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Experience-less Gaming


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So since AD&D came out the pattern was set: characters gain experience, and through that gain power.  That's how every game I know of is structured, although as games advanced they became more sophisticated, so starting with Dragon*Quest you bough specific abilities with experience instead of levels.

 

But what would a game be like without experience at all, where the focus is not to gain power and abilities, but rather to adventure and face stories, go through scenarios and play not toward a goal but just to play?  How would you keep player interest, and how would you deal with gaining skills or abilities over time (because it makes sense people will train new things on occasion even in a more or less static story?

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But what would a game be like without experience at all, where the focus is not to gain power and abilities, but rather to adventure and face stories, go through scenarios and play not toward a goal but just to play?

I predict it would go one of two ways:

 

1. About the same way life in the real world would go if you didn't improve your skills/abilities over time -- which is to say, the way of stagnation and boredom.

OR

​2. About the way things go today, with new skills/abilities gained as a result of improvement/learning over time.

 

 

Direction #1 is the natural outcome of adventuring/storytelling without experience to represent improvement over the course of time.  Obviously, most GM's would wish to avoid it.  Thus, in lieu of awarding experience ... which is a tool that lets players control the advancements of their own characters (and, thus, have a hand in their future destinies) ... what you suggest in pursuit of Direction #2 is the removal of that particular player input ... in favour of a completely GM-controlled progression in order to achieve Direction #2. (i.e. Instead of experience the player spends, you'd hand out new abilities or skills or the like, as you, the GM, see fit.)

 

That sounds nice on the surface, but I think most players would see it as Stalinistic and overly controlling ... and opt for other campaigns with more traditional improvement systems ... since most players like to have a hand in how their characters progress.  There would, however, be a small niche of players that enjoys working with the 'surprises' of new skills/abilities they didn't select, themselves ... as long as the new skills/abilities were congruent with the storyline (i.e. made sense).  A campaign involving solely that type of player ... is the only one in which experience-less gaming has a chance of success.

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Traveller (the original version) had no experience system, really. There were rules for self-improvement through dedicated study, but they took years. There was no experience reward for adventuring.

 

For those who wanted their character abilities to grow and improve, that was mostly achieved through equipment acquisitions, acquiring powerful friends, contacts, and allies, becoming powerful through politics or within an organization, etc.

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Without Experience gain, character's cannot develop new skills and abilities. If you any institute a system by which characters can develope new skills and abilitites, then they are gaining Experience (even if in that case all of their XP is earmarked by the GM). For example, in early editions of D&D all of your XP was effectively "earmarked by the system" (unless you were human and had the option to Duel Class), because as you gained XP your abilities improved in ways predetermined by the game engine (early JRPGs are famous examples of this sort of leveling system).

From a game-design perspective, the presence or absence of an experience system is entirely irrelevant. Experience, Levels, and so forth are almost entirely illusory forms of character development. All of us have played enough computer RPGs to know that as you gain levels the game forces you to encounter stronger enemies (effectively negating most of the benefits of leveling up in the first place). Whether or not you use Experience or Levels is a matter of table preference; many of us enjoy the illusion of progress, even if we recognize it as such.

 

How players react to the lack of an Experience/Leveling System also depends heavily on other elements of the campaign:

 

In a Heroic Campaign, players may become very mercenary. Equipment has a CP value, and therefore by proxy Money has a CP Value. As such the acquisition of wealth will become that campaign's "leveling system". Players will take anything that isn't nailed down, and if they can pry up the nails they'll take that stuff too. Because of this fact, Wealth By Level is literally an element of game balance in games like Pathfinder.

Players who go down this road may become bored once they've collected all of the "Cool Items" you've made available, or collected enough Money to purchase everything they want that is available on the market. After which they'll start blowing money on less adventurous pursuits or just plain wacky shit. For example, they might build a stronghold (a classic D&D style retirement goal), or blow money trying to research new spells and technologies (usually in a vain attempt to force the GM to allow them to gain CP by spending Money).

Players may also become mercenary in the social sense, and work on acquiring forms of power which are not necessarily (but can be) represented in CP. For example, contacts, followers, rank in organizations all have CP values, but don't necessarily cost CP in Heroic Campaigns.

 

In a Superheroic Campaign, players don't generally have the option to become mercenary. Equipment has a CP value, but because it cannot be acquired with Money they have no legal means to acquire it (and therefore no reason to try). Instead players may choose to treat the game like a Wargame (which also typically lack leveling systems and feature iconic characters).

Players who go down this road will be encouraged to optimize their characters as much as possible because CPs are a fixed resource like those used to build armies in table top wargames. They'll treat encounters as tactical challenges, and try to overcome them as efficiently as possible. For example "okay, how to a build a character that can take out Dr. Destroyer on 300 CP). Character Mortality will become irrelevant to them, because if a character dies they'll simply come back next session with another character built on the same number of points as the last one.

 

In either type of Campaign, there will be a subset of players who will be encouraged by the lack of an experience system to focus on the narrative storytelling element of RPGs. However, there is a chance these player's enjoyment of the game will likely be sabotaged by the behavior of other players who "go mercenary" or play "HERO the Wargame".

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It seems like a system based more on story and character behavior, solving problems and accomplishing goals could be a step.  Each session the players identify a goal to achieve, and move toward or accomplish it each session or adventure.

 

For those who wanted their character abilities to grow and improve, that was mostly achieved through equipment acquisitions, acquiring powerful friends, contacts, and allies, becoming powerful through politics or within an organization, etc.

 

This seems like a good idea to consider as well.  Technically that's power advancement and in Hero some points (contacts, favors, etc) but its a different approach from: "here's points, go buy stuff."

 

Character Mortality will become irrelevant to them, because if a character dies they'll simply come back next session with another character built on the same number of points as the last one.

 

Wait, you guys compound the frustration of having a character die with having their replacement come back without experience spent?  

 

"Sorry your 3-year character was eaten because of my die roll, Bob.  You start over at half the points as everyone else.  Have fun."

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Wait, you guys compound the frustration of having a character die with having their replacement come back without experience spent?  

 

"Sorry your 3-year character was eaten because of my die roll, Bob.  You start over at half the points as everyone else.  Have fun."

I a general rule, no I don't. But...

 

The rules as written support that being a logical (if unfair) conclusion. Experience is supposed to awarded to characters individually, not to the player, or to the group as a whole (although it is commonly house-ruled otherwise for reasons of fairness). The rules stipulate "starting points" for characters, but nowhere have I seen it officially suggested that a character created mid campaign be awarded anything other than the starting points for the campaign. Furthermore when a follower dies, even if you are refunded the points you spent to acquire them, any experience they've gained since then is simply lost. So yeah, rules as written: If you miss a bunch of scenarios, you'll have less Experience than other Characters in the campaign. If you make a new character mid-way through a campaign (for whatever reason), they don't have any Experience yet.

 

Therefore the fact that I award XP to the group and let sequential characters inherit XP is a house rule.

However, in some campaigns I can see the advantage of running things more or less as written. For example, Fantasy Hero Campaigns where Resurrection is available (to encourage the players to actually resurrect fallen allies instead of just looting the corpse and picking up "Joe the Fighter IV" at the next tavern they visit), or Meat Grinder campaigns where nobody survives long enough to double their point total, and therefore it isn't unbalancing if one or two members of the party are slightly more powerful than others. If I were to do so, I might take a leaf out of 3rd edition D&D and award bonus experience to catch characters up to those who have a significant lead.

 

Regardless, it is a matter of perspective. When you award Experience and players spend it, they become more invested in that individual character and the illusion of its development. They become excited about how it will develop next and become attached to the story that character has woven. Even if they are logically aware that the GM is effectively awarding that Experience to every future character they play in that campaign, and that all of their "character development" is an illusion.

Meanwhile, if you come into the campaign knowing you are already as powerful as you are ever going to be, and that nothing they do will really change that, it is harder to be tricked into becoming invested in that character's "development". You have to be invested in some other aspect of the game instead or you'll quickly become bored; aspects such as tactics, optimization, or compelling storytelling.

 

Personally, I'm not a compelling storyteller (I'm not an experienced enough GM to have gained that skill). So I don't know how to invest my players in their characters without giving them a carrot now and again. Something I consider preferable to playing "Fantasy Hero, The Table Top Wargaming Edition". Although Hero would make a pretty decent platform for a table top wargame with some strip mining of Game Elements to speed up play.

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Theron Bretz wrote a very interesting and useful article for Digital Hero #3 on eliminating Experience Points, and in fact Character Point totals and limits, for a super-HERO campaign; called "Pointless Champions." ;)  This website used to host a sizeable free sample from that article, the archive of which you can read here.

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Wait, you guys compound the frustration of having a character die with having their replacement come back without experience spent?  

 

"Sorry your 3-year character was eaten because of my die roll, Bob.  You start over at half the points as everyone else.  Have fun."

Characters should only be dying if it is dramatically appropriate ... in which case it could be the perfect beginning to the equivalent of a 'radiation accident' that results in the character coming back ... perhaps even stronger.  (A good example would be Halle Berry's character dying and coming back as Catwoman in that awful movie.)  Besides, the use of HAP in 6e pretty much precludes a die roll from killing a character, right?

 

​Now if the character's good and dead ... because THAT is what was dramatically appropriate ... with no returning (because that, too, is dramatically appropriate), then yes, if the player starts anew, s/he starts without any experience.  At least in the games in which I play.  And you know what, I like it that way -- because it means actions have consequences (up to and including character death) ... where character death has a real significance to the players.  I've observed that players tend to have their characters be more cautious when their characters can actually die ... without somehow coming back (unless dramatically appropriate) ... especially when such character death means starting without the experience the character had.

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But what would a game be like without experience at all, where the focus is not to gain power and abilities, but rather to adventure and face stories, go through scenarios and play not toward a goal but just to play?  How would you keep player interest, and how would you deal with gaining skills or abilities over time (because it makes sense people will train new things on occasion even in a more or less static story?

 

The closest to a "no XP" game I have seen is one where XP is not earned during the course of the campaign/adventure.  But instead is awarded to all the PC's at intervals.  D&D 5th has the option to do away with XP and simply advance all the PC's a level at a predetermined point.   

 

For Hero you could eliminate awarding XP for sessions and simply give all the PC's a predetermined amount of CP's after so many sessions.   I've toyed with this idea, but never tried it.  One of the issues with traditional XP awards in an RPG is they give great rewards to players that actively drive the game while the less aggressive players soon lag behind.   While a GM can take steps, it does not eliminate the relentless problem of power skew, where the active and aggressive PC's soon overshadow the meek players characters. 

 

A block CP grant at regular story driven intervals would allow the PC's to evolve, but together as a team instead of individually based on personality and real world moxie. 

 

Just a thought.

Edited by Spence
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Well, in the context of

But what would a game be like without experience at all,

My answer to

 

how would you deal with gaining skills or abilities over time

would have to be, obviously I don't. Or if I do, then I do in fact have some kind of experience system.

 

So I'm not sure I'm clear on what you're talking about when you say "without experience at all."

 

Traveler has been mentioned and it's the only role playing game I can think of offhand with no means of character advancement through experience at all.

But there ARE examples of games without experience POINTS.

The original Runequest - and as far as I know it's descendents such as Basic Role Playing etc follow in some form of this - had what I considered when I first encountered it to be an ideal experience system.

The system is percentile and skill based. If in the course of an adventure you succeed with a skill, put a check mark by it. Then in between adventures, you have a chance to improve the skill that's based on subtracting the current skill from one hundred (in other words, your chance to FAIL at the skill is equal to your chance to improve it.) So the poorer you are at a skill, the more likely you are to get better if you manage to succeed once, but the better you are at it, the harder it is to get even better because you already know it so well. It's slightly more complex than that, but that's it in a nutshell. It's also possible of course to spend time and money on training in a skill, assuming you can find a teacher (if you're already at ninety percent in Stealth, good look finding someone stealthier than you are to teach you anything.)

 

Lucius Alexander

 

The palindromedary says there was always a minimum chance to improve, meaning you COULD get over a hundred in a skill, which had a number of advantages.....

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Yeah that Digital Hero article is hitting the same points I've considered over past years.

 

Experienced Champions players know the drill:  you start small, usually with a character that isn't quite what you had in mind, improve him gradually until he gets there, buy off a couple of Disadvantages you didn't really want in the first place (but needed in order to balance the character), and maybe invest in a Base or a Vehicle or two.
 
Then what? The character is how you wanted him in the first place. Experience Points become meaningless to someone who has no further need for improvement.
...
Since the campaign's first session, we've gained in abilities, acquired a headquarters (complete with a demi-goddess housekeeper), engaged in PC/NPC romances, gained allies and enemies, won the hearts and minds of the people of Fair City, and confiscated a flying galleon from a villain who didn't need it anymore.

 

 

In a fantasy campaign, you can get rewards in other forms: a weapon, a spell, a contact, a keep, land, a favor, etc.  Characters don't need to advance in terms of points beyond a certain level, they have what their character needs.

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XP less games in D20 or other level based games work because the PCs are getting advancement. They just get their XP rewards when the GM thinks they need to advance a level. D&D/D20 is the only system that I have seen that has that different system. None of the point based systems work that way mostly because PCs can buy so many things with their points and Advancement isn't set and linear. You could set up such a system, but it would take a lot of work to come up with an alternate advancement system. IMHO too much work for too little gain. The D&D/D20 system without XP actually reduces GM and PLayer work. People don't have to keep track of XP or figure the XP out for every encounter.

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This seems like a good idea to consider as well.  Technically that's power advancement and in Hero some points (contacts, favors, etc) but its a different approach from: "here's points, go buy stuff."

 

Since it's all based on what the character does within the game, it's all organic. And since Traveller characters enter adventuring after having a career, and are usually middle-aged, it makes sense that they're not rapidly developing new skills. 

 

The original Runequest - and as far as I know it's descendents such as Basic Role Playing etc follow in some form of this - had what I considered when I first encountered it to be an ideal experience system.

The system is percentile and skill based. If in the course of an adventure you succeed with a skill, put a check mark by it. Then in between adventures, you have a chance to improve the skill that's based on subtracting the current skill from one hundred (in other words, your chance to FAIL at the skill is equal to your chance to improve it.) So the poorer you are at a skill, the more likely you are to get better if you manage to succeed once, but the better you are at it, the harder it is to get even better because you already know it so well. It's slightly more complex than that, but that's it in a nutshell. It's also possible of course to spend time and money on training in a skill, assuming you can find a teacher (if you're already at ninety percent in Stealth, good look finding someone stealthier than you are to teach you anything.)

 

That experience system sure does work great. I remember when I first encountered it, it was like a bolt of lightning. Although it was a completely different way of looking at character growth, it made total sense. It painlessly enforces in-game justification for all increases in skill while making the progression natural as the character goes from neophyte to master.

 

(As opposed to when I first encountered the Traveller "experience system," when my reaction was more along the lines of Jack Sparrow when confronted with a lack of rum.)

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We've done a Champions campaign where we didn't really get XP.  It was a concept game, no point limit.  The players and the GM built the characters together.  Since the characters started off "complete", there wasn't any need for XP.  Batman doesn't really get any better as the years go by, he has maxed out his abilities.  He just keeps being Batman.

 

The game worked wonderfully.  We weren't constantly trying to squeeze in an extra combat level, or more dice.  Nobody worried about being left behind in an arms race.  Nobody had a weird disadvantage that they needed just to make points fit.  We gained new abilities as the game progressed, but it was due to in game events.  You get a contact with so-and-so because you saved them.  You get a base because you defeated some villains and took theirs.  It felt very comic-bookey.  And we kept playing the game because we wanted to play those characters, to be superheroes.

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And I think that kind of thing can work in fantasy as well: you get assets and such, you might pick up a knowledge skill or something, but for the most part, you're done; this is your character.  The whole reason I brought this up is that I noticed in every game after a while, players didn't seem to care much about the xps they were getting. Several just let them pile up until they thought of something.  And if as a GM you don't turn it into an arms race where you keep requiring your players to build more powerful characters just to survive, I don't think they feel as much of the need.

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Since it's all based on what the character does within the game, it's all organic. And since Traveller characters enter adventuring after having a career, and are usually middle-aged, it makes sense that they're not rapidly developing new skills. 

 

What about the guy that blew their first re-enlistment roll and now have to make a living with Cutlass-1? :)

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Traveller had the perspective of a movie.  Your character is your character in a movie and doesn't really grow during the movie.  Character growth rules was added later because people wanted it.

 

Marvel Super Heroes (original) had the idea of a karma pool.  Basically a pool of XP based on the team.  I like this idea.  Give XP based on team play and let them sort them out who get how much however they want.

 

There was a game system which had people do checks(I can't remember the name).  Every time you use or critically use a skill, you got a check.  At the end of the session, you had to fail a skill check.  A GM friend of mine tried it for a hero level HERO game, it was interesting.  Anytime you made your skill roll by half or on a 3, you got a check.  You needed to fail your check and an 18 always failed.  He limited it to only the first advancement per session I think (been a while).  The problems in my eyes were, people tended to ultimately end up around the same skill value in everything and players would do random excuses to use their skills in order to get a check and once the check happened, they wouldn't care any more.

 

I had the idea for Fantasy Hero to just generically say any adventure's treasure would be worth X XP rather than a set amount of gold.  For example, the treasure of the goblins is worth 6 XP while the dragon's treasure is worth 18 XP.  PCs would buy their characters like a superhero, making all weapons with points.  It evened out power levels better but I am not good at Fantasy Hero, for some reason, especially where you have to make every little thing.  Characters who wanted to be wealthy from the hoard the found would just buy wealth.

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Traveller had the perspective of a movie.  Your character is your character in a movie and doesn't really grow during the movie.  Character growth rules was added later because people wanted it.

 

It did have the perspective of classic SF. So, even that character with just Cutlass-1 that IndianaJoe3 mentioned would have the ability to use any weapon without penalty, because all PCs are assumed to be competent adventurers with "an innate weapon expertise," as the rules put it. And to just have Cutlass-1, the character must have been a Marine for one term, rolled characteristic bonuses for both of his skill rolls for his initial term, and then rolled another characteristic bonus (or chose to roll on the money table) when mustering out. So the character probably has pretty good characteristics and/or some money at this point. And of course whatever standard campaign skills* are being assigned to all characters. He can then use the Experience system to do some self-improvement and immediately add one skill point to, say, two different skills if he so chooses (and if he made his dedication roll). And he can continue adding skills throughout his life by continuing a personal development program. It won't be quick, but he will be able to grow in skill and/or characteristics if desired. He can also go on a quest for a Psionics Institute and see if psionics is an ability he possesses. And of course all the usual campaign growth in personality, equipment, contacts, etc. So, not a hopeless or static character. 

 

* By the book, there are several skills which aren't needed in order to perform the task adequately in normal conditions. For example, Vacc Suit skill isn't necessary for wearing a vacc suit; it just provides a +4 DM per level when dangerous maneuvers are undertaken. Another example is Air/Raft skill: the rules say most people have a familiarity with operations, which allows them to operate an air/raft in standard conditions. Again, skill provides a DM when things get risky, such as in a storm or when being chased. Similarly, anyone can act as Steward on a starship, but having the skill can be helpful at times and can net the character a higher salary when hiring on as a Steward. And so on. Traveller isn't a skill-based RPG in the way that a lot of us think about the term. It's more of a saving-throw based RPG like early D&D, with only certain actions actually requiring skill levels in order to have any hope of success.

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Actually, for the game I'm designing, I was a bit influenced by the idea of Traveller development for skills, if not the execution.

 

Basically, if you can spend X amount of time working on a specific skill, you can buy X points in that skill, provided you have some source of knowledge, otherwise expenditures are worth half.

 

Additionally, in game occurences of something that could be related to a skill would count on a one per encounter basis for buying that skill, free of the limitation that you need a teacher(in essence, experience is that teacher).

 

For example, say it's fantasy, and your character fights with a sword and shield. You have an enemy you've run into three times who fights with spear and shield. You pretty much automatically can take three points in "Reading an Opponent- Spear and Shield".

 

This way, there is really no stockpiling, skill development is either a logical result of what has occured, which the player may argue for, but in which there is a means for measuring that is clear(hey, I have fought against people with spears exactly seven times, I should get seven points), as opposed to GM's discretion, plus the ability to get free points for a measurable amount of time training(let's say two weeks of consistent practice being worth a point).

 

Of course, this is just skills, but in the game, powers are not bought except at the start. Not going to get into how that works, but it's not an experience set up, but often related to a skill and built almost like building a gadget.

 

However, I'm not sure how well this would carryover to Hero. The system I'm designing is kind of built around the idea that any expertise spiders out into so many branches that it would be really difficult to become overpowering, because your ability to fight against a particulary weapon, for example, is partially tied to your knowledge of that weapon, not just the skill in the weapon you're using. So it's prohibitively expensive to, at the start, try to buy knowledge of all weapons. The way this plays out is that it should be more difficult to munchkin, because there is absolutely no way not to have vulnerabilities and many of them. We'll see how that goes in playtesting.

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I kind of like the FATE concept of milestones. You get to a certain point in the story arc, you get to rearrange your stats a bit. Get to a more important point, you get to add to them and get additional Refresh which can be used to buy additional Stunts (powers or maybe talents for Hero) or get more FATE points at refresh points. That always seemed to me a pretty intuitive system for advancement, without the need to micromanage XP. I also like the trade-off between competence (Stunts) and luck (FATE points). You can be competent or rely on luck to carry you through. 

 

Hero isn't really built that way though. One of the foundational concepts is that characters will improve over the course of the game and that XP buys those improvements. You can change that, but it requires some level of work to balance out. Or you can just have stagnated characters, but I would get bored really quickly if my character had no way to advance.  

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Hero isn't really built that way though. One of the foundational concepts is that characters will improve over the course of the game and that XP buys those improvements. You can change that, but it requires some level of work to balance out. Or you can just have stagnated characters, but I would get bored really quickly if my character had no way to advance.

I find Hero is very much an "incremental character enhancement" system.

 

However, overly rapid growth can leave the characters quickly unrecognizable - let me get some milage out of my 5th level abilities before adding on the 6th level ones (in a d20 model).

 

While I can sometimes have my eye on the next enhancement, my usual goal is a character who is fun to play, regardless of whether advancement is rapid, glacially slow or anywhere in between. Most comic book characters and many fantasy characters manage just fine with no or very occasional power increases. And heaven help the GM who tries to incorporate the frequent source material concept of depowering!

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