I think HRH was way before it's time as far as having a time based skill. You gain skill points as your player matures, and for those that want to grind, they can grind out for resources (food, minerals, ore, etc) while they are waiting for their next skill point.

It keeps things balanced, and with a little tweaking to your individual game, it could definitely help out a lot.

But as far as other ways to do it, mini-games haven't really been utilized too much on BYOND or anywhere for that matter.

No, that's stupid. That's grinding, with an extremely occasional random event. It's not eliminating the grind, nor is it making the grind any better.

Not really. The grind can be avoided by leveling only via quests, etc.

Ham Doctor wrote:

How important is it you see your progress via numbers and such? I have been thinking about making it so that while you can tell how wounded you are, you can't actually see the numbers which decide your stats.

I think this is how all games should start moving. In our game, Submerged, all of the stats are hidden. You will have a visual representation of how much damage you have had and so forth, but there will never be any numbers given to the client.

It keeps the focus on the GAME rather than the stats. I love this idea.

I had to just comment that Final Fantasy 6 had several side quests. Involving quests, items and even characters.

Well if you think of leveling through quests, that still seems like a grind.

1) You get quest.
2) You finish quest.
3) Gain experience.
4) Do it again.

Same concept as finding enemies to kill. No matter what you do it will still be a grind, the best way to make the grind better would be to make it interesting. I understand what Rapmaster was saying with the random events, which does introduce a nice bonus to certain aspects of game play. Although it is just the same random events over and over again.

If you look at hunting for example,

In a basic ORPG, you go out to the field find some randomly spawned and randomly moving enemies then click/press button to attack them. After they are dead, you loot whatever is dropped, then off to the next. Now if you made combat more interesting by adding in different attacks, combos, critical hits, chances to dodge, etc., just things to make combat with each enemy not seem the same. You would have to make everything balanced though, so that there isn't a 'best' attack etc. but have it so you can improve in certain places of combat.

With enemies have them have unique AI for different types of enemies. Take undead skeletons for example, they are made of bones and are probably resistant to some magic seeing how they are raised through some magical force. Using that knowledge you can make them more vulnerable to crushing attacks from hammers/maces and less vulnerable to magic. Things like arrows probably have a far less chance of affecting them (could go right through the rib cage!) and blade weapons can easily slip off the bone surface. Now being a skeleton by nature they are probably have a hard time walking without all those ligaments and muscles, even with the magic, they probably walk slower than most creatures. A resurrected skeleton probably only has one purpose as well, to protect whatever summoned it. So if they are protecting a necromancer, and you decide to attack said necromancer, the skeletons will probably have the instinct to rush to the necromancers aid.

Looting can also be made more interesting. Say you just killed a wild boar. Instead of just dropping boar tusks, boar meat, and boar hide you would need to have a knife or tool for extracting those thing from the corpse. Not only would this add an extra step for looting, but the player can also gain experience in the appropriate skill for this task.

Skills can have extra elements that make them more than just gain a level in the skill and you are done. You can have a system where gaining 5 levels in one skill may lower another skill by a level. At first you may think WTF? Look at it this way though, realistically if you spend a span of time learning one thing that requires thought (ie blacksmithing) you will probably become a little more sloppy somewhere else (like tailoring for example, can't thread those needles with charred calloused hands very easily).

These ideas are kind of vague, but the message I'm trying to get across is that you need to make the grind interesting. Come up with ideas to make it seem like every point of experience was actually a challenge to get, and required thinking instead of mindless button tapping.

If you need to write story to cover up your crappy game design, just write a book instead. Half-assed story is not a solution to a half-assed game.

The solution to the "grind" is the addition of new game elements which require a learning process in order to adopt them into your play. Learning is generally what is considered to be "fun".

It's not the fact that you grind, but HOW and WHY you grind. I found that I enjoy games with multiple things to grind rather than a straight-forward level race.

Games with trade skills and a story that provides quests or objectives are much more enjoyable than one that is purely about leveling. Allowing dungeons for certain levels along the way with story progression definitely catches interest, even if the story is far fetched. On the other hand having trade skills and limiting them enforces some sort of player interaction, which can also reduce the feeling of solitude. Allowing partying and having some group objectives that aren't required will also turn some of that grind into something more enjoyable.

I doubt there's any way to remove the grind from a game completely, otherwise there wouldn't be any progress. The main thing you want to focus on is allowing players multiple directions. This way when you actually start feeling the grind (or before you feel it), you can jump to something completely different for the time being.