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Equalizing Character Progression
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@Tez It’s not really a simulationist thing (I dislike simulationist systems in general) but just for game balance. I don’t really think it’s fair for plot runners who go to the trouble of balancing encounters or designing adventures for skillsets to have SURPRISE! skills come out of nowhere.
FS3 (when used within the design guidelines) lets you start awesome out of the CG gate. Missing out on a few weeks (or even months) of XP really isn’t going to make or break a character. (Plus you’d still have a bank of 4 saved up whenever you do remember.) There are plenty of FS3 players who never spend XP, ever, and still have kick-butt chars.
That said, there’s no One Perfect XP System to Rule Them All. Only tradeoffs. Every system and every game runner has to decide those tradeoffs for themselves.
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I don’t have an issue with people buying a lot of things at once, though I can agree with not really wanting people to do it in the middle of a scene.
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@Tez I forget to spend XP for long periods, too. Games where there’s a longish time-gap between the spend and the stat appearing on your sheet and a limit to how many things a PC can be learning at once, I’ll often end up at a point where I have XP I can never possibly spend.
I am not sure this is enough of a problem to do anything about besides streamline some spends for me when I notice it happened, if I should ask. Having the XP just expire seems kinda harsh, though.
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@Tez said in Equalizing Character Progression:
I do tend to prefer something where, rather than having those kind of limits, xp per source scales sharply – that is, your first beat per week is worth more than your tenth – and so do costs. The more XP you have, the more things cost. I think that lets people catch up and stay on a more even playing field.
Sometimes I wonder instead of a limit on earning you put a limit on spending per <suitable time period.>
It does run into that idea of having XP you can never really spend if you just keep accruing it, but maybe there can be other things it could be applied to in some way, idk.
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I’m absolutely terrible at min-maxing and being strategic about XP/leveling, so FS3 has been almost ideal for me on the two games I’ve played with it.
On Savage Skies I did screw up a little by having a character start super underpowered, with almost no truly high stats. IIRC an admin even double-checked if that was really what I wanted to do, and I said my dude was inexperienced IC and I looked forward to leveling him up over time. That was true, but I didn’t realize just how long the cooldowns on XP spends were, and just how long it would take to raise a stat from middling to high. I spent a lot of XP on that game and maybe barely brought him up to where he could have been straight out of chargen.
(Could I have reached out to an admin for help? Sure, if I were a different person that did things like asking people for help instead of stubbornly living with the consequences of my own dumb decisions.)
I chargenned day one on the Network, so in theory I would be in dinosaur territory there, but I love that the caps on stats and skills mean that my dude really isn’t crazily more powerful than anyone else. He just has a zillion points thrown over time into background skills, so he has a bunch of niche talents that make perfect sense as having been acquired over time in-game.
On every oldschool stat-heavy MUD game I’ve ever played, I ended up with completely hopeless builds and spent my XP all wrong and was always nerfed for everything compared to anyone who actually understood how to take advantage of the systems. That was less fun.
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@Livia said in Equalizing Character Progression:
Sometimes I wonder instead of a limit on earning you put a limit on spending per <suitable time period.>
I like the ‘downtime points’ idea, which limited how much off-camera stuff you could do, so you couldn’t spend sixty hours a week spying on Abelard, and forty hours a week at work and ten growing sacred herbs and fifty-four building a space ship.
If stuff that takes a lot of study or isn’t practiced in the course of other stuff the PC is doing cost downtime points it might work out well. But as somebody who keeps forgetting to spend their XP, it sounds too complicated.
'You ride the mechanical bull, you do not fight it.'
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@Clarion said in Equalizing Character Progression:
I chargenned day one on the Network, so in theory I would be in dinosaur territory there, but I love that the caps on stats and skills mean that my dude really isn’t crazily more powerful than anyone else. He just has a zillion points thrown over time into background skills, so he has a bunch of niche talents that make perfect sense as having been acquired over time in-game.
Action skill and Attribute XP caps are something I think FS3 does really well, however they’re applied. There is a certain disincentive when you hit a point where there’s nothing else to buy, but it’s worth it to be able to curb the dinos a bit.
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@Tez said in Equalizing Character Progression:
ETA: Shout out to all the people going ‘why the hell is Tez upvoting my year-old post’. Blame @catzilla for making me reread this thread and go YEAH GOOD POINT.
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@Gashlycrumb said in Equalizing Character Progression:
@Livia said in Equalizing Character Progression:
Sometimes I wonder instead of a limit on earning you put a limit on spending per <suitable time period.>
I like the ‘downtime points’ idea, which limited how much off-camera stuff you could do, so you couldn’t spend sixty hours a week spying on Abelard, and forty hours a week at work and ten growing sacred herbs and fifty-four building a space ship.
If stuff that takes a lot of study or isn’t practiced in the course of other stuff the PC is doing cost downtime points it might work out well. But as somebody who keeps forgetting to spend their XP, it sounds too complicated.
Yeah, it is starting to sound too complicated and too much like paperwork. I tend to prefer systems that just let players spend xp, I feel like most people know what works for their character and what doesn’t. Some like to race for big numbers but you know, it can work fine too.
I really dislike it when they get too much like paperwork, I have a lot of issues with the CofD Aspiration system on this front.
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@Livia as a Fiver, still apologizes for that one time she turned in like 10 aspirations at once
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@catzilla Ahahaha. It’s not the staff side of it, +job paperwork comes with the territory.
It’s the coming up with aspirations for my characters that often really stumps me and just feels like busy work for the sake of a beat. Especially when their intention is just ‘little one scene things like ‘eat a hamburger’’ that people suggest and you go okay I did that and it’s done and now I need to come up with ANOTHER one and – ack.
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@Livia There are times that I think asps can actually be really good to sort of put a mark on your RP calendar like ‘I wanna do this’. Eating a hamburger is not one of them and it can feel like a chore you have to do to keep up.
Kill the short term asp beats in favor of weekly RP instead!! Incentivize long term asp beats through PRPs!!
she/they
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@Tez In the last year or so when I realize ‘Oh I want to have a scene with character X about thing Y’ I have definitely started putting in a lil asp ‘talk to character X about thing Y’ and that does help it a lot, yes.
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@catzilla said in Equalizing Character Progression:
@Livia as a Fiver, still apologizes for that one time she turned in like 10 aspirations at once
Also, hurray, Fiver!
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@catzilla said in Equalizing Character Progression:
How do you still reward players for getting Beats without letting them run too far ahead of players that may be less active or unable to churn Beats as quickly as others?
How about a low depth, large breadth system? Suppose skills go from 0 to 3 dots, and there are dozens of skills. Give each character a max of 20 - 40 dots, or whatever you feel is reasonable and quick to attain. Keep the bank of XP small, like 1 or 2. Once at max XP, you still get XP, but they’re used for moving dots to other skills. In this way, your progression system becomes a way of characters predicting what they’ll be up against in a week or two.
This idea can probably be improved. I’m just throwing it out there in case it helps.
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@Jumpscare That brings the concern to me that people will change their dots around for all planned plot things. Which is pretty much the same concern Faraday expressed having for unlimited xp.
Arx does pretty good at getting people on par with the average of skill levels. There is also working in adjusting the points people get in cg to put them on the lower side of Stat average so people are not too far behind the long term players. I don’t know how easy/difficult it would be to write a code to get the averages of all stats and skills. Or you could do a command that returns how many people have a Stat at X level. Lyanna did something similar for Atharia since I was wondering about a few skills that affect code stuff not having people with the skill. Atharia’s list the names and their skill level. It helps me figure out what to throw out for possible rosters or what to suggest to players.
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I think it’s impossible to approach this issue without first deciding what you want to incentivize, most importantly whether you want to see generalist or specialist characters. The mechanical solutions for each are going to be complete opposites.
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@shit-piss-love said in Equalizing Character Progression:
I think it’s impossible to approach this issue without first deciding what you want to incentivize, most importantly whether you want to see generalist or specialist characters. The mechanical solutions for each are going to be complete opposites.
This is huge, yeah, and it’s a conversation that should take place more often when a game is being developed. How powerful do you want the PCs to be? How long do you want it to, on average, take to reach that upper level of power? What other ways can you incentive participation IC and OOC (such as running PrPs) other than XP?
Also recognize that no matter what answers you decide on, someone’s gonna hate them. That’s better than having no answers at all.
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@Pyrephox said in Equalizing Character Progression:
Also recognize that no matter what answers you decide on, someone’s gonna hate them. That’s better than having no answers at all.
Absolutely. The last time I approached this design challenge (when I made this thread) I was motivated by considering how badly I hate watching people become generalist jack of all trades types. I am of the opinion that this actively harms your game, for lots of reasons but primarily that it feeds directly into dinosaurs hogging the power and spotlight.
If you simply model your mechanics after the WoD/CoD style, where it is cheaper to buy the lower levels of skills, you’re gonna end up in that situation. An option to avoid this, for instance, would be to calculate skill cost not by absolute value but relative value to the original. That is to say, a character with a 1 in Melee and a character with a 3 in melee spend the same amount of xp to add a dot. That would preserve original build specialization.
Again, none of this is “this is the absolute way to do this”. Just an example of how mechanics affect gameplay.
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@shit-piss-love said in Equalizing Character Progression:
If you simply model your mechanics after the WoD/CoD style, where it is cheaper to buy the lower levels of skills, you’re gonna end up in that situation.
Just a quick pop in to say that this is not true of CoD 2.0 or whatever the right version and naming scheme is. It’s now a flat cost per dot.
