Experience Points and Skills

It's really refreshing that everyone can get together to talk about this. Thank you to everyone who helped express a similar set of worries as me, and thank you to the staff who took their time going through these replies and responding to them! 

I think my biggest concern with the exp system rather than the limits, honestly, is that cgen choices have a massive difference in terms of xp efficiency, so more specialized characters have a kind of huge starting advantage. And if the pacing is intended to be slow, then these characters will just sort of keep that advantage, easily expand and diversify, and the folks who spread their points around are going to be playing catch-up.

I imagine that you'd take umbrage with a character having a proper superoptimal minmax and simply not approve them, but post-cgen I'm realizing that there *are* "wrong" choices, and that I made them.

The White Wolf tabletop games tended to have this issue, too. If you slapped 5 Ability dots in Brawl at cgen, great! You're a master brawler, and you've paid no exp for it. You get to have a very strong dice pool, and acquiring low skills is pretty inexpensive in comparison, so congrats - you built your character in *the right order*, so if you play your cards right, you're affording the exact same character for less exp.

Setting the cgen skill budget to a certain amount of exp is the only way to ensure characters are actually on an equal playing field. Otherwise, making the "wrong" choices in cgen even for your particular character concept can set you back for months. Mixing point buy in cgen and experience in play incentivizes minmaxing and, when experience comes at a trickle, can heavily punish jacks-of-all-trades who might prefer to earn and develop high specialties in play rather than simply begin play with them.

Hmm, I see what you're saying. The scaling exp cost in-game doesn't apply with points in character generation.

There's also the situation that you get more points if you choose to play an older character.

What we can maybe do at some point to solve this issue is to make sure the cost scaling applies in character generation, too. 

In the meanwhile, I'd like to reassure you that you didn't necessarily make the wrong choices -- while exp cost can be an obstacle, another obstacle is finding someone to teach you a skill or finding a situation where you can learn a skill at all. So, if there's a jack-of-all-trades approach you're going for, it's good to start out that way and at least have a foothold in these skills that others may not have. And that could set them back for months in other ways -- primarily story, which is the main goal. The point of making a character is the story, not the dice pool.

If there's anyone making you feel as if the dice pool matters more than your story, please report them.  That said, unfairness in a system can certainly lead to unintended obsessing about mechanics, so we'll endeavor to fix the cost scaling in character generation -- I'm putting it on the checklist for beta phase now.

Nobody's made me feel that way except the cgen daemon. :)

For what it's worth I do imagine there are some pretty good benefits to already having things unlocked - it's just very much that theoretical. "2 skills at 10 versus 10 skills at 2" discrepancy. Even at lesser scales it looks like it could have severe consequences based on pretty innocuous circumstances.

They are "wrong" choices not because I actually feel like they're wrong, don't worry. I'm just used to having to make my concept viable in other games, so this kind of discrepancy sticks out like a sore thumb in hindsight. I have a story in mind and that thing is more valuable to me than the numbers behind it.

It's just that its one thing when a skill level is worth 7 exp, and another when they're worth hundreds of exp. The mental math starts going "i wonder how many Rivazes you could fit in a SuperRivaz". I look forward to seeing how the implementation goes later.

It's a really very good point.  Probably whenever we do this, we'll do something to normalize exp across the board, and boost up people who might've missed out on the points in character generation. (Something like what we do right now with people who earn 'age exp' and haven't spent it yet.)

There's another 'wrong' choice in character generation, too--though this one I'm not sure I mind as much. With age does come wisdom, with no 'benefits' for younger characters...and seemingly no drawbacks for older ones?

The drawbacks for older characters is something I'm considering implementing either as like random afflictions (uh oh, there goes a knee!) or stat mods, but it's just a bit far down on the priority list. 

This thread has been really interesting to follow along with, and as someone who made a pretty young character, I feel like this is a good time for me to chime in.

One of the things I'm enjoying about how this game is structured is that mechanical progression seems to be largely... not. I mean, yes, there's mechanical progression, but the game is pretty heavily designed around the primary gameplay progression track being purely narrative. It's flipping the whole paradigm in its head - which took me a bit to click to, but now that I "get" it, it's super freeing!

Am I as good at things as an older character? Probably not. But this is the key part: being "good" or "bad" at things doesn't affect my ability to progress. Because progression is the story! My skill choices are there to define and reinforce my character concept.

If you want to play a young character, they're just not going to be skilled or experienced at as many things, because they're young and that's part of the concept. So the mechanics are there to reinforce that concept and give you the right tools to play a younger, less experienced character immersively. Which means just not being as good at as many things.

I do think this whole idea of mechanical progression being the side note that supports your main narrative progression track, rather than the more common vice versa, could be written up more clearly and more frequently in chargen, because it's right on that line where it's familiar enough but also strange enough you have trouble shifting from the familiarity to really connect to the differences. (At least, I know I had some trouble, and I've read all the "this game is STORY FOCUSED, it's about the STORY" posts and pages multiple times.)

The idea of one of these older, salty mercenaries throwing out their back while swinging their swords around gave me a good maniacal chuckle today so I'm in full support of this 

I have to say - using a system where skills are scaled with character age is a HUGE relief to me personally. I am frankly so tired of games played in 1:4 time where everyone is required to start out as a peasant nobody, starting an apprenticeship from scratch, and everyone begins at 18 because that is the only age it makes sense to BE starting an apprenticeship from scratch, and then in six RL months that character is 22 and a Master Crafter.

In most of the games I have personally played, characters over 30 just simply don't happen. This is a narrative issue, and an immersion issue, but the problem goes beyond those things. Typically people who understand the mechanics of the game hit the ground running, gathering XP or skill points or whatever the system requires, and leveling up their skills as quickly as they can manage, so that characters who are 6 months old are VASTLY more skilled than characters who are 6 days old. It is basically impossible to make a 30 year old character (let alone a 50 year old character) with any vocational experience behind them - you can claim vocational experience in your background, but there will be 19 year olds lapping you constantly with actual skill use, and no IC explanation for that. It's demoralizing and no one ventures to do it.

And the thing is, if there was "no benefit" to playing a young character, then in a game like this where age offers an advantage to skills, people who wanted the skill benefit would just make older characters and not question it. I think the fact that there IS questioning of the "fairness" of older characters having a skill advantage actually demonstrates that there is something about making a younger character that people tend to prefer. And that's okay! It's fine to make that choice over playing an older character who has higher skills.

But very earnestly, could we perhaps not aim toward a system that doubly rewards youth, with all the benefits of youth (and we all know what they are) plus an even competancy playing field with older characters (which is narratively illogical)? Because that's how you create a world full of 20 year old master blacksmiths and guard captains, with no one over 30 on the board at all. Having spent an untold number of years (no really, I'm not telling :D) in that world, it sucks and I don't want to go back. I can't tell you how thrilled I am to see matrons played by actual human players. I would honestly be crushed if they were nerfed out of existence because we can't manage to choose between youth and experience in a game that isn't even supposed to prioritize skill advancement.