Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7725177" data-attributes="member: 4937">Once again, I'm the only one in this thread that has actually quoted the general definition of power creep.  So how am I the one avoiding it.Assuming longswords are well balanced, viable, weapons that bring lots of utility to the game, then yes, that is power creep.  But, that's not how power creep usually works.  Power creep generally happens by other mechanisms.   So imagine a surface that represents all the possible components of the game - whether it be elements of chargen or playing cards in a collectible card game.Somewhere on that surface is a line representing the most powerful a particular type of component can be without impacting the game play negatively - either by speeding the game up until their were no choices (and thus no deep strategy) or making the game choices trivial and repetitive.   Somewhere below that line roughly parallel to is a line that divides interesting playing pieces from choices that are so suboptimal that no one would ever willing make those choices.   In a collectible card game, they either are not played at all, or they are played only by new players before they understand how to evaluate the game, or else they are only played by players that have such limited collection they have nothing better to play.   In between is all of our interesting design space, which is initially empty.At the beginning of the game imagine the designers have thrown some 'darts' into the space trying to hit the interesting design space, but above all, not landing in the broken space above the line.   The result is a bunch of points that represent the playing pieces, but largely empty space.   There are still hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of possible new entries - whether cards or classes or feats or whatever.   Lets imagine that because they are good designers and the play tested that they nerfed all the overpowered stuff before going to production and that the game - whatever it is - is a success.It's at this point that the fact that power creep is tied to unbalancing the game is inherently important.   Because if it is not, then the startling result is you can add nothing new to the game.   Lets examine a case in point.  Suppose you had a 'Ranger' in your introductory set, and as a typical ranger the class was optimized for operating in the wilderness.  You now start exercising your creativity and you see that there is some design space near the ranger - off to just the side of it really - where you can create a 'Bounty Hunter' class that is much like the 'Ranger' but better suited to operating in urban environments and less well suited to the wilderness.  So you set about creating a 'Bounty Hunter'.Most people would agree that 'Bounty Hunter' was good design if it didn't completely invalidate the 'Ranger' and replace it.   That is, you'd be making trade offs between the two classes, and one wasn't clearly better than the other.   However, almost certainly before we introduce the 'Bounty Hunter' class, there was someone out there who was already playing a 'bounty hunter' by taking a Ranger and making it as suitable to an urban environment as possible within the rules.   The minute we introduce the 'Bounty Hunter' class, his character is invalidated because any character made with the new class would be strictly better at doing what his character does than any character made with the old class.   I think you'll agree though, this isn't power creep.  In fact, you are probably a bit angry with me about this point, and wondering where this is going.   You're probably going to start going on about of course it isn't because it isn't strictly better, and so it isn't power creep.   But, power creep almost never comes about by just strictly better.  Most games are far too complicated for that, and most designers far too 'woke' for that to just create things that are strictly better.   In MtG, Necropotence wasn't strictly better than Greed, but for practical purposes it was much better even though that was far from obvious just looking at the card.   Secondly, most of the time when you do see a strictly better card, it isn't power creep - it's creating a playing element in design space that is valid by our earlier definition because play testing has revealed our original designs weren't aggressive enough.  That's not power creep either.  It's only power creep when it goes over that line defining the maximum utility a card can have without being game breaking.  Again, let's look at another realistic example.   Imagine in our introductory set there was also a Wizard class.   In theory, the Wizard was supposed to represent anyone that used arcane magic, and everyone used it generally for that purpose.   However, if the designers notice that players want to play Summoners and Necromancers, but few people are actually doing so because the limitations in our original design make those choices too subpar to be enjoyable for most players, it's a perfectly valid thing to do to introduce new Summoner or Necromancer utility even if those new classes are absolutely better at being Summoners or Necromancers than the Wizard and completely obsolete any summoner or necromancer build made with the wizard.  Yes, the Summoners or Necromancers are better and more 'powerful', but it would be ridiculous to call this process by a negative term like 'power creep', particularly if (for example) the new classes while more effective Summoners or Necromancers were still perhaps even underpowered compared to any non-summoner or non-necromancer wizard.What would be power creep is if the divination based Wizard was already arguably the most powerful character in the game, and we made a new specialized Oracle class that was obviously even better than that - even if it was not strictly better than the divination based wizard.And that's a good example of how real power creep comes about - not usually with strictly better cards, but by well intentioned attempts to explore new design space that end up creating playing elements that aren't strictly better than some existing playing element, but are functionally much better.  Only rarely is power creep just a cynical attempt to sell new playing elements by creating a strictly better "longsword".  Power creep usually comes about by untested synergies, and aggressive exploration of design space that hadn't been aggressively explored before. Using the example of MtG, the printing of cards that make 'mill' deck (wins by removing the opponents library) viable isn't (necessarily) power creep (especially if never before was such a deck viable).  That's a valid exploration of design space, even if it was previously possible to make a weaker 'mill' deck and this one is strictly better.  It's only power creep, if the new deck is now faster and harder to disrupt than other decks that are already considered viable.  (But again, magic is so complex and often has an ever evolving meta as cards age in and out, that even that definition would need caveats and nuance.)You know power creep has happened ultimately because it changes how the game is played in negative ways.  It's not just a matter of "this is better than that".   It's a matter of characters of this level can now handily defeat monsters of a level that are supposed to be too difficult of challenge for them.   It's a matter of contests taking on average one or two rounds less than they used to take, or players starting to build characters that completely neglect aspects of the game that were previously interesting because winning this one element is enough to insure success and only by contesting that one area can you be successful.  Or to put this more simply, power creep is an inherently negative term that describes the (usually) gradual erosion of game balance as designers exercise less caution, or do less play testing, or decide to break the game to obtain short term profits.  If you are describing any process that introduces new powerful playing elements, but which doesn't harm game balance, we aren't talking about "power creep".   And that is backed up by my quotations of the general definition of power creep.Finally, this  so called 'straight forward' issue is something that tends to create all sorts of argument, which I think ought to prove that it isn't straight forward.  It's not just me arguing about the definition, but all sorts of arguments that have occurred over the course of say D&D's history, and which generally occur in just about any complex games history.   For example, when the Monk was introduced, many people in Dragon magazine commented on the fact that though it superficially looked quite powerful, with many different abilities, in point of fact it was rather weak.  You even saw attempts to fix different classes like the Monk in the 1e era (at least one I seem to remember being in Dragon Magazine) using theory crafting and math to show why the original needed an upgrade.   That wasn't power creep.   Giving all the powers of a Cavalier to a Paladin was power creep.  If someone printed a strictly better Thief class, that wouldn't have been power creep.  The ever expanding array of spells was power creep.  But of course people would argue over things like that.  Purists would argue that the game was ok how it is, and that because something historically had been useless then that is the way it should remain.   Similar arguments occurred in 3.5 - which don't get me wrong, had all sorts of brutal and even cynical power creep in it.   For example, almost everyone knew that the Fighter was so underpowered that it wasn't even very good in combat and couldn't even shine in the area that was supposed to be its thing.  But you had people defending the existing fighter anyway, and you had people declaring Bo9S wasn't power creep and that martial classes absolutely needed something like that to compete with spellcasters, and you had people claiming that no the Bo9S was just horrible power creep.   So no, the evidence is that in fact this isn't simple and straight forward.</blockquote>

Verification