In @Runehammer’s post The NORTH WATCH Campaign concluded!, Hank mentioned that no one in the party reached MASTERY during the campaign’s 20 sessions. That doesn’t seem surprising to me, but it made me start to wonder…
How about the rest of you? Have you had any players reach MASTERY at your tables? If not, what’s the closest a player has come to it? I’ve not seen much progress toward MASTERY in my games, and, at times, I’m wondering if MASTERY is more of a Tease than a potential Treat.
I wish to lend insight into your question. I will try to stick mostly to largely incontrovertible facts in my attempt to do so. You have been on the forum for quite some time, and I am sure you have a great deal of personal experience with which to inform and evaluate what I offer below. I hope my reasoning and conclusions make sense.
Mastery abilities, which happen to be my favorite new addition in ICRPG Master Edition, are essentially “discovery leveling”; they are strictly a function of the aggregation of dice results keyed to a segment of a uniform distribution. They add an element of variability to the inevitability of character progression for characters who survive multiple sessions, which I personally find exciting and fun.
The award of each of three successive Mastery abilities is keyed to the occurrence of natural 20s on a D20 check, a 5% chance on each roll; when twenty 20s are collected, the ability is granted. This means on average, a typical player character will receive one Mastery ability after every 400 ability checks.
Therefore, the more ability checks that occur at your table during a typical gaming session, the faster your party is likely to gain Mastery abilities. For example, if a typical combat encounter at your table lasts about five rounds, and if you run about four encounters per session, you could expect every player participating in those combat encounters to roll one natural 20 approximately every session and to earn a Mastery ability by around the twentieth session. Obviously, some PCs will progress faster than this, and others will not.
Player engagement in your game will factor in to some degree. A player who takes more action during a session and makes more PC attempts per encounter makes more D20 rolls per session than a player who abides by taking idle turns, so you can reasonably expect the former to be ahead of the curve in collecting natural 20s and earning Mastery abilities. Therefore, if your players are the type to press their advantage through interacting with your game environment, they may progress faster in Mastery than players who absorb your game narrative more passively.
Furthermore, I will speculate plausibly from personal experience that at most tables combat encounters prompt more D20 rolls per encounter than exploratory (“puzzle”) encounters, which in turn prompt more D20 ability checks than heavy roleplay social encounters. If these assumptions hold, then the mix of encounter types that a GM runs over the course of a given campaign can and will affect the likely rate at which the players at that table earn Mastery abilities.
Therefore, much like a GM who uses challenge tuning (disruption, duration, and damage) to make adjustments to encounter difficulty, a GM can choose to adjust the mix of encounters to slow or hasten the rate at which players at the table are likely to earn Mastery abilities. A combat-heavy game with lots of rolls will tend to bring on Mastery abilities sooner, as will a game full of encounters that use a lot of disruptive environmental features, which prompt characters to make extra rolls in the form of DEX and CON saves. A GM looking to have PCs achieve Mastery at a more sedate pace can include more exploration encounters, where players state what how their PCs interact with the encounter environment but don’t necessarily make D20 ability checks to succeed, or the GM can include roleplay-focused encounters, where much of the game play is first-person dialogue to advance the story narrative with relatively few D20 rolls inserted only where necessary.
I am NOT suggesting this level of GM control; I merely state that it exists. Personally, I think a GM should adjust the mix of encounter types to serve the emerging narrative and create the most fun and excitement for the players, allowing the dice to hold sway over Mastery abilities, as it seems they were intended to do. In my opinion, I think it’s a smarter choice for us to consider and adjust our preconceptions regarding the “right” rate at which Mastery abilities are obtained. The, if new earned abilities create any issues in the game, the GM has many other tools available to adjust the sessions and the campaign accordingly to preserve the essence of the game.
My $0.02…
[ETA: After 36 sessions (usually about three hours each week), one player at my table is now several 20s into earning her third Mastery ability, and every PC has earned at least one. I notice that when a well-developed PC gets to the point of a earning a second Mastery ability, in combination with the abilities gained along a typical Milestone path during the same span of time, the power level of the character starts to get pretty impressive, which makes designing challenging a bit more demanding but also leads to some pretty epic scenes at the table.]
The closest I have seen since we created Mastery was 18. So close. Although, I have seen a single player roll five Nat 20s in a night.
I agree that Mastery is a little sparse. As a result, I usually award a lesser reward every five pips: a milestone, a stat point, or an extra surge die.
Yes.
I’ve considered increasing the harshness of natural 1 results but adding them to the Mastery calculation.
I too saw this as an opportunity so in one ongoing game I’m running in which fame in the setting earns rewards, one of the rewards is spending time with veterans in training. When obtained, the player rolls for d4 Mastery Points.
Consider awarding mastery points in addition to the prescribed Nat 20 roll. ESPECIALLY if in a shorter campaign. A training with a sage or veterans is one idea. But you could come up with plenty more.
If entertaining this idea, I would still keep it limited. With plenty of milestones and loot being thrown around per ICRPG, i do like the idea of Mastery being something you really have to reach for the stars to obtain. That said, if it never happens, why use it. So giving a little nudge may be the answer.
1 player got Mastery in a 6-7 session campaign. Though that player had Quick Draw and 6 STAT points in DEX and would get attack streaks often, plenty of rolls.
Good points, @Wildstar, especially about shorter campaigns.
A reminder to us all: Dice are fickle.
Last night the dice were on fire around my table. Many rolls were thrown, and many came out very favorable. My daughter rolled three nat 20s in her first four D20 checks—two of them back to back out of the gate—and she scarcely had a really bad roll all night, finishing the night with a total four D20 crits toward her third and final mastery ability; this is somewhat uncanny, but everyone at the table has witnessed every roll. Even my wife rolled two natural 20s, bringing her elf Priestess up to 31 rolls toward mastery (her second) in 37 sessions, which is pretty close to statistical expectation given the number of rolls that are typical on a game night for us.
The evening was a perfect storm for rolling checks toward mastery, a combat-heavy three-and-a-half-hour session deep in a Duergar citadel, full of tactical movement using cover and concealment to evade and ambush a seemingly endless stream of evil dwarves as the party moved around the subterranean city from structure to structure, hunting for the six pieces of an ancient artifact that would serve as key to their exit portal. The whole night was devoted to a half dozen sub-encounters on one huge (18 sq ft) board, with the players constantly beset by new enemies. There was fighting, spellcasting, perception, and stealth in virtually every round, so the dice were very busy. One PC and the party’s oldest and most trusted NPC hireling were each one roll away from permanent death at the end of the night, but they simply got lucky. It was a good night.
This example demonstrates why, rules as written, progressing toward and attaining mastery abilities in ICRPG depends a lot on play style and encounter design.
Personally, I think Master Edition has mastery progression down perfectly. It should be hard. It should be swing-y, just like a D20 roll. It just happens naturally—like a critical hit. It rewards doing what it takes to keep your player character alive by means other than remaining idle. It serves to complement other means of leveling up. It’s only my opinion, but my opinion is that it functions exactly as it is needed to function within the game. Your mileage may vary, but I think it’s hard to argue that there is anything “wrong” with it, even if you choose to play it differently.
All that said, ICRPG is intrinsically hackable, so have fun making mastery rules your own.