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Equalizing Character Progression
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This topic is always a classic. It’s one I’ve been thinking of again lately particularly in the world of CofD.
The best solution is, I think, probably the per-week limit that Roz suggested. Alternately, you could do something scaling such as Arx has done, where returns drastically diminish and you make the first few hits of <whatever> XP-gaining mechanism more powerful, which is probably what I would prefer to weekly caps, but does require a bit more work.
I really, really, really wish this was something more game runners looked at, though.
she/they
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@Roz GoB had a bit under 250 PCs at its largest. I don’t think many games are larger. Not all of the GoB PCs actually made the spreadsheet, you did have to be a ‘regular’. Admittedly I sucked and the whole game was pretty under-served GM-wise, but the spreadsheet wasn’t the issue and was not terribly difficult.
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@Tez Does the per week limit mean that if you started later you can just literally never ‘catch up’ though? Or if you have a week where you were unable to reach the limit, suddenly you’re forever behind whatever amount?
Does it even matter? Probably not, but people do care about these kinds of things I think.
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@Livia That’s a fair point.
One of the things that bugs me about the way some games handle Ares / FS3 is having low XP holding limits. That is, you can only have a max of, say, 2 XP total, and you gain one XP per week. So if you don’t regularly spend it, you WILL be behind forever. And I think that’s terrible!
I do tend to prefer something where, rather than having those kind of limits, xp per source scales sharply – that is, your first beat per week is worth more than your tenth – and so do costs. The more XP you have, the more things cost. I think that lets people catch up and stay on a more even playing field.
ETA: Shout out to all the people going ‘why the hell is Tez upvoting my year-old post’. Blame @catzilla for making me reread this thread and go YEAH GOOD POINT.
she/they
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@Tez said in Equalizing Character Progression:
And I think that’s terrible!
The reason that limit is there, though, is to keep someone from storing up a crapton of XP and then suddenly learning 75 things overnight. You can spend your XP incrementally so that you don’t need to stash them to save up for some big thing.
The built-in limits, IIRC, only require that you log in once a month to spend your XP. I don’t think that’s unreasonable at all.
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@Faraday said in Equalizing Character Progression:
@Tez said in Equalizing Character Progression:
And I think that’s terrible!
The reason that limit is there, though, is to keep someone from storing up a crapton of XP and then suddenly learning 75 things overnight.
I actually don’t personally think this is a problem, tbh.
I don’t actually think the limits are unreasonable or anything, and games can and do customize all of that to fit their vibe, which is great! But I actually just don’t care at all if people bank a bunch of XP and then buy a bunch of stuff; it’s just a representation of time for me, so in my head, they were just working on it in the background.
I do know folk who have lost a lot of XP to XP hold limit just because it can be easy to forget. (ETA: And to be clear, I mean folk who are active and RPing regularly. It’s just that sometimes someone might also have ADHD, or their brain doesn’t keep that sort of reminder easily, so they forget to spend.) It’s just another thing in the innumerable number of things to weigh in systems, though.
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@Roz said in Equalizing Character Progression:
I don’t actually think the limits are unreasonable or anything, and games can and do customize all of that to fit their vibe, which is great! But I actually just don’t care at all if people bank a bunch of XP and then buy a bunch of stuff; it’s just a representation of time for me, so in my head, they were just working on it in the background.
I’ve seen lots of actual cases where people just whip xp spends out of thin air at a critical junction, like: “Oh, what, I didn’t mention that I’ve been studying Nuclear Physics this whole time? Well I have! So now I’m level 5 and I can totally disarm this bomb.”
I mean, hey, if that doesn’t bother you and you’re running a FS3 game, set the XP hoard limit to 999 and it won’t be an issue. But it bugs me, so that’s why the limit exists.
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@Faraday I definitely understand where you are coming from. It makes sense from a simulationist perspective, but I’m thinking about poor @sao and her going 3 months forgetting that XP even exists on multiple games. It’s one of the reasons I do bump the limit up on my FS3 games. I appreciate that it is so easy to do that.
she/they
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@Tez It’s not really a simulationist thing (I dislike simulationist systems in general) but just for game balance. I don’t really think it’s fair for plot runners who go to the trouble of balancing encounters or designing adventures for skillsets to have SURPRISE! skills come out of nowhere.
FS3 (when used within the design guidelines) lets you start awesome out of the CG gate. Missing out on a few weeks (or even months) of XP really isn’t going to make or break a character. (Plus you’d still have a bank of 4 saved up whenever you do remember.) There are plenty of FS3 players who never spend XP, ever, and still have kick-butt chars.
That said, there’s no One Perfect XP System to Rule Them All. Only tradeoffs. Every system and every game runner has to decide those tradeoffs for themselves.
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I don’t have an issue with people buying a lot of things at once, though I can agree with not really wanting people to do it in the middle of a scene.
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@Tez I forget to spend XP for long periods, too. Games where there’s a longish time-gap between the spend and the stat appearing on your sheet and a limit to how many things a PC can be learning at once, I’ll often end up at a point where I have XP I can never possibly spend.
I am not sure this is enough of a problem to do anything about besides streamline some spends for me when I notice it happened, if I should ask. Having the XP just expire seems kinda harsh, though.
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@Tez said in Equalizing Character Progression:
I do tend to prefer something where, rather than having those kind of limits, xp per source scales sharply – that is, your first beat per week is worth more than your tenth – and so do costs. The more XP you have, the more things cost. I think that lets people catch up and stay on a more even playing field.
Sometimes I wonder instead of a limit on earning you put a limit on spending per <suitable time period.>
It does run into that idea of having XP you can never really spend if you just keep accruing it, but maybe there can be other things it could be applied to in some way, idk.
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I’m absolutely terrible at min-maxing and being strategic about XP/leveling, so FS3 has been almost ideal for me on the two games I’ve played with it.
On Savage Skies I did screw up a little by having a character start super underpowered, with almost no truly high stats. IIRC an admin even double-checked if that was really what I wanted to do, and I said my dude was inexperienced IC and I looked forward to leveling him up over time. That was true, but I didn’t realize just how long the cooldowns on XP spends were, and just how long it would take to raise a stat from middling to high. I spent a lot of XP on that game and maybe barely brought him up to where he could have been straight out of chargen.
(Could I have reached out to an admin for help? Sure, if I were a different person that did things like asking people for help instead of stubbornly living with the consequences of my own dumb decisions.)
I chargenned day one on the Network, so in theory I would be in dinosaur territory there, but I love that the caps on stats and skills mean that my dude really isn’t crazily more powerful than anyone else. He just has a zillion points thrown over time into background skills, so he has a bunch of niche talents that make perfect sense as having been acquired over time in-game.
On every oldschool stat-heavy MUD game I’ve ever played, I ended up with completely hopeless builds and spent my XP all wrong and was always nerfed for everything compared to anyone who actually understood how to take advantage of the systems. That was less fun.
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@Livia said in Equalizing Character Progression:
Sometimes I wonder instead of a limit on earning you put a limit on spending per <suitable time period.>
I like the ‘downtime points’ idea, which limited how much off-camera stuff you could do, so you couldn’t spend sixty hours a week spying on Abelard, and forty hours a week at work and ten growing sacred herbs and fifty-four building a space ship.
If stuff that takes a lot of study or isn’t practiced in the course of other stuff the PC is doing cost downtime points it might work out well. But as somebody who keeps forgetting to spend their XP, it sounds too complicated.
'You ride the mechanical bull, you do not fight it.'
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@Clarion said in Equalizing Character Progression:
I chargenned day one on the Network, so in theory I would be in dinosaur territory there, but I love that the caps on stats and skills mean that my dude really isn’t crazily more powerful than anyone else. He just has a zillion points thrown over time into background skills, so he has a bunch of niche talents that make perfect sense as having been acquired over time in-game.
Action skill and Attribute XP caps are something I think FS3 does really well, however they’re applied. There is a certain disincentive when you hit a point where there’s nothing else to buy, but it’s worth it to be able to curb the dinos a bit.
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@Tez said in Equalizing Character Progression:
ETA: Shout out to all the people going ‘why the hell is Tez upvoting my year-old post’. Blame @catzilla for making me reread this thread and go YEAH GOOD POINT.
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@Gashlycrumb said in Equalizing Character Progression:
@Livia said in Equalizing Character Progression:
Sometimes I wonder instead of a limit on earning you put a limit on spending per <suitable time period.>
I like the ‘downtime points’ idea, which limited how much off-camera stuff you could do, so you couldn’t spend sixty hours a week spying on Abelard, and forty hours a week at work and ten growing sacred herbs and fifty-four building a space ship.
If stuff that takes a lot of study or isn’t practiced in the course of other stuff the PC is doing cost downtime points it might work out well. But as somebody who keeps forgetting to spend their XP, it sounds too complicated.
Yeah, it is starting to sound too complicated and too much like paperwork. I tend to prefer systems that just let players spend xp, I feel like most people know what works for their character and what doesn’t. Some like to race for big numbers but you know, it can work fine too.
I really dislike it when they get too much like paperwork, I have a lot of issues with the CofD Aspiration system on this front.
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@Livia as a Fiver, still apologizes for that one time she turned in like 10 aspirations at once
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@catzilla Ahahaha. It’s not the staff side of it, +job paperwork comes with the territory.
It’s the coming up with aspirations for my characters that often really stumps me and just feels like busy work for the sake of a beat. Especially when their intention is just ‘little one scene things like ‘eat a hamburger’’ that people suggest and you go okay I did that and it’s done and now I need to come up with ANOTHER one and – ack.
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@Livia There are times that I think asps can actually be really good to sort of put a mark on your RP calendar like ‘I wanna do this’. Eating a hamburger is not one of them and it can feel like a chore you have to do to keep up.
Kill the short term asp beats in favor of weekly RP instead!! Incentivize long term asp beats through PRPs!!
she/they
