(10-07-2015, 03:20 PM)McBeefâ„¢ Wrote:(10-07-2015, 02:23 PM)Verad Wrote: If your goal is to show that your character is in some way more powerful or dangerous than any other given character because of in-game RP and they should be respected for it . . . well, you can't. It might as well all be pre-written backstory from the perspective of a new player who's never met you before. and, indeed, one of the most obnoxious things I remember from freeform RP sites like Ayenee and Rhydin was the tendency of players to insist because the character had been played for X years and had all these cool abilities that they "earned" through RP, that I should respond to that accordingly. I am pretty willing to react as a player wants if they want to be seen as cool or witty or whatever, but doing so based on the argument of character longevity alone was one that never quite sat right with me.
I agree with this, but it does actually into play with FATE. Obviously people have to opt into the system, but new players are at a significant disadvantage compared to those with one or more campaigns under their belt.Â
It's a bit of an issue with adding stats to RP, people like and want to feel progression, but it can also leave new people feeling cheated. I'm not sure of what the answer is.
This should probably be split off into it's own thread. I'll say something about the OP's question after this.
This has always been a problem with progression pen and paper systems. It's typically handled by the DM specifying the power level of the game (i.e.: "This is a campaign for 5th level characters") or simply by the DM working with the same group all the time, so that they progress together.
For FATE, it's a little trickier since we've basically got a bunch of DMs with different events, running the same characters through it. I'm personally kind of tempted to say FATE characters shouldn't "progress", in the standard PnP level-up way. They can change, but they won't progress.
And this is where it starts heading back into the OP's question. I'll use my old character, C'kayah Polaali, as an example. He started out a scrappy smuggler with ties to a bunch of families in the Shroud, and gradually grew to become something of a capo, with a Syndicate charter to boot. This allowed him to really grow in power, and especially in wealth. This wasn't reflected in RP through me wandering around talking about how wealthy he was (well, it sort of was, in the sense that he was a big spender and would flaunt his wealth). It was reflected in the fact that a bunch of people knew who he was, and knew that he was someone they could go to if they needed something. In other words, it's not how he was presenting himself, it's how other people perceived him.
Back into the FATE thing: The standard progression strategy for dealing with this would say that his FATE sheet should add a high resources skill, which would power him up over where he was originally. What I'd suggest (and what I ended up doing on his FATE sheet) is to keep the point allocation the same, and reduce other things to make up for this. You could think of it like this: He used to be a really skilled archer, with a high archery skill. As his resources grew, his archery skill dropped, because he simply didn't have the time to keep it up.
I know doing something like that is a bummer to people who like to see their characters progress, but it does allow new people with established characters to join into the FATE RP scene without feeling like they're coming in at a disadvantage.
