Monday, I talked about having one character that could use a meta-stat to play through several campaigns. For busy roleplayers who don't have a lot of time to meet, but still want to try something new without making a whole new character to be wadded up and thrown away at the end of the session, it's a pretty good idea.
However, it's not without its problems:
-Some players may take this as an opportunity not to roleplay. In my opinion, they probably weren’t roleplaying anyway. Perhaps a throwaway line about some people of the lower planes visiting their homes or even rumors of a long ago war with the physical might encourage them to keep their mouths shut about their true origins. Stopping others from doing so might actually be the point of some stories.
-Graduating experience might be hard for open-ended games. Aberrant, for example, has no upper limit; you just sort of realize you’re a quantum god one day, either because you’ve gotten that tenth dot of Quantum or because you used that experienced to buy enough ancillary powers to make The Martian Manhunter jealous. If you’re running a game, you should be able to estimate the maximum level of experience you want. If the converted power levels end up playing out more or less powerfully than anticipated, just to lower the cap for that game.
-Powergaming is easy here. Any player can probably crunch numbers on just which game gives the highest percentage move up the scale for an average game and ‘grind’ that. They might not even grind it with one storyteller, but instead have a profitable one-shot with someone else, then run a profitable one-shot for that someone else. Gaming more often isn’t a drawback of this system. In addition, the simple, numerical breakdown means that a party’s level can be averaged before a game so that no one person has an unfair advantage.
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