That's a very interesting analysis, and I agre...

2009-11-10T08:17:43.642-05:00

That's a very interesting analysis, and I agree with most of the problems (the inadvertent snowballing into lopsided stats in particular), but I disagree on the "exploitation" issue. I think the tactic you outline basically turns a battle into training, converting the enemy into a training dummy and dulling and weighting the player's weapon. That sounds really realistic to me.

And with all the talk about grinding this past week (thanks, no doubt, to Dragon Age), I think I find my experience is that greater immersion makes grinds more tolerable for me. Then again, use-centric advancement isn't the final word in realism.

I see where you're coming from a lot better no...

2009-11-07T05:05:19.255-05:00

I see where you're coming from a lot better now. A more insighful analysis. A few thoughts:

I'm not sure "positive feedback loop" is the term you really want here. I think it's more precise to say that it's easier to use rarely used abilities in an alternative system. In a real game, most people who have a skill that is useful will go practice it; if you have a healing skill, for example, you're not going to wait until you're in the middle of a bad situation to finally use it and hope it saves you.

As for exploiting, I think that part of the issue here is that level-based systems have had more people pounding on them and thus the exploits have been addressed. There's nothing in use-based design that says if you repeatedly hit the same target you'll get skill increases. Just like there's nothing in level-based designs that say you need to get xp for killing very low-level monsters. The concept of trivial monsters ("gray con" that reward no experience) was introduced because people exploited that in gaining levels. Plenty of other exploits still exist; for example, people racing to the top level form AoE grinding groups and just go murder stuff en-masse, gaining lots of xp in a short amount of time.

This side-steps the whole discussion of "what is an exploit", though. Is AoE-grinding really an exploit, even though it allows faster than anticipated advancement?

I guess my driving thought is that few of these issues are intrinsic to every use-based system, no more than AoE grinding or killing level 1 enemies to max level have to be part of every level-based system. You could add elements to the design to "fix" most of these problems just as xp/level-based systems have fixed various problems over the years as well.

So, let's to back to M59's hit point advancement system. It avoids nearly all these problems you point out. You only get a chance to get a hit point upon killing an enemy that is hard enough, so you can't sleaze increases by killing weaklings or trying to hit the same monster repeatedly. Hit points are universal, so there's no worry about specialization ("positive feedback loop"). Hit points could be awarded from other sources like quests; there were temporary hp buffs that were removed because they were buggy, but the rewards could be permanent. This is still, at the core, similar to a use-based system. What are the remaining problems?

Comments on That's a Terrible Idea: Use-based Skill Gain, Revisited

That's a very interesting analysis, and I agre...

I see where you're coming from a lot better no...