I’m curious: Those of you that have played a good bit of UW, what’s the most advancements you’ve acquired with a single character?
I’m curious: Those of you that have played a good bit of UW, what’s the most advancements you’ve acquired with a…
I’m curious: Those of you that have played a good bit of UW, what’s the most advancements you’ve acquired with a…
We have characters up to 9 skills now.
I’ll be honest: it’s a bit too much. It’s a lot of skills to keep track of and they don’t all matter often. It can be a bit unweildy. That’s probably why other PbtA games cap around 5-6 skills and add stat bonuses and the like for the rest.
Yeeppp, sadly one of the big flaws with UW is directly linked to my own schedule of play. For the past few years I’ve tended to run one-shots with a lot of different people, not to mention with a ruleset that was being rewritten every week. I didn’t have the opportunity to really get a feel for very long-term campaigns, and the advancement system suffered greatly for it.
I’m trying to put together an alternate advancement system for FBH which will hopefully patch things over for long-running campaigns, and I’ll be leaning heavily on the community to help me out and provide their feedback when I write up the first draft.
So uh… sorry? 😛
I think this is the case with most, if not all PbtA games. The candle that burns twice as bright and all that. I also enjoy Fragged Empire. We’ve played our 37th session (these are only 3-4 hours each) and are still going. It is a very crunchy game, so not at all like PbtA games, but part of the fun is the loooonnnng game.
Sean Gomes heh, no worries. I’ve been looking into alternate ways to spend XP, even during play, to prolong the gaining of skills. Ideas include things like: spend 2xp for a +1 to a roll, 5xp to gain a Class 3 asset, or 10xp for a favor.
Aaron Griffin I’m absolutely going to hit you up next week with a preliminary draft of the new advancement, get your take on it, since I get the impression you’ve got the longest-running UW campaign going.
My group has a game that’s been running over a year now. I’ve lost count of how many advances we have, and what characters have what, and everyone agrees some sort of change or reset is in order. They really like our customized setting and seem to want to keep going though! So the game definitely has longevity for us even if the mechanical support for it is a bit poor. Not to mention despite my iffy GMing as well. 🙂
The factions we started the game with aren’t even all still relevant, and adding/removing them in a long game is something else I’d like to see some rule support for.
We’re likely to rely on some combination of resetting characters (paring them back to essential skills & careers like Dungeon World) or simply retiring them in favor of new blood.
My opinion on new advancements:
– No +1 to a stat. Other PbtAs have the problem of +3/+4 on a Stat making the chances of failure very low for a wide array of situations. Stats are broad in this kind of games. I’d rather go with +1 to this Stat in this particular situation. So still +1, but only in a narrow situation.
– Buy of favors/debts with XP, as Aaron Griffin said.
– Buy new upgrades, workstations or whatever for your ship, city or headquarters. Then describe how you got it (bought with money, stolen, built, present from some faction…)
– Buy new assets (guns, attire, hovermoto…). Then justify it in the fiction as the previous point.
– Buy skills as always.
– Burn XP for a 10+. Spend enough XP for an advancement and you get a 10+ on any roll, no matter what. You may do it after seeing the result in the dice.
– Burn advancement for a 10+. Destroy one of your advancements and you get a 10+ on any roll, no matter what. You may do it after seeing the result in the dice. You corrupt your cult rules with wicked magic and lose your access to that magic (I am thinking of FBH skills), crash your ship into other, getting a 10+, killing everybody in the enemy ship and surviving yourselves via scape pods… The asset/skill/advancement burnt has to fit in the fiction somehow. Taking it to the limit should reasonably give you an upper hand.