I think the most important idea here is having an ongoing conversation between players and the GM, rather than just a session zero. I want to hear more about that.
One day I'll eventually get to the video covering my opinion of Session Zeros. It seems a lot of people make the mistake of believing that Session Zero is only before the campaign begins and are then locked in stone forever. Session Zero isn't just before the campaign, but also the spaces between session. Things change or things no one thought about before the campaign began might come up. It should be an ongoing conversation.
@@SSkorkowsky Definitely. We're all friends here, and we're supposed to be having fun. That means communication. And doing so at the start of the problem, not when it's becoming untenable.
Ah, Aliens. A co-worker and I had an argument about the validity of the CO ordering his men to essentially disarm and enter potentially hostile territory because of the slight possibility of setting off a nuclear explosion within the reactor.
@@chadsmith8966 A very bad decision certainly. I think the right move was to pull back to re-assess and change their equipment loadout? But he was too green. It likely wouldn't make much difference because I'm sure they'd have seen the captive and reacted the same way. The real killer was the CO attempting to give a complicated string of instructions during an ongoing firefight. All he had to say was "withdraw" or "pull back to the APC" and leave the rest to the officers in the field.
@@aliceroorback3717 agreed. Falling back and re-assessing of the situation would have been the wise course of action. Problem lies the CO was too green and too eager to placate a corpo stooge. Simply put I’m firmly believe confiscating the mags was stupid. Say instead Xenomorphs there were human rebels hold up in the reactor, something the marines could safely assume. It can also be assumed said rebels have firearms. The marines going in the reactor without ammunition to prevent setting off a nuke is moot when rebels are more than willing to shoot while in said reactor. Whether it was xenomorphs or rebels, the unarmed marines were ambushed suffered heavy casualties from the fuck up. The CO failing to do his job when the ambush came made a bad situation worse.
One interesting way to handle part of this is to give the enemies a combat or equipment doctrine. In a world with power armor it makes perfect sense that an organization would have one member of every group of mooks that is given a clip of armor piercing rounds. They aren’t supposed to use that ammunition unless the situation calls for it, because that is expensive stuff, but they won't be completely worthless if armor does show up. Similar things can be done with scrolls, potions, grenades, or other small low use or single use items. It does take some thinking ahead about the capabilities of the setting and the responses available from people in that setting on the GM's part. Because it feels much better if that doctrine, or at least the basic version, is in place well before it actually affects the players. That makes the world feel more real. This then has a nice back and forth with the players, where they learn to priority target the mook with the extra equipment and then the organization responds by shifting doctrine as the players become more prominent as a threat. Natural in universe difficulty scaling.
this is how video games often handle it. Metal Gear Solid V is particularly interesting since it not only reacts to your choices, but *actively shows you* that it is doing so. Want to use tanks, because stealth is optional for this mission? Better learn to shoot the guy with the rocket launcher first. Snipe people? Well, they do issue helmets...and then they'll start setting up counter-snipers, who are a much greater threat than Guard Average. I've had success adapting this idea to games I've run, though with the caveat they were often players acting in a paramilitary situation anyway. It's a bit less fitting if your opposition is less organized.
This is one of my favorite things to do. Had a character that was basically an orc in an industrial power suit that got some guns built in later. The guns started shredding through mooks--I'm talking squads of 12 gone in two rounds, even with combat armor--and I needed to think of something else before the massacres started getting boring. It became doctrine for any unit dealing with them have a designated forcefield projector that stopped kinetic projectiles but allowed their laser rifles through. Suddenly, big man's best tool is useless and he has to lean HARD on the eyeball head space mage and the dashing totally not Han Solo smuggler way more.
I like this so much. It might not be a thing with gangers who are just taking what they can get, but against organized enemies, you can easily get away with like 5 man infantry sections of 1 NCO, 2-3 Rifleman, and 1 Specialist weapon user or a 2 man heavy weapons team. That can create a dynamic firefight that challenges the players, as the man with the Anti-Material rifle is naturally going to shoot at the hard target, while his buddies suppress and flank the less Armored targets.
I once did the same thing 15:18 as a GM in my 5e Shadowrun campain. On one extreamly dangerous mission, my players got themselfs into, the employer supplied them with a verry strong military grade full body armor with radiation protection and a chemical seal, to use on the job and as part of the payment. Afterwards I had a full party of runners with very serious protection and was very afraid, that they will try to brute force every encounter or heist. Luckily my players where to afraid of recognition and triggering special forces on their runs to do any of this, except in special circumstances where they expected dangerous enemys or they knew they coud get away with it. In the end I was really happy giving them the armor. As they used it as a nice tool for special sircumstances which always felt really nice for them gearing up to "terminator" level.
Yes, as I see it: It (the escalating) is a problem generated by the GM. Nothing wrong with the PCs getting effective gear, as long as the GM refrains from escalating!
I remember when Shadowrun was 1st edition. The ref had D&D mindset, magic was all. So did most of the players (all magician types) except for one Company Man and myself, a Street Samurai. Anyway, big shadowrun, big payoff - a bunch of magic resources. We two non-magic-ers said "Hey, what about us?" The ref, distracted, handwaved a bunch of bearer credsticks in for us, with millions of nuyen. Yeah, multiple millions of nuyen. A throwaway, because he was used to D&D from the interval when no longer was gold=XP and before gold=buy magic stuff. The Company Man was from Ares, so we bought significant stock and became Stockholders. Luxury living in the arcology on permanent status. Our own herd of bodyguards. The ref would set us a mission, and we would hire our own shadowrunners to handle it for us. After just a few sessions the ref had to reboot the whole campaign, but he remembered "gritty and poor" on the second try.
Gritty and poor can be fun, but 3rd edition shadowrun was about the apex of that game, the post dunkelzahn days. I had a voodooan/mage with a luxury lifestyle, a historic townhouse in new orleans, real food, a rolls royce modified to run on the grid, who scrambled for runs in order to keep that lifestyle. When he couldn't find a run, he had his AI frames and spirit watchers try to find a score and made his own runs and would put together crews just to get the nuyen to pay the bills and buy new toys. That character was fun as hell. One time when he was flush, he hired the other characters out of his own pocket to run a heist on a wine auction with him so he could score some historically significant wine, just to level up the spirit of his house. There's a lot of ways to run the shadows.
@ratholin Oh, we were having a blast, but the other players and the ref were screwed. They threatened magical retaliation on us, so we put the Salish-Sidhe national Medicine Lodge on retainer. The ref called shenanigans, apologized to everyone, admitted he'd made a mistake, and we all restarted with new characters. (I started decking)
Heads up, there's a fantastic Cyberpunk Humble Bundle going on for Cyberpunk Red and Cyberpunk 2020. 23 PDF books for $25, including the Core Rulebooks, Night City Guide, the Chromebooks, and more. It ends Feb 24th, so there's not much time left. www.humblebundle.com/books/cyberpunk-red-2024-r-talsorian-games-books?partner=sskorkowsky
One of the big challenges in running Traveller is the difference between ship-scale money and personal-scale money so players will often end up kitted out incredibly powerfully because the opportunity cost is a fairly marginal upgrade to the ship.
My personal trick (that I borrowed from Fabula Ultima) is to have the players make a wishlist. They don't have to indicate specific items, just an idea of what they are aiming for and then I provide them either the rough materials or a discount, so that their expenses are mostly "bound".
You can counteract that with the idea that it’s not buying big things that’s the issue . . . but finding someone willing to sell it to you, you could make ship stuff cheaper and personal stuff more expensive to help deal with that gap of a issue, just a thought then again it makes sense to make personal vs ship items have a giant gap, doesn’t matter how nice your stuff is compared to orbital bombardment potential.
I remember being told that if you walk around armed people might excuse it as self defense, but if you go around with armor well you must be looking for trouble.
Woah. I heard it in reverse! That if you walk around armored you’re just being cautious/defensive, but it you walk around with unconcealed weapons, you’re asking for a fight. Which one is right? Or does it depend on the game? I’m currently moving from D&D to Traveller. Is it edition or game specific (I.e. Cyberpunk or CoC only)?
@@rpeterson9182 i heard that for traveller (or maybe it was stars without numbers) I think it was in the law levels section. Basically you never know when something might come up that requires you to threaten but maybe not even use a gun hut if youre to the point of wearing armor you must be expecting something to happen.
@@leonfire99 Also generally armor is heavier and more cumbersome to carry around. It slows you down and helps you to stay in the fight. Not that practical for running away which is what you are expected to be doing in a self-defence situation. Handguns on the other hand are not that bothersome to carry around, are a great deterrent and can lay down some covering fire if outgunned or drive away attackers. Works basically the same way with swords.
@@rpeterson9182Think of it like in real life. If you meet someone with a pistol or a knife on their hip, you might be cautious around that person, depending on your level of familiarity and comfort with weapons, and whether or not that stands out as unusual in your area. Yet, there are valid reasons why that person might have that. They could be an off-duty police officer, a security guard who just clocked out for their shift and took off their ID badge, an undercover police officer, they might be a private citizen who has a valid reason to worry about self defense (i.e. you live in an area with a high amount of violent crime, or they might live or work in an outdoors area with large, violent predators like grizzly bears or tigers, against which a pistol might not be the first choice, but is more practical to carry around than a rifle) Someone wearing a bulletproof vest who does not have a police badge or something along those lines indicates someone who is actively intending to get into a firefight.
@@thejustlawofshamash i think you could probably get away with minor light armor like cut proof sleeves and maybe some dirt biking or motorcycle padding here and there tho if someone was walking around like an up armored eod tech I'd probably be alot more concerned then just jim dressed up like he was expecting to play an impromptu game of football (American football the kind with people intentionally tackling eatch other)
what could be more fun than listing out the 487 items you always carry with you because of that one time your DM asked if your character had a lighter on its character sheet, and now it's on. no mercy
You don’t get to carry that much in any game I’ve ever seen. Unless you have a bag of holding type item a pc shouldn’t be carrying very much at all. C&C has a great backpack mechanic for this. They are heavy and bulky and in the way. But great for travel. You would not bring it to dinner. It would be up in your room. So outside of a dagger or axe you have nothing if something happens and you have to rush out of town
@@bohort only if you want super light rules games for whimsical fancy. The reason there are rules around encumbrance and ammo track in the first place is to add something viral to play. Not to take away from your god level Superman of infinite healing potions shoved up his ass. You tell me which is an actual better scene. The party gets ambushed at dinner, rushes out into the night, realizes they don’t have most of their gear and either has to go back for it or rough it till the get more. Or “oh man thank goodness we all wear FULL PLATE to dinner with great axes at the table and my full quiver and bow, otherwise we might have had to do something other than the thing we do every time”.
@@Ifrit8054 The actual better game and scene is one in which people like you with their "I know BETTER than you how to have fun" attitudes AREN'T PRESENT. Jesus Christ, grow up.
@@Ifrit8054 I just have a rule, suggestion to my players where I mention “everyone look through your notes and item/character list before we start” handles 99% of stuff, that plus a horse/motorcycle/cart/car/trunk tends to be enough to deal with 90% of issues of inventory hangups
I feel like in cases like "one guy has disproportionately powerful armor, so enemies strong enough to hurt him at all can also severely cripple the other PCs" is likely best fixed by encouraging the rest of the party to armor up(or other equivalents to armor if there's some kind of rules/class/skill limits), or at the verry least don't make the whole enemy roster upgrade to the better weapons, just one or two anti-armor guys who will focus on the armored party members, and maybe have the other goons who weren't equipped that way try to pick up thise weapons if their buddies get killed if the party gets too good at snipping them first, and so on.
The imbalance between PCs is the biggest threat to the group as a whole. In our Traveller campaign, one of our crewmates has Battle Dress while the rest of us have various armor below the Combat Armor level...almost got my traveller killed in a firefight because of the escalation/balancing issue.
"almost got my traveller killed in a firefight because of the escalation/balancing issue" That's not how reality works. There ois no balance and shouldn't be. Either one is dumb to pick a fight he can't win, or does everything to turn odds to his advantage. It always cracks me like weak gamers blame stuff on rules, or GM because they want to end up in flames of glory. OK. have it your way. :)
@@hadeseye2297 Your tone seems unnecessarily belligerent. Some people prefer a balanced game in which the play experience feels less like how reality works and more artificial (in a good way) and curated. There is nothing wrong with that "game-y" playstyle-it comes down to taste: there's no mechanically, objectively superior way to have fun. On a personal note, I prefer inventory-based, class-free, asymmetrical TTRPGs with no encounter balance (similar to the OSR style)-nothing makes me feel that my choices matter as much as that type of experience. But I've had fun playing more railroady, narrative-focused, and superheroic games like 5E and Pathfinder, too. What it all comes down to is having an agreement at the table and realizing the game is an ongoing conversation.
@@hadeseye2297 I don't think you're in much of a position to explain to people how reality works if you think being good at tabletop games gives you any high ground to stand on and look down on other people. You're probably not even good, people like you usually talk a big game but only succeed because they munchkin their way out of consequences for anything and have a GM who goes along with it, and they'd die in 5 seconds at any other table. None of your tabletop accomplishments make you better than other people because they're all meaningless and don't matter. It's make-believe. There is no "reality" in there.
In Metal Gear Solid 5, enemies at bases will respond to what weapons or skills you use most often. If you go for headshots, they wear helmets. If you go at night, they'll have infra-red, etc. Makes the game very interesting
Shadowrun 3e and Sniper Rifles. We drooled over them until we thought about being the n the receiving end of one. Our GM was great about this whole concept. My Ork Gun Bunny got his hands on a HMG a couple of months in… about 18 months of play went by before there was a situation where he could use it on a Run, but he kept Mathilda under his bed the whole time and dreamed of the day… 😂
For an example for the 10:00 minute mark, where not everyone in the world are all the same feeling about weapons, just think of this: Walmart. In places like New Hampshire, there are signs that say "Firearms prohibited" on the doors of the Walmart when you walk in, whereas in Tennessee the signs say "please kindly refrain from open carrying within the store." Put that on a planetary scale, and there you go.
My Traveller PCs are currently on Dostoevsky. Using Traveller map, I determined that it was winter in the southern hemisphere were the starport is. Each season on Dostoevsky lasts ~621 days. My idea is that every building has taken this into account and have elaborate "coat check" ante-rooms for all the stuff that the majority of visitors are likely to need to take off.
You can always look for specific counters to what PCs have. For example a simple goon with an EMP grenade can cause a lot of problems to a guy with electronics-laden power armour while not being an extra threat to other players in flak jackets.
My Cyberpunk 2020 Rocker had two separate personas. His public facing Rocker self and his kitted out alter ego for when we'd go on missions. He had a fully enclosed, environmentally sealed, voice altering helmet and full combat gear for that. Depending on which mode he was in he'd have a completely different "challenge rating".
For Cyberpunk 2020, I ended using social mores to discourage player characters from trying to walk around in their beefiest armor carrying rifles. "You're going to wear a helmet into a club? Good like trying to talk to women." But I enforced those same social rules for NPCs as well. You weren't typically going to find a gang member at the local club decked out in combat fatigues he was wearing jeans, leather, or something cool looking.
I totally agree. What's socially acceptable in a certain situation is both a good way to balance the playing field and enhances the atmosphere. DnD players and people who are used to FPS computer games tend to forget that walking around in full combat armor with an anti-material rifle over the shoulder draws all kinds of attention.
Skill based games also have the drawback of characters hyper-focusing one skill or skillset. This can also throw off power balance. One character seems invincible, until anything happens that has nothing to do with their specialty and then they cry the adventure is too hard. It also leads to characters not doing anything at times that don't focus on their specialty. "I'm the sniper, not the talker, so I sit quietly as everyone makes plans with our employer." Which can give a player permission to 'check out' of certain encounter/scenes. Great video as always.
This is often the result of how people generate characters. There is a "pitfall" in both directions; the specialist and the jack of all trades. Players need to be aware of those before they go for more balanced characters. Something I consider strange is that hyper-focusing in fluent systems (Skill based) is often something players take with them from rigid systems. Most rigid systems only have hyper-specialists, thus characters there are often defined by that specialty. Perhaps it is not so strange, but now I think about it; they have never tried anything different! So how are they supposed to know?! In other words: If people become hyper-specialists in fluent systems, then it is either because they are unaware of the problems it can cause OR they are (from rigid systems) used to being hyper-specialists being the only option.
Absolutely. It's not even remotely hard to make an overpowered gunman in Shadowrun, nor Cyberpunk, for example. Even if it's not combat skills, a lot of players can be so bad about hyper-focusing one or two skills. I can't say I blame them with wanting to try and make it a reliable aspect of their character, but there's often a swiftly-cross threshold of utility. For example, in a campaign I was running, one player continuously pumped points into deception and gambling, took traits and perks to maximize this further. In only the first couple of adventures, he had gotten to the point even professionals wouldn't be able to try their hardest to catch on to him. So, what was he using this for? To scam random people in card games the party met along their travels. I suppose there's something funny about him not trying for the big leagues and high stakes poker matches with big money on the line. Shame though, it could have been something interesting if he got caught cheating against a mob boss or something.
The best thing I can think of to help prevent or lessen the chances of a hyper-focused character is to suggest to the player that they think of a theme for their character rather than just a skill. Example: Instead of being the gal that can shoot everything, figure out how you can work around the theme of guns. She can be real accurate at shooting, but maybe she can also have skills that can work along with the guns. Historical knowledge about firearms, be intimidating with them, bluff with them, even charm or impress people with her shooting skills. Be the character that can do funny and amusing trick shots with them. If your character is a sharpshooter type, maybe she's quite aware of her surroundings and notices little details and this can extend to studying other people and little changes in the environment. Recognizing the familiar click of a hammer being pulled back or the sound of a .22 cartridges hitting the floor. All of these examples require putting points in other skills besides the firearms one itself and allows two or three gun characters to be unique from each other.
I needed this video This is a pretty common problem for me going either way. I had two different groups playing Star Wars EotE. One group was a long time chill goofy group and I sometimes forget they all only have pistols and overpower the enemies while the other group is stealing ships selling them and decking out in high end weaponry breezing past a lot of my encounters.
Thanks. It's such a specialized topic, limited to mostly Skill-Based Sci-Fi games, that a lot of people have expressed not seeing the issue I'm referring to and I'd begun questioning if I hadn't expressed myself well. Glad to know it's been useful.
One more thing to keep track of is players want a different game experience from time to time. Not every encounter has to push them to their limits-sometimes it’s satisfying to mow down wimpy enemies, especially if they used to be challenging. I’ve also learned that not every player needs to be challenged equally; sometimes the reason they have an AC of 35 is because they need to feel like their character is safe, and finding ways to overpower that is just more stressful to them and the other players. But an open conversation can settle all that.
I feel like as long as they stick to the letter of the law, if not the spirit, GM's should honor character builds. If someone wants to be a silver tongued diplomancer and dump all their resources into being that, or similarly doing the same for a total combat monster, then we should respect that and tailor our games around giving them the best experience possible.
Reminds me of some Shadowrun discussions where the basic gist was: Runners are specialists and they should (easily) succeed in their specialty; but live isn’t fair and they will hardly control every situation, so they will have to roll dice on stuff they are truly bad at. And that’s how things become challenging again, when the perfect plan, where the perfect person for the job faces his preferred obstacle suddenly goes down the drain and everything is opposite land. So the game is basically a mixture of the easiest jobs ever, where everything works as planned, to the worst day of your life, where everything goes sideways at the worst moment. A rollercoaster instead of a constant balance act.
Reminds me of my first run at Hero System, coming from 3e D&D, lol. We were doing a Teen Titans/New Mutants style game and the first session was a danger room type scenario against some of the teachers. Very first round, the brick teacher knocked a student out in one hit... oops. Lol. Ended up being a great game, but omg was there a lot of learning to do. Thankfully my people were great and we laughed and fixed things as we went, but so many lessons. 😂
What is cool about power Scaling is that we see it in real life. Your players are starting to wear heavy armor well that means their opposition will start to purchase armor piercing rounds. It turns into an arms race which is kind of cool.
The best rule I ever found was a simple and completely reasonable one, "What toys you get as PCs are the toys I get as GM". Kept my Shadowrun and Cyberpunk 2020 games to the occasional grenade (mostly stun and smoke), sometimes ARs, and everyone away from Hard Suits and Metalgear.
Hey Seth, thanks for the video. I think this can also apply to Pathfinder/DnD in interesting ways. "Yeah, if you walk around town with combat gear people may treat you differently and it will be trivial to pick you out in a crowd." or "This fancy dining establishment has a strict dress code: no armor"
Although in Pathfinder the most annoying thing would be trying to calculate out all your new armor class, attack, damage, etc roll bonuses when you are *not* using your combat loadout
That's really the issue I have specifically with Starfinder: just because of the way the gear level system works you can't really... exist out of armor unless you've purchased some equally expensive socially acceptable armor. That being said, it might be worth doing some homebrewing: Pathfinder 2 is pretty specifically designed for everyone to be in full gear in a fight. If you're not particularly dextrous, you're going to want to patch that hole in your defenses with heavy armor or else you're going to be receiving crits *constantly*. It's a tough nut to crack, too: I'm playing in a heavily homebrewed pike and shot era game where the party is doing a lot of intrigue that means 'no armor', so I've had to do a lot to adjust accordingly: enemy to-hit is lower over all when people are out of armor so that we're not drowning in an ocean of crits, such like that.
Doing this right is extra fun in Cyberpunk because implants are an option for getting around most of the social limits. Getting little blades in her fingers cost Molly from Neuromancer way more than the price of a vest, helmet, assault rifle, and grenade launcher. But they make sense in context. Context is the key. And optimizing for multiple contexts is a reason to buy even more different kinds of toys, from legal/undetectable up to the LMG and rocket launcher that mostly stay in the van. But that just adds to the sense of occasion when a situation justifies bringing them out.
A major difference between modern/SF vs FRPG is that modern characters usually have homes, vehicles, and other places to store extra gear. They aren't like typical FRPG PCs who stagger around with every single thing they own hanging from their bodies.
A really helpful video gear is the divider in skillbased games while optimized builds if only one player does it throws of the enemy curve in classbased games without the addition of gear
This kinda happened to me in Shadowrun: my Rigger started with a couple drones and a van, but by the end of Act 1, she had amassed a huge army of former Bad-Guy Bots and an APC. The balance of this was that I usually couldn't USE any of my heavy-hitters because Shadowrun is not Cyberpunk, and the last thing you want is to draw attention... like parading paramilitary equipment through downtown Seattle
I ran one game once where all of the characters were wearing powerarmor. They were all captured and held by super strong animated plants / vines. The vines were too weak to crush or pentetrate the armor but could hold them in place. One of them realized he could fumble out a frag grenade. It killed the plants but didn't pentetrate the armor. So soon thereafter everyone was dropping grenades at their own feet to get free.
Great Video as usual. I've encountered this most in Star Wars. Lightsabers and droids wielding ship guns (without a ship) can shift the power dynamic. Thankfully, in that one I'm a player. As a DM though I encountered it in well 3.5 I had one player who min/maxed his character he made 8 dagger attacks against "touch armor class." So to raise the touch AC to something of a challenge it raised the regular AC out of reach for the rest of the party. Last one I remember was a dracolich with a touch AC of 25 but an AC of 40. Of course that fight was memorable because the Face could only hit on a 20, and he hit and confirmed the critical. Now what makes it memorable was it was the weapon he used was made to slay undead. On a crit the undead made a save or poof. I had to roll a 3 or higher to save, and I rolled a 2. So 30 minutes into the session it was over. I gave them the loot and it became a "shopping episode"
At 6:51 you mention picking up the equipment. I have a "funny" story...When I tried to give the party BONESAW! I had given it to a boss minion, and proceeded to roll four 20s in a row. I was rolling (as I do for attacks) outside the screen with that light up crit d20 that used to be sold. Luckily a player had the Lucky feat...I still killed a NPC and one player though with Vorpalness, and BONESAW was loving it.
I unintentionally have been doing escalation all my gaming career. Except it's more along the lines of "oops, I just gave you the Blade of Olympus... *to my co-DM* double the enemies".
In running my Mechwarrior Destiny games, one of my players managed to acquire an Atlas (the most powerful, foreboding mech in the game) weeks before I intended even introducing assault-class mechs into the game. Narratively, I've been able to handle this quite nicely by giving them missions that favor speed over firepower, employers not willing to pay the "tonnage drop fees" for assault 'mechs, a lack of replacement parts, and/or general improvements in the capabilities of the enemies they fight. This has led to a situation where the Atlas only comes out when the players "mean business." A near-perfect outcome from what could have been a disastrous power imbalance.
I like the idea of getting the player to have different gear setups for different scenarios. I have a rule I call hazard. It is something the players can not win against but only survive and get away. That can be poison gas or enemies. Form enemies do not be afraid to tell them it is a hazard. Second, find a way so players to always have an escape plan or two. One it is good role-playing and two when they are getting overpowered they have already do some planning.
Good stuff as always! Let me add something I consider worth remembering: Personal danger does not equal challenge. The guy who has armor to shrug off anything and weapon to instakill any enemy, is still limited in their scope and still has stakes in the world(hopefully) other than their HP bar... if all else fails they probably still love that equipment that will need some repairs and restocking from time to time. This obviusly isnt a catch all solution, but the problem might not be that big one after all, and I missed this from the video.
The same issue applied when i ran Shadowrun 5th. One player would turn every game into an arms race. Which directed everyone to put all of their xp into combat skills.
With Shadowrun (any edition), sticking with hard caps on Availability and Attribute/Skill/Force/whatever, helped me keep the game under control. When you want the power to escalate, bump up the max by a point or two. I found that setting those limits forced the players to creatively engage the setting instead of obsessing over the latest sourcebook. For the whiners, I simply made it so that powers, higher than their contacts, bottlenecked more powerful stuff. "Sorry man. I don't stock that Ares Combat Armor and trying to order some is a real hassle. I have to fill out forms, bribe the 'star investigator they send to snoop around. You get the idea. Just isn't worth it. Can I interest you in this nice Lined Coat instead? Look at how subtly the plates have been incorporated into the design...."
@nolgroth it was less an issue of that more of a problem player who attempted to do that with every game we played. Karma build really showed how much of a one trick pony he wanted despite the group's need for him to be more than a backline gunner. Honestly, once he asked him to leave, the issue was resolved.
"Hey hey, people. Sseth here." That other Sseth, who also reviews games, but of the video variety, and is crazier than most of the party at the end of a particularly sadistic Call of Cthulhu game...
One option I'd like to suggest is the PC graduates to "the big leagues" and spots a new character for some of their gear until the rest of the geoup is ready and wants to catch up. Gives you some grace period for the escalation and forces a bit of character development as you explore the relationships between the new character and old. It also means that now the bad guys are carrying bigger sticks you have a new character waiting to replace dead pc's.
You can also embrace power level it by setting a power level for the campaign. Tech level is the most important control for Traveller. I had so much fun running Traveller as a tech level 13 battlefield. Everyone had battledress armour, pgmp's, gauze sniper rifles, special ammo, gravity hanners etc and nukes. It was awesome. Think all those manga power armour series. Just as an alternative to a mystery or investigation - embracing power level can be fun.
Youve been going strong with one great vid after the other A thing id personally love to see from you. is a look at how you run Traveller digitally since ive been mostly just stumbling around trying to find a decent way to do it myself
enviromental hazards, oil refinery, methane swamp, air craft/spaceship, power relay station, to counter guns, adding water hazards to counter heavy armors, docks, sewers, yacht and my favorite ice sheets.
I find it fascinating that I pretty much saw all of this occur design wise in an indie TTRPG called HSD when it went from 1st to 2nd edition, especially on the front of legal and social consequences. The 2nd edition added the concepts of Gear Score and Clearance Level. GS is more about the availability or amount of legal hurdles required to get it, and can serve as an escalation benchmark if a Guide tells the players that they only have the credentials to obtain items with a GS of X or less, which can rise as the game goes on. CL is more the legal side of weapons and armor, what you can get away with being seen publicly with without the local authorities asking questions or demanding you store it out of sight. So even if it's within their gear level to own, the mechanics encourage them to only suit up when on a combat mission by discouraging (via Clearance Level) from being fully armed in public, though there are rules for things like having such a well established reputation that you can walk around more openly because people (or at least the cops) know you aren't about to start trouble. There's even certain surgeries you can get that change you so drastically that there is an inherent (situational) penalty to social rolls. It's natural that if the option is there, a lot of gamers will want to equip themselves with the best of the best to be prepared for anything. I see it as a bit of grey area meta-gaming dissonance as the characters may have no reasons to buy such heavy ordinance but the players are interested in the best stats they can get, "just in case".
I've played so many skill based games where the GM forgot how squishy PCs are & outfit all the enemies with machine guns or shotguns and then wondered why players got fed up. One memorable one loved to outnumber the party with these OP mooks, too. That's an entirely different situation than power creep, but still a mistake a DM can easily make when their experience is with level based games.
Your perspective on these topics is always welcome. Thank you! Funny how so many of these things boil down to what the "Mastering the RPG" podcast calls, "having an adult conversation." 😀
I agree with this whole-heartedly. I would also suggest some extra directions to talk over. When the players are drooling over all of their options for armoured clothing… etc. it’s often worth asking them to consider what their own wardrobe looks like; and how they would react to someone wearing literally the same clothes day after day. Many players are used to the (erroneous) notion that medieval people were unwashed and wore the same stuff constantly - reframing things in their heads can help a lot. I also find players more than happy to take “bundle deals” on things like mundane clothing and jewellery (representing an accrual over time) and actually reducing their spending on more “useful” gear because of that sort of opportunity. I believe it’s also really important to establish common visualisations for a lot of the modern and sci-fi gear (Mongoose Traveller is excellent in this regard); because if a player is thinking that their armoured jacket or cloth armour is entirely socially acceptable, or concealable, where the world is seeing something Hollywood would use tires to portray or something akin to a bomb suit… common understanding of the visuals might put them much more in the vein of the Securetech ultra-vest or Diplovest. Less relevant to cyberpunk settings; but very relevant to Traveller… I think it’s very important to have reasons to (per the example) wear a Vacc-suit for an extended period. Taking the premise from the “ghost ship” game; rather than disarming the players, I might allow a library search or advocate character to identify a quarantine procedure… this would allow all of the characters to wear vacc-suits; but it also gives them lots of opportunities to see the downsides - yeah, your suit does have the extended life support option; but you have still been breathing your own pits for twelve hours and you’re wearing what is still basically a rubber suit… oh, and the catheter is starting to get real uncomfortable… The effect is twofold; first players have good instincts for when the GM is trying to make them vulnerable and this runs counter; second, when that one guy wants to wear his military vacc-suit beyond the startown the other players will be allies in dissuading them. :-)
I remember sending a Punknaught against my players - they had a helluva fun time. After a triumphant battle to stop and destroy the Punknaught - in which there was some great strategy, roleplaying and some awesome lucky dice rolls for good measure - they turned to find... A street punk hastily cleaning the fresh tagging off one of the players' motorbikes before fleeing the scene.
Escalation is always a delicate issue. You want your players to feel powerful, but you need to maintain the threat. A part of escalation is also Rep. If the PCs are becoming a known quantity, then the response is going to get bigger and meaner when these chooms show face on the street. From bigger gangers trying to make a name for themselves being the guy who brought down Jack the Solo, or the NCPD calling in MAXTAC to deal with the PCs because they're known heavies on the street, the response is eventually going to get bigger. I loved the point you made in "Bigger Foe". The Chromebook isn't just for players. Hell, I'd not let a Dragoon in a player's hands ever, without spelling out exactly why this will go poorly. IT's one of the things I liked from Shadowrun's "Street Samurai's Catalog." When you opened the book, it wasn't just a book full of toys, it was formatted as an Ares corporate screamsheet for their latest and greatest toys. The meta of the book stated this was the stuff corporates were going to have access to, while also being a new toy box for your shooters. Legal and Social obstacles that Traveller has built in are the Law Level of each planet. On Planet Claire, you're not supposed to have anything more dangerous than a knife, and obvious body armor is frowned upon. Sure, you could try to sneak your combat shotgun in, but if you get caught, it's going to end poorly. A thing I've seen done is the "Standard streetwear" list. What's your typical daily wear? In a Cyberpunk setting, that does give you access to armor and a pistol regularly. But if you're trying to strut around in full Metal Gear carrying a Militech Ronin, the cops will assume you're trouble, and do something about it.
Thank you! There's a balance to be struck. Your party's maturity and experience are part of the formula for finding that balance. Consistency is key as well.
A great way to control Armor and the like is to exploit the common fact that most armor has to "fit" correctly to work correctly, and not all armors are amenable to fitting someone it was not fit for. Historically, most armor only had so much room for adjustment, with advanced armors like full-plate being literally custom-fit to one person. It was very rare for a person to be able to grab a random piece of armor and put it on without needing some fitting. In most game systems, it is fairly easy to implement this. 1.) Armor can only be worn by something within 10% of the size, weight, and shape of the original user. -A four-foot dwarf should not be able to wear a fullplate made for a six-foot human and vice-versa. 2.) If the new user is within 10% of the size of the original user, then a penalty is imposed for wearing the armor until it is fitted properly by consulting a specialists who can make the necessary adjustments. -A six-foot-tall human male loots a plate off a five-foot-six-inch-tall human male of about the same body weight, the six-footer can wear the plate with minor penalties as it will be a bit tight. Conversely, the smaller man will find the bigger man's armor a bit loose. 3.) Only armor that has been custom-fit or refit to a user can be worn without penalties. I find players tend to take their armor a LOT more seriously when this sort of mechanic is used. They value their personal armor a lot more because they know they cannot replace it on a whim from a loot drop or run to the store, and it makes sourcing specialist armorers more significant a part of the experience.
Hey Seth, this video has definitely helped me. I'm playing a radically complex homebrew with my brothers. I won't get too into it but basically we added just about every universe into one, so it's pretty hard to power scale very well when one part of the universe uses fallout type of guns and another part uses Halo levels of energy shields. I was playing with a group of friends of mine but the group had fallen apart and i really like how my brother's character arc was going and decided to pick up from there. Its been chaotic to try and find a balance and I've been dreading combat with the group even though I've loved combat and this is helping me plan much better.
I remember in a GURPS cyberpunk game I had made a character with ridiculously good gun skill and bought super accurate guns. I quickly realized that I could consistently place a 3 round burst into opponents' eyesockets. It was great the first time, but then lost its thrill pretty quickly.
Thank you for covering this issue. I ran into this a while back and didn't understand how to handle the power creep. Having that conversation at session zero will help me be a better referee in the future.
This was a great expansion on advice I've been told in the past 'never equip NPCs with gear you don't want the PCs to have'. By adding 'yet' to it. Phrasing the warning as keeping other players in mind before going full Iron Man is better than how I had first heard it, too. Another great video!
Honestly perfect timing. I'm taking my gaming group through "Through the breach" for the first time which is a skill based/class based mix with a lot of crazy steampunk equipment So far 1 hurdle we've encountered is that 1 of the players took a bunch of skills built around building steampunk robots to fight alongside them, though that's fairly expensive in system and he hasn't gotten around to using that yet (outside of the "mobile toolkit" that he got from starting equipment) I've offered to let him dig through the trash for scrap metal to mitigate the cost during downtime but he hasn't done that yet Maybe i should put them up against some more robot enemies and let him salvage parts afterwards
Different outfits is definitely something I started considering a while back. I would then quickly give a rundown of what my Traveller character was getting dressed into for the day and make it appropriate, even though it wasn't the safest choice. For example, if the crew were heading out shopping, or heading around town, she'd just wear pretty much standard clothes with a pistol. It would definitely affect the way I would consider going about any confrontation or situation and added more depth to our game. Also if there as a threat of any combat, I suddenly became extremely nervous even of a low-level threat!
Very useful video. I recently started a pulp cthulhu game in Sengoku Japan and I sort of ended up introducing the Resident Evil 4 merchant after my players started asking to find strange items to buy. I guess he’ll give me an easy way to help them acquire better stuff if needed. I’ve also found it difficult to give players spells in CoC so I’m giving that a shot here too.
Great, timely advice! I'm running a One Ring campaign where one of the PC's chose as an heirloom weapon a very powerful sword that can one-shot Undead, unbalancing a fair number of encounters (since Undead are generally difficult to kill in The One Ring). Now the encounter is too easy for one player and overtuned for the rest of the party. Love the content, Seth!
I usually do it in a completely different way. The equipment of the enemies are always "what makes sense" for what their purpose is. Goons and crooks have pistols. Army men carry military gear. Hired guards of a wealthy arms dealer will have give his guards all the newest shiny toys (its his safety after all). If they throw themselves unprepared and think they can take down an armed convoy with a pistol and class 1 vest. Well they better run instead. But this approach is most fair if you let your players almost always do recon on what enemies might be carrying so they can know what they are up against. whether its worth do openly fight and when they should be stealthy and maybe steal enemy weapons. etc. And if they do bring a box of dynamite to a knife fight i let them have it... as long as they are aware that now everyone and their mother will be searching for the band of crazy people that blew up half a mansion because they failed to sneak by a barely-armed pool-side security guard just because they wanted to steal a book from a rich person.
Funny youd mention dressing down and dressing up. I managed the party inventory during an adventure at sea and sorted my own stuff based on where it was stored on the ship, and had a reduced loadout for when we were at port. Some of my best work was fighting with that reduced gear. X3
I like peasant campaigns from medieval settings....NO ONE has a sword or heavy armor or mililtary grade anything. Once they fight their way up to something like that, the players really appreciate how much more powerful those tools are over what they started with.
A similar issue to this is when some of the characters min-max, and others don't, in a system where it makes a huge difference. In a Pathfinder 1e game, I had 4 players, 2 who min-maxed, and 2 who didn't. Now, as a GM, I am in a bind. If I buff the monsters to match the power level of the party, the 2 who didn't min-max get swatted easily and their contribution in combat, even when they hit, means nothing. But if I don't, the two who have min-maxed will face-roll the enemies with no challenge whatsoever. The answer was obviously to discuss with the players, and the solution we came up with was to redo the characters of the two players who had made sub-optimal character generation choices to bring them more in line with the other two. This issue is only possible in systems where optimizing vs. not-optimizing can create a massive gulf in power level.
I personally think that the player characters having to ask "how do we get our heavy equipment to the fight" adds to the fun. Like, if your target is in a heavily defended safehouse in the basement of an apartment building chances are you're not going to get within a mile of the building in power armor without getting some attention from the law... So the party does a little research, finds out that the apartment complex gets visited pretty regularly by a delivery truck that reloads their vending machines, so the party either steals the truck or disguises a similar vehicle and uses that truck to get their power-armored and heavily armed squad right within spitting distance of the building without ringing any alarm bells. Just by adding that little hitch at the start of the game the party EARNS the opportunity to take advantage of their advanced kit, the level of difficulty stays relatively the same as the party has just shifted some of that difficulty from the fight itself into the preamble.
This video was just in time. My players are in the frontier in my DnD game and soon they may go to the city. I've been wanting to implement restrictions on arms and armor in the city. The players are going to realize that carrying around a sword in the frontier is much more vogue than in the city.
I am in a Rogue Trader game where due to an un-errata'd book (and noone of us has the errata'd version, we've just heard that has been done, and we don't know what the exact changes are) got an item that is easily 50% better than the equivalent of the exact same rarity/price (the system does not use money). So the rulebooks themselves and lapses in editing can easily create cases of this. To clarify, after we found out we collectively decided to leave it as is, but it does stand as a good example for gear that is too easy to get for what it does and can cause imbalances.
@@johanneskaiser8188 Ah yes, power armour in general is a bit constrained by rarities. My group resolved that by simply making it so that it was impossible to acquire- nobody could make it, and the few people who had a suit wouldn't sell it for the entire sector. We had a similar issue with the Sororitas boltgun, as it was much cheaper and just better than a 'regular' boltgun, but our solution to that was just to say that that rarity only applied if you were in good standing with the Sororitas themselves.
Was running Cyberpunk Red and my players where well tuned and had constantly good rolls, so I had to add some elite cyberninjas to the adventure. As you mentioned, they killed a few and immediately snapped up their gear. But the first couple encounters were fun to watch them freak when they weren't insta killing them (save for one really good Molotov cocktail damage roll). Another thing to consider for a "soft" escalation is simple bumping up/down the tactics used by your goons. Its a good on the fly change that you can do if things are going to good or bad for your players.
My favorite response to powerful players, e.g. mopping the floor with enemies, is to have the remaining enemies freak out and turn to someone powerful for help. The rival mob boss is someone they normally would never deal with, but they're _desperate_ to defend their territory against this new group of armed and armored super soldiers that have started wiping them out and shutting down the drug trade. They're so desperate, that they make a Faustian bargain. And the Boss replies ominously "I have just the man for the job". This is organic escalation that feels compelling and natural when it happens. It can be tricky to always work it into the story and world, but when you do, the players being overpowered is a driver of very interesting events!
Of course, one way to handle some PCs being OP relative to the other PCs is the same way you always handle everything as a DM. Don't negate them. Just add benefits or complications to the situation in a way that will make the game more fun for everyone. Maybe build a story around it. "You want Super Uber Power Armor +27. Okay, sure! And ... this has attracted the attention of Powerful Lord Guy who needs you to help him on a mission that only someone with Super Uber Power Armor +27 and his intrepid allies can handle ..."
One of my favourite bits of the seminal (& my favourite) RPG Eclipse Phase is that it turns so much of our hobby on its head! Most games are founded on the idea of killing monsters to get more stuff to kill bigger monsters. Well, in the post-scarcity future of Eclipse Phase even the best weapons & armour are theoretically available at the start of the game…but the bad guys can have the same too & using WMDs always has consequences! Plus there’s some “Lovecraftian” nasties waiting in the inky black of space & human weapons don’t bother them much 😉👩🏻🚀🦑
Had a fun time learning about Escalation a while back. I was playing Cyberpunk Red as part of a shared campaign. Fun little character that was more meant for RPG and social stories. IIRC, she was a celebutant Russian mafia princess type. Could have been fun. Very low xp and very low gear, just starting out her career. I was happy to get into a game with some of the more established players- which turned into a 4 hour game of rocket tag (literally everybody else involved in the scene PC or NPC firing rocket launchers at each other). She tried to stay in the highly armored limo until that was taken out and she died. Remember folks, remember who you're hanging out with! :)
Vague memories (30? 35? years ago) but there was a discussion in the letters page of Dragon about an infamous set of armor in a Star Wars game- the infamous Red Eyes (?) armor. Again, long long time ago so lost in the dust of my memories, but could be fun to read back through it to see the thinking at that point.
I thought the Dressing Up section was going to be characters in high society where they have to dress to impress - noble banquets, high end casino's, royal weddings, court cases, ceremonial events. Combine that with a fashion shopping session and let your team of badasses get their inner peacocks on...
For Traveller, if the PCs are leveling city blocks with FGMPs and jumping around in Power Armor with Grav belts to ice some random gang members... um... the local defense forces might have something to say about that.
This is something that I've been struggling with myself in my own Dark Heresy game I've been running. I've found recently that scarcity of ammo for higher end weapons can help curb some of the escalation. Nothing like a bolt pistol that you've only got four rounds left. Makes you reconsider dropping the old revolver.
Any time I worry about power balance, I usually recall my own experience with flubbing up while I was dming in DND 5e. One of my regulars is also one of my best friends, so it's of course very easy for us to pick up the vibe the other is going for during scenes. We had some new players, however, and I was focusing too much on my friend that I didn't quite realize that his character was quite a bit more well optimized than the rest of the party. At the time he couldn't join as many sessions as he could due to scheduling complications, so to compensate for that in universe, the excuse was that he was a much more experienced adventurer and was hired specifically for different jobs than the rest of the party. It explained where he was, and added some flavor to the world. I wanted to make sure he could keep up with the rest of the party however, and would assign him some placeholder loot so he wouldn't fall too far behind. My earlier problem reared it's head though, he was quite a bit more min-maxed than they were, so it felt like when he would join up with the rest of the party he'd pretty much soak for the entire party, taking away their lime light and invalidating their progress. This was fine when he was on and off, but when our schedules lined back up he quickly became a monster in his own right! I discussed this with him in private, and after ping ponging ideas off each other he came up with a perfect way to patch up this hole. Since he was on and off, he never really got the connect with the party as much, and wanted a kind of fresh start. His character was more experienced, grizzled, and he wanted to start over with someone more fresh faced. The idea was simple, during a normal adventure things would turn more treacherous than expected, while mapping out an ancient catacomb where in a comedic twist, his character would brag of his many adventures, his experience, and the simplicity of this task...Before being killed off by a simple spike door trap. We had quite the laugh, and as they pulled his carcass from the door and returned to the surface to figure out what to do now, a village guard who had been tasked with keeping watch over the catacomb would question them on the absurd events, linking him seemlessly back into the story with his new character. Now-a-days I definitely keep a closer eye on the slippery slope that balance can be, and that hand waving too many issues without addressing them can really add up!
From what I've gathered, a lot of players/GMs have a problem with equipment allocation in one 'leveled' RPG in particular: Starfinder (essentially Paizo's Pathfinder.....In SPACE!!....but not really 😅) They introduced a new mechanic where equipment how has a 'level' associated with it, and its advised that players never possess equipment more than one level above their Character Level. This is supposed to be controlled by the GM keeping careful track of how much 'credits' the players have, so they simply don't have the money to buy equipment way above their level, although there isn't really anything preventing them from pooling their cash to give one character weapons/armor WAY above his character level, and no real mechanic to prevent it (like a penalty to AC/To Hit for having mis-leveled equipment).
Thank you very much. I've never read Starfinder. But a level cap on equipment sounds really goofy to me. I mean, apart from the PCs pooling money, there's also theft, or simply taking equipment off the badguy's corpse. I just don't see that working too well in an actual game.
Early in my GM career, my players regularly had access to massive amounts of equipment that they’d looted from defeated enemies. Thankfully, I came across one critical rule in Aftermath’s Project Morpheus module that was related to vehicle damage rules: always allow PC’s to escape an exploding vehicle, but they leave ALL EQUIPMENT not strapped to their body behind in their haste to escape. This one rule made up for a lot of “GM oops!”
Does Traveller and Cyber Punk have security systems to detect your pc's hardware? I was thinking you could make determining the power level part of the game play. For example, the Sec system could detect weapons, armour, cyberware, drones, etc within certain tech levels, then it runs the serials and licenses along with your biometrics to determine if you're allowed to have them, use them or have restricted access. This way in sec controlled zones your pc's have to account for this digital antagonists and how you're going to get around it to control the environment and scenario. Your spoofed id's permissions and hacks might put a ticking clock on how long until you're discovered for example. You might go so low-tech the system doesn't even registar your gear in the first place, or perhaps you manage to hack the system and update your permissions so it doesn't raise the alarm.
That exists. Of course some gear and augments might be specially camouflaged or stealthed to hinder detection. The PCs might break apart some weapon or contraband tech and spread it across several items and then reassemble it once they've gotten through security. Hacking is always an option. So are bribes. And some larger or more obvious items might be impossible to conceal (or at least so difficult it might was well be impossible). No matter which way it is, the players are still having to make an effort and take on the risk of failure. Or they might not be able to get to their gear right away because it's disassembled or hidden in the bottom of a crate. Those are all perfectly possible.
I'm glad we saw this tackled mostly from a Sci-Fi and skill-based mindset. DND is good, but gear and class abilities are always gonna be in contention with how they affect the power level. Whereas in Cyberpunk Red or Shadowrun, sometimes all you've got to work with is the 9 on your hip and a few hypos of Jazz or Berserk. It's those systems where gear really is the delineation in power, and how that gear is handled both socially and mechanically really sets the tone for what can be good fun as a player. I've certainly got as much love out of playing poor, ill-equipped runners in those settings, where the rules of escalation set a deliberate tone on what is and isn't acceptable in the games world, and that tension of knowing we can't just kick in the door and solve problems with brute force really helped us as players become more and more creative. Playing a borg'd up cyberpsycho is fun for a short while, but scrapping by just enough eddies or nuyen to afford a bowl of ramen to bribe some hobos with? Led to some priceless situations.
Since I run a lot of science fiction games, I've run into this numerous times. I used to try and limit the player's gear, but that got rather tedious, particularly in games like Traveller where being a typical merchant ship can generate a lot of credits and once rich, even hard to get items become much easier. So what I ended up doing was setting up enemies that with some warning have a limited function high damage/high penetration weapon like an RPG or LAW where the number of rounds are one or just a few. And the enemy with that weapon stayed in hiding and was tasked with hitting the PC that went above the rest of the group's armor or armament level. Not only did it leave the rest of the enemy to fight the more normal players, but when the hunter popped out they had a good chance to hurt the 'tank' character. And once that had worked, the weapon was mostly useless as it was disposable or out of hard to find ammo, meaning it didn't end up adding to the group's power level. The player's even eventually learned that word got around about the team with the combat armor guy and enemies were taking measures. Yes, the PC's were feared and respected, and that made them targets.
I run Index Card RPG now (which is basically a streamlined system-neutral D&D, but it's more skill-based than it's level-based). I honestly don't understand what I'm doing in general (it's the first game I run, and I have never played it), but we had a discussion about items with my players (initiated by them, actually), and I decided to tone it down by now (also I probably should not be lazy and choose items rather than make players roll). Sending them to some non-messed-up city and making them leave their equipment behind is also an interesting idea though. PS: thank you for your Traveler videos, they (and this system in general) give me a lot of inspiration. Especially as I run an entirely different system anyway and I can use old edition materials (some of which are really cheap or free).
