Advancement Systems and D&D, Advancement Systems and Des

[Marco]

So, basically, I don't disagree with you. You're just talking about *how people feel about the SiS,* whereas I'm only talking about *how the mechanics operate.*

Agreement here as well. I think much of the value of being higher level comes in the form of in-game SiS related rewards rather than the statistical makeup of combat on a time/danger basis (although the number of instant kills will certainly diminish at higher levels in most cases).

-Marco

[Paganini]

Mouse,

Yeah, that sounds exactly like what I'm talking about. I haven't played X-2, so it was a little hard to follow your description of the actual system. How different are the various abilities? Like, do a lot of the different jobs have the same 16 abilities just with different names, and different visual effects in engine? Or does every ability serve a unique and useful purpose, so you really do want to switch around between them?

Russel,

Yeah, I understand that D&D 3e doesn't have such a severe case of this as I described. My description was more of a hypothetical "pure" version of a D&D -esque advancement system. I know that individual feats, spells, and so on add scope for character change. I'd like a system, though, where change / acquisition is the whole *point* of the system, not just secondary feature to amassing XP and leveling up.

[Callan S.]

I think the interest comes from recurring conflicts.

When you fight old conflicts (orcs), when your equal capacity is something higher (owlbears), it means you can use different tactics against the old foe because your just more capable and have more resources to do fancy stuff with.

If the rules force you to never face the old conflicts and only equal ones, you can never discover the changes to tactics your new resources would result in against that conflict.

Thus D&D has a -/+2 party level random table for choosing the CR of an opponent.

[Precious Villain]

But you run into (potential) below level conflicts all the time in any D&D game.  It's called town!  Haggling with merchants and innkeepers becomes a lot easier as your character racks up ranks in Diplomacy or whatever.  Likewise a lot of wilderness challenges are just not an issue as you level up.

Of course, the old "High Level Campaigns" sourcebook and a lot of other DM advice out there warned against straight power escalation as the way to deal with high level PCs for pretty much exactly the reasons under discussion: if all that the characters get for achieving high levels is ever bigger monsters they're really going to think twice about adventuring anymore.  Why go out there and get killed off now that you've finally made it to 18th level?  

Either way, it must have been a problem that the designers recognized because about two chapters of the HLC dealt with it and I believe there are sections in the various DMGs as well about changing the challenges you face as characters reach higher levels.

[Eric J.]

This is a pretty common issue but I don't see it as a real problem.

There are examples in all sorts of games and I've thought about it a lot.

First, I'd like to tackle the idea that new 'kewlness' abilities vs. bigger numbers issue.  I don't see the difference that you do Paganini.  Special abilities just let you interact with things in a better way, same as better skills.

I think that what you're seeing is the difference in rapid development.  Let's call this skills vs. feats.  Skills increase on a curve and feats are spontanious abilities that your character can now use.  However, there really isn't that much of a difference.  If a player can choose 'Cleave' (letting her/him attack someone new once (s)he drops someone) or 'get +3 to my attack' they'll almost certainly go with the second one. Both of them increase their effectiveness in combat and I don't see how the first one really is better than the second one.

I can see your point however.  If AC and attack increase proportionatly with your level it's just dumb:

Two apprentices to the same fighter start at level one.  The first one has an attack of +1 and a Defence of 15.  The second one has an attack of +2 and a defence of 14.  They both get to level 20 where their attacks and defences are +20/45 and +21/44.

Same exact fight.  In fact, in both situations it's just a rollfest.  Neither have an advantige.

However, sometimes skills and such can be used to interact with the game in different ways:  Now that my Alchemy score has increased to +20, I can start brewing some freakin' awesome potions that a short time ago would have been impossible.

In Star Wars D6 (my current game) it isn't a problem.  It would seem like it might be but it isn't.  Even without a diversity of items or powers I can keep the game interesting.  Sometimes my players will be happy to try out some of their new skills but most of the time they're just happy to use their old skills in a new situation, hacking the newest database or facing down a reoccuring villain again.

In conclusion, I think that I understand what you're saying, but I think we need to figure out what stats are used for in the game before you make any strong assertions.

Unless you're just looking on building a game or finding a game with what you said in your initial post.  For the former, you could get inspuration from the current Video game market and with the latter, there have already been a mass of refferences in this thread.

May the wind be always at your back,
-Pyron

[Paganini]

Hey Eric,

Try this analogy on.

You may have seen those mini chess games that you play on a 5 x 5 board; you have 5 pawns, and one of each other piece. The idea is that, without the extra pieces the game is simpler, easier for kids to learn.

Now imagine that D&D is a chess game played on an infinite board. You've got three pieces, a bishop, a knight, and a rook. So, you have three men; three different styles of movement - jumping, diagonal, and straight - to form your strategies with. Three separate, specific abilities to use your imagination to combine in ways to outwith and outplay your opposition.

Each one of your three men has a percent chance of capturing an enemy piece if he lands on it. Every time one of your men captures an enemy piece you get an experience point. When you get enough experience points, you can slightly increase the precentage chance for all three of your men. But you never get to have more men than your starting three.

What I'm proposing is this:

Your percent chance never changes. In fact, you might not even *have* a percent chance. Instead, each man just has a unique ability that you can call on at will - never all the time though, you only get to pick one per turn, so you have to be carefull about when you use each ability, have your men set up in the right combination on the board, and so on.

In this game, at first level you have just one pawn. That pawn doesn't chance ever. For as long as you play the game, it's the same pawn you start with, and can do the same stuff it always could, with no increase in success chance. Every time you level up you get to put another piece on the board. A knight, a bishop, a rook, a queen, etc.

What happens is that leveling up does not make you *better* in the sense that your numbers just keep going up. Instead, leveling up gives you *more* options to choose from.

[Callan S.]

But you run into (potential) below level conflicts all the time in any D&D game.  It's called town!  Haggling with merchants and innkeepers becomes a lot easier as your character racks up ranks in Diplomacy or whatever.  Likewise a lot of wilderness challenges are just not an issue as you level up.
*snip*

What do you mean 'but'!? That's the whole point! :)

It's a gamist trophy to have conqured something 'Me and my 8th level character could take that town of evil in our sleep...we own that place!'

It's a matter of statisfaction to first survive the challenging conflict, build resources as you survive it more until you get to a point where it is not as challenging a conflict as before because you have so much resources.

Indeed, the truely gamist challenge is to, as a player, use tactics so smart that you don't need to gain all that much more resources to get into this position of power.

Completing that to any extent is how yuo conquour the game and show your mastery of it. It's the trophy you come away with at the end of the day.


Hi Paganini,

I think unique abilities are essentially just like having bigger numbers, only it's harder to see. Ie, if someone has cleave, in a certain combat situation you could do the math and it would show you they have combat score X, which is higher than their listed combat score. Ie, its just an increase in numbers.

The thing is, it's harder to see and fluctuates between encounters. So it takes player skill to percieve the probability map and use it to advantage. I think this is what your looking for here.

[M. J. Young]

So, if you think about it, D&D advancement (of ANY incarnation) is basically a scaling / pacing mechanic. I think we've had that discussion before, but to do a basic recap, the advancement system serves to present the illusion of escalating adversity in the SiS while keeping the overall meta-level of challenge relatively static.

I don't know that this is the point of this thread, but I think it misrepresents the several versions of D&D with which I am familiar.

The first thing that comes to mind is thief skills--hiding in shadows, picking locks, moving silently, climbing walls. The chance of success at these things kept rising, and there was no game mechanism for increasing the level of challenge. At high levels, a thief could pretty much guarantee that he would be able to open the lock or cross the room without being heard. At low levels, doing these things had an inherent risk, because the probability of failure was pretty high.

I know that it looks like combat is "the same thing at higher numerical values", but in the early versions it wasn't, really. The short reason is that average damage per attack did not keep pace with increased hit points. The effect of this might not be readily apparent. A first level character who enters a combat has a pretty good chance that he's going to go from full hit points to comatose in a single hit. By fifth level, it's going to be extremely rare that anything can have that effect on him--dragons and siege engines are about it, plus a few other super monsters. There's a built-in attrition at that point, by which the player can make sensible choices about whether to keep fighting or how to alter tactics to do more damage and take less. This applies especially to fighters, but to other types as well, to some degree.

The "toolbox" approach to magic use has been mentioned; here magic-users and clerics could expand their abilities with new ones that were useful in new situations.

The advantages of magic items should not be underestimated. I had a character party once who had a couple of figurines of wondrous power which were used tactically as well as strategically. This may be most like what you're actually seeking, as each device represents a limited use power.

I agree with Callan, though, that special powers can be reduced to numerical advantages if you're clever enough to work out the numbers. What makes them interesting is part color, part the fact that most people don't really know the numbers, and part the challenge of finding new ways to use something based on what's described (e.g., using a figurine Elephant to move a heavy statue that blocks a secret passage).

--M. J. Young

[Callan S.]

Another interesting thing about the numbers, I thought I'd add in.

I think in D&D 3.x the DC for disarming traps keeps increasing as the party level increases.

But it does not do so at a dramatic rate...it increases at about one point per level. So the player can sink skill points into disable device and keep well ahead of it quite easily.

But he wont be able to do that for all skills. The slow rising DC's for other things stop a completist 'Ah, now I'm a master trap disarmer, I'll become a master lock picker and so on, until really I don't have to gamist plan ahead for failure, since I wont ever fail.'

[Eric J.]

Also in D6 Star Wars (a good example because it's a good system that uses few special abilities) the difficulty doesn't exactly increase that much.  The difficulty is always chosen from one of the catergories.

Very Easy
Easy
Moderate
Difficult
Very difficult
Heroic

Your dice increases without limit, though.  It an get up to 12+ which yields an average of 42.  So an increase in skill lets you perform tasks in much worse situations (Flying through an asteroid belt) or perform multiple actions at once (Firing 5 times at 7D each, taking out 5 high level guards) or beat harder opponents (Boba fett only has a dodge of 9D so you can hit him pretty well with an attack of 10D).

As you can see only one of those really escalates at a rate that matches the players', and that's the last one.  And even then, it really doesn't because beating Boba fett is more than beating a stormie in a different color armor.  You just beat BOBA FEAKING FETT!  The guy, who's head has been a mug!  He even has a jet pack!  I mean, come on.  You just beat Boba freaking Fett!

It also might be worth mentioning that special abilities can aslo be supplanted by items (The new armor your D&D fighter got gave him fire resistance 100%).

I also totally agree that specials function just like skills in terms of scaling.  What's the difference between having a shield that gives you +25% miss chance verssus ogres and having your AC increase by 5?

I do agree that having specials can make the game more interesting, though.  The question then becomes: How do we use this for a practical game?

I don't like how D&D does this, actually.  You gain one of these every 3 levels (or what your class directs).  This is pretty lame and it's problem becomes even more prevelant in the Epic Handbook.

The Epic handbook is very worthy of mentioning in this thread because 99% of it is based on your idea.  Most of what's in the handbook talks about new feats that you can get.  However, at epic levels (20 to 30) only the feats really matter.  It's about letting your characters do really cool things (like cast epic spells 'n stuff) and just generally be cool.  Aditional attack bonus's just don't cut it so it's stupid to limit feats to once every 3 levels (21, 24, 27 and 30).  If you want to cast spells past level 9 you have to take a feat, just like everything else.

So, I'd suggest that feats are gained as more've an ingame mechanic versus an out'a game mechanic (which D&D is built upon.  Please replace what I just said with forge terminology if it exists).  You gain experience by killing monsters and you spend it by buying different abilities (since that's what the game's about).  You could do a dual-system.  One type of experience (which comes from killing things) results in increased levels 'n things (HP, Saving throws, etc.) and tech points (which comes from acomplishing your objective; saving the king, getting the supercrystal orb of light and glitter, etc.) and it functions that way.

That's just one way.  You could also do it like Star Wars Galaxies where you use a skill tree to buy different abilities and the manual bonuses (HP, Defence bonus, saves, etc.) at the same time.

So I guess you'd just have to make the system.  The benefit would really be that combat would probably be more interesting than normal, which reminds me of a thread I need to start.

May the wind be always at your back,
-Pyron

[Paganini]

Hey Eric,

I don't have much to add to your post right now, except that this:

The guy, who's head has been a mug!

Totally cracked me up. Holy crap, what a line!

[timfire]

Hmm... I've been thinking about his stuff lately myself. So let me try restate things, while throwing in a few ideas of my own...

So what you want is for heroes to advance horizontally, while enemies advance vertically. In other words, the heroes gain options, but never (or rarely) increase their numbers. While (I assume) the enemies are constantly increasing their numbers.

I don't think it would be very hard to create such a system, though it might take a shift in thinking from traditional "advancement" systems. For example, in the Mountain Witch, I specifically say that abilities NEVER modify a roll, NEVER grant automatic success, and NEVER grant rerolls. Abilities allow characters to do more stuff, but they use the same resolution system for everything. It's worth mentioning, however, that MW wasn't design for heavy tactics, but I'm sure something simliar could be used in another system for a better effect.