Learning on failure is actually brilliant, because the scale up for "harder to skill with higher level" is naturally build in, without needing special math or XP scaling.
Ahh, the smithing from Skyrim. Did you see the little comic where a pc is making daggers and is asked why. They answer "to make the best armor". The asker imagins it to be dragon bone armor, the highest tier in the game, and you need to grind your smithing to max or almost max to make it. But nope, the pc is making an armor out of daggers.
Not to mention casting a spell in one hand to turn health into magica (leveling alteration), while casting a spell in the other hand to turn magica into health (leveling restoration). Or just running down the road muffling yourself.
yea i think its a great mechanic, i cant believe i havent seen it done in a game yet. perhaps they think itll take away from the natural drive for victory
Oblivion: Step 1: crouch run into the wall inside the sleeping quarters in the capital's Mages' Guild. NPCs around you are sleeping so you're undetected. Step 2: Go get dinner. Step 3: Come back and enjoy your max Stealth
Literally what I did in Skyrim. And I was stealing gold and putting it back to level pickpocketing. To level my combat skills... well, it wasn't good times for my immortal horse 💀
Whenever I catch myself playing the game in grindy, un-fun ways like that, or using exploits, I just use console commands. Same result, much less time wasted. If the grind is fun, I'll keep doing it. But the minute it gets frustrating, it's not worth it.
@@shadowfragment Finding exploits is a reward in and of itself. You feel accomplished that you outsmarted the game. Though soon after you get bored and uninstall. What I am trying to say the less tempting and broken exploits the more likely the player will play the game for longer.
@@mattomwit "you do not understand" is a pretty insulting way to start a comment, you might want to try and avoid making arrogant assumptions about people when jumping into a conversation. Talk about yourself and what you know. Don't talk about the other person when you don't know anything about them.
You got me thinking about the good old days of MMOs. One place I did like skills was Ultima Online. The game was a total sandbox, so people could go anywhere. And being skill based rather than class or level based even players who were really low skilled could help out in really dangerous areas. You might fail your bandage skill 9 times out of 10, but with no levels, no party size limits, and no zone restrictions you were still contributing healing to your friends. The game handled some of the problems of skill based systems by limiting you to 700pts early in the game's life, spread across whatever skills you wanted to have. If you gained a skill past 700 you'd lose a skill point somewhere else. This lead to undesirable skill loss so they added a toggle to lock the skill to prevent it from changing. The result was a very flexible system where you could make your character any way you wanted with a great deal of flexibility. It worked well for UO's sandbox. The game had a relatively flat power curve compared to many later MMOs, there were few or no restrictions on where players could go or what they could attempt to do. Much of the economy was player driven so crafting and "RP" skills; cooking, tailoring, smithing, carpentry, were desirable for many players. UO has been mostly unique, and in it's context I thought skills worked quite well, playing to the game's strengths. Funny story about summoning monsters to grind skills; early on UO slimes would split in two when they took damage. Someone trapped one in a building and set up a script to cast a spell that dealt one point of damage. Several weeks later the guys at Origin were desperately trying to figure out what was consuming all of the server's resources and were flummoxed when they discovered a cabin in the woods with tens of thousands of slimes trapped inside.
I think UO had the perfect xp system. You earned on every use of the action (yes, every sword swing), but you couldn't just grind against a barrel. Well, you could until you hot about 30%, but that's very similar to real life. You soon max out your training resources and need to find tougher challenges to learn and improve. I think you got more XP when you failed, and the easier stuff gave less XP when completed until it gave none. I played on a bunch of custom shards, and I think one also only gave you XP when failing -- it was very similar. Plus I like that you could lock a skill, it wouldn't go down or up when you were training other things and at your 700 cap.
@@iwantagoodnameplease You're right. I don't remember exactly how it worked, but you had to keep going after tougher and tougher challenges, whether it was skeleton knights or flush fit blind joinery (carpentry) to achieve.
@@Frankmuddy Now that you mention them, I think skeleton knights were the top tier enemy you had to wail on to go from 99% to 100%? Nothing else would do it (or perhaps not as well). This was T2A expansions, so it probably all changed after that.
"so in this guide i will explain how to chease the lockpicking skill, ty throwing the chest underwater, setting yourself on fire, and taking out the torch in the room so the lvl 1 lock can fail enough to give you experience" - intrestingly enough, at some point that actaully wraps around to again becoming gameplay.
Indeed, I do think that this is not a problem at all. And it's still somewhat realistic. If you did that I bet you would learn from this experience as well.
If you were already always succeeding in normal situations, then this grind is only gonna help you in the situation you're mentioning. I mean, role playing as a thief who can pick locks while in the dark, on fire and the chest is underwater seems pretty cool
He's implicitly discouraging them. Saying otherwise doesn't mean he isn't. Though he draws from his experiences to explain why he thinks these are difficult and worse decisions to make. It's very reasonable advice from a well seasoned designer and programmer.
@@king_slimy8859 Except he explicitly said, "I'm not saying don't do this... but here are some pitfalls you will need to solve for." That doesn't sound like discouragement to me; just letting you know it's "not optimal" from his experience. And "not optimal" does not automatically translate to "bad".
I like the idea of the way Cyberpunk does it, an old-school XP system with points to distribute, but also a use-based skill system on the side. Sure, it's very video gamey, but it works well and feels fun to me. You get your main 'build' and develop your character with your stats and perk points, and you get a lot of small bonuses based on how you play the game, that improve upon your chosen playstyle.
I really like skill-based XP/skill levels when it's done right instead of character levels. Not that many games do it anymore, but one "new" game that I think does it very well is the survival rpg Project Zomboid, especially for its post-apocalypse setting, it makes sense, because your character before the zombie apocalypse might have never had skill like in Trapping, but since this makes sense for survival to improve this skill through your journey (if thats your choice ), it makes a lot of sense. Same with say its Fitness skill, if all you are doing is driving/focusing on using transport and not walking much in the world, you do not develop fitness skill much (there are various ways to increase it). I find it satisfying leveling skills and seeing my character grow stronger in certain dimensions, than simply "character levels" with a base poiwer increase to abilities or something
Reading through the replies and thinking about Tim's thoughts, I think sandboxes are where skill based systems do well. You're not following a story or a path of escalating challenge, so you don't need to have the kind of power curve that a game like Fallout or Skyrim encourages. Sandboxes can support non-combat skills in ways that other systems aren't as well suited for; Cooking or carpentry can be very important in a sandbox, but often don't make as much sense in a more combat oriented and plot oriented game. I suppose Kenshi would be another game to examine. Kenshi is a very open sandbox with a very definitive power curve where the characters start out pathetically weak and eventually become shonen protagonists (if they don't get eaten...). Since you can have anywhere from one to many (I ended up with over forty) characters the need to specialize is reduced. You can have your warriors and your scientists and your smiths and your farmers without being too restricted. The game gives the player tools to engage with the world in many ways - A stealth character might scout enemy defenses before the warriors go in. Or, I used my primary scout as a medevac; When a fighter was rendered unconscious, or my party was ambushed, my very fast, very hard to spot stealth character could dart in and carry people to safety.
I knew someone who stayed in a room summoning creatures to level up in oblivion. They went from level 1 to like level 25 sitting in a room grinding. Then they went outside and realized everything completely destroyed them because enemies scaled. And this was somewhat new back then, enemy scaling. He got so mad he wasted his time he just quit. lol
Kenshi is an example of skill based XP game which I really liked, specifically for its skill progression (among many other things the game has to offer). I think Kenshi's system works particularly well because, in that game, you're building up a whole tribe of specialized and sort-of-expendable characters in a build-your-own-story sandbox world, rather than a single hero or a party who are unique and central to the game's story and game-play. In Skyrim, arguably the best known skill based XP game in wich you play a hero character, the system is very easily exploitable. And it can be pretty enjoyable to exploit too, if that's how you want to get your fun from the game. Of course the player can self-impose a "fair" use of the system, if they REALLY want. But personally I never managed even a single play through of Skyrim in which I didn't exploit the skill based XP in some form or another, at some point, even when I tried. Thanks for your videos!
I really like Kenshi. I think the fact that one has to come up with ways to train characters in the skills they need is very cool, and lends a very unique feeling to the gameplay. The ability to decide that you'll send X and Y characters to the mines so they can level up strength by carrying rocks is fun.
kenshi is one of my top10 games i'll never play lol. it looks perfect, but also soooo overwhelming with all he variables. its a personal taste/psychology thing. maybe one day...
@@ince55ant You should try it out. It's a lot more straightforward then one might think when looking "from outside", especially because you can start playing with a single character, or a couple of them, while focusing on combat and stealing maybe (beware of the goats!!!), and then build up to a more base-building oriented game-play at a later moment, or in a subsequent play-through. The game gets better the more you explore its many features and mechanics, of course.
I made Kenshi! The main reason I went for skill based XP is that it's more organic and less micromanagement when you have numerous characters. In a single character game I would likely do it differently.
You could also argue a quest-based XP system encourages the player to do the bare minimum to finish content and not really engage with it properly. It's all up to the player if they're willing to shatter their immersion for efficiency in a single-player title. Like that old famous quote goes, "Players will always find a way to optimise the fun out of a game".
Oh man, I jumped everywhere I went in Oblivion to level acrobatics. That, and I remember one of the strategies early in Final Fantasy 2 was to fight your party members to level up stats.
The Elder Scrolls game are a great example of Tim's points. They've always had awkward levelling systems, to the point where most people consider it essential to get mods for Morrowind and Oblivion to make the levelling more approachable.
morrowind and oblivion summoning exploits were super fun though. i feel like real mages would do exactly that to practice, so im actually against blocking that sort of thing. just gotta find a way to make it fun.
Exactly what I did in The Discording Tales : You learn from failure, and more dramatic the failure (with a limit, which is when it's impossible for you to succeed anyway, then you just don't learn), the more XP towards that subskill. And in my system, all failures also lead to losses, and often literally painful. Each skill types (8) are tied to 8 usual kinds of ailments. So that when you fail you get hurt (whether it is fatigue from carrying, wounds from combat, frustration from persuasion or starvation from working for example) AND XP, and you then need (usually) healing to then continue gaining more XP. As such there are many divergent ways to heal many different types of pain, and it makes the whole system very varied.
This video really made me think about kenshi's leveling systems and xp. I loved the way it made you completely submerge your characters into their roles by training them in practical ways.
In Oblivion, I would jump constantly while healing myself (while not wounded) to raise my athletics and restoration while on the way to my next quest. Sneaking while running into a wall next to a sleeping NPC. Using speechcraft to piss off NPCs then giving them money to get their mood back up. I really love the idea of "you get better when you use it" Even back in Final Fantasy 2 I loved that system, but you did a great job at outlining all the issues here. The idea I've had for this is to track when the player uses a skill, but only give them XP from quests, and when they level up, they can only put points into skills they've actually used during that level. Of course, this would lead to a player just making sure they use each skill at least X times. There's always issues.
that first example sounds kinda fun. its like how fun movement systems make traversal more engaging. kinda like a rogue practicing knife tricks while on the road.
You have to be careful you don't end up with the attribute increase system from Morrowind / Oblivion, where your attribute bonuses when levelling up are simply better or worse depending on which skills you used - which leads to some of the most un-fun metagaming I've seen in any RPG. You could work around that with a more simple "you used it, so you can increase it" vs "you didn't use it, so you can't increase it" system, where the amount of use doesn't matter towards how much you can increase it.
the one big drawback you get with quest-based exp systems is that it requires the player to actually do quests. sometimes i just want to run off and live in the forest or something, you know? it puts a greater burden on quest design to give the player options theyll enjoy. though perhaps the separation of "base level" and "job level" in some rpgs like Ragnarok Online would allow for some interesting ways to mitigate that.
Was playing fallout 2 yesterday and I really like the system where you get general xp from every task that you do, but can you can upgrade whatever skill you want once you level up. You still have a situation where lockpicking give you pretty much a standard amount of xp regardless of difficulty (as far as I know) but it doesn't matter much in the end once you level up. It's why I think quests are a great way to give xp. That way you don't have to grind your way to leveling up a specific skill. Side note: Saw some pictures on Twitter from the Fallout TV show premiere and swear I saw you Tim. Hope you do a followup to the other video you did on your thoughts on fallout tv show. Must have been wild to see concepts you and the team thought up on the big screen with that kind of production value.
Decades later and I still think SPECIAL is one of the most rewarding character systems. Tags, perks, and the sheer amount of flexibility let me play with all kinds of fun builds. I still fondly remember soft-locking Fallout 2 when I punched some guy so hard he went sliding across the ground and never stopped.
These a great point when talking about Math Combat, where everything resolves in a math equation. A interesting thought came to mind whilst listening to this talk was "How interesting would be higher level skills being harder to use and having harder requirements" Example: Fireball needs more cast time, or needs different gestures/sign/reagents to use. Stealth require proper stealth equipment to trigger higher levels. Sword require proper timing on the swing press to get combos, things like this. When talking about turn based, first thing come to mind is Legend of Dragoon attack system. When talking about real time, games like Skyrim become way more interesting when saw through these lens. Imagine a melee combat that you have to time the press to execute different combos or powerfull swings. Very good video, thanks so much!
Y'know, it's funny - Oldschool Elder Scrolls pre-Oblivion *was* timing-based combat, but due to poor tutorialization they gained the reputation of being "The RPGs where you can't hit anything". Morrowind becomes a whole different experience once you understand that melee weapons have sweet-spot timings for maximum hit chance, instead of spamming LMB.
Very, very valid points! As someone who's tried to develop a skill-based (and HP-less) XP-system I ran into a lot of these problems. The encounter-scaling thing was the foremost one. Even if you had levels in some form, balancing a combat encounter around the possibility that someone made a character named "Silvertongue McGee" who's spent all their points on social skills, would negate these levels outright. Decoupling social skills from combat level is a possibility, but then you have even more systems to balance instead, because then you need a "social level" and a "combat level" in order to be able to balance both types of encounters. Skill-based XP also excludes any XP-rewards from finishing quests, unless you somehow flag the quest as the "lockpicking Quest", or what have you. So the purely altruistic quests that give no immediate reward would be harder to make compelling. I love the idea of skill-based XP, because it is one step further away from the classic D&D formula. The D100-system of Call of Cthulhu uses it to great effect, but those characters rarely make any true progression from session to session, they at best get incrementally better in the skills they are already good at. And then they die. Or go mad. Also, one huge problem is the ability to make one character be the best at everything. Take the Basic Role-Playing D100-system. There are no inherent limitations on characters getting 100 in everything, other than time, which makes for a really boring character in the end. No choice and no consequence. Skill atrophy, where you lower skills that have not been used for a while, is the only solution I can come up with for that, but that seems like a really punishing system.
I think skill atrophy is brilliant as long as it is limited. I'll never FORGET how to ride a bike, but I might get RUSTY, so maybe I lost 10% of my bicycle-riding skill points?
@@ClickToPreview Hmm, yes, I'm just afraid that it might lead to people playing catch-up to their skills. Or feeling compelled to always top some skills up. Maybe it could work if you had like a pool of skill points? Say a system that uses levels, and at level 1 you had a pool of x amount of points. If you use your character as a melee-fighter, every point gained in melee would be taken from your least used skill. Then every level you would get x-amount of more points added to a free pool. This pool would be used for further skill-ups until it was depleted and only then would points be subtracted from least used skills? Just spit-balling here, but this might work.
So I do GURPS-like skills progression. And I factor it thusly; each failure increases the cumulative chance that a skill will gain a point, but you perform the check for point increase on successes. Using the lock-pick example, each time you fail you learn something but once you succeed on that lock, all of those failures gel into knowledge and experience.
Hey. For dice pool systems (my favourite) I was thinking to utilize some throw formations. For example , thinking in d6+ context, the difficulty might be 13, but the player throws 10,9,9,8 ,5,5,5,3 - the 10 seems supported by the 9s and 8s so it is not a fluke but PC have figured something out. This can be used such the PC can decompose the difficult action into two easier ones, or gain Xp straight...
I like the way Elona did natural skill levelling - every skill, spell and stat had "potential" which acted as an experience multiplier that could range from 1% to 400%. When something goes up in level, its potential decreases, thus decreasing the efficiency of doing one thing over and over to increase one stat. To get more potential, the player could engage with the game in other ways, such as eating food. One of the ways to get food is to fish. Fishing is a perception-based skill, so raising it will also raise your effectiveness at ranged combat. Sleeping can also raise potential, and it's influenced by quality of the bed. This can encourage a player to seek out and buy or steal the best bed they can find, leading to more avenues of increasing skills.
One other thing about learning from failure that Tim forgot to mention is that it also gives you a really natural progression curve. When you are useless at a skill, you will fail almost all of the time, and so gain skill experience quickly. When you are good at a skill, you will fail far less often, and so gain experience more slowly.
That's just how normal experience and leveling works in most games. If you take on difficult challenges, you will get a lot of xp and level up fast. If you take on easy challenges you will get very few xp and level up slow.
Wow I’m really impressed! The amount of thoughts you give into the idea is surprising! I’ve been a programmer myself for a few years but have never been on the design side. There are so much to consider! Brought to the channel by the fallout show videos and I’m loving these game design videos already.
very interesting solution you've posed at the end. I have never thought of it like that before. This would absolutely give players even more incentive to go out and find everything. And it also makes them less likely to become overpowered, since they can't simply grind the skill from anywhere. very interesting.
Thanks for this. I'll write what I think I already wrote. Another solution to overusing skills is to prevent gaining more than X per Y period of game time where aging makes you become weaker. You can also add prices to increase the skills (like AD&D had rules at some point where you'd have to actually spend a lot of money to level up). A lot of the issues you have with skill levelling up didn't happen in a game like Darklands, where skill usage was pretty straightforward. It had the drawback of some skills (combat) getting up much faster than others. I like the idea of gaining xp when failing. This may lend to a quite organic system. If you're good, you could start difficult maneuvers (which are more likely to fail) not only because they give you an edge but also because it's the only way to get better, and you may fail because of hubris. That sounds cool.
Great vid. Old School Runescape is basically all of these issues taken to their extreme. It's perfectly normal and expected that you might cast the same AoE spell in a basement on some rats 10,000 times. The main issue I've always found with skill-based XP is that you invest so much effort into leveling the skill up, and then once you max it out suddenly there's no reason to ever use it again. For example: In Stardew Valley, hitting level 10 fishing is challenging. And when you hit level 10, you get a nice perk. But there's very little reason to keep fishing after you've maxed out the skill.
Tim really got me thinking once upon a time about critical failures. A critical failure in a skill based RPG leveling system that progresses skills based on failure could be like a critical success… a big XP dump based on certain perimeters. Or… maybe a critical failure is when you do not learn from failure, for whatever reason. Perhaps as a function of your character’s intelligence skill (assuming you built dedicated player stats into the game), the player character often learns from failure (higher intelligence) or more often doesn’t (low intelligence). Or, maybe that would be awful. But this was a FANTASTIC video that really got me thinking. I would love to mod Morrowind and make skills level on failure… thank you, Tim! Thought provoking!
First off: great video :). Kingdom Come: Deliverance is relying heavily on skill-based xp. I saw a video online of a guy who maxes out several stats in the prologue by punching respawning cows, so exactly what you're talking about with the rats :D It doesn't ruin the game for me personally because I just find it so ridiculous I'll never use it, but hey if someone wants to cheese the game that way more power to them. My point being yes it's a problem but it doesn't necessarily ruin the game or make EVERY player want to cheese it :) Another thought I have after watching is: the flipside is a system where you level up and then decide what to put points in. So e.g. you gain 5 levels just waving your sword and then put it into Alchemy. Feels very videogame-y. Personally I enjoy games with both extremes of point spending vs skill based but I'm curious if there's a golden mean (or goldilocks zone) between the two.
Ah my favorite topic yet again! You are spoiling us 😊 I have tried, unsuccessfully, to design a skill based xp system for a game like Arcanum that does not have the many pitfalls you have wisely presented in this video and the best i could do is a Skyrim-adjacent or similar to what you have described in the past where you skill usage is recorded and accumulated but you need some form of skill point or perk point obtained through a different process to truly tap into used skills and meaningfully improve them. It's a hard problem which I haven't seen solved in video games. Tabletop RPGs have done so, but they rely on common sense arbitrator (game master) which is surprising difficult to implement algorithmically (maybe AI could help here) or to support without a tremendous amount of dev effort painstakingly setting up each possible xp gain opportunity. Thank you for touching again on this topic! I really appreciate this wealth of design insights! Have a great night!
One idea I had a long time ago was similar to your xp-on-fail suggestion, but with an important change: You get XP inversely proportional to the chance that you got the result you would've expected to get. Sooo if you're a master locksmith and you fail picking a simple lock, you learn! Or if you are a newbie archer and happen to land a headshot from 100m away, you learn! And on the contrary, if you're a master locksmith and pick a simple lock successfully.. clearly you don't learn anything. Neither do you learn if you try to pick your first lock and it's a super duper master lock and you fail.
I think skill based xp is a great thing to have, but hard to balance because is very exploitable, Kenshi is a great example, every player will be exploiting skills as soon as they become familiarized with the game, max speeding the game and crouching everywhere, carring heavy stones everywhere to boost strenght, kidnaping a boss to then cut their limbs off so you can boost sword skill using a really bad sword and giving them a lot of armor, heal them and repeat. I love the fact that you can do that, but again, is unbalanced and exploitable. In project Zomboid it feels really natural at the beginning and later becomes a never ending grind. So yeah, hard to balance, kingdome come deliverance does a decent job at it in some aspects, since combat is player skill based you won't become a god at it that easy, so it feels natural, but again, horse mounted combat is OP so you can exploit it literally as soon as your get out of the starting area, stealth becomes dumb really quick, and so on. But even it has a lot of problems, I think is really fun.
Very insightful! EXP on failure is interesting, a few tabletop games do this to my knowledge. A few open ended thoughts: 1. What about skills that aren’t binary success or failure? E.g. jump height, run speed, etc. You might need other heuristics to determine EXP gain. 2. Mechanics don’t necessarily dictate player behavior as much as presentation. Simple countermeasures can be enough for most players (e.g. stale hits in Smash Bros). You could delay XP rewards until later, so that actions and rewards are somewhat disassociated (e.g. end-of-day level up in FFXV). I’d be interested to hear counter-arguments to this. 3. More involved math can do a lot while feeling subtle. Maybe there are equations such that you have to level up both jumping and running to maximize either one. Or maybe you give skills “exhaustion” that limits what you can do in a day. The point is, not everything has to be a “discrete state”, and instead “continuous values” can nudge behavior more gracefully. The flip side is, if it’s sufficiently complicated, you can’t make success dependent on the player’s knowledge of the system - the beauty of skill-based EXP is that players don’t necessarily have to think about it. You can also just explain the behavior in basic terms, no LaTeX equations necessary. 4. You can always provide more efficient means of leveling a skill to prevent unfun power leveling. Maybe there’s a dojo you can train at to increase melee combat faster than you would slaying rats. 5. Player choice is at the heart of the problem. By tying the choice to something the player _does_, we fundamentally change the way the decision is made. Because the choice is no longer _independent_, there will always be a dead-weight-loss to either the desired skill to level OR the player’s behavior. I’m not convinced it’s possible to align both at every given moment. The question is, what do we gain in exchange for this loss? To me, it’s removing tedious decisions from a game that doesn’t need them - but maybe there are other advantages worth exploring.
I think limiting progression of skill-based XP based on an overarching Character Level that is tied directly to finished game content is the way to go. If I'm Level 1, maybe I can only increase my lockpicking skill up to 10. To get to Level 2, I have to complete a certain amount of content (main quests, side quests, etc.), and THEN I can continue to increase my lockpicking from 10 to 20, etc. As long as the player understands how this works from the start, they'll stop themselves from trying to power level and micromanage and just enjoy THE GAME presented to them.
I love skill based games where I’m not forced to play the main story to progress, not sure why. There’s something satisfying levelling up by exploring and getting lost in a world. However, I find many skill based games don’t handle it well as you say, e.g. OSRS has massive guides for efficient levelling otherwise you’re wasting time, Morrowind can be tedious until you level up combat a fair bit, with some skills being hard and slow to level, and so on. I think one way you can somewhat mitigate is a hybrid approach, have “greys” (low lvl mobs/objects/locks) that provide zero xp to eliminate grind, these greys increase as your combat/utility skill increase, then combine that with a skill reward system , the obvious downsides being the time spent ensuring the world provides enough content for the entire level range, spreadsheeting and/or AI could help
Hope you had fun at the premiere! (Saw the group photo online) Would love a video about it. Currently playing Oblivion, and yeah I just cast spells on myself while listening to audio books to level up.
Good Morning Tim I know this channel is primarily about video games. But would you consider a video about your experience playing Pen&Paper Rpgs and how those can be used to practice storytelling and design if you have any experience with doing this in particular. Thanks for being you :)
That's an elegant solution, also mimics real life learning works. Easy to get a general understanding of a subject, but you can only progress if you continue to challenge yourself.
Skyrim comes to mind. When the player plays along, it works somewhat fine. When the player wants to cheat, he easily can. Also there is this boundless iron dagger smithing thing, the alchemy spamming thing, the enchant the best thing using the smallest soul gem on iron daggers thing. Oh and auto-walking towards a wall while close to several NPCs, the repeated casting of spells out of combat. I am sure it's all solvable with not much effort, but for the player it's tedious. Bethesda simply doesn't care about polishing Skyrim - even after bringing out several expansions. Anyway, Skyrim is an example of how to do it and how not to do it.
As someone who heavily prefers skill systems and plan on making my own, I absolutely love this video. Tim is a straight up game making professor. It's crazy that we get this for free. The role of being a critic/naysayer, aka someone who says, "Okay if you want to do this these are the obstacles" is such an important role that most designers have to play with themselves. It's great to hear this from a seasoned vet who knows his stuff. At the end of the day skill based XP may be tougher to implement while not be exploitable, but in the end creates a system that I think is funner and allows the player a ton of freedom. Obviously not always the case, nor is it always mutually exclusive from quest based XP, but overall I really prefer it. Thanks so much for making this video Tim!
Hi Tim. I was just wondering if you're going to talk about the Fallout TV series as it is coming out very soon. How does it feel to see your original game in this medium? Perhaps you can talk about it after a few episodes. If I remember correctly you talked about it briefly quite a while back; I seem to recall you were planning on watching it. Forgive me if I misspeak. Also a bonus question: if, let's say you wanted to, and you had the means to make a Fallout movie or TV series, would you base it on Fallout 1 or would you prefer make a new story? I would definitely like to see some Fallout characters in live action, perhaps Richard Dean Anderson as Killian? One thing I hope is that the TV series creators took at least some inspiration from the original game and not just Bethesda's; not that I have anything against 3 and 4.
Another problem with use-based skills is that some skills are more fun to actually use regularly than others. Using combat skills is generally fun (if combat is well-designed), so you probably won't mind using those a lot, but generally something like lockpicking isn't so fun that you'd actually want to pick every single door in a town because you enjoy it - but use-based skills might encourage or even require you to do just that. Same problem applies if you grant more standard XP for such behaviours, of course. You can somewhat work around that by not having too many places where you can use a skill "uselessly" like this. Maybe only allow picking locks on chests in dungeons, instead of every door in town.
+1 This is the worse thing about this design choice Imo. Fighting 100s of enemies in Skyrim is fun. Creating 100s of items from a menu (ahem... steel daggers) not so much.
@@UlissesSampaio i agree leveling smithing or enchanting is not fun in skyrim , tho it could be solved by being able to make rare metal stuff early on but a little less op to make it much better you have to improve it through repairing it after combat ( as combat is most people do ) , more you repair it , more xp you get for particular class of armor and more you can upgrade it by making little adjustments with ingots. Or just make specialized smith trainers who train you the perk you for a lot of gold.
@@yourstruly5013 this is an interesting idea how to improve the system. You could also incorporate enchanting or smithing into actual gameplay mechanics. For example you add ability to sharpen weapon to deal a little more damage or have higher chance for critical before or during the fight. The bonus would be temporary and process of sharpening would immobilize the character in place. Similar could be applied to enchanting. For example you have temporary enchant you can cast on weapon or armor. Though that is exactly the same as just using spells. Maybe using enchant that allows for casting spells cheaper or having a chance for not using mana.
There's one other big issue with skill-based systems that Tim didn't mention here: they can lack meaningful player choices. With a more standard XP-based system, a player generally gets to make interesting choices when they level up, picking which skills to increase. If your entire game is skill-use based, and especially if it has no levels, then you don't have interesting progression choices to make any more. It's not an insurmountable problem, as you can instead offer something like perks when levelling up (Skyrim does this), but it's still a potential pitfall to bear in mind.
Hmm, *conceptually* I'd say this can be shored-up by being a hybrid "Class and Skill" system like old Elder Scrolls, where non-class skills level at an XP penalty - The flaw of course is that it frontloads all the character-building choices and renders characters perhaps a bit too rigid.
You can have levels in skills, and choice of perk when levelling up a skill (e.g. you increase your sword skill, do you choose the finesse perk that gives you extra hit chance if you have high dex, or the brute perk that lowers hit chance but increases damage).
You do have a choice. With skill-based XP it's just passive. You gain XP by playing in your own playstyle. Whereas a standard XP-based system is more active, you get a Level Up and choose a skill etc. and you shape your playstyle with that. The problem here is of course that you can't experiment, because the standard XP-based systems are always "choose first, feel the result afterwards" while the skill-based XP approach is the other way around. You're playing the way you want and get rewards. This entirely kills problems like "you've skilled the wrong stuff, create a new character or you'll have a hard time finishing the game" or "the endboss has a weakness against magic" which means that you'll have a hard time if you're playing a fighter etc. Reskilling would be a solution but makes every decision meaningless.
Great video. Had a kinda funny thought from the idea of learning more from failure. The simplest skill-based XP system: literally make the game require decision making that the player can learn from. They'll learn more from the things they can learn more from, and not at all from things they already know how to do. No XP bar, no code. They learn nothing from hiding in a bush near an NPC, so no progression occurs. But if they're watching to learn his route, they learn his route. Bam, instant skill-based XP perfection. xD
One thing I think would be fun in a classic party-based RPG is to have some exploration focused mechanics. Your travels help create roads between towns. Fighting monsters in the area helps make the roads safer (and more established). Kinda like a party-based RPG approach to how your civilization builds up in Civ. It's not really related to the video topic, and also I'm pretty sure somebody's already done this, so I'd be interested in knowing who has if so. Related to the video topic, do you prefer more specialized skills, or a broader skill that covers a set of things that might fight an archetype? Closest thing I can think of is the Divinity Original Sin games, where you have a thievery skill set that combines lockpicking, stealing, and stealth. I can see benefits to both approaches, but I'm curious what Tim's take is.
Love your videos, Tim! Have you ever played RuneScape? I’ve heard you talk about WOW, and RS was a lot of people’s gateway mmorpg! RuneScape is 100% skill based xp and it’s one of the things I love about the game!
I really wish there was a time machine so we could send this video to the Bethesda developers _before_ they created the cheesefest that are the Elder Scrolls games. Was watching this and realizing almost every point raised was something the Bethesda developers either ignored or failed to address correctly. Great video Tim! Quick question if you happen to see this - I love the idea of gaining XP from failed skill checks - do you think it would be an improvement to tie that to some sort of Intelligence stat if one is present? Specifically thinking the XP from failures would itself rely on an Intelligence stat, and at low values you might or might not gain XP from the every failure. Obviously the higher the INT stat, the more likelihood to learn from failure and maybe more XP gained for that skill?
9:22 Counter question. Is it a problem, even in game lore, that a character who decides to spend a lot of time practicing one specific skill, like casting fireball, gains more experience in that regard? Sure, they are annihilating a wall, instead of going adventuring, but that's their choice to spend extra time practicing. Works the same in real life. The issue arises though, if there is supposed to be a sense of urgency. "the army of lord puppykiller is approaching the city!" "Nah, I'll deal with it after I finish my PhD in fireball"
I think the whole point was the problems that arise on the meta level, in terms of how the player interacts with the game. Yes, even though skill-based xp may make more sense in-game (from the point of game lore practicing on a wall is actually MORE sound than only levelling fireball when you deliver a love letter to another side of town), is it better in terms of what player experiences? I think it's very easy to argue no, besides everybody can have a different take and the situations can be very different. Like, it could be considered very, very immersion breaking that a 22 y.o. self-insert character killed 45 chickens in 1.5 days with fire magic and now not just has a PhD in it but can now defeat Elder Dragon Wizard Gods with it. Like, I'd probably take the love letter delivery way at this point. Bonus points if there's a perk to overcome fire immunity with fireball and now you can kill Elder Dragon Wizard FIRE God who is the main villain
@@alexanderabramov2719 Here is the difference between fireballing the wall and the love letter. The love letter is to a fair maiden that whole town adores and the delivery has to be stopped at all cost. You as a player have to talk your way out of fire ball your way out of that situation and any other person who wants to stop that letter from reaching it's destination. You get curious as to why everyone is so hell bent on stopping the delivery. You open the letter and it turns out that it is not a love letter but a sad message about ladys father death and an information about the fortune that he left for his daughter. Someone is trying to stop you from passing that information to her. Why was the message sent disguised as a love letter? Can she not get that information otherwise? Is it impossible to pass the message verbally? Is she maybe in danger of her surrounding knowing this information? Do you reach out to the lady? Do you reach out to the people who try to stop you and investigate? Maybe try to gain their favor in order to join them? Maybe you intent to join them and destroy the organization from within or take the treasure for yourself?
Great video mate. Even if they manage to solve all these issues (never seen anyone do that or even come remotely close) that time should have been spent else where (making more options in quest outcomes for example).
I've been playing CDDA on and off for some years. Its interesting to observe how their skill-based system was evolving over time. Initially there were skills, each with its own xp bar as you've said. You could raise them by reading books and by using them. This also lead to players figuring out easiest (or least time consuming) ways to grind them to a certain level. Raising fabrication from 0 to 1 required crafting and "disassembling" weapon "rock in a sock" multiple times. If using a skill is too easy for a character it doesn't give any skill xp. Then it was deemed that reading books shouldn't magically give you an ability to do something and now every skill has two xp bars: theoretical and practical. Theoretical unlocks recipe knowledge and speeds up gain of practical skill. If practical raises first it raises theoretical skill with it. Then this was also deemed not convoluted enough and proficiencies were introduced. Now if you craft a chainmail you use a fabrication skill but if you don't have a blacksmithing proficiency you'll receive various penalties: you're more likely to fail and using a skill will take much more time. To raise proficiency level you need to do proficiency-associated action. This simultaneously fixed "rock in a sock" problem and made it worse. Now you're not grinding single action. You're grinding many of them. To somewhat mitigate new issues "Training" recipes were introduced: if you want to raise fabrication to a certain low level and practice carving proficiency you can just sit practice it for an hour, consuming planks and producing wood splinters. More convoluted practice will require more convoluted ingredients. Overall I like the game but its a very messy skill system. Its an interesting system. But its far from ideal. In my opinion this kind of system is better used in any colony sim game like RimWorld where you control more than one character. Then you can have a dedicated miner who mines all day and specializes in mining more and more. And you can have a chief who cooks all day. But if chief is ill somebody else will have to step in, creating interesting scenarios.
Another interesting xp-gain alternative is varying it based on the difficulty of the challenge/encounter. In Kenshi, you get much more xp fighting opponents stronger than you, and hardly any for opponents weaker than you. When other parts of the game's design are considered it has some quirks: a common grinding method is just kidnapping a strong NPC (far easier than it initially sounds), giving them the weakest equipment, and forcing them to fight your characters to skyrocket through skill levels. That kind of low-risk grinding sorta defeats the purpose of what the game was trying to do in the first place.
I havn't played many skill based level system games (Daggerfall -> Skyrim, Kenshi and Final Fantasy 2 (sorta) is what comes up in my head ATM). They are awfully balanced and easy to exploit. Despite that, I have fun progressing through them (except FF2). I think exploiting the games system or not depends on the player in the end. And I think choosing major/minor skills and trainers was a good implication on the TES games to tackle some of the problems, becaus those Speech/Mercantile skills were awfull to level up on your own, but paying a master of the craft to train you made it bearable (and made gold more important). Kinda sad they removed the limit how often they could train you in Oblivion/Skyrim, but also understandable.
Ah good old skill based xp. Basically Runequest, Elric, Stormbringer, Call of Cthulu, all those good old Avallon Hill games that all used the same system really. One important consideration for skill based progression is whether you allow failures to progress the skill (learning from your mistakes) or if you only allow success to improve the skill. If it's success only then skills can be painfully slow to improve at lowever levels but might escalate later on (unless the increments required for progress also increase with every skill level).
Learning from failure: me, failing to block a single blow, and my infinite healers. Learning from failure 2: me, using lowest quality gear imaginably. Learning from failure 3: stepping on mines, purposely.
Skill-based XP system I really like: Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. It's a roguelike, but you pick skills to train that impact things in different ways. Like Fighting gives you more HP and a small accuracy boost to physical attacks. A specific weapon skill type increases your swing speed, and there are cutoff points for stronger/heavier types within that weapon category (i.e. a Greatsword requires way more Long Blades skill than a Longsword). Armor skills both increase your defenses and also help reduce/remove spell failures for casting in certain armor. Spellcasting skills reduce spell failure/miscasts and increase spell power, and the general spellcasting skill gives more MP. You still have levels, which mostly determine access to things like stronger spells, but also give you a choice of stat bonuses every 3rd level. Plus some of the different species you can play as gain new abilities at different levels. You can also "borrow" XP from some skills to help with another, particularly with weapon skills. Like the Axes skill cross-trains with Maces, so if you suddenly find a way better mace than your current axe, you aren't starting over from scratch even if you've been training axes exclusively.
I feel like interesting way could be having skill-based XP intertwined with quests/scenarios. Like leveling up stealth in such games is always touchy point, because generally it promotes violence to level it up, which is isn't always what players seeks, but if you have some quest or objective that can be done in multiple ways, reward player with way-bound XP, but also take into account potential failures to reward not for the fact, but based on progress. Like if player needs to get to third floor of a building, acquire something and leave, if he manages to get up-top while undetected but gets caught and resorts to violence, after completion still reward player with part of that stealth bonus XP for making some progress this way. That's certainly very unrefined thought and would require great amount of thorough thinking and designing (with potentially some intricate programming later), but hey, that's the essence of gamedev and why we are here.
Colony Ship does something like that. You may for instance solve a quest by either fighting, persuading or sneaking around. This will give you a given amount of learning points to the skill(s) you've been using to solve that quest. The drawback is, to make it work, you have to prevent either killing the enemies or gaining xp from killing them if you already did the quest by sneaking around for instance. CS prevents killing enemies you talked your way around or snuck by (at least in most quests, there's one I'm not sure about sneaking then attacking).
Age of Decadence dealt with this issue in the best way possible. Stats, including hitpoints are mostly permanent (you can increase them up to two times but only on certain playthroughs). You learn by doing, i.e., if you win a fight you get combat skill points. If you perform a civic action, you get civic skill points. If you finish quest, you get general skill points that you can allocate both to combat and civic skills. Truly a great system and an amazing game. If you haven't had the opportunity to check it out, I highly encourage it!
Is this a shot at Daggerfall, Tim? The best fantasy life simulator ever made? :D I loved the leveling system of Daggerfall, because you could imagine that you would go into woods and train on a tree to improve you skill. Or maybe take a room in an Inn and "study magic" all the time. However there were problems when raising other skills like lockpicking and stealth, because they would get you in trouble a lot. I think though in Daggerfall it was a good experience. I would have loved to have "training dummies" rather than simply throwing the sword into the air. I think for a modern way to incorporate "use to raise skill" you could set a constraint where you are only allowed to raise a skill when you have used it x amounts of time that level. It never made sense to me that you get XP for talking and put it all into "energy levels". I think Project Zomboid also has a "Use skill to improve it" mechanic and I think it matches the core game loop perfectly, because you actually have to be aware of zombies at all times and training is actually a real risk if you are not aware enough :D
I really like thinking about this stuff, it's an obsession of mine to make a really elegant system like this. I think Runescape has a lot of elegant solutions to these problems. Every skill deliberately is associated with a gameplay loop designed for your level, there aren't vague skills like 'speech' or 'stealth'. It rewards xp based on the amount of xp the activity gives, which incentivises you to seek harder challenges as you get better. Failure gives no xp though, which can feel bad, and the xp to level goes up exponentially to compensate for higher rewards, which gets ridiculous, like when getting to level 93 is half the xp you need to get to 100. also, many skills give resources you can use to train other skills, so after you catch fish, you can cook them with the logs you got from woodcutting.
I absolutely LOVE skill-based design in RPGs. I like the idea of getting better at things you do, and naturally shaping your character by your own actions. So I also love this video, it helps me work through some of the roadblocks inherent in that path, and reflect on games like Kenshi and Elder Scrolls that have put so much thought in it themselves. But as you pointed out, certain things require a lot of care to make the game a more enjoyable experience. I would argue there's no reason to try and block min-maxing and power-leveling cheese strategies, since that is what's fun for some people, but it greatly relies on casual players being able to enjoy the natural progression without feeling tempted or pressured to cheese. I think Kenshi does that very well, so I'll probably go play it some more on my next day off and think about these things.
You can reduce the cheesing by limiting any skill's ability to get better per Character Level, and tie Character Level to a certain amount of finished game content.
@@ClickToPreview personally, im not a fan of arbitrary limits like that. it doesnt feel intuitive or immersive for the player to hit a cap out of nowhere because they havent gotten far enough in the story. in open-ended games like Kenshi, its entirely untenable due to the overall lack of structure. you could probably get away with it in games with set paths or story steps, but it would still feel like a very rigid transition. itd be more productive to do the reverse- try tying story content to player level instead. scale major quests and story stages based on how strong the player is. if they wanna cheese, they can still get a challenge from the story. if they wanna play casually, the story will match it. its more work to distill everything down to a formula like that, but it helps in the long run to ensure everyone has a similar experience with the main questlines. but the overall best approach is still probably to address each skill's progression individually and decide whether or not cheesing is a problem and what can be done about it.
@@Anubis1101 I see your point regarding something more open ended, I just feel like if those gated skill caps each felt like they were on the verge of “power leveling”, and not too rigid and restrictive feeling, you could appease those kinds of players while also leading them to other satisfying content to complete as well. Idk, heck I’m just out here spitballing!
@@ClickToPreview nah thats great! never let anyone tell you its bad to share your ideas about game design, and never let the predisposed toxicity of internet discourse cast a shadow on real human interaction. ill never think less of someone for trying to work out a problem, so spitball away! anyway, i see your point and think its an interesting way of approaching it. i think there may be a way to make a game where that works out, like one thats on such a grand scale that normal players would never hit that cap or feel restrained by it, and even the min-maxers would find it satisfying to finally break through that boundary into the next 'tier' of the game.
Tim, don't know if you'll see this but just wanted to thank you for this channel. So much negativity and things happening in the industry that are just upsetting. I know when that gets exhausting, I can come here and listen to a genuine down to earth dude just take about games and no bs
Bad thing about quest based xp progression is the points distribution after the fact. You can slay everyone to finish the quest and then put points into reading, swimming ... Skill based feels more natural. If you do something, you get better at it.
Though it forces people to grind which imo is not very fun. Like when I wanted a cool perk in skyrim and had to grind a skill that was way bad compared to my main ones by doing repetitive stuff (e.g craft 100s of steel daggers while I had high tier equipment already)
@@UlissesSampaio There are flaws to every system. My personal preference is skill based over quest based. In quest based you grind side quest so that the main quest or some quest with stat check is easier to do ( E.g you shoot 20 rats and increase bartering, so that you can take a free weapon of trader with skill check). In skill based... you grind a skill until it's at the level you need it to be.
@@UlissesSampaio That can be solved by perks not gated behind a skill level and but also you want a cool perk that is only a high level player is supposed to have , you gotta grind either way.
You've highlighted my main problem with the way Skyrim does things. Making infinity iron daggers. One of the many reasons I've always preferred Fallout. I'm very glad that at least when Bethesda adopted, they did keep the standard xp system that goes into decision based character building, rather than adopting the way they do it for elder scrolls.
The biggest issue I have with failure-based skill increases is with how that interacts with combat specifically. You can apply the same method of questioning onto what counts as a "failure" as what counts as a use of the skill in the first place. Does combat EXP just function differently, where you only gain combat exp on kills? Does this incentivize going around and killing everyone? Does it make sense for a game to have two different skill progression tracks? If you try to put in exp on failure, then in combat, are people going to deliberately hamstring their own effectiveness and use suboptimal weapons or "intentionally miss" in order to gain exp? Do you gain exp per missed attack, or for every attack that gets blocked? Do you have to be aiming at something and then randomly miss - aka are we creating a Morrowind style situation where you're both required to aim but ALSO you have a random chance of spontaneous failure beyond your own control? And even beyond combat you KNOW people are going to create some degenerate self-restriction or debuff that makes them terrible at something so they can grind at it, constantly failing and gaining exp. Is there going to be a limit to how many times you can fail at something? Do you gain more or less exp for failing something far above your skill level? Are there *always* consequences for failure? Because if I can keep smashing my picks against a master lockpick while getting drunk enough to forget how to pick locks, and trying something difficult gives more exp than trying something easy, then the game is rewarding me for finding ways to make myself weaker. If you get more exp for failing at something you have a high chance of success at, then you suffer emotional whiplash between players who want to fail to get exp seeing success as locking them out of their personal win condition. Player mentality is insane when it comes to leveling up, and with optimization culture being the default norm for many, MANY players, if you create a system where you gain exp if you fail you are paradoxically incentivizing people to figure out the safest and most efficient ways to fail until they max out before actually playing the game. I agree that these players will be ruining the experience for themselves, but surely it has to be a consideration. TL:DR; Skill based XP systems are really cool but the playerbase will ALWAYS break them, and once broken, that then becomes the "recommended" way to play your game for many players, even if it ruins all the fun of your game in the first place.
An ARPG that had a 'skill' based growth system is Dungeon Siege 1 & 2 with their weapons and magic. DS2 also had a perks locked behind certain breakpoints for their skill levels that allow one to mix and match and create their own class
Looks like you were hanging out with Brian Fargo, Todd Howard, etc., at the premiere of the new Fallout show! ☢ We'd love to hear your thoughts on that event, your interactions with people there, the show itself, and anything else related to it. 👍 I'm sure the show won't 100% please all Fallout fans, but it's getting good reviews and I look forward to checking it out.
Another approach to skill-based progression (IIRC from Basic Roleplaying did something like this) is to track successes, and upon reaching the requisite number of successes (let's say equal to the current skill value), roll percentile. If the percentile roll is over the skill value, the skill goes up by one and the "bar" resets to the new value. If the roll is under, the check happens again after a number of subsequent successes (say, 25% of the skill's value). This allows lower value skills to advance quickly, while progression slows at higher levels.
Very thought provoking discussion. It prompted me to think maybe skill XP should be awarded on Fail (learning from your mistakes) - or maybe near-Success - rather than on Success. This would also have the benefit that skill gain would naturally taper off.
Kenshi has some very interesting answers to some of these questions as a sandbox RPG with a skill system. Raising your Toughness and HP is a system of rewarding failure. You have to get hit, beat up and recover from injuries to increase that skill. Your combat skills are raised through successful hits but you have to fight an evenly matched character or better to increase your skill. Initially you might be grinding easy enemies but eventually this encourages you to seek greater challenges. After a while the only real challenges will be seeking famous or infamous targets with high bounties. Those are a couple examples but in general if you're looking for interesting potential answers to Tim's questions in this video: You should look into Kenshi.
I haven’t played many RPG in the past 10 years so I might be missing a lot of good examples, but Last Epoch’s skill level seems to work pretty well from players perspective. It levels with usage and players doesn’t really have to grind the skill level intentionally. And of course, because of the type of game it is (Diablo like hack and slash with lots of mobs), all skills are used in combat, so it doesn’t need to handle issues like lock picking or stealth.
I am designing a system where basically there are two experience bars. Its not for an RPG per say, more of a strategy game where units level up. The first experience bar increases as you kill things/complete missions. When you level up you get to choose between a few randomly selected perks, and a couple of psuedo-randomly selected perks that are chosen based on what your character did on a mission. E.g. they attacked 20 times with a sword, each time theres a 5% chance on each attack to be able to unlock a choice for a new perk on level up each time you attack a random sword based perk. The higher levels you have more variety of perks to choose from because it takes higher to level up, so you have more of a chance of unlocking more choices in perks. Right now im designing such that you can't miss attacks, just to see if i can avoid the aggravation of missing 95% hit chances, but if i go back to that i think ill use your suggestion here. It seems like a really good way of leveling something up/getting better at something.
As a player, I really enjoyed the system in Brandish but I was fully aware I was cheesing it. For example, magic defense. This incrementally goes up with successfully taking magic hits and not dying. I later learned I could make the player character spontaneously sleep on the spot which lowers armor defense and makes magic damage go up significantly so I would force my character to stand in front of a magic caster and sleep only to be awoken on damage. After a certain point, my character was strong enough to sleep off damage cast by magic before getting with another spell. Brandish also had weapon durability but as a bonus for getting through enough sections, you can find an unbreakable (but usually substantially weaker for the area) sword. Brandish gives arm strength for every successful attack on any enemy and I'd intentionally use weak swords on strong enemies to build up the arm strength. Again, I realize my grinding/cheesing play style is not to every players' preference but that was a system I liked because it was clear to me
This reminds me of how some companies tie employee bonuses to things like "number of bugs fixed". Well, you just saw a big increase in the number of minor bugs raised and fixed. People will either intentionally or unintentionally game a system. In RPGs, I sometimes find that skills like sneak or lockpicking are better skipped because the rewards from lockpicking are so worthless it can be skipped entirely, and successful sneaking means you avoid getting XP. Go full meathead with strength and constitution, then the game becomes quite easy.
Abiotic Factor is a great implementation of this, you have "passive" skills like sprinting and sneaking, you level them slowly but it doesn't matter since you level them almost all the time, then you have combat skills, makes you feel rewarded for fighting the most basic enemies even tho the loot sucks, and finally you have the skills for construction/cooking/crafting/first aid which makes you feel like playing a sim like deus ex and also gives some sort of specialization which is great on an online coop game like a classless class system
I know this is unrelated to the video but i'm kind of upset that there isn't a mention of you Tim in the opening credits to the new Fallout series. Unless I just missed it... 😭 Love your videos dude.
I loved how they did it in Tales Of Symphonia; you had character levels which scaled up as you progressed through the story, and you had exp for skills as well: if you use a skill a certain number of times, then you unlock the higher level version What's cool about this is it encouraged you to fight tougher enemies, because lower leveled ones would die too fast, and you got a cool zoom-in on a character when they got the new skill, and would use it instead of the normal version. Then you can decide if you want to keep the old skill, or start using the new skill and possibly get another new skill from it
And there's also some higher rarity skills you can get by meeting certain requirements. Sometimes its a random roll, which depends on your luck stat, sometimes you need to do skills in a certain order, sometimes you need to combine skills from different characters. It sounds complicated, but the dopamine hit from seeing that new skill get unlocked is amazing
Also worth mentioning: skills that are connected. RuneScape's mining skill is faster to level up than the smithing skill. That's partly because you can buy the resources to level smithing.
Final Fantasy XI (the first Final Fantasy MMO) has a lot of design issues, but I do like the core idea behind its skill system: Skills will increase, whether you succeed or fail, if you're sufficiently close to the relevant challenge level. (Also possibly if you succeed despite being severely outmatched.) That ensures (to some extent) that you're doing level-appropriate tasks, while also having a logical feel to it as you're rewarded for doing things that are reasonably challenging and not just flailing wildly at impossible tasks (or grinding trivial tasks).
...It's worth mentioning that one of the design issues was that the actual odds of skills leveling up was pretty low, to match the glacial speed of the regular experience gain. Both have received a bunch of boosts in the past decade or so, though.
When I saw this title my first assumption was the topic of rewarding skilled players with more XP, which now that I’m thinking about it seems very interesting and I wonder how that system would be handled in a single player game.
Stealth is always a funny skill to level up because many times in games you just crouch walk back & fourth around people in broad daylight and miraculously gain XP
I'm of the opinion that having players train skills by fighting rats and casting fireballs against walls also has value. I remember, crystal clear, hiding in a closet and practicing my destruction magic skill in Morrowind when I was 13 - and all the other training tricks in that game - and I remember that "wasted" time extremely fondly. Why was my spellsword so good at casting fireballs? Because he cast 15,000 fireballs at a wall before ever casting one at an enemy. It makes sense. It's honestly diegetic rather than symbolically diegetic. More recently I've got a lot of joy from the grind in Kenshi. It doesn't have to be an abstracted Rocky style training montage. Some players do find value in the arduous training itself.
Kenshi has a skill-based xp system, the things the game incentivises your characters to do to progress is a little absurd but that's part of the charm.
That's the most interesting idea I've heard. Giving xp for failing an action. Is it really a big problem tho, that people will annihilate trees and walls to practice skills? Cuz it seems to me that it's what a good person would do - practice on dummies and then training with a partner before going into a real fight.
Another interesting point is that you probably won't fail to miss a wall or practice dummy unless you're really, really bad, which would mean you'd only be able to do it for the early levels of a skill. Which makes perfect sense and also prevents people from wasting hours hitting a wall.
This requires you to have a failure % chance in combat, which feels bad in my opinion. Also, are you really going to miss hitting a golem more than you would a pig? Evasiveness doesn't always go up with stronger enemies, so why would you fight a grizzly bear over a mosquito if you're less likely to hit a mosquito? Also, you're missing out on how it feels good to be rewarded for doing a good job.
One of the biggest challenges of game design is making the optimal way to play also the fun way to play
"The bad news: The surgery was an abject failure. The good news: I leveled up."
You try to heal yourself.
...
You fail to heal anything. You lost your leg because of that.
For losing your leg you gain 15 medicine xp.
This could be remedied, by having critical failure not count towards XP.
@@FathDanielhey, I've learned a lot from my critical failures
@@vacuumboots critical failures are when you not only failed, but also not learnt anything from it.
speech check failed, leveled up by 1
Learning on failure is actually brilliant, because the scale up for "harder to skill with higher level" is naturally build in, without needing special math or XP scaling.
Ahh, the smithing from Skyrim.
Did you see the little comic where a pc is making daggers and is asked why. They answer "to make the best armor". The asker imagins it to be dragon bone armor, the highest tier in the game, and you need to grind your smithing to max or almost max to make it.
But nope, the pc is making an armor out of daggers.
Not to mention casting a spell in one hand to turn health into magica (leveling alteration), while casting a spell in the other hand to turn magica into health (leveling restoration). Or just running down the road muffling yourself.
I mentioned it in another thread but there's a reason that so many modded playthroughs alter perks/levelling and crafting.
Classic Daggerbone Armour.
You can even bring a hide armor to the maximum resistance before unlocking the "best" gear lol
Picking on Skyrim is the lowest of low hanging fruit.
I gotta say, the idea of XP increasing when you fail is one of the most unexpected idea I've never thought about. Really really interesting 🤔
The concept is often called "Fail Forward". It's a great help for reducing player frustration.
The TTRPG system Dungeon World is renowned (though it didn't invent it) for exactly that. Failing is one of your biggest sources of XP and it's great.
yea i think its a great mechanic, i cant believe i havent seen it done in a game yet.
perhaps they think itll take away from the natural drive for victory
@@Denizu tabletops always be out here with the best rules and mechanics
@@Anubis1101 They do have the benefit of getting to exclusively focus on them
Oblivion:
Step 1: crouch run into the wall inside the sleeping quarters in the capital's Mages' Guild. NPCs around you are sleeping so you're undetected.
Step 2: Go get dinner.
Step 3: Come back and enjoy your max Stealth
Oblivion: great ideas and great jank. A great game imo.
Literally what I did in Skyrim. And I was stealing gold and putting it back to level pickpocketing. To level my combat skills... well, it wasn't good times for my immortal horse 💀
Whenever I catch myself playing the game in grindy, un-fun ways like that, or using exploits, I just use console commands. Same result, much less time wasted.
If the grind is fun, I'll keep doing it. But the minute it gets frustrating, it's not worth it.
@@shadowfragment Finding exploits is a reward in and of itself. You feel accomplished that you outsmarted the game. Though soon after you get bored and uninstall. What I am trying to say the less tempting and broken exploits the more likely the player will play the game for longer.
@@mattomwit "you do not understand" is a pretty insulting way to start a comment, you might want to try and avoid making arrogant assumptions about people when jumping into a conversation. Talk about yourself and what you know. Don't talk about the other person when you don't know anything about them.
You got me thinking about the good old days of MMOs. One place I did like skills was Ultima Online. The game was a total sandbox, so people could go anywhere. And being skill based rather than class or level based even players who were really low skilled could help out in really dangerous areas. You might fail your bandage skill 9 times out of 10, but with no levels, no party size limits, and no zone restrictions you were still contributing healing to your friends.
The game handled some of the problems of skill based systems by limiting you to 700pts early in the game's life, spread across whatever skills you wanted to have. If you gained a skill past 700 you'd lose a skill point somewhere else. This lead to undesirable skill loss so they added a toggle to lock the skill to prevent it from changing.
The result was a very flexible system where you could make your character any way you wanted with a great deal of flexibility. It worked well for UO's sandbox. The game had a relatively flat power curve compared to many later MMOs, there were few or no restrictions on where players could go or what they could attempt to do. Much of the economy was player driven so crafting and "RP" skills; cooking, tailoring, smithing, carpentry, were desirable for many players. UO has been mostly unique, and in it's context I thought skills worked quite well, playing to the game's strengths.
Funny story about summoning monsters to grind skills; early on UO slimes would split in two when they took damage. Someone trapped one in a building and set up a script to cast a spell that dealt one point of damage. Several weeks later the guys at Origin were desperately trying to figure out what was consuming all of the server's resources and were flummoxed when they discovered a cabin in the woods with tens of thousands of slimes trapped inside.
I think UO had the perfect xp system. You earned on every use of the action (yes, every sword swing), but you couldn't just grind against a barrel. Well, you could until you hot about 30%, but that's very similar to real life. You soon max out your training resources and need to find tougher challenges to learn and improve. I think you got more XP when you failed, and the easier stuff gave less XP when completed until it gave none.
I played on a bunch of custom shards, and I think one also only gave you XP when failing -- it was very similar.
Plus I like that you could lock a skill, it wouldn't go down or up when you were training other things and at your 700 cap.
@@iwantagoodnameplease You're right. I don't remember exactly how it worked, but you had to keep going after tougher and tougher challenges, whether it was skeleton knights or flush fit blind joinery (carpentry) to achieve.
@@Frankmuddy Now that you mention them, I think skeleton knights were the top tier enemy you had to wail on to go from 99% to 100%? Nothing else would do it (or perhaps not as well). This was T2A expansions, so it probably all changed after that.
"so in this guide i will explain how to chease the lockpicking skill, ty throwing the chest underwater, setting yourself on fire, and taking out the torch in the room so the lvl 1 lock can fail enough to give you experience" - intrestingly enough, at some point that actaully wraps around to again becoming gameplay.
so true
Indeed, I do think that this is not a problem at all. And it's still somewhat realistic. If you did that I bet you would learn from this experience as well.
If you were already always succeeding in normal situations, then this grind is only gonna help you in the situation you're mentioning. I mean, role playing as a thief who can pick locks while in the dark, on fire and the chest is underwater seems pretty cool
I like that you never recommend, but never discourage at the same time, potentially cludgy mechanics.
He's implicitly discouraging them. Saying otherwise doesn't mean he isn't. Though he draws from his experiences to explain why he thinks these are difficult and worse decisions to make. It's very reasonable advice from a well seasoned designer and programmer.
@@king_slimy8859 Except he explicitly said, "I'm not saying don't do this... but here are some pitfalls you will need to solve for." That doesn't sound like discouragement to me; just letting you know it's "not optimal" from his experience. And "not optimal" does not automatically translate to "bad".
I love these sleeves-up deep dives into the pros and cons of hard mechanics. Real game designer stuff.
theyre usually my favorite videos, they give me so much to think about.
I like the idea of the way Cyberpunk does it, an old-school XP system with points to distribute, but also a use-based skill system on the side. Sure, it's very video gamey, but it works well and feels fun to me. You get your main 'build' and develop your character with your stats and perk points, and you get a lot of small bonuses based on how you play the game, that improve upon your chosen playstyle.
It was lovely seeing you at Fallout premiere!
Thanks. That was an amazing night!
I really like skill-based XP/skill levels when it's done right instead of character levels. Not that many games do it anymore, but one "new" game that I think does it very well is the survival rpg Project Zomboid, especially for its post-apocalypse setting, it makes sense, because your character before the zombie apocalypse might have never had skill like in Trapping, but since this makes sense for survival to improve this skill through your journey (if thats your choice ), it makes a lot of sense. Same with say its Fitness skill, if all you are doing is driving/focusing on using transport and not walking much in the world, you do not develop fitness skill much (there are various ways to increase it).
I find it satisfying leveling skills and seeing my character grow stronger in certain dimensions, than simply "character levels" with a base poiwer increase to abilities or something
+1. Imho, character levels is a crutch that we took from D&D that we should try to stop relying on.
Reading through the replies and thinking about Tim's thoughts, I think sandboxes are where skill based systems do well. You're not following a story or a path of escalating challenge, so you don't need to have the kind of power curve that a game like Fallout or Skyrim encourages. Sandboxes can support non-combat skills in ways that other systems aren't as well suited for; Cooking or carpentry can be very important in a sandbox, but often don't make as much sense in a more combat oriented and plot oriented game.
I suppose Kenshi would be another game to examine. Kenshi is a very open sandbox with a very definitive power curve where the characters start out pathetically weak and eventually become shonen protagonists (if they don't get eaten...). Since you can have anywhere from one to many (I ended up with over forty) characters the need to specialize is reduced. You can have your warriors and your scientists and your smiths and your farmers without being too restricted. The game gives the player tools to engage with the world in many ways - A stealth character might scout enemy defenses before the warriors go in. Or, I used my primary scout as a medevac; When a fighter was rendered unconscious, or my party was ambushed, my very fast, very hard to spot stealth character could dart in and carry people to safety.
@@Frankmuddy would love to see Tim's thoughts on Kenshi
I knew someone who stayed in a room summoning creatures to level up in oblivion. They went from level 1 to like level 25 sitting in a room grinding. Then they went outside and realized everything completely destroyed them because enemies scaled. And this was somewhat new back then, enemy scaling. He got so mad he wasted his time he just quit. lol
Kenshi is an example of skill based XP game which I really liked,
specifically for its skill progression (among many other things the game has to offer).
I think Kenshi's system works particularly well because, in that game, you're building up a whole tribe of specialized and sort-of-expendable characters in a build-your-own-story sandbox world, rather than a single hero or a party who are unique and central to the game's story and game-play.
In Skyrim, arguably the best known skill based XP game in wich you play a hero character, the system is very easily exploitable. And it can be pretty enjoyable to exploit too, if that's how you want to get your fun from the game.
Of course the player can self-impose a "fair" use of the system, if they REALLY want. But personally I never managed even a single play through of Skyrim in which I didn't exploit the skill based XP in some form or another, at some point, even when I tried.
Thanks for your videos!
I really like Kenshi. I think the fact that one has to come up with ways to train characters in the skills they need is very cool, and lends a very unique feeling to the gameplay. The ability to decide that you'll send X and Y characters to the mines so they can level up strength by carrying rocks is fun.
kenshi is one of my top10 games i'll never play lol. it looks perfect, but also soooo overwhelming with all he variables. its a personal taste/psychology thing.
maybe one day...
@@ince55ant
You should try it out.
It's a lot more straightforward then one might think when looking "from outside",
especially because you can start playing with a single character, or a couple of them, while focusing on combat and stealing maybe (beware of the goats!!!),
and then build up to a more base-building oriented game-play at a later moment, or in a subsequent play-through.
The game gets better the more you explore its many features and mechanics, of course.
I made Kenshi! The main reason I went for skill based XP is that it's more organic and less micromanagement when you have numerous characters. In a single character game I would likely do it differently.
@@CaptainDeathbeard A great game, and I'm glad to see you listening to Tim's sage wisdom! I hope the sequel is coming along well!
You could also argue a quest-based XP system encourages the player to do the bare minimum to finish content and not really engage with it properly. It's all up to the player if they're willing to shatter their immersion for efficiency in a single-player title. Like that old famous quote goes, "Players will always find a way to optimise the fun out of a game".
Oh man, I jumped everywhere I went in Oblivion to level acrobatics. That, and I remember one of the strategies early in Final Fantasy 2 was to fight your party members to level up stats.
The Elder Scrolls game are a great example of Tim's points. They've always had awkward levelling systems, to the point where most people consider it essential to get mods for Morrowind and Oblivion to make the levelling more approachable.
morrowind and oblivion summoning exploits were super fun though.
i feel like real mages would do exactly that to practice, so im actually against blocking that sort of thing. just gotta find a way to make it fun.
@@Anubis1101 I did enjoy exploiting the systems. It made for fun emergent play. Being able to jump from Vivec to Solstheim really was amazing.
@@Frankmuddy the loss of the flying spell in elder scrolls games is one of the most tragic losses in game design history
Exactly what I did in The Discording Tales : You learn from failure, and more dramatic the failure (with a limit, which is when it's impossible for you to succeed anyway, then you just don't learn), the more XP towards that subskill.
And in my system, all failures also lead to losses, and often literally painful. Each skill types (8) are tied to 8 usual kinds of ailments. So that when you fail you get hurt (whether it is fatigue from carrying, wounds from combat, frustration from persuasion or starvation from working for example) AND XP, and you then need (usually) healing to then continue gaining more XP. As such there are many divergent ways to heal many different types of pain, and it makes the whole system very varied.
Getting more xp for failing sounds such a great idea.
This video really made me think about kenshi's leveling systems and xp. I loved the way it made you completely submerge your characters into their roles by training them in practical ways.
In Oblivion, I would jump constantly while healing myself (while not wounded) to raise my athletics and restoration while on the way to my next quest. Sneaking while running into a wall next to a sleeping NPC. Using speechcraft to piss off NPCs then giving them money to get their mood back up.
I really love the idea of "you get better when you use it" Even back in Final Fantasy 2 I loved that system, but you did a great job at outlining all the issues here. The idea I've had for this is to track when the player uses a skill, but only give them XP from quests, and when they level up, they can only put points into skills they've actually used during that level. Of course, this would lead to a player just making sure they use each skill at least X times. There's always issues.
that first example sounds kinda fun. its like how fun movement systems make traversal more engaging. kinda like a rogue practicing knife tricks while on the road.
yeah, it just leads to a lot of power-gaming
You have to be careful you don't end up with the attribute increase system from Morrowind / Oblivion, where your attribute bonuses when levelling up are simply better or worse depending on which skills you used - which leads to some of the most un-fun metagaming I've seen in any RPG.
You could work around that with a more simple "you used it, so you can increase it" vs "you didn't use it, so you can't increase it" system, where the amount of use doesn't matter towards how much you can increase it.
stab and heal your magic horse a bajillion times until you max out your restoration and one of your weapon skills...
the one big drawback you get with quest-based exp systems is that it requires the player to actually do quests. sometimes i just want to run off and live in the forest or something, you know? it puts a greater burden on quest design to give the player options theyll enjoy.
though perhaps the separation of "base level" and "job level" in some rpgs like Ragnarok Online would allow for some interesting ways to mitigate that.
Was playing fallout 2 yesterday and I really like the system where you get general xp from every task that you do, but can you can upgrade whatever skill you want once you level up.
You still have a situation where lockpicking give you pretty much a standard amount of xp regardless of difficulty (as far as I know) but it doesn't matter much in the end once you level up. It's why I think quests are a great way to give xp. That way you don't have to grind your way to leveling up a specific skill.
Side note: Saw some pictures on Twitter from the Fallout TV show premiere and swear I saw you Tim. Hope you do a followup to the other video you did on your thoughts on fallout tv show. Must have been wild to see concepts you and the team thought up on the big screen with that kind of production value.
Decades later and I still think SPECIAL is one of the most rewarding character systems. Tags, perks, and the sheer amount of flexibility let me play with all kinds of fun builds. I still fondly remember soft-locking Fallout 2 when I punched some guy so hard he went sliding across the ground and never stopped.
These a great point when talking about Math Combat, where everything resolves in a math equation.
A interesting thought came to mind whilst listening to this talk was "How interesting would be higher level skills being harder to use and having harder requirements"
Example: Fireball needs more cast time, or needs different gestures/sign/reagents to use. Stealth require proper stealth equipment to trigger higher levels. Sword require proper timing on the swing press to get combos, things like this.
When talking about turn based, first thing come to mind is Legend of Dragoon attack system.
When talking about real time, games like Skyrim become way more interesting when saw through these lens. Imagine a melee combat that you have to time the press to execute different combos or powerfull swings.
Very good video, thanks so much!
Y'know, it's funny - Oldschool Elder Scrolls pre-Oblivion *was* timing-based combat, but due to poor tutorialization they gained the reputation of being "The RPGs where you can't hit anything". Morrowind becomes a whole different experience once you understand that melee weapons have sweet-spot timings for maximum hit chance, instead of spamming LMB.
@@SaberVS7besides charging the weapon attack, how do you make a morrowind battle successful? From what I see, it’s dice roll.
Very, very valid points! As someone who's tried to develop a skill-based (and HP-less) XP-system I ran into a lot of these problems. The encounter-scaling thing was the foremost one. Even if you had levels in some form, balancing a combat encounter around the possibility that someone made a character named "Silvertongue McGee" who's spent all their points on social skills, would negate these levels outright. Decoupling social skills from combat level is a possibility, but then you have even more systems to balance instead, because then you need a "social level" and a "combat level" in order to be able to balance both types of encounters.
Skill-based XP also excludes any XP-rewards from finishing quests, unless you somehow flag the quest as the "lockpicking Quest", or what have you. So the purely altruistic quests that give no immediate reward would be harder to make compelling.
I love the idea of skill-based XP, because it is one step further away from the classic D&D formula. The D100-system of Call of Cthulhu uses it to great effect, but those characters rarely make any true progression from session to session, they at best get incrementally better in the skills they are already good at. And then they die. Or go mad.
Also, one huge problem is the ability to make one character be the best at everything. Take the Basic Role-Playing D100-system. There are no inherent limitations on characters getting 100 in everything, other than time, which makes for a really boring character in the end. No choice and no consequence. Skill atrophy, where you lower skills that have not been used for a while, is the only solution I can come up with for that, but that seems like a really punishing system.
I think skill atrophy is brilliant as long as it is limited. I'll never FORGET how to ride a bike, but I might get RUSTY, so maybe I lost 10% of my bicycle-riding skill points?
@@ClickToPreview Hmm, yes, I'm just afraid that it might lead to people playing catch-up to their skills. Or feeling compelled to always top some skills up.
Maybe it could work if you had like a pool of skill points? Say a system that uses levels, and at level 1 you had a pool of x amount of points. If you use your character as a melee-fighter, every point gained in melee would be taken from your least used skill. Then every level you would get x-amount of more points added to a free pool. This pool would be used for further skill-ups until it was depleted and only then would points be subtracted from least used skills? Just spit-balling here, but this might work.
So I do GURPS-like skills progression. And I factor it thusly; each failure increases the cumulative chance that a skill will gain a point, but you perform the check for point increase on successes. Using the lock-pick example, each time you fail you learn something but once you succeed on that lock, all of those failures gel into knowledge and experience.
Hey. For dice pool systems (my favourite) I was thinking to utilize some throw formations. For example , thinking in d6+ context, the difficulty might be 13, but the player throws 10,9,9,8 ,5,5,5,3 - the 10 seems supported by the 9s and 8s so it is not a fluke but PC have figured something out. This can be used such the PC can decompose the difficult action into two easier ones, or gain Xp straight...
Love the learning from failure argument
This guy just pumps out high quality videos
He's an old man in a profession where most die young. ; )
3:06 actually made me properly belly laugh out loud, thanks so much for that Tim haha. Your passion is absolutely infectious!
I like the way Elona did natural skill levelling - every skill, spell and stat had "potential" which acted as an experience multiplier that could range from 1% to 400%. When something goes up in level, its potential decreases, thus decreasing the efficiency of doing one thing over and over to increase one stat.
To get more potential, the player could engage with the game in other ways, such as eating food. One of the ways to get food is to fish. Fishing is a perception-based skill, so raising it will also raise your effectiveness at ranged combat.
Sleeping can also raise potential, and it's influenced by quality of the bed. This can encourage a player to seek out and buy or steal the best bed they can find, leading to more avenues of increasing skills.
Man, I just love your videos. Thank you for sharing your wisdom and ideas with us.
One other thing about learning from failure that Tim forgot to mention is that it also gives you a really natural progression curve.
When you are useless at a skill, you will fail almost all of the time, and so gain skill experience quickly. When you are good at a skill, you will fail far less often, and so gain experience more slowly.
easy enemies won't give you any xp because you have mastered fighting them.
He didn't forget to mention that. It was the very first thing he explained about it at 12:15.
That's just how normal experience and leveling works in most games. If you take on difficult challenges, you will get a lot of xp and level up fast. If you take on easy challenges you will get very few xp and level up slow.
But then how do you circumvent player frustration at consistently failing at the skills they want to specialize in early on?
@@exeterkered You're right, he did mention it, my bad.
Hi Tim, it's us, everyone.
We watched a video, a few weeks ago, about what the best way to give XP was. It was through quests.
this comment gets funnier every time i see it
Wow I’m really impressed! The amount of thoughts you give into the idea is surprising! I’ve been a programmer myself for a few years but have never been on the design side. There are so much to consider! Brought to the channel by the fallout show videos and I’m loving these game design videos already.
Tim, love this topic. Consider going into it deeper into it, with more concrete scenarios. A series perhaps, if that would please you.
very interesting solution you've posed at the end. I have never thought of it like that before. This would absolutely give players even more incentive to go out and find everything. And it also makes them less likely to become overpowered, since they can't simply grind the skill from anywhere. very interesting.
Thanks for this. I'll write what I think I already wrote.
Another solution to overusing skills is to prevent gaining more than X per Y period of game time where aging makes you become weaker. You can also add prices to increase the skills (like AD&D had rules at some point where you'd have to actually spend a lot of money to level up).
A lot of the issues you have with skill levelling up didn't happen in a game like Darklands, where skill usage was pretty straightforward. It had the drawback of some skills (combat) getting up much faster than others.
I like the idea of gaining xp when failing. This may lend to a quite organic system. If you're good, you could start difficult maneuvers (which are more likely to fail) not only because they give you an edge but also because it's the only way to get better, and you may fail because of hubris. That sounds cool.
I love the idea of learning from failure. It gives so much implications on the way people could play the game
Great vid. Old School Runescape is basically all of these issues taken to their extreme. It's perfectly normal and expected that you might cast the same AoE spell in a basement on some rats 10,000 times. The main issue I've always found with skill-based XP is that you invest so much effort into leveling the skill up, and then once you max it out suddenly there's no reason to ever use it again. For example: In Stardew Valley, hitting level 10 fishing is challenging. And when you hit level 10, you get a nice perk. But there's very little reason to keep fishing after you've maxed out the skill.
Tim really got me thinking once upon a time about critical failures.
A critical failure in a skill based RPG leveling system that progresses skills based on failure could be like a critical success… a big XP dump based on certain perimeters. Or… maybe a critical failure is when you do not learn from failure, for whatever reason. Perhaps as a function of your character’s intelligence skill (assuming you built dedicated player stats into the game), the player character often learns from failure (higher intelligence) or more often doesn’t (low intelligence).
Or, maybe that would be awful.
But this was a FANTASTIC video that really got me thinking. I would love to mod Morrowind and make skills level on failure… thank you, Tim! Thought provoking!
First off: great video :). Kingdom Come: Deliverance is relying heavily on skill-based xp. I saw a video online of a guy who maxes out several stats in the prologue by punching respawning cows, so exactly what you're talking about with the rats :D It doesn't ruin the game for me personally because I just find it so ridiculous I'll never use it, but hey if someone wants to cheese the game that way more power to them. My point being yes it's a problem but it doesn't necessarily ruin the game or make EVERY player want to cheese it :)
Another thought I have after watching is: the flipside is a system where you level up and then decide what to put points in. So e.g. you gain 5 levels just waving your sword and then put it into Alchemy. Feels very videogame-y. Personally I enjoy games with both extremes of point spending vs skill based but I'm curious if there's a golden mean (or goldilocks zone) between the two.
Loving this channel! So valuable to listen to while I work on my modeling homework :)
Ah my favorite topic yet again! You are spoiling us 😊
I have tried, unsuccessfully, to design a skill based xp system for a game like Arcanum that does not have the many pitfalls you have wisely presented in this video and the best i could do is a Skyrim-adjacent or similar to what you have described in the past where you skill usage is recorded and accumulated but you need some form of skill point or perk point obtained through a different process to truly tap into used skills and meaningfully improve them.
It's a hard problem which I haven't seen solved in video games. Tabletop RPGs have done so, but they rely on common sense arbitrator (game master) which is surprising difficult to implement algorithmically (maybe AI could help here) or to support without a tremendous amount of dev effort painstakingly setting up each possible xp gain opportunity.
Thank you for touching again on this topic! I really appreciate this wealth of design insights!
Have a great night!
One idea I had a long time ago was similar to your xp-on-fail suggestion, but with an important change: You get XP inversely proportional to the chance that you got the result you would've expected to get.
Sooo if you're a master locksmith and you fail picking a simple lock, you learn! Or if you are a newbie archer and happen to land a headshot from 100m away, you learn! And on the contrary, if you're a master locksmith and pick a simple lock successfully.. clearly you don't learn anything. Neither do you learn if you try to pick your first lock and it's a super duper master lock and you fail.
I feel like I should be paying you just to watch these videos from how much valuable insight I gain from them. Thank you
I think skill based xp is a great thing to have, but hard to balance because is very exploitable, Kenshi is a great example, every player will be exploiting skills as soon as they become familiarized with the game, max speeding the game and crouching everywhere, carring heavy stones everywhere to boost strenght, kidnaping a boss to then cut their limbs off so you can boost sword skill using a really bad sword and giving them a lot of armor, heal them and repeat. I love the fact that you can do that, but again, is unbalanced and exploitable. In project Zomboid it feels really natural at the beginning and later becomes a never ending grind. So yeah, hard to balance, kingdome come deliverance does a decent job at it in some aspects, since combat is player skill based you won't become a god at it that easy, so it feels natural, but again, horse mounted combat is OP so you can exploit it literally as soon as your get out of the starting area, stealth becomes dumb really quick, and so on. But even it has a lot of problems, I think is really fun.
Very insightful! EXP on failure is interesting, a few tabletop games do this to my knowledge. A few open ended thoughts:
1. What about skills that aren’t binary success or failure? E.g. jump height, run speed, etc. You might need other heuristics to determine EXP gain.
2. Mechanics don’t necessarily dictate player behavior as much as presentation. Simple countermeasures can be enough for most players (e.g. stale hits in Smash Bros). You could delay XP rewards until later, so that actions and rewards are somewhat disassociated (e.g. end-of-day level up in FFXV). I’d be interested to hear counter-arguments to this.
3. More involved math can do a lot while feeling subtle. Maybe there are equations such that you have to level up both jumping and running to maximize either one. Or maybe you give skills “exhaustion” that limits what you can do in a day. The point is, not everything has to be a “discrete state”, and instead “continuous values” can nudge behavior more gracefully. The flip side is, if it’s sufficiently complicated, you can’t make success dependent on the player’s knowledge of the system - the beauty of skill-based EXP is that players don’t necessarily have to think about it. You can also just explain the behavior in basic terms, no LaTeX equations necessary.
4. You can always provide more efficient means of leveling a skill to prevent unfun power leveling. Maybe there’s a dojo you can train at to increase melee combat faster than you would slaying rats.
5. Player choice is at the heart of the problem. By tying the choice to something the player _does_, we fundamentally change the way the decision is made. Because the choice is no longer _independent_, there will always be a dead-weight-loss to either the desired skill to level OR the player’s behavior. I’m not convinced it’s possible to align both at every given moment. The question is, what do we gain in exchange for this loss? To me, it’s removing tedious decisions from a game that doesn’t need them - but maybe there are other advantages worth exploring.
I think limiting progression of skill-based XP based on an overarching Character Level that is tied directly to finished game content is the way to go. If I'm Level 1, maybe I can only increase my lockpicking skill up to 10. To get to Level 2, I have to complete a certain amount of content (main quests, side quests, etc.), and THEN I can continue to increase my lockpicking from 10 to 20, etc. As long as the player understands how this works from the start, they'll stop themselves from trying to power level and micromanage and just enjoy THE GAME presented to them.
I love skill based games where I’m not forced to play the main story to progress, not sure why. There’s something satisfying levelling up by exploring and getting lost in a world. However, I find many skill based games don’t handle it well as you say, e.g. OSRS has massive guides for efficient levelling otherwise you’re wasting time, Morrowind can be tedious until you level up combat a fair bit, with some skills being hard and slow to level, and so on. I think one way you can somewhat mitigate is a hybrid approach, have “greys” (low lvl mobs/objects/locks) that provide zero xp to eliminate grind, these greys increase as your combat/utility skill increase, then combine that with a skill reward system , the obvious downsides being the time spent ensuring the world provides enough content for the entire level range, spreadsheeting and/or AI could help
Hope you had fun at the premiere! (Saw the group photo online)
Would love a video about it.
Currently playing Oblivion, and yeah I just cast spells on myself while listening to audio books to level up.
Good Morning Tim I know this channel is primarily about video games. But would you consider a video about your experience playing Pen&Paper Rpgs and how those can be used to practice storytelling and design if you have any experience with doing this in particular. Thanks for being you :)
You may want to scan through his videos he’s definitely covered the subject
That's an elegant solution, also mimics real life learning works. Easy to get a general understanding of a subject, but you can only progress if you continue to challenge yourself.
Skyrim comes to mind. When the player plays along, it works somewhat fine. When the player wants to cheat, he easily can. Also there is this boundless iron dagger smithing thing, the alchemy spamming thing, the enchant the best thing using the smallest soul gem on iron daggers thing. Oh and auto-walking towards a wall while close to several NPCs, the repeated casting of spells out of combat. I am sure it's all solvable with not much effort, but for the player it's tedious. Bethesda simply doesn't care about polishing Skyrim - even after bringing out several expansions. Anyway, Skyrim is an example of how to do it and how not to do it.
So I've always liked Skill-based xp as a system because I think its very immersive, so this was great to think about it more in depth. Thanks Tim!
As someone who heavily prefers skill systems and plan on making my own, I absolutely love this video.
Tim is a straight up game making professor. It's crazy that we get this for free. The role of being a critic/naysayer, aka someone who says, "Okay if you want to do this these are the obstacles" is such an important role that most designers have to play with themselves. It's great to hear this from a seasoned vet who knows his stuff.
At the end of the day skill based XP may be tougher to implement while not be exploitable, but in the end creates a system that I think is funner and allows the player a ton of freedom. Obviously not always the case, nor is it always mutually exclusive from quest based XP, but overall I really prefer it.
Thanks so much for making this video Tim!
Hi Tim. I was just wondering if you're going to talk about the Fallout TV series as it is coming out very soon. How does it feel to see your original game in this medium? Perhaps you can talk about it after a few episodes. If I remember correctly you talked about it briefly quite a while back; I seem to recall you were planning on watching it. Forgive me if I misspeak. Also a bonus question: if, let's say you wanted to, and you had the means to make a Fallout movie or TV series, would you base it on Fallout 1 or would you prefer make a new story? I would definitely like to see some Fallout characters in live action, perhaps Richard Dean Anderson as Killian?
One thing I hope is that the TV series creators took at least some inspiration from the original game and not just Bethesda's; not that I have anything against 3 and 4.
Another problem with use-based skills is that some skills are more fun to actually use regularly than others.
Using combat skills is generally fun (if combat is well-designed), so you probably won't mind using those a lot, but generally something like lockpicking isn't so fun that you'd actually want to pick every single door in a town because you enjoy it - but use-based skills might encourage or even require you to do just that.
Same problem applies if you grant more standard XP for such behaviours, of course.
You can somewhat work around that by not having too many places where you can use a skill "uselessly" like this. Maybe only allow picking locks on chests in dungeons, instead of every door in town.
+1
This is the worse thing about this design choice Imo.
Fighting 100s of enemies in Skyrim is fun. Creating 100s of items from a menu (ahem... steel daggers) not so much.
@@UlissesSampaio Or going into a dungeons to pickpocket bandits, because pickpocketing other NPCs isn't worth the risk.
@@UlissesSampaio i agree leveling smithing or enchanting is not fun in skyrim , tho it could be solved by being able to make rare metal stuff early on but a little less op to make it much better you have to improve it through repairing it after combat ( as combat is most people do ) , more you repair it , more xp you get for particular class of armor and more you can upgrade it by making little adjustments with ingots. Or just make specialized smith trainers who train you the perk you for a lot of gold.
@@yourstruly5013 this is an interesting idea how to improve the system. You could also incorporate enchanting or smithing into actual gameplay mechanics. For example you add ability to sharpen weapon to deal a little more damage or have higher chance for critical before or during the fight. The bonus would be temporary and process of sharpening would immobilize the character in place. Similar could be applied to enchanting. For example you have temporary enchant you can cast on weapon or armor. Though that is exactly the same as just using spells. Maybe using enchant that allows for casting spells cheaper or having a chance for not using mana.
All solvable problems, but definitely important to call them out!
There's one other big issue with skill-based systems that Tim didn't mention here: they can lack meaningful player choices.
With a more standard XP-based system, a player generally gets to make interesting choices when they level up, picking which skills to increase.
If your entire game is skill-use based, and especially if it has no levels, then you don't have interesting progression choices to make any more.
It's not an insurmountable problem, as you can instead offer something like perks when levelling up (Skyrim does this), but it's still a potential pitfall to bear in mind.
Hmm, *conceptually* I'd say this can be shored-up by being a hybrid "Class and Skill" system like old Elder Scrolls, where non-class skills level at an XP penalty - The flaw of course is that it frontloads all the character-building choices and renders characters perhaps a bit too rigid.
@@SaberVS7 Right, this front-loads all the choices, so you still don't have meaningful choices to make as you progress in the game.
You could argue that there's the same amount of meaningful choice, but you make that choice by in-game rather than on a level-up screen.
You can have levels in skills, and choice of perk when levelling up a skill (e.g. you increase your sword skill, do you choose the finesse perk that gives you extra hit chance if you have high dex, or the brute perk that lowers hit chance but increases damage).
You do have a choice. With skill-based XP it's just passive. You gain XP by playing in your own playstyle. Whereas a standard XP-based system is more active, you get a Level Up and choose a skill etc. and you shape your playstyle with that. The problem here is of course that you can't experiment, because the standard XP-based systems are always "choose first, feel the result afterwards" while the skill-based XP approach is the other way around. You're playing the way you want and get rewards. This entirely kills problems like "you've skilled the wrong stuff, create a new character or you'll have a hard time finishing the game" or "the endboss has a weakness against magic" which means that you'll have a hard time if you're playing a fighter etc. Reskilling would be a solution but makes every decision meaningless.
Great video. Had a kinda funny thought from the idea of learning more from failure. The simplest skill-based XP system: literally make the game require decision making that the player can learn from. They'll learn more from the things they can learn more from, and not at all from things they already know how to do. No XP bar, no code. They learn nothing from hiding in a bush near an NPC, so no progression occurs. But if they're watching to learn his route, they learn his route. Bam, instant skill-based XP perfection. xD
One thing I think would be fun in a classic party-based RPG is to have some exploration focused mechanics. Your travels help create roads between towns. Fighting monsters in the area helps make the roads safer (and more established). Kinda like a party-based RPG approach to how your civilization builds up in Civ. It's not really related to the video topic, and also I'm pretty sure somebody's already done this, so I'd be interested in knowing who has if so.
Related to the video topic, do you prefer more specialized skills, or a broader skill that covers a set of things that might fight an archetype? Closest thing I can think of is the Divinity Original Sin games, where you have a thievery skill set that combines lockpicking, stealing, and stealth. I can see benefits to both approaches, but I'm curious what Tim's take is.
Hey Tim, should we be excited for the Fallout show? How faithful is it to the source material? Did the show receive your blessing?
Love your videos, Tim! Have you ever played RuneScape? I’ve heard you talk about WOW, and RS was a lot of people’s gateway mmorpg! RuneScape is 100% skill based xp and it’s one of the things I love about the game!
I really wish there was a time machine so we could send this video to the Bethesda developers _before_ they created the cheesefest that are the Elder Scrolls games. Was watching this and realizing almost every point raised was something the Bethesda developers either ignored or failed to address correctly.
Great video Tim! Quick question if you happen to see this - I love the idea of gaining XP from failed skill checks - do you think it would be an improvement to tie that to some sort of Intelligence stat if one is present? Specifically thinking the XP from failures would itself rely on an Intelligence stat, and at low values you might or might not gain XP from the every failure. Obviously the higher the INT stat, the more likelihood to learn from failure and maybe more XP gained for that skill?
9:22 Counter question. Is it a problem, even in game lore, that a character who decides to spend a lot of time practicing one specific skill, like casting fireball, gains more experience in that regard?
Sure, they are annihilating a wall, instead of going adventuring, but that's their choice to spend extra time practicing. Works the same in real life.
The issue arises though, if there is supposed to be a sense of urgency.
"the army of lord puppykiller is approaching the city!"
"Nah, I'll deal with it after I finish my PhD in fireball"
I think the whole point was the problems that arise on the meta level, in terms of how the player interacts with the game. Yes, even though skill-based xp may make more sense in-game (from the point of game lore practicing on a wall is actually MORE sound than only levelling fireball when you deliver a love letter to another side of town), is it better in terms of what player experiences?
I think it's very easy to argue no, besides everybody can have a different take and the situations can be very different. Like, it could be considered very, very immersion breaking that a 22 y.o. self-insert character killed 45 chickens in 1.5 days with fire magic and now not just has a PhD in it but can now defeat Elder Dragon Wizard Gods with it. Like, I'd probably take the love letter delivery way at this point.
Bonus points if there's a perk to overcome fire immunity with fireball and now you can kill Elder Dragon Wizard FIRE God who is the main villain
@@alexanderabramov2719 Here is the difference between fireballing the wall and the love letter.
The love letter is to a fair maiden that whole town adores and the delivery has to be stopped at all cost. You as a player have to talk your way out of fire ball your way out of that situation and any other person who wants to stop that letter from reaching it's destination.
You get curious as to why everyone is so hell bent on stopping the delivery. You open the letter and it turns out that it is not a love letter but a sad message about ladys father death and an information about the fortune that he left for his daughter. Someone is trying to stop you from passing that information to her.
Why was the message sent disguised as a love letter? Can she not get that information otherwise? Is it impossible to pass the message verbally? Is she maybe in danger of her surrounding knowing this information?
Do you reach out to the lady? Do you reach out to the people who try to stop you and investigate? Maybe try to gain their favor in order to join them? Maybe you intent to join them and destroy the organization from within or take the treasure for yourself?
Great video mate. Even if they manage to solve all these issues (never seen anyone do that or even come remotely close) that time should have been spent else where (making more options in quest outcomes for example).
I've been playing CDDA on and off for some years. Its interesting to observe how their skill-based system was evolving over time.
Initially there were skills, each with its own xp bar as you've said. You could raise them by reading books and by using them.
This also lead to players figuring out easiest (or least time consuming) ways to grind them to a certain level.
Raising fabrication from 0 to 1 required crafting and "disassembling" weapon "rock in a sock" multiple times. If using a skill is too easy for a character it doesn't give any skill xp.
Then it was deemed that reading books shouldn't magically give you an ability to do something and now every skill has two xp bars: theoretical and practical.
Theoretical unlocks recipe knowledge and speeds up gain of practical skill. If practical raises first it raises theoretical skill with it.
Then this was also deemed not convoluted enough and proficiencies were introduced. Now if you craft a chainmail you use a fabrication skill but if you don't have a blacksmithing proficiency you'll receive various penalties: you're more likely to fail and using a skill will take much more time. To raise proficiency level you need to do proficiency-associated action.
This simultaneously fixed "rock in a sock" problem and made it worse. Now you're not grinding single action. You're grinding many of them. To somewhat mitigate new issues "Training" recipes were introduced: if you want to raise fabrication to a certain low level and practice carving proficiency you can just sit practice it for an hour, consuming planks and producing wood splinters. More convoluted practice will require more convoluted ingredients.
Overall I like the game but its a very messy skill system. Its an interesting system. But its far from ideal.
In my opinion this kind of system is better used in any colony sim game like RimWorld where you control more than one character. Then you can have a dedicated miner who mines all day and specializes in mining more and more. And you can have a chief who cooks all day. But if chief is ill somebody else will have to step in, creating interesting scenarios.
Another interesting xp-gain alternative is varying it based on the difficulty of the challenge/encounter. In Kenshi, you get much more xp fighting opponents stronger than you, and hardly any for opponents weaker than you. When other parts of the game's design are considered it has some quirks: a common grinding method is just kidnapping a strong NPC (far easier than it initially sounds), giving them the weakest equipment, and forcing them to fight your characters to skyrocket through skill levels. That kind of low-risk grinding sorta defeats the purpose of what the game was trying to do in the first place.
I havn't played many skill based level system games (Daggerfall -> Skyrim, Kenshi and Final Fantasy 2 (sorta) is what comes up in my head ATM). They are awfully balanced and easy to exploit. Despite that, I have fun progressing through them (except FF2).
I think exploiting the games system or not depends on the player in the end. And I think choosing major/minor skills and trainers was a good implication on the TES games to tackle some of the problems, becaus those Speech/Mercantile skills were awfull to level up on your own, but paying a master of the craft to train you made it bearable (and made gold more important). Kinda sad they removed the limit how often they could train you in Oblivion/Skyrim, but also understandable.
Ah good old skill based xp. Basically Runequest, Elric, Stormbringer, Call of Cthulu, all those good old Avallon Hill games that all used the same system really. One important consideration for skill based progression is whether you allow failures to progress the skill (learning from your mistakes) or if you only allow success to improve the skill. If it's success only then skills can be painfully slow to improve at lowever levels but might escalate later on (unless the increments required for progress also increase with every skill level).
Learning from failure: me, failing to block a single blow, and my infinite healers. Learning from failure 2: me, using lowest quality gear imaginably. Learning from failure 3: stepping on mines, purposely.
Hi Tim, it's me (a member of everyone), and I just wanted to say that I have that same shirt, and it is an absolute winner. Keep it up.
Skill-based XP system I really like: Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. It's a roguelike, but you pick skills to train that impact things in different ways. Like Fighting gives you more HP and a small accuracy boost to physical attacks. A specific weapon skill type increases your swing speed, and there are cutoff points for stronger/heavier types within that weapon category (i.e. a Greatsword requires way more Long Blades skill than a Longsword). Armor skills both increase your defenses and also help reduce/remove spell failures for casting in certain armor. Spellcasting skills reduce spell failure/miscasts and increase spell power, and the general spellcasting skill gives more MP. You still have levels, which mostly determine access to things like stronger spells, but also give you a choice of stat bonuses every 3rd level. Plus some of the different species you can play as gain new abilities at different levels. You can also "borrow" XP from some skills to help with another, particularly with weapon skills. Like the Axes skill cross-trains with Maces, so if you suddenly find a way better mace than your current axe, you aren't starting over from scratch even if you've been training axes exclusively.
I feel like interesting way could be having skill-based XP intertwined with quests/scenarios. Like leveling up stealth in such games is always touchy point, because generally it promotes violence to level it up, which is isn't always what players seeks, but if you have some quest or objective that can be done in multiple ways, reward player with way-bound XP, but also take into account potential failures to reward not for the fact, but based on progress.
Like if player needs to get to third floor of a building, acquire something and leave, if he manages to get up-top while undetected but gets caught and resorts to violence, after completion still reward player with part of that stealth bonus XP for making some progress this way.
That's certainly very unrefined thought and would require great amount of thorough thinking and designing (with potentially some intricate programming later), but hey, that's the essence of gamedev and why we are here.
Colony Ship does something like that. You may for instance solve a quest by either fighting, persuading or sneaking around. This will give you a given amount of learning points to the skill(s) you've been using to solve that quest.
The drawback is, to make it work, you have to prevent either killing the enemies or gaining xp from killing them if you already did the quest by sneaking around for instance. CS prevents killing enemies you talked your way around or snuck by (at least in most quests, there's one I'm not sure about sneaking then attacking).
Age of Decadence dealt with this issue in the best way possible. Stats, including hitpoints are mostly permanent (you can increase them up to two times but only on certain playthroughs). You learn by doing, i.e., if you win a fight you get combat skill points. If you perform a civic action, you get civic skill points. If you finish quest, you get general skill points that you can allocate both to combat and civic skills. Truly a great system and an amazing game. If you haven't had the opportunity to check it out, I highly encourage it!
Is this a shot at Daggerfall, Tim? The best fantasy life simulator ever made? :D I loved the leveling system of Daggerfall, because you could imagine that you would go into woods and train on a tree to improve you skill. Or maybe take a room in an Inn and "study magic" all the time. However there were problems when raising other skills like lockpicking and stealth, because they would get you in trouble a lot. I think though in Daggerfall it was a good experience. I would have loved to have "training dummies" rather than simply throwing the sword into the air. I think for a modern way to incorporate "use to raise skill" you could set a constraint where you are only allowed to raise a skill when you have used it x amounts of time that level. It never made sense to me that you get XP for talking and put it all into "energy levels". I think Project Zomboid also has a "Use skill to improve it" mechanic and I think it matches the core game loop perfectly, because you actually have to be aware of zombies at all times and training is actually a real risk if you are not aware enough :D
I really like thinking about this stuff, it's an obsession of mine to make a really elegant system like this.
I think Runescape has a lot of elegant solutions to these problems. Every skill deliberately is associated with a gameplay loop designed for your level, there aren't vague skills like 'speech' or 'stealth'. It rewards xp based on the amount of xp the activity gives, which incentivises you to seek harder challenges as you get better. Failure gives no xp though, which can feel bad, and the xp to level goes up exponentially to compensate for higher rewards, which gets ridiculous, like when getting to level 93 is half the xp you need to get to 100.
also, many skills give resources you can use to train other skills, so after you catch fish, you can cook them with the logs you got from woodcutting.
I absolutely LOVE skill-based design in RPGs. I like the idea of getting better at things you do, and naturally shaping your character by your own actions. So I also love this video, it helps me work through some of the roadblocks inherent in that path, and reflect on games like Kenshi and Elder Scrolls that have put so much thought in it themselves.
But as you pointed out, certain things require a lot of care to make the game a more enjoyable experience. I would argue there's no reason to try and block min-maxing and power-leveling cheese strategies, since that is what's fun for some people, but it greatly relies on casual players being able to enjoy the natural progression without feeling tempted or pressured to cheese. I think Kenshi does that very well, so I'll probably go play it some more on my next day off and think about these things.
You can reduce the cheesing by limiting any skill's ability to get better per Character Level, and tie Character Level to a certain amount of finished game content.
@@ClickToPreview personally, im not a fan of arbitrary limits like that. it doesnt feel intuitive or immersive for the player to hit a cap out of nowhere because they havent gotten far enough in the story.
in open-ended games like Kenshi, its entirely untenable due to the overall lack of structure. you could probably get away with it in games with set paths or story steps, but it would still feel like a very rigid transition.
itd be more productive to do the reverse- try tying story content to player level instead. scale major quests and story stages based on how strong the player is. if they wanna cheese, they can still get a challenge from the story. if they wanna play casually, the story will match it.
its more work to distill everything down to a formula like that, but it helps in the long run to ensure everyone has a similar experience with the main questlines.
but the overall best approach is still probably to address each skill's progression individually and decide whether or not cheesing is a problem and what can be done about it.
@@Anubis1101 I see your point regarding something more open ended, I just feel like if those gated skill caps each felt like they were on the verge of “power leveling”, and not too rigid and restrictive feeling, you could appease those kinds of players while also leading them to other satisfying content to complete as well. Idk, heck I’m just out here spitballing!
@@ClickToPreview nah thats great! never let anyone tell you its bad to share your ideas about game design, and never let the predisposed toxicity of internet discourse cast a shadow on real human interaction. ill never think less of someone for trying to work out a problem, so spitball away!
anyway, i see your point and think its an interesting way of approaching it. i think there may be a way to make a game where that works out, like one thats on such a grand scale that normal players would never hit that cap or feel restrained by it, and even the min-maxers would find it satisfying to finally break through that boundary into the next 'tier' of the game.
Tim, don't know if you'll see this but just wanted to thank you for this channel. So much negativity and things happening in the industry that are just upsetting. I know when that gets exhausting, I can come here and listen to a genuine down to earth dude just take about games and no bs
Thank you, this video really made my creative juices flow
Bad thing about quest based xp progression is the points distribution after the fact. You can slay everyone to finish the quest and then put points into reading, swimming ... Skill based feels more natural. If you do something, you get better at it.
Though it forces people to grind which imo is not very fun. Like when I wanted a cool perk in skyrim and had to grind a skill that was way bad compared to my main ones by doing repetitive stuff (e.g craft 100s of steel daggers while I had high tier equipment already)
@@UlissesSampaio There are flaws to every system. My personal preference is skill based over quest based. In quest based you grind side quest so that the main quest or some quest with stat check is easier to do ( E.g you shoot 20 rats and increase bartering, so that you can take a free weapon of trader with skill check). In skill based... you grind a skill until it's at the level you need it to be.
@@UlissesSampaioI grind skills in real life if I want to be good at them.
@@S.... yes, real life requires grinding to learn stuff. But this is a case where realism is not fun imo.
@@UlissesSampaio That can be solved by perks not gated behind a skill level and but also you want a cool perk that is only a high level player is supposed to have , you gotta grind either way.
You've highlighted my main problem with the way Skyrim does things. Making infinity iron daggers. One of the many reasons I've always preferred Fallout. I'm very glad that at least when Bethesda adopted, they did keep the standard xp system that goes into decision based character building, rather than adopting the way they do it for elder scrolls.
The biggest issue I have with failure-based skill increases is with how that interacts with combat specifically. You can apply the same method of questioning onto what counts as a "failure" as what counts as a use of the skill in the first place. Does combat EXP just function differently, where you only gain combat exp on kills? Does this incentivize going around and killing everyone? Does it make sense for a game to have two different skill progression tracks?
If you try to put in exp on failure, then in combat, are people going to deliberately hamstring their own effectiveness and use suboptimal weapons or "intentionally miss" in order to gain exp? Do you gain exp per missed attack, or for every attack that gets blocked? Do you have to be aiming at something and then randomly miss - aka are we creating a Morrowind style situation where you're both required to aim but ALSO you have a random chance of spontaneous failure beyond your own control?
And even beyond combat you KNOW people are going to create some degenerate self-restriction or debuff that makes them terrible at something so they can grind at it, constantly failing and gaining exp. Is there going to be a limit to how many times you can fail at something? Do you gain more or less exp for failing something far above your skill level? Are there *always* consequences for failure? Because if I can keep smashing my picks against a master lockpick while getting drunk enough to forget how to pick locks, and trying something difficult gives more exp than trying something easy, then the game is rewarding me for finding ways to make myself weaker. If you get more exp for failing at something you have a high chance of success at, then you suffer emotional whiplash between players who want to fail to get exp seeing success as locking them out of their personal win condition.
Player mentality is insane when it comes to leveling up, and with optimization culture being the default norm for many, MANY players, if you create a system where you gain exp if you fail you are paradoxically incentivizing people to figure out the safest and most efficient ways to fail until they max out before actually playing the game. I agree that these players will be ruining the experience for themselves, but surely it has to be a consideration.
TL:DR; Skill based XP systems are really cool but the playerbase will ALWAYS break them, and once broken, that then becomes the "recommended" way to play your game for many players, even if it ruins all the fun of your game in the first place.
An ARPG that had a 'skill' based growth system is Dungeon Siege 1 & 2 with their weapons and magic.
DS2 also had a perks locked behind certain breakpoints for their skill levels that allow one to mix and match and create their own class
Looks like you were hanging out with Brian Fargo, Todd Howard, etc., at the premiere of the new Fallout show! ☢ We'd love to hear your thoughts on that event, your interactions with people there, the show itself, and anything else related to it. 👍 I'm sure the show won't 100% please all Fallout fans, but it's getting good reviews and I look forward to checking it out.
Another approach to skill-based progression (IIRC from Basic Roleplaying did something like this) is to track successes, and upon reaching the requisite number of successes (let's say equal to the current skill value), roll percentile. If the percentile roll is over the skill value, the skill goes up by one and the "bar" resets to the new value. If the roll is under, the check happens again after a number of subsequent successes (say, 25% of the skill's value). This allows lower value skills to advance quickly, while progression slows at higher levels.
Very thought provoking discussion. It prompted me to think maybe skill XP should be awarded on Fail (learning from your mistakes) - or maybe near-Success - rather than on Success. This would also have the benefit that skill gain would naturally taper off.
Kenshi has some very interesting answers to some of these questions as a sandbox RPG with a skill system. Raising your Toughness and HP is a system of rewarding failure. You have to get hit, beat up and recover from injuries to increase that skill. Your combat skills are raised through successful hits but you have to fight an evenly matched character or better to increase your skill. Initially you might be grinding easy enemies but eventually this encourages you to seek greater challenges. After a while the only real challenges will be seeking famous or infamous targets with high bounties. Those are a couple examples but in general if you're looking for interesting potential answers to Tim's questions in this video: You should look into Kenshi.
I haven’t played many RPG in the past 10 years so I might be missing a lot of good examples, but Last Epoch’s skill level seems to work pretty well from players perspective. It levels with usage and players doesn’t really have to grind the skill level intentionally.
And of course, because of the type of game it is (Diablo like hack and slash with lots of mobs), all skills are used in combat, so it doesn’t need to handle issues like lock picking or stealth.
I am designing a system where basically there are two experience bars. Its not for an RPG per say, more of a strategy game where units level up.
The first experience bar increases as you kill things/complete missions. When you level up you get to choose between a few randomly selected perks, and a couple of psuedo-randomly selected perks that are chosen based on what your character did on a mission. E.g. they attacked 20 times with a sword, each time theres a 5% chance on each attack to be able to unlock a choice for a new perk on level up each time you attack a random sword based perk.
The higher levels you have more variety of perks to choose from because it takes higher to level up, so you have more of a chance of unlocking more choices in perks.
Right now im designing such that you can't miss attacks, just to see if i can avoid the aggravation of missing 95% hit chances, but if i go back to that i think ill use your suggestion here. It seems like a really good way of leveling something up/getting better at something.
As a player, I really enjoyed the system in Brandish but I was fully aware I was cheesing it. For example, magic defense. This incrementally goes up with successfully taking magic hits and not dying. I later learned I could make the player character spontaneously sleep on the spot which lowers armor defense and makes magic damage go up significantly so I would force my character to stand in front of a magic caster and sleep only to be awoken on damage. After a certain point, my character was strong enough to sleep off damage cast by magic before getting with another spell.
Brandish also had weapon durability but as a bonus for getting through enough sections, you can find an unbreakable (but usually substantially weaker for the area) sword. Brandish gives arm strength for every successful attack on any enemy and I'd intentionally use weak swords on strong enemies to build up the arm strength. Again, I realize my grinding/cheesing play style is not to every players' preference but that was a system I liked because it was clear to me
This reminds me of how some companies tie employee bonuses to things like "number of bugs fixed". Well, you just saw a big increase in the number of minor bugs raised and fixed. People will either intentionally or unintentionally game a system. In RPGs, I sometimes find that skills like sneak or lockpicking are better skipped because the rewards from lockpicking are so worthless it can be skipped entirely, and successful sneaking means you avoid getting XP. Go full meathead with strength and constitution, then the game becomes quite easy.
Abiotic Factor is a great implementation of this, you have "passive" skills like sprinting and sneaking, you level them slowly but it doesn't matter since you level them almost all the time, then you have combat skills, makes you feel rewarded for fighting the most basic enemies even tho the loot sucks, and finally you have the skills for construction/cooking/crafting/first aid which makes you feel like playing a sim like deus ex and also gives some sort of specialization which is great on an online coop game like a classless class system
I know this is unrelated to the video but i'm kind of upset that there isn't a mention of you Tim in the opening credits to the new Fallout series. Unless I just missed it... 😭 Love your videos dude.
I loved how they did it in Tales Of Symphonia; you had character levels which scaled up as you progressed through the story,
and you had exp for skills as well: if you use a skill a certain number of times, then you unlock the higher level version
What's cool about this is it encouraged you to fight tougher enemies, because lower leveled ones would die too fast, and you got a cool zoom-in on a character when they got the new skill, and would use it instead of the normal version.
Then you can decide if you want to keep the old skill, or start using the new skill and possibly get another new skill from it
And there's also some higher rarity skills you can get by meeting certain requirements. Sometimes its a random roll, which depends on your luck stat, sometimes you need to do skills in a certain order, sometimes you need to combine skills from different characters.
It sounds complicated, but the dopamine hit from seeing that new skill get unlocked is amazing
Also worth mentioning: skills that are connected. RuneScape's mining skill is faster to level up than the smithing skill. That's partly because you can buy the resources to level smithing.
Final Fantasy XI (the first Final Fantasy MMO) has a lot of design issues, but I do like the core idea behind its skill system:
Skills will increase, whether you succeed or fail, if you're sufficiently close to the relevant challenge level. (Also possibly if you succeed despite being severely outmatched.) That ensures (to some extent) that you're doing level-appropriate tasks, while also having a logical feel to it as you're rewarded for doing things that are reasonably challenging and not just flailing wildly at impossible tasks (or grinding trivial tasks).
...It's worth mentioning that one of the design issues was that the actual odds of skills leveling up was pretty low, to match the glacial speed of the regular experience gain.
Both have received a bunch of boosts in the past decade or so, though.
When I saw this title my first assumption was the topic of rewarding skilled players with more XP, which now that I’m thinking about it seems very interesting and I wonder how that system would be handled in a single player game.
Stealth is always a funny skill to level up because many times in games you just crouch walk back & fourth around people in broad daylight and miraculously gain XP
I'm of the opinion that having players train skills by fighting rats and casting fireballs against walls also has value. I remember, crystal clear, hiding in a closet and practicing my destruction magic skill in Morrowind when I was 13 - and all the other training tricks in that game - and I remember that "wasted" time extremely fondly. Why was my spellsword so good at casting fireballs? Because he cast 15,000 fireballs at a wall before ever casting one at an enemy. It makes sense. It's honestly diegetic rather than symbolically diegetic.
More recently I've got a lot of joy from the grind in Kenshi.
It doesn't have to be an abstracted Rocky style training montage. Some players do find value in the arduous training itself.
Kenshi has a skill-based xp system, the things the game incentivises your characters to do to progress is a little absurd but that's part of the charm.
Kenshi awards much more xp if whatever you're fighting has a higher skill level than you and far less xp if it's the other way around.
That's the most interesting idea I've heard. Giving xp for failing an action.
Is it really a big problem tho, that people will annihilate trees and walls to practice skills? Cuz it seems to me that it's what a good person would do - practice on dummies and then training with a partner before going into a real fight.
Another interesting point is that you probably won't fail to miss a wall or practice dummy unless you're really, really bad, which would mean you'd only be able to do it for the early levels of a skill. Which makes perfect sense and also prevents people from wasting hours hitting a wall.
This requires you to have a failure % chance in combat, which feels bad in my opinion. Also, are you really going to miss hitting a golem more than you would a pig? Evasiveness doesn't always go up with stronger enemies, so why would you fight a grizzly bear over a mosquito if you're less likely to hit a mosquito? Also, you're missing out on how it feels good to be rewarded for doing a good job.