Liminal Void updates: Advancement is hard and weird

April 6, 2023

Advancement in a game is tough. Or rather, like all things in game design, you can kind of just do whatever with it but it'll have long-ranging implications as to player behavior. As much as we don't like to admit it sometimes, numbers going up very frequently provide a throughline and driving force for campaign-length games, but how those numbers go up matters. If you give XP for gold, guess what, your game is now at least partially about making money. If you give XP for killing things, guess what, you're going to see a lot of killing. If you don't have XP but just give out character levels when important milestones get finished, they'll frequently beeline to those milestones. And so on.

That last one is mostly how I run my various "heroic" (D&D-like) games with levels. I don't like tracking XP, mostly because it's boring accounting that amounts to the same thing and/or encourages weird behaviors. But I think micro-tracking in that sense works better for something like Liminal Void, which isn't supposed to be about those kind of big epic quests and is at least somewhat about ups and downs.

Methods of advancement

The first method of advancement in Liminal Void is pretty standard: you make money. The more you can spend on your ship(s), the more you can make. Classic stuff. The second is kind of a standard thing, but I'm gonna get there through a third thing that hooks into it but is also its own thing.

First: Money and Spending It

This one's a no-brainer. Get money, spend it on your ship (or get more ships), repeat. Over time, the money you spend for upkeep goes further, as ship upgrades and being able to store better tools for various jobs make various regular expenditures cheaper. And so on and so forth. To wit, there's a fuckload of things you can spend it on for your ship (including just making your living space better), and eventually you can just get a second ship or more crew members or such.

Second: Levels and Tiers

This one's a little weirder of a fit, most games of this type do a point-buy thing for spending XP on skills or whatever. But I think there's a certain value in being able to track, like, general proficiency and status.

What you actually get per-level is pretty low-key. A few bonuses to personal durability/loadout flexibility (a choice between extra Health, Endurance, or equipment slots) and a choice of some passive abilities, as well as better credit for taking out debt. But it's something.

Every three levels, you gain a Tier. This is a 4E/13th Age idea that I've carried forward to Total//Effect because it's really narratively convenient: it represents which kind of

But how do you determine when to gain those levels? Well...

Third: Achievements

I want to preface this by saying, again, that none of this is new-new - it's at least partially derived from stuff I've seen done in other games. (Alpha Protocol especially does a lot with this kind of idea, for instance.)

You get your XP-equivalent by earning Achievements. These are little character/group beats that represent intentional actions and consequences. Every 10 of them you complete, you gain a level. Achievements can also have prerequisites and can come with benefits and penalties for completing them,

Some of these are pretty straightforward, and encourage you to put yourself in more dangerous situations to get them, or put your character out there in the spotlight to get a permanent benefit for it:

Some of them encourage players to take on certain kinds of jobs - and they'll get better at them as they go.

But I have secondary goals here. I'm trying to:

• Give players ideas for things to do. The game's very sandboxy in construction and some people really need guidance. Tying advancement to doing different kinds of things - including failing in some cases, see Not Worth It above - helps get the ball rolling, and including penalties as well as benefits adds texture to the game.
• Give the Narrator (GM) ideas for ways to react to players. A lot of the penalties (especially suggested Threats) act as sample ideas for pressures to put on players in various situations.
• Bring in core themes of the setting. This isn't a cyberpunk game but it's got a lot of the same DNA to it, as will any "hypercapitalist future" style game: you can get hired by a megacorp to work against another one, you can work for big companies against small companies and vice versa, you can work for the exploited to help them against exploiters and vice versa. But working for people with money is usually way better for you.

(A Threat is kind of like a FitD Clock.)

But even if they know the penalties and aren't willing to take the risks...well, the potential is going to be staring them in the face every time they're looking for something else they can move the ball forward on, daring them to do it.

And if they don't...well, that's very on theme, isn't it. This is a kind of power fantasy, but it's not the "everything is handed to you to do cool stuff that shapes everything" kind. It's far easier to sell out than do anything cool. If you want to make a change in future-capitalist space, it's possible, but you're going to have to wrench it from someone's cold dead hands, and you might not survive to see it. But maybe it's worth it anyway, y'know? Maybe it's the only way you'll be able to sleep at night.

Is this going to work as intended?

I have no fucking idea. This is probably the part of the game that'll need the most tweaks. But I think it'll be neat even if it's kind of a mess.

(You can get the quickstart here if this sounds cool: https://binary-star-games.itch.io/liminal-void-qs)

(Read the original on cohost here!)