Character Advancement

I remember being a young roleplayer diving into my first rpg’s. Character creation was similar in most of the games on the market. Make a very basic character, adventure with them, kill monsters, find treasure, gain experience points, gain levels, get more skills, rinse, repeat. Back in the day we would memorize the XP charts so we would know when our characters would level up.

Those old TTRPG’s were bad enough, but when computer programmers took their favorite table top games and ported them into the computer world the character advancement concept of “leveling up” started to look like heroine dealers giving their junkie friends the first taste for free.

Over the years character advancement has been closely tied to the leveling up concept, but I’ve noticed something interesting as I’ve become an older and more mature gamer.

I don’t care about leveling up.

It’s not the character advancement I’m looking for. I think I first became aware of the anti-leveling up faction when I first started playing Traveller all of those years ago. In Traveller you create a seasoned, experienced character. After character creation nothing really changes. And then there was Call of Cthulhu a game in which your character is more likely to get worse as you play and not better.

Funny enough, those are my two favorite roleplaying games.

In this episode Christina, and I are going to talk about character advancement. The traditional methods and why it was innovative and important at the time and the current ideas of character advancement and how they have changed over the years.

First let’s start with the Doc.

Christina, what are you personal thoughts on character advancement, before we get into all the scientific nitty gritty?

Kick to Christina