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I had to write some thoughts away I've been having for a couple of days. Thoughts I have on traditional RPG mechanics since I read an article that was posted in the news section last week. Any ruleset (White Wolf's, D&D, I suppose even that of not-so RPG's such as Oblivion or Deus Ex) applies to my idea since they're al basically about the same thing. A character that grows stronger, a character that matures, a character that restores its connection to The Force.. you get the picture. However, it has indeed been proven possible to let a character fall instead of grow. Story wise, Max Payne would be a good example. Gameplay wise it would be.. unheard of?

So lets speculate. D&D, Final Fantasy, whatever floats your boat. You start out your game with all the levels, attribute points, limit breaks, finishing moves, force powers, magic abilities, feats and skills of a capped character. Instead of gaining XP however, you loose XP** (or gain negative XP) with each battle to the point where you'll eventually have to level down, choose which ability scores you have to lower, which feats you can do without.. you get the idea. Like Spawn, your powers are finite. You have to save yourself for the toughest battles and use other means to progress through the game world, frequently favouring skills such as stealth or persuade over direct confrontations.

So who is this person that loses his or her strengths throughout the game? A Spawn-ish type, an anti-hero? Someone who is perhaps wounded and his/her proceedings through the game stands synonymous to their demise, 'fighting off the inevitable'? Or maybe something a little more sinister, like someone who is fighting a losing battle against their own insanity or dementia.

There are all kinds of possibilities for interesting characters here, let alone gameplay or storyline.

(**Note that I'm making the distinction between what would normally be the same thing, combat XP and skill XP. This distinction is necessary because you will have to be put in situations where you'll want to choose skills over combat in order to 'save your inner badass'. Plus, I never thought it makes much sense if you gain access to the Slayer perk by levelling up after you received 10.000 experience points for pressing a button on a computer in Vault 13.)

Tricky wrote: So who is this person that loses his or her strengths throughout the game? A Spawn-ish type, an anti-hero? Someone who is perhaps wounded and his/her proceedings through the game stands synonymous to their demise, 'fighting off the inevitable'? Or maybe something a little more sinister, like someone who is fighting a losing battle against their own insanity or dementia.

I think I may know of a character that goes through the above description (the rise and fall part). It's Richard B. Riddick, the main character and anti-hero of Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay (he is a notorious criminal, by the way). He is sent to the triple-max security prison and you, as Riddick, must find a way out of that prison. Made 3 attempts to escape from the prison and they all failed. Not to mention that at each failure, he is stripped of his weapons and sent to a different cell block. Does make me wonder whether this guy is a walking bad luck charm until the last attempt where he manages to escape from the prison (at last).

Another example is Gordon Freeman from the Half-Life series fame. At a certain point in the game, you are stripped of your weapons (same scenario as in Chronicles of Riddick). In the first Half-Life, the protagonist was knocked unconscious by the enemy soldiers, stripped of his weapons and dumped into the sewers. From there, you will have to trudge around to regain all your weapons. In Half-Life 2, the same thing happened when you enter the Citadel (enemy stronghold). Went through the security room and all the weapons disintegrated, except the gravity gun, which in turn, absorbs the power in that room, causing the system to malfunction. And from there on out, you are stuck with an overcharged gravity gun enough to send people flying to their deaths. :laugh:

The one thing in common in the examples I mentioned and in FPS mentality is having a lot of weapons give you the feeling of being powerful. Being stripped of them is like being stripped of your invincibility and having to start all over from square one (As for Chronicles of Riddick, there are other reasons besides this).

P.S. I hope I'm on topic here. I have a feeling that I might have gotten off-track somehow.

Hardly, I don't think there is much of a frame of reference to be found in RPG's anyway. I noticed before how character growth in most FPS games seems to be limited to the amount of weapons you gather. I remember when I was first thrown into that trash compactor off the old Lambda complex and lost all my guns. I think I cried, you think you'll never be able to get all that sweet stuff together again. But it takes what, twenty minutes to get it all back? It is probably the closest you can get to the type of gameplay I tried to explain.

Another thing to consider would be how the parties would work. Assuming you're the only one affected by this affliction, your party members would eventually outgrow you. That could have some unwelcome side effects. In the beginning though you'll have to take care of them, perhaps making some tough decisions in the process. Save the girl or defeat the dragon (and become weaker). Later on they would either return the favour by taking care of you OR their high level presence would ruin the gloomy decline to your character. Or at the very least make you obsolete.