When Is a Nerf Actually a Buff?

When is reducing the power of a character’s ability (“nerfing” it) actually making it stronger, in the context of a specific campaign or game concept? When the original character ability solves a challenge so completely that GMs simply stop including that challenge in the game. A nerf to such an ability returns that ability to relevance.

I ran a multi-year D&D 5E game from first level to well beyond 20th level. D&D 5E uses banded accuracy to control the runaway escalation of bonuses and modifiers that plagued previous editions. Banded accuracy works pretty well through the first 10 levels, but D&D 5E kinda falls apart beyond that point (although that can actually make the game more interesting). The following examples are all based on the 2014 version of 5E; the principle is less likely to occur in OSR or story games, where there’s less of a presumption of power balance. But the underlying idea is worth keeping in mind for all games.

For example, rogues at 11th level get an ability called Reliable Talent, which effectively puts a floor on their proficient skills. With Reliable Talent, the Expertise ability, a pair of thieves’ gloves, and a maxed-out Dexterity score, the party rogue in this game rolled dexterity-based skill checks ranging from the high teens to the mid-30s. 

For skills like stealth, this was manageable, because there was always room for enemy countermeasures. The highest stealth roll in the world won’t negate the effect of Alarm, a first-level spell that can be cast as a ritual. And an individual character with very high stealth tends to separate themselves from the group in ways that create interesting situations. 

But what about skills that have less prominent counter-play? What about picking locks? When designing locations for the party, I struggled with how to lock the damn doors in a way that was ludologically meaningful. This was the theme of several of my earliest posts, about how quickly a mundane locked door ceases to be a meaningful barrier in D&D.

Lockpicking in Hillsfar (1989) 

I had the following options, none of them great.

1. I could leave locked doors out of the game entirely. Not realistic, and would negate the ability the rogue had invested in building up.
2. I could inflate the DCs, preserving the challenge. But it would be transparently obvious that I was doing so artificially to “counter” the unbounded scaling of this particular ability.
3. I could leave locked doors in the game, but bypass the wasted time of rolling, and just say the rogue succeeds unless there is a trap or other complicating element. 
4. I could nerf the rogue’s skill to bring it back into line with the bounded accuracy system.

At the time, I went with a combination of options 1 and 3. I was never entirely satisfied with how those played out. I think option 2 is simply wrong. Option 4 was hard to consider for an ongoing game, but was… interesting.

Let’s consider another example. Paladins in 5E can easily cure non-magical diseases. On paper, this is evocative and makes sense. In practice, this means that most 5E games don’t bother to include non-magical diseases in their scenarios. I had a paladin in that 1-20+ 5E game as well, and the ability to cure non-magical diseases came up… two or three times? Not nothing, but it was very rare.

So what if we nerfed the paladin’s ability? How could that possibly be a buff?

Because if the nerf allows disease to matter in the game, the paladin will actually have opportunities to use the ability.

Imagine a campaign setting dominated and defined by a widespread, highly contagious plague. Even if the GM nerfed the paladin’s ability to cure diseases, relative to the 5E base rules, a player might get a lot more use out of that ability in a situation where the challenges include the presence of disease everywhere. 

There are more possible examples. The 2014 5E ranger famously has exploration- and survival-oriented abilities that, uh, basically trivialize traditional RPG exploration and survival. Getting lost and getting hungry are uninteresting challenges in a 5E group that includes a ranger (or to some degree, a character with the outlander background). Weaken that ability… and the ranger, counter-intuitively, becomes more useful and interesting, because navigation and survival are real dangers in a game where the ranger doesn't trivialize these challenges.

There are probably other examples, but this is enough to say – consider instances where nerfing an ability will actually make it more relevant to gameplay. If this is session zero, discuss it with the players. If you’re hacking a game in progress, talk to the players and see what abilities they have that they rarely use. You might be surprised how readily players will sacrifice a bit of on-paper power to ensure the DM can actually create opportunities for them to use those unique abilities.

Heist Logic: Why the Guards Stand Down in a TTRPG

False Machine had a nice post about the Thief video game series, its emphasis on stealth, and what aspects of the game can (and cannot) be applied to TTRPGs.

A useful comment by Kyana focuses on a particular issue for TTRPGs; how and why does security “reset” after an incursion? 

Thief (1981) Michael Mann

I haven’t played the Thief games, but I’ve certainly seen the same problem in other video games, like Metal Gear Solid. You’re spotted in a secure area by multiple antagonists, the whole place goes on high alert, you’re caught in a firefight, grenades are exploding, soldiers are dying. But after 90 seconds spent hiding in a locker, the game reverts to its baseline state, and the guards resume normal patrols, as if nothing happened.

Video game players accept this artifice because it facilitates good gameplay. It would certainly be realistic if you had to wait hours (or days, or indefinitely) for the guards to stand down from high alert, but it would also certainly be boring. So the game speeds past the boring part and gets back to the fun part.

TTRPGs also endeavor to speed past the boring part and get to the good stuff, but they also have a generally higher expectation of verisimilitude than video games do. This is, in part, because players in a GM-led game expect the GM to dynamically react to PC action in a way that is impossible (thus far, at least) for a video game to match. 

So say you’re running a heist or infiltration in D&D or a similar game – basically, any game that isn’t like Blades in the Dark, which has built-in procedure for heist complications and failure states. You need a plan for how and why the guards are going to stand down or otherwise redirect attention in a reasonable amount of time, because you don’t want a single guard sighting to botch the entire enterprise. What kind of circumstances and conditions can we add to prolong the heist without resorting to video game-level suspension of disbelief?

1. Misdirected response. The guards react, but deploy their resources in the wrong place. Perhaps they cut off exits while the players are still delving deeper into the facility, or move to protect the big boss when the players are really after the MacGuffin. 
2. Expecting someone else. A twist on the above. The defenders suspect a completely different adversary is behind the incursion. Either directly (if they didn’t get a good look at the PCs) or indirectly (they presume the PC party is a decoy, or merely an illusion, or similar). It might be a faction or NPC that the PCs know, or even a group they weren’t already aware of. Either way, the defenders’ reaction to the perceived “true” threat wastes time or resources that give the PCs a renewed opportunity.
3. Multiple infiltrators. Twisting the above in a different direction, there actually are other infiltrators, unconnected to the party, whether here for the same prize, or something unrelated. The defenders catch one of the other individuals or groups infiltrating, taking some heat off the PCs. 
4. They don’t appreciate what they have. Most of these options presume that the defenders have a good idea of what they’re protecting. But if they don’t – if they’re unaware of the value of what they have, or don’t even realize it is within their area of control – the nature of the heist changes, and it’s more plausible that their reaction would be delayed, misdirected, or ineffectual.
5. A crisis is also an opportunity. There’s some internal conflict within the defenders’ ranks. Maybe a second-in-command wants a shot at leadership, or a sub-faction wants to leverage the situation against a rival sub-faction. Resources are spent primarily to advance this goal, rather than respond in full to the threat presented by the PCs.
6. Environmental distraction or complication. “Environmental” in this instance is just shorthand for something happening independent of any faction action. Something in the scenario outside the defenders’ control hinders their response. It could be bad weather, wild animals, invasive plants, stellar emissions, localized tremors, or even some supernatural effect of the MacGuffin itself. 
7. The heist is counterintuitively helpful in some way to the defenders of the location, and tacitly allowed to proceed. The aforementioned Metal Gear Solid game does this. The antagonist actually needs the protagonist to succeed, at least in part, to advance their overall plan, so some suboptimal efforts by the guards can be interpreted as an intentional ploy. But be careful with this one, as it can stray into gotcha-style GMing. The antagonists’ goal should probably be orthogonal to whatever the PCs are trying to do, rather than a direct negation of their success, so that circumstances out of their control or awareness can’t rob them of a win if they complete the heist.
8. Dumb but dangerous. This is essentially what Patrick recommended in the False Machine post with his ogre guards. Aggressive, loyal servants with goldfish memories are good antagonists during a heist. 
9. Programmed guards. Some or all of the guards act programmatically. They are undead, golems, trained animals, robots, mind-controlled servants, or similar. They can patrol, pursue, and attack, but they don’t have the capacity to react in complex, adaptive ways to PC action. The PCs can take advantage of this to continue the heist even if they’ve been spotted once.
10. A wizard did it. Similar to the above, but more open-ended. Perhaps the wizard or other magical antagonist is so paranoid that they dose their guards with amnesia-inducing chemicals. Perhaps the guards are all charmed, and some of the enchantments breaking (due to accident or PC intervention) disrupt an organized response to an alarm.
11. Magical passage of time. Remember how we said it would be realistic but boring to wait a really long time for the guards to stand down from a high alert? In a fantasy world with magic, that’s not a hard limitation on PC solutions. Some kind of magical item that allows them to do a duration-extended Rope Trick or similar effect could go a long way here. In this instance, the heist goes on, but every failure requires waiting some long period of (in-game) time, with possible complications in the outside world. This trick is the twist to a certain heist movie, where the protagonist waits out the guards for an implausibly long time. Hiding for spoiler purposes, but I'm talking about Inside Man (2006).
12. Life is complicated and mistakes happen. The simplest explanation of all. If you read accounts of real-world revolutions, battles, and other pivotal historical moments, it’s amazing how often the fate of nations and peoples hinges on situations where people simply make a lot of mistakes, fail to communicate, or organize suboptimally, and those errors domino out of control. Defending a secure location is quite complex, and some security failures are going to boil down to this kind of thing.

Fantasy Language Review: Demons, Devas, Dragons, Derp Speech

The third in our series of posts on making fantasy languages more interesting. Go here for the post covering common, elvish, dwarven, and giant, and here for gnomish, goblin, halfing, and orc.

Abyssal

Variations: Fallen from grace. Abyssal continues the “dwarvish script" pattern from the previous posts, wherein chaotic creatures adopt a lawful language for written words. For abyssal, it is infernal that provides the script. But why not go one step further? If demons are fallen celestials, in the biblical tradition, they could simply use a corrupted form of celestial as their written language. Surely subverting the very words of the angels would appeal to demons as they are conventionally portrayed in D&D, right? 

An alternative approach: Terrifying telepathy. Almost all the demons in the 2014 Monster Manual have telepathy. A creature with access to telepathy would only rarely need to speak aloud, so why not lean into telepathy as their core communication method? When a demon uses telepathy to communicate with a mortal, it is not “speaking” with its own voice, per se. Instead it is using the doubts and weaknesses within that person’s mind as a medium for communication. To speak to a demon is to see the weakest and most vulnerable parts of one’s own psyche gather as a chorus and speak the demon’s words. Truly a language that is both chaotic and evil. 

Get weirder: Alien minds. If demons are truly alien beings, communicating with them should reflect that. Understanding their words is not a mere act of translation, but something closer to tropes in horror movies. A recording played backwards. A possessed person spitting blood and painting profane runes on a sanitorium wall. Sickly farm animals bleating and crying out in unison to say “I am Legion.”

Celestial

Variations: The original ur-language. Some D&D angels, as described in the 2014 manual, speak “all” languages. Maybe this just means immortality provides enough spare time for the multiverse’s wildest Duolingo streaks. But I prefer to think that they speak all languages because they spoke the Language from which all those tongues descended. This is the Babel story; angels still speak the language that humankind lost.

An alternative approach: Chaotic cosmopolitans. The above works well for the angels of law. What about their chaotic cousins? Perhaps we can simply invert our idea for demons from above. Chaotic celestials reject the rigors of “one true language” and consider a telepathy driven by strong feelings, intense emotions, and, well, vibes as the purest way to communicate. 

Get weirder: Compelling communications. Good celestials don’t necessarily intend to coerce mortals, but overzealous creatures with immortal minds who act on the instruction of hyper-certain gods aren’t great at subtlety. Celestial verbs when stated in the infinitive form have a weird tendency to come across as commands, even if they weren’t intended that way. Talking to an angel involves some tough saving throws to avoid simply Doing What They Say.

A dragon (?) by Asmo Grimae 

Draconic

“You are a very young wizard,” the dragon said, “I did not know men came so young into their power.” He spoke, as did Ged, in the Old Speech, for that is the tongue of dragons still. Although the use of the Old Speech binds a man to truth, this is not so with dragons. It is their own language, and they can lie in it, twisting the true words to false ends, catching the unwary hearer in a maze of mirrorwords each of which reflects the truth and none of which leads anywhere. So Ged had been warned often, and when the dragon spoke he listened with an untrustful ear, all his doubts ready. But the words seemed plain and clear: “Is it to ask my help that you have come here, little wizard?”

- Ursula K. Le Guin, "A Wizard of Earthsea"

Variations: Heavy breathers. Dragons do not use their terrifying breath for violence only, and draconic is not a purely verbal language. The lung capacity and unique throat musculature naturally also influences their language. Draconic is as much about subtle coughs, wheezes, inhalations, and snorts as it is about words. Non-dragon speakers of draconic must approximate these forms through a series of adapted techniques, and imperious dragons look down at such “debased” forms of the language.

An alternative approach: Perfect memory. Draconic is such a difficult language to learn for many reasons, not the least of which is that it is a language spoken by creatures with perfect memory. A dragon has a photographic memory for anything it cares about. It knows every inch of its domain and every detail of each coin in its hoard. Draconic reflects this exactitude with exactitude in magnitude. Draconic does not have words for concepts like “a lot” or “very far” or “pretty soon.” A dragon specifies everything exactly, because it knows exactly, and remembers exactly.

Get weirder: Binding words. Dragons are strange creatures. They are near-immortal, closer to gods than men, and perhaps greater than the gods, because the gods had to become gods, while the dragons were always dragons. Talking to a dragon is uniquely dangerous. Their words bind those they deign to speak with to consistent action. You can lie to a dragon, but once you do, you cannot speak the truth to them. The inverse is also true. With the passage of time, it is possible to take a new tack with the same dragon, but the older the dragon is, the more time must pass before this is possible. For ancient dragons, this may be longer than most mortal lifespans. 

Deep Speech

I don’t know what to do with deep speech. I think it’s a mistake.

I’ve been running through these languages in the order they appear in the book, and I haven't planned ahead for how I will tackle each one. So I hadn’t thought much about how deep speech fits into the game before I got here. Moreso than any other language covered in this series thus far, deep speech presents a problem. 

How and why is there a shared language for disparate creatures defined primarily by their incomprehensibility and unknowability? Creating a shared deep speech language present problems similar to those that we get when deciding how many hit dice Cthulhu has. Once you have quantified and categorized and “made known” the unknown, you've undercut the very essence of what makes the creature different from the more worldly monsters.

A quick review of the 2014 Monster Manual indicates how superficial deep speech is. Here are all the creatures that speak or understand it, along with their other languages:

• Mindflayer (deep speech, telepathy, undercommon)
• Aboleth (deep speech, telepathy)
• Intellect devourer (understands deep speech, but doesn’t speak it)
• Beholder (Deep speech, undercommon; the zombie beholder, like other zombies, understands deep speech, but doesn’t speak it)
• Cloaker (deep speech, undercommon)
• Chuul (deep speech)

Aboleths and mindflayers are mental masters who presumably use telepathy as their default form of communication. The chuul and the intellect devourer are servants of those creatures, respectively. Telepathy should be sufficient to give them their orders.

The beholder and the cloaker are underdark denizens who speak deep speech on top of undercommon. The beholder's polyglot nature in particular is strange, since the book describes them as xenophobic supremacists. Note that the spectator, a beholder cousin, gets telepathy as well, while the proper beholder and death tyrant do not, despite their superior mental stats. I guess this detail was included because the spectator is a summoned guardian rather than a free-range monster, but it still raises more questions than it answers.

If creatures like beholders need a language besides undercommon (which is presumably not their native language), why not just give them a language unique to their species? Slaads, for example, are aberrations, and quite alien in their behavior, but have their own eponymous language, on top of telepathy. Grell similarly only speak their own language, even though they are expressly described as “alien.” I think it is kind of entertaining that grell have their own language, even though they are mostly solitary ambush predators. Perhaps someone thought it would be weird if a brain-themed monster couldn’t talk? What do they talk about? Do they exchange tentacle-cleaning tips? 

The niche language that is even funnier to me is that hook horrors speak a language called… hook horror. Like, do hook horrors literally refer to themselves as "hook horrors" when talking in this language? I always assumed "hook horror" was a euphemism applied by survivors of encounters with these beasts. It seems like the designers could have knocked a point or two off of their intelligence score and lumped them in with all the non-lingual beasties, since nothing in their brief description differentiates them from animal-like monsters anyway.

OK, that’s a fun aside, but none of it really relates to deep speech. So I’m breaking format. I don’t have three interesting ideas for deep speech, because in contrast to the other languages we’ve covered so far, I don’t think there’s much to it that makes it compelling. 

Next time: We finish up with the last four standard languages: infernal, primordial, sylvan, and undercommon.

Mystery TTRPG Scenario: Recruiting the Suspects

The fiction at the intersection of mystery novels and social deduction games (like Werewolf or Blood on the Clocktower) prompted this idea for a mystery scenario in a TTRPG. This framework could work for any game where a mystery is central to the campaign premise; it is, like my last mystery pitch, otherwise setting- and system-agnostic. It simply needs various NPCs who are suspects in whatever the substance of the mystery is. We’ll use a murder as a classic example, but it could be adapted to any kind of mystery where the goal is to figure out who knows the truth or who is responsible for the central mystery.

"Hey, can someone figure out who killed me? I'll be waiting right here. Thnx."

The structure of the scenario is as follows:

1. The PCs are trying to solve a murder. They are on the clock (literally or figuratively, as in clocks from Blades in the Dark).
2. Various NPCs are suspected of the murder.
3. One (or more) of those NPCs is actually guilty of the murder, and wants the mystery to remain unsolved, or to be solved incorrectly.
4. The rest of the suspects genuinely want the mystery solved, either as a matter of principle, or because they cared about the victim, or merely so that they themselves will be exonerated.
5. Each and every suspect has a key secret. This is something they want to conceal, possibly because it is illegal, immoral, embarrassing, or compromising. No key secret should be on the same scale of importance as the central mystery, i.e., no suspect is guilty of anything as bad as murder. A key secret should be something like an affair, a civil crime like embezzlement, a child born out of wedlock (in a culture that forbids it), sketchy foreign entanglements, or something similar. Serious issues that would influence the NPCs’ behavior, and will incentivize them to lie and deceive, but decidedly Not As Bad As Murder. This is a common trope in many mystery stories, where the detective interrogates someone who is suspicious or evasive. They eventually learn their key secret, but doing so only removes a red herring from play; it doesn't solve the central mystery.
6. Each and every NPC suspect can be recruited to help solve the mystery by the PCs.
7. Recruiting a suspect gets the PCs access to everything the NPC knows, except for their key secret. The NPC will still lie and dissemble to hide their key secret.
8. Aside from their key secret, the NPC suspect will help as best they can to solve the mystery, offering any individual knowledge they have of the crime, as well as any skills or expertise they possess. However, their help comes at the cost of complications stemming from the key secret itself, or actions they take to hide it. Depending on the system, the “cost” can be a concrete game mechanic, like a GM intrusion, or something more implicit and abstract. Either way, the players should see the connection between the NPC and the resulting complication.
9. However, if the PCs figure out the NPC’s key secret, this tension is resolved. From that point on, the PCs can take advantage of the NPC’s help without complications or costs.
10. Remember that one of these NPCs is actually guilty of the murder. The murderer can be recruited just like any other NPC. Their key secret, of course, is that they’re the murderer.
11. If the party recruits the murderer, the GM starts a hidden countdown clock (or speeds up an existing clock) as the murderer tries to undermine the PCs or complicate their instruction.

This hits on a lot of things I want from an RPG premise. Time pressure. Resources at a cost. Players rewarded for asking questions and figuring things out. Consequences that make sense to the PCs. Motivations that make the players say “ohh, of course” after the mystery is solved. Now I just need to find an occasion to run this scenario. The clock is ticking…