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Incentivizing Specialization
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@shit-piss-love said in Incentivizing Specialization:
One result of this however is that buying lower stats/skills becomes more attractive for the lifetime of the character. Less so mathematically with factor-of-total-xp systems but even then there’s a strong urge to spend some of the XP you might be banking in pursuit of a higher-level purchase on something much cheaper.
There are some caveats to consider.
- Diminishing returns tend to create some ‘unrealistic’ situations. So for example if you create today and save XPs for months to buy Swords 5, you’d be playing a incompetent nobody for all that time - then suddenly you’re kicking ass!
- In the same example it tends to be more efficient to create a character in one go than to do so organically. If the XP are normalized (borrowing that concept from another thread) then if I create months from now I get to have my superb swordsman without the inconvenience of having been incompetent at first.
- These systems tend to be made (or broken) by XP availability. If there’s a lot of it then it won’t matter - you can have your cake and eat it. If there’s too little then your specialist will end up being a bit on the spectrum because they won’t be able to do anything else at all. So at least some napkin math will be needed to ensure you end up on the right part of the XP curve within the timeline your MU* will run.
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I might have missed some words in my opening post to make this clear but I wasn’t intending to make the argument that diminishing returns systems are a strategy for incentivizing specialization. My argument was actually that these systems actively push sheets toward homogeneity over a long enough timeline.
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I’ll offer a different idea:
Forced choices that allow for qualitative specialization. “Perks”, if you will, that aren’t tied to how much XP you can spend, but rather that you can only choose one of at each level.
So, for example, let’s say you have a Melee skill, and let’s say it works on a percentage system of 0-100 points. Designate mileposts along the way - for convenience’s sake we’ll say every 10 pts - and when you hit there, you get to pick a Technique from a fixed list available at that level. Let’s say we’ve got ‘Slicer’, ‘Smasher’, and ‘Stabber’ available at level 10, and then maybe a couple that are for people who don’t want to specialize in a weapon type like ‘Take a Hit’ and ‘Counterattack’.
Then, at level 20, you get to pick another Technique, and some of them require that specialization. If you picked up Slicer at 10, then at 20 you’ve got an option between Whirlwind Slice and Throatcutter, along with more generic options. While someone who picked up Smasher qualifies for Knockdown and Hammer Leap, instead.
Now, there are obviously downsides with this method, including the fact that some players are going to be so paralyzed by the choice that they do their best to never make it, or abandon a character rather than be “locked out” of any possible future choice. But it’s an option.
One of the other options that I’d really like to see more done with is positive reinforcement. If someone chooses a specialty, then reward them for having their character play to that specialty and open up rewards/opportunity based on how many times they’ve willingly engaged in that behavior. So, if someone wants to be a generic fighter/talker/mage, that’s fine!
But, you can have a player say, “I want my character to be a FENCER.” And then work out some milestones for a fencer that the game wants to promote and support, and that will be viable opportunities. When the character engages in those activities (uses a fencing weapon, choose the ‘parry’ option in combat, challenges people to one-on-one duels, whatever ‘being a fencer’ means in your game), then they get a little ‘tick’ in a box that counts up to a specialization reward for Doing Fencer Things. That could be a special fencing technique, or bonus, or even things like NPC recognition for Being a Fencer, like a title or a rank.
Get people invested in the option of being a specialist through the behaviors and actions they choose for their characters.
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@Pyrephox I absolutely think stylistic choices like those would be super appealing. Kind of like how knacks became a major xp sink on Arx, except more baked in systemically.
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@Pyrephox This is very close to what I have spec’d out for a project I’ve been tooling with, and it’s cool to see someone bring it up out of the blue.
I actually used something very similar in a fantasy LARP (boffer style) that we ran for years. About 80% of the character progression available was not in the core rulebook and you unlocked the ability to discover and buy stuff as you spent more in the relevant trees and/or reached RP-based milestones like joining the Assassin’s Guild or whatnot.
edit: capitalized the word “Guild” after receiving a threatening note in the mouth of a dead raven
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Give people specializations.
If that’s what you want, just give it to people. Give people one/two/three specializations that they get bonuses to or whatever number you want. You can pick how many and how big to get your players to whatever level you want.
Just understand, the moment you start messing with the established systems, the more you run the risk of creating more problems.
If people don’t wait to buy deeper into a specific ability or talent, then that sounds like an individual decision that they prefer well-rounded to specialized. And I don’t know that there’s anything wrong with that. But it certainly is a preference.
As a game runner, if specialization is what you want in your game, firstly, tell people that. You can definitely incentivize it, but I’d imagine, based on experience that you’ll have a bunch of people with the same or similar specializations. Especially in combat. So now that’s a new problem to address.
But the most general option I’d advise is to advertise a type of specialization you want on your game and let people work towards that on their own.However, the biggest barrier to specializations is the stories you tell. People will want skills that they can use in the stories being told, so make sure that you include the specific skill you want to see in your stories and have the other STs on staff do the same. There’s nothing worse than spending a bunch of points in one direction only for that thing never to come up. Or only come up once or twice in a year. That’s the reason most people prefer to be general.
For the opposite reason, most STs tell stories where the skills necessary are very general. Because no ST wants to get a group of people together and run a scene where the players can’t progress because no one has this very specific skill. Then everyone would just have to go home disappointed or you just go around that skill by using a more general skill, thus proving that specific skill was never very necessary to begin with and affirming everyone’s decision to avoid specializing in it (or anything else).
The things that people buy up highest on their sheet are generally the ones they want to use the most. So look at people’s sheets and include their high stats in your stories. Build stories around player specializations and people will specialize.
You can also set thresholds that need to be met for certain things in your plots. “This object can’t even begun to be studied without a 4 in ectoplasmology…” or whatever. Someone will go that route eventually, but that’s generally something to be done between plots, not during. Because leveling up in the middle of a plot generally doesn’t happen. I think giving a discount to leveling up a particular skill during a plot when it is thematically necessary sounds awesome in theory (and happens in about 75 percent of the stories we watch and/or read where someone suddenly does something they’ve never done before or do it better than they’ve ever done before). However, practically, people will gripe about it being unfair and everyone will want their own skill-discount plots.
So just a few options/cautions form my end.
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ETA actual thoughts:
In my experience, limited as it is, it would’ve helped to ‘incentivize’ specialization if the staff and/or PC-run plots had prioritized specialized characters instead of rewarded the jack-of-all-trades builds in their plots. Instead, people who invested in specs were shown it would give them a better chance of inclusion to widen their foci rather than narrow them.I guess I’m saying generally speaking, people choose the jack path because the jack path gets them opportunities.
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@eye8urcake A lot of that is down to the difficulty of challenges in events. To use a D&D example, if the DM makes the challenge DC 10, then is there really any reason to play as more than a Level 1-2 character? If the DM makes the challenge DC 15, then any jack-of-all-trades will have a chance to succeed, and specialists will just obliterate the challenge, so why would you be a specialist? If the DM makes the event instead a series of DC 20-25 challenges, then all of the specialists will have chances to look awesome, and the jack-of-all-trades can have a -chance- to provide backup if the specialists fail.
The above assumes mid-level characters, not level 16+s.
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I LOVE specializations! Even if it does suck when you pick knowledge/map-making and then it never comes up anywhere. I think it’s just awkward to have very broad skills like ‘Art’ where it’s like…if I have a skill in Art does that mean I’m now a master of oil painting and sculpture and watercolors? Can I restore ancient works?! Do I do mosaics? Or am I just really into magazine collages? And you know there are people who absolutely play it like they can do all those things because if you do one art you do all art the same.
And then that does help people sink lots of XP in different places if I want to specialize in art/oil painting, but also you know I dabble in art/water colors.
Doing something like that is certainly helped by having plot and PrP runners that can see sheets (maybe not ranks but skill names?) and try to work those things into the plots those people are in. That person who gets to roll their map making skill will never forget you!
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There is also the issue that the specializations that people choose are not always what they actually want to play. I remember when I was playing a D&D MU*, and I ran a PrP that was explicitly stated to be a stealth scenario - sneak in, steal something, sneak out.
I got four sign-ups. Exactly ONE PERSON had Stealth as a class skill. There was a PALADIN. And not one of those “paladin of the god of intrigue” sorts, either, just a straight up paladin in plate mail.
I adapted, and we had fun, but man, when players showed up, there was absolutely a moment when I was just like, “What on earth.”
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@Pyrephox That Paladin just wanted to Lay Hands on some art*, okay! Every heist groups needs a… err… platemail wearer…
*or whatever they were stealing!
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I think this is more of a system question and less of an XP question.
If the system doesn’t make each point of a skill matter that much, then it will very much be a generalization gambit. I have a custom homebrew system that generally incentivizes spreading out points early on so that you can live long enough to specialize. Though the diminishing returns is high, each point of growth, in this system, is so significant that a person with 2 points in something will very often lose to someone with 3 points in it. And since lots of strategy appears in both social and combat situations to navigate you toward which skills you’ll be using in those rolls, the person who plans and implements well, can lean on their specializations more often.
I generally think that most of the classless systems generate more generalized characters because you don’t know what ‘situation’ you’ll be in on a MU*. In TableTop I’ve never been in a game where anyone was a generalist like we see online, even to hundreds of karma later type situations, or multi-year long campaigns.
On MUs, it’s system choice that will do this for you, keeping XP limited so you can’t just buy everything, and maybe having steps that matter when you achieve certain progression levels. These would all be very system dependent, so no one answer fits each situation.
