One of the most common negatives I hear about the SCRPG is that it lacks an advancement system and characters don't change over time. Even fans of the game get evasive or start making excuses when "experience" and "leveling" comes up in discussions. And I don't get it. Not at all. I hear people saying they want "real" advancement, but what does that actually mean?
You want your character to get stronger? Collections do that in spades.
Narratively, you can use a collection to introduce elements to the story as long as you can provide a justification and get GM approval, and they tell the GM to be generous. Got a meeting with a politician who's known to be hostile to supers? Spend a collection and it turns out those hostages you rescued from Doctor Vivisector back in the first session included his wife and ten-year old daughter. He's not only rethought his stance where you're concerned, he asks you to come to dinner sometime, little Susie would love to see you again and she's growing up so fast. And that's a mild example.
Mechanically, they let you pay off twist costs to do stuff like using Red actions in Yellow or getting two uses out of a mod. Or you can set a die you rolled to whatever you want, and you do it after seeing your results. That's incredibly powerful, like being able to buy a critical hit in other games. And those aren't the only uses, just the most immediately impactful in an action scene.
Collections represent increasing ability as you gain experience just as much as levelling up a D&D character does.
You want your character to change over time?
You can do that each time you gain a collection, and more often if the GM allows it. The changes you can make are far broader than any other system's advancement system, including ground-up rewrites if the GM says story events have justified it. Guy Gardner loses his ring and become a morphing alien bio-borg? And then changes back later? Perfectly legitimate in this game, and it sure puts gaining a feat or a level in a new class to shame.
What else do most advancement systems do beyond that?
They add complexity. Complexity that eventually causes the game system to collapse under its own weight. Very, very few people play D&D from first up into the teens levels, much less beyond it. The characters become unwieldy in a way that an SCRPG hero never will. Even skill-based systems see the character sheet slowly get more and more cluttered, although they generally avoid the extremes level-based games have. SCRPG hero sheets will always be immediately comprehensible. The closest you get to serious complexity are a few of the more exotic archetypes like Modular or Form-Changer or Divided, and the complexity there is mostly in character design, not gameplay.
Setting aside complexity overload, the other problem with more traditional advancement is that your effective power level does ramp up enormously over time. That is a Bad Thing, no matter how counterintuitive it may seem. It makes it hard to take an experienced PC and use them alongside new ones. Arch-mages don't tag along with their new first level friends when they run through Keep On the Borderlands. That's a real problem if you have some players who can't make it as often as others and the experience gap between them widens to the point where they can't work together any more. There's also character death at higher levels to consider. The usual fudge of just starting the replacement with an appropriate degree of advancement raises the question of why bother worrying about character death, and having resurrection tricks available to avoid needing a replacement PC doesn't really change that.
The SCRPG avoids that entirely. The player always has control over PC mortality, sure, but that's not the key here. GTG has already said published adventures will (eventually...sigh) be rated for how many collections a character can use in a session, much like level ranges on a TSR D&D module. There's nothing stopping a GM from doing the same with their homebrew adventures. Decide how tough a challenge an adventure is likely to be based on stakes and enemies and assign a limit, preferably one around the average of your PCs' collections.
You want to bring your hero with 20 collections to a low-limit adventure with a bunch of new heroes? That's fine. Most or all of your collections will be walled off for that adventure, and with that limited access your character is instantly suitable to play a starter adventure. You don't have to recalculate anything. It's genius, and it takes all concern about everyone playing for roughly equal amounts of time off the table.
It also plays into the whole GYRO design philosophy. An adventure with a low collection limit puts less pressure on the heroes than a higher-limit one, and veteran PCs won't be giving their all (using all their collections) in those circumstances. It even emulates the wildly varying degree of competence displayed by characters in actual comics when they're making guest appearances or appearing in team books instead of their own solo title.
The only thing that's really missing is a section in the book on setting appropriate collection limits for an adventure, and some tips on challenging very experienced PCs. Hopefully that's coming soon, but in the interim you're going to organically develop a feel for adjusting challenges as your PCs gain collections. Action scene design is always going to be an art more than a science in this game anyway.
I have literally had the same discussion a few times on forums and with friends who were uncertain about advancement. Collections are super powerful. Also the rules don't seem to mention a limit on how many you can use at once. I have had a player want to use three collections at once during a particularly hard fight. I allowed it to happen and man was it ever effective.
ReplyDeleteThere are just so many subtle things about SCRPG. Love it so much.
AFAIK there's no limit on using multiple collections at once, which can produce some really stunning moments for a hero who's husbanded their resources for just the right moment. Feels suitably super-heroic to me.
DeleteIt would be nice if future SCRPG products gave some recommendations on how to adjust scene balance to challenge experienced heroes. You generally can't increase the number of scenes per play session (or "page count per issue" if you prefer to be meta) so you may need to throw harder challenges and more powerful villains at heroes with a lot of collections. There isn't much in the way of advice on how to modify the scene elements you use to do so, which makes it very much a trial and error process at the moment. Fortunately, death is optional in the SCRPG and having the heroes lose fights now and then is a tradition in comics, albeit one you don't want to have happening too often in a game.