Levers and Fixes

I’m fascinated by someone in a recording studio working the mixing board. I’m sure I don’t have an ear good enough to fully appreciate all the results of that work, but the thought of doing it is interesting because the adjustments seem very minor but important. One would assume that the person doing it knows that if you slide one lever in a certain way, it’s going to affect other aspects of the recording, and so perhaps other adjustments need to be made.

Game design shares a similar sensibility, where the GM is the sound engineer making adjustments in a studio you designed. I like to think of rules that can be altered in specific ways (with specific results) as levers for the GM to adjust. Make one change, and you might need to make a few others, or at least understand the implications of the change you made. Increase the difficulty to hit a foe in combat, for example, and fight encounters will last longer, any special effects that require a hit will happen less often, and so on.

Let’s talk about levers that a designer can give to a GM to adjust, and how some of this is good and some of it can just create extra work for the GM to make the game function (which isn’t good).

Levers

Levers, in this context, are controls a game gives to a GM to fine-tune things to ensure the group is playing exactly the game they want to play.

Consider experience points (or whatever the game gives to a player to advance their character in some way). While a game can just make this very formulaic, this is an example of a lever I like to give the GM control over. Some groups like to advance their characters more quickly than others—perhaps becoming more powerful is the fun they get from the game. Others like to go more slowly. Perhaps for them, it’s more about the story than the power of the characters.

The same is true for other rewards, like treasure, accolades, boons, or whatever exists in the game in question. These should be adjustable to suit the needs and desires of the GM and players.

However, when providing one of these levers the game then also needs to inform the GM what the effect of adjusting the lever would be, or, conversely, how to adjust the lever to get the effect you want. If you’re playing D&D, for example, and you really love characters from about level 4 to level 8, it should be made clear to the GM how many experience points to award and when to award them to keep player characters in this “sweet spot” longer. Similarly, the GM should understand that if the PCs gain a given amount of treasure, it will affect the campaign in a certain way. Will it make the characters considerably more powerful? Will it impoverish them so that they are strongly motivated by treasure? Will magic items become more important than character abilities, or will the PCs be underequipped at a certain point?

Other levers you might provide GMs are the difficulty of challenges, the length of time between adventures or between scenes within an adventure, starting gear or background options for characters, and so on.

Levers don’t have to be as complicated or precise as the controls in a recording booth. They can be as simple as changing the level of bass or treble on your stereo at home or in your car. But it’s nice, as a GM, to have some tools to perfect the gameplay experience.

Fixes

Fixes are different from levers, although they might seem the same at first. Fixes are things the GM is either told they have to do, or they learn they have to do through experience. They aren’t a matter of fine-tuning, they’re a matter of “the game doesn’t work otherwise.”

Fixes are almost assuredly a symptom of bad design.

Consider a fantasy game where some creatures cannot be harmed by mundane means, and you need magic to face them. The GM might look at magical treasure as a lever, and decide not to give the characters much access to enchanted stuff because they want a low-magic game. The results of this use of the lever in question are either:

1. PCs just can’t face certain creatures and have to run (or find atypical means of success)

or

2. Characters with magic (like a mage) become dominant over the non-spellcasters

If either of these happen once or twice in the course of play, that might be an interesting change of pace, depending on the game or campaign in question. If it becomes the rule of thumb, either result is going to end up with dissatisfied gamers.

However, the game’s rules (or the GM, tired of player complaints) might suggest that this isn’t a lever, it’s a fix. To make the game work, the GM needs to make sure the characters all end up with enough magic to deal with the monsters.

But the trouble with fixes is that they’re usually clumsy. Because now, if the GM hands out magic to make each character viable, how is a low-magic game even possible? Moreover, what’s the point of creatures that require magic to defeat if the GM needs to give everyone magic? If a creature is immune to non-magical attacks but every character has magic, that immunity is a waste of ink on the page of the creature’s stats. It has no meaning.

The true solution to this particular problem needs to come from the game’s designer. It requires a retooling of what immunity to nonmagic attacks means (or perhaps removing it altogether). It’s likely too big an issue to leave to the GM. Even if some GMs make it work, using enchanted treasure as a lever or even a fix, the game should work for all GMs, not just some.

Other fixes often revolve around healing. Hurt PCs need to recover from their injuries to keep going (and so the players can keep playing). But if the game system doesn’t inherently have a method to make this fast enough to please the players or robust enough to keep the characters alive, the GM and even the players are expected to fix it.

Look at (mostly older editions of) D&D and the “cleric issue” wherein someone “had” to play a cleric because the rules provided—getting back 1 hit point for resting a day—wasn’t enough to make the game work. A group of PCs without a cleric was seen as broken, and without one, the GM had to provide some kind of magic or technology to expedite healing.

While healing can be a lever in some games, where the GM can increase or decrease the rate of healing to alter the pace of a game to some desired end, in this case it was simply a fix that had to be implemented at the table.

Games shouldn’t require a GM to fix them. The idea that the GM has to do something like that points at a problem with the game’s design. Even when the needed fix isn’t too difficult, it often requires a fundamental change to something in the game, not just a little tweak. It seems almost ridiculous to have to say it, but game designers need to recognize the difference between the two, and provide needed information on the anticipated results of adjusting the levers, leaving the GM free to do so.