Lines of Experience
The Marvel Universe RPG is a diceless RPG with a highly unusual diceless system which is based on moving stones around different areas of your character sheet. For example, Cyclops’s optic blast might give him three stones, and he might move two of them to offense and one to defense.
That’s totally irrelevant to this post, but I think it’s a neat idea. The real point is to introduce another of MURPG’s awesome mechanics: lines of experience.
The idea is this: after each session, each character gets a couple lines of experience. Lines of experience might be things like:
Fought Namor underwater
Hijacked a sentinel
etc.
In other words, they’re one-line descriptions of things you did that adventure, and they serve three purposes. First, as the name suggests, they are your experience points. Get enough lines of experience and you advance your character. Second, they serve as a little campaign journal and help remind the players about all the cool things they’ve done. And third, and perhaps most innovative in my mind, they give you little bonuses later in the game.
For example, if you’re fighting some sharks, you might point out that time you fought Namor underwater, and how that experience would be really helpful here. If he agrees, the GM might give you an extra stone during the battle.
Now here’s the really cool thing: this advancement scheme can be ported to pretty much any system with little if any adaptation. It’s also really easy to customize the advancement rate. If you want to give people a line of experience for every encounter, average four encounters per session, and want people to level up every three or four sessions, then a level costs 12-15 lines of experience.
Well, the idea is nice, but not all that innovative… it sounds a lot like Aspects from FATE (especially Spirit of the Century and the new implementations of FATE v3, as opposed to the older FATE v2)… they are not meant for advancement, but they work in a similar fashion.
Basically, if one of your aspect can help you in a situation, you describe how it works and you spend a fate point to give yourself a bonus in that task. However, aspects can be also “compelled”; you get a limitation of some kind (for example, you can’t perform an action) but you GAIN a fate point for this. It’s useful to encourage roleplaying.
An example: if you have the aspect “Autodestructive courage”, which means you are brave but you tend to be a bit TOO brave, you could tag your aspect to gain a bonus, for example to not be shaken when exposed to something fearful. However… if there’s something very dangerous and the logical solution would be to run away, the GM may compel the same aspect and tell you “You are a bit autodestructive, don’t you think? Are you sure you will run away?” offering you a fate point. If you accept, and face the danger, you gain a fate point… but you have to act according to your aspect. You can still refuse, but in that case you don’t gain a fate point AND you have to spend one, just to do the most logical thing and to act “against your instinct”.
I suggest you to check out Spirit of the Century if you don’t know it already…
I’m not familiar with Spirit of the Century.
It sounds to me like the aspects are more of a character creation thing, not an experience thing. Do you gain new aspects based on what happens to your character? That’s the bit which I find interesting about the lines of experience, the specific things you do help your character in later adventures.
Aspects can change or be added on as a result of experience, yes. You can view an entire SRD for SotC for more details:
http://www.crackmonkey.org/%7Enick/loyhargil/fate3/fate3.html
The upcoming Dresden Files RPG is based on this system as well.
Anyway, both Aspects and LoE are nifty ideas that seem easily portable.
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I’m a fan of system that doesn’t make you much _stronger_ as you “level up” but rather _more_flexible_.* With those lines of experience, a character could have a “base build” and then get a “+1″ bonus whenever one of his lines apply (like in your example of fighting a shark after fighting Namor). I’d throw out the leveling part.
*) Well, I still play and like D&D. I mean it academically.
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I played a lot of this particular Marvel game, and while it had it ups and downs, I agree the lines of experience was a solid idea. Too bad the game it self faded.
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I rather like this “line of thought”. I’m thinking of adapting it to my 4th Ed. D&D game that I DM.
I really don’t care for the method by which Action Points are awarded in 4th Ed — with the entire party getting a wave of action points every other encounter (or something akin to it).
On the other hand, if I adopted this “Line of Experience” system, wherein each hero gets a 1-line summary of their best accomplishment that play session, then I could award that individual an Action Point the NEXT time they performed that 1-liner.
I like it, because individuals will be rewarded for repeat heroic behavior. It might be difficult to keep track of, however. I’ll need to toy it out a bit more.
Interesting idea. I’d worry about that just because it might give the characters too many action points after they’ve been played long enough.
The thing I enjoy about this idea is that it opens up “achievement” to be more than “experience”. It’s a lot more flexible in how and when you (as a DM) can give players “experience”. Social interractions can also be more easily rewarded.
For example, if a player outwits a jester in conversation or another player wins “the game of thrones” that’s being played in his nearby kingdom. Normal 4th edition rules say that we could make them a skill challenge or just reward them as DMs as we see fit. But with the lines, we can reward them more adequately as well as make it seem more personal and relevant to the character/player. I approve this concept.
(I also would like to learn more about the diceless/stone system. I may approve that concept as well).