On my pinky, you have character creation. It's important, but not vital. Stonekeep had its issues, but character creation wouldn't have drastically changed the game for the better, and probably would have hurt the story. And, ohhh, what a better story I could write now (You have gotten better at Storytelling! (134))
Character creation is always a bit point in a game, since that's typically the first thing the player is going to see. The more interesting the system, the better the game is typically. The more options the system offers, assuming all those skills and attributes are fairly well balanced, the better as well.
One thing I really don't care much for are the character creation systems that generate your character based on a question and answer session with an NPC. There's just something about them I don't like. I guess it boils down to a layer of unrequired abstraction based on someone else's interpretation of the answers.
For example, in Ultima 9, I answered every question with the most evil, nasty, hateful answer they offered. What class did I end up with?
Paladin! I wasn't going for
Paladin, I didn't want to be a
Paladin. In fact, I was going for something far removed from what I think a
Paladin is.
On my ring finger, you have story itself. RPGs without story are tactical combat and level treadmill games. Those can be interesting games, but not really conducive to creating a great role-playing game. The quality of the story can help determine the quality of the game, especially for RPGs. Planescape Torment would have been a good game without it's wonderful story, but was elevated to a great game by the quality of it's writing, story and dialogue.
I cringe when I hear people say the story is the most important part of the CRPG. Too much story often gets in the way of
role playing, which is the
real important part for me. That's not to say there shouldn't be story elements, it's just that those elements should be free for the player to discover, not crammed down the player's throat. If there's too much story, the game feels like you're passively wading through the events, waiting to do something predetermined to get to the next part of it.
This is one of the faults of PS:T, IMHO. Other than side quests and picking your character stuff, there wasn't a hell of a lot of freedom in the game.
The middle-finger, a very important finger I might add, is that character matters. Not the character of your development team, good character there does help, but the fact that player character statistics should matter in the game. If all characters are treated the same, then you have an adventure game and not an RPG. Fallout and Arcanum did this very well. It not only makes the game deeper, but it provides more replayability, which is a good feature for some.
Arcanum kind of screwed up there, if you asked me. Attributes were highly important, I'm not arguing that. However, they were also able to be raised fairly easily through the game. Because of this, you get people halfway through the game with 25APs naturally, 50APs when hasted. That totally throws off the combat because you can cut down an army in one round like that.
Because of the importance of attributes, combined with the easy raising of them, I made a Half-Ogre that was unstoppable with the Sword of Air at 34th level. I computed his average damage per round as
594 points because he had a 20 dex(with items) and could haste himself.
The pointing finger points out that along with characters that matter, you need consequence of actions. If a player makes a decision, then there should be some sort of ramification based on the result of that action. The more important the decision and the greater the action, then the larger the consequence. This makes the player feel like they are actually accomplishing something in the game that is meaningful. Wasteland has the classic example of consequence of action: that darn rabid dog.
I totally agree here. There are too many mainstream CRPGs that totally botch evil, like most of the Infinity Engine games, where the only real consequence of evil is having to give money to a temple.
I like EoB's method of handling this. You can't really be evil in the game, so don't allow that alignment choice. It's pretty simple.
However, I don't think the consequences for actions should ever be,
GAEM OVAR for pulling a simple boner. IWD2, for example, if you kill a town's person, you're basically screwed because the whole town attacks you. Even if you managed to wipe them out, you can never get out of town again, thus the game is over.
Now for the thumb. The thumb isn't the most important of fingers, but it does allow you to do what dogs cannot - open doors. And that's exactly what my fifth point is about: opening the doors of imagination. RPGs should not be about the mundane. We play the game of Life daily and it's rather boring at times. Like all good pieces of entertainment, RPGs should carry us away and give us respite from our day to day jobs, school and other things of mundanity. RPGs, like no other genre of gaming, can make us think we are on another planet, in another time, with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal game designers. Our characters can enable us to do things we players can only imagine. The task of a good game designer is to create unique worlds that can capture the player's imagination. Origin's tagline is "We Create Worlds". That sums up what an RPG developer should strive for.
I agree here as well. The problem with this is that most developers these days merely recycle things about settings. Not too many developers
create worlds anymore. They
license them, or make a world that's nearly the same as another license. It's basically,
Hey, D&D sells, let's make a world just like it. rather than actually trying to make something more fleshed out and less mainstream.
There are many other things that are important to an RPG, certainly this hasn't attempted to be a comprehensive list. I've tried to summarize what I think are important for an RPG regardless of platform or sub-genre. You should be able to see the Hand of Gosh Darn Good Design in many different types of games, from 3rd edition Dungeons & Dragons, to the classic RPGs of the day to the most recent critically acclaimed computer RPGs. From classic high fantasy to the farthest reaches of science fiction, there are always going to be key values that should be incorporated into an RPG.
Ahh.. I wish there was still such a range. :D
