The Arms Race

One of the perpetual problems of many role playing games, notably felt in third edition D&D, is the arms race effect. Initially the game comes out and their is a certain level of balance. But to make money and produce content supplements are added. These supplements seem to always end up offering better powers and characters built with these new powers tend to be superior to those without them.

I have a lot of anecdotes about this kind of thing. I will only relate a few. I remember talking to someone about Car Wars and they were telling me how they had these awesome new features on their cars. Then they went on to say how it was a huge advantage because the people he was playing against didn't have these features because they had not bought the supplement that the features were listed in.

Another time, I was a player in a cyberpunk campaign. We ended up battling some enemy mercenaries who had armor that was totally superior to ours. Their skin-tight armor was somehow much more effective than our bulky suits. When I questioned this, the GM simply responded that he had bought that latest supplement Chrome, and outfitted the mercenaries with equipment from it.

In my current game I am pretty lenient in allowing stuff to my players. A lot of them have invested significant amount of monies in supplements and I want to allow them to use the neat stuff they find because that is fun. However, they do realize what this means and I have one player will go through the supplements specifically searching for things he thinks are imbalanced and will state that that is what he is doing.

In Paizo's 3.75 D&D, they acknowledged this trend and specifically set out to power up the base classes that had been left behind in terms of power level. In World of Warcraft the classes have gotten more and more powerful over time since more power makes people happy and less power makes people complain.

So what the hell is going on? Well, it is simple. Companies know this happens. In many cases it is lilke the Warcraft case. Companies want to make it's customers happy and people are happier when they get more powerful and not less. Also if they have to shell out cash for a new supplement to make themselves more powerful then the company gets money and the player gets more powerful. So this really isn't just an accident, but a marketing strategy.

So is this a problem? What are the game effects of the powering up? Well it generates uneven power levels. There are two ways this manifests, player to player, and player to game master. Player to player power imbalances can often shift focus to certain players. This can be countered by DMs who can manipulate things to shift the focus back, but it requires work and in many cases a player who has 'spent more' has a lot more chances to shine. In terms of player versus DM, well the players outpace the challenges and the DM needs to adjust. This can be a lot of work for the DM and also be difficult since some games, notably high-level D&D, get very hard to accurately balance.

So rules that increasingly cause power imbalances force the DM to either modify things to rebalance the game or to let some players steal the focus and for adventures to become easy and head towards being boring.

One solution is to just do the work. You do a little extra to make the characters who didn't go crazy searching for powerful combos shine. You do a little extra to make the encounters more challenging and so on. Another solution is to just allow the vanilla rules. This removes a lot of work, but it can also be limiting and reduces the fun of character building.

Personally I like to allow these options and you just really have to accept that the nature of these games lends itself to this perpetual arms race.