[Nephilim]

Considering my recent displeasure with Zelda 2, I picked up a different GBA title called 'Mario Golf Advance Tour,' which has some definite traditional RPG elements to it. You wander around a map, explore locations, talk to people, and level-up your characters with experience points that make them more skilled. In this case, your skills apply to golfing rather than combat.

This got me wondering - are any of you working on, or have you worked on in the past, RPG's that break out of the "level up to get better in combat" mold? And if so, what design challenges did you run up against?
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[biggerUniverse]

I haven't, but this is exactly why I hang around RPGDX. I like this idea. It's still only cracking the mold, since there is discrete leveling, but by different means and for different purposes is a big change in direction.
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[Terry]

Ditto, I've never tried that, but on a tangantly related note, I borrowed an aspect from a golf game as a device in my current RPG project.

In a normal RPG, the damage you deal is usually simply a function of your strength, weapon bonuses, the opponent's defense and a random factor. I wanted to replace the random factor with something to measure the players skill, so I built a "golf meter".

It works like this: when you select attack from the menu, the meter charges up as the hero approaches the enemy, when you press confirm again, the attack triggers and deals damage relative to your position on the meter. If you get a perfect, the meter goes back to the start position and you can keep going for multiple hits (up to 5x).

In practice, it works a lot better that I expected it would, so I'll definitely be keeping it in this version.
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[RuneLancer]

Personally, I'm a very old-school developper and have a hard time enjoying RPGs without the traditional random encounter/level up system. Just a quick bit of background to keep in mind while reading my post.

I think it's important to keep in mind that character developement, irrelevant of the system, should always have an underlaying design-related reason for existing. The level system serves a two-fold purpose: pacing the game so the player doesn't just breeze through dungeons, and preventing the player from progressing too far too rapidly by exploring dungeons they shouldn't (and rewarding them with higher-tier equipment and items; I'm sure we've all gone through hard dungeons early on to get a certain weapon or spell, like FF4's cave of summoned monsters for instance.) If whatever system the game uses doesn't have a purpose for being there, then there remains one thing to consider: how fun it makes the game. And, even more than purpose, this last thing is what should be a priority.

As developpers, we enjoy seeing new ideas and like to think of innovative things. But no matter how impressive a system, when it becomes a chore for the player and when the game could simply do without it, we've failed.

One game that failed in this respect is, to me, Front Mission I. I loved this game. A lot. It was awesome. But one of the means of powering up a character, by replacing their mecha ("wanzer")'s parts, was pretty badly implemented. The thought of replacing every part on your machine sounds great in theory and should allow for a lot of customization that levelling wouldn't give. In practice, a typical trip to a shop meant buying the best parts available there and going through all of your characters, one by one, and outfitting them part by part with what you bought. There was some decision making involved: deciding wether to have a shield and a launcher or two launchers (weight vs damage), and how to set up your guns. But the rest?

Where did it go wrong? Well, the system was great and innovative, but every character was practically the same. There's no ability to take advantage of, such as "well, this guy's wanzer has high power but low defense so I should compensate for that" or "this character's better with ranged weapons so I can foresake defense in favor of movability to attack from afar." These decisions rarely came up because there were so few cases where equipment other than guns would focus more on one ability than another and so forth. It was unecessary and time-consuming to upgrade parts when everyone would get the same stuff.

What am I getting at? The game could've just allowed you to change your weapons and merely buy stronger wanzers. Or have characters with different strenghts and equipment that varied in terms of which stats were affected.

Luckily the game had the good old levelling system as well. ;)
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[Nephilim]

[Terry]

[Nephilim]

[Nodtveidt]