Because it's a game, not a story and players want to gain "points". Levels and experience are just one way of codifying "points", as is "Character Points", as is shiney new Stuff, as is NPC relationships, as is in-game political power and so on.

Are there any known instances of retro-fitting non-level progression to D&D?

Quote from: Caesar Slaad;365342More generally, it's Operant Conditioning (psychology of rewards) and Campbellian heroes at work in game form. The latter, of course, makes more sense in a fantasy setting.

You bin book lernin' agin?

Quote from: flyingmice;365345If I read your game I will understand fantasy? Cool!

-clash

I hope so. Seriously its meant to basically convey the idea of fantastic heroes and playing them well. Why we have Sagas, and Eddas, and so on and so forth.

Maybe not though. I think its a superior work to H&S, but different.

There is no grand design in the use of levels. It evolved out of the Fantasy Supplement for Chainmail. Where a Hero was worth 4 men and a Super Hero 8 men. Wizards has a similar legacy from Chainmail. As D&D grew out of Chainmail levels of progression was seen as the natural away to handle the experience gained on adventures.

Once D&D left the midwest then people started thinking of other ways of modeling character development and advancement.

Because of D&D position as the first roleplaying game it was the most imitated.

All of the concepts that went into D&D had similar routes before winding up in the original edition. The genius was Arneson and Gygax putting these elements together to allow individual character to advance and grow in a campaign setting moderated by a referee.

Once D&D started to spread and the initial ah-ha! moment passed people stated to think of how to do these things differently, better (namely because the original edition wasn't the best edited piece of writing around), or more realistically.

Even though Ninja's and Superspies is a level based game, the characters start with most of the power they will ever have, with the exception of some internal martial artists.

Runequest has been around since '78 and it's never had levels. It has formed a substantial part of fantasy gaming for many years, especially when you count variants like Elric etc.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;365412Runequest has been around since '78 and it's never had levels. It has formed a substantial part of fantasy gaming for many years, especially when you count variants like Elric etc.

8It grew out of the Perrin Conventions which was a collected series of house rules for D&D on the West Coast for (mostly adjudicating combat) and then proceeded to shed the character classes in favor of skills and the use of percentage dice.  But you can see some of D&D leaking through through the the 3d6 characteristic roll and some of the attributes.

Tunnels & Trolls started because the author that D&D had the right idea but was written stupidly and way too complicated.

I am not saying every 70s era RPG was derivative of D&D. But D&D cast a long shadow because it defined the game. Much of was done was done in because of D&D or reaction to D&D. And it not a bad thing because after it was done people had a grip on RPGs. Really started to think about the types of games you could make and the diversity began to grow a lot.

You can read up on the origins of Runequest here.

http://www.weareallus.com/runequestpage.html

Quote from: Caesar Slaad;365342More generally, it's Operant Conditioning (psychology of rewards) and Campbellian heroes at work in game form. The latter, of course, makes more sense in a fantasy setting.

This post pretty much nails it. Rob Conley accurately explains how it came to be, but I feel that explanation, in itself, doesn't fully acknowledge why the level model stayed on the long term.

Humans like to receive rewards at random intervals. You can never be sure on how long it will take to get to the next level, as it depends on what the GM has in store for you. So, from time to time you level up and get new perks. Also, the levelling makes character mechanical development easier and it makes also easier to calculate the difficulty of encounters.

Operant conditioning + appeal to laziness = win

The first fantasy roleplaying game used levels and the rest just uncritically copied it.

PS:

Any fantasy game which features a bestiary that is part Tolkien, part all other myths and folkore mixed in a blender and features priests as healing machines clearly looked for inspiration at D&D first and then other literary and sources second.

Okay put he level thing to one side for a moment as that was really my entry point not the thrust of my query.
Why is progression less important in non fantasy games,? I guess this is the thrust of it. The level advancement of Fantansy games liek D&D have a much more rapid power progression than a skills based game, which tend to be the modus for modern games.
RQ is an exception and I suspect the template for most of the modern games but why did that trope get adopted over the D&D model.
And lastly why do we bitch about 4e characters starting off tough when we don't do that in Bushido, or Traveller, or ...

(PS. just started thinking about Savage Worlds where there are levels, kind of, and skills, but it kind of feels different does that make it another trope?)

Quote from: Caesar Slaad;365342More generally, it's Operant Conditioning (psychology of rewards) and Campbellian heroes at work in game form. The latter, of course, makes more sense in a fantasy setting.

I would add that "levels" also let a player know how well they are doing, allow two players to compare achievements, and let a player keep a sort of "top score".  In other words, it lets players compare their achievements and have a measure by which they can "win" in competition with others.

Quote from: jibbajibba;365434Why is progression less important in non fantasy games,? I guess this is the thrust of it. The level advancement of Fantansy games liek D&D have a much more rapid power progression than a skills based game, which tend to be the modus for modern games.

Influence of Traveller. Not so much the mechanics but the realization that in-game advancement can be as satisfying as advancement of the mechanical advancement of your character. In addition many of the RPGs of the time focused on being realistic compared to the abstract nature of D&D. When a genre was first explored by an RPG invariably the designers did NOT chose an abstract mechanic. Later towards the mid 80s this trend reversed.

Quote from: jibbajibba;365434Okay put he level thing to one side for a moment as that was really my entry point not the thrust of my query.
Why is progression less important in non fantasy games,? I guess this is the thrust of it. The level advancement of Fantansy games liek D&D have a much more rapid power progression than a skills based game, which tend to be the modus for modern games.

It still comes down to D&D. D&D set a template for play which was based on going of levels and getting more stuff. The majority of fantasy games that followed mimiced this, but it doesn't mean that this is right or the natural state of things for fantasy games, it's just a quirk of history.

Games that broke off from the fantasy mould offered a better chance to review the bases assumption of D&D. But then again a lot of non-fantasy games (especially by TSR) still followed the D&D model closely with levels and treasure.

I'm sure a lot of it is just history/tradition...
I wonder if the non-fantasy-non-progression thing also ties into why fantasy, in general is a more popular genre amongst RPGs.
To my mind it ties in with the whole wish-fulfillment aspect that fantasy seems to cater to... more so than a lot of scifi/historical/horror games do.
Part of that wish fulfillment is the power-fantasy of turning into a superhero... even though it's often just an illusion and the bigger-badder critters are no more of a challenge to the top levels than the wild dogs were at lvl 1.
Folks who prefer the scifi and horror stuff maybe just aren't as into seeing their character morph that way.
I know I dislike levels in general and prefer any progression to be in the form in-game resources... skills to progress when used and degrade if ignored... and I much prefer horror and scifi to high fantasy.