It's a solid staple in role-playing games that you create a character, and over the course of a campaign he will have a series of adventures, and earn some form of points that allows him to buy new skills, abilities, powers, levels and whatever else in order to become more powerful. Let's call this character advancement. Personally, I'm not a big fan of that advancement model. I don't mind it, but I'm not its biggest fan simply because I'd just allow the characters to be the correct protagonists for the concept of the game. If it's a game about pulp heroes they begin as pulp heroes. If it's a game about super spies then they start as super spies. If they are epic fantasy heroes then they start as epic fantasy heroes. You get the idea. Once you do this, given the length of the typical campaign these days, in that it's not years of playing a weekly session, the need for advancement on a 'power' front is not actually necessary (as you've started as what you need to be and the points you'd accumulate in the relatively short run wouldn't amount to much anyway).

What is more important to me is character growth and change, so as long as the characters are given the requisite level of 'power' to be who they are supposed to be in the campaign (and this depends on numerous factors of which system is inevitably a part), I'm happy with them not getting more powerful and instead focusing on growth and change. As an example, I was quite happy for my Pulsars and Privateers character (using Cinematic Unisystem) never to earn any experience, she did, but I wasn't overly eager to spend it as she was pretty much who she was. The same is true of the Fate 3.0 version of her I've mocked up, I don't see the need to advance her either. I see the need to focus on her aspects, and over time tweak them and change them to represent how she has grown and changed, and to reflect the conclusion of stories, and that's interesting enough. The fact her skills will stay at the same levels and she might never earn more than her five original stunts, assuming we use them in Pulsars and Privateers, doesn't overly bother me. This raises another point: if the game has ways to mechanically represent that growth and change, I'm even less inclined to be bothered about advancement. The coolness of wiping off one aspect and replacing it with another, as an example, to represent new story direction is reward enough. I'm also willing to accept a time may come when that character's story is concluded, indeed, this is something else I favour: most characters I design have an implied end to their story.

As far as I'm concerned this is the model under which Thrilling Tales runs, the characters are powerful enough to be who they are supposed to be: kick ass pulp heroes, and like most of our games it's not going to run for years week after week, so the focus should be on dealing with the issues around aspects within the framework of a series of movies. That's the plan anyway, might need a bit of work, but then it's only had it's opening story really, but that's another topic. As one player did point out, under this model it's important to not miss out critical scenes that allow for other forms of pay off, but I tend to think those scenes should never be missed out ever, but it's potentially more true when no widgets are given out either.

This doesn't mean I seriously dislike advancement, as in some games it is appropriate, it just doesn't do a vast amount for me when applied as a matter of default. Take for example the Dungeons and Dragons model, which has people starting with first level characters and becoming epic heroes. The first campaign of the gaming group took this approach, the characters rising from first to about eight level. In a way Pendragon does it as well, with the characters starting off as lowly squires, gaining skill and renown and eventually dying of old age assuming they don't get run through first. Pendragon brings up an interesting point, in that even in a game that would involved 'power advancement' I'd not be inclined to do it by giving out experience at the end of each adventure, but to adopt a saga model. The idea being a series of adventures occur, time passes, and the characters get an advancement jump before the next mini-series. This is the tactic I'd use in either D20 Star Wars (not that I'm likely to run that now) or Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play (with characters advancing careers between mini-series). In this way the advancement is more story-focused, as the in the next mini-series the Jedi student is a full Jedi, or the plucky peasant in Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play has become an Outlaw leader, etc. I guess this way seems more dramatically powerful, as it's less about the adancement and more about the new dramatic situation the character is in and all that embodies.

I did have a bit of a think as to what the exceptions might be to this, the types of games under which I would do the experience points given out at a regular frequency sort of thing, on the basis characters would advance in power. I came to the conclusion I probably would do it for a superhero game. Even then I'd probably implement a minor wrinkle, because in my limited experience of comics, by and large, superheroes do not progress in terms of power magnitude (weird or special events aside), it's more that they gain width. As a result, in my mind I'd give out experience points (probably periodically, if not every session) but put mechanisms in place to ensure the experience points get spent to make the characters more varied, rather than going from lifting cars to jumbo jets, etc. It's not necessary to do this, many variables exist that might make me take a different approach (system being one of them), but in principle I'd consider it.

So, basically, from both a player and a GM perspective, the whole idea of character advancement isn't really high on my priority list. The only time it comes into play is when it's explicitly part of the set-up, and even then as a GM I'd rather it be saga based in most cases. I may feel advancement is needed to make the characters what they should have been from the start, but I put that down to a bit of an error in the original set-up of the campaign. I'd prefer games I play in to be set-up to minimise the need for it as well, apart from when it is truly linked to the point of the game (such as Pendragon), rather than being there just because that's what role-playing is.

As a result, as a player, and also at a system level, I'm more for character growth and change being represented, character advancement doesn't really do much for me except for specific cases.