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

[Lanefan]

If we’re talking about D&D (not to say this doesn’t apply elsewhere), there’s no incentive not to allow power creep in the game from a business standpoint. Power creep fuels more products, gets more sales, and when it becomes all too much, you get to reboot with a new edition and the beat goes on.

Which then raises the bigger question of whether D&D is better served as a business or as an elaborate non-profit hobby.

Over its history I'd say business-driven decisions have rarely been good for the game itself.

 

[Lanefan]

.... the rules bloat of 2e was arguably worse than the power creep. ....

The two bolded things have historically been so closely joined as to be almost indistinguishable.

 

[Clint_L]

Ha! What way would that be?

My impression is that you would like folks to see 5e thought of as the principle game, and D&D as one of the variants. WotC clearly has the opposite agenda.

 

[Umbran]

The two bolded things have historically been so closely joined as to be almost indistinguishable.

Yes, they tend to travel together, but they are easily distinguishable, as they are two different problems. Power creep is about power. Rules bloat is about how much stuff you have to wade through to have a handle on the game.

Importantly, you can have significant bloat before folks are bothered by the power creep.

 

[bmfrosty]

Except power creep is never a feature if the game is already working as intended.

It's a feature if they want to sell books to players other than the PHB.

 

[bmfrosty]

Which then raises the bigger question of whether D&D is better served as a business or as an elaborate non-profit hobby.

Over its history I'd say business-driven decisions have rarely been good for the game itself.

Hell. D&D would be better served as the latter. I wish that other media fueled by the central hobby were big enough that the game could be treated where every product was a love letter.

 

[Scribe]

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.

This is actually how MTG used to be designed. Sets would rise in power, and decline as a way to 'balance out', and only a few cards (subclasses) were obviously pushed.

They then did away with this, and blew away decades of format balance. /dies

 

[Older Beholder]

Power creep isn't really an issue to me outside of PVP, which is something I tend to avoid in TTRPGs.
As to power creep being the death of editions, I just don't see it.

 

[Lanefan]

Power creep isn't really an issue to me outside of PVP, which is something I tend to avoid in TTRPGs.

Which is a bit ironic, given that PvP is the one facet of the game where a general increase in the characters' power makes no relative difference to anything as they're all more or less increasing together.

As to power creep being the death of editions, I just don't see it.

Sooner or later it jumps the shark, at which point it needs to be stripped down and rebooted because people stop buying the supplements.

That shark-jump moment comes for different people in different editions. For some in 5e it was Tasha's. For others it might be this year's new 5.5e (or whatever it's being called this week). For me in 1e it was probably Unearthed Arcana; because of UA's rampant power creep I let the subsequent releases (WSG and DSG) pass me by and, in hindsight, am not sorry for it.

 

[Older Beholder]

Which is a bit ironic, given that PvP is the one facet of the game where a general increase in the characters' power makes no relative difference to anything as they're all more or less increasing together.

So long as everyone is increasing at the same time/pace it isn't a prob.
It also creates a need for power creep to get an advantage over other players in PVP

In a game where it's not a competition between players I find there's no issue at all.