The Gaming Den

Okay, for any of you who have played in any long-term HERO/Champions games, you've probably seen a couple of issues with advancement:

• A Dex / SPD arms race tends to develop between the players. This happens both because of their relative effectiveness and also because in groups of more than 3 players, higher SPD means you actually get to do things aside from waiting for your turn in Champions lengthy combat. This also becomes self reinforcing, as characters who pump up DEX and SPD are not pumping up defenses and are therefore less likely to be able to withstand a hit, so they need to put more points into going first and being able to dodge. This not only causes issues with the GM keeping enemies within a beatable but challenging CV range, but also results in the campaign gradually shifting away from a "superhero" feel and towards a "gunslinger" feel, and puts a strain on the genre simulation.
• Characters built around mulitpowers get to pick up a spiffy new power every couple sessions, while most other character types have to content themselves with mild stat increases or maybe a new martial maneuver. 6 points for a new 60 active point fixed slot is really cheap compared to the 30 points to put a new 60 active point power into an elemental control. While the usage limits may balance those point costs against each other in the abstract, the assumptions of 1-3 XP per session means that it's pretty much a whole semester before the elemental control character picks up one new power (unless he gets stupidly creative with limitations). One PC getting 5 new powers at effective levels in the time another PC gets only 1 new power at an effective level tends to breed some resentment.
• Balance issues as regards the interaction between advancement and active point caps / CV limits / Damage Class maximums / "Rule of X". Either PCs get to use advancement to push past the original campaign limits (which can throw off the threat enemies are supposed to pose) or the caps last for the entire campaign (which means that everybody eventually buys up to the caps and nobody gets to specialize in a mechanically distinct way.

So when I began what became the Forefront game, I tried something different than the usual N character points of XP per session:

1. At the start of the session, each player in attendance gets a token.
2. They also receive tokens banked from the prior session (more on that below)
3. These tokens are then used to bid on various characteristics, skills, powers, and perks which are selected one-at-a-time randomly from cards in a deck pregenerated by the GM.
4. The total point value of the cards drawn in each week is made equivalent to the total point value of the XP that would have been awarded to the group in the usual XP method. But this could be just a couple of high-point cards or a whole slew of low-point cards.
5. When all of the cards have been bid on, players pass their tokens in for the GM to record as banked for the following week.
6. Then the GM hands one new token out to each player - this may be given away to any other player before the end of the session. My original rule was "for any reason", but I much prefer Bleys's refinement: "You give that to someone when they do something awesome"
7. It is strongly recommended that tokens be something hefty enough to be thrown from the far ends of the table, but light enough not to cause damage. Some especially memorable actions/quips have resulted in players being literally showered with tokens.
8. Whenever a player leaves the session, they let the GM know of any additional tokens received in this way so the GM can record them as banked for the next session's bidding.

This totally solved my first issue with Champs advancement, in that I made any Dex or Speed boosting cards very rare within the deck.

It also went a long way towards solving my second as players who spent all of their tokens winning bids for new character abilities would have far fewer to bid in the following week, while players who hadn't gotten powers in a while would have the most tokens left to bid on new ones.

And by allowing all group members to use their bids to "vote with their tokens" for who most needed which cards, this combined with the ruling that point caps only apply at chargen to indirectly reduce the problems of the third (although it could very well have backfired on that one - there's nothing inherent in this system to enforce such co-operation)

But the really big deal here is that it's a mechanism for the group as a whole to provide instantaneous positive reinforcement for appropriate behaviour. This really encourages people to engage in the types of behaviors the group likes (with this group, that's mainly genre simulation, deep in character RPing and witty in-character quips).

Furthermore, it helped in that it provided a ritualized way to start the game session and get people focused at the start of the session. This may not seem like much, but for a large group with staggered arrival times, it's been very helpful.

Additionally, it provided an easy way to handle bookkeeping for players who had to leave a session early (we have some folks with wildly varied work schedules). No arguing about "but Brian left after the henchmen, he missed the real fight with Dr. Badguy so he should get less XP" If you have to leave early, you can still "do something awesome" in that reduced timeframe.

Furthermore, the horizontal advancement resulted in characters branching into areas they had not originally intended in a way that has seemed to mimic the not-so-straightforward power gain exhibited in comic books. Example: some random draws and a player "bargain shopping" for advancement resulted in the character acquiring Speed Reading multiple times. The player used this as a springboard to transition from a character all about energy blasting to a character about information processing abilities (which happened to include energy blasting)


Now the downside is that players do get a lot less control over how their characters advance, and they can feel forced to advance horizontally when they want to advance vertically - and that causes some resentment and frustration. After many discussions amongst the group, point 4 was amended a couple of times. It has ended up with a hybrid system, where the point value of cards works out to about 3 per player per session, but players still get 1 discretionary point per session. This is roughly twice the standard advancement rate, but players only have about half as much control, so it seems to work out.


Of course the real beauty of this system is that it can be easily adapted to any roleplaying game which does not use level / treasure based advancement.

While the cards for HERO are stuff like "gain one new background skill", +2" with any movement mode already possessed" or "reduce the severity of one drawback by 5 points" one could just as easily put a deck together for say aWoD which used cards like "Increase the rating of a resource already possessed by one rank", "Gain one new ability in a discipline already possessed" or "increase any social attribute by one dot" or "increase your Edge by one"

I really like this.

Of course, I´d do you one better and have Spd boosts simply not appear in the deck at all (pretty much everyone should have the same Speed, in our games it was usually 6). But yeah, the advancement deck sounds cool enough that I think I´m going to write that up for aWoD as a standard.

Our Champions group gave out discretionary points and "background points" that you had to spend on skills and perks and secret bases and crap. But I think that the system you lay out is very awesome.

-Username17

Ooh! Can we implement the ability to save advancement cards to play as needed?

Like, at the end of a session you might bid on "Learn one more ability from a universal you possess"

Then save it through the following session until you need more potence or auspex than you already had.

Is there a reason for the "only one card revealed at a time" thing? It just seems like it would piss off players who bid on a previous advancement when the next one turns out to be a lot more what they wanted. Or vice-versa, they might save their points for the last card, only to have it be something they have no desire for.

Of course, I´d do you one better and have Spd boosts simply not appear in the deck at all (pretty much everyone should have the same Speed, in our games it was usually 6)

Well there's an argument that the genre is served if the brick/invulnerable guy is a bit slower and the speedster should be a bit faster.

But yes, after the speedster in the group finally maxed to SPD 12, we ditched the speed card.

Ooh! Can we implement the ability to save advancement cards to play as needed?

That would be mechanically problematic to do for more than a session - in that a "saved" card is in the players hand and not back in the deck, and thereby effects other player characters potential advancement.

While we certainly could let people just copy cards and save the copies, this system already adds a deck of cards and a set of tokens to the dice and charsheets needed for the game, so I'd be concerned about the copies become lost before advancement happened or confused with the originals and changing the deck composition. Any such copies should be on different color index cards or in different colored ink or somesuch.

Is there a reason for the "only one card revealed at a time" thing?

Yes, but not a terribly good one.

The system was originally implemented as "hidden information" game, where the players had no idea what was in the deck or how the card schedule worked. This predictably made some players happy with the thrill of discovery and pissed other players off with the lack of control.

Through extensive use, the players have become familiar with most of the cards, and most have even designed a few to add into the mix now (more on that later), so there is a lot less "thrill of discovery" currently.

While bidding pretty much has to be one card at a time, there is no strong reason that you couldn't announce a list of everything to be auctioned off at the start. You could either precisely reveal each card or go with a partial reveal such as "this week, 4 cards, each one worth 5 points" or "this week, 6 cards: 2 perks, 2 skills, one characteristics increase and we'll end with one new sensory power."

This may not be a problem for the systems/cards in question, but it seems like this could produce some nasty results if it's possible to draw cards that don't benefit any of the PCs--attributes or skills that no one needs, abilities that don't work well with anything they've got, or the like. I understand that one of the goals was to force horizontal advancement, but in some systems I could still imagine getting stuff that is totally worthless unless you spend a huge amount of resources developing it after you get it.

I thought about a rule that if no one bids on a card, you throw it out and draw something else (like Bridge deals), but if the players cooperate that technically means that they can keep cycling the deck until they get exactly what they want. I suppose you could allow them to do it a limited number of times per session, or they could just cajole the GM for mercy if their luck is bad.

Or you could just be careful when designing the cards in this deck that they're all too general for that to happen.

Oh, and yes, this is a neat idea.

Well the obvious solutions to the "worthless" card that goes all the way around the table with nobody bidding on it are to either

A> make it free to the first bidder to have passed on it "if you don't put a token towards it, then Mike gets it for free"

or

B> Leave it out there as a free bonus to the next card to be bid on. "Okay, since nobody wanted '+3 points of the resistance talent' you'll now be bidding on 'A new 3 point contact' AND '+3 points of the resistance talent'" A two-for-one deal folks!"

From an aWoD standpoint, it seems like there would want to be a Minor Advancement and a Major advancement deck. Which to my mind implies actually making a table and then dealing out a normal deck of cards. And then you could have some of the higher numbered cards give out more control and the lesser ones give out less.

♥8: Add 2 to a background skill you used this chapter.
♣J: Add a Specialization to a skill you used this chapter.
♦2: Increase a technical skill by 1.
♠A: Choose a skill and increase it by 1.

-Username17

Well to my mind that implies Minor and Major Arcana and basing the chart off a Tarot deck to give a vague occult feel appropriate to the WoD

Why can't we bid on them all at once?

Everyone on their turn bids with their remaining tokens on any card. When everyone "passes," one card gets assigned to the current high bidder, everyone else who bid on it regains their tokens, and bidding recommences.

All you need is a simple mechanic for determining which card gets sold first. Either just number the cards before bidding, do it randomly, or, (my preference) sell the highest-priced cards first.

Josh_Kablack wrote:Well to my mind that implies Minor and Major Arcana and basing the chart off a Tarot deck to give a vague occult feel appropriate to the WoD

A good plan, although it is unfortunate that most people don't have a complete Tarot deck lying around the way they have access to a standard Bicycle deck. Notation might be a bit of a problem, I don't want to write out "Knight of Cups" because that's dumb. How's this:

†4:
¤5:
þ6:
¶7:

-Username17

Why can't we bid on them all at once?

. Because this is a ritual to help focus a large group on the game. Tracking multiple bids on multiple cards at the same time is more concentration than some of the players in my group are likely to have and adds confusion for no gain when compared to just pre-announcing what is to be auctioned.

Let me illustrate. It's your turn mid-bidding. Would you rather have to consider:

A> "We're bidding on +3 to strength, Brian is leading with one token, do you want to bid 2?"

The answer here is going to be either "pass", or "yeah sure, I'll bid 2" or perhaps even "heck I'll bid it up to three so Josh doesn't outbid me on his turn".

or

B> "The remaining cards are a +3 to Str which Brian has a token on, +2" of a movement mode, which Mike has 1 token on, +1d6 Luck, which Bleys has 2 tokens on and a new 3-point contact which Will has 2 tokens on, do you want to beat any of those?

The answer here is going to be something along the lines of "Was that 2 on the +3 strength or 3 on the +2 movement" "I bid on the cheapest one" "wait whose tokens are those in the middle? " or other raw confusion.

although it is unfortunate that most people don't have a complete Tarot deck lying around

Ahh, I see a key difference between the WoD players I know and the ones you have in mind.

Still easy enough to do the Deck of Many Things hack and have options for both.

Also worth pointing out that just writing stuff on index cards may require more prep time, but it has the advantages of being clearer as to what exactly players are bidding on and also completely open ended.

The open-ended nature is to me rather a big deal to miss out on. In the Champs game where this originated we've recently added a bunch of pretty character and campaign specific cards. Stuff such as

• a card where you get a REC bonus if you take a Recovery action while adjacent to the Weather/Lightning PC - as he can use his electrical absorbtion to help recharge *your* powers
• A card where you get rapid senses and perception bonuses while in telepathic contact with the information processing character - as he can help your mind process stuff in different ways.
• A card where you get Missile Deflection while you are reasonably close to the brick - as he will just reflexively use his stony body to protect his squishier teammates.
• A card where you get a DCV bonus if you have your team communicator in contact with the danger sense NPC, as he says stuff like "duck right now"

This sort of thing is really tied to the PCs and major NPCs in any given campaign, and really can't be effectively built into the system itself.

Just use staves = clubs, hearts = cups, spades = swords, and diamonds = coins. The tarot and playing card decks are identical aside from the major arcana.

Give everyone chips of a different color. Have them physically put things on the cards when they bid. the information is all there visually.

Evo does it. Evo's specific system is slightly different, and has the constraint that there be cards <= number of players, but it has multi-bids.

1. What is the gain to be had by parallel bidding when compared to just pre-announcing? I can see that when compared to holding subsequent cards in secret, parallel bidding gives players more information with which to make strategic decisions in the auction. But that same information is made available with pre-announcing and parallel bidding comes at a cost of added complexity and/or additional materials and space needed to implement it. I'm not seeing any gain to compensate for this.

2. Your suggestion of colored chips is thoughtful, but totally not practical. How many different colors of poker chips (or similar objects) do you have where you game? There's a really good chance that it's less than the number of players you may have. (seriously, the Forefront game has had 9 players during its run, up to 7 of whom have been at the same game session / auction at the same time) Futhermore, how many different stacks of chips can you reasonably fit on a playing card, (or the cut in half index cards we're been using) before some slide off and things get confusing.

Worse still, players are going to be handing chips back and forth over the course of the game, so it's entirely possible that the only chips a player would have left would be ones that started in the possession of other players.

-Username17

That's not actually a problem, here as the bidding happens at the *start* of each session.

To clarify, here's the step-by-step for the way we've done it, in chronological order:

1. Banked chips + one chip for attendance are handed out to each player. These could be colored coded by player.

2. Bidding happens.

3. After all the bidding is done, each player passes their remaining chops in, and the GM records totals to be banked for next session.

4. The GM then hands one chip out to each player to be given away for "doing something awesome". Even in a color-coded system, these could all be the same color, or any mix of colors whatsoever. (provided you aren't worried about players cheating by giving away extra tokens and have a rough memory of the awesome things that happened during the session)

5. Whenever a player leaves, they let the GM know of any such chips they received and these are added to the banked totals. (if nobody leaves early, each player just does this at the end of the session)

New proposal:

in addition to the chips, each player has a pawn. You place the cards in a horizontal row which is "zero." Players place their pawn ABOVE the card they're bidding on, and outbid others by simply leapfrogging other players' pawns.

The rason to multi-bid is to reduce stress, allow for player negotiations, and avoiding punshing concept overlap too heavily.

1: Stress Reduction. I know that I personally am an unusually nervous and controlling person, but even with the other cards revealed, I'd be sweating the early auctions a LOT trying to predict what would be available for cheap later on. All that effort trying to predict and outthink others makes the process feel too adversariel for RPGs, which are a co-operative genre. Simultaneous auctions allow everyone to see what's what, making it feel more like a party divvying treasure.

2: Negotiation. It's easy and natural with the multi-bid system to react to other people's bids. This lets you and a friend try to get a particular combo going (if you bid on summon swarm, I'll bid on Inspire), or lets you avoid planning on certain cards you know your friends want.

3: Related to the above. The auction system heavily punishes characters with overlapping concepts. If you have two bruisers competing for +STR cards, NOT ONLY will they each advance their primary schtick half as fast as the one guy who is collecting +LOGIC, but because they will get into a bidding war, they will each end up having fewer secondary schticks than the hacker gets. With multi-bidding, they can reduce competition by having one player grab the +STR, the other grab the +AGI or +Fortitude, rather than getting into a bidding war over first one, then the other.

I definitely disagree with simultaneous auctioning. All that does is make it take fucking forever before anyone actually gets anything and create a situation where a character with four chips who wants 2 different cards can end up losing both to two different players with 3 chips a piece. There's just no reason to do it that way.

There's real reasons to deal them face up and reasons to deal them face down, but the only thing you gain out of people being able to multi-bid is frustration.

Related to the above. The auction system heavily punishes characters with overlapping concepts.

True. But honestly multibidding does not help that. At all. It only does two things:

1> Your chip can be locked away on one that is going to end up going for 2 chips, which means it is probably going to go last, thereby depriving you of a chip for the ones that are currently getting fought over despite the fact that you aren't getting that one either and the chip is just going to get banked.

2> Everyone has 5 choices to make each turn instead of only 1, slowing down the process.

Seriously, any advantage of asking people if they want to bid on any card is gained by turning all the cards face up and then putting the cards out for bidding one at a time.

-Username17

Okay, give people's chips back as soon as they're outbid. I don't know why I didn't suggest that in the first place. That obviates the need for color-coding the chips as well.

If there are two "technical" characters and 2 or more technical cards, wouldn't they benefit from being able to divvy them up rather than auctioning one at a time? I'm not expert on auction theory, but that seems intuitive.

Boolean wrote: If there are two "technical" characters and 2 or more technical cards, wouldn't they benefit from being able to divvy them up rather than auctioning one at a time? I'm not expert on auction theory, but that seems intuitive.

No. As long as each player can see all the future offerings then there is no reason for any player to drive up the price of a card so long as there's another card he wants. Each player only gets one card, so any time the number of players who want an available kind of card is known to be equal to or less than the available copies of that card it is expected to go for one chip.

The only time there is a bidding war of any kind is when more than one player has a specific card as their first choice and there are not known to be additional cards of that value to those players in the set.

-Username17

Since when is there a constraint that every player gets one card? According to the original post, there's a fixed point value of cards dealt out, but a variable number of actual cards.

If you assume they're cooperating, and are able to freely communicate with each other, they can divy them up however they want regardless of the auctioning system you use.

If you assume they're not cooperating, then they've got to think very carefully about how much each power is worth to them, how much it will be worth to have extra chips banked for later rounds, and how much the other players are likely to bid. Under either system.

A more complicated system will require them to think about more possible sequences of moves and counter-moves, which will mean people will tend to make more mistakes and not analyze stuff as deeply, which means you will tend to get less optimal behavior, unless the more complicated system inherently makes optimal behavior easier.

I don't see any particular reason to think that simultaneous auctions would make optimal behavior easier. Maybe one exists, but I'm not seeing it. I still need to think about how much I want each power, and how much I'm likely to need to spend in order to win, and consider the benefits of saving chips for future use, but now I also have to make complicated decisions about the order I put my chips down in order to avoid having them tied up in one bid when I want them on another. I don't see an upside.

Since when is there a constraint that every player gets one card? According to the original post, there's a fixed point value of cards dealt out, but a variable number of actual cards.

If the system is constrained such that each player gets exactly one card per session, neither more nor less, then there's no pressing need to auction simultaneously. But I don't see the strong reason not to. In this case, it becomes less of an auction and more of a draft. I'd expect in most cases players to simply go 'round the table picking a card from those that are left, and bidding of any kind to be somewhat rare. The number of bidding wars--which are what are time consuming--is reduced, because if you like cards 1 and 3, you no longer have to try to buy 1 because you fear losing 3.

Minor Arcana:

Card	Advancement
†2:	A specialization in a Physical Skill
†3:	A new Physical skill at rating 1
†4:	+1 to Perception
†5:	+1 to Stealth
†6:	+1 to Athletics
†7:	+1 to Drive
†8:	+1 to a Physical skill you used this chapter
†9:	+1 to a Physical skill of your choice
†10:	+1 to a Physical skill of your choice
†P:	A specialization in any skill
†N:	A new skill at Rating 1.
†Q:	+1 to any skill
†K:	+1 to any skill
†A:	+1 to any skill or a new skill at rating 1
¤2:	A specialization in a Technical Skill
¤3:	A new Technical skill at rating 1
¤4:	+1 to Electronics
¤5:	+1 to Artisan
¤6:	+1 to Rigging
¤7:	+1 to Research
¤8:	+1 to a Technical skill you used this chapter
¤9:	+1 to a Technical skill of your choice
¤10:	+1 to a Technical skill of your choice
¤P:	A specialization in any skill
¤N:	A new skill at Rating 1.
¤Q:	+1 to any skill
¤K:	+1 to any skill
¤A:	+1 to any skill or a new skill at rating 1.
þ2:	A specialization in a Social skill
þ3:	A new Social skill at rating 1
þ4:	+1 to Bureaucracy
þ5:	+1 to Empathy
þ6:	+1 to Expression
þ7:	+1 to Persuasion
þ8:	+1 to a Social skill you used this chapter
þ9:	+1 to a Social skill of your choice
þ10:	+1 to a Social skill of your choice
þP:	A specialization in any skill
þN:	A new skill at Rating 1.
þQ:	+1 to any skill
þK:	+1 to any skill
þK:	+1 to any skill or a new skill at rating 1.
¶2:	Two new Backgrounds at rating 1
¶3:	A new Background at rating 2
¶4:	+2 to a Background you used this chapter
¶5:	+2 to a Background you used this chapter
¶6:	+1 to a Background you used this chapter and another Background
¶7:	+1 to two Backgrounds of your choice
¶8:	+2 to a Background of your choice
¶9:	+2 to a Background of your choice
¶10:	Gain a Positive Quality
¶P:	Gain a Positive Quality
¶N:	Gain a Positive Quality
¶Q:	Learn a Language
¶K:	Learn a Language
¶A:	+1 to any skill or a new skill at rating 1.