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Alex

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As opposed to xp grinding, which no one ever does. :roll:

I think his point is that you have to do senseless stuff. I mean, grinding is senseless, but at least it is the basic step of the game. You are purposefully doing something less interesting to get XP, but what you are doing is still basically what you would be otherwise doing if you weren't grinding. While in Daggerfall you might go everywhere running and jumping like an idiot in order to boost those skills.

One issue with this in computer games is that skill use there and in a tabletop game isn't quite the same thing. Getting a check in Call of C'thulhu for an interesting or well placed use of skill works really nice. You can't do quite that in CRPGs, at least if you are going to track skill use for each and every little action, like every blow in a sword fight.

On the other hand, I do think that saying a system doesn't work because you refuse to play it in a way that works is kinda silly.
 

Zombra

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I think his point is that you have to do senseless stuff. I mean, grinding is senseless, but at least it is the basic step of the game. You are purposefully doing something less interesting to get XP, but what you are doing is still basically what you would be otherwise doing if you weren't grinding. While in Daggerfall you might go everywhere running and jumping like an idiot in order to boost those skills.
Well, I did specifically cite Acrobatics as a poor implementation :)

In Jagged Alliance, if you want to get better at medicine, you heal lots of people. In Wasteland, if you want to get better at picking locks, you break into lots of buildings. In an xp system, if you want to get better at healing wounds or picking locks, ... you farm boars. Which is "senseless"? :?
 

Alex

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Ok, but by senseless, I meant that you would do things in game that you don't actually find fun (sorry, that wasn't a good use of the word).
 

Zombra

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Ok, but by senseless, I meant that you would do things in game that you don't actually find fun (sorry, that wasn't a good use of the word).
I'm into it. I reject that that is a necessary component of LBD, just like it's not a necessary component of xp systems. Raising skills in Jagged Alliance was certainly fun and completely doable without grinding or resorting to Sawyer's "degenerate" behavior. I found Skyrim's system to be perfectly fun and intuitive and never once was tempted to backstab an immortal NPC. Wizardry 8 (though a hybrid system) delivered a great deal of satisfaction from raising skills simply by playing the game. And so on.

Pointing out one or two skills that are stupidly implemented in a given LBD game has never proven that LBD is inferior; it just proves that those implementations sucked. As adrix89 observed, any system that rewards certain behaviors with progression incentivizes those behaviors. In essence, any game that includes character advancement will have some form of grinding. The only question is whether it's most fun to A) have advancement "checkpoints" that give arbitrary advancements you have no control over (such as in traditional D&D), with equally arbitrary metrics for reaching those checkpoints; B) have some form of "point spend" system that allows the player to arbitrarily choose his improvements, with total disregard for where the points came from; or C) have a system that rewards a given behavior by improving one's tools for continuing to pursue that behavior. To me C is by far the most responsive and has the strongest sense of feedback; it makes me feel that what I am doing moment to moment actually matters.

To put it another way, doing stupid shit to farm advancement is horrible no matter what kind of system you put it in. This is not an argument in favor of xp systems, because xp systems are just as guilty of it as any other.
 

octavius

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I think his point is that you have to do senseless stuff. I mean, grinding is senseless, but at least it is the basic step of the game. You are purposefully doing something less interesting to get XP, but what you are doing is still basically what you would be otherwise doing if you weren't grinding. While in Daggerfall you might go everywhere running and jumping like an idiot in order to boost those skills.
Well, I did specifically cite Acrobatics as a poor implementation :)

In Jagged Alliance, if you want to get better at medicine, you heal lots of people. In Wasteland, if you want to get better at picking locks, you break into lots of buildings. In an xp system, if you want to get better at healing wounds or picking locks, ... you farm boars. Which is "senseless"? :?

Nothing is more senseless than Morrowind where you can get to lvl 20 just by hopping up and down all day, only interrupted by sleeping 20 times.
It's funny...I used to love Morrowind, but the more I think of that game, the more I detest it.
 

CryptRat

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It's funny...I used to love Morrowind, but the more I think of that game, the more I detest it.
Maybe you should just stop thinking about its systems, which are not good ; Morrowind is a masterpiece because of its content : the world is undisputed if you combine its coherency, its size, its lore, its wildlife, its architecture, its NPCs, its factions (their background is very informed), ect. Several quests are good. The visuals are great, the music is great. That's only my opinion, and I'm generally a system fag who also like games which get to the point and do not bother with a lore and/or only use a generic Forgotten Realms(-inspired) setting.
 
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Roid King

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Has there ever been a LBD game where every skill increases at an appropriate level?
Every game I can think of with such a system there was at least one skill with terrible growth balance you had to get "degenerate" to increase.
Sharpen your pitchforks people. I thought Skyrim's system worked great. I never had to resort to exploits to feel that my characters' growth was commensurate with the amount of exercise they got with any given skill.

Agreed. The problems with Skyrim's skills and leveling lay elsewhere than the LBD system itself. The removal of the attributes (without at the very least incorporating what they actually DO into skills, which perhaps would have overcome the multiplier problem that was the real crux from a role-playing standpoint). Too many actions without a correspending skill (in my dream RPG, there would not only be many more game mechanics outside of combat, but everything would be tied to a skill), too fast skill increases, and no real barrier to increasing everything to high levels.
 

Shevek

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I like levels. I level up and.. bam.. endorphins. The notion that this leads to repetitive gameplay is crap. Any system can lead to repetitive gameplay. Action games with no levels are chock full of repetitive gameplay. To avoid xp grinding put in objective based xp or mix it up ala Underrail's oddity system.

I think another key is to avoid a level system that leads to players becoming absurdly powerful and never having to fear enemies of lower levels. This is trivial to do. Check out the Dnd 3.5 E6 variant system. Even official systems from big name companies (see 5E's proficiency system and it's scaled back itemization) have found ways to do this.
 

Telengard

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As opposed to xp grinding, which no one ever does. :roll:
Grinding all skills at once doing the main thing in the game is a very different kettle of fish than is asking them to go off and grind each skill one at time by doing something they don't want to do and that doesn't progress the game and has nothing to do with how people learn or act in normal life. It's one of the fastest ways to lead non-autists to abject boredom and turning off the game. It's kind of famous for it.
 
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I think his point is that you have to do senseless stuff. I mean, grinding is senseless, but at least it is the basic step of the game. You are purposefully doing something less interesting to get XP, but what you are doing is still basically what you would be otherwise doing if you weren't grinding. While in Daggerfall you might go everywhere running and jumping like an idiot in order to boost those skills.
Well, I did specifically cite Acrobatics as a poor implementation :)

In Jagged Alliance, if you want to get better at medicine, you heal lots of people. In Wasteland, if you want to get better at picking locks, you break into lots of buildings. In an xp system, if you want to get better at healing wounds or picking locks, ... you farm boars. Which is "senseless"? :?

In fairness, that's a problem of how exp is given out, not something intrinsic to exp. You can make exp quest-based, and that removes the immediate clash of 'practice X to get better at Y' by replacing it with a more abstract growth, while maintaining the build freedom of 'I want to play one style for a while, then add another option in at point A, etc'.

There's no question that the JA system is more intuitive, but it does lose something when it comes to the ability to diversify. Bear in mind that in JA, your characters are largely fixed in their roles. Which, ironically, makes it a good system for party-based crpgs - the fact that JA reverses the usual pattern where train-by-use is used for single character crpgs and exp-level is used for party crpgs, is probably a very large part of why it works in JA so much better than it does elsewhere. In single-character crpgs, where you might want to start by specialising in one playstyle, and then add side-skills in (say a fighter who, at medium levels adds a little bit of magic, or a diplomat who broadens out into a diplomat-thief later), train-by-use can be too restrictive.
 

Zombra

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As opposed to xp grinding, which no one ever does. :roll:
Grinding all skills at once doing the main thing in the game is a very different kettle of fish than is asking them to go off and grind each skill one at time by doing something they don't want to do and that doesn't progress the game and has nothing to do with how people learn or act in normal life. It's one of the fastest ways to lead non-autists to abject boredom and turning off the game. It's kind of famous for it.
You're describing horrible implementation, not a horrible system. No game "asks you" to go pick 200 practice locks in town before going to a dungeon and picking the lock there. People who grind in unfun ways because they feel they have to max all their skills before playing the game are just idiots.
 

deuxhero

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Has there ever been a LBD game where every skill increases at an appropriate level?
Every game I can think of with such a system there was at least one skill with terrible growth balance you had to get "degenerate" to increase.
Sharpen your pitchforks people. I thought Skyrim's system worked great. I never had to resort to exploits to feel that my characters' growth was commensurate with the amount of exercise they got with any given skill.

Agreed. The problems with Skyrim's skills and leveling lay elsewhere than the LBD system itself. The removal of the attributes (without at the very least incorporating what they actually DO into skills, which perhaps would have overcome the multiplier problem that was the real crux from a role-playing standpoint). Too many actions without a correspending skill (in my dream RPG, there would not only be many more game mechanics outside of combat, but everything would be tied to a skill), too fast skill increases, and no real barrier to increasing everything to high levels.

To its credit (I can't believe I'm saying this) perks did, at least in theory, make it impossible to be the best at everything even if you supposedly have a hundred in a skill. So many are complete shit and irrelevant while the good ones were utterly basic it hardly works out that way though.

In Jagged Alliance, if you want to get better at medicine, you heal lots of people. In Wasteland, if you want to get better at picking locks, you break into lots of buildings. In an xp system, if you want to get better at healing wounds or picking locks, ... you farm boars. Which is "senseless"? :?

The one where you let a more qualified guy than you stand next to you as your friend bleeds simply for practice, and open locks with no interest in what's on the other side.
 

Damned Registrations

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Has there ever been a LBD game where every skill increases at an appropriate level?
Every game I can think of with such a system there was at least one skill with terrible growth balance you had to get "degenerate" to increase.
Sharpen your pitchforks people. I thought Skyrim's system worked great. I never had to resort to exploits to feel that my characters' growth was commensurate with the amount of exercise they got with any given skill.

Agreed. The problems with Skyrim's skills and leveling lay elsewhere than the LBD system itself. The removal of the attributes (without at the very least incorporating what they actually DO into skills, which perhaps would have overcome the multiplier problem that was the real crux from a role-playing standpoint). Too many actions without a correspending skill (in my dream RPG, there would not only be many more game mechanics outside of combat, but everything would be tied to a skill), too fast skill increases, and no real barrier to increasing everything to high levels.
*Cough* BLACKSMITHING *Cough*
 

Roid King

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As opposed to xp grinding, which no one ever does. :roll:
Grinding all skills at once doing the main thing in the game is a very different kettle of fish than is asking them to go off and grind each skill one at time by doing something they don't want to do and that doesn't progress the game and has nothing to do with how people learn or act in normal life. It's one of the fastest ways to lead non-autists to abject boredom and turning off the game. It's kind of famous for it.

Nobody has to "go off". If you're a warrior, your "main thing" is to hack stuff/hack your way through the main quest, so that's what you do to make your warrior skills go up. "Going off" to grind random/non-quest encounters is as common in XP games. You're making up false arguments.
 
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Damned Registrations

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Well, either you don't consider crafting hundreds of daggers and bracers to be grindy/exploitative, or your smithing skill never got high enough to do jack shit. The smithing system in Skyrim is entirely balanced on the premise that you'll buy out the entire stock of the cheapest ores you can skill off of at smiths, make a million pieces of garbage, and sell them back to repeat the process. If you actually just play naturally, upgrading your gear as you go and buying ore to make better gear instead of explicitly to grind your skill, you'd stop using the skill after the first hour or so because it'd be entirely obsolete compared to the equipment you already have. Perfect example of why LBD doesn't work as a universal system.
 

Roid King

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Well, either you don't consider crafting hundreds of daggers and bracers to be grindy/exploitative, or your smithing skill never got high enough to do jack shit. The smithing system in Skyrim is entirely balanced on the premise that you'll buy out the entire stock of the cheapest ores you can skill off of at smiths, make a million pieces of garbage, and sell them back to repeat the process. If you actually just play naturally, upgrading your gear as you go and buying ore to make better gear instead of explicitly to grind your skill, you'd stop using the skill after the first hour or so because it'd be entirely obsolete compared to the equipment you already have. Perfect example of why LBD doesn't work as a universal system.

Again, this is bad implementation, not bad concept. What I would like to see is a system where all crafting - as well as other things, like mining or reading books - actually causes time to pass. This together with a sleep/hunger mechanic, as well as limited-time-quests and other mechanics that make time a precious commodity, merchants that doesn't infinitely restock, etc., would make it into actual roleplaying. Perhaps even a minigame for crafting, as long as it's not gimmicky and too repetitive. If these (highly logical) things were actually implemented in any god damn game, they would make LBD systems far more realistic than what can be done with XP. I'm aware of the shortcomings of LBD systems so far, but I'm calling for an evolution of them here, not just the same endless repetition of tried mechanics, which you XP-people seem to call for.

I would say that this grinding-problem ties into a larger problem in these games, and that is the completely player-centered world. Nothing happens unless the player triggers it, so there's no need to care about the time you spend doing stuff. It is not necessary to completely force the player into the main quest, or whatever, since that would perhaps stunt the experience of an exploration-heavy game too much, but I would like to see that things happen in the larger world outside the player's control, so that the player can't completely indulge himself in excesses like endless grinding. This would both improve immersion and player choice.
 
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Damned Registrations

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Again, this is bad implementation, not bad concept. What I would like to see is a system where all crafting - as well as other things, like mining or reading books - actually causes time to pass. This together with a sleep/hunger mechanic, as well as limited-time-quests and other mechanics that make time a precious commodity, merchants that doesn't infinitely restock, etc., would make it into actual roleplaying.
You mean like the game that already does all of that and makes the LBD aspect basically pointless because you'll have done everything there is to do before you raise your skills 5% from where they started?
 

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