[+]Training and Reward, not Assumed Advancement

[Staffan]

I don’t know what BRP is, but that doesn’t mean anything bc I hate acronyms.

BRP = Basic Roleplaying, the family of RPGs descended from RuneQuest and Call of Cthulhu. They are usually skill-based, and in most of them skills can either increase with experience or with training/practice.

Addendum: Typically, using a skill (sometimes with the requirement that it is used successfully, sometimes with the requirement that it's in an important situation) gets you an "experience check" on the skill, which means that you can roll against it after the adventure. On a failure, you increase the skill by some amount, usually 1d6%, 1d10%, or 5%. Training (with a teacher) takes time and money, but usually gives you good results. Study (without a teacher) only takes time, but is less certain than having a teacher.

 

[Aldarc]

Do I assume correctly you realize this describes most of the whole BRP family of games? Or not?

I have some comments I want to make on my experience with it, but I want to know how much I need to unpack it.

I believe that this also describes the Burning Wheel family of games too: i.e., Burning Wheel, Torchbearer, and Mouse Guard.

Also Pendragon and Ars Magica.

 

[TwoSix]

I do think it's important to differentiate between a "random proc" skill-based leveling system and actual diegetic (fiction-based) progression, in terms of what's desired.

Plenty of systems (BRP and Burning Wheel, as mentioned above, Troika! and Dragonbane also come to my mind as systems I've played recently) have some form of play as being skill-based. During the session, you flag various skills as they are used in some manner (crit successes or failures being common), and typically attempt a roll-under the skill (making the skill harder to level as it improves) at the end of the session.

Some of the newer NSR-type games (I'm thinking stuff like Knave and Electric Bastionland) have a more pure diegetic progression, where abilities are typically only acquired throughout the narrative, by acquiring items or circumstance during play.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Okay, BRP stands for Basic RolePlaying, and is the line of games descended from RuneQuest. There's been a lot of evolutionary bifurcation along the way, so what I'm going to talk about doesn't apply to every offshoot (parts of it don't describe Mythras, for example), but it at least describes RQ1-3 (and I think, but don't know for sure the current version), the standalone BRP book and some others.

There are two methods of advancement in traditional BRP: learn-by-using and training.

The former operates by giving you a check mark (sometimes called a "tick") in a skill the first time you successfully use a skill in an adventure. Since BRP is a percentile based system, at the end of the adventure or whenever there's some downtime (these don't have to be the same thing) all skills with ticks are rolled again, usually with a bonus based on either your skill modifier or Intelligence depending on which particular incarnation of the rules you are using, and if you exceed the current skill value (or get a 96% or greater roll in any case) you advance (in the earliest versions by 5%, in later versions by 1D6%). You cannot get more than one tick in each skill per adventure or time between downtime.

Training is done by spending time and money, and varies more in how exactly its expressed: usually there's been a cap about how high you can train (often 75%) and often can only be done once between advancement from use in the field. Some versions also allowed training to improve attributes though that's usually a long and expensive process.

A few observations, primarily about the learn-by-doing after using the game system for a long period:

1. There are some problems with how skills are used and handled. There are skills that are important but only relatively rarely rolled for, while others are rolled for frequently. The former can include things like outdoor skills (Climbing, Jumping or Swimming) while the latter include things like perception and combat skills. This can produce some lopsided advancement that is not clearly the way you'd expect things to go. Some versions have done various patches on this (in at least some versions if you were doing extensive Riding you'd get a tick in that even though a roll was never called for.)

2. This approach can also breed for what we always called "tick hunting", sometimes to a pathological degree. This is when a player basically hunts for excuses to use a skill just to get a tick in it. One would think, since normally its assumed you only get a tick when some risk is involved, this would be self-limiting, but that doesn't seem to stop people; in pathological cases people will even do this with skills they don't actually usually have much reason to bother with, just out of the compulsion to get that roll.

3. The approach only kind of crudely represents how much the skill is actually used, since only the first success counts (this despite the first note).

4. Some people find bookkeeping the ticks tedious (of course, those people often would find other elements of RQ at least tedious, such as the fact a combat round can involve as many five die rolls).

 

[Thomas Shey]

I believe that this also describes the Burning Wheel family of games too: i.e., Burning Wheel, Torchbearer, and Mouse Guard.

Also Pendragon and Ars Magica.

Well, Pendragon is arguably a BRP offshoot itself (though its obviously gone pretty far afield). I wasn't aware of that regarding the other games you mention.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I do think it's important to differentiate between a "random proc" skill-based leveling system and actual diegetic (fiction-based progression), in terms of what's desired.

Plenty of systems (BRP and Burning Wheel, as mentioned above, Troika! and Dragonbane also come to my mind as systems I've played recently) have some form of play as being skill-based. During the session, you flag various skills as they are used in some manner (crit successes or failures being common), and typically attempt a roll-under the skill (making the skill harder to level as it improves) at the end of the session.

Some of the newer NSR-type games (I'm thinking stuff like Knave and Electric Bastionland) have a more pure diegetic progression, where abilities are typically only acquired throughout the narrative, by acquiring items or circumstance during play.

There's also some in-between cases: Mythras, though it does a lot of traditional BRP things, gives you a flat number of improvement rolls per session, but you're supposed to only apply them to things you actually used or were otherwise exposed to in the session.

 

[Staffan]

There's also some in-between cases: Mythras, though it does a lot of traditional BRP things, gives you a flat number of improvement rolls per session, but you're supposed to only apply them to things you actually used or were otherwise exposed to in the session.

The Troubleshooters, which is in the same extended family tree as BRP, does the same thing (though it has on-use ticks as an optional rule). However, it adds one wrinkle: instead of an improvement roll, you can apply a tick toward gaining a new Ability (which are sort of analogous to D&D feats in that they are abilities you just have, rather than needing to roll for).

 

[John Dallman]

Training and reward based advancement instead says, if you want to get better at boxing, go use your boxing skills out in the world or spend some serious time training with a coach, or both.

It is perfectly possible in point-buy systems for the GM to award some points with a requirement that they be spent on a specific form of advancement. It's also possible to for the GM to require characters to buy up things they've actually used, and forbid buying up things they have not touched. These things tend to be quite deeply buried in the detailed dialog between the GM and each player that detailed point-buy systems like Hero or GURPS require, so they aren't talked about much.

Beware of reducing everything to training-time equivalents. I have played a homebrew system created by a chap who worked for IBM, at a time when staff don't seem to have been allowed to do things unless they'd taken the appropriate training courses. Adventuring didn't give you any advancement points at all; the only potential gain from it was money to pay for training. This does not promote an entertaining game.

 

[Thomas Shey]

The Troubleshooters, which is in the same extended family tree as BRP, does the same thing (though it has on-use ticks as an optional rule). However, it adds one wrinkle: instead of an improvement roll, you can apply a tick toward gaining a new Ability (which are sort of analogous to D&D feats in that they are abilities you just have, rather than needing to roll for).

There's a game called Sabre (there's both a Fantasy and SF version) that has advancement come from failures, is automatic, and is 1% each time (there's also a secondary experience-like resource to buy up skills that should be advancing but aren't going to be rolled as frequently).

 

[Thomas Shey]

It is perfectly possible in point-buy systems for the GM to award some points with a requirement that they be spent on a specific form of advancement. It's also possible to for the GM to require characters to buy up things they've actually used, and forbid buying up things they have not touched. These things tend to be quite deeply buried in the detailed dialog between the GM and each player that detailed point-buy systems like Hero or GURPS require, so they aren't talked about much.

It doesn't help that some people are fairly hostile to at least the "have to use it to advance it" versions; in particular, since Hero doesn't have a training system (if I'm recalling correctly--which I might not since I haven't run it in more than 20 years--GURPS does) it tends to just handwave off a lot of the other experience expenditures as landing there. Though I did often see one of the experience points being assigned to something used.

Beware of reducing everything to training-time equivalents. I have played a homebrew system created by a chap who worked for IBM, at a time when staff don't seem to have been allowed to do things unless they'd taken the appropriate training courses. Adventuring didn't give you any advancement points at all; the only potential gain from it was money to pay for training. This does not promote an entertaining game.

You also have the Traveler problem, where not only was that the only advancement method, it was extremely slow. Its a little understandable there because the bonus range was pretty small so you couldn't have it increasing very fast, but it did mean that characters after entering play could feel pretty static, and you never had a sense people were improving even in things they did constantly.