Experience point
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Experience Points (often abbreviated to 'Exp' or 'XP') are units of measurement used in many role-playing games and role-playing video games to quantify a character's progression through the game. In many RPGs, the player characters start as fairly weak and untrained. By completing in-game tasks successfully and winning battles against enemies, the character gains experience points as a reward. The amount of experience points a character has serves as a meter for their progression.
If a sufficient amount of experience is obtained, the character "levels up", or gains a superior level. Such an event usually increases the character's statistics such as health points and strength (depending on the game's rules), and introduces or allows the acquisition of newer or better abilities for the character to make use of.
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[edit] Types
[edit] Skill-based progression
In some systems, such as classic Traveller or the Basic Role Playing system, progression is based on increasing individual statistics (skills, rank and other features) of the character, and is not driven by the acquisition of (general) experience points.
[edit] Free-form advancement
[clarify]
Free-form advancement is a feature of many modern systems (such as GURPS and the World of abilities). While this free-form advancement usually is much more powerful, it is also more complex. Some games therefore offer to simplify character creation and advancement by suggesting packages or templates of pre-selected sets of abilities.
[edit] Computer role-playing games
Since many early computer role-playing games are derived from Dungeons & Dragons[1], most cRPGs use a level-based experience system.
In many games, characters are required to be of a certain level or higher to perform certain actions, such as wielding a certain weapon, entering a restricted area, or earning the respect of a non-player character. Some games use a system of "character levels", where a higher level character always has an absolute advantage over one of lower level. In these games, statistical character management is usually kept at a minimum. Other games use a system of "skill levels" that measures advantages in terms of specific aptitudes, such as weapon handling skill, spell-casting proficiency, and stealthiness. These games allow the players to customize their characters to a larger extent.
Some games, notably multi-user dungeons (MUDs) and massively multi-player online RPGs (MMORPGs), place a limit on how much experience a character can gain from a single encounter or challenge, hoping that it will reduce the effectiveness of power-leveling.
Remorting is another technique, while encouraging power-levelling, can alleviate the ill effects that power-leveling can cause by still giving the player a sense of achievement but keeping a balance with other characters of lower level within the RPG.
[edit] Remorting
Remorting (also known as ascending) is a technique used within some role-playing games, notably MUDs, whereby once the player character reaches the level limit within an RPG, the character can elect to start over or be remorted back to a weaker version of the player's character (back to level one usually). Yet the character has an added advantage, or power, that the player was unable to achieve before remorting. The advantage is usually access to different races, avatars, classes, skills or even different lands within the game that are not available to characters that have not remorted. Often, an addition to the character's name or symbol is used to signify the choice of remorting. An example of this occurs in City of Heroes where once a regular character hits the level cap, a new character archetype (like a character class) becomes available -- although the player keeps the high level character and is now able to play a new character archetype once concealed or forbidden to the player.
The term's origins are unclear but are thought to distinguish re-mortals (reborn characters) from mortals (normal characters) and immortals (game administrators).
Another explanation comes from MUDs where the players may apply to become immortal characters who tend to the administrative issues within the game, game development, design and such. The administrators are generally expected to keep a certain distance to the game, and their interaction with mortal characters may be severely limited. When such an administrator chooses to leave this position and to start playing the game as a mortal once again—usually from level one just as any other new character—he is said to have remorted.
Remorting is also known by numerous other names, such as "ascension" or "reincarnation".
[edit] Power-leveling
Power-leveling (also known as racking up) is the process of sustained, fast leveling in computer role-playing games. It is essentially the RPG equivalent of speedrunning, but many role players dislike the practice believing that, as an attempt to "beat" an RPG, it misses the point of role-playing. Also, by power-leveling high over the game developers' intended level, the challenge of the game decreases tremendously.
Power-leveling can mean different things depending on whether or not other people are playing the game. Sometimes in single player games it refers to a player strategically playing with the sole intent of gaining experience points as quickly as they can. This is frequently done by finding opponents that give a lot of experience points for very little challenge or by going to an area with very powerful monsters and making great use of the game's healing system. This definition can also be used in multi-player games, but it is typically displaced by a much more charged meaning.
Power-leveling is most frequently used in multi-player games, where it usually refers to a player that is of much greater power assisting a player of much lower power in defeating enemies that are far too powerful for the low level player, but are easily and quickly killed by the more powerful player. This practice is also referred to as "tanking", where a high level character or "tank" will act similarly to the real world counterpart by acting as a shield for the low level character, thus allowing him to defeat the high level challenge without fear of penalties associated with such challenges. Defeating high level challenges rewards the lower level player with experience points more rapidly than normal. In general this is considered a form of cheating, or manipulation of the game system for unintended results.
To combat power-leveling, game designers have devised better means of rewarding a player based on their actual contribution to the completion of the task. Another method used is to cap how much experience a character can gain at any single moment. For example, the game might not allow a character to gain more than 20% of the experience they need to level up by defeating an enemy. This is controversial in that it also punishes players who are skilled enough to face challenges more difficult than regular players or that band together with other players to face more difficult challenges. Another anti-power-leveling method is to base the experience given out on the highest level within the party that killed the enemy—power-levelers get around this by what could be called "passive power-leveling", where a high level character who has access to healing abilities heals the lower level character as he or she fights the enemy, or places beneficial spells on the low-level character while placing curses on the enemy.
Power-leveling increased in EverQuest as it became more common to sell characters through the Internet, which could go for as much as US$ 5,000.[citation needed] Estimates of possible annual income one could generate as a full-time EverQuest player range from $6,000 to $30,000 depending upon particular practices of the player.[citation needed] Of course, techniques of kill stealing and power-gaming would make this pursuit considerably more lucrative.
Power-leveling in MMORPGs can also refer to multiple people play the same character in order to level up quicker, there are even some online services which will do this for money.
Some online companies offer power-leveling services, whereby a customer pays a fixed amount for the company to level up their character. Essentially, the customer provides the company with the username and password for their account, and the company assigns an employee to play the character for the customer until a desired level is reached.
[edit] References
- ^ Barton, Matt (February 23, 2007). The History of Computer Role-Playing Games Part 1: The Early Years (1980-1983) (HTML). Gamasutra. Retrieved on 2007-10-30.
