On Niche Protection, Part II

How to Create Niches Where None Exist

Last week I delved into the tabletop RPG game design principle of niche protection and explained why it’s crucial for good gameplay. I explored some genres that suffer from poor niche protection, and then explained how “magic” (broadly construed) can overcome this problem — but only at the cost of fundamentally changing the genre.

Today we’re going to explore some other ways to create niches where none exist. But first, we’ll start with how not to do it.

Quantitative Differences

Virtually all TTRPGs assigns characters a number or mathematical rating that determines how good they are at succeeding in various tasks. The specifics of this can vary; some will use a combination of attribute and skill, some will use attribute, class, and level, some take into account differences in equipment, magic, etc.

And virtually all TTRPGs structure their character creation so that no character can be good at everything. Characters might be limited by a choice of race, class, template, and/or clan, by chance, by career, or simply by limited characters points. These are quantitative differences.

But just because different characters have quantitative differences in their ability to perform different tasks does not mean that the game has niche protection. Purely quantitative differences don’t usually create niches. This is the most common error that game designers make when evaluating niches.

Consider a hypothetical party consisting of Rinaldo and his seven companions (a mix of PCs and henchmen). Rinaldo is particularly expert at some task — let’s say at finding secret doors. He can succeed on a roll of 3-6 on 1d6, a full 66% of the time. The other seven companions are not proficient, and they succeed only on a roll of 6 on 1d6, just 16% of the time. Is “finding secret doors” a niche for Rinaldo?

No! TTRPGs are played in groups, and a niche has to be understood in the context of a group. In our hypothetical, Rinaldo has a 66% chance of finding a secret door. His party members collectively have a (1-(0.166^7)) = 73% chance of finding a secret door. Odds are, at any point in the adventure, one of the other party members is more likely to find the door than Rinaldo is.

Purely quantitative differences can almost never create niches because they can virtually always be overcome by simply applying more bodies. If we were discussing this in business strategy terms, we would say that these differences do not generally provide a sustainable competitive advantage because a competitor that simply has more scale can always overcome your advantage.

In my opinion, Classic Traveller and Mongoose Traveller have suffered from this problem for years. Only when Omer Golan-Joel and his co-writers at Stellagamma added feat-like abilities to the game’s attributes and skills was this problem solved — and solving it helped make their version of Cepheus a huge success.

However, we should not discount quantitative differences entirely. They are important to niche protection, but only when combined with qualitative differences.

Qualitative Differences

In TTRPG terms, a qualitative difference occurs when one character can do something that another character cannot. In some games, a qualitative difference occurs from an exceptions-based mechanic, such as a feat. In others, it’s built into classes or levels. In either case, the effect is similar. E.g. if Athelstan can wear heavy armor while Rinaldo can only wear light armor, then that’s a qualitative difference. Qualitative differences are very effective at creating niches.

Most modern TTRPGs make an effort to offer qualitative differences during character creation, but as often as they try, they often fail to matter.

The most common reason a qualitive difference fails to matter is because the designer evaluates “do something” based on the task process and not on the task outcome. Imagine that Rinaldo can climb walls, and no one else in the party can do so. Rinaldo has a niche. Now imagine that everyone else in the party can fly. Rinaldo’s niche has been destroyed, because the outcome (get to the top of summits) is available to everyone even though the process is not. This sounds trivial, except we see just this with thieves and magic-users in many versions of D&D. You have a chance to pick a lock? I just use knock. You have a chance to hide in shadows? I just cast invisibility.

It’s for this reason that thieves are sometimes discarded as unnecessary by old-school gamers. Their reasoning is that either thieves do things that every sword-and-sorcery hero ought to be able to try (like eavesdropping or sneaking or climbing) or thieves do things that mages are better at. In either case, there’s no niche for the thief. Solving this problem has been the bugbear of five generations of game designers.¹

The problem is much wider than just thieves, of course. D&D 3.5E is notorious for its linear fighters and quadratic wizards. In my framework, part of this problem is that wizards were able to eliminate all of the qualitative differences the rules otherwise imposed.

There is one further problem that qualitative differences can introduce: player traps. By this I mean a choice made when building a character that seems useful or effective but is actually inferior to other choices available. D&D 3E was riddled with these — on purpose. The designers were inspired by Magic: The Gathering, which frequently makes “Timmy cards” that are flavorful and fun but not effective for tournament play. Adopting a competitive collectible card game design methodology into a cooperative role-playing game turned out to be a very bad idea, and Monte Cook and 3E are rightly criticized for their “Ivory Tower” design approach.

Despite these problems, qualitative differences are the most important and valuable weapon in our niche-creation arsenal.

Operational Differences

An operational difference occurs when one character operates on a shorter- or longer- time horizon than another character. Operational differences can create niches when gameplay is distributed across the time horizon it covers.

The classic example of an operational difference is the D&D fighter and magic-user. A 1st level fighter’s primary action is to attack, and he can attack once per combat round. A 1st level magic-user’s primary action is to cast sleep, but he can cast sleep only once per day. However, the magic-user’s sleep is much more powerful than the fighter’s attack. This creates a dynamic in which the fighters must shoulder the burden of most encounters, but the magic-user can intervene at a climactic moment to demolish the opposition. Players who enjoy constant go-go-go enjoy fighters; players who enjoy patiently waiting for an opportune victory prefer mages.

Operational differentiation used to be very popular in game design (it’s all over early D&D). The problem with operational differentiation, however, is that it only works when gameplay is distributed across the time horizon it covers. As soon as players figure out that there are operational differences in gameplay, they will seek to circumvent them by manipulating in-game time. That, in turn, results in the obliteration of the niche.

In D&D the operational differences between fighter-types and spellcasters led to the rise of the so-called “15 minute adventuring day,” in which adventurers would explore and fight for a few brief moments, expending all of their spells, and then retreat from the dungeon until the next day, when spells had become available again. That, in turn, meant that the operational difference between fighters and spellcasters was destroyed, because the fighter time horizon never mattered. That lead to an exacerbation of “linear fighter, quadratic wizard” and resulted in people abandoning classes that couldn’t cast spells.

Dungeons & Dragons 4E decided to eliminate operational differences entirely, and 5E has more-or-less followed suit. All character classes now have powers that are available all the time, powers that are available once per short rest, and powers that are available once per long rest.

Operational differences therefore only work when the game provides mechanical or narrative reasons why the time horizons cannot be manipulated. D&D 3.5 failed to do so — in fact, it’s staged encounters with challenge ratings did the opposite, by encouraging the 15 minute adventuring day — but it’s not an impossible challenge. Gurus like Jeffro Johnson, BDubs, and Brian Renninger have shown that patron-based gameplay can help address the problem in D&D. Ars Magica, meanwhile, showed how a troupe-style model with multiple characters, with gameplay alternating between seasons at the covenant and adventures abroad, could maintain operational differences. (In general, Ars Magica is an underrated gem of superior game design. In any just world it would be considered one of the finest TTRPGs ever created.)

Teleological Differences

In most tabletop RPGs, all of the characters are rewarded in the same way for the same goals. In the early editions of D&D, the goal was to bring treasure back to town, and experience points were awarded on an objective basis, 1 XP per 1 GP. In more story-centric games such as Star Wars D6, the goal was generally to “beat” or “play through” the adventure scenario the GM had devised, and the GM would subjectively award character points based on the players’ efforts and role-play.

Some TTRPGs are designed so that each character is rewarded in a different way for accomplishing different goals. These games create teleological differences between characters. In D&D 2E, for instance, fighters got more XP for defeating monsters, thieves got XP for garnering treasure, and spellcasters got XP for casting spells. In the starter scenario for the recent Aliens RPG, each individual character has a separate story goal. Such games can create gameplay niches through this teleological difference.

Teleological differences can create very diverse gameplay. Players are encouraged to take greater risks in order to accomplish their personal objectives. When teleological differences are combined with quantitative, qualitative, and operational differences, the players may end up playing very different games within the same campaign.

The drawback to teleological differences is that…the players may end up playing very different games within the same campaign. In a traditional gaming group, this can slow gameplay to a crawl, and create unwelcome disharmony among friends. However, teleological differences can be awesome in patron-style games, or games with multiple tiers of play.

My most popular game, Adventurer Conqueror King System, is loosely divided into an “adventuring” and “conquering” tier. In the “adventuring” tier, all of the player characters are rewarded for defeating monsters and recovering treasure. This creates a harmony of interest in the party. In the “conquering” tier, however, the rewards vary depending on the type of campaign activity the player character pursues. Characters who rule domains are rewarded with gold and experience for building a large, thriving domain. Characters who wage war are rewarded for winning battles, pillaging settlements, and other military victories. Characters who run thieves’ guilds are rewarded for the successful hijinks of the ruffians that work for them. Characters who engage in magic research are rewarded for designing new spells, creating magic items, and performing ritual magic. The fact that there are so many campaign activities creates a number of new niches — the same class (say, mage) might specialize in mass combat or in magic research. Neither choice would diminish his capabilities in adventuring. It’s a force multiplier for niching.

But, it must be admitted, the transition from adventuring to campaigning is the most challenging part of ACKS and the disharmony of interests it can introduce have frustrated more than one GM and gaming group. My most recent ACKS work has focused on making the teleological differences more harmonized without compromising the niches.

The Complexity Trade-Off

All of the above solutions to the problem of niche protection have drawbacks. Some of these drawbacks I’ve mentioned above — 15 minute adventuring days, player traps, quadratic mages, player disharmony, and so on. Ubiquitous to all of them is the problem of complexity. Adding mechanics to protect niches, especially when the mechanics involve exceptions-based feats and powers, can hugely increase the size and scope of the game’s rules.

There are no perfect solutions in tabletop role-playing games because (as I’ve mentioned in earlier articles) players can have contradictory requirements for what they want out of a game. Some players want realism and complexity, some want speed and simplicity. And some want toasted snow: “realistic World War II action that takes into account hit location, weapon type, range, and cover… that’s really simple and plays fast, without any table look-ups or a lot of die rolling.” OK, then.

Depending on the players’ preferences, some game groups are not going to want to see any or all of these approaches used. Here are some examples of game groups who don’t need to worry about anything I’ve written:

• Game groups who prize simplicity over all other factors²

• Game groups whose players are so skilled at role-playing that they can magnify trivial differences into robust theatrical meaning³

• Game groups that are so tiny that niche protection doesn’t even come up⁴

That said, in 40 years of playing tabletop RPGs and 11 years of designing them professionally, I’ve found that for the vast majority of gamers, the complexity trade-off is more than worth it. Games with great niche protection are far more successful commercially than games without it.

Creating Niche Protection: A Real-World Example

In 2015, I ran a Mekton Zeta campaign set in the world of Robotech. The game was set in the aftermath of Earth’s devastation by the Zentraedi, and featured Robotech Defense Force squadrons rooting out Zentraedi from their hideouts in the Amazon rain forest.

In Mekton, all combat is controlled by the REFLEXES (REF) attribute along with the Mecha Piloting, Mecha Gunnery, Mecha Fighting, and Mecha Missiles skills. A linear tally of these points determines your chance to hit, dodge. A pool of points called the Maneuver Pool serves like Hero Points or Bennies; the size of the Maneuver Pool is determined linearly by your Mecha Piloting skill -5. As a result, any and every Mekton player will tend towards REF 10, Mecha Piloting 10, Mecha Gunnery 10, Mecha Fighting 10, Mecha Missiles 10, Maneuver Pool 5. The only question is how close they are to that optimum. There’s very little niche protection in the characters.

Now, the fact that there’s very little niche protection in character creation isn’t a terrible flaw for Mekton. Mekton’s design and default game world assume that differentiation comes from the mecha, with different players utilizing wildly different mecha.

But I wanted everyone in the game to be able to play a Veritech pilot, a la Rick Hunter, Max Sterling, and Roy Fokker. That way it would have the same feel as the anime. But in Mekton, same mecha meant no niche protection. My campaign seemed destined to be struck down by the “everyone wants to be Max Sterling/Red Baron/Usain Bolt” problem.

To solve this problem, I made the following changes to Mekton:

• I divided gameplay into two tiers, a strategic and a tactical. The strategic gameplay took place on the character’s base, and involved them deciding, sandbox-style, how they would attack the Zentraedi in their sector, what they’d prioritize, and what they’d spend their resources on in terms of spare parts, ammo, missiles, new base defenses, new mecha, and so on. The tactical gameplay then followed the players as they carried out the missions they’d just decided to undertake. In the strategic tier, the players were rewarded with military assets, resupply, and promotion for strategic success. In the tactical tier, the players were rewarded for tactical success. This teleological differences helped set the stage for operational differences to matter — the heroes couldn’t just do “15 minute adventures” without losing strategically. They were accountable to themselves.

• To account for the two gameplay segments, I had each player create two characters — one mecha pilot and one base staffer. The number of character points to build the characters, and their rank, were structured such that only one of the two could be an experienced vet; the other would be a low-ranking newb. The player who was the tactical squadron commander was the lowest-ranking member of the base personnel; the player who was the base commander was the lowest-ranking member of the Veritech squadron.

• I changed the rules for Maneuver Pools. Instead of being based only on the character’s Piloting skill, they were based on the character’s COOL attribute. With character points being tightly limited, a player could create a character with maximum REF or with maximum COOL, but not a character with both. Having higher REF meant you had consistently superior performance, but having a higher COOL gave you more Maneuver Pool to spend, giving you the temporary ability to surge to new heights.

• I added new mechanical sub-systems that weren’t based on REF but were still useful in combat, such as battlefield repairs, electronic warfare, and sensor scans. These allowed players to benefit from having high TECH attributes and related skills.

• I added a robust set of feats to the game. The feats were allocated based on which skills were purchased at which ranks and were gated with prerequisites that encouraged specialization. There were far more feats available than any character could purchase, and every single on was useful in a different way. Moreover, all of the feats were designed to work as “force multipliers” for differences I’d already set up, like REF vs. COOL vs. TECH. For example:

  • Ace Piloting: The character is an ace pilot. The character gains a +33% Maneuver Pool modifier. This feat may be selected multiple times, to a maximum 100% Maneuver Pool modifier. Prerequisites:  Base MP 1+

  • Missile Salvo Tactics: The character knows how to program a salvo of missiles for maximum coverage. Targets suffer a penalty to the Evasion roll based on the number of missiles in the salvo that reach them, as shown in the adjoining table. Prerequisites: TECH 7+, Mecha Missiles 4+

  • Technical Gunnery: The character relies on mathematical analysis and instrumentation when firing. Provided his mecha’s Sensors are active, he may substitute his TECH stat for his REF stat when making Mecha Gunnery or Mecha Missiles skill rolls (Maneuver Value penalties still apply). Prerequisites: Electronics Warfare 6+, Electronic Warfare Technician

Using my feat system, a character with a very high COOL might take Ace Piloting in order to maximize his Maneuver Pool. He’d become capable of incredible feats of derring-do, but only while his Maneuver Pool lasted. A character with a high TECH but low REF could focus on electronic warfare and take Technical Gunnery to make up for his poor REF. A character with a high REF might take feats like Missile Salvo Tactics, which increases his already-good chances to hit. You could even specialize in fighter mode, guardian mode, or battloid mode, or with particular weapons, and so on.

With these rules in place, the Robotech Mekton campaign was a great success. Yes, it did make the game more complex, but the trade-off was (for my group) worth it. It was, in fact, successful enough to convince me that I eventually need to design my own complete mecha role-playing game using the same design methodology. If that sounds interesting, be sure to let me know in the comments. And if you’re a Mekton or Robotech fan, you can download a copy of my niche-creating house rules here.

A Special Offer: Axioms Issue 16 for $2.50!

Today I released Axioms Issue 16 on DriveThruRPG. Axioms is Autarch's quarterly supplement for the Adventurer Conqueror King System. Each issue of Axioms offers a mix of short content updates for ACKS, such as new classes, new sub-mechanical systems, explorations of specific themes within the game, short adventure scenarios, and more. 

In this issue, Wounds & Woe, we offer an expansion of the beloved ACKS Mortal Wound and Tampering with Mortality tables. The new Mortal Wound tables deliver different wounds for different weapons, while the Tampering with Mortality tables assign different side effects for different alignments. In addition, we update the modifiers and mechanics to take the victim's age, HD, and other factors into effect.

If you're not familiar with the Mortal Wounds and Tampering with Mortality tables in ACKS, here's some examples of how they work.

Athelstan is a fighter with CON 13 and 20hp. He is reduced to -5hp after being struck by dragon fire. He is immediately incapacitated At the end of the fight, the party's cleric casts Cure Moderate Wounds on his burned body to try to save his life. This triggers a roll of 1d20 and 1d6 on the Mortal Wounds: Fire table. The 1d20 roll is modified by +1 (CON 13), +4 (1d8 HD), -2 (negative 1/4 max hp), +2 (2nd level cure spell), -3 (treated within 1 turn of injury), for a total modifier of +2. Athelstan's player rolls 1d20 and gets a 12+2=14. He rolls 1d6 and gets a 4. Consulting the table, the Judge reveals that Athelstan is critically wounded. He must be healed to at least 1hp within a day or he will expire. If he is healed, will need a week of bed rest before he can adventure again. 

Sadly, Athelstan's friends have no other healing magic available and Athelstan ends up dying. The party carries his body back to town, a 2-day journey, and to the Temple of Mityara. There they make a great donation to the Temple in exchange for the priestess casting Restore Life & Limb (ACKS version of Raise Dead) on him. When she casts the spell, this triggers a roll of 1d20 and 1d6 on the Tampering with Mortality table for Athelstan's alignment (Lawful). The 1d20 roll is modified by +4 (1/2 prieste'ss level), by +2 (cast in temple), -1 (hand destroyed), and -2 (dead for 2 days), for a total modifier of +3. Athelstan's player rolls 1d20 and gets a 3+3=6. He rolls 1d6 and gets a 2. Consulting the table, the Judge reveals that, although Athelstan is restored to life, his soul is permanently connected to the spiritual plane now. He glows like a candle to the unliving, such that all undead can sense his presence within 60'. He will require 14+1d20 days of bed rest to recover from his ordeal before he can adventure again.

While designed for use with ACKS, the systems are compatible with any d20-based fantasy RPG. They add a new level of flavor to the fall and rise of heroes in every campaign.

Click on the link to buy Axioms Issue 16 for just $2.50.

The Time of the Link Clicking is At Hand

Check out the links below for ways to get involved in the Autarch community. If you’re a fan, be kind and spread the word!

• Autarch Discord with ACKS and Ascendant campaigns and chat

• ACKS Patreon with a new article from our Axioms ezine every month

• Ascendant Patreon with a new character and story hook every month

• Autarch Facebook page with news and updates about our projects

• Autarch Twitter channel with brief comments and witty quirks

• Ascendant Comics Facebook page with sneak previews of the upcoming comics

• Ascendant Comics Instagram page with tons of art and cosplay

• Ascendant Comics Twitter channel with short messages and quirky wit

• ACKS Forums with discussion for the game

• Ascendant Forums with FAQ and Errata for the game

1. The Operational Differences section further explores how D&D tries to handle this problem of mages and thieves.

2. These people do not play my games.

3. I am told that these people play my games, but I have never actually played with one. Perhaps years of working in the videogame industry have colored the gamers I encounter.

4. ACKS has henchmen so a small group still ends up large and needs niches. Other games, though, may actually need very broad characters for small groups.