@Autumn
An idea I’ve been toying with is more of a carrot over stick approach, because I actually tentatively agree with you that stat/skill point-based systems can often incentivise approaches to progression that feel a bit silly.
But I feel that players often don’t respond well (myself included) when there’s a lot of restriction. I mean even knowing myself, if I’m playing in a game where something is on cooldown to prevent overuse, it will actually incentivise me to immediately do it on cooldown, when maybe without that cooldown I would’ve happily waited a lot longer than the cooldown period for story/realism, most of the time. The cooldown makes me feel like I have to do it ASAP regardless, so I don’t miss out down the line. So, by trying to hold off the worst players, I think it often actually brings more normal players up to their level and discourages a more intuitive, story-focused approach to that kind of decision-making.
The idea I’m workshopping right now is to have in parallel both a more conventional progression system (get XP, spend XP, progress) alongside free, event-based skill distribution.
So, if you don’t want to attend events, and just wanna up your strength one point a week, go ahead. But alternatively if you attend a training montage event at the dojo, staff reading the logs may just toss you a +1str that week as a freebie recognition of the RP you’ve been doing. With lower frequency and less guarantee for those sorts of casual social events, but a more explicit expectation for big season finale type events and boss fights.
Ideally my hope is that maybe people will stress less about the progression-over-time aspect if they know the story will organically reward them with progression that reflects their RP. But also keeping the more conventional progression track for people who either can’t or just don’t want to always feel like they need to prove their progress in public scenes, albeit a little slower.
