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Evaluating Your Game: Part Four
This is part four in an ongoing series, designed to help you evaluate and improve your game from the ground up. Previously, I discussed Genre, Setting, and Scope, followed by an analysis of Character Generation Methods and The Role of Randomness.
In most RPGs, you will eventually encounter something in character advancement that has a pre-requisite - something you must already have to be able to qualify for the advancement. These will typically apply to traits, classes, and occasionally skills.
Pre-requisites are good because they serve the function of providing a barrier between who may use something and who may not. This may be because of a concern with specialization, such as with d20’s prestige classes, or because the system does not implement a point-buy advancement and there is a desire to make somethings more costly, as with d20’s feat system.
The first concern with using pre-requisites is that it may make things too costly for a player to pursue - the Whirlwind Attack feat being an ideal example, it is highly desirable but almost never pursued because of the litany of pre-requisites.
The second concern with using pre-requisites is that they can go against a character concept. The Whirlwind Attack feat is another perfect example of this - among it’s pre-requisites are three defensive feats, one of them (Combat Expertise) will never see use if it was taken only because of the pre-requisites. Players will most likely try to avoid this wasted space on their character sheets.
There are one of two solutions to this problem:
First, you may offer alternate pre-requisites, a different path that can accommodate different concepts so that they may access the same thing.
Second, you may create an alternative to what the pre-requisites originally guarded - the alternative would represent the same skills if they were lacking whatever pre-requisites were not included and augmented by whatever they were replaced by. In the case of Whirlwind Attack, a version which did not include the defensive feats might provoke Attacks of Opportunity.
The use of pre-requisites is a balancing act - you must be sure that the requirements do not outweigh the perceived benefits, and that the requirements of a feature will appeal to everyone that would be interested in that feature.
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3 Responses to “Evaluating Your Game: Part Four”
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Personally I prefer organic development (character creation is free to have prerequisites, though they are often too complicated). The only d20 variant I have seen to that effect is test based prerequisites for prestige classes.
I don’t think balance is very important, which means that I canget away with using more organic development, which can, if desired, be more realistic.
Tommi Brander’s last blog post..Setting element: Those who fight the forest.
That’s an interesting concept… Feats which get better or unlocked new mechanics depending on what other feats you have.
It’s been explored a bit already (off the top of my head: Psionic Body grants +3 hp for each [Psionic] feat you possess, and one of the Fiendish Codices had a set of fiendish heritage feats which each got more powerful as you took more of them), but there’s still a lot of design room in there just begging to be mined.
Heck, this would be a great way to design feats which lasted the life of the character. One of the things I loved about City of Heroes/Villains is that the powers you took at level 1 could still be very important to you at level 50, depending on your build. It seems better than the constant “bigger gun” upgrades which define many RPGs, both video games and tabletop.
Asmor’s last blog post..Races with Flavor: The Kamit
Asmor,
Now that you’ve said that, I’ll think about releasing a supplement which re-does feats in the manner I discuss in the entry and you mention in your comment.