So today I was working on a new feature to my game and had a though that I would like to get some feedback on.

The project I'm working on is based on an RPG genre and deals with the leveling process or more the de-leveling process: Currently when a player dies in the game the game will take 25% of their Gold and Experience. If enough experience is take then a level down process is performed on the player using mostly random values. For now this works but here is the idea I'm thinking of implementing.

When the player level's up they will be given a number of points to add to their stats. Nothing new here. As the stats get updated I'm thinking of instead of just updating the numbers in the data structure that instead I clone the current levels and then adjust the new stats, in essence creating a new version of their stats. This way when a player goes down in level their character stats can then be reverted to the previous level numbers.

One reason I have been thinking about doing it this way is to prevent players from leveling de-leveling to try and gain more hit points because of the different in the random up and down process. I know another way to solve this would be instead of using random number just set the amount of hit point to be a constant value.

The couple of questions I now have though is if they go down in level would it be of value to keep the upper level's values or should I just dump the data and have the player go through the level process again when they reach their old level?

Does this add any value to the game design or is it just a waste of time?

I'm having difficulty picturing an audience who would enjoy such hardcore game mechanics. But if you can picture them, ask yourself if it would add value for them.

Some games do store the entire old level information for a character for removing levels. Ex: Neverwinter Nights 2 (I think NWN1 as well, but I'm not 100% on that one). However, it makes more sense to do so when there are player choices you want to preserve like class feature, feat or skill selections. If it's just stats, I wouldn't bother and just go with fixed stat gain/loss.

I'm having difficulty picturing an audience who would enjoy such hardcore game mechanics. But if you can picture them, ask yourself if it would add value for them.

Which is why this is still a thought and I haven't taken the development time to implement this kind of feature. I know when I played Diablo 3 they had some harsh penelties when you died which is why I was thinking along those line. But thank you for your oppinion it really puts thjis featrure in perspective.

Some games do store the entire old level information for a character for removing levels. Ex: Neverwinter Nights 2 (I think NWN1 as well, but I'm not 100% on that one). However, it makes more sense to do so when there are player choices you want to preserve like class feature, feat or skill selections. If it's just stats, I wouldn't bother and just go with fixed stat gain/loss.

Its been a while since I played NWN so I had forgotten about how they handled this in the game. I think it's time I do a little more research before I make a poor decision. Thanks for the information.

Hello Iede,

Final Fantasy XI has non-random stats that go down when you delevel. The various jobs (classes) have different (to the player invisible) tiers in each stat, and level accordingly. The variety in stats between two players of the same job and level comes entirely from gear. There are 16 slots for gear, and gear can be swapped on the fly from the inventory at any time. All gear requires certain jobs to wear, so not every job can wear everything. All gear also requires a minimum level to wear. When you fall below the minimum level for a piece of gear, it is automatically unequipped (which can sometimes leave you without pants on ;) ).

In essence, this gives every player solid base stats for their class while still giving them different playstyles to discover from gear. Just for some more ideas on what you can do.

If stat growth is random through all levels, you can roll and print out the stats for all levels when the character is created, then look up the new stats from that table whenever leveling or deleveling occurs. This prevents any and all min-maxing through deleveling/leveling or reloading the game over and over to roll better stats when leveling up. Keep in mind that there are gamers who actually favor that min-maxing style of play, however. What direction you wanna go is up to you!

Good luck,

Chris

Sure, you could save stats into an Array, so when the level drops, you have the stats of all previous levels saved. But are you sure you want to prevent players from being able to alter their stats in that way? Maybe allowing players to adjust their character after they die is a good thing.

On the other hand, I would hate to lose a level in an RPG, unless there was something deliberately fun about it's gameplay (like in Warcraft 3 The Frozen Throne, where Arthas starts really powerful but loses levels throughout the campaign). It sounds like you're just using it as a punishment, but I feel like that punishment goes too far. I think levels and experience should be kept safe from that punishment, so no matter what I at least have one type of progress that isn't stripped away from me after I've lost. Diablo 3 never took away a players experience. It actually has a reputation for being a very light death penalty, cause it just reduces durability on equipment, which requires some money to be repaired after you've died several times. They avoided harsher penalties cause they didn't want the player to feel like they were being punished.

Final Fantasy XI is SquareEnix's most financially successful game, has EXP loss and deleveling, and was one of the most hardcore AAA games you could find for most of its lifetime. It's a MMORPG of course, so the scale is different; but if scaled correctly for a single player RPG, EXP loss should sit just fine with hardcore gamers. I know many gamers who love such features, especially when the gameplay is challenging on its own.

Thanks for the feedback and comparison to other games.

I by no means think my little game can compare to a AAA title so these kind of decisions for me are very important. AAA games have several advantage that I don't have. Their games have a decent size budget and will have a user based to work out these kind of game ideas. Since I have neither the user base or budget to try this I'm going to put this on the back burner and focus more on game play.

Again thanks everyone who gave me feedback it was very good to see the different ideas.

Could you save the seed and just use that to restore the player's stats on re-level up? This would require detecting when a level is being restored instead of being attained for the first time, but that's all in all a pretty small amount of data to keep, unless you expect players to lose lots of levels before re-attaining a level.

(Though, as an aside I hate random hitpoints, though if the game is doing something like giving between 100-110 hp per level, that's less of an issue than, say D&D and a barbarians 1-12 hp per level, which is a ridiculous spread)

I'm having difficulty picturing an audience who would enjoy such hardcore game mechanics. But if you can picture them, ask yourself if it would add value for them.

Dungeons and Dragons has de-levelling upon death and resurrection (you lose a full level every time you die and are raised), as well as some monsters (namely vampires) causing "level drain" that can become permanent in some cases, at least in version 3.5. That might have changed in 4th or 5th edition. It seems some people do enjoy such a mechanic. :)