[Night and Day] Experience and a few last bits

[opsneakie]

Okay, so I'm almost ready to move into playtesting Night and Day, now that alignment is worked out. The last thing I need to figure out is experience. Does there need to be a fancy mechanic, or does simply awarding XP based on player success seem good enough?

As far as advancing skills and such, costs are going to increase as your skills get better, so buying that last point in Bladework (or whatever) is going to cost a huge amount of XP. I think that's a necessary bit to any experience system to keep high-level powers in check and encourage rounding out the characters a bit.

As far as a few last bits, I've been working on lists of possible powers, which will need some gameplay testing of course. An example power is Blazing Cleave, a Daylight power that lets you make an additional attack if you drop a monster on your turn. This attack is made as a Light roll rather than with the weapon skill, so having a high Light score makes it more potent. Some of the powers are strictly combat-related, some are acrobatic, I'm trying to make a list so that there are powers in each area that are useful in all sorts of situations. I'm also hoping that through playtesting and running the game, the players will create new powers to help flesh out the list.

Anyways, thoughts on an experience system? Something fancy pants, or just pants?

[chronoplasm]

Perhaps you could have two types of experience points: Light experience and dark experience. Perhaps these types of experience can be aquired through different ways and spent to advance different skills and abilities?

[Vulpinoid]

I guess the standard response around here will be...

"What sort of play do you want to reward?"

Do you want to allocate experience based solely on the competitive aspect of disposing enemies?

Do you want to award experience for meeting certain goals that are important (and unique) to the character?

Do you want to award experience for furthering the narrative and providing enjoyment for the others in the group?

Once you've considered these, I'll offer some potential ideas for how XP could be awarded, and how it could be expended.

V

[opsneakie]

I want to reward adventuring stuff. Not just killing monsters, but also exploring and puzzle solving. I was thinking of giving out XP at the end of the session based on success, but eh.

I guess what I really want to reward, when you get down to it, is picking a side or making a stand and sticking to it. If your character decides to side with the forces of Daylight, I want to reward him making personal sacrifices for the cause. But, on the flip side, I love the idea of a character coming to the realization that the 'bad guys' aren't so bad after all. This kind of takes me in the direction of trying the XP into the alignment system somehow, so that characters furthering their alignment gain more XP, and characters who convert can start gaining lots of XP in different ways. The idea still seems nebulous to me, but I think tying things in with the alignment would be great if I could make it work.

Alignment is really becoming more and more of a central feature in this game, and since it represents what your character believes in, I think it makes some sense to reward following it.

[Vulpinoid]

I'm a big fan of the experience systems where you have to actually do things to improve in them.

If you want the character to improve in puzzle solving, you have them solve puzzles. If you want to improve their strength, then the character should be lifting things, exercising, etc...If you want to gain a stronger alignment toward darkness, then do darkness related things.

This is already incorporated a bit in the alignment system, so it makes sense to evolve the concept across other areas of character development.

An idea has been mentioned previously about having "light experience" and "dark experience", this sort of addresses the idea, but it can get complicated when you have to decide what sort of experience is required to improve different skills and abilities.

Here's my simple suggestion.

Beside every attribute and skill, have a skill level and a bunch of checkboxes.

Every time a character fails in an attempt at something, they learn a bit more about the skill and how not to do it in future. Every time the character succeeds in a skill, they're just using the knowledge they've already acquired (they haven't actually learnt anything in the process). Each failure allows a player to put a mark in a checkbox, once they've accumulated more check-box ticks than the current level of the skill they rub out the checkboxes and improve the skill by a degree.

If skill attempts are based on a combination of attribute+ability, then the player might decide which of these two contributing factors is awarded the checkbox improvement.

You could play with multiplying factors here, maybe attributes can only be improved once a player has accumulated twice as many checkboxes, or even more. It depends how fast you want the progression to develop.

Actual success in the game is rewarded by means of bonuses provided by the greater powers, increases of in-game factional prestige and simple rewards for jobs well done. Gaining experience and gaining rewards are two completely different concepts in my mind. 

Characters staying true to their alignments could gain special bonuses at the end of the game indicating a benefit from their respective factional elders (maybe providing a couple of wildcard checkboxes that may distributed among any skills or attributes)...

Just some ideas.

V