Hi everyone. I do apologise if this has been posted in the wrong section. I am new to the forum (hi!!). As of late i have been slowly working on a new game. It is pvp and pve based. I am trying to think up a new and interesting way to level up my character. The general basics of the game are as follows :

Basic stats are :

Health

Mana

Stamina

You can learn various abilities that you can fight with that are based on the following :

Fire

Earth

Air

Water

Lightning

Dark

Light

Various weaponry stats

What i am trying to think up is a new and interesting way to level up these stats. I was going with the idea of gaining XP per quest / kill but honestly, that idea has been done to death. I have looked at various other ways of levelling included in other games ranging from time based, hybrid, vertical through to natural progression such as ;

Health improves the more you are damaged

Mana improves the more you use it and become accustomed to it

etc

But again, the issue is that all of these have been done and done and done.

Can anyone suggest to me an interesting idea that they think might be a cool way to put a new spin on levelling up a character in a pve/pvp setting?. I really want to try and do something different but i am struggling a little to come up with a viable alternative, so, i thought i would join a game development community and ask for ideas :)

Other experience system :

- The Sphere grid from final fantasy X : the player have a grid with multiple path which can be unlocked and each node give a boost in stat or a new skill.
- The fruit/eat from odin sphere : the only way to get xp in odin sphere is to eat things.

Else :

- unlock boost in stat by achieving things (beat X creatures, run for X seconds, end X level, etc...)
- use items (other than food)

They are the few I can think of right now, but if that can set you on a path. So good luck, and also welcome :D

Thanks for those, i appreciate it. The eating idea is an interesting one that i might consider as an extra way to further your progress. I think this is probably going to end up as some strange hybrid system if I'm honest. I would just like to try and create as unique an experience as possible if i can :)

I was on a text based MUD once that had an interesting skill up system. "You learn from your mistakes" was basically the theme so skill failures give you specific skill xp. So your 1-hand sword skill would only improve when you'd miss with it. This had an interesting and desirable effect encouraging players to fight things that were somewhat challenging. A high level character farming rats didn't benefit him much at all since he'd always hit them.

- Eck

I was on a text based MUD once that had an interesting skill up system. "You learn from your mistakes" was basically the theme so skill failures give you specific skill xp. So your 1-hand sword skill would only improve when you'd miss with it. This had an interesting and desirable effect encouraging players to fight things that were somewhat challenging. A high level character farming rats didn't benefit him much at all since he'd always hit them.

- Eck

That is also an interesting idea. That might be one to work into the weapon aspect of my game. Thank you for sharing it!

One twist on experience I enjoyed was Fable's system. Enemies dropped four kinds of experience: General Experience, Strength (i.e. physical) Experience, Skill (read: dexterity) Experience, and Will (magic) Experience.

Experience gets spent on skills of your choice to acquire them or level them up. You can only use Physical Experience on Physical skills/abilities, and only use Magical Experience and magical skills/abilities, and so on, but can use General Experience in any category.

Enemies drop General Experience and also other experience types depending on what you use against them when killing them (e.g. they might always drop 50% general experience, but the other 50% will be mostly 'Will' experience if you used alot of Will skills while killing them).

One question I'd suggest you ask yourself is: "What am I trying to achieve/encourage?"

Are you wanting something new to serve a particular purpose, or is it just a gimmick?

For example, another thing I like in games is when you can find ability points or stat points in the world itself, which encourages exploration by acting as a reward. This can be the exclusive way to level, or it can be in addition to other more common ways.

Examples of this include:

Quest 64 allowing you to find 'wisps' which basically act as instant level-ups. This was fantastic, and encouraged me to observe and explore the environment more. There were about one hundred wisps in the game.

Paper Mario allows you to find 'power blocks' that instantly level up one of your allies. Each ally can only be leveled up once, until you reach a specific point in the game, where each ally can be leveled up a second time. These make your allies alot more useful in combat. There were about 20 of these in the game.

King's Field allowing you to find elemental 'crystals' which instantly give you a new skill of that element type (i.e. the 3rd fire crystal you find gives you the third fire skill, regardless of what order you got the crystals in). There were about 20 of these in the game.

(Note: The fewer there are, the more excitement you have when finding one)

Other games use leveling to gate the player. "Leveling up" (in a more abstract sense) acts a reward for defeating a boss or beating a level.

Examples of this include many platformers like Mega Man and Metroid (using abilities and equipment as "levels") and Banjo and Khazooie.

Instead of exploration giving you the reward, the reward opens up new routes of exploration.

In Banjo and Khazooie they are both true: You find (exploration) the NPC and pay (money can be thought of as experience found via exploration) him to teach you a new ability (your level up) which lets you navigate the terrain more (leading back to exploration - it's a loop). Most players won't think of these as 'leveling up', but they are spontaneous growths of power that enable you to overcome in-game challenges, so in an abstract sense, they are leveling up.

A point brought up to me many years ago when I did MUD work - and not a point that I think is a major problem, just something to consider - is that use-based skill systems are subject to a form of grind-hack where a player constructs a system that is "difficult" for the player but without threat. Such a system allow the player to repeatedly use a skill without ever losing the combat. Such a hack can be carried out trivially both for XP-on-success as well as XP-on-failure systems, not to mention XP-on-use.

The usual abstraction of XP is that the player is supposed to endure hardship of some kind. This is one of the reasons that many games gage progress solely on campaign completion rather than acquiring points; whether or not the campaign is hard for the player, it's at least measuring the player's expertise againt a designer-controller quantity (length of campaign and cleverness of puzzles/obstables) rather than against the player's ability to game the system for points.

The table-top RPGs that XP was "stolen" from have the advantage of a human Game Master that can adaptively change the rules and challenges to suit players. Computer RPGs do not. Be careful with aping mechanics from a different medium (even if one that has been extensibly copied into your target medium many times prior!) without adapting them for the strengths and weaknesses of the new medium. Table-top games are much more free-form and adjuctable than a computer game; play to the strengths of a computer rather than the strengths of a human GM!

One question I'd suggest you ask yourself is: "What am I trying to achieve/encourage?"

This is exactly what I was thinking. When you level up a stat by using that specific stat, it tends to encourage grinding way too much. In contrast, it seems like a lot of games give big exp bonuses for doing quests. I tend to prefer this as the primary exp source, because it makes sure the player really plays the game instead of just fighting the same enemies over and over. You can still give a bit of exp as the player kills enemies or explores or whatever, because that's an important part of the game too.

Any creative gimmicks with the exp should keep in mind what players will do to get more exp. Will doing that be fun, and serve the game?

In Dungeon World characters level up after getting a handful of experience points and experience points are earned when failing a roll. The trick is that failing a single roll is a very big deal: it means getting hurt, failing at an important task, often a strategic turn for the worse.

Players are therefore mildly encouraged to push the envelope: they can become more powerful only by doing something hazardous and difficult. Easy life is not for adventurers.

This kind of system can be good in a computer game if the player is in control: flexible schedule (to get into trouble when the characters are ready), risk mitigation opportunities (e.g. allowing easy retreat in most cases, instead of punishing the player too much), an obvious challenge to complete the game quickly and/or with limited resources because playing it safe is easy.

In FORCED (they spell it with upper casing) you beat levels, where each level had 3 crystals you could unlock. One for completing the level, one for completing it faster than some set time limit and one for completing it while also doing some challenge. A challenge could be something like "don't get hit by a single shockwave attack" or "don't use walls for cover from energy beam" etc.

Your "level" (available skill set) was determined by the number of crystals you had unlocked, so if you had a hard time completing a specific level, you could greatly benefit from going back and completing the secondary challenges on previous levels.

It suits a very particular set of games I suppose though.