PrimeJunta

The nice thing with objective-XP is that it allows quest designers to do just that, with a very precise level of control too.

In case you were wondering, I like objective-XP precisely because it's a great way to encourage players to pursue optional objectives. IOW, have no fear on that score.

I have no desire to stop players from getting an advantage by "doing everything." I'm just changing the definition of "doing everything" from "pick every lock, untrap every trap, kill every monster" to "achieve every objective."

@TRX, you're still not quite getting the problem with perverse incentives and degenerate strategies though. If killing something always nets you XP, and XP are universally desirable, then killing something is universally desirable. It doesn't matter how much you ratchet up the rewards for other skills, since using other skills + killing everything is always better rewarded than using other skills + not killing everything. If you want to avoid that, you end up where that guy who looks like the paladin from BG ends up -- i.e., locking you out of areas after "completing" them, making monsters unkillable, explicitly assigning 0XP to them, or just magically disappearing them when no longer needed. Which is fiddly, complicated, error-prone, needs extra testing, and usually makes no sense for in-game reasons.

Right, thanks for clearing that up. I agree; a well-balanced system should not favor any single approach over others. I was thinking of particular situations, where the most efficient path is determined by whoever designed the problem and its possible solutions. Yep. If combat does end up systemically costlier, then that is poor design. However, I trust that JES wouldn't make such an elementary design mistake; it's not like this is his first game.

So you're not into powergaming after all? That's a bit of a U-turn.

If by "path of least resistance" you mean "most efficient path," then this is not a problem: it is good. It rewards players who are smart or skilled enough to figure out what is the most efficient way to deal with any particular situation. The most efficient way shouldn't be the most obvious way of course -- if the quests end up that way, then that's poor quest design. It's the same principle that rewards the most efficient killers in a game based on kill XP. The only difference is that the game rewards efficiency in quest resolution by any means available, not only killing.

By not going after all the XP that's available in the game.

Real-l-ly? Then why are you intentionally gimping your character by playing in a sub-optimal way? "I guess I'll shiv myself in the kidneys now and go into battle naked LOL" was the way you put it elsewhere, I think. Unless it was Helm, of course; you two are a bit hard to tell apart.

There is a crucial difference between systemic rewards and contingent (explicitly placed) rewards. Please explain, in your own words, what the difference is, and get back to me.

Actually, there is such a thing as a "normal" playstyle: it is the playstyle (or styles) the designer has in mind when designing the game. You could idealize that by considering a super-intelligent Valorian (hard to do, I understand, but you can try). Namely, somebody who retains every bit of information handed to him by the game, and pursues the most efficient (=biggest net reward) strategy in response to it. I.e., someone who responds to the incentives handed by the game perfectly mechanically, like a marionette dancing on strings. In a perfectly-designed game, this idealized Valorian will have a great time, never having to do anything that's repetitive, tedious or boring. No obsessive hunting for traps, locks, or killable monsters; no camping by spawn-o-mats and grinding until level cap; no trekking endlessly back and forth to bring rusty daggers from a faraway dungeon to a shopkeeper, and so on and so forth. Thing is, if you design a game for this idealized Valorian, other less efficient players will usually have a great time too -- the only thing you'll have to take into account is that they may not be quite as efficient and therefore you might have to find ways to tone down the difficulty for them. And if you're able to give players the freedom to do other stuff as well without being penalized (too much) for it, then so much the better.

Tell me, Valorian, do you actually enjoy playing a game like a rat running in a maze, obsessively hunting for locks to pick, traps to disarm, and goblins to kill? I'm just curious.

I've been running D&D campaigns on and off for about 25 years. I stopped awarding kill XP about 15 years ago. So no, that's not the reason. I'm just glad that game devs are finally seeing the light too.

Semantics. The way I've been using it, "kill XP" is a systemic feature: the system automatically rewards you for XP whenever you kill a creature. Objective XP is XP explicitly placed somewhere by the designer. There's no rule that says that designers aren't allowed to award objective XP for killing particular critters. I do not understand what you mean by this.

@Helm: The definition of degenerate strategy is something like "player behavior which is not aligned with the design goals of the game, but which results in an advantage for the player." If the designer has explicitly designated killing a group of monsters as a goal, then killing those monsters is, by definition, not degenerate behavior. That is because objective XP has to be intentionally placed. Systemic rewards, on the other hand, tend to incentivize degenerate behavior, such as hunting for traps only to spring them, locks only to pick them, or monsters only to kill them. Intentional incentive -> desired behavior = good design. Systemic incentive -> unintended incentive -> degenerate behavior = bad. Simple! Of course, if the designer's intention is that the player goes around killing everything, then killing everything is not degenerate behavior, and kill XP is a perfectly good way of incentivizing it. This is the case in Diablo or NetHack, for example. From what I've understood, this is not the P:E team's design intention, though. Therefore, no kill XP.

Nope, I want to get rid of kill XP as a systemic reward. (In fact, I would get rid of all systemic rewards. Rewards should always be explicitly placed.) You can still assign it to specific critters, of course, if you want to incentivize killing them. You would probably want to let the player know that you've done that though, even if it isn't through a formalized quest.

Yes, dear. That's because if the Baron of Derpwood offers the bounty, it becomes an in-game objective. Therefore, because whacking them aligns with designer intent, by definition, it is not degenerate behavior. This really shouldn't be that hard to understand. What you, Raszius et al. are proposing is providing a systemic reward, then identifying situations when it will produce perverse incentives, and then patching it up by removing the possibility to get it, such as by magically disappearing the critters, locking you out of areas, or making them exceptional 0 XP kills. Conversely, what P:E is going to have is no systemic reward, but situational rewards wherever and however the game designers feel they're appropriate. They can even put in kill XP for specific creatures by designating them objectives and manually connecting XP awards to killing them, if they feel so inclined. The former means that you have to anticipate degenerate player behavior, and then actively dis-incetivize it. The latter means that you just have to incentivize non-degenerate player behavior, and let the player do whatever he wants. The latter is fundamentally easier, because it's very, very difficult to anticipate everything a player might want to do.

"I don't mind that it's not going to be D&D, as long as it's exactly like D&D in every detail." Right.

I've no doubt you could make an un-abusable learn by doing mechanic. Haven't played JA so can't comment on that. But it would no longer be XP based, and that IMO would take things too far from the IE archetype.

What's wrong with having the Baron of Derpwood offer a bounty of 10 zorkmids per dead orc, payable upon presentation of an orc snout? I'm kinda interested to see how the P:E team does decide to handle it, since on the face of it The Endless Paths sounds very Diablo-esque (except not randomly generated) and as such a good candidate for an area where kill XP would work without creating perverse incentives. My guess is exploration XP -- they have said that that's in. So for example n * (dungeon level) XP for every room you enter. Yup, you can certainly work your way around the problems. My point is that with a kill XP system, you will have to constantly work around questions like this, whereas with an objective XP system you don't -- you just decide what you want to reward, and reward it, end of story. Systemic XP is problematic precisely because the bigger your game gets, the harder it gets to manage, and the more exceptions or special cases you have to add: locking areas (which always feels artificial to me), disappearing former foes (also artificial unless there's an in-game rationale for it), switching off kill XP for certain foes (e.g. those spawned by a spawn-o-mat, à la that BG2 temple). This is poor design IMO; you're taking something that doesn't really work very well and then adding patches to sort of keep it afloat. I'm curious to hear it.

There are certainly ways of making combat-XP less "degenerative," but since there are fundamentally less problematic alternatives available, what's the point? It's fiddly, involves more scripting, more testing, and more bugs, and every decision like that comes with its own downsides. For one thing, I think a world that behaves consistently is inherently more enjoyable to play in than one where the rules change all the time. I know I felt a bit gypped when I was suddenly getting 0 XP for those respawning shades, for example. Objective-XP is easily understandable and transparent; kill XP that you sometimes get and sometimes don't would likely just feel random and frustrating.

So the reward for doing all objectives and no objectives in a given quest would be exactly the same? See above. If I was the dev, I'd probably playtest this and see how players respond. Note that there's no way to complete a quest without completing any objectives, since completing it is an objective in itself, and I would expect it would have the highest individual XP reward. From a certain POV you will have completed all the objectives in any case, even if you completed some of them before they were active. It depends on how you look at it -- if you're a Communist you'll want to reward the player for work done whether he did it before being hired or after; if you're a capitalist, you'll only want to reward him for work done after you hired him, and consider anything he did before that point a freebie.

@Razsius: if those critters really are a deadly threat, why not make cleaning them up a quest? Suppose you sneak your way through, avoiding combat, then mention it to that freaky Nosferatu guy at the other end. He goes "Oh carp, that sounds nasty. Somebody really ought to do something about them. Would you...?" Then you could go back and splat them, then come back for the quest XP. Or if you already did on your way there, you can go "Well, I already smeared them all over the walls akshually," and he'd go "Good boy, Raszius, here's your XP. DING!" Point being: if something really needs killing, then presumably there's someone in the game world who wants it dead, in which case it makes perfect sense to make it a quest. On the other hand if something is there just as an obstacle to getting spit done, it doesn't matter how you got around it, in which case there's no point in favoring one particular approach (e.g. killing) over another (e.g. sneaking). Take that adventure staple: the guard. The poor sod is just doing his job. You need to get to whatever he's guarding. There's no compelling reason to kill him if you can just, oh, sap him, or sneak past him, or pickpocket his key. Why automatically grant extra XP for killing him?

@Osvir, lots of questions there. Some thoughts about them. First, I'm not a big fan of the "improve by doing" mechanic (improving your stealth by being stealth, improving your combat by fighting etc.). Realistic in a sense, perhaps, but also hugely prone to abuse. The Elder Scrolls series works this way, and it's by far the most exploitable cRPG system I've played; the incentives are totally wacky in it. Specifically, "learn by doing" encourages pointless busywork even more than action-XP, whether from combat, stealth, lockpicking or whatever. When I was playing Morrowind, I was jumping whenever traveling anywhere, 'cuz that's how I improve my athletics skill. Must've looked like an idiot. XP is a completely contrived mechanic; it's a high-level abstraction representing "stuff you've learned," which allows you to decide specifically what you've learned, regardless of how you got there. It really doesn't make much sense from a simulationist/realist point of view, but it makes for good gameplay. So as I said earlier, I'm all for XP-less cRPG's, but Project Eternity isn't it. So I wouldn't want to split up XP into "sneaky XP," "fighty XP," or "musical XP." However, I like your idea of associating affiliation with advantages in specific subsystems (e.g. thieves' guild members gain advantages in sneaky kinds of things, warriors' guild in fighty kinds of things etc), but I don't think XP is the way to go here. Perks or access to special equipment would be more appropriate and less fiddly I think. So the "no stealth experience?" question doesn't arise under this system, since I'm only awarding XP for reaching objectives, regardless of how you reached them. You get your XP however you got past the guards -- by fighting, sneaking, intimidating, or bribing, if that's what's allowed in that particular quest. "Do you get experience... because you saw the windmill?" See above: I addressed this in my reply to Hormalakh. In brief, I think the least problematic compromise would be to award XP for active quest objectives only, but then bump up the bonus when completing a quest to make up for any objective-XP you missed by e.g. killing the bandits before the quest was active.

/me raises hand I don't understand. Why is it bad design not to reward players for clearing those sewers instead of sneaking through them?