Jay Barnson Discusses High-Level CRPGs

Jay Barnson, better known in some circles as the Rampant Coyote and creator of Frayed Knights, has penned some thoughts in his blog about how CRPGs handle high-level gameplay.  Citing the horizontal expansion of mechanics in tabletop games as a strength, he argues that most CRPGs only scale in a linear upward manner, keeping mechanics and gameplay the same throughout.  Here’s a snippet:

At the high-level game, players have access to all kinds of powers that can change the game. This was always by design, from the early days prior to even the first edition D&D rules. Does one door lead to certain death? Okay, well, the players should have all kinds of divination spells to learn what is behind each door. They can cast disintegrate spells on the doors (or the walls next to them) to bypass whatever might be on the doors themselves. They can teleport to where they want to go, bypassing the doors altogether. They could animate an object or summon an extra-dimensional being to do the job for them. Or they could try far more mundane tricks to figure things out. Simply tracking footprints to learn which door has almost all of the traffic could solve the problem.

That’s exactly how my players operated with a combination of character abilities and their own personal problem-solving (and trying to see patterns everywhere to give them further clues).

I think that’s how the high-level game in RPGs should go, in general. At high level, characters should be able to change the rules of the game, to make the unfair reasonable. In a fantasy game, maybe it’s using magic to warp reality in their favor. In a science fiction RPG, maybe it’s calling upon powerful (perhaps alien) technology to do the same. Or in a more mundane setting, it’s calling in contacts and favors and paying bribes to redefine the problem. ‘˜Cuz sometimes nuking the site from orbit is the only way to be sure.

Be sure to read the whole piece if you’re interested by the topic.