How much character advancement mechanics do you actually need in a decent game?
Could someone make a good game where the characters stay mostly with the skills and abilities they started with, like in a movie or tv series?
Say perhaps there are only respeccing rules.
Or maybe whatever growth happens is slight/minor.
How would you do this well? Could it be done well?
Start with a higher level group and just don't give exp.
You don't need any, really. If you were the king of balancing, such a game would be perfect, in a sense. They could learn more skills, slowly, like in real life, but not gain more HP, etc.
The real problem is your playgroup. Most people just expect progression as part of their game. Some people will refuse to play it.
Tracey Hickman (of Dragonlance fame) wrote a game this way, called XDM (X-treme Dungeon Mastery). Unfortunately, it's full of fucking retarded jokes and cringey examples. If you manage to get past the thick veneer of shit he smeared through the book, the mechanics and philosophy behind it are pretty interesting.
Then you're not playing a RPG, otherwise known as "numbers go up: the game."
You're playing what D&D was originally envisioned as, minis with fixed stats using their limited resources to win fights. No roleplaying, no character creation, just wizard chess.
Many RPGs do this, its only DnD-inspired ones that do have character advancement. Since the premise of those games is the progressive increase in character ability you need a new premise.
Notably Traveller, which is almost as old as DnD. You get more money and that's important, but your character isn't changing (minus losing limbs, getting prosthetics/augmentations)
That's not true at all. No where does "roleplaying game" mean "having stats that go up". There's tons of weird ass games out there like Nobilis that still count as RPGs that don't operate by those guidelines.
Except i want the roleplaying, and character creation. The only part i don't see a need for is "numbers go up".
You can't learn new skills in traveler?
>no roleplaying
How does lack of character power progression imply lack of roleplaying? Roleplaying is collaborative creation of interactive fiction.
In fiction as presented by media other than rpg (books, movies) sharp power progression of character is rather exception than the norm. Does aragorn noticeably "lvl up" during the course of LoTR? Nope. You don't need progression to tell a story. Xping chars is purely gamist thing - not that it's inherently bad, but it is not needed from the narrative "roleplaying" perspective, and depending od the genre/type of story you want to tell it can be disatvantageous
>Then you're not playing a RPG, otherwise known as "numbers go up: the game."
This is bullshit and/or bait.
People like a feeling of progression, but there are other ways of giving that reward not just bigger numbers.
Tenra Bansho Zero is a game I'm reading over now. You can make a character that's basically as powerful as you want at character creation and never improve him, because that starting power comes at a cost. You run the risk of being consumed by your own ties to the world. If you keep advancing without learning to let go of the world, you become a demon possessed shell of a person.
Buddhism for Dummies. You get more powerful, but you also become less and less likely to use it. Or you remain at the same level of power, and just kind of deal with life.
It's a system that seems to be designed with one shots and short campaigns in mind so progression isn't a huge deal.
An easy way to do it is to keep the characters more or less static, but parcel out sweet gear instead. You can do this in stuff like D&D easy. Set the characters at level 6, or wherever nice in-game equilibrium is reached for your game, then experience goes out the window. At this point in a game, most characters aren't yet flying around shooting death leasers from their hands and eyeballs while the national anthem plays for them, they are still just really good normies. Realistically, they CAN'T get better.
The only advancement comes from gear upgrades, which become all the more precious. Eventually, everyone will have a batman-like utility belt with their favorite toys, and the thing they think they might need this time.
Op here.
Sure, that could work.
Or you might let them (with effort and training) learn a new technique or stunt or feat or class feature or whatever, but they aren't getting them automatically every couple sessions, and there numbers don't go up.
Is there a reason "numbers go up" is so important?
I mean, i get that d&d is "chumps to superheroes to gods: the game", but i don't see why that's a necessity unless that's explicitly the game you're getting to play /run, am i wrong.?
>Is there a reason "numbers go up" is so important?
Because normal people actually do get better at things as time goes on, so their chance of success at a given roll should increase.
>people get better and better forever!
Not so. Focusing on new things makes you rusty on the things you're neglecting to do it.
There's a sort of maximum efficacy achievable, and you can't get to maximum efficacy at everything.
If this were true 50 year old people would be better at everything than 30 year old people. Not so much the case.
This is why the bell curve is used.
Im gonna need more context in how you suggest to apply a bell curve to these game mechanics
This, also it takes A LOT of time to train anything, so if the scope of the campaign is one epic quest that will conclude within a year or two, lack of progression is more realistic than its presence, as opposed to long term campaign that can last for a decade. It all depends on the narrative goal.
Twenty year old people tend to be much better at what they do than fifteen year old people, and twenty five year old people tend to be better still. Experience can only go to a point, but it is still quite important.
As you apply +1 to the target number on a bell curve, the percentage chance of success changes in a non-linear fashion. The further you are from the centre the less that one point affects your chance of success. When you already have a high chance of success, adding more points to your skill changes things less, and investing in different skills becomes a more attractive proposition.
>once you reach a certain age you can no longer improve in any sort of skill, nor learn any new ones
Look, I can be deliberately retarded too.
I never hand out XP to my players, I just balance the campaign to what their strengths are at the start. It works really well.
You don't actually need character advancement; you just need the sort of campaign and game in which it's not required. You also need a group that's willing to play this sort of game. A good example might be comic book heroes; they can be static in terms of power for long periods of time, or at least until the publisher retcons their series yet again.
OP again.
Okay.
Let's now assume a campaign where you're not building children and playing them through several years of in - game time.
A campaign (in general, any game I've ever seen) rarely spans more than a year or two in-game anyways.
But say the pcs build a bunch of specops types with 10 years of experience under their belt.
Do you *really* need rules for them to keep getting higher and higher numbers?
I'm not saying there's never a reasonable place for them, but are they really always needed as
seems to be implying?
Don't give them xp.
Done.
Personally I don't see why would you do such thing unless whole campaign is going in very short amount of time.
No, not at all. It entirely depends on the sort of game you're running and the time frame it takes place in.
I wrote one a while back. The lack of character advancement had a few people dumbfounded. If the thread survives my shift at each job, I'll post it when I'm home.
Like FATE?
The question is this: why would you want to take the game aspect out of RPGs?
>Why would you want to?
Well, ime campaigns rarely last longer than 6 months to a year of real time.
As for the potential reasons to go for it?
>game takes place over a short in game period, like 6 months.
>the characters are already starting out as total badasses.
>the gm wants the game centered around a particular power scale.
So you might be able to gradually reallocate "points" towards things you're working on improving each game, and you might even gradually accumulate more "total points" until you've got whatever the maximum is.
But constant growth doesn't seem necessary to me either.
>once you've reached the peak of human ability (over all your skills and talents combined), you can only improve in one area at the expense of another. Those changes won't come suddenly, they take time. And if skills are neglected, they get worse over time too, like if you switch to a desk job and stop exercising for two years, you won't be in shape anymore!
FTFY
Are you saying all games have to be about making your numbers go up?
>your numbers going up is what makes it a game! Why would you drop that?
What about combat tactics, resource management, character design, any social gamemechanics, etc?
And from what my fate friend has told me, your numbers go up in fate, so no, not like fate.
Fate advancement is super slow, though. Not something to plan around.
Oh. That part is news to me.
This post is straight out of the RPGcodex shit hive.
we always play without solid rules considering stat and skill improvement, since XP are retarded and our group is pretty confident in the GMs judgement
if a character does this or that , his skill or stat goes up every session.
he uses a big weapon - his raw strength increases
he fights agile enemies- his dex increases
he uses swords most of the time - his sword and sharp weapon skill increases
first i let my players make a recommendation what skills/stats should have increased based on what they did, then i decide by how much it goes up
I've done this for a campaign once.
The mechanics were shit/unintelligible though.
I basically took a random homebrew i found online, realized that i didn't like the mechanics so I changed them arbitrarily, then I realized that it was too complicated for my players so I made it more D&D-esque, then I realized that I hate D&D's mechanics so I modified it again.
What happened was that the game was completely out of balance, no balancing whatsoever.
It was actually pretty fun, I ended up scrapping the whole character creation thing and just made a few character sheets with arbitrary stats, equipment and skills. Oh and the special skills were all inside jokes or references, like "get to the choppa" and "Han shot first", plus one guy's name was Mandalf Bumbledore.
The outcome was... interesting.
Basically some encounters were very easy, yet still very dangerous since a single attack could cripple your character (the balancing between character HP and damage output was really skewed)
It was a bit difficult at the start when the PCs were almost wiped out at the first encounter, but I modified it along the way to make encounters lethal, yet still manageable.
>You can't learn new skills in traveler?
You can, though it depends on edition
You generally train in your downtime, with number of weeks it takes to raise a skill being equal to the total number of skill points you already have.
Some versions have a max skills rule, where you can only have a total number of skill points up to a cap based off INT and EDU
You can still train after that point, but if you want one skill to go up, another must go down, representing your character getting rusty
Oh. That sounds neat.
>Could someone make a good game where the characters stay mostly with the skills and abilities they started with, like in a movie or tv series?
>How would you do this well? Could it be done well?
See Classic Traveller. Characters are built in a lifepath minigame at the start of play. The more terms you serve in a career, the more skills and benefits you gain, but you have to be careful not to go back too many times because while there's a chance to gain cool stuff, there's also a small risk your character will die, and you'll have to start over. Getting a good character involves knowing when to push your luck and when to stop before it's too late.
After chargen, your character enters the story, generally as a hardened veteran, and from there does not gain any more skills or stat improvements. Instead he faces an eventual loss of stats caused by aging, unless he can get rich enough to live on expensive anagathics to stop aging.
It's a big contrast to D&D's adolescent outlook that you whole future is ahead of you and you can be anything. In Classic Traveller, that whole thing is behind you, you know who you are, and now it's about facing the prospect of a slow slide toward death. A more mature outlook in many ways.