In ttrpg world its generally assumed the player characters gain some better stats and/or abilities as they act in the game world. Improving a character in this way is a driving force for players to act in the game world.
As to how and when this happens there are three main schools of thought:
Gold for XP
Your characters gain experience points(XP) equal to the value of things they manage to bring back to a safe place. At certain amounts of XP you gain a level.
The nice thing about this is that if you have a character that also wants gold themselves your motivations will line up. It also rewards cleverness, if you can avoid all the monsters and obstacles in some way to get the treasure, you still get the same reward, rather than granting XP for killing monsters, which I will not discuss. Players are also forced to think about the logistics of moving treasure around which creates its own challenges for the player to overcome.
Downsides are bookkeeping, having lots of gold you have to spend through lots of extra subsystems (carousing, building forts, running a shop or whatever).
Milestone levelling
The DM has determined several milestones in the game world that grant a level when reached. Usually employed in campaigns where you have a set story that everyone tacitly agrees to follow. On the plus side this is extremely easy, there is no bookkeeping at all. At the same time this totally locks you into doing what the DM wants you to do if you want to gain levels (of course in a sandbox campaign a DM could just say "hmm yeah that seems like a level", without having preset milestones but that brings it's own problems).
I'd say quest XP is a variant on this but without the upside of no bookkeeping.
I forget the third one
Anyway a lot of ink has been spilled on this topic!
The Job System
The game I'm currently working on has a different system. You gain 'levels' by learning jobs. Jobs are essentially smaller classes, so rather than being a warrior or barbarian the whole game you are a warrior that learned from a barbarian and then from a ranger and finally joined an order to become a paladin. You learn jobs either from trainers (in exchange for a nice quest of course!) or by learning it yourself from some ancient text you have to find first.
This system has a lot of advantages:
Player and Character Motivation
The nice thing about this is that players are almost always motivated to gain powers and abilities, and characters are too (to achieve some broader goal, sure). So you have synched motivations, without having to have a gold-hungry character.
Builds
Builds are a bit divisive. Some players really love planning their character. Others dislike the idea that players spend so much energy focussing on how to optimize their character rather than engaging in the world (also see https://www.bastionland.com/2016/05/foreground-growth-and-becoming-odd.html). Jobs bring build-thinking back into the game world. If you want to be a necromancer/alchemist/druid then go right ahead. Your character actually has to work towards achieving your build.
Informing the World
Needing to have jobs makes creating a world a bit easier.
- You can have factions flavoured by what jobs they offer
- You have lots of obvious quests to reach higher tiers in jobs (I'll explain tiers later), you'll have to come up with the quest of course but you have an instant quest-giver and reward ready to go.
- Certain jobs may be forgotten or forbidden, informing on the culture.
Powers have a source
It's always a bit weird when a character can suddenly cast spells or walk on walls out of nowhere when levelling up. Some games to require trainers along with XP or require spells to be found in the world so there are other solutions to this problem.
How does it really work then?
Well without posting the entire game, the basic setup is as follows:
Paths
There are two paths, magic user and warrior. These come with their own abilities etc. that continue to improve as you gain levels through learning jobs.
Jobs
There are several classes of jobs:
- Warrior Jobs, exclusive to warriors
- Magic User Jobs (Tomes), exclusive to magic users
- General Jobs, available to all
- Cursed Jobs, jobs you have no choice but to take (like vampirism)
Each time you learn a tier, which can be through questing or study, you gain some abilities as well as reach the next level, which unlocks some abilities granted by your path.
Why not just jobs?
Just having jobs with no restrictions would grant much more freedom so why did I add paths?
I chose to go with paths for two reasons. The first is so that groups of jobs can have some shared mechanics, this way not every job is a weird subsystem you have to remember. The second is so that even if you pick a very eclectic collection of jobs your path still grants your character some integrity. A level 10 magic user with three or four levels granted by tiers in general jobs is still a powerful caster.
I'm sure this has been done before. The Cypher system is similar in a way, there your character is a collection of a main class and two mini classes. But I think this method of character growth has some promise.
