Diegetic Character Advancement

This post is an overview of different types and methods of diegetic character advancement.  First, a definition.

Diegetic Character Advancement: Advancement based on specific in-world actions, items, or events, rather than abstracted or based on the story as a whole.  Generic experience points would be an example of abstraction, while milestone leveling would be an example of story-based progress.  These options listed here are neither of those.

Why would you want this?  Diegetic character advancement as a concept has two major benefits to it.

1 – It rewards players for taking the actions that you want the game to be about.  If you make a game that’s about shoveling snow, and you reward players for shoveling snow, then players are going to want to shovel snow in game.  They’re not going to want to use a snowblower to get rid of the snow more efficiently or a flamethrower to get rid of the snow in a more ridiculous way, they’re going to want to shovel it.  (Sorry it was snowing as I wrote this.)

2 – It is extremely intuitive and understandable.  By giving players direct goals that interact with the world, players know what they need to do to advance, and they know how to do it.  It being so understandable reinforces player attachment to the fictional world and helps them treat it as a more real place that matters, instead of as a series of setpieces that they travel through without attachment.

As an overview, these types will be listed and given a brief description, but not fully detailed with everything about them, because I don’t have that much time.  In theory future posts might cover one or more types in more detail, but for now we’re just going over the basic things about them, pretty much just what they are and a simple list of pros and cons.

Types of Diegetic Character Advancement

Note:  There is no requirement that a game, or a campaign, use exactly one of these types of advancement.  It is fully possible to mix them, and this is particularly true if using specific advancement; certain game elements might use one type of advancement (say, skill feats being unlocked only through job paths), while other game elements use a different type of advancement (spells being unlocked only through discovery).  You can do pretty much whatever you want with any of these advancement types, it just adds more work the more of them you use.

For each type listed here an example game or source that uses them is listed.  These are not exhaustive at all and are just off the top of my head when putting this together.  Some of them are RPGs, some are video games, and at least one of them is something I wrote that hasn’t been really publicly released.

Gold for XP (Used In:  Older versions of D&D, OSR games)

Or, more generally, advancement through collection of in-game currency or other items.  Whether it’s actually 1 XP for 1 GP isn’t important so much as it being advancement through collection of valuables in-game.  This is distinct from some other categories because the currency or item collected can be used for in-game things as well as for gaining XP; after you get your XP from the gold collected, you can then spend the gold, you don’t need to consume it or any such thing.

Pros: Compatible with existing systems, doesn’t require tracking anything that you weren’t already tracking, intuitive, matches existing incentives.
Cons: “Collecting massive piles of gold” as a primary motivation doesn’t suit every character or campaign style.  Still uses XP as a generic advancement currency.  May require numeric conversion to provide a satisfying advancement rate, depending on game system being used with, if the game was designed with a different advancement mechanic in mind.

Discoveries (Used In: Skies of Arcadia, random reddit post I’m referencing without a link)

One such example of this would be that reddit post where a GM had scattered obelisks around their world, and when the PCs found one, they gained a level.  Another example of discoveries is in Skies of Arcadia, where locating specific landmarks in the world can be reported for a reward.  Discoveries here refers to specific terrain features or environmental effects, and locating or exploring them provides advancement.  (Whether it’s a whole level, a specific feature gained, or a generic partial progress are all viable variants of this method.)  An argument could be made that Discoveries is a subset of Achievements, below, (achievement to reach a specific place), but I separate the two generally in that Discoveries are always a specific location in the game world, while Achievements can be anything but usually require repetitive action.

Pros: Joy of discovery and wonder at finding new parts of the world, incentivizes exploration, provides opportunity for GM to focus on making their world cool and let the players experience it.
Cons: Requires careful GM placement to feel good about how often they’re found, without feeling like they’re guaranteed to appear in the players’ path or otherwise unearned.

Job Paths (Used In: Aces and Eights)

Job paths are when you select a path of advancement, and it provides you with the conditions to advance.  For example, a Fighter path might say “Practice your sword”, while a Dentist path might say “Treat a patient’s sore tooth”.  The biggest distinction between job paths and other types listed here is that job paths allow not only different characters to have different goals required to advance, but allow the same character to have different goals at different times, if the game lets you change between job paths.  (In Aces and Eights, you can change your job path each session, but you only progress towards the goals of your current job path; if the Dentist job path says to treat 50 patients, any patients treated while you’re a Fighter doesn’t count.)  It is also worth noting that these job paths are not classes, and do not affect your actual abilities, just the conditions under which you gain advancement.

Pros: Allows players to define their own advancement in ways that align with their goals, requires little to no GM prep after defining the paths themselves.
Cons: Bookkeeping is required to track goals, higher player investment required for them to select the correct path for them.

Achievements (Used In:  Every Video Game)

For example, kill 100 jerks, collect 14 eggs, slay a dragon, do this list of things.  An achievement can be a single task, a collection of tasks, or a counting repetition forming a collective task.  Achievements can have additional narrative weight added to them by including flavor to what is functionally the same requirement; there’s not a lot of difference in terms of challenge between ‘slay a dragon’ and ‘drink the blood of a freshly slain dragon’, but significant narrative weight to the latter.  (At least, not the way most people would run it.  If the requirement is that you personally deliver the killing blow to the dragon, that actually is different.)

Pros: Familiar to most modern players, strong gratification when completed, provides strong control over advancement to players.
Cons: Requires significant setup in creating achievements for advancement options, repetition can feel like a grind that’s difficult to complete, requires carefully watching events to see if they match any of the achievements (since you can unlock any achievement at any time, not just a subset).

Consumable Items (Used In: Godeaters of the Astral Sea, Sorcerers of Ur-Turuk)

In Sorcerers of Ur-Turuk (which is sort of a d6 system Ars Magica in the desert), there are a variety of magical skills.  The titular Sorcerers go on quests to retrieve items that can be consumed to provide progression towards those skills, with each item being worth progression on a specific skill (to use a D&D example, you might find one item that boosts Evocation or another that boosts Conjuration).  Godeaters of the Astral Sea does it a little more generically, with crystalline godsblood being consumed to raise what is effectively your level cap.  In either case, these are examples of a consumable item; characters must physically locate and consume an item in the game-world to progress.  This is distinct from Gold for XP because the item is not generic, but specific and rare; Gold for XP refers to any kind of currency or fungible item, while Consumable Items are non-fungible.  (They’re never tokens, though, these things actually have value.)

Pros: Provides another kind of exciting loot to find, lets players portion out progression between party in-character
Cons: May require loot distribution between players, potential for in-game shenanigans around progression

Equipment-Based Advancement (Used In: Terraria, other survival games)

With this type of advancement, you don’t necessarily have character abilities.  Your abilities are your equipment (or, at least the type of abilities that are controlled by this advancement type are like this).  If you change your equipment, you change your abilities.  If your character dies, that’s fine, they were just a carrier for the equipment; as long as the equipment survived and was retrieved, your new character can put it back on and have the exact same abilities immediately.

Pros: Highly customizable character options, very understandable progression, exciting loot options
Cons: Limited character investment, possible loot competition between players

Faction-Based Advancement (Used In:  Roguelites, MMOs)

Faction-based advancement is similar to equipment-based advancement in that it has skills and abilities provided by a source other than your character.  As you progress with a faction or factions (whatever ‘progress’ means in your context, but usually it’s filling up a bar somehow), you gain new abilities.  These abilities are maintained between your characters if your character should die or retire, because they’re granted by the faction. 

Pros: Ties characters to in-game groups of NPCs, investment is maintained between characters, provides social choices
Cons: Limited character investment, doesn’t always offer opportunity for players to set their own goals, may cause some players to feel pressured to join a group they don’t totally agree with for mechanical rewards

Expenditure (Used In: Godbound, some OSR games)

With Expenditure, advancement occurs through expending a currency.  This currency may be something specific for advancement, or it might be useful for something else.  For example, in Godbound, characters earn Dominion points, which they can spend to alter the world.  Godbound characters can’t gain levels until they have spent sufficient Dominion.  Some OSR games use a carousing rule, where instead of earning XP for finding gold, you earn XP for spending it.

Pros: Ties characters to find a reason in-world to spend, rewards players who use their resources
Cons: Not all players want to spend in these ways, still requires collecting the currency.

Practice-Based Advancement (Used In: Cyberpunk 2020)

With practice-based advancement, you improve at a skill or feat by using it.  If you want a new ability, you try to use it untrained until you practice it enough to unlock it.  For example, in Cyberpunk 2020, at the end of sessions each of your skills gains IP based on how you used it that session.  You can spend the IP to improve that skill – and only that skill, you can’t spend it on anything else.  This can be done more generally if desired, for example by splitting into categories like Combat, Social, and Magic, and rewarding progression that can be used anywhere in the category when a part of the category is used.

Pros: Possibly the most intuitive system there is, rewards players for doing the things that they did
Cons: Large amount of bookkeeping, advancement rates can be challenging to get right

 

A lot of these options (or perhaps diegetic character advancement in general) are best used in games that have an assumed baseline of character power after which additional power is good to have but not necessary for basic combat effectiveness, such as Godbound and E6.  The reason for this is because when advancement is tied to specific in-game events, the exact amount of time for those events can be estimated, but not guaranteed.  Abstract or story-based progress can be guaranteed to occur at specific times or specific rates; diegetic advancement being based on the actual events in-world can only be guaranteed to the same degree that the events of the game can be guaranteed.  If you are running a game that includes player agency and the events of the game in-world are not guaranteed, then this also introduces uncertainty into your progression.  Uncertain progression that results in some characters having strongly different levels of combat effectiveness from others can be frustrating for groups (though it is also specifically desired for other groups and games; this is a question about asynchronous advancement and the options and effects related to it, which is out of scope for this particular rambling.)  Even with fully synchronous advancement, uncertainty about progression can make gameplay more difficult or less interesting if there are troughs.  It can also make it more interesting.  Having the level of baseline effectiveness guaranteed, and advancement providing things that are useful but not needed, smooths this out and prevents it from causing issues.  You don’t need to have that, but it’s nice.

Specific Rewards vs Abstracted Rewards

Any of the listed types of diegetic character advancement can be split into two general categories; specific rewards or abstracted rewards.  Specific rewards is what most people will think of when they hear or talk about diegetic character advancement, and in my opinion, is the real way that we get a strong benefit out of it.  But some of the same benefits can still be gained from generic rewards so I’m mentioning it as an option.  In a sense, modern D&D-type experience points can be considered a type of diegetic character advancement, because they are rewarded purely from combat* and serve primarily to make you better at combat by gaining level; that would be an abstracted reward.  They aren’t really diegetic the way they’re usually used, because most campaigns do not do the worldbuilding support that’s needed to make experience points actually fit into the world; but if you did, then they could be a weak form.

*(Yes, I know a lot of people reward XP for noncombat tasks, and some DMGs depending on edition mention this as an option.  We all know it’s basically just for combat though and any noncombat rewards are an afterthought.)

The distinction between abstracted rewards and specific rewards is what you put down on your character sheet after doing the thing.  After you complete whatever in-world task it is that allows you to advance, what form does the advancement take?  If the advancement is a specific thing, then we’re talking about specific advancement; if the advancement is something generic that you then spend or otherwise convert into a specific thing, then it’s generic.  For example, if discovering the Lost Temple of Ra gets you an advancement roll, that’s generic advancement; if it unlocks the feat Sun-Kissed for you, then it’s specific advancement.  Generic advancement still offers benefits over non-diegetic character advancement with tying characters to the world, but specific advancement is wrought chains of adamant turning a character sheet into a chronicle of heroism.  The drawback, of course, is that it’s way more work to build a world that has these rewards directly built into it, and it also requires a system that can support it; if your system doesn’t have enough unique game elements for it to make advancement feel different and rewarding, then there’s not a lot of point in using specific advancement, you’ll run out of things to reward.  This kind of specific advancement is analogous to the experience of magic items in old-school D&D, particularly the case in a play culture that prioritized modules.  If you had the Sword of Rainbow Lashes, it meant that you got it by going through the Pit of Despair, because that’s where that sword was.  Modern MMORPGs also brought this style forward, with drop tables in dungeons.  If you want that item, you go to that dungeon, it’s not going to be anywhere else.  As mentioned above I feel that the real power of diegetic advancement comes in when you’re doing specific advancement, because it ties your progression directly to your actions.  Every element on your character sheet becomes a specific thing that happened; it’s not just “I gained a level and selected this feat”, it’s “I stabbed a dragon with a magic sword, was splashed by its blood, and my world was changed thereby”.  A spell you learned isn’t something you selected on level up; you got that spell from the spellbook of the evil wizard you hired a thief to steal, and you avoid casting it with witnesses around so they don’t notice.  Every element on your character sheet becomes not just something you picked while playing a game, but a mark of valor, and carries its own story with it.

I have no ending to this planned and am done with words.  Ok bye.