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JoshuaZ comments on How my social skills went from horrible to mediocre - Less Wrong
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Ah, so ridiculously OP..? [1] X-D
If politics tend to mind-kill, discussions of SJ tend to disintegrate brains into dust. People just haul out their flamethrowers and go to town...
[1] For those not well-versed in DnD minutae, combining the abilities of a glass-cannon class (like a wizard) and a stealthy burst-damage class (like a rogue) tends to result in a quite overpowered character.
I think this is very edition dependent and what multiclassing rules you are using.
Eh, unless 5e changed things significantly I don't think wizard/rogue was ever a good combo. Both of them have features that are heavily dependent on class level, and so multiclassing makes you less effective at your core skill for both.
My thoughts exactly. The first commandment of multiclassing in 3rd is "Thou shalt not lose caster levels". Also, Wizards are easily the most OP base class, if played well. Multiclassing them into anything without wizard spell progression is just a waste.
OTOH, using gestalt rules to make a Wizard//Rogue isn't half bad, even if a little short on HP and proficiencies. I prefer Barbarian or even the much ridiculed Monk in place of the Rogue.
No offense to you guys, but this is why I don't play RPGs with other people. Instead of playing a role almost everybody is trying to make "efficient" "overpowered" characters as if it was some sort of a competition which you can win. I think entirely the other way around, I would make my character a wizard because and only because this career choice matches his personality, background and so on, and multiclass only when it looks like my char really would. And would not give no heed to efficiency and power. It would be the DMs job to match difficulty level to our characters, not the other way around.
I will have to invent an RPG where all armor has the same AC, all weapons the same damage, so that players don't try to make overpowered optimization monsters but plain simply choose whatever matches a characters style, background, culture, or the players general sense of coolness. Thus, for example, a player would be comfortable with a fighter character that wears no armor and carries only a rapier because he is a D'Artagnan type swashbuckler, that is his personality, background and style.
There's a concept in game design called the "burden of optimal play". If there exists a way to powergame, someone will probably do it, and if that makes the game less fun for the people not powergaming, their recourse is to also powergame.
Most traditional RPGs weren't necessarily envisioned as competitive games, but most of the actual game rules are concerned with combat, optimization, and attaining power or prowess, and so there's a natural tendency to focus on those aspects of the game. To drive players to focus on something else, you have to make the rules of your game do something interesting in situations other than fantasy combat, magical attainment of power, or rogue-flavored skill rolls to surmount some other types of well-defined challenges. All of these things can make for a very interesting game world of a certain flavor, but in that game world, some kinds of players and characters will inevitably do much better than others, usually the ones that have some progression to a god-like power level using magic.
The flexibility afforded to the DM allows people to hypothetically run their game some other way, and many succeed, but the focal point of the game is defined by the focal point of the rules. They can decide to make their game center more around politics, romance, business, science, or whatever else, because they get to choose what happens in their world, but the use of an RPG system implies that the game world will be better at handling the situations the game has more rules, or more importantly, better-defined rules, for. The rules of a game are the tools with which players will build their experience, even in a more flexible game like an RPG.
A few friends of mine invented a system that I'm helping them develop and playtest. It's somewhat rough at present, but the intent is to make rules that center more around information and social dynamics. In playtesting, people naturally gravitate toward situations the game's rules are good at handling, so a lot more people are interested in being face characters than otherwise have been. Through some combination of the system and the person running the game, the rules will define what people naturally gravitate towards. This doesn't surprise us when the person running the game is replaced by a computer that follows the rules exactly, and tends to be true to varying degrees based on the flexibility with which the rules are interpreted.
This is the recourse if they disliking powergaming a little. If they dislike it a lot, they play with someone else, or if they cannot then not.
Note: I have nothing against a competitive spirit, just 1) I think it is not an ideal avenue to exercise it 2) OP characters are simply boring, too narrow and predictable, walk around in full plate and carry the heaviest weapons, or shoot fireballs all the time and so on 3) it makes them "unrealistic", although in fantasy a better term would be "unmovielike" or "unnovellike".
It is just hard to convey in the rules system that just because I am a medieval noble I won't walk around everywhere wearing 40 kg of metal, hauling a huge sword and shield around just because it gives me the best stats. It would be uncomfortable, unfashionable, ridiculous and socially unacceptable but how would you encode that in rules?
Now, your analysis sounds a lot like a traditional libertarian market analysis: choices flow from incentives. But in this case, there is an omnipotent dictator so it is nothing like a market - if a DM dislikes powergamers, he can easily drop astral dragons on them, while treat non-powergamers well. And if his / her circle is largely non-powergamers, it works well. Because of the ominpotent nature of the DM, it is not a market nor like a sport nor any comparable thing, not even like a videogame. It is like a story, telling it as you fit or as you have agreed.
Nevertheless you are right that perhaps rules could encourage it. Hm. Maybe I should take an idea from Game of Thrones. Real power is not a spell or weapon but political, social power which is gained through intrigue which the player must personally roleplay and acquire, not just roll a dice and get. Once a traditional powergamer gets surprised the same way how Ned Stark was, that another player with low stats and bad gear can still make 100 city guards attack him because he is a social, political powergamer, a lesson will be learned.
The system you mentioned sounds interesting too.
It is not strongly relevant, but I also hope to fix some traditional fantasy / RPG terminology and gear for better historicity. Longswords should be renamed side-swords and bastard swords renamed longswords. Generally, paying attention to the Historical European Martial Arts folks and nobody should design a medievalist fantasy game or reading a novel without skimming wiktenauer.com
At least if people want to powergame, setting up actually medieval rules, like prices and availability of gear, would put a break on it.
I think you're confusing two different genres -- games and realistic simulations. As a matter of fact, it turned out (after much wailing and gnashing of teeth) that accurate simulations tend to make lousy games. Essentially the problem is that they need to optimize for different incompatible things. This was discussed to death in the gaming world.
Note -- you can certainly have good games which focus on e.g. political and social power and not on getting a full plate set with the ability to cast unlimited fireballs. But they are not going to be accurate simulations either.
Well, I was left out of it so you could give me some pointers that would be nice. I was just thinking it over myself. AD&D was infamously bad as simulation, in a "not even wrong" sense, you could literally not have a fight in the game mechanics that looks anything like normal fencing (i.e. 20 rounds without damage then one killer wound, instead it would be a death from a thousand cuts bullshit), so almost every other tabletop RPG e.g. Shadowrun or Vampire The Masquarade improved on that tremendously, which improved to me the fun factor to extent that it did not feel stupid at least, but indeed in itself did not max it out. I figured out, to max it out, it is not realistic simulations you want but movie-like or novel-like. Simulate a really good movie, not real life. So study the craft of writing, screenwriting, learn the trade of writers, and base the rules on that. This is where I am currently. Where to go from here?
Not that AD&D does any better, but if you're in a fight and you've exchanged blows twenty times without serious damage, at least one of the fighters isn't trying to win. Realistic personal combat (other types of combat can be more drawn out) is like Hobbes' state of nature, or a cannibal elf: nasty, brutal, and short.
The problem is -- well, there are several problems here, but the main problem is that it's really hard to build a multiplayer game that's actually fun but that looks and plays like realistic fighting; the winners haven't had time to play, and the losers feel betrayed. You can do it in single-player games, where there's an endless supply of mooks to shank and no particular requirement that killing your avatar take you out of the fight for more than a few seconds, but you usually end up with a very hard game.
Aiming for cinematics rather than realism is indeed the correct approach, but this wasn't clear in the tabletop RPG world for a long time; I suspect that has something to do with its roots in the strategy wargame genre, which values realism very highly and has the structure to mostly get away with it.
I can recommend a book -- A Theory of Fun for Game Design. Or look e.g. at debates between strategy grognards and people who want to have fun throwing heavy metal at each other (on screen, that is). Or look at the evolution of long-lived games like WoW -- simulation inconveniences are ground away and you're left with pure-game design.
You have to think in terms of abstraction layers. AD&D is a high-level simulation and I don't think rounds were ever meant to represent actual attacks and parries in a swordfight. Not to mention that are you asking for realism from a game that involves wizards and dragons..?
I generally don't play "optmized" characters, but the fact that there are some character types which are more optimal for most purposes (surviving games, making DMs cry, etc.) is well acknowledged. One can have fun discussing those issues independent of any characters one actually plays in a game.
There are however, some circumstances where it really does matter. Say for example one is playing a very high intelligence wizard in D&D 3.5. The fact is that throwing fire balls at everything is very fun, but not at all effective compared to battlefield control and buffing. So if one has a wizard who likes doing that sort of thing, you need an in game explanation for why they enjoy solving things with explosions so much.
It is also worth noting that in some games, the problem of optimal characters gets so severe that it makes it for some arrangements of characters where it is extremely difficult or impossible for a DM to match something that corresponds to the difficulty level of all the characters. A genuine threat to some characters will be the same level that makes other characters useless or dead. The 3.5 Tier list was made to try to help understand and fix this problem. So these issues do impact real game play.
I typically play storytelling games (like Dread) in order to get the story as uncontaminated by tactics as possible.
This simply does not work. The issue is matching the players to each other, not the difficulty to the characters. The three primary dimensions are time spent talking vs. fighting, plot vs. autonomy, and competence. Mismatch between the players on any dimension will cause conflicts. It's everyone's responsibility to form a group with accord on desires, and then the DM's responsibility to deliver sessions that line up with their desires.
Multiclassing in 2E was a lot more forgiving. You had a choice between ugly and horrible math and ugly and horrible game design, and 2E's unforgivably clunky race restrictions limited implementation substantially, but you'd natively end up with a lot more class levels for a given XP total, such that you'd usually be out one or two levels in both classes, or in your highest class if you were dual-classing. There's a lot you could do with that, especially if you were working with the thief's percentage-based skill set.