Power is relative. This is one of those lessons that, like a zen koan, has a thousand different angles and understandings and "Aha!" moments wrapped in it. Today, I'm going to be talking about two specific lessons I've learned from it that have an impact on RPGs. (Because that's what we do here.) Some of this has come out of conversations with fellow players, and I just want to make it clear that you're all awesome people. I like hot sauce, you like soda, you like dudes, I like gals, nobody's wrong and nobody's right.
Lesson the first is that what kinds of power are important changes depending on the game; This is obvious in an extreme (imagine a character who sunk all of their points into Craft(Basketweaving). Are they broken?) but I think sometimes can escape people, even really smart people, because they come at it from a holistic angle. Lesson the second is, it doesn't matter if I can crush a car in one hand if this is a romance novel.
Overpowered. What do you think when you see that word? Most folks have a story about that one munchkin who had this really crazy feat, or this really complex charm combo. Maybe he (and it's always a he in these stories, isn't it?) got annoyed at the rest of the party and killed you all. Maybe he was a team player, but just wrecked monsters before you all had a chance to move. Always succeeded on rolls. Always had a weapon this particular enemy was weak to. Knew every rule in the book, and exactly how to use each one to optimal use in combat. OP.
I don't think anyone is able to defend the fact that some game systems are not as balanced as they should be in mechanics. Most mechanics are about combat, so characters that have been mechanically optimized tend to be combat junkies. Anyone who's been reading this blog probably knows I don't have a problem with people trying to optimize this way, within reason. Most char-oppers I know get bored once they get far enough ahead of the monsters. They're looking for challenge, for a good fight, for a chess match. Still, if they're the only one looking for this, they wind up the only one who can contribute in combat, and also the only one pushing for combat, and this can cause some hard feelings. These people are called gamists, and this is just how they play the game, no matter how much shit gets pilled on them as 'munchkins.' But there's another side to this coin.
Narratively overpowered is a thing.
Let me tell you a story of another way to be a royal pain in the ass.
In Werewolf, like in other White Wolf games, you get points to spend on your characters background, giving you things like a mentor or special weapons. And Werewolf, like in other White Wolf games, some people silo their points, getting more and more out of some of them. There are lots of ways to game the character creation system, things easier to do in chargen than at other times. One player came to the table with something apparently innocuous- Pure Breed 5, meaning that her bloodline was unusually impressive. She wanted it to mean that she was somehow descended from the White Howlers, a tribe that had supposedly been wiped out and turned into Black Spiral Dancers. When asked what the story was, she had a ten page backstory involving her being descendant of the last chief of the Howlers and a high ranked member of the Black Furies (Basically feminazies. Look, this was the 90s, it was funny at the time.)
We tried it. It wasn't mechanically OP, obviously- she got a special charm out of it I think, but it wasn't that impressive. But what we found was that it warped the entire campaign- almost nothing the rest of us were doing was nearly as impressive as her just existing. Exalted players in the audience, imagine a team of dragonbloods; A wood aspect who took a high power Artifact, a water aspect who has Half-Caste mojo, an earth aspect with an epic manse, an air aspect with crazy resources, and a fire aspect who grabbed a 5 dot destiny- one equal to the empress herself. The fire aspect might be the weak link in a fight, but it's not hard to realize that if not strictly controlled the campaign will be about the adventures of the fire aspect and her plucky sidekicks.
I once had a FATE character in one of my games with the aspect "The ninja raptor clan wants me dead." Mechanically it was clearly sub-par. I mean, it didn't clear him for any stunts or powers. It really only came up once a session max to give him fate points. It was kinda hard to tag for a bonus, except in fighting the ninja raptor clan, and since it always took more than one tag to beat them back that was clearly a net loss. Except.
Except that I was DMing, and I just couldn't help myself. That was such a fun aspect- instant kung-fu dinosaurs! Just apply fate points! Hilarity ensues, that escalated quickly, shenanigans! Those rascally ninja raptors ambushed the PCs in an elevator, in a biplane, on a subway, and in a submarine. How, we have no real idea. Ninjas! It wasn't until another player took me aside after a game and pointed out that in the last five sessions, we'd had an encounter with the ninja raptors six times, and uh, I had only compelled his character twice.
There are less obvious versions of this. Some people are louder and more insistent than others, and wind up steering the party. Some people are mechanically well optimized and use this to force the narrative in a certain direction. Now, there is nothing wrong with this in moderation or if everyone is ready to ham it up for the story. Just like there's nothing wrong with a gamist pushing for more fights and stronger opponents. But sometimes too much of this locks other people out of participating as much as they'd like. People who care about the story over all are called narrativists, and there is nothing wrong with narrativism, except sometimes other people at the table are annoyed at all this talking with NPC relatives of yours about the fate of the your family and flashbacks to your character's childhood and explorations of your character's feelings, can we just maybe give mine a little bit of screen time? Or how about her, she's quiet and her character is quiet but I want to find out about her character.
I'm making an argument here. (And I'm being a bit hyperbolic above, and no I'm not angry at anyone I play with, you people are wonderful and this is an attempt to explain why we conflict sometimes even when we're all awesome folks.) Just as a character can be mechanically overpowered, crafted by a player who loves the mechanics, characters can be narratively overpowered due to being crafted by players who love the narrative. This is contentious in some circles, usually circles inhabited by people who vastly prefer one to the other. Now I'm going to suggest something I don't think I've ever heard anyone else suggest
Things can be simulationistically overpowered.
"Simulationistically." What the heck does that word mean?
I love Ron Edward's GNS theory. It's the first analysis of player archetypes that seemed to give me real predictive power that wasn't obvious. (Shy players are shy, door-kickers want door-kicking, eureka.) It divides games, gamers and GMs into Gamists, Narrativists, and Simulationists. Simulationists are those who want to want to explore made up characters in made up worlds, using the characters as a vehicle to look at the world. We (for I count myself among them) want the world to be as real in our minds as we can make it. Describe of the colour of the forest leaves. Tell me what we're eating when we sit down to consume 'rations.' When you strike with your sword, what muscles are damaged and how does that affect how the fight continues?
Abstraction is needed to maintain speed of play, but can often be annoying as games abstract the very reasons we show up to play. Imagine abstracting a conversation to "you talk to the king and convince him that his vizier is lying to him." Do you want to get into the details of that? Imagine getting into a fight with a dragon atop a tower, and the GM just says "you fight the dragon and win, John's character winds up taking some injuries." Feel a little cheated? This me whenever I hear "you travel for several months."
There are two spells I ban every time I run D&D, without fail. To me, they are the most annoyingly broken things in the game. Those would be Create Food and Create Water. Seriously, during the middle ages a way to instantly generate enough food for a small family would have been far more useful than a spell to make fireballs- do you know how many crusades got turned back due to lack of supplies? Cure Disease is also right up there, though high enough level to be enough of a pain in the ass that it doesn't always get the banhammer.
When I first read the rulebook for Exalted, I came across the mention that Solars can cause the caste mark on their foreheads to light up. I had a few moments where I thought that was incredible- how many AD&D characters had I lost because we ran out of torches and nobody had darkvision? (Answer: Too damn many.) Mad scrambles though pitch black woods, terrified moments crouching in dark caves trying not to make noise. Crafty ambushes when we realized that we had darkvision and they didn't, or just when we were really confident in ourselves.
I've been in a Dresden game that wound up in outer space, and had to ask "does pyrofuego give thrust? How much?" It wasn't really relevant to the story, it wasn't addressed by the rules, but it was bugging me. I've been in a star wars game and got into a tense conversation about how much air a lightsaber burned up, with the DM rolling his eyes and saying "you guys realize you'll get out just in the nick of time, right? Asphyxiating while trying to cut through a bulkhead isn't really interesting." Meanwhile, me and the other guy have figured out the airflows and are halfway to figuring out how to cook an egg on a lightsaber.
Just look at the dungenomicon guys. They looked at the mechanics of D&D and took it to the logical conclusion, matched only by the tippyverse. Note that I'm not a huge fan of playing in the tippyverse- in fact, that's exactly what I want to avoid. Something is OP in a simulationist sense when it would clearly change the world, but nobody is actually using it. Or even just make things really easy. Idiot balls are not killer for kick-in-the-door games, and only moderately problematic for story-first games, but are absolute murder on simulationist affairs.
Think of powers that would be amazing to have in real life. Portals between your office and your mudroom. One way commutes with Mark and Recall. Casting Fira when you're getting cold. (I was disappointed with the Frostfall skyrim mod- a mod that adds hypothermia as a danger- for not catching that one.) You and a couple of friends using up Augury spells to figure out the right lotto ticket to grab. These things break the simulation- better put, they are overpowered in the game world.
And for some of us, that's our main reason to show up to the table- matched only by getting to hang out with our best friends.
I may not be phrasing this perfectly. Other simulationists out there want to lend a hand if you've noticed the same thing?
