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

[Sigourn]

There aren't? Really? Why, thanks for telling me.

"I was merely pretending to be retarded", the reply.

It's also horrible that there are no other things, like forums, YouTube or the internet in general that could fulfill this orientation role so that you may learn about a system before creating a character in it (if one so desires, some like to jump right in).

Some good game design that one: adding orientation in the form of external sources to the game.

Just face it, dude. You suck at game design. Like I said earlier, at least Age of Decadence found its niche of bad game design apologists and makes a profit out of it.

What are you talking about? Last time I played, New Vegas had no button that let me skip combat. How would that even work?

Ever heard of "avoiding encounters" or "running away from encounters"?

What does "letting a player skip combat" have to do with "allowing a player to make bad builds"?

The point is that combat is very much avoidable in well done RPGs.

 

[JarlFrank]

Shitty builds are ok.

Builds that are shitty on accident because the skills that sounded useful on character creation actually aren't, not so much.

You can have a lot of fun making shitty builds, trying to make them work, and failing. A pal of mine made an Argonian pearl diver back in the early 00s when we all played Morrowind, taking acrobatics and athletics as major skills and not choosing a single useful weapon or magic skill as primary.
He did that as an experienced Morrowind player who knew which skills were useful and which weren't, to intentionally make a gimped character and see how far he can go. Also, Morrowind's skills are obvious enough that you know how to sort out the useless crap: obviously the Athentics skill, which merely increases your walking speed and nothing else, isn't going to be half as useful as a weapon skill or a magic skill or even speechcraft. It's a game about exploring a fantasy world and raiding dungeons, not a game about participating in the Tamriel Olymics marathon race.

So yes, if it's painfully obvious that some skills would be useless compared to others, it's the player's fault if he only picks those. I don't think anyone would seriously choose ONLY language skills in Daggerfall, for example, even without prior knowledge of the game. BUT a player might overestimate the usefulness of a skill like Climbing, expecting there to be plenty of walls and towers to scale... but then he realizes the skill is only useful once or twice in dungeons, and to get into a city at night when the gates are closed, and that's all.

Having skills in the game that imply a certain functionality but then don't actually have much of that functionality is deceptive and can give players false expections. So pretty much any D&D 3rd edition game that includes the entire list of skills without actually giving the player opportunities to use them all. You make a fighter and put all those skill points into climb and swim, but then there's not a single instance where you have to climb or swim. Big letdown. Having these skills in the game as options that can be picked creates the expectation that they can be used at some point during the game. A lot of games adapted from P&P suffer from that, either because the devs just copied the ruleset verbatim and didn't bother implementing skill checks for all of the skills, or because it was never planned to have skill checks for those skills anyway but the owner of the ruleset demanded that the rules be implemented verbatim. So you end up with riding being a skill in a D&D game even though there aren't any mounts to ride on in the game, just because it's a skill that exists.

When there's a dozen skills to choose from but only 5 of them are actually used in the game, it's all about guessing which ones are useful and getting lucky.

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.

But there are games where you invest all your weapon skills into clubs... then there aren't any useful clubs. It's the weapon type with the least magic items in both Baldur's Gate games so specializing in clubs expecting to go full Grug on your enemies with a powerful head-buster isn't going to work out that well. Sure, you can then claim "lol you should've known that a weapon type like club isn't as powerful as sword, because it's just a wooden stick lol" but do we really know that when we go into a game blind? One of the best weapons in BG2 is the Flail of Ages, especially during hte early parts of the game, and who would've guessed that one of the best weapons you can find is a fucking flail? You just have to be lucky in choosing your specializations, there is no rational planning behind it on a first playthrough. Once you're familiar with the game and know which items exist in it, you can plan accordingly, yes, but on your first playthrough it's a pure gamble.

Making gimped builds for fun when you know what to expect is great, like my pal's old Argonian pearl diver with a focus on skills like acrobatics and athletics, which even Morrowind noobs can guess are of limited use.
But making a fighter who's weapon specialization is clubs, and whose strongest skills are climbing and swimming, only to find out that there are no magical clubs and not a single instance with a swim or climb skill check, just makes you feel cheated. The game presented that character build as a valid option during character creation. Only after playing the game for a couple of hours do you realize that, in fact, it's not a valid option.

If a skill is in the game, it should have some use at some point. If it doesn't, why is it in the game?

 

[JarlFrank]

It's also horrible that there are no other things, like forums, YouTube or the internet in general that could fulfill this orientation role so that you may learn about a system before creating a character in it (if one so desires, some like to jump right in).

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

The game's "DM" is the development team: designers, writers, etc. They can adjust their system to fit the content of their game. They can cut out useless skills and merge situational skills (you got both science and repair as skills but it turns out you only encounter 2 science and 3 repair skillchecks in the entire game? You know what, the skills are similar enough to just combine them into one so it's less of a dead end to invest in). They can and should tailor the game's content to the skills that have been implemented. So your game has three dialogue skills, persuasion, intimidation, and seduction - but there are 20 persuasion checks, 8 seduction checks and 4 intimidation checks in the game. Seems a little unbalanced, doesn't it? And how could a fresh player know that this is so? It's pure guesswork and luck to pick the one social skill that is objectively better than all the other social skills.

This is why the level designers and writers should take care to include enough options for all the different skills in the game. So you designed a quest where the player is captured by orcs who throw him into a prison pit. But hey, remember - the game has a climb skill! What would be a good way for the player to get out of the pit? Yep, climb out of it! Let's put in a climb skill check here!

If a skill is included in the game, it is the obligation of the writers and level designers to make use of those skills.

 

[Saduj]

Is it bad when a shitposter realizes that bashing a certain game will get lots of strong reactions so he creates repetitive threads doing so and the forum encourages him by playing along each time?

 

[thesheeep]

It's also horrible that there are no other things, like forums, YouTube or the internet in general that could fulfill this orientation role so that you may learn about a system before creating a character in it (if one so desires, some like to jump right in).

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

It shouldn't, that's true. It is way better if the creation itself offers all (or most, anyway) one needs to know in order to create a good character.
But we all know that isn't always the case. And even if it isn't the case, that doesn't make the character system or the game bad. It's more of a UI problem, really.

And if someone believed that I was saying that character creation should be obfuscated on purpose, that's certainly not what I wanted to say at all.
I don't like obfuscation of rules.

If a skill is included in the game, it is the obligation of the writers and level designers to make use of those skills.

Certainly, but that doesn't mean that all skills included in a game have to be on the same level of usefulness.
And it also doesn't mean that a character build that focuses on all these "lesser good" skills should still be a viable character.
You can expect some logical thinking on the part of players. There's no point in treating players like idiots who have never played an RPG before in their life.
Even if some people here seem to desire nothing more than to be treated like morons by developers...

Just face it, dude. You suck at game design.

Said the person who insists on receiving handouts and removal of challenge in their games and tries to argue that developers need to make sure that players can do no wrong when selecting the worst skills available

What are you talking about? Last time I played, New Vegas had no button that let me skip combat. How would that even work?

Ever heard of "avoiding encounters" or "running away from encounters"?

Of course. Still has nothing to do with this discussion.

The point is that combat is very much avoidable in well done RPGs.

Yeah... all those hundreds of RPGs that do not allow you to skip combat just suck.
Never change. Please. I'm looking forward to more of your posts. Usually, idiots annoy me, but you have legitimately reached the point where I just want more of your ideas.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

I don't think it would hurt a game if it communicated something along the lines of "oh. wow. you only picked really bad skills. are you sure?"

That would just make the player ask why there are even bad skills in the first place. (or rather, why you knew they were bad and didn't fix them before release)

 

[unfairlight]

It varies on a case to case basis but overall I think making the game impossible to complete just because you chose a skill at the start you didn't know was good is poor design. This goes double when you only find out about the failure state much later in the game. It isn't clever, hardcore or a matter of "git gud" to just put up an iron wall 15 hours in because you didn't put sufficient points into one exact skill that's useless for the rest of the game, it's just shit design.

There's also something to be said about developers adding in a bunch of skill bloat and then saying "lol GOTCHA! You should've just KNOWN that the skills were shit!" and leading to a failure state if the player selects any of those skills.

 

[Sigourn]

Said the person who insists on receiving handouts and removal of challenge in their games

Saying (once) that the idea of bad builds that don't let you progress through the game is "insisting" on receiving handouts and removal of challenge in games? You are really grasping at straws now.

 

[Suicidal]

Making the player think during character creation/party building is absolutely a good thing.

If someone makes an incompetent dungeon crawler party maybe he needs to get his ass kicked. If someone makes an RPG character focused on social skills and then proceeds to get into every combat encounter imaginable then maybe he needs to get his ass kicked.

However a game that gives you the ability to fuck up should also give you the ability to learn and correct your mistakes or find other ways to progress that could be harder or more obscure than the more obvious ones.

If you give the player the ability to make a dialogue focused character and speech check his way through half of the game, only to be locked in an unavoidable series of 1v1 combat arenas in the second half, without the ability to use your speech skills to convince your opponents not to fight, or to weaken them, or recruit helpers, etc., then we're getting into full retard territory.

Consider the Pet Pall talent in Divinity Original Sin games that lets you talk to animals and unlock optional quests and other side content by doing so. Imagine if a main story quest required your main character to have Pet Pall in order to progress without the ability to respec or use alternate routes forcing the player to restart the game and pick Pet Pall because fuck you and your freedom of choice. That would be fucking dumb, wouldn't it?

 

[hpstg]

The point of this is how the game warns you about a shitty build, and how graciously (and when), it allows you to recover from it. What's your actual opinion on this?

 

[Grampy_Bone]

Come on this is ridiculous. Beloved Codex favorites Fallout 1 and 2 don't have unwinnable builds. The worst you can do is avoid all points in gun skills and even that mistake can be fixed by going back to the early areas and grinding out a few levels. Most stats and skills are pure gravy that just open new options for going through the game.

 

[thesheeep]

Come on this is ridiculous. Beloved Codex favorites Fallout 1 and 2 don't have unwinnable builds. The worst you can do is avoid all points in gun skills and even that mistake can be fixed by going back to the early areas and grinding out a few levels. Most stats and skills are pure gravy that just open new options for going through the game.

The discussion did become a bit too focused on that one example, true
However, it also shows that even a really bad build can be salvaged - it just won't ever reach the usefulness of better builds. And it also shows that if you - instead of salvaging - insist on doubling down on your bad choices, it is your own fault, not the developers'.

Said the person who insists on receiving handouts and removal of challenge in their games

Saying (once) that the idea of bad builds that don't let you progress through the game is "insisting" on receiving handouts and removal of challenge in games? You are really grasping at straws now.

You literally advocate the removal of the possibility to fail at a challenge, by not allowing players to make bad builds. How is that not the very definition of "removal of challenge"? Sure, you argue that it shouldn't be a challenge to begin with, but that is irrelevant for this point.
And how is "every character you create will be just fine! " not a handout by the developers? Like telling a little child how beautiful their (in reality quite ugly) self-drawn image is.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Allowing the player to make an unwinnable character is fine. The problem arises when that unwinnable character isn't a result of poor judgement, but arbitrary bullshit. Imagine if the only way to win Fallout 2 was to tag gambling and have less than 5 agi. It would be utterly retarded to make all those other characters unwinnable. Or even if just a small subset was unwinnable, like making everyone with 10 agi and luck auto lose to some arbitrary check. OTOH, if the game was unwinnable because you made a shit character that can't win at combat, stealth, or diplomacy and only excelled at first aid and lockpicking, that would be fine.

 

[JarlFrank]

If a skill is included in the game, it is the obligation of the writers and level designers to make use of those skills.

Certainly, but that doesn't mean that all skills included in a game have to be on the same level of usefulness.
And it also doesn't mean that a character build that focuses on all these "lesser good" skills should still be a viable character.
You can expect some logical thinking on the part of players. There's no point in treating players like idiots who have never played an RPG before in their life.
Even if some people here seem to desire nothing more than to be treated like morons by developers...

I guess it depends on what expectations the game creates in the player.
Sure, if you played a dozen RPGs you probably expect that jumping, climbing and swimming won't be used very often.

But if the game offers these skills and you're new to the genre you might expect them to be genuinely useful skills.
Why would I take climbing and swimming as my focused skills in pen and paper D&D?

Because I could infiltrate an enemy castle by jumping into an underground river that connects to the castle's well, then climb up the rope if the well's bucket is lowered or up the well's wall if my climb is very very high (gonna be a difficult skill check tho cause it's slippery!).
Because I could climb over the wall to enter the enemy castle from the flank rather than assaulting it frontally.
Because I could climb up onto roofs as a thief and break into homes via the chimney.
Because I could escape a group of enemy armored knights by swimming across the river where they would certainly sink.
Etc etc.

The skills sound useful and there are many reasonable applications of these skills that give your character a definitive edge or allow for unorthodox alternative approaches to a problem.
If you put these skills in your game, it's your job to consider the usefulness of these skills at every hand-placed encounter and situation you have in the game. Quest to deal with bandits occupying a castle? You better have various different options to get rid of the bandits and to get into their castle based on the different skills your game offers to characters.

Note that not all approaches have to be similar in difficulty and effectiveness. Maybe talking to the bandits and convincing them to fuck off is the easiest because all it requires is a bunch of persuasion checks and the threat of the army coming to clean them out. Climbing over the walls and taking them out stealthily would be more difficult since it requires both climbing, stealth, and some combat. Swimming through the underground river, then climbing up the well is the hardest because it's harder to climb up the well than over the wall AND you have to pass a swimming check before that, too. But all of these are valid ways of approaching the situation and by offering that many solutions, each dependent on a different skill, you give valid options to all kinds of character builds and you make re-plays more interesting because every character build can approach the situation from a different angle.

What would make a skill less useful, in your opinion? What's the criteria of a skill that isn't as useful as the rest? I mean yeah if there's a basketweaving skill it's obvious that the only use for it is making some additional money for your character to spend and making shitty low-tier makeshift helmets. A sock darning skill is going to be oviously less useful than a chainmail repairing skill.

But what about science and outdoorsman? What about first aid vs doctor (why didn't Fallout just merge them into medicine? lol)?
How would you judge - without preknowledge of the game, just common sense - which is more useful and which less?

 

[Vault Dweller]

Come on this is ridiculous. Beloved Codex favorites Fallout 1 and 2 don't have unwinnable builds. The worst you can do is avoid all points in gun skills and even that mistake can be fixed by going back to the early areas and grinding out a few levels. Most stats and skills are pure gravy that just open new options for going through the game.

Because combat in Fallout is very easy so most builds, no matter how shitty, can beat the game. Fallout shines in just about every design aspect but it has never been a challenging game. The skills go to 200 but you can kill just about anything with 75 points in your weapon skill. You start the game with about 45 points if I recall correctly so you need to add 30 points to become a killing machine, which won't take long.

 

[Squid]

Wait, is the question actually, "If games don't hold my hand, is that bad design?"

Sure, it's frustrating when a game is difficult and it's easy to badly build a character. The thing is, the game shouldn't just bend its knee to you because you refused to engage in its gameplay. As a general statement, how many games do you buy and think, "Wow, I'll never engage in combat and everything will go swimmingly!"? How many games do you think, "All social stats are a waste of time, surely this could never backfire on me and cause me to do 3x the amount of quests or favors!"?

Really, if your common sense is that off, the game's design isn't bad. It's you. Sure, sometimes a game doesn't convey what's an important skill and what isn't or sometimes certain combat/social options are vastly superior and it may be nearly impossible to know which ones are the best until you learn through playing. But, overall, no it's not bad design because you decided that in Bloodlines that you weren't going to fight anyone.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Athletics is a convenience skill. It should not exist because not investing in it makes walking around a literal slog, but it's there and treating it as useless makes the experience miserable until you find the sanic boots (and it's still kind of miserable when you have them)

 

[Safav Hamon]

Not wanting trap choices isn't the same as wanting my hand held.

If I build a stealth character, then I want to be put in challenging situations involving stealth. What I don't want is for my stealth character to be put in a situation that's unwinnable without combat.

 

[frajaq]

Like the only "trap choice" I'm iffy about are weapon specializations in a game like Pathfinder Kingmaker, since you have no way to know at the start what special weapons are available in the game.

There are safe weapon picks of course, like Longsword/Maces/Bastard Sword/Greatsword and others, but the rest you're kinda gambling about it

 

[thesheeep]

But what about science and outdoorsman? What about first aid vs doctor (why didn't Fallout just merge them into medicine? lol)?
How would you judge - without preknowledge of the game, just common sense - which is more useful and which less?

I certainly wouldn't invest exclusively into skills where I am doubtful if they are good or not. In the Fallout case, I'd pick two safe skills and maybe one where I am unsure but can see myself roleplaying that.
And then discover their actual use as I play - to be able to make a better judgement (and a different build) on my next playthrough. If the game isn't good enough to warrant another playthrough, the whole issue isn't really relevant anyway.

As I wrote initially, their order alone can be quite telling - weapon skills are on top, so I'd pick either one weapon skill or two (one melee, one ranged).
Just common sense.

 

[Darth Canoli]

Like the only "trap choice" I'm iffy about are weapon specializations in a game like Pathfinder Kingmaker, since you have no way to know at the start what special weapons are available in the game.

This !

Most of these RTwP things offer weapon specializations but some don't get you anywhere.
That's frustrating if you don't want to endure them once again (for obvious reasons).

One thing Low Magic Age does quite well (character creation) removing the old specializations and replacing them by weapon damage type.

 

[JarlFrank]

The whole narrow weapon specialization system of D&D 2 and 3 just isn't very well-suited for CRPGs.

 

[Black Angel]

All this shit talking about AoD makes me want to play it.

I already am, currently trying a full talker Praetor build, the only combat I did was when I want to get Cado's information on Carrinas and the one where I encounter Gaelius's assassin. The former I only act as a shield that knock back anyone from getting near my ally crossbow thieves, and the latter I just spam bombs. Currently looking for a way to let Meru lives.

 

[thesheeep]

The whole narrow weapon specialization system of D&D 2 and 3 just isn't very well-suited for CRPGs.

I think that depends on the weapons they put in there.
Pathfinder: Kingmaker and BG unfortunately mostly went the Realms Of Arkania way in implementing all the weapon skills, but just not offering the weapons.
But this could be rather easily fixed by simply adding more weapons to the game, as well as more finely tuned weapon crafting. Maybe a variant where you can destroy a unique weapon in order to create a weapon of a different kind, or weapon upgrading, etc. There are many possibilities to alleviate the problem.
You'd still have only the "unique" weapons put in the game, but at least no character would end up with a weapon skill there are no weapons for.

 

[Lemming42]

Haven't read the whole thread, but wanted to respond to the Fallout stuff. I think saying that Stealth, Outdoorsman and Barter are totally useless - and that only a few skills are really of any actual use - is a totally legitimate criticism of Fallout. For such a relatively brief game with relatively few quests, quite a lot of them can only be done one or two ways with only one or two skills applied (which are almost always science, lockpick, speech or combat).

The best of those skills is Stealth because if you pour all your points into it, you can stroll past the Mariposa guards 1 hex away from them completely unseen, but the game doesn't really give you a wealth of opportunities to use it outside of that, even in situations where it would make perfect sense. There's no stealth-based solution to the Khans quest, for example - you can't sneak Tandi out, you can't use your stealth skill to disguise yourself as a Khan, etc. Outdoorsman is literally useless and Barter is a joke given that you can become the richest person in the entire wasteland about ten minutes into the game. I don't remember it ever being checked in dialogue.

If a player receives a quest to rescue someone from a heavily-guarded raider camp, pumping all their points into stealth beforehand is a completely reasonable thing to do. The fact that the game basically tells you to fuck off when you actually arrive at the camp and find out your sneak skill does precisely jack shit isn't the fault of the player. Similarly, the guy in Shitty Sands has radscorpion poisoning - your first aid and doctor skills are worthless. You must kill a scorpion and take its tail (or knock out a scorpion and remove its tail from its inventory) and give it to the crap village doctor who will instantly produce the antidote - this is the only way to win the quest. You can then administer this antidote to the guy regardless of your doctor skill. Again, a skill that could and should have billions of applications in the Fallout setting seems to be useless.

New Vegas's approach to making non-combat skills more useful (including them as dialogue skill-checks) was awkward and led to some shockingly retarded lines, but it still gives you a reason to put points into non-combat skills other than speech and helps each build feel relatively unique. As fantastic as Fallout is, a good half of the skills you can choose are pointless, and most of the remainder have about three practical uses each.