I like Power Sets because...

This presumes that mini-maxers are bad gamers, which I don't think follows.

I guess we could explore the ever popular Stormwind Fallacy, and talk about how mini-maxing means you can't roleplay or build around a concept.

That's ok, it matches Jack and Bill

What's an example of a well balanced multiplayer game with an 'open' system of power advancement?

I haven't played everything, but in the games I have played people rapidly figure out the 'good' stuff and the junk and plan their advancement accordingly. Absent structural limitations like ATs, of course.

It may be that it's possible, but simply too resource hungry. If an AT system is substantially easier to balance than an open system, that alone makes it incredibly appealing to dev teams with limited man hours.

Also, and this is total conjecture, but I think the majority of players like having a pre-defined role to play. If its easier to balance and appealing to your audience, no wonder devs love the AT system.

My pen and paper Champions campaign was a seething hotbed of min-maxing and shameless Disadvantage abuse. The storyline was also mostly driven by very high quality role playing from my players.

Heh, I've had similar experiences in Champions, Shadowrun, Mutants & Masterminds...hell, Exalted is designed around being a seething hotbed of mini-maxing.

The Stormwind Fallacy is the fallacy that mini-maxing precludes roleplay.

We had something very much like this in the old version of the combat system in SW:G before the NGE. It worked fantastic, not flawlessly, but it was great. Just saying.

I wouldn't say Exalted is designed around min-maxing, but I also wouldn't even attempt to claim that min-maxing is impossible, or even difficult. For example, Dexterity is squarely in the "god stat" realm. Dex is used for hitting things, dodging things, running fast, climbing, manipulating devices, catching, and more. A character with low Dex is frequently left behind (figuratively or literally)

Edit: In Mass Combat, War is the god stat, since just about everything you try to do in Mass Combat is capped by your War rating. (I'd have to look it up, but I believe this does include Mass Social Combat)

Fortunately, in my opinion, there are only two truly "broken" Charms in the published sourcebooks. One of them (Void Avatar Prana, last Charm in Dark Messiah Style supernatural martial arts) should be considered a giant typo (it was added by the editor, not the author of the style), and it is extremely easy to claim that it simply doesn't exist. The other (Zeal) should be considered "lost", since it's in the Dreams of the First Age book. If you want to play a First Age campaign (in which case, all of the players are rulers of the world and they're brokenly overpowered regardless of what Charms they take), fine, allow Zeal. If you want to craft an entire story about learning the existence of Zeal and then rediscovering it, fine, it's an epic story for an epic Charm. In all other cases, I say, "Nope, everyone forgot".

There are a few other scarily strong Charms, but they also tend to require obscenely high Essence ratings (not that Zeal doesn't...), such as Fantasy, which essentially turns a character (not player) into storyteller for a scene.

I don't know about that. Usually when people say 'used' as in 'past tense', it drives me to think 'what caused them to no longer use this system?' My answer is usually found in either flaws in the old mechanic or greater efficiency in the new.

As back to CO? The game itself looks like someone went onto the Suggestion forums, gave a single glance and said "Screw it, I can make ALL these people happy and make my OWN game!" And so they got Dual Pistols which really aren't dual pistols, but part of a lots-of-guns-and-stuff set, they got color customization where you're free to make your powers any shade of OMGSATURATED you want, they got weather which does absolute dick, they got underwater zones which makes characters look like autistic dolphins swimming about, they got their open zones where there are a whopping 5 of them, and they got an Archetype-less system, where people can take min/maxing to a whole new level, and show them just how important the PvP crowd is.

I'm with No Pants on this one- I love incidental touches like that.

BUT.....I wonder how many dev hours went into it, and postulate they'd have been better off assigning those resources to creating more content.

I'd love to see weather added to this game, but there are a lot of other things I'd rather they spend the energy on.

TMI on your internet dress code

A goat in slacks would be far more offputting, trust me.

Hell yes. Aesthetics and mechanics being separated would be so awesome. I'd never feel penalized for making thematically appropriate choices.

...non-power sets obviously need more power!

--NT

Maybe it's just me... I barely noticed small drops of rain all around my screen. All I thought was "Christ, this is lowering my FPS."

Champions. Hell maybe it was just my perception. The framerate on that game is like a bad rollercoaster.

I always thought it would be better to use a sigmoid for returns, start with increasing returns for investment in a single skill, then diminishing after certain point.

I would argue that you have to go out of your way to have a super-hero/villain who is not physically fit. It's pretty standard in the genre. And Hasten, just represents being very fast at doing what you're doing. Graphics aside, most characters get better at using their powers at they grow.

Hasten and the Fitness powers are meta powers and as such don't really need a "concept".

Other than that, I agree with most point made by the Nethergoat. Open skill systems WILL lead to cookie-cutter min-maxing and even the best developer can't change that. MMOs provide too many variables for human beings to ever deal with all the combinations present even in a class based system. It's why when I start a new MMO, I expect nerfs, even brutal ones in the first two years and then ad hoc ones thereafter.

I have to agree with this. Archetypes, classes or whatever you want to call them are designed to pair up specific advantaged with specific disadvantages. An open-power system allows players to keep only their advantages while avoiding their disadvantages, or where that isn't possible, pick advantages that matter and disadvantages that do not. Left to their own devices, players WILL gravitate towards the best possible approach, and that ruins the fun for me.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

This nicely summarizes the rather incoherent impression I've been attempting (poorly) to get across in this thread.


Skill systems need a check to prevent inevitable player gravitation to "the best" powers, whatever they may be. In a pen-and-paper system the GM (and to a lesser extent fellow players) is the check so they can allow great leeway, as with the Champions RPG.

In an impersonal environment like an MMO there is no social pressure counterbalancing the urge to make 'the best' character, and there is no immediate response possible from those in power as there is in a pen and paper game (where the GM can always trump or counter any player action they feel isn't in the spirit of the campaign). In fact, MMOs lavish rewards on those who 'work the system' and find 'the best' powers and reward paths.

If something isn't working there's a whole process that has to be engaged to deal with it. Witness the slow motion dev response to the MA fiasco, where obvious problems that were pointed out in beta hung around for nearly two full issues.

Balance on a game wide scale is a madly complicated thing, even with the simplification imposed by an AT system.

And the more I think about it, the better AT systems seem to serve a multiplayer game compared to an 'open' stytem. Not only are they easier to balance, they encourage teaming without explicitly requiring it and give structure to character creation & team roles.