The nature of gaining experience in Thick as Thieves
There are no character levels. The amount of experience you can invest
in a particular skill is always just a certain dose. You increase skill
values individually, and you can spend experience into more than just
one skill, but this is dependent on how much experience you have, so you
still have to choose wisely based on what you might currently need.
Improving a skill is largelly down to performing a skill regularly and being successful at your actions
Improving a skill is largelly down to performing a skill regularly and
being successful at your actions. However, there's a difference between
experience gained through training or performing an action over and
over, and experience gained "in the field", in a "live" situation (a
real heist, real stealthy sneaking, lockpicking in a lived-in location, a
real fight/duel with someone instead of a trainer, etc.). The latter,
experience gained "in the field", has a higher value than experience
gained only through training or repetition.
Concerning specialisation, though you don't have character classes, you
do have professions, or specialisations, if you will. There's plenty to
choose from, but at any given time, your character can only have three
specialisations. These specialisations don't limit the skills you can
use and increase, but they do emphasize certain types of skills
(depending on the contents of the specialisation), so those are given a
certain degree of preference when it comes to investing in them. One
specialisation always covers several skills, from several skill types
(though not necessarily all types).
Crucially, as the specialisations are character development guidelines,
not rigid classes, you can actually change your character's
specialisation over time. You (gradually) abandon a certain
specialisation, then you can choose a different one. Or two, if you've
abandoned two, or even three, if all three. However, if you have no
prior experience in a new specialisation, whatsoever, you'll be starting
from square one or relatively low within that new character
specialisation. If you have some prior experience with a specialisation,
you'll have more experience built up in the skills of that
specialisation, from earlier.
Obviously, the aforementioned sentences mean that you can return to a
specialisation you focused on earlier and re-adopt it again as your
character guideline. The key things are that: 1.) adopting and
abandoning a specialisation and learning with it / gathering experience
always takes a certain amount of time (i.e. it's not completely instant)
2.) the maximum of specialisations is three at a time (so, if e.g. you
want a fourth one, you'll have to abandon one from your current trio,
then adopt that as the new third one).
Though the player character is not forced to adopt a specialisation -
theoretically, they can play without one, if they like - it helps to
have at least one, to provide a bit of focus for the character.
Regardless of whether a player character has 0, 1, 2 or 3
specialisations, they can always invest into stats and skills that
aren't covered at all by any of their specialisations. If you have three
particular specialisations, but decide to invest in a skill outside of
them, it's perfectly possible. You just won't get as much of a "boost"
to the skill improvement as you would if the skill was under one of your
specialisations.
(Sidenote: Of course, not all stats can be improved, some are dependent
entirely on the environment, but a handful can be occassionally improved
over time. Most of the improvement lies within the skills, though, and
in the abilities that some skills have as a subsystem of sorts.)
The character skills you don't utilise for a long time (months, years of
in-game/in-story time) lead to your character slowly losing experience
invested in them (especially if they're meant to be skills you can
easily forget) and the performance of your character in a particular
long-dormant skill will lower accordingly. It won't cartoonishly
disappear or anything, but if you haven't used a skill in a very long
time, your character might need to re-increase it a bit, or maybe
re-learn some things (at least those beyond the basics). Certain skills
are slightly more or slightly less prone to being affected by this
partial loss of experience.
For example, you were pretty good at lockpicking, you've grown to really
feel what your hands are doing with the tools while picking a lock,
etc., but you were no lockpicking master. Something got in the way and
for various reasons, you hadn't lockpicked for two or three years. Then
your character needs to lockpick and realises they're a bit rustier at
it. They still know how to do it, in terms of knowledge, in terms of
hand movements, etc., but it's become less "second-nature" to them than
before. Over time, they'll have to relearn that "deeper feel" they had
for the skill in earlier years. Obviously, if a particular skill isn't
that easy to forget, especially when a character has long-term ingrained
experience with it, it's very unlikely the existing experience would
vanish completely. The character learns to ride a bike, or a horse, and
after not doing so for a long time, they might be a little uncertain at
first while trying it again, but they won't be completely clueless about
how to do that particular thing. (As they say in the real world, it's
hard to forget how to cycle, especially if you have a few months or
years of experience with it, even if you hadn't cycled for years.)
Thing is, you can't just state you're doing something. You have to actually do it.
Want to "GIT GUD" e.g. at polearm or staff fighting ? Go visit a
reliable trainer and spend some time there. Just for a bit of practice
via sparring. Or practice your gambling skills with someone adequately
experienced (doesn't even need to be a trainer), etc. Alternatively,
maybe your character just needs a rest, socializing and reassurance with
friends, so you'll spend your downtime having a beer, picking apart the
latest gossip, intel, or just venting personal worries and such.
This makes it more interesting for player characters to manage their
downtime. You can't be in two places at the same time, so you have to
figure out your current priorities. The game is actually fairly
narrativist in approach, so there is no "lesser" use of a character's
downtime. If they prefer to focus on something, they can. Even just
having a thoughtful or informative conversation with someone can be
beneficial to the player character. The various skills are there to
serve the various characters' adventures (individual or teamwork-based),
rather than the skills being self-serving, for their own sake.
To balance things out, it's not all that hard to increase your
experience values in a skill. Generally, I try to limit any frustrations
that might pop up, since the primary goal is to have things be fluid,
engaging and fun. The skills and gear and such are only important
insofar as your characters can use them to achieve things. It's not a
'murder-hobo' type of game, but one where characters haveto achieve
things more through exploration, cunning and finesse. The characters and
their personal adventures are basically at the heart of the gameplay,
with the skills and gear only tools.
The point is that the players are encouraged not to treat downtime as a
boring routine. They're encouraged to change up things, depending on
what they'd like to do. If a character decides they're going for a walk
in the city, or even the countryside (alone or with someone), they can
do that. There's no schedules to plan, or anything of the sort. The
player just decides and they do what they decide to do.
Do note that I explicitly wrote in the above posts that this only
deteriorates a bit if you don't use it for a veeery looong time. Many
months, more than a year, two years of in-universe time. If you don't
use a skill for a few days or a week, nothing happens, no decrease.
Skill progression and experience
Are any of the skills listed in my earlier post a bit on the iffy side ?
Do any feel redundant ? Or cover too little or too much ?
As I've mentioned earlier, I prefer a "less is more" design approach.
partly because it's also more pleasant and readable to players that way.
I don't need 30 billion skill ideas, I think a few general archetypes
are sufficient. However, am I forgetting or overlooking something ? Not
sure.
Concerning the skill trees, one of the reasons I decided to adopt them
for some of the skills structure was when I thought long and hard about
structuring the combat skills and the artisan skills.
My structural train of thought when it comes to the skillset hierachy goes as follows:
Type of skill (skillset) -> Skill (individual entries) ->
Abilities (subsets of a particular Skill, advanced through skill trees)
In the case of the Artisan skills, I felt it was obvious that skill
trees allow characters to develop certain crafting skills in a more
custom manner. This would avoid me needing to add 70+ different crafting
skills for every thing imaginable, making the Artisan skills absurdly
bloated compared to the rest. You instead have a few broad categories of
crafting skills, and all the individual crafting knowledge and
abilities for a player character are under one of those categories. You
learn the basics of a craft, then you can branch out in the direction
you want to. Learning new stuff is more difficult if it's new to the
character and they have less of a basis in that particular kind of
crafting. And if they already have some basic experience in the area,
it's a bit less difficult to learn. If a character knows basic
woodworking and has learnt how to carve themselves a spoon, or assemble a
small wooden lantern, then they'll be able to grasp how to craft a
simple, weaker wooden crossbow much easier, than if they had never held a
carving knife, chisel, drill or saw before, in their entire life.
The combat skills, namely Melee combat skills and Ranged combat skills,
were the other two skill areas where I realised early on that skill
trees might be the best structural solution, at a micro level. In the
Movement skills, I only have about six or seven skills in total, so I
wanted each of the two combat skill overviews to be similarly simple.
Meaning, for both melee and ranged, you'd get only a few general skills
that make sense for each type of combat, and under each individual skill
for either Melee or Ranged, you'd get a skill tree on developing
particular combat abilities. A particular skill would still govern a
particular combat ability, but you can choose which combat ability it
is.
For example, you're investing in the Thrusting skill in Melee, and you
can choose to focus on Spear/Polearm thrusts, Knife-fighting thrusts, or
on Swordfighting thrusts, as more specific abilities. Within these, you
can then learn the basics of e.g. sword thrusting, then more and more
detailed abilities on thrusting with a one-handed sword,
hand-and-a-half, or a two-hander, then with a specific type of
one-handed sword, etc., or a specific style of thrust from a particular
swordfighting tradition. (When it comes to fighting traditions, I wanted
to draw upon the known and documented European martial arts traditions,
because it feels natural and fits the strongly historicist tone of my
setting. Doing fictional equivalents of stuff like the Liechtenauer
tradition or Meyer tradition or Fiore tradition in swordfighting, or the
French poleaxe fighting tradition, or Polish-Lithuanian sabre-fighting
tradition makes perfect sense. However, I didn't want to ape what games
like 7th Sea had already done years ago, where a country's fighting
tradition was basically a whole separate skill. So, relegating this
level of detail down to a skill tree level felt reasonable. If a player
character in my game wants to learn a very particular fighting
tradition, after learning the absolute defeault basics, they can, but
they don't have to if they find it superfluous.) Similarly, in Ranged
combat, you might decide to focus on your bow draw skill, and you can
develop this towards a certain (cultural) style of bow draw, depending
on what fits the character's current needs or preferences.
When it comes to Social and diplomatic skills, I realised that skills
like language learning, or a character's cultural knowledge, could also
be branched gradually, by way of simple skill trees. So that's one other
area where they are definitely present. It is entirely possible I will
add skill trees to some of the other skill types as well, beyond their
current availability in Artisan skills, Melee combat skills, Ranged
combat skills, and some of the Social skills. I only want to do it where
it makes the most sense and where it would be the most flexible for
players, for the sake of variety and enjoyability.
One design guideline I've always tried with my project thus far, for
years, was "Add depth, but avoid adding complicated-to-understand
features and structures". I consider it better to try and keep gameplay
relatively simple and interconnected, though without losing more
interesting details. Details that make it feel less generic (and more
unique to its own fictional setting).
Rewarding convincing roleplaying with experience and extra aces up the sleeve
"At the conclusion of every game session, the Narrator will award some
extra card values to those players who pulled off an interesting and
positive feat during the session, either a feat in local area
exploration (including finding hidden locations), a feat in
stealthiness, a feat in puzzle-solving or detective skills, a feat in
social and diplomatic skills, or a feat in using combat for a quick but
non-violent and non-harmful resolution. These extra assigned cards are
an equivalent of Drama Dice seen in other games, and can be used as an
ace up a character's sleeve if they'd later need an extra card for a
particular action.
The Narrator should note down in his/her overall session notes which
particular players (and their characters) achieved what feat in what
conditions during the course of a session. This makes it easier to keep
track of the achieved feats and award the players with potential extra
cards and bonuses at the conclusion of a gameplay session (and avoids
constantly interrupting a session's ongoing narrative). The Narrator
will write down a note about a specific player's feat and remind the
specific player to also write down a brief note in their character's
notes.
If a feat was achieved publicly, in front of NPCs, and if the player
achieves at least one feat per single game session, the Narrator can
award the player with a bonus to their public Renown (i.e. the positive
side of that specific player character's Reputation scale). The closer
the feat aligns with that particular player character's motivations and
principles (established during their character creation and entry into
the narrative), the greater the subtle boost will be to this special
one-off bonus for that player character."
In other words, this is meant to reward narrative-focused and character
action/choice focused gameplay, as opposed to violence-focused gameplay
and the infamous 'murder-hobo' style gameplay ('fight-and-loot', nothing
else). Rather than give players incentives to avoid roleplaying,
characters, story and just turn the game into a power fantasy combat
sim. Since the very start of design, years ago, I've always tried to
incentivise roleplaying, non-violence and constructive behaviour of
players in a natural manner. Rather than an arbitrary "Don't do this !
Because reasons !", which only confuses players, I've always created
logical in-universe reasons for why use of certain mechanics and
playstyles are much more rewarding.
Hence why stealth has been such a key mechanic from the outset, and I
actually encourage players to use it instead of combat, whenever they
can. Even though there's also combat, it's only effective in
self-defence (against smaller numbers) and using it too often will get
you in trouble with local authorities. The more densely settled a place,
the worse it gets the more you try to fight your way out of everything,
and this is enhanced by the fact the primary setting is mainly a
particular large city. Essentially, a player that outsmarts potential
adversaries by simply sneaking past them or hiding in plain sight in the
middle of an everyday crowd, etc., has a far lower risk of attracting
the attention of law enforcement and other local authority NPCs, a far
lower risk of getting into trouble and long-term consequences, and they
might even receive a reward every now and then for well done gameplay.
Similarly, as part of my recent effort to give the narrative and
roleplaying aspects added depth and impact on gameplay, including the
impact the character motivations (starting and evolving ones equally)
can have on overall character personal development, and on the course of
the storyline, I've wanted to incentivize players roleplaying their
characters' and their motivations and such, without feeling they're
forced into it, and instead feeling that if they pull it off well - even
exceptionally well - they might get a decent reward for it, or a small
advantage or small bonus they can use later in gameplay.
Of course, rewards like this (the card equivalent of 'drama dice') won't
be for every little thing. They'll only occur when players pull off
something remarkably well within the context of narrative-focused
roleplaying, within a given gameplay session. I feel this is an
important interconnectivity in the mechanics (though one of the
relatively simple and ordinary ones, within the bigger picture), because
players are naturally encouraged to roleplay and focus on story and
character, rather than obsessing over their gear or over when's the next
round of combat. (If anything, the encouraged rarity of combat makes
getting into combat more exciting and more tense as a result, anytime a
situation occurs when it becomes inescapable for a change.)
Copyright
(C) 2017 P. Molnár
(C) 2017 Knight-Errant Studios
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