Editorial Evolution of Skill-based Character Creation Systems @ Sinister Design

[Crooked Bee]

Tags: Fallout; GURPS; Sinister Design; Wasteland 2

Sinister Design's Craig Stern, the developer behind Telepath RPG: Servants of God and the upcoming Telepath Tactics, has put up a rather lengthy and informative article on the evolution of skill-based character creation systems in CRPGs. There is a lot there on GURPS, the general problems skill-based systems might have, and different ways to solve those problems. Here's a snippet:

RPGs continued to diverge from war games as the genre developed, and so too did their character creation systems. With increased focus on unique, individual characters came an increased focus on the abilities and limitations of each individual character. At their peak, these considerations would come to supplant the notion of character class entirely. Published in 1986, Steve Jackson’s GURPS represented a coming of age for skill-based RPG systems. GURPS characters have no classes at all–rather, they have four primary attributes and a huge variety of skills that can be leveled independently of one another.

In a way, this represented the zenith of the individual-focused approach to character creation. All vestiges of the old system were gone: in the skill-based paradigm, characters became unique, fully realized individuals rather than mere instances of a uniform military unit to be used in battle simulations. This approach became quite popular among pen-and-paper role-players, not just with GURPS, but later with White Wolf RPGs such as Mage: The Ascension and Vampire: The Masquerade.

Compared to pen-and-paper games, skill-based systems in cRPGs have been comparatively rare in cRPGs; and not for no reason, as we will see below.

[...] The point is, cRPGs aren’t pen-and-paper role-playing games. There’s no Dungeon Master to appeal to with creative uses for your characters’ various skills. Every last skill check that applies to a non-emergent game system has to be incorporated into the game in advance. The average player’s skills are useful in direct proportion to the number of times the game checks for them. Skills which are rarely used may serve a role-playing purpose, but they can also completely undercut a player’s enjoyment of the game by making survival and progression extremely difficult based on front-loaded choices the player is forced to make blindly.

[...] So here is my humble suggestion to developers who want to create a game with skill-based character creation: don’t force players into making a choice between skills of high value and skills of more dubious benefit. Instead, create two tiers of skills: survival skills and elective skills.

The survival skills tier should contain only those skills so consistently useful that at least one of them is probably necessary to complete the game in a reasonable playthrough (i.e. completing most main quests, and not exploiting special knowledge of where things are hidden in the game world). These will necessarily include skills that play into the game’s core emergent systems (e.g. combat; stealth; and physical manipulation abilities suited to the setting, which might include pick-pocketing or hacking). Ideally, persuasion should feature as well, assuming that the developers take sufficient care to make the game both challenging and beatable primarily through the use of dialog options.

The elective skills tier, by contrast, should consist of what I choose to call “flavor skills”–those which are useful only in specialized, uncommon scenarios (e.g. Science from Fallout 1-2 or the infamous Toaster Repair skill from Wasteland), or which provide benefits that do not directly impact the player’s ability to gain survive most in-game challenges (e.g. Outdoorsman from Fallout 1-2 or Cartography from Eschalon 1-2).

The player should get two pools of points to spend: one pool of points that may only be spent on survival tier skills, and a second pool of points that may be spent on either survival tier or elective tier skills. This ensures that the player cannot create a character incapable of surviving a normal playthrough while still giving the player the flexibility to pursue unique avenues of play and opportunities for role-playing.​

If that has caught your interest, click here for the full article.

 

[Adelphi]

Basically, this is what Tim Cain talked about in one of the Project Eternity kickstarter updates? A few years ago, I would have despised this dumbed down aproach of the problem, but now that time has become a scarce ressource for me, that's a compromise I'll gladly accept.

 

[TheNizzo]

how telepathetic

 

[Pope Amole II]

Why do the brainfarts of this guy get into proud codexian news? I'm not even trolling here - why? Anyone who has ever played the games this dude designs knows that his design skills are somewhere on the level of highly reviled RPGmaker community, so why the hell should we care? I'm sure there are tons of amateur designers somewhere out there across the webs who are absolutely sure that they can design the perfect RPG, but that doesn't mean that their shitposts have to be dragged here.

 

[MicoSelva]

This isn't exactly what Tim Cain was talking about, as he only mentioned separating combat and non-combat skills (as has already been done in Amalur, for example) with different point pools for each, but it is in the same vein.

Personally I prefer to have the choice to fuck up my character and work from there, but I don't care enough to rage for either of the approaches. if I get separate pool points, I will use separate pool points. Whatever.

 

[Excidium]

Why do the brainfarts of this guy get into proud codexian news? I'm not even trolling here - why? Anyone who has ever played the games this dude designs knows that his design skills are somewhere on the level of highly reviled RPGmaker community, so why the hell should we care? I'm sure there are tons of amateur designers somewhere out there across the webs who are absolutely sure that they can design the perfect RPG, but that doesn't mean that their shitposts have to be dragged here.

RPG Watch and Game Banshee must be having a slow news day so we get random blog posts instead

 

[CappenVarra]

All of these factors converge to cause significant problems for an unwary player. Providing skills that are less often useful can have nasty effects on an RPG playthrough, including: (1) consuming skill points that could have gone toward other, more helpful skills; (2) offering fewer opportunities to gain experience points and improve the character (which, in turn, further cripples the player’s ability to put points into more useful skills); and (3) failing to actively help the player character survive the most common situations in the game, leading to frequent player deaths.

Also known as the player gaining XP points i.e. learning to play the game? If your character sucks, create another using the information you gained through failure to make a better one? (But but I want to play a Fallout 2 character with only Science and Outdoorsman) Learning how the game works i.e. how to succeed at it is commonly known as "playing the game", and if you remove the feedback mechanism of failure, you've effectively removed the game from the game? If you can't fail but every random character any player can come up with can "win", it isn't a game but a toy? Why do I even bother with this dumbfuckery?

 

[Allanon]

Also known as the player gaining XP points i.e. learning to play the game? If your character sucks, create another using the information you gained through failure to make a better one? (But but I want to play a Fallout 2 character with only Science and Outdoorsman) Learning how the game works i.e. how to succeed at it is commonly known as "playing the game", and if you remove the feedback mechanism of failure, you've effectively removed the game from the game? If you can't fail but every random character any player can come up with can "win", it isn't a game but a toy? Why do I even bother with this dumbfuckery?

How is trying to play a character with certain skill set and failing because the developers didn't cater for that skill set is "playing the game"? Realizing half way through that you have useless skills is not "feedback mechanism of failure" but a misjudgement on the developers part. The player didn't fail - he tried to role play a certain character he created in the game with the skills the developers provided. The failure is on the game that it didn't allow the usage of said skills.

 

[Niektory]

Good article. Haters gonna hate.

 

[CappenVarra]

Also known as the player gaining XP points i.e. learning to play the game? If your character sucks, create another using the information you gained through failure to make a better one? (But but I want to play a Fallout 2 character with only Science and Outdoorsman) Learning how the game works i.e. how to succeed at it is commonly known as "playing the game", and if you remove the feedback mechanism of failure, you've effectively removed the game from the game? If you can't fail but every random character any player can come up with can "win", it isn't a game but a toy? Why do I even bother with this dumbfuckery?

How is trying to play a character with certain skill set and failing because the developers didn't cater for that skill set is "playing the game"? Realizing half way through that you have useless skills is not "feedback mechanism of failure" but a misjudgement on the developers part. The player didn't fail - he tried to role play a certain character he created in the game with the skills the developers provided. The failure is on the game that it didn't allow the usage of said skills.

Okay, let's zoom out a bit. So the player is playing the game for the first time, and character creation presents him with a number of skills (those being a primary character-defining mechanic in a skill-based system), out of which he must select a subset of skills his character will use. And the problem we're talking about is that some of those choices will be dead ends, right? Sure, I agree completely that utterly useless skills are a failure of development, and that it would be better to just remove them from character creation if they don't feature in the game. But that's sort of... obvious? Is there a large number of people clamoring for more skills at character creation which are never used, that you need to set straight? Has any developer ever put such skills in on purpose, instead due to lack of time/funding/whatever (i.e. it being a failure of management instead of RPG system design)? And not quite what the blog post examples were about.

Providing skills that are less often useful can have nasty effects on an RPG playthrough... - I'm sorry, but I really can't recall a computer game where all skills were equally useful, or useful equally often. If you strive for skill equality, you can either end up with a really small set of available skills (those you can actually implement in the game and ensure their conformance to the required standards of "equal usefulness"), in which case the total number of playable characters (skill combinations) tends to be quite small (and you might as well go with a class-based system). Or you can invest gargantuan effort to reach that lofty goal of skill equality in a system with numerous skills - achieving what? That a character can use just about any random combination of skills, and the game will make sure he succeeds? Sure, the challenge will then come from using those skills during the game instead of choosing the "right" ones at character creation... And the choice will then shift to finding those parts of it that can be overcome using those chosen skills among other parts of the game - which we'll say is better because the selection happens during gameplay instead of before it... But I still don't quite buy it.

The game is there to provide a challenge, and the player is there to figure out how to overcome it. It is not the game's function to worry about "some skills being less often useful", it's the players part to figure out which skills are more or less useful and incorporate that knowledge in his character build. Powergamers will focus on those skills which are "broken" and provide the least challenge. Other people will mix and match, getting a character that has some combination of more or less useful skills. That's how it works, right? The player doesn't choose a single skill that defines his character and dumps all skill points in it, does he? Because that is the only case where focusing on a "less useful" skill could actually make the game unplayable. But if you have a skill-based system, you should have a wide selection of skills and a character build will have a number of them, right? And there's also that other feature of a skill-based system, that no character is locked into using only the skills he started with, but can develop other ones freely on the go... Such as when he figures out the current ones aren't quite that suited to the game, perhaps? And if the player plays the game for 10 hours and only then realizes he would be having much more fun with a completely different character, restarting a cRPG is hardly a disaster worth averting with extreme prejudice.

We're not talking about P&P. And computer games that had completely useless skills were often P&P system implementations - providing skills so they could say "uses System X", but never really bothering to implement them completely. And yes, that sucks. But a computer game will always provide a pre-defined set of challenges, which some skill choices will make easier to overcome, while some will make it harder. Should we strive to make every skill available in the game useful? Of course. Should we strive to make all skills equally or near-equally useful? No, I don't see why we should. Should we label some skills with "sorry, we didn't have time to implement this properly"? Perhaps.

The article gives the contrived example of "try playing Fallout 2 with a pure scientist", which I found just ridiculous. If your "roleplaying" imperatives dictate that you play a scientist, it's more than just dumping all skill points in Science and expecting everything to work out well. It's also about learning that in Fallout's world (again with the "in-character" logic, since you seem to be placing some emphasis on it) scientists better know how to shoot and deal with the many dangers of the wasteland if they want an opportunity to practice their science in peace. You know, a "scientist" currently being someone who devotes his time and expertise to intellectual pursuits because other parts of society are presumably providing shelter, food, energy and security from bandits so he doesn't have to worry about that. Other parts of society which are kind of not quite as existent in a post-apocalyptic setting, the collapse of said society being one of its central themes? Why should the story-logic of the game make each skillset equally or near-equally useful, when there is no precedent for that in either RL (as if that mattered) or any fictional story? So that lovely example is pure nonsense even from a story-centric, "roleplaying" perspective. And from a more game-centric perspective, the idea that you're going to get far with a purely non-combat character in a single-character cRPG doesn't have much footing in the history of the genre (kindly refer to the codex thread archive if you feel the need to contest this point). And if it's a party-based game, you'll have multiple character covering each other's weaknesses, so there's again no need to cry how "this particular combination of skills makes the game harder!".

The article starts with a decent enough overview of some historical P&P moments, but that hardly brings anything new to the table. Then we come to the nonsensical "Fallout 2 doesn't let me play a scientist doctor who likes hiking" section (which I was ridiculing in my post). And then we come to the proposed solution of splitting skills to make it easier for the player not to fuck up. And while I might find the energy to argue why I'm not a fan of that, after reading that middle section I can't find the motivation to discuss it with somebody who writes stuff like that. Wall of text is a class power I only get to use 1/day

 

[Harg Harfardarssen]

Okay, let's zoom out a bit. So the player is playing the game for the first time, and character creation presents him with a number of skills (those being a primary character-defining mechanic in a skill-based system), out of which he must select a subset of skills his character will use. And the problem we're talking about is that some of those choices will be dead ends, right? Sure, I agree completely that utterly useless skills are a failure of development, and that it would be better to just remove them from character creation if they don't feature in the game. But that's sort of... obvious?

Not sure that it is obvious. It seems like every skill based game I've played has at least one or two which are worthless or only marginally useful. But even assuming that there were no skills which are strictly useless, there are skills which problem is that when all skills are listed together without differentiation,

We're not talking about P&P. And computer games that had completely useless skills were often P&P system implementations - providing skills so they could say "uses System X", but never really bothering to implement them completely. And yes, that sucks. But a computer game will always provide a pre-defined set of challenges, which some skill choices will make easier to overcome, while some will make it harder. Should we strive to make every skill available in the game useful? Of course. Should we strive to make all skills equally or near-equally useful? No, I don't see why we should. Should we label some skills with "sorry, we didn't have time to implement this properly"? Perhaps.

But a large portion of the article was devoted to explaining why sometimes skills conceived of in PnP context don't transfer well and actually argues that skills should have varying levels of use. The problem he's addressing isn't that that the skills are used less often, it that the skills don't have the kind of use that a player reasonably anticipates.

Take the Outdoorsman Scientist. What if they were an outdoorsman scientist with proficiency in energy weapons as well? With no other knowledge, this isn't a terrible decision. Presumably hacking (which is how science is actually described) will have a decent amount of use (getting info, turning off security systems, opening doors, taking over enemy equipment) and energy weapons will give the player good combat viability. They have no way of knowing that getting more information from terminals is marginally useful, that random encounters are only a small problem in the very beginning (when the skill won't be high enough to help that much) and that energy weapons don't appear until much later in the game. Why is science less useful than speech? Because almost all of the information and gameplay options the player wants are given by people, and most of the goals that can be satisfied with hacking can also be satisfied. Why is small arms more useful than energy weapons? Because it provides access to guns much earlier and, with the Gauss Rifle, doesn't actually mean you have less offensive power. Those two combat skills seem like they both should be useful, but perhaps with different tradeoffs. Instead, one has few tradeoffs and other isn't useful until the second half of the game. Why is lockpick more useful than repair? Theoretically the wasteland should have more broken equipment you can rebuild than complex locking mechanisms.

All of these differences in usefulness will be necessarily arbitrary unless the developer wants to make sure all skills are used with equal frequency, which, as you pointed out, would remove an important element of uncertainty in character building. So the writer is proposing a solution which attempts to balance the ability of the player to form reasonable expectations about what his/her character will be capable of without forcing the developer to remove all consequence from choosing a skill.

 

[felipepepe]

Ah, I remenber this guy, the one that posted about how cRPGs should stop using D&D...

This would be interesting if the guy himself came here and debated with us, but debating a blog post from a random guy on the internet seems pointless... We have our own cast of game designers here, like VD, Charles, Cleve, Styg and the bros from Chaos Chronicles, why highlight and debate a random external dude?

 

[kaizoku]

Interesting mechanic.

This isn't exactly what Tim Cain was talking about, as he only mentioned separating combat and non-combat skills (as has already been done in Amalur, for example) with different point pools for each, but it is in the same vein.

Personally I prefer to have the choice to fuck up my character and work from there, but I don't care enough to rage for either of the approaches. if I get separate pool points, I will use separate pool points. Whatever.

In that regard what Craig Stern said kind of makes more sense than what Tim said.
And in fact you have 3 tiers of stats: attributes, main skills, secondary skills.

Attributes: you know the drill...

In the main skills you could have:
- fencing
- marksmanship
- diplomacy
- scholar (scholarship?)
- thieving
- survival

In the secondary skills you could have:
- axe
- sword
- 2 handed sword
- gleave
- two handed weapons
- weapon and shield
- bow
- crossbow
- intimidate
- persuade
- street wise
- barter
- lore
- lockpick
- steal
- hide
- listen
- detect trap
- set trap
- topography
- herbology
- alchemy


This allows you to choose between a pure combat character, a pure diplomatic character or anything in between.
And the secondary skills may or may not have synergies from the main skills (in the same way the main skills will have synergies/dependencies from the attributes).

This system actually looks p. c.

What Tim is going for seems to be a half-combat half-diplomat.
In any case, I'm confident he will make it work.

Ah, I remenber this guy, the one that posted about how cRPGs should stop using D&D...

This would be interesting if the guy himself came here and debated with us, but debating a blog post from a random guy on the internet seems pointless... We have our own cast of game designers here, like VD, Charles, Cleve, Styg and the bros from Chaos Chronicles, why highlight and debate a random external dude?

so that this place doesn't end up in circlejerk inbreeding... oh wait



edit: well, in fact what I said is even yet another system, closer to what AoD gives (at least in regard to combat skills)

 

[CappenVarra]

All of these differences in usefulness will be necessarily arbitrary unless the developer wants to make sure all skills are used with equal frequency, which, as you pointed out, would remove an important element of uncertainty in character building. So the writer is proposing a solution which attempts to balance the ability of the player to form reasonable expectations about what his/her character will be capable of without forcing the developer to remove all consequence from choosing a skill.

Well yes, that's true. We have an agreement that such things can be handled better in general and in principle. I'm still not a fan of the developer going through the game a week before release and assigning usefulness scores to each skill depending on what was implemented and what was not, so players don't have to suffer learning that by themselves. Separating skills into different categories and providing more meaningful information - sure. But then again, how much effort should a developer expend to help the player form a reasonable expectation of the usefulness of the energy weapons skill on a level 1 character with a tribal background? Or a non-combat character in a post-apocalyptic setting? I don't think you need to be a fully-initiated acolyte in the church of Cleve to imagine how your squishy pacifist can look forward to being a slave or a source of the other white meat...

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying Fallout 2 handled it perfectly, and there's been a bunch of discussion on the topic during the years (which is kind of pointless to repeat). I'm sure the developers would've loved nothing better than to add much more skill use for all skills throughout the game, if only they had double the budget/time. As it is, they focused on implementing the only "emergent" (as the Sinister dude calls it, even if I would prefer to call not-completely-scripted gameplay "normal" and not "emergent") part - combat, and a bunch of more or less random uses for other skills. If we're worried about first time players getting wrong ideas about what the game is about, there is a lot of different things that can be done. Hell, even the developers of Fallout 2 wanted to make it easier for those first time players. They just did it in a really jarring and annoying way - what is the purpose of the Temple of Trials, if not to tell people who create "doctor scientists who love hiking" something along the lines of Hey, so, if your character is struggling to complete the tutorial section amidst his friendly tribe, perhaps that's not the guy you want to take out to the radioactive wastes of Gehenna?

I really don't see how people who try to create completely non-combat characters and don't want to figure out how the game works are a relevant audience that the game should try to accommodate. "Survival" skills in Fallout (and most games, for that matter) pretty much translate to combat skills - and if you want to emphasize their importance, perhaps you could list them at the top of the skill list or something? Again, I'm getting stuck at the utterly idiotic example from the blog post, sorry. And the energy weapons example you mentioned (which has some more merit) wouldn't quite benefit from the article's proposed solution, would it? I mean, are you going to put energy weapons in the "elective" category or what? Please split Fallout's skills into "survival" and "elective" with separate skill pools and tell me if you like what you get - and will other players with different preferences like it. And if the proposed "solution" doesn't work for the example it uses to demonstrate the "problem", what does it tell you about the "solution"?

If you want to model the fact that a starting character is highly unlikely to have any energy weapons skill due to his tribal background (which is reflected in their in-game availability), couldn't you implement skill cost modifiers, making high-tech skills cost more points (or even being unavailable) until the character receives some training? Or restrict the list of taggable skills at character creation to those a tribal manboon could reasonably have. Or any of the other possible solutions - all of which boil down to restricting the character from using the absolutely customizable skill-based system - at least partially defeating its purpose and benefits. But if you're really keen on such restrictions and worried that people won't "get it", why not give them pre-defined "classes" or skill packages to start with (as long as you leave full customization as an option for regular players)?

The player should get two pools of points to spend: one pool of points that may only be spent on survival tier skills, and a second pool of points that may be spent on either survival tier or elective tier skills. This ensures that the player cannot create a character incapable of surviving a normal playthrough while still giving the player the flexibility to pursue unique avenues of play and opportunities for role-playing.

And there you have it. Why the hell should I support a system that ensures that the player cannot create a useless character? That's pure hand-holding nonsense. If you're worried about new players and want to improve their experience, couldn't you come up with a system that helps them without restricting advanced players from doing whatever the hell they want? I'm not against giving first-time players a restricted choice from pre-defined "minimum viability guaranteed" templates, but I sure as hell am against locking it down for both them and the advanced players. You know how we call game design measures that ensure players can't fuck up too badly at the cost of customization options? I believe the expression is "dumbing down".

 

[Harg Harfardarssen]

All of these differences in usefulness will be necessarily arbitrary unless the developer wants to make sure all skills are used with equal frequency, which, as you pointed out, would remove an important element of uncertainty in character building. So the writer is proposing a solution which attempts to balance the ability of the player to form reasonable expectations about what his/her character will be capable of without forcing the developer to remove all consequence from choosing a skill.

Well yes, that's true. We have an agreement that such things can be handled better in general and in principle. I'm still not a fan of the developer going through the game a week before release and assigning usefulness scores to each skill depending on what was implemented and what was not, so players don't have to suffer learning that by themselves. Separating skills into different categories and providing more meaningful information - sure.

I think in this we are in complete agreement. And I actually don't like the division between skills which guarantee survivability and skills which do not - I would prefer a division between skills that are going to be core components of game progress (so, for example, Small Arms and Speech) and skills which are supplements (Throwing and Science). Nor am I particularly fond of the different point pool approach. But I think the core of the idea is sound - divide the skills into two categories so that the player will know that he will have an opportunity to use his main skills frequently.

As a sidenote, I was less convinced by the survivability rationale than the experience drought:

(2) offering fewer opportunities to gain experience points and improve the character (which, in turn, further cripples the player’s ability to put points into more useful skills)

If a game is developed such that one ability allows access to more xp, then that is a slightly different issue. Its one thing to not be able to complete most quests, its another to not have access to sufficient quests. Its partially a balance issue, but I think a developer should be free to let certain skills provide more in-game quests at the cost of making them less useful in completing a broad variety of quests.

 

[tuluse]

Is there a problem with the game just literally telling you these skills are not much use think twice before picking them? Or the opposite, make sure you put points into at least one of these 5 skills.

Didn't Wasteland do this in the manual?