Leveling up
Apr. 13th, 2010 11:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kilroySo, the new gaming project continues to progress in fits and starts. I have a much better idea of the basic structure of the setting now (thank you Andy), and an elegant version of an idea that's been kicking around in my head for about six months (and that fits the setting perfectly).
The Gordian knot I'm currently worrying is the question of power level and growth.
I take it as axiomatic that roleplaying can be enjoyed at any power level from sub-mundane to godlike. I've run successful games without any super-powers at all and I've run successful games where players could literally break the world in half by snapping their fingers. Either extreme lends itself to the acting part of roleplaying as opposed to the action part; in the former case because you can't really do much and in the latter because you can trivially do whatever you need to. Most roleplaying games live somewhere in the middle, where you can do significantly more than the average person but still have to work to accomplish things. It makes sense; you want to be cooler than you are in real life, but the existence of risk and danger adds a certain spice to the game.
Except that true risk doesn't really exist in roleplaying games. The heroes may suffer-- may have to make truly awful sacrifices or watch the things they love desecrated-- but they still accomplish their objectives 99 times out of 100. They get hurt, but they don't lose. Which is how you want it as a player, really. Sinking hundreds of hours into a character only to have them fail would be a huge and heartbreaking waste of time. Sometimes characters die, but this should only happen with the consent of the player (even if that consent is implicit: i.e. the player agrees to play in a game where it's clear up front that their character might die). In a properly run game, you lose what you're willing to lose and no more. Which makes the question of risk in some ways irrelevant.
Going back to the question of power level, then, it seems like the appropriate way to look at it is in terms of story scope: what kinds of things do you want your players to be able to do? Whatever actions your story requires, make sure your players can take them. If there are any kinds of abilities that would prevent your story from functioning, make sure your players can't have them. Simple.
Except that 99% of all roleplaying games include some concept of leveling up, which means that the characters' abilities are always changing. From a design standpoint I understand why this idea is so prevalent: it hedges against player boredom by changing what the characters can do over time, gives a continuous series of concrete goals for players to chase, and makes sure that players never stop feeling powerful because their characters are constantly becoming more awesome. But the tradeoff is that in a system with open-ended advancement players never feel good enough; they're always looking at the power or stat they don't have yet. This is especially bad in dice-based games, where even if you have the necessary attributes you can still fall on your face.
Personally I've always found this incredibly aggravating. I don't think I've ever played a game where the stats on my sheet matched my conception of what the character should be able to do, let alone their actual performance in-game. Per the discussion of risk above, my characters almost never ultimately failed at what they were trying to do-- but they didn't succeed the way I wanted them to either.
It's certainly possible to run a game with no advancement, where characters start out as competent and powerful as their players desire. It would definitely make the process of fitting ability to story easier, but I'm not sure what the implications would be for a long-term game. It seems like there would need to be a mechanism in place for players to create new characters or for existing characters to change their abilities; players' desires will change over the course of a long game, and the characters need to change with them. I suspect there would also be a relativity problem between characters: if Player A shoots lower in the power range than Player B, then Player A could feel inadequate when their characters do stuff together. And of course there's the fundamental problem that players expect to level and rely on advancement to keep them interested in the game. A game without it would need to involve the players without that crutch.
Really right now I'm just trying to feel out the corners of the pretending-within-a-system dynamic. For the purposes of my new game I'm still trying to figure out what I want players to be able to do and how I want them to do it. I know I want to have a very high level of flexibility in terms of character concepts and abilities, and I know I want resolution of actions to be simple and non-random. Everything else is still an open question. I suspect I'll end up having to invent a new system to do everything that I want (once I figure out what that is), although there are bits and pieces I can scavenge from other games.
So there we are. If any of you have any thoughts about how to make games work without advancement, or what kinds of systems for action resolution you'd like to see in a game, or what power level you think is best, I'd love to hear. :-)
The Gordian knot I'm currently worrying is the question of power level and growth.
I take it as axiomatic that roleplaying can be enjoyed at any power level from sub-mundane to godlike. I've run successful games without any super-powers at all and I've run successful games where players could literally break the world in half by snapping their fingers. Either extreme lends itself to the acting part of roleplaying as opposed to the action part; in the former case because you can't really do much and in the latter because you can trivially do whatever you need to. Most roleplaying games live somewhere in the middle, where you can do significantly more than the average person but still have to work to accomplish things. It makes sense; you want to be cooler than you are in real life, but the existence of risk and danger adds a certain spice to the game.
Except that true risk doesn't really exist in roleplaying games. The heroes may suffer-- may have to make truly awful sacrifices or watch the things they love desecrated-- but they still accomplish their objectives 99 times out of 100. They get hurt, but they don't lose. Which is how you want it as a player, really. Sinking hundreds of hours into a character only to have them fail would be a huge and heartbreaking waste of time. Sometimes characters die, but this should only happen with the consent of the player (even if that consent is implicit: i.e. the player agrees to play in a game where it's clear up front that their character might die). In a properly run game, you lose what you're willing to lose and no more. Which makes the question of risk in some ways irrelevant.
Going back to the question of power level, then, it seems like the appropriate way to look at it is in terms of story scope: what kinds of things do you want your players to be able to do? Whatever actions your story requires, make sure your players can take them. If there are any kinds of abilities that would prevent your story from functioning, make sure your players can't have them. Simple.
Except that 99% of all roleplaying games include some concept of leveling up, which means that the characters' abilities are always changing. From a design standpoint I understand why this idea is so prevalent: it hedges against player boredom by changing what the characters can do over time, gives a continuous series of concrete goals for players to chase, and makes sure that players never stop feeling powerful because their characters are constantly becoming more awesome. But the tradeoff is that in a system with open-ended advancement players never feel good enough; they're always looking at the power or stat they don't have yet. This is especially bad in dice-based games, where even if you have the necessary attributes you can still fall on your face.
Personally I've always found this incredibly aggravating. I don't think I've ever played a game where the stats on my sheet matched my conception of what the character should be able to do, let alone their actual performance in-game. Per the discussion of risk above, my characters almost never ultimately failed at what they were trying to do-- but they didn't succeed the way I wanted them to either.
It's certainly possible to run a game with no advancement, where characters start out as competent and powerful as their players desire. It would definitely make the process of fitting ability to story easier, but I'm not sure what the implications would be for a long-term game. It seems like there would need to be a mechanism in place for players to create new characters or for existing characters to change their abilities; players' desires will change over the course of a long game, and the characters need to change with them. I suspect there would also be a relativity problem between characters: if Player A shoots lower in the power range than Player B, then Player A could feel inadequate when their characters do stuff together. And of course there's the fundamental problem that players expect to level and rely on advancement to keep them interested in the game. A game without it would need to involve the players without that crutch.
Really right now I'm just trying to feel out the corners of the pretending-within-a-system dynamic. For the purposes of my new game I'm still trying to figure out what I want players to be able to do and how I want them to do it. I know I want to have a very high level of flexibility in terms of character concepts and abilities, and I know I want resolution of actions to be simple and non-random. Everything else is still an open question. I suspect I'll end up having to invent a new system to do everything that I want (once I figure out what that is), although there are bits and pieces I can scavenge from other games.
So there we are. If any of you have any thoughts about how to make games work without advancement, or what kinds of systems for action resolution you'd like to see in a game, or what power level you think is best, I'd love to hear. :-)