Experience (role play)
Experience is an essential element in the rules of role play . Experience is mostly measured in experience points (EP for short, experience points , EXP or XP), they are a measure of the development of the player's character . Some role-playing systems also use names such as adventure points or character points .
principle
The player character receives experience points for certain actions or when fulfilling objectives (e.g. quests ) within the game, which are usually specified by the game designer or game master. In some systems, this causes the character to move up a level at fixed intervals . This symbolizes the further development of the game character, for example he becomes faster, stronger or smarter, knows how to use his weapon better or how to operate electronic devices better. Other systems (for example GURPS ) use "character points", which are treated similarly to experience points. However, there are no steps upwards. Instead, the character points can immediately be used to increase a character's skills.
Typical opportunities to gain experience points are, for example, successfully surviving a difficult fight, solving a puzzle or a quest or playing the character particularly convincingly.
Experience in pen & paper role play
In the pen & paper role-playing game , the game master determines the award of experience points. He has to adapt the character development to the plot of the game, as monsters often have to be defeated, which sometimes require strong players. In this form of role play, action and experience are more inevitably linked.
Experience in computer role play (single player)
The computer role-playing game puts fewer limits on a system of skills and the formation of experience, since the management of experience points is a fairly trivial task for the computer. Of course, a computer cannot make spontaneous decisions about this. In a computer role-playing game, the allocation of experience is therefore usually much more predictable. There are usually many more sub-quests and monsters that bring experience, as the focus is on entertaining the player for as long as possible (sometimes stopping them) and creating a certain replay value (for example through different solutions). This usually requires more skill from the player; the experience is not built up in such a way that he can easily defeat the end boss, which is usually present, with the player's skills, but he still has to "cooperate" himself. In the AD&D game Eye of the Beholder 2: Legend of Darkmoon , for example, the last opponent is very powerful and can only be defeated with patience and skill. In computer role-playing games it often happens that the player repeatedly has to insert an intermediate phase in which he strengthens his character by defeating opponents in order to overcome the next challenge. This is especially true for games in which the opponents keep reappearing .
Experience in an MMORPG
In an MMORPG , character development plays a different role, because an online role-playing game theoretically lasts infinitely long and does not have a climax in the form of a final battle. On the other hand, in an MMORPG, the death of the player character is usually not final, but at most results in the loss of some skills or objects that have already been achieved.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Peter Winkler: Computer Lexikon 2010: The whole digital world for reference , p. 533, Verlag Markt und Technik 2009, ISBN 978-3-8272-4519-9