I've been thinking a bit about experience levels, particularly how I'm handling them in Ardeas, but that's a minor point. The conclusion I eventually came to about levels though is that, quite frankly, I don't like them.

I'm not saying I'm against having character growth. You need to have it. If you have some warrior who spends all day every day slicing monsters to pieces, it'd be unrealistic for him to never get any better at it. I'm just saying that experience levels are a bad way to do it. The most realistic way to do it, which I'd be willing to bet is fairly fun too is a use it to improve it system. Try this. Every time a character attempts to do something, roll a d20 against a target number from 2-18. Meet or beat the target number and you succeed, hit an 18 or higher and you increase your skill in whatever you just did. Next time you do that sort of thing, you get an extra die. You only need to succeed with one die, but you don't get another new one unless every single die comes up 18 or higher. Tada. That's a complete RPG system right there, have fun with it.

Things can't always be that simple of course. If you have rules that are more complex, or abilities that need to be acquired in some special way, you need some sort of experience system in your game. In my opinion though, your game is going to be better the more subdued this system is. Let me use a few examples to drive the point home. As usual, I won't name names to avoid causing offense.

The most pronounced experience system I can think of (not counting Power, but I'll get to that later) is in a certain extremely famous and popular and old game it's safe to say everyone is familiar with. Depending how old of an incarnation we're dealing with, you've got 10 or 20 total levels of experience to work with. At level 1, you're a worthless piece of garbage who can barely go toe to toe with a rat, and at the max level, you're practically a god. I don't so much mind that transition, but I have a huge problem with A- how few steps are involved, and B- what happens with those steps. I get a bunch of experience points from... whatever it is I do. Kill a few dozen goblins, tell a few amusing jokes, it doesn't really matter what I'm doing, it's just that after I do a certain number of things in general, I suddenly become harder to kill, my attacks become more accurate, and I most likely gain a number of groovy new powers out of the blue, depending on my class. I don't like classes either for the most part while I'm on the subject. In any case, there's no real correlation between what I'm doing and what's improving, too much happens all at once, and I don't really have much say in how I grow thanks to the rigid class system. Plus if a PC falls behind the bulk of the group in experience some, they're seriously hurt by it.

Next comes the bulk of the games out there. We tend to have pretty much this same system, but the scale of it is pulled way back. Take this other system that relies heavily on rolling d20s for instance. Every time I go up a level, I get a little more HP, and if I have any innate damage dealing powers, they most likely do a bit more damage. That's great. Also my odds of succeeding with all my skills go up. This bugs me because I've never used 80% of them. In my book, a good RPG should keep the number of skills or other such little abilities you constantly make rolls with (special attacks, spells, whatever) as low as you can, while making sure there's enough to have some nice variety. The more dramatic your levelling system is though, the more skills you have to throw in, or the more you have to nitpick about their growth. Ironically, the more skills I have in a game, the less likely I am to use or care about any of them. Let's say every time I go up a level, I get an extra 25% of success chance to distribute amongst all these skills I have like "identify poisonous mushrooms" and "photography" or other such silliness. I don't really care, because they're never going to come up. If I have just one point though, and I have to decide whether to throw it onto my only real combat skill, or my only real healing skill, this is a tough call, and I'll have a serious mental investment in my skills.

Then we have point based systems. I, generally speaking, prefer point based systems to level based systems, as should go without saying this far into this essay. You don't have a rigid class system to deal with, you don't have random stats (another thing I don't care for), you're ensured a certain degree of balance between all characters (which isn't a selling point for me honestly, but then I'm an anti-min-maxer), and you tend to have a lot of really interesting options for customization. All of this is great, all of this is stuff I think all games should strive for. However, we have the serious problem of how these games handle growth. You get the same points representing experience as you did to create your character with. So rather than increasing the abilities you have, you're most likely going to just spontaneously grow new ones out of the blue. Again, I don't like that sort of thing.

Finally, we've got the sort of system that by now everyone probably knows I'm in love with. The higher skill=roll more dice sort of system employed by a certain cyberpunk fantasy game, and I'm told by all those horror themed games I don't really like just due to their attitude and fan base. Here, character growth is incredibly slow. You DON'T start out as a rat smacker like you do in level based systems. You start out on par with how those people are when they start heading into the higher levels. You have serious serious edges over the common person in at least one area, but you're also more realistically vulnerable, and neither of these is going to change. Every session you get a handful of points. If you save up a lot of these, you can marginally increase a skill or stat (with diminishing returns not unlike my use it to improve it system up top). You do get better, but it's very subtle. Attacks become a little more accurate, you get better at grilling people for information, but you don't become godlike, and more important than how your skills are improving are the contacts you make, the tricks you pick up, the strategies you hone, and so forth. It's the PLAYER who improves with experience more than the character, and this is something I like to shoot for when I make a game.

So how does this affect my own games? Let's take a look. We've got Tyranny. It's diceless. You're a freaking demon. You start out extremely powerful. Stats don't really exist, if they did, the stats of any demon would be better than all of a human's stats, and older demons better than younger ones. Not due to increasing with time, but due to diluting bloodlines. You get some cool powers to start off, but they don't get better, ever. Character growth is pretty much a material thing, and this is intentional. Not getting experience points forces the players to strive for something else. Collect artifacts. Win over followers. Conquer cities. Sire a bunch of half-demon children and force them to do your bidding. That's the sort of character growth you get from Tyranny.

RPG the RPG isn't really relevant to this essay, so I'll skip it and move on to Power. Power on the surface seems to totally contradict everything I've said up to this point. The entire point of the game is to very rapidly and spontainiously gain all sorts of random nifty abilities just by killing things smaller than you and getting their experience points. The thing of it is though, Power isn't set up like a normal RPG. With a normal RPG, you have experience points to measure how your character is gradually becoming better at doing what he does as he strives towards some lofty quest (or his next meal, depending on the tone of things). Power meanwhile is a game about greed, and corruption, and how the more powerful you are, the more enemies you make. That and it's one of my heatsink projects. That is to say, Power exists so I have a place for certain concepts I want to keep out of my other games.

Finally, we have Ardeas, the system that started this whole mess. Technically speaking, it uses a level based system. You get however many experience points, you gain a level, you get bonuses depending on what class you're levelling in. The thing of it is though, you usually have a choice of several classes to level in, and the bonuses are very minor and linear. Take a Warrior level, you might get a marginal increase to your sword skill and your parry skill, that's it. You're really dealing with a system that's functionally closer to the many-dice games here. Every few sessions, a slight bonus to one thing, presumably a thing you've been using. The level based structure is just here to A- restrict players from having instant access to incredibly powerful skills, and B- simplify and streamline character growth so it's easier to manage. Before I started this essay I was thinking of completely revamping this notion, but now I'm more fond of it than ever.

One final note on this subject. I'd like to see a system where experience points come in different flavors. Something of a middle ground between generic experience points, and a use it to improve it system. Categorize all your skills in some way that makes sense to your game world (say, athletic, intellectual, social, and magical), and give out a different flavor of EXP for each. Experience you got from casting a spell can only improve your spells. Meanwhile, that bonus the GM gave you for bluffing the guard in such an amusing fashion can't help you swing a sword, but it can help you charm the pants off the princess. I'd do it myself if I didn't have such a full plate.