Tall vs broad advancement in RPGs

[jian]

I'd like to hear your take on these. I've seen the Dragonbane free quickstart, but I couldn't tell you how broad/tall it was from the small sample.

Sure enough. I should look into Modos 2 - I can see there's a free edition on DTRPG.

Basically, just on the broad/tall advancement front, I would say:

• Daggerheart is mixed. It deliberately caps out at 10th level but honestly a lot of the powers after 7th or so are fairly underwhelming. You do get more powerful (by the numbers, especially in resilience) as you go up in level but your powers don't show much tall advancement. Which is fine, I think it's happy having competent heroes out of the gate who get a bit tougher. It's not zero to hero.
• Fabula Ultima is similar, mostly broad advancement to fill in the gaps in your character (as it were). Most higher level Skills are lacklustre. As discussed, fights mainly hinge on which side has more actions per round, so choose your fights carefully at any level.
• Advanced Tiny Dungeon is mixed, again - like FU you're mostly getting Traits to complete your character concept as time goes on. Wizards aren't quadratic.
• Shadowheart embraces an OSR approach so it's quite similar to 1st ed D&D in having quite tall advancement despite the 5th ed mechanics. You definitely start at close to zero and level up. Wizards are still pretty quadratic.
• Dragonbane is mixed - you do get more powerful spells as you advance (if you're a wizard) but not much else. Heroes are fairly competent (though fights are pretty lethal) at the beginning and not much tougher at the end.
• I haven't so far read enough of Draw Steel to say.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

In my game, Crossroads, I have both types.

Tall: Mostly by way of skill advancement. You gain skill ranks which increase your dice pool when making a check with that skill. This is fairly slow, and not a sharp incline because there are no flat numerical bonuses. You have a base d12 and then add a d6 for each rank, and advantage or disadvantage add or subtract a d6. (You can also earn dice forward which you can use on your own checks or for or against another character’s check). The only other tall advancement is some traits (gaining a Companion is a power increase, but gain additional Contacts is more Broad advancement), and when you gain levels (similar to Daggerheart Tiers) you gain an Attribute point or two, and your skill rank limit and Attribute Score limit each increase by 1.

Broad: Most advancement is either new techniques, which open up what you can choose from in a scene but aren’t more powerful, or things like Contacts, reputation, earned favors, increases to your downtime resources, etc.

Even magic items usually do things like enhancing the reliability of certain actions by negating disadvantage from most sources or letting you Push a failure into a partial success with a specific kind of action without spending an Attribute Point once per scene.

 

[John Dallman]

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.

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.

This is definitely good terminology.

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.

I don't think that's an unbreakable rule. It may well be common, but it really depends on what you're playing and how you go about it.
For example, in a GURPS Dungeon Fantasy campaign I was playing a couple of years ago, the players all took slightly different approaches to advancement. The wizard went all-out tall, and became a killing machine. The fighter went fairly tall, and became more effective, but his motive in that was keeping the party members who weren't good at combat alive. The psychopomp and the cleric went broad: they could defend themselves, but their job was solving the political problems the campaign was about. The archer-thief who joined later was very useful at range, but the squishiest of us all in hand-to-hand.

 

[Deset Gled]

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?

I'd say D&D 3.Xe can be a very tall game. With feats, PrCs, synergies, and practically unbounded bonuses, it gave people the option to make extremely focused characters.

As for the general concept of tall vs broad, I would add that the things I like best are spikes and holes.

Spikes are secondary tall options. They are choices that encourage characters to pick advancement options that are broad. Something unrelated to their main focus, but give a notable bonus in another area. An example of this is the 3.5e "Combat Expertise" feat chains that require a 13+ INT score. Normally, INT would be a dump stat for fighter-types, and would be disincentivized in a game with a focus on tall advancement. But these feats are a broad advancement choice with a power spike that give a fighter's mental stats much more value. Other 3.5e examples would be skill synergies, or some class features like the Barbarian's Trap Sense. Options with spikes are very important, because they help players make choices that aren't directly tall while still feeling like they are useful, and can use broad advancement to justify character progression towards a primary goal.

Holes are intentional deficits in broad choices that encourage characters to pick advancement options that are tall. They are basically dead areas one character can't advance into (where "can't" may just be "really hard" or "disproportionately expensive"). The most obvious holes are class-exclusive abilities, like earlier D&D editions where only magic users could cast spells and only thieves can open locks or disarm traps. But other holes are much smaller, and can include things like banned spell schools, class specific feats, or alignment restrictions. Holes in broad advancement are critical to party play. They prevent one character that is broad from overshadowing or minimizing another character's tall points. And they encourage teamwork and roleplaying by ensuring characters have unique abilities.

 

[Thomas Shey]

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.

Besides progressive costs, there's always having caps (which can occasionally raise if you want). Its a common solution for point build games that want to keep costs linear for simplicity. As long as you don't set the gaps between the cap and what you can practically start at without otherwise crippling yourself, its usually fairly harmless.

 

[Piperken]

...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...

Not as versed in xianxia stories; it seems like it'd need some kind of tall advancement core, whereas wuxia would tend to look more at broad advancement possibilities?

I suppose with the prevalence of everyone being obsessed with cultivation in the former, some broad advancement elements could have a place via faction (sect) RP.

 

[jian]

Not as versed in xianxia stories; it seems like it'd need some kind of tall advancement core, whereas wuxia would tend to look more at broad advancement possibilities?

I suppose with the prevalence of everyone being obsessed with cultivation in the former, some broad advancement elements could have a place via faction (sect) RP.

I think it’s fair to say that modern xianxia fiction is dominated by Chinese manhua and web novels, some of which have been adapted into TV series. Some of these don’t really care about power levels or advancement - it’s about the interpersonal drama so the PCs get power whenever they need it - but some care a great deal, with actual numerical breakdowns of character stats every week. The latter have significantly affected the Western litRPG genre to the point that any litRPG fiction using the word cultivator will be very focused on the protagonists’ tall advancement.

If you wanted to run a campaign reflecting some of these tropes, then you would want a numerical and palpable tall advancement system. I’m inclined to start with a nice tall beanstalk like Labyrinth Lord and add some soft universal combat options (as in Advanced Tiny Dungeon) to make the fights more fun.

 

[kigmatzomat]

Are there any fun tall advancement fantasy games you'd recommend I haven't thought of?

Earthdawn. It is a mix of point buy and class system, where classes make abilities available and you need to get abilities up to specific ranks to advance the class to the next level. You can multi-class but it increases the point costs. It also balances casters vs martials with action economy and point costs. Casters may need 2-3 rounds to cast powerful spells and need to buy more abilities than other classes. Martials might make 2-3 attacks each round (or 4 or 5...). It does a good job of the tank/caster balancing.

 

[FrogReaver]

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.

Agreed. Personally I prefer playing broad but character building for tall.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Probably an unspoken reason why HERO resonated with me so well is that it can do broad and tall advancement simultaneously. It’s literally up to the player which path they want to take, and they can change with every time they expend XP for improvement.