@HelloRaptor said:
Scaling XP costs were bad. Incredibly bad. Because they were both kind of dumb to begin with, and only really matter if you have a relatively finite amount of XP to play with. If your xp is at a constant upward trend, no real scarcity or diminishing return is had. I mean from a purely technical sense yes, there is a diminishing return in paying 15xp when you buy the fifth dot in a skill instead of 9xp for the third dot, but if you've got a pool of XP not only larger than what you need to buy but everything else you're likely to need to buy, AND you'll end up with enough XP to buy the next thing you want by the time you want it, more or less, diminishing returns are pretty pointless.
Scaling costs work fine in tabletop, or on MUs that have very little or slow XP gain, yeah. I remember when I started MUing on Devilshire (a Buffyverse/Unisystem game) it was impossible (literally, there was a cap) to get more than 10 XP a month, and getting those 10 was really hard. And Attributes cost like Current Rating x 5, so I had to save up all of my experience for like two months just to get my Willpower to 5 on my Wizard, for example; and that's if I was raking in the maximum XP per month, which I often definitely was not, despite being one of the most active plot runners there. On that game? Yeah, sure. (Though see my complaint below regarding the 1-5 scale.)
Scaling XP costs really only exist to slow you down, and there are ways of doing that which don't require the irrational irritation factor of a big chunk of XP doing virtually nothing for you. Going from Professional (3) to World Class (5) in a skill isn't enough to even, on average, bump your expected successes up by 1, more than likely. Meh.
This is why I really kind of dislike the 1-5 scale. It's just not broad enough for the difference to really stand out. I get that if you have a Supernatural Resistance Trait that is above 5 you can go higher, but I'm still talking mortal-wise. If 5 is as high as a mortal can get, then 3 (above average, but not rare) shouldn't be less than 1 success of a difference.
Plus, we finally aren't paying for invisible fucking merit dots, which has always made me grind my teeth in the worst ways.
Still kind of are in that there are merits that are worth 2 and then another version worth 4, with no 3-dot version in the middle. But at least now every dot costs the same.
This begs the question, in a MU* environment, strictly using GMC, how fast is too fast to gain Beats? In an unlimited environment - long term speaking - how fast is too fast, how slow is too slow?
Reno gives 2 experiences per week, doled out in percentages over the course of the week. I think this is a fine number at the beginning but should probably be scaled down. I detailed somewhere else the type of gain system we'll be using on the game I'm working on with friends, which starts out at about a minimum/maximum (minimum being weekly passive gain and maximum being that plus whatever you gain from beats and plots) of 2/4 experiences for the first set of six months, 1/4 for the second set of six months, 0.5/4 for the third set, and then 0.2/4 from then on.
This would allow for an easier time for new characters to catch up to old dinosaurs, unless the dinosaurs were incredibly active, which is usually not the case and if they are, well, then they deserve the rewards of that.
