Design Room: System Mastery

System Mastery is a game design philosophy which basically holds these truths as the most important goals in the design:

• Players should be able to 'master' the game system
• The following choices should be supported in every game system:
• Good choices
• Neutral (bad) choices
• Bad choices

It sounds great on paper, right? Who wouldn't want to 'master' a game system by learning it and doing really well within the choices presented? This happens in a degree with all game designs, but System Mastery seeks to empower experiences players by giving them optimal paths through a game's rules.

Don't confuse this with learning a game and doing well at it, because System Mastery requires that non-optimal paths be present in every game system, rules systems, equipment, spells, powers, feats, and every other piece in the game presenting a player choice. These non-optimal paths are designed in on purpose to be 'weak choices' and are often presented as cool and useful options. There is an element of deception and a shell game going on by the game designer, because part of the game design theory is to present every option as equal and optimal, yet purposefully designing some options as less optimal.

What does this do? It typically triples the amount of options you need in every system in your game, because you are deliberately designing in bad choices and cruft. You need more spells, more feats, more equipment, more powers, and more of everything in order to have the room for bad choices to exist. It can be argued neutral and semi-useful choices can be lumped into the bad ones because they are on non-optimal paths. The worst result of designing System Mastery into your game is it triples the amount of rules you need to support actions, because you need to design non-optimal paths through every action supported by the rules, combat, movement, melee systems, and every other action that can be taken by a character in a rules system needs good, neutral, and bad paths through it.

It is interesting to note that games such as World of Warcraft have abandoned System Mastery in some aspects. WoW's talent system went from a system mastery style setup of optimal paths to one that gives equal and valid choices. For World of Warcraft's old talent system, the optimal paths would be figured out by the Internet within hours of the changes and the best paths published for everyone to see. This eliminates the design goal of System Mastery because in an ecosystem where everyone can make the same choices freely, everyone shares knowledge and copies each other. The new system is a lot better and eliminates bad choices (it is limited, though).

It is important to highlight that - shared knowledge invalidates the major design goals of System Mastery. The best builds will be calculated instantly, the "scripts" for everyone to follow will be published online, choices will be limited, and there is no discovery. This happens in all games to an extent, but in games with the "best paths" designed in? Those get found and shared instantly, and the best build becomes the only build.

System Mastery is present in the original and current designs of Magic the Gathering, and it influenced the design of D&D 3.0 and continues in Pathfinder. It works a lot better in Magic the Gathering than it does in pen-and-paper games because there is an element of scarcity in MtG that does not exist in pen-and-paper and online games. If the supply of a great and optimal card is limited and the card is very rare, its value increases, and it can be an optimal choice because there aren't that many of them in the world to choose from. You can go out and pay a lot of money for that option, or you can deal with a sea of less optimal choices within your budget.

System Mastery in MtG is supported by the free market and scarcity, and it works better under this model since your choices are dictated by what you have and what you can get within your means. With pen-and-paper games and also MMOs, the model doesn't work as well. There are infinite amounts of feats, spells, and other items to use to create "best builds" with.

In MMOs and role playing games, bad choices get used rarely - everyone knows the non-optimal builds, and players choosing those options are seen as weaker and are thus less desirable players. The goal of System Mastery becomes a false goal because optimal paths are figured out and the best performing players choose the best builds. Because the best builds are the top performers, the game's content is often balanced around the highest DPS and most effective builds, further marginalizing players who do not make the same choices - they can't play at high levels because they aren't following the best performing designs.

This is the negative feedback effect of System Mastery. Since the best players are using the best builds - the game gets balanced for those. You get into that MMO situation where "any other build" is non-optimal and will not be able to participate in high-level content.

It's a funny symptom of games following System Mastery as a design goal, they tend to profess infinite choice, but they actually have very few real choices if you want your character to perform and be able to participate in the toughest end-game content. This is more true in MMOs than pen-and-paper games, of course, but pen-and-paper balance has been a hot topic recently, and the concept of "game breaking builds" is a subject of discussion nowadays.

Game breaking builds are more of a problem in System Mastery games because it isn't always possible to test every conceivable combination of optimal paths across all your game's systems. Like World of Warcraft, when you have System Mastery, you tend to get a lot of game design churn with patches, OP builds being nerfed, "why bother" builds, and other problems that come as a result of deliberately designing in optimal paths. The churn in these games is high as errata and patches are issued, and then a new build is discovered and quickly becomes OP. It is an endless cycle, because all of your optimal paths are identified and the process starts over again because of relative power between the optimal and non-optimal paths.

With pen-and-paper games, patching and errata becomes a source of pain quickly. D&D 4's endless errata to balance the system invalidated the printed books within weeks of release, once the inevitable patch came out to remove exploits your hardcopy was worthless compared to the online info in Character Builder. Many players we knew avoided buying the books, and instead just subscribed to Character Builder to play because the investment in the books was devalued once the game was patched. In other games where they don't patch as much, the OP builds are left to sit out there, and it is up to the referee to disallow them.

In old-school OGR games, System Mastery was often, "Let's not do anything stupid to get the party killed." Many choices were equal and optimal, and you were limited by a depleting supply of resources (and often a rapidly shrinking carrying capacity as you collected loot). If you were smart enough to figure out the chess piece puzzle, you took hints in the room description and avoided the poison gas trap, or realized your party's resources were low and you shouldn't push it - that was smart play. System Mastery in old-school games came from the cleverness of the players and their ability to manage the resources they were given.

Modern games took the concept of System Mastery are embedded that into the rules with the concept of "optimal paths." The Internet for the most part has eliminated the goals of System Mastery, because the choices System Mastery presents are not choices anymore - there are no paths because everyone does the math and publishes them, and then the best choices within each class become the only ones to play and what the highest level content is balanced against.

"Equal but valid choices based on play style" is the more modern design philosophy in games (Play Style Focused), and it's a good thing to see because it support diverse builds, play styles, and it simplifies the game. You don't have to support bad choices anymore, because every choice is valid and supported given a play style. You don't need rules paths that lead to less-optimal results, and your spells and powers can be simplified and focused towards being optimal choices for play styles rather than a huge pot of choices with good and bad choices fore "general" play. You do less with more, and every choice is a good one.

It is often better to define and support diverse play styles (PvP, PvE, leveling, role playing, etc) than it is to support one play style (DPS focused, usually). System Mastery typically is focused on "beating the content" and usually does not have room to support more than that because of the complexity and choice-set needed to support the system.

It is a fascinating theory in game design, one which works well in systems with limited resources and physical scarcity, but one that often has difficulty in systems with infinite choices and resources. It is also a legacy of D&D 3 upon modern roleplaying games and also some MMOs, and it is interesting to see some games (WoW) abandon the design theory for more sustainable game design theories for their game model, while some continue on because the model works because of other factors (MtG).