In-character vs out-of-character progression

[NichG]

In almost every system I've seen, character progression is a predominantly out-of-character exercise. That is to say, there's usually some abstract resource such as XP which accumulates more or less regardless of your particular in-character actions, and is spent to progress in ways that, again, are basically unrelated to your in-character actions. Even systems with wealth usually either don't tie wealth to significant character ability, or have things such as wealth-by-level which rubberband wealth to some target value set by the abstract XP resource.

The downside of this is that if players are experiencing progression as a carrot which helps to engage them with the game, it's not actually engaging them with the gameplay itself but rather with the system's character building minigame. That in turn can create nonsensical incentives - yes this guy is threatening to end the world, but if we drag our heels for a session or two and not do anything too risky, we'll all level up!

On the other hand, when you do make progression an in-character exercise, the problem is spotlight time. If each character has to actually pursue personal plotlines in order to advance, you're either going to end up with each session being one person's advancement game until you go around in turn, or end up with lots of time spent at the table on low-detail micro-advancement ('shopping games', essentially), or no one will end up advancing because the table as a whole would rather pursue the overarching plotline (in which case, advancement might be worked into that plotline but it will be hard to make it personal or distinct between characters). The most successful implementations I've seen involve essentially uptime adventuring which provides the abstract XP resource, but where spending that XP requires specific downtime character actions - so essentially XP buys you opportunities to pursue individual advancement, rather than just giving you that advancement directly.

I'm wondering how one would design a game where all advancement is strictly due to in-character, uptime actions, and there is no abstract XP-like resource at all. Is there a solution to the spotlight sharing problem this creates?

[Anymage]

I remember seeing a couple of games (Call of Cthulhu and Ars Magica come immediately to mind) where XP was tied to using a given skill during a play session. That did occasionally encourage PCs who tried to find excuses to use every skill possible, but in general the prospect of failing kept people from making too many critical low-skill rolls.

Then again, XP from skill use does work best if the the focus of the game is on skills. And going from +7 in a skill to +8 can often feel underwhelming. If you have more significant jumps in power, either a leveling system or a system where you can grow your character with specific mechanical shticks, using XP as a player carrot and/or treadmill driver seems like it's the order of the day.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

I think a "use a skill to improve it" system works best in video games, it's just too much bookkeeping. I have thought about some minor nods in that direction before, as in you can only invest the points you gained this level in anything you used since gaining the last one. You can still build the perfect build you wanted to, but you'll have to save the points up until you've done something with the skill you want to improve.

For new skills you'd need some sort of learning moment, which would at least make those pretty in character. Asking the fighter to show you how to ride is more of a story thing than deciding to multiclass to cavalier out of the blue.

[Scarf Dude]

I agree that computer automation makes that sort of "improve through practice" system far more reasonable. However, I have seen one RPG (Mouseguard) manage it wonderfully. There were three reasons it seems to work well.

1: Its relatively low-crunch character design.
2: Skills require failures as well as successes to progress.
3: The game emphasizes using fewer rolls, if the outcome being in doubt doesn't impact the story, don't roll for it.

Having a game that misses even one check mark on that list would likely break down quickly.

[Darth Ultron]

Well, are not the answers: Have a Big Spotlight and have XP Story/Event Awards?

The first step is easy enough: everyone is in a big spotlight. So the ''focus'' is on the whole group, not each individual. Each characters personal plotline is part of the big plot.

The second is pretty simple: to get a good amount of XP the characters must do x. If they do they get a lot of XP, if they fail, they only get a little.

And for a third twist, the two above do mix very, very well. Like have the player make the role playing side of their character (not just all the roll playing numbers). You want to have the character have set hopes and dreams and fears and such. Then you want to set up such things in the game, and reward the player for the role playing. It is easy to do the ''my character is greedy'' and have the player get all excited when the character finds a chest of gold....but that hard part is where the character is very afraid of spiders, and role plays that even to the point having a bad effect(but also a good effect of more XP).

The fourth one is also more XP for working together as a group....but this is more just an importing thing to me. So a player gets like 10 xp if they go all evil, cruel lone wolf...but they get like 100 xp for working together with the rest of the group.

[NichG]

The use-a-skill-to-improve-it is an example, but yeah, it's a lot of book-keeping and it ends up being a bit grindy I think ('I'd better find an excuse to use all my skills this session...').

Maybe a better example of the kind of thing I'm thinking of is how in Vampire you can arrange to diablerize an older-generation vampire to improve your own generation. It's a bigger deal mechanically, and isn't really something you could rely on or just expect to get automatically. So your character really has to say 'one of my goals is to gain this power' and figure out how that can be achieved. It's also not something you can really split with other characters, and its a rare enough opportunity that comes with enough problems that it's not likely to be available to everyone in the group. A D&D example would be Planar Touchstones, how you can get things like location-specific powers or even up to a free feat, but you really do have to go out of your way to hunt those things down in-character to get the benefits. In both cases, this is pretty much a small extra bit added to the core of advancement-through-regular-XP-gain.

When I've tried to make games in which all advancement involves that kind of thing, generally it's caused problems with some players just not bothering to pursue advancement at all and ending up hopelessly behind.

[weckar]

I think a "use a skill to improve it" system works best in video games, it's just too much bookkeeping. I have thought about some minor nods in that direction before, as in you can only invest the points you gained this level in anything you used since gaining the last one. You can still build the perfect build you wanted to, but you'll have to save the points up until you've done something with the skill you want to improve.

For new skills you'd need some sort of learning moment, which would at least make those pretty in character. Asking the fighter to show you how to ride is more of a story thing than deciding to multiclass to cavalier out of the blue.

That's actually kind of clever. You could just mark every skill as you use it, and erase all the marks upon a level up.

[Lacco]

That's actually kind of clever. You could just mark every skill as you use it, and erase all the marks upon a level up.

RoS gives you "marks" every time you practice your skill for some time and/or every time you successfully use it under duress.

Once you hit 3 marks, you roll Mental Aptitude (equivalent of INT) against target number determined by your current skill (it's harder to learn new things the better your skill is). If you succeed, you improve the skill. If you fail, you erase 2 marks and can try it again. Makes the Mental Aptitude good attribute to put points in.

You can spend local variant of "experience points" to both force the roll and to automatically succeed in it.

[weckar]

RoS being.... what?

[Beleriphon]

RoS being.... what?

If I had to guess, riddle of steel.

[Max_Killjoy]

The Planet Mercenary RPG is a skill-only system, and you get X number of skill points to spend at the end of each "Job" (normally X=3).

Two have to be spent in Skills you used, and the third (or whatever remainder) can be spent anywhere.

[Lacco]

If I had to guess, riddle of steel.

Correct!

You win...

...well, let me get back at you when I figure what

[Max_Killjoy]

Correct!

You win...

...well, let me get back at you when I figure what

Having answered the Riddle, does he not win Steel?

[FreddyNoNose]

Bushido RPG back in the 70s had a fun skill system.

You had starting skills for which you get the Initial Skill Score (only during character creation). Afterwards, this skill plus other skills needed to be trained up. Then score can be from 0 - 99. Divide by 5 and drop remain to determine the base chance of success with that skill. So a 50, would succeed on 1-10 on d20. If it is a bonus skill, you add the level to the base chance. There are levels 1 - 6.

Kenjutsu: Swordsmanship. The most highly regarded of the Bugei: the principle martial technique of the Bushi. The character is drilled in the use of the Nodachi, Katana, and Wakizashi in combat as single weapon forms. Two-Sword technique is known as Ni-To-Kenjutsu, described below.
BONUS: Bushi
INITIAL SKILL SCORE: Strength+Deftness+Will

To train up, takes a lot of time and money. The basic training period is 10 days. You characters basic learning rate is the average of your wit + wil vs your class and will be a value of 1 - 3. You have a number of freely improvable skills equal to your wit, afterwards you get a penalty to learning. There are various bonuses and penalties. Penalties are call hindrances.
How much you learn in a week is calculated as follows:
(Learning Rate + Learning Bonuses)/(2 x Learning Hindrances).

[ZamielVanWeber]

That's actually kind of clever. You could just mark every skill as you use it, and erase all the marks upon a level up.

That is exactly what Continuum does. As you use a skill or stat you fill a piece of a clock. Fill up enough clocks et voila, skill level up. It was a cool idea but worked out badly in practice.

[Anonymouswizard]

I think for 'use skills to improve' it's still hard to beat Basic Roleplaying. Use a skill (or possibly succeed, can't remember) and you get to make a check against it, then at the end of every session you get to roll against your checked skills, a failure means you get better. This means that it's harder to get better at the skills you're already good at.

I think I discovered why I hate 'train to improve' systems as soon as I played a game that uses it, my character with an actual job was seriously disadvantaged. Training gave you one point per 200 hours, but doing my job only counted for one hour out of four. Oh, and an eight hour maximum for training and work in a single day, which meant not only did the skills the party need me to develop didn't advance, the skills for my job advanced so slowly they'd never get to the point I'd make enough money to make up for it.

[Anymage]

To play devil's advocate a bit here, while systems that give you XP for doing skills are interesting when you want to explore a theme and don't mind if balance isn't the highest priority, they have a couple of downsides.

First, many settings like to give explicit powers. Often because explicit powers are cool for both players (who get an awesome ability that's less dependent on the vagaries of GM approval), and GMs as well (who don't have to spitball target numbers for awesome moves). If I'm playing Exalted and my archer does a particularly impressive trick shot, where would the XP-for-doing XP go? Towards dexterity? Towards archery? Banked towards the next charm in the tree?

Second, sometimes balance is more important than the specifics of using XP as a carrot. If we're playing 4e D&D, a level discrepancy is more hassle than it's worth. No matter who's been using what skills more often, who's been interacting with the NPCs more, or who has a better attendance record.

[weckar]

It was a cool idea but worked out badly in practice.

Continuum in a nutshell.

[Quertus]

I'm wondering how one would design a game where all advancement is strictly due to in-character, uptime actions, and there is no abstract XP-like resource at all. Is there a solution to the spotlight sharing problem this creates?

Imo, such a game sounds like it would be horrible. Spent the past two years of downtime non-stop training for the Olympics? Who cares? You didn't roll athletics this session, you can't advance it. Bob spent the past two years of downtime as a couch potato, but he rolled athletics, so now he's better than you.

Personally, the closest thing to the kind of system you describe that I've enjoyed still gave an abstract XP resource, and, although I could only spend it on things I could make a case for, I could simply save it for later. I automatically succeed in making my case for things I used / succeeded / failed (I can't remember which) X times, and put a mark on the sheet whenever that happened to be able to make my case. Downtime was another good way to make a case.

Personally, I don't feel that I learned Math / English / Chemistry / Programming / Firearms / whatever IRL by making a certain number of rolls during "uptime", so this system doesn't feel very simulation oriented... what's the point of trying to design an advancement system this way?

Also, cue obligatory response regarding a pair of thieves reaching epic levels of skill by constantly stealing from each other during a several day journey.

The use-a-skill-to-improve-it is an example, but yeah, it's a lot of book-keeping and it ends up being a bit grindy I think ('I'd better find an excuse to use all my skills this session...').

Maybe a better example of the kind of thing I'm thinking of is how in Vampire you can arrange to diablerize an older-generation vampire to improve your own generation. It's a bigger deal mechanically, and isn't really something you could rely on or just expect to get automatically. So your character really has to say 'one of my goals is to gain this power' and figure out how that can be achieved. It's also not something you can really split with other characters, and its a rare enough opportunity that comes with enough problems that it's not likely to be available to everyone in the group. A D&D example would be Planar Touchstones, how you can get things like location-specific powers or even up to a free feat, but you really do have to go out of your way to hunt those things down in-character to get the benefits. In both cases, this is pretty much a small extra bit added to the core of advancement-through-regular-XP-gain.

When I've tried to make games in which all advancement involves that kind of thing, generally it's caused problems with some players just not bothering to pursue advancement at all and ending up hopelessly behind.

And this demonstrates the value of gating advancement by a finite abstract resource. As cool as your system sounds, it's not everyone's cup of tea. Unless you limit advancement by some abstract XP, you will inevitably encounter such balance problems when you have players who exhibit different levels of engagement with whatever you implement for the advancement minigame.

[NichG]

Imo, such a game sounds like it would be horrible. Spent the past two years of downtime non-stop training for the Olympics? Who cares? You didn't roll athletics this session, you can't advance it. Bob spent the past two years of downtime as a couch potato, but he rolled athletics, so now he's better than you.

On the contrary, what I'm aiming for would probably be more like:

'I got sponsored for the Olympics (in uptime) which led to me being assigned all sorts of training resources which I've been taking advantage of non-stop, so it doesn't matter if this is my 10th session of this character and your 200th session, I am going to be better at athletics than your character who has spent the entire game running fetch quests'

I'm not so focused on 'you advance what you use'. I'm focused on 'you advance what you, in character, pursue advancement in'. And to really explore this idea, there must be a very big difference possible between characters that seek out and sacrifice things for rare opportunities to advance, compared to just 'I dedicate myself to training'. So I'm interested also in the extreme cases where its like 'okay, you're all normal mortals in a mundane world, but if you go and hunt down the last remaining copy of the true Book of the Dead, you (and anyone who studies it for a few weeks) can now use necromancy at an archmage level regardless of how experienced your character is, and anyone who doesn't simply can't no matter how awesome they are'.

And this demonstrates the value of gating advancement by a finite abstract resource. As cool as your system sounds, it's not everyone's cup of tea. Unless you limit advancement by some abstract XP, you will inevitably encounter such balance problems when you have players who exhibit different levels of engagement with whatever you implement for the advancement minigame.

I suspect the easiest solution involves making the advancement objectives being something that the party can share. If we take the 'book of the dead' example, once the party has acquired it then everyone gets to be a necromancer, and before the party has acquired it no one gets to be a necromancer. Of course if you do that, characters are going to end up being very samey. If the shared advancement resources are actual physical objects that have to be held by the user (e.g. loot), then as long as the party has a reasonable way of divvying up loot you'd preserve character differentiation, so that could be workable.

[Slipperychicken]

I'm wondering how one would design a game where all advancement is strictly due to in-character, uptime actions, and there is no abstract XP-like resource at all. Is there a solution to the spotlight sharing problem this creates?

Pendragon has skill advancement that works partially in this manner, so I think you'd want to look into that. I think that skills got a chance to upgrade on some unlikely result.

Also, I think downtime should count for something. Maybe have training give extra chances to get better, and/or use it to increase the chance of uptime skill upgrades.

I think I discovered why I hate 'train to improve' systems as soon as I played a game that uses it, my character with an actual job was seriously disadvantaged. Training gave you one point per 200 hours, but doing my job only counted for one hour out of four. Oh, and an eight hour maximum for training and work in a single day, which meant not only did the skills the party need me to develop didn't advance, the skills for my job advanced so slowly they'd never get to the point I'd make enough money to make up for it.

What system is this?

[Anonymouswizard]

What system is this?

GURPS, using the skill training rules. Weirdly, in a more modern or futuristic setting where everybody has a job and you can expect weeks of downtime where you do nothing but work and train I think it would work much better, but I was literally the only member of the party with a job, which used a skill that wouldn't help the party. So while they all increased their swords and stealth and tracking and other adventuring skills I had to put more points towards Merchant (which was already my highest skill! I should never have built to concept).

[Algeh]

GURPS, using the skill training rules. Weirdly, in a more modern or futuristic setting where everybody has a job and you can expect weeks of downtime where you do nothing but work and train I think it would work much better, but I was literally the only member of the party with a job, which used a skill that wouldn't help the party. So while they all increased their swords and stealth and tracking and other adventuring skills I had to put more points towards Merchant (which was already my highest skill! I should never have built to concept).

This sounds more like GURPS was accurately modeling the situation that it sucks to be the only person with a job when all of your buddies don't need one than a problem with the skill advancement system per se. (In real life, I have a friend who spends hours a week training things like Morris dancing and madrigal singing in addition to recreational mathematics, which I have no time to do because I have to go to work and teach math to middle and high school students instead. He is probably leveling up in math faster than me even though I use it in my job since he gets to think about just the things he doesn't already know and I have to think about new and better ways to explain things I already understand instead.)

[Slipperychicken]

This sounds more like GURPS was accurately modeling the situation that it sucks to be the only person with a job when all of your buddies don't need one than a problem with the skill advancement system per se. (In real life, I have a friend who spends hours a week training things like Morris dancing and madrigal singing in addition to recreational mathematics, which I have no time to do because I have to go to work and teach math to middle and high school students instead. He is probably leveling up in math faster than me even though I use it in my job since he gets to think about just the things he doesn't already know and I have to think about new and better ways to explain things I already understand instead.)

This more or less sums up my thoughts too. It's worth noting that in Shadowrun, having a 9-5 day job is considered a serious disadvantage because it simply doesn't leave the time or energy for PC-activities like training and spontaneous mercenary violence.

If something like honing your skills a for violent life-or-death struggle actually is that much more important than your day job, and you can afford to live comfortably without the job (i.e. your violent struggle pays better than your job), then you probably shouldn't be spending your weekdays on the job.

[Quertus]

I'm not so focused on 'you advance what you use'. I'm focused on 'you advance what you, in character, pursue advancement in'. And to really explore this idea, there must be a very big difference possible between characters that seek out and sacrifice things for rare opportunities to advance, compared to just 'I dedicate myself to training'. So I'm interested also in the extreme cases where its like 'okay, you're all normal mortals in a mundane world, but if you go and hunt down the last remaining copy of the true Book of the Dead, you (and anyone who studies it for a few weeks) can now use necromancy at an archmage level regardless of how experienced your character is, and anyone who doesn't simply can't no matter how awesome they are'.

I suspect the easiest solution involves making the advancement objectives being something that the party can share. If we take the 'book of the dead' example, once the party has acquired it then everyone gets to be a necromancer, and before the party has acquired it no one gets to be a necromancer. Of course if you do that, characters are going to end up being very samey.

Advancing what you pursue advancement in sounds interesting. Having a character who, in his 10th session, becomes better at something (like athletics) than his fellow character will ever be, even after 200 sessions, sounds interesting.

No one being able to independently develop Necromancy is... Hmmm... setting dependent? I developed my own math theories - what would a character in such a system need to pursue to have the mad skills to roll their own Necromancy / develop their own unique skills?

Making the party samey through shared opportunities highlights a potential issue with such a system: the opportunities provided are very GM dependent. The samey nature of the resulting characters is just one side effect of this choice. Another is, if this is a major part of the character's capabilities being controlled by the GM, well, every failure of the game is the GMs fault. Personally, I generally prefer the player agency of getting to advance the character in the direction I choose for the character over the GM saying, "this level, you're taking a level in Barbarian, and spending your skill points on X & Y". While I personally would enjoy having the Book of the Dead and having near-unique Necromancy abilities. But someone who only cares about their knight killing goblins more better may not find this book as cool as I would, and so may not get add much out of the game as I do.

So, I can see this working better as a pitch for a game (let's play the guys who got a hold of the Book of Necromancy) than as something that develops organically in a game.

[NichG]

Advancing what you pursue advancement in sounds interesting. Having a character who, in his 10th session, becomes better at something (like athletics) than his fellow character will ever be, even after 200 sessions, sounds interesting.

No one being able to independently develop Necromancy is... Hmmm... setting dependent? I developed my own math theories - what would a character in such a system need to pursue to have the mad skills to roll their own Necromancy / develop their own unique skills?

In practice, your quest to make necromancy a thing probably starts with locating 'accidental' acts of necromancy in nature or in the populace, tracking down stories about necromancy, etc. The reason being, you not only don't know necromancy, but you also don't a priori know what would be required in order to invent it. So you need to find phenomena in the world that suggest that it's even possible, first. Ideally, that would mean getting your hands on an actual functioning undead to study - that might make it quite easy. But if such things just don't happen naturally and there are no necromancers, how would you even know that necromancy is a possibility? Someone might, for example, look at the phenomena that electric discharges cause muscles to respond even after death, and end up going down a Frankensteinian path. Or maybe you'd investigate reports of hauntings in the hope of discovering an actual ghost that you could study.

Once you've gotten your initial lead, you probably will need a steady supply of death in order to study and refine your ideas. You could maybe do that by becoming a camp follower in a major war , or get an appointment to the morgue of a major city, or prey off a village in secret for decades. And it may well be that exposure to some mystical circumstances would be required before you can really interact with the cosmic forces you need to - perhaps you need to have a near death experience yourself, for example. Finding out about those requirements would be pretty tough - you'd basically have to hope that you run into stories about someone who satisfied the requirements accidentally and started having weird stuff happen around them.

There would simply be no way to just sit down for a few days and say 'okay, I rolled well so that means I had an epiphany and now necromancy is a thing'. But the flip side of that is, if you did happen to stumble upon hints that something new and supernatural is going on over the course of an adventure, that instantly catapults you forward in the discovery process compared to someone sitting in a library and trying to just figure it out using philosophy or book learning. Even if this is your third week on the job and they've been trying for their entire careers, if you run into a natural necromancer and their risen pet, you might solve in the next few weeks what would have taken legions of scholars centuries of study to achieve otherwise - no gating behind levels or XP or 'innate skill' or anything like that.

Making the party samey through shared opportunities highlights a potential issue with such a system: the opportunities provided are very GM dependent. The samey nature of the resulting characters is just one side effect of this choice. Another is, if this is a major part of the character's capabilities being controlled by the GM, well, every failure of the game is the GMs fault. Personally, I generally prefer the player agency of getting to advance the character in the direction I choose for the character over the GM saying, "this level, you're taking a level in Barbarian, and spending your skill points on X & Y". While I personally would enjoy having the Book of the Dead and having near-unique Necromancy abilities. But someone who only cares about their knight killing goblins more better may not find this book as cool as I would, and so may not get add much out of the game as I do.

So, I can see this working better as a pitch for a game (let's play the guys who got a hold of the Book of Necromancy) than as something that develops organically in a game.

The way to make it player dependent is for the players to choose their goals and inform the GM of them, and to have a setting where pursuing very wide-ranging and open-ended goals is a feasible thing to do. For example, I was in a campaign where the setup was basically that the party lived in a demiplane at the end of time, and could open doors to any place they could describe. So we did have games where someone said for example 'I want to become a Jedi, so lets open a door to Star Wars and find someone to teach us'. That worked quite well for that particular campaign premise, but for a more general campaign it could work as well, so long as the players are clear that if they want something they need to take in-character actions to pursue it.

But this gets to the spotlight sharing issue. In your example, you might go treasure hunting for the Book of the Dead, but your knight friend is going to be dragged along assuming you're all playing at the same table together. Then, after a 3 game arc where you hunt down the book, he might want to take the party on his own 3 game arc looking for the lost sword Excalibur. And then the next person in the group has their own 3 game arc and... well, before you know it, it's been a year of game and you've just been doing disconnected personal power-up arcs.

I think if you even had something like a 75/25 blend of personal powerup arcs and main plot arcs that could still work, but in such a campaign they're always going to feel in tension against each-other (the same was true of the doorways campaign I described - there was often a tension between 'I want to power up today' vs 'hey, don't we have leads we should be tracking down?', but we had 10 hour long sessions and lots of between-game downtime actions, so we often had enough time to do something like a 50/50 split even within the individual sessions - before dinner we power up, after dinner we plot).

[Slipperychicken]

In practice, your quest to make necromancy a thing

Adding the ability to raise the dead into a pre-existing campaign world is a tall order, story-wise. Chances are there might have been something else the group to explore with the story, and it'd take some real narrative gymnastics to not make the whole game about life and death (or at least the necromancer's struggle against the status quo) after that.

So if a player wants to pursue something potentially story-wrecking like necromancy, I'd say it should go through a conversation with the GM first. If it simply isn't compatible with the game concept, then the GM should have the chance to refuse it. But if the GM and player are both okay with exploring a mad hopeless obsession with returning a loved one from the grave (or a desire to live forever, etc), accepting OOC that they'll most likely never get a "true" resurrection, then I'd be okay with having them go the Herbert West route with it. Or maybe there's some kind of restriction on the whole art; you can get temporary mindless zombies, but not 'actually' bring people back from the dead.

[FreddyNoNose]

I think a "use a skill to improve it" system works best in video games, it's just too much bookkeeping. I have thought about some minor nods in that direction before, as in you can only invest the points you gained this level in anything you used since gaining the last one. You can still build the perfect build you wanted to, but you'll have to save the points up until you've done something with the skill you want to improve.

For new skills you'd need some sort of learning moment, which would at least make those pretty in character. Asking the fighter to show you how to ride is more of a story thing than deciding to multiclass to cavalier out of the blue.

I might be recalling this incorrectly, but didn't some version of call of cthulhu have a mark it if you used it and do something when you "level" or something????

[Anonymouswizard]

I might be recalling this incorrectly, but didn't some version of call of cthulhu have a mark it if you used it and do something when you "level" or something????

AFB, but I believe it goes:
-Succeed at a skill check and the GM may allow you to check the skill (and in my mind probably should, CoC is dangerous enough as it is). You can have up to ten skills checked.
-At the end of a session roll against each checked skill. This is an advancement check.
-Each failed advancement check adds 1d10 to the skill.

[Quertus]

In practice, your quest to make necromancy a thing probably starts with locating 'accidental' acts of necromancy in nature or in the populace, tracking down stories about necromancy, etc. The reason being, you not only don't know necromancy, but you also don't a priori know what would be required in order to invent it. So you need to find phenomena in the world that suggest that it's even possible, first. Ideally, that would mean getting your hands on an actual functioning undead to study - that might make it quite easy. But if such things just don't happen naturally and there are no necromancers, how would you even know that necromancy is a possibility? Someone might, for example, look at the phenomena that electric discharges cause muscles to respond even after death, and end up going down a Frankensteinian path. Or maybe you'd investigate reports of hauntings in the hope of discovering an actual ghost that you could study.

Once you've gotten your initial lead, you probably will need a steady supply of death in order to study and refine your ideas. You could maybe do that by becoming a camp follower in a major war , or get an appointment to the morgue of a major city, or prey off a village in secret for decades. And it may well be that exposure to some mystical circumstances would be required before you can really interact with the cosmic forces you need to - perhaps you need to have a near death experience yourself, for example. Finding out about those requirements would be pretty tough - you'd basically have to hope that you run into stories about someone who satisfied the requirements accidentally and started having weird stuff happen around them.

There would simply be no way to just sit down for a few days and say 'okay, I rolled well so that means I had an epiphany and now necromancy is a thing'. But the flip side of that is, if you did happen to stumble upon hints that something new and supernatural is going on over the course of an adventure, that instantly catapults you forward in the discovery process compared to someone sitting in a library and trying to just figure it out using philosophy or book learning. Even if this is your third week on the job and they've been trying for their entire careers, if you run into a natural necromancer and their risen pet, you might solve in the next few weeks what would have taken legions of scholars centuries of study to achieve otherwise - no gating behind levels or XP or 'innate skill' or anything like that.



The way to make it player dependent is for the players to choose their goals and inform the GM of them, and to have a setting where pursuing very wide-ranging and open-ended goals is a feasible thing to do. For example, I was in a campaign where the setup was basically that the party lived in a demiplane at the end of time, and could open doors to any place they could describe. So we did have games where someone said for example 'I want to become a Jedi, so lets open a door to Star Wars and find someone to teach us'. That worked quite well for that particular campaign premise, but for a more general campaign it could work as well, so long as the players are clear that if they want something they need to take in-character actions to pursue it.

But this gets to the spotlight sharing issue. In your example, you might go treasure hunting for the Book of the Dead, but your knight friend is going to be dragged along assuming you're all playing at the same table together. Then, after a 3 game arc where you hunt down the book, he might want to take the party on his own 3 game arc looking for the lost sword Excalibur. And then the next person in the group has their own 3 game arc and... well, before you know it, it's been a year of game and you've just been doing disconnected personal power-up arcs.

I think if you even had something like a 75/25 blend of personal powerup arcs and main plot arcs that could still work, but in such a campaign they're always going to feel in tension against each-other (the same was true of the doorways campaign I described - there was often a tension between 'I want to power up today' vs 'hey, don't we have leads we should be tracking down?', but we had 10 hour long sessions and lots of between-game downtime actions, so we often had enough time to do something like a 50/50 split even within the individual sessions - before dinner we power up, after dinner we plot).

Adding the ability to raise the dead into a pre-existing campaign world is a tall order, story-wise. Chances are there might have been something else the group to explore with the story, and it'd take some real narrative gymnastics to not make the whole game about life and death (or at least the necromancer's struggle against the status quo) after that.

So if a player wants to pursue something potentially story-wrecking like necromancy, I'd say it should go through a conversation with the GM first. If it simply isn't compatible with the game concept, then the GM should have the chance to refuse it. But if the GM and player are both okay with exploring a mad hopeless obsession with returning a loved one from the grave (or a desire to live forever, etc), accepting OOC that they'll most likely never get a "true" resurrection, then I'd be okay with having them go the Herbert West route with it. Or maybe there's some kind of restriction on the whole art; you can get temporary mindless zombies, but not 'actually' bring people back from the dead.

... This sounds a lot like the reasons why I like these kinds of things to be "backburner" tasks, rather than central to the character's advancement and capabilities.

My signature character, Quertus, for whom this account is named, has catalogued creatures on hundreds of worlds in dozens of realities, researched countless custom spells, has learned roughly a dozen forms of magic, at least a half dozen ways to conceal dwoemers, and built numerous magical items, golems, and spacefaring vessels. But none of this was required for him to level, none of this was derailing to the general party goal, it just happened naturally as Quertus adventured. And he still has dozens of open "backburner" projects that he'd pursue if given the opportunity.

This sounds, to me, so much better than making the game about (maybe) leveling my character.