Game balance and ideology
Apr. 7th, 2015 01:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI was reading something with a primary focus that was definitely not on gaming, so I won't link to it, but it mentioned the moment of puzzled disconnect they had when reading D&D rules when they found out clerics charge for healing. They couldn't figure out why a good person or institution would ever turn someone away because they couldn't pay, and they concluded it was an ideological blind spot on the part of the USA game writers.
Could be, but, it's also a question of game balance.
D&D makes a lot of optimising choices that make fighting a whole lot of monsters quicker, easier, and safer. You can dungeon crawl, get in a whole bunch of fights, and walk away. Some of that is the weird way people get less squishable the more experienced they get, as if invulnerability is something you can level up towards with practice. I might be explaining it wrong, I don't D&D, I read rulesets where characters are either (a) fragile little mortals who have to seriously try and avoid fights, since they'll probably die dead, or (b) non human. but basically when I played D&D we got in fights, we fought, we won, someone waved their hands and it all got better.
And if that's how you want your game to go, hey, have fun. But you reach a slight problem when you have temples full of clerics to hand, because why does anyone ever have to worry about injury? Why does anyone have to worry about death? Just drag your friend along to the temple and boom, they're back.
... which happened to me a lot. I was epically bored and started random generating my character's actions, the most destructive of which turned out to be 'poke it with a stick'. It's amazing how often a basically unarmoured cleric can turn into an inconvenient heavy bundle if you poke it with a stick.
ANYway, bad play on my part aside, this was a bad decision, because eventually the party decided they couldn't be having with paying to bring me back. You dungeon crawl, you bring back treasure, you're supposed to make a profit, not spend it all at the temple to get your healer back.
And that's why you care about death. Profit/loss equations.
Now that choice is deeply ideological, and I'm pretty sure the thing where we were supposed to take shiny entirely imaginary arbitrary numbers of treasure as our 'you did good' feedback was why I was so bored (so very very bored). Some people can keep score that way or think of interesting things to do with it. I like characters having conversations and so forth. Different gaming assumptions entirely.
But if you take away that gold limit, you have to rejig the entire rule set to keep the game balancing assumptions going. Otherwise you lose all reason to fear. Well, as long as someone is upright and able to carry the corpses, anyway.
Day to day healing is limited by the cleric's level and when they can recharge. But once you've got a big institution like the church around, it seems likely there'll be someone all rested up. Maybe there isn't, and that's your game balance. Maybe the highest spells like resurrection are only available to the Pope or equivalent, and you'd have to travel to the vatican before your team gets stinky. Maybe healing only happens a little every day, and you'll have to wait around for ages being bored in between, if a little healing is even enough to stay ahead of your injuries. Free don't necessarily mean easy or available. But if you're not throttling availability with gold, you have to, like, pay attention to some other mechanic.
If you turn all your goods and services into an arbitrary medium of exchange they you only have to keep track of one points system. Enough gold? Good to go!
But if instead you have to be in good with a god before miracles are on offer, you have to keep track of something like karma. Or if you need social connections, have you in fact been turning up at church? Or can you bluff them that of course you're in good, just not at this church. Or are you set a penance, seeing as you haven't in fact been good but the clerics are, so they'll do the healing but then frown at you and make the sad puppy eyes until you do them a favour of equal difficulty.
All of these I like better, because it makes every instance of healing an opportunity for plot seeds. If the 'payment' is theological or social then you have to do things and talk to people, and it's not necessarily the same usual things with the killing of monsters. Though obviously if you're a monster killing kind of party, you may well be asked for that kind of favour anyway. Just, life is bigger than killing things and nicking their stuff, you know?
GURPS magic is limited by how very, very, very much fatigue it takes for the higher levels of healing. Sure you can resurrect someone, but it takes a ton of people or a lot of powerstone to do it. I've done the math before, where did I put it... http://beccaelizabeth.dreamwidth.org/2687469.html
I ran through the limiting options there, but they include time, money, and expertise. The fatigue problem can be solved by money and enchantment, or large numbers of people cooperating. Spirits and gods can have the fatigue pool to do it alone, but that 'alone' is recharged by having worshippers, so it's actually large numbers of people that just don't have to all be standing there. To do it with ceremonial magic you need a couple hundred people, maybe. But to even study up enough to know the spell is a lifetime's work, and even if it's the lifetime goal of a whole religion's worth of clerics, they shouldn't all know it.
So to get your character Resurrected you need to get them somewhere a couple hundred people can support one wise and rare expert in attempting a spell which you only get one chance at and that works, for the most epically skilled experts, 19 times out of 20. Also the usual limits on magic in GURPS apply, so any spell at all can end up demons.
GURPS kind of doesn't want you to treat death as routine. Getting raised is a quest. GURPS somewhat strongly encourages avoiding death, in the game mechanics that keep people fragile and healing hard.
... GURPS also has a whole set of supplements to tweak the settings to dungeon crawl mode, because they're really invested in that 'generic' thing, I'm just using the example vs the example of D&D I read.
Games that allow healing and resurrection to be routine or easy are pretty much going to turn into combat centered dungeon crawls. Games that tweak it to maximum difficulty are going to either be very short or have characters work very hard to make sure nobody pulls the trigger. There's a sliding scale in between.
If everything is money, you slide the scale by making it more or less expensive. Also it's a simple stat to keep track of.
If you're going to charge character points for every new life (and GURPS has a mechanic for that) then you're going to have characters advancing slower if they keep getting killed, which is a feedback mechanism that really ought to put the brakes on their behaviour, but might just piss them off if they really wanted the other things.
If you're going to keep it intangible? Karma or social relationships, earned favours or penance, something I haven't thought of? Everyone has to do a lot more accounting, keep track of more aspects of more things. But neither money nor the nebulous possibilities of self development that XP / CP represent become the sole focus of the game.
How it's set is ideological, for sure. But it's also about what the players think is going to be fun.
So charging for healing isn't only because USA, it's because a whole stack of settings to tweak the game play in one direction or another.
... how conscious they are of that I could not speak to, because not a mind reader, but that's the result.
Turning this around into storytelling options?
Stargate, the original movie, had resurrection. More than one character needed it in two hours. And that kind of made the war movie thing where people get dead and it's sad... difficult. But they set up their limits where it's gadget based, takes time, and the gadget is owned by an evil 'god', so it's a tad bit difficult to access. Rebelling against that 'god' means, among other things, losing access to resurrection. so we're back to the costs of war, with just kind of a bobble in the middle.
Stargate SG1 had a problem because having made this tech kind of central they had to figure out what to do with it. The whole series was, on a Watsonian level as pitched by the teams to the US government, about going out into alien temples to false gods and nicking their stuff. Really, their epic quest for honking great space guns was what the military thought it was about. Daniel had the idea it was about meeting people, but the series as a whole was kind of space gun centric. So, okay, why did they not nick the chest of resurrection?
First, they did. I think they got Hathor's? That even circumvents the problem where the current owner is very powerful, very attached, and very likely to be asleep in it. So having acquired one, the writers decided they had a problem, because now why would the protagonists ever die? ... yeah, at some point someone decided this was a problem, and then Daniel Jackson season 5 and onwards, leading to Jack just plain refusing to believe in death any more and yelling at the ceiling until his friend comes back. At that point they have left everyday reality far behind, but, pretty much just for Daniel.
So, okay, they initially thought the resurrection box was a problem, so they decided to give it side effects that make it damn near unuseable. Namely, you know that evil god? You know how they sleep in the box? The box is what made them evil. Sure, you can use it, but you're probably going to end up evil, at least temporarily. And then there's a small problem of becoming physically dependent on the damn thing after repeated uses. In GURPS terms they made using it give you serious Disadvantages, lowering your character point score in ways you'll have to buy off, so it's a non trivial Character Point investment every time but in ways with a lot of flavour rather than an empty mechanic.
In story terms, to get their made up tech out of their story they basically poisoned it so it don't do what it says on the tin. Which is one option, but a really frustrating one. Because the other access limit is simply that we can't make the things and we've only ever seen one per System Lord, which is fewer than one per planet. Even if Earth accumulates them here, there's a limited number of boxes, and seven billion humans. How do you decide who goes in the box? Probably the protagonists earn a place due to saving all seven billion humans several times over by now, but that's a pretty high bar. Also, every healing takes time, there's a limited amount of time, you might need to get them in the box quickly after death, it could be fraught pretty easily. It does however involve dragging your team around dead to get them treatment. And when they aren't the sole focus, you wonder who else gets the box, and how it is decided, and it's actually a huge great plot generator. One I kind of want to focus on and have bunnies for in general, but one that makes it more of a medical SF show than a military SF show.
If that level of tech is available to every healer though, if we're going more Star Trek, or one of the cyberpunk options where you just back yourself up and download again, you start making such changes to how we understand mortality to work that you've either got to handwave it a lot (oh no, failed again, sad now), make it the absolute center of the show, or ignore it entirely so death is just a minor reset and everyone knows they're the hero in an action show. er, I mean, I can watch the kind of afternoon TV where everyone shoots at everyone and I won't worry much because I know the series went more than 100 episodes with the same protagonist, and in a world where death is highly avoidable then everyone in that world knows they too are that protected. But that's going to change how they act. If such healing is only available to protagonists, then dungeon crawl results, but if it's available to everyone, then looney tunes or horror movie are pretty much the options. I mean, they can't die, they're either Road Runner or Captain Jack, and so is everyone around them. Pushing people off buildings for the funny is one plausible option. Do we want to watch that? But another option is to give up on violence altogether, since it's little more than a painful delaying tactic. If killing people don't do anything to get rid of them, why bother? Which can happen in very supernatural worlds with ghosts and so forth, where dead people can become even more of a problem, as well as with very SF worlds.
Tweaking the settings on death and healing changes the stories you can tell, but also changes the basic settings on what it means to be a person in that world. Like, if mortality is optional if you're rich enough? Don't matter if it's fantasy medieval settings or far future SF, people going to risk everything to get rich, if not for themselves then for their loved ones. If mortality is only optional if you're virtuous enough, according to a particular religion? Well that's... a lot of the history of global religion, come to think, except with a much more physical set of proofs.
It's actually interesting in this respect that the 20th century saw such immense strides in survivability. Like, anaesthetics and antibiotics make surgery survivable, and advances in surgery make a spectacular range of things survivable, and this is true in new ways compared to the 19th century and before. We're living longer, we've noticed that as a vague demographic fact, but there's ways life and death now work more like an RPG than they used to. Heart attack? Get them to a hospital (accessability / expertise / time / money limitation) and they'll probably live (chance of failure) but perhaps be less healthy after (long term disadvantage / character point cost). Heart attack in medieval England? Goodbye, the end. I just wonder how far our settings have already changed, and we're too in it to notice.
... compared to what I said above about survivability making a game world more violent, it's actually interesting that our world has, by some sets of stats, become more peaceful as these settings start to apply. Maybe survival not being so highly contested actually calms people down? Thought too big, real world, needs more data.
okay, took that thought set for a wander, rolled off the edge of my knowledge, might be talking rubbish now.
shall go away.
Could be, but, it's also a question of game balance.
D&D makes a lot of optimising choices that make fighting a whole lot of monsters quicker, easier, and safer. You can dungeon crawl, get in a whole bunch of fights, and walk away. Some of that is the weird way people get less squishable the more experienced they get, as if invulnerability is something you can level up towards with practice. I might be explaining it wrong, I don't D&D, I read rulesets where characters are either (a) fragile little mortals who have to seriously try and avoid fights, since they'll probably die dead, or (b) non human. but basically when I played D&D we got in fights, we fought, we won, someone waved their hands and it all got better.
And if that's how you want your game to go, hey, have fun. But you reach a slight problem when you have temples full of clerics to hand, because why does anyone ever have to worry about injury? Why does anyone have to worry about death? Just drag your friend along to the temple and boom, they're back.
... which happened to me a lot. I was epically bored and started random generating my character's actions, the most destructive of which turned out to be 'poke it with a stick'. It's amazing how often a basically unarmoured cleric can turn into an inconvenient heavy bundle if you poke it with a stick.
ANYway, bad play on my part aside, this was a bad decision, because eventually the party decided they couldn't be having with paying to bring me back. You dungeon crawl, you bring back treasure, you're supposed to make a profit, not spend it all at the temple to get your healer back.
And that's why you care about death. Profit/loss equations.
Now that choice is deeply ideological, and I'm pretty sure the thing where we were supposed to take shiny entirely imaginary arbitrary numbers of treasure as our 'you did good' feedback was why I was so bored (so very very bored). Some people can keep score that way or think of interesting things to do with it. I like characters having conversations and so forth. Different gaming assumptions entirely.
But if you take away that gold limit, you have to rejig the entire rule set to keep the game balancing assumptions going. Otherwise you lose all reason to fear. Well, as long as someone is upright and able to carry the corpses, anyway.
Day to day healing is limited by the cleric's level and when they can recharge. But once you've got a big institution like the church around, it seems likely there'll be someone all rested up. Maybe there isn't, and that's your game balance. Maybe the highest spells like resurrection are only available to the Pope or equivalent, and you'd have to travel to the vatican before your team gets stinky. Maybe healing only happens a little every day, and you'll have to wait around for ages being bored in between, if a little healing is even enough to stay ahead of your injuries. Free don't necessarily mean easy or available. But if you're not throttling availability with gold, you have to, like, pay attention to some other mechanic.
If you turn all your goods and services into an arbitrary medium of exchange they you only have to keep track of one points system. Enough gold? Good to go!
But if instead you have to be in good with a god before miracles are on offer, you have to keep track of something like karma. Or if you need social connections, have you in fact been turning up at church? Or can you bluff them that of course you're in good, just not at this church. Or are you set a penance, seeing as you haven't in fact been good but the clerics are, so they'll do the healing but then frown at you and make the sad puppy eyes until you do them a favour of equal difficulty.
All of these I like better, because it makes every instance of healing an opportunity for plot seeds. If the 'payment' is theological or social then you have to do things and talk to people, and it's not necessarily the same usual things with the killing of monsters. Though obviously if you're a monster killing kind of party, you may well be asked for that kind of favour anyway. Just, life is bigger than killing things and nicking their stuff, you know?
GURPS magic is limited by how very, very, very much fatigue it takes for the higher levels of healing. Sure you can resurrect someone, but it takes a ton of people or a lot of powerstone to do it. I've done the math before, where did I put it... http://beccaelizabeth.dreamwidth.org/2687469.html
I ran through the limiting options there, but they include time, money, and expertise. The fatigue problem can be solved by money and enchantment, or large numbers of people cooperating. Spirits and gods can have the fatigue pool to do it alone, but that 'alone' is recharged by having worshippers, so it's actually large numbers of people that just don't have to all be standing there. To do it with ceremonial magic you need a couple hundred people, maybe. But to even study up enough to know the spell is a lifetime's work, and even if it's the lifetime goal of a whole religion's worth of clerics, they shouldn't all know it.
So to get your character Resurrected you need to get them somewhere a couple hundred people can support one wise and rare expert in attempting a spell which you only get one chance at and that works, for the most epically skilled experts, 19 times out of 20. Also the usual limits on magic in GURPS apply, so any spell at all can end up demons.
GURPS kind of doesn't want you to treat death as routine. Getting raised is a quest. GURPS somewhat strongly encourages avoiding death, in the game mechanics that keep people fragile and healing hard.
... GURPS also has a whole set of supplements to tweak the settings to dungeon crawl mode, because they're really invested in that 'generic' thing, I'm just using the example vs the example of D&D I read.
Games that allow healing and resurrection to be routine or easy are pretty much going to turn into combat centered dungeon crawls. Games that tweak it to maximum difficulty are going to either be very short or have characters work very hard to make sure nobody pulls the trigger. There's a sliding scale in between.
If everything is money, you slide the scale by making it more or less expensive. Also it's a simple stat to keep track of.
If you're going to charge character points for every new life (and GURPS has a mechanic for that) then you're going to have characters advancing slower if they keep getting killed, which is a feedback mechanism that really ought to put the brakes on their behaviour, but might just piss them off if they really wanted the other things.
If you're going to keep it intangible? Karma or social relationships, earned favours or penance, something I haven't thought of? Everyone has to do a lot more accounting, keep track of more aspects of more things. But neither money nor the nebulous possibilities of self development that XP / CP represent become the sole focus of the game.
How it's set is ideological, for sure. But it's also about what the players think is going to be fun.
So charging for healing isn't only because USA, it's because a whole stack of settings to tweak the game play in one direction or another.
... how conscious they are of that I could not speak to, because not a mind reader, but that's the result.
Turning this around into storytelling options?
Stargate, the original movie, had resurrection. More than one character needed it in two hours. And that kind of made the war movie thing where people get dead and it's sad... difficult. But they set up their limits where it's gadget based, takes time, and the gadget is owned by an evil 'god', so it's a tad bit difficult to access. Rebelling against that 'god' means, among other things, losing access to resurrection. so we're back to the costs of war, with just kind of a bobble in the middle.
Stargate SG1 had a problem because having made this tech kind of central they had to figure out what to do with it. The whole series was, on a Watsonian level as pitched by the teams to the US government, about going out into alien temples to false gods and nicking their stuff. Really, their epic quest for honking great space guns was what the military thought it was about. Daniel had the idea it was about meeting people, but the series as a whole was kind of space gun centric. So, okay, why did they not nick the chest of resurrection?
First, they did. I think they got Hathor's? That even circumvents the problem where the current owner is very powerful, very attached, and very likely to be asleep in it. So having acquired one, the writers decided they had a problem, because now why would the protagonists ever die? ... yeah, at some point someone decided this was a problem, and then Daniel Jackson season 5 and onwards, leading to Jack just plain refusing to believe in death any more and yelling at the ceiling until his friend comes back. At that point they have left everyday reality far behind, but, pretty much just for Daniel.
So, okay, they initially thought the resurrection box was a problem, so they decided to give it side effects that make it damn near unuseable. Namely, you know that evil god? You know how they sleep in the box? The box is what made them evil. Sure, you can use it, but you're probably going to end up evil, at least temporarily. And then there's a small problem of becoming physically dependent on the damn thing after repeated uses. In GURPS terms they made using it give you serious Disadvantages, lowering your character point score in ways you'll have to buy off, so it's a non trivial Character Point investment every time but in ways with a lot of flavour rather than an empty mechanic.
In story terms, to get their made up tech out of their story they basically poisoned it so it don't do what it says on the tin. Which is one option, but a really frustrating one. Because the other access limit is simply that we can't make the things and we've only ever seen one per System Lord, which is fewer than one per planet. Even if Earth accumulates them here, there's a limited number of boxes, and seven billion humans. How do you decide who goes in the box? Probably the protagonists earn a place due to saving all seven billion humans several times over by now, but that's a pretty high bar. Also, every healing takes time, there's a limited amount of time, you might need to get them in the box quickly after death, it could be fraught pretty easily. It does however involve dragging your team around dead to get them treatment. And when they aren't the sole focus, you wonder who else gets the box, and how it is decided, and it's actually a huge great plot generator. One I kind of want to focus on and have bunnies for in general, but one that makes it more of a medical SF show than a military SF show.
If that level of tech is available to every healer though, if we're going more Star Trek, or one of the cyberpunk options where you just back yourself up and download again, you start making such changes to how we understand mortality to work that you've either got to handwave it a lot (oh no, failed again, sad now), make it the absolute center of the show, or ignore it entirely so death is just a minor reset and everyone knows they're the hero in an action show. er, I mean, I can watch the kind of afternoon TV where everyone shoots at everyone and I won't worry much because I know the series went more than 100 episodes with the same protagonist, and in a world where death is highly avoidable then everyone in that world knows they too are that protected. But that's going to change how they act. If such healing is only available to protagonists, then dungeon crawl results, but if it's available to everyone, then looney tunes or horror movie are pretty much the options. I mean, they can't die, they're either Road Runner or Captain Jack, and so is everyone around them. Pushing people off buildings for the funny is one plausible option. Do we want to watch that? But another option is to give up on violence altogether, since it's little more than a painful delaying tactic. If killing people don't do anything to get rid of them, why bother? Which can happen in very supernatural worlds with ghosts and so forth, where dead people can become even more of a problem, as well as with very SF worlds.
Tweaking the settings on death and healing changes the stories you can tell, but also changes the basic settings on what it means to be a person in that world. Like, if mortality is optional if you're rich enough? Don't matter if it's fantasy medieval settings or far future SF, people going to risk everything to get rich, if not for themselves then for their loved ones. If mortality is only optional if you're virtuous enough, according to a particular religion? Well that's... a lot of the history of global religion, come to think, except with a much more physical set of proofs.
It's actually interesting in this respect that the 20th century saw such immense strides in survivability. Like, anaesthetics and antibiotics make surgery survivable, and advances in surgery make a spectacular range of things survivable, and this is true in new ways compared to the 19th century and before. We're living longer, we've noticed that as a vague demographic fact, but there's ways life and death now work more like an RPG than they used to. Heart attack? Get them to a hospital (accessability / expertise / time / money limitation) and they'll probably live (chance of failure) but perhaps be less healthy after (long term disadvantage / character point cost). Heart attack in medieval England? Goodbye, the end. I just wonder how far our settings have already changed, and we're too in it to notice.
... compared to what I said above about survivability making a game world more violent, it's actually interesting that our world has, by some sets of stats, become more peaceful as these settings start to apply. Maybe survival not being so highly contested actually calms people down? Thought too big, real world, needs more data.
okay, took that thought set for a wander, rolled off the edge of my knowledge, might be talking rubbish now.
shall go away.