Is a little bit of blatant broken mechanics fun?

K · Post by K » Sat Jan 21, 2012 11:28 pm

So, I was tooling around with some old 3.x books and I realized that there were several ways to be an Illithid Savant without being a real EL 15 mind flayer, and that's before you figure in that the Savants are already fundamentally broken.

Then I realized, if I was trying to write up a version of the Illithid Savant for some theoretical new edition, it just wouldn't be as broken and I'm not sure the the PrC would be interesting to me any more.

So the real question is: how much is minmaxxing and broken things a selling point of an edition?

CapnTthePirateG · Post by **CapnTthePirateG** » Sun Jan 22, 2012 12:06 am

Pretty big to me.

A friend and I were discussing yesterday how to build a bag of holding with a time stop to breed infinite rabbits to destroy enemy kingdoms' grazing lands. I don't think you can do this in 4e.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Sun Jan 22, 2012 12:58 am

People play Rifts. I think this is evidence that blatantly broken mechanics can be fun - fuck, in the case of Rifts those broken mechanics aren't "Glitter Boy Pilots and Dragons shit all over Wilderness Scouts and Hobos!" (although they do), it's "How does this fucking game even work, I mean for fuck's sake, it can't make its fucking mind up on what you need to hit, FUCK."

That said...

K wrote:I realized that there were several ways to be an Illithid Savant without being a real EL 15 mind flayer,

So that I don't need to dig up Savage "Fuck you, play an elf instead" Species to go over the fine print, could you list some of these ways? I'm assuming Polymorph abuse is involved?

and that's before you figure in that the Savants are already fundamentally broken.

It's one of the few things that could theoretically get "Immunity to anything, even shit the MC specifically makes up to fuck with you." By eating it's own heavenly-assassin-clone. Then when it can gain "a special quality", you give it the one that says only the original creature can affect it in any way. Bam, the only thing that can hurt it is itself. Ever. And then you do a silly dance and don't even give a fuck about eating skills and special attacks. I mean, you have Immunity: yes

Swordslinger · Post by **Swordslinger** » Sun Jan 22, 2012 1:34 am

Some players do enjoy being able to rules loophole their way into being better than their other party members. I'm not quite sure if that's a huge selling point of an edition though.

Most people describe the bad and unbalanced rules of Rifts as a drawback, not a plus.

Avoraciopoctules · Post by **Avoraciopoctules** » Sun Jan 22, 2012 1:38 am

K wrote:So the real question is: how much is minmaxxing and broken things a selling point of an edition?

Depends on what they actually result in. But the theoretical optimization and ultimate implications of poorly thought out stuff in D&D do constite a sizeable chunk of my enjoyment of the game.

One of the biggest things that drew me into actually using Tome stuff was the write-up on Sahuagin in Races of War. It took some sketchy rules and used them to derive somethingly highly entertaining that improved the game world without ruining anyone's fun.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Sun Jan 22, 2012 2:15 am

This kind of thing depends on the GM's abilities to keep it interesting for you

and to some extent how merciful a knowledgeable player will be.

NineInchNall · Post by **NineInchNall** » Sun Jan 22, 2012 2:28 am

Honestly? A huge amount, but it doesn't even have to be actual broken or overpowered stuff. It just has to be perceived as such by the player. It's the feeling of extra power that makes playing a character feel a little more mechanically special.

A perfectly balanced system would be boring to mess around with, because there simply wouldn't be any sort of Cost-Benefit Analysis involved in character creation or strategy selection. When everything is equal, then you just describe your character and go. While that's ideal from certain perspectives, the "deck builder" or "strategist" type will find that hypothetical system mind numbingly pointless.

From an anecdotal perspective, the thing that spurred my enjoyment of 3E into a form of psychopathy was reading the write-up for The Wish & The Word. I'd never before seen such a simple use of the rules as they were written to produce something so inordinately powerful and immensely entertaining (especially in the presentation). If I'd never read that, I'd probably still be one of the mewling masses constantly droning on about the evils of multiclassing, single level dips, Fighters getting the ability to actually do something of value, and the incomparable power of Monks.

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Sun Jan 22, 2012 3:36 am

A game has to have interesting combinations, but a combination doesn't have to be "broken" to be interesting. (I hate using the word "broken", because a dozen people will have a dozen different definitions.)

NineInchNall · Post by **NineInchNall** » Sun Jan 22, 2012 5:55 am

I just thought of another reason slightly "broken" mechanics make the player/user feel good. One of the things about D&D is that there has always been in the background the idea that if you gain enough awesome (codified as XP + magic items) you can totally spank the gods with a nailed belt, which is ultimately an empowering premise that says no matter the bog from which you sprang, you can, through skill, cleverness, or pure luck, overcome obstacles that dwarf the imagination of your race.

"Broken" mechanics add to that feeling of empowerment.

CatharzGodfoot · Post by **CatharzGodfoot** » Sun Jan 22, 2012 6:06 am

Thought bottles and and candles of invocation are fun when you first realize that they can destroy the game. Then they destroy the game.

Being able to do crazy shit is good for a game, IMO, and so is being able to find synergy or 'easter eggs'. But non of those should actualy break the game.

Swordslinger · Post by **Swordslinger** » Sun Jan 22, 2012 6:11 am

NineInchNall wrote: A perfectly balanced system would be boring to mess around with, because there simply wouldn't be any sort of Cost-Benefit Analysis involved in character creation or strategy selection. When everything is equal, then you just describe your character and go. While that's ideal from certain perspectives, the "deck builder" or "strategist" type will find that hypothetical system mind numbingly pointless.

Strategists would actually be fine with starting equal if the gameplay itself offered options. A strategist gets their thrills from coming up with a clever and unique strategy to win a given battle or adventure, not from just coming in with an innate advantage. In fact, to many strategists, coming in with a big advantage would ruin it. There's no fun in winning a chess game if your opponent doesn't start with a queen.

It's really only that type of min/maxer player that really needs imbalanced character creation, because he's not looking to do well because he's smarter, but rather because he's inherently numerically superior. In my experience, generally this type of player is a poor strategist, and feels the need to fill that gap with overwhelming brute force.

Then there's other players who come in with a character concept and want the system to faithfully represent their character concept without that concept sucking. To them, a balanced game is really appealing and they just get annoyed when they have to suck because they didn't pick the same favorite class as one of the designers.

Vebyast · Post by **Vebyast** » Sun Jan 22, 2012 7:36 am

My group played DND with a side goal of collecting game-breaks. We played a completely normal game of DND, for the most part. Whenever one of us discovered a way that our character could execute an infinite loop or craft a broken item, we'd credit that player with a few brokenness points, depending on how clever and amusing the exploit was, and completely ignore it otherwise.

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Sun Jan 22, 2012 7:45 am

In a word, K, yes.

Take the Dungeonomicon Monk. It's a slick bit of handiwork, isn't game-breaking, gets cool stuff.

But I was screwing around and realized that with a fighting style for Two Full Round Actions, the 5d6 Sonic Damage, and the "Ignore DR/Hardness" and "Applies to held weapons" and TWF, you can throw down 80d6 sonic damage in a round, by attacking the floor under you or a wall or something.

And it was fun to have the lightbulb go off over my head.

I once spent about two hours off-and-on in Mass Effect 1, screwing around with various weapon setups. I found I can get an assault rifle to not overheat, with negligible accuracy loss, and I could turn a sniper rifle into a freakin' CANNON with the explosive ammo and the damage-boosters. Not to mention all the shenanigans biotics allow for.

I have a friend who, right now, is telling me over IM about how he's prepping to take on the end of the main quest in Skyrim, playing a pure mage. It involves reducing the mana costs for some spell schools so much that it becomes nothing. Multiple enchantments, ton of prep work, mastering a few schools, and all to stomp the end game into the dirt.

It's fun to put brainsweat into a game to deconstruct a challenge, and be proven right when you whip its ass.

Judging__Eagle · Post by **Judging__Eagle** » Sun Jan 22, 2012 7:46 am

Having players get access to "unlimited" versions of previously limited resources is a recurring theme in showing the escalation of character power.

In D&D, a characters get option providing equipment, flat out boosting equipment, constantly escalating resilience, and more resources to throw down as they get more experiences. A 16th level fighter can go to war, win, and return in the time it would take a normal army of level 1-5, CR 1/2 to 2 1/2, Warriors to mobilize and march.

Wizards of lower levels solve any problem given some free time; a week or two for a small project; like shore up the provinces defenses (set up stone foundations with then

In Skyrim, a character can level up as they choose; and even the hot shot crafting skills are pretty straightforward to level to maximum state. Being able to swing a Daedric Greadsword (Legendary) that swings for 80,000 hp or a Dwarven Bow that shoots for 108k makes you play the game as if it were more of an action film instead of the slogging mess that master difficulty combat can be in Skyrim. You shoot a guy in the eye with an arrow? They're dead. Shoot a Dragon with an Ebon Arrow? It dies, just like all Black Arrows are supposed to.

In WoW, players in "end game" content tend to not run out of previously limited resources. However, Having "infinite" of certain character resources means nothing if you're misusing the resource of time. A tank with "infinite rage metre" means nothing if they're not maximizing their aggro generation; and a DPS with massive damage and unlimited mana means little if they can't manage their own timing; while healers don't have to sweat their mana (now), they still need to play low-health whack-a-mole with some 3rd party UI if they want to be even remotely competetive (I know I always used something to manage healing and debuff removal).

In Rifts.... one can set up an PPE "storage golfball" to store large amounts of energy per instance. Cast a tiny spell to convert damage capacity into magical energy (MDC->PPE); then rely on (fast) natural healing, or cast cost effective healing spells to start the cycle over again. Once the group has large stores of previously thought limited resources, the game gets changed, and different stories can be told. You can talk about how you started opening rifts and buildingg ley-lines across Chi-Town; keeping back enemy advancement with magically fueled hurricane-storms arranged in a barrier and/or cast on top of enemy outposts/fortifications/formations to pin/scatter them. The potential shenanigans of an "infinite PPE loop" in Rifts is massive.

Really, it's like thinking about the post-Wish economy in a Tome game.

Once you hit level 11+; the DM's plans aren't going to be majorly affected by the players dropping a Bag of Holding's worth of Lamp Oil into a kobalt-skaeven hole and burning out some fuzzy, scaled, Therapsids of their home.

The temple to the Horned Kobalt that the PCs need to enter and destroy is still deep inside the ground, and the players will probably have to Disintigrate their way through the small-sized Kobalt-Skaeven holes. Probably with a called/summoned Beholder, or changing into a creature that can cast burrowing powers at-will.

One of the bigger problems with higher level play is that things like AC and Attack Bonus are still kept around; but now players have to contend with crit-resistance, save resistance boosting, gaining broad immunities, gaining new (non AC) defences, and of course, new travel methods. Everything from swimming, climbing, burrowing, flying, brachiation, phasing, teleporting, dimension "portalling", and planeshifting could eventually show up in a single campaign.

I'm currently trying to solve this by working on a short and early range of character growth; the first 5 levels of D&D; there, the infinite loops are things like "set up a trade route; get X bonus treasure every Y time" or "establish a town to pay tribute in exchange for protection from monsters/bandits/war/etc.", and Players get points towards the appropriate Resource type.
[bah edits]

TheFlatline · Post by **TheFlatline** » Sun Jan 22, 2012 9:11 am

The "ah-ha!" moment is important in most games. Going from "competent" to "holy shit this is a fucking power cycle" is one of the major rewards of these types of games.

As was mentioned though, it's the perceived "broken" part that appeals. Even if the game is actually geared to work with that level of synergy, the "holy shit I'm doing triple of what I was doing a minute ago" revelation is pretty awesome.

It wears out fast though. In Pathfinder, figuring out a way to generally hit on a 2 or better for 90% of the creatures I attacked by level 10 was fantastic, but after a couple levels combat became boring for me, because I had topped out: I only like to hit sh*t when there's a real chance I'll miss.

Judging__Eagle · Post by **Judging__Eagle** » Sun Jan 22, 2012 12:07 pm

If you're hitting things on a 2+; then you're past the "hit enemies" game; and are now entering a new portion of the game. Maybe start multiplying attacks, getting more distance on attacks, maybe find new ways to deliver attacks.

Solving the "hit enemies" problem is one of many that a PC can attempt to 'beat'.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sun Jan 22, 2012 1:44 pm

Figuring out the "I Win" button is extremely fun. Pressing the "I Win" button gets boring as hell pretty fast. Probably that calls out for harsh Tiering. If "breaking" the Heroic Tier actually doesn't matter when you hit Paragon Tier, that would probably be ideal. People could figure out game breaking combos and get their game challenge back just by going up in level.

-Username17

Mask_De_H · Post by **Mask_De_H** » Sun Jan 22, 2012 5:29 pm

Swordslinger: you've confused strategy with tactics; a strategist makes the most out of supply, outfitting, and organization, so in a TTRPG they would be the dudes rolling in with a huge advantage.

I think more so than broken mechanics, having exciting effects gets people hype. Entering the Wish Economy is awesome, as is punching somebody into a Gate. Broken shit just happens to have large, game changing effects, which is cool. Once the game is broken, though, it can either stop being fun (I Win Buttons), completely change (supporting the Wish Economy), or do both (melee classes becoming unplayable past level 11 or so).

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Sun Jan 22, 2012 6:13 pm

I think exploits like that are basically hacking, and are a feature for a small but vocal section of the community. Just like electronics, the people who are interested in hacking the system are the same people who will collect your product just to mess with, and also the mavens who are at the root of grassroots marketing.

CatharzGodfoot · Post by **CatharzGodfoot** » Sun Jan 22, 2012 7:27 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:Figuring out the "I Win" button is extremely fun. Pressing the "I Win" button gets boring as hell pretty fast. Probably that calls out for harsh Tiering. If "breaking" the Heroic Tier actually doesn't matter when you hit Paragon Tier, that would probably be ideal. People could figure out game breaking combos and get their game challenge back just by going up in level.

-Username17

So you can finally put together a competent flying archer one level before everyone has either flight or a good ranged attack? I can see that sort of setup working pretty well.

Swordslinger · Post by **Swordslinger** » Sun Jan 22, 2012 9:39 pm

Mask_De_H wrote:Swordslinger: you've confused strategy with tactics; a strategist makes the most out of supply, outfitting, and organization, so in a TTRPG they would be the dudes rolling in with a huge advantage.

Arguably you could call a strategy player more of a knot-cutter, but even still I don't feel like people who enjoy strategy want to walk in with an advantage, because the whole point of masterful strategy is creating the advantage through your strategy, not because you innately had the edge going in.

Now that's not to say you may not have the edge going into combat, but it'll be more so due to factors like surprise, superior positioning or specialized equipment/spell selection, as opposed to simply having better generated builds from the start.

I think more so than broken mechanics, having exciting effects gets people hype.

That's probably true. If anything's been proven by 4E, it's that a great deal of gamers don't want a game that's too predictable. They want one shot kills and swingy battles, even if it means losing PCs. For all the deadliness of prior editions, people seem to largely remember the good times when they one shotted a black dragon as opposed to the time that 6 ghouls took out their 9th level character by means of lucky hit and a botched save.

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Sun Jan 22, 2012 9:47 pm

Swordslinger wrote: Arguably you could call a strategy player more of a knot-cutter, but even still I don't feel like people who enjoy strategy want to walk in with an advantage, because the whole point of masterful strategy is creating the advantage through your strategy, not because you innately had the edge going in.

Experts disagree.

Sun Tzu wrote: Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.

Swordslinger · Post by **Swordslinger** » Sun Jan 22, 2012 10:02 pm

fectin wrote:
Swordslinger wrote: Arguably you could call a strategy player more of a knot-cutter, but even still I don't feel like people who enjoy strategy want to walk in with an advantage, because the whole point of masterful strategy is creating the advantage through your strategy, not because you innately had the edge going in.
Experts disagree.
Sun Tzu wrote: Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.

Maybe when you're playing for reasons other than fun.

But in terms of strategy games, I can tell you that it takes the fun out of the game knowing I had the edge going in. At that point, you can't feel good for having a good strategy, because you're already the projected winner anyway. The most you can do is embarrass yourself if you lose.

Vebyast · Post by **Vebyast** » Sun Jan 22, 2012 10:31 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:Figuring out the "I Win" button is extremely fun. Pressing the "I Win" button gets boring as hell pretty fast.

Pretty much. As I said, we just counted coup - "I could have pressed the 'I win' button five times so far.".

jadagul · Post by **jadagul** » Mon Jan 23, 2012 1:06 am

Swordslinger wrote:
fectin wrote:
Swordslinger wrote: Arguably you could call a strategy player more of a knot-cutter, but even still I don't feel like people who enjoy strategy want to walk in with an advantage, because the whole point of masterful strategy is creating the advantage through your strategy, not because you innately had the edge going in.
Experts disagree.
Sun Tzu wrote: Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.
Maybe when you're playing for reasons other than fun.

But in terms of strategy games, I can tell you that it takes the fun out of the game knowing I had the edge going in. At that point, you can't feel good for having a good strategy, because you're already the projected winner anyway. The most you can do is embarrass yourself if you lose.

I think that depends on the person. My favorite part of games is trying to construct strategies that leave me with enough of an overwhelming advantage that I can ignore tactics completely. (e.g. in Civilization I win by getting enough of a technological and industrial advantage that I can just roll over everybody else without having to worry about the details of what units are where).

I actually prefer solo games for this reason--games with other people tend to be symmetric and so don't have perfect unbeatable strategies. And looking for those is the fun part.

The Gaming Den

Is a little bit of blatant broken mechanics fun?

Is a little bit of blatant broken mechanics fun?

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