Equalizing Character Progression

[Nessa]

For the game that I’ve sort of white boarded but haven’t been able to code into existence, the XP progression has multiple components that eventually should bring people close enough together so as to not have massive disparities.

1. I am going to use a game system that already has a diminishing returns function (In this case, I want to use CP:Red, but it could just as easily be any other classless system with cost to buy up being more than previous levels, and so any SR past 3rd edition when karma pool goes away, no D&D or D&D like systems).

2. The more you participate in play, the more xp you earn per week, with a minimum (small) but no real maximum (but see point 3 for why that’s not a big concern).

3. Anything beyond the minimum xp is multiplied by a 1/current xp. So, if you have 100 xp and you put in Y amount of activity. You’d accrue the minimum + Y/100 xp till you hit 101, then it’s Y/101, and so on. The goal with this is that characters who join new, still feel new, but can accrue early xp pretty quickly so they don’t feel NEW forever. And could get within a close range of the majority of players within a reasonable amount of time. The amount earned, and minimum xp can be adjusted should they not work out correctly or needing to slow/speed up progression based upon ‘feel’. (This is what I need help with coding).

4. The last thing I would point out is that gear purchases and monetary progression will all be handled by various systems to remove staffer delay for most everything. (I need help here, but I think I can manage most of it based upon prior limited coding experience and the ability to manage with staff until complete).

[catzilla]

I’ve been mulling over this for a bit.

How do/would you guys handle something like Beats on a game where you want XP to be even among both new and old PCs? For those unfamiliar with CofD rules, Beats are handed to players after their characters do certain things (completing a goal, nearly getting killed, etc) and a handful of Beats equals 1XP. To me, it’s a pretty integral part of the mechanics (so getting rid of it isn’t an option), but obviously leans towards more active players. How do you still reward players for getting Beats without letting them run too far ahead of players that may be less active or unable to churn Beats as quickly as others?

[Roz]

@catzilla Maybe just a max beats per week cap?

[Gashlycrumb]

@catzilla said in Equalizing Character Progression:

obviously leans towards more active players

It doesn’t, really, though. It leans towards the players you’re lookin’ at.

It’ll probably tend to be a bit like xp-spend systems where you’re required to use the stat in an important context, ie, a staff-run plot event, to raise the stat. You can easily end up sitting on a huge pile of unspendable XP if you’re never provided opportunities to do the thing in the important context.

What you need to do is equalize your plot-distribution, and make a spreadsheet so you know which PCs are getting good chances to earn these beats and which are playing regularly but have done naught but karaoke and a tiff with their landlord. And then watch that shit most hawkishly.

[Gashlycrumb]

Another thing. Decide how much ‘less active’ you want to accommodate.

Yeah, somebody is gonna give you shit about it. How dare you exclude people just because they are not there.

But I’ve had the player experience of having my actions postponed so that staff can attend to somebody who shows up for a few hours once a week at a random time. Because I’m around frequently and predictably, I’d get put off and my scheduled shit would be cancelled for the irregular and infrequent players, who consequently were able to accomplish a shitload more than my PC could. It’s absolutely appropriate and a good idea to slow the game’s roll so that there’s a level of activity that’s enough to get a player the full-experience deal, at least in relation to GMing. But just decide what it is, don’t let it be a contest of who can log on the most or who can most effectively get sympathy for being too busy to play unless you drop everything when they show up.

[Roz]

@Gashlycrumb said in Equalizing Character Progression:

What you need to do is equalize your plot-distribution, and make a spreadsheet so you know which PCs are getting good chances to earn these beats and which are playing regularly but have done naught but karaoke and a tiff with their landlord. And then watch that shit most hawkishly.

While I love spreadsheets a whole bunch, this sort of thing is probably doable on a very small game, but it’s not gonna scale well.

[Tez]

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.

[Gashlycrumb]

@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.

[Livia]

@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.

[Tez]

@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.

[Faraday]

@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.

[Roz]

@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.

[Faraday]

@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.

[Tez]

@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.

[Faraday]

@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.

[Livia]

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.

[Gashlycrumb]

@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.

[Livia]

@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.

[Clarion]

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.

[Gashlycrumb]

@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.