A challenge implies some level of fairness. You can't just punish player randomly, you need to be able to show to the player that the failure is his fault, any you do this by demonstrating, in hindsight, how they had every means necessary to avoid the failure. The catch with bad builds and many other poorly designed "challenges" is that the crucial part of those means - the information - can only be obtained by failing. That's what separates mastery of a system from rote memorization.
Are we having a discussion here, or are you going to repeat the same things and ignore my arguments? If any failure that requires meta-knowledge is “random”, then race games, platformers, strategy games, FPS and almost every other genre in existence will be poorly designed because they all require meta-knowledge. The mastery of a system requires failing, because you obviously can’t know a priori what will be the effects of a particular build in every context. That is so obvious that I’m embarrass to try to convince someone of this, especially in a place that was supposed to have cRPG connoisseurs.
Since player is, at least on the first playthrough, necessarily ignorant of many of your mechanical minutiae, including finer aspects of character building, it's only fair to treat builds as legitimate ways to play the game and player's choice of a build as simply player's declaration of the character they want to play and thus the way they want to play the game - in this case if a build doesn't work, then allowing it is misleading.
Let me get this straight: If players can’t make a successful build without dying many times, then developers shouldn’t require them to die many times. Character builds should express players’ preferences and they should be respected. By that logic, if you can’t make a successful hand on the first time you play poker, bad hands shouldn’t be allowed in the game, because the way you deal your hand should express your preferences and they should be respected. If you can win a game of chess on your first game, then bad movies shouldn’t be allowed in a game of chess, because any player move express a player preference and should be respected. That must be the most asinine thing I ever heard on the whole fuck internet, and that is saying something.
The thing is 99.9% of time you are not doing any character building but you still need gameplay. Builds may be definitive component of an RPG but can't be core gameplay.
I already explained this before, but since you insist on ignoring the point, I will repeat: Character building is not just a fixed moment at the beginning of the game, but if it is done properly, it will encompass every single gameplay element. Leveling up, considering whether your THC will be good enough to beat your opponent, whether you should use a fast attack, how many APs you should use, how many experience points you should allocate to a particular skill in order to beat a encounter, or what type of consumables you should buy in order to beat fight, whether you will succeed or not in a skill or stat check, all these actions are nothing more than a natural extension of the same type of calculus you make in character building. First, you distribute some points to the stats and skills of your character, and then you nurture it as the game progress and your previous choices will decide whether you move on or not.
which items should be improved (for instance, by crafting) or how to make a item more deadly (for instance, with alchemy) (...) You celebrate (...) when you carefully strategy was successful.
Those are in no way exclusive to RPGs.
Of course not, because cRPGs can encompass many different elements from other genres, or maybe there are other genres are stealing stuff from cRPGs? What matter is whether these things depends of character building and skill/stat points allocation. They do. So you are wrong.
The only alternative of gameplay that is not governed by skills or stats is action games. Or strategies. Or about every genre other than cRPGs.
Actually, they all have all sorts of stats too, the difference is that you can't change them.
The difference is that you can’t choose then and because you can’t choose then, your success in these games doesn’t depend on your choices of stat and skill distributions, but your choices after these previous configurations. Again, these are different genres, so no problems here.
Rocks fall, everyone dies - the epitome of good challenge.
No, the epitome of good challenge is never suffering from unforeseen events, because special snowflakes like you don’t want to die. The epitome of challenge is popamole games.
The proper way would be to use something foreshadowing the kind of danger player is about to face. Of course, it doesn't have to be obvious or handed to the player on a silver platter. Properly designed hidden traps can be anticipated at least based on the structural elements that could hide traps, possibly on other things like previous victims. Monsters have their habits, leave traces and there probably exist sources in game world containing compiled lore on various types of them
On one hand, these things are always expected in the game world. A room filled with beholders is expected in a dungeon. So you can’t complaint that this was a poorly designed challenge. But if you want your party to know beforehand that you had beholders in that room, because this would be shameless popamole handholding. If the trap was never activated, you shouldn’t be able to see it. In fact, I don’t believe that this types of tips makes such a difference. Suppose you see a bunch of bodies, you have zero points in traps and low perception. You step right into it and die. I’m sure that you will still consider this a poorly designed challenge. But it’s your fault that your character didn’t have high perception or the proper skills. Complaining that this is bad designed because you couldn’t have anticipated this danger without proper skills amounts to complaining that your failures shouldn’t be determined by character building and stat/skills distribution. That is the hidden agenda with this “poorly designed challenge” talk. You talk as if your choices and failures should be governed by stats and skills, but at the same thing you want the developer to prevent you from making poor choices that results from your poor skills. You can’t have the cake and eat it too.
In the end it's always better (and smarter) to play Indiana Jones than some hapless grunts participating in clearing minefields by massed infantry charge.
Translation: “In the end it’s always better to play Commander Shepard than some regular dude that dies like normal people”.
Repeatedly running blindly to your doom doesn't reward any sort of intelligence, planning or creative use of mechanics
Translation: “This game doesn’t reward any sort of reflex or interactions that we would expect from an ACTION GAME. cRPGs doesn’t provide player agency, because your choices are governed by stats and skill points”.
Neither does it provide any room for player agency - why would you want to reward persistence and persistence alone? Do you lack any other desirable traits you could use and thus want to bring cRPGs down to this lowest common denominator?
That is because you are wrongly equating player agency in cRPGs with player agency in action games. You want to destroy everything that puts cRPGs apart from the rest, because you don’t like cRPGs, even though you think you do. The player agency in cRPGs resolves around civic or combat choices that are governed by allocation of skills and stats. However, you think that character building is boring, that players shouldn’t be able to make bad builds, and players shouldn’t suffer from poor allocation of skill points, etc. If we follow this type of thinking while designing a cRPG, then we don’t have any more player agency left. But you don’t realize that because you want action games, not cRPGs.
However, critical path should be accessible to all builds and different builds should have similar amounts of content barred from them.
That is the awesome button mentality. The critical path should be accessible to all builds that are good enough. If you don’t allocate your skills properly and you can’t keep up with the progression of the game, then you only have yourself to blame.
It's your job as a designer to achieve it while also making the game hard for any actual player. Killing the player is easy, what matters is killing the player in such way that they *know* they were morons.
But that is because you are assuming that a game world should be a theme park to pander the player’s ego. If we are considering a dangerous game world with lots of dangerous missions and out of the ordinary situations, then it is obvious that the player should die much more than he does in most cRPGs. That is GAMEWORLD BUILDING 101. That fact it you would think that only a moron could die for an unseen danger shows how you were spoiled by developers pandering to your precious ego after all these years. You can't die, because you are so special. If the developer is killing you, he is a sadistic coward. No wonder we have so many players here playing the latest AAA on their steam accounts. Popamole games are the perfect evolution of the many design vices that still hinder the progress of cRPGs to this day.
How about: Stats and skills are player's toolbox. The challenge is to prevail with incomplete toolbox of your choice, finding ways to compensate for missing tools or avoid the need for them completely. The challenge is not to pick the right tools, because you aren't revealing the details of the test, so the player can't know the right tools beyond the obvious. Extra goals may require specific tools as long as they aren't weighted to reward some to the exclusion of others.
The challenge is to develop an understanding of both the system and the game world, which allows you to pick the proper tools and make the best choices based on them, which include a myriad of things such as combat tactics, positioning, resource management, equipping stuff, deciding which route to follow, etc. If you are not required to have a proper understanding of the game world, then the developer failed in her task, because you can’t access every path using the same tools.
Do you know Vonnegut’s story “Harrison Bergeron”? It’s a dystopia about a society where people achieved the perfect equality by handicapping the well-endowed.
Which is where analogy breaks down. No one wants to handicap well-endowed builds, but to filter out the bad ones.
But the end result is the same. You want to artificially guarantee that everyone should be well-endowed because you are assuming that the inequalities that results from player’s intelligence in character building is a bad thing by default and shouldn’t allowed. This makes stat and skills completely pointless.
If a system is well designed then you shouldn't be able to break it by simple minmaxing.
Because (1) you are assuming that a good system ensures that every build is equally effective (hints: egalitarian prejudices); (2) you don’t care about the challenge involved in making effective builds; (3) you don’t care whether build egalitarianism will discourage gifted players from trying more effective or inovating combinations; (4) you ignore that in complex systems some solutions will be more effective than others; (5) you don’t like cRPGs, character building, etc. To sum up: because you are assuming all the wrong things because you hate cRPGs or you are confusing cRPGs with action games.
But it adds a lot of value to the game! In fact, any game (not only cRPGs!) that it is not insulting to the players intelligence and abilities will require lots of meta-knowledge and understanding of the right choices, whether we are talking about a race game or a platformer. The only thing that is surprising is that popamole pseudo-cRPGs gamers complain about the very bedrock of every decent game.
False and that's actually the best argument for randomization - voiding as much meta knowledge as possible.
By that logic a race track in a race game and the game world in super Mario should be random? Are you going to bite the bullet and accept this absurd conclusion? LOL. Be my guest.
If the game has any complex systems and player is using them as intended, player can use his OWN intelligence to solve problems in game. Whether it's by smart combat tactics, or smart environment manipulation, or smart NPC/monster manipulation or whatever, they are solving problems in game using their own intelligence score and you can't do a damn thing about it .
Of course he is going to use his own intelligence to make the best builds, but that is precisely my point. Good cRPGs rewards player’s intelligence. They reward the well thought out builds and punish bad builds. Your point of view tends to neutralize player’s intelligence and rewards laziness and poor decision-making. The fact that intelligence as a stat can’t override the player’s own intelligence is a glaring red herring in this discussion because the player can’t tell his character to make a choice that will only be available to a character with a given number in INT. The skill checks governed by intelligence will still be the same. Requiring that either the stat should govern everything or should be abandoned because you are assuming an arbitrary definition of intelligence and think that stats should be completely realistic doesn’t mean jack, because we have severe technological limitations. Let’s remove cities from cRPGs then, because real cities having thousands of citizens, and while we are at, let’s remove inventories, because players have a whole storage shed in their asses, but that it is unrealistic.
Congratulations, you have created something even shittier than modern cutscene rollercoaster because for same amount of interactivity and gameplay you don't even get the visuals
I think I'm having a clearer image of what it's at stake. cRPGs are incredibly hard to make, because they encompass different complex systems. Half a dozen understood the combat part of it and the challenge that makes cRPGs tick, but they abandoned game design a long time ago. Others understood the civil part of it, but never understood the importance of challenge. They were popamoles who knew how to provide C&C, but without the punishing part. They took the helms of game design and the result is that character building is useless as an appendix. Now we have a bunch of shallow games that provide the illusion of character building, have shitty combat system, inexistent resource management, pander to player’s ego all the time. As time went by, a whole new caste of players and developers was created that wouldn’t know a cRPG looks like if we shove them under their noses. The values were inverted. Punishing players for bad builds is bad. Rewarding players for their ignorance is desirable. Complexity in character building should be avoided at all costs. Players should have the risks telegraphed to them to prevent any risks of pandering their egos. RIP PC MASTER RACE!
