Power Creep

'Power creep' - or 'power inflation' as I used to call it, apparently it didn't catch on - is common in some sorts of games as a design shortcut to cool, as the OP pointed out. It's also all but inevitable with certain sorts of designs, and here's another couple terms that haven't caught on...

Lots of RPGs, like D&D, are what I call 'list based.' What can your character do? Well, choose from the lists. Choose a race, choose a class, pick a weapon for the table (yeah, they're mostly pole-arms, don't worry about it), choose some spells to learn, a few to memorize, and one to cast. Each thing gets it's own write-up, often it's own rules. Want to do something you couldn't do before? Someone has to add it to the list, preferably the publisher, so it's "official."
Thing is, each time you add to those lists, you create unexpected synergies among their elements. Choose 1 from column A and 1 from column B is 9 choices when you have 3 in each column, a hundred if you have 10. Even if the design keeps each individual new item in line, those synergies can be game-breaking, once a killer combo crops up, it crowds out everything else.
Power creep.

The alternative to list-based designs is 'effects based,' design, where the character's ability is defined by a finite set of things that can be accomplished, not an open-ended list of ways to accomplish them. "Kill an enemy" is an effect, but there's near-infinite ways to do it - swords to lasers to telepathic embolisms to poison to voodoo dolls to dim mak. The effect-based system has one sub-system to accomplish the effect, so if you want to add axes and phasers to the above list, you don't add to the system, just use the existing sub-system. No power creep.
Not so many supplements to sell, either.

Ilbranteloth said:

Yes, I have an ensemble mode campaign and it’s based off of how I think the Geneva guys played. Everybody has multiple characters and we can jump to a different group of characters depending on who can make it to the game that week. I’m even planning on expanding this to a public campaign and players from the home campaign can jump on with their characters too.

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This works with some players, but not all. The DM really has to be on top of things, and the players require a non-trivial level of investment. But it works for the right group.

I’ve started moving in this direction in part to safeguard against the inevitable attrition. When an interesting arc is happening, a particular group might make a 3-6 week commitment, but then when somebody can’t make it we continue the campaign with a different group.

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Yes, that's kind of why we ended up going that direction, if not for the exact same reason ultimately. Part of it was trying to avoid forcing the characters together when it wouldn't make sense for them to be on the same adventure. One thing that the ensemble did was really help fill the game world out. It also lets players enjoy changes and play at different power levels without having to force their characters into those changes if it doesn't make sense.

Tony Vargas said:

The alternative to list-based designs is 'effects based,' design, where the character's ability is defined by a finite set of things that can be accomplished, not an open-ended list of ways to accomplish them.

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That's essentially how a supers game like Champions or its various clones works. They can end up feeling rather generic, though, and doing the specs on a character can be a fair challenge, though.

EvilDwarf said:

I've said for years--well, at least to my gaming group--that level increases are an illusion. My AC increases, Monster BAB increases. My BAB increases, Monster AC increases. My skill levels increase, DCs increase. It's all a wash.

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Lylandra said:

In literature or shows, power creep refers to the fact that our protagonists keep getting stronger and stronger until they reach levels of fantastidiculous while their enemies miraculously keep up at their pace.

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Are we talking about changing the power level in the fiction, or about changing the way the game plays at the table, in the real world?

The first seems to be mostly a matter of taste - 4e, for instance, is expressly predicated on a Hero/Paragon/Epic tier approach to the fiction, so that PCs begin the game fighting goblins and kobolds, and finish it fighting demon princes, Tiamat, etc. You can do this without even changing the mechanics, just by changing the story elements from time to time.

The second is a matter of design. In 4e, for instance, PCs increase their breadth of capabilities over time, and there are some non-numerically rated mechanical effects (eg domination, invisibility, flight) that tend to be the preserve of non-Heroic tier.

Jay Verkuilen said:

A game like 4E, which is explicitly and very stridently gamist and strongly rooted in video games and minis games, tiered threats and put a number of them at different levels. So you'd have orcs that were leveled up. You didn't really graduate from threats, they advanced with you just as much. There still was some qualitative shifts in advancement but characters' powers didn't shift so much the way they did from lower to higher levels either.

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Ilbranteloth said:

in AD&D and now 5e, the system does stay fairly static, and when you level up it does increase your effectiveness. Monsters don't increase in difficulty themselves, although you tend to challenge more difficult monsters. In contrast 4e was designed so everything scaled. Your AC, attack bonuses, etc. were all higher at 10th level than 1st, and the monsters scaled with you.

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In 4e, the changes in the fiction are very dramatic with level increase. The mechanical changes are also rather noticeable - a 30th level PC is far more complex to run than a 1st level one, because of the breadth and intricacy of the options available to that PC.

I wouldn't agree that 5e doesn't increase effectiveness with levelling - the proficiency bonus applies to a range of dice rolls; and casters get a wider range of spells, some of which are simply numerical in their effect (and so may be "absorbed" by numerical changes on the GM's side of the table) but many of which open up a range of non-numerical but mechanical options (probably moreso than in 4e). It's true that AC in 5e doesn't scale to the same extent as in 4e, but that doesn't mean there's no defensive scaling - it's just built into hit points instead.

In AD&D, the scaling is also there but built into the attack tables (which tend to scale more rapidly than in 4e or 5e, at least for fighters) and hit points; and a lot of active/offensive scaling is built into the spell system and magic items.

lewpuls said:

I like blowing things up with tac nukes - well, fireballs anyway - and megawatt lasers (lightning bolts). But when you get up into Timestops and other Immense Godlike Powers, I think the GAME suffers in favor of the POWER TRIP. And at the same time it becomes less skillful, less clever, and harder to GM.

<snip>

Of course, many players and GMs don't care about skill or cleverness, they care about other things (among them, power trips).

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Blowing things up with fireballs is a mixture of an arithmetical problem (expected damage) and a geometric one (targetting). It's not inherent in the idea of (say) Time Stop that it poses a fundamentally different and game-breaking sort of problem - rationing effort per unit of time is just another optimisation problem

Of course, there is the less quantifiable tactical and logistical aspects of being in a position to bring one's fireball to bear, but the same might be said of Time Stop. And to the extent that Time Stop overrides such concerns (eg because the game system doesn't have any way, consistent with its fiction, of posing logistical or optimisation problems to people who can stop time) then that's not an issue with Time Stop per se but simply a problem with the particular design of that system. Fly spells would create exactly the same issue if no one ever came up with the idea of flying enemies and strong winds as elements of the game.

billd91 said:

In tabletop games, I see it more as an encounter building problem. If everything is keeping up with the PC's developments, the person building the encounter may be trying to "extend the sweet spot", but it's really just a treadmill. There really should be things that don't level with the PCs in a campaign so that the players get a real sense of improvement.

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I personally haven't had this experience. The "sense of improvement" can (in my experience) be conveyed in all sorts of ways -eg goblins surrender when they see the PCs; now when the PCs fight goblins they are in hordes rather than small groups; the PCs can stand with some prospect of success against giants, and hence can easily infer that goblins would cause them little trouble.

In real life, sometimes you mightn't know if you've improved until you try the same task again. But in a RPG this knowledge is ascertainable simply by looking at the maths of the system, and how that correlates to the fiction. You don't need to actually test it out.

In addition, as another poster pointed out, there is the issue that repeating past successes can make for boring play:

Jay Verkuilen said:

A combat with a bunch of goblins at low level is tough. A few levels later and they're chumps. Eventually they're not worth the RL time to fight so they stop appearing in the game.

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Lylandra said:

No, this is power creep. In literature or shows, power creep refers to the fact that our protagonists keep getting stronger and stronger until they reach levels of fantastidiculous while their enemies miraculously keep up at their pace

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No, you're talking about levelling up.

Power creep is what [MENTION=93444]shidaku[/MENTION] explains.

Lord_Blacksteel said:

All that said, what's the point of this article?

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Probably a thinly disguised dislike for either of the two concepts "levels" (and specifically levelling up) and "crunch" (as in more of it).

Tony Vargas said:

The alternative to list-based designs is 'effects based,' design, where the character's ability is defined by a finite set of things that can be accomplished, not an open-ended list of ways to accomplish them. "Kill an enemy" is an effect, but there's near-infinite ways to do it - swords to lasers to telepathic embolisms to poison to voodoo dolls to dim mak. The effect-based system has one sub-system to accomplish the effect, so if you want to add axes and phasers to the above list, you don't add to the system, just use the existing sub-system. No power creep.
Not so many supplements to sell, either.

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I generally agree with your analysis. I would refine the "non-list games" category into "tactical effect" and "narrative wrapper" games, as they seem to have their own sets of problems and limitations, IME. Whether that's worth a three-category split is eye-of-the-beholder, I suspect.

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Power creep in and of itself is not a problem. Someone earlier, maybe even the original poster, defined 'power creep' as being able to do at 9th level what previously required an 11th level character.

If that was the only problem, then power creep would just be a quirk. You could just change the encounters that you were expecting the party to overcome and overall gameplay wouldn't change. The real problem is that power creep is almost never so tidy. The real problem is (for example) being able to generate the damage of an 11th level character, while only being able to endure the damage of an 8th level character.

That is to say, power creep is a problem because it usually starts invalidating the overall balance of the design, changing not merely the pace of the game or encounter design, but actually changing the game. In 1st edition, because of the very hard caps on hit points (implicit in the design or actual in what was allowed for a PC) and the corresponding lack of caps on damage inflicted (implicit in the design or actual in what was allowed for a PC) as PC's leveled up, they tended to find themselves increasingly in a world of glass cannons - both themselves and their foes. This resulted in game play that shifted more and more importance to achieving surprise and winning initiative rolls, to the detriment of both gameplay, the social contract, and encounter design. Invariably though, the way power creep was observed in the game, was that over time new rules increased the damage capabilities of PC's and monsters without increasing their durability appreciably. A very good example is the 1e AD&D weapon specialization rules which nearly double the expected damage output of most low level fighters, and give a significant bump in expected damage even at higher levels, yet were paired with nothing to address either the survivability of PC's or monsters. Another example is the repeated attempts to 'fix' dragons that almost invariably just increased there ability to inflict damage, resulting in making the problem of balance worse. Yet another example is the increased potency of magical bows made available in the official or semi-official rules (Dragon Magazine). That is power creep.

Power creep hits balance in all sorts of ways. For example, weapon specialization made the already very marginal thief class too weak to be worth taking except as a 'dip' class of some sort. The problem was that after weapon specialization a 15th level thief would probably lose a fight with a mere 5th level fighter, and your already marginal utility was even less justifiable. The already problematic combat balance between fighter subclasses and everything else just got worse, meaning that unless you could bring to the table the massively potent spells that themselves scaled up with no limit, you weren't bring anything to the table worth taking up a slot in the party that could be filled by a fighter.

Power creep has to be distinguished from mere 'number inflation'. Number inflation is the tendency of all numbers across the board, both the damage inflicted and the damage capable of being sustained, to increase between editions. Every edition it feels like the maximum hit points and the maximum expected damage of monsters increases by a bit, but because everything this increasing together its not power creep. It might be fairly pointless, because if you double every number you end up with the same gameplay with just slightly more complicated math (more dice to add together, more digits in the addition and subtraction), but it's different than power creep in that it doesn't in itself change the gameplay.

Celebrim, I think what you are describing here is not actually Power Creep. Its an unbalance due to increasing power, and the other aspects of the game not compensating accordingly. And yes, that can definitely be a big problem. But Power Creep is a very specific phenomenon, where new game content is objectively better than older content, thus making the older content inferior. Its like introducing a new feat that is pretty much the same as an old feat, but better. Or adding a new class that does the same as an old class, but better. Say for example that an RPG has one dedicated healer class, and a new healer class is introduced that is objectively better than the older class. This then causes players to move away from playing that older class at all... it eliminates options. Yes, you could theoretically still make use of the older content, but you would be handicapping yourself.

In magic the gathering Power Creep seems to be kind of by design. They want older cards to disappear from rotation, so people buy new cards. There are both pros and cons to this design philosophy. But when the new content is intended to be on the same power level as the older content (but isn't), then this becomes a problem.

CapnZapp said:

No, you're talking about levelling up.

Power creep is what [MENTION=93444]shidaku[/MENTION] explains.

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No, I'm talking about power creep in shows or literature.
Power creep in games can be defined a bit different though See http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PowerCreepPowerSeep which kind of explains both (or many many Youtube videos on why which show or setting handles power creep well or not)