Attribute Bloat 'Re-Deux'

[JLV]

Originally Posted by Chris Rice

That's a very good point. I think we're cursed by the fact that the original RPG (Dungeons and Dragons) had such a strong focus on character development via "levelling up." For whatever reason (it probably started as simple laziness) I always ignored XP in D&D, and just gave characters a level after an adventure sequence but only if it was needed because the next adventures were of higher level.

Players were more focussed on their characters deeds and the consequences of these than on the artificial process of recording XP and levelling up.

As you say, players play differently and think about the game differently.

One solution is to simply tell players that YOU will manage the XP stuff and they can safely ignore it. When they do anything, you figure up the XP on your "super-secret GM sheet" and then when they can advance, tell them they can add a spell or a skill or an attribute point or whatever. All THEY have to do is tell you what they want to gain or learn next; "I want to learn the Illusion Spell," or "I want to learn Two-Weapons," or "I want to add a point to my ST." That way they can focus on playing and you can focus on the mechanics for them.

Heck, that would even solve Joe Tippets' issue on learning. They tell you what they want the next advance to be, and you start accumulating XP for them in that pot. If they change their mind and decide they want to advance something else, you start a new pot (but leave the old one intact and partially filled with however many XP they'd accumulated towards it); that penalizes (somewhat realisitically) changing your area of study in mid-stream, and the process of accumulating XP simulates the learning time necessary to gain the advance, whatever it is. All without a lot of extraneous rules that just confuse everyone!

You could even allow them up to three "pots" (as in the old system where you could study three things at one time), and simply divide, as evenly as possible, any incoming XP between the pots for them. All in all, it's an elegant solution, if I do say so myself! ;-)