# Character Progression: More Lateral Than Vertical tags: #thoughts #game/rpg/ironsworn #game/rpg/starforged #game/rpg/loner #game/rpg/ensemble ![[Ironsworn (cover).jpg]] ![[Starforged (cover).jpg]] ![[Loner (cover).jpg]] ![[Ensemble (cover).jpg]] ![[Wushu (logo).png]] Apparently today is the day for me to be prolix on Reddit and recording the rather lengthy responses here. In this case, we're talking about character progression, which is not level up vertical or, as I like to say, **"number go up."** --- > I feel like swimming out into stranger waters with my RPGaming. More story, less focus on 'Levels and increased capabilities'. > > The current campaign that I'm envisioning is set in a version of the Ghost in the Shell universe, but I want my players to be more invested in learning more about themselves, and their place in society, than anything else. > > I keep thinking about The Wire, the astounding and 'could-be-argued-the-Best' television show of all time. > > McNulty, Daniels, "Bunk"**,** Greggs, Lester, "Prez", Herc and Carver. All really GREAT characters. > > Did McNulty ever 'level up' and become better at shooting a pistol? Or increase his skill level in grappling? Or negotiating? > > Nope. McNulty was always McNulty in terms of his capablities. He had exactly the same capabilities at the end of Season 5 as he did in the first episode of Season 1. He didn't 'Level Up'. > > So what changed? > > What changed was our appreciation of who McNulty was, and why he has become the person that he is. By the end of 5 seasons, we haven't seen McNulty become a 'better' cop. But we just know him and understand him better as a human being. > > So anyhoo, I have gotten the feelings that some people out there in RPG land might know what I am talking about here. > > Anyway you can point me in the directions i'm looking for, much appreciated. If not, at least salute me as I point my RPG ambitions into the uncharted waters. > > -- https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/1t487cy/what_if_character_progression_was_more_about/ --- Have you ever played a tabletop RPG which is not *D&D* or *D&D* adjacent? That sounds like a rhetorical question. At a certain level it is, because I'm pretty sure you haven't if you haven't seen character progression which is not "number go up." This is a good time to expand your horizons. I'm going to start by referencing some freely available RPGs online which have very different sorts of progression systems. --- **[[Ironsworn]]** I'm going to open with one of my favorite RPG designs of the last five years and the predecessor to my favorite RPG of the last five years, *[[Ironsworn - Starforged|Starforged]]*, which uses the same mechanics but refines them a little bit and moves to a science fiction setting. *Ironsworn* is by default a sort of low fantasy, Viking-influenced world with mechanics which are explicitly narrativist/fiction forward. However, part of gameplay involves actually going through and putting together the truths of your setting, allowing you to adjust pretty much everything during your session zero. It's also able to be played solo, co-op, and in a traditionally guided way. The important relevancy here is that while you do generate experience points from completing vows (things that your character has sworn to do), the things that you can spend XP on **don't** tend to be ones that simply make numbers go up. Instead, you broaden the things that your assets apply to, or gain more assets in a way which is reflected in the fiction. By default there is one XP track in *Ironsworn*, while in *Starforged* you actually have three legacy tracks which reflect what you can do going forward. The mechanics are completely compatible, so if you wanted to use the *Starforged* mechanics in the *Ironsworn* setting, you certainly could. Of note is the fact that you can have the whole game for free, along with the *Lodestar* reference, which actually does a fair job at bringing the Ironsworn mechanics into alignment with the *Starforged* moves, as well as adds additional oracles. This isn't the most radical approach to the game space possible, but it is an extremely nice compromise which does not obsess itself with leveling up, but instead broadening characters outwards. --- **[[Loner]]**/**[[Ensemble]]** Let's go further into the extreme. *Loner* is a game which doesn't really have any quantified traits on the character sheet or anywhere else at all. Instead, it has a series of tags which are simple descriptors and represent a sort of binary narrative permission for a character to do something or have an advantage when doing something. They can also represent something that the character has a disadvantage when dealing with. This is really all you need to play the game. Mechanical resolution consists of determining whether your character has disadvantage, a neutral stance, or advantage on the resolution of a situation. Rolling a couple of d6 to read the highest in order to answer the oracular question, from which the answers may be "yes and," "yes," "yes but," "no but," "no", or "no and." There is one additional small mechanic for keeping up with when a plot twist of a more serious type can occur and a very simplified combat tracker, which you can consider optional if you like. The key here is to recognize that character development only comes through engaging with the game/the setting and accruing more tags when it is fictionally reasonable to do so. Did you meet a fence and do a little work for them so that they have a good opinion of you? Take it as a tag. Do you have a sucking chest wound? Take it as a tag. Some things will be an advantage in narrow circumstances. Some things will be a disadvantage in almost every circumstance. It's up to you as a player to incorporate those things into your engagement with the game. This is probably the most extreme example that I can come up with, but while it looks bizarre, I can tell you that it absolutely **does** work, and it completely changes how you think about character evolution if you've never been exposed to something like this before. *Loner* is Creative Commons licensed, and the link I've given to you above actually takes you to the full SRD on the creator's website. *Ensemble* is a version of the mechanics slightly tweaked with some other discussion which specifically talks about running as a group rather than a solo play system. Honestly, you can just use *Loner* to run things. It's perfectly fine even with surprisingly large groups. --- **[[Wushu]]** This is another one of my favorite games, and I unabashedly was thrilled when it went free to have access to, even though I had literally bought all the books that had come out before that point. Wushu is quite an exotic game because while it does have a GM, the way that they approach the game is not utterly dissimilar to how the players approach it, except for the fact that the GM can set the level of Threat which must be dealt with for characters to deal with a scene and go on. Characters themselves are defined by a handful of traits, generally three, as well as a weakness. The traits are ranked five, four, and three, whereas the weakness has a value of one. Play involves the players narrating what the characters do and getting a d6 for each notable element that they say. Whatever they say is what the character does. The dice do not exist to determine whether or not they can do it; if they can narrate it, they can do it. The dice exist to say how effective what they do actually is. How does this relate to the question of character advancement? Simple: **there's no system for character advancement in *Wushu*.** During a story, session, series, or campaign, the character doesn't change unless the player wants to change it and the GM is okay with it. If so, they can just change their traits or their weakness. It's that simple. The numbers stay the same, but the descriptions may change. Of course, any sort of fictional change of the character within the story isn't necessarily mechanical, but is still important. It's just not written down on the character sheet as a trait. That's it. That's the advancement system. --- Honestly, I'm thinking that the latter two might be something more like you want to try, but your players will have to be ready to buy into this kind of play. Many of them won't have ever been exposed to even playbook/milestone game progression, much less fiction-only tag-based progression. Do you want progression of any sort whatsoever? That's an important question to explore here. Outside of the context of a deliberate one-shot in which everyone is told up front they are playing a one-shot, most people don't want to play in a game without any sort of progression whatsoever. They want a degree of noted expansion of their capabilities, whether it be vertical ("number goes up") or lateral. You need to really think about what it is you want to represent within the context of gameplay and whether your players are going to want to do it.