"xp-based implementations are just as exploitable"? Even if we ignore the systemic solutions to the xp-based problem (you don't have to go full Sawyer, either -- you can have time limits that prevent the first example and faction-based consequences for murderhoboing to prevent the second)
Time limits are not always applicable and they fix, or at least alleviate problems with ALL kinds of advancement systems, so they hardly work in XP's favour over use-based.
Same applies when you replace time limits with time-based or even skill-usage based resource consumption in general which, unlike time limits, is broadly applicable and should be a part of any sanely designed game - in general there should not be any free grinding/farming loops in game, it doesn't matter whether you're farming XP, resources or grinding skills, the principle is the same.
And for any non-free loops, short circuiting them via, for example, trainer should be less costly than going through the loop.
Faction-based consequences only help if the game is completely devoid of unaligned or antagonist aligned filler, AKA XP-fodder (which is an interesting proposition, although I'm not sure if completely viable), and if they do help, they can just as well fix use-based problem (by removing free "training dummies").
In the end use-based is XP-based with more tools to curb shenanigans, so anything that can fix XP can fix use-based, some things that can fix use-based may fail to fix XP, and arguably the way to fix XP is to go full Sawyer on it (only better).
It's not surprising - XP gives you first and foremost simplicity at the cost of requiring hands-on management (because it turns into a huge mess if you try to contrive some way for it to work on its own), use-based is a heavy, nasty, complicated, rule-based engine for controlling character development autonomously.
The only way to keep it simple AND hands-off is to not have advancement system in the first place - just the initial builds, which too is a viable, if rarely pursued option.
what makes things significantly worse in a train-by-use system is that the player is forced to exploit it if they want to build their character / group the way they want simply because they don't have direct control over character development*, while in a standard level-up system they can just create their build and stick with it.
The only occasions when player needs to exploit anything in use-based is when the design is broken in some way:
- skills vary in their applicability over the course of the game (for example all good low level weapons are spears, but all good high level ones are longswords).
- disproportions between individual skills' contributions to level and other stats enabling all sorts of shenanigans - as in TES games prior to Skyrim, where only your class skills affected the level ups but all skills affected multipliers, this BTW is one of the (relatively few) areas Skyrim improved mechanically
If the design isn't broken, there is no incentive to try and abuse the system compared to playing normally.
The 'flexibility' you claim is given by a train-by-use system
I don't know what you're referring to. Where did I claim "flexibility"?
On the flipside, try to play a heavy hybrid like a ninja or 4-spellbook bishop in Wiz8 without engaging in ~degenerate gameplay~.
Actually that's largely CAUSED by the fact Wiz8 uses hybrid system (further exacerbated by the fact it uses level scaling) - because skill gains are decoupled from levels, you can engage in shenanigans to become disproportionately powerful for your level. Without that 4-school bishop would be doomed to be noticeably weaker than dedicated caster or even 2-3 school bishop (but still very versatile) instead of being 100% concentrated awesome sauce and effectively 4 casters in a can - trade-offs instead of IWIN button given enough tedium.
Hybrid systems aren't a solution - if anything they make problem worse by not providing anything beyond pure XP or use-based while opening a whole bunch of new loopholes.
Sure, the player may feel accomplished that "yes, I deliberately played less efficiently in this relatively easy battle to get some skillgains" (like throwing stix at the enemy for minor damage instead of casting heavy damage spells, or deliberately dragging the fight out for more skillgain opportunities), but that obscures the fact that you just had to micro-manage shit in an otherwise-trivial encounter just so your character's skills would keep up. AKA unnecessary busywork which is harder to control the more players are in your party (oh, did the high-initiative samurai kill everything before the slow mage could cast their spell... again?) that's entirely created by gain-by-use mechanics and doesn't apply in a level-based system.
That's a symptom of deeper issues, not problem with use-based. If you are willingly using less efficient skill, this means that either skills vary in utility along the course of the game (as discussed above) and you want to pump up currently useless skill so that it will be powerful later on, or that because the skill isn't tied to your level, you can gain some auxiliary benefits from it, beyond 'normal' power curve.
Things like artificially drawing the combat out also signalize underlying issues.
First thing is that the combat is easy enough and doesn't cause enough resource attrition to make toying with your enemies worthwhile.
Second issue is allowing using less effective attacks to be preferable for training reasons. This can be fixed in several ways:
- By removing ability to use less effective attacks - limited inventory and need to have different tools for different tasks may limit the ability to carry shit-tier weapons for training purposes, spells scaling with caster's skill may do the same with spells, lack of HP bloat may limit the notion of less effective attack.
- By reducing gains from less effective attacks - the most straightforward, if somewhat artificial way is to scale anything that can be translated to damage with damage caused by an attack. So hitting once for 100HP is as good as hitting 100 times for 1HP, critting a massive boss on first turn counts as reducing his massive HP pool all the way down, etc.
- By reducing skill gains when stacking - a good way is to base skill gain on difficulty on the task, then noticing that for example defense is generally active so if you cripple an enemy through less-lethal attacks to extremities or by hitting them with mental magic (that doesn't cause damage on its own), following killing blow is going to be much easier and thus much less educating.
And again, resource expenditure is your friend.
And that's without looking at noncombat skills and crafting, where gain-by-use is either going to be tedious, annoying, or both.
Balancing crafting is indeed tricky, but that's because it's role in game is often ill defined. Typical RPG protagonist isn't a craftsman, but an adventurer, so any crafting mechanics requires some limitations to funnel it towards adventuring-applicable uses.
Anyway, if all else fails use-based can be Sawyered just as XP-based, except unlike XP-based it doesn't have to be an all or nothing decision - you can perfectly well have Sawyered skills coexisting with mechanical ones.
Of course, resource expenditure may turn out to be a sufficient limitation here, without need to Sawyer anything.
As for use-based being more organic, ehh no. Gain-by-use is the embodiment of artificiality, simply because it adds a level of indirection between player choice and character advancement.
Indirection is indirection, artificiality is artificiality. There is no inherent relationship between those. If anything, a system which allows you to become better at picking locks by beheading 100 orcs is an artificial one.
In some cases indirection is perfectly natural, for example consequences of player's decisions or performance in quests cannot be manipulated by the player directly and that's a good thing - why should consequences of what skills the PC(s) become experienced with be any different?
In GBU you'd cast Detect Secrets or Knock-Knock at a chest/locked door even if the party's rogue can already lockpick them without problems just to increase your casters' skill levels; in the level/xp-based equivalent you wouldn't (and you wouldn't ever need to, either). Yes, you can make rules that limit this (like... give each chest item a limited amount of GBU XP that can be obtained from it), but - as we have seen in the three threads I linked in the OP - this adds even more artificiality and just leads down an endless rabbit hole of the designer trying to obfuscate how they control player advancement. And my argument is that in a gain-by-use system, ALL players become exploiters except for the most hardcore immersion fetishists.
Or you can answer the question: "why wouldn't I actually do that in such situation?". The answer will dictate what you'll need to do to proof the system against perceived abuse.
So, why, given an apt rogue in the party, would you not cast trap detecting or unlocking magic on stuff you need to open?
For example:
- Magic may not be trivial to replenish (indicates a weakness in magic system, rest system or resource system that makes replenishing magic too easy between occasions when it is needed).
- You actually would because spells and rogue abilities should stack in a meaningful manner, maybe rogue should consume resources when dealing with more complex locks and traps, which can be alleviated with magic?
- You actually would, but only instead of rogue's involvement - maybe rogue could have more to do with locks'n'traps skill than just opening stuff, making competition over training opportunities between your caster and rogue meaningful? Or maybe magic and rogue skills come with their own sets of advantages and disadvantages that would make rogue skills more worthwhile even if you have a caster?
- You have no (subtle) lockpicking magic and unsubtle magic (or straight physical abuse) breaks and burns stuff.
Either answer makes for a better and more interesting game and it was actually quite a problem with Wiz8 that magic essentially came for free and there were few disincentives to spamming highest dice spells you could manage without risk of self inflicted TPK.
Yes, it is extra work but it is extra work that gives you opportunity to avoid extra work fine tuning individual XP-gains and proving them against abuse (by Sawyering them), so if you have a lot of content it's smart man's work.
Or you can just accept this failure of your system as even unpatched it's still more sensible and less egregious (party members making the best out of opportunities to hone their skills) than persuading someone only to fireball them, so that you can become better at axe fighting - even when failing use-based behaves more gracefully than XP based, so the only way for XP-based to be worthwhile is precluding failure - which is done by Sawyering.
(Extra bonus: what about skills that can only increase when your enemy does something, like Resist Spells in UO?)
Passive skills also behave poorly in use-based so not having passive skills is worth considering. Alternatively, you don't need to make grind impossible, you just need to make it a worse deal than using a trainer.
So far I see three arguments in favor of train-by-use, in decreasing order of validity:
- advancement without direct player control (this is OK in some situations already discussed, like XCOM and Dwarf Fortress, and I could see an argument for roguelikes) or where skillgain opportunities are strictly limited / grinding isn't an option (like the Princess Maker stuff)
- secondary psychological reinforcement so the players in the skinner box don't mind repetitive and unremarkable challenges because omg skillgains (aka legitimizing grinding)
- ~muh immersion~
Not convinced how this is better than a system where the player has full control over their advancement (which doesn't preclude minor gain-by-use mechanics like weapon familiarity in Silent Storm)
How about:
- advancement without player's control (by just playing the game)
- muh immersion
- ability to handle advancement automatically without constant case-by-case oversight or horrible breakdowns of the entire system cauysed by lack of thereof
?
Various degrees of indirection aren't only involved between player and their character, they are also involved between the dev and player's character.
For the player direct control is and advantage, but for the dev it's a burden, because it forces them to explicitly spell out multiple possible situations, and it scales badly with increasing amount of content.
And if the player has more direct control over something than the dev, they can abuse it through all sorts of loopholes.
The fact that GBU is most popular in MMOs and usually isn't the only advancement system in a game* probably says something.
MMOs are giant nests of design pathologies oriented towards maximizing player's time investment.
MMO design is therefore not applicable to the problem except as "what not to do" case study.
And most devs are morons stumbling blindly while picking a mess of cargo-cult ideas along the way.
also, I suppose the obvious followup is -- which games in your opinion do this right, ie. have a GBU system that's strictly superior to any traditional levelup system? I think practical examples are much stronger proof here than theory.
Practical examples are only proof where they exist. That there was a time before someone made the first cart didn't mean that the wheel was impossible or not a worthwhile invention.
And besides:
You can do more things with train by use then level systems if you stop thinking of them as a damn reward system.
This.
In an XP system an XP is an universal food pellet. It's hard to think of it in any other way but a reward, because it just makes your character stronger - unless you try some truly demented shit like level scaling, there is no and cannot be disincentive to XP.
So, when balancing an XP-based system you need to think of XP gains as rewards for behaviour you want player to engage in, and need to find ways to reward good solution but not degenerate one.
OTOH this doesn't need to be the case with use based as individual skill gains can have a cost built into them being skill gains (so separate from any kind of resource mechanics or anything like that).
In an XP based system gaining XP is like monetary reward, and spending points on level up is like spending this reward on something you want.
In an use-based system the reward and spending it is no longer decoupled and you need to not only spend it right away, in the way determined by how you got it, but you may also be spending a bit of your character potential along the way, limiting your ability to benefit from other rewards further down the line. So in an XP based an XP is an XP is an XP, but in use based an improvement of long sword skill is only good if you want to use this skill, otherwise it just comes at the cost of your fire magic or speech skill.
Then the desired balance between focus and versatility dictates how much do you want to spread out - neither a one trick pony, nor a jack of all trades, master of none should be the optimal solution here.
uch:
