Leapfrogging in RPGs

[Wyrmlord]

Leapfrogging basically means going to a very difficult part of the game early on, finishing that part first with great perseverance, gaining all the rewards, and only then getting on with the rest of the game with much more ease.

Examples include:

1) Blowing up the military base in Fallout as a level 4 character before returning the waterchip - gives you 4 levels worth of experience.

2) The 2.5-year old Let's Play of Betrayal At Krondor in this forum, where I did all the latter game quests and dungeons in the first Chapter itself, and then easily sped through the following chapter with a powerful tank of a party.

3) Finishing some major Dark Side quests in World of Xeen before coming to the Cloud side.

Do you leapfrog? Do you enjoy it? Which game has the best chance to leapfrog?

 

[Jaesun]

How many times did you re-load getting to the Military base at level 4?

 

[JagreenLern]

Another big example would be getting into Navarro at level one in FO2 and getting Enclave power armor and energy weapons, then getting the pulse guns from the BoS in San Francisco. It's entirely possible, but makes a great deal of the fights to easy to be entertaining. I wait for it at least until I go to Mariposa, where minigun rape waits for those with sub-par armor.

Also, getting Marcus in your party early and stealing a Bozar from the guards at the NCR weapon shop to give him is pretty much leapfrogging, if you don't mind having to reload your game when he occasional blows you or your companions into little pieces. His inability to wear armor seriously limits his survivability later in the game though. Anyone know how much tougher the mutant armor plugin from the Restoration Pack makes him?. Either way, I usually do the oil rig solo. Even Cassidy in power armor has a hard time surviving the turrets on the rig, at least from what I recall.

 

[sser]

The power armor in FO2 is the only one I can think of except you're not necessarily leapfrogging anything, if I remember right. You just walk in and take it without any real effort.

 

[Wyrmlord]

How many times did you re-load getting to the Military base at level 4?

I counted. It was about 7 times. 3 times trying to outrun Krupper and his other mutant friend in the level above the VATs. 4 times running out of the base's perimeter. I started from the bottom of the base, because I asked Harry to take me there.

In 2 or 3 of those reloads, I think I did get shredded into pieces. But I had Garl's armour from the Khan raider's camp, and it is serviceable.

It worked, because I was agile and lucky. Thanks to luck, I got to critically damage and insantly kill the two mutants who got in my way with a grenade. Thanks to agility, I could outrun mutants until their rifles were out of range. The base was never in alert mode, because instant kills means no chance for alarm.

Perseverance is involved. But it is really no harder than playing the Taris area in KotOR with a Level 2 character. Ever tried that? It allows you to keep 18 other levels as Jedi. Also makes KotOR more challenging and forces you to actually use all the items you are supposed to use in battle.

 

[Daemongar]

The power armor in FO2 is the only one I can think of except you're not necessarily leapfrogging anything, if I remember right. You just walk in and take it without any real effort.

There are a lot of patrols/random encounters in the area though. You'd have to reload every time you get a random encounter. This is not poor game design, actually, I like it. It means the game is not all that linear, and thats a good thing. No person doing a first run through of FO2 could stumble on that base, it takes a familiarity with the game.

 

[Zarniwoop]

I found the Military base by accident the first time. (Fallout 1) I didn't get far but I managed to kill a few of the mutants and get a lot of xp plus a laser rifle.

I thought I'd try the same thing in FO3... boy was I in for a surprise.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

No, I always play iron-man .

And doing such thing with reloads... What's the point, you can use cheat codes/character editor as well.

 

[Jools]

Sometimes I do on later playthroughs, in the pursuit of alternative routes to complete a game or out of sheer challenge.

 

[Zed]

I very rarely replay a game so I don't know how to leapfrog, as you put it.

 

[anus_pounder]

I did the navarro run with no reloads. Though I only managed to do so because I didn't install the restoration patch. For some reason, my movement on the worldmap was at superspeed.

 

[Gord]

Usually I try to avoid it, as I prefer playing the game as intended and without applying to much meta-knowledge.

 

[Wyrmlord]

If we are talking about playing the game as intended, let's remember that Harry from Necropolis can escort you to the military base. Which means the developers intended that someone try to finish that section early.

How the developers intended to play the game could be anything. One suspects the developers of Deus Ex didn't expect you to make the effort of swimming in the canals. Yet, for some reason, if you do so, some character will actually ask why you were swimming!

 

[Gord]

Yes, good point.
OTOH their intention was probably to get your ass kicked at the base.
That you do have the freedom is certainly a nice touch.

But take FO2 and getting the early Power Armor in SF: Technically you can go there right from the start, but your char shouldn't be aware of the city yet, so why would he go there at all at this point?

Admittedly I have done stuff like that occasionally in Morrowind. If you know where to go you can easily find some nice equipment early on.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I think just about everyone that plays BG2 does this, doing every single available quest and encounter that is available to you in Chapter 2 before going to Spellhold. I think people do this mostly to milk Yoshimo for all he's worth.

Another game where I do this is the first Gothic game. In the Old Mine there's a powerful bow with a low Dexterity requirement that comes REALLY handy in the opening parts of the game, but you have to get past a couple of Minecrawlers to reach it. No problem if you know how.

In the Ultima Underworld games there's a really simple way to get MASSIVE XP early on, kill the Lurkers in the water. In UW1 there's enough of them to help you reach Level 5 without leaving the first level. Technically not leapfrogging, but it makes your character very powerful well ahead of his time.

There are probably some similar tricks in M&M3-6, abusing the portal mirror/hidden teleporters to do things out of turn.

 

[MMXI]

Doing a few levels of Watcher's Keep early in Baldur's Gate II.

 

[mondblut]

All the time, as long as I have confidence I won't break the game (as in scripts and quests and stuff, not "challenge", you silly man!) by going somewhere earlier than I should have had. Like killing something I'll be supposed to kill later on.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

If we are talking about playing the game as intended, let's remember that Harry from Necropolis can escort you to the military base. Which means the developers intended that someone try to finish that section early.

I think it was a badend.

 

[Johannes]

I don't replay rpgs almost ever, so no. Not planning it from the start anyway, who knows what I'll stumble into. If there's a boss that seems killable even if I'm outleveled, and I feel like doing it, I'll try even if I'll have to reload a bit.

 

[mangsy]

The Gothic games are melding together in my mind, but I think in Gothic 2 (maybe Gothic 3?) there is a huge camp of orcs outside the castle (which itself is surrounded by a magical barrier). I remember going there and luring one or two at a time at a really low level. Slowly but surely cleaved my way through the entire army after hours of doing so. Lots of XP. This experience taught me that orcs are brilliant military strategists.

 

[TNO]

Leapfrogging in RPGs where you get more powerful by orders of magnitude (that is most of them) is usually a sign of meta-gaming like hell or bad design.

The reverse problem is more common - having massive leaps in difficulty along the main path that invite canny players to grind all the sidequests available first. The best example is the black mountain mines, which I first arrived at when I was level 8. BG2 Spellhold is a bit like that, too.

Still, I prefer these hazards to the New Shit, which avoids these issues thanks to hamster-wheel level scaling.

 

[Ulminati]

The most leapfrogging I've ever done intentionally was in FO2. On my second playthrough I went directly to new reno, got a free sample of jet from wosshisname that greets you, went stright to Big Jesus mardino and used it on him. Leather armor + combat shotgun at level 1. Fuck yeah.

 

[Esquilax]

Leapfrogging in RPGs where you get more powerful by orders of magnitude (that is most of them) is usually a sign of meta-gaming like hell or bad design.

The reverse problem is more common - having massive leaps in difficulty along the main path that invite canny players to grind all the sidequests available first. The best example is the black mountain mines, which I first arrived at when I was level 8. BG2 Spellhold is a bit like that, too.

Still, I prefer these hazards to the New Shit, which avoids these issues thanks to hamster-wheel level scaling.

BMC was awful. I was rolling a gunslinger and I quit the game in frustration because my guns didn't do a fucking thing, I needed like a million bullets to kill the golems, I kept having to run back and forth from Tarant to BMC, and when the golems would would come in striking distance, I'd get clobbered. I had Magnus and Sogg as bros, but they'd get clobbered quickly too.

 

[Azrael the cat]

Before sandbox design and scale-to-level systems ruined it, leapfrogging was one of the parts I loved most about combat-focussed crpgs. It would be the thing I'd immediately look for when playing a game for the first time - where can I go to leapfrog into a later-level content/quest.

Have to say, I don't really count things like getting the power armour/energy weapons early in FO2, or getting weapons early in general, as the sort of leapfrogging I'm talking about. That stuff is either just 'reward for exploration', and is in any decent exploration-based game (e.g. Deus Ex), or it ends up with you breaking the game by doing something it wasn't designed to handle (the FO2 end-game gear speedrun). No, what I loved about leapfrogging was being faced with an area that you can only handle through a greater application of tactics than the game ordinarily requires, and then reaping the long-term benefit as a result. Out of the latter-era games, BG2 had a lot of content like that, and Gothic 2 had some, but neither game really pushes you tactically.

Mind you, leapfrogging still felt good in BG2 because it fitted so well with the power-gaming mentality encouraged by 2nd edition when applied to computer games. Dual-classing in PnP was awful for 2nd ed, but it was fantastic in a computer game environment with a fixed level cap. That was due to the way that 2nd edition handled exp, where early levels would require a tiny fraction of the exp that was needed for progressing in between later levels. You could calculate exactly how many levels you could get in your first class while still hitting the maximum level achievable for your 2nd class under the level cap. Hence, rather than going for a max level wizard, or a mid-level fighter/wizard multiclass, you could calculate that you can get, say, 7 levels of fighter and still end up with a max level wizard for that same character.

But doing so meant gimping that character for most of the middle game, as until she hits level 8 in wizard she's just an under-levelled wizard with better hitpoints (as her fighter class is inactive until her 2nd class overtakes it). Hence dual-classing would be a matter of party-management: working out how many characters you can afford to have gimped in order for them to turn into death-machines in the latter part of the game.

Because you're already making early-game v late-game tradeoffs with your party management, it just feels like a natural part of the game to do the same with your questing.

 

[Pony King]

I think my understanding of leapfrogging is closer to Azrael the cat's since I've never found much fun in save-scumming.

I don't have a long list of good examples, partly because most games are produced to be solved through brute force rather than intelligence, partly because I'm relatively inexperienced with older RPGs than quite a lot of people around here.

My best example would be Darklands where you could sneak into a Raubritter's castle and kill him without being bothered by his guards. This would give you some plate armor which was a major equipment progression over what you started with.¨

@The badend thing.
Wasn't it actually possible to survive (and possibly more) getting brought to the military base?
It does seem like something that has mostly disappeared from games. I seem to remember getting majorly trolled by the MM6 developers when clicking some random object on level 1 and getting teleported to the land of the giants and dying immediately (or something like that).