W.O.I.N. Experience, XP, and Ranks

[Morrus]

The XP system is one of the last core things that need to be hammered out. Once that's done, the core of all three games will be pretty much done. So here are my thoughts. This is just me thinking aloud at this point and reverse engineering what we already have.

Now that careers/traditions have been standardized, we know that each grade adds 4 attribute points, 2 skill ranks, and one exploit. Assuming those three things are roughly equal, that means that we can easily assign a point value: 1 point per attribute point, 2 points per skill rank, and 4 points per exploit (12 total). That gives us the base value of a career grade and its elements.

A starting character typically has 5 career grades. That defines his maximum dice pool, too. So a starting character is Rank 5. (This also gives us space for weaker critters without having to delve into fractions).

Adding a career grade to a creature or a character just adds one rank. Simple.

The tricky bit is non-career derived abilities and the like. A dragon or an elephant have high attributes but no career grades (unless you choose to add career or tradition grades to them). So that's where we go back to our point value system to derive the value of the critter. Remember, 12 points is one rank.

So, we take...

Total attribute points + (total skill ranks x 2) + (exploits x 4)

...and we divide the total by 12.

For example, let's take our old friend, the Tyrannosaurus Rex.

64 attribute points [64], 1 skill rank [2], 1 exploit [4] = 70.

70/12 comes to 5.8. Let's say we round up, so that's 6.

Hmmm. Feels low compared to a starting character. The attributes derive most stats, but not SOAK, so maybe we need to accomodate that separately. I'm not sure how right now, though.

Let's try another. A hill giant.

78 attribute points [78], 2 skill ranks [4], 2 exploits [8] = 90

90/12 comes to 7.5. Round up to 8.

A puny little goblin.

23 attribute points [23], 4 skill ranks [8], 2 exploits [8] = 39

39/12 comes to 3.25. Round up to 4.

A swamp dragon.

140 atribute points [140], 6 skill ranks [12], 8 exploits [64] = 216

216/12 comes to 18.

So, stuff this doesn't accomodate: SOAK, and equipment.

 

[Gradine]

The solution for PC rank seems simple enough; starting rank is 5 and it goes up whenever you spend X experience points, where X is the amount of xp needed for a career grade. You could set it so you always round down, or up, or to the nearest rank (so if I need 12 xp for a career grade, I'd rank up after I spent 7).

For NPCs I'd recommend tying certain levels of SOAK and equipment to NPC exploits. So a certain level of SOAK is worth a certain number of exploits for the purposes of determining NPC rank. Each die added from special equipment is worth an exploit, etc.

 

[Morrus]

Each die added from special equipment is worth an exploit, etc.

That's a heck of a mathematical assumption! Is each equipment die worth an exploit? That, basically, is the problem in a nutshell. Placing values on these things.

 

[Gradine]

I was giving that more as an example. Obviously without knowing the underlying math I wouldn't know the actual value of a specific equipment bonus or natural SOAK score.

I was thinking that you could compare the bonus from equipment to equivalent bonus gained from skill or attribute bonuses, but IIRC that's not a strictly linear scale, so bonuses from equipment mean more for lower ranked critters than for higher ranked ones.

It's also very dependent on what kind of information you want to communicate with NPC rank. Is it an overall measure of skill and ability as compared to the PCs? Is it a combat challenge rating? Is it something else entirely? What you want to communicate will be a huge factor in determining how you want to weigh certain elements.

A lowly rank 4 goblin is an easy combat encounter compared to a massive dragon. But give that same goblin access to spiffy high quality scanner and it's suddenly a much bigger problem during a stealth encounter.

It's fairly easy to compare opposed rolls when designing skill challenges. It's quite a bit harder to tell an even combat encounter at a glance. If that's the primary goal of ranking NPCs than I might even recommend creating an entirely different system of creating and ranking combat NPCs, one that doesn't take into account non-combat attributes and skills (which I gather is what's holding your T-rex back from being barely a rank above a starting character.)

If combat ranking isn't your primary concern then I'd say it's probably not worth over thinking. If you've got a universal exploit around that gives natural SOAK use that as your baseline (or design a hypothetical one if you don't have one), then use the eyeball test for equipment bonuses. You might weigh bonuses to defense or attack differently from incidental skill bonus equipment (such as the aforementioned scanner) or you might not. Then you can probably call it a day. I'd gather the bonuses from SOAK will give your assorted dinosaurs an appropriate enough bump.

 

[Morrus]

You're right. In the long run, no RPG - including every iteration of D&D - has had a perfect XP system. The best available is something 'good enough' and very few RPGs have encounters which aren't situation-dependent (and who want's an RPG that isn't? Not me, for sure!)

So, yeah, an approximation is the closest we're likely to get here, and that should be OK. To an extent, games are partly art, not science.

 

[Morrus]

Following this train of thought, it allows us to work out advancement rates. Games like D&D have, in the past, set rates such as 13 equal (combat) encounters per level, thought that figure varies with editions.

So, if we were to say roughly 10 equal combat encounters per career grade, that gives us the price of a career grade (which increases with each one). I'm just trying to get my head to grok the maths there; I'm having a bit of a mental block on something that should be very simple.

Right...

So if you get x experience for an equal combat encounter, a grade is equal to 10x.

Levels don't scale linearly - five starter characters (rank 5 each) can't take on a rank 25 monster. They can fairly easily handle a single level 5 one though. This is trickier than I thought.

 

[Gradine]

Yeah, I don't envy you that task at all.

One additional thing that occurs to me; using your calculations for NPC rank based on career grade, a starting PC would actually be quite a bit higher than rank 5, due to starting attributes, racial bonuses and free universal exploits.

I don't know if that matters much in the long run or not. After all, by most RPG standards a "balanced" encounter is one the PCs should be winning most if not all of the time, so it would make sense for a system to have a healthy tilt in the PCs' direction.

 

[Morrus]

I think it was D&D 4E - I'm not sure - which said that an encounter was designed to drain 25% of a party's resources (in terms of hit points, healing potions, spells and the like). That was considered an 'equal' or standard encounter. And you'd have 13 of those per level.