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

[toro]

... snip ...

Are you working on any game?

Maybe. Why you asking?

You sound like you have researched this topic therefore I assumed that it's something related to your job.

Honestly I would prefer a RPG designed by another codex which is not the Vault Dweller.

 

[Safav Hamon]

Would you please point out the situation in any CRPG where the stealthy character is actually able to lay a proper ambush and strike from a hiding place that is both quest-specific and not metagamey. Usually both talking and stealth are woefully simplistic and underdeveloped.

Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire. It has a fleshed out stealth system with detection radiuses, line of sight, noise detection, eavesdropping, firecrackers, traps, and even alarms in certain sidequests.

 

[Safav Hamon]

Out of curiousity, do you have any ideas on how could the generic dialogue with skill checks gameplay be improved?

 

[V_K]

Thing is, no RPG writer considers themselves bad. So I'd much rather they gave me skill tags, at least as a togglable option, than be overconfident in their writing skills.
To be completely honest, I'd much rather have the designers not rely on binary dialog checks at all, since there's way too little gameplay in them however you dress it, but we have what we have.

Out of curiousity, do you have any ideas on how could the generic dialogue with skill checks gameplay be improved?

I think The Council has a pretty decent system:
- The checks are only gated by you having the skill or not rather than its level.
- The difficulty of the checks instead determines how much effort (the game's main resource) you have to spend on the check. Granted, if you don't have enough effort, you can't succeed. But also if you have enough effort, you have to consider whether it's wise to spend it on this particular check or save for a more important one. Higher skill levels decrease the amount of effort you have to spend on a check.
- In connection with the previous points, lots of check-gated options are essentially traps that don't provide you with anything useful and are only there to make you waste effort.
- NPCs can be vulnerable or immune to certain skills. Using a skill against a vulnerable NPC restores some effort, using a skill against an immune NPC gives you a bad status effect. Immunities and vulnerabilities can be learned both through trial and error and through investigating the NPC.
- Important dialogs (called confrontations) progress through several stages. It is not completely necessary to pick the winning option at every stage, but the number of "blunders" you are allowed is limited (usually 1-3). If you reach the last stage of the confrontation with unused blunders a pick a wrong option, you are allowed to repeat the stage while you still have blunders left.
The only thing that kinda ruins this system in the game is the abundance of effort-restoring consumables.

Also the system The Colony Ship is supposed to use (if that's still the plan) seems ok, although Vince being Vince it'll probably still end up too restrictive.

But to be completely honest, I still prefer the old keyword collecting dialog gameplay to branching dialogs. I wish for someone to go all experimental and make and RPG with IF-style parser-based dialogs.

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

I question the practicality of your purist approach. Sure, the topic is "good or bad" and you point your finger and say "bad" but the developers usually operate with "is it good enough" and "how to make it better, preferably cheap". And in that case band-aids are the norm because we as players deal with a ton of hand made encounters and challenges that will never be perfect. In fact, I wouldn't even call them band-aids, they're just simplifiers that make choices clear and take thinking and guesswork out of the equation making choices trivial and increasing mainstream appeal in the process.

Yeah, this whole thread has been people pushing for perfection without necessarily thinking it through. If developers want to make a game with meaningful character creation choices and also many options for customization, non-viable builds are an inevitable side effect.

If developers add a third pillar, no non-viable builds, there will be trade-offs. Either they make the game substantially less difficult, lowering the bar for viability, or they give you fewer build options. Maybe a lot fewer.

"Just do tons of extra work testing every single potential build permutation and then disabling the ones that really suck" seems like it would take way more time and money than including helpful tooltips that warn you what not to do.

 

[JarlFrank]

Challenge in RPGs:
Stealth dude will try to lay an ambush for the enemy and critically strike from a hiding place.

...

Or let's take a quest where you have to drive bandits out of a fortress. Talky character goes up to them and tries to convince them to leave. The challenge for the player is to choose the right dialogue options that make the bandits leave. The stealthy character might want to infiltrate the fortress and assassinate the leader to disperse the other bandits. How he infiltrates the fortress is up to the player to decide (back door? climbing the wall?). Fighty dude will go for an assault, and the combat tactics are up to the player to decide.

Would you please point out the situation in any CRPG where the stealthy character is actually able to lay a proper ambush and strike from a hiding place that is both quest-specific and not metagamey. Usually both talking and stealth are woefully simplistic and underdeveloped.

None comes to my mind right now, which probably means it hasn't been done before. Which means it should be done by some game in the future, because it's untapped potential.

 

[Black Angel]

Challenge in RPGs:
Stealth dude will try to lay an ambush for the enemy and critically strike from a hiding place.

...

Or let's take a quest where you have to drive bandits out of a fortress. Talky character goes up to them and tries to convince them to leave. The challenge for the player is to choose the right dialogue options that make the bandits leave. The stealthy character might want to infiltrate the fortress and assassinate the leader to disperse the other bandits. How he infiltrates the fortress is up to the player to decide (back door? climbing the wall?). Fighty dude will go for an assault, and the combat tactics are up to the player to decide.

Would you please point out the situation in any CRPG where the stealthy character is actually able to lay a proper ambush and strike from a hiding place that is both quest-specific and not metagamey.

If by 'quest-specific' you mean it's scripted and/or can result in quest completion/progression, I'm pretty sure AoD had situations where you can lay ambushes and strike from the shadows. The one example that came into my mind right now is when, as a Thief, you improvise a trap to ambush a caravan.

 

[V_K]

Challenge in RPGs:
Stealth dude will try to lay an ambush for the enemy and critically strike from a hiding place.

...

Or let's take a quest where you have to drive bandits out of a fortress. Talky character goes up to them and tries to convince them to leave. The challenge for the player is to choose the right dialogue options that make the bandits leave. The stealthy character might want to infiltrate the fortress and assassinate the leader to disperse the other bandits. How he infiltrates the fortress is up to the player to decide (back door? climbing the wall?). Fighty dude will go for an assault, and the combat tactics are up to the player to decide.

Would you please point out the situation in any CRPG where the stealthy character is actually able to lay a proper ambush and strike from a hiding place that is both quest-specific and not metagamey.

If by 'quest-specific' you mean it's scripted and/or can result in quest completion/progression, I'm pretty sure AoD had situations where you can lay ambushes and strike from the shadows. The one example that came into my mind right now is when, as a Thief, you improvise a trap to ambush a caravan.

He also said "not metagamey".

Spoiler

 

[Black Angel]

Challenge in RPGs:
Stealth dude will try to lay an ambush for the enemy and critically strike from a hiding place.

...

Or let's take a quest where you have to drive bandits out of a fortress. Talky character goes up to them and tries to convince them to leave. The challenge for the player is to choose the right dialogue options that make the bandits leave. The stealthy character might want to infiltrate the fortress and assassinate the leader to disperse the other bandits. How he infiltrates the fortress is up to the player to decide (back door? climbing the wall?). Fighty dude will go for an assault, and the combat tactics are up to the player to decide.

Would you please point out the situation in any CRPG where the stealthy character is actually able to lay a proper ambush and strike from a hiding place that is both quest-specific and not metagamey.

If by 'quest-specific' you mean it's scripted and/or can result in quest completion/progression, I'm pretty sure AoD had situations where you can lay ambushes and strike from the shadows. The one example that came into my mind right now is when, as a Thief, you improvise a trap to ambush a caravan.

He also said "not metagamey".

Spoiler

I honestly want to offer Underrail because it has probably the best working stealth system in any recent RPGs to date, but I'm not sure if it counts as quest-specific. Underrail is filled to the brim with situations where stealthy character can set up traps everywhere, whether to ambush an encounter ahead by baiting them into the traps or to ambush some enemies patrolling specific points. But none of them are quest-specific, at least none from my experience. One that counts as such is probably the warehouse battle when you do the quest for the Coretech... or was it the Praetorian? I'm not sure which one because of the two playthroughs I ever finished, both of them are JKK.

 

[infidel]

I think The Council has a pretty decent system:
- The checks are only gated by you having the skill or not rather than its level.
- The difficulty of the checks instead determines how much effort (the game's main resource) you have to spend on the check. Granted, if you don't have enough effort, you can't succeed. But also if you have enough effort, you have to consider whether it's wise to spend it on this particular check or save for a more important one. Higher skill levels decrease the amount of effort you have to spend on a check.
- In connection with the previous points, lots of check-gated options are essentially traps that don't provide you with anything useful and are only there to make you waste effort.
- NPCs can be vulnerable or immune to certain skills. Using a skill against a vulnerable NPC restores some effort, using a skill against an immune NPC gives you a bad status effect. Immunities and vulnerabilities can be learned both through trial and error and through investigating the NPC.
- Important dialogs (called confrontations) progress through several stages. It is not completely necessary to pick the winning option at every stage, but the number of "blunders" you are allowed is limited (usually 1-3). If you reach the last stage of the confrontation with unused blunders a pick a wrong option, you are allowed to repeat the stage while you still have blunders left.
The only thing that kinda ruins this system in the game is the abundance of effort-restoring consumables.

Well, you could always gimp yourself and try to complete the game with using none, for example, or 3 per chapter, etc. I like the preying on the vulnerable bit. In a more procedural game it would be a great dynamic to restore your self-esteem that was hurt in a tough encounter - just go trample on some other "vulnerable" person.

Also the system The Colony Ship is supposed to use (if that's still the plan) seems ok, although Vince being Vince it'll probably still end up too restrictive.

But to be completely honest, I still prefer the old keyword collecting dialog gameplay to branching dialogs. I wish for someone to go all experimental and make and RPG with IF-style parser-based dialogs.

So basically they're both made or want to make the important dialogue a scripted battle where each choice brings you closer to victory or defeat. Sounds like fun.

Someone in the IF community might've but you will have to look into the IF community and check out their RPG experiments.

 

[what am i doing]

I don't think it's bad design to allow the player to create a non-viable character, since no matter how balanced your game is, some retard will find a way to make a shitty build that doesn't work, and they'll probably do it by combining things that are otherwise good into something whose components lack synergy with each other, or which is generalized to the point of uselessness (like spreading your points evenly across every skill in Diablo 2). That's just something that happens. I do think it's bad design to deliberately create shitty options just for the sake of having them (the DnD 3.5e design philosophy). But that's not the same thing.

 

[infidel]

Quite simple really. Use the Alpha protocol approach, where you have to have reading comprehension in order to succeed in dialogue. There are no skill checks, but you gather information by talking to other chars about what a char wants to hear. And then select that dialogue in the dialogue option. No checks, no tarded walls.

But it's just... dialogue. As in you can't build your character in any way to prepare for the encounter. L.A. Noire is built that way, read the tells by the actors and make your own conclusions.

 

[JarlFrank]

Challenge in RPGs:
Stealth dude will try to lay an ambush for the enemy and critically strike from a hiding place.

...

Or let's take a quest where you have to drive bandits out of a fortress. Talky character goes up to them and tries to convince them to leave. The challenge for the player is to choose the right dialogue options that make the bandits leave. The stealthy character might want to infiltrate the fortress and assassinate the leader to disperse the other bandits. How he infiltrates the fortress is up to the player to decide (back door? climbing the wall?). Fighty dude will go for an assault, and the combat tactics are up to the player to decide.

Would you please point out the situation in any CRPG where the stealthy character is actually able to lay a proper ambush and strike from a hiding place that is both quest-specific and not metagamey.

If by 'quest-specific' you mean it's scripted and/or can result in quest completion/progression, I'm pretty sure AoD had situations where you can lay ambushes and strike from the shadows. The one example that came into my mind right now is when, as a Thief, you improvise a trap to ambush a caravan.

He also said "not metagamey".

Spoiler

I honestly want to offer Underrail because it has probably the best working stealth system in any recent RPGs to date, but I'm not sure if it counts as quest-specific. Underrail is filled to the brim with situations where stealthy character can set up traps everywhere, whether to ambush an encounter ahead by baiting them into the traps or to ambush some enemies patrolling specific points. But none of them are quest-specific, at least none from my experience. One that counts as such is probably the warehouse battle when you do the quest for the Coretech... or was it the Praetorian? I'm not sure which one because of the two playthroughs I ever finished, both of them are JKK.

Making the options systemic rather than quest specific is even better!

 

[V_K]

So basically they're both made or want to make the important dialogue a scripted battle where each choice brings you closer to victory or defeat. Sounds like fun.

Yes, but also the effort mechanic in The Council is a step in the right direction I think - it brings resource management into dialog gameplay.

 

[Absinthe]

Then there's also the classic "I made my figher specialize in spears but all the cool unique weapons are longswords" problem. Age of Decadence is a game that actually manages to avoid this issue very well by making each weapon class unique and giving each weapon class some good weapons to use, as well as the crafting system allowing you to smelt any weapon type you don't need and forge a weapon type you do need from the materials you get. AoD never makes you feel like you picked the wrong weapon class because there's a lack of cool weapons for your class.

Sort of. Try playing AoD without the crafting skill and you do run into gearing problems depending on your build, at least in Teron. The biggest case of this is 10dex builds trying to have non-shit armor. That said, with regards to skill flexibility, combat is definitely one of the strong suits of AoD. Non-combat, on the other hand, is full of gotchas and other stupid things.

A game should not require you to spoiler yourself with out-of-game resources in order to create an effective character.

I've got a mild disagreement here. I don't see a problem with requiring players to read the manual if they want to make an effective character unless mechanics are being needlessly unintuitive/arcane/your UI sucks balls. Games that require you to understand the game are preferable to the ones where success is brainlessly attained. But if the idea is that you should look up a strategy guide online or go through trial-and-error progression, then we have a problem, yes.

Overall the freedom to make character builds should include the freedom to make less effective builds and the freedom to shoot yourself in the foot. It's a natural consequence of the need for character building to be meaningful since unless you want to be a full Sawyerist you will want players to be able to make better and weaker builds at particular tasks. But thesheeep's defense of trap options (options that sound viable only to be a waste) is fucking idiotic. I do generally agree with the notion that if you include skills they should actually serve a use. If you decide to make a character specialized into sneak attacks but overlook giving that character stealth capability, you deserve to be a useless piece of trash. But if you make a character specialized in sneaking around enemies only to realize that the game doesn't actually feature stealth paths and necessarily obligates you to just run in and fight everything, then the game's design fucked up.

 

[Black Angel]

Then there's also the classic "I made my figher specialize in spears but all the cool unique weapons are longswords" problem. Age of Decadence is a game that actually manages to avoid this issue very well by making each weapon class unique and giving each weapon class some good weapons to use, as well as the crafting system allowing you to smelt any weapon type you don't need and forge a weapon type you do need from the materials you get. AoD never makes you feel like you picked the wrong weapon class because there's a lack of cool weapons for your class.

Sort of. Try playing AoD without the crafting skill and you do run into gearing problems depending on your build, at least in Teron. The biggest case of this is 10dex builds trying to have non-shit armor.

Eh, if you try playing without Crafting, even in Teron you won't really run into serious gearing problems no matter what kind of *combat build* you made. You might not get the kind of gear you want, but it's not like you don't have options at all. At worst, you only get to scavenge gears off your victims, while at best you get decent gears from the factions you served. But the most important point is that what you lacked in Crafting, you made it up with investing those free SPs elsewhere, whether making your character even more deadlier in combat, or invest in thieving skills that allows you to steal good shits with which you can use to help you in combat, or even use those free SPs to advance and complete quests non-combat way. Those 10 DEX builds also would synergize well with Dodgers who focused in avoiding damages completely instead of taking them, or just characters who move out a lot, so I don't see how you would need much Crafting to get anything beyond Reinforced Leather Armor that provides best compromise in terms of DR, Armor Penalty, and max AP possible.

That said, with regards to skill flexibility, combat is definitely one of the strong suits of AoD. Non-combat, on the other hand, is full of gotchas and other stupid things.

I don't think AoD is full of gotchas or even stupid things. Like MRY pointed out in another thread by the same OP, you often couldn't do what you wanted, but you never were actually completely halted. On the other hand, you do some stupid shit in regards to your build you will reap what you sow. I said that I was currently replaying AoD, trying a full talker Praetor and was looking for a way to keep Meru alive, right? Well, here's my report, relevant to the discussion:

Spoiler

Against my better judgment, I stupidly decided I want to get the smelter going, which required Lore + Crafting. At most, I really only needed Alchemy to make bombs and pass rather minor combat situations. Now those points are wasted when it could've been further invested in Persuasion and Trade, or Streetwise and Etiquette which would've let me pass high-tier skill checks needed to persuade Antidas to assist Meru. In fact, I realized there's actually 3 ways to let Meru lives other than persuading Antidas, which is to side Meru and persuade Paullus, or to get the sky fortress to land in Ganezzar which required Lore + Crafting with a side of Streetwise + Impersonate. Are there any gotchas or stupid things here? I would say no.

 

[Wyatt_Derp]

No. Failing to plan is planning to fail. I myself make build mistakes quite often. It's how I've learned to become incredibly mediocre at games over the course of many years.

 

[JarlFrank]

A game should not require you to spoiler yourself with out-of-game resources in order to create an effective character.

I've got a mild disagreement here. I don't see a problem with requiring players to read the manual if they want to make an effective character unless mechanics are being needlessly unintuitive/arcane/your UI sucks balls. Games that require you to understand the game are preferable to the ones where success is brainlessly attained. But if the idea is that you should look up a strategy guide online or go through trial-and-error progression, then we have a problem, yes.

Yeah, I don't consider the manual to be out-of-game resources. It's included in the box, you're meant to read it before you start the game, so it's part of the game.

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

Look at these idiots. Talking as if Alpha Brotocol and Dumpsterfire were better than Age of Decadence.

 

[laclongquan]

Who decide "failed build"?

Players? players generally suck at playing games and their "failed builds" generally just mean they dont know how to play it.

Witness the facts that plenty of gamers can still defend sucky builds in wellknown games like NWN series or IE series or etc... Because they like their builds that way, and they like = good build.

So yeah, "git gud, scrub!" has its reason to exist. Cater to idiot gamers just lower your game's quality.

 

[HeatEXTEND]

Would you please point out the situation in any CRPG where the stealthy character is actually able to lay a proper ambush and strike from a hiding place that is both quest-specific and not metagamey.

As said before, Underrail.

 

[aweigh]

thieves and ninja have hide ability in Elminage and Wizardry games.

 

[Namutree]

In VTM Bloodlines, if you only focus on social skills and don't put any points into combat or stealth, you could render the game nearly non-completable because combat is mandatory in many parts of the game.

AoD is much more brutal, and it practically forces you to start savescumming early on. You could render the game ENTIRELY non-completable if you refuse to revert to an earlier save to remedy your mistakes.

I never had that issue. As for the question itself, I'd say no, as long as the only way to make a non-viable build is to do something obviously stupid.

 

[laclongquan]

Would you please point out the situation in any CRPG where the stealthy character is actually able to lay a proper ambush and strike from a hiding place that is both quest-specific and not metagamey.

As said before, Underrail.

or you can do thief/bounty hunter in BG2 and lay traps before luring them in. It's finicky as fuck, require dedicated trappers (skill invest in set trap) and casters (skull trap and delayed blast fireball) with members of party using invisible potions or invi sphere.

You can do the same thing in IWD2 but at higher level, which generally just mean Heart of Fury mode with high level party.

IWD2 is better than BG2 at that aspect because it's a tactic game. It geared toward that~

 

[glass blackbird]

Big props to Pathfinder Kingmaker, where outside information will actually trick you because they didn't implement the rules right and the skill descriptions lie to you