I want to talk about how characters change over the course of play in tabletop role playing games. How a game system manages growth can be crucial to a game's popularity and success. Players want to see their characters evolve along with the story. I theorize that this evolution falls within one of two growth categories. These are Narrative Growth and Mechanical Growth.
Narrative Growth is the flavor that sparks the imagination and colors the way a player envisions and describes their character's effect on the game world.
Mechanical Growth is the numeric crunch that adjusts the math that is used and the dice that are rolled.
Consider this example for a character with the power: Super Strength.
Super Strength Level One
- Narrative: Your character is strong enough to lift a mid-sized car or small SUV over their head.
- Mechanical: Your melee attacks inflict +2 damage.
Super Strength Level Two
- Narrative: Your character can lift a city bus over their head.
- Mechanical: Your melee attacks inflict +4 damage.
I struggle with the Five By Five game system and am constantly bringing it back to the drawing board so to speak, perhaps because it doesn't handle character evolution very well.
In Five By Five your narrative growth is in the definition of traits. When a player defines a trait, they are creating a handle that they can hang narrative on to. Mechanical growth is reflected in the trait's value. This value is what a player must roll in order to engage the related narrative handle successfully in the story.
It's an easy system and it's great for one-shots and short campaigns with very little character growth. Why? Because Five By Five doesn't handle character growth well.
Because traits are player defined, the game is versatile and can handle any sort of genre or setting. For the same reason, traits must be very basic and open to a great deal of narrative interpretation. This means that there is not a method for growing or evolving any given trait narratively because there is no way to know what a trait looks like or what it can do before a player defines it.
In my Super Strength example above, the narrative description of what super strength can do is defined and can grow because it was created with that kind of growth in mind. To facilitate this kind of narrative growth means looking at every possible power or ability and defining it in these terms. Since Five By Five doesn't do this, such narrative growth isn't possible.
This means that Five By Five's only method of narrative growth is in the defining of new traits. This is a weakness as players will tend to define the things that are most important to them initially and things added later will tend to be ignored.
Mechanically, Five By Five also struggles. It allows players to improve trait values. I love the idea that players can look at their character sheet and know instantly what they need to succeed. However in order to balance growth, that chance of success must start out very low in order to have some place to grow, meaning that new characters rarely succeed. At the same time, after several games, a character can improve their trait values so much that they almost never fail.
In my Super Strength example the power's growth provides a bonus to damage. This bonus works because it can be tempered by the concurrent growth of the character's challenge. An enemy might have more armor or hit points to counter-balance the increase in damage. This sort of Cold War escalation is a common practice in RPG design because it allows characters to grow without making the challenge too difficult or too easy.
I created Five By Five because I wanted something versatile and quick to table. Five By Five works for that. I have come to realize that if I also want a game that has longevity at the table, I need to design with both mechanical and narrative growth in mind.
I need mechanical growth that can be balanced by ever increasing challenges. This means embracing Cold War escalation style mechanics. To prevent this style of advancement from feeling "meaningless" it is also equally important to emphasize narrative growth.
I need narrative growth that expands on a player's options and sense of utility. This means that every character trait, power or ability must be predefined so that this growth can be addressed. The Super Strength example given above shows exactly the sort of thing that I need to do.
I also would like to stay as close as I can to the simplicity and accessibility of Five By Five. This is where things become the most challenging. That's okay. I enjoy a challenge.
