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."

Comments

Role Playing

[sexconker]

Real men role play with pencil and paper, or nothing at all.

Re:Role Playing

[__aanonl8035]

I got into a discussion last week with an old friend about how World of Warcraft replaced Dungeons and Dragons for him. I, being a curmudgeon, pointed out that MMO's seem wholly lacking in placing the player as the sole hero of the world. And the mechanics of the game, just lead to number crunching, and acquiring loot. Even in those instances where World of Warcraft tries to thrust you into a story mode of defeating some world destroying foe, it is diminished by the fact you can do it over and over again. And millions of other people can do the same heroic world saving. Computers still have a long way to go in making up a story. Bree Yark!

Re:Role Playing

[rpillala]

This is interesting in that your friend apparently views the game differently from you. That is, WOW is a social venue with a game attached that gives you something to do with your friends. The friends are more important than the game. Blizz has taken pains to ensure accessibility for a large number of people. The system requirements are low, the interface is responsive, and the game itself is extremely easy. All this improves the network effect of the game.

Re:Role Playing

[david_thornley]

There are different approaches to playing pencil-and-paper RPGs. Some people play socially, to be doing something with their friends. Some play to win, and will abuse the rules. Some like impromptu acting. Some like poking around in somebody else's imagination. None of these are inherently good or bad, but there's been plenty of conflict when people didn't realize that their colleagues were playing in a different style, or wanted something different out of the game.

Any MMORG will do for social players, really. Actors probably will avoid computer RPGs. The tourists will be happier with a rich and detailed world. The rules lawyers will like a game with complicated rules and, preferably, a real goal (although they're perfectly happy setting their own).

Re:Role Playing

[KahabutDieDrake]

The answer to this problem on computers is to include a live editor in the game. Such that when a player tries to do something that isn't pre-programmed, the editor comes up and gives the player a tool box to build the effect/outcome s/he was expecting. Then, the game automatically syncs all online copies of the game so that all players can use everyone's creations.

So long as the same, or similar engines are used for future games, all the enhancements can be rolled into new releases. Giving us all a game that includes player driven model of PnP, but with the ease of use and graphical power of a CRPG.

Not just RPGs

[Nakor BlueRider]

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.

Re:Not just RPGs

[spiffmastercow]

Well, its an issue of balancing "i want a challenge" with "fuck this, i quit". Back when I was 8 years old I had more patience for games like Final Fantasy, where I could enter a dungeon, spend 2 hours getting to the end, killing the boss, then get killed on my way out. I probably spent 15 hours on the marsh cave when I was a kid. But I'lll be damned if I'm going to go through that at age 26. If I can't have a save point in the dungeon, I'm not going to waste my time.

Disagree strongly

[jandrese]

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.

Re:Disagree strongly

[batquux]

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.

But apparently has fun doing it that way. If the way you play takes the fun out of it, maybe you're the one doing it wrong. Now, a good game isn't so impossibly difficult that the only way to succeed is grinding but isn't so watered down that everything feels like a grind.

Re:Disagree strongly

[Red Flayer]

Play ADOM.

Grinding too long will kill you via corruption. It's advance in the game or have no chance at success. There are also level limits on some of the quests that, while not mandatory, are pretty much necessary for the special endings (and for certain classes, very much necessary for a regular ascension).

There is also the fact that the more time you spend on a level, the more likely it is for an out-of-depth monster to come and kick your ass.

In short... try ADOM. It's definitely a roguelike, but is different enough from a lot of other roguelikes that the gameplay is, IMO, much better.

Re:Disagree strongly

[jandrese]

It may be fun (for awhile), but he's only playing the first 10% of the game over and over again. The rest of the game may as well not exist if you design it that way.

IMHO, probably the best compromise between the two is the often hated "checkpoint" system, where you can only save a set intervals. Sure this means that if you work at it long enough, you can beat the game even with "bad" playing, but it also means you can reasonably take risks and actually have fun instead of tediously grinding your way to godhood.

For a Roguelike, this could be implemented as an autosave every time you go down a level, with death resulting in a restart at the beginning of the level. Sure it will take the "challenge" out of picking up random potions of Blindness or Weakness and having to drink them because there's no good way to identify them otherwise (scrolls of identify being considerably more rare than the random potions you will pick up), but that is not exactly a loss that I would mourn.

I know people will argue that "but if you beat the game you won't feel the need to play it anymore!", but to be honest after a few bullcrap deaths in most Roguelikes, I don't feel like playing them anymore anyway. I'd wager that 90+% of the people who have ever played Nethack have never seen more than the first dozen levels or so, and have not played it nearly as long as a traditional RPG.

how about...

[greymond]

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/

Re:Importing characters from earlier games

[Hatta]

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.

Re:worst shortcomings are usually crappy stories

[Kadagan AU]

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?

Re:worst shortcomings are usually crappy stories

[_xeno_]

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.

Re:Nethack is a winner

[elrous0]

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."