The XP for Combat Megathread! DISCUSS!

[Bubbles]

Sure, I wouldn't get the money. But why wouldn't it give me experience?

 

[Raghar]

And how can your character improve when he would just move from point A to point B? XP only for quests is bad.

 

[Infinitron]

Sure, I wouldn't get the money. But why wouldn't it give me experience?

Oh, you misunderstood me.

That was not an argument from realism. It was an argument for a gameplay flow where you get rewarded for getting a job done, not for fucking around. Both gold and XP. Realism or no realism.

Besides its other advantages, I think that has a beneficial effect on pacing. I feel proud when I level up after finishing an important side quest. When I level up after killing some trash mob, I go "WTF? Uh, okay, I guess."

 

[tuluse]

I do, but I also wonder how often the people who enjoy playing JA, JA2, Morrowind, Baldur's Gate 2, Dark Souls, etc. ever think "Boy this game would be much more fun if I didn't get any xp or skill advancement from combat. This is way too degenerate for my tastes."

People rarely think of things they haven't been exposed to.

I loved in VtMB that I was equally rewarded no matter how I solved a quest.

 

[Bubbles]

Besides its other advantages, I think that has a beneficial effect on pacing. I feel proud when I level up after finishing an important side quest. When I level up after killing some trash mob, I go "WTF? Uh, okay, I guess."

Would you feel proud if you leveled up from finding Petrine's cat in BG1 after clearing out the Iron Throne just before?

 

[Lhynn]

Besides its other advantages, I think that has a beneficial effect on pacing. I feel proud when I level up after finishing an important side quest. When I level up after killing some trash mob, I go "WTF? Uh, okay, I guess."

Bullshit. Think of some other lame excuse, that one wont fly.

 

[AN4RCHID]

Just don't award XP for killing friendly NPCs. Problem solved. The game has faction mechanics so there is presumably already a disincentive for making enemies with quest-giver NPCs.

Once you attack them or otherwise piss them off they are no longer friendly.

That's why I mentioned faction mechanics. If you go around killing random NPCs for XP, you'll end up with no friends and a bunch of hit squads after you. Cee & Cee.

Besides its other advantages, I think that has a beneficial effect on pacing. I feel proud when I level up after finishing an important side quest. When I level up after killing some trash mob, I go "WTF? Uh, okay, I guess."

Would you feel proud if you leveled up from finding Petrine's cat in BG1 after clearing out the Iron Throne just before?

How about leveling up because you walked through a door, as in Poe's current system?

 

[Hobo Elf]

I'm between a fence on this. On one hand I don't mind giving XP for killing a monster. Killing a big baddie and being given a huge XP reward for it is nice. It feels less nice if you get the same reward by killing the baddie and then talking to some random NPC to complete the quest.
On the other hand it tickles my autism much less because if a character dies during combat I don't need to reload like a fag because they lost precious XP.

 

[Avellion]

For a story driven RPG, I can definately understand why monsters do not give EXP. For other games, especially those about exploration, I would rather still gain exp from monsters.

Pillars of Eternity's design should lend itself well to the whole no exp from monsters business. But we will truly be able to see when the game comes out.

 

[imweasel]

Nothing like a controversial design decision to split the community into opposing factions.

And how can your character improve when he would just move from point A to point B? XP only for quests is bad.

Depends on the game.

Shadowrun Returns has quest only XP. The missions were on rails, combat wasn't avoidable in most cases and it didn't have overworld exploration either (not really anyway), so nobody cared that you were only rewarded with quest XP (Karma).

 

[Raghar]

Well it's custom in Storyteller systems to reward XP at the end of the part of the story. Coincidentally, even failed quest nets some often non negligible amount of XP.

 

[AN4RCHID]

I like things to be systemic rather than scripted for reasons totally unrelated to simulationism/verisimilitude. If anything, it's a question of gamist (player driven reward structure) vs narrativist (rewards based on progression along the designated path) philosophies, albeit the difference in this case is pretty subtle.

Anyway, to answer your question, yeah, why not? I certainly would have preferred Josh to make the XP system more interesting instead of less interesting. I guess he was probably afraid of trying anything very different from the IE games because of backerlash.

Fine, I'm NS myself, so pretty much as un-gamist as it can get,but I can frame it in a gamist manner as well.

It all boils down to not shifting the weight from playing the game to gaming the system - the system I highly doubt can be made interesting because it's literally a single variable optimization problem.
Avoiding getting player to play the wrong game within your game already makes the *game* better.

XP optimization is this wrong game.

I don't think it's necessarily the wrong game, though. As long as part of the game is about not-totally-scripted character progression, optimization is going to be a part of that. If you're not optimizing via killing a lot of enemies, you'll presumably be pressured to optimize by doing all the fetch quests.

I agree that XP and linear progression is not that interesting, but the quest-only XP system doesn't fix that, it only makes it more transparent.

A step in the right direction might be tradeoffs at level-up - for example, if you don't ever use diplomatic options, your diplomacy-related stats decrease.

 

[Bubbles]

A step in the right direction might be tradeoffs at level-up - for example, if you don't ever use diplomatic options, your diplomacy-related stats decrease.

If it hasn't changed recently, AoD lets you only use xp gained in combat to increase combat skills and does the same for xp gained through social actions, with quest xp being free to spend on either type of skill.

Of course, PoE does not have any proper social skills.

 

[Alfons]

A step in the right direction might be tradeoffs at level-up - for example, if you don't ever use diplomatic options, your diplomacy-related stats decrease.

This is shitty because it forces you to do things you might not want to do.I like the xp system because it doesn't force you to do things you suck at i.e. you can pump combat first and then your diplomacy skills without going through the pain of having people spit in your face because the numbers say you aren't eloquent enough.

Getting xp only for quests is fine in a more linear game that is not open world.In a game which has exploration this doesn't work because it functions like a leash,either you stay near towns and finish quests or you don't level and keep exploring until you find out that you are under leveled and can't keep exploring so you have to go back to town and finish quests.

Someone mentioned that he has a problem That his PC is leveling by killing a trash mob,I don't know if you know this but MMOs have a solution to this problem,enemies that are far below your level don't give any xp.This mechanic can probably be used in a game where creatures don't have level ,after some modification.

 

[tuluse]

This is shitty because it forces you to do things you might not want to do.I like the xp system because it doesn't force you to do things you suck at i.e. you can pump combat first and then your diplomacy skills without going through the pain of having people spit in your face because the numbers say you aren't eloquent enough.

Getting xp only for quests is fine in a more linear game that is not open world.In a game which has exploration this doesn't work because it functions like a leash,either you stay near towns and finish quests or you don't level and keep exploring until you find out that you are under leveled and can't keep exploring so you have to go back to town and finish quests.

Someone mentioned that he has a problem That his PC is leveling by killing a trash mob,I don't know if you know this but MMOs have a solution to this problem,enemies that are far below your level don't give any xp.This mechanic can probably be used in a game where creatures don't have level ,after some modification.

You don't only get XP for quests in PoE.

Objectives != quests

 

[AN4RCHID]

A step in the right direction might be tradeoffs at level-up - for example, if you don't ever use diplomatic options, your diplomacy-related stats decrease.

This is shitty because it forces you to do things you might not want to do.I like the xp system because it doesn't force you to do things you suck at i.e. you can pump combat first and then your diplomacy skills without going through the pain of having people spit in your face because the numbers say you aren't eloquent enough.

So don't make a character build that's at odds with your preferred playstyle.

Getting xp only for quests is fine in a more linear game that is not open world.

Take this line of thought a step further, and why even have XP in that game? Why not just level characters up at predefined points in the story? The would be unmatched.

Someone mentioned that he has a problem That his PC is leveling by killing a trash mob,I don't know if you know this but MMOs have a solution to this problem,enemies that are far below your level don't give any xp.This mechanic can probably be used in a game where creatures don't have level ,after some modification.

Poe enemies do have levels I believe, and this is a pretty good idea.

 

[DraQ]

That is a problem of poor scaling (or rather, no scaling as leveling exists in modern games, where HPs start at 20 and end at 2000). If system is carefully topped after particular levels, and everything is scaled to a medium, the world design would not be harmed, characters will still feel growth, yet even weak creatures, properly used in encounters, would remain a threat.

I'm not sure I read it correctly - are you seriously proposing level scaling as good, fairly universal solution to cRPGs' woes?

tl;dr version: I don't think that there is a single right way of making a RPG game.

That still doesn't explain why including kill XP is one of the desirable ones.

And no, I wouldn't say it worked particularly well, not after cleaning some wilderness area of bears with a low level druid, just because they were several hundred XP a pop, so it was really making a lot of difference in a really short time.
By this logic Bethseda's games are mechanically watertight masterpieces too.

Meanwhile, simplicity and elegance alone is perfectly sufficient reason for dropping kill XP.
At least with my pet use based systems you have an excuse of simulationism for creating and trying to work out a convoluted mess, plus they really are the only sane way to have character growth in games focused around derping in wilderness with multiple possible playstyles and builds.
With XP you don't have such excuse so a simpler, cleaner system that effectively does the same job with much less work and no idiotic loopholes to be patched should be automatically favored.

It is up to the designer how he rewards (or doesn't reward) XP for killing a quest giver. You are acting like it is really complicated and unsolvable problem, when it isn't.

No, I'm acting like it shouldn't even *be* a problem (as in something the dev has to consciously handle) with sane progression mechanics.

It is different, because it only applies to quest givers and only after you help or spare them.

Why?

Because that is what a DM would do. I wouldn't reward a player for XP double dipping.

It's not double dipping. One chunk of XP is for fighting a (potentially challenging) character. The other one is for doing quest(s) which might not even involve killing anyone.

This was marketed to fans as a return to IE gaming, but instead such fans are being called "grognards" and there doesn't even seem to be an attempt at replicating the mechanics that made those games fun to play.

Put a clock near your computer if you want to see numbers go up as you kill shit.
Because that's what XP mechanics was in IE games most of the time - inconsequential numbers going up.
The level ups were few and far in between.

Who the hell are these perverse designers to decide what players should or shouldn't do?

Precisely. So why make a system that specifically rewards narrow group of playstyles?

WRONG! Combat XP provides an alternative means of developing your character aside from doing tasks that Sawyer wants you to be doing. It is not about incentives, it is about actually having the choice to PLAY not DO.

Yes, it provides alternative in form of single playstyle not really supported by content and with at best tenuous support from any sort of logic, at the expense of multiple playstyles that both make sense and have content created for them.

What's next, complaining that you can't take over a kingdom and command vast armies instead of derping around as murderhobo?
Maybe being able to spam daggers at the forge in Skyrim was also good mechanics because, hey, alternative! Those are good, no?

Besides, can't you play by doing?
(hurr...)

You are still completely missing the point. It isn't about being able to kill or not. It is about being able to progress by doing what you enjoy doing as opposed to what the designer would like to force you to do.

Like killing shit?

What if I'd rather progress by ghosting around shit?

Thats a problem that comes with finite exp.

Meanwhile the ability to go to arbitrary level by grinding the same shit over and over is a problem that comes with infinite XP.

If you need to do A, but B stands in your way, doing A implies that you must have overcome B in some way, therefore rewarding A also rewards B. Simple.

Wouldn't have a problem with that (group B being positioned in such a way that you have to go through it to reach your goal) but what if say you achieve pyrric victory over group B, don't get reward for it( whether in loot or XP), reload and find out you can just circle around group B to your actual goal (group A). In that case what would be the purpose of group B? To showcase how dangerous wilderness is (immersion)?

If you can get around B, and don't have any reason to fight it (loot, quest, rep, influencing some sort of dynamical mechanics by changing world state), why fight it?

Because you failed to scout out the alternative route? Because you were too stupid to think strategically? Why should failure or stupidity be specifically rewarded?
Because you wanted to burn some supplies getting in a big fight for lulz or to prove yourself? You have, you've got your reward, why do you want an extra for it?

It almost mimics the logic of modern 'tards who refuse to play old games because they have no achievements.
Do you really need something resembling achievements keeping your dopamine pumping?

I think it is. If it was more of a TES style game, I would disagree.

I've been meaning to ask you, how would you go about designing TES style system (improve skills by use) without it being open to exploits (hopping all the time, letting rat hit you for an hour to build up your block/armor skill etc.)?

It would take a longish answer because use-based systems are a mess, that only has simulationism and ability to work without explicit support by content, as their saving graces (that's not particularly damning, actually, because those are huge upsides, but would probably be bad enough when designing a quest centric game like IE ones).

I don't really want to derail the thread (again), and I have already went over this more than once but I'd:

1. Make the system involve skill based success failure for *all* skills (can't have meaningful fail state? can't be a skill, although it might still be a stat - or part of it) and have probabilities just cut off at 1 and 0.
2. Make the skill gain (or probability of skill gain, as I'd probably make it nondeterministic) depend on unlikelihood of outcome - (1 - p) as multiplier. That way skill gain would be tied to difficulty and guaranteed success or failure would never increase skill.*
3. Preferably make information about skill gains delayed to nearest rest or similar - like in Daggerfall.
4. Make upkeep cost in some way to make derping around unproductively non-viable.
5. Make all skills that can be increased contribute to character's growth (to eliminate ability to grind non-class skills like in MW and OB).
6. Make skill increase 'cost' independent of individual skill level, but instead a function of sum of all skills - meaning that each subsequent skill increase would get harder independent on skill being increased and its level. This would remove the comparative advantage of increasing low level skills and would introduce opportunity cost to developing your character.
7. Preferably make a hierarchical structure of numerous skills and sub-skills, and let them "trickle down"
   
8. Either make those skills shallow or try to ensure infinite, but capped growth (asymptotic) that would nevertheless remain relevant in skill contests - for example n+1 sword skill would give you a good chance at besting n sword skill guy in sword combat despite having negligible mechanical effect otherwise (because asympthotic).**

*) This is probably the trickiest part. Straightforward enough with traditional RPG rolls (because you could just take probability) but with more detailed simulationist mechanics it would require estimates. For example let's say you're shooting a ranged weapon. The game would have to take your dispersion cone, select all targets within it (preferably try to select hostiles and environmental triggers only, if no hostiles do so with neutrals, otherwise take all potential targets) sum up their hitbox sizes at given distance and divide by dispersion size. This would sadly drop the lower cutoff, but it would keep the upper one.

**) For example, take our sword skill. Being asympthotic, its effects on hitting, swing speed, penetration % and whatever parameters it could influence would effectively cap off relatively early, but whenever for example parrying or locking blades or performing any blade vs blade maneuver with another sword user it would compare the scores directly (with some influence from other stats, but let's not overcomplicate now) - large difference would guarantee success/failure while small difference would sharply alter probability of it so while at level 1000 you wouldn't be perceptibly better at swordswinging in terms of speed, precision or whatever, than at level, say, 50, a level 1000 swordsman would probably end you in seconds if he were to cross blades with you at level 50. It may sound like terrible waste of points but it depends on how often will you cross blades with someone - it might end up being primary reason to pump your weapon skill if mostly fighting other human(oid)s. For different weapon types there might be a table of pairwise effective level conversions, or you might default to more general skill in hierarchy.

If you want to pursue the topic just quote the relevant part of my post (starting from last quote - to keep the ideas in one place) in the relevant thread, preferably this one:
http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/oiling-the-cogs-of-use-based-systems.34792/

Spoiler

Other threads of interest on the topics from use based to PoE current system:
http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...fic-knowledge-based-system.35973/#post-886816
http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...by-use-skill-system.83200/page-3#post-2694004
http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...el-less-crpg-system.83249/page-2#post-2693329
http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...still-proper-design.83251/page-5#post-2693785
http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...-rewards-for-quests.65766/page-6#post-1931133

 

[Jagged Appliance]

This is shitty because it forces you to do things you might not want to do.I like the xp system because it doesn't force you to do things you suck at i.e. you can pump combat first and then your diplomacy skills without going through the pain of having people spit in your face because the numbers say you aren't eloquent enough.

Getting xp only for quests is fine in a more linear game that is not open world.In a game which has exploration this doesn't work because it functions like a leash,either you stay near towns and finish quests or you don't level and keep exploring until you find out that you are under leveled and can't keep exploring so you have to go back to town and finish quests.

Someone mentioned that he has a problem That his PC is leveling by killing a trash mob,I don't know if you know this but MMOs have a solution to this problem,enemies that are far below your level don't give any xp.This mechanic can probably be used in a game where creatures don't have level ,after some modification.

You don't only get XP for quests in PoE.

Objectives != quests

Can you give some examples of objectives as opposed to quests because I'm not really clear on what they are.

 

[Volourn]

"IE games "want" you to kill everything in sight."

No, they don't. Did you REALLY hunt down every last fukkin' xfart for 7xp? COME THE FUCK ON.


"For a story driven RPG, I can definately understand why monsters do not give EXP. For other games, especially those about exploration, I would rather still gain exp from monsters.

Pillars of Eternity's design should lend itself well to the whole no exp from monsters business. But we will truly be able to see when the game comes out."

PE is both story and combat focused. It is combat heavy. Obsidian even admits this. I don't get why (not you) people don't get the very simple concept that xp is sued to reward the player for overcoming a challenge or obstacle - tackling a tough (optional or otherwise) fight should be treated the same as finding the little girl her lost dolly. LMAO But, people are pretending the latter is more worthy than the former. COME THE FUCK ON.


"Shadowrun Returns has quest only XP. The missions were on rails, combat wasn't avoidable in most cases and it didn't have overworld exploration either (not really anyway), so nobody cared that you were only rewarded with quest XP (Karma)."

Exactly. There was nothing with SRR's xp system 'cause it fit and you felt properly rewarded for succesfulling winning a fight or accomplishing some other task.


"not after cleaning some wilderness area of bears with a low level druid, just because they were several hundred XP a pop, so it was really making a lot of difference in a really short time."

If you are a druid hunting down non hostile bears; you are the problem. And, the way tof ix that is to have the game 'punish' druids who commit such blatant poor role-playing. There is so many ways to fix this issue intelligently.

 

[Bubbles]

I'm not sure I read it correctly - are you seriously proposing level scaling as good, fairly universal solution to cRPGs' woes?

He means stat scaling, not level scaling. If the weakest monster in the game does 1 damage per hit, the strongest can do 12 damage or 12,000,000. He's advocating a low stat ceiling.

 

[DraQ]

It's really daft that you can get a "kill all 15 Ogres" objective, spend a hour in a dungeon killing 14 ogres, then fail to find the final ogre/run out of rations/get bored out of your skull killing ogres over and over and have to walk away with zero xp.

If the objective is to actually kill the ogres, then you can just as well get a chuk of XP for every sub-objective dead.

Durp hurp.

I don't think it's necessarily the wrong game, though. As long as part of the game is about not-totally-scripted character progression, optimization is going to be a part of that. If you're not optimizing via killing a lot of enemies, you'll presumably be pressured to optimize by doing all the fetch quests.

And that's a good enough reason to consider only awarding XP on MQ's critical path.

I agree that XP and linear progression is not that interesting, but the quest-only XP system doesn't fix that, it only makes it more transparent.

A step in the right direction might be tradeoffs at level-up - for example, if you don't ever use diplomatic options, your diplomacy-related stats decrease.

If you want a character development system that's interesting, then XP based is probably the wrong direction to look.
(See my prev. post)

 

[Bubbles]

Maybe being able to spam daggers at the forge in Skyrim was also good mechanics because, hey, alternative! Those are good, no?

If spam crafting daggers were in any way challenging, I'd completely support opening the xp floodgates for it. Since combat in PoE will supposedly be challenging, I would like to get xp for it.

If the objective is to actually kill the ogres, then you can just as well get a chuk of XP for every sub-objective dead.

Durp hurp.

Which would be kill xp.

 

[DraQ]

If you are a druid hunting down non hostile bears; you are the problem. And, the way tof ix that is to have the game 'punish' druids who commit such blatant poor role-playing. There is so many ways to fix this issue intelligently.

That makes good flavour fix, but such patch only fixes single instance of the problem.

Intelligent fix is one that just removes the entire issue in every place it may have manifest.
You can still apply flavour patches for flavour, immersion and some extra C&C, you just won't have to worry about covering every single problem caused by kill XP.

 

[Bubbles]

What if you spend hours clearing the overworld map of everything that moves to farm crafting ingredients, then wipe out all the villages to loot the NPCs?

 

[Alfons]

So don't make a character build that's at odds with your preferred playstyle.

So a smooth talking gunman is a nono in your world?

Take this line of thought a step further, and why even have XP in that game? Why not just level characters up at predefined points in the story? The balance would be unmatched.

You have xp because there are still sidequests,no need to be a smartass.