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

[kevin_presley]

hello!

  I have two other threads going(realms of adventuring), but I am getting off of that topic for a second to ask for some seasoned advise from anyone with a few moments to post.
  If, when building a game, you decide not to have the characters "build levels with experience" , what other reasons would you have to run a character.
And part two would be;
list some game examples that have this type of settings, if possible, so that I could take a peek. I have never been exposed to any type of RPG that uses that type of game mechanics.
thanks for any help
Kevin Presley
p.s.
shameless plug below
(www.bloodandstone.com)

[GregS]

Are you talking about not advancing the characters at all or just not by level?

Truthfully, I've always hated level advancement as a rule.  It's asinine that your character just spontaneously and randomly advances (before that last sword swing I was X, but now I'm Y!).  I've also hated kill based advancement since it doesn't promote anything but slagging.

Thus, my favorite systems, and the one my new game uses, are all awards based with player controlled upgrading.  Some good examples are (by system) Storyteller by White Wolf, Shadowrun by Fanpro, and the D6 system by Westend.

What these do, in short, is create a cost for each type of advancement (i.e. Stat, Skill, Powers, etc.) and have you spend award points earned per game session at your discretion.  It not only works much better than levels, since players can totally customize their characters, but is also much more realistic.

Other than that, the only thing I've seen is the occasional game that says "advance what they do", in other words, as a Narrator (GM/DM) you should randomly advance the character based on their actions.  I like it in theory, but it becomes a real hassle on a number of levels.

[lumpley]

Building levels (or skills) with experience looks like a hamster wheel to me anymore.  Kill monsters to kill bigger monsters to kill bigger monsters...  Bleh.  When I play a character, it's to find out what the character has to say about people.

Here's a tiny sample of free RPGs without that kind of character advancement:
Adventures in Space!
Bestial Acts
Kathanaksaya
Munchkins
My Love For You is Way Out Of Line
Nicotine Girls
Our Frustration
Shadows
Totem

All of which I pulled out of the free games section of the Forge's resource library.  Look up at the top of this page!

-Vincent

[Paganini]

"Level advancement" is not a reason to play a character. Maybe I'm misreading your post, but from your phrasing, it sounds like you view gaming as a long string of carrots in front of the bunny's nose, where, if you ever run out of carrots, bunny will smash head first into a brick wall and die (i.e., the game will stop).

The only reason to play a character, ever, is that you're interested in imagining what that character does, where he lives, what he thinks, how he feels, who he knows, etc. That said...

To really dig into this topic, you have to define a few things. Let's talk "character advancement." What does it mean for a character to "advance?" I mean, I could put a number on my character sheet, and just add one to it after every session and my character would be "advancing." But this advancement would have no effect on anything.

I think you're probably more interested in talking about accumulation of effectiveness, which does not have to be tied to character in any way at all. It can be, but it doesn't have to be.

To talk about accumulation of effectiveness, you have to understand currency, and what it allows you to do. Currency is basically in-game resources that you, the player, manipulate to get what you want. Coins in Universalis are a pretty obvious example. These Coins are strictly meta-game. They belong to the player, they aren't tied to character (or anything else). A less obvious example are D&D spells. You accumulate them, you spend them, they regenerate. You, the player, have to manipulate them skillfully to get the results you want.

Let's say, for example, that in your game, the only time mechanics are used is when a character is trying to do something with magic. The rest of the time, the GM just decides what happens. In this game, you wouldn't need any kind of "levels" at all. Learning new spells, or making old spells more powerful, would be the only advancement system you'd need.

Of course, it's not required that you have *any* sort of accumulation of effectiveness, and therefore, the whole concept of "advancement system" is optional. Effectiveness can, for example, be distributed by means of a circulating economy. Check out Shadows at http://www.harlekin-maus.com for a great example.

[John Harper]

It's not free, but the #1 game I can recommend to you is Trollbabe. This game will open your eyes to what a non-D&D-dreivative RPG can be. It doesn't have levels, or hit points, or increasing effectiveness, or classes. It also actually explains how to use the game system during play.

Trollbabe taught me more about good, concise game design than any other game text I've read.

[kevin_presley]

Keep it coming!!
        I also must explain myself a little more. I have the basic RPG moster games under my belt(D&D, rifts, marvel superheros, yadda yadda). Thus, all I have ever been exposed to are such increasing-effectiveness gaming. I am currently attempting to design an rpg, but I have been told by my peers that I need to expand my knowledge of various rpg styles.
         This is the reason I have posted. Thanks for what has been posted, and keep them coming!!
thanks for the info,
kevin presley

[rafial]

Other than that, the only thing I've seen is the occasional game that says "advance what they do", in other words, as a Narrator (GM/DM) you should randomly advance the character based on their actions.  I like it in theory, but it becomes a real hassle on a number of levels.

Just a quick followup, since I'm not sure if any of the systems cited so far by other posters include an "you are what you do" type mechanic.  Mostly I just wanted to point out that this can be made mechanically quite precises, it isn't always GM fiat as described above.

Pretty much any of the Chaosium Basic Roleplaying derived games (Call of Cthulhu, Runequest, etc) work like this.  Burning Wheel has a very highly developed form of this mechanic.

[Deadboy]

To summarize, there are really four major types of advancement mechanics (at least, that I can think of):

1. D&D style leveling. While it is easy in that it tells you when and how you may advance, and thus is more potentially game-balanced by the limits it puts on how much of what you can increase, many, myself included, feel this kind of advancement can be narrow, limiting and unrealistic.

2. Award system based. The character earns points with which he may use to buy skills, attributes, traits, etc. Players are really free to build characters how they want on the positive side, but on the negative there is potential for abuse if a player concentrates all his points on one aspect without growing the rest of the character with abilities he'd probably use and realistically need. Good games for this are Vampire, Deadlands and Shadowrun. There is also a subset of this type where points used to build characters also have a mechanic allowing the points to be spent in-game for various effects such as re-rolling die rolls. This makes for an interesting resource management aspect, in that players must choose whether to spend a point for immediate effect in-game or save it for increasing the character's abilities. Good examples of this are WEG's D6 system and my own games over at www.happynebula.com (sorry, shameless plug there *g*).

3. Then there's the  "you are what you do" (to quote a previous poster) system like in Chaosium's pre-D20 Call of Cthulhu system. Basically, every time you use a skill, you put a check-mark on that skill, and then after the game, there is a random chance that ability increases. While it's very realistic in theory in that you don't advance skills your character actively uses, in practice you end up with characters really good at combat skills and only mediocre at everything else, as chances to use many skills can be limited. It also completely ignores the concept of off-time practice.

4. Finally, there's systems out there where there is no advancement. I'm not sure if I personally like this way very much, because I've always felt increasing my character's stats was an integral part of the fun. Also, I've just recently had my eyes opened that this sort of thing even existed when I really started researching and trying out games I've found around the Forge. I particularly like InSpecters for this version of advancement so far, but I'm still looking at and learning about others.

Hope that helps... And, did I miss any?

[Eero Tuovinen]

Nobody has mentioned fixed advancement: a game can be designed such that characters advance through very limited paths in an almost automatic fashion. Usually this is more alike to development in general than advancement in particular.

Examples of this kind of game include
- My Life with Master: character statistics change according to strict rules. Usually they all go up in a predictable fashion.
- Polaris: the player decides himself when he wants his character to advance. Characters go through an arc of experience from novices all the way up to veterans, finally failing against the demons they battle. Although veterans are tougher, they are also closer to their final fate.
- Argonauts: from what Jonathan has told about his current plans, the characters will always get a level per adventure regardless of other considerations. Quite interesting for a near-D20 game.

[Ben O'Neal]

Well, just for the hell of it, I might jump on the bandwagon and mention my game, Scarlet Wake. In my game, you advance your character in different areas by doing specific things which are relevant to the trait you wish to advance. For example, to increase your Grudge, you must face a Dilemma and win, meaning that your grudge is strong enough to overcome any emotional barriers the dillemma might have presented, and to increase your Style, you must use your wits and what's available to you to escape a Bind. Each trait has a different requirement for advancement, and my experience so far tells me this works pretty well in keeping sessions varied and interesting, and certainly fun.

So what's that now, 6 different ways to implement character advancement that don't rely on experience points? I wonder how many more there are... and then there are the myriad ways to not implement character advancement at all and still have a fun game.

-Ben

[btrc]

There is also the subset of "you are what you do" called "down time". Lots of games have rules for accumulating experience or training between adventures. I think GURPS lets you accumulate 1 point per month if you are training in something, for instance. I have a similar mechanic in most of my designs (in addition to generic experience for play), so if you have the money, you can hire a full-time trainer in "skill X" and gain some basic proficiency in several months.

Obviously, this only works for games where you can have months of down time between adventures, but it is "real world" at least.

IMHO, some form of "advancement" is always possible. How many of us would look forward to being no more skilled and experienced 5 years from now than we are now? If you're alive, you change with time.

Greg Porter
BTRC

[Ben Lehman]

There is also a school of thought that says that you don't need to accumulate power -- but the ability to change around the character is granted by some mechanism.  My Cradle (not really yet fit for public consumption) is a little bit like this -- everyone has a pool of points that they can save or move around into different parts of their character (or even things external to the character.)  There is a bit of advancement in Cradle, but it isn't really the point.

Kirt Dankyemeyer's Pretender (free online) uses a purely freeform method of advancement -- your character gets more powerful if he/she gets more powerful in game, and likewise can get weaker.  Combined with Pretender's strong player narration mechanics, this is really fun -- you get to play exactly the character you want and, if you ever want to change things, you can.  Check the game out (google for Pretender RPG, or buy the hardcopy in the No-Press RPG Anthology) because, hey, it's free.

A note about Polaris (also mine) -- Polaris has a very strange "advancement" mechanic, which you probably gathered from Eero.  One thing that is important to note is that you never, mathematically speaking, get more powerful, even when your attributes go up.  However, your character still accumulates things that are important to him, and changes over the course of his career.  Polaris also ties advancement to character failure (either material or moral), which is similar in concept if not execution to Vincent Baker's Dogs in the Vineyard (soon the be available?  GenCon?), where you advance and change via introducing complications into your life and, generally, "failing."

yrs--
--Ben

P.S.  A draft of Polaris is free right now (see my sig) but pretty soon it won't be there, so read it quick if you're going to.

[kevin_presley]

First off, once again the discussion here is wonderful, and I feel like every post is adding to my education. Thank you.

My thirst for knowledge on the subject of RPGs seems bottomless, and I have yet one more question.
As far as my knowledge of the subject goes(and that is not very deep) it seems that most of the "mass publication" games are designed around the building experience/gain level type.
 Is the average joe/jane rpg buyer ready for that type of change? Is it time to challenge what most people consider "standard" role playing game rules? Would a non-level based game appeal to the average person in the market to buy this type of fantasy game? could this type of game be "translated" to someone who has no clue how to play an RPG?
 The main problem I have had in past experience with gamers is the lingo sounds like a different language to someone who is not involved in the gaming world.
I know there are several questions here. Anyone who wants to post, pick one, or answer them all, the more answers I get, the more questions I have,
thanks!!!
Kevin Presley

[Mike Holmes]

As far as my knowledge of the subject goes(and that is not very deep) it seems that most of the "mass publication" games are designed around the building experience/gain level type.

You're making up a lot of terms here, without defining them. What is a "mass publication" game? I assume you'd include D&D, but what about, say, Rifts, which is largely the work of one very busy man? What about Shadowrun which was produced by FASA who went out of business? I assume you'd also include most things from White Wolf. What about a game like Sorcerer? Which is published by the site moderator here in quantities that rival those of, say, some of the smaller things from White Wolf?

If you're saying that most people play with some sort of advancement, you'd be correct. Is that it?

The other thing is that you really have to look at is that different sorts of advancement systems are not all the same. That is they promote different sorts of play.

Is the average joe/jane rpg buyer ready for that type of change?

Well, average Joe plays D&D, and doesn't want to change, so, no. But he's not your target market, so it's useless to worry about him. The person that you want to target might play D&D, but doesn't like something about it. Meaning that your game should be different, not the same.

Is it time to challenge what most people consider "standard" role playing game rules?

"Time?" Long past time. We've been challenging these things for a long time. With good results, I might add.

Would a non-level based game appeal to the average person in the market to buy this type of fantasy game?

Yes. That is, they do buy them a lot. More than games with levels. That is, of people who do not play D&D, the majority do not play with levels. In fact, levels are, perhaps, the most commonly cited reason for leaving play of D&D.

could this type of game be "translated" to someone who has no clue how to play an RPG?

Much more easily that D&D can be translated to a non-gamer. The idea that D&D is a good entry game is completely fallacious.

The main problem I have had in past experience with gamers is the lingo sounds like a different language to someone who is not involved in the gaming world.

Indeed. Many games other than D&D are much easier to get a non-gamer to understand.

Mike

[cfc]

As far as my knowledge of the subject goes(and that is not very deep) it seems that most of the "mass publication" games are designed around the building experience/gain level type.

Um. Have you ever heard of GURPS, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Vampire: The Masquerade, or Champions? Those are just the first mass market RPGs that don't use levels that pop into my head; there are tons of others. In fact, the ONLY level-based mass market RPG I know of off the top of my head is D&D/d20. Most games these days are based on a skills system. Personally, I don't think of any game I'm familiar with as being "about" gaining experience, as written (with the possible exception of D&D). Buffy, for example, is "about" dusting vamps and looking cool while you do it -- That's why people play. Gaining experience is just a side effect.

Would a non-level based game appeal to the average person in the market to buy this type of fantasy game?

Depends. What is "this type of fantasy game"?

could this type of game be "translated" to someone who has no clue how to play an RPG?

As someone else has noted, explaining experience points and levels to someone who's never played an RPG is going to be far more difficult than simply saying "The more you use a skill, the better it gets" (as in BRP, for example).