Kataklysm

alexandraerin:

(Related to my previous post on the subject of levels.)

First, a key thing is that even if I keep experience levels/orderly ranks, the numbers the game uses won’t really scale up that much as you gain in experience/power. If you max out your fighting ability as far as you can at level 1 and then never touch it again, you won’t be as good as someone who maxed out to begin with and then kept developing it, but you’ll still be good… because good at hitting is always good at hitting. Hard to hit is always hard to hit.

Hit points will go up, but the game uses a relatively short scale for damage anyway.

Your stats can and will go up occasionally when you level, but the main thing you gain as you level is new capabilities… new things you can do, new options you can exercise. You expand and refine your character’s schtick more than you do your character’s stats.

What this means is that if there’s a “high level” opponent like a dragon or a godling or a titan or archdemon or whatever, there won’t be a situation where a 1st level character who is some kind of fightery person can’t possibly hit them, unless being unhittable by normal means is part of their schtick. The high level opponent would probably wipe the floor with the low level opponent, but even if the epic monster could slaughter the newbie player character twenty times in the time it would take the newbie to defeat them, the mismatch is not going to be wholly (or even primarily) represented by raw stats. They’ll only be a point or two or three above the best low level player character in a given area… harder to hit/beat/overcome/whatever, but not outside striking distance.

Apart from balance implications, this is also meant to reinforce that characters… adventurers and monsters alike… are more than their stats. The most interesting difference between a dragon and an overgrown cave lizard isn’t that the dragon hits harder, it’s the things the dragon can do that the lizard can’t.

Along those lines: if you take a stat block that represents a given monster or creature type and start using the more advanced tactics that are actually available under the rules—defensive actions, feints, grapples, tactics that involve positioning and teamwork, etc.—then you will have a more difficult encounter than if you use the same stats but do nothing more than move and attack in the most basic ways possible… it’s like the difference between wielding a weapon as a precision instrument and swinging it like a clumsy club. Same weapon, but the results are different.

There are some GMs I know who will immediately rebel at the thought of capitalizing on this as a way of balancing combat… it’s not “realistic” that anyone would ever do anything except try to survive and win by any means necessary, so everybody the players ever face will show the exact same mastery of the tactics of combat as approximated by the rules of the game as the GM would show if they were a player playing the game.

I can’t do anything for those GMs.

For GMs who are open to the idea of encounter difficulty/complexity being a function of “How difficult/complex should this encounter be?” rather than “Which monster is the party facing?”, A Wilder World lists monsters as a block of stats, and then offers different sets of tactics/options for combat based on how difficult you want the fight to be. The uber monsters like dragons will have options for presenting a bracing but not overwhelming challenge to a newbie party. For example: instead of fighting the party up close and personal and using multiple claw/jaw/tail attacks until they defeat it, the dragon flies overhead and makes single target swoop or breath attacks until it’s driven off.

This also works with less formidable enemies: the same humanoid mook/soldier/bandit type opponents can be used with more or less effectiveness to challenge more or less effective bands of adventurers at different levels.

The different tactical options won’t be useful only for matching difficulty levels, they can also be used to build different types of encounters… an “easy mode” dragon can provide aerial support to a more challenging battle. “Easy mode” enemies can also be piled on for a horde/swarm/mob/mass battle type situation… since the thing that makes them easier is primarily limits on their tactics and use of special attacks/abilities, it’s a lot easier to keep track of a dozen opponents’ actions when they’re “easy mode”.

It also makes adjusting difficulty on the fly easy. Nothing to adjust, nothing to recalculate. If a fight was meant to be challenging and the party blows through the ranks of the opponents, the survivors of the first bout regroup and take things more seriously. If a fight was meant to be challenging but it’s turning into an unexpected total party kill, the opponent grows complacent or bored and shifts down a level.

A Wilder World rewards achievement in the form of completed goals, regardless of whether fights were won, lost, or avoided along the way, so there’s no long term balance implication of a fight with a giant monster being easier than the stats should indicate. And because character progress is not tied to the number of green-skinned humanoids that are slaughtered, there’s also no long term balance implications to a party that routinely avoids, talks their way out of, or otherwise finds unorthodox solutions to “combat encounters”.

All of this comes back around to the fact that A Wilder World is in some ways a problem-solving game. A locked door has a difficulty for a Dexterity Check to pick the lock and a Strength Check to break it down, but the game’s basic assumption is that the door is there to present an obstacle to the party, and obstacles are there to be overcome, so if no one has the necessary abilities to pick or bash their way through the door then it’s the party’s job to think up another solution and the GM’s job to help them figure out how/why it works.

The same is broadly true of a combat encounter. GMs aren’t encouraged to just give things to the party, but rather than striving for “Every fight should be a statistical dead heat” type balance, the philosophy is “If it’s there in the characters’ path, the players should be able to overcome it.”

With this philosophy, you can put a dragon in the path of a newbie party, so long as there’s a way forward for them.

Reblogging for the spouse to see. <3

alexandraerin:

If you’re playing (or running) a typical fantasy adventure focused roleplaying game, how important is the concept of experience/achievement levels to you? Do you like having a means of keeping score/measuring overall ability, or does it add nothing to the experience for you to know that your character is level 1 or level 11, as long as the game gives you ways to grow in power and ability?

As a player, I’d be just as happy attaining ranks as numbers, so long as I kept getting new powers and abilities. But the numbers seem damn handy for GMs to keep the game balanced.