Advancing Steadily Forward

Posted by Bryant on November 26, 2003 at 12:29 PM

The Ghoul's comments on his dice post and a recent post from Rick Jones got me thinking again about what effect experience points actually have on PCs. For the purposes of this discussion, I'm talking about more traditional roleplaying games; some of the stuff over on The Forge has very different paradigms. That said, when a GM awards a PC a bunch of experience points and she levels up, what's happening in the gameworld context?

The easy answer: "the PCs are becoming more competent." OK, that's certainly true; now, what does competence mean? It means they can take on bigger and badder challenges. But it does not mean that their challenges become easier to overcome. Making challenges easier as PCs advance is Monty Haul syndrome and we've been mocking that GMing style for 20-odd years now.

The other answer, which is certainly relevant, is that added experience expands the options available to the PCs. You don't just spend experience on making your existing abilities better; you gain new abilities as well. More things to do translates into more chances to do flashy stuff, even if it doesn't make the battles any easier than they were at first level.

Leaving that aside for now, however, let's return to the ability to take on bigger and badder challenges. I wonder if it would be feasible to write a system in which experience points were spent, not on the PC's power level, but on the power level of the PC's opposition? (I must pause to cite Trollbabe here; the concept of Scale is pretty darned relevant to this line of thinking.) The mechanical details of battling a street urchin would be the same as the mechanical details of battling a master villain, but the scope -- the effects of victory and defeat -- would be far larger.

Going a step further, why not allow players to spend experience points on the nature of the opposition and conflict? I'm not talking about anything so daring as doing away with the GM, here, but one of the classic GMing tricks is eavesdropping on the players when they speculate about the conspiracies of the Big Bad. No reason why one couldn't say "for five experience points, you can write me the encyclopedia entry on Baron Von Verbiage. There'll be stuff the public doesn't know, of course, but you can define his public face."

So let's put pen to paper and provide an actual example. I'm going to use FATE as the base system, because it's a lovely piece of work and amenable to bolting on odd concepts. The rest of this post requires some basic knowledge of the system, but it's free and it's well worth reading anyhow.

Assume, during character creation, that the players are making a character at the peak of his or her abilities. I'd recommend using eight phases, in order to give players a chance to create really competent PCs, but I happen to like competence-oriented games. Players will still get skill ranks as experience during the course of play, but they won't use them on increasing their skills.

Use the Stunt Magic system as a basis for skill stunts. While PCs may not get better at a given skill, there's no reason why they can't expand its applicability. Contemplate the legend of Javern Spithorn and the Sunset Leap.

Finally, the meat of the concept: create an "enemy pyramid" that works the same way as FATE's skill pyramids, but with enemies. These should be treated as Aspects, because the players will feel a stronger connection to their enemies if there's a mechanical benefit to facing them. There should be one enemy pyramid for the PC group as a whole. At the start of the campaign, each player may generate one Average enemy, which establishes the initial base of the pyramid.

Players may collectively buy enemies for a number of skill ranks equal to the level of the enemy -- i.e., an Average enemy would cost one skill rank, while a Great enemy would cost four skill ranks. The level of the enemy refers solely to the enemy's impact on the game world. Doctor Doom is a Legendary enemy, and Greedo is a wuss. Which is to say he's an Average enemy.

Enemies bought collectively provide Aspect benefits for everybody. Players can also buy PC-specific enemies, which provide Aspect benefits only for the player who bought them. This could cause dissent around the gaming table, so it probably ought to be at the GM's option. Players may also bid Fate Points using the normal FATE Aspect Bidding system to define the enemy. It's perfectly legitimate to bid Fate Points to define someone else's enemy.

Voila: a wacky idea about advancement, with some concrete mechanics attached to it. Thoughts?