XP system is error

[Matrilwood]

Before we start we'll have a short history lesson...

Engineer: Heck no! *Throws a wrench at Wood*

Long story short pressing the red button is a REALLY bad idea... Wait what were we talking about?

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RPGs started off as tabletop, so the XP and level system was designed for table-top, a medium where the player and the game master would interact with one another. The Game Master would know exactly what level the players are at and would set the required level of the round accordingly. With the invention of video games, the creater of the game has very little contact with the player if at all. One side effect of this, in terms of RPGs, is the Game Master can only have a very rough idea of what the player's level is. Which normally results in forcing the player to grind or having the player run through a level that is way to easy.

Enter Kratos the god of killing everything regardless of who or what they are. Unlike other RPGs where leveling up increases your stats making difficult enemies easy and making impossible enemies fightable, God of War gives the player a larger selection of moves to choose from. It means that an enemy that is difficult at low level will still be difficult at high level.

This could be taken into account for any RPG, including MMORPGs, making it less about what level you are and more about how well you implement your skills.

[Robert Monroe]

Experience systems aren't necessarily a bad thing so long as they are more than just arbitrary numbers that keep you from doing stuff.

There's God of War clones everywhere for the same reason we had Doom clones and GTA clones.

[Gene Inari]

Eh. In some games, developers implement systems to prevent grinding.

Like diminishing returns and exponential gains needed for level ups. Like, say you kill X monster for 10 exp at level 5. You level up to 6 and now the same monster only gives 5 exp and now you need twice as much experience to level up again. While you can grind in that sort of system, it takes a godawful long amount of time.

Or you do what Mass Effect and Dragon Age does; restrict the amount of experience you can gain per playthrough. You can also scale the enemy levels along with the player, but that can work against you if you level up poorly and get killed by something that supposedly is around the same strength as you.

There are games out there that try to control a player's level to keep pace with the difficulty curve of the game, by flat out refusing experience gains. Some don't. If a gamer wants to grind to save himself some later trouble, I'd say let him.

[Vy'drach]

The original, turn based Fallouts seemed to have a problem with experience like that. Can kill the things in the town and for the quests just fine, but a random encounter right outside the first town will have you fight random raiders/slavers or so armed with 10mm SMGs, and they burst fire you for several times more health than you have. Instant gib death.