Game-design Brainstorming

>>52759771
I'm gonna be honest man, that sounds like a nightmare. I can't imagine regularly pausing for one person to level up while everyone else twiddles their thumbs. And if it doesn't happen regularly, why bother? And if leveling is fast or simple, why bother?

Use a d% system and everytime they fail a roll increase said skill by 1%.

Also, the d% makes a great one roll mechanic:
% to hit (71%, for example)
inverse % (71 becomes 17) for the hit location
plus % (so 71 becomes 7+1 = 8) is damage
minus (module) % (so 71 becomes 7-1 = 6. 17 also would become 6) is X
x% (so 71 is 7*1 = 7) is Y

I fucking love d%

>>52759961
Not OP, but this mechanic puts a time limit on characters. Say they start at 1%, they have 99 failures left before they reach 100% and two things happen:

>they stop advancing (at least in that skill)
>they no longer have any chance of failure (in that skill) without constant contrivances to explain why they can be made to fail

And that's assuming characters start at 1% (which will make everything a slog) and grow to 100% (which will make everything boring). Most games start PCs at ~60% chance of success on rolls they are good at, but cap out around 90% for a normal roll.

>>52759961
So, Runequest?

>>52759918
Thats partially the problem, I don't want it to slow down combat.

Character progression is fairly important, for one I want my players to feel like they have the flexibility to save up XP and then level up on the fly so that they can spec into whatever they need at the moment.

With any luck I want to try and get them to feel like everything they do is a trial by fire. They may not be prepared to handle whatever it is they are doing at first, but when under pressure they can still pull through at the last possible moment.

>>52759961
I don't really want them to feel like there is ever an inevitability of success. Thats part of what I like about the Fantasy Flight StarWars dice/force-point system, no matter how much investment you have in a skill, it can radically swing either way.

Also >>52760108 has some good points too. It leaves too much to chance at the earlier levels, but eventually spirals into inevitability as time goes on.

>>52760161
>They may not be prepared to handle whatever it is they are doing at first, but when under pressure they can still pull through at the last possible moment.
>They may not be prepared to handle whatever it is they are doing
>they can still pull through
If they know they will pull through, there will be no tension. This is a difficult balance - try thinking of consequences characters incur when they "pull through", and how regularly they should be forced to do so.

>>52760270
Such a major change to the gameplay loop of most RPGs means that other things change too. The tension is no longer dependent on whether they have the stats to do things, but rather whether they have the XP and fate point resources.

Its a system that rewards the players to squeak by while saving as many resources as possible for the next encounter, because if they dump everything into one aspect then they might be screwed for the next encounter when they don't have enough resources to dump into something else.

Of course I don't plan on flooding them with resources, the players will have to earn them by doing things. The harder the stuff they do, the bigger the reward they can funnel into the next challenge. Which will hopefully incentivize more high risk high reward gameplay choices.

>>52760161
>Thats partially the problem, I don't want it to slow down combat.
Then don't do it. It doesn't really sound like it's worth it. Just have encounters spaced out so that players can take a natural pause and level up.

>>52760610
I get what you are saying, but that fundamentally undermines the experience I'm trying to get across to my players. The "trial by fire" improvisational experience where they are forced to make it up as they go along.

I don't want to give them those moments of downtime where they get to pick and choose what to dump resources into in advance.

>>52760717
I think you might be putting the cart before the horse. Consider other avenues beyond "leveling up" to express this.

>>52760750
The reason I'm falling back onto leveling up is that it best suits my needs.

The key term here is "trial by fire". The players go into a situation unprepared to deal with it, but come out of that situation with meaningful growth that will carry forward.

Having a more temporary resource that gives short term buffs wouldn't let me pull that off. I am borrowing the force point/fate point system from Fantasy Flight to try and give my players some wiggle room on an action to action basis (frankly with the dice system I am also borrowing from them it needs that extra level of interaction to remain somewhat consistent). But that sort of temporary buff doesn't carry across into future encounters.

I am very specifically looking to develop a form of organic character advancement that reflects the things that the character has been through, rather than mere cookie-cutter archetype advancement.