The REAL overlooked sin in RPGs: disconnect between narrative and mechanics

[Eyestabber]

Trash mobs are bad, trashtext is bad, but here's what you people are REALLY overlooking: disconnection between in-game narrative/setting/"lore" and actual gameplay mechanics.

One of the main reasons why many consider Fallout to be GOAT is the fact that the game responds well to your character development choices. There are hundreds of "low intelligence run" videos on YT and several dozen short videos showcasing how to get a particular outcome on a given quest/town. When I played Fallout back in the day young naive me thought "DAMN, in the future games will react to EVERYTHING about my char". And what happened was the exact opposite.

I recently went on about this on the Iratus thread (won't self quote, you can read my rant here) and this issue isn't exclusive to RPGs, but due to their more story-oriented nature (compared to, say, FIFA games), RPGs are easier to analyze.

Take Dragon Age, for instance. Very early in DA:O you're told that mages need their mana potions and some get addicted to the stuff, become druggies and shit. You also uncover that even some Templars get hooked and become dirty cops, helping mages smuggle magical cocaine. Sure, great premise, I like it! Except...you can have as many mages in your party and mana management will never lead to addiction, legal troubles or anything of the sort. The narrative and the gameplay exist in different realities. That's the hallmark of a mediocre game. Same goes for blood magic: you can cast all BM buffs in front of templars, nothing is gonna happen, lol.

Now compare this to VTMB. The game adapts some really simple premises, but it takes them seriously and the result is a memorable experience with tons of replayability. Nosferatu are ugly, so you have to take the sewers, Malkavians are nuts, so you hear objects talking to you, Toreador are pretty boys, so you get your blood fill from club thots instead of hobos. All these things have an in-game mechanic backing them up.

That's IMO the "essence of games", in a sense. A movie/book has a story, but you don't interact with it. Chess has gameplay, but there isn't really a narrative going on. Vidya OTOH is unique in the sense that it is the only media in which you can have this intimate interaction between narrative and mechanics, with one helping develop the other. But instead of games becoming better...GAMES with time, what we got was an identity crisis, with games trying to become shitty imitations of other forms of media.

And it's funny, because that's a lost battle at this point in time. Everyone just accepts that the thing you PLAY and the stuff you read/hear can be in direct contradiction and it's all fine. PoE had guns, but no cannons and medieval castles were still all the RAGE and only the Codex bothered to notice. More mainstream titles like GTA have a protagonist going "OMG, I can't take this life of crimes anymore, I can't even think about taking another human life again, blablabla" and two seconds later you're back to killing hookers for easy cash.

Eh... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

I think this also ties in to lack of simulationist elements in most games. If things were more simulated, then everything would be tied in together more, but when everything is just a facade for disjointed game elements, coherence is optional.

 

[Darkzone]

Trash mobs are bad, trashtext is bad, but here's what you people are REALLY overlooking: disconnection between in-game narrative/setting/"lore" and actual gameplay mechanics.

This sentence is the reason why you have received a brofist from me. Now think why..

 

[Alpan]

While it's good to have, no game needs total consonance between gameplay and story. I view this as the ultimate fluff feature, and consequently drawing attention to this as the ultimate in storyfaggotry.

 

[Prime Junta]

disconnection between in-game narrative/setting/"lore" and actual gameplay mechanics

It's called "ludo-narrative dissonance" you pleb.

 

[Alpan]

disconnection between in-game narrative/setting/"lore" and actual gameplay mechanics

It's called "ludo-narrative dissonance" you pleb.

You might as well cite the seminal text.

 

[RNGsus]

The narrativefag is a whole other class of homo.

 

[smaug]

I’m pretty sure it’s just trashmobs.

 

[aweigh]

You offer some good points, especially with your VtM:B example. It's food for thought.

EDIT: I wanna say something: I fully agree that having a story is absolutely ESSENTIAL to making a good game. For example: if your game is about figure A going to attack figure B, it can have the best gameplay in the world but it will not resonate; however if you simply change the graphics on figure A and turn him into a Knight, and then change figure B into a Dragon, now you immediately have a story that is being told and it will be far more engaging and meaningful for all players. They will fill in the necessary blanks and the existing "Gameplay" will resonate much better with the players.

What I may disagree on is the degree of that kind of "story". For starters, I don't think a game needs dialog at all to even have a story, like in my above example. Archetypes and narrative are not defined by lots of words or dialog trees. People who think a game should be "like a novel" or that a game needs to be judged by such metrics, I think they completely miss the point.

I think storytelling is indeed essential to any good video game or RPG, but not in the way most of the people who say this think it is. Games (and RPGs) are not books. Human beings are hard-wired to seek "story" in everything, including in the games we play, however this is not the same as asserting that video game players seek for their video games to be literary experiences. Hell, I would argue that due to the interactive nature of a video game it simply can't be a strictly literary experience, and this is a compliment to video games. They're their own thing.

--The original post I made, before the edit: I don't need a game to "react" to my character buying 99 potions by having the game's NPCs all suddenly start calling him a MASTER MERCHANT, or whatever. At one point you have to decide if you're making an RPG or a larping simulator. If the main thrust of the game isn't exisential then I do not need scenes of my character crying over being a virtual participant in good gameplay.

I don't need, nor want Pool of Radiance to suddenly become a psycho-analysis of my Level 7 Fighter because he killed too many rats and now feels muh sad; and also I don't need nor want Dragon Age: Origins to become a preachy addiction simulator because there's a bit of "lore" about addictive magical items in the game. I'll choose good gameplay over secondary and tertiary considerations every day of the week, thank you very much.

"But oh, you can bake bread in Ultima 7! It's a pity that game doesn't recognize it and give you the opportunity to larp at being a master baker!!" -- to which I say: MEH. Stuff like that has nothing to do with actual gameplay, and I want to play an RPG, not Baker Simulator. Now if you take it further and introduce mechanics wherein the food you make has bearing on the combat, on the exploration, on the Itemization, on the game's power curve, or how it can even affect how you approach encounters or other NPCs; well now we're talking. That's a different thing altogether.

I think abstraction is the foundation of all RPG gameplay, not simulation (or emulation). Yes, you can have simulationist elements, but that's not what I think of when I think of an RPG, nor do I think excessive simulation/emulation is the secret key to success. I think having several layers of abstraction is more conducive to better RPG gameplay.

A game by definition needs rules and limitations in order to have any depth or meaning, and you simply can't expect a game to recognize every irrelevant little thing that (want) your character to do, or on the other extreme, you shouldn't want your RPG to be a game of "infinite LARPing". There needs to be a dedicated focus on gameplay mechanics.

TLDR: Who cares if you can do something that the retarded lore says you can't, as long as it contributes to better gameplay. Everything should be in service to the gameplay first; being in service to the gameplay is not contrary to being in service of the narrative, even if there is so-called dissonance.

 

[JarlFrank]

Trash mobs are bad, trashtext is bad, but here's what you people are REALLY overlooking: disconnection between in-game narrative/setting/"lore" and actual gameplay mechanics.

Fully agreed on everything here, my lad. The biggest issue of modern games is that they don't integrate narrative and mechanics with each other well enough (or even at all) and the end result is always mediocrity.

Take Dragon Age, for instance. Very early in DA:O you're told that mages need their mana potions and some get addicted to the stuff, become druggies and shit. You also uncover that even some Templars get hooked and become dirty cops, helping mages smuggle magical cocaine. Sure, great premise, I like it! Except...you can have as many mages in your party and mana management will never lead to addiction, legal troubles or anything of the sort. The narrative and the gameplay exist in different realities. That's the hallmark of a mediocre game. Same goes for blood magic: you can cast all BM buffs in front of templars, nothing is gonna happen, lol.

This is a perfect example of why this kind of "ludonarrative dissonance" (pretentious term but let's run with it) is bad, and why integrating plot and setting points into the mechanics can improve a game tremendously.
If the story tells you one thing but the game does another, it just leads to you disregarding all the lore fluff because it doesn't really matter in the game itself. You realize that it's all just a facade, and the illusion of exploring an actual world breaks apart.
"Blood magic is illegal!" everyone says. "Guards will jail you if you cast it!"
"Mana potions are addictive!" everyone says. "You'll turn into a junkie if you chug too many of them!"
Then you cast blood magic in public and nobody cares, and you chug mana potions and nothing happens except your mana regenerates, and to add insult to injury you can even buy those highly addictive mana potions at the local alchemist's store instead of having to go to the black market.

Ok. Looks like all that bullshit about illegal magic and addictive potions doesn't really exist. Immersion = gone.

That's IMO the "essence of games", in a sense. A movie/book has a story, but you don't interact with it. Chess has gameplay, but there isn't really a narrative going on. Vidya OTOH is unique in the sense that it is the only media in which you can have this intimate interaction between narrative and mechanics, with one helping develop the other. But instead of games becoming better...GAMES with time, what we got was an identity crisis, with games trying to become shitty imitations of other forms of media.

And it's funny, because that's a lost battle at this point in time. Everyone just accepts that the thing you PLAY and the stuff you read/hear can be in direct contradiction and it's all fine. PoE had guns, but no cannons and medieval castles were still all the RAGE and only the Codex bothered to notice. More mainstream titles like GTA have a protagonist going "OMG, I can't take this life of crimes anymore, I can't even think about taking another human life again, blablabla" and two seconds later you're back to killing hookers for easy cash.

Yes, GTA is a good example. GTA 4 and 5 try to give you those stories with emotional components and try to humanize the player character, meanwhile in the gameplay you're just a total psychopaths who drives over civilians with a truck and shoots at random cars until they explode. "Killing people really gets to me," your character says when you start the next story mission, but while you drove from your home to the story mission's starting point you casually drove over three dozen pedestrians. Ok.

This is one of the reasons why I liked Saints Row 2 a lot more than GTA 4. SR has the right tone for a game like this, cynical and with a lot of dark humor. Your character is a gangster who doesn't give a shit and casually shoots hobos in cutscenes just like you casually drive over pedestrians in regular gameplay. The story and characters make sense in that game because none of it clashes with the gameplay - it all fits to form a coherent whole.

The new Tomb Raiders are also a good example. During gameplay, you shoot more humans than in any of the earlier TR games, but in cutscenes Lara almost starts crying when she has to shoot and slaughter a deer for food. Once the cutscene is over you commit genocide on the wildlife just to gather more meat for your inventory. Yeah, ok.

Games are an interactive medium. They're not movies. Whenever control is taken away from you for the sake of a cutscene, the game suffers. Whenever the story ignores choices you made as a player, the game suffers. The worst thing is cutscenes where your character acts completely contrary to how you've played him up to this point. A good example are those cutscenes where you walk straight into an ambush even though you have reason to expect one and your character is a high int build. Do you really expect me to believe my character is dumb enough to fall for such an obvious ambush, devs? Seriously? Even when he has 18 int and discovered a letter from the bad guys saying that they set bounty hunters on his ass? He'd reasonably expect an ambush at this point and be careful rather than walk straight into it.

A big issue is designers creating scenes as if they were a movie's or a book's. Many game writers haven't learned how to write properly for a game. You can't do linear scenes where the actions of the player character are fixed. Scenes like "Protagonist gets ambushed and imprisoned, has to escape prison" only work as intros, you can't drop a scene like that on the player in the middle of the game and expect him to just go along with it. "This is bullshit!" the player says. "I would never have walked into that ambush if it weren't for this stupid cutscene! Also, how did one arrow manage to knock my character out? I was wearing full plate armor and my character has so many HP that he can soak up a dozen arrows in regular combat! This broke all the rules of the fucking game!"

Thing is, not only does the game become better when you implement all of the setting's little quirks as mechanics (such as mana potions being addictive, for example), having such mechanics also makes your job as a designer or writer more interesting.

Let's take the "mana potions are addictive" example and play with it a bit. What kinds of quests could you design around that?
What about a quest to help a junkie wizard come off the potions? Yeah, sounds good.
A quest to smuggle mana potions from a witch living in the forest into town to sell it to mages there? Yep, cool.

You can even derive additional mechanics from that mechanic. You can add something like mana potion withdrawal to your character, which you suffer from for X in-game days, after which you're clean. But drink just one potion after that and your addiction is back.

The more things are implemented as generalized mechanics which universally apply to every character in the game, the more you can use these mechanics to base quests on them, and the more unique gameplay elements you can introduce.

Everything that appears in your setting should be turned into a mechanic. The more mechanically sound your game is - the more is covered by its systems - the better it will turn out.

 

[aweigh]

Here's how I would've handled the Dragon Age: Origins addiction thing:

"Hey, so I read the new document on the mages and how they get addicted to mana potions. So I take it the guys have implemented addiction mechanics in the game? You know, since you'll actually be using mages"

"No, it's not in the scope of the game. The game isn't really about that kind of stuff, it's just some really detailed backstory that gives character to those NPCs in the game... the player won't really have anything to do with it during actual gameplay."

"Oh, ok, then cut all of that out since it's irrelevant."

 

[JarlFrank]

TLDR: Who cares if you can do something that the retarded lore says you can't, as long as it contributes to better gameplay. Everything should be in service to the gameplay first; being in service to the gameplay is not contrary to being in service of the narrative, even if there is so-called dissonance.

In that case, the solution is easy: just re-write the fucking lore to not contradict the gameplay.

It's simple, really.

The issue is that game writers often don't care about mechanics, just about writing their texts.

 

[Quillon]

Devs should use their games' settings more than just tools to tell their precious stories in. If protag's gonna be a captain in an archipelago; focus on the fucking ship more than anything else, if he's gonna be captain of a smuggler space ship; give him smuggling quests, if that ship's gonna be called The Unreliable; make it break from time to time ffs. Use these stuff more than just tools, give them personality.

Thus why I like simulation; it forces devs to use the games' systems more and what's already available in the game instead of relying on convenient spawns/custom assets/one-off shit mechanics etc. They are still gonna do all these things cos god help them if they can't tell their stories as they first perceived in their heads, but simulation helps.

If I could roleplay/larp/tell my own stories as I play I'd leave all this shit behind and go play M&B/C&K2 or something, I think

 

[RNGsus]

Setting is vastly more important than story, because the player is an agent in the world, as well as the listener.

 

[JarlFrank]

Thus why I like simulation; it forces devs to use the games' systems more and what's already available in the game instead of relying on convenient spawns/custom assets/one-off shit mechanics etc. They are still gonna do all these things cos god help them if they can't tell their stories as they first perceived in their heads, but simulation helps.

Yes. The more of the world's workings are implemented systemically, the more the game can do with it. Often, a setting's unique aspects are underused because none of it is implemented systemically. Having robust systems in place also helps with storytelling and quest design. If you can easily trigger an event with existing, fully implemented and perfectly working gameplay mechanics, you don't need to write a specific script that is only used one time in one quest and then never again. You just use the systems that already exist.

Setting is vastly more important than story, because the player is an agent in the world, as well as the listener.

Absolutely. And the more aspects of the setting are covered by systems, the more believable and more interactive the setting becomes.

 

[Quillon]

Who cares if you can do something that the retarded lore says you can't, as long as it contributes to better gameplay.

I care :D It bugs me if I notice it, if gameplay's important fix your lore or vice versa. Compromise for consistency is worth it.

It bugs me even if I don't notice this shit myself, like that Parvati choice reduction thing in TOW; missed it in the game but learned about it here; I don't care whether I can insult her or not, I care about consistency; if anywhere else in the game I get nuanced choices, I should get those choices there also. If you don't wanna allow me to say it then edit your convo in a way so those choices never come up, but she just had to make us or rather our characters "be nice".

 

[LudensCogitet]

Having robust systems in place also helps with storytelling and quest design. If you can easily trigger an event with existing, fully implemented and perfectly working gameplay mechanics, you don't need to write a specific script that is only used one time in one quest and then never again.

This is why the original Fallout, Arcanum, etc. can get away with being so janky and still be great. Because the jankiness is the result of the (less than perfect) interaction of fascinating underlying systems. Have an extreme personality? this pushes an NPC's reaction under a threshold and causes him to fight you to the death, when normally he would just dislike you. This makes a quest impossible to complete. But it is authentic and memorable and an attempt at simulating something like a living world.

You can file off these "imperfections" by scripting everything, but then your game isn't even doing the same thing. It might just be missing the point of RPGs all together.

 

[Daze]

Nosferatu are ugly, so you have to take the sewers

This though is another myth that gets repeated again and again till everyone believes it.
Playing as Nosferatu is done very badly, you should start the game immediately and try it.
As long as you keep walking you will get no consequences from being on the open street even under lanterns.

 

[mondblut]

RPG writers needing to justify why some NPC has died and was NOT resurrected at the nearmost village chapel for 250 gold pieces really have it hard. "Uuuuh apparently there was a special super sekrit soul-destroying poison involved, and the body has been chewed up, shat out then utterly disintegrated into dust, and when we contacted his spirit, he said that he likes it there and doesn't want to go back, so there - SOLVE AND AVENGE THIS VILE MURDER!". Poor sods.

 

[Quillon]

Nosferatu are ugly, so you have to take the sewers

This though is another myth that gets repeated again and again till everyone believes it.
Playing as Nosferatu is done very badly, you should start the game immediately and try it.
As long as you keep walking you will get no consequences from being on the open street even under lanterns.

No one played with Nosferatu yo :D

 

[Daze]

Anyway it's always a compromise between gameplay and a believable world.
If you think like that most games break apart anyway.

Where are the other parties of adventurers killing goblins?
Why doesn't the captain of the guard spend two minutes to make the trading route save?
If there are teleporter stones why does no NPC ever have one?

Does every game need explanations for that stuff now?
Dragon Age is interesting lore but would have been too annoying in actual gameplay so they discarded the gameplay idea.

 

[mondblut]

Nosferatu are ugly, so you have to take the sewers

This though is another myth that gets repeated again and again till everyone believes it.
Playing as Nosferatu is done very badly, you should start the game immediately and try it.
As long as you keep walking you will get no consequences from being on the open street even under lanterns.

They just predated the bodypositive movement for a few years. If anything, while the rest of the clans are power fantasies and wishful thinking on behalf of the Vampire fanbase, the Nosferatu are their actual self-insert.

 

[Trashos]

Thank you, Eyestabber, great post!

Since I am into simulations (and have come to RPGs from strategy and simulation games), I do not see the point of using the term "simluation" here. As a matter of fact, I think the term "simulation" contradicts the awesome OP. We need not call the coherence between lore and mechanics "simluation". It should be viewed as basic game making. Because

instead of games becoming better...GAMES with time, what we got was an identity crisis, with games trying to become shitty imitations of other forms of media.

 

[Tigranes]

To everyone saying this is storyfaggotry -

Why should you write the story about mana addiction first, and then make your gameplay fit that?

You could just as easily say we want our game to have mana addiction as an interesting take on resource scarcity in RPGs, creating new kinks in character power progression & such. And then, you would want to ensure that this shows up in your writing & setting.

And so, driven by gameplay concerns, let's say your game now has the kind of addiction/withdrawal/overdose mechanism such that rely too much on mana pots clearing a dungeon, and your guys are retching and pale by the end of it. You then write your quests in such a way that perhaps the faction you're trying to reach demonises mana usage, and so blasting your way through to their stronghold is really going to put a damper on any infiltration efforts.

You can also build it into not scripted moments but procedural / emergent interaction of systems, such that maybe NPC dispositions are modified by the visual effects of mana addiction, leading to what JarlFrank and others are talking about.

 

[Trashos]

Does every game need explanations for that stuff now?
Dragon Age is interesting lore but would have been too annoying in actual gameplay so they discarded the gameplay idea.

No, games do not need to explain everything, and by no means do they need to explain everything in words. However, their different elements should not be contradicting each other, they should be working together. If a lore concept contradicts good gameplay, get rid of that lore concept.

The DAO example was excellent. Either make it work or get rid of it.