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The Essentials of RPG Design
simoniker writes "As the latest in his Game Design Essentials series for Gamasutra, writer John Harris examines 10 games from the Western computer RPG (CRPG) tradition and 10 from the Japanese console RPG (JRPG) tradition, to figure out what exactly makes them tick. From the entry on Nethack: 'Gaining experience is supposed to carry the risk of harm and failure. Without that risk, gaining power becomes a foregone conclusion. It has reached the point where the mere act of spending time playing [most RPGs] appears to give players the right to have their characters become more powerful. The obstacles that provide experience become simply an arbitrary wall to scale before more power is granted; this, in a nutshell, is the type of play that has brought us grind, where the journey is simple and boring and the destination is something to be raced to. Nethack and many other roguelikes do feature experience gain, but it doesn't feel like grind. It doesn't because much of the time the player is gaining experience, he is in danger of sudden, catastrophic failure. When you're frequently a heartbeat away from death, it's difficult to become bored.' Harris' Game Design series has previously spanned subjects from mysterious games to open world games, unusual control schemes and difficult games."
Real men role play with pencil and paper, or nothing at all.
As a long time player of RPG's like the Gold Box series, I really miss the ability to to import characters from earlier games into later installments (mentioned several times in this article). I know there was some talk about Mass Effect 2 or some other RPG's maybe bringing this back. I wish they would. I hate having to recreate a new character in every sequel, when I really just want to play as my original character. Knights of the Old Republic 2 is a great example of a RPG that would have been so much better if you could have simply continued playing as the original Revan instead of some faceless new douchebag.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Seems like you didn't forget the fail, though, NUMBER 2!
This is pretty true of gaming in general these days. Many old games had the threat of failure (take a look at the list of challenging NES games), and you'd have to start over. Some old greats simply got harder until they beat youâ"like Tetris for example. Now of course it's a foregone conclusion that the end user will eventually win simply by persisting long enough.
It's not nearly on the same scale as Nethack versus modern RPGs of course, but the drop in difficulty is certainly not limited to the RPG genre.
I have to wonder if the shift toward online multiplayer (such as in the FPS genre) is at least in some small part due to people wanting to find the difficulty and challenge that no longer exists in most single-player games.
I disagree about nethack not having grind because it has permadeath. Permadeath in Nethack is the primary reason the game is almost entirely grind. If you ever find yourself in a situation where death is close, you are playing wrong, in order to succeed in Nethack (or any roguelike for that matter), you have to play conservatively, beating up on things that pose no threat to you while escaping anything that might pose a challenge. Even if you can beat a challenging monster 95% of the time, eventually that 5% will catch up to you and all of your progress will be erased by a small handful of bad rolls. This is why only obsessives play Nethack, nobody else has the patience to grind their way up to the godlike levels required to survive the games final challenges.
From the writeup, it sounds like the author is one of the players who never makes it past the mid teens, because he constantly takes risks with his character and will inevitably lose.
I read the internet for the articles.
Is your RPG designed around the destination or about the journey? (JRPGs vs Western / Narrativist vs Simulation)
Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING. Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING. Filter error: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Not exactly revolutionary but this is a great description of the game mechanics involved in playing to the casual audience. Like it or not any game that wants widespread adoption will not be targeting the hardcore players more willing to reroll when they fail. It's too bad really since those games were far more entertaining than end-game World of Warcraft is today.
Another good reason for games to reward players for their time is that it requires far less testing. if your Cow kills my level 99 Amazon because of a glitch then I may uninstall rather than rerolling. If I only lose the time it takes to run from the graveyard then I don't care as much about how well tuned the encounters are. Perhaps the article mentions this but I'm too lazy to read it.
we just give up on mmo's and micro transaction based flash games and go back to some good old Tabletop Gaming with friends that uses our brains and some funny looking dice - if you really need a computer, there are excel characters sheets and virtual dice that will run on any platform?
http://www.rpgnow.com/
http://www.yourgamesnow.com/
http://www.paizo.com/
http://e23.sjgames.com/
Ave Molech Setting
Of the rpg's I've played in recent years, the ones that were the most tedious were the ones lacking in good stories. It makes the entire play experience feel like a chore.
If bad storytelling is the first sin, then the second has to be needless complication. Oblivion is the prettiest rpg I have ever seen but the leveling mechanics were atrocious.
The whole bit about having numerical stats and assigning points is a holdover from pencil and paper gaming. I think they should just ditch the idea of leveling. If you just make it equipment-based, you start out with crappy loot and get better loot the further you go. Better loot means you can take on bigger tasks. If you insist on having personal stats that advance independently of the equipment, then just make it be a linear progression based on the amount of time spent doing stuff. You use melee weapons a lot, your melee skill grows. You use the bow, that grows. But if you don't use staff weapons, then that stat never progresses.
What absolutely must be avoided at all cost is making the player feel like he has to consult a guidebook on how to play the game. When you have to think about how to play rather than simply play, all immersion is ruined.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Diablo II comes to mind. Hardcore was twice as fun.
NetHack still has more game awesomeness than any other game I've ever played. Not only are you potentially one cockatrice away from death, but the levels are randomly built and stocked (never the same game twice) and there are a lot of them. The game has many levels that are fixed (castle, town, etc.) but even there what you will encounter is a total crap shoot; the game even takes into consideration the phases of the moon and adjusts your "luck" accordingly (sacrifices don't give you anything, etc.). It has something of a story arc; you are definitely not the same character by the time you've "ascended" and the puzzles and challenges fit accordingly to where you are in the story. Throw in an amazingly deep set of game rules, more items than you know what to do with (though you'll want to cache them on some levels 'cause you're gonna need them coming back up), more characters and monsters than in the D&D MM, and the ability to play it on every computer/operating system in existence.
In short, if you don't mind that it doesn't have multiplayer or graphics that require OpenGL or DirectX, it's the perfect RPG. But as a college freshman who discovered it on a VT100 in the library, I can easily say it's the game I've played the most over the years, bar none. And I've never played the same game twice. And, to my eternal frustration, I've never ascended (got as far as the plain of water, though!).
What it really boils down to is that game designers need to strike a balance between "Oh my God I'm going to die" and ease of game play.
Games like City of Heroes have this done right (we won't discuss the Architect missions). People that want more challenge can go and set their instance difficulty higher, earning more rewards (and more experience) for their troubles. More casual players can set the difficulty lower. Seems to be win-win.
Unfortunately, where games require that players share a broad world at all times this doesn't work out. It may be that outside of non-combat areas each difficulty level should be its own instance, and players go to the difficulty they want when they travel.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The Plot
1) A young naive protagonist who is resourceful and scrappy but not particularly strong.
2) gets caught up in a fight against an evil (organization, company, religion, empire, conspiracy)
3) requiring him to leave his small village
4) and gradually explore parts of the world on a linear path
5) until he eventually gets free roaming of the entire world
6) and eventually goes to visit outer space or time shift
7) on the way to fight the proto enemy, who turns out not be the real enemy
8) and eventually reaches the real, final enemy
And they all contain a job system, an elemental weakness system (fire, thunder, water, ice, earth, holy), a super move, time consuming optional side quests, etc.
That seems to cover most of the modern 3d Japanese RPGs including Final Fantasy VII-XII, Chrono Cross, Skies of Arcadia, Grandia series, as well as some of the 2d ones (like Legend of Zelda). RPGS within a series have a number of other common elements including chocobos, tonberry and a character named Cid.
And even though they are largely similar, I still love to play them. The structure is the same, but the quality of the implementation makes it worth playing.
It's a misunderstanding that developed somewhere along the way, and I doubt it's ever going to be rectified. I suppose they must be called JRPGs for lack of a better term, but just because they're called that way doesn't mean they actually are RPGs. So they shouldn't be part of this article.
Where is Megami Tensei and all its spin-offs and sequels?
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
To paraphrase a certain master swordsman, "You keep using that term. I do not think it means what you think it means."
Even in Nethack all you risk is time. Eventually you'll progress. Might take starting over entirely but that's just another version of starting over from the last save. In any case, the reward for risking your time is progression of the game/story.
this is also why there are no more janes type sims. no one is willing to spend a week learning how to work the controls just so they can take off and not blow up.... (mig alley im looking at you).
i LOVED janes games. longbow, f15, f/a18. excellent gameplay, good replay, tough to learn in sim mode.
the only hardcore game like that left i know of is ww2online
-.no
You must be under 25. Nethack requires an imagination. Check out this description of Nethack, and a story of one persons ascention with the Amulet, http://garote.bdmonkeys.net/nethack/index.html
I mean, what? And no, it's not "a Baldur's Gate sequel". It's a unique game, driven mainly by user content, "firefox of RPGs" if you like it.
Wait, I cannot find Fallout, too. Is this a joke?
Just wait till Homeland Security finds out about this Rocket Propelled Grenade manual.
You can expect a knock on the door, and Slash dot is going to to FISA court.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
The easier something is, the more people enjoy it.
And the harder something is, the more gamers enjoy it.
The only decision is, who are you going to market to? Stealing from VGcats:
Why make great when good sells better?
(sort of anyway...)
But the article reaked of bias when it got to the Mother (aka Earthbound) series. It elevated a controversial cult game to same level of the works of Chopin, who happens to be on my mind as I'm playing through Eternal Sonata. Earthbound in particular had some great features, but it also had some nasty downsides. I couldn't play with sound on after 30 minutes because the soundtrack literally induced headaches. There were many gross-out parts to the game that are best compared to fart humor. The esoteric references in the game typically are received two ways, with cheers from those who catch them and in-one-ear-out-the-other from those who don't.
An article purporting to be the "essentials of RPG design" needs to acknowledge when a game gets a lot of hate, and why.
Charisma is the measure of someone's ability to lie with a straight face.
don't lump all MMOs together- Final Fantasy 11 has incredibly harsh penalties for character death. You lose a nontrivial amount of experience points. It is not uncommon for characters to de-level upon death.
Sadly disappointed in the deception here. Got me all excited thingking I could learn how to make Rocket Propelled Grenades.
I think the difference being mentioned between nethack and 'grinding' is probably that (and nethack excluded) most games are simply too damn easy nowadays.
I know by being a gamer since 88' or so I must have a lot more developed skills and such --- but -- really... I put games on the hardest levels and almost never die or 'restart' or whatever the form of LOSS is that happens in games.
Games are just too damn easy. Mario for NES was hard and took work. Anyone remember Abadox? Or Battletoads? Most games were much harder.
But at present, games have all these things to tell you exactly where to go, a million places to save (if not at any damn point), and a hundred other incentives to basically always keep you going. And then, without the challenge, people are just not as excited by games and in this case, the work of the game in many RPGs has simply been reduced to a 'grind'.
On the new Prince of Persia, you can't make the mistake of falling off a cliff... some magic chick comes and pulls you up EVERY SINGLE TIME. YOU CAN"T LOSE! To me, that's boring.
I'm guessing somewhere in the business/marketing/sales department, richer gaming companies have figured out that permitting noobs to continually succeed generates more sales... Who knows... That has basically been my assumption as I've seen game sales climb while the net difficulty dropping significantly...
I guess my point is that easiness/laziness seems to sell more games, and even if it gets boring, it probably outsells equivalent games that carry challenge and accomplishment. Hell, much of the reason of the MMORPG is to fulfill the lack of accomplishment in our mediocre reality by becoming doctors and architects with only a week's worth of effort... We grind through university, quickly forgetting why we took ethics and US History --- and all the important material we were required to learn. .................
Anyway.. Games are too damn easy now. I just read some article where nintendo is setting up to actually put the game on auto-pilot and have it play FOR you. .... :/ (no comment). It would be nice to be challenged/pushed. Many of us are begging for it, but multiplayer competition is pretty much the only place where we can find it. Game Dev's themselves are pandering to the weak for quick cash -- no wonder the real work is being generated in competition communities.
...this, in a nutshell, is the type of play that has brought us grind, where the journey is simple and boring and the destination is something to be raced to. Nethack and many other roguelikes do feature experience gain, but it doesn't feel like grind.
Sounds like an attempt to prove "the game I like is OBJECTIVELY BETTER than the game you like." The other RPGs must be doing SOMETHING right, since they are far more popular with a much wider audience. Nethack is great, but it is not the sole pinnacle of RPG design.
Three things are essential:
-Angsty protagonist and possibly an angsty antagonist as well.
-Grinding, grinding, grinding.
-Cutesy anime girl sidekicks.
I recently completed Chrono Trigger on the Nintendo DS, which I haven't done since it's SNES days. I didn't read the article, so I don't know how this game was classified. I realized on my second play through how perfect this game is. At no point do you really need to grind to succeed, equipment went a long way but was never really critical, and the story still knocked my socks off the second time through. After completing it, I realized I had just experienced pure fun. IMHO, if an RPG doesn't have all the aforementioned qualities, it isn't worth playing.
Maybe you need to take on something more challenging than gaming, like creating a game that will be a challenge to experts and still sell enough copies to justify the effort. Or is that to much challenge?
20 years ago the "challenge" that most games offered was basically rote learning. BS tricks like insta-kills that you could never possibly anticipate the first time you saw them. Oh and forcing you to start from square one over and over again.
I'm glad that game designers have mostly abandoned that crap. But if you feel differently, there is nothing stopping you from hitting the reset button when you fall off a cliff.
If you can beat either of those 2 games on the hardest difficulty on the first play through without dying repeatedly, I'll suck your dick.
This seems like a good an opportunity as any to ask this question (prepares a curse on those who would mod me 'Offtopic')...
So, I've never played Nethack (I know, I know, negative a million geek points). So let's say I want to give it a try, to at least experience it. And let's say I don't care about nostalgia and am entirely open to pretty graphics and ease-of-use. What manifestation of Nethack would you recommend (for a computer running GNU/Linux)?
Property is theft.
Here's an idea - not sure if anyone's tried it out (it's sort of a hybrid approach). . .
1) Have your imported character gimped a little bit (say drop from level X to level X/2 or something - still pretty powerful though). You could explain this as a result of any number of things - from simple inactivity (not been any crises for a few years, so the character got out of shape), or an illness, accident, or some other trauma, or perhaps a result of a magical curse from an enemy or angry god.
Coupled with:
2) Allow the character to be imported, but not played until later on in the game. For example, maybe your PC from the previous game acts as an NPC during the beginning of the new game - training your new PC, giving him a quest, etc. Later on, when the new character has progressed to a point where they would be closer to the level of the imported char, the import joins your party or something along those lines. That way, you don't gimp the character all the way back to level 1.
3) You could then allow the imported character to eventually become more powerful than before the import (raised level cap, etc).
The question then becomes what to do for players who don't have a character to import? Maybe provide a couple pre-fab import characters to fill that role.
I dunno, it's a thought, anyhow.
the young naive protagnoist is usually not naive or weak. In fact, the protagonist is often portrayed as strong, cocky, and sometimes needs the wisdom of a counterpart (usually a woman) to temper his ego to help him complete his goal.
see - Indiana Jones, Top Gun, (most any Tom Cruise movie), Conan, Star Trek, Tarzan, etc.
This article seems to have quite a bias towards "western" computer role-playing games (even the naming, CRPG vs JRPG, makes this obvious).
The quality of the comments for JPRGs is much poorer, and it really feels like the WRPGs are more noble in the eyes of the author, even though these days it's a real struggle finding a decent WRPG while there are very good JRPGs everywhere (which are actually challenging and well-balanced, unlike most western ones, and contain much more content), which have also much more titles, are more popular, sell more, etc.
Why the hell he even tries to compare everything back to D&D as the True Source of Origin is beyond me.
It was said the legacy of Tales was poor, even though Star Ocean is a rather big one IMO.
Putting Zelda while discussing Tales is also nothing more but a joke.
It also lacks mention of quite of few other important JRPGs (and a few western ones as well) while too many similar games are mentioned.
Furthermore, it puts too much credit on Pokémon which is nothing more than a copy/paste of classics.
If you want to go old school and look at still running text muds, medievia's chaotic player kill sections are even meaner. You _will_ lose a level (sometimes more than 1), and in the roughest spots you can have all of your equipment stolen by other players. That's a huge loss in invested time, but the opposite is also true. Things get really insane in large PvP brawls in these areas. Entire "clans" will be de-leveled and all their members stripped of their best equipment.
It's amazing how much of an adrenaline rush plain old text can give...
Total Time Calculations
Total Time Output
Detail Time Calculations
Detail Time Output
RPG Cycle explained
You never catch me alive
"When you're frequently a heartbeat away from death, it's difficult to become bored."
Actually, thats one of the main things that made the rogue-like games so boring to me. It never seemed much fun to play a game where every action, no matter how trivial, seemed to come with a decent chance of spontaneous unavoidable death. Some people really get into the challenge, but a lot of people find the constant stream of trivial deaths fairly boring.
Grinding too long will kill you via corruption. It's advance in the game or have no chance at success.
In other words, it's a game where if you work hard to avoid the a Rogue-like's traditional punishment of "you just wasted all that time, start over," it punishes you for it.
YOU'LL TAKE YOUR LUMPS AND LIKE IT.
In tabletop gaming, this is known as "railroading," and it's universally hated for a reason.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
This is what a lot of "JRPGs suck" or "Western RPGs" people are missing.
The two types of games have radically different gameplay goals. They should no more be considered the game genre than turn-based strategy and real-time strategy or FPS's and 3D platformers. The interactive storytelling model of JRPGs and the "character living in a setting" focus of Western RPGs are apples and oranges.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Japanese RPGs focus on telling an interactive story (and placing game & combat mechanics on top). This is radically different from the western RPG model of simulating a character in an environment (and placing game & combat mechanics on top), but it's no less role-playing. Look up GNS Theory and The Big Model, sometime.
If your main interest is exploring a world, play Western RPGs. If your main interest is getting a cohesive narrative, play JRPGs. Either way, don't fall into the "No True Scotsman!" fallacy and declare everything that it's your favored style of play "not actually RPGs."
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
It was Hero's Quest and Might and Magic III that I was addicted to. They are actually the reason I got back into programming after dropping it as an interest for a while -- my life probably would have turned out completely different without those games. My first real forays into C programming were savegame-editor programs for those two games.
Being a teen, with no real experience, I was limited in what I could do. But I was able to alter the strings shown in Hero's Quest (of course, I changed them to obscenities) as well as hack a few of the statistics. With MMIII, I actually managed to decode almost all of the save game format, painstakingly writing down (on PAPER!) hundreds of flags, enum values, offsets. I decoded every possible item type in the game, along with their modifier flags, the offsets of the various statistics, the field where the current "time of day" was stored, etc.
These days people seem to frown on that kind of reverse engineering and hacking, preferring to call it "cracking" instead. Poo on that. My career started with that.
I'm playing through Oblivion now. I first bought it a couple years ago for my PC, then promptly forgot about it. Now I have it running in Cider on my Mac. Getting Oblivion mods to work properly is evidently a challenge but getting a bunch of them to work together through Cider is a pain in the ass.
I say this because after having played Oblivion on and off for a few months now, I've finally fucking had it with the leveling mechanics. I really did try to like it and I give it a good whirl (~50% of the main quest) I went looking for solutions to this and evidently, there are three:
1.) Don't level-up. There is very, very little in the way of incentives to advance in level. At least the way I think Bethesda intended. A huge portion of the leveling mechanic is a zero sum game. There is actually quite a disincentive to leveling up.
2.) Meta-game. "Efficient" leveling. Oblivion metagaming makes D&D munchkin powergaming look tame. Really, it's completely asinine.
3.) Game mechanic changing mod. The most popular and extensive mods are ones that significantly change the leveling system because not a lot of people seem to like it. They'll put up with it, because the game has a lot of other things going for it, but everyone I seem to know and the general zeitgeist seems to be that if any one thing could be changed, it would be the leveling system.
In Oblivion, the advantages to leveling up are access to better gear, more hit points and more magic, and better attribute stats. But here's the catch, everything else gets access to that stuff, too. And if you do it inefficiently, you are BEHIND the power curve of everything you fight. Yo, WTF? The purpose of kicking ass to get better stuff and increased stats is to kick more ass! It's not to maintain a status quo.
I realize that Bethesda has mentally locked themselves into this dumb mechanic. No one likes that shit. They tolerate it. It's an evolutionary dead end of RPG gaming. Seriously, cut this shit out.
The key to any good RPG is the ability to prepare your character to meet new challenges; to ponder ahead of time what goals you have in mind for your character development, and then to go about accomplishing these feats. Sometimes this looks like grinding for hours on end to increase your level, other times it involves using clever combinations of items and abilities to suit the task at hand. RPGs that are too easy, and RPGs that allow the grinding to become repetitive both suffer from the same flaw: you're not being asked to use your brain. Grinding is good when there is a steady and evolving challenge, but too often it's just mindless repetition.
Other things are important too of course. Some light tactics, and a light story, for instance. I prefer RPG stories light because the heavier they are the more apparent it becomes how lame they are. Better to let my imagination fill in the blanks.
Oh, Role Playing Games! I thought you meant "Rocket-Propelled Granades". Please stand by while the FBI knocks your door down.
Interesting how I havn't seen any comments relating to MUDs. There were some games all about grinding until you got your skills maxxed and then you went on to die repeatedly until perma death (the number of times you could die varied greatly between MUDS) and then started over again. And each death could mean the instant loss of all your belongings if te player who killed you decided to bury, or pillage, your corpse (and act frowned upon, but still occuring on occasion) or your corpse might disappear after time if you couldn't find someone to ressurect you in time. This has been removed from most mainstream games, WoW only has a gold loss for damage armour on death and a short corpse run (if no ressurect available). The main reason for this is due to subscriptions. It is largely okay for people to suffer massive setbacks on death if the game is already paid for such a setback only affects yourself. A simmilar effect in a MMOPRG would mean that progress would be held up constantly as people reroll after a permadeath, or regear if their equipment was lost (look what happened to players who were hacked in WoW before they were able to restore people's belongings). It would not only affect the player it happened to, but also all who play with them. Also, the game itself would have to become alot easier if anyone, as a team, were to have a chance at achieving anything. The way these games are now is possibly the only way thay can be in a MMO environment. Punishment for death has to be near negligable and content must be oriented about team play, and not the Hero's Story, which many single players games are based on. I myself have played WoW extensively, but I've seen in all the MMO's I've tried over the years, that they, from the early stages of the game, focus on the team, the faction, the race, the corperation and how you fit in the greater orginisational structure, and try to steer away from the loner, the solo adventurer so as to promote an online society, culture.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned Ultima Online. From my understanding, it never took off because players were *always* under constant threat of being attacked and killed by more powerful players. The only "safe zones" were the banks. So players would be constantly under threat regardless of what they did in the game. It wasn't fun because it was little more than an exercise in stress-management and frustration.
MMORPGs are mostly about the social aspects of RPing, and less about creating powerful characters. Anyone who focuses on the latter is basically ignoring the MMO in MMORPG.
back when I was programming in RPG. Next thing you'll be telling me that they've eliminated the fixed-column format.