RPGs and the Experience Points in them...

[Shurikane]

This has been tickling my mind for a while. You know all about RPGs, where you will usually spend some time wandering around town, killing monsters to gain XP and levels, and then move to some other town in a tougher part of the world and repeat the process...

Generally, in games that are well done and well-balanced (Castlevania, Phantasy Star IV, Chrono Trigger), this grinding is small or nonexistant. But other games (Phantasy Star II, Lineage II, Final Fantasy XI, Ragnarok Online, GunZ, etc.) require hours upon hours of repetitive play just to gain a minor item. Just as an example, a small, basic shield in Lineage II was sold at the price of 15000 game currency. On the official servers, a player gets from 50 to 75 bucks a kill. This is a long time.

Anyway, now thinking solely of the XP part. I don't know about you guys but I find it pretty weird. As you fight, you gain experience, and thus you fight better. However, under this system, you could fight the same giant ant for days on end, and then meet up and fight a soldier, and as long as he's not much quicker or stronger than you, you could beat him easily, even though you have never fought a soldier before and his moves are fundamentally different than those of a giant ant. Hardly realistic.

Therefore, I was thinking of this: instead of XP on a character, the player gets XP per monster, up until a given point where he has 100% knowledge of said monster. In other words, I fight the giant ant enough time to be able to predict its moves and thus beat it more efficiently. But, when I encounter the soldier, I don't know how he'll act and what's his fighting style, and thus my first battles against soldiers will be difficult until I "know" this enemy well enough. However, let's say I go meet the Giant Ant Queen. I've fought a lot of giant ants before, and thus I will have at least a feeling of how the Giant Ant Queen will behave. Thus, fighting a particular monster will allow me to better fight other monsters that look and act like the one I've beaten, to a degree.

What does that mean? That means character levels are virtually gone. That means gameplay will focus much more on traditional skill-based techniques rather than leveling beyond the monster's strength and doing no-brainer Leeroy-style strategies.

I was wondering what you guys thought of this system.

[Daijaga]

Wow.

Thats the coolest, most innovative system of "experience" management Ive heard of in a dame long time. In the since of MMOs, this would create certain definable regions for the players, so they would fall into their home regions almsot naturally. If you wanted to travel to a desert region from your temperate savanna - it would be very dangerous for you because you hadnt "grown up" there. For a native, the elemental scorpions are a minor set back, but for all your dinosaur slaying skills, the giant scorpion is quite new for you.

Shuri, I think your on the the hottest idea since classes. You coudl even expand certain aspects of the system so that there is XP synergy. If your monster lore on fire elemental lizard men in 100%, you have a +10% bonus against other fire elemental humaniods, and a +5% vs any fire elemental types. That way even if you went from the Vocalnic reagion of your home jungle to the open lava flows of a demonic region - youd have some sort of experience in how to handle your self.

PC levels coudl there for be managed not by their expereince point total but by their knowledge cap. You start off only being able to "know" 10 types to the fullest. By the apex of your characters life, they could know as many as 30 or 40 over all, but that would still pale in comparison to an over all monster assortment of over a hundred or more. Certain classes could have maximum bonuses (a hunter could get as high as 125% knowledge vs many animal tytpes), or have bonus knowledges (so that a demon slayer could know three types of demons in addition to his normal knowedges, bringing his total up to 33 or 43, making him a more versitile guy.)

Those are just a few ideas that poped into my head. Yeah, I think youve come up with a pretty solid idea there, shuri. We shoudl really do something with it some day.

[Girkon]

The only thing I would consider a fundamental flaw (if at all) would be the amount of monsters put into the game. If in the case of it being an MMO. Knowing that there will be uber players playing the crap out of it, the amount of expansion and patches required to keep pace with the players would be much larger than usual.

Plus would this carry over into a PvP system as well? Will there be beings that could never totally be studied, for as easy as it is to believe there are some beings that can never be totally predicted for it's sheer skill or unpredictability. Also what of humanoids added to some conflicts. Will there be differences if a group dynamic is placed as well?

Just a few questions I would think with such a system implimented.

[Silver Adept]

Monster amounts aren't necessarily as important as monster types. Keeping the types down or up would be the most important part of the game. What I want to know, though, is what sort of system will be in place for unlearning old monster types and learning new ones, if you change regions.

Plus, at some point, even though you have knowledge of specific monster types, at some point, just by fighting things, you're going to get better at fighting itself, especially with your weapon. So perhaps a secondary system is a weapon experience, so that even in a place you have no clue about, you still can hold your own if you're an experienced fighter.

[Girkon]

[Razer]

The amounts of types is definitely important but also how said types are assigned. For example, beating a million giant fire ants could give XP towards Fire ants and ants but black ants, poison ants, etc. What about beetles or other similarly formed insects. Using a more widespread animal would be cats or dogs. If you would want to undertake differentiating between Lions (jungle, mountain), tigers (saber toothed, black panthers, striped), etc you would be in for quite a haul. I think this idea has definite merit but I might go at it simpler maybe hitting element types first. Since it's an rpg, it's easy to classify ten totally diff beings under one class (fire) first. Then when you get a good base or skeleton of the system working you can maybe try tackling individual species.

[Shurikane]

This is a good set of replies. You guys are pitching in with stuff I had forgotten about when I took my first shot at the idea.

Considering PvP: Because that "knowledge XP" is only a versus factor, there would be no XP between two players. In other words, when you fight amongst yourselves, your efficiency is constant. This is to keep battles fair. I don't set this in stone though, since it could be possible to implement a system where there would be different efficiencies regarding fighter VS mage or fighter VS ranger, etc. This would be an idea to kick around.

One of the basic properties will also be the rate of knowledge gain. Robots will be very easy to learn from since they have set, predetermined patterns. Androids, a little more difficult, but still predictable. Animals and humans would be the toughest to figure out and thus the knowledge XP rate would be lower.

I thought about this "fire elemental" idea and the things associated with it. This could be applied to specific skills of monsters (i.e.: You suffer several hits of Fire Ball as you work in a volcanic environment. You move to another part of the world, and a different monster casts Fire Ball on you. Even though you cannot effectively attack the monster since you don't know it well, you can still have some guarding against the Fire Ball since you've seen your fair share.)

Now, the monster types. Of course, there's only so many monsters the player can fight. However, to keep the spice up, a developer could implement areas where some monsters are fundamentally weaker or stronger than the player. This allows for both casual and serious gaming, and keeps the challenge up when one seeks it.

Additionally, there could be a system where a character gradually "forgets" information about some monsters he hasn't fought in a long time. I personally don't like the idea since I'm an "accomplishment-based" gamer by nature and thus my thrill is to fully complete the game (as in, full XP, full level, full items, full everything.) BUT! This could be a separate stat, called "forgetfulness" which means this: say I go off for a while and don't fight any giant ants whatsoever. I come back, fight one and don't remember much of its moves, but as I fight a few, my memory comes back and I can fight them as usual. In this manner, forgetfulness decreases your effectiveness against monsters you've forgotten about, but you need to fight far less of those monsters to get them back in memory.

I also had "weapon XP" in mind too - this came before the "knowledge XP" in my train of thoughts and I had already applied it to my RPG concept by introducing weapon-specific skills. In fact, the idea of "weapon XP" has existed for a while, namely in MUDs where one had a certain mastery of certain weapons.

[BWS-1]

[Shurikane]

BWS-1 has to be the only guy I know to be able to take a geeky RPG system and turn it into a martial arts mantra. ^_^

[Yunni]

Hrem, and it would be easier to become 'experienced' with monsters that are more common than monsters that are rarely seen, much like in RL.