Philosophical discussion: "Experience" in RPGs

Buckle up, this is going to be a doozy of a ramble. (Don't worry, there will be a TL;DR summary at the end.)

I was ruminating this morning on the difference between RPGs, where your characters get permanently stronger over the course of the game, but if you die, you're dead; and platformers (think Sonic, Mega Man) where you never actually gain raw power, but if you "grind" so to speak you can accumulate lives/continues that allow you to stave off your "game over" screen. (In particular, I was imagining the Mecha Sonic/Death Egg Robot battle at the end of Sonic 2.) I was thinking, how is this fair? If you're not good enough to beat Mecha Sonic, how are more chances going to help you?

Then the light bulb went off: experience. Not experience points, as in an RPGs, but actual literal experience. By the time you've spent 12 lives on Mecha Sonic, hopefully you have a better idea of his attack pattern, you react more quickly, and you're able to defeat him, because you, as a person, gained experience fighting him. I came to realize that this is the concept that RPG developers imply with their systems. The simplest ones reward you with experience (points) for killing enemies, suggesting that your characters got better at attacking and defending, learned about the enemy's characteristics, and are therefore stronger for it. Some games also award you experience for discovering new areas, opening treasure chests, solving puzzles, etc., which is one step closer to the real-world connotation of "experiencing" something. Then there's the direct route of games like FFII, where experience is abstracted (or rather...concreted?) from generic "points" into specific actions. This really makes a ton of sense, on the surface, but implementation can be awkward.

Going back to the "points" system, though, here's where it doesn't make a lot of sense: grinding. Don't get me wrong, I love a good grind in my RPGs. But each enemy, generally, gives you the same amount of experience whether you kill it for the first time or the 1000th time. But by the 1000th time you've killed an any, you know what you're doing; you know your weapons and defenses and abilities; you aren't really gaining anything that maps to real-life experienceaside from, yeah, another battle took place. (This is, of course, somewhat ameliorated by the fact that level requirements typically increase so that you can't easily become an all-powerful titan by killing Fangs in the Evil Forest.)

What would an RPG look like where "experience" most closely mapped to the real-life concept? I think you'd definitely get boosts for all the little non-combat things like exploration, questing, and discovery because those are new experiences as you do them. As far as combat though, what if the experience was tied to the bestiary like in the FFXIII games? As you battle an enemy, your bestiary fills in as you try out different spells and attacks on it. That's literal experience: you find out that an enemy is weak to fire by casting fire on it. In a sense, that is its own reward, as it makes subsequent battles with that enemy easier and doesn't offer any more "experience" the 1000th time you cast fire on the enemy. But imagine if your level progress was tied to your bestiary progress; the more you know about your foes, literally the more experience you have with them, the stronger you are. (I'd also throw in the II-esque system of getting better with different weapons by using them.)

TL;DR: "Experience points" are sometimes, but not always, linked to the real-life concept of "experience". Should they be more directly linked? What would that look like? Have some games done this better than those I mentioned?

They way most games are tuned you get the same experience every time, but it is proportionally a smaller and smaller percentage of what it takes to get to the next level. So that is the same as the amount of experience you get decreasing every time, just modeled different mathematically.

As for grinding. Real life training looks a hell of a lot like grinding. A whole crap load of repetition of whatever the heck it is you are trying to learn. The main thing to keep track of is the difference between just doing something and dedicated training.

It's a good thing I am short on time, I can literally talk for hours and hours about how to best structure training to optimize skill growth.

For the most part, XP is tied very strongly to real life. For instance I started an exercise regime a few months ago cause frankly I needed it, I have no upper body strength and could barely do 10 push ups without resting yet after a few weeks of doing just 10 push ups per set, I eventually got to the point where I could do it easily. On the other hand, I could do 10 push ups every day for a whole year, but it wouldn't mean I would be able to do 100 push ups in one setting. I need to build myself up cause the repetition (grinding) got me strong enough to do it easily, but without really upping my game I eventually reached a point of getting diminished returns cause I needed to do more push ups to increase my strength and stamina. Likewise in game, as you level up, the XP you get is diminished, as VeloZer0 pointed out, most do this by making the requirement for the next level to increase while others like Suikoden or SRPGs make weaker enemies give smaller returns of XP.

In terms of games that have really expanded XP gain, Xenoblade is probably the best example in recent years, you get XP for killing enemies, discovering new locations, completing quests, but you also get them for collecting certain items or reaching ceretain achievements like killing your 100,000th enemy, or completing a characters skill tree, or finding your tenth location, or meeting your 50th named NPC. It actually takes the silly bragging rights achievement system and gives it a practical use within the game and I really wish more games would do that.

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Originally Posted by metagloria

Going back to the "points" system, though, here's where it doesn't make a lot of sense: grinding. Don't get me wrong, I love a good grind in my RPGs. But each enemy, generally, gives you the same amount of experience whether you kill it for the first time or the 1000th time. But by the 1000th time you've killed an any, you know what you're doing; you know your weapons and defenses and abilities; you aren't really gaining anything that maps to real-life experienceaside from, yeah, another battle took place. (This is, of course, somewhat ameliorated by the fact that level requirements typically increase so that you can't easily become an all-powerful titan by killing Fangs in the Evil Forest.)

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You're describing FFXI here, you know. In FFXI, exp gain is relative to enemy level. Kill an enemy that is the same level as you, and you'll always get 100 exp. Kill one that is 2 levels below you and you'll get 75 exp, kill one that is 10 levels below you and you'll get nothing at all, not even one single point. The enemy level range from 0 exp to max exp from a single kill increases as you level up. a lv99 character can get exp from an enemy that is 20 levels below them, while a lv15 wouldn't get anything from something that was level 6-7 or so. To add to that, even with relative exp gain which forces you to always fight higher and higher level enemies, the exp you need for each level also increases. At lv1, you need 500 exp to reach 2, but at 74 you need around 45000 exp to reach 75.

Oh, but it doesn't stop there. Each job has a skill ranking in various weapons and defensive skills (going from A+ being the best to F being the worst (well actually I think a rating that is even lower than F exists in the game, but they are very rare)), and you only get a skill-up in each of those skills by performing an action on an enemy that is within an appropriate level. You can have a level 1 crab swing at you for all eternity without gaining a single evasion skill up if your evasion skill maxed out for level 10. Likewise, you will never cap your greataxe skill at level 99 by hitting a level 75 enemy. You'll get up to 75, but then it'll slow down severely and eventually stop, the same goes for magic skills, parry, shield blocks and martial arts "guarding". To add to this, your skill level in whatever affects your accuracy, and this accuracy is combined with the dexterity and accuracy rating you get from your regular physical level, which means that even if your greataxe skill is equivalent to level 75 while you're level 99, you can kill level 90 trash enemies because you can make up for it with your raw physical might/nimbleness/whatever. However, once you meet a level 110 boss enemy, that lv75 greataxe skill is gonna cause you to miss 80% of the time, and that is only because hit rate is floored at 20% regardless of stats. Not only that, with physical weapons, your skill rating also affects your attack rating, which is put up against the enemy's defense rating to make a ratio where you have to be above a certain amount to actually be able to inflict damage on things.

Basically, a white mage who has seen an enormous amount of combat and maxed her F-ranked evasion rating at level 99, will evade things better than a level 99 ninja who just leeched exp and never got a single attack thrown towards her, even if the ninja job has an evasion skill rating of A-. If the ninja actually starts taking hits from a high level enemy though, she'll gain evasion skill really fast, and eventually get higher than the white mage could ever get. This of course doesn't take into account that the ninja job also has access to probably 50 times as much gear that boosts evasion than white mage has, but I'm sure you get the point.


With that out of the way, I think the exp systems where you always gain *something* even if it is incredibly little doesn't really imply that you are still learning anything combat wise from fighting that enemy, but it could be an abstraction of your stamina and patience still increasing from fighting for an extremely long time. Even if your muscles won't grow to hit any harder or faster against a certain enemy, your muscles will still grow in endurance. At first you might only be able to swing your sword efficiently for perhaps 10 minutes, but after practicing against the same easy enemies for half a year, you'll probably be able to keep it going for hours without getting exhausted.

There are games in which kills > 1 receive decreasing levels of experience. There are also games (notably FFXI) wherein the same creatures give less experience (up to eventually 0 experience) upon leveling up. FFXI's system kind of sucked from a practical viewpoint (early ffxi was a GRIND), but I always liked its "realism."

What I would like to see is a game with separate systems for each of a character's parameters. As in: strength is leveled up through repetition, intelligence through varying inputs (in other words, systems of diminishing returns for repeated patterns of actions, greater experience for variations in actions) [reading the same book over and over doesn't increase intelligence as quickly or efficiently as reading different books each time], charisma by talking to different people in different situations (in TES, as a Breton, talking to a Nord would not be as much a test of charisma (personality) as talking to an Orsimer would be, and would therefore provide less "experience"), etc.

Edit: yeah what Mirage said. Speaking of which, do FFXIV's systems approximate FFXI's?

No, they don't. FF14 incorporates a standard x-exp from y-enemy and have exp requirements that grow by orders of magnitude every few levels. There are also no combat skills to train. Mechanically, it is very sterile and simplistic compared to FFXI.

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Originally Posted by Mirage

No, they don't. FF14 incorporates a standard x-exp from y-enemy and have exp requirements that grow by orders of magnitude every few levels. There are also no combat skills to train. Mechanically, it is very sterile and simplistic compared to FFXI.

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I thought that was maybe the case. Yay for SE taking giant step backwards going forward! Gimme FFXI-2. That's what my heart truly wants.

We also have to remember that it is a developers job to make the improvement mechanic fun first and foremost over making it realistic. If people are looking for realistic skill improvements they tend to just apply themselves to accomplishing something tangible in the real world.

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Originally Posted by VeloZer0

We also have to remember that it is a developers job to make the improvement mechanic fun first and foremost over making it realistic. If people are looking for realistic skill improvements they tend to just apply themselves to accomplishing something tangible in the real world.

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It can happen in a realistic manner and still be fun. That's the challenge for developers, yes, but it's a realistic challenge. Not talking about hyper-realism, here, but systems that make sense and aren't arbitrary. As Mirage noted, FFXI had a fantastic, realistic and chaotic system that was very fun.

That's not to say FFXI didn't have any faults. I don't think the way you increased your skills were bad at all, just the rate at which some of the increased.

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Originally Posted by chionos

It can happen in a realistic manner and still be fun. That's the challenge for developers, yes, but it's a realistic challenge. Not talking about hyper-realism, here, but systems that make sense and aren't arbitrary

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Guess that is where we have to agree to disagree. I think making designers consider how to make their systems not arbitrary is artificially confining, and just serves to hamstring the design process.

I'm not saying that you can't go for something more like you describe if that is what the game devs feel will work best with their game, I think the decision should always ultimately be a mechanics/immersion one rather than based on some meta-level value system they are working under.

I never wanted to play FFXI so bad as right now :(

This is a very similar concept to the experience gained by Pawns in Dragon's Dogma. Yes, there is generic experience for levelling up when they hang out with you personally, but they don't gain this experience when loaned to other players. What they do gain, is a three star rating of world and enemy knowledge. Fight an enemy a few times, and they'll be able to identify it easily ("Wolves, master! :eek:). Fight in many times, and they'll become more accustomed to its attacks (they warn you of a wolves mauling attack, for example). If you use a variety of elemental and status effects, you can gain the final star as they become more knowledgeable about the enemies weakness ("They're weak to fire! Try blinding it! The cyclops' eye is its weakness!" etc). This also works with world knowledge. Enter an area, and they know about it (Oh trout, Gran Soren! etc) . Explore it fully and they'll be able to tell you things about it ("You can find chests hidden away behind buildings! There's a chest down there! Maybe we can leap down... etc"), and it also applies to the wildnerness ("There are often wolves prowling around this area... Beware of bandits, master" and so on).

It's a really unique system, and I find it adds a lot of depth to what are essentially handmade NPCs.

This is barely tangentially related, but I want to post it anyway.

In Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness, Lara had a dumb as bricks stamina thing going on. As an example, early on in the game, you need to hold onto a ledge for 40 seconds to shimmy around to where you need to go. Unfortunately her stamina only allows for 30 seconds of intense holding, so you do fall to your death just before you make it.

The solution is to do some arbitrary thing, like kick a door or brute force something out of the way (very specific things, I might add, you can't do this just anywhere), and she'll comment in her Keeley Hawes voice that "I feel stronger now" and then her stamina has increased so you can do that thing you needed to do.

It's a pretty cool concept, but it is handled terribly in this game. xD The fact that it is under very specific circumstances that you can "improve" your skills and not just anywhere makes feel like a pointless addition. I think it actually only happens like 3 times over the whole game, and in that sort of situation I have to wonder why they even bothered adding this function.

In SotC, you increase your stamina by killing lizards. Arbitrary skill increase winner of all time, IMHO. xD

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Originally Posted by Quin

This is a very similar concept to the experience gained by Pawns in Dragon's Dogma. Yes, there is generic experience for levelling up when they hang out with you personally, but they don't gain this experience when loaned to other players. What they do gain, is a three star rating of world and enemy knowledge. Fight an enemy a few times, and they'll be able to identify it easily ("Wolves, master! :eek:). Fight in many times, and they'll become more accustomed to its attacks (they warn you of a wolves mauling attack, for example). If you use a variety of elemental and status effects, you can gain the final star as they become more knowledgeable about the enemies weakness ("They're weak to fire! Try blinding it! The cyclops' eye is its weakness!" etc). This also works with world knowledge. Enter an area, and they know about it (Oh trout, Gran Soren! etc) . Explore it fully and they'll be able to tell you things about it ("You can find chests hidden away behind buildings! There's a chest down there! Maybe we can leap down... etc"), and it also applies to the wildnerness ("There are often wolves prowling around this area... Beware of bandits, master" and so on).

It's a really unique system, and I find it adds a lot of depth to what are essentially handmade NPCs.

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This is exciting! Dragon's Dogma is sitting in my drawer right now because a friend basically forced me to borrow it ("Here, play this"). I just beat a massive RPG in Kingdoms of Amalur, so I didn't want to start another one right away, but I'll probably play it soon!

PS3 or 360? :D

PS3. I don't play anything on the 360 unless I have to (Lost Odyssey).

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Originally Posted by VeloZer0

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Originally Posted by chionos

It can happen in a realistic manner and still be fun. That's the challenge for developers, yes, but it's a realistic challenge. Not talking about hyper-realism, here, but systems that make sense and aren't arbitrary

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Guess that is where we have to agree to disagree. I think making designers consider how to make their systems not arbitrary is artificially confining, and just serves to hamstring the design process.

I'm not saying that you can't go for something more like you describe if that is what the game devs feel will work best with their game, I think the decision should always ultimately be a mechanics/immersion one rather than based on some meta-level value system they are working under.

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I see what you're saying. I guess sometimes what makes a game immersive for one person doesn't quite have the same effect on another. I'm not saying that every game should have the same depth in its leveling system. For instance, TES are a series of games that approach realism on every level of gameplay, so of course their leveling systems should be complex and on some level approach realism too. However, a similar system implemented in a game like Kingdom Hearts would not be appropriate to the overall expression of that game's aesthetic. Those games have an entirely abstracted and unrealistic system of leveling, but it fits the story and the feel of the games so it works (at least for me).

I agree with you to the extent that realistic leveling (or any other specific type of leveling) should not be the focus or priority of any game. Each game should find its own system that works for it. However, no system in a game should be arbitrary (outside of games that are parodies or meant to be ironic). It has to make sense or it's going to annoy/frustrate the gamer, even if it's aesthetically pleasing somehow, or matches the developer's vision.

Also, Quin, you're probably right. That is a silly (arbitrary) system, lol. Not that I didn't enjoy hunting and sniping the little bastards, but it really doesn't make any sense. Well, maybe it makes Team ICO sense, but not normal human sense.