#azag

You can train abilities you already have and use and improve on them. But if you want to gain a new ability - and I assume this is also true for new spells - you will be made to pay a terrible price. You either...

lose 4 Stamina, or

2 Luck, or

a rank in a random skill (which means you might lose that skill), or

a magic item, or

gain something powerful chasing you in the next adventure, or

gain a debt to somebody powerful they call in soon.

The first two options mean your character gets considerably less effective. The third option means you roughly stay where you are, just changed. The 4th can be remedied by gaining another item, I guess. The 5th and 6th are more plot-oriented but will increase challenge. The 6th could also mean that the GM asks you to do something you would normally not willingly do - and your choice is to piss people even worse off than option 5 if you do not want to.

I can't tell how risky 5 or 6 are, but 1-4 definitely reduce your power in a way that will offset what you gain, and only one of these options is remediable. (Though you might stay behind in terms of magic items behind other players in the party, I guess.)

But look at it. If you want to improve in something you don't already know at the beginning, the game will penalize you. If you want to learn to wield a different weapon or cancel armor penalties, if you want to learn a new spell, anything, you have to face these penalties.

This would make sense if the game was balanced towards staying roughly the same power level. But it isn't! The game actually allows you to become more competent in abilities you had from the start, or any that you gain. There is a notion of advancement. But it discourages change.

A tiger cannot change its stripes?

To be clear. The game does not penalize you for improving. It however penalizes you for not spreading your eggs widely. In order to make use of a spell, you better have lots of ranks in it. But if you don't spend your limited initial learning points in as many different skills and spells as possible, it will eventually only allow you to effectively max out a spell (the most egregious example) that you might have taken several ranks in to begin with. I'm emphasizing spells because they are so costly to cast without the prerequisite skill ranks, and you might use them very little otherwise.

This is one of the occasions where "commonsense" makes game design lopsided. Already, there is no balance between the power levels of characters. You roll 1d3+3 for your Skill attribute. If you roll 6, you will not only have a significantly higher chance to make any Skill roll to begin with (roll under with 2d6 vs this number + ranks), but you get 6 ranks to spend on abilities. You improve in two separate ways over a person who rolled poorly. But then you also can set up your character in a way that it has better chances to hit (weapons skills) than other players or spread it wide and get many talents and spells you can improve in play. This in a game where you are penalized for sneaking if you don't have the Stealth ability.

Consider this: You try to attack with a light weapon. You're untrained. It's not exactly spelled out in the rules, but I think it works like this - you only get to roll 2d6. Compare a trained opponent - they roll 2d6 + Skill + Ability ranks. So, that's a minimum of 4 for Skill and a minimum of 1 for ranks. While this nicely demonstrates how important training is, it also means you should be skilled in at least one weapon, and so if you have a Skill of 4 to begin with, there goes your 1st point right away. The advantages of rolling a Skill of 6 are in fact going to put a character ahead of other characters in a lot of ways over the course of a game.

Now, the game is fair in the sense that it does not require you to succeed to acquire "Use Tallies" which you need to improve your known Abilities later. But consider that using those Abilities can be rather risky - spells that fail or attacks on which you roll low can quickly end your character, depending on circumstances. But at the very least, having Ability ranks will effectively allow you to do so while also putting your Skill into play or reducing your Stamina cost for spells.

Now consider that one character starts out with more advantages for no better reason than luck of the roll and has more potential to begin with. Why penalize learning new Abilities as much as done here? Why not at least allow something that levels the field eventually?

Consider also the lack of story logic behind all of this once you think about it. Maybe learning to use Stealth indebts you to a Rogues Guild that wants you to steal something in return. But if you chose to have Stealth at character creation, you walk into your 1st adventure with an advantage and no associated cost or debt. Did you pay all your debts before we enter the first scene?

(I'd personally introduce a Mana stat that you can deplete before using your Stamina to make magic users worthwhile without having to have Stamina like hulking brutes.)

Where I harp more about the design of DCC

Now, other OSR niche games like DCC do something similar. DCC allows you to constantly get better at your core competence - being a Warrior or an Elf or a Cleric - and grants you more powers, higher dice, higher bonuses, more hit points, etc. But whenever you try to do something that might not fall under the umbrella of class, it penalizes you almost instantly.

(How do you become better at being a Halfling? Just kidding.)

The "replacement" for leaving out a skill system altogether is composed of two things - your original occupation that you had before taking up adventuring and penalizing unskilled attempts.

You only get to pick one occupation and that at random. And it defines everything you are good at except what your class says. It never changes or improves since you don't do it anymore. You can't cross-train a skill. You can, in fact, not train in anything.

While some common abilities are exempted from being penalized (balancing, feats of strength, climbing, listening, searching, spotting, and sneaking), some examples suggest most skills do not. The example is of a Mage who had been a scribe and gets no penalty on trying to decipher some writing. Errr... so that is not covered by being a Mage to begin with? Another example reminds us how crucial occupation can be - only a fisherman or equivalent occupation is consider to be skilled at swimming. Considering you can drown quickly in the attempt, having nobody skilled at swimming in the party can be quite the setback.

The penalty for being unskilled is having to roll a d10 instead of a d20. If you have some weak connection to the skill (a miller might know about the seeds he mills) you get to add +2 to the roll. And that can cover a lot of things you may attempt.

So here we have a game that uses the rather flexible and robust 3rd edition resolution rules of rolling a d20, add the attribute, and any relevant modifier, and then removes almost all skill modifiers and then penalizes you.

I'm sure they can justify that to themselves (they assume you don't have time to invest into anything else), but I think I said this before: DCC never seems to consider how one cogwheel of the system interacts with the others. Consider the fact that occupations provide the only additional skills you can count on. Consider also that your occupation is chosen at random and many are added to the list for fun. Consider that further many adventures provide situational occupation lists, like being musicians at a wedding. Now, if you rolled "Gong Farmer" (somebody who digs out latrines)... What skills can you expect to have? Digging? Knowing about excrement? The lifecycle of flies?

So occupations are partially played for laughs. They mostly make for funny characters during the funnel stage. And yet they were also used in stead of a real skill system. And you never improve. My nose was put hard on this fact when I faced a player rebellion over the fact their characters never got better at a lot of things that might come up from time to time but nobody had a fitting occupation for. (We house-ruled in a skill system and eventually abandoned DCC altogether.)

We like you the way you are, gong-farmer-turned-rogue. Never change.

You were born a peasant, you stay a peasant for a long time

The last example I want to point out is not an OSR game, but it's an updated version of a game that has been around for a long time: Warhammer Fantasy RPG (WFRPG).

WFRPG 4e is one of those games that encourages you to roll a character. And boy, did I rue that I did. You see, you can build a character that comes close enough to what you want to achieve. Or you will either accept what you roll (and roll with it, har har) or take forever to change towards what you would want.

I rolled a Smuggler. I wanted to one day to be a noble knight. But even turning the Smuggler even remotely into somebody who could aspire to such a thing was ... a task associated with an enormous build cost. I tried refashioning the character - in a system that already seems to be just fine with beginning characters having a poor chance of success if not tuned/mix-maxed heavily. But the associated cost of points you need to earn and spend was way too high for the short campaign we allowed ourselves to test the system out.

I largely felt like a gong farmer had to do the job of a fighter. Yay...

I had more issues with the system (and its basic builds where some were not even good at the basic things their combined class was supposed to be good at), but what vexed me most is that not being able to change your character that much was seen by some as a feature, not a flaw. In a feudal society, escaping your designated role is hard... While I don't like baking such stuff into a system at all, then please be upfront about it. Tell me: Changing your character is hard. If you want to be something specific, don't roll at all. Pick.

Conclusion

But beyond that, RPGs are about change for me. I don't like static characters repeating the same abilities over and over. Not everything has to be a D&D with 20 levels and ability trees and what not. But getting to expand what your character can do is an empowering feeling. If it's hard earned, okay. But putting too many penalties before it will cancel the feeling out that it's worth it even trying to expand your capabilities.

Look at it. WFRPG already is effectively a hard RPG with strong horror elements and little hope. If I manage to keep my character alive through all the corruption and the powerful evil, shouldn't I feel like I just gained more than a small incremental boost and live another day?

Why make characters so rigid, DCC and AZAG? I understand that there are many aspects to a character not having to do with skills and stats, but you distribute your love rather unevenly, randomly. To add insult to injury, DCC wants to minimize magical items as much as possible (oh, so rare!) when they are one of D&D's main ways of adding powers to a party besides character progression. At least, AZAG allows you going that route. Magical items are a great way to add (or sometimes, take away) capabilities. There's a reason that the gear you carry can play such a big role in many adventure and fantasy stories.