Practice Doesn't Make Perfect

[rowyn]

One of the reasons that people like levelling games is that with practice, your character gets better. Always. It's a simple linear formula: do Y for X times and you will improve. It's based on the popular fiction that doing something will make you better at doing it.

Which of course isn't true. If it were true, skill-based games would be just like levelling games: the more you played the better you'd be. But they're not. In part that's due to natural differences in talent, and to skills learned in prior games that apply to the current ones. (Even levelling games have a certain amount of skill involved, with better players progressing faster and capable of more difficult challenges than inferior players of the same character level).

But a lot of it is that skills are acquired not merely through performance, but through the conscious effort to learn the skill. For myself, I find that simply doing something for a while will make me better at it until I reach a plateau. After that plateau, doing more of the same doesn't make me any better.

And at some level, I think that performance stifles my ability to improve. I once wrote, in full knowledge of the irony: "I'm too busy writing a novel to learn how to write a novel!"

I did learn some things about writing a book by writing a book. But there's other stuff that I still haven't figured out, like "how to write a book concisely" or "how to write action" or "how to build tension" or "how to work in reversals of fortune to keep the narrative interesting". I'm not sure I'll ever learn those things just by writing.

More subtly, when I'm focused on producing, I'm not focused on improving. If I read a book for enjoyment, I don't notice most of what the author does well or badly, or how she does it. I only see the product and not the process, not the pieces. To notice those things I need to pay careful attention, to keep in mind what I'm trying to learn and see how it's done. When I'm trying hard to make the writing happen at all, it's more difficult to think about how I might do it better.

With this in mind, and also because my muse quit a few weeks ago and I haven't been able to woo him back or hire a new one (does anyone know where to get a good muse?), I dug up my copy of Creativty Rules!, a book of writing exercises that I started a few years ago and only got through a few chapters of. Maybe now that I'm not writing anything, I can figure out how to get better at it.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

One of the problems I have seen over the years with various “leveling” games -- RPGs especially -- is the assumption by the designers that every character can continue to progress forever in their chosen field. In other words, any thief, fighter, magic-user, or whatever has the potential to work up to the maximum level (if there is one) in their “class”. Some games don’t seem to have any concept of a person having a maximum skill level of anything.

As a real life example, I’m not a particularly good bowler. I usually score in the 150-180 range, although I once had a 240 game, but that was when I was in a league and playing regularly. I would say my normal max score would be under 200, and that’s as good as I will ever get, no matter how much I practice. And the same thing goes for a lot of different physical activities in my life: there is a limit to how good I can get no matter how hard I try.

That seems to be a factor that many games just don’t take into account. I remember that way back in my college days when I played D&D (this was before AD&D was ever heard of), there were very few limits on character classes. If a magic-user had Intelligence less than 18 (the max), he/she had a limit on the number of spells they could memorize, depending on their actual Intelligence level; but that was about it.

Likewise, there was a limit to the amount of “stuff” a fighter could carry, depending on his strength, but that, IIRC, was in some optional rules, or it was some rules that most players routinely ignored. In our games, if you could put it in a sack or backpack, you could carry it.

The only hard-and-fast limits to how good a character could get seemed to be for the non-humans, who could only progress so high in a class before maxing out. A dwarf could only reach the 7th (I think) level as a fighter, while a human could go to the max, which was at least 12th level. Elves could only be low-level magic-users and I don’t think they could be clerics at all, unless they were half-human. So, there were some limits to skills and abilities, but they were mostly race-based, and humans had no real limits at all.

One of the worst systems for skill levels was in GDW’s ‘Traveler’ game. There, skill levels were assigned by *die roll*, rather than by allowing the player to choose what the character needed. I remember I had a character that stayed in military service long enough to retire, and reached the rank of General. Unfortunately, he kept getting better in “Cutlass” rather than in something useful like “Leadership”. I don’t recall reading many SF stories where officers such as majors and colonels were at the front of boarding parties.

If I was designing a new RPG, I would work out some system for limiting various character skills, and I would try to make it so the character didn’t know what his/her limit was -- pretty much like we do in real life. Perhaps only the game master would know the character’s limits, and players would apply to him to raise a particular skill after doing so many weeks of practice. After getting the same skill number several times, the player would (hopefully) figure out that the character isn’t going to get any better at picking locks, or casting spells, or swinging a sword. It’s taken me years, but I’ve figured out several things I’m never gonna be good at, so I’ve turned my efforts to improving things that I *can* work on. RPG characters ought to be able to do the same.

-- (formerly) MenziesClan

[rowyn]

I suspect that, while it might be more realistic, an RPG with built-in randomly-determined skill caps would not be popular. People *like* being able to have their PCs improve without limit; it's part of the fantasy. In a tabletop game, the lack of strict 'realism' is usually not a problem, since the PCs are expected to be more powerful and capable than the people around them. The GM doesn't need to say that everyone in the setting has unlimited capabilities, merely that certain people (like the PCs and select NPCs) represent the very best, the people with the most potential in their chosen fields.

Traveller's randomly-determined PCs were indeed awful. :) Most RPGs have gotten away from randomly determining anything, because players prefer to be able to direct the development of their PCs. It's more fun, even if these aren't always choices the PC could make ICly.