CAP'N LEVELS

Ah, this post might just eat all my free time :3

Well this is my current game's concept of level caps. The normal game caps at level 50. I'm hoping that the player reaches this level before fighting the final boss. If for some reason they do not, the FB will give them maxed out EXP.

After that, I plan on releasing an expansion that increases the level cap to 100. The same method applies to this, has it did for vanilla SR.

Now after all that is done, I want to release another expansion aimed straight for the hardcore players (assuming I get them, lol)
Every boss has a set difficulty, and you cannot out level a single one.
I want to allow for premade saves for my first expansion. This is because E1 has a lot of story. HOWEVER, E2 is mostly fighting and side quests. Therefore, no save will come with this piece of the game. The only way you can hope of completing all of Santoo Rinba is by playing the game on hard difficulty throughout E1, and E2- with a stat bonus if you complete the Vanilla game without premade saves.

If a player plays through vanilla and E1 on easy mode, they will not have the appropriate stats for E2


LoL, that was fun to write :P

I rarely implement LV caps below 99.
I rather control players' power through the EXP system:

In Crystalis, your current LV is subtracted from the EXP given by the enemy. That way the EXP given by a monster can eventually fall to zero, meaning that you won't be able to LV Up by fighting this particular enemy anymore.
Levels cap at 30 in the game (and at 16 in the original NES game).

In Fabulist (LVs cap at 99), characters always need 100 BP (EXP) to reach the next LV. BP received after the battle is always divided by your character's current LV. The minimal amount of BP given by an enemy cannot fall below 1 though (this system is similar to Castlevania SotN).
For instance, being on LV1 and defeating an enemy that gives 10 BP will neat you about 10 BP, but beating it on LV2 will only neat you 5 BP.

I like to allow players to still be able to grind up to a certain point if they want to. I like to allow them the freedom of choice.

There's not much point to gaining EXP at all then. Better to just avoid most battles and let inflated gain from later fights cover the difference.

Battles can provide more than EXP. You can have weaker enemies drop useful items and equipment stronger enemies don't, for instance.
I also have a tendency to encourage speed runs, therefore encouraging the avoiding of earlier battles can be intended. Most FF games can actually be beaten by avoiding 90% of the regular enemy battles, yet most players never run away from a fight.

author=ChaosProductions
Dividing by level falls short at higher levels. An enemy that gives 1000 EXP to a Lv50 Player gives 833 to a Lv60 Player. Depending on your game, that's a very significant jump in power. At the highest levels, it's obsolete entirely: a Lv70 player getting 10,000 EXP from a foe still gets 7,777 EXP from the same foe at Lv90.

This feature only really helps at the lower ranges, from say, 1-20 or so. After that, then the player becomes able to grind from progressively weaker and weaker foes.

An alternative to this can be found in the 3rd edition (and possibly other editions, but I can't say firsthand) of Dungeons and Dragons: Rather than dividing experience gained by level, the experience gained is multiplied by ~0.7 for each level of difference between your character's level and the level your character is expected to be at. This results in a system that scales no matter what level range it's applied to.

(If I were modifying the system to work in a JRPG, I'd lower the penalty a bit. DnD cuts the experience in half for every two levels, but that's because there are only 20 levels total (without going into epic levels), and a 2-level difference is expected to make your character twice as powerful as they were. JRPGs tend to have a slower rate of power gain, so I'd lower it to halve experience every 5 or 10 levels, depending on how wide of a range I want the players to be guided towards. (This would be multiplying it by either ~.87 or ~.933 for each level of difference))


On the subject of level caps in general, I don't really like the idea of caps that the player is expected to hit during the mandatory game content, unless they've done a lot more grinding than expected. My method for figuring out a "good" level cap would be as follows:

1) Figure out the minimum level a character can reach the endgame at. Design the final boss to be beatable by a highly skilled player at this level.
-- a) If you have several sidequests at the end of the game that give the player additional characters, equipment, spells, etc that boost their power level, feel free to raise the difficulty of the boss slightly. This will result in the player having several options at the endgame for raising their power level to fight the final boss. The player will be required to pursue at least one (or a few) of these options, but they can choose to go for more to make the fight even easier.
-- b) If your game has few (or no) sidequests of the abovementioned sort throughout the game whatsoever, feel free to decrease the difficulty of the boss slightly. Your not-expert players will appreciate not being forced to grind at the end of the game.
2) Once you've determined how powerful the final boss will be, figure out what level a party would need to be such that, with all of the collectable extras that have been found throughout the game so far, they'll be able to trivialize the final boss fight. ("Trivialize" may be a bit of a subjective term. I'd define it as the point where a player has no chance to lose if they apply only a little bit of strategic thought to the battle).
3) Set the level cap slightly below the level found in step 2. This means that, if a player goes through and finds every single power-boosting item in the game and raises their level up to the cap, they will have a very basic grasp of the game's battle system if they wish to win (ie. They'll have to do something more complicated than mashing "attack").

author=ShortStar
Not having a level cap means the player will always beat the game.

I don't quite get that. I understand, however, that no leveling will increase the chances of a player rage quitting hard fights.

author=rabitZ
Am I lazy?

No, not for a short game. Though I'm ignorant to how the game balances those 10 levels...