[Echelon A&A] Character advancement and class(less) problem.
Richard:
Hello chaps.
I seem to have hit a devil of a quandary in the development of my game (Echelon, currently sitting in a rather rough alpha state at http://www.latech.co.uk/rpg ) concerning character advancement.
I have settled on the 'currency' of advancement - time - probably to be measured in weeks, although in the current draft it's measured in hours.
However, I have yet to establish how to structure the advancement. I would love to go classless, but I am worried that doing this will yield unacceptable levels of munchkinism.
I have also thought about splitting the advancement structures for physical skills, knowledge and trades in three separate whatevers as well, to encourage at least learning on the part of characters.
Help?
BubbaBrown:
Nothing like setting up an economy.
Munchkinism is going to happen one way or another after a certain point. You can certainly make it less desirable. Sectioning off components helps a bit, especially if you make mutually opposing components affect the cost of the other or be in the same section as each other. This way they'll have the share the same points between the two rather than being able to dedicate separate point pools to each.
If you are using a point system, you'll have to set the price to encourage the behavior you want. Static costs are good for things that you don't mind players buying multiples of. Increasing costs are good to place on items which are nice to have, but you don't want the players to solely dump everything into repeatedly without considering the merits of other aspects.
You'll want to do an "Importance Weight Tally" of the upgradable aspects of a character. List these aspects and find out how much they affect a character's ability to operate and the importance of such. You'll quickly locate the bits you want to guard from misuse and it'll help in determining how you want to "price" them. The most valuable are best to put an increasing cost upon. This cost can be based on the current value of the aspect or just how many times it has been upgraded. Pick one reason and stick with it to avoid confusion. Cost based on current score is great for allowing players to caught up less than impressive aspects, but cost based on number of upgrades is good to encourage players to be careful in what they upgrade and how they construct characters. Increasing linearly is great for nice to have items, and exponential is perfect for REALLY NICE to have items you don't want players to over capitalize on.
Pardon if the advice is pretty general, but the rest is tweaking and experimentation to form the feel of the game you want to cultivate.
Callan S.:
Hi Richard,
The answer might be in the why of why you are having character advancement at all? What are you trying to get at with it?
Or; if your just doing character advancement because everyone else does, then it the situation becomes harder - it's like trying to repair a mechanism you didn't even want in the first place.
Daniel36:
Make them choose a "Career Path" or two, which is far from the same as a "class", which gives them access to career specific skills, that they need to train at a facility that is built specifically for their career. We will call those schools for the time being, and studying for a skill takes 1 week for the first level, 2 weeks for the next, etcetera.
How you go about career choosing would be another matter which I will leave to rest until you tell me you are interested in the who's and what's.
Besides that, you can have non-career specific skills such as special attacks or spells, that can also be taught at a school, but these are for each and every character. I personally hate exp. points, I think they are stupid, and I would personally make them pay cash to advance, since they are training their skills in a school, which would need the cash to stay open for business. That's what I would do. Hope it helps.
Richard:
Quote from: BubbaBrown on September 11, 2011, 10:30:37 PM
Nothing like setting up an economy.
Munchkinism is going to happen one way or another after a certain point. You can certainly make it less desirable. Sectioning off components helps a bit, especially if you make mutually opposing components affect the cost of the other or be in the same section as each other. This way they'll have the share the same points between the two rather than being able to dedicate separate point pools to each.
If you are using a point system, you'll have to set the price to encourage the behavior you want. Static costs are good for things that you don't mind players buying multiples of. Increasing costs are good to place on items which are nice to have, but you don't want the players to solely dump everything into repeatedly without considering the merits of other aspects.
You'll want to do an "Importance Weight Tally" of the upgradable aspects of a character. List these aspects and find out how much they affect a character's ability to operate and the importance of such. You'll quickly locate the bits you want to guard from misuse and it'll help in determining how you want to "price" them. The most valuable are best to put an increasing cost upon. This cost can be based on the current value of the aspect or just how many times it has been upgraded. Pick one reason and stick with it to avoid confusion. Cost based on current score is great for allowing players to caught up less than impressive aspects, but cost based on number of upgrades is good to encourage players to be careful in what they upgrade and how they construct characters. Increasing linearly is great for nice to have items, and exponential is perfect for REALLY NICE to have items you don't want players to over capitalize on.
Pardon if the advice is pretty general, but the rest is tweaking and experimentation to form the feel of the game you want to cultivate.
The fact that your answer is pretty general is a reflect of my pretty general question - so no appologies needed.
Like I mentioned, I'm not going to be using a points system, but rather the time that has passed in-character (with some GM fudge of course - "You have spent so long reading and learning this ancient language over the past week that you gain a +1 bonus" etc.)
I'm not too worried about efforts at character optimisation, as opposed to outright munchkinism.
The linear advancement of skill bonuses (+1, +2, ... +n) will be roughly exponential. A +1 bonus will be much easier to attain than say a +4, and hugely less expensive in time terms than +9 (which is the max presently). For clarification, it's primarily the relationship between the skills that I'm having the brain-bleed over.
I've been shown a rather neat system for ensuring a broad mix of skills that I'm toying with implementing: for every skill of level n, there must be 2 skills of level n-1 to support it. I'd need to ensure that I have enough skills for this to work of course.
Could you give an example of this Importance Weight Tally thingy that you refer to? I think I understand what you're referring to, but I've never seen such a logic device used in practice before.
Quote from: Callan S. on September 11, 2011, 11:15:59 PM
Hi Richard,
The answer might be in the why of why you are having character advancement at all? What are you trying to get at with it?
Or; if your just doing character advancement because everyone else does, then it the situation becomes harder - it's like trying to repair a mechanism you didn't even want in the first place.
The answer to that query is both reward and character evolution. Reward for the players who can see their character advancing, and because people learn stuff. Primarily it's for character evolution.
Quote from: Daniel36 on September 12, 2011, 02:37:16 AM
Make them choose a "Career Path" or two, which is far from the same as a "class", which gives them access to career specific skills, that they need to train at a facility that is built specifically for their career. We will call those schools for the time being, and studying for a skill takes 1 week for the first level, 2 weeks for the next, etcetera.
How you go about career choosing would be another matter which I will leave to rest until you tell me you are interested in the who's and what's.
Besides that, you can have non-career specific skills such as special attacks or spells, that can also be taught at a school, but these are for each and every character. I personally hate exp. points, I think they are stupid, and I would personally make them pay cash to advance, since they are training their skills in a school, which would need the cash to stay open for business. That's what I would do. Hope it helps.
Thanks for the ideas! I like the idea of needing money for training.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page