Having extensively played Dungeons & Dragons in one form or another – including Empire of the Petal Throne, which is clearly derived from D&D – for more than four decades now, I've pretty well made my peace with its idiosyncrasies. That said, there is one aspect of the game that increasingly vexes me and that's the way that experience points and levels interact with one another.
One of the first things you'll notice if you take a look at an experience table for any class in any edition of D&D is that, as level increases, so too do hit points. Glancing at other charts indexed to level reveals that nearly every important mechanical feature of a class, such as its combat effectiveness, saving throws, spell and other abilities, likewise increase in step with level increases. 
While it's certainly simpler to tie every ability to a character's level, it doesn't make much sense. Logically – to the extent that word has any meaning in this context – abilities ought to go up separately, as a character makes use of them and thereby becomes better at using them or through study and practice. Of course, this is not how D&D works or was ever intended to work. I don't blame the game for not conforming to this specific understanding of experience.
While it's certainly simpler to tie every ability to a character's level, it doesn't make much sense. Logically – to the extent that word has any meaning in this context – abilities ought to go up separately, as a character makes use of them and thereby becomes better at using them or through study and practice. Of course, this is not how D&D works or was ever intended to work. I don't blame the game for not conforming to this specific understanding of experience.In my House of Worms campaign, which uses Empire of the Petal Throne, this issue has reared its head several times. Unlike D&D, EPT includes a rudimentary skill system that delineates the areas of knowledge a character knows at the start of his career. In addition, as the character gains levels, he has the opportunity to acquire new skills, in addition to the more usual D&D-ish benefits of more hit points, greater combat effectiveness, etc. But what if a character wants to pick up a new skill outside of a level increase? This is an issue, because level increases in EPT occur much more slowly than in D&D. Furthermore, among the possible skills are things like foreign languages that ought to be learnable simply by seeking out a tutor or by spending enough time in a foreign land among native speakers to develop some degree of fluency. (To be fair, this is also an issue in D&D, which ties language acquisition to Intelligence score.)
In my campaign, I allowed characters to acquire new skills (and spells) by spending time and money to study with someone capable of teaching them. This made logical sense to me, since that's how people acquire new skills in the real world. It was also attractive as part of the game, because it immersed the characters further in the setting. If, for example, they wanted to learn the Livyáni language prior to their visit to that far-off land, they'd need to find and hire an NPC to teach them. If one of them wanted to learn the sphere of impermeable quiescence spell, he'd need to visit the Temple of Sárku and cajole one of its sorcerers into instructing him in its intricacies. All of this led to a greater connection to the people and institutions of the setting, which I consider important to the long-term success of the campaign.
But none of this, strictly speaking, is allowed by the game. More to the point, it's contrary to the way skill acquisition is presented in the Empire of the Petal Throne rulebook, which ties it to level advancement, just like hit points or saving throws. Now, obviously, I'm well within my rights as the referee to change anything in the rulebook I want and have done so without any qualms. However, that doesn't change the fact that what I am doing – detaching a level-based ability from levels – is the camel's nose under the tent for uncoupling experience gain, level advancement, and ability improvement.
I'm by no means opposed to this line of thought. Indeed, I'm rather well disposed toward it, especially of late. At the same time, there's no denying that it inevitably leads to some places I'm not sure Dungeons & Dragons (and games based on its model, like EPT) can go very far. That might explain why I find myself looking longingly at Basic Role-Playing and its descendants for inspiration, even though I am instinctively more inclined toward the D&D approach to most things, given its relative simplicity for newcomers.
I'd be very interested in hearing others' thoughts on this matter, particularly from those who've wrestled with it in their own campaigns.
I suspect that a large part of Gygax's motivation in putting training time into AD&D was to explain how all these things are connected to leveling up. The other, of course, was to take money and game time off the player's hands.
ReplyDeleteI think the sort of renaissance men you get by allowing skills and languages to be picked up too freely are exactly the sort of people who would be too busy to go on adventures, and am therefore quite content with the simplicity of the class system.
For the last decade or so, I have come to understand singular character levels, when intended as a general measure of character effectiveness, as a measure of what we might call "protagonism" rather than skill or anything like that. I think that gaining new character abilities should be slightly decoupled from level, perhaps by adopting a system similar to the "college courses" of Top Secret, found in an issue of Dragon magazine then in the Top Secret Companion. Characters/players would pay in-game money and spend time and get a new ability, like codebreaking or skydiving or whatever. The courses would also affect the various stats of the character, but that was usually a secondary effect.
ReplyDeleteBut character levels shouldn't be thought of as "degree of skill". It's more like tracking how much Glory a character has in Pendragon.
I understand and like your point - level as glory or reputation and therefore hit points as an abstract form of toughness or luck.
DeleteI find it interesting you call out " the D&D approach to most things, given its relative simplicity for newcomers", as this issue with skills and levels was one of the main stumbling blocks for me as a newcomer to D&D! Ironic, eh?
ReplyDeleteActually, I have been thinking that maybe the way online games like WoW and suchlike use levels, having trucksloads of them, is one way to go? Maybe have more levels, and not make each one such a bit deal? It would "flatten out the stairs" a bit, so to speak. It probably has other to me unforeseen circumstances, I bet.
If by some oversight you have not looked at Rolemaster' Character Law, I recommend it for just the sort of skill progression mechanic I believe you may be inspired by. CL uses levels, but has characters work on the skills they will advance when reaching the next level. It also covers learning skill outside the class core list.
ReplyDeleteCheers!
In Adventures in Middle Earth (D&D 5e based), feats have been recast as Virtues. Many virtues have "levels" (usually 3) that can be improved independently of the character's level. The basic requirement is spending downtime.
ReplyDeleteIn classic D&D, languages learned are not level dependent. For that matter the # of henchman you can have is also not level dependent. If you haven't learned all your languages or if you haven't recruited all your henchmen, then you can do so independently of the character's level.
Personally I view level as a mark of experience. A shorthand for what would be a certain point range in GURPS. Apprentices are 1st to 2nd, journeymen start at 3rd, masters at 6th and so on.
But not all skills or things that can be learn are subject to the learning curve of learning one's profession. So if that is a concern then have a mechanism for those things that work independently of level or only lightly touched by level like Virtues in AiME.
Realism vs game play. Gary usually leaned in the direction of game play, the folks that wrote Aftermath (as one example) leaned towards realism. Only time will tell which the world prefers but I think D&D is in the lead.
ReplyDeleteI've wrestled with the same issues, and now prefer to think of character levels as a measure of a character's "heroic status" rather than anything else (sounds similar to faoladh's "protagonism" scale). In particular, Chainmail's named Fighter levels make this very clear: Hero, Superhero, etc. Viewed this way the languages, riding, blacksmithing, etc. skills should be completely independent of a character's "level", and so I much prefer to have an elastic and broad "background", comprising species, culture, upbringing, etc. and then a simple task resolution system to adjudicate such non-heroic abilities. Heroic abilities comprise class abilities, combat, HP, magic and saving throws.
ReplyDeleteYeah that's pretty much what I'm thinking of. I'd add that the heroic guy is also a better blacksmith, but not because of actual training. It's because the hero is a Hero. It's how important they are to the story (without going all the way in that direction to "story is most important", because it's not).
DeleteNow comes the question we can ask: how important is it to do levels at all once we discard "open table" style campaigns? If all of the players have characters of about the same level, why are we tracking this any more at all? All of the advice (even the implicit advice in things like giving a level range for adventures) is to scale up encounters to match the players' characters, so why inflate the characters in the first place?
I don't think of it as inflation so much as scaling: a hero is worth 4 regular fighters, a superhero 8, a wizard more powerful than a seer, etc. It gives one a quick metric, much like skill systems do with scaling their skill levels to make game tasks easier. Whether that's the best way to measure a character's "heroic ability" is debatable.
DeleteAll of that is fine in a game with many characters of differing ability. When the game is a single, unitary party of adventurers, the purpose of closing off some content at the beginning (and for that matter, of making certain content obsolete later on) seems less valuable or even unreasonable. I mean, I'm sure that it's possible to justify it after the fact, but starting the game saying, "Sure, slaying dragons is cool, and in fact the game is partly named after that, but you can't fight dragons effectively until you kill a lot of rats and get a bunch of loot first, or whatever other way we've come up with to throttle your character's heroism," seems a bit of a bait and switch in the context of the ways games are played today. No matter what you call it - increase, inflation, scaling, whatever - it arbitrarily cuts off adventure, to the point that many groups structured as what we might call the "latter-day method"* just arbitrarily start at higher level anyway.
Delete*I'm being perhaps unfairly dismissive here. If I were creating an actual typology, I might in fact call it something like the "common method", as opposed to things like the "original method" (or, to avoid the appearance of advocacy and to give it a more descriptive name, the "open-table method") or the "troupe method".
I'm not following the concern: any game which has "power scales" is inevitably going to have to deal with a mismatch in scale between PCs and the game challenges. One way of dealing with that is to ignore it (i.e., whatever random scale challenge comes up in play is what it is, just deal with it) or to eliminate it (i.e., scale everything in a game to match the PCs' scale). Games like Classic Traveller fix this by having a very narrow scale, games like BECMI fix it by having a very broad scale.
DeleteI think you are following what I'm getting at, since you just paraphrased a lot of it. I don't know that it's worth calling it a "concern", though, just an observation that the question deserves to be asked: what is the point of levels if they aren't being used to create gaps of effectiveness between characters in the campaign? If all we're doing is trading fighting hordes of 1HD orcs at level 1 for fighting hordes of 2HD great orcs at level 2, what was the point of getting that second level?
DeleteOkay, now that I think I understand the observation, my best guess is that the PC levels must be measured against the demographics. In a level-based game like D&D it's useful to know how many 1st-level NPCs, 2nd-level NPCs, etc. there are in a setting. I know I've seen a few such demographic analyses, and find them useful, and especially when telling the players "Your 1st-level PC is a 1-in-20 exception to the rule that the vast majority of people are 0-level nobodies." In light of that kind of demographic assumption it should not be the default case that just because a PC levels up, so will the opposition. That may be a common case, but I'd argue it should not be.
DeleteThat seems like an excellent summation, but it also points out that, in that case, there needs to be more discussion about those demographic issues. There's going to be a difference between that "1 in 20" and Gygax's "1 in 100" (in the DMG, though he's more forgiving of nonhumans with levels for once, making them 1 in 50 of that population). Because, yeah, for levels to be important as a part of a setting rather than as part of a game, you (as the DM/Referee/whatever) have to know how the setting distributes them, even if only to realize that you are choosing to distribute them arbitrarily.
DeleteOne of the things that I like about "Swords & Six-Siders" is that it is essentially a class/level system until level 6 and then essentially turns into a 'skill-based' system - meaning that after 6th level you can buy anything with your experience points you want.
ReplyDeleteI read the BRP fast play yesterday for the same reasons. I think wotc is trying to imitate skill based advancement with going back to feats (feats being larger chunks of power than skills). The idea must be in the zeitgeist.
ReplyDeleteOne thought on EPT in particular - doesn't level somewhat drive social status, going from outsider to gradually working into the culture. Not being able to learn new languages until one is more integrated in the culture makes a certain amount of sense.
ReplyDeleteThat said, yes, this is a problem with class and level systems forcing very granular advancement.
This isn't quite such a problem in Cold Iron as I use an Expertise Level to grant additional skill points, particularly to be used for non-combat skills. In theory it's trainable. I haven't worked out all the details. There's also the original rules where fighter level basically grants ONE free skill. All other skills are learned independently and can be trained. I find that a bit restrictive so I added skill points for fighter levels, and to make things run smoother, added the Expertise Level.
In Bushido, the skills are separate from, but helped by, the character class, so anyone can learn any skill. Level adds to any "class" skills and grants more hit points, more effective magic, and a few other things.
And of course, my other favorite RPG is RuneQuest.
Ultimately I think that if I'm going to run a version of D&D, I'd be looking at a game where skills are less important and focus on the class archetypes.
Thank you for reminding me about Bushido's approach, which might spark some ideas about how to proceed.
DeleteI was going to mention Bushido as well. Levels are a bit différent, both representing experience and personal and perceived honnor (you can lose Levels by losing On). Gaining skills is made through training, time and money with factored by having a good masters joining school, etc. There is also a neat job mechanic if one needs money, solved abstractions but with the possibility of being interrupted by a social obligation.
DeleteI am reminded of the system presented in The Arcanum RPG, which had levels and XP, but I think you could spend XP for things like skills or other classes abilities.
ReplyDelete"But none of this, strictly speaking, is allowed by the game. More to the point, it's contrary to the way skill acquisition is presented in the Empire of the Petal Throne rulebook, which ties it to level advancement, just like hit points or saving throws."
ReplyDeleteWe've both done various interpolations of the rules in Empire of the Petal Throne, but here's an interesting quote from Sec. 421: "Skills may also be 'learned' in the game itself. A Group I skill costs 1,000 gold Káitars (paid to the clan-chief of the profession), plus two game months of time to learn it. A Group II skill costs 5,000 K., plus four months of game time. A payment of 10,000 K. plus 6 months is required for a Group III skill. Players must first find the clan-chief at the Palace of the Realm in a major city (60 percent chance for Group I, 40 percent chance for Group II, and 20 percent chance for Group III)."
It seems to me that while this deals specifically with so-called "Original Skills" there's no reason that system cannot be used for learning new spells or magic-user/priest "Professional Skills" (which are really spells under a different name). I think that's what you were describing in your post, and I'm minded to think that's what was intended, if only for the fact that the "spell success" table is also used for success in using skills.