Power Creep

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On your left: Four useful cards at the time of their releases but with some draw-back(;). On your right: One card released later that can do the same as those four, AT THE SAME TIME! with no draw-back! ()

Power Creep is a term used in any kind of multi-player game (including Video Games, Collectible Card Game and Tabletop Games) to describe the process in which newly-added-content can be played along with the old-content, but with the new content being far more powerful/useful in every sense. These process leaves old-content completely worth-less, save for few exceptions and for Cherry Tapping.

This makes sense, at least for a monetary point of view. New-added-content requires people to actually buy it and use it, but why would they use their money to buy some obscure thing they don't know how to use (yet) if they can keep on using their awesome Infinity+1 Sword by paying 5 mana? Easy, make every new content item a Inifinity+2 Sword which requires 3 mana to work. And the same will happen in the next expansion, with a Infinity+3 Sword that only cost 2 mana.

The thing is that this gets out of hand really easy, particularly in a Long Runner. After four or five expensions, with the new Infinity+8 Swords that gives you 10 free mana, there is little point in using the Inifinity+3 Sword that cost 2 mana, and let's not talk about the lame Inifity+1 Sword that cost 5 mana!(who'd ever use that anyway?).

A Power Creep virtually always leads to a Broken Base, with the most "conservative" players stating that the new unbalanced content is an insult to the original game (which might be true or not, depeding on the case). On the other hand, there will always be players who like these new adds on, saying that it actually makes the game more fun to play.

Have in mind though that as a general rule, Power Creep has a negative connotation. The reason behind it is that, while there may be some few exceptions, it usually shows that the producers were unable to come up with something interesting and balanced, instead resorting to create an over-powered add on. Power Creep also tends to lead a game beyond it's pre-defined limits, with one of two results: it will becomes a competition of mindless speed, or of predictable slow strategies.

This trope is the Gameplay Mechanics counter-part to Sequel Escalation and Serial Escalation, which refers to narrative or thematic elements.

Compare with Revenue Enhancing Devices. The complete opposite of Promotional Powerless Piece of Garbage, which is a new content which is actually unusable.

Not to be confused with Power Creep, Power Seep.

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Examples of Power Creep include:

Tabletop Games

Tabletop RPGs

• As noted e.g. in A Less Travelled Road articles here and here on Infinite Stars blog/zine, Traveller inevitably and rather quickly became a victim of the Modifier Creep. In part because with 2d6 main roll any modifier is a big deal, much more significant than for linear and almost twice as wide 1d20 distribution (where +1 bonus moves 1/20 of the rolls from "failure" to "success"), thus Splatbooks introducing more adjustments necessarily either bend the game balance too much (if cumulative with what existed before — 5× +1 turns an even chance into certain success, 5× -1 turns it into a certain failure), or become meaningless mechanics-wise (if not cumulative — your second source of +1 bonus at least may be a fallback in case the first is negated somehow, but adding another 3 of them simply does nothing).
  • While narrowing the scope of adjustments (via specialization and conditions) can noticeably slow down the Modifier Creep, another problem brought by a stream of splatbooks is Complexity Creep, and such rules would obviously contribute to it more.
  • Modifier Creep and Complexity Creep in the mechanics corresponded with Scale Creep in the setting (maybe even encouraged it: growth in power and complexity clashes less with bigger things and wider scopes that are supposed to contain more power and complexity). New content pushes in the same direction: you want more shipyards building all those Extra Custom variant ships for much the same roles, and perhaps some bigger ships for more custom equipment, so the market grows, and navy grows, and the next time you look at it, it's…

not 4x 1,200 dton cruisers per subsector, but rather multiple 30k dton cruisers. This costs a lot of money, and a loose Imperium or pocket empires as implied by books 1-3 can't finance and maintain such an expensive fleet. So then came a huge, powerful Imperium of 11,000 worlds with strong Imperial rule and large interstellar military presence making piracy and smuggling much less feasible.

Trading Card Games

• Wizards has been aware of power creep for quite some time, and has taken measures to significantly slow it down it in Magic: The Gathering. For example the format Standard, formally known as type 2. This works through Standard's defining feature. It's card pool uses only cards from recent sets. Development does something Rosewater calls the Escher stairwell. One thing is powerful, and then in the next set something else is powerful and what was made powerful before isn't as powerful in this set, and remember Standard only makes use of recent sets so what is powerful rotates, and thus power creep is slow to grow in eternal formats (which don't rotate) like modern. Changes that might look like the result of (bad) power creep to someone unfamiliar with the mysterious ways of R&D may just because R&D deemed something underpowered, not to outclass something existing so you get the new thing. Creatures have crept up in power over the years along almost every possible metric. Force Of Nature was the original strongest creature in the game, a 8/8 (for 6 mana) that you need to keep paying mana in order to keep alive and lacks any useful powers. Compare Emrakul, the current strongest creature, a 15/15 (for 15 mana) that still needs host of special powers to be relevant. The old creatures were terrible from a competitive standpoint compared with other ways to play the game. Largely because removal was cheap (and in some formats still is) and big creatures were very expensive (with in-game resources, not necessarily cash) and the big ones had horrible drawbacks, so their wasn't as much reward to play creatures, as there is now. If an entire card type with large diversity is barely being used on a competitive level, something is wrong. Infact creatures used to be so terrible that some competitive players usually got away with sucking at how to deal with creature combat simply because the intricacies didn't come up (because the creatures sucked at the time).
  • A better comparison to Force of Nature would be Terra Stomper. For a more flexible cost you get the same creature without the detrimental upkeep costs, and a cannot be countered perk.
  • On the other hand, several mechanics have experienced power seep as the developers decided they were too effective or too cheap. Compare Counterspell to Cancel, or Lightning Bolt to Shock.
  • The card draw effects they print get nerfed periodically and still manage to be metagame-defining.
  • The effect is most clearly seen on creatures. One only needs to compare Serra Angel, a creature that was at one point removed from the core set for being too powerful, to Baneslayer Angel, a sort of okay creature.
• The Pokémon Trading Card Game similarly raises the bar for each generation. In the 1st generation, Stage 2 Pokémon (Pokémon who have evolved twice, like Charizard) were lucky to have 120 HP. In the 5th generation, Basic Pokémon (Pokémon who don't evolve or haven't evolved) get published with this much HP or more in every set, with evolved Pokémon approaching 200 HP. Attacks have since increased in damage and Energy costs too. It has gotten to where Base Set Venusaur's "Energy Trans," which allows free transfer of Energy between Pokémon, was a near Game Breaker in the card game's earliest days but the more recent Meganium Prime from HeartGold/SoulSilver, which has the same power, was quickly brushed aside for quicker and more powerful cards.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!, as seen in the above image and caption.

Video Games

• Kingdom of Loathing has had this in spades. An example would be the power difference between the formerly-awesome Green Pixie (2007) and the Pair of Stomping Boots (2011). Both familiars attack monsters and drop items that can be used to generate turns, but the Stomping Boots does those things better and also can be used to save turns.
• Warframe essentially made standard mods and warframes without large area-of-effect attacks completely obsolete when rare mods with crazy upsides supposedly balanced by massive downsides were added to the game. The meta in high-level missions consists of entire squads of instant room clearers modded for ability power and ability range up the wazoo with little regard for anything else. Any different build is a liability.

Web Comics

• Full Frontal Nerdity shows a slightly exaggerated wargame variant here.