TOPIC: Power Creep Discussion

Michelle wrote: A lot of people are asking what percentage of runs are at each difficulty level. That's a question I've asked before and I've yet to see an answer. Coaches/DMs might be able to ballpark what they've seen, but I don't think there's any real data on this. Maybe it would be a good idea to start getting some real data on this. If TD keeps the party cards (which I think they take them from you at the end) they can see what difficulty people are playing on, what classes, and their stats. If you add maybe a little survey at the end like someone mentioned, you can find out how many people died, how much life they had left, you can ask them how they enjoyed it, if it was too easy or too hard, what they liked and what they thought wasn't fun. Relying mostly on the forums for feedback, does not cover the views/options of most players, and I think that's to the detriment of the average player.

I asked about keeping the party cards several years ago so we could crunch data to provide to Jeff. That didn't keep them then and it very much sounded like there wasn't interest to do so. That might have changed since then though.

If all party cards were collected, I wouldn't have issue putting them into something that Jeff and Co could look at. Though if we eventually get to digital party cards the data could be stored and analyzed as well.

Here's a crazy idea. My group has talked about the idea that TD could be infinitely scalable with the help of some technology. I think that's not actually realistic for every run because relying that much on technology means lots of problems when it doesn't work. So, what if instead, we scale back and really standardize (and stop shifting up) the lower levels to where you could actually have guidelines for players that would give them a pretty good idea what level is right for them. Then, work on this scalable system for the much fewer people at the top. This scalable system would take in the specific party's stats and then scale the stats if each fight/monster as appropriately as possible. I'm sure someone could make an app for that.

jedibcg wrote: If all party cards were collected, I wouldn't have issue putting them into something that Jeff and Co could look at. Though if we eventually get to digital party cards the data could be stored and analyzed as well.

I think that would be awesome and really helpful information.

jedibcg wrote:

Fiddy wrote: Just like we require a unanimous vote for difficulty, I'd think a unanimous vote to ignore the caps should be allowed. That addresses the concerns around solo'ing the dungeon on a lower difficulty or the "no, we really want a cakewalk" concerns.

ICK!!! So a number of players end up on a pug run, they are 'forced' to play normal by 1 player (okay, sure) and they are 'forced' to neuter their builds by 1 player.

It wasn't in that post, but I'm against caps in the first place. I'm saying that if caps ever were to happen the party needs to be able to say no to them.

Picc wrote:

Rob F wrote:
For those that don't favor caps if you were a brand new player walking into TD for the first time and the game had caps on the difficulties (except for the hardest one) do you think you would still enjoy the game and continue down the TD path of playing/Token purchases to where you are today?

In a word no, I would have played once, said meh cool escape room I guess and called it a day. For reference my first run was NM sealich in 2011 (because as a new player I didn't know what that meant and wouldnt have cared anyway). I ran with people who hugely out geared me and that inspired me my letting me see the awesome stuff they could do. If they had been capped so as to not make me feel bad about my admittedly negligible contribution I would have had no intensive to try harder since there was no way to progress anyway. But I get that my experience may just be a product of a different generation.

Oh, we should probably also talk about renaming normal to hardcore to make it more accessible, Nightmare then becomes the old epic, epic becomes Heroic, we might need to revisit this in a few years so we can make Nightmare more accessible too. Don't laugh this 100% happened in world of warcraft and its actively killing the games subscriber numbers.

Actually under my proposed scenario, with no cap on the highest level (which was Nightmare at that time), you would have still had the same experience therefore continued to play.

jedibcg wrote:

Fiddy wrote: Just like we require a unanimous vote for difficulty, I'd think a unanimous vote to ignore the caps should be allowed. That addresses the concerns around solo'ing the dungeon on a lower difficulty or the "no, we really want a cakewalk" concerns.

ICK!!! So a number of players end up on a pug run, they are 'forced' to play normal by 1 player (okay, sure) and they are 'forced' to neuter their builds by 1 player.

I actually think this is ok. The message is.

New player, we welcome you to true dungeon. While you may be playing with seasoned veterans, your experience is important enough to us that we will make sure you can play on normal and participate in the run, rather than just standing around while these other players dominate everything.

This is an extreme example of course, but I think it sends a powerful message to the newer players.

Michelle wrote: I think stat caps at normal is a terrible idea. As several other people mentioned, some players may want to play normal and just be able to enjoy the run without dying. The price of a run has basically doubled since I started playing and I don't want to pay $80 to be dead and not be able to participate for three rooms. I understand that there's non-lethal, but no one wants to play that. Like I said before, my group keeps hoping each year this will be the year the coach says, "yeah, I think you could try hardcore."

Someone mentioned scaling back normal and maybe hardcore and I agree. I think maybe non-lethal should just be gone and normal should be something a run where you can get to the last room alive with your starting back of tokens. That's how it was 8 years ago, and now I have a party decked out in mostly reds who is being told in the coaching room that they recommend normal. We listen, because we want to have a pleasant experience.

I agree too that the leveling between adventures seems to be way off sometimes. Like last year at Gen Con, having a run where most of us took no damage the whole run and the next we were all dead in room five.

A lot of people are asking what percentage of runs are at each difficulty level. That's a question I've asked before and I've yet to see an answer. Coaches/DMs might be able to ballpark what they've seen, but I don't think there's any real data on this. Maybe it would be a good idea to start getting some real data on this. If TD keeps the party cards (which I think they take them from you at the end) they can see what difficulty people are playing on, what classes, and their stats. If you add maybe a little survey at the end like someone mentioned, you can find out how many people died, how much life they had left, you can ask them how they enjoyed it, if it was too easy or too hard, what they liked and what they thought wasn't fun. Relying mostly on the forums for feedback, does not cover the views/options of most players, and I think that's to the detriment of the average player.

Your reasoning that people would be dying with a stat cap on Normal is flawed, at least how I invision the caps working. They would be set to cap people at the upper end of gear for the challenge level, not the lower end. If parties died on Normal with caps it would mean they still weren't sufficiently geared.

Wade Schwendemann wrote:

jedibcg wrote:

Fiddy wrote: Just like we require a unanimous vote for difficulty, I'd think a unanimous vote to ignore the caps should be allowed. That addresses the concerns around solo'ing the dungeon on a lower difficulty or the "no, we really want a cakewalk" concerns.

ICK!!! So a number of players end up on a pug run, they are 'forced' to play normal by 1 player (okay, sure) and they are 'forced' to neuter their builds by 1 player.

I actually think this is ok. The message is.

New player, we welcome you to true dungeon. While you may be playing with seasoned veterans, your experience is important enough to us that we will make sure you can play on normal and participate in the run, rather than just standing around while these other players dominate everything.

This is an extreme example of course, but I think it sends a powerful message to the newer players.

Agree with Wade here.

Michelle wrote: Here's a crazy idea. My group has talked about the idea that TD could be infinitely scalable with the help of some technology. I think that's not actually realistic for every run because relying that much on technology means lots of problems when it doesn't work. So, what if instead, we scale back and really standardize (and stop shifting up) the lower levels to where you could actually have guidelines for players that would give them a pretty good idea what level is right for them. Then, work on this scalable system for the much fewer people at the top. This scalable system would take in the specific party's stats and then scale the stats if each fight/monster as appropriately as possible. I'm sure someone could make an app for that.

I think in theory this is a great idea, and I think I remember others proposing this before. Have a camera take a snap shot of each players Tokens and auto build the party card, and from there use technology downstream to scale the dungeon differently for each run. I would still worry about the party where you have one, or a few players that really out gear the others. It would still be hard to scale the monsters with some players at +20 to hit and others at +5 let's say. The tanks would still do all the "playing" while the lowely geared would probably do more of the watching. And I think the cost to develop and implement something like this would be on the high side. Still worth exploring further though as you could really custom tailor adventures based on characters gear.

Michelle wrote: Here's a crazy idea. My group has talked about the idea that TD could be infinitely scalable with the help of some technology. I think that's not actually realistic for every run because relying that much on technology means lots of problems when it doesn't work. So, what if instead, we scale back and really standardize (and stop shifting up) the lower levels to where you could actually have guidelines for players that would give them a pretty good idea what level is right for them. Then, work on this scalable system for the much fewer people at the top. This scalable system would take in the specific party's stats and then scale the stats if each fight/monster as appropriately as possible. I'm sure someone could make an app for that.

Gear is not the only factor in success or failure. Ability of the group to work together, solve puzzles, slide well, and get the most from the resources available to them are all just as important.

I have a handful of mostly-disconnected comments, and unfortunately not much in the way of solutions, but maybe some of you who have been at this longer than I have can make something from it heh.

One of the things Fantasy Flight Games (FFG) uses for their organized play is the concept of a restricted list - cards you can have in your deck, but you can only choose one of those cards to use. It's basically a way for them to retroactively limit cards that they realize should never have been printed without making them an auto-include in every deck. I wonder if just enforcing something like this at various levels is a quick-and-easy way to reign in some power creep? I saw someone mention limiting the number of UR tokens in normal, or legendaries in hardcore, as a way to keep things in check a bit - though I wonder if that causes big problems with people having their treasure enhancers turned off by being forced to a lower difficulty. Maybe another option would be to cap the number of slotless items that can be worn?

One of the oft-forgotten guidelines to engineering and design is that more complexity is best avoided. If there's a way to solve your problem by taking away or simplifying rules rather than adding new ones, that is often the more elegant solution. Easier said than done and I have no great ideas on how to do that, but it's something to keep in mind if anyone comes up with a suggestion for that. (At the very least, I'd look at that as something going forward - a request to avoid adding new slots to fill).

As an observation - as a new player at GenCon 2018, one of the obvious problems I saw with the token system in general was that there is a pay-to-win element to the game, and that power creep means the barrier to entry is only going to get higher. Whether that problem is real or perceived is another matter entirely - we ended up running a sealed quest with no problems on normal, then the rest of our runs were relatively smooth as well. I've heard from a few friends that the 2018 dungeons were a jump in difficulty over previous years, so if our group of <40 tokens to our name - mostly commons at that - was able to stumble through with just a couple people in better gear, maybe there's less paywall than it seems.

There's something to be said for the newer players' unintentional slowplaying of a boss encounter as well. Two rounds of attacks plus push damage at low difficutlies may be comparable to 3 rounds of getting hit by the boss and has the same effect of getting to the next room to continue the adventure. So there is a self-correcting gimmick that newer players actually end up in a situation where their damage output may be straight-up irrelevant. Some of us got talked into a hardcore run at PAX this year and we never killed a monster, but the only players to die got auto-killed by Byfrost rather than damage.

I feel like a lot of the need to create and enforce balance comes from co-op board games and video games. There's a goal of saying "I finished this and accomplished it fair and square." If you can accomplish it by just throwing a wallet at it, that cheapens it a bit - but the vagueness of what constitutes "enough" gear is problematic. Where am I bringing the party down? Where am I trivializing this for someone else? I would personally advocate stat caps, down-sync'ing, or some system to that effect, but in their absence I would strongly request clearer guidance on recommended gear levels.

… Like I said, it's an eclectic collection of thoughts rather than any real solutions or offers, but hopefully that's useful. Thanks for reading my post.

Matt Robisch wrote: I have a handful of mostly-disconnected comments, and unfortunately not much in the way of solutions, but maybe some of you who have been at this longer than I have can make something from it heh.

One of the things Fantasy Flight Games (FFG) uses for their organized play is the concept of a restricted list - cards you can have in your deck, but you can only choose one of those cards to use. It's basically a way for them to retroactively limit cards that they realize should never have been printed without making them an auto-include in every deck. I wonder if just enforcing something like this at various levels is a quick-and-easy way to reign in some power creep? I saw someone mention limiting the number of UR tokens in normal, or legendaries in hardcore, as a way to keep things in check a bit - though I wonder if that causes big problems with people having their treasure enhancers turned off by being forced to a lower difficulty. Maybe another option would be to cap the number of slotless items that can be worn?

One of the oft-forgotten guidelines to engineering and design is that more complexity is best avoided. If there's a way to solve your problem by taking away or simplifying rules rather than adding new ones, that is often the more elegant solution. Easier said than done and I have no great ideas on how to do that, but it's something to keep in mind if anyone comes up with a suggestion for that. (At the very least, I'd look at that as something going forward - a request to avoid adding new slots to fill).

As an observation - as a new player at GenCon 2018, one of the obvious problems I saw with the token system in general was that there is a pay-to-win element to the game, and that power creep means the barrier to entry is only going to get higher. Whether that problem is real or perceived is another matter entirely - we ended up running a sealed quest with no problems on normal, then the rest of our runs were relatively smooth as well. I've heard from a few friends that the 2018 dungeons were a jump in difficulty over previous years, so if our group of <40 tokens to our name - mostly commons at that - was able to stumble through with just a couple people in better gear, maybe there's less paywall than it seems.

There's something to be said for the newer players' unintentional slowplaying of a boss encounter as well. Two rounds of attacks plus push damage at low difficutlies may be comparable to 3 rounds of getting hit by the boss and has the same effect of getting to the next room to continue the adventure. So there is a self-correcting gimmick that newer players actually end up in a situation where their damage output may be straight-up irrelevant. Some of us got talked into a hardcore run at PAX this year and we never killed a monster, but the only players to die got auto-killed by Byfrost rather than damage.

I feel like a lot of the need to create and enforce balance comes from co-op board games and video games. There's a goal of saying "I finished this and accomplished it fair and square." If you can accomplish it by just throwing a wallet at it, that cheapens it a bit - but the vagueness of what constitutes "enough" gear is problematic. Where am I bringing the party down? Where am I trivializing this for someone else? I would personally advocate stat caps, down-sync'ing, or some system to that effect, but in their absence I would strongly request clearer guidance on recommended gear levels.

… Like I said, it's an eclectic collection of thoughts rather than any real solutions or offers, but hopefully that's useful. Thanks for reading my post.

Great post Matt, a few things in it to think on for sure. And thanks for sharing your experience so far. Always great to get posts from the newer players, helps keep fresh ideas rolling and brings a different perspective to the forums which I think at times is really needed.