Kyle Labriola

i think the idea was to prod people into switching out their party members but few games besides pokemon ever did much with it ime

e: and even pokemon doesnt do that anymore

its hard to say if its "fun" exactly, but I've always got the vibe that by choosing to build your party one way and level up a specific group of character you're being rewarded for making a Party Decision. committing to level up these characters.

it feels much more "hardcore" of a way to approach RPG experience. but I do often feel like leveling up from a shared exp pool makes leveling up less exciting and important to me

Yeah this is the kind of thing that incentivizes me just picking a party and sticking with it, never swapping out

As another comment mentions, Pokemon is about the only exception for me, but also I plan out my squads in advance and often don't get the mons I want until the mid or late game so I simply make do with others before then

No idea if it's a "reason", but sometimes having XP not shared between active party members, can give you some interesting additional options.

For example, I regularly use the fact that dead party members in FF5 don't get XP to change the level distribution in my party. One reason for that is that it enables you to learn one very powerful Blue Magic ability (level 5 death), without it completely wiping out your entire party. I know it's not exactly the same case, but you could imagine a scenario where you do something similar with a character swap.

Though I agree that for the vast majority of cases, it's just not very interesting and occasionally fairly punishing (for example if the game forces you to play with characters that haven't used in a while).

For alternative approaches to this I recommend checking grandia 2. They do the following:

• They make the sorry so you always have three characters in the game, for one reason or another one of the characters leaves and changes for another after a while. They do make character returns and they do scale them up to your party. In game story is kinda cool because you sense that the characters has "grown" I'm your absence.

They do have the guts to actually kill a character, but since you don't know on advance that he's going to get killed you will invent on him a bit.. he's areadu a bit beefed up compared to the others, maybe to compensate this.

• The second thing they do is to invest in "magic eggs" or something like that I addition to characters. These eggs have magic properties that can be equipped by any character. This helps you to safely put points and XP in those eggs and not feel bad if a party members leaves because, a part from their unique characteristics tou can swap those eggs to another party member, which will probably appear soon in the story or swap an egg with another. It does deperzonalize the characters a bit, because aside from their special attacks they are all a bit samey in that regard. Their specials are pretty unique though so it compensates.

Another option is to take a page from ttrprgs like Index card RPG and revolve around loot and equipment rather than typical character advancement. Index card RPG uses loot more than stats as a method of upgrading and empowering characters. That could be an interesting idea to explore as well.

I feel like broadly speaking having exp being "shared" is better for the first play experience when the player may want to experiment, but being able to disable it to get deeper into certain characters' skill trees or for challenge runs is good for replayability