RPG Systems

The three interlocking number-systems that make an RPG feel like growth: progression (you get stronger), economy (you accumulate and spend), and loot (you find things worth finding). They fail together — level-scaling guts progression and devalues loot; a broken market guts the reward loop and the economy — so design and audit them as a triad.

When to use this

• Designing progression: leveling, skill/attribute systems, classless vs. class, level scaling vs. zone gating
• Designing or balancing an economy: currencies, faucets/sinks, crafting materials, anti-hoarding
• Designing loot: rarity ladders, drop rates, legendary/unique identity, smart-loot biasing
• Diagnosing: "leveling feels pointless", "bandits in Daedric armor", "players never spend", "all legendaries are stat-sticks", "drowning in vendor trash"

Scope

This skill owns the RPG number-systems triad. Adjacent concerns live in sibling skills, cross-linked from the guide:

• The "interesting decision" test, flow, reward schedules → game-design-fundamentals
• How loot/combat feels (impact, telegraphing, the rarity-effect ladder for finishers) → combat-design
• The single-save consequence model & meta-progression → permadeath-and-lethality
• Spatial gating, where a zone sits in the world → open-world-design
• Generating items/economy content within these constraints, and gating it → procedural-generation, procgen-review
• Systems that interact to produce emergence (currency-as-material chains) → systemic-emergent-design

How the pieces fit

• GUIDE.md — the cited why, in three sub-domains: progression (price advancement, don't scale the world), economy (faucets/sinks, desirable sinks, anti-hoarding under scarcity), and loot (rarity baseline, build-defining affixes, procedural breadth vs. hand-authored identity). Each rule carries an exemplar, source, test-for criterion, named failure mode, and the procedural/headless implication.
• CHECKLIST.md — Do/Don't + machine-checkable Test-for criteria, grouped by sub-domain, written to be enforced as automated gates in a generation loop.

The one idea to anchor on

Build identity is preserved by opportunity cost, not by walls — and the path of least resistance must always be playing the game. Every advancement should spend something finite; never scale the whole world to the player (the canonical trap — Oblivion's own designer called world-scaling "a mistake"); reserve the top loot tier for items that change how you play, not your numbers; and never let a market, an exploit, or a flood of drops outpace the kill → loot → upgrade loop.

Why this matters doubly for a generator: an autonomous author will happily open uncontrolled faucets, mass-produce "uniques," or scale loot to the player — all locally reasonable, all globally corrosive. Hand-author the invariants (the spent resource, the zone level-bands, the finite-legendary manifest, the faucet/sink rates) as declared, inspectable, machine-testable contracts; let generation fill only the common→rare tiers inside them.

Start with GUIDE.md, then apply CHECKLIST.md.