In reverse chronological order:
EvoG said:
Instead of tiny improvments, lets have broader, more appealing and obvious improvment. From leather to metal plate to ranger to power armor to enclave armor?
More subtle distinctions are necessary in a system that accounts for armour with more distinctions that just the protection it provides. For instance, the typical notion that palte armour offers far better protection, but hinders mobility and inhibits magic. If that's the case, then you need to make obvious improvement within the armor archetypes.
It's more difficult to set apart improvement, but it can still be done. Also, wasn't a good part of this discussion to do with encouraging players to make choices of their own accord, rather than just going for the higher stats? I think the general idea here should be that statistically similar items should be subtly distinguished, and for want of a better word, different "tiers" of equipment should be obviously distinguished. So for example:
Claymore (2d6), Zweihander (1d12), Bastard Sword (1d10), Dai-Katana (3d4) are all roughly equivalent, and should all look equivalent, despite obvious stylistic differences.
Claymore and Claymore +1, represent a tiered progression, and so they should share the same stylistic design, but the better of the two should be embellished in order to represent the superior craftsmanship/enchantment.
Of course, there should also be items that exist outside of this rule of thumb, just to keep things interesting, and to satisfy certain curiosities/exploration rewards.
EvoG said:
How about instead of a +5 modifier to the armour, it has a magical glow? Or when worn erupts into magical flame (resistance to cold attacks)?
I think this is a great idea, amd it's a good time to introduce another concept to this snowball.
If a player is making decisions based on something other than a clearly defined statistical comparison, then they're now developing in unintentional ways. At first, this might seem like a bad thing, since on the surface, it seems like you're wresting certain liberties of control from the player, but really, if done in parallel with a system that does allow control, it can add a great deal of flavour.
For instance, take ego weapons and cursed weapons in D&D. Both have the potential to over-ride certain elements of a characters core personality, but in doing so, provide some more compelling choice to be made. Do I pick up and swing every weapon I stumble upon, knowing that it might be cursed? If I'm under a curse, do I just do what is required to satisfy it, or do I find a way to rid myself of it?
Or to be a little more dramatic, let's say a paladin decides to wield a weapon, and it turns out to be cursed. It degrades constitution for each day the goes by without shedding innocent blood. Since that goes against all of the paladin's beliefs, he tries to grin and bear it. It gets to the point where he's a decripit husk of a paladin, and one more day would see his life end. Does he make a noble sacrifice, and let himself die, or does he start killing innocents? If he falls, all of a sudden, there's an unexpected emergent plot twist, and an oppotunity to re-evaluate his character. Does he seek redemption, or does he turn to the evil that has corrupted him?
If role-playing is only about ultimate free choice, it's boring, like Morrowind. If the game inflicts "lesser of two evils" choices on the player, then that's all part of validating the character choices you've made.
Imbecile said:
I guess what is being aimed for is a system that lets you completely ignore the stats. Its more of a hassle if people really need to know exactly how good they are, but much less of an issue if the player can simply accept that their character is what he/she is.
Lets face it, no-one is that bothered that we cant see an opponents stats, and since combat is relative you dont KNOW that you will win(although you may be able to guess more accurately). Losing the ability to see your own stats changes nothing - you will still have to guess.
That's a good way to look at it. Hiding explicit stats is neither leaving the character in the dark, nor necessarily "dumbing down." If I'm able to evaluate my opponent by non-statistical means, there no reason why I can't do that to myself, with a broader and more accurate understanding, of course.
To put another wrapper on the concept, if you're in combat, and you're making your mind up which opponent to shoot, does it matter what particular "chance to hit" values are exactly, or is the comparison more relevant? It doesn't really matter than I have 90% chance to hit this guy as opposed to 60% with that guy, if I know I'm almost certain to hit the first as opposed to the slightly above average chance I have to hit the other.
Just like a general doesn't need to sit down and have a "one-on-one get to know you session" with each and every soldier he commands in order to make effective tactical and strategic decisions, neither does a player
need to define their character with unerring accuracy.
crufty said:
My feeling is that a stat sheet is a neccessary evil, like automapping, for all but the most hard core players. It's an efficient way of presenting information about the character that could be obtained via inspection of the game world. Not saying that its not better to have a strong guy be buffer, etc...
Don't completely discount the idea of "obtaining via inspection." You start Fallout knowing only the location of Vaults 13 and 15, and part of the game is exploration and discovery. In the same way, RTS games use fog of war to good effect in making fuzzy tactical decisions. I don't necessarily know explicitly where an enemy town/base is, nor do I know what buildings it has, what defenses it has, what resource supplies it has, etc, until I find that out. But, I can make reasonable predictions, and still develop my own settlement effectively without knowing every single fact of tactical significance.
Imbecile said:
Will players, (and in particular some RPG players - who love the levelling up thrill) accept a game based on invisible stats? I think increasingly the answer is yes. I appreciate that these two examples may not be entirely appropriate, but in both Call of Duty 2, and Halo 2 there is no visible health bar. If FPSers can take this kind of uncertainty, I dont see why RPGers could not accept it on a wider scale.
Good point, but there are also some qualifiers to the systems in Halo and Call of Duty 2. Halo 2
does have a measure of shield strength, which is very important, and it is this that makes the health bar less important so it can be hidden. I haven't played Call of Duty 2, but if it follows the conventions of its predecessor, then health is largely unimportant because
any firefight has the potential to be lethal, and finding ways to avoid or minimise the chance to be shot is a core part of the gameplay.
In a game like Doom or Quake, where the player is expect to soak up a certain amount of damage, being able to measure health effectively is important, although admittedly, I prefer to play both without a status bar, and instead check it periodically in the moments where I do need to know.
EvoG said:
But once you start assigning points every other hour, modifying the character based on what you've experienced in the game or you simply changed your mind, the character becomes fuzzy, losing any of the starting idiosyncrocies that made him who he was.
This one goes both ways. I can think of quite a few games where inexperienced characters are very similar by the common ground that they're bad at nearly everything, and it's only once they have a chance to develop that they're able to blossom into an individual. There are also ways to keep a character archetype on track. There's Fallout's tags, the almost completely static SPECIAL attributes, and of course the perks.
It's only a poorly designed or overly flexible system that encourages fuzzy character definition, and so this assertion has little bearing, since a statless system also has a marked reliance on effective complementary design.
GhanBuriGhan said:
<a bunch of good logical additions and musings>
Good stuff there, but I'd like to expand on it, and say that in a game context, there's potential for abstractions beyond what's possible in reality also. For instance, to use the example of "shaking and wobbling" as a means to convey aiming skill in Deus Ex, it also provided meaningful visual abstractions, like the width of crosshairs, to represent the margin of error in shooting. It also had some other visual clues, like the representation of health on a green to red scale.
Not all visual clues have to be realistically depicted, not that I'm disagreeing with any of your ideas.
--
Anyway, my summarising of my posts in the other thread isn't really coming along in a hurry. I prefer the more organic discussion that's going on in here.