Party based RPG's shouldn't have non-combat skills.

[a Goat]

Non-combat skills are pointless in party-based RPG's because you are obviously going to build a party to get around majority of obstacles that may be hidden behind skill check of some sort. Need to pick locks? Steal some key item? Disarm trap? Hit something from afar? Talk your way through? You'll have a specialized guy. Having lots of non-combat skills won't solve it as eventually metaknowledge will take over and people will realize which of them are essential and which are mostly useless(see Wasteland 2 for recent example).

As the only possible obstacle against player with a piece of brain left in his skull(capable of getting enough proficiency in non-combat skills across his party) is bound to be some particular combat encounter, and nothing else. Therefore rather than planning several approaches depending on the kind of skills your party has, there should just be 3 approaches open for everyone and more focus should be put to optimize combat.

 

[Sentinel]

Sawyer agrees with you. Play PoE2.

 

[Tigranes]

POE2 expanded the number of skills that have a noncombat use. If anything, it tried to make many of its skills both combat and noncombat use.

I think the better solution is extreme points scarcity for party RPGs, but people cry and cry that they can't have their dual wielding assassin who is stealthy and powerful at the same time alongside their partymates Legolas the Machine Gunner and John Doe the Charismatic Talky Tanky Fighter.

 

[Zanzoken]

Someone should figure out how to make non-combat solutions more interesting than "put points into skill --> use skill when game prompts --> win". Obviously people have tried, and that's where half-assed lockpicking mini-games and such were originated, but these are lazy solutions -- the non-combat equivalent of trash mob spam.

Can anyone think of examples where a game actually challenged you to plan out a non-combat solution to a quest? The one that comes to my mind is Age of Decadence but that's not a party-based RPG.

 

[Dorateen]

Never had an issue in computer role-playing games like Realms of Arkania, or latter Wizardry. A party is made up of individual player characters. So why would one be built any more limited than another? The player should also be unrestricted in how they compose their team, allowing they might have a focus on melee or magic, and forgo a stealth member all together.

 

[V_K]

Can anyone think of examples where a game actually challenged you to plan out a non-combat solution to a quest? The one that comes to my mind is Age of Decadence but that's not a party-based RPG.

Legacy: Realm of Terror, Quest for Glory. The Council could have been that if it didn't have that many consumables.

 

[Funposter]

The solution of course is to present more options than the player can reasonably cover, so that they can either get past most mid-level skill checks, or get past a few focused, high-level skill checks. As a hypothetical, assume that a game has a 4 member limit on the player party, and that there are 6 skills or some such. Levelling is such that a character can only max out a single skill by max level. So, do you focus entirely on 4 skills, or turn 2 of your party members into 50/50 or 70/30 guys in order to gain access to more content? Which skills do you pick? Why? This is basically the backbone of how Age of Decadence works, since the idea is to enourage multiple playthroughs with different kinds of characters. You can see the opposite at play in a game like Pathfinder: Kingmaker. A Wizard or Rogue (Octavia) will comfortably cover about half of the skill checks in the entire game (Mobility, Stealth, Trickery, Knowledge: Arcana and your choice of a fifth), leaving the rest of it up to the other five party members. With Jaethal alone, you can probably cover the rest. Of course it's better if the character has the skills as a class skill, can potentially pick up a feat to add onto it etc. but you can probably just build a "persuasion tank" face in order to cover that and not worry about your slightly lower Lore: Nature checks. The party size of six would perhaps be appropriate in a game that has all 35 of the tabletop's skills on offer.

 

[turkishronin]

Non-combat skills are pointless in party-based RPG's because you are obviously going to build a party to get around majority of obstacles that may be hidden behind skill check of some sort. Need to pick locks? Steal some key item? Disarm trap? Hit something from afar? Talk your way through? You'll have a specialized guy. Having lots of non-combat skills won't solve it as eventually metaknowledge will take over and people will realize which of them are essential and which are mostly useless(see Wasteland 2 for recent example).

As the only possible obstacle against player with a piece of brain left in his skull(capable of getting enough proficiency in non-combat skills across his party) is bound to be some particular combat encounter, and nothing else. Therefore rather than planning several approaches depending on the kind of skills your party has, there should just be 3 approaches open for everyone and more focus should be put to optimize combat.

Every party-based RPG should be a blobber

 

[Black]

JA2 disagrees so.

 

[Deleted Member 16721]

I see you haven't played Pathfinder: Kingmaker. Play that and observe the non-combat skill checks and then delete this thread.

 

[a Goat]

JA2 disagrees so.

JA2 offers very characteristic solution tho, as you can and will split your parties often. In typical RPG party stays together for most of the game. Don't get me wrong, it works beautifully on JA2 but that's because it's far from being ordinary rpg

 

[Reinhardt]

assume that a game has a 4 member limit on the player party

Looks like really shitty game to me.

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[Deleted Member 16721]

Have you played the game lukaszek ? You can't steamroll through everything, lol. I fail plenty of checks and many of them come in multiple tiers, i.e. Athletics + Nature Lore + Mobility all at once with one character. You guys are on some other planet it seems sometimes. It's hard or even impossible to cover everything in Kingmaker especially if you mix and match your party.

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[Reinhardt]

you do know that unless you are solo, for each check best character is chosen

There is at least one text sequence where you running away from big bad thing and it choses which character to pursue at random, so only his skills matter. You can try to climb the wall, or hide, or something else, but you don't know which character will be chosen for any of the checks. And checks are pretty high, so even if you are lucky with character selection you can still fail. Also result of fail is death. If it's mc - game over.

 

[Delterius]

Can anyone think of examples where a game actually challenged you to plan out a non-combat solution to a quest?

princess makers i guess~

 

[Bohrain]

I see multiple solutions that in reality wouldn't work out well in practice.
1. More skills than the party size can cover. You can accomplish it by either making more skills or diminishing party size. Wouldn't necessarily play out well since it's hard to make all the skills around equally optimal and if there are less units in combat it tends to homogenize their roles, which goes against the idea of using a party instead of single character in the first place.
2. Give the protagonist's specialization some content that is unachievable when doing the same spec with another party member. Like having higher skill ceiling, or implementing something like a language that a companion knows already, but if you spec to it yourself it reveals that the translating companion is an unreliable narrator of sorts. Obviously doesn't work out for blobbers where you create your party since they don't have a single protagonist. And the dev actually has to go through the effort of making multiple skills useful to the player instead of just speech.
3. Make non-combat and combat skills use the same resource for leveling them and have extreme scarcity. Problem is that you'll probably just make people invest on the most worthwhile non-combat skills if any in a combat heavy game.

The second solution is probably the one I could see being implemented reasonably well, Pathfinder does it to some extend, but the player only checks are rareish. But the dev has to implement more mutually exclusive content and that goes against the convention that a RPG should be 40+ hours long where the last 15 hours make you wish this would end already.

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

In Icewind Dale there's a quest where an old drunk asks you to get him some alcohol. You can get the alcohol without fighting anyone. He's happy & you gain XP.

 

[Deleted Member 16721]

trying

Good for you, I hope you enjoy your time with this instant modern classic.

as in single check or chain of 3 separate checks?

3 separate checks in one overarching check. And guaranteed your character will not be good at all 3 unless you got very lucky.

you do know that unless you are solo, for each check best character is chosen

It is very hard or impossible to cover all checks at all times in Kingmaker. Even by metagaming it's hard because each class has skill strengths and come with different bonuses. You will miss some, many of them in fact, because some are very hard or even impossible.

Responses in bold. Trust me, I've played over 500 hours of Kingmaker so far. You will fail many checks throughout the game and the game usually offers multiple ways of doing things, but you'll still fail. There are what, 16 skills in the game in a 6 person party? If you don't save scum and live with consequences it's a very interesting experience because of the skill checks. Alignment isn't the only thing that matters.

 

[Lonely Vazdru]

player with a piece of brain left in his skull

I wouldn't worry about that too much these days. Here included.

 

[jasaro96]

I think that's thet way they meant to be played. To make you have a balanced party to complete the cool quests instead of a team of six berserk pure-bred orcs specialised in big swords so you can obviously break the combat. Or as a tool to make you take that choice consciously.

 

[Infinitron]

Actually a pretty thoughtful OP.

Vault Dweller How is Colony Ship approaching this?

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[J1M]

So many things I disagree with in this thread.

The idea that there should be more skills than you can cover with your party is terrible. Shocked at how many are suggesting it. The first playthrough is the most important, and giving a choice on the character creation screen that decides which half of quest solutions are simply not available to you from the middle and end of the game with no knowledge about them is horrible design. As is locking players into only a few options based on a character creation choice.

These problems largely arise from the idea that all characters should be nearly as effective as each other in combat. When you build a party, you should be deciding which types of challenges and content they will be good at and for that to be interesting the scope of the decision has go beyond just "combat" or "skills". RPGs need to abandon the notion that everyone is equally useful for all aspects of the game. It is more interesting to consider if your party should have an easy time with goblins/traps/negotiations/etc and that's what the player should be thinking about when allocating a party spot.

It's difficult to explain this succinctly without talking about specific games, so just imagine you had to design an RPG and the number one design objective was that each character had to have a different level of effectiveness in combat. ie. Character A does 20 damage a round and Character B does 2 damage a round. With others falling somewhere in the middle. Now, design the rest of the game so players are equally compelled to take all of the character types.