Maintaining a healthy game can be difficult under the best of circumstances.  Trying to keep a game healthy and have fun doing it can be nearly impossible.  Power control, done properly, allows players to have a more enjoyable experience as well as keep the DM’s headaches to a minimum.

Power control, for the purposes of this post refers to balancing the abilities of the player characters in relationship to their world.  In other words it can become an unhealthy game if the players are able to do things that the rest of the world, even the most powerful NPC’s, cannot do.  Another, and perhaps even more damaging situation arises when the power levels among different characters is vastly different.  This can mean that one player has few or very limited options while another can essentially do whatever she wants.

Many players will argue against various forms of power control, though I have known few DM’s who suggest that no form of power control should be implemented.  Those few I have met haven’t run more than a few sessions and are not generally regarded as enjoyable to play with.

Power control does not refer to cheating a player.  If as a game master you made the mistake of allowing a player to have an item or to perform an action which severely disrupts the game, the one paramount rule that you cannot break is that you cannot break the core game rules.  This means that if you have, for example, allowed an item which works spectacularly well with a given power or feat into your game that you cannot then turn around and disallow that feat or power.  This immediately causes resentment and bad feelings.

There are emotions tied to the core rules of any game, but Dungeons and Dragons in particular has as sense of canon with regards to the Players Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide.  Think twice or three times before messing with rules the players consider as gospel.

Some better ways to control power levels include following the rules.  This does not mean rules-lawyering every little point with your players.  It means being fair and consistent with your application of the rules.  Encounter balance, treasure guidelines, and experience awards are there for a reason - they keep the power levels consistent so that players feel a level of challenge without feeling cheated.  If your version of power control is to give your NPC’s a high level magic item which they use to decimate the party (until one of them finds a scheme around your uber encounter and someone rolls a lucky crit), and the party ends up with uber item in their possession, then you may wish to consider the consequences.  Either all monsters you throw out now will have to be more powerful or you will have to have the item (and/or the character with the item) disappear.  Option one means that the game balance will skew out of control quickly.  Option two means the players will be pissed at you personally.

One of the biggest complaints about power control is that it feels so arbitrary.  Any game, especially an RPG will have many arbitrary limits and decisions.  The key is to make the arbitrary feel organized.  Again, consistency is a great tool.  If the players know ahead of time that getting control of an item of immense power will cause them problems then the loss of the item (or even the death of the character) at a later date will feel a lot easier to take.  They may even decide to leave the item alone.

Another way to avoid making decisions that feel arbitrary is to make them ahead of time.  Make as many decisions before the game starts as possible.  How much treasure is availalbe?  Write it down.  Which monsters are available?  Write it down.  If you like to use random encounters then get out the random encounter table an hour before the game and roll up the encounters.  Having 5 minutes to review the encounter to do a sanity check can save you having to scale the encounter up or down on the fly later.

On a side note - those of you who read my site regularly will have guessed I’m not a huge fan of random encounters - if you want to make your encounters feel more random to the players (no idea why you would want to) you can always roll the dice behind the screen anyway.  The players won’t know that you made the encounter up yesterday and that you planned for them to face the lizardmen “randomly” before they found the wounded black bear “randomly”.  They probably won’t even notice at the end of the night they got exactly as much XP as they needed and they all have a well balanced treasure sack.  But you can bet they’ll notice 3 weeks later when its time to level up and nobody is a ton more powerful than anyone else and the campaign still makes sense.

Power control is not about limiting options - it is about creating an enjoyable game.  It is about giving as many options to your players as possible and understanding the consequences of those options.  Understanding that giving out 1/2 a level worth of XP to a specific player while ignoring the rest of the party will not only piss everyone off when they find out, but it will limit the ability of the other characters to contribute to the party.  It will also effectively make the affected character 1/2 a level poorer in terms of gold and wealth (unless that is handed out for free as well).  The point is to be careful here.  It may seem like a good idea to arbitrarily reward a best friend, but ultimately the game will probably suffer.

Setting limits to the game is just one more tool for making the game more enjoyable.

Until next time have fun!

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