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[Heron TSG]

Smithing wasn't bad, you only needed to buy iron. Grinding enchanting was a different story. Not only did you need items to enchant, you needed to go out and find some soul gems. THEN you had to fill them up. Of course, the most common gems were petty or lesser gems, which could only hold shitty monster souls.

Fun: fighting dragons with extra-modded-in-difficulty
Not fun: fighting 300 mud crabs so that you can get enchanting up 5 ranks

Extra fun: Using your rad enchanting skills with your rad smithing skills and rad destruction skills to produce endless lightning storm to (literally) blitzkrieg your way through everything.

[alexandertnt]

A few years back I would've agreed with you 100%. I really do believe, though, that developers have worried about the plausibility of their mechanics so much that they've sacrificed good game design. Sometimes real life logic just doesn't make for good video games.

Its not so much about real life logic, then it is acutally making the skills fun to do. A minigame is one method, but this can often become tiresome depending on the game. Also playing Pipes to hack stuff is so random it might as well just roll dice. For example I found the pick-locing minigame in TES 4/5 was an improvement over Morrowind's stab-the-lock-until-result-of-RNG-is-above-some-numer mechanic. I likes the fact that they went to some effort to make it seem like your sort-of picking a lock. However, I dont play these games for the hundreds of hours some people do, and can understand that the minigame could become annoying. It ties in with my main problem with RPG mechanics. I just don't like how heavily statistical they are. Sometimes it gets to the point where you can work out the probability of success/failure of a given action using simple maths. Its been like this for years though. Our 64bit 3ghz multi-core processors are still doing the same mundane logic that 8bit 4mhz cpu's were in the 80's.

I do, however agree that RL logic definetely won't always work in a game. There are plenty of boring things in RL that I dont want to do in a game. Hell, the reason I play games is because they are not RL. As such game-design can't forget its a game.

Doing something a few times and having it matter is a rewarding experience. Having to button-mash 300 times just to be allowed to be better at it is pure grind.

The post was mostly an attempt to describe a method of making a skill fun and interesting. There are lots of other things that you could tie onto that, for example different types of materials with significantly varying and interesting differences (instead of material of +1 defence, slightly-better material of +2 defence). Of course mashing a button 300 times would be boring though this could be due to a boring mechanic, a skill/level/etc that advances far to slowly, or game design that focuses on the ends and not the means.

If the skill is boring to begin with, then of course someone would have no interest in increasing it. That person may prefer to do some other action instead. But IMO in this case the mecanic should not be necessary. Making armor can help you, but there can be other ways to aquire it, allowing you to advance. It should also be fun. If the person doesnt particularly enjoy the mechanic but they need to do it for whatever reason, a reasonably original and fun mechanic shouldnt be painful to do, as long as it isn't required over and over.

RL actually has a pretty good idea, if you find activity A boring, go and do activity B. You don't advance in activity A, but given you dont need to, nor do you find it entertaining to, thats fine. If you want (or in the sometimes-unavoidable situation need) a product from A, you can aquire it somehow through B (eg selling and money etc). Throw in some largely varying activities and I think it can provide fun, and a varied game experience.

Wheather any of this acually eliminates grind depends on the player though. But hopefully at least it can reduce the grindy-feeling for most. What I described doesn't really eliminate having to do activities per se, then it does with trying to make doing them an interesting and original experience. What is interesting will be subjective, even if the activities are varied.

[Vattic]

alexandertnt beat me to what I was going to say really.

I like the skill-by-doing system at least in principle but think it's been badly implemented often enough. Being able to specialise in an activity you like, profit from it, and use that profit to get other things seems ideal. If you can afford it you should be able to pay the best smith in the land to make your weapons for you or perhaps you buy your potions using the proceeds from your smithing?

[DJ]

I don't think I've ever seen a good implementation of learning by doing, IMO it *always* turns into a boring grind. Sure, it's more realistic, but realism should always be lower priority than good, fun gameplay. So yeah, I'm 100% in the point buy camp.

[Blaze]

I like the skill-by-doing system at least in principle but think it's been badly implemented often enough. Being able to specialise in an activity you like, profit from it, and use that profit to get other things seems ideal. If you can afford it you should be able to pay the best smith in the land to make your weapons for you or perhaps you buy your potions using the proceeds from your smithing?

In principle yes; but when put in practice, specialization would only work in social MMOs or games with many players; but then it comes off as min-maxing. It tends to fail in SP games due to Artificial Incompetence or "Balancing".

Usually, in games with crafting systems, or perhaps especially in games with crafting systems, nothing beats the feeling of creating your own Infinity+1 sword and putting it to use. If you could get something that eclipses anything you could ever make, why bother with crafting at all? If you made an awesome one-of-a-kind item but lacked the skill to use it would you let it be used in the hands of an NPC who could never use it to its full potential?

[GlyphGryph]

I hate point buy systems except for heavily mechanical games. I'm alright with a point buy system to divvy up among my units in tactical games or others of the sort where the mechanics are all that matters, but in RPGs and other story based games it feels incredibly unnatural, especially in games where you can do a wide variety of things I find it incredibly boring. I have literally stopped playing point buy rpgs because I felt like there was absolutely no point to anything I was doing, since it would all go towards skills I didn't particularly care about but made beating the game easier, all while breaking me out of the narrative I spent so much time building.

In games where the ONLY skills are combat skills, this obviously isn't an issue, and I imagine it's why so many RPGs get away with it, because it makes sense to grow in a way of your choice, fighting wise, when you spend all your time fighting.

I've never had any problems with learn as you do skills, however, as long as they are part of a strong game, in which case they can be incredibly fun.

And they can be done REALLY well - See Crackdown - where the learn-as-you-do actually becomes a primary and enjoyable force of the game.

If you're grinding in a game that does learn-as-you-do well, you're only ruining it for yourself, and it's no different than spending 70 hours grinding low level enemies in an RPG meant to keep you on par simply by advancing through the normal number of battles. If you're not interested in actually playing the game before you, and instead focused on playing some other incredibly boring game, don't complain about how the game doesn't work. The game you are playing sucks, yes - maybe you should try playing the game that was built instead?

[Blaze]

Isn't Crackdown a game with a skill set entirely focused on fighting with absolutely no side skills at all? So technically there IS only one way to play?

[Vattic]

In principle yes; but when put in practice, specialization would only work in social MMOs or games with many players; but then it comes off as min-maxing. It tends to fail in SP games due to Artificial Incompetence or "Balancing".

Usually, in games with crafting systems, or perhaps especially in games with crafting systems, nothing beats the feeling of creating your own Infinity+1 sword and putting it to use. If you could get something that eclipses anything you could ever make, why bother with crafting at all? If you made an awesome one-of-a-kind item but lacked the skill to use it would you let it be used in the hands of an NPC who could never use it to its full potential?

Crafting instead of paying to get something made would rely on an in game economy that wasn't totally broken; A myth from what I hear. If you had to specialise to really pull in the gold to afford the highest tier gear crafted by NPCs. As things stand earning gold is often far too easy for this to be workable.

You make some really fair points. Selling your self-crafted epic items and having them pretty much just disappear into a merchants inventory would be dull. I hope to play DF as a legendary smith in the future and have my swords show up in the hands of heroes in great battles for centuries and have them and my character be well known. That kind of thing would work well in a SP game I'd say but then DF plans to have a kind of ongoing narrative only usually found in player driven MMOs.

[lordcooper]

Armageddon MUD uses the 'failure' system for skill progression.  I like it

[Blaze]

I think the issue with it is that we gamers want sandbox games to be more like real life, except easier.

[Mithras]

I've been dying for an excuse to introduce Shadows of Isildur MUD onto the forum and this seems to be the chance. I believe its built on the same system as Armageddon, they certainly look similiar.

Character skill is divided into skills and crafts. Skills are how good you are at doing certain things and are defined in four vague tiers going up from Novice to Master. Crafts are recipes that make skill tests to see if (and how well) they succeed. Crafts are also divided into catagories but they're generally narrower than skills, so the woodcutting skill will be very important for timber work crafts (finding and choppping trees down) wood carving (making anything from a wooden sword to spoons) and furniture making crafts. Certain crafts test more than one skill.

Anyway the skills system is a bit opaque but as far as I understand skills have a small chance of increasing by a small ammount for each failure, but that then set off a timer that meant you couldn't increase the skill again for a good chunk of the day. Meanwhile you can only learn a new craft recipe by succeeding at one in the same catagory (with a preferance to a recipe that either used the ingredients the recipe you were using made or made the ingredients for the recipe you were using) again with a timer so that you can't learn more than two new crafts in a day. Most recipes also have at least hour long timers that stopped you from using other recipes with timers in order to avoid spamming (So while you could cut down as many trees as you can find people to carry back with you, you can only find one suitable for cutting down every half hour). So failing a craft meant you get better at what you already knew what to do but succeeding it means you could learn to do new things. This works great in noncombat skills, especially ones where things progress in trees, it was brilliant to be an aprentice armourer making iron rings until you slowly got all the recipes for things you could make with iron rings. It was less brilliant when you flush several deer only to figure out how to catch a goldfish.

For the combat skills it was even more murky. You see there's a craft to practice each weapon type, which meant novices can practice without getting themselves killed (death is perminant) but eventually they get high up at second level (familiar) and they succeed all the tests so they have to spar or go into combat. Sparing with wooden or padded weapons was also quite deadly if you weren't wearing armour on every location. There was a rumour going around that wooden weapon sparing only got you to a certain level then you'd have to fight with real weapons, of course since the skill levels are so vague it's hard to substantiate.

There's also a teaching system where a more experienced teacher can give another player a small skill boost, teach them an entirely new skill, or teach them a new craft, all with varying levels of roleplay. Teaching a new craft was easiest, and didn't have a chance to fail but it had its own pitfalls because generally one only learns new crafts when one is at a skill level to sometimes succeed at it, but you could teach and extremely complicated task to a complete novice and then watch as they wasted loads of patiently hoarded materials trying to do something you were supposed to have shown them.

For all its failsafes the game doesnt really stop spamming, partly because the mechanincs are so obscured many just assume that doing the same thing over and over again would increase skill or gain a new craft, partly because peple learned to gauge the timers, especially for crafts and stop crafting everytime they got a new recipe, coming back to it once they figured they'd waited long enough.

I hope I got all the tenses straight, I get confused because the game's been closed for almost a year now and is coming out with a new version in September, the new version promises wear and tear, repair, more variable item quality and with that a way to finish and improve already made items so you don't have to keep spamming loads of dodgy daggers to hopefully get one new one. Writing this has made me pine for the old game again it introduced me to roleplaying all those four years ago!

[GlyphGryph]

Isn't Crackdown a game with a skill set entirely focused on fighting with absolutely no side skills at all? So technically there IS only one way to play?

No way. If all you're doing is fighting, you're playing this game exceptionally wrong. Strength, Firearms and Explosives are admittedly all (arguable in the case of strength) combat based, but Agility and Driving are anything but.

And most players I know spent at least (if not more) time driving and exploring than they did fighting. It's a beautiful game with a ton of exploration and some high quality exploration mechanics, and that was the primary reason I played it, and you gained Agility skill by exploring the map. Driving you gained mostly by completing driving challenges and stunts.

It's actually, I think, the best way to handle "gain by doing" - instead of having any doing result in gain, making it grindable, give the player a set of milestones they need to accomplish with the skill in order to improve it (unlocking new milestones with each level). So to level up in crafting, you could either find some meteorite and craft a piece of armor and a weapon from that rare ore, or manage to meet a rush supply for goods quest, or make a masterwork item, or so on, and actually making each of the skills a game in its own right.

Not even a minigame, exactly, but a game on par with any of the other skills, and with at least as much complexity and (hopefully) enjoyableness for the right sort of person as combat is.

[LeoLeonardoIII]

Spoiler: Why we grind (click to show/hide)

I agree that a lot of systems encourage grinding. I agree grinding is not fun if you don't want to do it. I've seen systems that discourage grinding, such as Freelancer. That game prevented you from buying better ships and guns if you hadn't advanced far enough in the storyline. I hated it because often I had the cash to buy the next upgrade even though I wasn't even grinding.

I think part of the issue is people choose to grind. You can kill low level monsters to get XP still, and you want to gain that next level before moving on to a new area. Or you want more gold to buy a better sword with. Then again some games require grinding because the next area is so hard you need that extra level or better sword to survive. That sucks because the designers just didn't include enough original content.

Imagine two games: in Grindgame you do a couple interesting quests in Zone 1 and then in order to survive Zone 2 you need to play things you've already played. In Fungame you have far more than enough quests in Zone 1 that you don't need to see them all before you're ready for Zone 2.

Now we have the problem that people want to see all the content, so are playing quests in Zone 1 that are below their abilities and get bored because the game is too easy. That's less a grind and more a complaint about being able to access quests of suboptimal difficulty.

Anyway, my point is, often people complain about a grind when there are plenty of other things to do in the game, but they prefer to grind for whatever reason (better rewards usually).

Spoiler: It's okay that grinding isn't fun (click to show/hide)

A secondary point is that in cases where you can grind to achieve a higher level, or just play the game as intended, most people grind like crazy and then complain that it isn't fun. That's because if you can be a 100.0% Blacksmith, and you start at 30.0%, you want that max skill. But you can't complain to the designers that they should have made it more fun for you to click the same button 100,000 times. There's no justification for that being fun. We have this huge sense of entitlement, that nothing we can do in the game should be un-fun. What if it's possible for me to circumnavigate the world by crawling backward? Should I complain that it's not fun for me to do that just because it's a possibility in the game?

We need to realize that it's okay to not pick up and sell every piece of loot, or kill every monster, or perform every quest, or max out any skill. Let's say there's a +6 Vorpal sword in the game. I think it's okay if, because the drop rate is so low, almost no player will ever have one. Entering the game does not guarantee success, much less the opportunity to fondle every scrap of content.

Spoiler: Ultima Online's system (click to show/hide)

This is from my days as a freeshard programmer / GM. UO's skill system had a base skill, a small bonus from related attribute (STR, DEX, INT), plus equipment modifiers, arriving at total skill. Max Base Skill was usually 100.0% per skill, up to 700.0% overall Base (which meant you could max out 7 skills, or max 6 and get two to 50.0%, etc).

Skill gain was based on usage, easy at low skill and harder at high skill. Up to 30.0% you could gain skill even if you failed, but after that you needed to succeed to gain skill.

Easy targets (an item easy for you to craft, or a monster easy for you to fight) wouldn't give a skill gain.

This is all from my script set, and was I believe the intended system even if other servers didn't implement it effectively.

You could also get your skills up to 30.0% by skipping skill use - by spending money for training from knowledgeable NPCs or hitting a training dummy for a few hours.

Spoiler: HP-based EXP from a D&D OSR perspective (click to show/hide)

You could award XP based on damage dealt and damage taken. You don't get XP from "overkill damage" beyond the target's HP. This encourages people to fight stuff that's hard because (1) it can soak up lots of your damage, and (2) it can hurt you. If you turtle up or stay back and so never take damage, you will level up slower. If you never hit anything for damage, instead buffing or healing, you never gain XP from that. You often have a choice between a slog fight in which you gain XP because you deal and take lots of damage, or a quick win for which you earn little or no XP (for example, paralyzing the enemies).

This sounds hard to adjudicate on a computer, because you need a strong, neutral referee to prevent abuse. For example, if you go into a farmyard and kill a chicken, no XP. Hit your friend in a duel: no XP. Come upon a sleeping monster and kill it instantly? No XP. This is really commonsense stuff that people only argue about because they want to screw over the game by getting huge unwarranted rewards. Analogous to all those "optimal build" forum threads and obscure rules-lawyering scams like Pun-Pun and the Hulking Hurler throwing iridium moons around. These people have fun by trolling earnest players and find no such fun in a well-run game.

Spoiler: XP based on difficulty: most MMOs and 3E D&D sorta. But with repetition-throttling. (click to show/hide)

You get 100 XP per monster you kill. Except: if the monster is one level lower than you, you get only 50. If two levels lower or less, you get nothing.

If in a party, XP is split equally, but each member gets the XP reduction depending on his own level. So a L10 partying with five L1s to powerlevel them will get nothing unless he's bringing them in to fight L8 monsters, and even then he'd be killing more L8 enemies with a party of peers than this party of nubs. The L1 nubs, meanwhile, are getting as much XP from these L8 enemies as if they were fighting L1 enemies.

Of course, these L1s are also going to constantly get killed off by stray attacks and area-effect magic.

The same system can be used if you rate craftables / harvestable resources based on difficulty.

This all means there is no benefit from succeeding by chance or chicanery at things that are way above you, and there's no benefit to grinding easy things. You have to constantly move upward if you want to learn.

Then, too, you can track exactly what the PC does and reduce XP awards for doing the same thing. For example, if you kill 100 Orcs you stop earning XP from Orcs entirely even though you could still earn XP from other L1 monsters.

[LeoLeonardoIII]

Also:

Spoiler: Minigames don't need to be fun on the 1,000th try (click to show/hide)

A lockpicking minigame should be fun and interesting and make you feel like you're picking a lock. It's not necessary for the mini-game to be fun if you're doing it 1,000 times because you want to pick every lock in the game. Again, if you decided to make a dagger mural by dropping daggers artistically in the town square, there's no reason to expect that to be fun after the first few minutes. It's ludicrous to consider the game designers at fault because you can do something not fun in their game.

[GlyphGryph]

That HP-based XP system sounds utterly miserable to ever play, to be honest! It's sort of a role-lock system, and actually punishes playing the game intelligently, which I don't really like.