Friday, November 23, 2007
Frayed Knights: Are You Experienced?
And this week's progress report on the comedy / fantasy CRPG, Frayed Knights!The Math of Monster Mashing
I did my whole spiel about experience points and character improvement in my last post. Naturally, that's been on my brain a lot, as this week I've been tackling those issues in Frayed Knights.
Level progression in a traditional RPG presents an interesting little bit of math fun. Generally speaking, most RPGs assume that each level will take a little longer to progress than the previous one. This makes for rapid early progression, but keeps a "soft boundary" on the upper levels. Dungeons & Dragons (the pre-2000 versions) had XP requirements for each level that were roughly double that of the previous level (up until level 12 or so). Since the monster XP (and gold - which was also worth XP) also increased, this didn't mean you had to double your adventuring time to gain a new level.
Working on the experience system in Frayed Knights has had me trying to figure out those numbers to make a leveling up system that just "feels right," and it's been hurting my brain. Probably because it's hard to plug in "feels right" on the one side of an equation. I want to have a system that emphasizes quest-based experience, but also rewards other dramatic, interesting, and especially risky actions --- like combat, or picking locks. The little problems going through my head included:
* Since a group of monsters is far more dangerous and difficult than encountering all of those monsters separately, should a group include a bonus over a single monster?
* How much more should a level 3 monster be worth over a level 2 monster?
* Approximately how many monster kills of around equal to one's level should it take to raise an entire level?
* How many monster kills should quests of different lengths be worth?
* How should disarming a trap or picking a lock compare in terms of experience points to these other rewards?
* If you defeat only half a group of enemy monsters before fleeing, should you get experience points on the ones that you defeated?
* Should a party member that ends an encounter incapacitated (Frayed Knights' kinder, gentler equivalent to "dead"), should they get experience for the encounter? What about if they started the encounter incapacitated? What if they both start and end incapacitated, but at some point in the middle of the fight was revived just long enough to get beaten down again?
Yeah, yeah, the easy answer is that these questions SHOULD have all been answered in the design doc before I got to this point. You know what? The flavor of combat in Frayed Knights has evolved quite a bit in the last five months or so, and so anything I'd have done back then would have already been thrown out.
Engineering Backwards
What I DO know is that the adventure in the dungeon of Pokmor Xang - plus a little bit of knocking about in the forest on the way back to town, and the mission completion - should allow the party to level up. Once. Though in theory even that can change. But that's kind of the weird backwards engineering that I'm doing right now. And I expect the player to finish the full game somewhere in the mid-teens, though I'm allowing progress up beyond level 20.
So whatever numbers I put in (and after running through a LOT of numbers and formulas, I did manage to lock down some numbers to put in for now), they'll be completely replaced once the whole game is humming along and has been play-tested a few times.
But for now, I have a workable system in place that seems reasonable enough for right now. It is fun seeing the little numbers increase on the screen, at least...
UI, UI... Woah, Baby, We Gotta Go
Besides working on experience point systems and fixing the usual assortment of bugs, I also worked on "UI Manager" that should hopefully clean up some of the transitions between, say, combat and dialog.
And as a quick-and-dirty modification, combat now rewards you with one or more drama stars upon conclusion.
So there's progress being made.
Foreseeing how development is going to be the next two weeks... expect little. We've got a major milestone at work that is going to demand some serious overtime for the next couple of weeks. But I'll continue work on monster scaling (YES, I used the "S" word), random encounters (MORE Evil!), keys for doors, and interactive object capabilities.
As always, have fun!
(Vaguely) related stuff I found stuck underneath my desk:
* The Rules Lawyer
* Disappointment in the Demonweb Pits
* RPG Design: Same Ol' Grind
* Can CRPGs Age Gracefully
Got Something To Say? Have At It On the Forum!
Labels: Frayed Knights, Roleplaying Games
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