lunartulip | (no subject)

I don’t understand the school of RPG design whose level curve is such that, as one levels up, the time between levels increases. As far as I can tell, that sort of curve has pretty much no benefit compared with curves which have constant time between levels, and comes at the cost of reducing the frequency with which the player gets to experience the satisfaction of advancement, so it seems pretty purely negative to me. Does anyone have thoughts on what design principles lead to exponential time between levels seeming like a good idea?

(I do understand why it’s valuable to have fast levels early on, because they’re a nice compromise between low levels being boring for experienced players and low levels being information-overload-y for new players, letting the new players settle in to the basic gameplay but then introducing more mechanics quickly enough that the non-new players don't have time to get too bored. My point of confusion is specifically about why there are so many games which don’t keep going with that faster leveling curve once they’re past the early levels.)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

A case where this might be the best policy is where there's a "sweet spot" of levels where the game functions best, but where it's satisfying emotionally to imagine that infinite upwards advancement is possible.

Such sweet spots might be a function of the rules (such as in 3.5alikes, wherein at higher levels balance typically disappears, certain poorly designed meters come apart from each other, and lists of abilities become unweildly) or because of an interaction between the world and a committment to not having enemies scale with your level (which can have downsides like this this kind of problem, but may be preferred to the the kinds of problems with or aesthetic objections to scaling by level).

That makes a lot of sense. I don't think it covers all instances of the thing, but it definitely gets at at least some of them, and it's a much better explanation than I'd managed to think of on my own. Thanks!