What system has the best form of progression? Mechanically speaking, like from a sense of conveying 0 to hero.
The only system I know of that tries this is DnD, a lot of the other big ones your character seems to plateu and you're always kinda frail.

>>96051752 (OP)
GURPS. You can literally build characters worth zero net points. And then just keep giving them points from there. Characters worth a thousand points on net are entirely playable.

There's a reason why many systems don't try to encapsulate a large swing in scale / scope, though. For one thing, it gives a false sense of options to the players: if you see that the level scale goes up to fifty, you have already established the expectation that it is not only possible but reasonable to get there... in *this* story.

Which is just not true. This story might not involve titanic clashes between deities in personal combat with the farm boy. Or, the other way around, this story might just be way beyond trivial banalities like local farmers fending off goblin raids. Picking the scope and scale of the story is an unavoidable necessity, whether you are aware of that or not, and it doesn't necessarily have much to do with how "epic" the plot feels.

Lord Of The Rings does not involve any characters higher level than about 6 or 8 or so in D&D 3.5 and Sauron himself might possibly be a level 8 character (or less, because he's described as a necromancer but he doesn't actually restore the dead to life, and that's assuming you interpret the Ring Wraiths as actual wraiths). https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/587/roleplaying-games/dd-calibrating-your-expectations-2

>>96051752 (OP)
I guess that just depends on what you consider a "zero" and a "hero." Like the one anon said, you can technically pull it off in GURPS (or really any point buy universal system).

>>96051752 (OP)
Development is overrated in games. Skill Development is hard that't what makes it meaningful. It takes weeks and months to grow new skills.
Bilbo Baggins is the protagonist of the story that almost all Western fantasy descends from, and he didn't really gain any skills in his quest, and he didn't need to go Super Sayian and fight Smaug in a beam battle for us to remember "There and Back Again" 100 years later.

>>96051971
As a longtime GM, I *hate* character progression. I understand that players need it, but it's a huge mathematical inconvenience to worry about.

>>96052084
They don't that was my point.

>>96052094
Players 100% need it. XP is the player experience.

Characters of course don't.

>>96052084
Conversely, I kind of like character progression. It gives the players something to work towards and it's fun making the journey seem like a mountain climbed. Now if only games didn't fall apart before they got there.

>>96051752 (OP)
>Mechanically speaking, like from a sense of conveying 0 to hero.
Competently handled Class+Level, no matter the bitching from the point-buy cultists. The guarantee of a party niche and locking to pre-planned ratios confines the game to handle the improvement in a STABLE fashion.

>>96051821
>GURPS.
A complete void of rails maximizes skill floor, which GURPS offers little to no advice on the particulars of forcing either a long series of failed sessions from somebody fucking up their numbers or intensive studies of external sources to wrap your head around it.

>For one thing, it gives a false sense of options to the players: if you see that the level scale goes up to fifty, you have already established the expectation that it is not only possible but reasonable to get there... in *this* story.
Just make the tiers qualitatively different enough that it's trivial to explain, like putting them in separate books. Beat them upside the head with your pseudo-BECMI set one book at a time as needed until it sinks in.

>>96052084
...Even setting aside milestone leveling making the stepping up for scale happen entirely at your behest, XP-for-encounter still offers a long list of ways to fudge it in most cases without touching Rule Zero.

>>96052412
Ok but what system are you trying to reccomend

>>96052422
...Most of the TSR-era D&D editions, if you can find people willing to run them? There was a LOT of balancing factors WotC dropped in 3e and never really brought back to create "true" martial-caster disparity instead of the two retaining niches basically the whole way, for all Domain play is annoying.

>>96051752 (OP)
What do you mean by "best"?

>>96052412
>skill floor
Stay the fuck away from my table.

>>96052584
You're welcome to walk blindly into the vastness of possibilities, but it does not change that it is a game that the principles of design apply to. Reducing degrees of freedom reduces the cases where the playgroup fucks up handling the math, thus improving the rate of good game conditions. The balance-point between ground covered and odds of the rulebooks alone being adequate instruction lies far from GURPS, because its fundamental premise is maximizing the former to the willful expense of numerous metrics for ease of understanding that it makes no effort to compensate for by explaining.

>>96052628
>muh game balance in muh co-op game
>we must reduce freedom maximally to ensure balance

>>96052412
If you stopped trying to "win" at tabletop roleplaying games, all of your problems and complaints would vanish. Turns out, the problem is you. You are the problem.
For the record, class + level is not in some kind of mutually exclusive dichotomy with point-buy. You can have point-buy while also having classes. You can have point-buy while also having levels. You can have all three together. In GURPS, specifically, in fact, too.
So, again, it bears repeating, that you are the problem. You in combination with your opinionated ignorance that you're trying to present as facts. Everyone worth playing with immediately smells the shit on your breath.

>>96051752 (OP)
I doubt it’s the mechanically “best system ever”, but I like how Double Cross does it. It gives the players themselves XP, not their player characters, to spend or hoard between sessions. Which is important cause player characters are also ticking time bombs capable of overclocking themselves into becoming enemy npcs, and the chances of them exploding increases as they get stronger, so giving the XP to the players keeps them from having to start back at square one if their pc corks it and jump up to a more mechanically appropriate strength level asap.

>>96051752 (OP)
Midgard
It's a ton of book keeping but worth it. You basically earn exp by performing tasks and you can earn extra practice points, by performing well that let you skip training. It takes into account the costs and time of learning new things and that different skills are learned at different rates. By investing exp into skills (and spells) you also level up. When leveling up you gain more endurance and your active defence improves, but your hp stay the same. That way it elegantly solved the "meat points vs skill" debate ~50 years ago.

>>96052651
>muh game balance in muh co-op game
Yes, because it has to actually be run. There's a lot of fudge-factor to drag it away from the raw math, but this can only go so far before you're better off with a from-scratch shitbrew because of how many rules you have to override to get a manageable campaign.

>we must reduce freedom maximally to ensure balance
The other side being balanced with is "odds of the rulebooks alone being adequate instruction to a playgroup with basic literacy", as that is the "skill floor" of relevance to TTRPGs. Mechanical balance is merely one major tool for removing possible modes of failure.

>>96052812
>If you stopped trying to "win" at tabletop roleplaying games, all of your problems and complaints would vanish. Turns out, the problem is you. You are the problem.
I'm not saying I'm tryharding at "winning the game", I'm saying that it sucks ass to get a TPK because the GM was uninformed of how to weigh conditional defenses and so hit a crippling weak-point without understanding how bad it was.

>For the record, class + level is not in some kind of mutually exclusive dichotomy with point-buy.
It is a spectrum, because levels are a constraint necessitating the system not be pure point-buy that can be taken to the point where there is no mechanical ability outside levels and thus no point-buy at all. I myself like the idea of progression with point-buy then granting class levels based on the total to provide the crucial rails preventing blind-siding on "boring" baseline numbers without hobbling the option of fiddly utilities and for-flavor frills.

>In GURPS, specifically, in fact, too.
Unless you can cite me a sourcebook and page number explicitly laying out how to construct a level-based progression, it is not a feature of GURPS itself but a construction of specific playgroups. Without a clear explanation of how to do it, there is no standard and thus the constructions are at the mercy of the void of relevant game design instruction.

>>96051821
Sauron is a literal demi-god who taught magic to the elves. He does not fit into DND's little class based system any more than does Gandalf, also a literal demi-god.

>some stuff about wraiths
He doesn't raise the wraiths. They are cursed by the rings he made. He does fuck all concretely in the story because he's the almost never seen but always always felt dark presence menacing the heroes and the world. Him being the Necromancer is a tie in to The Hobbit to establish a connection to the earlier work not a plot point of TLOTR that defines his character and existence as a simple spellcaster.

>>96053058

Man, you like difficult words because it makes you feel superior huh

>>96054212
...No, I just have a bloated vocabulary from reading dictionaries for fun as a kid.

>>96052084
It's a huge mathematical inconvenience to say 'hey, you guys get 1xp per session' as a bare minimum.

>>96054212
Which ones were difficult for you? It and the?
>>96054258
Sure, Jan.

>>96052412
what are you even trying to say? That people are too retarded to understand a simple 3d6 probability bell curve, where you have 50% to roll 11 or less? You need a 101 class to understand that, buddy? I don't deny people ARE retarded, but the solution to this is make sure each of your players have 100+ IQ

>>96054930
>what are you even trying to say?
The sprawling combinatorial complexity of the naked point-buy in GURPS is too extensive to go unexplained.

>That people are too retarded to understand a simple 3d6 probability bell curve, where you have 50% to roll 11 or less?
No, I'm saying that people generally require either instruction or experience to understand how to budget from among hundreds of fully fungible elements to avoid giant unintended holes in competency that brick the character. Or get them mulched when they weren't supposed to be, on the other side of the screen.

It's just very difficult to manage expectations with degrees of freedom leading to vulnerability at relative progression being a constant balancing act. Again, instructions on how to avoid it are fine by me, but GURPS doesn't actually do that as far as I've learned by simple osmosis so the entire "select which abilities are available" layer of running it seems to be infested with fail-states without outside study.

>>96053058
>The other side being balanced with is "odds of the rulebooks alone being adequate instruction to a playgroup with basic literacy", as that is the "skill floor" of relevance to TTRPGs. Mechanical balance is merely one major tool for removing possible modes of failure.
I play alot rifts snd palladium, balance is the GM's job. Its the GM's jib to say no hobo with a shotgun and Galactic level ftl capable paladin in the same party with the dragons.

You as gm tell the players NO if it's broken or unwieldy for the game you're looking to run. Same with enemies you the gm should be placing reasonable challenges in front of them and do something to prevent to major a challenge. Them backing down or running away should be rewarded if it was smart.
Avoiding conflict should be as valuable as winning a fight. Players who go looking for a fight that is beyod them ahould die

>>96055231
Fuck I have so many typos. Sorry

>>96055231
>You as gm tell the players NO if it's broken or unwieldy for the game you're looking to run.
Which requires you understand that. Which GURPS, to my awareness, has fuck-all advice on, because the relevant mathematics to handle this in a remotely timely manner is rather advanced.

>>96054930
>That people are too retarded to understand a simple 3d6 probability bell curve, where you have 50% to roll 11 or less?
Apparently you are retarded.
Because it's a 50% chance to roll 10 or less.

>>96055284
There is the "How to be a gurps GM' line of books, one of which is literally titled "managing expectations". You are really hung up on maths when it's still just 3d6 roll under with +1/-1 circumstantial modifiers.
>>96055313
Wrong. It's 62.5% chance to roll at least 10.

>>96055694
>There is the "How to be a gurps GM' line of books
>separate supplemental product
Still shit product design.

>You are really hung up on maths when it's still just 3d6 roll under with +1/-1 circumstantial modifiers.
It's that all the stuff to spend the points on creates a massive and often chaotic possibility-space to wrangle.

>>96051821
>Lord Of The Rings does not involve any characters higher level than about 6 or 8 or so in D&D 3.5
Aragorn tracking the orcs destroys this argument.
>tracking over solid ground: 20
>3 days or more behind: +3
>tracking at night: +3
>18 uruks: -6
>MOVING AT TWICE YOUR SPEED: -20
Unless Aragorn was entirely specced for tracking, he would have to have at least a +18 in survival to track down and overtake the uruk band with the hobbits.
Even with feats, with no magic items, he would need to be at least level 10 to consistently track them without something like scent to give a bonus with the assurance that he did in both the books and the movie.

>>96055231
>balance is the GM's job. Its the GM's jib to say no hobo with a shotgun and Galactic level ftl capable paladin in the same party with the dragons.
And he has to understand the system well enough to veto it, and that hyperbole doesn't account for lower-powered but also unfun characters and systems like the one-trick pony whose skill is either always useful and who trivializes swathes of the game, or whose skill is niche and player twiddles their thumbs or bombs everything else.

Demanding system mastery from a new GM is an antipattern.

>>96055694
>Wrong. It's 62.5% chance to roll at least 10.
https://anydice.com/

>>96055284
If i look at your character sheet and you have 500 mdc and the rest of the players have 50 sdc, I know there will be an issue. How are you so lazy you dont take the time to read your players sheets

>>96056198
>Demanding system mastery from a new GM is an antipattern.
Not mastery but competence.

Give me an example of a power/class/ability that trivializes all possible encounters? In dnd,rifts, palladium, shadowrun, gurps, iron kingdoms, or some other reasonably common system

If you cant read the fucking sheet and see a power will imbalance the gsme or setting you dont understand the system well enough to run npc's
So go ahead give us an example

>>96057383
Speedware and companions in most systems. Whether that's speedware in Cyberpunk or Shadowrun, or a Toreador maxing out Celerity. The tempo advantage is often more powerful than GMs anticipate. Some initiative systems like SR2's initiative pass systems particularly get run over by optimization.

On the companion side, methods to get companions also tend to be more powerful than GMs anticipate. Leadership is considered broken in 3.PF, which might not be obvious to a new GM. Summons and Animal Companions give you tempo, ablative hp, and access to skills your character would otherwise be unable to obtain. There's a considerable amount of out-of-combat utility to being a rizz god.

Additionally, there's overinvestment into a gimmick like 3.5's ubercharger builds, which often do nothing if they can't get the charge off, and require builds which severely limit their noncombat utility.

>>96057347
It's not the single obviously too large numbers, it's the complicated interaction between abilities and overlooking too SMALL numbers. Each interaction and variable to track adds an opportunity to fuck up.

>>96057383
>Give me an example of a power/class/ability that trivializes all possible encounters?
NTA, but "always useful" and "trivializes swaths of the game" seem to be separate clauses. "Swaths of the game" is not "all possible encounters".

>>96057658
>Speedware
Banning a starting beta grade speed booster in shadowrun is nuts, its like cyber sam and gilitette 101, the point of a cyber character is to move fast or super strong. The games are based around at least facing punk gangers with it. Yeah they will get off 2 burst to every 1 of the non augmented, the shit is so common its expected.
>methods to get companions also tend to be more powerful than GMs anticipate.
Ad more npc's/Villians, attack pc's in a tight spot, have the companion unwilling to go into the cave, kill the companion....again these are basic mechanics the summoning and familiars. These arent game breaking or even min/maxing its expected and geared into the threats.

>there's overinvestment into a gimmick like 3.5's ubercharger builds
Place traps, locked doors, puzzels, ranged enemies, civilians in the way, fortifications....combat should rarely be in an open field/arena.
Penalize them for having no non-combat abilities whilst rewarding the skill monkeys is this is a table wide issue

Honestly you seem to want a level of fairness only seen in pregens vs. Modules style play.
Being a gm is hard, being retarded is harder

>>96058297
You need to much hand holding, like a reddit article per ability to tell you where it might trip you up. "If a player is geared for ranged combat, make sure you block running away and heavy cover often to force them to srop their main build idea cause...I dont know reasons"

Its the gm's job to forsee power interaction, counters and disparities.

>>96058369
>You need to much hand holding, like a reddit article per ability to tell you where it might trip you up.
Doesn't need to be that granular, the broad game design theory and general mathematical principles ought to suffice to get most on the right track. The point remains that crucial basics to running the game WELL are not in the set of books that are supposed to be the minimum to play.

>Its the gm's job to forsee power interaction, counters and disparities.
And when the first step is sorting HUNDREDS of them for player availability as is the case in GURPS, the fundamentals do in fact need explained to be sure they don't get lost in or buried by the fringes.

>>96058454
>The point remains that crucial basics to running the game WELL are not in the set of books that are supposed to be the minimum to play.
The how to gm well book would be 3x the rules and fluff book. Things take experience, trial and error.
You shouldnt be gm'ing before you play, the previous gm is going to impart on you basic skills and techniques.

For the sake of worst case scenario you live rural, you and 3 friends want to play , your all game virgens and you somehow dont have access to YouTube to watch someone else gm.... trial and error is all you got then. You cant expect to be running Kevin Siembieda level tables of 16+ players. "I'll make anything work and its gonna be epic" your first time out...if ever

Most gm's make rulings mid game "that power is too strong, we're gonna nerf it," or " well, it really should hit a group, not a single target, will change it."

It's like you expect all the perfect home rules and tweeks to be made for you. It's just not that simple.

>the fundamentals do, in fact need explained to be sure they don't get lost in or buried by the fringes.
They are, you just aren't willing to invest the time to read them during character creation or before game night.

Can you give an example of a game that did/does it right?

>>96058344
Games should be transparent because most GMs are more incompetent at analyzing what's good and how to break a system than casual EDH players. Game writers should spell this out, because getting blindsided by these types of abilities is a consistent pain point that GMs bitch about across games for decades at this point.

It's self-evidently not as obvious as you think.

>Place traps, locked doors, puzzels, ranged enemies, civilians in the way, fortifications....combat should rarely be in an open field/arena.
I'm saying that there's a certain level of system mastery required to warn players that "denying the charge isn't that hard" and that the tradeoffs may be less fun than they think.

>>96058729
Get good scrub.

Learn to say no, or ok if you can I can...

In rifts there is this one retarded rifle called the JA-12 that has a bonus to aim, huge capacity, under berral grenade launcher and does 1d6X10+10.
>average pulse rifles do 1d4x10 on a burts at best, often 6d6.
You fall for every player having 1 once, then a simple.."hey if all these level 1 players are running this amazing rifle it must be very common, many mooks will have these"
Most players dont want to get atomized by 2 shots tops. Or just ban it.
The game pre tells you what to expect from a power, yes in gurps's 1000 powers. The power describes its effect, exactly what it does. The gm reads it and quickly understands "power x, boosts ability Y"
Rpg's are for upper mid to high IQ people, GM'S either need incredible imagination or to be at least high IQ.
Tldr we would mock the shit out of a game company that made a side bar next to most powers warning GM'S about possible pitfalls

>>96056788
Try clicking the At Least tab dear retard. Don't worry, I won't make fun of you if you don't respond.

>>96056788
Your favorite flavor of crayon was red.

>>96055020
You're doing it wrong.

GURPS is a tookit you use to illustrate an idea you already have. Not the other way around.

There cannot be "instructions" for using GURPS for the same reason there are no instructions for how to be human. It's nonsense. Lots of people have opinions about what you should do and why, but they're just opinions about how to do the thing *they* want you to do.

There aren't any instructions for how to be an artist. There aren't any instructions for how to be a musician. I'm not talking about how instructions for playing a specific piece of music, I'm talking about being a *musician*.

There are no instructions on how to play with LEGOs. There are only instructions on how to assemble specific objects using LEGO bricks (ignoring for the moment that you can make the same thing many different ways using LEGOs)

LEGO bricks are pieces. They're tools. You use them, you assemble into something you want to make. You're the one who has to provide that idea, though. You're the one who has to know what you want to do with the LEGO bricks.

You have to know who your character is before you can begin illustrating them with the pieces GURPS provides. You're supposed to pick up an advantage and then modify it with limitations and enhancements so that it works the way you want, and then you put that assembled thing on your character sheet - not because you can afford it, but *because it's important for depicting your character*. You don't buy skills because they're useful, you buy them because your character has certain areas of expertise. Your character is not a character sheet. The character sheet is just a tool you use when interacting with mechanics.

>>96051821
Trying to measure non-D&D characters using class levels will always be bullshit because actual characters don't follow strict class progressions.
Another reason why GURPS is superior, because you can build actual characters, and not just packages of inseparable abilities.

>>96052412
>Competently handled Class+Level
I agree. I just haven't yet actually encountered a game with "competent" class+level. Or, it's more the case that my games never follow the assumptions that any class+level system requires for it to function as intended. It's much easier for me to take a point-buy system and slap on a class+level system, than to try to deconstruct a class+level system to work for my group.

>>96064071
Well, I do admit that there is one specific reason to use class + level as a framework.

It organizes the character's abilities and progression in a way that allows the GM to know roughly how powerful a character will be, while also preventing the player accidentally or intentionally crippling or overpowering their character. There's *this* much alloted to your skills, you have *this* much hp, you have *these* important abilities so you can be sure you can do your job at the very least.

People new to GURPS often don't know how to spend points so you end up with someone with a billion points spent in cooking and baking for a Call Of Cthulu story. Yeah, the GM can / should exercise oversight to prevent that, but GM is busy. They should not have to build the players' characters for them just to make sure they're not stupid. And likewise, there's abusive scenarios, too.

If the GURPS GM is reduced to having to provide a "schedule" or "rubric" for characters to be built accordingly (you can't spend more than *this* amount on your base attributes, your skills can't go higher than *this* rank, you can't buy *that* advantage or you can't buy an advantage worth more than *this*, and you can't have more than *this* value of disadvantages), then what you're actually doing is providing the players ... a class system. Those are what Templates are. There's a lot less of a need for levels in GURPS if you're using class templates, but you can see chunk out your character progression with mini-templates / lenses to add later in the story if you don't think your players can spend their points responsibly.

That's the real truth of GURPS: just because you can afford the points to buy something doesn't mean you should be able to buy it. And players absolutely cannot be trusted to understand that.

AD&D. It just werkz.

>>96069961
It ain't no Palladium Fantasy but its aight...

>>96064363
Oh! Oh! I feel similarly, but I've never actually done it. Do you have any examples? I'm very curious to see how you went about it.

>>96064363
I usually run GURPS, so I'll use that as an example.
Last game was 500-point TL10 post-apoc sci-fi campaign. I gave a brief overview of the setting and the campaign premise, then asked each of the players to describe to me each of their character concepts, so we could make characters together. Of course, players are welcome to make characters on their own, for which I give a list of stipulations and recommended templates or class kits. For example, something like:
>ST no higher than 100
>other attributes no higher than 20
>innate DR no higher than 50
>damage abilities no higher than 15d
>more powerful abilities may be permitted with usage limitations (Costs Fatigue, Limited Use, Preparation Required, Takes Recharge, etc.)
>exotic/supernatural abilities must take one of the Cybernetic, Mutagenic, or Psionic power modifiers
>LC1, LC0, and superscience equipment are forbidden from normal purchase
>here is the list of equipment that everyone should have: [insert equipment here]
>here is the list of skills that will be most relevant in the campaign: [insert skill list here]
>here is the list of skills that are recommended everyone take at minimum: [insert skill list here]
>here is the list of common roles/archetypes that the party is expected to fulfill and associated templates with minimum recommended traits and skill level to fulfill that role: [insert templates here].
>anything in violation of these limits may be permitted, but requires GM permission and an Unusual Background
>limits on traits and equipment may be raised or loosened depending on the progression of the campaign

>>96072887
Meant for
>>96070316