Excalibur from level 1: Why not?
I’ll take a break from further talking about foundations of GMing, and would take this post as an opportunity to talk a bit about this meme I’ve found online:
To put it bluntly: why not?
Why not give your players epic weapons right from the start?
If you ask most GMs why, you would hear something similar to “because it’s overpowered”.
This is a sentiment I see a lot in the PNP sphere, and I’d like to address it here. There are, broadly speaking, two ways to think about player power, from the perspective of the GM. One is by using the taxonomy of player fun i’ve presented before, or something equivalent to it - seeing how players having a certain amount of power at a certain time impacts their enjoyment and yours, and then basing your decisions off that. Second way is to base your decisions on what “feels balanced” - this is what the vast majority of GMs do. And that second way is very bad.
Basically, the algorithm most GMs use when they consider wherever something is “overpowered” is similar to this:
Mentally compare the item or ability to other items or abilities they have seen in the same game
Compare it to items or abilities they have seen in other, broadly similar games
Compare it to their mental conception of what the game “should be like”
If the item or ability comes out on top in these comparisons, then it’s “overpowered”
If the item or ability is “overpowered” it should be nerfed or banned: start thinking of the nerfs!
Now, this is not an inherently unreasonable mechanism in some cases: if a GM has a lot of experience with the game system, they can quickly estimate how strong a certain option is (e.g. when homebrewing), and bring it in line with the other options in the game. But using it outside of the very limited range of those cases is dangerous.
Danger comes from two very major issues with this algorithm. First of all: it has nothing to do with the key issue the GM should be concerned with, which is the fun of both parties! Really, this should render any such algorithm dead in the water.
Now, it may or may not be the case that that some option having a certain degree of strength impacts player or gm fun: for example, GM may find it hard to build challenging encounters for the players, and if GM used to have fun running them, they won’t have that kind of fun anymore. However, this claim can be made if and only if we have already established that that kind of fun is important to either players or the GM!
Second problem is more complicated. PNP systems can be very arcane, with dozens of parts that all connect to one another and interact in unpredictable ways. In my experience, when GMs jump on the “overpowered” bandwagon, this fact is often ignored. This can result in hilarious situations: first, game developers of a particular system carefully tweak options to be just in line with the overall power level of the entire system. Then a game master comes in, and, relying on their preconceptions about what the system is “supposed to do”, ruins the careful balance that was set up!
Giving a complete list of all ways how this could happen is naturally impossible, but I will give some examples.
An option may seem overpowered in isolation, but be balanced by some other component of the overall system. A special attack may be very powerful, but require a lot of experience investment to pull off, or have a high cooldown, making it overall not as powerful as it seems.
An option may rely on mathematics of probability to balance itself out, and it is no secret that most people have issues with this subject! Without a good handle on probability - which most people, and by extension, most GMs, do not have - trying to tweak it can lead to unpredictable changes. It can make the option worthless, or even more overpowered than it was before!
Due to a similar effect as before, some options may seem more powerful than others simply because the math that goes into them is more legible to the GM who makes the changes. This can, ironically enough, lead to more powerful options never being changed because their power is “invisible” up until they are used in practice!
Alright, I hope we all agree that the above mentioned mental algorithm is bad. So what’s a better one?
Well, it’s Bella Swan Universal Recursive Planning Method (link first post) all over again. First we consider what types of fun are important to the GM and to the players. Then we consider how this option impacts those types of fun. Finally, we try to change it in ways that maximise fun.
So what types of fun are impacted by players having access to legendary weapons from level one?
Well, when we look at the list, most of the types are actually not affected at all. Zero, zilch, nada effect. Is it any harder to immerse yourself in character scenes if your character has Devil Mclyncher 9000 on their hip? Is your ability to follow the plot in any way impacted? Are you incapable of drawing your character with an epic weapon? No, of course not.
(You may say that it imposes restrictions on storytelling: you can no longer tell a story about weak characters out of their element. I say it imposes no more of a restriction than deciding to run a campaign about fighting undead, since you can no longer tell a story about characters not fighting undead)
The only types that are affected are:
Tactics. Obviously, it may be less interesting to solve combat encounters if you have an obvious best solution to every combat problem right there! Similarly, from a GM side, it may be less interesting to design encounters if you know the players will choose a single unfailing approach every single time. However, consider this: are you really prevented from designing interesting encounters, or are you simply forced to design encounters different from the ones you are used to?
For simplicity, let’s imagine that we only have a single player, and they have a sword that, when pointed in a particular direction, erases everything within a 100 meter long 1 meter in diameter cylindrical channel, starting at the tip of the sword. Enemies within? Gone. Walls? Gone. Major villain didn’t dodge in time and their legs were still inside the target area? Start looking for a wheelchair, those legs are not coming back. Now, I hope it’s obvious that such a weapon would pose major issues to any conventional encounter design - the player can kill any enemy in a single action, what horror! If they so much as get within 100 meters of the main villain, they can win in a single strike!
But does this really prevent you from designing interesting encounters that make the player use their brain to find a solution? Here are some ideas off the top of my head that can make encounters interesting to run again:
The character can kill any enemy they see: so use cover and concealment! Make the encounters about finding the enemy, not about managing to out-kill them. Start thinking like a modern general exercising that modern system of combat. This is an acceptable challenge!
The 100 m long channel is both a blessing and a curse: since it erases everything in the area, you may not want to use it in a crowded and lived area such as a town, lest you hurt civilians. Make the challenge about finding acceptable angles of attack to use the ability: long stretches of road, or high buildings and flying mounts from which you can target the ground.
Of course, just because the character can kill any enemy, this does not make them invincible. They can still use their brain to hide from the enemy before they can strike - use cover and concealment to their advantage, and work as a sniper, constantly repositioning to keep their position secret. This, too, can be an interesting problem.
Similarly, infinite killing power doesn’t keep any items on their person or people they are escorting safe - this too can be exploited.
All of these encounters would look very differently from a “typical” PNP combat encounter, of course - but that is irrelevant. The point of PNP games is not to copy people’s preconceptions about how it looks like: the point is to be fun and interesting.
Do note that the point here is not to shut down the player’s ability because it is “overpowered”. The point is to bring back the fun of tactical puzzle solving which may have been lost once the ability was gained.
Of course... there is an implicit question here. Was any fun lost in the transition? If neither the player, nor the GM, enjoyed tactical combat all that much, then nothing was actually lost. And that means that there is no actual problem. You can just not have combat encounters. You are allowed to do that, there is no PNP police who will stop you. And so if you want to bring it back - consider asking the players if they want it back, or if they are having fun as is. And if they are having fun, and you weren’t having fun designing combat encounters - why the hells would you want them back?
But let’s get back to the subject. What other types of fun are affected by “overpowered’ abilities? Well, another obvious candidate is Power Fantasy and Political Power Fantasy. However, both of these types are generally improved by the inclusion of legendary, unique weapons. So if you - mistakenly - believe that your players are suffering because their weapons are just too strong, and you remove them, but in actuality they were having great fun due to Power Fantasy - you have just sabotaged yourself.
Pictured, GM removing overpowered abilities their players loved
A final type of fun that may be affected by “overpowered” abilities being available right at the start is Growth - there isn’t a lot you can grow if you are already the top dog. This is true: however, as discussed before, “overpowered” abilities have holes in them, and you can grow in respect to those holes. Furthermore, you can grow in ways other than raw combat power: players can grow politically and in fame, with direct consequences related to that. And as before, if growth just isn’t very important to your players, then this is irrelevant.
These four types of fun are, in my opinion, the only ones strongly affected by overpowered combat abilities. Out of those four, they only cause a problem for two. So to answer the meme’s question: what kind of maniac gives their players legendary weapons? The kind who is fine building unique encounters around them, or the kind who just doesn’t care about combat encounters at all.
Of course, there are some overpowered abilities that affect other types of fun: very strong utility abilities can have major implications on the kinds of stories you can tell, with various kinds of divination, intelligence gathering, mind control and teleportation being the usual culprits. But same as before: if those implications are not important to either the players or the GM, there is no actual problem.
Try giving your players Excalibur at level one. It’s fine, nobody will stop you. See if you like the results.
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