On Fri, 17 Dec 1999, John Robertson wrote:
>
> One of the game designers (Ryan Palacios) casually
> mentioned the algorithm for determining whether you can
> group with people to me once, but foolishly, I didn't
> write all of it down. I do remember the meat of it, which
> is that the distance that people can be apart is one
> quarter the levels of the highest level person in the
> party. So a level 40 person and a level 31 person could
> group and both get experience. There were a number of
> exceptions involved as well, but I dont' remember them :(
> I believe there is a lower limit of 3, which makes sense.
> Unfortunately, too many people seem to think that this is
> the UPPER limit as well.
By definition, the upper limit has to be the same as the lower
limit, since a L40 grouping with a L31 (-9 levels) is also a
L31 grouping with a L40 (+9 levels).
J.M. Capozzi posted a message this Saturday on how experience
gain works, which made a lot of sense to me (it "solves" one
of my dislikes I've always had with level-based RPGs). In a
group, the experience you get is basically proportional to
your total experience, relative to other members of your
group. e.g. if the bard has 10,000 e.p.s and the warrior has
5,000 e.p.s, the bard will get twice as much experience as the
warrior. What makes this work is that the bard's level
advancement scale is steeper, so in terms of bubbles of
experience (% to next level) both gain the same amount
assuming they are both similar in numerical level.
The grouping limitations are hard-coded on top of this to
prevent someone with too few exp from benefiting by grouping
with someone with a lot of exp. I dunno if this is based on
numerical level or total exp, but if I were coding the game,
I'd do it on total exp with a conversion factor to offset
race/class penalties. So a L10 bard would have 10x the exp of
a L1 bard and they couldn't group, but a L40 bard would have
something like 2x the exp of a L31 bard, and they could group.
(These numbers are not accurate, they are made up to
demonstrate how a sliding grouping level restriction arises
naturally out of this type of scheme.)
--
John H. Kim
kim@...