@Faraday said in Equalizing Character Progression:
In practice, progression after chargen is so slow that there isn’t much difference between a brand new char and one who’s been playing for a few years anyway (assuming equivalent chargen spends).
@Pyrephox said in Equalizing Character Progression:
Mind you - there’s not a lot to spend XP //on// in most of the FS3 games I’ve played, so there’s not a whole bunch of FOMO. No one’s really flashing cool powers and abilities that you can’t…quite…afford, and they’ve tended to be very easy going and unlikely to push character death, so there’s not a lot of fear of ‘I must be X mechanically competent or I won’t survive combat’.
Yeah, I’ll admit that in a number of FS3 games I’ve played, it may not have been a huge difference. Some games expand what XP can be spent on, though, like Spirit Lake, where XP was used to purchase spells. And while I know they did eventually start giving some free spells to new characters, and it didn’t necessarily make a PC any less able to participate in plot to not have the same breadth of spells – it can feel less fun to just not have as many fun options to play with purely because you started a game later. This isn’t intended to be a knock on Spirit Lake, who I know put thought and effort into the best way to solve or alleviate that issue, but they’re just – an example that tends to stick in my mind. XP, in that scenario, really does become a currency for your character getting to feel cool and fun in that regards. Of course, this is a super custom usage of FS3 XP!
@Polk said in Equalizing Character Progression:
The larger a game, the more you’re going to have inherent disparities, and the more you have to find a way to DEAL with that. Not all PCs can be at the same point in their arcs in a big enough game.
Why tho?
That may sound kind of flippant, but I actually mean it kind of seriously. I feel like there’s this lingering sentiment in a lot of corners of “well, you have to OOCly earn your right to be super cool/as powerful as others who have been on the game longer,” and that’s kind of at the heart of the approach I don’t like. I think that, if anything, XP should be locked more to IC age (in addition to IC time). (And, if you want to dig deeper into IC age, then you can also start to cap or degrade certain stats or skills at certain ages so you can’t just be super old but still an Olympic-level athlete.)
Arx is a real big game, and although it doesn’t have time-based XP, and it hasn’t sought to make XP totally equal across all PCs, it did calculate a baseline average of PC sheets in order to give those falling below average catchup XP, and it helped alleviate some (some!!) of the frustration people had in that arena. In that regard, it didn’t really matter where PCs were in their on-cam stories; they were all adults who had similar amounts of IC time to cultivate their skills.
That said, I do understand that a big genre people are going to be talking from the perspective of here is WoD, of which my experience is EXTREMELY limited.