For Space Opera, Star Trek RPG and Traveller. The character didn’t generally become too powerful innately. No level systems. But you tended to accumulate enough tech and gadgets as to be overpowering.
1st Ed D&D had both accumulation of magic items and a level system. So becoming overpowered almost always happened by 12th at the latest.
2nd Ed was worse yet, as you had all the issues with 1st and enough buff spells to walk around like a super hero by 8th.
My personal experience in the 90s was that most people who played Vampire were there to play vampires. Some sort of power fantasy of either katanas & Desert Eagles or seduction & goth romance and they weren’t especially interested in playing other RPGs because those weren’t about vampires. This doesn’t make them any less “role players” (hell, a million DMs will lament that they can’t push their table off 5e) but I can’t say I know anyone who broadly plays RPGs and started with World of Darkness. Feels more like its own pocket RPG community.
But maybe I’m wrong and they all went on to play Call of Cthulhu or some other non-Swords & Sorcery style game.
Moreso than 4th? I don’t know anything about 5th, but one of the few things I liked about what little I know about 4th is that they increased 1st level HP, and the majority of players don’t like characters that will often instantly die from an unlucky hit.
I’ve not met her but she seems very sharp and energetic; the kind of GM and player that makes a game a pleasure to play in. I caught her playing in the CoC scenario “Servants of the Lake” and she definitely leaned into the ‘futility of fighting an unknown horror’ and her character dying their best trope-worthy death. Her story of how she got into playing RPGs is very atypical and illustrates both the value in reaching out to potential players who seem interested but don’t fit the ‘standard mold’ of game store kids, any why representation is important not only in the game world itself but also in the art:
Both classes and leveling are abstractions which serve the game or not depending on how the players approach roleplay and whether it serves a functional purpose in the progression of the story. There really isn’t a particular need to have classes except to have some way to stovepipe characters into not being generalists and playing in a particular way. There shouldn’t be any particular reason a character could not be both a “magic user” (awkward label) and good in combat except that the time to develop one set of skills limits that available to work on another. As noted above, the classes really come out of tactical wargaming where there really wasn’t any need for character development and they exist now in D&D and other games as a heritage artifact of that but in the general form you really only need three or four character archetypes—say, a fighter-type, sorcerer-type, a thief/sneaker-type, and maybe a healer/scribe/priest-type that essentially cover all of the heroic fantasy roles—and then sufficient variation within those types to cover all possible roles.
But because AD&D uses classes has a shorthand to cover essentially all skills, restrictions, et cetera, you have to have a class for every subtype of every possible role; if you go to Japan, you need a ‘samurai’ class because Japanese fighters use different weapons, tactics, and have different mores and beliefs than fighters based upon some weird merger of Bronze Age barbarians, Celtic warriors, and Roman legionnaires. In fact, one of the major critiques I have about AD&D—and not just 5e, going back to its beginnings as a more expansive system—is that it is an attempt to have one set of mechanics and rules that includes classes to cover all manner of different types of worlds from the fantastical to the mundane, and thus ends up as a big mixture of different and incompatible tropes and cultures that don’t really fit anything very well. It ends up being a sort of mythology onto itself but one that is kind of muddled and that makes it difficult to feel that you are playing in a very specific world.
The original pre-Advanced D&D was just basically a Minoan-influenced Bronze Age world with a bestiary pulled from a few different sources, a pseudo-Vancian system of magic, ‘races’ mostly borrowed from JRR Tolkein’s very skewed view of Norse and Celtic mythology, and a handful of basic archetypes, which worked fine for limited sandboxing and dungeon crawling (even though their “dungeons” were really more like labyrinths and the treasures were just something to keep the players motivated rather than making any contextual sense) but expanding into a wider mythology and complex worldbuilding kind of breaks that system in my opinion.
Leveling is problematic not because there is something wrong with the mechanics of it per se (although I prefer skill-based systems where you focus improvement on skills that are used and applicable rather than more abstracted overall improvement) but because of the problem of scaling, where say a 3rd or 4th level character is still quite vulnerable to ordinary threats and hazards but a 10+ level character can take on a small army single handed and by the time a character is approaching a level cap they are essentially god-like. The intent of that scale was someone deliberate—that in the absence of large, overarching plots they characters would just go on a heroquest to challenge gods and flit between planes of existence—but it is really inconsistent with the more grounded style of play in earlier development and unless that is something your players really want in the game they are essentially just forced into becoming immortal beings with no fear of death or permanent harm. Capping levels or just starting over after getting to a certain level is an ad hoc way of dealing with that problem, but in my opinion making sure the characters are always vulnerable to maiming injury, death, and other consequences keeps them more invested in the game provided that they understand that they do not have plot armor to make them invulnerable to the consequences of bad decisions and vagaries of random hazards.
Not having played the game and really only skimmed the material (because the subject matter wasn’t that interesting to me), my impression is that the World of Darkness games weren’t really about supernatural horror. The players were supposed to be vampires or warewolves and so forth, so the supernatural elements were as mundane to them as a car equipped with rocket launchers that turns into a submarine is to James Bond. WoD seemed to be more about urban fantasy with a gothic-tinged conspiracy vibe to it rather than any kind of existential horror a la Stephen King or Lovecraft.
Regardless, it was a decidedly different feel and genre than heroic fantasy (which was actually more dungeon crawling), and the other options of post-apocalyptic survival and science fantasy/opera which mostly ended up being variations on the theme. (In theory you were supposed to play games like Traveller as traders living on the ragged edge of profitability or deep in the intrigue of Imperial politics but most of the games that I saw were in essence quest-fests with some kind of a dungeon crawl or overthrowing a local warlord or such, which is essentially just fantasy tropes laid upon a science fiction milieu.) Ditto for most spy-themed and current and near future warfare settings like Twilight: 2000; you’re basically running a series of sidequests in hope of getting some bigger prize or to find a mythological submarine that will take you back to America or whatever.
I gravitated toward Call of Cthulhu because it actually undermined those tropes by essentially making any victory transitory and mostly hopeless, but even there most Keepers and players tried to play it out much like a heroic fantasy, albeit one where running away to live another day. was an accepted and respectable strategy. That isn’t for everyone, either because most people play games to feel more powerful and successful, not to be reminded that they are mayflies in the scale of existence who can be wiped out or driven permanently senseless a single unthinking flicker of Azothoth’s tentacle flitting in through a crack in the interdimensional plenum.
Anyway, people play RPGs and other games for different reasons and motivations, and it is good that it isn’t all just wandering fortune-hunters killing innocent kobolds just trying to live out their miserable existence raising their families in the darkness of abandoned structures of some forgotten great civilization.
Stranger
SuperGame! By Jay Hartlove.
The core of WoD was supposed to be the player’s basically inevitable descent towards their dark end. As a vampire, you need to feed and do vampire things that that reduces your humanity but increases your power so even if you refused to feed on humans, you’re going to get pushed around by stronger vampires. Likewise for garou falling to their bestial natures or wraiths getting lured into final oblivion by their shadows, etc. Embracing your new nature removed your humanity but refusing to embrace it turned you into a pawn.
In reality, I never really saw it play out that way and never really felt any existential angst but that seems to be what White Wolf wanted.
I can’t really say much about 4th edition as I disliked the rules and my playtime was very limited.
One of the things I really loved about 4e (I loved lots of stuff about 4e, but that’s neither here nor there) was the class descriptors. Every class had a word describing their role in the party and a word describing the source of their power.
So I could show this to a newbie:
Power sources: Martial, Arcane, Divine, Primal
Roles: Leader, Defender, Controller, Striker
And then, with minimal explanation (except perhaps clarifying what ‘striker’ and ‘controller’ mean), I could just say, “Which of those combos sounds like something you’d like to play? Oh, an arcane leader sounds neat? You’re a bard! A divine defender sounds cool? You’re a paladin! A primal striker, you say? Here’s your greataxe!”
But 5e’s sublcass system also accomplishes a whole lot with minimal fuss. It’s a great way to inject new concepts and ideas without needing to create whole new classes, and you never have to learn more than a couple new concepts for any given subclass.
On the whole, I think 5e is probably the best all-around edition. It’s accessible, has bounded numbers to make scaling into higher levels a little more tolerable, and has purposeful design to allow modular integration of new ideas. When the new books start coming out (and they will be more like 5.5e than 6e), they’ll be fully compatible with existing ones.
IME (which is limited to the old World Of Darkness) the real horror came from contemplating real and actual things in the light cast by the game. Charles Manson didn’t form a cult and have them kill innocent people due to his being a Black Spiral Dancer kinfolk. He did it because he was crazy and evil. The USSR didn’t spend all that money and manpower to kill wild wolves because Baba Yaga was secretly in control of things. They did it because . . . I don’t know why.
Hence the horror.
I never played 4th ed. but everything I read or hear about it makes me glad I didn’t. I wouldn’t like this system at all. Such roles should arise through discovery from natural player interactions with each other and with the setting.
We play WoD and no one is a Vampire, in fact we hunt them. My PC is a sort of Fey.
Yes, I concur.
I feel Pathfinder is the best system, but that is for experienced players I think. 5e is great for intro to D&D and I think it works well even for us 'experts".
I am sure the idea of the new books/edition is to get everyone to buy a new Players handbook, etc. But yeah, doubtless much will be usable from 5e.
There are aspects of Pathfinder I really dislike. The feat trees are not to my liking.
I loved 1e but as one of my oldest friends and my kids have reminded me, my house rules had grown to be over 100 pages of smallish print.
The role/source system referred mainly to how the characters operate in combat. It was just a very convenient shorthand for helping players understand what kind of underpinnings any given class had. Saying that a bard is an “arcane leader” just meant that it was a spellcaster with healing and buffing abilities.
It wasn’t intended to lock you into any kind of roleplaying leadership role any more than being a charisma-based character tends to nudge you in that direction anyway.
As I mentioned, this happened in my long-running 1st edition game too.
I think the fact that the players were all programmers / lawyers / chess players (and sometimes a combination of those) both explains the creation of our manual and its acceptance.
If you need that many ‘house rules’ to successfully run a game, you’re probably better off going with another system or just making your own at some point. Ideally, a system has enough flexibility and consistency that you can make sensible interpretations even if there isn’t a specific rule about a situation (i.e. damage from falling foam debris, or asphyxiation effects due to inhaling burning army ants, or navigating your starship through a field of interstellar whipped cream) instead of having to have specific, predefined rules for any situation that are sufficiently arbitrary to not be obvious.
One of the things that has always bugged me about D&D and many derived systems is how they constrain the character’s action; combat is swing, arrow/arrow, or fireball, and if you want to be more clever than that you either have to pull in some extra rules or create your own. Ditto for abilities that only someone of a specific class can use at any degree of proficiency, and so forth. The rules of an RPG should really just facilitate resolving whatever wacky notions and desperate maneuvers that the players come up with, giving them at least an understanding of how unlikely it is that their acrobatic leap from balcony to balcony is going to result in anything but a wet red splotch on the pavement below, or how they can disarm a group of goblins and then ask them why they are so traumatized that their first reaction is to attack the characters upon entering a room instead of inviting them in for tea and crumpets. I mean, if that’s what your characters want to do although if it were me I’d just grab one of the suckers, tie him up, and use him as a meat shield against the big boss because goblins are mean and drink mud for tea. But whatever; your characters should be able to do anything they can dream up within physical reason of the world they live in.
Stranger
Those rules accumulated over 30 years.
Any system is going to exist somewhere on a continuum between “absolutely open-ended storytelling medium” and “highly technical dice-based world simulator.” D&D tends to exist near the middle, but it absolutely has rules in it for facilitating wacky notions and desperate maneuvers so long as the DM is willing to cogitate a bit.
But if you’re playing a game where you’re being told, “the rules don’t explicitly give me a way to make you roll for this so you’re not allowed to do it,” that’s a problem with either the DM or the expectations the group has set for itself. Not the system. A good friend of mine who is truly stellar at running games once said that the primary job of the DM is to figure out a way to tell players “yes, you can try that” so long as they’re being reasonable and operating in a shared group framework.
This is what I was going to say. If a D.M. says “I’m not going to let you try that because the rules don’t explicitly set forth a mechanic for me to determine success or failure” then what you have there is a D.M. problem, not a rules problem.
(Only after reading this through do I realize I basically repeated what Johnny Bravo said.)
Firstly (as What_Exit said) our rulebook grew over time (40 years!)
Also everyone in our group took turns to be the DM - so we really needed consistency.
I had a copy of that game I picked up from the bargain bin. Interesting, but not nearly as good as Champions which came out shortly after.