This game's progression design is pivotal. Leveling up, getting skills, unlocking locations. Unlocking equipment. How does the player move 'up'. What is it like to progress. Penalties for losing, too. What does going through gametime do.
But that means that almost any other experiment with the level up tweaking matters
except choosing how much stuff you get per level. In alpha, everyone is accepted that nothing is final. You can alter it in ways that make other ways of tweaking exist.
There's enough content for people to see that the writing will continue to be great and that mechanics can interact with the plot in ways not yet exhausted. This is splendid. This gives you much freedom.
Picking reward amounts when content can change, is almost guaranteed to be something that will be re-revised. You have to know the data you get is still worth even
if when you reverse that change for something else. Questions that matter:
- Does every 1 point in Power(/stat) do the same thing? If so, Lovers Runes and the like always have the same penalty with no variance. If not, you're telling the player to specialize/be rounded. But Will-Power Temple also has something to say about that.
- What is the action economy, is it really one action, do you have to pick a move before a stance change might skip your turn, will monsters never have the free Push Away the player does? stance shenanigans are how you perform way beyond any other strategy atm. stance shenanigans are also how you get mad at harpies, the must-protecc generics. it's quite vexing.
- Is the only cost of skill use going to be EP? The interpreter doesn't allow a move to inflict a self stat penalty. So how complex will energy management be? Player needs to know how hard/complicated it's going to be to spend all their energy, win, and profit after Ardor Potion expenses, if changing the EP bar is a build choice.
The way that a player responds with build choices to the way these other factors work, that is him picking his gameplay experience. It's also what gets interfered with for in-progress saves with those new versions, but, you should interfere the bejeezus out of them. Reward quantities like stat-ups are answers to the noncreative question of what he needs to beat what's there. The creative questions radically alter what is reasonable for designer and player, and come up every time you put in something new for the gameplay experience to
be.
When I saw frickin character creation I thought 'the level up screen is set because all these formulae would let the developer just do hard math to
prove each of these bonuses have about the same impact on winning/losing a run through an adventure deck.' If there are some dud level-up choices, it's a good thing that grinding can get it right the second time around. Virility shows you were wise to outclassing fun early characters due to progress, and turned it into a way to scale fights and unlock scenes.
Regarding grinding, "dawdling in previous areas", at least, is necessary for fighting off combat loss penalties and restocking restoratives. So the game for the moment has an inevitable bit of returning to the front of the plot some number of levels past when you first could have got there (and first did get there). It's cool that the game is designed for dawdling because BFRPG reasons. But also it means that you might -mostly- experience the game with more stats than is challenging. Which brings us back to progression design. Player has gained a level - player's gained <everything he gets from doing stuff>, actually. In what way do you want the player experience to change, from that <progress> ?
Because ... you can make it whatever the hell you want.
