Editorial Rampant Coyote on Creating Good High-Level CRPGs

[Alex]

Infinitron

What I mean is this: wouldn't the article's suggestion imply a paradigm shift in all levels, not just the highest? I'm all for minimizing combat and putting an emphasys on the creative use of abilities, after all, Portal was a pretty good game.

The difference between "creative use of abilities" at high levels and at low levels, is that at low levels, when you choose to use an ability, you're taking a risk. You're not a demigod. You might fail. You're probably sacrificing another option by choosing to specialize in that ability. That depth is usually lost at high levels.

Eh, not if the high levels are managed well, as suggested in the article. A bad choice can hurt you in many different ways. Yeah, high level has spells like resurrection, wishes and other stuff that can make recovering from death and dismemberment not only possible, but trivial. But on the other hand, there are new dangers from which these might not help. Having your soul stolen, losing your fortress, having half of your army killed, spending hundreds of thousands of golden pieces in a wild goose chase.

These things can make stuff for which the players fought along while simply disappear. And while people point to the wish spell as if it was some kind of panacea, if we are talking about old school D&D here, wishes can bite you in the ass. In fact, they can be far worse than the situation you are trying to remedy. One particularly memorable case I remember was of a player unused to making wishes who tried to recover the soul of a PC of another player. He went something like "I wish I had Sir Henry's soul". So, of course, his soul was swapped with Sir Henry's (by the way, I made up this name, I don't remember the name of the original character). Sir Henry's mind now resided in the bard's body, and the bard's soul was now lost. Point here is that those cool weapons of high level can be dangerous. They may, and should, have unintended side effects.

 

[Infinitron]

Eh, not if the high levels are managed well, as suggested in the article.

Oh? All I see in the article is a plea to give high level characters more choice and flexibility in CRPGs. It doesn't say anything about negative consequences for those choices or other limitations.

 

[DraQ]

#2 – A very flexible quest / plot progression system that makes no assumptions about the manner in which quest goals are achieved. If the scepter is in deepest dungeon of the Fortress of Horrible Death, the quest to obtain it shouldn’t break if the player simply tunnels under the fortress and grabs the scepter in five minutes.

That actually should be a norm in any games with some degree of openness, regardless of level and setting.​

If player is given freedom, he will use this freedom to break shit for fun and profit.​

This is a *good* thing.​

#3 – Lots of player-acquired high-level abilities that change or break the rules.

Actually, we can pretty much count on player's invention here, even if they aren't provided with those tools explicitly.​

#4 – An open-ended approach to creating challenges, including a willingness to make them completely unfair against a “brute force” approach, and a willingness to let the player ‘cheat’ his way to victory. And no more making ‘boss monsters’ impervious to the most debilitating spells!

And that's the the proper reaction to #2.​

It's a sound approach. Although, I would say that it's also a kind of admission of defeat. As your characters grow more powerful, they tend to converge to a "high level singularity", such that the game's RPG mechanics recede into the background and it becomes more of a puzzle or adventure game.

Freedom of approach and rich mechanics may already allow such singularity at level 1.

This is good, proper RPG should be about finding and exploiting advantages - an evenly matched battle has, by definition 50% likelihood of player victory. Multiply by the number of such battles and you either have an endless train of savescumming or you don't have to bother to make the ending, because no one will reach it. Unless players can bend shit to their advantage and generally avoid evenly matched combat (if only by making it not so evenly matched).

 

[Infinitron]

DraQ, read the rest of this thread and you'll see that's not quite what I was referring to.

 

[DraQ]

DraQ, read the rest of this thread and you'll see that's not quite what I was referring to.

Broader case.

This kind of approach scales down perfectly fine and is far better than railroading players into one battle after another even at low level, (where the players are traditionally at the mercy of every single roll due to their pitifully low hit dice).

It's not just an antidote to mechanics durping up at high level.

 

[DragoFireheart]

I have never played a RPG where high-level (character level) combat didn't break down into some monotonous pattern that was either tedious, boring, unsatisfying, or some other combination of the former aspects. The beginning of the game is great: you are weak and struggling, which makes every victory enjoyable. The middle of the game (mid-levels) is also a fun experience: you are stronger and get can some amount of joy in "revenge" killing enemies that gave you a hard time before, but you are also just weak enough that the most powerful enemies will still instill fear into your heart. You must still apply strategy into beating those more powerful foes.

 

[Alex]

Eh, not if the high levels are managed well, as suggested in the article.

Oh? All I see in the article is a plea to give high level characters more choice and flexibility in CRPGs. It doesn't say anything about negative consequences for those choices or other limitations.

Sorry, I should have been more clear. The article doesn't really mention much on how to make high levels stay challenging. By that phrase, I was referring to the article mentioning that high levels up the risks in more ways than just beefing up monsters, and trying to expand on it to show that not everything is just a minor set back. With such high risks, you are liable to suffer a lot if you make a bad judgment call at a bad time, even if your life is spared.