I've been thinking about the games I play, and what kinds of games I tend to enjoy playing the most. I've written about atmosphere, mechanics, and even mechanics previously, and these apply equally to tabletop and video games. The component I'm thinking about lately is the glorious feeling of [pretend] power.
You can derive a sense of superiourity from anything, but the feeling I'm talking about is sheer make-believe dominance. It's not the feeling you get when you defeat your mentor in chess. Instead, it's the feeling you get when your Pathfinder character takes a swing at a giant and somehow cleaves him clean in two, or when your battle mech figurine runs up to a tank and flattens it with a casual stomp. In other words, it's the sense of power you get from emotions drawn from roleplaying a character and then empathizing with that character in moments of success.
The strange thing about power in a game is that too much of it cancels itself out. When I played my first battle of my Adeptus Mechanicus army with Imperial Knight allies against a group of Genestealer Cults, I realised pretty quickly that Imperial Knights can be really powerful. I had to add a tank to my Genestealer Cults army to find balance. While I admit that I enjoyed seeing my Adeptus Mechanicus army winning for a change, the constant "why bother rolling?" feeling didn't feel very satisfying. After all, had I wanted to win without rolling dice, I could have just played toy soldiers.
When you get the balance right, though, you get a satisfying brew of feeling powerful. But I think there are two brands of power within this roleplayed satisfaction: strategy and brute force.
Sometimes you feel powerful because some risks you took (we call it "strategy") actually pays off. Those are the times the dice roll in your favour, maybe not against all odds but the stakes are high so it really really matters. And when it works out in your favour, and you manage to do something ostentatious, you feel powerful.
Other times, it's not that the dice roll in your favour, it's just that the dice don't roll against you. This is when your character clearly outranks the enemy, but not so much that it's beyond the realm of possibility that a few bad rolls for you, and a few good rolls for the enemy, could bring your game to a swift end.
Finding the right mix of power and risk is a delicate balancing act. Sometimes you get it wrong, and in fact it's not something I want in all of my games. One of my favourite characters is a pure Illusionist, with no healing spells and very few damage spells (some Illusions deal Psychic damage, and there aren't enough Illusion spells in most spellbooks to build a character whose magic does no damage). But sometimes, especially when I have a big stompy robot at my disposal, I want to feel the surge of power that the fiction suggests. Sometimes, I game for power.