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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.
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.
One of the major pitfalls of importing characters is such:
Oh look, I just beat the game. I have the planet killing weapon. I know levels one, two, and three of every spell. I've got ninety nine's for every item in my inventory. My Gold/Gald/Gil/GP/Etc is maxed out too. I stopped the evil force that was about to (destroy the earth with a meteor)(end mankind and consume time)(open a gate to an evil artificial intelligence to end life)(resurrect an even more scary monster from beyond the grave).
Let me import my character for the sequel. Aaaaaaannnd, it's all gone. Somehow all of my gear disappeared, I've got to start from the beginning and kill giant spiders, rats, and thugs. My muscles have atrophied, my aim has gone to zero. I've got base vigor (what the fuck is the vigor stat supposed to do, anyways?!), and someone jacked all of my cash.
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
In every RPG I've ever played you start out pretty weak and helpless, and work your way up to being an unstoppable demigod. Starting the next game out with god like powers is going to ruin a lot of the game.
The only RPG I've really found character importation to be nice on was the Quest for Glory series. It helped that that series was mostly a point in click adventure game though, and being all powerful doesn't get you through the game alone.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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.
Never played Dungeon Siege, eh?
This space for rent, inquire within.
Seems like there's a middle ground where the designer could provide for a dual path experience. Create levels and challenges that can't be solved using the god-like tools developed in the previous installment. Newbies to the 2nd installment could play through and gain the tools they need along the way. Imports could play through and still be entertained by the challenges and gain new tools.
I think it's limiting to assume that any uber-powerful skill can be applied to solve any kind of problem.
Not A Sig
On one hand yes. On the other hand, sometimes its asif the authors of these stories just got their copy of The Hero with a Thousand Faces" and are just using it as a checklist. It'd be nice if sometimes things got switched up or 99% of the plot wasn't discernable from the first training mission.
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.
They tried that in Final Fantasy II. (I don't need to add the "J" any more, do I? Everyone knows FFII as the NES game by now, not the US release of FFIV, right?) It sucked.
The problem is that it takes mindless grinding from "grinding to raise every stat" to "grinding to raise a single stat." So in that game you'd find yourself wandering around getting attacked, ignoring the enemies, and then fighting amongst yourself to boost HP and weapon skills to the point where the enemies in the next area wouldn't kill you. It also meant that you could easily gain useless equipment. (Great, I've got the Staff of Pwning, and everyone is Level 1 Staves.)
The whole bit about having numerical stats and assigning points is a holdover from pencil and paper gaming.
(There's no rule about responding in order, is there? Er, anyway...) I disagree. The numerical stats and assigning points are done in computer RPGs because the run on computers. A computer is good at handling numbers. When you get right down to it, every computer game has these numerical stats. For example, in an FPS, each weapon has a different damage stat and enemies have different health and armor stats. The player might not see the stats, but ultimately, every computer simulation basically handles things using numerical stats.
What I would agree with is having "large jumps" in power levels is a hold over from pen and pencil days. There's a reason that the level cap in WoW is 80 and the level cap in D&D is 20. (I think?) In WoW, the computer can easily handle the larger range in values, where a human with pencil and paper would easily get bogged down if they had to keep track of everything.
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.
The problem with that comes when combined with:
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.
Leveling allows a player to adjust difficulty within the game. If you absolutely suck at the game, you can grind until you get higher stats and reduce the challenges to the point where you can handle them.
If you tie advancement to equipment, if the player sucks at the game, they're either SOL because they can never gain more power until they overcome the current challenge, or they have to look into a guidebook to discover which pixel the Staff of Pwning is hidden under.
Otherwise, I agree - you shouldn't need a guidebook to be able to generally play the game. The game mechanics should be easy enough that you don't need to worry about permanently screwing up your character. Good PC applications have an "Undo" button for a reason - the user/player should not be punished for experimenting. ("Save repeatedly" isn't acceptable for a PC application, it shouldn't be for a game, either.)
But computer games are always going to have stats, and allowing grinding to advance turns out to make the games more accessible to a wider range of skill levels. The best players can blaze through at low levels, while the worst can slowly slog along.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
By "when you have to think all immersion is ruined" I believe the OP meant "when you have to meta-game all immersion is ruined." Vanilla Oblivion, with it's level-scaling baddies, was definitely a game where you had to meta-game in order to succeed. Otherwise the monsters would level more efficiently than you would and eventually you would find yourself outmatched by the Goblins you had utterly pwned 10 levels ago.
Quoted from the linked article: "I'm writing this because, after twenty years of playing, I finally completed the game." I think that pretty much confirms the parent's assertion that "only obsessives play Nethack."
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
In his (and my) defense, "pushing the envelope" is in the hand of the mailer.
JRPGs and Western RPGs are not the same games, and they're largely incomparable. Sure, they both have characters, levels, advancement, and worlds. But the similarities really end there. Contrary to what TFA does, lumping the two together in an attempt to produce a "grand theory of RPG design" is not really productive. They're different games for different people, and trying to claim one genre is better than the other is just childish and annoying. You might as well try to claim that science fiction is better than fantasy.
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.
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").
In every RPG I've ever played you start out pretty weak and helpless, and work your way up to being an unstoppable demigod. Starting the next game out with god like powers is going to ruin a lot of the game.
Then you change the rules of power:
* The source of power you use has become bankrupt. All "spells" stop working.
* The more powerful metals experience an effect similar to rust. Suddenly than bronze sword and steel plate become more powerful than mythril.
* You suffer a curse because your might hurt the wrong person. Now the more strength you use to accomplish something the weaker you become. Sure you have 25 strength, but try an break that door and you lose HP.
* The big baddie you fought last time was just a mere drone. Feeble compared to the mighty armada that is about to descend upon you and your world.
* You died. Now your offspring must take up the mantle. Sure they inherit your +5 Battle Axe of Butt Kicking, but they aren't powerful enough to wield it yet.
There are tons of way to make people weak again. Just play around with these concepts; make what they have useless, make what they have unusable, make the foe resistant to their power, make the foe more powerful.
Gilgamesh went to outer space? Now I'm regretting just using spark notes.