FAIL STATE INFLATION - Monocled, or degenerate?

[Infinitron]

Captain Shrek
First issue doesn't have anything to do with what I'm discussing in this post.

Second issue:

Let's call the first group Casual players and the second Hardcore players.

Haha, you know it's not that simple. In case you haven't noticed, you're on a forum filled with "Hardcore" players who spend hours arguing with each other on fundamental issues.

You're saying that what i posted is a non-issue for hardcore players. I disagree. Now, do you have anything relevant to say about it?

 

[Infinitron]

There are different kinds of "hardcore" gameplay. Save scumming perfectionists and Iron Manners both consider themselves "hardcore", but their gameplay styles couldn't be more different.

Again, do you have anything to say about what I wrote other than "lol you're a casual for even caring about this"?

 

[Grunker]

I don't think it's very interesting to discuss whether one is more "hardcore" than the other. I do think, however, it's viable to discuss which is more interesting and beneficial for gameplay. I usually reload if I fuck up or carry myself less optimally, but that's because I have the option to. Why wouldn't I? Frequently games are even balanced around me doing this exact thing - savescumming - making some games frustrating if you just stick up with every permanent injury there is.

However, some form of Ironman seems much more beneficial to gameplay. Actually having to both play with perfect "partyhealth" and also having to deal with shit gives a more varied experience. That's why I always play in Ironmanish modes if they're legitimate and not just some ultra-hard mode thrown in for perfectionists. In other words, my favourite kind of Ironman-modes are where the game is balanced around it, enforces no reload, and have difficulty-settings that are not connected to whether you're using ironman or not.

Now, you may disagree, but I think the discussion is more interesting in terms of what makes the best game, rather than what's more "hardcore."

 

[Infinitron]

I don't think it's very interesting to discuss whether one is more "hardcore" than the other. I do think, however, it's viable to discuss which is more interesting and beneficial for gameplay. I usually reload if I fuck up or carry myself less optimally, but that's because I have the option to. Why wouldn't I? Frequently games are even balanced around me doing this exact thing - savescumming - making some games frustrating if you just stick up with every permanent injury there is.

However, some form of Ironman seems much more beneficial to gameplay. Actually having to both play with perfect "partyhealth" and also having to deal with shit gives a more varied experience. That's why I always play in Ironmanish modes if they're legitimate and not just some ultra-hard mode thrown in for perfectionists. In other words, my favourite kind of Ironman-modes are where the game is balanced around it, enforces no reload, and have difficulty-settings that are not connected to whether you're using ironman or not.

Now, you may disagree, but I think the discussion is more interesting in terms of what makes the best game, rather than what's more "hardcore."

Yes, I agree that ultimately every serious CRPG player should be aspiring towards an "Ironmannish" style of play, especially on his first playthrough of a game.

If the game design supports that style of gameplay, then that helps.

 

[evdk]

So, how is the weather on your high horse, Infinitron ?

 

[Infinitron]

So, do you have any solution, or are we just philosoraptoring here?

Just philosoraptoring. I haven't thought deeply on the matter of solutions.

I'd like to think that making traditional "failure situations" less punishing isn't the only way to solve this problem, though.

Another method is to just make the game so goddamned hard that you basically have no chance of getting through fights without a bloody nose, even after dozens of reloads. I'm thinking here of levels in Frozen Synapse. When I started playing that game's campaign, I actually tried to go for a zero casualties approach at first. I didn't last long.

But, that game gives you a fresh new squad on each mission, so your failure to keep your men alive doesn't matter in the long run. So, it's simultaneously more and less forgiving.

 

[Infinitron]

Since a lot of people have trouble accepting the notion of regenerating health, another method of increasing survivability would be to make FLEEING combat a more prominent tactic in the game. Is a character about to die? Make it easier for such a character to run away from combat before he gets finished off, and encourage the player to do this.

 

[GaffQ]

Or abolish combat altogether. Video games should teach our children to solve their conflicts peacefully.

 

[Rpgsaurus Rex]

I'd divide CRPG "gameplay" into 3 categories: puzzles, dialogue and combat. For now, ignore other aspects where the concept of "failure/success" doesn't apply (e.g. exploration).

Puzzles: never leave the player permanently stuck because he took the wrong path, or force him to reload. It's tolerable and even exciting in adventure games, but really sucks in cRPGs where puzzles shouldn't really be anything more than a fun and brainy distraction.

Dialogue: allow failure if the player acts stupid (e.g. acting cocky with an arrogant and powerful wizard). However, make all sensible options lead to interesting or at least non-dead-end conclusions. Case in point: bounty taker in BG1 in Nashkel. He takes you for someone else (another bounty hunter) when you first meet him, and you can take that man's reward if you lie. However, by doing so you are shooting yourself in the foot because the ruse will get discovered no matter what and you'll lose out on a future reward. This is bad - BG2 is also known for punishing you for being evil (not hurr durr evil - punishment for stupidity is allowed). Introduce "karma", or "virtue" (like the famous mod") to punish player indirectly for being a bad boy if that's your thing - but don't make carrot-and-stick so obvious.

Combat: allow failure and reloads, always. Give enemies petrify, insta-kill, party-wipe abilities, whatever - it introduces an element of risk which not only makes it fun, it also adds tactical depth (so playing defensive is viable now - introduces lots of new options as opposed as opposed to "wipe them out quickly, we can't lose anyway"). Most fun I've had in cRPGs was prolonged fights where I lost party members, ressurected them, survived continued assaults and persevered eventually, as opposed. FTL (yeah, it gets a lot of flak here, and it's not a cRPG proper) got the final boss fight right.

Remove saving in combat - so you can't play brainless roulette like savescumming in JA2. Allow for different routes to victory, so reloading doesn't become a chore and you can try new stuff if your first attempt at blunt force fails.

 

[PorkaMorka]

Save scumming and the desire for a perfect run combined with the fear of skipping content to destroy the potential of the cRPG genre and turn it into a genre for autists and/or people suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder.

The classic CRPG formula tends to play as follows; the player will explore every tile on the map (or clear every inch of shroud), the player will complete every possible quest, the player will search every barrel for loot and the player will exterminate every monster. Reloading will be used to achieve a perfect run where the player never suffers any permanent losses or setbacks unless they are mandated by the plot. The player's four characters will kill 5,000 monsters while suffering zero losses themselves. The player characters will grow in power after almost every encounter. The result is a sterile and tedious exercise in task completion, not an adventure. Play the later Avernum games to experience the banality of the cRPG formula laid bare.

Pen and paper roleplaying games do not play like this at all. Pen and paper roleplaying games do not have a concept of reloading, unless the DM has failed very badly. Instead of perfect success and a hard failure state, P&P has many intermediate states of partial success and partial failure, because the DM is capable of adjusting difficulty on the fly to maintain a good challenge without wiping the party unless they "deserve it" because of poor play.

In pen and paper roleplaying, resting is often sharply curtailed, so that the party is worn down by each successive encounter. In p&p, consumable items take on greater importance because of the high level of challenge, so a party may end up losing resources after an encounter. In p&p death is often permanent, because the best adventures take place at lower levels. Losing a player character is a setback, but hardly the end of the world like it would be in a cRPG. In (traditional) p&p, parties are often much larger than four characters, due to henchmen, hirelings, large parties and people playing multiple characters. So the death of a character does not immediately diminish the party's power by 25%, forcing a reload. You just roll a new character who is a level lower than the old one and he joins up at an appropriate time. In pen and paper you rarely have to repeat boring content, like you do when you play a cRPG on ironman.

Pen and paper roleplaying games are a lot like Blood Bowl. Sometimes you win and make a lot of money. Sometimes you get badly beaten up and lose a star player character. Either way, there are permanent consequences and you can end up weaker than you were three games adventures ago. The risk and the high stakes just add to the tension.

Computer roleplaying games are an obsessive compulsive exercise in task completion. Scour the map, make sure you haven't missed anything. Pen and paper roleplaying games are an adventure. You're not trying for a perfect run or farming encounters for experience, the game is too challenging for that. You're just trying to complete the mission/get the treasure and make it out alive. Exploration, creative solutions and encounter avoidance are big parts of the game, not just combat.

Earlier games can be forgiven for their adherence to the cRPG formula, because computing power just wasn't very high. If you mess around with FRUA you will see that the developers of the Gold Box games were pretty limited in what they could include. But the fact that the genre never evolved beyond the formula means that it kind of deserved to die. Other genres (strategy games for example) are just so much more ambitious.

 

[evdk]

But table top RPGs fail states are mitigated by the DM, you cannot really compare it to CRPGs.

 

[Rpgsaurus Rex]

PorkaMorka

No one forces you to be an OCD guy and explore every inch of the map, in any of the KKK esteemed RPGs. You can breeze through Fallouts, Arcanums and ignore most of the content etc. for your "adventure". In fact, that's what they are balanced for, normally - an OCD guy who does every side-quest will probably find his games far too easy.

If you feel like single-player RPGs are inherently lacking compared to PnP games, you're better off waiting until they invent an AI that can DM for you.

 

[Crooked Bee]

In pen and paper roleplaying, resting is often sharply curtailed, so that the party is worn down by each successive encounter. In p&p, consumable items take on greater importance because of the high level of challenge, so a party may end up losing resources after an encounter. In p&p death is often permanent, because the best adventures take place at lower levels. Losing a player character is a setback, but hardly the end of the world like it would be in a cRPG. In (traditional) p&p, parties are often much larger than four characters, due to henchmen, hirelings, large parties and people playing multiple characters. So the death of a character does not immediately diminish the party's power by 25%, forcing a reload. You just roll a new character who is a level lower than the old one and he joins up at an appropriate time. In pen and paper you rarely have to repeat boring content, like you do when you play a cRPG on ironman.

I've no P&P experience, but that sounds a lot like the original Wizardries, where even losing most of your party is just a temporary setback (not only can you, and the game encourages you to, hire new recruits, but you can also create rescue parties for the players you lose inside the dungeon). The game doesn't assume you're going to reload (even if we set aside the fact there is no way to reload in Wizardry), it assumes you will manage your resources differently and more carefully - and your characters are just a resource to you, among other resources.

Another CRPG that did the same thing, and even better than Wizardry, is Dark Heart of Uukrul - you didn't have to repeat any "boring content" there because the dungeon "chunks" were small and you could quickly catch up on the lost progress with your new hirelings/backup party.

I guess those early games were really intent on recreating the kind of P&P experience you speak of. Too bad that kind of thing still hasn't evolved properly, due to the laziness of CRPG designers worldwide.

 

[GaffQ]

PorkaMorka
No one forces you to be an OCD guy

It's the OCD that forces him to be an OCD guy. That's why they call it obsessive-compulsive disorder.

 

[Saduj]

The real problem I see is that player actions in most games can be immediately identified as positive or negative.

I think crpgs would be more interesting if quest outcomes weren't so obviously pass/fail. In real life, people lie and deceive all the time and you often don't find out about it until well after the fact. If you're trying to play peacemaker in a given situation, whether or not you've succeeded shouldn't be immediately obvious. Faction A can tell you they aren't going to fuck with Faction B anymore when you are trying to play peacekeeper. But they may just be telling you what you want to hear and waiting for you to leave. When you come back later, you find out Faction A completely wiped out Faction B. And not only that, but they will smile in your face and deny doing so if you confront them about it. Its unrealistic that people are going to tell you the truth all the time or that they are going to tell you ahead of time that they plan on doing something nasty after you fail at diplomacy.

The immediate results of combat should be obvious: Someone wins and someone loses. But the long term consequences of removing other beings from the game world shouldn't be immediately obvious.

That won't stop people from reading walkthroughs or going back to an old save game and replaying X many hours of the game in order to achieve a desired outcome. But that's not really my problem if they do.

 

[tuluse]

I'm one of those players who pretty much always reloaded when a character died in BG1/2 (unless I had a resurrection spell on hand). I generally save scum liberally too. The weird thing is that I don't really enjoy save scumming. Yet on the other hand, I rarely rest-scummed. I would always try to limit my resting to just once or twice per dungeon. Sometimes I would even larp and make myself leave the dungeon before resting. I like the increasing difficulty that comes from dealing with resource exhaustion, but once I've solved the current challenge or mission or however you want to define it, I like everything to reset for the next one.

And yet, I still like the idea of permadeath, it lets me know when I've really fucked up.

 

[Cromwell]

If were already cmparing to PnP, its not just that you cant do everything the right way, since there is mostly no right way, you cant even know what other ways there are. So for RPGs that would mean you have to create situations where a player is forced to choose what to do only in regards to what he thinks its his way, not in regards to whats the outcome. Good design would be that a player can guess a outcome but not definetly know it. Of course that only goes for story choices and the like not for coombat since there the outcome is obvious.

For combat I dont think its a very good idea for a developer to cater to players who abuse savegames, It would only water down the experience for players who wouldnt do that and its regardless of difficulty possible to abuse saves. Since its the player who does it its not the developers fault that it happens, he should stick to what he envisioned, what the combat in his mind has tobe, what the story has to be etc, if players find that to hard they can abuse saves, they can cheat otherwise or simply refuse to buy it.

A game should be designed for the audience the designer wants to cater to, if you cater to the masses thats fine if you say you would be delighted to cater to hardcore but sadly the masses are not hardcore enough for your product so you cater to them youre a fucking douchebag.

I'm no gamedesigner, I write things from time to time, and I write them the way I want them to be, if people read it I'm very happy, if people use a dictionary or read up on second literature to understand what im talking about im also happy. I simply cannot be happy with something I wrote if i have in mind that I could do better, but I am forbidden because of some "design for a greater mass" rule. Its not bad design just because people dont want to learn it. You design Games, not people, If you start to cateer to heavy to them you could never create what you wanted in the first place, that takes away your artist badge and gives you the slave badge.


Of course this way of thinking doesnt include the necessity to actually sell your games to make more.

 

[Arkadin]

I suck badly at most types of games, so my opinion matters little, but I occasionally just wish a game would tell me: by the way, I'm balanced around savescumming, or by the way, I'm balanced around you resting every time you fight someone. As I said, I suck at games, but I originally tried to rest so seldom during the Icewind Dales and ToEE that I was just handicapping myself...My idea was that this was like playing DnD with friends, where resting wasn't really needed all that often, but I was wrong because these games are more balanced around having a lot of health and a full complement of spells. So yeah, you do have to get used to how games as a whole, within certain eras, and also are individually built before you can learn to play the way that provides the best pace for you. Sometimes this feels worth it, sometimes it doesn't. I personally would prefer less needing to reload, but either way is fine if the game is well-designed.

 

[Lautreamont]

Why can't more cRPGs just let us select an enforced perma death or no-save mode at the start of a new game? Mount & Blade's "realistic mode" worked beautifully and I don't see why we can't have something similar in Wasteland 2 or Chaos Chronicles.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

The real problem I see is that player actions in most games can be immediately identified as positive or negative.

I think crpgs would be more interesting if quest outcomes weren't so obviously pass/fail. In real life, people lie and deceive all the time and you often don't find out about it until well after the fact. If you're trying to play peacemaker in a given situation, whether or not you've succeeded shouldn't be immediately obvious. Faction A can tell you they aren't going to fuck with Faction B anymore when you are trying to play peacekeeper. But they may just be telling you what you want to hear and waiting for you to leave. When you come back later, you find out Faction A completely wiped out Faction B. And not only that, but they will smile in your face and deny doing so if you confront them about it. Its unrealistic that people are going to tell you the truth all the time or that they are going to tell you ahead of time that they plan on doing something nasty after you fail at diplomacy.

Heh, Fallout 3 does this with the Tenpenny Tower quest. Caused much butthurt, iirc.

 

[Cromwell]

Heh, Fallout 3 does this with the Tenpenny Tower quest. Caused much butthurt, iirc.

They did? Only played it a few hours but didnt the tenpenny guy straight out say he will blow the settlement to pieces?

 

[sea]

I think manipulating fail states and players' perceptions of them is a key part of the weaponry in a designer's arsenal.

This is why complex game mechanics and systems are a good thing, not a bad thing. More complex mechanics usually lead to more complex and variable fail states which tend to depend upon how anal a player wants to be about them. This phenomenon can be exploited to create scenarios where there are multiple possible outcomes and players will then be able to decide how difficult they want the game to be rather than being saddled with an experience they feel is too hard or too easy.

Difficulty levels are only a small part of this equation. Consider the way achievements can be used to encourage players to take paths through the game they might not otherwise, such as, say, a "no deaths" run. This is easily extended to "hardcore mode" rules with stiffer punishments for failure that are imposed mechanically, "ironman mode" gameplay where failure is absolute, and so on.

However, take a look at how many RPG quests are handled - while it's lazy to provide the player just one or two options, sometimes designers give players less binary outcomes. For example, perhaps the player needs to liberate a town from bandits. With some effort, the player may be able to defeat the enemies before they do any damage to the town's inhabitants, and a special reward will be given on top of it, or even just some extra acknowledgement. Players who don't work as hard as they can to achieve "perfect" results won't really care one way or the other and may not notice the extra reward is there, while players who manage to do it will feel as if the game acknowledged them.

One specific example from a game takes place early in Deus Ex where the player encounters a group of civilians being held hostage in a subway. It's possible to rush in guns blazing, and if you are lucky, the hostages may survive. The more rewarding path, and more challenging as far as exploration and ingenuity goes, is to search outside the subway for a vent that takes you inside through the back, allowing you to free the hostages without the enemies even noticing - you get a different response from your peers as a result of your actions, which affects your perceptions of them and may make you examine them differently later in the story.

Neverwinter Nights 2 has the semi-famous Crossroad Keep siege, and it's the same sort of idea but stretched out over half a game instead - you can get by with minimal effort but suffer heavy losses, or do all the side-quests and build all the upgrades in order to defeat the enemies much more handily. I really, really like this example because even though it's not fully exploited (the outcome of the battle doesn't matter too much), it gives you an ongoing sense of agency over the story and incorporates the free-form questing and exploration into a much larger and coherent picture.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Heh, Fallout 3 does this with the Tenpenny Tower quest. Caused much butthurt, iirc.

They did? Only played it a few hours but didnt the tenpenny guy straight out say he will blow the settlement to pieces?

No, that's the Megaton quest. The Tenpenny Tower quest is about solving a conflict between the inhabitants of the tower and a group of sane ghouls who aren't allowed inside. You can either do what Tenpenny wants and kill the ghouls, or be the goody-two shoes diplomat and convince the people who live there that not all ghouls are insane zombies (alternatively, you can make the inhabitants want to leave by robbing them, threatening them, etc). If you convince humans and ghouls to buddy up and sing kumbayah around the campfire, you'll leave satisfied with your optimal solution, one step closer to sainthood and the Maximum Good Karma achievement.

Come back some time later, and all the humans (except Burke, the bomb guy) will be dead, their naked bodies stuffed in the basement. The ghoul leader will just tell you that shit happens. The kicker? Killing him in a fit of butthurt (your save prior to this quest was most likely a long time ago) will net you negative karma, because he's non-hostile to you

Shame you can just go to Megaton or Rivet city and give a few bottles of water to the hobos to make up for the lost karma.

 

[Papa Môlé]

You're playing a CRPG with permadeath. You're engaged in a pitched battle against a large orc horde. Everything is going reasonably well, until suddenly, a few of their warriors get lucky rolls and your fighter and cleric both go down. You now face the challenge of having to dispatch the rest of the horde with just your thief and mage. Pretty cool, huh?

Oh wait, you can just reload a saved game instead. Phew, challenge averted!

Unless of course, you're a bad ass Iron Man player who just Deals With It, even though he's just permanently lost a fighter and a cleric who he invested hundreds of hours of game time in.

Traditional RPG status quo: Good for save scummers, good for elite-level Iron Manners, not as good for everyday ordinary average CRPGers.

Does that mean every CRPG needs to be made less punishing? No. But it does mean it's an approach worth exploring (without resorting to the excessive dumbing down and removal of consequences seen in AAA console RPGs)

See, normally in real life you are "punished" for failing a task or attempting to break rules. In RPGs, you are very often punished solely because God Hates You, as in the above example. Randomness in RPGs has a lot of good qualities as far as preventing static gameplay goes, however losing characters you've put hours upon hours leveling up, and if TT, writing back-stories for or whatever to a lucky shot by a low-level mook has never been one of them. There's no realistic way you can plan for these sorts of situations, which mans the Iron Manner rationalization of claiming you should be ready for anything doesn't work in a game so heavily based on dice rolls.

Think of it like being married to your characters. In one scenario, you "invest" tons of time into your marriage so it works and your family is happy, but then one day your wife is hit by a drunk driver while walking on a sidewalk. Should you just emotionally Deal With It?, should you have tried to imagine very possibly way you could have prevented it which still wouldn't work? Now, in another scenario imagine you were married and things were going pretty well but then one day you lost your temper and beat your wife pretty badly. She divorces you and you lose your kids. Now this is a more acceptable form of "punishment" because it was based on your actions and is something you could ostensibly have prevented. Sure, lots of people still wouldn't accept it as their fault but there is no way you can actually accept the first scenario as your fault without being delusional. The old "you walk into a room and/or look at this object and are now dead with no save"-trap is another type of situation that is almost entirely random, while not being based on dice rolls, but is still common in older RPGs.

While we are on the example of marriage though I have a feeling a lot of people don't accept their character dying in RPGs, especially these days, because they don't want to miss the dialogue options and character development. Most games don't use random mercs for party members, they use characters so the player gets attached. From a developer standpoint, if you let the party members die easily and then punish reloading as well, that's basically wasted content you have. Not to mention all that money spent on voicing acting for that party member that won't get experienced by the player now so the game could look hardcore to a small niche segment, most of whom reloads anyway.

 

[Roguey]

then yes it should be balanced to account for that.

Balancing by removing any chance of such a failure. Fuck yeah, Sawyer balances.

Such a thing can still happen if you make a series of bad decisions with short-term consequences e.g. health in Project Eternity.

Also, fuck the majority of players and Sawyer together with them. Majority is the lowest common denominator. I don't see why I should accept games targeted at the lowest common denominator.

The majority of players aren't the lowest common denominator. There are a lot of people out there who have no interest in RPGs, likewise a lot of people who have no interest in playing a party-based RPG, whether it be turn-based or real-time. When it comes to making games for people who enjoy party-based RPG combat, one should make that as enjoyable as possible for the biggest portion of that audience (unless you're independent with a shoestring budget, in which case, knock yourself out making a game strictly for your tastes). By watching them play, tuning, and seeing if they enjoy the changes, of course, not by listening to them.