In all RPGs – computer, console, and pen and paper – one of my all-time favorite classes to play is the rogue. I love sneaking around, stabbing things in the back, and pulling off stealthy head shots from afar. The only complaint I’ve had is that it’s difficult to play a true stealth character in a lot of games because they don’t provide experience for avoiding conflict.

In many pen-and-paper games, the game master can provide experience for resolving a situation, whether it was through combat, negotiation, or completely circumventing it somehow. This is difficult to pull off in a computer game. It’s really easy to give out experience for killing an enemy, but what if you used stealth to avoid combat, or froze the enemy with a spell and then high tailed it out of there? Should you get experience from that?

This is a question I’m putting a lot of thought into for my game. I would like there to be real differences in how a player plays depending on their character. If you work up your stealth attributes, I don’t think you should be punished for avoiding combat. The question is when is it appropriate to award experience for this, and how do you guarantee that players can’t double dip, avoiding the enemy and gaining experience and then killing it for more.

One idea I had was to give each enemy a max experience value that gets transferred to the player bit-by-bit for different actions. Here’s a scenario:

Goblin: 100 max XP
Player turns on a stealth skill and manages to sneak past the goblin, who is within 5 squares of the player. Player gets 20xp for this, goblin now has 80 left in its pool.
Player comes back that way again and sneaks past – another 20 point transfer, goblin has 60 xp left.
Player tries to sneak past again and is noticed, combat ensues, player kills the goblin and gains the remaining 60xp.

If the player hadn’t killed the goblin, then they would have earned 40xp from it. They’re still not rewarded fully for avoiding it, but I think by tweaking the numbers it would be enough that playing a non-combative stealth character would be a viable option.

I’m still not sure how to reliably detect a non-kill defeat though. I could see a rogue character scoring a hit on a creature to stun it and then running out of the room, locking the door behind him to trap the creature. It seems like that should deserve some XP, because it’s a more true to character action than standing there pounding on the enemy like a warrior, but how best to detect those scenarios and award them? The answer is that I’m not sure yet.

Another idea would be to implement offensive skills that would be more appropriate to a rogue character. If a rogue builds a trap on a square and then lures a creature into it then they get experience for the kill. Running away or avoiding a creature wouldn’t gain xp, but passively defeating it still counts. And then there’s always the old ranged attacks standby.

Getting off of the rogue class specifically, I’m also undecided on the type of skill system I want to put into the game. I’d like to keep it casual and avoid having the player distributing skill points or picking powers, but feel that the ability to mold different types of characters through play should be integral to the game.

One idea I have is to split skills into several categories, like “Rogue” “Warrior” and “Mage”. The player starts with an equal skill in all three categories and as they do things in the game experience points accumulate in the different pools accordingly. Attacking something with a sword puts the XP into warrior, using stealth or picking locks gives you rogue points, and casting spells or using scrolls increases mage. When the total XP from all groups combined hits a threshold then you gain a level and your general stats go up, but modified by the distribution of points. So, a player that has done a lot of head on combat will gain more hit points per level than a stealth character, and a magic user will gain more mana than a warrior. When the points in a particular category reaches a threshold then new skills may become available. So, a character with a lot of warrior points might be able to conduct a spin attack that hits all squares around him at once, while a stealth character might get a tumble action that allows them to slide several squares in one round. These skills could be a bit randomized to add to the Roguelike feel of the game. Each time you play a new game different sets of skills could be given to your character in each category to keep it interesting.

As you can see I’ve got a lot to ponder here. If you have any comments or ideas, please step forth and speak your piece.

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