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<blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 8505287" data-attributes="member: 87792">I don't think it's unexplored - I think that it was explored quite a bit in the 80s with things like skills where using them gave you a chance to increase and oD&amp;D where a lot of your power came from treasure. I think that what happened was that in the tabletop roleplaying arena player-facing growth won. There are, however, plenty of modern computer games where randomised growth is used (one of my favourites being Hades where your boons are mostly random; Hades is an amazing game) and it's what e.g. deckbuilders and roguelikes are based on. It's simply that randomised growth works a lot better when you've only got to stick with this build for about an hour rather than an entire campaign.The other issue is there's a huge difference in feeling between major changes and cumulative minor changes. 5e, unlike pre-3.X (for non-humans) has major changes in that you can change your character class. And given that your character class, in other words what you do, is a huge decision it does allow pivots. Not as well as Apocalypse World where you change your playbook entirely - and one of the times you can is &quot;when life becomes untenable&quot; which leads to the Hardholder, the town boss, being left with a bullet in his head and coming back as the combat monster Gunlugger looking for revenge with no more care for their holding. You can also change playbooks once (but only once per character) by levelling up so a Gunlugger can take over the town and become the new hardholder. But the other type of growth is steady change in focus. There was no point at which the sci-fi character I mentioned earlier made the conscious choice to become the best engineer in the galaxy. They just kept getting more challenges for it and getting better at it until they were. It happened through play and over the course of about half a year of weekly sessions.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Neonchameleon, post: 8505287, member: 87792"] I don't think it's unexplored - I think that it was explored quite a bit in the 80s with things like skills where using them gave you a chance to increase and oD&D where a lot of your power came from treasure. I think that what happened was that [I]in the tabletop roleplaying arena player-facing growth won[/I]. There are, however, plenty of modern computer games where randomised growth is used (one of my favourites being Hades where your boons are mostly random; Hades is an amazing game) and it's what e.g. deckbuilders and roguelikes are based on. It's simply that randomised growth works a lot better when you've only got to stick with this build for about an hour rather than an entire campaign. The other issue is there's a huge difference in feeling between major changes and cumulative minor changes. 5e, unlike pre-3.X (for non-humans) has major changes in that you can change your character class. And given that your character class, in other words what you do, is a huge decision it does allow pivots. Not as well as Apocalypse World where you change your playbook entirely - and one of the times you can is "[I]when life becomes untenable"[/I] which leads to the Hardholder, the town boss, being left with a bullet in his head and coming back as the combat monster Gunlugger looking for revenge with no more care for their holding. You can also change playbooks once (but only once per character) by levelling up so a Gunlugger can take over the town and become the new hardholder. But the other type of growth is steady change in focus. There was no point at which the sci-fi character I mentioned earlier made the conscious choice to become the best engineer in the galaxy. They just kept getting more challenges for it and getting better at it until they were. It happened through play and over the course of about half a year of weekly sessions. [/QUOTE]

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