Need a little insight on a non-level building rpg game

[kevin_presley]

Now,

I have a question for those of you who prefer to run and play in non-level advancement games. This type of rpg does more to emphasize on role-playing itself, or is there just as much combat-involved gaming? Is the majority of the game designed with building skills, or some other type of underlying goal.
I know my questions tell the story of my rpg life. I have had "0" time at a non-level advancement game, and I am just looking for a "cliff notes" of what the bulk of the game is doing to drive the players.
Do these type of games still have the epic-style save the world type game possibilities of say, D&D, or is it more of a role-playing in a local game world environment?
To all that wish to help me out the mists of stupidity,
Post away!!!

[sergeant_x]

Now,

I have a question for those of you who prefer to run and play in non-level advancement games. This type of rpg does more to emphasize on role-playing itself, or is there just as much combat-involved gaming? Is the majority of the game designed with building skills, or some other type of underlying goal.
I know my questions tell the story of my rpg life. I have had "0" time at a non-level advancement game, and I am just looking for a "cliff notes" of what the bulk of the game is doing to drive the players.
Do these type of games still have the epic-style save the world type game possibilities of say, D&D, or is it more of a role-playing in a local game world environment?
To all that wish to help me out the mists of stupidity,
Post away!!!

The second game I played was Traveller which had no level advancement at all. The players chose their own goals which were generally related to making money or pulling off one of Andy's elaborate cons. The game did include training rules and IIRC we did toy around with some experience related skill improvements, but it wasn't the focus at all.

The focus of play when no character advancement is involved, in my experience, has been on pursuing the goals of the character, which were whatever the player found interesting and appropriate. Without an experience system that rewards specific types of success, and without standardized power-ups to look forward to, players were free to choose whatever goals they wanted to for their characters.

[Mike Holmes]

What Sergeant said. Or, rather, each game promotes something different. Sergeant's example is classic. Looking at Traveller at first, you might think that play would end up being about fighting aliens, and saving the universe or something, but the material presented always ends up getting played the same way. That is, a lot of the Traveller mechanics end up dealing with economics, and how to circumvent legalities. So most games end up being about the PCs owning (or trying to own) a starship, and then making money trading amongst the stars, doing illegal actions related to trading (like smuggling contraband), and doing cons and odd jobs on planets while waiting to take off.

Have you read the System Does Matter essay in the essay section linked to above? Basically, the system that the game in question puts forward has a strong effect on what people do with the game. This should be obvious, but people always make the opposite claim. That you might as well play Traveller with D&D rules, and vice versa.

Anyhow, the point is that there are so many non-level games (if I had to guess, I'd say about ten times as many as have levels), hundreds of games if not thousands, that you really can't say what they tend to produce as a whole. This is what you're not wrapping your head around here.

Analogy time again: It's like you're asking, "How do cars with automatic transmissions handle? I've only seen standard transmissions." We can make generalities about how you don't have to shift, of course, but other than that, each car will be very different.

Some are very, very combat oriented - see Feng Shui, Phoenix Comand, or Riddle of Steel for three completely different takes on combat in a non-level RPG. Many are less about the fighting, and more about some other element, Call of Cthulhu (horror), Unknown Armies (weird psychology), Over the Edge (surrealism), Dust Devils (western themes). Some have no particular prediliction towards combat at all, like Inspectres, The Pool, Nobillis.

As to the power level of PCs, interestingly these games have a lot more of the "save the world" stuff than non-level games do. That is, your assumption is that, because in level-based games, you have to start out a pipsqueak, you have to in all games. But you can see that's obviously not true, right? In Nobilis, for instance, you play characters that are akin to gods. There are other games where you do nothing but actually play gods. There are RPGs where you create the universe as part of play. And every power level in between.

Unknown Armies, again, has three power levels that you can play at, one at "Street Level" where the characters are "norma", another at a level where characters possess strong supernatural powers, and another where they can bend reality to their will with ease. In Ars Magica, similarly, a fantasy game set on mythical Earth, you can play normal folks who hang out with wizards, heroes who are pals with wizards, or wizards who kick all ass over anyone else but other wizards. These are not "levels" that one can progress through in Ars (in UA, you can go from one to the other, but characters advance within the levels separately, and it's really a different game from one "level" to the next), a character at one power level can never become a higher level. Players rotate through who gets to play the more powerful characters, or some players just accept playing much weaker characters. And it all works fine.

There are superhero games where the GM gives out points and the characters can be anywhere from diabled incompetents with hardly any points, to characters with godlike powers depending on where the GM sets the power levels. In Champions, for instance, a character with about 250 points will be about like a character in Marvel comics. One with 400 or so will be more like a DC character (though they vary in power level more). Using the generic version of the system, there are stats for this system for a setting called Shadow World where the gods are rated around 2000 points each or so.

I could go on and on and on. Put it this way, if you can imagine it, it's probably already been done in RPGs in terms of things like power levels, and what characters do. There are games where characters can't be said to be rataeble in terms of power.  Further, just to give more perspective, some people play what's sometimes called "freeform" where there are no rules, you just make up what happens. These can be anything at all with characters of any power level.

To give you an idea of the range of subject matter in RPGs, take the game Puppetland, where you play a puppet in a puppet-show trying to save the world from the evil Punch. In the hilarious game Paranioa, you are troubleshooters for a computer that rules over a dysfunctional underground domed society, in which you're likely to go through three or more characters per session of play (the idea of power in this game is just ridiculous). In My Life with Master, you play deformed minions of an evil master who must obey his commands until they gain enough love to become brave enough to kill him. In Over the Edge, your character might meet you, the player. In the World of Darkness games, you play either a party of Vampires, Werewolves, Fairies, Ghosts, Mummies, Demons, or various other types of monsters (note these usually don't mix, the party is supposed to be all Vampires, or all Werewolves, in most cases), in modern day Earth, where normal humans tend to be way below your level of power. In Teenagers From Outer Space, you play, well teenagers from outer space who go to shcool together and have wacky adventures. In Little Fears, you play children between the ages of 4 and 13 who are beset upon by a real boogeyman, and other monsters.

To give you an idea of how many games have actually been created to hit any one potential genre, in genre of "Players represent multiple facets of the same character's personality" I can think of three games off the top of my head that fall into this tiny niche. I can think of four Harry Potter knockoffs (despite Rowling saying that she won't authorize one), and there must be more. Four different takes on playing kids at a magical school.

There's a game called HOL where... I can't even describe HOL.

Getting the picture? There are games that have been succefully designed to promote just about any sort of play. That's not to say that everything has been done, just that anything can be done.

Mike

[dewey]

Kevin:

The fact that your game is going to be non-level based is OK, but that does not make a great difference among existing games. Basically no difference.

Also, there are truckloads of universal systems out there, so that's again a niche which is quite crowded.

Where you can really create something new is the setting. And once you have the setting, you can build the game mechanics serving that particular setting. Why should you do that in this order? I can point in the same direction as Mike Holmes did: System Does Matter.

If you still have capacity for new RPGs, and if you are willing to download lots of interesting settings and systems from the net for free, check this link. Many are really short, so you won't need months to read them. Have a fruitful reading.

[Elkin]

A bit of an off-topic post, I know, so you might want to answer it in PMs and keep the thread focused in level/non-level character advancement.

To give you an idea of how many games have actually been created to hit any one potential genre, in genre of "Players represent multiple facets of the same character's personality" I can think of three games off the top of my head that fall into this tiny niche.

Which games, exactly?
I intend to run a game of Everyone is John with different settings, sometime in the near future. If there's another system that's geared better towards the grim, black humor I'm trying to create, I'd love to hear about it.

[Mike Holmes]

That was one that I was thinking of. Can be found here: http://wso.williams.edu/~msulliva/campaigns/john/

I miss Mike Sullivan (AKA Epoch).

Jason Blair had Insects of God: http://www.key20.com/insectsofgod/
(this may be the one you're looking for, Elkin).

There was the game Khaotic, where the PCs were psychics controling a monster in another dimension.

Here's one developed here called Shattered Spirits: http://machmoth.tripod.com/rpg/shattered_spirits_beta01.pdf

There've been other discussions of "Herman's Head" style games, too. I"m sure I'm forgetting others.

Oh, and there was an Over the Edge adventure in Sylvan Pines, IIRC, in which the players wake up in the asylum with amnesia (I made a whole game off of this) where one of the PCs is played by two players who have to vye for control.

This theme seems to come up regularly. In any case, to get back to the topic of the thread, one can see how very narrow realms of subject matter can have very different treatments.

Mike

[Doug Ruff]

I'm a newbie poster to this forum, so please let me know if I'm off-topic or stating the obvious.

Usually, in a story-driven campaign, character advancement is necessary (a hero should be changed by their experiences and adventures) but secondary to the the achievement of story goals.

Also, in most well-paced campaigns, the characters have something that they need to achieve urgently at least 80-90% of the time, which is why they aren't sitting at home training their skills.

For example, if my character's loved one has been kidnapped by bandits, I'm not going to spend 1 month training up my combat skills before rescuing her.

I agree that this can lead to undue focus on certain abilities, especially combat/conflict type skills. This can be addressed in-game through giving characters a variety of challenges which will test their other faculties.

Also, a well-developed character history or lifepath helps. This helps to give starting characters a broader base of skills which they are more inclined to use, and therefore develop.

In my experience, most point-based (as opposed to level-based) systems have more focus on initial character concept. Although I admit that I'm mainly thinking of D&D/D20 here as an example of 'level-based' play.

-Tetsuki

[Mike Holmes]

Usually, in a story-driven campaign, character advancement is necessary (a hero should be changed by their experiences and adventures) but secondary to the the achievement of story goals.

Sure, but does Frodo really get perceptibly better at, well, most anything? In fact, it could be argued that Frodo is what's called in literature, a "static" character. He's interesting precisely because, though he's tested, he remains the same old Frodo. It's his neverchanging love of the Shire and the like (and the support of his good friend Sam) that makes him capable of succeeding.

Which is not to say that all characters are like this. I agree that many, maybe even most, change in some ways. But the question is whether or not any of this needs to be tracked in terms of character power.

And that's not to say that power isn't one way to do that, as well. Just that it's competely valid to just have the character change only in terms of the decisions that the player makes for him. There are a lot or possibilities.

What makes for a "well-paced" campaign depends on so many factors that it's hard to really make any generalizations. This sounds like a preference, here, not anything that can be said to apply to all players across the board. To be precise, some players do like to have things proceed at a pace that includes time taken for training, etc. Especially, if "campaign" means more than one plot arc (of there are plots at all) - which is pretty common.


Where I do agree is that one really good way to take the pressure off a game to perform in terms of having advancement be a big thing, is to keep away from the old cliche of having characters start off "inexperienced" or worse, incompetent. This is a fine place to start characters if you want to tell the story of such a character, or if you want to focus on development. But if you want to focus on anything else, start characters precisely as powerful as they need to have the appropriate action ensue.

By which I mean to say, most games really should have characters start out as competent, at least. Most games tell you that the characters are "heroes" but then give you characters incapable of heroism. If the characters are heroes, make them that way to start. Yes, point based games have an advantage here in that you can always just give enough points for the characters to qualify, but the problem is that it also implies that you might want to start off with less, or that you might want to get more in the end.

If you really want to get off of the "advancement" treadmill, don't give any reward mechanics for it, and have any mechanics for changing the character be the result of play, not as a goal that the players can see shooting for.

Mike

[Doug Ruff]

Mike,

I bow to your superior insight - I guess I'm over-used to the 'advancement treadmill' myself!

(I hope the rest of my post stands as an example of how to transfer from level-based to point-based systems.)

Certainly, the 'hero's journey' is much more important than how powerful the hero is at the start and end of that journey.

I guess that Call of Cthulhu is a good example - the gradual erosion of Sanity representing a downward trend in character 'power'.

Cheers,

- Tetsuki

[Sven Seeland]

Hello together,

I really don't wanna hijack this thread, so if you think this belongs into a seperate thread, please tell me and I'll be happy to oblige. I just thought that it might fit, since this is about advancement mechanics anyways...

Since I've grown dissatisfied with Shadowrun and most other RPGs out there lately I have decided to design my own one.
I'm pretty new to this whole game designing business (and not a native english speaker) so please forgive my inadvertible misuse of terms, vocabulary and the english language.

I'm currently very intrigued about the advancement mechanic around training time. My original idea was to give the points to those skills/attributes that are used often, resulting in something that has been called "you are what you do" (or something like that) earlier in this post. However, I dropped this idea since it occured to me that you'd end up with characters that are very good at a certain thing (whatever they do most) but totally lousy at everything else. Also, as someone already stated, it's rarely the case that you get substantialy better at something in the stressful situations that usually happen during RPG sessions.

So I now switched to an approach (which has also mentioned in this thread, I think) which is solely focused on training time. This means no experience points whatsoever, the only resource you have to get better at something is time and money. Time for actual training and money for life support during that time (rent, food, heating, etc.) and to buy books, pay the fees for the shooting range, pay a teacher/trainer of some sort, etc.

However, I'm not quite sure about the consequences of this. Does it encourage characters to neglect the "real" roleplaying in order to have more time for training? Is it really possible to specificaly train such things like charisma, wisdom, sprituality or dexterity? Has anybody had any experience with a mechanic like this one? What is its overall effect on gameplay?

[Ben O'Neal]

Hi Sandman, welcome to The Forge.

However, I'm not quite sure about the consequences of this. Does it encourage characters to neglect the "real" roleplaying in order to have more time for training?

In a word: probably. You're off to a good start in thinking in terms of what your mechanics encourage players to do. I won't talk about "real" roleplaying, and what that might mean, but I will say that if the only way a character can advance is in "down-time", and if advancement is an important part of your game, then it will definately encourage players to want their characters to spend as much time as they can afford in training. This can become a problem if you have designed a campaign that requires successive sessions with very little in-game time difference, because characters won't have time to advance. So it will likely encourage campaigns that are very sporadic, with plenty of in-game down-time for the characters to advance between sessions. It might also ensure that the strongest characters are all very old, and this may, or may not, be something you'd want.

Is it really possible to specificaly train such things like charisma, wisdom, sprituality or dexterity?

In theory, I guess so. But I'm of the opinion that your advancement mechanics should fit into the rest of your mechanics seemlessly, so that there couldn't possibly be a mismatch between how a thing improves and what that thing is. So if you want your only advancement mechanics to be training, I'd be inclined to have a skills-heavy system, because skills progress far quicker with training than does raw ability. For example, I enjoy taking IQ tests because I think they are fun, and I can see my scores improving all the time. This doesn't mean that my raw intelligence is going up, it only means that my skill with thinking inline with IQ-esque questions is going up. My skill with writing essays hasn't changed one bit.

So in short, your advancement mechanics should tie in perfectly with the rest of your mechanics.

Has anybody had any experience with a mechanic like this one? What is its overall effect on gameplay?

I haven't personally, but I know this idea has been done before in a number of games, but I couldn't tell you how it affected gameplay.

-Ben

[Mike Holmes]

The real question about a "training only" mechanic for advancement is where you see it fitting in with the other parts of play. What is the rest of the game like? Without that context, without knowing what you intend to do with the game, we really can't tell you anything about how your intended mechanic will fit in.

That is, other than Ravien pointed out, that, yeah, it will get players to play out more training, probably, it's hard to say what other effects it might have.

So, given that, I do suggest that you start a new thread about your game, to discuss this there.

Mike

[MrSanmdan666]

Ok, this will go into a new thread then. Thanks for the help so far. I hope to see some of you people in the new thread...