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

[Vault Dweller]

That's the thing though, Fallout 1/2 are easy because of the open-ended skill system. It was either that or try to make every possible combination of skills have a separate, viable path through the game, which for a system as complex as Fallout's would be prohibitively expensive (Not that I need to tell you that). Inevitably the design will fail to account for one more builds, and players who try those builds will be in for an intensely frustrating experience.............

I'd prefer a game where I have to figure out how to create a viable character to a game where combat is easy to accommodate all builds, no matter how flawed, but that's subjective.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

If there's a skill that implies a valid playstyle, it should offer a valid playstyle. Obviously nobody will expect Morrowind's athletics and acrobatics to be massively useful primary skills that will get you through the challenges the game throws at you, BUT people will reasonably assume that the stealth and speechcraft skills are going to be useful and offer a valid path through the game.

You can't reasonably expect anything because that is relative to each player's expectation, which on its turn reflects their past experiences.

Wait, how is it the player fault for expecting a skill not to be shit?

 

[infidel]

You know, a lot of CRPGs character generation would benefit from actual stats on the front page. In case of conversation skills, a simple "This skill can be used X times in the game" would make the choices much more informed. In the case of secondary skills it would be "This skill can be used in X quests out of Y total and is not necessary for the main questline".

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

There's some balancing involved: the player should have enough freedom to make bad decisions, and fail, but on the other hand, it should be fairly logical and common-sense like, and not some labyrinthine meta-guessing of what the developers intended.

For instance, if you create your build around gambling and hunting, and then get stuck, that kinda makes sense. Gambling and hunting can be used to make money, but it's hard to imagine getting through human problems with just those 2 skills.

But if you create a build centered around some type of combat, and then get stuck because apparently that type of combat needs to be paired with this type of crafting and so on, because the developer said so, that is bad design. The point of good games is not to guess what the developer intended, or suffer through trial and error until you nail the one way things work, but rather to make intelligent decisions and profit.

 

[Damned Registrations]

If there's a skill that implies a valid playstyle, it should offer a valid playstyle. Obviously nobody will expect Morrowind's athletics and acrobatics to be massively useful primary skills that will get you through the challenges the game throws at you, BUT people will reasonably assume that the stealth and speechcraft skills are going to be useful and offer a valid path through the game.

You can't reasonably expect anything because that is relative to each player's expectation, which on its turn reflects their past experiences.

Wait, how is it the player fault for expecting a skill not to be shit?

This. If a skill is in the game, it should be for a reason. If they added driving as a skill and never give you a fucking vehicle, that's on the devs, not the player. And if they give you a vehicle so you can drive the last 10 feet to the final boss and nothing else, that's not any better. That's just retarded design. It's insane how many games include an unarmed or melee skill, but never take weapons/guns away from the player to make it valuable, even when it would totally make sense, like when they're meeting high ranking officials or something. Instead it's a skill as some sort of retarded self imposed challenge, or it's balanced so that being unarmed isn't even a disadvantage.

Whittling a game down to ten skills may be dumbing it down, but padding it with a dozen skills nobody who played the game already would ever want to invest in is even worse.

 

[Shadenuat]

You know, a lot of CRPGs character generation would benefit from actual stats on the front page. In case of conversation skills, a simple "This skill can be used X times in the game" would make the choices much more informed. In the case of secondary skills it would be "This skill can be used in X quests out of Y total and is not necessary for the main questline".

what the fuck

infidel

now that's accurate!

 

[The Great ThunThun*]

Jeezus men.

Useless skills/abilities, bad.
Choices to make shit/OP builds, good.

It's that simple.

 

[Darth Canoli]

Yes, but Big Guns is also a skill. And a pointless one at that when you could easily merge both into one and keep the strength requirements.

Dude, did you even play the game ?

You're so wrong, the run i had the most fun with was a Big gun run with marcus (big gun too) and cassidy with a pancor, main char was switching between minigun and rocket launcher or a flamethrower against aliens, same for marcus.

 

[Lemming42]

Huh? Pretty sure you can break Tandi out with a stealth build and the lockpick check is fairly low. You just mosey around back, take out the guard (maybe two guards? if your sneak is high enough you can kill them one by one without alerting the rest of the khans), then sneak over to Tandi’s cage and pick the lock. Easy peasy. Stealth + melee/unarmed is a pretty obvious build since it lets you get close before combat starts.

Or if you want to go pure sneak + steal, you can steal enough shit to pay Tandi’s ransom and/or rob the leader of Khans to get your caps back. Generally speaking, anything that can be solved with money can be solved by a sneak/steal character and you will quickly be able to make/make back those caps.

Weird to cite the Tandi quest as a negative example considering that’s when the game really starts to open up. I guess you have two ways to stop the Shady Sands radscorpion menace and you could sneak or shoot your way through Vault 15. But in Vault 13, Vault 15 and Shady Sands, this is the only quest with more than two possible resolutions (IIRC). You can kill everyone, you can use speech, you can box the leader one on one, you can sneak around back and only kill a couple of khans then pick the lock, you can go in with 9 luck and the right armor (leather jacket maybe) and the khans will mistake you for the ghost of the leader’s murdered father. Everyone should play Fallout with a luck build at least once.

I chose the Tandi quest because it seems like one of the quests in the game that should allow almost any build to approach it in a logical way, but in practice only really allows for three or four fairly specific approaches. Side-quests like the radscorpion caves only having two solutions - kill everything or dynamite the entrance - is more understandable.

Is it true that you can kill the two guards at the back using your stealth skill? I was fairly sure you could kill them without using stealth and still not alert the rest of the base, and then walk up to Tandi's cell with nobody in Garl's room bothering you, but if entering stealth and then combat does actually stop the rest of the base from being alerted then fair enough.

Fallout does have useless skills, but sneak, outdoorsman and barter are not among them. Outdoorsman is essential if you want to avoid as much combat as possible. Sneak is very useful if you don’t just try to barge in through the front door. Barter is insanely overpowered to the point where I never raise it above 30-40 because it feels like cheating. You DON’T become richer than god that quickly unless you put lots of points into barter. Take it over 100—maybe 120—and you can make infinite money selling the same goods back and forth to the same merchant. Admittedly, this is a waste by the time you loot The Glow, but it’s incredibly powerful in the early to mid game.

With a combat build, you can take the Khans at about level 2 or 3 with combat set to normal difficulty. After that, you're carrying around a shitton of leather armour and desert eagles (and Garl's metal armour if you don't choose to keep it for yourself). I don't even think there are any merchants in the game who actually have enough money to pay for all of that, but you can use the loot just from the Khans base to clean out every other store you come across, and still have enough left over to score a ton of super-stimpaks from the dealer in Old Town all without ever putting a point into Barter.

I don't agree that Outdoorsman is useful, because every almost combat encounter on the world map either ends with you successfully making it to the exit grid in 1-2 turns, or super mutants unavoidably critting you with a chaingun for 200+ damage. It basically just means there's a higher chance that you'll make it through the trip through the northwest desert to Mariposa in one try, but you can make it fairly easily without ever investing in the outdoorsman skill. It's much more useful in Fallout 2, but in that case it's chiefly due to annoying encounter design, especially in the stretch between The Den and Modoc.

The problem with tagging sneak, outdoorsman and barter is not that the skills are useless, it’s that the combination doesn’t have a ton of synergy. Sneak, outdoorsman, speech would be a much better pacifist build.

Fallout is unbalanced. That’s part of the fun. Given that the game is so short and contains so much build related reactivity, it’s very much designed to be replayed. Given that it’s easy, a gimped build is not the end of the world.

I agree that the game's length is a strength because it encourages the player to play through various times seeing how different builds work, but the end result (at least in my case) is the discovery that there are about three skills which dominate everything and the rest are useless at worst and provide minor advantages at best. It's a game with fantastic build reactivity, but ultimately only for a select few builds - of the quests that offer multiple solutions, they generally have a speech path, a combat path and occasionally a lockpick/science challenge. There aren't any quests in the game where expertise in Barter, Doctor, Repair (other than the mandatory check in Necropolis, and having to re-roll the Mariposa forcefields less), Outdoorsman etc will ever help you out in any significant way. Given that the character creation screen itself telegraphs that these skills will be useful by offering the Good Natured trait, it's not surprising when new players get pissed off when their Charisma Doctor build fails after the game gave every indication that it should work.

Doctor, like first aid, is a utility skill. It’s valuable because it lets you fix injuries. But you don’t need to look all the way to New Vegas for a Fallout game that makes better use of the skill system—Fallout 2 also gives you far more opportunities to use science, repair, doctor etc... And sneak is downright essential for some quests. However, some of that is probably because it’s a much larger game.

I've got to maintain that Doctor really is useless in Fallout. You have to be very unlucky to break a limb in the first place, and it's not hard to fix with a low doctor skill even then. First aid would be useful if the game didn't give you a wealth of stimpaks pretty much no matter what you do.

Agreed about Fallout 2. Doctor being used to fix the brahmin's leg and diagnose the irradiated guy in the Vault City shantytown are perfect examples of logical applications of skills that the original Fallout is sadly lacking in.

 

[Glop_dweller]

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

I think it's poor practice to allow narrative/gameplay paths that do not anticipate every possible build in the game. It is not poor design to allow for difficult characters, or paths at whom only certain characters can succeed. I liked that the Fallout devs [not Bethesda of course] made the point of implementing a triple path for nearly all quests; warrior/diplomat/thief.

If this is a roleplaying game, then the player should be afforded a measure of possible success with any build they make—but this is contrary to my own preference though. In an RPG it —should— be possible to run characters that are ill-suited for success at anything...and that's their lot in life (that's how they would react in the situations), but in practice this doesn't make for a good game. Still... If you look at Tord's Fallout 1&2 let's plays, you will see a character who succeeds (through NPCs) despite their own utter physical ineptness. Tord's PC is jinxed to the point that she breaks firearms in the first round, and can cripple her own limbs in HtH combat.

Best option [IMO] is to have the game evaluate the ever changing PC, and ensure that a minimum of at least one path open up as others are closed; let the player figure out how to succeed on their own.

 

[JarlFrank]

You know, a lot of CRPGs character generation would benefit from actual stats on the front page. In case of conversation skills, a simple "This skill can be used X times in the game" would make the choices much more informed. In the case of secondary skills it would be "This skill can be used in X quests out of Y total and is not necessary for the main questline".

Uuuh no, is this a parody post? This would take the entire process of discovery out of the game.

 

[Glop_dweller]

Most will likely hate this... But I actually liked the speech mini-game in Oblivion. What it does is that it strips out the repetitive banter and small talk, by making it assumed. The player plays the minigame to influence how the conversation progresses, and ultimately wraps up; and there is just a hint of uncontrolled risk in the process. It's nearly perfect... and that's about the only thing that is in Oblivion.

Perfection in the speech game would have been weighted conversational ability that could tip the scale more than just being liked (or not) by the NPC; and also the addition of charm enchantments.

 

[V_K]

You know, a lot of CRPGs character generation would benefit from actual stats on the front page. In case of conversation skills, a simple "This skill can be used X times in the game" would make the choices much more informed. In the case of secondary skills it would be "This skill can be used in X quests out of Y total and is not necessary for the main questline".

Uuuh no, is this a parody post? This would take the entire process of discovery out of the gamefaqs guide.

FTFY

 

[DraQ]

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.

You are fucking delirious.

Wanting the game to be challenging does not preclude challenge having no place in many of its components:

• Installing the game should not be challenging.
  
• Getting the game to work on your system should also be easy.
  
• Likewise navigating the menus.
• Uninstalling being challenging is just being fucking mean.

Same goes for chargen and making good build:

A well designed game does not punish player for not being psychic (or Teela fucking Brown*).
Ideally player's failure should always be traceable to player's error given available knowledge at this point - technically player should be able to beat game on the first try with no luck involved, and no, that doesn't mean that the game should be easy - merely that player, who has deduction skills of Mycroft fucking Holmes, reflexes and coordination of a Shaolin master and who can grind numbers like fucking Rainman (in addition to not making any mistakes, ever) should be able to beat the game without failing irrecoverably (and thus having to restart/reload) even once.
During chargen, expecting player to know anything but what was conferred by manual and the chargen itself is expecting them to be fucking psychic ergo shit design.

Chargen's purpose is facilitating player's expression of their (viable in particular adventure's context) concept of character they want to play and translating this concept into game's mechanics. Game proper and challenge proper starts after player clicks "done" after chargen ends and not a second earlier (unless the game does funny shit like trying to infer character build from playstyle during relatively unrestricted prologue).
That doesn't mean that chargen has no room for gameplay mastery - skilled player may very well go for a very specific build to achieve very specific goals through his superior understanding of game's mechanics - but the only challenge resulting from chargen should be finding a way to prevail with whatever you built - possibly having to revise your understanding of the character concept (waah, my bare chested barb cannot tank archers!), not building something that can prevail.
In any case player should spend chargen thinking of what character *they* want to play, not trying to predict (in vain) what hoops *game* will want them to jump through at some later point.

*) in a well designed game, even one heavily reliant on RNG, chances of a roll fucking the situation beyond recovery without player's error being involved - possibly by taking stupid risks - should be negligible. Rolling is meant to remove certainties and force planning contingencies, not to game over randomly. Random gameovers whether due to shittily used RNG or player failing due to being prevented from having necessary information are no more challenging, fun or a sign of a well designed game, than game randomly crashing to desktop and corrupting saves.

Doing bad builds that cannot progress is okay. Having options in the game that are not actually options but rather are mistakes is not. In other words, choice is good but trap choices are not.

Except:

• Doing bad builds is just that - having options that are not actual options.
• Trap options are not in themselves bad design, only trap options that require being psychic to avoid (which happens to include all character building traps). If player decides to bed a fire elemental (with obvious hilarity ensuing) or piss off someone powerful who can easily enough get them killed, and then, later on get imprisoned and executed or killed in their sleep *without* any loud noises bullshit giving them chance to defend themselves or flee - be my fucking guest. The game has no obligation making every or even majority of options viable or even immediately punishing. It just needs to provide reasonable variety and avoid any and all cheap gotchas.

Then what role do the stats and skills serve if you can beat the game no matter what? Unlock extra bonuses and make your character even more awesome?

Simple: Tell what you can and cannot do.

That Fallout sucks mechanically is not relevant to the current topic.
What makes Fallout great (along with pretty much every worthwhile RPG out there) is more its aspirations than their actual realization - in this case honouring different decisions player may make by going along with them and providing consequences.
(In Fallout's defense RPGs are hard.
)

Anyway, stats and skills alone shouldn't guarantee you victory in combat so nobody's talking about removing the player's ingenuity from the equation but the ingenuity shouldn't make the character system optional either.

Character system specifies the toolbox player has at their disposal.
Player decides what to do with it, applying ingenuity.
If ingenuity is sufficient they should succeed provided sufficiently deep and rich mechanics.

Success only has meaning if failure is also a possible outcome.
If every possible build can realistically succeed, this is no longer the case.

Seriously, are you guys (mostly you and VD) even listening to yourselves?

In every other genre every possible build can succeed by the virtue of there being only one. Those genres somehow don't have any problems providing challenge (other than game market catering to the lowest common denominator, that is) which should be enough to clue you in that you are not making any sense.

Maybe it would be a good idea to learn actual game design in general sense before trying (and failing) to design a cRPG specifically?
Walking before running and all that.

 

[Drowed]

I think a lot of people here are taking the "if there is such a skill it should be a valid way to play" a little too far. Yes, if there is a skill in the game it obviously needs to be useful. But that doesn't necessarily mean that any random combination of skills is valid as a way to beat the game. I'd compare skills with ingredients. To make good dishes, you can use several different ingredients, and all valid. But that doesn't necessarily mean that you should combine coffee and pepper.

I think the role of the designer is to make it clear to the player which recipes the game most intends to use, but a good game allows each player to try to create their own recipes with the ingredients they received. But some people have shitty tastes, so yeah.

 

[Black]

https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.p...otally-avoid-combat-in-fallout-1-and-2.22371/

 

[Vault Dweller]

In every other genre every possible build can succeed by the virtue of there being only one.

There are builds in shooters or strategy games?

 

[DraQ]

That encapsulates most criticisms in this thread.

Players assume that every possible combination in character creation should indulge every flight of fancy and whim they have.

When the reality of the limitations of game design hit, they blame the developers like a spoiled child.

Don't be a spoiled idiot.

How about:
Don't make promises you cannot keep.
?

And especially don't whine about players holding you to your word after you do.

Interfaces are contracts. This includes UI.

In every other genre every possible build can succeed by the virtue of there being only one.

There are builds in shooters or strategy games?

Trivially, there is always one:
Doomguy, for instance has 100 base HP, can use such and such weapons, can move such and such fast, can NOT jump, etc. Those are all stats describing what Doomguy can and cannot do. It's just that you don't have any say in what they are and they are not variable due to Doom not being an RPG.

 

[JarlFrank]

In every other genre every possible build can succeed by the virtue of there being only one.

There are builds in shooters or strategy games?

I play Age of Empires 2 competitively and yes, I guess you could compare build orders there to RPG character builds.

Funnily enough not all builds are considered valid but if a pro tries some unorthodox build that shouldn't work, they sometimes pull it off by the sheer surprise they send the other player into. You're supposed to specialize and not be a jack of all trades because each unit type requires an investment and if you spread your resources too thin the enemy will be able to out-badass you. If you upgrade your infantry, your cavalry, and your archers, but the enemy focuses purely on archers, he'll have badass archers vs your average jack-of-all-trades army. Different unit types require different military production buildings. Different upgrades only apply to certain unit types. Each playable civilization has its own bonuses that can influence the playstyle and viability of certain builds (Goths have cheaper infantry that train faster, so they tend to go for infantry spam, British have higher range for their archers, etc).

So yes, strategy games definitely have builds.

If you stretch the definition of builds, classes in military FPS might also apply. Playing a medic who only has a handgun but can supply medpacks to allies is going to be different from playing a rifleman is going to be different from playing anti-tank is going to be different from playing assault SMG dude. They all have their unique battlefield uses and using your class wrong is going to get you fucked (anti-tank gun isn't a good weapon to use against more flexible infantry in the field, a medic who goes to the frontline is just gonna get himself killed, etc).

While it's nowhere near RPG complexity, FPS classes are actually pretty great: they all have vastly different utility, different strengths and weaknesses, etc. They're all useful, but they're all useful at different things.

 

[V_K]

To make good dishes, you can use several different ingredients, and all valid. But that doesn't necessarily mean that you should combine coffee and pepper.

People here aren't necessarily arguing for making coffee with pepper (although spiced coffee is an actual thing). It's more like in some games you must have coffee in every recipe, and in other games coffee would only work with sugar and is useless without it - and that is some bad cookbook authoring however you spin it.

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

I think the role of the designer is to make it clear to the player which recipes the game most intends to use, but a good game allows each player to try to create their own recipes with the ingredients they received. But some people have shitty tastes, so yeah.

How? In character creation? That's impossible. Some players judge what combinations they can use based on common sense, past experiences and the available information about the game, while others base their builds on wishful thinking. The second group will always feel frustated and will always the blame developers for their own misguided expectations.

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

Wait, how is it the player fault for expecting a skill not to be shit?

I’m not talking about shitty skills, I’m talking about less useful skills. You can’t expect every skill to be equally useful, but at the same time, players don’t want to invest in a suboptimal skill. The more skills you have, the harder is to make them all equally compelling in gameplay. One could make the criticism that there is too much cargo cult in cRPGs. Developers chose to include a bunch of skills without thought because they need to include such and such skills, because most games have such and such skills, and in such and such number. It’s a trap. If you can’t implement them properly, why include them in character creation at all?

 

[DraQ]

Game literally hands you a 10mm pistol and a knife as your first weapons (this is a big hint unless your parents used INT as a dump stat during your character creation—if you read the first few pages of the manual, you know these will be your starting weapons going in), then the first town you come to has regressed so far they don’t even remember crop rotation... yeah, this tells you absolutely nothing about which weapons you’ll be more likely to come across in the early game. Just a total puzzle. No way you could possibly make any kind of inference at all. You’re totally in the dark, you’ve got nothing to go on aside from your trusty knife and pistol, which are of absolutely no significance whatsoever.

Pretty much all advanced weapons (as in: not spears) are pre-war so that's irrelevant.

And even cursory look shows that Fallout is pretty much the embodiment of old jumpsuits & rayguns sci-fi 'verse full of shiny rocketships and blinkenlights gone wrong by the means of nuclear apocalypse. Hell, one of the loading screens have VaultBoy dual wielding raygun and shotgun, the box has fucking PA on it and you can drive a fucking nuclear car in 2. Laser pistols and assorted rayguns were to be fully expected.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Energy weapons shouldn't have been its own skill in Fallout. If the argument was that you needed special knowledge to know how to properly operate/take care of the weapon, that should have fallen under 'Science'.

 

[harhar!]

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.

That was just MCA being stupid. Virgil easily beats the shitty wolves, the proper wolves only come after you are supposed to quicktravel with the map.