Secrets

I am continually amazed by just how influential the design of Dungeons & Dragons has been on nearly all roleplaying games that have followed in its wake. Aside from those games descended from or inspired by Chaosium's Basic Role-Playing, the vast majority of RPGs include rules for character advancement that make use of experience points in one form or another. Lest there be any confusion, by "experience points," I mean an abstract, numerical measure of a character's achievement the accumulation of which enables said character to improve his abilities or acquire new ones, whether in level-based "chunks" or by using them directly as currency.  

I was pondering this fact recently as I was working on the latest draft of Secrets of sha-Arthan. After a couple of periods of doubt, I've committed myself to a D&D-descended class-and-level design, because it's familiar and easy to use. The experience of refereeing House of Worms over the last eight years using the 1975 Empire of the Petal Throne rules – itself a D&D variant – confirms this to my satisfaction. Given all this, I had initially assumed, without much thought, that I would also be adopting a D&D-style experience system, right down to XP for defeating enemies and accumulating treasure. 

But, as I was revising my draft in light of playtest comments and suggestions, I began to wonder: do I need to use experience points at all? Or at least, do I need to use experience points in the same way as Dungeons & Dragons? The truth is, I've never had a problem with D&D's XP system. It does its just well and largely gets out of the way. Does it "make sense" from an in-game perspective? Kinda, sorta, if you squint the right way and don't ask too many probing questions. As I said, I'm largely fine with it and have used EPT's idiosyncratic version of it without much complaint from my players over the course of the campaign. That's why I was (am?) prepared to use it more or less as-is in Secrets of sha-Arthan.

But there was this little voice in the back of my mind telling me I could do better, telling me I could do something that fit both the sha-Arthan setting and the intended focus of game play, namely, the uncovering of secrets. Like Tékumel, which inspired it, sha-Arthan is an ancient world full of mysteries. Things are most definitely not what they seem and my goal from the beginning has been the creation and presentation of a fantasy setting in which unraveling its mysteries lies at the heart of things. Rather than merely delving into the depths for "more and bigger loot," I wanted to emphasize learning more about the setting and its history but in a way that was both approachable and valuable in-game.

Unfortunately, I must confess to being a bit stumped on how best to achieve these two goals. One of the perennial issues of any detail-rich setting, whether it be Glorantha, Tékumel, or Hârn, is degree to which those details become the setting rather than illuminate it. I know far too many self-professed "Tékumel fans" who never actually play in the setting; instead, their hobby consists of talking and thinking about the setting and its encyclopedic details rather than exploring them through play. That's something I do not wish to encourage with sha-Arthan – quite the opposite, in fact, which is precisely why I keep thinking about ways to square this particular circle. 

Here's an example of what I'm aiming for. Sorcery is a fact of sha-Arthan and has been for untold millennia but its workings are neither widely understood nor publicly taught. Spell formulae are thus secrets and player character sorcerers can only acquire additional ones through in-game activities, such as finding occult tomes or instruction crystals, joining a cult, or simply convincing another sorcerer to share his knowledge with the PC. Thus, to achieve a higher level, the character must do something in-game, such as, for example, learn a certain number of new spells through his own efforts. In effect, the character is actively involved in the acquisition of the power traditionally associated with gaining a new level and his player simultaneously learns a bit more about the setting in the process.

I very much like this idea and think it opens up a lot of possibilities, but it'll require a lot more work from the referee, who has to consider where the necessary secrets are located within his own campaign, not to mention from me, who has to lay this all out in a way that is easily intelligible to others. There's also the fact that the secrets necessary for every character class to gain levels are as straightforward as they are for sorcerers or adepts, whose level-based abilities derived from spells or psychic disciplines and are, therefore, easier to present as in-game knowledge. What about martial warriors or persuasive scions, to say nothing of the nonhuman Chenot, Ga'andrin, or Jalaka? How do I make a secrets-based advancement system work for them? 

I have little doubt I'll eventually find a way to make this idea work. At the moment, though, it's proving a little vexing, because I can clearly see where I want to go with the game. I just don't – yet – know how to get there.