How much explicit info do you need?

[Mangoose]

I'm having a funny discussion in another subforum. Would you enjoy playing a game such as the following?:

Imagine a D&D game where you weren't allowed to know anything about the combat mechanics. Every spell requires you to cast it 5 or 10 times to figure out exactly how strong it is against which monster and the peculiarities of the spell's effects. Every weapon requires you to fight multiple fights before even figuring out how useful it was.

 

[dibens]

google

 

[Morkar Left]

No, I wouldn't enjoy it at all. Knowing the rules allows you to judge the surrounding in a rpg like you can judge it in real live. E.g. I assume that a fighter knows how effective different weapons are in different situations. A typical mage knows at least theoretically what is possible and where he stands on the full spectrum of magic abilities.

I remember a small magic/rpg-system from Germany called Saga (not the dice system) where you really had to research spells by trying and guessing and then actually creating them. It was completely based on spontaneous/free casting. You choose a magic effect you want to accomplish and according on how much you knew about the system you could formulate the spell and guess how difficult it could be. Failing a spell could easily let you explode or other things. To cast a typical fireball there were actually different solutions; you could "simply" heat up the air, you could cast it from an elemental plane, you could inflate the destination point with highly explosive gas and just create a small flame etc.
There were lots of modificators located in a pentagram which allowed the dm to determine the difficulty. Or the mage if he had enough knowledge about the particular things.

 

[Mangoose]

That... You should totally copy into the thread about magic. And/or the PE thread.

 

[Phelot]

While it might not be necessary to overly feed the player with how much blunt damage was absorbed due to resistance to blunt damage, it shouldn't be a gimmick which I fear it would be. "LULZ turns out the Omega Boss can only be harmed by Astral magic, but we aren't going to give any indication of that fact in game"

I mean, I'm ok with making the player connect the dots in a situation like, say, a fire demon being resistant to fire, but I don't really see how this can be made into a "feature." For that matter, unless we're talking about weirdo metaphysical/divine/every-spellname-is-in-Latin I don't really see how it would take long to figure out what "Ice Bolt" is going to do.

 

[Morkar Left]

That... You should totally copy into the thread about magic. And/or the PE thread.

Point me to it, please. And what exactly of my post is that repeat-worthy?

 

[spectre]

I am actually quite anal about rules. I can live with a degree of randomness, but I like to make my decisions based on something conrete (like knowing the dice pool used for the rolls).
Full rule obfuscation i pnp rpgs is nice and all, but it largely boils down to "how much do I trust the game master". Definitely not something I would do with random people, because it's very easy to cross the line whne the player feels that his input doesn't ,atter and it's all about the GM's interpretation.

What the Op's describing could work in a very obscure setting, where feeling your way arund the place is an integral part of the experience. but, as with all pnp scenarios, it's all about the group and what THEY want. It certainly is demanding with regards to GM skills. You need to balance the unknown wit a set of basic principles your team can depend on, otherwise there's danger that it degenerates into random lulz. Achieving that is an art form, imo.

 

[Average Manatee]

CPing from the thread my response to his response:

Imagine a D&D game where you weren't allowed to know anything about the combat mechanics. Every spell requires you to cast it 5 or 10 times to figure out exactly how strong it is against which monster and the peculiarities of the spell's effects. Every weapon requires you to fight multiple fights before even figuring out how useful it was. Such a game would be a joke. Yet because GW2 is an MMO, a genre with earth-shatteringly low standards, this is accepted by the player base.

Someone never played Morrowind.

Do you even play CRPGs?

Also that would be a fine fucking game. You act like it's a chore to experiment, when I enjoy it.

Three Points:

1. Morrowind is not a PvP game. Rules in PvP need to be much more rigidly defined than a single player game. If I go outside and play a sport with a friend, we hardly need a few hundred pages of rules and referees to go with it. So there is a lower standard in the first place. Morrowind can be about exploration, but a PvP game has to be clear about the rules of the match.

2. Morrowind still gave a lot more information on most things. All I can think of that was not well-defined was the to-hit formula and the formulas for various misc things like spellcrafting and alchemy. Things like spell effects? All right there and well defined. The difference is that in Morrowind you can figure out how to-hit works in the first 5 mins and then the combat is completely understandable. For GW2 you have to figure out each and every individual skill for each class to understand the combat.

3. GW1 had detailed skill descriptions. GW2 does not. The TES series has always similar mechanics, it isn't breaking any traditions here by hiding anything new in Morrowind. Imagine how bad (worse...) Fallout 3 would be if all skills were hidden so that you could only raise them randomly through stats. That surely wouldn't be hated by the codex, no siree.

Hiding game mechanics isn't a horrible idea in games that aren't PvP focused. The problem is really when you start to hide skill mechanics, especially in PvP games. Game mechanics can be understood once and applied universally to a game. Skill mechanics have to be learned one by one and may become obsolete at any time throughout the game.

 

[taxalot]

I dislike hand-holding pretty much as a religion. The less I know, the more stuff I will be given to figure out by myself, the more there is to love. I learnt how to play Chess being 6 years old, launching Battle Chess on my 286 and clicking at random places to see when it worked and when it didn't work.

Same thing goes for games. Even if it's obscure at first, the feeling of being smart as fuck when you DO get it is pretty much priceless.

I am saddened by the Codex giving in to the bells&whistles of in game indicators. I do not care if a sword hits for 34 points or 35 ; I just want to see it hurt pretty bad, and that is pretty easy to figure out if the same enemy goes down quicker with the same weapon. I like my immersion ; how immersive is it to compare two swords and say "oh hey, this fire one does 2D4+2 _BUT_ my halberd is already doing 1D12. " What the fuck, really ?

I thought you guys were men.

 

[Undead Phoenix]

As long as the ganeworld is logical and consistent, then it is a very good thing indeed.


Of course, that is ignoring just how difficult it is to create a logical, consistent gameworld.

 

[Daemongar]

Spell effect vs. creatures: most games already do this. A little mentioned feature in Arcanum was the familiarity with creatures that went up as you fought more. You may want to check it out.

Figuring spell mechanics as you go along: well, there are games that let you experiment with mechanics, such as The Summoning, and Arx Fatalis. I guess it would come down to implementation and the exact spell casting mechanism the game uses.

With weapons, I would like this, as I always thought identify spells and the mechanics of them in D&D games was a little cheap. The understanding of a weapon shouldn't be a complete mystery, though. Hammers are obviously more effective vs certain armors than swords. Fighter types would know the rough damage type and ranges for certain weapons, but some may be more effective in practice. Like in pnp D&D, a magic sword would look better, feel lighter, etc. A keen weapon would feel and look sharp. A Flametongue sword, well, there is no reason you'd have to identify this: the damn sword is on fire! However, this mechanic would be a pain if cursed items were included, but that could be a feature...

 

[Fowyr]

So you want roguelike identify mechanics (DCSS even don't give you a weapon stats until you fight some time with it) but without identify. Been there, done that. Was bored to death trying to making tables with quantity of hits, needed to kill random monster #456776.

 

[flabbyjack]

The suggestion reminds me of games with abstract or unexplained game mechanisms. But typically it ends up as a gimmick(The Void) or it just don't make sense

 

[Destroid]

It's not an uncommon roguelike feature. Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup and Brogue come to mind, so you can see how this works first hand.

 

[J1M]

A character should know the relative strength of his own abilities. It is acceptable to obscure the exact details of an opponent until a lore check or an autopsy is completed.

 

[Deadeye Dragoon]

Basic damage should be given per spell/weapon, as well as multiplyers. But the problem here is really divided:

1. In 1-player games, experimentation also has a reload function to get you aware that a particular weapons is useful/useless (if you fucking died from using a twig on a werewolf etc). Plus 1-player games are relatively balanced.

2. In MMOs, knowledge of ultimate game mechanics leads to shittyness. At least for me; my best MMO experiences have been in early Everquest and WoW when no one had a Thottbot or Arenajunkies to tell them what they should use. Thus it was purely a new experience and not a crunchfest.

If there comes a "best" setup to use, munchkins (of which I've been too) will use it, if the game is that competitive. In single player RPGs, one can get away with using a .223 pistol all game even if it's not the statistical best, and win. In an MMO, one cannot use an inferior weapon/stat/class against other humans.

To your OP alone, I'd enjoy that game, as long as I had reloads in order to learn the mechanics.

 

[TheNizzo]

I recall playing a MUD with similar mechanics - you'd see a monster described based on a lore check of some sort, and it would only be explicitly named if you had heard that name before from an NPC or reach a certain threshold of lore. There were similar checks for spellcasting and equipment ID (the NPCs could identify equipment but not always reveal certain hidden stats). Every time you repeated the check you'd get an additional +1 bonus to the roll, so you could brute-force repeatable ID checks and monsters' stats and abilities would be gradually revealed over time.

I don't know how well any of this would work in the current era of rampant datamining, though. At least for something that would garner a decent following.

 

[EG]

When I was younger, I wanted to make a post-nuclear survival MUD, purely in text, with all stats obfuscated by descriptors . . . It would be a truly frustrating experience, encouraging the use of cheats to glimpse behind the fucking curtain.

 

[DraQ]

I'm having a funny discussion in another subforum. Would you enjoy playing a game such as the following?:

Imagine a D&D game where you weren't allowed to know anything about the combat mechanics. Every spell requires you to cast it 5 or 10 times to figure out exactly how strong it is against which monster and the peculiarities of the spell's effects. Every weapon requires you to fight multiple fights before even figuring out how useful it was.

You mean like Lands of Lore 1?


The idea makes no sense. Even if you don't know the numbers, formulae or exact mechanics, you can still, in character, examine various properties of objects - for example how sharp the sword is, how balanced, how heavy, quality of craftsmanship, wear, ergonomics, shape and length of the blade, material, etc. and infer how well it would work in a fight and how to best use it. If the game doesn't communicate this information your character is supposed to know - not necessarily in form of clear numbers and formulae, mind you, and not necessarily covering implicit interesting effects of stuff - it's just plain broken.

The only way it could make sense is if your character had absolutely no knowledge of the world. And I don't mean amnesia, I mean no muscle memory no implicit expectation of the laws of physics, no nothing.

It applies to spells too - if you cast something you can generally expect to know what the fuck you're doing, what the fuck are you, an escaped wizard's familiar trying to mimic stuff that worked?

Actually, that would be an interesting idea for a game and would explain PC's lack of rudimentary knowledge, but otherwise, in a general case, no - not knowing what the fuck you're doing sucks.

 

[oscar]

You should have exactly as much knowledge as your character could reasonably have. So you shouldn't have to guess spell effects that a first year wizard's apprentice knows off by heart in a universe where magic and wizards are fairly common or whether your fighter is better fighting with a sword and shield or if he's a skilled marksman with a longbow.

 

[wormix]

Why not fill in the information in the spell description as things are discovered. When you first get a spell, it's the bare bones description (does some fire damage), as you use it more and more, information is added (does about 20 damage and lights flesh on fire) and padded out eventually leading to a complete description. This way you get both the experimentation aspect, but the game also eventually tells you whats going on so you don't have to remember every single detail about every spell (similar to monster manuals in Roguelikes)

You could do a similar thing with base items and magical items. Detect magic tells you if an item is magical, but that's about it.

I think any system like this is better for single character games rather than party games however.

 

[markec]

One thing I really liked in Battlespire was lack of information about magic items. You had to use them to find out what they do, and then you had two problems. First was that using a magic item greatly decreases its durability and you could not fix you stuff and in most cases you only got a small icon (which marked that magic spell is active) on top of the screen which told you nothing about what it does. Only way to find out what which magic effect does was to find scrolls of lore scattered trough the game. I loved this because it added to the atmosphere of being lost in a hostile environment.

 

[DraQ]

You should have exactly as much knowledge as your character could reasonably have. So you shouldn't have to guess spell effects that a first year wizard's apprentice knows off by heart in a universe where magic and wizards are fairly common or whether your fighter is better fighting with a sword and shield or if he's a skilled marksman with a longbow.

This.

I have nothing against not knowing what unidentified items exactly do.

I also support embedding as much information as possible into presentation and not showing the exact numerical values when possible.

Gradually filled textual descriptions are nice, it would also be nice to have space for player's notes attached to each spell, item, ability, etc.

 

[Haba]

Would you enjoy playing a game such as the following?

Yes, that's the way I roll. When you stab someone with a knife in real life, do you get feeback in the form of numbers? You either miss, are not able to penetrate, cause a shallow wound, cause a serious wound or kill the guy with a single hit. If you get full feedback, the opponent cannot pretend getting wounded, for example.

Shallow level of feedback is more than enough, if the rest of the mechanics support them (no hp bloat, no grinding, reasonable trash mob count).

 

[CorpseZeb]

Probably not the best example, but... Two Worlds 2. Of course, game tells you exactly, what type of damage your weapon has, so theres no mystery at all, but even if you don't bother to look at statistic, in the practice you'll see immediately difference between a sword and a mace versus certain opponents (game incorporate natural knowledge about how swords works with flesh/meat and mace with bones/shields).