Basic Rules of Character Development

[Aeterus]

*Warning Long Thread*
*English isn\'t my primary language so excuse me for typos and mistakes i just hope i will get the main ideas clear.*

Introduction
I haven\'t thought that i would actually open a thread about this element, since it is ussually the player who adjusts herself/himself to the rpg mechanics rather than vice visa, allowing for an utterly insane set of rules to appear fair after some time of getting used to them.
Then i started replaying a few games i regarded as stable, and just noticed so many flaws.

Character development, is one of the 4 elements which form the atmosphere of an rpg , the other 3 being the economy (both personally and between players), the environment (graphics and sound) and the general in-character roleplaying level.
For most players character-development is the way they \"role-play\" their character, the way they shape it to their will is one of the reasons they play rpg\'s and not first person shooters.

Wether true in-character roleplaying exists in a game or not, does not mean the game shouldn\'t have a good character development system, because for some reason this seems to be the case...


Skill Levels/effects
There are two methods for skill levels, either a number from 0-100 (0 is no knowledge in this skill, and 100 is grandmastery), or a level which has a direct effect and can raise potentially to infinite (while of course that isn\'t possible, it\'s just its mechanic, which means 50 point can make a great iron maker for example but 100 in say some other skill can be nothing considering its use).
For the sake of it\'s simplicity and popularity i\'ll use the first for the examples.

The effects of skill level should be balanced and well laid out, this is quite important to give the player a solid idea of how powerful his character is, rather than have a sort of dozzy number which doesn\'t mean much than \"if it\'s higher it\'s better\". (sadly, i have seen this in so many games)
This doesn\'t mean a player can guess his chances of success accuretly (unless he can assess his chances, but that too is ussually not too accurate), it just shows him his level regarding to the skilless bum, or the grandmaster himself.

The difference between 40% to 20% is therefore much higher than between 100% and 80%, which somehow makes sense : a 20% skilled fighter is sort of a beginner which struggles to put a meat on his table by hunting, a 40% skilled fighter is one who can use his blade quite well, he can hold and defeat the common creatures which walk the earth, and even make profit by hunting exotic animals.
If those two would fight between themselves the 40% skilled fighter won\'t have much difficulty in defeating the other.
While on the other hand a 80% skilled fighter is a master, he can parry a mighty axe as if it was made of wood, and is known and feared as a mighty swordsman - while a 100% is a grandmaster, whose moves are simply flawless.
If these two would meet in combat, it will be a long and mighty battle, the grandmaster will likely take the lead as the skills suggest (although on rare occassions may not), but it will be a very much closer fight then the other one.


Skill Restrictions (powerclasses prevention)
Every game restricts (or doesn\'t) skills in a different way, they can be categorised as followed :
*. Avatar (no) restriction : While playing an avatar seems to be appealing for a lot of players who want to be good in everything and taste all the game has to offer, this is an immature aspect and does nothing but harm the role playing atmosphere of the game.
This seems to be quite a popular style of mmorpg\'s , though anyone who played that kind of games must have seen the boredom which rises with the similiarity of players.
*. Premade class restriction : originated from classic rpg\'s, this is the known fight/wizard/thief/etc idea which is made to prevent power classes, unfortunatly this ussually prevented classes based on individual tastes (thus leading to the next system)
*. Custom class restriction : a popular system, which allows every player to curve his character as he see fit, while the system enpowers restrictions to prevent power players.
This system either set restrictions at character creation (by decided special skills and/or forbidden ones), or as the player plays the game. (for example if the game\'s system allows only one skill above 50%, when the player raises a certain skill above 50% it will be set as the master skill and all skills will be capped until this master skill will go below 50% again)

Skills aren\'t all of the same nature, therefore there has to be a certain devision in the restriction to allow class flexibility of characters and to restrict power classes, i\'ll explain them as follows :
1. Combat skills : skills regarding styles of fighting
(which are broken down to subskills, offense and defense - for example parrying with a knife, has nothing to do with parrying with a two handed axe, thus it\'s part of the knife skill), and styles of magic.
so a character which uses both magic and fighting skills won\'t be very good in both. (though it will be possible), farther more a game system can limit magic skills to only one school (forcing magicians to act as elementalists), prevent people who pick magic skills from picking blade weapon skills and so on. (depending on the amount of restrictions wished to be enforced)
In my point of view, magic helps making life easier, therefore people who have access to magic must be very limited in other aspects, or an element of the game\'s balance gets damaged ...
2. Craft skills : It seems that in most games players pick a craft to color up their playing, however when a player has access to a few craft skills which relay upon each other, he becomes a powercrafter, such things have negative effects on the workflow of a player\'s economy.
Therefore, the only option to prevent the undesired side effects, is allow a very few craft skills (one or two depending on how complex they are, one is enough if the skills are complex enough to satisfy basic sanity ^^) to be picked up, and have all the other skills severly capped. (i think 10% from max skill level is a good cap for craft skills, any higher just misses the whole point)
3. Misc skills : non combat/craft skills, such as stealth, swimming, lockpicking, weapon handling (keeping a weapon in good shape), arcane knowledge, herb knowledge, athletics, dodging, etc ...
a player should be able to profficient in several of those, but again not all, therefore there will be an assassin which possess knowledge in herbs to poison her weapons, is stealthy etc but doesn\'t know how to handle her weapons very well for example.
4. Attributes : everyone wants to be perfect, but that wouldn\'t make sense in a decent roleplaying environment.
Therefore there has to be capping to ensure a mighty genius magician will also be physically weak, and so on.
5. Perks : negative perks should be as serious as their positive counterparts, and shouldn\'t be able to be bypassed by veteran players no matter what (or it would be exploited).
Farther more there shouldn\'t exist permanent and non-permanent perks together, because then no veteran player will ever pick the non permanent ones.


To farther reduce the number of masters and enrich a gameplay at the same time, a game can allow (for example) instead of having 2 skills which can be mastered in a category (which means the others are seriously capped in that category) - have 1 skill which can be mastered and 2 middle skilled which are capped at around 50-75%.
(of course this helpful idea shouldn\'t be included for the craft category ...)


Skill/Attributes development
Old games had the \"experience\" system (still present in most of today hack n\' slash games), where a player would kill a lot of monsters gain levels and improve stuff upon leveling up to his choice.
With the coming of dynamic (combat and mostly non-combat) skills, games developed a learning curve system, where the more a player used a skill, the more it leveled up, (thus eliminating experience system) and the higher the skill was, the harder (actually longer) it was to advance it.
Of course nothing\'s perfect, and in most modern games we see this system is quite flawed, to level up people repeat the same action thousands of time ussually leading to the use of utilities known as \"macros\".

Therefore game developers who use the learning curve system, have two option - either continue using the basic method (and have people macro their way to heaven in order to stay sane, or just repeat tasks in a silly way such as walking all day long in stealth mode, etc ...), or modify a few aspects.
A rule i can draw for skill/attribute development, is that people should never repeatedly use a skill in order to improve it, they should use the skills to earn money, fight monsters to seek rare items. i will try to point ways to follow this rule :
* Instead of making tasks such as stealth, or swimming require more usage in order to level up, minimize this requirement and create gaps in which the skill doesn\'t improve (the gap may enlarge as the skill gets higher) - this gap means that using stealth all day long won\'t have any different effect then using it for an hour at this day, thus to get to high levels one would simply need to do what he ussually do, but only for a longer period of time. (this way developers also have more power to govern skill advances).
so if a player with zero skill in stealth for example, uses it all day long, he can learn a lot, however as he starts to get used to this skill his learning curve shifts from minutes to hours, and finally days, thus a veteran would improve based on daily usage instead of per-click usage.
* The slower stats improve, the less people are focused on improving them - so at some point they should increase tremendously slow.
in my humble point of view, must players should be around the 50-60% on their profficient skills, after monthes of playing that is, it just seems wrong to me, that in most mmorpg\'s people rich mastery (75%-100%) of skills after a mare month of playing, ussually less ...
* Attributes ussually raise faster than skills in games, it actually makes sense to be the other way around.
Actions shouldn\'t be linked with one attribute only, but rather several, so they would each slightly increase upon each action.
In classic rpg\'s stats were fixed, and as much as it wasn\'t realistic it\'s still closer to reality than most game\'s mechanics.
Attributes can increase, but only at a very slow pace.
* If the economy is stable, and people have a serious need for money (like in real life, either through daily expenses, or things to buy), they use crafting skills to earn their bread, and on the opposite combat and such should never be convenient, never easy (against creatures which can raise the combat skills, creatures who are easy pray shouldn\'t increase skills) and death should have some negative impact that would favor people in avoiding it as much as possible.
This will minimize the fruitless practicing of skills. (of course someone who uses a skill knows it will increase, but he wouldn\'t use it only to imrpove it - as seen in a lot of games were 85% of their time people practice their skills to increase them more and more)


Conclusion
Both mmorpg players and developers should think why a good mmorpg is played for -  is it to improve a character and make it the strongest it can be ?? or is it to roleplay a character, based on its weaknesses and strengthes which make it unique, on its everyday life, without regards to its levels ??

Myself, play games for the latter reason, it seems i am from the minority and not the majority.
It seems for me that unless true power is rare and hard to gain, there is no value to it ... and if a game is only played to improve the character so it means the game itself isn\'t that fun, so why play it in the first place ?

All i hope is that PS will be a roleplaying game and not yet another rollplaying game.

I know this thread isn\'t very complete, and i probably forgot about important rules of development outlines. (i just stopped playing rpg\'s so i
Therefore, unlike my stubborness in my economy thread, any ideas will be welcome and i\'ll try to edit the original post in respect to point will agree upon.

[Krissanasli]

I had written out a pretty good introduction before a lightning bolt took a fancy for my local power grid. I\'ll be a bit blunt at first:

An RPG (even the standard MMORPG) doesn\'t need all of the four elements you described, and can feature many more. It might be helpful to divide something into any number of parts, but when you do that, you\'re always likely to avoid some parts or include others that don\'t really deserve it. For instance, the Molecular Blue version wouldn\'t feature any economy or coded interaction (except chatting and RPing) if you took out the economy, yet it\'s still a perfectly functional RPG. Also, a game where every character was a planet floating in a void wouldn\'t have any \"atmosphere\" beyond what the players created themselves.

Just be careful about how you use taxonomy. It sometimes does more harm than good.

There are two methods for skill levels

Actually, there are also skill systems based on intervals that change, either periodically or through player action.
Going deeper into the 0-100 scheme, you could also place several sub-skills into a single skill, so that if your axe-fighting (or woodcutting) skill was 50, you could give yourself a berzerker skill of 30, an \"axe murderer\" skill of 25 and a 5 in axe-throwing; divide the skill into several \"difficulty ranges\" that define how many of the player\'s actions were \"easy\" and how many \"difficult\" - a hardened wimp who always took on easy targets (bonus to his \"easy\" rolls) could still hold a +5 sword of doom, but he\'d have trouble going against a hardened veteran, who typically fought people of his own skill level (bonus to his \"average\" rolls). There are just so many ways to handle skill levels... Also, I disagree with you that players have to advance from 0 to 100. A blanced game might just as well use an interval from -100 to 100, and assume that a person with -100 was different from, but just as good as, one with 0 or 75.

The effects of skill level should be balanced and well laid out

By \"well laid out\", do you mean \"explained in detail\"? So that people can measure how powerful they are? I would argue that each skill should be powerful in its own way, for its own purpose. If only two aspects of the game are taken into account - how much money the player can make and how many monsters he can kill - then most people will prefer to go for that one skill that gives them the biggest bonus. When two skills service different goals,  picking one of them will be a matter of personal preference
and playing style. Tropico, that wonderful island-building RPG, offers a multitude of goals, and if you don\'t choose, say \"\'Tis money that makes a man\", your presidential slush fund will be a waste of public money (but if you do choose that goal, you\'ll want to pepper the island with banks).

I don\'t really see the difference between knowing and not knowing what another skillpoint would do... You shouldn\'t invest skillpoints just to \"max out\" your abilities, even if you\'re not RPing. Rather, you should use them to enhance your playing style and explore new ones. So what if it\'s easier to go up in headbutting levels than in long-ranged combat? If you like fighting from a distance (and can reasonably do so), go for it...

Furthermore, what if some skills don\'t offer any power at all? Imagine a skill system split between \"useful\" skills and \"useless\" (fun) skills, like fireworks and other minor tricks... Supposing you went up in a \"useless\" skill whenever you went up in a \"useful\" skill (and further supposing you could choose which \"useless\" skills to increase), there wouldn\'t really be a point in having \"balanced\" skills. In fact, most players wouldn\'t even care which skill was the most \"powerful\", as they\'d probably choose a unique one to entertain themselves and their fellow players.

The difference between 40% to 20% is therefore much higher than between 100% and 80%

I don\'t follow... Where does your post suggest that? You seem to say \"therefore\" like it\'s been explained above...

Unless I\'m missing something, that\'s not necessarily the case. If the game used a function like (skill^2) to calculate the skill\'s effects, a skill of 40% would suddenly become very close to one of 20%, unlike an 80% to a 100%, which would be miles above all of the three levels combined.

I don\'t really like weapon-based skills - they group too many things, like style, handling and an understanding of the weapon, into a single concept. A person who understands how an axe is wielded, what sort of combat moves can be initiated with it and when, will always know what an enemy axeman is about to do, and will always have something to counter it. Meanwhile, a grandmaster swordsman who\'s been duelling his whole life might find himself on the wrong end of a spear, simply because he was inexperienced against that weapon.

There\'s also general fighting to take into account: how much effort the character can put into each move without growing tired along the way, how much pain he can take etc. I agree that a soldier with twice as much skill in combat as a brigand will beat the brigand easily, but just what does \"combat skill\" mean?

*. Avatar (no) restriction

It\'s not clear what you mean by that... Probably because I\'m new to MMORPG theory. Does it mean that anything the player can do, the character can do as well? That sort of system can be very good for role-playing, actually. Otherwise, I\'m assuming \"avatar\" stands for \"levelless and classless\". If so, what\'s wrong with it, and why do you think people develop the same kind of character because of it?

The \"custom class\" system sounds like something where you pre-set your skills, and are unable to replace them in normal circumstances. The fixed-class system has a clear advantage over this one, despite its lack of flexibility: new players are given skillsets that they can \"rely on\". The two systems seem to work best if used in combination. Of course, the introduction of fixed classes  is just a safety net for a bad game, since all skills should be useful on their own.

Also, who says you can\'t start out with a single skill and be able to gain more (related to the skills you already have) as you progress, or use any number of other \"systems\"?

Finally, I\'m not sure if you should look at this sort of thing as a \"system\" as much as a way of managing skill adjustment. Calling it a system makes it seem immutable and draws away attention from its underlying functions.

You divide skills into combat, craft and misc... Why? Who says an RPG even needs combat or crafting? It seems you\'re not looking at it from the perspective of theory, but from the perspective of history - that is, you recall every character-building system you ever experienced, and try to find the best compromise between them. For that reason, your essay limits itself to what already is, rather than studying what can be, and generally doesn\'t go into the deeper theoretical levels.

In my point of view, magic helps making life easier

That depends largely on the magic system in use. If all a magic skill does is create a bound weapon and determine how good you are at using it, it becomes nothing more than an unarmed combat skill.

Everyone wants to be perfect, but that wouldn\'t make sense in a decent roleplaying environment.

I disagree. If I\'m role-playing a dumb brute, I\'d never  ever boost my intelligence score, even if that was possible. Also, I doubt many role-players would truly want to be \"perfect\". To be honest, rather than capping stats, I\'d simply do away with them... They rarely have more than a minimum relevance in RPing, and in those hack&slash games that do use them, they\'re simply a separate pantheon of skills.

On capping skills: use any function with a horizontal asymptote. That\'s all it takes. Players can still grow and grow and grow if they wish, but it won\'t do them much good. A low, oblique asymptote would be more reasonable, although it would still give very-high-level skills an advantage over high-level ones.

You talk about \"learn-by-doing\", but hardly mention any other systems, like \"automatic skill gain over time\", \"fitness-training\" (where you have to keep paying gold to keep your skills up, making them a liability) and a dreaded \"learn-by-experimenting\", where you could only, say, improve your fighing skills by using a new weapon. While I agree with you on most of your points, I wish they\'d be less appropriate for Ultima Online, and more appropriate for RPGs in general.

I\'ve read about the \"gaps\" before... One person suggested that the number of skillpoints gained at any time could grow until it reached a cap, then \"leak\" back to nothing over the course of several days.

On attributes: whether they should change or not depends largely on what they represent. A \"magical affinity\", for instance, could increase over several months if you lived and logged off in a region sated with mana. Heat resistance, likewise, could increase for desert-dwellers. You seem to focus on the effects of player actions, while ignoring those of more subtle, long-term phenomena.

Anyway, again... You ignore a lot of things by concentrating on what\'s already been done. The concepts of \"skill\", \"perk\" and \"attribute\" aren\'t set in stone - in fact, character development can work perfectly fine without these things. Rather than wondering what could be done to make typical skill-based systems more feasible, ask yourself what could replace them (provided you started this thread to talk theory instead of focusing on Planeshift). Small adjustments to the superficial side of things, however meaningful, can\'t fix the deeper, more tenacious problems.

[Aeterus]

I tried writing basic outlines for character development, while you are totally right that an rpg can exist even without any actuall substance (such as an online star wars game which has no system, no nothing, but players who are involved as storytellers - this is still a roleplaying game, and a darn good one), i didn\'t refer to roles concerning the role playing element, but rather the blunt character development. (things you can \"improve\" - and different aspects about them)

Anyhow, i have started writing a lot of points concerning your post, but i have decided to delete all of them now and say this.
You have wrote a lot of good points, and by far it seems you are one of the few people here who view and analyse these elements at my level (+/-) of extent.
I tried to make a dry seperation when i wrote these things, so an economy evaluation won\'t be effected by the role-playing aspect of the game. (the real one, the thing which barely exists in today rpg\'s).
I believe that if i would force myself to become a bit less hardheaded (as you have noticed, i am ^^) it could lead to quite a well thought of system based on both of our views and deep analyses. (while looking at this thread now i see just too many mistakes, and a lot of things left out)

However with that said, i bitterly decided to stop associating myself with mmorpg\'s. having some experience with rpg development (from graphics to programming and designing) i see no future for them, the systems are too terrible made, the economy systems are a sham, the players are digusting and  the role-playing level is ridiculous (i am too tired of the \"powergaming\" roleplaying, as well as the lack of innovation i see).
mmorpg\'s are made to the masses, and i\'m too arrogant to be part of them.

Thanks again for the insights Krissanasli, farewell.

[Krissanasli]

mmorpg\'s are made to the masses, and i\'m too arrogant to be part of them.

I always thought arrogance was a common flaw... And I haven\'t seen it in you. Honestly, I\'m not sure if you should give up on Planeshift yet, or MMORPGs in general. Before Armageddon, Harshlands, Otherspace and other RPI MU*s, you could just as easily have said that MUDs are for the masses. Sure, Planeshift won\'t change into an RPG overnight (I highly doubt it will ever be one without an application system), but it certainly has the potential. Many of the players are willing to bring it there. With more and more of these players leaving Molecular Blue, however, there might not be any role-playing community here by the time the game goes gold.

If you\'re determined to leave, I could PM you a list of other MMORPGs to try... Though I didn\'t play any of them, I did go through their websites and forums, and it seems one of them is actually RP-enforced.

That Star Wars game you mention sounds like a PBP (also known as PBF) or large-scale PBEM... It\'s true that, no matter how good the role-playing level will get in Planeshift, it will still feel like a MUD without the text. The role-playing expectations will undoubtedly be lower, but you\'ll be more likely to find players to interact with.

Anyway, regardless of whether you stay or leave, let me suggest taking up both a MUD/MMORPG and a PBP/PBEM or two. That way, while you\'re waiting for people to log on, you can work on your next post or email.