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In my humble experiences..... this best be fits darker genre of gaming. If continued play results in less character sheet growth and more in game tricks, you need some more bait for the players.....like Severely expensive skill acquisition....only a LONG campaign would result on real skill betterment. Character creation would need to be able to make very skilled characters.


I vote Film Noir...not enough game in that genre

Any setting where the characters are live-fast, die young. For example, post-apocalyptic might fit that mould as there is unlikely to be any happy ever after.

Having just read Nathan's Verge setting in detail, there is an aspect in there where you get to augment the number of die you roll. Is that what you mean by hero points? Re-rolls and such?

For those systems that lean towards story games, you might reward the players with control of the narrative.

I think in most games, the suspension of disbelief can stretch enough to allow for characters to improve greatly. In Pendragon, years would go by between sessions, so you could accurately gain skill and favour. In most games, I think players accept that their characters improve very rapidly and it's a break in the simulation for the sake of a game with good progression.

As an aside, I prefer incremental games rather than levelling ones. Gaining ability bit by bit as you use the skill or stat makes more sense to me than suddenly becoming more powerful.

Part of why games have methods to improve characters (often, but not always, via experience points to levels) is tradition. Roleplaying games have been doing this since their inception. Another aspect is simple logic. If a character is at X level of ability, then that character got there somehow. Therefore, another character could conceivably achieve that same degree of competency.

Other than that, there isn't really anything that says games must have levels, or even character advancement at all. The current trend for most games since the 'nineties has been to get away from levels. Personally I like levels. They are a nice, quick, and easy way to reference a character's power level and time-in-play. Let's compare two mages to illustrate this. One is from D&D (any version) and the other is from Mage: the Subtitled. A mere glance at a character sheet tells one that the fifth level D&D wizard has been played for a few months. You know instantly how powerful a spell can be cast (fireball), and how much of a threat to throw against that character (5-35 hit points isn't much, but it's much better than a first level fighter). The other mage conversely takes a bit more study to determine how long he or she has been an active character. You have to do some maths to even determine if this is a starting character or not. The threat this character poses, and the appropriate threats to defend against, are much trickier affairs. Plus, it's a really good feeling as a player when your character levels.

There are games that have little to no advancement. Traveller (or at least the version I played) has no character advancement beyond character generation, excepting only getting more equipment. That is somewhat similar to the experience-points-as-credit-rating idea. Paranoia works that way, using a colour-coded system. Savage Worlds posits that your character is at the top of his or her game. Character development is part of the boring parts of your character's life that you are skipping over prior to game. I also dimly recall reading about a zombie game recently where your character is in a downward spiral--you don't even get to heal damage received.

Nothing says a level-based system has to be quite as strong as it is in D&D. You don't have to have your character's hit points (or other method of survivability) increase with level. You can have character advancement outside of gaining a level. Midian does this beautifully. Most mechanical advancement is done apart from gaining a level, and can be done at any time: from learning a new skill to improving an old one, from attack bonuses to increasing an attribute.

I don't think that it's not so much a setting or genre that makes it appropriate to have static characters. It's more of a game style that makes it appropriate or not. Games where life is cheap work for static characters. In my experience, the less control a player has over the character's advancement (as opposed to control at creation) the more likely they are to find a way to bump off their existing character to bring in a new one. I have seen players do this for something as trivial as needing a weapon proficiency slot for the magic item they just found. It also helps greatly if character creation is fast and easy. Complex character generation schemes coupled with static character generation just seems to be asking for trouble.

For static rewards, you can look at social benefits. Getting money or more stuff is always nice, but those are their own rewards. If you give rewards like a reputation, introductions to high society, street cred, influential friends, public office, or a promotion, you also increase the potential plot hooks. You can also progress the game this way, as a character moves from being just some spud off of the street into an important mover and shaker.

Something my brother and I are currently fooling about with is bargain-based character advancement. The idea is that the character is offered x job for y reward, and at the same time the GM says to the players "What do you want for your character? Ok, well, achieve this and I can give you that." We decided we did want advancement, because the thing we're working on is pretty oldschool-shaped, and it made sense in context.

This is all from a player perspective, I've never GMed (well, not for years and not enough to count)

I don't think there's any reason that stats on a PC have to go up with level, experience can be rewarded in all the ways you say.

However, aren't they all similar in a way? wether the reward is money, equipment or experience, the general game effect is to make situations they get into easier to resolve... while its not the same exactly its all in the same vein...

(skulks back off to the darkness of the Icar corner)

I don't like levels and I don't like benchmarking. As a GM, I don't want the players to be told what level is, I prefer to let them find out the lethal or non-lethal way. It actually gives the GM and players more choice as description takes its place.

For example: A level 10 Dragon is terrorising a village and eating children. The characters are level 1.

With levels
Player group knows that Dragon are level 10 (because it says that in the bestiary) so they stay clear until they are tough enough to face it.

Without levels
Player group has no idea how tough the Dragon is. They hide to watch it do damage to the town. It's mostly breathing fire and setting fire to buildings. If they characters are a foohardy bunch, they might try and set a trap for it or go and kill it in its cave. Or they might just sneak off and leave the village to its fate. They might think of something else really very clever indeed (like filling a sacrificial bait child up with Dragon poison and leaving him/her out in the open).

I don't like the idea of encounters being decided statistically.

I like the Call of Cthulu method of Character advance, If you roll very well when using a skill you tick next to that skill. at the end of the session you roll a d10 and add that to the skill