DraQ
Arcane
It's finally the day - you may think - this DraQ guy might have seemed resonable at first, but he is from TESF, after all, and we know, oh too well, that they all want RPGs become oblibians. Moreso, he's fucking furry! DIE HERETIC!
Unfortunately it's not so simple. The minigames in oblibians sucked a big time.
First, the success rate depended on player's skill - you could easily twitch any lock open with a single lockpick at any skill level, which rendered character skill irrelevant.
Second, the persuasion minigame had absolutely no connection with the act of persuasion which effectively broke the immersion (immersion as opposed to immershun is desirable in RPGs).
Third, the game stopped during the minigames eliminating any reason for even having such thing as lockpicking minigame.
Let me present you with two examples of games with well done minigames:
Wizardry 8 - an RPG/dungeon crawl
System Shock 2 - RPG tinted FPS/survival horror
In Wizardry 8 there were two kinds of minigames - lockpicking and disarming traps.
Lockpicking involved clicking on tumblers that could result in either locking them in proper position or not, depending on character's skill.
Disarming traps required identifying trap by clicking on the "examine trap" button, where degree of success varied according to character's skill, and disarming the individual components by clicking on them, with success being again determined by character's skill.
System shock featured several variants of a single minigame used for various technical tasks. Basically player had to sucessfully light three nodes in a row by clicking on them. Whether an individual node went light or dark depended on character's skill and various dificulty modifiers. There were also special dangerous nodes where failure caused some very undesirable effect, like destruction of the item.
What we immediately notice is that none of the minigames featured in both games relied on player skill. They did require attention, however and were performed in real time which was especially important in SS2 where you could often be attacked when you focused on performing some technical task.
Therefore I propose that the minigames may be present in RPGs if success depends solely on character's skill and they play the role of an attention sink forcing player to divert attention from the surroundings of their character/party.
Discuss!
Unfortunately it's not so simple. The minigames in oblibians sucked a big time.
First, the success rate depended on player's skill - you could easily twitch any lock open with a single lockpick at any skill level, which rendered character skill irrelevant.
Second, the persuasion minigame had absolutely no connection with the act of persuasion which effectively broke the immersion (immersion as opposed to immershun is desirable in RPGs).
Third, the game stopped during the minigames eliminating any reason for even having such thing as lockpicking minigame.
Let me present you with two examples of games with well done minigames:
Wizardry 8 - an RPG/dungeon crawl
System Shock 2 - RPG tinted FPS/survival horror
In Wizardry 8 there were two kinds of minigames - lockpicking and disarming traps.
Lockpicking involved clicking on tumblers that could result in either locking them in proper position or not, depending on character's skill.
Disarming traps required identifying trap by clicking on the "examine trap" button, where degree of success varied according to character's skill, and disarming the individual components by clicking on them, with success being again determined by character's skill.
System shock featured several variants of a single minigame used for various technical tasks. Basically player had to sucessfully light three nodes in a row by clicking on them. Whether an individual node went light or dark depended on character's skill and various dificulty modifiers. There were also special dangerous nodes where failure caused some very undesirable effect, like destruction of the item.
What we immediately notice is that none of the minigames featured in both games relied on player skill. They did require attention, however and were performed in real time which was especially important in SS2 where you could often be attacked when you focused on performing some technical task.
Therefore I propose that the minigames may be present in RPGs if success depends solely on character's skill and they play the role of an attention sink forcing player to divert attention from the surroundings of their character/party.
Discuss!