Levels

The real answer is that they used levels because no one had done it before so there was nothing better to ape.

Though some modern games have an approach more similar to what you propose, such as Burning Wheel. This adds a lot of extra bookkeeping and I can understand why that might be a hard sell in the 70s.

>>55374986
>Using linear equations for level calculations
Get on my level, pleb.

>>55374986
>linear progression
This is how I can say you only play martials, if you play mages at all.

>>55375268
The real answer is that games without levels are horribly easy to break, and rely on gentleman's agreements not to.

File: 600px-Logistic-curve.svg.png (12KB, 600x400px) Image search: [Google]

12KB, 600x400px

>>55375324
>>55375345
Well, in the real world skill as a function of experience follows the logistic curve, but who is going to put that in a game?

>>55375355
As opposed to games WITH levels that break anyway if you don't adhere to the game's rigid structure of "Challenge Ratings" and "wealth by level"?

>>55375398
Games with levels are certainly more resistant. Any game can be broken with effort put into breaking it.

>>55375422
Maybe some levelless games are, but how is a game where abilities are functions of experience more vulnerable than a game with levels? It's essentially the same thing, but with a finer grain.

>>55375355
I don't think you can possibly make such a categorical statement. How easy a game is to break has far more to do with the mechanics surrounding whether or not it has levels than whether or not it has levels at all.

>>55375504
> a game where abilities are functions of experience more vulnerable than a game with levels?
Because not all the abilities would advance at the same rate for all characters, unless they were all playing identical characters.

The basic rule is that the more options/versatility a system has, the more readily it can be broken. With all other aspects being equal, compartmentalizing advancement as levels keeps progression more controlled.

Game balance is always a complicated dance between giving players options and also providing restrictions.

>>55375555
Nice notable numbers.

>>55374986

I imagine because it is way simpler than assigning strict values to various resources the player can obtain.

>>55375376
Wait, has this been studied? I remember hearing something about Starcraft...

It'd be pretty interesting to figure out whether different kinds of tasks have different sorts of curves (e.g., a steeper linear bit), and whether coherent categories emerge.

>>55375715
>Wait, has this been studied?
I should have said "approximately follows". It is just my observation. It also follows from the fact that there are cumulative effects and diminishing returns to learning and training as your reach the limits of your potential. It gets easier, then harder, over time. But then again, I could be wrong. There could be several plateaus instead of one in your typical IRL skill acquisition case.

>>55374986
My suggestion for a house rule in a game I was in once to fix a broken mechanic was rejected because dividing small integers by 3 was too hard. Players in games routinely have difficulty adding up small numbers to derive values they need to know every other round. No system that involves asking players to do more advanced math than simple addition/subtraction/doubling/halving on a regular basis will achieve much popularity.

>>55374986
compared to point buy for skills, you can just plug and chug
point buy tends to attract people who mix and match skills for maximum effect while letting new players spread their skills widely making them useless

this can creates vast gulfs of power that eclipse everything except 3.5e
even star wars ffg, a rather noob friendly point buy, tells you straight up to min max your stats over skill
new players will be glad to just think of an archetype, be handed one, and be on his merry way

even in CoC, a game people here rather like without gettibg yelled at, you can end up with skills you will never use at the start
at least fighters can kill things in DnD, a pure combat character in CoC will find even a tommy gun useless, which is the point of the game, so it's not so bad, but it does cut down on the options available to the player

>>55375355
You're fucking retarded.

>>55374986
Because its easier if you're designing something that big from the ground up. Levels and classes solve one problem: balancing individual abilities. That said, they introduce a ton more if you're not a god of game design (Gygax wasnt).

>>55375555
Not him, but while I agree with you, Id say that level and class based systems are generally underbalanced as a result of some people thinking that clustering abilities makes them more balanced somehow.

>>55376783
Only D&D/OGL content falls under this, really, when it comes to games with levels, and that was due to the outlier capacity of magic within the game offering more character power than most.
Classless games often run into the same problem that certain abilities are just flatout better than others when you break their costs down, and just as often are designed to be better, rather than accidentally.

>>55376903
I agree that it can happen in classless games, but the solution is far simpler: houseban those abilities. In a class based game you cant go banning more than two or three classes before things get out of hand.

>>55374986
Levels were made specifically to represent steps in experience and power, not to necessarily represent how powerful someone was relative to someone else.

A 3rd level fighter = Green Belt
A 1st level fighter = White Belt
Which are meaningless to the Cleric and Barbarian belts because they're a different school altogether, and in the old days grew at different steps.

>>55376938
It is disingenuous to treat houserules as a solution to a system's problems, however, and even then, what game does banning classes that distort the curve push things out of hand?

>>55375715
The standard rule of thumb is that someone learns a skill, like permanently learns it to a point where they never forget it and can apply it meaningfully, when they have done the task 10,000 times. Throw 10,000 punches or answer a question 10,000 times, and you'll have the skill grafted into your soul.

>>55376967
Taking core 3.5 as an example, you could not fix it by banning overpowered content.

While I would normally agree that house-ruling is not part of a system, my point is that in general its easier to fix things in a modular system because its just a single note that effects none of the rest of the game. Were you to play a class-based game where each class fills a unique role and some are just bad means that banning a class cuts you off from a ton of content and ways to solve problems just because of game balance.

>>55376967
>It is disingenuous to treat houserules as a solution to a system's problems,

Not really, unless your only goal is to bitch and complain about the system.

>>55375715
10,000 hours is a good rule of thumb, but it really depends on how many tasks something is made up of. The difficulty in finely measuring these things is that every person likely has varied levels of experiences with aspects of a given task.

For example, lab work (which I do for a living) is made up of math, knowledge, technique, and planning skills. Each of which has analogs elsewhere and so the time it takes to become an expert technician depends on which of those sub-task you've got prior experience with.

>>55374986
You need them to make perfectly horizontal/vertical lines and align surfaces, especially on uneven floor.

>>55377230
Treating houserules as a fix to a systems problem is the same thing as that one guy who says "We don't have to vote for a shitty president if we all vote green party". You're asking people everywhere to just figure out a solution to a problem on their own and praying everyone just thinks rationally for 30 seconds to make things right, when the system could have been fixed from the start and nobody would be in that situation.

>>55374986

So instead of wanting levels, you want smaller levels that update more frequently, thus having to change calculations between every battle?

Well okay, whatever floats your goat.

>>55377470

>It's unreasonable to ask someone to think rationally for 30 seconds

>>55377214

Unless you have a specific example, 3.5's problems can be fixed by causing a shitton of encounters to occur in any given day and/or by giving martials a bunch of magic items.

>>55378818
I mean, you greentext that sarcastically, but the entire whole of human history would back that up.

>>55378840
You aren't fixing the basic math, anon, or the feat system, or the prevalence of magic as a solution, which are the core issues with 3.5.
Even then, are you really going to shower specific pcs with items and tell others to go suck it because reasons?

>>55374986
That doesn't really work with new abilities though, does it? New spells, extra attacks, etc. They all don't work with that. Sure combat damage/hit rate/hp/DC's/saves all work with your method, but shit will get boring fast without new abilities.

>>55375900
I don't know about several plateaus. There's probably just a single hill to climb in most cases, but if you lack the skill necessary to recognize that there's more to the hill to climb, then it will probably look like you've reached the plateau even though you've only reached halfway. Much like how an incompetent individual doesn't know that he's incompetent simply because he lacks the necessary framework to know that there are things he doesn't know.

For example, if you like to draw and paint then you've probably reached a point several times where you feel like you don't make any true advancements anymore. Where it feels like that you've reached the plateau, and then almost suddenly you realize that there's something you didn't know how to do before, and you suck at it, but you train and train and train, and you get better at it, and by the end your skills as a whole have increased dramatically. It's not that you actually reached the plateau, it's that you lacked the skills necessary to recognize that there were more skills to learn.

>>55378840
Tons of combat per day isn't good for martials either. After level 3-5 or so, Wizards don't really have problems with running out of spells anyways, and any day that has the obscene encounters needed for that is going to end with the fighter dead or close to it.

As I've said before, we've had to stop and rest to heal the fighter up more than we've had to stop to get spells back.

level up

>>55375555
Daft punk has check'd 'em.

>>55377007
>when they have done the task 10,000 times
It's about 10k *hours* of focused study (with definite variation, but within around 2000 hours of that value). Not mucking about either; if you aren't working hard at learning it, the effect doesn't kick in.

For most people it takes about 10 years to do that much as life gets a bit in the way. The time includes all the learning, and also repeating it enough to get the neural pathways myelinized so that they don't decay rapidly.

So yes, true expertise is about being effortlessly good at something.

>>55378840
Neither of which are interesting. Combat in D&D takes forever anyway. The problem isnt combat disparity by me, its the combat disparity combined with caster supremacy in utility to boot.

>>55390455
>tfw you've put in 10k hours on 4chan

The idea of player level being a power guideline was never consistently applied, If it was the original intention at all.

Classes had wildly different level rate and caps. And amount of xp they got altered to sats requirements.

If the purpose was to aid game balance it definitely didn't. Class is were quite explicitly better at different levels in comparison to each other.

When would you get new abilities?

>>55374986

Read Chainmail. Early D&D had very little to do with realism, and Gygax never claimed it did.

If you're trying to play a huge wargame, the last thing you want is a lot of complicated rules. A level, a class, and if you're lucky, 1-2 small bonuses from high stats was plenty complicated for the kind of tactical fantasy boardgame D&D grew out of.

Levels have remained because they're understandable and a nice shorthand for a character's overall toughness.

Levels are incredibly simple, and make it easy to quickly get a rough understanding of everyone's progress/strength. Changing that to "I have x health and y attack" would make it harder to jump from one game to another.

>>55374986
Because they were bunch of dense motherfuckers. It's that fucking simple. Most of rules invented by them were retarded from the start, but rather than changing them once figuring better solutions, they've sticked to what they already had in hand. That's why D&D turned into such a clusterfuck by late 80s and that was just 10 years of being on the market - they were patching things up, rather than realising the core is bullshit.

>>55375706
Yes, anon, because "You need X exp to get to next level" is somehow less strict than "You need X exp to rise your Y ability"

>>55397305
The point isn't that it's less strict, it's that there's a fuckload more of them.

A level increases HP, saves, THACO, gives abilities, etc. You'd have to put an XP cost on all those, and probably/possibly stats as well.

>>55380185
>>55394399
One possibility would be to "unlock" stronger abilities stat advancements.
A wizard needs X int and Y wis to be able to learn and understand that cool new spell.
A fighter needs X str and Y dex to learn that neat new maneuver
etc. ...
Not sure how good that'd work, just throwing the idea out here.

Or you get experience points and can "buy" abilities with them. Like in the FFG 40k RPGs and probably a handful other systems.

>>55393789
>I can come up with five insults and choose best one under ten seconds

>>55397294
>Doesn't understand game design
>Makes posts anyways
Man, /tg/ has been getting worse than /v/ these days.

>>55402173
>Considers levels good game design
>Berates others
Irony is strong in you

>>55405326
>He thinks levelless games are good
The only one being ironic is you. Except for horror and modern games. I completely agree that they should exist either with no levels or forced to level 1 if no other system is available.