More roleplaying geekery - WoD/IoD
Oct. 1st, 2010 08:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aumentouSo, World of Darkness (or more accurately, Isles of Darkness, the UK-wide live game confluence) dot build system, and MC system. Two parts of the character creation system. Both are crap, and both encourage min-maxed stupidity.
First, dot build. WoD (and by extension IoD) normally sell you stuff in "dots". You have between 0 and 5 dots in a thing (or between one and five for Attributes, which are things you can't be without like Strength). There's also this principle: each dot costs more than the last. So attributes cost "new dots" (which is to say, the amount of dots you'll have after you've raised it) * 5 Xp each. Raise your strength from 1 to 2, that's 10XP. Raise it from 4 to 5, that's 25 XP. It mostly works, at least in principle.
The dot build system involves observing this functioning principle and chucking it out of the window. You get given a number of dots, and each dot is just that - a dot*. When you're done assigning dots you sprinkle on some actual XP to finish the character.
*with the exception that the fifth dot is two dots. Stupid approximation.
This encourages stupid min-maxing. Let's look at our old pal strength again. Strength is a physical attribute, which means it starts at one, it can go up to five, new dots cost new dots *5, and it's in a group with dexterity and stamina, the other two physical attributes. When defining your character, you rank your physical attributes, mental attributes, and social attributes, as groups, and you get 5,4, or 3 dots to each group depending on how you ranked them. So if you ranked physical first, you'd have five dots to spend there.
So you go to your physical, you decide you want the character to be stronger than average (strength of 3), significantly more dexterous and agile than average (dex 4), and tougher than average (stamina 3). This isn't an unreasonable desire - a fairly larger number of, say, professional soldiers must be statted like this. So you put two of your dots in strength, two in dex, one in stamina, and make up the rest with XP. Well, your XP cost there is 20 (to raise dex to 4, plus 15 (to raise stam to 3). 35 of your starting XP, just to have the stats of a mundane soldier? Okay whatever.
But there's a better way. Because if you instead put two dots in strength and three in dex, you can get those two built up straight away. If you then buy the stamina score with XP, you can get exactly the same fucking stats for 10 XP less.
...which is a lot, if your starting budget is dots + 50. It gets worse when you consider that you have three sets of attributes to do this with. It gets worse again when you realise that you can usually get by with quite a few attributes at 1 or 2. You don't really need that strength 3 if you take a cheap merit somewhere else. So now you have a strength 2 average person or strength 1 wuss who is somehow still remarkably agile.
It gets even worse when you consider that you have 24 seperate skills, and that some of them are so ubiquitous in the modern world that they ought to be mandatory without a good excuse. A real-life skillset would include average levels of empathy, academics, socialise, and a half dozen others. IoD-optimised skillsets are narrow and deep - experts in one thing who somehow never learned how to have drinks with friends.
It is also in principle quite fucking stupid that the system can build identical characters and charge more for one than the other.
A storyteller recently told me that he insists characters be sensibly constructed just on the dots alone, and that the XP can do what it likes afterwards. This appeals to me in some ways - the idea that the dots represent an earlier stage of development than the XP supplement is kind of intuitive. However, it comes with the rather hefty downside that it makes things more expensive, and it's the people with normal XP levels that suffer.
There is, of course, a solution. Axe the dot build. Start with attributes at 1, other stuff at zero, and a large pile of XP. Spend according to the usual rules. Yes, you can still specilaise, but now specialisation will actually cost you like it would if you bought it in game. Rather than starting with your specialities and then back-filling with acquired XP to make a rounded (semi-)human being, you'd start with a human and then alter them as you thought was appropriate.
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Now, MC. This is an IoD thing where people who have done useful work for the organisation gain a higher "membership class", or MC. This is like becoming a premium member or something. Afterwards, all their characters get more XP to spend on creation, and always will. It could be the last thing you did was ten years ago, but you're still MC whatever with whatever more XP to spend than new players.
Each point of MC gets you 20 XP more. Each third point gets you a 40 point "bump" bonus for no reason at all. These "bumps" are ludicrous, but the system itself is so fucking batshit it's hard to tell. It's fair enough that there should be some sort of reward for doing voluntary work for the system, but some of the problems are:
1) It's an in character reward for an out of characteraction. Yes, it's nice that you help out, but why does that mean you get a more powerful character? Why not, oh, I don't know, have some sort of out of character reward, like money or something? This is a bit of principle: the MC system lets you buy experience with your personal time. What's the difference between buying it with your time and buying it with cash?
2) It never goes away. Even if the last time you did something useful was fifteen years ago, your MC persists and you're still being rewarded years later. Last time I got paid for doing work I got paid at the end of the month for that month. I don't work there any more and they don't pay me. Why should this be different?
3) It clutters the place up with high-XP characters and hence drives new players away.
In a player-versus-enemy (PvE) game, it's hard to work out how tough the monsters should be when the player characters are an eclectic mix. If we establish that the local mooks are about as tough as starting PCs, then that means starting PCs behave very carefully, whereas Dave the Ineffable, (with 400 extra XP behind him and the ability to teleport your head five yards to the left while leaving your body in place and the ability to be ethereal while doing that) is going to find things quite easy. This means that either the whole place is a newbie playground and Dave rampages through it, or the stuff is dangerous enough to bother Dave, and that means Dave has to be involved in every plot that leads to conflict, because if he isn't there you can't handle it. As a new character you end up looking at the plot and deciding that somebody else had better handle that shit, because you clearly can't. Or to put it another way, your character is encouraged not to go near the actual game.
In a PvP game it gets even worse. Fucking with Dave is clearly doomed, so either your character arrives at an accomodation, or they leave, or you die. If Dave is a nice character this makes the game dull. If Dave is a twisted nutter who needs putting down for the good of everyone within head-teleporting range, it means either you play someone of equal moral flexibility, or you get used to physrepping your characters heads with paper mache. Again, there's not really much reason to hang around playing this game.
4) It's always the same players with the power. Okay, now I'm getting personal. Having variations in the power of characters in a game is okay, depending on the setting. It makes sense that the Princess of the Eternal and Unpleasantly-Befanged Night has some wacky powers, because it's a stupid title and if she wasn't tough enough to stop them someone would pull her head off just so they never had to use it again. But if and when you finally manage to off a character with a fucking shit-ton more XP than yours, you know what happens? The fucker respawns as another character with a fucking shit-ton more XP than yours. When the big characters in game 1 are player Xs, player Ys, and player Zs, and you consider game 2 where they are player Xs, player Ys, and player Zs, and you start to think that maybe game 3 would be better because player Z doesn't like that one so there will be some variety, that's not a good thing. In the best case, where the people with the big number MCs are nice, it's still boring. In the worst case, if the people with the big number MCs are dicks, there might be fuck all you can do to stop them.
5) It encourages precisely the sort of munchking min-maxing that the dot-build system encourages.
Got there in the end! In order to do something interesting in the game, your character has to have value, whether as a useful ally or a dangerous enemy or both. This means they need to have power, power being defined as "things they can do that other characters think are impressive". If you munchkin the crap out of a starting character, you might be able to do something or you might not, but it's your best bet to have something the character is good at that they can trade on. If you don't munchkin the crap out of the character you can expect to have no useful assets in game, which will leave you uninvolved as the other characters quite rationally decide your character has no value.
----------------------
Conclusion of sorts: If you're a storyteller, and you want players to reduce the min-maxing stupidty, you can do two things: 1) remove the dot-build system and use XP from the ground up, imposing rules and guidelines as you see fit. 2) Do something to reduce or remove the effects of MC. Anything you can would be good.
Rant over.
First, dot build. WoD (and by extension IoD) normally sell you stuff in "dots". You have between 0 and 5 dots in a thing (or between one and five for Attributes, which are things you can't be without like Strength). There's also this principle: each dot costs more than the last. So attributes cost "new dots" (which is to say, the amount of dots you'll have after you've raised it) * 5 Xp each. Raise your strength from 1 to 2, that's 10XP. Raise it from 4 to 5, that's 25 XP. It mostly works, at least in principle.
The dot build system involves observing this functioning principle and chucking it out of the window. You get given a number of dots, and each dot is just that - a dot*. When you're done assigning dots you sprinkle on some actual XP to finish the character.
*with the exception that the fifth dot is two dots. Stupid approximation.
This encourages stupid min-maxing. Let's look at our old pal strength again. Strength is a physical attribute, which means it starts at one, it can go up to five, new dots cost new dots *5, and it's in a group with dexterity and stamina, the other two physical attributes. When defining your character, you rank your physical attributes, mental attributes, and social attributes, as groups, and you get 5,4, or 3 dots to each group depending on how you ranked them. So if you ranked physical first, you'd have five dots to spend there.
So you go to your physical, you decide you want the character to be stronger than average (strength of 3), significantly more dexterous and agile than average (dex 4), and tougher than average (stamina 3). This isn't an unreasonable desire - a fairly larger number of, say, professional soldiers must be statted like this. So you put two of your dots in strength, two in dex, one in stamina, and make up the rest with XP. Well, your XP cost there is 20 (to raise dex to 4, plus 15 (to raise stam to 3). 35 of your starting XP, just to have the stats of a mundane soldier? Okay whatever.
But there's a better way. Because if you instead put two dots in strength and three in dex, you can get those two built up straight away. If you then buy the stamina score with XP, you can get exactly the same fucking stats for 10 XP less.
...which is a lot, if your starting budget is dots + 50. It gets worse when you consider that you have three sets of attributes to do this with. It gets worse again when you realise that you can usually get by with quite a few attributes at 1 or 2. You don't really need that strength 3 if you take a cheap merit somewhere else. So now you have a strength 2 average person or strength 1 wuss who is somehow still remarkably agile.
It gets even worse when you consider that you have 24 seperate skills, and that some of them are so ubiquitous in the modern world that they ought to be mandatory without a good excuse. A real-life skillset would include average levels of empathy, academics, socialise, and a half dozen others. IoD-optimised skillsets are narrow and deep - experts in one thing who somehow never learned how to have drinks with friends.
It is also in principle quite fucking stupid that the system can build identical characters and charge more for one than the other.
A storyteller recently told me that he insists characters be sensibly constructed just on the dots alone, and that the XP can do what it likes afterwards. This appeals to me in some ways - the idea that the dots represent an earlier stage of development than the XP supplement is kind of intuitive. However, it comes with the rather hefty downside that it makes things more expensive, and it's the people with normal XP levels that suffer.
There is, of course, a solution. Axe the dot build. Start with attributes at 1, other stuff at zero, and a large pile of XP. Spend according to the usual rules. Yes, you can still specilaise, but now specialisation will actually cost you like it would if you bought it in game. Rather than starting with your specialities and then back-filling with acquired XP to make a rounded (semi-)human being, you'd start with a human and then alter them as you thought was appropriate.
--------
Now, MC. This is an IoD thing where people who have done useful work for the organisation gain a higher "membership class", or MC. This is like becoming a premium member or something. Afterwards, all their characters get more XP to spend on creation, and always will. It could be the last thing you did was ten years ago, but you're still MC whatever with whatever more XP to spend than new players.
Each point of MC gets you 20 XP more. Each third point gets you a 40 point "bump" bonus for no reason at all. These "bumps" are ludicrous, but the system itself is so fucking batshit it's hard to tell. It's fair enough that there should be some sort of reward for doing voluntary work for the system, but some of the problems are:
1) It's an in character reward for an out of characteraction. Yes, it's nice that you help out, but why does that mean you get a more powerful character? Why not, oh, I don't know, have some sort of out of character reward, like money or something? This is a bit of principle: the MC system lets you buy experience with your personal time. What's the difference between buying it with your time and buying it with cash?
2) It never goes away. Even if the last time you did something useful was fifteen years ago, your MC persists and you're still being rewarded years later. Last time I got paid for doing work I got paid at the end of the month for that month. I don't work there any more and they don't pay me. Why should this be different?
3) It clutters the place up with high-XP characters and hence drives new players away.
In a player-versus-enemy (PvE) game, it's hard to work out how tough the monsters should be when the player characters are an eclectic mix. If we establish that the local mooks are about as tough as starting PCs, then that means starting PCs behave very carefully, whereas Dave the Ineffable, (with 400 extra XP behind him and the ability to teleport your head five yards to the left while leaving your body in place and the ability to be ethereal while doing that) is going to find things quite easy. This means that either the whole place is a newbie playground and Dave rampages through it, or the stuff is dangerous enough to bother Dave, and that means Dave has to be involved in every plot that leads to conflict, because if he isn't there you can't handle it. As a new character you end up looking at the plot and deciding that somebody else had better handle that shit, because you clearly can't. Or to put it another way, your character is encouraged not to go near the actual game.
In a PvP game it gets even worse. Fucking with Dave is clearly doomed, so either your character arrives at an accomodation, or they leave, or you die. If Dave is a nice character this makes the game dull. If Dave is a twisted nutter who needs putting down for the good of everyone within head-teleporting range, it means either you play someone of equal moral flexibility, or you get used to physrepping your characters heads with paper mache. Again, there's not really much reason to hang around playing this game.
4) It's always the same players with the power. Okay, now I'm getting personal. Having variations in the power of characters in a game is okay, depending on the setting. It makes sense that the Princess of the Eternal and Unpleasantly-Befanged Night has some wacky powers, because it's a stupid title and if she wasn't tough enough to stop them someone would pull her head off just so they never had to use it again. But if and when you finally manage to off a character with a fucking shit-ton more XP than yours, you know what happens? The fucker respawns as another character with a fucking shit-ton more XP than yours. When the big characters in game 1 are player Xs, player Ys, and player Zs, and you consider game 2 where they are player Xs, player Ys, and player Zs, and you start to think that maybe game 3 would be better because player Z doesn't like that one so there will be some variety, that's not a good thing. In the best case, where the people with the big number MCs are nice, it's still boring. In the worst case, if the people with the big number MCs are dicks, there might be fuck all you can do to stop them.
5) It encourages precisely the sort of munchking min-maxing that the dot-build system encourages.
Got there in the end! In order to do something interesting in the game, your character has to have value, whether as a useful ally or a dangerous enemy or both. This means they need to have power, power being defined as "things they can do that other characters think are impressive". If you munchkin the crap out of a starting character, you might be able to do something or you might not, but it's your best bet to have something the character is good at that they can trade on. If you don't munchkin the crap out of the character you can expect to have no useful assets in game, which will leave you uninvolved as the other characters quite rationally decide your character has no value.
----------------------
Conclusion of sorts: If you're a storyteller, and you want players to reduce the min-maxing stupidty, you can do two things: 1) remove the dot-build system and use XP from the ground up, imposing rules and guidelines as you see fit. 2) Do something to reduce or remove the effects of MC. Anything you can would be good.
Rant over.
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no subject
Date: 2010-10-05 05:44 pm (UTC)2) because The ST doesn't have to stand over the players either way - that's an exageration. If the ST has to check a dot-build system (to see if they followed that in a reasonable way and got everything right) and then check the XP spend as well, then the ST has more checking to do than if they just check the spreadsheet adds up right and that the supernatural expenditure isn't too high. This way saves the ST effort.