I understand why a lot of people like the concept of experience points, it's functional and it represents a steady pace of advancement, but in the system I'm making I've decided to completely scrap it. I'm not as familiar with a lot of RPG systems as I should be, so chances are this (or something like it) is used elsewhere, but here is my concept for replacing experience.

Amazing FeatsAs characters progress a plot there will be a number of amazing feats they accomplish. Amazing feats are things such as-

Completing a major plot point

Accomplishing something extremely impressive

Completing an important task in an unexpected or dramatic manner

As you can see, the list is quite subjective. It is between the players and the GM to determine an appropriate rate of Amazing Feat accomplishment. It is highly recommended that characters within the same party are kept at the same number of Amazing Feat accomplishments. Essentially, an amazing feat for one, is an amazing feat for all.

Amazing feats should only be rewarded for actions that encourage the enjoyment of the group as a whole. If a character routinely singlehandedly wipes the floor with an enemy group and leaves nothing for the rest of the group to do, it makes the game less enjoyable for all. Similarly, if a character bravely volunteers to hold off the enemy force while the group escape, and in doing so draws the rest of the players into the game more, increasing peoples enjoyment, that character would earn an amazing feat point even if he lost the fight.

An amazing feat is NOT

Defeating a normal fight

Going through the motions of an encounter

Completing a task

Leveling up
Characters advance by going up levels, and gaining the associated bonus' with advancing in those levels. To qualify to go up to the next level, the character must accomplish the appropriate number of Amazing Feats. This is determined by halving the character's current level, rounding down, and adding 1.

For example, to go from level 5 to level 6, a character must accomplish half of five rounded down (two) plus one (three) amazing feats.




This was written on the fly and likely has mistakes and holes in the logic. The idea of the system is to stand halfway between quantifiable advancement, and the GM simply handing out levels arbitrarily when they feel like it. Players can see advancement when they are granted Amazing Feat points, but the GM still can carefully control the level up progress and use it to encourage good play.

Thoughts?

Quote from: TheHarlequin;398181I understand why a lot of people like the concept of experience points, it's functional and it represents a steady pace of advancement, but in the system I'm making I've decided to completely scrap it. I'm not as familiar with a lot of RPG systems as I should be, so chances are this (or something like it) is used elsewhere, but here is my concept for replacing experience.

Amazing FeatsAs characters progress a plot there will be a number of amazing feats they accomplish. Amazing feats are things such as-

Completing a major plot point

Accomplishing something extremely impressive

Completing an important task in an unexpected or dramatic manner

As you can see, the list is quite subjective. It is between the players and the GM to determine an appropriate rate of Amazing Feat accomplishment. It is highly recommended that characters within the same party are kept at the same number of Amazing Feat accomplishments. Essentially, an amazing feat for one, is an amazing feat for all.

Amazing feats should only be rewarded for actions that encourage the enjoyment of the group as a whole. If a character routinely singlehandedly wipes the floor with an enemy group and leaves nothing for the rest of the group to do, it makes the game less enjoyable for all. Similarly, if a character bravely volunteers to hold off the enemy force while the group escape, and in doing so draws the rest of the players into the game more, increasing peoples enjoyment, that character would earn an amazing feat point even if he lost the fight.

An amazing feat is NOT

Defeating a normal fight

Going through the motions of an encounter

Completing a task

Leveling up
Characters advance by going up levels, and gaining the associated bonus' with advancing in those levels. To qualify to go up to the next level, the character must accomplish the appropriate number of Amazing Feats. This is determined by halving the character's current level, rounding down, and adding 1.

For example, to go from level 5 to level 6, a character must accomplish half of five rounded down (two) plus one (three) amazing feats.




This was written on the fly and likely has mistakes and holes in the logic. The idea of the system is to stand halfway between quantifiable advancement, and the GM simply handing out levels arbitrarily when they feel like it. Players can see advancement when they are granted Amazing Feat points, but the GM still can carefully control the level up progress and use it to encourage good play.

Thoughts?

This really is just experience points with different criteria, like Palladium, except for the group aspect. My advice is to emphasize that more. Make levelling explicitly a group thing. Your Amazing Feat is owned collectively by the group, and is not an individual award. That would be a bit different.

-clash

In My Amber games you get XP points to spend on your stats and skills in 2 ways.

i) Complete personal objectives. You can have 3 active at anyone time they must involve a 'conflict' to be overcome although that can be political, social whatever.
Each objective is worth 1-5 points set by the GM depening on how hard it is to do.

ii) The 'plot' is chopped into objectives. Discover who poisoned the king, defeat the army of Moonriders etc. Most of this come in at about 3-10 points and the points are split sometimes asymetrically across all the PCs that played a part.

This means that experience is ongoing and PCs can get experience and grow even if they choose to ignore the plot and pursue their own objectives, which in Amber is just what you want them to do.

As Clash points out your suggested system does just appear to be a simplified XP system where you just get 'xp' for completing things the GM specifies as important and as such is not so different to just bumping the Pcs up a level once they complete each scenario.

Also this is only geared towards Level based games and I'm assuming specifically D&D.  For games that you spend xp regularly to buy smaller increases regularly the experience problem you are talking about doesn't exist.

Quote from: kryyst;398212Also this is only geared towards Level based games and I'm assuming specifically D&D.  For games that you spend xp regularly to buy smaller increases regularly the experience problem you are talking about doesn't exist.

TheHarlequin (OP) noted openly that he was "not as familiar with a lot of RPG systems as I should be". I am assuming this is for a D&D-type system, a "fantasy heartbreaker" type game. The basic assumption of 'levelling' being the norm, and the thought that these criteria are something different from XP confirm this. OTOH, the OP is the best judge of what he wants to do, and if that is creating a D&D-with-something-different game, that's cool.

Personally, I would look at a lot of different games first, even if the goal specifically was a D&D-type game. You get a lot of perspective on the state of the art, because there's more than one way to skin a cat, and a lot of those ways have already been tried.

-clash

The only real similarity between the system I'm working on and DnD is the use of levels and it taking place in a world that doesn't exist.

I'm aware of many (by no means all) of the arguments for and against levels as opposed to more open character development. I chose to use them because it's a fairly simple way to quantify the potential abilities of characters, and gives a GM more of an indication of the capabilities of a party. A party with freeform points buy in all areas may all have spent the same number of points on their character, but that by no means results in a party of equal characters. I will admit the problem also exists in level based systems (one level 10 character is not likely to be equal to another level 10 character) but with mechanics the problem can be constrained somewhat.

I do maintain that the Amazing Feats are different from XP. While they are a measurable standard of advancement (you can measure gaining two Amazing Feat points just as you can measure gaining 200xp), to ignore the differentiation of the criteria for gaining them is to ignore half the issue. By changing the criteria it will (hopefully) inspire a different kind of playstyle, one geared more towards dramatic and enjoyable gameplay than victory through force.

Of course, all the issues I'm hoping to avoid are just as easily avoided by groups with this mindset anyway, but hopefully having these mechanics in place will encourage others to try this style of advancement, and encourage people who use this system anyway to give the game a try.

Although I'm going to take what flyingmice said and run with it, adding a new Amazing Feat criteria based entirely around teamwork.

Of course one of the difficulties I'm trying to work around now is the 'all or nothing' approach this offers. It is difficult to reward a player for a good (but not excellent) approach to a problem with this experience, as it would devalue the reward and make later, even more impressive actions, feel less valued as they gain the exact same reward.