FRACTAL ADVOCATE'S PROFILE

I like #2 and #5, since there's an opportunity cost for it.

#1 seems like a bad idea, otherwise, you can choose a non-OOB class and get top-notch OOB skills for some extra work, making some classes pretty underwhelming - would you allow the Rogue to pay money to become as good at hand to hand as the fighter, summon ghosts, or heal?

#3 and #4 might be nice if you feel people need more points in general, although I'd be leery of doing #4 too much, or it would become much like #1.

If the stats of the party directly effect the stats of the monsters they face, then there's no real point to levelling stats, at least, and you're basically just giving the party the illusion of getting stronger - but it's a pretty weak illusion, since if they go back to an early area to fight slimes, the slimes will be as tough as they were before(except now they might have new spells/abilities that deal with them better, I suppose - but they would have had those without stat-based levelling).

If you want the player to be at a fairly consistent level of power vs the monsters they face, it makes more sense to me to reduce the effects of levelling(if the player gets less stats at level up, it's basically the same as averaging the party and monster level by a certain percentage), or remove them altogether, or do as Yoshio said and only have a certain amount of XP available.

I guess if you only care about boss difficulty, Drakonais' suggestion makes sense, but...

Basing monster stats directly off party stats makes stat+ equipment essentially useless compared to special effects equipment, and also means you can weaken a pure physical monster by equipping all magic+ gear and attacking with pure magic, or vica versa, weaken a strong evasion monster by de-equipping all your evade gear for stuff that hampers movement, etc.

If you do it directly by level, so monster level = X+party level, I imagine you get FF8 syndrome, where you should stay as low level as you can so the best equipment/spells make more of a difference.

Puzzle... submitted!

post=94322
The hero archetype i've always hated for some reason was the whole "Hero chosen from birth" thing.
Y'know, like Link, the warriors of light, etc...
It's not that i hate the characters themselves, it's that they're automatically destined to win from the get go.
I like it when the hero isn't a chosen boy. When they actually overcame the challenge because they worked hard towards it, not because the gods said so.

Yeah, I hate this too. It's enough to make me stop watching most series that contain it, these days.

So, I'm starting on an iteriation of the puzzle I initially intended for BQ2, dunno if it'll get done in time.

A thought, though: Would it be difficult to give the player a couple of 'skip puzzle' tokens at the begin, and give them a slightly better ending if they don't use any? I mean, a lot of people get frustrated on one puzzle or another, and it would remove the need to cheat or use a walkthrough to play the rest of the game if you really just can't get it.