Creative Corner > Game Design

Leveling Up.

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kurashu:
What is your favorite system of leveling up? D&D3.5 class system where you always receive a feat at fighter 1, 3rd level spells at wizard 5, and become an outsider at monk 20 (easily the best capstone ever)? Or is is it Mutants & Masterminds where you get a handful of points and can choose what to change about your character? Or D&D4e where you get a selection of powers over levels (but always in the same progression)?

Or branching into video games, Dark Souls where you level one stat per level (for increasingly huge amounts of souls...)? Or Borderlands' and Dragon Age's linear skill trees? Or Skyrim's and Dragon Age II's skill trees? Or old school RPG where you receive a random increase to HP/Mana/Attack/Defense and either learn skills when you level or from items?

veekie:
Leveled definitely, it has distinct advantages game wise where characters are dynamic, by ensuring availability of certain thresholds are clear. However, for abilities gained FROM leveling, I like branching skill trees over plug and play components(like spells/feats), mixed with a number of static abilities to round it out.

archangel.arcanis:
I like skill trees. Though I'm liking a bit of a hybrid system i'm in now. It essentially has 2 numbers for level Tier and Rank. Each rank represents a level and you have a list of choices that you can take, some are limited to once a tier and others have higher limits. After so many ranks you go up a tier which re-opens those you had maxed out on previously. Obviously some things require you be a certain tier to get but that is independent of the leveling system.

SneeR:
Dark Souls' leveling system is downright disappointing. For pen-an-paper RPGs, leveling up needs to have oomf in my eyes. Getting +2 damage, 10 more hp, or 2 more stamina is not a satisfying reward, more of an afterthought for when you just happen to have enough souls...

I like leveled systems, to be sure, because nonleveled systems are staticly dynamic. Basically, you add points ad infinitum until nothing can match you unless it is designed to. Best to just get a chunk of points at the same time and call it a "level" so you can have level-appropriate encounters.

I like to have a list of abilities available at each level, not necessarily linked to each other, but definitely building off of simliar abilities from earlier levels.

Bozwevial:
I'm not a huge fan of skill trees where you have to pick up abilities early in the tree before you can take the upper-level ones unless:

1) The abilities scale with level, so that you can start over in a new tree or go down a new path and still get something that's appropriate for your level.

2) You get multiple tree advancements at once, so you can continue advancing in your primary tree while starting down a secondary/tertiary tree.

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