Just a quick random idea I'm jotting off before I go do some real life chores.
So, power creep. It's an issue in a lot of games, particularly in MMOs or any game that have been around for ages that keeps adding content to itself.
Generally, in order to help the player feel like they're actually advancing, the player is allowed to get steadily more and more powerful. To offset this, they take on more and more powerful enemies and challenges. A common RPG plotline might have you first facing off against local bandits, then the evil king's agents controlling the bandits, then the evil king himself, then the evil king's demon allies, then the evil god controlling the demons. But then...?
Eventually, the power starts to feel silly. How many world-ending events can you stop before it starts to feel like this world attracts more danger than sugar attracts ants? For games less concerned with story, it also starts to wear on the players: either the highest level players are exponentially more powerful than lower level players, making playing together difficult as well as not feeling very realistic, or it starts to feel like an endless grind with no real reward for a ton of work beyond a few extra shinies.
Now, I'm more of a storyteller, so I started to think about this issue from a storyteller's perspective. Most games and RPGs follow the formula of the Hero's Journey. A Hero's Journey goes something like this: The Hero (the player) starts off in the boring, mundane world and is basically a weakling. They keep facing harder and harder challenges, descending into a dark underworld and having to learn difficult (life) lessons along the way, until they face the Big Bad, whom they must use all the lessons they've learned prior to defeat properly. The defeat of the final Big Bad is normally the point where the Hero rides off into the sunset and we never see them again.
Or do we? Old Heroes turn into mentors as well as parents of the next generation, after all!
So what if the solution to power creep is to follow this Hero's Journey: Epilogue? AKA, playing the part of that mentor or that parent. This might take the form of rolling new characters that are the children of your main character in later expansions, or perhaps your role in the story and game becomes guiding a second player or character through their own Hero's Journey instead of embarking on your own. (For those who still want to keep their original characters, in generic fantasy worlds you may conveniently have magic or long-lived races, like elves, instead.)
You might also be able to use the fact of your character is aging as a way of adding a new mechanic and difficulty to the game. You may find yourself facing the same challenges, but you are getting slower, less powerful, less sharp, more in need of the assistance of the sprightly young thing you're trying to teach, until the game wraps up in your character entering the Hall of Legends and crossing the rainbow bridge and a new character taking up the mantle. So playing all the way to a death might be a bit depressing, though there is always the journey of the afterlife to start next, I suppose.
Anyway, just a thought. Hopefully I may have sparked something. 😄
