XP Tax

[surreality]

@Hexagon said in XP Tax:

What I'm learning is that this method may be suitable mechanically, but it hasn't been tested or applied by any known system out there.

Er, not really. It is heavily biased toward certain types of characters and certain types of spends.

You haven't remotely touched on the problem of a 4 dot merit costing more to maintain than 1 dot of an out of clan discipline, for instance, despite the fact that their initial XP cost is the same. This is a real, functional problem that impacts supers considerably less than minor templates or mortals. Both of these things cost 4XP to buy, but the merit will cost the player 20% to maintain, and the discipline dot will cost 5% to maintain, despite the fact that the power granted by each in play is likely to be about on par.

While that may not matter to you, it matters to plenty of players out there who enjoy these character types -- and they're already weaker on the whole, so adding yet another detriment to playing them is a very bad idea under the heading of 'well they already aren't as special'. It also heavily penalizes characters who invest in social merits like contacts and so on, to the extent that it may make those character concepts considerably less viable on the game.

The way you've laid this out, it is best to play a super, and buy high-cost-per-dot powers instead of skills or merits, because that will ultimately be 'taxed' less, despite the fact that these things are considerably more powerful that things that would 'charge' the player the same 'tax cost' to keep.

If you can't see that glaring problem, I dunno what to tell you, because it is one. @ThatGuyThere raises a very good point re: characters freshly created, too.

[Hexagon]

@Killer-Klown I appreciate the advocatus diaboli approach, it's one I rely on heavily professionally.

1. This is the key design element restated, a "soft cap" that you rise to and fall from on a regular basis as you choose or your automatic income can keep you at the soft cap. It does reward people who gain participation XP (plots, recommendations, or other) with a higher cap, but only if they continue to excel.

2. The majority of people will eventually end up at the cap because the math more or less demands it. You have two curves, an earning curve and a debit curve, and the intersection is that cap. Since this is an arbitrary number, it could be 50 or 500 XP. This is made slightly more difficult if you make preserving Attributes more difficult than Skills by charging extra to preserve those points, but only in calculation. If attributes cost 20 beats per dot and skills cost 10 beats per dot, charging 1 beat per 10 beats spent comes out the same way.
   You make a very good point about extended absences, but consider the costs. If you are on opportunities to participate and earn additional XP, the system encourages people to create more participation events so they can gain XP. Since maintenance is 10% in my example, even 1 XP earned can support 10 XP of expense. It will take a long time to fall to the cap, but there will always be the tendency to approach the cap, from above or below.

3. This is by far my biggest concern. I'm inclined to treat it like a credit check. You pass at the time of purchase, and they don't know you have sufficient income, so you get to keep it as long as you can keep paying for the thing you bought. In this case you drop a point of resolve, you pay to keep martial arts, but you can't increase that because you don't have the resolve necessary to buy it.

[Hexagon]

@Ganymede It might be adequate. CoD seems to be leagues better than nWoD and oWoD with the flat payment per dot, especially when it comes to encouraging drama to gain a beat (such as with rewarding critical failures).

I'm not quite sure how it limits the ability of well-developed PCs to increase traits versus the not-well-developed PCs. Can you elaborate on that? I appreciate the analysis.

By making it based on XP spent, and allowing people not to maintain weak stats they no longer need, they lower their XP spent and accrue XP at a faster rate because they become not-well-developed. Or, they can elect to stay well developed by paying maintenance, which is a fixed percentage of the XP spent. At 10%, you could be very well developed on even a moderate automatic XP allowance.

[Ganymede]

@Hexagon said in XP Tax:

I'm not quite sure how it limits the ability of well-developed PCs to increase traits versus the not-well-developed PCs. Can you elaborate on that? I appreciate the analysis.

The system itself doesn't do it, but several CoD games have limited auto-gain to 1 XP or 5 beats per week. (You can still get beats for participating in plots, to encourage activity.) When a PC hits a certain level of accrued XP, the auto-gain code knocks down the gain to 4 beats per week. Hit another level, and it goes to 3 beats per week.

On RfK, you were limited to the amount of beats you could gain per week. As you spent more XP, the cost of each XP -- these are what you need to raise stats -- increased, i.e., after 50 spent XP, each XP cost 6 beats instead of 5; after 100 spent XP, each XP cost 7 beats; etc.

I wouldn't call this a "tax," but it does throttle advancement after a certain threshold of spent XP. I don't think there should be any maintenance cost for stats because you're adding a completely different mechanic to complete the same purpose (I think) as modifying the existing mechanic.

[Hexagon]

@surreality I was composing a post that addressed maintenance as you posted, but I don't think it quite addressed what you're saying. Wouldn't the 4 dot merit cost exactly the same for the mortal and the vampire? I would be wary about mixing apples and oranges, though I try to address that by suggesting to use the XP costs as given by the books as the basis for maintenance.

The human never has the opportunity to purchase the out of clan discipline, so there's no real conflict there. I prefer playing mortal, though that's immaterial here. I will say that if everyone, regardless of template, approaches the same limit or cap, where one spends the XP becomes very important. Items with high utility tend to cost more. Increasing Dexterity and Athletics will both make you better at football, but increasing Dexterity costs more and reflects that increased cost by increased utility; it can also make you better at using a sword or hiding.

I don't think the system benefits building tall (characters with a few but expensive stats) or wide (characters with many low stats), but it does make building tall and wide difficult. The only real variation seems to be with the innate abilities granted to a supernatural template at character creation. When given characters that approach a limit at 50 XP, this is dramatic. When given characters that approach a limit of 200 XP or 400 XP, isn't this less of an issue?

[Hexagon]

@Ganymede Is this not somewhat similar to reducing the auto-gain XP (you're just subtracting it off the front end, before the player gets a chance to pay it later as "tax")? The difference seems to be that a character is stuck with what they've purchased in a system like that, instead of having the opportunity to let their abilities voluntarily degrade because they no longer use them, and spend that XP on increasing something else.

"Tax" may be an ugly word. I have started to think of it as "stat decay" the more we've all talked about this. I'm glad the discussion is changing how I think of it. I came across an instance of this today when discussing ceremonies. There could be an instance where you teach someone a ceremony for an event, they buy it, and they don't need it afterward. If you don't do it, you forget how to use it. When you forget by not maintaining it, your spent XP lowers. You accumulate XP faster at that point and can spend it elsewhere.

I think you're right, though. I think it's trying to complete the same purpose. The difference I'm seeing is that it allows the players some additional agency by choosing what to maintain and what to ignore. I'm unfamiliar with RfK. How did players recompose their characters?

[surreality]

@Hexagon said in XP Tax:

@surreality I was composing a post that addressed maintenance as you posted, but I don't think it quite addressed what you're saying. Wouldn't the 4 dot merit cost exactly the same for the mortal and the vampire? I would be wary about mixing apples and oranges, though I try to address that by suggesting to use the XP costs as given by the books as the basis for maintenance.

The human never has the opportunity to purchase the out of clan discipline, so there's no real conflict there. I prefer playing mortal, though that's immaterial here. I will say that if everyone, regardless of template, approaches the same limit or cap, where one spends the XP becomes very important. Items with high utility tend to cost more. Increasing Dexterity and Athletics will both make you better at football, but increasing Dexterity costs more and reflects that increased cost by increased utility; it can also make you better at using a sword or hiding.

I don't think the system benefits building tall (characters with a few but expensive stats) or wide (characters with many low stats), but it does make building tall and wide difficult. The only real variation seems to be with the innate abilities granted to a supernatural template at character creation. When given characters that approach a limit at 50 XP, this is dramatic. When given characters that approach a limit of 200 XP or 400 XP, isn't this less of an issue?

In your initial example, you're discussing a charge per dot, not a charge per amount of XP spent. That's what makes this a problem, because different dots have different costs. If the 'tax' on a dot of Blood Potency is the same as the 'tax' on a dot of Resources, you have a real issue on your hands.

It also fails to account for things like Professional Training, which grants a pile of 'free' merits, skills, specs, and things that otherwise will drastically increase the character's 'tax burden'. Not only would you be paying on your PT merit, you'd be paying on the two free dots of contacts, on the free specs, the free skill dot, and so on, in addition to paying the 'tax' on the merit itself.

I really just don't see this as a good idea. Diminishing returns on earning has been shown to work quite effectively. This kind of maintenance is a hassle, it's more work for staff, and I don't see a single upside to it that can't be resolved through much less complicated, high maintenance, and grief-inducing measures. I would not even consider a game that had this setup -- and I'm not the only one who's said as much. Meanwhile, people regularly play on games with hard caps or diminishing returns, typically without complaint.

I think the inspiration here is clever and insightful. I really do. I also think it's one of those aspects of RL that no one looks forward to and we all more or less consider a teeth-grinding hassle that is not something we'd necessarily want to be forced to do/waste time on, and I don't think adding that kind of hassle to the gaming experience is going to improve the gaming experience -- it's going to bring part of RL most of us loathe into it, instead.

To be fair, I do not loathe it in my case. Self-employed artist. I'm always learning new shit for work and am a font of useless skills and specs, were I to be written up in CoD. Everyone else I know loathes this, loathes having to spend a small fortune on it in some cases, and really, really hates it. My mother? Teacher. It was endless. My husband? Massage therapist. He has to do tons of additional 'refresher' training that is not cheap annually that's just a review of things he's already learned, he maintains nothing he doesn't do by working at his job day in and day out, learns nothing new, and is out money for the privilege of that waste of time.

Is this the kind of experience and frustration anybody wants to invite into their relax, unwind, and play a game time? I mean, really? It strikes me more as exactly the kind of thing we enter into the hobby to avoid having to think about or give ourselves the chance to destress from.

[Hexagon]

@surreality I love that I'm getting a lot of time to discuss this and think about it.

Each dot on a character sheet represents an amount of XP spent with the exception of the fiat dots granted at character creation. If the amount of automatic XP granted is in excess of what is needed to support that, then it becomes immaterial. You will never lose those dots as long as you have the XP to pay their maintenance. Since the "soft cap" of automatically granted XP is arbitrary, to be set by whomever is running the game, that value could be just above chargen (effectively a 0 XP character) or a very powerful character (such as a 500 XP character).

I don't own VtR 2nd Edition, so I had to reference the Reno wiki for XP costs. If they're incorrect, please let me know. It looks like Blood Potency is 5 XP per dot and merits are 1 XP per dot, so luckily there's no equivalency there. If maintenance is 10%, and each XP is 5 beats, one point of merit is 0.5 beats to maintain (its own potential headache, but most MUs seem to have fractional XP gain already) and one point of Blood Potency is 2.5 beats.

Professional Training doesn't explicitly add merits, it gives the benefits of merits according to my reading and I admit that's a subjective difference. Regardless, you didn't "buy" the Contacts as a merit and you wouldn't pay for them that way with maintenance. You're maintaining those benefits by maintaining the merit Professional Training. That might make the coding for the accounting trickier, but that's implementation and not system. The same should be true for things like Mystery Cult Initiation and other group memberships that afford you benefits you didn't buy separately. It definitely wouldn't be fair to pay for it twice. CoD no longer gives an XP break to buying dots of an asset skill, either, but now grants a single beat when you purchase a dot. Could you play jump rope by decaying a stat and purchasing it back up? Sure, but it's not going to benefit you.

If it was viewed as maintaining your current abilities, the way you might keep going to the gym or regularly play trivia or do it every day as a part of your job, is that less egregious than viewing it as tax? I wonder if the connotation is offensive to some people, I mean, who likes paying income tax?

CoD, and other games like D&D or AFMBE or Shadowrun, seem to be designed around particular instances. This is the week where your pack of werewolves saved a town from predatory vampires, or the night you broke into ARES to steal a prototype of the new Predator pistol. They don't award XP for downtime. They award it for accomplishment. MUs, however, seem to award the bulk of their XP for downtime to represent growth as a person through day to day interactions. XP gained for participation is only a percentage of the total instead of the whole. A year long chronicle played twice a month covers a much smaller window of time than a MU that lasts a year, so it has no need to deal with maintenance. You don't have to buy more bullets, you don't have to pay rent for your house, you only do things for your allies if it furthers the story.

Paying maintenance represents all the things you have to do to stay where you are. Does that seem to close to RL? It can. I wouldn't want to do the math myself, at least not beyond a test case or three to prove my coding worked out. So I hear you, I really do. I brought it up here as a question about systems. It's about nitty gritty math and how do we advance and what does it cost us. I think there could be interesting ways to implement it, but that's a conversation for coding I think. Personally, I'd make a command like +stat/lock Computer and it calculates "Oh, you have Computer 5. That is 25 beats. To maintain, you need 2.5 beats" and it adds that value to the top of your sheet as XP Maintenance. You lock your important stuff, you see how much you "owe" and how much you have saved. Would that be a headache to code? Yes, and I'm not suggesting otherwise. This is not a "wouldn't it be cool if" scenario, or hunting for a reason to implement a formidable amount of code.

I do find it interesting that no one has mentioned respecs, because allowing stats to degrade and different ones to be repurchased seems like a rolling respec that doesn't break immersion.

...this was a lot longer than I anticipated. Sorry for the lengthy reply. I appreciate the feedback very much.

[Ganymede]

@Hexagon said in XP Tax:

I'm unfamiliar with RfK. How did players recompose their characters?

You really didn't, after a month or so. Why would you?

Stat decay is an understandable concept, but it's not something that seems to be applicable to a MU*. which takes place, generally, in real time. Why would my stats degrade over 6 months?

As someone said before, I don't know if there's really a problem here to be solved.

[Jennkryst]

@Ganymede said in XP Tax:

Why would my stats degrade over 6 months?

My band nerd self is showing through here: having done Drum Corps on the world class level (in WoD terms, I'd say... Expression 2-3, with specialties in Dance, Music, (specific instrument), and some bullshit rule that lets you tack on a 4th of something for the lolz). Within 2 weeks of finals, I could still play the notes... standing still. Not running around a field like a madwoman.

Better example: take Michael Phelps, right now, and throw him in the water. Has he kept up his regimen from the olympics? Sure, he's probably still damn fast. But is he Athletics 5/Swimming/Butterfly/Sith Lord Hoodie fast?

[surreality]

@Hexagon said in XP Tax:

@surreality I love that I'm getting a lot of time to discuss this and think about it.

Each dot on a character sheet represents an amount of XP spent with the exception of the fiat dots granted at character creation. If the amount of automatic XP granted is in excess of what is needed to support that, then it becomes immaterial. You will never lose those dots as long as you have the XP to pay their maintenance. Since the "soft cap" of automatically granted XP is arbitrary, to be set by whomever is running the game, that value could be just above chargen (effectively a 0 XP character) or a very powerful character (such as a 500 XP character).

I don't own VtR 2nd Edition, so I had to reference the Reno wiki for XP costs. If they're incorrect, please let me know. It looks like Blood Potency is 5 XP per dot and merits are 1 XP per dot, so luckily there's no equivalency there. If maintenance is 10%, and each XP is 5 beats, one point of merit is 0.5 beats to maintain (its own potential headache, but most MUs seem to have fractional XP gain already) and one point of Blood Potency is 2.5 beats.

This is a lot clearer and more sane, yes. The previous example had everything as 'per dot' -- which doesn't balance out on paper, with those dots costing various amounts to acquire.

If it was viewed as maintaining your current abilities, the way you might keep going to the gym or regularly play trivia or do it every day as a part of your job, is that less egregious than viewing it as tax? I wonder if the connotation is offensive to some people, I mean, who likes paying income tax?

Honestly, no. There's a reason a lot of folks here don't go to MUDs where you have to grind to maintain or sustain what you've earned -- that is not something everyone wants out of their play/game/roleplay experience.

I know I am not in any way looking for something that emulates RL in this way, and I don't even think it's a terrible accurate emulation; it's something I consider hassle and drudgery RL, and that's not what I go looking for in my relaxation/creative/fun time at all.

Most people actively cringe about games where you need to post a simple 2-3 sentence written justification to raise a stat, because it's considered too much hoop jumping and needless hassle.

What you're suggesting is leaps and bounds beyond that. It does involve more or less a forced respec every so often, unless people want to just sit on points, which... I dunno how much staffing you've done. I was in charge of the 1e -> 2e respec on Reno1 for weresphere. Allow me to be brutally clear: this quite literally ate my life for more than an RL month of stress, hassle, and generalized nightmare stress. Getting players to go through respec under threat of ending up in the freezer if they didn't make the deadline (which was a month from when respec opened, this is plenty of time) didn't even motivate several folks; we did absolutely have folks freeze on account of this. On the staff work and player stress front, I really can't emphasize enough how many problems this will actively create -- which is far more than it could ever hope to solve.

@Hexagon said in XP Tax:

Paying maintenance represents all the things you have to do to stay where you are. Does that seem to close to RL? It can. I wouldn't want to do the math myself, at least not beyond a test case or three to prove my coding worked out. So I hear you, I really do. I brought it up here as a question about systems. It's about nitty gritty math and how do we advance and what does it cost us. I think there could be interesting ways to implement it, but that's a conversation for coding I think.

As a philosophical abstract, it's interesting to ponder, sure. It is not something I would ever in a million years suggest implementing on a game.

The problem is that it doesn't just remain a problem of code. It becomes something players need to be thinking about at all times, with every spend they make, every XP they accrue. I am not interested in having that be a part of my MUX experience.

What Ganymede is describing is a much better approach if you want some sort of advancement throttle.

[Hexagon]

@surreality Yeah, undergoing a massive fundamental code change can eat you alive. Sometimes it makes it hard to remember it's a hobby and not a job.

It looks like a lot of people wouldn't be interested in this, and I'm fine with that. It seems to be the difference in a player who likes that their weapons degrade in System Shock 2 and players who like that they don't have to bother with that in Doom, or the kind of person who installs a life support system in Kerbal Space Program and those who don't.

[Hexagon]

@Ganymede Some games do allow respecs. Over time some things get used a lot, some don't get used at all. Wanting to play a character that hews more closely to your ideal for them is the only response I can give for that question.

[surreality]

@Hexagon It isn't that the idea doesn't have value -- for instance, I'm pretty sure you'd probably get traction with the RPI crowd on this one much faster than the typical MUSH crowd, since they're more into the code+mechanics-heavy simulationist experience, generally speaking.

It was pretty much a ton of work to put 60 characters through respec within a month. It is not something I would ever consider doing again as a staffer. We had the extra stress of the entire mechanics and system being new, but that wasn't the hardest part of the process: it was getting people to reply to their jobs and simply tell us what they wanted.

People don't seem to have a huge problem with 'work harder to advance beyond X point', as was the case with RfK's decreased value per beat, or even with oWoD/nWoD's multipliers in costs.

Paying more just to keep what you've already earned and paid for is a different animal, though.

Now, I actually do get the argument re: passive earning, and I think that's a very valid area to examine. People have looked at all manner of ways to try and figure out some way of making this 'fair' or somehow tied to activity (which some people feel is in itself unfair) or slow it down after a point... nobody has found a universally satisfactory answer to that one. I don't feel this one is it, either, though, even if I think the idea comes from a reasonable application of observation of the real world.

Looking at Reno specifically, I feel the starting total definitely allows players to make a pretty dang capable character. Maybe not their dream badass, but definitely a very competent and capable character, especially if they go for the background incentive. With that starting amount, personally, I would have dropped the passive gain from 2xp/week to 1xp/week, and let the rest flow from activity/beats/etc. That's me, though.

The average lifespan of a game lately doesn't seem to be terribly long (before it becomes a ghost town, and I'm not counting the ghost towns), barring a few exceptions (FC, Shang, Arx will get there I'd bet, etc.), and this becomes a factor, too. While it's not a bad idea to plan for what happens if the game runs for 4 years and players are getting 104XP passively per year for just avoiding the freezer, it's the kind of problem people seem to go to extremes about preventing with very low starting amounts, or incredible amounts of hoop-jumping to earn XP through activity, etc. to prepare for a problem that will arrive on a later day that is simply not in the cards for that particular game to reach. Often enough, these methods -- and the hassle associated with them, or the feeling of sucking at everything all the time and it being difficult to advance at all, or whatever else -- will actively contribute to the game not succeeding to become one of those games that lasts long enough for this problem to actively manifest.

I have ideas, but no answers -- at least not for this problem on any given oW/nW/Cod game. (I don't, heretical as this idea is in most parts, feel oWoD or nWoD or even CoD are terribly well-suited to this hobby, at least not without some major overhauls. Which then becomes a new problem, because fans of the game as written will feel like they're no longer playing the game they like as it is, etc.)

[Miss Demeanor]

@Hexagon There's a world of difference between 'allows an occasional respec that doesn't result in anything actually being lost, only shifted around' and 'mandatory taxation on already purchased dots that will absolutely result in loss of earned dots if you don't make sure you have enough xp to cover the cost of their upkeep'. And its not even something that would only happen once or twice a year. You would have to keep a constant running tally of what everything will 'cost' just to ensure that you have enough xp saved up come 'tax time' to pay for it. Which means at the very least, trying to remember once a month to sit down and math out what you have versus what it will cost. That's a lot more effort than most people are going to want to put into simply maintaining the stats they already purchased. Especially when no other game will take away the stuff they already bought if they don't pay for it again.

[Seraphim73]

@Hexagon said in XP Tax:

@Ganymede Is this not somewhat similar to reducing the auto-gain XP (you're just subtracting it off the front end, before the player gets a chance to pay it later as "tax")?
"Tax" may be an ugly word. I have started to think of it as "stat decay" the more we've all talked about this.

The key difference, which you touched on later in your post, is that stat decay is taking away something they have (reducing a skill), while reduced XP is taking away something they never had (the XP was never in their pocket, they just earned less of it). It's human nature to be less comfortable with losing something you already have than losing something you never had, it feels like you're being punished.