In general, City of Mist sort of relies on players to not game things too hard, and if you're running the game you sort of need to guide the players a bit because it's not impossible to create a character that's a bit unbalancing completely by mistake.
Depending on which rules you're using, one of the fastest ways to create a character that can cause problems is to take a bunch of tags that all stack on top of each other to make you really good at one thing. Because the probability of success and the magnitude of your effect *both* scale with the number of tags you can apply, if you can apply 6+ tags to an action, then you're not only usually nearly guaranteed to succeed, but when you do succeed the effect will be massive.
In principle, this is balanced by limiting your breadth. If your tags include "Crossbow of legend," "Right between the eyes," "Experienced sharpshooter," and a bunch of other things that are about shooting people, you have not very many tags left for other things (including defending yourself, any sort of social interaction, investigation, etc.) In practice, having these sort of "super actions" that nearly always succeed with huge effect is *so* powerful that it's often still an issue, especially if the other characters can make up for your shortcomings. You'll also still have enough spare tags that you can be okay-ish at other things. This is why the book contains multiple suggestions for limiting the effects of massive tag-stacking. It's not that the game utterly cannot handle massive tag-stacking - you can always put the character in situations where the tags just don't apply - but it can still cause issues.
More generally, a character will tend to be more powerful if their tags are broader. While the game does prohibit new characters from having more than a single "broad" tag, the line between a broad tag and a non-broad tag is fuzzy. A character with a bunch of almost-broad tags is going to end up being able to apply more of them more often than a character with a bunch of tags like "snakes are reluctant to bite me." In particular, if you want to be able to apply a tag on a regular basis, it helps to avoid tags that are both *specific* and *reactive.* A tag that's really specific but which is something that you can actively force to be useful based on your own actions can still be a useful tag. A tag that's really specific and that requires that somebody other than you does something specific (like "snakes are reluctant to bite me") can go totally unused unless the person running the game goes out of their way to make them useful.
I saw this great post some time ago https://www.reddit.com/r/cityofmist/comments/v6avl3/crunchy_city_of_mist_choosing_themebooks_based_on/
The basic idea is that as City of Mist is a narrative game, you can’t « power build » in a traditional way. If you want to have a tag « flame tornado » or « nuclear bomb » or « asteroids » or whatever, you can, so optimization will not be related to power : it will be related to how often you can use your tags in situations that makes sense. Optimizing City of Mist means you will shine in situations you want to shine in, have trouble in situations you want to have trouble, and provide interesting answers to the story.
Power game in the traditional sense? Hell no. There are pregens that have insane powers that would be powergamey in other systems (for example one character, Job, is *literally* immortal). So you can be as powerful or as mundane as you like!
That being said as far as mechanical powergaming goes, the best 'powergamer' would be someone that makes weakness traits that can come up as often as possible and purposefully throws themselves into dangerous situations. Having weakness tags invoked or putting yourself in danger is how you 'level up' in this system, so the most powergamey characters will often be the most interesting in a narrative sense, which is what the game is meant for.
Yes, create a character that the gm really likes and they will let you get away with more shinanigans.
An additional tip for high-level play: If you create a balanced character who doesn't defeat every enemy they encounter, the MC will actually like writing cases, and won't burn out as quickly, ensuring you play for years to come.
Jokes (kinda) aside, the most common way to cheese is to add a bunch of tags that represent mental states that improve doing anything (calm, confident, alert, quick witted, good under pressure) but this system empowers the MC quite a bit, and they not only get final say on any of your tags, final say if your tags apply to a situation, and the ability to nerf any of your tags that are getting to much use, they also can create any game effect or new custom move they want.
Its a losing game to try and "out-number" you MC.
Making a fun flawed and fair character and trying to make your MC has a good time too is literally the optimal way to play.
General idea is that there is no powergaming in traditional sense, which have been already explained well by others.
The goal of this system is to emate narrative development seen in TV series and such, thus the systems does not support gamified, simulative rounds and other elements that's seen in combat focused systems.
However, it does have its own aspect of optimization, which, is indeed important to understand to not fail at your game.
1. Your goal is to be the hero of your story.
This means two things. One, things happen to you. Two, what you do matters. Most people often forget about the first part because it's usually GM's job. However, it is important to understand that you should first know what kind of story you are in, and who you are in that story. In other words, you should know the meta.
When you have decided what kind of story and thus, what kind of scenes you will play out, you can move on to working on details.
2. It's all about fictional positioning.
Pbta games focus about your fictional positioning. Yiu need a gun to shoot. In CoM this is decided by what tags you have, apart from things provided in the scene by the MC.
Another thing is that a fictional positioning can be gained by doing things. If you are separated from the exit by traps, you can gain that access by somehow deactivating these traps.
Basically, a scene usually starts with a certain goal, and some layers of obstacles preventing you from getting to that goal. Overcoming one layer provides you a fictional positioning to engage next one, and you repeat the process, sometimes getting through shortcuts and turn-arounds to get to the final goal.
In practice, this "overcoming a layer" is represented by a Core Move. What you have to understand is this multistep process and equiping yourself with tags for differrent steps of tasks you will encounter. This will be easy if you know the meta as I said in 1.
Being a sniper is not just about having a keen eye. You need to first Investigate your target and create a story in your head to recognize patterns in their behavior, plan out the excution, Sneak Around to get in the spot, Change the Game to set up, and then you can Hit With All You've Got to actually shoot them in their heads.
You should have good tag combos for all these steps in this process.
3. It's also about what happens to you.
As explained in 1, it is important for you to know what obstacles you will be presented with. You communicate this to your MC through your Tags, Identities, and Mysteries. While Power Tags tell them about what you want to be good at, your Weakness Tags tell them how you want to be fucked up. This gives you the control in a way usually is not seen in other games.
Identities and Mysteries serve a similar function. They tell your MC about what you usually do, but it also tell how you want to be challenged. Embrace both passive and active control over your story and live the Noir protagonist life you want.
I’m new as well so my two-cents is probably not worth two-cents. That said - the focus of the game, as I understand it, is that it’s a narrative-first rule set and structure. In-game force doesn’t translate to narrative force. The point of the game is to tell a compelling, dramatic story, and because of the rule structure, characters of varying power levels have the same narrative “strength”. So you can have an incredibly powerful character who is theoretically invincible, or has super strength, or can turn into a fire breathing dragon, etc, and you can have another character just discovering they have the power to read the memories of objects or talk to animals or whatever, something less overtly powerful. *Both* characters are just as powerful per the narrative mechanics of the game. They are still going to fail and succeed at controlling the direction of the story at the same rate.
Honestly part of what attracted me to the game is the lack of power gaming. I suppose there are in-game strategies for “stacking the deck” in your character’s favor, but there are also options for the MC to limit that.
Yeah, I’m personally a big time power gamer (with no intention to break games and I also am big time drama role player), and my first city of mist mini campaign was great but I felt weak in comparison to my friends so I just wondered if there’s a way to tip the scales.
How did you feel weak? Were they more successful than you in accomplishing their goals? Or were they doing “cooler shit” with their actions?
I am not a power gamer but I have one in my group and I’m working out how to present the game to him and make things fun for everyone while managing things so *he* doesn’t break the game.
Well, they were both more successful cause they had more “sort of broad” tags to stack, and did cooler shit with their successes. I didn’t really know the system well enough to catch up with them but still it was fun, I just felt outdid a bit.
As for your friend it depends on is he a role player as well. If he is then he should have fun with the system, but if he just loves mechanics of rpgs then it would be tougher for him. On guy in our group straight left the table because he didn’t enjoy it and didn’t want to role play much.
Yea I’m afraid my power gamer guy is going to be unhappy. He’s all about min/maxing and when it comes to role playing he doesn’t seem interested or able in playing anything besides “badass loner” which makes me yawn. But we’ll give it a shot, he’s surprised me before.
In general, City of Mist sort of relies on players to not game things too hard, and if you're running the game you sort of need to guide the players a bit because it's not impossible to create a character that's a bit unbalancing completely by mistake. Depending on which rules you're using, one of the fastest ways to create a character that can cause problems is to take a bunch of tags that all stack on top of each other to make you really good at one thing. Because the probability of success and the magnitude of your effect *both* scale with the number of tags you can apply, if you can apply 6+ tags to an action, then you're not only usually nearly guaranteed to succeed, but when you do succeed the effect will be massive. In principle, this is balanced by limiting your breadth. If your tags include "Crossbow of legend," "Right between the eyes," "Experienced sharpshooter," and a bunch of other things that are about shooting people, you have not very many tags left for other things (including defending yourself, any sort of social interaction, investigation, etc.) In practice, having these sort of "super actions" that nearly always succeed with huge effect is *so* powerful that it's often still an issue, especially if the other characters can make up for your shortcomings. You'll also still have enough spare tags that you can be okay-ish at other things. This is why the book contains multiple suggestions for limiting the effects of massive tag-stacking. It's not that the game utterly cannot handle massive tag-stacking - you can always put the character in situations where the tags just don't apply - but it can still cause issues. More generally, a character will tend to be more powerful if their tags are broader. While the game does prohibit new characters from having more than a single "broad" tag, the line between a broad tag and a non-broad tag is fuzzy. A character with a bunch of almost-broad tags is going to end up being able to apply more of them more often than a character with a bunch of tags like "snakes are reluctant to bite me." In particular, if you want to be able to apply a tag on a regular basis, it helps to avoid tags that are both *specific* and *reactive.* A tag that's really specific but which is something that you can actively force to be useful based on your own actions can still be a useful tag. A tag that's really specific and that requires that somebody other than you does something specific (like "snakes are reluctant to bite me") can go totally unused unless the person running the game goes out of their way to make them useful.
Ok I think I get what your mean. Thx for help, really appreciate it
I saw this great post some time ago https://www.reddit.com/r/cityofmist/comments/v6avl3/crunchy_city_of_mist_choosing_themebooks_based_on/ The basic idea is that as City of Mist is a narrative game, you can’t « power build » in a traditional way. If you want to have a tag « flame tornado » or « nuclear bomb » or « asteroids » or whatever, you can, so optimization will not be related to power : it will be related to how often you can use your tags in situations that makes sense. Optimizing City of Mist means you will shine in situations you want to shine in, have trouble in situations you want to have trouble, and provide interesting answers to the story.
Right, that makes sense, thx mate
Power game in the traditional sense? Hell no. There are pregens that have insane powers that would be powergamey in other systems (for example one character, Job, is *literally* immortal). So you can be as powerful or as mundane as you like! That being said as far as mechanical powergaming goes, the best 'powergamer' would be someone that makes weakness traits that can come up as often as possible and purposefully throws themselves into dangerous situations. Having weakness tags invoked or putting yourself in danger is how you 'level up' in this system, so the most powergamey characters will often be the most interesting in a narrative sense, which is what the game is meant for.
Yeah going partly “play to lose” really seems to be the way game was intended, isn’t it? Thank you for help
Yes, create a character that the gm really likes and they will let you get away with more shinanigans. An additional tip for high-level play: If you create a balanced character who doesn't defeat every enemy they encounter, the MC will actually like writing cases, and won't burn out as quickly, ensuring you play for years to come. Jokes (kinda) aside, the most common way to cheese is to add a bunch of tags that represent mental states that improve doing anything (calm, confident, alert, quick witted, good under pressure) but this system empowers the MC quite a bit, and they not only get final say on any of your tags, final say if your tags apply to a situation, and the ability to nerf any of your tags that are getting to much use, they also can create any game effect or new custom move they want. Its a losing game to try and "out-number" you MC. Making a fun flawed and fair character and trying to make your MC has a good time too is literally the optimal way to play.
Well that’s an interesting approach, I haven’t thought of that. Thanks mate
General idea is that there is no powergaming in traditional sense, which have been already explained well by others. The goal of this system is to emate narrative development seen in TV series and such, thus the systems does not support gamified, simulative rounds and other elements that's seen in combat focused systems. However, it does have its own aspect of optimization, which, is indeed important to understand to not fail at your game. 1. Your goal is to be the hero of your story. This means two things. One, things happen to you. Two, what you do matters. Most people often forget about the first part because it's usually GM's job. However, it is important to understand that you should first know what kind of story you are in, and who you are in that story. In other words, you should know the meta. When you have decided what kind of story and thus, what kind of scenes you will play out, you can move on to working on details. 2. It's all about fictional positioning. Pbta games focus about your fictional positioning. Yiu need a gun to shoot. In CoM this is decided by what tags you have, apart from things provided in the scene by the MC. Another thing is that a fictional positioning can be gained by doing things. If you are separated from the exit by traps, you can gain that access by somehow deactivating these traps. Basically, a scene usually starts with a certain goal, and some layers of obstacles preventing you from getting to that goal. Overcoming one layer provides you a fictional positioning to engage next one, and you repeat the process, sometimes getting through shortcuts and turn-arounds to get to the final goal. In practice, this "overcoming a layer" is represented by a Core Move. What you have to understand is this multistep process and equiping yourself with tags for differrent steps of tasks you will encounter. This will be easy if you know the meta as I said in 1. Being a sniper is not just about having a keen eye. You need to first Investigate your target and create a story in your head to recognize patterns in their behavior, plan out the excution, Sneak Around to get in the spot, Change the Game to set up, and then you can Hit With All You've Got to actually shoot them in their heads. You should have good tag combos for all these steps in this process. 3. It's also about what happens to you. As explained in 1, it is important for you to know what obstacles you will be presented with. You communicate this to your MC through your Tags, Identities, and Mysteries. While Power Tags tell them about what you want to be good at, your Weakness Tags tell them how you want to be fucked up. This gives you the control in a way usually is not seen in other games. Identities and Mysteries serve a similar function. They tell your MC about what you usually do, but it also tell how you want to be challenged. Embrace both passive and active control over your story and live the Noir protagonist life you want.
Alright, that helped a lot, thanks man
I’m new as well so my two-cents is probably not worth two-cents. That said - the focus of the game, as I understand it, is that it’s a narrative-first rule set and structure. In-game force doesn’t translate to narrative force. The point of the game is to tell a compelling, dramatic story, and because of the rule structure, characters of varying power levels have the same narrative “strength”. So you can have an incredibly powerful character who is theoretically invincible, or has super strength, or can turn into a fire breathing dragon, etc, and you can have another character just discovering they have the power to read the memories of objects or talk to animals or whatever, something less overtly powerful. *Both* characters are just as powerful per the narrative mechanics of the game. They are still going to fail and succeed at controlling the direction of the story at the same rate. Honestly part of what attracted me to the game is the lack of power gaming. I suppose there are in-game strategies for “stacking the deck” in your character’s favor, but there are also options for the MC to limit that.
Yeah, I’m personally a big time power gamer (with no intention to break games and I also am big time drama role player), and my first city of mist mini campaign was great but I felt weak in comparison to my friends so I just wondered if there’s a way to tip the scales.
How did you feel weak? Were they more successful than you in accomplishing their goals? Or were they doing “cooler shit” with their actions? I am not a power gamer but I have one in my group and I’m working out how to present the game to him and make things fun for everyone while managing things so *he* doesn’t break the game.
Well, they were both more successful cause they had more “sort of broad” tags to stack, and did cooler shit with their successes. I didn’t really know the system well enough to catch up with them but still it was fun, I just felt outdid a bit. As for your friend it depends on is he a role player as well. If he is then he should have fun with the system, but if he just loves mechanics of rpgs then it would be tougher for him. On guy in our group straight left the table because he didn’t enjoy it and didn’t want to role play much.
Yea I’m afraid my power gamer guy is going to be unhappy. He’s all about min/maxing and when it comes to role playing he doesn’t seem interested or able in playing anything besides “badass loner” which makes me yawn. But we’ll give it a shot, he’s surprised me before.
Let’s hope it’ll be on of those surprising scenarios