Generational games encouraging PC retirement

mercredi 11 mars 2015

Linked to my other thread, I have been thinking about "generational games" where the rooster of PCs is changing from time to time, with "old hands" retiring and new characters joining the group.



The genre I was thinking about was Cyberpunk, but this could equally apply to fantasy (in particular, Dungeon Fantasy) games where the "adventuring party" goes through many different members, though the group itself continues to exist.



Part of the reason why I am interested in such a game is to limit power creep - over a long campaign, characters with even a moderate amount of character points each session can become very powerful indeed. By introducing new, inexperienced characters, the overall power level of the campaign can remain at lower levels.



Of course, this would mean that new characters start out with fewer CPs than the more experienced characters. Which will likely make player characters more attached to their existing, experienced characters. Sure, some of them will die during the game, but others - through luck, caution, or cowardice - will survive far longer, and thus surpass the other characters by far, which can be unbalancing to the game.



So, I am trying to figure out how to make retiring voluntarily a more attractive proposition. First of all, the mechanics of retirement: If you make a one-time payment of 100 times the monthly lifestyle cost for a particular Social Status (for example, 100x$600=$60,000 for Social Status 0), you can opt out of your "adventurer's life" and permanently retire at that lifestyle.



The trick is to make retirement an attractive goal for players, in addition to their characters. So far, I've had two ideas:



First of all, each retired player character permanently increases the default "starting point value" of all new player characters, depending on the Social Status they are retiring at. Social Status -2 adds 1 CP, Social Status -1 adds 2 CP, Social Status 0 adds 5 CP, and each higher Social Status adds a further 5 CP. This ensures that the power level of the campaign will still go up - but more slowly.



Furthermore, any character points the "replacement character" has less than the previous character goes into a pool of "one-time character points" (for example, if a 185 CP character retires and his substitute has 155 CP, then that's 30 CPs that go into the pool) that the next characters can use for "impulse buys", as specified in Power Ups 5: Impulse Buys. These can not be used for permanent character improvements, but anything that gives the character a one-time boost is fair game. This way, the hard-won CPs won't be entirely lost and will greatly improve the odds of survival of new characters. However, if a character dies before retirement, the points are lost.





Your thoughts?

Generational games encouraging PC retirement

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