What if We Leveled Backwards?!

[THE_NAMSU]

This idea sounds pretty awesome. I like to think of it as the player starting off with the game being "easy" - you have many unskilled, maybe fool-proof skills or attacks or what nots, but as you progress you have to rely on the harder to use skills as the others are removed or whatever as you level down. Also rely on experience you gained from playing the game for long.

That. Sounds. AWESOME!!!!

In fact, I have an idea. While every stat gets lowered, one should go up. Intelligence. That could help with the "Wise old man on a mountain top".

This is what I was thinking - as you lose weaponry and armour, you gain in other skills like stealth. It would be great in the context of a soldiering game. A very simple mechanic would just be to have a game with no ammo or health packs - start off fully equipped, then as you use up your weapons or your armour becomes useless, you have to leave it behind and rely more on skill. That would also give you the option to save up some of the weapons for later.

I second this!

 

[Skeleon]

Reminds me of WC3: Frozen Throne. In the Undead-campaign, Arthas actually grew weaker from level to level as the Lich King lost his power. It was a nice twist to the usual formula, although it was somewhat undermined by the fact that your bug-hero levelled normally.

 

[head desk tricycle]

This is a pretty old discussion, and I've had some dumb arguments with people over whether this constitutes an RPG, but whatever. Oregon Trail is exactly what you're describing, and it works out great. You start with a giant pile of money and you can buy yourself out of every problem, but over time the money runs out and you're forced to do more and more with less and less, until by the end you're desperately trying just to figure out a way to survive, maybe one of your guys randomly died of typhoid because you couldn't afford to take care of him right then so you've already given up on zero casualties, in any case you can't hold it together any longer and you're just praying for that finish line to come. I understand that you are an aficionado of FTL which I've been told is a similar kind of game except in a space setting, so maybe it's moot by this point anyway.