RPG limits?

[c2007]

But with these tropes comes the playerbase that grew up on them. Sure, we can remove any of these but then how many people would actually buy it?

I'm absolutely not interested in money or reaching out to mass market.
All I want is to develop and play something different.
I'll literally go crazy if I play another generic fantasy RPG and sacrifice nearest fan of such games to Cthulhu!

This makes me more interested in your project. Different is good enough; don't shit on what you believe is tired and boring. That alienates potential customers, triggers autism and puts you in a large shadow you don't belong in.

Instead, just talk about how the new devices you are working on work, and what you like about them. I'm sure you'll get better feedback.

 

[Viata]

Mundane archery-like magic: magic is always just a fancier form of archery, with more visual effects. It has some utility too, but you have to be quite dull to sleep/confuse enemies when you can just blast them. This is not what magic should be like. Why not make magic truly different in every way? It should be learned by going through dramatic rituals, performing experiments, obtaining long lost secrets, etc, not by leveling up or buying scrolls at the store. And it should do dramatic, epic things, not be an archery substitute.

I always though magic should limited to a few people, not every person in the world should be able to learn it. It should also be hard as fuck to learn and only characters above some age were mages, anyone younger was still learning. Then again, Harry Potter sold like shit so I may be completely wrong here.

 

[Sharpedge]

Vancian Casting or Mana systems. RPGs largely use 1 or the other. Whilst I don't think it is necessarily a bad thing, it would be great to see some attempts at new systems. Fantasy writing has examples of many different magic systems, but games fall mostly into those categories.

 

[JarlFrank]

I would like to see more unforgiving wound systems, for example, being able to lose an arm. It isn't something you really see often in games and playing through a game where the possibility for that happening existing, makes a player need to be more careful. The whole idea of a person keeping their body whole throughout an entire setting is in my opinion overdone and is a limitation in the sense that the OP is talking about.

I mean, that's the sort of 'limitation' that is there to keep the game fun. If your level 1 character takes an arrow to the knee and you have to just give up and retire to a life of mucking stables, there's not much of a game. Games also don't make you stop to take a shit or brush your teeth. The assumption is that if your character was wounded enough to lose a limb, he may as well be dead anyways so the devs saved you the trouble of finding a cliff to hurl your worthless ass off of.

Wound systems and loss of limbs can be interesting if done well.

How to not make it be an automatic death sentence for low level chars:
- add locational HP and damage, so your hand won't be chopped off at the first hit and you know when the limb's condition is getting dangerously low
- add locational armor so you can protect the most vulnerable parts of your body with high quality armor
- make limb severing only happen on a critical hit, or when the limb's locational HP has been reduced below zero (when locational HP reach 0 you suffer a broken wrist or something, which disables the limb until it's healed; but when it receives more damage it gets severed and you won't be able to use it anymore, sry pal)
- make even a crippled character still viable to play: if you lose your sword hand, you'll have to use weapons with your other hand now at a malus because it's not your strong hand; but you can strap a shield to the other arm that doesn't need to be held with a hand; so you get a major malus but it's not game-breakingly bad
- don't make low level characters as weak and susceptible to random chance as in D&D but develop a more sensible system (D&D is only fun between levels 3 and 12, anything below is too lolrandom anything above is too roflstompy overpowered)

You can also add cool shit like some NPCs reacting to your missing limb, and it giving you the reputation of a grizzled veteran, making intimidation checks easier or something.

So your character starts out already able to take an axe to the hand without losing it, with high quality armor, in a game where combat is easy enough that losing your hand isn't a big deal (hope you're not a fucking archer?) And presumably losing a foot never happens because then you're just fucked and the game takes twice as long to even go anywhere?

I've played several games with crippling implemented. If it happens in Battle Brothers or Rimworld or Kenshi you fire/exile the guy immediately because he's not worth the slot in the party. If it happens in Unrealworld you just fucking give up because you'll never survive doing anything remotely interesting. If it happens in IVAN you probably did it on purpose so you could pray to have it replaced with an arm made out of golden eagle feathers. In Dwarf Fortress you're dead from bleeding out in adventure mode. Ditto in CataDDA, you're probably dead if you're at the point where a limb is permanently fucked.

IVAN is the only one where it's fun and that's just because it's a silly game where you might get arms made out of bananas or paper.

Permanently weakening a character runs counter to decent gameplay- you may as well just start over because in an open world you haven't made any progress, and in a linear game you're going to be fucked by the difficulty curve. It has nothing to do with fighting lots of enemies or whether combat is over in 3 or 30 attacks. The only games it works in are really short roguelites where the powercurve is so erratic you might be fine with doing half damage from some curse effect because you got a shitton of money in exchange and might trade it for double speed and range or something, or you're close to the endgame and were already OP as fuck so it wasn't run ending.

If the game is designed in an open-ended way that allows for plenty of non-combat solutions, and where you can have companions rather than it being a full solo game, a permanent injury can be lived with. It doesn't mean combat has to be trivially easy just to make a crippled character able to prevail in later fights, if you offer enough tactical variety even a crippled character will have a chance to succeed.

If you lose a leg you can replace it with a wooden prosthesis which will leave you with a limp, increasing the movement cost in combat (but keeping the animation speed out of combat the same as before, because who wants to wait longer for his char to get anywhere just because of that?)
If you lose an eye, you lose some points of perception.
If your face gets heavily scarred, you lose some points of charisma (but also get better at intimidation).
Etc etc.

And when the game is designed to not have tons of filler combat, but meaningful handcrafted encounters, the whole thing becomes more interesting and more bearable because most of the time you'll be able to avoid combat if you don't have the character build for it. And when you do enter combat, it becomes more exciting because it's more dangerous.

The thing is, the system I propose wouldn't make it easy to lose a limb. It's not like one axe hit would sever it. Yeah, it's not 100% realistic that a wrist can take 4 axe hits before being severed, but then is it realistic in other RPGs to take 4 headshots before dying? One-hit-kills are rarely a thing in RPGs because it would make combat too dependent on lucky hits and misses, so giving each limb a decent HP pool that lets it survive one or two hits before being severed isn't an issue. But it is a possibility, and enemies can aim for your weak spots to disable you.

It makes combat more interesting because it changes what is usually a binary win or lose situation into something with more degrees of success or failure. In most RPGs, you either win or lose a fight. In this proposed system, you can win but a critical hit to your right hand removed two of your fingers, making it very hard to grasp weapons properly now. Or a sword hit to your face left you with a permanent scar. You can have a pyrrhic victory in this system. You can also disable enemies with aimed strikes. It's actually a great counter to the issue of HP bloat which many RPGs with a single hitpoint system suffer from.

It can also work well in other games than short roguelikes. It would work well in something like Age of Decadence, which is a short game that offers you non-combat solutions for most situations.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Why would you want to go to the trouble of having a complex locational damage system with permanent wounds and all the headaches that implies when it's barely going to be a factor anyways because you have a whole party, the game is short, and it's not actually crippling? I'd much rather have a game with a fleshed out time/speed system instead of everyone getting one turn per round regardless of what they do. Or a stamina system. Or a morale system.

 

[aweigh]

no limits in elminage: gothic, that's for sure.

<3

 

[JarlFrank]

Why would you want to go to the trouble of having a complex locational damage system with permanent wounds and all the headaches that implies when it's barely going to be a factor anyways because you have a whole party, the game is short, and it's not actually crippling? I'd much rather have a game with a fleshed out time/speed system instead of everyone getting one turn per round regardless of what they do. Or a stamina system. Or a morale system.

And where did I say the system would have a one action per turn system? I much prefer action point systems so this would also have action points.
And it's still going to be a factor because
a) like Fallout, Arcanum or BG2, you only create 1 char and the rest is companions
b) it is actually crippling, but not entirely disabling; you can accept the loss and soldier on rather than absolutely having to reload
c) the game wouldn't be short, it would just have a structure that allows circumventing a lot of combat by stealth or diplomacy (also no filler combat, which means that yes, it won't be one of those 100 hours games but there isn't a single game in existence that wouldn't be better with less filler)

 

[V_K]

circumventing a lot of combat by stealth

Well if you have a wooden prosthetic for a leg, that doesn't leave you with too many stealth options either. Ditto for lacking an arm, that'd put quite a wrench into climbing and lockpicking.

I think a more interesting solution would be to give you some sort of magical (or cybernetic) prosthetic (that might be even better than the real thing), but have you do a quest to get it.

 

[Beastro]

I would like to see more unforgiving wound systems, for example, being able to lose an arm. It isn't something you really see often in games and playing through a game where the possibility for that happening existing, makes a player need to be more careful. The whole idea of a person keeping their body whole throughout an entire setting is in my opinion overdone and is a limitation in the sense that the OP is talking about.

Beyond a rogue-lite or a game very expressly built around that concept all that would be would be yet another form of perma death the player would reload after suffering.

The issue would be the expectation of keeping your original party through to the end of the game in stead of losing members here and there, that being an express idea to the game, and then supplying replacements around to help replenish numbers.

I don't see that flying in a conventional RPG. I could only see it happening where emergent story is emphasized more where the fun of suffering wounds and making do with the less optimal is expressly part of the fun in games like Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld.

Mundane archery-like magic: magic is always just a fancier form of archery, with more visual effects. It has some utility too, but you have to be quite dull to sleep/confuse enemies when you can just blast them. This is not what magic should be like. Why not make magic truly different in every way? It should be learned by going through dramatic rituals, performing experiments, obtaining long lost secrets, etc, not by leveling up or buying scrolls at the store. And it should do dramatic, epic things, not be an archery substitute.

I always though magic should limited to a few people, not every person in the world should be able to learn it. It should also be hard as fuck to learn and only characters above some age were mages, anyone younger was still learning. Then again, Harry Potter sold like shit so I may be completely wrong here.

That or everyone has some degree of it, but are unable to do much to the point that they'd be called a "magic user".

 

[*-*/\--/\~]

When I was at university they built a new building on campus to hold seminars in. The layout was confusing, the numbering system of the rooms had no logic to it so even if you knew the room number you had to search for 10 minutes, and there were doors that freely opened from one side but required an access card to open from the other side. I never had any seminars in that building because it was mostly used by sociologists (who are heavily SJW infiltrated so it's literally a villain's base) but I accompanied a friend to her seminar room in there after she told me how confusing the building is. I wanted to see it for myself.

It was the fifth week of her seminars so she had been to that room several times before. It still took her fifteen minutes to find the room because of the confusing layout and room numbering system that made no sense. I tried helping her find it by looking at a layout map on the wall, with the room numbers on it. Even that didn't help much. When we finally found her room she said goodbye and entered her seminar. I was left alone to find my way back out. I decided to go back out the way we came in. But one of those doors required an access card to open for some reason (even though going through the other way hadn't required anything at all) so I had to find a different way out. Took me at least 10 minutes to find the exit.

Legend of Schoolrock: SJW Tower :D

 

[infidel]

If you lose a leg you can replace it with a wooden prosthesis which will leave you with a limp, increasing the movement cost in combat (but keeping the animation speed out of combat the same as before, because who wants to wait longer for his char to get anywhere just because of that?)
If you lose an eye, you lose some points of perception.
If your face gets heavily scarred, you lose some points of charisma (but also get better at intimidation).
Etc etc.

And when the game is designed to not have tons of filler combat, but meaningful handcrafted encounters, the whole thing becomes more interesting and more bearable because most of the time you'll be able to avoid combat if you don't have the character build for it. And when you do enter combat, it becomes more exciting because it's more dangerous.

The thing is, the system I propose wouldn't make it easy to lose a limb. It's not like one axe hit would sever it. Yeah, it's not 100% realistic that a wrist can take 4 axe hits before being severed, but then is it realistic in other RPGs to take 4 headshots before dying? One-hit-kills are rarely a thing in RPGs because it would make combat too dependent on lucky hits and misses, so giving each limb a decent HP pool that lets it survive one or two hits before being severed isn't an issue. But it is a possibility, and enemies can aim for your weak spots to disable you.

It makes combat more interesting because it changes what is usually a binary win or lose situation into something with more degrees of success or failure. In most RPGs, you either win or lose a fight. In this proposed system, you can win but a critical hit to your right hand removed two of your fingers, making it very hard to grasp weapons properly now. Or a sword hit to your face left you with a permanent scar. You can have a pyrrhic victory in this system. You can also disable enemies with aimed strikes. It's actually a great counter to the issue of HP bloat which many RPGs with a single hitpoint system suffer from.

It can also work well in other games than short roguelikes. It would work well in something like Age of Decadence, which is a short game that offers you non-combat solutions for most situations.

 

[infidel]

Sure, we can remove any of these but then how many people would actually buy it?

SteamDB puts West of Loathing in the 200k-500k copies sold range. It has none of the three aspects mentioned in the OP.

I don't think these two facts are related.

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[V_K]

Sure, we can remove any of these but then how many people would actually buy it?

SteamDB puts West of Loathing in the 200k-500k copies sold range. It has none of the three aspects mentioned in the OP.

I don't think these two facts are related.

You asked how many people would buy a game without megadungeons, fantasy races and filler side quests. Since WoL is an actual game that has none of these three elements, the answer to your question is "at least as many as bought WoL", i.e. at least 200k. Now, there's no guarantee of course that another game without these three elements would sell as much, but the size of its potential audience is at least that.

 

[DalekFlay]

I'm the weirdo who dislikes loot. I'd rather see a small number of weapons in each category that maybe a blacksmith can enhance in some way, but otherwise your damage with it is dependent on stats and experience within that weapon class.

 

[infidel]

Sure, we can remove any of these but then how many people would actually buy it?

SteamDB puts West of Loathing in the 200k-500k copies sold range. It has none of the three aspects mentioned in the OP.

I don't think these two facts are related.

You asked how many people would buy a game without megadungeons, fantasy races and filler side quests. Since WoL is an actual game that has none of these three elements, the answer to your question is "at least as many as bought WoL", i.e. at least 200k. Now, there's no guarantee of course that another game without these three elements would sell as much, but the size of its potential audience is at least that.

My point was that any tropes are there mostly because people are expecting them, starting with overused fantasy setting and ending with crappy side quests (as in they expect a lot of content, let's give 'em a lot of it). And if you're hell-bent on not having any, that will only hurt your profitability because humans are creatures of habit. Also OP explained later on that he's not against megadungeons, he's against dungeons that he does not find believable.

 

[PapaPetro]

1. Gygaxian dungeons

The idea of dungeons being detached from the main compound (castle, etc.) and placed in the middle of nowhere without a backstory always baffled me.
DnD is filled with such "logic" - dungeons don't need an explanation, they need monsters.

There's an economy to it: Dungeon Keeper makes the dungeon, spreads juicy rumors about it, adventurers have a go at it, die, and their gear gets added into the Dungeon Keeper's collection. Sure some adventures might get lucky and pilfer some of the loot, but statistically the odds are in the dungeon's favor; you just dangle enough cheese at the end of the maze, but keep all the good stuff for expensive evil wizard hobbies. Undermountain in the FR was pretty much the definition of this type of economic system.
Plus it's a good way to resolve in-universe political problems of having too many high-level PCs around competing with low-level NPC nobles. I'm sure these apply named dungeons were convenient for lvl 3 aristocrats would send a bunch of busybody demigods to their deaths, fighting demi-liches and RF.ED insta-death traps.