• 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