In fact I often wished games would eschew numbers more often. Because, well, life (pain, stamina, health, abilities) isn't numbers. And quantifying everything is depressing.

So I've enjoyed games that had different kinds of cues. A red tint. A battered portrait. A sound. States instead of stats, although I wish they were more continuous than discrete. Even a bar, I appreciate. But also... I realize it's cheating. Because they're computer games. They're made of maths. So all we can do is dress up the display of a number. No escaping it.

At least none I can think of.

ah yes would be so much better if they made games like this for example

BG3

Your companions say thing's like o god that hurt (-8 damage)
or being close to -0 saying i think i dying here. (3 health left)

makes games so much more realistic

Final Fantasy Tactics does something similar, except:
* The value that speed is added to each tick is given a name, CT. (I *think* it stands for Charge Time or something.)
* You need only 100, not 1000, CT to get a turn.
* If you don't both move and attack, you get to keep some of your CT, causing your next turn to come sooner.
* There is one job, the Calculator (Arithmancer in modern translation I believe), that has the ability to target spells based on the divisibility of certain stats, and it's possible to target CT. So you could, for instance, hit everything whose current CT is a multiple of 3. (Note that this job, or rather its Math Skill (Arithmancy?) ability, is considered overpowered by those familiar with the game. The Calculator job is slow to counter-balance this, but it's quite possible to learn this ability and then put it on a different job, and break the game that way. Then again, keep in mind that you actually have to work to get access to this, whereas the game just hands you an overpowered party member (Orlandu) at a certain point in the game.)

Personally, I prefer it when high Speed doesn't allow extra turns, as when it does the stat becomes too powerful. (See Lords of Xulima for a game where you have to spend one of your 2 level up stat points on speed if you want to keep up with the enemies.)
I hear Disgaea 6 inflates the numbers st the start, giving you 5 digit stats at the starting level. (Not sure if it's level 1, as I haven't played Disgaea 6, or even heard much about it.)

Thing is, some games, particularly RPGs and idle games, I play for the numbers. I like math, and I like numbers and seeing how they behave.

One other thought: If you look at the stat page or character sheet of a typical RPG character, usually experience points and gold will be the highest numbers. Now, inflating gold might not be realistic (unless the in-game economy is experiencing severe hyperinflation), but how about inflating experience points?

Just think about it: You need 1e20 XP to level up, but the enemies are only giving around 1e12 XP each. Essentially, this means you can't level up any further, and hence are forced to go to an area where the enemies are more difficult, but give, say, 1e19 XP each, if you want to level up. How does that sound?

Could be an interesting way to softcap a character's level at any given point in the game. (Contrast to the approaches that I have actually seen in games, like having XP gains decrease when your level is high relative to the enemy's levels, or making it so that level ups past a certain point aren't worth much.)

I'd argue that numbers in the range are still comprehensible, and there's still enough room for the player to gradually accumulate XP in any given area. It's not like when the exponent is in scientific notation, at which point the system becomes equivalent to "your XP is set to the enemy's XP value unless it's higher", which could be an interesting mechanic, but isn't what players are used to.

To put it another way, having the exponent be in scientific notation would be similar to a rather unusual leveling system where, if you kill a level n enemy, you are instantly raised to level n, but if the enemy is lower or equal to your level, you get nothing. This means that it might be worth seeking out a higher level enemy in a secret area to reach a higher level than you normally would be at that point of the game. This could be an interesting dynamic, though again not what most players are expecting.

Come to think of it, there actually is a mechanic that has some of this feel. In SaGa 1 and 2, as well as in the SaGa 3 remake, if a monster eats the meat of an enemy, the monster will change form according to a table, and if there's a suitable form of the monster's rank, the monster is immediately brought up to the enemy's rank. So, in SaGa 1 and 2, if you eat meat from a miniboss in the final dungeon, the monster will reach the top rank, which has forms in every monster family, and will then be at the most powerful, which is excellent, provided that you weren't looking for a skill not found on monsters of that tier (SaGa 1's SAW skill, which has the same bug as the item with that name, comes to mind).

With just simple scientific notation, you could have a game where XP works as follows:
* Every enemy awards a certain type of XP. Perhaps there's Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum XP.
* If you get Silver XP, you no longer have Bronze XP, and can't gain any more.
* Even just 1 Silver XP will take you to a level that is impossible to reach with just Bronze XP. Alternatively, use different types of levels, so Silver XP takes you to Silver level 1, which is stronger than Bronze level 99, serving as a sort of softcap on power if you can't get any Silver XP yet.
* Similar rules apply to higher tiers of XP.


I actually haven't encountered that mechanic in any of the games I've played.

Honestly, I think it would just add to the clutter and most players would quickly lose count of which color means bigger damage and which one means that damage is lower. I believe some form of scientific notation is the way to go in such cases as at least it's easier to keep track of. I honestly can't think of a reason developers would want such huge numbers anyway, unless it's an incremental game or some kind of a niche MMO.

I don't quite get it: what is the actual difference between those two options? Again, I believe first option would just mean more clutter, as opposed to the time-tested formula of decreasing xp gains when the difference between player and monster levels is too big.

The only reason I can think of is for people to still feel like they are getting something, instead of getting 1 experience point when they need thousands/millions.

Still, I believe those huge numbers that require scientific notation should be saved for incremental/idle games only, as it's just unnecessary clutter in story-based RPGs in which ways should be found to keep the numbers low.

Correct me if I'm wrong but I think mqstout is referring to a system somewhat akin to TES: Oblivion, where monsters/areas get progressively stronger/higher level along with the player, which means one can actually get weaker by leveling up.

No, not that. There are some games that, for various bits, clamp your stats/skills down to a max range. "You may be level 150, but, for this area, you and everyone who plays it are level 60 at most." It's not too common. Nioh's twilight Missions do this, and Nioh 2 lets you turn it on arbitrarily for any stage (and is on by default for twilight missions).

(There are other games that that go the other direction and implicitly level you up to a challenge set, or set you to specific stats even, too.)

Yeah, Diablo 2 was REALLY weird behind the scenes. It's a wonder it ever worked. (Though many parts of it never did, like the Inferno and inferno-like skills, once they added hitlock protection delays. Even Blizzard themselves stopped trying to fix those skills.

The way the XP works behind the scenes so they didn't overflow the integers... "We can't make level-ups require this much, so how about we add global XP penalties instead?"

That approach can have some strange behavior. Specifically:
* You have situations where the level a character can reach depends on the order in which non-repeatable fights are done. (When this affects final level, this can lead to something like the missable stats issue.)
* You have situations where a character who starts out at a lower level can end up a higher level than another after killing the same boss.
* When XP is used for other things (D&D 3.x), this provides an incentive to spending XP on those other things rather than leveling up.
* If average party level is used (like in D&D 3.0, and particularly Icewind Dale 2), you have situations where adding a new low level character to a group will make higher level characters level up faster. (In IWD2's case, you essentially have to cheat to avoid the game becoming too easy if you introduce a new character to the party later on.)

Edit: Also worth noting that, for table top games, division is harder to do by hand than multiplication or even adding large numbers. Hence, in that case, decreasing XP gains may not be the best approach.
What about RPGs that *aren't* story-based?

The Magic of Scheherezade is an interesting example. Once you kill a chapter boos, you are automatically leveled to the maximum level for the chapter you just cleared, which then becomes the starting level for the next chapter.

(Except that, I believe this doesn't happen when you kill the final boss.)

Reminds me of early Pokemon. In the damage formula, the game has to divide the attacker's attack by the defender's defense. However, the game can only do 8-bit division, so if either stat is 256 or greater, the game will first divide both stats by 4 (which is just a bit shift) before doing the division.

For example, if the attacker has 256 strength and the defender's defense has been reduced to 3, in R/B/Y the game will first reduce them to 64 and 0, respectively, and will then try to divide 64 by 0, causing the game to hang. (G/S/C added an extra check for this, dividing by 1 instead in this case.)

Then again, there's other games that divide by 0, with different results:
* SaGa 1/2 gives 0
* Final Fantasy 6 gives 65,535 or so
* Civilization 2 crashes with an "overflow or division by zero" error (requires cheat mode to trigger this)

This reminds me of another case. In Dragon Warrior 2, the princess's level ups eventually start requiring over 65536 (2^16), but the game uses only a 16-bit integer to tell the player how much more XP is required, so the XP needed to level up is only given mod 65536.

I misunderstood then, my apologies. I have to admit I never encountered this system either and it does seem a bit weird and unintuitive. I like to feel rewarded for the time spent playing the game, and having my character de-leveled for specific parts of the game that would otherwise seem too easy is just not my cup of tea. After all it's my job to decide when I'm ready to tackle some bit of content, not developer's. Still, it's just my opinion and I can definitely see myself still enjoying such a game nevertheless.

Come to think of it, the difficulty meter in Oblivion kind of works that way, making you simply weaker or stronger depending on the setting and still I must admit I enjoy that game immensely.

In my opinion this system is still preferable to very big numbers cluttering the system in cRPGs, even though it does have its problems. To refer to your post more specifically:

1. Are there? Correct my math if it's wrong, but doesn't either way lead to the same amount of xp in the end? You just either get a big chunk of it from one fight or spread it out among many fights. I don't know, I guess I must think about it some more.

2. That's only if xp gain from killing a boss is big enough to advance lower level character beyond the level of higher level character, which from my experience isn't the case, if the game is well designed that is. Still, I might be wrong.

3. 4. Edit. : No arguing here. As I said, this system does have problems of its own, and I'm not big on table top games so I'll take your word on it.

You got me there. Out of curiosity though: could you name an RPG that you consider not to be story-based?

with this sort of system, you can have a boss that gives enough XP to raise a level 20 character to level 22, but not enough XP to level up a character who just turned level 21.

Easy. See:
* Wizardry games (especially 5 and earlier, or the many Japanese-made Wizardry games.)
* Many Dragon Quest games, particularly the earlier ones.
* Final Fantasy 1-3 and arguably 5. (FF4 is probably the earliest JRPG that I'd really consider to be story based.)
* Most SaGa games. (Interesting to note that the Romancing SaGa games are more like WRPGs structurally.)
* Rogue and other traditional roguelikes. (Yes, they fit my definition of RPG.)

You are right of course, but only in cases where xp drop is sharp enough to cause this. I'm pretty sure that well designed system could make such a situation impossible and it falls to game designers to design it properly after all.

I'd argue that all Final Fantasy games are story-based. You are right about the rest. Come to think of it, most older cRPG titles could hardly be called truly story-based. Akalabeth and first Ultimas come to mind.

Even FF1?