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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.
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.
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.
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!
Don't forget The Forge, a great place to find off the beaten path games.
Oh, and, of course, Troll Lord games for those of us in the "get off my lawn" demographic.
If your cheap, you can wait a year until Free RPG Day
Of course, me? I prefer boardgames. (and card games).
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
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
What you just described there is referred to by mythologists as the Hero's Journey and can be found in everything from Gilgamesh to Star Wars.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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.
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.
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.
Wait till you get to 36. I could barely bring myself to finish reading your post.
(Joking! Joking! Don't hit an old man!)