Equalizing Character Progression

[shit-piss-love]

@Pyrephox said in Equalizing Character Progression:

Also recognize that no matter what answers you decide on, someone’s gonna hate them. That’s better than having no answers at all.

Absolutely. The last time I approached this design challenge (when I made this thread) I was motivated by considering how badly I hate watching people become generalist jack of all trades types. I am of the opinion that this actively harms your game, for lots of reasons but primarily that it feeds directly into dinosaurs hogging the power and spotlight.

If you simply model your mechanics after the WoD/CoD style, where it is cheaper to buy the lower levels of skills, you’re gonna end up in that situation. An option to avoid this, for instance, would be to calculate skill cost not by absolute value but relative value to the original. That is to say, a character with a 1 in Melee and a character with a 3 in melee spend the same amount of xp to add a dot. That would preserve original build specialization.

Again, none of this is “this is the absolute way to do this”. Just an example of how mechanics affect gameplay.

[Tez]

@shit-piss-love said in Equalizing Character Progression:

If you simply model your mechanics after the WoD/CoD style, where it is cheaper to buy the lower levels of skills, you’re gonna end up in that situation.

Just a quick pop in to say that this is not true of CoD 2.0 or whatever the right version and naming scheme is. It’s now a flat cost per dot.

[Warma Sheen]

My biggest issue with character progression is that the only way most characters progress on a game is through xp and stats.

XP and stats should not be the only way a character progresses. There should be other achievables like rank or resources or territory or a combination of all of them that allows a character to progress without simply racking up xp and spending it.

If people had more objectives to achieve besides MOAR XP, then a game wouldn’t need to give out so much xp per week to keep people interested and uber stats become much less of a problem.

But handing out scads of xp is the easy, traditional solution. It takes very little monitoring and is often completely automated. So that’s what most games do.

Not saying that is bad or wrong, just that it really puts the burden of character progression on xp if that’s all the game has.