The Gaming Den

[Orion]

Unlimited Advancement is Fundamentally Misguided: Why High-level play Has Always, and Will Always Suck. Or, "Frank is Trolling Us: Why 10KF, like TNE, is going nowhere." (1 of 3)

The backstory:

Okay. It's not news to anyone that the Den is in a furor about magic, non-magic, swords, "fighters," action heroes, and military commanders. We have two states: "fighting about that shit", and "derelict." There are about 5 recent threads, some of them are locked, and all of them are about other things. This is about calling out an assertion Frank (and Lago) make in passing in a lot of threads but rarely gets defended. Specifically, the claim that high-fantasy must advance characters until they are all basically Wizards. Frank is very fond of pointing out that the theoretical maximum power of "magic" is greater than the theoretical power of "not magic." This is true. He also points out the corollary, that as Level -> Infinity, all characters must end up being "magic." So far, so good. However, in every thread about "non-magic" heroes, someone suggests simply capping advancement before the non-magic ceiling needs to be breached. And the way Frank has responded to that has been a little weird. It would be easy to state a personal preference for games that go to higher power levels. It would even be pretty easy to make the case that most of the source material breaks the non-magic cap, or even that most players who think they want a non-magic Fighter actually do want to go beyond the cap. Any of those would be good reasons to insist that a fantasy game turn all the characters magic at some point. But in a recent thread (obsolete concepts, I believe?) Frank went for a far weirder argument: that you shouldn't allow PCs to stay non-magic, because even if you made a Fighter that was balanced all the way up to the level cap, players might decide to invent Epic rules later, and then the Epic Fighter would be screwed. I don't know what to make of this. If we're to take this argument seriously, than we need to make sure that every character available scales up smoothly from "Conan" to "Hercules" to "Corwin" to "Bad Wolf", even if we are only writing rules for Conan to Hercules. That's... deeply weird.

Let me take a time out here to clarify that I personally am not invested in having "non-magic" characters. I just plain like stories that go up to necessarily-magical levels of power, and I find the prospect of designing a game where you can be a Fighter up to max level stifling. However, there's a popular archetype that I do enjoy: the Mystic Swordsman. And that archetype gets shit on as inexorably as the Fighter in this worldview. The Mystic Swordsman is a character with substantial magic defense, mobility, and utility powers, and optionally personal-scale energy nukes, who nonetheless cares deeply about their sword. In D&D terms, suppose you had a "monk" class with full BAB and a longsword. Then give them always-on water walk, air walk, delay poison, see invisible, "ghost touch," detect thoughts, detect evil. Give him a flaming sword and Telekinesis and you've got yourself a Jedi. But even the Jedi gets shit on by unlimited level-advancement, because he lacks arbitrary breadth, and scale.

Breadth is Frank's hobbyhorse. I think he and I broadly agree about what "paragon tier" narrative abilities look like: water breathing/movement, flight, curse-breaking, resurrection, plane-shifting, teleportation, spying, crafting, mass combat, and so on. However, while a Jedi or a Gryphon General has some of them, Frank is insisting that a Paragon adventurer have all of them. He's explicitly unsatisfied unless a Mind Knight can wake up one morning and, without any preparation or outside equipment, decide to pop off to Hell, the bottom of the ocean, the Underdark, or the fucking moon. You could imagine a Jedi-level hero who could do any one of those, but a character who can do all of them is something else entirely. Scale is Lago's pet. He and Frank both harp on the notion that after a certain level, "hitting something with a sword" is not an appropriate contribution, even if you have enough magic to allow you to actually do that. But Lago is more likely to spin off into talking about fighting elementals the size of castles or gods throwing demi-planes like shuriken or wearing abstract concepts or something. Either way, the point is: unlimited advancement doesn't just kill the Badass Normal. It also kills the Magic Swordsman, by demanding that he acquire out-of-theme powers and eventually stop caring about swords at all. To be clear: they're totally right. As level -> infinity, PCs level out of "Jedi Knight" just as surely as they leveled out of "City Guard."

Ok, digression over. Let's go back to the part where Frank says that levels must be allowed to go -> infinity. The reason I find this so weird is that if you look at his own design principles, the games he wrote, or what people like on the Den, you get the opposite impression.
[list=]

Popular on the Den: Frank loves Feng Shui, which doesn't do advancement at all. Shadowrun has advancement, but characters start near the caps in their specialties, and two bullets will always take you down. The "advancement deck" mechanic was created by a poster to flatten the power curve of Champions. I'm a big fan of Apocalypse World, which also essentially doesn't scale at all.

Frank's Games: After Sundown has a default setting where players start near the caps in their fields and diversify horizontally. It also has largely untested "epic levels" that don't do any of what Frank is asking for Paragon D&D to do. Warp Cult is even more interesting. For that game, he took a pre-existing setting with lore scaling from farmer to immortal energy god, and capped the game to the lower end of that setting. I don't think he's ever considered adding rules for "Epic Warp Cult." I believe he's on record saying that if you want to play Spess Mareens, you should design a new game.

Design Principles: The big one here is monsters come first. He and I agree that one ought to start with a list of challenges and then give PCs the abilities to solve them. Doing it this way explicitly rules out throwing in post hoc epic scaling. When PCs hit the level cap, they gain the abilities needed to pass the toughest challenges. They can't advance further than that, because there isn't anything left to fight.[/list]

If you comb the archives of the Den and synthesize, you get something like this: If you want to design a game, take a setting. Write a bunch of challenges in that setting for each level you intend to play. It's okay if there are monsters in the setting that are "too big" to show up on your challenge list. The smaller a band of levels you're trying to cover, the more elegantly your game will run. Then, write up some characters who could solve the max-level challenges. Start with a Wizard. Then, try a Jedi. If you can, great! If not, require all Jedi to prestige into being Wizards. Then, if you want, try writing a Knight. If you can't do it, make the Knights prestige into Jedi. Include one paragraph in the MC's chapter warning them that if they decide to break the level cap, only wizards will be level-appropriate, and that they should force everyone to turn into wizards at that point. TL;DR If you believe anything else Frank says about RPG design, ignore him when he says fantasy must scale to infinity.

Stay tuned for Part 2, in which I will explain why advancement is a priori bad for the game, and what we can do about that. Part 3 will be a list of fantasy media I happen to like, and a proposed power-level which is better than Fighter, but worse than Frank's Mind Lord.
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STEAM: Orion.anderson
A Broken SkyIdentity Crisis

[ishy]

So basically, you're saying that you can make games with a limited 'power level'. And that Frank and Lago are totally wrong about stuff?
Except you take 1260 words to do so?
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[Orion]

part 2

Okay, so as I said in the other thread that got locked, an RPG is a game wrapped in fiction. Advancement is only objectively real if it changes the game. We can argue back and forth all day about the relative "high" or "low" levelness of casting a plane shift, walking to a Hellmouth and opening, hiring a priest to Plane Shift you, constructing your own portal or having a big penis NPC demon kidnap you. The point is: you're in Hell. There are demons. Roll initiative. Your characters are "high level" iff you can kill the demons using nothing but the printed combat rules and the abilities on your character sheet, and fighting a demon is materially different from fighting an orc. That means you want to be adding and removing mechanics from your game as you advance. Maybe you start caring about 3-D movement. Maybe you stop caring about difficult terrain. Maybe you start worrying about pokemon types. Maybe you stop worrying about spells-per-day. Whatever.

Here's where it gets weird: "adding some mechanics and removing others" is also known as taking your handcrafted masterpiece and pissing all over it. You have a limited amount of time and energy, and whatever "tier" you design first, or spend the most time on, is probably going to be the best. If "Heroes" is the best game you've ever written, than "Paragons" is necessarily going to be worse. D&D has traditionally started out with some "masochism levels." 3.5 is mostly a lot less fun or interesting at levels 1-2 than it is at level 3-7. Which is why most people start games at level 3 or 6. Other games are smarter and hide the masochism level as a "0." Think "street-level" Shadowrun. Either way, most groups these days start people at whatever level makes the PCs cool and playable, and advancement only takes them further away from the part of the game that works well. It's not strictly required that Heroic Tier be better than Paragon Tier. Theoretically, you could do the opposite. However, there are some structural reasons it usually is. First, it's assumed that people will play Heroic first, and then possibly Paragon. So Heroic is going to see way more play time, and thus deserves way more testing and balance time. Second, most people think a "high-level" character should be more complicated than a "low-level" one. These days, we tend to figure out what we think is "just complicated enough" and hand that out to starting characters right away, so advancement pushes you into "too complicated" almost immediately.

Now I'm not saying you should completely remove advancement. (Although you totally could do that.) Even though Paragon is a straight-up worse game than Heroic, it can still justify its existence as long as the pleasure you get from the feeling of being "rewarded," from your ongoing investment in the character, and the opportunity to jizz power fantasies all over the old NPCs makes up the fun gap. Also, sometimes I get sick of 7 Wonders and play Settlers of Catan, even though Settlers isn't as good. Similarly, I could just get sick of Heroic and decide to play Paragon. But you should accept going in that the higher levels are going to suck, they're going to suck more the higher you go, and that there will always be an upper limit to how high you can go before the game falls apart. If you really want to tell superhero stories without the rules sucking, you have exactly two options. You can cut Heroic entirely and make a game where "level 1" characters fly around shooting lightning at demons. Or you can turn the entire Heroic tier into masochism levels. Make high-level characters less complicated than low-level ones, and do the bulk of design and playtesting on the Paragon monsters. Put a note in your book saying that Paragon is the "deault game" and Heroic is "experts-only" because it introduces new mechanics like ammo, food, and disease. Or better yet, write a game where the PCs start at max level, and then level down until they fight the final boss at level 1.

TL;DR: No matter how many levels your game has, one of them is going to be the best. You should strongly consider making that one "level 1."
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STEAM: Orion.anderson
A Broken SkyIdentity Crisis

[Lord Mistborn]

I don't think anyone has argued for infinite advancement. Look at the degree too which everyone rips on the Epic level handbook.

There is however the very broad fact that D&D style fantasy heartbreakers have to cover a lot of ground and that ground includes character concepts that mundane characters can not hope to match. Heck the amorphous mass that is D&D's generic fluff is weighted very strongly to some form of caster supremacy.

Other games have a more solid structure that can limit mundane obsolecense like how Warhammer mages are in danger of demonic suprise buttsex (and how PCs are supposed to suck suffer and die). D&Ds genericness means that it has to accept a much wider range of character concepts. You are going to have one person come to that table wanting to play Conan and another wanting to play Rand Al'Thor. Now how D&D is limited in how it can aducate that since theres basically no way Conan isn't going to feel small in the pants.

That's becaus those concepts reprsent vastly diffrent scales of power and D&D handles that by assigning them diffent levels. So here is the deal ultimately with respect to the mundane/magic problem

-People want to play as Conan
-People want to play as Rand Al'Thor

Now we can actually give them the tools to be both those thing but those archatypes can't coexist in the same party. Now haing a lower level version of Rand Al'Thor is fairly easy the problem is that there is no higher level of version Conan that dosen't radically alter his Conaness.

What the mundane side of the debate is usually arguing for is to have peoples ability to play as Rand Al'Thor so they never at any point have to consider not being Conan.

Any questions?

[Orion]

I think trying to stuff Conan and Rand Al'Thor into the same game system is a fool's errand. Write a game where Conan scales up to being Prince Zuko, or where Zuko scales up to being Rand. Don't try to scale Conan into Rand. It will end in tears.
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STEAM: Orion.anderson
A Broken SkyIdentity Crisis

[Lord Mistborn]

[Orion]

Writing a satisfying game where people ride around on horses and care about squads of footsoldiers is so different from writing a game where you teleport around, travel the planes and nuke cities that nothing is gained by pretending they are the same game. Just go ahead and write two different games already. Put them in the same setting, if you want.

EDIT: In fact, I'm gonna throw this down: Three tiers is too many. High-fantasy only needs or wants 2 tiers.
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STEAM: Orion.anderson
A Broken SkyIdentity Crisis

[Lord Mistborn]

[Orion]

Every setting has room for Conan on the bottom. To the extent that there is a setting problem, it's not with Conan. What your setting needs to do is decide what the upper level of magic is. It's fine to write a game where spending 24 hours to open a Hellmouth to go to hell is supposed to be "awesome" or where it's supposed to be "lame." But if you want it to be "awesome," you can't then go on and write another, higher tier of the same game where now you get Plane Shift.
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STEAM: Orion.anderson
A Broken SkyIdentity Crisis

[Stubbazubba]

I largely agree. The greater disparity between max level and min level, the sloppier one of those extremes is done, usually max level.

All of my favorite games involve starting out at halfway to the cap or higher in your specialty, and having advancement come through horizontal competency increase or even be limited to temporary bonuses only.

The sheer amount of scale-changing D&D has saddled itself with is a fundamental detriment to the game. I think you pointed out one of the big reasons; to really do that you'd have to insert and remove mechanics too frequently to call it the same game. Development resources are scarce, there's no reason to try and spread your attention over all that, and trying to make things transition from one to another is more wasted effort. You're far better off making separate, but coherent, games, even for the same setting. Preferably, though, just make a setting that matches the game. No one complains.

Now, we like to pretend that we're in charge of a new D&D, and D&D, to remain D&D, pretty much has to go from crap-covered farmer to Multiverse archmage who has gods shine his shoes, because sacred cows and all that, so that's what we talk about. But it's not a good design goal to have otherwise.
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Josh Kablack wrote:

PhoneLobster wrote: He is like a living warning to all RPG designers of what happens when you talk about RPG design for too long without sitting down and actually trying to test some of your insane ideas in practice. That's unfair. By which I mean it probably applies to most posters on this forum, so it's unfair to single one of us out with it.

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Matters of Critical Insignificance
03/23: Cinematic combat without damage or HP? Challenge accepted!

[Lord Mistborn]

[Darth Rabbitt]

[Lord Mistborn]

[Previn]

[PoliteNewb]

[K]

There are several hundred DnD novels in many different settings.

This means that people who want DnD to represent myths, or fairy tales, or some other fantasy novels like Conan or WoT or GoT can go suck a barrel of dicks because they want DnD to be not-DnD.

[PoliteNewb]

[K]

[Orion]

Yeah, Rand al'Thor scales up from being a shit-covered farmer to being the Dragon. But I've never seen a game in which at least one of those extremes wasn't stupid or boring to actually play, and I'm not convinced it can be done.

---

High-level magic hasn't always been part of the D&D game, and I don't think it's an integral part of the brand. Red Box/Darkmoor/Greyhawk/Eldritch didn't even go up to 9th-level spells,it stopped at 5th or 6th or something. AD&D printed some 9th-level spells, but I never saw them used or heard of them being used. Queen of the Demonweb Pits is marketed for levels 10-14. That means that at best, you might get 7th-level spells just before the end of the campaign. Honestly, the game has lots of little ways to make clear that you're supposed to stop shortly after hitting name level, and the typical game caps at 5th-level spells. They even add a bonus "fuck you level" for M-Us at 11, just to reduce the risk of you accidentally getting past 5th-level spells.

If I understand my history right, 2nd edition is when they started printing lots of high-level spells, and also when they introduced level 20 as a standard endpoint to aspire to. They also started printing Forgotten Realms tie-in novels where wizards really did use clones and teleports and wishes and soul bindings. But Die Vecna Die was still printed for 10-13. As we all know, 3rd Edition took the foundations of second edition straight to ye olde crazy towne, and 4th edition overcompensated by nerfing everything. Oh, then there was Basic, which had the Immortals shit. By my count, there have been 6 major editions of D&D, only three of which had any significant high-level content at all. Now for the brand side: Forgotten Realms does have high-level characters in their tie-in fiction, and is a brand with some relevance. But "D&D" generally? Weirdly enough, people expect it to involve going into a dungeons to fight a dragon, which is not a high-level adventure in 3E terms. If you write a book where teams of heroes fight monsters underground, everyone will recognize it as "being D&D" even if the best spells anyone gets are lightning bolt and dimension door.

So yes, I think you could sell an edition of "D&D" where the biggest you ever get is Katara, Vanyel, or Covenant.Cutting Elminster might harm your brand a little bit, but not as much as adding playable fighting men would. Alternatively, if you want to scale up to Elminster, start people as Luke, Aragorn, or Li Mu Bai.
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STEAM: Orion.anderson
A Broken SkyIdentity Crisis

[PhoneLobster]

My current project is intended to have 3 tiers, the low tier and the medium tier being the main ones I'm focusing on.

High tier is intended to be a somewhat brief phase of additional awesome just a bit beyond mid tier that then rapidly offers up a bunch of options that are effectively victory states.

Basically the game is intended to go sort of...
Low Tier Crawl out of the gutter and go on some adventures and get pretty awesome.
Mid Tier Get so awesome you need a kick ass palace to store your awesome in. Go on lots of awesome adventures.
High Tier Get some totally crazy abilities while you build your ultimate planet destroyer laser. Then win.

So what I'm saying, and aiming for, is that your highest level play probably shouldn't go forever. It should be a short explosion of crazy followed by victory. It should be designed to be brief, unstable and full of win conditions.
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[Orion]

3rd Edition D&D is a good combat game that works well enough on the first tier. (1-7). If you wanted a good squad combat game, mass combat game, and socializing game, over three tiers, your project would be nine times as big as D&D 3.5. That's not something a lone amateur designer is ever going to be able to churn out, even Frank or Koumei.
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STEAM: Orion.anderson
A Broken SkyIdentity Crisis

[K]

[Orion]

I've been playing D&D for 15 years. I have never heard of Caramon, I know Robilar was a Fighter from Greyhawk, and I read a bunch of Drizzt novels. I'm pretty sure Drizzt feels right at home on a team with Li Mu Bai and Anakin. They're all swordfighters with super acrobatics, arbitrary magic resistance, and a couple miscellaneous magic tricks.
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STEAM: Orion.anderson
A Broken SkyIdentity Crisis

[Chamomile]

Caramon is a Fighter. The extent of his awesomeness is being a good influence on his brother, who is a Wizard. He would not win a fight with Anakin.

[PhoneLobster]