Is exposing core rules paramount in an RPG?

[Morpheus Kitami]

I don't think there's any benefit for you to hide anything in this case. Recently I finished Dungeon Master, and one of the few things that annoyed me about it was that I didn't have a clue what any items didt without using them for a while or looking them up in a wiki. This is a game where there's not a very big shift between your starting gear and your endgame gear. Even if the stats of items get noticeably better over time its good to actually know they're getting better. I think you need a better reason than preventing munchkinism for doing something like that. Even some highly realistic games don't hide things like that.

 

[perfectslumbers]

Much prefer the numbers on shit. Reminds me of when I played World of Warcraft and not a single item would tell you things like proc rate so I had no way to compare items.

 

[Volourn]

It's a game. Games have rules. And, for good reason. And, players should be allowed to know the rules.

I would have hated to play monopoly not knowing the rules. Imagine not knowing the rules trying to play sports.

On top of that, 'stats crunching' is part of the fun. This is the difference between RPG GAMES like D&D or FO and fukkin' acting even though both are part of playing someone you are not.

CAPICHE!?!

 

[Mr. Magniloquent]

Consider that your player will not understand the game as intimately as you. If the mechanics are hidden, the player doesn't have an objective sense of proportion. While that can be mildly thrilling, consider that much of the fun and appeal for the genre is maximizing your build. Also, RPGs are highly abstracted, so without numbers, it can often be difficult to know what you're getting. Many times an ability or item won't live up to the description it led the player with.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

figuring them out is half the fun, you guys are crazy

 

[gurugeorge]

It depends on how tactical the gameplay is.

If the thing is story based and/or twitch-combat-based, then fuzzy definitions are okay - but you might bump up against the difficulty of describing intermediately-finely-graded distinctions in non-clunky or non-idiosyncratic language.

But if victory in gameplay depends at all on razor-thin margins of numbers and not on player twitch skills, then you have to expose yourself. Plus also, it's true that spergs will laboriously test it out anyway, so all you'll have done is add a layer of annoyance for some people, and introduced a layer of meta community (where people are interacting with each other about the game and not with the game itself) where none might have existed before (which could be a good thing or a bad thing).

 

[octavius]

so there's not much room for munchkinism.

Bullshit, they'll find a way. Always have, always will.

Where there is a mondblut, there is a way.

 

[mondblut]

Game designers who are appalled at the thought of players gitting gud in their games should find another hobby.

 

[Generic-Giant-Spider]

Why do kids wear a blindfold to hit a pinata when they lack the power to break it open anyways?

Ask yourself this. When you find the answer, that is when you're ready to come back to me.

Come back to me and face me.

vanishes

 

[Nifft Batuff]

Rules are not enough. I want the source code too.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Game designers who are appalled at the thought of players gitting gud in their games should find another hobby.

Figuring out how the rules work seems like gitting gud to me.

 

[lukaszek]

Game designers who are appalled at the thought of players gitting gud in their games should find another hobby.

Figuring out how the rules work seems like gitting gud to me.

first you need to trust the dev that its worth figuring out

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Game designers who are appalled at the thought of players gitting gud in their games should find another hobby.

Figuring out how the rules work seems like gitting gud to me.

first you need to trust the dev that its worth figuring out

It it's not worth figuring out it's not worth playing.

 

[lukaszek]

chicken egg problem much?

 

[mondblut]

Game designers who are appalled at the thought of players gitting gud in their games should find another hobby.

Figuring out how the rules work seems like gitting gud to me.

Sorta, but there is a short way and long way for figuring out the rules. I, for one, prefer checking the mithril mace's description for damage value to counting the number of blows it takes to down a stone giant with mithril mace, then comparing it to my previous notes on bronze axe, iron sword and obsidian bec-de-corbin. But you do you.

 

[Haba]

It depends.

Let's take Aleshar, as an example. I liked how there were no visible hitpoints or anything of the sort. You could look at the enemy and the textual description would tell you roughly in what sort of a shape they are. This could be taken further, with enemies feigning being tired or wounded.

Melee combat was a very simple, so even though you got no feedback on why you were missing, it didn't matter too much. If there were more tactical options available, it would've needed more feedback on why certain things work and certain didn't.

With magic, it was integral to not have any feedback or anyone to teach you. Experimenting was the only way to get better, and experimenting was always dangerous and could lead to your death. Game didn't tell you anything about magic, you had to try it out and see what happens. You tuned the amount of magical power you could expend and learned the limits of your character.

All in all this works in a game where skills and traits improve through use. Combat is simple with visceral feedback. You're spending more time about thinking about positioning and watching your exhaustion.

So yeah, the parts need to fit. With complex turn-based combat, as an example, you can't really expect the players to experiment to figure out every mechanic.

Look at Nethack and it's like. Items are unidentified and you figure out their use... trough use. Again the player's effort is shifted into a different direction, and as a balancing act, the combat is straightforward. If the game tried to do everything while obfuscating complex mechanics, it simply wouldn't be fun. You'd be overwhelmed.

 

[Bester]

It betrays a lack of respect for your players

And who says that you gotta "respect your players" in that particular sense? How is this an axiom?

It's more like this: sure, you respect your woman, but you're the one in the driving seat and you take care of her. You're the adult in the room, not her.

Devs who cave in to players' requests are pussies and their games suck. I'm pretty sure the best games we got came from the devs who respected their own vision more than anything.

I used to play a MUD that had no mechanics exposed. It created rumors, which is always fun. There was an in-game calender with original months, like "the month of the Bull" and we had theories that spells are easier to learn on certain months -- some spells dropped once in a lifetime, so learning them was a big deal. Also, there was a "weather" command and we theorized about the impact of weather on learning, too. Figuring stuff out on your own absolutely can be fun. Imagine being a dev and hearing rumors about how some mechanic is supposed to work. Then fucking with the players by slightly altering it to sometimes work exactly like they say it does, and sometimes to work how you originally conceived it, and flip the switch once/month. Make them paranoid.

But yeah, like someone in this thread said, it can be reverse-engineered, so it only works in online games.

 

[Haba]

[...]hearing rumors about how some mechanic is supposed to work. Then fucking with the players by slightly altering it to sometimes work exactly like they say it does, and sometimes to work how you originally conceived it, and flip the switch once/month. Make them paranoid.*

Fucking fishing in Haven and Hearth.

 

[Grauken]

It drives me crazy when I can't find exactly how a system works in a CRPG. Yes you really do need to know this shit. Everything about how the game works needs to be available. You don't know what people will need to know when they're making their builds and gear/ability selections. It doesn't necessarily all need to be there in the item blurb, but it needs to be accessible somewhere. If people can't see the stats on their screen they're forced to figure out the effects of things by direct observation. They'll get there in the end but there's no reason to make things harder on them.

One thing that drives me crazy is equipment with no stats and there's no in-game mechanism to find out, just guessing based on prices and equipment names. Thankfully that happens less and less these days

 

[Trojan_generic]

The rules will be exposed anyway sooner or later. Because somewhere there is a moron who has nothing better to do than hit that monster 1000 times with each item and calculate the average damage, taking into account all the other known variables as well and repeating as needed. The moron knows enough mathematics to calculate the hit points of the monster as well. This is what happened for example with the first UFO game. Then the rules can be found on the internet.

 

[Alex]

(...snip)
I used to play a MUD that had no mechanics exposed. It created rumors, which is always fun. There was an in-game calender with original months, like "the month of the Bull" and we had theories that spells are easier to learn on certain months -- some spells dropped once in a lifetime, so learning them was a big deal. Also, there was a "weather" command and we theorized about the impact of weather on learning, too. Figuring stuff out on your own absolutely can be fun. Imagine being a dev and hearing rumors about how some mechanic is supposed to work. Then fucking with the players by slightly altering it to sometimes work exactly like they say it does, and sometimes to work how you originally conceived it, and flip the switch once/month. Make them paranoid.

Well, this is the key of the issue, I think. If your game's system is a very simple combat system, where you don't get many more actions than "attack", "shoot" or "cast spell"; hiding its mechanics is not really accomplishing much. The reason games like you describe can be fun is exactly because there is actually a whole lot to discover and try out in them. Hiding details about the implementation makes sense if you have this kind of gameplay planned for the game. An example of game where I had fun with this kind of thing is Spasce Station 13, where there were a lot of interesting sub-systems you could toy with and do interesting things.

So, my point is, if you want to make combat something unpredictable with lots of possible different actions the player can take, then sure, go ahead and do this! But don't do it like Ultima 7 did, where you didn't really know how much damage spells would do for instance. The game tried to obfuscate how these things worked, but I don't think it accomplished anything by doing that. Then again it wasn't harmed much either because combat was trivial.

But yeah, like someone in this thread said, it can be reverse-engineered, so it only works in online games.

I think that is hardly a problem worth fretting over. People can spoil the game for themselves in many ways; some might even derive more enjoyment out of it this way, maybe. The point is that as a designer you did your job to point the player in the direction you think he will have fun playing your game. If he is bloody-minded about using a walk-through, a save-game editor, or simply watching your game being played on youtube by someone else, that is neither something you can control or worth worrying about.

 

[thesheeep]

I don't think it is a cardinal sin not to expose core rules. So I went with kingcomrade.

But it is at least bad design:
It's obfuscation for no good reason. Players don't gain anything by not being able to look up how shit works.
If they don't need to know it, it very likely doesn't matter - which is in itself bad design, rules that don't matter. Or it is very obvious/intuitive, which is cool but not achievable for everything.
If they do need to know, not being able to find the information in-game is needlessly frustrating. And they WILL find the information online anyway, so hiding it away serves no purpose other than making people switch to their browsers for a moment...

You don't want players to worry?
I got news for you: You have no say in what players will or will not worry about. If there is something, someone will worry about it, rest assured...

There's no need to overload the player with information by showing all rolls. checks, etc. of course.
But that information should be somewhere if a player does want to see it - and the developer will need to have that information visible anyway for development, debugging, etc.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

The rules will be exposed anyway sooner or later. Because somewhere there is a moron who has nothing better to do than hit that monster 1000 times with each item and calculate the average damage, taking into account all the other known variables as well and repeating as needed. The moron knows enough mathematics to calculate the hit points of the monster as well. This is what happened for example with the first UFO game. Then the rules can be found on the internet.

Hate this argument and a lot of people are making it.

Someone else figures out the rules = who cares.
The game explicitly tells me everything = I have been robbed of figuring it out myself.

 

[Calthaer]

These days I think the answer to this is "yes." It was all well and good back in the day to try to hide this stuff, but with the internet it's all going to be figured out and available in the Steam discussions page (or GameFAQs, if people still use it) within a week. Obscuring it therefore only has the effect of obscuring mechanics from your least-engaged players likely to give up in frustration in the midst of competing entertainment options while not hiding it at all from dedicated players willing to look things up. It is pointless to hide it and doing so can lead to frustration...grease the wheels for your players and they will line your pockets, I say.

 

[octavius]

About the only time I've used a hintbook, is to look up weapon stats. I've become less autist and more fan of unpredictability over the years, but I still need to know which weapon is most effective. Might&Magic 1 and Dungeon Master comes to mind.