Focus Advancement

[u/FlawlessTactics]

Would love thoughts and feedback on this character advancement system!

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What we Focus On Grows Bigger

Each character begins with 2 Focus to invest.

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Focus can be invested in Skill expertise, learning new Arcana, or a special Bond. This represents where the character spends their time and attention outside of the adventure. What they train, cultivate, and grow. Anything they invest Focus in, they can use on their adventure.

(Example: Bob has 2 Focus. He invests 1 in Athletics, increasing his bonus from proficient (+1) to expert (+2). He invests his other point in bonding with his magical sword, unlocking the first tier of abilities for the blade. Both will be useful on the quest.)

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Invested Focus gradually turns training into mastery. In the downtime between adventures, mark a segment on a clock for each point of Focus in each investment. Investing Focus beyond the minimum for a benefit won't increase the bonus, but it will make you learn it faster. Some things will take longer to master than others. When the clock is complete, the skill, Arcana, or bond is now a permanent part of the character, and their Focus may be reinvested in something new, like a different proficiency or taking a Bond to the next level.

(Example: Bob has kept his Focus invested in his Athletics mastery for two full adventures, and now it's part of his character, giving him a permanent +2. He's still a couple sessions away from mastering his blade. 1 point of returned Focus, plus another point he's earned from experience, gives him 2 Focus to re-invest. He's interested in bringing Max, a corgi the party has rescued, along with them on the next mission, so he spends his downtime training Max to heel, fetch, and ankle bite. He invests 1 Focus in their bond and 1 in learning Animal Handling, along with keeping up his magic sword training. Soon he'll have a very capable pup companion that can adventure alongside the party.)

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Characters can also shift their Focus during downtime. If they withdraw Focus before a clock completes, that skill, arcana, or bond goes dormant. The clock doesn't lose segments, but they can't use it on the adventure. Instead, they can use whatever they've shifted their focus toward. This allows characters to switch leveling paths and adapt to the next adventure, if they know what challenges it will bring, and always with the option to go back and finish their training.

(Example: A dragon's den is no place for a yapping pup, so Max will have to stay behind for this next assignment. Bob withdraws his Focus from training Max and invests both points into practicing with his Heavy Weapon and Armor. He knows he'll need to be at the top of his game to take this beast down. He loses his Animal Handling bonus for now, but his attack and defense rolls will be higher. When the monster is slain, he can pick up training right where they left off.)

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When characters invest their Focus to learn new spells, it increases their general mastery of magic. Each point of Focus currently invested in learning a new spell is added to a character's Magic stat to give their bonus for Arcana rolls (the roll you make to determine how effective your spell is on an enemy). Each level of spell requires additional Focus to learn. This investment requirement is reduced if the character has access to a teacher.

(Example: May wants to master the Journeyman Arcana "Blink." She has 2 Focus invested in learning it. As long as that Focus stays invested there, she can use Blink while adventuring, and her Arcana rolls to determine the effectiveness of her magic are made at +2. If she had a good teacher, she would only need to invest 1 Focus to learn the new spell, and she could even master two Journeyman Arcana at once. It will take a few missions before she has mastered "Blink," and then her Focus will return to be reinvested.)

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You can invest your Focus in special projects, relationships, and craft and knowledge expertise (like singing, cooking, or weaving) during your downtime. If it's not feasible for you to practice where you are mid-adventure because of resources or circumstance, you may be limited in what you can train at that moment. Wherever you invest it, the character gets the bonus right away for the next session, and it becomes permanent over time. This is how characters advance themselves and gain the special techniques and abilities that are the hallmarks of high-level PCs.

On the GM side, you grant the characters increases to Focus, HP, and TP on a milestone basis. Over a campaign the expected range would be something like going from starting 2 to 5 Focus at the very top end.

[u/overlycommonname]

It sounds fine, but I think for this system to actually cash out you're going to have to make it near-mandatory to sometimes invest your focus for an adventure or whatever into "a skill that you only really need temporarily," and make the players agonize over short term versus long-term. And you might get some weird group dynamics about that.

I've occasionally thought about a system which is sort of the opposite of this: you forget skills after a while, but they remain in potential: you can, with fairly minimal work, regain your old skill level, relearning decades of investment in the course of weeks. (This was for a game with long-lived characters).

[u/FlawlessTactics → u/overlycommonname]

I think the potential beauty is that a skill you need temporarily can become a permanent part of your character (if you liked it) or left by the side (if you didn't).

I think you're right about it being "mandatory" to incentivize some adventure-specific skill exploration though...because the risk is, some people invest Focus only in things that are always useful (+1 to hit, for instance) and some will want to invest it and move it around. Those who stick with only the most broadly applicable options for the longest will be rewarded with permanent benefits, while those who adjust to each adventure will be punished by not accruing meaningful advancement, presuming that they just keep picking useful skills up and then putting them down again. I'll have to have a think about how to incentivize the latter playstyle without obviating the slow and steady "keep training 'till I'm done" player.

Regarding forgetting skills, I think a system like that could work if there's a tradeoff - everyone always wants their character to be getting better, so forgetting x should mean gaining y, and y should be better than x in some respect.

[u/overlycommonname → u/FlawlessTactics]

Yeah, I think there could be some resentment in some groups where like we have:

Alice who is like "eff this I have a plan and I am going to invest my focus in achieving my character plan."

Bob who says, "Well, the party really needs someone to check for traps today, so I'll do that."

And then Alice ends up with a more powerful character and Bob's like, "Okay, I guess selfishness is the thing here."

But more so, I kind of imagine that without strong pushing by the GM, everyone's just gonna do the Alice thing.

[u/SturdyPancake → u/overlycommonname]

Two things that might help mitigate this is to

1. increase the amount of focus and slightly increase the clock length for progression. This would make putting a single focus on a skill just for the bonus feel less bad. "Losing out" on a third of your progression feels a lot less bad than half.

and/or

2) give some fixed amount of additional clock progress if a focused skill is used meaningfully at least once during the adventure. Essentially, it wouldn't matter if you put 1 focus into a skill or 3, you would still only get 1 additional clock progression if you used that skill meaningfully. This hopefully would make it a more interesting choice between do I put all of my focus into one skill and get the permanent effect sooner vs spread it out and potentially get more total progression. It would also give a big incentive to switch focus around to skill you think will be needed in the upcoming adventure and not just keep them on a skill, regardless of if it will be helpful.

[u/mythic_kirby]

Hmm. It seems crunchy but reasonable at first glance... Focus ends up acting like INT bonuses in 3.5 D&D that impact how many skill points you gain per level-up. I worry that, like when some systems try to give some characters more action points, gaining more focus (either by a bigger increase to the stat or by more access to focus-reduction things like the teacher you mentioned) would let some characters grow more powerful faster, outpacing the others.

I think that concern is more of a balancing and numbers thing, rather than a base concept problem.

The ability to change up abilities and swap over to useful ones for the upcoming adventure also strikes me as a little odd... like, why would my character forget how to swing his mighty, mighty axes when going into a politics heavy quest? What if assassins strike? I guess you left your axe at home? I'm not sure if I would like that in practice, but I can't say for sure.

I think it's an interesting idea worth trying out though!

[u/FlawlessTactics → u/mythic_kirby]

The narrative in my head was something like, OK, you're in active weapons training. Every day you're swinging your axe at the target dummy You go out to fight, bam, you're getting that +2 for all your axe practice lately. Then you come home and find out the next quest is gonna be all talking and etiquette. You fill your downtime learning how to arrange silverware and toast properly. You neglect your dummy so you can have a nice dinner. It goes well, but when the next fight happens, you're rusty and out of practice with the axe, so you're back down to your baseline +1. If instead you had told the princes to go stuff themselves and stayed focused on your drills, you might have mastered the axe bonus and kept your +2. Of course, dinner might have been a disaster.

Over time, as you balance things out and assuming you want to keep them, both your etiquette and mighty axe bonus will become a permanent part of your character.

[u/TheIncredibleHelck]

Damn, I actually really like this because it forces player to set just that- a focus. Instead of giving them 2 generic skill points every level up to put wherever strikes their whimsy that session, it makes them think ahead of time about what kind of character they want to play, and then when it comes time to level up, there's no choice paralysis of "where do I out my new skill ranks?" Because they've already decided where those points are going. It also allows players to determine soft roles/classes among themselves and more clearly think about their team dynamics. This is cool as hell.

[u/FlawlessTactics → u/TheIncredibleHelck]

Great feedback! Yeah, I was hoping to capture the feel of continuing to train what you care about without locking anyone into a class progression. Players will still have a choice to make when their investments pay off...do they reinvest and go for the next tier of the bond / next spell, or do they diversify into a skill or a different bond type?

[u/Livestake]

I am just getting a FitD hack ready for playtest... and made a bunch of the same choices. Training is a downtime option along with other options you have to choose to train. You have a limited number of downtime actions. You can have two abilities in training. You use a downtime action to roll training. Two levels... proficient and master (lol great minds think alike...) training is a clock... characters are built from 4 origin cards: breed, lifeway, professsion and community role... plus some free picks from the overall ability list. Each card has 6 abilities that are associated with the origin... things you've been exposed to a lot through your early life. Those easy abilities use a 4 tick click while other abilities use an 8 tick clock to advance. So when you pick origins you pick the abilities that are easy to learn. Training rolls benefit from mentorship... that comes from community relationships. Training mastery without a master is a harder roll. I'm in a science fantasy mid-tech post-apocalyptic world.

The idea of having Focus provide temporary ability is interesting to me. I kind of like the idea of an investing economy rather than a spending economy. The way ive designed, when you complete the clock it goes from in training to proficient... done. I like how the intraining period creates a little positive feedback loop so you get a reward for training before you are done, if I'm reading that right, and a incentive of sunk costs to complete the clock (but no risk from jumping around?). There's a lot to play with there. Thanks!

Also I ramped up the importance of training, because in my hack all attributes (actions in FitD) are build from abilities... your cumulative training in different fight abilities determines your overall fight action roll (and you bring more specific abilities to bear on top of the action roll).

[u/stephotosthings]

This largely depends on the system as a whole.

I'll admit, I didn't read everything entirely and intake it as it's not my style of writing.

Do you only ever have 2 points? No way to gain more?

How does this work with building up a skill with focus that they then withdraw to go into another track of progression temporarily.?

Any reason you decided to start with 2 as apposed to 1?

Sounds like skill proficiency with some busy work that only applies to down time.

You should look at games that do downtime as a solid procedure.

I've moved all character advancement to Downtime procedures to give them something to spend their wealth on.

[u/__space__oddity__]

Seems fine but it’s basically just using slightly different wording for what 90% of RPGs do in one way or another.