Thread by @rdonoghue

There is a thing in Fire Emblem which illustrated why mechanical balancing in RPGs will always be second best for me.

One of the characters is HELLA strong. Like, probably superhumanly strong. Utter whirlwind of death on the battlefield.

The problem is, he wants to be a good king, but all he's good at is killing

(he's REALLY good at killing)

In a mechanically balanced system, something needs to mitigate that combat effectiveness.

In my ideal, hypothetical system, I am ALL IN on a character like this because his capabilities are at odds with his aspirations, which is my jam.

This is similar to why superman breaks games. The problem is that *superman* works, because he has a similar tension. But a character who can do all the things superman can do...doesn't.

And the thing is: Radical mechanical imbalance can *absolutely* work at the table.

With a lot of caveats. Right people. Shared intention. Right level of trust. Unified focus. Stuff like that.

But, man, it is hard to put in a rulebook.

We try. I am not alone in delighting in these tensions, and games are full of attempts to make this work to one extent or another.

(Secret reveal: One of the reasons that Fate aspects can seem wiggly is that they are ultimately designed to be able to do this, if it's what the table wants. But not every table is comfortable with boiling all of Batman down to the "I'm Batman" aspect)

So, that lead to a diagram in my head of Capability and aspiration, that looked something like this.

The dotted lines are so you can draw the shape that suits the characters: -->, <--, <--> or --

But then I got thinking more.

Because the thing that REALLY makes characters like that sing is that the real problem is usually not their capability, but their self-perception.

The guy in question CAN be a good king, and that is visible to anyone but him.

So that lead to this:

But then that got me thinking.

It's also important that the character change over time, and the thing is that that change MIGHT be in the direction of the aspiration, but more likely it's something else which just complicates it all.

And so

At this point, I now have the bones of a mechanic.diagram which would be useless ANYWHERE outside my head and i have no idea what to do with it except exorcise it to twitter.

So...You're welcome.

Ok, tangential thought that spun off this is the idea of player authored failure.

This doesn't happen a lot, but it does happen - a player directs their character to do something with a clear expectation of failure.

It might be something light and painless (Sure, my fighter will roll Arcana, ha ha) or it might be real painful and toothy consequence.

In these situations, the dice creating a success can be funny, but it can also be something of a betrayal.

As I say, it's an uncommon pattern, but it's one I look for. Players who embrace failure are a green flag for me. Players who pre-emptively embrace failure are gold, because (to my experience) they have excised the shadow of "Success==good"

Lot of games do really good things to help with that excision. Things like failing forward and mixed results can really shift mindset.

It's a thing I'm looking for when I say "trust". A player who wants to win is not untrustworthy, but I also don't give them an 'I Win' button.

I sometimes call this the Benedict test (for the character from the Amber series). If your character was *guaranteed* to win every fight, could you still have an awesome time with them? How?

The underlying point is that the "I Win" character will be SUPER BORING (after, perhaps, a period of novelty) unless there is some reason why they are not.

If the GM brings the reason, that's ok. But when the player brings the reason? That's the table I seek.

(P.S. - The character was Dmitri and it turns out the Blue Lions path is WAY BETTER than I anticipated. It is the path to play in classic mode.)