Interview Jay Barnson Interview

[VentilatorOfDoom]

Tags: Frayed Knights

<p>As the release of Frayed Knights draws nearer RPGWatch caught up with Jay "RampantCoyote" Barnson:</p>
<blockquote>
<h4>RPGWatch: Could you give us some background on what you hoped to achieve when you first began FK?</h4>
<p><strong>JB:</strong> While I can't even pretend that <em>Frayed Knights</em> is going to make much of a dent in the world of CRPGs, I guess in many ways it's part of my <em>damn-fool idealistic crusade</em> to prove a point. There's a lot of talk about how RPGs have evolved into their current incarnation --- which I feel is more like action gaming with lots of story and the trappings of character progression. I don't believe that's "evolution" so much as an attempt to find a unique selling point in the much larger action game market. I don't really want to turn the clock back to 1993 or anything, but I think the ideas and conventions of the genre from earlier eras are ripe for mining by modern, low-budget indie games. They may not be able to sell a million copies anymore, but they don't need to!</p>
<p>So besides the humor aspect, what I was really trying to capture was the feel and flavor of not only the old-school CRPGs, but also the thrill of playing dice-and-paper RPGs back in the early 80's.&nbsp; I don't know if it's possible to bottle that - or if it is, if I have one iota of the talent necessarily to make it happen - but that's what I've been going for.&nbsp; And I wanted it to be a game that would still be a fun RPG even if the humor didn't work at all.&nbsp; I've also tried to address some of the deficiencies of the genre. For example, I've tried to make picking locks and disarming traps an interesting mini-game of its own, and then I introduced the drama star system to encourage an alternative to save-scumming.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>Spotted at: <a href="http://www.rpgwatch.com/#18076">RPGWatch</a></p>

 

[Gragt]

Lockpicking minigame? Maybe it'll actually be fun and well-designed but I got a small moment of surprise when I read it. Won't that clash with the character skill design?

 

[RampantCoyote]

Only if it was implemented the way it's been done in other games that shall remain nameless here.

The lockpicking / trap disarming "minigame" is totally skill based. It's just that rather being a pass / fail dice check, there are multiple components to try and disarm, with a different difficulty & risk level. And there are different tools that can be acquired and used that change the equation.

And it's completed / failed in stages. So, if things are going poorly at the beginning of trying to disarm a trap, you could pull back and start over with a smaller chance of it going off.

And so forth.

 

[villain of the story]

So it's kind of like the Thief series? I've always liked that lockpicking is real-time and takes time in Thief, so you had to watch out while doing it and it was mechanically simple and also varied enough to keep things suspenseful.

That and another thing I've yet to see in RPGs: lockpicking sending noise events to NPCs so you actually need to be careful about it and perhaps your relevant stats playing a role in how much noise you make or whether you do it fast and loud or slow and quiet.

 

[RampantCoyote]

Not quite like like Thief. But here's how it works...

For traps, you have three sets of components - triggers, mechanisms, and payloads. To defeat the trap, you have to defeat all of the components of a particular set. Disarm all the triggers, and the trap will not fire.

Payloads are a special case in that they are not all-or-nothing... if a trap has multiple payloads (most don't, but some do), each component you disarm means that effect will not fire if the trap goes off.

Each component has three main values: Difficulty, Threat, and Stages. Difficulty is the skill check you will need to defeat it by one stage. The Stages is how many successes you need to completely disarm that component (most have 1 or 2). And "Threat" is how much the Danger level of the trap will go up when you fail.

If the trap's overall Danger Level hits 100, it goes off.

You can abort in the middle of disarming, but if you do there is a percent chance equal to the danger level that it will go off anyway. And if it doesn't go off, the trap completely resets, requiring you to start over from scratch.

Locks are just like traps, except there are no payloads.

Succeed or fail, the game runs a check to see if a group of local enemies come by while you are busy disarming their traps or picking their locks. That's the danger of trying to pick a lock 20 times until you get it right. It may be better to either find the key, or use the Drama Star ability "Fool's Luck" to make it easy.

Some other details:

On a critical success, you disarm a component by 2 stages instead of just one.
On a critical failure, the trap Danger level goes up by 2x the component's threat level.

Besides raw skill checks, there are tools - some which get used up, some of which can be used forever unless they are damaged with a critical failure. There's a slowing goo which reduces the threat level of a component. There are tools that raise your chance of success with certain kinds of components (those you break, those you jam, and those that use magic). There's the classic ten-foot pole, which allows you to perform a disarm action from a distance, which gives you a penalty to your skill check but automatically gives you a successful "dodge" check against the trap (reducing or eliminating the effect when it goes off).

 

[Shannow]

Defenestration, ten-foot pole...

Do you plan on releasing another demo? I can hardly remember what I didn't like about the last one

 

[sgc_meltdown]

inclusion of misc dungeoneering equipment like ten foot pole is incline indeed

tell me you have uses for rope

 

[RampantCoyote]

Sorry, no rope this time. Maybe Frayed Knights 2. I seriously wanted to - I mean, sheesh, it's a classic - but it didn't make an appearance this time. A lot of things got switched around when I realized I had three games' worth of material.

Yes, there will be a brand new demo. It will also feature the Temple of Pokmor Xang, like the old pilot. You may not notice a huge difference unless you've played the pilot recently. Same dungeon, some of the same jokes, but vastly improved gameplay.

And then there's the fact that the temple takes about an hour on the average to play through to the end, and the total game is taking testers 30+ hours to complete right now.