MuhVerisimilitude
Hero
Monsters being built like PCs is great in theory, but it's sooooo much work in practice. I personally love the idea of it, but man I do not feel like it works well when you sit down to play. Too much prep.
D&D General I'm a Creep, I'm a Powergamer: How Power Creep Inevitably Destroys Editions
- Thread starter Snarf Zagyg
- Start date
EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
The one, and only, thing I will say about 4e--other than to give props to Snarf, because that actually was a pretty reasonable assessment of both what 4e did wrong and what it did right--is to note that it is, very especially, THE edition that suffered effectively zero power creep across its run. Yes, it did have a little bit--especially if you skimmed off only the absolute best-of-the-best options--but given the enormous volume of production compared to 5e, it is a testament to its designers' efforts. By and large, new player options were either pretty much in the same ballpark, only needed relatively gentle errata to fix silly mistakes, or (surprisingly often) were actually less powerful. The vast majority of Essentials, for example, is actually less powerful than what you can get out of the rest of the system! And several of the so-called "weak" classes, such as Warlock and Vampire, had the same top-end power level as any other class, they just needed a lot of optimization to get there, as opposed to quickly reaching 99% power and only slowly gaining more thereafter (as, for example, Sorcerer and Wizard did).
The core point of the above, which is not strictly about any specific edition: Power creep is NOT totally unavoidable. It is, in fact, possible to create a system that actually manages to stay on an even keel and more or less within the same ballpark of balance. You just have to put in a LOT of testing and effort, and you have to know not just what you're designing but WHY you're designing it and how it will intersect with the other parts of the system. You have to set testable standards, and then...y'know, abide by those standards.
Sometimes, this has knock-on consequences. Fireball isn't allowed to be stupidly more powerful than most other spells, for example, because when you have that kind of imbalance baked into the core, "power creep" becomes nearly unavoidable. After all, if nobody can say it's more powerful than fireball, surely it can't be overpowered! Right? ...right? Except that it totally can. If fireball is a huge outlier compared to other spells of its level...and new spells come out that are on a par with (but not better than) fireball, and you keep doing that once or twice per book...by the time a few years have passed, even with 5e's glacial release schedule, you've suddenly pushed out 90% of the spells from the PHB.
This is why I don't actually agree with Snarf's claim that unbalance in the core book has zero relation to power creep. IF it's the very specific situation given in the example--three classes that are pretty much even, one class seriously weak, and that class gets new additions that fix the gap--then yes, absolutely that's not a power creep thing. But we can use an example from another edition to show how unbalance in the core rules does in fact lead to power creep.
I give you the contrast of two 3.X feats: Toughness, and Natural Spell.
Toughness is a joke. It is a terrible feat. Absolute garbage. The only context in which it has any use at all is a convention game where you're not sure you're going to survive to 2nd level, so those extra HP might literally save your PC's life. Otherwise, you should avoid it like the plague unless it's a prerequisite for something else.
By comparison, Natural Spell is almost inarguably the second-strongest feat in the entire PHB; its effect is that the Druid who takes it can cast spells in wild shape form, which means, in general, it is acquired immediately at level 6, the first feat you get after gaining the wild shape feature. (The strongest is Leadership, since it effectively gives you a second slightly weaker character for the price of one single feat, but its strength was quickly understood and most DMs banned it for that reason.) Natural Spell is so powerful that, in 5e, which is inarguably extremely similar to 3e, the effect that Natural Spell grants is the 18th-level feature of the Druid class. And spellcasting in general was almost exclusively more powerful in 3.X than in 5e. That is how stupidly strong this feat is.
This design choice, to have such stupidly massive power disparity in the core rules, leads to three deleterious effects that hasten power creep substantially:
Bad feats, like Toughness and Mobility, will now be used as gatekeeping devices to slow the progression to really powerful later stuff--a choice that occurred rampantly across 3.X/PF. But then...you get ways to get these feats without spending your proper feats on them. Lots of ways, actually. There's an entire guidebook for it on GITP. So these "bad" feats become a gateway for power creep, by being used as "justification" for future great power...except that the stumblign block part theen gets removed, so you just have great power with effectively zero cost.
Amazing feats can still be written that are less powerful than Natural Spell....and more powerful than anything else anyone might be interested in taking. Because the ceiling is so damn high, there's almost no reason NOT to push things into the stratosphere. Sure, you aren't pushing the maximum/outlier points any higher, but you're absolutely shifting the center of the distribution higher and higher.
These pervasive issues propagate outward and upward, as if contaminating a food chain by poisoning the algae and plants. (As Snarf said, no analogy is perfect.) The vast majority of "Fighter bonus feats," for example, are closer to Toughness and Mobility than they are to Natural Spell, Leadership, or (to cite a PF example) Sacred Geometry.* But...with the Fighter class completely dependent on feats being good in order to be a good class...you can see how this disparity could lead to issues. If feats collectively cover a really really broad range of power, but important subsets of feats are clearly crap (examples already given) or clearly OP (e.g. metamagic feats), then it's extremely easy to fall into the trap of viewing the whole when you should be viewing the parts or vice versa. (Gotta love Simpson's "Paradox.")
These three get further compounded, then, by the fact that attempts to avoid power creep within one class can result in power creep between classes. If Fighter is underpowered, but you refuse to recognize that fact, then we get things like what Snarf said above WRT: Rogues and Steady Aim. If you're of the belief that the existing 5e Rogue was 100% fine, zero issues, then Steady Aim is necessarily power creep--you need to have TCoE to "keep up." Conversely, if you're of the opinion that Rogue was weak (which, I think, most fans did think that Rogue was weaker than most other 5e classes), then Steady Aim is simply bringing the straggler closer to par, which Snarf already said is a perfectly fine thing to do!
Point being: Significant imbalance in the core can absolutely encourage future power creep, doubly so if the designers fail to recognize or understand what the problems involved actually are, or if they cling to incorrect and deleterious beliefs about the systems in the game. This is one of the many, many reasons why it is so deeply important for game designers to actually define what their design goals are, set testable metrics for meeting those goals, continually evaluate how they're performing (and whether those goals were, in fact, actually wise in the first place), and iterate based on both testing and player feedback.
When we treat game design as a pure art, we encourage power creep. When we recognize that it contains both elements of an art AND elements of a science, we can significantly discourage power creep while still producing a rich, enjoyable game experience. Game design is necessarily teleological; I wish more designers, and more importantly more TTRPG aficionados, cared more about the ends of game design, rather than almost exclusively caring about the aesthetics of game design, the appearance of the rules.
*I actually ran a character that used Sacred Geometry. It was for an intentionally very high-power game. I swore to the DM that I would only use it for prepping my morning buff spells and for no other reason unless I actually crunched the numbers myself. She actually gave me permission to use a calculator for it...but only if I coded up that calculator myself. I got about a third of the way through doing so before the campaign folded. It's really surprising how much you can squeeze out of just knowing a few math tricks regarding primes, e.g. every prime except 2 and 3 is either one more or one less than a multiple of 6, so if you can generate 6, 1, and your multiplier, you're golden. That cuts down the search space IMMENSELY.
The core point of the above, which is not strictly about any specific edition: Power creep is NOT totally unavoidable. It is, in fact, possible to create a system that actually manages to stay on an even keel and more or less within the same ballpark of balance. You just have to put in a LOT of testing and effort, and you have to know not just what you're designing but WHY you're designing it and how it will intersect with the other parts of the system. You have to set testable standards, and then...y'know, abide by those standards.
Sometimes, this has knock-on consequences. Fireball isn't allowed to be stupidly more powerful than most other spells, for example, because when you have that kind of imbalance baked into the core, "power creep" becomes nearly unavoidable. After all, if nobody can say it's more powerful than fireball, surely it can't be overpowered! Right? ...right? Except that it totally can. If fireball is a huge outlier compared to other spells of its level...and new spells come out that are on a par with (but not better than) fireball, and you keep doing that once or twice per book...by the time a few years have passed, even with 5e's glacial release schedule, you've suddenly pushed out 90% of the spells from the PHB.
This is why I don't actually agree with Snarf's claim that unbalance in the core book has zero relation to power creep. IF it's the very specific situation given in the example--three classes that are pretty much even, one class seriously weak, and that class gets new additions that fix the gap--then yes, absolutely that's not a power creep thing. But we can use an example from another edition to show how unbalance in the core rules does in fact lead to power creep.
I give you the contrast of two 3.X feats: Toughness, and Natural Spell.
Toughness is a joke. It is a terrible feat. Absolute garbage. The only context in which it has any use at all is a convention game where you're not sure you're going to survive to 2nd level, so those extra HP might literally save your PC's life. Otherwise, you should avoid it like the plague unless it's a prerequisite for something else.
By comparison, Natural Spell is almost inarguably the second-strongest feat in the entire PHB; its effect is that the Druid who takes it can cast spells in wild shape form, which means, in general, it is acquired immediately at level 6, the first feat you get after gaining the wild shape feature. (The strongest is Leadership, since it effectively gives you a second slightly weaker character for the price of one single feat, but its strength was quickly understood and most DMs banned it for that reason.) Natural Spell is so powerful that, in 5e, which is inarguably extremely similar to 3e, the effect that Natural Spell grants is the 18th-level feature of the Druid class. And spellcasting in general was almost exclusively more powerful in 3.X than in 5e. That is how stupidly strong this feat is.
This design choice, to have such stupidly massive power disparity in the core rules, leads to three deleterious effects that hasten power creep substantially:
Bad feats, like Toughness and Mobility, will now be used as gatekeeping devices to slow the progression to really powerful later stuff--a choice that occurred rampantly across 3.X/PF. But then...you get ways to get these feats without spending your proper feats on them. Lots of ways, actually. There's an entire guidebook for it on GITP. So these "bad" feats become a gateway for power creep, by being used as "justification" for future great power...except that the stumblign block part theen gets removed, so you just have great power with effectively zero cost.
Amazing feats can still be written that are less powerful than Natural Spell....and more powerful than anything else anyone might be interested in taking. Because the ceiling is so damn high, there's almost no reason NOT to push things into the stratosphere. Sure, you aren't pushing the maximum/outlier points any higher, but you're absolutely shifting the center of the distribution higher and higher.
These pervasive issues propagate outward and upward, as if contaminating a food chain by poisoning the algae and plants. (As Snarf said, no analogy is perfect.) The vast majority of "Fighter bonus feats," for example, are closer to Toughness and Mobility than they are to Natural Spell, Leadership, or (to cite a PF example) Sacred Geometry.* But...with the Fighter class completely dependent on feats being good in order to be a good class...you can see how this disparity could lead to issues. If feats collectively cover a really really broad range of power, but important subsets of feats are clearly crap (examples already given) or clearly OP (e.g. metamagic feats), then it's extremely easy to fall into the trap of viewing the whole when you should be viewing the parts or vice versa. (Gotta love Simpson's "Paradox.")
These three get further compounded, then, by the fact that attempts to avoid power creep within one class can result in power creep between classes. If Fighter is underpowered, but you refuse to recognize that fact, then we get things like what Snarf said above WRT: Rogues and Steady Aim. If you're of the belief that the existing 5e Rogue was 100% fine, zero issues, then Steady Aim is necessarily power creep--you need to have TCoE to "keep up." Conversely, if you're of the opinion that Rogue was weak (which, I think, most fans did think that Rogue was weaker than most other 5e classes), then Steady Aim is simply bringing the straggler closer to par, which Snarf already said is a perfectly fine thing to do!
Point being: Significant imbalance in the core can absolutely encourage future power creep, doubly so if the designers fail to recognize or understand what the problems involved actually are, or if they cling to incorrect and deleterious beliefs about the systems in the game. This is one of the many, many reasons why it is so deeply important for game designers to actually define what their design goals are, set testable metrics for meeting those goals, continually evaluate how they're performing (and whether those goals were, in fact, actually wise in the first place), and iterate based on both testing and player feedback.
When we treat game design as a pure art, we encourage power creep. When we recognize that it contains both elements of an art AND elements of a science, we can significantly discourage power creep while still producing a rich, enjoyable game experience. Game design is necessarily teleological; I wish more designers, and more importantly more TTRPG aficionados, cared more about the ends of game design, rather than almost exclusively caring about the aesthetics of game design, the appearance of the rules.
*I actually ran a character that used Sacred Geometry. It was for an intentionally very high-power game. I swore to the DM that I would only use it for prepping my morning buff spells and for no other reason unless I actually crunched the numbers myself. She actually gave me permission to use a calculator for it...but only if I coded up that calculator myself. I got about a third of the way through doing so before the campaign folded. It's really surprising how much you can squeeze out of just knowing a few math tricks regarding primes, e.g. every prime except 2 and 3 is either one more or one less than a multiple of 6, so if you can generate 6, 1, and your multiplier, you're golden. That cuts down the search space IMMENSELY.
Parmandur
Book-Friend, he/him
Well, this example is a bit problematic, excuse the 2014 base balance assumption is that the Rogue has access to Sneak Attack every single Round: they added Steady Aim because they found after several years of play that some Rogue players were having trouble reaching the assumed base power Level, so that is a big fix for an option underperformed in practice, lt really power creep per se.
Mike Mearls in the way back with his Happy Fun Hour presented an interesting take on power creep, that the trouble came from calibrating new options by the most recent publication, which is what designers were doing in 2E: measuring their next design based on the latest Splatbook, not the 2E PHB options. Ao the 5E approach, other than rolling out new stuff slowly, ia also to weigh every new option against a control option, such as the Champion for Fighter, to slow down the creep.
Pedantic
Legend
It's a whole other topic, but I think it's more salvageable than everyone says if you built more carefully for it from the ground up. The basic Saves/BAB/HP progression math isn't really the source of the problem, and it's pretty easy to quickly develop shorthand knowledge of those rates/averages. Plus it's an easy place to use tools. Skill point allocation isn't ideal, but you could make that a simple "pick X skills to be at the trained value for your level." The big thing is class features and subsystems, and that's probably best controlled by making those systems used across more classes in more consistent ways. I still have common 3e spell effects memorized from just consistent usage.
The biggest issue is feats. Ideally, you want a nice clean set of packages by function/role that you can deploy without demanding full customization each time. Also, if we're starting from a 3e base, you need to completely rebalance feats, which is no small undertaking.
payn
Glory to Marik
The numerous Monster Manuals, Bestiaries, NPC Codex, and Adventure Path material certainly gave me all I needed. Though, yes creating high level baddies was a chore. I do miss PC and monsters using same rules tho.
This has been one of my chief complaints going back to when the Mordenkainen monster book came out - the monsters get buzzsawed by PCs and the measuring stick by which a DM determines whether a monster is a suitable challenge for a party, the Challenge Rating, became less and less useful. It was fixable but at a certain point, a DM doesn’t want to have the fix them.
Parmandur
Book-Friend, he/him
The point of Monsters is to be buzzsawed...? By design, they are meant to last 2 Rounds, sometimes 3.
DarkCrisis
Let her cook.
Sounds good. I'd rather get through the combat quicker and get back to the meat of the story and/or exploring etc.
mamba
Legend
ironically that is a 'lesson' I started out with from day 1. Back then these books cost me a lot of money , relatively speaking. So I was a lot more picky about whether they are worth the spend, and all the Compete X always felt unnecessary and power-creepy (to incentivize buyers) to me even then
mamba
Legend
not sure about that, the power creep always was why I decided against buying more books. Without it I might not have been as strict with my 'stick to the core books' rule
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