Planning for inevitable power creep.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Okay, when you write an RPG book you have three basic ways you can go, all fraught with problems.

1) Write a book with power creep.

Depending on how much you give, this approach may make people happy or piss them off. If you're boosting underpowered concepts or giving things a mild, but universal boost (such as the Adventurer's Vault or Oriental Adventures) people are generally happy. If you go too far, though, you'll make people increasingly unhappy--and if you go TOO far with power creep people will just not buy your book people they know that DMs won't allow it at the table. Overpowered options get a LOT more bad press than underpowered ones.

2) Write a book with no or even negative power creep.

When you do this, you need to ensure that the book is designed specifically to appeal to aesthetics on some level, like the Stronghold Builder's Guide or the Monster Manuals. But when we come to player options, this is really, really hard to do. The first one being that basic game theory states that having more options makes your position stronger and things can interact in unexpected ways to create cheese loops. But your chances of this are still lower than intentional power creep.

The biggest drawback to this method though is that these books are usually the least popular of the set. Adventurer's Vault 2 just isn't as well-liked as the Adventurer's Vault. Song and Silence is probably the most laughed-at at the class expansion books. And Martial Power 2 will never hold a candle to Martial Power 1. I'll go a little more why this method is unsuccessful with the third one.

3) Release books with horizontal power creep.

This means that you release options that are just as powerful as the old ones but they don't intersect. This means that you release a Warlock class that's just as good as the Wizard but they have no overlap at all.

The benefit to this method is that it requires the least amount of supervision to write books for. You don't need to worry about introducing the next Incantatrix nor do you need to worry about writing the next Dread Pirate. The downside is that this method sells the LEAST amount of books if your players are already happy with this. Seriously, if people are already happy with four or five of the published classes, you need to give them a reason to use your shiny new one. Humans being humans, you can't just show someone something just as good and expect them to abandon ship; you need to make it clearly better. Which leads to power creep. Sigh.

The worst position to be in is what happened with 3rd Edition D&D. They were locked into a position where increasingly few ways to release books were viable. There was so much material that the new bits had to be special to get noticed, but there was also so much power creep that people were already on a veto-happy spree. There was just no room to go upwards.




So, how do you reconcile these paths? My proposal: at the beginning of the edition, you should first indulge in no or negative power creep. This is when you coast by on materials like the SBH or the MM2 or Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting. But this period should be very short. Like 3 or 4 months. The reason being is that your edition is still shiny and new and people buy the most books during this period. Next you do horizontal power creep. You should have been polling your player base and releasing the bulk of your horizontal options at a steady rate. If the power creep in the game has been mild it makes balancing and writing the material easier to do; you don't have situations where everyone is all with your artificer or assassin because there's a wealth of material for a cleric or a warlord or a ranger. This phase should last about a year.

Next, power creep. Power creep should be actively planned for well in advance. People should measure the power of characters across the board at the beginning of the edition and then come up with an expected power level for characters when the edition is expected to run its course. Power creep should follow this curve. After you knock out all of the non/negative power creep options and end up with about the expected number of basic expansion options (races, classes, weapons, the like) you start releasing minute but still measurable improvements for players until the edition dies out.

When the edition does start to die out this is when you go back to horizontal power creep and release your Playtest materials. You examine the BASIC complaints about your ruleset (not complaints like 'the wizard is overpowered', complaints like 'there's not enough non-combat stuff to do' or 'people feel too dependent on magical items') and then release material that starts to address these complaints. The fixes that are well-received, like Book of Nine Swords, you incorporate into your next edition so people don't feel like they've been wasting their time.

Yes, this means that you can't plan your edition like it's going to go on forever. You actually need to determine a date for planned obsolescence. But don't tell the playerbase about it.

Basically, the model should follow 3E's from 3.0 to 3.5E. 3.0E released a lot of options during that four years period of time but characters at the end of 3.0E lifecycle by and large weren't all that more powerful than characters a year or so in (I'd like to say from the beginning, but pre-OA and S&F warriors were in an even worse shape believe it or not). 3.5E's decision to jump the gun by releasing a bunch of negative power creep options and horizontal power creep options wasn't a bad one, since people were still duped by the 'brand new edition direction' deception, but they milked this period for way too long. 3.5E's selective nerf period should've ended after a period of a year rather than going on for as long as it did.

At no point should you make people feel like they've wasted their time or you're wasting their time. This means that after a year and a half you should have released three monster manuals. This means that you also released all of your extra classes and races. But this also means that you can't release options that are so power-creepy that it invalidates materials of the old book. While this is fine to do for one iteration (like Adventurer's Vault 2) doing it twice or thrice (what happened in 3E repeatedly) burns people out and makes them not interested in new books.

[RandomCasualty2]

The main problem with horizontal power creep isn't so much that your classes have to be better, but just that horizontal stuff isn't usable in existing campaigns. That alone basically means that there's little incentive for a lot of people to buy that. If you're already playing a rogue, you can't play an avenger, so basically introducing the new class isn't something that particularly helps you unless you want to make a whole new character.

If you're running with an open multiclassing system like 3.5, then adding new classes just means that you run into possible standard power creep since you have to worry about how psion powers interact in the hands of a warblade and so on.

[Lago PARANOIA]

The main problem with horizontal power creep isn't so much that your classes have to be better, but just that horizontal stuff isn't usable in existing campaigns.

This is exactly why horizontal power creep stuff needs to be released as soon as possible while also giving DMs the heads up that it's okay for characters to rebuild their rogue to become an avenger.

[ggroy]

[Roy]

The main problem with horizontal power creep isn't so much that your classes have to be better, but just that horizontal stuff isn't usable in existing campaigns. That alone basically means that there's little incentive for a lot of people to buy that. If you're already playing a rogue, you can't play an avenger, so basically introducing the new class isn't something that particularly helps you unless you want to make a whole new character.

If you're running with an open multiclassing system like 3.5, then adding new classes just means that you run into possible standard power creep since you have to worry about how psion powers interact in the hands of a warblade and so on.

This. Book sectioning is another big thing and a part of that. If say... Arcane Power is released, and you aren't playing an arcane... there's nothing there for you. It's not like say... Complete Arcane where there's also some stuff for other types of characters that is still arcane related, you flat out have no use for the book so you don't even look at it. And of course if Arcane Power doesn't make your existing arcane better you don't really care either. But marketing to a tiny subset of your total audience is a bad idea. And going around and nerfing the old stuff just makes people stop caring about, or at least buying your stuff.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Honestly, the Player's Handbook II should have been put on the backburner. Let it sizzle and steam and let the slow burn do its magic, like it did with the 3E PHBII. Then when players couldn't take the suspense anymore or they needed a Christmastime trump card, release it in a dead period. I'm sure they wanted to do that, too.

Yet meanwhile, people were whining for their druid and barbarian and sorcerer to be released. So sensing an opportunity, they combined the two books together and rubbed their hands together greedily. Pandering to the playerbase's most common complaint (that of 4E fans, not RPG players in general) while also using the PHB II title! Imagine the moolah to be made! Isn't this a great idea?!

But that was a bad idea. By doing it in that way they reduced the strengths of both player-pleasing paths. They missed out on an opportunity to do a massive player satisfaction by smothering out the 'oh wow, a PHB II!' by combining it with something people already wanted. These two things should have been split up. I'm sure that they would have sold more books total if they dedicated one book to the new classes while the Player's Handbook II was dedicated to a bunch of universal options.

IOW if you're releasing Final Fantasy XIII, there's no reason to package it with New Super Mario Bros. Wii. The combined product, if you make the price the same as the other games, might sell more than either one but I bet you would sell even MORE if you split the two up and released the two at appropriate times.

The PHB2 reeks of missed opportunity and Golden Goose syndrome and the lessons learned from that fiasco is precisely why I made this guide.

[ggroy]

[Lago PARANOIA]

In hindsight, should the 4E PHB1 have covered all the classic races and classes, while PHB2 should have covered the less known ones?

No, that was the worst possible thing to do.

People wanted new races and classes, PHB2 or no, and would've bought a book that had these things regardless.

The PHB2 should've been reserved for some other event that you can't normally have a book for. Seriously, think back to the 3E PHBII. What did it actually DO? It had some feats and spells and in it and a bunch of bullshit options. But it still sold great anyway. Why? Because it had PHB2 on the cover, that's why. You don't need to have some game-changer Super Secret Project planned for these books. You just need to include enough material in it so that people don't feel that they've wasted their time and as the 3E PHB2 showed us this is an incredibly low hurdle to clear.

[RandomCasualty2]

This. Book sectioning is another big thing and a part of that. If say... Arcane Power is released, and you aren't playing an arcane... there's nothing there for you. It's not like say... Complete Arcane where there's also some stuff for other types of characters that is still arcane related, you flat out have no use for the book so you don't even look at it. And of course if Arcane Power doesn't make your existing arcane better you don't really care either. But marketing to a tiny subset of your total audience is a bad idea. And going around and nerfing the old stuff just makes people stop caring about, or at least buying your stuff.

I'm actually not sure about that. I always wondered how a development cycle of book release -> power creep -> errata nerf -> repeat, would work.

It'd be a parallel to M:tG in a way where you constantly get your cards cycled out, though in this case it'd be just targeting the more overpowered stuff instead of removing everything. I think this would actually get players to constantly buy new books to replace the stuff that got nerfed before. The important thing in that setup though is that you need character rebuilding to be a major feature that everyone is expected to use, so everyone can constantly be upgrading to the new material.

Another possible book selling model would be to set up a constant arms race between monsters and PCs. For instance make potent abilities in the first wave of player option books that beat out the standard MM monsters. Then the MM2 comes out and has monsters that are specifically designed to trump the special abilities you got out of the player book. After that, you produce another wave of player books to beat those monsters, and then later, you make monsters that can trump those abilities.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Dungeons and Dragons isn't supposed to be a competition, though, unlike MtG. While in CCGs it's inevitable and expected that you cycle out old non-staple cards, people in tabletop games get much more pissed off when they find out that their avenger or razor cleric is suddenly obsolete.

This is because, you know, people actually grow attached to their characters and abilities. If your avenger goes from having the best AC in the party (one of two of their main selling points) to having average AC, people don't shrug and go 'oh well, can't wait for the next avenger expansion option', people get fucking pissed that WotC stabbed them in the back.

And also unlike CCGs nerfing only targets the cream of the crop. If you look at any banlists they only really change for the latest deck releases or for some unexpected new combo (like Brionac + Premature Burial). The errata stuff has been targeting shit people have been using for over a year and a half and not even stuff people have complained about being overpowered. Seriously, if you look at the cleric guides on the character optimization guide they pretty much flat-out state that Righteous Brand is the only real selling point of the razor cleric.

WotC has pretty much lost me as a customer after they gave my razor cleric and blaster wizard the finger. If they did that to get me to try the Runepriest then they utterly failed, because not only will I not be buying the PHB3 but I will not be buying any of their other products. I'm sure I'm not the only person that feels that way.

[RandomCasualty2]

Dungeons and Dragons isn't supposed to be a competition, though, unlike MtG. While in CCGs it's inevitable and expected that you cycle out old non-staple cards, people in tabletop games get much more pissed off when they find out that their avenger or razor cleric is suddenly obsolete.

It's not a direct competition, no, but there's always competition between PCs and while nerfing upsets people, so too do overpowered characters. I had lots of people in 3.5 complain about how the CoDzilla was a better fighter than their fighter. And that upsets people and gets them to quit the game too, because they know WotC will never fix that.

Nobody is talking about making characters obsolete. We're just talking about nerfing them to the point that they're more in line with the rest of the party. I don't want to make the CoDzilla unplayable, just make them lose their edge over everyone else, and basically the incentive to buy more books is to keep your edge. For a lot of players, that's a big deal and they totally will continue buying books to do that.

Assuming the nerf isn't excessive, I really don't understand why people would get upset with WotC for trying to balance their game. If the nerf is well-deserved, then it should be something people should be able to get over without quitting the game over. And what few people quit will probably be offset by the fact that you're getting more people to stay in the hopes that the broken character's powers get nerfed. I definitely know my 3.5 high level group would have had more players if they did a better job of balancing it.

There can also be a pendulum effect in the book release + nerf schedule where each class gets their spotlight time. And everyone knows that when the next Divine power or whatever comes out, their cleric gets to be awesome again. Now, you may get people jumping the bandwagon, by constantly creating new flavor of the month characters based on who is best, but the way to combat that is pretty much to grant bonuses to organic characters such that newly created ones won't be quite as good. So you encourage people to just wait out the power cycling effect, and eventually their class will have their month to shine.

It ironically also solves some of the blandness of 4E because your character will be switching up some of the powers he's using. One month you may decide to focus more on healing, and the next you may adapt to utilize the new defensive shield powers and so on.

[Lokathor]

What if you're not an RPG company, you're just a group designing a game you want people to play and enjoy playing like we do with Tome and aWoD material and so on?

Should everything be as close to the "pure horizontal" plan as possible?

[RandomCasualty2]

What if you're not an RPG company, you're just a group designing a game you want people to play and enjoy playing like we do with Tome and aWoD material and so on?

Should everything be as close to the "pure horizontal" plan as possible?

Then basically you don't have to worry as much about power creep because you can design a closed system. The problem RPG companies have is that they always want to put out more products. So it's not just okay to throw out a few books with material, they basically need to create a constant stream of material (and if they want to survive, a constant player need for material).

But if you're not trying to get books sold, then you don't have to worry about selling books and therefore power creep honestly isn't an issue. At some point you're probably just going to stop producing material altogether.

[Lago PARANOIA]

RC2: the correct thing to do in that instance would be to bump up the level of the fighters to CoDzilla. Why do you think everyone loved the Bo9S so damn much?

Nerfing old material is a bad move. It makes people pissed off that they plopped down money for a book that had material they wanted at the time but can't be used anymore.

If you really wanted to sell books you would release material that boosted underpowered concepts. That way the people holding the bag will have an incentive to buy your new shit (hey! 4E paladins are 'fixed' now!) while people don't feel gypped having bought your old stuff.

There can also be a pendulum effect in the book release + nerf schedule where each class gets their spotlight time. And everyone knows that when the next Divine power or whatever comes out, their cleric gets to be awesome again. Now, you may get people jumping the bandwagon, by constantly creating new flavor of the month characters based on who is best, but the way to combat that is pretty much to grant bonuses to organic characters such that newly created ones won't be quite as good. So you encourage people to just wait out the power cycling effect, and eventually their class will have their month to shine.

This fails for two reasons.

The first and more important one is that it completely destroys any incentive for new players to the game to buy old books. If the boost + nerf cycle left Martial Power in the dust but the game was rocking on Martial Power 3, what's the new player's incentive for buying Martial Power? If you released a steadily but non-obsoleting rate of power creep materials, people would buy Martial Power 1-3. But if the stuff in MP 1 and 2 are nerfed, they would just get the third one.

The second one is that it disengages people from their characters. In YGO and MtG, we actually want people to be disengaged from their decks. People who still hang onto a Monarch or Burn/Stall deck because they had good memories of those decks or like the artwork are viewed as suckers. But tabletop RPGs don't work like that; if someone says 'rogues suck right now but I want to be one' you don't tell people 'play a warlord and suck it up', because the point of the game isn't actually to win--it's to play the character you want. You won't get a 'well, time to turn in my Monarch deck for a Vayusworn one' you'll get a 'wake me up if rogues ever become useful; otherwise I'll be playing Super Smash Brothers'.

[K]

Here's the thing: when I pick up a new book, there are things I am looking for.

-I look for things for my current character.

-I look for things for my next character.

-I look for things I can write adventures with, or that spark ideas for adventures.


And that's it. I mean, if I'm playing a Sorcerer, you can just write up the best Necromancer class ever and I won't be picking up your book until I'm ready to play in my next campaign. Or I'm DMing something and decide to go Necro-licious.

Horizontal power is always an interesting problem. Assuming you can errata in a timely manner to avoid unexpected combos, and you can avoid the power creep of more options, players will choose equivalent options that more exactly fit their concept or the demands of the story.

I mean, if DnD ever had a Necromancer that was as tactically interesting as even the Sorcerer, I'd probably play one every chance I got. 3e dribbled out Necromancy material at a rate that was so slow that I never had enough stuff together to play a competent Necromancer.

So horizontal can work. You are playing an adventure with some golems and someone releases a new supplement where you can take golem parts and replace your own limbs with them and someone in your party is going to do that because that's cool.

So ideally you mix in at least one of the three things I want to see. If you don't, I will simply ignore your book regardless of the quality of its other content (like Stronghold Builder's Guide, Song and Silence, Serpent Kingdom, etc).

[ggroy]

[Kaelik]

Meh, if you want to deal with powercreep, this is how you do it. Write generalized books that power creep everyone a little bit, including the monsters.

1) MMI, PHB, DMG
2) It's inside outside
3) It's hot/wet/cold
4) Fiends
5) Undead
6) Dragons
Slap on a PHB 2/MMII-V in there whereever you want.

Each book has:

1) feats and spells and acfs and PrCs for each class that already exists. (and is popular)
2) A couple new classes.
3) Environment rules/Sailing rules/whatever and campaign seeds
4) Items
5) New Monsters that are slightly more powerful, and templates or alternative versions or feats or whatever for old MM monsters.

Now everyone wants every book. We win at life. And everyone is always getting a little better with each new book, but so are the monsters, so deal.

[K]

I've often thought that books should just admit the power creep. Like, they should just errata all the old powers when they put out the next level of creep and power them up to match the new ones.

So you might have a Complete Arcane-type book with new classes like Warlock, and then in the back you say "Evocations +1 damage per die."

[IGTN]

I've often thought that books should just admit the power creep. Like, they should just errata all the old powers when they put out the next level of creep and power them up to match the new ones.

So you might have a Complete Arcane-type book with new classes like Warlock, and then in the back you say "Evocations +1 damage per die."

That would be interesting.

Of course, your allowed book list then becomes really meaningful, and raises questions when the DM says "alright, pick any three non-core books you have to use."

[Username17]

People want character options. There should be character options in every book. K's list is very good:

• I look for things for my current character.
• I look for things for my next character.
• I look for things I can write adventures with, or that spark ideas for adventures.

So right away you know that your Monster Manuals are solid gold, because everyone knows that they fulfill the third category. With 4e's Kitchen Sink Racism going on, they could seriously have fulfilled number 2 as well by coming out with a short list of racial feats at the end that endeared each race to a class build. Shit like Gnome Phantomist in addition to the minimalistic racial template would make Monster Manuals a huge get for many players as well (if you're going to be an Illusionist, the Gnome looks pretty fucking good).

But 4e should have been releasing new classes in every book. And I don't mean "a new class" - I mean several new classes. A fully playable class with 2 distinct "builds" takes up 12 pages. And yeah, that's too many. It would have been shit simple to change the format on the game so that classes were shorter than that, but they didn't. Regardless, every book should have 48 pages devoted to making 4 new playable classes. The number one complaint of people with 4e is that the classes are so incredibly narrow that there is no room for their character concept. Every rogue has to use a Dagger or a Rapier. Don't take that shit lying down. Next time you write a book, put in the Skirmisher (who uses Polearms), the Thug (who uses clubs and maces), and the Scout (who uses a bow). That's like 3 different sneaky guys that you can crank out and format in under a week. And you've provided apparent value and options for upcoming characters - and even established characters in the form of multiclassing power selections (who wants to bet that some of those Thug exploits would look good on your Hammer Brother fighter?).

The decision to keep the number of character classes down was inexplicable considering that they had a model where each class was so rigidly defined. If you wanted to be a guy who channeled power and used it to shoot lightning bolts, you needed them to write a whole new class, because the basic Arcane Class that channeled power (the Warlock) did not deliver. So you needed a Sorcerer to be written in the PHB2. Except... it didn't need to come out in the PHB 2. The first things they came out with was the Forgotten Realms book and the Adventurer's Vault. Those are books, and therefore they should have had 4 or more classes in them each.

The Adventurer's Vault should have had the Artificer and the Treasure Hunter (he gets a whip), and the Bounty Hunter (a martial controller with bolos and a net), and the Alchemist (he blows stuff up mostly). In short, it should have driven home the whole "roles" thing they decided to go with by having a new class that does each of the roles in every book.

By failing to release new classes, and then instead gradually releasing more and more powers and build options for each of the tiny number of classes they had, it did two things:

• First, it made it impractical to add new classes, because the original classes had so much material to dumpster dive through that you basically couldn't compete if they came out with a Monk or a Psion for you to play.
• Secondly, it eroded the definition of roles altogether, which made it blatantly obvious that the people at the top didn't know what they were doing. If you're going to insist that on player plays a "Leader" and another player plays a "Striker" you have to make those terms mean something.If you keep printing "defenderish powers" for your leaders and "strikerish powers" for your controllers and shit, none of those terms have any meaning, and it undermines confidence in the regime.

Yes, they fucked up the opening PHB classes something awful and managed to, for example, forget to write level 9 for Tron Paladins. Which was inexcusable to begin with. It's really not that hard to check to see if every supposedly supported build actually has an offered power at every level - they have searchable key words. But yes, having made that inexcusable blunder, you are now obligated to fix it by coming out with a patch in the form of extra powers to complete the builds that were offered but unsupported in the basic rules (I'm looking at you: Starlock). But that should have been the end of it. 4e's system allows and essentially requires dozens of character classes. And it would not have been hard to give people that.

Draconomicon I: Chromatic Dragons was a silly idea for a book. But they could have sold it if they had included four character classes in the damn thing. Each of them with a Dragon theme. Sorcerer, Dragon Shaman, Lancer, Dragoon. Go fucking nuts. Open Grave, same deal. Necromancer, Hunter (a Buffy tie-in class), Seer, and Bane Knight.

Books like Martial Power should be more than fifty percent character classes by weight. So, 8 Character Classes. Samurai, Gladiator, Swashbuckler, Corsair, Ninja, Cavalier, Skirmisher, and Sniper. I'm not even kidding.

I don't think that 4e was very well presented to begin with. But I don't understand why they didn't follow through with the Classplosion that was clearly hinted at in the PHB1. Had they actually done that, I might even care about the game, since by now there would be so many classes that I might be interested in some of them.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

I wasn't really trying to just analyze D&D, though the lessons are easily applied. I'm just talking about moving RPG books in general.

Basically, your cycle for power creep should be--> negative/no power creep --> horizontal power creep --> when your game reaches the saturation point for different generalized concepts keep slowly upping the ante until the edition runs out of steam.

3.5E, despite my many problems with it, was in a way a brilliant maneuver. By announcing that they're going to change a bunch of things, they were able to reset the cycle and keep it riding. But then they messed up by instead of having a slow burn buildup they had spiralling power creep even worse than the excesses of 3.0E.

4E also messed things up. They unloaded the GOOD stuff first and each expansion book has less power creep than the one before--Martial Power was a HUGE across-the-board boost, Arcane Power was a fairly big one (cemented wizards as DPR AoE champs and made swordmages credible), Divine Power much less so (except for clerics and a couple of options nothing much), and Primal Power even less (nothing really in it except for a couple of druid and warden options if you discount the summoning). I understand that they wanted to control power creep but they tried to bring things under control when the ship had already sailed. Fixing Divine Miracle is one thing, 'fixing' Righteous Brand is quite another.


The game designers routinely make huge mistakes when they engender this idea that their game is more or less perfect and that the game people played when the edition was 6 months old should be the same as when it is 3 years old. 4E actually interested me for awhile when battles were suddenly able to be completed in 3-4 rounds in paragon tier, but they seem to want to erase that.

[ggroy]

[RandomCasualty2]

RC2: the correct thing to do in that instance would be to bump up the level of the fighters to CoDzilla. Why do you think everyone loved the Bo9S so damn much?

Not really Lago. People loved Bo9S because it gave fighters options. Those options weren't even really all that great. A warblade actually wasn't all that powerful, but he was just a heck of a lot more fun to play because you could do something else other than spamming the same full attack or trip all the time. And for fighter players, this was a really big deal. They actually had choices now.

A warblade still wasn't even close to a CoDzilla or a wizard though.

Nerfing old material is a bad move. It makes people pissed off that they plopped down money for a book that had material they wanted at the time but can't be used anymore.

Eh. Nerfing tends to piss people off as much as it makes people happy. Unbalanced classes piss people off a lot too. When Starcraft had the patch that made the Spawning pool cost 200 instead of 150, yeah you had a bunch of zerg players up in arms about it, but you know.. they got over it.

Saying you're not going to nerf because you're afraid people will whine about it is just cowardly design. When you're appealing to nerds you're going to have to deal with nerd rage, but that's gonna happen seriously no matter what you do. If you don't nerf it, people will yell at you, if you do nerf it, people will yell at you. Seriously. Just do whatever makes your game better. You can't please everyone. Spineless game devs make terrible games.

If you really wanted to sell books you would release material that boosted underpowered concepts. That way the people holding the bag will have an incentive to buy your new shit (hey! 4E paladins are 'fixed' now!) while people don't feel gypped having bought your old stuff.

I wish it worked that way, but it seriously doesn't. A lot of powers are just too powerful to even exist and your best bet is seriously to nerf them. Now you can get into an arms race where you constantly make new monsters that are immune to the new shit. So shivering touch comes out, and it's all that for a couple months, then the new MM comes out and everything has crazy counters to cold spells and ability damage. Now people have to rethink their tactics and start using some of the other stuff. That would actually work.

But handing out a shivering touch level power to every class just makes the game boring as fuck. Mainly because it totally invalidates everything before it. You know that all the other shit you had is just useless so everyone just spams the ubermove and rapes the monsters. And that game is basically ass and not one I want to play.

The first and more important one is that it completely destroys any incentive for new players to the game to buy old books. If the boost + nerf cycle left Martial Power in the dust but the game was rocking on Martial Power 3, what's the new player's incentive for buying Martial Power? If you released a steadily but non-obsoleting rate of power creep materials, people would buy Martial Power 1-3. But if the stuff in MP 1 and 2 are nerfed, they would just get the third one.

Yeah, it certainly encourages people to buy your newest book, so people getting into the hobby late probably aren't going to go fishing for old stuff. But that's really kinda fine, because the idea is that you're not doing print runs of old stuff. So you send out old stuff to stores and then you're kinda done with it, because you start on the next batch of books. And the moment you decide that "we're done printing arcane power," that's when your nerfs come out.

The second one is that it disengages people from their characters. In YGO and MtG, we actually want people to be disengaged from their decks. People who still hang onto a Monarch or Burn/Stall deck because they had good memories of those decks or like the artwork are viewed as suckers. But tabletop RPGs don't work like that; if someone says 'rogues suck right now but I want to be one' you don't tell people 'play a warlord and suck it up', because the point of the game isn't actually to win--it's to play the character you want. You won't get a 'well, time to turn in my Monarch deck for a Vayusworn one' you'll get a 'wake me up if rogues ever become useful; otherwise I'll be playing Super Smash Brothers'.

The idea isn't really to make anyone suck, so much as give each class their moment in the sun. And I addressed the fact that you're going to want to hand out some incentive to keep playing organic characters, such that the guy you've been playing will be better than just constantly creating the latest flavor of the month character based on whatever book is out.

But it's cyclical anyway. So while this may not be the month of the paladin, in a few months you'll be back in business.

[CatharzGodfoot]

What about vertical power creep in the fashion of 2nd edition: Publish only level 1-10 (or even just 1-5) in the Player's Handbook?

After all, if you're looking for what you character will be doing next, what the hell her next level looks like is a fairly big concern.

The higher level books won't sell as well, but with a good multiclassing and prestige class system you could totally pull it off.

[Lokathor]

Kenzer & Company did that with Hackmaster Basic. The core book covers levels 1 to 5 only.

>_> but now they've yet to release the next book.