Zero Punctuation - TTLG Forums

DaBeast on 3/1/2009 at 09:31

Quote Posted by Papy

In that sense, I agree. I did say in a previous post in this thread that "I expect every choice I have at the start of the game to be viable". The thing is I already had a similar conversation before and the general trend was : a role playing game should not "punish" the player for developing any skill in particular in any way.

Here's a question : Suppose I decide to roleplay an intelligent, but weak, fighter. What I mean is I will choose a fighter class and put a lot of skill points in intelligence, but almost none in strength. Now, suppose that because of my choice, the game becomes almost unplayable. Would you say this is a flaw? Ostriig said that this is not an issue with the game but rather with the player being bad with that class. Would you agree?

If you choose to play as a high int fighter, then you bring that weakness in combat upon yourself. Not because you are playing it wrong(...well technically you would be playing it wrong), but because classes are so linear in a way that in order to play as a fighter in pretty much all RPG's, the fighter must be made a certain way. That's a design issue/limit inherent with all RPG's.

It would be great to have a really smart barbarian who could use his brainpower to, I dunno, use his surroundings to his advantage or something smart, I suppose he could bombard his enemies by reciting the standard particle model while he hacks them up or something :P

The initial point with punishing the player by making the game harder or easier by poor design choice for any particular class. In a way classic RPG's expect you to follow the tradition, which is something I don't really like about RPG's, as I mentioned before this can feel forced. Like regardless of how you build your character, there is the way the developers want it done with some leeway for your own personal taste. I prefer to see my input affect the game world as I play through it rather than simply improve a certain attribute of my character by .000x%.

Quote Posted by Papy

Before I continue, I have three questions about semantics and the English language because I feel I don't know enough to communicate efficiently. First, do "role playing" and "playing a role" have the same meaning? Second, is there a difference between "acting" and "role playing"? Third, what is the difference between a "game" and a "toy"?

I think you have a pretty good grasp of English tbh. I'm constantly impressed by continental Euro's :P

Playing a role is indeed role play. Acting is something done by actors for a film or theatre etc, role playing is ....(http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=nYc2JWSpSvI&feature=related) lol. (could also include couples trying to spice up their sex lives). In computer game terms its debatable I suppose.

A childs' (http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=3IET9wqG59o) toy would be anything other than a video game I guess. A game is generally something one or more people play for fun. A game can be played using toys and the like, or you could play a board game, from which RPG's are descended...I think.

Silkworm on 3/1/2009 at 21:23

Quote Posted by Papy

So how do you call games where your choices of where you invest your skill points matter to the outcome of the situation?

Skill points change the way players must deal with situations, but there shouldn't be right and wrong answers to how you should invest them.

Remember that RPGs started out as little more than acting toys, NOT games. Pen and paper games like Dungeons and Dragons were extremely flexible in their rules and what they inspired in the imaginations of participants. They were FAR from being "challenges" that you had to plan out and "solve." Pen and paper games like D&D were acting toys where you developed your alter-ego in an alternative world, they were about creating characters and worlds, not being put inside pre-made worlds.

Fortunately, good games are not bound by this paradigm, and we do have well crafted challenges and obstacles. But character creation itself should not be one of them.

Matthew on 4/1/2009 at 00:23

Silkworm is correct in that analysis, I believe.

Papy on 4/1/2009 at 09:03

Silkworm : Actually, except for the DM, players were put inside pre-made worlds. I did play as a DM a few times, and although my worlds were flexible (I was improvising most of the time), those worlds were never a player centric theme park. The world was an entity by itself and players had to adapt to it. Of course, I was also somewhat adapting my worlds to the players, but I would never have compromised common sense or "logic" simply to please them. I gave them clues, but if they still insisted to live their fantasy and make something stupid, I had no problem punishing them. I did kill a few characters. You may say this does not follow the original spirit of role playing games, but the truth is we got bored quite quickly with this original spirit, so we all ended up seeking something with more intellectual depth. In the end, contrarily to popular belief, I think this way of playing is far more useful for introspection as it can force someone to go beyond his own imagination and superficial desire.

Anyway I still don't understand why character creation should never have consequence on the ability to succeed. I don't understand why there should never be right and wrong about who you choose to be. I will agree with your point of view if the goal of the game is to be an "acting toy" or a fantasy provider so the player can feel good about himself, but as I think you implied yourself, acting toys are not the only form of role playing games. From a common sense point of view, what you do with yourself pretty much define if you will "succeed" or not. So why a particular RPG, whose goal is not to be only an acting toy to freely live your fantasy, couldn't do the same thing?

If I look at games like SS2 or Deus Ex, I will have to say that for me the most interesting aspect was to know and understand the world around me and to know who should I become and what should I do. I never play those games as : "Hey, I want to pretend I'm secret super-agent so I can live my fantasy and do whatever I want". The fact that I could die quite quickly if I did stupid things certainly pushed me to see those games as challenge based games, not as some kind of tools to live my own little fantasy (in my own little fantasy I kind of... don't die).

Again, I do accept the idea that some RPG could let the player be whoever he wants without any consequences, but I don't accept the idea that all RPG should be that way. If the problem is with the term "RPG", then I will have no objection to use another one to describe games which are not about personal fantasy only. Do you have something to propose?

BTW, since I'm trying to understand why you refuse character creation to be part of the challenge, I will ask you a personal question : do you think every person has the same value? Do you think that, although different people may have different abilities, in the end everyone is intrinsically equal? Do you think we should promote equality as a social value? Basically, I'm trying to know if your point of view is due to deeper philosophical reasons or simply because you want to stay true to a particular kind of gameplay.

DaBeast on 4/1/2009 at 09:14

Quote Posted by Papy

Do you think we should promote equality as a social value?

Why wouldn't you want to promote equality? :confused:

Chade on 5/1/2009 at 04:41

There is a fundamental difference between character progression in DX and Oblivion.

In DX, every skill and augmentation you choose give you a tool to overcome challenges in the world. While there may be some combinations that are worse then others, it seems to me that for the vast majority of combinations there is a playstyle which takes advantage of your chosen abilities.

For every ability you get in oblivion which you can use to overcome challanges in the world, I would say the same thing. I think there should be playstyles to take advantage of most combinations of player tools.

The difference is that oblivion employs a tiered system. In addition to having abilities which you can use to overcome obstacles in the world, you also get "meta-abilities " which determine how effective your real abilities will be. In that sense, it is possible to build a "poor character": one whose meta-abilities do not do a good job of supporting their abilities. In fact, that is the whole point of having such meta-abilities.

So when discussing this "intelligent fighter", we should be specific about the ways in which our fighter is intelligent. Does he have actual abilities which can be used to overcome obstacles which would mark him as intelligent? Or is just all brawn, but without the meta-abilities to support that?

Papy on 5/1/2009 at 09:15

Quote Posted by DaBeast

Why wouldn't you want to promote equality

I'm sorry if I'm blunt, but this is a "dangerous" philosophical question and this is not the place to discuss it. If we do, there's a good chance some idiots will begin to say very stupid things and the thread will degenerate into a series of insult quite fast. I asked that question only to have his point of view, not to discuss the subject. As I said, I just want to understand why he thinks there should be no right or wrong in how the player choose to develop his character, nothing more.

Quote Posted by Chade

In addition to having abilities which you can use to overcome obstacles in the world, you also get "meta-abilities " which determine how effective your real abilities will be. In that sense, it is possible to build a "poor character": one whose meta-abilities do not do a good job of supporting their abilities. In fact, that is the whole point of having such meta-abilities.

I must admit I don't understand what you mean. Can you give me an concrete example?

Anyway, although I've heard about the problem with Speechcraft and Mercantile, which is really the result of a hidden and counterintuitive rule of the game (i.e. the absurd NPC and loot leveling system), I think that in the end the point is moot because the player can always reduce the difficulty slider anytime he wants.

Chade on 5/1/2009 at 21:39

Oh, sorry ... I wasn't saying anything profound ... just using overly obscure words to discuss things which should be as plain as day.

Iirc, the "meta-abilities" are your attributes. I called them meta-abilities because they affect your other abilities, rather then directly giving you something to do in the game world. I didn't call them attributes, because then I would have to admit that I couldn't quite remember whether there were non-attribute meta-abilities, or any attributes which actually gave you any special abilities and weren't "pure" meta-abilities, so to speak. :p

So I guess what I was saying, is that the character customisation in Oblivion includes attributes (meta-abilities), which have mostly no other use then to modify the affectiveness of your "real abilities" (skills, etc), and can be clearly optimised. It seems to me to be objectively clear that these attributes are intended to be "gamed", as you suggest. In that sense I agree with you.

On the other hand, the design of Oblivion also includes a DX-lite simulation, where it seems that almost every combination of real ability should have a play style that works. In that sense I agree with Silkworm and the others ... personally I prefer there not to be right or wrong answers to what abilities I choose.

heywood on 6/1/2009 at 02:35

Quote Posted by Silkworm

Character classes are for deciding how you want to play the RPG, difficultly levels are for deciding how difficult you want the experience to be - developers should never confuse the two. Choice of character build should NOT be part of beating the game, because then it's no longer an RPG at all.

Yes and no. Some skills/stats/abilities/weapons/etc. are complementary and some are not. A large part of the fun and challenge of a good RPG is finding a good combination of attributes to make your character balanced and effective in different circumstances. I'm not saying that there should be a single "right" character build that's clearly better than the rest. But if you choose to build an unbalanced character, you should suffer for it.

For example, energy weapons complement the Psi character class in SS2. If instead you try to pursue exotic weapons with a Psi character and struggle, the problem is player stupidity and not a game balancing issue. By the same token, playing the whole game sans weapons using only the psi-amp is like playing Deus Ex non-lethal. They are both imbalanced choices and should be difficult.

Quote Posted by Silkworm

The goal of traditional RPGs is to solve problems, win battles, gather treasure and experience, and upgrade. Character development not only matters, building a powerful character is the whole fricking point!

And based on your criteria, Deus Ex would have to be considered a bad game, because certain combinations of skills and augs can definitely make the game easier or harder, and for every level there are probably 2 or 3 different character builds best suited for it. In fact, I would argue that certain augs and skills were intentionally designed to complement each other.

I think if you want to ensure that character choices never affect the level of challenge during the game, you either have to make the game very easy or make the choices shallow and insignificant. And then it becomes a sandbox game and not an RPG. The difference is that sandbox games are all about giving the player the freedom to do whatever they want without negative consequences, or as 2K Boston puts it, saying "yes" to the player. Whereas an RPG is about making character choices that have significance and involve real tradeoffs, consequences, and limitations.

Papy on 6/1/2009 at 05:45

Quote Posted by Chade

I would have to admit that I couldn't quite remember whether there were non-attribute meta-abilities, or any attributes which actually gave you any special abilities and weren't "pure" meta-abilities, so to speak.

I hate you. Are you on a quest to give me a headache?

Ok... I'll take an chance and guess that what you mean is some character's skills are there to let the player do things more easily, while others are about choosing a character (cosmetic) path.

As an example of a "difficulty" modifying skill, there was a perception character skill with Arx Fatalis which had the effect to make partially hidden things more visible by changing a bit their color. So instead of a particular wall stone activating a secret door being slightly darker than a usual one if your skill level was at "5", its contrast was intensified to make it clearly visible, even if you were just passing by and not looking for it, if your skill was at "50". The only practical effect of this skill was really to make things easier for the player.

On the other hand, you say (I think) there are some character skills which are purely about giving new options and opening new paths to the player. This is like, for example, choosing between a magic user who can cast spells or a thief who can pick locks. No matter how good the player would be with the picking lock mini game, if he choose the spell skill his character simply won't have the choice to pick locks.

If this is what you mean, then I will say this is great in theory, but in the end the difference is purely academic. In practice, with every RPG there are somewhat equal paths (I mean path as climbing the stairs or choosing the tunnel), which are there only for flavor or to give a sense of freedom, but there are also good paths and bad paths, and I don't see why a character's "career" path should be excluded from this gameplay model. Sometimes these paths qualification as "good" or "bad" (including career paths) are relative to the player's natural abilities, sometimes they are just a test of choosing the correct solution to a problem. As an RPG is not a pure puzzle game, most of the time things are not black and white and the price of choosing the "incorrect" solution is not to lose but only to make things harder for the player. In the end, whether a path is really about the player's taste or about solving a problem is really something the game designer decide. From a general RPG definition point of view, partially using character skills in this "find a good solution" gameplay would certainly not disqualified the game as an RPG. Letting the player be whoever he wants without any restriction is not a required attribute of an RPG.

Just to make it clear, I'm not against having different but equals "career" paths, I'm just against the restriction that each and every character choices proposed should always be equal (as long as those are not blind choices, of course) for all RPG. I understand this gameplay design might appeal to some people, but to me it simply kill any motivation for choosing and, as a result, kill my desire to play the game.

As for Deus Ex, with every discussion about its qualities and flaws, there are always people who says several skills and augmentations were "useless". Maybe this was really unintentional from the developers and so really a "flaw", but the consequence of this "flaw" is one of the reason why I was interested in the game. The fact that they tried to correct this "flaw" with Invisible War is in part why I viewed Invisible War as boring.

In the case of SS2, I view the possible fact that Psi characters were more difficult to play as a (minor) flaw because this was a blind choice at the start of the game. On the other hand I don't view the fact that investing all your skill points in maintenance was not really useful as a flaw at all. The goal of SS2 was to survive, not to let you live any fantasy you can have. Most of the time, in order to survive, we have to do things we don't really like or want.

In the end, for someone who seek a way to let his imagination loose, then I agree every choices should be equal. As for me, that's not what I seek with an RPG. My preferred model of RPG is pretty much real life, not fantasy.

Quote Posted by heywood

The goal of traditional RPGs is to solve problems, win battles, gather treasure and experience, and upgrade.

I'm not sure what you mean with "traditional", but as far as I can remember this was never the goal of Bethesda's games, and yet I think we can now say they are in the "traditional RPG" category.

I'm beginning to think that this whole discussion is about semantics and our own personal and restricted view of "RPG".