Rampant Games - New RPG Blog Posts
The Rampant Coyote posted a few updates on his blog this week that may be of intrest to some you. The first post talks about,"The Role of Magic & RPG Balance."
I’ve been doing some brooding over Frayed Knights 2: The Khan of Wrath since Comic Con (more on that in a future post), and it’s brought about a few changes. There’s one point I’m not sure on yet, because changes might mess with the flavor. I don’t want to mess with the flavor.
One problem – and it is a problem – is that things were a little too balanced. Yes, I know, in a world where people on the Internet are screaming about AAA games not being balanced well enough, I’m here to tell you that it is the imbalance that makes things interesting. If you’ve got things balanced so well that at a high level the differences between options are pretty subtle, then you have a problem. Subtle doesn’t play well in games, so you’ve ended up with a non-choice.
His second post shares his opinion about Dungeon Crawling & Combat Systems.
One concept of early dice-and-paper role-playing games (and some of the old CRPG counterparts) that has been somewhat lost in the modern era is the idea of avoiding combat encounters. Old-school D&D has a not-entirely warranted reputation for being about killing everything in sight. After all, that was how you got XP (experience points), right? For killing things?
Well, actually, no. In the actual rules, you got far more XP for treasure than for killing things. Some dungeon masters chose to ignore this rule, which resulted in far slower-paced games where the only way to make progress was to kill everything in sight. You had to kill a LOT of enemies to get to level two, and in a “properly” run game, you were unlikely to survive that many encounters.
What happened over time was that DMs ignored the rules to force the game to play the way they wanted it to play… and, in a sense, they “won” – later versions of the game (and their computer RPG cousins) followed this new style. XP was no longer given for treasure, as treasure was its own reward. Combat was exciting, so it became the only real source of XP. And there are a few articles and letters in old copies of Dragon Magazine suggesting that DMs would reduce the experience point reward if the players won too easily because they were clever about it. After all, what did the characters learn when all they did was drop a rockslide on a giant’s head instead of fighting it toe-to-toe?