Frayed Knights Pilot Critique and Delayed Consequences
Diego Doumecq has written up a third part of his critique of the Frayed Knights Pilot: The Temple of Pokmor Xang. I thought I'd link to it here, and talk about it (and Frayed Knights) a bit.

Frayed Knights Pilot Critique, Part III

Curiously enough, even in the pilot, there is something similar to the danger-o-meter he suggests. As you fight creatures in an area, the threat level (and chance of additional encounters) decreases. However, that aspect was never fully tested. I've since made some modifications and in the version that I am running, I've actually got something like that running in the UI. But not as pretty - it's just a number.

His speed-run through the dungeon made me grin. I wasn't sure anybody would actually try that, but I wanted to script it out appropriately. And yes, I wanted to make it a viable (if not the easiest) way to complete the dungeon. It needs to be cleaned up a bit, but that was the main idea. Or rather, a prototype for the idea. Was it worth the effort?

I'm going to give a cautious "yes." Yeah, I spent some extra time coding up an alternative that very few people will try, but the fact that it's there means something to me. Best-case would be to have some genuinely organic high-level AI deal with it as a more general solution. But then you wouldn't get the warning dialog.

Honestly, I never thought that I (or anybody else) would consider the lack of feedback to a player as being a virtue. But this brings up the topic for today: Delayed Consequences. Diego writes the following:

"Just imagine it, you made a bad choice but you don’t know that yet, so you go on and use another save just in case. Three hours later, the ramifications of your previous decisions surface and now you have a really strong urge to reload. But that would mean three hours down the toilet wouldn’t it? And you still don’t know the consequences for the other possibilities, so that could also mean even more hours down the toilet.

"Most likely, the player will just go on, preferring to live with a stain on their record than to waste various hours trying to do everything perfectly. He would be taking responsibility on his actions, and facing the consequences without all the metagaming that quickloading implies."

He's speaking of the encounter with Valeria inside the cell. There are basically four states that you can leave poor Valeria in (although one was broken in the pilot):

a) You never encountered her.
b) You encountered her, but refused to set her free
c) You encountered her, and set her free immediately (after an argument within the party).
d) You encountered her, don't set her free at first, but come back to let her go later.

From a design perspective, I really want all four options to be perfectly valid - there is no "correct" decision. But as to which might be considered the "preferred" set of consequences? I ain't sayin' yet. :)

If the consequences of the decision are not immediate, they MUST be non-fatal to a successful completion of the game. One of the cardinal sins of game design is allowing the player to save the game in an unwinnable state.

In theory, I could make sure that every decision is either wrong or right by changing Valeria's purpose based upon the player's decision. But that's not how I roll. I feel that robs the player of real consequences for their decisions. That, and I do like to provide some hints throughout the game with these kinds of decisions, so it's not a flip-the-coin type of issue.

The more fun kinds of decisions like this are when the player is choosing between all desirable or all undesirable options. Kinda like picking the cards in the character generation mini-game of the older Ultimas. Both options are "good," but they take you along different paths. It makes the answers non-trivial.

In the case of Valeria, that encounter was also something of an inside joke, and an attempt to twist a standard fantasy RPG trope. The "damsel in distress" thing is pretty much hackneyed. In some of the older Dungeons & Dragons modules, however, it was twisted so that said damsel, always needing rescue, was also almost always EVIL and a threat to the party. Other dungeon masters picked up on this, and routinely threw this kind of threat into their custom adventures. It kept working, too, because the adventuring parties were almost always played by teenaged boys with only one thing on their mind besides hacking & slashing.

It got to the point where finding a beautiful woman chained to a wall in a hostile dungeon automatically set off warnings. The more beautiful and scantily clad, the greater the likelihood that she was part of a trap. And yet, we kept falling for it, unless we were playing evil characters. Because you just CAN'T leave some woman chained to a wall in a hostile dungeon like that if there is the slimmest chance that she might be innocent.

Invariably, it would be a trap, and we'd get our butts handed to us one way or another. Sometimes it was immediate, sometimes not. And the DM would laugh at us for falling for it. And we'd fume, and vow never, ever to free some scantily clad beautiful girl from the torture chamber of the giants' fortress again.

But there are still yet more purposes for Valeria!

One of the things I have learned over the years is that in games, you really have to meet a character (NPC) a couple of times in different situations before you (meaning, the player) gain any amount of interest in them. Everyone else is a stage prop. I don't care if he's Lord Freaking British, if you only encounter him when he's got his butt planted on his throne, he becomes two-dimensional wallpaper.

Running into that NPC in other places seems (to me) to give them a life, a hint of a story that goes beyond them sitting in one place waiting for you, the PC, to chat with them. It provides the illusion of activity.

But I've got to do a better job with handling NPCs than I am now. This was a prototype, and I'm pleased it actually worked for Diego.

So what do you think? If you have faith that a decision with delayed consequences won't "wreck" your game (but may not make the game easier, either), are you okay with this in an RPG? Or do you really prefer to receive immediate feedback as to the consequences of your actions - the negatives and positives to faction, etc.?

Labels: Frayed Knights, Game Design

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