Lately, I've been playing a lot of Five Parsecs From Home, and really loving it. One thing I've decided to house-rule about it is the rate of Ability Increase from XP spends.
In my opinion, the system in the main rulebook is a little too kind to the player. It lets you unlock upgrades very fast, nearly every session. That rapid upgrade rate is great early on when your characters are using scrap pistols and pointy sticks and you need every advantage you can get. Before long, you'll end up in a situation where your team only misses on natural 1's, and after a while the play balance starts to take a hit from it. That's not in any way on knock on the game, or it's designer. Balancing co-op games is really tricky, especially when they have as much proceduraly-generated content as 5 Parsecs does. It's impossibly difficult to account for every situation that can come up in game, so you have to thread the needle between such-an-easy-cake-walk and so-hard-you're-not-having-fun-anymore.
Fortunately, the first expansion was just released, the Trailblazers Toolkit, which has a ton of great options for adjusting difficulty as you level up. It's an amazing supplement to the game. 5 Parsecs is great right out of the main book, but this expansion goes a long way towards keeping the game exciting, fresh, and tense even repeated play with an ever-improving Crew of PCs. If you're 5 or 10 games in and starting to find it too easy, grab this expansion and adjust the knobs it provides.
Among the many optional changes the new Trailblazers Toolkit proposes is a new XP chart. This does two things.
1) it increases the cost of Reactions, Combat Skill, and Toughness by a point or two each, to slightly slow down the rate of increase in 3 of the 4 most important stats.
2) It lowers the maximum rating of most stats, so you can't get to the stage where you obliterate the opposition without trying.
These are both good changes, but I think they actually introduce a small problem for the longer-running campaign: that you can reach a point fairly quickly where all your characters have the identical maxed stats.
Assuming you've had good luck, with relatively few long-term injuries, it only takes maybe 15 or 16 missions to get a most characters to the point where their Reactions, Combat Skill, Toughness (and Luck, if they aren't human) are all maxed out. That leaves Speed and Savvy, which have higher maximums, as the only stats you're spending on for a fairly long stretch of a campaign. There is the Advanced Training abilities, but you're limited to 1 of those per PC, and can be purchased with Credits or XP, so that's only a few more sessions tops.
Now, this wouldn't be a problem if campaign length were intended to only be about 20 Missions or so... but it's definitely intended to go longer. Campaign Victory Conditions range from "Play 20 Campaign Turns" at the easiest benchmark, all the way up to "Win 100 Tabletop Battles", so at the longer 2/3rds of that spectrum you've hit a plateau and are basically not doing anything with XP any more.
There's also the optional Story Track campaign narrative, which means you're unlocking the next chapter of the story in Missions 6, 10, 13, 19, 23, 24, and 27, with the possibility that events could cause that to take a little longer if you fail Missions, miss some Evidence, face an Invasion, or can't get Off-World on schedule.
It's less than ideal if the level-up system conks out 10 or more Missions before the end of the campaign, which it currently does for most Campaign Goals.
And just to confirm that I'm not imagining a problem that doesn't exist, here's the stat bar of my Captain at the end of the 13th Mission:
Reactions 4, Combat Skill +3, Speed 7, Savvy 2, Toughness 4, Luck 1.
By the Trailblazer's Toolkit, she's 28 XP from maxed out, over half of which would be Savvy upgrades that she doesn't need (as I have an Engineer in my Crew with a higher Savvy than her already, and Savvy rolls happen less than once per Mission.) She'll probably hit the new (i.e.:Trailblazers Toolkit) Toughness cap after Mission 14, and Speed cap by Mission 15 or 16.
The rest of my team is only shortly behind her, and I think they'll all hit the Trailblazers caps before Mission 20.
With that in mind, I brewed up the following alternate XP-spending chart a few weeks back to keep the XP system working in the long-haul:
1 (from 0 to 1) | 2 (from 1 to 2) | 3 (from 2 to 3) | 4 (from 3 to 4) | 5 (from 4 to 5) | 6 (from 5 to 6) | 7 (from 6 to 7) | 8 (from 7 to 8) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reactions | n/a | 7 | 8 | 8 | 16 | 32 | n/a | n/a |
| Combat Skill | 7 | 8 | 8 | 16 | 32 | n/a | n/a | n/a |
| Speed | n/a | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 8 | 10 |
| Savvy | 5 | 5 | 5 | 10 | 10 | n/a | n/a | n/a |
| Toughness | n/a | 6 | 8 | 8 (Engineer Max) | 8 | 16 | n/a | n/a |
| Luck | 10 | 15 (Humans Only) | 20 (Humans Only) | n/a | n/a | n/a | n/a | n/a |
1 (from 0 to 1) | 2 (from 1 to 2) | 3 (from 2 to 3) | 4 (from 3 to 4) | 5 (from 4 to 5) | 6 (from 5 to 6) | 7 (from 6 to 7) | 8 (from 7 to 8) |
With this system, the lowest level of upgrade costs what it did in the main rules, so you usually get your first upgrade after just a mission or two, while you're still stumbling about with substandard weapons and gear. The second time you upgrade any particular stat (or if it started out above-default because of your character background), it costs what it does in the Trailblazers Toolkit. The abilities are capped at the levels established in the main book, but taking them above the cap from Trailblazers costs a premium, generally double.
The usual limits apply: Only Humans can get Luck above 1. Engineers can't get Toughness above 4. Bots upgrade with Credits, not XP.
The main downside of this system is that the sliding scale is harder to remember, so you'll need to refer to the chart more often. But it should keep XP meaningful for at least another dozen Missions or so. Not enough to carry you all the way to "Win 100 Battles", but enough to keep things interesting past the end of the Story Track at least.
Another ripple-effect benefit from this chart is that the Advanced Training options seem like a comparatively better option, without adjusting their costs at all. Pilot Training's XP isn't just automatically a far-worse proposition than spending those exact same points on Savvy.
No comments:
Post a Comment