I would really like to play a Role Playing Game without any kind of XP mechanic. I think it'd be really cool to play through an epic storyline that my character came through about as strong at the end as it was at the beginning.
Adding abilities lets the game designer present extra complexity later in the game. Most interesting mechanics have some complexity to them, so if you have many of these, you don't want to present them all at once. That would make it very hard for the player to cope and grasp the nuances of the abilities, never mind the interactions between them. Leveling is a very good mechanic for gradually introducing more interesting gameplay.
An alternative to this is making the environment more complex: changing what the player has to do instead of what he can do. This has been done by some games (Super Meat Boy comes to mind right away), but I don't think it works very well with the tropes of RPGs. The canonical RPG is the hero's journey, and that story really calls for improvement in the hero.
Usually an XP system improves a character's numerical stats without adding or removing specific abilities; or, it acts as a catalyst where every time you accumulate some amount of XP you get to choose a new ability from a list. You can have the hero's journey progression without using numeric XP or leveling to keep track of progress, e.g. Zelda, Metroid, Megaman.
A reason for XP is to serve as some kind of yardstick to your progress. A non-linear quest (such as in the Fallout games) uses XP to give you new abilities the more you play the game, whatever you happen to do in it. Whereas in linear stories you can simply present the hero with whatever bonus their progress deserves.
Note that you can have the character-improvement mechanic in more than RPGs; a game like Half-Life introduces weapons, equipment, and new ways to manipulate the environment as you progress.
Well, I'll admit I haven't played Metroid (shame on me, I know) but both Zelda and Megaman add complexity and power to the player throughout the game. They do this in the form of new abilities instead of levels, but the principle is the same: your character now can do more than he could do before. There's no way I'd say on either of those games the "character came through about as strong at the end as it was at the beginning". XP may not be the underlining mechanic to improvement, but character improvement is a(if not the) core mechanic of both games.
The one game that I can think of as having an excellent portrayal of the hero's journey without character improvement is Journey.
The difference is that RPG leveling systems don't care about you passing a specific challenge - they just care that you've spent a certain amount of time in an area. In Metroid and Zelda, if you know the solutions to the puzzles, or are just really good, you can blaze through them and get to the good part in a fraction of the time spent before. That's why there's an entire subculture of people who speed-run Metroid-style games, and not so much for Final Fantasy.
I think that that kind of progression is a more accurate indicator of a) whether the player is ready to handle the complexity that the new ability brings, and b) the value the player has received from the game, so far (if we're dismissing the notion that time spent is necessarily proportional to value).
There are plenty of these kind of games, ones that tell stories but don't do character development. LA Noire or Indigo Prophecy/Farenheit spring to mind. The problem is that because they don't do character development, they're not seen as RPGs.
(Or Heavy Rain. Or every point-n-click adventure ever.)
> There are plenty of these kind of games, ones that tell stories but don't do character development
You can skip character development altogether in the Mass Effect series (especially if you lower the difficulty and enable autoleveling). Only the first one requires you to increase a member's e.g tech skills to unlock some devices.
I played the first one without using basically any skills but my player sharpshooting abilities, occasionally upgrading armor and guns, more often than not for the sake of looks.
Telling stories, Resident Evil or Gears of Wars also come to mind, but I'm not sure that's what is asked here.
If someone wants something more freeform, maybe Skyrim, and dialing down the difficulty level will make a warrior's adventure possible (challenging even) without caring about the levels. A thief might be harder (without any points, I manage to stay covert, or pick master locks with patience, precision and a dozen lockpicks, but purse stealing is still a dice roll), while a wizard will be fundamentally limited in available spells unless he increases magicka.
Therefore I suppose here's the point: a game purposely designed on emphasizing on the player's skill (like lockpicking a master lock) instead of a virtually progressing one is something I would certainly like to play.
I want to make an RPG with a reverse XP mechanic. You start the game at level 99 and a full suite of skills, and they disappear as you progress. You fight the final boss with nothing but a few HP, your wits, and a wooden sword.
So at the start of the game, when you're new, your battles are about choosing optimally between 20 different powers. And at the end, with maximum experience, the battle is about pressing "sword attack" repeatedly until the enemy dies.
Great storyline and writing, with no XP or grinding or anything of the sort. The player does find different - not necessarily better - weapons, and the only sort of 'levelling up' you do is yourself getting better at the combat mechanics.
I've thought about this. Another way to do it would be to have stats that can vary, but keep them secret. Don't provide any concrete information to the player about what special ability a sword has, or that killing monsters all day made the player stronger, or running a long distance improved their endurance.
One way is to have no character ability improvements, only player skill and player experience matters. Like say...tetris, q-bert, pacman or tekken. In this scenario, you skill and experience is always fully portable. I hope Subotai's CLANG is like this.
Another is to limit the communication to human terms. Maybe you occlude all knowledge like jcromartie says, or maybe you realize that nobody ever feels like they have 18.6 strength. They feel weak, strong, or very strong. They feel nimble, graceful, clumsy, dumb, quick, lethargic, injured, smart, etc. Color gradients might be a non numerical way to give fuzzy information about ability. Your character is not a precision machine (unless maybe you're playing mechwarrior)
I was wondering if anyone knew of that game.
I wouldn't necessarily call it an RPG though (it seems as though lots of games are trying to blur that distinction though imo). Also the game (whichever puzzle) gets slightly more difficult as you get better (in some cases).
You should check out other game genres. Character progression (typically in the form of XP or XP under another name) is an underpinning of the genre, but you can find most of the other cool things about RPGs in other genres now.
The roots of the RPG genre are in games like Dungeons and Dragons where character progression (through gaining XP and levelling up and then choosing perks/skills) were how you added additional definition to your character beyond the things you chose at the start (like name, race, etc). Modern RPGs have expanded on this with complex skill systems and relationship systems and such, but almost all of that still sits atop the foundation of character growth through point rewards during gameplay (experience, gold, etc).
I hear that Shadow of the Colossus is a bit like this. At least, there aren't lots of enemies to grind through, and I don't think there's much in the way of XP as a result.
I think it would be an interesting experience but probably not a satisfying one. As I see it, to be as strong (in character skill) at the end as you were at the beginning, one of two things have to happen:
1. You start weak and finish weak. This gives you games like "I wanna be the guy", which build player skill, but I haven't seen this in RPGs. If the player gets noticeably stronger and then weaker along the way, the part where the character's powers are taken away can make the player feel cheated. (Not always: see e.g., the last fight in Ocarina of Time.)
2. You start strong and finish strong. Everything is easy and boring, unless you are depowered along the way and have to claw your way back up. See Metroid Prime (1 or 2) on the GameCube, or Wonder Boy III: Dragon's Trap on the Master System (or Dragon's Curse on TG-16). Usually the strong start is used to ease the player into the game, so that it's harder to fail while learning the controls and patterns of the game. Regardless, you still have a definite progression: either of tools, stats or something else that means you can go to places you couldn't before.
Wonder Boy III is an interesting example, because although you start with the best armour and weapon at the start of the game (which you then lose), the various forms that the player takes (mouse-man, hawk-man, &c.) give the player a different kind of power than the one that was removed: flexibility of movement as opposed to better offensive/defensive stats.
Basically, characters do not level up beyond level six, but gain additional feats every 5000XP which provide various small bonuses. This means that the players still get more powerful, but they don't scale up into the world-destroying powerhouses that you get at high levels.</aside>
I don't think that getting rid of XP means that you should throw out the whole concept of power progression in an rpg-like game. You may as well tie power progression to items or other things that will happen along the way. If you have an XP system (with power progression tied mainly to XP), then you as a designer need to match XP progression to story progression. If you don't, players either need to grind (yuk) or everything's too easy because you're levelling too fast (snore). Why not throw that out and go with the metroidvania-style of getting more tools to solve your problems? Metroid did this especially well because if the current fight was too hard, you could backtrack and explore for more energy tanks, missiles and so on so you have more resources at your disposal.
