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Craft (Cheese)
2011-09-27, 12:10 PM
I've been thinking about game design lately (mostly from the perspective of CRPGs rather than tabletop) and a thought came up: XP. Why does it exist? What does it add to the game?

As far as I know, the experience and level system originated in D&D. What was the reasoning behind this design decision?

Yuki Akuma
2011-09-27, 12:11 PM
The reasoning was "Hey, we're inventing an entire genre of games here, and we want a quick and easy way of measuring character growth".

DukeofDellot
2011-09-27, 12:18 PM
It has been there since the beginning. It allowed more powerful classes to level at different rates than less powerful ones... even though it wasn't always used that well.

Now days it's a genre convention.

In some other games, it's used to balance individual abilities against each other. But in modern DnD, it's just kind of there.

Telonius
2011-09-27, 12:29 PM
In the original edition, magic users were assumed to progress much more slowly in their power than other sorts of characters. This was to match the idea of the old bearded guy hunched over a tome of arcane lore; also because the original rules assumed that Magic was truly special, world-altering stuff. (More Conan, less Elminster). In fact, each of the classes had a different level-up speed. Since the rate of power gain was different, simply telling everybody, "You all gain new abilities!" at the same time wouldn't work so well. If they'd done that, every class would have had to be broken up into loads of different "level-up" points, vastly complicating everything. So they forgot all about that and made each class have its own rate of gain to get to the next level. Experience points gave the designers a relatively simple way of measuring that kind of progress.

In later editions, the idea of XP stuck, especially as a way of making magic item crafting reasonable. D&D has always had a tenuous grip on economics as it is; having gold and time as the only costs to item crafting would throw what little sense it had, totally out the window. Elves, with their super-long lives and love of magic, would have flooded the market with magic items eons ago. "XP for crafting" also models the idea of a magic user putting his "life force" into the items he's making, which is a common enough idea within the fantasy genre.

ken-do-nim
2011-09-27, 12:29 PM
Note that the direct ancestor game of D&D is Chainmail, which did not have experience points. You had men-at-arms on the battlefield, heroes equivalent to 4 men, and super-heroes equivalent to 8 men. But how did an ordinary man-at-arms get to be a hero? How did a hero get to be a superhero? Enter D&D, which made the standard man-at-arms 1st level, a hero 4th level, a superhero 8th level, and developed intermediary levels. How did one rise from one level to the next? Experience.

gkathellar
2011-09-27, 12:31 PM
Ostensibly, because it provides a standard of measurement for speed of advancement relative to challenge and/or time investment.

The real answer is the same as "why do elves have immunity to paralysis?"* It's a legacy thing — and was a lot more useful in earlier editions, where characters would level up at different speeds, high ability scores gave you a +10% experience point bonus, and every monster had a unique experience value.

*Back in the days of Chainmail, before D&D, elves were weak against the undead faction, so they needed a bonus against them. Enter immunity to ghoul paralysis.

Eldan
2011-09-27, 12:35 PM
Yeah. It's just a convenient way to summarize "your character has learned something. Do it some more, and he gets stronger". A quantifiable way.

Mr.Bookworm
2011-09-27, 12:39 PM
I've always had the idea that XP was magic. Everything in D&D is magical by nature, and when you kill something, that magic goes into you, allowing you to perform noticeably better in a vastly shortened amount of time. As you gain this magic, you need more and more magic to show noticeable improvements in ability, sometimes being completely incapable of gaining any sort of improvement from creatures much weaker than you. This internal magic allows all character to improve incredibly fast and mundane characters to perform superhuman feats. When a spellcaster creates an item, they invest some inherent magic into the item. When they cast a particularly powerful spell, they have to pay out of their inherent magic instead of just drawing it out of an external source.

This obviously is completely unsupported, but I think it explains pretty much everything about D&D's XP system in a way that makes sense in-universe.

Craft (Cheese)
2011-09-27, 12:43 PM
I suppose I should have been more general: Why have character progression at all?

Mr.Bookworm
2011-09-27, 12:46 PM
I suppose I should have been more general: Why have character progression at all?

Because it would be a very, very boring game if your characters never improved at all. Imagine if you started at 1st level, and then you never got anything else. Ever.

It's not a D&D concept, either. Most RPG systems have XP or some similar concept with which you improve your character. Even the ones that don't have some explicit magic bean you gain to improve your characters allow improvement and advancement of characters.

EDIT: It's also partially a psychological thing. It's the reward for taking risks and playing the game.

Gavinfoxx
2011-09-27, 12:48 PM
Didn't XP exist as a means of measuring score in D&D team tournament games? Which was why it was tied to GP?

Niek
2011-09-27, 12:49 PM
Stories can be interesting without the protagonists being significantly more powerful at the end than they were at the beginning. What makes a tabletop game any different?

Mr.Bookworm
2011-09-27, 12:51 PM
Stories can be interesting without the protagonists being significantly more powerful at the end than they were at the beginning. What makes a tabletop game any different?

You and some other people have to actually play the story.

Even in a story, you would call BS if the protagonist never learned or improved from his experiences. Even if they never gain significantly greater power, there is still some noticeable improvement of skills and ability.

Yuki Akuma
2011-09-27, 12:51 PM
I suppose I should have been more general: Why have character progression at all?

Because, again, Chainmail; it had normal men-at-arms, heroes, and superheroes. Logically, there had to be a way to progress from one to another.

And also every single RPG in existence has character progression - it's a genre convention. All stories have character growth - RPGs just need a way to do it mechanically.


Stories can be interesting without the protagonists being significantly more powerful at the end than they were at the beginning. What makes a tabletop game any different?

Any story in which the protagonist is not more skilled, knowledgeable and/or powerful at the end than he was at the beginning is a very badly written story. People get better over time. It's a natural process called "learning".

Niek
2011-09-27, 12:56 PM
Character growth need not mean better fighting ability. And even if it does, the increase in power doesnt need to be as believability-stretchingly great as it is in most RPGs (ie, getting clobbered by random wildlife one day, slaying the 10,000 year-old Demon King of Legend a month later)

gkathellar
2011-09-27, 01:08 PM
I suppose I should have been more general: Why have character progression at all?

Because unlike getting bored of your life, getting bored of your character is easily preventable: give him new powers and new things to do. So, basically the same reason superhero comics and shounen action series have to constantly scale up in magnitude over time.


I've always had the idea that XP was magic. Everything in D&D is magical by nature, and when you kill something, that magic goes into you, allowing you to perform noticeably better in a vastly shortened amount of time.

That's pretty much exactly how experience points work in the Rance games, to the point that characters are consciously aware of leveling. (It helps that the series is a pretty self-conscious parody of RPGs in general.)


Any story in which the protagonist is not more skilled, knowledgeable and/or powerful at the end than he was at the beginning is a very badly written story.

Take the time to read some Raymond Chandler. Philip Marlowe hit his level cap a long time ago, and he's one of the best characters in fiction.


Character growth need not mean better fighting ability. And even if it does, the increase in power doesnt need to be as believability-stretchingly great as it is in most RPGs (ie, getting clobbered by random wildlife one day, slaying the 10,000 year-old Demon King of Legend a month later)

Yeah, but power-fantasies have long been an important component of RPGs, and for better or worse are what attract a lot of people to them.

Telonius
2011-09-27, 01:41 PM
I suppose I should have been more general: Why have character progression at all?

You wouldn't have to. But the system was designed to support the concept of people improving as they go. It is a fairly common idea in literature. A lowly pig-farmer, after overcoming obstacles, becomes the High King. An apprentice mage, through years of hard work and study, eventually becomes an Archmage. A weak and gangly youth blossoms into the greatest warrior the land had ever known. A bunch of silly halflings go adventuring, turn into some of the greatest heroes in the realm, with such change that their friends don't recognize them at first when they return home.

If you don't have some method of granting abilities to characters as the story progresses, the system will not be able to support any of those (not terribly uncommon or far-out) plotlines. The existence of classes is an attempt to standardize the progression, so you don't have a single character who's far ahead (or behind) the others. The theory being that this is a collaborative game, with the players having most fun when they all feel they can contribute something significant to the team's efforts.

The game is also set up so that there are more- and less-dangerous monsters. If your antagonist is a local goblin chief, that's one thing. Perfectly mundane and "low-magic" ways exist of dealing with the threat. Your average pig-farmer stands a decent shot of winning, if he uses his wits. But if you want your antagonist to be a demon lord, the players would need some method of becoming strong enough to fight him. You could just make the players at roughly the same power level as the demon lord, but that kind of takes the specialness out of the fight. (Kind of the, "If everybody's super, nobody is" effect). With character progression, the system can support both antagonists fairly easily.

It's perfectly possible to play D&D without ever leveling up. One-shot adventures are actually pretty common, and hardly anybody levels up in those. There's nothing that says the DM can't just jettison XP altogether and keep throwing CR-x encounters at the party. It's also possible to run a campaign where the heroes are vastly weaker than the villains. Horror-themed campaigns are notorious for this. This kind of campaign is usually the exception, rather than the norm (though it does have some support for it in sourcebooks like Heroes of Horror). Level progression does not prevent this kind of campaign; but it does allow flexibility for people who don't want to play that way.

Tengu_temp
2011-09-27, 02:39 PM
Character growth need not mean better fighting ability. And even if it does, the increase in power doesnt need to be as believability-stretchingly great as it is in most RPGs (ie, getting clobbered by random wildlife one day, slaying the 10,000 year-old Demon King of Legend a month later)

By most RPGs, you mean DND? Because many other games have much slower character growth, smaller differences between low-power and high-power characters, and if they're not level-based (and very few modern games are), you can usually spend all your experience on non-combat things without getting better at fighting at all.

Xefas
2011-09-27, 02:53 PM
I suppose I should have been more general: Why have character progression at all?

You don't need it to have a fun time, certainly. Check out Primetime Adventures, Shock: Social Science Fiction, Fiasco, Poison'd, Blazing Rose, Dread, Misspent Youth, Don't Rest Your Head, and Silence Keeps Me A Victim.

That's off the top of my head. All of them great roleplaying games where the characters do not get mechanically more powerful over time. In many of them, you change over time - so, in Misspent Youth, you can go from being Smart to being Pedantic or from being Cool to being Trendy, or in Don't Rest Your Head, you abilities shift from being disciplined to being psychotic. In Poison'd, the more sins you commit, your abilities automatically shift to be better at committing sins and worse at doing other things.

edit: The wide variety of Fate games are a good example of middle-ground. They tend to have extremely slow character progression. You only get a noticeable boost maybe every 7 sessions or so. However, there are much shorter intervals where you can shift your stats around to reflect change. Maybe your character gets softer, so you shift a point from Discipline to Empathy. Or your morals have decayed so you shift your Aspect from "Freedom Fighter" to "Terrorist". You aren't more powerful, but you're different.

edit2: I thought of other possible examples of good no-progression games. Kagematsu, The Fisherman's Wife, and Pilgrims of the Flying Temple.

Totally Guy
2011-09-27, 03:49 PM
Inspectres is a weird case. The characters never improve but the business grows (or shrinks) according to what's happened in the game.

The characters can call on the franchise's resources to help them in play. It's kind of like advancement that any member of the party can use.

Tengu_temp
2011-09-27, 04:06 PM
Don't Rest Your Head actually lets you advance in the form of accumulating Scars - but instead of being boosts to your abilities, they're stuff you can activate once per session for a moderately good effect or consume permanently for a very good one.

Mordar
2011-09-27, 05:11 PM
I suppose I should have been more general: Why have character progression at all?

Easiest answer: To keep score. Sure, levels keep score, but don't happen often enough to satisfy the drive to know how well one is "performing" (you don't get a score each game session with levels, but you do with Exp/Karma/Hero Points/Whatever - hereafter called Reward Points).

There's also the same reason "free" ap games have points/money/whatever - locking in on our competitive nature to keep us coming back and continue our "tangible" progression.


Because it would be a very, very boring game if your characters never improved at all. Imagine if you started at 1st level, and then you never got anything else. Ever.

It's not a D&D concept, either. Most RPG systems have XP or some similar concept with which you improve your character. Even the ones that don't have some explicit magic bean you gain to improve your characters allow improvement and advancement of characters.

EDIT: It's also partially a psychological thing. It's the reward for taking risks and playing the game.

There are some games out there where you start at (arbitrary numbers alert!) 5% of your maximum capability - D&D, for instance - and some where you start at 80-90% of your maximum capability - Marvel Super Heroes, World of Darkness games. Even in those where you start nearer max capability, there is a score-keeping rubric...maybe it's gold/money, or temporary performance rewards like karma/rerolls/special action chips, but they're still Reward Points.

Some people really like the scale that comes with low-initial-capability games, and some like to jump in at already-hero levels. In either case, the need to see progression over months/years of play can be pretty strong, and Reward Points provide the vehicle to do so. In D&D-esque games, you cash in Reward Points for levels, increasing your combat prowess. In something with a higher initial capability, you might use Reward Points to buy bells and whistles like a couple new faceless goths upon which to feed, or perhaps enhance an esoteric ability like Reading Greek. Either way, it's progress...but perhaps on a different scale.


Stories can be interesting without the protagonists being significantly more powerful at the end than they were at the beginning. What makes a tabletop game any different?

Primarily because we're not reading a book or watching a movie for a few hours, but investing tens to hundreds of hours (and perhaps dollars) in a shared social experience that is in truth a game...and pretty much all games have a way to keep score.

That being said, I think that tons of one-off games are great fun, but those are very different than a "campaign" style RPG.

- M

stainboy
2011-09-27, 05:34 PM
Because it would be a very, very boring game if your characters never improved at all. Imagine if you started at 1st level, and then you never got anything else. Ever.


It's also hard to find mechanics simple enough for a player to grasp quickly but complex enough that the player won't get bored with them. Leveling up means characters can get more complex over time.


By most RPGs, you mean DND? Because many other games have much slower character growth, smaller differences between low-power and high-power characters, and if they're not level-based (and very few modern games are), you can usually spend all your experience on non-combat things without getting better at fighting at all.

I think that's an outgrowth of the system as much as anything else. Lots of other popular systems just don't support much advancement. Percentile skill systems don't have much room between "enough points to reliably use a few skills" and "enough points to max out your specialization." Die-pool games are awkward at high power levels just because you have to physically count 20 dice for every roll. Pure skill-based systems in general get weird at high power because characters advance asymmetrically and the divergence between specialist and non-specialist gets huge. (Especially specialist attack vs non-specialist defense.) If you know White Wolf that's a good example: WoD mortals is a solid game and Aberrant is almost unplayable.

I'm not saying lots of advancement is automatically better. But I think a lot of games don't have much of it because they learn late in design or through experience that it doesn't work well.

Starbuck_II
2011-09-27, 05:47 PM
I've been thinking about game design lately (mostly from the perspective of CRPGs rather than tabletop) and a thought came up: XP. Why does it exist? What does it add to the game?

As far as I know, the experience and level system originated in D&D. What was the reasoning behind this design decision?

Do you reason the real reason?
Because treasure.
No, that is the reason. They needed a lure to make players go for treasure. Treasure = Exp. Monsters gave 1/5th the exp as treasure so originally, the game was based on avoiding encounters with monsters and grabbing loot. This helps explain why Thiefs sucked in combat (except for rare backstabs) in 2E and later (3.0 decided Rogues should be able to fight too and added sneak attack instead of backstab).
Later 2E made game focused on combat with monsters and left the old rules of treasure = Exp as a side thing (even though every 2E module accounted for the exp granted by treasure as that was still expected).


See the game had a shift from wargames to exploration and finding treasure toward combat.

cattoy
2011-09-27, 05:50 PM
I suppose I should have been more general: Why have character progression at all?

Because RPGs with no character progression have one thing in common:

They all went out of print.

Craft (Cheese)
2011-09-27, 07:55 PM
Thank you all for the responses. Reading this thread has confirmed my suspicions: The RPG trope of character progression is something that was invented to solve problems specific to tabletop RPs (making a common narrative element consistent between disconnected stories). In CRPGs it's most often a solution looking for a problem.

Mr.Bookworm
2011-09-27, 09:18 PM
Thank you all for the responses. Reading this thread has confirmed my suspicions: The RPG trope of character progression is something that was invented to solve problems specific to tabletop RPs (making a common narrative element consistent between disconnected stories). In CRPGs it's most often a solution looking for a problem.

No. CRPGs have more need to offer progression.

Tabletop RPGs can be enjoyed without progression, as they are inherently unbound activities, in that you are limited by nothing more than your imagination. They are also, on a level more fundamental than even MMOs or multiplayer games, social games, which is a pleasure in of itself.

A computer game, however, is locked into a set course. To keep people playing, you need to set up a work-incentive loop. You put work into the game, it rewards you with improvements to your character. The developer also tries to make you think of yourself as your character, so rewards are more visceral. Rewards are usually greater immediately, as once the pattern is ingrained into the gamer's brain, you can start stretching out the length between rewards.

Take a look at first-person shooters and WoW, just to pull two examples out of thin air (I have more).

In an FPS, you are your character, because you see the virtual world from their viewpoint. The most popular FPS in recent memory, Modern Warfare, introduced RPG conventions of doling out rewards for play in multiplayer into the genre

In WoW, you directly identify with your character; Overfang Sauron the III is you, on a very fundamental level, and I don't think I need to explain how integral loot is to the WoW experience. WoW has 11 million subscribers. MMOs (WoW in particular) have spun this into an art form, as they rely on subscriptions for revenue.

This is all pretty basic conditioning. A tabletop RPG doesn't need as much of this, because you're directly playing with your friends and using your own imagination on some level, instead of just plugging into a machine. Computer games, however, almost require this sort of thing.

lightningcat
2011-09-27, 09:28 PM
I always saw XP as player bribes. "You do stuff you get XP. You follow my story rather than wandering around wasting time, you get more XP." And since player's like getting stuff for their characters, XP is one more thing that they can collect.

Dr.Epic
2011-09-27, 09:39 PM
I've been thinking about game design lately (mostly from the perspective of CRPGs rather than tabletop) and a thought came up: XP. Why does it exist? What does it add to the game?

As far as I know, the experience and level system originated in D&D. What was the reasoning behind this design decision?

Seriously?:smallconfused: Experience points are used to mark your overall progression. You kill something or multiple things you earn a set of points. Once you earn enough of these points, you can redeem them by leveling up. Each level grants you knew abilities and/or an extension of your current abilities. Without experience points, it would be difficult to measure such progression. Unless you think we should just take a cue from Munchkin and each thing you kill grants one level and you can bribe your way to higher levels with 1,000 gp.

Craft (Cheese)
2011-09-27, 10:32 PM
No. CRPGs have more need to offer progression.

Tabletop RPGs can be enjoyed without progression, as they are inherently unbound activities, in that you are limited by nothing more than your imagination. They are also, on a level more fundamental than even MMOs or multiplayer games, social games, which is a pleasure in of itself.

A computer game, however, is locked into a set course. To keep people playing, you need to set up a work-incentive loop. You put work into the game, it rewards you with improvements to your character. The developer also tries to make you think of yourself as your character, so rewards are more visceral. Rewards are usually greater immediately, as once the pattern is ingrained into the gamer's brain, you can start stretching out the length between rewards.

Take a look at first-person shooters and WoW, just to pull two examples out of thin air (I have more).

In an FPS, you are your character, because you see the virtual world from their viewpoint. The most popular FPS in recent memory, Modern Warfare, introduced RPG conventions of doling out rewards for play in multiplayer into the genre

In WoW, you directly identify with your character; Overfang Sauron the III is you, on a very fundamental level, and I don't think I need to explain how integral loot is to the WoW experience. WoW has 11 million subscribers. MMOs (WoW in particular) have spun this into an art form, as they rely on subscriptions for revenue.

This is all pretty basic conditioning. A tabletop RPG doesn't need as much of this, because you're directly playing with your friends and using your own imagination on some level, instead of just plugging into a machine. Computer games, however, almost require this sort of thing.

There are plenty of great video games that either have no or barely any character progression at all. In Super Mario Bros, for instance, you reach the limit of "power" Mario gets before the end of the first stage. And even in games with character progression it in no way needs to be provided by a level system: Metroid and Zelda (the older ones anyway) do it entirely with items the player collects.

(By the way, are Metroid and Zelda CRPGs? Is Mario with the mushroom/fire flower system one? Defining the CRPG by progression mechanics is clearly not the right way to go.)

But this has started to drift off topic.

Gavinfoxx
2011-09-27, 10:41 PM
I think Zelda is classified as an Action-Adventure game with RPG elements.

Yhynens
2011-09-28, 12:11 AM
It's also of note that a lot of CRPGs can be beaten without actually having to have your characters progress. Basically any FF game is beatable through trickery at initial levels (or close to it for the ones that give exp for bosses) and even in Zelda games you can just not get the hearts and heart pieces and make your character progression solely be items (which are mostly used for puzzle-solving rather than combat.) You can skip individual items in most Metroid games, as well.

What I'm getting at, here, is wouldn't it be possible to have an RPG that doesn't have progression? You start off with a few tricks, and your "progression" isn't getting new tricks, but figuring out how to use your tricks together to beat stronger badguys. The player progresses rather than the character. That's basically what happens in Mario, Metroid, and Zelda. It's what happens in minimum-level FF runs, as well. So, I don't think an RPG necessarily requires character progression... but it would have to be a very different sort of game than DND. Some of my friends and I did a paper mario inspired RP, where my character (a french-canadian gangster Koopa)'s only progression was falling into lava and becoming a Dry Bones. We all had two HP for the entire game. I guess it was only about as long as a one-shot, though (it was online, so, hard to gauge.) I think if you wanted a more advanced system you could do some actually pretty cool things in a progressionless RPG, both tabletop and CRPG.

Also, the discussion isn't off-topic, it's just evolving...?

Philistine
2011-09-28, 01:31 AM
You mean adventure games?

EvilDM
2011-09-28, 01:41 AM
Character progression mirrors real life, which is why it is used. Levels are nothing more then a way of measuring experience and practice in what you do.

As an example, someone who picks up a basketball and heads to the court would preform like a level 1. Someone who goes there every day might be a level 3-4. A top NCAA player would come in at level 6-10, the best in the NBA are 15+.

The same can be had for academics. An average student coming into a university would likely be a higher level then someone who doesn't go to school. A student in their 3rd year wouldn't be as high a level as the professor with 4 degrees.

The Military is another good example from the real world, from civilian to guy in basic to guy in AIT to guy in his unit to ranger to special forces or sniper, you could easily map it out as levels. Military ranks are another way of showing levels based on experience.

Heck, the girl who has been at the coffee shop for 2 years would be a higher level Barista then the guy they just hired off the street.

And while the individual systems have different ways of measuring levels, in the end they all serve the same purpose: it prevents that farmer from picking up a sword and going out and slaying a dragon...

http://flic.kr/p/ar7Uy9

Daftendirekt
2011-09-28, 01:56 AM
I've always had the idea that XP was magic. Everything in D&D is magical by nature, and when you kill something, that magic goes into you, allowing you to perform noticeably better in a vastly shortened amount of time. As you gain this magic, you need more and more magic to show noticeable improvements in ability, sometimes being completely incapable of gaining any sort of improvement from creatures much weaker than you. This internal magic allows all character to improve incredibly fast and mundane characters to perform superhuman feats. When a spellcaster creates an item, they invest some inherent magic into the item. When they cast a particularly powerful spell, they have to pay out of their inherent magic instead of just drawing it out of an external source.

I'm picturing the glowy balls of experience from the first Fable.

Eldan
2011-09-28, 02:34 AM
You mean adventure games?

Either that, or fighting games. Quite a few shooters, too, though in most you get more weapons.

Ravens_cry
2011-09-28, 03:35 AM
Either that, or fighting games. Quite a few shooters, too, though in most you get more weapons.
And increasing trend, for good or ill, to add "RPG elements" to a game.
On the subject of D&D, why it has experience points, why one needs to improve ones ability? In my view, it is because most D&D stories tell the Heroes Journey in a very raw form. You receive the call to adventure, starting small. Then you kill nastier things, and nastier things, gaining various rewards for doing so. Items are one way to give you added capability to do this, but that can, in my opinion, potentially feel unsatisfactory as it doesn't feel like the power is coming from you, you are not getting better, just your gear. Of course, they help, a lot depending on the type of character, but in the end, its you that gets better, or rather your PC.
Interestingly, games that don't centre around the archetypical Heroes Journey, like intrigue based games of courtly manners and back stabbery, seem to tend to level slower, if at all. You don't need another +1 to hit if the only killing, if any, is with a coup de grâce or with poison.

Eldan
2011-09-28, 03:45 AM
That's really only true inside of D&D, which has rather limited ways to level up your intrigue skills, most of which also level your combat skills along with them (I still do my intrigue games in D&D, though. I like the diplomacy system, but I'm weird).

In another game, getting that +1 to Contacts, or Seduction or Forgery could be very important in an intrigue game.

Yhynens
2011-09-28, 03:54 AM
You mean adventure games?

I'm assuming you're talking about like, Maniac Mansion, right? Because that works, yes, but those games aren't really the same as something like Baldur's Gate. No combat, I guess would be the only real difference? Still, those would be a go-to example for an RPG without character progression. They weren't really what I was imagining--they don't really have a "meta-game" where your creativity as a player can mimic a progression curve, which is more what I was going for.

I was imagining something where you make a character and then play with it. Like, let's say you have a campaign where everyone plays gods who have control over certain domains, like Luck or Time or Gravity. They don't need to get stronger, but as players they can think up new ways to use their powers over time. Or, similarly, some of my friends were doing a One Piece game once, which I've never watched and I didn't play in, but the theme there is that everyone gets a special power from eating a fruit, like a rubber body. The way you use the power is up to you--you can make new abilities by extrapolating the way the power works. If you want to grab a big rock and throw your arm over to another ship and then have people run across your stretched out arm, and you just thought that up yourself, do you really need a feat for it if you already have plasticity powers? If the game is free-form enough, then progression isn't strictly necessary.

But like I said, that doesn't really work in D&D where progression mimics getting stronger and learning new things rather than developing a fighting style or using old abilities in tricky ways. Though a part of the meta-game does, like proper use of Grease, I guess. It's just not a main aspect of the game as it's designed. That's not really a bad thing; the theoretical sort of games I'm talking about would serve a very different function, and I'm sure most players love learning new skills and getting new magic items (well, I do.)

EDIT: Right, so like Eldan said, fighting games and some shooters mimic that, but they aren't really used to tell stories. Oh, you know what's a good game for what I'm talking about? Catherine. There's still roleplaying elements in that you get to pick some of the MC's actions and dialogue, but the game is just a series of sweet, sweet block puzzles, and your only "progression" as a character is being told new "techniques" for solving the puzzles--basically integrating the meta-game with the actual game. Neat.

Eldan
2011-09-28, 03:58 AM
There are adventure games with combat. Or, well, at least "defeating people". But a lot of them take a puzzle approach to that as well. Press that lever to drop that weight over there to crush that monster. No leveling required.

And D&D has actually quite a lot of metagame. Just look up the numerous "exploits" and "combinations" people come up with. The many, many ways to (ab)use certain spells. There are entire guidebooks on the kinds of crazy things you can do with some specific spells.

Ravens_cry
2011-09-28, 04:04 AM
That's really only true inside of D&D, which has rather limited ways to level up your intrigue skills, most of which also level your combat skills along with them (I still do my intrigue games in D&D, though. I like the diplomacy system, but I'm weird).

In another game, getting that +1 to Contacts, or Seduction or Forgery could be very important in an intrigue game.
Even still, I would personally prefer progress to come from role play rather then increasing aptitude. Making contacts might give you an ad hoc increase in that particular area, but it wouldn't (shouldn't?), be the across the board increase that is "levelling" in D&D. In my humble opinion.

Yhynens
2011-09-28, 04:13 AM
Right, I never said there wasn't meta-game in D&D (in fact I even directly addressed it with the Grease spell,) just that it's more in line with something like Starcraft's metagame; it's something that the players create through careful examination of the system, rather than something that's innately built in. Like beating the final boss of a Final Fantasy game at minimum level, it's not necessarily what you're intended to do, but it's something that you do via player expertise. You can play D&D without doing any of those abuses or exploits--it's not something you need to do to play the game, like learning how to play a fighting game, since you brought that up. I guess it's a pretty fine line, probably one that doesn't exist for a lot of people, but apparently it does for me.

I guess a good comparison for a table-top game that actually exists would be stunting in Exalted. You can get bonus dice, "MP," and even experience for doing unique and interesting attacks. The system's actually built to be free-form, and you can stunt any skill, not just certain ones.

Eldan
2011-09-28, 05:17 AM
A similar thing would be the use of Aspects in FATE and its derivatives. Aspects are descriptions of your character and his skills, and "invoking" them gives you a +2 bonus to a roll, in its simplest application. It is still a bit limited, though, in that invoking an aspect costs a fate point.

Still. Invoking your "Why did it have to be snakes" aspect to gain a +2 on an acrobatics roll to get over a snake pit is pretty cool.

Ravens_cry
2011-09-28, 05:20 AM
A similar thing would be the use of Aspects in FATE and its derivatives. Aspects are descriptions of your character and his skills, and "invoking" them gives you a +2 bonus to a roll, in its simplest application. It is still a bit limited, though, in that invoking an aspect costs a fate point.

Still. Invoking your "Why did it have to be snakes" aspect to gain a +2 on an acrobatics roll to get over a snake pit is pretty cool.
It even makes sense, at least in the specific instance. Fear and Panic can give you wings. That's why Redbull is made from the tears of children.:smallamused:

Eldan
2011-09-28, 05:33 AM
It even makes sense, at least in the specific instance. Fear and Panic can give you wings. That's why Redbull is made from the tears of children.:smallamused:

Personally, I prefer the new extra strong Red Bull War Orphan.

Ravens_cry
2011-09-28, 06:13 AM
Personally, I prefer the new extra strong Red Bull War Orphan.
I find the bitter aftertaste of crushed dreams rather off putting myself.

Zombimode
2011-09-28, 06:41 AM
EDIT: Right, so like Eldan said, fighting games and some shooters mimic that, but they aren't really used to tell stories.

Huh? Shooters arent used to tell stories? Then you must have played very different shooters then I have.

Eldan
2011-09-28, 07:03 AM
Huh? Shooters arent used to tell stories? Then you must have played very different shooters then I have.

What they rarely have, however, is character creation, or a story you can actually influence beyond either living through a level or dying. Many fighting games at least have something like a campaign mode, though the story of those is often more an excuse than anything else.

Still, these are games that tell a character's story, however badly written and told that story may be, and they contain little in the way of character growth. (What they do contain is growth of player skill. Learning a new move, being able to predict the AI to a certain degree.)

Knaight
2011-09-28, 07:16 AM
Character growth need not mean better fighting ability. And even if it does, the increase in power doesnt need to be as believability-stretchingly great as it is in most RPGs (ie, getting clobbered by random wildlife one day, slaying the 10,000 year-old Demon King of Legend a month later)
See below:


By most RPGs, you mean DND? Because many other games have much slower character growth, smaller differences between low-power and high-power characters, and if they're not level-based (and very few modern games are), you can usually spend all your experience on non-combat things without getting better at fighting at all.

And adding to this - outside of D&D, there are games without mechanical character progression. Not a lot of them, true, but a handful. They still tend to have mechanical change, which is consistent with narratives. There is also the matter of starting points - getting clobbered by random wildlife tends to be below the starting points of characters in more cinematic games, period. In Spirit of the Century, you are never going to be threatened by a single cat. In D&D? Better hope you aren't first level.

Zombimode
2011-09-28, 09:42 AM
What they rarely have, however, is character creation, or a story you can actually influence beyond either living through a level or dying. Many fighting games at least have something like a campaign mode, though the story of those is often more an excuse than anything else.

Hm, true. I was mostly thinking about the Stalker series, but there is a reason why those games are often descriced as RPGs with the gameplay of a tactical shooter and an horror-survival setting.

erikun
2011-09-28, 11:14 AM
I suppose I should have been more general: Why have character progression at all?
Because a RPG is inherently a game, and part of playing a game is a sense of progress and doing better. D&D has levels for much the same reason it has +5 swords: people enjoy moving from a weaker state to a stronger state. It's a psychology thing. People are motivated when they find progress, and so giving the player a sense of progress (in increasing levels, in increasing treasure, in increasing skills) motivates them towards playing the game more.

This doesn't mean that levels, experience, and character progression are necessary at all. However, I would say that they are practically necessary for RPGs intended to be played for the long-term. One-shots, short scenarios, or very goal-driven RPGs can probably get by without the characters progressing, mainly because the average total play time would be less than it takes for people to get bored, and the goals are something other than increasing character power. (Yes, it is entirely possible to have a RPG that doesn't assume a multi-year saving the world plot.)


Any story in which the protagonist is not more skilled, knowledgeable and/or powerful at the end than he was at the beginning is a very badly written story. People get better over time. It's a natural process called "learning".
I really wouldn't consider this a good point towards keeping experience points. Yes, a protagonist that never changes is a bad literary device - but so are dungeons that have no relation to the plot, repeated swapping of equipment for little obvious reason, and focusing on one character to highlight their special abilities repeatedly. The all work in a RPG, though, especially the last one. Giving a character the chance to pull out their special abilities and dominate a scene is a good RPG mechanic, as it lets the player have fun with their ability and enjoy picking it up, but it's a bad literary device and would likely receive calls of "Mary Sue" if encountered.


In CRPGs it's most often a solution looking for a problem.
Not really.

For tabletop RPGs, you can have other reasons to continue playing other than character progression. You do so to hang out with friends. You do so to tell a story. You do so to imagine something. You do so to see the end of the campaign.

Computer RPGs need some reason for the player to stick around throughout the whole game. Adventure and sandbox games have exploration and the offer to do anything you want, anywhere. Action games translate player skill directing into gameplay experience, so getting better at the game becomes more rewarding. For RPGs, the improvement comes from XP. Yes, cRPGs can have a story and that can motivate the player to continue the game, but the story tends to be only a small percentage of the gameplay time (even for highly cinematic games such as Xenosaga) and thus XP is used to provide motivation for players in the "downtime" when there isn't a story element playing nearby.

Note that a lot of the more successful RPGs tend to have other rewards beyond XP to continue playing, as well. Many have an exploration element. A number have some kind of weapon-synthesis or something similar. Lots have a monsterdex or monster-collecting system, encouraging players to go out and hunt down the rarer encounters. All are designed to keep the player playing beyond just following the initial storyline.


What they rarely have, however, is character creation, or a story you can actually influence beyond either living through a level or dying. Many fighting games at least have something like a campaign mode, though the story of those is often more an excuse than anything else.
To be fair, most computer video games have this problem. Even some of the better (or perhaps just better known) RPGs still stick you on the predetermined storyline path, with "win game" or "reload save" as your only real options.

Kenneth
2011-09-28, 07:20 PM
I think everybody is forgetting in my opinion, the most important reason why D%D and all RPGS have EXP or any form of characte progression at all.



it makes you feel warm and fuzzy, like a hug from a bear, only its a bear hug and you managed to roll a nat 20 Be rollin' nat 20s all day son! and Kill the bear and somehow mysteriously and miracously find yourself stronger, faster , better, smarter and all around much imporved.

Kenneth
2011-09-28, 07:27 PM
I think everybody is forgetting in my opinion, the most important reason why D%D and all RPGS have EXP or any form of characte progression at all.



it makes you feel warm and fuzzy, like a hug from a bear, only its a bear hug and you managed to roll a nat 20 Be rollin' nat 20s all day son! and Kill the bear and somehow mysteriously and miracously find yourself stronger, faster , better, smarter and all around much imporved.

Craft (Cheese)
2011-09-29, 12:58 AM
For tabletop RPGs, you can have other reasons to continue playing other than character progression. You do so to hang out with friends. You do so to tell a story. You do so to imagine something. You do so to see the end of the campaign.

Computer RPGs need some reason for the player to stick around throughout the whole game. Adventure and sandbox games have exploration and the offer to do anything you want, anywhere. Action games translate player skill directing into gameplay experience, so getting better at the game becomes more rewarding. For RPGs, the improvement comes from XP. Yes, cRPGs can have a story and that can motivate the player to continue the game, but the story tends to be only a small percentage of the gameplay time (even for highly cinematic games such as Xenosaga) and thus XP is used to provide motivation for players in the "downtime" when there isn't a story element playing nearby.

I don't buy this. Why?

Progress Quest (http://progressquest.com).

Is there seriously nowhere for CRPGs to go aside from being Progress Quest with graphics?

gkathellar
2011-09-29, 05:27 AM
I don't buy this. Why?

Progress Quest (http://progressquest.com).

Is there seriously nowhere for CRPGs to go aside from being Progress Quest with graphics?

False equivalency. Progress Quest is a parody of the useless and repetitive level-grinding in many MMORPGs. What Erikun was saying is that there are many reasons we play CRPGs, and periodic rewards are among them — whether those rewards come in the form of story, exploration, or gear/XP. The last of those is just simpler to do at a regular pace.

Eldan
2011-09-29, 05:33 AM
Progress doesn't have to mean more killing prowess, as it does in some games. Or just bigger numbers, that allow to progress some more.

It can just as well give truly new abilities that change gameplay. In D&D, the game dynamics radically change a few times when new spell levels become available. As soon as you get reliable flight, chasms aren't a problem anymore. When you get Teleport, you will rarely be stranded on a lonely island for long. These are story-changers, not mere number progress.
In a computer game, a new ability can unlock new game areas (see any Metroidvania or Zelda game).
You can find part of a story. I've fought through entire long dungeons just for a shred of backstory. Morrowind could just as well reward me with books as with treasure and skills.

The Succubus
2011-09-29, 05:49 AM
There's one other factor we've overlooked - how computers actually work.

Computer RPGs are programs ultimately based on logic and mathematics. As such, *any* system in a game has to adhere to fundamental preset rules. Even legendarily sandbox games like Minecraft still have basic rule systems to adhere to:

10) If placedblock = gravel OR sand and block at position y-location-1 = Null

THEN

placedblock y-location = y-1

Goto 10

ELSE

placedblock location = true

This is a rather bad example of some psuedocode *just to put a sand block down in Minecraft*. Now when you have a system that involves magic, combat feats and the world's supply of random numbers, trying to put character progression into some form of logical structure is bloody difficult to put it mildly.

Should CRPG developers stop looking for an alternative to the XP system? Of course not. Trying to find an alternative system of scaleable power increase that fits within a logical framework is no easy task.

Worira
2011-09-29, 05:51 AM
I don't buy this. Why?

Progress Quest (http://progressquest.com).

Is there seriously nowhere for CRPGs to go aside from being Progress Quest with graphics?

So... Did you just sort of see Progress Quest and go "Oh wow, that's so profound! Clearly all character progression in videogames is bad!"?

Craft (Cheese)
2011-09-29, 08:20 AM
So... Did you just sort of see Progress Quest and go "Oh wow, that's so profound! Clearly all character progression in videogames is bad!"?

No. As stated, I think Metroid uses character progression to great effect by turning the map itself into a giant door and key system: As you explore, you pick up items (keys) that let you get past associated obstacles (doors) to open up more parts of the map so you can continue onward. A gorgeous example of data-driven design. A bad game would have had cutscenes at the points where you get item pickups and the obstacles would be invisible walls that suddenly disappear after you see the cutscene. Metroid uses the progression of getting better items to guide the player through the game's narrative, so the progression here serves a purpose.



Final Fantasy (for simplicity I'll only consider the very first game here), by comparison, uses purely numerical progression, though there were some door/key moments as well like getting the TNT to make the canal. When you kill monsters you get EXP, which lets you do more damage and take more damage before death. Except the monsters get progressively stronger as well as you advance through the game's narrative.

Here's what I'm thinking: What, in Final Fantasy, does making the monsters in the next area stronger accomplish? If all the monsters did as much damage as the enemies at the start then it would have been far too easy but this is only because of the leveling system. I can think of only 2 (barely) positive effects:

1. That great feeling when you go back and slaughter those Ogres who OHKO'd you when you first encountered them. But this is fleeting and really only happens one time throughout the course of the entire game.

2. Giving mages more options slowly over time as to gradually introduce more complexity to combat as not to overwhelm the player, but this itself has three problems. First, it only applies to playthroughs that use mages at all, and considering the four-Fighter team is the easiest team to use, this is a massive problem (Yeah, yeah, knights can use white magic after the class change, but still). Second, the rate at which you get new options is far slower than most players will learn the mechanics of the game, and combat never gets much more complicated than it was at the beginning anyway. Third, without a fan-made patch almost all of the non-damaging spells are bugged and don't even do anything.

Pretty tiny advantages when you consider the two big drawbacks:

1. It creates a skinner box-like effect, big time.

2. It artificially pads out the length of the game by requiring (well, requiring for sane people anyway) to go back and grind if they didn't spend an arbitrary length of time wandering around before finding where they needed to go.

Let's say we dumped the leveling system from Final Fantasy. Let's say we started out all of your characters class changed, at level 50, with every spell, infinite gold, and the best equipment, then rebalanced all the encounters, stores, and encumbrance limits to be an appropriate challenge for such characters. Would we have had a better game for it? I'm starting to think the answer is yes.



So, my challenge is this. How do you design an experience and leveling system of character progression such that it:

A. Seamlessly fits in with the rest of the game's mechanics such that the game wouldn't be nearly as fun anymore if removed. Starting Link out with all the powerups would have made A Link to the Past's dungeons much less fun.

B. Makes these mechanics more than a cheap skinner box. The game should be enjoyable not because of the flashy lights from the level-up screen you get to see every so often, but because it has genuine depth that the level-up system contributes to in a meaningful, irreplaceable way.


And that's what I meant by "a solution looking for a problem." I don't have a game design problem that I need experience points to solve: I need to find a genuine game design problem where XP systems are a useful solution. I figured a good way to start with this would be to find out why XP was invented in the first place and what problem they solved to make them so popular. Hence, my original question.

Telonius
2011-09-29, 08:42 AM
Let's say we dumped the leveling system from Final Fantasy. Let's say we started out all of your characters class changed, at level 50, with every spell, infinite gold, and the best equipment, then rebalanced all the encounters, stores, and encumbrance limits to be an appropriate challenge for such characters. Would we have had a better game for it? I'm starting to think the answer is yes.


Little problem there, still ... if you're having a similar level of difficulty defeating each encounter, why not just skip all the mini-bosses and go straight for the Big Bad? For that matter, why aren't the mini-bosses rebelling against the Big Bad (since they're all about as tough as he is)?

The only reason I could think of throwing out for that is the item-based thing you were talking about. But having the item functions (basically) the same way as a level-up system. It allows you to fight the next thing, at least much more easily.

I do think it's interesting that in the original game of the Zelda series, there was a mixture of level-up and item dependence. Each of the Underworld levels you fought had a unique item in them, which would be necessary in getting through the next Underworld. But usually those items weren't absolutely necessary to defeat any individual boss or creature (with a few exceptions, like the flute for the big eyeball, and the arrow for the crab-thing). And when you beat the level, you got a "Hitpoint" level up: an extra heart container.

Mr.Bookworm
2011-09-29, 08:49 AM
There are plenty of great video games that either have no or barely any character progression at all. In Super Mario Bros, for instance, you reach the limit of "power" Mario gets before the end of the first stage. And even in games with character progression it in no way needs to be provided by a level system: Metroid and Zelda (the older ones anyway) do it entirely with items the player collects.

Those have different kinds of progression in them. Old school games (from Pac-Man to Mario) usually rely on different rewards to create work-reward loop. I never said that loot and XP were the entire story of computer games. Rewards can be many things. They can be simple scoring, levels, even less tangible things like new environments or progressing the narrative.

XP and loot are, however, one of the simplest ways to do it. Our brain loves repetition and patterns (as in, there is a literal natural high from experiencing them). You get a +1 sword and gain 1000 XP for killing a goblin. Your brain recognizes that you get a reward for doing something (killing a goblin). You kill some more goblins, you get more rewards. It's a fairly simple loop (this is at the most very basic level, mind you).

There are thousands of other variables, but this inherent conditioning in the game is a big one.

So, yeah, XP ain't going anywhere.

Eldan
2011-09-29, 09:05 AM
Okay, then. New suggestion:

Deus Ex. The Original, I haven't played the others yet.

Here, XP are gained for finding secrets on the map and solving missions. You invest them in various skills. None of these skills is ever absolutely necessary, but they make things easier. Additionally, you find augmentations you can similarly invest. Being able to make yourself invisible, or create spy drones or just soak more damage is effective and often fun, but not strictly required. Problems always have several solutions, one of which is, usually, combat. You can always just try shooting enemies in the face with your un-upgraded, unskilled starting pistol.

gkathellar
2011-09-29, 09:41 AM
Some of the very best modules I played during the golden age of NWN1 didn't give you any experience for actual combat. Completing quests, updating your journal and talking to people were the only means of leveling up.

Roderick_BR
2011-09-29, 09:45 AM
You wouldn't have to. But the system was designed to support the concept of people improving as they go. It is a fairly common idea in literature. A lowly pig-farmer, after overcoming obstacles, becomes the High King. An apprentice mage, through years of hard work and study, eventually becomes an Archmage. A weak and gangly youth blossoms into the greatest warrior the land had ever known. A bunch of silly halflings go adventuring, turn into some of the greatest heroes in the realm, with such change that their friends don't recognize them at first when they return home.

If you don't have some method of granting abilities to characters as the story progresses, the system will not be able to support any of those (not terribly uncommon or far-out) plotlines. The existence of classes is an attempt to standardize the progression, so you don't have a single character who's far ahead (or behind) the others. The theory being that this is a collaborative game, with the players having most fun when they all feel they can contribute something significant to the team's efforts.

The game is also set up so that there are more- and less-dangerous monsters. If your antagonist is a local goblin chief, that's one thing. Perfectly mundane and "low-magic" ways exist of dealing with the threat. Your average pig-farmer stands a decent shot of winning, if he uses his wits. But if you want your antagonist to be a demon lord, the players would need some method of becoming strong enough to fight him. You could just make the players at roughly the same power level as the demon lord, but that kind of takes the specialness out of the fight. (Kind of the, "If everybody's super, nobody is" effect). With character progression, the system can support both antagonists fairly easily.

It's perfectly possible to play D&D without ever leveling up. One-shot adventures are actually pretty common, and hardly anybody levels up in those. There's nothing that says the DM can't just jettison XP altogether and keep throwing CR-x encounters at the party. It's also possible to run a campaign where the heroes are vastly weaker than the villains. Horror-themed campaigns are notorious for this. This kind of campaign is usually the exception, rather than the norm (though it does have some support for it in sourcebooks like Heroes of Horror). Level progression does not prevent this kind of campaign; but it does allow flexibility for people who don't want to play that way.
We could then contrast Mutants & Masterminds, with a system made to mimic typical comic superhero stories, where you are already given most of your powers, without an high demand of new powers every game session.
D&D, like most fantasy-based games, just prefer the "start as a newbie, turn into a legendary hero" route.

If you want, say, a campaign where the characters start around level 10, power-wise, and then you guys just don't consider XP at all anymore, nothing is stopping you. But your players will eventually complain they can't get any new shiny new power after they fight a few enemies with higher CR than you.

stainboy
2011-09-29, 10:01 AM
Okay, then. New suggestion:

Deus Ex. The Original, I haven't played the others yet.

Here, XP are gained for finding secrets on the map and solving missions. You invest them in various skills. None of these skills is ever absolutely necessary, but they make things easier. Additionally, you find augmentations you can similarly invest. Being able to make yourself invisible, or create spy drones or just soak more damage is effective and often fun, but not strictly required. Problems always have several solutions, one of which is, usually, combat. You can always just try shooting enemies in the face with your un-upgraded, unskilled starting pistol.

Deus Ex would work fine without its skill system though. The most important thing skills do is force you to choose what kinds of guns to use and the inventory system does that anyway. (Well, unless you're a filthy cheater.)

Deus Ex could give free Expert everything without reducing player choice. The difficulty wouldn't even change much after level 3 or 4.

Oh, random trivia: you can't have an unskilled starting pistol. If you drop your pistol skill to Untrained at char gen it goes back up to Trained when the game starts. And you get to keep the points. Filthy cheater.

Craft (Cheese)
2011-09-29, 11:26 AM
Little problem there, still ... if you're having a similar level of difficulty defeating each encounter, why not just skip all the mini-bosses and go straight for the Big Bad? For that matter, why aren't the mini-bosses rebelling against the Big Bad (since they're all about as tough as he is)?

I didn't mean that all enemies would be the same challenge, just that they should be balanced around a single party level instead of being balanced for different ones depending on what level the developers reason you "should" be at that point in the game. Imps would still die in one shot and Chaos would kick your ass.

Besides, it's not like the plot of Final Fantasy made any sense before ;p

gkathellar
2011-09-29, 11:44 AM
I didn't mean that all enemies would be the same challenge, just that they should be balanced around a single party level instead of being balanced for different ones depending on what level the developers reason you "should" be at that point in the game. Imps would still die in one shot and Chaos would kick your ass.

But that gets really boring, really fast. It's one of the reasons why overleveling your guys can ruin a game.


Besides, it's not like the plot of Final Fantasy made any sense before ;p

You disrupt a stable time loop. That seems reasonably straightforward.

Project_Mayhem
2011-09-29, 12:03 PM
Moving back to the original point, D&D 4th ed doesn't actually *need* XP - its a legacy that players expect. There would be barely any difference just saying 'The players level up every x encounters'

XP in other systems can add something though - take World of Darkness, where different upgrades have different costs - buying an upgrade can cost anything from 2 XP to around 80. You have the option of saving up for one big thing, or focusing on many small things.

Sipex
2011-09-29, 12:19 PM
You disrupt a stable time loop. That seems reasonably straightforward.

I find it interesting that this is considered a straightforward story. I agree mind you, it's just really interesting.

I love the idea of EXP because I'm human, I like progression. Does this mean EXP is the end all be all of progression? Not at all. In fact, when EXP is the only means of progression a game tends to suck and suck hard.

The best games have several routes of progression each which are usually obtained by doing different things meaning no matter what you do as a player, you're probably progressing something.

The three basic lanes are EXP, Story and Loot.
- EXP is progression for fighting
- Story is progression for moving forward and talking to people
- Loot is progression for fighting and exploring (overlap adds to the sense of accomplishment)

Any RPG with just these three is usually on the 'decent' scale depending on the quality of each lane (ie: of the story sucks then there's a hit to the game). Why these three? Because with the most basic of games this means you have progression no matter what you do.

Of course most good or better RPGs have additional lanes for progression like bestiaries, skills, unique spells, story blurbs, etc.

Mind you, EXP isn't mandatory but usually some system of skill improvement (Heart containers, skill points, etc) tends to greatly enhance a game.

In short? EXP is there because people enjoy it.

Yhynens
2011-09-29, 12:20 PM
I didn't mean that all enemies would be the same challenge, just that they should be balanced around a single party level instead of being balanced for different ones depending on what level the developers reason you "should" be at that point in the game. Imps would still die in one shot and Chaos would kick your ass.

Besides, it's not like the plot of Final Fantasy made any sense before ;p

Honestly I feel like I already answered most of your questions in my earlier posts. Regardless, there's a sort of big problem with what you're suggesting here specifically: the way FF1's combat system works is ludicrously simple, and there's not enough "room" to balance every encounter in the game to have increasing difficulty based on a one-level system, especially considering that that early in the history of RPGs there weren't even bosses in every dungeon, and a lot of the difficulty was just in making it down into the cave to get new swords and "keys." If you wanted to balance the whole game around a one-level party, who start with all magic, it would be difficult to make later areas actually more difficult than earlier areas since you'd have to either slightly increment the enemy's damage, raise the number of encounters, or just make the place bigger, all of which are not actually good solutions because if you couldn't gain strength there wouldn't be a good way to overcome these problems besides "play better" which you likely can't because of the simplicity of the game.

FF1 is basically a dungeon crawler: you have to make several trips into the cave, slowly exploring it, getting the weapons out of the chests, and gaining strength. The level system is designed not to have you come back later to kill the ogres that were giving you ire, but to come back now and kill the ogres who were giving you ire. In a few levels you go from being able to handle 3-4 groups before you have to leave, to like 10, to them not really being a big deal at all. You get these levels naturally as a part of playing the game the way it's meant to be played. The only area I remember grinding was Lich Cave, actually, I was able to get strong enough to beat other areas after two or three "spelunking sessions" in every case. There's nothing wrong with the progression in FF1. Skinner-box like? Well, sure, but basically everything we do is. Would you complain about "grinding" at work to gain the monetary progression of your paycheck? As for artificially padding game time, I wouldn't really call it artificial since leveling up IS the game; and even then this wasn't really a complaint people had back in the 80s.

Even though the FF series eschewed it eventually, this sort of gameplay is still alive and well today in games like Etrian Odyssey. But like I said... if you want a game without character progression, you're probably going to have to change the design of the game from step 1. Another good genre for what I was talking about before is beat-em-ups. Even then, the enemies and bosses typically don't get that harder after, say, level 3, but your characters start with all the skills they're going to have and don't gain any more (in most cases) besides maybe picking up an item after beating it out of some guy's hands.

stainboy
2011-09-29, 12:37 PM
I didn't mean that all enemies would be the same challenge, just that they should be balanced around a single party level instead of being balanced for different ones depending on what level the developers reason you "should" be at that point in the game. Imps would still die in one shot and Chaos would kick your ass.

Besides, it's not like the plot of Final Fantasy made any sense before ;p

You need XP to force you to fight in random battles, and you need random battles to gain XP.




The three basic lanes are EXP, Story and Loot.
- EXP is progression for fighting
- Story is progression for moving forward and talking to people
- Loot is progression for fighting and exploring (overlap adds to the sense of accomplishment)


My lanes would be like this:

Abilities: You get new ways to solve problems. You can overcome one of your old limitations and your character probably becomes more complex. You learn Invisibility. You find the rocket launcher. You are now healed by electricity.

Content: You can interact with new parts of the game world. The walrusfolk fix the bridge so you can go to the Ice Zone. The king gives you a title and a keep. The Assassin's Guild offers new missions.

Stats: You do the same things as before, only now you do them better. You gain a level. You get a skill point. The item shops now sell better equipment.


I'm gonna say almost every game needs to give you new abilities and new content, but increasing your stats only matters if it lets you rely on abilities you previously couldn't (effectively giving you a new ability) or take on challenges you previously couldn't (giving you new content).

Craft (Cheese)
2011-09-29, 02:42 PM
Honestly I feel like I already answered most of your questions in my earlier posts. Regardless, there's a sort of big problem with what you're suggesting here specifically: the way FF1's combat system works is ludicrously simple, and there's not enough "room" to balance every encounter in the game to have increasing difficulty based on a one-level system, especially considering that that early in the history of RPGs there weren't even bosses in every dungeon, and a lot of the difficulty was just in making it down into the cave to get new swords and "keys." If you wanted to balance the whole game around a one-level party, who start with all magic, it would be difficult to make later areas actually more difficult than earlier areas since you'd have to either slightly increment the enemy's damage, raise the number of encounters, or just make the place bigger, all of which are not actually good solutions because if you couldn't gain strength there wouldn't be a good way to overcome these problems besides "play better" which you likely can't because of the simplicity of the game.

FF1 is basically a dungeon crawler: you have to make several trips into the cave, slowly exploring it, getting the weapons out of the chests, and gaining strength. The level system is designed not to have you come back later to kill the ogres that were giving you ire, but to come back now and kill the ogres who were giving you ire. In a few levels you go from being able to handle 3-4 groups before you have to leave, to like 10, to them not really being a big deal at all. You get these levels naturally as a part of playing the game the way it's meant to be played. The only area I remember grinding was Lich Cave, actually, I was able to get strong enough to beat other areas after two or three "spelunking sessions" in every case. There's nothing wrong with the progression in FF1. Skinner-box like? Well, sure, but basically everything we do is. Would you complain about "grinding" at work to gain the monetary progression of your paycheck? As for artificially padding game time, I wouldn't really call it artificial since leveling up IS the game; and even then this wasn't really a complaint people had back in the 80s.

Even though the FF series eschewed it eventually, this sort of gameplay is still alive and well today in games like Etrian Odyssey. But like I said... if you want a game without character progression, you're probably going to have to change the design of the game from step 1. Another good genre for what I was talking about before is beat-em-ups. Even then, the enemies and bosses typically don't get that harder after, say, level 3, but your characters start with all the skills they're going to have and don't gain any more (in most cases) besides maybe picking up an item after beating it out of some guy's hands.

As far as I'm concerned, grinding is when you do the same thing over and over again well past the point at which the activity in itself has become uninteresting and boring for the sole purpose of repeatedly gaining the reward for doing so. Going into a cave, fighting a few battles, leaving to heal up, rinse and repeat until you're strong enough to just ignore all the encounters, is grinding. And if the combat is so simple* there's nothing to beating encounters other than grinding them into triviality, then the game isn't much better than Progress Quest, and removing the leveling system will at least do the favor of letting you get through the story faster.

*While the base game never really gets much more complex than spamming the "Fight" option I don't think it's beyond salvation. An obvious way to go is the introduction of interesting status effects, locks, and resets available to the enemy that get progressively weirder and combat essentially becomes a puzzle game of figuring out how to get yourself out of the current mess you're in.

Yhynens
2011-09-29, 02:58 PM
Mm. I think you might be misunderstanding my point about going into the dungeons multiple times. It's not "go in once, fight a few battles, and get out." It's "go in once, explore, find some chests, have to leave because it's getting too dangerous to stick around." That's the way the dungeons are designed (for the most part.) After you explore a couple branches you've gained enough levels to be strong enough to not have to leave. You couldn't really simulate that if there was no character progression, since you wouldn't gain anything by exploring (even if there was only progression through better equipment, it would have to be really radical increases in equipment strength.) As it is, what you gain by exploring the dungeon isn't just a knowledge of what the area is like, but also actual character strength, both in terms of levels you gained by incidentally fighting enemies while exploring, and equipment you found directly through the exploration process.

Keep in mind, especially for your last paragraph, what I'm suggesting isn't that a game with your changes would be bad, but that it isn't really the same sort of game as what FF1 and other dungeon crawl games are trying to do. In a similar vein, and as I feel like I've already said, progression is there in D&D because that's the kind of game it's trying to be. It's a game about getting stronger. Should there be games that aren't about this? Yes, of course. There are some, and there should be more. But does that mean D&D is automatically bad for including an element (here, progression, not exp solely) that it needs to accomplish the goals it's trying to accomplish? Not really, no.