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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jian" data-source="post: 9747106" data-attributes="member: 78087">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?</blockquote>

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