Before I start explaining why Performance is a designer trap, I should explain what a designer trap is. To understand that, we need to understand what a design trap is. A design trap is a player choice that looks beneficial but does not provide appropriate benefit. Now for some examples.
In original wow, now known as WoW Classic, when you leveled up, you learned new ranks of spells that were stronger more powerful versions of those spells. Naturally, you would just assume to start using the stronger version of the spell, rank 2 fireball does 45 damage up from rank 1 fireball that does 30 damage. This natural thought process was wrong for casters and especially healers. Because the lower ranks cost less mana, those versions of the spell were used when mana needed to be conserved and you still wanted chances to proc passives or talents. This is a design trap because the natural thought process of a player is to just use the newer bigger spell always, when in actuality maintaining access to some lower rank spells was crucial to maintaining your mana. This design trap was fixed in the first expansion, Burning Crusade.
Another example, In modern Call of Duty, players are taught to use C4 one way. press the use C4 button to throw then, when all of your C4 is thrown and attached to a location, press the button again to detonate that C4. But another use of C4 exists that is better in almost every way. The C4 can be tossed and detonated, 1 at a time, in the air by pressing the general “use” button twice. This is another example of a design trap as one option is better, but the existence of both leads player to believe that both options have their uses. That in itself is the design trap.
So now that I have explained design traps, I can move on to a designer trap. A designer trap is a mechanic that game designers adopt or add that creates a design trap within their game. I will admit, I fell into this trap. When analyzing other systems for the skills they included in their system, I considered each skill as a method to solve a problem and checked whether I needed to be able to solve those problems. Thus, skills like Performance were added. As I refined my list, some skills were removed, and other added, but I never found something to answer the “What if a player wants to be good a playing an instrument, singing, etc”, as a result, Performance stayed.
That was the mistake. I was looking at the Performance skill through a different lens than all of my other skills. All current skills are methods to solve a problem, you want to look for more information? Awareness; you want to fiddle with something mechanical? Tinker. If a player wanted to put on a performance, what would they be trying to do? Draw attention or distract in some way, right? But I already have a skill that does exactly that, its called Misdirection. So why did Performance last so long? Its because I was looking at it like a background of a character, to accommodate Bard like characters, while all other skills were being looked at through the lens of how would a player use this to solve a problem. This was a designer trap because Performance as a skill was a design trap in my game. It was a niche skill, that would rarely get used, and every case that it could be used would almost always be covered by the Misdirection skill, so any player that took points in it would be wasting skill points, to create their own background.
Performance as a skill or ability may not be wrong for your game, but it is important to consider that just because it is contained within popular RPGs does not mean it is necessary in yours. Remember to consider what the players will be doing regularly in your game, because all skills should emphasize those actions. If Performance is only there because you want to give music playing characters a way to mechanize their backgrounds, you are creating a design trap for them to waste their advancement resources.
Final Notes: The removal of Performance did lead to a lower number of skills than I targeted, but this allowed be to fix the issue that has been nagging me for months, Intellect Potential does not have an appropriate representation of skills within my system, but I’ll talk about that solution next time with the addition of Navigation.