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.)

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It actually has to do with game designers using the way the human brain's reward system works to get more people hooked than would be otherwise.

As I understand it, making quick progress when starting a new endeavor, especially when someone is completely new to a game or hobby, makes someone far more likely to continue with it. Once someone has made a habit of doing something, they don't need as many rewards to continue, and they are more willing to wait for longer and longer times, as long as the rewards they do get increase in size too (better loot, more in game money, access to new maps, etc).

When done well, it adds to an already enjoyable experience. Done poorly, and it's a cheap trick to get new players hooked and long time players to stay. It might also be paired with smaller, semi-random rewards that make things like gambling so addictive.

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).

Huh. That's interesting, because to my mind that same reward-system thing is precisely why it seems worse than a more linear time-per-level. When time between levels goes up, I find that I lose investment compared with when level-ups are more frequent, because I'm no longer getting the constant rush of Cool New Stuff to keep me focused. But I guess maybe I'm just psychologically weird in that regard and for most people the slower rate feels fine once they're hooked?

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!

One situation where I've done this or seen it done is where the early game (for a character) is meant to be high-risk but low-investment. In a game where there's PC death and you restart from scratch (for video games this might be like a roguelike), this gives you the feeling that life is genuinely dangerous for newbies and that the characters who survive have risen above a crowd of average characters; for games where permadeath isn't an issue, this can give you some nailbiter experiences early on. In either case, these are experiences that quickly overstay their welcome, so the game wants to bootstrap you out of that stage pretty quickly.

Lategame levelling can't rely as much on significant growth and radical changes to your quality of life, because no game can really offer enough breadth to give that experience constantly. Games that try tend to be treadmill experiences, and these can be unsatisfying to players. Thus, lategame levelling tends to be more sedate, and spacing it out farther can be a way to ensure that when you do level, it still feels like a meaningful advancement.

For a bit of clarity on the second paragraph above:

One system I made a long time ago gave you a fixed amount of points at each level and spaced the levels evenly. This would provide a steady rate of advancement if all mechanics were based on differences between stats, but there were some that were proportionate to ratios -- for instance, having twice as many MP meant you could cast twice as many spells, and having twice as many HP meant you could survive twice as long against a given opponent.

The result of this was that your first few levels felt like you were improving dramatically (which was desirable), but each successive level mattered less and by the time you were at like level 12-15, every further level felt trivial and incremental. Eventually (as a minimally disruptive midgame hack) I just collapsed later levels into one level that took longer and gave larger bonuses, because even though this resulted in weaker characters overall, it made levelling feel meaningful rather than like some kind of 3% superannuation bookkeeping.

(That system sucked, but the same general problem can arise elsewhere, of course.)