… and by that, I mean that they should be inspiring good, old-fashioned awe with the things that they do.

This is something I first talked about in D&D: Calibrating Your Expectations and I developed the theme in E(X): The Many Games Inside the World’s Most Popular Roleplaying Game.

Recently I was speaking with someone who was unhappy with the “crazy scaling” of Perception checks he was seeing in the arms race of high level Pathfinder games: The players crank up their Perception modifiers. The GM responds by simply cranking up the DC necessary to accomplish previously much easier tasks. The result is “silly” and “ridiculous”.

This is what I said:

FIRST, CONTEXTUALIZE THE NUMBERS. Instead of just blindly cranking up the numbers, think about what those larger numbers really mean. If a DC 30 check reveals a “well-hidden secret door”, then what does a DC 40 check really mean? Well, it means something that no one in the real world without special tools would ever be able to detect. So maybe that means that the door has been phase-shifted onto the Ethereal Plane; or painted with the illusion-infused blood of a demon; or covered with the alchemically-treated hide of an animal that has evolved the ability to make people psychically ignore its presence.

In other words, embrace the fact that the PCs are doing awesome things and really emphasize how awesome it is.

SECOND, EMPHASIZE NOT CHANGING THE NUMBERS. Instead of trying to keep the same old tasks challenging, focus on the paradigm shift that’s occurred.

Yup. They’re really, really good at finding hidden things. Similarly, they’re really, really good at killing 1st level goblins. Instead of resisting that change by leveling up all the goblins in the universe to match their new abilities, focus instead on exploring how their interaction with the world shifts.

A mechanical option along these same lines would be to include guidelines for improving the quality or speed of a check by accepting a penalty on the check. For example, I have a generic set of guidelines for “quick checks” that drop the time required for the check by one category in exchange for accepting a -10 penalty to the check. (High level characters, for example, can make successful Gather Information checks in 1d4+1 minutes instead of 1d4+1 hours by accepting a -20 penalty on their check.) For Perception checks, you might apply a -10 penalty to allow characters to notice hidden doors/objects/etc. without actively searching for them. (They just walk into a room and spot the hidden door in the corner.)

An extreme example of this sort of thing is Doctor Who: The Doctor can open the door of the TARDIS, sniff the air, and instantly identify the atmospheric content, the planet he’s standing on, and the time period. (I like to imagine that this is based on complex spectrographic analysis compared to charts which Time Lords study in school much like we study multiplication tables.)

ALTERNATIVELY, PUT A CAP ON THE AWESOME. If you don’t want to embrace the awesome, on the other hand, you’ll be much happier simply stepping out of the arms race. Cap their advancement before they become “too awesome”, either drawing the campaign to a close or finding other ways of advancing their characters. (This is where E(X): The Many Games Inside the World’s Most Popular Roleplaying Game comes back into the picture.)

I’m a big fan of co-op games in general and, as I’ve mentioned in the past, I think they’re a great way to introduce new players to theme-rich boardgames.

One potential drawback to co-op games, however, is the “alpha-quarterback”: A single player that dominates the game by effectively making all of the strategic gameplay decisions. The alpha-quarterback might be the person most familiar with the game, a person with generally deeper strategic insight, or just a forceful personality. Whatever the case may be, however, the result is that only one person is really playing the game and everybody else at the table is reduced to being their pawn. (A related problem can also occur if four or five more experienced players are all collaborating as a collective “alpha-quarterback”, while one or two new players are effectively turned into spectators.)

In most cases, quarterbacking can be avoided through the simple expedience of the more experienced players simply choosing not to do it: Instead of making decisions for new players (“you should go fight that monster”), they can use their expertise to discuss the general strategic situation and then offer the new player a few options of actions that they might want to consider.

Because it’s generally possible for people to choose not to be jerks, a lot of people think that quarterbacking in co-op games is only a “people problem” that isn’t really relevant to game design itself. This, however, is an over-simplification: The problem with co-op games that are trivially quarterbacked is that they’re really solo problem-solving games that are masquerading as games for multiple players. (Pandemic is an excellent example of this type of game.) It’s like adding a rule to Solitaire saying that two players should alternate turns and then claiming that it’s a two-player game.

There’s nothing wrong with alternating-play Solitaire if everybody’s having fun, of course. But it’s not an ideal way to design a game even if an individual group doesn’t default to quarterbacking while playing it.

DESIGN SOLUTIONS FOR QUARTERBACKING

The solutions for quarterbacking are:

HIDDEN INFORMATION. (Which often doesn’t work because there’s no motivation not to share the information, but can at least create the impression that individuals are contributing by discussing the information they have access to. However, games like Hanabi make hidden information co-op work by making the hidden nature of the information integral to the game design.)

TACTICAL DEPTH. (In these games, groups may coordinate on a large-scale strategy but there’s enough tactical depth in each player’s execution of that strategy that individual players are still allowed to play the game even with aggressive quarterbacking happening in the same room. Arkham Horror, for example, does this with a fair amount of success: Quarterback all you want, but the individual players are still responsible for playing through their encounters.)

INCOMPLETE INFORMATION. (By hiding information from all of the players, decision points are turned into a gamble. A simple version would be a draw deck containing white and black cards: If a white card is drawn, certain actions will be advantageous. If a black card is drawn, a different set of actions will be advantageous. Players can offer input about which card they think it’s going to be, but nobody really knows and so it’s ultimately up to the current player to make the guess and determine which set of actions they should be attempting. Knizia’s Lord of the Rings, for example, does this with a stack of tiles that determine the pace and sequence of various horrible things. The shortcoming of this solution is that if the system is actually completely random, then the decisions are meaningless. And if it’s not completely random, then there’s a viable strategy and that stategy is still open to quarterbacking.)

TRAITOR MECHANICS. (These enforce the hidden information solution by providing a motivation for concealing information. Battlestar Galactica does this, for example.)

REAL-TIME PLAY. (These enforce the tactical depth solution by making it impossible for a single player to make all the decisions that need to be made within the time allowed. Space Alert and Escape: The Curse of the Temple are examples of this.)

Of these solutions, real-time play seems to be the only surefire solution to the quarterbacking problem. (Hidden information can be shared, tactical depth can still be micro-managed, incomplete information still lends itself to strategic quarterbacking, and a game with a traitor isn’t actually co-op). Other co-op games generally need to rely on a mixture of techniques to mitigate the quarterbacking problem (although exceptions like Hanabi do exist).

(It should also be noted that the “this is really just Solitaire, but you alternate turns” problem isn’t limited to co-op games. For example Dungeon Roller pretends to be a competitive game, but is really just two people playing solitaire and then comparing their scores.)

I’ve engaged in a couple of discussions recently about designing games to eliminate powergaming or character optimization.

My personal opinion is that you can’t: Any system featuring 2+ choices in order to create or advance a character in which those choices have a mechanical impact is going to have people using those choices to optimize their characters. (Note: Equipment choices count.)

This becomes even more true if the content of the campaign can be varied: As a I discussed in “Fetishizing Balance” many moons ago, a character loaded up with seafaring skills is going to be non-optimized for a campaign based around Robin Hood, but is absolutely going to rock it in a campaign based around Treasure Island.

When game designers try to solve the “problem” of character optimization they generally end up falling into the fallacy I describe in “Ivory Tower Design“: The belief that you can allow for meaningful choice in any kind of complex system without having some choices be inferior to other choices. And the result is that they limit either (a) the flexibility of character creation, (b) the scope of the game, or (c) both.

(Which isn’t to say that game designers should just completely ignore issues of balance: Correct obvious imbalances between options aiming at the same effect. Remove anything that radically alters the fundamental experience or nature of the game in unintended ways. But trying to make Blackbeard just as effective in Sherwood Forest as he is on the high seas? Or making fighters specialized in a bow just as effective in melee as the fighter who specialized in a longsword? You’re wasting your time and your efforts will probably cause a lot of collateral damage.)

GMs vs. OPTIMIZATION

So we’ve concluded that all RPGs are going to feature CharOp and we’ve also concluded that there’s very little or nothing that game designers can do about it. But what if you’re a GM faced with optimization-obsessed players and you don’t like the effect it’s having on the game?

First, recognize that there’s nothing about optimizing your character to be good at X that’s incompatible with enjoying a good story. In fact, a lot of character optimization originates as a completely logical, in-character motivation: I need to be good at X to succeed/stay alive, so how can I be really good at X?

Where this becomes problematic is when it turns into an optimization arms race: The PCs keep getting better at X, the GM cranks up the difficulty of X to “keep things challenging”, and the players respond by making their characters even better at X. Rinse. Wash. Repeat.

When there’s a clash of expectations or problematic behavior at a gaming table, I generally recommend solving those problems by sitting down and just talking out the issues involved. But the optimization arms race is a slightly different kettle of fish because it originates in-character. A conversation about expectations may still be useful (particularly if the behavior has become reflex or habit), but you have to solve the in-character motivation first.

(1) Diversify your game. If X is the only thing that a character ever has to do in order to succeed, then the character is highly motivated to optimize X. If players have to do a bunch of different stuff in your game, then they won’t be able to hyper-optimize one facet of their characters.

(2) Worry a lot less about “challenging” the PCs at whatever the PCs are badasses at. For example, if one of your players creates a badass hacker, you shouldn’t necessarily respond by cranking up the difficulty of every computer system they want to hack. If you do that, they’ll respond by trying to figure out how to crank up their hacking skills a few more notches.

In other words, just opt out of the arms race. And this remains true even if the results seem extreme: Have they created a character that can hack the NSA on a whim? That’s OK. Cyrano de Bergerac was the greatest swordsman who ever lived. Edmond Rostand didn’t negate that or ignore it, but he also didn’t respond to it by creating an elite brigade of soldiers who could match Cyrano in a swordfight. (Think about it.)

Sometimes, of course, you’ll want to throw a hundred swordsmen at Cyrano. Or have the NSA contact the PC because they’ve seen what she can do and they need some help cracking the encryption on an alien artifact that the Martian Rover just found.

What I’m saying, though, is that you should spend less time trying to one-up your players and more time thinking about the interesting stories that result from the consequences of success rather than the risk of defeat.

Last year I posted a thought of the day concerning “Disarming Magical Traps”. Although this particular thought of the day was most specifically and immediately prompted by Numenera, it’s also something of a sequel to that earlier thought and equally applicable to magic items in a typical fantasy campaign.

As I mentioned in that earlier thought, I think it’s important that a GM not allow any interaction at the table to become purely mechanical. Partly this is just an aesthetic preference on my part (it keeps things interesting), partly it’s ideological (rules are associated for a reason), and partly it’s because specificity and detail usually leads to creative gameplay.

In Numenera, as the title suggests, a great emphasis is put upon the leftovers of the older (and almost incomprehensible) civilizations that predated the Ninth World: “The devices, the vast machine complexes, the altered landscapes, the changes wrought upon living creatures by ancient energies, the invisible nano-spirits hovering in then air in clouds called the Iron Wind, the information transmitted into the so-called datasphere, and the remnants of visitors from other dimensions and alien planets—they call these things the numenera.”

Particular significance is given to the cyphers: Single use items that function according to forgotten sciences, proliferate throughout the Ninth World, and (from a purely mechanical perspective) serve to constantly vary and refresh the abilities available to PCs.

Before cyphers can be used, however, they have to be identified. Mechanically speaking this is straightforward: The character attempting to identify the cypher attempts an Intellect task with a low difficulty. If they succeed, they now know what the device does and how it can be used.

It can be difficult, however, to visualize or describe how this process of identification takes place: Consider the example of a pill you can swallow which will then allow you to teleport to any location you can clearly visualize with your mind. There’s no self-evident way to “experiment” with the pill short of swallowing it; and if you do that, it would be consumed and gone. So what does the mechanical resolution of the identification task look like in the game world?

Ultimately, it’s a combination of lore and/or limited experimentation. In the case of the teleporter pill, for example, options might include:

• There’s a sigil on the side of the pill. You recognize that as a sign associated with teleportation in other artifacts that you’ve used.
• Or you cross-reference the sigil using a lore book and discover that the armies of Salla Izirul once discovered a cache containing millions of these pills and used them to teleport entire legions behind defensive lines before his supply ran out.
• You scrape a little bit off the side of the pill and feed it to a mouse. The mouse vanishes and reappears next to a piece of cheese on the far side of the room. Guess it’s a teleporter.
• Yes, it’s a pill. But there’s a small metallic nodule attached to one end of it. And, yup, that’s definitely a transdimensional regulator. The only reason you’d be swallowing one of those is if this thing was going to teleport you.
• You’re a nano and you’re using a low-powered Scan to determine the energy signatures locked inside the physical matrix of the “pill”.
• The pill is actually encoded with a psychic memetic mesh. If you can just manipulate the articulated junctures of the pill correctly, it will basically download an instruction manual into your brain.

And so forth. My point is that there’s not a single or precise method that the character can use to identify the object, so you should feel free to get creative.

FAILURE

 Conversely, a failure on the roll might indicate that:

• There is no way to identify this featureless pill: All they can do is swallow it and see what happens.
• They’ve misidentified what the pill does.
• They’ve misidentified how powerful it is.

 PARTIAL SUCCESS

A partial success (perhaps succeeding at a difficulty one-half the required difficulty to fully identify the object) might yield some useful information:

• How to activate the device, but not necessarily what the device will do. (This would obviously be more applicable to cyphers that aren’t self-evidently pills. Although maybe this “pill” only works if it’s a suppository or stuck up your nose or surgically placed under the skin or ground up into the user’s eye.)
• A general sense of what the item does, but not its specific function. (“It has something to do with non-Euclidean travel” instead of specifically indicating that “it will teleport you X distance”.

My point with all this is that you shouldn’t be afraid to discover (or define) features of the world as the world is being explored.

 ARTIFACTS

More powerful technologies of the old world in Numenera are referred to as artifacts. These devices can be used multiple times (although there’s a risk that any given usage will be the object’s last) and it’s far more likely that the PCs are just using one of the many possible utilities the original device had. (The other functions may be inexplicable, irrelevant in this dimensional space, broken, only intermittently available, more likely to deplete the device, or dangerous to the user.)

On page 299 of Numenera you’ll find a really fantastic random chart for determining random quirks for an artifact: I recommend taking it to heart.

Roger the GS over at Roles, Rules, & Rolls posted some interesting thoughts regarding the use of the techniques I described in Xandering the Dungeon in small, one-shot scenarios. This, in turn, prompted me to ruminate on the application of xandering techniques on small scales.

Xandering isn’t a cure-all. But, in my experience, it does scale to almost any size and it’s almost always useful to at least consider xandering as a potential tool even if you ultimately decide against it. (I might even go so far as to say that you should default to it unless you have a really good reason not to. In no small part because, as I mentioned in the original essay, this is actually the way the real world works 99 times out of 100.)

To demonstrate what I mean about using xandering techniques at any scale, let me give you an example at an extremely small scale to emphasize the point: A two-room “dungeon” that I just got done designing for an Eclipse Phase scenario.

The “dungeon” in this case is actually a warehouse: The first room is a small security office. The second room is the big warehouse floor itself. Since it’s only two rooms, there’s really no way that we could apply xandering techniques, right?

(Spoilers: That’s a rhetorical question.)

Let’s take a look at a few xandering techniques:

First, multiple entrances: Skylight(s) on the roof of the warehouse. The loading dock. A door leading into the security office. (From a tactical standpoint, this is infinitely more interesting than just having a single door leading into the building.)

Second, multiple paths: Rather than just having one connector between the security office and the warehouse, what if we include several? There’s the door. A ladder leading to a trapdoor in the roof that gives you access to the skylights. Let’s toss in a trapdoor leading to a crawlspace that’s used for electrical wiring; it’ll let you pop up right in the middle of the warehouse (or maybe in multiple places). (If that crawlspace is actually a tunnel that leads over to the exterior generator we could also add that as yet another entrance to the complex.)

That crawlspace would also qualify as a secret or unusual path (another of our xandering techniques).

This obviously isn’t the only way to design a warehouse. (It might even be overkill.) But it does demonstrate how you can use xandering techniques even on the tiniest scales can organically create interesting tactical and strategic choices.

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