Yemala said,

I think it really depends on how character advancement is handled.

If you have lots of choices or lots to tinker with per level, slow advancement is great. Really, slow advancement is my preference regardless.

If the levels are just ‘+1 health +1 damage’ or similar, they need to come fairly quickly, or be omitted entirely.

I, however, am more and more in favour of level-less systems, both for pen and paper and otherwise. More in a ‘spend experience to upgrade whatever you want’ way than a ‘you spend 2 hours jumping up and down, jumping +1!’ way.

Darius said,

I’ve found that I tend to prefer a little bit slower leveling system with bigger gains on the levels. If a game grants skill points to be distributed at level up time I’ll often save them through two or three levels, so that I can get a bigger boost all at once.

I really enjoy the anticipation of achieving new powers with a new level, and when there’s a little more time between levels it feels like that’s heightened.

The one exception to this is when the game itself isn’t terribly engaging, then the only thing keeping me going is the excitement of the level up, and in that case they can’t come fast enough.

Spaceman Spiff said,

Slightly OT/related – One of the reasons Fallout 1 is one of my all-time favorites is because they capped the player’s level at 21. (it had a traditional slowing down/more XP needed for each level)

That meant that out of the wide inventory of perks in the game, at most your character could only get 7 of them. It also set a max on hitpoints and statpoints which could vary a bit based on initial character configuration/stats.

What this meant what that you could only make your character really strong in a couple areas before hitting the cap, unlike in many game where you can go off and grind to pad out your character’s various stats until you had a virtual super fighter/diplomat/thief/doctor/etc with more hitpoints than a tank.

For me, that made the choices of how to play the game (diplomat vs HtH fighter vs Thief vs sniper, etc) something I had to think through more carefully, and overall each playthrough with a different character/style was more rewarding.

Fallout 2 did away with the level cap, and it was possible to make your character a super badass at everything before heading to the later stages of the game.

LateWhiteRabbit said,

I’m personally a fan of the skill system method of character advancement, especially if we are talking pen and paper systems. I always felt the level based system in D&D and other games made the gameplay a little stilted. A mage went from nearly useless to a heavy hitter in one single jump (4th level to 5th – God bless that 3rd level Fireball spell you had to be level 5 to get). I feel it makes things a little too “obvious”. In a level based system you KNOW what is going to be easy to deal with and what is going to be hard. Before D&D introduced templates and levels to monsters, you would know immediately if you were adequately leveled to deal with a certain monster or not.

I like skill based systems because I feel they are more “realistic”. When I joined the Marines, I didn’t “level up” and get more resilient to being shot – or even get very much stronger. Instead, I got more skilled. Better able to plan, better able to shoot, better able to sabotage and outperform an enemy. In systems like Alternity or the Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines game you never really get more health or go against enemies that are massively more powerful than yourself. Instead, you get more options and skills to creatively deal with problems.

I’m not saying our gaming group didn’t get creative when facing encounters in AD&D, but the level system tended to always encourage certain strategies. Is your mage below 5th level? Use magic missles. Group of enemies at close range? Burning hands. Then run and hide behind the group to avoid being slaughtered. Over 5th level? Fireball.

In the skill based system of Alternity, I always found our group being much more creative. Everyone had time to adjust to the slow accumulation of skills and develop an interlocking strategy system with the group to avoid death. And since everyone was relatively equally bullet-absorbent, no one had to hang back out of the action for fear of being insta-killed. Or I should say, everyone had to deal with the fear of being insta-killed.

Alternity was an eye opener for me. Our group in D&D had a tendency to rush into combat and crack skulls together, because we didn’t really fear death (unless you were a pre-level 5 mage). Our second “adventure” in Alternity, our player famous for loving to rush in and beat up the bad guys was going to rough up a bookie for info – and he suddenly restrained himself when the bookie was revealed to have a pistol in their belt. I remember thinking, “Wow. That’s how a person would act in real life.” I doubt in D&D a crooked NPC having a dagger would stop a player from attacking them, but the skill based system in Alternity meant a small cheap weapon was still a threat – you know, like a WEAPON. I saw much more realistic and reasoned approaches and thought patterns in our Alternity adventures than in our D&D campaigns.

This relates to another failing I see in level based versus skill systems. The monster or enemy power creep factor. In a level based system you have to constantly keep pitting the players against more powerful opponents to keep things interesting. In a skill based system like Alternity, a bookie with a pistol can be equally as threatening to an experienced player character as he can be to a new character just created. The difference is the experienced character may be confident they can outdraw the bookie, or know enough martial arts to disarm him before he can fire. But if the player is wrong, a single bullet can kill them just as easily as in real life, so they tend to STRATEGIZE as if it were real life.

To me this opens up more story-telling potential and scenarios without having to constantly follow the ramp up of monsters to dragon and archlich or demigod levels. It allows regular humans and enemies to keep being a viable threat practically forever.

I found it a lot of fun to run one-off or short campaigns with a skill based system too, where players didn’t see a lot of progression, but were given a certain number of skill points to spend however they wished prior to the adventure. We might run an adventure where the party is a group of experienced federal agents hunting down a terrorist cell, or a group of space pirates making one final run to pull off a final heist to retire on. It encouraged more of what I like to consider “traditional” role-playing, in that they became a character with a certain skill set and used those skills to essentially solve puzzles or situations put together by the game master.

I noticed we didn’t have as much of the “power greed” as we had in level based systems like D&D either. In D&D (especially before they “fixed” the way experience was given out), players were hungry to acquire kills for themselves, treasure, and anything they could to become a powerhouse. It was almost like racking up a score or accumulating points to be the “best”. With the skill based systems there was more focus on doing what was best for the story or acting realistically in character. Especially in the one-off adventures, players were more focused on the story goal rather than personal advancement, even to the point of being willing to sacrifice themselves to save the day or the group.

Both systems have their uses, but I tend to find that a level based system has the adventure in service to advancing the characters, while a skill based system has the characters in service to advance the adventure.

Maklak said,

I agree with LateWhiteRabbit. I prefer point-buy systems to levels and classes as well, for similar reasons.
I find classes to be too artificial and restrictive. I’m fine with getting improvement points for levels, as it is an acceptable way of slowing down character progress, but I prefer getting IPs directly for quests.
I prefer not to get combat experience, but just quest experience. That way I don’t feel as compelled to kill and loot everything to powerlevel and make the fights easier.

If you want to have a feeling of “big reward every few hours” rather than slow tickle-down of improvement points, that’s fully doable in a point-buy systems too. Just have some cheap and some costly upgrades and give a lot of IPs for completing major quests.

Grampy_Bone said,

One thing I’d just like to point out is that the glacial leveling pace of Ad&d was actually a “bug.” Allow me to explain:

The first version of D&D was very much a dungeon-looting simulator. There were no rules for towns, shops, economies, etc; and any reason given for exploring the dungeons was basically fluff. You were there to try to get as much loot as you could without dying. The whole game revolved around dungeons. So there were these ruins full of gold but nothing to spend it on.

You want to encourage players to search for the treasure, but how to get them to risk their character’s life and limb? By awarding them XP for finding it. In the original D&D, you got 1 experience point per gold piece found. You weren’t supposed to level up from just bashing goblins but also hoarding shiny things. You’d kill stuff, survive the traps, escape with the loot, and level up based on how well you did. The leveling tables were based on kills + money found. That’s why an orc is only worth 35 XP and it takes 2000 XP to level.

As the game evolved and became more complex, it moved beyond simply being a dungeon simulator. Along the way to Ad&d and then to 2nd edition, the XP tables remained the same but the “XP for Treasure Found” mechanic became an optional rule. It was thought that DMs who wanted something other than a loot-focused game could make up the XP deficit with quest awards or other styles of progression. The problem was the 2nd Edition rules were extremely vague and just did a piss poor job of explaining how to figure out things like quest XP. Giving XP for a monster kill is easy, figuring out how much XP a successful bluff or negotiation is worth is a lot harder question.

The result was most DMs didn’t award loot XP or quest XP, or if they did it was grossly insufficient, and thus the super-duper slow-ass leveling of AD&D was born. This is why old-school AD&D based games tend to hand out massive piles of quest XP (Both Baldur’s Gate games for example). If you rely solely on monster kills for xp you end up with an incredibly slow rate of progression.

McTeddy said,

I was lucky. None of the GM’s I’ve played with cared about counting XP. Instead, it was “You guys just killed your first dragon, I think you’ve earn exactly the XP you need for your next level.”