Some thoughts on role-playing

[Vault Dweller]

http://www.rpgcodex.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=9527
I can't believe you guys like totally missed that post. Luckily, I'm kind enough to give you a second chance:

Its interesting. I actually agree with a lot of what those so-called 'kids' were talking about. This has been the one push with my game designs, separating the "clinical" aspect of roleplaying such as the character sheet and inventory model in conventional RPGs, with the more active reactive roleplaying ironically evident in GTA San An. I know I've brought this up before, but it is a perfect example of roleplaying a character without actively 'arranging' for his development by adding experience points, but of course by doing (or not doing) activities that can increase your characters capabilities.

One thing that was almost cathartic, was the sense of not being on a "quest/mission", and being able to get into the idea of being this avatar on screen, and still having something to do. So I'd mentally plan and prepare to hit the gym, get something to eat and take the girlfriend on a date (prior to finding out it really does nothing for the story but only serves to unlock a two player mode ). Aside from the GF, those other activities rewarded me so the compulsion to do them was greater. I'd do all this while almost subconciously parking my car in the proper places as if parking a virtual car properly in a virtual city had a virtual consequence (which it of course doesn't). This extends exclusively throughout any gameplay context. If you want the player to participate more with the gameworld and feel more intimately tied to his alter-ego, offering these seemingly mundane elements to the game then rewarding the player makes them substantial and less ridiculous. Eating in a game, like old school Ultima, was a product of keeping the player alive...a terrible motivation, as its like perpetual poison without a permanent antidote. Eating in GTA is rewarded by allowing your character to keep his well earned muscle and fitness, but is not mandatory. I was more compelled to eat in GTA for the benefits of doing so then the arbitrary mandate to eat in Ultima.

I know I've said this as well before, but it IS ironic how much more of a roleplaying game GTA SA is over most so-called "pure" RPG's. My point isn't sell GTA, but rather the model. I'd MUCH rather see this open infrastructure in a fantasy or high science fiction setting, which would be an amazing experience.

Anyone who won't reply or comment on what this totally awesome guy wrote would be banned or tubgirled with extreme prejudice!

 

[Sarvis]

*replies to avoid getting tubgirled*

 

[LlamaGod]

lol evog lol

 

[MINIGUNWIELDER]

shadowrun crpgs would greatly benefit from that...if they ever make ONE!

and ultima... i never realized that you had to eat for anything else but camping

 

[Chefe]

hello world

 

[Sol Invictus]

la la la

 

[Naked_Lunch]

shadowrun crpgs would greatly benefit from that...if they ever make ONE!

and ultima... i never realized that you had to eat for anything else but camping

That was up to Ultima VI. In Ultima VII (I forget if Pagan had this feature) the Avatar or your party members would complain that they're hungry and you'd have to feed them, and they could say this at any time. You could be trying to cut a fucking horde of cyclopses and all of a sudden a caption would pop up above Iolo and he'd say something to the effect of "I'm hungry. Feed me dammit!" To my knowledge, Ultima VII was the only Ultima that had this. I'm probably wrong, though.

EDIT: In Ultima IV you had to buy rations to survive on the world map, otherwise your health would just keep going down until you were dead dead dead. And considering the difficulty of just finding out where the fuck you were on the world map, it could get quite annoying.

 

[corvax]

Interesting post, well put. I concur. Now, don't spam me please.

 

[MINIGUNWIELDER]

shadowrun crpgs would greatly benefit from that...if they ever make ONE!

and ultima... i never realized that you had to eat for anything else but camping

That was up to Ultima VI. In Ultima VII (I forget if Pagan had this feature) the Avatar or your party members would complain that they're hungry and you'd have to feed them, and they could say this at any time. You could be trying to cut a fucking horde of cyclopses and all of a sudden a caption would pop up above Iolo and he'd say something to the effect of "I'm hungry. Feed me dammit!" To my knowledge, Ultima VII was the only Ultima that had this. I'm probably wrong, though.

EDIT: In Ultima IV you had to buy rations to survive on the world map, otherwise your health would just keep going down until you were dead dead dead. And considering the difficulty of just finding out where the fuck you were on the world map, it could get quite annoying.

I-III did that also...forced me to buy a map

 

[franc kaos]

Its interesting. I actually agree with a lot of what those so-called 'kids' were talking about. This has been the one push with my game designs, separating the "clinical" aspect of roleplaying such as the character sheet and inventory model in conventional RPGs, with the more active reactive roleplaying ironically evident in GTA San An. I know I've brought this up before, but it is a perfect example of roleplaying a character without actively 'arranging' for his development by adding experience points, but of course by doing (or not doing) activities that can increase your characters capabilities.
One thing that was almost cathartic, was the sense of not being on a "quest/mission", and being able to get into the idea of being this avatar on screen, and still having something to do.
...substantial and less ridiculous. Eating in a game, like old school Ultima, was a product of keeping the player alive...a terrible motivation, as its like perpetual poison without a permanent antidote. Eating in GTA is rewarded by allowing your character to keep his well earned muscle and fitness...
I know I've said this as well before, but it IS ironic how much more of a roleplaying game GTA SA is over most so-called "pure" RPG's...

I didn't grow up playing PnP but got introduced to RP thru' Ultima so I never had the sense that a certain type of genre was roleplaying until I got online.

The very first game I played 'Midwinter' in 1990 had no stats and only one mission statement, kill the bad guy hiding somewhere in a 3D world. You had ski's, snowplough and hangglider to get around, with various settlements dotted around the world and people you could recruit (John Smith is a good shot, but bad strategist, he hates Bill Brown, but likes Terry over in another settlement). Other than that you had complete freedom to play the game in any manner you saw fit.

Comparing game structures I kind'a began to think, ah, roleplaying is about freedom, you're given this virtual world and aside from that kill the boss, you had time to explore and basically do what you wanted, then Arena came along and confirmed it along with improving myself - for me at least - I never saw the onscreen avatar being different from me. Then I got online and discovered all these rules, and it was like, oh Carmageddon (drive anywhere, kill pedestrians, destroy other drivers or win the race) isn't roleplaying.

In another thread there was concern over what Bethesda is going to do with Fallout3. If I know those guys (and I don't), they'll have played Wasteland and Fallout 1/2, but given that the game is utilising a 3D engine, I can't see how they could offer turnbased combat. TB, to my mind, was implemented due to the constraints of the engine - I tried realtime in Fallout (must have been tactics) and quickly reverted back to TB as it equaled the playing field.

So yeah, the skills perforce have to change as well (what's the point of shooting skills when that has to move over to the player who aims with the mouse - or controller?), and let's hope you can still aim at body parts - shoot a leg (or stalk) to cripple.

Unless Bethesda really wanna make a shooter I think Fallout3 could be a good RPG (and not because of Bloom - luckily soil erosion shouldn't be there, more like scorched earth).

Heavily EDITed for clarity.

 

[Twinfalls]

Please at least use paragraphs. I know people seem to be able read this kind of stream-of-consciousness over on the TES boards, but it really does hurt the eyes.

 

[StraitLacedDeviant]

Yes, I agree. I didn't read that post because its ocular rape.

 

[corvax]

That style (shit what is it called? I go, you go), was implemented due to the constraints of the engine - I tried realtime in Fallout and quickly reverted as it equaled the playing field.

You mean real-time Fallout Tactics because the other two were strictly turn-based. The combat system in tactics, which ever you choose TB or real-time, was underdeveloped. It's one of those good examples where the devs should stick with one combat system and not try to do both.

 

[crufty]

I quite agree. A good "classic" RPG will have lots of little well-executed details that serve to frame the bigger picture. Exploration, killing, development, and immersive choices are all part of the experience.

I haven't played GTA, but it sounds like it has more interactivity than a lot of recent RPGs. Can you go through the game without killing anyone?

 

[Chefe]

hello world

 

[Naked_Lunch]

The whole point of playing GTA is just to kill people. It's no fun otherwise.

 

[gromit]

First let me get a pet peeve off my back: I posit that there is really nothing, that's right, NOTHING, non-linear about the series. They let you stall between the mandatory missions by wandering around the map having "activity playtime." Furthermore, the missions seem to get further away from "create this result" in each game, and closer to "drive THIS car through THESE beacons, and then do THESE smaller steps in the order they are presented to you."

At best, I would say that, while linear, it's sometimes a thick line allowing marginal amounts of lateral movement, which lets you take rest stops. I don't dislike the games, but they're not half of what people like to say they are.

That said, I do think the ideas behind the systematic additions to SA were clever, if not the "NES Olympics" implementation. The button-pushing was a sizable part, though not the only one, in making them feel like a chore to keep my character from being gimped, rather than a task I willfully undertook to develop him. I know, I know, those clauses say almost exactly the same thing, but hopefully my meaning gets across.

 

[Section8]

SA had some interesting "non-kill" missions, that were still exceedingly violent. My favourite was one where you had to get a captive to talk, so your chosen method of torture was strapping him to the hood of your car, and doing crazy shit, like driving at high speed, insane jumps, etc.

But yes, it did have a linear progession pretty much exactly as described by Wallace. I'd like to see a return to some of the concepts explored in GTA2, where you had a choice of which crime syndiacte to work for, and doing so would likely incur the wrath of another. Of course, with GTA3 they made a conscious decision to move toward cinematic effect, with a storyline on rails.

 

[TheGreatGodPan]

The respect system RULED! GTA2 is still my favorite in the series. I never played Mercenaries, did it do a good job with Rockstar's orphaned mechanic?

 

[Psilon]

I've been playing Boiling Point lately and it's easily described as GTA2 mixed with Deus Ex. The faction system was so close to the Respect-O-Meter, I kept expecting the Hare Krishnas to show up and start fighting Zaibatsu Corp.

 

[voodoo1man]

Well, I was about to say that I wouldn't mind getting tubgirled with extreme prejudice, but I guess now that I did, there's no chance of it happening.

As wallace pointed out, there's really no role-play in GTA. What there is, is a really fucking fun simulation. I love big, open-ended simulations. Everyone does. But a simulation does not a roleplaying game make. However, take a good simulation and a good RPG and you've got yourself an awesome game. Gothic was like that, so were Fallout and Arcanum to a very limited extent. Now Bloodlines really had only one simulation element: you could run around the streets feeding on people. Same thing with VtM: Redemption too (and then only in Prague and London). Now you say, what makes a simulation different from an RPG? I like to define it this way: a simulation is very non-linear, lots of choices, but they are "shallow" (only affect a small temporal and/or "physical" area), while in an RPG the choices affect the PC and NPCs more deeply (nowadays the ignorant youngsters think this means only having long lists of useless stats that in no way impact the gameplay). So there's my stupid little classification.

 

[Twinfalls]

VD, I suspect people didn't pick up on what you first posted here because it's GTA related. You may make a valid rpg-related observation, but if it uses GTA in any way, the thread will descend to GTA-talk.

NB EvoG's final point, that:

I'd MUCH rather see this open infrastructure in a fantasy or high science fiction setting, which would be an amazing experience

- leads directly to Bethesda and Oblivion, for they are the ones pursuing that model in a fantasy setting.

 

[Second Chance]

shadowrun crpgs would greatly benefit from that...if they ever make ONE!

and ultima... i never realized that you had to eat for anything else but camping

That was up to Ultima VI. In Ultima VII (I forget if Pagan had this feature) the Avatar or your party members would complain that they're hungry and you'd have to feed them, and they could say this at any time. You could be trying to cut a fucking horde of cyclopses and all of a sudden a caption would pop up above Iolo and he'd say something to the effect of "I'm hungry. Feed me dammit!" To my knowledge, Ultima VII was the only Ultima that had this. I'm probably wrong, though.

EDIT: In Ultima IV you had to buy rations to survive on the world map, otherwise your health would just keep going down until you were dead dead dead. And considering the difficulty of just finding out where the fuck you were on the world map, it could get quite annoying.

all Ultimas up to U8, including the Underworlds, had this. Effects of hunger would vary from game to game of course.

 

[franc kaos]

Please at least use paragraphs. I know people seem to be able read this kind of stream-of-consciousness over on the TES boards, but it really does hurt the eyes.

I edited and clarified it somewhat.

 

[dunduks]

- leads directly to Bethesda and Oblivion, for they are the ones pursuing that model in a fantasy setting.

Except that Morrowinds model was plain boring and simply not fun, where as in GTA I could drive around and do stupid stuff and generaly just have fun for hours. All it boils down is to fun factor - GTA was and is still fun, while MW is just plain boring.