RPG Design: Making the Tough Decisions
When I lived in the Washington DC area, I loved to go to the National Air & Space museum - it's literally my favorite place in the city. I once spent one Saturday a month for an entire summer exploring that place, and I'm still not convinced I had seen everything. Many years ago, I got to go to DC with my wife on vacation. She wanted to hit the museums - particularly the natural history museum - but I convinced her to come to the Air & Space Museum with me for a few hours.

As luck would have it, that season they had a wing devoted to a Star Trek exhibit. My wife wasn't nearly as excited about rockets and jets, but she loves Star Trek. Since the original TV show was older than either of us, we never really understood a big part of what made the show awesome. We didn't realize its history.

And we had no clue how insidiously revolutionary Star Trek really was.

Sure, we'd heard that the first interracial kiss on television was on Star Trek. But we didn't think about the fact that George Takei became a key cast member during the height of the Vietnam conflict, when all Asians were being stereotyped as something far different from Sulu's friendliness and professionalism. We didn't realize that in the late 60's, you just couldn't deal with topics such as racism, or the Mutual Assured Destruction policy in the cold war era, or any of these charged topics directly on television --- but Star Trek's science fiction metaphor allowed it to explore these topics indirectly.

Rock, Paper, Shotgun had an article yesterday ripping into a particular moral choice in Bioware's sci-fi RPG Mass Effect, called Morality Tales - Bioware Versus the Issues. John Walker gives props for the issue being an interesting one with real-world moral or ethical implications. he indicates that it is a step in the right direction. But he also expresses his disappointment that the issue takes place inside a vacuum - and he's not meaning outer space. Without the full means to explore the issue or any significance on the game itself, the decision does not become meaningful.

I've not yet played Mass Effect (I was waiting for the PC version, but the DRM made me hesitate...), so I can't discuss this matter specifically. But as a general statement of things, I'd have to agree with Walker.

Video games have the same power as television, movies, and books to explore important issues - and to allow players the chance to actually explore the "tough decisions" in a the safer analog of the game. This is especially true in such story-driven genres as RPGs. But we can't just toss these kinds of issues around off-handedly or in a trivial manner, and expect critical acclaim.

For all of its faults and poor design, at least Super Columbine Massacre RPG! did try to tackle these kinds of issues head-on, with no masking metaphor at all except for the shocking transposition of a real-life tragedy into the made-up gameplay of a 16-bit style RPG. But there are other, better examples. RPS also explored a little bit of darkness in a relationship and difficult decisions (with real meaning and consequences) in the article Heather And Me, about the critically acclaimed but woefully overlooked RPG Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines.

I guess it would be silly to suggest that the successful RPG-making powerhouse Bioware seek to emulate the dead-and-buried Troika Games. But I don't know that tough, meaningful decisions would either contribute or detract from commercial success. But the metaphors of video gaming - like Star Trek in the late 60's - can provide designers and audiences with a safer, less stressful context in which to explore real-world issues.

I'm not really suggesting that Star Trek was the high point for television as a cultural medium. But for being such a "silly" science fiction show that people tended not to take seriously, I think it probably had a greater cultural effect than we give it credit for (and I'm just not talking about the geek culture, either). I strongly believe video games could do the same thing. We just need to learn to do it in such a way that it is neither trivialized nor heavy-handed.

Labels: Game Design, Geek Life, Politics

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 1:03 PM (Permalink) 0 comments links to this post

 
RPG Combat Option Opinions
You are facing a hungry ogre, wielding a club dotted with spikes rusted brown with blood. What do you do?

(A)ttack
(P)arry
(C)ast
(U)se Item
(F)lee

One thing I've been looking at of late is the number of practical options available to players in combat in RPGs. At a certain point, too many options lead to frustration - especially amongst less experienced players of the genre. Too few options can lead to boredom.

The above is not too unlike something you might see in a vintage 16-bit jRPG, or in a first-person western RPG in the 1980s. Wizardry, Final Fantasy, you name it.

Fast forwarding about a decade to Diablo II - your effective choices are constrained due to the pressure of real-time to move, attack, use a loaded special ability, and to use a potion (which we could break down to healing or mana regeneration). That's four (or five), at least of what I normally used. Swapping special abilities or swapping weapon sets is also an option, though less commonly used in the heat of battle (though I'd fumble through swapping special abilities a lot). Other options were certainly present, but less practical in real-time combat.

Oblivion? You had movement, two practical attacks using your currently equipped weapon, blocking, and using your currently equipped spell or special ability. That's five. Swapping spells or equipment was always possible, but more of a secondary option.

It seems like the practical "sweet spot" for choices is around 4 or 5 options, regardless of whether or not it is a turn-based or real-time. Some leeway is often given for players to go outside the box a little bit and attempt a secondary option.

Casual RPGs - and I'm thinking Aveyond, Cute Knight, and Empires & Dungeons - offer tend to come in on the lower end of the count. Is this a case of the games keeping things simple for a less experienced audience?

Spells are a special case, as in many games this opens up an entire sub-menu of options that break my entire theory here.

So I don't know if I've come to a definite conclusion over whether I'm looking at a sweet spot, historical legacy, or just making up pictures in clouds yet.

Labels: Game Design, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 10:07 AM (Permalink) 11 comments links to this post

 
Game Design: Mixing Turn-Based and Real Time
Indies aren't always more open about their current projects in development than mainstream developers, who usually have a veil of secrecy enforced by publisher contracts and non-disclosure agreements. But sometimes, members of the indie game development community open up with current challenges facing development. Sometimes they solicit the opinion of other developers or their own customers for suggestions for dealing with the quandary-of-the-month.

This can be a little bit like offering tours around the sausage factory. In general, gamers really don't want to know how the products of their hobby are made. But a few of us do. Even before I was a game developer, I was fascinated with the nuts-and-bolts of how games get made. I loved looking behind the curtain.

Now that I am a developer, I have another reason for appreciating these looks into design and development. Often, I am dealing with similar problems. Even if the solution suggested isn't applicable to my particular issues, I just appreciate knowing that I'm not the only one struggling with these kinds of things.

Such is the case for me with Mike Rubin, in his latest chapter about the difficulties moving from the text-interface world of Interactive Fiction to the more fully-detailed "virtual" 3D world of Vespers 3D. In this installment, he deals with the issues of integrating a real-time interface and movement system into what is, at its heart, a turn-based game.

You Got Turn-Based Chocolate In My Real-Time Peanut Butter

Time in the text-based game was largely literary or turn-based. The world patiently awaited the player's next action via a text parser. Distances in text adventures are abstract - crossing a large garden might take exactly the same amount of time as crossing a tiny room. Text is inherently static - we would balk if words changed as we read them.

But you take a game designed around that paradigm, and translate it to a visual world where players expect real-time motion and action... and it gets weird. Rubin notes that even something simple like an idle animation can get weird when the AI does nothing but repeat their actions while waiting to react to player input.

I've run into exactly the same issues with Frayed Knights. I do not want time to progress while the player is just standing there, doing nothing. I'm deliberately trying to maintain a more leisurely pace with the game. But one of many 'resources' of the game is time - which I calculate in abstract "turns." How do you reconcile that with movement? My solution was simply to progress time by fractions of a turn for distance traveled. Not an optimum solution, but it worked.

Another noteworthy comment is how a design decision on one element of the game can impact so many others.

I recommend giving the article a gander!

Labels: Game Design

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 5:00 AM (Permalink) 3 comments links to this post

 
Classic RPG Design and the Art of Exploration
And now, I want to explore.

Writer Tyson McCann has an article at GameBanshee about design virtues of older computer RPGs, entitled What an Old RPG Can Teach Today's Designers. In it, he talks about how much fun he is having playing an old RPG (specifically, Might & Magic: World of Xeen) in DOSBox, and it's not for nostalgia's sake. He's enjoying the game fully, and finding a bunch of game design points that made these games the classics that they are - design elements that have been forgotten and neglected by modern RPG designers. As he went through the list, I felt I should staple this list to my forehead:

• Reward Players For Exploration
• Big Rewards for accomplishments
• Average fights were pretty easy. Big fights were fierce.
• No scaling of encounter difficulty to keep things exactly at your level.
• Specific to Might & Magic - but cut monster respawns to encourage further exploration.
• Make the game unique and quirky, so it stands out.
• Simplification of micromanagement as you progress

One point he repeats is how several of these elements encourage exploration of the game world. There are skills in the game (and in some other games, too, like Wizardry 7) that are there for no other reason than to allow exploration, like mountaineering and swimming. There are plenty of rewards for exploration. The lack of respawns encourage further exploration. The variability of encounter difficulty makes exploration more exciting. Scorpia has written about this before, as have many others.

This has made me ponder. Which helps me concentrate on something other than the pain of a staple in my forehead.

Exploration is a big deal - perhaps not a requirement of the genre but certainly a hallmark of the best games in its short history. But too often in modern RPGs it is extremely limited, or ... unsatisfying. What was the difference?

Worlds were somewhat easier to make back then, due to the predominantly tile-based approach to world construction. As a developer, the tiles - while boring and repetitive - really constrained the action so we didn't have to worry about physics bugs, getting stuck in the geometry, pathfinding problems (well, not as much), and so forth. The difficulty of getting all these things to work together in a freeform world is daunting - whether in 2D or 3D. 3D worlds are just exponentially more challenging.

A similar issue with exploration comes with the difficulty of creating content for modern RPGs. When a single dungeon takes so much time and effort to construct (as opposed to the tile-based days, where a designer could whip up a 10 x 10 grid with a handful of interesting encounters in a few hours), do you really want to spend so many man-months of effort and expense on optional content that only a handful of gamers will ever see? Theoretically, the old 2D RPG game designers could have built their worlds pixel by pixel. Come to think about it, I think Bioware actually did just that, with Baldur's Gate series. But it wasn't just a limitation of technology, I feel, that stopped the hand of most RPG designers from attempting this. It was also judicious application of available resources.

Both of these issues, in my opinion, could be resolved by adopting the idea of less granular building blocks for the 3D world. Yes, this means more repetitive pieces of content, arranged with tighter constraints, in a 3D world. However, the Elder Scrolls series, the Neverwinter Nights series, and I'm sure many other modern CRPGs - have had their own approaches to this very idea. But I think a lot more could be done here.

Another issue that comes up with modern game design is the worry about "game balance." If we give the player so many rewards for exploring the game, won't it make the end-game too easy? Won't it be harder to test and balance if some players finish the game at level 15 with only the standard magical gear, while other players finish the game at level 25 with assorted uber-weapons picked up through 20 hours of poking about the world?

McCann's answer would appear to be "so what?" I kinda like that answer. With all the talk about difficulty levels, and magical auto-scaling difficulty levels, and... well, wouldn't this - at least in part - put the difficulty level in the hands of the player where it belongs, and let him (or her) handle it organically? Boss monsters got you down? Try a little extra adventuring first!

And finally, there's the concern about players getting lost and frustrated in the face of too much open-ended gameplay. I have quite a few unfinished RPGs from that era that I lost interest in because I lost track of what I was doing, where I was going, or even what my next objective should be. But I don't think that is a problem with exploration-friendly worlds, exactly. Oblivion showed - perhaps too well - how an environment could be left open to exploration without letting the player get too lost or confused about his next step.

I think these are all legitimate concerns which face modern designers. And they go a long way to explain why so many games these days - RPGs and otherwise - are extremely linear in their construction. But I think they are not insurmountable challenges. I think there's plenty of room for inventive approaches to these problems that might help game developers combine modern design sensibilities with some of the classic - and successful - gameplay elements of classic CRPGs.

Labels: Game Design, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 7:36 PM (Permalink) 11 comments links to this post

 
RPG Design: What Does It Con?
Our pen-and-paper RPG playing group has an annoying tendency to try and fight impossible odds.

We left poor John dazed and confused when our group of 4th level characters managed to wipe out an elder werewolf. Improved Trip, plus some Enlarged wolves summoned with a wand in tight quarters managed to give us some pretty amazing advantages and pull off the impossible.

On the other hand, I've had the players try and go toe-to-toe against a giant ape demon that they've had no business trying to fight. By the time they realized they were way out of their league, it was too late to avoid casualties. I had to frantically figure out how to give them a plausible escape route to avoid a total wipeout.

This is hardly unique to us. I remember, as a kid, trying to take some non-verbal cues from the Dungeon Master to try and figure out if we were facing a combat encounter, or an "Oh, time to pretend to be blown away by epic coolness of our enemy" encounter. You really didn't want to guess wrong on those. Sometimes it would be obvious, if you knew the game. When you encountered a huge red dragon or a beholder at level three, you knew that it was time to negotiate, not fight.

Single-player computer RPGs kept it pretty simple. There were really four situations:

#1 - You could kill it. No guarantee that you WOULD, but it was designed to be smacked down.

#2 - You were over your head and would die, but you could re-load a saved game.

#3 - You were watching a cut scene or dialog sequence.

#4 - Said creature was unable to be targeted in an attack.

Later, some multiplayer computer RPGs (AKA "MUDs" or other flavors of "Multi User..." something-or-another) instituted a command to gauge the danger of a monster called "Consider", or "Con" for short. It was made even more popular in EverQuest, but in modern MMORPGs, enemies are frequently color-coded automatically for your convenience.

Few things pissed off players more than seeing a "mob" under-conned. Meaning, they are much, much harder than their color-coding suggests. Except, maybe, in a single-player game, being forced into a whiny, sniveling dialog sequence or cut-scene with a bad guy they figure they are powerful enough to take down.

Assuming there is a point to be found here, it might be this:

I like the idea of having things beyond the characters' (current) capabilities to take down, which requires some other strategy than just "brute force." Like, oh, I don't know... avoidance. Or negotiation. Or treachery. Or... well, something other than a stand-up fight.

However, too often, such a thing really comes across as little more than smacking the player upside the head with the plot hammer. Like my young D&D playing, searching for clues from the DM that we were facing his pet NPC that he really didn't want us killing. The problem is that the players are supposed to be heroic, and dealing with "impossible" enemies is what heroes do. So simply having a peasant warn the player, "Oh, beware the dragon, who has killed a hundred men this year!" is more like an invitation.

I've talked about "brute force" problem before, in general. But specifically - assuming you are taking the approach that not everything the players encounter is designed to be easy enough to take down in due course. Assume, secondly, that you are trying to be all non-plot-hammer-esque, and you want to preserve the option for the player to TRY and take down said uber-foe. They can give it a shot, and maybe even come back later (after they've leveled up a bit) and take him down. But what you don't want to do is let the players think they are supposed to fight.

What's the best way to do it? And while I'm looking specifically at computer RPGs here, some suggestions for pen & paper to avoid future total party wipeouts that would be similarly applicable would be nice.

Should enemies be color-coded, to represent some practiced calculation on the part of wary characters? This is the simplest solution, but it also takes out a few elements of surprise. Like the bunny rabbit from Monty Python.

Should it be an active skill for the characters? Sort of like an "appraise" skill for item value, but for enemy difficulty?

Maybe a dramatic cut-scene the player sees when he or she gets close? The bad guy wiping out another group of adventurers? Okay, I hate this idea as a general rule, though done once in a while for dramatic effect, it's cool.

Or should we just stick with the tried-and-true "oops-reload-saved-game" system?

Labels: Game Design, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 10:02 PM (Permalink) 9 comments links to this post

 
Gamasutra on Dialog Systems
When you ain't killin' em, you are talkin' to 'em.

Gamasutra has a fairly in-depth article on the design of dialog systems in games. pros and cons of various approaches, and historical notes on where they have been used and progressed.

As this is pretty near and dear to the hearts of most RPG and Adventure gamers, I thought I should pass this along:

Defining Dialog Systems

Labels: Game Design

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 8:32 AM (Permalink) 2 comments links to this post

 
Favorite Abusively Difficult Games
After our discussion yesterday, numerous (but not all) folk suggested that people who preferred more challenging "do it yourself"-ness in games were in the minority. I admitted that I, too, get frustrated in games, and while I usually do not want to be led by the nose, I often find myself saying, "Okay, I give, what am I supposed to do now?" For me - figuring it out for myself and conquering the tough challenges on my own is a big part of the fun. But there's a fine line between "fun" and "frustration" when it comes to difficulty or confusion level, often related to the quality of the game.

This got me thinking about really hard games. I'm talking the practically abusive games that we love. The ones where you think the designer(s) had some kind of passive-aggressive hatred of players, and wanted to punish them. The kinds of games that seemed to want to bend you over, spank you with a pledge paddle, and make you say, "Thank you sir! May I have another?"

You don't see many of them these days. At least, you don't see many of them where there isn't some kind of difficulty level setting so you can dial it down to taste. I have been playing a couple of old Nintendo games from the 8- and 16-bit era, and noted that designers of the era still had that coin-op arcade-game mentality, killing the player within two minutes as if the NES needed a constant diet of quarters.

But some games are worse than others. Even some arcade games just seemed to reach out and almost physically pimp-slap the player. At least, they did to me. Maybe it was just because I sucked. But, for some reason, a few of them I still loved, in spite of our abusive relationship. The games turned my crank as they beat me to a pulp. I never really grew to be their master, but in some cases I played long enough and hard enough that I could at least hold my own for a while.

Here are the most abusively difficult games that I still loved in spite of - or because of - the punishment they doled out on me:

Sinistar
I heard in an interview with one of the developers that this arcade game was originally a lot easier, but the manufacturer was worried that it would not suck down the quarters fast enough. So they cranked up the difficulty to a level for release, and now simply beating the first level is something of an accomplishment. I think I've made it to level three once or twice. Once Sinistar becomes "live," you'd better pray you've created enough Sinibombs, because that giant space station with a face will hunt you through the entire map, knocking asteroids out of his way, and then EATING YOU. In space. The game is sheer evil, and is one of my favorites from the arcade.

"Beware, I live!"

The Bard's Tale
Okay, I'd forgotten about how horribly difficult this one was just to get started on. If you decided to create your own party - one without the bard's starting gear of a magic horn (am I remembering this correctly? Help me out here, guys... it's been a while), you ended up facing some kind of Darwinian "survival of the fittest" thing where the survivors of a dozen failed attempts to get through the first two hours of the game would end up getting together into some kind of "super-party" which actually had a prayer of making it through fifth level or something. Again, the details are sketchy, and I don't remember how easy it was to save or load games. But I imagine the overpowered default starting party came about as a result of playtesting, when the QA guys screamed bloody murder about how they would NEVER see the end of the game.

Falcon 4.0
The game had a manual with lessons in it that mirrored actual flight school for F-16 "drivers," co-written by an actual F-16 instructor. And you needed to go through them, because the game was hopelessly complicated. Just getting your missiles armed and ready to fire and in a radar mode where they could actually hit something took some serious effort. In real life, this all makes sense, because you don't want pilots accidentally thumbing the "A" button and sending a missile off to blow up whatever little passenger plane happens to be within 20 miles in front of them.

The first time I got into a particular type of stall, I swore the game was bugged, because it didn't behave anything like a real aircraft. I later discovered a whole chapter in the manual devoted to this condition, which arises because the F-16's on-board computer gets confused by the fact the plane is going "backwards" (it's dropping tail-first). You have to first hit the "manual override" button to disable the fly-by-wire interpretations of your control inputs. So, I guess you could say it's a bug, but it's actually an accurate simulation of a real-world bug and standard operating procedure of the F-16 Fighting Falcon.

Add to this some enemy missiles that were practically impossible to dodge, bombs that would blow YOU up if you dropped them too low, insanely complex operating procedures for locking and firing a maverick missile at a tank, landing gear that felt like it was made out of glass and required HOURS of practice just to learn how to land properly, and a dynamic campaign that felt like drinking from a firehose with sheer task overload, and you had a torture device masquerading as entertainment. Amazingly, I thought this was incredible fun. I still do. Blowing up a tank in a video game is no big deal. Blowing one up in Falcon 4.0 was an accomplishment that almost made you believe the Air Force could set you in a cockpit of the real thing tomorrow.

(Incidentally, Lock-On: Modern Air Combat is just as psychotic in its adherence to realism, though I haven't really gotten into it like I got into Falcon 4.0 back in the day.

Streak
This was a game created by my old company, Singletrac. I wasn't on the development team, but I loved the game. Streak was Singletrac's poorly-marketed attempt to go with a new publisher (our new owners) and IP with what we'd learned from Jet Moto. The game was about hoverboard racing, and your maximum speed was based on "confidence" that you built up by doing ridiculously tricky and risky stunts in the middle of a race. And yeah, there were other games that came later and stole our thunder (and got accolades for their innovation), but we were there first. But the game was also pretty vicious in its difficulty level. It was designed, tested, and produced by veterans of the Jet Moto series, and they made a game which was moderately challenging for them. Which meant practically impossible to unlock the last levels for anybody else. But I loved the game. Maybe because I was a Jet Moto development veteran who thought the game was only somewhat too difficult.

Suspended
Sheer evil in a text adventure, by Infocom. You played some dude in suspended animation, who is supposed to be the "brains" of a facility that controls a terra-formed planet. However, you are stuck inside your chamber, unable to physically interract with the world. Instead, you control a handful of robots, each with dramatically unique capabilities and temperments. For example, only one robot has visual sensors and can actually "see" a room. Only one other can hear what's going on. One can perform diagnostics on the machinery, but it always recites its findings in the form of abstract-sounding poetry.

You wake up with the planet in a state of crisis because the machinery falling apart. There are a whole bunch of colonists who are trying to break into the facility to kill you and replace you with another controller. So you have a limited number of turns to use these robots to repair the damage and make things right again. If it sounds nuts, that's because it is. I can't recall how many times I played this game before giving up, unsure if I'd really made any progress.

Okay. There's my list. There are plenty of harder games I've played that I considered (anybody else play one of the first graphic adventure games, "The Wizard and the Princess," by Sierra? Nasty ultra-lethal maze in practically the first room! Well, first location in the desert), but they weren't games I really liked as much as these.

So - your turn. What are your favorite, abusively difficult games? Do you have any?

Labels: Game Design, retro

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 6:13 AM (Permalink) 25 comments links to this post

 
Game Design: Is Freedom Not Fun?
Randy Smith, lead designer at EA, has an article on Next Generation about how choice and consequences are out of vogue in today's game designs. He cites Ultima V as his example - a game that freely let you shoot yourself in the foot, go off the beaten path, make bad choices, and get clobbered by them.

Smith states, "Today, this sort of thing is considered bad and wrong, and we’ve developed some of our most sophisticated design around preventing it... Why do we do all this? Because games are supposed to be fun, and fun only happens when you are pointed directly towards it, when it’s neither too easy nor too hard to get, and when you’re told ‘good job’ upon acquiring it. We’ve brilliantly succeeded in eliminating the interstitials, stripping away everything but fun."

Is this a good thing? Is this the right thing? Randy brings up the "games as art" argument, and suggests that being led around onto exactly the right path, rendering our choices irrelevent, might not be the evolutionary Utopia of gaming that we really want. Smith continues, "I worry that in the course of evolution we created a philosophical divide with exploration, choice, and consequence on one side and goals, scores, and balance on the other. I’m not sure the two sides are equally vital for producing unique, relevant works. Are we so hooked on the escapist fantasy of an uncomplicated life, of reverting to the safety of childhood, that no other games should be made? Have we explored alternatives?"

In her commentary article "Hold My Hand," Scorpia contends that stripping away choice and marking the path for the player every step of the way doesn't necessarily refine the "fun," either. "is so much direction really a good thing? Does having to think about the game and what we’re doing somehow take away from the 'fun'? I certainly enjoyed playing Ultima IV. But it wouldn’t have been as much of a pleasure had Hawkwind (or anyone else) been directing me through the game. "

Later, in comments, she notes "Funny, when I first started gaming - and with some pretty tough adventure games - I never felt intimidated. And back then, I wasn’t doing it professionally, either."

Going back to the discussion yesterday, is this just a matter of audience? The games of yesteryear certainly had technical limits as to how much they could "guide" the player - they even had to pack crucial data into manuals for lack of RAM on the system. But in the 1980's (the era of Ultima IV and V and many text adventures), the gamer was a niche audience. Today, games are mainstream.

Perhaps only a small niche of players like figuring this stuff out for themselves?

I don't know. I'm sort of a middle-of-the-road gamer. My gaming history is littered with titles that I never completed because I got stuck at some point --- stuck, frustrated, and the game ceased to be fun. However, some of the most fun I've had in games has come from puzzling my way through challenges. I absolutely loved solving the Babel-Fish puzzle in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I have a threshold of pain and confusion where I really do want some hand-holding and some good guidance. But I'm much happier - and having more fun - when I am able to tackle those challenges on my own.

I had way more fun white water rafting as a kid than riding roller coasters, too. Am I just an exception? A niche?

Or should this be the next evolutionary change games take a "helping hand" rather than hand-holding*. I think I'd really prefer that. Maybe I would have finished Ultima V if that were the case...



* Of course, this assumes that the game is actually made in such a way that it allows players to chart their own course. Due to development costs for content, designers are loathe to create any aspect of the game world that the player isn't required to see.

Labels: Game Design

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 12:16 PM (Permalink) 12 comments links to this post

 
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) 2 comments links to this post

 
Going Beyond the Monitor
The last few weeks, I have been spending some quality time re-browsing some old, classic RPGs. Call it research. One of the things I've been looking over has been the game manuals.

Remember those? Okay, some of you may not.

The manual for Wizardry 7: Crusaders of the Dark Savant is 128 pages long. By comparison, the entire Player's Handbook for 1st edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons was also ... 128 pages long. Now, the former had slightly larger type and was only half-sized, but still...!

Checking out this manual, and the one for Might & Magic: World of Xeen, I was struck by the thought that they'd only have to add a section for dice-rolling and you'd practically have a playable pen & paper RPG with these manuals alone. They even included a section for new gamers explaining "what is a role-playing game?" Clearly, they were trying to emulate the pen & paper experience for computer gamers as much as possible.

Since I am doing this as research for that little gaming project of mine, I'm finding the books even more interesting now than when I originally played those games. They were thorough, informative, and filled with "fluff" that was of interest to maybe only 10% of the players. In the case of the Wizardry 7 manual, it was apparently a big part of the job of Brenda Braithwaite, formerly Brenda Garno. The hefty game manual had quality born of some sincere attention paid to it as part of the gaming experience. .

The "offline" paper manual has all but disappeared in recent years, aside from flimsy jewel-case inserts that warn of epileptic seizure risks, provide installation instructions, and try to upsell you on more products. With digital distribution becoming ever more popular, I don't expect to see them return. Besides, having the instructions there, in the game, is usually more useful. The paper manuals were there because it was too unwieldy to put all that text on the two 1.44 meg floppy disks, and to serve as a horrible copy-protection mechanism, to instruct the user on how to play the game, and to entertain the players and help draw them into the game's setting.

It's that last part that I miss.

Now, I'll admit - even back in the day, I didn't read through most paper documentation fully. I'd browse through the docs while waiting for the game to install, for looking up questions in the middle of the game, and for those times when I had to pause in my gaming for an extended bathroom break. But I actually read through the very good ones just for their own entertainment value. Browsing through the Wizardry 7 manual - which has gathered dust for something like sixteen years - I'm discovering a few things I didn't know when I was actually playing the game. Maybe that's why I never finished it! My bad.

But there were quite a few that were genuine pleasures to read. They were entertaining in their own right, and reading the documentation actually contributed to the enjoyment of the game. Reading the manual (often while waiting for the game to install) exposed you to promises of the amazing adventure the game had to offer. They helped provide context for the game, immersing you in the fiction or setting in a way that the underpowered computers of the day could not. And the best ones extended the experience of the game beyond the computer in a way that modern games can not.

Origin had some of the best documentation for their games back in the 80's and early 90's. They tried to turn their "accessories" into things that would go beyond merely informing and assisting the player. Their game manuals posed as official documents from the game world. They were entertaining, informative, and extended the fiction of the game beyond the confines of the computer. The Wing Commander manual posed as an issue of the ship's official magazine, and the game included technical spec sheets on each of the fighters (lamentably, those specs were also used as copy protection...) The poor graphics of the older Ultima games were compensated for in the documentation with Denis Loubet's excellent sketches and evocative cover art. Much of the detail that was lost in those early games due to technical restrictions was poured instead poured into the booklets that shipped with the games. The Ultima games also included other accessories - like cloth maps, moonstones, ankhs, and other little touches to try and make the game come more alive in the minds and hearts of players.

One of the best game manuals of all time came with Their Finest Hour - The Battle of Britain by Larry "X-Wing" Holland for Lucasfilm (later "LucasArts"). The book is still wonderful long after the game has been wiped from my hard drive. Besides instructions for playing the game, it also includes detailed information on the aircraft of the era, combat tactics, and the history of the Battle of Britain, and it has a number of stories and vignettes from the battle told by actual participants on both sides of the conflict.

I don't know if we'll see the like of these manuals again. Most of the required function of game manuals has been fortunately pulled into the game itself, in the form of user-friendlier context-sensitive help and tutorials. I'd still much rather jump right into the game than spend twenty minutes getting "prepped" by reading a book. But that little extension of the game outside the confines of your monitor or TV set that the better documentation provided - that was pretty dang awesome.

Can we still have that? Maybe. While it loses its bathroom-and-bedroom reading potential, there are some games which have adopted the Web as the place to make the game come alive with supplemental materials. Depths of Peril, in particular, has provided short stories, news, instructions, and a small "monster manual" on its official website. While many of these elements can be (and are) incorporated into the game itself, when you are playing a game, your brain goes into a different mode that - at least for me - isn't quite so conducive to reading (unless I'm playing a text adventure).

Are there other ways of capturing this aspect of the silver age of gaming, short of actually printing out 128-page manuals and sending them to players in the era of digital distribution?

Labels: Game Design, retro

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 12:58 AM (Permalink) 9 comments links to this post

 
Video Games and Exploration
Jim Rossignol writes at Rock Paper Shotgun about "Exploration Games" and what an important aspect exploration plays in our enjoyment of certain kinds of games.

One of the issues with creating RPGs is that they are usually exploration-based - which means the game developers must create a LOT of content for the players to explore. While I don't know that exploration is a required element of an RPG, when I think about what thrills me, personally, when playing an RPG --- it usually comes down to the feeling I get when I am exploring.

When I played the early Ultimas, I was forever getting killed because I'd set out wandering all over the world, get lost, and then come across some dungeon or other dangerous place in the middle of the map which I just HAD to explore. One of the biggest thrills of both Morrowind and Oblivion was just poking my head into these random dungeons, ruins, castles, and abandoned houses laying strewn about the countryside.

Unfortunately, the thrill of exploration in Morrowind - and especially Oblivion - were nuked by the same problem that eliminated any such thrill in games like Diablo (after your first play-through): The randomly-generated encounters were clearly... randomly generated. They didn't belong in the world - they were clear reminders that the world was simply make-believe and centered around nothing so much as giving you something to do. In a sense, all that random variation actually made things even more clearly generic.

It's the hand-crafted stuff that makes the world seem real and in some way bigger than ourselves.

In a sense, there are two different kinds of "exploration" that I think of - the exploration of breadth and the exploration of depth. Breadth is the kind of exploration we normally think of - wandering around the world and finding new "stuff" of interest. The little Super Mario-esque "secrets" left by designers for those enterprising players who like to explore every nook and cranny. The stuff either on or off the beaten path that invites the player to take a closer look.

The other kind is as I described above - the details that can unfold in the game world as you keep going deeper and trying to explore a little bit behind the curtain. The mid-to-late Ultimas tried really hard to provide this kind of detail, with NPCs on regular schedules, a working "economy" of sorts, and all kinds of extra details that had nothing to do with the core plot - and certainly didn't aid in "streamlining" any kind of interface - but it added a great deal to the experience.

While I'm not opposed at all to the trend of generating more content procedurally, designers should remember that it is no substitute for a ton of hand-crafted, human detail in a game, particularly RPGs. That's what gives the game its life and "personality" - and makes it worthy of exploration.

Labels: Game Design

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 4:45 AM (Permalink) 6 comments links to this post

 
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) 5 comments links to this post

 
Innovation Overrated? Notes From the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness
I finished the new Penny Arcade Adventures RPG, "On the Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness: Episode 1." While nothing has really changed from my "quick take" last week, I thought I might yap on a little bit about it for a while. Because that's just what I do....

The game was simultaneously unlike any RPG I'd ever played, and an awful lot like many RPGs I have played.
From a mechanics perspective, the game has nothing really innovative to recommend it. It's a conglomeration of tried and true game mechanics lifted from a dozen other games, it is linear to an extreme, and there's really not much there that hasn't been seen countless times before. We were talking about a minimalist RPG recently, and while On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness isn't it, from a mechanics perspective it doesn't go too far. The special abilities have been termed "limit breaks" among other things in certain game series before.

Even the exact timing of a defend button (or spacebar press, in my version) isn't particularly new. Though it does give twitch gamers quite an advantage over their more turn-preferring brethren. Too much so, I felt... the difference between an easy battle and a wipeout often came down to whether or not you could time your blocks well enough to take no damage and launch a free counterattack, rather than any kind of tactical decision making.

All that being said - I did play the episode to its end, and I enjoyed myself while playing it. Most of the time. Maybe it's because I'm an RPG junkie, or maybe it's because I'm just not quite jaded enough. But the unusual setting, the humor, the very bizarre puzzles that came off a little bit like a much courser and anti-kid-friendly version of Monkey Island, all somehow worked through what was otherwise kind of a paint-by-numbers RPG. I had a blast battling killer mimes, hobos, clowns, robots, and barbershop quartets.

And I'm a sucker for Lovecraft parody.

While the subject matter was dramatically different, the end result was similar to my play-throughs of Aveyond and Aveyond II. I was delighted by those games. And yet, mechanically, they offered little by way of innovation. Even the setting was - on the surface at least - pretty vanilla (something that On the Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness is decidedly NOT). But the style, humor, and personality of the game was what hooked me. It had a distinctive flavor.

A few years ago, after walking out of yet another summer blockbuster movie, my wife and I were commenting on how much we enjoyed the film in spite of its adhering almost religiously to formula. And we came to the conclusion that there's a formula for a reason. It works. It's the story people in our culture like to hear, in all its myriad variations. It's the variations - and the execution - that counts.

So maybe RPGs don't necessarily need to reinvent the wheel with every game. On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness pushes the genre in terms of content, eschewing the traditional orcs, swords, and wizards for mimes, soul-imbued rakes, and a gadgeteering adolescent. It doesn't need to make people re-learn how to play RPGs, because it doesn't need to. The mechanics were entertaining and challenged me, but didn't attempt to redefine the genre. The story was extremely weird, but also entertaining and engaging enough to keep me playing to find out what happened next. It was like watching a movie, when you rip it to pieces, is clearly an adherent to formula, but is just different enough to keep you engaged and wondering if what happens next is what you expect.

Maybe I'm just getting old and stuck in my ways, but I find I'm okay with that.

Is innovation overrated? Yeah, sometimes. I'm not calling for a flood of paint-by-numbers RPGs, but I think being innovative is often less important than just being interesting.

Labels: Game Design, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 6:23 AM (Permalink) 3 comments links to this post

 
RPG Design Roundtable at Iron Tower Studios
A few weeks ago (during crunch week for me, unfortunately, which might explain the terseness of my answers...), Vince Weller of Iron Tower Studios asked some RPG design questions of several CRPG designers / writers - from esteemed industry veterans like Chris Avellone (Fallout 2, Planescape: Torment, Neverwinter Nights 2, and a great deal of et cetera), Jeff Vogel (Avernum, Geneforge, etc.), and Josh Sawyer (Icewind Dale 2, the upcoming Aliens RPG), to newbies who are still working on their first full-fledged commercial RPG release (like Gareth Fouche, Jason Compton, and Yours Truly).

The questions were about setting, characters, and our preference for "open" or "linear" stories.

I think all three posts ought to be bookmarked on any would-be RPG designer's browser for a wealth of information and opinion on the subject. One thing I keep discovering as I do this is that the more I learn, the more I discover there is to learn. I joke that I used to be an incredibly talented game designer, and that now I am struggling to become merely competent.

Iron Tower Roundtable Part I: RPG Setting

Iron Tower Roundtable Part II: RPG Story

Iron Tower Roundtable Part III: RPG Characters

Labels: Game Design, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 6:46 PM (Permalink) 0 comments links to this post

 
Tragedy In Video Games
Ah, tragedy in videogames! Like when you just pay $60 for a disc better used as a coaster.

Well, not that kind tragedy. Brian "Psychochild" Green muses (and solicits comments) about incorporating elements of tragedy in video games.

While I'm cool with the idea in concept, I'm not positive how to execute it in a game. Tragedy - as I understand it as a dramatic element - is where the protagonist brings about their own downfall due to the possession of a tragic flaw: the human failing that we all possess to some degree, which can lead to failure if not bridled. MacBeth's blinding ambition, Romeo and Juliet's immature but overwhelming teenaged love and angst, and Hamlet's wishy-washiness. Oedipus

I love the idea, but I'm not sure how to implement it within a video game. Basically, you have two options:

#1 - You force the tragic flaw upon the player through backstory or non-interactive elements that force the player's avatar's hand.

#2 - You encourage the player to make the tragically flawed decision(s), and hope that they play along. In which case, you must plan a completely alternate story for those players who do not exercise that option.

Some games do have alternate endings to allow for option #2, but the rest of the story is unchanged - reducing the "tragedy" to little more than an unsatisfactory footnote. Players are rarely pleased to get the "bad" ending, and I believe this is in part because they don't see it coming in a generic narrative that shifts direction only just before the final credits.

However, if game designers would actually tackle this, I believe that interactive games would be an extremely powerful medium for the message. If you can keep the players from reloading or restarting (or quitting) once the ramifications of their actions become clear.


(Vaguely) related tragic failures of writing:
* Why the Quest For Storytelling In Video Games Is Doomed
* Game Design: Fixing Interactive Storytelling
* Games As Art: Media's Double Standard
.

Labels: Game Design

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 8:42 AM (Permalink) 6 comments links to this post

 
RPG Design: Sick Of Saving The World?
I'm tired of saving the world. Saving the world is for wusses.

Lessons From Pen and Paper
I remember my first attempt to run a pen-and-paper game of Vampire the Masquerade. After some really cool character origin sub-plots, we got to the meat of the campaign. I immediately reached for a generic, epic plot of earth-shattering proportions... and found that it was a total dud. It just didn't work. The players were these supernatural creatures of the night who were at the top of one food chain and the bottom of another. Their mortal lives were long gone... and the big, world-saving plots just didn't ring true.

I was stuck for a while, trying to figure out what to do with the campaign. And then, I recalled running and playing an earlier, post-apocalyptic RPG called "Twilight: 2000." It was a "realistic" game of post-nuclear holocaust. High radiation didn't turn you into a mutant - it made your hair fall out and caused you to puke and excrete blood. Your enemies were disease and power-hungry local warlords who'd gotten their hands on a functional tank or two.

Twilight: 2000 was another game where "saving the world" had no meaning. That particular quest had already failed, and the world had been destroyed. That game was about trying to put the pieces back together on a small level. And yet somehow, in our games, it worked. Saving a small community of families from the chaos of the complete breakdown of civilization often felt far more significant than saving the entire world.

To resolve the Vampire situation, I went back and creatively edited the campaign. The "big bad" villain that the players were trying to defeat ended up - with a little nudge from the players - as a victim of his own hubris. What began as an epic but lifeless campaign became a subquest that merely put the players on the radar of other powerful entities... and then things got personal. And petty. Amazingly enough, the little close-to-home petty squabbles and local political infighting were far more interesting - and fun - than the big epic cross-country plot.

What About Computer RPGs?
Having the stereotypical "epic plot" of saving-the-world proportions is pretty common in all computer and console games, and RPGs are no exception. I don't know if it just caters to adolescent power-trip fantasies, or that those generic epic plots have just proven to sell more copies. But they are definitely in abundance. (To be fair - I've not read a lot of fantasy novels in recent years, but back in the day, there was an overabundance of Lord of the Rings wannabe plots, too...)

Stalin said, "A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic." As creepy as that sounds, its generally true. The more epic the scope, the more watered-down the emotional impact of the story (assuming that's important to you), and the more it becomes about numbers. Saving Kvatch (or what was left of it) was a lot more interesting than saving the rest of the world in Oblivion. And saving the world from Meteor wasn't half as satisfying as getting a little revenge on Sephiroth.

Now I am not saying that I don't want any more big, epic, world-saving or kingdom-saving plots. Those are cool, too. But I think we can use a few more computer RPGs that bring the stories closer to home, with fewer but more detailed NPCs, and plots more about people than planets. Once we get away from trying to put nations in dire peril, we can probably start coming up with some more interesting and diverse plots. Things like... uh... becoming an Avatar of Virtue and recovering a codex from the underworld. Or settling a faction war between vampires over a McGuffin that may or may not be the rise of some ancient evil.

I mean, okay, I probably wouldn't be the first one to pre-order Sense and Sensibility: The RPG. But with all this talk of what makes an RPG a more compelling experience, I think one of the things designers need to consider is that it might be time to think a little smaller.

Labels: Game Design, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 12:13 PM (Permalink) 12 comments links to this post

 
Fixing Cut-Scenes
As I've stated before, I believe the natural reactions of players is to move in the opposite direction of what makes a traditional "quality" story in linear media. Successful game-playing leads us to take optimized, least-resistance paths. Good stories, on the other hand, take us along escalating peaks and valleys of victories and catastrophes. Marrying the two concepts is tricky at best.

And so we have the non-interactive cut scene - the bane of games, according to some, but the staple of story-based games of the last ten years or so. Once mere reward sequences in games like Pac-Man, they are now mini-movies cut up into pieces to force players into situations they'd never allow themselves to be stuck in if the game had given them control over the situation. They impose story on the player, in spite of his best efforts to keep things straightforward and boring.

And I have to admit, I do enjoy them. I mean, I was a big Wing Commander fan, and that was arguably the series that raised the stakes on cut scenes and led us to our current condition.

Over on I Whine About Games, Whiner posts a couple of possible alternatives to the conventional cut-scene in what sounds suspiciously like an RPG or FPS game example. Effectively, she suggests something more along the lines of "interactive cut scenes." Or at least breaking up the non-interactive pieces into smaller chunks, and actually providing the player with some semi-meaningful options during the sequences.

This last part has been tried before - even in the aforementioned Wing Commander series - but I don't recall any that worked quite on this level. Wing Commander's mid-cutscene choices tended to go along the lines of "Torque off this person" or "Don't torque off this person," with a couple of more interesting, "Choose which person to torque off." With a semi-cool courtroom multiple-choice cutscene at the end of WC4.

We've made some progress since then, at least. And we do have some games, like Portal and the Half-Life series, which have eschewed mid-game cut-scenes altogether.

So what's your take on cut-scenes? A necessary evil, a benefit to games, or something that can be improved upon? And if the latter... how?

Labels: Game Design

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 6:43 AM (Permalink) 16 comments links to this post

 
RPG Design: Wipeout!
A friend of ours ran what was destined to be a very short-lived "pen and paper" RPG set in the American "West" of the mid-to-late 1800's. A cowboy RPG. In our first or second session, we had to take out some bandits that were holed up ins some tiny one-road town. We were facing slightly superior numbers, but we had the advantage of surprise and what would be termed "initiative" in the real world ... the battle started when we wanted it to start. We managed to take down a couple of their perimeter guards silently. Then we split up our team, had one group perform a diversionary attack to draw the bad guys out, while the second group attacked from behind. With dynamite as well as guns, if I recall correctly...

Yeah, as RPG players often do, we subscribed to the belief that there is no kill like overkill.

The game master felt that his game had been too easy. We won what he'd thought would have been a very difficult combat with nothing but a couple of minor wounds. So the next session, he had us come up against more bandits - a couple of survivors from the first fight, plus a whole bunch of brothers or cousins or something. Whatever the case, he felt that since the last fight had gone so easily, he obviously needed to have us face tougher opponents. Only this time, we didn't get the drop on them. It was a "fair fight." We managed to survive it, though I don't remember how. I think we had two player characters dead, and my own character had suffered a head-wound that would leave him permanently brain-damaged.

I was all ready to roll up a new character and keep going, but the game master had had enough. He felt terrible about how things had gone, and he never ran any RPG for us again.

In a similar fashion, in Dungeons & Dragons (particularly the latest editions), a battle against a dragon by a group able to make preparations and initiate the attack in favorable terrain can be ... well, in my experience, it can be easy, whereas the same dragon would devastate a party that hasn't had a chance to set up the appropriate defenses, prepare the propert spells, and is stuck out in open terrain where the dragon's mobility can come into play.

In dice & paper games, that sort of thing can devastate the game, as a major wipe-out (or worse, a "TPK" - "Total Party Kill") can pretty much end an entire campaign, and isn't much fun for players or the game master. And the largest difference was only the level of preparation of the party. This is realistic - this is exactly how things play out in the real world. But it isn't very dramatic or fun.

By contrast, death in computer RPGs is treated more as a gentle hint to the player that he's doing something wrong, as Scorpia points out. Which I admit is preferable to a weekend-ruining TPK in a pen-and-paper game. And as far as fun is concerned - it is satisfying to make a "virtual comeback" and trounce enemies that had clobbered you once or twice already. But doing it by re-playing the same combat three times robs it of some of the drama, adds a bit of frustration in return, and virtually eliminates the need to "be prepared" beyond saving the game frequently.

The player gains knowledge from the failed encounter which will help her in subsequent encounters. The knowledge that a fire-breathing dragon lay in wait down the strairs will allow her to make intelligent decisions the second time around and put up fire-protection buffs, and maybe replace those fire-based attacks to which the dragon may be resistant with other, more effective attacks.

Is there a happy medium that could be struck here? Would a more cinematic escape, regathering of strength, and a better-prepared return serve the player better than the reload option? Or are there better ways of preparing for an encounter (or realizing it is out of your league) than by stumbling blindly into it and reloading after a horrible defeat?

Mechanically, a game could encourage encourage non-reloading for otherwise disasterous encounters against an unprepared player a number of ways:

* Give the player more options to discover what they are about to encounter without forcing them to fight it first. This is the traditional role of rogues and divination spells in games like D&D.

* The game could make escapes possible and easy to recover from (at least not much worse than the penalty for reloading a recently saved game).

* The game could also augment the player's knowledge by giving the characters a bonus against a previously-faced foe, regardless of whether previous encounters were successes or escapes. This would make the second or third try against a boss a bit easier than just reloading the first fight until victory.

But the question remains - is this necessary? Or does reloading a saved game serve the same psychological function for a player?


(Vaguely) related sleep-deprived and logic-deprived musings:
* Ye Olde Saved Game Debate
* RPG Design: The Brute Force Problem
* Why Can't I Get Past the Stupid Door?
.

Labels: Game Design, Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 8:06 AM (Permalink) 10 comments links to this post

 
Frayed Knights - Feedback Frenzy
And here's another weekly update in the development of Frayed Knights - the (arguably) humorous indie RPG coming from Rampant Games.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a couple of articles about a "red line" test for games. The idea was borrowed from a professional fantasy writer who spoke at a science fiction symposium I attended in college. In her writing group, when they'd peer-review each other's work, they'd draw a red line in the text where they - as a normal reader or editor - would have stopped reading for whatever reason. The idea, during revisions, was to keep pushing that line down, further into the story, until it disappeared altogether. Then it might be ready for reading by a real editor or audience.

I thought this could be applied to games, and that's a lot of what the pilot episode of Frayed Knights was all about. It was a rough draft of the first 'chapter,' if you will, and the feedback I've gotten back has been invaluable. I'm nearing 250 feedback responses so far, and I've read every one. Even had to have one translated from German for me (I only took two years of German in high school, and hardly remember a thing....)

As far as the red line goes, a vast majority went on to finish the episode, even though I felt - from their feedback - that there were a lot of issues that might have dissuaded them from playing all the way through. There's been some really clear responses - some with very long suggestions - as to what people would like to see changed. In some cases, I can't act on the suggestions, because it's just not that kind of game, or it would be cost-prohibitive. But the most common suggestions are

But where fixes can be made, I'm making 'em. Slowly. Not so much this week - between recovering from burnout from last week's mad rush to get the pilot out, to this week's crunch-time for the ol' Day Job, I've mostly been focusing my efforts on paper and planning. And I'm going back and playing some of the "old school" games I'm trying to emulate, seeing what sort of things they did so well (even if they'd not appeal to today's gamer).

The best news so far has been - as far as I can ascertain from the feedback - that the core idea behind Frayed Knights is solid and is appealing to a lot of people. There are lots of rough edges in design, interface, and mechanics that need to be fixed and polished, but overall, I feel pretty good about it.

Watch this space for new updates.

Oh, and while I'm at it - any other Torque developers out there - is DirectX support for TGE just as crappy as it seems to be in Frayed Knights, or did I somehow break something? OpenGL runs great, but DirectX is causing flashing polygons, bad lighting on some objects, and nasty terrain anomalies.

Labels: Frayed Knights, Game Design,