Truisms of Leveling Design

[Dracos]

As it applies to RPG design, I'm a firm believer in the effectiveness of Leveling as a dynamic of power per time spent, from the conceptual level.  There are several valid examples demonstrating it as an effective measure, although there are also examples that the conceptual framework is ill defined.  My suggestion is that there be rules of thumb, some truisms, positive and negative, that can be learned from past projects in order to fine-tune this concept.  Towards that end, I have attempted to put such a list together.  This will, by necessity, be a meandering construct, with the truisms stated throughout each section, and listed once more after the reasoning for all has been given.

   Dragon View provides an example of poor leveling structure.  The game provides static level growth schemes and an exponential damage curve.  With each level, your ability to absorb and deal damage increases linearly – with little deviation between level-up bonuses.  This seems sensible until one considers how each fight is exponentially easier or harder.  If you have 40 HP, and an enemy does ten less damage per blow per level gained, then four levels can be the difference between life and death.  Being underleveled at any point means you'll quickly die from the slightest mistakes, whereas being overleveled will result in waltzing through enemies without any danger.  Obviously neither is desirable, though being underleveled makes it unreasonably difficult to progress.

Another game, Ys: Ark of Naphistim, suffers from a similar problem.  Being underleveled makes boss fights tremendously harder, not out of any difference in strategy, but because the defensive gap simply makes it impossible to do any real damage at a low level.  The result is that players will overlevel for safety.  They will stay around and slaughter hundreds of lesser enemies, preferring an easy (and almost certainly less interesting) fight to a virtually impossible one.

   There are valid alternatives.  One in particular involves avoiding attack/defense as linear effects in the system.  Namely, a designer can provide static measures that represent the majority effect, such as weapons or armor; these tie gameplay more to finding these measures, and less to level gaining.  There are undoubtedly others, but we are brought to the first truisim: A good leveling design should not discourage being underleveled.  To do so effectively makes the game about leveling, typically to its detriment.

   Overleveling, of course, is the other side of the same problem; breaking the game's difficulty.  Ignoring, for the moment, that many fans do enjoy working up to ridiculously high levels, it can seriously damage the difficulty margin of a game.  Perhaps we could make things harder with more levels, or by making the enemies stronger – in proportion with the time taken by the heroes not fighting them, and in turn letting the enemies gather their own strength.  Implementations like this range from the silly, such as Final Fantasy 8s version, to the reasonably logical, Lunar: Silver Star Story.  On the surface, they make sense; enemies that are left to prosper grow stronger, posing a greater threat.

   Except that they ignore that earlier premise of leveling: to provide a dynamic scale of difficulty that reduces slowly as you go up in level.  This runs the risk of being logically confusing – fights which get harder, not easier, upon leveling – and even unrecoverable, given that almost no game (certainly no console game) implements methods for losing levels.  Therefore, by tying leveling to difficulty, you're giving players a one-way street in which they cannot regress to an earlier level without starting the entire game over.  Some may say it forces them to adapt, but that's not the point.  The game's challenges should require adaptation, not the fact that you spent too long killing monsters outside.  Thus, we're brought to a second truism: Do not punish overleveling.  Instead, simply don't encourage it.  Allow the natural forces in place to work their ways on the environment.

   Twentytwo brought up Seiken Denestu 3 in the last discussion, and specifically a segment in which you have to fight eight demon beasts.  The fights themselves are enjoyable, but they also have a level with enemies that are slightly stronger each time; Twentytwo posited it as an example of filler.  While I disagreed with that being intentionally a case of it, it does bring up another point of leveling design philosophy.  A good game is meant to be finished.  It does not seek to go on beyond any measure in which it is fun.  Naturally, programmers cannot ensure such things on their own end but, at the same time, there are often uses of leveling to extend gameplay.  Final Fantasy has done this on occasion.  The earliest Dragon Quest definitely has, as did both Seventh Sagas.  The early Breath of Fires did so as well.  It's not wrong, per se, but at the same time it misses the point.  Leveling, ideally, should happen naturally.  It's supposed to be a tangible, though not ever-present, sliding scale of difficulty.  A way of growth that feels good yet you don't hunt for.   Thus, a third truism: Leveling should not be filler for content.

   Dragon View highlights another issue with leveling that bears examination.  After a level or two, you could stop taking enemies seriously.  Not only would you have a huge margin of error due to your life and defense, but an idle swat would kill an enemy.  If you leveled and searched well, this could even apply to bosses.  There is no way to make a boss challenging if it dies in a couple of hits.  The same goes for enemies which are dispatched by a single attack.  Leveling should make things easier, certainly, but it shouldn't completely erase the experience.  Yes, it's supposed to represent growth in the aesthetic sense, but the game still has a responsibility to be entertaining.

Lots of games use leveling as a means to increase your potential to survive a fight, as opposed to increasing combat ability.  Valkyrie Profile, though I hesitate to admit it, encapsulates this idea fairly well.  The weapons you receive are means to improve your fighting prowess, and are limited by where you were in the game, while your HP and defense are tied to your levels.  The practical result is that your margin of error would increase as you fought enemies, though you still wouldn't be invincible.  Given that the game had its own issues which limit the purity of this example, it is one of the most accurate for precisely what leveling should do: give the player more room to breathe, without stripping enemies of the threat they pose.  Thus, the next truism: Leveling should increase Survivability, not Killability.  And yes, Killability is a fake word; nonetheless, its meaning should be obvious.

   Part of the issue leveling design has these days is overcoming years of screwing up the formula.  Dragon Quest effectively created the standard for console RPGs in the mid eighties.  They had a system and, whatever else anyone can say about it, it worked like it was supposed to.  It wasn't perfect, but it was significantly better than most of its contemporaries.  Final Fantasy took it and cut out a part of it that really started the whole trend towards overleveling; the implementation of Game Over, meaning when you die, you have to reload from your last save.  They balanced it in their own way, by releasing easy games for the most part, but in doing so game over became a staple of most RPGs.

   This is a heinous activity from a leveling design perspective.  Nothing could be more thoroughly encouraging of leveling than permanent death.  If you lose, you lose everything you've gained after your last save, and possibly hours of your time; furthermore, you'll have to spend even more time to regain what you lost.  It discourages being underleveled by punishing it with repeating the action over and over again.  Worse, it represents contempt for player time.  Any time spent experimenting, scouting out early, and trying to see how far you can go in the game is wasted, as all the practical benefits are lost.  This has encouraged entire generations of RPGers to push towards a standard of being overleveled as they're expecting a need for it that often never exists, simply because they don't want to go do all that stuff over again.  Thus, I suggest another truism of leveling, and indeed of gaming as a whole: Time is valuable, do not waste it.  Entertainment is not an excuse for being wasteful with time.

   In many games, the amount of wealth you have is directly tied to how many enemies you have slaughtered.  There is no other way of earning cash, and consequently no other way of acquiring goods.  Enemies also offer experience, meaning cash hunting can lead to overleveling, and vice versa.  Some of this is intentional, and, in earlier games where memory was at a premium, it was the most rational of all ways to distribute gold.  The problem is that it for 20 years it has been the primary, and in almost all cases the only, way of generating revenue.  When you need experience, you kill enemies and gain experience towards levels.  When you need gold, you kill enemies and gain experience anyway, with the obvious end result that would entail.  Sometimes this is intentional, but by and large the lack of an alternative means to make money encourages (or at least accommodates) overleveling.  You should generally not feel the need to level if you are strong enough to fight nearby enemies, and thus you shouldn't have to in order to afford a shiny new dagger.  There are many ways of addressing this, but the point follows: Leveling tied to wealth leads to overleveling.

Arc the Lad 4: Twilight of the Spirits continued on with a long-held tradition of including some kind of arena in each game.  These arenas varied from the good to the mediocre, but in all of them, a single warrior faced off against one or more enemies, attempting to kill them to win prizes.  The Tales series used the same idea.  When done well, it allows the player to experience the fun of the battle in controlled challenge environments, while being rewarded for completing said challenges.  Typically, cash or item rewards are the real end of such arena systems, but often a secondary end is that it's one of the more fun ways to isolate the battle system.  The problem, unfortunately, is that it rewards those who enjoy the combat system the most and are the most skilled with it; the rewards being a decrease in challenge by way of experience.

In Tales of Phantasia, I often saw Cless up to ten levels above the party average through a few arena fights.  Twilight of the Spirits I found particularly absurd in this regard; any character who fought through the arena left the rest of the party in the dust, and there was no good way to do party fights.  While many will see this as not a problem and generally I stand with them, in the concept of balancing leveling, it offers a clear truism: Give ways to enjoy the battle system without overleveling.  Yes, it's fine to give such experiences and use them intentionally, but in giving no other way to enjoy the battle system without gaining levels, you effectively sabotage your system's difficulty by its quality.  Logically, all battle constitutes experience, but it is a game and if you're trying to keep the leveling down, providing such is a good way to achieve this while at the same time providing more access to what these players find enjoyable.

   Truthfully, that itself is borderline and leads into the last one I could come up with.  With a specific design it could be fine tuned to tens or hundreds of such truisms, though it still wouldn't provide a perfect solution.  Some ass in Norway would discover a way to break the system using some absurd method and by the beauty of the internet, some ten thousand others would learn of this method in a matter of minutes.  Nothing can be done to prevent this, nor should anything be done.  These are players of your game, playing your system into the ground and, quite often, having fun doing it.  There's nothing wrong with them enjoying doing so, and in fact, as Final Fantasy loves to prove, there's quite a market for slicing difficulty entirely out of the equation with five hundred ways to become god.  So to end it, the last rule of thumb is: Whatever you do, someone will have fun becoming god in your game.

Truisms:

1)Do not discourage being underleveled.
2)Do not punish overleveling.
3)Leveling should not be filler for content.
4)Leveling should increase Survivability, not Killability.
5)Time is valuable, do not waste it.
6)Leveling tied to wealth leads to overleveling
7)Give ways to enjoy the battle system without getting overleveled
8)Whatever you do, someone will have fun becoming god

Postscript:

This is a growing article.  If there are any suggestions for it, it will be added into the primary article.  I think I covered pretty much everything but, the idea is more desiring thoroughness.

[kpjam]

Very nice article.

[twentytwo]

Excellent list! I think I'll use them...

Can't say I have much to add, but I'll definitely be thinking about it!


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There are valid alternatives. One in particular involves avoiding attack/defense as linear effects in the system. Namely, a designer can provide static measures that represent the majority effect, such as weapons or armor; these tie gameplay more to finding these measures, and less to level gaining. There are undoubtedly others, but we are brought to the first truisim: A good leveling design should not discourage being underleveled. To do so effectively makes the game about leveling, typically to its detriment.

There are quite a few games that do what you suggest.

One that comes to mind is Lagoon. That game was incredibly difficult, mostly due to a weapon that can only cause damage one inch in front of your character (I never could figure out its strike-zone...). In that game, you leveled up, but the amount of gain per level was minute compared to what you gained by finding the next available equipment (hidden somewhere in each level). As you would guess, it discourages the act of over-leveling.

Another effective way of doing this is like Megaman Legends, or Megaman Battle Network: fight to earn the money you need to BUY upgrades, thus preventing you from ever being more powerful than is allowed at any particular stage. Of course, this is the other extreme: Time is Power, without true leveling. In fact, Grandia 2 used a similar system, where you purchased your skills and abilities with Coins dropped by enemies (Lufia had you purchase magic at churches... the list goes on); however, these actually encouraged another form of over-leveling: over-earning money. They gained their balance by putting a cap on the maximum ability of your character at any particular moment... (and making you aware that you are not yet powerful enough to survive by a lack of the proper equipment)

Personally, I still prefer the Soul Blazer idea of making each level upsurdly difficult to get to and thus requiring you to move on to the next stage just to even hope for a level or two... (powerleveling, though possible, was nowhere near enjoyable...)


Of course, I've always wondered why games don't have a "currently suggested exp level" displayed somewhere. (Final Fantasy: Chaos Temple - suggested level: 4)

Darn Strategy Guides...


article-

Thus, we're brought to a second truism: Do not punish overleveling. Instead, simply don't encourage it. Allow the natural forces in place to work their ways on the environment.

And this actually works well for those games that know how to do it.

This was actually touched on by Final Fantasy 7. In that game, your stats would reach approximately 150-180 naturally as you approach the end of the game. If you leveled up to 99, it still wouldn't reach the upper 255 limit. Using special items, it was possible. However, here's the burn: the ultimate weapons in the game will do 9999 damage under certain special conditions, while even the next to ultimate weapon with 255 Strength would only do approximately 5500. It was balanced so well that the extra leveling actually didn't do you any good. However, this doesn't change the fact that there were so many Uber-killing moves that broke that silly little balance...

Too many games can be beaten at level 25-50, making the extra 49 just overkill... (and then there was Final Fantasy 4 that made any level above 70 feel like too much hassle for the effort given...)


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Given that the game had its own issues which limit the purity of this example, it is one of the most accurate for precisely what leveling should do: give the player more room to breathe, without stripping enemies of the threat they pose.

I can see your point, including the non-purity bit. That game suffered from a major flaw that made over-leveling absolutely necessary: Stats effected the outcome of the PLOT. Just like Fallout, you ended up having to fight a dozen battles just to get the options you wanted... (another one was Interplay's "Dragon Wars", but who would remember that one...)

The weapons gave you different abilities that allowed you to implement different attack combos and strategies. It wasn't always good to switch to a more powerful weapon when the one you had gave you attacks worth singing about. Strategy is always a plus in battle, and most RPGs fail to fully simulate this.

Indeed, Survivability is King.

(Kill a Bill ity...)


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Final Fantasy took it and cut out a part of it that really started the whole trend towards overleveling; the implementation of Game Over, meaning when you die, you have to reload from your last save.

There's nothing more pleasing than fighting Odin: his countdown drops to zero, and with a flash, you get a happy flashing SquareSoft logo... (the bastards...)

Of course, there's always Pokemon... (but then, there's always my favorite: Mystic Quest! Lose a battle, just Try Again! Or Septerra Core, which automatically stores your current position in the game ever so often - or temporary Quick Saves...)

On the other hand, there are some games where you could just run away from the boss and come back later to try again - like they have nothing better to do than wait for you to kill them...


article-

Logically, all battle constitutes experience

"Practice" makes Perfect "Practice".
Practice "Perfect" makes "Perfect".

In reality, you tend to only learn useful skills when you practice doing them right, and usually only in controlled environments (like a dojo or a classroom). You have to be able to afford getting them wrong and ultimately being corrected. In battle, this is NEVER the case, and you will ALWAYS find that soldiers degenerate in combat (usually VERY quickly). Chaos ensues... (the Law of Entropy)

In my opinion, you can separate the two: leveling can be done outside of regular combat (in fact, you could actually argue that over-using bad skills can actually decrease your overall experience and ability, ingraining bad habits that can't be easily erased; but if I put that in a game, I'd get jumped...).

One truism might be: Remember, this isn't reality...

(I would argue that there's a hidden benefit behind separating the Learning and Executing portions of an activity... - you feel able to have fun, being pushed to your limit, without the possibility of permanent loss...)

(A lot of dating sims actually do that... or so I've heard...)


article-

With a specific design it could be fine tuned to tens or hundreds of such truisms, though it still wouldn't provide a perfect solution.

That's because these truisms are actualy Rules for how to build a leveling system in Games. Since each game has its own rules, there are different truisms for each.


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as Final Fantasy loves to prove, there's quite a market for slicing difficulty entirely out of the equation with five hundred ways to become god.

LOL. Excellent quote.

But then again, the ultimate secret boss is usually there for a lesson in humility... (So, you think you're all that...?)

***

All ideas aside, I still would prefer my own implementation of the system (currently still theory): Rewards and Punishments. Artificially control the difficulty of the game by dropping it when the player stays above the desired level of effort and increasing it with a lack of sufficient "playing" (not equipping new items, etc). In this way, the actual stats on the characters (and enemies) become moot and only represent a way to describe to the player that he is in fact stronger than he was a moment ago...

In other words, more practicality (heuristics), and less statistics...
-22

[Dracos]

Excellent list! I think I'll use them...

Can't say I have much to add, but I'll definitely be thinking about it!

Means I was pretty thorough.  Whch is good =)

article-

There are valid alternatives. One in particular involves avoiding attack/defense as linear effects in the system. Namely, a designer can provide static measures that represent the majority effect, such as weapons or armor; these tie gameplay more to finding these measures, and less to level gaining. There are undoubtedly others, but we are brought to the first truisim: A good leveling design should not discourage being underleveled. To do so effectively makes the game about leveling, typically to its detriment.

There are quite a few games that do what you suggest.

One that comes to mind is Lagoon. That game was incredibly difficult, mostly due to a weapon that can only cause damage one inch in front of your character (I never could figure out its strike-zone...). In that game, you leveled up, but the amount of gain per level was minute compared to what you gained by finding the next available equipment (hidden somewhere in each level). As you would guess, it discourages the act of over-leveling.

While you're definitely riight, I don't believe lagoon was that good an example of it.  I've beaten it twice, and remember vaguely that leveling was of fair import and checking an end game save of mine, I find that leveling outweighs equipment on a 3 to 1 scale of importance by end game.  And yeah, the sword was a pain in the ass, even if I adored the music of the game.  That said, i think your conceptualization of it is a fair one.  Using equipment as the primary gain is an excellent way to do it, even if one should be wary of the extremes such as Valkyrie Profile, where 99 perent of your damage potential is wrapped up in what sword you're using at the moment with the difference between a level 1 character with an uber weapon and a level 99 character with the same being effectively negligable.

Another effective way of doing this is like Megaman Legends, or Megaman Battle Network: fight to earn the money you need to BUY upgrades, thus preventing you from ever being more powerful than is allowed at any particular stage. Of course, this is the other extreme: Time is Power, without true leveling. In fact, Grandia 2 used a similar system, where you purchased your skills and abilities with Coins dropped by enemies (Lufia had you purchase magic at churches... the list goes on); however, these actually encouraged another form of over-leveling: over-earning money. They gained their balance by putting a cap on the maximum ability of your character at any particular moment... (and making you aware that you are not yet powerful enough to survive by a lack of the proper equipment)

MML style I thought worked pretty gracefully as, what's being missed here, is that there usually was a number of side jaunts you could go on to boost your survivability, with the everpresent hp bottle that never seemed to max as an obvious but expensive one.  I'm keen with acknowledging that as a pretty good design as I've thoroughly enjoyed the MMLs I've played.

Personally, I still prefer the Soul Blazer idea of making each level upsurdly difficult to get to and thus requiring you to move on to the next stage just to even hope for a level or two... (powerleveling, though possible, was nowhere near enjoyable...)

yup.  I thought that was pretty neat as well.  Underleveling didn't kill you as equipment was of primary importance, while overleveling wasn't likely since it was slow to camp the respawning enemies compared to moving on.

Of course, I've always wondered why games don't have a "currently suggested exp level" displayed somewhere. (Final Fantasy: Chaos Temple - suggested level: 4)

Truthfully, that's a pretty good idea.  Aesthetically, I can see why it's not been done, but really it's a good idea.

Darn Strategy Guides...

Well, and that.

article-

Thus, we're brought to a second truism: Do not punish overleveling. Instead, simply don't encourage it. Allow the natural forces in place to work their ways on the environment.

And this actually works well for those games that know how to do it.

This was actually touched on by Final Fantasy 7. In that game, your stats would reach approximately 150-180 naturally as you approach the end of the game. If you leveled up to 99, it still wouldn't reach the upper 255 limit. Using special items, it was possible. However, here's the burn: the ultimate weapons in the game will do 9999 damage under certain special conditions, while even the next to ultimate weapon with 255 Strength would only do approximately 5500. It was balanced so well that the extra leveling actually didn't do you any good. However, this doesn't change the fact that there were so many Uber-killing moves that broke that silly little balance...

Too many games can be beaten at level 25-50, making the extra 49 just overkill... (and then there was Final Fantasy 4 that made any level above 70 feel like too much hassle for the effort given...)

And many of  the smart ones have max level at 30-40.

article-

Given that the game had its own issues which limit the purity of this example, it is one of the most accurate for precisely what leveling should do: give the player more room to breathe, without stripping enemies of the threat they pose.

I can see your point, including the non-purity bit. That game suffered from a major flaw that made over-leveling absolutely necessary: Stats effected the outcome of the PLOT. Just like Fallout, you ended up having to fight a dozen battles just to get the options you wanted... (another one was Interplay's "Dragon Wars", but who would remember that one...)

The weapons gave you different abilities that allowed you to implement different attack combos and strategies. It wasn't always good to switch to a more powerful weapon when the one you had gave you attacks worth singing about. Strategy is always a plus in battle, and most RPGs fail to fully simulate this.

Indeed, Survivability is King.

(Kill a Bill ity...)

Did the best  I could termwise there :P

article-

Final Fantasy took it and cut out a part of it that really started the whole trend towards overleveling; the implementation of Game Over, meaning when you die, you have to reload from your last save.

There's nothing more pleasing than fighting Odin: his countdown drops to zero, and with a flash, you get a happy flashing SquareSoft logo... (the bastards...)

Of course, there's always Pokemon... (but then, there's always my favorite: Mystic Quest! Lose a battle, just Try Again! Or Septerra Core, which automatically stores your current position in the game ever so often - or temporary Quick Saves...)

On the other hand, there are some games where you could just run away from the boss and come back later to try again - like they have nothing better to do than wait for you to kill them...

Yup.  My favorite remains DQ precisely due to the separation between failing and trying again without real time penalities.  Try again actually would be best linked with this system: Hey, change your strategy OR go get stronger?  Options?  Awesome!

article-

Logically, all battle constitutes experience

"Practice" makes Perfect "Practice".
Practice "Perfect" makes "Perfect".

In reality, you tend to only learn useful skills when you practice doing them right, and usually only in controlled environments (like a dojo or a classroom). You have to be able to afford getting them wrong and ultimately being corrected. In battle, this is NEVER the case, and you will ALWAYS find that soldiers degenerate in combat (usually VERY quickly). Chaos ensues... (the Law of Entropy)

I disagree with that If only by the fact that you're comparing war to battle.  Most of the fights in games are more like duels or small team on team skirmishes than the sheer chaos of war.  That said, you're still sort of right, except in RPG worlds, you can take a fatal slash and get right back up.  This inherently makes the environment seem less sensible for it...

That said...

In my opinion, you can separate the two: leveling can be done outside of regular combat (in fact, you could actually argue that over-using bad skills can actually decrease your overall experience and ability, ingraining bad habits that can't be easily erased; but if I put that in a game, I'd get jumped...).

Yes, you would be, but this sort of split isn't a bad idea.

One truism might be: Remember, this isn't reality...

Don't think that's so much of a leveling design truism though as a design truism in general.

article-

With a specific design it could be fine tuned to tens or hundreds of such truisms, though it still wouldn't provide a perfect solution.

That's because these truisms are actualy Rules for how to build a leveling system in Games. Since each game has its own rules, there are different truisms for each.

Yup, though I think a good game could use almost all of these and be bettered  for it.

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as Final Fantasy loves to prove, there's quite a market for slicing difficulty entirely out of the equation with five hundred ways to become god.

LOL. Excellent quote.

But then again, the ultimate secret boss is usually there for a lesson in humility... (So, you think you're all that...?)

I've generally found that their secret bosses have become more and more just 'stat up slugfests' as the years go by.  Five's hidden boss was a brutal fight which overleveling didn't help compared to strategy.  A trifling of strategy was necessary in seven.  Eight was item use or death pretty much because every attack did 9999 (which despite what some morons think, does not in the least make for a good hidden boss or a good fight whatsoever).  Nine's sort of was strategy...though reallly it was more "If you had  this armor, you won, if not, you lost".  I fought it with the armor and thus was unimpressed as there was barely any room beyond that for strategy.  X?  Solid stat slugfest the entire way through, not even the intent of strategy.  X-2?  Haven't played yet.  

***

All ideas aside, I still would prefer my own implementation of the system (currently still theory): Rewards and Punishments. Artificially control the difficulty of the game by dropping it when the player stays above the desired level of effort and increasing it with a lack of sufficient "playing" (not equipping new items, etc). In this way, the actual stats on the characters (and enemies) become moot and only represent a way to describe to the player that he is in fact stronger than he was a moment ago...

In other words, more practicality (heuristics), and less statistics...
-22

Using something other than leveling is absolutely fine, and for the health of the industry should be there.  These were more a clarification of things that should generally be there anytime leveling is used.

Dracos