Power curves and tiering in leveled RPGs

[Knaight]

Why? The reason Fighters are Linear and Wizards are Quadratic is that Wizards get magic (which scales indefinitely) and Fighters don't (and therefore suck). Effectively, you're suggesting that niches should be reserved by power source, which is dumb. Paladins can do whatever swording Fighters do, and also be magic. If your game demands that Paladins don't exist, you need to rethink things.

This only works if you assume that magic has to work that way. It doesn't; the concepts hold together just fine without leveling increasing two efficacy variables that get multiplied together (in this case the power of individual spells and the number of spells).

[Jormengand]

This only works if you assume that magic has to work that way. It doesn't; the concepts hold together just fine without leveling increasing two efficacy variables that get multiplied together (in this case the power of individual spells and the number of spells).

While this is certainly true, I'd like to think that it's far more interesting to have a scaling effect of lower-level abilities while also granting access to better abilities. There's incidentally no real reason why fighting shouldn't be able to be "Quadratic" either.

[HidesHisEyes]

That's really the thing, as I see it. The obvious solution that I am seeing is the linear wizard. There is no need for wizards to become all powerful shapers of reality. By being more modest about what magic can and can't do you can smooth out the power curves pretty well.

This appears to be one of the reason why the B/X edition has become so hugely popular in oldschool D&D circles. It's capped at 14th level and 6th level spells.

When I modified B/X for my own campaign, I capped spells at 5th level and removed many of the directly offensive spells, changing spellcasters into more of a utility-support class. Their focus is to help other characters do their jobs even better.

Definitely agree here. If I were writing a D&D-like RPG I would handle this with a certain approach to setting lore concerning magic: it was only ever truly understood by the ancients, who could shape reality to their will. Magical war, apocalypse, what-have you: thousands of years later certain gifted individuals seek out and study the remaining scraps of arcane lore, and can do impressive things but aren't demigods.

I think if you want wizards to be demigods in the fiction then they have to be demigods in the gameplay, and that will inevitably lead to fighters and rogues feeling outmatched to one degree or another.

Edit for how I see it actually working: spells are arranged into gated trees so you're forced to either specialise in one role (direct damage, healing and buffing, utility and exploration, control etc.) or collect less powerful spells and be a magical jack of all trades. Something like that.

[CharonsHelper]

I think if you want wizards to be demigods in the fiction then they have to be demigods in the gameplay, and that will inevitably lead to fighters and rogues feeling outmatched to one degree or another.

Or just have the crazy powerful spells take longer than 6 seconds to cast, making them reliant upon the fighter/rogues to not die horribly while casting?

[PhoenixPhyre]

Or just have the crazy powerful spells take longer than 6 seconds to cast, making them reliant upon the fighter/rogues to not die horribly while casting?

That's been tried, but sitting around twiddling your thumbs for multiple rounds doesn't seem fun to most players. Also, isn't there a law? Grod's law I believe? You can't balance an ability by making it annoying to use?

[Mendicant]

If you had an engaging enough minigame to play while casting a multi-round spell you could maybe get away with that. Otherwise it just doesn't seem like good game design for a PC.

[VoxRationis]

That's been tried, but sitting around twiddling your thumbs for multiple rounds doesn't seem fun to most players. Also, isn't there a law? Grod's law I believe? You can't balance an ability by making it annoying to use?

I feel like that "law" gets thrown around far too broadly, partly because the term "annoying" is vague. In this case in particular, having a multiple-round delay in the middle of combat is more than just "annoying." That delay could potentially cause your side to crumple in the face of severe resistance, and the temptation to drop the spell and do something less dramatic but quicker could be significant.

Not to mention that wizards as-is often spend some time thumb-twiddling because they didn't prepare the right spells for this combat, or ran out of spells, or are seeking to preserve their spells for an anticipated fight.

[Jormengand]

That's been tried, but sitting around twiddling your thumbs for multiple rounds doesn't seem fun to most players. Also, isn't there a law? Grod's law I believe? You can't balance an ability by making it annoying to use?

Grod (or someone else explaining it, but IIRC Grod) explains in an example that annoying isn't the same as time-consuming. Spell slots aren't "Annoying" either. "Annoying" in the circumstances means restricting the type of circumstances under which it can be used; in general any limitation that isn't a number-of-uses-per-time or time-to-use restriction. Contrast Sneak Attack (annoying as it requires you to set up a certain situation) and Death Attack (time-consuming as you have to do nothing a while).

[Anonymouswizard]

Or just have the crazy powerful spells take longer than 6 seconds to cast, making them reliant upon the fighter/rogues to not die horribly while casting?

I feel this works better for separating noncombat spells from combat one. It doesn't matter if create water is two levels lower and can create 1000 gallons, hydrowhip doesn't take half an hour to cast while orcs are being down on you. Now create water is still awesome of you want 1000 gallons of water, and is better than hydrowhip in those cases, but it's not going to be a major part of combat strategies.

Symbol of Encroaching Doom might be awesome, but it takes three hours to set up (on the plus side it lasts for one day/week per caster level or until set off), it's a trap not battle magic.

Battle magic becomes the week magic here, but it's still useful, and in wars single mages still massively affect the outcome (like say reducing the need to transport supplies, or flooding the enemy's camp, or creating roads to make travel easier, or...)

That's been tried, but sitting around twiddling your thumbs for multiple rounds doesn't seem fun to most players. Also, isn't there a law? Grod's law I believe? You can't balance an ability by making it annoying to use?

True, which is one of the reasons I hate the idea I occasionally see if 'each player must make up their own magic words for the spell, because roleplay' (if I ever have to do it I'm just translating the spell names into Mandarin). Oh look, I've learnt a new spell, now I've got to spend 15 minutes coming up with magic words, checking they're not used by my existing site, and telling the GM what they are, then noting them down so I'll remember them.

And yes, I've occasionally seen it in games. In Dark Heresy each psychic power used has a one in ten chance of causing psychic phenomena (relatively harmless most of the time), which has a one in for chance of causing Perils of the warp, which has a decent chance of either killing the party outright. This is per die, you'll begin with one but have three when you unlock the good powers, and you'll need those three to activate them. Oh, and IIRC phenomena activates individually for each die. At least when Rogue Trader was released it's system allowed you to sacrifice power for not potentially dooming the party (or do the opposite). The risk versus reward how much to risk was an alluring process that allowed down the game for everyone.

Might was well balance powerful spells by asking the player to compose new original limericks whenever have to cast one.

EDIT: also retiring certain have situations for use is just plain annoying, when it gets beyond components. I can except 'you can't cast ball of flaming death when you don't have your ruby rod' much more than 'you can only cast ball of flaming death during a full moon while the target has a dove's carcass pointed to their shoulder'.

[CharonsHelper]

That's been tried, but sitting around twiddling your thumbs for multiple rounds doesn't seem fun to most players. Also, isn't there a law? Grod's law I believe? You can't balance an ability by making it annoying to use?

If you had an engaging enough minigame to play while casting a multi-round spell you could maybe get away with that. Otherwise it just doesn't seem like good game design for a PC.

Oh - definitely. You wouldn't want to slap the multi-round casting on top of 3.x/Pathfinder or another system designed without it. It would need to be integrated from the ground up.

It would need a minigame or allow you still fight with weapons, albeit with sub-par combat skills.

Potentially have the familiar be more significant and also under control of the same player who would still do things while the wizard is casting. etc.

Of course - they would have the option to avoid the problem by casting their weaker/faster spells in combat and only use the big ones out of combat where the slow casting speed doesn't matter. (And I didn't mean that they should take hours to cast - but maybe 2-4 rounds.)

[FreddyNoNose]

"Because Gygax."

But they retired characters too.

Watch this for a few minutes: https://youtu.be/RwKztsXquoM?t=44m12s

[Max_Killjoy]

Then D&D can be the quadratic game where everyone's quadratic, and everyone assists somewhere. Then we can have another game, say Soldiers & Scholars where magic is weak and linear, and a third have, Demigods & Demons where magic and marital abilities are strong and linear.

I know if mostly ruin a version of the S&S game with maybe some occasional Demigods & Demons, but that's because I like linear games. Should I be debited playing fantasy just because I don't want my what's calling down due from the sky?

Exactly -- pick a power level and progression curve, and then apply it to every type of character across the board.

[Mendicant]

Exactly -- pick a power level and progression curve, and then apply it to every type of character across the board.

Even in the example you just agreed with, the desire was expressed for "Demigods and Demons" to be able to communicate with "Scholars and Soldiers."

That might be possible with two different games, depending on what semantic hair you consider it vital to split. It is not possible with two different systems. A tiered system allows all of these disparate games/tiers/genres to exist with the same architecture, and there is no compelling reason to assume you couldn't pick 1 & 2 or just 3 or whatever else seems appropriate. "Just make different games" is the approach WoD took. Of course, people wanted to run mages alongside vampires, but the system architecture made it a mess to do so.

Level-capped D&D already exists, as do games of D&D that start above 1st level. The d20 system, viewed across its entire spectrum, is actually very amenable to all kinds of genre emulation across various bands of its level space, and it is also eminently hackable because its core resolution mechanic is so simple.

What does not work is the inbuilt assumption that all classes and concepts must run along the same continuum for their entirety. Expanding the level space and alternating power growth more thoughtfully solves that problem without tossing the baby with the bathwater.

[Max_Killjoy]

Even in the example you just agreed with, the desire was expressed for "Demigods and Demons" to be able to communicate with "Scholars and Soldiers."

Where?

I thought the poster was saying they like mainly game X, but sometimes want to play some game Y -- not play a mix of X and Y.

[Mendicant]

I might have misread it. In any event, demanding that high level and low level play be siloed in different games is still unnecessary and arbitrary.

[Max_Killjoy]

I might have misread it. In any event, demanding that high level and low level play be siloed in different games is still unnecessary and arbitrary.

The comments related to power and progression/advancement, not specifically to level. It's not about keeping low-level and high-level play apart from one another, it's about keeping different progression curves out of the same game*.

The "silo" options are two of several "be honest with yourself and your gamers" variants, where different character types start out at a similar potency compared to each other and relative to their setting/world, and then progress along the same curve so that they're all linear, all exponential, all quadratic, or whatever. It's not silos with different levels, it's silos where each contains identical-as-possible starting power, progression, and "ending" power across all character types.


* Unless you deliberately combine them and everyone is up-front and open-eyed about some types of characters being more viable than others as the game progresses.

[Arbane]

That's been tried, but sitting around twiddling your thumbs for multiple rounds doesn't seem fun to most players. Also, isn't there a law? Grod's law I believe? You can't balance an ability by making it annoying to use?

IIRC, the steampunk pseudohistory game Castle Falkenstein had multi-round spells. The way it worked was that the magician had to gather up X amount of mana of the right sort to cast a spell, and you did that by drawing cards (the game used playing cards instead of dice). If they weren't of the right suit, they'd cause side-effects if you didn't get rid of them. So casting a spell was a minigame while everyone else was busy fencing or whatever.

But they retired characters too.

Watch this for a few minutes: https://youtu.be/RwKztsXquoM?t=44m12s

True. Unfortunately, the early editions of D&D weren't very good at explaining how it was 'supposed' to be played.

[Frozen_Feet]

@Mendicant:

What you want when you say you want a game where the bones remain the same even though the game changes, is combinational emergence.

The easiest example to study is a zero-player game, Conway's Life, and its variants. From a simple set of rules, you get increasingly complex patterns as the number of building blocks increases.

There are several problems with this in the context of what you want, though. The primary thing being that emergence is unpredictable. It is unlikely you will get a stable progression of the exact sort you want out of any ruleset which supports emergence. Tiny initial differences between characters are likely to lead to massive and unexpected differences in their middle and end states.

The secondary thing is computational intensiveness. When trying to calculate everything from "first principles", so to speak, it quickly becomes infeasible for humans to deal with large amounts of elements on the tabletop. This is already visible even in normal play when using d20 rulesets: as characters gain levels and abilities, the time required to resolve their actions grows. It becomes glaringly apparent if you try to use same rules for mass combat. Speed of play, more than anything, is why many systems move resolution from the rules to the GM or have cut-off points where you move from a small-scale, detailed rules to large-scale, abstract rules.

Of all RPGs I own, only one, Noitahovi, scales smoothly from zero to hero to cosmic while retaining same basic mechanics and remaining computationally feasible on tabletop. But it succeeds mostly by virtue of being so abstract it barely models anything. The conflict resolution of that game doesn't tell you what happens in the game, it tells you which player gets to tell what happens in the gane.

[Anonymouswizard]

Where?

I thought the poster was saying they like mainly game X, but sometimes want to play some game Y -- not play a mix of X and Y.

This was the intent. It was intended in the same way 'I'd normally pick Traveller but sometimes I'll run Rocket Age' would be.

[FreddyNoNose]

IIRC, the steampunk pseudohistory game Castle Falkenstein had multi-round spells. The way it worked was that the magician had to gather up X amount of mana of the right sort to cast a spell, and you did that by drawing cards (the game used playing cards instead of dice). If they weren't of the right suit, they'd cause side-effects if you didn't get rid of them. So casting a spell was a minigame while everyone else was busy fencing or whatever.




True. Unfortunately, the early editions of D&D weren't very good at explaining how it was 'supposed' to be played.

Perhaps the problem is people need to have someone explain it to them....

[Zale]

If you had an engaging enough minigame to play while casting a multi-round spell you could maybe get away with that. Otherwise it just doesn't seem like good game design for a PC.

As I recall, one of the older editions of D&D (1e AD&D?) did have a flavor of multi-turn spells. As I understand, each round was divided into 10 or so "segments" or "ticks" and you would act based on your initiative and the speed of your weapon (or other action).

If you were doing something fast, it happened on the first segment, while very slow actions might take until the sixth or seventh segment.

Spells added their level to the segment you acted on, so even if you could end the entire fight in a single spell, you may have to wait until everyone else acted in order to do so. I feel like you had to declare you were casting at the start of the turn, though, so you could lose your spell if you were casting something that wouldn't go until segment 8 and someone punched you on segment 5.

[Lemmy]

Why does a level system need to include "zero to god" progression at all?

Because it's fun. Because it's possible. Because people like that concept. And those who don't... Nothing is forcing them to play all the way from 1 to 20+. E6 is a great game, but it shouldn't be the only way to play D&D.

[Max_Killjoy]

Because it's fun.

I never found the "zero" stage fun, and the "godling" stage is only fun with a very particular setup and carefully crafted opposition and challenges.

Seriously, I don't question that people have fun playing "zeros", to each their own... but I'll never understand it.

[VoxRationis]

As I recall, one of the older editions of D&D (1e AD&D?) did have a flavor of multi-turn spells. As I understand, each round was divided into 10 or so "segments" or "ticks" and you would act based on your initiative and the speed of your weapon (or other action).

If you were doing something fast, it happened on the first segment, while very slow actions might take until the sixth or seventh segment.

Spells added their level to the segment you acted on, so even if you could end the entire fight in a single spell, you may have to wait until everyone else acted in order to do so. I feel like you had to declare you were casting at the start of the turn, though, so you could lose your spell if you were casting something that wouldn't go until segment 8 and someone punched you on segment 5.

2nd edition AD&D had something to that effect, definitely (though nothing about "segments"—it was all expressed in terms of initiative count). And that was before Concentration checks were a thing, so a kobold doing 1-2 damage with a thrown rock could shut down a powerful wizard.

[FreddyNoNose]

Because it's fun. Because it's possible. Because people like that concept. And those who don't... Nothing is forcing them to play all the way from 1 to 20+. E6 is a great game, but it shouldn't be the only way to play D&D.

Plus the whole escapism thing. We have the real world, this is something outside of that constraint.

[FreddyNoNose]

I never found the "zero" stage fun, and the "godling" stage is only fun with a very particular setup and carefully crafted opposition and challenges.

Seriously, I don't question that people have fun playing "zeros", to each their own... but I'll never understand it.

Well, are you playing the game or playing the rules of the game?

[Frozen_Feet]

Why does a level system need to include "zero to god" progression at all?

The honest answer is "it doesn't". But it could, hence the question "how to do this well?".

[FreddyNoNose]

The honest answer is "it doesn't". But it could, hence the question "how to do this well?".

What is wrong with good enough?

What is wrong with trying something and failing?

[Frozen_Feet]

"Nothing" to the former.

"Depends on motive of the effort and consequence of failure" to the latter.

What on Earth triggered those questions in response to my post?

[Morty]

Because it's fun. Because it's possible. Because people like that concept. And those who don't... Nothing is forcing them to play all the way from 1 to 20+. E6 is a great game, but it shouldn't be the only way to play D&D.

That's kind of a weird way to put it, considering that E6 isn't so much a "way" to play D&D as it is a homebrew patch.