Now that folks have been running games for a while, has anyone created, imported from other PbtA systems, or otherwise scrounged up alternate advancement goals?
Our players are starting to amass quite a lot of skills, and some of them are standing out as the more frequently useful ones; Toughness and Tactics come to mind. Yes, I do know a good GM can make the others relevant, but that’s a separate topic. 🙂
I know in Dungeon World you typically are encouraged to retire characters at level 10. I’d just like to get creative about alternate rewards to be bought with XP if some sort of skill cap is enacted. Some ideas we’ve bounced around are: data points, reroll credits, skill trades, equipment, currency, political favors. I’d love to come up with something system-related so people still feel like their characters are earning something fun and powerful, but we don’t end up with everyone being good at everything.
Time to start that Epic Level Handbook! 😉
Buying debts from other people and factions?
I have been considering this, but I think fictional goals fit the setting better.
My other option is to port things from, say, the Cypher System/Fate where you can start buying single-use or once-per-session moves tied to equipment or some knack.
But I’d love to see what others come up with.
Perhaps starting their own faction. Come up with faction appropriate advancement triggers (a negotiation brings peace or war) and increase one of the fledgling faction’s stats ( might, reach, ideology (popularity) and organization (loyalty))
While I like the idea of faction advancement, that would have to be something that we’d have needed to start with, as the characters’ actions have already been advancing their factions (and since we’re converted from another system, we didn’t start with the Faction rules). I tend to be of the feeling that RP and choices should influence factions, while XP rewards should lean towards the mechanical. That said, maybe we’ll put a few things together and see what the players think, test them out and see how they play.
So let’s see. In DW, advancement gives you a stat increase and a move each level, with the stat increase resulting in a +1 about every 3-4 levels. Other PbtA games are closer to UW in terms of advancement – you can get either a move or stat advancement, with a smaller set of moves.
Have you played many other PbtA games? Are you running an open ended campaign?
If you set a discrete time frame for your campaign (a number of sessions, solving specific problems, some end goal, etc), advancement is less of an issue.
If you run things open ended, PbtA games don’t work all that well, in my opinion. Your best bet is to retire the main characters and bring in some sort of underling as a new character, or just give them a second character to play. Basically make it so that they start fresh while keeping the story in tact.
It’s definitely a problem I’ve been chewing on. My players are all getting quite the rack of skills and starting to overlap more, which is kind of dull. At the same time, they’re all having a great time and have no interest in wrapping anything up… 20 sessions or so in and we’re still going strong.
Since everyone’s happy, I haven’t been in a huge rush to change anything or implement any sort of cap.
The other option is to start offering custom skills based on the fiction