Kapol said:
One final thought to add in: Static really sounds like a shooter more then an RPG. Maybe a shooter with RPG elements, but a shooter overall. Again, like Mass Effect 2.
Actually, there's a lot of tabletop RPGs that employ semi-static stat systems, most notably Exalted and Shadowrun. I employed a static stat system myself, in a game called Super Smash Quest. It's exactly what it sounds like, an RPG based on the Super Smash Bros. fighting game series.
The premise is that after the tournament in melee, Bowser and Ganondorf, sore losers that they are, left the Stadium to pool their resources and pursue their own devices: namely, attacking the Stadium. Since the Stadium is a place between worlds, it has no defenders of its own. Mario, Link, Kirby, etc. all have their own worlds that they have to defend. So, they recruited some willing fans to protect the Stadium. Professors E. Gadd and Oak combined their efforts to create a device called the Fighter Remote, which could infuse any ordinary person with the powers of the fighters; and thus, the Super Smash Questers were born.
Week after week we'd have a new "episode" following the Star Trek model, with some problem that needed solving in the Stadium, an unusual case in one of the other worlds that needed investigating, or a scheme by Bowser and Ganondorf (and later, Dracula from Castlevania) that needed foiling, usually resulting in an away mission. In between players would be able to compete in the Stadium with one another and even challenge the Smash Bros. fighters.
The stats themselves were derived from Exalted and mostly static, the reason being that this was an extremely long-running game (it's been going on for almost ten years now, in the same IRC chatroom it was founded in) with an extremely large player base (50 people at the game's height) that would gain and lose members all the time. Stability mattered a lot more than power curve or progression in that we wanted new players to be able to jump in with old ones and not feel overshadowed too much and that we wanted to prevent "DBZ syndrome," IE the game's power level spiraling out of control such that the game masters couldn't reasonably keep up with the players without cheating. We'd guess at how powerful a boss needed to be in order to challenge the players, then be
way off and have to adjust mid-fight. With a static system, there was no guesswork. We knew exactly how powerful or tricky we'd want an enemy to be in relation to the players, and just... make them that powerful.
The times we experimented with traditional leveling systems always resulted in this in the long-term. But, we still wanted to differentiate peoples' play styles and physical parameters as fighters. That's what the stats mainly existed for, and we found a lot of success with that model. OCCASIONALLY a character would be awarded with a point to advance their stats in some way, but we made sure this didn't happen often.
Progression was handled--as the OP says--mainly through acquisition of new equipment. Players were awarded a salary for every mission that they completed, with bonuses for achievements that they earned, much like the end-of-battle achievements in the Smash Bros. games themselves (star finisher, home run, no specials, et cetera). Those could be used to buy items like the Home Run Bat, Metal Box, Heart Container, and others, which could be carried in a pack and used at will, or to buy "badges" not unlike the ones from the Paper Mario games.
They also could collect the moves of the Smash Bros. fighters not unlike how you collect Pokemon in... well, Pokemon, with the stipulation that they could carry only four at a time on a mission, so they'd obtain greater versatility in movesets as the game progressed, with ones that their stat blocks supported better (IE heavy characters got more benefit out of using Bowser or Ganondorf's moves, fast characters got more benefit out of Captain Falcon or Pikachu's moves, etc.) being generally more desirable and delivering a greater sense of power when acquired. Additionally, moves could be upgraded a la Earthbound, with Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Epsilon, and Omega versions of all the special attacks, and there was an expanding set of "normal" moves that could be chained into combos.
All in all it's still one of the best role-playing games I've designed, which is pretty bloody ironic, and players never leveled up once and barely advanced in stats. The stability it afforded us saved us a metric ton of time we'd have wasted balancing numbers and made it easy for GMs to host and develop challenges for, which is really the bottom line of why you'd adopt a more static system to begin with. You don't even want to know how much effort goes into estimating the power curve of a some-several-dozen-levels-high system. Ever notice how often World of Warcraft has revised the character classes' abilities and balance, or how much errata D&D 4th edition has released? Yeah. Even when the game's finished, it's not even close to perfect and it's full of exploits and holes.
Now, part of the problem with this is that it really only works in the context of differentiating multiple players, with groups of people being able to fill in for one another's weaknesses. In a game with a create-a-character system it
can work just fine, as there's still this element of playstyle building to it, but there's a problem in that the player never gets the opportunity to fill in weaknesses. Still, I'm a big advocate of more static systems as developers don't have to waste so much time trying in futility to balance numbers and it creates a more grounded atmosphere. Plus, to be perfectly honest, most RPG developers can't seem to balance or implement stats and leveling systems to save their lives. Bethesda's stat system always felt like a bloody mess to me, for example, and Mass Effect 1's seemed very clumsy, like it was there just for the sake of putting one and not because the developers had a clear idea of what they wanted to do with it.
