Experience-less Gaming

[massey]

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!

 

"Depowering" as seen in the source material would probably be best represented by one campaign ending, and a new campaign beginning.  You'll have those guys who still want to play the same character, and the GM is like "fine, but you start with the same number of points as everyone else."

[Christopher R Taylor]

Well that's a thread in its self: things that happen in source material you can't do in a campaign (or at least, have to be very careful with).  Like "everyone is knocked out and defeated, waking up tied up."

 

I've done the de-powering thing before, for a one-off.  Everyone was about 100 points less powerful after a trick by Dr Destroyer and had to make their way out of Detroit, which is even worse in my campaign world than the real one (VIPER basically runs the town).  It set up a spinoff campaign of street level Dark Champions types.

[bigdamnhero]

The only experience-less games I've done were of such short duration that it wouldn't have come up anyway. The idea of characters getting better at fighting [or whatever] the more they do it in difficult situations against increasingly tougher opponents is so baked into most genre material that I think it would be difficult to extract it from the game. I do try to enforce that XP expenditures need to be tied to something going on in-game wherever possible. In fact, when I hand out batches of XP, I'll even make suggestions like: "You could buy up your KS: the Fey based on the time you spent with them" and such. My players are also usually pretty good about that sort of thing: "I'm going to have the priest teach me to read so I can buy Literacy at the next drop" and so on.

 

I also try to draw a distinction between character development and character advancement. The latter is XP-driven; the former is roleplaying & story-driven. The two don't have to be mutually exclusive of course, but don't confuse the two. And some players are naturally better/more interested in one and may need more encouragement in the other.

[Hugh Neilson]

The idea of characters getting better at fighting [or whatever] the more they do it in difficult situations against increasingly tougher opponents is so baked into most genre material that I think it would be difficult to extract it from the game.

You mean like how Spider-Man no longer finds threats like the Green Goblin, the Vulture or the Kingpin credible after going toe to toe with more powerful foes over the course of his own 50+ year career? I find in Supers source material, especially, the heroes don't find their recurring foes any less powerful, relative to themselves, over time.

[bigdamnhero]

That's because the villains also get more powerful/more skilled. Spidey is actually a perfect example of what I'm talking about, particularly in his early comics where almost every other issue was about him pushing himself to level up in order to face a greater threat. He starts out as strictly street level beating up muggers and bank robbers, and over time is fighting world-beaters alongside the Avengers.

 

Another classic example is Buffy: Season 1 an individual vampire is a serious fight for her, but by the time she's out of high school she can wade through crowds of them. (Until an exceptional vamp shows up of course.)

 

Of course both those examples are of young heroes just starting out in their careers.

[Hugh Neilson]

Spidey also holds his own against the Hulk in one issue, and struggles to win a physical fight with the Kingpin in the next. In Amazing Fantasy #15, his opponent was a thug, but he was in no way a physical threat. In Spider-Man #1 (so his second appearance), he was capable of battling the Fantastic Four, including the security measures in the Baxter Building (and a bunch of aliens in the second story). In #2, an octogenarian with a flight suit gave him trouble.

 

That doesn't feel like a steady, gradual power increase to me.

[bigdamnhero]

Heh, fair point Hugh. Looking to Silver Age comics for consistency in anything is an exercise in futility.

[Ninja-Bear]

Chirstopher Taylor I took your original post to mean something like this; if I play in your game, then you as a GM would award me new skills, perks or powers based on the roleplaying or on my comments. Comments such as, I wish I could do X. Or hiw many times did I try to use a power stunt to perform y. The change in character would be more of story based and I think player based than trying to save x amount of points to increase a certain ability.