World Wide Wrestling: Advancement

So i know there’s quite a few people on here that have either run WWW, or played in it, and I wanted to get some thoughts and opinions, specifically on advancement, but i have many thoughts in general.

As it stands, I find the basic, and optional Advancement methods to be either way to fast for some, or incredibly slow for others, but rarely balanced for the group.

I’ve been in games where 1 or 2 players have earned well over ten advances, where as some players struggle to get 3 advances.

the most common advance usually coming from Audience 4, but I have seen someone hit audience 4, end a feud, and win a title all in one match, so they earned 3 advances all at once.

Where as Jobbers and Managers sometimes struggle to get any of those things. Many GMs usually avoid dropping someone’s audience to 0, because of the threat of being fired at the end of the episode (that’s a different thing I’ll gladly talk about).

So what can be done to make it more even and balanced?

My own belief is bringing in the classic pbta xp on a miss system. Everything that normally gives you an advance, now gives you 1 xp, and you get 1 xp for rolling 6-. Not only does it balance out advances, it now actually encourages players to take a “botch”, because “Botches” in this game, can be much more brutal than so many of the other pbta systems.

The word “Botch” likely doesn’t help either, especially when many other pbta games and/or GMs often describe a “miss” as “An opportunity for the gm to do something”, where as “Botch” usually means “you screwed this up, it’s your fault.”

But the language is accurate to the ling of the world of wrestling, so that’s pretty cool?

Anyway, what are thoughts others have on this?

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I like the idea-- I agree with you that advancement’s uneven. Certain playbooks have a significant hurdle to overcome, while others have moves that lean into that. Its especially true where you have a player who understands the dynamic and leans into it to get lots of advances. Any system’s exploitable, but WWW makes that easy and attractive.

I like the idea of XP on a miss as it means players might look towards areas and moves where they aren’t the best. It’s a cool idea. I’d be curious about @GerwynWalters and @Tylom’s thoughts.

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So far tests of it have gone well. I also added another xp trigger of “when you lose a title”, so it encourages losing as well.

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This could work but it does cut into one of the special factors of one of the playbooks, The Ace.

This playbook is specifically about playing with the championship and is there to encourage them to give up the belt that the moves make exceptionally easy to get.

Ultimately i’ve seen a lot of games hold off giving the championship out early, as it’s a major way to gain an advance. Ultimately, i’d be much more comfortable with the championship giving out +1 audience rather than an advance.

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This sums up my thinking on this. In my mind WWW is meant to be run over a couple of games rather than a long run.

During Lowell’s recent 11 game series the advanced we were getting were adding up quite quickly.

I certainly think some work needs to be done on the advancement system although i’m not sure if having botches be the way to advance may be the best course. it’s would need some playing with to see how it goes.

I like the idea of having an experience track rather than straight advances, and if something like that was instituted that i certainly think a trigger for that should be (when you lose audience) although that itself is subject to abuse when you consider people being knocked off audience 4.

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I’ve been playtetsing with it a while now, and have gotten good feedback, but i need more people to play around with it.

The resewn I don’t think the game is intended to play over a couple of games is because of playbooks like the jobber, or the young one. In a couple of games, they might be able to switch playbooks, but if that’s when the game ends, they didn’t get to see their characters grow and change too much.

Plus wrestling is a soap opera, players often want to see their journey from hero to villain and back again, while making their way to title contention. That’s hard to do in 10 sessions or less.

I like botches giving xp, because I’m always partial to the xp on a miss mindset. If botches only do “bad things”, as they currently do, then players will often spend as much momentum as possible to avoid them.

Seeing that advancement option on The Ace is why i changed it for all playbooks. I’d say it no longer cuts in, because they still have their other moves, it just shares a good trigger.

Nowadays, I usually have a player start off as champion anyway, because i find it more fun for the players to start off having the champion move available at the start.

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