This particular topic comes to us by way of Mike Shea’s blog, “Sly Flourish“, which had an article this morning about player resistances in 4th Edition D&D. The article is a good read on that particular topic, but the last paragraph hints at a larger concept that a lot of GMs fail to understand:
Above all, however, remember that resisting damage is one of the things players enjoy about their characters. Don’t steal it from them. Let them resist most of the attacks of a loathsome beast if it happens to work out that way. For normal encounters, players should feel powerful. For those particular boss battles, however, you may need to step in to ensure the threat stays high.
Emphasis mine. Mike’s point can be summed up with just a paraphrase of that emphasized bit: “If your players enjoy something they’ve worked for, don’t take it away from them.” This is a corollary to the Rule Of Fun—the entire gaming hobby is pointless if its players aren’t having fun, so keep it fun by letting your players earn and keep rewards.
How many times have you seen a player acquire some new ability in a game, whether passive (like resistances or an ability to overcome damage soak) or active (like a new spell-like ability or a teleportation power), only for it to quickly lose relevance because in practically every encounter the GM negates it? I’ve seen it happen far too many times (and it’s happened more than once to me.) While this occasionally stems from the insecurity of a power-tripping GM (which are otherwise well beyond the scope of this article), I believe that most of the time there’s a more benign (though still unacceptable) explanation: Creative inertia.
Most GMs (including myself) tend to fall into certain habits when creating challenges for the players to overcome. New character abilities can quickly make those challenges, and even entire categories of challenges, far easier than they once were if the GM doesn’t adjust. (A classic example is the acquisition of mind-reading powers by a psion or enchanter in D&D; such powers dramatically change how investigations play out.) An intellectually lazy GM who can’t adjust to the new circumstances is often very tempted to say “Well, this guy’s immune to your new power” or to up a target’s damage or to make them immune to mind-reading–in short, the uncreative GM simply declares that things are as they were previously.
Here’s the problem: In doing so, the uncreative GM is declaring that the resources the player has spent in-character–perhaps by saving up money to buy a particular piece of equipment, perhaps by spending time adventuring and recovering magical artifacts, perhaps simply by spending experience points to level up–didn’t actually have any effect on that character. Not only is this immensely frustrating (after all, the player put a lot of time and effort into this too!), it shatters the suspension of disbelief. After all, if there are hundreds of enemies immune to your new power, where there weren’t any before, the world is pretty clearly not internally consistent!
When players earn some new ability by spending resources–whether those be adventuring time, money or experience–they’re doing so to acquire some advantage over the challenges you’ve been throwing at them. It’s critical that the GM let that advantage stand. If that new ability makes your current challenges too easy, the solution is not to take away that new ability; rather, you need to find new challenges for that player (and her character.) And don’t be afraid to let the new abilities lead the way; in the case of resistances, perhaps the character’s new-found resistance to necrotic damage means the party can take on the lich villain at last. In that case, the enemies they’ve been fighting should remain as they are, because they’re no longer the same challenge they were; the players will naturally seek out the greater challenge because they’ve got an advantage that’s in their favor.
This is not to say that the GM should never negate a character’s abilities in some manner, or be careful to never bypass them–but they should do so only to make that challenge stand out from the others. A good GM is constantly looking to make each encounter unique and memorable in its own way; if a player takes on a new ability that makes certain encounters easy, roll with it. They’ll naturally progress to new, challenging encounters and when you do introduce a negation of that new ability in one or two unique encounters, the PCs will remember those all the more readily.
1 Comment until now
This advice is spot on, and I would suggest that you could even take it a step further. Not only should the DM avoid negating the character’s new ability except in certain special encounters, but he should sometimes actually *showcase* it. Make the character’s new ability important to the adventure in some meaningful way, and the player will be that much more psyched and have more fun. If the party would have a very difficult time or could not succeed without that new ability — for example, maybe they can’t get into a complete sealed chamber without the wizard’s new teleportation magic — then the player is likely to cherish his choice and remember/talk about the adventure where it was so important. (Like so many other pieces of advice, you can’t do this all the time, lest things become hard to believe.) In short, don’t shut down the characters’ new abilities — make them vital tools!
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