Character advancement currencies
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Character advancement currencies
So a bunch of questions. What character advancement currencies (experience, karma, etc.) have you seen in games that you either really liked or really hated? What was unique about this currency that made it different? Finally, a design question - should everything be advanced using the same currency? For instance, if you are running a "tier" based game (discussed elsewhere on these boards) would you implement a different currency for each tier? Why or why not?
I believe in segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever, of combat-boosting XP and non-combat XP.
It doesn't work in d20, but in Street Fighter, things are separated enough that you can give XP for fighting and physical stat improvement separate from skill improvement. You can do the same in pretty much any other point-buy system, and I like it a lot.
It doesn't work in d20, but in Street Fighter, things are separated enough that you can give XP for fighting and physical stat improvement separate from skill improvement. You can do the same in pretty much any other point-buy system, and I like it a lot.
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CatharzGodfoot
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After Sundown has an interesting method which divides "acquisitive advancement" of resources that you have (money, friends, gear) from "transformative advancement" which are powers that cannot be taken from your character.
That's pretty standard, but transformative advancement is attained (meta-game) by drawing power cards from a deck and then auctioning them off. The powers are further divided into major and minor arcana (as is the Tarot deck) as a (very) rough distinction between power levels.
That's pretty standard, but transformative advancement is attained (meta-game) by drawing power cards from a deck and then auctioning them off. The powers are further divided into major and minor arcana (as is the Tarot deck) as a (very) rough distinction between power levels.
The law in its majestic equality forbids the rich as well as the poor from stealing bread, begging and sleeping under bridges.
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Mount Flamethrower on rear
Drive in reverse
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-Josh Kablack
-Anatole France
Mount Flamethrower on rear
Drive in reverse
Win Game.
-Josh Kablack
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Josh_Kablack
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Okay, let's look at some of the more common and notable advancement schemes:
Fair Warning: I'm gonna call your favorite system garbage - go cry now if you need to. If I don't, that doesn't mean I like it, it means that your system is too obscure for me to care about - so you should probably go cry anyways.
Levels and XP
Most versions of D&D use this, and it's really common in D&D descendants. Overcoming challenges gives points. When you get enough points, you get a level, which is whole bunch of powerups at once. This is convenient in a couple major ways. Firstly it means that powerups are generally large enough to be meaningful, which provides a useful scale for character benchmarking. Secondly it means that powerups do not necessarily eat up session time with bookkeeping, since leveling calculations are ideal performed before or after a session (the reality is sadly not so efficient)
However, sometimes you can get smaller powerups along the way by spending some of that XP on magic item creation or splitting it between your multiclassing or sacrificing it to a demon lord or whatever. This approaches appears to offer more flexibility than just levels, but ruins the two main appeals of level-based systems, in that smaller powerups occur, making levels a less meaningful benchmark, and often session time is wasted dithering over the specifics of XP component costs.
Levels without XP
I don't think I've seen this done officially anywhere, but I have both played and run in D&D games that worked thusly: "Every N sessions, everyone levels". This offers the simplicity of the above and simplifies it even further.
Sheer Randomness and the DM rolling in your favor on charts with "risky" results
Lets be honest, this is how each and every single D&D game prior to 3rd ed, and a fair portion of them since have actually run. Did you speak the correct deity's name with a neutral character when you touched the alter (AD&D page 216) - CONGRATS YOU GET A WISH FOR FREE, else your character ages 10 years. Did you roll a Psionic Wild Talent the first time your character encountered a psionic monster ? - CONGRATS FREE POWER. Can you avoid blowing yourself up on the potion miscability table long enough to get a new result ? - CONGRATS FREE POWER. Did you get good draws from the Deck of Many Things ? - CONGRATS FREE POWER, else make a new character. Did you roll a 00 when diving into the Pool of Radiance? CONGRATS FREE POWER. Did you read the book the MC stole his McGuffin Artifact from so you can figger out what it does and how to activate it? CONGRATS FREE POWER.
This is horseshit that removes player agency and usually unbalances the power level of the PCs relative to each other and the only plausible reason for it not to die completely is the even shittier job that professional game designers tend to do in presenting balanced options for player character choices. Sadly, DMs need the freedom to dole out steaming piles of this manure in order to rebalance severely out of whack games.
XP without levels
Used by Shadowrun, Storyteller, Feng Shui, Tri Tac, this is universally shit with no redeeming value and is one strike against any system that uses it.
Seriously, the point of advancement is to allow characters to gain new abilities over multiple sessions. However if the XP system is in anyway different than the chargen system, that means that a player must make optimization tradeoffs between what's cheaper and more effective to gain chargen and what's cheaper and more effective to gain with XP, and that in turn puts an expiration date (or minimum timescale) on inter-party balance
The classic example is the triangular advancement common among Storyteller, Shadowrun and Feng Shui: For an oversimplified generic example: a character who has two stats at 1 dot and gets four freebie dots to split between them at chargen, but each stat costs its current rating in XP to raise by one. The player who puts four dots into one stat and starts with a 5 and a 1 then needs only spend 1+2 xp to raise his characters stats to a 5 and a 3. The other guy who starts with a balanced 3 and 3 instead needs to put 4+5 xp into his characters stats to get to the same 5 and a 3. That's right, they two characters end up with the same stats, but one payed triple what the other did for them.
Designers who can't math somehow think this sort of scheme encourages character diversity, since increasing a character's best gimmick is more expensive than increasing that character's other gimmick. This would potentially be true if both the initial char gen and the XP advancement worked on exactly the same triangular system, but in any system where the initial chargen works on a different point system (triangular or not) than the XP, there are optimization tradeoffs between the two systems. And players who make different tradeoffs between the two schemes for their characters will have characters of differing effectiveness depending on the actual length of the game.
Character Points as XP
Okay, so what about when the Chargen and XP systems are exactly the same? The best example of this HERO and its pale imitator GURPS.
In theory, this solves the problem of character imbalance over time being inevitable. In practice, this results in either player option paralysis due to overwhelming choice or players hyper-focusing to compete in just one area of character advancement. (See my earlier rants about how common Dex/Speed arms races are in long running HERO games)
I can't quite swear at this one, aside from saying DAMNIT this just doesn't work out in practice.
Levels as bundles of character points
This is done to some degree in both Mutants and Masterminds and in Rolemaster. To be honest, I'm not up on current editions of either, but in the editions I am familiar with:
M&M hands out character points as XP. Every bundle of 15 XP ups your Power Rank, which means that you have higher caps on some numbers and will be expected to be within a certain variance of those caps. This isn't a horrible compromise between point buy and level as it retains some of the useful benchmarking of leveled systems while offering some of the flexibility of outright point buy. It reduces both the precision of said benchmarks and the flexibility of point buy, but it also limits option paralysis and tries to direct the inter-PC arms race along a predetermined path. I'd like to swear about the inadequacy here, but I gotta save an extra dose of profanity for the other way this can work:
Rolemaster actually hands out a number of development points each level based on your stats at the time you leveled (and your stats can change based on random rolls when you level). You then spend these development points on a skill list - but each class has radically different costs for each skill. A fighter can pick up one box in longsword for 2 points, and a second box in longsword for another 4 points, but has to spend 20 for a 5% chance to learn even a basic open-to-anyone spell list. Meanwhile the wizard has to spend like 8 points for a single box in sword but can gain 20 boxes (each a 5% chance to learn) a restricted wizard only spell list. Some idiot Monte Cook, must have thought this offered the benefits of all the other options, since it's flexible yet level based and encourages players to develop class appropriate skills. But I think it's eyeball-bleedingly-neon-from-Vegas obvious that Monte Screwed the Pooch Without a Rubber what you actually get is the drawbacks of all the combined models. Flexibility is constrained by skill costs, but not enough to prevent obviating level as a useful way to benchmark power, especially with the random component coming from character stats while also having all the bookkeeping nightmare, player option paralysis and arms race issues of straight point buy. Until someone publishes an RPG where advancement involves unleashing rabid weasels amongst the player group while they attempt Russian Roulette, this will likely stand as the MOST SUPERLATIVELY ASSTASTIC DOUBLE PLUS FUCKTARDED GLUESNIFFING ADVANCEMENT SYSTEM OF ALL TIME!
Secret Character Points as Advancement
This is an interesting experiment implemented in Amber Diceless. The players don't know how many XP they get, nor necessarily when they get them. Instead players present the MC with a wish list of potential advancements and a cap on how far into hock against fate they are willing to go to get each one.
So a player might present a wishlist for their character like "Learn Basic Sorcery, Increase Endurance, Learn two additional Power Words, willing to go to negative 1, but no further." The MC then awards say 10 XP. Since sorcery costs 15, the PC doesn't get that, but if the next endurance increase is only 9 away, the PC would get that, but then not have the 4 points for the character to gain the new power words, leaving them with a 1 point positive balance on the scales of fate.
This does a lot to address the option paralysis of the straight "Character Points as XP" setup, but it works by actively encouraging the PC vs PC arms races in some areas, removes player agency and requires extra bookkeeping by the MC, so there are some really fucking good reasons why this post is likely the first time you've heard of it.
No Advancement
Hello EVERWAY and MUNCHUASEN. You're both great games, it's a fucking shame your authors never heard of Pavlov. That's why most of the readers of this post have never heard of you. Give the players what they want or be ignored to the dustbins of history obscurity of Yandora's discount boxes.
Whatever, Next.
Skill Successes
An interesting mechanic presented in the Chaosium Cthulu (and maybe other Chaosium games, but Michael Moorcock is a fucking prick who tries to double-sell his RPG rights so they shall remain unnammed).
Anywho, in this system when you get a skill success during a session you put a little checkbox next to the skill. At the end of the session, you roll each skill with a checkbox next to it again, with a failure indicating that you gain a +01% to it. On paper, this should provide a reason for players to use as many skills as possible and yet provides a "grading on the curve" mechanic that rewards players who have skills in the range where both success and failure are likely. In practice, Cthulu characters always die inside 4 sessions so it's like a fart in a hurricane. Whoop-de-fucking doo.
But even if those characters somehow lived, welcome to a world of skill-spamming and the bookkeeping nightmare of playing a bloody game of Yahtzee with each individual player at the end of each session. That's what you wanted to run, right, a Yahtzee night each week? Hard Cheese, it is what you are fucking running with this ill-advised trainwreck of an advancement scheme.
Secrets
A very vague catchall term for generally non-character sheet advancement as the players come to understand the game world and the MC's assumptions. In this setup, the PCs gain power and options as they learn how to recognize an avenger of the Cult of Horus, how much to bribe a Coast City cop, and what the password to the Mob Hideout is. This setup can be sometimes used to great effect in short-arc games that are otherwise non advancement and incorporate a degree of in-character mistrust and information withholding. And to some degree, this sort of thing tends to be present in all other advancement schemes.
However, this has all of the potential pitfulls of Sheer Random advancment, and a serious potential for interparty character imbalance. On top of those, there is the added possibility of inverse pavlovian conditioning, if some players freely share such in-game information while others withhold it, then the characters who withhold secrets gain relative advantage, so the rational thing for players to do here is to remain tight lipped and not share information, instead each working to rediscover what someone else already found. Does a game where the MC rehashes things for each PC and the PCs are discouraged from talking sound like an RPG you'd enjoy? If so, FUCK YOU!
Bidding Minigame
Most notably used for After Sundown's Transformative Advancement, this hackjob from the mind of a drunken internet slob requires an entire additional prop to be present at the game session and can eat a notable chunk of session time while layering an additional bookkeeping task on the group as a whole. You fucking need to appoint a "token tracker" in the group to make this work. Only a designer who's used to navigating Kafkaesque bureaucracies woulda decided to use this in his game
Fair Warning: I'm gonna call your favorite system garbage - go cry now if you need to. If I don't, that doesn't mean I like it, it means that your system is too obscure for me to care about - so you should probably go cry anyways.
Levels and XP
Most versions of D&D use this, and it's really common in D&D descendants. Overcoming challenges gives points. When you get enough points, you get a level, which is whole bunch of powerups at once. This is convenient in a couple major ways. Firstly it means that powerups are generally large enough to be meaningful, which provides a useful scale for character benchmarking. Secondly it means that powerups do not necessarily eat up session time with bookkeeping, since leveling calculations are ideal performed before or after a session (the reality is sadly not so efficient)
However, sometimes you can get smaller powerups along the way by spending some of that XP on magic item creation or splitting it between your multiclassing or sacrificing it to a demon lord or whatever. This approaches appears to offer more flexibility than just levels, but ruins the two main appeals of level-based systems, in that smaller powerups occur, making levels a less meaningful benchmark, and often session time is wasted dithering over the specifics of XP component costs.
Levels without XP
I don't think I've seen this done officially anywhere, but I have both played and run in D&D games that worked thusly: "Every N sessions, everyone levels". This offers the simplicity of the above and simplifies it even further.
Sheer Randomness and the DM rolling in your favor on charts with "risky" results
Lets be honest, this is how each and every single D&D game prior to 3rd ed, and a fair portion of them since have actually run. Did you speak the correct deity's name with a neutral character when you touched the alter (AD&D page 216) - CONGRATS YOU GET A WISH FOR FREE, else your character ages 10 years. Did you roll a Psionic Wild Talent the first time your character encountered a psionic monster ? - CONGRATS FREE POWER. Can you avoid blowing yourself up on the potion miscability table long enough to get a new result ? - CONGRATS FREE POWER. Did you get good draws from the Deck of Many Things ? - CONGRATS FREE POWER, else make a new character. Did you roll a 00 when diving into the Pool of Radiance? CONGRATS FREE POWER. Did you read the book the MC stole his McGuffin Artifact from so you can figger out what it does and how to activate it? CONGRATS FREE POWER.
This is horseshit that removes player agency and usually unbalances the power level of the PCs relative to each other and the only plausible reason for it not to die completely is the even shittier job that professional game designers tend to do in presenting balanced options for player character choices. Sadly, DMs need the freedom to dole out steaming piles of this manure in order to rebalance severely out of whack games.
XP without levels
Used by Shadowrun, Storyteller, Feng Shui, Tri Tac, this is universally shit with no redeeming value and is one strike against any system that uses it.
Seriously, the point of advancement is to allow characters to gain new abilities over multiple sessions. However if the XP system is in anyway different than the chargen system, that means that a player must make optimization tradeoffs between what's cheaper and more effective to gain chargen and what's cheaper and more effective to gain with XP, and that in turn puts an expiration date (or minimum timescale) on inter-party balance
The classic example is the triangular advancement common among Storyteller, Shadowrun and Feng Shui: For an oversimplified generic example: a character who has two stats at 1 dot and gets four freebie dots to split between them at chargen, but each stat costs its current rating in XP to raise by one. The player who puts four dots into one stat and starts with a 5 and a 1 then needs only spend 1+2 xp to raise his characters stats to a 5 and a 3. The other guy who starts with a balanced 3 and 3 instead needs to put 4+5 xp into his characters stats to get to the same 5 and a 3. That's right, they two characters end up with the same stats, but one payed triple what the other did for them.
Designers who can't math somehow think this sort of scheme encourages character diversity, since increasing a character's best gimmick is more expensive than increasing that character's other gimmick. This would potentially be true if both the initial char gen and the XP advancement worked on exactly the same triangular system, but in any system where the initial chargen works on a different point system (triangular or not) than the XP, there are optimization tradeoffs between the two systems. And players who make different tradeoffs between the two schemes for their characters will have characters of differing effectiveness depending on the actual length of the game.
Character Points as XP
Okay, so what about when the Chargen and XP systems are exactly the same? The best example of this HERO and its pale imitator GURPS.
In theory, this solves the problem of character imbalance over time being inevitable. In practice, this results in either player option paralysis due to overwhelming choice or players hyper-focusing to compete in just one area of character advancement. (See my earlier rants about how common Dex/Speed arms races are in long running HERO games)
I can't quite swear at this one, aside from saying DAMNIT this just doesn't work out in practice.
Levels as bundles of character points
This is done to some degree in both Mutants and Masterminds and in Rolemaster. To be honest, I'm not up on current editions of either, but in the editions I am familiar with:
M&M hands out character points as XP. Every bundle of 15 XP ups your Power Rank, which means that you have higher caps on some numbers and will be expected to be within a certain variance of those caps. This isn't a horrible compromise between point buy and level as it retains some of the useful benchmarking of leveled systems while offering some of the flexibility of outright point buy. It reduces both the precision of said benchmarks and the flexibility of point buy, but it also limits option paralysis and tries to direct the inter-PC arms race along a predetermined path. I'd like to swear about the inadequacy here, but I gotta save an extra dose of profanity for the other way this can work:
Rolemaster actually hands out a number of development points each level based on your stats at the time you leveled (and your stats can change based on random rolls when you level). You then spend these development points on a skill list - but each class has radically different costs for each skill. A fighter can pick up one box in longsword for 2 points, and a second box in longsword for another 4 points, but has to spend 20 for a 5% chance to learn even a basic open-to-anyone spell list. Meanwhile the wizard has to spend like 8 points for a single box in sword but can gain 20 boxes (each a 5% chance to learn) a restricted wizard only spell list. Some idiot Monte Cook, must have thought this offered the benefits of all the other options, since it's flexible yet level based and encourages players to develop class appropriate skills. But I think it's eyeball-bleedingly-neon-from-Vegas obvious that Monte Screwed the Pooch Without a Rubber what you actually get is the drawbacks of all the combined models. Flexibility is constrained by skill costs, but not enough to prevent obviating level as a useful way to benchmark power, especially with the random component coming from character stats while also having all the bookkeeping nightmare, player option paralysis and arms race issues of straight point buy. Until someone publishes an RPG where advancement involves unleashing rabid weasels amongst the player group while they attempt Russian Roulette, this will likely stand as the MOST SUPERLATIVELY ASSTASTIC DOUBLE PLUS FUCKTARDED GLUESNIFFING ADVANCEMENT SYSTEM OF ALL TIME!
Secret Character Points as Advancement
This is an interesting experiment implemented in Amber Diceless. The players don't know how many XP they get, nor necessarily when they get them. Instead players present the MC with a wish list of potential advancements and a cap on how far into hock against fate they are willing to go to get each one.
So a player might present a wishlist for their character like "Learn Basic Sorcery, Increase Endurance, Learn two additional Power Words, willing to go to negative 1, but no further." The MC then awards say 10 XP. Since sorcery costs 15, the PC doesn't get that, but if the next endurance increase is only 9 away, the PC would get that, but then not have the 4 points for the character to gain the new power words, leaving them with a 1 point positive balance on the scales of fate.
This does a lot to address the option paralysis of the straight "Character Points as XP" setup, but it works by actively encouraging the PC vs PC arms races in some areas, removes player agency and requires extra bookkeeping by the MC, so there are some really fucking good reasons why this post is likely the first time you've heard of it.
No Advancement
Hello EVERWAY and MUNCHUASEN. You're both great games, it's a fucking shame your authors never heard of Pavlov. That's why most of the readers of this post have never heard of you. Give the players what they want or be ignored to the dustbins of history obscurity of Yandora's discount boxes.
Whatever, Next.
Skill Successes
An interesting mechanic presented in the Chaosium Cthulu (and maybe other Chaosium games, but Michael Moorcock is a fucking prick who tries to double-sell his RPG rights so they shall remain unnammed).
Anywho, in this system when you get a skill success during a session you put a little checkbox next to the skill. At the end of the session, you roll each skill with a checkbox next to it again, with a failure indicating that you gain a +01% to it. On paper, this should provide a reason for players to use as many skills as possible and yet provides a "grading on the curve" mechanic that rewards players who have skills in the range where both success and failure are likely. In practice, Cthulu characters always die inside 4 sessions so it's like a fart in a hurricane. Whoop-de-fucking doo.
But even if those characters somehow lived, welcome to a world of skill-spamming and the bookkeeping nightmare of playing a bloody game of Yahtzee with each individual player at the end of each session. That's what you wanted to run, right, a Yahtzee night each week? Hard Cheese, it is what you are fucking running with this ill-advised trainwreck of an advancement scheme.
Secrets
A very vague catchall term for generally non-character sheet advancement as the players come to understand the game world and the MC's assumptions. In this setup, the PCs gain power and options as they learn how to recognize an avenger of the Cult of Horus, how much to bribe a Coast City cop, and what the password to the Mob Hideout is. This setup can be sometimes used to great effect in short-arc games that are otherwise non advancement and incorporate a degree of in-character mistrust and information withholding. And to some degree, this sort of thing tends to be present in all other advancement schemes.
However, this has all of the potential pitfulls of Sheer Random advancment, and a serious potential for interparty character imbalance. On top of those, there is the added possibility of inverse pavlovian conditioning, if some players freely share such in-game information while others withhold it, then the characters who withhold secrets gain relative advantage, so the rational thing for players to do here is to remain tight lipped and not share information, instead each working to rediscover what someone else already found. Does a game where the MC rehashes things for each PC and the PCs are discouraged from talking sound like an RPG you'd enjoy? If so, FUCK YOU!
Bidding Minigame
Most notably used for After Sundown's Transformative Advancement, this hackjob from the mind of a drunken internet slob requires an entire additional prop to be present at the game session and can eat a notable chunk of session time while layering an additional bookkeeping task on the group as a whole. You fucking need to appoint a "token tracker" in the group to make this work. Only a designer who's used to navigating Kafkaesque bureaucracies woulda decided to use this in his game
Last edited by Josh_Kablack on Fri May 20, 2011 4:55 pm, edited 5 times in total.
"But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities."
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PhoneLobster
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In my current projects I'm looking largely at advancement by points, and gaining those points by either...
XP but more directed
So each character selects one or more "Missions" from a list with things like "Think of the Children" or "Revenge Revenge Revenge" etc...
When they complete any related notable achievement, like saving a burning orphanage or killing one of the suckers on their angry list, they get XP points to spend.
Players are encouraged to seek out opportunities to chase after mission goals in all their adventures, and go on adventures specifically to achieve mission goals. GMs are encouraged to facilitate this and dangle obvious mission goals in front of players at every opportunity.
This is almost exactly like giving out adventure/quest XP. Only you write down a few options at character creation that pick which theme of quest XP your character benefits from.
The general idea is that it's a tiny nudge towards creating a stronger narrative for individual characters.
For added bonuses it is potentially possible to outright complete some missions (like "Revenge Revenge Revenge") and get a replacement one.
Presumable there would need to be a cap on how many (if any) shared missions are allowed between the party, otherwise the entire campaign might end up being wall to wall "Save the Children". Not that that is ENTIRELY bad, but still...
I'm better at kicking ass because I own a Yacht and staff it with Dancing Girls and Expensive Booze
So luxury stuff. Primarily associated with where you live and what cool luxury services your personal pleasure palace provides you gives you more awesome powers. As per my cunning Barby Mansion plans previously discussed around here.
So you rather care about having a cool throne room, getting a cooler throne to put in it, employing some fan waving slave girls to fan said throne, maybe some ornamental guards to line the avenue into the throne room, etc... Because each of those things raises the cap of skill points gained from Luxury that your character then invests directly into punching dragons with.
Oh and also...
Currency
OK so currency is mildly important as currency for character advancement, you know, if items matter at all. I'm trying to tie all the mid to upper end advancement through equipment to the barby mansion so that currency eventually all just rolls into Mansion Benefits and Luxury points. But getting more Treasure to spend on that still clearly makes you more powerful.
XP but more directed
So each character selects one or more "Missions" from a list with things like "Think of the Children" or "Revenge Revenge Revenge" etc...
When they complete any related notable achievement, like saving a burning orphanage or killing one of the suckers on their angry list, they get XP points to spend.
Players are encouraged to seek out opportunities to chase after mission goals in all their adventures, and go on adventures specifically to achieve mission goals. GMs are encouraged to facilitate this and dangle obvious mission goals in front of players at every opportunity.
This is almost exactly like giving out adventure/quest XP. Only you write down a few options at character creation that pick which theme of quest XP your character benefits from.
The general idea is that it's a tiny nudge towards creating a stronger narrative for individual characters.
For added bonuses it is potentially possible to outright complete some missions (like "Revenge Revenge Revenge") and get a replacement one.
Presumable there would need to be a cap on how many (if any) shared missions are allowed between the party, otherwise the entire campaign might end up being wall to wall "Save the Children". Not that that is ENTIRELY bad, but still...
I'm better at kicking ass because I own a Yacht and staff it with Dancing Girls and Expensive Booze
So luxury stuff. Primarily associated with where you live and what cool luxury services your personal pleasure palace provides you gives you more awesome powers. As per my cunning Barby Mansion plans previously discussed around here.
So you rather care about having a cool throne room, getting a cooler throne to put in it, employing some fan waving slave girls to fan said throne, maybe some ornamental guards to line the avenue into the throne room, etc... Because each of those things raises the cap of skill points gained from Luxury that your character then invests directly into punching dragons with.
Oh and also...
Currency
OK so currency is mildly important as currency for character advancement, you know, if items matter at all. I'm trying to tie all the mid to upper end advancement through equipment to the barby mansion so that currency eventually all just rolls into Mansion Benefits and Luxury points. But getting more Treasure to spend on that still clearly makes you more powerful.
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Josh_Kablack
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PL, you should get that published....
.... so that I can swear at it properly
.... so that I can swear at it properly
"But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities."
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PhoneLobster
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Oh the potential problems are obvious, I mean the first bit?
Potential for uneven advancement. Needs some sort of round robin Mission fulfillment limit or some other mechanic or guideline to prevent someone from saving ALL the damn children before the guy with Revenge Revenge Revenge gets past his first "Re...".
And the major danger with luxury Barby mansion is the fairly typical loot explosion issues we are all familiar with from various RPG economics discussions. Which a fairly strongly formalized loot and build mechanic set MIGHT manage to mildly mitigate, but easily might just worsen instead.
But sometimes you have to push things to the edge. Because damnit, luxury god damn barby mansions damnit.
Potential for uneven advancement. Needs some sort of round robin Mission fulfillment limit or some other mechanic or guideline to prevent someone from saving ALL the damn children before the guy with Revenge Revenge Revenge gets past his first "Re...".
And the major danger with luxury Barby mansion is the fairly typical loot explosion issues we are all familiar with from various RPG economics discussions. Which a fairly strongly formalized loot and build mechanic set MIGHT manage to mildly mitigate, but easily might just worsen instead.
But sometimes you have to push things to the edge. Because damnit, luxury god damn barby mansions damnit.
Phonelobster's Self Proclaimed Greatest Hits Collection : (no really, they are awesome)
Phonelobster's Latest RPG Rule Set
The world's most definitive Star Wars Saga Edition Review
That Time I reviewed D20Modern Classes
Stories from Phonelobster's ridiculous life about local gaming stores, board game clubs and brothels
Australia is a horror setting thread
Phonelobster's totally legit history of the island of Malta
The utterly infamous Our Favourite Edition Is 2nd Edition thread
The world's most definitive Star Wars Saga Edition Review
That Time I reviewed D20Modern Classes
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violence in the media
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Two other systems:
Traveller-style: purely by time. IIRC, it's 1 week per existing point in that stat.
WEG Star Wars style: spend accumulated rerolls to improve your stats. (sort of. Specifically, you accumulate character points, which you can spend either to boost rolls or to improve stats)
And one sort-of system:
Better living through chemistry: you build yourself a better body within the game rules, but without formal advancement. For example, DnD's haunt-shift shennanigans.
Traveller-style: purely by time. IIRC, it's 1 week per existing point in that stat.
WEG Star Wars style: spend accumulated rerolls to improve your stats. (sort of. Specifically, you accumulate character points, which you can spend either to boost rolls or to improve stats)
And one sort-of system:
Better living through chemistry: you build yourself a better body within the game rules, but without formal advancement. For example, DnD's haunt-shift shennanigans.
I'm pretty much running this right now with my group. Replace N sessions with Major Story Arc completion. It encourages players to actually accomplish things that are important instead of worrying about being underleveled because they missed a few encounters.Jack Kablack wrote:Levels without XP
I don't think I've seen this done officially anywhere, but I have both played and run in D&D games that worked thusly: "Every N sessions, everyone levels". This offers the simplicity of the above and simplifies it even further.
The fact that it takes care of a buttload of book keeping for everyone involved is delicious gravy.
I'd change this to Resources maybe. This is how Terraria works. Progression is strictly equipment based and the stuff you're wearing is going to determine what ores you can access, which determines what you can make to wear.Phone Lobster wrote:Currency
Harder monsters guard better resources... so, Trees come with Slimes. Iron Ore comes with Skeletons. Obisidian Dark Matter is only located in the upper levels of Hell (or something like that) and is guarded by Demons.
Money still comes into play because you can eventually establish a city, which attracts merchants, and those guys can sell you things that you may not be able to craft yet, which lets you explore further than you could before.
Expanding on that, you eventually run around with the best Mundane Armor you can craft and the only way to progress from there is to hunt down things like Dragons and you make equipment from Dragon Pieces. Eventually, you start being able to take on the gods and you put their battered souls into your Sword or something.
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Josh_Kablack
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violence in the media wrote:@Josh--Did I miss the part where you ranted about Drama dice systems, like in 7th Sea? I always enjoyed the idea that one could burn future power on rolls that may or may not succeed (or even matter) in the immediate moment.
[/sarcasm]
This was popular in the late 80s and early 90s; it also happened in Mayfair's old DC Heroes system and TSRs Marvel Superheroes.WEG Star Wars style: spend accumulated rerolls to improve your stats. (sort of. Specifically, you accumulate character points, which you can spend either to boost rolls or to improve stats)
The idea of "Bank XP for later advancement or Burn XP for increased success chances now" is yet another neat concept that stinks to hog brown marmorated stinkbug heaven and the sooner we sic some parasitoid wasps on those promulgating this idea, the better.
On paper this increases player agency and presents players with a meaningful long-term strategic choice about their character. These look attractive at first glance, since a player can spend their advancement on tasks they consider most important and make educated guesses about rushdown vs charging their combo meter. But in practice, this also falls apart horribly, as this has the same time-frame dependent character imbalance issues as the "XP without levels" setup but the added FAIL that the best strategies are the extreme ends. A player who spends ALL of their XP on immediate successes and none on advancement will achieve more immediate successes and likely dominate the lion's share of time within the game session; A player who spends NONE of their XP on immediate successes and uses it all for advancement is encouraged to hang back out of the limelight and avoid majors risks for the potential payoff of having a more kickass character later.
If later actually comes in a given game, then the hangback, conservative XP accumulator (whose character has become the rockinest in the group) is now incentivized to completely change his/her playstyle and pick up the slack from the characters who previously set their XP on fire; meanwhile the players who burnt their XP are incentivized to step back and take fewer risks (or to whine to the MC that their characters can't keep up). Thus, the imbalance is such characters are rewarded for acting completely contrary to what their players have previously established for them.
"But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities."
Actually, to my knowledge, it's completely up to the GM as to whether the Power Level increases or not. Accumulating 15 character points just means you're slightly more powerful than is suggested for your power level. But, my days of comprehensively reading rule books are long gone, so maybe I missed something and my gm just house ruled it.Josh_Kablack wrote:Levels as bundles of character points
This is done to some degree in both Mutants and Masterminds and in Rolemaster. To be honest, I'm not up on current editions of either, but in the editions I am familiar with:
M&M hands out character points as XP. Every bundle of 15 XP ups your Power Rank, which means that you have higher caps on some numbers and will be expected to be within a certain variance of those caps. This isn't a horrible compromise between point buy and level as it retains some of the useful benchmarking of leveled systems while offering some of the flexibility of outright point buy. It reduces both the precision of said benchmarks and the flexibility of point buy, but it also limits option paralysis and tries to direct the inter-PC arms race along a predetermined path. I'd like to swear about the inadequacy here, but I gotta save an extra dose of profanity for the other way this can work:
well, it's certainly interesting, and suggests a vaguely satisfying way to advance Drones if I ever get someone to play a Drone in a possessed Storyteller game... Of course such a game is probably even more obscure than Amber so...Secret Character Points as Advancement
This is an interesting experiment implemented in Amber Diceless. The players don't know how many XP they get, nor necessarily when they get them. Instead players present the MC with a wish list of potential advancements and a cap on how far into hock against fate they are willing to go to get each one.
So a player might present a wishlist for their character like "Learn Basic Sorcery, Increase Endurance, Learn two additional Power Words, willing to go to negative 1, but no further." The MC then awards say 10 XP. Since sorcery costs 15, the PC doesn't get that, but if the next endurance increase is only 9 away, the PC would get that, but then not have the 4 points for the character to gain the new power words, leaving them with a 1 point positive balance on the scales of fate.
This does a lot to address the option paralysis of the straight "Character Points as XP" setup, but it works by actively encouraging the PC vs PC arms races in some areas, removes player agency and requires extra bookkeeping by the MC, so there are some really fucking good reasons why this post is likely the first time you've heard of it.
And then there's the Way BRP and Runequest do it, where it's slightly more than a fart in a hurricane, in that usually your character lives a good bit longer*, but the process is even more annoying. At the end of the game, your GM says "Everyone gets X checks." where X is usually 3 in my experience. Then you get to use those checks to buy rolls for skills you successfully used in game. Successfully use twenty skills? That's nice, you only get to try to advance three. (Except for playing Mongoose Runequest 2, because then your charisma can give you extra rolls for every range of 6 above 12 it is. ie, 13-18 +1 improvement roll, 19-24 +2, etc.) Then you pick your skills, possibly flushing some rolls as you bank them to improve attributes or buy advanced skills you don't have, and roll against your skill number. Again, you have to fail, so if you're already pretty decent at your skill, good luck improving it. If you do manage to roll above your skill, you then roll 1d4+1 to find out by how much you improve.Skill Successes
An interesting mechanic presented in the Chaosium Cthulu (and maybe other Chaosium games, but Michael Moorcock is a fucking prick who tries to double-sell his RPG rights so they shall remain unnammed).
Anywho, in this system when you get a skill success during a session you put a little checkbox next to the skill. At the end of the session, you roll each skill with a checkbox next to it again, with a failure indicating that you gain a +01% to it. On paper, this should provide a reason for players to use as many skills as possible and yet provides a "grading on the curve" mechanic that rewards players who have skills in the range where both success and failure are likely. In practice, Cthulu characters always die inside 4 sessions so it's like a fart in a hurricane. Whoop-de-fucking doo.
But even if those characters somehow lived, welcome to a world of skill-spamming and the bookkeeping nightmare of playing a bloody game of Yahtzee with each individual player at the end of each session. That's what you wanted to run, right, a Yahtzee night each week? Hard Cheese, it is what you are fucking running with this ill-advised trainwreck of an advancement scheme.
*unless you're the person who grew up a dark loner kid who likes powers that get peasants with pitches and torchforks chasing you at the behest of a chaos hunter. Then four sessions sounds about right.
Yes, it is really fucking annoying, why do you ask?
Last edited by Prak on Fri May 20, 2011 9:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.
You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
Older versions of Talislanta have a system which is sort of level-based, and you can opt to spend accumulated xp to either buy a level (25 xp), raise a non-archetype skill a level (5 xp IIRC), raise a stat (25 xp) or learn a spell (5 xp). Not too dissimilar to 3.5, except that spending on stuff besides levels is much more common.
One of the benefits of this is that the PCs have the option to customize themselves by spending xp, while the DM can still pick up an NPC stat block (from the huge archetype lists in the book) and just level it up without having to worry about lots of minor decisions. Compare a 3.5 super-NPC where after levelling a dude up you're still obliged to make a bunch of feat-assignment and skill-rank-assignment decisions.
One of the benefits of this is that the PCs have the option to customize themselves by spending xp, while the DM can still pick up an NPC stat block (from the huge archetype lists in the book) and just level it up without having to worry about lots of minor decisions. Compare a 3.5 super-NPC where after levelling a dude up you're still obliged to make a bunch of feat-assignment and skill-rank-assignment decisions.
Last edited by CCarter on Sat May 21, 2011 4:38 am, edited 2 times in total.
Mouse Guard uses a (better) variant of skill successes. It ditches the rolls and just has the skill improve when the player accumulates successes equal to the new skill level and failures equal to the current level. I don't necessarily think it is the bee's knees as far as advancement goes, but marking down success or failure when you use a skill is pretty low-maintenance. I'll forgive a fair amount if a system isn't a hassle.
Yeah, in BW you keep track of your rolls and their difficulty and when you have achieved enough tests (success or failure) your skill goes up.
So if I have a Sword of 3 I need three routine tests and one difficult or challenging to go to 4. The difficulty is based on the number of dice rolled vs the TN; so if a character needs a challenging roll to advance their skill then the player has to balance their desire to advance the skill versus suceeding on the roll (by adding advantage dice for help, other appropriate skills, etc.).
It can be a bitch to keep track of, especially since for extending conflicts such as a fight you only get the hardest test of each type. If you swing your sword fifty times during the course of one duel you only get one test for swording. When I play I write down all the tests I make and their difficulty in a notebook as I go and look up the difficulties later. I can use the notes to do a write up of the game session so it's not all bad.
So if I have a Sword of 3 I need three routine tests and one difficult or challenging to go to 4. The difficulty is based on the number of dice rolled vs the TN; so if a character needs a challenging roll to advance their skill then the player has to balance their desire to advance the skill versus suceeding on the roll (by adding advantage dice for help, other appropriate skills, etc.).
It can be a bitch to keep track of, especially since for extending conflicts such as a fight you only get the hardest test of each type. If you swing your sword fifty times during the course of one duel you only get one test for swording. When I play I write down all the tests I make and their difficulty in a notebook as I go and look up the difficulties later. I can use the notes to do a write up of the game session so it's not all bad.