Time for me to open the ole mailbag and dig out a few questions to answer. It’s Ask Angry Mailbag time.

Incidentally, if you want to submit a question, send it to ask.angry@angry.games. Tell me what to call you and keep it brief. I answer questions, not f$&%ing essays.

Thomas asks…

What are your thoughts about systems in which the players earn experience points through failure or wherein characters’ skills get stronger as they use them? What are the downsides to those approaches? I only ever hear people praising them and I want a more balanced opinion.

Thanks for this great question Thomas. I love questions that begin with “what are your thoughts about…” I mean, any idiot answer can answer a clear, direct question or solve a complex problem, but it takes real skill and talent to just vomit forth unqualified opinions on random topics.

Also, I can’t help but notice that you don’t really seem to want my opinion on alternative advancement systems. You seem bothered by the fact that all the opinions you hear about them are positive. Seems like you want me to tell you why all those opinions are wrong and why the people holding them are idiots. Well, I guess that’s a kind of balance. Kind of like force-choking your pregnant wife, murdering a bunch of doe-eyed children with a magnetically-suspended-plasma sword, and trying to drown your teacher and partner in extra-planetary pahoehoe is a kind of balance.

Look, alternative advancement systems are great, okay? That’s why they get so much praise. Only D&D and other dinosaurs keep lumbering forward with this ‘win a thing, get XP, then level’ bulls$&%.

Nah. I’m kidding. Actually, alternative XP systems suck. There’s a reason why the big, popular games—the ones that have been successful for fifty f$&%ing years—keep using the ‘win a thing, get XP, then level’ approach. And also why nearly every major video game release these days includes some version of that approach. Hell, ‘win a thing, get XP, then level’ is so central an idea to the entire genre that it’s basically what the term ‘RPG elements’ means.

Nah. I’m f$&%ing with you again. And now you have no idea what to think, do you?

So, let me explain.

Actually, before I explain, let me define. Not because I like codifying s$&% or arguing semantics, but just to keep us all on the same page and to save me a lot of typing. From this point forward, when I call something a ‘traditional advancement system’, I mean a system in which the characters gain XP or skill points or perks or level-ups or whatever by winning at something. D&D is a traditional advancement system. When you win an encounter, you get XP. And when you get enough XP, you level up. Note, though, that winning encounters isn’t the only kind of winning I mean. Some games give you XP for completing objectives. Some give you XP for discovering new areas. Some even give you XP for finding treasure and returning it to civilization. Point is a traditional advancement system is one in which you earn XP by accomplishing things. And if you don’t accomplish things—in the immortal words of a certain psychopathic, child-murderer—you get nothing!

Meanwhile, when I call something an ‘alternative advancement system,’ I’m referring to a game in which you get XP or skill points or perks or level-ups or other such improvements for doing anything other than accomplishing accomplishments. For example, in The Elder Scrolls series of video games and in the Call of Cthulhu tabletop RPG, there’s a chance your skills will improve every time you use them. The only way to get better at picking locks or keeping cool when you see an eleven-dimensional dog-squid the color of insanity is by actually picking locks or keeping cool when you see an eleven-dimensional dog-squid the color of insanity. Burning Wheel does s$&% like that too. Alternatively, there’s various flavors of Apocalypse World ripoffs—I mean games inspired by AW—in which the only way to earn XP is to either fail at things or give in to various flavors of screwjob.

Terms defined. Now, let me explain.

The issue is that generally, you can’t discuss the merits and flaws of traditional and alternative advancement systems because you always end up fighting gamers’ biases toward the default or the different. And, honestly, I’m pretty sure that’s what’s at the heart of the actual design decisions too.

For example, I’m about 80% sure that most designers who put a traditional advancement system in their game do so mainly because, “you know, that’s how you do advancement.” They don’t think about why advancement’s done that way or whether there’s other, better ways to do it. They do it because everyone does it. That 20% uncertainty is because there are probably some designers out there who choose traditional advancement systems because, even though there are better systems out there, traditional advancement systems are what people expect. They’re easy. Intuitive. Familiar. And you can’t f$&%ing fault that. Because approachability is extremely important in game design. And the people who denigrate that argument are just f$&%ing hipsters who have a bias toward the different.

Meanwhile, I’m 90% sure that most of the designers who choose an alternative advancement system do so only because they don’t want to be like all those other games. They want to do something else. Something that appeals to a higher form of gamer, not to unwashed masses. Those design hipsters choose another system because they feel they have to do something different. And that 10% uncertainty is because there’s some designers out there who choose alternative systems like ‘advance by doing’ and ‘advance by failing’ because “it’s more realistic.” They’re offended by the abstract idea that killing goblins might make you a better locksmith. Or they’re laboring under the idiotic notion that you learn more by failing than succeeding. Most people learn nothing from their failures. That’s why people who fail at a lot of things tend to just keep failing.

But I digress. My point is that 90% of game designers who choose alternative advancement systems are just elitist hipsters who have to be different and the remaining 10% are chosen for realism. Which is a stupid-a$& reason to make a design decision.

Truth is that the whole traditional versus alternative advancement issue isn’t really an upside/downside kind of thing. I mean, it is a design decision. And one that should be made consciously. And there are factors to consider. But it’s not really a choice that can be usefully made with a pro-and-con list. It’s more like picking the right fit for your game.

Take D&D for example. What’s D&D really about? What are its themes? What are its core engagements? Now, I could write a whole f$&%ing article about what D&D is really about, but for the purpose of this discussion—and to keep my rambling under control—I’m just going to call out two things that are part of D&D’s themes and core engagements. First, D&D is about a party of adventurers taking on a particular quest and then facing a series of obstacles that stand between them and success. Even though the game’s expanded beyond its dungeon-crawly origins, it’s still basically just about the players navigating a series of disparate encounters on their way to some finish line or another. They might be navigating a physical space or a flowchart or they might be plodding along a linear gauntlet or they might just be sweeping through a series of events, carried by the mercilessly irresistible forward-flow of time. Doesn’t matter. What matters is that D&D is about overcoming a series of obstacles on your way to a goal.

Beyond that, D&D’s about fantasy archetypes. It’s about knights and wizards, clerics and rogues, warlocks and rangers and barbarians. And I’m not just saying that D&D because is class-based. There’s more to it than that. D&D characters are assembled from a collection of archetypes. Race, class, background, and eventually, class build. With just four words, you can describe a complete character and almost every D&D player will know what they’re about. The tweaks you can make to customize your character are minor. They’ll never push you beyond your archetypes.

Given just those two things, D&D’s traditional advancement system is actually just the right choice for D&D. Players gain XP by winning encounters and when their characters level up, they mostly do so along their archetype’s prescribed advancement paths. Like it or hate it, you can’t deny the system fits the game perfectly. And if you hate the advancement system in D&D, you probably also don’t like the things I said D&D is about. There’s a simple way to check. Are you typing a comment right now about how “D&D can be anything you want it to be” or how “D&D is so much more?” You don’t like D&D. Go play Monsterfarts or Wangst in the Dark or some other PbtA game.

Actually, wait, though. Because I want to talk about a specific PbtA game. Because, the thing is, there’s one PbtA game that does advancement really, really well. That is to say, it’s advancement system is perfect for it. Almost perfect. Nothing’s perfect.

That game is Dungeon World.

DW’s pretty similar to D&D. It’s a map-and-encounter-based game. That’s not surprising given that it’s inspired by older editions of D&D and given that its name literally promises nothing more than a world full of dungeons. It’s also archetype-based. More strongly archetype-based than D&D. Because every character has just one archetype. You only pick your class. Even your race is a sub-choice, something you pick based on your class. Your race is a refinement of your primary archetype. And DW has mostly traditional advancement. But it’s a little different from D&D’s. And I think that’s honestly because DW understands D&D better than D&D.

At the end of each play session of DW, you get 1 XP if, during that session, you overcame a substantial threat or defeated a significant foe. You also get 1 XP if, during that session, you made an important discovery about the world. And you get 1 XP if, during that session, you recovered a major or memorable treasure. Now, that’s basically traditional advancement right there. You get XP for accomplishing things. But DW has a broader definition of accomplishment. It puts defeating substantial foes equally with recovering valuable treasures and exploring the world. It also emphasizes the fact that the foes you beat, the treasures you find, and the discoveries you make are all things you do as part of a bigger adventure. You don’t get XP for every evil orc you kill or every coin you lift from their evil pockets. You get XP for defeating substantial foes, finding major treasures, and making significant discoveries.

Second, you also gain 1 XP if, during the night’s play session, you stayed within the behavioral bounds of your alignment. And that doesn’t mean that you just acted good in some abstract way. Every character chooses a specific ideal based on both their chosen alignment and their chosen class. So, your specific code of behavior is another refinement of your archetype.

Third, you also gain 1 XP if, during the night’s play session, you resolved or advanced a previously defined aspect of your relationship with another player’s character.

See, Dungeon World recognizes that it’s role-playing game. And, as such, it’s also about the choices the players make during play. Thus, if you play your character in a way that conforms with both their archetype and their moral code, you earn experience. And because it’s a team-based role-playing game, if you interact with your fellow players in keeping with your archetype and role, you also earn experience.

Let’s look at another game. Take Call of Cthulhu. CoC is set in the near-modern era. Most games take place in the 1890s or the 1920s. It’s an investigative horror game based on the writings of H. P. Lovecraft in which the players portray characters from various walks of life who’ve started to glimpse maddening, terrible truths about reality. They dig deeper and deeper into the eldritch mysteries of the universe and confront the forces of the inhuman mythos until inevitably, they are killed or driven mad. Like most modern and near-modern games, CoC eschews archetypes. Characters have professions, but they’re defined more by what they know than what they are. Professions are simply basic skillsets and characters are highly customizable. Beyond that, CoC is about learning the truth. As the characters pursue their investigations, they learn more and thus, become more powerful and more capable.

In Call of Cthulhu, players improve their characters’ skills by using them. Each time you roll a skill check during the game, you mark that skill as ‘used.’ At the end of an investigation or during a period of downtime, you roll a die to see if each ‘used’ skill improves. And this advancement system suits CoC very well. Because the game is about skills, not archetypes. And it’s about learning, not becoming more powerful. Moreover, CoC is a horror game. Most adventures don’t have a happy ending. Even when the characters succeed in their investigations, the endings are usually ambiguous. At best, the characters stave off madness and doom for a time while becoming aware of yet another horrible force of destruction lurking in the spaces between realities. There’s no winning. There’s just surviving. A traditional advancement system would actually work against the game’s themes. It doesn’t matter whether you succeed or fail in Call of Cthulhu; what matters is that you keep digging.

But there’s more to choosing an advancement system than just knowing what your game is about. You also have to know who’s playing your game. And by that I mean you have to design an advancement system for human beings. Because human beings will be playing your game. And you also have to understand that advancement systems have nothing to do with character growth or improvement. Believe it or not, a lot of RPG designers just don’t seem to grasp these two basic facts. And they f$&% up their advancement systems as a result.

Whatever excuses you provide for it in the game—be it about gaining power or getting smarter or training or learning or evolving into a higher form—character advancement is just there because human f$&%ing brains need to see tangible, permanent changes as a result of their efforts. They need a sense of progress and accomplishment. Tabletop RPGs are long-lasting affairs. They go on and on and on and the players have to come back week after week after long, tedious week. And while it’s nice for you to see your character overcome obstacles and complete quests, you know there’s always another obstacle around the corner and another quest to complete when this one’s done. Every victory’s short-lived. Except the last one. The campaign-ending one. But that one’s reward is “game over, let’s start a new game.”

Human brains have these reward pathways in them and they need regular dopamine squirts to keep feeling good about what they’re doing. The technical aspects aren’t important. What’s important is that, in any long-lasting activity, humans need a sense of progress and achievement or else they get tired of doing the thing they’re doing. And the warm fuzzy feeling that comes from hearing “you won the adventure, good for you” ain’t enough. It’s got diminishing returns. Hence, character advancement.

But it’s not enough that the characters just periodically get better as the game goes on. People need to feel like their rewards are earned. Otherwise, they don’t feel as good. And people need variety in their rewards. People respond best to variable rewards. Even somewhat random rewards. That’s why lots of people enjoy gambling. And why lots of people become addicted to gambling. And if you want to see a brilliant exploitation of the idiosyncrasies of the human brain’s reward systems, check out the achievements in any video game ever.

That s$&% is why I refer to XP as ‘rewards’ and usually refer to ‘earning’ XP rather than ‘gaining’ XP. Progress is a reward. It’s a payoff. That’s how 90% of human brains register it. And if you’re currently posting a comment about how you and your players don’t see XP this way and don’t even like using XP, welcome to the ‘other’ 10%. Sorry kids, you’re the exceptions, not the rules.

You know what else? 90% of human brains don’t like to fail. Failure doesn’t feel good. It isn’t fun. And that’s something that needs to be remembered by all the story-gamer GMs who think they’re qualified to write for the internet gaming advice-o-sphere just because they attended—and likely flunked—a summer improv class. You can repeat axioms like “fail forward” and “make failure fun” all you want. It doesn’t change basic human neurobiology. Sorry.

People like to succeed. And they like to be rewarded. Which, I guess is me saying that advance-by-failing systems suck. And they do. But man that abnormal 10%. They never f$&%ing shut up.

And now I have to come back to Dungeon World. Because I praised DW’s advancement system. But it includes an advance-by-failing system. So obviously, I must be wrong somewhere, right?

Wrong.

See, when DW came out, a lot of its fans just wouldn’t f$&%ing shut up about the brilliant and ‘oh so realistic’ advance-by-failing system. In addition to all of those other ways you earn XP in DW, you also earn 1 XP every time you fail an ability check. Learn by failing. But, in DW, that’s just a tacked-on little extra bonus bit. Sure, if you suck at your die rolls, you’ll get a lot of points that way. But the odds of rolling a six or less on three six-sided dice given you’ve usually got a positive modifier is pretty slim. It ain’t the primary way you earn your XP. It’s just gravy. Random gravy.

Dungeon World‘s advancement system doesn’t just fit the game well, it’s also well-designed for human beings. Because the XP gets doled out at the end of each session with a little play-by-play of the session’s significant moments, there’s a clear connection between the rewards and the actions that warranted them. Because most DW sessions are going to include at least a few things that are XP-worthy, there’s always going to be a baseline level of progress. So, it’ll always feel like the players are moving forward. But the actual amount of progress varies from session to session. Which adds some variability. And then, there’s also a random chance every time you take an action that you’ll get a little extra bonus advancement. And it nicely offsets the sting of failure. It’s a really well-done reward system.

It’s sort of like achievements in video games. There’s some reliable achievements everyone gets just for making progress. You know, “Finished Chapter One” or “Reached the Third Island of Mayhem.” Then there’s the more personal achievements you earn for doing specific things in the game. Achievements for specific choices like “Befriended Slaggoth the Unbathed” or “Sacrificed the Puppy to Kali.” And then there’s the weird ones that catch you by surprise. The ones you blunder into. The ones with punny names you earn after you kill Bast nine times and stop her from respawning or after you die 1001 times to the Arabian Knight. S$&% like that.

Honestly, I don’t have thoughts specifically about whether traditional advancement systems or alternative advancement systems work better. It just ain’t that simple. As long as the advancement system fits the game, it’s probably a good one. If it’s just chosen by default or just chosen to be different, it probably sucks. The best advancement systems mix and match elements of both. And they’re also built to make human brains happy. Traditional advancement systems are better for the way human brains are wired. That’s why they’re so common, so approachable, so intuitive, and so enduring. But that doesn’t mean they’re always great.

Look, I yell at people who dump D&D’s XP system in favor of bulls$&% milestone advancement or even worse “you get a level when I tell you and you’ll thank me for it.” But it’s D&D’s fault that people do that. D&D’s system is pretty dull. It rewards players for winning encounters, but the players have to win encounters or else they lose and die. So, D&D’s advancement system just amounts to a bunch of “Beat Level Seven” achievements. It just rewards players for not losing the encounters the GM said they had to win.

Point is that any achievement system—traditional or alternative—has to be judged on its own merits. You can’t just say “these kinds are good” and “those kinds are bad.” However you define these and those and whether you prefer the default or the different.

Arthur asks…

Most of your content is focused on D&D and fantasy and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah what’s your take on Word of Darkness and Vampire the Masquerade 5th Edition?

And the award for the greatest number of words ever taken to say something a normal person could say in five goes to… The Angry GM. But you’re the runner up, Arthur. I can tell you’re a WoD player based on how many words it took you to get to your question.

Sorry to say though that I’ve got no opinion here. I haven’t done anything with WoD since, like, 1998 when I was a player in a very short-lived Changeling: the Dreaming game. And I remember very little about it. And considering the very clear memories I have of other games I played for fewer sessions twenty years ago, that doesn’t speak well of the game, the setting, the system, and possibly the GM. Or Storyteller. Whatever pretentious, bulls$&% title WoD assigns to the game’s administrative magistrate these days.

I gotta be honest, the whole secret world, urban fantasy thing doesn’t do a lot for me. And romanticizing soulless, amoral, or vile creatures that represent all of the worst sins humans are capable of—like vampires and werewolves—just doesn’t win me over either. They’re just not my thing.

Joe asks…

I define a hidden mechanic as a game mechanic that the GM uses and whose results are described to the players, but which is never explained directly to the players. When should mechanics be hidden? Is my definition bad or dumb? Is there a better definition?

Who f$&%ing cares?

Sorry. That was harsh. Let me clarify.

First, I want you all to know that I did a bit of editing on Joe’s question to improve the readability a little. But I didn’t change the question. I didn’t even change the order in which he presented it. He gave me his definition, asked when hidden mechanics should be used, and then asked me to grade his definition. And the words ‘bad’ and ‘dumb’ were his words, not mine.

I know this is the internet, but I really can’t think of anything less interesting than arguing about the definitions of made-up terms when those definitions don’t do anything useful. So I’m not going to weigh in there. But I will explain why I think the term comes from the wrong place.

The fact that an RPG’s mechanics are hidden from the players isn’t something that needs to be called out because, honestly, that should be the default position. The question isn’t “what do you hide,” it’s “what do you let the players see?”

I don’t think I need to spell out again how RPGs work, but I will for completeness’ sake. Here it is: the GM describes the situation, the players describe their characters’ actions, the GM determines the outcomes and describes them. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

In theory, the players don’t need to see any of the rules. And most players don’t want to see the rules working anyway. Just like when you play a video game, you don’t want to watch the console step through the computer code and do all the math. You just want to pull the trigger and see something’s head asplode.

In practice, though, it ain’t possible to play an RPG without seeing some of the gears turning. The medium just has too many limitations to keep all that s$&% hidden. The players can’t actually see, hear, or feel the world. Everything they perceive—everything they know—is conveyed through verbal communication. Or simple visual aids. Characters know all sorts of things that players don’t and challenges are open-ended. So that knowledge can affect the outcome. And character skills are completely unreliable. When I’m playing a video game and I press the jump button, Mario jumps. He jumps the same distance along the same trajectory every time. If Mario misses a jump, it’s because I either f$&%ed up the timing or I aimed wrong. But when Marionan the Barbarian swings his mighty greataxe, it’s a crapshoot. It’s going to come down to a die roll. And I can’t affect that die roll. I can make choices that modify the roll, but if the attack misses, it’s the dice that missed. I didn’t miss. And, of course, characters in TTRPGs can do all sorts of impossible things. Things players have no intuitive understanding of. I understand gravity. I know how it works and how it feels and what it does. From a practical standpoint, anyway. I know how it affects me. But I will never have the same intuitive grasp of what’s possible by channeling mana from the Astral plane through my body and shaping it into spells. And then, of course, there’s just stuff that’s impossible to do at the game table with dice and paper and figures. Try as I might, I cannot run an actual, real-time combat between five heroes and five slavering, brutal, uncivilized orcs all acting simultaneously.

To make reasonable choices—choices that represent the choices the fictional characters would make in the fictional world—the players have to see some of the rules. They have to know how actions get resolved and how to assess their odds of success. Consider this: I never mastered parrying in Dark Souls. I just never got the timing down. So when I had to fight Gwyn, the Dark Lord of the Sith, I learned to do it without parrying. I knew my parrying skills weren’t up to snuff. I couldn’t count on them when I was fighting something that could kill me in three hits. D&D players need to know which skills they can rely on and which ones they can’t so they don’t try to do things that they should know are beyond their abilities.

D&D players also need to know how their abilities and skills work in mechanical terms. Again, they can’t see them in action and thus can’t use them strategically otherwise. I can see how Mega Man’s Bounce Ball travels. I can learn how to use it to hit the enemies I want to hit. Wizards at the D&D table need to know how to aim their fireball and lightning bolt spells just the same. And they need to know how much ammo they have.

We have to abstract the hell out of combat because there’s no other way to do it. We have to take turns. One action has to follow another. We can argue about what initiative system’s best and whether we need strict turn orders, but we can’t argue that everything should just play out in real-time.

And so on. And so on. And so on.

But every abstraction and every mechanical rule damages the illusion of reality that underlies role-playing games. Whenever we talk about spell slots or ability checks or hit points, we’re blurring out a little part of the world and saying, “okay, don’t look too closely at what’s actually happening there.” Whenever we handle something with the rules, we’re stepping out of the world. We’re thinking of the game as a game. And that ain’t great. The popular response to D&D 4E is a great example of what happens when there’s too many abstractions between the players and the imaginary world of the game.

It’s a delicate balancing act deciding how much of the game world’s computer code you should let the players see, but the correct answer is always, “as little as possible.” When it comes to the game’s rules, the players are on a strict need-to-know basis. You want the players playing the world, not the mechanics. So you never show the players any mechanic that doesn’t represent something the characters would know clearly and unambiguously if the situation were real. Characters know how badly injured they are and they know their own physical and mental capabilities. So players get to know their hit points and see their skill and ability scores. But players don’t get to see the math inside an NPC’s head that determines whether the NPC’s going to help them. They only get to see the NPC’s actual behavior. They don’t get to see how I’m scoring a chase. They just need to know how close the calamity dragon is to the flagging wizard who made Constitution his dump stat.

In short, don’t talk about hidden mechanics and argue about when it’s better to hide a mechanic. Instead, talk about when you absolutely have to show a player the rules because there’s no other choice. That’s what you have to decide.

Besides, it’s not like 90% of players want to read the damned rulebook. Why give anyone a book they don’t want to read?