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Is it bad design to allow a player to create a nonviable character? (Age of Decadence)

Do you think it's bad design to allow players to create failed builds?

  • Yes

    Votes: 54 23.0%
  • No

    Votes: 181 77.0%

  • Total voters
    235
  • Poll closed .

Sigourn

uooh afficionado
Joined
Feb 6, 2016
Messages
5,624
I recall an old drama on the Interplay forums. Someone bought was Fallout, got all excited about exploring the post-apocalyptic world and made a character specializing in outdoorsmanship, barter, and stealth. Naturally, he didn't enjoy the experience. Was it the developers' fault for not ensuring that any randomly-picked skills would allow him to beat the game?

Yes? What kind of a question is that?

"Freedom" is not "freedom" anymore when you need to specialize in certain skills to be succesful.
 

Big Wrangle

Guest
Real RPGs are for monocled genre-savvy scholars who know in advance how the game mechanics work, because they have played the same games that the developers did play for inspiration. And that's a good thing.
I'm not sure about that, there is a difference between reading the skills the game offers and looking up the "ultimate build" and copypasting it.
 

cosmicray

Savant
Joined
Jan 20, 2019
Messages
436
At least I expect the game to communicate(via manual or on-screen) to me the choices I'm making when creating my character. Something like "(not recommended)" when I lower my Strength to 1.
 

Duckard

Augur
Joined
Aug 14, 2010
Messages
354
If this is bad design, then I guess XCOM is a shit game because you can fail when you make poor decisions.

There's nothing wrong with letting the player fail to build a good character and fail after some time. The problem is when the game isn't different enough between runs to keep things interesting, and doesn't teach the mechanics well enough that the player can make a better character next time. It is bad to make the player repeat hours of the same content (even if they're bad at the game).

In AoD specifically, at least you can reroll and do a completely different quest line. Most crpgs don't have that much meaningful c&c or variation in between runs, so I admit that it is often bad design but it doesn't have to be.
 

Fairfax

Arcane
Joined
Jun 17, 2015
Messages
3,518
If the build is completely unviable and the player absolutely cannot make any progress, yes. There should always be a chance of succeeding through player skill, no matter how slim it is.

One of the core principles of old-school RPG design is that player skill comes before character skill. Builds and items are there to give players superior/inferior tools, but the player's own ingenuity is the ultimate factor. This is lost on munchkins, however. They believe skill resides in system mastery, because that's how they can tell themselves that they deserve the extreme power they've acquired through min/maxing, metagaming, savescumming, etc. Munchkins are also a majority around here, hence the poll's result and all the talk about games like P:K supposedly being 'incline'.
 

typical user

Arbiter
Joined
Nov 30, 2015
Messages
957
If I make character with 1 on every stat, use meme weapons then by all means the game should punish me for that.

But on the other hand at the begining there should be multiple choices how I can overcome some obstacle. If I need to lockpick a door then the lock itself should be easy enough to open and if not then I should be able to smash it, blow it up, steal a key or do some other stuff.
 

nikolokolus

Arcane
Joined
May 8, 2013
Messages
4,090
Not every ability or skill should be equally useful and not every build should equal in all situations but if a developer puts basket weaving in their game and then never gives me an opportunity to use it, then that's a bad design.
 
Joined
Jan 14, 2018
Messages
50,754
Codex Year of the Donut
Not every ability or skill should be equally useful and not every build should equal in all situations but if a developer puts basket weaving in their game and then never gives me an opportunity to use it, then that's a bad design.
millions of people choose to get basketweaving degrees irl and are 100% useless
nothing wrong with having realism in games
 

nikolokolus

Arcane
Joined
May 8, 2013
Messages
4,090
Not every ability or skill should be equally useful and not every build should equal in all situations but if a developer puts basket weaving in their game and then never gives me an opportunity to use it, then that's a bad design.
millions of people choose to get basketweaving degrees irl and are 100% useless
nothing wrong with having realism in games
Realism in games that feature elfs and dragons and psycho mutant punks. Fuck "realism" unless you're gonna make me a game using GURPS.
 

DeepOcean

Arcane
Joined
Nov 8, 2012
Messages
7,394
Do you think it's bad design to allow players to create failed builds?
Depends what you mean for failed.

"I failed because I couldn't beat all the content of the game on one go with my first Jack of all Trades character."

That is an invalid complaint. This kind of mentality leads to aberrations like Skyrim.

"I failed because the game lied to me and there is no content for my character, the game presented a flexibility it doesn't have."

Now that is a valid complaint. This is specially bad when it is on the main critical path, Avellone social lady character being murdered by wolves over and over again on Arcanum's start is a great example of that.

If the lion share of your game will be combat but you want social interaction as an optional thing, making segregated stat pools for social and combat skills is a great idea so you can avoid that kind of situation. I agree with Sawyer when he said RPGs should stop pretending they are simulating tabletop RPGs when they can't do that, I just didn't like the implementations of those ideas.
 

Bad Sector

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Yes, but with the caveat of 'nonviable' meaning that you cannot finish the game with the character. Getting locked out of situations is fine as long as you are given the tools and information to avoid it. For example if you make a speech oriented character and the game forces you into a combat situation where you cannot get out of - not necessarily by winning - then it is bad design (with "forces you" i mean you have no alternative or the alternative is so unclear that might as well be random).
 

mondblut

Arcane
Joined
Aug 10, 2005
Messages
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Location
Ingrija
Real RPGs are for monocled genre-savvy scholars who know in advance how the game mechanics work, because they have played the same games that the developers did play for inspiration. And that's a good thing.
I'm not sure about that, there is a difference between reading the skills the game offers and looking up the "ultimate build" and copypasting it.

Someone has to post that "ultimate build". Well, that's us.
 

hpstg

Savant
Joined
Nov 14, 2014
Messages
485
It's a quality equals quantity situation, sometimes.

If the studio has the talent, time and resources, most situations should support multiple ways of approaching them.

I don't believe that failure states themselves are a real issue, but when they are hinted at, and how they are handled by the game. Restricting the game to min maxes very often limits fun and choice. That doesn't mean that your crippled outdoorsman can fulfill his messianic task in the nuclear post apocalypse.

Again, a question of talent and resources for the developers.
 

ntonystinson

Scholar
Joined
Nov 11, 2016
Messages
181
It's a quality equals quantity situation, sometimes.

If the studio has the talent, time and resources, most situations should support multiple ways of approaching them.

I don't believe that failure states themselves are a real issue, but when they are hinted at, and how they are handled by the game. Restricting the game to min maxes very often limits fun and choice. That doesn't mean that your crippled outdoorsman can fulfill his

With freedom of choice (i.e. a skill-based system that doesn't hold your hand the way class-based systems do) comes the freedom to make mistakes.
Depends on what one means by mistake. There is certainly fun in finding yourself in a rough situation requiring you to do some serious improvisation to get out of. Such situations can end up being more memorable than the "viable" route.

But if it's just "You literally cannot access anything" then yeah, not that interesting.
This
 
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Alexios

Augur
Patron
Joined
Feb 18, 2014
Messages
444
Every alternative that people are proposing is a downgrade of the game's quality. Forcing people to restart if their build sucks is harsh, but is preferable when the alternative is to make the game so easy that it's either completely unrewarding or not worth replaying. If a game is easy then there better be something else compelling about it (e.g., KotOR 2 and Bloodlines) otherwise it brings absolutely nothing to the table.
 

Funposter

Arcane
Joined
Oct 19, 2018
Messages
1,773
Location
Australia
Only beyond what is reasonable. Most people can probably cobble together a minimally functional build just based on what looks "good" or "fun", and based on some experience with the genre. The problems begin when a game doesn't adhere to those expectations, or doesn't implement features properly.

Age of Decadence tell you from the beginning that a hybrid build is going to be more difficult than one focused entirely on Combat or Social/Civil, so the player accepts it, and if their weird hybrid build doesn't work properly, they can't exactly blame the game for tricking them. However, AoD does do some unforgivable things in this regard - start the game as a Praetor, and game highlights Etiquette as one of your recommended skills, alongside Persuasion and Streetwise. This is fine, except for the fact that there's something like a total of 4 Etiquette checks in the entire game. A player can reasonably think that a common RPG archetype (basically a Knight - sword and board + Speech) will work, but the game itself has intentioally misled them into wasting points on an almost non-functional skill.

This sort of pops up in other games too. VTMB features Intimidate and Seduce, but they are extremely situational compared to the basic Persuasion skill, which pops up in dialogue far more often. They are still functional for roleplaying purposes (or to access certain content), but they are not as useful as they may first appear, alongside Persuasion as a sort of "pick your favourite Speech skill". A player could probably make something like Daggerfall completely horrific if they picked nothing but Language skills etc. but that goes beyond our first qualifier, in the sense that 99.99% of people will realise that isn't reasonable.
 

Alex

Arcane
Joined
Jun 14, 2007
Messages
8,750
Location
São Paulo - Brasil
With freedom of choice (i.e. a skill-based system that doesn't hold your hand the way class-based systems do) comes the freedom to make mistakes.
Depends on what one means by mistake.
I recall an old drama on the Interplay forums. Someone bought was Fallout, got all excited about exploring the post-apocalyptic world and made a character specializing in outdoorsmanship, barter, and stealth. Naturally, he didn't enjoy the experience. Was it the developers' fault for not ensuring that any randomly-picked skills would allow him to beat the game? He seemed to think so because the skills were there and he was free to pick them ignoring the other, more useful skills.

Well, yes, it was. Fallout is a great game, but it does a really poor job communicating to the player what skills will be useful and how they will be. Picking outdoorsmanship, barter and stealth as focus is in no way just random, it fits perfectly with the idea of a survivor in the wasteland, who tries to get by by himself and would rather avoid problems than deal with them. If someone made a character like that in a P&P game, no one would bat an eye, unless the GM had made it very specific everyone needed to be competent at combat. You might argue that such a character wouldn't fit with a vault dweller, much less that it would be chosen for retrieving the water chip. This is true, but until the player gets a feel for the game, he has no way of knowing this from the get go. What kind of character is viable depends entirely on what the designers made content for. For instance, if the devs had made energy weapons a lot more scarce, but wasteland movement more important, tagging energy weapons instead of outdoorsmanship would have been suicide.

Not only that, but the player is also led on by the trait system, and how dialogue heavy some areas are. My first fallout character had tagged science, doctor and speech. He also was good natured, had a high luck, charisma and maxed int. Needless to say, it wasn't a pleasant experience. Was my character bad? Sure, but then again, with his charisma and speech, it wouldn't have been impossible imagining him working, since he could have gotten combat NPCs on his side. That didn't work, since the NPCs weren't that good at combat and frequently had bad AI, but neither was it so outlandish to think these skills would be fun to play with.

I think it is impossible, however, to provide the player with choices that are all winnable. Some choices are just bad, and if this is made clear enough for the player, I don't see a problem at all. Other choices may seem good but turn out awful later on on the game, which is annoying but not a deal breaker in an otherwise good game. But if you put two skills side by side, like science and big guns are in Fallout, I think the player is justified in blaming the designers when it turns out that big guns is enormously useful for most of the areas in the game while science can only be used in a few specific dialogues and provides you with the eventual bonus xp or disabled robot.

Like I said, I think Fallout is a great game. It has lot going for it to make up for these shortcomings. And in the end, I think science or outsdoormanship or doctor or whatever having little effect in game is more a reflection of how ambitious the designers were rather than simple bad design. But that is no reason for not calling out bad design for what it is.
 

Alex

Arcane
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Messages
8,750
Location
São Paulo - Brasil
Without the chance to screw it up or do a good job, there would be no point.

The point is not whether you can screw up or not. You can still leave room for the player to screw up, especially if your game mostly about character build making.

However, the skills in Fallout are at first a little like a promise. Not a promise that you can finish the game with them alone (otherwise you wouldn't have 3 tags), but the promise that there will be interesting role-playing opportunities for those skills. They are an interface for you, as the player, to interact with the world. So, having skills that are just dead ends that lead almost nowhere is just bad design. It is not creating an interesting challenge for the player to come up with ways to use them so as to make an effective character.

They are more like a room in an adventure game that kills you if you open it, with no kind of hint or indication that you shouldn't open the door to that room. And even then, at least in an adventure game a random death can help set the mood, while in an RPG dying because you made what seemed like a perfectly viable PC which the devs didn't account for only helps breaking the mood.
 

Mexi

Dumbfuck!
Dumbfuck
Joined
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Messages
6,811
You're asking the wrong forum. These phaggots shill for that Age of Cuckadence game.
 

Papa Môlé

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Messages
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Voodoo Hell
If you put skills and feats in your game they should do something. If they are only there as fluff or side stuff then mark them separately or even have a separate point pool for taking them compared to real skills. It's incredibly lame when devs try to make a game look like it has tons of options in character design to puff up the game and in reality over half of it is useless garbage.

Making a build is not an element of skill when you start up a new game. You just play the game and realize something doesn't work because it's not supported by the game or you read shit ahead of time on a wiki or the like. Using a build is where the skill is and the entire point of an RPG is to give a player a number of ways to solve problems that reflect the idea of their character and ideally change the world in different ways.

Having to read a developers mind to figure out what's actually going to matter or savescum back to earlier saves is not challenging gameplay and on top of that it's rather immersion breaking, even more so in a game that's supposed to have choices and consequences as a basic feature of gameplay. "Haha you fucked up and put points into a skill we didn't bother to write instances where you can actually use it to complete tasks that matter" is not meaningful choices and consequences.
 

thesheeep

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I recall an old drama on the Interplay forums. Someone bought was Fallout, got all excited about exploring the post-apocalyptic world and made a character specializing in outdoorsmanship, barter, and stealth. Naturally, he didn't enjoy the experience. Was it the developers' fault for not ensuring that any randomly-picked skills would allow him to beat the game?

Yes? What kind of a question is that?

"Freedom" is not "freedom" anymore when you need to specialize in certain skills to be succesful.
Nonsense.
A character system that makes every build viable is entirely worthless.
If you do not need to think about your build, then there is no challenge in creating a build. No challenge = bad design.
Skill traps are part of that.
That doesn't mean those skills are entirely without use (if a skill is entirely useless, it should not be in a game, I guess we can all agree on that). But featuring a range from good to bad skills also allows players to set their own challenge level, once they become acquainted with the system. Without that, you wouldn't even need to become acquainted with the system.
And players that aren't acquainted with the system have a learning experience to look forward to - if you don't like that, what the hell are you playing games heavily relying on number crunching for?

In that example, the player was simply a fool for going in blindly, expecting a game that is about combat & dialogue to be solveable via stealth, trade and wilderness skills.
The need to think about metagame (what used to be RTFM, if you ask me) at least somewhat is essential for any real RPG enthusiast and essential for the experience - if you do not want that, read a book, watch a movie or play a walking simulator, but stop demaning (c)RPGs to feature braindead character building.
Thinking back, all the gaming experiences that I enjoyed (at leat those related to RPGs) were in games that required me to think about builds and allowed me to screw them up.
One of the reasons I remember my times with BG, Arcanum & Fallout fairly well, but frankly I remember very little about Pillars of Eternity is that in PoE no matter where you put your points, every build just works (sure, some are more optimal than others, but there's simply no real failure here). Of course that doesn't lead to anything memorable.
Not once when playing something like Arcanum did I think "What a bad game for allowing me to make a bad choice", instead I thought "I learned something. Next time I'll do better".

However, the skills in Fallout are at first a little like a promise. Not a promise that you can finish the game with them alone (otherwise you wouldn't have 3 tags), but the promise that there will be interesting role-playing opportunities for those skills. They are an interface for you, as the player, to interact with the world. So, having skills that are just dead ends that lead almost nowhere is just bad design. It is not creating an interesting challenge for the player to come up with ways to use them so as to make an effective character.
There ARE interesting role-playing opportunities for those skills (well, except the outdoor stuff, iirc). However, they are not all on the same level.
Which is something you learn over the course of multiple playthroughs (by far not all of them have to be complete, of course), or by doing some research.
As soon as you can randomly pick any abilities to focus on, and it would always work, the system becomes worthless and might as well be replaced by no system at all -> just pick how you want to solve quest X and it will succeed. That is essentially what you are asking for if you are asking for a system that does not allow bad builds.
 
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