Tall vs broad advancement in RPGs

[jian]

Advancement - gaining experience, power, improved stats, other resources - in RPGs is always a bit of a tricky one, because it really seems to depend on the genre and indeed the feel of the individual game at your table. Some games don't do advancement at all, and that's fine.

Other games do what you might call broad advancement - you gain new options and resources but they're not necessarily more powerful (except maybe in synergy with other options) than what you could do when you started the game, or the benefits are more narrative and less about personal power. So in a given fantasy game, you might be no better at fighting enemies, but you might have more reliable equipment, more and better contacts and friends, more non-combat skills, more fame and renown, and maybe more authority or even land and title. None of this makes you better at surviving a particularly irascible orc with a cleaver, but you're probably less likely to be in that situation. This is probably the default model of advancement for superhero games - you're no more personally powerful than you were at the beginning of the campaign (exception here for teen heroes, who gain power quickly) but you're more popular, you're a card-carrying Avenger, and SHIELD returns your calls.

Another common model - which is not at all mutually exclusive with the above - is tall advancement, which is definitely about gaining more personal power throughout the campaign. At the beginning the irascible orc is a lethal threat; at the end you ignore his most powerful attacks and can defeat him with harsh language; at this level you're fighting dragons and demon lords routinely. Of course, how quickly this advancement happens is one thing you can adjust, and wizards may simply become more powerful and/or more useful than knights as the campaign progresses. This model is notable in many fantasy games, such as most versions of D&D, and is integral to settings based on such assumptions (or similar ones such as those of JRPGs or action-RPG videogames) such as many xianxia or Korean fantasy (e.g. Hunter) settings.

I'm certainly not saying one model is better than the other and they're certainly not mutually exclusive - most tall advancement games also have some broad advancement, a classic example being some editions of D&D where you get a castle/wizard's tower/temple/etc at 10th level.

What made me think about it was reading the recent crop of, for want of a better word, D&D alternatives such as Draw Steel, Daggerheart, and (to a lesser degree) Shadowdark, Advanced Tiny Dungeon, and Dragonbane. It's quite interesting to see how much broad vs tall advancement there is in these games. I was partly looking at them to try and run a JRPG/xianxia style game (yes, also read Fabula Ultima etc) with lots of tall advancement, and I'm not sure any of them is a great fit. Older games such as Tunnels & Trolls or even Dragon Warriors probably are better at tall advancement, but they're often rather short on tactical play and fun character options, so there's that.

I'm certainly not asking if you prefer tall or broad advancement - that really depends on the campaign you're running - but what do you think? Are there any fun tall advancement fantasy games you'd recommend I haven't thought of?

 

[Celebrim]

I don't have much comment on this but as a general rule of design I would say it is an unbreakable law that if your CharGen uses point buy then it must strongly encourage broad advancement over tall advancement in character advancement or else your system is poorly designed. One of the most common failings I see in point buy systems is vastly underestimating the utility of going tall over going broad, with the result that system mastery strongly encourages the creation of highly one dimensional characters that can only do one thing but who can use that one thing like a hammer or cleaver to solve any problem.

Class based systems avoid this by tacking on a lot of relatively low value advancement that you are forced to take alongside whatever it is you want to optimize. The class while much more narrow than what is possible with point buy is generally still broader than what is optimal in point buy, resulting in a situation of minimally enforced breadth most of the time. This is the reason that attempts to replace D&D chargen with point by generally fail and more specifically why you can't have a variant cleric that trades improved spellcasting for no innate martial combat ability. Losing all the small class benefits in exchange for "more power" is almost always right from a system mastery perspective. If you could build a Wizard class with even worse BAB progression in exchange for some meaningful increase in spell casting ability, you probably would.

If I really wanted to create a broad system that wasn't class based, I'd be probably looking at tall requiring exponential more points spent to obtain a newer level or even some non-polynomial thing like N! - 1 point for your first rank, 2 for your second, 6 for your third (cumulative 9), but then 720 for your 6th rank. That might sound absurd but the standard intuitive linear or geometric progress ion so many systems use just guarantee everyone goes tall and doesn't really seem to realize just how important one additional rank in something is. This is especially true if you can bypass the cost of going tall in advancement during chargen by paying for ranks or dice pools linearly out of your starting resources (Star Wars D6, WW "colon games", BRP, etc.).

 

[Micah Sweet]

Advancement - gaining experience, power, improved stats, other resources - in RPGs is always a bit of a tricky one, because it really seems to depend on the genre and indeed the feel of the individual game at your table. Some games don't do advancement at all, and that's fine.

Other games do what you might call broad advancement - you gain new options and resources but they're not necessarily more powerful (except maybe in synergy with other options) than what you could do when you started the game, or the benefits are more narrative and less about personal power. So in a given fantasy game, you might be no better at fighting enemies, but you might have more reliable equipment, more and better contacts and friends, more non-combat skills, more fame and renown, and maybe more authority or even land and title. None of this makes you better at surviving a particularly irascible orc with a cleaver, but you're probably less likely to be in that situation. This is probably the default model of advancement for superhero games - you're no more personally powerful than you were at the beginning of the campaign (exception here for teen heroes, who gain power quickly) but you're more popular, you're a card-carrying Avenger, and SHIELD returns your calls.

Another common model - which is not at all mutually exclusive with the above - is tall advancement, which is definitely about gaining more personal power throughout the campaign. At the beginning the irascible orc is a lethal threat; at the end you ignore his most powerful attacks and can defeat him with harsh language; at this level you're fighting dragons and demon lords routinely. Of course, how quickly this advancement happens is one thing you can adjust, and wizards may simply become more powerful and/or more useful than knights as the campaign progresses. This model is notable in many fantasy games, such as most versions of D&D, and is integral to settings based on such assumptions (or similar ones such as those of JRPGs or action-RPG videogames) such as many xianxia or Korean fantasy (e.g. Hunter) settings.

I'm certainly not saying one model is better than the other and they're certainly not mutually exclusive - most tall advancement games also have some broad advancement, a classic example being some editions of D&D where you get a castle/wizard's tower/temple/etc at 10th level.

What made me think about it was reading the recent crop of, for want of a better word, D&D alternatives such as Draw Steel, Daggerheart, and (to a lesser degree) Shadowdark, Advanced Tiny Dungeon, and Dragonbane. It's quite interesting to see how much broad vs tall advancement there is in these games. I was partly looking at them to try and run a JRPG/xianxia style game (yes, also read Fabula Ultima etc) with lots of tall advancement, and I'm not sure any of them is a great fit. Older games such as Tunnels & Trolls or even Dragon Warriors probably are better at tall advancement, but they're often rather short on tactical play and fun character options, so there's that.

I'm certainly not asking if you prefer tall or broad advancement - that really depends on the campaign you're running - but what do you think? Are there any fun tall advancement fantasy games you'd recommend I haven't thought of?

Is there any version of D&D that isn't focused primarily on tall advancement?

 

[TheAlkaizer]

Is there any version of D&D that isn't focused primarily on tall advancement?

I'd argue that they focus on both. But probably leaning more towards tall.

There are elements like gaining some ability score improvements. Your HP increasing. Potentially some spells having more damages added to their damage.

But you also get new features, new magic items, more spells to pick from without talking about all the interactive elements from the fiction (being owed a debt from a ruler, having a domain, etc).

 

[jian]

I don't have much comment on this but as a general rule of design I would say it is an unbreakable law that if your CharGen uses point buy then it must strongly encourage broad advancement over tall advancement in character advancement or else your system is poorly designed. One of the most common failings I see in point buy systems is vastly underestimating the utility of going tall over going broad, with the result that system mastery strongly encourages the creation of highly one dimensional characters that can only do one thing but who can use that one thing like a hammer or cleaver to solve any problem.

Class based systems avoid this by tacking on a lot of relatively low value advancement that you are forced to take alongside whatever it is you want to optimize. The class while much more narrow than what is possible with point buy is generally still broader than what is optimal in point buy, resulting in a situation of minimally enforced breadth most of the time. This is the reason that attempts to replace D&D chargen with point by generally fail and more specifically why you can't have a variant cleric that trades improved spellcasting for no innate martial combat ability. Losing all the small class benefits in exchange for "more power" is almost always right from a system mastery perspective. If you could build a Wizard class with even worse BAB progression in exchange for some meaningful increase in spell casting ability, you probably would.

If I really wanted to create a broad system that wasn't class based, I'd be probably looking at tall requiring exponential more points spent to obtain a newer level or even some non-polynomial thing like N! - 1 point for your first rank, 2 for your second, 6 for your third (cumulative 9), but then 720 for your 6th rank. That might sound absurd but the standard intuitive linear or geometric progress ion so many systems use just guarantee everyone goes tall and doesn't really seem to realize just how important one additional rank in something is. This is especially true if you can bypass the cost of going tall in advancement during chargen by paying for ranks or dice pools linearly out of your starting resources (Star Wars D6, WW "colon games", BRP, etc.).

That is a fantastic point and well worth making. Lots of point buy systems use non-linear (I hesitate to say geometric) costs for skills/stats/whatever and that's generally a good idea unless the GM also thinks it's a good idea to hand out more XP accordingly.

There are games that aren't point buy but do allow you to buy advancements directly with XP, such as Advanced Tiny Dungeon. ATD is somewhat saved by the fact there's little tall advancement in magic and so forth - no magical or martial discipline is particularly better than another and having more doesn't make you more powerful in a measurable way - so you're required to do broad advancement however many Traits you buy. This is also roughly the case with Fabula Ultima and Skills, though you do get some helpful bonuses to certain checks with some Skills, as well as capstone Skills for Classes.

(FU also has a combat system where the action economy is king and generally, the side with more actions per round - usually the PCs - will win unless the big bad boss is cheating, which they usually are. This means that a goblin is little threat to most PCs but half a dozen goblins is actually a pretty serious threat to PCs at any level because of all the actions they have.)

 

[payn]

I've come to prefer broad advancement. If I am using a system with tall advancement, i prefer its not too tall. For example, Id prefer if D&D was only 10 levels (including cutting off much of the power in 11+ which I know isnt for everybody).

The reasons I find for broad is players tend to focus more on what I want to focus on. Adventuring, advancing plots, effecting the setting, etc.. Less on collecting XP, gear, building on a personal power fantasy avatar. You can, of course, have both in either design paradigm, but there are certainly behaviors encouraged through design choices. YMMV.