) and your games (allow lots of items but then have them taken away instead of putting a limit on it). You bring up later in the response that you do talk these things out and try to set limits but what the lack of in-rules limitations conveys is that, yes, those kinds of builds are completely legal; by then responding that the setting will prevent an element you consider disruptive it comes across as having a hidden punishment for minmaxing as the intended result.

The item rules do directly mention that it is possible for them to be stolen and what happens if they are, and under the hood these merits are under-costed precisely because they can be taken away (hopefully temporarily); so I don't see it as hidden. But I suppose I could be more explicit about it.

IMO telling someone that their character cannot survive as presented without plot armor does not equal going out of their way to punish someone for min-maxxing.

I am curious about how people would react to the opposite character, one who is totally defensive based, but can't actually accomplish any task and is often just ignored and bored. Would it also be considered a "hidden GM punishment" if one didn't arbitrarily lower the difficulties of the various tasks they came across so they could feel like they were contributing something?


Actually your stated reasoning of people with lots of magic use and items showing up like a miniature star in the senses of all the major powers of the setting does make me question some things from a story perspective as well. For one how exactly are any of the big name villains who would do all this casual theft not either being targeted and hunted down for being such obvious threats when any real display of their power would let people pinpoint them like this? For another how have those same villains not thoroughly reduced their own numbers by targeting each other to prevent their own resources from being stolen or themselves from getting backstabbed the moment they look vulnerable?

Even without the obvious animosity that would come from "more magic used = easier to find" when that kind of thing is possible you'd still get situations where a bunch of different evil opportunists coming in to grab the loot would run into each other and contest the theft. Or where, even if it's just one or two, they would realize "huh, they managed to get this powerful stuff that might make them a problem later" and outright kill the party before that can happen. The issue with that last part is, and I will mention this again later, that is punishing the party for how one person built their character.

Huh. I guess I did a better job of conveying theme through mechanics than I thought.

You don't know it, but what you described is pretty much the core concept of my setting.

In short, the world is dying, and in the hands of a score of evil powers who are squandering what few resources it has left trying to destroy one another, and all the while trying to be the first to claim the macguffin artifact (the eponymous Heart of Darkness) which will allow them to triumph over their fellows. The "ur" game of Heart of Darkness should play out like Yojimbo, where the players come in as mercenary free agents, play these powers against each other while building up their own strength, and then overthrowing them.

But yeah, throwing in a random PC who appears out of nowhere with dozens of potent artifacts would quickly turn a cold war hot, and would all but end the setting as well as the campaign in very short order. I have no idea who would survive, let alone come out on top, but the odds of it being the PCs are miniscule.


I know you're using intentional extreme hyperbole but you're using it to make a point about an actual topic, and it is still along the lines of the actual issue in question.

Scenario A would be the GM taking an out of game issue in game, which like taking an in game issue out of game is a big warning sign and problem that should really raise questions about why they'd bother playing together again. It would be the GM being pointlessly cruel for things beyond the player's control simply because the players are there to take it out on. So yes the player is faultless.

But scenario B? Session one the player can state a goal, they can even try to act on reaching that goal, but the GM is still the one deciding that they get all the way to Moria, right up to Smaug, and pee on his nose in order to provoke him in that session without any intervening incidents along the way. Or to put it a different way, the Gm, as the person setting the encounters and pacing the campaign, heard their goal and went "yeah sure lets have them go die, I'll even clear the path so they get there immediately while the rest of the party is actually getting set up for the real adventure which will be much longer and more difficult." Is the player faultless for taking the action when it's available to them? No. Is the GM faultless for facilitating that action they knew would raise so many issues? No.

Neither exists in a vacuum, the person interacting with the world or the person showing the world and how it interacts with them.

I assumed the campaign was set in Wilderland, where just about any man of Laketown could wander into the Lonely Mountain unopposed if they had no fear of the dragon.

My point is, character A is clearly the GM punishing them player for out of game reasons, and the latter is clearly a PC who isn't going to survive unless the GM extends them plot armor.

IMO, bringing in a min-maxxed character with tons of weaknesses and who also strongly incentivizes everyone he meets to rob him is closer to the latter than the former.


Second, if you are specifically countering a player by focusing on their weaknesses all the time that is targeting them. If they're going to be targeted and put into a situation specifically meant to shut them down over a build choice then that makes having that build choice in the first place into something that sets off hostility. That then makes it a valid question why a build you'd object that much to is left as an option.

I feel like you are making the assumption this decision occurs during the adventure design state rather than the round to round tactical state. Is that correct?

Like, say you have a character who is from a race that takes double damage from fire.

Are we talking about the GM designing the adventure The Fire Breathing Fire Giants of the Fiery Mountains of nothing but Fire (Part 1 of 20).

Or are we talking about encountering a sorcerer who knows both fire bolt and chill touch, but decides that fireball is the tactically sound choice against said PC?

Because what Bob is usually complaining about is the latter; ogres who choose to grapple the tiny child or giant spiders who don't refrain from attacking him just because he is critically weak to poison.


That is definitely an aside since it's nowhere near the same issue. Yes, players can screw themselves over by using a point buy system to give themselves minimal Constitution (or other stats tied to health and survivability) and it should definitely be advised against simply because it's such a clearly bad idea that they'll probably die the first time they get into a combat situation. That's personally something I see as a flaw of point buy systems and some of the weird min-maxing ideas that always accompany them more than anything, but it's not the same situation as the item/heirloom option and is generally so objectively and obviously self destructive that the only ways I see it happening are either a complete lack of understanding of how the system's rules work or intentional trolling.

Health variation from stats is pretty standard, there are systems where it's flawed but overall it usually works and basic common sense usually prevents someone from running around with 1-2 Constitution just to boost their other stats they'll die too quickly to use. If you invest heavily in constitution you'll end up with lots of health but everything else will be a bit worse as a consequence, that health may be taken from your character in a fight but you'll be in no different a position than anyone else in the party. You may actually be in a better position than the rest of the party simply because you've got the spare health to tank your way through it. It could still be disruptive or boring if you have nothing going for you except health but then that leads to the same solution, discuss what's wrong or why there are problems and work with the party and GM to fix it. None of that is setting dependent, it's all in clear mechanics, the danger involved in minimizing Constitution is purely on the player with the clear result of less health to survive off of.

Item investment meanwhile is a very different issue, it's tying a significant swing in power to something that is purely external. "The item guy" is basically building their character entirely around having those items, if the item is lost so is a significant percentage of their power and ability to contribute and unlike lost hp it can't just be quickly recovered, it's also an impact on their character concept if they built that way for story reasons instead of purely for the power of it. In allowing the option without any limitation or restriction there is a case to be made that you're leaving taking those items away forcibly as the only balancing method left which then runs into issues of it being a targeted retribution against the player.

The swing from overpowered and disruptive for it to underpowered and disruptive for it is even worse if the item is stolen instead of destroyed because then the item is still out there somewhere and can be used against the party. In balancing the item guy only by taking away after the fact when they've proven themselves overpowered not only are they weakened in a way that (by how Fable Wright pointed out and your response elaborated on) the rest of the party has to put up with for an extended period of time but the "established villains of the campaign world" now have a few more toys to play with and are actively aware of the party.

Or to summarize, messing around with Constitution is mostly going to result in a player punishing themselves, messing around with "my character is a ton of items and also this useless guy who carries them from fight to fight" style builds is punishing the party as a whole whether they keep it all or lose it all.

To add to all that this specific scenario that the whole thread is spawned from is due to a detail of your chosen setting. That means a restriction is in place in your official content despite there being no actual rule for it, and thus so it can be claimed there isn't a "real" restriction. A more honest comparison of the issue to Constitution would be saying "well the rules have no set minimum or maximum but the setting has all these named dragons hanging around that detect people who are really frail or really strong and decide to come eat them if they think the risk/reward ratio is worth it." That still fails to address the difference in how an external resource is being targeted vs a built in resource common to everyone, but it would somewhat elaborate on the issue that you set things up in a way that does sort of encourage a hostile response against the player character whenever the GM isn't satisfied with how the game is going.

I don't see a huge difference, both of them are a player making a build so min-maxxed they are going to die without plot armor.

The idea that the item guy will take the rest of the party down with them is a new twist, but I don't necessarily agree. As presented, said item guy wouldn't even survive long enough to meet up with the rest of the party, let alone get them caught in the crossfire, and a low HP guy could very well bring the party down with him if he went down mid adventure.

And yeah, the notifying everyone of his existence was a by product of how he was using the artifacts rather than an innate property of the artifacts themselves. There are plenty of ways in an RPG to announce your presence or pick a fight with something that is way out of your league, and imo that's really a separate issue.


Anything Powered by the Apocalypse serves as an example. Only the player characters have full character sheets and well-defined moves they can take to influence events in the game. Non-player characters usually don't have independent statistics or moves at all - this means how the game master decides actions for them is fundamentally different from how players decide actions for the player characters.

I suppose a narrative game does run by different rules than a traditional simulationist game. I don't really consider them RPGs, and aren't trying to run one, but I suppose that is technically correct.


For an example that might be more familiar to you: 3.5 D&D has massive list of character options for both players and game masters. These overlap significantly, but the game master's side is typically greater. This means that while it is possible to make scenarios where the player party is symmetric with their opponents, having access to exact same tactics, strategies and resources (with the most obvious case of this being the mirror match, where player party is pitted against another similar party), it's also possible to make scenarios where all opponents are of different quality and have to use different tactics as a result (say, a scenario where all the opponents are NPC class humanoids).

PCs and NPCs have different abilities, sure, but I am not aware of any mechanic that actually forces them to make sub-optimal tactical decisions about how they use those abilities.


...No, that's not at all how this works.

If my character has an 80% chance of failing if I encounter a Resolve check, and as you indicated, a failure means almost certain death, then in a Resolve-testing scenario I'm still likely to die. If there is no way to force the aggro of the Resolve-testing effects, and if it's an AoE resolve effect, then everyone who fails to make the bar suffers almost certain death. If it's one person who did not dump Resolve surviving and everyone else falling down, you still have a scenario where it's one character vs a threat meant to take on the whole party.

Ok. This is a big one, and touches on numerous related ideas.

First, Heart of Darkness allows players to influence the results of their dice rolls. So you are not talking so much about "80% chance of death vs. 65% chance of death" but rather how many resources you are going to expend surviving the encounter.

Likewise, while every attack is, theoretically, "save or die" if the enemy rolls a big enough crit, most combat isn't. It is instead a matter of the rate of HP attrition, which goes from damage, to incapacitation, and then finally death (although the latter will usually only occur if the entire party is wiped out.)

The magic to bring someone back from the dead exists, and the wealth curve is flat enough that most any group can scrape together enough to afford it, and so even "death" is often just another means of resource attrition.

And of course, when you say "save or die" do you literally mean "save or die"? Because there are only two spells in the game, iirc, that outright kill you, and they aren't very practical to cast unless you are a necromancer who has a tactical need for the corpse. Where do you draw the line? Long term curses that leave you out of action until they are cured. Curses that will kill you eventually if your allies don't help? Curses that incapacitate you and allow your enemy to kill you at their leisure after they win the fight? Effects that take you out of the fight? Effects like mind control that are worse then death on a tactical level, but have no long term penalties?

The vast majority of status effects result in damage, a minor debuff, or losing a turn. So making a "glass cannon" character who is all offense and no defense generally means that you will spend the latter half of every fight on the floor. The flame that burns twice as bright burns for half as long and all that. Is this the correct decision from either a tactical perspective or a fun perspective? I can't answer that.

But I can say that everyone in the party sharing the same weakness is akin to playing Russian roulette.

Different defenses apply in certain situations, and you are never guaranteed to face any given one in any given adventure, but over any campaign of even modest length, they will all come up multiple times. So while taking resolve might appear to be a gamble in a one-shot, it isn't in a longer game.


In general, a more balanced character will perform "better" than a min-maxxed one, and a team that is min-maxxed to synergize well and cover one another's weaknesses will perform better than a uniform one. But ultimately, it is impossible to say without knowing every encounter and dice roll in advance, and so for me the obvious answer is to go with whatever you find the most fun; if you like the idea of Wolverine shrugging off a hail of gunfire, go for it, if you like the idea of Raistlin being a cosmic being in a frail human shell, then go for that. Play what is fun for you, and as long as your goal isn't too break the game or the setting, you should be just fine.


@Fable Wright & King of Nowhere:

Both of you are wrong about what kind of a party dynamic Talakeal wants, and as a result, wrong about what would be optimal.

What Talakeal wants is equivalent to Pokemon party dynamics, where each character stands for a single 'mon. Every character has their own checks and counters, which means switching opponents in the heat of battle is regular and often necessary. No single character can cover all their bases, so each individual is reliant on other party members having traits different from them to succeed. It is the party and its tactics, not individual characters and their tactics, that require optimization.

In this paradigm, everybody focusing on Resolve at the cost of other defenses is equivalent to a everybody choosing to play an Electric type. They'll be very surprised pikachus when they're predictably countered by a single Ground type.

Furhermore, in this paradigm, there is no such thing as single optimal character, or single optimal strategy. Instead, there are a number of viable characters and strategies that have to come together as a group to actually be effective in play.

We can discuss whether Talakeal's system supports this kind of play and what would need to be altered to make it do so, but simply telling Talakeal "that's not how it works" is neither correct nor useful.

However, we can just as well observe Talakeal himself has other design goals that contradict this desire for particular strategic landscape. In Pokemon, there is a single trainer who oversees the strategy for the entire team. Without a comparable player role serving as team captain for the player characters, team building is made in to a co-ordination problem that gets more difficult for every player added. This is not helped by Talakeal's idea that each individual player should make their character based on a high concept. This is a bad way to play a team game. And of course, Talakeal's player suck as team players anyway.

Instead, when the operative unit in the game is supposed to be a team, or a party, it is the party that should be ground concept, and every character selected to benefit the party's concept. Unlimited freedom for individual players does not make sense here.

I pretty much agree with all of this, even the stuff that isn't entirely complementary.

As for the last bit though, generally people have a general idea for the character they want to play, or a choice between several characters, and will often make those choices to better fit in with the rest of the party. Heck, it could even be in character, actively training in areas your party lacks to shore up weaknesses and make yourself more valuable to the group.


However, in Pokemon, the fact that there's one human controller for six Pokemon means that "Pikachu was pretty much useless this battle" is fine and not a problem. Even if it happens for several fights in a row, no big deal.

And, IDK, maybe I'd feel this way in a TTRPG too, if we were doing like a dozen fights a session (which sounds quite excessive if the fights are anything like D&D). But when I'm only playing one character, and there are, say, 1-3 fights in most sessions, and sessions for a particular campaign happen once every 2-3 weeks ...

Nope - not the kind of experience I'm interested in. "Yeah you just sat around for an hour being stun-locked this time, but simply wait a couple weeks, six at the outside, and you'll be able to do something useful in combat!" ... that sounds lousy. Totally / mostly being shut out of combat is something I'd consider a major problem with a character if it happened remotely regularly (unless the character was intended to suck at combat, obviously). So yeah, I'm going to try to avoid that situation, and "the team is still tactically effective though" is not really saving it.

Generally, I would say this is about conservation of spotlight time.

If you want to be all offense, you will do the most while you are up, and then spend half the fight doing nothing.

Likewise, a guy with min-maxxed defenses will sometimes be the big damn hero who saves the party by walking through hell and not even taking off his coat, but other times he will be the damsel in distress needing his ally to rescue him.


This is why most point buy systems make aquiring moderate defenses quite cheap, some even automatic. And high defenses quite costly, often giving diminishing return or even apply caps.

As does mine.


Well, no. if each specializes in a different defense and dumps the rest, that means that each time an enemy is focused on one of them, they can easily take out 2/3rd of the party and then bring in superior numbers to the last one standing.

If that is the case, the party was simply outmatched and/or unlucky, and their build didn't really matter.


If you really want your party to distribute among themself which defense to concentrate on, you must implement a method for someone with high defense to cover for the others. But that would be very gamey for most kind of attacks. While it kinda makes sense that the courageous character rallyies their allies and dispells any fear gripping them, it is way more of a stretch if the immune characters somehow negates the poison the others fell for just by being so sturdy and while busy fighting.


Also for most players having your character killed because of a poor defense is as bad as having a TPK (unless revival magic is available). Players are invested in their own charakters and far less in the group or the adventure. So they don't care much if a portion of the group that had different builds survives or not. The story of their character is over. And misery loves company anyway.

Ordinarily, downed characters aren't literally dead (and even if they are, we can fix that), and if even one person survives, they can bind wounds and recover bodies. But if the whole group goes down, then everyone might be gone for good.


This is something that needs thinking about in game design. The same thing is different when the player does it than when it happens to them.

If, for instance, there was a 1% chance of instantly killing the enemy when the player attacked, they probably wouldn't think much about it. Happens sometimes, whatever.

If there was a 1% chance of the player instantly being killed when any enemy attacked they would dedicate their entire approach to the game around avoiding that happening.

I think if you actually take crits into account and look at damage vs. hp values, you would find that D&D does actually have greater than a 1% chance of killing someone on each attack, atleast at low levels.


Unrelated to your argument: Monotype is quite a fun format, and Electric monotype teams don't exactly instantly fold to Ground. Rotom-Wash covers ground weakness well with water coverage on top of Levitate, Toxic Zapdos can break special ground walls, and Scarf Xurkitree given a safe switch can absolutely clean up a weakened Ground team with Energy Ball. Against standard parties, they can be absurdly difficult to beat for many types between Tapu Koko and Alolan Raichu providing speed control and devastating offenses. (Note: I last played monotype in Sun/Moon; advice no longer up to date.)

With that having been said: Your assertion makes sense only in the circumstances where the player(s) can dictate aggro, usually at some cost (IE losing a turn to switch-ins, or the tank taunts as an action, or whathaveyou).

Yep. But that requires synergy and planning, it isn't something that will just come about if you slap together any six random electric types.


Such abilities simply do not exist within the system. Riposte (the AoO equivalent) cannot even disrupt spellcasting. Grapple can impose a -4 penalty, maximum, on spellcasting, making me retroactively baffled as to why Bob is so frustrated by it. (Seriously, I expected it to prevent casting at all, but instead it only gives a -4 penalty on Implement-requiring actions like spellcasting?! It is not hard to render a low-Resolve attacker unconscious at a -4 penalty if you spec for it! Bob, not only are you a munchkin, you are incompetent at it!) If a monster, for whatever reason, doesn't require an Implement to use its Resolve-targeting action, they can just... target someone on the backline and there's nothing you can do about it. No Charisma ability to taunt, no ability to grapple to shut down casting, no AoOs that can disrupt abilities other than movement.

There are absolutely ways to force targeting or disrupt spell-casting in the system; if you care we can go over them.

As for Bob, the grapple penalty is cumulative, and he is also vulnerable to being strangled or disarmed. But yeah, I definitely agree, his whine is often disproportional to the actual amount of danger he is in.

[Fable Wright]

Also, I got your PM. That character looks fairly reasonable, actually pretty similar to what Bob is playing right now except for illusion instead of chronomancy, perform instead of domestic, and expression instead of technology and medical.

For reference to anyone following, operating under the assumption that Talakeal was no longer interested in discussing spell design/balance philosophy in this thread, I posited an example build of a character as something that his system might incentivize:



Agility: 3
Charisma: 3
Dexterity: 3
Endurance: 3
Intelligence: 10
Perception: 3
Strength: 3
Willpower: 10
[...]
[Artifacts, items to support specialization in Chronomancy]
Summary:

64% chance, flat, to restore party Inspiration (a sticky modifier to increase/decrease the result of a roll by one when a roll is made; common party support feature) per attempt
The ability to permanently tie up a 'buff slot' into being able to take a number of useful battlefield control actions: Digging earthworks in a very large area over the course of a standard action, or setting traps as a standard action, etc. without a persistent mana cost
The ability to nearly always win initiative without costing mana
The ability to spread extra actions to the party consistently without costing mana
A large number of uses for one point of mana that allows the school to be used for healing or character improvement
The ability to reroll one Chronomancy spell per encounter [more often in the encounter/reset by using an action]
85% odds of spending one action, first thing in initiative, to give the two most effective party members a bonus action outside initiative order; remembering reroll from above to boost this to 97.75% chance until expended.

Solid set of party support skills:

Primary Skills:
Chronomancy +22
Domestic +17 (after acquiring starting household utensils)
Stoneworking +20
Resolve +20
Technology +16 (after acquiring starting tinker's tools)

Secondary skills:
Acrobatics +6
Alertness +6
Reason +13
Medical +14 (after acquiring doctor's tools)
Fortitude +6


If this is what you want your system to generate, then that's fine; it's primarily important to be aware of where the incentives are. The incentives are currently at many/most characters having very low stats in most areas, and exceptionally high stats in a few key others, because of the benefit in refining key skills. It had sounded like you intended for character stats to primarily center around human average, and were confused why this didn't often occur.


The only issue I foresee you running into is not being able to access the materials required to make earthworks or booby traps, and I don't think you have enough mana to get you out of *every* potential bit of trouble. But that is just a first impression, I will look at it in more detail later.

...Access to a shovel for earthworking, exceptionally fine flour for cooking and fuel-air explosions, cheesewire for causing limbs to be impaled or, well, cutting cheese, should handle most scenarios. Indoors where large earthworks can't be raised is where small-area-resources shine.

Moreover, mana doesn't need to get out of every potential bit of trouble; rationing does a lot of work, and moreover at the end of an adventure, leftover mana can be stockpiled into Holy Water and leftover Concentration can be crafted into Periapts, both of which are stockpiled indefinitely until use.


The answer is because I changed how perform worked at some point and didn't go back and change cooking to account for it.

Still, I am not sure I would say its the superior decision unless you are having *really* long adventures or you are spamming cooking checks (which might be something that needs looking into).

How many fights do you have in a day? Breakfast, lunch, and dinner are pretty solid when prep time is handled by a chronomancer. If you have a multi-day adventure as opposed to room after room of dungeon crawl in an afternoon... then why can you afford a few hours of someone singing to cheer one person up?


I agree with pretty much all of this, although I do think you are failing to take into account the need for situational metamagics like piercing, amplify, reaching, seeking, or maximize that might be needed to make your spells stick on any given target.

Broadly speaking, I don't think I am. Difficulty 20 effects are where the one action-for-one-action-no-save buttons are (Blink, Haste, Protection, etc.) and single-target Stuns are difficulty 15 (Tremor is an AoE and thus 20, but Daze, Befuddle, and Halt are in the 15 range). A 25 target number is enough to pull out a Stun effect at Piercing -10, or Reaching/Piercing -5. A 20 effect can easily get a Piercing -5 as easily as Multi or Reaching. I set 25 as the staple field as the primary beneficiaries of the level 25 breakpoint are [Multi-] target party buff effects, and buff effects usually don't need to worry about reaching/piercing/amplify/maximize.


Cool. Sounds like you have a plan.

Trying to actively protect yourself from threats is a great challenge for a player, and if you can pull it off, you deserve the extra power from min-maxxing imo.

What's not acceptable, again imo, is acting entitled to the extra power without putting in the effort, and instead demanding that the NPCs hold the idiot ball to provide you with plot armor so that your weaknesses never come up.

For the record, I generally feel the same way you do when I PC, and like to have my fate in my own hands. But its a lot easier to act competent and unbothered by adversity when making a character in a white room scenario than it is when a streak of bad rolls or bad decisions have left one in a bad state.

I... hrm. I'm having trouble telling if we're on the same page or not.

Fable's thesis:
Because of the manner in which this system is designed, significant defensive investment is discouraged due to odds of the investment not paying off. A proactive defense requires high stats to pull off, which can be had at the cost of passive defenses. An additional benefit to this is that the proactive defense simultaneously improves offensive abilities.

Corollary: Passive defense investment is a newbie trap, tying down points that can be best used elsewhere, leading to intra-party power imbalance. Likely to lead to subpar gaming experiences; the 3.5e D&D experience of Angel Biker and BMX Bandit is not an impossibility if a player is a spotlight hog. If entire party is on this wagon, may lead to 'rocket tag' or list of binary defense behavior that many viewed as undesirable in D&D 3.5e era.

Talakeal's response [as I understand it]:
This is desirable behavior; high risk build decisions giving more points is an explicit feature of the system to reward mastery. There is no real reason to address the newbie trap issue; that can be solved later by alchemy.

Proposed solution: Reduce cost of passive defense investment for newbies (the packages idea I mentioned, perhaps refined a bit more to increase diversity within packages, would allow you to give defenses for 'free'). See below.
Additionally, potentially introduce more cost scaling to the investment of primary power stat.



Character package: Imperial Templar

Starting Agility: 4
Starting Charisma: 4
Starting Dexterity: 5
Starting Endurance: 6
Starting Intelligence: 4
Starting Perception: 3
Starting Strength: 6
Starting Willpower: 6
Starting Qualities: Obstinate, High Metabolism
[Value: 76 points; discounted value for package: 60 points, let's say]

Points that must be spent raising those starting stats [to a total of no more than 8]: 16
Points that must be spent on a specific subset of starting qualities: 12 8
Points that may be spent on anything: 12

Character Package: Marhanna Buddha-Touched

Starting Agility: 2
Starting Charisma: 4
Starting Dexterity: 2
Starting Endurance: 3
Starting Intelligence: 4
Starting Perception: 3
Starting Strength: 2
Starting Willpower: 6
Starting Enlightenment: 6
Starting Virtues: Obstinate, Dragon-Blooded
[Value: 64 points; discounted value for package: 54 points. Smaller discount because more flexibility in what you can take.]
Points that must be spent raising non-Enlightenment starting stats [to a total of no more than 6]: 10
Points that must be spent on a specific subset of starting qualities or Enlightenment: 16 12
Points that may be spent on anything: 20



I (mostly) disagree.

In D&D (it varies from edition to edition, let's say 5E) when you level up you gain HP, one of your major saves, and one of your minor saved. Aside from that (and maybe an occasional defensive class feature) all other defenses are static; your AC and 4/6 saves don't improve at all unless you choose to improve them with feats or magic items, and doing so does indeed cost you offensive power.

And, as you point out, you can indeed dump your defensive stats (WIS, CON, DEX) in favor of more offensive stats (INT, STR, maybe CHA) and will never get this choice back unless you spend feats or magic items trying to balance yourself out.

5e's design is a reprehensible joke. :smallyuk:

The editions that did it best were AD&D, 4e, and Pathfinder 2e. AD&D's infinite tables issue was problematic, but because there was clear bounds on where everyone was supposed to fall, because there wasn't a whole lot players could do to modify them. They accepted their strength and weaknesses and moved on because that's your lot.

In 4e and Pathfinder 2e, your saves are all tied to your level, plus modifiers. I'm less familiar with the exact mechanics of 4e than PF2e because I'm in two games of the latter at the moment, but the broad jist is that you have level + proficiency modifier (ranging from +2 to +8, determined by class and level) plus your stat modifier (between -1 and +6). The big thing is that Pathfinder 2e gives you four ASIs every time you level up, letting you retain two weakness stats to represent serious character flaws, but letting you invest in your offensive stat and three defensive stats without being penalized. You get class feats every even level; these can be used to add more lateral abilities to a character, or with a bit of investment, increase one of your defensive-only proficiency modifiers by +2 at level 12; and a second one of your defenses at level 17, to a maximum of +6 each time.

Your defense investment is determined by your class; can be invested in with a few wiggle points; because of the bounded nature of PF2e where critical successes/failures occur 10 above/below every roll, that +2 matters one fifth the time you roll it; there's a cap to the amount you can invest; and you cannot ever directly increase your primary offensive modifier outside of class-based increases.

This design has led PF2e to stand next to 4e in being the most balanced D&D game ever, with martial classes actually beating out most spellcasters in this edition save at the level Prismatic Wall comes online. This sharp curtailing of offensive potential means no rocket tag. The bounded scope of saves means that you don't have party members who are completely hopeless with resisting certain effects.

On the other hand, in 5e, the Intelligence Devourer at level 2 can instantly kill the barbarian by stunning it with a DC 12 int save. At level 20... if the barbarian is surrounded by five intellect devourers, he's got the same odds to save. The only difference is that the threat level has gone "down" by the CR system but the barbarian is vastly more likely to die.


Sounds interesting. I have heard of Unknown Armies, but I know literally nothing about it, not even the genre. Maybe I should look into it.

Genre: Urban fantasy.
Pitch: Magic is real, but anything stronger than sending someone a psychic nosebleed is only available to two types of people: Those so completely broken as to no longer fit in to normal life, and those who are so ordinary they're supernaturally good at the role they fill. When you're new to the streets, you're probably trying to figure out what why the shut-in who keeps cutting herself has suddenly become involved in multiple missing persons cases and vanished; when you're clued into the whole picture, you're dealing with the secret wars of people who want to control what happens when the world ends.
Arc phrase: "You did it!" In the accusative, or the supportive.
3e tagline: Broken people trying to fix the world

(Second edition's fluff was better for the inclusion of John Tynes, as Greg Stolze can have a bit of an abrasive writing style, but the chargen system in 3e is vastly more interesting from a game design perspective.)

In general, Greg Stolze (lead designer) is a game developer who's made his niche in creative mechanics for the core of a game; REIGN lets you play as an organization, and resolve the successes and complications (good and bad) with a single roll of your dice pool.


Did we ever decide if scaling costs were a good thing or a bad thing?

On one hand, they de-incentivize min-maxxed builds, but on the other, they more strongly punish them if you ignore the incentives and min-max anyway.

On a related note, in HoD generally you get atleast double the value out of raising one of your base attributes that you would increasing all of its key scores individually, and every attribute (except maybe Endurance) has both offensive and defensive benefits. What does this do for min-maxxing?

Generally speaking, what is your goal? Scaling costs are usually very useful for herding characters together, but how much and where the breakpoints are depends on your design goals.

The first concern is that you're using a d20 + number as a base to determine efficiency. That's... going to lead to number inflation, as you've seen. You are giving out 100 points, if each point tends to be worth 1 point on a d20, and to reach the point of exponentially increasing returns on success you need to get around a +20 modifier. That's not... great? You can spend two points for a +5, once, then linear costs for the next +15, and then it gets to a jump to a higher bracket of linear costs. For me, the player, that communicates that I should aim to reach the first softcap at character creation, and then aim for the second softcap limit over the course of the game.

The problem occurs when you have systems like magic that give exponential returns for linear costs. Take Dweomer Mastery (Multi) as the primary example. Stick 10 points in there and each of your one target spells now hits four targets. Linear costs, exponential returns. I can play a magic user and stick with a linear 1-point-for-+1 for my entire career getting exponentially stronger over time.

The system as I see it right now... honestly, I'd look at Ars Magica as an illustrative example.

[EDIT: I'm about to go on a long tangent and it may not make sense to anyone not named Fable. So in short,

Thesis: Scaling costs do a very good job at creating a world benchmark for PCs to be measured against. A set of strictly limited linear-cost-exponential-reward bonuses to represent either unique new abilities or supreme skill with an existing ability can rewards investment in ways that strongly reward both one-trick ponies and diversified builds, and makes it easier to rectify character weaknesses into acceptable levels over the course of play.]

Here's how that game works:

Resolution mechanic is 1d10 + modifier. In a stressful situation like combat, if you roll a 0, then something bad happens. If you roll a 1, you roll again, doubling the next number and counting 0 as 10. It ends up exploding in a manner similar to HoD. So if you roll 1, 1, 8, you get 32. If you roll 1, 0, you get 20. Stuff like that. The difficulty steps are every +3 being the equivalent of +5 in HoD. So difficulty 3 is an easy task for most people, difficulty 6 is average, etc.

You have eight stats.

Intelligence
Communication
Presence
Perception
Strength
Dexterity
Stamina
Quickness

You have 7 points you can distribute between them, up to +3. The first increase on a given stat costs 1 point, then the second increase on it costs 2, and so on. So you could have Intelligence +3, Presence +1, all other stats zero. The caveat is that this also works in reverse; the first decrease to a stat refunds one point, the second refunds two, etc. No cap. So you could have Intelligence +3, Strength -3, Perception +2, Quickness +2, Stamina +1.

The caveat here is, the highest/lowest you can have a stat at in character generation is +5 or -5. Why?

Each character has a separate pool of Virtues, counterbalanced an equal point pool of Flaws. It's the Flaws that are capped, usually at 10 point value for Fated-equivalent, 3 for non-Fated. One example of a one-point Virtue is to gain 3 points you can distribute among your stats. Alternatively, you can increase a stat of +3 to +4 for one virtue point, or +4 to +5. You get linear scaling for exponential return, but you're capped at two instances of that linear return. Another example is a +2 bonus to a particular skill. They're balanced because they're explicitly special investment from the player, above and beyond the normal expected cap. Other virtues can modify the amount of XP you can gain and spread around to multiple skills; some can multiply the XP you invest in a skill by 50%.

All of the player's numbers in the game are graduated in the way your stats are. The cost to increase a skill from 0 to 1 is 5 xp; then from 1 to 2 is 10xp, then 2 to 3 is 15xp, and so on.

Ultimately, this means that the costs to go from +0 to +3 are 30xp, then up to +6 is another 75 xp, then up to +9 is another 150 xp.

The game sets the bar of 'professional level' at skill 6, regardless of what your stat is.

So where does that leave us? Well, we can look at what a 'normal' professional adventurer looks like (his sword-arm is at +6, his Dex and Str are at +3). The fanciest adventurer, investing it all in his sword arm, could have up to Dex stat 5, and his sword-arm skill at +10 (+2 from one virtue, the 50% refund letting you pump the underlying skill to 8 for reasonable cost). So you're fairly sure, even with a fairly free-form point buy, about the upper bounds of where a starting character is (+15 in primary modifier, an exemplar); where the average character is (+9 in primary modifier, competent enough to get through the day), and where an explicitly novice character will be (+3 to +6). You can project where the best in the world might end up (+21 would be a tall peak to climb even for the exemplar) and use these numbers to calibrate the difficulties of an adventure and the world. It's very customizable, but the upper and lower bounds are known, and not usually out of the realms of plausibility with help or situational modifiers. Linear investment for exponential returns is known about and rewarded, but capped—they make you uniquely good at certain sets of things, but there's only so far you can go... and those virtues might have instead gone to other things, like a large amount of XP in certain fields (there's a 3-point virtue that gives 225 XP to distribute between intelligence skills, or a 3-point virtue that gives you access to the equivalent of level 1 Chronomancy in the first place, or a 3-point virtue that gives you a +3 to all rolls in a certain type of terrain, like a town or forest). A min-maxxer can't lower all his dump stats as low as they can go (you're capped to three instances of the drawback that brings your -3 to a -4 or a -4 to a -5) and those flaws are competing with all sorts of other drawbacks.

Ahem. Anyways. Point is, scaling costs like this means raising the base stat from +6 to +9 costs enough points to raise two more skills from +0 to +6, or ten skills from +0 to +2. Options for min-max come up when you invest from your limited pool of linear scaling. You can really feel the difference of improving, say, Int to +5—for your average village sage to get a secondary skill up to a +6 modifier, it costs 30xp on top of his +3 int. For you, it costs five XP—you can cover six times the skills with the same investment. And because you limit the degree which players can sacrifice their stats, even the most egregious munchkin is unlikely to sacrifice all of their stamina and quickness and so will be able to invest in skills and get up to acceptable levels in a reasonable time frame.


There are absolutely ways to force targeting or disrupt spell-casting in the system; if you care we can go over them.

As for Bob, the grapple penalty is cumulative, and he is also vulnerable to being strangled or disarmed. But yeah, I definitely agree, his whine is often disproportional to the actual amount of danger he is in.

Worthwhile to know where they are to see how they tie in, if nothing else. :smallsmile:

[Ignimortis]

In 4e and Pathfinder 2e, your saves are all tied to your level, plus modifiers. I'm less familiar with the exact mechanics of 4e than PF2e because I'm in two games of the latter at the moment, but the broad jist is that you have level + proficiency modifier (ranging from +2 to +8, determined by class and level) plus your stat modifier (between -1 and +6). The big thing is that Pathfinder 2e gives you four ASIs every time you level up, letting you retain two weakness stats to represent serious character flaws, but letting you invest in your offensive stat and three defensive stats without being penalized. You get class feats every even level; these can be used to add more lateral abilities to a character, or with a bit of investment, increase one of your defensive-only proficiency modifiers by +2 at level 12; and a second one of your defenses at level 17, to a maximum of +6 each time.

Your defense investment is determined by your class; can be invested in with a few wiggle points; because of the bounded nature of PF2e where critical successes/failures occur 10 above/below every roll, that +2 matters one fifth the time you roll it; there's a cap to the amount you can invest; and you cannot ever directly increase your primary offensive modifier outside of class-based increases.

This design has led PF2e to stand next to 4e in being the most balanced D&D game ever, with martial classes actually beating out most spellcasters in this edition save at the level Prismatic Wall comes online. This sharp curtailing of offensive potential means no rocket tag. The bounded scope of saves means that you don't have party members who are completely hopeless with resisting certain effects.
And all of that is rendered absolutely meaningless by the numbers being tuned in a way that expects a minmaxed specialist to approach any DC, including combat DCs like AC or save DCs, and still gives them a 30 to 40% chance of messing the roll up. People who are 4 points behind the minmaxed specialist are pretty much bad at the thing, having at best a 50% chance to succeed at something level-appropriate.

Also, out of those four ASIs, one goes to your offensive stat, and two go to CON and WIS, because you don't have the luxury of having inflated save bonuses like the monsters do, and without maxed out CON/WIS you'll fail more saves than beat them - not to say anything about not having any HP to speak of without levelling CON every chance you get. A Wizard with 10 or 12 CON at level 15 is one crit away from being downed.

PF2 ends up being one of the most balanced D&D-likes not because it's good at balancing varied choices and abilities and actions, but because it takes everything you can do, cuts it down to basic number manipulation, and chains it to a very narrow treadmill that's always slightly too fast to keep up properly. It would be my last go-to if I were to try and design a fun TTRPG (not just a game, but specifically a TTRPG). There are some decent concepts, but the core system math is just too rigid to make good use of them.

[Satinavian]

On a related note, in HoD generally you get atleast double the value out of raising one of your base attributes that you would increasing all of its key scores individually, and every attribute (except maybe Endurance) has both offensive and defensive benefits. What does this do for min-maxxing?That is probably why all those example builds people post have one or two stats at 10 - if you want an ability to be really good and your main shtick, you might as well max the corresponding attribute. But for other attributes high values seem too expensive.





Generally, I would say this is about conservation of spotlight time.

If you want to be all offense, you will do the most while you are up, and then spend half the fight doing nothing.But if you concentrate on only one defense, you will still be down doing nothing half the fight in 2/3rd of all cases. And be significantly weaker at the times you are not down. So better to go all offense than that.


As does mine.Really ?

And why do people specialize in a defense then instead of spreading their points here ? That would mean not taking advantage of the cheap point in all the other defenses and biting the huge cost for the one defense they have. That would not happen unless "moderate defense" s just way too low to matter and might as well not exist or there are synergies between the defense stats and other things. It is probably the latter when attributes are heavily involved : If an attribute you max because of skills also boosts a particular defense, you will be good in this defense.


If that is the case, the party was simply outmatched and/or unlucky, and their build didn't really matter.Really ? Would not a party where everyone spread their defenses have fared better ? Where the enemy main attack is less effective against the whole group instead of ineffective against a single person and very effective against all else? Then the whole group can fight on.

Distributing defenses in the party seems stupid. Unless a high defense makes you literally immune against enemy types so that not only being outnumbered does not matter anymore, they don't even have secondary attacks against other, weaker defenses. You should be better off, even as a party, if everyone spreads defense points equally.

[Fable Wright]

And all of that is rendered absolutely meaningless by the numbers being tuned in a way that expects a minmaxed specialist to approach any DC, including combat DCs like AC or save DCs, and still gives them a 30 to 40% chance of messing the roll up. People who are 4 points behind the minmaxed specialist are pretty much bad at the thing, having at best a 50% chance to succeed at something level-appropriate.

I... do not think we're on the same page with regards to what 'min-maxed' is in this case.

Taking a gander at a standard DC-by-level chart for level... 14? One level before Legendary modifiers enter the table, standard DC is 32. The game pretty much assumes that every relevant skill for the party will be Master rank at this point.

A low investment of stat 16 [12 at chargen before raising it], skill investment of Expert [when most skills this level will be Master], a trivially cheap +1 Item bonus, and you have a +22 on the check. 55% odds of a pass, before adding in Hero Point, Status or Circumstance bonuses from allies helping.

A maxxed out investment of stat 20, skill investment of Master, a best in-class +2 Item bonus, and you have a +27 on the check. You fail 20% of the time before circumstance, status, or rerolls are taken into account.

Bearing in mind that at this level, it's pretty reasonable to have a party member help you out with a +2-3 Circumstance bonus, and you're sitting at a 65% chance to pass in the former case, and a 90% pass rate in the latter case.

You are, however, correct in that the math for your primary offensive modifier is unfortunately very tight. It assumes maximum investment in offensive abilities, and going below that by +1 does reduce your damage by an average of ~10%.

On the other hand, your stat modifier for AC means that non-caster combatants... don't need to min/max to reach maximum defensive investment? If you can reach 14 dex on class-scaling Medium armor proficiency, you're good.


PF2 ends up being one of the most balanced D&D-likes not because it's good at balancing varied choices and abilities and actions, but because it takes everything you can do, cuts it down to basic number manipulation, and chains it to a very narrow treadmill that's always slightly too fast to keep up properly. It would be my last go-to if I were to try and design a fun TTRPG (not just a game, but specifically a TTRPG).

So... what I'm hearing is that, from your perspective, PF2e is Precise, but not Accurate. It has removed much of the choice from numbers, but you view that the way DCs scale by level is always just slightly overtuned for where PCs are. The solution would appear to be to... reduce the target difficulty class by 2-3 across the board, so that a maxxed skill expert gets their 95% success rate for on-level tasks, whereas low to moderate investment gets 70% to success rates for on-level tasks?

If your complaint is about how level scaling punishes the low-investment individual more than the high-investment one, we could alternatively cut the number scaling in half, so DCs and skill proficiency only goes up by 1 every 2 levels, and suddenly that 70% for on-level tasks is more meaningful above-party-level tasks than it had been before.

Because the numbers are now more standardized and require less finagling, design space has been opened up for players to invest their resources in lateral abilities, rather than picking and choosing when to get their number bonuses.

I'm going to agree, the game would have benefited from enemy statblocks and DCs getting a little tuning downwards, but as a framework I maintain that it's the best model I've seen to rubber band the party. If you're complaining about a very narrow treadmill that's always slightly too fast, then... you just slow the brakes on the treadmill and make it a bit wider.

[Satinavian]

Because the numbers are now more standardized and require less finagling, design space has been opened up for players to invest their resources in lateral abilities, rather than picking and choosing when to get their number bonuses. That is totally not my impression at all. Instead it seems that buying the required/expected abilities for your party role leaves you with little left for lateral abilities.

I have the fealing that PF1 characters generally had far more lateral investment than PF2 character and thus feeling overall more competent.

Imho PF2 would benefit from giving everyone more feats and skill increases without making the higher level feats available earlier. But personally i am more happy to just play Splittermond instead of tweaking PF2.

[Ignimortis]

I... do not think we're on the same page with regards to what 'min-maxed' is in this case.

Taking a gander at a standard DC-by-level chart for level... 14? One level before Legendary modifiers enter the table, standard DC is 32. The game pretty much assumes that every relevant skill for the party will be Master rank at this point.

A low investment of stat 16 [12 at chargen before raising it], skill investment of Expert [when most skills this level will be Master], a trivially cheap +1 Item bonus, and you have a +22 on the check. 55% odds of a pass, before adding in Hero Point, Status or Circumstance bonuses from allies helping.

A maxxed out investment of stat 20, skill investment of Master, a best in-class +2 Item bonus, and you have a +27 on the check. You fail 20% of the time before circumstance, status, or rerolls are taken into account.
Remove the item bonuses and you end up pretty much where I pointed at. And that's just out-of-combat tasks, which tend to be less drastic than combat DCs.

For instance, Intimidation has to contend with Will DC of the enemy - the same level 14 character at +27 on the check...has to beat a 37 or 39 Will save DC on average, because despite what the "average numbers" table suggests, most enemies have two strong or strong-ish saves. Opposing Fort DC is even worse, because pretty much everything has a strong Fort DC for its' level, so even a minmaxed Athletics user with items on their side often plays with a 50% or less of a chance to actually do anything. Treat Wounds is also quite botchable - at level 6, when you're about to get Master next level, you roll +14 or +15 against DC20, and at level 14, when you're about to get Legendary next level, you roll +25 to +27 against DC30. Again, all of these are minmaxed characters, who may or may not have item bonuses, but otherwise have invested into the skill to the max.

A character who only "dabbles" in a skill (despite basically investing into it noticeably, and simply not having the requisite magic items and the skill's stat as a main stat) will be 3 to 4 points behind pretty much at all times.



Bearing in mind that at this level, it's pretty reasonable to have a party member help you out with a +2-3 Circumstance bonus, and you're sitting at a 65% chance to pass in the former case, and a 90% pass rate in the latter case.
The assistant is likely someone less proficient at what you're attempting, so them giving out a +3 bonus is unlikely to begin with. Otherwise, hitting a DC20 check is possible, if they're trained in the same skill you're attempting to roll.



You are, however, correct in that the math for your primary offensive modifier is unfortunately very tight. It assumes maximum investment in offensive abilities, and going below that by +1 does reduce your damage by an average of ~10%.

On the other hand, your stat modifier for AC means that non-caster combatants... don't need to min/max to reach maximum defensive investment? If you can reach 14 dex on class-scaling Medium armor proficiency, you're good.
Medium Armor + 14 DEX is outright bad in PF2. The frontliners are expected to wear full plate and advance it at martial rates to barely keep their AC in the "same-level enemy hits on 8+, crits on 18+" range (level 14 - avg to-hit is +29, full plate AC is 36 (10+6 (armor)+2 (rune)+4 (prof), get hit on 7, crit on 17). Medium armor gives you 1 less AC even with requisite DEX, still requires 14 or 16 STR to not be hampered by it, and 12 or 14 DEX to even get that extra AC point that doesn't close the gap to heavy armor.

The fact that going above "Fighter in full plate" AC is hard, doesn't make that AC good. It's barely sufficient, and everything below it ends up crit by a boss on a 12 or above, and by a same-level enemy on a 15 to 16, which is also pretty bad.



So... what I'm hearing is that, from your perspective, PF2e is Precise, but not Accurate. It has removed much of the choice from numbers, but you view that the way DCs scale by level is always just slightly overtuned for where PCs are. The solution would appear to be to... reduce the target difficulty class by 2-3 across the board, so that a maxxed skill expert gets their 95% success rate for on-level tasks, whereas low to moderate investment gets 70% to success rates for on-level tasks?

If your complaint is about how level scaling punishes the low-investment individual more than the high-investment one, we could alternatively cut the number scaling in half, so DCs and skill proficiency only goes up by 1 every 2 levels, and suddenly that 70% for on-level tasks is more meaningful above-party-level tasks than it had been before.

I'm going to agree, the game would have benefited from enemy statblocks and DCs getting a little tuning downwards, but as a framework I maintain that it's the best model I've seen to rubber band the party. If you're complaining about a very narrow treadmill that's always slightly too fast, then... you just slow the brakes on the treadmill and make it a bit wider.
Can't do that. It's how the system is designed - it revolves around base number manipulation on a minute level, and letting numbers be noticeably more variable or in players' favour would ruin what it's going for. Dropping all DCs and bonuses for NPC by, say, -2, would just make a level+2 enemy easier to deal with, and would make applying skills against them more reliable. But it would not introduce any different tactics, while also making the dominant PF2 tactic of "debuff them as hard as you can, because that's how you 1) not die 2) win" far less encouraged - leading to the prevalent tactical choice being "rush'em and beat'em into dirt". Kind of like D&D 5e. And that's not a good point to arrive at, because that just means you can do whatever and still win.

Though I guess dropping just Fort/Ref/Will by 2 or even 3 could make the game more fun. Make it so that using maneuvers is encouraged by them being easier to land than basic attacks.



Because the numbers are now more standardized and require less finagling, design space has been opened up for players to invest their resources in lateral abilities, rather than picking and choosing when to get their number bonuses.
Due to how the system is now fundamentally predicated on those same numbers in a greater way than PF1 was, I wouldn't exactly agree. Free Archetype lets you get some stuff that isn't absolutely necessary, but otherwise you're very likely to pick things that work. No real sense in picking Athletics without STR, or Acrobatics without DEX - they simply won't work, because the numerical bounds are too tight to excuse you for lacking a +4 or a +5 bonus from your stat. A PF1 character can get by just fine with never increasing their DEX, but improving their Acrobatics every level and getting its' benefits nonetheless. A PF2 character can maybe get some use out of some Acrobatics feats, like Cat Fall.

P.S. I sure hope I'm explaining my position alright.

[Vahnavoi]

PCs and NPCs have different abilities, sure, but I am not aware of any mechanic that actually forces them to make sub-optimal tactical decisions about how they use those abilities.

You're trying to draw a line in the sand that doesn't matter. The fact that PCs and NPCs have different abilities means they have different spaces for tactical decisions, potentially up to the point that one side has no winning strategies against the other. Which of course means that in comparison, the favored side has a lot of special dispensations when it comes to tactics.

For specific mechanics that force decions in D&D 3.5, if you're actually using them, the rules for Intimidate, Diplomacy, Forgery, Knowledge checks etc. information gathering abilities put NPC classes at severe information disadvantage. Fully modeled, NPC class enemies will know significantly less of their opponents than the PCs does. A lot of common arguments for how the game master has easier time co-ordinating their side than the players have co-ordinating as a party more or less presume that a game master is ignoring good chunk of such rules and granting NPCs information by fiat.

[Fable Wright]

That is totally not my impression at all. Instead it seems that buying the required/expected abilities for your party role leaves you with little left for lateral abilities.

I have the fealing that PF1 characters generally had far more lateral investment than PF2 character and thus feeling overall more competent.

Imho PF2 would benefit from giving everyone more feats and skill increases without making the higher level feats available earlier. But personally i am more happy to just play Splittermond instead of tweaking PF2.

...Nno? This is just plain wrong. I don't know how else to say it. None of your feat slots are required to get all the required/expected abilities for your party role. You get 1-2 per level, even outside of the extremely common Free Archetype rule that increases your class feats.

One of the people in my groups ran an campaign including a bunch of optimizing adults and their 10 year old son. The son was playing a fighter and took the feats that sounded cool. He was one of the more effective group members in combat without someone with system mastery doing his build for him. My understanding is that this is not likely to happen in Pathfinder 1e or D&D 3.5e.


Remove the item bonuses and you end up pretty much where I pointed at. And that's just out-of-combat tasks, which tend to be less drastic than combat DCs.

Okay, but... item bonuses exist. If they undermine your point, that's on you.


For instance, Intimidation has to contend with Will DC of the enemy - the same level 14 character at +27 on the check...has to beat a 37 or 39 Will save DC on average, because despite what the "average numbers" table suggests, most enemies have two strong or strong-ish saves. Opposing Fort DC is even worse, because pretty much everything has a strong Fort DC for its' level, so even a minmaxed Athletics user with items on their side often plays with a 50% or less of a chance to actually do anything. Treat Wounds is also quite botchable - at level 6, when you're about to get Master next level, you roll +14 or +15 against DC20, and at level 14, when you're about to get Legendary next level, you roll +25 to +27 against DC30. Again, all of these are minmaxed characters, who may or may not have item bonuses, but otherwise have invested into the skill to the max.

A character who only "dabbles" in a skill (despite basically investing into it noticeably, and simply not having the requisite magic items and the skill's stat as a main stat) will be 3 to 4 points behind pretty much at all times.


The assistant is likely someone less proficient at what you're attempting, so them giving out a +3 bonus is unlikely to begin with. Otherwise, hitting a DC20 check is possible, if they're trained in the same skill you're attempting to roll.

Your complaint is that the DC for out of combat skills and for saving throws that people target is too high.

My counter-offer is 'yes, and taking inspiration from the system's successes and failings, we can change those numbers to no longer be too high'.

Am I missing something about why this is a structural issue rather than a tuning issue? :smallconfused:


Medium Armor + 14 DEX is outright bad in PF2. The frontliners are expected to wear full plate and advance it at martial rates to barely keep their AC in the "same-level enemy hits on 8+, crits on 18+" range (level 14 - avg to-hit is +29, full plate AC is 36 (10+6 (armor)+2 (rune)+4 (prof), get hit on 7, crit on 17). Medium armor gives you 1 less AC even with requisite DEX, still requires 14 or 16 STR to not be hampered by it, and 12 or 14 DEX to even get that extra AC point that doesn't close the gap to heavy armor.

The fact that going above "Fighter in full plate" AC is hard, doesn't make that AC good. It's barely sufficient, and everything below it ends up crit by a boss on a 12 or above, and by a same-level enemy on a 15 to 16, which is also pretty bad.

...We live in fundamentally different worlds. Yes, enemies hit on 7+ and crit on 17+. That is the balance point where the game math was balanced around. That is the point where debuffing an enemy will reduce its crit rate to only 20+, or where flanking can effectively get its bonus up to hitting on a 5+/critting on a 15+. It's the point where Raise a Shield or Take Cover can make a meaningful difference in enemy damage, even for a Monk or Champion sitting at 2 AC over the Fighter as their unique gimmick. I don't understand how 'carefully calibrated to where game math is most meaningful' is 'barely sufficient'. Being crit by a boss easily is why the boss is threatening at your level.



Can't do that. It's how the system is designed - it revolves around base number manipulation on a minute level, and letting numbers be noticeably more variable or in players' favour would ruin what it's going for. Dropping all DCs and bonuses for NPC by, say, -2, would just make a level+2 enemy easier to deal with, and would make applying skills against them more reliable. But it would not introduce any different tactics, while also making the dominant PF2 tactic of "debuff them as hard as you can, because that's how you 1) not die 2) win" far less encouraged - leading to the prevalent tactical choice being "rush'em and beat'em into dirt". Kind of like D&D 5e. And that's not a good point to arrive at, because that just means you can do whatever and still win.

Though I guess dropping just Fort/Ref/Will by 2 or even 3 could make the game more fun. Make it so that using maneuvers is encouraged by them being easier to land than basic attacks.

Yes, saves are overtuned because Paizo apparently has a grudge against Wizards. You're not wrong.

I would like to ask, however—setting aside the details of implementation, what should dominant tactics look like?

Pathfinder 2e's dominant tactic is debuff and focus fire, a preferred tactic in real life.
D&D 3.X's dominant tactic is 'if Melee gets a charge, they will annihilate the target; caster's job is to prevent anything that the Fighter is not charging from taking relevant actions'. Which of course means that player are getting smacked with hard CC regularly.
In Unknown Armies, the dominant tactic is 'de-escalate, a fight isn't worth your life'.
5e's dominant tactic is 'release low-level swarms on your enemies'. Or be a low-level swarm, I guess.


Due to how the system is now fundamentally predicated on those same numbers in a greater way than PF1 was, I wouldn't exactly agree. Free Archetype lets you get some stuff that isn't absolutely necessary, but otherwise you're very likely to pick things that work. No real sense in picking Athletics without STR, or Acrobatics without DEX - they simply won't work, because the numerical bounds are too tight to excuse you for lacking a +4 or a +5 bonus from your stat. A PF1 character can get by just fine with never increasing their DEX, but improving their Acrobatics every level and getting its' benefits nonetheless. A PF2 character can maybe get some use out of some Acrobatics feats, like Cat Fall.

P.S. I sure hope I'm explaining my position alright.

Picking Assurance (Athletics) without Strength lets you fairly reliably target level-2 enemies' Ref or Fort for grapples or trips as a third action as a guaranteed success. And yes, level-2 enemies still show up, and having actions to deal with them is good. You can also use them on appropriately debuffed enemies of a higher level. It's commonly considered a great investment as a third action. You also get access to the Quick Leap skill feat, which improves your ability to leap over battlefield control, or Underwater Marauder to ignore underwater fighting penalties even if you're not a strength-Primary fighter.

Picking Acrobatics without Dex gives access to Kip Up, allowing you to rise from Prone as a free action that doesn't provoke, as well as unlocking Steady Balance, which lets you entirely ignore penalties from Grease-like environments where others may stumble and fall.

What part of those benefits just... don't work?

Taking a step back:

My brain, as a preference, likes looking at games and asking "what happens if I take this number as high as the game will let me?" and then making a character to complement that high number.

If I do that with Athletics in Pathfinder 1e, I am now a grapplemonster and trivialize a significant portion of encounters.
If I do that with Athletics in Pathfinder 2e, I am now able to reliably use my athletics in combat against dangerous monsters without forcing the GM to redefine tactics to take me into account.

Your complaints, it sounded like, was "if I am ~4 points behind with skills, then I am unhappy". We have a number of tools to change this, though, from altering the DCs to adding abilities to change the crit thresholds away from 10 above/below a target number to expand the middle zones. I don't know how this makes PF2e a base system I should never take inspiration from.

[Talakeal]

But if you concentrate on only one defense, you will still be down doing nothing half the fight in 2/3rd of all cases. And be significantly weaker at the times you are not down. So better to go all offense than that.

That assumes every fight has a "save or lose" element to it, which is far from the case. Most of the time, you are simply going down from taking too much damage.

There are many types of defenses in Heart of Darkness;

You have Dodge, Resilience, Vitality, and Tenacity, which are your equivalent of D&D HP and AC. These are used all the time.

Then you have Acrobatics, Fortitude, and Resolve, which are the equivalent of your Fort/Reflex/Will saves in D&D and they are used frequently.

Then you have might, which is used to resist grappling and other combat maneuvers, which can come up in any fight but often doesn't.

Then you have social, which protects from being lied to or misdirected, reason which protects from being tricked or confused, alertness which protects from being ambushed or robbed, all are sorts of minor defense.

And then you have Insight, which let's you detect and identify magic, athletics which helps you move around, and initiative which lets you go first, all of which are sort of defenses in certain situations.

And of course when it comes to spells and artifacts, many have defensive uses of various sorts.

So when you say a character is going "no defense", that covers a lot of ground.


As for the rest of your post, I will think about it and respond some more latter, got to get to work now!


You're trying to draw a line in the sand that doesn't matter. The fact that PCs and NPCs have different abilities means they have different spaces for tactical decisions, potentially up to the point that one side has no winning strategies against the other. Which of course means that in comparison, the favored side has a lot of special dispensations when it comes to tactics.

For specific mechanics that force decions in D&D 3.5, if you're actually using them, the rules for Intimidate, Diplomacy, Forgery, Knowledge checks etc. information gathering abilities put NPC classes at severe information disadvantage. Fully modeled, NPC class enemies will know significantly less of their opponents than the PCs does. A lot of common arguments for how the game master has easier time co-ordinating their side than the players have co-ordinating as a party more or less presume that a game master is ignoring good chunk of such rules and granting NPCs information by fiat.

Maybe we are talking at cross purposes then. When I first made the statement, I was talking about tactical decisions like focusing fire on the unarmored guy, grappling the small puny guy, using AoE against the bunched up guys, disarming the guy with the glowing magic sword, etc. and how a lot of players feel that you are punishing / picking on them OOC for employment such tactics which, to me, are just common sense for the bad guys to use.

[Ignimortis]

Okay, but... item bonuses exist. If they undermine your point, that's on you.
They do. But they, at least in the games I've played in, are not as commonly available as combat-facing ones.



*snip*

I would like to ask, however—setting aside the details of implementation, what should dominant tactics look like?

Pathfinder 2e's dominant tactic is debuff and focus fire, a preferred tactic in real life.
D&D 3.X's dominant tactic is 'if Melee gets a charge, they will annihilate the target; caster's job is to prevent anything that the Fighter is not charging from taking relevant actions'. Which of course means that player are getting smacked with hard CC regularly.
In Unknown Armies, the dominant tactic is 'de-escalate, a fight isn't worth your life'.
5e's dominant tactic is 'release low-level swarms on your enemies'. Or be a low-level swarm, I guess.

I think that this is probably the most pertinent point. PF2e's dominant tactic is "reduce basic enemy numbers/increase your own numbers (to-hit, AC, damage per hit) as much as you can, then hack at it with basic attacks to reduce it to 0 HP while healing damage it does to you in turn".

However, 3.5's dominant tactic isn't what you describe, or at least, it's not the dominant tactic. In 3.5/PF1 games I've played there have been several ways to approach a fight, including the same one that PF2e does, and denying the enemy a chance to act, as well as 5e-adjacent "just rush them and see what happens", as well as a mixture of all that. All of that tended to depend on what the players chose to play, what enemies they were facing, and how good they were at optimizing. It's never really the same thing all the time.

In my current PF1 game, if a heavy-hitting enemy turns out to have a low Will save, then I'll keep hitting them with the same attack+daze maneuver every turn, because that's what the best solution for this particular fight is, and since it's PF1, "low" means "fails the save 80% of the time". The next fight does not have that sort of enemy, so instead I focus on a low-AC, low-HP dangerous target that is targeting our backline. Yet another fight, I throw low-powered AoEs every round to clear out mooks that have just enough HP to die to around a single attack's worth of damage. Next fight, I use my non-exceedingly higher base speed to effectively prevent a couple of enemies from ever closing distance with me enough to strike, while I plink them down with a ranged weapon.

PF2 doesn't do that. If you're fighting something in PF2, it's never a "glass cannon", because all enemies of a similar level have similar EHP. Nothing ever has a save bonus abysmal enough to fail same-level saving throws more often than 50% of the time. There's never a "lumbering brute" that can be kited indefinitely, because pretty much everything can either double move for 50 or 60 feet + Strike once, or make ranged attacks in kind. There aren't any mooks that die in one hit, because if they die that easily, they're likely level-5 or below, and thus are quite literally unable to pose any threat aside from maybe granting flanking to a higher-level enemy - for a level 14 character to kill an enemy in one hit, even, say, on an appropriately runed scythe crit (8d10+16+4d6, avg 74), they'd have to be...level 4? They simply cannot touch the level 14 PC. Etc.



Picking Assurance (Athletics) without Strength lets you fairly reliably target level-2 enemies' Ref or Fort for grapples or trips as a third action as a guaranteed success. And yes, level-2 enemies still show up, and having actions to deal with them is good. You can also use them on appropriately debuffed enemies of a higher level. It's commonly considered a great investment as a third action. You also get access to the Quick Leap skill feat, which improves your ability to leap over battlefield control, or Underwater Marauder to ignore underwater fighting penalties even if you're not a strength-Primary fighter.

Picking Acrobatics without Dex gives access to Kip Up, allowing you to rise from Prone as a free action that doesn't provoke, as well as unlocking Steady Balance, which lets you entirely ignore penalties from Grease-like environments where others may stumble and fall.

What part of those benefits just... don't work?
Other things, like Tumbling, or tripping an enemy who actually matters and who really needs that -1 action or -2 AC choice, or succeeding at higher-level skill checks. Basically, you don't get to use that skill against most relevant threats - you can get some basic utility out of it, but far less than a character who has a suitable main stat for that.



Taking a step back:

My brain, as a preference, likes looking at games and asking "what happens if I take this number as high as the game will let me?" and then making a character to complement that high number.

If I do that with Athletics in Pathfinder 1e, I am now a grapplemonster and trivialize a significant portion of encounters.
If I do that with Athletics in Pathfinder 2e, I am now able to reliably use my athletics in combat against dangerous monsters without forcing the GM to redefine tactics to take me into account.

Your complaints, it sounded like, was "if I am ~4 points behind with skills, then I am unhappy". We have a number of tools to change this, though, from altering the DCs to adding abilities to change the crit thresholds away from 10 above/below a target number to expand the middle zones. I don't know how this makes PF2e a base system I should never take inspiration from.
And this is the major distinction here. I don't take a number as high as the game will let me. I look at a game and ask myself "can I make something that will be both effective enough to pull its' weight and cool enough that I'm not bored after playing it for five, ten, twenty sessions?". If a game lets me take a number to X, but Y (let's say Y=X/2) will suffice, I usually take it to Y, maybe Y+(a bit) for certainty and control, but not to X, because that tends to mean I can also take a few other numbers to Y, and combine them to do stupid fun stuff instead of doing one thing super well.

With how PF2 works, it expects you to go to X, because that's the number that the game is balanced around. Taking twice as many numbers to Y just means you're bad at everything, and even having all relevant numbers at X doesn't mean you're amazing, just that you're good enough to fully utilize those numbers. For me it means I have to pull out all the stops just to do one cool thing properly, and still have a 30% chance of failing to do that (e.g. - Whirling Throw, rolled at +32 at level 15, is generally opposed by DC39 for a same-level enemy, and a whole DC43 for a level+3 enemy - that is, if they're Medium and not, say, Gargantuan like a proper target for that ability - that would be a +28 roll instead).

And PF2 is built exactly that exact principle - it's a losing numbers race against an ever-speeding-up treadmill, and you never really "hard counter" anything (even though sometimes you yourself are hard countered rather directly). Once one starts changing things to suit a pattern more in line with my preferences, it's likely one would've arrived at a similar result with less effort by picking a different starting system altogether. Which is why I say that PF2 has some decent concepts (I like how conditions work, for the most part, and skill feats are great if a bit slow to come to the best parts - can't wait for Cloud Jump next level), but the core math and most of the content built around that math holds them back (in my perspective), and also why I think the most important thing PF2 can be looked to, for a TTRPG designer, is a cautionary tale about overvaluing balance in a TTRPG. Yes, you can rebalance the numbers, but that doesn't solve the issue of content still being focused around numbers and numbers only, nor does it solve the issue of those numbers being rather narrow in themselves and thus leading to a certain approach to dealing with them in almost every situation.

[gbaji]

Strong disagreement on this core element. In theory a game that can cover a broad range of power levels allows the group to tune their game to whatever power level they like. In practice, though, at best it means that the group requires a high level of system mastery and a lot of self-imposed bans to fit within the right power window. Otherwise it means a high chance of accidental imbalance* and/or extra work being piled on the DMs shoulders. Both of which make for extra hassle and raises questions of why to use this system as opposed to any other.

*(Or worse, if one player is better at optimizing and/or more plugged into the optimization community, intentional imbalance. That's again hard to work around, especially if you want to avoid having your fixes come across as too heavy handed. Heavy handed fiat fixes may not be literal DMPCs, but feed into the same frustration of feeling like the PCs are just observers in someone else's story. The strengths of wide potential wind up not existing while the flaws of the idea quickly compound.)

This can be a problem with any point buy system. I remember back when we played Champions a lot, we would actually set "levels" for different games/settings. This would include a total power point level, and an "individual power" cap as well. This ensured that, for the most part, all characters were similarly powered for the game. Actually worked pretty well, and we played in a variety of levels, from uber powered supers, down to street level stuff.

Didn't prevent some players making more optimized builds than others, but the optimization generally didn't make the characters "more powerful", it usually meant they were equally powerful at more things. Which could still be a thing, but was at least less of a thing. Hah. Nothing's perfect...


On the other hand, while double standards aren't a problem in the sense of the NPCs feeling bad about it, it can bad for the suspension of disbelief if it's too obvious. If all the werewolf hunters in the land knows to bring silver weapons, except when they fight the werewolf PC, that would probably bother me, at least (even if the werewolf PC was my character). Yes, of course the PCs are special, they are the literal center of the universe they inhabit, but I prefer it when it's not very noticeable.

Yup. We had a thread recently that discussed the pros and cons of Rock-Paper-Scissor style resolution. This is always a problem when the game system pushes characters into a "very tough, unlesss...<some weakness>". In HoD, the whole "put points into defenses, but there are three, and putting a little in each isn't worth much, so you should really focus on one, but if you pick wrong you're going to get hosed", has some similar aspects to that. This can be alleviated a bit by making the effects from those defenses a bit more scalable (which may be the case here). But if you don't do this, and the effects are more strong/absolute, then it takes us to this issue:


Personally, I find “save or die” effects, along with “hard control” (the total stun-type effects that say ‘no, you don’t play for now’) to be hard to get right.

Yup. "save or die" is just a terrible mechanism all the way around (and "save or incapacitated" still falls into this category, as you stated). Defenses, ideally, should be scaled things, with scaled effects. And the things you are defending against should (ideally) be scaled as well. Sometimes, "all or nothing" effects are unavoidable, but game systems should attempt to avoid them to the greatest desgree possible IMO. I'm a big fan of "wound track" systems, since this allows for such scaling (while getting away from the standard HP model). The same concept can be applied to multiple types of effects. Imagine if you had a track for all three of those defense types, and where you are on the track determines how affected you are by that kind of damage (physical, mental, spiritual?, whatever...). Now, how many points you have in defense for each area reduces the track movement from any given damage/effect of that type. This makes linear scaling of the defenses actually work well, and gives a decent reason for even just a few points on each of the defense types.

If putting 3 points into a defense just means a slightly lower chance of being incapacitated by an effect of that type, I'm probably not going to spend those points. But if those same 3 points means the difference between being one-shotted by an effect of that type, and "I'm affected, but still functional, but one more such hit will take me down", I'm going to totally spend those points. A small amount spent on each defense in that model, effectively doubles the amount of hits I can take of that type. And higher defenses may make me even more resistant, standing up to a number of hits (possibly scaling all the way to being able to ignore all but the most powerful attacks of that type).

But that's just my preference for games. IME, players don't like playing out an encounter where their character spends it lying face down in the mud. If the "balance" is that "in any given combat, X% of the party will be disabled, while the rest save the day", that's going to always be un-fun for X% of the players, and should be avoided. Which, I suppose, loops me back to the RPS problem mentioned above. I'm just not a fan.

And, as several posters have pointed out, players tend to have more fun and prefer to idenfity with what they can do to others and not so much what they are good at taking in terms of what others do to them. That's the whole "active vs passive" stuff. Players want to "do things". So focus the success of an encounter on them making good choices in terms of active/offensive abilities, and less on whether their choice of defenses during character creation matches up well with whatever offensive abilities the bad guys are using.

[icefractal]

...We live in fundamentally different worlds. Yes, enemies hit on 7+ and crit on 17+. That is the balance point where the game math was balanced around. That is the point where debuffing an enemy will reduce its crit rate to only 20+, or where flanking can effectively get its bonus up to hitting on a 5+/critting on a 15+. It's the point where Raise a Shield or Take Cover can make a meaningful difference in enemy damage, even for a Monk or Champion sitting at 2 AC over the Fighter as their unique gimmick. I don't understand how 'carefully calibrated to where game math is most meaningful' is 'barely sufficient'. Being crit by a boss easily is why the boss is threatening at your level.I can't speak for everyone, but personally, where this falls down for me is that it utterly fails to convey that a PC is "tanky". Getting hit more often than not (by a "normal" foe for your level, not the BBEG) and getting crit often is not tanky, unless AC is not actually supposed to be important and people have damage-reducing abilities instead?

So let me ask you this - for enemies that are "tanky", do the PCs still hit them on an 8+ out of the box? Not "can they do it with teamwork and setup time" because the enemies don't need those things.

That kind of asymmetry - that PCs need to scramble and specialize and use teamwork and tactics to match what theoretically "on par" enemies can do just by existing - makes the PCs feel like perpetual underdogs. And if the setting was geared to this - like a Shadow of the Colossus type deal where the enemies are just way stronger than you and you can only hope to win by superior tactics - then that'd be fine. The problem is that the game sells a false premise of "the PCs are powerful and competent adventurers" and then they get clowned on by NPCs who are theoretically "on par" with them.

[Satinavian]

...Nno? This is just plain wrong. I don't know how else to say it. None of your feat slots are required to get all the required/expected abilities for your party role. You get 1-2 per level, even outside of the extremely common Free Archetype rule that increases your class feats.Really ? I don't need my class feats for my party role ?

Also "Free Archetype" is already doing exactly that : Giving extra feats. And that it is such a popular rule shows how many other people believe the game would be way better with more feats.


Yes, saves are overtuned because Paizo apparently has a grudge against Wizards. You're not wrong.I am with Ignimortis here : There shouldn't be dominate tactics. There should be many viable tactics, most of them shining extra bright in specific situation and being useless in certain others. That is how fights not become stale. If every fight is basically the same, i lose interest very fast.


My brain, as a preference, likes looking at games and asking "what happens if I take this number as high as the game will let me?" and then making a character to complement that high number.And i don't like or play minmaxxed characters. For them chasing "the best" always constraints character building variety too much. I generally prefer if the balance point of a game is one or two steps below the builds with the highest numbers.

Now that does not mean that PF2 can't be improved. But as i said, for me i would rather play a system that is already more to my taste than investing lots of time into homebrewing and then trying to find players who want to play some untested howmebrew.

[Tyndmyr]

I have always thought it meant a player character which is run by the GM.

I agree. I think perhaps the person is using the term in an atypical fashion, to describe overpowered NPCs.

Which, to be fair, have also been a problem, and one that shares some overlap with the GMPC worries. Railroading, lack of player agency....it has other terms as well. In Larping, one might encounter the term "NPC Theater" to pejoratively describe any situation in which two or more NPCs interacting with the others is the main conflict, and the players are largely bystanders.

GMPC is a bit more specific, I think, and does not encompass every possible such agency-depriving situation....but I can see why the term gets mashed in there. It's sort of getting at a similar thing, and words are sometimes used imprecisely.

As always, I myself prefer to use the term fairly strictly, and find that when done so, the practice of GMPCs is generally undesirable, but not every undesirable thing is a GMPC.




So again, if you can JUST START MAKING A CHARACTER and purchase said items/abilities they are NOT end game items nor end game abilities

you are just being salty and needlessly punitive for reasons that are trivial and oppressive just to get players to do what you want them to do.

The logic appears to be that spending some points on equipment is fine. Spending all points on equipment and none on anything else is unwise, as your character is now basically just a loot drop.

An explicit point limit may be of help in such circumstances. I had to institute one in one such game because of one player that wished to make rich, suicidal characters to join the group, promptly die, leaving their loot to the party, and reroll immediately. That's a sort of video game approach that doesn't quite fit the world of many games, and tamping down such munchkinry may be necessary.



Adventurers, if they start with the loot, do presumably own it in a manner the regional government recognizes, by inheritance or whatever other means.

I have played quite a lot of RPGs, but do not recall any of them ever being set in the sort of world where the NPC government accurately and efficiently handles ownership in great detail. Such a world usually doesn't need adventurers.

Obviously, Paranoia is the sole exception, as Friend Computer handles this problem perfectly.

[Fable Wright]

PF2 doesn't do that. If you're fighting something in PF2, it's never a "glass cannon", because all enemies of a similar level have similar EHP. Nothing ever has a save bonus abysmal enough to fail same-level saving throws more often than 50% of the time. There's never a "lumbering brute" that can be kited indefinitely, because pretty much everything can either double move for 50 or 60 feet + Strike once, or make ranged attacks in kind. There aren't any mooks that die in one hit, because if they die that easily, they're likely level-5 or below, and thus are quite literally unable to pose any threat aside from maybe granting flanking to a higher-level enemy - for a level 14 character to kill an enemy in one hit, even, say, on an appropriately runed scythe crit (8d10+16+4d6, avg 74), they'd have to be...level 4? They simply cannot touch the level 14 PC. Etc.

This is the core, meaningful feedback for the system I can get behind: Because everything is made to scale by level, fights end up roughly the same. The homogenization of monster design means that players don't get free wins against targets. This is especially bad at high levels, as enemy HP inflation can be bad against groups of mooks, and casters' "weak target" saves often have them lose turns.

For the record, there are glass cannon enemies in PF2e—those with a low effective AC take damage that scales harder than their HP—but they tend to be able to take a couple hits from the HP inflation because of how much more that scales with damage.

Would you say that this is a fair way takeaway? That even if you're aiming for a balanced system, include obvious weaknesses even to the highest levels for the sake of rewarding diversified builds, for the goal of preferred strategy being 'find the weakness and do what you can to hammer it'? Bare minimum, include 'catch-up' feats that allow you to invest in a skill without a high primary stat and still get comparable returns to an expert?


With how PF2 works, it expects you to go to X, because that's the number that the game is balanced around. Taking twice as many numbers to Y just means you're bad at everything, and even having all relevant numbers at X doesn't mean you're amazing, just that you're good enough to fully utilize those numbers. For me it means I have to pull out all the stops just to do one cool thing properly, and still have a 30% chance of failing to do that (e.g. - Whirling Throw, rolled at +32 at level 15, is generally opposed by DC39 for a same-level enemy, and a whole DC43 for a level+3 enemy - that is, if they're Medium and not, say, Gargantuan like a proper target for that ability - that would be a +28 roll instead).

And PF2 is built exactly that exact principle - it's a losing numbers race against an ever-speeding-up treadmill, and you never really "hard counter" anything (even though sometimes you yourself are hard countered rather directly). Once one starts changing things to suit a pattern more in line with my preferences, it's likely one would've arrived at a similar result with less effort by picking a different starting system altogether. Which is why I say that PF2 has some decent concepts (I like how conditions work, for the most part, and skill feats are great if a bit slow to come to the best parts - can't wait for Cloud Jump next level), but the core math and most of the content built around that math holds them back (in my perspective), and also why I think the most important thing PF2 can be looked to, for a TTRPG designer, is a cautionary tale about overvaluing balance in a TTRPG. Yes, you can rebalance the numbers, but that doesn't solve the issue of content still being focused around numbers and numbers only, nor does it solve the issue of those numbers being rather narrow in themselves and thus leading to a certain approach to dealing with them in almost every situation.

There are several relevant counterpoints here:

1. The ubiquity of the numbers, lack of hard countered enemies, and rubber-banding of monster design make this the only D&D-alike (next to 4e) where challenge rating is a systemically consistent indication of threat. I have had a friend who's tried to GM for games that I'm in before. In D&D 5e, alleged CR 18s go down to a level 9 character. Many games like Exalted don't even have CRs to give new GMs the building blocks to work up to meaningfully challenging encounters. On the other hand, he can throw together meaningfully designed encounters in PF2e. Making hard-countered monsters means that breaks back down—if a CR+3 boss can be stunlocked 60% of the time by a lower-level party, the encounter math breaks hard; and that's where he'd have to be at for a 80% failure chance to lower level PCs.

2. The ten year old playing the Fighter did not run into issues where he was complaining about spreading himself too thin. That is a 'you' problem bringing in expectations from previous game systems in with you. Those who experience it blind have a better experience than those who experience 3.PF blind.

Cards on the table, while PF2e is probably my favorite of the D&D-alikes... I'd much rather be playing Exalted 3e in a D&D setting. Heck, that's what I'm running at the moment. That has the same hard-cap on numbers as PF2e based on Excellencies and hard-capped stats; but monsters just exist with no real presentation of CR, just having statblocks with their abilities. It's much more work for a GM to figure out what's a good encounter or not; but diverse solutions can absolutely work; you can have a party where the person sunk half his charms in Bureaucracy next to a combat specialist and still have fun; a strategic set of ~4 combat charms can turn the bureaucrat into a competent fighter; and it supports power levels from 'world-changing demigod' to 'Princes of the world threatened by the return of nascent god-kings but busier with internal civil war' to shapeshifters living on the edges of reality and fighting back chaos. Or Sidereals, the unconditionally best splat and I will not hear otherwise until we see what Getimians are like.

The extreme barrier to entry for a GM has led me to never see a game of it run outside the internet. When I've tried to run it, I was incompetent at balancing challenges and party spotlight. This was common to most people I've seen trying to run it on the internet.

PF2e gives you consistent quality, GM to GM. If you tweak the chassis, you can tweak what that quality is like, but while that consistent quality is probably going to be outshined by a skilled PF1e or Exalted 3e or any number of other game system GMs... finding and developing those GMs is hard. The friend who's tried to run a number of games for me and other friends just gave up because balancing was impossible for him; he refuses to run a game system other than PF2e now, because PF2e gives him the tools to ensure that at least the threat levels are in the right place.

EDIT: System question addressing.

I can't speak for everyone, but personally, where this falls down for me is that it utterly fails to convey that a PC is "tanky". Getting hit more often than not (by a "normal" foe for your level, not the BBEG) and getting crit often is not tanky, unless AC is not actually supposed to be important and people have damage-reducing abilities instead?

So let me ask you this - for enemies that are "tanky", do the PCs still hit them on an 8+ out of the box? Not "can they do it with teamwork and setup time" because the enemies don't need those things.

Yes, they do.


That kind of asymmetry - that PCs need to scramble and specialize and use teamwork and tactics to match what theoretically "on par" enemies can do just by existing - makes the PCs feel like perpetual underdogs. And if the setting was geared to this - like a Shadow of the Colossus type deal where the enemies are just way stronger than you and you can only hope to win by superior tactics - then that'd be fine. The problem is that the game sells a false premise of "the PCs are powerful and competent adventurers" and then they get clowned on by NPCs who are theoretically "on par" with them.

A design decision was made in which non-human monsters get inflated stats on the assumption that they wouldn't be used together synergistically. I disagree with the decision and have consistently said that I'd prefer lowering the saves and flat DCs that the PCs need to target.


Really ? I don't need my class feats for my party role ?

Also "Free Archetype" is already doing exactly that : Giving extra feats. And that it is such a popular rule shows how many other people believe the game would be way better with more feats.

The game is better with extra feats. But yes, if you make a Fighter and invest all of your extra feats into weird multiclass things, you're still a Fighter and will still be effective at your role.


I am with Ignimortis here : There shouldn't be dominate tactics. There should be many viable tactics, most of them shining extra bright in specific situation and being useless in certain others. That is how fights not become stale. If every fight is basically the same, i lose interest very fast.

Fights are not the same; a fight with a PL +1 Aboleth and a large number of PL -4 meatshields plays out extremely different than a fight against a single PL+3 bladesinger plays out different to a fight with two PL+1 graveknights in a trapped room that they use to their advantage. The predominant tactic for PL+3 fights like the bladesinger is trying like hell to get a debuff to stick whittle it down; fight against the Aboleth has a dominant tactic of trying to keep the mooks from meatshielding with crowd control and then bursting down the aboleth; graveknights might be handled by debuffing one to focus down and then the other, suffering the trap, or it might be to set up as hard crowd control as you can to buy time to deal with the trap. PF2e has a rep for the debuff + focus fire being the predominant tactic because that is the strategy for boss fights, but unless your GM only throws single enemy encounters at you, there's a wide variety in dominant tactics.


Now that does not mean that PF2 can't be improved. But as i said, for me i would rather play a system that is already more to my taste than investing lots of time into homebrewing and then trying to find players who want to play some untested howmebrew.

Great. Good for you. Even at the state where the game is at, I'd rather play it than 5e where my fighter spends time in the Banish dimension regularly and party tactics boil down to 'loot goes to the fastest!', and at every FLGS in my area, getting PF2e is about the best hope I have at getting a non-5e game going.

[kyoryu]

Yup. We had a thread recently that discussed the pros and cons of Rock-Paper-Scissor style resolution. This is always a problem when the game system pushes characters into a "very tough, unlesss...<some weakness>". In HoD, the whole "put points into defenses, but there are three, and putting a little in each isn't worth much, so you should really focus on one, but if you pick wrong you're going to get hosed", has some similar aspects to that. This can be alleviated a bit by making the effects from those defenses a bit more scalable (which may be the case here). But if you don't do this, and the effects are more strong/absolute, then it takes us to this issue:


One of the things with RPS is that a lot depends on when you make your choice - if it's at character build time, then it can leave players kinda screwed.

If you move it to encounter-time or even per-turn, it can give you a lot of more interesting gameplay options.

Usually people look at it at teh build-level, though. And I think that's a bit problematic, basically like hte Pokemon examples previously mentioned.

[Vahnavoi]

Maybe we are talking at cross purposes then. When I first made the statement, I was talking about tactical decisions like focusing fire on the unarmored guy, grappling the small puny guy, using AoE against the bunched up guys, disarming the guy with the glowing magic sword, etc. and how a lot of players feel that you are punishing / picking on them OOC for employment such tactics which, to me, are just common sense for the bad guys to use.

Your perpetual failure is conflating "common sense" tactics with good or "optimal" tactics.

None of the actions you describe can be determined to be optimal in a vacuum. They're just basic actions a player could try in a game, how much they're worth is game and situation dependent. The actual point is that in an asymmetric game, they can have wildly different worth to different sides in play.

Let's go through your examples: focusing fire on the unarmored guy? The presumption is that this guy is easier to hit, but in 3.5 D&D, a PC-class character in light or no armor can actually be harder to hit than one in heavy armor. Grappling the small puny guy? PC-class characters have lot of ways to mitigate size difference or even turn it into an advantage. Using area attacks against bunched up characters? The whole reason they're bunched up can be because one of them has area defense as a contingency. Disarming the guy with glowing sword? PC-class characters have lot of ways to fake a weapon being magic.

So when you, in the role of an opposing player, makes the decision to employ any of these tactics, what information do you make that decision on? Because again: lot of the complaints you face are based on the presumption that you are giving the opposing side correct information by fiat. As in, in practice, enemies only try these actions when you know they'd be effective, and never fail to take these actions out of the honest consideration that the "common sense" tactics might be kinda bad.

[Ignimortis]

This is the core, meaningful feedback for the system I can get behind: Because everything is made to scale by level, fights end up roughly the same. The homogenization of monster design means that players don't get free wins against targets. This is especially bad at high levels, as enemy HP inflation can be bad against groups of mooks, and casters' "weak target" saves often have them lose turns.
Funny thing is, some enemies get free wins against players solely by the dint of PC saves not being as inflated. We once spent half an hour in an encounter with some sort of plant that had a "apply confusion every turn until you succeed on a save" aura. Sat around for five turns getting wailed on, because the DC for it ended up requiring 15+ on a d20 for several party members, and those who needed "only" an 11+ were rather unlucky that day. It was amusingly close to a TPK.



Would you say that this is a fair way takeaway? That even if you're aiming for a balanced system, include obvious weaknesses even to the highest levels for the sake of rewarding diversified builds, for the goal of preferred strategy being 'find the weakness and do what you can to hammer it'? Bare minimum, include 'catch-up' feats that allow you to invest in a skill without a high primary stat and still get comparable returns to an expert?
Yes. Almost everything having an obvious or a not-so-obvious-but-exploitable weakness is good design, IMO. And if you make an enemy unusually fortified (immune to crits, 5e disadvantage on attacks against it, regeneration, resistance to most damage types), it's not enough to go "well, this enemy has about 2/3 as much HP as an average creature of its' level". There needs to be a weakpoint you can hit hard, because otherwise it's just a slog.

As for skills, I'm not sure what exactly could be done. Maybe Assurance bumped up to "take 13 with no stat mod" instead of "take 10 with no stat mod".



There are several relevant counterpoints here:

1. The ubiquity of the numbers, lack of hard countered enemies, and rubber-banding of monster design make this the only D&D-alike (next to 4e) where challenge rating is a systemically consistent indication of threat. I have had a friend who's tried to GM for games that I'm in before. In D&D 5e, alleged CR 18s go down to a level 9 character. Many games like Exalted don't even have CRs to give new GMs the building blocks to work up to meaningfully challenging encounters. On the other hand, he can throw together meaningfully designed encounters in PF2e. Making hard-countered monsters means that breaks back down—if a CR+3 boss can be stunlocked 60% of the time by a lower-level party, the encounter math breaks hard; and that's where he'd have to be at for a 80% failure chance to lower level PCs.
Not untrue. A lot of people praise PF2 for being one of the easiest D&D-likes to work with as a GM, even compared to D&D 5e, despite the higher mechanical load of PF2.



2. The ten year old playing the Fighter did not run into issues where he was complaining about spreading himself too thin. That is a 'you' problem bringing in expectations from previous game systems in with you. Those who experience it blind have a better experience than those who experience 3.PF blind.
Also not untrue, but let's be honest, the Fighter chassis carries itself. It's almost too good numerically, simply because it gets sufficient AC, decent saves and impossibly high to-hit from the start of the game. As for expectations, I think that PF2 isn't exactly correct when it calls itself a heroic fantasy system. Fantasy is there, but heroic the PCs are not, at least not in the same sense as you would be in PF1 or 3.5 or 5e. And that's very much related to how it's tuned and how it plays out.



PF2e gives you consistent quality, GM to GM. If you tweak the chassis, you can tweak what that quality is like, but while that consistent quality is probably going to be outshined by a skilled PF1e or Exalted 3e or any number of other game system GMs... finding and developing those GMs is hard. The friend who's tried to run a number of games for me and other friends just gave up because balancing was impossible for him; he refuses to run a game system other than PF2e now, because PF2e gives him the tools to ensure that at least the threat levels are in the right place.
Not sure about Exalted (there are many factors why it's hard to run, I think), but my current PF1 game is run by a person who has only ever run oWoD games before. He's doing pretty well. It's certainly more fun mechanically than the PF2 game I'm in right now - the GM of that one does try, but it's clear the system is holding the game back.

[Satinavian]

Great. Good for you. Even at the state where the game is at, I'd rather play it than 5e where my fighter spends time in the Banish dimension regularly and party tactics boil down to 'loot goes to the fastest!', and at every FLGS in my area, getting PF2e is about the best hope I have at getting a non-5e game going.Well, if the only options were PF2 and 5E i would probably stick to PF2 as well. The systems i would rather play than 5e number are roughly a dozen. That does not mean that 5e is one of the worst options out there, just that it is not very close to the best.

As it is, i am happily playing/running Splittermond with 3 groups that already play for years. So far it is the best system i know. But i am considering throwing in a short PF1 campaign just for some change of pace, i sometimes miss all this gonzo nonsense a bit. But i would probably not stick to it. And there are also systems i would play when presented with the option, but not run or others i would run with serious player demand but not look for players without prodding.


Well, enough of the sidetrack. I just want to say "It is better than 5E (in various areas)" is not enough to make me play a system. Most of the benefits of PF2 don't excite me at all and many of its weaknesses are in areas i do care for.

[King of Nowhere]

When I first made the statement, I was talking about tactical decisions like focusing fire on the unarmored guy, grappling the small puny guy, using AoE against the bunched up guys, disarming the guy with the glowing magic sword, etc. and how a lot of players feel that you are punishing / picking on them OOC for employment such tactics which, to me, are just common sense for the bad guys to use.

I can confirm it is just common sense. I've never seen any player object to that.
You just have bad experiences. And bob

[Talakeal]

Your perpetual failure is conflating "common sense" tactics with good or "optimal" tactics.

None of the actions you describe can be determined to be optimal in a vacuum. They're just basic actions a player could try in a game, how much they're worth is game and situation dependent. The actual point is that in an asymmetric game, they can have wildly different worth to different sides in play.

Let's go through your examples: focusing fire on the unarmored guy? The presumption is that this guy is easier to hit, but in 3.5 D&D, a PC-class character in light or no armor can actually be harder to hit than one in heavy armor. Grappling the small puny guy? PC-class characters have lot of ways to mitigate size difference or even turn it into an advantage. Using area attacks against bunched up characters? The whole reason they're bunched up can be because one of them has area defense as a contingency. Disarming the guy with glowing sword? PC-class characters have lot of ways to fake a weapon being magic.

So when you, in the role of an opposing player, makes the decision to employ any of these tactics, what information do you make that decision on? Because again: lot of the complaints you face are based on the presumption that you are giving the opposing side correct information by fiat. As in, in practice, enemies only try these actions when you know they'd be effective, and never fail to take these actions out of the honest consideration that the "common sense" tactics might be kinda bad.

So are you saying that enemies should default to ignoring common sense (in the literal sense, not the colloquial one) because they don't know a deception isn't in play (even though they have no reason to suspect one is)?

That seems very odd, but I am not sure what else you could be trying to say.


Really ?

And why do people specialize in a defense then instead of spreading their points here ? That would mean not taking advantage of the cheap point in all the other defenses and biting the huge cost for the one defense they have. That would not happen unless "moderate defense" s just way too low to matter and might as well not exist or there are synergies between the defense stats and other things. It is probably the latter when attributes are heavily involved : If an attribute you max because of skills also boosts a particular defense, you will be good in this defense.


I would imagine its some combination of character concept, pride, and not having to outrun the bear.

If I see my character as being good at something, I usually want them to be the best at something, that's just human nature. Some people are more into it than others, and some people are more competitive than others, but most don't like to be just "pretty good" at "their thing".

And then, assuming perfect knowledge, the enemy will likely do their best to target the person with the lowest defense against their primary form of attack, so there is some incentive not the be the worst in the party in any given area.


Really ? Would not a party where everyone spread their defenses have fared better ? Where the enemy main attack is less effective against the whole group instead of ineffective against a single person and very effective against all else? Then the whole group can fight on.

Distributing defenses in the party seems stupid. Unless a high defense makes you literally immune against enemy types so that not only being outnumbered does not matter anymore, they don't even have secondary attacks against other, weaker defenses. You should be better off, even as a party, if everyone spreads defense points equally.

Its important to realize that defenses aren't just about "save or lose", most are about eating away at the party's various resources. And you can absolutely play this smart; for example if you fight giant spiders have the people with good fortitude engage them in melee and those with poor fortitude stand in the back.

In the case of normal defenses like dodge and resilience, this is just a basic hammer and anvil (or tank and dps if you prefer) setup.

Likewise, if you get hit by something like an AOE web or an AOE sleep, those who make their save can then go around and free those are failed, while a party that all fails just sits their waiting for coup de grace. Likewise, priests and healers can repair or dispel debuffs if they themselves are free to act.


If this is what you want your system to generate, then that's fine; it's primarily important to be aware of where the incentives are. The incentives are currently at many/most characters having very low stats in most areas, and exceptionally high stats in a few key others, because of the benefit in refining key skills. It had sounded like you intended for character stats to primarily center around human average, and were confused why this didn't often occur.

Can you tell me why you think this is? The idea that one will build a character around a single skill and then raise that skill to the expense of everything else doesn't appear to be borne out by any play testing or white room math I have done, either in end result of player intent.


...Access to a shovel for earthworking, exceptionally fine flour for cooking and fuel-air explosions, cheesewire for causing limbs to be impaled or, well, cutting cheese, should handle most scenarios. Indoors where large earthworks can't be raised is where small-area-resources shine.

Moreover, mana doesn't need to get out of every potential bit of trouble; rationing does a lot of work, and moreover at the end of an adventure, leftover mana can be stockpiled into Holy Water and leftover Concentration can be crafted into Periapts, both of which are stockpiled indefinitely until use.

Couple of things.

How are you planning on carrying the tools you need for your skills, let alone all the materials for cooking and trap making. I am not quite sure what you mean by "small area resources", but I assume any stone-working you do indoors or in paved areas is going to involve carrying materials with you.

Prodigy can't take you above your cap.

Does having one arm normally hinder complex actions? I don't recall that being an issue, and don't see anything in the rules.

Likewise, it will hinder your ability to use a wand, which I am surprised you didn't buy with your starting points given how front loaded this build is. What wand would you use?

I would probably require an additional chakra if you wanted to use acceleration as an enchantment, but that is up to the GM.

Surprised to see no dweomer mastery or ring of power relic given how otherwise focused on a single school this character is.

How do you plan on surviving combat? With a 3 agility, 3 endurance, no armor, the inability to use a shield or parrying dagger, with no free chakras from shrouds (and a not terribly defensive school to begin with), and with only 3 rerolls all dedicated to 1s on spellcasting, I am pretty sure you will have a significant risk of death every time you are engaged in melee or even fired upon.


On a broader sense, starting builds aren't terribly revealing by themselves, I am really curious about how you plan on advancing the character. Because, while this is very front-loaded, I imagine that at 120 or 140 CP, this character will look very different as you are forced to build out rather than up.


How many fights do you have in a day? Breakfast, lunch, and dinner are pretty solid when prep time is handled by a chronomancer. If you have a multi-day adventure as opposed to room after room of dungeon crawl in an afternoon... then why can you afford a few hours of someone singing to cheer one person up?

Not sure quite what you are saying here. I think you left out a word or two.

Perform doesn't take hours, and it effects the entire audience. You should be able to easily find the time in a multi-day adventure, or indeed any time you have a moment between encounters.

What I was saying is that the first perform is DC 20, the second 25, the third 30, the fourth 35, the fifth 40, the sixth 45, etc. So you need 6+ encounters before the average difficulty on (critical) cooking is lower than easier than perform.

Of course, I suppose by RAW there is nothing to stop you from just cooking meal after meal after meal until you get a critical success, although I would question where you are getting all that food to waste, and would probably start applying the penalties for retrying a failed task as cooking does not have mulligan, although I can certainly see the argument for allowing 3+ rolls a day while traveling to represent every meal.


I... hrm. I'm having trouble telling if we're on the same page or not.

Fable's thesis:
Because of the manner in which this system is designed, significant defensive investment is discouraged due to odds of the investment not paying off. A proactive defense requires high stats to pull off, which can be had at the cost of passive defenses. An additional benefit to this is that the proactive defense simultaneously improves offensive abilities.

Corollary: Passive defense investment is a newbie trap, tying down points that can be best used elsewhere, leading to intra-party power imbalance. Likely to lead to subpar gaming experiences; the 3.5e D&D experience of Angel Biker and BMX Bandit is not an impossibility if a player is a spotlight hog. If entire party is on this wagon, may lead to 'rocket tag' or list of binary defense behavior that many viewed as undesirable in D&D 3.5e era.

Talakeal's response [as I understand it]:
This is desirable behavior; high risk build decisions giving more points is an explicit feature of the system to reward mastery. There is no real reason to address the newbie trap issue; that can be solved later by alchemy.

Proposed solution: Reduce cost of passive defense investment for newbies (the packages idea I mentioned, perhaps refined a bit more to increase diversity within packages, would allow you to give defenses for 'free'). See below.
Additionally, potentially introduce more cost scaling to the investment of primary power stat.

The idea that "I am such a skilled player I can use my active abilities to proactively protect myself and therefore don't need defenses" is a laudible one in theory, but in practice everyone has bad days and won't always play at that level. Likewise, when you are already in a bad mood, it is often hard to see those failures as choices you made rather than lashing out and blaming them on the GM / other players.


If you want your character to have a weakness or a min-maxxed ability for either RP or playstyle reasons, that isn't going to break the game.

But a character who spreads around their scores is almost always going to accomplish more than one who min-maxes.

But a team with a variety of strengths and weaknesses that synergizes well together and learns how to work as a team is stronger than either.


If someone has it in their head that they need to min-max, packages or anything else aren't going to stop them. If scaling costs don't get them to pay heed to the guard rails, why would packages? Heck, attribute scores are already "packages" in many ways because they are 3-5 times more efficient than raising scores directly.


I feel like you would actively have to use TO exploits or anti-optimize to go out of your way making a useless character to actually get the BMX Bandit scenario of 3E in HoD, or, well, pretty much any RPG that isn't 3E.


5e's design is a reprehensible joke. :smallyuk:

The editions that did it best were AD&D, 4e, and Pathfinder 2e. AD&D's infinite tables issue was problematic, but because there was clear bounds on where everyone was supposed to fall, because there wasn't a whole lot players could do to modify them. They accepted their strength and weaknesses and moved on because that's your lot.

In 4e and Pathfinder 2e, your saves are all tied to your level, plus modifiers. I'm less familiar with the exact mechanics of 4e than PF2e because I'm in two games of the latter at the moment, but the broad jist is that you have level + proficiency modifier (ranging from +2 to +8, determined by class and level) plus your stat modifier (between -1 and +6). The big thing is that Pathfinder 2e gives you four ASIs every time you level up, letting you retain two weakness stats to represent serious character flaws, but letting you invest in your offensive stat and three defensive stats without being penalized. You get class feats every even level; these can be used to add more lateral abilities to a character, or with a bit of investment, increase one of your defensive-only proficiency modifiers by +2 at level 12; and a second one of your defenses at level 17, to a maximum of +6 each time.

Your defense investment is determined by your class; can be invested in with a few wiggle points; because of the bounded nature of PF2e where critical successes/failures occur 10 above/below every roll, that +2 matters one fifth the time you roll it; there's a cap to the amount you can invest; and you cannot ever directly increase your primary offensive modifier outside of class-based increases.

This design has led PF2e to stand next to 4e in being the most balanced D&D game ever, with martial classes actually beating out most spellcasters in this edition save at the level Prismatic Wall comes online. This sharp curtailing of offensive potential means no rocket tag. The bounded scope of saves means that you don't have party members who are completely hopeless with resisting certain effects.

On the other hand, in 5e, the Intelligence Devourer at level 2 can instantly kill the barbarian by stunning it with a DC 12 int save. At level 20... if the barbarian is surrounded by five intellect devourers, he's got the same odds to save. The only difference is that the threat level has gone "down" by the CR system but the barbarian is vastly more likely to die.

It seems like you and I just have opposite perspectives on what makes for a good RPG. (Although I agree, 5E is yuck).

I really enjoy creativity and freedom, which is something that 4E and PF2 just don't grant. 3E is weird, in that it is, in effect, a super cumbersome and counter intuitive point buy system masquerading as a class based system.

AD&D is by far the best edition of D&D, but it still has lot's of arbitrary restrictions (race/class/alignment combinations the biggest among them). I much prefer Storyteller or Exalted style to any edition of D&D.

[icefractal]

So when you, in the role of an opposing player, makes the decision to employ any of these tactics, what information do you make that decision on? Because again: lot of the complaints you face are based on the presumption that you are giving the opposing side correct information by fiat. As in, in practice, enemies only try these actions when you know they'd be effective, and never fail to take these actions out of the honest consideration that the "common sense" tactics might be kinda bad.Eh, the fact that a deception might exist doesn't mean it's as likely as the lack of one. Of course enemies are operating off incomplete information, which is why they should default to assuming a relatively "standard" situation until there's evidence otherwise.

I mean heck, you know what's fun? Being a monk-type, disguising yourself as a mage, and counter-grappling the **** out of people who rush in to melee you. Which only works because that situation is uncommon and enemies do usually assume "caster looking guy in robe = weak in melee". And we should ditch that so that ... fragile casters never have to deal with melee?

Honestly, as someone who often plays casters, and often dumps Strength ... dealwithit.jpg. Yeah, if you're a classic low-Str mage with no anti-grappling tech, that's going to be one of your major weaknesses. Sometimes that's fine - not having such a weakness might be OP, depending on the rest of the group. Other times, if I don't want that weakness, I take measures against it - Freedom of Movement. Items (not spells, because concentration) that can teleport me at least a short distance. Contingencies. High Escape Artist skill. There are a number of options.

[Fable Wright]

Can you tell me why you think this is? The idea that one will build a character around a single skill and then raise that skill to the expense of everything else doesn't appear to be borne out by any play testing or white room math I have done, either in end result of player intent.

How best to phrase...

You have Bob. You said, effectively, that he had a character that dumped most physical stats in exchange for Will, Int, and Occult. Fable independently produced the same. This is a pattern.

Many game systems have diminishing marginal returns on stats as they increase. Either the costs increase exponentially for a linear benefit, or the costs are linear with a logarithmic benefit. HoD is a system where costs increase linearly for an exponential benefit. Halving the chance of wasted turns or failures for every +1 or +2 in any of the cases where you have a flat DC that you are targeting.

When those skill DCs are based off monster DCs and thus not known, it's fine—linear costs, linear benefits, pick where you want to fall on the line. Intelligence, Occult, and Charisma stand out as exceptions, though. Charisma skills target Resolve or flat DCs, when Resolve appears to be softcapped at around 20. They also, on a critical success, can permanently improve skills above normal cap by getting above-Animus quality items. Intelligence, meanwhile, is relatively cheap to increase (in the sense that you effectively get 1.5 points in Sagacious for every 2 points spent in Intelligence), has flat DCs (meaning returns from repeatedly halving chances of missing DCs), and is the primary stat for 11 separate skills, many of them useful. Compare Charisma, which governs five skills and are only effectively 1 point per increase (given that it costs +/- 1 point for Destiny). Willpower is just the cost of 1 Mana + 1 Concentration on top of boosting a valuable defense. If one can get high value from Concentration and Mana (through use of ritual magic, as an example), then that 10 Concentration can give you the benefits of 10 levels effective levels of Occult for one relevant spell per mission, bringing access to effects that would normally be scoped beyond means, or extra mana per mission through crafted items during downtime, or other niche uses. How best to phrase...

If you would like as much mana as possible (because you're a wizard and the amount you can do is dependent on mana), then the cost of raising Willpower can be effectively a cost of 0.5 points for +1 Will (assuming that one always uses full conversion of 2 conc -> 1 mana through crafting) which is a far greater ROI than most things in the game. Because the higher Willpower goes, the better Willpower is, the return on that 0.5 point investment is higher the more you spend. Thus the incentive to move the slider to max. Likewise Intelligence in the example above.

I will admit that this is less the case with Agility, Perception, Dexterity, Endurance, Perception, or Strength. Or it may be that I just haven't noticed those synergies yet. Either way, the above is my reasoning for my assertion.



Couple of things.

How are you planning on carrying the tools you need for your skills, let alone all the materials for cooking and trap making. I am not quite sure what you mean by "small area resources", but I assume any stone-working you do indoors or in paved areas is going to involve carrying materials with you.

Carrying capacity can be solved by having a trained pack animal or party member's assistance. Small-area resource was a failure of my brain to communicate. What I meant was, traps can use relatively mundane, low-bulk equipment to high effect. Cheesewire is light, low-bulk, and used correctly can slice through flesh as part of a trap if there is a constrained area to force movement through it. It could be carried without much bulk. A rope can take a large piece of rubble to nail someone in the gut. Extremely fine flour can reach critical density in the air far easier in a confined space than in wide open areas. Traps work best in small areas, while earthworking is best in open areas. Including paved areas; most medieval towns are paved dirt roads, or are surrounded on all sides by dirt. And if we're talking about a dungeon... if I can move 10 zones' worth of dirt per action, I can move 10 zones' worth of dirt through the dungeon with us as we go.


Prodigy can't take you above your cap.

Could... you tell me what you mean by 'cap'?


Prodigy Minor Mental Merit
The character has exceptional ability in one skill, either due to natural
aptitude or lifelong experience. Each time this merit is selected, the
character increases their score in a skill of their choice by one.

You can't stack it repeatedly, to my awareness, but it does not indicate that this bonus is of a type that is mutually exclusive with something else. :smallconfused:


Does having one arm normally hinder complex actions? I don't recall that being an issue, and don't see anything in the rules.

Fable does not know whether a hostile GM might give you a circumstantial penalty not explicitly mentioned in the rules for having one arm when trying to do complex actions.


Likewise, it will hinder your ability to use a wand, which I am surprised you didn't buy with your starting points given how front loaded this build is. What wand would you use?

Failed to notice that Wands were in a section. To be honest, I kinda glossed over the fact that Dweomer Master reduces the cost per instance. Four points of DM letting you apply Multi for +1 DC per doubling is, to be frank, absurd. I would save a few points to add in Dweomer Master (Multi) x4, unquestionably, probably trading out heirloom masonry. Using a wand... I would probably pass on the opportunity, to be honest, because Dweomer Master gets better returns. Which would you rather: 8 character points for one extra Alacritous spell per turn, or 8 character points to be able to reduce the cost of Alacritous to +2 DC, and scale up to many extra spells per turn?


I would probably require an additional chakra if you wanted to use acceleration as an enchantment, but that is up to the GM.

System does not indicate how to handle chakra for incantations turned spells. I would advise indicating your instincts somewhere in the text to communicate to players that it is a possibility; I'd have slipped Ka in there if I'd known.


How do you plan on surviving combat? With a 3 agility, 3 endurance, no armor, the inability to use a shield or parrying dagger, with no free chakras from shrouds (and a not terribly defensive school to begin with), and with only 3 rerolls all dedicated to 1s on spellcasting, I am pretty sure you will have a significant risk of death every time you are engaged in melee or even fired upon.

Plan A: If there is dirt around, win initiative and set up a defensive positioning that prevents engagement.
Plan B: If there is not dirt around, creating a barricade with furniture is probably a feasible use of a Complex Action.
Plan C: Regardless of A or B, there are presumably party members who can be Hasted to intercept and prevent engagement.
Plan D: If melee is sufficiently dissuaded by plans A-C, Celerity metamagic to either stun with Halt, flee before someone can close to melee through Haste on self, or cast Haste on ally so that they can intercept the movement and get in a Riposte to dissuade further focus fire. There is little risk of losing the initiative check to successfully run away on the interrupted action.
Plan E: If A-D fails, wounds can be patched as a Complex Action [down to a standard action with Acceleration] to cut wound loss in half, and many forms of damage can be undone with Chronomancy healing, and a Contingency [x2] Haste set up at the start of the mission to trigger when one hopes to get out of trouble is a suitable backup plan.
Plan F: If A-E fails, Ritualized Contingency x2 Eternity in a Bottle on an allied party member. If the scene ends without my character alive to disenchant, we try again, and again, and again until we all make it through. 'Save' the successful run with disenchanting the Eternity.

The goal is generally to give people bigger problems to worry about than a 12-year-old, and make sufficient hassle to reach the 12 year old through means of Home Alone, earthworks, or magically enhanced fleeing that you will instead deal with another party member, with an absolute trump available.

Rerolls dedicated to spellcasting will exceed 3, as Priest is an infinite source of casting-dependent rerolls between combats.


On a broader sense, starting builds aren't terribly revealing by themselves, I am really curious about how you plan on advancing the character. Because, while this is very front-loaded, I imagine that at 120 or 140 CP, this character will look very different as you are forced to build out rather than up.

That depends on what is revealed to be lacking in play, in party comp or character's resources in particular. Barring external influence, probably save for Dweomer Mastery (Alacrity) and further increased Chronomancy.


Not sure quite what you are saying here. I think you left out a word or two.

Perform doesn't take hours, and it effects the entire audience. You should be able to easily find the time in a multi-day adventure, or indeed any time you have a moment between encounters.

Perform is a Complex Action. It appears to take the exact same amount of time as cooking or setting up earthworks. The advantage to cooking is that it will be on par with Perform after the first three performances, and being flat difficulty after that means that it scales harder. Strictly speaking, Cooking can be done to make sandwiches of superb skill after every combat to restore morale. I did goof initially and did not realize that Perform affects the whole audience; that was my bad.


It seems like you and I just have opposite perspectives on what makes for a good RPG. (Although I agree, 5E is yuck).

I really enjoy creativity and freedom, which is something that 4E and PF2 just don't grant. 3E is weird, in that it is, in effect, a super cumbersome and counter intuitive point buy system masquerading as a class based system.

AD&D is by far the best edition of D&D, but it still has lot's of arbitrary restrictions (race/class/alignment combinations the biggest among them). I much prefer Storyteller or Exalted style to any edition of D&D.

As I mentioned upthread, I prefer Exalted to any D&D variant. I prefer Unknown Armies to any D&D variant. Or Shadowrun, or Ars Magica, over a class-based system. Our preferences are not as far away as my defense of PF2e indicates.

The reason I have been stating defense for Pathfinder 2e is because, from what you have related, Heart of Darkness is primarily a dungeon crawl. Everyone is expected to participate in combat. That is not the case in the aforementioned systems. In Shadowrun, there's a street sam, but also the getaway driver and the hacker and the social face who aren't expected to spec into combat. In Exalted, sure, you might have a kung-fu bureaucrat, but you could also be playing the greatest melee fighter in Creation bodyguarding an Eclipse diplomat to the Fae, aiming to secure safe passage to a lost pocket of Creation to uncover its lost wonders. In Unknown Armies, you could be a methodical serial killer or a broke med student trying to pull a Breaking Bad. No one is going to look at your med student and ask "so what are you going to do in a fight?" The answer is probably "run and hide". Maybe "call the police". Because being that terrified med student trapped in a firefight coming back from that trauma can be an interesting and fun experience in and of itself.

When I sit down to look at Heart of Darkness, I see that it's about dungeon crawls and activities to support dungeon crawling. It does not signpost what good defenses are for starting characters. It doesn't signpost what good offenses look like for a character. It doesn't prevent you from dumping Fortitude, or even strongly discourage doing so outside of GM build guidance. When you're in a scenario where everyone is going to need to be productive in a fight, competitiveness over effectiveness often emerges. It's human nature. And you're going to have a percentage of people who don't invest wisely and suffer for it. If everyone needs to be competent, add guardrails to keep them from messing up, and add caps to keep someone from outshining the others too brightly.

[Vahnavoi]

Eh, the fact that a deception might exist doesn't mean it's as likely as the lack of one. Of course enemies are operating off incomplete information...

The entire issue I'm underlining is that whether enemies operate as if they have incomplete information depends on how a game is set up and what the game master is actually doing. Which a player presumes going in also changes how fair or punitive they think the game master is being, because tactics that are fair when all parties have incomplete information can become grosly unfair when one party does not.

As noted near the beginning of this tangent, it's entirely possible to set up a game so that it's perfectly clear players have no special dispensations for tactics - that is, a game where they have to "just deal with it". Whether Talakeal has succesfully done that is the actual question. The answer to that question is what decides whether the complaints are justified, or whether the complaints are barking up the wrong tree.

---

EDIT:


So are you saying that enemies should default to ignoring common sense (in the literal sense, not the colloquial one) because they don't know a deception isn't in play (even though they have no reason to suspect one is)?

That seems very odd, but I am not sure what else you could be trying to say.

No. I'm asking you a question that would determine whether your concept of fair play is even appropriate for the game you actually run. Answer the question first before wondering what enemies in your game should do.

[gbaji]

One of the things with RPS is that a lot depends on when you make your choice - if it's at character build time, then it can leave players kinda screwed.

If you move it to encounter-time or even per-turn, it can give you a lot of more interesting gameplay options.

Usually people look at it at teh build-level, though. And I think that's a bit problematic, basically like hte Pokemon examples previously mentioned.

Yeah. RPS is generally ok enough as a decision point while playing (as long as changing tactics is a thing that can be done situationally). It can lead to problems if it's applied at the build level though since the player can't change their build to adjust for changes in the setting. The example of every player taking one defense and then failing badly against a single medium power opponent because no one had any ability to resist its special attack highlights this problem.


So are you saying that enemies should default to ignoring common sense (in the literal sense, not the colloquial one) because they don't know a deception isn't in play (even though they have no reason to suspect one is)?

That seems very odd, but I am not sure what else you could be trying to say.

If I'm reading correctly, he's saying that you are the GM. You are playing the enemies. So you need to be careful that when you have your NPCs make common sense tactical decisions, that you are doing this consistently, and not only doing so when it benefits the NPCs. You have knowledge that the NPCs do not. You know if that guy with light armor is really going to be more affected by a fireball or a different spell. You know if the guy in a robe is really a wimpy caster who will be vulnerable to grapple, or a monk wearing a robe who will own the NPC who tries this.

This is not a dig on you personally, but an observation about GMing in general. It's very common for GMs to have NPCs make tactical decisions while taking into account the GM's own knowledge (often subconsciously). It's actually quite difficult as a GM to *not* do this. You know that the guy in the center of that tightly packed group of PCs has an amulet of fire restance 10' radius, but the NPC spell caster does not. It's really really tempting to just have that NPC cast something other than fireball in that situation. And hey. It's easy to rationalize. He's got a bunch of different spells he could cast, so there's no particular reason he would have cast fireball that round against that group, right? But the players will start to notice when the guy with the fire resistance is always hit with lightning bolt, and the guy with electricity resistance is always hit with fireball. And the PC with high strength never has anyone try to grapple him, but the one with low strength is hit with grapple attacks every combat. And what a coincidence that the guy with the active concentration spell effect going that was really helping the group out gets targeted with some kind of spell or effect that disrupts concentration.

Sometimes, the NPC choices are obvious and make sense. They can see who looks strong and who doesn't, and who is focusing on some spell effect, and who isn't. But some things they can't see or know so well. That's where GMs have to be really careful.


I once played with a GM who did this sort of thing all the time (and yeah, pretty convinced it wasn't intentional, he was just trying to have his NPCs be efficient). The absolute most blatant example was when we had a character who had a super rare and powerful artifact that made them immune to chaos features when weilding it (was a super powerful weapon of Law). We were fighting chaos creatures, and one of them had a choas feature that allowed it to breath fire. At some point in the combat, it breathed on her, and she was unaffected. Kudos for him having the NPC do something ineffective, right? Except that, somehow, he decided that this meant that the NPCs knew she was immune to chaos (which is literally a super rare thing, that exists only on a single one of a kind artifact that she had, and none of these NPCs could possibly even know it existed, much less that she had it). The NPCs apparently concluded this anyway, instead of a miriad of other ways she could have taken no damage from the fire. It's a simple 3d6 effect, weakest armor blocks. She could have had more than the die rolled amount of damage in armor. Heck. It's trivial to get 10-12 points of armor just using mundane armor and basic defensive spells that many combat cults have. More powerful spells can get that up much higher, as can wearing enchanted armor. And even if the NPC assumed some kind of immunity or special resistance, it would make a whole lot more sense to assume it was to "fire" and not "chaos". But... the GM knew it was chaos, so he had an NPC run up to her with a pot of oil, spill it over/around her, and then toss a torch on it. Cause.... reasons.

I remember the entire table of players just watching this happen and thinking: Really? But in his mind, the NPC's actions made perfect sense because it was "obvious" that since she wasn't affected by the fire breathing, that it must mean she was immune to chaos effects, so trying to find some other way to light that character on fire was perfectly reasonable. Note, they didn't even bother to try other combat tactics (which actually might have worked, since she was otherwise a well skilled but not uber tough warrior). Nope. They decided that they really really wanted to set her on fire, so that's what they did (I actually suspect this GM also really liked fire too, so when he couldn't hit her with fire one way, he tried another). And in this case, it wasn't even that the tactic itself was unsound. Pouring oil on someone and lighting them on fire is a perfectly valid tactic. It was just the sequence of how that came to happen seemed odd. I mean. If I was the guy with the pot of oil and a torch, and I was looking for someone to light on fire, the last person I'd single out of a group of opponents would be the one person I just saw have fire breathed on them and be undamaged. Even if you don't know why that happened, maybe target someone else anyway? You got one pot of oil, and one torch. Pick a different target.

But that would require actually thinking from the NPCs perspective though. The GM was thinking in terms of "ok. that didn't work, what else can I do that might hurt this character". And that's always a dangerous line of thinking for a GM. It's just too easy to apply your own knowlege of that specific character's abilities to the solution you come up with. And the result can be NPC actions, which make perfect sense to the GM, but actually make no sense at all from the NPCs perspective.

[SquidFighter]

So, I've been reading the thread and here are my two cents :

You can't balance game mechanics with story elements. Game mechanics should be balanced by other aspects of the mechanics.
Having a high-magic low-physical strength build be balanced by being vulnerable to physical combat mechanics is fine.

But you can't balance a overly-high physical build by threatening "the strong-men association will be jealous and try and stop you".
That's an adventure. And you don't disentivise a player from doing something by threatening them with gameplay.

So your munchkin Bob, with enough high-power artifacts attracting BBEG ? Sounds like a cool game premise to me, not a balancing mechanism.
And at that point, as a DM, your job is to make the adventure fun.

[kyoryu]

This is not a dig on you personally, but an observation about GMing in general. It's very common for GMs to have NPCs make tactical decisions while taking into account the GM's own knowledge (often subconsciously). It's actually quite difficult as a GM to *not* do this.

100%.

This pops up in a lot of ways. For instance, the NPCs can defend against the PCs' invasion plans for their hideout - with the GM forgetting that the NPCs wouldn't know the actual invasion plan, and would have to plan against any possible plan.

One of the easiest is chasing players.... sure, it makes sense if you know that it's a party of PCs. But the enemies don't know if they're chasing them straight back to a larger formation or not.

It takes a good amount of mental effort to remind yourself of other options that the NPCs might have to think about, when you as the GM already know the actual truth.

[gbaji]

This pops up in a lot of ways. For instance, the NPCs can defend against the PCs' invasion plans for their hideout - with the GM forgetting that the NPCs wouldn't know the actual invasion plan, and would have to plan against any possible plan.

Or heck. Just the layout and defenses of an NPC hideout, stronghold, lair, whatever. It's really really easy as a GM to think in terms of "what nasty defenses/traps can I put in here to make things hard for the PCs". But you also have to consider that the NPCs need to actually live/work here too. You have to remember that while your objective as a GM may be "challenge the PCs while they proceed on their quest for <whatever>" that is *not* the NPCs objective. They are trying to live in their home, conduct their business, engage in whatever things they are doing. The spaces NPCs inhabit need to first serve their own purposes, and then secondly constitute something potentially difficult for the PCs to manage.

This can come up in really subtle ways sometimes. I remember I was setting up a lair for a rogue they were tracking. There was a locked cabinet where he kept valuables. I decided to put a needle poison trap on it. Seems like something a rogue might set up to stop people trying to steal his own stuff, right? And since this guy was like a master thief, it was a really difficult trap too. But then I had to stop and think: "Ok. But he stores stuff here, so he has to be able to open this thing up, not just once, but repeatedly". Most game systems have some kind of skill roll that auto fails, no matter how good you are (like 1 in 20, right?). So.... He would presumably occasionally fail to successfully disarm his own trap and get stuck by the needle (maybe a double fail, since he knows about it, but still something that will happen if he's opening and closing this thing every time he needs to get something out or put something in).

So I had to think about how the NPC would actually use this thing, and not just how it would serve as a risk/obstacle to the PCs. In this particular case, I had him keep a vial of antidote to the poison on a shelf right next to the cabinet (among some other vials, with colored labels so he would know which was which, but someone else would not). He could just take an antidote every time, but that would be expensive, so having one on hand (just in case) made sense, but it was also in a vial where only he would know which was which (and the others varied from "nothing" to "more poison"). So... Still a nastry trap for the party, but now one that made sense and would work as intended by the guy who set it.

There's lots of little things that you can do as a GM to make the behavior of your NPCs (and even the environment itself) work better and seem more "real" to the players. And a big part of that is realizing that these NPCs and that environment doesn't actually exist solely to provide a gaming experience for the players. I mean, technically that is exactly why it exists, but it should not feel like that. If it does, the players will detect it, and it will actually be a less enjoyable experience for them.


But yeah. This is often actually quite hard to do right as a GM. And it's incredibly easy to just not realize that you are doing something that violates this concept. There's a temptation to "make things interesting for the players", but "interesting" has to also "make sense".

[kyoryu]

Or heck. Just the layout and defenses of an NPC hideout, stronghold, lair, whatever. It's really really easy as a GM to think in terms of "what nasty defenses/traps can I put in here to make things hard for the PCs". But you also have to consider that the NPCs need to actually live/work here too. You have to remember that while your objective as a GM may be "challenge the PCs while they proceed on their quest for <whatever>" that is *not* the NPCs objective. They are trying to live in their home, conduct their business, engage in whatever things they are doing. The spaces NPCs inhabit need to first serve their own purposes, and then secondly constitute something potentially difficult for the PCs to manage.

Oh, yeah. Thanks. I was going to mention that one. Good jorb. You're 100% right.


This can come up in really subtle ways sometimes. I remember I was setting up a lair for a rogue they were tracking. There was a locked cabinet where he kept valuables. I decided to put a needle poison trap on it. Seems like something a rogue might set up to stop people trying to steal his own stuff, right? And since this guy was like a master thief, it was a really difficult trap too. But then I had to stop and think: "Ok. But he stores stuff here, so he has to be able to open this thing up, not just once, but repeatedly". Most game systems have some kind of skill roll that auto fails, no matter how good you are (like 1 in 20, right?). So.... He would presumably occasionally fail to successfully disarm his own trap and get stuck by the needle (maybe a double fail, since he knows about it, but still something that will happen if he's opening and closing this thing every time he needs to get something out or put something in).

There was a supplement, I think for Fate Core, that was written by the guy that wrote Leverage, the TV show. One thing that he wrote about was particularly illuminating to me - the vault has to be accessible. A vault that just keeps thing in is easy. What's interesting is one that stores things and controls access. And that access provides the keys for the party to figure out how to break it.


There's lots of little things that you can do as a GM to make the behavior of your NPCs (and even the environment itself) work better and seem more "real" to the players. And a big part of that is realizing that these NPCs and that environment doesn't actually exist solely to provide a gaming experience for the players. I mean, technically that is exactly why it exists, but it should not feel like that. If it does, the players will detect it, and it will actually be a less enjoyable experience for them.

Exactly. And if you do it right, the "real" purpose of it can lead to more interesting gameplay.


But yeah. This is often actually quite hard to do right as a GM. And it's incredibly easy to just not realize that you are doing something that violates this concept. There's a temptation to "make things interesting for the players", but "interesting" has to also "make sense".

Yup. As I pointed out, the ninja trick is to use this to create more interesting options for the players. There's a lot of mental tricks you can use to check yourself. Some of the easiest are "how is this actually used day-to-day?", "what does this look like when not in the middle of an attack?" "How much does this cost to defend at this level, is it worth it, and what could these other people be doing?".

One good way to validate counter-tactics (like chasing) is to ask how the players could expoit the counter-tactic if they know it's occurring, and aren't doing what they're doing. Like, with chasing it's obvious - send in a small group to engage, and have them retreat into an ambush. Any obviously counterable tactic should be avoided. Because it's not actually a good general tactic, it's just a good tactic based on the GM's knowledge.

Another good thing is to put yourself in the shoes of The Being In Charge. Okay, you've got 100 'workers'. The castle/whatever has to run, and do its job. Assume you have a budget that has to be split between defense and actually Getting Stuff Done. How do you allocate those? What are your strategies that allow day-to-day work to occur efficiently, while allowing defense in case of the rare attack?

Another good trick is to presume that PC plans are reasonable and think of how they might be reasonable. It's exceedingly easy to hear a plan and think "oh, it's obvious how they'd trivially repel that". But that's really falling into the trap - what you're really thinking is "given that I know this plan is in the works, how would I repel it?" And while some level of that is reasonable (you're spending less time figuring out defense plans than the "actual" people would), you really want to remind yourself that you're making decisions based on privileged information, and that it's trivial to defend against a known plan. I also like thinking in terms of the PC plans are less about whether they will succeed or fail, and more about what that path/adventure will look like.

[Talakeal]

So, I've been reading the thread and here are my two cents :

You can't balance game mechanics with story elements. Game mechanics should be balanced by other aspects of the mechanics.
Having a high-magic low-physical strength build be balanced by being vulnerable to physical combat mechanics is fine.

But you can't balance a overly-high physical build by threatening "the strong-men association will be jealous and try and stop you".
That's an adventure. And you don't disentivise a player from doing something by threatening them with gameplay.

So your munchkin Bob, with enough high-power artifacts attracting BBEG ? Sounds like a cool game premise to me, not a balancing mechanism.
And at that point, as a DM, your job is to make the adventure fun.

How do classes like paladins with codes of conduct fare under this philosophy?

Does this extend to NPCs defending themselves? Or does the idiot ball only apply to offensive actions? Like, if a PC walks into town carrying a million gold, they can't be robbed. But, if they walk into town with a soul-sucking artifact item that kills everyone whom they come within ten feet of, are the townsfolk allowed to react to this by having the sheriff shoot the character before he can kill any more of them?

If you were running a game of Vampire: The Masquerade and one of the players chose to be a Ventrue (a clan whose weakness is particular feeding habits) and decided that they could only drink the blood of dragons (dragons in the setting being both *extremely* rare and powerful) are you obliged to somehow hook him up with enough dragon blood to keep him alive? What if he chooses the blood of something that doesn't exist in the setting at all, like say klingons?

IMO if a character cannot survive without copious amounts of plot armor, it isn't reasonable to demand the GM provide it so that you can play your special snowflake character that just doesn't fit in with the setting.


No. I'm asking you a question that would determine whether your concept of fair play is even appropriate for the game you actually run. Answer the question first before wondering what enemies in your game should do.

For the game I want to run? Not really. Only fair enough to keep the game going until the story has reached its end.

But I doubt my players would agree, and I don't have a problem playing combat as sport.


100%.

This pops up in a lot of ways. For instance, the NPCs can defend against the PCs' invasion plans for their hideout - with the GM forgetting that the NPCs wouldn't know the actual invasion plan, and would have to plan against any possible plan.

One of the easiest is chasing players.... sure, it makes sense if you know that it's a party of PCs. But the enemies don't know if they're chasing them straight back to a larger formation or not.

It takes a good amount of mental effort to remind yourself of other options that the NPCs might have to think about, when you as the GM already know the actual truth.

Metagaming is certainly an issue for both sides when coming up with tactics; and it goes both ways.

If the players know that you need fire to kill a troll or silver to kill a werewolf, but their characters don't, how many turns should they be required to waste using ineffective methods on them?

Likewise, if the GM knows one of the players is immune to mind control, how many turns should the enemy wizard be required to waste casting on them before switching to fireball?

That is an ongoing problem (although I don't think targeting the unarmored guy or grappling the little girl fall under this sort of metagaming), but I really don't think that is what Vahnovoi is talking about. But it is hard to tell, they are being pretty cryptic.


Carrying capacity can be solved by having a trained pack animal or party member's assistance.

Pack animals are useful, but they have a tendency to die or get stuck. Party members are more reliable, but this character does seem like it will need a lot of buy in from the rest of the group. Which is reasonable, given that this character primarily acts as a haste-bot, but it is something to keep in mind.


And if we're talking about a dungeon... if I can move 10 zones' worth of dirt per action, I can move 10 zones' worth of dirt through the dungeon with us as we go.

While there is no rule against it, I can't imagine any GM actually letting someone move ten tons of earth with them one shovel at a time, especially for a small child with 3s in all their physical stats. Yeah, you can warp your time relative to the rest of the world, but from your perspective you are still moving all that soil manually 3 paces at a time.


Fable does not know whether a hostile GM might give you a circumstantial penalty not explicitly mentioned in the rules for having one arm when trying to do complex actions.

I don't see why distortion would remove circumstance penalties for lacking limbs.


Could... you tell me what you mean by 'cap'?

You can't stack it repeatedly, to my awareness, but it does not indicate that this bonus is of a type that is mutually exclusive with something else. :smallconfused:

Failed to notice that Wands were in a section. To be honest, I kinda glossed over the fact that Dweomer Master reduces the cost per instance. Four points of DM letting you apply Multi for +1 DC per doubling is, to be frank, absurd. I would save a few points to add in Dweomer Master (Multi) x4, unquestionably, probably trading out heirloom masonry. Using a wand... I would probably pass on the opportunity, to be honest, because Dweomer Master gets better returns. Which would you rather: 8 character points for one extra Alacritous spell per turn, or 8 character points to be able to reduce the cost of Alacritous to +2 DC, and scale up to many extra spells per turn?


The table at the end of the merits section tells you how many ranks of each trait there are.

Prodigy can be taken as many times as you like but cannot take a skill above 10 (before modifiers for proficiency, equipment, magic, etc).

Dweomer mastery can only be taken once per metamagic.


System does not indicate how to handle chakra for incantations turned spells. I would advise indicating your instincts somewhere in the text to communicate to players that it is a possibility; I'd have slipped Ka in there if I'd known.

It doesn't say it implicitly, but it does say the details are up to the GM, and it does give an example of using it with cantrip that requires chakras.

But yeah, it is simple enough for me to add an explicit line about it and for you to add Ka.


Plan A: If there is dirt around, win initiative and set up a defensive positioning that prevents engagement.
Plan B: If there is not dirt around, creating a barricade with furniture is probably a feasible use of a Complex Action.
Plan C: Regardless of A or B, there are presumably party members who can be Hasted to intercept and prevent engagement.
Plan D: If melee is sufficiently dissuaded by plans A-C, Celerity metamagic to either stun with Halt, flee before someone can close to melee through Haste on self, or cast Haste on ally so that they can intercept the movement and get in a Riposte to dissuade further focus fire. There is little risk of losing the initiative check to successfully run away on the interrupted action.
Plan E: If A-D fails, wounds can be patched as a Complex Action [down to a standard action with Acceleration] to cut wound loss in half, and many forms of damage can be undone with Chronomancy healing, and a Contingency [x2] Haste set up at the start of the mission to trigger when one hopes to get out of trouble is a suitable backup plan.
Plan F: If A-E fails, Ritualized Contingency x2 Eternity in a Bottle on an allied party member. If the scene ends without my character alive to disenchant, we try again, and again, and again until we all make it through. 'Save' the successful run with disenchanting the Eternity.

The goal is generally to give people bigger problems to worry about than a 12-year-old, and make sufficient hassle to reach the 12 year old through means of Home Alone, earthworks, or magically enhanced fleeing that you will instead deal with another party member, with an absolute trump available.


This could all work against most encounters, but I still feel like you will be spending most of your mana and actions on just trying to stay alive rather than actually contributing to the fight, and this character is effectively crowd controlling itself most of the time.

Trying to use eternity in a bottle as a ghetto turn back the clock sounds like the most annoying thing ever for everyone at the table :p


That depends on what is revealed to be lacking in play, in party comp or character's resources in particular. Barring external influence, probably save for Dweomer Mastery (Alacrity) and further increased Chronomancy.

At this point, aside from a ring of power, you can't increase your chronomancy score any higher.

Maxxing out a single score at the expense of everything else is just kind of a gimmick at character creation, seeing how the character branches out is the really interesting thing.


As I mentioned upthread, I prefer Exalted to any D&D variant. I prefer Unknown Armies to any D&D variant. Or Shadowrun, or Ars Magica, over a class-based system. Our preferences are not as far away as my defense of PF2e indicates.

The reason I have been stating defense for Pathfinder 2e is because, from what you have related, Heart of Darkness is primarily a dungeon crawl. Everyone is expected to participate in combat. That is not the case in the aforementioned systems. In Shadowrun, there's a street sam, but also the getaway driver and the hacker and the social face who aren't expected to spec into combat. In Exalted, sure, you might have a kung-fu bureaucrat, but you could also be playing the greatest melee fighter in Creation bodyguarding an Eclipse diplomat to the Fae, aiming to secure safe passage to a lost pocket of Creation to uncover its lost wonders. In Unknown Armies, you could be a methodical serial killer or a broke med student trying to pull a Breaking Bad. No one is going to look at your med student and ask "so what are you going to do in a fight?" The answer is probably "run and hide". Maybe "call the police". Because being that terrified med student trapped in a firefight coming back from that trauma can be an interesting and fun experience in and of itself.

When I sit down to look at Heart of Darkness, I see that it's about dungeon crawls and activities to support dungeon crawling. It does not signpost what good defenses are for starting characters. It doesn't signpost what good offenses look like for a character. It doesn't prevent you from dumping Fortitude, or even strongly discourage doing so outside of GM build guidance. When you're in a scenario where everyone is going to need to be productive in a fight, competitiveness over effectiveness often emerges. It's human nature. And you're going to have a percentage of people who don't invest wisely and suffer for it. If everyone needs to be competent, add guardrails to keep them from messing up, and add caps to keep someone from outshining the others too brightly.

Dungeon crawl? Hardly.

I am using it that way right now because nobody wanted to run a new system, but that is not the intended genre or style of play. (The Dark Tower, Princess Mononoke, Sucker Punch, Aeon Flux (Shorts), King Kong 2005, Van Helsing, and Willow is my appendix N.)


Now, as far as action goes, I have never been part of a gaming group that didn't demand combat at least once a session, and players who don't mind sitting out that combat are few and far between. But there is nothing wrong with playing a non-combat character if that is what you want. But this is a game set on a savage frontier, and you can't expect anyone to be safe if they forego their defenses, after all cutting off your enemies supply chain is a classic strategy in both real life and fiction.

[Darth Credence]

...This can come up in really subtle ways sometimes. I remember I was setting up a lair for a rogue they were tracking. There was a locked cabinet where he kept valuables. I decided to put a needle poison trap on it. Seems like something a rogue might set up to stop people trying to steal his own stuff, right? And since this guy was like a master thief, it was a really difficult trap too. But then I had to stop and think: "Ok. But he stores stuff here, so he has to be able to open this thing up, not just once, but repeatedly". Most game systems have some kind of skill roll that auto fails, no matter how good you are (like 1 in 20, right?). So.... He would presumably occasionally fail to successfully disarm his own trap and get stuck by the needle (maybe a double fail, since he knows about it, but still something that will happen if he's opening and closing this thing every time he needs to get something out or put something in).

So I had to think about how the NPC would actually use this thing, and not just how it would serve as a risk/obstacle to the PCs. In this particular case, I had him keep a vial of antidote to the poison on a shelf right next to the cabinet (among some other vials, with colored labels so he would know which was which, but someone else would not). He could just take an antidote every time, but that would be expensive, so having one on hand (just in case) made sense, but it was also in a vial where only he would know which was which (and the others varied from "nothing" to "more poison"). So... Still a nastry trap for the party, but now one that made sense and would work as intended by the guy who set it...

I like this particular trap and evasion method and will have to use it in the future. As a general rule, though, I go with the idea that a trap has a way to be turned off and the person who installed the trap knows the way, so they can do it correctly every time. Meanwhile, someone who did not install it doesn't know that way, and part of the mechanism can be hidden well enough that it isn't easy to figure out. So if you installed the trap, you know that you have to hold the outer ring in place while turning the inner ring 720 degrees counter-clockwise before pressing the outer ring in, then it opens up. Anyone else coming around has to start inspecting everything, figure out there is an inner and outer ring that can turn separately, figure out that turning the outer ring at all sets off the trap, figure out that it needs two full rotations and no more to be positioned to avoid the trap, that pushing in the inner ring would set it off and that pushing in the outer ring will open the door. With nothing but what looks like a button on the outside, that could be a very difficult trap to disarm, without knowing the trick. This also gives

I do have one personal favorite method that I've used a time or two, but it was always for a wizard that was willing to sacrifice some stuff. Wizard built an inground vault where he would store things that he needed to have access to without burning a spell slot on demiplane. Heavy stone lid that has to be removed to get into it and then climb a ladder down, and the lid is crafted to look like part of the stone around it. On top of that, he laid out a portable hole, creating the 6' diameter, 10' deep extradimensional space. From there he used stone shape to create stone walls on the side of the hole, to make it look like the hole had been carved from rock. Placed a ladder in, put a lid on top of that big enough to conceal the edges of the hole, with a heavily trapped and securely locked door. Put some treasure in there, to make it look real. Since almost everyone has an extradimensional bag of some sort - I assume that's not just my campaign - when a thief comes along and decides to attempt to steal from the treasure vault, hello Astral Plane. (If anyone sees a fundamental problem with this trap, let me know!) The wizard loses the things he put in there intending to be lost, the person with the bag who broke the plane of the hole and anyone within 10' are in the Astral, and anyone left is probably unlikely to look around at the aftermath and see the actual entrance to the actual vault.

[Reversefigure4]

Does this extend to NPCs defending themselves? Or does the idiot ball only apply to offensive actions? Like, if a PC walks into town carrying a million gold, they can't be robbed. But, if they walk into town with a soul-sucking artifact item that kills everyone whom they come within ten feet of, are the townsfolk allowed to react to this by having the sheriff shoot the character before he can kill any more of them?

If you were running a game of Vampire: The Masquerade and one of the players chose to be a Ventrue (a clan whose weakness is particular feeding habits) and decided that they could only drink the blood of dragons (dragons in the setting being both *extremely* rare and powerful) are you obliged to somehow hook him up with enough dragon blood to keep him alive? What if he chooses the blood of something that doesn't exist in the setting at all, like say klingons?

But these are problems that are fairly easily solved out of game, with in-game resolutions generally making it worse rather than better. A vampire who feeds on dragon blood is a player that doesn't understand the setting (there's a good enough line of logic that says "vampires = magic universe = dragons are real and commonplace" for someone who doesn't know VtM). The player picking Klingon is either drunk or trolling. Either way, the solution is just to have a simple conversation with the player ("the concept is meant to be more something like Feeds On Horses"), not wait until the character is in the game, then immediately have him die from not finding klingons to feed on him.

A PC entering town with a million gold might be a non-event (anyone who posseses the power to rob the PC also finds a million gold a fairly trivial amount, any PC with a million gold is high enough level to effortlessly defeat your average robber). Or if you end up with a PC who has a million gold, no ability to defend it, and flashes it around repeatedly, should be getting the GM talking to them and saying "Hey, what are you up to? Your character, of normal human intelligence, knows this kind of behaviour will get them robbed. Do you really want to do this?"

The GM provides the eyes and ears into the world for players, which should include assuming a basic level of competence characters should possess.

While it's plausible and realistic that Item Man would be robbed by more powerful NPCs, it's actually not plausible that Item Man would appear in the game to be played and THEN immediately get curb stomped. After all, in-universe he's been building up these artifacts for years in his backstory. He didn't just spring into being out of nothing and wake up with them all sitting on his pillow.

[Talakeal]

But these are problems that are fairly easily solved out of game, with in-game resolutions generally making it worse rather than better. A vampire who feeds on dragon blood is a player that doesn't understand the setting (there's a good enough line of logic that says "vampires = magic universe = dragons are real and commonplace" for someone who doesn't know VtM). The player picking Klingon is either drunk or trolling. Either way, the solution is just to have a simple conversation with the player ("the concept is meant to be more something like Feeds On Horses"), not wait until the character is in the game, then immediately have him die from not finding klingons to feed on him.

A PC entering town with a million gold might be a non-event (anyone who posseses the power to rob the PC also finds a million gold a fairly trivial amount, any PC with a million gold is high enough level to effortlessly defeat your average robber). Or if you end up with a PC who has a million gold, no ability to defend it, and flashes it around repeatedly, should be getting the GM talking to them and saying "Hey, what are you up to? Your character, of normal human intelligence, knows this kind of behaviour will get them robbed. Do you really want to do this?"

The GM provides the eyes and ears into the world for players, which should include assuming a basic level of competence characters should possess.

While it's plausible and realistic that Item Man would be robbed by more powerful NPCs, it's actually not plausible that Item Man would appear in the game to be played and THEN immediately get curb stomped. After all, in-universe he's been building up these artifacts for years in his backstory. He didn't just spring into being out of nothing and wake up with them all sitting on his pillow.

Agreed 10,000%.

The original item man that was pitched for me, iirc, had a backstory that he used to be an archmage, but then his attempt to make a suite of ultimate artifacts went wrong and shredded his soul, knocking him back to level 1* just as the game begins, but with all of his epic artifacts and knowledge of magic intact.

*Or the equivalent in a point buy system.

[Fable Wright]

Pack animals are useful, but they have a tendency to die or get stuck. Party members are more reliable, but this character does seem like it will need a lot of buy in from the rest of the group. Which is reasonable, given that this character primarily acts as a haste-bot, but it is something to keep in mind.

Getting stuck is less of an issue when one can build roads and fords with a normal action.


While there is no rule against it, I can't imagine any GM actually letting someone move ten tons of earth with them one shovel at a time, especially for a small child with 3s in all their physical stats. Yeah, you can warp your time relative to the rest of the world, but from your perspective you are still moving all that soil manually 3 paces at a time.

Such a GM interested in a realistic solution might reasonably infer that a character might be able to run outside of 10 zones to grab dirt if they're spending the hours anyway. Or that one might be able to use more logical local materials like loose stonework, old furniture, or other objects one might find around a dungeon could be used instead of raw dirt.


I don't see why distortion would remove circumstance penalties for lacking limbs.

My initial statement: In the event that not having an arm applies a circumstance penalty to complex actions by an adversarial GM, one can turn back the clock so that one is not permanently stuck in that penalized state forever. Unlike a fighter who lost an arm, for instance.

Your follow-up: I do not see anything in the text why your lacking limb would apply a circumstance penalty to complex actions.

My clarification: You might not; some might.

Your follow-up: I do not see why acceleration would remove circumstance penalties for lacking limbs.

Presently: I feel like we have lost the plot.


This could all work against most encounters, but I still feel like you will be spending most of your mana and actions on just trying to stay alive rather than actually contributing to the fight, and this character is effectively crowd controlling itself most of the time.

Trying to use eternity in a bottle as a ghetto turn back the clock sounds like the most annoying thing ever for everyone at the table :p

...Let us suppose that I did add a Wand of Multi with the clarifications provided. My first action, four party members get to move even if they would have otherwise lost initiative. It's an entire extra turn. In the event I am rushed, I can opt to haste self and haste party member to advance most important combat state in the ensuing melee, stun multiple targets to make them more easily picked off by melee, or any number of similar things. The goal is to gain incremental advantage on actions that naturally shield one from harm and create an environment where the opportunity cost to rush the supporting wizard is high enough that wasting actions for defense is unlikely.


Dungeon crawl? Hardly.

I am using it that way right now because nobody wanted to run a new system, but that is not the intended genre or style of play. (The Dark Tower, Princess Mononoke, Sucker Punch, Aeon Flux (Shorts), King Kong 2005, Van Helsing, and Willow is my appendix N.)


Now, as far as action goes, I have never been part of a gaming group that didn't demand combat at least once a session, and players who don't mind sitting out that combat are few and far between. But there is nothing wrong with playing a non-combat character if that is what you want. But this is a game set on a savage frontier, and you can't expect anyone to be safe if they forego their defenses, after all cutting off your enemies supply chain is a classic strategy in both real life and fiction.

It has been oft stated but bears repeating: You need a better group.

Less often stated: Exalted in every edition has mechanics for social manipulation (different levels of commitment to a project that someone feels, ways to increase or decrease those levels, to set them on a course of action that aligns with their beliefs, and so on) that in 2e was literally called 'social combat'. Integrating high-interactive systems like that can encourage less-combative behavior. If there are rules to use social combat in a physical combat environment, and perks giving you an advantage in doing so, then some players selecting those options will lead to more interesting roleplaying sessions where you have surrendered enemies and prisoners that you can pump for information and may pose moral quandries. You will have scenarios where multiple party members may engage in social combat without breaking out the battlemap and feel engaged and coordinated in doing so.

Unknown Armies has rules for coercing someone that can be very effective in de-escalating fights. In the previous advantage of the med student trying to save their lives, it can be effective to try and guilt your the person with the gun into no longer trying to shoot them—convince them that they're a better person, that they don't have to do this. That, and having the first section of the Combat chapter being labeled 'Six Ways To Stop A Fight', encourages groups for experiences that do not end with the smell of blood and feces from corpses every session.

You do have rules for morale being easier to break if surrender was offered. That's a start. But more proactive abilities to encourage speccing into engaging with that system will lead players to exercising it more.

[Vahnavoi]

That is an ongoing problem (although I don't think targeting the unarmored guy or grappling the little girl fall under this sort of metagaming), but I really don't think that is what Vahnovoi is talking about. But it is hard to tell, they are being pretty cryptic.

It was exactly what I was talking about and two people not you realized it just fine.

The part in parenthesis is where you keep making your error. You think those tactics don't fall under what I talk about because you fail to appreciate the degree to which tactics are game and situation dependant. It is, in fact, possible to imagine and design a game where these are poor actions from viewpoint of someone who doesn't have full information, yet best possible actions from the viewpoint of someone who does - and then it's possible to imagine and design a second game where it's the exact other way around.

So which set of information do you actually use when you make decisions?

There is another aspect to this, which I have discussed earlier in this thread, but which perhaps hasn't been examined as well as it should: when there are more possible motives for actions than there are available actions, pigeonhole theorem dictates that several different motives lead to the same action.

This matters greatly for classic scenarios such as a player character grabbing a torch to fend off nightly attackers that they totally do not know are trolls. In majority of such cases, the legality of the move itself is not under question - grabbing and fighting with the torch is unquestionably something the character can do. We're only concerned with the motive. In cases where there is a plausible legitimate motive in addition to the illegitimate one (such as the fact that a lot of monsters fear fire and can be fought off with a torch), the player can always claim plausible deniability.

This applies on the game master's side just as well. Most obviously, a lot of hobbyists insist a game master is or should not be an adversarial figure, but as long as a game master is the primary player of characters opposing the players', the game master is de facto the opponent player and a lot of things they'll do will naturally be the same as those of a genuine adversary. This, as I've noted before in several threads, is at the root of many common complaints in hobby groups, and almost certainly the root of many complaints you are facing. If your players presume a hostile motive on your part, your actions alone won't convince them that's not the case if you'd be acting this way anyway.

This loops back to the question of tactics and asymmetric information. Consider a boxing match. Hitting your opponent in the face is a legitimate tactic there. So is it bullying? Does the answer change if your motive is to break your opponent's nose?

[Anymage]

The original item man that was pitched for me, iirc, had a backstory that he used to be an archmage, but then his attempt to make a suite of ultimate artifacts went wrong and shredded his soul, knocking him back to level 1* just as the game begins, but with all of his epic artifacts and knowledge of magic intact.

Not related to your game or group. But "I'm an epic hero who got depowered to starting character status" is not that rare a character concept (some players are just want epic badass deeds in their backstory even if they don't have the levels/stats for them), but unless handled very carefully they tend to encourage the view that the campaign world is just a set for the PCs to go wild on. Powerful heroes tend to leave their marks on the world by the definition of heroism. A powerful hero who died is going to be mourned and remembered, while a powerful hero depowered is still going to be someone with a lot of clout.

Again nothing to do with you, your game, or your group specifically. Just thinking about how often you find players who want to plop their character into the world with little thought how the character is actually someone who lived and grew in that world.

[Telok]

Old Shadowrun adage: "Magical superiority through applied firepower. Geek the mage first."

Unarmored person casting spells during a fight? Might fireball you. Might summon a demon. Might mind control you and have you cut your throat. Don't have casters on your side to counter that? Throw some ammo at them. If it doesn't kill them maybe they'll at least be too busy diving for cover to turn you to stone.

Fists and swords bouncing off an armored person? Real world solution was to knock them down, grapple up, and try to stick a dagger through the visor.

Not metagaming to avoid being a twit is one thing. Having characters, be they PCs, NPCs, etc., act like video game mobs that just stand there and repeat a basic attack until they die is just as bad. If you have a world with several powerful wizards, common hedge magic, regenerating trolls in every mountain range, and legendary magic swords, then don't go acting like characters don't know what the **** a spell caster or troll looks like. Vampires get splashed with holy water, staked, heads cut off, and cremated. Nobody says "what's a vampire?", they ask what kind of vampire. That stuff isn't myths lost in the depths of history. Its the evening news, current events, and celebrity gossip.

Talking about it like there's only two extremes is like talking about optimization only existing at theory op with infinite exponential wish loops and actively making bad choices in character creation. Unless someone actually shows up at table with a character thats brain damaged, illiterate, and was kept in a cellar their whole life then they know about stuff in the setting. If the setting includes current or recent newsworthy events involving trolls and wizards then the character knows **** about trolls and wizards. They may not be an expert, but tthey know at least the basics. And this applies to all characters, PC & NPC alike.

[Vahnavoi]

@Telok: except, it's entirely possible to imagine and design a game where not all characters know the basics, and more importantly, where not all players know the basics.

Get it? I'm not using opposite extremes under the impression that there are only two options. I'm using them to drive home the point that different games can have different strategic landscapes. This is not simply about whether to metagame or not, it's about whether Talakeal and his critics are even basing their arguments on the right metagame.

[SquidFighter]

How do classes like paladins with codes of conduct fare under this philosophy?

Does this extend to NPCs defending themselves? Or does the idiot ball only apply to offensive actions? Like, if a PC walks into town carrying a million gold, they can't be robbed. But, if they walk into town with a soul-sucking artifact item that kills everyone whom they come within ten feet of, are the townsfolk allowed to react to this by having the sheriff shoot the character before he can kill any more of them?

If you were running a game of Vampire: The Masquerade and one of the players chose to be a Ventrue (a clan whose weakness is particular feeding habits) and decided that they could only drink the blood of dragons (dragons in the setting being both *extremely* rare and powerful) are you obliged to somehow hook him up with enough dragon blood to keep him alive? What if he chooses the blood of something that doesn't exist in the setting at all, like say klingons?

IMO if a character cannot survive without copious amounts of plot armor, it isn't reasonable to demand the GM provide it so that you can play your special snowflake character that just doesn't fit in with the setting.


Player action should cause an effect on the world. But the effect needs to provide gameplay. Having an angel come down from the Heavens to smite a level 1 thief because "Evil characters attract the ire of Good creatures" simply makes for a bad story, bad gameplay, and overall bad experience for everyone involved.
In my book, the #1 job of a DM is to bring to life the most interesting gameplay out of the emergent premice brougt by the existence and actions of the players.

That said, unreasonable acts by players are bound to the setting and internal coherence of the in-game world. "You want to jump over the canyon, you say ? You don't care its a kilometer wide ? You know the fall will kill you, but STILL want to try it ?"

In the case of the over-equipped character, I think there is the potential to make for a good, reasonably paced story, built in a way that the (possible) demise of the character could be of their own design. You might have to skew the setting a bit (maybe, even though the artifacts shine like beacons, the involved higher beings act cautiously, as aggressive moves at the level they are playing are destabilising, and they suspect shenanigans from their respective opponents, etc ...). The point there is that the keeping of the OP artifacts become the (or at least a) story. As a DM, make it a good one. And, if you can't find a way, or simply don't want to make that story, refuse the character.

But the point I was getting at, is that none of this is balancing the game-system. It should be expected that the mere existence of PCs affect the setting in one way or another, and they should also create enemies, allies and everything in between.
All of which have absolutely nothing to do with having a low strength character have low stats vs grapple, or what have you.
You cannot balance the system with gameplay by creating enemies. That's already a given. No matter the build, I should expect to fight foes.

So if the problem is that the build is mechanically OP, change the math.
If the problem is that the player doesn't like to have obstacles and enemies in the cooperative story which is TTRPG, explain to them that that is what the game is about. Or change the player.

[Telok]

@Telok: except, it's entirely possible to imagine and design a game where not all characters know the basics, and more importantly, where not all players know the basics.

Get it? I'm not using opposite extremes under the impression that there are only two options. I'm using them to drive home the point that different games can have different strategic landscapes. This is not simply about whether to metagame or not, it's about whether Talakeal and his critics are even basing their arguments on the right metagame.

No, I don't get it. Its not about game design or player ignorance. Its about if general average characters, pc & npc, should know basic information about the settings and where the lines lie on metagaming going too far. Talking about "strategic landscapes" and "the right metagame" don't make any sense or connect to anything I can see.

[Talakeal]

It was exactly what I was talking about and two people not you realized it just fine.


Sorry. You used so many words for such a simple concept that I figured you had to be trying to impart some deeper wisdom.

No, there is no metagaming going on here. Everyone knows that spiders have poison. Everyone knows that heavy armor makes some weapons ineffective. Everyone knows that it is easier to grapple a tiny person than a large one. Everyone knows that if someone is flashing around millions of GP in wealth, they better have a means of defending it from robbers.

[King of Nowhere]

No, there is no metagaming going on here. Everyone knows that spiders have poison. Everyone knows that heavy armor makes some weapons ineffective. Everyone knows that it is easier to grapple a tiny person than a large one. Everyone knows that if someone is flashing around millions of GP in wealth, they better have a means of defending it from robbers.

wait, wait, wait.
the third is not like the other two. logical fallacy here.

everyone knows spiders have poison. everyone knows heavy armor protects from weapons. everyone knows anyone who has a huge loot is powerful enough to defend himself. that should be the default assumption. when the party comes to town and see someone with expensive weapons, they don't think "this one is noob, let's rob him". no, they think "this guy must be very powerful, let's be careful".
so, unless someone knows exactly how artifact guy is a whimp inside his suit, they would treat him with caution. they would be very wary of this obviously very powerful dude. and if the party does not live up to its supposed power level, well, clearly those other weaker guys must be his henchmen. it could actually make for good roleplay. with healty players, at least.

[Mechalich]

Does everyone know spiders have poison?

In the real world largest spider is the Goliath Birdeater (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goliath_birdeater), and while it does have venom, said venom is broadly harmless and the spiders are liable to 'dry bite' in self-defense rather than for predative purposes. Large arthropod predators are actually less likely to have dangerous venom because they usually have large and potent means of causing physical damage. As such, Giant spiders might be poisonous, in some settings, but they also might prioritize mechanical injury like most large predators. The only way to know is to read the setting documents.

HoD is a unique setting being run by its sole designer. This, inherently, produces a massive asymmetry of information. The GM knows everything about the setting, the players know only what they have read from a single source. And, because players are lazy - and this group has specifically been described as having low-engagement - they probably have read little and internalized even less. I strongly believe that many, perhaps most, of the things Talakeal believes are 'obvious' regarding their setting are in fact anything but. Also, I suspect that descriptions of monsters and NPCs rarely reveal that sorts of 'obvious weakpoints' that are regularly targeted on PCs by virtue of the GM knowing what all those weaknesses are and the players having only a vague idea what the monsters even look like.

The net effect is the the GM and the Players aren't operating on even close to the same level. One is, a pro and the others are noobs, which is functionally the default. However, in TTRPGs, it is impossible to impose an expectation that the players should 'git gud' and master a system. Instead, it is the GMs responsibility to dumb things down to the player's level. D&D, as a brand, has been progressively dumbing down it's entire game since at least the mid-90s, and it works.

[Talakeal]

Does everyone know spiders have poison?

In the real world largest spider is the Goliath Birdeater (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goliath_birdeater), and while it does have venom, said venom is broadly harmless and the spiders are liable to 'dry bite' in self-defense rather than for predative purposes. Large arthropod predators are actually less likely to have dangerous venom because they usually have large and potent means of causing physical damage. As such, Giant spiders might be poisonous, in some settings, but they also might prioritize mechanical injury like most large predators. The only way to know is to read the setting documents.

I wasn't actually the DM in this game.

I mean, if you want to be pedantic, it is common knowledge that some spiders are venomous.

But if you got bitten by a spider IRL and didn't know what species it was, would you seriously ignore the possibility that it might be venomous?


HoD is a unique setting being run by its sole designer. This, inherently, produces a massive asymmetry of information. The GM knows everything about the setting, the players know only what they have read from a single source. And, because players are lazy - and this group has specifically been described as having low-engagement - they probably have read little and internalized even less. I strongly believe that many, perhaps most, of the things Talakeal believes are 'obvious' regarding their setting are in fact anything but. Also, I suspect that descriptions of monsters and NPCs rarely reveal that sorts of 'obvious weakpoints' that are regularly targeted on PCs by virtue of the GM knowing what all those weaknesses are and the players having only a vague idea what the monsters even look like.

I don't disagree with you in principal.

But the stuff we are talking about in this thread; that armor makes it harder to wound someone, that big strong people have an advantage in wrestling against small skinny people, that evil people will steal stuff if it benefits them, are hardly secret setting knowledge, they are true IRL and in virtually every fictional universe.

And even the weirder stuff that the PCs can't reasonably be expected to know, well, that's what in character knowledge skills are for.


The net effect is the the GM and the Players aren't operating on even close to the same level. One is, a pro and the others are noobs, which is functionally the default. However, in TTRPGs, it is impossible to impose an expectation that the players should 'git gud' and master a system. Instead, it is the GMs responsibility to dumb things down to the player's level. D&D, as a brand, has been progressively dumbing down it's entire game since at least the mid-90s, and it works.

Subjective. Nobody in my circle will even touch D&D anymore because it has been so dumbed down.

[King of Nowhere]

Subjective. Nobody in my circle will even touch D&D anymore because it has been so dumbed down.

huh...
if they don't like what the newer versions have done, why not use the older versions? it's what I do

[PhoenixPhyre]

Subjective. Nobody in my circle will even touch D&D anymore because it has been so dumbed down.

Yes, absolutely subjective. Everyone in my circle started playing D&D because of the simplifications and better focus. Potato, potato.

[icefractal]

huh...
if they don't like what the newer versions have done, why not use the older versions? it's what I do

From previous mentions, Talakeal's players do appear to prefer HoD to other systems they've tried. That doesn't mean they won't complain about it, because they'll complain about anything.

Possibly from a lack of self-awareness, or possibly because they consider "complain until the GM changes the rules / situation in your favor" to be a normal part of "playing a TTRPG". As much "part of the game" as spending a benny to reroll in Savage Worlds.

[Telok]

HoD is a unique setting being run by its sole designer.

Anyone who has played with a GM using a custom or personal setting, or even a published setting the players know nothing about, is functionally the sole source of information in exactly the same way. There's nothing special about the HoD setting. End of a golden age, crumbling empire, despotic warlords, evil wizards, ancient artifacts, prophecies. Its really fairly typical as fantasy settings go.

Traveller with players who know nothing of the 3rd Imperium. Rogue Trader with people who haven't read anything about the 40k 'verse. Using Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings as a setting with people who haven't read the books or watched any of it. Some non-generic fantasy setting based off an old computer game nobody else in the group ever heard about.

In all those cases the player's lack of knowledge means the GM can be the only source of information and possess your "massive asymetry", doubly so if the GM goes off canon at any point.

Edit: Heck, I have the same thing going on. A setting of 300 star systems, half finished in a 3 megabyte text file. I have zero expectation of them reading anything so I regularly produce one page bullet point lists and talk info dumps at them. I just have a group of well adjusted reasonable adults playing the game. Still, run around flashing too much bling in places with low law levels when you don't have the reputation to warn people off is expected and understood as basically painting a target on your back and inviting trouble. There just isn't any whining about it at my table.

[Morgaln]

I wasn't actually the DM in this game.

I mean, if you want to be pedantic, it is common knowledge that some spiders are venomous.

But if you got bitten by a spider IRL and didn't know what species it was, would you seriously ignore the possibility that it might be venomous?



To be really pedantic, all spiders in our world are venomous. But only a handful of those are venomous enough to be dangerous to humans.



Anyone who has played with a GM using a custom or personal setting, or even a published setting the players know nothing about, is functionally the sole source of information in exactly the same way. There's nothing special about the HoD setting. End of a golden age, crumbling empire, despotic warlords, evil wizards, ancient artifacts, prophecies. Its really fairly typical as fantasy settings go.

Traveller with players who know nothing of the 3rd Imperium. Rogue Trader with people who haven't read anything about the 40k 'verse. Using Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings as a setting with people who haven't read the books or watched any of it. Some non-generic fantasy setting based off an old computer game nobody else in the group ever heard about.

In all those cases the player's lack of knowledge means the GM can be the only source of information and possess your "massive asymetry", doubly so if the GM goes off canon at any point.

Edit: Heck, I have the same thing going on. A setting of 300 star systems, half finished in a 3 megabyte text file. I have zero expectation of them reading anything so I regularly produce one page bullet point lists and talk info dumps at them. I just have a group of well adjusted reasonable adults playing the game. Still, run around flashing too much bling in places with low law levels when you don't have the reputation to warn people off is expected and understood as basically painting a target on your back and inviting trouble. There just isn't any whining about it at my table.

There is, however, a difference between "if you flash your wealth, local criminals will try to relieve you of it" and "if you buy these artifacts (legally) during character creation, the most powerful people in the world will converge on your location and rip them from your cold, dead body."

[icefractal]

TBF, in the example the artifact thing came from, it was casting "very large magic" that put heat on the character, as that's detectable at significant distance in this system, not just possessing artifacts.

Not really an equivalent I can think of in D&D, but imagine in Shadowrun if you got your hands on some super-hacking gear and used it to grab secret data from Zurich-Orbital, perhaps?

However - is that listed anywhere in the rulebook? Because until it was mentioned, I didn't assume that was the case - someone in D&D can sit in their tower casting Wishes and Gates left and right without being inherently more noticeable.

[Talakeal]

TBF, in the example the artifact thing came from, it was casting "very large magic" that put heat on the character, as that's detectable at significant distance in this system, not just possessing artifacts.

Not really an equivalent I can think of in D&D, but imagine in Shadowrun if you got your hands on some super-hacking gear and used it to grab secret data from Zurich-Orbital, perhaps?

However - is that listed anywhere in the rulebook? Because until it was mentioned, I didn't assume that was the case - someone in D&D can sit in their tower casting Wishes and Gates left and right without being inherently more noticeable.

Yes, it is in the rulebook. The insight skill is entirely based around sensing magic and other supernatural phenomenon. (Although the character in question did get me to add a note to the difficulty chart about how it continues to scale, the spells he was casting were literally off the charts!)

Also note that this is something I warned the person about at character creation, and it was the warning that got the anger, not me springing it upon them during play.


Anyone who has played with a GM using a custom or personal setting, or even a published setting the players know nothing about, is functionally the sole source of information in exactly the same way. There's nothing special about the HoD setting. End of a golden age, crumbling empire, despotic warlords, evil wizards, ancient artifacts, prophecies. Its really fairly typical as fantasy settings go.

Traveller with players who know nothing of the 3rd Imperium. Rogue Trader with people who haven't read anything about the 40k 'verse. Using Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings as a setting with people who haven't read the books or watched any of it. Some non-generic fantasy setting based off an old computer game nobody else in the group ever heard about.

In all those cases the player's lack of knowledge means the GM can be the only source of information and possess your "massive asymetry", doubly so if the GM goes off canon at any point.

Edit: Heck, I have the same thing going on. A setting of 300 star systems, half finished in a 3 megabyte text file. I have zero expectation of them reading anything so I regularly produce one page bullet point lists and talk info dumps at them. I just have a group of well adjusted reasonable adults playing the game. Still, run around flashing too much bling in places with low law levels when you don't have the reputation to warn people off is expected and understood as basically painting a target on your back and inviting trouble. There just isn't any whining about it at my table.

Hey! I take objection to that bit about prophecies ;p

[Vahnavoi]

No, I don't get it. Its not about game design or player ignorance. Its about if general average characters, pc & npc, should know basic information about the settings and where the lines lie on metagaming going too far. Talking about "strategic landscapes" and "the right metagame" don't make any sense or connect to anything I can see.

What is considered "basic" information and who should know what are both active game design decision, so when you say a thing should be this or that, you are in fact proposing a game design guideline with an under-examined premise. Player ignorance matters more than character ignorance, because players are the actual entities at the table who know things and decide things; what a character knows or should know is always something that needs to be communicated to the player in order for it to influence their tactics.

Right metagame should be self-explanatory and I've already mentioned multiple times what the wrong metagame is in context: approaching asymmetric information games with the expectation that they work like games where opponents have symmetric information, and vice versa. Or for another example I talked prior to that, approaching team-focus games with the expectation that they work like individual-focus games.

---


Sorry. You used so many words for such a simple concept that I figured you had to be trying to impart some deeper wisdom.

Two other people gave equally wordy elaborations and examples to you of what my point was, and you still narrowly missed it. The deeper wisdom which you still fail to apply is that it applies to everything you consider "common sense". Something being "true IRL and in virtually every fictional universe" is not a binding statement for how any new game, or new fictional worlds, operate. It doesn't tell you those tactics are the ones that make sense for the game you actually play.


No, there is no metagaming going on here. Everyone knows that spiders have poison. Everyone knows that heavy armor makes some weapons ineffective. Everyone knows that it is easier to grapple a tiny person than a large one. Everyone knows that if someone is flashing around millions of GP in wealth, they better have a means of defending it from robbers.

You claim there is no metagaming going on. This neatly sidesteps a number of observations made by not just me, but by Mechalich, gbaji and kyoryu. Most importantly, the fact that acting as if you don't know something after you know it is extremely difficult, and your conscious proclamation that you aren't doing it isn't enough to prove that you aren't doing it. Studies on relevant cognitive biases, such as hindsight bias (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias), show that even being aware of and trying to eliminate the effects of additional information, cannot eliminate the effects of additional information.

Focusing on the stuff you think "everyone knows" is not a meaningful counterargument, because in practice, you'd know more than your players in nearly every situation where your "common sense" tactics could come up. Most obviously for the "item man" case at the root of this discussion, only you by default know how many robbers there are, where they are and what they can do to their potential victim. Maybe I missed it, but I never saw you answering my question of how much your players would actually know of those things if you didn't tell them. What, outside your declaration that robbers would be gunning them, would inform them of that?

If your answer is "because that would happen in IRL and virtually every fictional setting", your claim of "no metagame information" cannot be true, because those are metagame information. So focus on the things in the actual game.

[Kish]

Also note that this is something I warned the person about at character creation, and it was the warning that got the anger, not me springing it upon them during play.
Well now wait. Unless you're talking about something that wasn't what I saw, it was on this forum and that person was never actually going to play with you.

[Talakeal]

Well now wait. Unless you're talking about something that wasn't what I saw, it was on this forum and that person was never actually going to play with you.

This is correct.

I suppose I could have phrased it more precisely, but my point was that it wasn't some "gotcha" I was springing on a player during the game, rather warning them that their character was disruptive to both the setting and the mechanics and such a build would ultimately be self destructive.

[Keltest]

This is correct.

I suppose I could have phrased it more precisely, but my point was that it wasn't some "gotcha" I was springing on a player during the game, rather warning them that their character was disruptive to both the setting and the mechanics and such a build would ultimately be self destructive.

Once again, youre the game designer here. If such a build is disruptive to the mechanics, then just don't let people buy gear with starting points to that extent. Don't say "you can do it, and then I will make sure you can't have any fun with it."

[King of Nowhere]

Still, run around flashing too much bling in places with low law levels when you don't have the reputation to warn people off is expected and understood as basically painting a target on your back and inviting trouble. There just isn't any whining about it at my table.

It depends on the bling. If you go into a slum ruled by crime lords with expensive jewelry and expensive car, you are painting a target on yourself. But if you go with an expensive gun and expensive, special-forces-grade body armor, maybe some fancy granades and a night visor, I bet you'd be left alone

[icefractal]

Once again, youre the game designer here. If such a build is disruptive to the mechanics, then just don't let people buy gear with starting points to that extent. Don't say "you can do it, and then I will make sure you can't have any fun with it."IDK ... I think there shouldn't generally be "traps", but OTOH in a system with freedom in what you build, they're unavoidable to an extent?

I mean, imagine someone does the Grey Elf Necropolitan Wizard thing, puts absolutely nothing in defense (doesn't even do the Desecrate thing, so their HP isn't that great), and then loads up on potent mind-control spells and other "this effect that's seriously ****ing you over will end once I die" offense.

The incentive, for enemies with half a brain, is to take down that mage. And since said mage is undead, "take down" means "destroy", and that means "difficult to bring back" (because undead). It's very possible that the character would get killed mid-campaign and the party won't have a way to bring them back, which could be an un-fun experience for the player.

So ... what part of this combination should be banned, in your view?

[Telok]

It depends on the bling. If you go into a slum ruled by crime lords with expensive jewelry and expensive car, you are painting a target on yourself. But if you go with an expensive gun and expensive, special-forces-grade body armor, maybe some fancy granades and a night visor, I bet you'd be left alone

Left alone short term and in that place at least. That sort of gear attracts a different kind of attention. Of course the majority of the HoD setting basically is ruled by magical crime lords.

Kinda like playing the Star Wars setting using Gurps or something and having a player try to start the game with a Star Destroyer. Sure, it might be technically within your point buy and Jabba might not try directly fighting you with guns. But is it really a good idea if you want to go anywhere civilized, and what's the Empire think about you running around with a major battleship? That sort of thing just needs to be communicated during chargen and reasonable adults will come to a comoromise or adjustment.

@Tak: I thought I recalled some prophecy attached to the Heart of Darkness and possibly Excalibur or the Grail?

[Kish]

IDK ... I think there shouldn't generally be "traps", but OTOH in a system with freedom in what you build, they're unavoidable to an extent?
I think putting "this is how you can get a gamebreaking artifact weapon which I wouldn't actually want any character to ever have, which costs the bulk or entirety of, but not more than, a standard starting character's character points" in is avoidable and has no upside.

[Unoriginal]

Yes, if Green Lantern gets captured, enemies will likely take away the ring or do anything they can to prevent him from using it.

Yes, sometime Green Lantern will be attacked by a villain who wants the ring. Quite often Sinestro, who is basically the designated nemesis of GL.

Yes, sometime Green Lantern will be attacked by a villain who, either intentionally or coincidentally, has an ability or another that makes taking the ring a favored tactic.

Green Lantern doesn't constantly get attacked by street thugs who want his ring. Neither by minor villains. And nor by major villains.

Green Lantern doesn't constantly get harassed by the government, either.

Same can be said of Iron Man, Mr. Freeze and Mecha Maid.

I mean, by OP's logic, the moment Stargirl did her first outing as a superhero, Lex Luthor or Vandal Savage would immediately have sent their people to go get her magic staff and wouldn't have stopped until she was dead.

Heck, by that logic, the moment *Batman* did his first outing as a superhero, he'd be a dead man walking, because that Batmobile and utility belt sure are wonderful help.

[icefractal]

Hmm, I guess that's the difference between "equipment as part of the character" and "equipment as orthogonal advancement"? D&D classically went the second route - a 1st level character could potentially get their hands on a Holy Avenger, but could also have it taken from them. However, a number of tables do play it more the second way - you have a WBL-worth of gear, you might lose it temporarily but never permanently, and likewise you won't likely get the chance to go significantly above-WBL. And games like Hero system are firmly in the second camp, to the point that "being a billionaire" costs less points than "a good pistol", because you can't get the latter with the former (well technically you can buy it, but not keep using it).

I think either model can work, but the system does need to be clear about which one it is.

[Talakeal]

Once again, youre the game designer here. If such a build is disruptive to the mechanics, then just don't let people buy gear with starting points to that extent. Don't say "you can do it, and then I will make sure you can't have any fun with it."

This would be simple enough if there was a clear line, but there isn't. "Too much" is dependent upon so many factors; the player, the GM, the setting, the tone of the game, the other players, etc.

You are assuming the GM is being petty and malicious and that they are the reason this build is no fun when what actually happens is that the build requires the GM to ignore the existing rules / setting to make the build functional. As I said upthread, if we were playing D&D and someone came to me with a wizard build who had 18 str, 8 int, skill focus, and full plate, I would explain to them the weaknesses of such a build and make sure they knew what they were getting into before the game began, it's the same thing here.


I think putting "this is how you can get a game-breaking artifact weapon which I wouldn't actually want any character to ever have, which costs the bulk or entirety of, but not more than, a standard starting character's character points" in is avoidable and has no upside.

This isn't what happened here.

No single artifact is game breaking.

The build in question spent 100% of its build points (actually more than 100% because he also took almost every flaw in the book) on over a dozen artifacts.

Even then, it's not so much "game-breaking" as setting breaking.

Spending 100% of your resources on any one facet of a character is going to leave you with something that has numerous crippling weaknesses. Equipment is a bit more extreme because it is under-costed due to the fact that you won't always have access to it, which compounds the problem, but doesn't actually create the problem in the first place.


@Tak: I thought I recalled some prophecy attached to the Heart of Darkness and possibly Excalibur or the Grail?

There is some folklore and divine decrees, but no, I intentionally try and avoid prophecies as a setting element.


Yes, if Green Lantern gets captured, enemies will likely take away the ring or do anything they can to prevent him from using it.

Yes, sometime Green Lantern will be attacked by a villain who wants the ring. Quite often Sinestro, who is basically the designated nemesis of GL.

Yes, sometime Green Lantern will be attacked by a villain who, either intentionally or coincidentally, has an ability or another that makes taking the ring a favored tactic.

Green Lantern doesn't constantly get attacked by street thugs who want his ring. Neither by minor villains. And nor by major villains.

Green Lantern doesn't constantly get harassed by the government, either.

Same can be said of Iron Man, Mr. Freeze and Mecha Maid.

I mean, by OP's logic, the moment Stargirl did her first outing as a superhero, Lex Luthor or Vandal Savage would immediately have sent their people to go get her magic staff and wouldn't have stopped until she was dead.

Heck, by that logic, the moment *Batman* did his first outing as a superhero, he'd be a dead man walking, because that Batmobile and utility belt sure are wonderful help.

Ok. So:

1: Batman, Green Lantern, and Star Girl are all exceptional people who are competent with or without their gear.

2: This is single author fiction, the characters (and their gear) can have as much, or as little, plot armor as the current story allows.

3: How do Vandal Savage and Lex Luthor even know about Star Girl's staff? Could they even use it if they wanted to? (I don't know much about Stargirl).

4: There are plenty of plots that do revolve around the heroes having their gear stolen. Heck, Lord of the Rings is all about Sauron trying to get Bilbo's ring, and every episode of Pokemon has Team Rocket trying to steal Pikachu. Heck, I am pretty sure it is a trope in many 80s cartoons that the villain tries to steal the same macguffin every week and never succeeds.

5: Batman is all about being dark, mysterious, and intimidating. The utility belt and the car are just nice gadgets, but nothing world shattering, and they aren't especially flashy or easy to steal. And Batman is the last person you want to try and steal from.


Hmm, I guess that's the difference between "equipment as part of the character" and "equipment as orthogonal advancement"? D&D classically went the second route - a 1st level character could potentially get their hands on a Holy Avenger, but could also have it taken from them. However, a number of tables do play it more the second way - you have a WBL-worth of gear, you might lose it temporarily but never permanently, and likewise you won't likely get the chance to go significantly above-WBL. And games like Hero system are firmly in the second camp, to the point that "being a billionaire" costs less points than "a good pistol", because you can't get the latter with the former (well technically you can buy it, but not keep using it).

I think either model can work, but the system does need to be clear about which one it is.

My rules are very clear that equipment purchased with starting points can be lost, destroyed, or stolen.

That being said, as a GM I don't mind given players and their gear some degree of plot armor if that is what they want, but there are limits!

[King of Nowhere]

This would be simple enough if there was a clear line, but there isn't. "Too much" is dependent upon so many factors; the player, the GM, the setting, the tone of the game, the other players, etc.


This isn't what happened here.

No single artifact is game breaking.

The build in question spent 100% of its build points (actually more than 100% because he also took almost every flaw in the book) on over a dozen artifacts.



how about drawing the line somewhere and making a rule that you can't spend more than 30% of your build points on artifacts?

[Telok]

how about drawing the line somewhere and making a rule that you can't spend more than 30% of your build points on artifacts?

Because there are options for general artifacts that make thrm symbiotic/implanted clockwork weird science rather than magical and its possible for such a 100% gear character to be functional. Difficult to play, but possibly functional. Its just that such a character would have fewer toys than the shining beacon of magical effects character.

Going full christmas tree, either way, isn't non-functional by the games' mechanics. Its just that in the default Heart of Darkness setting its inadvisable to walk down the street in despot lord #7's town visibly glowing with magic to everyone with a single point in the detect magic skill. Like its not against the mechanics of the game Shadowrun to walk down the street with unlicensed armor and a rocket launcher. But in the default SR setting its a really bad idea to walk around downtown Seattle or one of the megacorp arcologies dressed that way.