TTRPGs: broken mechanics vs. abusive players

[The Shadow]

"Oh so the wizard can make a few magical ice clones, what's the worst thing that could happen?"

You've just reminded me of one of the most memorable 2e campaigns I was in.

We repeatedly faced this half-drow necromancer who Kept. Coming. Back. No matter how extreme of prejudice we used in killing him and disposing of the body. He kept weirdly voluminous notes on his evil plans, though, which gave us plenty of adventure fodder.

Turned out he had researched a version of Simulacrum that left a corpse behind instead of snow. In 2e, Simulacra got a random percentage of the subject's levels and memories - hence the notes. The bastard literally didn't trust anyone besides himself to manage his plots!

When we finally figured this out, we were like 7th level, and had fought level-appropriate Simulacra of him three times. So suddenly we realize there's an evil necromancer archmage out there, with plots spanning several continents - one of which we hadn't known existed! - and we've been annoying him.

Gulp!

 

[James Gasik]

You've just reminded me of one of the most memorable 2e campaigns I was in.

We repeatedly faced this half-drow necromancer who Kept. Coming. Back. No matter how extreme of prejudice we used in killing him and disposing of the body. He kept weirdly voluminous notes on his evil plans, though, which gave us plenty of adventure fodder.

Turned out he had researched a version of Simulacrum that left a corpse behind instead of snow. In 2e, Simulacra got a percentage of the subject's levels and memories - hence the notes. The bastard literally didn't trust anyone besides himself to manage his plots!

When we finally figured this out, we were like 7th level, and had fought level-appropriate Simulacra of him three times. So suddenly we realize there's an evil necromancer archmage out there, with plots spanning several continents - one of which we hadn't known existed! - and we've been annoying him.

Gulp!

This made me think of something. Some spells seem to largely exist largely as justification for NPC abilities. "How is his entire fortress magically protected?" "Guards and Wards, naturally."

There are certainly spells that most adventurers would never bother to prepare. But they exist anyways, to lend a sort of verisimilitude to the magic system. Let's call these sorts of spells "narrative spells". They exist to explain some facet of the setting.

All well and good, but, by having these in the same spell system as the stuff like fireball that players are likely to use, there becomes a greater chance that a player might pick up one of these narrative spells, and use it to define, warp, shape, or dictate the narrative to the DM!

It's like giving a regular player access to a debug menu in a video game. Or cheat codes. Now the DM is scrambling to regain control of his campaign, or put actual controls on something that otherwise was left entirely to his discretion.

Turning an ally into a T-Rex and having it attack the party? Perfectly fine.

Wait, now the Fighter is a T-Rex? Uh, well, he has the mentality of a rampaging predator and loses agency!

It just seems to me that the fact that some spells aren't labeled "not for player use without careful consideration" and just plopped into the PHB is seriously irresponsible. And I'm not just saying this as DM- I have in the past seen a spell, thought about how I could use it, and then employed it in game without thinking "oh wait, how is the DM going to respond to this?". Or even "how can the DM respond to this?".

And when told my tactic is nerfed/banned/or never allowed again, I don't always immediately go "ah yes, that makes sense". Here I was using the tools the game gave me, and oh no, you can't do that!

I mean, yeah, in retrospect (much like this magic circle incident), I might see the problem. But in play, it can sometimes feel arbitrary and unfair, like a DM randomly deciding 1 out of 20 arrows is flawed and will veer off course or break on impact.

 

[billd91]

When it comes to broken mechanics/abusive players, there are sometimes differences in perspective. Players will probably try to overstate what they can do with a power or spell and sometimes the remedy is just to look at things and rule it NOT work in an overpowered manner while still trying to be fair. Take the repel wood example. Looking at the spell and its description, there's nothing to indicate that it has anywhere near the power to lift a ship. It can't even move a firmly barred door. If I pointed it at my kitchen cabinets, also firmly attached, it could certainly break off the wooden door handles but it isn't clear it can do much more than that. It can push away people holding wooden object like shields. But move a multi-ton ship, much less lift it out of the water? Seems out of proportion to the rest of the description by significant magnitude.

 

[Thomas Shey]

But, yes, MDC was something of a problem in Rifts, where player characters could differ radically in power level. You could start out a party with a young dragon, a Glitterboy (which isn't as fabulous as it sounds but still powerful), a drugged out psycho, and a vagabond.

If Palladium gave a single damn about intra-party balance, you wouldn't know it. This is pretty obvious in Heroes Unlimited, too.

 

[MGibster]

If Palladium gave a single damn about intra-party balance, you wouldn't know it. This is pretty obvious in Heroes Unlimited, too.

Ah, man. George Bush, senior was in office the last time I played Heroes Unlimited! I barely remember anything about it.

 

[Thomas Shey]

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.

Well I can tell you why in at least some cases; because having to guess what you'll need and do it all in advance is for a lot of people, tiresome.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Ah, man. George Bush, senior was in office the last time I played Heroes Unlimited! I barely remember anything about it.

Superhero games have been my gig for much of my gaming career so I looked into it--and quickly realized that you had a game which wanted there to be a wide variety of types (with accompanying variance in power level) without having the narrative-overlay tools to make that work at all well.

 

[GMMichael]

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'm on team The Players Deserved It. However, any spell the players can use (and "break"), the NPCs can use too. So if a PC wants to break your game, just ask "are you cool with NPCs doing this too?"

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. . .

I mean, as long as there's not a bris involved...

If I were in the DM chair, and I have to warp my encounter design around a player ability, that seems ridiculous.

I hope this doesn't mean that you refuse to consider PC abilities. If it means one PC shouldn't dominate, well, there are two sides to that coin. The flip side is that dominating PCs get a reputation, and opponents act accordingly.

 

[JiffyPopTart]

@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.

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.


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

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....

I can't speak to Robotech as I've never played it.

My issue with MDC in Rifts is that it's possible for one starting character to have a pistol attack that does 1-6 damage while a different party member with a different pistol is doing 100-600.

The problem is there are MDC personal items like pistols and skin, it's not reserved for extra tough military vehicles.

 

[ThorinTeague]

I can't speak to Robotech as I've never played it.

My issue with MDC in Rifts is that it's possible for one starting character to have a pistol attack that does 1-6 damage while a different party member with a different pistol is doing 100-600.

The problem is there are MDC personal items like pistols and skin, it's not reserved for extra tough military vehicles.

That's only a problem for you because you're fixated on combat, and ignoring or at least deemphasizing all other aspects of the game. The Palladium xp advancement system specifically deemphasizes combat--the game doesn't give much reward for blowing things up and killing vs. making good decisions and role playing.

I'm also willing to assume that said party member with the 1d6sdc pistol has a laundry list of abilities and skills that the 1d6mdc pistol guy lacks.