[Ideas] RPG Anti-Grinding

A lot of WC3 RPGs suffer severe grinding problems, so I was wondering, what are some good methods of massively decelerating or better-yet completely stopping it?

There are the obvious ideas such as restricting the number of creeps or making an exp scale (which might end up increasing grinding anyway), but I'd like some more ideas.

I have ideas and everything for my RPG, but I just need some methods to scratch out some problems.

So far I have an idea of making creeps give little experience compared to quests and "item runs", but there's probably a huge problem with that which I haven't thought of yet.

EDIT!
I am aware of that other topic, but I'd prefer not to steal it.

well people will only grind if thats the only option, unless they come from wow and they r like "its t3h way 2 go man ('.')" which is just fail.

So giving people other options is the best thing to do.

Encouraging farming for items and quests is good, and restricting level limit, or making level less important.

Ill think more latter, i nd 2 sleep =)

And i think its ok to hijack a thread about rpg ideas with more rpg ideas ^^

Something i always have missed in every map i have seen is some real training grounds that works.

Like that you can stand and hit a dummy for X amount of time and every time you hit the dummy you gain Y amount of exp. A similar idea is that you can battle someone and if you win you get X amount of exp, if you loose you loose X amount of exp.

In this way you dont really just have to kill and kill units all the time. You can stand in the training grounds and get some levels.

Come up with something original rather than a tinkered rehash.

I would make grinding not worth it. If your RPG has ladder-quests (as in one builds on the other; you do one and then another, slightly harder quest is opened up to you), then just work your map and exp gain so that your heroes should level up to match the quests (so they don't have to grind for new levels). Oh, and don't make areas with 1000 monsters that respawn every 60 seconds and 9/10 drop items. Most RPG's do that, and that just screams for grinding.

I think a problem a lot of RPG's suffer from is a pathetically slow EXP gain rate, which forces players to battle stupid creeps for 40 minutes in order to get to a level so they can finally beat another "go kill X" quest.

But how is that less boring?

What you need are two things: first of all, an interesting combat system. It only counts as grinding if it's mindless and repetitive; if you have a system that allows for diverse and dynamic battles, you can get hours of gameplay out of it without it becoming grinding. Second, you need a good story/setting. If combat actualy has a storyline/quest reward at the end that has a meaning, then it gets boring much later than if it was just combat for the sake of experience.

If you want to solve the experience problem, just trigger experience gain yourself. You don't have to deal with all of the hassles that Game Constants gives you; all you have to worry about is the amount required. For actual experience gaining itself, make the factors of the manual experience growth exponential, not linear.

One thing I saw for a peculiar map was when the map started, you pick from EXP Mode, Normal Mode, or Raid Mode. EXP Mode was for the sole purpose of gaining experience, but no items dropped. Raid Mode gave little to no experience, but item drops went up drastically. Regular Mode is was just a moderated version of EXP Mode and Raid Mode. I don't know if you someone would want to go that far just to fix common problems, though.

Gaining a level should take no more than 30 seconds to a minute or two if the player is within the correct area to gain levels. Grinding is basically extending that range to 10 minutes to even hours per level.

Grinding might come from the deficiency of quests. Some RPGs that I've played have it so that quests constitute most of the experience the heroes gain, not the creeps. The diversity of quests is important too; from what I've seen, I'm always stuck with "Get X [Insert Item Here]" or "Kill X [Insert Creep Here]" quests, which are insanely repetitive. Less often I find "Defend [Insert Structure Here] for X Minutes" and "Kill [Insert Boss Here]", which are also repetitive. It's easier to make quests that deal with stationary things or things that concentrate in one area.

And, by "better quests", I think people forget how vague the word 'better' is. Quest diversity is kind of based on personal preference, too.

If one were to use something like Final Fantasy, where battle transitions to a restricted battle field, the fights would be more interesting if there were things to interact with. They do not necessarily have to be environmental hazards, traps, and whatnot, this kind of interaction usually only happen once. Why not something that can be used multiple times? I don't know what exactly, but something. Let's hope that not all interaction is bad, either.

If you go with Ignitedstar's idea for triggering EXP gain, I made an EXP "system". It's in the demo section, if you're interested. You'll have to reverse the system though, but it's got all the instructions to do so.

Or we could just look into 'Resources' under your name. X_X

About the level thing...

The importance of leveling is entirely up to the creator. In games like Disgaea, where the level cap is 9999, there are other factors that make characters strong. What levels do in Disgaea is that they perform something along the lines of a Level Factor, which is like a mulitplier to item bonuses. Therefore, a level 1 character with an ultimate weapon will not be as strong as a level 2000 character with the same ultimate weapon. However, items themselves are very important, because of the existance of the Item World. One thing that many people have proven is that you don't need all of those levels for any character to become strong, because like I said eariler, items are just that important. You can get a level 250 with about 3 million Attack, supposably. (damage can go as high as in the hundreds of billions per hit)

However, for games like DnD, where levels are less, levels become increasingly important. A five level difference can mean everything, where as in a game like Disgaea, a five level difference isn't noticable. I've never played DnD; I've only seen it, so I can't really say much about it.

Coming back full circle, the importance of leveling is entiring up to the creator.

Get rid of levels completely, make the battles as skill based as you can and have completion of important quests give a good unit overhaul (Stats up, Skill abilities, etc) That way people aren't grinding, they are trying to complete the storyline and get rewarded for doing so.

The best way to eliminate grinding is to make it useless. Remove XP. Add skills through quests/plot events. XP isn't essential to an RPG.

Go the StarCraft way:
Get X kills to get a level! HOORAY! (/joke)

But really, you could go a more complicated StarCraft way: normal creeps equal only 1 or 2 points, and then bosses give you extra points. You could use custom integers to keep track (and unit-types), and then create a multiboard to contain information such as "Points" and "Points Needed." If you use this method, I suggest you stick with lower amount of Points Needed per level, like 25 or so for Level 2, and then 50, 75... In fact, you could use "Replace Unit" and then you'll be able to reset the custom integers. You'll probably need a lot of Object Editor units, which could decrease performance.

I'll say, the idea of killing the experience requirement all together was extremely appealing... but...

For some odd reason, I like the idea of not using experience/levels as much as they are... though I do like seeing and having a level ~30 ass-kicker.

My idea WAS that there would be 50 levels, every 5th level gave a new ability from the basic+elemental spell book, every 5th level (starting from 2) gave a class spell book ability.

Now I think I might revert that idea, as it would probably induce severe power grinding.
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If I cancel the importance of levels (including removing stat gain from levels), and just make it 5 levels - counting experience of 1500/3000/4500/6000/7500 - just to count "points" (perhaps creaps that are... weak=1, average=2, strong=3, special=5, ???=10).

I might make a novelty or a super special awesome prize acquirable only at level 5.
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I am considering cutting the gravity of experience, however... Some aspects I do worry about are...
- Abilities (how to give them and when?)
- Items (will these be the new grinders?)
- Quests (should these contribute to points? how many will I need?)
- "Worlds" (should I include temples which could have hidden boxes and such?)

Perhaps with the abilities, should I make them all immediately available, but dependent on the stats (making certain items give extra stats) could change spell failure/power... or any alternatives?

Cutting experience is a good idea, but at the moment I have a total mind block which should clear up soon enough... but some ideas about some of my newer problems would be nice.

Another thing you could do for leveling is to do it as Paper Mario has done it: For every level acquired, you can only increase one stat (HP, FP, and BP). In the first game, it was severly limited to 50 HP, 50 FP, and 27 BP with a max level of 27, but in the sequel they drastically changed it so almost limitless (HP and FP were capped at 99; BP could go on forever until one hit level 99).

Games like Romancing Saga don't have level ups at all, bonuses to health and what-not was somewhat random as you fought enemies.

Counting "points" doesn't seem to make sense. It's basically your regular experience, in my eyes. What am I missing here?

Don't give every hero all of their abilities in the beginning; what're you going to do about mana, then?

It could work, make the spells all stat based, then give stat points on quest completion, that way they scale with you in whatever field of that tree you want to go and not from grinding monsters but completing the story line.