D&D4 Updates Overview - General

I've been impressed at how Wizards of the Coast has issued online updates to correct issues with D&D 4^th Edition. The question of issuing rules changes is always a tricky one. On the one hand, it means the rules are constantly changing, and your books you purchased soon becomes obsolete. On the other hand, it allows the rules to be constantly perfected, rather than having mistakes be carved in stone, making the game become slowly more and more obsolescent. As a lover of game design, I prefer the game to be updated and improved.

They seem to have changed their update philosophy. When the game was first released, there seemed to be no sign they would correct any rules imbalances, as they didn't seem to give much feedback. Then they started issuing fixes to badly worded rules and gross game balances. Recently they seem to have become more aggressive, really trying to solve game balance issues, as if they were a MMORPG.

Since I'll need to explain the rules changes to my players and friends, I decided to call attention to the rules changes I think are most significant, and what I think of them. Since there are a lot of changes, I'm concentrating in this first article on the more general rules changes and major racial/class feature changes. A lot of these changes were made in the recent May update, but I'm not restricting myself to those.

An extensive change in May was to change the tieflings racial power to some quite different. Instead of getting a bonus to their next counterattack after being wounded, they instead get automatic fire damage on the attacker. This is certainly a lot more potent than the old Infernal Wrath, which I considered to be a rather minor racial power. The other tiefling racial powers seemed pretty decent. I suppose the tieflings were not one of the more powerful races, but I really don't know why they decided to make such a major change.

Zone and Aura attacks no longer have the restriction that the damage they cause isn't cumulative. On the plus side, this is good from a game balance perspective. Before, if you had two creatures with damaging auras (say, 2 howling hags), the second creature was clearly not worth as many points as the first, because you could only take damage from one of the auras. It meant that one howling hag was a pretty scary addition to the fight, but a sisterhood of howling hags was pretty ineffective. Really, if you were a monster, you wanted to hang out with some totally different monster – having a fire aura and a cold aura together was a deadly combination, rather than cancelling out as you might expect.

On the other hand, this change doesn't necessarily improve game play - the GM can always make encounters with multiple identical aura creatures a little tougher to compensate, and you end up with an interesting tactical problem that killing one of them doesn't stop the aura. Also, the game is still chock full of things that don't stack, anyway. It is still the case that monsters with similar ongoing damage don't stack well. And creatures with dazing auras still don't stack. So I'm not sure why it was so important to issue a change to just how damaging zones and auras work.

The clerical power Healer's Lore was weakened so that it only applies to healing that spends a healing surge; the stated reason is to "reduce the potency of surgeless healing, such as astral seal". This seems like a good change, because many of the clerical powers to which it applied seemed more balanced without it, and adding Healer's Lore to a small amount of healing boosts it massively.

However, this did make me notice that I hadn't paid too much attention to the new clerical powers in Divine Power, such as astral seal. It always appeared to me that an unstated design premise of D&D4 was that healing that does not require a healing surge must always be a daily power. This is necessary to fit into the design of the healing surge system. The rule that healing requires use of healing surges gives you a resource that can only be restored by an extended rest. This means that, in an adventure with time pressure, the damage you take from a fight has meaning, if you take too much damage over multiple fights you will be forced to take an extended rest. Allowing surgeless healing that is still daily doesn't change this, it is still a resource that needs an extended rest to recharge. But if you allow surgeless healing with an at-will power, then you can forget the healing surges almost entirely and bypass this aspect of the game.

Now, astral seal comes with the limitation that you can only use it in combat, so normally you can't use it for unlimited healing. But allowing this sort of power creates an incentive for perverse tactics, like intentionally leaving a monster alive but helpless so you can beat on it until you heal. So it is puzzling that they removed the unspoken prohibition on non-daily surgeless healing.

The Aid Another action was fixed. Before, it required a check against DC 10, regardless of level, which made aiding easier (indeed, virtually automatic) at higher levels. This was too easy, and violated the general D&D principal of making things scale regularly with level. Now the DC is 10 + ½ level, and if the check fails, the aid gives a -1 bonus instead of a +2 bonus. It also mentions specifically that the DM should sometimes limit the number of creatures that can give aid. These changes make the actual skill level of the creature giving the aid meaningful and reduce the extraordinary ease of aiding another, so I think they are clearly an improvement.

The dominated condition was reworded to not make the dominated creature dazed, but has about the same effect. I'm sure there was a reason for the change, but I don't know what it was. Similarly, the restrained condition was reworded to not be based on immobilized, and to prevent even forced movement. This is cute, but I'm not sure why it was done. I think it is a fine rule, but I usually figure that published rules shouldn't be changed unless the new rule is a substantial improvement, and I don't really see how this qualifies.

Forced teleportation now gives a saving throw if you attempt to teleport a foe into the air or into hindering terrain. Seems like a good rule for balance. Also, a peculiar interaction with immobilized/restrained was changed. In general, a huge change between D&D3 and D&D4 was that effects are now controlled by game rules rather than trying to apply real world logic. So sleep spells work on the undead, poisons can slow you down in terms of movement without inhibiting your fighting ability, pole arms can be used at close range even when the monster is bear-hugging you, and so on. Some people didn't like the change, but it was consistent – no need for arbitrary GM interpretation of what works and what doesn't, the game rules say exactly what works. But teleportation would cancel being immobilized or restrained if it was a physical effect, but not if it was an effect on your mind or body. These terms were not defined in the game. The new rules say teleportation cancels being immobilized or restrained if it is an effect location in a specific square, such as a monster grab. I'm still not sure this is perfectly well clarified, but it is a big step in that direction.

The wizard's Orb of Imposition was totally nerfed; it now only gives a penalty to the next saving throw a monster makes against an effect. I feel the problem with the Orb was that it got proportionately better as you gained in levels, plus it was better when used on more powerful high-level status effects, plus you could combine it with other saving-throw penalty effects. When all of that combined, a high-level Orb wizard could totally neutralize a monster forever with a good attack. The change is good for game balance, it certainly fixes that. But I always felt that the Orb was conversely rather weak and disappointing at low levels, when the effect was weak and there weren't many choices to combine it with. Now I really feel like the power is disappointing at low levels.

Skill Challenges were changed so that "higher complexity" (longer) challenges are also harder. This is good and bad. Many sections of the original DMG rules implied that higher complexity challenges were harder to succeed at, when in fact they were not. So the new change fixes that problem. On the other hand, it isn't clear why a lengthier skill challenge should be harder to succeed at; it seems more intuitive to be able to decide the difficulty separately from deciding the length.

The Avenger's Armor of Faith ability was modified to work only with cloth armor, to make sure they wore cloth armor instead of upgrading to better armor. This is sensible, but what seems funny to me is that it was changed now instead of being that way all along. If the intent was for the class to wear cloth armor, why clearly specify that the Armor of Faith works with "light armor"? It seemed obvious to me the first time I saw the class that they would certainly want to spent the feat to get leather armor.

In the original Adventurer's Vault book, double weapons were introduced, and were so clearly superior to actually wielding two hand weapons that they supplanted that idea entirely, and made classes using two weapons, such as melee rangers and tempest fighters, much more effective. These have since been toned down to be less powerful, which seems good. The urgrosh changes were a bit odd. Before, the urgrosh was clearly superior to most of the other weapons, as it did the same damage if you attacked with both ends, but was better on attacks that only required attacking with the main end. Now the urgrosh has been made even better relative to the other weapons, but the two ends count as different weapon groups, making it harder to get bonuses from Weapon Expertise and similar feats. Odd, but I guess it is sort of appropriate for it to be the "most superior but hardest to use" of the double weapons.

The charge rule was clarified to work the way I had been playing it, that every square of movement during a charge must bring you closer to the opponent. The mount rules were rewritten, and the rules for move skills were clarified. The rules for flight were simplified even further, so that flying monsters don't have to worry about moving around in order to stay in the air.

Running Away is Hard

I was recently reminded of something I've long found true in most roleplaying and wargames – running away from a combat is very difficult, much more difficult than it is in the source material.

There are really three sorts of situations I'm thinking of where the players might run away from a tactical combat. They might run away as soon as they see the monsters, they might run away as soon as they realize how powerful the monsters are, or they might run away near the end of a difficult combat once they realize they are going to lose. There are many other situations where the players might decide to flee due to story reasons or interesting complications in the encounter, but I'm sticking to the basics here.

For this article, I'm going to concentrate on the third situation, running away during a pitched battle as an alternative to being defeated by the enemies, as this is the most problematic time to retreat.

The primary reason that running away is difficult in roleplaying games is the problem of fallen comrades. In order for the players to be losing badly enough to consider retreat, they generally have to have taken a lot of damage and lost significant fighting strength. Since damage is not dealt at exactly the same rate to all characters, this usually means at least one of the characters has been knocked unconscious. This is a severe problem, as unconscious characters cannot run away.

Another character could try to pick up the unconscious character and run away, but this is usually quite difficult to do. How difficult depends on the game rules, but usually it is going to take a whole turn for someone to move over and pick up the fallen character – and you can count yourself fortunate if the game rules do not then give you a movement and/or combat penalty for carrying someone as big as you are.

In games with healing, you might be able to revive the unconscious character. But if you are losing badly, there is a good chance you have already used up all of your healing powers much earlier in the battle, while attempting to keep everyone fighting and maximize your chances of winning.

However, even if you do heal your ally, there is a good chance he is still surrounded by the same deadly enemies who defeated him in the first place, and they may just do so again. And if an ally picked up your unconscious comrade, he may go down too. After all, if the fight is that tough, he is probably pretty thrashed too, and now the opponents are getting uncontested attacks against weakened characters. There could potentially be a domino effect in which the whole party would be trashed trying to save one character.

To go further into the issue of being surrounded, it can very easily happen that in an interesting and well-roleplayed combat, one of the bolder characters has pierced the "enemy lines" and is flanking the front ranks or attacking the vulnerable back ranks. Or the desperate fight has broken down into a wild melee, and one character is separated from the others. In either case, once a retreat is called, the character now finds it is pretty tough to get out with enemies in between him and the rest of the group.

Worse, the combat may involve characters simply being in situations which specifically prevent them from moving. One of the characters might be encased in webbing, or hobbled by leg wounds, or grappled by a giant bear.

Even if the players can get into the situation where they are grouped up and trying to run away as a unit, they aren't out of the woods. Now the characters have to either outrun the enemies to a point that they can't be attacked anymore, "lose" the enemies (in a car chase, for instance), or move the fight to a point where the monsters won't follow.

If you can't plain outdistance the enemies, the tactical nature of the combat really becomes a problem. In a typical tactical combat system, the battle map can be seen very plainly, and the movement of all units is very plainly specified. Every time the characters move, the enemies can simply move to follow. A common strategy is to switch to some sort of non-tactical chase rules at this point, because if you don't, there often isn't much opportunity to shake off pursuers on a tactical map.

A further reason for this is the fact that tactical combat often has a very short time frame. In many games an entire combat takes place in less than one minute of game time. This means that if the enemies can continue to attack the charaters during the chase, there just isn't enough time for the characters to get anywhere that the opponents wouldn't want to follow. There may not be enough time to run from one street corner to another, much less to have a complicated chase.

So the characters are going to need to run away in a fashion that prevents the enemies from attacking them efficiently during the chase. Whether this is possible really comes down to the precise rules of the game in question.

If the game rules say that you can move full speed and attack, running out of range is pretty much hopeless unless all the PC's are faster than most of the enemies. But in the typical mixed party of adventurers, at least one character is going to be slow enough for the main body of the enemies to catch.

Many games have the rule that you can move twice as far when you are not attacking. This rule is what would seem to give a real fair shot at escape. But they may also have rules that circumvent this. Two games I'm thinking of, Champions and 4th edition D&D, both have "charge" rules that let you move at full speed and still attack, at least with melee combat.

Even if the PC's are fast, they may not be able to open the range fast enough without the aid of favorable terrain. In a game system with decent weapon accuracy at range, there is practically no chance of escaping beyond bow or gun range before being mowed down. If the enemies have range, you need to find terrain to block them off – and given the compressed time scale of tactical combat mentioned above, that terrain had better be really, really close by.

Furthermore, even if the characters are all conscious and all faster than the opponents and running away such that the enemies only get one or two shots, we return to the fact that if the players have decided to flee from a tough combat, they are probably pretty badly wounded. In most games, a lot can happen in one round of combat, and the process of running away doesn't give you any better defenses. So even one or two volleys from the enemies can wreak havoc with the wounted party, defeating or hindering one or more of them so they can't properly escape.

Finally, some notes about a couple particular games.

In Champions, you can move at full speed and still perform a Move-Through, potentially making escape difficult. However, a majority of opponents cannot effectively perform this maneuver, so that is not the primary problem when escaping. More pertinent is that the extremely varied nature of superheroes and supervillains means that even though you may be able to move twice as fast when escaping, it is quite possible for a character without movement powers to be half as fast as everyone else, and thus be incapable of escaping. There is some relief by the fact that the really fast characters are probably more than strong enough to pick up the slow people and escape at full speed. But Champions combat is also pretty violent, if you don't have the right powers the chance of being clobbered while attempting to return to the fight to pick up a fallen comrade is pretty high. The good thing about Champions is the genre; since the comics say that heroes get captured all the time, losing fights is not a big deal.

In 4th edition D&D, a fleeing character can take two run actions per turn and escape from a typical range 10 monster in a pretty short period of time. Escaping from a melee monster is a different matter, however. Some of the players are likely to be slowed by wearing heavy armor, and a melee monster than is even one point higher speed than the character can run/charge and keep pace while attacking every turn. The attack is at a penalty, but not enough of a penalty to be ineffective when you make it every turn against a foe who doesn't fight back. And all of the other monsters who can't do this can at least double run to keep up and make sure the party can't stop and fight. Actually, though, the situation for running away is much worse than this, because of the opportunity attack rules. Once you are next to a melee monster, trying to run away at full speed will provoke a free attack from the monster. You can run away at reduced speed to avoid this, but then you really aren't getting away from the monsters.

I am try to recall situations in games I've played in which tactical escape was actually possible. One time was in Car Wars, when one enemy car was defeating two trikes. The two trikes split up, the enemy followed one, and that trike was specially equipped with massive rocket boosters that let it pull out of range before being destroyed. In Champions, there were a couple classic fights in which our party was outmatched and called a retreat, but we soon discovered that retreat was tactically impossible while the enemies were still around, so we started fighting super-efficiently and abusing as many game rules as possible in order to get rid of the pursuers, and ended up winning the battle instead. But I can't seem to recall a successful tactical retreat in a roleplaying game.

Even my successful example shows that if you want to realistically escape from a tactical combat, what you need is some sort of "Deus Ex Machina" power, some sort of extremely powerful effect that allows you to escape from combat. In some cases, the effect has to be so powerful that you wouldn't allow it if it was usable to win combats rather than simply escape them. Something like "When the characters say the mystic word, the entire party and all of their possessions are instantly transported back to their home." Now, that's a way to escape from a combat!

Hybrid Classes

The idea I thought was really cool in the Player's Handbook 3 was the idea of hybrid classes. Basically, this allows 4th edition characters to imitate 1st edition dual-classed characters, where you choose two classes as part of character creation and are equally good at both classes. In 4th edition, each of the two classes is called a "hybrid" class. You get all of the powers are both hybrid classes, but each hybrid class has only a portion of the powers of a full class. Numeric values like hit points and defense bonuses are, in general, half as much as a full class, so the final character is more or less the average of the two classes. Hybrid characters have the same number of total powers, but must split the powers within each category between the two classes.

An additional interesting concept is that for strikers, and some defenders, they came up with the idea of tying certain class features to class powers, so that hybrid strikers can only use their primary "striker ability" to pump up the powers derived from that striker class.

Here are a list of things I thought were pretty cool about the hybrid classes:

1. The idea of constructing specific half classes for every class seems really clever for game balance purposes. Instead of having to make some sort of generic rules and hope that they aren't totally unbalanced when applied to specific classes, you can craft each hybrid class to be half as powerful as a full class, and design the powers in that hybrid class to work well when combined with another class, while still having the freedom to design the powers in the main class without worrying so much about whether they will be balanced in a multi-classed character.

2. It is clever that the construction of 4th edition D&D, based on a common level progression concept for every class and bonus powers based on class, really works well with the hybrid concept. Each class can just have half the bonuses of the full class, and the level progression bonuses are either owned by the character as a whole, or divvied up between the two classes in a natural way.

3. Tying class features to powers makes the design of hybrid classes much simpler. Instead of having to figure out how to cut a feature in half (and many features don't really have a natural way to be cut in half), you just give the full feature and restrict it to combining with half of the hybrid character's powers.

4. Tying class features to powers seems very entertaining if both hybrid classes have tied powers. In particular, I like the idea of a fighter/rogue who can choose each round whether to "lock down" the enemy with his fighter attack, or backstab him with his rogue attack. It adds an interesting tactical dimension to the simpler alternative of a character who tries to both backstab and lock down the enemy, both with half effect.

Things that are not so great:

1. Tying class features to powers is cool when both classes have a tied feature, but is awkward when one does and the other doesn't. If you have, say, a striker/leader, you have a striker ability that can only be used with your striker powers, and a once per encounter healing power that is not tied to your powers in any way. This is OK with your encounter and daily powers; you will get to use the striker ability on about half of these (more like 2/3 in practice if you put your "odd" picks in the striker class). But with the at-will powers, you have two at-wills you can pick from, but one has a big bonus the other one doesn't. So it is tempting to use that at-will power an awful lot and skip the other one, which makes the character less interesting rather than more interesting.

2. Not only is having only one class with a tied feature less interesting, it is unfortunately also more efficient. A striker/striker can use only one striker power at a time, but a striker/leader can use a full striker power every round (abeit with somewhat less flexibility), and a half leader power on top of that.

3. What to do with armor is, and always has been, a tricky question. I really don't see a simple, elegant way to do this in 4th edition rules. I guess my best idea is to average the number of armor feats each class gets, then let the character buy extra feats without the statistic prerequisites until he reaches the armor type of the better class. Anyway, what D&D4 chooses to do is to use the weaker armor type of the two classes, then allow the character to spend his one and only hybrid talent to get the better armor type instead. This actually seems like a pretty decent way to solve the problem given the fact that averaging armor types just doesn't fit cleanly into the system.

4. The way that classes are tied very tightly to certain statistics in D&D4 is not very friendly to hybrid classes. With single classes this is relatively harmless, since you just pick your class first, then take whatever statistics it requires. But an awful lot of hybrid class combinations that might sound cool require incompatible statistics and just aren't practical (especially at high level, when you are going to fall seriously behind if you try to advance more than 2 statistics).

Each hybrid class has a "half-powered" role feature. The role feature is what gives strikers extra damage, defenders the ability to mark and tie down opponents, and leaders healing. Note that, in many cases, half of a role feature is more than 50% as good.

To see this clearly, consider whether a hybrid character with two classes of the same role is better or worse than a single class character.

A hybrid leader/leader has a slightly better healing ability than a regular leader. This is because, although he gets the same 2 healings per encounter, he can choose to use both on the same round. However, at 16th level he becomes worse, as he does not gain a third healing.

A hybrid striker/striker would have a very useful flexibility advantage over a regular striker, in that he can choose the better striker ability for each situation. As many of the striker abilities are situational and don't always work, this is a significant benefit. A rogue/ranger, for instance, could use hunter's quarry/twin strike whenever he was unable to arrange a sneak attack. The hybrid character does lose the ability to gain striker damage on basic attacks, but that doesn't seem a big enough penalty to offset the flexibility advantage.

Controllers don't have "role features" in 4th edition D&D. Presumably, in order to be game balanced, they have better powers. So, in effect, a controller's role feature is always "baked" into his powers, just like the role feature of a hybrid striker. However, a controller/controller doesn't seem too exciting; after all, all controllers have two at-will powers from a substantial list, the only difference with a controller/controller is that the two powers come from different lists. This just isn't as exciting as having two large striker powers with very different activation criteria. This is a good time, though, to consider the case of a half-controller, half-something else. In this case the one controller power starts to seem pretty good. A controller/striker, for instance, really would have two very different at-will powers, each with a very different situation they are good in, and would thus seem better than either a controller or a striker (in terms of the role feature).

The fighter hybrid has a role feature tied to class powers, and thus works like the striker. The other defenders work in a variety of different ways that are hard to describe in a generic way; each power has to be considered separately whether it is half as good as the full power, or more. My impression is that most are more than half as good as the full power.

The upshot of all of this is that a hybrid striker class feature seems rather better than half a striker class feature, and the same is generally true with controller and defender, but not with a hybrid leader class feature, so hybrid leaders seem to need more other stuff to really be equal. I guess the one saving grace of a hybrid leader is the ability to use your one healing per encounter to revive the real leader; but it seems like there are a lot of other, easier ways to get this ability.

Looking at the game balance as a whole, the advantage of a hybrid character is having better role features that a standard character, and more flexibility in selecting powers. The numeric values will be essentially comparable, except for minor things like having to round down, and the fact that the hybrid characters have one less skill. The hybrid character may, or may not, have inferior armor, and may, or may not, have more difficulty choosing optimum statistics. The real balancing factor is that a regular character will generally have two or more strong class features which are better than most feats; the hybrid character generally has few or none of these class features, but can get one (and only one) by spending a feat. This seems to me like a good overall balance, steering in the conservative direction of making the hybrid characters a bit weak, to make sure they don't overshadow the traditional classes.

Then there is the question of the balance of specific hybrid classes, whether they are strong or weak, looked at purely by themselves. That sort of thing is always an interesting exercise for me. There are two ways to do this – analyze each hybrid class from the ground up, or compare it to half of the real class. The latter is far easier, so I will do that.

My impression is that the typical hybrid class keeps a half class feature which is better than half as good as a full class feature, and loses two strong class features and half of the remaining features (if any).

Avenger: Typical half striker feature. Loses two strong features, Avenger's Censure and Channel Divinity. Loses Armor of Faith as well, which leaves the Avenger with pretty poor armor no matter what he combos with, instead of his usual fairly strong armor. Seems harsh.

Barbarian: Typical half striker feature (baked into the at-will powers). Loses Feral Might, which is really two features in one – seems tempting to get it back with the Hybrid Talent. Loses Barbarian Armored Agility, but this may not be too bad if the character can end up qualifying to buy a feat to wear heavy armor. Keeps the Rampage feature. Seems favorable.

Bard: Half healing power. Loses strong features Bardic Training, Bardic Virtue. Also loses minor features Multiclass Versatility, Song of Rest, Words of Friendship. Does get one extra skill, just like a full bard, and keeps the little Skill Versatility feature. Seems unfavorable.

Cleric: Typical half leader feature. Keeps the strong Healer's Lore feature, but effectively only half of it, since it only applies to cleric powers in the first place. Loses the strong Channel Divinity feature and the ritual caster feat. Can only get back half of the Channel Divinity feature. Seems OK.

Druid: Loses 3 decent powers - a third at-will power, +1 speed, and ritual casting. Seems OK. The loss of the Primal Aspect may make Con-based hybrid Druids less practical.

Fighter: Has a striker-like half defender feature. Loses the strong Combat Superiority and Fighter Weapon Talent features. Doesn't lose a skill, like a normal fighter. Has very nice armor proficiencies which will probably be lost in most hybrid combinations. Seems OK.

Invoker: Loses the strong Channel Divinity power, plus Ritual Casting. Keeps the pretty good Covenant Manifestation power. Seems favorable.

Paladin: The Divine Challenge defender feature does about half damage or a little more, and is clearly rather better than half as good. While the damage is halved, it is every bit as difficult for the monster to avoid the damage. So either it inconveniences the monster just as much to have to attack the paladin, or the monster takes damage more often. The paladin loses two strong class features, Channel Divinity and Lay on Hands. These are pretty good, and the paladin is likely to lose his massive armor as well. On the plus side, the loss of Lay on Hands may allow the paladin to skip the Wisdom statistic entirely. Seems OK at best. On the other hand, the Divine Challenge is exceptionally easy to abuse with a ranged character, so who knows, maybe the hybrid Paladin is quite deadly.

Ranger: Standard half striker feature. The ranger has three mediocre class features – Prime Shot, a free feat, and a free skill. The hybrid keeps the free skill, and only loses two weak class features. The ranger seems like a pretty sweet hybrid.

Rogue: Standard striker half feature. Loses the strong Rogue Tactics and First Strike powers, plus the ability to fight well with daggers and shurikens. Seems OK.

Shaman: Standard leader half feature. Loses the strong Spirit Boon and opportunity attack powers. Keeps the Speak with Spirits power. Seems OK.

Sorceror: Standard striker half feature. Loses a couple nifty but not all that strong powers. Seems pretty favorable.

Warden: The half defender power affects one adjacent enemy instead of all of them – this certainly seems more than half as good. Loses the strong Font of Life power. Also loses Guardian Might, which is odd, as this is a small power combined with an AC feature needed to balance the class. So you have to find a way to get a good armor class, which may or may not be difficult, depending on what other class you choose. So it is hard to say how favorable the Warden is.

Warlock: Standard half striker feature. Loses the strong Pact Boon and Shadow Walk powers, and the Prime Shot power. Ouch. The poor warlock never seemed that great to begin with, and just gets to keep the weak striker power and loses all the cool warlock stuff. Seems weak.

Warlord: Standard half leader power. Loses the very strong command presence feature, but keeps the solid combat leader feature. Not sure if this is good or bad.

Wizard: Loses two lesser features – ritual casting and spellbook – and keeps Cantrips. Loses the one primary class feature, Arcane Implement Mastery, but can get it back. Seems pretty good.

Three-Player Game Mechanics

When games involve players being able to attack each other or ally with each other in a relatively unrestricted way, I generally feel that such games work best with only two sides. When there are more sides, certain characteristic things happen in the game that tend to overshadow the ordinary play of the game. I am referring to these developments of the game play as three-player game mechanics, as they tend to exemplify why it can be difficult to create a three-player game without careful thought to the game mechanic. The same things can happen with more players as well.

Perhaps the most classic 3-player game mechanic is the Alliance mechanic, where two players will form a semi-permanent alliance in order to knock the third player out of the game, before turning on each other. It is easier to win a 2-player game than a 3-player game, so it is very logical for 2 players to team up like this. And in the kind of games I'm discussing here, the third player is likely to have little or no chance of surviving against this kind of odds. So the most important part of game play is to be one of the players in the alliance. This is what I really think of with a game like Diplomacy. In my experience, given an average group of players, socializing among the players basically determines success, overwhelming any tactical or strategic considerations. Often the most persuasive player will convince the weakest player to join an alliance, hoping he can destroy the dangerous third player then eliminate his ally. The rules of the game don't make a whole lot of difference – the game is won or lost at the very beginning, when the alliances are formed.

In theory, when the alliance has just about crushed the third player, one of the alliance might want to suddenly backstab the other, thus allowing the third player to stay in the game. But this doesn't seem very likely unless the game is carefully constructed for it; there are many things that can prevent it. Sometimes attacking a weak player is very profitable in terms of stealing resources, so there is really no reason to attack your strong ally until the weak player is totally destroyed. Sometimes there isn't much of a gray area, by the time the alliance has done enough damage to consider turning on each other, the third player is hopelessly crippled. Sometimes the alliance has so many forces in the third player's territory that he'll be destroyed by the fighting anyways. Sometimes the game doesn't really allow the alliance players to catch each other with surprise attacks, so there is little incentive not to continue the alliance properly. Very often the personalities or social relationship of the players is such that they aren't inclined to terminate the alliance until its successful conclusion, regardless of other logic.

Another classic 3-player mechanic is the Balance of Power mechanic, in which player with the strongest position at any given time is opposed by the other two players, until that player is no longer the strongest. This mechanic is actually fairly popular, as it helps ensure that all players remain in the game. When this is done is a very weak way, it can be a nice mechanic for that purpose. But in the unrestrained format, it results in a game where any form of successful game play that is visible to the other players is meaningless, because they just team up to remove any advantage gained. So most of the game is just a formality, with no effect on the eventual outcome, unless a player can get some sort of secret advantage the others aren't aware of. Then, at the end of the game, it becomes a question of who chooses the right time to sprint for the finish line. Somewhat like the end of a cycling road race stage, where if you start your sprint too early, or too late, you lose. Very often the first player to come close to winning is just barely stopped, then another player sneaks in to victory.

A third mechanic is the Let's You and Him Fight mechanic. This is characteristic of games in which combat simply causes attrition to the attacker and the defender. In this sort of game, it is highly advantageous not to attack at all. If the two other players fight each other, you are the one that benefits. If all of the players realize this, then either the Alliance or Balance of Power mechanic takes over, or the game just goes on without combat, and is rather boring. Very often, however, if the game is about combat, the players will fight anyway, simply because there is no point playing if nothing is going to happen. And if they do, eventually a winner will be declared. But this means the game is creating a degenerate situation where trying to make the game fun causes you to lose the game – not a situation you want in your game.

If you are interested in a game of deception and tricky diplomatic maneuvering, the Alliance and Balance of Power mechanics can be very interesting. There are definitely games built around this sort of thing, such as Diplomacy. But if you don't want this to be the focus of the game, these 3-player mechanics are destructive, as they dominate the game play and make most of the actual game mechanics insignificant. The Let's You and Him Fight mechanic, as far as I can tell, is purely something destructive to be avoided.

If you don't want your multiplayer game to be dominated by one of these mechanics, they can be prevented or minimized by an appropriate game design; most popular multiplayer games do this. In many games players have strong reasons to be interested in improving their own unique position, and a very limited ability to concentrate attacks on specific players. But if you just take a good competitive two-player game, and add multiple sides, it is all too easy for the game to degenerate into one of these three-player mechanics and become a very different game.

Game Balance Analysis: Battletech 3025 Weapons

I love game balance, and when I study a game, I usually like to look at the game balance and figure out whether the various items in the game are balanced against each other, and which are too powerful or too weak compared to the others. I thought I'd go over my game balance analysis of an actual game.

The game I felt like analyzing was classic Battletech, the version in the 3025 Technical Readout, an old game book I have a great fondness for. I was thinking of Battletech recently, and started thinking of the game balance between the various weapons, so that is what I'm writing about.

I'm not really an expert on Battletech tactics, and it has been quite a while since I've actually played the game. But this is primarily an analysis based on mathematics and logic, supplemented by some play experience, the typical kind of analysis I like to do. And I'm using my old Battletech Rules of Warfare manual for the analysis, not the latest Battletech rules; this is an example of game balance analysis, not a commentary on the current state of the game.

The first thing to note about the weapons is the distinction between energy weapons and ammunition weapons.

1. Energy weapons have unlimited ammunition.
2. Ammunition will explode if it suffers a critical hit; this typically destroys the Mech.
3. Energy weapons are better at clearing woods and starting fires.

In addition to these advantages, energy weapons tend to be smaller but require more heat sinks. Spending tonnage on heat sinks rather than spending the same tonnage on more massive weapons has advantages of its own.

1. If you have a weapon that takes up fewer critical spaces but needs more heat sinks, then more of the mech's critical spaces are filled with heat sinks compared to weapons. This is good, because a hit on a single heat sink is no big deal, much preferrable to a hit on a weapon.
2. Weapons that require more heat sinks are more flexible. If you are in danger of overheating, a mech with heat-heat weapons and lots of heat sinks can just skip a high-heat weapon and cool down a lot. A mech with low-heat weapons and few heat sinks would have to lose a lot of firepower just to cool down a little. This could be important if the mech has taken engine criticals or needs to use jump jets.
3. If you build Mechs like they do in the classic 3025 Technical Readout, with more weapons than heat sinks to handle them, then the flexibility of high-heat weapons becomes really useful. You can choose to fire the high heat weapon, and accept the heat buildup, or not fire it, and cool down.

I should then mention some other important effects I didn't put into the ETR, since I don't feel I can calculate them, but they do factor into my balance considerations. The effectiveness of a weapon is not directly proportional to its damage. Weapons that do a lot of damage to a single area are especially good because they cause damage more unevenly, and can defeat the enemy mech without destroying all armor on all locations. Weapons that cause a smaller amount of damage have the advantage of being more efficient at causing critical hits, since you roll on the critical table for each hit, and the amount of damage doesn't matter. In general, I think the first effect is more important, particularly as the absolute damage gets larger. A 10 damage PPC is definitely more than twice as good as a 5 damage medium laser. And the devastating power of a 20 damage AC/20 is really extraordinarily useful. At damage 5 or less it isn't so clear, and certainly two 1 point weapons would be better than a 2 point weapon. It should also be noted that having two small weapons is slightly better than one weapon with twice the firepower, since one hit can only destroy one weapon, and you can choose to fire only one for heat purposes.

To analyze the weapons more conveniently, I'm going to make up a number that estimates how resource-intensive the weapon is. It will be the tonnage of the weapon, plus 90% of the heat, plus the weight of 15 shots of ammo. This total will then be increased by 5% for an ammo-based weapon (to account for the disadvantages). The numbers don't have to be super-exact, since I'm not interested in perfect balance calculations, only determining whether different weapons seem close enough that you could argue over which one is better.

I made some charts calculating the ETR, damage, and damage efficiency of each weapon. The tables didn't copy easily into the blog, you can see the version of this article with tables here.

Let's start out by examining the long-range weapons. They generally have a range band of 5, or 6 with minimum range 3, or 7 with minimum range 6. It is hard for me to make a statement on whether the longer ranges with higher minimum ranges are better or worse, so I'm just going to treat them as pretty close.

My baseline weapons are the PPC and the laser laser. These weapons are pretty similar to one another.

The AC/10 seems like a pretty similar ammunition-based weapon to these two. By my estimate, it is pretty close, just about as good as the other two. The ETR is very close to that of the PPC, which does the same damage with slightly different range characteristics. I'd prefer the PPC, but still, they are pretty close.

The AC/5 is clearly an inferior weapon compared to the PPC. It is significantly less efficient than the PPC in my calculations, and it does less concentrated damage. Even if you ignore the advantages of the PPC as a concentrated-damage heat-based energy weapon, and use a more favorable way to calculate ETR, you still have the fact that the AC/5 does half the damage of a PPC, yet consumes more than half the tonnage.

The AC/2, on the other hand, is just silly and useless. It requires about 75% of the resources of the AC/5, but does 40% of the damage. It does have the best range characteristics of any weapon, but the extra range is not worth this much! And the AC/5 is already a weak weapon to compare to. It is true that it has the very longest range in the game, so maybe you could use it for some sort of strategic siege. But the weapon is so weak that if you carry the standard amount of ammo for mechs in the 3025 readout, you won't be able to seriously hurt another mech at long range before exhausting your ammunition.

The LRM/5 feels a bit weak to me. While its damage/ETR is slightly higher than average, the damage is very non-concentrated. And although the range is very good, I feel the terrible accuracy at close range is a real hindrance. However, that being said, for balance purposes it is close enough to the PPC and large laser that I would consider it an equivalent weapon, one you could easily argue was as good or better.

The other LRM's are practically just scaled-up versions of the LRM/5. They use slightly more tonnage and fewer heat sinks, and cause slightly more concentrated damage. I consider the LRM/5 the best, but really they are so close it doesn't matter much.

Next, we move on to the short-range weapons, those with a range band of 3. They are easy to compare with each other, but hard to compare with the long-range weapons, because I can't say for certain how much better the longer range actually is.

My general feeling is that the SRM/6 is the weapon closest to being balanced with the PPC and Large Laser. It has slightly more than 50% more damage efficiency, which seems to be in the ballpark of being an equal exchange for the long range.

The SRM/4 and SRM/2 are just inferior versions of the SRM/6. This can be seen pretty clearly by the fact that the heat output is more per missile in the smaller launchers, while everything else scales about evenly. This assumes you aren't using the optional Inferno SRM/2 rules; that weapon is insanely potent for its size.

The medium laser has a much better ETR than the SRM/6, and seems like an extremely efficient weapon. This has always been my intuitive feel as well; the key is that the one ton weight is just amazingly low for a weapon with pretty good damage. I tend to think that the medium laser is more efficient than any of the long-range weapons, despite the shorter range.

The AC/20 is a queer weapon. The ETR is pretty low, rather less than the SRM/6. But the damage from this weapon is so amazingly concentrated, it is absolutely deadly. 20 points to one hit location is just incredibly frightening. Because of this, the power of the weapon is hard to judge. My feeling is that it is a very good weapon, much better than an SRM/6, but it is probably not as efficient as the medium laser.

Finally, the point blank weapons. Again, it is hard to say how these compare with longer-ranged weapons. The Mechs in the 3025 Readout carry so few of these that it is almost irrelevant how efficient they are, they just don't have much effect on the total effectiveness of the Mech. But when you use the Mech creation rules to design your own Mech, it is very tempting to load it with an enormous number of point blank weapons.

The small laser is what I would think of as the "standard" point blank weapon, although with so few point blank weapons, this isn't a very meaningful designation. If you look at my ETR, I estimate it is more than 50% more efficient than the medium laser. It seems plausible that 50% might be worth the extra range of the medium laser, so these weapons seem maybe equally efficient to me. Since the medium laser is unusually good, I would say the small laser is awfully good too.

However, if the small laser is good, then the machine gun is really good, at least according to my ETR. It has the big disadvantage that the tonnage I'm calculating doesn't "come" with a heat sink; most of the tonnage of a small laser is in the heat sink, which can be used for another purpose if you are out of range, but the machine gun just sits there taking up space if you don't get to point blank range. But if you are building a custom mech, the machine gun seems like the best weapon in the game. You can get 10 machine guns and a ton of ammo for only 6 tons!

Now, there are some caveats to this. Saying it is the best weapon in the game doesn't necessarily mean you would actually want an army of nothing but machine gun mechs; there might be some situations they can't handle. It just means that in a typical Mech battle, if you could replace one of the Mechs with a custom design, I'd guess you couldn't do better than to put on a horde of machine guns.

Another point to note is that some of the weapons are much less effective when used in the typical configuration of a mech in the 3025 readout. You can make a pretty evil mech with machine guns using the mech creation rules, but machine guns on the standard mechs are usually pretty awful. They often have 2 machine guns with a whole ton of ammo, which is way too much ammo. And the key to counteracting the poor range of a machine gun is to be totally focussed on getting to point blank range. With so few machine guns, the average 3025 Mech may have little incentive to close the distance, so the machine guns stay idle, and might better be replaced by a different weapon.

The final weapon is the flamer. Since a flamer is identical to a medium laser, except that it does 2 damage instead of 5, it is clearly worthless for any purpose other than setting fires. In my opinion, it is pretty worthless even for that purpose. I would rather have a medium laser to start fires with. Even though it has only 7/12 the chance to start a fire, it can start a fire from three times the range. The flamer is mostly good if you want to set your own position on fire!

A final note is that from a strategic point of view, energy weapons are clearly better than ammunition weapons. The odd thing is that, in general, they do not seem to pay anything for this ability. The average energy weapon is about as good as one of the better ammunition weapons, even without the extra advantages of being an energy weapon. I'm not sure why you would mess around with the logistics for ammunition when energy weapon based Mechs are at least as powerful and never need rearming.

Disparity of Power Level in Superhero Games

One interesting issue when designing a superhero roleplaying game is how to handle the vast disparity in power levels between characters considered to be superheroes. If you allow the players to imitate any characters from the comics, how can you play a game in which Captain America might fight alongside Thor? If you try to model the game in a realistic fashion, the results would be bizarre. Any attack which can hurt Thor at all should kill Captain America instantly with any hit. And any opponent who can withstand even a single attack from Thor should be immune to Captain America's martial arts attacks.

When designing a superhero game, you need to have an approach to handling these issues. And the fact that the comic books are unrealistic in this way isn't necessarily bad or something that needs to be fixed; I myself like to model the classic comic books and intentionally recreate the unrealistic action in them. But this means understanding how the action seems to work and what your game will do to deal with issues relating to the great variation in the scale of attacks and defenses in the comic books.

How do traditional superhero roleplaying games handle this issue?

Compression of Scale: This is a classic in superhero games. I tend to think in particular of Champions. Characters can have vastly different power levels in terms of conception, but the game mechanics ensure that they can engage in combat with one another and still enjoy a good slugfest. When a high-offense character attacks a low-defense character, he does a lot of damage, but not an unlimited amount of damage. And a low-offense character can cause a small amount of damage to a high defense character. Typically interactions with the unliving world are also scaled, so that strengths can vary a thousand-fold and strong characters can bust through concrete walls while weaker ones have to make a roll to pull the door off of a car. This approach gives great freedom in designing and playing characters who act like the comics, while still making possible a well balanced combat system; it is my favorite approach. The disadvantage is that a lot of edge cases tend to feel odd and unrealistic. If you are really thinking of the game as a comic book, it can be hard to envision how the martial artist can be grabbed by molten lava man without ending up in the burn ward, or how he can get lucky and karate kick his way out of a prison cell. You need even more suspension of disbelief than you would in an actual comic book.

Fixed Character Power Level: This is another mechanism that can work very well in superhero games. The game may allow you to be many different types of superheroes, but all of these superheroes end up having a similar overall power level. The game does not try to mimic the vast disparities between the power levels of supers in the comics. This approach feels more realistic than Compression of Scale. Everyone can engage in bang-up battles just like the comic books, and everything feels just about right. The down side is that the characters can look like classic comic book characters, but they clearly can't quite be the same. You can make a character who looks and acts like Superman, but he can't really lift the space shuttle into orbit or survive howitzer shells without a scratch. You can make a character with the attitude and super-senses of Daredevil, but he is also a "meta" with steel-hard skin and super-strength, who can't really go on an adventure in which he faces an ordinary human crime lord and is overwhelmed by hordes of martial arts minions. But as long as you don't mind matching your conception to the setting of the game, everything works great.

Harsh Reality: Many games just don't really deal with the scale issue at all. You can make characters of greatly varying power levels, and those characters are not balanced at all against each other, so fights can be lopsided and brutal. By "not balanced at all", I mean that they may be equally good overall, but they are not balanced so that a slugfest can really work. Maybe one guy controls minds, while the other is strong enough to kill with one blow, so the fight is decided by who can attack first. Such a game can work, but only if it is understood that the game is not trying to model a classic comic book reality, but something quite different. Typically this works well with games that are attempting a modern rethinking approach to superheroes - "what would happen if people had superpowers in real life?" I think of Aberrant as an example of this. The harsh reality approach is really meant for a game that encourages a "combat is rare and very scary" approach, with a focus on storytelling and noncombat activities. I am generally rather disappointed with games that use the harsh reality approach, but pretend to be a 4-color comic book game when you design the characters. You can make your classic comic book character, but once you start playing, you find your character had better change his entire outlook on life, lest he end up dead or booked for manslaughter. Unless the GM simply mandates that all characters have reasonably comparable attacks and defenses, in which case the game is transformed into Fixed Power Level.

How do the comic books handle these issues?

Compression of Scale. Often, in the classic comic books, big attacks are more powerful than small attacks, but not as much more powerful as you might expect. For instance, a superhero who can lift 50 tons may fight a supervillain who can lift 10 tons. The supervillain may appear to be outclassed, but not nearly as outclassed as you might logically expect when one guy is 5 times as strong as the other. Compression of Scale is often used when, visually, you can get away with it. I remember several times in the Avengers when a mighty villain would make his entrance with an explosion that flattened all of the Avengers. It looks good in the comics. But realistically, one explosion is not going to have an equal effect on Avengers of vastly different toughness levels.

Rationalization. Many comic books characters will give excuses for why attacks between vastly mismatched opponents can have the effects they do. For instance, a character with low defenses will say, "Good thing that attack only grazed me, or I'd have been killed!" Good thing the attacks always just cause grazing hits! Or a villain will grab him and say, "I'll crush you like an overripe melon." Odd that the panel makes it look like he is already applying the squeeze to a resisting hero. Realistically, if you can tear steel like tissue paper, you should be able to tear an ordinary human body to a pulp faster than you can say the line. Instead, the villain just announces his awesome capabilities, but the fight goes on with compression of scale. Some heroes, like Spider-Man, like to say that they always pull their punches against weak opponents. This is somewhat convincing - it would be logical for them to do so - but it is interesting that the fights then play out exactly as they would if Spider-Man's punch just wasn't strong enough to overwhelm a human-level villain. In other words, in terms of how you would simulate this in a roleplaying game, Rationalization acts much like a special effect of Compression of Scale, with the special effect being that whenever a low defense character is hit by a big attack, he takes the usual amount of damage, then says "lucky I avoided 90% of the blow." And whenever a high offense character attacks a low defense villain, he rolls the usual amount of damage, then says, "good thing I pulled my punch, or that would have killed him." But otherwise, the fight goes on with the character exchanging blows according to the regular rules of the game.

Comic Book Coincidence: This is my term for a staple of comic books and many other media, the fact that the books are scripted so that heroes and villains without superhuman defenses are virtually never hit by bullets and other lethal attacks. The effect is really strong. Batman can dive through a hail of gunfire again and again and again without getting hit, but switch to punches or non-lethal energy blasts, and he gets quite often (he is agile enough to dodge most of them, but he still takes many hits). I often try to think of ways to model this, but I haven't seen this modeled in a published roleplaying games. That is, many games model the idea of comic book luck, but not the idea that characters are much luckier against bullets and swords than concussion blasts and fists. The closest is games that use fairly abstract damage such as hit points, then encourage you to think of hit point damage as just representing fatigue from avoiding close attacks. But this approach isn't very convincing when the game mechanics ignore it - when the unarmored character not only takes damage from being encased in molten lava, he is also immobilized and suffocating until someone breaks him out.

Harsh Reality: The advantage of the comic books is that, since they are totally scripted, they need not be consistent. The comic book writer is free to switch to harsh reality when desired for dramatic effect, then switch away when it becomes inconvenient. So many comic books which generally use compression of scale have some dramatic moments in which the true disparity of power levels becomes apparent. Sometimes this is used for comic relief - the hero seems so much mightier than the villain that instead of the writer trying to convince the reader that the villain can really provide a challenge, they just make him the joke for the issue. In any case, this relates to the general difference between highly scripted source material and freeform roleplaying games; you can't always match the source material unless your roleplaying game is also highly scripted. Of course, the more straightforward form of harsh reality is that some comic books, especially more modern ones, that just don't try to match the four-color feel at all, and combat really is pretty brutal and short unless both foes are very well matched. A game trying to imitate this form of superhero action wouldn't need to worry about the problems of scaling attacks and defenses.

Balancing The Game To Encourage Genre Appropriate Actions

One of my primary goals when designing game mechanics is to make the game encourage actions which are genre-appropriate, fun, or fit well with the theme of the game. Encouragement can mean different things, but it most often means making that action one of the best possible actions from the competitive point of view (winning the game or defeating the adventure).

Let's create an example of what I'm trying to prevent. Imagine you have a fencer in a swashbuckling adventure game. The character concept, and the genre, imply that he should frequently use his weapon to disarm his opponents, rather than simply stabbing them.

In most traditional roleplaying games, the disarm maneuver involves the attacker making some sort of (often fairly difficult) roll to successfully force the defender to drop his weapon. So the game has fulfilled the mechanical requirement of permitting the character to disarm the foe.

The problem is that the disarmed opponent can then spend his action to pick the weapon back up. So all the fencer has done is spend an entire action to force the opponent to spend an action. And that is if he succeeds in the disarm; otherwise, he has spent an action for no effect. So overall, disarm costs an action for the attacker in order to cost the defender less than an action. Not very useful.

Now, one might point out that there are situations where this disarm maneuver is indeed useful. In particular, if there are two PC's fighting one opponent, one PC can disarm the opponent, and the other can pick up the weapon, leaving the defender unarmed and helpless. Or if you are fighting near a cliff or in a bog, you may be able to disarm an opponent and have the weapon be lost for good. Also, you can use disarm just to waste time, in case the situation doesn't require you to win, or if you are one-on-one with a more powerful opponent and want to delay matters until your allies arrive.

Unfortunately, none of this really helps the situation at hand, which is capturing the spirit of a swashbuckler movie where the fencer frequently disarms opponents in situations where none of these are true. Indeed, the fencer is often outnumbered and pressed for time, yet still disarms the opponents. But when playing a game with standard disarm rules, one would very quickly realize that this is totally ineffective and basically a waste of time, and the player would want to start stabbing opponents to win the battle.

One response to this would be to say that the swashbuckler has a psychological limitation that makes him enjoy disarming opponents even though it isn't really effective, just because he enjoys doing so. This limitation could give him the points to be such a good fencer that he can get away with some nonsense and still win the fights. But I don't really feel like this is true to the source material or the character. If this were true, you'd expect the other characters in the movie to say, "Wow, that guy's a good fencer. Too bad he's a grandstanding moron!" But they don't do so, and the movie doesn't convey that impression. Indeed, the character concept for the swashbuckler may well be that of a reluctant hero forced to fight for an important cause, not a that of an egotist enraptured with his own fencing skill. Also, if the psychological limitation theory were true, you'd expect the swashbuckler to drop the disarming when he has to save the life of his true love, but that doesn't really seem to happen in the source material.

A slightly different response would be to say that because disarming is appropriate to the source material, it is the player's responsibility to throw in some disarm attempts as "good roleplaying". The idea of expecting players to help make the game fun is a good one. I don't generally play roleplaying games in a highly competitive style, and in the roleplaying games I play in, it is understood that the players don't just go all-out to optimize every game mechanic to win the game, but try to do fun things and advance the story, or at least make the battles entertaining. There is no way to balance everything perfectly or guarantee that the most entertaining move is the most effective. You expect the players to mix things up and put some variety in the game even if a careful analysis may reveal that a more boring strategy is somewhat more effective. But I generally think this sort of thing works best when the game balance between the different actions being considered is pretty close. A lot of the time, you may suspect a certain action isn't optimal, but there are pros and cons both ways, so it isn't really clear. So you really feel free to do whatever you think is cool.

For instance, in Torg you had the ability to take "approved actions" each round, like taunting or tricking the opponent, instead of just attacking them. Success would give you a minor advantage over the foe and an extra card. We loved approved actions, they were cool, and we did them over and over. We always strongly suspected that just attacking the foe would be more effective; ending the battle early is generally a good thing. But the benefit of cards was hard to quantify; they could set you up for a big attack later on, and could potentially be saved for use later in the adventure. And approved action were fun, and Torg characters were so full of possibilities (hero points) that you weren't that scared of combat anyway. So it all seemed to work OK. Actually, though, I should admit that in this case I did make some rules changes to make the approved actions a bit better and encourage them more.

However, when one action is just flat out way inferior to another, even in cases where it ought to be useful, that is just going way beyond the scope of what should be expected from the players. In the case of the disarm example, using disarm in most situations isn't an interesting choice with pros and cons; it is just a way to make your character less effective. The more you use it, the less effective you are. It is basically as if the GM is saying, "I'd like you to vary your actions to make the combat more interesting. Whenever you do so, I will punish you by making you less effective. The more interesting you are, the more I will punish you." It is perverse and unfortunate, and even though players can and often do make games more entertaining this way, it would be much better if the rules were changed so that they were not made ineffective by doing so.

On a related note, the players can bypass various forms of rules abuse by following conventions. For instance, in Champions, when an enemy strongman jumped up to you and started trying to smash your face in, it was most effective within the rules to ignore that person and attack a weaker enemy. Nothing in the rules required you to pay any attention to enemies attacking you; even if you were virtually surrounded on all sides with angry swordsmen, you were free to run off to a different part of the battlefield as if they were all paralyzed and attack the vulnerable boss behind them. Since this was totally inappropriate to the genre (and reality too), we made a convention that you were expected to defend yourself when attacked and had to do something if you wanted to fight your way past the attacker. This was a good convention; conventions can be useful to fix bad rules or substitute for rules that don't exist. But it is even better to fix or create the rule, rather than having a convention. Then you know exactly when the rule applies and what the penalty is for breaking it. In any case, the idea of making a convention doesn't work well for disarm example because it isn't clear how you would apply the convention. Saying that you had to disarm every other attack would just be way too unnatural.

Another way to deal with the issue here is for the GM to compensate by rewarding genre-appropriate maneuvers. I highly approve of having the GM reward genre-appropriate maneuvers with cool custom bonuses. But this is best for things done infrequently. If the genre rarely involved disarming opponents, and you suddenly had a good reason to do so as a surprise maneuver to liven things up, it would be very appropriate for the GM to make up some sort of bonus on the spot. But if you disarm constantly as part of the genre, custom bonuses aren't very practical. If you give the same bonus every time, you've created a rule, and the rule might as well be written down. If not, you start to play a game where the GM is just making up the rules arbitrarily. You can do this, of course - you can roleplay without any rules at all if you want to. But the assumption here is that we are playing a game with rules, and the premise behind playing a game with rules is that, most of the time, it is better to have a rule than rely on pure GM arbitrariness.

So for all of these reasons, I would want to devise an improvement to the disarm rule. One could argue against this by pointing out that boosting the disarm power as written shouldn't be done because it would be too strong and would break the game in the situations where disarm is already a useful ability. This is true, but simply means that attempting to fix the problem requires rethinking the rule rather than simply boosting it. Part of the skill in modifying game rules is making sure that you don't create more problems than you fix. Just because my game analysis indicates that a game has some sort of problem or imperfection doesn't mean I will make a rule to fix it. I only make a rules change if I think the new rule will be better overall than the previous rule.

The truth is that every game is going to have problems simply because of the choices made in meeting various conflicting design goals. And sometimes those elements that make the game fun also seem to have disadvantages too. For instance, one of my favorite board games is History of the World. But it has the disadvantage that more than 6 hours to play. It can be hard to get people to play for this reason. But the length of the game is related to the fact that it plays out the "History of the World", and that is part of what I like about it. I haven't really thought of any clever way to speed up with game without detracting from the epic quality I like about it. So I haven't tried to make a rule to speed up the game, I just consider the length part of the pros and cons of a game I really like overall. I feel that putting in a simple-minded rule to speed up the game - like playing for only 3 turns - would make the game worse rather than better.

But if I did think of a way to make the game just as fun but twice as fast, I wouldn't hestitate to try it out. Just because a rule is hard to improve upon doesn't mean you shouldn't try. Sometimes I try a lot of experiments, and a lot of those experiments fail. Sometimes I try experimental rules that I know won't work perfectly, just to get information. But in the end, the goal is to craft a new rule that is better overall than the previous rule.

By the way, I've never really come up with what I would call a perfect solution to the disarming problem, only various ideas. One example of an idea would be to use the 4th edition D&D power design philosophy and have disarming be a special attack that causes damage, with the special effect that the damage is totally abstract and the attack looks totally non-violent. Attacks which fail to kill have the bonus effect of temporarily disarming the enemy; attacks which kill the enemy either look like kills on-screen, or the enemy looks like he is still conscious but is counted as "defeated" and no longer has any game effect on the battle.