Written by Peter Weilnböck
Published on: 2023-03-11
Looking into the basics of power progression in TTRPGs in a bit more detail
I already took a short look at the basics of power progression in my last blog post to this general topic. Now I want to take a bit of a closer look into various ways how power progression works.
But once again, I need to start with a few definitions.
Many TTRPGs use classes to define what a character can do. Others do not. Those systems that do not use classes, I would call classless systems. Those that use classes can be once again split into two categories: hard classes and soft classes. Hard classes are the DnD approach: You choose a class, and when the character improves, he improves along the strict lines that are given by his class. With soft classes, the class only defines a starting situation, and maybe a few restrictions, but leave the improvement open in principle.
The lines are of course not that hard, and the whole thing is more of a continuum than hard borders. But it helps to define some points on this continuum to make it easier to talk about it.
A small titbit, that I find quite interesting: even systems that are mostly classless, often make a distinction for magic. So everything can be learned by everybody, with the exception of magic. For magic somehow there needs to be an inherent talent, that is reserved for “special people”. Of course there are always exceptions, and one notable exception that comes to mind is the German TTRPG “Splittermond” where magic can be learned by everyone, but it is not necessarily easier/more powerful than the mundane alternative to do the task.
Before I digress further: In principle class based systems are more predictable, but also seem more artificial to me. Classless systems are much freer for the player to simply choose what they want to have. For class based systems to have the same amount of choice, the character creation and power progression instructions would need to get rather bloated.
Class based systems also impose roles, which might be desirable. However, classless systems can also have roles that need to be filled. An example for that would be “Shadowrun”. At least in the 4th edition, there are roles and archetypes, but other than magic (and technomagic, äh, technomancy of course) everything can be learned by everyone. In theory. In praxis the various roles get filled by specialists, sometimes with a narrower focus than most classes would provide.
If it has not been clear by now: I have a strong preference to classless systems. Or at least to systems with softer classes.
I wrote levelling, even though it actually is just one of the options for power progression. The other is a kind of “point buy” system, where individual skills and attributes can get upgraded one by one.
Classic levelling basically demands a class based system. A system where you receive a pre-bundled package of advantages and power-ups at once. Since this is quite restrictive, there are often options for each level, or the option to multi-class, etc. which demands a large amount of rather detailed descriptions in the rulebooks.
Point buy systems on the other hand are rather flexible because of the pick and choose method of upgrading. In most point buy systems each new skill level is more expensive than the last, which encourages building wide characters instead of narrow, highly specialised ones.
A interesting variation is done by “Lex Arcana”, where experience to upgrade is earned separately for each skill/attribute based on an allocation that is set up individually for each character. This system would seem to make the PCs more specialised with time, while the less prioritised skills still get upgraded automatically with time. Unfortunately I was not able to observe this in practice so far, since we only played the quick-starter as a one-off.
For point buy, there are again separations in what can be upgraded.
And now we come to the point that startet the whole topic for me:
In some systems, such as “Genesys” you can not upgrade the attributes of a character after creation, only the skills. This seems to be the same for the “Year Zero Engine” games from Free League Publishing. And it is something that I do not particularly like.
Such a practice does limit the ways in which a character can progress und it does seem a bit artificial to me. I understand that in such systems the attributes are quite powerful, and since the level of those attributes is rather low, each additional point is worth a lot. Allowing those attributes to increase during play, would severely impact the balance. Additionally it is a ways of restricting characters more to their starting role, since they are limited in how they can develop in areas, where the do not have adequate attributes from the beginning.
Another observation I have made with “Genesys” was, that since not only the attributes were fixed, but also the skills had a rather low maximum level, there was a rather close ceiling that could be reached for the main area of expertise. The large pool of additional talents that could be bought mitigated the problem somewhat, but I personally felt rather limited. Frequently I struggled with what to save up for next, because none of the available options seemed particularly appealing to me.
For comparison, in the German TTRPG “Das Schwarze Auge”, I always have too many things that I want to buy for my characters so that I am always excited for further progression that lets me improve another part.
I already mentioned in the last section, that the limited possible increases for the skills was a problem for me. I think this is alright for short campaigns, where other considerations (ease of the basic test / roll, interesting mechanics that would become bothersome with a higher skill, etc.) trump the power progression, but for long campaigns it does feel… off.
I think the reason for this is, that the progression curve for each skill is necessarily rather steep, if there are only a small number of steps available. And as discussed in the last article, steep progression curves with a hard limit, seem not ideal for longer campaigns.
With higher average skill values, each increase has far less impact, but much more increases are possible. This would facilitate a flat progression curve. If the increases get prohibitively expensive, then not even a hard limit would be necessary and the power progression would taper off on its own.
Additionally there is the granularity of what activities are covered by each skill. Basically how many skills exisit. This is more often termed granularity, but this type of granularity is not the topic of this blog post.
I am not sure, if it really makes sense to write down my preferences again, since I was not very objective during most of the article, but to summarise: