So...this is for a MUD, but I don't see why it wouldn't apply to an MMO or whatever.

I'm working on a heavily cooperative player-versus-environment concept.  All players are on the same general team, so there is no PvP balance issue.  My main concern is...  How do I let low-level and high-level players play with each other, without stepping on each others' toes or making the high level players be disappointed at low power levels?

I want areas where a high-level party has some important mission to accomplish, but a low-level party can also help them out--like, take out some enemy archers or support troops.  My big problem is:  "If it's important enough to get a low-level party involved, how do you keep one high-level player from steamrolling through those weak enemies?"

Some places just lock high-level people out of low-level areas but that seems really cheap.  Ideally, I'd like an overpowered-level player to have no real advantage over an appropriate-level player in any given area.  I'm just not sure how to pull that off.  Maybe if every fight takes a decent amount of time, even if you totally overpower your enemy?  I don't know, would that even be fun?  I really don't want to boost newbies or downgrade highbies outside of their appropriate areas...  I've seen the 'boost newbies' thing in Warhammer Online, and while it was fun, it seemed like it was just a crutch to allow PvP to be playable at all; it made advancement a little less important than it could have been, but most importantly it just didn't make much sense.

Other concerns...  If a level 5 and a level 30 player want to play together, how do you let them have some amount of fun?  If they're different classes (healer and fighter, respectively) it works...because any healer is better than no healer.  And if one player has useful powers (ie, you need a psychopomp to take your party to the land of the dead and get around there), that works too.  But if it's two fighters, then it starts to feel a little weird--and in many systems like this, the low level player gets huge piles of experience, while contributing very little.

I'm toying with the idea of levels mostly giving you new abilities and customizations, instead of new powers...so it's more Metroid than Final Fantasy.  But that has a couple of problems.  First off, won't the high-level people be upset if they're only twice as strong as a raw newbie?  Secondly, will newbies be upset if they have very few abilities and customization?

So...what are design opinions on this?  Would serious players be disappointed at a very shallow levelling curve, would that make people more or less apt to grind?  How do you slow down a high-level player in a place where he's overpowered?  What mechanics do you find useful for letting wildly-disparate level players play together?

The Magic the Gathering CRPG had a cool method of levelling up.. you just win cards from battles, which you can then put in your deck for later battles.

Have you ever played the card games that infest the Final Fantasy series from 8 onwards?

Those games seem even MORE grindy than the RPG itself!  It's very easy to do card-game-based advancement wrong, that's for sure.

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If you give the player something easy but time consuming which will allow their character to become stronger, they will often do so. 

All battles that give a benefit to the player should be difficult enough to actually require strategy from the player.
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I'm not sure I agree here.  It's certainly important to make the game interesting and at least somewhat challenging...  But the 'grind' can be very difficult, too.  Imagine a horribly difficult randomized monster that has randomized attacks each time you find it, such that there is a strategy but it's different each time.  And it makes you gain a level every time you fight it, but it's always difficult regardless of level.  If the player fights it over and over...winning, oh, 4/5 of the time, enough that they are constantly challenged but their skill as a player is pushed to the wall each time...  well, can't that still be grinding?  Especially if they manage to find that monster early in the game, then fight it for ten hours, then breeze through the game because they're way higher level than the plot?

Grinding to me is "avoiding the plot", somewhat.  And when you consider that there's plenty of casual puzzle-gamer type people out there who really like doing something very difficult for a while, something that is very repetitive, for many days at a stretch, and ENJOY it... If you can level up your character by grinding crossword puzzles, even if they're hard, that might still be a problem in your game.  I guess it depends on what they're supposed to use their levels for, and how 'gaining power' fits into the gameplay.

This entry is CANCELLED/LATE.

Not many schedules can survive an engagement getting broken off.  Life has been very busy and complicated the last few weeks.

Frustrating, since I'd under-engineered this hard enough that it would have survived just about anything else getting in the way.  Well, I plan to finish this sometime.

Hey, that's cool to me.  Myst was a good game, so was Monkey Island (yes I know you can die if you try really, really hard).

The completionist in me hates finite XP.  The actual game player in me enjoys it.

The free and awesome Iji did this in a fun way.  It was very System Shock like.  However, you had the ability to redistribute all your points by rebooting your nanofield.  It was crippling so you wouldn't do it on a whim, but it wasn't crippling enough that you couldn't use it when a need arose.  Plus, if you were playing on a hard mode with less XP, and you wanted to get everywhere, including secrets behind locked doors that needed certain skills to access...  just reboot and get in there.  It didn't cut you off from anything just because you didn't have enough stuff.  And at the end of the game, even though you didn't have enough points to max everything out, you had enough to feel like you were a huge badass in all the categories you cared about.

single key presses maybe. but thats the really unintuitive thing ctrl+s (which is easy to hit with one hand) is slower than moving you hand off the keyboard and hitting save with the mouse, at least for a certain level of being untrained. It seems faster because it's harder for your brain to remember a string than a location so using keys makes you think more and thus it seems like less time passes. The relevent studies were done by Jef Raskin i think.

I have a doubt.  I play RTSes, heck, I play MOST games-with-graphics with one hand on keyboard, one hand on mouse, and when I am editing documents, I default to that position when not actively typing.  If I don't reach away from the mouse to the keyboard, ctrl-S is right there.

The main thing is this, though.  In most interfaces, 'save' is under a menu.  Like, there's a little menu button in the upper right corner, past your mini-map.  So Ctrl-S is faster than clicking two different places in the screen, one of which doesn't appear until you click the other.  And you can usually just hit enter after ctrl-S to save to a default name; either that or you type in a saved-game name, and that needs both hands on the keyboard.  Whereas with full mouse control, even the default name means you click menu, click save, click OK...  With keyboard, you hit ctrl-S with left hand while moving right hand to enter key, then press enter when that screen appears, and you're done.

Also, in word processors, there's often a 'save' button you can click with the mouse...but you often have to hunt for it and find what the icon looks like in this application!  Ctrl-S is pretty universal.  For me, it's less thought.

I don't like dying due to not micromanaging enough.  I'm very frustrated by dying on Nethack because I didn't abuse knight jumping enough, didn't position myself perfectly and didn't realize I had a better wand I could have used to escape.  Don't like dying because I didn't spend ten minutes scoping out an area, and instead just charged in with a reasonable plan--That counts for you too, Hitman, you annoying game you!

I don't like dying because I wasn't patient enough.  So that means I don't like some games.  I think some games require too much planning, and that isn't fun.  It's alright when you have to plan or you won't succeed.  It's not alright if not planning kills you 10% of the time, just rarely enough to convince yourself that you CAN play the game without getting bored.

Decker also does this to me.  I could be super careful and always disable all countermeasures as perfectly as possible whenever I go anywhere, but that's just not FUN.  So every once in a while, I die because I failed to do something that wasn't fun.

Little Big Adventure, entering the desert, when the music swells.

Iji, when you haven't killed many people and kill someone, and she sobs "I'm sorry!".  Really makes you think whether you want to kill anyone else.

Iji, having a damn good reason to kill Asha, and then splattering him in an uncharacteristically violent way (for a mostly bloodless game).

Kid Chameleon, running into a dead-end on an auto scrolling level and dying, and realizing that the billboard in the background reads "OOPS".  Wow, the villains really are designing the levels specifically to kill you.

X-Com, the first time you take out a hoverdisc...insanely powerful and you just had five guys plinking at it before your last guy manages to kill it with his last shot of the turn.  WhaBOOM.

Cave Story, teaming up with Curly for the first time in the labyrinth, incredibly happy music as you UNLEASH HELL ON EVERYTHING.

Return to Zork.  "Want some rye?  'Course ya do!"  The sheer comical absurdity of pouring out your drink repeatedly into a houseplant because you're too much of a lightweight to keep up with Boos.

Kana: Little Sister, just for the constant heartbreaking reminders that your little sister only has like a year to live.  (It's a H game, though.)

Double Dragon 2 was surprisingly epic.  "I can lure those guys so they fall OUT OF A FLYING HELICOPTER!"  Also, boss fight really really made you want to kill the guy, a lot.

Secret of Mana, running into people from a totally alien tech level (starships and robots) after you got used to the idea that you were in a pure-fantasy setting.

Puzzle Pirates, giving orders in pirate-speak to your pickup crew, and having them respond in kind, even though you've never met before.  That doesn't quite count...

RetroMUD, being cornered and deeply, desperately lost in a confusing underwater area, with underpowered characters from slightly weak classes, and managing to survive and retroactively map our way back to the surface around hostile opponents.  It's hard to script something like that, considering it was a MUD and most of the trouble came from "we are in way over our heads and we didn't map on the way in", but that was a ton of fun.  In fact MOST of the times I have fun on MUDs, it's places that I'm vastly underpowered and just barely surviving through unorthodox tactics.  But if they're always like that, then it doesn't count as "underpowered" or "unorthodox" anymore.

I'm...I'm pretty sure those are all well-accepted non-1337 terms.

I think.  I don't even KNOW anymore.

A platformer that allows the protagonist to turn into various Tetris pieces and break through walls that way

Already been (very similarly) done, I think it's called Tetroid.  It's Metroid, but instead of new weapons you get new blocks you can fire.  Some areas are locked with untilled rows, and you have to use the blocks in your inventory (max 1 of each out at a time) to fill them to proceed.

I like it!  Would also be possible to borrow occasional elements from the "survive in a randomly generated landscape" genres.  Like...being in a place that's somewhat randomized each time.  Or...having to not die starving and forgotten in a gutter.

Instead of sickness type bars, easy enough to just display those effects on your avatar with very minimal interface, if it's third person 3d or something.

My only question is, what's the win condition?  (Haven't read the book, no idea of the way it ends.)  If you win by integrating with the culture, it seems like the game would shift genres very rapidly...and I'm not sure that's entirely great.  It would feel like those 'survive on a desert island' game where you manage to establish a totally sustainable food and water supply and shelter within the first three days, then think "now what, do I build a bigger house?".  I suspect this game would want to be short and to the point, not a sim game.

Has anybody here heard of Titan? It's a board game where you build armies by recruiting units along a tiled board. When armies meet, though, you move to a secondary board where you do the battle.

I think it might be interesting to split an RTS into specific "management" and "battle" modes, with the game effectively pausing for the duration of battles. That way you could focus on one thing at a time, instead of multitasking and missing things that you really shouldn't have missed.

Archon, X-Com, Master of *, and Close Combat III are all good examples of this.  Sadly, also consider platform games with the mine cart level.  Sometimes, having a different mode you have to change to can be annoying instead of a fun change of pace or a fun strategic element.  X-Com suffered from that a lot, late in the game, when you needed the cash from looting your thirtieth small UFO but you really didn't want to micromanage another team of rookies.

Actually I think it is important from the psychological point of view.  Higher numbers impress the monkey in our brain that wants to throw banana peels at those 'lower' than us.  Being able to see our XP bar climbing up gives us prompt feedback for things that may otherwise be boring to us.

So one thing to ponder is, if we remove levels and/or XP, how do we substitute for that 'Ding!' gratification?  Even the 1d Linear Rpg had dings!

So on second thought, I don't think I'd get rid of levels from RPGs.  But it might be interesting to ponder an 'opposites' RPG where you level down as you play...

Hmmm.  I wonder what's more instinctively satisfying:  Watching that XP bar slowly climb up and roll over as you shoot monsters, or picking up that missile pack.  Honestly, a lot of modern games DO have very satisfying numbers...but the individual level has stopped having much meaning.

Look at Disgaea, where it's not uncommon to gain eight levels from a single enemy.  Also, MUDs...  I've played on one mud where levels go from 1 to 201, then wrap around MANY times, adding new powers every time you start over; on that MUD, individual levels stop meaning much, and going from level 170 to 175 in a night is kind of an off-day.  On the other hand, another MUD I'm on just goes from 4 to 100, and it's common to take several years (average is probably around 5?) to get to level 100, with many players just not making it there; on that MUD, adding a single level is meaningful again.

I guess it partly depends on how fast you blow through the content, and how much time you spend anticipating it.  Of course I guess it was obvious that not all numbers have the same meaning, otherwise all hit points would go up to seven digits just for kicks.  (Then again, look at how pinball game scores have changed over the years; observe the slow growth of HP scores in Final Fantasy games, from three to five digits; and look at shooters like Giga Wing that have to color code your score just to see how big it really is at a glance...)

I do have a problem with the whole "you improve in what you keep doing" system, where attacking->gain strength, casting->gain magic skill.  I find it's extremely vulnerable to grinding and to pigeonholing players.  If you level up your 'dodge' ability by dodging stuff, then by halfway through the game, if you never bothered to dodge early on, you have zero incentive to start:  you'll gain skill very slowly, and your pathetic skill won't even help!  All of a sudden if you want to learn to dodge, you have to go back to easier levels of the game and spend half an hour ducking monsters that couldn't possibly hurt you if they hit you...etc.

Never mind that it's somewhat realistic.  It's just not fun.  I guess if you scale things correctly it could at least be usable, but...meh, it's probably just a personal preference thing.

As for "levelling up just to get access to the new spell", the munchkin side of me approves, but my working stiff with limited gaming time side says that's horrible, and points to Metroid and Zelda.  Even if you can improve your stats by staying in one area, I do think it's more fun if you have to move on to get new abilities.  I look back to games like Final Fantasy 4, where some of the abilities you only get at a certain level can be -really important-, with a mix of nostalgia and pity.

Hmm.  Are there any RTSes out there that have strategy, but no economics?  In general, resource management is what seems to turn an RTT into an RTS, but doing the resource management always seems like I'm playing a minigame called "see who gets to build the most units".  And that can be fun, especially against AI players--but just like the player with the most actions-per-minute will usually win a match, the player with the best build order will also usually win.

It's all well and good to worry about how many units you can support, and have a sense of whether you should boost your economy or your military, but take two players who have the same general strategy in mind, but one person has honed their build order very finely and pays obsessive attention to their home base is just plain going to have more soldiers.  Witness micromanaging your SCVs in Starcraft, or fussing with villagers in Empire Earth--there's a very specific optimal order for "okay, I put the 22nd villager onto the resource, then I have the next three join the city for the percentage harvest boost, then I put the next two on the resource" etc.  And winding up with resources for four less soldiers over five minutes, just because you put your harvest site diagonal to the resource instead of orthogonal?  Those things just aren't strategy to me.  It would be nice to see games with strategic elements (what units do I choose to build?  what parts of the map do I want to capture?) but no micromanagement of the economy at ALL.  Heck, even games like TA where you build solar power plants that give you a constant income without micromanagement suffer from that.

Chrono Cross had hard level caps (for slightly abstract concepts of levels) based on the number of bosses you had completed.  In general, if you used your main party all the time, never grinded hardly at all but didn't run from everything, you'd stay something like three levels below the cap.  I'm not sure how much I liked the system.  It discouraged grinding quite effectively, true, but it made me wonder why I even got normal experience points at all.  Seems like "1 boss = 1 level" would work just as well, the only thing this system did was let you go up three levels by grinding a little for a really hard boss.

One of the CPB entries had you raising the undead bodies of former players to fight for you.  They were whatever level they died at, and you found them wherever they had died.

One of my favorite RT?s is Close Combat III.  I guess it counts as RTT within a single round (ceasefires let you re-equip, redeploy, and call in more troops which adds strategic elements).

I guess my take on rushing is:  "If rushing requires no skill, then what about building N buildings in X order to get defenses up optimally, or researching XYZ techs in order to get fastest resource production?"  Before you start considering first contact with the enemy, all games are pointless races.

For example of a -different- way of doing it that is, in my mind, a more pure thinking game...  When you start a round of CCIII, you have your units, they have theirs, and you're blind to a certain extent; you have your territory, they have theirs, and you can put your guys anywhere within your territory oriented however you want, without seeing where your enemy is putting his units.  When the round starts, it's quite possible to have placed an anti-tank gun within clear view of an enemy tank, and then you're happy...but there's essentially no prep time at the very start of the match.  Your defenses are already UP.  If you want to turtle, well, just start your guys where you want to keep them.  If you want to go on the offense, your guys are probably starting right at your border and you can start sneaking them into enemy territory immediately.

So I like games that take out the pointless economy stuff.  Hey, if I know that capturing the radio tower lets me call in an airstrike, then that's a resource I can use.  If I know that accepting a ceasefire gives me more troops I can buy during downtime based on how much territory I possess, that's also a resource.  I shouldn't have to shuffle building locations or peons to deal with resources.

CCIII is slow enough and the orders are simple enough that it's real-time without being twitch--it's more a game of waiting for the right time to move, than it is about moving as fast as possible.  And many many turnbased things have annoying micromanagement, like MOO.

I think it would improve C&C-style RTSes if the map was always revealed, and if you somehow as a player could actually know what was going on everywhere.  That way you'd always be reacting, not predicting and guessing.  It's all well and good to have some uncertainty, but not for the first whole five minutes or more of a game...

Just wanted to bring up the topic of MUCKs briefly, though they're almost a different creature entirely.  (They're essentially non-combat MUDs that usually give players a mostly-unregulated ability to build their own stuff.)

Most MUCKs tend to delete players and their creations after a year or two of inactivity, to open up old names and clean up the database a bit, but some of them have been around for upwards of ten years without an idle character purge.  Also, even on ones that do delete stuff, some established players have long since built areas that never get visited and are forgotten, while some areas that were important a long time ago got put on a kind of protected list (well, they're given to a placeholder character that keeps them from getting deleted) and lost popularity since then.

Anywhere you have a multiplayer community, you're going to have some permanence, just in terms of "oh I've known you for ten years".  But what I really enjoy is that you can make an area and then ten years later, it's still there--and depending on where it gets attached to the world, a small handful of people a month, maybe only one or two per year, wander through.  Heck if you really go off the beaten path, you can find places that haven't been explored in five years or more.  Sometimes you can find old bulletin boards (last post: October 21, 1998) or old programs for playing cribbage on the MUCK, long since abandoned, given that the last people to touch it were long since deleted.  Some places let you leave graffiti that sticks around for a LONG time, some areas let you track people and occasionally find footprints from ten years ago.  (Heck, sometimes you can even find ghosts of past conversations in the room.)

It's not quite *permanence*, but there's some artistic merit to taking persistence to slightly absurd levels, and allowing a big world to be connected together even if many parts of it literally never get used.