D&D General I'm a Creep, I'm a Powergamer: How Power Creep Inevitably Destroys Editions

[Umbran]

So, I agree that power creep is close to inevitable, due to market forces if nothing else. Customers will be excited by a new option that is just slightly better than current options, and therein comes your creep.

However, I am not on board with the idea that every edition gets killed specifically by power creep. There can be many factors that weigh in the business decision to put out a new edition - power creep may only be one, and not even a major one.

Like, face it, back when TSR folded, WotC was going to want to put out a new edition as new owners. That was bound to happen whether 2e was suffering power creep or not. Moreover, the rules bloat of 2e was arguably worse than the power creep. Also, game design had advanced a great deal since the 2e chassis had been rolled out, and WotC was far more in tune with design of the day than TSR had been.

Suggesting 2e -> 3e due to power creep is, at the very least, an oversimplification.

Which is to say, correlation does not imply causation (or post hoc ergo propter hoc, for you legal types).

 

[DarkCrisis]

Honestly? Yes. Otherwise I won't bother will all of the jank that comes with D&D. I'm not going to deal with all the fiddly knobs and dials when combat is just a sack of HP trading whacks with another sack of HP for d6 damage. I'd play an actual rules light game.

So does that mean combat is your main focus when playing D&D?

 

[Frozen_Heart]

I wonder if it's possible to factor in, and therefore prevent power creep from the start.

It sounds awful, but if the subclasses/classes in the PHB are intentionally designed to have slightly different power levels, you can then set the top and bottom ends of the scale from day 1.

No option can be more powerful than X. No option can be less powerful than Y.

Rather than having each book having a 5% more powerful option off to infinite, until those options which are the least powerful become almost unusable.

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

So does that mean combat is your main focus when playing D&D?

We roleplay a lot, including in combat, but action combat is why I play and run D&D. Characters interactions with NPC is why combat can have stakes, but the action is the draw. D&D is a bad game for social resolution compared to modern game design and I have no interest in the pixel bitching of old skool exploration. If it's an exploration action set piece or an actual puzzle, sure. But I'm done with placing random pit traps and secret doors or tracking minutia like arrows, torches, and rations.

 

[payn]

I wonder if it's possible to factor in, and therefore prevent power creep from the start.

It sounds awful, but if the subclasses/classes in the PHB are intentionally designed to have slightly different power levels, you can then set the top and bottom ends of the scale from day 1.

No option can be more powerful than X. No option can be less powerful than Y.

Rather than having each book having a 5% more powerful option off to infinite, until those options which are the least powerful become almost unusable.

I think design is already in the neighborhood. 5E uses BA as gauging factor, and PF2 uses the 4E chassis for silo'd classes that can be templates for additional class creation. Power creep hasnt been eliminated, but its been sufficiently corralled.

 

[Clint_L]

I like to think of this in terms of evolution. I like to think about most things in terms of evolution, TBH; my masters thesis was on evolutionary pressures and language. But I also note that WotC has repeatedly used evolutionary language to describe their design principles behind the One D&D/2024 project. In fact, it's been their main analogy since it launched. So, let's look at the implications, because Snarff's arguments imply some looming problems for WotC's plan.

In a simple way, we can see player characters as D&D's alpha predators, and all the mobs as basically prey. They essentially exist to get eaten and turned into delicious experience points (milepost levelling makes this process less granular, but it still more or less persists). Power creep means that PCs are continually becoming better predators. But, as Snarff notes, the prey is more or less static. This is unsustainable!

Natural systems more or less evolve towards equilibrium until some disaster or another occurs. But D&D is not a natural system. There isn't the same evolutionary pressure on the prey as there is on the predators (specifically, the pressure to please players).

DMs can account for this by just adding more mobs. But that starts to get unwieldy, and also changes the game experience in ways that we might not like. Having to fight three red dragons to get the same challenge as fighting one just ain't the same. So, yeah, eventually you have to reset the game.

I think this has a lot of implications that I hadn't put enough thought into for D&D2024. Because the player characters: their power level is definitely a-creeping in a pretty significant way. I'm not going to really argue about this; I've been play testing it for awhile and so have a lot of other folks, and that is the universal conclusion. But I'll give you one example: nu monk. I've been struck by how much more powerful it is than the 2014 iteration. In this case, the power hasn't so much crept as sprinted past Usain Bolt. So I've been simulating a lot of different encounters to see just how much stronger it is, and here's one result that stands out, given my dragon reference above: a 2024 Level 20 Mercy monk can solo a CR24 ancient red dragon and finish at full health almost 100% of the time.

That's more than a little power creep.

I agree with Umbran that power creep hasn't been the main cause of previous edition changes. I think the main cause of previous edition changes was financial and legal crises at TSR, and then a desire by WotC to basically figure out how to better mainstream the game.

But that changes with a so-called evergreen edition, which is what 5e is supposed to be. Because the power will keep on creeping, and it'll likely creep a lot faster for players than for mobs. If Snarff's argument is correct, then WotC's stated design goal of sticking with 5e forever and allowing it to gradually evolve is probably doomed, unless they keep evolving the mobs at the same pace as the player characters. But that runs up against their backwards compatibility design goal. It seems like a pickle!

I've previously been quite a cheerleader for WotC's new evolutionary paradigm. As I said, I'm a sucker for evolution. But I have to confess that reading the OP made me reconsider it from a monster's perspective. If WotC wants it to work, they HAVE to keep evolving the monsters at the same pace as the player characters in order to keep that treadmill, that equilibrium, functioning. We haven't yet seen the details of the new MM, but from their public statements, I am not confident that WotC has evolved the mobs at the same pace as the characters.

 

[payn]

I like to think of this in terms of evolution. I like to think about most things in terms of evolution, TBH; my masters thesis was on evolutionary pressures and language. But I also note that WotC has repeatedly used evolutionary language to describe their design principles behind the One D&D/2024 project. In fact, it's been their main analogy since it launched. So, let's look at the implications, because Snarff's arguments imply some looming problems for WotC's plan.

In a simple way, we can see player characters as D&D's alpha predators, and all the mobs as basically prey. They essentially exist to get eaten and turned into delicious experience points (milepost levelling makes this process less granular, but it still more or less persists). Power creep means that PCs are continually becoming better predators. But, as Snarff notes, the prey is more or less static. This is unsustainable!

Natural systems more or less evolve towards equilibrium until some disaster or another occurs. But D&D is not a natural system. There isn't the same evolutionary pressure on the prey as there is on the predators (specifically, the pressure to please players).

DMs can account for this by just adding more mobs. But that starts to get unwieldy, and also changes the game experience in ways that we might not like. Having to fight three red dragons to get the same challenge as fighting one just ain't the same. So, yeah, eventually you have to reset the game.

I think this has a lot of implications that I hadn't put enough thought into for D&D2024. Because the player characters: their power level is definitely a-creeping in a pretty significant way. I'm not going to really argue about this; I've been play testing it for awhile and so have a lot of other folks, and that is the universal conclusion. But I'll give you one example: nu monk. I've been struck by how much more powerful it is than the 2014 iteration. In this case, the power hasn't so much crept as sprinted past Usain Bolt. So I've been simulating a lot of different encounters to see just how much stronger it is, and here's one result that stands out, given my dragon reference above: a 2024 Level 20 Mercy monk can solo a CR24 ancient red dragon and finish at full health almost 100% of the time.

That's more than a little power creep.

I agree with Umbran that power creep hasn't been the main cause of previous edition changes. I think the main cause of previous edition changes was financial and legal crises at TSR, and then a desire by WotC to basically figure out how to better mainstream the game.

But that changes with a so-called evergreen edition, which is what 5e is supposed to be. Because the power will keep on creeping, and it'll likely creep a lot faster for players than for mobs. If Snarff's argument is correct, then WotC's stated design goal of sticking with 5e forever and allowing it to gradually evolve is probably doomed, unless they keep evolving the mobs at the same pace as the player characters. But that runs up against their backwards compatibility design goal. It seems like a pickle!

I've previously been quite a cheerleader for WotC's new evolutionary paradigm. As I said, I'm a sucker for evolution. But I have to confess that reading the OP made me reconsider it from a monster's perspective. If WotC wants it to work, they HAVE to keep evolving the monsters at the same pace as the player characters in order to keep that treadmill, that equilibrium, functioning. We haven't yet seen the details of the new MM, but from their public statements, I am not confident that WotC has evolved the mobs at the same pace as the characters.

One of the interesting things about 3E/PF1 is that NPCs and monsters were built like PCs. I know this is unpopular for some, but the power creep was distributed more evenly during this time. The result was much more of a players keeping up with the system mastery to be able to compete with the newly buffed monstrosities. That is, of course, if a group/GM just set the power level at some resource point, which was a very popular decision during that edition run. Though, that put a lot on the GM to learn and understand where those points resided on the games they wanted to run for their players. Thats been much relaxed in the 5E era.

 

[Cadence]

My biggest issue with 5E and 5.5E.

I would love for those who have never played old school B/X (and/or OSE) to try it's combat. Combat is fast and smooth.

Because its not all bloated with HP and powers and feats etc

And once you get passed level 1 (and assuming you have gained some magic armor by level 2) it's pretty survivable.

In at least one campaign the speed was helped by most characters not living past level 1... (fond memories, so that isn't a complaint).

 

[Clint_L]

Further thoughts: I'm speculating that what players are really consuming when they play a game is novelty. So I think there is an inevitable pressure to change things up if you want to keep growing your game's consumer base, which is how businesses work in a capitalist society. D&D is not like chess, which doesn't have to worry about change because no one owns it, so it can just sit in its more or less stable niche in the game ecosystem.

Until D&D is truly a public domain game, WotC will probably need to keep changing it. Of course, if @SlyFlourish and others have their way, this will happen sooner rather than later.

 

[Incenjucar]

I wonder if it's possible to factor in, and therefore prevent power creep from the start.

It sounds awful, but if the subclasses/classes in the PHB are intentionally designed to have slightly different power levels, you can then set the top and bottom ends of the scale from day 1.

No option can be more powerful than X. No option can be less powerful than Y.

Rather than having each book having a 5% more powerful option off to infinite, until those options which are the least powerful become almost unusable.

It's possible, but it's a lot of work and requires a lot of foresight and careful editing. Combos are a bit of a nightmare and where things are most lkely to be missed or become clunky.