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Defining Progression Within Games
GameSetWatch is running a piece discussing some of the ways in which gameplay can progress from simple to complex. The author talks about how acquiring items, new abilities, or just increasing the player's overall effectiveness can make it difficult for game designers to keep their content balanced and interesting. Quoting:
"What do I mean by progression? There are at least two distinct types of progression in computer games, which I'll label player progression, and character progression (narrative progression is arguably a third). Player progression is the increasing aptitude of the player in mastering the game: whether through learning and understanding the technical rules of the game (surface play) or the implications of those rules (deep play). ... Character progression is the unlocking of additional rules of play, or altering the existing rules, by choices or actions within the game."
D&D was the one of the first RPGS and one of the biggest. So it can be excused if it has balance flaws. Fighters only had a certain limited styles of attacks, but mages would get like 10 new types of spells each level. Simply by giving a cornucopia of abilities, a few of them have to be overpowered. The further a mage progressed, the more spells they get, which makes them even more powerful! They just said that mages at the beginning are weak, but towards the end they get strong. That holds up in dated RPGS, but not for MMORPGS where many players judge your game by end game balance because that is where PVP goes on.
God spoke to me.
I think my Frustration Trivia game has done a pretty good job of defining levels... it rewards with a slightly harder question for each one answered right, and throws you back to the bottom of the tower when you get one wrong.
Interesting comment, asking whether or not rewarding players is because there isn't enough in the gameplay or story to keep them playing.
Also interesting was the question about a level 50 warrior's gleaming sword being nothing really more changing than a level 1 character stabbing at a giant rat. This is something that I have felt often in games - as you progress, nothing changes much except the prowess of your enemies. This requires some interesting story mechanics - why didn't the level 35 people just come down and kill you right off the bat if you were so important? Some stories can overcome this difficulty because the story is otherwise so good (e.g., Baldur's Gate, a personal favourite).
I have also tended to think of what would happen if instead of you and enemies becoming so ultra-powerful that you could essentially wipe out an entire town in on spell, would there be a way to instead have your power come from being able to deal more quickly/efficiently with multiple enemies at once? Let's face it, you can train all you want, but it still takes only a few slashes with a sword to kill you. Battle skill comes in killing the other person before he can kill you. The better you are, the faster you can do that while taking fewer hits.
With this approach, "tanks" would not really be in existence anymore; battles would be seen more as a part of a larger scale battle, not you+4 verses 60, and you just have "that much health." Magic, unfortunately, throws a wrench into the equation.
Another interesting RPG comment, this time by me - I have always felt that the most pleasing RPG experiences, with regard to story and gameplay, are those in which I was part of a larger battle, not fighting on my own. Example would be in Baldur's Gate II when you defend your "keep" (Nalia's family's castle). You defend it along with the keep's guards. Seemed much more realistic.
Cake, perfect sign of progression
Not every discussion of a feature that WoW poached is a discussion about WoW. Paladins, as a character class in an RPG, predate WoW by a few decades. So, take your whining about your retribution Paladin to a discussion board that cares... if you can find one.
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Hell, there's probably one dedicated to it.
And the brethren went away edified.
As someone who's actually made a game (Game! - The Witty Online RPG) I'd say that balance is very tricky to maintain, probably even the hardest aspect of designing a game, but yet extremely central to having a fun and challenging game. You can plan out a scale of progression initially, but unless you plan out everything in advance (which is basically impossible), you'll still end up with things that are tricky to effectively balance later on.
You mentioned the idea of giving particular classes more abilities than others, and just by chance at least some of those will be overpowered, making the character overpowered. That's true, but you also have to consider the interaction between different abilities, and with more abilities, the number of combinations grows exponentially.
Starcraft is a great example of balance done correctly, and I think that's the main reason it's still popular today. Speaking of Starcraft, I doubt Blizzard anticipated that people would become so adept at microing just about everything (try watching a game between two good players these days!), and that changes the balance of the game a lot too.
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
SIgh, it wasa ctually better balanced then people think.
First mages 'shoot there wad' pretty quickly
Second - You were supposed to be a group of about the same experience points, not the same level.
Third, hardly anyone actually played with the encumbrance rules.
Forth, They are squishy, even at high levels.
The were design to be glass cannons.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Yep, Macroing was the secret to me SC awesomeness back in the day. I won a lot. But the time to reward factor starts getting skewed and it wasn't worth it to me to start doing global tournies; which were just starting in a serious way.
I wonder if thy made macroing allow more complex macros in SCII?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The author of the article is the developer of Unangband, and it's officially part of his "Designing a Magic System" series, part 12. It doesn't really fit in with the rest, but it's still an interesting read. I recommend checking out his blog, as he's got several other very interesting articles for game devs, such as 20 Underused Game Mechanics and earlier parts of his magic system series.
I was always a Total Annihilation guy. Whenever I played Starcraft, I thought the whole game layout was just dumb.
In TA, if I want to build a hundred rocket kbots, I hold shift and click on it 20 times (shift increments +5). Then I wait a bit, and they're done and hanging around. In Starcraft, nope. You cant. If I want a hundred zerg, I need to babysit the hive they come out of and keep the damned clicking. ANNOYING.
In TA, if I can afford it, I can have 100 nuke facilities each building 10 nukes. No limits on how many I can have, nor is there a limit on how many can be in the build queue. The Humans in SC could only build 1, and using that weak beacon dude was more of a PITA, and then the rush for the dot.. WTF? Antinukes stop nukes, not some "dot disarmer". Should have had protection from the nukes.
The maps in TA are also well laid out, and many have nasty hidden holes in which porcs can camp in, and cut-off points that are nasty as hell. In SC, the maps themselves are a maze to figure out where the resources are. A experienced player using a new map on TA can easily learn it. A new map on SC however, turns out a exercise in futility.
Also the extremely-long cannons make long distance games fun... Dont take out our fusions and you'll be shelled from 20 screens away. There's no such long-distance game in SC.
Air can only be fought back by "special anti-air units". Lame. They should have done it the same way that TA did it: in the config file for units, there was a vs_ground vs_air vs_sea modifiers that could be tailored against a class of units. Even in our military, an AK47 can take down a low-flying helicoptor, but will NEVER touch a 70k feet bomber.
SC paled in comparison to TA.
This is why I don't enjoy computer RPGs, only a subset of tabletop ones. Computers can do RPGs, sure, but not the type that I like.
RPGs can mean a variety of different things. The character that you take on the role of overcoming challenges that come before them (the most classic of which is the dungeon crawl), exploring the world and content of the game (Morrowind or Oblivion would be examples that are decent at this), or playing a story that your character is the protagonist in.
Since it is flatly contradictory for one person (say a game developer or GM) to author a story, and another person to determine the actions of their protagonist in any meaningful way, this leaves the player of the protagonist to author the story. The GM exists to facilitate this story. Computer games can't react to the limitless potential of human authorship without having a true AI. At best such a game run by a game designer (such as in a CPRG) can only railroad a story (be it a multi-track railroad, a very well disguised railroad with the illusion of choice, etc... but railroad none the less).
Progress in types of games I enjoy would mean conflicts that either introduce complications to the story, events which get the protagonist closer to their goals, conflicts that illuminate the thematic content of the game, or similar story oriented events.
Not even the most open and flexible of computer RPGs even start to cover this style of RPG. Final Fantasy series is often the classic held up for story telling CRPG. It's railroaded as far as the story is concerned. The content is there to provide challenges and to explore the world the game designers built. You can't play out the protagonists story, because your choices don't affect the story in a meaningful way.
So called open ended games like Morrowind are similar. You can't affect things in a meaningful way... you can just go on one of several pre-selected railroad tracks the game designers built into the game, so far as the story is concerned.
What you're looking for isn't a CRPG, it's real life. That's the only way you're going to get the infinite span of choices that you seek.
Im not even talking about mod tools. If you want to though.... 5000+ new units each with unique models, and those are the good ones.
And you have no clue on balance when there's a force 1000 strong against a enemy base. Me and my ally would go against the enemy (and their ally) and would routinely get slaughtered... and they would send their wave on us.
On the modded versions we play, we have mech facilities, extremly long range cannons mounted on expensive vehicles, redesign on every unit to create better balance, and overall more units for general mayhem on each player.
Let me know when a Starcraft game will have 10000 units on the field at once. I've been in games with twice that at maximum.
Let me know when a Starcraft game will have 10000 units on the field at once. I've been in games with twice that at maximum.
Which games would those be? I'm always looking for good RTS** games, and while it's not a deal breaker, I enjoy having more units visible on screen. To me it seems to help increase the immersion levels a bit. Helps to give the battlefield a grander scale and all that.
** Actually, I'm more partial to the types of games that mix turn based and real time battlefields such as the Total War series, Imperial Glory, etc - but I still enjoy RTS games as well.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
Meh, I find Real Life to be overrated. The monthly subscription fees are outrageous. Also, it seems like one of those games with limited re-play value, but I hear a couple of expansion packs like the Hindu and Buddhist ones address this issue.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
+1 if I had it to give
Total Annihilation, with a patch, allows 5000 units per side. Up to 10 sides.
It is a bit unstable with that amount though, as it was originally made for 200 per side. A recent rewrite by a modder , called TAWP, allows stably 1000 units per side, with many enhancements in the scripting and units in general. It also beefs up the AI script so that it uses all technology equally.
The TAWP mod was made for overall fairness in fighting between each other regardless of side picked (Arm or Core) however choices for each do differ drastically. I've played 9 players and 1 AI in a nice game that lasted 4.5 hours. Damn fun considering the nastiness of each side. And when the spider called the Cyberoth gets out, not even 10 nukes can stop that damned thing. Took me a half an hour to build though..
I've tried them out, but they just take you through the same stuff over and over again. Islam and Christianity promise unique end game content but I cant find any screenshots on IGN.
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
Perfect BALANCE made Starcraft the best RTS ever made.
And in which patch was that finally achieved?
While I enjoyed Starcraft, personally I thought Myth II was the "best RTS ever made" because of its balance of finite units. You would be given a handful of seemingly pathetic units -- a few archers, a few berzerkers and one dwarf -- and yet the balance, and strategy, made it possible for you to hold off wave after wave of enemies.
Reading the post, it most likely was the original D&D/AD&D that was referred to. The game was balanced in a way that reflected its Chainmail roots, with different XP thresholds for each class. What you describe are the ways munchkins to this day use items that were added later to the game that the original balance paradigm was not equipped to handle.
AD&D Magic Users were artillery pieces who benefited the most from feature creep. After all, magic is the easiest route to add new, more amazing things to a game. Players made up ever more powerful spells and items, and even in 1980 (when I first started playing) we had godlike wizards.
This inherent balance is why so many other role playing systems used the D&D class/level/XP framework, and concentrated instead on what class and level meant. Other systems like Traveller and GURPS never used class and achieved balance with other tools, but D&D still is the role model for most online RPG systems.
I spend a lot of time replaying old console RPGs from the Nintendo and Playstation era.
I wish they had additional levels like "Easy" where are the monsters points are cut in half, for when I feel like a quick walkthrough of the game, or "Hard" where the points are doubled for additional challenge. Squaresoft provided Easy and Hard levels for Final Fantasy 6, which was a good idea, but sadly never caught on.
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
Here's a beta of TAWP.H
TAWP's website is currently offline, so I cant get the TAWP.G release.
Not quite, and it doesn't always work that way.
In D&D 3rd edition, mages went from being "artillery pieces" (past about level 10) to being ornaments for the fighters. Their "best" spells weren't the ones that hit the enemy, they were the ones that gave buffs to the fighters to allow them to attack 4-5 times around, at Full Power Attack, while still needing only to not roll a 1 to hit the enemy.
Their secondary spells, the best ones, were the battlefield-control or debuff types - again a buff to the fighters who would actually kill stuff.
The THIRD rank of their spells were the damage types... half because everything was f'ing immune to the basic stuff (or had a jacked-out saving throw), half because a fighter could do the same damage (albeit to one target) in one swing as the average damage of most damage spells. In a game where an enemy with 1 hit point left is just as effective (damage-wise) as one with full HP, the point is to kill them individually as fast as you can... an area-effect spell that takes off 1/4 of each enemy's HP might be impressive until you realize that 4 monsters standing, rather than 2, means twice the damage coming back at you.
And of course, the more "prestige classes" got into the game (along with the feats system), the more and more and more fighter-types got to play with.
The "Level" system isn't about "balance", either... what it *does* do is provide an easy rubric for comparing relative power or advancement ("I'm level 5 therefore I'm more powerful than X at level 4.") This is in comparison to non-level systems, where you have to count up how many character points it takes to "build" in a certain way, and you have to weigh the fact that you could theoretically "build" the same character in multiple ways, some ways costing more points than others.
It has nothing to do with "inherent balance", it just makes it easier for munchkinny types who need to have easily-defined comparisons between their characters and easily-defined "ding" points to have them and takes away the need to "store up" character points for that ability or advancement that you want to see happen.
One of the nicest things I've ever seen was a 3.5 adaptation (sorry, don't have a current URL) for someone who took the various abilities and gave them each a point score (for example: d4 hit die free, 2 points per bump, so a d12 hit die would cost you 8 advancement points; similar for skill points and class abilities and feats), and allowed all characters a set number (I think it was 20) of advancement points per level with the option to "store" overflow for future use. It gave an interesting alternative to the silly "I'll take a level of X and a level of Y and a level of Z which will allow me into P-class Q and then P-class R and then P-class S" munchkinning that became the trademark of D&D in the past 8 years.
Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, Torment & Neverwinter Nights I & II all do this.
There is a war going on for your mind.
Fallout (2)! Could be much better (i sure hope fallout 3 wont screw things up), but its awesome game, where your action influence what you can do next. It's all designed but still not bad. And i don;t think we need some true AI for good stories, just some advanced procedural generation techniques and maybe some little additional stuff.
Overspecialize, and you breed in weakness. It's slow death. - Major Motoko Kusanagi(Ghost in the Shell)
Solar Angels can be beaten, in fact SHOULD be beaten if you're facing a collection of enemies (rather than one action-starved uber-CR enemy). And if you're at the level you can cast Gate, the game is already fundamentally broken.
As for the rest... saving throw, saving throw, saving throw, saving throw, environment that doesn't allow its casting, saving throw...
Ray of Enfeeblement: you should try empowering it. And then you should realize that at the higher CR's, even a (max roll) 16-point strength penalty is largely meaningless to the monsters.
Sorry, but you obviously read too much and don't play enough to see the game actually working from both the player and DM sides of the table. Trust it from one who spent a tremendous amount of time on this both in home and organized play: past level 9-10, it is simply NOT the mages the DM is worried about.
No, the problem is that people are role-playing (which, if you think about it, should encourage a magician to act like a munchkin) in a tabletop fighting system that tries to balance the game and reward people by elevating their ranking. That's totally incompatible with achieving success through your character's actions.
Why on earth should "classes" be expected to balance? Magic just IS better than swords, 99% of the time.
Balance needs to considered by the designer before starting the world - if magic is possible why is it not used, etc. Why train for years as a fighter when a magic-missile scroll (crossbow, in spell form) is cheap and anyone can kill you? What must the balance in the world be, for the world to be?
Once the game starts when someone says balance they really mean equal plot-power. Someone to weak to fight cannot change a fighting dominated game and feels useless - ditto a fighter in a diplomatic setting. This means the story needs to be tailored (balanced, to use another word) with respect to the party.
I think we both have the same idea, the whole "blind men describing an elephant" thingy. The original D&D was balanced for a win/lose of opposing players, not for players on the same side being equally rewarded.
I used to play a lot more AD&D, since it was the only game the rest of the group would play, but it wasn't ever my favourite rule system. I preferred games like Traveller and GURPS, where you only had one role: Protagonist.
I also agree with your philosophy that the only balance necessary in a game, no matter the rules, is equal involvement in plot. The revisions to the D&D rules may now address that, but I left that rule system before Wizards of the Coast took over.
Now you're talking about specifics in a version I never played, son*. What I was talking about was how the level system originally evolved out of the primitive level system of wargames (for example "Green"-"Veteran"-Elite"), and that the different numbers of XP needed to reach each level were supposed to balance this. It had nothing to do with how experience really played a role in how the heroes developed, but was to keep the magic users from stealing the show too soon. That's why different character classes had different XP levels to reach in the first editions.
The balance in the original D&D/AD&D wasn't inter-party balance, either: it was balance against the other side. Monsters and adventure modules were rated according to what level the adventurers were expected to have. It was a logical extension if the tabletop wargame, where armies were ranked by size times experience level. A fifth-level champion thus costing as much as five companies of infantry or five 1st-level champions when building your army and so on.
The things you describe, the whole prestige classes and Feats are alien concepts someone like me, a guy who played the original D&D. Back in my day, sonny, munchkins would exploit loopholes and logical inconsistencies, as there were less options to tweak the stats. Instead, they would fudge their stats outright or complain loudly when a roll went against them.
*Note: I'm making fun of my own age here, not of yours.