What Is A Scope Even
on January 4, 2013 at 2:48 pmI’ve written about my Scope System a little bit here and there, mostly avoiding the subject because I’ve been so busy working on the foundations of my game system that I didn’t want to bother getting into detail about something so liable to change.
Now I figure it’s time to talk about Scope.
Do you know what a tier is? Fourth Edition Dungeons & Dragons recognizes three tiers of play: Heroic, Paragon, and Epic. I guess those are okay, at least two of them are descriptive. Heroes being what most characters are (or aren’t, if they’re anti-heroes) and epic being something super-awesome. I don’t hear “paragon” too much.
What is a paragon anyway? I mean, I know what the word means, a paragon is someone who’s sort of at the top of their game, the head of their field, almost a representative of whatever it is that they do, but it isn’t a word in common parlance. Before Fourth Edition, most gamers I spoke with didn’t use the word.
Not that it’s a bad word. It just doesn’t carry a lot of meaning.
At this stage of development, Scope mostly references what can be effected by a character or organization of that Scope: Personal, Local, Regional, Global, Planar, and Cosmic. Most characters begin at “Personal” and move up from there. Most characters don’t make it past “Local,” but there’s a clear difference to be found.
Today I stumbled upon another d20 game project, called “Echelon d20.” It uses the term “tier,” much like Fourth Edition Dungeons & Dragons does, but divides characters into seven tiers that span four levels each, with admitted difficulty in defining the differences between tiers. It’s a project to watch. Find it here: Echelon d20.
I can’t rightly say that “Scope” is much better, except perhaps in definition. Scope refers to how widespread a character or effect might be, and I haven’t really identified how a character or effect crossed the invisible bridge between the two. I’ve separated the concept of Scope from “Scale,” which reflects character levels.
In other words, characters “scale” from one to thirty, and their “scope” increments from one to six. Your Scale increases as you take on more encounters, while your Scope hypothetically increases roughly every five levels. I think my point is they doesn’t have to, but if you want your actions to mean something, your Scope must increase.
Scale is something that might fluctuate on a given day of the week and I’m not entirely sure how it would operate – only that it’s less important in the grand scheme of things than say, Scope. A monster you encounter might be disadvantaged somehow and be at a lower Scale, whereas a “giant” will tend to have an undeniable Scope advantage.
One of the difficulties faced here will be in determining what precisely is determined by Scale, particularly if it tends to fluctuate, and what is defined by Scope.
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I have spoken a bit — in other places, I’d probably have to hunt for a bit — about how characters in different tiers might have different ‘setting scope’.
Basic characters might be notable in their village or their neighborhood. That guy is strong, of course he is, he’s the blacksmith here. More or less. You can be competent at your work, but you’re only special because others don’t do what you do.
Expert might be notably good at what they do. The smith is one known for miles around as the best (that is available here), and he even made a sword that was given to the baron! There are likely a few, even, in town and more in the capital.
After that (Heroic, Master, Champion, Legendary) might look like barony/duchy, kingdom, continent, world. Or kingdom, continent, world, plane. I think I’d rather have planar stuff be roughly parallel to the mundane world — I don’t mind lower-level characters going to other planes, but they would likely be planes proportional to their tier. A Heroic plane will be different from the normal one, but probably not in really big (dangerous) ways, or will be a brief visit to a smallish place, and so on. At Legendary you might go places that would obliterate lesser beings, because that’s what Legendary does.
Incidentally, Echelon is really modeled around five tiers, four levels each, that roughly map to levels 1-20 in D&D 3.x (or Pathfinder; it’s easier for me to work with Pathfinder source information). Basic is just ’0-level’ expanded and not really part of the game except as conceptual structure, Epic is ‘more than Legendary’ and is mostly there to show it exists. I may or may not really do anything with it, since apotheosis, becoming a god, can start rather earlier (Master tier, levels 9-12 in D&D).