A Quick Blog About The Joys of Item-based Character Advancement

A friend of mine was telling me recently that a player in his Conan RPG wanted to switch to D&D or PF because he felt like Conan didn't "give [him] enough freedom for [his] character." This was confusing to me and my friend - from what I've been told by that friend, the most recent Conan RPG is very much one of the modern 4-stat, stats are dice that you can buy up to bigger dice kind of freeform games that's a little crunchier than The Electrum Archive and a little less crunchy than, yknow, 5e/PF. When pressed, he clarified that he meant that he didn't know how to make his character "good" because there was no clear path to make his character do more damage in combat. When he was told that this was giving him less freedom to express his character as he wanted, he didn't seem to understand.

I don't fault this guy for this opinion. I've stated before that I started playing TTRPGs on D&D 3.5 and was DEEP in the CharOp build buildcrafting mines, like I understand wanting to do that - but the fact that someone viewed that as MORE freedom rather than less surprised me. More likely than not, this is just a good old fashioned neurodivergent quibbling about word meanings - his "freedom" might be what I think of as "parameters," and that's fine. My years of hanging out with the chiptune community have reinforced the idea that constraints breed creativity. But then I got to thinking about games that just don't do character progression that way - no levels, no classes, no skills, just the stuff you find and the way the world reacts to what you do in it. Cairn does this, of course - as do most descendents of Into The Odd. When I brought this up to my friend, who's a longtime AD&D fan but didn't really do much with OD&D, he was curious as to how that would even work in a longterm game: in his mind, if everyone had access to the same pool of items then there's no way to make the characters feel meaningfully different from one another; and while diegetic rewards like land or titles or retainers or an airship might be cool, if not everyone is bought in on the world of the game then there's not a lot for them to engage with. 

My first response was "I hear you, and I want to talk about this but actually Gamefacecon is this weekend so I'm just gonna go take you to meet Yochai and Amanda P and the other non-Cairn OSR folks and I'll just ask them to explain it better than I ever could," because boy howdy do I love taking people directly to the source to get their information. And to be fair, I did also explain a little - about how the kind of items you bring with your can inform your play style and how you interact with the world, and what you prioritize keeping with you determines what kind of character you're really playing without those pesky labels. 

But I did earnestly engage with this - because I feel like there has to be some kind of happy medium between the "hee hee, make number go up" crowd and the "I have fun by chucking weird little freaks into the meatgrinder" crowd, and I think the happy medium is The Wildsea! Whereas Into The Odd et. al. have your single Background/Failed Profession/Whatever, The Wildsea has you build someone out of multiple archetypes. Likewise, where the Oddlikes have you with a limited inventory and a small pool of health which when combined dictate how effective and survivable your character is, The Wildsea literally combines all of this with all of your defining character traits (which includes iconic items) having HP boxes associated with them, and when you take damage you tick boxes on your items and traits - which means that taking damage may mean you lose access to vital abilities until you heal rather than the "only the last hit point matters" mindset in most games. You don't have to worry if everyone is bought in on the game world or not because YOU DON'T HAVE A CHOICE, YOU'VE GOTTA CHIP IN AND BUILD THAT BOAT, and otherwise anything that shows up that might be a reward or quest for your characters is going to be very directly shaped by active choices the players are making. It remains just tactical enough that CharOp gremlins can have fun getting their greebly little hands all over everything while not making any one build more or less "viable" than another, meaning that you cannot make "bad" choices (a thing I find plagues all games descended from D&D).

Anyway, this is just a bit of a ramble to pass the time until we can skedaddle up to Baltimore for Gamefacecon, but if there's anything to take away from this it's that you should always do root cause analysis on your players' opinions (and your own, for that matter) because you can't trust that everyone is self-aware enough to be able to accurately articulate their own preferences.