well im afraid you might end up with Oblivion's situation of player sticking a rubberband on their controller while sneak walking into walls.

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Original post by Alpha_ProgDes As opposed to grinding, repeatedly killing the same enemies over and over, why not let skill determine your experience points? For instance, a minotaur. There are several ways to kill minotaur. But as opposed to killing 100 minotaurs just to get to level 3, why not just kill the minotaur in less than 2 minutes? Or kill the minotaur without getting hit? Or kill the minotaur by attacking and getting as close as 100% hit accuracy as possible?

Logically, this doesn't make sense to me, at least as far as RPGs go (and we're talking about RPGs, right?) If a character manages to kill an opponent quickly and without taking damage, wouldn't that mean the character and/or player is superior (probably even considerably so) to their opponent?

For instance, suppose a 10th level fighter engages a 1st level fighter. The 10th level fighter is probably going to win handedly. Would the 1st level fighter have brought much to the encounter that the 10th level one hasn't seen before? As far as percentage of potential XP for a kill goes, why should someone learn more from a significantly inferior opponent than one who's more evenly matched?

Or, what if a veteran player with a new character manages to kill some high level creature, and gains 12 levels? Did the character or player really learn anything from the encounter where they should be rewarded?

It sounds more like an action game where experience points are really just a renamed 'Points Scored'.

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Original post by Alpha_ProgDes The experience gained by expertly killing a minotaur should determine the amount of experience as opposed to how many times you kill a minotaur. Ex: Blinding a minotaur and then running my sword through its neck should net me 100 XP vs.

I would say this would just slightly modify how grinding is done in your game. Now, instead of just hacking away at an opponent, the players will just blind the minotaur and run them through (or whatever method produces the greatest XP to time spent ratio). If anything, it sounds like the grind just goes faster, so the player is more inclined to do it. Maybe that's what you want; I don't know.

There are several games that simply reward quest completion and plot points, but grant little to no experience for combat. I would probably say this is a better way to dole out experience, but its not without its flaws, either.

I haven't read through all this threads, but I think creative grinding shouldn't be rewarded with XP's, because the creativity and speed with which you level up should be its own reward. I mean, when you found something new and are totally proud of yourself and then the games gives you extra XP as a reward, I would be irritated because of this "double reward". In other words, XP can be used to influence players but in this case (assuming you'`re talking about RPG's), IMO there's no need for this.

Action games (especially beat'em up's) is another matter.

Btw, look into Magic: The Gathering for creative combinations.

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Original post by JasRonq well im afraid you might end up with Oblivion's situation of player sticking a rubberband on their controller while sneak walking into walls.

The modifiers need to be applied to skill rather than action. That's why it would be rather difficult to measure stealth beyound the stealthy elimination of enemies.

One possible solution might be to present a large bonus on mission completion for not being noticed during the mission. But it would obviously have problems. For one, every situation can't be measured as a part of a mission. For another, the difficulty of being stealthy will vary wildly between missions, and it might be impossible for the game to accurately measure that difficulty. If you reward the same bonus for them all, you might provide too much incentive to play easy missions. So in short, difficult to implement.

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Original post by derickdong Quote: Original post by Alpha_ProgDes As opposed to grinding, repeatedly killing the same enemies over and over, why not let skill determine your experience points? For instance, a minotaur. There are several ways to kill minotaur. But as opposed to killing 100 minotaurs just to get to level 3, why not just kill the minotaur in less than 2 minutes? Or kill the minotaur without getting hit? Or kill the minotaur by attacking and getting as close as 100% hit accuracy as possible? Logically, this doesn't make sense to me, at least as far as RPGs go (and we're talking about RPGs, right?) If a character manages to kill an opponent quickly and without taking damage, wouldn't that mean the character and/or player is superior (probably even considerably so) to their opponent?

No, it doesn't mean that. It could simply mean the player took their time, planned out a quick execution, then carried it out accurately. Playing a good game effectively should be about the player's current concentration and effort. That's something that everyone can muster up equally, given enough motive.

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Original post by Alpha_ProgDes I think this method rewards skill and ingenuity and not boredom and mindless play. Agree? Disagree?

Disagree. This doesn't really eliminate grinding, does it? Now it's just a requirement to grind with style to get the most benefit from your grinding.

However, on first reading your post, I thought of it more as collecting acheivements.

Let's say combat is some combination of player and character skill so, for example, dodging isn't just a matter of rolling dice, but also a matter moving your character out of the way. Next, let's say you get so much experience for killing a monster in only X hits, and more experience for killing it while only being hit Y times, etc. Now, you only get the XP once per acheivement per monster. Thus, no benefit to grinding other than the joy of fighting. This could have a "gotta catch'em all" effect, with some players wanting to gain all acheivements. Also, it could create a sort of bragging rights, having gotten all acheivements against some particular monster, or having even one against some particularly nasty monster.

Another possibility would be to determine level by the highest acheivement instead of XP. Say that an orc is tougher than a goblin and you've managed to kill an orc in one hit. From then on, even if you've never killed a goblin before, killing a goblin in one hit won't matter since you've already done something greater. There are two issues here. One is how to deal with defeating a minotaur in 20 hits being as tough a feat as killing an orc in 1. The other is how do you compare orthogonal feats like killing in X hits with only getting hit Y times, or simply having killed the thing (perhaps killing a dragon is impressive no matter how you manage it). To the first, I think it's a matter of how you define the feat. If it's simply a "Killed in one hit feat", then that's how it is, but, otherwise, it's just a matter of defining which is the greater feat in the game (perhaps something like number of hits divided by enemy HP is enough). For the second, I'd probably just not compare them and having two being better than only one.

You could combine these by grouping enemies into families. If orcs and goblins are in the same family, then an acheivement against an orc is better than the same against a goblin, but is completely separate from the same acheivement against the serpent family.

I think this would eliminate grinding (except insofar as your combat system is enjoyable in itself) since there is no benefit to simply being repetitive and create a drive toward ever more impressive feats. This would also fit neatly with K_J_M's desire for multiple ways to gain XP since getting up, for example, a difficult climb is simply an acheivement.

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Original post by Kest Games reward players who play more skillfully. That's been a fact since the very beginning.

True, but games have also tended to provide a more difficult challenge as the player gets better. In sports, you find yourself playing (and wanting to play) more skilled opponents because they pose a greater challenge. In video games, the next level tends to be more difficult than the last, meaning you need to be even more skillful to get to the next level, but that just means you'll be faced with an even greater challenge. Even in RPG's, even though your party got stronger, the later dungeons of, say, Final Fantasy I were more difficult than the earlier ones (as a general trend, anyway...).

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Original post by Iron Chef Carnage So how about linking the levelling system to style and performance, so if you go out there and give it your all and try a dozen different tricks and wind up getting a minotaur's axe shoved through your face anyway, you still learn something? On the other hand, if you take your platinum uber-sword of doom out there and perform the Fist of Justice maneuver eighty times, killing 500 minotaurs with each movement of your arm, you don't get much out of it except bloodstains and a huge pile of horns.

This can be (and, so far as I can tell, traditionally is) solved by increasing the XP needed to level up faster than the increased XP production of being able to kill more minotaurs per second.

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Original post by Way Walker This doesn't really eliminate grinding, does it? Now it's just a requirement to grind with style to get the most benefit from your grinding.

Grinding with style = fun gaming.

Seriously, players who play games that focus on leveling characters are assumed to enjoy the gameplay that goes along with that territory. If they don't enjoy the gameplay that levels up the characters, the game, as a whole, fails. As the designer, there's nothing you can do to fix that. Your idea of fun just doesn't work for them.

Negative grinding is created by players. Specifically, by players who want something from the game other than what it was intended for. In short, if you're in it for something other than the gameplay that provides leveling, playing a different genre might be more profitable. As a designer, to help prevent negative grinding, you either remove leveling entirely, or make the gameplay that provides leveling more complex and fun. Alpha's suggestion is aimed toward the latter. Rewarding skill, rather than end results, makes leveling more complex. It helps to make every little decision more important.

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Original post by Way Walker Quote: Original post by Kest Games reward players who play more skillfully. That's been a fact since the very beginning. True, but games have also tended to provide a more difficult challenge as the player gets better. In sports, you find yourself playing (and wanting to play) more skilled opponents because they pose a greater challenge. In video games, the next level tends to be more difficult than the last, meaning you need to be even more skillful to get to the next level, but that just means you'll be faced with an even greater challenge. Even in RPG's, even though your party got stronger, the later dungeons of, say, Final Fantasy I were more difficult than the earlier ones (as a general trend, anyway...).

That's sort of beyound the point, isn't it? Players who don't play skillfully can still reach those levels of increased difficulty, but they won't have the same bonus that the other player obtained by playing better.

For an example, sports (or just about any real world challenge). The winning team earns money and prestige. They can use both of those resources to hire more talented players. The losing team loses out on both, and thus has a harder time on the next game. However, the losing team also learns something from the loss, and will have something to prove next time they face them. They'll be playing with heart in place of BFGs.

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Original post by Kest Negative grinding is created by players. Specifically, by players who want something from the game other than what it was intended for.

The game designer may intend for something, but have designed a game that actually plays something else.

A game designer might think RPG=role playing game, therefore we'll have lots of story and character interaction. But as it turns out, the character's main action is combat, and combat is improved quite a lot by getting XP level-ups and monster drops.

So even though the plan was role playing, the game turned out to be level-up and get stuff, and watch a movie while doing it.

Player skill already lets you grind faster in a typical MMO (we're all talking about WoW again, right?). So you already have a reward for being able to kill the minotaur in one second rather than spending five minutes doing it: you can kill 100 minotaurs in 100 seconds, and level up faster.

I think the general idea of giving bonus XP for "cool tricks" is fine, but I think it could go too far. The early levels are where your players are still learning the ropes, and you would usually want to maintain a somewhat steady level curve for all players so that you can lead them through tutorial-style quests. Once you get to mid-levels, I think it would be easier to allow a bigger discrepancy, where you let the good players rocket to the level cap and force the worse players to grind away in obscurity for years.

Of course, I think this might make a lot of the worse players quit the game, since they're being doubly penalized: first, they're bad at the game and can't kill things very fast, and second, they're getting far less XP than everyone else even when they do finally kill things.

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Original post by AngleWyrm The game designer may intend for something, but have designed a game that actually plays something else.

The gameplay that character leveling revolves around is the interactive center attraction. If not, then it should have been.

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A game designer might think RPG=role playing game, therefore we'll have lots of story and character interaction. But as it turns out, the character's main action is combat, and combat is improved quite a lot by getting XP level-ups and monster drops. So even though the plan was role playing, the game turned out to be level-up and get stuff, and watch a movie while doing it.

So what's stopping them from attaching the leveling to character interaction and story? Just incompetence? You think they can't keep track of what they're doing long enough to build it? Oops, I made the wrong game? Something tells me that isn't right.

Combat is a central part of those games because it was intended to be. The designers either enjoy that type of gameplay enough to focus on it, or they just aren't designing games accurately (based on what they believe to be fun).

Grinding is the process of reluctantly leveling characters to reach some other portion of the game. But at the core, it's just reluctant gameplay to reach something else. Playing Half Life 2 just to see the story is one big grind. Players grinding here want the action to stop, while everyone else is enjoying it. There's no way to fix that from the developer's point of view, other than to just turn it into a movie. Players who grind in Half Life 2 are playing the game for something other than what it was intended for.