Segregated Xp, Yay or Nay?

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sat Jun 04, 2011 1:01 am

I mentioned FATAL to a friend the other day, and showed her the TV Tropes page, and she actually praised one thing about it, the fact that you get XP for specific tasks that you use to improve your ability to do those tasks, much like Oblivion, or in my actual experience, Fable (which is the better way to work it, I think).

But what do others think of the idea that "picking a lock gives lockpicking/Guile xp, Swording gives Swording/Body xp"? I do like it for a point based system (in a class system it'd just be wonky). Is it interesting? Is it mechanically good?

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Sat Jun 04, 2011 1:10 am

I think it's ideal for some kinds of videogames, by which I mean, the Oblivion way, not the Fable way.

But for a PnP RPG, I would say it's almost never worth the extra accounting.

Also, you have to do some work to make the game interesting enough that grinding a skill isn't done in the video game, but because of time skips, you are never going to get to the point where a Rogue doesn't timeskip skill grind his open lock.

Wrathzog · Post by **Wrathzog** » Sat Jun 04, 2011 1:12 am

For a video game, it's ideal.

For a Pen and Paper game, it's too much damn work for what you get out of it.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Sat Jun 04, 2011 1:15 am

Odd to see that two people called it ideal without seeing what each other said.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Sat Jun 04, 2011 1:16 am

PA wrote:Is it interesting? Is it mechanically good?

If you think that kill experience is good then you'll think that this is the bee's knees. It has all of the problems and advantages of that system (which means that there aren't any meaningful pros at all) except that there's less room for a DM to cockblock you for doing counter-genre stuff like offscreenedly slaughtering villages full of kobolds.

Wrathzog · Post by **Wrathzog** » Sat Jun 04, 2011 1:47 am

Kaelik wrote:Odd to see that two people called it ideal without seeing what each other said.

Well, the only real negative to the system is the added book keeping, which is a task that computers excel at. Other than that, it's just another way to track character progression and it just so happens to be one that closely resembles reality.

I'm going to follow this up by saying that I haven't seen it implemented right and that I prefer Fable's take on the idea over Oblivion's (but that may be because I despise Oblivion with a fucking passion).

Quantumboost · Post by **Quantumboost** » Sat Jun 04, 2011 1:54 am

Isn't that essentially what Burning Wheel does for advancement? Or at least very similar?

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Sat Jun 04, 2011 1:55 am

Wrathzog wrote:
Kaelik wrote:Odd to see that two people called it ideal without seeing what each other said.
Well, the only real negative to the system is the added book keeping, which is a task that computers excel at. Other than that, it's just another way to track character progression and it just so happens to be one that closely resembles reality.

I'm going to follow this up by saying that I haven't seen it implemented right and that I prefer Fable's take on the idea over Oblivion's (but that may be because I despise Oblivion with a fucking passion).

Oblivion, with a mod to make leveling not occur, and stats 100% based on skill level, without that stupid leveling mechanic, makes for a perfect leveling system. I originally did it on Morrowind, which is a better game than Oblivion, but with an even worse leveling system, so once you fix that, it's a great game.

Morat · Post by **Morat** » Sat Jun 04, 2011 2:16 am

Quantumboost wrote:Isn't that essentially what Burning Wheel does for advancement? Or at least very similar?

BW is something like "make a number of skill checks of varying difficulties, when you've accumulated enough, skill goes up." Mouse Guard, a simplified variant, is just "accumulate successes and failures, when you have enough, skill goes up."

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Sat Jun 04, 2011 2:28 am

One of the old "I swear it's not some houserules for AD&D" games, Forge, basically did that. I can't remember how it figured out your actual level for the purpose of new spells and shit, but for skills, every time you succeed on a skill you put a little notch beside it. Then at the end of a story arc you roll once for each notch, and on a failed roll the skill goes up 1% (so that it's harder to get better once you're an expert).

IIRC there were some non-percentile skills and things, like the equivalent of BAB/THAC0, that gained .1 each time you did this, and only after ten of these does it go up a whole integer (until which point those .1 increases are meaningless).

It was a pain in the ass. And no explanation was given as to why you didn't get notches by practicing pick-pocketing on your friends during the three day horse ride to the next area.

Benjamin · Post by **Benjamin** » Sat Jun 04, 2011 6:05 am

What about Cthulhu, RuneQuest and Basic Roleplaying? I think there the stats also advance through success.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sat Jun 04, 2011 7:19 am

Benjamin wrote:What about Cthulhu, RuneQuest and Basic Roleplaying? I think there the stats also advance through success.

Sort of, but it's not really the same. BRP basically says "at the end of the session, the GM gives X chances to improve your skills. you can bank these to improve a characteristic (#checks=current score), or you can roll them to try to improve a skill that you used in the game."

There isn't anyway that you're getting better at lock picking by picking locks, except that you have to remember to say "I practice lock picking on all the doors in my house" each session you want to improve your lock picking.

The improvement system in those also sucks, and I hate it because I have shit luck with dice rolls.

TheFlatline · Post by **TheFlatline** » Sat Jun 04, 2011 7:52 am

Kaelik wrote: Oblivion, with a mod to make leveling not occur, and stats 100% based on skill level, without that stupid leveling mechanic, makes for a perfect leveling system. I originally did it on Morrowind, which is a better game than Oblivion, but with an even worse leveling system, so once you fix that, it's a great game.

Ah yes... Morrowind. I loved that game. But I used to power game the f*ck out of it by making all of my stats that let me level up as low as possible. The stuff I wanted to be good at (swords & shit) I max'd out but never made level dependent.

Red_Rob · Post by **Red_Rob** » Sat Jun 04, 2011 8:36 am

The whole point of making a balanced set of rules is that each player will have a roughly equal ability to affect the game, meaning that each player has a similar level of competence in their chosen field. By introducing a non-standardised advancement mechanic you leave the game open to some players advancing quicker than others, and uneven power levels. If your game already has ways to accomodate this, thats fine, but thats why I think it makes for a better single player mechanic in a videogame than a multiplayer mechanic at the table.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sat Jun 04, 2011 10:02 am

Red_Rob wrote:The whole point of making a balanced set of rules is that each player will have a roughly equal ability to affect the game, meaning that each player has a similar level of competence in their chosen field. By introducing a non-standardised advancement mechanic you leave the game open to some players advancing quicker than others, and uneven power levels. If your game already has ways to accomodate this, thats fine, but thats why I think it makes for a better single player mechanic in a videogame than a multiplayer mechanic at the table.

If it makes it any better, I'd go the Fable route, with Body, Guile, Wisdom and General XP. Body would increase health, strength, speed, etc, maybe weapon proficiency, Guile would increase skills, Wisdom magic ability, and General could be put to any of them. You'd get Body for swording/meleeing, Guile for being sneaky, silver tongued, and using ranged attacks, Wisdom for casting spells, and general for completing tasks and quests. So if you want to be a Swordguy, you go out, get a sword, wail on beasties, and level up your strength and swording. If you then need to sneak past people for a quest, you go practice sneaking and silver tonguery in a large town and get some guile xp to increase your ability to be stealthy. If you want to start slinging fireballs, you burn a bit of general xp for mana and a spell, and spam that till you can afford another, and so on. You get general xp every time someone hires your hobo ass to handle an infestation of goblins, or fetch something they don't care enough about to get for themselves, and you can spend it on any category for the same rate as the proper xp for that category.

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Sat Jun 04, 2011 6:17 pm

It also works great for games where you basically never see any improvement (Traveller...)

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Sat Jun 04, 2011 6:43 pm

fectin wrote:It also works great for games where you basically never see any improvement (Traveller...)

Yeah, I was thinking a tack on for something like Mutants and Masterminds

Dogbert · Post by **Dogbert** » Sun Jun 05, 2011 5:26 am

Nay.

1) If the GM is lax, it encourages grinding.

2) If the GM is a control freak, you're allowing him to dictate even the way PCs will grow every step of the way, because he'll be cockblocking every attempt to progress in any areas other than those he wants you to.

3) It becomes a hassle to keep track of every single action the PCs take in order to adjudicate XP (and if the GM doesn't, the players will, and will be harassing him constantly about each skill use).

4) If the XP only counts on succesful skill use, then not only progression is basically conditioned to luck of the dice (which sucks if you ask me), but also it becomes likely that the PCs won't even bother with skills they have no ranks in (and thus, little to no chance of succeeding).

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Sun Jun 05, 2011 5:36 am

Not to mention encouraging counterintuitive and/or anticlimatic behavior such as the PCs refusing the once-in-a-lifetime chance to ride the GhostTrain back to their hometowns because they need to grind out their Survival and Athletics skills a bit more.

Blasted · Post by **Blasted** » Mon Jun 06, 2011 4:46 am

These issues crop up in computer games which use them as well.
It's grindy to the max and with Oblivion, et. al. you also get an arcane stat grind thrown in for free.

hyzmarca · Post by **hyzmarca** » Mon Jun 06, 2011 5:42 pm

I'd suggest that the way to do this without making it grindy or counter-intuitive is to limit it to automatically upgrading skills that are used to directly advance the plot at the end of the adventure.

If you pick a random lock you don't get anything. If you pick the lock on the Tomb of the Evil Ghost Lord then you get a lockpicking skill point at the end of the adventure.

This makes uninspired grinding impossible, since you can't advance without advancing some sort of adventure. In a freeform game your thief might be able to grind by impersonating Carmen Sandiego, but such huge world-shaking thefts can hardly be called boring.

It does cause the problem that your players might end up fighting over who gets to solve which task, however. If a door can be picked or hacked open with an axe, your fighter might think his axe skills are more important. So it would be best to tie it to the general idea of advancing the plot rather than specific actions.

Korwin · Post by **Korwin** » Mon Jun 06, 2011 6:49 pm

Midgard did this.
I remember 3 different sorts of XP and it had levels.

But it was a long time ago (and I didn't play it often).

Don't know if it is alive, or if it got translated into another language. (it was an german one)

Manxome · Post by **Manxome** » Mon Jun 06, 2011 6:58 pm

This is one of those ideas that sounds really neat and realistic/immersive but in practice leads only to massive stupidity.

The bottom line is, unless your players are magically 100% oblivious to all meta-gaming concerns, you need rewards that incentivize the things you want players to do. If you want players to complete adventures, you should give XP for completing adventures. If you award XP instead for grinding skills, then players will grind skills instead of completing adventures. It's really that simple.

You might think you can solve that with some sort of patch about only rewarding skill use when it's relevant to the story, but if you think it through, there's no possible way you can win with that approach. Players will still use whatever freedom you give them to grind--they'll go through obstacles they could avoid in order to buff up their skills, they'll make protracted arguments about how picking the lock on this storage shed could be important, they'll switch to nerf-padded weapons once it's clear they're winning the fight to drag things out and get more skill rolls, etc. You can continue to tighten things down, but the logical extreme (and the only way to prevent grinding) is if you don't give them any meaningful control over how many skill points they get during the adventure--at which point you're back to giving XP for completing adventures, you're just not calling it that. Your use-based XP awards lead to a good game to precisely the same extent that they are not actually use-based XP awards.

And while it is "realistic" that people get better at things that they practice, it is actually extremely UNrealistic that heroic adventurers in a climactic life-or-death struggle would give priority to practicing. Armies in real-life do not go around slaughtering villages or pinging deadly enemies with piddly little attacks to get target practice, they practice under controlled conditions during downtime, and then when they fight a real battle they do not screw around.

And the way you represent that in a game is with a training montage between adventures, during which the PCs practice (and therefore get better at) whatever they want, regardless of what they did during the adventure itself. And that is honestly and genuinely more realistic than skill-based XP awards.

And that's before even considering all the balance and implementation details with the skill XP system, which are considerable. Some skills invariably advance faster than others, because every skill will not be legitimately useful an equal number of times per game (and which skills advance fastest will vary from group to group). In particular, skills that you use in emergency situations--like healing magic, for example--tend to be feast-or-famine, and after playing well for a while, your emergency skills will be (comparatively) atrophied and suddenly you no longer have a safety buffer for when something does go wrong--and thus, playing well makes the game function worse.

Party members will fight over who gets the opportunity to practice whenever a one-man job comes up, and will argue about what activities generate XP. The players who hog the spotlight and/or argue better will soon be better than the other PCs, which means they will be the logical choice when the next task comes up, which gives them a snowballing run-away lead and an ever-better reason to continue hogging the spotlight. The disparity between optimized and unoptimized characters grows with time.

Even if you somehow like this idea, I don't think I've ever seen a system that was even passably well-balanced.

Once upon a time, I thought use-based advancement was obviously awesome and that it was stupid that so many games failed to use it. But now I believe that using it is absolutely inexcusable in virtually all cases. The game is not running a simulation of the character's entire life, nor should it. You therefore need mechanics that give the results you want, not that attempt to simulate realistic processes.