Highwinds, and Constructed Challenge

Highwinds is a space opera RPG, with elements of fantasy thrown in for good measure. The game encourages you to “Take the role of resourceful heroes on the edge of space and fight pirates, save people from killer robots, and explore ancient vaults locked in astral space.”

Focused on combat, the game only has four stats for its characters: Accuracy, Dodge, Initiative, and Toughness. You pick your skills, your talents, your equipment, and off you go to swash your buckle across the stars.

In addition to the usual laser-gun staples, you can also be a psychic, a magic-user, or a master of martial talents. You can be a multiude of standard sci-fi races, including insectoids, saurianoids, and fungoids. The system itself is fairly simple, but it has a good interplay between the different systems that allows for solid character variety.

Then there’s Eclipse Phase, a transhumanist game where playing a “human” isn’t really an option. Every adjustment to your character costs points and provides a trade-off of cost and benefit. Its a bit like GURPS in that respect, though there are a lot more than just “skills” that drives your actions.

Or there’s Shattered, a grimdark post-apocalypse game with a huge variety of abilities, races, classes, and mechanics to match. Everything from Magic to air-ship piloting is its own separate system with subtly different rules and systems that can interact in interesting ways.

Or there’s Lancer, Strike!, Zafir, Exalted, or any number of rules-rich games that provide you with a plethora of choices when making your character. Multiple systems all working off each other to increase the amount of variety in your play.

To clarify: I mean mechanical variety. Narratively, of course, you are free to create any character you like, but in rules-light games that variety can go unrecognized by the system. You can say you’re a devilish rogue and they’re a clumsy bookworm, but you’ll both roll the same dice. It’s up to the table to decide what parts of your character affect play and how.

Highwinds, like the other games I listed, plays on the other end of the spectrum. Highwinds allows characters to select feats and abilities to specialize or generalize their character as they see fit, so that they play differently.

There are different theories about Specializing versus Generalizing. A game can balance itself in favor or against either strategy, and there are long forum posts about the validity of “the perfect build” that can solo Lichs or shrug off dragons. I prefer examples:

I once played a game of Exalted where I decided I wanted to be a brick wall. I specialized my character out the arse, boosting stamina, defensive skills, and getting all the charms I could that turned my persona into an invincible battle-tank. I wanted to be able to survive a cannon to the chest.

And I could. I did, actually. I charged towards a battleship with a massive ship-to-ship laser cannon aiming right at me and took the blast full to the face. Almost took me out, but I survived it. I survived an attack designed to crack dreadnoughts in half.

The thing I remember most about that character? How useless they were.

See, I had spent everything on defense, which meant I had no social skills, no education, barely any aggressive combat skills…and when the GM saw me walk off an essence cannon, he learned right quick that the combat situations that would challenge my character would obliterate the rest of my party.

It’s the impossible Catch-22 of strategic gaming. If I specialize in fighting, then the monsters that provide me a challenge will be unstoppable by those who didn’t specialize like me. At the same time, if I come across a wizard then either they provide me suitable challenge, which means a magic specialist wouldn’t be bothered, or they’ll wipe the floor with me and my specialization doesn’t matter.

Then there’s the generalist. The jack-of-all-trades. Not as good as a specialist, but can at least try anything. Balancing challenges to the generalist renders specialists overpowered, while balancing to the specialist makes the generalist ineffective. Consider how a bard is a fighter/thief/mage combo, but any party with a priest and three bards will not be as effective as one with the cliche breakdown.

Ultimately, finding a perfect balance between requiring and mitigating specializing becomes impossible; a specialist will always be better than a generalist at their specialization, and either that difference matters significantly or it doesn’t.

Does this mean game balance is a fruitless endeavor?

You could certainly make the case, but I’d like to talk once again about Dan Olsen’s Thermian Argument. Remember, RPGs are constructed. There is no real dungeon or tomb. No one has ever interviewed a Lich or done a zoological study of Dragons and their habitats. Any challenges that are placed for the players to encounter were designed, whether poorly or well.

This is the purview of story balance.

Story balance makes specializing vs generalizing superfluous, because whether one is better than the other depends entirely on the whims of the GM. My GM stopped challenging my character with huge cannons, and started including political intrigue, stealth obstacles, and a resistance movement that needed recruits. Another GM might have built a unstoppable force to meet my immovable object, and forced me to occupy its attention while the rest of my teammates handled the rest of the conflict.

Story balance can be a tricky thing to manage; the stories we are told usually focus on one, maybe two main characters. There is usually a singular hero who is “the chosen one.” They wield the sword of hope, are captain of the ship, vanquish the Foozle, get the Significant Other at the end, or are in some way “special.” Even stories about groups or teams can easily fall into this trap, slipping once significant characters into extras, side characters, and support.

But RPGs don’t have a main character, they have a party. They can have up to seven different people who are all equally important, because they’re all PCs. Stories like that can get messy. What happens when you reach the final showdown and the Foozle shouts their final threats? Does everyone get the chance to give their heroic rebuttal? Does everyone get to have the final stroke, like a group of Roman senators?

Well, that’s up to the dice, isn’t it? The GM isn’t supposed to create a story, that’s the players’ job. The players have to create their characters and play them how they see fit, while the GM reacts to their choices. The players are supposed to make sure their characters never hog the spotlight, nor solve every problem on their own. Teamwork is the player’s responsibility.

But the GM is as much a player as the rest of the group, and they can make mistakes too. If the goal of your RPG is challenging players over crafting the narrative, then how you construct a challenge is an important practice to explore.

For example, what happens if the GM shys away from any specialized solutions? A good fighter won’t be challenged by most fights, so they never have to roll in a fight. A thief is good at hiding, so they need never roll to be stealthy. This makes specializing a means of automatically bypassing certain minor-to-major challenges in the game like a Master Key.

Alternately, challenges could focus on the character, pushing on their build’s strengths. If a fighter is strong enough to walk over an orc, the next fight has ogres. A wizard out-casts a genie? Next they meet a demon. If these challenges outclass the other players, the secondary challenge is managing the team and their different responsibilities.

Or, if the point of the game isn’t specifically to challenge, then the GM could fall back on “realism,” and provide a world that is uninterested in the players specifically. Palace guards are palace guards, after all, and there’s little reason to suspect that they’d all be issued expensive magical weapons just in case a min-maxed fighter came calling. If you create a super-fighter, then you must not want to be challenged with combat.

Or, some people think balance is a waste of time; the point of RPGs is not to make pen-and-paper versions of video games but to challenge players’ creativity. Bilbo thwarted Smaug by hiding and spying a weak-spot, not by min-maxing his build. Players can get past anything if they’re creative about it.

This is why there is a school of thought that says RPGs are fundamentally bad at telling stories. Narrative convention is antithetical to gaming, and the game-narrative should come exclusively from playing within the meta- and ludo-narratives. Throw away the idea of story tropes and constructed narratives: rely on the meta-narrative. Just you, the dice, and what happens next.

I don’t particularly like this view. It’s the same mindset that turns MMORPGs into a series of proscribed and ritualistic behaviors rather than a space to play…but before I get into that, I’ve teased you long enough. I’ve mentioned OSR before, and you are no doubt either curious or furious that I haven’t said much about it.

Next time I’ll bite the bullet and talk about the OSR movement, and how they address issues of balance and narrative, among other things.