Game News J.E. Sawyer: Obsidian's Five Hard Lessons Of RPG Design

[Jaesun]

Tags: Obsidian Entertainment

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<p><em>In a <a href="http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/36637/GDC_Europe_Obsidians_Five_Hard_Lessons_Of_RPG_Design.php">talk at GDC Europe</a> J.E. Sawyer, project director for Obsidian Entertainment (Fallout New Vegas) discussed the "challenges that the RPG industry has faced in adapting from its pen and paper roots."&nbsp;</em></p>
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<blockquote>
<p><strong>Five Hard Lessons</strong></p>
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<p>Sawyer outlined five hard lessons that he's learned over the years:&nbsp;</p>
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<p><strong>Mechanical chaos is frustrating</strong>. RPGs often rely on random number generators, "in part because that is the only way to simulate things in a tabletop environment." However, he said, "In some cases, where you can reload, mechanical chaos is pointless." It also can be frustrating either way.&nbsp;</p>
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<p><strong>What you can perceive is the most important thing</strong>. Games "often focus on statistics, but we often can't perceive the effects in games." Small stat upgrades don't mean anything to players at all when they can't see the effect.</p>
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<p>Conversely, he said he's "implemented broken things in games but players don't notice it," because there's no external statistic reflection.&nbsp;</p>
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<p><strong>Strategic failures are the biggest disappointing failures for players</strong>. When building a character or a party, "you're making long-term decisions," said Sawyer, "but many RPGs effectively punish you for making bad choices."</p>
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<p><strong>The idea of player vs. character is a false dichotomy</strong>. Developers with a traditional tabletop background expect players to be roleplaying when they play games. However, he said, "it will be the player doing the action... ultimately games are about the players trying to accomplish a goal." There is a definite question of "how much are we asking the player, and how much are we asking the character."</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><strong>Good gameplay is better than whatever your ideas or whatever the player's expectations are</strong>. Simple and understandable: don't follow genre conventions simply because they exist. Beyond that, "attempting to execute something because you think it's a good idea or players insist it's a good idea doesn't always result in something good."</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Sawyer goes into more in-depth on each point <a href="http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/36637/GDC_Europe_Obsidians_Five_Hard_Lessons_Of_RPG_Design.php">here</a>.</p>
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<p><em>Thanks RPGCodsex Is The Best!</em></p>
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<p>Spotted at: <a href="http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/36637/GDC_Europe_Obsidians_Five_Hard_Lessons_Of_RPG_Design.php">Gamasutra</a></p>

 

[commie]

Strategic failures are the biggest disappointing failures for players. When building a character or a party, "you're making long-term decisions," said Sawyer, "but many RPGs effectively punish you for making bad choices."

While you don't want the game ending somewhere because you didn't have 'skill x' necessary to get past some trap, there should be a punishment for making clearly gimped and ridiculous characters. RPG's shouldn't be a puzzle, there should always be a way to get past the game with most decent and varied build; otherwise what's the point of character creation; but they should give alternate ways of defeating some beast or bypassing a trap if your character has a focus in different skills, and too few games give alternatives.

 

[ortucis]

..but they should give alternate ways of defeating some beast or bypassing a trap if your character has a focus in different skills, and too few games give alternatives.

*codexer playing a stealthy character bypasses all boss-fights and majorly patrolled enemy areas*


Next day a new thread appears on the Codex..


"THIS GAME IS GAY! FOR CONSOLEFAGS! No challenge, so easy. I can't believe I pirated it."



And this is why developers don't give players alternatives to crucial game moments. Cause most players are fucking stupid.

 

[Jaesun]

Unique alternatives to some crucial game moments based off of your build is the key.

 

[DarkUnderlord]

Mechanical chaos -- "randomization as a means to resolve a gameplay conflict" -- is "very frustrating to players," said Sawyer.

I agree with his point here. Nothing like having x-thousand% in a skill and still randomly failing. I do prefer min-limits (once you're lockpicking is passed x%, you can open all locks up to that skill), even if they feel artificial and some-what contrived.

Contemporary games which offer FPS-like interfaces still rely on randomized accuracy, which drives players nuts. His own company's Alpha Protocol is one example of this. "No actual human being likes this! You really struggle to get to the point of competence in the game," said Sawyer.

So maybe don't have an FPS-like interface? Though I guess this is why Bioware have moved on to making action games now.

Mind you a better solution is to subtly alter clearly visible mechanics. EG: Most FPS have some sort of an aiming reticle. Give players with poor skill a big-ass aiming reticle, then make that reticle tighten up as players advance and it makes it clear to players what's going on. By the time they max out their skill, they see a nice small dot - and it's all up to their own skill from there. If you just stick a crosshair there from the start though, then yes, they get pissed.

In Dungeon Siege III, Obsidian changed the game so that the AI-controlled companion characters do 25 percent damage and take 25 percent damage. It's an improvement over the characters in Fallout New Vegas because "they're still there and doing something, but you don't have to babysit them and the player still feels like they're doing something."

"Players did not react negatively to it," he said.

They were probably pre-occupied by the rest of the suckiness in DSIII.

I'm not sure what this has to do with his point though. He got here by talking about feedback to the player... And then he's talking about DSIII's NPCs which don't feedback to the player or...?

More relevantly, Icewind Dale and Temple of Elemental Evil required the player to create entire parties at the adventure's outset. "The games were tuned for D&D veterans. There are tons of ways you can make strategic errors. There are tons of ways you can make bad parties. What happens is 20 to 30 hours into the game, you can't go any further."

"Yes, the player made the error but we placed a high demand on them," Sawyer said.

That probably stems from old-school game design more than anything else. You remember those old arcade games? The ones where you'd fight through to level 100, only to face something you've never seen before and die horribly because you didn't know what tactic you needed to fight it - and there was no reload so you had to start again, put more money in and fight through the same 99 levels perfectly. Funny thing is, those games were fun and challenging. Today's games aren't so much.

"I don't see a compelling reason to not" let players re-spec characters that aren't suited to the gameplay design in an RPG, he also added.

Basically, Sawyer doesn't want to make RPG's anymore.

Never create gameplay mechanics simply because that's "just the way that RPGs are," he cautioned. "If we ignore the lessons that those games [in other genres] teach us then we're really limiting our audience's ability to have fun," he concluded.

Basically, Sawyer doesn't want to make RPG's any... Oh wait I said that.

The fact is, a lot of RPGs have poor implementation of their skills and choices. EG: Ever played a game involving magic where you can choose between Fire, Water, Air type skills? Diablo is classic for it. You could play the whole original game as a specialist Mage casting Fireball... Only to meet the Big Bad at the end and discover that... He has an immunity to fire! Restart though and go through again casting Holy Bolt and you take the mother-fucker down before he can even twitch. Now, notice how the Barbarian or Fighter character never have this problem? Notice how Big Bad's never have an immunity to sharp pointy sticks?

What happens is some smarty decides to put magic in. But then if you've got magic, stuff should be immune to it! Right? So they add a really awesome spell and then add a monster that's completely immune to the really awesome spell. They never add anything that's immune to "Much Bigger, Sharper Axe Mk. XXDCCI".

Now if the magic user had access to a book or something that gave him a heads up, it'd be cool. You could plan for it (as it is a legitimate issue) but often times, the monster is just a SURPRISE! And you're screwed - and you wish you'd just gone with the fighter class.

Traps is another classic. It gets implemented as a skill in RPGs which is cool... Until you never actually encounter any meaningful traps. Have you ever played an RPG where you encountered a trap where some designer didn't implement:
a) A way around the trap (so the Fighter who's immune from all nerfs can get through)
b) Make the trap do such piss-weak damage that you can just set it off and walk through it anyway (they never insta-kill you, which oddly enough you'd think a trap would be designed to do).

... both of which render the trap skill completely fucking useless.

Fallout is over-used but it does a lot of these things well. You don't get info from the computer in the Glow without High Int and Science (I'm pretty sure - or its repair or something). There are optional areas with more fun stuff in them but they can only be accessed by someone with lockpicking to get through the doors or repair to get a machine up and operational again. Fallout 2 has a brainbot NPC you can get depending on your skills. And of course you get the Speech ending option or the "blow up the base with a nuke" option depending on your skills.

Good designers make good games by figuring out fun and interesting ways to make skills useful, not by just removing the skill and making an action game.

 

[Jaesun]

Good designers make good games by figuring out fun and interesting ways to make skills useful, not by just removing the skill and making an action game.

If only devs would take this to heart.

 

[Shannow]

What DU said, only

Notice how Big Bad's never have an immunity to sharp pointy sticks?

Irenicus
I could expand on how to implement RPG skills in an FPS but I already did that for FO3. They didn't listen M) and it turned out shit.

Does anybody else notice that ortucis is slowly turning into a mixture of Drog, JC and skyway?

 

[Drakron]

My only real complains about New Vegas companions were they kinda killed everything before I could and someone should have really made then use anti-venom, if you are making a party system were the player does not have to babysitting them BUT also makes then so ineffective I end up having to do everything there is no fucking point and I recently played a game like that ... Mass Effect 2 were the only reason I taken then was because I was forced and maybe because they could draw some of the enemy fire from me, they were UTTERLY USELESS beyond that.

 

[almondblight]

Fallout is over-used but it does a lot of these things well. You don't get info from the computer in the Glow without High Int and Science (I'm pretty sure - or its repair or something). There are optional areas with more fun stuff in them but they can only be accessed by someone with lockpicking to get through the doors or repair to get a machine up and operational again. Fallout 2 has a brainbot NPC you can get depending on your skills. And of course you get the Speech ending option or the "blow up the base with a nuke" option depending on your skills....Good designers make good games by figuring out fun and interesting ways to make skills useful, not by just removing the skill and making an action game.

Eh...Fallout? I remember at least half of the skills being useless (barter, gambling, outdoorsmanship, etc...). I remember higher-level repair being useful only twice, once for the Glow and once for the Power Armor (maybe there was another time), and in those situations the stuff you got is mostly useless (save that disk about how the mutants are infertile) if you don't have weapon skills (IE, what good is power armor or weapons to a non-combat character?). Even then, I usually just leveled it up using the books that were giving to me and the ones you could buy - I don't remember raising it past 100 being useful at all.

I only remember science being useful for finding out about the mutant infertility. Lockpicking and Repair (for the energy fields) could be done over and over again until you got the desired results.

Tagging one or two combat skills and speech were the way to go, since you would use them all the time in Fallout. I guess stealth could be useful if you wanted to play that way. The other skills, a couple have a few places in the game where they are somewhat useful (but the game gives you ways to raise them if they're too low), and the rest are just useless. Hell, this was a game with both a Doctor skill and a First Aid skill, with both of them being useless.

 

[bhlaab]

That probably stems from old-school game design more than anything else. You remember those old arcade games? The ones where you'd fight through to level 100, only to face something you've never seen before and die horribly because you didn't know what tactic you needed to fight it - and there was no reload so you had to start again, put more money in and fight through the same 99 levels perfectly. Funny thing is, those games were fun and challenging. Today's games aren't so much.

Yeah, I remember those games being bullshit and unfair and designed to steal childrens money.

 

[bhlaab]

some clarifications on his forumspring

Your forward thinking philosophy toward game design seems to be in direct opposition to the diehard fallout 1 and 2 fans who still think isometric is the way to go. Is there any merit to their vigil or are they just nostalgia zealots?

During my talk at GDC Europe, I said that I actually think that top down/iso turn-based or real-time with pause games are MORE viable now due to the rise of mobile and free-to-play games. Randomization as part of combat resolution from that perspective is often totally fine because there is SO MUCH randomization that any individual result is often loss in the overall pool of checks. However, after the talk I elaborated on what I meant with one of the people in the audience -- because there are some aspects to combat that still encourage the sort of save scumming you find with dialogue or lockpicking checks.

Take something like the classic spell Disintegrate from A/D&D. In older editions, this was a total win/loss spell. If the target failed the save, it died, flat out. People effectively used this as an effective degenerate tactic against many difficult enemies in Infinity Engine games. The first spell cast would be Disintegrate. If the target made its save, the player would just reload and try again.

With Disintegrate reworked as a spell that does a large amount of damage on a failed save and a decent amount of damage on a successful save, it's no longer an all-or-nothing spell that encourages save scumming. The effects are still variable, the results of the save still matter, but it's one check that's normalized with many others during combat. The more the randomized checks of combat are normalized, the more the player's specific character strategies and tactics matter.

As an aside, I've been playing the 1992 RPG Darklands for most of my trip. I still love the game, and while aspects of the combat are random, they are much LESS random than the extreme examples of old editions of AD&D. The worst aspects of the game are the ones where there are severe consequences (often through random encounters) that come down to purely random checks. It's a double whammy of (randomly) getting a horrible encounter, attempting to escape, and (randomly) failing due to one check.

You say IWD required creating entire parties but it didn't. There were preset parties/characters available. Why not present the presets as the "standard" way to play and keep character generation as a "hardcore" option instead of just cutting it entirely?

I said that we typically asked the player to make entire parties, which we did. They didn't have to, but they often did -- in part because the prospect of making you own party is a lot more appealing than using a pre-made set.

I don't think you have to cut the option of making parties at all! But if a game asks the player to make a party, the system design should not be such that new players have to be extremely prescient and forward-thinking to avoid making a terrible group of characters. For example, in 1st Edition AD&D, demihumans often had level limits. If you missed this fact, you could make a totally viable character -- right up until you hit the leveling wall. Once that happens, you're essentially stuck.

Very few non-MMO RPGs allow character respec, but I think character respec is another good way to address balance range issues in games with a huge amount of character variety. You thought it was a good idea to make a party of Genasi Bards called Earth, Wind, and Fire. It was not a good idea, so if you accept a small cost, you can rebuild some -- or all -- aspects of your characters.

But can't respecs be abused in the same 'degenerate' way as quicksaves? And do they run counter to the idea of choices & consequences?

No, because respecs involve strategic decisions with long-term consequences. And if there's a cost to respec, there's still a consequence to building poorly. I think the consequence of "you cannot continue to play this game" is absurd, but not entirely uncommon in RPGs.

 

[Zomg]

Lesson 6: put hats in the game that make you better at science. When you need to do science you go into your inventory and put on the science hat

 

[Xor]

*snip*

For all of its faults, that's something Fallout 2 did better; there are far more opportunities to use your skills. Only a handful of skills (first aid and thrown off the top of my head) were useless, and I think there's an easter egg in the Enclave that checks first aid.

 

[DarkUnderlord]

Eh...Fallout? I remember at least half of the skills being useless (barter, gambling, outdoorsmanship, etc...).

Gambling was the free money skill. It allowed you to buy pretty much all the decent weapons a lot earlier than you otherwise would be able to, which made things easier. Also useful if you're going Big Guns and need lots of ammo. Otherwise you had to face all those random encounters, kill everything and go through the kill / loot / sell process. Barter was semi-useful along the same lines but less so. Outdoorsman allows you to avoid random encounters which is fairly useful if you're a non-combat character. So sure, if you're running through and shooting everything than they're useless but that's the point. If you're NOT running through shooting everything, they become useful. It's that whole "role-playing" thing.

I remember higher-level repair being useful only twice, once for the Glow and once for the Power Armor (maybe there was another time), and in those situations the stuff you got is mostly useless (save that disk about how the mutants are infertile)

Yes, mostly useless save for a way to complete the game without combat and get the most powerful armour in the game that makes you virtually immune to everything.

Yes, mostly useless. That's like saying your Plasma Rifle and Energy Weapons skill is mostly useless because you really only need to pull it out for those few times you face the really tough enemies - every other time you just make do with the Sniper Rifle.

if you don't have weapon skills (IE, what good is power armor or weapons to a non-combat character?).

It's pretty good for being able to take the hits as a non-combat character (who would have low strength and endurance and thus less HP). And if you are a combat character and you really want that awesome armour, you had to no choice but to get repair.

Even then, I usually just leveled it up using the books that were giving to me and the ones you could buy - I don't remember raising it past 100 being useful at all.

It's true that books ruined most of the skills. There's not much point leveling up things that can be leveled up to a satisfactory level by other in-game methods. That goes back to developers adding in really awesome stuff and then having the brain fart "but what if that stupid player who's running through as the fighter doesn't have the really awesome skill needed to get the really awesome stuff? I know, I know!! I'll add another way for the fighter to do everything!" which is bad game design (for an RPG). This is the same problem Doctor and First Aid have - why get them when there are more convenient ways to heal?

I only remember science being useful for finding out about the mutant infertility. Lockpicking and Repair (for the energy fields) could be done over and over again until you got the desired results.

That goes back to Sawyer's point about save / reload and arbitrary random numbers.

Tagging one or two combat skills and speech were the way to go, since you would use them all the time in Fallout. I guess stealth could be useful if you wanted to play that way. The other skills, a couple have a few places in the game where they are somewhat useful (but the game gives you ways to raise them if they're too low), and the rest are just useless. Hell, this was a game with both a Doctor skill and a First Aid skill, with both of them being useless.

So the combat skills were useful (excepting throwing). That's 5 / 6.

Sneak is good "if you want to play that way" which given this is an RPG, again, is the whole point. Outdoorsman, Lockpicking and Stealing all fall into the same box. 9 / 10

Science gives us a way to end the game with a lower speech skill and opens up an entire storyline. Repair gives you the best Armour in the game which is useful whether you're combat or non-combat. 11 / 12

Speech you accept is necessary. Unless of course you go low INT because you want to play that way. 12 / 13

Gambling I'd argue is semi-useful again "if you want to play that way" as it is a nice money skill for non-combat characters. 13 / 14

That leaves First Aid and Doctor, both of which I accept are completely useless (there are so many Stimpaks in Fallout it's not like health-care is an actual issue). Again this is a case of "adding in something to make it easy for the fighter". The best way around that would be to remove Stimpaks but then that would mean re-balancing the entire combat system. 13 / 16.

Traps is completely pointless and Barter is really only marginally useful - but gambling is the better money skill anyway. 13 / 18

So out of 18 skills, 13 of them have a significant use at some point in the game. Enough that you certainly want to consider grabbing them, depending on how you intend to play. That compares with what, games where the skills let you cast Fire spells vs Water spells? And I agree with the point about books.

Again though, the response to useless skills is not to remove them from the game (necessarily - I mean there is a point where adding in stupid skills does get dumb. Such as I do believe First Aid and Doctor should've been combined into the single "Doctor"). The solution is to design the game so that they're useful. Make traps deadly, insta-kill devices and players will either get traps or avoid those areas that are trapped (which in a well designed game, will mean missing out on crucial story clues or useful equipment). Put that super-cool car into your post-apocalyptic environment for sure, but set it up so that only a repairman can get it and all of a sudden there's a damn good reason for that skill. Make hacking the supercomputer and launching the nuclear missile reliant on the science skill and suddenly, weak science characters can wreak havoc in their own unique way.

The whole point of a role-playing game is to setup opportunities so that players who are playing in a certain role, get to have some fun with the role they've chosen.

But can't respecs be abused in the same 'degenerate' way as quicksaves? And do they run counter to the idea of choices & consequences?

No, because respecs involve strategic decisions with long-term consequences. And if there's a cost to respec, there's still a consequence to building poorly. I think the consequence of "you cannot continue to play this game" is absurd, but not entirely uncommon in RPGs.

If you can design respec to have choices and consequences, you can sure as hell design a decent fucking game that doesn't rely on respec. Respec is the designer saying "I failed to give you the adequate information you needed through the story so that you could make appropriate decisions. Here, have a respec!".

 

[waywardOne]

You thought it was a good idea to make a party of Genasi Bards

If this, then you're a moron and should face the appropriate consequences.

There's no "lesson" here other than Sawyer is also a fucking moron.

 

[GarfunkeL]

Lockpicking and Repair (for the energy fields) could be done over and over again until you got the desired results

Why do you lie? Failing lock picking had a chance of ruining the lock forever, you couldn't try forever, not to mention that with low repair you would have to try thousands of times to fix the energy fields - and there were a bunch of them. Only a super-aspie would have the patience to do something like that. So no, they aren't marginal/useless skills.

 

[Zarniwoop]

Agree with Shannow, only it's not just Irenicus. A few bosses in BG2 were completely immune to damn near everything except one or two particular spells, and if none of your spellcasters had it (or you didn't know which spell disables which force field), you were dead. Fighters in that game didn't have it so easy.

In Arcanum, it's the mage that has no problem with combat, just Disintegrate fucking everything. Everything. Any enemy or obstacle. Who needs lockpick skills? Disintegrate that shit. The only thing in the game you couldn't disintegrate was Kerghan iirc, but then you could go back to the good old Harm. Combine it with Teleportation and you were an unstoppable killing machine that can basically skip random encounters.

 

[Azrael the cat]

Traps is another classic. It gets implemented as a skill in RPGs which is cool... Until you never actually encounter any meaningful traps. Have you ever played an RPG where you encountered a trap where some designer didn't implement:
a) A way around the trap (so the Fighter who's immune from all nerfs can get through)
b) Make the trap do such piss-weak damage that you can just set it off and walk through it anyway (they never insta-kill you, which oddly enough you'd think a trap would be designed to do).

... both of which render the trap skill completely fucking useless.

Credit where credit is due, this is one area where the Baldurs Gate games are pretty solid. Not everything is trapped to hell, but both have sections with harsh hp-reduction from inescapable traps (inescapable without magic or thievery to detect and disarm), and in a couple of spots per game, instakill traps.

Traps+locks is treated as a 'job to be filled', even if you only need one character to take a handful of levels in rogue to do it well. If you haven't filled that job, you might get through with a lot of effort (not sure, as the punishment for not having a trap-detector is harsh enough that I've never tried to go through the full set of games without), but you're certainly going to be feeling like you've got a gimped party.

 

[Azrael the cat]

That probably stems from old-school game design more than anything else. You remember those old arcade games? The ones where you'd fight through to level 100, only to face something you've never seen before and die horribly because you didn't know what tactic you needed to fight it - and there was no reload so you had to start again, put more money in and fight through the same 99 levels perfectly. Funny thing is, those games were fun and challenging. Today's games aren't so much.

Yeah, I remember those games being bullshit and unfair and designed to steal childrens money.

Kind of true, but that kind of game design wasn't hated at the time. What really drove the kids out of the arcades and onto the home consoles was (a) the growing cost of playing the games (during the time I was in primary school, I remember seeing arcade games go from being 20 cents per credit to $1 per credit, with $2/credit for the ultra-cool-expansive-tech games like the fully-enclosed rotates-360-for-realz cockpit version of Afterburner. On top of which, early games would always give you a decent amount of gameplay for that first credit - and a skilled player could complete the game on one credit (well, not in my 5 year old self days, when they had pacman and donkey kong with endless repeated levels, but later with double-dragon and ghosts-n-goblins etc.

I remember being profoundly pissed off as games started popping up where you'd put in one credit only to get a timer that wasn't so much a logistical requirement, insomuch as a guarantee that you'd have to invest 10 credits to get anywhere. The timer would only ever catch you in double-dragon as a punishment for dawdling, and in Gauntlet it operated as a challenge, but never as a credit-stealer. By double-dragon 2 and time-cop the timer would be designed so that even good playthroughs would hit it and require more credits at regular intervals.

 

[J_C]

Does anybody else notice that ortucis is slowly turning into a mixture of Drog, JC and skyway?

People are starting to compare others to me? I'm on my way to become a well known Codexian celebrity.

 

[Icewater]

Skills in Fallout weren't useless, they were just gimmicky because of their extremely limited range of uses.

When you take a skill called "Repair" in a post-apocalyptic world with broken shit everywhere you expect it to be a constantly useful skill. Instead, you only need it once or twice.

And, by the way, you can get power armor without the repair skill, so strike that off the list.

 

[Azrael the cat]

Which one of you fuckers is Bart Stewart? And Robert Boyd? They sound like Codexians, except WAAAYYYY too reasonable, with a much greater ratio of sound argument to personal abuse.

 

[thesisko]

Sawyer's out of touch. What's the point of learning lessons from complex RPG's when everyone is making games with no character generation, no stats and combat that plays itself?

 

[Stinger]

Lockpicking and Repair (for the energy fields) could be done over and over again until you got the desired results

Why do you lie? Failing lock picking had a chance of ruining the lock forever, you couldn't try forever, not to mention that with low repair you would have to try thousands of times to fix the energy fields - and there were a bunch of them. Only a super-aspie would have the patience to do something like that. So no, they aren't marginal/useless skills.

Except that then you can just save scum to avoid that issue and people clearly were constantly doing this as some codexers have mentioned in the OEI thread in General RPG discussion.

And this is exactly the kind of "degenerate" playstyle that Sawyer is talking about. A lot of binary dicerolls are going to be undermined by the presence of saving and reloading.

Either work them out of the system (replacing them with something better mind you, none of that streamlining bs) or enhance them with more results to the dicerolls (I think Alex had a great example of this in the Obsidian thread) or whatever other way to enhance them in a way that makes save scumming a bit more of a moot point.

This could be, say, clear thresholds as opposed to percentage ratings...e.g. Fallout NV's dialogue thresholds over F3's stupid dialogue percentage success meters thing (I'd just also get rid of the actual threshold levels to stop handholding the player so much).

 

[VentilatorOfDoom]

Mechanical chaos is frustrating. RPGs often rely on random number generators, "in part because that is the only way to simulate things in a tabletop environment." However, he said, "In some cases, where you can reload, mechanical chaos is pointless." It also can be frustrating either way.

I see. Gamers are frustrated when the game nefariously "decides" that they fail an action due to a bad roll. However, random rolls don't only come with the chance to fail, they also give you a chance to succeed against really bad odds. It's like success and failure are 2 sides of the same coin.

As for skill checks in dialogues or elsewhere, nothing stops you from checking against the skill, without any random roll involved. However, that also means no chance to get lucky with a roll. If you want to discourage reloading to prevent "degenerate gameplay behaviour", I'm sure there's a way to do that without removing the dynamic aspect that random dice rolls represent. If everything is just 100% predictable (e.g. 36 damage per second a la DA2) the game will be just boring. Plus, a lot of the appeal of DnD games comes from the many ways to shift the dice rolls in your favor, by means of feats, spells , equipment etc.

What you can perceive is the most important thing. Games "often focus on statistics, but we often can't perceive the effects in games." Small stat upgrades don't mean anything to players at all when they can't see the effect.

Conversely, he said he's "implemented broken things in games but players don't notice it," because there's no external statistic reflection.

In Dungeon Siege III, Obsidian changed the game so that the AI-controlled companion characters do 25 percent damage and take 25 percent damage. It's an improvement over the characters in Fallout New Vegas because "they're still there and doing something, but you don't have to babysit them and the player still feels like they're doing something."

I take it, it's not that important what actually happens, since everything is obscured for the player nowadays anyways, but what the player perceives what might be happening. In other words, it's OK to have followers which are nigh useless offensively, nigh immortal defensively so that you don't have to "babysit" them which wouldn't be very welcoming, but that's cool because it looks as if they're doing something productive. Great. It's good to see Josh finally learned this very important lesson.

Strategic failures are the biggest disappointing failures for players. When building a character or a party, "you're making long-term decisions," said Sawyer, "but many RPGs effectively punish you for making bad choices."

More relevantly, Icewind Dale and Temple of Elemental Evil required the player to create entire parties at the adventure's outset. "The games were tuned for D&D veterans. There are tons of ways you can make strategic errors. There are tons of ways you can make bad parties. What happens is 20 to 30 hours into the game, you can't go any further."

Well, in recent RPGs an aweful lot of the gameplay mechanics, feedback and general info necessary to make informed decisions are hidden from the player. The prized "immersion". Does that help much with making proper decisions? The fix to this glaring issue seems to be to either allow respecs or making the game so easy and the character system so simple that it really doesn't matter at all what character building decisions you make.

Of course there's another way: just give the player the info he needs to make sound decisions. Besides, what kind of fucked up parties would one have to come up with to not be able to finish IWD or ToEE?

The idea of player vs. character is a false dichotomy. Developers with a traditional tabletop background expect players to be roleplaying when they play games. However, he said, "it will be the player doing the action... ultimately games are about the players trying to accomplish a goal." There is a definite question of "how much are we asking the player, and how much are we asking the character."

"In every game you are expected as a player to use the resources available to you. A player very consciously makes decisions on how to build their character, so really it's about what do you ask the player to do over the course of a game," he said. "You have to be cognizant of what you're demanding of people."

Some games expect the player to manage too many options at once, and often developers argue that this is "dumbing down" the game to reduce them. However, he said, "This isn't about whether an RPG gamer can play twitch gameplay, it's about if a player is asked to manage a lot of stuff you shouldn't ask them to."

"Mental awareness and their ability to engage what's in the game," is something developers need to better pay attention to, said Sawyer.

Is that true? So, what games or those? Which games are demanding the player to manage too many options at once? Must be hard for the players.

Good gameplay is better than whatever your ideas or whatever the player's expectations are. Simple and understandable: don't follow genre conventions simply because they exist. Beyond that, "attempting to execute something because you think it's a good idea or players insist it's a good idea doesn't always result in something good."

Good gameplay is better than bad gameplay. 'k.