TNE: Mini-tiers and Character Replacement

[K]

Ok, as a model for character advancement I like 3e Sorcerers.

Let me explain. As a 3e Sorcerer reaches key levels, his world changes. When he gets Fireball or Stinking Cloud, he enters the mass combat mini-game. When he get Teleport, he gets out of the "overland adventure" phase of his life and enters the "instant travel to exotic locales" part of his life. When he gets Charm Monster he enters the social minigame.

I could go on. Every two levels he enters a new tier of power and he is different from a Wizard in that a Wizard gets everything at once and is crazy broken despite doing so at increments of two levels; a Sorcerer discretely enters certain tiers of power.

So the model for TNE that I like is this: a character gets levels and every level he gets a two new abilities. Every three levels he hits a new mini-tier and is forced to pick new abilities from the next mini-tier. Each mini-tier is a specific thing. Levels are an easy way to calc how many abilities you have, and the numerics don't increase.

For example. Grogor the Black is a mage type guy and is level 6. This means he has twelve abilities, and they are broken down as three abilities from mini-tier A, B, and C each. A is personal and ranged combat, B is combat mobility, and C is the mass combat minigame. So for example, a Burning Hands type ability is in Tier A and is the only ability you want to use in personal combat; Fireball is in C and if the party warrior is in close combat with a manticore there is no way to hit it with a Fireball without cooking the warrior.

So the question is this: since we all know that the only way for a level system to mean anything is for people to be able to say "at this level, a character should be able to defeat this kind of challenge regardless of class", so then should we have levels at all and not just mini-tiers?

Even more, why even make any teirs mandatory? If people don't want to enter the mass combat mini-game and just want to be an archer who goes on more and more fantastic adventures and not a leader of men/monsters/machines/etc or mobile "artillary piece"/"war machine", should they be forced to get those abilities?

Part of me says force everyone into tiers, and if they don't want to use those abilities the DM can multitask his game ("ok, we will fight his army as a cover for you sneaking in and seducing his consort").

Another part says give everyone abilities and let people specialize in the tiers they like and that work for their character concept. The problem with this is that then you don't have a level system at all AND you'll have people refusing to play certain tiers and this makes adventure design impossible.

At the end of the day, you are either forced to tell people that their exiled fairy princess must become a leader of killer fairie warriors OR you are going levelless and ceding all control for the adventure to the players and forcing the DM to write adventures for specific players that show up.

Right now, I'm leaning toward telling people "your character must be this tall to continue having meaningful adventures." because certain tiers are going to make certain adventures meaningless. I mean, once you enter the mass combat minigame the Zombie Horde is not a survival adventure where you pick off single zombies but a single combat in a bigger adventure where you fight masses of zombies to get to the necromancer in the middle of the cave complex.

I also like people getting levels in a tier before they hit as new one so they get a chance to get used to that tier a few abilities at a time.

Thoughts?

[Lago PARANOIA]

K, first of all you need to be able to identify which new abilities are actually worth creating a tier for.

I don't think 'mass combat' should be a tier. A 4E wizard can do it at first level with scorching burst and enlarge spell. I don't think 'social minigame' should be a tier either, since all charm person does is give you a bonus to your roll. And I don't think jumping from +20 to +30 on your diplomacy check should get you a tier. The closest idea you gave was the overland combat one, which is the idea that horses and walking should no longer be sufficient to get you to adventures. And even this is kind of underbaked, because someone or their mountain could have superspeed. Or there could be portals in the world where even a level 1 commoner could step into.

[Spaghetti Western]

I think you have to go forced tiers because if you don't as a practical matter the game becomes just a repetition of the same challenges. You're always fighting monsters which the only distinguishing characteristic being how many hp they have or how much dmg they do etc.

what you could do is allow the tier A abilities for example continue to advance in power allowing them to remain useful. This would allow a DM with a group of tier B characters to combine mass combat type encounters where fireball is the primary weapon with some strategically placed tier A encounters where good ole burning hands gets broken out again.

this probably just repeated what you already stated - sigh

[Username17]

I don't see any reason or benefit for having levels within tiers. Why give people 2 abilities when they "level" instead of just giving them one ability at a time? What possible advantage does one gain out of splitting character advancement into chunks like that? For that matter, why should people only be allowed to get six abilities in a tier before moving on? If people want to play E6 style where they keep having Theseus style adventures for four years of play, why should they be required to stop character advancement? For that matter, why should people be required to get six whole abilities before they tier jump? If they are moving the focus to another field of view, what's the point of giving people a bunch of abilities that are only relevant in another reference frame they aren't even paying attention to?

Playing Civilization has taught me that levels should be given profession names. Like this:

• Child
• Civilian
• Warrior
• Mayor
• General
• Champion
• King
• God

I don't think 'mass combat' should be a tier.

It definitely should be. Things you can do to a Warhammer Fantasy Battle tabletop that would make an appreciable difference are incredibly different from things you can't. And when players become Generals and start marching troops around, everyone needs to have abilities that matter on that scale. Abilities like "kills one orc per turn" just don't cut it.

Now what I don't think is that players should be required to go in any order. If players really want to go directly from playing Harvest Moon to playing Populous they should be able to do that.

-Username17

[Heath Robinson]

If some people will want to cede limelight in certain areas in exchange for more limelight in other areas, we could give limited crossover abilities that give bonuses in their minitier of origin, but are usable in others. For example, the Fairy Princess character might take A Lady's/Lord's Favour in the Combat Minitier, an ability that enables her to give a token of her favour to a character that grants them a bonus. In the Social Minitier, A Lady's/Lord's Favour lets them give their favour to extract a service or improve their relationship to the grantee.

Tactical Genius works the same kind of way; you give your party a bonus in the Combat Minitier in exchange for an advantage in the Mass Combat Minitier.

There are problems with allowing people to exchange resources between minitiers, but it's also problematic to render certain character concepts that people might want to play impossible. At least, impossible whilst also keeping the party appropriate to the power curve.

[MGuy]

Then there are people who want to play completely different games at the same table. If you have a mass combat man among a group of people who are duelists or vice versa you have people sitting out of an encounter because their skills are cumbersome or don't matter.

What's more is you end up having different games. Each tier representing a different minigame which you must design and balance individually. While this is not itself a problem how do you handle abilities that cross the lines? How do you keep a team at different tiers engaged? Do you want to force your players to all play a certain tier? If so how would their abilities differ in a way that is significant?

[K]

I don't see any reason or benefit for having levels within tiers. Why give people 2 abilities when they "level" instead of just giving them one ability at a time? What possible advantage does one gain out of splitting character advancement into chunks like that?

So that people have time to get to learn their abilities and how they work with the game world and get a sense of advancement over the course of adventures. I mean, level-based RPG's appeal is mostly the movement towards new abilities you want in a heroic arc fashion. Don't underestimate that appeal.

The alternative is just complete character replacement after a predefined number of adventures. At that point you might as well just pick up a new game. I mean, games like Shadowrun or Vampire encourage complete character replacement because advancement is so small that you never really get to play with anything new so might as well make a new character or just pick up a new game; basic level-based games work so well because they model the heroic arc and make the rewards for play each adventure concrete and advancement is steady and incremental. I mean, I can't tell you the number of Shadowrun and Vampire games I've dropped vs the number of DnD games which have persisted.

For that matter, why should people only be allowed to get six abilities in a tier before moving on? If people want to play E6 style where they keep having Theseus style adventures for four years of play, why should they be required to stop character advancement? For that matter, why should people be required to get six whole abilities before they tier jump?

Because there is only limited room for archetypes. If you want to wallow in one tier then after a while you will overlap other character's uniqueness, even if you are rubbing off the serial numbers on abilities so that they seem different ("no, its a Cold Bolt which is entirely different from a Flame Bolt and it's a Ninja Strike and not a Rogue Strike").

I'm all for a party to make a conscious choice to stay at a fixed level and accumulate campaign-based rewards as an alternative play option, but actual character advancement has to reach a certain point or else everyone is a ninja/warrior/wizard/priest and they look the same.

I mean, fleshing out a tier feels like advancement. Being stuck in a tier just means that after a certain point you don't even care about yet another power in that tier because you've hit a wall regarding the number of new kinds of stories that can be told. New tiers by definition force you into new stories.

At no point should "and then you lose players to boredom as player abilities overlap" become a default of your system. I mean, it takes a long time to happen in Shadowrun but it does happen.

If they are moving the focus to another field of view, what's the point of giving people a bunch of abilities that are only relevant in another reference frame they aren't even paying attention to?

Well, because then the DM can write adventures at all. I mean, even if the Warlord character is always the one to bring his Black Coats to face enemy armies and the Faerie Princess always does the one-on-one battle, it has become a by player matter of choice about how you choose to engage the adventure. But if Bob drops out the group midway through and you need to face an army, the Princess can call on her White Court Riders and let someone else do the one-on-one battle.

I envision a system where people can write and post their adventures for others to play, and the only way that works is if when you write a level 10 adventure I know that I can toss in an army in that adventure and someone will be able to take care of that.

Playing Civilization has taught me that levels should be given profession names. Like this:

• Child
• Civilian
• Warrior
• Mayor
• General
• Champion
• King
• God

Since Civilization is a god game and this idea is for a mult-player RPG, I don't see how this applies. Like at all.

Seriously. No idea what your point is here.

Now what I don't think is that players should be required to go in any order. If players really want to go directly from playing Harvest Moon to playing Populous they should be able to do that.

The reason you put people on rails is so you can have a game. If two people decide to start making a mass combat character and someone else is still playing with single combat stuff, they can't play the game any more when you write a mass-combat adventure for them.

Getting people to agree to the hard-coded conventions in a game is easy; getting them to agree to identical character advancement is impossible. I mean, it's rare to even get people to agree to making characters who can use stealth in any game thats not Shadowrun even though its vastly rewarded in every game. Heck, even in Shadowrun they had to eventually revise the whole premise of the game world to get deckers to play even a close approximation of the game played by other people.

[IGTN]

Why railroad DMs into doing "you must gain warhammer and sim city abilities in this order," whichever one you put first?

Why have levels within tiers instead of just giving out abilities one at a time?

Why have a fixed number of abilities known in each tier?

The alternative here is that:
When the DM says you do, you gain a new ability in your current tier/any tier you already have/a specific tier you already have/all tiers you already have.
When the DM says you do, your current tier changes to whatever they say it does.

[Username17]

So that people have time to get to learn their abilities and how they work with the game world and get a sense of advancement over the course of adventures.

No. That's an argument for giving people one ability at a time as their "advancement" it is an argument against saving up advancement until they get 2 new abilities at the same time. This thing where you "level" and suddenly gain two abilities is pointless. You could just give people one ability and give it to them twice as often. That would feel more organic, give people more time to try out each new ability, and give each ability a moment in the sun by itself. So not only would advancement be easier on the player, but it would even feel like you were advancing more.

Think Sailor Moon. She gets one new power in an episode. This is the same for shows like Stargate or Buffy. In an episode, characters normally develop one new trick and use that trick to push the plot forward. Giving out two new tricks, one of which advances the plot and the other of which just gets sat on unless and until you remember that you have it in a later episode is a justifiably rare construction in any media. They usually do not do that in TV shows, comic books, or even novels.

In short, I accept your argument for giving people discreet abilities as character advancement rather than marginal numeric increases. But that's not an argument for levels, and I don't accept your conclusion that levels add anything to the picture.

Because there is only limited room for archetypes. If you want to wallow in one tier then after a while you will overlap other character's uniqueness, even if you are rubbing off the serial numbers on abilities so that they seem different ("no, its a Cold Bolt which is entirely different from a Flame Bolt and it's a Ninja Strike and not a Rogue Strike").

Eventually? Sure. At the limit of infinite ability gain, then yes everyone will overlap to the point of being completely identical. But games don't last to the infinite future. Eventually people move away. And if the game is to be interesting on replay, it's going to have to have substantially more abilities than the players have in any particular group. My Shadowrun Horror board game has 23 characters in it, and they all have different abilities. The game is pretty replayable. And an actual P&P RPG can have much more than that because it doesn't need to print and laminate a whole piece of paper for each ability.

If the game is replayable 3 times, then it can handle people sticking around in a tier and accumulating 3 times as many abilities without falling apart. And honestly, by the time that could even remotely be a problem, someone could write a "Civilian Power" book and extend playability for the E6 crowd for another 4 years if that's what they want to do.

Seriously. No idea what your point is here.

That from a nomenclatural point of view, a tier should be named after the guy in it, not after what the character is doing in it. You name it "General" not "Mass Combat."

-Username17

[NativeJovian]

The tier system only works if you're dealing with character power, which in a D&D style RPG means "ability to fight people", since no one wants to play the diplomat who has intriguing conversations with the king's treasurer but has to hide every time swords come out because he hits like a girl and faints at the sight of blood. People who are good at fighting get to have intriguing conversations with the treasurer anyway because if the guard doesn't let them in they can kill the guard and step over his corpse on the way to the treasurer's office.

What this means is that tiers should be tied directly to how well you stab people in the face (or avoid being stabbed in the face, or heal people after they've been stabbed in the face -- something that applies directly to combat). A "social mini-tier" is worthless because it doesn't help you stab people in the face, so it doesn't enter into a character's power level. Arguably a "mass combat mini-tier" is equally useless, because while it helps you kill swarms of tiny men, it doesn't help you kill villains or monsters that are equal or more powerful than you. Because, really, that's what you do in a tabletop RPG -- you don't end the threat posed by the Black Empire by wading through their Army of Evil, you teleport into the Emperor's throne room and stab him in the face. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is a matter of preference, but if you want mass combat between hordes of tiny men, you want to play a wargame, not an RPG.

What K seems to have proposed in this thread is creating tiers by role rather than by power level. Meaning that there are the "stabs people in the face" or "heals people" tiers rather than (or possibly within) the "mundane adventurer" and "hero of myth" tiers. This would seem to work very much like a class system made entirely of very short classes -- if you're on the "face stabbing" tier, you're essentially taking levels in "face stabber", and once you've taken a certain number of levels in the "face stab" tier/class (whether that's three or six or "as many as there are face stabbing abilities"), you move on to a new tier/class. This can work, as long as each ability scales with level so that face stabbing doesn't become useless because you took it four tiers and 12 levels ago. But, depending on how many tiers/classes you have, this can quickly run into the "everyone's the same" problem already mentioned.

The other possibility is that you set in stone the order the tiers appear. The first tier is "fights woodland creatures" and involves knowing how to kill things that aren't people. The next tier is "fights tiny men" and involves knowing how to kill thinking, reasoning beings. Eventually you get up to "fights those with the power to unmake all creation" and you're at DBZ levels of blowing up whole planets as a side effect of whatever epic battle you're undertaking this week. The issue here is that if you break these up too far into "fights tiny men" and "fights less-tiny men" and "fights almost-not-tiny-anymore men", then why are you using tiers at all? Just stick to levels and be done with it; there's virtually no difference.

[K]

So that people have time to get to learn their abilities and how they work with the game world and get a sense of advancement over the course of adventures.

No. That's an argument for giving people one ability at a time as their "advancement" it is an argument against saving up advancement until they get 2 new abilities at the same time. This thing where you "level" and suddenly gain two abilities is pointless. You could just give people one ability and give it to them twice as often. That would feel more organic, give people more time to try out each new ability, and give each ability a moment in the sun by itself. So not only would advancement be easier on the player, but it would even feel like you were advancing more.

Think Sailor Moon. She gets one new power in an episode. This is the same for shows like Stargate or Buffy. In an episode, characters normally develop one new trick and use that trick to push the plot forward. Giving out two new tricks, one of which advances the plot and the other of which just gets sat on unless and until you remember that you have it in a later episode is a justifiably rare construction in any media. They usually do not do that in TV shows, comic books, or even novels.

In short, I accept your argument for giving people discreet abilities as character advancement rather than marginal numeric increases. But that's not an argument for levels, and I don't accept your conclusion that levels add anything to the picture.

Except, in a TV show if the new ability sucks you never hear about it again. In an RPG, you are stuck with it and it is expected to do actual work in the campaign.

Players are stuck with their new power. If they don't like it or it doesn't work, they might have to wait weeks for another. The only alternative is to let people trade out powers willy-nilly, and that's no better than just playing Magical Princess Teaparty. At least with two powers, you have a better shot at getting a power you like.

Levels do one thing and one thing only: they let you feel discrete power increases and they tell others what you can do.

Ideally, advancement within a tier would do something at the beginning like letting you combine with the party to defeat a challenge for that tier and at the end of the advancement individual characters can deal with those challenges. Whatever. the details can be worked out to make levels meaningful.

Because there is only limited room for archetypes. If you want to wallow in one tier then after a while you will overlap other character's uniqueness, even if you are rubbing off the serial numbers on abilities so that they seem different ("no, its a Cold Bolt which is entirely different from a Flame Bolt and it's a Ninja Strike and not a Rogue Strike").

Eventually? Sure. At the limit of infinite ability gain, then yes everyone will overlap to the point of being completely identical. But games don't last to the infinite future. Eventually people move away. And if the game is to be interesting on replay, it's going to have to have substantially more abilities than the players have in any particular group. My Shadowrun Horror board game has 23 characters in it, and they all have different abilities. The game is pretty replayable. And an actual P&P RPG can have much more than that because it doesn't need to print and laminate a whole piece of paper for each ability.

If the game is replayable 3 times, then it can handle people sticking around in a tier and accumulating 3 times as many abilities without falling apart. And honestly, by the time that could even remotely be a problem, someone could write a "Civilian Power" book and extend playability for the E6 crowd for another 4 years if that's what they want to do.

Yeh, but Shadowrun Horror hands out abilities at random, and if you don't like your new ability you can get a new one in 5-10 minutes. Heck, based on that same randomness, you may need to play 10 games before you even see a particular ability. Randomness and the fact that complete character replacement happens every game is the only thing that makes it replayable.

Unique abilities are uncommon. Check out the 3e SRD and count up the number of "elemental damage at range" abilities". By my count, there are around 35. Sure, some are borderline: Wall of Fire and Fireball can be liberally said to be different powers, and some are hydrid debuffs like Sunburst, but most are just straight out duplicates. Call Lightning and Lightning Bolt are the same ability with the license plates changed and a new paintjob. Avoiding that situation and locking abilities into certain tiers drops the pool of available abilities dramatically.

Then the situation to avoid is "now that I have my stuff, I want his too". Each tier needs enough abilities that two characters with the same class can be in the same party and not have overlap if they don't want to. That can't happen with unlimited ability advancement because at some point the Sorcerer is not going to show up because the Rogue already has all or most of the Sorcerer's stuff and feels (correctly) that you don't need him. No one wants to be merely "more DD"; they want some role in the party not shared by someone else.

Shadowrun is the game you want to play. It has no levels and has unlimited advancement so that after enough time single character is several characters timesharing the same action pool so that if any player drops out he is basically covered. Considering the very narrow scope of play available in Shadowrun, that works..... but in a setting with a larger scope sideways advancement has a limited shelf-life before it stops feeling like advancement at all.[/b]

A reasonably functional fantasy RPG has the premise of "have adventures, collect treasure, grow in power to defeat bigger and bigger enemies." Nothing more and nothing less. People want to be afraid of manticores in their early life and to crush them utterly after their character has grown in power.

Sideways advancement will never let you defeat bigger challenges; it only lets you defeat more challenges alone. Remember, this is a cooperative game: we want people to depend on each other to a certain degree.

[Username17]

Players are stuck with their new power. If they don't like it or it doesn't work, they might have to wait weeks for another. The only alternative is to let people trade out powers willy-nilly, and that's no better than just playing Magical Princess Teaparty. At least with two powers, you have a better shot at getting a power you like.

That's a complete non-argument. Give everyone two powers at once and one person will get two powers that are super useful, while another players gets only one or none at all. That shit happens. It has happened. It will happen again. And giving people lists of multiple powers in a giant lump sum they have to digest all at once doesn't make those discrepancies go away. It just makes things harder to digest.

The number one way to have powers end up being completely useless is to have players forget that they have them. And the surest way to make that happen is to give people more than one new power at a time. That way you can make damn sure that players will manage to go the inaugural voyage of one of their new powers without ever getting around to using it. And then it can lose its luster and become simultaneously unfamiliar and unexciting. That's how you get powers forgotten and by extension make them completely useless.

An ability you don't use is just like an ability you can't use.

---

I'll grant that something should be done about getting people able to use the powers they gain in order to save the day like happens in literally all fiction. My suggestion is to have players gain new abilities dynamically in the middle of games as part of spending Narrative Imperative to take control of the story for a bit to make it a certainty that your new power is going to come up in the adventure it is introduced.

Just giving them out two or seven at a time in no way makes ability gains do what they are supposed to do: which is to make people feel like their character has achieved a greater impact on the story. It just makes things more confusing and harder to manage.

Levels do one thing and one thing only: they let you feel discrete power increases and they tell others what you can do.

That is not what they do at all. Levels forbid people from min/maxing and expanding RNG differences beyond what the system will allow. Levels make your offensive advancements come with defensive advancements and in that way everyone stays "tall enough" to ride the ride at each point.

But you know what? If you aren't engaging in Attack/AC arms races, that doesn't mean anything. If the RNG isn't diverging, there's nothing that levels bring to the equation. They are just getting your abilities two at a time half as often instead of one at a time twice as often. It's more confusing for literally no benefit.

Considering the very narrow scope of play available in Shadowrun, that works..... but in a setting with a larger scope sideways advancement has a limited shelf-life before it stops feeling like advancement at all.

So? The scope of a Shadowrun game is the same as the scope of any other game: it's the time it takes for a game to played before the GM has to move back to Prague or two of the major players break up with each other or someone gets a job or whatever. Every RPG has a definable and foreseeable end. And it is the same for all of them because it's a social reality rather than a game mechanical one.

So long as your game has the availability for more potential advancement than the game will in fact last, the game's advancement potential is indistinguishable from infinite. And if you allow tier hopping, if the game ever becomes stale as Adventurers, the players can become prices and play King or Mayor tier games until Complete Adventurer comes out.

-Username17

[opera]

I very much like the idea of levels + tiered powers as described by K; seems like a natural way to chart progression in a story to me. (Pardon the contentless me-too post... I'm a little drnka, as it were.)

[K]

Players are stuck with their new power. If they don't like it or it doesn't work, they might have to wait weeks for another. The only alternative is to let people trade out powers willy-nilly, and that's no better than just playing Magical Princess Teaparty. At least with two powers, you have a better shot at getting a power you like.

That's a complete non-argument. Give everyone two powers at once and one person will get two powers that are super useful, while another players gets only one or none at all. That shit happens. It has happened. It will happen again. And giving people lists of multiple powers in a giant lump sum they have to digest all at once doesn't make those discrepancies go away. It just makes things harder to digest.

The number one way to have powers end up being completely useless is to have players forget that they have them. And the surest way to make that happen is to give people more than one new power at a time. That way you can make damn sure that players will manage to go the inaugural voyage of one of their new powers without ever getting around to using it. And then it can lose its luster and become simultaneously unfamiliar and unexciting. That's how you get powers forgotten and by extension make them completely useless.

An ability you don't use is just like an ability you can't use.

Seriously? Your argument is "players are too stupid to remember two new powers per level."

THAT is an actual non-argument. People that stupid should not have characters. They should be making popcorn or rolling dice for monsters, but they have no part as players in a cooperative RPG.

I'll write RPGs for the people smart enough to remember two new things a month.

Levels do one thing and one thing only: they let you feel discrete power increases and they tell others what you can do.

That is not what they do at all. Levels forbid people from min/maxing and expanding RNG differences beyond what the system will allow. Levels make your offensive advancements come with defensive advancements and in that way everyone stays "tall enough" to ride the ride at each point.

But you know what? If you aren't engaging in Attack/AC arms races, that doesn't mean anything. If the RNG isn't diverging, there's nothing that levels bring to the equation. They are just getting your abilities two at a time half as often instead of one at a time twice as often. It's more confusing for literally no benefit.

Considering the very narrow scope of play available in Shadowrun, that works..... but in a setting with a larger scope sideways advancement has a limited shelf-life before it stops feeling like advancement at all.

So? The scope of a Shadowrun game is the same as the scope of any other game: it's the time it takes for a game to played before the GM has to move back to Prague or two of the major players break up with each other or someone gets a job or whatever. Every RPG has a definable and foreseeable end. And it is the same for all of them because it's a social reality rather than a game mechanical one.

So long as your game has the availability for more potential advancement than the game will in fact last, the game's advancement potential is indistinguishable from infinite. And if you allow tier hopping, if the game ever becomes stale as Adventurers, the players can become prices and play King or Mayor tier games until Complete Adventurer comes out.

Players won't agree to move onto a tier all at once. What will happen is two or three will get bored and want to move on, two will want to stay, and the game breaks up.

Pushing people along rails means that people who want to solve problems with their old abilities can do that and people who want to use the new ones can use those. At this point it doesn't even matter if players don't use their all tier abilities in every adventure because more options means more ways to complete the adventure in a way that individual players like. If one guy wants to stop the enemy army on Front A by diplomancing the commander and another player wants to stop the army on Front B by raising an army of the dead, then that's cool because both armies get defeated for the purposes of the adventure and the players got to do it their way.

Personally, I'm out of a game once I get ""Flame Bolt #4". Shadowrun is designed to end by petering off; it's not like you are ever going to run a multinational corp or turn into a dragon.... the scope of the game is too small for that and at best all you will ever be is a moderately successful criminal or maybe a band of government sponsored spooks who act like criminals.

But in fantasy RPG you really can expect to rule a kingdom, take over a cloud castle, or rule an army of the dead despite your beginning adventures as a Dung Farmer who fights goblins. Even if the campaign lasts a month before someone bones the DMs girlfriend, I'd like a chance to get some number of steps towards those goals before the game ends (and I think most people would agree).

[ckafrica]

I'm with Frank on levels vs. tiers. I'd much rather be getting a single ability twice as often than more less frequently. And rather than providing bigger numbers to hit and defend, I'd like to see more powerful abilities and advancement be more impressive in what they accomplish.

I think one option to consider for ability acquisition is to allow the acquisition to be postponed so that a player could choose an ability that he can use right away in specific situation where it is obviously effective. It doesn't prevent players from making stupid choices but it does prevent players from picking abilities which don't end up being useful for 5 sessions.


Levels are frankly just a sacred cow that need to be ground up into hamburgers

[Crissa]

Levels should have names because words convey more meaning than numbers, even while numbers give you more exactness to an experienced player.

-Crissa

[MartinHarper]

I'll write RPGs for the people smart enough to remember two new things a month.

What is the advantage of giving players two new things a month, rather than one new thing every two weeks?

[NativeJovian]

If one guy wants to stop the enemy army on Front A by diplomancing the commander and another player wants to stop the army on Front B by raising an army of the dead, then that's cool because both armies get defeated for the purposes of the adventure and the players got to do it their way.

The problem with this is that then you're playing different games. The diplomancer is chatting with Army A Commander and maybe rolling some dice for Charm Person saving throws or diplomacy skill checks, and the necromancer is raising an army of dead guys to fight Army B. Well and good; each player is playing using the skills he's interested to play the game he wants to play... but only half the time. While the DM is dealing with the diplomancer, the necromancer is waiting and getting bored and maybe wandering off to play Halo in the meantime and maybe not coming back when it's finally his turn again (and ditto for the diplomancer when the DM is dealing with the necromancer). At no point should you ever have to say to the players, "your character is useless here so just chill while other people do stuff". It's okay to have, say, a party face who does most of the in-character talking, but the other players still need to be there and feel involved so they don't lose interest. Dividing up the party -- either by actual location (ie "this half of the party is in the Imperial Capital while this half of the party cuts their way through the Jungle of Fear") or by role (ie "the stealthy half of the party is sneaking into the castle while the rest of you wait outside the walls") -- is always a terrible idea because it means someone isn't having any fun.

About levels: you have to have SOME sort of advancement mechanic, or else your players are going to get bored of their characters that never do anything new. You don't have to call them "levels" or award them via experience points gained by killing things, but you need SOMETHING. Whether it's class-based and level-based ("I take another level of Fighter, so I get the Merciless Beatdown ability!") or classless and point-based ("I have 6 character points to spend, so I'm going to use 5 of them to buy the Merciless Beatdown ability!") doesn't make a whole lot of difference.

[MGuy]

The problem with this is that then you're playing different games. The diplomancer is chatting with Army A Commander and maybe rolling some dice for Charm Person saving throws or diplomacy skill checks, and the necromancer is raising an army of dead guys to fight Army B. Well and good; each player is playing using the skills he's interested to play the game he wants to play... but only half the time. While the DM is dealing with the diplomancer, the necromancer is waiting and getting bored and maybe wandering off to play Halo in the meantime and maybe not coming back when it's finally his turn again (and ditto for the diplomancer when the DM is dealing with the necromancer). At no point should you ever have to say to the players, "your character is useless here so just chill while other people do stuff". It's okay to have, say, a party face who does most of the in-character talking, but the other players still need to be there and feel involved so they don't lose interest. Dividing up the party -- either by actual location (ie "this half of the party is in the Imperial Capital while this half of the party cuts their way through the Jungle of Fear") or by role (ie "the stealthy half of the party is sneaking into the castle while the rest of you wait outside the walls") -- is always a terrible idea because it means someone isn't having any fun.

Party splitting will happen whenever you give players who have different goals/ideas/styles etc the freedom to be different. Unless you force the players to all do the same things this is quite possible. If everyone is good at doing similar things (which would promote parties staying together) then player's won't feel unique and everything will boil down to who has the bigger bonuses. While if you have the stealth group go through their recon scene so that the front line fighters get to show off later then you will get good returns. I don't mind letting some people at the table talk amongst themselves or go off and do other things while I'm handling party splits. I just have to make sure that the game is so exciting that they want to come back and get their light as soon as possible.

[NativeJovian]

Well, sure, a certain amount of it is inevitable, but I don't think we want to encourage it, which is what K seems to be suggesting.

[RandomCasualty2]

Yeah, party splitting, especially if it's doing something as complex as raising an army and fighting with it, should probably be discouraged. At that point you're really just playing a separate game. I mean that's all well and cool if you run solo sessions for the two players... but I wouldn't want to have one PC wait at the table while the other shit is going on.

[MartinHarper]

If we're playing at the "Empire Zoom", then each army would be akin to a single monster. In that model, it's fine to have one PC making a diplomacy check against one army's Will defence, while another moves to the capital's graveyard and casts Summon Undead Horde, while a third casts Change Weather to cause the ground around the second army to bog down and become difficult terrain. And this is just one round.

[mean_liar]

I like K's idea. It's similar to something I've been working on but I can't seem to get to the mechanics part of it; I just have an ever-lengthening list of design concepts I want to hit.

Having each Tier (for this post I'll call it an Arena, as in an arena of play) contain a subset of Power Lists. For Combat, as example would be: one-on-one, hordes, anti-magic, NAD attacks, buffing, healing. Then each Power List would have a series of capabilities that scale with level (more damage, more targets, larger area, bigger effect). A character takes a List as primary but can pick cross-List once in a while. Everyone is playing in the same Arena and so no one feels left out for playing a courtier since they don't get a choice in the matter.

Then there's Arenas for Social interactions (Interrogation, Diplomacy, Carousing, Mind Control, etc), Mass Combat (Leaders of Men, Epic Heroism, War Magic), Empires (Religious, Governmental, NGOs, Mercantilism)...

You'd have to balance the powers of each list against each other, but after that the GMs main responsibility is to determine with the group when certain Arenas are activated and at what rate abilities off of the various Lists are acquired. It may be you take 1 Empire power at level 1, but you don't get your second until level 8, and the 3rd at 10 and then a normal progression afterwards.

Fundamentally you want everyone to play the same game at the same time and so I think Tier/Arena access has to be mandated, just to prevent someone from mining the shit out of Combat for a few levels before realizing he's been left behind.

You can toss in some "take any" slots for some further diversification, so that you have cross-pollination both within an Arena and between Arenas, so that characters aren't all entirely locked into their primary choices.