• he/him

kind of obsessed with the pressure sensitive buttons on the dualshock 2 & 3


avatar picrew: https://picrew.me/en/image_maker/678422/


Campster
@Campster

There aren't enough reverse RPGs where you slowly age and lose skill points and the game gets harder and harder. Which is surprising if only because "game where the skill floor slowly rises as you master its systems" feels like a much more natural arc than "game where you start pathetic and it's super hard and then 40 hours later you've ascended to godhood and combat is trivial."


bruno
@bruno

The thing is though:

  • The player character becoming more powerful as the player's skill level rises is conducive to alignment;
  • Rising character power can, in a properly designed system, translate to a rising skill floor. Most commonly this is because in an RPG, as you advance through the game you acquire more abilities, and you're expected more and more to understand and employ those abilities competently; so the power curve is met by a complexity curve.

A very standard thing in RPG design is in fact to make the power curve totally illusory – the numbers on enemies just scale with the player's numbers so that, for at-level encounters, there's always parity. But the complexity curve creates a rising challenge, while the process of adding more options + 'number go up' creates the sense of progression that facilitates alignment.

Another version of this is one where encounter difficulty scales in ways that make encounters more demanding from the player; you have more and better tools, but the margins of how you're supposed to use them are thinner. This is very common in action RPGs; both Dark Souls and Mass Effect are kind of in this space.


NireBryce
@NireBryce

roguelike where instead of dying, your character collects more and more impairments



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in reply to @Campster's post:

I've been playing some random mobile game lately, which was obviously designed for monetization but since it's netflix-premium now, the nags to buy more coins or whatever aren't there.

The result is that you start with a bunch of money and powerups, and quickly deplete them. Getting new ones is very difficult, as you can't pour real world money into it.

As a progression it kinda feels like a reverse rpg. You have all these powers, use them up, and all you're left is experience to hold on to.

I'm still waiting for the combat equivalent to Disco Elysium's system where the higher skills get, the more they demand to be used, often to your detriment. No clue how you'd do that though.

Feel like that end of things would more or less take care of itself. People are going to automatically gravitate to the big-number skill that makes the problem go away in the quickest manner possible, you just need a fun way to implement eventual drawbacks to using your level 200 Murdering skill for absolutely everything.

Hmm...quick and dirty way to do that would be a boss or some enemies that get back up if you do too much overkill damage. Might need something tied to personal progression to make it feel meaningful instead of frustrating tho. Thanks, this is gonna be fun to think about

Usually in RPGs (in an abstrasct way, there are a lot of types of RPGs) the stronger you get the more options open up for you, and that's used as a way to introduce the player to more complexity over time. In a well balanced RPG (not saying good because sometimes the point is for them to not be balanced) the enemies would get stronger along with you, making the game harder while still expanding your options.

With the reversed level setup I feel like the player will simply be losing out on options over time and the game would still have to balanced around your decreased power. Obviously a game designed around that can still work and be interesting, but to me it makes sense why it's not a common thing...

There was this metroidvania called Resin where (to my knowledge) you'd lose a bit of health/stamina/movement speed after each boss, and eventually lose the ability to do moves you started with, but it was delisted from Steam and you can't really get it anymore.