LVL Headed

I was stuck in one place for too long, and I started to think about what the systems in computer Role Playing Games have to say about us as humans. In games like Fallout, you’re given points that you can distribute between intelligence, charisma, strength, and other such qualities. After you’ve created your character, there isn’t much you can do to heighten these statistics. Fallout makes sure to separate inherent characteristics from gained skills. You can become better with handguns, but you can’t become stronger.

Compare that with the Final Fantasy series (and most other jRPGs). A player’s intelligence, strength, speed, and so on goes up for every level they gain. A system like Fallout’s uses a mixed nature and nurture system, in which there are unchangeable traits, but skills that can be mastered. jRPGs like Final Fantasy go the pure nurture angle, wherein as the player goes on, they become stronger, more intellegent, get more charisma, and so on.

This is kind of interesting, but obvious enough. But this lead me to think about the level system in RPGs themselves. Is it really necessary anymore?

Levels to me seem to be a kind of shorthand, an easy way to calculate how strong the player should be after enough battles. But a system of levels usually just rewards “grinding,” or going out to fight random things in order to raise levels. Players see the best way to get through a game like Final Fantasy is to go outside a town, run around in circles and participate in random battles until they’ve leveled up to the point where the next boss is an easy target.

I’d like to see a little more thought go into these systems. I’d like to see a game which gets rid of levels on whole. My suggestion is to take each action the player can do (such as “Fight,” “Magic,” “Run”) and give these experience points. Each time a player uses that action, that action gains experience. And instead of adding up that experience to get to a new level, just use the amount of experience to calculate the strength of that skill.

You see what I’m saying?

Give experience to each action instead of the player, and you set up a new system of player growth. Instead of the player choosing new skill sets every level, the skill sets are chosen by what the player uses. If the player wants to be a magic user, they’ll have to exercise their skills with that magic. If they don’t use those skills after a long enough time, maybe they should start to deteriorate.  Deterioration of skills prevents grinding because it prevents a player from trying to level up that skill.  Too much work would be put into “leveling up” a skill that won’t stay leveled up for that long.

With the way computers can take over calculations for us, there’s no reason to use something like a level.  A game could make it so that the player sees the rewards for each action they take, and interesting gameplay could occur around a system that asks players to constantly exercise all of their skills.

Just a thought.