JADE - Experience levels and professions

Java-based Ancient Domains Engine
© Copyright 1998-2012 by Thomas Biskup. All Rights Reserved.

Important: The new JADE website is located at http://www.ancientdomainsofmystery.com. There you can find the latest news, downloads, etc. This website exists simply for documentation purposes. Please update your bookmarks and links!

Experience levels and professions

JADE will see a radical departure from the ADOM philosophy of experience levels and professions. In ADOM experience levels are very important because they allow you to increase skills, hit points, gain special powers and more. Professions also are pretty defining in giving you your core abilities and determining the best approach on solving the game according to your choice.

This will be very different in JADE. Here you won't be constrained to but one profession but you rather will be allowed to learn more professions as time goes by. Professions will guide how much experience you have to "pay" to advance a skill and will grant you certain in-game benefits (access to guild halls, access to specialized guild equipment and more). This effectively means that you will be able to become a guild member in as many guilds as you like - as long as you can convince the respective guild council that you might be a worthy guild member... which actually might become pretty difficult when facing the council of the paladins guild after having proven oneself a powerful assassin or a nasty necromancer!

Experience levels also will play just a minor role. They will give you a very minor hitpoint bonus (+1 hitpoint per experience level) and only serve as a general guideline for your accomplishments... it has no other effects. You profession powers will be guided by your reputation in your guild and your experience score in the respective profession.
General experience levels will be determined according to the following chart:

Experience score	Experience level
0	1
100	2
300	3
600	4
1000	5
1500	6
2100	7
2800	8
3600	9
4500	10
5500	11
6600	12
7800	13
9100	14
10500	15
12000	16
13600	17
15300	18
17100	19
20000	20
...	...

Naturally this has some additional consequences:

In contrast to ADOM their will be no (real) experience level limit.
Monsters will yield a lot less experience than they do in ADOM.

An alternative I had considered to this is the following approach: use the table above to determine your rank within your guild(s) and calculate the overall experience level as the average of your guild ranks. I decided against this, because picking up a new profession at a later point will decrease your overall experience, which doesn't seem reasonable.

Yet another approach might be to only count experience points for your professions and use the total of those points to determine your overall experience level. I like this one very well, because it removes the need to have some abstract experience point amount, just for the sake of being able to calculate some abstract experience level.

The final (and most simple) approach might be to simply use the maximum guild rank as your overall experience level. This has one disadvantage: let's assume that guild rank is determined by looking at something I'll call reputation score for now. It is influenced by your deeds and increases if you behave appropriately to your profession (a healer tending the sick, a thief picking pockets, an assassin killing targets, a merchant reaping trade rewards, etc.). It decreases if you behave in an improper way (a paladin stealing things, a druid killing peaceful animals, a wizard engaging in melee constantly, etc.). This would pose some interesting challenges to be successful in several varying professions, something I find very realistic and very intricate. Since this possibility is not yet ruled out, the final approach mentioned in this paragraph won't be used for now, despite it's simplicity. These changes will permit a more variable, realistic and exciting approach to things, allowing you to play a very high number of very different characters.

Thomas Biskup recommends: The Universal Principles of Design
"A great book about design principles, no matter whether you are designing games, software or tools. I like the two-page structure: First the design principle is explained and then you get real world examples of how the principle can be applied. Combined with clear writing, a crisp layout and streamlined editing this makes for great reading!"

More details about this item can be found here: United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Germany.

Please support this website by going to Amazon through one of the links on this website (if you want to shop at Amazon at all that is ;-). It doesn't cost you any surcharge, but provides me with ADOM-related income. Thanks!

A complete list of my reading recommendations is available here.

| Suggestions? EMail me.