Errant Design Deep Dive #4: Renown & Experience

For the duration of Errant's Kickstarter I will be doing a series of posts where I go through Errant, more or less in order, diving into the design of the game and its inspirations. To follow along, I suggest reading the relevant section being discussed at errantrpg.carrd.co. Also, we have a Discord server now.

Diving right in today, we'll be talking about Renown & Experience.

Renown & Experience

I think I just renamed levels to renown because I had renamed classes to Archetypes (because I wanted to emphasize that they weren't narrow expressions of function-as-profession like conventional naming schema that Fighter or Wizard or Cleric imply, but rather broader expressions of purpose; The Violent can be a barbarian or a paladin or any other dude whose primary expression is, well, violence) and races to Ancestries (I am not going to go into all the reasons why "race" is a fucking bullshit word to describe fucking dwarves and elves and shit), and so being a pretentious designer git I decided to rename levels to Renown. Once I did that I was like "oh shit this should actually measure Renown" and so I added the roll under to test Renown. It was originally a 2d6 roll back when the max Renown was 10, but I dropped it down to a d10 when the level cap was reduced to 9.

As for why the level cap went down to 9: I had the standard "XP thresholds double per level" to begin with, but really didn't like the fact that that meant the level 1-2 and level 2-3 had the same amount of XP needed to advance. I fiddled around until I eventually landed on some numbers that I liked, with the amount needed to advance to the next level being 2000 + 2*the last renown threshold. Under that formula Renown 10 would have been 1,022,000 XP which is an ugly number I didn't want in my game. It was a happy coincidence that I ended up discovering all of the Archetype abilities had smoother scaling across 9 levels then they did across 10.

But the big design question here is why: XP for Waste? XP for Gold is old faithful, but when I came into the scene a lot of people (I have forgotten specifics; I feel like Gus may have been one of them?) were doing XP for Gold Spent systems, as a way of investing further in the world. This is what I adopted initially, but two things usually ended up happening:

1) characters would buy all the best mundane gear they needed and then be set for life, pretty much. This had a sort of doubling effect on character power growth as they both got the boost from levelling up and from making their gear better.

2) After that they would pretty much just literally throw their gold away on carousing in order to get the XP they needed.

So the system was already halfway towards XP for Waste already. I just pushed it a bit farther, and in a little of a souls-like direction, with a tension between spending a resource as a currency or spending it as experience. 

Adding in the caveat that items breaking or investments becoming unusable through threat was kind of an attempt to integrate "fail forward" ethos into Errant.  It gave some more mechanical weight to the Quality mechanics around item degradation. It gives another incentive to make large cash investments in things like businesses and domains because they can eventually turn into a passive means of XP whenever they become threatened, and is a better way to scale XP into the late game as eventually the XP requirements become high enough that you can't very efficiently reach them via carousing (the way the XP rules interact with Downtime systems is one of my favourite parts of Errant and the thing I am most proud of as a designer, but we've got a few deep dives to go before we get there [and I have to add the downtime procedures up onto the carrd still]).

As I put it in one of my very early drafts of Errant

The rule by which PCs gain XP for their investments coming under threat is there so as to not discourage players totally from investing in the game world, and also naturally creates an escalating cycle of stakes by which the things the PCs own come under threat, so they must ensure their safety, thereby in the process earning more things which can later come under threat. At higher levels, PCs will find that having their ships or castles be destroyed or come under attack is the fastest way to gain XP, since wasting the amount of wealth required to increase in Renown becomes near impossible through traditional forms of debauchery. You can only throw so many lavish parties before people stop showing up.

I also like the XP for Waste rules as a kind of accidental form of genre emulation; combined with the mechanics for carousing (the primary mechanical form of wasting provided to players), debt (what players are likely to get into when they carouse), and lifestyle expenses (when downtime turns end, halve any remaining money) it creates a play experience where players will get a large score from an adventure, and then immediately blow all of the cash, starting out the next adventure with nothing or significantly in debt, having to scrape by in order to scrounge up the resources needed for the next adventure. It manages to maintain a tension to the resource management aspect of the game that often disappears once your player character's accumulate enough wealth, while also providing a real impetus as to why characters need to keep adventuring.

Its a common formula to the best of adventure fiction, your Cowboy Bebops and your Fafhrd's and Gray Mouser's, stories of fiscally irresponsible, perpetually down on their luck adventurers that, if they're lucky, might fail upwards into positions of power.

Quoting from that same early draft:

XP for wasting gold is meant to replicate picaresque swords & sorcery stories where our he roes often seem to be in a state of constant destitution. Which is not to say that in these stories the characters never earn money, but that we don’t focus on them when we do. Deprivation drives desire, and desire is at the heart of conflict, tension, and drama: all the things we want from a good story. We don’t read stories about Conan when he is a king during peace time, but we would read a story about Conan deposed from his throne and his quest to recover it.