Character improvement concepts

[Airshipjones]

Hey, new here, so forgive if I offend.

Looking at the this topic has brought a couple ideas to mind.

First is the idea of creating the experienced and inexperienced characters.  In the Star Wars Saga, Han was more experienced that Luke, but he was a wanted man, a smuggler with a reputation, etc.  Obi-Wan had similar flaws.  So did all the more experienced characters.  Luke was the unknown, without those limitations, but without the skills.  He learned skills to compensate, while the more experienced characters dealt with the limitations they had already accrude in becoming so skilled.

Next idea was to create a system where a character devotes time/resources to maintaining skills or to learning new skills.  Since time is limited (everyone has pretty much 24hrs/day), there will be a limit to how much a character can improve.  Old skills could be abandoned (I know I haven't practiced fencing in too long so that I could keep my day job) to develop new skills or improve existing skills (skills should also include attributes, if we are separating them).  Basically anything that can be trained should be able to be improved if the cahracter has the time, resources and drive to do so.  

I'm still not sure what kind of I game I would implement it in (I was thinking a time-travel game), but it is a different way of looking at the system of character development.

Strengths or weaknesses?

[clehrich]

Troy,

I'm not sure what you're pointing to as untried.  Do you mean the business of trading in old skills for new?  That seems like an interesting development, though some of the usual gang here would be more helpful in determining whether it's really new.  Beyond this, you're talking about a system like Champions (and many, many others), in which you gain points for flaws.  Luke would just be built with a number of as-yet unspent points, plus an additional flaw, "Inexperienced," or whatever.  The rest would be ordinarily balanced.

The trick with a system like this is that Obi-Wan is going to be very radically flaw-heavy if you want balance to be maintained.  I mean, he's a Jedi Master, after all, so he's obviously got insanely high skills in certain areas; presumably the fact that Darth Vader hates him personally would compensate.  So on a 100-odd point scale, you're talking about Luke as an 80+30 point character (the flaw "Inexperienced" giving him the 10 free points to spend), Han as a 120-20 point character, and Obi-Wan as a 200-100 point character.  This sort of thing, without moderation, leads to really insanely flawed characters who are also ridiculously powerful.

I think balance isn't the way to go here.  Obi-Wan is just plain more powerful, but he is plot-constrained.  It's not that he's got a big mechanical flaw, but that his powers are of a nature that they can't be used efficiently.  I mean, based on Phantom Menace and other atrocities, it would appear that we could in another circumstance have seen Alec Guiness skipping down a hallway deflecting blaster bolts and wiping out Stormtroopers with the deflections and the odd saber-cut.  But instead, he lifts up the light saber and lets Darth Vader cut him in half --- and then turns into a helpful voice instead of a character.  I just question whether this can be done numerically.  It's more a question of what was needed by the story at the moment, rather than how it all balances out.

Maybe I've totally missed your point, in which case, please correct.

[Valamir]

One method I've seen (may have been in an old FGU game, don't quote me on that) was to award maintenance points at various character breaks.  These points had to be distributed among current skills and attributes in order to maintain the current score (before applying any increases).  If you had a skill in the lowest quartile 0 points were required to keep it there.  If you had a skill in the third quartile it took 1 point.  If you had a skill in the second quartile it tood 2.  If you had a skill in the top quartile it took 4.  

The net effect was maintaining peak levels of Strength, Agility, and Sword Fighting skill, pretty much used up the bulk of your maintainance, leaving every other skill to atrophy to relative mediocrity.  Leave off sword fighting for other pursuits and those skills would begin to drop.  How many points you got was a fairly involved formula which included factors such as dividing the maintenance points into adventuring and non adventuring skills and keeping a pool of maintenance based on how many months out of the year you spent adventuring vs months of down time.  Too much down time inbetween hack fests and your character quickly got fat and lazy.

It was possible to convert down-time / non adventuring points to adventuring points through training.  You had to pay money to purchase units of this training, but the efficiency of the conversion depended on the character "diligence" attribute with negative modifiers for having a high "carousing" skill.  Indicating you didn't train very hard and it might take 3 points of non adventuring maintenance to get 1 point of adventuring maintenance.  

How much non adventuring maintenance you got depended on your "day job".  As I recall the game assumed that when characters weren't out adventuring you actually had a real career (merchant, blacksmith, farmer, laborer, etc) although IIRC being a "layabout" and living off your adventure haul was an option.  Each career had a list of non adventuring skills it provided automatic maintenance for (and at what level) and also how much "free time" the job allowed.  Free time provided points that could be used for other skills not related to the job.  I also think that each cultureal region provided certain automatic maintainence points for a set of background skills suitable for that culture  (things that anyone who spent any time in the region would be exposed to enough to get maintenance on the ability).

I remember studying the system at length for inclusion in one of my home brews...but in the end it seemed pretty involved for the benefit.

[Airshipjones]

Valamir, you have a concept that is close to what I had in mind.  But I would like to keep the mechanic out of the way as much as possible.  To do that, I had in mind that the 'purchase' of skills/attributes would be set at chracter creation, and that would defined the amount of time/resources the character had to devote to maintaining the skills/attributes.  To improve a skill/attribute, the character would not be able to spend as much time using another skill/attribute, so its value would deteriorate.  In effect, the overall 'points' of a character would not change by much, but what was emphasized in that characters life would.  The only thing that would change this would be experience, which would not effect individual skills, but would effect a characters worldliness.  So experience would be a pools of 'dice' to use to add to skill/attribute rolls when chosen.  Sort of like the old Overall Levels in Champs, but they are used up over a story arc (and then replaced, though I'm still thinking about that).

[Ron Edwards]

Hi there,

I split the above posts from Character improvement, taken for granted?, as it is a new topic that isn't directly related to GNS stuff.

Welcome, Troy! Keep posting and let's see what we can come up with.

Best,
Ron

[M. J. Young]

Beyond this, you're talking about a system like Champions (and many, many others), in which you gain points for flaws.  Luke would just be built with a number of as-yet unspent points, plus an additional flaw, "Inexperienced," or whatever.  The rest would be ordinarily balanced.

The trick with a system like this is that Obi-Wan is going to be very radically flaw-heavy if you want balance to be maintained.

It seems to me that there have been two threads of late that addressed this sort of issue, but I'm not sure where they would be.

One of them suggested the idea of two different kinds of characters, low level improvable characters and high level fixed characters. The idea would be that if you took the low level character you had the ability to grow into whatever you wanted to become through play, while if you took the higher character you had the powers up front but couldn't improve.

The one that has more promise in my mind was the suggestion that a player might borrow points at interest, that is, we'll give everyone a hundred points, but they'll get more points during play. To create Luke, you spend about fifty points and bank fifty on which you'll gain interest over time so that maybe you'll have sixty by the time you need to buy something else (plus whatever you earn), but if you want to play Obi-wan you're going to spend three hundred points, and you're going to have to pay back those points at interest over time, significantly limiting what you can do and giving the character who started with banked points a fast track in your direction.

(Actually, I don't think the part about banking points and gaining interest on them was part of the idea at the time, but it seems a good addition and provides an additional incentive to create the weaker character.)

--M. J. Young

[Airshipjones]

I think the point that I was trying to make that was most important was the second one.  The idea that characters don't improve attributes/skills appreciably over a campaign due to time/resource constraints except by neglecting skills that they already have and getting rusty in those skills.  I also have some ideas on how to incorporate experience that may be rather unique, but that is still banging about in the back of my head.

I brought up the Han/Luke thing to point out a way of looking at what realize is another idea.  Flaws vs Potential.  Luke had plenty of potential, but no experience or training, while Han had lots of experience and training, but also had the flaws to offset those.  Potential would be the exception to the skill change limitation.  But even that would be limited.  Balances out the two over the campaign pretty well, as long as we aren't min/maxing from the start.

Now, I can see a way to incorporate these together fairly well, as long as I can get a skill system and task resolution system working that I like.  I have one I am starting to work on, but my day job just keeps getting in the way.

[contracycle]

~Well, one way to do this might be to establish a weekly or monthly diary laying out how much time, by default, a character commits to certain actions.  So, to keep up Acrobatics 8, say, they need to find a slot for X many hours of stretching and practice per week.  Etc.

[JMendes]

Hey, all, :)

Hmm... These concepts sound interesting, but I'd like to raise a note of caution. Usually, this sort of thing is done in the name of realism (which is all well and good), but it might end up generating characters that are completely one-sided and/or narrow-minded.

For instance, who do you know that spends every single waking instance practicing to improve or maintain their 'skills'? Most people I know have lots of 'off-time'. But a system like this simply isn't going to reward that. And thus, there goes your realism.

My personal experience witih this comes from a long campaign of Bushido. (An old, poorly written, poorly play-tested, but lots of fun, RPG from the guys who later brought us Shadowrun. The guys themselves, not FASA.) Character improvement is done by training. So what does everybody do the moment they get a free minute and a nickel (training costs money)? They train.

Of course, if it's not in the name of realism, you can just arbitrarily limit the number of 'skill points' or 'working hours' or whatever that are available each week and be content. :)

Like I said, just a note of caution.

Cheers,

J.

[Airshipjones]

There are two ways I see it working.  First, there is the Potential thing.  You might not spend every waking minute training, but you have the capability of becoming great if you apply yourself.  Second, a mechanic built around the attributes, such that the attributes limit the amount of skill or skills one can develop in that category.  So if a character has a low strength, the character is not going to have a lot of strength based skills.  But if the character has a high analytical skill, the character can hit the books hard and develop many or a few highly developed analytical skills.