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Equalizing Character Progression
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@farfalla said in Equalizing Character Progression:
@Faraday If so, what is the point of xp at all, if nothing changes? Either the xp is irrelevant, or someone joining 2 years later is never going to catch up. I don’t even care about stats much, everyone on Arx could have better stats than me and I wouldn’t care. But psychologically I know I could if I wanted to, I’m not somehow “behind”.
You can somewhat mitigate this issue by tuning your progression curve to higher rates of diminishing returns.
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But the rewards I want for gming are like… the game using things I made. People love contributing and feeling their contribution is useful. I wrote 107 arx characters so I may be spiders georg in this conversation but I want my character’s mechanics to be based on their progression. Luck points / inspiration as a reward for ooc work I vastly prefer because it’s not concrete, it’s momentary. An instance of my character getting a boost because I earned a moment instead of concrete, weighted mechanical growth.
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@farfalla said in Equalizing Character Progression:
@Faraday If so, what is the point of xp at all, if nothing changes? Either the xp is irrelevant, or someone joining 2 years later is never going to catch up. I don’t even care about stats much, everyone on Arx could have better stats than me and I wouldn’t care. But psychologically I know I could if I wanted to, I’m not somehow “behind”.
I think there are two schools of thought on it.
One is giving people something to work toward is a good thing. It essentially turns oldbies into the game’s elite, since they’ve simply had more time to accumulate XP, but it also means people have reasons to keep playing.
The other option is what you said. You aren’t in an arms race; you can be (nearly?) as good as anyone else is, and your character is as valued as you can play them as. The PC will never be a shitty combatant simply because they were created long after others did, regardless of their background or IC age. On the other hand some people don’t like the fact I can roll a character right out of the gate just as skilled with a blade/musical instrument/fireballs as theirs is after all their IC achievements and adventures.
Both mindsets, IMHO, are just as valid. It’s a matter of preference.
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@farfalla I WOULD
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@Arkandel said in Equalizing Character Progression:
Both mindsets, IMHO, are just as valid. It’s a matter of preference.
Yeah. It’s all about what kind of game you want.
To take an even more extreme example, a system that doesn’t use XP at all: Castle Marrach. The progression in that game was achieved through participating in scenes where your character was actually learning the thing in question from a teacher with a higher level in it. You want to learn to swordfight? You had to go to a class. You and the teacher would both do a command and you had to at least be in the room for 30 minutes. At the end the system would roll dice to randomly determine how much progress you made toward the next level of the skill. You got a vague textual prompt about how much you thought you learned, if it wasn’t a full skillup. The amount of progress needed for next level had severe diminishing returns.
For some, this was awesome. I loved it at the time because it seemed so immersive. But it also meant that progression in the game was explicitly tied to both how much time you could invest in playing and your ability to get a teacher. That game is still running but it is almost exclusively populated with people who have been playing for 10-20 years.
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@Arkandel said in Equalizing Character Progression:
On the other hand some people don’t like the fact I can roll a character right out of the gate just as skilled with a blade/musical instrument/fireballs as theirs is after all their IC achievements and adventures.
Both mindsets, IMHO, are just as valid. It’s a matter of preference.
Hm. I guess to me, the latter is like people who paid off their student loans being against loan forgiveness, so I’m …not that interested in their opinion.
I do like having something to work for! I like to make number go up as much as the next person. But why bother working for something you can never achieve?
as previously stated, good day.
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@farfalla Sheets change, but because of skill caps, learning cooldown, and steady rate of XP gain, the “best” use of XP (after boosting 1-2 attributes) is filling areas of weakness or adding BG skills that provide more depth to your character. Characters can usually come in 1-2 points below the max in all of their key skills, as @Faraday said, and then top off if they want to, and otherwise fill in the corners of their character sheet to make the character more unique.
Formerly known as Seraphim73 (he/him)
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@Roadspike I’m not trying to be an asshole, I just genuinely think that essentially means xp doesn’t matter.
as previously stated, good day.
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@farfalla said in Equalizing Character Progression:
essentially means xp doesn’t matter.
This is not incorrect. In a well-balanced system, XP is essentially no different than points you get in CG.
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@KarmaBum but then why have it?
as previously stated, good day.
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@farfalla said in Equalizing Character Progression:
If so, what is the point of xp at all, if nothing changes?
Chargen represents all the accumulated knowledge your character has acquired over their 20-40 year lifespan. Logically, a person isn’t going to change much from that baseline in the handful of years that your typical game covers. XP is for the little things that reflect your character’s development. Small progressions in skills due to practice, picking up new things at low levels that you get into ICly.
It’s not the typical carrot-on-stick advancement that many RPGs offer. I’ve had plenty of fun on MMOs where you start at lvl 1 and have a continual progression to lvl 60 or whatever. But that’s a completely different model of why XP exists and what it’s trying to represent, and that’s not what FS3 is about.
If you’re motivated by XP and advancement you’re not going to have fun on a stock FS3 game. Full stop. But you also won’t be appreciably behind other “dino” players.
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@Faraday But you will be, because you can never ever have as much xp as the dinos. If xp matters, you will always be behind. If xp doesn’t matter, why have it.
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@farfalla idk i played pern for 20 years and never spent a single xp but
I think some people like to feel like they’re progressing.
I open all my stupid treasure boxes on Overwatch, and there’s nothing in them but skins and sprays.
I spend my XP on background skills like Piano & Religion, the FS3 equivalent of skins and sprays.
It’s just fluff that some people enjoy spending. Other people completely ignore it.
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@farfalla said in Equalizing Character Progression:
Hm. I guess to me, the latter is like people who paid off their student loans being against loan forgiveness, so I’m …not that interested in their opinion.
You might not like it but it has its advantages. I could mention a few real quick:
- It’s less likely that some newbie character is created just to PK other PCs. Those PCs would kick the noob’s ass.
- It makes more intristic ‘sense’ that the established hero with a bunch of adventures under their belt is more capable than the snotty-nosed nobody who walked into camp this week.
- It provides a sense of achievement, something to work toward, rather than just logging on and have power served without doing the ‘work’.
- It keeps people playing. Don’t underestimate that one. You value what you worked to get, and activity is the lifeblood of any game. Not all MU* are Arx with logins in the hundreds to self-sustain.
Again, there’s no reason for you to agree with folks who think differently. But I think there’s value in understanding where they come from, and being able to see things from their perspective.
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@KarmaBum lol, I think the Pern background informs a whole lot of my xp opinions in that I don’t think it matters that much. But if you tell me there’s a thing to get, but I can never have as much of the thing as that guy over there, it’s gonna bum me out even if it’s upvotes or pens or xp.
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@Arkandel None of that conflicts with my opinion that it should always be possible to have/get the same amount of xp.
What I disagree with is “I was here longer so I am better than you forever.”
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@Arkandel said in Equalizing Character Progression:
Again, there’s no reason for you to agree with folks who think differently. But I think there’s value in understanding where they come from, and being able to see things from their perspective.
And also that not all games are trying to achieve the same thing. Mechanical semantics matter. I’m gonna beat the ludonarrative attributes drum all day.
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To be clear, this discussion started because I said “I won’t play on an established FS3 game” not that “FS3 is bad and wrong.”
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There’s several schools of thought when it comes to character progression.
For some there is the abstract, character personality and relationship growth which does not necessarily require a change on a sheet at all.
For others there is the ‘gaming’ aspect of it, the sheet is quantified by a variety of characteristics, and progression comes from adding to the sheet.
Many times this requires the earning of nebulous ‘experience points’ or ‘character points’ in order to equate to some sort of systemic method of balance, which in itself is something attempted by the system.
So really, in order to ‘equalize’ character progression, first one must define ‘character progression’ so that everyone is talking about and discussing the same thing.
As it stands there are so many systems, crunchy, hard, soft, abstract, that it’s about finding the system that works best for you as an individual as a place to start.
Take, for example, the systemic differences between ShadowRun 4th edition and 5th edition. They are /incredibly/ similar in most aspects, except where the limits are defined. In 4th edition you could at chargen create a character who literally could not get /better/ at their chosen role. In 5th edition that wasn’t possible.
Both allowed for different kinds of character progression, but one was more abstract and one was more systemic.
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@farfalla I don’t think you’re trying to be an asshole. I don’t think you’re saying that FS3 is bad. I’m just trying to explain FS3’s design choice and how the system as a whole works, in case your negative experience came from someone doing something nonstandard, and it’s that game’s choices you didn’t enjoy, rather than the system’s choices.
But FS3 is never (without a lot of tweaking) going to represent the Hero’s Journey well. It’s not built to show a callow farm boy becoming an ace pilot and space wizard. What it is built to do is take characters with a broad range of abilities and throw them into PvE environments and allow them to improve their skills slightly over the course of their story. Just like trying to make FS3 do Star Wars or D&D, if someone tries to make FS3 do the Hero’s Journey, the results are going to be wonky and not representative of the system itself.
Formerly known as Seraphim73 (he/him)
