Ivory Tower Design

I've told you time and time again that the difference between "power players" and regular gamers is smaller than you think. We don't sit around reading RPG books all day. I personally haven't done that without cause in fifteen years or more. Any time I open a book, it's because I'm working on a game, a character, or a post. It's not a question of IQ or schooling either. For everyone dedicated to PNP games that has a BS or Masters in something, there's probably ten more like me who have no higher education. Dedication and experience help, but what they guide you toward is recognizing concepts and synergies. A healthy background with math and an understanding of how an "average" game is likely to go helps too.

We're talking about one of those recognized concepts today. People who like this sort of thing call it "System Mastery", its more accurate name is Ivory Tower Design. Basically, it's a design choice that places substandard or even bad choices in a system alongside good ones. There's a lot of reasons this would happen. Sometimes(as you'll see below) it's a little necessary and sometimes it's due to simple poor balance in the system, but most popular games that do this do it for a really stupid, minorly insulting reason: to make you feel good when you figure it out. Yes, there is seriously a model of thinking in PNP design that thinks this little of your intelligence.

We're using 3.5e D&D and Pathfinder for examples today. 3.5e is the worst for Ivory Tower Design by far, and Pathfinder still has plenty of this stuff. A small amount of it is a side effect of games with individual stats for weapons and armor. Here, we're gonna do something. I want you to open up a PHB. You can get the same idea from 3.5e but I'm using Pathfinder since it's my gold standard.

Remember, today we're putting roleplay and fluff entirely aside. We're just looking at mechanical effectiveness. I should probably make a whole post about this, but the gist is that using a better weapon doesn't make you a worse RPer.

So open up the equipment section of that book I made you go get. Pathfinder vastly improved weapon selection and now most of them have some sort of reason you'd wield them over others. In the one-handed section, Longsword is better base damage. Rapier and Scimitar are more frequent critical hits. Battleaxe and Warhammer are better crits. Et Cetera. However, there's plenty of weapons on this list that you'd only wield because you didn't have another option. Quarterstaff, Heavy Mace, et cetera. Now look at two handed martial weapons. Greatclub is 1d10 damage, a x2 crit, and bludgeoning damage. Right under it is the heavy flail, which is 1d10 damage, 19-20/x2 crit, bludgeoning damage, and the disarm and trip flags. Even if you're never going to disarm or trip someone, what reason would you have to ever wield a greatclub?

Before we answer, flip to armor, where this is even more obvious. Look at the various armor types and add together its armor and max dex. This isn't perfect, but it'll give you a ballpark of their effective protection value. Breastplate is 6/3 with -4 ACP. Chainmail is 6/2 with -5 ACP. Even if you only had a dex of 14, the breastplate is still better. This happens again in heavy armor with splint mail, banded mail and half-plate.

In terms of equipment? Ivory Tower Design exists partially because not everyone is going to have the best gear. Some things are way cheaper. Sometimes people have shitty equipment because they're poor or part of an organization. Mechanically, this lets a GM shave a few points of AC off or a few points of damage without cheating. This is the only place Ivory Tower Design is acceptable, in my opinion. Even then, you have to be aware of the fact that some choices are substandard.

Because yes, it does get worse. This sort of thing, these examples of choices that are bad on purpose repeat themselves in places where they absolutely don't belong, like feats and spells. 3.Xe even has whole classes and PrCs that are false choices. It sucks when you can't trust a game to play fair, but sometimes this is deliberately introduced to make people feel good about "mastering" a system. If you don't believe me, think about all the times the feats Run or Endurance came up in your game. Or even better, tell me about all the times they would have been handy to have. Chances are, it's very few.

There are more traps than that, and to be fair some of them are caused by developers losing sight of how much something is worth or how often it'll happen in an average game. With Run, it's a terrible feat, true, but that's made worse by the fact that the average game just isn't going to have many people taking the run action at all. Even then, it's possible the extra speed doesn't matter. A normal fighter with run still isn't going to catch a normal monk without it if they both take the run action, even if he's in light armor. You can sometimes see this in how expensive something is versus its usefulness as well. The biggest examples here in D20 games are darkvision and water breathing. With darkvision, the expense is solely because a light source, even a hands free one, will alert people with its shine. How often will that really happen in your game? I'm guessing it'd happen to the rogue a hell of a lot and to anyone else approximately never.

Other times, there are feats, powers or prestige classes which are very good but require you to plan your character very, very far ahead. Most people do build like this in some way, picking out a PrC or far away feat, but I don't think anyone wants to have to plan as far ahead as 3.x D&D sometimes asked you to. The "Higher tier" PrCs like archmage required a lot of strangely specific choices...and then there's the epic level handbook, which makes your choices at levels as low as 5 matter to when you're 21 or higher.

So you can see why Pathfinder made some of the decisions they did. They moved away from prestige classes in favor of base classes and archtypes. They gave you more feats overall and less feats with a laundry list of requirements. It has less instances of Ivory Tower Design and introduces an alternate rule to eliminate its impact entirely.

Yes, it's pretty easy to remove this dumb crap from your game. Simply put, let people retrain. This is a core rule in many games, and an alternate rule in our two biggest culprits, D&D 3e and Pathfinder. Just use that rule. Let people spend gold or time to revise their choices. Even if they end up choosing a different class entirely, which you shouldn't need to do in Pathfinder, I think. Eliminating the fear of making a bad, "trap" choice eliminates Ivory Tower Design's control over your game.

You probably shouldn't assume every bad choice in a game is because of Ivory Tower Design. It's unhealthy. However, it doesn't matter, really, why it's bad. Identifying that a system is inequal or unbalanced is often enough. It puts your guard up. Ivory Tower Design is a ridiculous attempt at making people feel accomplished that only ends up "Gatekeeping" the hobby. My final piece of advice is to help each other out and don't make people wallow in bad choices. That's all you need to do, give new players a leg-up and let even older players revise their choices a bit if they notice they fell into a trap.