galsiah said:
Xi said:
As for flaying your arms pointlessly for reward, people kill kids in fallout for the pointless pleasure.
To be clear, my above game design isn't for a computer game - it's a game you play with a book and a knife.
It's a Role Flaying Game!
Oh, I really can't tell you all how much pain and agony I had to suffer through during this family dinner. All I could think about was this marvelous pun. No less than a thousand reliefs I felt when I realized I still could pull it.
Well, the pun is made, now I can move on. However, I find it very hard to argue with anyone, as galsiah steals all the good points and calls everyone on their bullshit. So, I guess I'll just diverge the entire discussion until SkeleTony reappears.
Saint_Proverbius said:
Same thing goes for wizards. How many CRPGs offer spells other than ones that make things dead? A wizard should be able to invis himself, transmute a stone wall to mud to make a hole in the wall, and make his way in like that. Use illusions to trick the guards in to thinking he's a dragon so they run away would be another way. The problem is, wizards just get attack spells so they just blast the guards and do things the same way warriors do.
The wizard is a RPG archetype with extremely unfulfilled potential. I've just played the hell out of the Penumbra tech demo, and I couldn't help but being struck by the possibilities a fully utilized physics-system could have for a wizard. The laughable attempt on telekinesis in Oblivion is a fucking disgrace to these possibilities. Combine a good physics engine with breakable scenery, and wham, the wizard is suddenly most interesting character in the game. Spells like melting walls, using telekinesis to distract people, smash people, or even lift people up and use it as a way to intimidate them would open up some real interesting possibilities. I remember seeing the first demo videos of Half-Life 2 and thinking on how what I saw could be utilized in Oblivion (early in the hype., when I still wasn't deprived of all hope). Further, things that have nothing do do with physics, like spells of the type of Jedi mind trick is too seldom to be seen. Spells that make you change appearance, not to a wolf, so you can kill people in a cool way, but to another person, so you could sneak in somewhere, infiltrate a faction, make people trust you, then proceed to fuck them in the ass. I'd like to see this type of a cunning mage, rather than the ranged attack with funny colours-fighter, as is the current standard in CRPGs.
Proper use of physics would be a great help for innovative gameplay for other archetypes as well. Look at Thief the Dark project. They had rope arrows ten bloody years ago. Now combine the gameplay of Thief, the combat of Dark Messiah (without the blatantly stupid placement of obviously usable objects like the omnipresent spikes), and the wizard described above. Then add this to a quest system like Gothic III, with the same open world, with opposing factions, some real consequences for your actions, consequences that would show.
Ah, it'd be like a wet dream come true. Worst thing is, by looking at Penumbra, an independently developed,
beautifully looking 3d-game, and what seems to becoming of AoD. I can't help but think this actually could happen. If AoD don't turn out to be shit, and rather be the second coming of Christ that I hope it'll be, then just imagine, imagine what those four people combined with those crazy dudes in Frictional Games could do. I think I just came in my pants.
elander_ said:
Here's a dumb idea, what if you role-play a character that is progressively decaying until he reaches point zero. Usually you role-play games where you become a god like character and savior of the world striving to become better and more powerful. In this game you start as a genius and influential person and will slowly decaying striving to learn and live as much as you can to stop this process. Would this be an rpg?
Reading this just made me remember one of my first experiences with PnP. I participated in a session of Shadow Run, with some heavy house rules to boot. We all started out as very skilled characters, the only info about the upcoming campaign was that we would be very experienced. As the munchkins we were, we all made some heavy combat focused trolls and minotaurs, except one who made a human focusing on intuition and logic (or what it's called). It turned out that the concept of the campaign was that we had been abducted, and infected with some sort of virus or nanobots of sorts. This virus-thing made us weaker by the day, it attacked muscle mass and bodily functions first, so obviously the guy who played human made the better choice. We could expose our self to radiation to slow the degeneration, with the consequence of suffering some other negative effects, but there was only one way to actually stop it (We had to eat some shit some guy had, far far away from our current location, don't remember the details).
We started out imprisoned, and at the best our characters were ever to be during the entire campaign. The first fights were the most difficult (enemy strength-wise), but as we escaped and made our way around through the world, fights and challenges became progressively harder, but the enemies we fought and the challenges we were put up to were, per normal rules an progression, easier. The story reflected this, as we had to seek out some hermit in the wilderness, where there were less and less bad guys. Sounds silly when I write this now, but it made sense back then. Best GM I've ever had, but he moved away soon after that, and all PnPs I've played since have been utter shit in comparison. We played for four days straight, and we all ended up dead. Pure awesomeness. So my answer is: Your suggestion could most definitely make a RPG. Might even turn out to be a great one too.