Stat Substitution Glitch

FigureFour,

What I'm curious about is what you did with that pile of advances.  Your Gunlugger, for instance, "pretty much ran out of advancement options".  Does that include the crew, the gang, and the hardhold?  If so, how did the other players react to the introduction of all these extra characters?  Or did the MC use NPCs you guys already knew and loved (or loved to hate) for the gang members and hold citizens? 

I never got a crew, but I did get a hardhold and a gang. They fit into our story pretty seemlessly, since we tried to tie the advancements into the fiction. The gang was what remained of an NPC hardholder's gang after she was killed in a massive raid (actually, I killed her, but that's another story). We jumped ahead a bit after that session, so it seemed to make sense that, as the toughest and most savage guy around, the remaining gang of savage toughs would follow me. At least as long as I could keep them scared and in line.

The hardhold came later, and I spent a few sessions taking action trying to assert control over the hardhold. Nothing really NEW was introduced, but my relationship to it changed.

Some NPCs were new, some were old, but the new ones weren't NEW people, they were just people who were previously unimportant.

Does that help?

I think I might have been in the faster end of the scale with my operator, Wilson. A short way into the first session I had both Easy to like and Ice cold, so I had three basic moves on Cool+2, and another two on Sharp+2, as normal. Since my character was so all about being cool and being sharp, and the others wanted to see him rock, I had both those stats highlighted, and so I got xp marks like crazy. I hit three advances in a rather short first session, maybe one and a half hour or something of active play. We had a 2+1 group.

Second session, the others felt, not surprisingly, that we had enough for now with highlighting Cool, so I got my Weird-1 highlighted instead. I still kept progressing fast, with three more advances in maybe three hours this time, but the dynamics felt slightly different.

In the first session I drove hard at what I wanted, rocked most of the time and was rewarded with xp for being good at what I did. And with success came new complications in the fiction. That was great fun.

In the second session, success was its own reward when I did what I was good at, but at the same time I was rewarded with xp for doing what I sucked at. I started opening my brain quite a lot (I was aiming at that ungiven future, dammit, I needed to become a gunlugger to bring down my enemies!), failed most of the time, and opened up for a lot of direct badness. This was also great fun!

The brilliant thing with this reward system, like with Keys in Solar System/The Shadow of Yesterday, which is similar, is that you decide what gets rewarded based on what you think would make the game the most fun at the moment. You can get xp for rocking hard, and you can get xp for failing equally hard. The important thing is that progression comes from doing stuff, from taking action. And that you can change the xp triggers when it would be more fun differently.  

My two cents on this. :)

FigureFour, thanks for the help, and I'm glad your game wnet well!

Simon, if you don't mind indulging me

--did you always feel that you had a logical place to put your advancements when they came?

--how long did you play the character, and did you feel "done" with him when you stopped?

I think I'm unused to the idea of characters having a planned obsolescence of 3 or 4 sessions.  My prior experience tends toward the superheroic game style, like D&D, and as I haven't had a lot of chances to run long games, I tend to enjoy best the rare chance to get in a character's head for 8 or more sessions.   

"Planned obsolescence of 3 or 4 sessions" is plain nonsense. Don't bring that crap to the game or you'll screw yourself up.

Some characters last 3 or 4 sessions. Other characters last dozens. All fall under a bell curve, naturally. Your characters will too.

-Vincent

Of course I don't mind! :)

Yes, I had things that were natural to take. Fact is, I wanted those advances, wanted them now, dammit! That's why I was hitting those keys... sorry, highlights, so hard. At a different point in play it would have been slower, and that would have been fun at that point. My group has been playing Solar System campaigns for years now, and it has always been up and down the way those xp flow, and never exactly synced between characters. Some sessions you get loads, others you get hardly any. And it has never been a problem. Partly because it tends to even out in the long run. But even when it hasn't, that hasn't affected Fun.

Thing is, these games are built for play to flow organically. There are no point pools for the GM to build threats with. They just throw in stuff that seems good and fun at the moment, and that builds on what's gone before. Same with advancement. There is no mechanic that keeps balance between player characters, because it's not needed for the game to rock. Every character grows and develops at its own pace. Check what Vincent said about how it's unproblematic for a new character to enter play a good ways into the campaign. We've often had new characters enter play in the middle, or the end, of a Solar System campaign, and they have naturally been made as starting characters, with no extra advances to put them on par with the old ones.

Like I mentioned above, since you keep adjusting the xp triggers throughout the game, there's no reason to fear the game is going to "break" because of some character's setup, or "build" if you like. 

With all due respect to "destructively" playtesting the hard mechanics of a game, I believe it has never been a good idea to play it destructively. Presumably you play to have fun. I mean, you can ruin any game if you want to, but I hope that's not what you or anyone else is aiming for. It might be especially important in this kind of game, where it's actually the "soft" rules that are the most important. Play to find out, and make the characters' lives not boring. Fuck with them, don't fuck them over all the time. Give them what they work for, but introduce complications.

Those things can't be hardwired. But luckily you've picked up a game where the hard mechanics actively support the soft rules making the game awesome.

Uhm, back to your questions! :)

We haven't played more than those two sessions, we live in different cities, but I surely don't plan to see that character obsolete in two more sessions, no sir, I don't! As I said before, I trust the pace to adjust organically, because it's we who play the game, and at the moment we want it to go on. Maybe at some point I'll want Wilson to retire, but that will be because I'll want him to, not because he's become to good or something like that.

On a tangent, I was a bit worried when Vincent said somewhere that the game will start rocking hard after about six sessions. I mean, I want it to rock now! Now, though, after two smoking first sessions, where so much change is going on, I got a whiff of how it's going to be even better when we have even more play behind us with Wilson and his world. Not going to be obsolete after three or four sessions, oh no! Or he will be, but I'll know that then, won't I?

I'll gladly keep talking if you're interested in more. Sorry for all the emphasis, I get excited about this stuff. :)

(Sorry for the crankiness, Orion. It came out crankier than I meant it, I'm just pressed for time.)

-Vincent

No problem, Vincent, you've already addressed the issue to my satisfaction, anyway.  I'm just asking for stories at this point because, hey, who doesn't like stories?