medical uses of drugs

Dream Factory

Do we need Ding in our RPGs? Part II

Carrying on from the previous post, I spoke about not needing character advancement in a role-playing game – but does not having advancement mean not having ways to award players?  Hardly.

Take my game for example.  In Dream Factory there are two kinds of awards, point based and plot based.  You get a Karma point each episode for embracing your character’s personal struggle – whatever that is, whether you succeed or fail – so long as your success or failure is dramatically interesting.  You also also are given a Karma point for each Lynchpin that the GM thinks you embraced well in the episode.

(Lynchpins are group-created principles of the story your group is telling – for example, if you were trying to promote a light-hearted wise-cracking kind of atmosphere, you could have a lynchpin that “People tend to be quippy and crack wise.”  Players that steer the story to those truths get rewarded, thus incentivizing the game the group wants to have.)

You also get awarded Karma points for bringing value to the game apart from your gameplay for the gaming group, anything from volunteering to write an essay about a new town for the GM, to bringing snacks for all to enjoy.  And in Dream Factory(DF), having Karma is good – one of the most popular uses is in boosting your chances to win Outcome Checks, and therefore having the story in the moment go your (the players’) way.

Additionally there are plot awards, given at the end of every season ( a group of connected episodes, like a TV show.)  You might, for example, rescue a princess and defeat a villain during the season, and perhaps request a plot award that the villain is defeated so thoroughly that they don’t come back next season.  Or maybe you would rather keep the princess around as a love interest for the character, so you ask for that.

These awards are worth pursuing, but they have nothing to do with advancement or leveling up – instead, they’re all about the story – which in my mind, is how it should be!

On the other open question, it’s fair to ask if removing advancement in some way hinders us from telling stories we want to tell.  For example, what if we want to tell the story of an adventurer who starts off weak and somewhat ineffectual, but by the end of the tale has become a mighty hero?  How can we accomplish that without character advancement?

As it turns out, even more easily than we could have done before!  Now, instead of some prewritten mechanics telling what we have to do and how many goblins we have to kill before we can be a better fighter, the GM and the players can decide that for themselves.  Now it’s about the hero’s journey more than ever, not following some pre-laid-out mechanical path.

As always, it’s all about the story – it always was.  Now that the mechanics are out of our way, we can tell precisely the story we always wanted to tell, whatever that may be!

And isn’t that the whole point?

You don’t need character advancement to tell any story – for an ultimately simple reason.  Mechanical advancement is never the story, even if the hero’s journey is.

And people can tell that tale far better than any chart of levels and abilities.

So, in conclusion, while it is important to always have challenges that never become too easy, we can have that without advancement – in fact, if anything, advancement makes it more complicated to keep the amount of challenge relatively the same.  And while sometimes we do want to tell the tale of a character that grows in ability, sometimes we don’t – and either way, game mechanics are not the only way, nor are they the the best way to tell these tales.

We don’t need Ding in our RPGs.  If you like your Ding – that’s fine.  But of all the things necessary for great story experience – creativity, ingenuity, imagination, good friends to share the ride with – Ding is not necessary.

So leave it behind, sit back, and enjoy the ride.  🙂