(no subject)

[technoir]

I had an interesting game design question.

Is earned advancement really needed?

Whats to say we have to have experience points in a game?

I was wondering if would hurt a system is if all the character advancement was based on how long the characters played or age. It seems to me that concept of an earned advancement through points is not inherently even. And if you are doing it in such a manner to keep everyone even then there is not point in having an earned point advancement.

Just a thought. I would be interested to see what other people thought.

Comments

[evangelos.livejournal.com]

It's probably important to consider just how important advancement points are in that particular game system. In DnD, being two or three levels behind everyone else is a drag, and your weakness will show. Low level characters are extremely weak compared to higher level ones. In Deadlands, if one character has 50 post creation points and another has 80, you may not even notice much of a difference (in fact, I doubt you could tell at all unless both were hucksters, templars, etc) especially if the two characters have very different types of skills, and while the 80 pointer would probably have the upper hand against a 20 pointer, the 20 pointer is far from screwed.

Deadlands has a system where you are rewarded for all sorts of things, whatever gives you a fate chip (which can pretty much be for ANY reason the marshal wants). You could call that "earned point advancement" and in my experience it works out well (though we houserule a 3-4 bounty point base reward per session in addition to converted fate chip bounty points).

[technoir.livejournal.com]

ACtually I was thinking in a different direction. Obviously it would work best with a system designed from the ground up this way but instead of keeping track of points imagine D&D and you just kept track of how much game time of adventuring the characters had. Say for every month of actively running around they got a level. Just evenly across the board. no keeping track of how much experience. Nobody missing out cause he missed an individual session. Your character is active for a set period, he just levels. And the party goes through time at the same rate so they all level at the same rate.

I was thinking in terms of divorcing the rewards for role play, killing a particular monster, or any goal based achievement. Simply making it an even you have adventured this loing there for you get blah. Do you think that would be a good or bad thing?

[(Anonymous)]

Reese's outer planar game was that way - he would just tell us when we gained a level.

I think a system with no earned advancement suffers a bit. I think a game with rapid but even advancement can outweigh that significantly.

[hoshiadam.livejournal.com]

(That would be me, stupid sign out)

[evangelos.livejournal.com]

That's actually sort of what I've been doing in DnD all along...well, with base XP anyway. There's still some variance when you take into account player-given RP awards. But I've honestly never used the book version of XP in DnD anyway...it was much easier to just ballpark a number based on how much the PCs accomplished (usually 20-50% of their level). And actually, before that, I'd just flat out hand them about 40% of a level in base XP per session, regardless of what they did.

Basically, my point with the last comment was this (which probably wasn't clear, I'd been playing AoC all day): earned XP awards where different players get different amounts is better or worse depending on the system you're using. In DnD, falling behind can be bad; in Deadlands, it doesn't matter as much. So, with a system like DnD, I would say that giving more even advancement is best, maybe with just a little bit of variance at most. In Deadlands, even advancement doesn't matter as much because the power curve is much flatter.

All told, I'm a favor of some earned advancement, with some controls to keep anyone from falling too far behind. Even if it's not tied to the character, but the party (ie, a session where you kill a major bad guy is worth more XP to the party than one where you only do minor things). The even advancement thing could work...I'm just not sure that I would like it as much. I want extra XP/advancement points for accomplishing big things.