Advancement over Time

One of the things that I really like about Ars Magica is the advancement of the character. In Novarium, I am trying to take the good ideas from the game and distill out the essential elements while leaving the obtuse and cumbersome nature of the Ars Magica design. I am panning for gold, in that sense. However, simultaneously I am going to be building a secondary structure that is alien to Ars Magica and integrating the two. I think you will find that it is really really really cool. So stick with me here.

Lets start from the basics.

How to people learn?

Teaching is a difficult thing to quantify, but I want to isolate two patterns that we find in nature. The first is that certain things can only be learned in a long slow uphill trajectory. This is easiest to spot in early childhood. There are things that a child can learn quite quickly, but only at a shallow level.  For example, speech. A young child can learn conversational speech quite quickly. My daughter just turned three, she can already carry on a pretty good conversation. However, if you start using words that she doesn't know, she gets lost.

Building up that vocabulary is a long slow process over decades. I have a really strong vocabulary and I have to explain a word to another adult about once a month (my daughter will benefit from this). However, there are still whole wings of the language that are specialized (legalese, anatomy, etc) that even a broadly educated person may not know.

I think language is a nice measure of how humans learn in the long term. But there are much faster short-term learning capacities. Someone can learn a new software program all the way up intermediate skills within a few days, in a few months much more so, and within a year; near total mastery. That is assuming dedicated training, but even self-directed training only elogates the curves by a few degrees.

So despite having some things that are on long trajectories, there are still things that can be taught in the short-run. That said, we still value people with a lot of experience because it helps them adapt to new situations that might be analagous to the skills they have accumulated over time.

Back to gaming...

Traditional game design has a single advancement trajectory. You pursue a single thing (XP) and depending on how much of it you have, you can do cooler stuff with your character (gain levels). While there are advantages to this model, the downside is that it totally does not gel with our real life conceptions of how people get better at things. You cannot learn language skills (or other long-trajectory skills) simply be chasing after XP (killing monsters, accumulating treasure, completing quests, etc). You just can't learn things that fast.

So what do you do?

Well, my solution is to create two advancement tracks.

The first is a character level. These are structured similar to classic D&D. You gain XP primarily from extracting essence from font pools, which is similar to gaining treasure in many ways. You can also get XP by completing your personal goals, or the goals of the person to whom you are strongly attached. So the model is that XP represents the abstract gains you make in the process of pursuing challenging goals. Everyone should be familiar with this abstraction, RPGs use it constantly.

Now when you gain a new level, you only gain a single point of willpower, a single point in a body stat (strength, endurance, or resilience), and a few skill points (not many). It is not a huge increase. A few Identity (read Class) abilities become slightly better. That's about it. It is not EVERYTHING, like in D&D. And it isn't even Magic, which is the principle focus of the game.

By the way, the gaining physical power is offset by an aging mechanic that exists for everyone, regardless of level, so don't worry about super-powered old people.

The way to really increase your magic powers or your skills is to actually spend time working on them. The game is a troupe game. You send your inactive characters off to do their own thing while your active character is adventuring. Or everyone can spend a few seasons of downtime if you need to. There is not a pressing need to adventure, per se. You make your own destiny in this game.

Thus the second track becomes your off-time. You can spend a season researching your magic. You can spend a season building up your skills. You can train an apprentice, write books, read books, socialize, etc. You can build up those long-term things.

However (and here is where it gets really interesting) there are connections BETWEEN the two tracks. You cannot advance a skill beyond CL + 1. When you try to experiment with new forms of magic, you subtract your CL from the difficulty, thus a low CL will mean a high difficulty and thus a chance of magic experiments going FUBAR. As in "your tower explodes in a giant fireball and people never even find your body in the wreckage", that kind of FUBAR.

Whoops

So you can sit in your wizard tower and do research and read books, but eventually you will reach your natural limit. You will know everything that can be learned from dusty tomes and combat dummies. And you will have to climb down out of that tower and deal with the real world.

Damn, I am loving writing this game. HUZZAH!