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, this is in other words the game mechanics about the experience. 

As a foreword, I have to admit that I have never been satisfied of the various solutions that were proposed in the several editions of the first and most famous RPG. The XP system had always 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 in the rulebook.

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:

  1. Progression by Growth, which replaces the XP approach
  2. Progression by use of the skills
In the first way, I made up a system linked to the KUP approach. The usual 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 the actions of them due to the presence of this gap of information. In this context I decided to foster the famous aphorism γνῶθι σαυτόν (know thyself): the way a character can grow (and basically earn points to level up) is, whenever the GM deems it useful, to ask the player how the action of his character will end. The more the player guesses the right result, the faster will be the level up. 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.

In the second way, I applied 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; if it is possible to have a rule for a single skill, this preserves the players from the mere application of the unveiled rule to any other skill.

Just to wrap up: a character can get a level up and more knowledge to allocate in his skill if the player is good enough to understand how he will react in-game and (not or!) a character can improve a single skill by using it in a proper way (unfortunately not known...)

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! 

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