Leveling/Experience

[penguin_buddha]

So I'm comparing alternatives for how to have the player increase in power as they play my game. I wanted to get your opinions/preferences on some of the different options:

Experience Gain/Leveling:

• No Experience: No leveling system, players only get more powerful through equipment and simply getting better at the game
• Experience from Kills: Players gain experience whenever they kill a monster. Experience can be spent to improve stats and buy abilities. Could give rise to players feeling the need to fight everything rather than flee/hide.
• Experience from Descending: Players gain experience whenever they descend to the next floor. Promotes players just running through floors, though they'd miss out on loot.

Starting Stats:

• Static: Every game the player starts with the same stats. More balanced gameplay.
• Point Buy: The player starts with an amount of experience to spend to increase their stats.
• Random: The player's stats are randomized. Could cause large swings in game difficulty from game to game.
• Archtypes: The player chooses a starting class/archetype and their starting stats are based off that

[wire_hall_medic]

What I have observed:

No Experience:  Players get bored if they don't feel they're advancing.  Not an issue if the game is pretty short.  A clear loot progression mitigates this.  Encourages players to avoid combat, which is good for some types of games.

Experience From Kills:  The standard.  Encourages combat.  Easy to implement, and players understand it right away.  I don't like it much, because I like to have a lot of my loot drops come from monsters, and with a standard experience system that means the player is rewarded twice for combat.  In systems with experience from kills, most players will assume that grinding is an option.

Experience from Descending:  Must be clearly communicated to the player.  If they don't know they're more capable at depth 10 than at depth 1, the monsters at depth 10 don't seem more threatening.  A clean way to make sure the player is an appropriate level for the depth.  Discourages both exploration and combat.

Some players equate progression to how far they got, while some equate progression to experience level.  Different systems appeal to different types of players.

[Quendus]

I think when talking about this kind of thing we need to eliminate assumptions about "experience" and "levels" being a thing. We're talking about alternative methods of changing character abilities, so we should talk about alternatives to experience and levels:

No character progression:  Players may get bored if they don't feel they're advancing.  Not an issue if the game is pretty short, or has deep enough mechanics that progression in player skill makes a big difference in their success. See Tetris, Pacman.

Character progression at a set number of points in the game: The character gets increases in power or additional abilities at the end of every level, or after completing specific quests or acquiring certain quest items. Very nice system, but potentially hard to mix interesting abilities with procedural content. See Zelda, Metroidvanias.

Experience dependent on player performance: Either the frequency of gaining power, or the extent of the improvements at the specified power-gaining points in the game, is dependent on player performance. Maybe determined by experience values from dead enemies, enemies seen (Sil), treasure found (if the character progression consists of buying things rather than changing intrinsic abilities). Can potentially encourage grinding or interdict diving.

Progression dependent in more interesting ways on player performance: Maybe the character gets a shiny new ability only when they accomplish some unlikely feat of skill, like killing three enemies in one turn. Similar to achievements and unlockable content in modern games - essentially a more complex version of the previous possibility.

[Vanguard]

I'm a fan of games that give out character progression for making progress in the game.  They reward the player for getting results instead of rewarding the player based on how they got their results.  It liberates the player from needing to do tedious things to stay up to date.  Now you can use whatever tactics you want instead of being obligated to murder everything you can.  It also makes grinding impossible because leveling up and advancing in the game are now the same thing.

I think when talking about this kind of thing we need to eliminate assumptions about "experience" and "levels" being a thing. We're talking about alternative methods of changing character abilities, so we should talk about alternatives to experience and levels

This is why Rogue Temple is a good forum: people here know how to ask the right questions.

I'd like to see more experimentation done with perk systems, especially games where the only form of advancement is a perk system.  They offer every advantage of class-based and attribute-based systems and don't suffer from most of their drawbacks.

Mage Guild is almost like that (you choose a class at the start and your hp and mp can rise without perks) and it works great.  Every time you level up you can feel the difference in your character's abilities.  A few different choices can lead to wildly different builds.  Nearly any perk can be added to any build and it will be useful in some way (though not always optimal, obviously).

[Zireael]

Why can't we have both XP for kills and for descending and for other stuff (enemies seen, stealth, etc.)?

[getter77]

Zireael knows what is up---Sil and Incursion very much light the way in terms of good progression variety.

I would also suggest thematic/plot based advancement.

[King Ink]

What about skill based progression no leveling but you get better at skills you use.
ala runequest?

that is my favorite.

[getter77]

Skill based progression can work, but it is tricky in cases to avoid grinding via intentionally odd behavior as well as trying to balance how things will work out with rarely used skills when you need them to work as almost always winds up happening.

[King Ink]

Skill based progression can work, but it is tricky in cases to avoid grinding via intentionally odd behavior as well as trying to balance how things will work out with rarely used skills when you need them to work as almost always winds up happening.

In real life grinding is called training and studying. (and can be very boring in a game but it can also be argued that training is embedded in every game. )

I think a good mechanic is that one level in an obscure talent is as powerful as 5 levels of a common one.

[Vanguard]

What about skill based progression no leveling but you get better at skills you use.
ala runequest?

that is my favorite.

Those always lead to metagaming and grinding.

[akeley]

I think "grinding" has been unnecessarily demonised, mostly in recent years. In fact I only learned it`s bad for you from some RPG forums. Before that I was just doing the usual roleplaying stuff - exploring, killing monsters, listening to strange dialogues, sidequesting - having fun, really. Occasionally a monster would appear that was too powerful - oh, my, time to do some more exploring, maybe find a better weapon/spell, probably kill more rats and go up a level.

Point is, if the game was well designed and balanced - especially in the combat department - it was never a chore. jRPGs seem to be the mostly accused as "grindfests"- but it feels to me as if it just arose as a part of the strange backlash against the genre (and Japanese games in general) that appeared somewhere along the PS3/360 generation.

It should also be left to the player to decide if they want to stick around and kill more beasties in order to become more powerful. To some extent of course - again. balancing is the key.

Having said that, I`d also be interested in other systems, like teh No Experience angle. Cant` say I recall an RPG using that, but RLs seem to be more daring and experimenting, so why not.

As for Starting Stats, hmmm...hard to decide. Now I play mostly RLs and go for Random every time it`s possible - but it has more to do with the nature of the genre and the way I play/perceive it. I don`t really want to spend lots of time and care point-building my char only to be wiped out 2 minutes later...that`s more of a we-can-save! RPG territory. Here, randomization is genius - because I don`t really play myself anymore, but some ker-razy characters. It`s extremely liberating after years of "normal" roleplaying. So I rolled a crap-stated weakling? Well, tough luck bud, down you go! Let`s see how he fares...and occasionally such creations surprise me by surviving the initial dangers thus earning heaps of respect and creating a true underdog story.

[Zireael]

Zireael knows what is up---Sil and Incursion very much light the way in terms of good progression variety.

I would also suggest thematic/plot based advancement.

Thanks for kind words.

The only reason Veins has only XP for kills now is that I haven't gotten around to implementing the other XP sources

[getter77]

The moment where grinding for skills, as opposed to just killing lots as per jRPGs and whatnot, jumped the shark collectively was pretty well literally jumping constantly via Elderscrolls: Oblivion and the entire lot of how that was handled.   As it was a rather big game with lots of eyes on it, well, they did a number on exposing the absurdity.

[akeley]

Ah, Oblivion, the whipping boy of the modern RPG era 

I`ve heard that complaint about its skill system before, but frankly it still doesn`t make any sense to me. How is it more "absurd" than any other system employed by any RPG/RL ever? Apart from the fact that  it actually has much more in common with reality than, say, paying a "trainer" to magically make you an expert in halberd wielding?

I suppose the angle here is that if one chooses to spend an afternoon jumping up and down in one spot, his Jumping skill will max out. But this is only absurd as in "absurd way of playing the game" - not in the system itself. I (and probably many, many others) played it in a "normal" way and my stats increased accordingly. And I thought it was quite good (up to the point where I discovered the leveling bug which broke the game, but that`s entirely different story). Nobody forced you to do that jumping thing or swing your axe at a tree bazillion times - but it was a truly open game so if you wanted to, you could.

Seems to me that Crawl uses similar system (if not identical). Works a charm, too.

[Vanguard]

The problem is that you're injecting an unrealistic and mechanically unsound implementation of a real-world concept into a video game designed to be challenging and mechanically interesting above all else.   You started with a system where you can make the tactical decisions you feel are best for the current situation and moved to one where you have to deliberately make bad choices and waste time so your skills will go up.  Its slows down the game's pacing, it introduces a ton of metagaming, it has no mechanical benefit and, despite introducing all of these new problems, the game is still completely unrealistic anyway.

Crawl used to use a system like that and it was dumb and metagamey.  Now it uses a system where your experience points go right into the skills of your choosing and everything works much better.

Ah, Oblivion, the whipping boy of the modern RPG era 

It deserves it.  The only thing Oblivion is good for is teaching game developers what not to do.