Experience increasing

[Guyon]

As you get better at something, it usually get harder to improve. I was thinking about levels and abilities. After your initial buy, I think it would make it more fun to increase the difficulty to improve. It would also make it more rewarding to have say, a 40 Strength.

For example after your initial buy of strength, each additional buy would cost increasingly more experience. So you could go up in plateaus like real life.

 

I know that would involve more record keeping so there must be a better way to do it. Either way that is something I would like to see in future versions of the game.

[Derek Hiemforth]

Re: Experience increasing

 

Rather than changing the cost of increasing, you could decrease the frequency with which it can be increased. For example, you might make it a house rule that whenever you want to buy up a Skill, you have to make an unmodified Skill Roll with that Skill. And you can then only buy it up if you fail the roll. The higher the Skill gets, the less often you'll fail that check, so the less often you could increase it...

[Lucius]

Re: Experience increasing

 

Rather than changing the cost of increasing' date=' you could decrease the frequency with which it can be increased. For example, you might make it a house rule that whenever you want to buy up a Skill, you have to make an unmodified Skill Roll with that Skill. And you can then only buy it up if you [b']fail[/b] the roll. The higher the Skill gets, the less often you'll fail that check, so the less often you could increase it...

 

Which is almost exactly how experience works in Runequest. Or Basic Role Playing or whatever it's called now. And I still consider it the best experience mechanic I have ever seen.

 

The same thing could arguably be applied to characteristics. That might not work so well on the Superheroic scale, but maybe it would on the more Heroic level.

 

How (or if) you'd apply it to powers, spells, talents, etc. I'm not so sure.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

Palindromedary Luck

[Jaxom]

Re: Experience increasing

 

There are a couple of possible mechanics for something like this depending on what effect you want to have on the game.

 

First, it sounds to want to focus on each skill separately so that it is more expensive to raise a 40 STR than it is to raise a 10 PRE. This mechanic penalizes people who want to corner. Make sure it is what you really want in your world (whether it feels real or not, remember what it will do to your *game* experience). It means that people will be penalized for cornering... Never again will you see the simple STR/CON brick. They'll instead spend time taking new tricks because it is more point efficient.

 

This will also open the can of worms asking how you handle figured stats. Is it cheaper to buy END, PD or ED directly than it is to buy STR/CON? Does the price of buying PD depend on the current PD or only on the portion of it that is not derived from stats?

 

Do you want to do this by raising the cost or just lowering the amount of experience you award? Functionally it's the same difference. Of course, if you raise the cost and then you end up handing out more experience so that the players can still crawl out into the typical corners all that you have done is add bookkeeping work for yourself (and the hassle of trying to figure out how much experience to award this time).

[Egyptoid]

Re: Experience increasing

 

perhaps in other genres, but not in champions.

 

it doesnt feel like comic books to me.

 

people grow change or alter their abilities easily therein.

[Guyon]

Re: Experience increasing

 

I was just going to say that is exactly how experience works in Runequest. I loved that system BTW. D&D could learn a lot from RQ.

 

***

 

Good point Egyptoid, Though we go up much too fast for my taste. I like a slower growing campaign.

 

 

Web:

http://www.protectors.frih.net/index.html

[Hugh Neilson]

Re: Experience increasing

 

Seems to me this approach would result in more focused, less rounded starting characters. Right now, if I want to end up with a 60 STR brick who knows basic martial arts (15 points of maneuvers, say), I might start with a 60 STR and no martial arts, or a 45 STR and my martial arts package. If it's more expensive to buy my STR up from 45 to 60 than it is to buy basic martial arts, then the guy who starts with 45 STR and Martial Arts, and buys his STR up, is at a disadvantage over the guy who starts with 60 STR, then buys Martial Arts.

 

Why should two characters with 60 STR and 15 points of martial arts maneuvers, otherwise identical, have different costs because one bought STR with experience and the other bought marrtial arts with experience?

[Guyon]

Re: Experience increasing

 

Really? I thought it would give more rounded characters because the lower level attabutes and powers would be cheeper.

[Robyn]

Re: Experience increasing

 

Really? I thought it would give more rounded characters because the lower level attabutes and powers would be cheeper.

 

If "more rounded" is what we're after, the idea is good. In a supers game (which is not all the HERO system is for), that isn't common.

 

Now, if you let people bypass the extra cost by starting out with those skills rather than buying them during play with experience, you should also require them to take the "aged" Perk (or whatever it is) to justify that, in the past, they have had time to learn those from experience.

[Lucius]

Re: Experience increasing

 

Really? I thought it would give more rounded characters because the lower level attabutes and powers would be cheeper.

 

Perhaps there are too many ideas flying around, some of them too poorly articulated.

 

If you UNRESTRICTED at start, but some things are harder to buy later, you will put points into those things that will be harder to buy later. If you know you want to have a high Stealth eventually, you START with it rather than planning to start low and buy it up.

 

Characters will tend to START less well-rounded, because they sank points initially into the things they want to specialize in. Then their DEVELOPMENT will be more generalized and less specialized, because it's harder to improve those things that started out high, but easier to learn something completely new.

 

At least, according to what I understand of some of the models put forth.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

Weaponsmith: Palindromedary mounted weapons

[Robyn]

Re: Experience increasing

 

Which is almost exactly how experience works in Runequest. Or Basic Role Playing or whatever it's called now. And I still consider it the best experience mechanic I have ever seen.

 

And it's how XP works in Pendragon, though it's limited to specific characteristics there; at the end of each in-game year the knights look back and reflect on the events and their lives. During the year, they got an experience check beside each skill, statistic, Trait or Passion they did really well at (multiple checks have no extra effect past the first), and at this time they can try to roll versus each characteristic to improve it, only doing so on a failure.

 

I would like to see a "XP spent just to make the roll" mechanic. That would be interesting, to encourage a more rounded character and discourage people from hyper-specializing; if you have to spend XP just for the chance to improve the skill, and the odds of doing so are inversely related to your proficiency, you could take the XP you would spend on trying to improve a high skill by a single point, and have a fairly good chance of improving lots of other skills.

[sbarron]

Re: Experience increasing

 

I would like to see a "XP spent just to make the roll" mechanic. That would be interesting' date=' to encourage a more rounded character and discourage people from hyper-specializing; if you have to spend XP just for the [i']chance[/i] to improve the skill, and the odds of doing so are inversely related to your proficiency, you could take the XP you would spend on trying to improve a high skill by a single point, and have a fairly good chance of improving lots of other skills.

I usually want just the opposite for my games. I like it when PCs specialize, cause it makes it easier for them to find their nitch. If every character has most of the skills at an average level, then they are all pretty much the same. For me at least, specializing is way more fun.

[David Johnston]

Re: Experience increasing

 

As you get better at something, it usually get harder to improve. I was thinking about levels and abilities. After your initial buy, I think it would make it more fun to increase the difficulty to improve. It would also make it more rewarding to have say, a 40 Strength.

For example after your initial buy of strength, each additional buy would cost increasingly more experience. So you could go up in plateaus like real life.

 

I don't think I'd find that all that fun. It would lead to very abrupt leaps as suddenly people triple how strong they are and nobody ever buys a new ability at modest cost.

 

However, the thought has occured to me that, instead of having hard ceilings you could charge a premium for going above them similar to the one for normal characteristic maxima. That way not every player will design their character to exactly hit the ceiling.

[Derek Hiemforth]

Re: Experience increasing

 

As you get better at something' date=' it usually get harder to improve. I was thinking about levels and abilities. After your initial buy, I think it would make it more fun to increase the difficulty to improve.[/quote']I had another thought on this...

 

You might be looking to solve a self-correcting problem.

 

Yes, it doesn't get any more expensive to keep improving. However, it also gets less useful to keep improving. So from a certain point of view, continuing to spend points on a Skill that's already high is something of a waste.

 

For example, once you have a Skill up to around 14- or 15-, additional bonuses to the roll mainly just serve to cancel penalties. They're not really useful all the time, because you're nearly always going to succeed with normal Skill rolls anyway...

[Ockham's Spoon]

Re: Experience increasing

 

I had another thought on this...

 

You might be looking to solve a self-correcting problem.

 

Yes, it doesn't get any more expensive to keep improving. However, it also gets less useful to keep improving. So from a certain point of view, continuing to spend points on a Skill that's already high is something of a waste.

 

For example, once you have a Skill up to around 14- or 15-, additional bonuses to the roll mainly just serve to cancel penalties. They're not really useful all the time, because you're nearly always going to succeed with normal Skill rolls anyway...

 

This is an excellent point Derek. Furthermore, because of the bell curve, buying any skill up higher gives diminishing returns, unless, as you mentioned, you are just cancelling out penalties. I think that between this and enforcing Normal CHA Maxima in heroic level games you can curb people from overly high ability levels. Okay, well, at least to my satisfaction.

[Mike W]

Re: Experience increasing

 

Which is almost exactly how experience works in Runequest. Or Basic Role Playing or whatever it's called now. And I still consider it the best experience mechanic I have ever seen.

 

The same thing could arguably be applied to characteristics. That might not work so well on the Superheroic scale, but maybe it would on the more Heroic level.

 

How (or if) you'd apply it to powers, spells, talents, etc. I'm not so sure.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

Palindromedary Luck

 

 

I definitely think the "fail a roll" to go up idea is a bad one for Superheroic levels. Once you get past 40 STR you would have a 1 in 216 shot to increase your STR. And the same for moving skills over 17. Granted, I very very rarely allow such things, but if you're going to be applying penalties and trying the ridiculous stuff that superheroes sometimes do, you may need a huge skill roll to offset the penalties - unless you're going to let people buy penalty skill levels cheap.

 

I think the best "mechanic" for controlling XP in any system has always been the GM. If you're a good GM, you should have little trouble controlling XP and keeping the players happy.

[Robyn]

Re: Experience increasing

 

I think the best "mechanic" for controlling XP in any system has always been the GM. If you're a good GM' date=' you should have little trouble controlling XP and keeping the players happy.[/quote']

 

What about those of us who aren't already a good GM, though? We need a better solution than merely being told to "Just go out and do it!", i.e., a system or rule of some kind. If there are just one or two areas in which we aren't a good GM, we should be able to find some sort of help on how to fix that. It's the rare GM who starts out perfect

[Dust Raven]

Re: Experience increasing

 

I'm all for adding a dose of realism into the game, such as making it harder to increase some stats when they are already high; higher stat = fewer challenges = slow improvement. However, I'm completely opposed to the idea of making this an aspect of how much the stat costs in XP. A character that goes from 40 to 45 STR (and nothing else) is not equal to the character that improved all 50 of his skills by a single point.

 

It's not that hard to just say yes or no to how a player want their character to improve. I usually have a rule that limits a character from improving Characteristis for example. No more than n XP in a particular Characteristic per scenario with n depending on how high the Characteristic is and how much it was challenged during that scenario. I don't dock a character XP if they earn more than they are allowed to spend on a particular Characteristic though; they can spend it on other things like Skills, Perks (earned through game play and they want to keep them) and such.

[JDHMorgan2003]

Re: Experience increasing

 

And for Skills, you could also adapt the Valdorian Age Normal Skill Maxima...basically, they are allowed normal progression up to 13-, then like Normal Characteristic Maxima, they have to pay twice the normal cost...

 

Also, there are no Skill Levels. You can still buy Combat Skill Levels or Penalty Skill Levels. The Valdorian Age book also introduces several new types of Penalty Skill Levels. Thay way, you don't necessarily have extremely high skill levels, but with the right Penalty Skill Levels, you can reduce a number of different types of penalties

[Curufea]

Re: Experience increasing

 

I should introduce skill maxima in my game...

However, there are some skills it doesn't apply to very well - such as magic skills. As power in spells increases the active points, they create a cummulative negative to the skill roll. So I allow large skill rolls for magic skills, to account for large spells.

 

I do have a house rule that characteristics can only be increased (or decreased) with XP every 2 months of game time (not real life time).

[JDHMorgan2003]

Re: Experience increasing

 

why not introduce penalty skill levels that apply only to the increasing cost of powerful spells. that way you could have somebody who sucked at casting spells, but when he did succeed, he could have a serious impact.

[prestidigitator]

Re: Experience increasing

 

I agree we shouldn't change the Experience system for this. We pay in Character Points for the effectiveness of the ability in the system, not its rarity (in the particular setting) or the subjective toughness the character has in learning the ability. The latter are best moderated through storytelling, not cost. Even Normal Characteristic Maxima might be going a little too far in that regard. I haven't decided yet.

[Vurbal]

Re: Experience increasing

 

It's not that hard to just say yes or no to how a player want their character to improve. I usually have a rule that limits a character from improving Characteristis for example. No more than n XP in a particular Characteristic per scenario with n depending on how high the Characteristic is and how much it was challenged during that scenario. I don't dock a character XP if they earn more than they are allowed to spend on a particular Characteristic though; they can spend it on other things like Skills' date=' Perks (earned through game play and they want to keep them) and such.[/quote'] I generally try to spend my experience a lot like you're describing. It makes character development feel a lot more organic if I put points into an characteristic, skill, or power gradually and it eventually pays off for a slightly better effect. The character I'm playing currently has a power with Limited Range that I'm going to buy off. He started with a very low range and I've been increasing it just a little bit every session it gets used. At the same time I'm saving points to buy off the limitation when the range is enough for it to be appropriate.

[Lucius]

Re: Experience increasing

 

I agree we shouldn't change the Experience system for this. We pay in Character Points for the effectiveness of the ability in the system' date=' not its [i']rarity[/i] (in the particular setting) or the subjective toughness the character has in learning the ability. The latter are best moderated through storytelling, not cost. Even Normal Characteristic Maxima might be going a little too far in that regard. I haven't decided yet.

 

You'll probably have to figure it out for yourself; I usually have to think things through for myself, as several people around here will probably attest. However, if you're willing to take the word of someone who's already thought it out -

 

yes, Normal Characteristic Maxima go too far in that regard. I will never use them when I'm running a game, nor allow it for a superhero. I WOULD allow a physical limitation "mere mortal" or "only Human" though.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

The palindromedary and I have to see a woman about a bed.

[keithcurtis]

Re: Experience increasing

 

I have to be bribed with whole boxes of cookies to allow someone to spend XP on characteristics. Generally once or twice in the lifetime of a character will I allow it, and only with justificataion. Such as a young person growing up and/or significant passage of time, or rigorous in-play training.

Skills require in-game usage, or in some cases an educational resource. Six weeks of exploring dungeons isn't going to allow you to buy up your Riding skill. You aren't going to be able to increase your knowledge of Chemistry without a teacher, school, lab or reference texts.

 

Keith "Common Sense" Curtis