Game Imbalance Is More Fun!

I've been doing some thinking on the role of game balance in old school play. That's when I realized that part of the point of old school gaming was game imbalance.

I've written before about the old school ideal of immersion and how it's facilitated by the lack of rules. The other thing that facilitates immersion is game imbalance. Specifically, power imbalance between the PCs and the opposition. In old-school D&D, a first level character was a nobody, little better than his 0-level brethren. With single-digit hit points, magic users wielding 1 spell per day, and a bonus to hit only if you're lucky, that first level party can't count on the numbers to save them. They need immersion to give themselves every tactical advantage if they wanted to survive to second level.

KS tries to sell Rifts and other Palladium games as "thinking man's games", and that's true to a degree. I can readily imagine some early 90's Palladium gamers who's GM just bought Rifts. Up to that point, it was a fantasy campaign, or maybe Heroes Unlimited. They've got a few levels and are killing orcs/beating up thugs with alacrity. Then they find themselves on Rifts Earth. Suddenly, their SDC-level abilities don't matter for much. That super-tough guy with the scads of SDC and armor and stuff? 1 or 2 hit points on the MDC scale. 3 if he's lucky.

Suddenly, those characters who thought they were top dogs have been knocked down a notch. Time to start thinking. Time for immersion. Time for roleplay.

All well and dandy until the surviving party members (and the native characters that wound up replacing the dead ones) get their hands on MDC gear. Once they level the playing field, now the GM has to up the ante yet again. It's kind of telling that the first Rifts Worldbook details creatures that are functionally immune to MD.

So what does this mean for BTR? Does this mean that I'm throwing out all notions of game balance? No. Balance between characters is one of my priorities. The ability for every character type to be awesome and relevant is very important to me. But one thing I am definitely not including is a method of encounter balance. And I can definitely see putting some advice in the GM section advocating putting the players out of their element in order to keep them on their toes.

Micro-Mega-Damage

While I mentioned the use of an armor divisor system to represent mega-damage in my first post, an idea that would save me some math has recently occurred to me, though it does have something of a catch.

The catch is, you'd have to give up all of your polyhedral dice and rely solely on the d10.

What I'm proposing is a damage-scaling system (sort of like how MDC works, but smaller so it's not as cheesy) where the next tier up isn't 100 points of damage, but only 5. And the reason that you'd have to leave all your other dice behind is that the average roll of a d10 is 5 (5.5 for those detail minded folks out there), so a 1d10 damage die could simply be averaged to 5 points of damage, or 1 point of damage on the vehicle scale. And rolling 5d10 damage against a vehicle and then dividing by 5 could be simplified to rolling 1d10 vehicle scale damage.

So this scaling mechanic has the ability to save us from the "buckets o' dice" problem of human-scale weaponry vs. heavy vehicles. It also grants the armor-like property of mega-damage to things that probably should have it.

For example, in the Rifts system, a car has about 200 SDC. An untrained mook does 1d4 damage (average roll 2.5) with a punch and has 2 attacks per melee. So at an average 5 damage per 15 seconds (I'll let someone with stronger math skills factor in the 15% miss chance due to the fact that he could miss his roll to hit), that car is useless after about 10 minutes of some guy (nobody special) punching it. A combat trained character could do it faster.

Under a x5 scaling system, the car has only about 40 vehicle scale hp, but it takes 5 points of human-scale damage to cause 1 hp. If an untrained human still does only an average of 2.5 damage per hit, that converts to 1d10-3 (it gives a larger range, 0-7, but retains the same average). Since only results of 5,6, and 7 (8,9, and 10 on the die) would damage the car at all, that's about a 30% chance of doing 1 point of damage on a successful hit. That feels a bit more realistic to me.

So here's the question, guys: This feels a lot cleaner than the current MDC system and seems to produce more realistic results. Is it worth giving up all of those funny little dice?

Bonus question: Am I doing my math right? Do I only think this works like I say it does?

Mega-Damage is Broken!

Thank you for tuning in to the first post on the Project BTR blog. In case you haven't figured it out, BTR stands for Better Than Rifts. If you don't know what Rifts is, you suck. If you do know what Rifts is, you know how much of an overhaul the system needs. This blog will detail my thoughts and progress toward designing an upgraded system.

To avoid legal snafus, note that Better Than Rifts is a preliminary name that serves as a convenient descriptor of my design goals. The final product will have a different name, though finding a way to keep the BTR acronym would be fun.

The easiest thing to point out as broken in the current iteration of the Rifts RPG is the concept of Mega-Damage. Each point of Mega-Damage represents 100 points of regular (SDC) damage. When this was introduced in Palladium's Robotech RPG, it made a degree of sense. It was a clean way to delineate personal combat from mecha-scale combat. When a mecha-scale attack came at little ol' you, you're toast and a human-scale attack had to be huge in order to even dent one of the giant robots.

Rifts didn't really keep with that split (and some say it didn't work too well even in Robotech). Personal weapons and armor appeared that interacted on the Mega-scale. Meaning that anyone had the ability to wield a weapon of mass destruction and survive attacks from same.

While this does the job of separating heroes and villains (with MDC weapons and armor) from the average joe (who operates solely on the SDC scale), the break between the two scales is too extreme to hold up believably for any extended period. If everything worthwhile is MDC, why waste skill selections to max out your SDC potential? Why does the SDC scale even exist?

One solution used by some Rifts gamers is to reduce the MDC scale to 10xSDC rather than 100xSDC. This still allows for MDC characters to be a cut above, but not to the point that it's ridiculous. It makes SDC much more viable, as a normal PC will often have 20-30 total hit points (counting innate SDC) along with whatever is provided by SDC-scale armor. This translates to 2-3 MDC hit points. Better than 1, certainly.

My proposed solution: Armor Divisors. This does mean stepping away from the traditional Palladium conceit of "armor takes damage for you" and into the idea of "armor stops damage" that is prevalent in many other RPGs. While it might be fun to incorporate an armor damage mechanic, it would have to require minimal bookkeeping (and be another post, anyway).

The idea is that super-powered weapons are more likely to penetrate armor rather than simply render the wearer into chunky salsa. It also helps control the "buckets o' dice" that tend to come out with very large damages. Here's how it works: Say you have some armor that stops 10 damage. Now we take a pistol that does 1d10 damage. That's not scary at all, is it. The armor is going to stop that attack every time. Now let's take that 1d10 pistol and give it an armor divisor of 2, so that any armor it goes up against is divided in half. Now your 10 armor points will only stop 5 points of damage. Gets a little scarier, doesn't it? If we upgrade the armor divisor to 10, that armor is only going to stop 1 point of damage from that pistol. See how it works? And we're not radically increasing the amount of damage done, but we are affecting how the hypothetical player would respond to the attack.

Another component of the problem is that weapon damages (especially Mega-damages) are assigned by pure whim. While this works from a given perspective (the designer says "I need a weapon that's about this scary"), each designer winds up using their own contradictory formulas or notions, making the whole thing even less logical. Any attempt to create consistency from all of this just muddies the waters even more, as exception after exception pile up.

My proposed solution: Guns Guns Guns! A publication of BTRC, it is designed as a generic weapon creation system, with a focus on detail and realism. While a setting like Rifts has all kinds of wacky technologies, having a solid, consistent base to draw from can make the wackiness that much more believable.

See you next month for more fun taking Rifts apart and making it truly awesome!