Editorial Don't Ask Questions Until the Player Can Answer

[VentilatorOfDoom]

Tags: Avernum: Escape from the Pit; Jeff Vogel; Spiderweb Software

<p>As Jeff Vogel gets older and wiser he also gains new insights into gamedesign. <a href="http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2011/08/dont-ask-questions-until-player-can.html" target="_blank">In this blogpost</a> of his he explains how to make a character system more welcoming while at the same time maintaining - and even improving - the customization-options.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>You start out with a ton of skill points, so that you can majorly customize your character from the beginning. You can use skill points to increase base attributes or regular skills, but the base attributes are expensive. However, it could break the system if a player put a huge amount of skill points in certain skills. To limit this, I made increasing a skill cost more skill points the higher you trained it. At high levels, you might have to save up for two or three levels to get enough skill points to raise a major skill one point.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>Think about this. It's a system where the more you play and learn about the challenges facing you, the less you can do to customize your characters. You have to make most of the big changes at low level, when skills are cheap. Worse, it was necessary to increase the base attributes to survive (especially Endurance, which increases health), but they were so expensive that doing so required careful planning. As a result of this mess, many players had problems with getting halfway through the game and finding that they were not strong enough to proceed. These players got angry at me, and justifiably so.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>Spotted at: <a href="http://www.rpgwatch.com/#17817">RPGWatch</a></p>

 

[hanssolo]

 

[Norfleet]

I have to say I sort of agree with this, and nowhere is this more true than online games. With single player games, this is mostly a nonfactor: You screw up, you start over. But with online games, the option of starting over may not really be feasible: Either you can't delete yourself and start over, or doing so carries some significant cost (may be illegal, involve loss of your username, etc). And if I'm asked to make any kind of decision without the full information on doing so too early in the game, or even before the game STARTS, so I haven't even decided I really WANT to play? Yeah, I'm backing away. Just not worth it. Not gonna make what may very well be a major permanent and irreversible decision before I have any information to base it on.

 

[Pope Amole]

This is a bullshit on so many levels that I don't even know where to start.

First, the "you make more decision in the early game than in the late game" is bullshit - decisions are equalized by the fact that in the beginning you have zero equipment and quest-based buffs and in the late game you have ton of equipment and some quest-based buffs, so you make your decisions through them. Of course, IF the shit is designed RIGHT and you have some choice of equipment, Avadon, wink-wink.

Second, if you think that your auditory consists of lobotomized retards, respecs help. Well, they are there in Avadon so it seems like I moot point, but it's the other way around - if they have worked with Avadon system, why wouldn't they work with oldschool Avernum system?

Third, traits were very, very obvious in their descriptions and their effect could confound only a profound dumbfuck.

Fourth, this "each attribute goes up by one in turns so player won't neglect them" is totally needless and waste of your points since, in the magical RPG wonderland 2011, pumping one attribute for your character is enough. Really, in Avadon, you just overtrain STR, DEX or IN, depending on the type of your character's attack, and you're done with it. Because other attack attributes are useless for you and END raises your health by whopping 5 points (and doesn't depend on your level, just a static bonus) when your average attack beats somewhere around 50 pts of crap out of you. Ri-i-ight.

Fifth, spending 2 skillpoints per level may sound nice, but its effect on your character is usually meager, you rarely feel instant power-up and, thanks to the skilltrees interlocking, there's really little variation here in Avadon or, rather, none at all. And you can already see this crap in his new Jjewernum screens - oh, so you want to have this special attack for your sword? Sorry, train your polearm skills a bit! Or you want to take your grand skill on the archery path? Sorry, train in the polearms and swords first! Some fucking choice here, yeah.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

I guess he haven't heard about game manuals.

 

[Johannes]

I kinda agree with the principle, but not sure how good his execution of it will be. Just don't make it so that the characters are too plain at the beginning to do anything but mash simple attacks and firebolts at the enemies.

Though I really can't imagine how someone makes a build so stupid that a Vogel game becomes unbeatable, on normal difficulty.

Third, traits were very, very obvious in their descriptions and their effect could confound only a profound dumbfuck.

While you can easily tell roughly what they're supposed to do, you have no way to quantify the traits effectiveness at all when you pick them.

 

[Pope Amole]

While you can easily tell roughly what they're supposed to do, you have no way to quantify the traits effectiveness at all when you pick them.

So? By the same reason, when you pick your character's class in the beginning (either from pre-gens or by just pumping the corresponding skills and thinking "oh, this one will be a mage" and stuff), you too don't have a slightest idea about its power and effectiveness, so? You propose to skip classes altogether for a truly next-gen experience?

 

[baronjohn]

Well personally I think rpgs should be finishable with a character that ignores leveling and stays at level 1 and upgrading your character to a higher level should be something left to the hardcore gamers.

Luckily a lot of publishers (like Bethesda) agree with me.

 

[Secretninja]

 

[felipepepe]

But then, when you gain a level, a base attribute goes up by one point. It's different each level, so every four levels each attribute has gone up by one. In addition, each level you can choose one attribute to increase by one. This allows a lot of character customization while making sure all skills go up gradually so that you won't be hamstrung by completely neglecting an attribute.

So, I'm getting 2 points per level, but you're taking one away from me to make sure I don't fuck things up....that's insulting!

And of course that limit's my customization, but fuck that, he just used it to solve 2 issues:
1 - No more faggots rage-quitting because the game got hard from their shitty biuld.
2 - Absolutly no need for making some quests / dialogs play differently for each kind of player, since all characters will have pretty much the same stats through any playthrough.
Nice one Vogel, you now can now spend less time making the game, have new players endure it more and thus make more money. You also fucked it up for people that liked it the old way and removed any need for game replay, but clearly that isn't your focus anymore...

 

[sgc_meltdown]

Mr Vogel just addressed the age old problem of uneven stat skill usage/viability + metagame decision uncertainty and removed this barrier to entry entirely.

 

[Johannes]

While you can easily tell roughly what they're supposed to do, you have no way to quantify the traits effectiveness at all when you pick them.

So? By the same reason, when you pick your character's class in the beginning (either from pre-gens or by just pumping the corresponding skills and thinking "oh, this one will be a mage" and stuff), you too don't have a slightest idea about its power and effectiveness, so? You propose to skip classes altogether for a truly next-gen experience?

Well it's almost like that thing Vogel was talking about.

Difference between (in Avernums/Exiles) picking skills in the beginning and picking traits is that you can get more skill points as you play (and unless you go all out retarded with your picks having the starting points a bit suboptimally laid out isn't a big deal), but traits are a 1-time uneducated decision that has a big impact on how hard the game is gonna be for you. Sure if they were better balanced and better documented, it wouldn't be as big of an issue.


Also - character creation should never be the main challenge in a game. Because that's a fucking easy thing to get right anyway...

 

[lisac2k]

Also - character creation should never be the main challenge in a game. Because that's a fucking easy thing to get right anyway...

Pretty much true. Usually, it's enough to stick to combat skills and you're on the right track.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Isn't this the system used in Fallout?

 

[Kawaii Theurgist]

Gothic and Risen did it, and there's nothing wrong with Gothic and Risen outside of being forced to play as some boring guy without the slightest hint of character or sexyness or charm. What's the point of giving you a lot of choices if you don't know their exact workings and relative usefulness? And about puting such information into the manual or the character creation interface there are still two problems: First, why should the player waste her time reading your fucking manual before even knowing if she likes the game and is interested in understanding it more? Second, while both the manual and the tooltips can give you a lot of mechanical information they can't give you actual information about the way the game's designed: Are you picking a spell that sounds really useful in theory but in practice it will have little use for it, and what little use you find for it would easily be taken care of by items in the gameworld? Are you focusing in a weapon group you will not find powerful examples of until very late into the game, or that because the way the game's designed will be less useful than others, while the descriptions make it sound like they all have their place and function? Are you wasting your points on diplomatic skills that will get little use outside of some particular events, or which will allow you to get nothing you would not possibly get by using pew pew skills?

Most people I know just store their skill points in their character sheet until much later, if the game allows for it, and then they spend it right before the situation they believe it will be useful in instead of actually developing their characters naturally, so you have people doing Deus Ex runs and System Shock 2 runs and Arcanum runs and The Legacy runs, and even ARPG runs, with the bare minimum investment in skillpoints they feel they can get away with so later they have a pool if they need to learn something to advance the game or ease a hard scene. Who wants to waste their time in a game they will be getting a lesser experience with because they have to actually make definite choices before you even know how the game plays and what do you find fun in it?

Sure, it works diferently in P&P but then the gamemaster is suposed to actually prepare the campaign to fit her players' characters and even then many systems actually recomend running short preludes to give new players a feel of their characters, the gameworld, and the gamemaster's style and then allowing them to change their sheets as they see fit.

 

[SuicideBunny]

You propose to skip classes altogether for a truly next-gen experience?

classes are a retarded cliche of the genre that should be fucking burned at a stake, same as levels, generic hp and mana points.

Second, while both the manual and the tooltips can give you a lot of mechanical information they can't give you actual information about the way the game's designed: Are you picking a spell that sounds really useful in theory but in practice it will have little use for it, and what little use you find for it would easily be taken care of by items in the gameworld? Are you focusing in a weapon group you will not find powerful examples of until very late into the game, or that because the way the game's designed will be less useful than others, while the descriptions make it sound like they all have their place and function? Are you wasting your points on diplomatic skills that will get little use outside of some particular events, or which will allow you to get nothing you would not possibly get by using pew pew skills?

the thing is, those aren't problems of character creation and progression, all of those are the direct result of botched balance due to bad design or implementation, and changing creation and progression to force the player to navigate around your bad design rather than working at improving said design and its implementation just makes you a lazy and bad developer.

 

[Kraszu]

I agree making choices after you had played the game a little, and you gather information from the actual gameworld is much better then having only descriptions. There is also no reason why guild based skill/abilities can't be more advanced then they were in PB games, or any other game. It also offers much better pacing to the game.

 

[coaster]

You can still fuck up your character in Gothic (NOTR at least). Its fairly easy to try to multiclass & fail (eg by leaving you with too few mana points). Characters can always be fucked up by bad choices, whether at the start or during the game; I guess it just depends how much idiot proofing you feel you have to do.

 

[eugene2k]

I guess he haven't heard about game manuals.

Nobody wants to read those unfortunately. So the way developers do it now is by including introductory tutorials in the game.

 

[mondblut]

Vogel wants to sell games to inbred retards who cannot into formulae, and making manual a mandatory reading ruins the sales. Big news.

Oh, and respeccing is an horrible abomination. I'll take level scaling over it any day.

 

[DragoFireheart]

Video games: where winning is always the outcome and losing is an abomination.

 

[Kraszu]

You can still fuck up your character in Gothic (NOTR at least). Its fairly easy to try to multiclass & fail (eg by leaving you with too few mana points). Characters can always be fucked up by bad choices, whether at the start or during the game; I guess it just depends how much idiot proofing you feel you have to do.

And that is how it should be. I don't think that the game should prevent you for doing stupid things that can make the game harder for you, or maybe even impossible. I do partly agree with:

" The number of decisions you have to make to build your character should be proportional to the amount of time you've spent playing the game. The more you play, the more you should decide.


Or, to put it another way ...

Whenever you make a decision about your character at the very beginning of the game, you are answering a question that hasn't even been asked yet."

But I look at differently, when you are in the gameworld, and you gain the information about it, then that is the time when you should figure out on what is the best way to gain advantage in this word, or archive your goal. It doesn't mean that you shouldn't have to plan at all. Just gather enough info to decide how you want to play, and yes playing in the gameworld gives you better information then only reading the descriptions of the spells/skills.

"Finally, every other level, you can pick one trait from the long list. The number of available choices starts out small (to keep from confusing new players) and grows dramatically as you proceed. You will eventually have a lot of traits. Some of them give simple bonuses to your spells or attacks, while others (like Backstab or Swordmage) will affect how you actually play your character."

Does this mean that information about higher level traits will be hidden from you? Or does he expect people to not check the whole tree before putting points in there?

It also pisses me off when game developers suggest bigger difficulty for "hardcore" players, when it simply means that your enemies will have so much HP that the fights will drag forever. FFFUUUUU

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

How about the dev explaining what kind of a campaign it's going to be and what kind of characters are most useful?

 

[DragoFireheart]

How about the dev explaining what kind of a campaign it's going to be and what kind of characters are most useful?

BUT THEN I HAVE TO PAY ATTENTION/READ AND SCHOOLS MAKE ME DO THAT ALREADY! JUST GIVE ME THE GOLDEN TRAIL OF BREAD CRUMBS NOM NOM NOM

 

[Gragt]

Don't worry: school likely won't have you do that for much longer.