Gaining Experience

Although characterization is developed and grows through storytelling, RPGs demonstrate personal growth through the acquisition of experience. Almost every RPG has some version of experience point allocation. The player gains experience for beating challenges and whacking enemies in the game, and she can then spend the experience to increase her character’s attributes or to purchase new abilities. This reward boosts the character’s usefulness in upcoming challenges the player might face. Let’s say Gina’s character Grog the Barbarian just decimated a crew of ten vile goblins. Grog receives 18 experience points for his reward. Gina can either use part of those experience points to raise Grog’s strength attribute to 14, or she can purchase a marksman skill, which will allow Grog to shoot bows and arrows. She decides she’d like Grog to have a ranged attack, so she buys the marksman skill. This decision has immediate ramifications in the way Gina will play through future combat situations. Experience becomes a form of scorekeeping in RPGs, therefore, and amassing a certain sum of experience will cause the character’s level to go up, an act called “leveling up.” RPGs that feature character levels will start the player’s character at level one and go up based on how well the player plays the game and gets involved in the storyline. Some of the finer RPGs today use a training system for experience, such as the system developed for Lionhead Studio’s Fable series. In a training system, the game’s internal programming reacts to the actions players select most frequently and increases the player character’s attributes accordingly. This means that if a player character uses a sword for a long while, the character will automatically become more proficient with the sword. If the player, instead, decides to cast a lot of magic spells, she’ll become better at spell-casting.