ADG Advancement Table tweaks
I ran A Dungeon Game for a group of 8 players last night. A couple had played 5e before and one was very experienced but the majority of them had never played an RPG at all. I love running games for those sorts of crowds, not least because it makes me very aware of the sort of terminology we use and assumptions we bring to the table that we expect are a shared parlance but actually aren't. (A good, small example, is that I explained that players had to roll "3d6 in order" to generate their 3 stats and found half the group rolling 1d6 for each stat, because they just assumed they were only using 3 dice total rather than 3 for each attribute).
Today I've been reorganising the text of the book to make it a bit more approachable for new players, because I've now had experience of watching them try - and struggle - to navigate it. And in doing so I've been looking at some of the assumptions I've made in the text and the way I present things and trying to figure out if they're actually good or if they're just things we've always done.
One thing that has just jumped out at me is the advancement table. I originally organised it so that Character Level is the first column, because of course I did. But now I'm questioning why that's the case? (This is where I wish that Cohost had better image support to help illustrate my point).
My original tables looked like this:
| Level | XP | Health Die | Recovery Die | Melee Damage | Safe Rituals/Day |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 0 | 1d6 | 1d3 | +0 | 2 |
| 2 | 2,500 | 2d6 | 1d3+1 | +0 | 3 |
| 3 | 5,000 | 2d6+1 | 1d3+1 | +0 | 4 |
| etc. |
The thing that's jumping out at me is that the leftmost column, in terms of information design, is basically our anchor here. We're referencing it and then looking laterally to find out the rest of the information we need. Things like Health Dice, Melee Damage, etc are all dictated by that first column.
The problem, in my eyes, is that XP is not dictated by level. In fact it's the opposite. Our level is dictated by how much XP we have. So it seems to me that XP should be the first column in this table:
| XP | Level | Health Die | Recovery Die | Melee Damage | Safe Rituals/Day |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | 1 | 1d6 | 1d3 | +0 | 2 |
| 2,500 | 2 | 2d6 | 1d3+1 | +0 | 3 |
| 5,000 | 3 | 2d6+1 | 1d3+1 | +0 | 4 |
| etc. |
Suddenly this makes sense. And if we're dealing with new players, we probably need to explain what this all means rather than just assuming they know what it means to advance a level. The original explanatory text beneath this table read as follows:
You gain Experience Points (XP) for overcoming challenges and gathering wealth.
For each silver penny you extract from the wilds, you gain 1 XP. Monsters give 100 XP per hit die, whether defeated, avoided, or captured. All XP earned is split evenly among the party.
When you advance a level, roll your new Health Dice. If the amount rolled is greater than your current maximum health, increase it to the new total. Otherwise, increase it by one. You do not add half your Brawn score to this new roll; this bonus is only granted at the first level.
If I'm a new player looking at this text and the first table, do I understand how I advance a level? Maybe I can intuit it, maybe it's not actually that complex to figure it out, but the text could be clearer and I think it's my responsibility as a writer to make sure the text is a unambiguous as possible. That paragraph now reads like this:
Your Adventurer Level, and the benefits it provides to you, are dictated by your XP. When you reach a new XP threshold and advance a level, roll your new Health Dice. If the amount rolled is greater than your current maximum health, increase it to the new total. Otherwise, increase it by one. You do not add half your Brawn score to this new roll; this bonus is only granted at the first level.
Maybe I'm missing something and/or overthinking things. Maybe there's a reason we normally list level first. Players generally know what level they are and can quickly cross reference things in play, and for experienced players this change probably doesn't make much difference. But XP changes much more frequently, and it feels to me like this way of organising things makes more sense.
Probably I'm overthinking it, but I'm going to leave this as it is and see how it goes in future games.