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I've mostly played D&D in the past, and thus have ample experience with character advancement that is primarily based on increasing power: higher level characters pack a bigger punch (especially when it comes to magic). For example, fireball deals more damage and affects more creatures than burning hands. For the most part, however, characters are in complete control of their abilities at all times; the fireball goes where you want it to go.

However, recently I've been wondering about what it would look like if character advancement was primarily about control, not power. At lower levels you can whip out the same fireball spell, dealing the same damage, as you can at higher levels, but you have more trouble putting it where you want it and minimizing collateral damage.

There are obviously a huge number of implications to the game based on this sort of change to character advancement, so I think it would be a non-trivial task to take a power-primary system and make it a control-primary one. So I'm curious, are there any published systems out there that have played with this dynamic? I don't currently have a group to try this out on, so I'm just looking for something to read to inform my speculation at this point.

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closed as off-topic by KRyan, doppelgreener♦ Feb 21 at 15:54

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    \$\begingroup\$ Hi, welcome to the site. Unfortunately, a while back we made the decision to stop handling “shopping” questions like this, that are seeking a system that has a feature or functionality. They just tended to get bad answers and not help anyone, and caused a lot of extra work for the moderators. Sorry. There probably isn’t really anything we can help with on this query—I can’t think of a good way to ask this question that would work here, or I’d recommend some edits. But we do have a list of discussion forums that might work better, like Role-playing Games Chat. \$\endgroup\$ – KRyan Feb 21 at 15:53
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    \$\begingroup\$ Guess I need to dust off my login credentials to a forum site. \$\endgroup\$ – rpspringuel Feb 21 at 18:11
  • \$\begingroup\$ @rpgspringuel Alternatively, try to ping me in the main chat and I'll try to give you an example of an answer there (it's more shoplist-ish). \$\endgroup\$ – vicky_molokh Feb 21 at 19:38