Before he departs for his Christmas festivities, Saint Angry is cracking open a couple of your letters. E-mails. Whatever. It’s Ask Angry mailbag time.

Want to submit a question? Send it to ask.angry@angry.games. Remember to tell me what the hell to call you and to get to the f$&%ing point.

DaaaahWhoosh asks…

You recently defined traditional advancement as getting something for winning. You get loot for winning. Isn’t loot a traditional advancement system? Do you even need XP in a game that has loot? Am I missing something?

That’s a f$&%ing good observation there, Whoosh. And I mean that. I know this is where I usually rip into the question or the person asking it, but I don’t have anything to b$&% about here. You met the minimum standards for not pissing me off. And I’ve already made fun of your name numerous times in my Patreon Discord server. The only thing I’d add is how much of a pain in the a$& it is to make sure I put the right number of a’s in Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah. But I’m just going to call you Whoosh anyway. So no big deal.

Anyway…

You’re right, there, r-slash Whoosh. Well, you’re not. But you’re only not right on a technicality so I’ll give you full credit. Loot and experience points do both qualify as parts of traditional advancement systems. It’s just that neither is actually an advancement system. An advancement system is a set of rules by which characters, you know, advance. XP is a progress indicator. It’s how you measure progress toward advancement. You don’t actually advance until your XP hits some magic number. And then you get some shiny new hit points and your level increases by one and you get whatever else you get for leveling up.

Meanwhile, loot is more complicated. Loot can actually be a kind of advancement by itself if it comes in the form of new or upgraded equipment. But loot can include temporary items like single-use supplies. And it can include cashy-money and non-cashy money-equivalents. And it can even include things like crafting materials. This means that some loot is an advancement system by itself, but some of it’s just a currency you exchange for advancement. And some of it isn’t part of an advancement system at all.

But aside from that technicality, gathering physical, tangible s$&% during your adventure does constitute a form of advancement. Yes. You got that right.

Now, you asked me why you need both experience-advancement and loot-advancement systems. And the answer is “you don’t.” You don’t need any specific mechanic at all. Including those two systems, side-by-side, is just one way to design a game. A very common way.

But I suspect what you’re really asking is “why include both if they’re doing the same thing; aren’t they redundant?” And having mentioned that, I could actually go back and make fun of you for not asking the real question. But that would require me to scroll up and edit a bunch of s$&%. So f$&% that.

Here’s the thing: they aren’t doing the same thing. They aren’t redundant. And they complement each other such that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Complementarity and synergy are really important. Plus, they’re big, fancy words that make you sound smart.

The thing is, just because I consider two advancement systems to be traditional, that doesn’t mean they’re identical. XP-advancement and loot-advancement are very different systems. They don’t play the same, they don’t feel the same, and they don’t emphasize the same. Things. The same things.

XP is basically automatic. Overcome a challenge, get XP. Get enough XP, and you get a level. Flash of light, triumphant music, open the menu to spend your skill point, the whole shebang. After that, your character’s inherent abilities and raw statistics change in some way. Your character has gotten better as a person. They’re stronger, smarter, or more durable. They can do some shiny new trick they never could before. And that can never be taken away from them. Whatever they get from leveling up, that’s an inherent and permanent part of the character. Especially since the current crop of WotC designers are such pussies they won’t even let me drain levels anymore.

Loot-advancement, though? That’s different. Oh, sure, when you find some magical widget, you can slap that puppy into one of your item slots and start reaping the benefits right then and there. Provided you can actually use the doodad in question. And depending on how your party divvies up the treasure. Because, unlike XP, which is something everyone shares equally, loot has to be divvied up and allocated. Only one character benefits from each trinket. If any.

See, there’s no guarantee that every piece of loot will actually be useful to anyone in the party. That’s on the published module or the GM. Whereas, when you gain a level, you almost always get something useful out of it. Because each level is tailor-made for the character you chose to play. I’m not saying there’s never any dead levels with crappy benefits, but you’re a lot less likely to get something you can’t use from level-advancement than from any given treasure drop.

But let’s say you do find something useful. You don your new thingamajigger and now your character is permanently better, right? Hardly. Because you just know that someday you’re going to be melting that whatever down or selling it off to make room for some new magical whoosiwhatsit. And that doesn’t necessarily mean an upgrade either. Tossing away your cloak of displacement to acquire a cloak of arachnidia isn’t really an upgrade. It’s swapping out one power for another.

Point is that equipment-advancement feels very different from level-advancement. And remember that feeling is everything. Feeling is why we play games. We don’t give a s&% how they actually work. Game feellings don’t care about your game-mechanical facts.

But there’s also cashy-money loot. Because, in theory, you can use that cashy-money to buy your own equipment advancement. The viability of that option varies from game to game, but we’re talking about theory here. In theory, any game that allows players to trade cashy-money for shiny new equipment has an in-built progression for said advancement and assumes players will periodically upgrade or swap out their equipment. In theory.

On the surface, cash-for-upgrades feels a lot like XP-for-levels, right? It’s just a currency you earn toward future advancement. But cashy-money is usually a lot more versatile. A lot more customizable. You can buy whatever you want. Whatever’s available anyway. You can split your funds between a bunch of little, incremental improvements or put it all toward one big ole super upgrade. You can spend your cash right away or save it up for something really big. You can focus on stuff that gives you fixed stat boosts or buy a bunch of weird-a$& utility items that let you do all sorts of crazy things you otherwise couldn’t. Most level-advancement systems, even the ones in games with a lot of character customization, don’t offer the same plethora of possibilities.

But cash-for-upgrades can be complicated because upgrades ain’t the only thing you need cash for. You also need a stock of supplies for your adventure. Rations, ammunition, spell components, light sources, healing potions, magical scrolls, whatever. And you might have to pay upkeep costs between adventures so you don’t freeze and starve and die on the streets before your next foray into Goblington Hollow. You might have to pay to have curses removed and diseases cured and allies un-deathed. And you might need to spend some money during your adventures. You might have to pay tolls, buy passage on ships, hand out bribes, that kind of crap. So, while a pile of cashy-money is potentially a pile of traditional advancement currency, it doesn’t always work out that way.

In the end, the two systems feel really different. Level-advancement is steady, reliable, and automatic. It’s permanent. It becomes an inherent part of your character. But the benefits are delayed. You have to work slowly toward advancement and it usually comes more slowly the more advanced you are. Level-advancement usually offers only limited chances for customization. At best, you usually get to pick from a limited list of options.

Loot-advancement, meanwhile, feels haphazard. Variable. Even if the GM never touches a random treasure table, loot-advancement feels a little random. Arbitrary. The characters are just sweeping up whatever discarded crap they find lying around and hoping some of it will be useful. But there’s also a lot of ways to use it. Lots of ways to spend money. And most of it isn’t tied directly to the character you chose to play. And even if you find a piece of equipment you don’t want or can’t use, you can usually sell it for cash and trade that cash for something you can use.

Notice the two systems don’t just feel different, they feel like polar opposites. And that’s what I mean by complementarity. Each covers the others’ weaknesses and each has different strengths. You can get by with just one, but advancement will feel more limited. You’ll notice the weaknesses in the single system. And they won’t feel good. The level-advancement system provides a good, steady, baseline advancement. As long as you keep surviving, you keep advancing. And you advance along prescribed and highly mechanical paths. Along the way, though, you luck into treasure. And you can use that treasure to advance in more limited, more transitive, but much more customizable ways.

That also means there’s a variety to the rewards. Which is important. Rewards get stale over time. Games that offer only one kind of reward get dull. Having both means you have two different kinds of rewards to scatter around the game. And they don’t even have to come together. You can have monsters that don’t have any treasure and treasures that aren’t guarded by any monsters. Players can earn XP for completing quests or they can earn money or they can earn both. A well-hidden side-path with some treasure at the end offers a small but no less rewarding bit of advancement as compared to slogging through the encounters on the main path.

So, yeah, Mighty Boosh, you’re right that loot can represent a traditional advancement system, but that doesn’t mean it’s the same as level-advancement. They’re different. And they complement each other. They create a whole experience that’s greater than the sum of the individual experiences.

Gandave asks…

When you were asked to expand on your claim that D&D 5E combat is strategically boring, you said it was mainly because the players’ two combat goals—survive and defeat the enemy—rarely come into conflict. How would you design an RPG combat system to put those goals in conflict? What concrete elements would such a game need?

Holy mother of f$&%, two excellent questions in one day. I guess it helps that they both involve taking something I’ve said as true and then expanding on it. Smart strategy, folks.

Let me quickly catch y’all up. Well, all of you who aren’t Gandave or who weren’t in on the conversation. I did indeed say D&D 5E combat isn’t really as strategic as it seems. And that it’s f$&%ing dull. I said it in my patrons-only Discord server. And that was after I said it during my Brewmaster’s podcast interview. But I’ll forgive you if you don’t want to wade through three hours of babble searching for that one, specific point.

The reason 5E’s combat is boring is that it involves utterly f$&%ing boring choices. Players—and monsters—generally only have two choices to make: where to stand and which attack to use. And the first choice is based almost entirely on the second choice. If you want to make a melee attack, you have to stand next to the target. If you want to make a ranged attack, you have to stand absolutely anywhere else. Sometimes, there’s a little more to it, but rarely. And not much more.

Your choice of attack, meanwhile, is almost always an optimization problem. Just choose the attack that’ll get the enemy deadest fastest. But optimization problems are boring as s$&%. They say nothing interesting. All they say about the character—or the player—is “I’m good at math.” Real choices—interesting choices—force the player to choose between two desirable, exclusive, and usually incomparable things.

In a battle, you’re always chasing two different but desirable goals. You want to defeat the enemy and you want to survive. And they’re actually pretty exclusive goals. Because the best way to survive is to stay the hell out of life-or-death battles. But you can’t defeat the enemy if you stay out of the fight. So, instead, you’re stuck constantly balancing your desire to live against your need to defeat the enemy. From one round to the next, you’ve got to adjust your strategy because the balance keeps changing. Especially when the random whims of the dice get their say.

Except that ain’t really how it plays out in D&D. Players don’t balance offense and defense, they just focus on killing foes as quickly as possible. And that’s by design. Or rather, that’s a consequence of D&D’s design.

Now, as I said to DaaaaahWooooosh above, game design isn’t about concrete answers. You can’t just slap together a bunch of mechanical elements and get the game you want. There’s lots of possibilities and lots of ways to mix-and-match ’em up. So I can’t give you a list of concrete mechanics a TTRPG needs to make combat strategically interesting. But I sure as hell can tell you what you’d have to fix about D&D to even get close.

First, in D&D, there’s no difference between defeat and death. By the rules—and remember kids, just because the GM can invent a new option, that doesn’t mean the system gets credit for including the possibility—by the rules, battles are decided when one side or the other has been reduced to a pile of corpses. Monsters don’t run away. Neither do the PCs. And there’s no way they could. The initiative and movement rules make it impossible for one party to escape from another unless they have a drastically higher tactical speed. And that’s probably the biggest problem. If there’s no difference between winning and surviving, you never have to choose which one to risk for the other. Which means there’s no dilemma at all.

There’s lots of ways to fix that, though. Morale rules let the monsters lose without dying and let the players win without killing. Flight, pursuit, and evasion rules let the players lose without dying and survive without winning. Hell, even a discussion about how to handle players surrendering to the monsters or whether monsters might take prisoners would do a lot to change that s$&%.

That said, D&D’s inherent adventure structure also causes problems. An adventure in D&D is usually just a string of encounters the players have to win. Win all the encounters, you win the adventure. Lose any encounter, you lose the adventure. Even if the players could lose a fight without dying, there’s usually no way for them to recover from such a loss. So, alongside rules for morale, flight, surrendering, imprisonment, and so on, you also need to build some more complex adventure structures directly into the system somehow.

The second big issue with D&D is that it’s so carefully and precisely balanced that it… tha… th… ha. HAHAHAHAHAHA! Sorry, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t get through that sentence. I tried.

The second big issue with D&D is that the system math is so heavily skewed in favor of the players that their characters are never really in danger. And I’m not even talking about TPKs here. Even if a character goes down—which, ironically, they do a lot—even if a character goes down, it’s trivially easy to make sure they live to fight another day. And that’s because it’s just not cool to kill PCs anymore. There’s lots of reasons for it—from increased character complexity to greater emphasis on personal stories and personal expression to generational changes in what gamers will put up with—but the fact is it’s a problem. If no one seriously believes their character might die, well, why would they ever balance their survival against anything else?

But this isn’t me pissing and moaning about the lack of PC murder in modern games. If you wanted to write character death out of the game, I’d be totally fine with that. But you still need some kind of risk. Some kind of long-lasting consequence or setback or inconvenience from getting smacked around by evil orcs. Doesn’t matter what it is. Permanent injuries, lingering injuries, equipment destruction, expensive healing, whatever. D&D’s got none of that anymore. You’re never in danger of dying and, if you don’t die, you’re perfectly fine immediately thereafter. Or after one good night of sleep at most.

So the characters are never risking anything to defeat the enemy. There’s no dilemma. Combat is entirely about “which super-cool mega-awesome chocolatey-coated attack option do you want to show off this turn?” No one worries about living to see the next round. Either you’ve got to dial down the survivability of PCs a few notches or you’ve got to add some other risks to the fights. That way, the internal conflict becomes “avoid death or serious injury or defeat the enemy.”

And, as I addressed in my Fighting Spirit article, by the time a character’s survival really is in question, there’s not much the player can do about it. They’re unconscious and hoping the death saves don’t randomly kill them before the rest of the party wins the fight.

But even if you somehow got the players to acknowledge the survive-or-win conflict and even if you managed to build an adventure that the players could win without defeating every enemy, you’d still end up fighting with the system. Because there’s no way for the players to actually do anything about that conflict. There really just aren’t any viable options in the system for increasing survivability by risking victory. There’s not a whole lot the players can do to actively defend their characters. And the one time D&D tried to address it—in 4th Edition—the designers just added a bunch of abilities that let you defend yourself while hurting the enemy. Hard to believe though it may be, you can’t emphasize a choice by adding “all of the above” to the list of options.

D&D doesn’t include any compelling gameplay on the defense side of the game. Which means there’s no mechanical hooks to hang anything on to let players—or monsters—focus on survival over victory.

But suppose you did find a way to make defensive play as rich as offensive play and then create ways to shift resources between the two as the battle ebbed and flowed. It still wouldn’t fix the issue because the players couldn’t make those choices dynamically and strategically. What do I mean? Well, in D&D, you can’t really see what’s coming next. You can’t try to read an opponent or anticipate its next move. You can’t tell the dragon’s warming up his elemental furnace and think, “okay, this round, I’d better just hunker down so I can survive that blast.” That, by the way, is called telegraphing. It’s important in strategic combat and literally every video game foe ever does something to telegraph at least its biggest attacks. Hell, in real-life combat sports, one of the first things you learn is how to read your opponent and spot their ‘tells’ so you can respond to what’s coming.

Likewise, it’s pretty hard to tell when an opponent’s on death’s door. When they just need one good, solid attack to push them over the edge. Not unless the GM is just counting down the enemy’s hit points. Which is not something most GMs do. And it’s something that GM’s really shouldn’t do. But the end result is that you’ll never have a player seriously considering whether to turtle up and try to survive the ogre’s super-powerful attack or finish the ogre with a solid blow before it can launch that attack. Which is a perfect example of the survive-versus-defeat dilemma in action. If you take your attack, you might kill the ogre right now. But if you don’t kill the ogre, it’s winding up an attack that will probably kill you. If you focus on defense, you have a chance to survive the attack, but you definitely won’t kill the ogre this round.

And those are just some of the things it’d take to make D&D combat strategically interesting. You’d have to decouple winning, surviving, losing, and dying. You’d need to structure adventures so the players don’t have to win every fight. You’d need to decrease the odds of survival or add something in place of dying that carries enough weight to counterbalance the desire to win the average combat. You’d need ways for players and monsters to shift resources between survival and winning on a round-by-round basis. And you’d need to give the players the information they need to allocate their resources without giving them so much information that combat becomes a math problem.

And you have to do all the same s$&% for the monsters too. Well, most of it. Though you don’t have to do it in the same way. Because it’s only when facing thinking opponents that respond to your strategies that you’re forced to change strategies and adapt. Take dice or decisions away from the monsters and the GM and try to emulate video game AI and you’re taking away what makes TTRPG combat interesting and unique compared to PVE video gameplay.

Grant asks…

How would you create an adventure or campaign with a time loop gimmick like the one in The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask? One in which the players have a limited time to accomplish their goal or they’re sent back in time to the start of the campaign?

Wow! Everyone’s just asking interesting, well-thought-out questions. Everyone’s getting to the point. Everyone’s giving me a name. I have no idea what to do with these transitionary paragraphs. It’s true what they say, huh? Be careful what you wish for.

So, uh, good question Grant. That sounds like a fun idea… NERD!

Sorry. Old habits die hard.

Anyway…

I’m not sure what you want, exactly. Do you want time-loop mechanics or structural advice or story ideas or what? I guess I’ll just babble about the idea and hope something I say helps. Which it will. Because I’m such a genius.

Let me start with mechanics. In theory, time-loop game mechanics should be simple. Make copies of the players’ characters at the start of the game and then, when time gets reset, just take away their character sheets and give them the copies back. Done and done. And you don’t even have to explain anything to the players. You can just surprise them. Which is probably the best way anyway. Majora’s Mask doesn’t let on about the time-loop thing. You just play the game for a while and then the world gets destroyed by the f$&%ing terror-moon and then you wake up back at the start wondering what the hell that was all about. You have to figure out the time-loop thing for yourself. That’s probably how I’d do it.

And I’d go all out too. Like, I don’t usually write out descriptive text in advance, but I’d write out the descriptive text for the start of the game in advance. Then, later, when the disaster happens, I’d describe the end of the world or whatever and then take the PCs away. And then, a few moments later, I’d hand the players back their old sheets and then restart the campaign with the exact same descriptive text. I wouldn’t explain anything. Just make them work it out.

But a successful time-loop campaign isn’t as easy as that. See, time-loops erase the players’ progress. And in TTRPGs, progress is extremely important. I mean, if you’re just running a one-shot adventure over a few sessions, you probably don’t have to worry about this s$&%. But if you’re running a campaign, you can’t keep resetting the PCs completely. And while it’d be easy enough to grant the players the standard temporal immunity that protagonists in time-travel games have, that’d actually work against the feeling of being stuck in a time-loop. So, you can’t reset the characters completely, but you also have to reset something. Maybe their stats and levels stay intact, for instance, but their equipment doesn’t make the trip with them. Or maybe they keep their levels and stats but lose any experience they’ve accumulated toward their next level. Or maybe they even lose a level. It doesn’t matter much which s$&% gets reset and which s$&% doesn’t.

And look, I know the comments are going to be full of people telling you how much it does matter and how, if you took levels or experience or equipment or whatever away, they’d hate it and so would everyone they ever gamed with and it would be a disaster and blah blah blah. Don’t listen to any of that s$&%. There’s a reason you sent me this question instead of posting it on the internet for general input from every screaming gamer moron with a keyboard. No human being can judge how something will feel in play by reading it on paper. Any experience can be a good one if it’s done right.

But I digress.

Time-loops present another problem, though. And that’s the problem of urgency. If you know that, every time you fail, you just get to go back in time and try again, there aren’t any real stakes. No real pressure. If you fail, so what? Just take another pass. Sure, resetting might be painful because some s$&% gets reset, but you’re also still getting smarter and more powerful with each run. Majora’s Mask lacked any sense of a final, irrevocable, complete and total failure.

You might want to add some instability to the world. After a few taps on the reset button, maybe reality starts showing some cracks in the seams. Or maybe the characters start cracking up. It doesn’t matter what it is. It’s just a sign that the heroes can only hit the reboot so many times before the system just fails to restart. That creates a sense of urgency. Inertia. If the players don’t do something to win, they’re eventually going to lose.

It doesn’t matter, by the way, if you actually institute some kind of limit on the number of resets. All that matters is that the players think there’s a limit.

Now, apart from allowing the players to make mechanical progress that doesn’t get reset, there’s another kind of progress to make in the game too. And this is where we get into some structural s$&%. Because the players have to be able to make progress in the game. And that can be really tricky if the game itself keeps getting reset.

Now, the main way the characters will make progress in the game is by learning s$&% and figuring s$&% out. Gaining knowledge. Each time they pass through the loop, they’ll learn a little more about what’s happening. Eventually, they’ll be able to figure out how to fix it. And once they have a plan, they can execute that plan. In that sense, the game is building toward one perfect run through the loop where the players are strong enough and have everything they need and do everything right. And then they win and the loop is broken.

But that may not be satisfying by itself. It might not feel like the players are making enough progress. Which is why you need to establish the rules by which the time-loop works. And I don’t mean game rules. I mean the world rules. Because another way the characters can make progress in the game is by gradually overcoming the world’s rules. For example, if the heroes’ equipment doesn’t survive the reset but their statistics do, then you can grant them special magical boons and blessings that stay with them through the time-loop. Permanent stat upgrades, basically. They’re just magical items without the items, but they’re valuable.

Or maybe the heroes can find locations that exist out of time. Places immune to the reset button so they can stash useful stuff there and pick it up on their next go around. Or maybe they can find special materials that are so inert that they’re even immune to time travel. If a character gets a suit of armor made out of this super lead, then, when they go through the reset button, the armor just drops to the ground right there even as time resets around it. If the heroes then return to the place from which they got flung back in time, they can pick up their armor of temporal stability again.

But that doesn’t mean equipment and gear won’t be valuable. Even if all the party’s gear goes back to its starting point and they get vomited out of the time gate naked and screaming every time the universe resets, they still know where they found all that gear. Once they know that there’s a +5 sword of demon slaying in the Tomb of Sir Rufus Ted Preston Esquire, they can return to the tomb and get it again when they’re ready to confront the Demon of Time.

This brings me around to something else. Since time’s going to be a big deal in this game as a resource, you’ll need a good way to keep track of it. You’re going to have to track the hours, days, and weeks. That way the players can manage their time strategically.

And then there’s the issue of repeated content. As the players keep playing the same Groundhog Day over and over, they’re bound to want to do something they’ve already done again. Like, retrieve that magic sword from the tomb again. How are you going to handle that? See, going back to the tomb to get the sword again because you know you’re going to be fighting a demon this time around, that’s smart and clever and interesting. Actually playing through a dungeon twice isn’t. Well, playing it twice is. Playing it three times isn’t.

See, the second time players do anything, they’re going to be able to do it smart and efficient. That’s their chance to show off what they learned playing it the first time. You don’t want to deny them that chance. But if they ever go back a third time or a fourth or a fifth, you want to skip that s$&%. But you can’t just handwave it either. Because going through the dungeon costs time and chews up supplies and other resources.

So maybe, when it comes to designing particular quests and subquests for the campaign, watch how well the players do the second time. Keep track of how much in-game time it takes them and how many resources they chew through and use that to establish a baseline. That way, if they ever complete the same quest a third time, you can skip playing it in detail, narrate the result, and just tell the players to mark off the resources. You can adjust the resources downward each time to reflect how the party gets a little better with each attempt. And adjust them downward based on the character’s increased levels. You might want to come up with a systematic approach for that.

Anyway, that’s all the big stuff I’d think about if I were running a time-loop game like you described. I hope something in there helps. Otherwise, good luck. And have fun.

…

NERD!

Sorry. Man, I can’t take this “not making fun of people” thing.