Experienced Tiers or How much is too much?
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I think this is probably the best place for this.
What is the general thoughts of allowing every player a PC with 750 xp right out of the gate?
Pay no attention to me. I'm old, jaded and generally unfriendly. I am prone to fits of stupidity, but I am still unique, just like everyone else. ~~ Current President of the Anti-Faraday fan club.
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What system and setting?
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Nwod 1.0 current dayish
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@seamus said in Experienced Tiers or How much is too much?:
I think this is probably the best place for this.
What is the general thoughts of allowing every player a PC with 750 xp right out of the gate?
Well - one, it really depends on the system you're using on how much that actually is, and what power of characters it produces.
But let's say that we're talking having high-powered characters right out of the gate. That's fine, IF the game is set up to have events and plots that are commiserate with the capabilities of the characters. My experience is the higher powered the PCs are, the fewer GMs are able to design and run plots - especially if power translates into 'ability to change the environment or rules of the universe'. A high powered game, particularly if it's a high powered fantasy or high SF game, is going to be doing /seriously freaky stuff/ to the local social, political, physical, and occult environment. If your GMs can't handle that, or you don't /want/ to handle that, then there's really no reason to have high-powered characters as your default. They're going to get bored and start going after the only worthy challenges - each other.
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@seamus
What's the goal with it? All you're going to see if a hefty frontload for everyone, except for the people who are going to be like 'Okay, I'm a neonate, so I'll grow into my 750XP organically' and then the eventual insanity that will result from them trying to play that while the rest of the game handles 750 XP monstrosities.
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It is not my plan. But one I heard about. And I can fathom the concept of doing it because of the massive imbalance it will cause.
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I don't see an issue with it if all players are granted the same access to characters with that xp, if some choose not to take it, or choose to take it and spend it to grow more slowly that is the choice they are making.
If people who prefer lower powered don't make high powered characters I see no issue with that as long as events and plots get labeled on what xp range they are being designed for. I mean a 50 Xp char will be pointless in a 750 xp plot and a 750 xp char would find a 50 xp plot trivial at best (at least from a challenge perspective) but a 50 xp char and a 750 XP char can interact and rp fine. -
He is referring to the currently in development Miami game.
We are eliminating the 'catchup xp' and the loads of xp gained for a tier system with a much slower gain. 750 was arrived at because that was the average xp on Fallcoast when we first started development. But rather than have every single PC being boosted to the top Xp as the systems on TR and FC did, we are going for a spread of XP levels.
So every player will be allowed one alt with high xp from the get go (how/when they spend it is up to the individual) and subsequent alts on lower tiers. See Fates Harvest for an example. SF I believe is also doing similar with a lower start.
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If the game is set up for it it can work ok I guess. The problem only really arises in two places:
PvP and Plots.
If a Plot is built around a certain xp level it can be to hard/trivial, but that also depends on character build too. A completely social char with 500 xp is still probably not going to be as good as starting combat build with 50 xp in a fight. This can be dealt with though by solid plot design.
PvP is another beast entirely and probably deserves it's own thread, but huge xp combat beast is probably going to make some problems if not handled appropriately.
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@wretched said in Experienced Tiers or How much is too much?:
He is referring to the currently in development Miami game.
He's also referring to the currently in development Open Beta SF game, whether or not he knows it. Will be interested to see how it works for both of you.
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos -
@thenomain said in Experienced Tiers or How much is too much?:
He's also referring to the currently in development Open Beta SF game
The SF game doesn't have quite that much. I think that their max tier is somewhere around 400.
Racism isn't Tinkerbell. It doesn't need you to believe in it for it to exist.
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http://fatesharvest.com/w/XP_Tiers
900xp max in a 1e game. Seems to have worked fine since the game is still up and running.
I don't know why people are so scared of XP.
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Tiers are better than fast XP gains, at least. If you want to play a powerful character and staff is fine with having powerful characters, at least you can make a character that makes sense instead of trying to shoehorn a concept into the really fast zero-to-hero reality of, say, Fallcoast. Why should your character have to start out relatively
incompetent? -
This is what I honestly think about Tiers:
They're stupid.
Look, give everyone 300xp (or whatever) and then go back to the slower-xp system that WoD/CoD expects.
Throwing people all over the map for what they can and can't get involved in just tweaks me the wrong way. I can elucidate, but for the moment it's just a knee-jerk reaction of "barf".
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos -
@thenomain said in Experienced Tiers or How much is too much?:
This is what I honestly think about Tiers:
They're stupid.
Look, give everyone 300xp (or whatever) and then go back to the slower-xp system that WoD/CoD expects.
Throwing people all over the map for what they can and can't get involved in just tweaks me the wrong way. I can elucidate, but for the moment it's just a knee-jerk reaction of "barf".
100% agree with all of this.
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They remind me a lot of the 'Feature Character' thing I used to read about oWoD games having, just more widely available. Which is, I guess, a step up from restricting them to whoever's the favorite of the day, but still a step down from not having them at all.
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There is no such thing as 'too much' in a vacuum.
When you make a game you decide what XP is for, and what power level - and variance - you want from your characters... and why. Then on top of that different spheres are more or less powerful at certain XP ranges, players like different things, etc.
There's no one-size-fits-all approach; if there was we'd have discovered that secret recipe by now and every MU* would be using it. "Hey I noticed on TR when people had 220 XP everyone was having a blast, no exceptions! Then we awarded 50 more and boom, it went to shit".
If only it was that easy.
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A lot of it depends on the players. Fates Harvest did it, but players there are generally pretty cool and the fact that it's a single-sphere game helps keep things balanced. Fear and Loathing had something akin to tiered starting xp as well, but that seemed to be more a barrier than anything else there.
As far as Feature Characters, that was a different sort of beast - when done properly. Features were supposed to have a dedicated role which they needed to be active in and maintain. You generally did not just put in an app and ask for more xp (Though some places did that); but you apped for a specific position like Primogen or Sept Warder or whatnot, and that position came with increased experience (Since those positions would logically be more powerful). It was sort similiar to the way some games do Rosters, exept you were rostering in for a position rather than a specific character. The biggest problem I remember from it was that sometimes it passed over an existing pc who might have been shooting for it by bringing in an 'outsider'; though that was largely due to a lack of communication <Either from the player not expressing a desire for the position to staff, or staff not opening the position to existing players before advertising>
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@thenomain said in Experienced Tiers or How much is too much?:
This is what I honestly think about Tiers:
They're stupid.
Look, give everyone 300xp (or whatever) and then go back to the slower-xp system that WoD/CoD expects.
Throwing people all over the map for what they can and can't get involved in just tweaks me the wrong way. I can elucidate, but for the moment it's just a knee-jerk reaction of "barf".
If you're referring to Fate's Harvest, the Tier system is there to allow people to have alts. You don't have to apply to become a Tier-5 PC, but you can only have one of them.
“It is better to live doing the things that you like. It is foolish to live within this dream of a world seeing unpleasantness and doing only things that you do not like.” -- Yamamoto Tsunetomo.
