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While playing Edge Of The Empire last week, a topic of conversation briefly arose: should advantage mechanics grow more extreme in effect in the big finish to an adventure or campaign?

Musing on Advantage Mechanics

Advantage mechanics of various forms have become a popular game mechanic in recent years. You have something of the general variety in TORG, in 7th Sea, in Edge Of Empire, in D&D 5e. The general principle is that a bias to the likelihood of success or failure, or other benefit for one faction and not the other, is introduced for dramatic effect. Sometimes it favors one side or the other based on circumstances and the tactical situation, and sometimes it is an ever-present existential balancing act in which the act of consuming the advantage on offer conveys a potential advantage to the opposition, and sometimes it represents wild luck or destiny taking a hand on a broader scale than any single die roll.

I have even seen the concept used as a narrative mechanism, where the conditions for the PCs to achieve victory were to accumulate a certain number of untapped advantages and then convert them all at once, while their NPC enemies could achieve victory at any point by achieving any of a variety of conditions. PC strategy, then, had to be to so obstruct the NPC march toward victory that the only way they could win the battle and get closer to a victory condition was to tap a potential advantage. In doing so, they advanced towards their own victory but also brought the PCs closer to success – eventually causing the whole conflict to reach a perfectly-poised knife edge at which things could go either way, in narrative terms; which is when the PCs gain the final untapped advantage that they need in order to sweep to a come-from-behind all-or-nothing victory.

Now, when adventures and campaigns are reaching their climax, we want everything to come down to a larger than life dramatic decision point in which all the chips are down and its win or lose for the whole ball game. Easy victories or inevitable failures are dull and boring; we want the whole adventure to be a struggle, each side gaining advantages and losing them as the stakes grow larger and the choices more decisive. Every game should come down to the last pitch, the last shot, the last chance; every race to the last corner, the last lunge at the line.

The entire first year of my superhero campaign was the PCs slowly whittling away at the advantages of an overwhelming enemy, earning first his attention, and then his respect, and then, ultimately, a final victory – with just enough ambiguity about the outcome to keep life interesting in the future. Move and counter-move, one step back for every two steps forward and every step a struggle against the odds, until they were able to redefine victory for both sides into something that everyone could live with.

The same pattern can be observed in the Lord Of The Rings; every grand victory consists of the cumulative effects of many smaller battles along the way until a decisive turning point is achieved.

Reflecting On End-games

No matter how big an advantage one side holds over the other, when it comes to a big finish, we want the stakes to be raised, a sense of winner-takes-all, and a sense of decisiveness. We want it in the final scenes of an adventure, we want it in our end-of-level monsters, and we want it in our cliffhanger endings. And, when we get to the final chapter of a string of such stories, we want the bar to be lifted even higher, we expect final confrontations and do-or-die situations, and climactic highs and lows.

One of the handicaps that the Star Wars prequels were always going to be lumbered with was the mere fact that they were prequels, and so we already knew that whatever happened was not going to be do-or-die; Revenge Of The Sith could never fully deliver that all-or-nothing climax because we already knew that neither side achieved total victory. (Lucas could have stunned everyone by appearing to deliver exactly that, and then attaching a 30-minute ‘prequel’ to a re-released episode IV that ‘undid’ the seeming victory, and a LOT of the criticism of the prequels would have melted away – and a lot of buzz would have been generated about the discontinuity, to boot. That was a definite opportunity missed).

The same forces apply in RPGs. We want the final adventure to be turned up to 11 – if not higher. So, the question is, should the scale of these artificial advantages become greater, or become smaller, or remain consistent, when the drama is to be heightened? Does doing so help to achieve this heightened level of dramatic tension and release?

The Inflate Advantages Case

If you want drama, and the potential for sudden and crashing reversals of fortune, increasing the effectiveness of advantage mechanics will certainly deliver. There would no longer be a small tactical advantage; any advantage that you can wring out of the circumstances would become hugely significant – for as long as it lasted.

It suddenly becomes an effective tactic to avoid a decisive conflict and focus on maneuvering, trying to line up as many advantages as you can to create an overwhelming, decisive situation. You would only pull the trigger on a final confrontation when you knew your advantage could not possibly be made any greater. Because any single advantage could be wrested away by a clever stratagem, you would find yourself better off pursuing a host of small advantages. It also puts wiles, intelligence, cunning, and wisdom on equal footing with physical strength, if not advantaging those qualities.

And all of that sounds very much like the pattern that we have described as being what you want in a big finish. It makes the desired situation all but an inevitability – and that’s a pretty strong argument in favor of the ‘yes’ case.

The Steady-as-she-goes Case

Players don’t like instability in the rules to which they are subject; they like to know where they stand. They especially don’t like the GM changing the rules to benefit NPCs relative to them. If the NPCs can orchestrate a string of small advantages as per the “Inflate Advantages” case, they can do the same without changing the rules, and the effect will be the same.

In other words, it’s up to the GM and his plotting machinations to deliver the appropriate tone and intensity to a big finish, and he shouldn’t use game mechanics manipulations to make his work easier. That’s cheating.

The Minimize Advantages Case

What inflating advantage benefits does, from this point-of-view, is to increase the level of uncertainty. That’s not inflating the drama, that’s maximizing the chaos – and when you maximize the chaos, it’s easy to make a misjudgment and hand someone so much advantage that a lucky roll can upset the applecart.

If anything, runs this line of argument, you should minimize chance and maximize strategy, tactics, and story. Prepare an exciting “script” and leave as little as possible to chance, with contingency plans on standby in case chance rears up and bites anyway.

The Hybrid Solution

There is a fourth option, which is important since each of the three lines of argument presented have their own merits – and their own shortcomings. That fourth option is to play to the strengths of each option at different points during the big finish. Let the NPC enemies implement multiple strategies at once (via flunkies), multiple ways in which to gain a major advantage, let the PCs discover some of them and decide which ones are the most important to block, let the other tactics of the NPCs succeed and be enough in aggregate to bring them just short of an overwhelming advantage – and then let the PCs pin back the NPCs a little bit at a time until they get to the big finish just short of having the overall edge, with one final chance to tilt the balance in their favor.

In essence, this means subordinating the net effect of advantages to the dictates of story, of creating an exciting finish.

The Other Variable

Before this discussion can be brought to a conclusion, there is one more variable that needs to be considered: It’s entirely up to the GM whether or not he invokes the benefits of an advantage. The dramatic objectives can be met, or very nearly met, simply by choosing whether or not to do so.

A pattern of conserving advantages until the NPC enemy is in a position to invoke several of them in a row, swinging the contest in his favor almost to the point that victory is within his grasp followed by a period in which the PCs have the opportunity to whittle away at those advantages and ultimately swing the overall balance in their favor, has exactly the desired outcome.

The smaller the benefit from any single advantage, the more finely this bias can be controlled, and the finer the control, the closer to the ‘edge’ the GM can dance. Ultimately, then, I have to declare a preference for either the Minimize Advantages option or the Steady-as-she-goes alternative.

To decide between the two, I next consider the disadvantages of each: the minimize advantages option risks upsetting players with changing rules and reads an awful lot like a plot train; there are no such problems with playing the rules as written and pulling strings by means of the timing variable.

The Verdict

This, then, is one case where the downsides of any house rules intended to maximize the drama of a big finish would seem to me to be counterproductive, and I would recommend the rules as everyone knows them. Smart play (by the GM, not necessarily by the NPC, who might just get lucky) will still yield all the benefits desired, with far more credibility, than manipulating the rules to artificially create risk and danger in the pursuit of cheap thrills.

Don’t cheapen the drama of your game. It will only undermine your credibility in the long run, for no good reason.

A relatively short post, this time around – I just ran out of things to say on the subject! Don’t get used to it…It’s also not the article that I was intending to publish today, that will be coming along in a couple of weeks.