Well I have few thoughts about the current Planeshift experience gaining system, whereas the general thought is \"It\'s bad\". I have no idea how other players feel about it, but in my opinion it is kind of dull and not really innovative. Sure, there is a good point in it
and I mean here that you can gain experience not only from fighting monsters, but also by mining and so on, but I think Planeshift could move a little further. Maybe I should start from stating what bothers me most:
First of all, I think the speed with which characters advance in power is too fast. It might be good in early testing phase, but I don\'t think it will bring anything good in the future. Having an overpowered character can often prove to be discouraging for roleplaying, for example: A warrior has a mission to retrieve an item from a castle filled with all sorts of traps. Whilst overpowered warrior could collect various potions and let the traps damage him, a character with lesser power should find a thief with detect traps skill and maybe a mage to back them up with various spells. What is more, if the detect traps skill affected whole group, the thief would have a possibility to leave the group while being between many traps and have certain power over the rest of adventurers. But that\'s just a side note, there\'s also second point:
Generally people can gain experience by fighting monsters all day long. As we all know, that has a strong connection with the phenomenon known as power-leveling. Simply, as long as people see that hack&slash brings lots of experience, they will do that. And that brings me to the point where I share my idea of a little more innovative (I don\'t think it was used in any other game) system.
To give a general picture, here\'s an example that should be quite familiar with the real life:
Normally when someone studies from a book, he won\'t be able to study all day long on same ratio. His mind would keep getting tired and the studying potential would decrease. So let\'s say that this person would take a bath. The results are quite obvious - he would relax and the studying potential would go up. What is more, he could also go outdoors and play football, decreased potential for studying wouldn\'t have many bad effects on playing it.
By using some mathematical calculations, something like that could be brought ingame without bigger problems. Of course, there would be many factors affecting all sorts of things. Besides potentials for studying, fighting and so on, gained experience would be also affected by how tired or hungry the character is.
With that stated, here\'s a more ingame example:
Let\'s say that a dermorian trains on the arena in order to gain more experience. With each hit he gains some experience, however in same time he gets more tired and his fighting potential decreases. After longer time, keeping in mind that the fighting potential is too low for further practice, the dermorian goes to a library to study a bit. His studying potential would be at its full, but still being tired after the fight makes it hard to study anything. The character is slowly getting less tired, his fighting potential goes up while the studying one goes down. However, because of being tired studying doesn\'t go well and the dermorian decides to get some rest at a tavern. There he talks with people (talking should give a bit of experience too, after all we also train charisma and who knows what can we learn from others) and drinks ale (liquids should increase the potentials). After getting some rest, he goes to mine a bit, where he spends his mining potential.
Relaxing would also depend on place where character spends his time. While everyone are doing quite well in a tavern, a dermorian would relax even faster in a forest, while a dwarf or a kran in a dungeon. That wouldn\'t however stop the dermorian from getting used to a dungeon. If he spends lots of time there, after a longer while, his relaxing ratio would be higher in a dungeon, not in forest.
Same goes for potentials. If character does more fighting than studying, then fighting potential decreases slower, while studying one faster.
That could create such characters as gladiators who feel great while fighting monsters on the arena, or druids who while in forests, can study for a very long time.
Also, characters who don\'t fight or study as much (explorers or bards) should have different ways of gaining experience. While everyone would gain minimal experience by talking or changing locations, bards (characters that talk a lot) should get more experience from talking, while explorers (characters that travel a lot) should get more experience from changing locations (note that the biggest variety occurs in the locations, the more experience is gained - switching between same two would give very low ammount of it).
As the last point - experience shouldn\'t be given at once. Rather stored together in a pool (player shouldn\'t be able to see how much there is) and, for example, after every ingame hour certain percent of stored experience would be gained by the character. That would make the character gain experience constantly, no matter what he\'s doing. And with bigger variety in his life, he should gain more experience. Simply, characters would develop just by living.
