Posts Tagged ‘character development’

I was going through some very old gaming files from when I was at college and came across some notes on designing the difficulty of encounters in a tabletop role playing game. A few weeks ago I questioned if Role Playing Games Need XP and the notes reminded me that in a game with experience the characters can effectively not develop. That sounds like a contradiction but it can happen and it can be a problem. It happens when the difficulty faced by characters increases at the same rate as the characters improve and this can be frustrating for players.

In most table top RPGs experience, and character development happens between adventures characters’ capability develop something like this:

Character Capability against time (blue vertical lines represent the end of adventures)

A game with linear encounter difficulty is one where as the characters abilities increase so does the difficulty of the encounters they face. The characters may gain some advantage; they may hit their enemies harder or more often and may have more hit points. Unfortunately their opponents also now hit harder, more often and have more hit points. In its purest form every encounter has the same chance of their succeeding, as the last for characters. In fact, apart from a little colour in their encounters, they might as well have not improved at all and their opponents could have remained at the same power too.

Linear Difficulty over time (blue vertical lines represent the end of adventures)

So difficulty and capability always keep step with each other…

Capability and Linear Difficulty (blue vertical lines represent the end of adventures)

Some games virtually encourage this style of adventure design by including charts or advice to allow referees to work out the ideal encounter for a group of X players of level Y to face. Charts and tables like that serve a useful purpose in helping new referees and those unfamiliar with a game to find their feet when designing encounters. The risk of building an encounter that will obliterate a group or underwhelm them is significantly reduced without having to resort to dice fudging or deus ex machina. There is a real risk of boredom if this type of difficulty progression is slavishly applied.

Others virtually rule out easy adversaries – I read one rulebook recently (forgive me I can’t remember which one) that said all “easy” encounters where the characters were guaranteed success should be role played rather than roll played. While I agree with that generally (although I hate the phrase roll play and its derivatives) doing this all the time means the players can never feel how powerful they are in a crunchy way.

I’m going to leave this here for now but I’ll be back soon with some other kinds of difficulty progression and some thoughts on one of the worst game I ever played in.

Update: Part 2 is now available Variations on the Difficulty Theme.

When making rules for a role playing game there is the ongoing balancing act between narrative and simulation.  Both of which ultimately need to create fun.  At one extreme you’ve a game like Over the Edge with very lightweight rule system and at the other end you’ve got rules heavy, simulation game like Rolemaster.  Both have their place and both have advantages and disadvantages.  A rules light game can be as hard to run (harder in some ways for a novice) than a rules heavy game.

When I wrote Under Stairs Over Stairs I deliberately decided that character development should be based on a character’s age not on how many fights they had been in.  However over the years some of the feedback I’ve had suggests some players would prefer an experience system.  They’re just more comfortable with games that keep the elements most games have like Statistics, Skills, Combat Rules, Experience Rules and buying equipment with cash.  The further a game moves from the comfort zone the less they like the sound of it.

Simulating an episodic TV shows before the story arc era of shows like Babylon 5 and Buffy the Vampire Slayer presents an interesting dilemma.  In that era, where episodic and serial TV shows were clearly separate, characters didn’t develop much from one episode to the other.  There were good reasons for this: channels could show the episodes in any order and repeat them in any order without having to worry about it.  Writers didn’t need coordinating so the story line maintained continuity.  Crucially it was felt the audience could miss an episode and then start watching again.

So in the game I’m running I’ve been talking to the players about how we can simulate this narrative style in-game since the setting is style after episodic TV shows.  Traditional experience systems see XP awarded and characters improving from adventure to adventure.  The game has that kind of system at the moment.  Episodic TV didn’t see characters changing and growing.  They usually began as fully formed heroes, at least once the pilot episode set them up, and then carried on in the same way for the rest of their dramatic lives.

I’ve been considering a few different approaches to take to this.  The first is simply to not bother with XP.  The second is to not bother with XP but to allow players to reshape their characters a little between episodes by moving skills or stats round till they are happy with the balance.    A slight variation on these possibilities is to give the players more points when creating their character’s so they start out better.  Many games are designed with the idea that the characters will become more powerful and thus deal with bigger challenges as time goes on so this would balance that out.

Another thought is to use XP but instead use it to buy prominence in an episode’s story or to buy central casting in the next episode.  I’ve seen this in a few games – role buying in Hong Kong Action Theatre springs immediately to mind.  I’m wondering if a system that allows the players to buy into the story could work. A little XP would net them a part in the adventure’s B plot.  A bit more would buy them a connection with a character in the story or being in the right (or wrong) place at the right time.  A really big spend in advance of the adventure would let them buy a pivotal position in the next adventure.

So would throwing out XP or using it in a different way make you less likely to be interested in a game?  How would you feel about buying a bigger role for your character in a game?