Snapping systems right in half.

Gelare · Post by **Gelare** » Mon Jan 12, 2009 9:09 am

So, some years ago I picked up D&D 3rd Edition, and, excited as I was to finally get a chance to delve into the rule system and the game, I made a single-classed Bard 5 who could Cure Light Wounds and fire a Longbow once per round. Then 3.5 happened, and I got a little better at making characters - they were competent, and could tackle CR-appropriate challenges. But at the same time there existed a Character Optimization board where people were getting +100 to their attacks and saves and building Pun-Pun.

As time went on, I got better at making degenerate characters - which, in 3.5, really just means you need to know the secret "instant win" techniques, such as buying a Candle of Invocation and immediately getting infinite Wishes. In Shadowrun, my characters throw 20 dice at their specialties, and the other day I picked up HERO 5th Revised, and gosh, it seems downright easy to buy a DEX of 30, all your defenses at 30, and an Energy Blast of 20d6 and go to town.

So, I should probably get to the actual point. Game systems tend to be breakable. Even 4th Edition, which tries to be so unremarkable that no one will want to try to break it, was eventually broken. Of course, increasing the options available to players, while making the game more enjoyable, also tends to render it more easily breakable. What are we expected to do about this to get past the brokenness and actually play a game, and how much do we care in the context of designing games, such as TNE?

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Mon Jan 12, 2009 11:46 am

Bugs in a game system will always exist. How much they actually matter varies wildly based on the bug, and I think it is a good idea to categorize which ones are important. In D&D the fact that Lesser Planar Binding is better than the Fighter player is a big important bug, but Pun Pun is completely meaningless. Something has to be done about the conjuring/fighter disparity and Pun Pun could be left as-is without any harm coming to any actual game. Why is that?

A game issue has three things defining it: Tenacity, Veracity, and Obscurity. Depending on its levels of those traits, it can become a large problem or be swept under the rug and safely ignored.

Tenacity: A bug coming up in play may be workable around. A bug that makes one encounter super easy is no big deal: the monsters die and you move on with your life after a chuckle and fight other, hard monsters; a bug that makes one encounter super difficult is a much more pressing problem: player characters die and then they don't come back. Bugs which have larger or longer lasting effects on the game or the world have more Tenacity and are more Severe because of it.
Veracity: A bug may exist in the game without you ever coming into contact with it. What actually happens when the bug comes up may not be harmful or obvious. Pun Pun for example, can't actually do any of that shit. The entire loop revolves around convincing your DM that the line "or other abilities" can be used to give out literal god-like power when the example abilities are things like "sticky hands: +2 to climb!" While the absence of explicit limits does leave open the possibility of the DM allowing infinite power, this is a very low Veracity bug since in most actual games you're just going to end up with a prehensile tail and not the destruction of the moon. On the other side, More Wishes is a very High Veracity bug, because it has very explicit guidelines where the limitless power is extremely specifically within them. Bugs that have more Veracity are more Severe.
Obscurity: We all know the punchline to the setup "Doctor! It hurts when I move my arm like this!" The fact is that a bug that doesn't come up in play does not matter. The more crap you have to do before the bug has the potential to come into the game, the less likely it is to do so. And as we know from Magic: a broken combo you don't draw doesn't affect the game. Any bug that triggers off of a 20th level ability or which requires players to make specific builds out of dozens of splat books carefully stacked together is so obscure that it seriously might as well not exist. Bugs that happen to low and medium level players using normal options have very little Obscurity and are more Severe because of it.

More games fall apart because the party Druid casts nature's favor on their animal companion (rendering the Fighter a comical vestige) than fall apart because people actually use Balor Mining or the Free Vacation (No Save). Not because telling the entire multiverse that they are teh suxxor lacks the tenacity of telling that just to the Fighter - but the veracity and obscurity ratio is so much worse for "giving a luck bonus to Mr. Bigglesworth" than anything you could possibly do with a 9th level spell.

In general the Severity of a Bug is roughly:

Tenacity times Veracity divided by Obscurity.

And that's why Phoenix Duplication is a minor annoyance, Pun Pun isn't even that, and Artificer Skill Dancing is a game stopper.

-Username17

Voss · Post by **Voss** » Mon Jan 12, 2009 3:40 pm

Gelare- 4e was broken? What can you actually do thats honestly noticeable?

Gelare · Post by **Gelare** » Mon Jan 12, 2009 6:43 pm

Voss wrote:Gelare- 4e was broken? What can you actually do thats honestly noticeable?

To be fair, I didn't actually bother to check my sources on this one, but I heard something about stun-locking enemies, which I assume means they don't get to move ever again while you beat them to a pulp. If it means something much more mild, like that enemies can't move but can still shoot you with their laser eyebeams, I will not be surprised, because 4E is really just that boring.

Oh, also, didn't someone here notice a thing from Martial Power that gives your whole party infinite move actions?

Voss · Post by **Voss** » Mon Jan 12, 2009 7:28 pm

Ah, that sort of thing. Not exactly. None of this is automatic, and as you go up in level the numbers mean its actually harder to hit and pull off.

There are things in 4e that are noticeably better than other things, but the game really doesn't break, because all you can do is throw attacks. They traded stability for a complete lack of interesting options.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Mon Jan 12, 2009 7:59 pm

The broken loops in 4e are stuff like having a twentieth level Ranger/Warlord give the rest of the party unlimited attacks once per day or having a Wizard/Cleric take away all of an opponents actions forever.

The sad part is where automatically winning a battle or killing a dude qualifies as "broken" in that game - because literally all you do is fight battles and kill dudes.

-Username17

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Mon Jan 12, 2009 8:13 pm

Forgive my ignorance, but what's Artificer Skill Dancing?

CatharzGodfoot · Post by **CatharzGodfoot** » Mon Jan 12, 2009 8:19 pm

Maxus wrote:Forgive my ignorance, but what's Artificer Skill Dancing?

It's been a long time since I looked at it, but IIRC they have a spell which changes the bonus type of a skill item. I think they also have one which grants a level-based skill bonus to an item.

"Dancing" usually implies some loop like the Spelldancer's, so I'm guessing that there's a way to get the second spell in an item that can be CL boosted via UMD, so that you can gain an arbitrarily large bonus to UMD (and thence to any other skill).

Otherwise, it probably just involves getting lots of more normally sized bullshit bonuses.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Mon Jan 12, 2009 8:21 pm

Maxus wrote:Forgive my ignorance, but what's Artificer Skill Dancing?

It's where you use your inherent Artificer powers to give yourself unlimited recastings of a skill dependent bonus to your skills and use it to set your caster level for purposes of blowing the fuck out of enemies and then kill gods.

Power Surge + Skill Enhancer + Item Alteration + Holy Word. All on a pile of staves. Then you kill Hextor.

-Username17

Gelare · Post by **Gelare** » Mon Jan 12, 2009 8:39 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:Power Surge + Skill Enhancer + Item Alteration + Holy Word. All on a pile of staves. Then you kill Hextor.

Neat.

So what fixes are there for when a player can break a game? I'm especially interested in HERO, though it applies equally well to 3.5 and whatever wizards can do. But in HERO, I want to give the players free reign to create their superheroes without me imposing a bunch of limits, but it seems just too easy to just buy up your DEX to 30+, which controls not only your attack rolls and AC, but also your initiative passes, Shadowrun style. Then buy a 20d6 anything (Energy Blast, Mind Control, whatever) and go to town on the opposition. Which isn't even a problem on its own, but when the other PCs don't do that, then I can't just bump up the difficulty level of the opposition lest I kill the lower-powered characters.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Mon Jan 12, 2009 9:16 pm

HERO is customizable at the power level you play it at, and really isn't amenable to broad statements. Our old group had CVs of 7-11, Defenses of 12-25, attacks of 9-15 dice, and speeds of 6. Some people find these numbers to be cheesy powergaming numbers, other people find them to be restrained to an absurd degree. The point is that it was a power point that we were comfortable with. Tougher "brick" characters tended towards the lower end of the CV scale and the higher ends of the defenses and attacks, while "martial artist" characters did the opposite.

There are more ways to "break" Champions than can be easily mentioned. Aside from simply purchasing some number or another past the point that the group is comfortable with, there are also a number of combinations that are flat unworkable in most games. "Brain Mole" is a character who tunnels, has N-Ray vision that sees through virtually all material, and has a psychic attack that he can use on anything he sees. While he might conceivably be playable in a game about teleporting spirit assassins, in the vast majority of games the simple fact that there are like 8 meters of earth and stone between him and the people he is fighting makes Brain Mole a ridiculously overpowered character - regardless of what his numbers actually are.

You really just have to have "the talk" with all the players so you get on the same page.

That being said, characters can and occasionally even should be made to break out of the standard. In a villains game, I once ran a character called "Rag Doll" who was a babbling lunatic who had very small penetrating attacks and was invulnerable. Like seriously, he absorbed damage to recover himself and had 75% damage reduction. Special effect was that everything still hurt, he just flowed back together. Had it been grafted onto an attack that was even mediocre it would have been broken as hell - but within the confines of a character whose best attack was literally a 3 die penetrating martial throw - there you go.

HERO allows you to pick your power level. Not just in number of points, but also in how those points are spent. The players can end up being Fighters or Druids basically. And if you don't get the players on the same page, some will end up doing one and others the other. Having defenses or CVs or attacks that are too high or too low for the group is frustrating. You need to put your foot down and explain how things are going down in your game.

-Username17

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Tue Jan 13, 2009 12:01 am

The images won't show, and that makes me sad. Although I'm sure they're image macros I've seen before.

FrankTrollman wrote:Free Vacation (No Save).

What's this one again? I thought it might be Planeshift, but nope, that has a save. Though I suppose you could, in theory, Planeshift yourself to the plane of horrible things happening, or the Elemental Plane of Bears or whatever, Gate your foe in, then Planeshift out, but that's 3 spells (one of which an XP-guzzling 9th) for that, and by that stage they can just shift back.

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Tue Jan 13, 2009 12:40 am

It's using Gate to see someone to the Negative Energy Plane. Or other unpleasant place of your choice.

angelfromanotherpin · Post by **angelfromanotherpin** » Tue Jan 13, 2009 1:21 am

Maxus wrote:It's using Gate to see someone to the Negative Energy Plane. Or other unpleasant place of your choice.

I think specifically it's using Gate to call someone to the Negative Energy Plane and compelling them to hand-roll taquitos for 18+ rounds while you and your friends do elbow-drops on their neck for the duration.

Josh_Kablack · Post by **Josh_Kablack** » Wed Jan 14, 2009 8:06 pm

Gelare wrote: Oh, also, didn't someone here notice a thing from Martial Power that gives your whole party infinite move actions?

You get inifnite moves, your buddies get infinite standard actions. But you have to be a specific 30th level class combo to pull it off - so the obscurity will be high in actual play.