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BC - 1) Time, experience points, and levelling up
Hello everyone,
As I mentioned a while ago I'm working on an entirely new campaign, and as I have some time on my hands I want to really dig at some of the foundational assumptions I have about role-playing and gaming. I think it's an effort to find something new and energising, and also some life changes, mostly good, mean that I am able to change direction. So I am going to be posting some thoughts about what a good role playing game is like. Thoughts are a little chaotic, but that's the way I do things.
One of my basic ideas is good role playing is not about losing your self in a character (PC), but becoming good at playing the PC in the context of the play. PCs aren't real, so losing them is no real loss. I'll take more about this in another post in a couple of days.
But first thing I wanted to discuss and ask about was experience points and levelling up. This in the games I grew up with experience (XP) is extremely important for combat, which is a core game within a session. Most every game I play has had a progression mechanic for PCs, and it shows most in combat. And it's always been a pain.
@clash_bowley kindly gave me a copy of StarCluster4 (SC4) where, in my reading, progression (and regression) occur simply as a question of age (p.59). Time also applies in RM, but is less important than than experience from adventuring. SC4 provides an elegant way of simplifying XP to time tracking - as PCs age their situation changes. Seems nice. But as I thought about this, I realised 2 things:
1) While I don't really care about PCs levelling up in a physical way for the combat game (HPs as improved bodies), it seems to me the PCs should improve, not in so much a physical way as much as becoming better at combat, and then as the PC ages, they should become worse at it. Violent combat is not a solution that can be maintained over a campaign. After all, while old age and deceit almost always defeat youth and skill, youth always wins in the end, even if it is only through the passage of time. RM has a nice way of tracking this (actual vs potential stats), but it is fiddly and paperwork. I want to play in the session. Don't mind paperwork around the session, but it has to be less onerous than the fun it generates.
That said, I do want to play with PCs levelling up in the area of social standing, which includes the social and communal effects of memory and history in the game as PCs become known in their life-paths. This would include titles, like in early D&D, and also social obligation and the conflicts that creates. So I still want to keep track of XP from play sessions, and I want my players to value that.
2) Also, I want the players (not the PCs) to have a sense that through experience they are becoming better at playing the game. I want to avoid "grinding" through stuff that should have become easy, but I'd like this to reflect the players actually improving, not just paying their dues. Also, as the players become better at playing the challenges for the PCs need to increase, so some kind of mechanical improvement needs to be noted. It's encouraging for everyone.
Anyway, a bit of a mess. Any comments or ideas?
Thanks, BC
Comments
I thought of your first point and I believe it is covered. In StarCluster 4, all checks are skill based. Skills use the associated attribute as Target Number. As characters age, the characters gain skills, but as they age past the age of 30-33, they begin to lose attribute points, lowering their Target Numbers, thus increasing their difficulty levels over time. At advanced ages it becomes increasingly difficult to compete against younger, less skilled opponents, even with more skill.
Also, the equivalent of hit points in the game are based on the attributes, so as attributes go down with age, the amount of punishment the character's bodies can deal with also declines.
Some general thoughts on experience:
Experience and advancement are artifacts of D&D's wargaming roots. D&D was originally seen as a military squad type game, where the squad infiltrated a dungeon. Only the squad were a hodgepodge of adventurers. But experience and advancement was useful to show how the rookies advanced, and to help create the conditions of leveling up to make it easier to tackle the next dungeon level - because the dungeon also levels up as you go deeper. So I think in your campaign, it's worth asking - do character need to level up as they go deeper into the setting or culture? And do you want to go from rookie to hero? Maybe both of these are not important.
Aside from this basic mechanical feature of levelling up, it turns out that 'getting xp' or 'levelling up' have a player facing role as well. These things give a hit of dopamine to players, which encourages participation. And depending on what XP are rewarded FOR, it can influence player behaviour. D&D, for example, traditionally rewarded players for collecting treasure. Then it was for killing things and collecting treasure. These days, it's more a reward for overcoming challenges by whatever means. Do you want to us levelling as a way to reward certain player activities?
The BRP family of games didn't traditionally award XP - and characters didn't 'level up'. But they still advanced, incrementally. After each adventure, players had a small chance to increase each of their skills that they had used during the adventure. This represented getting better, but it wasn't a reward for any activity except for participating in the game. Amodern BRP system like Mythras takes more of a hybrid approach. In Mythras, XP are awarded (not for any specific activity, just for being there) and players can spend the XP to try to improve the skill of their choice. The advances are still small and incremental. And since there's no 'levelling up' the characters don't get a bunch of new perks all in one bang - no HP increase, for example, and no new spells or abilities.
Computer RPG games seem to have more diverse ways of improving abilities than tabletop games do. One method I've seen, for example is the granting of skill points. When the character 'levels up', they are given a small number of skill points which they can allocate to specific skills. It's the skills themselves that level up, and each skill might have a chart of abilities associated with it - when you advance from level 2 to 3 in that skill, the number of things you can do with that skill goes up. For example, Dodge level 1 might allow you to try to dodge punches. Level 2 might allow you to try to to dodge punches and small weapons. Level 3 might let you try to dodge swords. Level 4 arrows. Level 5 bullets or spells. So this is useful if you want to have some kind of fine control over exactly how characters can improve.
There's no reason to feel limited by these things. In your setting, maybe the characters never improve - instead it's the setting that gets altered. Yes - imagine if you give XP to your party, which they accumulate. Then, when they have enough, they can spend the XP to alter the setting. Spend 10xp to make haggling with merchants easier. Spend 12xp to improve access to temples. Spend 20xp break the vizier's roadblock to an audience with the king. Spend 30xp to reduce the citizens propensity for violence - they now ask questions first and shoot later. Give them a shopping list of ways to earn xp, and another list of ways to expend it.
I don't really have the practical experience to comment much, but this section intrigued me. I think you are saying here that as characters improve (however measured) a good chunk of that improvement should focus on who knows them and by implication what kind of "jobs" they are offered. This was certainly a feature of how Empire of the Petal Throne was intended to be played (how often it was actually played this way is probably a more dubious statistic) - the first jobs that brand new PCs just arrived in their small boat in the entry port would be offered was probably with a petty merchant / small gang / minor wealthy person. Quite apart from not having any ability worth speaking of, you also had no gear, so all of the higher echelons of society were denied you.
The theory was then that you then progressed socially, either by way of the nobility or the numerous temples or by what you might call private armies, but the rulebook expectation was that it would take a long time to meet anyone really important. The notion that some two-bit character would suddenly get called into the Emperor's presence would be absurd.
@Apocryphal thanks for the extensive answer. My working question here is really about what you said in point 2 and point 5. I think that players will have their PCs do what they are good at, and avoid what that are bad at, so tracking this stuff is important for the players to be able to make decisions that will work in the game, and setting XP is a powerful way for the player called GM to make decisions that will work in the game.
When you talk about say BRP I see a game system that allows the players at the table to play games that aren't about the rather short list of good actions in the D&D games. I assume though that this requires greater work in assigning and tracking XP, because how can a system book include suggestions for the XP value of everything that might be worth tracking?
@RichardAbbott what I've read about EPT suggests that it might be a good source for how to think about this problem. Also maybe Pendragon. At the moment I'm thinking about how I would make a game like Worm Ouroboros or the Zimiamvian Trilogy work. Unlike say LOTR, which begins familiar and gradually goes odd, that story just chucks you in, and as a reader you have to figure it out. That's what I want to present to my players, but keeping them involved long enough to get it is a challenge. Not many fantasy buffs actually read ER Eddison, but a lot have digested JRR Tolkien. Ideally I'd also like to play at something like the intertextuality of Eddison. Only it would be bits of RPGs instead of text.
That is a cool way of thinking about a campaign, Tom! A campaign is your experience, and what you experience changes you, for better and worse.
>When you talk about say BRP I see a game system that allows the players at the table to play games that aren't about the rather short list of good actions in the D&D games. I assume though that this requires greater work in assigning and tracking XP, because how can a system book include suggestions for the XP value of everything that might be worth tracking?
Yes, BRP games (and many others, not just those) don’t tie advancement to any quality.
In the older games (RuneQuest, Call of Cthulhu, Stormbringer, etc.) there was a little check box beside each skill. When a character used that skill, they put a check beside it. When it came time for advancement, the checked skills were given a chance to go up by a small amount.
In the current iterations, there are no check boxes. The GM simply assigns 3 or 4 ‘advance rolls’ every few sessions and the players can apply them to any skill they like.
In both cases, there’s no moral weight or decision-making to advancement. This is unlike an experience point system, where you can award set XP amounts to specific actions or goals.
There’s a game called Artesia: Adventues in the Known World that has a very interesting advancement system. That gameworld has an in-setting mythology based on its version of the tarot deck of cards, and each card represents a specific set of actions or behaviours. When you fulfil a number of the actions associated with that card, get an advance 'gift') appropriate to the card. Since there are many cards in the deck, there are many ways to go - but players can advance on the path of the queen of swords, for example, or the path of the hanging man, or multiple paths at once. It’s a bit unwieldy, but quite flavourful.
See linked photo from a page in the book.
Good stuff Chris!
yeah. Where I'm getting a little hung up is that this applies to the players as much as the PCs. I would like to think that level advancement would correspond with the players becoming better players, which is something that mechanical / rule bounded advancement systems have trouble inspiring. My experience is that level advancement, as @Apocryphal says, can become the goal of the game, rather than an expression of the playing. We'll see how it goes.
Well, that's some of the reason why I moved away from levels in the first place. But many people love Levels and Leveling! It's just not such an attraction for me. Mind I am way out on the pointy edge of nobody where RPGs are concerned, so no one much cares.
@Apocryphal that Artesia looks quite interesting. Have you played it? It looks like the players can choose a path for their PC, who then accumulates rewards on that path as the play develops, i.e. they get rewarded for playing their role in the game / setting. Can the PCs get pushed off the desired path, and end up being different than the players intend, because of the decisions made over time? The unforeseen outcome that only makes sense in hindsight is one of the things I want to play at. I see this as being one of the most important ways of driving action as the play progresses - the PCs try to fix their mistakes, but don't really know how things work. I want that to carry over and through from PC to PC, just as we inherit problems from our forebears. The PCs are a sequential descent of previous be-ers. See this page for a brief explanation of what I mean: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/forebear
This leads into another topic I've been preparing to discuss: the relation between rule system and setting. Part off what I'm tired of about RPG rules is that they push playing in the setting into whatever types of situations or resolutions the system is meant to deal with, rather than supporting what the players want to deal with. I'll deal with that later.
@clash_bowley I'm tired of leveling too, but I don't know how else to govern the effect of experience. It's one of the reasons that PCs go off track, as I mentioned in post to @Apocryphal, and I want a way to enforce the consequences, even if the player wishes it didn't happen.
So one of the things from early D&D that got dropped was alignment, but if it was tracked as a reflection of player decisions I think it would provide a great mechanism to let the players know what kind of PCs they have made, and enable the GM to treat different PCs differently in the same in-play social situation. So NPCs might not help a PC because of the company they keep, but that might be tinged with respect or contempt. But it's not really clear to me yet.
An interesting classification of alignment might be philosophical - Nietzschean, say, or Machiavellian, or Hegelean. Using a Venn diagram rather than rigid boxes...
A lot of rules-lite games in particular do not have levelling at all. Diaspora, which is based on the Fate system, allows you to change your aspects (prose character descriptions) to represent change at the end of a session, but you don't really improve your character, so much as evolve your character.
There's a variant of Trail of Cthulhu in which character have 'pillars of sanity' - which are those rock-hard beliefs that a character has about the world around them. When faced with sharp attacks to this reality, a player can choose to let one of their pillars of sanity crumble and replace it with a new truth about the world. Cthulhu gaming is all about attacking a character's belief in the world around them, and gradually peeling off the skein of reality to expose the actual Great Old One's truths of the universe. This naturally results in hardening the character to the new reality, or a psychotic break (depending on your point of view).
So those are also ways to change a character without 'levelling' them. Any since the character is the player's window into the gameworld, changing the character will also change the player's perception of the world.
I never did have a chance to run Artesia for my group - I'd still like to try some day. I did make dozens of characters - character creation is like a game in itself. It uses a fun lifepath system. But the game seems cumbersome to run - I'd have to try it to be sure. The author has been teasing a second edition for something like 15 years. It's moving at the speed of cold fusion science.
This sparked a memory of some computer games that my son used to play quite a few years ago. One was the whole Star Wars franchise, where your actions while navigating through the early scenarios got summarised behind the scenes into which side of the force you would end up on. Of course you could influence, eg that randomly killing any innocent bystander you came across would pretty soon propel you into the dark side, but it was a nice in-game mechanism.
The second was a kind of god-game (I don't recall the name) where you started out with a kind of infant god which you then "grew up" on your island by deciding how you wanted to steer the direction of the islanders. Put simplistically, if you got them to do nice things then your god grew up nice, but if you got them into human sacrifice or whatever then your god turned bad. The appearance of the representative creature (think Shardik but more fantasy elements), the island, the overall colour scheme and all changed as your islanders changed in one direction of the other.
Again this was all handled behind the scenes by the game engine, but in both cases there was the principle of feedback between in-game actions and character/destiny.
Thank you everyone.
@Apocryphal do you think it's worth getting a copy of Artesia? It's not cheap for such an old game without a community ($20 US), and the reviews all talk about the art. Pictures are not really my thing - they're nice, but I am buying a game book, so I want something I can use at the table. A review mentioned awarding "Arcana points" that the player can spend as they wish. Is that part of the lifepath system you were talking about?
@RichardAbbott All these ideas are good, but someone needs to track them without much interruption, at least until everything is quite mature. That's why I am relating it to XP and levelling in D&D etc. I'm not good at tracking, it interrupts the flow, etc., so I'm trying to figure out how to put the tracking on the players as their role in awards / consequences for play.
@clash_bowley That is a good idea for the alignment - it could be easily played vs temple / clan / club memberships. More about those later. I am kind of hoping that if I can get a few areas that players can easily track they might provide the alternatives for the dopamine hit that @Apocryphal talks about. The other thing levelling does is it gives the players an anchor for their decisions. So I'm looking for more in-play activities that can replace killing and looting as the point of the game.
Now for a check in:
If people are interested in this kind of discussion I have quite a few topics I'd like to hear from people about. I've tried a few of the more recent iterations of rpgs (D&D5e - god what a lot of material), and it left me cold. The OSR / NSR thing seems to be a mess because it's somehow wrapped up with who likes who, combined with poor support. Basically, not very professional. I looked into Artesia and that is the kind of thing I am talking about - No problem with people changing / dropping plans, but if you want to change your word and be respected, you need to change it out loud. Anyway.
I was looking for some folks to play Into the Odd, Mythic / Electric Bastionland, but it wasn't clear how to find them, and to be honest if I'm going to learn a new set of rules at this point I might as well learn my own. So I guess I am working on a heartbreaker as a hobby. I have some players, so why not?
I originally thought to make different threads for each topic, but maybe it's better to have a long thread. Let the discussion develop more organically. What do you think?
Again thanks for all the feedback. BC
I'm not sure if it's worth it to buy Artesia. The game is unwieldy, but it's one of my favourite indie games I own for it's cool setting (a bit like a mix of ancient Greece and Persia in an early renaissance time period), and it has really interesting ideas around character creation and the advancement mechanism. The Arcana is the tarot-based advancement system I mentioned. I'm surprised a PDF of it costs that much. It's too bad the revised edition never materialized.
As for more questions - sure, have at it. I'm glad someone is talking RPGs.
I'm always up to talk about RPGs!