Do we need Ding in our RPGs? Part I

Since the early days, we’ve had character advancement in our role-playing games.  The classic example goes something like this:  The players stumble upon  an encampment of some sort of designated monster race – say, goblins – and then the players proceed to attempt to slaughter them.  After a dramatic combat, when the players emerge “victorious”, each killed goblin nets the players a certain amount of “XP” or “experience points”, as does any collected treasure.  And the players are hungry for as much XP as they can get, for once they get enough they can advance to the next “level” – and each level adds more abilities, potence, and goodies than the one before.  So though you may start off a lowly level 1 fighter, kill enough adversaries and loot their treasure and you will eventually attain the mythical level 20, when you will be so much more than you are now – so much more capable, skilled, and powerful.

And the desire for more power is a common one.  After all, if you had more power, you would be able just to give a marauding bunch of bandits the hairy eyeball, and they would hop right over to some other village with a less mighty protector, right?

Well, not exactly.

You see, the dirty little secret – well, actually, it’s not that much of a secret – is that as your character levels up, you fight higher and higher level opponents – yes, they have levels too – which is good because now you need twice as much XP to get to the next level as you needed to get to this one.

It’s a never ending cycle, a carrot that promises that the next level will make you more powerful when the truth is that the Game Master(GM) generally chooses what adversaries you fight based on what’s going to be a certain amount of challenge.  Your character’s life never gets easier, you see, because as your power increases you wind up facing that much more powerful foes, so as to always keep the relative power balance the same!

So it occurred to me, as I am sure it has occurred to many in years past, if the protagonists and the antagonists are always balanced against each other no matter what, then why lift one side just to rise the other?  Why have advancement or levels at all?  All they seem to do is provide an artificial veneer of progress, when in fact none is really taking place.

The truth is, you don’t really want progress after all.  Think of it, what if your character grew in power, but your challenges did not?  Well, then everything you do would get easier and easier, and all the obstacles you faced would seem more and more trivial.  And the game would lose all drama and get boring fast.

It’s important that there are always obstacles in the path of the protagonists – for that is where drama comes from.  These could be physical, military, emotional, even spiritual – there’s needs to be challenges to overcome.

But we don’t have to overcomplicate it.  We don’t need to create a level system for the illusion of “progress” – not if we can admit to ourselves that we don’t really want progress – not in the manner of our character’s life becoming easy and uninteresting.

We can simply embrace the idea that our “progress” is no more and no less than the progress of the story that we tell.  That we move from the first reveal to the next plot twist, to the final obstacle.  If we are telling an exciting and compelling story, we really don’t need Level 2 and another fighting stance.  Which, come to think of it, is why you can tell just as fulfilling stories in the comics even though most supers begin with their full powerset, as opposed to receiving one power doled out every ten issues.

The next post will address the dual questions of what awards do players get without advancement as well as whether we can still accomplish everything we could in a level based game without advancement.