I’ve been struggling with the experience system in Gloomhaven. Character progression is obviously a big part of the game and the main way that happens in the vast majority of RPGs is through a system of experience gain and leveling up. You collect enough experience and you gain a level – making your character stronger in some ways.
The mechanics of leveling-up itself has always been pretty clear. When a character gains a level, they gain access to a new, powerful, class-specific ability card they can add to their deck. Since all their stats and powers are determined by that deck, it’s a pretty logical choice.
The problem comes in when I try to determine how a player actually earns experience. For a long time, I had a generous system in which, if the players did pretty much anything on their turn, they got an experience point. In addition, they got a bonus experience for landing a killing blow on a monster or healing a knocked out ally. Maybe also for disarming a trap. Or doing some other thing. It was pretty clunky, hard to keep track of and just didn’t feel very cool.
First of all, like I said, if you did pretty much anything on your turn, you got an experience. It was pretty lame and unnecessary. I wanted a baseline experience to reduce the variance of experience gain among players, but by far the easier way to do that was to just give that base amount of experience for completing an adventurer – not make the players keep track of that experience accumulation during the scenario. “Oh, gosh, did I get my free experience that turn or did I forget?” said no satisfied player ever.
Everything still just felt sort of samey with the bonus experience, though. Especially since getting bonus experience for killing stuff seemed to give a significant advantage to the Brute, who was very good at running around and murdering stuff. He’s a Brute. That’s what he does.
So I decided pretty quickly that what would be really cool would be that if every class in the game had a different method of gaining experience – a method that accentuated the way that character was supposed to be played. If murdering stuff is what the Brute is good at, give him bonus experience for it, but give other classes bonus experience for doing what they are good at. The Scoundrel is good at setting up big attacks for massive damage, so give her experience for doing lots of damage on her turn. The Spellweaver is good and blasting lots of monsters at once. The Tinkerer is good at healing.
And so it all came together.
Except.
I was severely limiting the versatility of the classes. Yeah, the Tinkerer could do things other than heal, but what was the point? He only got experience for healing. What was the point of the Brute tanking when he only got experience for murder?
I thought about adding multiple bonus experience cases for each class. Maybe the Brute gains experience for every enemy he kills and for every time he takes damage. And also maybe something else. The more I thought about it though, the more ridiculous it became. Was it going to be a whole paragraph of stuff on each of the character sheets? Wasn’t the whole point to take all the stats off of this sheet and put it into a much more manageable hand of cards?
All the stats are on the cards.
Duh.
This has become the mantra of the game: get as many mechanics off of the sheet and onto the cards as possible. So why not do it with experience? Have the skills themselves reward the experience, not some external, unnecessary system.
Let me tell you why this is cool.
First of all, it offers the play more interesting decisions. Maybe the player has a great set of abilities he can play on his turn to really tear up the battlefield, but the actions he’ll be using won’t give him any experience. He’s gotta decide how dire the situation is. Can he afford to do something else that will get more experience, or does he need to clear out the enemies before everyone ends up dead? You not only have to think about playing abilities that you could lose, but also about abilities that give experience and abilities that could lose you good sources of experience on the other half of the card. It’s just one more layer to think about in terms of optimization of strategy.
And that also ties into what I was talking about a couple weeks ago in terms of organic difficulty scaling based on how much stuff you walk away from the dungeon with. If you’re not playing very well, you may be forced into to situations where you’ve gotta do things that won’t get you much experience, but, on the other hand, if you’r handling the dungeon just fine, you may have more freedom to maximize your experience gain. Both ways you’ll finish the scenario and move on, but playing well will be a more rewarding experience.
I feel like I’ve been saying this a lot lately, but I’m very happy with where the system is now. More than that, I’m super-excited about the direction Gloomhaven is headed. I have a lot of really smart play testers, and they are really helping to shine a light on a lot of the cracks in the framework. It will take a long time to fix them all, but, in the end, I think Gloomhaven will end up being something pretty special.
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The more I read about it, the more excited I become about this game! It promises really much and with more details revealed, I become more and more confident that it can deliver a lot of those promises! Keep on!
If only I had more time on my hands, I would gladly playtest this game and get a few plays in ASAP, but as it is, I will just have to wait 🙂
Great article. Experience in an RPG game is tough enough to handle especially if it is a different progression per class then a static chart for all to use. But then when you add that element into a board game it can be a lot tougher.
Game balance and how characters are played can be a really big choice in how they are played. Usually if a character is going to get experience points for doing something specific then I can see them getting played most of the time that way. After all who wants to play a game and not get all of the experience points possible.
The main problem with that I can think of is if you have a full party of characters then with all of them working to there strengths things will flow and and the party will be able to handle everything that the scenario throws there way.
But when you cut the party in half and play the same scenario people need to learn that they cannot just play the character to there strength all the time and have to break from there norm if they want to complete the adventure. This is a much more challenging way to play and one that I actually prefer. You have to think more and not just play for experience points but for the game experience. But then again how many people play this way opposed to just doing the standard min/max.
Putting the experience on the cards is an interesting idea. I assume only some cards will have experience on them and only on the portion that sort of exemplifies the class you are playing, is that correct? It seems like this will be much easier to track, at least for the Scoundrel and the Spellweaver. It also seems like there will be a LOT more experience to go around. I honestly don’t feel like the decision making process will change a whole lot because you are already deciding whether you are going to do something that will give you experience vs what is best for the party. I do think the Brute is the most straight forward class to play because he is rewarded for killing, everyone else has some other choices to make. I’d like to see the Brute gain experience by playing a shield card as well, but his initial HP might need a small boost. I’m really enjoying the game and I’m looking forward to the new cards.
That’s true, but because there will be more ways to get experience (the Brute playing a shield card of instance), the decision should be at least a little richer. Glad you’re enjoying the game! I should have the revamped cards out to play testers soon.
There’s two ways you could mean “put the experience on the cards.” I think each skill you use will state a criteria for gaining experience by it.
Another way of doing it is that each skill one can gain could have a prerequisite. So in order to learn “Bash 2” you have to kill 2 enemies in one round, and once you do, you can take that skill. Either without fiddly xp tracking, or a sheet to mark how many times the criteria are met.
I think that would be an interesting way to do it, but on the whole if there are a lot of abilities their use would probably often be overlooked and people might not realize when they’d earned them.
This is a pretty cool idea, but I agree it would be very hard to track.
I like the idea of having experience in the cards rather than tracking points. I’ve always thought that rewarding the characters for doing something they are already good at is kind of boring mechanic. That way the roles are very strict. And in real life you normally learn most by doing something you don’t know well. The brute is good at killing and the Tinker at healing, so the safest strategy is to play them that way. But to make things interesting you should give Brute experience for healing and Tinker for killing stuff. That way the players have to make decisions how to play.
But in the end the mechanics are secondary thing if the game fails to tell a story that the players (and characters) have input in.
Would be really interested in playtesting too…
It is a valiant effort. The problem that I see occurring in real time play is the balance issue between the classes. Namely the difference between the tinkerer and the scoundrel. The Tinkerer currently gets XP for losing cards. I don’t have a single one that is repeatable(off the start this may change at later levels). The scoundrel haas nearly half of his normal cards that give XP. So every game the scoundrel gets a lot more XP. For instance most games the timkerer gets around 9-10 xp-His max is 16 though if he can arrange all enemies to arrange themselves perfectly for his area attacks and he uses all lost cards(8 of 12 are lost card options although it could be aas high as 10 of 12 if choosing differently). The tinkerer has to watch how fast he burns the lost cards so normally I only get to use around 6(with 2 being the last round). The Scoundrel has 9 cards and earns on 7 of those with two of those being lost. Our scoundrel averages 14-16 without using more than one lost card. So after 3 adventures the Tinkerer is at 50 XP while the Scoundrel is at 68 with the difference just getting bigger as we play. Our group has a spellweaver and craig as well which seem to get the same as the Tinkerer.
Why is there such a huge disparity for the Scoundrel or is it just so he gets all the XP and Loot and levels faster? ie the scoundrel also has the best loot options so normally gathers about 50% of the parties loot(like we get 3,3,2 loot and the scoundrel gets 8 loot plus any special loot that is available). Is there some reason the Scoundrel has such overpowering options?