Well, it's fairly easy to make it so players don't level up. The way I handled it is by removing the whole function that rewards xp in fight.c (the code for the gain function was still there, but it was just never used).
After that, I remembered playing some other muds that, I think, based your health completely on your endurance/constitution (seeing as they were RPI, they never revealed the mechanics of their game, but that's how I figured they handled hit points and stamina). Came up with a formula for those, and had them set when characters were initialized after stats were set.
Skills are a little more complicated. At first, I thought, "Hey, have them go up through use!" Sounds easy enough, except for a couple issues.
1.) How would int and wis play a factor? We need smart characters to be rewarded for sacrificing (in a way) points that could've gone into combat-related stats. A base percentage chance of skills going up was what I started with then modded it (10% to have a chance of bringing up a skill, with the gain rate being 5*int score... if it's a failure, 5*wis score is the percent chance to have another shot at that roll).
2.) Is there any skill cap that needs to be put in to keep players from powering through skill levels by grinding? I figured actually having to spend money to train a skill might be a good solution. Couple this with having to buy/repair equipment constantly as one adventures, it makes training skills this way like an investment that requires you to sacrifice gold for. A new iron breastplate, or increasing that sword skill? That kind of thing. Note: I didn't try to hard code this but instead had a very insane looking set of DG scripts that actually worked quite well. The price of the training went up depending on the skill level, and the idea was a trainer in the starting town only went up to, say, 40% before the players had to find other trainers or just increase them through use.
3.) Is that % skill level equal your chance for success? If so, makes the rogue's skill of hiding/sneaking almost useless early on. True, powerful when it is high, but perhaps making some terrain easier to sneak in can make it more forgiving. However... the more forgiving you try to be, the more some will take advantage of it. Other examples: first aid, foraging, crafting skills. I guess this is one of those, "Depends on the skill we're talking about" situations.
Those are some of the ideas that I had tried out when I was tinkering with the levelless system. In the end, seeing as I was the only one doing any building (this is just a fun hobby I'm tinkering with), it just didn't seem that feasible for me to make a lot of content for. I envisioned using a lot of scripts to make events and dungeons which takes a lot of time. This also was before throwing together talk and ask chains; perhaps if I had done that back then it would've been an idea I would've stuck with.
At any rate, perhaps I should've thrown this into a new thread! Since we were talking about muds, people starting one up, and you wanted to ask me what ideas I had... well... here we are!
