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.
Showing posts with label RPG theory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label RPG theory. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Disadvantages, Part IV: How the types of disadvantages work with the disadvantage system goals
In my last article, I classified disadvantages into 4 types, and previously to that, a described 2 goals of disadvantage systems. Now I will discuss how each type of disadvantage fits into each goal.
If you are thinking of the goal of your disadvantage system as encouraging characters to take interesting disadvantages, you want to give points for disadvantages which make the characters and the story more interesting. In that case, all 4 types of disadvantages are pretty valuable and important, and should be encouraged. Restricted choice is perhaps the most interesting to encourage, as it makes you describe the psychology, motivations, and beliefs of your character. This can both come through in your roleplaying, and provide hooks for the GM to make customized adventures. Story disadvantages can be even stronger in terms of really providing clear hooks for the GM to make stories – putting a rival or a loved one in a scene can be a convenient way to add some emotional connection. On the flip side, they may have little effect if the GM doesn’t want to customize an adventure – they tend to require work from the GM. Situational vulnerabilities are similar to story disadvantages, though it is often rather harder to use them in a fashion that is fun for the player. Negative abilities are good to encourage, and along with situational vulnerabilities they are the least likely sort of disadvantage to be taken in a game with no disadvantage system (roleplayers are more likely to given themselves interesting psychology and back story than to arbitrarily penalize their own characters). But in some sense, they are less important to encourage than other types of disadvantages. Characters are likely to have clear strengths and weaknesses even in a system with no disadvantages at all; for instance, a fighter may have the “weakness” of being incompetent in ranged combat, simply because he didn’t put any points into it. Thus, even with no disadvantage system, the GM can create situations that play on character weaknesses. So encouraging negative abilities isn’t really a qualitative difference over having no disadvantage system at all, it just provides more and stronger weaknesses to differentiate the characters. But really, all types of disadvantage are pretty close in terms of the goal of encouraging interesting disadvantages.
When it comes to the goal of compensation, however, we have a different story. If you are trying to give characters extra points as compensation for the problems the disadvantages provide to the characters, then the disadvantages had better be truly disadvantageous.
Negative abilities are the perfect disadvantages to offer compensation for. Your character is less powerful, and you get back points corresponding to how much less powerful your character is. If the disadvantage is small, you earn a few points; if the disadvantage is large, you get back lots of points. Of course, there are many tricky practical issues around how to correctly price disadvantages and how to reduce the risk of abusive minimaxing, but I’m not getting into that here. In terms of high-level theory, compensating characters for negative abilities is quite straightforward.
Giving characters substantial numbers of points as compensation for a story disadvantage, on the other hand, is fraught with problems. A story disadvantage adds features to the character’s adventures that cause him problems. But the point of adventures is already to be difficult and cause the adventurers problems. Story disadvantages work very well as a way of helping the GM find challenges to put into the adventure, but not so well if you try to make sure they are a large penalty to the character.
In Champions, one method of using story disadvantages is to create the story first, then add the story disadvantages – the character’s enemy just shows up as an extra menace to cause trouble. But this is an example of what I would call “disadvantages which penalize the GM”. Part of the GM’s job is to make a good adventure, which is basically an act of creative writing. Trying to shoehorn a bunch of extraneous elements into an adventure is hard work for the GM, and is likely to reduce the quality of the adventure. The more natural and desirable approach for story disadvantages is to periodically make adventures that are designed to feature them, or to otherwise work them nicely into the plot. This matches the way such story elements would be used in the source material.
When you do this, it becomes very hard to say how much of a penalty the story disadvantages are, because there is no source of comparison – you can’t really say how difficult the adventure would have been if the storyline had been different. This is true in the source material as well. In a comic book, for instance, a Superman story which includes Lois Lane getting in trouble isn’t necessary more difficult overall than a storyline which doesn’t. If is just a characteristic type of Superman story showcasing a special problem which Superman often has to deal with.
Now, in principle, it would be mathematically possible to construct adventures in such a way as to make sure that story disadvantages appear with a predictable frequency and adventures which include them are appreciably more difficult. This is tricky to do correctly. Consider, for instance, a Champions character who is hunted by a team of supervillains. You can’t just add the enemies on top of an existing encounter – that way make it way too hard, totally unwinnable. The most likely thing to do is to add the enemies as a separate encounter. But this just isn’t worth the same kind of compensation as a negative ability, which actually makes your character less powerful. From the player’s point of view, you can only fit so many encounters into a play session, and one encounter is just being replaced with a different one. Champions characters don’t normally suffer any lasting effects from fights, so it doesn’t really hurt the character in later fights. The main penalty is the chance the players may lose the fight, and that this would have negative repercussions within the story.
Since story disadvantages usually don’t come up too frequently, the GM would really have to stick it to the characters to make them worth a substantial amount of compensation. There are certainly a number of ways the GM can do this. But I don’t think it is the right approach. I think the game works best when story disadvantages mostly just make the story more interesting, and you acknowledge that they aren’t really worth many points from a compensation point of view.
The same is true of situational disadvantages. Consider the case of Superman and kryptonite. You could just randomly add kryptonite at random spots in your adventure, on top of threats that are already balanced for the characters. Whenever it showed up, Superman would be rendered helpless and the villains would win a devastating victory. This might be fair if the vulnerability to kryptonite is worth a good number of points. Mathematically, if that were true, Superman should find non-kryptonite encounters slightly easier and krytonite encounters vastly more difficult, in order to balance out the points. But it doesn’t seem like that much fun. A more comic-book approach is to use kryptonite as a way to challenge Superman in situations that wouldn’t normally be a challenge – for instance, to allow him to be captured by villains who lack the earth-shattering might necessary to defeat him in open combat. And conversely, you don’t normally want to make all of Superman’s other fights easier just because they don’t have kryptonite. This points to the vulnerability being used primarily to enhance storytelling rather than as something that is really equivalent to a negative ability.
Restricted choice disadvantages don’t necessarily have this aspect of wanting the adventure to be designed around them. It is common enough to just go on a prepackaged adventure and find that your desire to do everything by the book is getting in your way. However, characters can make both good and bad choices during an adventure whether they have formal disadvantages or not, so the effect of the disadvantage is somewhat muted. Also, the kind of extreme psychological limitations that cause you to make very bad choices can often be very annoying for the GM and the other players. Restricted choice disadvantages that have strong effects on the style in which you complete the adventure, without preventing you from properly playing the adventure, are usually most interesting. But such disadvantages really aren’t worth as much compensation as a negative ability.
So my conclusion is that all types of disadvantages are worthy of encouragement, but negative abilities are generally worth more in terms of compensation than the other disadvantages. I might describe negative abilities as “hard” disadvantages and the others as “soft” disadvantages. This leads me to describe a problem stemming from this.
In designing a game with a disadvantage system that wants to encourage characters to have disadvantages, it is typical to make all 4 types of disadvantages worth comparable numbers of points, and try to force everyone to take a substantial number of such disadvantages. In the natural play of the game, though, negative abilities are more of a penalty than other disadvantages, and players tend to lean towards soft disadvantages in taking the required disadvantages. When the game master or game designer notices that this is happening, the tendency is to want to “crack down” on the soft disadvantages by trying extra hard to penalize characters who take them, in an attempt to make them worth their points. In my view, this is counter-productive, as for the reasons I’ve listed above, it makes adventures harder to write, more awkwardly constructed, and generally less fun, and restricts character design to a subset of particularly deranged and troubled characters. I think that a better solution would acknowledge that the purpose of soft disadvantages is to make characters more interesting, and that it just isn’t natural to expect that even several of them will reduce a very powerful character to be no better than a very weak character without disadvantages.
If you are thinking of the goal of your disadvantage system as encouraging characters to take interesting disadvantages, you want to give points for disadvantages which make the characters and the story more interesting. In that case, all 4 types of disadvantages are pretty valuable and important, and should be encouraged. Restricted choice is perhaps the most interesting to encourage, as it makes you describe the psychology, motivations, and beliefs of your character. This can both come through in your roleplaying, and provide hooks for the GM to make customized adventures. Story disadvantages can be even stronger in terms of really providing clear hooks for the GM to make stories – putting a rival or a loved one in a scene can be a convenient way to add some emotional connection. On the flip side, they may have little effect if the GM doesn’t want to customize an adventure – they tend to require work from the GM. Situational vulnerabilities are similar to story disadvantages, though it is often rather harder to use them in a fashion that is fun for the player. Negative abilities are good to encourage, and along with situational vulnerabilities they are the least likely sort of disadvantage to be taken in a game with no disadvantage system (roleplayers are more likely to given themselves interesting psychology and back story than to arbitrarily penalize their own characters). But in some sense, they are less important to encourage than other types of disadvantages. Characters are likely to have clear strengths and weaknesses even in a system with no disadvantages at all; for instance, a fighter may have the “weakness” of being incompetent in ranged combat, simply because he didn’t put any points into it. Thus, even with no disadvantage system, the GM can create situations that play on character weaknesses. So encouraging negative abilities isn’t really a qualitative difference over having no disadvantage system at all, it just provides more and stronger weaknesses to differentiate the characters. But really, all types of disadvantage are pretty close in terms of the goal of encouraging interesting disadvantages.
When it comes to the goal of compensation, however, we have a different story. If you are trying to give characters extra points as compensation for the problems the disadvantages provide to the characters, then the disadvantages had better be truly disadvantageous.
Negative abilities are the perfect disadvantages to offer compensation for. Your character is less powerful, and you get back points corresponding to how much less powerful your character is. If the disadvantage is small, you earn a few points; if the disadvantage is large, you get back lots of points. Of course, there are many tricky practical issues around how to correctly price disadvantages and how to reduce the risk of abusive minimaxing, but I’m not getting into that here. In terms of high-level theory, compensating characters for negative abilities is quite straightforward.
Giving characters substantial numbers of points as compensation for a story disadvantage, on the other hand, is fraught with problems. A story disadvantage adds features to the character’s adventures that cause him problems. But the point of adventures is already to be difficult and cause the adventurers problems. Story disadvantages work very well as a way of helping the GM find challenges to put into the adventure, but not so well if you try to make sure they are a large penalty to the character.
In Champions, one method of using story disadvantages is to create the story first, then add the story disadvantages – the character’s enemy just shows up as an extra menace to cause trouble. But this is an example of what I would call “disadvantages which penalize the GM”. Part of the GM’s job is to make a good adventure, which is basically an act of creative writing. Trying to shoehorn a bunch of extraneous elements into an adventure is hard work for the GM, and is likely to reduce the quality of the adventure. The more natural and desirable approach for story disadvantages is to periodically make adventures that are designed to feature them, or to otherwise work them nicely into the plot. This matches the way such story elements would be used in the source material.
When you do this, it becomes very hard to say how much of a penalty the story disadvantages are, because there is no source of comparison – you can’t really say how difficult the adventure would have been if the storyline had been different. This is true in the source material as well. In a comic book, for instance, a Superman story which includes Lois Lane getting in trouble isn’t necessary more difficult overall than a storyline which doesn’t. If is just a characteristic type of Superman story showcasing a special problem which Superman often has to deal with.
Now, in principle, it would be mathematically possible to construct adventures in such a way as to make sure that story disadvantages appear with a predictable frequency and adventures which include them are appreciably more difficult. This is tricky to do correctly. Consider, for instance, a Champions character who is hunted by a team of supervillains. You can’t just add the enemies on top of an existing encounter – that way make it way too hard, totally unwinnable. The most likely thing to do is to add the enemies as a separate encounter. But this just isn’t worth the same kind of compensation as a negative ability, which actually makes your character less powerful. From the player’s point of view, you can only fit so many encounters into a play session, and one encounter is just being replaced with a different one. Champions characters don’t normally suffer any lasting effects from fights, so it doesn’t really hurt the character in later fights. The main penalty is the chance the players may lose the fight, and that this would have negative repercussions within the story.
Since story disadvantages usually don’t come up too frequently, the GM would really have to stick it to the characters to make them worth a substantial amount of compensation. There are certainly a number of ways the GM can do this. But I don’t think it is the right approach. I think the game works best when story disadvantages mostly just make the story more interesting, and you acknowledge that they aren’t really worth many points from a compensation point of view.
The same is true of situational disadvantages. Consider the case of Superman and kryptonite. You could just randomly add kryptonite at random spots in your adventure, on top of threats that are already balanced for the characters. Whenever it showed up, Superman would be rendered helpless and the villains would win a devastating victory. This might be fair if the vulnerability to kryptonite is worth a good number of points. Mathematically, if that were true, Superman should find non-kryptonite encounters slightly easier and krytonite encounters vastly more difficult, in order to balance out the points. But it doesn’t seem like that much fun. A more comic-book approach is to use kryptonite as a way to challenge Superman in situations that wouldn’t normally be a challenge – for instance, to allow him to be captured by villains who lack the earth-shattering might necessary to defeat him in open combat. And conversely, you don’t normally want to make all of Superman’s other fights easier just because they don’t have kryptonite. This points to the vulnerability being used primarily to enhance storytelling rather than as something that is really equivalent to a negative ability.
Restricted choice disadvantages don’t necessarily have this aspect of wanting the adventure to be designed around them. It is common enough to just go on a prepackaged adventure and find that your desire to do everything by the book is getting in your way. However, characters can make both good and bad choices during an adventure whether they have formal disadvantages or not, so the effect of the disadvantage is somewhat muted. Also, the kind of extreme psychological limitations that cause you to make very bad choices can often be very annoying for the GM and the other players. Restricted choice disadvantages that have strong effects on the style in which you complete the adventure, without preventing you from properly playing the adventure, are usually most interesting. But such disadvantages really aren’t worth as much compensation as a negative ability.
So my conclusion is that all types of disadvantages are worthy of encouragement, but negative abilities are generally worth more in terms of compensation than the other disadvantages. I might describe negative abilities as “hard” disadvantages and the others as “soft” disadvantages. This leads me to describe a problem stemming from this.
In designing a game with a disadvantage system that wants to encourage characters to have disadvantages, it is typical to make all 4 types of disadvantages worth comparable numbers of points, and try to force everyone to take a substantial number of such disadvantages. In the natural play of the game, though, negative abilities are more of a penalty than other disadvantages, and players tend to lean towards soft disadvantages in taking the required disadvantages. When the game master or game designer notices that this is happening, the tendency is to want to “crack down” on the soft disadvantages by trying extra hard to penalize characters who take them, in an attempt to make them worth their points. In my view, this is counter-productive, as for the reasons I’ve listed above, it makes adventures harder to write, more awkwardly constructed, and generally less fun, and restricts character design to a subset of particularly deranged and troubled characters. I think that a better solution would acknowledge that the purpose of soft disadvantages is to make characters more interesting, and that it just isn’t natural to expect that even several of them will reduce a very powerful character to be no better than a very weak character without disadvantages.
Labels:
Champions,
game analysis,
game design,
Hero system,
RPG theory
Monday, September 28, 2009
Disadvantages, Part III: General Classifications
As I mentioned in my previous article, I’m going to classify some general types of disadvantages:
1. The negative ability. This sort of disadvantage is something that makes your character statistically worse, the opposite of an advantage or ability which makes your character better. So if having superior eyesight is clearly an ability that would cost points, having inferior eyesight is a negative ability that should give you back points. If being wealthy is a useful ability that costs points, being flat broke is a negative ability. Similarly, having a bad leg is the opposite of being a fast runner, being vulnerable to fire attacks is the opposite of being fire proof, being forgetful is the opposite of having a perfect memory, and so on. Corresponding Champions disadvantages include Physical Limitation, Unluck, and Vulnerability. Getting points back for having very poor statistics is basically also in this category, though in many games (such as Champions) it is not formally considered a disadvantage.
2. Restricted choice. With this type of disadvantage, the character has no limitations on how well he does things, just limitations on what he can choose to do. Normally, the assumption in a role-playing game is that the player can have his or her character perform any action at any time. So if a villain threatens to kill a hostage if the character doesn't surrender, the player can decide whether the character surrenders, or tries a risky gambit to stun the villain before he can carry out his threat, or ignores the threat and attacks the villain, or flies away and becomes an insurance salesman. But if the character has the disadvantage “Protective of innocents”, then the character is more limited in the choice of actions he will consider. This disadvantage does not inhibit the character in carrying out whatever course of action he chooses to pursue. It just means that the character may not be able to perform the action which the player believes is optimum in that situation. Corresponding Champions disadvantages include Enraged and Psychological Limitation.
3. Story disadvantage. This type of disadvantage tells the GM to put specific additional elements into the adventures that cause trouble for the hero. For instance, if the character is wanted for a crime he did not commit, this can control the entire flow of adventures in which he participates. The character really wishes this wasn’t the case, and is constantly inconvenienced by having to stay one step ahead of the law. But the character doesn’t have any penalties to his abilities, and no restrictions on what actions he can choose to take. Corresponding Champions disadvantages include DNPC, Hunted.
4. Situational vulnerability. This means that certain story situations cause severe problems for your character. The classic example is Superman’s susceptibility to kryptonite; whenever the opponents have kryptonite, he is a much less powerful character. This is similar to a negative ability in that it materially reduces the character’s effectiveness, but feels quite different because it is applied more like a Story disadvantage. Corresponding Champions disadvantages include Dependence, Susceptibility, Vulnerability.
These classifications aren’t necessarily exclusive – an individual disadvantage may blur the line between two categories. But these represent what I think are the broad types of effects that disadvantages have. Actually, it is the first three I was really thinking of as describing the fundamental categories of disadvantages. But as I was writing this, I felt that the situational vulnerability was distinctive enough to be described in its own category.
Next article: How the classifications relate to the 2 goals.
1. The negative ability. This sort of disadvantage is something that makes your character statistically worse, the opposite of an advantage or ability which makes your character better. So if having superior eyesight is clearly an ability that would cost points, having inferior eyesight is a negative ability that should give you back points. If being wealthy is a useful ability that costs points, being flat broke is a negative ability. Similarly, having a bad leg is the opposite of being a fast runner, being vulnerable to fire attacks is the opposite of being fire proof, being forgetful is the opposite of having a perfect memory, and so on. Corresponding Champions disadvantages include Physical Limitation, Unluck, and Vulnerability. Getting points back for having very poor statistics is basically also in this category, though in many games (such as Champions) it is not formally considered a disadvantage.
2. Restricted choice. With this type of disadvantage, the character has no limitations on how well he does things, just limitations on what he can choose to do. Normally, the assumption in a role-playing game is that the player can have his or her character perform any action at any time. So if a villain threatens to kill a hostage if the character doesn't surrender, the player can decide whether the character surrenders, or tries a risky gambit to stun the villain before he can carry out his threat, or ignores the threat and attacks the villain, or flies away and becomes an insurance salesman. But if the character has the disadvantage “Protective of innocents”, then the character is more limited in the choice of actions he will consider. This disadvantage does not inhibit the character in carrying out whatever course of action he chooses to pursue. It just means that the character may not be able to perform the action which the player believes is optimum in that situation. Corresponding Champions disadvantages include Enraged and Psychological Limitation.
3. Story disadvantage. This type of disadvantage tells the GM to put specific additional elements into the adventures that cause trouble for the hero. For instance, if the character is wanted for a crime he did not commit, this can control the entire flow of adventures in which he participates. The character really wishes this wasn’t the case, and is constantly inconvenienced by having to stay one step ahead of the law. But the character doesn’t have any penalties to his abilities, and no restrictions on what actions he can choose to take. Corresponding Champions disadvantages include DNPC, Hunted.
4. Situational vulnerability. This means that certain story situations cause severe problems for your character. The classic example is Superman’s susceptibility to kryptonite; whenever the opponents have kryptonite, he is a much less powerful character. This is similar to a negative ability in that it materially reduces the character’s effectiveness, but feels quite different because it is applied more like a Story disadvantage. Corresponding Champions disadvantages include Dependence, Susceptibility, Vulnerability.
These classifications aren’t necessarily exclusive – an individual disadvantage may blur the line between two categories. But these represent what I think are the broad types of effects that disadvantages have. Actually, it is the first three I was really thinking of as describing the fundamental categories of disadvantages. But as I was writing this, I felt that the situational vulnerability was distinctive enough to be described in its own category.
Next article: How the classifications relate to the 2 goals.
Labels:
Champions,
game analysis,
game design,
Hero system,
RPG theory
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Disadvantages, Part II: Design of the Champions disadvantage system
In my previous post, I said that there were 2 different goals for disadvantage systems, encouragement and compensation. Now I will go into some more specific analysis and say that Champions, my reference system, is primarily designed for encouragement. By the way, when I say designed, I don't necessarily mean that it was intentionally designed with this goal in mind, but rather that the game design as it stands is most effective at supporting that goal.
The fact that Champions is designed to encourage disadvantages can be seen with a very high-level analysis, without actually looking at the disadvantages themselves. A fourth edition Champions character is built with 100 base points plus up to 150 points of disadvantages. Almost every character I've ever seen uses the maximum 150 points of disadvantages. This is very telling all by itself, strongly implying that the points that disadvantages give you is a very favorable trade in return for the disadvantages you suffer; in other words, that the points you get from disadvantages is more than they are really worth, so you want to take as many as you can. If the points from disadvantages were balanced to be exactly what they were worth, you would expect that a character built on 100 points with no disadvantages would be about as good as a normal 250 point character. This is not at all the case, 100 points is totally insufficient, such a character would be totally inadequate compared to a 250 point character (unless the 100 point character were built in a much more point efficient manner than the 250 point character, but this wouldn’t be a fair comparison).
This sort of structure, with disadvantages that are very favorable and a cap on the total amount, is very well suited for the goal of encouraging disadvantages, and seems to do an excellent job of achieving that. I can attest that most Champions players I know of spend quite a while sitting around trying to think of disadvantages which aren't part of their initial character conception, just so they can make the 150 points.
If, on the other hand, your goal is to fairly compensate people for disadvantages that are part of their basic character conception, this structure would seem a little weird. The compensation you get for building a character with a major flaw is not that really that you get extra points, since every character ends up with the same 250 points. Rather, the compensation is that you are not required to take as many other disadvantages. In effect, the advantage you get from wanting to play a character with serious disadvantages, is that you are an easier time picking your 150 points of disadvantages and are likely to be happier with the results. This is a workable mechanism, but sort of sub-optimum for this goal; it is odd that character conceptions for which it is easier to think of disadvantages cannot actually end up with more disadvantages then character conceptions which do not naturally lend themselves to a lot of disadvantages. And what happens if the flaws that arise directly from your character conception are more disadvantageous than the 150 points of disadvantages that a normal character takes? Then there is no way to be fairly compensated.
However, at this point this is all a bit too abstract to continue discussing without knowing more about the actual disadvantages themselves. So for the next article on this topic, I will start going into more detail by categorizing the types of disadvantages.
Next topic: Disadvantage classifications
The fact that Champions is designed to encourage disadvantages can be seen with a very high-level analysis, without actually looking at the disadvantages themselves. A fourth edition Champions character is built with 100 base points plus up to 150 points of disadvantages. Almost every character I've ever seen uses the maximum 150 points of disadvantages. This is very telling all by itself, strongly implying that the points that disadvantages give you is a very favorable trade in return for the disadvantages you suffer; in other words, that the points you get from disadvantages is more than they are really worth, so you want to take as many as you can. If the points from disadvantages were balanced to be exactly what they were worth, you would expect that a character built on 100 points with no disadvantages would be about as good as a normal 250 point character. This is not at all the case, 100 points is totally insufficient, such a character would be totally inadequate compared to a 250 point character (unless the 100 point character were built in a much more point efficient manner than the 250 point character, but this wouldn’t be a fair comparison).
This sort of structure, with disadvantages that are very favorable and a cap on the total amount, is very well suited for the goal of encouraging disadvantages, and seems to do an excellent job of achieving that. I can attest that most Champions players I know of spend quite a while sitting around trying to think of disadvantages which aren't part of their initial character conception, just so they can make the 150 points.
If, on the other hand, your goal is to fairly compensate people for disadvantages that are part of their basic character conception, this structure would seem a little weird. The compensation you get for building a character with a major flaw is not that really that you get extra points, since every character ends up with the same 250 points. Rather, the compensation is that you are not required to take as many other disadvantages. In effect, the advantage you get from wanting to play a character with serious disadvantages, is that you are an easier time picking your 150 points of disadvantages and are likely to be happier with the results. This is a workable mechanism, but sort of sub-optimum for this goal; it is odd that character conceptions for which it is easier to think of disadvantages cannot actually end up with more disadvantages then character conceptions which do not naturally lend themselves to a lot of disadvantages. And what happens if the flaws that arise directly from your character conception are more disadvantageous than the 150 points of disadvantages that a normal character takes? Then there is no way to be fairly compensated.
However, at this point this is all a bit too abstract to continue discussing without knowing more about the actual disadvantages themselves. So for the next article on this topic, I will start going into more detail by categorizing the types of disadvantages.
Next topic: Disadvantage classifications
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4e dungeons and dragons,
game design,
Hero system,
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Sunday, September 13, 2009
Disadvantages, Part I: Overall Purpose
A major game mechanic I've often thought about and analyzed is the disadvantage system. This is a complex subject, so I’ll start with some introductory analysis. The classic disadvantage system is that of Champions/Hero system, so I'll use that as my reference system. Role-playing game systems tend to have so many variations between different games that it is difficult to make any statement or use any terminology that is true across all games, so I think it is most practical to take one classic system as a reference model about which comments can be made that are true about many games, then describe the many variations at a later time.
What is a disadvantage system? When making a role-playing character in almost any system, you can make choices that determine how strong your character is in various categories, and you can make choices that grant your character extra advantages or abilities. In a point system like Champions, you pay for these extra abilities. In a system with disadvantages, you can make choices that are disadvantageous for your character, and you can get points back to spend on other things. These disadvantages can take many forms as listed in the individual system; examples include “one-eyed”, “wanted by police”, “won’t kill animals”, “unlucky”, or “afraid of spiders”.
In games without formal systems for disadvantages, some players will usually take some equivalent of disadvantages for their characters. This is particularly true of players who really like role playing. The player may decide that the character is obsessed with avenging her husband's murder, for instance. Or a whimsical player may decide that his dwarf drinks too much and smells bad. After all, the purpose of a role-playing game is to have fun, and making your character more complex and interesting can be a lot of fun. Other players, however, may be more interested in other aspects of the game and less interested in designing personality and back story, or they may have a very specific character design which is not particularly disadvantageous – perhaps a laid-back elven noble with an elaborate series of political connections. But whatever they choose, it has no impact on the formal character design and doesn't involve use of game rules.
An actual disadvantage system formalizes this process and assign some sort of value to each disadvantage. My analysis is that a disadvantage system has two distinct goals.
The first goal of a disadvantage system is to make characters more interesting by encouraging them to take characters with dramatic flaws as well as dramatic strengths, or by simply encouraging them to think a lot more about the personality and background of their character, creating more interesting facets of the character and more things for the game master to hook stories off of. Certainly this is very evident when comparing a bare-bones Champions character (one where the player builds the character according to the rules but doesn't add any optional written description) with a bare-bones D&D character. The D&D character has practically nothing on the sheet that indicates personality, except perhaps for some idea of the combat and noncombat styles and whatever stereotypes you might expect from their race, class, and statistics. With a Champions character, on the other hand, you can usually glean a lot about their major role-playing elements just by looking at the list of disadvantages. Of course, in D&D it is recommended that you write up a detailed back story, but many players don't do so. And even if they do so, the character may not have many really tangible flaws or problems that would make adventures more dramatic. And a disadvantage system not only encourages creating character flaws and hooks, it provides a standard structure for doing so, and a very helpful list of examples.
The second goal of a disadvantage system is to fairly compensate characters who put flaws into their character conception. If characters have to pay points for having positive attributes, it is only fair that they receive points back for having negative attributes. This is particularly true when you consider that, in many cases, not purchasing some sort of advantage that all the other characters have is equivalent to a disadvantage even in systems that don't have formal disadvantages, and you certainly are allowed to spend more points in other areas if you do so. The important point here is that most players, in addition to wanting their characters to be cool, want their characters to be effective, and are reluctant to intentionally weaken their characters in any significant way without getting something back. Receiving fair compensation for disadvantages makes players feel more free to make the character design choices they really want to make.
The second goal (compensation) may seem very similar to the first (encouragement), in the sense that the mechanism for achieving the first purpose is basically the same as for the second purpose - to compensate characters for having disadvantages. But in terms of how you analyze and craft the precise disadvantage mechanics, these are different goals. In particular, they would have different ideal end results. The ideal result of encouragement would be for every character, without exception, to have a large list of interesting disadvantages. Whereas the ideal result of compensation would say nothing about how many disadvantages the characters have - they should feel free to have many, few, or none, according to their conceptions, and know that they will be fairly compensated for the ones they picked.
Next Related Post
What is a disadvantage system? When making a role-playing character in almost any system, you can make choices that determine how strong your character is in various categories, and you can make choices that grant your character extra advantages or abilities. In a point system like Champions, you pay for these extra abilities. In a system with disadvantages, you can make choices that are disadvantageous for your character, and you can get points back to spend on other things. These disadvantages can take many forms as listed in the individual system; examples include “one-eyed”, “wanted by police”, “won’t kill animals”, “unlucky”, or “afraid of spiders”.
In games without formal systems for disadvantages, some players will usually take some equivalent of disadvantages for their characters. This is particularly true of players who really like role playing. The player may decide that the character is obsessed with avenging her husband's murder, for instance. Or a whimsical player may decide that his dwarf drinks too much and smells bad. After all, the purpose of a role-playing game is to have fun, and making your character more complex and interesting can be a lot of fun. Other players, however, may be more interested in other aspects of the game and less interested in designing personality and back story, or they may have a very specific character design which is not particularly disadvantageous – perhaps a laid-back elven noble with an elaborate series of political connections. But whatever they choose, it has no impact on the formal character design and doesn't involve use of game rules.
An actual disadvantage system formalizes this process and assign some sort of value to each disadvantage. My analysis is that a disadvantage system has two distinct goals.
The first goal of a disadvantage system is to make characters more interesting by encouraging them to take characters with dramatic flaws as well as dramatic strengths, or by simply encouraging them to think a lot more about the personality and background of their character, creating more interesting facets of the character and more things for the game master to hook stories off of. Certainly this is very evident when comparing a bare-bones Champions character (one where the player builds the character according to the rules but doesn't add any optional written description) with a bare-bones D&D character. The D&D character has practically nothing on the sheet that indicates personality, except perhaps for some idea of the combat and noncombat styles and whatever stereotypes you might expect from their race, class, and statistics. With a Champions character, on the other hand, you can usually glean a lot about their major role-playing elements just by looking at the list of disadvantages. Of course, in D&D it is recommended that you write up a detailed back story, but many players don't do so. And even if they do so, the character may not have many really tangible flaws or problems that would make adventures more dramatic. And a disadvantage system not only encourages creating character flaws and hooks, it provides a standard structure for doing so, and a very helpful list of examples.
The second goal of a disadvantage system is to fairly compensate characters who put flaws into their character conception. If characters have to pay points for having positive attributes, it is only fair that they receive points back for having negative attributes. This is particularly true when you consider that, in many cases, not purchasing some sort of advantage that all the other characters have is equivalent to a disadvantage even in systems that don't have formal disadvantages, and you certainly are allowed to spend more points in other areas if you do so. The important point here is that most players, in addition to wanting their characters to be cool, want their characters to be effective, and are reluctant to intentionally weaken their characters in any significant way without getting something back. Receiving fair compensation for disadvantages makes players feel more free to make the character design choices they really want to make.
The second goal (compensation) may seem very similar to the first (encouragement), in the sense that the mechanism for achieving the first purpose is basically the same as for the second purpose - to compensate characters for having disadvantages. But in terms of how you analyze and craft the precise disadvantage mechanics, these are different goals. In particular, they would have different ideal end results. The ideal result of encouragement would be for every character, without exception, to have a large list of interesting disadvantages. Whereas the ideal result of compensation would say nothing about how many disadvantages the characters have - they should feel free to have many, few, or none, according to their conceptions, and know that they will be fairly compensated for the ones they picked.
Next Related Post
Labels:
game design,
Hero system,
RPG,
RPG theory
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