Levels - How about two-dimensional advancement?

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

A think I have been toying with was "two-dimensional" advancement.
Characters can basically grow in two ways in most games:
1) Their statistics "increase" - your BAB goes up, your strength score increases, you add another skill rank or something.
2) The character gains a new ability - you learn a new skill, you pick a feat.

There are some overlaps in most games, since most basically don't distinguish between these two aspects. But still, this might be something to change about in games.

D&D always mixed these two, except in one special case:
Wizards learning new spells. You can learn a new spell (but not a new level of spell) by getting a scroll or something similar to learn it.
4E does this with rituals.

4E (and 3e PHB 2) have "retraining" rules, which are a little bit like this idea.

Using 4E as a basis:
- As you gain levels, you gain your half level bonus to everything, improve your ability scores, and you gain new power slots.
- Parallel to that, you learn new feats (in your level range, for example your tier), and you learn new powers.

A more point based game might use this more "loose" rules:
- You have a maximum rank for skills that you can increase by gaining experience.
- With training, you can learn new skills or improve existing ones, but you can't increase them over you maximum rank.

The distinction I would made would be "training" vs "experience". Training can be done in the safe comfort of a training ground. Training might cost you money or require a teacher. But if you are "out in the field", you can gain experience. And experience really means you deepen your abilities and learn things that training just can't teach you.

Experience gives you power, Training gives you versatility. Now, versatility to some extent is power, but it it still gives you a certain upper limit. Having a +5 modifier to all skill checks thanks to training is nice, but sometimes you really want a +10 modifier to Diplomacy, and that's why you still need experience.

Question is - how do you gain training, how do you gain experience?
The easiest way in D&D might be to give experience as usual - kill monsters, take their stuff, complete puzzles. Training would require money to be spent, and that's it.
But one could go a different route.
Fulfilling certain camapign or character goals (Quests?) could award XP. Killing monsters is basically training. Or maybe it is a mix of both? You get more training for weaker monsters or easy encounters, and more XP for powerful monsters or difficult encounters.
Quests might also be a way to access certain training - a rare ritual, a trainer that improves your skill.

In videogames, one might gain XP for solving quests and reaching certain milestones in the game world. You gain "TP" for what in most games exist as "grinding".

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Finally - why bother?

Good question. I think the distinction between "versatility" and "power" can be useful. It provides a better way to balance characters in games that allow a more free-form way to advance characters. Many point-buy games suffer from the fact that versatile characters lack power. You might be able to create "soft" rules on versatility and power to keep a balance. For example, you could say every character has maybe 4 core skills (a combat skill, a social skill, a knowledge skill and a "general adventuring" skill) that always improve with your characters power, but in the meantime you can freely decide how much you specialize and how much you go into your versatility. This way there is always one surefireway to contribute (rely on your core skill), but you have still ways to distinguish youself from others.

In a level & class based games, this might provide better ways to handle "multiclassing", and would also allow to stop or slow down level advancement (because you feel best at a certain power level for example) without giving up character advancement as a whole.

I think E6 is a good example for this - Gain raw power over 6 levels, then just broaden your abilities.
One could do something similar to D&D 4E tiers - people stop at level 10, 20 or 30, and then just get new feats of their tier and new powers of their existing levels which they can switch around each day or each encounter.

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So, what do you think? Could such a method work? Are their games that already use this concept? What would you do with this idea?

 

[Mallus]

Mutants and Masterminds does something like this, and rather elegantly.

 

[Prisoner6]

This reminds me of Runequest or the CRPG Wizardy (6,7, and 8) where each time you use a skill, there is a chance that the skill advances on its own, regardless of level. So, for example, you character might have a "sword skill". Each time he used his sword there would be a chance that his sword skill might improve. In Runequest the evaluation was done at the end of the adventure, so your character couldn't improve his sword skill 22 times during a single combat. CRPGs can check continuously, however, since it's not a bookkeeping nightmare.

 

[I'm A Banana]

The basic idea of an X and Y axis for advancement is a pretty good one. Ultimately, for FFZ, I disregarded it because that extra axis didn't mean much in a PnP game where "grinding" isn't really an option. Levels in FFZ give you breadth AND depth, at the same time, mostly because of the chronology factor: FFZ wants you to have a fully realized character a few sessions, while in a game like D&D perhaps you have the option of realizing the character over longer periods of play time.

The switching is nice but adds some verisimilitude issues into play. This isn't necessarily a problem for all games, but it might be an issue for more narrative games that need a more believable world and more consistent character powers.

 

[jasonbostwick]

One useful way of separating Vertical and Horizontal advancement would be to use the two main 'reward' systems already built into D&D; Treasure and XP.

In 4e (and earlier editions), both reward systems contribute to both types of advancement. The levels acquired through XP gain grant both numerical bonuses as well as new powers to use, and magic items include both +3 Flaming Longswords and Bag's of Holding.

A good example of a game that seperates advancement (with XP being used exclusively for horizontal, and treasure being used only for vertical) is the Fable series. Defeating enemies and training with the various fighting styles grants you experience to develop new ways to use your skills (new spells, sword techniques), while treasure is used to obtain better quality weapons.

 

[Cryptos]

White Wolf, for old WoD and also new, also suggests that a storyteller can do something similar in terms of rewards. You can give out generic experience that a character can spend on anything, or you can give out experience that can only be spent on specific things such as skills you've used in play, stuff you've practiced, things someone might be able to teach you. For instance, you might award a Mage with experience specifically for learning new rotes (formulated spells) which they would have to learn from a mentor or a grimoire, or you might award someone experience that can only be spent on skills they used during gameplay, or in a blurb I was just re-reading about converting a mortal character with psychic merits into a Vampire, it suggests converting those merits into experience that can only be spent on psychic-like Vampire disciplines: Auspex, Dominate, etc.

Both the old and new systems have always been pretty flexible in that they don't just give you, say 80 experience points for killing that goblin, but rather suggest a general guideline (and only a guideline) of one experience point per chapter, plus one for resolving a plot or story, plus bonus rewards of different types as a storyteller sees fit: roleplay XP, training XP, XP for giving yourself drawbacks the storyteller can exploit or for overcoming extreme circumstances, or whatever the storyteller wants to hand out XP for.

But I've found that having the ability to say, "This experience goes into a seperate pool for you to spend on X" does a lot to add to the immersiveness of character development. It's always good to get generic XP that you can spent willy-nilly, but it's also kind of interesting to say that you're only going to allow players to spend XP (or a chunk of it) on things they actually used or practiced during the game... it gets people using their skills and abilities in more ways more often, thinking about trying everything their character would try. My storyteller in an old Vampire chronicle did this... we could only improve on things with in-game justification as to why the character should get better at it. You wound up having players come up with activities for their characters to be involved in (taking a class, researching something, engaging in a sport or activity, actually practicing non-story related larceny rather than just calling themselves a 'thief', etc) and working it into the game. He'd then also give us generic bonus XP when our play warranted it.

It's easier to do in systems where character building is point buy or primarily point buy: Hero, M&M, WoD, etc. You can make the points or experience you reward represent anything that goes into building a character... skill XP, power XP, etc.

I think one interesting way to do it in a level based system could be to take what 4e has done a step further and completely divorce combat abilities and basic attributes from things like skills, rituals, and perhaps some types of feats (skill feats, things like linguist, etc.) Let the level-based advancement handle the combat side and then let DMs reward points for players to invest on the other, non-combat side.

 

[Umbran]

Can it be done, sure.

Do you really want to do it? That, I'm not so sure of, especially with 4e. If I wanted to do this sort of thing, I'd probably work with a game that was more designed for it in the first place. A point-buy system would be far better - or even 3e, that has more loose multiclassing options.

But not that the loose multiclassing (or more flexible advancement, in general) gives the player far more ability to either min/max or shoot themselves in the foot. Everyone crows about how a 3e Wizard/Fighter of evenly distributed levels is inefficient, compared to a straight wizard or straight fighter. Same logic applies here.

Splitting up the ways characters can advance is a good way to lose track of how tough they are. One of the gains the GM gets from the way 4e does things is having a good clue how much punishment the characters can deal out and take. The more variability in advancement, the less grasp the GM has - and that can lead to either more work in adventure design, or adventures that are accidentally not well-suited to the party.

 

[steenan]

I agree that 4e is not a good starting point for two-dimensional advancement.

But the idea, in itself, seems very interesting - and much better for game balance (necessary in a gamist system) than splitting resources. The important part is keeping the horizontal advancement from becoming vertical through combos and synergies. That is what made 3e prcs a min-maxer's wet dream - picking abilities from different classes and stacking them one on top of another. If horizontal advancement is just that, a widening of options without increasing effectiveness, there won't be similar problems.

 

[jmucchiello]

Back when I had free time, I started a game design where characteristics (str, dex, etc) were two-dimensional. Each of your characteristics had two values, one for raw talent and one for experience. So you could have two strong guys, one with great talent was great at lifting stuff but lacked experience using his talent in combat. The other couldn't bench press a house but could apply leverage to maximum effect in combat.

I never did get past creating the task resolution system though. It was called Poly-3 and it used the 5 polyhedral dice other than the d20 . The smaller the die, the more talent you had. The more experience you had, the more dice you rolled. When resolving a task, you rolled the required dice and any die showing a number less than or equal to 3 (thus Poly-3) was counted as a success. Some tasks would need only one success (and thus any level of experience could succeed) while others needs more successes. The more talented you were, the smaller the number of die results that were failures. d4 talents succeed 75% of the time while d12 talents succeed only 25% of the time. Simple, elegant and it made all the polyhedrals (except the d20) useful.

This probably isn't helpful though if you require a D&D solution.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Back when I had free time, I started a game design where characteristics (str, dex, etc) were two-dimensional. Each of your characteristics had two values, one for raw talent and one for experience. So you could have two strong guys, one with great talent was great at lifting stuff but lacked experience using his talent in combat. The other couldn't bench press a house but could apply leverage to maximum effect in combat.

I never did get past creating the task resolution system though. It was called Poly-3 and it used the 5 polyhedral dice other than the d20 . The smaller the die, the more talent you had. The more experience you had, the more dice you rolled. When resolving a task, you rolled the required dice and any die showing a number less than or equal to 3 (thus Poly-3) was counted as a success. Some tasks would need only one success (and thus any level of experience could succeed) while others needs more successes. The more talented you were, the smaller the number of die results that were failures. d4 talents succeed 75% of the time while d12 talents succeed only 25% of the time. Simple, elegant and it made all the polyhedrals (except the d20) useful.

An interesting idea!
Mine was to base all dice rolls on 2d10. Your experience was added as a static number. Training would allow you to roll more then 2d10 and add the highest two. Training basically got you a certain degree of reliability (you will rarely get a subpar result), but only real experience could make you reach new heights.

A variant system I had in mind would use experience as a static modifier and depending on your training in a skill, the dice were affected. Untrained characters roll only 1d10, trained 2d10, and with more training, you would also be granted a minimum dice results (I think I had stages of 5, 10, 15 in mind).

This probably isn't helpful though if you require a D&D solution.

I don't look for a D&D solution. It's just a general design thought. I refer to D&D in my OP because that's what most of us are familiar with.