A thought - Tabletop RPGs

[Hotfoot]

Okay, so we all know what your standard tabletop RPG consists of. Get a character, level him up (through levels or just skill levels), make him a badass, etc. Sure, fun bits of story intermix with all that, but in the end, that is the reward mechanic for doing well - you get better.

This of course causes a basic problem with many RPGs - some things become utterly beneath you. In D&D, a man weilding a sword means nothing unless he's within a few levels of your level or higher if you're above 4th level or so. However, starting off, you'd be afraid of just about any sword weilding maniac, 1d8 per swing will bring down almost anyone in a few rounds of combat! In Interlock/Fuzion, if you can go first and hit, you can really dominate. In Silhouette, High Defense, armor, and cover allows you to pull some truly amazing jujitsu.

Many systems limit what's possible with really tricked out characters in many ways, and don't misunderstand, in each of those systems, there are many ways to legitimately take down people who are otherwise badasses. However, I digress. What's the point? In D&D, it doesn't really matter how badass you get, the threat level is designed to constantly increase to match your new badassitude, until finally you're duking it out with dieties and demigods, or legions of what have you.

The point I'm try to make is...is it really necessary for there to be that sort of a reward dynamic? I know I've sat through numerous games where my character starts off at far below where I want him to be, far short of the concept I want to play, and as a result, the first several sessions feel painful as I try to get the character to the point of where I want him to be. Then, it feels like when I've gotten him to the point where I want him to be, the campaign is almost over.

So why start out like that? Why not start your character with the concept you want from the word go? Obviously, god characters would have to be discouraged, but once a "power level" is decided on by the players and the GM, just keep it there, along with the characters. Everyone plays the character they want to play, and they don't have to worry about keeping ahead of the game. Threat assessment is relatively easy, and, I think that such a system would focus more on roleplaying than making your character a badass in any particular field.

I mean, let's face it - interesting games are almost always a function of cool story and character interaction. Combat can spice things up, but in the end, just throwing lots of combat at players causes it to cease being about playing a role, and more about who is the best at tactics and stacking odds in your favor, the PCs or the GM.

Thoughts?

[Stark]

I think I know what you mean, although I express it differently. What's the point of levelling and getting the uberzor items, when the next mission will simply feature better enemies with better gear? Overall, there *is* no advancement, beyond the addition of capabilities (ie new spells, bend bars +5 etc). It's Diablo, but with stupid bits of paper and combat that takes hours.

This is why most RPGs disgust me. It's why games like Milleniums End and Call of Cthuhlu get my limited play time, because levelling and items are essentially worthless, meaning the game is about roleplaying, thinking, planning, mood and shit like that - not delayed blast fireball or my street index 4 Heavy Machine Gun.

[Dalton]

Well, my experience with RPGs is rather limited, but I think the dynamic we have with the Stargate RPG is pretty good - it's not all combat and shoot-em-up. It takes a lot of thought, planning, luck and foresight to successfully pull off a gigantic explosion visible from space.

[PeZook]

So why start out like that? Why not start your character with the concept you want from the word go? Obviously, god characters would have to be discouraged, but once a "power level" is decided on by the players and the GM, just keep it there, along with the characters. Everyone plays the character they want to play, and they don't have to worry about keeping ahead of the game. Threat assessment is relatively easy, and, I think that such a system would focus more on roleplaying than making your character a badass in any particular field.

There is no reason not to - which is why I only play like this
Me and my players have grown bored with the whole "start as a wimp" thing, and now whenever we play, they usually get a character that suits them best - within the power limit of the game, that is.

Even when they started out as peasants (yes, there is such a game with me as a GM currently in progress), they weren't wimpy stereotypical RPG peasants - they each had a certain set of skills and abilities which peasants could master while living their lives. A hunter, for example, isn't someone who simply "can use a bow". A hunter lives from the bow, and thus will be quite deadly with it. Same goes for all the others in the party.

Though I have to admit that game mechanics have very little to do with that particular game, as it's mostly just IRC stuff - but the same thing went on with my table-top Cyberpunk game. Both players got competent proffesionals at the start, the kind that best suited them. After all, if the threat level is going to increase anyways, then it may just as well start suited to stronger characters, if the players want them that way. Ultimately, it's all about having fun.

[brianeyci]

An opinion from someone who just recently tried D&D 3.5 IRL (before it was all internet). I don't think that systems are what limit the game but how the system is implemented. It's not "no reward and reward" there's obviously a balance and if there's no reward at all... well golly gosh gee, why should I play when my character isn't getting any better.

I don't believe RPG should be about acting. I talk in third person and my dwarvish accent sucks so forget it. I want my dice dammit, and people who don't like dice and think it ruins the game well go to hell and suck your own cock. I like the way the dice drops, the tension of the dice and the uncertainty. And LARP, I mean come on.

<edit>My first time went really good, the GM was really fun. We started at seventh level and I started with a pure fighter for simplicity's sake. We had a riddle, a hallway where we fooled around with for half an hour until we realized it was metal that was setting off the hot plates and we dragged our stuff behind us so we wouldn't be burned, and the three of us fought two ghasts naked and since I got improved grapple I won every single grapple check and someone pushed a ghast into our pile of metal stuff and he was fried . Call me a simpleton but I want my dice no dice no game see you later.</edit>

Brian

[CaptainChewbacca]

Well, my experience with RPGs is rather limited, but I think the dynamic we have with the Stargate RPG is pretty good - it's not all combat and shoot-em-up. It takes a lot of thought, planning, luck and foresight to successfully pull off a gigantic explosion visible from space.

I reserve the right to siggy this later.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

*snip*

This is more or less what I've done for in the last two games I've run. The SDN3 game's XP gain per session averaged about 15 instead of the previous game's 50, but with higher starting XP. However, three times the number of sessions means that the total amount of XP given was higher overall, so I kind of screwed it up in execution.

If you remember, of course, the SDN4 game featured no XP gain at all, and I didn't hear any complaints. Still, if it had ran longer than just 6 sessions, I probably would have doled out small amounts of XP. The feeling of progress and advancement keeps people more interested, even if the real hook is the story or playing their characters.

It's a balancing act, of course. The natural GM inclination to give too much XP can result in characters so overpowered that they break the system, but knowing how much to give comes with experience, just like anything else.

[Hotfoot]

Take in mind, I'm not saying there shouldn't be any reward at all, I'm just talking about reward that increases skills and physical attributes. There are plenty of other sorts of rewards a GM can hand out - better equipment, money, influence, contacts, and genre points/bennies/tokens to influence the story/NPCs/bad die rolls/what have you.

As for the Stargate game we've been doing every so often, don't get me wrong, I'm not going to change much in that other than what I need to fix for the conversion. The interesting thing is that since we've moved on to permanent characters rather than pre-gens, now I'm going to be handing out XP, which will lead to character improvement, something that didn't happen before. Not that I'm not going to allow that, don't get me wrong, I'm just musing about this possibility on the side.

Brian, dude, seriously, chill. I'm not suggesting a diceless system or LARPing. I'm talking about getting more involved with your character than "OMG he's a badass with a Hackmaster +12". By taking the focus away from building yourself into a badass, you can focus on getting into roleplay more often. Tabletop RPGs should be more than a Final Fantasy Tactics LAN party. I think that the worst thing that could hit a Tabletop game is to have the following exchange:

GM: You have a puzzle
Player 1: I roll my puzzle solving skill
GM: You succeed. You solve the puzzle. There's a Monster
Player 2: I kill it.
GM: You succeed. You have saved the princess.
Player 3: I seduce her.
GM: You succeed. She fucks you rotten on the dungeon floor. Make a save for crotch rot.
Player 3: I use a sheepskin condom +2 against skank.
GM: You all win. Great game, 8,000 XP for everyone.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

I agree completely with that sentiment, I just think that giving out a small amount of XP is better than giving out none.

[SCRawl]

(Just as a warning, my experience with RPGs, though vast, is mostly limited to AD&D 1e.)

Certainly, starting off with a certain power level can work. As you say, the (sometimes) mindless tedium and risk of certain death around every corner that go with a low-level party can be avoided, and you can start to play the character you want right away. In the best campaign I ever played, sometimes a player would leave or a character would die; instead of starting a new party member at first level, a substitute at slightly lower level than the rest of the party would be generated and played.

Then again, there is a certain attachment to a character which can only be gained by fighting it out at first level. That first extra hit die is a welcome relief, I remember, and when the new abilities start to roll in, slowly but surely, you can even have a certain amount of pride in having created such a character. I always found it the most rewarding to start in this manner.

[McC]

Alternately, you reward good roleplaying and not the fighting achievements. The incentive becomes the ability to roleplay a character exceedingly well, and not killing all the enemies.

This is what I tend to do in my games. I take the recommended XP awards (assuming they exist) for conquering various foes, cut 'em in half (or into quarters, if I feel inclined), and then use the sum of all of them as a rough benchmark for how much XP a player can earn from roleplaying well. I then award XP based on that. Tends to encourage good roleplaying.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

I used to do that, but then I got with a better group of people, and found that good players don't need to be encouraged to roleplay. Developing a 3 dimensional character and getting into it is its own reward. So now I just give a set amount of XP each real-life hour that the session lasted.

[weemadando]

I *hate* games that are just dungeon crawls or XP hunts. It fucks me off no end.

[Edi]

I used to play tabletop RPGs quite a bit. I absolutely hate the kind of shit that Hotfoot's above example embodies. I've also gotten completely fed up with level based games, which is why my vast AD&D collection is sitting in a box in a closet and staying there. What I like are systems where advancement is based on skill levels and with built in equalizers that make sure that you basically stay within a reasonable bracket of bad-assitude. This is one reason why I like DragonQuest and Star Frontiers (house rule modified up the wazoo, but still easily recognizable as Star Frontiers)

A well run and enjoyable campaign (in my subjective opinion) is one where the emphasis and focus is on the story and on the characters as people, not just some random collection of numbers on a sheet. In that kind of a situation how you make your character interact with the environment can count for far more than having e.g. high combat skills.

Hell, some of my fondest memories are from several D&D campaigns a female friend of mine (the one with the ridiculously lucky DQ character) ran. In those, your levels and combat abilities generally counted for shit in the large scheme of things, because the worlds she built were real, the characters in them acted like they were real, and doing the (in my experience) all too common "we're players, so our characters are special and get a free pass" routine got your characcter whacked in no time flat. You still had to use skills and whatnot and the dice could fuck you over, but how you went about your business counted for far more.

Edi

[weemadando]

A recent column of mine where I talk about the way I try and run a game - in order to avoid the "I roll diplomacy." effect.

[SirNitram]

Take in mind, I'm not saying there shouldn't be any reward at all, I'm just talking about reward that increases skills and physical attributes. There are plenty of other sorts of rewards a GM can hand out - better equipment, money, influence, contacts, and genre points/bennies/tokens to influence the story/NPCs/bad die rolls/what have you.

This is one of the important thing to realize as a DM: There are lots of rewards. Even with groups who like one type(XP, influence, equipment, cold, hard cash, or just a fireball the size of the New York Metro area), it can help to add variety.

I strongly suspect there's no one 'right' answer here. It will depend on the group, the game, and the setting. A character who plays, say, a Forgotten Realms game and loves getting levels, may play Paranoia just for whacky moments, and may then go on to play Shadowrun for piles of cash and influence.

[Hotfoot]

Granted, having good players makes it much easier to have a good game, there's no question there, but I think that introducing new players should be relatively painless. I've found that even giving players large amounts of cash has resulted in relatively low abuse, as the GM is ultimately in charge of what the players have access to (and enough dinners at fancy places with hundred+ dollar tips), lots of cash ceases to become a huge advantage. A simple sense of real life economics tends to help things, and while you don't want it to bog down the game, simply having players aware of such things helps a lot.

Another thing is, well, players aren't there characters, and sometimes people will play characters that possess skills that they do not. While having someone give a nice speech to try and convince someone that he's right, someone with two ranks in diplomacy shouldn't automatically be better than someone with twelve because the player is better, any more than someone with two ranks in small arms be better in combat than someone with twelve because he knows what combat is really like. There is an essential disconnect between characters and players - and in my experience, keeping a certain level of seperation is necessary. If someone's a crack investigator, penalizing him for not specifically stating he is putting on crime scene gloves before putting his hands all over evidence is just petty and stupid if he made his roll for investigating the place.

What I tend to do for static or noncombat challenges is I consider how likely it would be for the characters to succeed, and set the difficulty accordingly, giving them bonuses for doing certain things, like taking their time, finding a weak point, so on and so forth.

Nitram's right though, there isn't a perfect solution that will work perfectly for everyone. It's really about what suits you and your gaming group buddies best for the game. I got the idea of a static character system in a round table I was in for indie RPG developers during a convention. Nothing serious, just decided to toy around with it and see what people thought.

[Symmetry]

Hello all. Haven't been around for a while, but the otehr webforum I frequent now is down due to a hacker so I got bored and decided to return to the old haunt for a bit.

For anyone thinking about these issues, I'd really recomend you go over to The Forge and look at some of the articles, particularly System Does Matter which lays out most of the issues the people over there have been talking about for the last decade or so.

To summerize, though, if the reason you play RPGs is to explore a fantastic other world (simulationism in Forge speak), or to take part in creating a good story (narativism) then reward mechanics might not be an important part of the system and maybe ought to be dropped.

On the other hand if you play to compete with and/or show off to the other people around the table (gamism), then the reward system can serve an important role in enabling that. If the poeple around the table are there for that reason, then no reward mechanic might mean that they get locked into painful zero-sum games rather than the positive sum games that rewards represent, and so if thats the play dynamic they do make an important contribution. Also, they mean that the best tactics for the characters change giving gamist players more opportunities to be clever.

[SirNitram]

Nitram's right though, there isn't a perfect solution that will work perfectly for everyone. It's really about what suits you and your gaming group buddies best for the game. I got the idea of a static character system in a round table I was in for indie RPG developers during a convention. Nothing serious, just decided to toy around with it and see what people thought.

I can think of some settings where it'd be perfect. Say, a Dirty Dozen/Saving Private Ryan war game. None of those guys levelled up or drastically, noticably improved their skills.

I would consider something like, say, 'hero points', for such, though, when a player clearly needs rewarding for effort. Basically, a widget to turn near misses into hits, or vice versa. Very handy when your a bog standard guy who just got machinegunned.

[dworkin]

Okay, so we all know what your standard tabletop RPG consists of. Get a character, level him up (through levels or just skill levels), make him a badass, etc. Sure, fun bits of story intermix with all that, but in the end, that is the reward mechanic for doing well - you get better.

Then I would suggest a PnP that doesn't emphasise leveling up. Old school Traveller comes directly to mind. Amber Diceless is another.
GURPS and Colon:The Adjective games are technically supposed to involve starting with a fully realised character with only glacial development though you wouldn't guess that from the reality of how they are played. Runequest and Dragonquest are nice fantasy games where a 'man with a sword' is never out of your league.

All that said I like high fantasy, high reward games. Why? They're fun.
There is a certain fun in being the mover and shaker one night a week.

And it's fun things like terrorising a fertility cult, negotiating with drow slavers, riddle games, getting out of a demon pact and telling the Evil Overlord to die that are remembered. Magic loot and leveling is much of a muchness. If I want that I've got CRPGs.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Yes, but neither the concept of high fantasy nor any of the things you mentioned are facilitated by a system of starting from humble beginnings with large XP rewards after each session, so it's a bit of a red herring.

[DPDarkPrimus]

Is not the journey itself a reward?

[SirNitram]

Is not the journey itself a reward?

You, sir, have never driven through Iowa.

[Uraniun235]

I know I've sat through numerous games where my character starts off at far below where I want him to be, far short of the concept I want to play, and as a result, the first several sessions feel painful as I try to get the character to the point of where I want him to be. Then, it feels like when I've gotten him to the point where I want him to be, the campaign is almost over.

So why start out like that? Why not start your character with the concept you want from the word go? Obviously, god characters would have to be discouraged, but once a "power level" is decided on by the players and the GM, just keep it there, along with the characters. Everyone plays the character they want to play, and they don't have to worry about keeping ahead of the game. Threat assessment is relatively easy, and, I think that such a system would focus more on roleplaying than making your character a badass in any particular field.

Have you never tried starting a game at a higher level?

Personally, for me, half the fun is the bullshitting that goes on before, during, and after the game.

[Hotfoot]

Have you never tried starting a game at a higher level?

Of course I have, but that's not the point - starting at a higher level only mitigates the issue at hand. Why bother having levels in the game that serve only as frustration? Shouldn't the game be fun to play from the first moment you pick it up? Additionally, it does nothing to change the reward dynamic created by the system.

Personally, for me, half the fun is the bullshitting that goes on before, during, and after the game.

Well, yeah.