Y'know, a while back while I was playing DnD, I realized I'd gotten tired of using XP to track advancement. It seemed dumb to tally up numbers that meant nothing beyond how close you were to leveling up and getting shiny new stuff. Could you get that new stuff immediately? Of course not, you had to wait for... I don't know why, truth be told. I mean, anytime I asked people, they'd just shrug their shoulders and say "I don't know, it's just that way". I'd shrug my shoulders too, and keep attempting to make epic plots that didn't work.
Of course, leave it to Carpe to start asking questions and making it even more difficult for me to accept a system that makes no sense outside of its OD&D origins, where gold was XP, and that the gold was supposed to get you more items in the meantime until your character "got it" and leveled up. I mean, if you use XP in that way, it does make sense. You go into a dungeon, and get the most XP for getting the gold. This gold goes towards advancing your character and may then be used to buy better items, which will keep your character alive longer, allowing him to level up. See, that system makes sense, especially with D&D's origins as a dungeon raid. Since monsters didn't give as much XP and killed you significantly faster than gold you didn't want to fight them, which is why wandering monsters were a bad thing. So, in OD&D's context, XP made for a very tight and gripping game, as you attempted to get to the gold without dying a horrible death. Sometimes you succeeded, and sometimes you didn't.
So why do a lot of modern games (video games like Mass Effect included) have this XP system without tying it to wealth, like it was originally intended? If I had to guess, I'd say tradition. With D&D being the definitive RPG of the first 30 years of the hobby's life, most people grew up with this system and had it ingrained in them. It's just a case of "this is the way things have always been done". The problem with this thinking, of course, is that whenever you change the reward system in a game, you change the very way the game is played. The rest of the mechanics almost don't matter in comparison to this one rule. If your game has a good and clear resolution mechanic it will be incredible. If there isn't a clear rewards mechanic then why bother?
...which where I'm at with modern D&D and, to a lesser degree, with Pathfinder. Great. World of Darkness at least reduces the amount of XP, but it gives no clear answer to the problem, either. It's like the major RPGs we've attached ourselves to have no idea how to be designed or something, and have forgotten the very basic rule of gaming: the game is as good as the rewards given in it.
So, here's a question: is it possible for 4th edition and Pathfinder to have this style of play re-integrated with little trouble? Now that's an interesting question...
Getting more XP is the central goal of those games that you mentioned - because everything leads back to it. I want to complete my mission, get better gear, gain new abilities...but the system doesn't let me do them as interesting ends, for they quickly lead back to XP.
ReplyDeleteIt is a cyclical mindset the player is forced into. The only underlying statement that I see is "XP is inherently good". This is critically different from "character progression is good", though, because you can gain XP without any progression. New abilities and new numbers are not valid substitutes for genuine growth.
So, instead of XP, a character should either stay the same (The game is about how your character deals with their problems AS THEY ARE) or change in important and dynamic ways (The game is about changes in worldview, identity, friends, ambitions).
As unlikely as it seems, you can still have a dungeon raiding game without XP. Though the focus can no longer be killing creatures for gold and XP. For those who desperately love the semi-mindless release of killing hordes of things, they will have to do it for meaningful reasons now.
Maybe your mother was killed by trolls, and you have a decade of pent up hate to unleash. Maybe you were traumatized as a child and feel no emotion - you have a valid reason to coldheartedly do assassination jobs for money.
RPG players need to wake up and realize that their characters really don't have any reason whatsoever to be slaughtering hundreds of people and creatures. (At least 90% of them have no valid reason). What kind of world does that make sense in, anyway?
While those are all good points, I disagree. If I'm going to be playing a game I want to be rewarded for playing a game. A story-based gamed should have rewards for making an interesting story, making the reward twofold.
ReplyDeleteFor instance, if I the player make a character who has a decade's worth of anger because trolls killed my mother, I'd like to be able to make my story about successfully killing those trolls. The game should reward me for making those decisions in a way that will make my ability to control the narrative easier. Xp isn't good because there is no actual immediate reward; I've never met a gamer who seriously cared about XP as anything other than trying to get a reward that made no sense to be kept waiting.
Hmm,I must have explained myself badly, because I agree with you.
ReplyDeleteAs a player of console jRPGs (I know, not exactly the same thing -- even though I play the really old ones pretty much exclusively -- but bear with me), I think that 1) in a game where building up a character's strength is a major component xp and levels make sense, and 2) it wouldn't make much sense to get a stronger swinging arm for grabbing lots of loot any more than it would make sense to get a better sword simply for practicing that swinging arm enough. (It occurs to me that I'm not sure what all rewards come from loot and what from levels in a modern DnD type RPG [I've heard more about old DnD and about totally different RPGs], so maybe the whole issue here is getting that all mixed around?) Sure the typical console stat-building level system is usually exploitable (but that's not in itself the same thing as broken -- you shouldn't deliberately game a system and then complain that you didn't enjoy the way you played the game, at least not when the GM's a designer whose work is done and who can no longer step in to find ways to require more creativity when you game the system). But it basically works (for those of us who play sufficiently casually to enjoy it more or less as intended, even if seriously enough to get through a game that requires you spend time just building up your characters), because most of them have a decent grasp of what sort of rewards (mostly stronger skills, although sometimes spells) come with practice (xp from fighting) and which (mostly equipment, also spells in some games) from loot (gold found on slain monsters plus in treasure chests, equipment found the same), and because they deliberately set out to be games where taking the time to build up your characters is a major premise. You could conceivably create a console RPG that doesn't do that whatsoever -- but there'd be little to no point in random encounters and at that point it begins to look less like an RPG of any kind and more like an exploration/puzzle game a la Myst or Shadowgate (though admittedly the latter tends toward non sequitur at least as often as true puzzles... so not the best example -- maybe an example of why such games are challenging to design well). On the flip side, in a game where building up your character strengths isn't supposed to be what time is spent on... why have levels at all? As you've noted in another post, and as I believe Andy noted somewhere back on his blog discussing xp, it's a matter of what the game system is going to reward as much as how it's going to reward it.
ReplyDeleteOf course, I do love a good alternative to typical levels, whether of a build up your strengths based on which you use variety (when properly balanced this means that you have to be careful not to spam if you don't want one-sided characters), a build up strengths in terms of a non-stat-based system variety (say, finding and utilizing powerups in different combinations), or a variety where you have to learn how to play your strengths well without mechanics specifically for building them up. And likewise, not all of those are well suited to some games. Powerups are awesome in Super Metroid where you spend most of the game wandering back and forth across the planet looking for them and then have to fiddle around to learn all the ways you can use them, not so much in a game where your path is linear and the world is practically built so as to have your powerups used in/on it (actually, making equipment and world such that even from an in-game standpoint they seem designed for each other is something that's basically a cardinal sin of modern gaming with a few exceptions where it's decently, thoroughly, plausibly and sensibly explained in the storyline/setting/backstory itself... so maybe that's another matter). I could go on, but the point is that the same reasoning about why the game is the way it is has to come into play in RPGs that has to come into play anywhere else.