Tall vs broad advancement in RPGs

[Thomas Shey]

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.

I think in a lot of campaigns its true that tall advancement can be overly attractive in Hero, however, especially since advancement costs in each area are linear. That's why there usually are secondary capping mechanics.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

That's why there usually are secondary capping mechanics.

Yes. As I recall, usually in the form of campaign limitations on a power’s active points.

For me, it was all situational. In some campaigns or for certain heroes, I’d spend points almost as fast as I got them, usually boosting a skill or two, or buying off a Disadvantage. For others, though, I’d add skills or abilities, or new uses of established powers.

One in particular I recall was kind of a combination of The Highlander and Elric- ancient, ageless inhuman albino swordsman & spellcaster. But his HTH martial skills, while high, were not truly super. Nor was his combat sorcery truly reality warping. His real schtick was his supernatural senses- the typical 5 heightened beyond most natural beings, ESP, and the like at the beginning. As the campaign progressed, his perceptual suite expanded into temporal and cross dimensional realms.

 

[dbm]

Personally I prefer broad advancement for my characters. I like to be flexible, and find that this approach lends more to that in play. The tricky bit for a system is to be broad or detailed enough that you can have a party of broad characters without them all seeming cookie-cutter in nature. GURPS addresses that by having so many options PCs can have different approaches to the same challenge, hence feeling different while being able to operate in a similar space.

Trying to play a more broad character in a strongly tall system like D&D means I end up playing almost exclusively bards or wizards. Wizards are arguably the most flexible class since their load-out of spells can be tailored to be more tall or broad on a daily basis. Trying to be broad in a tall system has its own challenges, however. Tall systems tend to have scaling difficulties to keep challenging the players. That can make broad characters who, by definition, aren’t specialising in one thing become basically irrelevant. There is almost no benefit in being second best at picking locks, for example. Or even the social skills - the Face character will always be the character the party want to talk to NPCs by default. These issues can be overcome by more nuanced GMing (e.g. making more use of languages, or encouraging the party to split up) but basic scenarios pretty much fall into the trap of only needing one character to be good at a a thing.

Fully broad systems can end up being a min-max exercise, GURPS certainly falls into that trap a lot of the time in my experience. Some kind of limit is desirable, like in Hero. I particularly like how Savage Worlds handles this, with caps on various skills and edges based on your stats and/or your rank. It is functionally a broad system with no classes but don’t-call-them-levels. I think that is an overall positive for the system. Savage Worlds offers a decent balance of tall vs broad through encouraging a broadening of skills via the cap system while offering vertical growth through chains of edges. You tend to see characters specialising in a particular edge-chain for their main schtick while they still gain a degree of breadth. The system also helps by having a useful system for helping other PCs - you really can play a fully non-combat character and still contribute in fights by applying knowledge or social skills to help/hinder as appropriate. Dramatic Tasks encourage group solutions to non-combat encounters, too.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Trying to play a more broad character in a strongly tall system like D&D means I end up playing almost exclusively bards or wizards. Wizards are arguably the most flexible class since their load-out of spells can be tailored to be more tall or broad on a daily basis.

My love of flexible PCs is one of the reasons the vast majority of my D&D characters going back to AD&D are multiclassed- usually with some kind of spellcasting class.

Trying to be broad in a tall system has its own challenges, however. Tall systems tend to have scaling difficulties to keep challenging the players. That can make broad characters who, by definition, aren’t specialising in one thing become basically irrelevant. There is almost no benefit in being second best at picking locks, for example.

I have definitely played “Mr. 2nd Fiddle” in a campaign. As you might expect, there were very few times that PC was truly the star of an encounter.

But there were moments when he did get some bragging rights, typically when the experts failed. Amusingly, one such instance involved picking a lock the rogue failed to.

 

[dbm]

I think something was lost when multi-classing moved away from the AD&D model. Given the way XP worked, a two-multiclass character would typically be one level behind a single-class character, which was a noticeable difference but they were still very able to contribute. Being a 5/5 fighter/wizard is a meaningless character by comparison in my opinion.

Broad characters can, indeed, contribute and be fun - I still keep playing them. In some ways, Amber gave me the idea how to achieve this. For people unfamiliar, in Amber players bid for stats and they are ranked, someone is first, someone is second and so on. The first character will always beat the second character in a challenge based on a given stat, so the way to defeat opponents is to change the nature of a conflict so that it plays to your strengths, not theirs. That is often how I play broad characters in D&D - if the enemy is strong up-close, go for a ranged strategy, or vice versa and etc. Magic can be used tactically to achieve these aims - splitting up the battlefield or moving around it being fairly clear examples. Casting ‘a big gun’ is usually a sub-optimal versus a battle-changing spell IMO. When we played Out of the Abyss a while back, my bard became ‘the battle taxi’, using Dimension Door to move the barbarian into melee with squishy opponents. A mind flayer got a very nasty surprise that way…

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yes. As I recall, usually in the form of campaign limitations on a power’s active points.

Yeah. I did a more elaborate version myself some years ago, but it was more complex than most people wanted to fuss with (and was only really combat relevant).

For me, it was all situational. In some campaigns or for certain heroes, I’d spend points almost as fast as I got them, usually boosting a skill or two, or buying off a Disadvantage. For others, though, I’d add skills or abilities, or new uses of established powers.

I'm not going to say no one ever went broad, but going tall still seemed to be the attractive path for an awful lot of people, especially when focusing on a combat ability in a game where it was a significant factor (as it tends to be in most superhero campaigns).

One in particular I recall was kind of a combination of The Highlander and Elric- ancient, ageless inhuman albino swordsman & spellcaster. But his HTH martial skills, while high, were not truly super. Nor was his combat sorcery truly reality warping. His real schtick was his supernatural senses- the typical 5 heightened beyond most natural beings, ESP, and the like at the beginning. As the campaign progressed, his perceptual suite expanded into temporal and cross dimensional realms.

Well, no one ever felt bad for investing in perception skills.

 

[GMMichael]

Daggerheart . . . it's happy having competent heroes out of the gate who get a bit tougher. It's not zero to hero.

I can appreciate a streamlined starting hero. Unlike D&D 6, which starts with broad characters that basically grow into tall AND broad characters.

• 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.

I thought this was a Final Fantasy-inspired game? If so, it missed the mark, because FF (old school anyway) was all about tall characters who would fight anywhere from one to nine opponents at a time.

 

[jian]

I thought this was a Final Fantasy-inspired game? If so, it missed the mark, because FF (old school anyway) was all about tall characters who would fight anywhere from one to nine opponents at a time.

I think it’s fair to say that FU is going for JRPG feel (not just Final Fantasy of any number but also Fire Emblem, Tales, Trails, Breath of Fire, etc) and as such isn’t aiming to duplicate the rules, just the way it feels to have JRPG style adventures in a wide range of fantasy and science fantasy settings.

But yes, pretty much every JRPG ever does tall advancement, which isn’t really a focus of the FU rules. And this is reflected in the thousands of manga, manhua, manhwa, light novels, web novels, anime, xianxia TV series etc which are often very derivative of JRPGs and similar games.