What should leveling up get you?

[Slamz]

Maybe instead of just passing out skills based on a level you just throw out levels all together and make all of your gains very specific.

You want 200 more hit points? Go do X and once you are done then you receive 200 hit points. Once you accomplish your gain of 200 hit points it opens up your ability to go gain something that gives you 400 hit points or 150 hit points and 150 mana. This idea certainly doesn't remove the grind but at least it gives the players the choices of what there grind is.

Yes but for purposes of this thread this is the same thing as "leveling".

You are doing X in order to improve Y by Z.

That is,
You're eating 500 muffins in order to improve your hit points by 200.
You're killing 500 rats in order to improve your dagger skill by 200.
You're making 500 widgets in order to improve your crafting skill by 200.

It's really not much different than leveling other than, as you say, you can choose which part of your character to level as an individual item.



But the question still remains:
How much improvement should this get you?

If you log into the game as a brand new character and have 1000 hit points and your aim is to max that out as much as possible, how high should the game let you go? Even if we're talking about diminishing returns, what is it heading towards?

Basically, if you got to sit down and design these skills, would you make the "Hit Point Buff" skill be like...
Skill Rank 1-5, +100 per rank? +50 per rank? +500 per rank?

If you could do a weapon skill, would it be like...
Skill Rank 1-5, +5% DPS per rank? +2%? +50%?


Maybe this is something you just have to sit down and try to hash out all at once in order to try and paint a clear picture but I'm curious where people's knee-jerk reaction would be to put the numbers on the first pass.