RPG Design: Letting the Player Drive
On Memorial Day, I played an unusual pen-and-paper (and indie!) RPG called "InSpectres." The game was kind of a cross between West End Games' old but hillarious "Ghostbusters" RPG, and some sort of reality TV simulation.

What was curious about the game was how player-driven the plot was. For many dice results, the players were invited to describe their own results. Then, once per game, a player could have a "confessional" in the style of reality TV, where the player sits in a chair and talks about an upcoming scene in the past tense - effectively writing part of the next scene.

For his part, the game master really doesn't have so much to do but plan the bare bones of an adventure, from what I could tell.

The conceit of traditional RPGs is that you are playing a character, and your ability to interact with the game world is limited to being done completely through your character. But many of the newer pen-and-paper RPGs offload some of the game master's traditional responsibility onto the players - giving them a hand in defining the world and story surrounding their characters.

Naturally, this made me think about how this effect could be translated to computer RPGs. Now, this is far most effective in a social setting with other creative players, of course... computers generally suck at making stuff up on the fly of any creative value. But - the potential is there.

We already do this, to a point, when we are given a difficulty slider. We control how dangerous and threatening and challenging the world would be. But why stop there?

Some of this thinking was part of the genesis of the "Drama Star" idea in Frayed Knights --- though it has since morphed into a much more straightforward spell-like effect. But originally I had ideas of the star powers including such effects as forcing the enemy to make a critical mistake, or getting rescued at the last moment from certain doom - stuff like that. Letting the player earn the ability to change the story.

Soldak's indie RPG, "Depths of Peril," showed us a glimmer of what can be done with a more dynamic world. While the player couldn't directly control events happening in the world, he or she had to make decisions that would impact the setting and their ability to interact with the world. Fail to address the "plague quest" immediately, and the player might have to contend with a lack of surviving NPCs to trade with. And so forth.

Dwarf Fortress garnered a lot of attention last year for being a very "simulation heavy" indie strategy / role-playing game. In a game with a highly detailed and simulated world, why couldn't we throw in a little bit of "god game" (a la Populous, the "Sim" games, and others) onto something like this? We could give the player the chance to move outside their on-screen avatar and change the world in big or small ways. Maybe the player could have the chance to say, "Rocks fall, everyone dies!"

I would dread coding up a user-friendly interface to give the player this level of control, but it could be done. It's already been done, in the form of editors and mod utilities. Just not usually in real-time. And not tied into game mechanics. But anybody who has spent time in the Dungeon Master's mode in the Neverwinter Nights games (or in the Storyteller mode in 2000's "Vampire the Masquerade: Redemption") would be familiar with the potential here.

While this idea wouldn't be appropriate for all (or even most) RPGs, particularly very story-driven ones, this could be a fascinating offshoot of the genre worthy of being explored.

Labels: Game Design, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 8:36 AM (Permalink)