This a thousand times. Classless systems are such a cheap cop out, basically the designer saying he can’t be bothered with unique design and balance.
In theory I like advancement by use better, but in practice I prefer classless point based systems such as that in AC:Odyssey.
I also like purely equipment-based advancement such as Subnautica, BATTLETECH or Elite:Dangerous. They feel more realistic to me. I wish someone would build a DCS campaign where you could “gain” better tools by doing well or getting secondaries… (hint hint @Anklebiter )
I like the Japanese “job” progression system described by @DJscman, that you can find in many games, from RPGS to tactical RPGs like Shining Force or even in oddities like Valkyrie Chronicles. As he noted, the visual aspect of the transition is also quite important (and rewarding, as a kid at least).
The stats bump isn’t why the new jobs matter most, but because they open new gameplay possibilities, not dissimilar to the feeling given in Metroidvanias in a way. The truth is that those games probably just distillate very slowly the progression for 10 levels, to the point of that “underprogression” being really almost pointless. Then suddenly they give you the whole package of skills and stats that you’d have won leveling 10 times in D&D. But in my experience it feels as rewarding, for some reason.
It has the side effect of being a nightmare to balance, from what I’ve played. Basically, in all those games, the beginning of the game tends to be much harder than the later points of the game, especially during the high point of the “class transition” phases.
Some games go totally overboard with this, letting you switch, then reset and accumulate jobs, like Der Langrisser/Langrisser 2 or in a lesser measure Final Fantasy Tactics, allowing you to play the game over and over again its (multiple in Langrisser 2’s case) story paths only to manufacture the ultimate godlike character. There is no challenge or balance anymore, yet I remember it being strangely compelling in its own way.
Like @jsnell, I like equipment based systems a lot. They are not fundamentally different from the traditional xp gain probably, but I love their sense of reward and discovery when new gear drops or is crafted, and it seems to be a nice way around the unrewarding feeling, at least to me, of stabbing away, one notch at a time, at an experience bar or seeing a counter going up. I think design ships in EVE scratches a somewhat similar itch, while being a puzzle within the game to try to make the perfect ship, although EVE’s ship construction is heavily tied to a time-based character progression system which comes from hell.
I prefer gain by use, but I appreciate the grind that it can lead to (see: Ultima Online).
What I’ve really come to like is equipment-based leveling where the equipment itself it what levels up. I don’t know what it is about leveling up equipment that appeals to me so much, but it’s just cool!
For PC games I often prefer classes with levels and point distribution. Alternatively skill trees like in AC: Odyssey that basically are classes but you can dip into other areas as your main concentration as well.
Pen and Paper I prefer classless with point distribution and XP gain by milestones. A quest completed or personal goal reached. In addition to baseline XP per level. You can spend the XP whenever you have enough to improve a skill/attribute/feat whatever and are not bound by levels.
My favorite advancement system is the Burning Wheel / Mouseguard system. Mouseguard being the most refined and simplified version.
It is advance by use, but it manages it better than most other systems by forcing you to try hard. That is, you need to attempt a difficult task for your current knowledge level at a skill, so menial or just average use of a skill does not improve it. Some versions (that I prefer) require you to fail at least one of these tests too (which would work great to discourage save scumming).
Note that this means that to advance a skill you need to fail a lot. Since the systems are PnP, and you can’t try the same thing twice, that means those failures do have significant narrative consequences, and thus advancement of a skill, story progression and setbacks and agency become integrated into a complex system that feels true and organic and satisfying narratively and mechanically (you go from failing to improving and succeeding at very difficult tasks).
For a computer RPG it’s harder to comceptualize such a system, since it works best for important, non repetitive tasks, and computer RPGs have a lot of combat and simple skill tests. I guess for combat it would mean engaging (and surviving) difficult combat encounters. But the ability of saving and loading could lead to scumming, so the need to “lose” a combat should be part of the game. It could work if tied to significant “combat setpieces” with a narrative branch tied to its successful (or not) completion and requiring you to “lose” the encounter and face the consequences of such loss. For non combat tests it should have to be tied to important quest tests (which is easier to do) or make the tests require non-unlimited consumables.
It also works better with few but more significant levels to advance through in a skill (from 0 to a cap of 5, for example, and not 0 to 200), so the lower average of meaningful tests does not make advance,ent feel inconsequential.
Anyway, I’ve been dying to see a CRPG with a system like this for a while. I even did some consulting on a project that I pushed in this direction, but it never got off the ground.
I like the way Burning Wheel’s advancement incentivizes doing things you are bad at, but it’s sloooow and mostly not particularly satisfying as an advancement system, IMO.
My local RPG Meetup, RTR, is launching a Mouse Guard-based Semi-Organized Play campaign this month, Allhaven. I’m pretty excited to play more than a one-shot of this system to really get a feel for how the advancement works, but what you said: about the game incentivizing interesting failure, and thus stories that are not contingent on “every roll must succeed somehow or, uh, I guess the game ends?” style challenges? That’s the shit that really gets me going, and yeah, it’s hard as fuck to do right in a CRPG.
There are basically two parts of my brain here, regarding the question of the thread (great thread, btw, @Rod_Humble).
Part The First: Really enjoys hyper efficient tweaking, optimizing, and minmaxing of a set of defined core components (e.g., a class, some equipment, some player-chosen Feats/Spells/etc.) to produce interesting, hyper-focused builds that do Thing X really fucking well, or pull of Silly Combo Y super reliably over the course of a level-up style progression where each level enables me to slowly improve those core competencies and occasionally add in new “pieces of the puzzle,” so to speak.
My go-to example for this is a lot of the “advance a hero while engaging in tower defense-style shenanigans” maps in Warcraft 3 that weren’t DotA (I mean, it mighta worked in DotA, too, but I never played it), wherein I’d always max out dex ASAP, as it improved dodge-chances and hit-speed. In maps that didn’t apply some kinda cap, you could essentially reach a point where your hero would attack as quickly as the game ticks would update, which was goofy as fuck and almost always super effective. But this also holds true when minmaxing a potent two-handed Cornugon-Smashing Mass-Intimidating-to-Shake-opponents-and-then-get-Sneak-Attack-against-them-while-they’re-cowering Half-Orc Thug Rogue build in Pathfinder, or when I’m perfecting a melee Sorceress build in Diablo 2 by stacking a weird assortment of high level gear and usually-useless spells.
The downsides of Part the First here is that, since it does usually involve cobbling together an assortment of unlikely abilities, bonuses, and gear, is that it might be wildly ineffective for hours–maybe even dozens of hours!–of play before suddenly “turning on;” that it might involve grinding for weird and rare equipment or enemy ability learning chances or game-within-a-game card battler sidequests; and that at the end of the day, the product is usually a build that’s so wildly effective at its particular niche that it sort of removes any genuine challenge from the remainder of the game while you just blazing-whirlwind cannon-blast your way through hordes of Orcs till the credits roll.
Thus, Part the Second, which really digs on classless, milestone-dictated, narrative-heavy, low-granularity, low-cap advancement systems, like in my perennial favorite, the Fate RPG. Characters growing in power and reputation organically with story beats rather than by just killing enough dudes or collecting enough gold is far more interesting to me on an intellectual level (not that there’s not some lizardy part of my brain that gets off on the loot treadmill Skinner box!). Being able to assemble any sort of character you imagine, balance between characters ensured by a mixture of low granularity, slow advancement, and fairly tightly bound numerical growth (D&D 5E gets this right: in the end, to-hit bonuses and AC never go wildly off the charts, so the game doesn’t just degrade into a tedious exercise in stacking +accuracy magic gear at high levels) is just satisfying to me in a deep, rich way.
And I love advancement that is narrative in nature. In CRPGs, the equivalent is sort of a mixture of story advancement and ability unlocks. The idea is that your character has grown, and changed, and learned, and now they can affect the world in ways they couldn’t before, interact with it in novel ways, etc. Being granted the airship in FFX is a narrative advancement: you did a thing in the story that netted you a massive new toy that is wildly out of scale, balance-wise, perhaps, but its primary effect is in opening up the gameplay and letting you travel with a far higher degree of freedom than you’ve had for the preceding couple-dozen hours. Similarly, a wizard gaining the ability to bargain with more powerful extraplanar entities for boons and powers that are of a wildly different scale than the low-level Firebolts and Ice Knives he’s been chucking so far, like gaining the power to raise the dead or create pocket universes. Characters gaining titles and land, Kingmaker style, opening up whole new levels and layers of gameplay, wherein you can’t just quest around dungeons anymore because you’ve got subjects to care for, yo.
In essence, I like advancement that fundamentally alters the available gameplay experience, reflects my character’s actual growth and actions in a real way, and generally just plain-ol’ does more than increasing damage by 2.4% every 3.8 gameplay-hours.
edit: I just ate a super carby lunch and am falling asleep in my chair, so apologies if this rambled away into nonsense as it got longer and longer and longer. . .
I’m a fan of the multi-class approach in Titan Quest and Rift, because it offers insane flexibility and the opportunity to severely powergame/munchkin your character.
Thanks all! I am gonna stop cheer leading here but I am taking a bunch of notes from all your great feedback. Thank you! I will probably post my faves at some point as well but my views have changed due to some of the answers here. Thanks again folks this is a really great read.
Briefly: the RPG advancement system I hate the most?
Dutifully staggering my character down an entirely pre-set pathway, set down like the words of so many gods at the dawn of time by masters far more knowledgeable than sad, pitiful players like myself, grinding away to accrue enough experience points to unlock the next bland, predictable, immutable Number Increaser dujour on the finite pathway to the End of the Game.
If my actions and choices don’t matter at all, it’s not really an RPG, is it? It might be an excellent adventure game or action game or shooter or whatever, but to me, role-playing implies I have some choice in the role that I elect to play. Otherwise it’s just a glorified visual novel, perhaps with some especially convoluted quick-time events.
Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s just not an RPG in any meaningful sense of the word, at least so far as my brain sees it.
But improvement-by-use-and-by-use-we-mean-endless-grinding-like-I-dunno-fucking-jumping-up-and-down-the-whole-time-you’re-walking-between-quests-so-that-your-dodge-stat-is-high-enough-for-the-next-boss is easily the second worst.
Burning Wheel is slow, I agree. Mouseguard not so much, but the low fantasy setting does not give you cool level ups. Torchbearer is a nice mix of the Mouseguard skill advancement system with cooler skills and a narrative-tied old school class-level advancement system (you get XP by completing mostly narrative goals).
I don’t have strong preferences except that I’ve come to prefer flatter leveling curves and worlds in which lower-level creatures (e.g. goblins, whatever) can still pose a threat in the right circumstances or in sufficient numbers. I also don’t like the MMO style, artifact of gated/leveled zones, in which you have a Level 75 Gazelle that could kill the boss of a newbie dungeon. Put another way, a Level 100 Goblin is no longer a Goblin, he’s some kind of immortal Goblin Lord. I want creature types/difficulties to align properly, although that’s not really an advancement issue. But I do feel that experience-curve flatness/steepness ties into this to some degree.
I was tinkering with this, I should retrieve some of those notes…
In general, I was building a system that is old school mixed with Dark Souls.
In PnP skill based systems you have your adventure, check those skills you’ve successfully used, and at the end of the session you might roll OVER your skill. If successful you gain a little %.
The rolling over part is important because it creates a system where if the skill is low then it has more chances to grow fast, but when you get really high values then the improvements are rarer. And with a critical you can also go over 100% (useful for modifiers).
Layering this on top of something like Dark Souls means that you gain experience as a currency. In Dark Souls you can lose that currency, but when you spend it then it’s all determined.
My idea was to tinker with the possibility of spending that currency and still having to roll over that skill (then all this system would be automatized every time you rest at a campfire). Maybe with an explicit system that artificially offers a bonus every time a failed upgrade happens (known as “failstacks”). But there are many other parts to consider. You have to enable at least some mild farming, and probably respawning monsters. It’s all stuff tied to the type of game you’re making. But advancement like this has to be mostly hands-off, it constantly happens in the background while active attention has to go to more macroscopic systems. It has to matter, but it shouldn’t be the focus.
Then the idea was layering other classic systems on top of this. So instead of just having a skill that goes from 1 to 100, you’d also have special discrete actions that are gated by the skill value. So for example when you hit 70% you’d also unblock a special move with its own perks and uses. Something like a talent system tied to % skills (then you can also make it synergize directly with loot, with its own progress system and perks).
Actually the beta of Pathfinder is doing something similar as it is normalizing skill values, but then “gating” certain actions only if you invested into specific tiers.
In general the perfect recipe is a granular system that feeds progress with some frequency, plus some timed rewards, like gated skills activating at some point.
And then, the other fundamental ingredient, is that one path of progress isn’t good. You need to have various paths. Both independent and that influence each other. You shouldn’t monotonously focusing on one thing. There should be different goals and they all should move in concert even while you’re not specifically looking there. Improving a number of different things, even if incidentally, gives a nice positive feedback.
Also, this skill system solves the problem of use-based grinding. You only need to successfully use a skill once in a session to attempt an upgrade (or just flag the whole general area). So the simple act of repeating and grinding is discouraged. All this system needs is the “currency”. But the currency is one and shared by all skills. So you can redirect it however you want.
That bothered me to no end in City of Heroes. A rentacop from a later zone would defeat infinity number of eldritch monsters from a slightly earlier zone yet these are all part of the same city somehow. It’s not enough to gain new powers on a level-up, you also have to become bullet proof to earlier villains, even if being bullet-proof isn’t in your character concept.
I spent a bunch of time as a teenager poring over pen-and-paper RPG books and coming up with amazing(ly broken) combinations, but have almost completely lost interest in that sort of optimization problem. As @ArmandoPenblade noted, in computer RPGs that generally means you’re severely underpowered while waiting for the pieces to come together, or severely overpowered once everything is working, and either way you’re cheating yourself out of enjoying appropriately challenging battles. And in pen-and-paper games, it’s frustrating to have one super-optimized character outshining the rest of the party. I’d rather have the brain-bending choices exist primarily on the moment-to-moment tactical level rather than in intricate freeform character-building.
At this point, I am more in favor of discrete, chunky, mutually-exclusive choices that make an immediately noticeable impact. I don’t need to be getting a constant drip-feed of +3% here and there, as long as you make sure that the game is fun to play on its own.
And in keeping with that, I’ll note that I’ve largely drifted away from traditional RPGs altogether. Very few battle systems are well constructed enough to stay engaging for dozens of dozens of hours with incremental improvements to the same character build. Various flavors of roguelikes scratch the itch better by having each new character build last for a much more limited time, and tactics and action games often give a bit of the RPG advancement hit while being more interesting to engage with on a moment-to-moment level.
Oh, and on the discussion about verisimilitude in leveling and zones, I don’t personally give a fig about the world making logical sense as a place – the story and environment serve the gameplay. If a level 100 goblin is the best way to provide me a fun and interesting thing to fight, then bring it on!
Worldness vs. gameness, again.
For me, specifically as it relates to CRPGs, the worldness is actually part of the gameness. My standards in other genres are quite different.
Yeah…because Dark Souls isn’t a unique design. Nether is Fallout or Ultima Online. All of them are CHEAP COP OUTS by the DEV! Damn you FromSoft, Origin, and Black Isle…I mean Interplay!
I’ll probably get hate for this, but balance was never a high value factor in RPGs. I am 100% ok with wizards and clerics becoming overpowered in D&D. Balance is only important at a high level of play in a competitive space. RPGs don’t really exist here, nor do they even belong there AKA fuck balance. I’ll keep my Egyptian magic.
Not in the sense being discussed, no? (Well, I can’t be 100% sure about UO, never having touched it.) I mean, I don’t endorse the sentiment that classless is a copout, but Dark Souls and Fallout definitely don’t have character advancement systems that define really striking, distinct character types with bespoke powers and trappings, and I’m pretty sure UO doesn’t either. Hell, Dark Souls is all just stats and one of the biggest impacts that has is what gear you can equip and are most effective with.
Gotta disagree here. If you can build your character in a way that renders you noticeably less competent at the things the game is actually about than someone who’s done a bunch of math and minmaxed an optimal build, you’re probably not going to feel great about your time in the game. If there are choices that are dramatically less useful than others, the actual effective choice space is meaningfully diminished because most people aren’t going to spend their limited advancement options on the ones that don’t do very much. It’s only important to really tune out exploits and polish everything to a flat line in competition, but there’s more to balance than just a level playing field in PvP.
Every holiday season I return to my hometown and DM a certain 80s RPG for my two of my childhood friends and their kids. Last year or the year before, I changed the experience system.
Now all the characters level when the party completes a major objective, as determined by their choices and paced by me.
No need to track XP or even monsters killed. Works great, feels right. Only downside is I lose the standard way to reward exceptional play.