Advancement on Designing Virtual Worlds

Attributes

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Attributes are the fundamental properties that define a character. Because they are tangible, they should properly only rate physical qualities, such as the character’s strength and manual dexterity. However, under the influence of table-top role-playing games they often include non-physical concepts, such as intelligence and wisdom. This just about makes sense to a hard role-player, who can work with “My character is stupid,” but it has its limits: “My character is a genius” would for most players entail pretending to be cleverer than they really are, which is not quite so simple. For most virtual worlds, though, these “mental attributes” are merely convenient labels: Intelligence is used primarily as a fiction to determine how much magic a character can use, and wisdom serves the same function for priestly types.

Levels

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

In the development of virtual worlds, levels came first (as they also did in table-top gaming). Levels are the classic advancement system—easy to implement and to manage—and are based on the concept of goals and rewards. Characters undertake actions, for which they receive a payment in experience points; because the notion of experience is general enough to apply to pretty well any activity, this approach has wide applicability. When a character’s experience points reach a certain threshold, the player rises in (ability) level. This will typically involve things such as attribute boosts, skill boosts, resistance boosts, greater choices, and higher status (among NPCs and, often, PCs).

Skills

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

In virtual worlds, skills are tangible representations of the abilities that characters have (supposedly) learned.

In real life, a skill is a related series of actions that a person has internalized to the extent that they can apply it “without thinking;” skills are either innate or learned through practice. In virtual worlds, the notion of what a skill is remains the same, but skill acquisition is often only tenuously linked to “practice makes perfect.” In particular, some virtual worlds allow characters to improve skills when they go up a level, irrespective of whether the skills they choose to improve are ones they’ve actually used.

Skill Organizations

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The “skill levels” approach is an example of a linear skill progression. To acquire a specialized skill, you have to learn its parent (or prerequisite) skill first. Thus, you can’t learn, say, “diving,” unless you already know “swimming.”

A skill hierarchy takes this idea one step further and allows several specialized skills to be learned following the acquisition of a general skill. For example, having learned a “single-handed weapon” skill, a character may then learn “sword,” “axe,” or “club,” and from there further specialize into particular weapons (longsword, shortsword, rapier, cutlass, and so on).

Skill Sets

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The biggest problem with skills lies in deciding which ones your virtual world should have. How many should there be in total? Is 100 skills too many? Too few? From whose point of view—newbies or oldbies?

We should begin by determining what is meant by a “skill.” Most virtual worlds would admit derivatives of crafting—making or repairing things in the virtual world—as qualifying as skills. Some would include weapon skills, and others would also add spells. The disparity is in part due to the different mechanisms by which acquisition works: If you get crafting skills by collecting “skill points” for going up levels but you get weapons skills by buying “training,” the two are distinct. It would be confusing to call them both “skills,” so commonly some other term is used instead (for example, “weapon specializations”).

Caps

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Levels and (in most implementations) skills operate on a linear scale. A character starts at 0 and improves incrementally. A level 22 necromancer isn’t as powerful as a level 55 necromancer, but would be roughly on a par with a level 22 monk or assassin or whatever and much better than a level 11 necromancer ¹. So what’s the highest value that a level or skill can have?

If you have no limit, characters will improve relentlessly, getting more and more powerful until newbies are little more than insects by comparison. Once-daunting content will appear trivial; players will demand more to satisfy their appetites.

Skill Improvement

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

How do characters improve their skills? To preserve the notion of what a skill is, there ought to be some relationship between what you do and how your skills improve; but what?

If skills are rated using a points system (as most are), the question becomes one of deciding when to increment a skill by a point. There are basically two ways to do it:

Random chance. Each time a skill-enhancement opportunity arises, there is a small chance of causing a skill point increment. This chance may increase over time.