A Matter of Level

[theinfn8]

Of late I have taken to converting the mountain of notebooks full of materials from campaigns and adventures past into digital format. Being the glutton for punishment that I am, I have not been satisfied with simply scanning everything and storing it that way. Instead I have been slowly retyping everything, formatting it, redrawing the maps (then scanning them in, madness, right?), etc. These notes span a multitude of different systems and genres. Most of them, as I have been working through them, I keep thinking to myself, "Self, why don't you convert this to Hero, it would be a far superior product in the end...?" Obviously that's not always true, but it has made me wonder about the "level" indicators used by commercial products. When a level based product says "For a group of 5 adventurers, level 3-4" you know exactly what your getting and what to expect of the NPCs contained in the product. When you get a Hero adventure, saying that the adventure is "for a group of 4 heroic characters of 200 pts" (or 800 points total, etc) actually doesn't really tell you much.

 

So, after my long ramble, my wonder is this, has anyone standardized their "levels" of play so they know what level to set NPC stats at? Would the community be served by setting such a standard?

 

For me, I have not done it. I just track my player's CVs, Defenses, and relative "health" and build around that (but I don't typically use published adventures).

[Tjack]

  While I agree that an across the board standard would be nice, I think the closest you could get would be some terms like beginner, journeyman and experienced.  Otherwise knowing the differences between say 3-4th level D&D and 200 pt Champions is like converting Fahrenheit to Celsius in your head.  It’s a skill some people do easily, some roughly and some like me just have to look out the window at what everybody else is wearing.

[HeroGM]

When I started that kind of stuff I just typed in outlines and didn't worry about specifics - game systems are too weird. One person online did help me re-fine an old conversion book though.

 

As for software I used WordPress so I could put stuff in categories and tag them easier.

[theinfn8]

3 hours ago, Tjack said:

  While I agree that an across the board standard would be nice, I think the closest you could get would be some terms like beginner, journeyman and experienced.

That is actually kind of the image I had in my head as well. "Beginner" means CVs in the 5-6 range, defenses in the 8-10 range, etc (and I am just pulling numbers from the ether, not suggesting this is what they should be). "Journeyman" means a slightly higher range and so forth.

 

I know I have seen some people say they set maximums and then periodically increase them as play occurs. That kind of mirrors this same thinking. Having some kind of community standard would make labeling content a little more inuitive, I suppose.

3 minutes ago, HeroGM said:

When I started that kind of stuff I just typed in outlines and didn't worry about specifics - game systems are too weird. One person online did help me re-fine an old conversion book though.

 

As for software I used WordPress so I could put stuff in categories and tag them easier.

 

That's actually a pretty solid idea. I could host it internally on my rpi test server and push to the web easily if I felt like sharing it (which I probably would).

 

Did you outline like a plot point campaign, or more indepth?

[Tjack]

  You might need two different classifications.  One like we’ve discussed for the level of the characters required and another for for how experienced a player you should be to understand the rules system.  Champions is a pretty simple set of rules to pick up on the fly. Other games I won’t mention *coughStarfleetBattlescough* are murderous to learn all by yourself.

[Mr. R]

I don't think point totals would help too much.  It is possible to create a Champions Character that costs 600 pts, but he has Normal Characteristics, no powers and just skills, contacts and favours.  Compare that to the original Doc D who clocked in at 600 pts.  One is a very behind the scenes type and the other is Doctor Doom, fight at your own risk.

 

I think a better set up is something like the rule of X.  Set up some base points like the following:

 

Attack 30 active points (45 with advantages)   [ this gets you 6d6 EB AP or a 2d6 RKA Explosion, etc]

Defenses 10-20 points (25 with advantages)  [ this gets you 6pd, 6ed + 6/6 armour + 3/3 Combat luck]

OCV/DCV 3-6 (up to +3 with skill levels and or Martial Arts)

SPD 3 [ starting mages may have 2, elite warriors 4]

 

Then you can gauge your party in compared to the opposition!

 

Just a thought!

[theinfn8]

10 minutes ago, Tjack said:

  You might need two different classifications.  One like we’ve discussed for the level of the characters required and another for for how experienced a player you should be to understand the rules system.  Champions is a pretty simple set of rules to pick up on the fly. Other games I won’t mention *coughStarfleetBattlescough* are murderous to learn all by yourself.

 

Something more like "An Expert adventure for 5 Tier II characters"

 

 

[theinfn8]

25 minutes ago, Mr. R said:

I don't think point totals would help too much.  It is possible to create a Champions Character that costs 600 pts, but he has Normal Characteristics, no powers and just skills, contacts and favours.  Compare that to the original Doc D who clocked in at 600 pts.  One is a very behind the scenes type and the other is Doctor Doom, fight at your own risk.

 

I think a better set up is something like the rule of X.  Set up some base points like the following:

 

Attack 30 active points (45 with advantages)   [ this gets you 6d6 EB AP or a 2d6 RKA Explosion, etc]

Defenses 10-20 points (25 with advantages)  [ this gets you 6pd, 6ed + 6/6 armour + 3/3 Combat luck]

OCV/DCV 3-6 (up to +3 with skill levels and or Martial Arts)

SPD 3 [ starting mages may have 2, elite warriors 4]

 

Then you can gauge your party in compared to the opposition!

 

Just a thought!

 

That is exactly it. Some baseline set of stats that give an idea of what the opposition will be and what the characters will need to be. At least, out of the box.

 

And don't get me wrong, there are definitely game styles/genres that benefit from characters with a broad range of social skills and contacts that may never even touch combat.  But, I daresay, that is not the standard. An adventure could at least indicate that requirement, "A social adventure that requires characters with interaction skills and deep connections" or some such. Even then, we can still say that those specific skills should be around a certain level, and contacts at a certain level/quantity. Points spent certainly would not be the best way to describe that setup either.