Dragon Warriors

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PostPosted: Sun Apr 29, 2018 10:58 am 
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It's about making the experience for the player more balanced, regardless of the character they are playing.

Unless you and the players are prepared to leave it unbalanced? I once had a player roll up a Mystic with average, and one below-average, scores - I offered him a re-roll but he refused; the character went on to be very successful and entertaining.

If you have an XP penalty for those above rank for the adventure level, then it also eventually balances out. The uber characters forge ahead in XP, only to slow down as their higher rank means they learn less from experiences others in the party still find challenging.

It's also down to how the GM allocates the XP - if a character is distinctly tougher in combat scores than his associates but insists on hanging back and simply 'mopping up' to take a share of XP and loot, then they shouldn't get the same amount of XP as the others.*
* Unless, somehow, this is a case of amazing role-playing on the part of the player.


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PostPosted: Sun Apr 29, 2018 11:32 am 
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Hm, balance... I would imagine Baron Aldred would like to surround himself with competent, smart, good looking types who will gain more experience just because of their superior natural abilities. I do have issues with how a party becomes a colourful team of Stan Lee ideals. But I'm not against penalizing competents or smarter types just because they got lucky. If a knight has a challenged intellect I figure its up to the player to run it. I once played a retarded mystic in a game not all that long ago. It was fun. Who's to say the village idiot can't get far in their career?

I think the description in old book 4 says that Assassins should be rare. Thats not to say you can't have a game, a party composed of assassins if thats what the gamesmaster wants, but there should be more knights and barbarians in proportion to others in a 'balanced' party.

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PostPosted: Tue May 01, 2018 6:02 pm 
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From my own guidance on awarding experience points, I have an "against all odds" category:

If the character has one or more primary ability scores (not including Presence) below 9, award an additional XP for that adventure to that character. Additionally, if a character is at least two ranks below the party average, award an additional XP to represent what they have picked up from the other characters' greater experience.

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PostPosted: Tue May 01, 2018 9:32 pm 
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Experience in the game should reflect the general tendency in the real world for skills to become increasingly difficult to improve on (in other words, you can pick up the fundamentals of something quickly, but to become a master takes many, many hours of practice).

If we assume the skills measure linear ability, and a skill of 20 is twice as good as a skill of 10, then the rules kind of do this but not very well; it takes more experience points to get from rank 9 to rank 10 than it does to get from 1 to 2. However this ramp doesn't start until rank 5 and stops after rank 10. Furthermore, all sklls increase at the same rate because they're all tied to rank.

In a skill-based (as opposed to level based) rules system this is easy addressed but DW doesn't work that way.

Thoughts?

Cheers,

-Kyle


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PostPosted: Wed May 02, 2018 1:19 am 
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There is a big break from early ranks where you need 30 experience to what I believe is 250 experience points for the later levels? I'm figuring whether politicians should get big gains for convincing a town to vote them in as the mayor. Maybe there should be advanced experience points for simple leadership, teaching and training and command?

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PostPosted: Thu May 03, 2018 9:38 am 
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I reckon one xp should always mean the same thing regardless of who is earning it, and arrange things so the skills effectively become harder to improve as you advance. This can either be baked into the skill values themselves to make them non-linear (which this requires that the skill resolution reflect this) or make the advancement process non-linear. DW kind of does this but not really.

Here's a non-rank-based illustration of this.

Lets pretend you need 10,000 hours practice to become an expert at something. Let's also assume "expert" equals a skill of 20. I think 1xp should be translatable into a specific amount of hours practice (lets say 10 hours practice), regardless of whether I'm already nearly an expert or am only starting out. So you can either award 1 skill level every 50 xp but design your skill resolution system to make it much harder to roll high numbers than low ones, or you can make the cost of improvement gradually increase (for instance skill level*5xp) and make the skill resolution system linear. I prefer the latter.

Doesn't entire help with DW though because the system is level-based not skill-based. Sigh.

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-Kyle


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PostPosted: Thu May 03, 2018 10:57 am 
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I reckon one xp should always mean the same thing regardless of who is earning it, and arrange things so the skills effectively become harder to improve as you advance.

I agree entirely. It's easy to acquire a basic grip of something... Perfecting the skill takes considerably more effort.

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So you can either award 1 skill level every 50 xp but design your skill resolution system to make it much harder to roll high numbers than low ones, or you can make the cost of improvement gradually increase (for instance skill level*5xp) and make the skill resolution system linear. I prefer the latter.

I use a system for skills where the skill levels are set on a scale of 1-20 (it is possible to exceed 20, but difficult). To succeed at a skill, you have to roll equal to or under the skill level. To improve the skills, you have roll against the skill value - if you exceed the skill rank, then the skill goes up by 1 (i.e. if a skill value is 12, you have to roll 13+ on 1d20 for the skill to increase; if a skill value is 16, you have to roll 17+; skills always increase on a roll of 20).

I also allow training in skills during the quiet winter months. For skills upto a value of 15, you can train 1d4 skill points; OR you can train one skill value of 15+ up by one point.
(So, yes, it takes time to hone and perfect those secondary skills.)

Note: I devised this system long before the new DW stuff came out, so it doesn't match in any way the new DW 'secondary skills'.


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PostPosted: Thu May 03, 2018 12:20 pm 
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Starkad wrote:
I use a system for skills where the skill levels are set on a scale of 1-20 (it is possible to exceed 20, but difficult). To succeed at a skill, you have to roll equal to or under the skill level. To improve the skills, you have roll against the skill value - if you exceed the skill rank, then the skill goes up by 1 (i.e. if a skill value is 12, you have to roll 13+ on 1d20 for the skill to increase; if a skill value is 16, you have to roll 17+; skills always increase on a roll of 20).


I like that mechanism. It's quite similar to how it was done in Maelstrom. That system had twist to the rule too; if you critically failed your roll you actually went down one point (effectively, you'd forgotton something or lost the knack in some small way). I thought this was a nice touch and it felt realistic to me, although only on Maelstrom's percentile system (where I think 1 was a critical failure). On d20 a 1 in 20 chance of losing a point of skill is probably too high, particularly when you get to high skill levels and have only a small chance of improving each time you test your skill.

Cheers,

-Kyle


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PostPosted: Thu May 03, 2018 2:16 pm 
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On d20 a 1 in 20 chance of losing a point of skill is probably too high...

You're probably right. If anyone wants to implement the chance of forgetting (or just "getting rusty") they could use the system as you describe it. Then, when a 'critical failure' occurs (a 1 on a d20?), the player could roll against their character's Intelligence on 1d20; if the roll is equal or less, the character remembers just enough to maintain their skill level, if they roll exceeds the character's Intelligence score, the skill goes down by a point.

Essentially, a 'save' to avoid the results of the 'critical failure'.


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