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[Photon]

As RPG elements are a whole lotta places these days in games, I recently gave gave some thought to the subject and laid it out:

https://photongamedev.wordpress.com/2015/03/07/are-traditional-rpg-systems-critically-flawed/

The trumpet has been sounded on this before but I hadn't really considered that EXP in the traditional sense just may not be readily salvageable. I speak theoretically of course from a designer's perspective, but from the end-user side having experienced games that try to use it, some of the critical weaknesses of the system just seem to get more glaring over time.

What I'm curious to know is, warts included and all, whether or not you think there is still substantial merit in the traditional EXP systems. Why should it stick around and how can it be done right? If major change is needed, what could be done to refine the mechanics in place? I'm interested in how to make the idea of "leveling up" hold more distinct value to the player rather than it being "x level = y points."

EDIT: Whoops, how'd I end up in Technical? Can someone move this over to the Design part of the Creative forum?Thanks. Sorry about that.

[wccrawford]

I've played plenty of RPGs that don't give you XP if you fight things that are too easy for you, and some that even do it if you fight things that are much too hard.  There are still plenty of ways to use XP and not fall into traps like these. 

So why don't we see them more often?  Players don't like them.  XP-based RPGs are typically not about player skill, but about numbers.  Skilled players can do things faster and more complexly, but even rank amateurs can get to the end and beat the game.  This is not a flaw, this is a design choice.

[valrus]

Yeah, there's basically a continuum of content gating, between:

• Skill unlocks content, and so a player's skill determines how much content they can see.
• Time unlocks content, and everyone gets content unlocks on the same schedule.

The latter would be less-than-optimal for a game, to say the least; it wouldn't matter what you do.  But in the middle, there's:

• Skill x time (that is, EXP) unlocks content.  You essentially purchase content with time, but there's a potentially big discount based on skill.

There are various ways to move this further towards the skill side (countdown mechanics like roguelike food) or time side (idle EXP), but to a large extent we've settled in the middle for a lot of genres, almost certainly because this is where aggregate player engagement is maximized.

Regarding making EXP more realistic rather than treating it as an amorphous blob, certainly a lot of RPGs do that.  I wouldn't necessarily say I like it, though.  When the player achieves something of type X and becomes more skilled in X, there's now an opportunity cost associated with other choices, and therefore an incentive to keep doing X.  That's actually how the world works, but it's not necessarily good for a game; you've set up a system in which, hopefully, there are a wide array of choices available to the player, and going too far in the realistic direction can result in a game in which the player's early choices can get them stuck in a rut, where numerically optimal play is always making the familiar choice.

[Pfotegeist]

You could say our modern RPG systems are flawed.

[starsrift]

You appear to have the complaint that 'XP' is essentially unrelated to the method of 'earning' it.

I think this is completely the wrong way to go about things. Not everything has to be a simulation, especially RPG's! It's a game. Let's say it's a game, nod and smile and say these are the rules.

XP is a nice way to let a player scale into a game and gate their progress. Ideally, you unlock not only stronger perils, but different kinds of perils, at different levels. You don't throw a Mute effect at the player at level one, for instance. And it lets the player get an instant feedback of positive progress as well as achievement.
Allowing the player to distribute the gains of the XP (perks, spells, etc) is allowing the player to become more personally invested in their characters as they make the choice of how to improve their character - not the choice of going through the red door which led to fire monsters instead of the purple door that led to the ice monsters, which is the end result of your blog's closing suggestion.

Giving a player free agency is the most powerful tool we have in making games. It's what makes them games! Taking away that agency under the guise of versimilitude is a bad thing to do, IMO. If you're frustrated that a player's character is just as 'good' after killing 1000 ladybugs as one who killed 1 dragon, then I'd say you're a bad encounter designer - if they haven't killed that one epic dragon, then they still have no idea how to do it. Unless there's absolutely nothing special about that dragon, and it's just effectively the 1000 ladybugs packed into a single encounter.

[skaz]

An other way to approach the question of progress can be seen with the Elder Scrolls levelling system. Each skill is upgraded individually, by practice, not by "traditional" XP. It still requires a lot of grinding, and slashing 100 times your sword at ladybugs is actually the same as slashing 100 times a dragon.

So it has its flaws, especially with your global level, which is just the sum of the individual skills, which can lead a high level alchemist/merchant/social enthusiast to be unable to fight enemies of the same level, if those enemies are specialized in killing stuff with pointy staff.

I think the "level" paradigm is quite old. Player can feel their progress when they overcome obstacles they previously failed, and this progress can be earned by raw numbers, or skill. In games where the laws of nature are only dictated by number, skill can't help you. You can't kill a monster with to much DPS and HP in WoW, if you don't have the stats and the level to do it.
I understand why players like it, because you get the reward, never-mind how bad you are. It's easy, just grind, and in the end the reward is yours. If it's the basic spirit or what we call RPG, maybe trying to do something completely different is needed. XP bars are so often lazy design and barely disguised Skinner boxes. I like to focus on the actual game, and when it's examining excel spreadsheets to get the better dps or physical resistance, I get bored extremely fast (diablo and its FPS counterpart borderlands are perfect examples). My vision of adventure doesn't include using a calculator to buy a magical axe.

I personally tend to imagine systems where stats are simply not a thing. But skill are actually something tangible, gameplay wise, not just higher numbers. Skills that opens new possibility. Rather than minimal requirement to be actually capable of overcoming that enemy you can't defeat, with less that 10k HP. But again, maybe I'm talking about something that's no longer RPG. Maybe I no longer love RPGs

[s0]

You appear to have the complaint that 'XP' is essentially unrelated to the method of 'earning' it.

I think this is completely the wrong way to go about things. Not everything has to be a simulation, especially RPG's! It's a game. Let's say it's a game, nod and smile and say these are the rules.

XP is a nice way to let a player scale into a game and gate their progress. Ideally, you unlock not only stronger perils, but different kinds of perils, at different levels. You don't throw a Mute effect at the player at level one, for instance. And it lets the player get an instant feedback of positive progress as well as achievement.
Allowing the player to distribute the gains of the XP (perks, spells, etc) is allowing the player to become more personally invested in their characters as they make the choice of how to improve their character - not the choice of going through the red door which led to fire monsters instead of the purple door that led to the ice monsters, which is the end result of your blog's closing suggestion.

Giving a player free agency is the most powerful tool we have in making games. It's what makes them games! Taking away that agency under the guise of versimilitude is a bad thing to do, IMO. If you're frustrated that a player's character is just as 'good' after killing 1000 ladybugs as one who killed 1 dragon, then I'd say you're a bad encounter designer - if they haven't killed that one epic dragon, then they still have no idea how to do it. Unless there's absolutely nothing special about that dragon, and it's just effectively the 1000 ladybugs packed into a single encounter.

100% agree.

i also 100% disagree with any attempts ive seen to construct a quasi-"moral" distinction between time gating and skill gating (not necessarily from anyone itt).

id say that "grinding" and "learning a skill" in a videogame are just 2 different types of activities and satisfy different psychological needs. "grind" is kinda like gardening, esp when it involves some form of choice or planning (ex: skill trees, gear, investing stat points etc). "skill"-based games are like rock climbing. theres room for both gardening and rock climbing in this world, and there even people who enjoy both. why can't there be room for both time gating and skill gating (and combinations of the 2) as well?

also note that learning a skill always involves a time investment as well.

[Pfotegeist]

I recall a discussion about the flawed experience system in another closely related topic
which mechanics are you sick and tired of seeing in RPGs?

http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=44516.0

You could give that a read if you're interested in just hearing about RPG stuff.

I'm going to critique your blog post photon.

Although you mentioned RPG's have bled into other genres. I think the mention of RPG here could be removed, when the purpose of the blog appeared to be about experience being turned into a pool of points. If I play pinball to gain experience in a video game, and the pinball itself wasn't the entire game, was I playing an RPG with pinball in it? How can I be sure?

In any game where I gained experience points, be it not an RPG, I find I get upgrades that make completion of the game possible for any grind-fest. When it's not a grind-fest then the upgrades are used to alter the game for my enjoyment or challenge, and vary the tactics in a game of wits (often creating power balance issues). If a game has some semblance of narrative, then it may be an RPG, and we could make similar comparisons when there are grind-fests involved and when there aren't

Now on to RPG's only. Your true acts of valor may result in exceptionally endowed items, further opening quests, and rewarding you in many ways other than experience. I think that pretty much solves your problem, but I'll continue. The experience itself is usually not worthy, consider that finite maximum levels are valued less than in-game currency, which makes particular actions all the more valuable, grinding a specific location, doing more intricate leveling at the right time. I'll leave reality out of the loop for now.

Sometimes you'll get a title like "epic ladybug killer", the title is just as valuable as having actually killed ladybugs for 100 hours because the conditions for acquiring it are transient.

[Jordgubben]

Yeah, there's basically a continuum of content gating, between:

• Skill unlocks content, and so a player's skill determines how much content they can see.
• Time unlocks content, and everyone gets content unlocks on the same schedule.

The latter would be less-than-optimal for a game, to say the least; it wouldn't matter what you do.  But in the middle, there's:

• Skill x time (that is, EXP) unlocks content.  You essentially purchase content with time, but there's a potentially big discount based on skill.

...

What to aim for on this axis of time<->skill depends mostly on whether one is creating an challenging or relaxing experience. Something like an e-sport should not have any long term exp (or exp-like things), but a casual game played for leisure could very well be all exp-grind (and there is nothing wrong with that).

But then you also have games like Long Live The Queen where the game is more or less all about how you spend your (mostly fixed amount of) XP. This game is both really hard and played for leisure.

[Photon]

Thanks for all the feedback guys, I really appreciate it. As I did say near the end, I certainly don't think we should throw traditional RPG EXP completely out the window. It has and can still work under the right circumstances. Looking back, it probably would have been a better idea to focus more on alternative approaches to traditional RPG's than calling it out as critically flawed. Because, for better or worse, as wccrawford pointed out, this is sometimes a design choice. Any design choice typically comes with a negative side to it.

Regarding making EXP more realistic rather than treating it as an amorphous blob, certainly a lot of RPGs do that.  I wouldn't necessarily say I like it, though.  When the player achieves something of type X and becomes more skilled in X, there's now an opportunity cost associated with other choices, and therefore an incentive to keep doing X.  That's actually how the world works, but it's not necessarily good for a game; you've set up a system in which, hopefully, there are a wide array of choices available to the player, and going too far in the realistic direction can result in a game in which the player's early choices can get them stuck in a rut, where numerically optimal play is always making the familiar choice.

This would definitely fall under one of the challenges briefly alluded to near the end (absoluteness of choice.) I know the feeling of not wanting to spend any skill points because I have no way of knowing what the latter half of the game holds. On that note, it does make me wonder how said system could counteract that apprehension, whether through partial or complete resets or even providing some kind of road map as to where the player expects to go. Because ultimately, no matter how hard we try, it often is numbers pulling the strings behind the curtain.

If you're frustrated that a player's character is just as 'good' after killing 1000 ladybugs as one who killed 1 dragon, then I'd say you're a bad encounter designer - if they haven't killed that one epic dragon, then they still have no idea how to do it.

Can you elaborate a bit more on the last part of this statement? Are you saying that the design of such a game is such that it hasn't "taught" the player how to beat the dragon yet?

And you bring up a very important point. Sometimes we don't want the game to kick us in the shins. Sometimes simply enjoying the act of slaying bugs or dragons is really the reward in and of itself, in which case the question may become whether or not the design of the game puts more emphasis on the battles themsleves or on the activity of leveling up (or both.) All can be fun in their own right, of course.

I personally tend to imagine systems where stats are simply not a thing. But skill are actually something tangible, gameplay wise, not just higher numbers. Skills that opens new possibility. Rather than minimal requirement to be actually capable of overcoming that enemy you can't defeat, with less that 10k HP. But again, maybe I'm talking about something that's no longer RPG. Maybe I no longer love RPGs

Yes! This is more or less what I'm talking about, where more emphasis is placed on how you play the game rather than number crunching. I personally like some good number-crunching when done in moderation, but it can get a little crazy when you spend two hours trying to rig an armor set-up so that boss five will go down in exactly eleven hits. That works for some people, but I totally understand your pain there.

I guess the thrust of what I'm getting at is, if we decide to forego number-crunching or even reduce things down to a much simpler stat setup, what's the best way to make it meaningful? I suppose that's more of what I'm curious in exploring and what we are exploring here over how to shoot down traditional EXP point systems.

[randomnine]

I don't think XP is fundamentally broken, it's a great system for drip-feeding new stuff, but I agree it's often implemented in such a way that striving for that new stuff isn't much fun. I think it's just intrinsically hard to get right. XP is a complex game-spanning system, so just about any exploit or imbalance in the game becomes an XP exploit/imbalance.

I think the simplest way to address grinding in systems with endless sources of XP is to make XP more abstract, not less. Rebalance XP income so that most XP in normal play comes not from performing routine actions but from completing larger one-off tasks: quests, challenges, achievements, etc. The optimal path for levelling up will then involve seeing and doing as much stuff in the game as possible.

[starsrift]

If you're frustrated that a player's character is just as 'good' after killing 1000 ladybugs as one who killed 1 dragon, then I'd say you're a bad encounter designer - if they haven't killed that one epic dragon, then they still have no idea how to do it.

Can you elaborate a bit more on the last part of this statement? Are you saying that the design of such a game is such that it hasn't "taught" the player how to beat the dragon yet?

And you bring up a very important point. Sometimes we don't want the game to kick us in the shins. Sometimes simply enjoying the act of slaying bugs or dragons is really the reward in and of itself, in which case the question may become whether or not the design of the game puts more emphasis on the battles themsleves or on the activity of leveling up (or both.) All can be fun in their own right, of course.

I'm not quite sure how to elaborate on this. I don't want to offend, but...
If your epic dragon combat is just a health/dps contest, then why is it a dragon? What makes it epic, what makes it special? What makes this dragon so fearsome? If all you have to do is (correctly deflect/absorb damage) while (dealing damage) over time, why is there any particular value to the dragon over the 1000 ladybugs where you do the exact same thing on a smaller scale?

Include mechanics in your advanced encounters. You have a dragon, so maybe it spreads a fire damage over time effect that the player has to clear. Maybe there's a spike damage that the player has to prepare for. An AOE effect. And so on. They come in patterns, so a player can learn and beat them, but it's not just standing and swinging a sword at a ladybug.

Encounters should never be pedestrian, unless you want the player to expect the pedestrian. If you want a player to expect pedestrian from a goddamn dragon, I want to see your epic end-game encounters for the sheer awesomeness they include.
And they better include an operatic score alongside.

[vinheim3]

Concerning the article about giving exp more meaning, I can agree that elder scrolls style was definitely a successful way of doing things, exp is not just a single value that determines how strong you are overall, but how hard you work in different waYs can let you shape the direction your characters go, and trying and getting better at newer things speeds it up. Some other ways of giving exp more meaning have been done great in other games like La Mulana where the grind can keep you healthy when you need it, and some games where exp can be taken away by enemies so it becomes a resource to take more care of.

[JWK5]

id say that "grinding" and "learning a skill" in a videogame are just 2 different types of activities and satisfy different psychological needs. "grind" is kinda like gardening, esp when it involves some form of choice or planning (ex: skill trees, gear, investing stat points etc). "skill"-based games are like rock climbing. theres room for both gardening and rock climbing in this world, and there even people who enjoy both. why can't there be room for both time gating and skill gating (and combinations of the 2) as well?

Demon's/Dark Souls is a perfect example of combining the two. If a boss is too tough you can grind for better stats and gear and retry them with potentially much better results, but if you are very skilled you can dance around them with lower stats and less effective gear. Grinding helps the players who would otherwise be at an impasse.

What I would have liked to see more of, which seems to be only limited to a boss or two, is rare item drops as a result of beating a boss on a much lower level. Even better would be overall reward scaling based on the level disparity. For example, you are guaranteed X amount of souls for beating the boss, but the lower your level is than the boss the greater your item reward. In that instance 100 ladybugs would be worth 1 dragon in terms of souls/XP but not in terms of item acquisition (which technically is already the case, if 100 ladybugs dropped titanite they would not be equal to the dragon that drops a twinkling titanite). It would encourage (and reward) attempting greater challenge but leave room for less skilled players to scale the challenge down to a manageable level in order to progress further into the game.

[Alevice]

i think vtm: bloodlines did it right with its skill point reward. the points you earn are directly traded for skill profficiency, and there is a very limited amount (you earn them by solving quests).

[s0]

btw i dont think the "1000 ladybugs vs 1 dragon" thing even matters that much in practice.

i sometimes play games with levelup mechanics and i think "hmmm in theory i could farm those trash mobs until im max level" immediately followed by "but im not going to do that because it's a waste of time". you could probably beat super mario bros by pressing random buttons, monkey-with-typewriter style, but who actually does that?

[valrus]

This would definitely fall under one of the challenges briefly alluded to near the end (absoluteness of choice.) I know the feeling of not wanting to spend any skill points because I have no way of knowing what the latter half of the game holds. On that note, it does make me wonder how said system could counteract that apprehension, whether through partial or complete resets or even providing some kind of road map as to where the player expects to go. Because ultimately, no matter how hard we try, it often is numbers pulling the strings behind the curtain.

Kingdoms of Amalur had the rather nice feature where you could unbuy all your skills whenever you felt like, if you were bored of being a mage and wanted to try out being a rogue.  (It became more expensive the more you did it, though, so it was limited in that sense.)  I think they saw how boring a long RPG becomes if you get locked into a single effective strategy.  (But KoA could pull this off because it uses amorphous EXP.  If magic-using experience could only make you better at using magic, then you'd still be stuck being a mage even if you can unbuy skills.)

I think a good illustration of fixed-type EXP systems is the comparison between Final Fantasy II and Final Fantasy III. Or even better, Final Fantasy V.  The experience system in FF2 was entirely abandoned in subsequent games, whereas the "job" system in FF3/5 became essentially the FF default, the one they come back to when they're not being more experimental.  Both involved a "narrow" experience system (in FF2, whatever you choose to do is strengthened, in FF5 you get special and nontransferable experience points applied to a job). 

In FF2 you pretty much end up doing the same thing the whole game, if I remember correctly, because whatever a character does, that becomes the thing that character is good at.  There's a big opportunity cost to switching.  On the other hand, since FF5 jobs keep getting added, and new jobs are better than old ones, there are diminishing returns to doing and being the same thing the whole game.  Moreover, the power of jobs is in part the way they combine, so to optimize play you have to try to find the best combinations.  So the mechanics promote trying new strategies, rather than maintaining strategies, even though it likewise has a "narrow" experience system.

[s0]

This would definitely fall under one of the challenges briefly alluded to near the end (absoluteness of choice.) I know the feeling of not wanting to spend any skill points because I have no way of knowing what the latter half of the game holds. On that note, it does make me wonder how said system could counteract that apprehension, whether through partial or complete resets or even providing some kind of road map as to where the player expects to go. Because ultimately, no matter how hard we try, it often is numbers pulling the strings behind the curtain.

Kingdoms of Amalur had the rather nice feature where you could unbuy all your skills whenever you felt like, if you were bored of being a mage and wanted to try out being a rogue.  (It became more expensive the more you did it, though, so it was limited in that sense.)  I think they saw how boring a long RPG becomes if you get locked into a single effective strategy.  (But KoA could pull this off because it uses amorphous EXP.  If magic-using experience could only make you better at using magic, then you'd still be stuck being a mage even if you can unbuy skills.)

seems more like a problem of the game's classes being too rigid in the first place to me and re-speccing is a band-aid solution.

honestly respeccing is kinda a wack mechanic 99% of the time its used because it makes character customization feel pointless and most games dont have a good thematic metaphor for it (massive exception: monster hunter) so it destroys the roleplaying aspect of the game.

[JWK5]

seems more like a problem of the game's classes being too rigid in the first place to me and re-speccing is a band-aid solution.

honestly respeccing is kinda a wack mechanic 99% of the time its used because it makes character customization feel pointless and most games dont have a good thematic metaphor for it (massive exception: monster hunter) so it destroys the roleplaying aspect of the game.

In KoA it is part of the story (your (sole) character's ability to bend, twist, and defy destiny while everyone else is enslaved to it). There are three classes (essentially fighter, mage, and rogue) and each has several skill trees. You can mix and match skills from any class as you please, but the more skill points you have in finesse (rogue) for example the more able you are to equip higher level finesse gear. Resetting your stats was less a band-aid and more of a matter of fine-tuning your play style through experimentation, and it's cost rises with level and times used so for low level characters resetting your stats is rather easy but for higher level characters it becomes much more costly. The end result is that in the early quarter of the game you get a feel for what play style feels right and for the remainder of the game you hone it.

[stefoid]

As RPG elements are a whole lotta places these days in games, I recently gave gave some thought to the subject and laid it out:

https://photongamedev.wordpress.com/2015/03/07/are-traditional-rpg-systems-critically-flawed/

The trumpet has been sounded on this before but I hadn't really considered that EXP in the traditional sense just may not be readily salvageable. I speak theoretically of course from a designer's perspective, but from the end-user side having experienced games that try to use it, some of the critical weaknesses of the system just seem to get more glaring over time.

What I'm curious to know is, warts included and all, whether or not you think there is still substantial merit in the traditional EXP systems. Why should it stick around and how can it be done right? If major change is needed, what could be done to refine the mechanics in place? I'm interested in how to make the idea of "leveling up" hold more distinct value to the player rather than it being "x level = y points."

EDIT: Whoops, how'd I end up in Technical? Can someone move this over to the Design part of the Creative forum?Thanks. Sorry about that.

hi - my 2 cents.   If grind is the critical weakness of XP, you can make it so your game doesnt facilitate grind - the stick way is to not allow it - for instance, where do these 1000 ladybugs come from?  Home come the game spawns 1000 ladybugs and continues to give the player 10XP every time they kill one?  Lets say you get less XP every time you kill the same monster?

I think we all agree that grind is bad, but to be more specific grind is bad because the player isnt making any consequential decisions while grinding. - they arent playing a game any more, they arent having fun - they are 'working' .

So I dont think the XP itself is the evil, but the way you earn it.  If all XP in your game is earned by the player doing fun things (continually making consequential decisions) then great!