To me personally, character advancement isn't particularly important. I'd much rather have some sort of story advancement instead.
I have run games where the players sweated off on XP at the end of every session and couldn't wait until they got to the next level up. It kinda concerned me some, to tell the truth.
I think one of the neatest advancement systems I've ever come across was in the diceless Marvel Universe RPG. Basically, at the end of every session, each character earned a number of "lines". These had to be written out as sentences and attached to the character's abilities, and they had to be relevant to the game that had been played. For example, if you had the Black Ops skill and you successfully infiltrated an enemy's base, you could add a line to your Black Ops skill along the lines of "Broke into the Enemy's Secret Base and stole the plans". Over time, the lines you added to each skill built up the story of that character's exploits.
But then, whenever you added a total of ten lines to an ability, you got to increase it's numeric value by one. So, like CoC, the more you used an ability, the better it got.
It was kinda a little from Column A and a little from Column B.
I had a lot of fun with MURPG. I think it's a vastly underrated game (not without it's problems, but definitely worth a play)
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Date: 2007-05-17 05:55 am (UTC)I have run games where the players sweated off on XP at the end of every session and couldn't wait until they got to the next level up. It kinda concerned me some, to tell the truth.
I think one of the neatest advancement systems I've ever come across was in the diceless Marvel Universe RPG. Basically, at the end of every session, each character earned a number of "lines". These had to be written out as sentences and attached to the character's abilities, and they had to be relevant to the game that had been played. For example, if you had the Black Ops skill and you successfully infiltrated an enemy's base, you could add a line to your Black Ops skill along the lines of "Broke into the Enemy's Secret Base and stole the plans". Over time, the lines you added to each skill built up the story of that character's exploits.
But then, whenever you added a total of ten lines to an ability, you got to increase it's numeric value by one. So, like CoC, the more you used an ability, the better it got.
It was kinda a little from Column A and a little from Column B.
I had a lot of fun with MURPG. I think it's a vastly underrated game (not without it's problems, but definitely worth a play)