Opinions on this system idea?

[chzr]

It's fine, but there's nothing there to distinguish it from any other traditional system. I certainly wouldn't use it in a PnP game because it does nothing to support interesting play - but for a bog-standard cRPG ... I guess it's fine. Unexciting, but fine.

 

[PandaBreeder]

First, what is to suggest that it would not be more rewarding? Splitting the intelligence attributes should only be done if the designer can ensure that such a separation is more rewarding. Otherwise, it is a superficial addition to make the game look more detailed than it is.

My point is that undue complexity isn't just a matter of how information is presented to the player, but can also harm things such as game balance, among others. I'm all up for game designers taking advantage of a computer's ability to make split-second calculations, but complexity for complexity's sake isn't good game design.

 

[bhlaab]

Right now your major thing seems to be splitting Smarts/Savvy, but to me that doesn't sound all that different than the typical Intelligence/Wisdom

 

[SkepticsClaw]

I probably agree with denisizi on this one. It's simplistic to say that the underlying mechanics can be 'complex' but the interface 'simple', because there will be factors the player is not immediately aware of operating that do not serve to increase the fun of the game, do not provide any further game choices, but instead are basically mathematical fluff only serve to muddy the intuitive strategic and tactical elements of gameplay.

I see no particular reason to use the full might of a computer to design a hugely complicated system in which inertia, angles, sharpness of weapon, muscle fatigue and so on are calculated in minute detail, when a simplified abstraction is both more transparent to the player and far easier for the developer to balance and control. Thousands of extraneous variables make for bloated, over-complicated game systems that are far more susceptible to bugs, balance issues, and usually provide no more *meaningful* choice to the player than a simple abstraction would.

I would prefer to see a greater breadth and variety of actions modelled in a more abstract sense - something that gives a reasonably accurate feel of the action to the player without crunching a hundred numbers - and let the player's imagination fill in the gaps. In my view, the most parsimonious thing to look for in any system is *elegance* - how much it can do in a few simple rules - rather than *complexity*. I think the best board game designs are actually more enjoyable, innovative and interesting than most computer game designs, which are often bloated and lazy because they rely on a computer's mathematical brute force to solve problems rather than elegant mechanical solutions.

That said sometimes complexity for complexity's sake is interesting, such as when you have a simulation like Dwarf Fortress. Then, the scope of the game is on managing the incredible complexity, and laughing at the verbose injury descriptions born of the depth of the combat engine. I like this, because complexity is used as an actual gameplay mechanic. Dwarf Fortress wouldn't be Dwarf Fortress without it.

So, back to the point, I do like the parsimony of this system. It seems quite comprehensive, gives an adequate representation of a person and allows an intuitive grasp of what things do what, allowing the player to play the game instead of filling out a spreadsheet. Not original, but probably functional.

 

[Excommunicator]

It's simplistic

Your entire post is simplistic. I am also convinced that you didn't actually read any of the important posts in this thread, or you wouldn't have tried to exaggerate the point you are arguing against just to make your counterpoint.

I would pull your post apart and show you, but there isn't anything new that hasn't been addressed in previous posts. Sorry to disappoint.

 

[Mastermind]

Everything else being equal simple is far better than complex. There is a limit to what there is a point to include in an RPG and what there is not.

The limit is always highly complex.

I would much rather have a small amount of classes that cover the possible styles of play than a billion classes just because WotC wants to sell more source books. There is no point in having 100 spells when 90% of the players will pick the specific 10 of them and ignore the rest anyway.

I don't think you understand what "everything else being equal" means. If 90% of the spells are not worth picking in one case and 0% of spells are not worth picking in another then everything is most certainly not "equal".

There is no point in having a full range of 'fire' spells that are the exact same as the 'cold' spells and the 'lighting' spells.

There is if there's a difference between the elements. Some monsters might be resistant or immune to 1 or two elements. This makes variety good.

More options for the sake of more options without adding different ways to play the game are pointless.

Not necessarily but this is pointless because you don't seem to have the capability of comprehending what I'm actually saying. I never said anything about "more options for the sake of having more options".

 

[SkepticsClaw]

It's simplistic

Your entire post is simplistic. I am also convinced that you didn't actually read any of the important posts in this thread, or you wouldn't have tried to exaggerate the point you are arguing against just to make your counterpoint.

I would pull your post apart and show you, but there isn't anything new that hasn't been addressed in previous posts. Sorry to disappoint.

OK. I was mostly countering 'we should get away from boardgames because there's no need now to keep calculations in our heads', which as far as I can see is a contention that hasn't really been addressed in this thread. I would like to see more games that actually do the opposite of that by finding the simplest possible solution to a problem, rather than the most deep/complex option that doesn't impede gameplay. This seems to me the wholly opposite approach to that which you advocate, unless I've missed a key point somewhere.

However I admit did express myself very badly (mixing in various other musings is always a terrible idea if you want to make a point) and it's a pretty tangential point in any case, so carry on. Complexity vs. Simplicity is just something on my mind lately.

 

[Shemar]

Not necessarily but this is pointless because you don't seem to have the capability of comprehending what I'm actually saying. I never said anything about "more options for the sake of having more options".

I know exactly what you are saying. Your examples are very clear. How may (playable) races and how many classes does a cRPG need? If your answer to either is more than 5 then you are already in the realm of uneccesary comlexity that adds nothing for me.

No, having fire/ice/lightning/whatever and then just having the relevant resistances and play 'guess the right type of damage' is exactly the complication I see as adding nothing to the game. Unless one is some kind of moron that can't figure it out in 3 seconds flat. If that kind of repetitive no-brainer satisfies your criteria for 'variety' good for you. It falls way short of mine.

 

[Mastermind]

I know exactly what you are saying. Your examples are very clear. How may (playable) races and how many classes does a cRPG need? If your answer to either is more than 5 then you are already in the realm of uneccesary comlexity that adds nothing for me.

That's because you have no imagination. I'm designing an RPG (for fun, mostly, don't expect to ever actually make it). I have a tentative 18 or so races set up. Humans have over a dozen subraces built around genetic abilities. All of them have something they're good at that nobody else can match. It's all a matter of finding things to do. Sure, you can have a warrior that also casts buffs and heals the party, but it's not "unnecessary" to split those roles up to different classes, or to make classes that specialize in them. If it isn't, why not make just one class that can do everything as well as possible and get it over with?

Hell, I'll give you an example of a game with assloads of classes in which every class is useful and fairly unique: Wizardry 8.

No, having fire/ice/lightning/whatever and then just having the relevant resistances and play 'guess the right type of damage' is exactly the complication I see as adding nothing to the game. Unless one is some kind of moron that can't figure it out in 3 seconds flat.

It's not necessarily obvious what's weak to what. The time being spent guessing wrong or testing could be crucial time to finish off the enemy before he finishes you off. Your problem is that you have no imagination regarding how such a system could fit within the game as a whole.

Nevermind that the differences don't have to be limited to that. It's merely one example that's almost universally implemented and destroys your claim that "there's no difference" between a spell that's the same in everything other than the element.

More potential differences: the fire spell could set enemies on fire, blind them, distract them, scare them, dehydrate them.
Cold spells could slow, freeze outright, start coughing fits, condense gases into liquids and drown enemies, put out fires (enchantments, torches to spring an ambush, etc).
Lightning could stun, burn mana, have a chance to kill instantly, do extra damage to grounded enemies or enemies wearing metal armor.

They could even interact with each other (IE: cold puts out fire, but also attracts condensation to the person making lightning more lethal).

Differentiating fire/lightning/cold ball/missile/cone/cloud is not that hard at all. It's all in the implementation. And the above system is superior to one in which you just have a fireball that does all the fire stuff but no cold/lightning ball alternatives that would add a whole new dimension to the game.

A simple example:

You run into a mob of enemies. There's 6 orc berserkers wearing heavy metal armor who hit liike a bull charge and 1 orc shaman wearing heavy leather clothing who can heal and cast nasty area spells.

You're a mid level party and it's gonna be a tough fight.

Under your system there's just fireball to use because lightning/cold balls would be redundant. So you cast that and if the random numbers work out, you win. If not, the orcs use you as a blow-up doll.

Under my system the player has the choice to use a fireball which will hurt them all somewhat but not shut any of them down, cold which will shut down the shaman but not the warriors, or lightning which will fuck up the warriors but get deflected by the shaman's insulation. So you have to make a choice: do you take out the shaman and have your party deal with the berserkers, or do you take out the berserkers and hope the shaman doesn't wipe out your entire party before you can take him down?

 

[bhlaab]

There is no point in having a full range of 'fire' spells that are the exact same as the 'cold' spells and the 'lighting' spells.

There is if there's a difference between the elements. Some monsters might be resistant or immune to 1 or two elements. This makes variety good.

I don't think I've ever come across an rpg that balances this properly, and it's usually a bullshit kind of balancing where you can suddenly find out that your Ice Mage build is fucking useless most of the time because designer oversight made it so that only 10% of the monsters are weak to ice.

 

[Excommunicator]

It's simplistic

Your entire post is simplistic. I am also convinced that you didn't actually read any of the important posts in this thread, or you wouldn't have tried to exaggerate the point you are arguing against just to make your counterpoint.

I would pull your post apart and show you, but there isn't anything new that hasn't been addressed in previous posts. Sorry to disappoint.

OK. I was mostly countering 'we should get away from boardgames because there's no need now to keep calculations in our heads', which as far as I can see is a contention that hasn't really been addressed in this thread. I would like to see more games that actually do the opposite of that by finding the simplest possible solution to a problem, rather than the most deep/complex option that doesn't impede gameplay. This seems to me the wholly opposite approach to that which you advocate, unless I've missed a key point somewhere.

However I admit did express myself very badly (mixing in various other musings is always a terrible idea if you want to make a point) and it's a pretty tangential point in any case, so carry on. Complexity vs. Simplicity is just something on my mind lately.

No hard feelings then. I do take exception when people come in to the Workshop and start talking purely so they can read their own words, without being a participant in the existing discussion.

As for your stance of "simplest possible solution" that is certainly not the opposite approach to what I advocate, and I don't advocate complexity for complexity's sake either. I think the misunderstanding here is the difference between using one solution over another. All problems realistically have more than one solution, but no solution will solve the problem in the same way, nor will any solution solve every conceivable problem (this is subject to your design goals). If you add more variables to the game through a process of trying to arrive at another solution, and these variables aren't having an effect on that final solution, then they aren't a part of it, and are superfluous content. The problem here though, doesn't lie in the fact that we have these variables at all, it lies in the fact that they have no meaningful contribution to solving a problem. If you can devise a way to make those variables meaningful to the game then that will contribute to the nature of the solution, and will inevitably offer something different to your "minimalist" approach. Of course, whether that solution is better or not is a consideration to be made against resources and goals.

I also think it is extremely important that we avoid constructing an artificial ceiling as to how detailed of a simulation or mechanism we can achieve just because we are intimidated by the idea of not being able to easily approximate calculations in our mind when we play or design it (which it does sound like you are). As I said, added detail needs always be considered in context of the available resources and the core ideas of whatever it is that game is about. It also needs to be designed to have a purpose beyond simply "more [of the same] options".

I would aggressively cut back what most games consider "content" on the basis that their inclusions don't have any purposes beyond very slight variations on the same idea,and certainly don't solve any real problems by being there. If you can't put the proper effort and design into making the "content" meaningful, even to me as a self described "maximalist" it shouldn't be there.

My design method though, wouldn't be to spontaneously cut things just because they have no existing purpose, but rather to look at them analytically and see what would be required to make them a contributing factor in the solutions, and what the game would lack without the contribution of that element.

There is no point in having a full range of 'fire' spells that are the exact same as the 'cold' spells and the 'lighting' spells.

There is if there's a difference between the elements. Some monsters might be resistant or immune to 1 or two elements. This makes variety good.

I don't think I've ever come across an rpg that balances this properly, and it's usually a bullshit kind of balancing where you can suddenly find out that your Ice Mage build is fucking useless most of the time because designer oversight made it so that only 10% of the monsters are weak to ice.

This is a particular dislike of mine. Games that have the complex damage and resistance-based system and then put in a bunch of creatures with very high resistances or immunities, but don't consider the effect this has on character builds that just happen to have chosen abilities and spells that are made useless because of the resistance/immunity implementation somewhere further down the track (because what reason do they have to choose one over the other if you offer both with no meaningful difference, huh, you stupid fool?). This isn't contributing to the game. It is like some idiotic puzzle that has no logical basis, that you can only get through either by complete chance or if you know the solution already.

If your system has a difference between fire magic and death magic, and that difference completely dissolves down to which enemies have immunities and which don't, then you have fucking failed you short sighted amateurs. You have succeeded in making your game more irritating and contributed nothing worthwhile to the playing experience. Either offer deeper mechanics with ways around problems with different available options to characters or leave it out. FFS.

 

[Mastermind]

There is no point in having a full range of 'fire' spells that are the exact same as the 'cold' spells and the 'lighting' spells.

There is if there's a difference between the elements. Some monsters might be resistant or immune to 1 or two elements. This makes variety good.

I don't think I've ever come across an rpg that balances this properly, and it's usually a bullshit kind of balancing where you can suddenly find out that your Ice Mage build is fucking useless most of the time because designer oversight made it so that only 10% of the monsters are weak to ice.

Diablo 2 balances it pretty well.

 

[Shemar]

That's because you have no imagination. I'm designing an RPG (for fun, mostly, don't expect to ever actually make it). I have a tentative 18 or so races set up. Humans have over a dozen subraces built around genetic abilities. All of them have something they're good at that nobody else can match. It's all a matter of finding things to do. Sure, you can have a warrior that also casts buffs and heals the party, but it's not "unnecessary" to split those roles up to different classes, or to make classes that specialize in them. If it isn't, why not make just one class that can do everything as well as possible and get it over with?

That sounds like a nightmare to me. Maybe you are into character building or whatnot, but I am into playing. Spending the time to go through all these options for a character I will play a single game with sounds utterly droll.

And actually yes, my favorite systems are the ones with effectively only one class, the class-less systems where you build your character from a list of skills/perks etc. Specialization comes with smart allocation of attributes and skills not a high handed set of arbitrary class definitions. The same with races. Having races just have a plus here a minus there a special skill somewhere else is also pretty pointless when all these could be skills/perks a player could use with any race.

It's not necessarily obvious what's weak to what. The time being spent guessing wrong or testing could be crucial time to finish off the enemy before he finishes you off. Your problem is that you have no imagination regarding how such a system could fit within the game as a whole.

The problem is that you have no imagination about how a computer game is actually played. You guess wrong, you die you reload. Where this process could be very interesting if you had to use different tactics in order to finally win, winning by just swapping your fire damage to cold damage sounds unimaginative, pointless and boring to me.

Even worse, unless it is a unique one-shot monster, then you also don't have to guess the other 100 times you will fight it. I imagine it is even more pointless for those that replay games. Not to mention that having to 'guess' without the game giving you clues that a smart player can use to turn guesses into almost certainties is just outright bad design.

But really it comes down to tastes. I used to run tabletop games counting food rations, water rations, arrows and bolts, even material spell components. Then I realized all this complexity added nothing to the game except busywork and accounting. And did away with it. You obviously like complicated for the sake of complicated. Have fun.

Under your system there's just fireball to use because lightning/cold balls would be redundant. So you cast that and if the random numbers work out, you win. If not, the orcs use you as a blow-up doll.

You are obviously confusing complexity in the rules system with depth is the combat system. You describe an encounter with so many interesting tactical possibilities and then you break it down to which damage type the mage will use? How boring is that?

If your system has a difference between fire magic and death magic, and that difference completely dissolves down to which enemies have immunities and which don't, then you have fucking failed you short sighted amateurs. You have succeeded in making your game more irritating and contributed nothing worthwhile to the playing experience. Either offer deeper mechanics with ways around problems with different available options to characters or leave it out. FFS.

+1

 

[PorkaMorka]

Should include "Stamina" as a stand in for constitution.

Big muscles and hard to kill are two different things.