Interview Chris Avellone is still pretty mad about Obsidian

Kev Inkline · Nov 22, 2016

I though Azrael has walls already, isn't it the country that is mostly inhabited by the Jaws?

laclongquan · Nov 22, 2016

DraQ said:
laclongquan said:

For a derailment, the PST option of ascending to be the Silent King did surprise us when it happen. Ooops?

Click to expand...

And what *did* you expect at that point? You couldn't have foreseen the exact detail, but it had this air of finality - whatever would have happened it was certain that you wouldn't get to continue your quest.

I had no expection at that point in time. Or every expectations I suppose.

See, Planescape Torment was my second or third rpg. My 1st is Fallout 1 which I abandoned. I completed Fallout 2 and curious about the game makers so I checked out PST.

As a newbie gamer, I had none, and every expectations. I think that I expected at the time to be playing as a Silent King, a counterpart to the Rag King I have been trying to please. Fuck that King!

Vaarna_Aarne · Nov 22, 2016

There is one simple, fundamental problem that RPGs have with gameplay and challenge. And it's this fucking thing:

That's all there is to the subject in the genre.

DraQ · Nov 22, 2016

Brancaleone said:
DraQ said:

OTOH focusing on content at the expense of system is glaring error. Systems are infinitely reusable, content is one-shot. System actually support the content - if you have thievery and law systems in place, then applying thievery based solution to every context where it is logical amounts to just placing the items that should be there. With well developed systems you lose less time implementing content, get more solutions available by default making viability much less problematic and won't need to resort to dumb crutches like excessive reliance on levels and power curve. Good content is still crucial but with systems in place you can discern where it is actually necessary and where bare systems don't do the trick - well designed systems are force multiplier for content makers.

Click to expand...

It was never meant to be an absolute statement - "thou shalt devote 100% of your time and resources to content and 0% to the system". My point is actually a quite banal one, and it's that as I see it you can have a game worth playing with a crappy system but great content, while you will never get a game worth playing with a great system but crappy content. So obsessing over the system at the expense of content is a no go for me: after all, you don't play a game just in order to see how a system works, right? Or maybe there are people out there who take accountancy as a hobby, who knows.

You know what? I can generally agree with that (although DOS1 proves mediocre content with at least some great systems can go a long way, Skyrim modded for good systems can also be stunningly entertaining). PS:T is still one of my absolute favourites as far as cRPGs go.

All the advantages of a great system, while true, just make the process of creating and implementing content easier/faster/more efficient/with less hiccups, and so on: if all you can do is crappy content, a great system will make it very easy and efficient to implement a yuge lot of crappy content, well done I guess. After all, an RPG system remains an abstraction, and therefore will never be a good fit for all content whatsoever, it does not have magic property of turning lead into gold, and it definitely does not act as a 'force multiplier' for the quality of the content.

It's not "just". Just easier, faster and more efficient already means more content, bigger, more complex content, and less buggy content, but good systems also act as glue for content and gameplay, implicitly handling myriads of cases no one in their right mind would care do manually and allowing to handle some that would be done manually implicitly, and with much less potential for game going bonkers on some corner case. Good and well defined systems also help shape the content by making obvious what will need explicit handling and dropping powerful tools in content creator's lap.

And that you need to be able to make good content to make good content with good systems? That's why I specifically said "multiplier" - I tend to be exact for a reason.
:obviously:

The point is not that you should trade-off content for systems - it's that there is no real trade-off, just like, for example, with good coding practices.
Finally, systems don't amount to accounting - systems are what makes gameplay exist.

And it is quite absurd to think that having a percentage based system instead of a flat-number based

That has near-nil impact on overall system quality. We can discuss their relative merits, and it might even be worthwhile, but good system isn't made by the way it expresses modifiers.

Brancaleone · Nov 23, 2016

DraQ said:
Brancaleone said:

DraQ said:

OTOH focusing on content at the expense of system is glaring error. Systems are infinitely reusable, content is one-shot. System actually support the content - if you have thievery and law systems in place, then applying thievery based solution to every context where it is logical amounts to just placing the items that should be there. With well developed systems you lose less time implementing content, get more solutions available by default making viability much less problematic and won't need to resort to dumb crutches like excessive reliance on levels and power curve. Good content is still crucial but with systems in place you can discern where it is actually necessary and where bare systems don't do the trick - well designed systems are force multiplier for content makers.

Click to expand...

It was never meant to be an absolute statement - "thou shalt devote 100% of your time and resources to content and 0% to the system". My point is actually a quite banal one, and it's that as I see it you can have a game worth playing with a crappy system but great content, while you will never get a game worth playing with a great system but crappy content. So obsessing over the system at the expense of content is a no go for me: after all, you don't play a game just in order to see how a system works, right? Or maybe there are people out there who take accountancy as a hobby, who knows.

Click to expand...

You know what? I can generally agree with that (although DOS1 proves mediocre content with at least some great systems can go a long way, Skyrim modded for good systems can also be stunningly entertaining). PS:T is still one of my absolute favourites as far as cRPGs go.

All the advantages of a great system, while true, just make the process of creating and implementing content easier/faster/more efficient/with less hiccups, and so on: if all you can do is crappy content, a great system will make it very easy and efficient to implement a yuge lot of crappy content, well done I guess. After all, an RPG system remains an abstraction, and therefore will never be a good fit for all content whatsoever, it does not have magic property of turning lead into gold, and it definitely does not act as a 'force multiplier' for the quality of the content.

Click to expand...

It's not "just". Just easier, faster and more efficient already means more content, bigger, more complex content, and less buggy content, but good systems also act as glue for content and gameplay, implicitly handling myriads of cases no one in their right mind would care do manually and allowing to handle some that would be done manually implicitly, and with much less potential for game going bonkers on some corner case. Good and well defined systems also help shape the content by making obvious what will need explicit handling and dropping powerful tools in content creator's lap.

And that you need to be able to make good content to make good content with good systems? That's why I specifically said "multiplier" - I tend to be exact for a reason.

The point is not that you should trade-off content for systems - it's that there is no real trade-off, just like, for example, with good coding practices.
Finally, systems don't amount to accounting - systems are what makes gameplay exist.

And it is quite absurd to think that having a percentage based system instead of a flat-number based

Click to expand...

That has near-nil impact on overall system quality. We can discuss their relative merits, and it might even be worthwhile, but good system isn't made by the way it expresses modifiers.

An RPG system represents a tool in order to operate a hard abstraction (one might say a gross oversimplification) of the content you want to be represented in-game. So the better the system, the better it represents the content you had in mind, therefore, a great system allows you to enjoy said content to the fullest. You might say that the systems sets the floor for an RPG, but the content sets the ceiling. And if the ceiling is set really low, the floor can only be lower. Again, a system does nothing in terms of affecting the quality of the content you want to be represented in the game, and the 'multiplier' effect you keep talking about makes no sense whatsoever, no matter how much you claim to be 'exact'.
With a better system, you *might* (but not necessarily, since a crappy but very simple system would be much quicker to implement than a great, very sophisticated and nuanced one) have some more time to spend on the content. But if the content is shit to start with, you naturally end with a polished turd.
Creating a system from scratch is not free in terms of time and resources, you know: it's very time consuming, and after a certain point, it's pointless to keep slaving off on it, no matter how elegant and reusable it is, if by then you don't have enough time and resources to pair it with good content, and you end up with a game that is basically a test-environment for your glorious system.

An (actually not tremendously fitting, but whatever) example would be Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader. The system is really, really, really bad: but the Barcelona area has decently good content, and if the entire game had that level of content, you know what, it would actually be a game worth playing overall, and that in spite of a truly horrendous system. Sadly, as long as you explore the wilderness areas the level of content becomes quite worse, and it simply plummets from Monserrat and Montaillou onward. So you can judge how an abysmal system works when paired with decently good content, or with abysmal content, within the same game.
An opposite example would be, again, TOEE's Hommlet: the system is great, the Hommlet area is not rushed or mechanically inadequate, and yet is just a big great turd of a chapter, in spite of the alleged 'force multiplier' (?) effect of a great system, in spite of how much said great system 'glues content and gameplay', in spite of 'all the myriads cases such a great system allegedly handled automatically', and in spite of how it 'prevents the game from going bonkers'.

The 'gamey' feeling people complains so much about derives exactly by a mentality like yours, that you don't think in terms of the content you want to represent, but in terms of rules, excel spreadsheets, and 'multiplier effects', whatever they are. And then when the content is shitty, you are led to think that the problem with the content is that the system wasn't good enough, and next time you waste even more time after the system at the expenses of the content, and next iteration turns out even worse.
Anyway, you are not alone in thinking that a system is a sort of Philosopher's Stone that can turn shit into chocolate (it's actually a very popular concept among people who wouldn't be able to produce interesting content if their life depended on it), so each to his own I guess.

Azrael the cat · Nov 23, 2016

Excidium II said:
Azrael could build a wall to keep the entire southern hemisphere away.

Dude, you understimate me. Australia used to be part of the greater incontinental land-mass. I don't do walls of text to keep the border-hoppers away. I do oceans.

DraQ · Nov 27, 2016

Brancaleone said:
An RPG system represents a tool in order to operate a hard abstraction (one might say a gross oversimplification)

So far so good. At least you know what an abstraction is, although you want to avoid the "over-" part.

of the content you want to be represented in-game. So the better the system, the better it represents the content you had in mind, therefore, a great system allows you to enjoy said content to the fullest. You might say that the systems sets the floor for an RPG, but the content sets the ceiling. And if the ceiling is set really low, the floor can only be lower.

Again, a system does nothing in terms of affecting the quality of the content you want to be represented in the game, and the 'multiplier' effect you keep talking about makes no sense whatsoever, no matter how much you claim to be 'exact'.

Most of the system don't really have anything to do with any specific content, though. A lot of it isn't even dependent on the setting. The majority of a system deals with basic, generic stuff - rules governing combat, movement, detection, damage, interactions, and so on. The generic parts are also more important as they affect majority of content, while any content-specific ones may typically only be used once or twice and could in principle be replaced by situation specific scripting.
This means that you don't really need to know the content to make mechanics, just the setting, and overall gameplay you aim for.
Which is good, because content can change during development (just see all the outtakes, changes of vision, etc. in known games) and you do need to know mechanics to fully exploit it with your content.
So instead of floor and ceiling metaphor, it's more apt to say that mechanics forms the foundation (though if you wanted to really be pedantic, it's also a good part of the materials you'll need to construct the rest) - you still need good content, but without good system you're doomed to the horrors of ghetto architecture.

With a better system, you *might* (but not necessarily, since a crappy but very simple system would be much quicker to implement than a great, very sophisticated and nuanced one) have some more time to spend on the content. But if the content is shit to start with, you naturally end with a polished turd.
Creating a system from scratch is not free in terms of time and resources, you know: it's very time consuming, and after a certain point, it's pointless to keep slaving off on it, no matter how elegant and reusable it is, if by then you don't have enough time and resources to pair it with good content, and you end up with a game that is basically a test-environment for your glorious system.

Getting into a car is also not free in terms of time, yet it would be insane to forgo it before a long journey just because you're in a hurry. Good system is an investment that pays for itself.
When developing the system becomes a runaway effort it's usually the sign that the system was built on wrong assumptions, wasn't flexible enough, or was shoddily built to begin with - just a special case of ubiquitous software industry fuckup.

An (actually not tremendously fitting, but whatever) example would be Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader. The system is really, really, really bad: but the Barcelona area has decently good content, and if the entire game had that level of content, you know what, it would actually be a game worth playing overall, and that in spite of a truly horrendous system. Sadly, as long as you explore the wilderness areas the level of content becomes quite worse, and it simply plummets from Monserrat and Montaillou onward. So you can judge how an abysmal system works when paired with decently good content, or with abysmal content, within the same game.
An opposite example would be, again, TOEE's Hommlet: the system is great, the Hommlet area is not rushed or mechanically inadequate, and yet is just a big great turd of a chapter, in spite of the alleged 'force multiplier' (?) effect of a great system, in spite of how much said great system 'glues content and gameplay', in spite of 'all the myriads cases such a great system allegedly handled automatically', and in spite of how it 'prevents the game from going bonkers'.

TOEE is an adaptation of preexisting content using a system it was built for that was never meant to support a video game (video game needs its system to be a mechanical glue that fills in not just the role of PnP RPG system but much of the GM's role as well). It's not really relevant here.
Lionheart was panned on all fronts, but one has to wonder if, if it wasn't such a mess, it couldn't have been a much better game due to less time lost on trying to salvage a pile of poo.

Anyway, good system is force multiplier, because good system MAKES content. And that doesn't merely apply to actual procedural generation systems. If your game has crime system, you get scenes where protagonist(s) have run afoul of the law essentially for free. If you have good 3D movement system on top of that (and AI that can handle it), you can have a rooftop chase scene you haven't even planned for. A system can't match real GM's creativity in handling unexpected input, but you can feed it more simulation (and it's going to be better than live GM at remembering tons of minute details). In exchange you can not only handle more unexpected situations, but you can allow yourself not expect some situations you'd otherwise need to prepare for, and can hope for sensible resolution if the content trips over itself either on its own or assisted by the player (for example by kiting enemies into one another or town).

And then there is the fact that system IS gameplay, and no matter how focused on content you are, gameplay is a nice thing to have in game and can elevate even mediocre content (DOS) or, in extreme cases, no content (roguelikes, DF).

The 'gamey' feeling people complains so much about derives exactly by a mentality like yours, that you don't think in terms of the content you want to represent, but in terms of rules, excel spreadsheets, and 'multiplier effects', whatever they are.

From my experience the 'gamey' feeling derives entirely from people forgetting what abstraction actually means (see the first paragraph) and devising some aimlessly convoluted schemes that have no relation with anything they are supposed to represent - not just any specific content, but basic generic stuff.

Azrael the cat said:
Excidium II said:

Azrael could build a wall to keep the entire southern hemisphere away.

Click to expand...

Dude, you understimate me. Australia used to be part of the greater incontinental land-mass. I don't do walls of text to keep the border-hoppers away. I do oceans.

You took your sweet time, though.

Brancaleone · Nov 27, 2016

DraQ said:
Brancaleone said:

An RPG system represents a tool in order to operate a hard abstraction (one might say a gross oversimplification)

Click to expand...

So far so good. At least you know what an abstraction is, although you want to avoid the "over-" part.

of the content you want to be represented in-game. So the better the system, the better it represents the content you had in mind, therefore, a great system allows you to enjoy said content to the fullest. You might say that the systems sets the floor for an RPG, but the content sets the ceiling. And if the ceiling is set really low, the floor can only be lower.

Again, a system does nothing in terms of affecting the quality of the content you want to be represented in the game, and the 'multiplier' effect you keep talking about makes no sense whatsoever, no matter how much you claim to be 'exact'.

Click to expand...

Most of the system don't really have anything to do with any specific content, though. A lot of it isn't even dependent on the setting. The majority of a system deals with basic, generic stuff - rules governing combat, movement, detection, damage, interactions, and so on. The generic parts are also more important as they affect majority of content, while any content-specific ones may typically only be used once or twice and could in principle be replaced by situation specific scripting.
This means that you don't really need to know the content to make mechanics, just the setting, and overall gameplay you aim for.
Which is good, because content can change during development (just see all the outtakes, changes of vision, etc. in known games) and you do need to know mechanics to fully exploit it with your content.
So instead of floor and ceiling metaphor, it's more apt to say that mechanics forms the foundation (though if you wanted to really be pedantic, it's also a good part of the materials you'll need to construct the rest) - you still need good content, but without good system you're doomed to the horrors of ghetto architecture.

With a better system, you *might* (but not necessarily, since a crappy but very simple system would be much quicker to implement than a great, very sophisticated and nuanced one) have some more time to spend on the content. But if the content is shit to start with, you naturally end with a polished turd.
Creating a system from scratch is not free in terms of time and resources, you know: it's very time consuming, and after a certain point, it's pointless to keep slaving off on it, no matter how elegant and reusable it is, if by then you don't have enough time and resources to pair it with good content, and you end up with a game that is basically a test-environment for your glorious system.

Click to expand...

Getting into a car is also not free in terms of time, yet it would be insane to forgo it before a long journey just because you're in a hurry. Good system is an investment that pays for itself.
When developing the system becomes a runaway effort it's usually the sign that the system was built on wrong assumptions, wasn't flexible enough, or was shoddily built to begin with - just a special case of ubiquitous software industry fuckup.

An (actually not tremendously fitting, but whatever) example would be Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader. The system is really, really, really bad: but the Barcelona area has decently good content, and if the entire game had that level of content, you know what, it would actually be a game worth playing overall, and that in spite of a truly horrendous system. Sadly, as long as you explore the wilderness areas the level of content becomes quite worse, and it simply plummets from Monserrat and Montaillou onward. So you can judge how an abysmal system works when paired with decently good content, or with abysmal content, within the same game.
An opposite example would be, again, TOEE's Hommlet: the system is great, the Hommlet area is not rushed or mechanically inadequate, and yet is just a big great turd of a chapter, in spite of the alleged 'force multiplier' (?) effect of a great system, in spite of how much said great system 'glues content and gameplay', in spite of 'all the myriads cases such a great system allegedly handled automatically', and in spite of how it 'prevents the game from going bonkers'.

Click to expand...

TOEE is an adaptation of preexisting content using a system it was built for that was never meant to support a video game (video game needs its system to be a mechanical glue that fills in not just the role of PnP RPG system but much of the GM's role as well). It's not really relevant here.
Lionheart was panned on all fronts, but one has to wonder if, if it wasn't such a mess, it couldn't have been a much better game due to less time lost on trying to salvage a pile of poo.

Anyway, good system is force multiplier, because good system MAKES content. And that doesn't merely apply to actual procedural generation systems. If your game has crime system, you get scenes where protagonist(s) have run afoul of the law essentially for free. If you have good 3D movement system on top of that (and AI that can handle it), you can have a rooftop chase scene you haven't even planned for. A system can't match real GM's creativity in handling unexpected input, but you can feed it more simulation (and it's going to be better than live GM at remembering tons of minute details). In exchange you can not only handle more unexpected situations, but you can allow yourself not expect some situations you'd otherwise need to prepare for, and can hope for sensible resolution if the content trips over itself either on its own or assisted by the player (for example by kiting enemies into one another or town).

And then there is the fact that system IS gameplay, and no matter how focused on content you are, gameplay is a nice thing to have in game and can elevate even mediocre content (DOS) or, in extreme cases, no content (roguelikes, DF).

The 'gamey' feeling people complains so much about derives exactly by a mentality like yours, that you don't think in terms of the content you want to represent, but in terms of rules, excel spreadsheets, and 'multiplier effects', whatever they are.

Click to expand...

From my experience the 'gamey' feeling derives entirely from people forgetting what abstraction actually means (see the first paragraph) and devising some aimlessly convoluted schemes that have no relation with anything they are supposed to represent - not just any specific content, but basic generic stuff.

Yeah, I seem to know what an abstraction is. The problem is, you don't seem to.
You keep confusing 'efficiency in implementing content' with 'elevating the quality of the content'. You also keep talking about re-usability, good investment, and all that, as if it had anything to do with content.
And guess what: I couldn't give less of a shit of all those factors, because what I'm paying for is the final product. In other words, I play games (which are entertainment and therefore judge on that factor), I'm not interested in being an apologist/fanboy for my favorite developers. Whether a system makes their work easier is 100% their problem, I pay in order to be entertained, not in order for their future job to be easier.
Besides, yes, you absolutely do not need to know which content you will be implementing in order to devise a system: and guess what, that will make it on average a poorer choice for abstracting specific content than a system specifically tailored to that specific content. What is laughable is that you present this as it were a good thing. Unless you mean it as a good thing in terms of convenience for the developers, which, let me repeat, I could not give less of a shit about, since I am not a fanboy but a user, and I am only interested in judging the final result for its intrinsic merits.

Anyway, I've refrained from asking for examples of what you are claiming, but since you insist that 'a good system is a force multiplier, because good system MAKES content' and you keep thinking that it applies to the quality of the content to be implemented in-game, there is no point in trying to discuss at this level.

So do convince me: pick your best system, and explain to me how it will 'force multiply', for example, Hommlet into the realm of great content. Or how the uninspired drudgery that is vanilla NWN2 would be 'force multiplied' by a better system into great content. Or... you catch my drift.