Should companion and faction reputation meters be considered popamole now?

[Doktor Best]

I care more about the nature of the reputation and the thought put into it than its visibility, but yes i think there should atleast an option to turn them off just like numbers for stat/skillchecks ingame.

 

[Ranarama]

Knowing the outcome of a choice is completely undesirable, it's not a choice at all in that case

It certainly can be. Knowing the outcome doesn't have to be absolute, it could be "there's a chance" or just hinting.

In any case, you can still have a choice even if you know the outcomes. That you think there isn't a choice is due to choices frequently all boiling down to a single choice of which faction do I join, and then only ever acting for that faction. Which is crap, and it's not roleplaying.

Duh, I've been repeating that it's game-y and nonsensical like a broken record forever. It only works in MMOs where reps are mechanical systems that can be gamed, rather than a simulation or an attempt at a coherent world and actual roleplaying. Who are you roleplaying if you know all the information there is to know? God?

Actual Pen and Paper Role playing games don't met your definition of being a role playing game. Simulating countries and mecenary bands or guilds with diverse values and points of view would involve reps, could have temporary alliances, which is what seems to be missing from RPGs. Designers never thing in arcs where you temporarily ally with a group while it is convient. Intended arcs tend to be all or nothing, pick one side and be done.

I don't think reputation systems are at fault here at all. At best they occur in games that have other problems.

Your example of MMOs is silly, because it's frequently just yet another kind of XP there. Where it adds nothing.

Just hide that information from the player, I know it's an easy way to show "progression" (that doesn't make any sense in the context of factions though, because it's not a progression curve, what are you progressing towards?), but the PC has no way of knowing that, do you have a machine that lets you know your "standing" with all the people you know?

No, but here's the thing. Those are people that act sanely. If I don't see a meter in a game, the tendency is to ascribe it no agency at all. Besides, these meters just show something your character would know. Much like a health meter serves as a proxy for your character being able to tell when they are wounded.

Hiding information doesn't work well, either it promotes grinding up to max as fast as possible (as in FO4, to get the perks) or it leads to the assumption that it doesn't matter, the player ignores it completely, the bar never hits the threshold and content has been effectively removed from the game.

 

[zeitgeist]

This is a problem of the omniscient UI, it's funny how many problems stem from that. The UI giving us plot info that the PC can in no way know about is a crack in the logical construct that is the created universe. Not to mention that it makes no sense for a faction to base their opinions on you on a number scale. We also have to differentiate between mechanical and plot systems. Your standing with a given faction is a story concern, while your stats are a mechanical aspect (but muh story and mechanic symbiosis! If you find a way to hide stats from the player while giving them enough info to make their builds, go for it). The game can track your standing with numbers or bars, but the player shouldn't have access to that info.

I agree with this, but I'd say that the problem with the omniscient UI is not as much about how it displays things (or that it displays them at all), but how simplistic of an underlying structure it betrays by displaying said things.

Sure, without it, even simple reputation meters can be made to feel more organic and fuzzy, and with it it's just a matter of "when this bar goes to 75%, this event happens", which I'm not a great fan of, but what should be "fixed" is the reliance on such silly mechanics in building the gameworld, plot, factions, NPC relations etc. in the first place.

 

[mutonizer]

Actual Pen and Paper Role playing games don't met your definition of being a role playing game. Simulating countries and mecenary bands or guilds with diverse values and points of view would involve reps, could have temporary alliances, which is what seems to be missing from RPGs. Designers never thing in arcs where you temporarily ally with a group while it is convient. Intended arcs tend to be all or nothing, pick one side and be done.

errrr, what? That statement makes me kinda sad for your P&P RPG experience :/
To me, that's exactly what any decent GM handles constantly when running anything more than a one-off scenario. Handling real time, then prepping, how the entire campaign world reacts to whatever the hell happened during the sessions is, for any self respecting GM, most of the job and fun.

That said, I never considered people who buy modules and read text blocks and the like to be actual GMs or anything so, as usual with RPGs, we need more new words for this shit because you always have 100 people talking about different things using the same words...

Hiding information doesn't work well, either it promotes grinding up to max as fast as possible (as in FO4, to get the perks) or it leads to the assumption that it doesn't matter, the player ignores it completely, the bar never hits the threshold and content has been effectively removed from the game.

It's not about hiding the information, but the METERS.
People running from you IS information.
Soldiers attacking you on sight IS information.
Thieve's guild looking to recruit you IS information.

Big glowing bars showing EXACTLY your current relation level with all the thresholds and bonus is information too, but it is retarded

 

[Ranarama]

Actual Pen and Paper Role playing games don't met your definition of being a role playing game. Simulating countries and mecenary bands or guilds with diverse values and points of view would involve reps, could have temporary alliances, which is what seems to be missing from RPGs. Designers never thing in arcs where you temporarily ally with a group while it is convient. Intended arcs tend to be all or nothing, pick one side and be done.

errrr, what? That statement makes me kinda sad for your P&P RPG experience :/

Think more Reign and the like. They just provide stats and mechanics for running your own factions, and having groups interact. By providing mechanics, you get concrete ways of manipulating things, and don't have to rely on DM rulings and fiat to move on. Those RPGs didn't met his requirement of not putting numbers to things.

It's not about hiding the information, but the METERS.
People running from you IS information.
Soldiers attacking you on sight IS information.
Thieve's guild looking to recruit you IS information.

Big glowing bars showing EXACTLY your current relation level with all the thresholds and bonus is information too, but it is retarded

Those examples show the consequences, but not opportunities to change things. They're also rare pieces of information. I imagine a bar as an abstraction to all the tiny bits of dialogue and reactions that games couldn't possibly include. Soldiers attacking you on sight isn't helpful information - that's sadly the default in games. And when it happens, does the player even recognise that an alternative existed to make peace or otherwise get past without resorting to combat? I see a bar and I think maybe there is. I think maybe my actions will matter in determining their reaction. None of them actually tell a player their actions have mattered. People run away? That's some nice scripting. Thieve's guild is looking to recruit me, I guess that's a quest line offered to everyone.

Not including feedback makes the game with a single play-through that has consequences the same as a well scripted yet railroaded game. Because frankly, past games have taught a lesson to be cynical about how they approach these things. I'd like to know what matters, because frequently I can steal and kill without consequence. Or the opposite extreme which is also useless, of having it ruin the game and therefore being relegated to a single attempt, and then reloading.

I play D&D and I know all the numbers. How much damage a sword does, and how much health a first level fighter will have. Why does combat get a pass here? Aren't non-combat mechanics the freaking goal? Imagine you have a game where you don't know how much damage you're doing with each weapon, and how much health enemies have. (One comes to mind actually, Necropolis suffered from this) The way I reacted? I didn't care which weapon I used - because they all seemed the same (laughably in Necropolis's case they all had slight situation buffs, but the descriptions were useless and you'd have to devote time to real scientific experiment to notice the difference.)

Without feedback the entire system didn't matter, and was a waste of the developer's time. Also realise that combat decisions happen quickly so those experiments and feedback is easy, whereas the results of dialogue in making people hostile not only happens once, and often irreversibly, but also builds from many individual choices and the payoff is so incredibly displaced that the average player simply hasn't got a chance to notice that those dialogue choices actually mattered.

edit: Look I don't think it needs to be bars. Notice the parallels between this and diplomacy in 4X games. The various games in CIV have suffered from this. It's not enough to support diplomacy, or to have an AI that makes decisions based on player action - they need to tell the player WHY Genghis is attacking. Sure, the reason might just be that he's Genghis, but if it's because I settled too close, or have the wrong religion, let me know. I might be able to do something about it.

EU4 gets this right. Because I know my relations with other countries and the fixed modifiers that make those up (fixed modifiers being a better solution than the stupid RPG solution of adding up penalties for killing peeps and insults - that might conceivably be the issue people have with bars - that they are just a sum). And EU4 is very clever with balancing those modifiers, and limited the amount certain things can contribute to them, and having them rightfully decay (or not as the case maybe).

And when I can see the relation, and know what is contributing to the relation, I don't have to wait until Genghis attacks to find out he doesn't like me. I can take the hint (again abstracting over tensions and giving the player some of the nous that a world leader would have over foreign affairs) and change my religion and mollify him before it happens. And that's a fantastic result - a possibility and a choice that would simply not happen otherwise.

 

[mutonizer]

Those examples show the consequences, but not opportunities to change things.

Because nothing should be clear cut, that's the entire point. The player should feel that the system is natural and just works, not be shown that it works constantly with bars and whatnot, but is just dumb.

And that's a fantastic result - a possibility and a choice that would simply not happen otherwise.

Yea...in predictable so called god-view strategy games that need to be played on impossible levels with insane AI boosts because they're completely broken and abusable otherwise.


Not in cRPGs for people above 5 years old...

 

[Beastro]

There is nothing wrong with reputation meters in general, much like there is nothing wrong with stats. It's all about implementation. You can have stats and meters that do absolutely nothing other than displaying an ever growing number but serve no other purpose. You can have stats that define every aspect and meters that track and inform you of meaningful gameplay-affecting changes. Needless to say it doesn't work without those changes.

What I hate in games is that there's a window you can open to see a list of sliders showing your standing. That is gamey to me, instead of leaving it ambiguous and forcing you to intermittently test what your standing is or try to go on your gut feeling if you don't want to, or are unable to.

To compare MMOs, seeing the list of sliders in WoW really annoyed me going from EQ where your exact standing was between -2000 and 2000 rep and was hidden behind various stages of attitude you could see by conning NPCs, from ready to attack to considered as an ally. If you forgot your standing with a faction and wanted to check you had to go out and find a mob on the particular faction and con them to see how they considered you, and even then the exact number was hidden, since each stage of faction applied to roughly 500 faction points, with the exception of ready to attack which took up the bottom -1500 of the range.

It can create interesting situations where you use your non-kos faction to go deep into dungeons and camp named spawns, but you have to be careful and judge when to call it if you feel you're getting close to becoming KOS, especially if you're a class that cannot get out of the dungeon without much risk. You might want to keep going killing hoping they'll remain dubious and then curse yourself for not calling it early when you see they're finally threatening to you and will finally attack.

For companions, you should have to go by the tone of their dialogue alone and be forced to tred carefully if one is really pissed at you and you don't know if you're one bad comment away from them leaving.

IMO, more games should look to NEO scavenger for what to do with these sorts of things.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Hiding information from the player would be nice in an ideal world where we're willing to replay games seven times to see every branching, but most people probably have a good idea of what they want so this just makes life more difficult for them. Ever played an hentai game where you find yourself stuck in a path you've already played because you praised a girl's tits instead of her eyes, because you had to know somehow that she would love that? After you restart you make a point of treating her like shit, just inverting the "suck up to NPC" strategy. If you hide reputation from me and I have at least a passing interest in the story, I'll suck up even harder to the guys I'm interested in gettign cozy with, because I have no way of knowing if I'm doing enough. They asked me to run an errand I don't care for? Better accept it, I don't wanna risk losing access to their exclusive shop. One might argue this feels more natural but that doesn't necessarily make for fun times. Of course, the "killing Vulpes Inculta in the middle of a deserted town has made you a sworn enemy of the Legion because they have spies EVERYWHERE, dur hur" thing was hamfisted af and shouldn't happen.

 

[Lacrymas]

It's not about 7 playthroughs, it's about the first one, if you want to metagame subsequent playthroughs no amount of hidden meters is going to stop you.

 

[Azarkon]

There are two separate problems here.

The first is: should the player's relationships be measured as an one, or in the case of Tyranny, two-dimensional value?

The second is: should this value be visible to the player?

The first problem exists regardless of whether there is a reputation value that the player can check, as the game has to keep track of the player's relationships with other characters and/or organizations no matter what. Just the same, the second problem exists regardless of whether the player's relationships are kept as an one-dimensional value, two-dimensional value, path through a decision tree, etc.

My answer to both of the above is it depends. But since that's a fucking stupid answer, even though it's right, I'll instead say NO. The player's relationships to characters and/or organizations should not be modeled as an one-dimensional or two-dimensional value, AND it should not be visible to the player. The reason for the first is that it is too simple of a measure for the depth of human relationships. The reason for the second is that knowing the permanent effects of your choices immediately reduces it to a Pavlovian response, which is the very definition of popamole.

 

[Ranarama]

The player's relationships to characters and/or organizations should not be modeled as an one-dimensional or two-dimensional value,

I still think the real issue is the accumulation of tiny modifiers for things that have no effect. What EU4 does with modifiers introduces non-linearities, and limites the effects of tiny actions. Once you do that you lose the ability to grind out relationship, and your ability to manipulate relationships feels infinitely more realistic. Maybe you can't convince evil death knight to be your friend, but you can't find others to work on.

AND it should not be visible to the player. The reason for the first is that it is too simple of a measure for the depth of human relationships. The reason for the second is that knowing the permanent effects of your choices immediately reduces it to a Pavlovian response, which is the very definition of popamole.

Too simple? These are games you need abstraction everntually.

I deny that it becomes a pavlovian response. That's the result of other poor decisions of games. Like only ever wanting a reputation to increase in one direction, and not providing decisions that offer both a hit in relationship and other rewards. Then decisions become meaningful. Say you have to take a hit, but you know you can work back with effort then you get a real choice. It only becomes a mechanical stimulus response between the rewards if rewards are all there is, instead choices need to be between relationships or between rewards.

Because nothing should be clear cut, that's the entire point. The player should feel that the system is natural and just works, not be shown that it works constantly with bars and whatnot, but is just dumb.

So your ideal RPG is a game book. No mechanics, just pre-written choices. Are you sure those are RPGs for the over 5s?