Just as many other posts start: I am making a hack for Blades in the Dark.
The issue I am pondering is about the how the players in Blades have access to almost any upgrade/special ability/item from the very start. The options are spread horizontally, not vertically, so to speak. Besides Claims, there are no requirements like “to get ability A, you must first have ability B”. Which is great for what Blades is intended to do for the fiction and player choice.
The hack I am working is about kids learning magic in school (OBVIOUS HINT, NUDGE). Which means the characters start at age 10-11 and go up to adulthood. A vertical progression implementation sounds logical here, from a fictional standpoint. For now, I am keeping free access to special abilities, crew upgrades. But I am adding a simple magic skill system (basically a fourth action dot block) which limits what spells they are able to learn based on how many dots you have in any of the branches of magic, as I call them.
Spells themselves do not change the mechanics much, as they are just fictional tags to your main actions, increasing their potency or giving fictional options.
How do you think this might change the game dynamics or player engagement? Maybe there is a hack that already does a vertical progression system?
Your solution sounds reasonable – it’s kind of a personal tier that only applies to spell-casting? That should work.
But you know, when you mentioned the claim map that did get me excited, because the claim map is one of my favourite parts of Blades. I was really interested to see in the Bluecoats youtube stream that John has turned the claim map into a kind of investigative pin-board of how your case is progressing. Love it!
So anyway – why not have a sort of individual claim-map for every PC? See attached mockup (I don’t know much Harry Potter, so the details are placeholder!).
The idea is that PCs would also have special playbook abilities that they level up in the usual way, but they have this separate track of Academic XP. You can use downtime actions to study/go to class to increase your Academic XP (or some special abilities might feed into it). You start with a few courses finished in a few subjects (pick, say, 2-3 of the top boxes to start with) and progress from there, choosing which subjects you ace and which spells you learn.
At the top of the tree the progress is linear (101 level to 102 level), but as you get really advanced you can use your expert knowledge in one subject to move laterally. Except for the Dark Arts, of course – that’s a specialized and lonely branch.
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/3qAfEAPCFnwq200OuaGSizq3yviAL7zWQ_gB-WPuKZ2vs4IW-DiTIG1XjbAgg5wRn8GHCOLr7gsPkquA5bNh7VQwKgr4ipNIOyE=s0
My concern would be that if there’s vertical progress, either characters will be patchy as they grow, or they’ll get more samey.
Benjamin Davis I think the trick would be to balance it so that the spells are mostly fun fictional positioning and not core to game balance as such (they would still change position & effect of course). But most of your advancement is still in Actions and Special Abilities, as normal (and thus not vertical progress).
Or to go back to the source, I think it’s in-genre that all the students start with a similar toolkit of spells to deploy, and it’s their character-archetypes and backgrounds that distinguish them, not (generally) what school of magic they specialize in.
To propose an alternate way of looking at spells: perhaps they aren’t special abilities, but are rather “equipment”. In a school environment for the ages you are talking about, everyone is roughly speaking learning the same spells/alchemy/whatever.
Then you can represent people who are abnormally good at an area (or have studied ahead) by giving them “fine” versions of the spells on their sheet. Remember “fine” is really just another way to say “its quality is of a tier higher than the character should normally have” which translates roughly to “has already learned the spell that is taught next year” if you decide to reflavor “tier” as “schoolyear”.
You even have the ability for people to get access to spells/alchemy that isn’t normally available to them by slightly tweaking the crafting rules or using “acquire assets” if the spell is well established just not taught in normal class.
So just as someone in Scum and Villainy might have a jetpack that gives them implicit permission to fly around, a young wizard might know a spell to fly or have a magic broom. A Cutter in BitD might use some manacles to restrain someone while your wizard uses a binding charm.
If the magic setting you are running in has components or other requirements for spells instead of just some words and a wand then it’ll even make sense for spells to potentially have a load cost.
That is a very neat approach, Charlie Collins.