How to make non-combat skills really playable?

[Kaucukovnik]

Another keyboard diarrhea monologue of mine:

Basically all CRPGs share one thing. By far the most advanced aspect is combat. You know, usually the real gameplay consists of bloodshed (spiced up with some sight of boobs).* Nothing against bloodshed (or boobs), but it gets old when there is nothing else to do (and watch).

Yes, there is, but not much of it is actually played. When fighting, you get to equip your armor and weapons, pick your skills and then use that all in a turn-based or realtime manner to destroy your enemies, hit by hit.

Compare this to, say, lockpicking: click, skill check -> success/failure. Similar for all other skills.
A little better in case of magic. If you choose combat magic, that is.
Dialogue is awesome in those well-writen and talkative games like PS:T, but charisma, diplomacy and such are not that well implemented either.

Overall the complexity of non-combat gameplay is as if you'd decide a whole combat in one skill check comparing your character and the enemy. Doing that to combat would be an outrage, yet screwing other aspects in the same way is perfectly fine, we even don't know it any other way.

Is there a game that lets you actually play a mage? Not a "fireball thrower" - a mage. Who studies mystical powers and learns to use them in his favor. Drawing symbols like in Arx Fatalis doesn't count as "simulated understanding of magic" in my book, but it is a step in the right direction.
Bethesdian minigames are as well, in a way. The difficulty is totally wrong (along with the awful philosopy "never let the player screw up"), but they are trying to let us actually lockpick, hack or negotiate. Adding some interesting skill influences on the course of the action could do wonders.

I'm not talking about realtime or twitch gameplay, immersion etc. Neither about dialogue trees vs abstraction. Just giving the player actually something to do, not only click a button and imagine the character having all the fun.

I think a good beginning would be designing the whole mechanics not from the combat end (because most RPG systems indeed feel like combat rules with the rest hastily sticked on top).
The best starting points seem to be either politics and society or ecology. From there you get a wide variety of connecting points with possible character development system.


tl;dr version:

-Start designing RPG systems from the game world structure, deriving the needed skills and stats from what needs to be interacted with and how.
-Make sure that any gameplay option implemented is actually to be played, not just triggered.


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* Yes, I'm bluntly referring to the primitive nature of our player needs

 

[Duckard]

But I don't like minigames.

 

[Unradscorpion]

No adrenaline or deciding/planning in lock picking. Why don't we stick to 'building atop the combat engine' model?

 

[Baron]

I loved playing a Lizard Alchemist Assassin in ES:Oblivion, sneaking about gathering reagants, mixing them in my laboratory, and then sniping monsters from afar with my poisons and watching them collapse at my feet. The preparation was reminiscent of Ultima's magic system, and I enjoyed them both. I prefer Mages as the slower, more prepared Class, that yield great power and/or diversity of play for the patient and resourceful; as opposed to the Gauntlet mage. Yes, a reagant system is slow gameplay, but afterall, that's why wizards are so fucking old. Impatient Players can pick Barbarian.

Regarding spell acquisition, I always liked building up a base. I would like if ALL spells could only be obtained from books (purchase, find, loot, coerce, defeat a rival wizard, author!). The PC would eventually build his own library of every spell he/she owned giving them the same satisfaction as a Warrior would seeing his swords and shields on display.

For Rogues, Witcher 2 hinted at a simple Stealth system of placeables on the floor to indicate tripping/kicking something, making noise (thus summoning guards). You could make it obvious at low levels, and then dim the area light and provide less obvious clues at higher levels to increase the challenge, even just sand or leaf texturing on the floor. Place a summoning trigger around the area to avoid. For Traps I was planning to use dialogue descriptions, with disarming options based on Intelligence, Wisdom, and obviously Player experience. A more elaborate system would be great, but... too much god damn work as it is.

Thanks for the topic though, I've been trying to ensure the Rogue particularly had a unique gamestyle and path to success. Same with the Mage, using in game magical artifacts that can be activated through dialogue; teleporting to locations, laying waste to armies, and turning unyeilding villages into sheep so that they may be more easily subjugated. You know, wizardly things.

 

[Kaucukovnik]

But I don't like minigames.

In Fallout, when you encounter an enemy, a rather lengthy minigame takes place. You and the enemy/enemies take turns, and in a simplified depiction of combat you are trying to reduce enemy "hit points" to zero while retaining at least one of yours.
I mean, what besides complexity makes a lockpicking minigame different from a combat "minigame"?
These don't have to include any time limits or require any dexterity with your gaming controller - it's just the developers' choice of what kind of gameplay they want to offer.

Impatient Players can pick Barbarian.

Exactly!

 

[Baron]

Makes me wonder if that's not a bad area for the Indie game designer; making solid mini-games and selling them to larger releases. The Mass Effect frogger wheel was probably the least annoying for me, given it could be completed in a couple of seconds. The Oblivion conversation wheel was unrelated, boring and inane, the Bioshock hacking game would have been okay if exposed to it 90% less, and Mass Effect 2 : hacking and bypassing were mindless, repetitious but mostly inoffensive, and planetary scanning was a massive mistake. Christ, I would love to mod that game. I would replace Unexplored Worlds with Populated Drell Worlds and replace Mineral Scanners with ICBMs.

Renegade Shepherd would be a very different cat in my universe.

My mod is specifically for non-combat stats, although high Charisma currently just gives you better lines and automatic solutions (sometimes % rolls). I admit it's a potential flaw unless it also provides some challenge, a flaw like Mass Effect's red and blue dialogue, dammit. (Low or medium Wisdom will still provide unwise choices amongst the responses, so you still have to read and consider future consequences before your click.)

Pity about priorities. Will leave Open Locks as a percentage roll for now and design an enjoyable Disarm Trap system using dialogue before worrying about redesigning a diplomacy system more involved than carefully choosing from a myriad of responses.

I'm not too worried if playing a diplomat priest, or a wise magician, is slow, text heavy, and light on combat. It's always what I wanted to play in a game, and a friend who made a NWN PW convinced me 'If you don't like any of the others, make it yourself'. And as I said, stupid Barbarians will still have fun. They'll get stuck in vicious ambushs and traps, accumulate enemies with every faction, and can solve all their problems with an abiding love for their axe; an absurdly challenging slaughterfest. I don't despise the dumb grunt, I relish him. It will be a vastly different playthru and they will have plenty of laughs from the 'screwed over' situations they are placed in. Politics... -no place for the pinhead.

The first bridge(?) encounter after leaving the vault in Fallout 2 left a lasting impression on me about separating playstyles. (I talked my way out of a fight with my high INT and CHA char, but then got killed too much by radscorps. So I made a STR grunt, and my responses at the bridge encounter became 'Ughh...' 'Derr...' I was in love.) My goal is a full story mod with comprehensive branching based on 5 stats, 4 classes, and 9 alignments.

Sanity is for the weak.

 

[Duckard]

But I don't like minigames.

In Fallout, when you encounter an enemy, a rather lengthy minigame takes place. You and the enemy/enemies take turns, and in a simplified depiction of combat you are trying to reduce enemy "hit points" to zero while retaining at least one of yours.
I mean, what besides complexity makes a lockpicking minigame different from a combat "minigame"?
These don't have to include any time limits or require any dexterity with your gaming controller - it's just the developers' choice of what kind of gameplay they want to offer.
[/quote

It's the complexity that makes it fun. I can play a lockpicking minigame once and that's that. There's nothing more to it. The way things are, there's nothing enjoyable about having to do the minigame. It's a repetitive action and doesn't make you think any more than commanding your character to pick a lock.

The only way for other skills to be seen as alternatives (in terms of fun) to combat would be if they were developed with the complexity that combat is developed. This way, a task like picking a lock wont just mean going through the motions to get to the fun part, but it would be the fun part itself. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to make a lockpicking minigame into something intriguing.

 

[Baron]

It would involve a blowtorch.

 

[zeitgeist]

Simple: don't make a cRPG.

A cRPG is combat-oriented practically by definition, and all the other systems suffer from being relegated to the status of minigames, no matter how complex they are. To make them anything more, you have to design the entire gameworld, and the game mechanics from scratch to support the style of gameplay that isn't mainly combat-oriented (with dialogue coming in at a distant second place).

To take lockpicking as an example, you'd have to have a gameworld where almost every single lock can be picked, and where it makes sense to pick some and leave some be. Your lockpicking would have to be an actual game, not a minigame, you'd have to have shops with various locksmith tools, you'd have to be able to construct a lock from scratch and test your skills at it, you'd have to have a way to upgrade your lockpicking skills both as a character (not a single skill, but entire skill trees related to lockpicking) and as a player, you'd have to be able to disassemble an existing lock into pieces to study its inner workings and so on.

And then if you want your game to be a proper simRPG instead of just a lockpicking-oriented RPG, you'd have to do this for at least another 10 or 20 possible playstyles.

 

[BearBomber]

Skill checks will be boring as long as the player do not engage in the conflict with sentient opponent. Combat would also be boring if it all about hitting combat mannequins. Playing a character with maxed lock-pick skill would be interesting if the patrolled the corridors and the speed of picking the lock made a difference. Or if there was another rogue trying to break in before him.

 

[Sceptic]

A cRPG is combat-oriented practically by definition

"By definition" and "99% of developers seem to do it this way" are not necessarily the same thing.

 

[The_scorpion]

In order to make a skill like lockpicking interesting enough it would have to have major importance in the overall game. Like an RPG where you play a burglar that has to find better ways to break into and rob houses.
That burglar may only rarely encounter an armed citizen, where his shooting skills would come into play. And since armed citizens usually can't shoot for fuck, he'd even more rarely be forced to use his medical skills.
In this situation, various detailed ways of "lockpicking" or otherwise gaining access to restricted areas would make sense. Minigames shouldn't be the answer.

the alternative is to make the RPG party-based and add lots of locked doors :/
So you'd have to have at least one decent lockpicker with the party. Yeah well.

 

[zeitgeist]

In order to make a skill like lockpicking interesting enough it would have to have major importance in the overall game. Like an RPG where you play a burglar that has to find better ways to break into and rob houses.

Yeah, you'd pretty much have to elevate all skills to the level of importance combat currently holds. Which given the development scope of an average game just isn't feasible - you'd either end up with one skill much more important than the others, which would just change the focus of the game to something other than pure combat (such as your burglary RPG example), or with a bunch of skills that aren't very well fleshed out. This, mind you, can still work to a point (see Deus Ex as an example) if other game mechanics are interesting enough and mesh together well enough to build a consistent and immersive gameworld.

 

[Mastermind]

Regarding spell acquisition, I always liked building up a base. I would like if ALL spells could only be obtained from books (purchase, find, loot, coerce, defeat a rival wizard, author!). The PC would eventually build his own library of every spell he/she owned giving them the same satisfaction as a Warrior would seeing his swords and shields on display.

I like this. A lot of games are poorly balanced because the spellcaster gets his useful abilities automatically while a warrior has to hunt down and find a good weapon or piece of armor to stay competitive. Forcing wizards to hunt for spells would put them both on similar footing.

 

[Nickless]

One of the major issues with minigames is that they quickly become repetitive, right? Why not then tier minigames by the difficulty of the encounter, simple, mediocre, average, good, superior (But with more stages than that), or something similar. Then when you complete the simple ranking point of interaction, you have the option of never having to face it again, it's only when you come across the more complicated that you'll need to interact with it once more, and at the later tiers this should be extremely difficult, next to impossible without a hefty skill investment.

 

[Mastermind]

One of the major issues with minigames is that they quickly become repetitive, right? Why not then tier minigames by the difficulty of the encounter, simple, mediocre, average, good, superior (But with more stages than that), or something similar. Then when you complete the simple ranking point of interaction, you have the option of never having to face it again, it's only when you come across the more complicated that you'll need to interact with it once more, and at the later tiers this should be extremely difficult, next to impossible without a hefty skill investment.

Alternately, they could make different lock types with different minigames. And have fewer locked stuff (but increase the importance of what's behind the lock) to keep it from becoming a chore.

 

[Nickless]

Your ability to ignore tiers could also be directly related to your level of skill, to avoid incidences where through pure brute force, an unskilled character defeats a superior encounter. Of course, for all this to be viable the developers need to work out a way to make it as challenging and entertaining as the combat. You can definitely make it turnbased. To take lockpicking as an example, maybe a high skill in lockpicking reveals the components needed to be interacted with to activate the mechanism, while dexterity affects the interaction. That said, I don't know how you would make it fun, I just know it can be done. You could also have lockpicking equipment that effects an encounter in different ways, skull keys, crowbars, picks, probes, and whatever else, as you would have a sword, armour and shield in combat.

 

[Zomg]

Find a game type that isn't about combat (ex: a tycoon game)

Add some stuff that is in a lot of RPGs that isn't combat to that game, so e.g. a tycoon game with characterized NPCs, stats that impact stuff, level-ups of various kinds, a branching plot, whatever

Now you have a tycoon RPG

squad tactics is just the chicken that the RPG dead baby is stapled to

 

[SCO]

I guess you can make the minigame just as complex as real combat. Defeating lock is not exactly easy in real life too.
There is a massively successful combat alternative in Thief. When you base your game mechanics on other than combat while still not being a "movie" you get new sub/genres.

Recent example: mirrors edge

 

[denizsi]

Overall the complexity of non-combat gameplay is as if you'd decide a whole combat in one skill check comparing your character and the enemy. Doing that to combat would be an outrage, yet screwing other aspects in the same way is perfectly fine, we even don't know it any other way.

Active opposition seeking out to kill you vs. passive static obstacle. I'm also not that crazy about single-click skill checks. There could be some research involved in learning different types of locks when you can't pick a particular lock, for instance. Appeal of the combat is in the immediacy of it due to the life threat so maybe the appeal of static obstacles should be pulled back to thoughtful preparations ahead of time?

Is there a game that lets you actually play a mage? Not a "fireball thrower" - a mage. Who studies mystical powers and learns to use them in his favor. Drawing symbols like in Arx Fatalis doesn't count as "simulated understanding of magic" in my book, but it is a step in the right direction.

How so? It was just a shitty consoltard front to the same old shit, ie. alternative way of killing. Drawing symbols was a retarded gimmick that got old by the time you've learnt your third rune. There's nothing about it that makes it a step in the right direction.

Bethesdian minigames are as well, in a way. The difficulty is totally wrong (along with the awful philosopy "never let the player screw up"), but they are trying to let us actually lockpick, hack or negotiate. Adding some interesting skill influences on the course of the action could do wonders.

No. Only FO3 had semi-decent lockpicking and hacking but that's about it. They let you bypass the limitations of your skill through manual skill, ie. shit.

 

[Mastermind]

No. Only FO3 had semi-decent lockpicking and hacking but that's about it. They let you bypass the limitations of your skill through manual skill, ie. shit.

So what? Intelligence can let you bypass the limitations of your skill in combat. I don't see the problem with letting the player bypass the limitations of your skill as long as the skill plays a heavy part in your ability to use that skill. So more skilled players should be better at lockpicking than less skilled players (assuming the pc skill is the same), but should not be able to break every lock in the game through pure skill.

That's not true of fallout 3 anyway, if you didn't have a certain skill level you could not even try to lockpick/hack certain stuff.

 

[denizsi]

I don't see the problem with letting the player bypass the limitations of your skill

Oh hello Todd. You almost fooled us for a moment there.

 

[Mastermind]

I don't see the problem with letting the player bypass the limitations of your skill

Oh hello Todd. You almost fooled us for a moment there.

As usual, the codex never fails to deliver when it comes to hard hitting arguments.

You're a fucking retard. Not only do you have no idea how Fallout 3's lockpicking worked (but talk shit anyway, that is after all the codex way), but your idea of a game would be pretty much indistinguishable from a movie, because the only way to prevent a player from bypassing the limitations of his skill is to not let him play at all, just have him make the character, make level-up decisions, then have an AI play the game for him because letting the player use his intelligence to bypass a situation a dumber player might get stuck in "bypasses the limitations of your skill".

 

[Sceptic]

As usual, the codex never fails to deliver when it comes to hard hitting arguments.

You're a fucking retard.

Mastermind, on the other hand, certainly delivers

 

[Kaucukovnik]

"Player skill" is obviously a forbidden term around here. And the only proper way to make a true RPG is to avoid anything that's even remotely incorporated in a commercially successful title.

Hardcore.