Is XP/level based character progression still proper design?

[Telengard]

The learn-by-use system (most notably in 'recent' Elder Scrolls games) is shit and, moreover, easily exploitable.

The problem is with the game design and not with the learn-by-use system.

1. Have a hunger bar. It does decrease constantly. It can only be raised by eating.
2. Have a thirst bar. It does decrease constantly. It can only be raised by drinking.
3. Have an energy bar. Every action in the game (every swing of your sword, every spell cast, etc) decreases it. It can only be raised by sleeping.
4. There is a limited amount of food in the dungeon.
5. There is a limited amount of water in the dungeon.

There you go. It is no longer 'easily exploitable' as the game has an effective time limit by having a static amount of food and a static amount of water, which in turn does become a static amount of total energy to spend as to recover energy does consume a measure of your total time.

Edit: Or given most RPGs do seem to be about 'OMG, evil plot ahead, dark lord returning, powerful artifact about to fall in wrong hands, go and stop them before it is too late!' You just need to add 'It will be too late in 25 days, since we are at it.' and be done with it.

I am going to assume one can't just find/buy food and drink in the wilderness and towns, because otherwise you have simply made a speed bump on the path of the exploit, not actually prevented the exploit.

Kay, now there's a limited amount of food and drink in the world for the player, which translates to so many moves available to complete the game in. Now, say I'm of a mind to use the usual exploit techniques. Having draining bars doesn't actually change the system of exploits. It merely puts the exploits in a time frame. So, the exploiter needs to accomplish the exploit in as few moves as possible. If he wants to max block, he gathers the resources necessary to keep his bars up, and then does the exploit. The loss from wasted moves is more than made up for in that from there on he will have higher stats and so will have to make fewer moves to defeat every enemy and obstacle from there on. Thus, this system merely incentivizes him to get his exploiting done early and quickly in order to maximize its effectiveness over the length of the game.

 

[Cool name]

And if he does exploit the system too much he will find himself unable to finish the game as there is not enough time left for him to complete the main quest anymore. And he will discover this... what? Fourty hours down the road? Fine with me. Choices and consequences and all that.

The point is to make 'Time' a resource. You do choose how you spend it, yes. Spend it badly and the game does get into an unwinable state. And you will not know the game is unwinable until you are left without time to complete it. Good job exploiting the game, dood.

You are also asuming there would be enough time to both complete the game and max several skills. That's a design problem, not a system one. Why is your system so defective as to allow a skill to be maxed in just a few days?

But we obviously do look for different things in games so there is no point in continuing this conversation.



Edit: One more thing I did fail to notice before. How do you collect enough resources to keep your bars full when the only way to obtain resources is to explore ahead? That's the beauty of a hunger system: While there is an absolute time limit in the total amount of food you can find there is also another time limit in the amount of food you have with you at a given time. If you start with, say, enough food for two days then until you do find more your time limit is of just two days. To find more you have to explore forward, and in doing so suffer damage, waste time to heal, etc. So when you find another day's worth of rations you have, what, a day and a half total? Still two days? In which way does this allow you to stand in a place for, say, two weeks training a single skill?

 

[Telengard]

You're neglecting that a person who has exploited can kill enemies faster. If he exploits early, that means every enemy from there on falls quickly, and he thus needs to make fewer moves to finish the game with. He will have to spend extra time up front, as an investment, which will then pay off throughout the rest of the game. Overall, he will have to spend less game days to finish the game, because he will need to make fewer moves overall to complete the game than someone who plays normally.

 

[Cool name]

How does he make that initial investment when he does only begins with enough food for, say, two days and can only obtain more by exploring ahead? As long as you keep giving resources in small amounts he can never stop to whack the wall with his sword for the, say, four weeks of constant whacking it would take for him to max a single skill.

 

[Telengard]

All of these things above - this is why Scale to Your Level exists. It wasn't put into these games just because. It's there because the devs gave people what so many wanted - an open world by-use system, and Scale to Your Level is one of the few ways to make such a system function as a game when there isn't a GM to counter all the shit.

 

[J1M]

How does he make that initial investment when he does only begins with enough food for, say, two days and can only obtain more by exploring ahead? As long as you keep giving resources in small amounts he can never stop to whack the wall with his sword for the, say, four weeks of constant whacking it would take for him to max a single skill.

Or, instead of propping up a terrible system with all sorts of artificial constraints (like food only being found in dank caves) you could just tell the player how many moves they have left to finish the game.

"Wouldn't want people to play the game more than we intended! They might buy our next product!"

I hope looking at it this way helps you see how dumb it is.

 

[Damned Registrations]

The whole argument is ignoring the simple fact that the system only discourages lazy abuse of the system. It actually ENCOURAGES abuse of the system, because someone who just plays through naturally is far more likely to run out of food and be utterly fucked than someone who minmaxed the fuck out of his skills with the time he did have available.

It's simply not possible to make a level by use system that doesn't favour metagaming. Any penalty to people trying to manipulate the system will be felt even more harshly by people who are just trying to play through naturally. Crawl had a food system just as you described, with an absolute limit on the amount of food available to the player, requiring exploration to get any more. All it means is that you're ten times MORE fucked if you wasted time levelling a skill you didn't need later than you are if you planned ahead and took the time to punch plants or cast spells at nothing so you had the proper set of trained skills.

 

[Cool name]

It does not compute.

What shit does exist because strict time limits?

My point was, again, a way to solve this issue by both creating an absolute time limit, the total amount of food and water in the dungeon, and a short-term time limit, the amount of food and water you did find so far. The rest of the game should remain hardcore: Enemies do not scale down. Not all enemies are weak to all skills. Focus too much in a single skill and you will be defenseless. Spread your focus too much and your skills will be useless. Take too long and your game will be unwinable. Advance too fast and you may miss secret areas with food and water you WILL need further on. Have fun dying five hundred times until you find a way that works for you or you do give up like a little bitch.

 

[Telengard]

How does he make that initial investment when he does only begins with enough food for, say, two days and can only obtain more by exploring ahead? As long as you keep giving resources in small amounts he can never stop to whack the wall with his sword for the, say, four weeks of constant whacking it would take for him to max a single skill.

Let's run it into numbers. Keeping the math simple. If you swing your sword 10 times, it goes up a pip. You're allowed to swing your sword 100 times before you rest. You rest, you consume one food. So, you've got two food, that's 200 swings, translating to 20 pip increases.

The trick is how many enemies does that kill. If the player goes through normally, every 5 hits kills an enemy, and the enemies get tougher as you go on, so it always remains 5 hits even as you increase your skill. So, playing normally, you can kill 40 creatures before you need to have consumed new food.

But, if you exploit, such as forcing 3x the swings on the first enemies you meet, you will exhaust yourself sooner; however, you will also get your first 10 experience pips faster, which will allow you to kill later enemies in less than the normal 5 swings. The dev will have to have padded the swings to food ratio a bit to account for misses, and you use that padding in the early enemies instead of what it's supposed to be used for, reloading if you get in trouble. Eventually, you'll get some distance on the curve. Once you're ahead of the curve on the swing to food ratio, you park it on the next available food source while you still have some food in your pockets, and start grinding away. Playing leapfrog in that way until you're maxed. Once you're maxed, everything goes down in 1 swing for a while, and you gain a bunch of time on those who are playing normally.

And that's just a straight up exploit. Once the system is in place instead of just spoken in general terms, additional exploits tend to crop up. That's just a general rule of thumb.

 

[J1M]

It does not compute.

What shit does exist because strict time limits?

My point was, again, a way to solve this issue by both creating an absolute time limit, the total amount of food and water in the dungeon, and a short-term time limit, the amount of food and water you did find so far. The rest of the game should remain hardcore: Enemies do not scale down. Not all enemies are weak to all skills. Focus too much in a single skill and you will be defenseless. Spread your focus too much and your skills will be useless. Take too long and your game will be unwinable. Advance too fast and you may miss secret areas with food and water you WILL need further on. Have fun dying five hundred times until you find a way that works for you or you do give up like a little bitch.

Strategy guide showing the path Agassi intended available for $19.95 at your local gamestop.

 

[Cool name]

Or, instead of propping up a terrible system with all sorts of artificial constraints (like food only being found in dank caves) you could just tell the player how many moves they have left to finish the game.

"Wouldn't want people to play the game more than we intended! They might buy our next product!"

I hope looking at it this way helps you see how dumb it is.

Honey, did I not propose a total time limit of which you were informed at the start of the game as well? Oh, my, I did!

Read the fucking posts before writing shit.

And I was coming from the perspective of a dungeon crawler. All that adventure game with stats and combat shit is not something I have an interest in. So, Dungeon Crawler. You are in a Dungeon. You can't leave. All your food will come from, alack! A dungeon.

Duh.

The whole argument is ignoring the simple fact that the system only discourages lazy abuse of the system. It actually ENCOURAGES abuse of the system, because someone who just plays through naturally is far more likely to run out of food and be utterly fucked than someone who minmaxed the fuck out of his skills with the time he did have available.

Technically it does encourage metagaming. It does not however encourages maxing skills by the simple fact that, as I did say, to max a skill should take too long for it to be feasible to max more than one or two in the entire game, and that build would not stand a chance at the end.

Metagaming is good. *shrug* It is an intrinsic part of dungeon crawlers as well.

It's simply not possible to make a level by use system that doesn't favour metagaming. Any penalty to people trying to manipulate the system will be felt even more harshly by people who are just trying to play through naturally. Crawl had a food system just as you described, with an absolute limit on the amount of food available to the player, requiring exploration to get any more. All it means is that you're ten times MORE fucked if you wasted time levelling a skill you didn't need later than you are if you planned ahead and took the time to punch plants or cast spells at nothing so you had the proper set of trained skills.

Those are again not problems with learn-by-use but problems with the design of the game. Why are your skills raising when you are not actually using them effectively? Why does a spell skill up when you cast it at the air instead of at a valid target? A damage spell does only skill up when it does damage. And unlocking spell does only skill up when it does unlock shit. Your mighty punch does only skill up when you punch something and hurt it. Why can you go from zero to grand master without dying of hunger a hundred times over? Why are the monsters not coming for you?

 

[mondblut]

TIme limits is one certain way to make a game unplayable junk.

You mean like Fallout? Or DCSS?

DCSS has time limit?

And I almost convinced myself to install it. Off it goes.

 

[mondblut]

TIme limits is one certain way to make a game unplayable junk.

Have you played Ur-Quan Masters (open sourced Star Control 2)? Check it out to see how to do great game with time limit. http://sc2.sourceforge.net/

I never played SC2 to begin with, but if its remake has time limit, that's all the more reason to steer away from it.

 

[J1M]

For added realism, the adventurer should die due to food poisoning at level 2.

Also, mage is overpowered because he can conjure food and water.

 

[mondblut]

he will find himself unable to finish the game as there is not enough time left for him to complete the main quest anymore. And he will discover this... what? Fourty hours down the road?

Spend it badly and the game does get into an unwinable state. And you will not know the game is unwinable until you are left without time to complete it.

Thank god you are not designing games.

 

[J1M]

he will find himself unable to finish the game as there is not enough time left for him to complete the main quest anymore. And he will discover this... what? Fourty hours down the road?

Spend it badly and the game does get into an unwinable state. And you will not know the game is unwinable until you are left without time to complete it.

Thank god you are not designing games.

All skills go to level 50. If you take the time to make any of them higher than level 40, you lose the game!!! Why didn't you read my mind for how you were supposed to play? -Female game designer

 

[mondblut]

All skills go to level 50. If you take the time to make any of them higher than level 40, you lose the game!!! Why didn't you read my mind for how you were supposed to play? -Female game designer

Women, stop fucking ruining our hobby.

 

[Cool name]

Let's run it into numbers. Keeping the math simple. If you swing your sword 10 times, it goes up a pip. You're allowed to swing your sword 100 times before you rest. You rest, you consume one food. So, you've got two food, that's 200 swings, translating to 20 pip increases.

Yet every single action does take energy.

So where will you now take the energy to get to the next food cache from? The game did not give you two days of food because it was lenient. The game did give you two days of food because you were going to need at least one day and a half to reach the next cache, with half a day of grace. Oh, and there is no other way to recover energy than by resting. For which you do need food not to die.

Your game did just become unwinable.

And that half a day of extra food? Well, maybe you did use that to train. Now you do 0.5% more damage. WOW! You just won the game.

The trick is how many enemies does that kill. If the player goes through normally, every 5 hits kills an enemy, and the enemies get tougher as you go on, so it always remains 5 hits even as you increase your skill. So, playing normally, you can kill 40 creatures before you need to have consumed new food.

So you never block? You never jump? You never dodge? You never run? You never force a door? You never climb a wall? You never disarm a trap? You never push a boulder? Man, your dungeons must be really boring places to visit.

All those actions do take energy as well.

Why are all your enemies weak to the same skill? Why do your enemies do nothing like dodge your strikes, block your attacks, attack many at the same time, ambush you, etc? Did you just get hurt? Well, magick does cost energy as well. But you spend all your food maxing fireball so you do not even have the spell heal anything beyond 1hp. And is that a fire elemental? Welcome to your game did just become unwinable as your only useful skill is, well, useless now. So you did just spend all your food maxing sword instead? Damn, that enemy is resistant to 'sword' damage. Ooops. Now you need much more energy to defeat him, and run the risk of being wound much more as well. Another unwinable situation as you did not have a food buffer.

Oh, and yeah, you are now too tired to disarm the trap in the entrance to the cache. Oops. I guess you are dead. Shame.

 

[Cool name]

he will find himself unable to finish the game as there is not enough time left for him to complete the main quest anymore. And he will discover this... what? Fourty hours down the road?

Spend it badly and the game does get into an unwinable state. And you will not know the game is unwinable until you are left without time to complete it.

Thank god you are not designing games.

All skills go to level 50. If you take the time to make any of them higher than level 40, you lose the game!!! Why didn't you read my mind for how you were supposed to play? -Female game designer

'I want to be able to win the game no matter how stupid my build is.' - J1M.

You should try Bethesda games.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Those are again not problems with learn-by-use but problems with the design of the game. Why are your skills raising when you are not actually using them effectively? Why does a spell skill up when you cast it at the air instead of at a valid target? A damage spell does only skill up when it does damage. And unlocking spell does only skill up when it does unlock shit. Your mighty punch does only skill up when you punch something and hurt it. Why can you go from zero to grand master without dying of hunger a hundred times over? Why are the monsters not coming for you?

Alright, lets put your changes into effect (actually they somewhat are in effect in DCSS, you can only train melee skills with actual melee for example): Now, if I kill a rat with my melee weapons instead of my spells, I have forever lost the chance to train my attack magic. Now it's EVEN MORE important that I metagame the fuck out of the system. I'd better cast spells that don't quite kill the enemy so I get to cast more of them. Maybe I need to heal the enemies as well so I can damage them more. Also, I'd better slow and confuse every enemy I find, no matter how unnecessary, to train those abilities as well. And I need to let them attack me, to train dodging, instead of killing them efficiently.

Meanwhile, the guy that plays through by using his magic when it's needed gets utterly reamed. He killed the rats on the first few floors with a dagger, saving his magic for the goblins and orcs that are far more dangerous. Then he met an ogre and starved to death trying to avoid it because he never trained his magic/stealth/whatever skill enough to get by.

I enjoy the metagaming aspect of constructing the ideal character as much (hell, far more than) the next person. But that process doesn't benefit at all from being chained to other gameplay mechanics. Making the decision of how to deal with a horde of zombies be about how to distribute skill gains instead of about how to kill zombies without getting mauled to death cheapens the encounter. It makes far more sense to make the decision on how to distribute skill gains it's own choice, while how to fight a given group of enemies revolves around fighting them effectively. Then you get to make two interesting choices instead of one, and the atmosphere of the game benefits enormously when you aren't doing retarded abusive things to milk enemies/traps/etc. for skill gains. Searching doors for traps and then disarming them to train your skill feels completely insane when you can freely cast a spell to safely open the door instead. Same goes for pickpocketing or fast talking or sneaking past enemies you intend to kill in a drawn out slugfest. These situations crop up endlessly in use based progression systems. And trying to plug the gaps is like trying to patch a leaking innertube by stapling patches over the holes.

 

[J1M]

he will find himself unable to finish the game as there is not enough time left for him to complete the main quest anymore. And he will discover this... what? Fourty hours down the road?

Spend it badly and the game does get into an unwinable state. And you will not know the game is unwinable until you are left without time to complete it.

Thank god you are not designing games.

All skills go to level 50. If you take the time to make any of them higher than level 40, you lose the game!!! Why didn't you read my mind for how you were supposed to play? -Female game designer

'I want to be able to win the game no matter how stupid my build is by utilizing my abilities and equipment in a creative fashion.' - J1M.

Fixed.

Why would you intentionally put a trap in your character progression system that prevented people from playing your game? Any build that makes it impossible to progress in the game should be deemed invalid and the player instructed to make a different decision. (Or better yet, don't build such a fucking stupid system in the first place.)

 

[baturinsky]

TIme limits is one certain way to make a game unplayable junk.

You mean like Fallout? Or DCSS?

DCSS has time limit?

And I almost convinced myself to install it. Off it goes.

Time limit in form of finite food.

 

[Cool name]

Alright, lets put your changes into effect (actually they somewhat are in effect in DCSS, you can only train melee skills with actual melee for example): Now, if I kill a rat with my melee weapons instead of my spells, I have forever lost the chance to train my attack magic. Now it's EVEN MORE important that I metagame the fuck out of the system. I'd better cast spells that don't quite kill the enemy so I get to cast more of them. Maybe I need to heal the enemies as well so I can damage them more. Also, I'd better slow and confuse every enemy I find, no matter how unnecessary, to train those abilities as well. And I need to let them attack me, to train dodging, instead of killing them efficiently.

In the system I do describe every single one of those actions do cost energy. Energy can only be recovered by sleeping, and that does greatly increase your Hunger and Thirst. Every single action you take, even walking, does in some variable measure reduce your energy. Grind too much and you will be unable to win the game, as the amount of food and water is limited and thus the total amount of actions you can take is limited. Every extra strike you make is energy that was gone forever. Every extra spell you cast is energy that was gone forever. Every extra step you take is energy that was gone forever. Of course not all of those actions consume the same amount of energy, but that's the same for now.

Let us say you find an enemy that's resistant to fire. You use fire on it so that you can get more strikes. So you kill ten enemies with four spells each instead of exploiting their water weakness and killing them in a single cast. Now your fire spell does, say, 2.5% more damage. You also did spend four times as much energy to kill those enemies than you would have spent by exploiting their weakness, not to mention the extra blocking, the extra dodging, etc. The energy you did use is gone forever from the game, as the total amount is limited. Was it really so smart to spend four times the energy for 2.5% more damage? You do this even more times. So you now have 10% more damage and a fast casting perk you did choose from several options. You would have killed four times the enemies by using water, so in the end you would have had... 10% more water damage and a fast casting perk on it.

You did win exactly nothing beyond 'My character's a fire wizard!' flavor, as otherwise you would have obtained exactly the same extra power in a different element. You did actually lose something from all the extra dodges, blocks, wounds, etc. Also, you did kill just 25% of the enemies that energy would have otherwise killed. And that energy, as I did say, is gone forever.

In a game that does its best to slaughter you that does not seem to have been a smart choice.

Meanwhile, if you had used, I do not know, Earth damage you would have needed two casts to kill every one of them as they are neutral towards it, with neither resistance nor weakness. This would have been less efficient than using Water, yes, but still more efficient that using Fire. This may be a good idea if your build has a flaw that only a particular Earth Spell can cover, and you end up making a bet: The long term gains of using that skill, say Earth Magic, will pay off the waste of energy. That's a choice. With a consequence. A very real one: Either you save energy in the long run or you do not, and as energy is a limited resource that it is fundamental to winning the game...

Fixed.

Why would you intentionally put a trap in your character progression system that prevented people from playing your game? Any build that makes it impossible to progress in the game should be deemed invalid and the player instructed to make a different decision. (Or better yet, don't build such a fucking stupid system in the first place.)

Is not a trap. It would be a trap in a 'level up' system. It is not a trap in a learn-by-doing system.

Let us say there are enemies who are immune to a certain skill, resistant to other skills, and weak to yet another one. You do LEARN BY DOING, so if you are paying any attention to the game you are using several different skills, and thus all of those skills are leveling up. You may pick this one over this other one. You may choose to make those enemies harder so that those other enemies are easier, but in the end if you are PLAYING THE GAME at all you do understand that to focus on a single skill is stupid.

If you do not, well, you deserve that Game Over screen.

 

[deuxhero]

TIme limits is one certain way to make a game unplayable junk.

You mean like Fallout? Or DCSS?

Atelier is also good here. It's VERY hard to get a bad ending without completely slacking off, even as a complete novice (and even if you do, you go into NG+), but it stops grinding cold and getting a particular good ending or the "true" ending requires actual thought. You are also told about the time limits at the very start of the game

 

[Damned Registrations]

In the system I do describe every single one of those actions do cost energy. Energy can only be recovered by sleeping, and that does greatly increase your Hunger and Thirst. Every single action you take, even walking, does in some variable measure reduce your energy. Grind too much and you will be unable to win the game, as the amount of food and water is limited and thus the total amount of actions you can take is limited. Every extra strike you make is energy that was gone forever. Every extra spell you cast is energy that was gone forever. Every extra step you take is energy that was gone forever. Of course not all of those actions consume the same amount of energy, but that's the same for now.

You're digging the hole even DEEPER now. Now the player is going to metagame even more anally. Now he's going to use every ounce of energy before sleeping, he'll avoid walking except when it'll count as sneaking to train his stealth skill at the same time as normal movement. Now every action taken has to be measured against it's cost like you're spending currency. Now you do even more inane things, like purposefully avoid ever equipping a shield so you don't waste energy blocking. Now he'll drag enemies around so he can hit more than one at once with a single spell to get the best xp to energy ratio possible. Meanwhile, some poor fuck is getting permanently screwed because he thought equipping a shield instead of nothing at all would actually help him, when in fact it meant he ran out of food before ever getting enough skill for (insert very useful perk unrelated to blocking here.)

You would have killed four times the enemies by using water,

There are infinite numbers of every variety of enemy? If yes, then now the player is being anal about what he's fighting too, specifically only fighting X enemies over and over because they give the best skill to energy ratio. And if there are limited quantities of each enemy (as I was assuming to begin with) then you wouldn't get 10% more damage with the other type of magic, you'd just end up with outright crappier magic since you trained it less and accidentally spent more points on a skill you didn't need at all.

What you're trying to do is make it impossible to get more than a fair benefit out of the system by making the best benefits illegal. This just moves the clever people to the next best benefits while the normal people have a shittier time all around because they have no idea what the fuck was going on to begin with. Whereas before the abusive players only wasted 10% of their skill/energy/whatever points, now they waste 20%. But the normal players went from wasting 50% to wasting 60%. They suffered twice as much, losing 20% of their useful skills instead of 11% And they were already closer to being utterly fucked by the system to begin with.