Balance and Imbalance.

Yesterday's post got a bit of feedback, and that's great. It's also interesting to see parallel discussions emerging on various Facebook groups today. I don't know whether it's my superpower of "Tapping the Zeitgeist" at work again, or if those people starting the discussions were prompted by reading my blog. Either way, there's some good thoughts out there and I'd love to engage the area more deeply.

One of the great points raised, came from Joseph Teller...

"The questions in design you need to ask yourself is, does Age=Experience or does Activity=Experience?"

It's an awesome question that isn't really addressed in a lot of games.


I'll address it with some instances I've seen over the years. It was probably about four years ago when I joined up with the fledgling Clans of Elgardt LARP. During tbe first couple of months there were teething problems, including a "gold = XP" system akin to the early days of D&D. A policy was established where teams could pool their gold tnen withdraw it for upgrades. I saw a number of teams at this time, who had numerous characters contributing, with the same one or two "leaders" getting first serve of the gold after every session. This led to charismatic or intimidating players getting the best characters in the game. This was exacerbated by the way these large teams would get most of the game's rewards due to sheer weight of numbers. When called out on this, these privileged players claimed that since they had the best characters, they contributed more, and it was only fair that they got more rewards...a self fulfilling prophecy which rapidly led to more extreme imbalance as the games went by.

This is clearly something I want to avoid.

Let's go back further, 15-20 years ago, to the turn of the millennium. I was playing and running the various Minds Eye Theatre (MET) LARPs, under the umbrella of the global Camarilla organisation. Based on the Storyteller System from White Wolf, the MET games streamlined things and made politics and social intrigue the driving factors in the narrative. This came at the expense of other parts of the game (such as the combat system which was notoriously terrible), but produced a distinct style of play. The Camarilla organisation applied it's own meta-rule framework around the MET core, giving richer background interaction for players to drive storyline, and allowing players who had done service for the game in the real world to gain advantages within the fictional world. For example, a player who ran games for a year or two might be rewarded with characters who started play with higher rank or more XP. A player who sacrificed their character for the good of a wider story involving other characters might be offered an exclusive character type to play next. Chatacters would gain XP for turning up, filing a report for the organisers, and maybe for making a bit of extra effort like wearing a costume or engaging other players in their stories...that's about it. One character might have been created two years ago, but if they weren't regularly attending games, a new character might match them in XP after a few sessions. Similarly, a boosted character started by a prestigious player might have the edge initially, but they'd have to regularly play to maintain that edge. Yes, there were people who abused the system, and yes, it wasn't perfect...but it was aiming at turning the hobby into something more commumal.

This is closer to what I'm after.

Neither of these really specifically addresses my concerns. But they hold clues to what I do and don't want. So, I'll look at some of those Facebook posts.
This screen-capture from gets really close to what I'm aiming for when it comes to asymmetrical play.

So does this one. 

I want characters of different power levels, but I want everyone to be able to contribute relatively equally to the game narrative. I want ancient characters, who have shaped empires and history, to stumble when they encounter a smart phone while the young cyberpunk street urchin has no trouble at all with the phone but gets utter.y lost in the catacombs under the city because they have no idea what happened more than 20 years ago (except the revisionist history they've seen in movies... "but in the movie, there was a secret passage here").

So a lot of it boils down to what power actually is in the game.

It reminds me of Cyberpunk 2020... why would you play a Solo or a Media, when you could play a Corporate who could relatively easily hire either of these types when the need arises, letting them take the risk so you don't have to??... because those who take the risks are the ones involved in more interesting stories, and taking risks brings experience.

I know this isn't for everyone, but I like games where there is enough risk that the end of a character's story is alway a few steps and a couple of die rolls away. The d20/OSR level zero and level one characters who could die at a moments notice against a giant rat don't have enough agency for me. The characters beyond level 10 wno are basically gods among the mortal world bore me, especially when combat ends up with six whiffs for every strike, and each strike literally tzkes away no more than 5% of an opponent's hit points... I came here for story, not for rolling dice and looking up tables for two hours. Levels four to seven are the sweet spot for me in that style of play, a few good hits are dangerous, characters start picking up some of the fun quirky abilities, and the world opens up. No character is more than twice as powerful as any other, and a decent DM/GM/Referee can create a range of situations where the less powerful characters still have a chance to shine. Beyond that, I'm happy to retire a character and work my way through that sweet spot again and again.

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