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"Spawner abuse" now prevented?


madwand

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I have been away from the board for quite a while (years actually) so my apologies if this has already been discussed to death at some point (my search attempt did not turn up anything).

In the Geneforge series it "used to be" that a good way to level up was find a spawner and, rather than killing it as soon as possible, sit there and keep killing creations as it makes them.

However in Geneforge 4 I've noticed an odd thing. For a given spawner you can do that for a while, but then suddenly the kills begin yielding no experience points. It doesn't even say "you receive no points" like [to my recollection] it used to do when you were killing things way below your level. It just fails to mention points at all after a kill and, sure enough, your experience point counter does not go up.

Again, this is not about killing things that are too weak for you, as I still get the expected points by killing similar creatures elsewhere. Also, I do not level between the stage where I am still getting points and the stage when I stop getting them (which used to be the point at which your per-kill reward would drop).

Does this ring a bell with anyone, either as a known bug or a deliberate change? BTW, in one case I believe a spawnwer wasn't even involved, but rather a Shaper (Moshe) repeatedly creating the same set of creations. (I have not dealt with him yet so I could be wrong, but in the past Shapers didn't even use spawners -- only rebels).

Any input would be appreciated!

 

M

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Yes this has been discuessed before, though I don't recall and an actual topic about it. Jeff made it so you can't keep killing creations freshly made by a Spawner/Shaper/anything that shapes. When you get to the fens you'll really see what I'm talking about.

 

Moseh isn't using spawners, hes making them himself. Shapers still don't use spawners.

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You only get experience for creations that exist already and not for spawned or summoned creations. There is a GF4 screen that mentions this as a help message.

 

That no experience message because the creation is too low is gone, but you do notice it when you kill something and get nothing for the effort

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Hmm... Yeah, regarding G3, at least:

 

Click to reveal..
...The basement of the Monastery of Tears yielded no XP except, I think, for the spawners. Essentially, except for 2 or 3 important items, if I remember right, it was an extraordinarily difficult area yielding no benefit (hence whichever companion you chose (if you chose him or her) suggesting that your energies be better spent elsewhere). Still, even though I remember it taking several days to get through all those nasty things, I remember it being quite a fun area.

 

Personally, I'll say again that a player should never receive 0 XP, but that the XP requirements become larger for each subsequent level gain, while the XP gain remain unchanged for all creatures.

 

EDIT: However, as far as spawner-creations go... I can think of no better solution, off-hand, than Jeff has apparently decided upon long ago. It makes sense that spawned creations give you no XP since they're essentially strategic agents of the spawner. It makes sense that only killing the spawner (or the Shaper if that should be the case) can give you XP.

 

EDIT: Not realistic sense, but gameplay sense.

 

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From a game design perspective, the nice thing about experience is that it can make a player feel like they are making progress when they kill something. The bad thing about it, is that this can be potentially illusory or meaningless, or lead to stupid munchkin sagas that are not worth it for anybody.

 

Having static XP drops and increasing requirements to level, maximizes the good part, but also leaves opportunity for the bad part.

 

Having static requirements to level, but decreasing XP drops depending on your level, minimizes the bad part, but also reduces the opportunity for the good part to happen. Killing something and getting less than you used to is not usually a positive experience, unless the enemies scale up pretty quickly.

 

Personally, I deplore experience, in part because of its potential negative impacts and in part because it is one of the most unrealistic elements in RPGs, perhaps behind only hit points in absurdity.

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You know, it occurs to me that given a sufficiently well-developed equipment system, the gameplay role of experience could be replaced entirely with money. This mostly solves the realism problem: instead of getting stronger at a ridiculous rate, you're just buying increasingly powerful equipment. It also allows designers to create well-defined endpoints for levelling: if you can buy all the best equipment currently available to you, you're strong enough for now and should probably go advance the damn plot already. Finally, it gives the designer a way to discourage players from sitting in one place killing the same things over and over again: not everything you fight is going to drop fat wads of cash, and in fact most things probably won't.

 

Has any RPG actually done this, or something like it?

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Thuryl: that's the same conclusion that TM and I came to several years ago.

 

That said, I do think it's ridiculous that all people carry money on them (let alone wild animals and monsters), but I'm a big fan of realistic and consistent item drops -- which, dear god, is something that Realmz got right that almost no other game has. Although the best answer may be the way the Exile series did it: specifying that "gold" actually refers to all sorts of barterable items and valuables. I'd prefer to see that implemented by changing the name of "Gold" to, say, "Loot".

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Originally Posted By: Evnissyen
Personally, I'll say again that a player should never receive 0 XP, but that the XP requirements become larger for each subsequent level gain, while the XP gain remain unchanged for all creatures.

I've seen other, non-Spiderweb games that do this. It actually works fairly well.
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Originally Posted By: Slarty
Thuryl: that's the same conclusion that TM and I came to several years ago.

That said, I do think it's ridiculous that all people carry money on them (let alone wild animals and monsters), but I'm a big fan of realistic and consistent item drops -- which, dear god, is something that Realmz got right that almost no other game has.


Fallout did the same thing: kill someone and you can loot their corpse for everything they were carrying. I think a few other western RPGs from that era worked that way too.
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Originally Posted By: Slarty
Having static requirements to level, but decreasing XP drops depending on your level, minimizes the bad part, but also reduces the opportunity for the good part to happen. Killing something and getting less than you used to is not usually a positive experience, unless the enemies scale up pretty quickly.

 

I've already pointed this out to Jeff for GF5 where some of the quest expected levels were set so low you got no XP by the time you could finally get into the required zone to complete them. You had to pick and chose a path to maximize XP by knowing which areas would still give you something.

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No XP, only cash and stuff, was I think how it worked in the old sci-fi P&P RPG Traveller. You started out with knives, and in principle worked your way up to starships. In parallel with the money constraints were tech-level and (I think) law level constraints that varied from planet to planet. But it was such a lousy system in so many ways that this particular feature was hardly going to redeem it.

 

As a former DM the objection I immediately see to a cash-rather-than-experience system is that cash (and any other material assets) have to be subject to wild swings of fortune. You've got to be able to make the big score, or go suddenly bust, at just about any time. Because that's how money really works, and people know it. It's easy to accept dragons and magic, but being told that money isn't money is just irritating.

 

A great deal of the appeal of RPGs, on the other hand, is the security fantasy. If you reach 18th level, they can't take that away. And there's no shortcut to getting there, so no upstarts are going to be able to pass you without paying their dues, and so the value of your 18 hard-earned levels is secure. When these things aren't true, RPGers freak out. You can luck out at third level and score a million gold (it will soon be lost somehow), or have your castle sacked by giants (you can rebuild after a few good adventures), and that's a rollicking good time. Your levels can't just go up and down like that.

 

XP are the labor theory of value made natural law. Money is capitalist and you can't even pretend otherwise (at least not if you want to sell an RPG).

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You could conceivably build a system around it, though. Instead of turning money into portable or even stationary goods, you can turn it into intrinsic enhancements to your character. In a fantasy setting, maybe you are enchanted to turn aside the spears of your enemies, or so you can now shoot fire from your eyes. In a sci-fi setting, you get bigger and better genetic, cybernetic, or other technobabble alterations. It doesn't work so well for all systems, but there are plenty that already either don't have sharp, stepwise, and permanent character advancement or that can already incorporate wild fluctuations in character ability.

 

—Alorael, who likes the idea of RPGs in reverse. You start with plenty of equipment and power, but you gradually deplete or give up your resources until in the end you're running on empty. Depending on how things are set up, it's either an exercise in resource conservation and judicious application of what you have or a game about playing a role rather than min-maxing your rolls.

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If the character enhancements are just bought, with money that comes and goes as money must, then your investments in enhancements would presumably be fairly secure, unless bionic limbs can be repossessed to cover bar tabs. So that side of the security fantasy might be okay. But you would still have to deal with lucky idiots suddenly turning into demigods, taking the shine off your hard-earned powers.

 

(Of course if that sort of thing happens rarely, as a campaign event, then it can be cool. Last week Drobo Droggins found the Ring of Power in his drain, quit his job as a foot barber, and conquered the coast! You, my brave adventurers, must unseat the half-pint tyrant. His gaze can level a city now, but he only really knows foot hair, and this is your edge.)

 

If the character enhancements are somehow constrained to accrue in close to direct proportion with player performance, so that the Bingo hall isn't just popping out a new Palafox every week, then I'd say what you have is an in-game rationale for an XP and levelling system. Which I'm all for. All I'm saying is that I think it's easier to give the XP + levelling system some plausible in-game rationale, than to make abrupt and reversible jumps in PC power palatable to the normal RPG player — except perhaps as comparatively minor additions (like the magical items of most fantasy campaigns), or rare exceptions (divine interventions and the like).

 

The RPG in reverse would probably not appeal to many. Most of us will eventually get our chance to try that kind of game, whether we want to or not. As far as I'm concerned, it can wait until then.

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Now that I think about it, there are certainly games other than RPGs that have used money as the sole source of character advancement. Space sims like Star Control II and Escape Velocity, where you earn money and spend it to upgrade your ship, are obvious examples. In Escape Velocity, it's even possible to lose most of that money in one swell foop if your ship is blown up... although I'm sure that most players just reload their saved games when this happens.

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Between the saveloads and the lucrative trade routes that give millions for brief tedium once you know where they are, the PC-grows-in-power part of EV and its ilk is basically broken. When you're new to the game, the engine is restrictive enough that cash functions okay as a rationalized XP. Insofar as it does behave like money, rather than like XP, I think it's a weak feature in these games.

 

And it's not any more realistic than XP, either. The galaxy is full of freighter captains scraping by, but somehow in a few months I can rise from shuttle pilot to admiral of a private battle fleet stronger than the strike forces of interstellar navies. Evidently my money is somehow better than everyone else's.

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I agree with SoT that justification for the sudden surge in power (as in G1) is great, but there is another solution. PC power doesn't have to rise dramatically over the course of the game. It's well established that having power rise in some way, finding little bonuses -- the "ooh, a treasure chest" or "ooh, a canister!" effect -- is very pleasing to players. But those increases can be spaced out and they don't have to be large.

 

The reason most games employ large power increases is a lame one. If PC power doesn't increase much, enemy power can't increase much either. So if you are not willing to have a versatile battle system with room for interesting and different varieties of enemies at a given power level, a long game without large power rises quickly becomes boring. Personally, I'd rather play a game with enemies that don't get significantly more powerful, but rather employ an increasing variety of attacks and strengths. Make me do something a little different, rather than do the same thing again and again and pretend it's different just because the numbers are bigger.

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Originally Posted By: Slarty
I agree with SoT that justification for the sudden surge in power (as in G1) is great, but there is another solution. PC power doesn't have to rise dramatically over the course of the game. It's well established that having power rise in some way, finding little bonuses -- the "ooh, a treasure chest" or "ooh, a canister!" effect -- is very pleasing to players. But those increases can be spaced out and they don't have to be large.


I think that this is also a fine plan, and lots of non-RPGs of course do exactly this. (It's possible to beat, say, Megaman X without ever finding a health upgrade: good luck beating an average RPG without ever levelling up.) But is it possible for RPGs to do the same and remain RPGs? Going from very small numbers to very big numbers seems to be a significant part of the genre's appeal.
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I think Slarty is right about the big power boosts as an excuse for bringing in a new league of challenges. But it's also true that a big part of what RPGs are about is rising in power enough to do the things that everyone knows are big and cool. Eventually you've got to slay dragons or destroy battle fleets, or why are you playing this game? So it may well be that the big power jumps are in these games, not in order to spice up the diet of orcs and shuttles with dragons and battleships, but in order to spin the game out by introducing a low level phase of the game, with orcs and shuttles, before getting to the dragons and battleships that the game is really about.

 

In my DM days I did myself get bored with simply flipping ahead in the monster list as the players went up in level. At higher PC levels, the havoc a fully charged-up party can unleash if it goes full bore grows quite nonlinearly, while the number of interesting monster varieties actually seemed to decrease. (Later versions of the rules introduced more and more high-end creatures, but few were cool.) More and more the player party came to be fighting epic battles with comparable parties of NPCs, instead of monster species. But occasionally I took lower level monsters and found reasonable ways to pump them up. A quite high level party was seriously challenged by a well dug-in platoon of the United Orc Marines, who fought from trenches with breastworks and dugouts, fired ballistas, and threw grenades.

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Doesn't the unreality come in because of what abilities you can increase -- that is, all of them? It's not implausible that as you gain experience you can get better at fighting, or casting, or shaping, because those are skills where one could increase their knowledge and gain better intuition. On the other hand, it's a bit odd that your intelligence can increase 100% or more just from... what? Practice? In most games, before the game starts your character has been through some sort of rigorous training. You're in superb condition. Yet as the game goes on, your Endurance or Constitution or whatever it's called goes up, sometimes a lot. I don't know if I buy that. But, few RPGs are meant to be simulations, and those that try to go in that direction, like Millennium's End, can get a little tedious.

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As Jeff pointed out in an article, though, the desire to slay the dragon and/or level the city doesn't require big increases in power. It can also be filled by higher starting power. D&D in particular is infamous for the disposability of low-level characters. Why not begin with power and just increase the number of ways it increases?

 

—Alorael, who thinks leveling may come about partly from false analogy to, say, arcade games, in which difficulty steadily ramps up. Roleplaying games aren't really supposed to do that, but they need to seem to do that, so the compromise is more taxing challenges for characters who can more easily meet them.

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