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Weird (Game Design Corner)
Mar. 25th, 2009 04:38 pmIf you look into the examples in my entry on the Hero System, you can see, in broad strokes, how you could create such broken characters. The first trick is abuse of disadvantages: Make your PC a blind illiterate quadriplegic with a dozen enemies and a half-dozen dependents and you'll get a gazillion points to blow on game-breaking powers. The second trick is to plow all of those points into a single ability. You can only do one thing, but when that "one thing" is throwing planets at people, who the hell cares?
Now the Hero System designers wanted their game to be playable, and not just the butt of jokes, so they imposed hard limits on these kind of abuses. They restricted the number of points one could get from disadvantages (these limits were too high, in my opinion, but that's another issue), and they told GMs to impose maximum levels on attack damage, defenses, attack speeds, and so forth.
I understood the need for these restrictions, but I felt they were too rigid. I felt that a superhero game should be designed in such a way that a generalist, like Batman, and a one-trick pony like the Flash, could be in the same party and be on more-or-less equal footing. Point-build systems were supposed to be both extremely flexible and finely balanced. If one-trick ponies broke the game, maybe it would be better just to charge them more points for their single powers, and do so in a way that balanced them with the generalists?
One solution would be to charge players on a sliding scale for their abilities, imposing higher marginal costs as ability values rose. I considered this approach for Two Fisted Tales, but ultimately rejected it, because I felt it worked clumsily with character templates (I wasn't happy with how they interacted in 3rd edition GURPS, for example).
Then I remembered DragonQuest, the old SPI fantasy RPG. In DragonQuest you rolled 2d10, and this told you how many points you had to spend on characteristics and the range of values they could take. The higher the roll, the more points you had to spend, but the lower your characteristic maximum: If you rolled a 2 you got 81 points, with a ceiling of 25, and if you rolled a 20 you got 99 points, but your highest score could only be a 19.
I didn't like the random roll, but in other respects, I saw a lot of potential in the approach, in which players could spend points to raise their ability maximums. My original name for this ceiling was MAX, but I didn't care for it. Later, I thought that characters with freakishly high ability scores were "weird," and the name stuck.
Now the Hero System designers wanted their game to be playable, and not just the butt of jokes, so they imposed hard limits on these kind of abuses. They restricted the number of points one could get from disadvantages (these limits were too high, in my opinion, but that's another issue), and they told GMs to impose maximum levels on attack damage, defenses, attack speeds, and so forth.
I understood the need for these restrictions, but I felt they were too rigid. I felt that a superhero game should be designed in such a way that a generalist, like Batman, and a one-trick pony like the Flash, could be in the same party and be on more-or-less equal footing. Point-build systems were supposed to be both extremely flexible and finely balanced. If one-trick ponies broke the game, maybe it would be better just to charge them more points for their single powers, and do so in a way that balanced them with the generalists?
One solution would be to charge players on a sliding scale for their abilities, imposing higher marginal costs as ability values rose. I considered this approach for Two Fisted Tales, but ultimately rejected it, because I felt it worked clumsily with character templates (I wasn't happy with how they interacted in 3rd edition GURPS, for example).
Then I remembered DragonQuest, the old SPI fantasy RPG. In DragonQuest you rolled 2d10, and this told you how many points you had to spend on characteristics and the range of values they could take. The higher the roll, the more points you had to spend, but the lower your characteristic maximum: If you rolled a 2 you got 81 points, with a ceiling of 25, and if you rolled a 20 you got 99 points, but your highest score could only be a 19.
I didn't like the random roll, but in other respects, I saw a lot of potential in the approach, in which players could spend points to raise their ability maximums. My original name for this ceiling was MAX, but I didn't care for it. Later, I thought that characters with freakishly high ability scores were "weird," and the name stuck.
