What's the best type of progression system in your opinion, Veeky Forums? Point-buy, levels, a mixture of the two...

What's the best type of progression system in your opinion, Veeky Forums? Point-buy, levels, a mixture of the two? Free leveling on downtimes? Action-based skill gain?

Forgot to put it in the OP but, diminishing returns or hard caps? Why?

Depends a lot on the tone of the game, although adds nuance. Whichever you do? Be consistent.

Nothing pisses me off more than character generation using different scaling to character progression, meaning that two people can end up with vastly stronger or weaker characters due to the inconsistency in translating between generation budget and progression budget.

Just use one system for everything, keep it consistent and know the strength of your system, what you're trying to achieve with it and what will add to that.

Point-buy with flat costs. Makes templates super easy to apply to any character for quick building.

Point Buy.

Levels can get messy if the power level between classes isn't consistent and Point Buy allows you to create the character you want without pigeon-holing yourself into a preset archtype with abilities that you might not necessarily want.

That and it's much more natural to receive points which you can either save for later or use to buy shit now than to get a level for killing shit and suddenly learning how fly or shoot fireballs because of it.

While I tend to prefer point buy, it should be said that class and level systems do allow you to explore certain mechanics more easily, since you can define the context they exist in more exactly and make things mutually exclusive. Then again, you can also blend the two quite effectively.

Generally I prefer point-buy.

However that has frequently lead to people hyper-specialising which really annoys me and means that either nothing challenges their character, or I have to introduce exceptionally difficult opponents to do so.

It's far and away better than levels though.
Also, I prefer linear costs.
Exponentially increasing costs might be helpful to stop hyper-specialisatoin, but frequently it just means that you have to take forever to get any good at anything, rather than leaving that possibility in the hands of the GM and player.

>ywn be a naive young initiate
>ywn be bullied and teased by an amazonian orc
jdimsa

I disagree, mainly because to me, it feels like most games that use a level/class system feel like my character is a template with the entirety of his progression already decided for him through no fault of my own.

Like a Fighter can only hit stuff, a Rogue can only sneak around and be a skill monkey, a Wizard can only cast Wizard spells, while the Cleric can only heal and cast Cleric spells.

There's nothing stopping me from recreating most D&D characters I've played in something like GURPS for example but if I want to port over a GURPS character to D&D, it'll require a lot of compromise that may in fact leave them much weaker as a result since so many abilities that they have simply don't work for a single class.

Looking at bad class based systems and good pointbuy isn't really a fair comparison.

Even the best class/level based systems will generally have a progression that states that all characters who are a specific class will get X ability at level Y no matter what.

It's not to say it's a bad system or anything, it's just that I'd rather use point buy as it feels more like a natural progression with more choices that allow me to create a character beyond the standard list of classes.

Have you taken in account the mention of "a mixture of the two" in the OP? What if levels were generic for everyone and they only handled the EXP-based progression, but left that exp to buy whatever a character needed like a point-buy system?

I think you're mixing Classes and Levels as if they were inseparable elements, or at least that's what i'm gathering from your replies.

Hybrids. I like L5R's school system. Schools fall into broad categories, basically Warriors, Courtiers, and Spellcasters. Advancement and Chargen are all pointbuy. When you reach certain milestones you gain an extra ability from your school. It also has limited multiclassing in the form of Paths, which are single ability schools that are associated with your main school and replace a school rank. This makes it so a character's skills and attributes define the character as much or more than as his class.

As an example I once played in a game where four of the six players showed up with characters from the same school. We rapidly diverged and all found niches. Player 1 took a lot of social advantages and skills, effectively making him like a multiclass Warrior/Courtier. Player 2 focused on defensive skills and dueling and became the spellcaster's bodyguard. Player 3 focused on stealth and poisons becoming a ninja-like guy. Player 3 focused on chain weapons and grappling and became the non-lethal takedown guy. And player 4 became a generalist and could fill about any gap, but wasn't as good the specialists in their niche but was good back up.

>Even the best class/level based systems will generally have a progression that states that all characters who are a specific class will get X ability at level Y no matter what.

Except the ones that don't?

Heck, even D&D broke this principle with 4e.

Diminishing returns allows multiple power levels w/o unbalancing the game. Whereas like in GURPS, by RAW, I can make a 100 point hero that can headshot running opponents from 500 yards with 90 percent accuracy, and only GM fiat can stop me. The game encourages you to build wide not tall, but the skill system"s flat costs do not back up this intention. Only hard caps set by the GM.

Levels
Linear class progression for all characters; ie, no feats or skills
3 classes

Roleplay your characters as unique, separate skilled individuals. Anything more just attracts retarded Pathfinder players who think numbers on a sheet makes for good storytelling.

Contrary to most I don't hate levels, as a DM it's usually a lot easier to manage as there is an element of predictability.

Point buys are lot more open for character building fun and lets you get the exact character you want, but you better have a fucking on point GM with very explicit limits on powers/skills. It's easy as shit, in point buy games to have a disparity greater than that of fucking DND between martials and casters if you have a munchkin versus a nonoptimizer.

Plus in some ways point buys falls almost into the class based traps, as players divy skills up so they don't have overlap, and don't have to spend points on the same skills but shittier than dude X. So its once again up to the GM to ensure that players can't always be hyper optimized, and give them a challenge.

If you want to scare off 3aboos, just say you're using point buy instead of rolling for stats.

Nothing sends them packing like a point buy system that limits how high and how low they can be in a stat while making them just as powerful as everyone else in the party.

None of the above. The best is when you have a good GM who you can trust and who understands both how the game system works and how the game he wants to run interacts with the system. Then the GM will tell you when it's time to raise stats and how much you can do so, having taken into account the requirements of the game's intention, the rules system, the desired rate of advancement, and your character concept.

The implementation of this removes every complaint about progression, except for "wah, it's not fast enough!", and "wah, I can't min-max!", neither of which are valid complaints anyway.

So you'd reduce the entire game to mother may I and GM favouritism? That sounds like it would be an absolute clusterfuck with anything less than a perfect GM.

And perfect GMs, you know, don't exist.

If that's how you want to characterize it, then fine, yes, I would. First, it's the nature of an RPG , and second, it's a small price to pay to get rid of min-maxing and munchkinism.

If you have so little trust in your players you have to rob them of so much freedom, why the fuck are you playing with them?

Literally the exact opposite.

3aboos and pathfinder fags use point buy. They want to use it so they can minmax and put 18 in every useful stat for their class and 3 in charisma because they don't need it.

Rolling for stats creates uncertainty and makes it so most of your stats will be average and makes you actually have to make your character class choice *based* on your *stats* instead of the other way around, which scares autists to death.

I have no idea how someone could come to the conclusion that point buy isn't somehow what 3.PF fans want. That's literally all they want. Every time.

Why even run a game for a party that you can't even trust not to break your game out of spite?

>3aboos and pathfinder fags use point buy.
Oh lord, my sides.

Perks, skills, and the like individually purchased with xp. Leveling is a good system for beginners but it isn't good for much else.

Point buy isn't only about minmaxing. This always annoys me when it's brought up.

I prefer pointbuy because it lets me make the character I want to play. It lets me make my character sheet a proper representation of them and their capabilities, and in many ways it means I don't have to optimise. If I'm rolling, I might get unlucky and need to pull out all the stops to stay useful. Having control over my stats and freedom of choice means I can focus on making a less optimal character with more fluff based choices in the knowledge that they'll still be competent and functional within the system.

What's the fucking joke? Is this bait?

The entire fucking post is a joke, I just picked out the funniest line because goddamn, nobody can possibly fuck up this hard this early unless it was intentional in some way.

Probably playing 3.x. There isn't another kind of party in that game.

>flat cost skills
>GURPS

You're talking out your ass, user.

Ignore him. He is (was?) a frequent troll in the GURPS general thread, even after multiple people having explained how what he thinks is an issue isn't.

I don't get why this deserved to be quoted.

Probably because you're just as stupid as the retard I quoted.

I just have a growing party level, and the level goes up when it's dramatically appropriate.

It's a flat 4 points per level. It's a linear increase. Unless you think by flat cost I meant a 100 in a skill and a 50 in a skill cost the same, in which case you could have infinite points in one skill. No, I mean that the costs dont increase so there is no incentive to build wide instead of tall.

I prefer strict classes (no level-by-level multiclassing) because I believe they lead to better, more focused gameplay, but with the option for a character to expand his horizons if he wishes.

Basically 4e/Strike! with lots of bonus feats

How is pointbuy handled after chargen? At which point do characters sit down to level their shit up? I've never played a pointbuy system before in pnp, only in vidya.

Also what do you think of stat increases costing the new rank? I.e. instead of 1 point to level up one level on a stat, getting it to level 4 costs 4, level 5 costs 5, etc
Its great in vidya but im not sure how good it is in pnp

>How is pointbuy handled after chargen? At which point do characters sit down to level their shit up?
Usually you just spend the points between session and let the GM know what you spent your points on either before game or between sessions.
>Also what do you think of stat increases costing the new rank?
That's generally how they're handled in most games, though some games will also include a waiting time to determine how much downtime it'll take for you to actually learn the skill that you're attempting.

>Of all the worlds we can think of we live in this one

Levels are trash. Point-buy is decent as long as the GM is spartan in giving them out. All the systems I design have multi-point buy system with three types of points to spend based on different levels of achievement.

we're not even talking about stats, we're talking about progression. Learn to read.

It's one point total for the first, two total for the second, four total for the third, then four additional points for every subsequent level. It isn't linear until you invest four points into a skill. Putting points into a skill is only efficient if you only want to raise a single skill, but that's usually a bad idea because characters need about a dozen or so skills at decent levels (10~12) to have reasonable agency.

Also, you miss the point of GURPS, or really any generic point-buy system, which is that it lets the GM run any game they want. The GM defines the game within the system, and the players build characters accordingly. What's allowed in a game is contextual. If a character doesn't fit the context, then the GM doesn't allow that character.

Skills are also the snag in GURPS templates because they don't have a linear cost. It can be annoying to apply multiple templates with overlapping skills, as they might not add up to a full level. If costs were graduated overall, it would ruin one of GURPS' greatest strengths, templates and lenses. You suddenly have a bunch of point-juggling to use something that was supposed to expediate and simplify character creation.

And to address the 100-point aimbot hero: Is that the game your GM is running?