It struck me the other day that most fantasy RPGs poorly model how people learn and grow in real life. Specfically, in many fantasy RPGs, characters grow exponentially better in all facets of their being, regardless of whether or not they actively apply their knowledge or practice their abilities/skills.

I'm aware of one fantasy RPG in which levels of skill and ability atrophy if not exercised frequently, though I forget which game it was (I've very literally read hundreds in the last ten years or so). Likeiwse, I can think of only a few fantasy RPGs in which PCs don't automatically become more able all around simply because they survive some challenges.

What fantasy RPGs are you aware of that contain both rules for skill/ability atrophy based on non-use and advancement rules that don't guarantee improvemet based on character longevity?

[Note: Lots of fantasy RPGs have lip service rules for atrophy based on charcter age, though these often don't negate the aforementioned exponential upward growth in overall ability (thus, my referring to them as "lip service rules" above). Rather, they tend to simply levy an arbitrary penalty on raw physical traits.]

I believe it was an edition of Harnmaster which had rules for skills dying off without practice.

I'm not sure what you're after here. It strikes me that there are three basic ways to advance a skill in any rpg,

• Practice/experience, sometimes abstracted into "so many xp per year of life" - the StarCluster system.
  
• XP awards for whatever the game thinks is good (roleplaying, killing things and taking their stuff, etc); then spend xp on whatever you want - GURPS, D&D, etc
• If a skill was used, tick it and it may go up after the game session - RuneQuest

There are some variations to these, such as the second requiring that you've used the skill in the adventure, and the third requiring that the skill use was a success, or a failure, and a further roll, etc. But as far as I can see, that's about it.

As for skills declining with lack of use, in general rpgs don't seem to deal with that. A few offer an optional rule, such as "a skill over 90% requires daily practice of one hour or more, every week this is missed out on, there's a 10% chance the skill will decline by 1%" or something like that. But usually that's optional.

I think the basic thing is that the game designers think that players will complain too much if you take their characters' skills off them. This is another area where people's perceptions of their own abilities comes in - "Oh but I was a really good shot in scouts in 1995, I totally could hit a coin in the air with a pistol right now, why should my character be less capable than me? Just forgetting things, that's stupid!"

It also ties in with the rather Spartan lifestyle players offer their characters. They have them march overland for hundreds of miles surviving on nothing but dried fruit and nuts and jerky, sleep in the open in their armour - so if you say, "but you have to train an hour a day" they'll say, "so I'll train! So what?"

One idea I've toyed with is the idea of change, not improvement in PCs. That is, if you began as a (say) 100 point character, you'd never have more or less than that - the spread would just change. So a young guy might have most of his points in football, agility and strength, but as he grows older, they transfer over to education, teaching, wealth and family. The character never entirely forgets their old abilities, nor are they overall better or worse, it's just that the emphasis changes.

Yes, I also seem to recall HM being the game with skill atrophy rules, though I may have seen them in one or two other games. I think the reason this is so rare is that it's rather difficult to keep track of, with dubious payoff. (I.e., players will whine.)

(It seems to me that skill atrophy is most attractive if the game emphasizes training over "adventure experience", because otherwise you have PCs just get better & better all round all the time.)

The idea of skill caps for all but a number of skills, perhaps based on willpower, might be a good way to handle this without too much complication. PCs could change the skills they emphasize but those not in the select group would atrophy quickly down to the cap.

The exponential growth issue needs more definition. James, is the problem with games like AD&D 1e, where levelling up means an across the board improvement, or with games like GURPS, where different aspects improve independently, but there's no linkage between what you do to get character points, and what you spend them on. (Actually that's not entirely true for GURPS since in at least some cases such as buying off Disads, you have to perform in-game actions that justify the change to the character. But just suppose GURPS doesn't have that rule/guideline.)

Pretty much every game I design has realistic character development as a core goal.  I did move away from the brutal atrophy model I was using  in Galactic Adventures (where you had to buy any points in a skill with a rating over its base stat every year or lose them) to a maximum rating method because I felt it was a pain in the ass to track and harsh enough to drive off players.

As I think about it GURPS actually does a pretty good job of realistic skill development as well and has some optional atrophy rules somewhere.

Quote from: Elliot WilenThe exponential growth issue needs more definition.

For me, the problem is that, in many fantasy RPGs, PCs have no effective ceiling for growth (i.e., they simply continue to get better at everything until they're nigh unto gods or, in some games, become gods). They retain everything that they ever learn, never suffer ability/skill atrophy when they go months or years without using a given skill/ability (which is actually quite common in real life), and seem to improve in many aspects which never actually get used in-game, simply by virtue of being alive.

I guess I should explain why I see that as a problem, too. On its face, this kind of character growth serves primarily as a player reward -- the more cleverly you play, the more badassitude your character ammasses. It's the proverbial carrot on a stick for escapist roleplay. To be clear, that's not the problem, though it is an integral part of the problem.

The problem is that the exponential growth limits PCs to one or two adventures of any great length during the course of their lifetime (despite the fact that their lifetime could, feasibly, accommodate many more adventures in terms of years). You can't 'go back' and run a party of characters through less difficult adventure scenarios once they've reached a certain plateau of development. You can't explore other areas of their lives as they might have been lived.

I look back at most fantasy RPG PCs and think "Man, what one-dimensional people!" -- their entire being is defined by one (or two) adventures. What about all the other other stuff that they did? What about serving in the Legions of Theobrad during the Salt Wars, or chasing those goblins out of the family barn as a kid? Childhood or young adulthood could conceivably be filled with hundreds of adventures -- but not in most fantasy RPGs.

In most fantasy RPGs, the upward spiral of advancement is so skewed in favor of player reward that you tend (in a D&D adventure path, for example) to evolve from being a simple farm boy to being a world-reknown hero in less than one year. That is, characters seem to grow in temrs of power/expertise much more quickly than the passage of time should reasonably allow.

As a kid, I hiked the pyramids in Mexico, went skin-diving in Bermuda, and deep sea fishing in Florida, South Carolina, and Alaska. If I grew and learned like the typical fantasy RPG character, I'd easily be the most powerful, skilled, and knowledgeable man on planet Earth. The reality is that I can remember very little about native Bermuda sealife or how to bait a hook for catching king salmon. Because people don't grow like RPG characters do.

I'd really like to run a game that chronicles the life of charcters and all of their adventures, not just the 'big one' (as my friend describes it). And I'll be damned if I can think of any system that will let me do that out of the box. That said, Kyle's idea of allowing finite advancement with the option to re-allocate points (in GURPS) comes pretty darn close.

a 3.5 problem is that the amount of XP required to level up has shrunk drastically.  maybe if you change it tenfold or something you won't get the peon-to-ubermensch-in-a-year syndrome.  

i think 4th edition traveller (or MT, can't remember which) had a skill cap.  INT + EDU was the total number of skill levels you could learn.  therefore, if you were maxed out and wanted to improve a skill you currently use, you could knock off a level elsewhere to make room.  

but since we're playing games, not necessarily modelling RL, i generally don't worry about skill degradation or the like.  but i do like keeping a certain amount of grounding in my games, so i'll stick to slower and more specific advancement, like the CoC/RQ model, or the like.

I'm still in the process of digesting Reign, but it certainly has a mechanism by which skills can atrophy at the player's request (basically if you claim one of your skills is useless you mark it and if you run the whole next session without using it, you delete it and get some points back for it -- points that are in no way commensurate to its actual point value).  I'm not sure atrophy is what you're looking for as that's degeneration from disuse.  If you mean degeneration simply from age, Reign doesn't seem to have that.

It does manage to avoid exponential power growth though there is continuous growth -- every session is worth at least one point of experience.  You might, however, spend your points on your Company rather than your character, so a character's personal growth might be limited while his power becomes concentrated in his cohorts and his political sway.

that stuff in Reign sounds interesting.  what game is that?

Quote from: beeberthat stuff in Reign sounds interesting.  what game is that?

Greg Stolze's woefully underpublicized fantasy RPG. Heck, I didn't even realize that it had been released yet.

Quote from: beeberthat stuff in Reign sounds interesting.  what game is that?

Greg Stolze's fantasy ORE game, recently delivered to my door.

Quote from: jdrakehIn most fantasy RPGs, the upward spiral of advancement is so skewed in favor of player reward that you tend (in a D&D adventure path, for example) to evolve from being a simple farm boy to being a world-reknown hero in less than one year. That is, characters seem to grow in temrs of power/expertise much more quickly than the passage of time should reasonably allow.

Well, there are a number of games where the differential is less.  For example, in Fantasy HERO characters tend to start out as skilled hereos, and their advancement is much less pronounced.  HarnMaster is similar, where characters creep up one percentage point at a time.  

There are also some games which have in-game efforts to spread adventures and advancement over many years rather than crunched in next to each other -- notably Pendragon and Ars Magica.

Quote from: jdrakeh[Note: Lots of fantasy RPGs have lip service rules for atrophy based on charcter age, though these often don't negate the aforementioned exponential upward growth in overall ability (thus, my referring to them as "lip service rules" above). Rather, they tend to simply levy an arbitrary penalty on raw physical traits.]

The aging system in Praedor is fairly harsh, and not unlike the one in Ars Magica. After a character has turned 40, during each winter he'll have succeed in an increasingly difficult Health test. Every failure decreases a random attribute by one, and a botch by 1d6. Once any of the attributes reaches 2, the character will become bedridden; and at 0, the character dies. While you can hold that off by trying to invest all your XP into attributes, that won't work indefinitely.

Also, your hit points ("Blood") are determined solely by the Health attribute, and when it falls, so does your HP. Likewise, both Health and Strength together determine your crit threshold ("Deep Wound"), so you'll suffer more of those when you grow older and your bones more brittle.

Quote from: jdrakehWhat fantasy RPGs are you aware of that contain both rules for skill/ability atrophy based on non-use and advancement rules that don't guarantee improvemet based on character longevity?

Hmmm...not fantasy, but MS&PEs skill system was designed so that each individual skill gained XP when you used it based on how much you succeeded by.  So each skill leveled independent of other skills or character advancement.

Quote from: jhkimWell, there are a number of games where the differential is less.  For example, in Fantasy HERO characters tend to start out as skilled hereos, and their advancement is much less pronounced.  HarnMaster is similar, where characters creep up one percentage point at a time.

Slowing advancement is the easiest way to obscure the power escalation of which I speak, though it doesn't get rid of it, rather it merely prolongs the process. This does solve the problem of time management that I spoke of, though it does nothing to address the natural (and fairly commonplace) atrophy of learned aptitudes due to non-use.

QuoteThere are also some games which have in-game efforts to spread adventures and advancement over many years rather than crunched in next to each other -- notably Pendragon and Ars Magica.

This solution is little better for my needs, though it's probably the most efficient answer to the 'problem' that I've seen in a commercially published RPG. still, though, it does little to address the natural atrophy of learned aptitudes. The time management issue is, again, addressed -- though the upward spiral toward excellence is still firmly in place.

And of course "no advancement" whatsoever doesn't quite work for fantasy games, because too many examples of heroes in fiction who do begin as schlubs and work their way up or who were already great, now fallen, who must regain what they lost.

However, what about making more things important gains: discovering clues to important/personal quests? Gaining glory and social impact?