The Business: A Palladium That Survives Through The 21st Century (Part 7)

(Following from yesterday's post.)

You are far, far too used to think of Experience like this.

A believable adventure game does not work like this. Verisimilitude doesn't hold up when Experience is just a DING! That creates, and has created, all sorts of ludological dissonance where players act contrary to how real people think and act in such situations.

Which is why AD&D1e has the only leveling system in a Class/Level game that doesn't make people do that.

Summarize, for those coming in late:

• Gain Experience Points sufficient to qualify for the next level in your man's Class (or Classes, for multi-Classed demi-humans).
• Get your performance graded by the Referee, with the primary rubric being "Did you PLAY the ROLE in the GROUP that your man's Class fulfills?" Your grade, a number from 1 to 4, sets the number of weeks your man must spend in Mandatory Downtime in training to receive to level up and get all the benefits thereof.
• Find a trainer. If the Referee does not let your man self-train, he cannot level up without a trainer; the DMG specifies when this is an option (hint: PLAY the ROLE well).
• Spend a number of time measured in weeks in training. Take his current level (not the new level) and multiple it by 1500; this is the cost in Gold Pieces (or equivalent value) per week he spends on training expenses. Failure to pay either the time or the gold means NO TRAINING.
• Track the time spend on the Campaign Calendar; that man is out of play until Training is complete and can do NOTHING ELSE. Track the gold spent; that cannot be used for ANYTHING ELSE. Write down the man's return date on the Calendar, and his adjusted wealth upon returning in your campaign notes.

This is part of the overall feedback loop that keeps players hungry to sortie into the wilderness to seek out dungeons to delve and lairs to loot. It's a great system.

Palladium has NOTHING like this at all. Palladium is all about the DING!

Guess what's not being allowed anymore? We're taking that DING! and throwing it against the wall.

The Abstraction Explained

A mandatory downtime for leveling up represents the man taking his experiences in the field and, under supervision of his betters, refines them into actionable lessons.

This is akin to a professional athlete, such as a boxer, watching recordings of his recent bouts to analyze his performance (and that of his opponent) to find what did and did not work and thereby identify what specific things he needs to do to improve as a fighter. American Football greats do this as a matter of routine, and they take this seriously. So do champions in any sport, or martial endeavor.

In time, those that gain valuable experience and survive rotate back to train the next batch- well, in functional systems they do. (Axis powers during the war, looking at you.) It also becomes harder to find better-than-you people to train under, so the skills and habits needed to be effective at being auto-didactic become necessary for professional development once at the peak.

This is how, therefore, we use the AD&D1e scheme under Palladium.

Adaptation Notes

For Fantasy, this is used straight. (Again, it's just Kevin's House Rules, so reversion to Orthodoxy is AOK.)

For the other games, the clause heres are "...or equivalent value" and "trainer".

In the gonzo kitchen sink of RIFTS, a Coalition Grunt doesn't pay in cash but in Services Rendered to the State; this often means (a) reassignment to a position of greater authority with concommitant accountability (No more E-4 Mafia for you, Bob!). Meanwhile, a Godling may well be voluntold by Daddy to do something upon emerging from his training. By comparison, that Headhunter gets to pick his poison because he's either doing contractual work in return for training or he's banking credits like his Fantasy counterpart.

Ninjas & Superspies characters, often tied to an Agency, get to pay for training with services rendered. Heroes Unlimited characters get to self-train more often, depending on their powers (or lack thereof), with all the extra time spend that such entails; people join teams like the Avengers and the Justice League for good reasons.

You get a sense of how this works now, don't you? In lieu of cash, valuable services may be offered instead as payment.

It's also how players running Patrons can build up a Faction (or exploit one they've built already): offer the necessary training, and cut deals for payment. That Lizard Mage is willing to train you in Summoner magic, but you'll be required to render him a service in return. Want your Splicer's Bio-Armor to be more like a Guyver unit? (A leveling up perk in Splicers: more BIO-E to play with.) Be ready to take a big risk against a Machine installation to get the data necessary to do it.

And with each service so rendered, your man gets an opportunity to rise up in that Faction's ranks. Maybe even enough to make his own bid to take power and rule it.

Totally not how Prosek took over the Coalition States.

Introducing this most basic degree of verisimilitude improves campaign integrity greatly. It breaks up One True Parties. It encourages players to have multiple PCs in the campaign (or to take breaks when their man is out of play). It allows players to have their mans do something useful if they stop playing for a while--they become trainers--and it plays right into the big wargame level of Domains, Kingdoms, Diplomacy and determining the fates of nations and empires- what this hobby is all about.

Yes, even in your slasher scenario right out of prime 1980s B-movie horror. Today's Final Girl becomes tomorrow's Faithful Matriarch, able to stare down vampires knowing full well that God is with her, and the man who survived the Zombie Apocalypse becomes King of the Ruined World after he slays the last of the Dead Lords and all the zombies crumble to dust.

Death to DING!

Tomorrow, how all this works together to make a better Palladium.