Welcome
back to my entropic cosm of terror where we pierce the veil of this
illusion of benevolence and accommodation that's the current trend in
RPGs and put the MASTER back into Game Master. Being a GM is akin to
being a Greek God, the players being the mortals subject to your
whims and cruelty. If you are a player reading this blog, check your
sanity at the door as you discover that you are but mere puppets
dancing to the mad tune of your GM.
This
week I'd like to shine the light on the topic of asymmetric
challenges. What happens when you get one or two min-maxers at your
table is a topic of some concern for many GMs. This is because the
twinkers often super-optimise their characters to be combat fiends
dwarfing the non-optimisers like a boot to an ant. Oblivious or just
unconcerned with the disruption they cause to the balance of
encounters for their group, these players are a cancer to
long-running campaigns. If you were a bleeding heart GM, you'd try
and rehabilitate these players. But that's not why you're here. Time
to drop some divine retribution on their munchkin souls and deliver
them screaming into the consuming maw that is your black heart.
To
edify, many run-of-the-mill RPG encounters are written as
straightforward “beat X monster” or “solve Y puzzle/mystery”
and the more rare “deal with Z social situation.” Players are
given these challenges for their characters and they just straight-up
attack them head on. This is okay albeit incredibly boring for the
savvy GM, but min-maxers eat this kind of stuff for breakfast and
crap the half-digested excrement of the challenge onto the rest of
the party. In
order to both alleviate tedium of staid encounter archetypes and to
wreck a munchkin's day, God Mode GMs use encounters that are horribly
unbalanced on the surface (hence asymmetric). The more unfair the
challenge is to a straightforward approach the better. Seriously,
you're not GMing to just hand players easy victory and mad lewt. If
you are, you're reading the wrong blog.
Now
if you just made stuff straight up unfair, then you're really
wrecking all of your players instead of just the obstinate few whom
you desire to crush. No, the key to accomplishing the objective is to
make the headlong tackling of the encounter punish the optimisers by
rendering their twinked out abilities futile in the face of
opposition. However, you also create some unconventional paths to
success that play to the things the other more reasonable players
have done with their characters. Who knew that the uncompromising
delegations from the two warring nations at the peace summit both
share a love of nihilistic haiku. Good thing your RP-focused player's
warrior-poet happens to have skill at clever wordplay and mad rhymes.
While they normally would not be able to reach an accord, their
shared appreciation of the RP PC's Nietzschean verses have brought
them to common ground. Stick it to the power-gamer while rewarding
balanced and characterful PCs. Story win.
With
that, I must bring this installment to a close. Would you like to see
this expanded upon in future weeks? What other areas of Games
Mastering would you like tips on? Questions? Compliments?
Non-sequitur megalomania? Leave it in the comments below!
