alternate hero advancement

[Mike Holmes]

Several unrelated comments:

Starting Level
So, Josh, you're saying that the ability levels at which you add abilities are simply at what you start abilities off at in character generation? Correct? That is, if you started off higher, that you'd go even higher with new abilities? Meaning that for a game where abilities start at 13 right now, that it would make sense to start new ones at 13?

I'm very ambivalent on that one. That is, I agree with you that character abilities should be higher, generally (rather that we should not always play newbs), but I also like the simmy notion of abilities starting from newb level when they're new. I think this is what the rules intend, even with advanced experience in play. That said, I'd also like a way for them to go up faster, so...

I think what you have should work well, in any case. The question of starting level is really another discussion entirely.

Flaws
Funny, I thought that was on the list. No, really, I didn't read the lists closely enough, and assumed that you could take a flaw at any level you like. In any case, I really like this as a mechanical way to monitor the addition of flaws (which I've been considering charging for, for a while now). Which makes me think about...

Rapidity of Development - "Augment Only" Abilities
I think that players will focus on their main abilities here, since the return is higher, and that will create a pretty high rate of advancement. That's a good effect, I think.

I do worry, however, that "augment only" abilities will tend to get ignored because of this. It's a double whammy, really, because players already tend to ignore raising up abilities that tend to be only used for augmenting, understanding that they're getting only one tenth the benefit (roughly) if they do so.

So what I'm thinking for victory is:

2) Raise three traits used to augment the main ability by 1.

And for defeat:

2) Raise two traits used to augment the main ability by 2.

If the player augmented with fewer than this many abilities, then he is limited to raising only the number used. What this does is to make the main trait about spiking effectiveness, and the augmenting option about breadth.

Playtesting
I like it too, Fred, so what's say we try it out in the IRC game?

Tickmarking
What I'd do is to make this optional. That is, a player can choose to do either in play, his choice. I don't really think that the handling time is too great, so I don't mind if the player raises the abilities up in play. But I also don't mind if they defer. So I'll leave it up to them.

Ability Costs
It looks to me like this rule ignores the idea of some abilities costing more than others. Specifically magic abilities, and the cost of being unconcentrated. I don't have a problem with this, I'm using a house rule for concentration anyhow (it's just a flaw that augments all magic use in the particular area). But I thought it should be mentioned for people who still assume that the costs are based on the charts.

Another way to go, for people who want to keep the original costs would be to convert the benefits to "Spend for development only" HP.

The Big Question
I don't agree with how John stated his objection, but I think he may be sensing a problem. What if the behavior the system produces is bad? I'll play devil's advocate here: Why isn't this system just as problematic as BRP development?

I've often railed against BRP development because it means that players often have their characters go off and "practice." That is, they say, "I want a contest with my sword skill representing getting better by practicing?" Or they say, "I'll pick this lock twenty times" expecting a benefit each time.

Accusations of assholism notwithstanding, I think it's pretty reasonable for a player to say this if the system incentivizes it - min-maxing is not an anti-social behavior, but what's expected from a player presented with system X (so sayth Von Neumann). Further, call me a simmie, but I like the idea of practice contests.

So is this going to become problematic? One solution that leaps out is the BRP solution of only allowing one skill check per ability per session (or adventure). But this then leads to the "I have to use my battle axe skill, too" syndrome where the character uses a different weapon each conflict so as to increase in ability in all of them. That's an odd behavior we don't want to see.

So let's not do that. The usual solution that follows, then, is to say, "You only get benefits when in a field situation." No practice contests allowed. But this denies that, in fact, most actual training benefits occur from practice, and not field use (field use reinforces what's already learned). So what this really comes down to is, "You only get benefits when it's dramatically interesting." I mean, we want there to be real risk in these situations, right? Would you give these benefits for an automatic success? So I declare that I'm running across the road to the temple, and I get a bonus to my running ability? No way, right?

This might be the key, however. If the practice can be said to have a potential downside, risking injury, say, then is it viable? I think that's a start. But I still see far too much gamism potential here. The player has a direct rout to powering up his character, and he can keep pumping away at it. This usually leads with such systems to ensuring that the risk level is high enough. That is, that the downsides outweigh the upsides. The rule would be something like, "You only get the benefit if the resistance TN is higher than your TN." But then aren't we simply saying that simple practice shouldn't be allowed at all?

When it comes down to this, the problem is that it becomes a narrator choice about when it's dramatic. And I, for one, don't want to have to discern when players are playing gamism, and when not. I'd prefer that the system simply reinforce narrativism.

So, having exhausted all of the usual methods for rectifying the system, are there any that I'm not seeing? Will the problem never occur, because the rest of the system is so narrativism supporting that players won't slip into this sort of gamism? Or is there some mechanical way to force contests mechanically to be narrativism, even if the reward system remains as above?


I'm still willing to playtest it to find out. :-)

Mike

[CCW]

This system could indeed have some of those BRP (Basic RolePlaying?) problems, but only if we insist a player only raise the traits that were used in the contest.

Now, I like Josh's point that...

If you want to raise your "Feckless Charm" ability, it's obviously an ability that's important to you. So, put your character into conflicts in which his "Feckless Charm" is the main ability. Succeed or fail, interesting things will happen and you'll be rewarded with an increase in "Feckless Charm" (or something else, if you choose a different thing on the list).

...and it feels like the right thing, on a gut level, but does the advantage of "increasing the degree to which game mechanics reward player decisions about character actions" outweigh the disadvantage of it becoming "a narrator choice about when it's dramatic"?  I don't know the answer, although, as a point of comparison, I'm pretty sure that Dog's fallout system allows you to change any trait, not only ones used in a contest.

Ideally we'd have two playtest groups going: one that has players only raise traits that characters have used, the other allowing them to raise any traits they like (so they can point out their interest in new kinds of conflicts to the narrator, for example).

Just something to consider.

Charles

[Mike Holmes]

I'm not sure, Charles, that I see the connection between opening up what you can buy to avoiding the problem. You're saying that because it works in Dogs, that it'll work here? Or do I miss the point?

Mike

[CCW]

Mike,

Most likely opening up what you can buy would only solve the, as you put it, '"I have to use my battle axe skill, too" syndrome'.  People would still try to get in as many contests as possible, but they might be less strange.  As many contests as possible isn't necessarily bad or good.

I only mentioned the way this works in Dogs because Dogs' fallout inspired this one and it might be worth considering.  Certainly what works in what system doesn't automatically (or even probably) work in another.

Charles

[joshua neff]

Mike, you're giving things to think about. Which is not a bad thing.

Starting Level
So, Josh, you're saying that the ability levels at which you add abilities are simply at what you start abilities off at in character generation? Correct? That is, if you started off higher, that you'd go even higher with new abilities? Meaning that for a game where abilities start at 13 right now, that it would make sense to start new ones at 13?

Right, yes. I prefer to have 17 be the starting rating. But the starting rating for a new ability really should be "whatever the starting rating is in your game."

Rapidity of Development - "Augment Only" Abilities
I think that players will focus on their main abilities here, since the return is higher, and that will create a pretty high rate of advancement. That's a good effect, I think.

I do worry, however, that "augment only" abilities will tend to get ignored because of this. It's a double whammy, really, because players already tend to ignore raising up abilities that tend to be only used for augmenting, understanding that they're getting only one tenth the benefit (roughly) if they do so.

So what I'm thinking for victory is:

2) Raise three traits used to augment the main ability by 1.

And for defeat:

2) Raise two traits used to augment the main ability by 2.

If the player augmented with fewer than this many abilities, then he is limited to raising only the number used. What this does is to make the main trait about spiking effectiveness, and the augmenting option about breadth.

That's not a bad idea at all.

Tickmarking
What I'd do is to make this optional. That is, a player can choose to do either in play, his choice. I don't really think that the handling time is too great, so I don't mind if the player raises the abilities up in play. But I also don't mind if they defer. So I'll leave it up to them.

Yes. In my head, it doesn't seem like much more handling time than anything else in HQ. (And since it's a fairly simple couple of tables that could be memorized over time, the handling time should go down as play goes on.) And I don't have a problem with traits increasing--or new traits suddenly appearing--in the middle of play. But if a player, for whatever reason, would prefer to do advancements in one lump outside of regular play, that's fine, too.

Ability Costs
It looks to me like this rule ignores the idea of some abilities costing more than others. Specifically magic abilities, and the cost of being unconcentrated. I don't have a problem with this, I'm using a house rule for concentration anyhow (it's just a flaw that augments all magic use in the particular area). But I thought it should be mentioned for people who still assume that the costs are based on the charts.

Yeah, that was something I've been struggling with. Honestly, I don't really see the point of the whole "concentrated/unconcentrated" thing. And I hate that magic traits have a different cost than other traits. The last time I ran HQ, one thing my players (who were all newbies to the system and setting, except for Julie, my wife) complained about was that you have all of these traits--abilities, personality traits, relationships, items--that you can use as the main abilities in conflicts, and then you have these cool-sounding magic traits that you can only use as augments. It's like "here are all these cool things you can do all over your character sheet, but this one corner works differently and costs more to raise."

These is really a whole 'nother issue, so I won't go on and on about it. But basically, I'd rather play HQ where magic works like any other ability. So, these tables reflect that.

Another way to go, for people who want to keep the original costs would be to convert the benefits to "Spend for development only" HP.

The Big Question
I don't agree with how John stated his objection, but I think he may be sensing a problem. What if the behavior the system produces is bad? I'll play devil's advocate here: Why isn't this system just as problematic as BRP development?

I've often railed against BRP development because it means that players often have their characters go off and "practice." That is, they say, "I want a contest with my sword skill representing getting better by practicing?" Or they say, "I'll pick this lock twenty times" expecting a benefit each time.

Accusations of assholism notwithstanding, I think it's pretty reasonable for a player to say this if the system incentivizes it - min-maxing is not an anti-social behavior, but what's expected from a player presented with system X (so sayth Von Neumann). Further, call me a simmie, but I like the idea of practice contests.

So is this going to become problematic? One solution that leaps out is the BRP solution of only allowing one skill check per ability per session (or adventure). But this then leads to the "I have to use my battle axe skill, too" syndrome where the character uses a different weapon each conflict so as to increase in ability in all of them. That's an odd behavior we don't want to see.

So let's not do that. The usual solution that follows, then, is to say, "You only get benefits when in a field situation." No practice contests allowed. But this denies that, in fact, most actual training benefits occur from practice, and not field use (field use reinforces what's already learned). So what this really comes down to is, "You only get benefits when it's dramatically interesting." I mean, we want there to be real risk in these situations, right? Would you give these benefits for an automatic success? So I declare that I'm running across the road to the temple, and I get a bonus to my running ability? No way, right?

This might be the key, however. If the practice can be said to have a potential downside, risking injury, say, then is it viable? I think that's a start. But I still see far too much gamism potential here. The player has a direct rout to powering up his character, and he can keep pumping away at it. This usually leads with such systems to ensuring that the risk level is high enough. That is, that the downsides outweigh the upsides. The rule would be something like, "You only get the benefit if the resistance TN is higher than your TN." But then aren't we simply saying that simple practice shouldn't be allowed at all?

When it comes down to this, the problem is that it becomes a narrator choice about when it's dramatic. And I, for one, don't want to have to discern when players are playing gamism, and when not. I'd prefer that the system simply reinforce narrativism.

So, having exhausted all of the usual methods for rectifying the system, are there any that I'm not seeing? Will the problem never occur, because the rest of the system is so narrativism supporting that players won't slip into this sort of gamism? Or is there some mechanical way to force contests mechanically to be narrativism, even if the reward system remains as above?

Okay, I'll admit, you kind of lost me here. Is the point "this might encourage bad behavior among players"? I don't think it would encourage bad behavior on my part, and since I don't want to play with anyone who has worse behavior than myself, I'm not sure I see what the problem would be.

But without playtesting it, I think it's hard to say for sure.

[Mike Holmes]

Okay, I'll admit, you kind of lost me here. Is the point "this might encourage bad behavior among players"? I don't think it would encourage bad behavior on my part, and since I don't want to play with anyone who has worse behavior than myself, I'm not sure I see what the problem would be.

This is very complicated.

A game can be defined as an activity the internal results of which have no moral implications. That is, within the agreed framework, its OK to beat an opponent, because you've agreed that neither side has a moral imperative to not hurt the other side by making them failures. In a RPG, you can have your character kill somebody, but it's not as though you killed somebody in real life. You can't be held morally responsible for your acts within the game.

But you can be held responsible for acts that affect the social contract that forms the agreement to play the game. As such, if the agreement is such that everyone agrees that we should play narrativism or whatever, then, in fact, it's a moral violation to play otherwise. For instance.

Now, that said, most groups do not explicitly agree to how to play. Instead, "System Does Matter" means that we're generally informed by the game system as to how to play. So if the system encourages X, and we agree to play by the system, then we're agreeing to play X. In such a case, if the system encourages one thing, but we play another way instead, then the person adhering to the system has a gripe against all of the other players.

That is, unless you explicitly agree to ignore any min-maxing incentives that a system has, you're implicitly agreeing that these incentives are not only OK, but the expected way to play. Min-maxing is, no more or less than doing what the system informs you that you should do.

So I am in no way arguing that min-maxing is bad behavior here. It's only bad behavior if the group has said, "Yes, the system encourages this, but we're going to ignore that and do something else." You can do this, of course, but then why use said system?

What I'm saying is that, very possibly, a player informed by this system may (that "may" has a couple of meanings here) rightly decide to have their character do loads of "practice" contests or the like, barring a local rule that says that this is bad form. Any such rule, however, has the difficulty that somebody is going to have to oversee it and make judgements about it. In which case, why have the first rule at all? Is it really worth the added problems?


Now, all of this said, it may be that the system doesn't incentivize this because the players do not give any value to having high ability ratings. If that's the case, then there's nothing to maximize for minimum cost. And I think you can potentially make an argument for HQ that this is true - that HP expenditures on raising abilities is really more about pointing to that ability than how high it's gotten (and that the other context of HQ means that players are more likely to feel this way). But I think you can make an equally true argument that some people will value high ability levels simply because they have a reasonable desire to explore power fantasies in their RPG play.

If it's reasonable to want more power for your character, then it's reasonable to employ the system as it's designed to get more power. If play becomes bad in some way because players persue these tactics, that's a fault of the system, not of the players.


All of which means that you may well be able to make this work for your local group. And I probably can make it work for mine as well. Since we've already interpreted the rest of the game in a way that forms an implied contract about creative agenda. But for groups who are approaching the material for the first time? I think that they might well have trouble with a HQ system with this reward system. As has been said, the reward system informs creative agenda more strongly than any other part of the game. And this one could slant HQ play to gamism fairly easily, it seems to me. In fact, since it does give the player a strategy to "level up" in power, that can directly inform players that higher levels of power are, in fact, sought.

I think that it's important in the current version of HQ that the player can't do anything in order to power up his character more quickly than any other behavior. I think that, again, informs players that high power levels are not what's sought. The same goes for all of this with HP's used to bump and winning. I wouldn't want players feeling that they should be desiring only victory for their character which a system like this could end up producing (though, I admit, strongly mitigated here, by giving larger rewards for failing than for winning).


I'm guessing that you're only going to use this locally, so I wouldn't worry about it too much in that case. But I would tell other people reading this to use it as is at your own risk (not knowing what their groups are like). Because even coming to the game well-intentioned but uninformed, this system might end up producing odd behaviors.

More importantly, what I'd like to see is a "fix" to said problem where the system both produces the behavior you seek to produce (driving into contests), and where players are in no way informed that they should be out to power up their characters or the like. For instance, one thing that might work would be to use the rule that says that instead of a HP adding one point to one ability, that a spent HP can add as many points as you like and/or change the name of the ability. HPs spent to "transform" abilities instead of "adding" to abilities. Then the player is definitely informed that the reward system is not about powering up (too easy), and is instead about being allowed to alter his character "appropriately." Meaning, basically, to make an alteration that fits the community standards of the group in terms of plausibility/drama suitability.

In that case, however, it messes up what you have, and said system has it's own little drawbacks (like having to judge what's "appropriate.") But it's an example of a fix.

Mike

[Doyce]

Just to let folks know, I'll be running the third episode of my Firefly game (http://random.average-bear.com/HQFirefly/HomePage), using a modded version of Mark Humphreys's HQ/Star Wars conversion and, as of this session, a conglomerate version of these alternate hero advancement rules.

My version, below:

1. Hero Points are still used to bump success levels in contests. That is all they are used for.

2. After every contest that has some kind of dramatic importance*, the player goes to one of two lists.

a. If the player won the contest, s/he can choose one thing from this list:

1) Raise the main trait used in the contest by 2.
2) Raise up to three different traits used to augment the main ability by 1.
3) Take a new ability at 13.
4) Take a new personality trait at 13.
5) Take a new relationship with someone involved in the contest at 17.
6) If an item (special or not) was involved in the contest, take ownership of the item at whatever rating the Narrator already assigned it (or at 17 if it hasn't already been rated).
7) Take a flaw at an appropriate level.
8) Take 1 Hero Point for later use.

b. If the player lost the contest, s/he can choose one thing from this list:

1) Raise the main trait used in the contest by 3. (Or one, if it's a 'power' attribute.)
2) Raise up to two different traits used to augment the main ability by 2.
3) Take a new ability at 17.
4) Take a new personality trait at 17.
5) Take a new relationship with someone involved in the contest at 17.
6) Take a flaw at an appropriate level.
7) Take 2 Hero Points for later use.

This does a couple things, but the main one is that character change is entirely tied to seeking out interesting scenes for the character. You want to be safe and sit on your tukas? Fine, but the character's never going to get any better. Also, if a particular attribute/skill is important to you, it's in your best interest to look for conflicts that INVOLVE that trait.

* - "I pick the lock 20 times, for practice, while we're sitting around," is -- generally -- not interesting or dramatically important, and wouldn't earn the character a selection from the list, let alone 20.

I think this version incorporates all the parts I liked best from everyone's thoughts on this system, as includes a few addendums to prevent the sort of gamist abuse that Mike was talking about.  I pitched it to my players and they thought it looked nifty.  If folks are interested, I'll report on the results.

[Vaxalon]

Please do report back.

[joshua neff]

What Fred said. (Right said Fred!) I'm very interested to hear how my rambling thoughts actually work in actual play.

[Doyce]

Alrighty. Game's tonight. News to follow this weekend sometime. :)

[Vaxalon]

Doyce, why does your version have winners get 17's for relationships and items, but 13's for the other types of traits?

And given that the game was three days ago... report?

[Vaxalon]

OOOH!

I just had an idea.

What if you could flip from the winner side to the loser side (not giving up the win in the contest, but rather grabbing a better advancement for it) by accepting a dramatically important "wound"?  A wound, of course, could be any number of different types of sacrifices.

[Mike Holmes]

Hmm, concession mechanic. I assume it's something like Narrator proposes such (being potentially influenced by player suggestion, of course) and player decides whether or not to accept?

Getting pretty close to how FATE is working these days with temporary aspects.

Mike

[Doyce]

Doyce, why does your version have winners get 17's for relationships and items, but 13's for the other types of traits?

And given that the game was three days ago... report?

1. Re: relationships: becuase I wanted relationships to latch in harder and have more pull than other stuff, right out of the gate.  I don't want there to be a 'bad' time to get a relationship.

2. Because items can't be had in the 'loss' section, so I just opted for the High result.

3. Game was postponed, so apologies, but you (and I!) have to wait a couple weeks for results.

[Vaxalon]

Mike:
1> PC wins contest
2> GM proposes possible "wound" - anything from an actual wound to a metaphorical one, like damage to one's reputation
3> player chooses whether to accept wound
4> If player accepts, PC advances by the "loser" list, if he declines the PC advances by the "winner" list.

Doyce: I've adapted the advancement rules we've been talking about here:

http://www.thesmerf.com/vaxalon/RegainTheStars.html#Advancement