Alex what are your thoughts about this?
This thread is really big, so chances are I am probably just parroting someone I didn't read. So apologies in advance.
Anyway, looking at this last page, people seem to be commenting about how XP is an incentive for the player to do the "objective" of the game. Like
Telengard mentioned old D&D having XP for killing and looting. I think one big issue to discussing this is that this isn't the complete vision of what experience points are. To understand this better, let's turn to tabletop gaming for a second.
I think the best P&P rules systems don't treat experience as something taken for granted. In many games, or at least, in many groups, nowadays, the PCs evolve in XP more or less together. If one player is particularly gifted (maybe he roleplays really well, or maybe he comes up with good ideas every session), he might shoot ahead. If one is particularly obnoxious (maybe he makes death prone PCs every time), he might lag behind. But even the death prone guy will probably keep making characters that have more XP from the last, as he would be in disadvantage from the other PCs otherwise.
Now, the issue with a game like this is that XP isn't really its own mechanic. Experience points aren't really important per se. Depending on how you performed in the game, you might be a little ahead or behind the expected "power level", but in this kind of game, it is usually much more important how you used the XP than how much you have. That is, how you built your PC (games without some customization aspect played this way would be just boring). So, XP might be important so you can get that one ability that will make a "killer combo", almost like a M:tG card to a deck.
Now, many CRPGs* treat XP just like this, in that they are designed with specific character levels in mind for each area and dungeon and so on. Even the original Baldur's Gate did that. In these games, XP is a matter of time, and player skill comes in the form of character, or party, building. A good example of this is the many ways people try to "solo" BG2.
So, getting back to the issue at hand, since these games are more or less made with a specific level in mind for each area, it seems like a design mistake to have a "non finite" source of XP in the game. Especially when there is no risk attached. In a non iron man game, the player is never under any risk. The only thing stopping the player from using random encounters with weak monsters to increase his level is tedium. Furthermore, it seems like managing to go over the intended level for an area would only make the fights in the area easier and less interesting.
Thus, if CRPGs are going to have XP not be important in themselves, and if combat XP create design issues like these, keeping them seems counterproductive. I believe that is more or less the way Mr. Sawyer sees the issue. If the party is supposed to be in a certain level range at different points in the game, making XP work as a "progress meter" makes a whole lot of sense.
Let's take a break from quest only XP, however, and look at Planescape: Torment. PS:T had combat experience in it, but the great bulk of XP came from quest. Now, the thing about PS:T is that while combat was far from stellar, the game had a whole lot to explore. There were a lot of interesting PCs to talk to, a lot of interesting stories, a lot of strange items you could interact in dialog and a lot of quests that, rather than just sending you off somewhere to accomplish some tasks, worked as a way to show the strange setting.
My point is that experience in Planescape wasn't a measure of how far along you were in the story, but rather of how much of the game you had explored. It was somewhat similar, in fact, in how adventure game scores worked. Unfortunately, XP in PS:T wasn't really an example of how to implement it. First, even though XP was (mostly) a reward for exploring the world, getting experience didn't help much with the exploration itself (in paper and pen games, at least, the point of XP is that you get it for doing what the whole game is about, the point of the game, and getting it help you go further along with that. So, in an exploration centric game, earning XP should open up new exploration options). At best, it helped you raise your stats to open up new dialog options and made going through battles easier. It also allowed you to try out new mage spells, but those didn't usually do anything interesting in themselves either, they were more interesting as another element of the setting to experiment with.
But my point in bring this up is that although PS:T may look like an example of what quest only XP should be, I don't think it is what Mr. Sawyer has in mind. I think he wants simple to make XP more akin to a progress meter that will ensure the player can play through the game not worrying about XP in itself, but just how levels work. Maybe I am wrong here, and he is planning to have exploration be an important aspect of PoE, but I think his point is to make experience more "transparent".
Now, I mentioned that as CRPGs work nowadays, the XP is a more or less "broken" mechanic. Without risk and with level design and character systems made around certain expectations about the powers the PC have, it might seem counterproductive to defend the way RPGs have worked up to now. Even if you don't mind the incentives to replay battles ad nausea, the lack of risk behind combat mean you are still "breaking" the game. I believe the issue here is that some people have a more exploration based approach to combat.
In Baldur's Gate 2, there were many different ways to use your abilities. Different spells that needed to be used against different enemies, different ways to use summoned creatures, different ways to use thief traps, et ceteri multi. If you were only worried about winning the combat, things could get boring fast. Once you learned some good tricks to use in combat, you could always just repeat those, until a situation forced you to learn a new one. However, if you were curious to see all the different ways you could use to win, then there was a lot of variety in that game. This is also the case, I reckon, in the later Wizardry games. The character system in Wizardry 6 and 7, especially with the class change mechanics, is broken as hell. But seeing all the different character builds you could make was a lot of fun!
Now, from what I have gathered from PoE, the game isn't concerned so much with the exploration of character building and combat tactics, but rather in how they are used. The challenge comes not so much from finding the right combinations, but knowing which abilities and combination of abilities to use on different situations. I usually think of this a bit like the gameplay in moba games. That is not to say that PoE will be only about timing abilities, but rather that the challenge is more in executing plans correctly rather than coming up with them.
Now, I prefer games that are exploration based myself. The Ultima series is still my favorite CRPG series, so that shouldn't be a surprise. But given the game is going to focus in a different kind of gameplay anyway, I suppose choosing patching up the experience system makes sense. I think, however, they could have made XP work differently rather than simply diminishing its importance. For instance, I think an interesting idea would be to somehow measure how well the player does in each combat, and giving him XP depending on how well he does. You know, much like fighting games give a mark to the player on different categories depending on how he fights. Of course, the player would be given XP only once for each "kind" of fight. So fighting poorly the same group of goblins, or a very similar fight (no idea how to measure if a fight is similar to another, though) won't give you more XP. But improving your marks give you more XP. So the game is rewarding the point of the game, and the lack of risk isn't really an issue.
Of course, some people dislike the idea that there would be any difference in how much XP you get depending on how you solve problems. Of course some people prefer for XP to not be an element of the game at all. But I think this makes the game poorer. It makes the player's actions matter less, much like regenerating health and small inventory spaces in FPSs. It is true, if you want to maximize how many XPs you get, this means the game is more or less defining how you should play. But that is a decision you make by yourself. I will agree, however, that it is bad decisions to have different paths for accomplishing things be objectively better or worse than each other. But having different actions not be directly comparable to each other makes for a richer game than simply equalizing everything, I think. For instance, sneaking past an enemy encampment might give you less XP than killing them, but it might open different quests or give you different options if you later can talk with the enemies after you killed their boss, allowing you to hire them yourself.
Now, I think there is room for a lot more interesting XP systems. I originally wanted to look at interesting P&P XP systems and comment on how they could be implemented, but this post is long enough already, so maybe next time.
*One example of CRPG that didn't treat XP just as a "fact of life" is Fallout. Because of its very open advancement system, and world design, the game instead encouraged the player to simply explore the many options. Of course, as mentioned before, BG had an important exploration aspect in its party building feature, but fallout was all about exploration. In fact, I think a Fallout game where XP worked more or less like an adventure game's scoring system, where you get XP for finding and/or doing secrets besides moving the game forward could work really well.
