Thinking about an advancement system

Morrus · May 15, 2019

Inspired by CoC and similar systems. I haven’t thought it all the way through yet. It’s very similar to the way CoC does it.

Percentile system. Everything is a skill. You improve with failure.

Every time you fail a skill check, the skill improves by 1%. Technically they can go over 100% (modifiers might bring it down).

Hmmm. Definitely easy to abuse though. Find lots of easy tasks and repeat. Though I guess you’d stop failing them, so your score would remain static.

Satyrn · May 15, 2019

Morrus said:
Inspired by CoC and similar systems. I haven’t thought it all the way through yet. It’s very similar to the way CoC does it.

Percentile system. Everything is a skill. You improve with failure.

Every time you fail a skill check, the skill improves by 1%. Technically they can go over 100% (modifiers might bring it down).

Hmmm. Definitely easy to abuse though. Find lots of easy tasks and repeat. Though I guess you’d stop failing them, so your score would remain static.

So you'd find lots of hard tasks, instead. (And that's what they'd have been doing from the start, since they were trying to fail). But then, this creates a story where the character is constantly trying to test his limit, which could work out well.

Morrus · May 15, 2019

Satyrn said:
So you'd find lots of hard tasks, instead. (And that's what they'd have been doing from the start, since they were trying to fail).

That’s what I meant to say.

Satyrn · May 15, 2019

Right.

So, if you amended the idea so that the skill improves 1% every time the character fails at a task he could have succeed at if he rolled 100 (or should that be a 1?), the character wouldn't be able to game the system by seeking out actually impossible tasks.

And perhaps if the system is prone to getting gamed, you could lower that threshold. So maybe the character didn't gain that 1% if he would have succeed with a 80+ (or <20, my mind is blanking on which threshold would be used).

Blue · May 15, 2019

What about making it narrative? Any time the character succeeds at a meaningful and important* task they may instead fail and improve the skill.

* Defining & measuring "meaningful" and "important" are left as an exercise for someone smarter than I.

The Crimson Binome · May 15, 2019

I'm not a fan of any system where the optimal path of advancement involves sitting around and practicing your skills instead of having adventures. If the world really worked this way, then anyone would start their heroic career by grinding in their basement for a month until they could no longer fail.

Morrus · May 15, 2019

Saelorn said:
I'm not a fan of any system where the optimal path of advancement involves sitting around and practicing your skills instead of having adventures. If the world really worked this way, then anyone would start their heroic career by grinding in their basement for a month until they could no longer fail.

One can reasonably assume that XP is only gained during the course of an adventure. Otherwise it’s not really a game.

The Crimson Binome · May 15, 2019

Morrus said:
One can reasonably assume that XP is only gained during the course of an adventure. Otherwise it’s not really a game.

So the adventure "starts", and then everyone spends a month in their basement to max out all of their skills.

This sort of system has been done many times in the past, and this is always a sticking point. The optimal path of advancement is to avoid adventure as much as possible. You would need some sort of caveat in order to keep everyone moving forward, instead of just grinding, and that's not an easy passage to phrase. If the rules are clear and precise, then they can be gamed. If the rules are too vague, then they can be misinterpreted.

GreyLord · May 16, 2019

To make it interesting, if they try and fail, they might actually have consequences of failure?

Sometimes we learn from failure, other times we learn more from the consequences of that failure?

It also would tend to make a character think twice about trying an impossible task if there were dire consequences if they failed.

trancejeremy · May 16, 2019

If failure improved your skills, I would be one of the skilled persons on the planet.

I never really liked how CoC/BRP did it. The idea (where you check each skill that was used in an adventure and roll to see if it improved) is okay, but in practice, characters rarely improved. I just hand out a fixed number of skill points they can add.