Hi

Im doing a dungeon crawler/rpg/management game where you control up to 6 fantasy heroes travelling and dungeon crawling (similar to Darkest dungeon and Battle brothers).

Your heroes gain xp and level up. But im not sure what the leveling up process should be. Right now each level:

You gain strength, agility, wisdom, health and energy (used for abilities) based on your hero class. This is automatic.

You also gain skill points. These are manually assigned either on abilities or party skills:

Abilities:
4 of these are available (based on your hero class).
First point unlock, further points strengthen/upgrades that ability (such as poison shot (archers) and shield-bash (dark knight))

Party skills:
A hero are given 2 of these at creation (and you choose which hero you want to recruit in towns).
You can only upgrade these, not start new party skills for a hero (or maybe spend 3 points to start a new skill?)
The hero with the highest of any party skill is the one the party benefits from (similar to how party skills in mount & blade works)
Travel skills such as faster movement, better vision, ability to collect herbs, hunting (gets food)
Dungeon skills such as trap disarm, scouting, food preservation.

What do you think? Mix the fixed upgrades (hp, strength etc) with assigned points to abilities and party skills? Would you change something?
Another way to do it is to give BOTH ability points and party skill points, but then the player doesnt have to choose on what to develop.

Battle brothers (generally a great game!) got a bit anoying to assign detailed points to all characters (and you had 12 guys!) so Im looking at a middle ground.

Thoughts?

No thoughts on this? Any system you are particulary fond of or dislike and why?

Is there something particularly different from what others are doing, something that wasn't called out well above? If so, I'm not seeing it.  That looks like the standard level-up process that's been around since the 1970s.

Gain some base stats, gain some individual skills or stat points you can choose, possibly gain a party skill you can choose. It's been that way since D&D was released, possibly before in earlier games.

I like what you have come up with so far, sounds like you have the ball rolling on where you would like to go with the game. I would combine the both ability points and skills points.

dou you mean combine them into a single point (so you have to choose either when you level up) or to have both abillity point and skill points?

It might be frustrating to feel you are missing out on mechanics if one option is more fun but the other is the more sensible choise (such as unlocking a spectacular ability vs a boost to economy/heal rate).