Video games and roleplaying games give people the impression that all options have pros and cons, and are roughly pretty equal: the Warrior is just about as powerful as the Wizard is just about as powerful as the Rogue.
You haven’t spent a lot of time hanging around tabletop RPG players, have you? It’s more than a cliche to declare certain character options useless, or to declare the obvious superiority of others.
(In older versions of Dungeons and Dragons in particular, there’s a well-known issue where certain types of character have a basically linear progression—a character at level N has incrementally more hit points and better attacks than one at level N-1 -- while others progress geometrically, gaining for example both more powerful spells and the ability to cast more spells at a time. Over time this creates a situation where the former type dominates the early game and the latter dominates the late—not very fun in a game where each player controls a single character and can feel ignored or useless at any given time. This in turn creates metagame considerations where players that can exploit the rules better are more effective and therefore more influential over the emerging story. The jargon is “system mastery”.)
Oh, I’ve spent my fair share of time around D&D 2nd ed, and I’m well acquainted with munchkining/minmaxing. However, D&D is an environment were the narrative is one of balance and tradeoffs.
For example, notice how it’s OK for one class to be stronger at low levels and another class to be stronger at high levels, but how people would be pissed off if one class was stronger at all levels. This is the “narrative of balance” that I’m talking about: people think it’s OK for there to be tradeoffs (e.g. early vs late dominance), but pure dominance is considered a bug and not a feature.
(I’m not bashing this generically; balance is a fine feature for many games. But I’d appreciate games where there is a narrative of exploitation rather than a narrative of balance.)
D&D has often had issues with magic users. They often are stronger than non magic users at all levels. For example, use of the spell sleep allows you to disable a group of enemies with no save allowed. Exploitation is common.
In games you can generally gain a huge amount of power by researching the right choices and doing them.
In the real world that’s a lot trickier because people in the past have researched the right choices and heavily exploited and monopolized existing power resources, and any publicly known power resources will likely be heavily exploited. Competition makes it harder than when you’re playing with three or four people.
Of course, one could run a D&D campaign in which NPCs have already exploited and monopolized those resources. That said, I suspect this would start to approximate playing Papers & Paychecks.
You haven’t spent a lot of time hanging around tabletop RPG players, have you? It’s more than a cliche to declare certain character options useless, or to declare the obvious superiority of others.
(In older versions of Dungeons and Dragons in particular, there’s a well-known issue where certain types of character have a basically linear progression—a character at level N has incrementally more hit points and better attacks than one at level N-1 -- while others progress geometrically, gaining for example both more powerful spells and the ability to cast more spells at a time. Over time this creates a situation where the former type dominates the early game and the latter dominates the late—not very fun in a game where each player controls a single character and can feel ignored or useless at any given time. This in turn creates metagame considerations where players that can exploit the rules better are more effective and therefore more influential over the emerging story. The jargon is “system mastery”.)
Oh, I’ve spent my fair share of time around D&D 2nd ed, and I’m well acquainted with munchkining/minmaxing. However, D&D is an environment were the narrative is one of balance and tradeoffs.
For example, notice how it’s OK for one class to be stronger at low levels and another class to be stronger at high levels, but how people would be pissed off if one class was stronger at all levels. This is the “narrative of balance” that I’m talking about: people think it’s OK for there to be tradeoffs (e.g. early vs late dominance), but pure dominance is considered a bug and not a feature.
(I’m not bashing this generically; balance is a fine feature for many games. But I’d appreciate games where there is a narrative of exploitation rather than a narrative of balance.)
D&D has often had issues with magic users. They often are stronger than non magic users at all levels. For example, use of the spell sleep allows you to disable a group of enemies with no save allowed. Exploitation is common.
In games you can generally gain a huge amount of power by researching the right choices and doing them.
In the real world that’s a lot trickier because people in the past have researched the right choices and heavily exploited and monopolized existing power resources, and any publicly known power resources will likely be heavily exploited. Competition makes it harder than when you’re playing with three or four people.
TVTropes has an article, Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards ….
Of course, one could run a D&D campaign in which NPCs have already exploited and monopolized those resources. That said, I suspect this would start to approximate playing Papers & Paychecks.