Four Examples of Extrinsic Leveling

Last Week: Gear-Based Leveling and the Allure of Extrinsic Rewards

Scrolls, Staves, Wands, and Objects of Power

Want to be a magic-user? You need scrolls, grimoires, wands, or similar instruments. There is no Vancian retention of magic within the mind. The wizard’s power is purely a measure of their ability to coax magic out of such eldritch tools.

With its slot-based system, Knave already assumes that spells come from physical objects. The only addition is to take Kill It With Fire’s concept and add leveling. This is already implicit with the caster’s level scaling the effect of many Knave 1E spells (Knave 2E – in non-final form, as of time of writing – moves this to INT and expands it to more spells).

Weapons and Armor

Want to be a fighter? Level those weapons up. Use the same weapon often enough, and your character not only does more damage, but also can execute maneuvers and advanced techniques. The typical D&D fighter is a generalist, equally skilled with each weapon in the player’s handbook. A fighter in this system is much more defined by the weapon or weapons they actually wield.

But there is also tension in specializing versus broadening their skillset. If a fighter spends a handful of sessions building their skills with an ordinary sword, and then finds a magical axe, they face an interesting decision point. Stick with the sword, and hope to find a magical one in the future? Or switch to the axe, begin building up those skills, and reap the benefits of its magic right away? If this system feels too restrictive, weapons could be organized into families that partially or fully share the benefits of progress (e.g., all swords).

Holy Relics

Want to be a cleric? Your connection to the divine is only as strong as the symbols, texts, reliquaries, and sacred bones you carry on your person.

It’s worth thinking about how relics should feel different from the tomes and scrolls of the wizard. Especially in a classless system, we need to be deliberate about how such things work, so it can’t be boiled down to interchangeable numbers and mechanics. 

The Knave 2E rules again provide a helpful way of thinking about this. Patrons, through shrines and relics, give characters missions. PCs completing them can gain blessings. The blessings can grow or wane as the PCs earn or lose favor with the patron.

So leveling up item-based divine powers depends on balancing the patron’s interests against the PC’s other goals and incentives in their adventuring life. And the patron could issue ever-more-demanding and important missions and become increasingly particular about the PC’s adherence to their domain. Finally, in contrast to PCs in many other fantasy RPGs, nothing prevents PCs from bearing relics for multiple patrons (potentially even opposed patrons). PCs can have as many relics as they wish, though the number of blessings active at any time is capped by their Charisma.

Tools and Tricks

Want to be a thief? You need tools.

Rogues and other “expert” classes suffer in high-magic fantasy games. Because of the insufficiently low level of abstraction in certain fantasy TTRPGs, there’s only so much room to plausibly scale mundane power. But in a low-magic game, it’s much easier to build expertise with tools with out exceeding the reasonable bounds of what characters can do in the world.

Some of these extrinsic advances are obvious; leveling up with the lockpick improves the ability to pick locks. There’s ample class-based progression in D&D and other games to model this. 

Leveling up a torch or lantern gives the user finer control over how the light is projected, who perceives it, and how it spreads fire. Leveling up a hacksaw allows one to cut through increasingly difficult materials, or to dismantle and destroy things with greater stealth and effectiveness. Leveling a smoke bomb allows one to use it with progressively less chance of blinding themselves, or even their allies. 

But what does it mean to become more experienced with a chisel? Or glue? Or a birdcage? Or a mule?

OK, I don’t have an answer for every tool in the Knave 2E book. Some of the more abstract, less obvious options would require a dialogue with the player to understand what they want to do and how they are mentally modeling their character’s use of the tool in question. But we can test out some examples. 

Multiclassing and Multitasking

I’ve used the four classic class archetypes of D&D as a guide for thinking through leveling options. But in a classless game like Knave, there’s no need to steer into just one course. A character could level up some mix of gear that meets the actual challenges they face and the particular concept that emerges from play.