I have to say, many of the RPG mods I have looked at have been disappointing over the years. Some simply add more content with little consideration for difficulty, others focus on adding cool new things, or even more dimensions and bosses. While these methods can be exciting, they get pretty lame only after a short while and rarely sustain a player's interest.
I want to keep my mods with a Minecraft theme, but add true RPG elements to the game. I have a few games in mind on how I want to draw these elements from, but that isn't really important right now. First things first, Minecraft has 'infinite' size worlds (at least for PC and by infinite I really just mean ridiculously large. So what draws the player to explore these massive worlds? Usually its the hunt for resources such as diamond, redstone, and maybe iron. I don't see how any other resource really ensures the player explores.
It is flawed. This is because these reasons to explore are basically near bedrock, why would the player ever want to go far away on the surface? To get away from other people, to build new things, to start something new but keep the old world. None of these are really about exploring, the intent of these reasons are just to build more stuff. Now before anyone starts telling me about how Minecraft is a sandbox game, I just want to say that I know. I'm really looking at just making things more interesting since a sandbox is great, but once you are in my position where you have played this game for over 2 years, you really just want something else to do.
Enchanting and levels are very tightly bound. They need to be separated so that 'rpg-levels' can become something meaningful. I would simply call the old level system 'enchanting power' or something along those lines. Instead, there will be something called "Power Levels" (PL) which have nothing to do with enchanting and literally do what you would expect, making your character more powerful. Obviously, you probably have heard this term from other places, which is fine because it is typically associated with the concept of the higher the power level the more powerful the entity is.
I'm going to be vague on details because I am simply putting out my concept and not really wanting to get into details on how it would work or what specific values are supposed to mean except for a few minor ones. For instance, all characters would start in a world at PL 1. Instead of getting experience from kills, you gain essence from what you kill. Earn enough essence and you gain a PL. When you gain a PL the overall abilities/attributes of your character increase very slightly and you gain Skill Points (SP) that you can spend towards different aspects of your character. These aspects would consist of combat related abilities such as faster attacks, more damage, more health, gain natural armor, better blocking, and potentially new things I would add through other RPG elements. Additionally, they could be spent on other things such as faster block breaking rate (some for different types), faster base run speed, faster sprint speed, longer sprint distance, jump height, larger hunger bar, and many others.
So how would you gain experience? Obviously, I want to ensure exploring and if you could simply stay in the same place and grind experience that would take away from the game. Well, when you start a world you spawn in the overworld at roughly an x,z location of 0,0. So lets assume at that location and the relative area nearby ever mob would spawn at level 1. As you move away from the start location, the strength of mobs would increase relative to the distance from 0,0.
There is a catch, as you move away from the center you would be moving linearly, but the area would be a quadratic. This means mobs cannot grow in strength linearly, or the area for new challenges would get massive. However, if I make mob strength increase by squaring the distance, then once you start getting to distant locations, mobs will become exceptionally powerful very quickly. Instead I'll compromise with something in-between the two called log-linear. An example formula would be: y = (x * log(x)) * 0.05 + 1, where y is the level of the mob, and x is the distance (in chunks) from 0,0. Additionally, the amount of essence you get from killing a mob would be proportional to the difference between your level and the mob's level. So killing lower level mobs would yield very little essence, and killing higher level mobs would yield lots of essence.
But how does this promote the player to explore? Well, obviously there needs to be an incentive for the player to explore other than just gaining some arbitrary power levels. More on that another time.
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