RPGs: The Glass Ceiling and Expectations

[sulleniguana]

Something I've encountered repeatedly in both tabletop gaming and LARPs is the glass ceiling of power level. This is the sort of thing that shows up most promimently with spellcasting, I think because the power of spellcasting is measured in a very literal, quantifiable way (spell levels, or circles, or whathaveyou). It exists in other aspects of

Comments

[moosea1]

While playing RELIC (a local post-apocalyptic game with psionics, which essentially equates to magic) a few years back, the rulebook listed spells through level 5. Which was pretty hard to reach. I remember talking with a potential instructor, who casually mentioned something about a 6th level psionic. "Really?" I say. "Really." Apparently psionics went above fifth, and no PC knew how far. I liked that dynamic. You had no idea what the masters were capable of, nor where the ceiling was.

The flip side, of course, is logistics - what do those unknown spells DO. The players have to know how to handle them, even if the characters know nothing of the spell. To me, the real balance is how to leave mysteries in the world for the characters to discover while still enabling the player to know the rules.

[shieldhaven]

If RELIC had had a full lifespan, PCs almost certainly would have achieved whatever the actual limit was, and once that was known, you're back to the model described here, but only if you're an experienced player. A new player looking at the rulebook can't even set his expectations appropriately, and might justifiably be shocked to see PCs casually throwing around effects that aren't in the rulebook.

Without immediate access to the RELIC rules, I'm curious to know how many events it would have theoretically taken for a focused PC to go outside the bounds of the published rules.

[moosea1]

Oh, absolutely. No argument here. In fact, I was (in theory) in line to get a 6th level psionic in the next game or two as I was super focused. I think the best answer I've seen to this is Interaction where they have a list of published effects, and then you can make up new spells whenever you like that combine published effects to your heart's content. Since each spell ends with listing all the effects, even the verbals are effectively only for flavor.

[pleroma]

One thing that I noticed in KG is that there isn't quite a glass ceiling for the alchemy schools, whereas there seems to be one for sorcerers. Once the alchemists have reached mastery, they can learn all sorts of interesting things like ley-line walking and are given grand tasks by their masters, so the glass ceiling isn't quite there for the elemental schools.

[shieldhaven]

On the point of 9th level spells in D&D, I've found it interesting when GMs or settings have explained that limit as part of their cosmology. And of course D&D did publish rules for spells beyond 9th; in 2e, there were 10th level spells and higher in some publications, while in 3e there are epic spells (even if the epic spellcasting system makes me bleed from the eyes

[smiths_hammer]

Well, think of it as any other sort of teaching. Say you're a high school teacher. You went to college, got your Bachelor's of Education (or whatever it is), and have gone out and begun teaching. You have a senior student who wants to do the same thing. He or she graduates high school, goes to college, and 4 years later they're just as qualified to teach as you are

[kingfrog]

Don't know how you could fix this for any LARP that would be comprehensible enough for the average player - or certainly, I don't know how you could fix it well enough for someone like me, who may be a bit sub-average in keeping new rulesets in his head. :)

For a table-top, though...you would need to design things so that power and effects worked on a sliding scale. That way, the master keeps advancing right along with the students, though if the students work really really hard, they could catch or surpass the master - though it's no longer a given.

Hmmmmm. Will have to ponder that. In my head is a nebulous idea of how to achieve something just like this, but it involves thinking about things a very different way than d20 does. Maybe something more like the old Traveller rules - I'll have to break them out and see what can be done.