In order to combat the consequences of a duel love of programming and donuts, for the past several months I have been engaging in some strength training. I thought it would be interesting to apply what I''ve learned to game design, in particular, RPG design. Strength or Str, has long been a core statistic of RPGs, and with good reason. From dragon slaying to bending bars, nearly every physical activity can benefit from increased strength. Stronger muscles also means stronger bones and connective tissue. This makes an individual more resistant to injury, from both internal and external sources. An individual''s base strength is determined by two things, genetics (die rolls) and lifestyle (character class). Just as fighters tend to be stronger than mages, farmers and dockworkers tend to be stronger than programmers. But all is not lost for our mage/programmer. Unlike D&D, there exist some options for strength gain that doesn''t involve a major lifestyle/class change. First, magic potions to increase strength do exist. As long as you don''t mind side effects such as extreme body acne, breast tissue growth, and testicular shrinkage, steroids/potions will boost your strength so long as you keep taking them. For those who wish to keep their genitals from shrinking, strength training is an option. The first thing to realize is that your body does not really want to increase its muscular mass. Muscles are a metabolically expensive tissue and way back when, during our evolution, food was nowhere as plentiful as it is today. To get stronger, you have to convince your body that more muscle is a good idea. To do this, you have to provide a stimulus that will overcome your body''s tendency to keep muscles at a minimum. Lifting weights is a a great way to do this. But two other things are needed. Good nutrition is absolutly essential. A balanced mix of protein, carbohydrates and fat (yes, fat) will provide your body with the means to build strength. The final ingredient is rest. It is only during rest that strength actually increases. Your body needs time to properly build strength. If you deny your body this time by working out everyday, you will actually end up losing muscle mass, and you will become mroe prone to injury and illness. Skill based games such as Ultima Online that allowed players to build strength by macroing skills endlessly could benefit by requiring a rest period to get the strength gains. Ok, here is some ideas to apply the above to a game. Characters are given a genetic maximium strength that is kept hidden. Their base strength is displayed, and a player can estimate their potential from this value, but they will not know just how strong they can be. Over the course of an adventure, the game tracks a characters actions and determines how much the character was pushing their abilites. After the adventure, when the character is back in town recovering from the ordeal, that is when their strength will increase. This system would reward characters for pushing their skills to the max during gameplay, instead of blind macroing. It would allow for steady progression for both the causal and core player and the hidden "genetic" maximum would allow a greater diversty in characters. Korven

So what you''re saying, or what I got out of it, is that rather than going out and fighting endlessly and getting a level up here and there and getting your strength that way, the player should be forced to return to town and sleep and rest or whatever and then get their levels there, based on how much work they did prior to that. Hrm, if done right, I''d like it.

-> Will Bubel
-> Machine wash cold, tumble dry.

I''ve thought that my ideal online RPG would allow for a complete adventure to be completed in a 2-4 hour session. The leveling up/recovery would occur while you were offline, say for an eight hour period. When you logged back in, your character would have made noticable gains. This system would help to level out the playing field between the casual and the more dedicated player, without screwing either one. The players with a lot of time to play, could play several different characters if they wanted to max out gains/time.

I would also hope that this would shift the players focus to enjoying the adventure rather than obsessing on leveling.

Korvan

Thats actually a really great idea now that I think about it. I tend to think in terms of a cRPG and stopping at an inn to get your levelup bonuses seems like an odd twist to it. But for a MMORPG, that would give a big bonus to less experienced players, having a regulated system as such.

-> Will Bubel
-> Machine wash cold, tumble dry.

sounds like a good system to me, but what does it mean in relation to the bigger system? how will it affect levelling in general? and how much will the gains differ from each other? will the type of slain dragon make a difference on the strenght increase? and more importantly, will there be attrition?

I''ve always hated attrition. I find it adds an unpleasant element of anxiety. I remember playing UO, back before they added the ability to lock skills; there was a feature where your character would automatically make small skill gains when observing another character using a skill. If you were at the skill cap, this would cause one of your other (almost always a much more usful skill) to drop. A quick stroll through town could cost you hours of skill development time.

Anyway, regarding attrition of strength, my take is to assume your character, during downtimes, would be making some effort to maintain their physical condition. In real-life, maintaining your condition involves a good diet and a reasonable amount of exercise. To improve your conditioning requires that you make enough of an effort to push your body to just beyond what it can deliver.

During the course of an adventure, if a character used strength related skills with enough effort, after the adventure was over, they''d gain strength. To avoid the problems of macroing, the gain would have to be a fixed value. So, if a character needed to bend 5 bars and wrestle an orc to trigger a gain, bending an additional 20 bars and grappling a gorilla would provide no further benefit. Once the adventure has concluded, the character could look up the gorilla to trigger another gain. The real trick is to work out a method of determining what is required to trigger a strength gain.

In real-life, the posibility of "over-training" is a very real one, and can even lead to loss of strength, but I don''t think this concept would be too popular in a game setting.

What I am trying to achive is to allow a player to enjoy the adventure, and not worry about "leveling up". If the character is pushing their abilities, they will be guarranteed a steady, appreciable skill/stat gain.

Korvan

I have already taken most, if not all of the ideas you mentioned above into account while creating my RP system for my RPG.

basically, there is a formula comparing a stat of yours to a stat of your enemies, and every time you perform an action (block, attack, whatever) a formula is executed to generate a percentage, and a 1d100 is rolled to see if your stat goes up. At the end of the battle, the total stat-ups are shown.

The game basically works on a system of "you use, you gain". If you go to the local dojo and hit the heavy bag for a half hour in-game (i.e. going there, paying the guru, and then going offline for a few hours), your stats (STR, DEX, and CON) will increase proportionately until you have run out of energy, and need to drink, eat, and/or rest.

My cRPG thinking runs along the lines of pushing off the whole level up thing until after a length of play to designated times, while still offering the play a chance to boost stats if so desired. With a cRPG, theres little to balancing a stat, just constantly increase it. If you as a developer favor difficulty, all of the enemies get a bit of a boost as well. However, the implications of having all of your bonuses waiting until a rest point is that you can very well control how strong the player gets during the game. Its apparently always been gain some exp, get stronger, lather, rinse, repeat. Being forced to return to civilization to get a bonus thats greatly biased towards the general difficulty of the section of game you''re in tells the player thats hes more or less on the own. "EXPless" systems have always failed at trying this from my experience and having this different strategy to it might just work out.

-> Will Bubel
-> Machine wash cold, tumble dry.