Equalizing Character Progression

[Roadspike]

@Roz Pretty early. I think I was the… second… Gabriel Bisland? For about a month? I didn’t mention it to be a knock on Arx, I figured they’d probably figure out a solution (I got a little bit of catch-up XP on Gabriel when I started I think, although he was a starting character sheet-wise). I just mentioned it as a supporting fact for the idea that roster characters falling behind on a big XP game can be a shock. Especially if the roster characters have a big reputation ICly.

[Roz]

@Roadspike said in Equalizing Character Progression:

@Roz Pretty early. I think I was the… second… Gabriel Bisland? For about a month? I didn’t mention it to be a knock on Arx, I figured they’d probably figure out a solution (I got a little bit of catch-up XP on Gabriel when I started I think, although he was a starting character sheet-wise). I just mentioned it as a supporting fact for the idea that roster characters falling behind on a big XP game can be a shock. Especially if the roster characters have a big reputation ICly.

Yeah, I remember you being a really early Gabriel! But I didn’t actually read your post as being a knock, nor was mine meant to be a defense. I was just agreeing how it totally IS an issue and sharing some of the stuff they’ve explored to help mitigate it in the time since you were there.

[Jennkryst]

A thing I played around with when I staffed on Shadowrun Denver like… a decade ago (which everyone hated for different reasons which proves it is the best idea) was skill retention times!

Denver, being 3rd edition, has training times for raises… but also has time management for damn near everything. Time is a resource. And Denver (at the time) was super into being mega simulationist. More than Shadowrun 3e is by default.

So what do I mean retention times? Well, since raising skills was linked to spending time to raise it… maintaining skills at a certain level should also take time. Olympic athletes spend damn near all of their time rising to - and staying at - that level. If you don’t, say… allocate time to go to the gym or the gun range, maybe you don’t maintain that Athletics or Firearms skill?

Of course, if you do spend all your time I’m the gym or the gun range, maybe you don’t have time to keep your sweet tuba-playing or marching band/dancing skillz that got you a silver medal in world class competition.

… not that I’m bitter or anything.

I mean, look. We all took basic high school math, right? Do you remember any of it? Probably not a lot. Because it’s been years since you were actively doing it every day. Or if you were bad at math, replace it with the thing you were good at, but has fallen to the wayside because some capitalist jerk told you it wasn’t going to make you any money so why bother.

I forgot exactly where I was going with this, here have some Christmas in July: https://youtu.be/Zsxkj1gu-6o

[Pyrephox]

In the FS3 games I’ve played, both flat XP progression and XP caps on everything but background skills work out fine. People don’t obsess as much about ‘catching up’ or XP farming, and most characters seem perfectly competent.

Mind you - there’s not a lot to spend XP //on// in most of the FS3 games I’ve played, so there’s not a whole bunch of FOMO. No one’s really flashing cool powers and abilities that you can’t…quite…afford, and they’ve tended to be very easy going and unlikely to push character death, so there’s not a lot of fear of ‘I must be X mechanically competent or I won’t survive combat’.

[Faraday]

@Jennkryst said in Equalizing Character Progression:

So what do I mean retention times? Well, since raising skills was linked to spending time to raise it… maintaining skills at a certain level should also take time.

FS3 has the same basic concept baked in, but in a less-simulationist way that doesn’t require you to actively manage it. It just assumes that you’re going to maintain your skills at the current levels, and that’s why there’s a cap on how many high skills you can have. Nobody has the time to be a world class boxer AND musician AND physicist all at the same time.

[glitch]

@mietze One of the big problems with The Reach’s catchup mechanism came about from early projections of a 2-3 year life for the game and the max possible XP gain per week supposedly a known quantity

I was overly tickled with myself at the time, but when 6-month catchup became even 30xp per week, it became silly. Let alone what it would become years later. It was definitely a learning experience though.

I am a big fan of @Roz’ approach. It gives people XP to play with each week and things to look at to spend, but when a new person comes in, they don’t, for example, start at gnosis 1 and hit gnosis 5 in 6 months. It also allows them to build a mostly comparable character if they’d like to, with XP to use how they want if they want to bank some. A complete character from CG at an XP pool equivalent to the rest of the game makes for better IC continuity than every newb being a zero-to-hero in a few months.

A set XP per week with an understood common pool also allows game runners to manage their game progression since the only thing they have to account for is a roughly equivalent power level that they can slow down or speed up as necessary.

[Polk]

I think this is a complicated subject, that doesn’t have one correct answer.

The smaller a game, the more you can run it like a pure, classic tabletop, where you really want the party roughly equalized. In scenarios like that Roz’s time-based idea is a good one.

The larger a game, the more you’re going to have inherent disparities, and the more you have to find a way to DEAL with that. Not all PCs can be at the same point in their arcs in a big enough game.

One clever way I’ve seen that handled this is a hard retirement cap, but resolved with an epic sendoff. You’re not just booted from the grid, you get to be the star of a grand finale and exit with style. Your story gets a conclusion. That prevents “dinos.”

But it cuts off stories arbitrarily and ends characters people might really be attached to.

Another idea the concept of diminishing returns. So you still get XP as time goes on, so you still have motivation to get out and get XP, and you can still buy stuff. But over time you won’t end up with 3000 XP dinos, so effectively people can catch up.

[Roz]

@Faraday said in Equalizing Character Progression:

In practice, progression after chargen is so slow that there isn’t much difference between a brand new char and one who’s been playing for a few years anyway (assuming equivalent chargen spends).

@Pyrephox said in Equalizing Character Progression:

Mind you - there’s not a lot to spend XP //on// in most of the FS3 games I’ve played, so there’s not a whole bunch of FOMO. No one’s really flashing cool powers and abilities that you can’t…quite…afford, and they’ve tended to be very easy going and unlikely to push character death, so there’s not a lot of fear of ‘I must be X mechanically competent or I won’t survive combat’.

Yeah, I’ll admit that in a number of FS3 games I’ve played, it may not have been a huge difference. Some games expand what XP can be spent on, though, like Spirit Lake, where XP was used to purchase spells. And while I know they did eventually start giving some free spells to new characters, and it didn’t necessarily make a PC any less able to participate in plot to not have the same breadth of spells – it can feel less fun to just not have as many fun options to play with purely because you started a game later. This isn’t intended to be a knock on Spirit Lake, who I know put thought and effort into the best way to solve or alleviate that issue, but they’re just – an example that tends to stick in my mind. XP, in that scenario, really does become a currency for your character getting to feel cool and fun in that regards. Of course, this is a super custom usage of FS3 XP!

@Polk said in Equalizing Character Progression:

The larger a game, the more you’re going to have inherent disparities, and the more you have to find a way to DEAL with that. Not all PCs can be at the same point in their arcs in a big enough game.

Why tho?

That may sound kind of flippant, but I actually mean it kind of seriously. I feel like there’s this lingering sentiment in a lot of corners of “well, you have to OOCly earn your right to be super cool/as powerful as others who have been on the game longer,” and that’s kind of at the heart of the approach I don’t like. I think that, if anything, XP should be locked more to IC age (in addition to IC time). (And, if you want to dig deeper into IC age, then you can also start to cap or degrade certain stats or skills at certain ages so you can’t just be super old but still an Olympic-level athlete.)

Arx is a real big game, and although it doesn’t have time-based XP, and it hasn’t sought to make XP totally equal across all PCs, it did calculate a baseline average of PC sheets in order to give those falling below average catchup XP, and it helped alleviate some (some!!) of the frustration people had in that arena. In that regard, it didn’t really matter where PCs were in their on-cam stories; they were all adults who had similar amounts of IC time to cultivate their skills.

That said, I do understand that a big genre people are going to be talking from the perspective of here is WoD, of which my experience is EXTREMELY limited.

[Pavel]

I think a key part, in my view, of equalising character progression but still allowing meaningful progression is having some nature of character age limit, XP limit, or other encourager to prompt people to retire characters.

The main comparison when it comes to progression is between fresh new characters and years-old dinosaurs. So. Eradicate the dinosaurs. Either, have an XP cap (or skill cap, as in FS3), or have a retirement age “characters can last six months, that’s it.”

[Third Eye]

I think there’s an inherant tension between opening up progression tracks that feel satisfying and putting the PCs on as equal footing as possible and, while I generally agree with the idea of catch-up XP, I think it’s more complicated than that and I’m not sure how to resolve it. I think if everyone is getting roughly equivalent XP you shift the stuff that requires time/grinding to other things, and thereby shift the dino problem. Maybe to arenas where it’s less visible particularly to newbs, but it’s still present. On some games I’ve been on, IC items/gear have become a big thing, or alternative XP sinks, or customizable stuff, and so on. I don’t think this is bad, I think progression is an intangible but important OOC motivator and I do get bored when I ‘top out.’ I just don’t think this question should begin or end with XP.

Like one thing I’m trying to think about right now for a maybe-new thing is alternative progression sinks when PCs are starting on more equal footing and have similar roles, but inspiration hasn’t struck yet.

[sao]

My PCs on fs3 games consistently get behind others because my adhd interferes with my ability to deal. On SL, my inability to stay on top of this so that Dominica was consistently behind others who started around the same time contributed directly to my drifting on a character I loved. There were definitely other factors but it was right up there as one more thing for my broken ass brain to fail at. Why is this dedicated and competent woman not succeeding at what she’s setting her mind to? Idk, her player sucks. There’s no IC justification, it’s a 100% OOC problem. Feels bad, man.

[Roz]

@Third-Eye said in Equalizing Character Progression:

I think there’s an inherant tension between opening up progression tracks that feel satisfying and putting the PCs on as equal footing as possible and, while I generally agree with the idea of catch-up XP, I think it’s more complicated than that and I’m not sure how to resolve it. I think if everyone is getting roughly equivalent XP you shift the stuff that requires time/grinding to other things, and thereby shift the dino problem. Maybe to arenas where it’s less visible particularly to newbs, but it’s still present.

Tbh there is one big, HUGE advantage dinos ALWAYS have, and that is just – the history. They have the months or years of investment into the game, building relationships, building connections, etc. Like, you’ll never actually lose out on that particular advantage just because people can mechanically catch up to you.

[Third Eye]

@Roz
Yeah, I mean, that’s a thing you can never really equalize (OOC relationships and institutional knowledge) and idk that it’s worth stressing about trying. But I’d like to get at ‘OK, you have catch-up XP or sizeable XP bonuses for newbies, then what?’ And what are the long-term spooled consequences of that/what more complicated issues do the other sinks you create cause. Because I do love the build-tinkering aspect of a character and I think it’s not unimportant, I just dunno if there’re better ways to tease it out.

[Pyrephox]

@Pavel said in Equalizing Character Progression:

I think a key part, in my view, of equalising character progression but still allowing meaningful progression is having some nature of character age limit, XP limit, or other encourager to prompt people to retire characters.

The main comparison when it comes to progression is between fresh new characters and years-old dinosaurs. So. Eradicate the dinosaurs. Either, have an XP cap (or skill cap, as in FS3), or have a retirement age “characters can last six months, that’s it.”

I really wish more games would have XP caps. Not just for issues of equalizing progression, but also because…

In many games, XP and character power also make a qualitative difference in the challenges a PC is going to face. But most MU*s do not have the staff (and staff don’t have the experience and/or interest) to change the quality of challenges thrown at high power PCs. Which means that a lot of “higher end” challenges just end up either being things that the higher end PCs can cakewalk through, or end up being so quantitatively overpowered that it gets kind of ridiculous.

I tend to think a game should define what power level it wants to run plots at, and bound the XP to within that power level. If your staff is really enthused at running street level stories, then no starting XP, and an XP cap to ensure that people don’t exceed that - if you want “progression” beyond that, find ways to make it non-numerical, like consumable resources.

[shit-piss-love]

Everything I’m about to say has the caveat of “This effect may be desirable for your game, games are different and can have different goals”. I actually raised this thread because I’m working on a design project and some degree of character progress equalization is an attribute I’m looking to achieve. Don’t @ me because this doesn’t solve every problem.

One big wrinkle with the “every Character earns XP at the same rate” and especially “every Character has the same sum total XP” structure is that games tend to have a finite number of progression options. There are only so many Attributes, Skills, Spells, etc and, variable by where the ceiling is, there’s going to be inflection points where Characters start to all become Jacks-of-all-trades with homogenous success. This is incidentally the prime reason that I don’t play Arx and I imagine it’s a big problem in WoD/CoD games as well. For the kind of game I’m trying to design right now, I want to encourage deep specialization and especially cut a line between combat/noncombat Characters.

I’ve tinkered with a lot of solutions to this and the one I think is most interesting alongside an Equal Progression structure of some time, is a hefty amount of options for purchasing expendable benefits and assets that are subject to loss. Favors with NPCs or Factions. Assets like a Bar that gives you some influence but can also be burned down, etc. The idea that something you spent XP on can be lost is sacrilege in some philosophies but for what I’m trying to achieve, I think it has the interesting effect of these temporary or risked benefits being attractive to the sorts of Characters that “dinos” tend to be; deeply enmeshed in the story of a game, standing atop organizations that seek to project power, conducting higher stakes conflict against other actors.

(edit: first paragraph sounds defense because it is. i was having this same thread of conversation elsewhere and got dogpiled with unhelpful “it doesn’t solve every problem” responses and it ruined my morning coffee)

[GF]

@Roz said in Equalizing Character Progression:

@Faraday said in Equalizing Character Progression:

In practice, progression after chargen is so slow that there isn’t much difference between a brand new char and one who’s been playing for a few years anyway (assuming equivalent chargen spends).

@Pyrephox said in Equalizing Character Progression:

Mind you - there’s not a lot to spend XP //on// in most of the FS3 games I’ve played, so there’s not a whole bunch of FOMO. No one’s really flashing cool powers and abilities that you can’t…quite…afford, and they’ve tended to be very easy going and unlikely to push character death, so there’s not a lot of fear of ‘I must be X mechanically competent or I won’t survive combat’.

Yeah, I’ll admit that in a number of FS3 games I’ve played, it may not have been a huge difference. Some games expand what XP can be spent on, though, like Spirit Lake, where XP was used to purchase spells. And while I know they did eventually start giving some free spells to new characters, and it didn’t necessarily make a PC any less able to participate in plot to not have the same breadth of spells – it can feel less fun to just not have as many fun options to play with purely because you started a game later. This isn’t intended to be a knock on Spirit Lake, who I know put thought and effort into the best way to solve or alleviate that issue, but they’re just – an example that tends to stick in my mind. XP, in that scenario, really does become a currency for your character getting to feel cool and fun in that regards. Of course, this is a super custom usage of FS3 XP!

@Polk said in Equalizing Character Progression:

The larger a game, the more you’re going to have inherent disparities, and the more you have to find a way to DEAL with that. Not all PCs can be at the same point in their arcs in a big enough game.

Why tho?

That may sound kind of flippant, but I actually mean it kind of seriously.

There’s probably a less offensive comparison I could make if my brain was working, but I get the feeling the sentiment is cousin to the fear of welfare queens. “If we don’t make people work for XP, then no one will roleplay at all, they’ll just stay in their rooms TSing and getting superpowers.”

[Roz]

@GF said in Equalizing Character Progression:

@Polk said in Equalizing Character Progression:

The larger a game, the more you’re going to have inherent disparities, and the more you have to find a way to DEAL with that. Not all PCs can be at the same point in their arcs in a big enough game.

Why tho?

That may sound kind of flippant, but I actually mean it kind of seriously.

There’s probably a less offensive comparison I could make if my brain was working, but I get the feeling the sentiment is cousin to the fear of welfare queens. “If we don’t make people work for XP, then no one will roleplay at all, they’ll just stay in their rooms TSing and getting superpowers.”

When Arx did institute the catchup XP that I mentioned before, there were absolutely people who publicly expressed unhappiness with the idea that others could have free XP that they had had to work for. It made me sigh a lot to see. (I do think it was a minority opinion; I heard a lot more in favor/approving of the change then and also now, years later.)

[Polk]

@Roz Why do you need to handle disparities?

Because a lot of character concepts get dull if you jump straight to page 200 of the story.

Sure, 3 months into a game, having people jump ahead a little bit isn’t a big deal.

But once a game is a year old, 2 years old? You’re skipping a lot of opportunity for character development.

[Faraday]

@Pavel said in Equalizing Character Progression:

The main comparison when it comes to progression is between fresh new characters and years-old dinosaurs. So. Eradicate the dinosaurs.

Or remove the tension in the first place. The philosophy of FS3 is that if you want to play a badass, you can start out as a badass.

I got so sick of games where I wanted to play a mature, skilled character but had to start off as some underpowered low-level newb and then scrape and scramble for XP. It was infuriating.

I’m not saying that’s the only way to do XP, or the best way. Ultimately it’s going to come down to the kind of game you want to run, and your motivations for having XP in the first place. But it is a way to avoid some of these issues. Progression isn’t everything.

[shit-piss-love]

@Polk said in Equalizing Character Progression:

@Roz Why do you need to handle disparities?

Because a lot of character concepts get dull if you jump straight to page 200 of the story.

Sure, 3 months into a game, having people jump ahead a little bit isn’t a big deal.

But once a game is a year old, 2 years old? You’re skipping a lot of opportunity for character development.

I would say the main problem that comes from power disparities is that you can easily find yourself stymied in participation if you’re not throwing for example the huge dice pools that 75% of the game might be. Games tend to congeal, and it can be very hard to break past the “we’d love to bring you but you suck buddy”.