7 Feats? For a starting character?

This is just a little rant about game mechanics. It's really not helpful in any way, and not particularly entertaining. If you're looking for usable content, scroll down to my next post.

If you just want to hear me whine a little bit, this is the place.

When I did my initial review of the Warhammer 3rd Ed, one of the things I didn't like about the game was the analysis paralysis that sets in during character creation. Between the main game and the player's toolkit there's over 100 action cards, and they're not easy to analyze. You could spend all day reading over the action cards, and still not know what's best for your character. As it turns out, it's actually a little worse than that. On top of the 100 action cards, there are more than 70 talent cards.

Turns out the analysis paralysis isn't only likely to show up at character creation. I'm really glad they put everything on cards, or this game would be a nightmare. Instead, the cards make it run smoothly.

I was thinking about it today, though, and I realized just how insanely buff starting PCs are. Talents and Actions are both very much like Feats in D&D, or Edges in Savage Worlds. It's relatively easy for a starting character to begin the game with 3 Talents and 4 Action cards, that would use 6 of your 20 to 25 character points.

Imagine a 1st-level D&D 3.x character that starts with 7 Feats. Or a starting Savage Worlds character somehow loaded up with 7 Edges. That seems pretty busted, right? Surprisingly, WFRP has fewer combos, so I think it's probably less unbalancing than giving someone 6 extra feats or edges would be in either of those games. Still, it was kind of a shock when I sat down to analyze it.

So I broke out my rarely-used D&D 4.0 PHB to compare. There a PC starts with 1 Feat, 2 at-will attack powers, 1 encounter attack power, and 1 daily attack power. This is roughly the equivalent of 1 Talent and 4 Actions in WFRP's terms, as near as I can eyeball it. So, you're only a little bit stronger / more diverse in WFRP than in 4.0 D&D, and that only if you choose to spend 6 of your 20 points on talents and actions. You could just as easily build a valid WFRP character with 0 talents and 1 only special action. Unless, of course, we factor in the 8 "basic actions" that all PCs start with. You just have a lot of options in WFRP.

Why on earth do they give starting PCs so many options? It's a design choice I'll never understand. If I'd written the rulebook, all PCs would start with exactly 2 talents and 1 special action. Instead they start with 0-3 and 1-4, and I don't feel like the game gains anything for having all this extra options at character creation. Later on, when you know the system better and are advancing your characters, it's probably justified, but right out of the gates, it's overwhelming. Remember the law of 7 +/- 2? It would seem the FFG crew have either never heard of it, or at least interpret it very differently. I guess they thought it should mean "don't start with more than 7 Feats"...

It's especially weird for a game whose previous editions are noted for the meager power levels of starting characters. I guess they wanted to distinguish this edition from that which came before, but it seems an inelegant way to do so. WFRP 1st & 2nd are the game where a single goblin armed with a wooden spoon is a danger capable of a TPK, though, so maybe I shouldn't complain. There was certainly room to build up the heroism a few notches, and 3rd Ed did so rather nicely, even if it did so at the cost of making character creation painful.

I'm planning on running WFRP for my weekly one-shot group sometime soon. When I do, it'll be with pregens, and for most of the characters, I'll be going with 1 or 2 talents, and only 1 or 2 actions. I might even trim the default character points down from 20 to somewhere in the low teens. I see no need to complicate things to the fullest extent possible.

Gripe session over. We now return you to (hopefully) more useful content...

Fine tuning via the Law of Three

Yesterday, re: Robot Chicken RPG, I wrote:

The point system didn't work as smoothly as I'd hoped. There were scenes where players did hilarious things, but scored hardly any points at all. In the future, I'll lighten up the scoring a little bit. If you make the whole group laugh, that should be worth 25 points, and probably every time you roll a d12 (in other words, every time you use your Depth Card) it should be another 5 or 10 points.

Thinking about that in the context of the Law of Three*, it now seems obvious how to handle this. The first three times in any given scene that you use your Depth Card, it's worth +10 points. After that, it's not worth points any more. This motivates players to use their powers/skills, but only as often as it's adding to the fun. If the power is one that's still fun or beneficial after the third use, it'll get leaned on naturally, but if it's just something that grows old quickly, you won't get points for over-emphasizing it. Since you can stop counting at three, it's pretty easy to know if someone deserves the full benefit - even the worst cheater can't squeak more than 20 or 30 extra points out over the course of a game, so you can safely run the honor system even if you do care who won the session that night.

*: The Law of Three: Our brains intuitively make the leap from "it happened three times" to "it can happen an infinite number of times, and is to be expected." That gap is much smaller than the processing gap between "happened twice" and "happened three times". This is why professional running gags mostly use the pattern of once, twice, pause, three times. Once something's happened a third time, it's crossed from exceptional to accepted. More on this subject.

Amber +/-2

I also admire Amber more thanks to that observation.

Amber had 4 attributes. It has 7 powers. They're very clear that the vast majority of your points should go into the 4 attributes and 1 or 2 powers. Erick Wujcik was also quite up-front that Pattern costs 50 points but is a bargain. He encourages you to buy Pattern, because it's such a sweet deal, and that encouragement has saved the bacon of many a new player on more than one occasion.

Unfortunately, he also claims "Psyche is the most important attribute," then says the same about Strength, Endurance, and Warfare. That makes players not want to trust his advice (and the GM's advice, since we typically use that same line on the players).

Better character creation for Amber would happen if you invert the order. Tell the players to pick (and commit to) one or two powers before the attribute auction. Do it secretly, so no one benefits from knowing how many points others have left. Adjust point totals, then auction as normal. If you have points left over, then we haul out artifacts, worlds, and followers/creatures. If not, don't sweat it.

Still, it's hard to find a more brain-friendly character creation system than the one from the Amber DRPG.

Scion +/-2

Thinking about my latest post, I find I admire Mark Rein-Hagen just a bit more, and the work of the 15 or so authors of White Wolf's more recent Scion line that much less.

• Mark designed Vampire: The Masquerade. In that first edition, he said there were 13 tribes of vampires, but only let PCs choose from between 7 of them. It was relatively easy to store the archetypes of 7 vampiric tribes in your mind. Easier than 13, anyway.
• In the game he had 9 attributes, and seemed to know that might be pushing the envelope of some people's memory. So, rather than giving you points to split 9 ways, he instead had you first rank Physical vs Social vs Mental. You'd make that 3-way decision, then move on to subsets of 3-way decisions to make it all easier to handle. Smart move, that.
• Likewise, instead of 30 skills, you had Skills, Abilities, and Talents, IIRC. You'd prioritize those 3 groups based on your concept of the characters professional or educational background. Then, within each group you'd get some number of points. This wasn't quite as fluid as the Attributes, but it was worthy effort, at least.

But then compare that to Scion:

• 6 pantheons to choose from in the main book. That's not too bad.
• But each pantheon has a dozen Gods statted out, and you have to choose one to be your parent. Luckily, you've got mythology to draw upon, it's not clans or characters you've never heard of. You probably already have one or two favorites from mythology.
• For attributes, they kept the Phy/Soc/Men distinction, and it's subchoices. Good for them. But for skills, they just made one big list of 25 or 30 skills, many of which are further subdivided into specialties. Luckily, skill dice become irrelevant fairly quickly, so poor choices at this stage won't hurt you much.
  
• Then you get 10 dots to split between Epics and Boons, combined. Here's where the problems set in.... There's 9 Epics (available at 1-3 dots each, and 15 knacks to choose from for each Epic), and 50+ boons (3 boons each in 16 standard purviews, +3 special purviews that use levels, one of which also has spells which adds another half-dozen choices at least) to choose from if you're making a Hero-level PC. Your divine parent gives you an xp break on half a dozen of those, but it's not such a break that it makes you stay purely "within type" - you can take any boon you want, and most PCs will dip outside the parently purviews.
  
• By mid-campaign, you've 200 to 400 things you could be spending your XP on, and it's downright overwhelming.

That last point pisses me off. Faced with a landslide of possible expenditures, the players who are playing for fun, or to portray a character or tell a story just don't work at figuring out the puzzle. They grab whatever strikes their fancy, 'cause they don't want to spend time trying to balance out everything. Meanwhile, the munchkins who are playing to stroke their own egos find it worth their time to analyze and dissect between games. So the very people you don't trust with the most powerful characters end up with characters that are more powerful than everyone else. If you simplify things, and are up-front about the best choices in character design, you end up with minimal power gap between the players you trust and the players you want to throttle.

7 +/- 2; no more than 3x if it's magical

Here's a link to a cool blogpost at Delta's D&D Hotspot about the limitations to how our minds process information, and how those limits should be applied to RPGs. It's good advice, and I plan on heeding it in my own future designs. In a nutshell...

• The human mind can evaluate (and store in short term memory) between 5 and 9 parcels of information at a time. More than that leads to analysis paralysis (or just forgetting things).
• Therefore, no single step in character creation should include a choice between more than 5-9 alternatives.
• Likewise, no single die roll should ever have more than 5-9 modifiers.
• The more complicated the parcels, the fewer you can handle, and the exact limit varies a bit from person to person. So, to handle the lowest common denominator effect, you should really read "5-9" as "5, maybe 6 if it's fairly simple".
• Another, largely unrelated property of the human mind is that we tend to think of things as: one-time unique event, two-time coincidence, and three-times means there's a pattern.
• As a result, things that you want to feel exceptional or magical shouldn't happen more than twice in any single game session. If you can cast that spell 4 times per session, it no longer feels special.
• An exception would be things that happen 3 times, but with a long pause between the second and third iterations. Like a recurring joke in a movie, when the long-delay third riff occurs, you laugh heartily and say "I shoulda seen that coming!"

Okay, so that wasn't a nutshell - it was 7 nutshells, coming from 2 different nut-trees. But, as a result, it was still just short enough for you to grok the point. (Well, most of you, anyway)