An RPG without leveling

[kingcomrade]

Ho ho, I hath been outwitted. Moron. If you weren't saying that people are deluding themselves as to whether they liked the game or not then you weren't saying anything. The bryce defense, pretending nobody was able to understand what you wrote while simultaneously not clarifying and posting something condescending, isn't going to get you off the ground.

 

[Romanian_Dude2005]

I would personaly like to see a game, where you level backwards.

If, say, you build a diplomatic character, the main story takes him through some life chaging events like his family or best friends dying. At the end he is forced to kill and becomes the oposite of what you've originaly build, a psyhotic killer.

The same, if you have a combat charracter, the MQ should show him some of the worst things that war or combat can offer and he sees so many dead bodies that towards the end of the game he looses all his desires to kill and becomes a diplomatic character. (example: the Master of Fireamrs from Arcanum)

There would be no leveling, but instead if you have 10 XP points at "Guns", the skill would slowly drain while it's oposite gains more points.


I know it sounds weird or ilogical, but atleast it's original.

 

[Lumpy]

It's already been said in this thread. And in another thread some time ago.

 

[cutterjohn]

OK, I'll admit it I didn't bother to read all 10 pages of posts as I just know that there'll be a huge POS in it forcing me to filter out the dross and off-topic crap from the on-topic posts.

Anyways, my take:
An RPG WITHOUT levelling IS an action adventure game, and unless it was actually designed to be an adventure game, possibly with a few RPGlike elements, it'll be a shitty adventure game. If you remove/reduce/or otherwise simplify the combat a great deal it could even qualify as a plain old adventure game.

Well, maybe if you had bothered, you would have noticed that your point has been brought up fairly early, discussed controversialy and was more or less smacked down.

Sorry old boy, but I went back and looked through part of the drivel and never really came across where my opinion that a non-levelled RPG is merely some sort of adventure was ever adequately, well, "smacked down", as you put it. So, i'm going to happily maintain my demotion to mere adventure game opinion.

e.g. Beyond Zork had stats and even had levels, but it's still an adventure game as they were mostly meaningless, really only affecting combat a little and what items could be used IIRC.

Quest for Glory had classes, again levels, and skills but the levels were largely meaningless as it was much more of an adventure game than RPG.

Quarterstaff had classes and a party IIRC, but it was an adventure game.

hmmm... I need to find some of the other ones that didn't have levelling but had skills and combat.

 

[galsiah]

The point isn't that you're wrong (though I'd be inclined to say that you are), but rather that this is a discussion about design. Classifying an as yet undesigned game rigidly in one genre is stupidity. Genre has no place in design discussions.

This has been stated many times, and it's not getting less true. All the "It's not an RPG"... "It is too!"... "Is not!!!"... crap is just an aside. It is irrelevant.
If you can't abandon a rigid notion of genre in a discussion of fundamental design, then you suck at design.

Also, please stop with the pointless lists of: game X had... but was... game Y had... and was...
A long list of correlations would demonstrate nothing about causation, even if the point you were trying to make weren't worthless - which it is.

 

[Amateur]

RPG without levelling, advancement etc...

Well, it is like kebap without any meat.

Try frp or adventure game instead...

 

[Lumpy]

I think an rpg without levelling is an adventure game.

 

[RGE]

Oh, in Pirates! you got to choose one skill that your captain was better at than the others, and then you levelled backwards as he got slower and slower when he aged. Had to go from young guy with heavy cutlass to old guy with light rapier in order to be speedy enough to actually fight successfully.

I'm not sure if the remake of the game is like that too. Still, you got to play to get the points, it's just that the points don't make you better (like XP do), they only count at the end. And when you're hiring a new crew after the last divvying up of the loot.

If Pirates! had been an RPG I guess that one would eventually have ended up being the King of Pirates, with superskills and defeating flying Dutchmen and their krakens. Just to steal their gold. And one would've started out as a cabin boy, sent down to the cargo hold to kill rats. RPGs sure suck.