Character advancement in RPGs

rmsgrey · 2005-06-26T16:19:00

A couple of years ago, there was a cluster of threads on ways of "levelling up" in cRPGs - since some recent threads have been touchingon similar issues, I thought I'd summarise what I can remember of the suggestions: 1) The default generic XP model - doing anything gets you experience. Whenever your total experience passes a threshhold, your character improves in some arbitrary fashion - either by automatically improving, or by leting the player choose freely what to improve. 2) Learning through skill use - every N times you use a skill, it improves (and related skills may improve slightly). This can be further refined by only learning from successes or only from failures, and would usually include some sort of limiting effect whereby your rate of improvement decays as your skill improves - either by reducing the amount of improvement, increasing the usage requirement for gain, or having a chance of failing to improve linked to your current skill. 3) A system I came up with, whereby you improve skills by use, with a chance of failing to improve each time you advance, and once you fail to advance three times in a row, that skill becomes "blocked" and can no longer improve. If enough skills in a given skill group are blocked, the entire group is considered blocked (and so on up the skill tree). So, for example, a character that specialises heavily in longsword will eventually become blocked, and unable o improve his longsword skill any further. If he then switches to bastard sword, two-handed sword, scimitar, rapier, or whatever, he will be able to improve his skill in whichever he chooses for a while until it eventually becomes blocked too. Once his third type of sword becomes blocked, he's no longer able to gain skill with any specific sword, although he'll probably have a pretty good generic sword skill from the three types he studied before blocking. So our dedicated warrior switches to another type of weapon to focus on, and eventually blocks out on that too. Sooner or later, he's blocked in enough classes of weapon that he just plain can't learn anything new about dealing damage to people. To unblock, you need to improve an unrelated skill - every time you improve a skill, you have a chance to unblock each other skill - the less closely related, and the more chance of improving, the new skill, the more chance of unblocking the old. So our heavily blocked warrior starts studying poetry. After improving a few times, he returns to the longsword, and finds that the aesthetic sense he's developed in studying poetry grants him new insight into the use of a sword - by applying the new principles, he can advance his skill to yet higher levels. And, by unblocking longsword, he's also indirectly unblocked swords in general (which in turn unblocks the higher categories), though may well still be blocked on bastard sword (he's unable to get out of the bad habits he'd studied himself into and apply his new insight)