Your favorite character advancement scheme

[Hella_Tellah]

I've been thinking about character advancement and experience schemes recently, shopping around for the best advancement system I can find for the kinds of games I like to run. Which are your favorites?

I really like Keys from The Shadow of Yesterday. Define what is important for your character, then receive experience points each time those situations, complications, or motivations come up in play.

The Basic Role-Playing system is really fun and fairly logical, as far as experience point systems go. Make a check mark next to a skill when you use it, then roll d% under your skill rating at the end of the session/adventure to see if it advances. The higher your skill, the less likely it is to advance.

The Storyteller system of awarding experience at the end of a session is pretty good for awarding particular sorts of behavior among the players. It does feel a little bit too heavy-handed from the ST's side, though, and I've found it often ends the night on a low note because someone feels like they didn't get all the experience they earned.

About the only system I actively dislike is the D&D 3/4 system of awarding experience for overcoming challenges of a particular Challenge Rating. It encourages weird behavior, like clearing out dungeons rather than trying to get in, grab the treasure, and avoid wandering monsters. I also don't like doing all the math involved in handing out experience parties of mixed levels in 3.0/3.5, so the 4e method of assigning static numbers is a little nicer at least. The GP->XP system in 1e is a little odd in terms of realism, but it does encourage the sort of behavior that the system is best at. It's great as an incentive for "smart play", but it doesn't really simulate learning very well.

Which experience/character advancement scheme do you like best? What are some good systems that are easily ported to other games?

 

[Vyvyan Basterd]

It encourages weird behavior, like clearing out dungeons rather than trying to get in, grab the treasure, and avoid wandering monsters.

Which experience/character advancement scheme do you like best? What are some good systems that are easily ported to other games?

I like D&D's advancement scheme. I've always found other systems too uneven, which makes my job as GM harder.

To address the issue of weird behavior, I focus on awarding experience for accomplishing goals. In 4E this relates directly to Quest Rewards. If the goal the players have chosen is to get in, grab the treasure, and avoid trouble, I give them an appropriate* quest reward for doing that.

*Appropriate in my opinion is an equal amount of experience to what they would have gained if they went room-by-room clearing the location.

 

[EvilQAGuy]

I run two games with very different advancement schemes. In my 4e campaign the players advance according to the story. In our last session they freed a bunch of priests of different religions from a prison. The passion of the prayers of thanks coming from all those priests caught the gods’ attention and that attention imbued them with just a bit more power. This has been pretty slow advancement, but so far the players are digging it. They even try to engage plot hooks that may lead to the right situation. You have to have agreeable characters, both for slow advancement and advancement according to story. Otherwise I set an XP amount for the 'mission' and let the characters accomplish it however they wish. In twenty years I've only had one D&D player be completely against the idea of tweaking the way experience points work. He also wanted to argue alignment with the other players. We, um ... 'corrected the glitch in the system' pretty quickly and everyone was much happier.

I also run a Cadillacs & Dinosaurs game that uses a character advancement scheme that deviates slightly from the core book. Players get points for encounters (combat or not), advancing the story and making the table laugh. Points can be spent on skills, but players must either have an instructor or a lot of time on their hands. Expense increases as skill level increases. Skills also have a practical upper bound of an associated attribute – it’s really expensive to advance them higher than the parent attribute. Finally, most points go into specific pools based on what the character was doing when it was awarded. On the negative side it’s a bit more complicated for the GM unless you build a good process or tracking tool to handle it.

 

[Asmor]

The Basic Role-Playing system is really fun and fairly logical, as far as experience point systems go. Make a check mark next to a skill when you use it, then roll d% under your skill rating at the end of the session/adventure to see if it advances. The higher your skill, the less likely it is to advance.

I like this idea a lot, and am using a similar idea in a system I'm working on. In my version, which is d100 based, you need to roll greater than 50+skill level on a straight d100. The reason for the high threshold being that, because of the way the system works, letting people get very large modifiers to skills would be undesirable.

Another interesting system was from the Marvel Super Heroes RPG. It used "lines of experience;" basically, after each adventure, you'd write a line describing something your character did. For example, "Fought Mystique underwater" or "Hacked a sentinel." When you got 5 lines of experience, you got more points to spend, and in addition if a previously-written line of experience was applicable to something you were doing you'd get a bonus (e.g. trying to hack into a missile defense system, you could point out your experience hacking sentinels).

Also cool because your experience sheet also served as a simple chronicle of your character's adventures.

 

[vagabundo]

I like the warhammer scheme of actually spending your XP points to upgrade your abilities.

Another interesting system was from the Marvel Super Heroes RPG. It used "lines of experience;" basically, after each adventure, you'd write a line describing something your character did. For example, "Fought Mystique underwater" or "Hacked a sentinel." When you got 5 lines of experience, you got more points to spend, and in addition if a previously-written line of experience was applicable to something you were doing you'd get a bonus (e.g. trying to hack into a missile defense system, you could point out your experience hacking sentinels).

Also cool because your experience sheet also served as a simple chronicle of your character's adventures.

That is pretty cool. I wonder if that could work for DND...

 

[Jan van Leyden]

The theoretically "best" system I know of is used by the oldest German RPG named Midgard. Midgard ist class and level base, though it uses a different way of describing a characters capabilities, mostly in form of skills.

When engaging in an adventures characters earn XPs in up to three different categories: General XP, Combat XP and Magic XP. A player can spend the XP for increasing stuff or learning new stuff.

How much she has to pay for the improvement depends on the current value and the character class. While a Fighter type needs only few XP to increase a weapon skill, the Mage type has to pay more. On the other hand the Fighter type may learn how to cast spells, if the player saves a lot of XP.

Not all types of XP can be used for each improvement. General XP can pay for anything, Combat and Magic XP only for related stuff.

Part of the payment can also be made in gold, and the player can decide how to weight XP and gold for the payment.

A character's level, which sets an upper limit for some values, improves according to the number of XP spent for improvement, not on the values themselves.

In theory this is a pretty versatile system with a healthy degree of consistency. In practice it proves to be very cumbersome. The system provides very detailed rules on how to earn XP.

Did your PC cast a spell? She gets XP according to the Stamina spent for casting and the type of spell cast.

Did your PC fight? He gets XP for the number of rounds spent in combat according to the data given for the exact opponents.

Did he use a skill? What skill against what difficulty and in what situation?

The Midgard system wants to be a compromise between abstract learning like in D&D and the experience based method of BRP. It works, but requires too much time and effort to be worth the result.

 

[Nagol]

I'm a big fan of Heo Games' style of awarding expereince.

It's a points-based character design system. Every adventure, the players are awarded a few additional points -- typically about 1-2% of the original points used in to create the characters.

The player is free to spend the points as he likes.

This lets the characters evolve slowly over time without huge shifts in capability.

 

[Jhaelen]

The systems I like best are Runequest's and Ars Magica's. Both allow advancement by spending time rather than xp.

The Runequest system doesn't use xp at all. you just check any skill successfully used, and when you have time to train, you can check to see if you improve any of them. You can also spend more time and try to advance skills without checks.

In Ars Magica the advancement rules are quite elaborate. It depends on your activities during a season what you may advance and by how much. There's also ways to improve certain related skills while your doing something else, e.g. when you're reading a book about counterspelling written in Greek you improve your Read (Greek) skill along the way. On the other hand your current reading skill may influence how fast you improve your counterspelling skill.

What I love about both systems are the elaborate down-time systems. Time between adventures is never wasted and in fact you never seem to have enough time. Time's a precious resource.

 

[Hella_Tellah]

Another interesting system was from the Marvel Super Heroes RPG. It used "lines of experience;" basically, after each adventure, you'd write a line describing something your character did. For example, "Fought Mystique underwater" or "Hacked a sentinel." When you got 5 lines of experience, you got more points to spend, and in addition if a previously-written line of experience was applicable to something you were doing you'd get a bonus (e.g. trying to hack into a missile defense system, you could point out your experience hacking sentinels).

Is that the TSR Marvel game I've heard so much about? I still have yet to find a copy, but everything I've heard makes it sound absolutely fascinating.

What I love about both systems are the elaborate down-time systems. Time between adventures is never wasted and in fact you never seem to have enough time. Time's a precious resource.

Ooh, I love Ars Magica's system, too. Pendragon is great for this as well. There is the small problem that it constrains the kinds of games you can play a bit--you can't have the players constantly on the run, for instance. Small price to pay though, really. I do adore a system with good downtime mechanics.

 

[GlassJaw]

I've always been a fan of Shadowrun's Karma/point-based system.