Summary of "Skill-based XP"
Topic and presenter
Tim (channel host) discussing pros, cons and design questions for skill-based XP systems in games.
What Tim means by “skill-based XP”
Each skill has its own XP bar; using the skill fills its bar and levels that skill. Applies broadly to perks, traits, attributes, backgrounds—anything selected by the character that’s used to determine outcomes.
In other words, progression is tied to individual abilities (combat, stealth, persuasion, lockpicking, etc.) rather than a single, global player level.
Main problems and design questions to solve
What counts as “using” a skill?
- Combat: every swing, only hits on hostile targets, only against monsters, or something else?
- Stealth: does merely sneaking count, or only successful stealth actions/attacks?
- Dialogue / lockpicking: once world-placed opportunities are exhausted, how will players continue to raise those skills?
Edge cases and exploitable loops
- Summoning low-level creatures to kill repeatedly for XP.
- Camping a shopkeeper or NPC that resets to farm persuasion XP.
- Grinding trivial enemies (rats) or spamming a spell on walls to raise a skill.
Frequency imbalance between skills
Combat skills are used far more often than niche skills (lockpicking, persuasion), making balanced progression difficult.
Procedural content needs
To give players many meaningful uses of each skill, you may need procedural generation so opportunities exist consistently and don’t dry up.
Design and technical specificity
Programmers need unambiguous rules for what grants XP (radius, hostileness, resets, per-target caps, etc.).
Consequences of removing player levels
Encounter design, challenge scaling, and hit point progression become harder to plan if power is scattered across many skills and there is no single player level to represent overall strength.
Player behavior and messaging
Granting XP signals desired play: poorly designed skill XP can encourage undesirable behaviors and produce predictable, exploitable walkthroughs.
Suggested fixes, alternatives and strategies
- Define explicit XP-trigger events
- Be precise: what event gives XP, how much, and under what conditions.
- Cap or exhaust XP from individual sources
- Give NPCs, locks, or guards a limited XP pool to prevent infinite farming.
- Balance use-frequency via XP rates or bar sizes
- Make frequent-use skills require more XP per level or give less XP per use; make rare-use skills grant more.
- Procedural generation for repeatable meaningful opportunities
- Ensure each skill has reasonably frequent, varied uses in the world.
- Consider XP-on-failure instead of on-success
- Failing grants more XP; succeeding gives little or none. Benefits:
- Encourages players to attempt varied actions and learn from failure.
- Makes generalist builds viable (failing raises many skills).
- Encourages players to seek challenging content rather than trivial grinding.
- If success removes XP opportunities, design targets to exhaust or regenerate in controlled ways.
- Failing grants more XP; succeeding gives little or none. Benefits:
- Reassess whether you need a separate player level
- If you remove levels, provide designers tools to gauge overall power and craft encounters (or keep a hybrid system).
- Anticipate and design against exploitative behaviors
- Consider cooldowns, diminishing returns, per-target XP pools, or requiring contextual conditions (hostile flag, meaningful challenge).
- Communicate rules to players
- Show when a source is exhausted, indicate allowed farming, and make progression logic transparent to avoid confusion and frustration.
Practical tips for dev teams
- Write unambiguous rules so programmers can implement them exactly.
- Playtest specifically for grinding and unexpected player strategies.
- Balance time-to-level across skill types; expect long tuning cycles.
- Expect reviewers and players to critique exploitable or unintuitive progression mechanics.
Sources / people featured
- Tim (the video’s presenter).
- Tim’s referenced videos (class-based vs skill-based systems; procedural generation; learning from failure).
- Viewer comments and discussion that prompted the follow-up video.
Category
Gaming
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