TTRPGs: broken mechanics vs. abusive players

[Lanefan]

I'm hearing "my party used magic as intended and it did precisely what it was supposed to..." What am I missing? Assuming the enemy got the appropriate saving throws and such. Of course if it didn't, that's an entirely different issue than the subject at hand.

Agreed.

Why? If the adventure text says it doesn't come out, it doesn't come out.

Agreed again, to a point. If it has an in-module reason to stay put e.g. it's defending something in that room or there's a border it can't cross, then fine. Absent such things, however, this is IMO an authorial flaw in that why would it stay put when it can see all those nice tasty adventurers standing just outside its door?

What we're also not told is how intelligent this creature was. If it had any sort of intelligence, once the PCs opened up with their ranged attacks wouldn't it have hidden against the wall next to the door such that someone would have to step into the room to target it and thus come within its reach?

The writers of that adventure assumed the players would be standing at the door casting buffs or whatever. I'm just not really following your train of thought, unless you are one of those people that thinks the game should be played competitively, DM versus player. That's what it seems like to me when somebody suggests that the parameters should be changed mid game to be more adversarial towards the players.

My train of thought is that the creature should do what would make sense for it to do given its capabilities and-or intelligence; and if that comes across as adversarial then I've no sympathy.

Maybe the spell could be level 4 instead of level 3, but other than that I really don't see a problem with the scenario you described.

It was a scroll, as per the OP, meaning the party burned a resource to pull this off. I've no problem with the end result, but I do have issues with a) how this encounter was written and b) how the monster was run, unless it was mindless.

 

[aramis erak]

@ThorinTeague
for me, broken mechanics are those that either...

• make some particular character choice completely either
  • mandatory for most groups
  • a total waste of character gen resources to take
• are contradictory to other mechanics in the same ruleset
• are contradictory to the established setting
• are unintelligible due to either jargon or language fail.

The only genuinely broken mechanism/rule is the one that conflicts with other rules in that system. Yes, you probably won't see these in nth-degree-tested games, but it's fun to note that D&D 3.5 seemed to have errata updates until the day they shut it down. (Sorry: put it in hibernation until after 4th edition.)

IME Those are the games most likely to be encountered having rules that are at self inconsistent...

• they're the most likely to be encountered at all, as they're typically by the big names for brand recognition
• they tend to be longer, and length correlates to more errors.
• the "tested to the Nth degree" is a huge misconception in most cases...
  • The FFG Star Wars testing phase for EotE was 15 weeks, one of the longest public beta's I've seen; the other two were shorter.
  • The playtests for D&D 5 were mostly alpha, and mostly about large details, not polish in beta
  • the playtests for WFRP 2E were literally barely even Alpha... Chris was writing the rules, and playtesters getting pretty much raw first draft... a detail utterly lost upon Black Industries.
  • The published playtests for Mongoose's Traveller (2008) were several months, but again, not really a beta. The beta was a closed portion... Drafts 1 & 2 weren't even fully playable. Drafts 3, 3.1, and 3.2 were quite playable... but the in-house 4 is what made it to print, and wasn't widely playtested. The combat rules, the task system, the ship power rules, and the ship combat rules all got scrapped and replaced after 3.2....
  • GURPS is notorious for semiclosed (pay to play) playtests under 8 weeks... mostly looking for typos...
• most public and semiclosed betas are crowdsourcing proofreading, not actual mechanics testing. If enough complain about elements, changes may get made.

For the round 2 testing on Dune, we had 6 weeks ... I don't know the changes adopted in the final, but we were able to spot a dozen changes from the public beta to the second round closed. The later materials, we had a timeframe for one chunk of rules, and pushed it as hard as we could, it was 8 weeks... but, much to Modiphius' credit, when we (and apparently others) found a number of issues, they rolled back the product to put it in... and had us test another part for another 6 weeks...
As someone who's done a lot of playtesting for big names... it's almost always time-crunched. 3 companies have been really positive experiences:
Modiphius. They listen. They iterate. And, when needed, will go back even if it's a major time hit.
Fantasy Flight: the GM's from several groups in a private forum was excellent - we were able to examine others' feedback. And FFG also listened. Far more so in splat alphas than in the core betas. But their betas really are betas - the alpha was done before that.
BTRC: Greg Porter's betas are always early beta, some felt more like alphas. My favorite was one that went nowhere, and was clearly 4 successive alphas... Mars 2100.

Speaking of Palladium I'd say the concept of MDC is Rifts is broken. Not because it exists, but because one starting character may have them and another may not.

Agree it's broken, but not why...

For those unfamiliar with Rifts/MDC...it was basically a higher value version of HP. I believe it was a 1-100 or possibly 1-1000 ratio. So you might have a starting party where one character had 18HP and another 1200.

Perhaps broken isn't correct here depending on your definition, but I'd say it was.

Just to make certain people grok the issues...

HP hit points
SDC Structural Damage Capacity - same scale as HP.
pSDC Personal SDC (from various skills)
[a]SDC Armor SDC - if the attack hits your armor, the armor takes the damage until it runs out of aSDC
MDC MegaDamage Capacity

1 MDC damage does 100 HP to an HP+SDC being or SDC structure.
infinite HP/SDC damage does no damage at all to a MDC structure.

Pre-Robotech, Palladium's to-hit rule was very sensible: AR determined how much of the character was covered and how well that coverage worked. ARs ran from 6 to about 18, to hits were on 1d20 with mods, ranging from -2 to +7 or so. Rolls 1-4, or unmodified 1, miss. 5-AR hit the armor, depleting its SDC. Over AR hits wearer of said armor. Essentially, unarmored was AR 5.

MDC armors have no AR; the hit always hits the armor.

MDC was introduced in Robotech... it is worth noting that mecha are all MDC in Robotech, but Zentraedi are hundreds of SDC. A group of guys with heavy MG's can hurt a non-micronized Zentraedi... but the Zentraedi's hand-to-hand damage does MDC, so it can, quite literally rip-apart a mecha... or insta-kill humans.

My issue is that...
1. MDC armors should still have retained an AR
2. non-MDC weapons should, in big enough numbers, gellatinize the squishy inside the MDC structure

Given that the Zentraedi are the same size, or bigger than, the Veritechs in Battloid mode, I've no issue with them having human scale HP ×100... but a guy in cyclone battle armor, which isn't full body covering - arms and legs are visible - provides essentially AR 30 and immunity to small arms... which seems to violate the setting both as shown and as described in game.

converting all the MDC to 100 SDC each doesn't break play in Robotech... but last I heard, Mr. Siembieda did not want to see it at all....

 

[HaroldTheHobbit]

For me a system is broken when some character options are vastly more effective then others, thereby leading or tempting players to build to optimize, rather that build for roleplaying and character concept.

I have a couple of players in my group that enjoy optimizing Pf1e-style, but when at my table they and the rest of the group build for interesting roleplay rather that maximum efficiency, even in systems that per my definition is broken. As it should be imho.

 

[James Gasik]

I'm hearing "my party used magic as intended and it did precisely what it was supposed to..." What am I missing? Assuming the enemy got the appropriate saving throws and such. Of course if it didn't, that's an entirely different issue than the subject at hand.


Why? If the adventure text says it doesn't come out, it doesn't come out. The writers of that adventure assumed the players would be standing at the door casting buffs or whatever. I'm just not really following your train of thought, unless you are one of those people that thinks the game should be played competitively, DM versus player. That's what it seems like to me when somebody suggests that the parameters should be changed mid game to be more adversarial towards the players.

Maybe the spell could be level 4 instead of level 3, but other than that I really don't see a problem with the scenario you described.

How about the fact that there is no save? The creatures affected by the spell cannot enter the circle; only if they have some means of teleportation are they allowed a Charisma save to enter it. How about the fact that, instead of being used as a means to let the characters inside be protected from attacks from outside (as they would have disadvantage), it effectively became an unbreakable wall?

I don't have problems with spells that say "this spell makes things difficult for the enemies" or even "very difficult", as long as they have some way to interact with them or save against them. But there are spells that simply say "oh unless you have X ability, this spell works and likely ends the encounter".

Especially since those spells can be used against the party, and I thought it was 5e's design that we don't force players to play certain character classes- so imagine the party of 4-5 Fighter and/or Rogues up against a forecage. Saying there's no reason you can't play the character you want, then introducing a play element that says "but since you didn't play an X, Y, or Z, you lose" would seem unfair, wouldn't it?

If I were in the DM chair, and I have to warp my encounter design around a player ability, that seems ridiculous. I remember the first time I read Champions, and next to some powers were little icons and sidebars that said "hey, this power is potentially busted." or "this power 100% is busted", warning the GM to be careful about allowing them.

Instead, we have a PHB full of all kinds of colorful spells with no advice, adjudication, or anything. So now the DM has to go over each spell with a fine toothed comb, learn about summoning 8 pixies the hard way, or hope that someone else warns them about it first?

 

[Fenris-77]

I'm not sure I know what that means....

Some people simply can't resist mathematical optimization, or optimization generally. It's possible in 5E but I haven't found it adds anything to the game, and often causes problems of various sorts.

 

[Warpiglet-7]

I don't think that preventing the abuses of power gamers needs to be a frontline concept for RPG design (as annoying as those people can be). Munchkins gonna munchkin.

That’s the thing. I play with people I like and we just would not want to wreck the game.

Given the huge numbers of combos with class abilities, subclass abilities, feats, multiclassing and race (species), designers are not going to catch everything. Their foresight is not equal to the masses en masse trying to break things then collaborating online!

To stop abuses, I guess you can curb options. Most of us like some options…people including the DM just need to say this does not work for our group—prior to its introduction if possible.

 

[Fenris-77]

That’s the thing. I play with people I like and we just would not want to wreck the game.

Given the huge numbers of combos with class abilities, subclass abilities, feats, multiclassing and race (species), designers are not going to catch everything. Their foresight is not equal to the masses en masse trying to break things then collaborating online!

To stop abuses, I guess you can curb options. Most of us like some options…

Yup. I'd prefer more options and a assumption of good-faith play over less options that have been carefully micro-balanced somehow.

 

[Warpiglet-7]

Yup. I'd prefer more options and an assumption of good-faith play over less options that have been carefully micro-balanced somehow.

I am very fortunate. Ii get to play with friends. I am sure pick up games at the game store are a different animal.

 

[Panzeh]

There's definitely stuff in, for example, GURPS, where you're expected to curate what's included- a lot of advantages and disadvantages are made with superheroes in mind.

The big one i often get is gadgeteer- which is roughly an ability that lets you pull out technologically sophisticated gadgets whenever you want. I always end up asking someone who asks me to have that on their sheet why the appropriate skills (machinist, armory, etc) aren't enough to hit their concept, and that usually gets them to relent. I know a lot of people have the fantasy of somebody who can do gadgets, i just prefer to handle it with the game's voluminous skill system and to have them actually play it out rather than having an advantage where they just always have something on hand. Usually, I think they see it in the basic book and feel inspired by it without really thinking it through. And, BTW, it is a massive pain to DM around, almost as much as a high-point GURPS Magic user with Create X spells.

I generally find there's players I can trust with certain things and players I can't, and I DM accordingly.

 

[MGibster]

I'm hearing "my party used magic as intended and it did precisely what it was supposed to..." What am I missing? Assuming the enemy got the appropriate saving throws and such. Of course if it didn't, that's an entirely different issue than the subject at hand.

I can't find fault with players using spells as intended, and sometimes I really appreciate it when they show some creativity and think of novel ways to use spells But there are times when I've been frustrated by setting up an interesting challenge only for it to be completely bypassed because I couldn't keep track of every spell or magical ability. To be fair, there have been times I was delighted they bypassed a challenge because they did so in a creative and awesome manner. It's not like I don't want the PCs to succeed.

Why? If the adventure text says it doesn't come out, it doesn't come out. The writers of that adventure assumed the players would be standing at the door casting buffs or whatever. I'm just not really following your train of thought, unless you are one of those people that thinks the game should be played competitively, DM versus player. That's what it seems like to me when somebody suggests that the parameters should be changed mid game to be more adversarial towards the players.

The authors of a module don't have perfect knowledge of what player characters will do. All things considered, if the PCs are starting a ritual in the next room over, I'm probably going to have someone check it out even if the boxed text tells me the creature isn't coming out. I was running a Living Greyhawk module way back in 2002 (Helm on a pogo stick it's been twenty years!), where the PCs got into a big, big fight right outside a small barrow where the main bad guys were holed up. The PCs decided this was a good time to take a long rest. In the module, the bad guy had an alternative exist leading to a small dock on the river. I went ahead and had the bad guy take off absconding with a good portion of the treasure. The module didn't say there was a boat there, but I figure there's no reason for this dude to stick around.