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.