Why must numbers go up?

[Aberzanzorax]

To use a sports analogy:

Joe plays pee wee football. He gets good at it.

He moves on to club football. He gets good at it.

He moves on to high school football. He gets good at it.

He moves on to varsity high school football. He gets good at it.

He moves on to college football. He gets good at it.

He is selected to play in the NFl....



While he'd OWN in pee wee football, I don't think he'd want to try it. He'd likely own at college football as well....but he'd rather the challenges and rewards of the NFL even if he's less likely to be better than his competition.





As RC said, a more static world (with place you could only DREAM about going to at level one being KNOWN about at lvl 1...and reason to go back to, say level 5 zones that were scary and now become king) really addresses this.

 

[Raven Crowking]

I was originally referring to a hypothetical rpg game which has no leveling up, and no opportunities for improvement of any type, such as skills, abilities, etc ...

You mean Classic Traveller?


RC

 

[Mark]

Some games are mostly about keeping all relative levels in your control consistent with relative levels out of your control and hoping the dice make the difference or maxing one outlier and steering conflicts to play to that outlier.

 

[ggroy]

You mean Classic Traveller?

I played Traveller once more than two decades ago. My group didn't really like it much. For some of the players, they thought it was kinda boring from not being able to advance quickly. On the other hand, one player actually like Traveller a lot for reasons I don't understand.

 

[Celebrim]

There are so many agendas going on here below the surface that I'm finding it very hard to avoid the temptation to address the agendas of the people responding to the post, rather than the bare question.

1) Character advancement is not an essential part of an RPG. The original version of Traveller didn't have rules for character advancement. Many superhero games don't assume any sort of character advancement. So, the numbers don't have to go up.

2) Having the numbers go up can be a meaningless excercise. In some computer games, Diablo immediately comes to mind, the math was arranged such that a character who did X damage to a monster with Y hit points, when they advanced such that they did 10X damage they monsters would have 10Y hit points. You could play the game over as a higher level character and for the most part the game played the same. Concievably, you could fix the math so that regardless of level, the game played exactly the same. If you did that, leveling up would be a meaningless exercise - the illusion of advancement without the reality of it. Such games would actually play better as pen and paper games if the numbers stayed small and managable, since in effect, you are doing all the bigger math for no purpose. My understanding is that the problem of scaling monsters to the character power is so bad in some computer games that its actually disadvantage to level up.

3) It's quite possible to design a sandbox-ish world where nothing evolves in response to player character power, but yet, regardless of the player character power challenges are to be found. You do this by creating barriers between different power groups and niche enviroments for them to inhabit. A lich sealed in a tomb that only a powerful party could breach can live right underneath the village of commoners you explored at 1st level. You also concentrate heavily on how the lower powered members of the ecology plan to deal with their high powered neighbors, and quite possibly slow down the advancement rate in some fashion. At the far extreme end of this you get somewhat deginerate states like 'Tucker's Kobolds', but its quite possible to make the 'ordinary' inhabitants of your world relevant threats for very long periods of the campaign without scaling up those ordinary threats from what was a reasonable challenge at low levels. You do this numbers, tactics, terrain or circumstance advantages, and so forth rather than raw power. You also pay special attention to 'level invariant attacks', that is, abilities which remain somewhat useful regardless of how high level the defender is. For example, a touch attack is almost always threatening. A spell effect that still has some effect when the save is made is almost always threatening. Abilities that offer no save, like magic missile, are almost always threatening. Monsters with level invariant abilities can be used as challenges over very wide ranges indeed.

4) It's quite possible to design a rules set which lacks D&D's trademark ability to take a character from ordinary mortal all the way up to demigod, yet still have character advancement.

5) Someone already mentioned it, but its the pinball effect. Very rarely is anything in a pinball game worth 1 point. Most of the time doing anything is worth at least 100 points. The newer the game, the more likely it is that anything is worth at least 1000 points. The extra zeros are of course unnecessary for keeping score, but they give the illusion of greater success. Would you rather score 1,000,000 points from the jackpot or 1000? One looks more impressive than the other, but the 1000 point jackpot on the older game is probably physically the more impressive feat. Pinball game designers know however that the customer will stop feeding customers into the game machine when they become frustrated with the amount of skill required to achieve a greater success. The trick is to give the illusion of success without increasing the amount of play time a quarter actually purchases. Most modern cRPGs are dreadfully easy having been designed such that a minimally skillful player with a casual level of commitment will certainly complete the game. In a modern game, 'finishing the game' is the expected result for all players. Older cRpgs (and video games in general) tended to have less content but much higher difficulty levels to maximize the play time. If you grew up with that environment or with games inspired by tournament modules, inflating numbers to create the illusion of success or games where winning is the expected outcome for all players regardless of skill or commitment can be annoying.

6) cRPG's generally are some of the worst offenders here precisely because the whole concept of levelling up works against the need for high levels of skill. In a normal video game, a scene can normally only be passed if you develop sufficient player skill. But in a cRPG, you can get through a scene by either developing greater skill or by leveling up to the point that the challenge can be defeated at your current skill level. Guess which tends to be easier?

 

[Ariosto]

Originally, the numbers in the combat and save matrixes got smaller -- in current terms, the "DCs" went down and the chances to hit or save went up.

What's the big difference? Those improvements were not immediately nullified. Saving throws were usually unmodified, and Armor Classes remained mostly in the same range regardless of monster level -- until you got into greater devils and the like.

So, a high-level monster with more hit points would get hit more often by high-level characters. A high-level magician could cast more spells, and more powerful ones, but high-level targets would make their saving throws more often.

Recovery of hit points could take considerable time, depending on magical resources (which were in shorter supply than in WotC's games). Hit points themselves were thus not usually regarded as a "per encounter" resource. Instead, attrition took its toll. PCs and monsters alike could be worn down, potentially to the point of succumbing to an attack that they could fend off if fresh.

 

[Ariosto]

How receptive would rpg players be to an rpg which has does not have any character advancement? (ie. No leveling up, no skill improvement, etc ...).

Metamorphosis Alpha (1976) came and went pretty quickly. I don't remember the lack of "leveling up" being a common complaint. However, successor Gamma World (1978) added a system in which each experience-point level granted a roll on a table yielding +1 to an ability score, or chance to hit, or damage.

Designer Jim Ward, though, was (really!) the original "Monty Haul". He liked high-powered games with lots of crazy toys for the players, and that's what he designed. One dice worth of hit points to start? Heck, no -- try a dice per point of constitution (or "physical endurance", as the case might be)! You can be a mutant with a few far-out powers, or a pure-strain human able to use the whole range of "high tech" magical gadgets to be found (and also possessing "leadership potential" to gather followers).

Then there's the world to explore, full of places and people and monsters and machines with which to deal. Lack of interesting developments? Not likely!

One concern I recall, looming even larger in the case of Traveller, was the sheer vastness of possibilities. Where MA confined itself to a single world, and a very small one at that -- a giant, but hardly planet-sized, starship -- GDW's game presented the GM with the task of running a universe of which a planet was but a part.

The main problem with MA, I think, was one that continued to limit the popularity of GW through however many versions. It was just too wild for a lot of folks. Marvel Comics have nothing on Ward for sheer "Wah-Hoo!".

Maybe the usual perspective back then was less laser-focused on "stats" and more interested in the bigger picture of what players do in the game.

 

[Raven Crowking]

"You must spread some Experience Points around before giving it to Ariosto again."

 

[Ariosto]

You mean Classic Traveller?

The original Traveller Book 2, page 42 (in the revised edition, maybe a different page number in the first) details Experience and self-improvement in the forms of education, weapon expertise, skill improvement and physical fitness. All considered, these proceed at approximately the same rate as in the previous-career system in Book 1.

The original version of Traveller didn't have rules for character advancement.

I don't have a 1977 printing on hand, but -- if memory serves -- the experience rules were not a radical addition in 1981. The differences, as I recall, were much more subtle: minor corrections and subtle shifts in emphasis, not whole game-mechanical systems! (Those were grist for additional Books, Supplements and Games.)

 

[Jdvn1]

The way I see it, there are two issues why numbers go up (or, at least, change):

1. Class Options.
Take casters. When you're a newbie, you only know a couple spells. When you become more experienced, you now know a ton of spells. Same with Fighters and techniques. In order to unlock new (and progressively more advanced) spells and techniques, there has to be an objective measure of skill. You have to gain experience.

2. Intuition.
When I start working out, I can lift 120 lbs. After working out for a year, I can lift 200 lbs. After working out for another year, I can lift 300 lbs. The amount of force exerted by my blows increases each year. The accuracy of my archery increases measurably every year. Numbers increasing makes sense.

Besides:
I think a lot of people will tell you that higher levels isn't necessary about rolling really high all the time, it's about tactics. At higher levels, you can do more cool new stuff, and you'll need to use your new abilities to overcome more creative obstacles. Having to roll a number isn't all that high level gaming is about.