Designing Change
Advancement
Advancement has always been a strange concept for me in TTRPG design. Today I want to explore it in-depth and present an alternative way of thinking about advancement that, I think, suits the medium better. But before that, a little about my experience with it and my own beliefs around it.
When I speak about advancement, I am thinking about the classic holdovers from video games: experience points, levels, talent trees, new abilities, all representing a character becoming more capable. There are also external sources of advancement we think about less, like gear, items, and the money to afford such things.
These made sense to me in video games because the only meaningful growth I would see in my character was measured in numbers and combat effectiveness. Stories were structured and pre-written, so that could be entirely seperate from the mechanics of the game. When I got into D&D, this focus on combat seemed to remain true, even though we were now creating our own stories. There have always been ways to award experience for other activities, but killing monsters was the most effective and consistent.
Since most of the changes to my character over time involved their combat effectiveness directly, I never understood experience being given out for other things, like exploration or roleplay. If experience gained me levels, and levels mostly made me better at combat, experience for non-combat stuff seemed to be addressing the wrong problem. I want those other parts of the game to matter, but just handing out experience for them was meaningless because it never really changed that part of the game. I wasn’t frustrated with how we gained experience, but what experience did, and especially with what it failed to do.
I began to play more diverse games with different goals. Power fantasies never hooked me, so playing games where the goal was to tell a great story was refreshing. But for some reason, I found myself itching for games with more mechanical grit to them. I started a Pathfinder 2E campaign and was entranced by the rich options for character creation and advancement available. It felt like opening a huge bin of Lego pieces.
Yet the problem came back, where most of our choices pertained to combat and how god-like our characters could become. Where was the middle-ground? What was I looking for? What did each game have that the other didn’t?
This all has me circling around the idea of character growth and change. Advancement is one type of change, but not the only one. I wasn’t drawn to games with heavy advancement options because I needed to see my character add bigger numbers to their d20 rolls; it was because they extended the fun of character creation into the rest of the campaign in a meaningful way, and allowed me to watch my character change along with the story.
And while many games encourage such change, to me the secret is having change reflected in mechanics.
Immersive mechanics
Immersion is, to me, a mental zone you get into, like a flow state or meditation but with others. It comes from a lot of places, like where you play, using voices, and picking great music. Sometimes it’s more magical, where everyone clicks and the moment is just right. But it is ultimately a state of attention, where everyone is drawn into the story, the scene, the emotion, or the setting, and finds it hard to look away. I think that, concious or not, it’s a big reason why many of us play TTRPGs, and creating immersive games is the main goal of many designers.
Immersion is often put at odds with complex mechanics, and it’s not hard to see why. Having things slow to a halt to look something up, or the feeling of interpreting something one way and having someone disagree, all distract you from what’s happening in the fiction. When at their worst, mechanics compete for the attention that immersion requires.
One answer to this problem is the light-mechanics design school. The idea is simple and effective: if worrying about mechanics takes people out of immersive states, then having less mechanics that are simple and easy to remember eliminates that problem.
But there’s another way of looking at it. Let’s imagine a game where the mechanics are taking up 30–40% of the attention at the table. What if those mechanics, instead of competing, helped create immersion? What if they focused on the most important parts of our story and the themes of the game?
This is not a new concept. Many game designers have realized this and gracefully created systems where each mechanic leads you back to what’s most important in the story. It was a huge part of the design of Apocalypse World. (The lumply games blog has some great insight into this.) And they pull it off because they know that mechanics are a tool, just like a cool setting or music or putting on voices, that can aid immersion.
As a mechanic, advancement is unique. A huge part of immersion is reactivity: how your character reflects what they’ve done, where they’ve been, and who they’ve become. In many games, experience points and levels are the most impactful vehicle for those changes. It is in many ways how you extend the fun of character creation. When you choose what form advancement takes, you are telling the players what parts of their characters are going to change the most and what changes are important. If that involves killing monsters more easily, your story will naturally center around becoming powerful monster-slayers.
When you zoom out and see typical advancement systems as merely an expresion of character growth in mechanical form, you can find other mechanics that do similar things. Advancement, to me, is part of a larger set of mechanics that reflect change.
How we express change
Before you design a system for advancement, it is important to ask: what character changes do I want my game to focus on? And when you know the answer, you have to look at advancement alongside other mechanics that reflect change. Some mechanics reflect small-scale change that happens during a session or a scene, while others will be more long-term. Seeing how they all interact should paint a clear picture of what your game is about.
In D&D 5e, when you gain enough experience points, your combat power and chance of succeeding on certain skill checks improves. So no matter the story, most campaigns involve becoming powerful combatants and explorers, able to go to more dangerous places and fight more dangerous foes, until you fight the most dangerous foe at the most dangerous place that you weren’t strong enough to go to right away.
But what other mechanics for change are there? Your character often becomes wealthier over time. They collect magical artifacts and tools. They get cooler weapons. They gain reputations. How much some of these matter is up to the game master. The more focus they have, the more they flavour the story.
What isn’t tracked as finely? Relationships to NPCs. Injuries and wounds. Character age and the passing of time. While all of these could be a part of the story, they don’t receive the same attention in the rules as your hit points or damage modifier. While anyone can draw attention to them, the mechanics will always draw you away from those parts of the game.
In Blades in the Dark, experience points are based on how you engage with the themes of your character and the game. While this kind of “bait” system has advantages, to me it always feels a bit forced. However, it’s clear that this game is about bringing your character to life and diving into roleplay. Since experience improves your stats and gives you more abilities, the game is inherently about becoming more diverse and capable than the other riff-raff in the city. Your crew sheet expresses this even more: your goal is to become a big deal and be able to compete with stronger forces over time.
Stress as a mechanic reflects character change over the course of a job. You’re encouraged to push yourself and help allies, but it costs you stress, and as you run out you’re more likely to worry about yourself first and take devil’s bargains. So the game becomes about knowing when to push yourself and knowing when you need to take less risks, and the feeling of things getting desperate. With trauma, the mechanics focus on how your character suffers and copes with the things they’ve been through, and offers more experience for bringing this to life. With injuries replacing hit points, it becomes less about managing resources smartly and more about the narrative and mechanical effects of specific, named wounds. This sets a very different tone.
Apocalypse World tracks Hx, or history, with other players. While the relationships between characters are usually a part of a TTRPG experience, having mechanics tied to them makes them a focus. Growing closer and further apart isn’t abitrary; it matters, and it’s reflected when you roll the dice. The game doesn’t have a bestiary or a huge list of cool treasure sorted by power level, because that’s not what the game is about. You can try adding monsters and treasures, but the game will nudge you back around to interpersonal problems, tense conflicts, and character drama.
In my game This City Must Burn, characters have privileges that depend on their ability to lay low. The more you sacrifice, the more privileges you lose, and this is the main mechanical way in which your character will change. There is no character advancement in the sense of experience points or level-ups. It’s not about becoming someone more powerful or capable. It’s about you, with your current skillset, living through a tumultuous event and deciding how much you’re willing to sacrifice for the revolution.
Advancement is simply part of a bigger network of mechanics that reflect change in characters. When desigining games, it’s important to get clear on what changes are important and which ones aren’t. If you gain experience points that eventually help you roll better, you’re declaring that my character becoming more competent than others is important. Likewise, if something like your reputation in a local community is a big theme, a mechanic that highlights that will help draw people in.
The role of the designer
A great group of players can make any system as immersive and interesting as they want, and can often pull games in entirely unintended directions. I have played games of D&D where we barely roll dice and share amazing scenes and emotional moments with each other. And as long as we’re having fun, system can fade for a bit as we tell the story.
But as a game designer, I am not responsible for the active, concious way a group decides to run a game—instead, my job is to steer them where I want the game to go by desigining it well so it always nudges and leads players to the right spots. I can’t control what happens at the table with my game, I can only suggest. And while stating your intents outright can be effective for some, mechanical design can manipulate attention without anyone realizing it, and if you aren’t concious of how it does that, it will push them in directions you didn’t intend. This, to me, is one of the more effective devices for presenting the themes of your game and one which drives the core of my designs.
That D&D game will always nudge us back to fighting monsters, finding treasure, and becoming powerful adventurers, no matter how much we fight it. If we pull too far away from that, we’ll start to feel like we’re at odds with the system itself.
I hope this little exploration has been helpful and give you some insight into how I approach my own designs. I’ve always loved lists of questions to help sort out design problems, so I’ll leave you with a couple that help me when designing change into my game:
Who are the characters at the beginning of a game, and who do they become?
What’s the time-scale of your game? How does a character change over time? Do they learn? Do they age?
What character changes are most important, and which mechanics showcase that?
Does the amount of room something takes up on a character sheet reflect how important it is? Where will players be looking the most?
If a player or game master wants to take your game in a different direction, does your game encourage or discourage it, and how?
How do you want the player to have changed when they finish your game?
Let’s assume all typos are intentional.