Pillars and character options

[jt]

Let's say that we've identified a set of situations we expect the characters to experience - for a boring anchor example, let's say the game is somewhat D&D-ish and the situations are combat, social, exploration, and maybe leadership. Someone coined "pillars of play" for this so we'll call it that. Each pillar represents a situation that A: we expect to happen in our game and B: lasts long enough that not being able to contribute isn't fun. Thus we have to ensure that all characters are roughly equally useful in all pillars.

(The internet is already full of arguments about the above point, so if you disagree I'd ask that you pretend to agree so we can cover something newer, such as disagreeing with me on anything below this point.)

It follows that it shouldn't be possible for someone to trade powers from one pillar for powers from another pillar. If the characters were roughly equally useful in each pillar before that trade, now they're not. Buying a power that is only useful in one pillar with a resource that could've been used to buy a power in another is equivalent to trading, so that doesn't work either. ("Buying powers" can mean levels, skill points, feats, etc.)

I can think of two mechanisms for buying powers that don't have this problem:

1. (Packages) Whatever you use to buy powers always buys packages with equal utility across all pillars.

2. (Pools) You use different resource pools to buy from each pillar. These might be different flavors of the same resource allocation mechanic, or a mix of different ones.

Now the part that makes this tricky: some character concepts more naturally fit some pillars than others. "Master swordsman" is a purely combat concept - the person might also be a dashing gentleman and avid rock climber, but these do not fall neatly out of the swordsman part of the concept. Meanwhile "shapeshifter" can easily cover all three pillars.

This leads to a problem with the package approach. The designer can easily write a package for a shapeshifter. To be able to make a swordsman, they must package it with other ideas in other pillars. You can get pretty far by mining cliches - one specific swordsman package includes rapiers, skill at swinging from things, and being good at flirting, while another package includes two-handed swords, breaking things, and intimidation. But it gets hard to keep distinguishing package after package, and I know this because this has been the main direction I've been exploring design in for the last few years.

In the pools approach, you can chop up the swordsman packages I described and sell the components in different pools. But the shapeshifter becomes a problem - if you chop it up, you can have someone buy the combat version and be able to turn into a bear in a fight but not to climb a tree. The only way I know of to handle it coherently is to make one option cost all three pools' resources. Which is pretty strange, especially if your resources for different pillars look different (e.g. one is levels and one is skill points).

So -
Is there a third approach to the problem that I'm missing?
And is using multiple resources to buy one character option too weird?

[Foxwarrior]

Turning into a bear should let you maul people, climb trees, roar at nervous peasants, fit in with werebear cultists, etc.
With levels and skill points, costing both for paths that provide benefits in multiple pillars with most powers is sort of easy, just have class features that require skill checks.
For gempunks I had a semi package approach: you have class level packages that contain combat and some utility, but more utility if you pick a wizard class level than if you pick a martial artist one. And in exchange, wizards have to spend their wealth on items that let them actually use their spells ("gems", thus the name), while martial people have more cash to splurge on magical gadgets and utility weapons.

[Username17]

Let's say we're doing a basic castle assault. You sneak into the castle, then you fight the guards in the throne room. That's your standard adventure plot and is done "seriously" like in The Scorpion King and it's done "comedically" like in The Court Jester and everything in between. We can assume there's a "getting into the castle" minigame and there's a "combat" minigame. Those seem like pretty valid minigames that you might want to declare to be your pillars.

Now let's consider an ability like "Move Silently." Obviously its utility in the first minigame is obvious. But equally, the ability to sneak up on an enemy is going to have relevance in the combat minigame as well.

The very moment you start being a role playing game and stop being a board game, your abilities stop having specific modifiers during specific phases and start having declarational effects on the co-authored game world. And that means that you can't stop players from being able to use abilities that are "for" use in one minigame in to affect the goings on in another. And you wouldn't even want to.

-Username17

[jt]

The very moment you start being a role playing game and stop being a board game, your abilities stop having specific modifiers during specific phases and start having declarational effects on the co-authored game world. And that means that you can't stop players from being able to use abilities that are "for" use in one minigame in to affect the goings on in another. And you wouldn't even want to.

Yes, I'm taking this for granted. The question is - if move silently is predictably going to have both combat and exploration utility, how do we set up the accounting so that climbing isn't a chump option.

(And if someone finds a combat use for climbing, good on them. Balance isn't about making everything exactly equal, it's about making the results predictable enough on average. The best we can hope for is being able to design an encounter that's challenging and allows everyone to contribute, without knowing the characters in advance, and having it usually work.)

For gempunks I had a semi package approach: you have class level packages that contain combat and some utility, but more utility if you pick a wizard class level than if you pick a martial artist one. And in exchange, wizards have to spend their wealth on items that let them actually use their spells ("gems", thus the name), while martial people have more cash to splurge on magical gadgets and utility weapons.

This is clever. It looks like you've set up packages with a fixed amount of combat ability, accepted the disparity in non-combat utility, and then made people pay for non-combat utility with a different resource. But you used an in-game resource, which might help people get past the potential weirdness of a resource pools situation more easily than if, say, Scorching Ray costs a spell slot but Alter Self costs both a spell slot and eight skill points.

[Omegonthesane]

If you were dead set on having your minigames be separate, then you'd have to account for abilities which logically impact them all.

So you couldn't have a Move Silently that only costs "stealth minigame" XP and can't be used in combat - but you could, in theory, have a move Silently that costs some of both and can be used in both. Might be a little confusing at character generation though.

[Foxwarrior]

The trouble is, when an ability can be used in multiple minigames, that doesn't mean it works very well in combination with the rest of the player's build in all those minigames (maybe the move silently guy's combat schtick is yelling to charge up big energy blasts) or that the player realizes just how versatile the ability is. So I'm not sure you can fully solve multi level balance problems like this when even just making balanced combat in a game with extensive character customization is very difficult.

What you can do more easily though is make sure that everyone gets some things in every minigame, and make sure the DM knows to actually include all the minigames so that players realize it's worthwhile to make sure their characters aren't accidentally min maxed for just one minigame.

[deaddmwalking]

For the premise, I think it's worth restating as 'meaningfully contribute' as opposed to 'equally contribute'.

There's a whole lot of difference between those two, and understanding that is important.

Where you have problems is when one player can solve all the problems without help from the other players (Angel Summoner versus BMX Bandit). But if one player can weaken all the opponents (fireball) and the other can finish them quickly (cleave) it doesn't matter whether one player did 80% of the damage and the other did 20% of the damage if neither player could have succeeded alone.

With that said, you do want to make sure that everyone has ways they can contribute to all the pillars. The best way to do that is make sure there are multiple ways one COULD contribute to all of the pillars (Feats, Talents, Skills, Class Abilities, Backgrounds, etc) and ensure that they're purchased with different piles of points and some of them are specifically geared toward non-combat pillars. For example, Background and Skills could PRIMARILY provide Explore/Social abilities that rarely have combat functionality. You can give [Social] Feats at the same rate as [Combat] Feats. And you can have abilities that work everywhere (charm is combat relevant and social relevant).

Across a wide swath of different types of encounters, each character will find that they have an ability that is particularly good.

In our heartbreaker, a berserker is good against hordes of weaker creatures while a knight is better against a single powerful opponent. If every fight is always hordes or always a boss, one class would always be superior. But some fights are one, some are the other, and some are a combination. As a result, both a knight and a berserker find ways to 'meaningfully contribute' even if in a particular instance their contributions are not always 'equal'.

[jt]

I don't think of characters being able to contribute equally as a goal, but rather as a target. Set a target competency level in all the situations you care about, try to make sure every character is in that ballpark, and meaningfully contributing comes naturally.

Meaningfully contributing inherently has some balance component. BMX Bandit has a strong character concept that can contribute to a wide variety of situations. He's useless only because he's teamed up with Angel Summoner. There are separate campaigns that'd fit either of them. This is what a balance target is for.

You don't need to nail the target every time, and in some cases it's the right call to give up. I wouldn't worry about optimized characters being better than unoptimized ones - it's a bit regrettable but still okay in D&D 3.5 that a fighter who picks a variety pack of interesting combat feats is less competent than one who picks spiked chain proficiency, combat reflexes, and improved trip. It's not okay that a wizard who casts Web once is better than both of them - that's a completely unforced error.

I'd view the guy who's good at moving silently and yelling to charge up his kamehameha as just another unoptimized character. It's also an interesting example of what a resource pools approach means for optimization. Let's say stealth is a combat+exploration ability, climbing is an exploration-only ability, and shouting based martial arts is of course a combat-only ability. Then, if we're using resource pools, the stealth+yelling guy is worse at yelling than a climbing+yelling guy of the same level.

[Orca]

The advantage of a level-based system is that you can keep character abilities at least vaguely on par for combat, and if you insist there's nothing like the D&D fighter as an option then they should have some non-combat abilities too. With a character point/skill based system I've seen some messy mismatches though not quite Angel Summoner/BMX Bandit.

If shouting for extra strength is combat-time only can characters not use that ability to throw a grappling hook that little bit further? Or is it just that you reasonably expect that most shouting will be happening while the combat music is playing.

[Username17]

While the cross utility from exploration to combat of something like move silently is obvious, the further reality is that there could be cross utility from fucking anything at all. You might never see a character use their knowledge of birds in combat, but equally I could imagine a dozen instances where it might come up.

The goal of the chargen system is to make sure each character can have something to do during each major phase of the game. It can't be to cost out all the potential uses of every ability in every possible situation because there are infinite number of possible situations. Bird watching probably isn't going to come up at all, but if you happen to have the final fight in Oswald Cobblepot's lair and there are a bunch of deadly bird themed traps, your bird watching hobby may save the party several times over.

You can't cost for eventualities like that, so it's senseless to try. If you give people multiple piles of points, the purpose is to make sure people can contribute to all the phases you think are important. It's to empower the players, not to limit them.

-Username17

[Omegonthesane]

I mean... yes, it's senseless to try to cost for an adventure specifically designed to cause a knowledge ability to have logical combat applications. But there's always going to be a line drawn where "we have to expect this to come up THIS much before we cost and design for it".

The simple fact is, it's easier in this medium to make ad-hoc spot fixes for circumstances that come up once. So you cannot extrapolate from "there might be circumstances you haven't thought of" to "it's pointless to think of common circumstances".

[OgreBattle]

many folks do most of their roleplaying on their character sheet, if it doesn't say they're a lost prince with beautiful harp music then saying 'hand wave it' won't do it for them. I figure that's a big part of the appeal of the DnD's and the notDnD's that let you write down 'dorf brewer' on the sheet.

What you actually do on the table is often less important than just having that on the sheet.

----

What kind of story is being told will affect the story. If combat is a second by second gridmap affair while negotiations are handwaved or a single roll then combat is the focus of the game.

Now... many games do combat in ways that are satisfying to a table of people, but few really do 'talk to the dragon' or 'organize the village to thrive'.

So what are the non-combat mechanics that make it worth being a pillar?

[Guts]

What kind of story is being told will affect the story. If combat is a second by second gridmap affair while negotiations are handwaved or a single roll then combat is the focus of the game.

Now... many games do combat in ways that are satisfying to a table of people, but few really do 'talk to the dragon' or 'organize the village to thrive'.

So what are the non-combat mechanics that make it worth being a pillar?

Look into games that are focused on non-combat interactions, like Hillfolk, Monsterhearts, Smallville, Dogs in the Vineyard, etc? By principle, these games must have non-combat mechanics driving play and thus becoming pillars, right?

*Edited for clarity.

[Foxwarrior]

You'd think so, but actually there's a big difference between a game where the rules tell you "act out a scene where you meet the supervillain up close, because dramatic timing indicates this is the kind of scene you should have and also the rules aren't giving you anything else you can do right now" and one that says "you're finally in a room with the supervillain, and if you say the right things, they'll realize the error of their ways and give you the password to turn off the doomsday device"
...I wonder if you can have a Social CR that's higher the more uncompromising the person is...

[jt]

I used the combat / social / exploration set as examples because they're commonly cited as things characters need competency at, but:

Each pillar represents a situation that A: we expect to happen in our game and B: lasts long enough that not being able to contribute isn't fun.

If you don't expect the games you run to include long stretches of social interactions, you don't need to do anything special to balance them. And even if you do expect long social interactions, if they're handled entirely through magical tea party you might not need a pillar either. Or because the play is non-mechanical the benefits might be non-mechanical like getting to write "Knows spell to summon bubbles," or "Has really excessively pretty eyes," on your character sheet.

For things you do want to delve into with crunch, you need a structure (the repeatable default thing you do which the adventure-building mechanics revolve around, like dungeons or heists). You might have separate structures for adventures focused on each pillar. Or you might have one structure that covers scenes of all of them. Or you might be able to have a structure where scenes can switch pillar.

If you want to do that last one, you need to be able to fail a CR 4 social encounter and get dumped into a CR 5 combat encounter with specific rules about how to link them. Have some sort of flowchart that uses your method/success/failure to transition from an encounter in one minigame to the encounter building rules of another. If it's very clever you can have a cohesive idea of how your level 3 characters interact with a CR 3 stealth section to avoid a dragon that's CR 12 in combat. And designing that would be a pretty deep discussion; I only have a loose idea of what it looks like.

[Guts]

many folks do most of their roleplaying on their character sheet, if it doesn't say they're a lost prince with beautiful harp music then saying 'hand wave it' won't do it for them. I figure that's a big part of the appeal of the DnD's and the notDnD's that let you write down 'dorf brewer' on the sheet.

What you actually do on the table is often less important than just having that on the sheet.

This was common in older games, yes (Shadowrun, Vampire, Warhammer FRP, etc). But more and more the designs seem to be sidelining that stuff in favor of things immediately useful in play. So, less "Johnny wrote pages and pages of background stuff" and more "Johnny, pick 2 traits/facts/goals about your character and we will make play about that".

[Guts]

If you don't expect the games you run to include long stretches of social interactions, you don't need to do anything special to balance them.

How about games where the expected interactions vary according to the archetypes players bring into play? I think there's a spectrum in regard to this, that works like this:

Great variation - in Apocalypse World, play structures will vary wildly according to the playbooks chosen at chargen. A group composed by a Hardholder (community builder/leader), a Hocus (cult leader) and a Skinner (social manipulator) will face drastically different type of interactions than a group composed by a Gunlugger (direct figher) a Battlebabe (stylish fighter) and a Faceless (brute fighter).

Moderate variation - in Shadowrun, play structure will vary less (it will always be heists) but still be dictated by team profile. A team specializing in direct assaults will see moderately different interactions than one specialized in social infltration. The very contracts/runs each team pick will vary depending on that focus.

Small variation - in OD&D/retro-clones, no matter what the team composition, they will face the same type of interactions: dungeon exploring, close quarters combat, etc.

Makes sense? How do the pillars theory fits in this? Can we have "fluid" or optional pillars in place?

*Edited for clarity.

[Dean]

Silva thinks bearworld is great and wants to tell you about it, news at 11.

I've worked up combat, chase, and stealth games that work well enough to have fun with but I think the social pillar might be a wild goose chase. The fun of the hobby as far as I've ever seen is in being allowed to pretend to be an elf yourself there at the table. The rules are there to let you pretend to be an elf in ways that can't be modeled there are the table. People already enjoy the bit where they get to pretend to be a warrior princess talking to a Dragon and even if you could make a social game as full and nuanced as combat I don't think you'd want to. A session of wall to wall combat makes people get bored and listless so I don't think non stop mechanical interaction is a goal worth striving for. I think the bit where people pretend to be an elf is actually what they've signed up for and then a game is built around that to allow it to be more than 4 people doing bad improvisational roleplay for 4 hours. So while I think there's room for some abilities that flavor a characters social prowess I don't think you want to go further than that.

There's been many people on this board who've tried to make some kind of fully realized social combat game and my statement isn't that that isn't possible but that even if you did it most people would prefer not to use it.

[Guts]

... So while I think there's room for some abilities that flavor a characters social prowess I don't think you want to go further than that.

I think there's a difference between:

a) having social interaction as a strong, or even the main pillar;

and

b) relying solely on social interaction, with no other pillar around.

The first case is doable (see the games I've cited above), the second case I don't know. If it is doable I don't remember seeing it.

[Kaelik]

I've worked up combat, chase, and stealth games that work well enough to have fun with but I think the social pillar might be a wild goose chase.

This. I've seen one "social" system that was better than MTP, and that's Shadowrun shopping/Shadowrun asking your contacts to look into stuff.

And that only works because it is so limited and confines itself to people who already fit in a specific kind of relationship.

[jt]

How about games where the expected interactions vary according to the archetypes players bring into play?

[Snip]

Can we have "fluid" or optional pillars in place?

If the entire party brings different capabilities to the table, they're playing a completely different game. It might be under the same system as a game focused on a different pillar, but unless you actually use the other pillar, having something else covered in the same system is just a novelty.

If different characters work under different pillars you have a problem where someone is bored all the time. Don't do it. The only trick I know to stretch this is that if someone has an ability that's so strong it trivializes a certain kind of challenge, and so narrow it doesn't break the game, then by virtue of it being so strong nobody has time to get bored. This looks like the GM saying "you're ambushed by wolves" and the ranger saying "I tell them to shoo, and they listen because of this ability of mine." Then the ranger gets a cool moment, it takes like thirty seconds, and the only cost is that the GM had to occasionally remember to exercise this ability. But this is a trick, not something I'd build a system around.

The "resource pools" approach I proposed earlier works nicely for a campaign with flexible pillars. Your social party has a wizard and a shapeshifter who have both combat and social levels because those concepts are cross-applicable, but it also has a charlatan and a leader among men who have social levels and unspent combat levels. There's a vague idea they'll become a rogue and a paladin if combat ever becomes part of the game, but there's no reason to spend the levels until that happens.

[Guts]

Jt, thanks for clarifying. Makes sense.

Do you think you could give an actual example of a game and it's pillars, it's character types/archetypes and the chargen options in regard to those pillars? It would be a fun exercise I think? How about Shadowrun?

[Foxwarrior]

Actually I think the distinct pools might be more important if some of the pillars are of ambiguous significance.

If everyone knows that the campaign is going to have combat and social interaction in it, then you can use just one pool, ensure that intra-pillar synergies make it so two combat/social characters is stronger than one combat character and one social character, and then trust that once the players figure out what's going on they'll try to make characters that work in both.

But if the social rules are a bit vague and the rules don't impose enough on the DM to force them to include social and combat in every adventure, some players might assume one or the other pillar will be non present and make a character who can only do one of the things. While if you ensure that every character has something for every pillar, the players may be excited enough about their cool character abilities to push to sometimes use a pillar even when the pillar is a bit fuzzy.

[OgreBattle]

I've worked up combat, chase, and stealth games that work well enough to have fun with but I think the social pillar might be a wild goose chase.

This. I've seen one "social" system that was better than MTP, and that's Shadowrun shopping/Shadowrun asking your contacts to look into stuff.

And that only works because it is so limited and confines itself to people who already fit in a specific kind of relationship.

That’s downtime stuff you wouldn’t be playing out line by line yeah? Social contact stuff works well for downtime.

Many stories also have great warriors that are charismatic or talking a foe down, recruiting them as an ally in the middle of battle, so stabbing and talking are not necessarily separate scenes.

[MGuy]

I think there should be 'some' framework for resolving talky encounters of only to give the players 'some' semblance of control over these encounters. I don't think it needs to be as complicated as combat but I think there should be something there because it gives some kind of structure to these encounters. Of course as I said in the past, you'd only need to take out the dice when necessary. When what the players desire to do something that is in conflict with the characters they are interacting with. So none of that dumb superman issue bullshit where you're forcing the dice roll even when the character you're interacting with would normally perform in line with the players' desires anyway.

'The Face' is, I think a pretty recognizable role that's worth having some levels of disparity to distinguish those who go all in on it vs those who don't whether this manifests as vertical differences (where some have higher numbers) or horizontally (where charismatic characters have more ways to engage social encounters*). Skilled weapon fetishist is a thing people like and want to have in these games and I think talky talky man is similarly in need of support in these rpgs. Unless the ttrpg in question features everyone as a talker of some sort or where influencing people has such marginal use that there is no reason to dedicate space on a character sheet to the idea.

*not that it needs to be an encounter in the social combat sense