RPG Design: Breaking Up the Routine
The party is hired by a village to take out some local bandits. To encourage the bandits to attack, the party disguises itself as poor villagers. The bandits come in search of easy prey, and find that the party is quite capable of defending itself. The bandits are dispatched. The village has a celebration, and offers the party a meager reward for their fine services.

Does this sound like a pretty straightforward - and, dare I suggest, boring - adventure for a party of adventurers? Maybe.

But in "Our Mrs. Reynolds," episode six of the short-lived (but critically acclaimed) science fiction TV series "Firefly", all this - and more - takes place before the opening credits. And then the real story begins.

Not that the whole bandit-hunting adventure couldn't have been an episode on its own. I mean, Captain Mal dressed as a pioneer woman telling the bandit leader, "I swear by my pretty floral bonnet, I will end you" is worth the episode all by itself. But the whole point was that this particular caper went off without a hitch - an actual routine mission - and so wasn't worth more than a passing mention. The fireworks start as an indirect result of its successful conclusion.

Yet in computer roleplaying games (and, true, most pen & paper RPGs), we are constantly facing the routine. We get the endless battles of similar opponents. We get the bandit story instead of... the , uh, sexy nubile hijacker scoundrel claiming to have gotten married to one of the crew during the previous drunken night of revelry incorporating little-known and subtle marriage rites. And we don't get Jane putting Vera the Big Gun in a space suit.

There are two reasons for this:

#1 - Coming up with those more elaborate, twisty stories is hard.

#2 - Generating such stories that survive contact with the player without ramming it down the player's throat is even harder.

Which I've harped on before. But it's making me ponder. Just a bit. Oblivion did a pretty good job of throwing plenty of twists and bends in what sounded like otherwise straightforward, conventional quests. But could more be done? Granted, stories like Our Mrs Reynolds will need to be carefully hand-crafted plotlines in games. But how do we get around the routine?

To give credit where credit is due, 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons has gone to great lengths to help make combats unique by making the battlefield, movement, and variants on enemies in mass quantities pretty interesting. Those tactical combinations can mix things up nicely. But those aren't really story-based twists, those are variations.

I guess the routine is defined by the fact that it is - well - routine. But a good story skips or breezes past those parts, letting the audience understand that "time passes" and routine events do indeed happen without doing a full accounting. But maybe the hesitancy for many players to try RPGs is that it too often revels in that tedium, "the grind."

But is there a better way to handle that what we do now? Can we breeze past the "grind" aspects more easily in single-player RPGs? Can we throw some interesting story elements into even a "typical" combat by introducing a vulnerable hostage or something into what would otherwise be a simple "speedbump" encounter? Can we jump to the part about the sexy nubile hijacker instead of battling Orc Group #300?

And most interestingly (to the game developer side of me): can we do it algorithmically or some other way that does not require 100 designers working 70 hour weeks for 5 years to give us a solid 10 hours of gameplay?

Labels: Game Design, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 4:26 AM (Permalink)