Theorycraft: Incentivizing Difficulty by giving appropriate experience rewards, Part 1: Goals and Basic

Note: Presented here is probably a rethinking of the old 'encounter' based experience system used in Pen and Paper and how to apply it to the digital games of today.

Goals:

1) Gate progression appropriately as needed to let Content trickle down in a healthy manner
2) Incentivize players to attempt to take on the hardest challenge they can at their level.
3) Disincentivize low-difficult grinding (or ease of repeat grinding)
4) Encourage exploration and experimentation of new areas to avoid stagnation.
5) Create a system in which EXP is distributed based on difficulty.

Major Paradigm Explored: 'The Encounter' as a replacement for individual monster exp.

What is an Encounter?

In lieu of granting players experience primarily on a kill/reward basis, where the act of defeating a monster is what grants the experience or rewards, one should take a larger view at the encounter or set of monsters that the player is dealing with.

For example, let's take a look at a basic case: our player encounters a single slime and defeats it. Let's say that defeating a single slime is worth one experience point.

Now let us say that the player can either take three slimes at a time or one slime at a time. For the sake of this simple example, let's assume that the player has no area of effect attacks and has to attack the slimes one at a time. This means that the player is incentivized in this system to always take one slime at a time, as taking three slimes at a time while only being able to attack one means that the three slime encounter is exponentially more difficult while only linearly more rewarding. This is due to the fact that, while the player is busy with one slime, the other two slimes have free reign to attack him. The time it takes to kill the last slime is multiplied threefold while only giving the reward of killing one slime. Hence, taking one slime at a time is the safest and most efficient way of gaining rewards per slime killed. In this system, the player benefits more from avoiding harder encounters.

However, what if rewards were given on an encounter style basis? What if, instead of assigning an experience value to killing one slime, we gave an experience value to the entire pack? If killing three slimes at a time granted the player five times the experience as killing one slime at a time, the player can then choose to be rewarded according to the difficulty he wants to challenge himself to.

This is the basic paradigm: Rewards must be tailored to the context of the encounter. Rewards given or tailored to individual discrete actions lose out on the essential context and thus promote the maximization of performing those small discrete actions.