Core Rules deep dive: Experience
New post on the core rules "deep dive": this time I will focus on the progression of the characters. In order to make it compatible with traditional RPGs, these are, in other words, the game mechanics about the experience.
As a foreword, I admit that I have never been satisfied of the various solutions proposed in the several editions of the first and most famous RPG. The XP system has always had some drawback or gaps. Nothing extremely important but any of them led me to do some amendments with a homebrew system which was basically closer to the approach of the tournament adventures than the one of the official rule.
Now, given the fact that even with my homebrew solution I was not fully satisfied, I came to the conclusion that there was something to change at a deeper level... and at the same time I felt very important to keep and stress out the improvement of a character in case he uses in the correct way his skills.
This brought me to build a 2-way progression system:
Progression by Growth, which replaces the XP approach
Progression by use of the skills, very close to a videogame model
With the first rule, I made up a system linked to the KUP approach. The starting point is that under the KUP model the players do not know completely how their characters are built and they are not certain of their actions due to the presence of this gap of information. In this context I decided to foster the players’ attitude of famous aphorism γνῶθι σαυτόν (know thyself): the way a character can grow (and basically earn points to level up) is whenever the player understands how the action of his character will end (upon GM request). The more the player guesses the right result, the faster will be the level up: this means that a character fails all his actions and the player guesses all the failures! (It is a way to express the lessons learnt approach) This solution implies that new players or players with new characters will need some time to acquaintance but once they start to understand the underlying KUP model, this game should not be that difficult. Btw, for this rule I decided to use the Nash Equilibrium for two main reasons: in order to make it a simple rule and also to credit one of the most brilliant man of the last century.
The second rule has a very simple and direct approach: the more a character uses a skill and the faster the score in that skill will improve. Full stop. The KUP model is present even in this case: the GM defines the rules to achieve the thresholds to get the improvements. The players should be unaware of these rules. ...ah, and the rules might be different according to the skill! (to the skill and not to the player!) This is not because I want to have nasty GMs for this game but simply because it could be the case that in some circumstances a rule can be unveiled; the option to have a rule for a single skill preserves the players from the mere application of the unveiled rule to any other skill.
Just to wrap up: a character can get more knowledge to allocate in his skills if he levels up and properly uses his skills; this happens if the player is good enough to understand how his character will react in-game and improve a single skill by using it in a proper way. Both ways are made ‘mysterious’ to the players due to an information asymmetry which transform this circumstance interesting enough to be used as the filed for a bet: the player has to demonstrate he knows his character… the in-game results of the later affects only in part his growth.
I really hope this way will make even the experience/growth an interesting topic game-wise. I look forward to having a confirmation from the playtest!