The Eighteen

Do you see this glorious woman? That's the eighteen, and you can't stop her.  She's an unstoppable android made by a mental patient who has one goal: Fucking up Saiyans. One particular Saiyan, anyway. The thing is, in the end she turns out to be a good person. If Krillin had gone through with blowing her ass to scrap...then he wouldn't have a daughter.

'Stop talking about anime you god damn weaboo' I hear you say. Fair enough. The point is, when you're a GM you might perceive a mechanic or habit to be your enemy when it may not be...or it even might be your friend later. Today, we're talking about the psychology of character building.

The reason you're still looking at Android 18 is that she shares her number with a legendary holy grail of gaming: a score of 18 in an attribute. In the old days of D&D, statistics were one of the few ways to measure the power of a character, and they were also pretty hard to get. These days, it's not exactly the same. Plenty of games have point buy systems where players can pick where they're putting their eggs.


What I'm saying is that you can't stop people from building the most effective character that they can, nor should you try. If you reduce the number of stats they get, that eighteen will stay there like a mesa while the other stats around it erode and flatten into the ground. Give your players a mere 23 points to spread and I promise you there'll be a guy out there with an eighteen and five ones. If you lower the 'cap' manually and tell them they simply can't take an eighteen...they'll take a sixteen. What's worse, the further you go, and the closer you get to making the player feel like you're building their character for them. I'll discuss this concept of  "Socialist Gaming" in a future post, but for now let's focus on why this particular thing is bad.

People naturally want to build the most effective character they can. It's part of the fun of the game for most players, building a character can feel like putting together a car: sometimes it's tough, but it's very rewarding when you're done...plus, you get to drive it around. When you lower their points available for whatever reason, they will naturally want to sacrifice what makes them effective last. Nobody wants to play a fighter with a 14 strength, just like nobody wants to play a street samurai with a guns skill of 4 or a gunslinger with a deftness value of D8. What they will cut is fluff: things that might have made their character feel unique without really making them directly more effective. They'll also cut cross-class utility that might have made them more useful in situations their character isn't suited for. All of these, I've found, are natural inclinations.

But you want a 'low power' game. I'd first ask you to ask yourself why you want that. Really, put down the reasons you want to run a 'low power' game. Ask yourself if it's going to be fun for anyone but you, then find different ways to fulfill those reasons. Consider finding another system more suited to the tone you want and transplanting your world. Tell the players you'll be tracking seldom-used values more closely like encumbrance, or apply alternate rules to your game, such as the wealth of them inside D&D's Unearthed Arcana or Pathfinder's Pathfinder Unchained. What I'm saying is, find a way to challenge the person with the eighteen instead of making them suck.

Some game systems are made to make the character feel special. They're the hero, the man or woman with the amazing strength, the killing machine, or the crafty rogue with the golden touch. Other systems are more suited to taking the everyman and putting him in an extraordinary situation. Find which are which, and you and your players will be happier.

Next I'm going to go into why stat values in D20 games aren't as big a deal as you might think. It's a companion piece to this post.