Secret project: Progression
By request (seriously) I’m using today’s column to go into more detail on character progression. I hinted before about it but wasn’t very clear.
There are levels in the game, and there is progression among these levels (you know, obviously), but it’s somewhat nontraditional. There is no XP awarded for killing mobs, thereby removing the "grinding" that usually goes along with raising levels, and also allowing for more flexibility in design; it’s more viable to avoid or disable the mobs as a long-term strategy since you won’t be missing out on valuable XP (there are still the drops, but missing out on some drops is a much smaller impactor than missing the XP).
So if it’s not from mobs, where does the XP come from? Quests. But not all quests. As I mentioned in my first post on the subject, there are both major and minor quests (or "primary" and "secondary," or whatever terms I eventually decide on) — only the major quests award XP, and the XP for lower-level quests is less than that for higher-level quests (meanwhile, it takes more XP to advance the higher you already are). This is prevented from being overwhelming and confusing by flattening the level band; there are only four character levels.
Raising a level results in an increase in stats and some new skills, and also allows you access to the next level’s dungeons and quests. Levels are per character — if character A goes up to level 2, the remaining characters do not. XP, however, is shared in a pool; you don’t need to level the characters you used to complete any given quests. The XP can be stored and spent at will, but you need at least one character at the level of a quest before you have access to it. So you can’t complete the game without getting at least one character to level 4, but you don’t need to level all of them if you don’t want to. Hell, if you want a challenge, you can keep your play character at level 1 and just promote a character you don’t use.
This also (meaningfully and not unintentionally) avoids the situation where you can no longer develop any other characters because you completed too many quests with the same one and there isn’t enough XP left for everybody else. There will be enough XP available if you do all the quests to get every character to level 4.
