Dominant Strategy

"Johnny solves all his problems with a chainsaw.

It might be messy

and it might be loud

but he never has the same problem twice."


I have some posts coming up that talk about good vs. bad game balance and player options, things like that. I thought I'd go over a common thing in gaming once now instead of having to explain it in every one of the next two or three posts. Examples will be forthcoming, since this is a pretty complex issue.

Dominant Strategy is when one single way to play a game is better than any other, regardless of circumstance. It means doing a particular thing regardless of what your opponent is doing. This is usually a term used in competitive games, and there's a lot of interesting baggage to it that we don't really need to go into. In PNP games this can also mean ways to approach a challenge or situation, character building, spell selection, or class/archetype selection. We're also dealing with shades of dominant strategy a lot, more than the "weak vs. strong" used in competitive gaming. This is because we're dealing with things that are more arguable and variable than a game with simple, set rules. Keep that in mind.

Dominant Strategy is usually bad. We blur the line a little, though, because it doesn't always impact the fun of a game when it crops up. The large amount of choices in games like Shadowrun, Mutants and Masterminds or Pathfinder can make for "must-take" abilities or combinations. That can easily be called a minor dominant strategy. Things like cybernetic characters taking enhanced articulation, or superheroes taking the Luck feat don't negatively impact the game. It's a fault in game building, sure. But it could be worse.

It could be worse like Cyberpunk 2020, for example. That game's damage scale is so wildly deadly that the strategy of stacking initiative, using automatic weapons and playing a cyber-samurai(called Solos in CP2020) emerges. Other things in combat don't really work. Unless you have some kind of weird Gentleman's Agreement(more on that later) the game kind of devolves into everyone doing the same thing.

That really is the difference. You can say that Dervish Dance Magus is a broken or bad combination. Hell, I'll say that all day, my hatred for Dervish Dance is pure and well known. It doesn't really lead to a broken game, though. There are other builds that can compete, and even if there weren't, it still doesn't have the non-combat utility of other classes. Even a game full of players who are very serious about their character's effectiveness will have several classes in it. Shadowrun has several minor dominant strategy moments in it, such as layering form-fit armor and certain pieces of cyberware and bioware.

Usually when you have a major Dominant Strategy in a game, or a large set of smaller ones, there's no fixing it. Am I saying you shouldn't play Cyberpunk 2020? Kind of. Sorry. If your group enjoys all playing initiative stacking solos with automatic weapons or Toreadors, City Gangrels and Brujah with celerity 5...well, who am I to tell you what to enjoy? Just don't enter into these games thinking you're going to fix them.

There is, however, another way.

Sure, sometimes you can toss a house rule if this becomes problematic. You can tell people not to take Probability Control or bar the Magus class. I think most players are primarily interested in making a cool characters, though. I think you'll find you mostly don't need to worry about this kind of thing. Plenty of them are harmless(like armor stacking in Shadowrun) and the ones that aren't? It doesn't necessarily come up. If it IS coming up, you've got to do something about it, sure. But if none of your six Vampire PCs stacks Celerity like there was a sale at the discipline store? Maybe don't worry about it.

This probably happens the most in VtM and Mutants and Masterminds. There's so many cool options that people don't feel the need to gravitate toward the most powerful combinations. Most mature groups do this with everything. If your group needs to be reigned in, well...you need to do it. I can't give you any advice on when. I can only say to let things slide if there's no real problem.

So yeah, I probably use the term Dominant Strategy a little wrong. Really it's not a concept that's intended to port outside of competitive games, and I'm co-opting it for my purposes. So next time I discuss game design, hopefully I can just point back to this post.

EDIT: There's an extremely good example of what I'm talking about in Exalted called Paranoia Combat, or the 2-7 Filter. Here's some more information on it, but the gist of it is that two charms in a game of hundreds are the "correct" choice.

https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/10602/what-is-exalted-paranoia-combat