The Gaming Den

Having a rich system for character optimization is bad for an RPG. It's a bunch of decisions that happen in a bubble outside of the game itself, aware from the shared narrative/tactical space. The output of these decisions is differences in how effective your character is in the actual game, which is contrary to completely reasonable design goals like having a predictable character power level so everyone can contribute and so the scenario designer knows how much to put in the party's way.

Nevertheless, character optimization is fun. It's fun to explore the unintended consequences of a system of rules. It's fun to combine rules in ways that haven't been tried before and then explore the consequences of that. It's fun to participate in optimization forums. If it helps, think of this as a completely unrelated genre of game, that's mostly played on internet forums, that was created by accident by the RPG scene (and mostly D&D 3.5).

Since optimization is fun but bad for RPGs, what would it look like to remove the RPG from the optimization game entirely?

Removing the RPG leaves some holes that need to be filled.
- Goals. An optimization community is going to make up a lot of their own goals (e.g. find the highest possible jump check), but without the assumption that a character is going to some day be dropped into a D&D campaign, there needs to be some replacement assumption about what the character does and how their rules interact with that thing.
- Metaphor. You don't necessarily have to be building a fantasy adventurer to conquer a dungeon. I'm assuming it for now, but there might be a metaphor that has better thematic resonance with the game being played. Tower defence games are mostly about guard towers killing sci fi / fantasy monsters because they grew out of Warcraft and Starcraft, but Plants Vs Zombies rethemed it to be about something immobile killing something dumb, which fits better.
- Structure. How does the game last longer than it takes to find the best build? Do you have a way to repeatably change what the best build is? Change available options, change goals, add content?

Random scenarios seem fruitful. One possible game is to generate a random dungeon and ask the community to find the lowest-level character that can beat it (this implies the answer is deterministic). Ties go to whoever posted a level N build first, but if someone finds a level N-1 build then they're the new winner. There might be a time limit if you're running a tournament, but you could also have long-running challenges that sometimes get whittled down months after everyone thought they were solved.

Random subsets of available character abilities seem harder to set up, but they might be a more interesting way to do it, since novel rule interactions tend to be attached to character abilities rather than to dungeon features. Of course these methods can also be combined.

There was an interesting challenge at The RPG Site between Kaelik and some guys. His contention was that an intelligently played enemy, rather than one that simply walked up and tried to beat the combined PCs with a stick, would wipe the floor with a mid-level party. I was adjudicating the scenario. The challenger gave up because he found the dungeon extremely frustrating, time consuming, and claimed he really had nothing to prove. In my opinion, Kaelik was successful since the party of PCs never forced a confrontation or interaction.

What it boils down to is that 'intelligent play' by the challenges makes a big difference. It would not be hard to beat the challenge with a 1st level character and an expendable flock of sheep if the bad guys don't do anything. 'Winning' in this case likely means that challenges were not always played to their full extent.

Optimization doesn't have to be bad for the game. Being able to optimize for every situation and always be better than everyone could be a problem, but if there are a variety of challenges and optimization tends to be very specific, it doesn't have to be a major issue. It's worse for the game if optimization comes at the expense of being 'generally good'. If you can only contribute if you can charge your enemies and have nothing to do if they fly, are incorporeal, or have any mobility powers, that's a problem. If you sometimes smash a threat with massive damage isn't that big a deal.

Removing the RPG component from an optimization game should mean removing the need for adjudication, the need for knowing how smart the opposition is, and really anything granular enough for those considerations to even exist. Think more boardgamey.

As entertaining as those thunderdome threads are, making an entire game around them would probably end in the community dying of popcorn overdose.

deaddmwalking wrote:There was an interesting challenge at The RPG Site between Kaelik and some guys. His contention was that an intelligently played enemy, rather than one that simply walked up and tried to beat the combined PCs with a stick, would wipe the floor with a mid-level party. I was adjudicating the scenario. The challenger gave up because he found the dungeon extremely frustrating, time consuming, and claimed he really had nothing to prove. In my opinion, Kaelik was successful since the party of PCs never forced a confrontation or interaction.

What it boils down to is that 'intelligent play' by the challenges makes a big difference. It would not be hard to beat the challenge with a 1st level character and an expendable flock of sheep if the bad guys don't do anything. 'Winning' in this case likely means that challenges were not always played to their full extent.

Optimization doesn't have to be bad for the game. Being able to optimize for every situation and always be better than everyone could be a problem, but if there are a variety of challenges and optimization tends to be very specific, it doesn't have to be a major issue. It's worse for the game if optimization comes at the expense of being 'generally good'. If you can only contribute if you can charge your enemies and have nothing to do if they fly, are incorporeal, or have any mobility powers, that's a problem. If you sometimes smash a threat with massive damage isn't that big a deal.

Presumably in the kind of game K is describing you would have simplified rules of adjutication based on set actions for enemies, or you would simplify farther and just have obstacles be spot checked to see if they could be beaten. Instead of having "+10" specifically to attack and entire stated monsters, you'd say something like "Golem Strong against magic, weak against water, and electricity or destroy secret totem" or whatever and a character who had a Medium Physical attack, ability to flood the stage, or weak electricity attack, or the ability to find the totem or Strong Magic Attack would be able to beat the Golem.

I don't actually understand what advantage this would have over a deckbuilding game. The fun of poring over thousands of options representing unknowable trillions of possible combinations to find the combinations that are unbelievably powerful is probably much better realized in a game of Slay the Spire or magic. The one thing that RPG's give you is that they're run by the human brain which means you have truly infinite options in how to approach problems. If your optimization RPG doesn't let me collapse the Wizards tower or flood the Beholders dungeon then there's no point to it being an RPG at all. 4E proved that all the number crunching in the world isn't something people are interested in if their fireballs can't burn ropes and cottages.

If you wanted to make "Minmax the Game" I think that's a laudable goal but you have to think of it as a board or card game. I would definitely sit around with my friends playing a game where we taking turns "levelling up" and adding one of 5 randomly drawn powers to my character to see who can beat the Dungeon Bosses faster. That sounds fun. I definitely won't get a bunch of friends together to play an intentionally shallow rpg because with that amount of effort I could just play D&D and playing D&D rules.

Kaelik gets my drift. Great examples with the Golem too; having a rich set of ways to handle the problem is necessary for this sort of thing. It'd be good to use (small) numbers instead of a Strong/Medium/Weak system, so that you know how many modifiers you need to stack to inefficiently brute force it down with magic. That could still be the right solution if the rest of the dungeon is weak enough to magic.

(Also I'm not K, I'm some other guy with an annoyingly short name.)

Makes me think of Slay The Spire. Replace the deckbuilder with an elaborate build/advancement system, run them through an escalating gauntlet of semirandom encounters. Probably do pretty well.

What I'm describing is definitely more board game or card game than it is RPG. It's explicitly what you get by removing the RPG from something .

And a board/card/video game might be where this line of thought ultimately leads to, but in the interim I'd like to keep an open mind for something a little weirder: what if it's allowed to be more baroque than fits on a card, or there are so many available options that it makes sense to collaborate with people to sift through them?

I think Kaelik is actually going in the wrong direction here: in order to support really complex optimization problems, you kinda have to have complex challenges to beat the problems with. If your challenges are simple [have thing? yes/no] checks then the optimization problems you can have can only be in the vein of getting the best spread of [things] by mastering whatever super-elaborate spreadsheet is used to create the costs, but if the challenges are open-ended ones like "destroy this tower quickly without being destroyed" you can approach it from all sorts of angles.

So I'd say the games closest to what you're asking for are like, Slay the Spire, Besiege, From the Depths, Diablo, Screeps, or a Zachtronics game.

jt wrote:(Also I'm not K, I'm some other guy with an annoyingly short name.)

I was about to ask. I'm pretty sure someone else made the same mistake in another thread.

Yeah, Frank of all people thought I was K. It was too flattering and funny for me to bother pointing it out. I joined this forum much later than most, lured in with the discussions on things like what a logistics and dragons game would look like, and all that stuff about challenge-first RPG design.

Yes this is probably something like a Zachtronics game. Zach and I went to the same college, and we don't get along at all. It'd be funny to shoe in on his territory.

Foxwarrior wrote:If your challenges are simple [have thing? yes/no] checks then the optimization problems you can have can only be in the vein of getting the best spread of [things] by mastering whatever super-elaborate spreadsheet is used to create the costs, but if the challenges are open-ended ones like "destroy this tower quickly without being destroyed" you can approach it from all sorts of angles.

Agreed that "Have thing? yes/no" is insufficient for an interesting challenge, but let's break down what I thought was interesting in Kaelik's example.

Kaelik wrote:Golem Strong against magic, weak against water, and electricity or destroy secret totem" or whatever and a character who had a Medium Physical attack, ability to flood the stage, or weak electricity attack, or the ability to find the totem or Strong Magic Attack would be able to beat the Golem.

So I actually misread this the first time around and thought it said "find the totem AND a strong magic attack," like destroying the totem requires finding it and then knowing enough about magic to exploit it. That's a combined requirement. Start chaining those together and it starts to look like a boolean satisfiability problem, which is NP Hard, so you should be able to get at least a bit of a headscratcher.

There's also the "flood the stage" bit, which to me implies that your route through the dungeon can involve flooding it. Maybe that's a feature of some dungeons where you can reach a reservoir room and flood it, maybe you can just get enough druid levels to flood dungeons whenever you want, maybe both. This is all great if the crocodile moat is before the golem, but not so great if the crocodile moat is after. And if we're including rooms that change the dungeon state (or just plain old keys), then the order of crocodile moat and golem room is indeterminate. So that's interesting too.

And there's also "just have a weak electric attack," which is boring if that's how you handle everything, but gets a lot more interesting when it's being weighed against complex schemes. Like let's say there's also a giant wolf, which can be solved with a lot of brute force, a combo of speaking to animals and being good at lying, or opening the crypts (which doesn't solve the problem so much as replace it with skeletons). Now we could build a necromancer or cleric who doesn't mind the problems from opening the crypt, but still needs a solution for that golem. Or the high-level druid who can flood the place at will, and just needs to be a little bit of a liar to deal with the wolf. Can a necromancer pick up a lightning attack more easily than a druid can flood a dungeon and lie to a wolf? Or was the solution actually to get a mer-rogue to sneak into both the reservoir and the cypts, then swim over a bunch of skeletons?

Tom Clancy and military porn stories tend to be about optimization scenarios. Calling your wizards ‘operators’

A lot of turn based rpg’s have player made challenges like winning within X turns

Early DnD tomb of horrors sounds like ‘speedrun the dubgeon’ Was the goal

Is the board game Roll Player what you are asking for? It's literally a board game about creating characters for a role playing game without the role playing game, though it does involve a lot of dice rolling.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/169426/roll-player

For pure optimization I don't know of any rpg themed games but there are any number of board games that let you do that

I was at a convention recently where I talked to a gentleman who'd made a product called Emberwind. I got drawn in by the pretty art and heard his sales pitch. Basically he'd made a game that was I suppose looking to get rid of the GM and the part he went into the most detail about was how encounters would sort of play themselves with the creatures taking actions based off of die rolls which would arbitrate what they would do from turn to turn. I think that's about as boardgamey as you could make it. I didn't talk to him for too long so I've no fucking clue how anything outside of combat was supposed to work outside of having a few character prompts but I assume it gets pretty *worldy outside of that.

I don't know how much leeway the system would give you for character op but if you wanted to cut out pesky things that don't have to do with attacks, damage, and maybe some conditional modifiers that 'might' be up your alley. I didn't look too much into it myself because I have the same opinion as Dean as far as ttrpgs are concerned.

Dean wrote:If you wanted to make "Minmax the Game" I think that's a laudable goal but you have to think of it as a board or card game. I would definitely sit around with my friends playing a game where we taking turns "levelling up" and adding one of 5 randomly drawn powers to my character to see who can beat the Dungeon Bosses faster. That sounds fun.

That or a weird version of Red7 the card game. The max-stat specialized fighter says he's best because he can win a competition by the biggest number, the rogue says they win because they can overcome the most different obstacles, and the mage wins because they can overcome the most obstacles using the same method (utility magic). Not sure where you go from that first round, though, unless you're improving your character as you go.