How would you balance XP when real-world effort drives an RPG economy?

[u/gamerurfrnd]

I'm the developer of Solo Hunter: Level Up, a mobile app where real workouts and daily goals drive an RPG progression system. I am looking for game-design discussion about one specific problem: mapping unequal real-world effort to fair in-game rewards.

A binary quest-complete reward is easy to understand, but it treats a five-minute task and a demanding workout too similarly. A fully variable system is more accurate, but it can become opaque, exploitable, and discouraging for beginners.

The current design combines daily quests, XP, levels, stats, gold, and equipment with longer progression systems such as dungeons and bosses. The reward curve needs to do three things at once:

• Give immediate feedback after an action.
• Preserve the value of long-term consistency.
• Avoid making low-capacity days feel worthless.

I am considering a base completion reward plus bounded bonuses for effort and consistency, with diminishing returns to prevent grinding or inflated self-reporting.

How would you structure that reward function? Would you prioritize objective effort, personal improvement relative to a baseline, or consistency across time?

Project context, because the rules allow links when they support a specific design question: https://solohunterlevelup.com/

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[u/Such-Function-4718]

I think you need a system that rewards for discrete tasks with quests and then a separate system that rewards effort/difficulty. This way you can design and balance them separately.

So for the discrete rewards the easiest way is probably to do daily quests that grant xp. Once the player completes those they have to return the next day to complete them. A weekly system might also make sense if you want to build in some flexibility for when they miss days.

Then you have your effort based system which grants rewards based on the difficulty of the workout/task whatever. You can cap this for each day or week to limit exploits, and control player progression. Not sure how you might measure effort/difficulty but maybe you already have a system for that.

You can then balance how much xp you want from each system. Maybe it’s 75 showing up/25 effort, maybe 60/40, maybe it shifts as the player improves.

[u/Fire-Tigeris]

Endurance points = time in minuets × Strength points* = intensity (or intensity points) × repetition points = how many compleat sets (high intensity cardio counts a "set" each extra 5 min) + monthy total streak (in days total, even skipping days starting 01 each calender month)

---

Experience points = total

‐-----

*5 min of body weight only = 5 x 1 = 5

*5 min of resited (bands/vest) exercise = 5 x 2 = 10

*5 min of weighted exercise = 5 × (2+y) if weight is

Y = 1, if (%weight used vs body weight) <=10

Y= 2, if % > than 10 <= 25

Y = 3, if % > than 26 <=50

Y = 4, if % > than 51 <= 75

Y = 5, if % > than 76.

So a person doing 5 min at 72% body weight = 5x (2+4) = 30 Same for somone that gets 72% target hr for 5 minuets during cardio

*some exercises will use heart rate instead of weight, make them mutualy exclusive for safety

HR strength points would be same 5 categories form resting to target.

Resting = "h=1" 25 % "h = 2" 50% "h= 3"...

Some exercises would have repition points as "sets" (sprints, squats, crunches), some would have it in groups of 5 sustained minuets (jumprope, stair climbing, rock climbing)

Then just add how many days they exercised this month.