Wednesday, August 08, 2007
RPG Design: Scaling Encounters
When I was a kid in the Commodore 64 era, I had a dream about an RPG. When the dream started, I was looking down upon tiled geography similar to what I'd expect in Ultima III or the soon-to-be-released Adventure Construction Set (which I later used to try and replicate my dream-game), albeit with far greater color and higher resolution than home computers of the time could provide. The way to the east of my avatar's starting position seemd open and inviting, but for some reason, I went west.
Not too far to the west, I found three castles, separated by a pixellated lake. I chose the furthest castle, and entered in the gate, wondering what I'd find.
At this point, the dream's perspective changed to something more traditional, though it alternated between first and third-person as I discovered I was in way over my head. Monsters popped out with the regularity of an amusement park haunted house ride, and I fled from encounter to encounter, soon becoming completely lost. Eventually, I found myself in a high tower room, witnessing a sunset through a huge window. And keeping an eye on a vampire in the shadows, who would creep towards me whenever I let my eyes wander away from him for even a brief moment. The dream ended as I frantically tried to figure a way out of this predicament.
Maybe this dream came to me after I had just discovered The Bard's Tale, and was reflecting the anxiety I felt towards the almost punitive difficulty level of that RPG. You might spend an hour creating the perfect adventuring party, only to have them slaughtered to the last man in a single combat two steps outside of the starting tavern. The success of The Bard's Tale notwithstanding, my little dream game was not an example of stellar RPG design. Most players are not inclined to endure repeated butt-stomping so early in the game.
Most games prevent this by limiting the player's access to the world in the early game. You just can't get to the harder areas of the game early on, until you have accumulated the appropriate keys, passwords, or flying vehicles to get there, or until you have slogged through more intermediate-difficulty locales to get there. You can't get to level 10 of the dungeon until you've successfully navigated levels 1 through 9.
But there's another solution: Scaling encounters to match the power level of the player's characters. As the player gets tougher, so do his challenges, all determined algorithmically.
This has been done for years. I think Ultima III or Ultima IV had the random monsters that hunted your party across the landscape increase in difficulty based upon the number of turns that had elapsed in the game. While not directly correlating to the strength of the player's characters, the end result was that you didn't have to end up fighting groups of enemy Balrons at level 6. Neverwinter Nights featured built-in scaled encounter support as well, both for its own campaigns and as a tool to module designers.
The use of scaling was perhaps most blatant in the recent best-selling RPG, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Quite frankly, there was no harder or easier parts to the game. I learned this when I first attempted to end the daedric siege on Kvatch at level seven. I found it a little difficult, so I decided, with typical brute-force strategy, to go away and come back in a few levels when I could better handle the enemies. Much to my surprise, when I came back, the bad guys had also leveled up. The previous residents of the dimension had vacated in favor of a meaner, nastier bunch.
In fact, I have heard of people deliberately avoiding the "leveling up" process so they can complete the entire game at a very low level (as low as level 2, I understand). Since the game takes such pains to scale the encounters to the player's level, the player never has to deal with anything too tough to beat. Leveling up is almost useless, as the challenge is always flat.
A lot of players really hated the scaled encounters in Oblivion. While it prevented a situation like the one in my dream from happening, part of the thrill of an RPG is the possibility of finding yourself in "over your head." The understanding that the game is throttling its encounters to match your capabilities ruins the illusion of exploring a fantasy world. that is populated whether or not your character decides to visit. The scaled encounters mean you never really felt like you are progressing... your power level relative to the monsters is always the same, and nothing is too difficult for you to overcome (given time and a few saved-game reloads). It denies the player the chance to set their own pace as far as intensity of the game. As a designer, it means creating fewer unique or signature encounters, and making sure that those that are in the game have appropriate variations to use for all power levels.
On the other hand, scaled encounters simulate what a human Game Master would do to prepare an adventure for you, as a player. They allow the world to be far more open-ended, allowing the player to go anywhere without fear of ending up either bored or frustrated from segments that outside of their "challenge window." You do not run the risk of dropping the players into an unwinnable section of the game because they were more aggressive and luckier through an earlier part of the game and didn't waste time "grinding."
So where do you stand on the issue? Are scaled encounters a good or bad thing? How far should they go, if they are not inherently wrong?
(Vaguely) related colorless commentary:
* RPG Design: The "Brute Force" Problem
* Oblivion: The Flower-Picking Simulator
* MMORPGs Broke Jeff Vogel
* Why Do RPGs Suck Now?
* Original Dungeons & Dragons Trivia
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Labels: Game Design, Roleplaying Games
- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 6:00 AM (Permalink)
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In D&D 3.X, If a DM runs straight dungeon crawls where the challenge ratings are always scaled exactly to the party, it can cause just as much frustration as an auto-scaling CRPG. The beauty of having a human GM is that, even if the challenges are roughly scaled for the players, ingenuity and timing can make things feel more or less dangerous. One encounter might only be a challenge because the party is low on resources, while another might only be winnable by thinking completely outside the box. In a CRPG, the former just leads to the player resting up to full resources and the latter requires coding the solution, which means it becomes the default solution once walkthroughs are available.
There is some room in CRPGs for the scaling, however. NWN's engine does an acceptable job, but that's largely due to the granularity of D&D; an encounter that spawns a challenging pair of goblins at first level will not really be a challenge to a high level character, even if it spawns dozens of goblins. If that same encounter is designed to start spawning ogres at a certain level, instead, it is harder to level up and come back.
Still, a lot of this can be solved by, as you noted, gating the world so that the "harder" levels can't be accessed early on. The player may never notice that monsters are never getting any easier because, obviously, these are more challenging areas more fitting the character's increased level. The problem with Oblivion was that it was completely open ended. The game couldn't really predict what order you'd do things in, so every area was as hard or as easy as every other. You could never go back to your first dungeons to show those goblins who was boss now, because now those dungeons were full of high-level goblins and demons that gave you just as much problem as they did before.
There is some room in CRPGs for the scaling, however. NWN's engine does an acceptable job, but that's largely due to the granularity of D&D; an encounter that spawns a challenging pair of goblins at first level will not really be a challenge to a high level character, even if it spawns dozens of goblins. If that same encounter is designed to start spawning ogres at a certain level, instead, it is harder to level up and come back.
Still, a lot of this can be solved by, as you noted, gating the world so that the "harder" levels can't be accessed early on. The player may never notice that monsters are never getting any easier because, obviously, these are more challenging areas more fitting the character's increased level. The problem with Oblivion was that it was completely open ended. The game couldn't really predict what order you'd do things in, so every area was as hard or as easy as every other. You could never go back to your first dungeons to show those goblins who was boss now, because now those dungeons were full of high-level goblins and demons that gave you just as much problem as they did before.
I like the Bard's Tale model a great deal. In fact, I'm sketching out an RPG design now, and in my notes under "managing challenge", I have Bard's Tale 2 as a reference.
I think of the encounters in the BT model as separated off into notional "regions" of difficulty - sometimes they're spatial (a dungeon is going to be more difficult than the surrounding city), sometimes they're temporal (Skara Brae at night was a scary place for a level 1 party). The nice thing about this model is that the player gets to choose when to cross from one region to the next - to risk "getting in over his head".
With this model, the responsibility for managing this risk is part of gameplay. In the "scaled difficulty" model, the risk is smoothed out (to some extent - the scaling algorithm might not take into account the number of healing potions in the party's inventory).
Speaking of old-school RPGs with "regional difficulty", I've gone back and am currently replaying "Autoduel", which I'm finding has a pretty steep difficulty curve at first.
I think of the encounters in the BT model as separated off into notional "regions" of difficulty - sometimes they're spatial (a dungeon is going to be more difficult than the surrounding city), sometimes they're temporal (Skara Brae at night was a scary place for a level 1 party). The nice thing about this model is that the player gets to choose when to cross from one region to the next - to risk "getting in over his head".
With this model, the responsibility for managing this risk is part of gameplay. In the "scaled difficulty" model, the risk is smoothed out (to some extent - the scaling algorithm might not take into account the number of healing potions in the party's inventory).
Speaking of old-school RPGs with "regional difficulty", I've gone back and am currently replaying "Autoduel", which I'm finding has a pretty steep difficulty curve at first.
I avoided picking up Oblivion for that fact alone about the scaling ability/logic of the game.
Part of the fun of most MMO games is to "return" to the dungeon instance at a later time to solo or pwn the content!
It's too bad because until Oblivion I really enjoyed the Elder Scrolls series of games..
Part of the fun of most MMO games is to "return" to the dungeon instance at a later time to solo or pwn the content!
It's too bad because until Oblivion I really enjoyed the Elder Scrolls series of games..
IMHO, scaling challenges to the character's abilities makes sense, so long as there's always a minimum and/or maximum difficulty for the opponents.
So, a goblin-infested cavern may be a challenge for a starting party (say, levels 1-5). At some point, though, the goblins simply can't get any tougher. A party of level 1-5 will enter the caverns and find a challenge. Once the party gets past level 5, though, the goblins max out... and from that point, the challenge of the goblin caverns effectively disappears.
On the other side, consider the haunted castle inhabited by a vampire lord and his minions. That set of encounters may scale between levels 20-30. If you hit the haunted castle with a party level below 20th, just surviving will be a victory. If you run through it once you're past 30th level, it won't be much of a challenge. In the given range, though (level 20-30), the encounters will scale appropriately, so that regardless of when you actually visit the haunted castle, it will be (roughly) the same level of difficulty.
Putting a min/max on encounter scaling lets you keep some level of open-endedness. There's always some general category of challenges that are suitable for the player, without forcing them down a specific path. Despite this, though, you still preserve the element of danger - the idea that there are simply some things in the world that you Can't Mess With (Yet :-)
So, a goblin-infested cavern may be a challenge for a starting party (say, levels 1-5). At some point, though, the goblins simply can't get any tougher. A party of level 1-5 will enter the caverns and find a challenge. Once the party gets past level 5, though, the goblins max out... and from that point, the challenge of the goblin caverns effectively disappears.
On the other side, consider the haunted castle inhabited by a vampire lord and his minions. That set of encounters may scale between levels 20-30. If you hit the haunted castle with a party level below 20th, just surviving will be a victory. If you run through it once you're past 30th level, it won't be much of a challenge. In the given range, though (level 20-30), the encounters will scale appropriately, so that regardless of when you actually visit the haunted castle, it will be (roughly) the same level of difficulty.
Putting a min/max on encounter scaling lets you keep some level of open-endedness. There's always some general category of challenges that are suitable for the player, without forcing them down a specific path. Despite this, though, you still preserve the element of danger - the idea that there are simply some things in the world that you Can't Mess With (Yet :-)
I agreer complete Sam, It's O.K. to scale an encounter, but having a group of demons and other high level monsters suddenly inhabit every dungeon in the world, and mudcrabs turning into giant mudmen is a bit much, suddenly every corner of the world is so dangerous that the little cave outside of town could take over the entire continent.
(plus the ridiculousness of a lvl 1 or 2 character taking out the endgame... when the 1 town guard is ten times as strong as you...)
Brian H
(plus the ridiculousness of a lvl 1 or 2 character taking out the endgame... when the 1 town guard is ten times as strong as you...)
Brian H
Sam - that's actually kinda close to where I think the solution lay, too. Although the thought that I had was that there would be an "optimal" level, but that the encounter would "meet the player halfway" if the player came in above or below that level.
I actually had a pretty extensive system planned out for an RPG that I ended up backburnering until Apocalypse Cow & Frayed Knights get completed.
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I actually had a pretty extensive system planned out for an RPG that I ended up backburnering until Apocalypse Cow & Frayed Knights get completed.
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