Dungeons and Dragons is a horrible, horrible, HORRIBLE model for character advancement. Even games BASED OFF OF Dungeons and Dragons don't use the utterly insane dicerolls it does. Hell, even games of Dungeons and Dragons itself tend not to use them.
I also find it laughable that you're striving for any semblance of balance when you're designing some players to arbitrarily be up to 6 times more powerful than others. And if you don't want my opinion on your stupid game design then you shouldn't share it. Sorry, but it's a public forum. | |
Honestly Garthor, when it comes to coding, I will take almost any advice you have to give. When it comes to gaming philosophy though, I will almost always disagree with you.
Notice I said almost though, because in this issue I actually agree with you. If two people put in the exact same amount of time into something, it should only be expected they would be pretty close to on par with each other ((Of course, not exactly so perhaps, natural variances and all)). You definitely should not have a system where two players can be playing on the same character for the same amount of time doing the same things, and have one possibly several times stronger than the other. | |
Agreed. No matter how skilled and grand you are, death should always be an imminent possibility.
You can be a lvl #.INF, but if you mess up, a smart lvl 1 should be able to kill you. | |
This philosophy would go well with harsh death penalties, so that people can zerg higher-level players with level 1 characters for the sole purpose of griefing them.
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"You definitely should not have a system where two players can be playing on the same character for the same amount of time doing the same things, and have one possibly several times stronger than the other."
So you basically agree with what he said? Baladins system allows for characters to be stupidly different in terms of power and the amount of time spent playing. A level 10 character that is unlucky and rolls 1 on stats every level up has 10 to stats by level 10. A lucky level 10 player on the other hand could have 60 to stats by level 10. The unlucky person by level 60 would only be as strong as the lucky level 10 player. (That does not take into account training points, which the lucky character would have a lot more of). A system that relies on luck to advanced character stats will always be horrible, and horribly hard if not impossible to balance. Anyway. My game uses stats that increase as they are used. The main difference is that stats can just as easily be decreased (permenantly) as they can be increased. Every single action you preform can in someway effect a stat, positively or negatively. Being poisoned for example has a chance of decreasing physical stats, having your brain eaten has a large chance of decreasing int, even walking into a closed door also has a (small) chance of decreasing int. But things like fighting increase physical stats, spellcasting increase magical stats, walking around while carrying heavy items increases str and stamina (but walking into water or down some stairs will decrease int and wis... Because neither is very smart, provided you don't want to sink like a brick or potentially fall down the stairs). The system might not be perfectly balanced, but you can't just repeat the same action over and over again, because most of the time it will have a negative effect on other stats. And the game is designed to encourage players to forget about their stats, as getting a single stat to 100 means doing the same thing some 25,000,000 times, which is going to feel a hell of a lot longer if you're not having fun doing so, and unless you are taking a risk, such as fighting monsters then lifting those weights all day to get stronger isn't going to have very good effects on your agi (muscles too big to move quickly), int (don't study = not smart) and cha (overly bulging muscles are ugly). So if you want to spend the next month in my game getting those god like muscles then feel free to do so, but it is your own fault when you find out you are slow, stupid and ugly as a result of that. | |
Two people can spend the same amount of time, doing the same thing, that doesn't mean they will progress at the same pace as one another. One person might encounter problems the other person might not. One person might not be as skilled at that thing as another person might be. That is what the system represents.
Both of us could be put into the same room, doing the same thing, that doesn't mean the results are going to come out the same all the time. Garthor, it isn't even your opinion I dislike, you are entitled to your opinion, it is how you like to dish it out. You could say, I don't like that, it is a bad idea. Instead, you like to insult people while you are doing it. If I just got done painting my house and you were walking down the street, looked at it and said something like "Good job idiot, your house looks like crap." I'd be at the very least trying to beat the crap out of you. Just because you are online doesn't mean you get a free license to be a prick. | |
I took part of the idea based off of D&D 3rd edition, where, a few stat builds are based on luck of the draw, and more then enough people still enjoy it. Actually, most of us hate that aspect. We just enjoy the game in spite of its flaws. | |
The Magic Man wrote:
So you basically agree with what he said? Yeah, I do. I phrased that reply weird, but I went back and rephrased it to make it obvious I for once actually agree with Garthor's criticism xD | |
"Two people can spend the same amount of time, doing the same thing, that doesn't mean they will progress at the same pace as one another. One person might encounter problems the other person might not. One person might not be as skilled at that thing as another person might be. That is what the system represents."
The only problem is that such a system doesn't represent what you want. It represents "If you're lucky you'l be strong, if not then sucks to be you!". True enough, not everyone is equal and some people progress at faster rates that others. But given time and effort most people can be just as good at something as someone else. If someone exercises and lifts weights everyday eventually they will get strong. No doubt about that, it might take different amounts of time and effort for different people, but eventually they will get strong. Your system doesn't allow for this, it says "IF you are lucky they you can get strong, if not then you'll never be as strong as someone who is lucky or you might just never be strong". Also, this is a game we are talking about. Realism is nice and all, but gameplay and game balance are much more important, especially in a multiplayer game. Seriously, who wants to play a game where they will never be as strong or good as another player regardless of how much effort they put into it (and the other player might not even put any effort into it). Why not just... Throw game balance out of the window, and make two character choices. "God" and "Not God", "God" can do everything, kills everything instantly and can never be killed, "Not God" can't do anything, can't kill anything and dies in one hit. The only difference you are doing is that you don't let people choose whether they want to be "God" or "Not God" (and there is a few more choices, such as "Sort of God" and "Sort of Not God"). Personally I'd rather play a game that is balanced because it is a lot more enjoyable than playing a game that regardless of what I do and what choices I make I will always be inferior to everyone else (sometimes by a lot). And I suspect a lot of people will feel the same way. Fair enough, it is your game, do what you want with it. But if you are making the game for OTHER PEOPLE to play then it helps if you actually take their opinions and what those other people would prefer into account. If you are just making the game and don't intend on people playing it then you should probably not go around telling people about your systems, because they probably aren't designed to be used or played in a real game and just wouldn't work. I have a friend who had a problem similar to this. He is a property developer, and would always develop properties in a way that he liked (even though he was only going to sell it). He didn't make much, if any profit doing so. Then he took an experts advise and started developing properties in a way that his target buyer would want (he would make family houses into houses that families could live in for example). Suprizingly he suddenly started making profit, a lot of profit at that! | |
Oh, so it's realism we're talking about now. You want your game to be realistic. Okay then, let me share a few ideas on how to make your game more realistic.
Start off with the easy one: permanent death. You die, you lose your character for good. Oh, but that's not realistic enough. If you die, you're permanently banned from the game. People don't come back to life as another person, no matter what some nutjobs say. So you're in a medieval fantasy setting, right? Okay then, 1 in 3 chance of childhood death. BAM! You're character's dead during the creation process. Permanent ban, too. We need realistic distances between things, too. If you want to travel anywhere, you need to spend a week in real life running to the north. You'd better hope you know where you're going! Combat is something we need to give consideration to, as well. The only characters that can use swords would be the nobility. That's a 1 in 100 chance or so, right there. And that's being generous. Everyone else gets to spend their entire character's career on a farm. Well, that's not fair. If you happen to be rabble, you have a good chance of being drafted. Being English (of course), this means you sit around in a line with longbows clicking "NOCK ARROW, LOOSE ARROW" over and over until you win or die. Super realistic! Oh, this reminds me, sleeping! A character is going to need to spend about 1/3 of their time sleeping. This means black screen, no interaction. Realism woo! Speaking of sleeping, that should also be the primary way to heal injuries. Well, not really sleeping, but being unconscious. If you get injured, you'll either quickly die, or you'll spend the next couple weeks unconscious, or barely conscious. When you wake up, you won't be able to move around much: you'll be weak, and you could just get sick. There's a better-than-even chance of just straight-up dying due to infection and what-have-you after that, too. Amputation would be a good solution, resulting in a character disabled for life. Oh, and it'll take about a month of real time sitting around in this state before you are even well enough to get out of bed for any length of time. Oh man. It's so realistic it can't not be good! | |
Never even bothered to read that whole post Garthor. But I already know what it pretty much says. Whatever.
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It done in Runescape (sortof), your skills get up depending on what you do. It still just creates farming farming and more farming
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The truth is, that we don't live in the past, so not many people would enjoy the harsh life that people used to have. (Not to say people back then enjoyed it either.)
Well, I think the main goal of a game should be to have fun. But, that's just my opinion. Leveling can be fun. If the entire game is based only on leveling, then of course it won't be that fun, because most people don't have fun when all they do is increase numbers all the time. It's the core mechanics of the game that determine exactly what the leveling entails. So, leveling or no leveling, it depends what is accomplished by the player throughout the game. Of course RPG's have leveling, as many people in this thread have explained, it shows character development, etc. I agree with the people that say it shouldn't be random how strong you are and players should be balanced. It's not very fun when you always get owned by everyone else... Anyways, the goal of the game and the gameplay determine whether it's fun, not just the leveling. The leveling is probably not that important, if you're actually doing something fun. Instead of having a feeling of, "I've finally reached level 10, now I have several more levels to go," it should be more like, "That was fun! Let's keep playing!" or "I've finally accomplished something!" Or I don't know, you figure it out, we all have opinions. | |
I both agree and disagree with this.
Its always good to have the idea of leveling up in a game because it introduces a challenge BUT when a game is 100% based on leveling up it gets boring. So if you include leveling up you have to draw the line somewhere. If you don't include it at all I sure hope you have something else to include as a challenge. | |
What you said is probably what I should have said from the start.
But when I refer to leveling up I refer to pure old-school crappy leveling up which most games still use, including byond games. BUT that does NOT mean I am against Character Development. On the contrary, thats what Im fighting for. Im trying to open people's minds to better types of Character Development, not just leveling up, since Leveling Up is the most archaic and boring form of Character Development. Leveling up is a type of Character Development. But its one of the worst and most unoriginal types. | |
This is the way I like to balance things. For instance, in the Lord of the Rings movies, all of the non-hobbit characters would be considered "epic-level" in D&D; they're the best of the best. Boromir is skilled enough to dodge an arrow headed straight for his face, Aragorn cuts an Uruk-hai chieftain bred for battle to pieces, Legolas can make a kill with every shot he looses, etc.
Even in spite of this, Boromir is fatally shot -- though he's so tough he keeps fighting in spite of the first two arrows -- Aragorn nearly dies during the final battle (only Sauron's defeat causes the troll to cancel the coup de grace), Faramir and his cadre charge a fortified position in a suicide mission and Faramir is shot and nearly slain, etc.