When playing D&D with my friends and leading them through the game, I always find myself battling against the leveling system the game has.
It offers me one simple thing: Creatures give Experience Points. Kill creatures. Get XP. Kill monster. Gain level. Kill-Win, Kill-Win. This forces everyone who plays D&D to either accept this and become extremely proficient murder machines or invent some alternative way to level up.
The easy solution to this problem is, of course, stop playing D&D. But sadly, the problem isn't exclusive to it.
So what are some alternative ways of leveling up your character? Can we make something even better, conceptually? Can we make the leveling up diegetic?
What I mean by this is making the leveling mechanics of your game part of the story itself. To paint it extremely clearly:
In this Useful Example Game (UEG from now on), your character chops wood. It's their main skill. And there's plenty of subtiers of wood chopping and lot's of axes and saws and some other wood-chopping paraphernalia I'm ignorant of. But at Level 1 in UEG you chop wood. That's it. And the more wood you chop the better you get at it. Maybe every log you chop fills a pip in your wood chopping skill until it reaches a threshold. BLAM! Level 2 Wood Chopping. Incredible.
That's how real world skills work. You do something and you get better at it. It's like a job system. It's simple and it works... sort of.
The problem with UEG's leveling system is that once you start doing something and upgrading your two or three skills you're discouraged from trying anything else. Why would I try learning Magic I, when I already have Wood Chopping XVII, with which I can chop enemies harder than any spell could!
This is a little boring I think. You grow very tall and barely wide. There's some power fantasy in play here, of course. Who wouldn't want to become the Ultimate Wood Chopper.
I wouldn't, but someone surely would.
So how about growing wider? How can we grow wider and keep it grounded? After all, we people can only learn so much in one lifetime.
Loot is one option.
"I don't have to become the best gunslinger in the world if I just have the best gun." Some terrible, terrible gunslinger.
Somewhat. Maybe you don't need to acquire so many different skills but just focus your system on providing your more-or-less competent adventurers with gear, and work your "leveling" (if we can even call it that here) along this. This also allows you to grow into unexpected skills, discouraging your players from "planning their build".
I mark this words in red and Courier New to accentuate their evil. Build Planning and stopping it (or trying to) is something I'll talk about some other time, though.
Back to loot. Find things. Have things. New things! 3rd level spells? I don't speak that language, sir, only brand-new-ancient-tablet-that-holds-a-new-spell-for-me!
You might complain about the lack of diversity, as finding a thing isn't the same as having a fun list of 30 new spells to read and try once. But I think that's also a terrible problem so I'm going to complain back to you. This is so fun.
Also shops exist! And do my players LOVE shops.
What am I doing though?
Now I beg you to imagine me picking up a very old tome with both my hands and blowing a thick layer of dust off of it.
Ember White was my first serious (ha ha ha!) ttrpg project. It was an ICON hack set on space, loosely based on the Destiny IP. In it, players embody the Forgotten, a group of people that had been space-kidnapped by a mysterious entity and brought back many years later with almost none of their memories back. During character creation, players chose three memories: A friendly, a familiar and a terrible one, and that would be all they or we would know about their character's backstory. This made character-making very quick, but it also gave me a wonderful opportunity.
In Ember White, experience points are called Slivers of Remembrance. These Slivers are given every session to each player whenever they accomplish something great, or fail something miserably.
Doing an alright job hiding won't make you remember anything, but sneaking behind the Imperial Guard in perfect silence will bring back the memories from when you were a little lad and you stole from the shop that was below your house with your friends.
Cooking a serviceable meal isn't much but preparing an absolutely terrible dinner for your party might remind you of that time you met your until now forgotten wife.
This I believe is diegetic, and most importantly, fun!
- It makes leveling up a real thing, as the powers given to the Forgotten are tied to memory
- It gives you an opportunity to expand your story both to you and your group.
- It's a wonderful gamble! Players are encouraged to sometimes try their most dangerous plans because they now that even if they fail terribly, their characters will develop (both their story AND their skills).
