Do You Like Your RPGs Creamy or Crunchy?

I really, really enjoyed The Witcher 3. It’s one of the best games I’ve played in a long time. The writing is solid. The combat is simple but engaging. Once I finally picked up Gwent, I briefly became addicted. It did so many things right — but there were still a few things that really bothered me.

Most of the upgrades and tweaks in the game are small numbers. The Muscle Memory ability will increase your fast attack damage by 5%. Crushing Blows increases the critical chance of your strong attacks by 2%. Basic-level oils will increase your attack power by a whopping 10%. You know what I have to say to that? Boooooring.

These buffs are just too damn small. When I kill that cockatrice, I have no idea if that 5% saved my ass, and it’s impossible to tell for sure. But my guess is that it probably wasn't a big enough deal to make the difference between success and failure. This is a problem. I am playing to kill monsters (and beat local merchants at a trading card game), and I want to know that my decisions are making a difference.

I can’t get excited about 5% more damage

There is a natural instinct for game designers to push their systems to be more granular, i.e. using smaller and smaller pieces. You could call a system that uses many small pieces creamy, and a system that uses a few larger pieces crunchy.

Systems like World of Warcraft are very creamy indeed. Player stats are rarely ever under 10, and can quickly grow into the hundreds or thousands. Mobs can have health pools in the millions of points. The max level as of this writing is 120. In The Witcher 3, Geralt starts out with 3500 vitality, and a baked potato will regenerate 800 of that. Other systems are more crunchy. Systems like the D6 System rarely include any numbers larger than 10. Somewhere in the middle are systems like D&D, which uses the d20 for most rolls and rarely has HP totals over 100.

Creamy systems are very common, and I think this is because they appear to offer a way to meet many of our design goals. A lot of this comes from the simulationist instinct, the desire to get more real-world detail into our games. Sometimes we want to capture aspects of real life that other systems have left out. But it can get ridiculous pretty quickly.

Taylor and I have fallen into this trap before. A lot of our old projects ran on the creamy side of the RPG-peanut-butter-spectrum, and we had a lot of conversations that ran something like this: “D&D is ok but it’s strange how getting a really good night’s sleep doesn’t improve performance, the way it does in the real world. I want my characters to get a bonus if they’ve slept well the night before. A +1 bonus on a d20 roll is too high. Wait! What if I made it d100? Then I could give them a +1 for each two hours of sleep, up to +5!”

Unfortunately this isn’t very fun or interesting.

There are two major problems. First, it makes keeping track of the system unbearable. “Wait! I forgot to add my bonus from using my whetstone every night, and that other bonus for fighting opponents who are using bludgeoning weapons. Can I re-roll that last attack?” Actually doing the calculations is even worse.

Having a computer keep track of all the bonuses and do all the math for you will help a bit. This is why video games, like The Witcher 3, are more likely to use this sort of system. But of course, I was just complaining about The Witcher! Using a computer doesn’t fix everything.

The second problem is that small changes are, well, small. This isn’t just an issue of flavor. It’s true that doing 100 damage to an enemy with 1000 HP feels like a much bigger deal than dealing 1 damage to an enemy with 10 HP. But flavor isn’t the problem.

The real issue with small changes is that small effects don’t make for a strategic system. If an ability doubles my damage, then I really want to take that into account, and so do my enemies. My gameplay will be focused on getting into a position to use this killer ability, and my enemies will find themselves doing everything they can to keep me from using it.

If an ability increases my damage by 5%, then I will probably do what I was going to do anyways, and my enemies probably won’t even notice the difference. I’ll deal a little more damage, which probably won’t come close to tipping the balance of the battle, and it will be a huge headache keeping track of it all.

(Incidentally, you can have it both ways. For a while a friend of mine was designing a giant robot game in which all damage was measured in units of one million. It turns out it’s really satisfying to say, “I punch you for FIVE MILLION DAMAGE”, and you still get all the crunchy benefits of only having to keep track of simple math.)

Players don’t care about multipliers below x2 — and neither should you. Toss them out.

Even better are effects that go beyond multipliers. In The Witcher 3, Geralt also has an ability that lets him deflect arrows and crossbow bolts. This changes gameplay in a way that is much more appreciable. It’s more satisfying.

Is it better? That’s a matter of opinion, but it’s certainly more noticeable.

Chunk It

The point of these games is a sense of agency — I did that, I made it happen. My choices were relevant.

You know: I slew the monster. I saved the princess. I stole the boots. If I can’t figure out what caused some outcome, I can’t tell if my choices mattered. That ruins the game.

So for this system, we went hard in the crunchy direction.

Having made several games that were much too creamy for their own good, Taylor and I went into Fantastic with the explicit goal of making it a very crunchy system indeed.