Munchkin Opposition

What is the point of the Opposed Check mechanic in Warhammer 3rd?  I only recently figured out the answer to that question, and until I did so, I hated the mechanic. Now, I realize it's kinda awesome and absolutely vital to the health of the game.

The point of that rule is certainly _not_ to provide results where both parties' stats have equal weight. Not by a long shot. Blue dice and purple dice just don't have anywhere near mirrored results, and really there is no accurate conversion ratio (because Chaos Stars complicate all the math). Even if they did equate better, the initiating participant in the challenge would still have the advantage of Green, Red, or Yellow dice, none of which are available to the opposing participant in the roll. The defender's stance makes no difference, and the defender's skills are devalued in comparison to the aggressors.

So there must be some other reason for using the opposed mechanic.

Having run a lot of math (see below), I've come to a likely answer to the above question. The answer is interesting, and it's a shame that the designers over at FFG never discussed it in something akin to one of those "Behind the Curtain" sidebars you sometimes see in D&D books. Why does the Opposed Check mechanic exist, and work the way it does? For the singular purpose of preserving character niche for those who didn't take a 2 in Fellowship and Intelligence.  It's main point is to ensure that the wacky non-combat careers in Warhammer (such as Agitator, Courtier or Scribe) actually have a relevant specialty that isn't easily encroached upon by the brute-force combat types just throwing 2 XP at a non-career skill.  Tangential to this, the Opposed Checks ensure that those who optimized their stats actually pay some trade-off for those 5 or 6 blue dice they're getting in their best areas -- there are some things they just can't do at all.

To elaborate: Warhammer 3rd is a game where characters generally begin with a high degree of competence. Starting characters can readily get above a 90% success rate from their best skills and actions. Even if something is well outside your focus, you've still almost always got a better than 50% chance of success for a standard roll.

There's two areas where this high success rate isn't true:

• one is Opposed checks by characters with a low stat,
• the other is arbitrarily high difficulty ratings used on plot-relevant checks specifically called out in published adventures. 

The later exist as speed-bumps to prevent PCs from whistling through a scenario due to dumb luck in a way that's not dramatically satisfying. If the PC does manage to short-circuit drama by grasping at straws / thinking outside the box / spamming some random skill at every NPC, the drama that was lost by short-cutting the plot is (hopefully) replaced by the thrill of having beat a high-difficulty (often 4 Purple) check.

The former, those Opposed checks when one side or the other has a 2 in the relevant stat, is there only to make sure that if you put a 2 in your Fellowship or Intelligence you will never succeed at a default roll of that stat. It does this to protect the character niche for those who did invest in Fellowship or Intelligence.  Tangential to this it also makes the person with the 2's occassionally and infrequently get brutally pwned by NPCs with high stats. Said pwnage is just the icing on the cake, it's not the main point of the opposed checks. The game already puts high success rates on the high-stat (N)PCs and if providing PC vulnerability was your only goal you'd solve it with something less like opposed checks and more like the elegant 1-purple of vs Target Defense rolls. There's easier ways to empower GM's manhandling of PCs, but there's not easier ways to protect character niche.

That's probably a good point to segue into all that math I alluded to. After I broke down the success-rate percentages of the official opposed check rule and the most common house-rule to replace it (many GM's use purple dice = opposed stat minus 2), I got a comment from one of my players that perhaps the problem with those numbers was due to the minus two, and the way it zero'd out the difficulties at the low end. If I did 1/2 or 1/3 the stat as purple dice, and any remainder as blacks, maybe that would fit a more reasonable curve. So a 5 in the opposed stat would always produce either 2 purple and a black, or 1 purple and 2 black depending on which variant I used, and a 1 in the opposed stat would always be a single black die no matter how high or low the aggressors stat was. That was actually pretty close to a house-rule I actually used in my first couple one shots, but had eventually dropped because I wanted to try a campaign with a minimum of house-rules to see how the game ran by the books.

Anyhow, I ran a bunch more numbers, and here (after a weird gap that blogger insists on inserting before all tables) are the results:

Opposed Stats	original success rate	Purple = Stat -2	Purple = Stat / 2, Remainder = Black	Purple = Stat /3, Remainder = Black	1 Purple
2 opposed by 1	44%	75%	58%	58%	44%
2 opposed by 2	25%	75%	44%	44%	44%
2 opposed by 3	14%	44%	33%	44%	44%
2 opposed by 4	8%	25%	25%	33%	44%
2 opposed by 5	8%	14%	19%	25%	44%
2 opposed by 6	8%	8%	14%	25%	44%
2 opposed by 7	8%	4%	10%	19%	44%
3 opposed by 1	88%	88%	75%	75%	60%
3 opposed by 2	59%	88%	59%	63%	60%
3 opposed by 3	38%	59%	49%	59%	60%
3 opposed by 4	24%	38%	38%	49%	60%
3 opposed by 5	24%	24%	31%	40%	60%
3 opposed by 6	14%	14%	24%	39%	60%
3 opposed by 7	14%	9%	19%	31%	60%
4 opposed by 1	94%	94%	85%	85%	72%
4 opposed by 2	72%	94%	72%	76%	72%
4 opposed by 3	72%	72%	63%	72%	72%
4 opposed by 4	51%	51%	51%	63%	72%
4 opposed by 5	37%	37%	43%	53%	72%
4 opposed by 6	37%	23%	37%	51%	72%
4 opposed by 7	37%	14%	29%	43%	72%
5 opposed by 1	97%	97%	92%	92%	81%
5 opposed by 2	97%	97%	81%	85%	81%
5 opposed by 3	81%	81%	73%	81%	81%
5 opposed by 4	81%	63%	63%	73%	81%
5 opposed by 5	63%	46%	55%	65%	81%
5 opposed by 6	46%	32%	46%	63%	81%
5 opposed by 7	46%	21%	39%	55%	81%
6 opposed by 1	98%	98%	95%	95%	88%
6 opposed by 2	98%	98%	88%	91%	88%
6 opposed by 3	88%	88%	82%	88%	88%
6 opposed by 4	88%	72%	72%	82%	88%
6 opposed by 5	88%	56%	65%	75%	88%
6 opposed by 6	72%	42%	56%	73%	88%
6 opposed by 7	56%	30%	49%	66%	88%

See how every variant I tried* resulted in far more favorable numbers for those with a 2 in the relevant stat? It's a feature, not a bug. It was as if the designers had specifically chosen the official method just to screw with people who had 2's.  It's not monsters they're trying to hamstring, as a quick glance through the NPC stats and PC's Action cards will show you that even the most dim-witted beast has Willpower enough to resist any opposed check the PCs want to throw at them (it's almost always easier to stab a monster than to intimidate or charm it). The only rolls that these opposed mechanics specifically penalize are rolls only PCs ever make: haggling checks, all-or-nothing improvised social rolls, and intution checks to determine NPC motive. PCs with high stats are (as expected) very good at them, but PCs with low stats are terribly handicapped (far more so than a low-strength character swinging a sword).

* = (EDIT: running some more numbers, I just stumbled across a version that probably would work. More about that in a future blogging, as adding it here now would further bloat an already unreasonably-long post.)

Every character in the game needs a decent (at least a 3, and really it should be a 4) Toughness and Willpower, or else they'll spend most of the campaign carrying around a dangerous number of critical wounds and insanities, and slump over at the first sign of Fatigue or Stress. 2's in either of those stats will kill you. You also need either a high Strength, or a high Agility, to power your attacks. Wizards can get away with a high Intelligence + Willpower, and (at least some varieties of) priests can get away with a high Fellowship + Willpower. Between Strength and Agility, whichever of those stats you don't focus on, the other can be dropped down to a 2 with almost no associated downside or penalty. Likewise, each party needs a single character good at Fellowship, and a single character good at Intelligence, and everyone else could effectively dump those stats down to a 2 as well.

The opposed checks mechanic exists only to make that sort of min-maxing dangerous, and to reward the one person per party that decided to invest in the stats everybody else is ignoring. Opposed checks generate unfair results that double-dip on the stats and penalize those with 2's and 3's. Because the game fails to ever discuss the logic behind this, it strikes most readers as a bug. The moment you realize that Hans the shy dockworker can't ever pull a fast one on his coworkers, but Prof. Moriarty can always pass a Guile check vs Sherlock Holmes, you feel like you've just found a shocking loophole that the designers somehow missed. You didn't. That the system works like that was actually the entire point of their design.

There's one thing I'll say about FFG's crew: somebody over there (probably Jay Little) really knows their math. Words aren't always their strong suite, but numbers clearly are. The stance dice, and their complex interactions with the two sides of the action cards, are absolutely brilliant. There is a lot of very complicated math going on behind the scenes all throughout this game system, and so when I see something where the obfuscated math does something very pointed and unusual, I can only assume that it was put there for a reason.

As it turns out, if opposed checks it didn't work like that, there would be no downside to having a 2 in Fellowship. The game has such low difficulties across the board (outside of a low-stat Opposed check) that anyone can try their hand at any non-opposed check. If you're using the default difficulties for non-opposed checks (which is usually around 1 purple), anyone can reasonably do anything. "I absolutely suck at this" means I've only got a 62% chance of success. Unless it's an opposed check, that is.

While the game makes some nods towards Social encounters and progress trackers moved by "Influence the Target", the obvious truth is that most social situations likely to come up in play will be solved by a single roll of a single social skill. GM's might like the idea of building intricate social encounters, but it's a lot of work to do so, and is not an easy thing to improvise and still make it fun. The game is rather light in concrete examples of it in action, and off the top of my head I can't think of a single published adventure that has a really good one at it's core. If there is a good example, it's probably in the adventure from Lure of Power, but that came out very late in the game's development cycle.

This is Warhammer. The game has several-decades of reputation as the game where your party includes the dregs of the Empire. The party is more likely to be a ratcatcher, a blacksmith and a coachman than it is to be a knight, a wizard and a healer. That's a vital part of the setting and product identity, and FFG wasn't about to eliminate it entirely (even though they were interesting in making the game more cinematic and heroic than the previous editions). Part of the fun is being the unlikeliest of heroes. The spoiled nobleman fop, the illiterate peasant, or the malpracticing barber-surgeon that is thrust into the deep end and has to make do. Someone was going to draw those careers, and feel compelled to invest in non-combat stats just to be true to the character.

It's not fun for those players if everyone else (especially those lucky few who drew legitimate warrior careers) can sink those same points into killing things faster, and then still get by when forced to roll their one non-combat check of the session (because the difficulties are always low and success means the puzzle or social encounter is over). To make those colorful non-combatant careers worth playing at all, it was necessary to make 2s in non-combat skills suck.

The lengths the developers went to in the attempt to make these wackier careers worth playing is actually kinda cool and commendable. A vague framework of a social encounter system that takes a lot of GM prep time? That's to give the nobleman or agitator a chance to shine, and if you don't have one at the table the GM can skip it in favor of a single die roll. Obnoxious rarity and haggling system that relies on too many opposed checks? That's so merchants and conmen have an area where they feel needed, and if you lack that sort of character you can handwave it. Byzantine healing rules that involve a million die rolls? That's so barber-surgeons and physicians can be vital to the party, but if you don't have one, a liberal dose of GM fiat will whisk it all away.  All the clunkiest, most annoying parts of the rules exist just to make players of certain careers feel good. The only problem with all this is that FFG is so tight-lipped about design philosophy, they never actually say "skip this if you don't have a character at the table who cares about it."

Maybe I'm wrong and they don't intend you to skip them -- it could be that they expect high PC mortality rates to make all those careers relevant eventually -- but we'll never know because FFG never explains their motives or decisions.

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Arcane Afterthought: Wizards and Priests sort of break this dynamic I was just raving about. They both use a non-combat stat as a combat stat, and so get a large number of spotlight moments both in and out of battle from that single investment. The game tries to compensate for this by making 1st rank spells and blessings weaker than default actions, so they don't come into power until late in the campaign. The game also makes them vulnerable to a bad channel/curry roll, so they have to invest in a second stat (Willpower) to fuel their effects. Intelligence has the most skills, so Wizards in particular are also subject to nasty miscasts (there are also thematic reasons for this, but that's beside the point) and minor restrictions on armor. Priests avoid those downsides, but require extra XP investment to unlock their "magical" abilities in the first place, so they trail behind wizards in the early game (at a time when wizards themselves trail briefly behind others in combat at least). None of which really manages to bring wizards or priests back in line with the other characters in a long campaign -- any Wizard (and any Priest of Rank 2 or higher) has tons more options and spotlight moments than a similar-rank scholar or merchant.

Honestly, the biggest thing keeping this in "balance" there is the low frequency of these character types. To be a wizard or priest, you have to get that one particular career card as one of your three random draws from the pile of 50 basic careers (and not have anything of greater personal interest on the other two cards). If none of the players get a lucky draw on day 1, it's a non-issue. If you have every expansion and follow the character creation rules as written, there's a less than 25% chance of even having an apprentice wizard in a 4-player campaign.

Obviously this mitigating factor goes out the window if the GM lets players pick any starting career instead of drawing randomly, but even then it's a least partially mitigated by the lesser chance of anyone playing the random non-heroic careers who get eclipsed early on by Priests and Wizards. Even in these circumstances, a min-maxed caster will eventually grow to be better than everyone else at nearly everything, but you'll get 20-30 sessions of balanced play before that happens.

So again, perhaps the designers just figured the game's high lethality and grimdark grittiness would prevent characters ever living long enough for that to be an issue.

Why I don't like starting at Seasoned

Thursday night I played in the second half of a really good Savage Worlds short-shot where the PCs were Seasoned-level characters. Before going any further, I'll reiterate that it was a great game and I had lots of fun.

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At that session, however, I made an offhand comment about really not liking the process of how you make an experienced PC in the Savage Worlds system. The other players questioned me about it, but I couldn't articulate it at that moment. On the walk home from the game, though, I realized roughly my issue with it.

My main complaint can be summed up as:

• The system actively bills itself as being faster and lighter than D&D, but the process of making a Seasoned character is much slower and more complicated than making the equivalent level of character in D&D.
  

This complaint has several corollaries and sub-points, which are:

• Seasoned looks on the surface like it's the equivalent of a mid-level character in most systems, but it's really just the equivalent of 2nd-level in D&D.
• The greater flexibility in Savage Worlds open-ended character system means the learning curve of making a good character is much higher.
• While Edges and Feats are equivalent in power, the prereqs for an Edge are often more like the prereqs for a Prestige Class.
• It's really easy to screw up the order of your advances, or take more than one Seasoned-level advance, which means the GM has to police the character creation process pretty heavily.
• Novice level spellcasters are pretty potent in Savage Worlds, but advancing to Seasoned rank almost never results in any increase in the power of said magic-users. It's the inverse of the "Linear Fighters, Quadratic Wizards" trope.
  

That's it. The rest of this post is just specific examples of those points. If those points made the case for you, feel free to stop. If you're unclear about what I mean by any of that, read on...

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At first glance, the 4 advancements of being a Seasoned PC feels like you're making a 4th or 5th level character. But you're not, you're making a 2nd level character. Here's how I came to that conclusion:

The power increase from going from starting character to Seasoned in Savage Worlds is akin to the power increase in going from 1st to 2nd level in D&D. A fighter gaining second level in 3.x D&D gains +1 to his attacks, +2 skill points, and a bonus feat. A Feat is roughly like an Edge, and the rest are basically the same as advancing 4 Skills (consider that +1 to BAB in D&D is like increasing both your Fighting and Shooting skills in SW). That's 3 Savage World's advances right there. The D&D fighter then gets a +1 to his Fortitude Saves, which, by it self isn't nearly as broad as +1 to Vigor in SW, however, he also gets big boost in Hit Points - his chance of surviving any given sword blow has probably gone up by 50%. The combination of hit points and Fort is roughly equal to increasing Vigor by a Die-Type in SW. That's roughly equal to 4 advances.

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Even if the above point weren't true, and you were making a slightly higher-level character in comparison, I feel that SW makes the advancement system more complicated then it needs to be.

Let's say, for the sake of the argument, I'm making a D&D character of moderate level - say a 5th level character.

In 1st or 2nd Edition, that really only takes about 90 seconds longer than making a 1st level character. You had to pick a couple of proficiencies (none of which have prerequisites, and most of which will almost never actually matter in-game), and if you're a 2nd Ed Thief you had to assign some thief skill points. More if you're a spell caster, because you have two more spell lists to read over, but I'll say more about that in a moment. The biggest time-sink is just spending your extra money.

The important point is that in D&D you don't have to make a 1st level character, then advance them to 2nd level, then to 3rd, etc. Instead, you just make a 5th-level character, and the charts are set up to let you just copy over the relevant info. Your character is at least 200% more powerful, with only like 10% more work.

In 3.X edition D&D, it's a little more complicated. Everybody has skill points, and you're looking at an extra feat (or three for a fighter). Feats have prerequisites, so it can take a bit more time building the character, and you need to have an idea what you want the character to be. But, over all, it's still probably at most 15% more effort, for a character who is at least 200% more powerful. Again, the most lengthy part of the process is probably picking out your magic items. (And again, this is assuming you're not an arcane caster with spell lists to consider - I'll get to that, I swear.)

In Savage Worlds, a Seasoned character is definitely not 200% more powerful than a Novice character - it's more like a 50% increase in power. Yet despite that far tamer power curve, the amount of work added is about a 25% increase. Nearly twice as much additional effort for about a quarter of the boost. I'll detail why it's so complicated in the next section.


I'm going take a quick aside to justify my math on Savage Worlds:

Building a character has 4 steps.

1. You assign 5 attribute points - but that's really just two decisions, which single attribute do you want at d8 and which one do you want at d4. Yes, sometimes you'll decide you want a d10 in an attribute, but you probably won't do it at this stage - the drawback of having 2 or more traits at d4 is much nastier than the benefit of having a d10. 8/6/6/6/4 is the most common split I've seen.
   
2. You assign 15 skill points - which probably takes rather longer than the previous step. On the other hand, some character concepts need just a couple skills. Some characters have to make do with a lot of d4s, while others just pick 3 or 4 skills and max them out.
   
3. You pick 0 to 3 Hindrances. If this is your first Savage character, that's tricky. But by your 3rd, you'll realize that half the list (at least) are bizarre things you'd only use for 1 character in a thousand, and you can safely ignore them. How many one-armed or blind PCs do you make?
   
4. Now you choose 1 Edge, plus possibly a few more advances, depending on how many hindrances you've picked. Edges are beyond a doubt the trickiest thing about character creation. Many have prerequisites, some of which aren't easy to get. More on that in a later section.
   

Counting each skill point, it's a total of 19-26 decisions, with the majority of the difficulty being in the 1-3 decisions that could involve edges.

If you want, you could bump that up by including the equipment decision, but honestly, vanilla Savage Worlds has no decisions to make in regards to equipment. Unless you took the Pacifist Hindrance, you get the best weapon and armor available for the setting of the game - SW lacks the extensive equipment lists of D&D, and there's nothing in edges or powers that motivates you to take a substandard weapon. Plus, weapons are expensive enough, you aren't going to have a bunch of back-up and contingency items as a starting character.

Now let's look at a seasoned character. I'm only adding 4 more decisions - but they're all akin to the level of complexity of the Edge decision - slightly more so, because they can be an attribute raise, various permutations of skill bumps, etc, in addition to being Edges. Because they can be used for skills, you could call it 8 new decisions. 0, 1 or 2 of which can be attribute raises - if the number is 0, you'll also get 1 Seasoned-rank Edge or Power. If the number is 1, then you may or may not get a seasoned-rank Edge, depending on when in the process you raised that attribute. The number of decisions is probably only up by 20% or so. However, you're more than doubling the number of really hard decisions.

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In D&D, advancement just flows from your class. It's a hallmark of 3.X - advancement can be really tricky (multiclassing, prestige classes, complicated feat choices, etc) if you enjoy that, but it has plenty of tools to speed it up and simplify if you'd prefer - there's some straightforward paths to advance characters along that, once initiated, make leveling-up quick and easy.

Savage Worlds has no equivalent, no obvious choices, no shortcuts. If you've got the time to spend on it, and a good solid understanding of how the system works, that's an advantage to Savage Worlds. It's really flexible, and you're never pigeon-holed or restricted. But unless you've mastered the system, and have a really clear idea of what you want your character to be like, it's just tricky. The system is opaque. There's no archetypes to base your character on. It's hard to figure out just how much better d10 is than d8. No yardstick by which to measure how proficient your character actually is.

Partly as a result, those advances in Savage Worlds take a lot more thought than their D&D counterpart. It's not just read one line of a chart, then pick two skills (as it is to raise a D&D fighter by a level). Instead, on each of those 4 advances that make up a rank, I have darned-near limitless options. I'm choosing between raising one attribute, raising 2 skills, raising 1 really good skill, buying a whole new skill, or picking one of over 50 Edges. In the D&D equivalent, 3 of those 4 decisions are made for me, and all I really have to worry about is what feat I'm taking... if it's a level where I get a feat.

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Complicating it further is the prerequisite issue. Yes, I realize there's prereqs in D&D as well, but here's the big difference:

• While Edges and Feats are equivalent in power, the prereqs for an Edge are often more like the prereqs for a Prestige Class.

Let's say I want an Edge that does something simple but potent - a boost to my skills. Both games have a Feat/Edge called "Investigator", that gives you +2 to rolls to find clues and get information from people. In D&D, it has no prerequisites. In Savage Worlds, it requires you to have a d8+ (so, above average, and a significant expenditure during character creation) in Smarts, Investigation, and Streetwise.

Similar things can be said about Acrobatic/Acrobat, Stealthy/Thief, etc. There's a few exceptions (for example, every Savage Worlds PC effectively has D&D's Power Attack for free), but in general the prereqs are higher and more fiddly in Savage Worlds. The result is, much more care must be taken when advancing your SW character. I think the worst perpetrator I've seen is the Texas Ranger Edge in Deadlands Reloaded, the cost-to-benefit ratio for that one is just wonky. It costs 2 Attribute Points, 12 Skill points, and Seasoned Rank to qualify - for benefits that comparable to (and in some campaigns less reliable than) the Charismatic Edge.

On a related note, many of the best Edges list "Seasoned" (or a higher rank) as a prerequisite. Starting at a particular level doesn't mean you get to take Edges of that level. It means you get to take exactly 1 Edge of that level - or exactly 1 Power of that level - or raise 1 more attribute instead.

If I'm gonna have 4 or 8 advances, I need to think ahead to decide whether or not I need the early advances to qualify me (by being prerequisities) for the better advances I plan to take after them. It's really easy to get 3 advances in, and then realize you're 1 skill point short of the thing you want.

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The fact that you only get 1 Seasoned advancement when making a Season character trips me up a lot - for my most recent character, I basically had to build him three times to get the order of advancements right. From looking at other PCs character sheets, I see I'm not the only one having this trouble. My wife had similar troubles with her character. The GM caught a similar problem on another PCs sheet last night at the start of the game - and he'd even goofed up and taken 3 such advances, not just two. Likewise, in my Deadlands campaign, 2 of the 3 players who took Veteran of the Weird West had made the same mistake as well.

One reason for this is that in normal character creation, you get to apply the steps in whatever order you want. This means you can finagle "extra" skill points out of the system by using your bonus points from a Hindrance to boost your Attributes before doing skills. Or you can buy up a prerequisite skill to qualify for an Edge before you take it. In making a higher level character, however, you first build a Novice character, then apply advances in order. It seems like a simple and self-evident difference, and the Explorer's edition book just casually drops it in a single sentence. But it's a fundamentally different paradigm, and causes all sorts of slip-ups. Switching between the two modes requires a conscious analysis/transition, but nothing in the text makes that clear - and so again and again I see people screw it up.

Policing the character sheets to prevent this extremely common mistake, however, is really time-consuming. There's a decided lack of transparency in character creation - the order is so important, but there's no good way from a character sheet to track the order without deconstructing your build. A legal Seasoned character could have between 3 and 9 Attribute points, and between 10 and 32 Skill points, depending on Hindrances and order of creation. There's 13 edges and 7 powers that are restricted to Seasoned rank, and any PC can only have one of them - but if so they end up with 1 less Attribute point. You can't eyeball that.

So much so that the GM is tempted to just let it slide. A character built without paying strict attention to that timing restriction while leveling up can be a little more potent. That's all, just a little - the various Powers and Edges that require a higher rank aren't really all that much more potent, and there's (to Savage World's credit) not many degenerate combos in the system. If you goof up and take two Seasoned Edges, it's not like you're going to overshadow all the other PCs and make people angry.

So, you want to just say "screw it". However, there's a slippery slope here. It magnifies the potential that a player who's more familiar with the system will have a huge advantage over someone new to the game, and opens a potential for point-weaseling and munchkinism. A mistaken extra Seasoned power or edge won't unbalance anything - but intentionally taking all your advances as Seasoned-rank ones might. Or taking Seasoned-Rank powers with not just your advances but also initial character build - that'll give you a significant step up. Exceeding the number of Attribute raises you take, especially if you also have a Power who's derived stats come from those attributes will give you a huge leg up. So, a mistake is not likely to cause any troubles, but waiving all restrictions probably will.

This is not an insurmountable flaw, not a game-breaker, but it is the sort of thing that just rankles my hide.

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Now, as promised, let's talk about Magic. One of the strengths of Savage Worlds is the simplified magic system. The spell list is much shorter, and in theory the trappings let you customize as you need without having to read an extra 150 spell descriptions. Even assuming that the trapping system does that (which it would if they gave a few more examples - there's not much guidance and no real tools for balancing it in the Explorer's Edition), we still hit an issue with the utter lack of high end magic.

Savage Worlds seems takes pains to avoid the "Linear Fighters, Quadratic Wizards" trope. Magic Users do not appear to suddenly jump out ahead of other character types in later stages of the campaign. At first blush, this is admirable and welcome - I am not a fan of that trope, after all. However, the more I build high-rank characters, the more I suspect they overcompensated and went too far to fix it.

There are 31 spells in Savage Worlds - 20 of which can be taken by starting characters, 7 that require Seasoned level, and 4 that require Veteran status. Invisibility, Quickness, and Telekinesis are all pretty buff (Telekinesis sickly so), the other Seasoned-rank spells aren't really worth it. Of those 11 "higher level" spells, four of them are even sadly redundant to lower level powers:

• Blast is only marginally better than lower level Bolt or Burst (and not a lot better than Stun, either).
• Fly and Teleport both have situations where they are superior to Burrow and Speed, but come with a lot more complexity and expense in the process.
• Greater Healing is really expensive, and in most situations not actually more helpful than Healing.

No doubt there are specific situations, plotlines and campaigns where these will pay off, but their the sort of situations that a GM has to specifically set out to create, or else it will never matter. Unless a PC has Fly, the GM is not going to make the story involve an impassable crevasse 20 table top inches long with no bridge. Buying the power creates situations where the power is needed - kinda circular, huh? In D&D, that wouldn't be the case - there's an established number of flying creatures, traps and magical tricks are common, castles dominate the countryside, etc, and plenty of reason to expect every wizard will eventually be able to fly. That setting has a need to fly built into it, but SW has no default setting.

When you take one of these advanced Powers, you really don't get you much more than the Novice powers would give you. I had Burrow and Bolt, I'd never be seriously tempted to pick up Teleport and Blast. In both cases, sinking the points into my spellcasting skill would be a better upgrade - it'd make my existing powers more effective. Since Bolt (SW's Magic Missile) takes the same amount of Power Points as Blast (SW's Fireball), and does the same amount of damage, there's not much desire to take both. Bolt can hit the same target three times, or hit three targets. Blast, the "better spell" can sometimes hit more targets, but it's gonna be rare to get more than 3 enemies in the radius with no friendly fire problems, and it can never do more than 1 hit to a single target. The sole real advantage it has is the reduced chance of rolling 1's and getting a misfire - but since the dice mechanics of SW are a little wonky, it's hard to say if that's really better than just spending the advancement (where you would have bought Blast) on raising your Spellcasting stat. Either method reduces the chance of scoring a critical failure, and the later method would improve all your other spells as well.

In D&D, picking up new spells is pretty easy. Spellcasters just naturally gain versatility as they level up, and you're happy that you have both Magic Missile and Fireball, because it didn't really cost you anything. In Savage Worlds, each new spell costs an Edge. That edge, "Extra Power" feels weak. The original Arcane Background Edge got me 10 power points, plus 2 or 3 powers. The new Extra Power Edge gets me just 1 power, with no power points. I've gained versatility, but have to spread my powerpoints thinner to use it. They didn't just do away with "Linear Fighters, Quadratic Wizards", they effectively inverted it - it's now "Linear Everything Else, Diminishing Returns On Magic".

Compared to D&D, making an experienced wizard in Savage Worlds takes a lot less time - and I applaud that. This character type is the only one that takes so much less effort in Savage Worlds. It accomplishes this because there's such shorter spell lists to read over. However, the cost of that simplification is that you can't really capture the feel of a high-level wizard. There's just no spells that boggle the mind, wipe out armies, or make everyone sit up and take notice.

---

Well, I've rambled on long enough. The point was to just explain why I'm not enamored with making experienced characters in Savage Worlds. I don't feel they gain enough power to warrant the extra complexity. I'm pretty happy with starting characters in Savage Worlds, and feel my desire for elegance outweighs my desire for power. I'd rather play a starting character than have to worry about all that crunchiness.

MOCking one's self

"Ears" Petrov was the CP2020 character of mine that Jeremy mentioned at his blog. To Quote Jeremy:

"Rolfe's character has less social skills than the fence, no real combat skills to speak of, and didn't otherwise stand out in the crowd."

The following will be as painful to write as that was to read, but I'm pretty sure it will be cathartic.

My concept was actually quite the opposite of how it played out. His back story was that "Ears" Petrov was the guitarist of a band called "Eyes, Ears, Nose and Throat," which had a number one hit as recently as a year ago and then broke up suddenly when the lead singer went cyberpsycho and killed the drummer. He had failed to invest in his brief flash-in-the-pan, and was now slumming it while trying to figure out how to make a name for himself again. The other band members had been the ones with ambition - he had oodles of talent but no taste for marketing.

This could be seen as an obvious parallel to my situation in regards to the gaming industry - I'd been a bit of a force for the last six months to a year before Wargames West Distribution suddenly went out of business (due to emotional complexities on the part of owner), and then I vanished completely. My work was emulated (and in at least one case plagiarized) by other Distributors, but my name was no longer associated with it. Despite having been really good at marketing games, I was a total flop at marketing my own talents once that Industry Giant fell off it's beanstalk.

The dice then conspired with Rob and Sarah to completely hammer this metaphor home.

My character, Ears Petrov, was intended to be the face man, since no one else had any such desire during the big character-creation session. I was a Rockerboy with totals of (attribute + skill) of 16 to 18 on Charismatic Leadership, Wardrobe & Style, Social, Perform, and Human Perception. I could solve most difficult tasks in that niche by rolling a 3.

Sarah, as GM, felt it was important Charismatic Leadership (exclusive to Rockerboyz) not replace skills such as Leadership, Oratory, or Streetwise. Sadly, she told me this several sessions after character creation. I ended up rolling Charismatic Leadership once in the entire campaign. She also favored Persuasion / Fast Talk over Social, and favored rolls of Personal Grooming over Wardrobe & Style. This all cut into my character's effectiveness. Sarah had yet to establish her style as a GM, and her self-confidence was lacking, as such I wouldn't question her judgment or rules calls, not even in private.

Rob, missing the first session and character creation, asked what roles we had, and then built a fixer. Having never played cyberpunk before, I thought fixer was some sort of techie, so I didn't speak up about already being the faceman. Via cyberware and a more efficient distribution of points (stemming from years more experience at CP2020 in high-school campaigns where point-weaseling was encouraged) had totals of over 20 in Human Perception and Persuasion / Fast Talk. To further strip me of my spotlight, every time we both rolled for either of these skills, his die would be a 9 or 10, and I rolled far more than my fair share of 1's.

Despite the fact that I'd known and gamed with Rob for 5 years and never known him to be at all dishonest, I started getting irrationally paranoid. Eventually I started asking Sarah after sessions "did you see any of his dice rolls tonight, or just hear totals after modifiers?" which didn't help the situation at all. My being so accusatory of her high-school chum was rude, even if it was behind the scenes. I was pissing off my wife and GM, by repeatedly making an ass of myself out of jealousy over Rob's dice karma. Sorry. Had I just asked to revise my character to match the skills she found pertinent to social interactions, she probably would have said yes.

I feared the dice, and tried to avoid rolling them. This was doubly true for things my character should have been good at. After about 4 or 5 sessions of that, I was so fed up with it, I just changed my character concept to match my die-rolls. It was easier for me to play a burned-out loser than to get yet another critical failure on a skill I was practically maxed out on. I started cracking jokes about how bad his band was, and how he was nothing now that Eyes and Throat were dead. When Sarah asked me to make some item cards for cool low-value stuff we could find as random loot, I presented her with the card on the right.

I even badgered an NPC to shoot me with my own gun at one point. Everybody was shocked, so since it was my gun I claimed OOC that I knew what I was doing and the math of it guaranteed she couldn't hurt me. This was a lie - a critical hit on a head-shot would have meant a new character and a great tale about fateful last words. Yet despite all this, I really loved that game. I am a truly complicated individual.

but I digress...

For the past 5 posts or so ago, I tried to share a very simple concept, and kept getting mired in tangents. Getting mired is rarely fun, as we'll read below.

Finally, the topic at hand: The most brokenly point-weaselish Ork army I ever wrote up for Warhammer 40k. I never played it, 'cause I'm just not a Munchkin at heart, and I knew no one would enjoy facing it.

It was a 2,000 point army. Warboss (nothin' terribly special, but on a cyboar), several small mobz (squads) of Snakebite Boarboyz, pretty much the maximum compliment of Squig Catapults, and the rest in Gretchin.

Here's how it would have worked. I'd deploy the Gretch up front, and fan them out on the opening turn. Each mob of boar-riders allowed one extra runtherd, so the Gretchin could operate at a slightly higher morale rating. Gretch, of course, had very little chance of killing anything. That didn't matter, they were there to be speed-bumps and cover. The idea was that any foe who tried to approach would get mired in melee.

In addition to providing extra Runtherdz, the boarboyz would be available as tactical strike teams. If any enemy unit tried to break through the Gretch screen, I could respond quickly.

What would actually have won the game would have been the often-crappy catapults. These heavy weapons are crewed by Gretchin, and fire hives of Buzzer Squigs. Think killer bees that won't sting Orks. The templates move randomly about the battlefield every turn after being fired. Individually, or as a battery of 2 or 3, the catapults where unpredictable and wacky, but not unbalancing. The odds of any given buzzer squig template bagging a target is normally pretty unlikely. However, I've seen one down a Carnifex, in one shot, on turn one, with a lucky miss (not even a hit). It was seeing that happen that caused me to think of this stratagem.

At 40 points a piece, I could easily afford 20-30 Squig Catapults from the 1,000 points of my support budget, and spread them out across the back of my lines. That meant that even with misfires and the resulting attrition, I could expect to place at least 20 templates on the board on the first turn, and a good 50+ by game's end.

In fact, I just got out the old codex, and did some math. Starting with just 24 catapults my statistical average (counting misfires) would be 69 templates having been deployed before the game ended. Most would miss, but the effect would be total chaotic disruption of the enemy lines. Cover wouldn't help. Toughness and forcefields would be irrelevant. Heavy weapons and melee troops alike would be just wasted points.

I'm pretty sure there's only two strategies that would stand a chance against this.

• Massed indirect weapons fire devastating my gretchin when they were clumped together on the first turn. I don't know if Eldar (or Tau these days) could pull that off, but I'm confident you could build a Guard army that could do it. However, a Guard army needs to roll a 6 to my 1 in order to win the initiative for the first turn. With just one movement phase, I'll have spread out enough to stop it.
  
• The other strategy would be open to Eldar, Space Marines, and Sisters of Battle - it would involve jump packs or teleporters to put entire squads into my deployment zone on turn 2. Most other fast-attack troops would be incapable of getting there in time or be too few in number. Bikes and Genestealers would get mired in the Gretchin waves, heavy vehicles would be an easy target for coordinated catapults, and a Lictor or Imperial Assassin can at best take out two catapults a turn.

Working through this revolutionized the way I built armies for 40k. The best tactics made the game unfun for the other player, which also made me not want to play anymore. I played two or three games after theorizing this army, then switched to Gorkamorka.

Munchkinism vs Point-Weaseling

Munchkin: Someone who sees all Roleplaying Games as a competitive sport, and is willing to use less-than-ethical means to feel like he or she is "winning." There are a few intentionally-competitive RPGs out there, Rune and Amber for example, and most LARPs. The Munchkin is distinguished by shady actions and a desire to achieve at the expense of the other players - not just at the expense of adversarial characters.

Point-Weasel: Someone who "min-maxes" a system, by making every decision during character creation (or XP expenditure, magic item creation, etc) based on achieving the maximum possible impact from the system. A point-weasel never asks "is this fair?" Character concept, or the overall enjoyment of the game, are distantly tertiary to the attempt to milk every advantage out of a system.

Corollaries to these: Munchkinism can manifest as point-weaseling, or as resource-hording, spotlight-stealing, or out-and-out cheating. Not all munchkins are point-weasels. By the same token, I've met people who point-weasel at character creation but then do a fine job of role-playing cooperatively ever after. Making an effective character isn't the same as point-weaseling, either, provided said character has flavor and doesn't take abusive advantage of obscure loopholes in the rules. Also, note that "playing to win" isn't munchkinism when playing a game where there is a way to win, and winning is the stated goal.

Developer: A person who's job or hobby is to playtest and refine a game system with the intention of minimizing the opportunities for munchkinism and point-weaseling.

To those who design point-based character creation systems...

Here's a lengthy rant. It was recently provoked by Scion, but I first noticed this issue in the 7th Sea RPG. Truth be told, the problem is as old as gaming itself.

My rant will start with number crunching, but get into design theory and philosophy before I'm done. The part where numbers turn into theory will be marked by a picture of Odysseus amongst the stars - why, 'cause it's a picture I can conveniently upload. And it gives a visual clue to those who want to skip the parts of my rant that deal with math and the specifics of the Scion RPG experience system.

Where it begins: Some RPGs use point-based character creation systems. In the abstract, it's my preferred character gen ideology, since it gives so many options to the player. However, sometimes the execution has problems...

Often times that problem is that the system uses a different type of point for character creation and character advancement. If it was just semantics, two functionally identical points with the same name, it would be perhaps a tad silly but not troublesome. The issue comes when the points work differently.

Let's look at Scion, a game I love and am having a blast GMing/Storytelling. In Scion, you get multiple types of points. First there's "dots" that you get in various categories, such as Attributes and Epic Attributes or Boons. Then you get "bonus points" that can be used to buy things from any of those categories at the end of character creation. And later you get "experience points" at the end of each session. Even later, if you become a Demigod, you get a second round of "dots" and additional "bonus points". Dots vary by category and occasion, bonus points come in a cluster of 15, and xp arrives about 4 to 6 per session.

Raising an Attribute from level 2 to 3 costs 1 dot, 4 bonus points, or 8 xp.
Raising an Attribute from level 4 to 5 also costs 1 dot or 4 bonus points, or it costs 16 xp.
Note that it's the same cost in dots or bonus points, but double the cost in xp.
Conclusion #1: Mechanically, you're encouraged to raise your most important attributes only at character creation and ascension to Demigodhood. But the attributes that only matter a little to your character concept you can put at really low during character creation and then bump up to mid-level with xp.
Conclusion #2: Effectively you get a price break if you focus heavily at character creation and then use xp to just cover your self-inflicted weaknesses. If you had to choose between having three attributes at 2, 2 and 5 or having them both all at level 3, you're better off going with 2, 2, and 5. It will save you xp in the long run.

Epic Attributes do the same thing:
Epic level 0 to 1 costs 1 dot, 4 - 5 bonus points, or 8 - 10 xp
Epic level 1 to 2 costs 1 dot, 4 - 5 bonus points, or 4 - 5 xp.
Epic level 2 to 3 costs 1 dot, 4 - 5 bonus points, or 8 - 10 xp.
Conclusion #3: Conclusions 1 and 2 also applies to Epic Attributes.
Conclusion #4: Since getting to 1 from 0 costs more xp than getting from 1 to 2, you are also encouraged to take at least one level in any Epic you plan on ever being interested in. Doing so saves you 4-5 xp, which is about an entire session's worth.
Conclusion #5: At the end of character creation, each Epic should be rated at 0 or 3, rarely at 1, and never at 2 (0 if you'll never be interested in it, 3 if you plan to use it at all, and 1 only if you really wanted it at a 3 but ran out of points to get there).

But there's this other category of powers called Boons.
A level 1 Boon costs 1 dot, 4-5 bonus points, or 4 - 5 xp
A level 2 Boon costs 2 dots, 8-10 bonus points, or 8 - 10 xp
A level 3 Boon cost 3 dots, 12-15 bonus points, or 12 - 15 xp
Note that while dot cost remains in ratio with bonus point cost and xp cost.
Conclusion #6: Conclusions 1 through 4 don't apply to Boons. There's no way to get an effective xp break on Boons. If you had to choose between three level 1 Boons and one level 3 Boon, either is an equally good choice from a point of xp. So, you'd choose based on personal desire for one big flashy power or the versatility of multiple little powers.

Now's where it gets interesting. Epics and Boons come out of the same pool of Dots. Let's compare them:
Epic level 0 to 3 costs 3 dots, 12 - 15 bonus points, or 20 - 25 xp.
A level 3 Boon cost 3 dots, 12-15 bonus points, or 12 - 15 xp.
Note the same cost in dots or bonus points, but Epics cost nearly twice as much in xp / Boons cost just over half as much in xp.
Conclusion #7: Mechanically, your best move is to spend all those dots on Epics. Leave the Boons for your experience points later. Provided you eventually get them all to the same level, doing so saves you 8-10 xp (nearly two session's worth) for each Epic you buy at character creation instead of a Boon.

So, conclusions paraphrase: Your best call during character creation is focus on a few high Attributes and a few high Epics. Leave everything else at their starting/base level. You should never buy Boons with dots or bonus points, only with XP.

Conclusion #8 (Drawn from that paraphrase): Focused, narrowly specialized characters will eventually be much better than jack-of-all-trades generalists. They have vulnerabilities if the opening sessions of the campaign, but they will compensate for them much faster (for fewer xp) than the generalist evenly spent PC will be able to catch up with the specialists best moves and powers.


(For those who scrolled down to this picture to start, what you missed is an in-depth analysis of the Scion RPG experience and character creation systems, some quirks in said systems, and how to maximize your character by drawing conclusion from those quirks) The rest is observations, theory and philosophy...


In my experience, players will generally fall into one of three categories:
Category A: "I made those conclusions the first time I looked at the Scion rulebook. My character is all the better for it. I'm here to game."
Category B: "I made those conclusions at some point, but had a cool character concept that was fun to play even if it meant a few suboptimal decisions at character creation. I'm okay with lagging behind in XP because my character does really neat things right out of the gate and is a lot of fun to play. I'm here to roleplay."
Category C: "I'll never notice. All this math isn't my thing. I'm here to have fun."

Now, I wish everyone fell into category B. Oh, the games we'd have then! But my experience is that the real distribution amongst gamers is 45% A, 30% C, and only 25% B. And that's after years of gaming and self-selecting my gaming groups.

Back when I was in junior high, and only 3 people in town role-played, it was a very clear 33%A, 66%C, 0%B breakdown. For the record, I was group C. And when I figured out that one person in our little clique was Type A, I was pretty rude to him. "Point Weasel" was I called him, but I think "Munchkin" and "Twink" are the accepted (but no less harsh) terms these days.

But I wasn't being fair. (And wherever you are, dude, my apologies) The game system we were using had the same flaws, I just couldn't see them yet. He did, and he took advantage of it. The books were (and generally are) written to reward you for figuring out the math behind the systems, but that math is almost never (in the books) put into language that could possibly make a Type C player get it. That language, in Scion, would have been something along the lines of my 8 conclusions, above. Just conclusion #8 and the paraphrase directly preceeding it would have done it. 2 extra paragraphs added to a 330-page book would have benefited hundreds of gamers.

The same thing is what contributes to the main criticisms of D&D 3.x and the OGL. All those feats and prestige classes and 3rd-party supplements mean you min-max and penny-pinch or tweak your character for days.
The Category A's think there's nothing wrong with it, and the rulebooks clearly agree with them. For a subset of this Category, figuring out how to get the most out of the system is part of the fun.
The Category C's often think it's cheating, and many get as rude as I used to about it. Even if they don't call it cheating, it'll often rip the fun out of the game for them, because they don't want to crunch numbers, they want to play and socialize.
The Category B's can go either way. Some will be happy with a character that's fun and unique, and others will slowly grow resentful of their Cat A buddies till it wrecks the group.

Nowadays, I'm pretty clearly in the B category. Concept is most important to me, but I'll analyze a system to make sure there's nothing that's really holding my character back. If I notice something (like the above 8 conclusions) before character creation is done, I'll point them out to the rest of the group.

After character creation, it's a lot less useful, but I still get pretty offended at the subset of Category A players who horde the secrets of the system to themselves. Sometimes it's about ego, they want to have the most powerful PC at the table. Sometimes it's about not trusting the GM, pulling a fast one because your so fearful the GM will kill your character.

But the thing I need to keep in mind is that most of the time, for most of the Cat A's, it's a much more innocent reason: "Huh, that looks like it might be better. I'll try it out. If it proves to be really broken, everybody will notice and the GM will house-rule it. But if turns out just a little better than my other options were, then nobody gets hurt and it's all a-o-k. Next time we're making characters, since I'll know how well it works by then, I can tell everybody about it."

The game that opened my eyes was 7th Sea. We were several hours into character creation for the first time, and everyone was nearly done but me. We were all really tired. I was trying to decide whether or not I really could stretch my points to be both a Swordsman and a Full-Blooded Mage. Weighing it in my mind, I decided to look at the XP charts to see how long it'd take me to regain things I might cut from my character sheet to make room for it. Suddenly I realized that the base Swordsman and Mage placeholders were all I needed, that and the Attribute called Panache. All the Advanced Knacks dropped off the character sheet, 'cause I'd get them all cheaper by experience a couple sessions down the road. Sure, I'd roll less dice in the first few combats, but since Panache let me act so quickly, it'd be sure to hit at least once a round. It was late, I was tired, and I didn't think to explain this to my fellow players, who had already finished their characters.

Three sessions later people were pissed at me (And here's another apology, for a different group of people: Sorry I didn't speak up the night we made our characters, I really should have) because I got twice as many actions as them, had made up for most of their initial dice lead, and had Magic and Swordsman tricks too. I felt horrible, but it was too late to do anything about it.

My advice to game designers and developers: the lessons to be taken from this are ones that Monte Cooke has already called out a couple years back. I'm mostly seconding what he said. We need to step down from our Ivory Towers and meet the people. We need to make sure the character creation sections of our rulebooks include simple approachable statements about the math behind our game systems. We need to ensure it's possible to get the most out of your character without 2 hours of math and multiple thorough reads of the rulebook.

Don't worry too much about losing those for whom the dissecting of the rules is a big part of the fun. We can still debate the merits of whether an low-damage area-effect power is better than a high-damage single-target ability. And you can make the high-end powers (that starting characters don't get) have all the depth and subtlety that requires analysis - by the time a player gets to worrying about those they're pretty invested in the game and already know what they're doing.

Make sure the most basic math of your system is spelled out where (and in a way that) the non-scientists can get their hands on it. It'll improve everyone's first experience with your game. Thanks.