Why advancement and XP?

[K]

So I've been thinking about this a lot: why wait to play the character you wanted to play?

Now, I understand the urge to power up your character. I even understand the need to change your character because you are bored with using some or even all of your stuff and wanting to play with new things.

But let's face it, when someone takes a PrC they really just want to be that thing.... the levels of whatever classes that let them become shapeshifters or true necromancers or dragon riders or something that's what they wanted to do all along and the prereq were just a speedbump that made you slightly unhappy until you finally got what you wanted.

So here is the proposal: no advancement, but let people shift some abilities around between adventures. Let them find (and lose) magic items easily as a faster and more flexible method of gaining and losing abilities, but don't let magic items become an alternate form of advancement.

Start people out with a lot of abilities. Of course, there is going to be some option paralysis but that gets minimized by the fact that you can move things around between adventures.

For advancement queens, give them the ability to get setting stuff instead after adventures. For example, completing a quest for Westgate might let you choose off a like like the Wizard Guild lets you use their stuff like their teleportation network or the leaders of Westgate might offer you a building or something.

[JonSetanta]

Exalted has this. AKA, the Mary Sue RPG.

Also, it's not option paralysis if you have ample slots to not only grab what you need, but some extra junk abilities on the side.
Less chance of getting screwed due to bad or uneducated decisions.

[Kaelik]

Exalted doesn't have this, since a starting exalt is missing several key sticks that you want, and adventuring gets you a direct power up in the form of more essence, and charms that directly synergize with the ones you have.

[Fuchs]

I always try to make a character that is as quickly as possible "done" so I don't feel the need to advance anymore. When a character is done is usually dependent on options, not numbers.

If I want to play a shapeshifter, then I want to play a shapeshifter as soon as possible, not at the end of the game for a level or 2.

[Fuchs]

Oh, in our games, shadowrun and D&D, we don't use exp, we advance "when we see fit", which comes out as about a lvel every one or two years in D&D, and more gear and such in Shadowrun.

[hogarth]

So I've been thinking about this a lot: why wait to play the character you wanted to play?

I would say that a minority of RPGs have actual "levels" and a high degree of vertical advancement like D&D does, so that question has been asked and answered many, many times.

[Ghostwheel]

Robin D. Laws gave one possible explanation to the "why" that I found rather interesting in the book "Robin's Laws of Good Game Mastering (page 8, under "Crunchy Bits"):

One of my pet theories about the popularity of roleplaying games goes like this.
Roleplaying is fantasy shopping for guys.
That is, men would, as a group, be more interested in shopping if a) it meant never having to leave the house, and b) they were shopping for super-powers.
In that sense, the typical roleplaying rulebook is like a Nieman-Marcus catalog for super-powers. Depending on the game system and character type, these extraordinary abilities might be called feats, spell, shticks, disciplines, skills, high tech gear, psionics, or whatever. For lack of a better all-encompassing term, I refer t these things as "crunchy bits." Players who dig crunchy bits can not only have fun at gaming sessions, but can enjoy rule books at their leisure, paging them through them in shivery anticipation of powers to come. It's not secret that the best-selling game supplements are collections of additional crunchy bits.
Dungeons and Dragons is the classic crunchy bits game, doling out coveted powers on a punctuated schedule that would make B. F. Skinner proud. (Skinner was the psychologist whose pioneering studies examined the impact of rewards and other external stimuli on behavior. He found that rewards that occurred every so often were more likely to encourage a desired behavior than those doled out constantly and consistently.)
Vampire ingenuously aims its play style advice at method actors and storytellers, but doesn't stint on the crunchy bits. Some of its top-level crunchy bits put to shame any zillionth level wizard/paladin with his +50 vorpal sword.
Though the power gamer is the purest exponent of the love of crunchy bits, even the most dedicated method actor or storyteller can secretly lust for them in his heart. They allow us to fantasize about flying even after we're too old to run around the house with red towels tied around our necks.
(Of course, I know that the above bit about shopping and guys is a vast, stereotypical generalization. The world is full of men who like shopping, and every year more and more women are coming to appreciate the advantages of the +50 vorpal sword. But still...

Note that the book was published in 2002 when D&D 3.0 was still rather new, so some of the examples may be rather cliche to say the least.

[Josh_Kablack]

Major reasons for advancement

• RPG tradition / Player expectation
• Tool for MC to use Pavlovian conditioning to promote his favored playstyle
• Player anticipation
• Breaks learning the game into smaller chunks
• Allows player to adjust character after they are better aware of group's playstyle and game environment.

Major reasons against advancement

• Reserving stuff for later limits the scope of available characters for players. (not just power level, but actual archetypes)
• Requires player (and often MC) time to be spent on a non-interactive task after game start.
• Assumes that grossly unbalanced opposition exists in the game, and therefore in any setting using that game system. This can lead to all sorts of verisimilitude conflicts.
• Can cause character's abilities to shift rapidly leading to characters who are inconsistent and narratives that are outright confusing.

[Orca]

A feeling of achievement, and a feeling of security. Those are the main reasons for gaining XP/levels IMO. The latter you can get around by making starting characters less squishy, I'm not sure that stuff you can't carry would be enough for the former.

If some abilities can be 'unlocked' later, even if they're not really stronger, would that be enough or would it just irritate people?

[Dean]

I think there is a place for advancement but it should really be quite binary I feel. This is another place where "Tiers" would be very useful. If the game had lots and lots of abilities available to you at character creation you could simply make the character you wanted immediately. And this is good. But if the system supported, say, 3 Tiers of play corresponding to something like Mortal, Legendary, and Mythic. Then advancement would still exist but it occurs when Neo comes back to life or whatever. Big end of the campaign arc power ups. That way it is both totally reasonable to spend your whole career playing a character who would be constantly trading out abilities and becoming different WITHIN a single power tier, but also possible to level up should the time come to a completely different kind of hero. This way the only type of character concept not supported upon character creation is "Guy who's more powerful than everyone else" which is a very reasonable thing to limit.

[8headeddragon]

Unless the mechanics are absolutely perfect, wouldn't players who could do that simply marry the "I win" abilities? And very likely then wouldn't a fair portion of these players find themselves sooner getting bored of the best abilities than fooling around with inferior ones?

Generally speaking people want to be better at the things they spend any committed amount of time in. Either in the form of polishing their personal skills (assuming they're a competitive type) or in the form of accumulating a state of being better (having more levels/points/wealth/stuff).

You may be onto something regarding a variety of abilities that come and go faster, but that model for power ups sounds a lot more like a card based game.

[Mask_De_H]

Unless the mechanics are absolutely perfect, wouldn't players who could do that simply marry the "I win" abilities? And very likely then wouldn't a fair portion of these players find themselves sooner getting bored of the best abilities than fooling around with inferior ones?

You have to write and line-test abilities that are good for different people. Even with the best options, you have different playstyles and different methods of using the abilities. As long as there are no complete trap options, the game will stay fresh. Look at competitive fighting games, for example.

Generally speaking people want to be better at the things they spend any committed amount of time in. Either in the form of polishing their personal skills (assuming they're a competitive type) or in the form of accumulating a state of being better (having more levels/points/wealth/stuff).

You still give them stuff, it's just fluff stuff. You can still gain wealth, respect, prestige, and whatever the fuck with a semi-static power set; if this weren't true, the superhero RPGs probably wouldn't exist. You don't have to reward your players with vertical advancement, if they want power you just give them new shit on the level of their old shit.

[8headeddragon]

You have to write and line-test abilities that are good for different people. Even with the best options, you have different playstyles and different methods of using the abilities. As long as there are no complete trap options, the game will stay fresh.

Hence why it has to be more or less perfect. Just consider the amount of disagreement on balance and the hidden gamebreakers these boards alone generate.

Look at competitive fighting games, for example.

Fighting games regularly have to make tweaks to smooth out old imbalances, all the while accidentally implementing new infinites and other such gamebreakers. This is why there are going to be many iterations of any particular series. The competitive fighting game scene routinely places characters into tiers based on how effective they are and tournaments regularly have to ban certain characters if they're too easy to exploit. A game needs to be as polished as Starcraft, which did indeed take several years of testing and refinement to get to it's current state.

You still give them stuff, it's just fluff stuff. You can still gain wealth, respect, prestige, and whatever the fuck with a semi-static power set; if this weren't true, the superhero RPGs probably wouldn't exist. You don't have to reward your players with vertical advancement, if they want power you just give them new shit on the level of their old shit.

Horizontal growth alone is only really going to work if there's a skill or strategy that can be sharpened through continued play. Trophies and rank are typically earned for reaching levels of skill, and if the characters just get them for simply surviving, well... I really have to question the replay value in that. Imagine resolving battles through rounds of tic-tac-toe. Your rewards will be dismembered dragon parts and marrying the princess, but battle will always be resolved this way. Can this last a whole campaign?

[Nebuchadnezzar]

A factor may be how there are more examples of fantasy supporting the bildungsroman model somewhat commensurate with vertical character development than, say, superhero tales, games simulating which tending to have less growth in overall kickassery. I blame anime.

[tussock]

So I've been thinking about this a lot: why wait to play the character you wanted to play?

Not what I'm doing. Starting with a guy, a little like me only fucking awesome, having trouble with Orcs and less trouble with Kobolds. Becoming a guy not at all like me, who counts Orcs he's killed by the score, but thinks Giants are still scary. Becoming a ridiculous machine of destruction who makes Giants cower in fear and give tribute by the tonne, desperately seeking to find the ancient Blade of Unmaking. Having a laugh when finding it turns out to be a trap, because the character was getting to be a dick anyway.

Now, I understand the urge to power up your character.

I'm pretty sure I'm just reliving some bad childhood experiences and making come out in my favour this time. I don't want to be super-dude, I want to grow from some guy into a super-dude who totally fucks over everyone who used to scare me when I was just some guy. And when I'm bored with that, I want to do it again from the start.


See, it's not being rich that people like, it's making more money than you used to.

[hogarth]

A factor may be how there are more examples of fantasy supporting the bildungsroman model somewhat commensurate with vertical character development than, say, superhero tales, games simulating which tending to have less growth in overall kickassery.

Uh, I'm pretty sure K is not suggesting that we ban character development, just power increases.

[RadiantPhoenix]

Major reasons for advancement
...
Breaks learning the game into smaller chunks
...

And this right here is the part that I think is the most important. I consider myself past the point of learning the basics, but I still appreciate the concept of a "tutorial level" for a character; maybe even multiple tutorial levels for sufficiently complicated characters, like wizards.

[TheWorid]

Major reasons for advancement
...
Breaks learning the game into smaller chunks
...

And this right here is the part that I think is the most important. I consider myself past the point of learning the basics, but I still appreciate the concept of a "tutorial level" for a character; maybe even multiple tutorial levels for sufficiently complicated characters, like wizards.

Are we supposed to expect that every time someone plays a Wizard, they need a tutorial? Declaring the first couple levels to be a practice round is pointless because there is a large contingent of players who are skilled with the system enough that they don't appreciate a certain chunk of gameplay being inevitably boring before they're allowed to have a decent set of abilities. Moreover, having the first few levels be a "tutorial" is the same as saying "Don't try to play low-level games, because those are just for beginners", preventing meaningful play at that degree of power.

If you want a tutorial, put a sidebar in with rules for playing the game in EasyModo. Don't subject everyone to it regardless of their wishes.

[Josh_Kablack]

Are we supposed to expect that every time someone plays a Wizard, they need a tutorial?

Given the number of houserules and errata regarding various spells in 3.x and 4.x D&D, that would, sadly, not be an unreasonable assumption.

Declaring the first couple levels to be a practice round is pointless because there is a large contingent of players who are skilled with the system enough that they don't appreciate a certain chunk of gameplay being inevitably boring before they're allowed to have a decent set of abilities.

Interesting argument.

But to counter:

• I myself never sad "tutorial" or "practice levels". I said "smalled chunks to learn". For example: In all pre-4e versions of D&D the spell level setup is such that whatever level a primary caster starts play at, their best spells are (largely) their newest spells, so they can generally be effective just focusing on their highest level or two of spells. This is a lot easier for anyone, regardless of experience to keep track of than needed to pay scrupulous attention to all spells at all times.
• There is also a large contingent of players who are not skilled enough with the system to successfully manage multiple levels of abilities all at once. Personally, I can't say I've been in a group that didn't have at least one new-to-that-system player at any point in at least the past decade.
• You can totally, and many people really do start games above 1st level/ suggested starting character points. It's easier for a given group to skip a tutorial level written into a game's assumptions than it is for that group's MC to write a tutorial level to append to the game.

Moreover, having the first few levels be a "tutorial" is the same as saying "Don't try to play low-level games, because those are just for beginners", preventing meaningful play at that degree of power.

Are low-power games incapable of being meaningful games?

[Maj]

I hope that there's no assumption here that classless = no advancement.

[ScottS]

XP = attendance grade to give people an incentive to show up (not fully advocating for "Mister Fascist" play style, just saying it's useful to have a if-you-don't-show-you-start-sucking mechanic, in case you get players with "focus issues")

[Orion]

Are low-power games incapable of being meaningful games?

That's the opposite of what he said. His argument is that if you make the low powers levels also low complexity, you make low power play meaningless when it could otherwise have been meaningful.

[TheWorid]

Given the number of houserules and errata regarding various spells in 3.x and 4.x D&D, that would, sadly, not be an unreasonable assumption.

Houserules and errata indicate that people consider the rules bad, not necessarily that they don't understand them. See: the Tomes.

Interesting argument.

But to counter:

• I myself never sad "tutorial" or "practice levels". I said "smalled chunks to learn". For example: In all pre-4e versions of D&D the spell level setup is such that whatever level a primary caster starts play at, their best spells are (largely) their newest spells, so they can generally be effective just focusing on their highest level or two of spells. This is a lot easier for anyone, regardless of experience to keep track of than needed to pay scrupulous attention to all spells at all times.
• There is also a large contingent of players who are not skilled enough with the system to successfully manage multiple levels of abilities all at once. Personally, I can't say I've been in a group that didn't have at least one new-to-that-system player at any point in at least the past decade.
• You can totally, and many people really do start games above 1st level/ suggested starting character points. It's easier for a given group to skip a tutorial level written into a game's assumptions than it is for that group's MC to write a tutorial level to append to the game.

I was responding to Radiant Phoenix, so you not mentioning tutorial levels is irrelevant.

Regardless, I don't think that abilities should be gained in the manner you describe. Rather, you should have a set number of them that remains constant throughout play, but the powers themselves scale up to where they're supposed to be at that tier. This holds complexity constant (at an optimal level for human decision-making to take place, in a good game) while still allowing for whatever advancement the designers intended.

The problem with your last point is that levels 1-3 (or whatever) are at a certain level of power that is being essentially thrown away by the designers by forcing them into a simplistic mold. Doing this prevents people from playing games of normal complexity within that tier.

Are low-power games incapable of being meaningful games?

No, my point is that they are capable of containing fun, meaningful play, but setting them up as tutorial levels robs them of meaning by putting them in that box.