Role Playing Games – Builder’s Guide 4

The Challenge: An important challenge in creating a role playing game—and one prone to be overlooked—is the challenge of game variety. Many role playing games are genre-specific, their rules geared to only a certain game style. Indeed, some RPGs specify more than just genre. The game world, story line, even play style are all used as factors in game design.

Not all RPGs worry excessively about this. Many use a specific game world or story line setting to benefit from brand loyalty and recognizable realms and characters. However, the more variety the game makes available, the greater the game’s potential to draw in players.

In any case, particularly specific role playing games fit their niches well enough. The designers who truly have to worry about the fourth challenge are those who intend to create a reasonably broad RPG. The fact is that role players demand variety. Browse the web sites (or even the banner ads!) of a few on-line role playing games, and you will quickly find that one of the most common selling points is the number (and, sometimes, unpredictability) of the character types they offer. Role players enjoy having a lot of character types to choose from. A fantasy game that only has fighters, wizards, clerics, and rogues won’t cut it, as won’t a sci-fi game where the only choices are astronaut, robot, and alien.

Crossovers are also becoming popular in some groups. There are plenty of players out there who would much prefer a game where robots and aliens can fight alongside fighters and wizards. And if there is a superhero or two in the group, so much the better!

But for a game to provide such options, it must be versatile. The RPG has to be able to support not only the vast (infinite?) number of character types that imaginative players might think of within a single genre, but if you want to cater to crossover players, also to the possible character types from other genres. And you have to do so while maintaining the first three challenges, and the six that will be provided afterwards.

The Risk: So now you know why it is good to make for a game with variety. So let’s say you intend to do so, going all-out with any genre possible. Good!

Here’s the problem.

You immediately find friction between this challenge and the third challenge, character value. Technological development insists that a sword is a better weapon than a club, a gun better than a sword, and a laser rifle better than a gun. So how are you supposed to maintain character value between a party that consists of a cave man, a medieval knight, a modern soldier, and a futuristic robot?

You also need a solid and balanced way for forces from opposed genres to interact. Consider magic, superhero powers, technology (both modern and futuristic separately, of course), psychic abilities (possibly differentiating between aliens, gifted modern humans, and mind-crafting mages), and simple physical prowess, to name just a few broad groups of abilities. Can you reliably say that any of them trumps the others? If so, you are shattering character value. Do they interact at all? If not, there is no way for such characters to defend themselves against one another, turning any cross-genre encounters into “who goes first” tests. Perhaps certain powers interact in superior fashions, each having ways to counter others? Too complicated, with too much emphasis on certain abilities. Players wind up locked into a multi-genre arms race rather than able to play the characters they want to play, which simply counters the point.

You could have each sort of ability working in a different way, but again, the complexity is there. In that case, it’s almost like you’re creating a different role playing game for each genre, and collecting them all into an anthology. This naturally leads to too many supplements, and a feeling that players have to buy them all to keep up to date. Good for business, bad for players, and very bad for attracting new players to a new RPG, where there is no brand loyalty getting them to buy even the core book, let alone supplements.

And, of course, there is the problem of interacting abilities within a single character. What happens when a robot learns magic or a cave man develops psychic powers? How about a superhero wielding an enchanted greatsword in one hand, an antimatter rifle in the other, and a wand of fireballs telekinetically? Players want to have access to such character types. They have to be taken into account.

The problem is that the more rules you have for describing different abilities, the more likely it is for those rules to interact in a critically unbalancing way. Next thing you know, characters have gotten around every limit you place on each genre, and used cross-genre abilities to improve their power more in a multiplicative fashion than an additive one. Variety is what players want, and it is the hardest thing to give them without breaking the system.

The Solution: As I noted in previous articles, the core rules for QoTR rely on a selection of broad ability types, each with lists of advantages that a character specializing in the ability can gain. Unlike many role playing games, the actual abilities the character has and the player’s description of its abilities are not tied together save for to assert that the description must emulate the stats. Of the various systems I have tried, I found this to be the best option for allowing unlimited description, versatile stats, and balanced character value.

Put simply, a swordsman who specializes in attacking and defending is no better or worse than a robot, modern soldier, or caveman of the same level who specializes to the same degree. Discounting specifically chosen penalties, they all have access to the same abilities and have the same stats. Their descriptions, however (and possibly the abilities that they use most frequently), will vary widely.

There is the potential for some glitches in realism using the system, but realism is actually little more than a sub-genre in and of itself. Some RPGs make a terrible mistake of assuming that players wish to play a realistic game. In QoTR, I handle realism by putting it in the player’s hands. If you want to play a realistic game, build and use your character realistically. The game rules allow plenty of leeway for character design, so players should suffer no real penalty for electing to limit their actions to realistic levels. There are options for unexploitable hindrances (yes, unexploitable) that players who wish to realistically limit their actions can use to get higher stats in other areas or other bonuses. Also, many abilities have a cost to use anyway; ignoring two abilities only gives you two more uses of the ability you really like.

Variety is one of the most important aspects of a role playing game, and also one of the most difficult to properly use. Assumptions and excessive detail can lead to imbalances that only squelch the opportunity to use the versatility offered to its fullest extent. To best encourage variety, design a system that allows players to build characters they way they wish to play them, and forces them to play their characters the way they built them.

Copyright © 2006 Dustin Schwerman.

Dustin Schwerman has been playing RPGs for over a decade, using an analytical approach to critically evaluate the game systems (and so to create the most powerful characters he could get away with). He used the extensive experience gained doing so to create his own game, Quests of the Realm. QoTR focuses on unlimited character customization, relying on its author’s understanding to detect and counter game-breaking power plays. Though balanced, QoTR still allows players to create highly effective characters and run them through heroic story lines. To contact Dustin, read more of his writings, or learn more about Quests of the Realm, visit his web site, Quellian-dyrae.