In my RPG Annoyances post, I forgot to discuss one significant problem, which is that RPGs tend to work well in a certain “average” set of cases, but fail to scale well outside of the range it’s originally designed for.
To illustrate, imagine that the game was originally designed to deal with heroic characters who are Hominoids in a medieval setting. Combat was worked out to work very well for characters of a similar experience level and size, but problems could arise when we try to add in much larger creatures like trolls or dragons. Are the trolls as strong as our initial expectations inform us? Or can one warrior with a sword somehow slay a magical, fire-breathing, 3000 year old, 50 ton & 120 ft long dragon? Many existing games have this issue with size not scaling proportionally to expected effectiveness in the game.
Additionally, some games will later create add-on rules to address this deficiency, but usually end up creating a huge set of exceptions rules, making the game quite large, and likely will lead to inconsistencies in rules. This is also detrimental because we don’t want to learn an excessive amount of rules, and we don’t want rules that are contradictory.
The solution to scalability is deliberate system design with these issues in mind. Most games focus solely on the “average” case, and get into trouble when they start expanding the possibilities. One needs to consider the breadth of scaling issues from the beginning, because this will require the core of your game to be designed in a fundamentally different way. And if this is done, there will be no need for encyclopedia-sized expansion compendiums when new content of different scales is added.
[...] Scalability [...]