RPGs: The Glass Ceiling and Expectations
Something I've encountered repeatedly in both tabletop gaming and LARPs is the glass ceiling of power level. This is the sort of thing that shows up most promimently with spellcasting, I think because the power of spellcasting is measured in a very literal, quantifiable way (spell levels, or circles, or whathaveyou). It exists in other aspects of the games as well, but I'm going to use spellcasting as an example because it's straightforward, easy to work with, and it's something that just about everyone reading this will already know.
In every game I've ever played, the system of magic is static: it is codified -- spells go up to a certain level, typically 9th or 5th -- and it is simply impossible to go beyond this level. What's more, this limit is well-known to the people living in this world, and is accepted as a natural law. This bugs me a little bit, because it implies that the entirety of magic was developed all at once, that it sprang into being fully formed and has remained unchanged every since. There's no sense of evolution, of research and advancement. These are the capabilities of your magic system, neatly defined and placed into this box. Characters in the world may during the course of a campaign research a new spell or discover a new way to shape magic (e.g. a new Feat, if you're playing D&D), but the boundaries are more or less set in stone; no one ever develops 10th level spells or discovers the 6th circle. This in and of itself is not a gamebreaker; it bothers me more because of what it implies about the world than because it represents any real problem with the system. However, combined with player expectations, I think it leads to a very unreasonable situation.
I'm going to shift the focus to LARPs here, because I believe that this is a phenomenon that shows up in that medium a lot more than it does in tabletop gaming. Players have the expectation that their characters will hit the glass ceiling, that they will be able, within the course of a campaign, to become 'masters' of their craft. Is that a problem on its own? Not really. I don't necessarily think that it's reasonable to expect that, however. Certainly a lot of tabletop games never reach the highest levels where characters would gain access to 9th (or whatever is the maximum) level spells. And I've never really heard anyone complain about that sort of thing. Some campaigns just don't go that long, and I've been in games where the GM told us in advance that by the time it ended we should be around X level (where X is well below the top end). But if someone ran a LARP in which they announced from the start that there are for example 5 levels of spellcasting, but that PCs in the course of the campaign would not go beyond 3rd, I would expect there to be a lot of cries of outrage. Am I wrong in thinking that would happen? Am I failing giving the average LARPer enough credit? If not, then am I wrong in thinking that that sense of entitlement is not necessarily a good thing?
Why is it a problem? I think, when combined with the glass ceiling, it creates some very unrealistic situations in a game. In my tabletop game, I have a character who has recently hit the point that he can cast 9th level spells. This puts him on the same level as his master, who taught him his very first spell. Because his master was already capable of casting the most powerful spells, and cannot advanced any further, he has managed to catch up with him in just a few in-game years. We see this sort of thing happen in LARPs all the time. Characters who begin the game with no training whatsoever in a particular craft -- whether it's magic, a martial school, whatever -- can, within 3-4 years, become masters. Their own masters, again, being unable to advance any further, suddenly find themselves the equal of people who just a handful of years previous were just learning to crawl, so to speak. It would be like if someone started taking martial arts classes, and after four years were just as good as their instructors, who may well have been doing this for decades.
This is hardly a new issue, and it's one that we've always just ignored because there's really not much you can do about it. But I've been thinking a lot about games lately, and it's something I would like to find a way to change.
In every game I've ever played, the system of magic is static: it is codified -- spells go up to a certain level, typically 9th or 5th -- and it is simply impossible to go beyond this level. What's more, this limit is well-known to the people living in this world, and is accepted as a natural law. This bugs me a little bit, because it implies that the entirety of magic was developed all at once, that it sprang into being fully formed and has remained unchanged every since. There's no sense of evolution, of research and advancement. These are the capabilities of your magic system, neatly defined and placed into this box. Characters in the world may during the course of a campaign research a new spell or discover a new way to shape magic (e.g. a new Feat, if you're playing D&D), but the boundaries are more or less set in stone; no one ever develops 10th level spells or discovers the 6th circle. This in and of itself is not a gamebreaker; it bothers me more because of what it implies about the world than because it represents any real problem with the system. However, combined with player expectations, I think it leads to a very unreasonable situation.
I'm going to shift the focus to LARPs here, because I believe that this is a phenomenon that shows up in that medium a lot more than it does in tabletop gaming. Players have the expectation that their characters will hit the glass ceiling, that they will be able, within the course of a campaign, to become 'masters' of their craft. Is that a problem on its own? Not really. I don't necessarily think that it's reasonable to expect that, however. Certainly a lot of tabletop games never reach the highest levels where characters would gain access to 9th (or whatever is the maximum) level spells. And I've never really heard anyone complain about that sort of thing. Some campaigns just don't go that long, and I've been in games where the GM told us in advance that by the time it ended we should be around X level (where X is well below the top end). But if someone ran a LARP in which they announced from the start that there are for example 5 levels of spellcasting, but that PCs in the course of the campaign would not go beyond 3rd, I would expect there to be a lot of cries of outrage. Am I wrong in thinking that would happen? Am I failing giving the average LARPer enough credit? If not, then am I wrong in thinking that that sense of entitlement is not necessarily a good thing?
Why is it a problem? I think, when combined with the glass ceiling, it creates some very unrealistic situations in a game. In my tabletop game, I have a character who has recently hit the point that he can cast 9th level spells. This puts him on the same level as his master, who taught him his very first spell. Because his master was already capable of casting the most powerful spells, and cannot advanced any further, he has managed to catch up with him in just a few in-game years. We see this sort of thing happen in LARPs all the time. Characters who begin the game with no training whatsoever in a particular craft -- whether it's magic, a martial school, whatever -- can, within 3-4 years, become masters. Their own masters, again, being unable to advance any further, suddenly find themselves the equal of people who just a handful of years previous were just learning to crawl, so to speak. It would be like if someone started taking martial arts classes, and after four years were just as good as their instructors, who may well have been doing this for decades.
This is hardly a new issue, and it's one that we've always just ignored because there's really not much you can do about it. But I've been thinking a lot about games lately, and it's something I would like to find a way to change.