Enough with character building!

#1

Quote:
what is the connection between, lets say, killing 30 rats in some murky sewers and spending skill points in lock picking?

That's pretty much why I've always despised the concept of level-grind.

#2 I don't like lvl grinding ether though the only game I do liek that has lvl grinding is Final Fantasy games its worth the story lines.

I am makeing a rpg without lvl grinding I have not decided if I will have people build there own character or not yet. I like your idea though of over time they change based on what they have done in the game thats one thing I never thought of but should of.

#3 You know what is the worst of it all? Random encounters grinding!

#4 Dragonrealms did it right. If you go out and fight rats, you gain experience in the weapons you use, the armor you are wearing, the skills you utilize (evade, parry, feint), the spells you cast and skill related to them (harness, primary, targeted magic), and so on and so on. You don't fight rats and go "spend points on X skill." You don't actually spend points...it restores the true definition of "experience".

That's why Dragonrealms is still my all time favorite RPG. Best character development system ever, plus the fact that you actually HAVE TO ROLEPLAY =)

#5 There are quite a few skills based games out there that do like Michael Perry mentioned in the post above. They are skills based and your skills go up while you do certain activities. I pesonally prefer though.

#6

Quote:Dragonrealms did it right. If you go out and fight rats, you gain experience in the weapons you use, the armor you are wearing, the skills you utilize (evade, parry, feint), the spells you cast and skill related to them (harness, primary, targeted magic), and so on and so on. You don't fight rats and go "spend points on X skill." You don't actually spend points...it restores the true definition of "experience".

Almost the same thing was in Ultima Online. If you fight with a sword you become more skilled in sword fight, if you use spells that you will be more skilled in spell casting etc. If you are fishing you become better fisher ). But there was a catch in Ultima, some people wright the scripts witch allowed them to fight with some other player with most basic swords and heal themselves when needed. So people went to some far places, run script there and left the game client open for like 9 to 15 hours straight...

#7 What about the button-mash-fest of Everquest? To train a skill you had to use it (which makes sense to a degree), but I can recall waiting for the next pull, and passing time by mashing the "track", "taunt" and even the "drinking" skill, . It was horrible to increase skills this way, and in the end, it still seemed as pointless as grinding.

Also, we have to recognize that for skills such as lock picking, a real world person would practice in their leisure time. How do you replicate this fact in a game environment? Do you scale the "learning" so that only a few locks picked equals 100's of hours spent training in the real world? Why force a player to seek out a lock just to increase the skill?

It's certainly a quagmire!

#8 Yeah I often want my character to be good at this and this. And it should be just based on doing that.

There should be places where you can read a book or practice on the subject to further it or to learn new locks for example. But these places shouldn't up your skill as much as "real-life" uses.

I also think there should be skill based on per weapon, if you use one weapon say a 9mm pistol you gain in skill for the Pistol class. But also that pistol to you is more familiar to you also. And familiarity for an item will make it multiply your Pistol skill.

To stop people running scripts etc, you just say that they can only gain x amount of experience for each ability from each type of monster. So they can kill 50 snails and gain xp for it, then no more. Why would you gain more experience by killing the same thing again and again?

#9 I've been running through some thoughts of my own MMO style to try out, not as serious project I think will work, but just as a bit of experimentation in the concept. I'd like to use a setup sort of like Ultima Online where you have tons of skills to choose from and using the skill is the only way to advance it. I'd like to however take it to a degree beyond that where you have, truly, a skill for everything. On top of that, unlike what Ultima did, you could master as many skills as you like and there isn't a true cap on any skills, you can raise them however high.

Already it may sound like a grinding nightmare and open to exploitation but the big part of it would be how you work the skills into the game itself. The bigger problem in my opinion is that games make player skills the end all. Skills need to be a subtle added bonus, not the sole determining factor. Also no reason not to make gains very slow, you'll still be able to play just fine since the skills are what makes you good, they just help.

Ultimately for exploitation of the system though, that would have to come down to moderating the system. Grinding won't fully go away either, but if games would start venturing away from making skills SO crucially important and just have them as added effects, grinding may be a bit less severe.

#10 Some people like that idea, some people don't. Lets say lock picking, balancing issues aside, are books 1 use, if not, they can be easily abused, if they are, do you have enough books ? It makes sense for combat skills, swords, spells etc which are used pretty often, but for non combat skills like lock picking, how many chests are you going to place to make it feasible to level up from use ? If there are too many, what are the non lock picking classes going to think ?

A very good example, pertaining to wizardry series is this (i read this some where). I have this uber cool and dark assasin ! Damn ! He needs the acrobatic skill, which is gained by jumping, and he also needs the running skill which is gained by... duh... and he needs herbalism to make his poisons ! The end result ? The player goes running and jumping all around while picking herbs to level his poison skill ! The net result ? You have a effeminate assasin skipping through the woods picking flowers ! Woohoo ! Thats what people are gona do, and its not more realistic then assigning points to lock picking.

To understand the system which people took and used, you have to understand its roots, basically, D&D. D&D began as a table top game, and as such, had a GM to govern it, who should have been able to explain vague points. "Experience" is exactly that, experience. Your experiences during the adventure. Before fighting the rat, you might have observed some behavior which gave you some insight as too how to pick locks better etc, like how a particular mouse got food from a locked chest. This element is lost in computer games, because it mainly just shows you the enemy and whack whack whack.

Just my $0.02

#11 I have always thought computer RPGs should have some kind of aging system and offspring system as well so that your character should grow older increasing his wisdom but losing strength.

This will force you to focus into a few skills and make the best of them instead of maximizing everything. This will also allow you to get into a school/guild/temple/arena and train while you are not logged in. In that time the player is considered to be training one skill and you can login back to the game and get your increased skill... but at the same time your character will be older.

Eventually your character will die but you can pick one of your sons to reincarnate into the game. The other sons can be played by other players so they will have their own personalities. They may be faithful or may leave your clan. They can keep your name and gain part of your treasure when you die or leave the clan and lose any fortune.

Maybe one day I will try to do something like this...

Luck!
Guimo

#12 Ooooh, I like this thread!

So yeah, Epic Frontiers' system works in a way that does try to improve upon the beaten-to-death-rezzed-and-killed-again "character building" paradigm...

Basically, WoW proved that you can successfully have autoleveling skills when they debuted with their professions, in which your skills level as they are used. Using that as a model, I bumped it up to the next level and made the entire system so that your character is how you play it. A fighter needs to fight, and a crafter needs to craft. The skill levels increase by 10% over the last level, making "soft caps" on skill levels without actually having an end level. A bit of Excel math showed me that to raise a particular skill to about 250, a player would need months of sitting at their PC just clicking the button- and that's only possible if the character was in the immediate area of an object to use that skill on.

Also, because we're trying to be flexible, we're introducing Skill Families which cover related skills such as Melee. The situation this tries to address is where the player is, say, a skilled boxer, and runs into an intermediate martial artist. Now, neither is a novice, but the boxer knows his art better than the martial artist knows his. With neither having training in the other form of combat, they still know how to fight, and so where defensive rolls come in, they fall back on their general Melee Family skill. Attack rolls are still handled by their respective skills (1DLevel, to be precise). In this way, a skilled fighter is not completely at the mercy of an unfamiliar opponent, though there is a bit of a penalty for that unfamiliarity.

Since it's a skill-based, classless system, those rules also work for crafting, so a car mechanic isn't rolling zeroes for aircraft mechanic skills. And the classless system allows for crafters and farmers to level up just like fighters, and for a near-unlimited amount of skill combinations to be used in a character.

The problem with classes isn't just character-building, but that from the moment you create your character, its destiny is known. Just created a Druid? A Druid it will be until its dying day. Paladin? Don't bother learning Rogue skills. Classless systems allow a player to change their character by simply changing the way that they play without penalty (unless you consider the past playing time spent doing other kinds of gameplay a penalty).

I'm glad that I'm not the only one looking at these kinds of systems :)

#13

Quote:Since it's a skill-based, classless system, those rules also work for crafting, so a car mechanic isn't rolling zeroes for aircraft mechanic skills. And the classless system allows for crafters and farmers to level up just like fighters, and for a near-unlimited amount of skill combinations to be used in a character.

Good idea, I like that. :)

Quote:The problem with classes isn't just character-building, but that from the moment you create your character, its destiny is known. Just created a Druid? A Druid it will be until its dying day. Paladin? Don't bother learning Rogue skills. Classless systems allow a player to change their character by simply changing the way that they play without penalty (unless you consider the past playing time spent doing other kinds of gameplay a penalty).

And that too :)

#14 The problem is that whatever you provide rewards for the players will feel compelled to do repeatedly due to the psychology of the brain.

This is why people playing Morrowind or Oblivion will bunny hop around the countryside. Personally, I'd be casting minor healing spells on myself ALL the time, regardless of wounds, just to get the skill level up.

So you aren't removing grind via increase-to-use systems, you're simply shifting where the grind is. People will grind using their skills instead of grinding combat. While it is a bit more realistic, it is also more boring (IMO) as it becomes a chore.

My personal favorite system is XP for completing objectives and only objectives, not how the player achieves that objective. If the objective is 'Steal the documents' you should reward the player for bringing you the documents whether they slaughtered their way in or snuck around all the guards.

#15

Quote:So you aren't removing grind via increase-to-use systems, you're simply shifting where the grind is. People will grind using their skills instead of grinding combat. While it is a bit more realistic, it is also more boring (IMO) as it becomes a chore.

Right. The grind is shifted to the skills needed for that grind. It's not just about combat, but also because otherwise you need to "balance" out classes instead of rules, and then you find yourself running back to nerf/buff weapons, items, classes repeatedly. Put in a consistent ruleset to begin with, and you don't have to do that as much (you will still find yourself having to do it though).

As for it being a chore- no solution possible. I wanted a horse in WoW back in the day so I spent a week grinding at the areas where there were elemental drops for the money. Unless you used those levelling guides, you found yourself doing some grinding, and honestly, doing Fed-Ex quests at level 43 was part of grinding. But then look at it from the other direction... I wanted to get back in shape and started Thaiboxing a couple of years ago. Had to grind on that for a while as well, and those skills only increase as you use them (my elbows aren't as good as my hands, knees, or feet).

The one way I've see to skip grind altogether is when some of the virtual goods-based games sell levels and xp, which is not something I'm prepared to do myself. What I'd rather do is make the grind more realistic and flexible with a skills-based system, and then slow the action down with "soft skills" like conversation and roleplaying-centric gameplay to make the game less about grind and more about fun.

But even then, at the end of the day, the player will still grind. Look at Ms Pac Man: In order to progress, because there is no persisting of the progress you've made (well, there is that "insert credits to continue" chance to save your character), the grinding becomes external through the use of quarters to get your skills up, and it becomes all about the high score.

Quote:My personal favorite system is XP for completing objectives and only objectives, not how the player achieves that objective.

I'd argue that that is less about grind or even class/classless systems and more about how flexible the quest creators are in creating their quests, and more flexible missions are something I'm actively working on.

#16 I'd say that the 'problem' is even more basic than that. The "RPG" label basically means "fantasy action game with lotsa numbers" on a computer. Essentially it's a bit of a mix between RTS gameplay and FPS looks with some space game long term planning on top of it. It has very little to do with roleplay. The best CRPG games allow RP, the rest more often than not frustrates it by forcing you to adapt to the rules set by the action game engine.

The game that probably facilitates RP more than anything else is The Sims, and nobody would classify it as that. Ahh... the irony.

I guess if you want to appeal to the 'hardcore' RPers (I guess it's a breed of people who want to live their own stories, not sure how I'd define one) you better add sittable chairs instead of big loot, lots of clothing options instead of 101 levels, etc. Your server would be pretty empty after a while, though. Everybody gets bored in the end.

Sorry for getting a bit off the rails here. It may help to rethink what you actually want to create, though.

#17 Well if the character evolution follow a logical sense, yet feel tedious and boring, maybe it's simply that the underlying mechanic is flawed, not simply that tieing the character's evolution to it's actions is flawed.

#18 Discussion continued here.