I've posted more than once about the weird gamer psychology behind the presence of levels in a RPG contrasted to an endgame where character improvement came incrementally with better gear/attributes/etc. and increased player skill. It's pervasive through all of the videogame RPGs, maintaining dominance even in genres where it should not be a thing logically. (e.g. Borderlands)
There's a root to this. Back in the early days we not only had Dungeons & Dragons, but also Traveller and Gamma World. Over at the Castalia House blog, Jeffro goes over the difference in approach between the two TSR games.
And unlike D&D characters that start with a single hit die and then play very, very carefully until they can (maybe) graduate to a new level where they might get a precious few additional hit points, Gamma World characters are much, much heartier. They start with a number of d6 hit dice equal to their already larger than average Constitution scores!
The class and level system that is the touchstone of every D&D and D&D-like games is simply obliterated. Your to-hit targets are a function of weapon class versus armor class with levels not really coming into things at all, really. Your saving throws against things like poison and radiation don’t go up according to a schedule based on your level. Your Constitution score determines that– just like your Mental Strength determines how well you’ll fare resisting mental attacks. Finally, there is no outline of what sort of followers and strongholds you’ll establish once you reach “name level” and so forth. You’re going to have to be content with whatever amount of followers your Charisma can pull down for you!
I think I know what the issue is: most players want clear, consistent, constant, and substantial character progression. Levels do that very well. Incremental changes do not, not in tabletop RPGs during play at the table. You have to break out calculators and do theorycrafting to see if it's an upgrade or not. As most players aren't theorycrafters, they have--over time--revealed their preference for levels over not.
This explains why later editions of GW shifted towards that D&D paradigm, and why retroclones (e.g.Mutant Future) usually have that sort of thing as an option. You will have far more success if you use some sort of class-and-level scheme
Gamer psychology gets weird, but it is not impossible to understand. They want clear, objective measurements because that's info they need to inform their decision-making. Be that gamer one who prefers to work on the Strategic or Tactical level, good info is vital towards success. Class & Level contributes significantly to that clarity. Sorted. So that's your default unless you have a damn good reason to do otherwise.
It occurs to me that there's a bit of behavioral psychology at work here: the principle of irregular reinforcement. It works like this: if you give one a rat a piece of rat chow every time she pushes a button, and have another button that "pays out" randomly about half the time the rat pushes it, the rat actually gets conditioned faster with the second button.
ReplyDeleteThis works with humans, as the City of Las Vegas illustrates.
Now consider how this works with XPs: in a game like GURPS where XPs equate directly to character points, it's like the button that always gives out the rat chow. In a game like Pathfinder, there's more uncertainty. Will I get enough XPs from this session to level up? No? Next week for sure!
I wrote a post on my own 'blog about experience, proposing an alternative which might meet this same criterion. http://www.jamescambias.com/blog/2017/04/experience-points-part-1-do-we-need-them.html