EXPERIENCE AND LEVELING UP

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Thiamor
I assure you I'm no where NEAR as STUPID as one might think.
63
I wanted to know if anyone has found any good way in RPG MAKER yet to limit grinding when leveling up yet still using a good leveling system? I've yet to come up with a good way to do this.

slash
APATHY IS FOR COWARDS
4158
You could have enemies only grant experience if the heroes are below a certain level; for example, in Paper Mario, enemies grant you less and less experience the more level ups you've received. A system like that could discourage or totally prevent grinding.
You could scale enemies

You could limit the amount of exp the player can get in certain map, or set level caps on them. If you're over level 15 you can no longer get exp from the cave

Touch encounters with the majority of them not respawning

Have skills and stats not entirely dependent on level. So pure leveling won't make you much stronger

Have exp payouts reduce as you level up, from lower level enemies only

um...that's all I can think of right now. Not sure how viable they are but that's what comes to mind.
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
When you say "limit grinding" there are two things you might mean.

A) Limit the player's need to grind
B) Limit the usefulness of grinding

A is pretty simple: you just need to make the gameplay less repetitive. If there are enough things to do that the player can reach max level without ever doing the same thing twice, then congrats, you've removed the need to grind from your game!

But you haven't done B; the player still can grind to do things before he should be able to, and the end result is that all your game's challenges before max level can be completed either by overcoming them or by spending hours doing other shit until they're skippable. If you want the player to be overcoming your challenges, this is pretty lame! It's thought of as sort of an inherent problem in RPGs, but it doesn't have to be.

Here are some of the many, many ways around it:

- Assign levels to monsters, and make it so killing a monster that's more than 5 levels below you gives no experience
- Make monsters simply stop appearing if you're more than 5 levels above them (this really only works in a game with only one character or where everyone levels together even if dead or absent, otherwise you can keep one character low level to grind)
- Make each enemy group only give experience points the first time it's killed
- Make each enemy group never appear again after the first time it's been killed
- Make enemies increase in power, or get replaced by stronger enemies, to match the player's level
- Make 80% of your power come from equipment, skills, monster souls, or some other thing that is obtained only by progressing in the game; maybe levels only affect HP and MP
- Make 100% of your power come from equipment, skills, monster souls, or some other thing that is obtained only by progressing in the game, but make each thing require a certain level to use
- Have the player reach the level cap very early, like maybe only 25% of the way through the game, and all power increases from then on are acquired by other means such as equipment upgrades
- Make experience points be a spendable currency instead of automatically providing level ups - so the player might spend 200 XP to get +10 strength, for example - and then add more purchasable upgrades to the list as the player progresses in the game
I recently played Ys the ark of Napishtim and in that everytime you level up you get less experience from monsters until they are only giving 1 exp
It meant that I would get to a new area and I would grind for 10 mins and then grinding would become ineffective and I would have to proceed further into the game and find new areas with tougher monsters.
Leveling up in Ark of Napishtim is especially well done, because a single level up, already means you are significantly stronger. There is always a level where the game is "challenging" and on the next level the game is "fairly easy". To get from the former to the latter, you need a little bit of grinding, to level up even further than that is almost impossible, you have to wait until the monsters get harder.

I always thought that's exactly how "grinding" is supposed to be. It is a way to reduce the difficulty for players who are not so skilled. I like this solution much better than a difficulty setting (in RPGs).
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
Actually, I fuckin' hate that style of levelling in games with any decent amount of optional content, because it means that the game can never be the correct difficulty unless you skip parts of it.
Yeah it was a problem in Xenoblade for example.

But Ys leveling system is so well done that this doesn't happen. If you do optional content and are already at the level where it's easy, you will basically get no exp, so even after 3 optional dungeons you will still have the same level. If you now go to the next story dungeon, it will be hard again but you also get alot exp (if it's super hard, you level up from only 5 kills). Not to mention that Ys is pretty linear.

It works however pretty well in full open world games where your progress is only limited by your character strength and normal random encounters scale with you, like in Romancing Sa-Ga 3 or SaGaFrontier. So the normal encounters are always challenging but the bosses are the "limiters" to progress.
Backwards_Cowboy
owned a Vita and WiiU. I know failure
1737
I like the way Mana Khemia 2 handled level ups. There were no actual "levels", but you purchased stat increases, skills, and attack effects using points earned from battle. By just battling enough, your HP and SP would go up. Equipment also provided you with generic skills and stat increases, as well as special effects. You purchased from a "Grow Book", where tiles were unlocked as you synthesized items using Alchemy. You could grind for as many points as you wanted, but you would also gain obtains necessary for synthesizing new ones, but were restricted based on which item recipes you knew. You couldn't get the best skills in the beginning of the game, but you could accumulate a lot of small stat increases. The first Mana Khemia game over-restricted you by requiring you to unlock adjacent tiles before you could continue through the Grow Book. Missed one recipe from an early dungeon? You need to go back and find it if you want to ever increase your power.

It worked really well, and Mana Khemia 2 also included a Hard Mode to make the battles more difficult and offset the stat increases.
- Have the player reach the level cap very early, like maybe only 25% of the way through the game, and all power increases from then on are acquired by other means such as equipment upgrades
I am giving this a shot in my next RPG (except I was shooting for around 50% of the way through). The level cap is going to be low, 12 or 15, and you get your final skill around level 10, and the power difference between level 1 and 10 won't be exceptionally great. So the team's power will only grow after that via equipment, crafting, and rebuilding more powerful droids to join your team. I guess we'll see if I can pull this off.
Sailerius
did someone say angels
3214
If that's the case, why have levels at all?
author=Sailerius
If that's the case, why have levels at all?
Getting all the skills at once would be overwhelming, there would be 0 sense of progression, player tactics would not have to change throughout the entire game, I like leveling.

Edit: oh yeah, I was going to have significantly higher ratio of optional content compared to games I've made in the past. The goal I am setting is if you took the fastest route to the end dungeon, then you would be at level 10, but if you did all of the optional content, you would be maxed out about 50~75% of the way through the game. I am attempting to make all of the game accessible while still capturing the sense of progression. We'll see if I can do it. (probably not well!)
Sailerius
did someone say angels
3214
My point is:

So the team's power will only grow after that via equipment, crafting, and rebuilding more powerful droids to join your team.

Why not do that right off the bat? That's a lot more interesting than leveling up anyway.
author=Sailerius
My point is:

So the team's power will only grow after that via equipment, crafting, and rebuilding more powerful droids to join your team.

Why not do that right off the bat? That's a lot more interesting than leveling up anyway.
I just might! But I haven't solved the problem of not-overwhelming-the-player-with-a-list-of-skills.

Any ideas?
Sailerius
did someone say angels
3214
One idea I liked from Chrono Cross was how the only way to "level up" was by beating a boss. So what you could do is gradually immerse the player in the battle system by adding one skill at a time, and testing them on what they've learned with a boss battle, which then rewards them with the next skill, and then you test them on use of that new strategy, and so on, until you have all the skills.
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
One big reason to have level ups up to a certain point, in a game like that, is that level ups are a lot easier to figure out than the other systems, because they happen automatically. Thus the player has the first half of the game to get used to the way that the other systems are used to acquire more power, before they are forced to use only those systems.

It also makes the first half of the game more forgiving and less demanding, which is how a lot of people, quite sensibly, like their games to be paced - starting out easier and gradually getting harder. In the fourth dungeon, if you're having trouble, you can grind to be 5 levels higher than you're supposed to be - a notable advantage. But in the seventh dungeon, if you're having trouble, you can only grind to be 2 levels higher than you're supposed to be, because you're only 2 levels away from the cap. And in the ninth dungeon you are capped and can no longer grind at all, and have to beat it the proper way.

Kentona: If you do start out at max level, one way to keep from overwhelming the player is to start with only one team member, and add the rest of them in the first few dungeons. Another, possibly less intrusive, way would be to have "level ups" that literally only grant new skills (or new skill slots?) and have no other effect. Or maybe you can just use gold to buy skills, or they're obtained some other more complex way like downloading them from bosses / installing circuitboards that teach skills after 30 battles / using your old skills to gain tech points.
I kind of agree with Sailerius here. If you DON'T want to use the leveling system for the grinding advantage "If you can't beat that boss, we give you a chance to grind and get stronger so you can beat him", you might as well completely drop it.

As for the argument that players shouldn't be overwhelmed with options when they start playing the game - this can easily be incorporated into the strength increase system. Think of FFX. The path in which you could choose the abilities was pretty much completely linear until endgame, but after that went completely chaotic and you could pretty much do whatever. That's exactly what you are aiming at, expect branching starts earlier than endgame, right?

Also I have my doubts it's a good idea --- I really hate to have choices, because it means I need to figure out a useful build and that's kinda unnecessary extra work for me. If a game would start with linear leveling progressing and then suddenly switches to me having to make choices, that would probably make me instantly quit that game (exactly this happened to me with Magna Carta 2).

Instead, why not give the player a choice? Make an optimal auto-path for getting the abilities. By default the ability grid will have "auto path" enabled, so you just grow stronger by the optimal path. If the players wants a higher challenge he can switch it off and manually assign stuff. Tales of Xillia does that pretty nicely (though the effects of leveling are hardly noticable in that game at all, so maybe it's a bad example).
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
I don't even understand the mindset of the player who decides to play an RPG and then doesn't want to make skill and stat choices

Like, if you don't enjoy figuring out the puzzle of how to best become stronger and how to overwhelm enemies with cool strategies and how to manipulate your build to make best use of your best skills and circumvent your weaknesses, why are you playing an RPG instead of an adventure or action game

I know there are people out there who are like this, I am sure there are tons of them, I just can't get inside their heads and figure out what part of the gameplay they actually enjoy, because it's clearly not the part I think of as the RPG part, and yet they keep playing RPGs
Action and adventure games don't have as anime-ish stories as JRPGs. Flashy animations at the press of a single button are also cool.
Yeah, making builds (either specific character builds or "party makeup" builds) + equipment is like 75% of the fun for me in RPGs. The battles and whatnot are just tests to see how good I am at making builds. (this is why Diablo 2 was so awesome, but Diablo 3 was lame - I could make builds in D2, but in D3 they just gave me ALL THE THINGS (plus equipment was meaningless)).

With my particular game, the very first thing you do is pick the classes of your 4 party members (so having them join one by one later on isn't an option I am considering). So I have to decide how to dole out skills - either by having a leveling system, or having them be rewards from bosses, or be purchasable/winnable some other way.
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