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Experience Points and Character Advancement
JacobKnoll
Member Posts: 31
I was reading the topic on Genning, some people mentioned Imping and how they hated it and I began to think about some other things that felt to me to be out of place.
I was wondering if there could be alternatives to gauge your characters advancement without using the traditional yet somewhat out of character system using "Orbits/levels" and "Experience Points" .
I was thinking, maybe instead of acheiving 3,000 experience points after collapsing a nightmare or player and just leaving unwanted essences all over the game, you might do somthing with that essence.
Yeah, I mean the main idea is to collect the essence and bring it to your prime, or evoke a special Art upon it, but if players recieved experience only after they did one of those things.. anyway I think it would make more roleplaying sense what you did with the essence than how you got it.
What I think would be really cool was if there were different "experience" rewards depending what you did with your essences.
I also think it would be a good idea to get rid of the annoying "number" of experience points, and the "checkpoints/orbits" these can easily become part of a conversation that really ruins a roleplay.
I suggest some sort of visual indication of advancement, players love visuals and they can be interperted in almost any way giving roleplay a fighting chance in a roleplaying game.
If you have Ideas or suggestions, or you just think this is an important issue, please, follow up.
Comments
wow I like this idea, gain your reward of orbits etc through your actions. this idea adds alot to the roleplaying dinamics of the game I think. though you would have to make sure that one way of treating the ess was not favoured over anotherie between banishing imprisoning etc.
so all gathering to the house stones having a direct effect and better advancement possibilities for your character than just leaving it behind. or absorbing onto yourself such as with drain essence. this would encourage more players to get activly involved with either their house or aspirant guild.
another thing that would be good would be a kill count also. I would love to know how many emphants/boggies/agos etc my character has killed/saved. also total times I have been collapsed and perhaps how many dreamers I have collapsed in my characters lifetime.
I really like those count ideas of yours Rikku, I love statistics. I am worried though that they might become too much of a source of bragging, and people might start acting so and so to affect the counts.
One thing I'd love to see is a count on how many days you have dreamt. No, if you start in January and leave for 6 months, those 6 months dont count. Only the days you are actually logged in to the game. It is really annoying when old chars come in from 4 years of absense claming to have dreamt for 5 years. It'd just be cool to know though. I may not know all that much about programming, but I dont see how it would be all that difficult.
As for the essence idea, it is good, but how bout freespirits, or new dreamers not yet in a house? what's the solution for them?
Well I have always personally hated the idea of freespirits. But generally you'll end up aligned with someone, and I dont think ess are going to be the only way to gain experience. else how is the advocates going to advance? I dont think they plan to keep then as uselesss as a newlie do you?
But the Doing something with the actual essence will gain you reward some greater than others obviously, like suppporting a guild or house with the ess should be of more benefit than to stay solo and use it upon yourself.
Basically I see this idea as a way to make sure that people get involved with the groups in rec. rather than just being some on the fringe solo person.
I totally agree with Rikku, I guess the idea is that no matter if your in a house or not, there is some sort of roleplaying solution to earning your experience.
If your a freespirit it could be as simple as evoking drain upon your essences, but that may not be the most efficient way of harnessing the power contained inside. Players believe essences contain many things but it is very clear that they contain something (maybe just chaos), I think this is fundamental to the game.
So Houses are powerful for a reason, they form an aggregate of players and lay control over certain territories.. these are powerful advantages freespirits just do not have access to. I don't think its a problem if freespirits cannot have direct access to the same advantages, but I also don't think they are limited by them.
Also I don't think hunting should be the sole vehicle to advance your player, experience should be taskable by a teacher so that players can avoid a confrontational approach.
Or if your a freespirit who wants nothing to do with the politics of other players or the aggressive nature of hunting (Like Anneki from the story of The Grove), then maybe they can advance their character by altering the environment around them. There are heartstones that effect houses on certain territories, why should the lands respond solely to them?
I sometimes think it would be cool to roleplay a freespirit druid type character who wants to guard sacred lands from the tyrrany of the dream society. Maybe that freespirit could do work to transform that area and use its power to ward off intruders to some "natural" degree, maybe using weather, "heartstone defenders", or whatever maybe even faction could play a part here to bridge the intentions of the player to the behavior of the land.