Alternative Leveling?

>We all know leveling up is an illusion (if you're a good GM). As your players level up, you level up the challenges and the badguys to keep the probabilities of success in the exact same sweet spot. Whether your players are level 1, or level 20.

That's what you get when you play games as computer simulators instead of thriving narratives. Of course PCs are going to face ever-increasing opposition, because there's no narrative tension otherwise, but the world neither stops outside of PCs nor levels up en-mass like in Morrowind.
You've been playing for 20 years, so you're probably too far down the rabbit hole to be saved and should just retire. But if you want to try, try any of the games with no progression, or those with uneven progression (no levels), or those with narrative progression.

So you want a system with infinite rewards that doesn't break. Same difference.

Yah, that's what I was leaning towards too. I mentioned it in the OP. But some of my players won't be satisfied.

Maybe... the more skilled you are in something, the more temp points you can get? Like a max pool?

There is also my preferred solution of not running 20 year long campaigns. Have character grow and get stronger and have things end before it goes out of hand.

You must be young to think that 20+ years of experience makes you LESS able to adapt at your skill.

It doesn't work that way. XD

No, my games are going great, they're fun, I just want to see if anyone has thought deeply about this problem, and what kind of suggestions/solutions are out there.

I've solved lots of problems on my own, so I'm asking a community for this one instead of sitting down and crunching my brains for a few hours.

It's not the campaigns running long like that, it's your players wanting to keep their characters, which I totally understand. They're very invested.

They don't want to reset their characters or etc.

It's not super important, I was just curious if anyone has thought deeply about this problem and found a satisfying solution.

Everyone here is pretty much saying, "No, we also don't have a solution to this problem., but we want to say something anyway?"

/thread

>You must be young to think that 20+ years of experience makes you LESS able to adapt at your skill.
That can definitely happen. People are rigid in their ways so 20 years of experience tells basically nothing. It is very much possible that some with that experience is really good at the one thing they've been doing for that 20 years, but GMing is position with infinite potential and no one will be master of it all.

I think it's more like, "this isn't really a problem".

Apocalypse World's system doesn't break and satisfies the players. You've got meaningful progression throughout a character's life and if you haven't been playing completely wrong, by the time your players get the option to retire their characters, they'll be in such dire straits that being able to get them to safety is a welcome proposition.

Actually, the problem is purely psychological. How a character would perceive the flow of time in-world and how you, the player, do that is different.

From the character's PoV there's no sense of desire for getting gradually empowered. Your character just does what she does, and if she's successful at that, it's a plenty of reward in itself. She will get more skillful with time, if the game world is consistent, but we are talking in-world timescales that don't translate well into the outside player reality.

Now we, players, do want that sense of progression, because we don't emphatise with our characters very well. However deeply you are immersed, a butt-clenching battle with orcs is just a battle with orcs, a narrative episode. Our brains are kinda wired to resist immersion that is too deep (also known as schizophrenia).
And if the props (i.e. stuff that our characters can do) keep stagnating from one narrative episode to another for too long, it gets stale. You could fix it by doing fat time-skips every session, but it's ridiculous.

Now, what can you do? I think, you really have to choose one of the poisons and teach/bamboozle yourself into being comfortable with dissonances of each.

This leads us again to one of the maxims of healthy roleplaying: know yourself well and wisely choose that which you enjoy.
Viz., don't play Paizo Excel (in Space Edition) if you want any verisimilitude, and vice versa, don't play Traveller if you want to get that videogame experience.

*empathise

>I've Gm'd for over 20 years and inevitably leveling breaks the game
you haven't GMed for a year, possibly never

Yah, you're definitely right that's it's a purely psychological problem.

I have one player in particular who is very heavy into needing that progression, the others don't care so much, because the actual games are fun.

So your advice points me the right way. It's probably just a matter of dealing with the people who feel this way. Players usually take the lead of the group, but I have a player who is just very stuck on the idea of empowering himself.

After reading the op i would have to disagree.

just because it can happen it doesn't mean we accuse a stranger of it, just because they asked for help solving a problem

don't we all ask for help sometimes? That doesn't sound inflexible to me.

this isn't really.. normal though.

show me an artist whose been an artist for 1 year, and I'll show you an artist whose been an artist for 20 years, and 99.99% of the time the 20 years of every day practice guy will be better.

I've found no exceptions. Not even child prodigies are that good. so even if you were handicapped 20 years is not a joke amount of experience

Can't solve the problem so blame the one asking it.

/thread

Have you honestly never in your 20 year gaming career never played a system that has character progression mechanics that are not levels?

I'm glad that you're finally coming to understand that levels are a cancer begotten by D&D, but your answer is "how do I fix a game mechanic that is working fundamentally exactly how it was designed to work even though I don't like it?" instead of "what games are there that don't have levels?" Shit, even Shadowrun doesn't have levels. You're telling me you've played for 20 years and have never so much as looked at another system?

Play Mythras or something. It doesn't have levels, and you instead use XP rolls to increase your skills, or to learn new ones, or to learn new spells. Character progression that doesn't depend on levels but still feels like it's progressing your character.

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Question: Why is ending a character a problem in the first place?
Answer: D&D.

The problem here is that its progression system has you play what amounts to different games at different levels. Your character goes from a peasant who barely knows how to hold a weapon to a demigod with cosmic phenomenal powers (or to a peasant who knows how to hold a magical weapon reasonably well). Ending a character means going back to playing a different game, potentially even playing a different game from everyone else at the table, so of course you'd want to keep your character as long as in any way possible.

In Apocalypse World, you go from playing a survivor who keeps rolling from the frying pan into the fire to playing a slightly more capable survivor who keeps rolling from the frying pan into the fire. Ending, resetting, losing a character in a game with this kind of progression system is no big deal, because you'll still be playing the same game afterwards.

For dnd, leveling works fine. Challenges are getting harder, but the scale of the questing also gets grander. You start with problems to kill a hobgoblin, end able to take down dragons in open combat. You start delving into a rat infested cellar, end delving into a lich's lair.

Don't increase CR for no reason and you will be fine. It's ok if some challenges are a breeze for the party, if they are smacking kobolds, that's reasonable.

That's the way many rpg systems work and it's fine for generations of roleplayers, but you are nitpicking for some reason.

You're so much of a faggot that you /thread your own post.

>+20 years
>Mentions a problem that took importance in 3.5
Hmm

Okay psychologist Jim, what solution do you propose then? Should they kill themselves? Is that the mature answer your grand wisdom dictates?

Oh wise one.

Tell us your godly ways.

Hmm indeed, we have another psychologist here. Please tell me, oh great one, lord of all thought, what does it mean that someone with 20 years of experience asked a question!

Tell me everything about them, all their secrets, dreams, thoughts, tell me how badly they should know what you know, oh great god!

OP Here. I was done at this post. Juuust so you guys know.

Lurk more.

point based system with slow point games. If its a super-hero game, you can easily justify new power builds or techniques.

Oh thank you master. Your wisdom has made me a better person.

>Does anyone know of a leveling system that doesn't ultimately break the game, but satisfies players?
Play a point buy system like GURPS? And make sure progression from earned points is tied to in-game time spent studying and adhering to verisimilitude. (You spent time at the library for X hours)

Every system you named has the problem of awarding xp for encounters. I am to believe that old school DnD gave out gold instead which seems a good solution. But this is inherently a problem to a system with a linear progression system and fixed upgrades to classes as levels go up.

Thanks for input.

Not DnD, but in SR I made it a habit periodically to take away some of the progress from the players. Either through the loss of equipment, death of important NPCs or other shenanigans. It keeps them from getting too powerful and adds a sense of a living world, where sometimes things happen that will set them back.
Two sessions ago, I killed their beloved go-to NPC decker because they started to rely upon a bit too much on her skills. Also I wanted to introduce a new powerful enemy faction and I thought they could use some stronger incentive to go after them.Besides money, of course.

RETIRE CHARACTERS
It's THAT fucking simple.
God
youtube.com/watch?v=X9vECzikqpY

I like the idea of an Epic 6, though I have never tried it.

Sidegrade, not upgrade.

Instead of hitting harder, you hit in different ways. A warrior starts with only a charging technique, but at the end he knows how to trip, push, disarm and charge. New tools, without the need of increasing (much) the bonus. Think Zelda.

If you haven’t before, check out Shadow of the Demon Lord. I’ve found that the leveling, while making characters stronger, doesn’t feel over the top or fuck up the math and lead to crazy bloat. Just gives em new stuff to do in a fairly elegant and easy to manage way. I love it.

Even though SotDL is one the best systems around, have you seen the HP progression of characters/monsters?
A lvl10 character will have 6/7 times more HP than a lvl0 character.
Monsters have ratios approaching 15.

It's not bad, I have no problem with that kinda progression, but OP might.

>newfag gets called out on his bullshit
>spergs out

lurk moar

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Runequest. It's not leveling, but skill based advancement, and the rate of growth falls exponentially as you get close to 100%. It feels like how you actually gain experience in real life. Landing a blow and successfully parrying at 90% instead of 25% doesn't add any more complexity to the system, but feels vastly more powerful.

I would disagree with you that ending characters isn't a real solution. The oldest editions of D&D were designed so that you could quickly roll up characters in cased your current died, and a lot of modern RPGs emphasize storytelling and narrative over mechanics. In that case, most good stories possess a strong ending and resolution towards a given characters arc. I hope I don't sound TOO pretentious and arrogant, but I think this is sort of a symptom of, I guess, an infantile desire to amass power so that players can wank themselves off towards their fantastic alter-egos. It's not much different from writing masturbatory fanfiction. The problem doesn't lie with the game, as much as it does with the players.

If you have fun, that's fine, fantastic even, as I don't really know your or your players so I can't really criticize your methods, but personally I derive a lot of enjoyment from giving my characters a goal, and then working with the GM to bring it to a conclusion, even if it means that I have to roll up a new character.

I agree with this.

The only problem with rerolling is if the characters the players are RPing as are too good to get rid of. Sometimes people just get attached to the characters and the accomplishments and narrative they've developed. In that case just nerf them down.

Literally this

>And then of course, there are imbalances that start to happen. So you have to cheat/fake the challenges or, be extra creative by creating specific challenges for each individual character for EVERY SINGLE ENCOUNTER.

That certainly doesn't sound the same ... not from your perspective, nor the players. Complex high advancement games tend to go from relatively simple encounter balancing, to rock paper scisssors, to the rules being so broken it turns into a defacto narrative game with a lot of mostly useless dice rolling.

The only real solution is to design the game like a MMO, where all equal level opponents almost always have counters to all the insta-win shit players get access to and vice versa. Or in other words 4e.

Of course the math still grows far too complex during the game ... but that's also like MMOs, people like increasingly more and increasingly large numbers flying around. Automation is the solution.

The thing about leveling that I actually enjoy (in 5e D&D) is when I gain access to a spell or ability that enables me to apply new solutions to existing problems. I hate the levels that just increase your raw numbers because, like you said, it's just an illusion because the enemies also get higher numbers.

In my mind leveling is fine because it means that you gain new abilities/tools in your toolbox after you've had some time to mess around and experiment with the one you got last level, instead of having a laundry list of options dumped on you immediately. Then if you're already familiar with the mechanics, just start at a higher level so you have access to them.

So I guess i'm saying leveling is basically a tutorial that you don't need once you've learnt the system? I'm not sure where I intended to go with this.

>Epic 6

"Literally just stop leveling up" is not a solution.

Savage Worlds, motherfucker. Horizontal progression, the most you can get up to is a d12 in a skill, and even then that d12 has to roll 4 or above, on average with no modifiers. If you want to avoid invisible treadmill, look into games where progression isnt vertical, but horizontal - that is, you learn new tricks and NEW skills, rather than just pumping points in your class's chosen do-things stat. Also classless games.

Check out Riddle of Steel's character progression. It has a more abstract 'leveling' mechanic which is tied to the character's stated interests and objectives and permanently upgrading the character has a trade off in power as their general competency is at odds with a dice pool which is used when invoking their character's interests.

The only way to level is to invoke the character's interests (called Spiritual Attributes, which can change over the course of a character's life) and use the pool, so being as competent as possible in these narrowly defined aspects is highly rewarding versus just being good at everything. So the system encourages the player to have a character motive, to explore and engage in those motives as often as possible so they can level, but also to be judicious in how they actually spend their XP as spending it potentially makes the pursuit of more XP riskier without their buckets of extra dice.

Also whenever a player permanently spends points from these pools the player receives a kind of meta-experience which can go towards making characters more powerful at character creation in the future, which helps to break some of the attachment to a current character by opening up more options which weren't available the first go round.

I took OP's point to be about more than literal "leveling" and about overall power growth so classless systems don't entirely address the issue. Although classless systems tend to have a much flatter power curve which partially solves the problem.

It is, it's just not a good one. The issue is the game becoming a different game because the PCs become so powerful they can no longer be challenged by mundane threats. It's the classic problem. Flattening the power curve so that the most powerful people in the setting are much closer to the weakest and can still be threatened by them under the right circumstances would allow for acquisition of more abstract "power" over a long campaign while keeping the kinds of sessions you are having generally similar. You are taking out the "I killed a fucking God!" bullshit out of the game by completely removing this conceptual, mythological potentiality out of your setting.

Savage Worlds doesn't have explicit levels, but advancements occur very much in level-like manner. Every 5xp you get an advancement, which can be one of a few predetermined things. It's not like, say, WHFRP2e where you buy upgrades for varying amounts of xp.

This is what I came to say, unironically the answer is GURPS

You still have to increase the difficulty of the challenges, but you can go basically forever, and there is progress but it's not as game-breaking and is in smaller increments. Characters can branch out into a wider range of specialties as they get stronger.

Also, GURPS has plenty of ways to reduce abilities in play. Age, skill maintenance rules, permanent crippling injuries, social traits which can be lost and gained, mental disadvantages caused by horribly failed fright checks...

I don't think it's unique in that regard. There are probably lots of other systems where characters can degenerate faster than they grow. Most of the warhammer RPGs tend to have high-level characters seriously be seriously fucked up by the time they get there. In Unknown Armies, gaining power and getting more fucked up are often the same thing. Pretty sure Pendragon and Traveller at least had something similar, although I never played them so can't say for sure.

Also I believe there are games which focus on playing an organisation or dynasty more than individual characters...

I find that rounding and social progression works well.
Shadowrun has bucketloads of huge flaws, but one of the things I appreciate about it is that you start pretty much as good as you can be at whatever thing you want, if you use the correct rules. From there you spread out into auxillary skills and get to know more and more people, forming a powerful net of abilities and supporters while still remaining about as effective at your primary task, with maybe a few new toys here and there.

Call of Cthulhu is a nice system if you're not already familiar, there's link all over in the trove.

Having good game design is a start
You can't really solve the underlying problems with a system unless you resolve the problems the numbers presented create

Leveling up is fine, but personally I prefer a few milestones where you get bonus' and then spend XP for stuff along the way.

I just level them as a group based on campaign milestones. I do this because I'm too lazy to track so and it keeps them moving forward.

E6 stops you at level 6, but you can use XP to buy more feats after that. It's not a good system because feats in 3e are weak shit, but it's thinking in the right direction. Let your players gain more lateral power instead of infinitely inflating the same few numbers.

So... Are you ok with non level based systems then? Agone is really good for that, mostly because characters usually start the game near the limit of their power in their chosen field and juat get better at more things. Flame let's them get better in general as they improve it, but on average you're only making skill checks that ammount to adding 3 numbers between 1 and 10 plus a D10. There are some small modifiers but that core math never changes, the numbers just get a little bigger. Most progression is done through gaining new Flame powers or improving your party's Sanctuary or Domain.

Enemies are usually more in the vein of machiavellian politicians, though they're usually more than capable in a fight, and the truly dangerous ones are immune to all but relic weapons, which are not nearly as simple mechanically as DND magic weapons, and much MUCH rarer. (though players can use Fortune points to give their weapons the ability to damage them for 3 turns).

PCs also gain corruption from encounters with truly evil enemies that gives them extremely difficult to get rid of de buffs, I'm exchange for special powers. If they gain too much though, they loose control of their character, who becomes evil.

Yes, the term has been used a couple times but the key is horizontal improvement. Something point-buy systems can accomodate a lot easier since as a general rule you aren't working up a pre-determined skill tree and instead are creating your own.

>Also I believe there are games which focus on playing an organisation or dynasty more than individual characters...
It's rare, but I have seen at least one system where each player can represent a group of individuals rather than a single person. It read more like a wargame manual though.

Forgo levels, or slow them even further and go with alternative rewards. Things like quirky magic items that have a niche use, contacts in organizations, merchant friends or even their own empire.
In other words, where a leveling system is a sort of ever higher tower, which eventually topples because the numbers get out of hand, go broad. Let your players do a higher variety of things, just at the same level.