I recently gave up on running a campaign of Exalted.
It’s not a friendly parting. I have many complaints with the game, and have no intentions of ever running it again. There’s a lot of angles to criticize it, if I wanted to dig into a detailed list of grievances someday. For now, however, I want to focus on a part of the system I don’t think is inherently bad, so much as, bad in context:
The PCs are naturally too good at things. It’s really hard to meaningfully challenge them.
A build in Exalted is highly specialized in a few fields of engagement – combat, sorcery, social persuasion, long-term bureaucratic logistics, sailing, etcetera. Nominally, each of these fields has its own bespoke game mode. In practice, however, not only are these game modes not given equal weight… a character who is specialized in a given game mode will simply win. A social build enters a social interaction, has vastly higher numbers than any NPC who is not themself one of the rare empowered chosen ones in the setting, and just completely loses all rolls against social interaction. A combat build trivially fights a small army. Nothing is difficult, until the players are facing a group of NPCs on an equal magically-super-empowered level.
In some discussions of the game I’ve been privy to, this has been presented as a feature. After all, as noted, the premise of the PCs is that they are magically-super-empowered types. When one of them specializes in combat, the result shouldn’t just be someone who can hold their own in combat, but someone whose presence means combat is no longer an issue. (So the logic goes.) Since each player can only specialize in a few game modes at a time, the challenge of gameplay comes in planning your movements. The players can rely on their specializations, have to avoid engaging with the other game modes (or figure out a bypass), and then when other Exalted show up you can have a meaningful challenge.
The trouble, in my eyes, is that (some of) the game modes are interestingly built, and I want to see them in action. This is a game with a massive catalogue of powers for players to shop from, giving them new options and upgrades to use during a fight, say, or while attempting to seduce someone. That catalogue of powers can only become relevant in cases where they can’t already just steamroll the problem – but they get those powers through specializing, and when they do specialize, they no longer need all that texture.
This isn’t why I gave up on Exalted. The game has many other aspects that are straightforwardly faults, as opposed to something like this. Most damningly, the GM is obligated to invent mechanical opposition whole-cloth – in the rare cases where enemy Exalted were a direct challenge, my options were to work from a premade NPC or to invent everything myself. Exalted seems to rely on having a GM who is already significantly familiar with running Exalted, willing and eager to invoke rule zero and just write entire new sections of the game as needed. I am not that GM, and running it made me absolutely never want to try to become such a thing. So, I am not running the game anymore.
Nevertheless, it’s this aspect of Exalted that I’m thinking about now. A player choosing to specialize in a given mode of interaction is a method of skipping challenges, moreso than getting to play them as challenges. There’s something to it that disappoints me.
In a recent conversation with an acquaintance, about Shadowrun, he expressed the following sentiment:
A good run in Shadowrun never goes as planned.
Shadowrun uses “run” as the term for adventure, the players get assigned a mission to fulfill in an urban fantasy cyberpunk setting and they go off and do that as they please. The claim, then, is that the game is made a lot better by throwing setbacks, twists, and often escalations to violence in the mix of a given adventure. For another quote – “this character brought a cursed sword, she will use that cursed sword.” Since a character can specialize in combat, a plan that lets the players bypass all concerns of combat should not be allowed to happen without a hitch. That would, among other things, deprive people of the gameplay they specialized in.
There’s a significant texture difference between here and Exalted. Among other things, in Shadowrun, player specialization is far from an insta-win for a given game mode. “A fight happens now” in Shadowrun is sufficient to satisfy the desire to engage in combat, whereas in Exalted it will be a steamroll unless the opponent is something absurd. However, the comparison is pretty obvious. An Exalted adventure where the players only use their preferred game modes, steamroll the whole challenge, and don’t get tossed into something difficult, is like a Shadowrun run where the players never need to enter a game mode at all. In both cases, there’s an easy-to-understand dissatisfaction. I (the specialized player) wanted to experience this part of the game, and now I cannot.
Because it wasn’t part of the plan.
The Plan
Exalted and Shadowrun are both games with complicated settings that directly impact gameplay. They aren’t contexts where you can stick yourself to following the rules and trust that it will produce an effective gameplay experience – you are presented with a scenario in the world, and step one, as a group, is figuring out a plan for how to approach that scenario.
If the plan proceeds without a hitch, this essentially is the gameplay. Make a plan, if the plan is good, you win.
This is workable. It’s an entirely feasible pattern of play, for people who enjoy planning as the core challenge of the experience. If you don’t, of course, you get the logic presented before. The plan can’t be allowed to just go right, or you skip all the gameplay.
I’ve seen a similar take with Exalted. The players will plan in a way that leans into their specialties, lets them avoid game modes they don’t have investment in, and ideally resolves without a hitch. The GM is there to make sure unexpected twists occur, despite the gameplay being tilted towards the players just winning.
This is an interesting puzzle to me, because I find I’m split on my opinions. I will present two arguments here, both of which are things I earnestly believe, in response.
Firstly. What if the plan is just really good?
Suppose, for a given adventure of Shadowrun, the players plan an optimal route where they avoid detection and never have to get into a fight. They take very few risks, and the course they chart would feasibly succeed at their goal anyway.
Is the GM supposed to just, slip in some new problems to make sure that doesn’t happen?
Well, yes, that’s the idea. But that gets at the discrepancy here. The planning phase is a test, among other things. The players have to sit down and actually make a plan. If their plan is bad, it’s going to cause problems for them – they’ll be pushed through more dangerous obstacles, they might not be able to reach the thing at all. If the plan is good, then, notionally, for passing the test, they are rewarded. If the result is a mess of combat either way, then that reward isn’t being given. If the reward is getting to skip all the messy gameplay, then this test can be the entire game!
This is what Shadowrun and Exalted take for granted, at least. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Blades in the Dark, for instance, actively prohibits the existence of the planning phase. The game does not want to test its players on their ability to plan a heist, so it doesn’t. Instead you are dropped into a heist and go. But Shadowrun, as a game, does want that test of planning. A lot of its material is focused on the various resources and directions you could take to prepare for a run, to find bypasses to avoid problems. Going into an average run without planning to a decent degree will probably result in things falling apart and you just dying. The test of player planning ability is there.
A test that you can fail in a way that dooms you but success only unlocks the rest of the difficult gameplay chafes against my expectations. In contexts with tests of planning, my baseline very much is that passing the test means passing the gameplay. (Which often means entire systems turn into smoke and mirrors – all those rules only exist for you to avoid bothering with them, because you planned well enough.)
This brings me to my second thought, by way of an amusing contradiction – if I’m being tested on planning, I expect to be able to succeed from it. But ultimately, I just don’t like being tested on planning. Blades‘ approach works a lot better for me. This is because I want to play the game, rather than just the planning test.
That motive is core to the claim about Shadowrun. If a run goes smoothly, the players might feasibly never play the game. Especially those who specced into combat. If I were in their shoes, I would be disappointed in a perfect plan. That’s the logic, and I absolutely understand it there. I do think Shadowrun‘s heavy reliance on the planning stage means it’s possible to lose before the gameplay hits by planning badly enough, and my ideal would be neither are on the table at that point, but, still.
It gets more confusing with Exalted.
In Exalted, steamrolling the game is your gameplay. When you make an efficient plan, that plan leans on the game modes your party is specialized in. You do indeed get to roll the dice and run a fight and everything – it’s just a setup where the players are virtually certain to win.
This is also unsatisfying. I did not enjoy GMing for it one bit, and my tastes of it playerside haven’t been much better. The same logic that applies with Shadowrun should apply here. Except, the gameplay is already being invoked. The options are either to have the players willfully pursue interaction modes they aren’t specialized in, that is, actively making bad plans; or for the GM to invent whole-cloth a content roster that can meaningfully challenge (but not overwhelm) the players and hope they get it right.
As a player, even recognizing this dissatisfaction, I know I would never do the first.
That’s one of the tangles to this, I think. My player experience is actively worse when planning gets me a free win, but if the option is there, I won’t hold back.
I’ve been playing some Rune recently, a fairly compelling tactical-combat solo game. It’s not a bad time! I’ve gotten the itch to make some homebrew content for it, and that’s been fun as well. Given how many solo RPGs are confined to the storytelling zone, I solidly recommend it as a glimpse into something different.
However, it’s never been a challenge, after the very start. The game has some semblance of balance, but it has a few particular options that utterly break its power curve. Just using official material, I can begin each fight by dealing 4 damage to everything on the map, and in many cases that means entire zones have no fights that can challenge me. 4 health is an average amount for an enemy, so most fights die before they can even begin, and bosses can barely put up much more of a fight. The game has a notable balance problem in a few particular options.
I could just, not use this. Not equip the “damage everyone on the map” option, nor the “deal extra damage whenever you deal damage” option. I could put down the weapon that lets me heal back all the damage I deal and take an item that doesn’t automatically move me so I have to actually use a mobility tool. The game has given me all the resources I need to make a worse build for myself that actually struggles to play the game, and thus, to actually see all the interesting fight dynamics I’m skipping past.
But I don’t. I have stuck with my optimal murderspam build through thick and thin, and for every zone I blast through without having any issue, I stick to my guns all the more.
I do somewhat blame the game for this. It’s imbalanced, I’m playing perfectly within the rules it set out for me. It’s on the dev for making a content roster that overwhelms the base level of opposition to the world. I’m not even using homebrew for it, this is all dev-official imbalanced gear. That being said, objectively, at this stage of things, continuing to be stuck in my ways is just sabotaging my own enjoyment. I will continue to sabotage my own enjoyment, out of stubbornness, but there’s clearly some underlying motive why.
Gameplay is another test. In Rune, in Exalted, in Shadowrun – you’re faced with a problem, and the rules define the limits of how you can resolve it. Here’s how you roll to hit, here’s how damage works. Here’s how you can influence someone to do what you want. You have something you need to accomplish, and the gameplay is in your way. Traverse it.
In Exalted‘s context, the problem is that the gameplay is a trivial test. You built for this mode, you massively outclass anyone who isn’t also a super-powered being who was built specifically for this mode. But it’s the same as Rune. I picked the options that massively outclass the enemies in combat. It’s a test I know I’ll win – but it’s a test. It’s checking if I can win. If I have an advantage, why would I ever put it down?
That’s what I’ve been reckoning with, as I mull over these conversations.
Effort
I am an instrumental player at heart. When I sit down to play an RPG, I am looking for the goal that I need to accomplish, and endeavoring to pass all the tests in the way of me reaching that success. If I don’t have that clear direction, I putter around in dissatisfaction.
I do not enjoy planning as a step. I still do it, but in broad I avoid experiences like it. This is because, distinct from my interest in instrumental gameplay, I enjoy interacting with mechanical systems in their own right. If a plan can succeed so well that we don’t need to use the rules anymore, then that planning test bypasses all the parts I was most excited for. I get the win I want, which is a higher priority, but it’s still unsatisfying to my tastes.
(Thus, after mulling it over for some time, my conclusion is that I do also prefer Shadowrun in this mode. No matter how hard you plan, the gameplay will come to you. My initial reaction was because I would, if I could only have one, choose victory over gameplay. In ideal circumstances, the opportunity exists for both.)
Instrumental play and game-enjoying play often get lumped together. Here, in picking apart the different directions they push me and my interests, alongside those of other players I’ve spoken to, I think I’ve found the distinction. For someone with game-enjoying as a higher priority than instrumental play, making an actively bad plan for the sake of triggering, say, a fight, is an entirely coherent act. I am allergic to the very notion, even when I would enjoy the result more.
There’s a third ingredient at play here. Alongside the desire to see success, and the desire to engage with the mechanics of the game in detail, there’s also a desire to engage with the setting in detail. This, I think, is the interest that the planning step appeals to most. A plan requires overarching conceptual structures to connect element to element, independent of whether it’s connecting mechanical gameplay (fighting one’s way in) or conceptual bypasses entirely. A good plan in an RPG with a planning step understands the world it works in, and tries to thread all that together into as effective and costless an approach as possible.
A plan letting you bypass gameplay entirely rewards that third desire. For players with setting-engagement and instrumental play as interests, but with less or no interest in mechanical engagement as an experience to pursue, winning because you made a good enough plan is essentially the ideal.
These ingredients often get lumped together as one set of impulses. They do all, in essence, fall under the umbrella of “playing to win”, or perhaps “powergaming”. There’s ways for them to overlap in other directions, of course, both mechanical engagement and setting engagement can be indulged without focusing on instrumental goals at all. However, when in an instrumental context, these still push in different directions. That’s what I wanted to examine today.
Instrumental gameplay wants to get its wins. If a path exists to get a win, then instrumentally speaking you can just stick to that path and you’re good. Even for instrumentally-oriented players, what shape that path is or is not allowed to be will massively impact the experience. Despite being quite focused on winning, I have never once enjoyed a proper OSR game – the focus is on setting-engagement as the best path to success, and that does nothing for me. A game of Shadowrun run as my acquaintance posed, by contrast, would make anyone who found enjoyment in the planning phase and didn’t care about the mechanical execution rather disappointed. (Again, this reduces to knowing one’s audience, but still!)
There is some historical amusement in Shadowrun being the game that prompted all this pondering. In the GNS days, Shadowrun was the go-to example for a game that appealed to “gamist” sensibilities. As a wastebin taxon, that bundled a bunch of distinct impulses, some of which I’ve untangled here. That model took for granted that instrumental play also included a satisfaction with both setting-engagement and mechanical engagement as modes of interaction, for the purposes of instrumental gain. (As well as an investment in gaining power within the setting, and progression mechanics, interestingly enough. It’s very much an arbitrary lumping of several vaguely-connected behaviors the writers did not like, when one gets down to it.)
As an instrumental player, I find it quite valuable to be able to express my particular interests in gameplay, and what will make me lose interest. I think this split is core to a lot of what I’ve attempted to communicate in the past, once I had the concept of instrumental play as a basis to work from. Exalted and Shadowrun both pose interesting edge cases that emerge from this split of interests, even when played fully instrumentally.
Even when one’s goal is to play to win over anything else, the question of what types of play one enjoys will be a factor. If you don’t enjoy the best path to the end, but you do it anyway, you won’t get as much out of the experience as you would otherwise. That’s worth keeping in mind.
So, yeah!
