Should the player char be able to become more powerful than the most powerful NPCs?

[Rpgsaurus Rex]

btw, people actually statted lady of pain, but the forum I found it in is down now
like statting cthulhu, it's pointless because player characters aren't even in the same class

I remember it was funny to read about Caine's "combat stats" in pen-and-paper VtM :

Spoiler

you lose.

Games that give you hidden rewards or endings when you kill bosses that you're supposed to lose to are cool, too. Do any western games even have this?

ToME4 (a very combat-heavy roguelike) had a really unfair boss fight vs. an orc warlord and his goons where you were supposed to "die" to advance the plot. However, it *was* possible to beat it with smart play and some character builds to get some loot, xp and lore - nothing too substantial though.

Though your point stands: such examples are, sadly, too rare in Western RPGs.

 

[Beautiful Clown Painting]

I dream of a game where the leveling is done through completing quests, exploration and combat.

World of Warcraft

There was great fun in seeing enemies that murdered you in one hit die by your blade eventually when you grew powerful enough (Gothic games, anyone?) What would be the fun in not being able to beat something or someone that doesn't have a good reason to be immortal (like the Lady of Pain in PST), no matter how powerful you hero became and how good at the game you were?

If the combat degenerates into being boring and repetitive, that's more of an issue of combat design. Make the player pay for the tiniest mistakes when battling the best of the best, but don't make these guys unbeatable.

That's the main problem for me with the Piranha Bytes games: in order to become powerful, you have to genocide every living life everywhere except for those in cities. It's weird. I even slaughtered fucking turkeys and chicken in Risen 2 to grab a few XP points: where your "hero" passes, all life does trespass. It's funny at the same time but dumb nevertheless. But then, it's part of their charm, I DO love Piranha Bytes weirdness.

And for me it's not a problem that some NPCs are unbeatable, it adds to the reality of the situation: those guys (or gal in the case of the Lady of Pain) have ruled the multiverse for thousand of years and are on top of all the power struggles. What's the point of being able to kill them like a fucking Aurora psycho: it makes them dumb.

 

[Alex_Steel]

I don't believe he should. I do believe he could. It depends entirely on game design and how much you want to make your game about resources management and other stuff, to have it make sense. I mean, if you can defeat everything, what else is there to do except from meaningless exploration, leading something or destroying the god-damn place?
The problem usually is that a cRPG cannot correspond to the idea of a player being the most powerful. Being the leader implies that something and/or someone are/is following your ideas and rules. Being the destroyer of worlds implies that the environment corresponds to your rampage.
This is mostly unattainable in cRPGs since the world is limited, unlike p'n'p. You cannot script every possible reaction, you cannot design every possible outcome. Being the most powerful means your choices bring the hugest consequences. The game would have to get into SimCity/something mode. That's why most games become totally boring and meaningless after you become the most powerful.

An example:

You: "I killed Vivec, Dagoth Ur, Almalexia and Sotha Sil"
Ordinator: "You crazy? Cannot happen!"

 

[Beautiful Clown Painting]

The almost godlike-creature: "I am the ruler of the multiverse".
Your character: Boom! One-shot.
200 guards come rushing from all wings of the palace: Boom! One-shot X200.

Even in moronic movies such as "Commando" with Schwartzenneger, such situations are treated tongue-in-cheek. Not in video games where it's a SERIOUS convention. Think about it for a while, it's really dumb.

 

[Beautiful Clown Painting]

I liked Human Revolution for that: yes, you can one-shot practically everybody, but if three foes are alarmed and come onto you, you're screwed, having all the perks or not. In Ultima, you can take one guard one on one without any problem, the problem being that if you start killing the citizens, they come at you in waves of 8 at a time, wave after wave, and you can't resist very long.

That's a better game-design in my book. If you allow the player to be the Almighty Destroyer as Phelot called it, at least aknowledge the tongue-in-cheek side of the situation.

 

[JarlFrank]

There was great fun in seeing enemies that murdered you in one hit die by your blade eventually when you grew powerful enough (Gothic games, anyone?) What would be the fun in not being able to beat something or someone that doesn't have a good reason to be immortal (like the Lady of Pain in PST), no matter how powerful you hero became and how good at the game you were?

If the combat degenerates into being boring and repetitive, that's more of an issue of combat design. Make the player pay for the tiniest mistakes when battling the best of the best, but don't make these guys unbeatable.

Nobody should be unbeatable, but you should also not become unbeatable. That's the issue. Gothic games are a good example - even if you're powerful, when you don't pay attention you can still be killed by a pack of wolves, but if you're using good tactics and are good at melee combat you can kill an orc at low level. There's a very noticable ability curve when levelling up, but there's no point when you are so overpowered that you can steamroll everything without fear of death (well, or when you reach that point, you already have finished everything except for the final boss anyway).

 

[Rpgsaurus Rex]

There was great fun in seeing enemies that murdered you in one hit die by your blade eventually when you grew powerful enough (Gothic games, anyone?) What would be the fun in not being able to beat something or someone that doesn't have a good reason to be immortal (like the Lady of Pain in PST), no matter how powerful you hero became and how good at the game you were?

If the combat degenerates into being boring and repetitive, that's more of an issue of combat design. Make the player pay for the tiniest mistakes when battling the best of the best, but don't make these guys unbeatable.

Nobody should be unbeatable, but you should also not become unbeatable. That's the issue. Gothic games are a good example - even if you're powerful, when you don't pay attention you can still be killed by a pack of wolves, but if you're using good tactics and are good at melee combat you can kill an orc at low level. There's a very noticable ability curve when levelling up, but there's no point when you are so overpowered that you can steamroll everything without fear of death (well, or when you reach that point, you already have finished everything except for the final boss anyway).

I agree with the original sentiment that you should never become unbeatable. Even in Morrowind once you pass some power threshold, combat is resolved by mashing one button vs. 99.95% of your opponents, those remaining ones being Vivec, that Telvanni ubermage and Dagoth Ur (there were maybe more, but I forget). It was more of a combat system flaw than overall game design flaw, though - you couldn't really make enemies more powerful except for bloating their HP and damage, and that just drags out fights instead of making them more interesting.

I was more responding to :

You should start out halfway competent, and end up very skilled, but it should be impossible to surpass the most powerful NPCs in the gameworld. Why should you, in the course of a few months/years, become more powerful than warriors who have trained for decades and have been the unbeaten champion since many years, or wizards who have spent centuries studying magic?

I think every enemy in a video game that adheres to game rules and is part of the game world should be eventually beatable, as it creates interesting challenges for the player to overcome instead of hitting a brick wall. Unless he appears in some scripted sequence only, and/or it makes sense for him to be immortal or at least far, far out of reach of the PC's power as explained by ingame lore - but those should be very rare and be "untouchable" for some damn good reason.

The idea of a newbie fast becoming powerful may not be "realistic", but IMO interesting combat challenges (and variety as growing more powerful means more powerful and different enemies) > realism.

 

[tuluse]

I kind of felt like it never left the realms of "just implied" in BG. They didn't do enough to really integrate it into the plot and justify it. But maybe that scenario, done much better, would be one situation where levelling up really quickly actually makes sense.

I don't mind somethings not explicitly stated. However, while this could explain the main character and Imoen, it doesn't explain how the rest of your party gains experience so fast.

Another thing that could help is that you can get quite strong, but eventually, you get older and weaker again. In Morrowind, they had these level-up messages that said as much, but it didn't actually mean anything in-game as you just got stronger and stronger. In Sid Meier's Pirates! you eventually had to retire, but that was just a game with some RPG elements rather than an actual RPG. I can imagine that people would feel frustrated if they had to retire from killing everything in their beloved open world.

Assuming you start at 20 years old, that gives you about 20 years before aging would become even a minor issue. I know people have played Morrowind a lot, but does any one have 20 years worth of game time with a single character?

 

[sea]

It really depends on the type of game. Skyrim can get away with a very powerful player character because there's only one character that's actually being used - all the power has to be concentrated into a single individual. While Skyrim is definitely too easy for its own good, especially at high levels, I wouldn't want a game where you have to hack and slash 30-50 times at a single enemy to kill it. That's not fun. Action games are always best when the player has to react to something new, and if you don't have a Devil May Cry kind of combat system to provide that depth, enemies need to be relatively quick to dispatch so that the player can finish that "see enemy -> kill enemy -> loot enemy" cycle faster.

This applies even to games like Fallout, where, while your character isn't super-powerful, ultimately you've still single-handedly killed thousands of creatures, and in a fair fight you can usually take on just about anyone of an equivalent level. The game would simply be unplayable without it.

Party-based RPGs are another matter. The big thing to take into account is that more party members allow the player to absorb more damage, and that damage is then distributed across many characters. Even if you lose one, you still have some remaining to finish the fight. What's more, players are usually smarter and will focus their attacks on single enemies to remove them faster, whereas computers rarely focus their own attacks because that'd make, say, playing a mage a real pain in the ass (i.e. start every fight -> killed by 10 arrows in the first round). In general the challenge of party-based games comes less from overwhelming enemy numbers and more from effectively prioritizing targets, or using the right strategies to take them down, and you have a lot more breathing room to make mistakes and experiment than you do in single-character games, where the priority is always to eliminate everyone else as fast as possible, almost always using hit-and-run tactics.

I still kind of like having a main character that is slightly more powerful than the other characters in the party, especially if there is some sort of CHOSEN ONE story reason to justify it. Just feels better to me to know that if my character is supposed to be a badass story-wise, he/she is also a badass in game rule terms as well.

 

[Beautiful Clown Painting]

I agree to a certain extent with you Rex. If I took on Obama one on one, it could be possible that I could beat the living shit ouf of him (not sure of that by the way). But taking on his whole CIA pretorian guard, no way.

 

[laclongquan]

There should be a script that will autolevel the final boss to yourlevel+1. THAT will drive powergamer boys insane.

/trolololo

Isn't that the definition of level scaling ?

Level Scaling in boss fight is NOT a bad thing. A rat with over 9000 HP is funny, though.

 

[Raghar]

Have you heard about dynamic NPCs? When a main character does side quests, the main villain/final boss is training too. That's a simple stuff which has great suspension of disbelief, especially when you meet him during the travel and see him he is improving.

In PnP, I never allowed to defeat any monster, some either were too powerful, or theirs defeat would have brutal consequences.

Do you remember that bunny from Sluggy freelance? He killed Easter bunny, and as a consequence he was forced to do his job. Another funny example is Slayers next. Lina and Gourie were subject of the same system which they used to earn money, and they were a prime example why using bounty hunters in any justice system is a bad idea (if not held in massive minority with bad consequences against them).

 

[Raghar]

Level Scaling in boss fight is NOT a bad thing. A rat with over 9000 HP is funny, though.

Well Omega weapon level scaled. From one hit kill, to hard to wound one hit kill.

 

[laclongquan]

After killing the rest of holidays power that bunny calm down considerably.

 

[Papa Môlé]

I've always felt that when the player character starts to become more powerful than most PCs the "world" the PC occupies needs to shift. In other words, the PC becomes some sort of contending world-ruler type vying with other would be rulers or he ascends to some kind of demigod status and his adventures continue on a different plane. Good example of what I mean off the top of my head would be Hordes of the Underdark where your epic level character ends up going to the outer planes. Having epic PCs exist in the same "space" as regular NPCs always makes your epic status feel...not epic. The game should either have you contending with other supremely powerful figures for control or whatever or, if they want to keep you on a more level field with most other monsters or NPCs, have you become a different type of being and occupy a different reality (so you're now a low level demigod rather than a high level mortal).

 

[DraQ]

you simply don't put them up in active gamespace at all

Unfortunately sometimes you can't really avoid that, though, especially if you need to have creatures that are way above a guy in plate with magical sword (or whole bunch of such guys supported by a mage and ranged weaponry) in terms of pecking order in your gameworld and then you need a way to implement

1) Everyone rolls initiative
2) The party dies in descending order of initative
3) When interviewed about the incident, Ao says he doesn't care

in the least jarring possible way when it comes to mechanics.

If the character is human, there should be a level cap.

Or level asymptote.

I wouldn't want a game where you have to hack and slash 30-50 times at a single enemy to kill it.

Difficulty and HP count don't follow from each other.

Tedium and HP count, OTOH, do.

My general rule is to allow the player to reach a level comparable to that of most powerful characters in the game. There's very little point in having super hard enemies that require unrealistic grinding

You're missing the subtle part where if leveling system is constructed in a way that never allows you to even approach the relative strength of some potential opponents, then no amount of grind will ever alleviate that.

Giants and dragons should always remain majestic and terrible, mostly because the group fights in Skyrim with NPC allies are a blast. And whilst it sucks when a giant clubs me into the stratosphere it's very funny when I see him do it to another guy.

When it comes to Skyrim it should be balanced so that dragons are rare and only beatable by a strong character accompanied by dozens of cannon fodder (expendable mooks hired for single task, military camp or town guard).

And yeah, making your uber creatures beatable with brute force and levels for 1 character or small party just lessens them and your world.

There should be a script that will autolevel the final boss to yourlevel+1. THAT will drive powergamer boys insane.

/trolololo

Actually, while obviously a design crutch, you can make a workable level scaling scheme. You just have to observe some restrictions:

The strongest characters in the gameworld should be inherently powerful and only be leveled up if player tries to exceed their not normally attainable level.

Power structure should be preserved at all times, even if it would mean loss of challenge - for example local arena champion should never be as powerful as endgame boss demigod even if you do the arena after MQ.

Creatures meant to be stronger than mere mortals should remain so regardless of mere mortal's level.

It could even funnier than that. In addition to the boss gaining +1 level, if you level up in a place where the interruption won't cause a break in concentration (NOT in the middle of killing 2 out of 3 enemies or something), you can be treated to a cutscene of the boss guy levelling up with all the appropriate sparkle and fanfare you got...except he's doing something thoroughly mundane, like drinking tea, or taking a shit.

Most elegant would of course be to have the enemies gain strength as the gameworld time passes. Then you've got a real challenge, to gain power as fast as possible.

That would be as shitty as oblivious and as unrealistic. For one, the power structure in the gameworld will generally not change much - there is only as much power character can achieve, and people retire or buy the farm all the time.

Kodeksowy Kutas Karny dla tego pana.
: x

 

[MMXI]

My general rule is to allow the player to reach a level comparable to that of most powerful characters in the game. There's very little point in having super hard enemies that require unrealistic grinding

You're missing the subtle part where if leveling system is constructed in a way that never allows you to even approach the relative strength of some potential opponents, then no amount of grind will ever alleviate that.

No I'm not. I wasn't even talking about such games. I was talking about optional JRPG bosses that require 40 levels of grinding to take out, usually done in the final dungeon.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

The point of these is to give the grind-loving players something to do with their game-breaking power. These guys exist, and since creating a few uber creatures for them isn't much work (they usually don't get much explanation for their power, if any), why not?

 

[Norfleet]

Why? I think the game could be just as interesting if the PC is the one with raw power being beset by foes constantly screwing you over with underhanded trickery and and malicious artifacts the player/character is unwilling/unable to use.

I don't think this design would work too well. Computers, for some reason, are very bad at deception and basing an entire game around tricking the player tends to involve making the player character mandatorily mentally retarded, which inevitably annoys the player. Normal people might fall for a trick precisely once, if that many times, then it never works again.

 

[HumanTotemPole]

Either a dominant PC or dominant NPCs can work if the rules and mechanics of the gameworld in question are set up to properly accommodate either option. Even a hybrid approach can be successful if the rules and mechanics allow it.

While it's not an RPG, I've been playing Severance - Blade Of Darkness recently and I reckon it is a successful example of a hybrid approach of both gradually increasing PC and NPC power working in tandem with good mechanics. The player character's stats, weapon power and combo moves all increase as the player levels up and moves through the levels. The NPC enemies also level up to increase their health and attack power and gain access to better equipment as the game progresses. Some enemies will always be more powerful than the player at the point they are encountered and the player will always be more powerful than some enemies at the same point.

The reason I feel this approach works well in Blade Of Darkness is because the basic combat mechanics are balanced in a such manner that it is possible for most enemies to defeat or heavily damage the player if the player does not focus and think about what they are doing but equally well the player can beat any opponent if they focus. In essence, the combat mechanics (and therefore Blade Of Darkness because it is effectively nothing but its combat mechanics) feel fair and the game is an enjoyable and reasonably challenging experience as a result.

I hope that made sense. I appreciate that getting the balance of power of the PC versus that of the NPCs right is a lot harder in cRPGs, which are much more complex games than BoD by nature. Whatever approach is taken must be founded on good mechanics and/or rules in order for it to work.

Incidentally, has there ever been a Codex LP done for BoD? It's a pretty tidy little hack'n'slasher. I was considering giving one a go when I get some spare time.

 

[Damned Registrations]

So don't have random battles (or at least not ones you expect to be difficult). It doesn't matter if the player only falls for a trap once if it only gets used once. If a dozen lizardmen pop out from behind a fake wall to rip your party a new ass, they're 10 times more dangerous than when the line up in formation and march towards you like retards. And even if the player sees it coming, what is the character supposed to do exactly, give up on the quest because it's obviously a trap and going up the ladder/down the pit/through the narrow passage/across the moat is dangerous?

Enemies can also rely on strategies that are powerful but useless to the player, like suicidal attacks, or relying on debilitating poisons that will only really be a problem in the 3rd or 4th battle in a row. Or using expensive consumable items.

There are plenty of ways to make 'weak' enemies completely ass rape a strong PC party as soon as you stop trying to play fair and take turns exchanging attacks.

 

[kaizoku]

Have you heard about dynamic NPCs? When a main character does side quests, the main villain/final boss is training too. That's a simple stuff which has great suspension of disbelief, especially when you meet him during the travel and see him he is improving.

Sounds like level scaling to me.
fake edit: mmm... if implemented correctly maybe it won't be that bad. So all critters have a base level (that means you won't be able to walk into mordor at LvL1), but because __some__ of them are not lazy fucks they do improve and progress. To make things interesting the progress could be in the 80%-120% range of the PC xp.
This sounds good in theory. Not sure how good it would be in practice.

When a main character does side quests, the main villain/final boss is training too.
He sounds like a rival.

This idea is kind of cool.

ok, maybe not that cool


I prefer to have heterogeneous maps. So the guideline would be that you have critters of different levels at each map (within reason). Try to go Rambo popping moles and you end up dead.


The biggest problem is that - in most games - there are cyclopean differences between a LvL1 char and a LvL10 char. And with this come the issues of game balancing (setting areas for each PC lvl).
I think AoD does a pretty good job at this. HP stays the same from start to finish. Throughout the game you can improve your skills and equipment. But, at least in the demo, you never become too powerful. You can die at every occasion.

 

[Mother Russia]

This is what I loved about the realms of arkania series: Your party is never too powerful. In fact, once your sorcerors run out of astral energy, which they do really quickly no matter the level, the powerlevel of your party goes wayyyy down. Furthermore, there is no potion spamming in RoA, in fact there are hardly any potions at all. You gotta rest to regain astral energy and health, which takes quite a while. God help you if you are attacked while resting....

 

[Johannes]

Most elegant would of course be to have the enemies gain strength as the gameworld time passes. Then you've got a real challenge, to gain power as fast as possible.

That would be as shitty as oblivious and as unrealistic. For one, the power structure in the gameworld will generally not change much - there is only as much power character can achieve, and people retire or buy the farm all the time.

No, when you look at the plots of different RPGs, you'll notice that a common trend is that the villain is supposedly doing something all the time, building up forces to take over the world. Like in Oblivion, I don't know the exact plot but aren't there demon gate thingies an actual threat that would be a big problem if left unchecked for a long time? Or BG2, the later you get to Suldanesselar the stronger Irenicus is? Or Fallout, the Masters army is constantly growing. The list goes on and on.

 

[GarfunkeL]

But if the PC/party IS strong, the gameworld should react to it. It's ridiculous how in BG2 a random street gang consists of several level-9 fighters and rogues, with cleric and wizard in support - these guys are way more powerful than the bounty hunters / mercenaries from BG1. WTF are they doing, robbing random people in Athkathla? They should be running their own fiefdom on the country side or something.