No More XP for You

There's something that I wanted to try for a very long time; a thought that ran through my brain for months, maybe even years; an idea for a game that I'm still waiting to try. The idea itself is pretty simple: No mechanical advancement for the PCs.

Too much of the games that I ran saw the players focusing on the mechanics, and how are they gonna be better and cooler. This resulted with them making the characters incomplete, always saying that when they'll achieve this and this, they'll be better, fuller, richer...

I don't like it, this aspect of gaming, and if we'll look at Lord of the Rings, or James Bond, Hamlet or Casablanca, the characters don't get any better physically, or any better magically or the like. Even in comics they don't get better (except for Spider-man, but it always turns bad...), so why do we see it there? Isn't story and character advancement is enough? Must we go for the mechanics to feel the advancement? I'm not too sure.

So the idea is really simple, and the possibility of running a game like this might be even positive, might even be plausible to run a game like this. I don't know when, or how; I don't know if it will be fantasy or sci-fi; I don't even know if I'll enable advancement by getting better tools; there's too much to think about in a game like this, but the PCs... I think they and their story will be much fuller, richer, and overall all the way better.

A Game for GMs?

Yesterday I tried a new thing. Once in a while, my players ask me to improvise a game. They give me some elements (usually genre and tone), and I run a game around based on them. Yesterday, it was a post-apocalyptic high fantasy comedy game.

The game itself wasn't all that interesting, at least not to write about it anyway (although it did include an electrical tiger blowing up a 40 meter long dragon), but I tried a new mechanical trick. It was very simple: During character creation (which was done collaboratively by all players) each player chose 2 events that changed the life of the character.

Then, at certain points in the game, there was a role switch: The character had a kind of a flashback to the event; one of the other players (or me in one incident) played that character (in that event), without knowing how it is supposed to end; the original player GMing the flashback scene, with the goal of making it come close to what he originally envisioned, without railroading.

I think it went really nice, and added a lot of tone and comedy to the game, but as with any experiment there were a few things that weren't done well. The most important one was that the other players railroaded too much. The second thing was that the players didn't know when to end it, and sometimes it felt too long. Luckily I was there to stop it when I felt it was enough, but it felt like a forced conclusion.

I don't know yet if I'll ever do that again, but I'll make sure that I have fellow GMs as the other players. I think that their understanding will surely help to reach a fuller potential of this technique.

Has someone tried something similar to this? How did it go? Any tips will be welcome.