 Gamemastering
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| Getting Ready | The Three Commandments of Gamemastering Overseeing Character Creation |
| Playing the Game | Running a Game Creating an Adventure |
With a system as open as d20 Advanced, the role of the GM in ensuring that all the characters players bring to the table are appropriate for the game. Even characters built according to the rules could be unbalanced, and it's up to you to make sure that everyone's on a level playing field.
Unfortunately, there aren't any hard-and-fast rules that will tell you precisely whether or not someone's character is too strong or too weak. This section also isn't a list of things you shouldn't allow a character to have. Rather, this section presents a series of guidelines to help you identify when a character's abilities might prove problematic for your playstyle.
Ignoring Ability Scores[]
Especially in superheroes games, it's easy to design characters who have little or no use for the base ability scores and who simply invest most or all of their points into FX to represent their powers. Sometimes it is indeed appropriate for a character to be otherwise average in every way, but for the most part, a character with nothing but 0s in his or her ability scores is likely to be intentionally designed with mediocrity to shave points and boost up what the player sees as "more important" for gameplay (often powerful attack FX or unbeatable resistances). If you see signs of characters skimping on "essentials" like ability scores and skills, it should raise your suspicions about their other abilities.
Extreme Trade-Offs[]
Sometimes players will approach you requesting very high trade-offs for their characters. While they are becoming more effective in one area at the expense of competence in another, you should be aware that this is a way in which players can create "unbeatable" attacks or resistances. In the interest of still keeping them within the realm of power of the campaign, you usually want to limit trade-offs to no more than plus or minus half the campaign's power level. That means that a PL 6 game shouldn't see trade-offs of more than +3/-3 and PL 10 games should be limited to trade-offs of +5/-5.
Massive Arrays[]
FX arrays are meant to represent different "settings" for a supernatural ability, like a superhero who can manipulate fire creating fireballs or walls of flame. The cheap flexibility which arrays represent can be abused in two ways:
Fat Base FX[]
Some players like to invest heavily in the base FX for an array, slapping on countless extraneous extras and feats just in the interest of being able to afford lots of powerful alternate FX. If the cost of the base FX for an array is above 5x the campaign's PL, it's possible that the player is attempting to "fatten up" the array. Scrutinize the base power for unnecessary feats and extras (like penetrating on damaging FX or the like). Make sure players have a good justification for the modifiers on their FX before you allow them.
Sprawling Alternate FX[]
Players also can get a little overzealous with the number of times they take the alternate FX feat. They might be stretching the bounds of what truly constitutes an "alternate setting" for a particular FX (such as including in a water-controlling array an FX which lets the user create tornadoes by virtue of the water vapor in the air), or simply including far too many alternate FX. If a player has more than five alternate FX, you might want to look over them again to make sure that the character isn't being made so versatile that he or she will intrude on the other characters' niches. And during play and the process of improving characters, you might want to limit players to only taking alternate FX for their characters which they've already stunted in the past.
Overly-Broad Descriptors[]
Good descriptors for FX are essential, but some players may request descriptors which are just too broad for you to be able to work with them effectively, because those descriptors can just do too much. That's not to say that you can't allow characters with potentially wide descriptors, but that you should be careful to work with such players to ensure that their descriptors don't allow them to intrude on the niches of other characters.
- "Atomic Control": Control over atomic structure; power over matter at the atomic level. This can essentially allow a character to transform any material into anything else at will, allowing careless players to run rough-shod over your game as enemies are turned into frogs and bullets into steam. This sort of power can work well in the hands of a moral character who won't abuse it, and really benefits from having some illogical but appropriate limits (such as being unable to affect organic matter).
- "Cosmic Power": The fundamental energy of creation; the power over all the cosmos; the ability to control the essential whoozits of everything. This is just a fancy soft-sci-fi way of saying "magic". While it's a staple of cosmic-level comic books, you should be careful to come up with appropriate limits for any such "do-anything" descriptor (such as limiting the character to folding space, or reshaping matter, or wielding star-fire).
- "Divine Power": Power of the gods; demonic power. Unless you agree upon a specific and limited divine patron (such as a god of war or a shadow demon), godlike power can be overwhelming for the GM, especially when miracles of all sorts can do almost anything. Limiting such characters to specific aspects of nature is a good way to start, as are moral or ethical codes for more loosely-defined divine powers.
- "Magic": Sorcery; witchcraft; spellslicing; arcanum. There's a reason why a common excuse for continuity errors in fantasy is "a wizard did it". So long as it doesn't tread too far into the realm of science, magic is another one of those descriptors which can, in theory, justify almost anything, from turning invisible to shooting magical missiles of force to turning into a dragon to causing one's foes to dance uncontrollably. Magic especially benefits from deciding in advance on a specific type of magic and trying to stick to the tropes of that type of magic as best as possible. Some suggestions for types of magic include (but are by no means limited to) Elemental Magic (earth, fire, air, water), Enchantment (charms and suggestions), Necromancy (control over life and death energies), Nature Magic (controlling plants and animals), and Spirit Magic (controlling spirits of nature or the dead).
- "Psionics": Psychic powers; mental powers; mind tricks. Individual psychic disciplines, like mind-reading (telepathy) and moving objects (telekinesis) are perfectly fine and acceptable in most games, and even creating multiple arrays to include different types of psionic powers can be okay. But watch out for players who also want to add something like "telekinetically vibrating the water in their blood to cause heat-death" or "psychically re-arranging matter at the atomic level to change anything into anything".
- "Super Science": Advanced technology; super high-tech; alien technology. Arthur C. Clark noted that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Technology is a great descriptor for explaining many different kinds of FX, but be sure to work with players interested in using technology for their FX to arrive at a unified theme for what technology lets them do. Technology might be specialized for hunting or controlling electricity or perhaps just boosting strength and toughness. Follow the same guidelines you would with magic.
- "Time/Space Continuum": Warping time and space; time control; time/space distortion. Being able to control the flow of time can lead to many annoying paradoxes, and tends towards characters who can do no wrong, because they've already seen/lived through mistakes and can go back in time and correct them automatically. This is another example of a potentially great, flavorful descriptor for a character's abilities, but can result in a character not necessarily being able to do too much, but to be very disruptive to a game by virtue of the nature of his or her abilities. Time travel paradoxes are headaches for science-fiction writers the world over, and if you're not ready for them at your table, you might want to approach these sorts of descriptors with caution.
Progression Overkill[]
The Progression extra is really cheap for the benefit it provides. You should be careful to scrutinize any FX which has more than 3 applications of the Progression extra. Multiple applications of the extra can literally allow characters to destroy cities or move mountains, which may not be appropriate for all games.
Summoning an Army[]
The Summon FX is potentially dangerous in that it allows players to essentially gain additional actions from their minions. While it is expensive to buy multiple minions (thanks to it taking an extra to get additional minions), more than five minions can be extremely disruptive, taking up a lot of time at the game as one player has to decide each round precisely what to do. This problem is only made worse if the player also has minions of a broad type, so each creature could have vastly different abilities. In general, the Summon FX is meant to represent someone able to conjure up a very small number of powerful minions or to create a horde of weaker minions (which are easily dispatched). Be careful of players trying to use Summoning to buy huge numbers of minions or to buy a vastly more powerful "second character" at a discount (for example, a player's "main character" being a squire who has the "real character", the mighty knight, as a summon). Minions should generally be weaker than the character. If not, you need to ask why the minion isn't the master.
Variable FX[]
The Variable FX structure is included for versatile odds-and-ends which just aren't covered by the rest of the system. Some groups, for instance, might use the Variable structure to represent magic, and GMs often enjoy having an FX which is just perfect for enemies with very weird abilities that will allow them to adapt on the fly to the PCs. And while d20 Advanced does allow for great versatility, the Variable structure further allows for unpredictability. An array also allows for versatility relatively cheap, but it is also predictable: the player still only has a set list of options, and can't come up with something new for every encounter. Certainly Variable structures are useful, especially for characters such as shapeshifters or changelings, or even wizards or spellcasters, but you should be careful to make sure that these FX have definite limits, so you at least have some idea of what the players can cook up. For example, a shapeshifter might only be able to change into natural animals (like lions and birds), or a magician might always have to cast spells involving fire. These limits are up to you to decide upon with the player.
When a Flaw Isn't a Flaw[]
A flaw is a good flaw when it limits the usefulness of an FX by about 50%. For example, being limited to only affecting men (or alternately, only women) with an FX is a valid flaw for most games. But if you're playing a game following a gendercide which wipes out all of the men on Earth, then it's not nearly as limiting as it could be in other games, and thus isn't a valid flaw (indeed, this is, at best, a complication). Similarly, an FX which is only used out-of-combat (such as a non-combat ability to open locked doors with a touch), and thus the number of actions it consumes is trivial, is unlikely to be balanced with an application of the Increased Action flaw, increasing the number of actions it takes to use the FX to 2 actions each round. This doesn't make it any harder to use the FX in most cases. Instead, flaws such as these might instead be priced as FX Drawbacks rather than flaws, to keep things more balanced. A flaw which doesn't limit the FX enough just isn't a flaw, and shouldn't give the point-benefit of one.
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