As a life-long D&D player and computer gamer who is now hooked on the Xbox 360 game Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, I want to say a few words about leveling and difficulty in fantasy (and I suppose Sci-Fi) video games.
In a linear game, things are simple. Put the higher level creatures further away from the character, and expect them to reach them only when the characters are of suitable level to handle the encounter. This makes sense, and it’s pretty much what game masters have been doing in pen and paper RPGs for decades. The question then is how do you handle this in an open-ended game, where the characters can do anything they want, go anywhere they want at any time – how do you keep the characters from getting slaughtered if they reach a certain baddie at the wrong time?
Oblivion’s solution is inelegant. All the creatures level up along with the characters so every fight is always tough, but you can overcome this by sliding down the difficulty bar to as low as a 1:6 ratio of the monster’s power relative to your own. I personally feel that this is incredibly boring, and takes the fun and challenge out of the game. I don’t like that it’s totally up to me whether or not my character is going to have a hard-time.
Given this problem, I’d like to offer a solution based on my gaming experience. My solution is an attempt to take realism into account: the same dungeon should not have rats if I’m first level and arch-fiends if I’m 20th. That just doesn’t make sense. At the same time, my first level character should not randomly encounter unbeatable arch-fiends at that level and get eaten for breakfast. That doesn’t seem fun at all. The solution to all this requires quite a bit of planning and some programming, but isn’t that complicated.
First off we have to designate some categories of power level and of creatures. I offer the following categories, which I’ll call Difficulty Ratings or DRs:
Weak: a weak creature is from the lower 1/3 of the game’s creature database’s overall range.
Moderate: a moderate creature is from the middle third of the game’s creature database’s overall range.
Powerful: From the upper third of the database.
Now for the creatures:
Random nasties (RN): These are the creatures that can be encountered anywhere, but don’t have much story significance. Rats, skeletons, bears, ogres, wyverns, whatever. The database spawns these creatures first by determining whether a RN exists, then by determining the DR: weak, moderate, or powerful. Finally, the database looks at the power level of the PC and limits the choice as follows: weak drawn from 1-5 levels below the character, moderate drawn from 1 level below to 1 level above the character, powerful drawn from 2 to 4 levels above the character (see the note below about basing these ranges on the games overall difficulty setting). This allows characters to travel anywhere at anytime and know that the random encounters will be just right – sometimes cake-walks, some times blood-fests.
Fixed nasties (FN): Here’s where it gets tough. Fixed nasties are what they are, no matter what level you meet them. The nice thing about Fixed Nasties is that they’re fixed in place, so that they tend to get a reputation. By reading books, finding journals, and talking to NPCs, a player can get an idea of what the Fixed Nasties in there are like. If an NPC says, “You look pretty tough, I bet you’re about a 10th level assassin, right? Well if you go into that cave, the dragon in there is going to toss you a serious beating and picking his teeth with your bones.” Thus, duly warned, it’s up to the player. Go now, or save it for later? Don’t forget to save your game. Needless to say, the Internet will be full of helpful FAQs on where the Fixed Nasties are and what you need to take them on.
Fixed Nasties might even have a Reputation Score attached to them and magic might allow a PC to read a Reputation automatically. The Reputation Score (RS) could be closely linked to level. If you’re tenth level and that creature has an RS of 14 … well, you’d know what you’re up against.
Fixed Nasties don’t wander, so players don’t have to worry about running into super-powerful Fixed Nasties by chance. At the same time, since it’s a video game where combat skills with the controller or mouse should have a significant role, weaker characters can still engage powerful FNs with a chance of winning, even while at lower levels.
Using Fixed Nasties in this way let’s the player’s playing style and conversations with NPCs reallly have an impact. Are you a risk taker who routinely challenges more powerful foes, or are you a cautious player who only picks fights you can win, and enjoys coming back to take out Fixed Nasties with hefty reputations only when you’re certain you can clean the floor with them? Players can then compare online: I took out that Iron Golem Metalknees at seventh level! Can you believe it? The fight took three hours!
Another thought about FNs might be to add another level of realism to the game by superseding the ‘save the game to fight another day’ mentality. The game could have a mechanism whereby any attempt to take on a much higher level FN that results in the PC’s death could award the FN with a further power boost – thus meaning that after restoring your game, if you go in for round two you’ll be in for an even tougher – and most importantly new and different – fight.
And yes, it’s true, you might level up to uber-dude on the west coast, turning all the east coast FNs into cake-walks – with one caveat. Those FNs will still have just-right RNs around in their territories, and hell – this makes sense. That east coast bandit lord should kick your butt if you’re third level and run in terror from you if you’re 23rd. The game designers can even stack the deck by giving a large percentage of the game’s FNs RN followers or henchmen – watch out for the bandit lord who’s pet RN has turned into a vampire, even though he himself is only fifth level.
The last and most dangerous type of creature is the Leveling Nasty. These are the most important encounters in the game, the “boss” baddies if you will. They function exactly like FNs, but an LN has an extra-edge. They live in the real world just like the PC, and they can increase in power level and equipment just like a PC, as game-time goes on. In other words, Leveling Nasties are also training and advancing, acquiring new spells and better gear.
An LN, like an FN, also has a DR that can be discovered through research and role-play or magic, but that DR is constantly on the rise. This could be as simple as fixing the level gap between PC and LN and governing the fix by the system’s own algorithm for increasing difficulty in gaining new levels as the character’s level goes up. In other words, as soon as you click play somewhere out there in the world is an LN named Draxor the Archmage who is an 18th level mage against your 1st level warrior. When you have advanced from 1st to 10th level, gaining let’s say 100,000 xp and taking let’s say 120 game days, Draxor has also had 120 days to accumulate 100,000 xp, and he gets to be 18th level + 100,000 xp x a mod for his higher level (he’s fighting higher level nasties) – whatever the algorithm for level advancement determines that might add up to.
Whether you face Draxor at 1st level (if you could possibly get to him without spending time and leveling up) and he’s 18th level, or you face him at 10th level knowing that he’s been working out all along is up to the player. As everyone knows, it makes more sense to take him on at 10th level vs. say 23rd level rather than 1st level versus 18th.
As far as having an overall difficulty setting, after all your grandmother might want to play and she doesn’t know which end of a mouse is up, that is easily linked to the DR. With three DSs (Difficulty Settings) of Easy, Moderate, and Hard, we need three DR ranges. Weak on the Easy level is, for example 3-9 levels below the character, while weak on the Hard setting is 1-4 levels below the character, or somesuch.
Some number crunching would obviously be needed to fix DRs relative to DSs and to create an algorithm for the advancement rate of LNs, but once done, you’d have a perfectly balanced and exciting leveling system.
As a final note, since I have Oblivion on the brain now, there is the issue of training skills versus advancing levels. In this system, we could easily incorporate that. If you train skills you can advance your level, and all the ratios remain the same, including those governing the advancement of LNs. There is one huge advantage to adventuring over staying in town and training: you can collect magic and money. If LNs are assumed to be advancing, they will spawn with appropriate gear when it’s time to fix their level for an encounter with you. If all you’ve got are iron weapons and book smarts, you’ll have that much more of a disadvantage. Of course, with smart game design and plotting, there will be some LNs designated as ‘homebodies’ or HBs. Homebodies don’t adventure, but they do train. An LN HB’s gear will be fixed – he doesn’t adventure to get new stuff. An adventuring LN on the other hand will have super-duper gear just like the kind you can get by adventuring.
To add a final, exciting tweak, once we designate an LN as an adventuring LN (ALN?) then we can add those ALNs to random encounter tables, of course with very low appearance percentages. What happens if you meet a Powerful ALN while you’re wandering in the woods at third level? Well, you run away or you die and restore from a saved game, that’s what you do. But imagine how cool it will be when you do randomly meet, trade a few spells with, and then run away from a certain ALN, only to meet him fifteen levels later in his castle? “I remember you …”
The people who designed Oblivion deserve all the props in the world. It is class all the way and those folks are geniuses. Nothing I’ve done with my life even begins to approach their accomplishment in terms of creativity. That having been said, it is downright stupid to find the same cave filled with skeletons one day and Daedra the next. My idea is a fix for that: designers set the LNs and FNs for that cave, and use a proper algorithm for any RNs that might be there, and the world is perfect and more closely reflects the real world.
In fact, there’s one more advantage to this system: since it will be possible to meet an FN and meet some RNs while running away from it, everyone’s FN encounters have a chance of being slightly different. This makes it possible to write game walk-throughs that simply can’t spoil everything. There are random factors easily governed by in-game algorithms as well as modified by your level and time spent playing that the walk-through writers can’t know about, so they can’t spoil them for you.
My next project might be to think about how this system would fare in an MMORPG. Needless to say the calculations would have to take into account mixed level parties … well, more on that some other day perhaps.
Those are my suggestions for how to take a spectacular game like Oblivion and quiet all the negative banter about its leveling system. I’d love to hear people’s comments.
