Thursday, May 04, 2006
RPG Combat Design
So a few weeks ago I talked about interesting "non-combat" possibilities in computer roleplaying games (RPGs). And so now I'm gonna talk about combat.
I've played a few roleplaying games, both pen-and-paper and the computer (CRPG) variety. In particular, with CRPGs, combat boils down to this:
You have two stats - health and magic (or mana, or power, or whatever they want to call it - a battery that powers special abilities). Those are your primary resources you are trying to preserve between locations where they get restored to full. You may have access to some form of restoration items which can partially or fully restore your health or "magic battery". In combat, you can use boring, "Free" attacks, use powers that draw from your magic battery stat, or bring limited-use items to bear. The objective is to reduce the enemy's health stat to zero while minimizing the consumption of your own resources (health / magic / items), as you may need them in later combats.
In many Massively Multiplayer RPGs, the two primary stats restore over time rather than geography, though geography may play a role.
The virtues of this system is that it is simple to understand, flexible, and generic enough to get a new coat of paint slapped on it to appear different. It can also have a few extra systems layered on top of it to give it depth without much effort (Like Final Fantasy 8's "Guardian Force" system). Some games have spiced it up a little bit with a "stamina" stat or something, which is really just a secondary "magic" stat (once you run out of stamina, all your attacks weaken...)
But can't we have RPGs with a little more interesting systems? The great-granddaddy of RPGs, Dungeons & Dragons, has a spell memorization system which was adopted mainly to simplify tabletop play and enforce variety. But that was dropped in Dungeons & Dragons Online, in favor of a more generic spell point system. This was partly due to the fact that adventures in DDO have about 5x the combat of the tabletop "Dice & Paper" game. Neverwinter Nights preserves the dice & paper system - and it's every bit as complex and cumbersome to use in real-time combat as one might imagine.
One of the most interesting system I've played from the Dice & Paper world was the game, "Mage: The Ascension." As one might expect from the title, magic played a big role in the game. But there were no spell points. In fact, there weren't really SPELLS, exactly. You had nine 'spheres' of mastery which covered pretty much everything in the universe: Time, Matter, Forces, Distance ("Correspondance"), Spirit, Life, etc. So long as the combination of sphere mastery could allow you to do something, you could give it a shot to cast a 'spell' to do anything you can imagine.
So what was the limit, without spell points? Instead of being limited to a finite quantity of castings, the characters had basically a meter of 'risk', called Paradox, which accumulated over time. The more major the effect you were trying to produce, the greater the chance of failure and gaining Paradox. Or in the case of truly blatant spells, Paradox would just happen to some degree anyway. As Paradox grew - either from cumulative spell-casting or from a really tremendous screw-up with a really big spell - it increased the chance of Bad Things happening to the caster (and anyone else close to Ground Zero when it finally blew).
So while it might be theoretically possible for a mage to summon a fire-breathing dragon in the middle of Madison Avenue during rush hour, mages who survived long enough to be able to do such a thing knew better than to try. It just wasn't worth the risk.
This played well into a game system and universe where music was supposed to be secret and subtle. Not the best video-game (or movie) fodder, but it made for high drama. But it was also danged confusing and off-putting for many players. It was too open-ended for many. And players as a rule don't like being subject to awful misfortune by sheer chance. They love it when their OWN weapons score a critical hit against the bad guys --- but anything negatively effecting them has to be highly predictable and controllable or they get annoyed.
Which is why things like Spell Fizzles and monsters making their saves on high-powered spells REALLY piss off players and make them moan and groan to no end on Massively Multiplayer bulletin boards. It's one thing to know that a spell has a 5% chance of failure... but to actually have it fail when it really COUNTS is something else!
One other thing that Mage (and its predecessor of a similar system, "Vampire the Masquerade") did was to partially get rid of the abstract "health" measurement as well. Depending upon your character's constitution, powers, and the type of damage inflicted, you had the chance of reducing the impact of damage even to the point of nothing. The remainder afflicted you in a cumulative fashion, reducing your character's abilities and eventually killing him (or her).
Curiously, the computer game adaptations of Vampire the Masquerade eschewed this novel idea for a more straightforward and "safe" health stat, straight out of D&D, Ultima, Final Fantasy, and about every other CRPG ever seen.
So there ARE alternatives to the traditional (overused?) two-stat "race to be last to zero hitpoints" combat systems out there. It doesn't seem like you'd need too much to innovate in this area.
I guess my questions are:
* What alternatives have been tried before in computer or console RPGs?
* Why haven't they caught on? Or is the hitpoint / magic point system a "perfect" system that can only be embellished and not improved upon (it ain't broke, so no sense fixing it...) ?
* Am I really just rambling incoherently because I need more sleep?
Labels: Game Design, Roleplaying Games
- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 11:15 PM (Permalink)
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Good post. The problem with free form or expressive magic systems within CRPGs is that they're very difficult to program. So, when faced with spending a lot of development money on creating a magic system from scratch, or utilizing a "tried and true" magic system, publishers demand the latter.
I've been slowly quantifying the free form RPG magic system I created for table top gaming for use in computerized versions of my system, It's led to some fun ideas.
I'll post about it some time next week perhaps.
I've been slowly quantifying the free form RPG magic system I created for table top gaming for use in computerized versions of my system, It's led to some fun ideas.
I'll post about it some time next week perhaps.
Simplicity is the key. So starting with the knowns, we want a system where if you get hurt too much you die. How do you measure that hurt? No matter how you do it, you end up with something that is easy to interpret as a health bar.
So now you add in magic. We still want simplicity, and reusing something the player already knows and understands is simple. Sure, you could create something interesting like basing your magic capacity on proximity to power nodes in a map so it becomes progressively more difficult as you move away from the nodes. But that's unnecessarily complex unless it's a core part of the level design and story.
We already have a lot of complexity to deal with in most magic systems. Having a simple representation of magic capacity like a mana bar lets us elaborate elsewhere in the magic system without totally burying the player in complexity.
I like the concept of being able to TRY any magic effect, with the chance of a backfire being based on your level of experience. But then that level of experience can be displayed as something very much like (drumroll...) a mana bar.
Sometimes we must accept that we already have a hammer that will work perfectly well on the nail in front of us. Of course that doesn't mean we should never look around to make sure there isn't a better hammer. Just don't spend a lot of time looking.
So now you add in magic. We still want simplicity, and reusing something the player already knows and understands is simple. Sure, you could create something interesting like basing your magic capacity on proximity to power nodes in a map so it becomes progressively more difficult as you move away from the nodes. But that's unnecessarily complex unless it's a core part of the level design and story.
We already have a lot of complexity to deal with in most magic systems. Having a simple representation of magic capacity like a mana bar lets us elaborate elsewhere in the magic system without totally burying the player in complexity.
I like the concept of being able to TRY any magic effect, with the chance of a backfire being based on your level of experience. But then that level of experience can be displayed as something very much like (drumroll...) a mana bar.
Sometimes we must accept that we already have a hammer that will work perfectly well on the nail in front of us. Of course that doesn't mean we should never look around to make sure there isn't a better hammer. Just don't spend a lot of time looking.
The actual MECHANICS of Mage's spell system are trivial to program - the dice rolls, the chances of failure & Paradox, etc. The trick is the user interface, to allow some semblance of an open-ended spellcasting.
I mean, in theory, you could allow the player to write a programming script in-game to do whatever effects he wants. Voila! Extremely open-ended magic system. But a DOG to play, and very difficult to balance. But that demonstrates the extent o possibility within a computer game - and it's certainly quite open. The trick is getting that into an interface that won't grind the game to a halt and sent players running away screaming.
The simplicity of the health bar / mana bar system is certainly desireable. It's tried and true, but also a little boring. And it makes magic not feel so much like magic. But it WORKS, absolutely.
I was reminded after reading these comments of a 7-year-old article by Ernest Adams at GamaSutra called Let's Put the Magic Back in Magic. Maybe that was subconsciously influencing today's blog.
But would players accept something like this? Something less predictable, less broken down into clear-cut math where the player can analyze the risk / reward ratio with very few variables to muddle up the calculation? And how would it be presented to the player?
Corvus, I'd really love a peek at what you are doing :)
I mean, in theory, you could allow the player to write a programming script in-game to do whatever effects he wants. Voila! Extremely open-ended magic system. But a DOG to play, and very difficult to balance. But that demonstrates the extent o possibility within a computer game - and it's certainly quite open. The trick is getting that into an interface that won't grind the game to a halt and sent players running away screaming.
The simplicity of the health bar / mana bar system is certainly desireable. It's tried and true, but also a little boring. And it makes magic not feel so much like magic. But it WORKS, absolutely.
I was reminded after reading these comments of a 7-year-old article by Ernest Adams at GamaSutra called Let's Put the Magic Back in Magic. Maybe that was subconsciously influencing today's blog.
But would players accept something like this? Something less predictable, less broken down into clear-cut math where the player can analyze the risk / reward ratio with very few variables to muddle up the calculation? And how would it be presented to the player?
Corvus, I'd really love a peek at what you are doing :)
Mage and Vampire have a really interesting combat resolution system, and the abstraction they use instead of hp also is.
The problem is, that if you are designing an action packed game HP/MP is the best way to go. Because Vamp/Mage system is better suited to grittier combats, it's not casually called "spiral of death" for nothing, because your combat potential gets nerfed everytime you get hit, usually the first one to connect a serious blow wins the fight (pretty much like real life, my background on this comes from the Taekwon-Do tournaments I used to participate in).
Another thing i want to adress is the magic system:
-MP is easy to use, and even easier to understand. When i was 12 years old i began to DM, and since I was too poor to buy myself the Dungeon and Dragon books, i began to design my own systems (then when i was older, I bought the books for a lot of games but i heavily "modded" the systems). What i did was to copy the MP system from FF3 and ported it to my Dungeons and Something game, replacing the Spell Levels for MP (basically you had an amount of MP based on your level and the spell's MP cost was it's level).
-More complicated systems, like the power nods system that john suggested, are in fact easier to port to a digital RPG, because you only have to code it once, and then the processor does the math everytime. Those systems in pen and paper games, usually stoped the game to a screeching halt. I think it is only mysterious that we don't see more of those in indie games. (It's not the mainstreams fault, because it's their job to be "mainstream", it is the indies fault, because it is our job to experiment).
-About Mage's magic system, i played a short campaing where we had to rescue a lot of "Saints" like Jean D'Arc when she was at the stake (and we had only a two hour notice, it was incredebly fun to play, describing it as "intense" falls short), I played a mage that had Correspondence and Time abilities (this was about 5 years before the movie "Jumper" by the way), and i had a blast teleporting back and forth from everywhere.
The thing is that i had a blast, but other people were having a really hard time, so then, when it was my turn to dm, i created a extensive spell list, with "safe to use" spells (they all came from superstitions, so sleepers weren't as shocked when they saw them, and the parallax costs were lower), in addition to the free form. All my players had a blast with this system. The more creative ones loved the freeform, and the more strategic ones liked the ability to choose from the safe-list and freeform when it was really important.
anyway, i think it is us, the indie developers that must experiment, we are the artists, the mainstream are the craftsman, they just wont innovate, it's not their job. Always remember that ID sofware was indie at the beggining. And they created Doom.
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The problem is, that if you are designing an action packed game HP/MP is the best way to go. Because Vamp/Mage system is better suited to grittier combats, it's not casually called "spiral of death" for nothing, because your combat potential gets nerfed everytime you get hit, usually the first one to connect a serious blow wins the fight (pretty much like real life, my background on this comes from the Taekwon-Do tournaments I used to participate in).
Another thing i want to adress is the magic system:
-MP is easy to use, and even easier to understand. When i was 12 years old i began to DM, and since I was too poor to buy myself the Dungeon and Dragon books, i began to design my own systems (then when i was older, I bought the books for a lot of games but i heavily "modded" the systems). What i did was to copy the MP system from FF3 and ported it to my Dungeons and Something game, replacing the Spell Levels for MP (basically you had an amount of MP based on your level and the spell's MP cost was it's level).
-More complicated systems, like the power nods system that john suggested, are in fact easier to port to a digital RPG, because you only have to code it once, and then the processor does the math everytime. Those systems in pen and paper games, usually stoped the game to a screeching halt. I think it is only mysterious that we don't see more of those in indie games. (It's not the mainstreams fault, because it's their job to be "mainstream", it is the indies fault, because it is our job to experiment).
-About Mage's magic system, i played a short campaing where we had to rescue a lot of "Saints" like Jean D'Arc when she was at the stake (and we had only a two hour notice, it was incredebly fun to play, describing it as "intense" falls short), I played a mage that had Correspondence and Time abilities (this was about 5 years before the movie "Jumper" by the way), and i had a blast teleporting back and forth from everywhere.
The thing is that i had a blast, but other people were having a really hard time, so then, when it was my turn to dm, i created a extensive spell list, with "safe to use" spells (they all came from superstitions, so sleepers weren't as shocked when they saw them, and the parallax costs were lower), in addition to the free form. All my players had a blast with this system. The more creative ones loved the freeform, and the more strategic ones liked the ability to choose from the safe-list and freeform when it was really important.
anyway, i think it is us, the indie developers that must experiment, we are the artists, the mainstream are the craftsman, they just wont innovate, it's not their job. Always remember that ID sofware was indie at the beggining. And they created Doom.
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