Yet even more RPG development thoughts.

[Shurikane]

So I was thinking over that XP system and went a bit further into the idea...

CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT
I figures that if I wanted to put a stop to grinding, I'd have to let go of the XP system altogether. You ain't powerful enough? You kill more stuff. Beh. Boring.

So I thought of the system they had used in Castlevania, in which you could find items that permanently boosted your HP and mana. I thought it'd do good to have the same thing in my RPG, except that these items boost all your abilities, not just a few. This way, character advancement requires a minimum of exploration, as most of these items will be placed in remote or inconspicuous locations. Although, to ease things up a bit, some of them may be offered as quest rewards or may be placed right along the player's way. Basically, that provides the game a way to keep the player from jumping directly to the final boss. As well, it allows the player to get a sense of progress and to allow him to customize his character a bit by assigning his new points to his stats. It also helps out a lot for other classes, since supporters no longer need to go through the pains of killing monsters alone - they can choose to subdue them, or thief classes can simply zip through and attempt to get to the treasures without having to put up a fight.


MONSTER EXPERIENCE
I talked about this before in my other post. Basically, the player is only partway effective against a certain type of monsters until he fights against them enough to get knowledge about them and "figure their patterns." This can thus introduce some kind of curve to areas and making it so the game can have several main quests in different parts of the world, and the player can go from one to another and it's like he's begun a new game. Now, that goes back to the grinding formula, and to manage it, one has to program some fancy methods to make sure everyone gets his fair share. Therefore, you need to take account the top healers, the top buffers, the top de-buffers, the lures and the tanks on TOP of the usual "who did the most damage" formula. The problem with that system is that it loads the system with several more calculations than usual. Another way to go is to keep the system classic but make this part of the RPG a somewhat negligible part, where fighting monsters without prior knowledge isn't necessarily that hard.

Plus, that curve can be approached in several ways. Let's assume someone encounters a monster for the first time of his life:

• Brute Method: The character's stats against this monster act as if they are decreased. This represents a character who is cautious about the monster and doesn't know how to approach it.
  
• Weak Point Method: The character does less damage than usual, and suffers more damage than usual. This represents a character who fights without knowledge of the monster's weak points, and without knowledge on the monster's different attacks.
  
• Luck Method: The character has a lower critical hit chance than normal and can suffer critical hits more often. This is an alternate outlook on the above method.
  
• Raw Knowledge Method: The character's personal bestiary starts out empty and gradually fills as the character learns about the monster. This prevents the player from knowing the monster's patterns and attacks until he has fought that monster enough (taking into account the bestiary lists really everything about a monster.) This is a good way to create a curve for newbie players, but those who fought that monster before as another character won't have any trouble. But! That method can be overlapped on the others.

MAGIC
I have trouble working this one out. One cannot improve his magic skills by simply gaining levels - that would be like a warrior learning spells by doing push-ups. So far, I found only two ways to create advancement:

• Experience by Usage: The character gains magic experience as he uses spells and may put those experience points into learning any magic of his choosing thereafter. Of course, to gain experience, the spell must be "relevant" and successful. In other words, you can't cast into the air like that and expect experience. To get experience, you need that fireball to hit your target!
  
• Experience by Boost (Morrowind's Method): The character has to meet a teacher to be "introduced" to a particular spell. After which, the more he uses that spell, the better he gets at it, unlike the above method where he can use one's training in spell to learn others.
  
• Experience by Teaching: The character can "buy" experience from a teacher in order to quicken his learning. This allows for easier and more fluid learning, and may even be used as a launchpad for those who are able to make good money but don't fight as much. The problem is that if someone has a high level character, he can transfer money to the lower level one and get himself a newbie with godlike magic abilities.

I don't know how else to approach the problem. I want to effectively cutoff any means of helping a new character through transfer from a mule or a high level char, but I want, at the same time, to offer alternate ways of strengthening one's magic without necessarily grinding, which I want to avoid at all costs.


SKILLS
This poses the same problem as magic. In my system, the character can learn skill that do not require any "fuel" to be accomplished. They are simply extra moves the character can learn.

The way I set it up so far is that the character pays a teacher in order to learn a skill of his choosing. Skills have a number of levels each, and no tree, which allows one to learn the last skill if he wishes, though the cost is relative to difficulty, so the player is naturally guided into a top-down outlook on the gig.

But now, there's once again the problem of mules and high levels. You transfer cash to your lower level guy, you pay the teacher, you have a level one ninja!

Right now, my quick fix is to make it so that there's some kind of experience point method, where the character then uses those points (alongside money, optionally) to learn skills. Problem is, it involves grinding! And what about the thief or the naturalist class or whoever doesn't fight? He gets jacked. This is a much bigger problem than magic because most skills the character learns are related to fighting. Magic can be used to attack, defend, buff, debuff and heal. With skills, you are mostly down to attack and defend only... If you got any ideas on this, let me know.

[Nogrick]

I like where you're going with all this. Here's a couple of things I was thinking about.

Experience by Teaching: To help cut back on "god modding", You could make each spell have a time frame to learn the skill. This kinda seems like grinding, but I think it would keep people from taking the time to power up the newbie characters. Also it would help in this situation to have a loose skill tree, where if the character wants to learn a revive spell, having some experience with a cure spell will cut down on the time it takes to learn that spell, but not having cure won't inhibit you from learning revive.

SKILLS: A loose skill tree would also work here too. Having skills along the same tree will cut down on time learning the higher skills, but don't prevent skills from being learned.

Skills like First Aid will help non spell casters to heal. Stealth can boost evasion and Bloodlust can give an attack buff. Intimidate can debuff enemies, and Concentration/Meditiation can be used to beat out Confusion/Fear/Berserk.

The only thing with these types of skills, though, is that most times you must sacrifice a stat to gain a stat, instead of sacrificing mana/magic. For example, most often with skills like Berserk/Bloodlust, you sacrifice defense or speed for your attack boost. Stealth sacrifices speed or your ability to make an attack to boost evasion.

[Nogrick]

Just to add. I just rented Colosseum: Road to Freedom which has a pretty good skill based battle system. Basically you have four major attacks(High, Low, Left, Right) to attack different areas of your opponent's body. You also have a button for defensive stance. When defending, you can guess which attack your opponent is doing and effectivly parry your opponent. Or you can time your defense button correctly and dodge the attack altogether.

This would be good for skill based gaming as players who can dodge and parry will more likely survive fighting. Also, enemies can have certain weak points so different attacks will be more effective. On the down side, this only accounts for melee characters. Different methods may be needed to account for spellcasters or ranged characters. Also, it seems that a system like this could generate a lot of lag due to processing so many commands at once. The only solutions I could think of to make this work would be to:

A: Make battles an instance. Cutting down on the amount of players in an area could lighten the load. But then you'd sacrifice playing in large groups, cutting down on things like guild wars, or town sieges, which seem, to me at least, be one of the bigger draws of online games as of late.

B: Tone down graphics. At the cost of visual neatness, make it so the server can be able to process the commands and render the world. This method seems to be self destructive though, because most gamers want good graphics. If it isn't pretty, most people won't touch it.