What Do You Want to Do in an RPG?

[Megatron]

The problem with not giving experience for something just because you're higher level than it is are the situations where you run across a pack of those things that can kill you. If I'm in a fight where I can die, I want experience for it.

But when you get really good at something, you rarely learn anything new as you're using methods you've tried and tested 80 orcs ago. Fallout did this to an extent with the books and only training your skill up to 100.

 

[Walks with the Snails]

I'd like to see an experience system rooted in at least an attempt to express what your character is actually learning rather than just a quest to see how many points you can rack up. I get rather sick of quests where fetching the old wizard's ring might net you 100 or 100,000 experience simply depending on what level you're expected to be at.

Yes, this is something I've never really liked. You do something simple, but because it's late in the game, you get lots of experience for it. However, you do something similar in the beginning and it's worth less. Then again, "fetch this ring" later on might be more tricky than the lower level one. As long as the quest is acceptably challenging, and getting the ring is difficult, then fine. Just adding more experience for the same situation because it's later in the game is just silly though.

Yeah, if you had to go through a lot more, it's one thing. I'm more talking about things like in the IWD expansion pack, where doing a few trivial pure dialogue quests in Lonelywood netted you over a million experience, but doing more or less the same thing in Easthaven at the beginning got you a few thousand.

Also, you have to wonder exactly what incredible insights your character is going to glean after killing his 100th orc.

The problem with not giving experience for something just because you're higher level than it is are the situations where you run across a pack of those things that can kill you. If I'm in a fight where I can die, I want experience for it.

There can be other rewards other than experience, though. If you're going to fight your 100th orc, it should be because he's guarding something you want, or he's kidnapped the farmer's wife, or something along those lines. I think experience in general should be treated less as a reward and more as a genuine reflection of learning. If you've got a meathead warrior who's beheaded more orcs than most people will see in a lifetime, he shouldn't learn much by chopping up a new one in the same fashion he did with the last 50. On the other hand, if he gives a try at sneaking or diplomacy with them for the first time, give him some experience. And if he fails miserably, he still gets it. Presumably he's going to be thinking about his mistakes and will try to do better next time. Likewise, a thief shouldn't learn much from sneaking through his 20th orc camp, but if he botches it and is forced to kill a few in a skirmish, which rarely happens with him, he should learn quite a bit. I think that's one of the biggest problems with looking at experience as a reward is failure generally gets you less or nothing, when really it's usually your failures that you learn the most from.

 

[NeoFax]

Experience

Many RPG's nowadays are just stat chasers. I have yet to play a RPG lately that excites me on the stats front. I think stats should be given out using common sense approach. If a PC were to enter in to battle he would get experience just for joining and then with each new act he should gain experience right on the spot not at the end of the battle. However, if he uses the same strategy as the last couple times he would get less. If he uses a new strategy he would get more and if he was using an attack that is out of his character class and was successful, he should get an extraordinary amount.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

Re: Experience

Many RPG's nowadays are just stat chasers. I have yet to play a RPG lately that excites me on the stats front. I think stats should be given out using common sense approach. If a PC were to enter in to battle he would get experience just for joining and then with each new act he should gain experience right on the spot not at the end of the battle. However, if he uses the same strategy as the last couple times he would get less. If he uses a new strategy he would get more and if he was using an attack that is out of his character class and was successful, he should get an extraordinary amount.

Prelude of Darkness does this. You gain skill improvements during battle. The skill learning curve starts slowly from skill level 0-10, then gains quickly through 11-20, then starts to slow down. At least, the model strives for emulating that type of situation.

 

[thathmew]

Prelude of Darkness does this. You gain skill improvements during battle. The skill learning curve starts slowly from skill level 0-10, then gains quickly through 11-20, then starts to slow down. At least, the model strives for emulating that type of situation.

yeah, we tried to create a more realistic approach to character development in and out of combat. Interestingly we started by assigning each quest an experience award for completion, but we quickly realized this didn't reflect the actual process of the quest so we broke it down and make each small step or success and occassionally failure give experience, so even if you don't complete a quest the characters "learn" soimething as they progress through it. Also this naturally means that more complex quests yield more experience. This can be tough to balance, though, because sometimes different paths of completing quests were of vastly different lengths, particularly when you start adding "evil" options. This could create some incentive to always take the longest path because you learnt the most, but we tried to usually balance this with non-xp rewards, one path might gain more xp, but the other might net more drachs, or a better weapon, etc... But in some cases one path is just easier or much shorter and therefore usually rewards less xp. Overall I like our system, but it required a pretty careful balancing and individual tweaking of xp assigned per quest. I'd like to see (or make :wink: ) a more general system where xp is assigned based solely on what you do and never as a "reward."

-mat