The REAL overlooked sin in RPGs: disconnect between narrative and mechanics

[DOS]

It's not the separation of narrative and mechanics that's even the problem anymore. It's how time is used in the game world that hampers the experience over all.

Twitch-based gameplay has taken over the industry, which was borne from the arcade systems of yore. I call it the Coin-Op Paradigm, where everything needs to be effectively designed around clearly-defined solutions (and failures) in order to affect the player to put another coin in the slot. Games of today have refined that feedback system into a more elaborate and abstract experience that dumbs down anything even remotely narrative-driven.

Ludonarrative dissonance is merely collateral and symptomatic of a much larger issue here.

The industry of today, where we have a lot of producers and investors whom having prior expertise in pushing high volumes of toy products through retail vendors are now in charge of what is "successful" design. It's the difference between a real novelist and a career-novelist. The difference between 1960s-70s old cigar-chomping music execs versus the new-age hippie execs predicting musical trends and risk-averse ventures (to paraphrase Zappa). The video game industry is no different. Those producers want extremely minimal barrier-to-entry games so that players can "digest" the experience immediately.

It's no wonder that narrative and plot are separated from interactivity, it's because the way we generally define gameplay is twitch-based and how mechanics are predicated on that definition. So therefor we have gameplay arenas that contradict the linear expositions of cinematic storytelling; a mutation of two distinct mediums merging into a bastardized form as "game" or even worse, "rpg game".

DnD took the likes of any epic story by Vance/Tolkien (among other influences) and transmuted it into mechanical form. It's like what Jack Mamais (designer of Heavy Gear II, FarCry, Crysis and Starfighter Inc.) said recently on a podcast with another friend, "I learned game design by playing and mastering DnD". His friend would go on to say that making the original DnD book WORKABLE (seeing as it was broken) was crucial to his ability to design games. And both of these guys have never even made an RPG!

I think that speaks volumes over how lost most modern game designers are today.

The DnD rulebook should be the bible on how to "narrate" a video game. The mechanics are centered on narrative-structuring and players are the agents of plotting within. You can't do this when reducing the complexities of such mechanics to continuous real-time events.

Returning to games that are more "turn-based" is a start in the right direction, but with a demographic of players and designers that have attention spans of flies clinging to shit, you can pretty much rule out any possibility of that ever happening (re: Cyberpunk 2077).

Which means that the 90s was merely a time of pure chance and discovery where the ceiling of risk was virtually unknown.

 

[Cryomancer]

JRPG's and MMORPG's(except few ones like UO) has a insane amount of ludonarrative dissonance. Not that old school CRPG is perfect in this regard. For example, on Arcanum Ore golems can break weapons BUT not "natural weapons", so a dog claw/bite can damage the ore golem without being damaged while a mace can't...Don't get me wrong, compared to modern games like D3, is a minor tiny inconsistency BUT older CPRG's aren't perfect either. Just much better than modern games.

 

[Shadenuat]

they suffer HP damage when they do that though.

 

[Absinthe]

The Dungeons & Dragons ruleset, in all its various incarnations, is by and large hot garbage. There was a time when D&D was a hot and interesting thing among certain subcultures but the ruleset has never failed to be a broken piece of shit encouraging a certain breed of formulaic design that is often inherited by bad videogame developers. The biggest issue with D&D is that it was never any good for roleplaying adventures. It was only any good for dungeon-crawling adventures, as the name fucking indicates, but it's encouraged this weird fucking notion of RPGs being completely combat-oriented in terms of mechanical design while going on narrative sprees where the player is more of a tourist than participant, lacking the tools to meaningfully affect the situation because D&D handled all that shit like an afterthought and no one had a notion of what mechanics for non-combat gameplay should be like, hence the loads of cutscenes or really basic fetchquests. You also get stupid problems like the magic über alles disease because D&D was always hot garbage at making non-casters any decent or interesting, the whole "splitting combat into room-sized discrete encounters where no one in the next room pays the slightest attention to the sounds outside the door" problem, uninspired fantasy settings that generally try to crib off D&D settings instead of innovating or borrowing from folklore and myth, and a load of other dumb shit. Those people no longer think in terms of realism, in terms of literature, in terms of folklore and myth, no, they think in terms of fucking D&D and produce shit as stale as D&D, usually even worse than D&D.

I think you can pretty directly blame D&D for the disconnect between narrative and mechanics, because that's how D&D operated. The D&D storyworld collapses under the weight of all the shit that is possible by player characters and no good reason for why society and the story hasn't adapted to it. D&D conditioned designers to not give a fuck about this crap because when your spellcasters can just divine the answers to everything instead of doing legwork, your clerics can go around resurrecting dead people, and your wizards can easily destroy the local economy with the slightest bit of effort, and loads of teleportation is a thing, then the D&D storyworld only manages by overwhelmingly ignoring all the shit that player characters can get up to over the course of its narratives. It set a norm that it was fine to have player characters' abilities break storyworld rules and that their ability to do so should be largely ignored or overruled anyway.

And D&D's roots stem from wargames, iirc.

 

[samuraigaiden]

GURPS is 34 years old. Let's not pretend only DnD exists.

 

[Absinthe]

GURPS never had the influence D&D did on role-playing design. If it did, today's RPGs would be much higher quality. Fallout is the closest, and they abandoned the GURPS ruleset over creative control concerns.

 

[Cryomancer]

You also get stupid problems like the magic über alles disease because(...) spellcasters can just divine the answers to everything instead of doing legwork, your clerics can go around resurrecting dead people, and your wizards can easily destroy the local economy with the slightest bit of effort, and loads of teleportation is a thing

In other RPG's, including warhammer and WoD, magic trumps everything too. On WoD, a archmage can literally create his own universe. Tremere is arguably the strongest clan exactly because they have access to the closest discipline to magic(blood magic/thaumaturgy and still far weaker than what true magic can do).

HOWEVER, i agree that resurrection and destroying local economy spells should't be in the way that D&D handles it. Resurrection should be a RITUAL, has a check and failure chance chance and permanently reduces the target constitution and AGES the caster. And keep in mind that 4e tried to nerf magic and made the game fell extremely boring. Exactly because magic felt more like just "a attack". As for the spells who can destroy the local economy. Any civilization would have "anti illegal magical practice" laws and organizations just like in a cyberpunk game, with high technology, people will try to have ways to deal with people trying to steal virtual currency using illegal implants and etc.

 

[Üstad]

Spoiler

Trash mobs are bad, trashtext is bad, but here's what you people are REALLY overlooking: disconnection between in-game narrative/setting/"lore" and actual gameplay mechanics.

Fully agreed on everything here, my lad. The biggest issue of modern games is that they don't integrate narrative and mechanics with each other well enough (or even at all) and the end result is always mediocrity.

Take Dragon Age, for instance. Very early in DA:O you're told that mages need their mana potions and some get addicted to the stuff, become druggies and shit. You also uncover that even some Templars get hooked and become dirty cops, helping mages smuggle magical cocaine. Sure, great premise, I like it! Except...you can have as many mages in your party and mana management will never lead to addiction, legal troubles or anything of the sort. The narrative and the gameplay exist in different realities. That's the hallmark of a mediocre game. Same goes for blood magic: you can cast all BM buffs in front of templars, nothing is gonna happen, lol.

This is a perfect example of why this kind of "ludonarrative dissonance" (pretentious term but let's run with it) is bad, and why integrating plot and setting points into the mechanics can improve a game tremendously.
If the story tells you one thing but the game does another, it just leads to you disregarding all the lore fluff because it doesn't really matter in the game itself. You realize that it's all just a facade, and the illusion of exploring an actual world breaks apart.
"Blood magic is illegal!" everyone says. "Guards will jail you if you cast it!"
"Mana potions are addictive!" everyone says. "You'll turn into a junkie if you chug too many of them!"
Then you cast blood magic in public and nobody cares, and you chug mana potions and nothing happens except your mana regenerates, and to add insult to injury you can even buy those highly addictive mana potions at the local alchemist's store instead of having to go to the black market.

Ok. Looks like all that bullshit about illegal magic and addictive potions doesn't really exist. Immersion = gone.

That's IMO the "essence of games", in a sense. A movie/book has a story, but you don't interact with it. Chess has gameplay, but there isn't really a narrative going on. Vidya OTOH is unique in the sense that it is the only media in which you can have this intimate interaction between narrative and mechanics, with one helping develop the other. But instead of games becoming better...GAMES with time, what we got was an identity crisis, with games trying to become shitty imitations of other forms of media.

And it's funny, because that's a lost battle at this point in time. Everyone just accepts that the thing you PLAY and the stuff you read/hear can be in direct contradiction and it's all fine. PoE had guns, but no cannons and medieval castles were still all the RAGE and only the Codex bothered to notice. More mainstream titles like GTA have a protagonist going "OMG, I can't take this life of crimes anymore, I can't even think about taking another human life again, blablabla" and two seconds later you're back to killing hookers for easy cash.

Yes, GTA is a good example. GTA 4 and 5 try to give you those stories with emotional components and try to humanize the player character, meanwhile in the gameplay you're just a total psychopaths who drives over civilians with a truck and shoots at random cars until they explode. "Killing people really gets to me," your character says when you start the next story mission, but while you drove from your home to the story mission's starting point you casually drove over three dozen pedestrians. Ok.

This is one of the reasons why I liked Saints Row 2 a lot more than GTA 4. SR has the right tone for a game like this, cynical and with a lot of dark humor. Your character is a gangster who doesn't give a shit and casually shoots hobos in cutscenes just like you casually drive over pedestrians in regular gameplay. The story and characters make sense in that game because none of it clashes with the gameplay - it all fits to form a coherent whole.

The new Tomb Raiders are also a good example. During gameplay, you shoot more humans than in any of the earlier TR games, but in cutscenes Lara almost starts crying when she has to shoot and slaughter a deer for food. Once the cutscene is over you commit genocide on the wildlife just to gather more meat for your inventory. Yeah, ok.

Games are an interactive medium. They're not movies. Whenever control is taken away from you for the sake of a cutscene, the game suffers. Whenever the story ignores choices you made as a player, the game suffers. The worst thing is cutscenes where your character acts completely contrary to how you've played him up to this point. A good example are those cutscenes where you walk straight into an ambush even though you have reason to expect one and your character is a high int build. Do you really expect me to believe my character is dumb enough to fall for such an obvious ambush, devs? Seriously? Even when he has 18 int and discovered a letter from the bad guys saying that they set bounty hunters on his ass? He'd reasonably expect an ambush at this point and be careful rather than walk straight into it.

A big issue is designers creating scenes as if they were a movie's or a book's. Many game writers haven't learned how to write properly for a game. You can't do linear scenes where the actions of the player character are fixed. Scenes like "Protagonist gets ambushed and imprisoned, has to escape prison" only work as intros, you can't drop a scene like that on the player in the middle of the game and expect him to just go along with it. "This is bullshit!" the player says. "I would never have walked into that ambush if it weren't for this stupid cutscene! Also, how did one arrow manage to knock my character out? I was wearing full plate armor and my character has so many HP that he can soak up a dozen arrows in regular combat! This broke all the rules of the fucking game!"

Thing is, not only does the game become better when you implement all of the setting's little quirks as mechanics (such as mana potions being addictive, for example), having such mechanics also makes your job as a designer or writer more interesting.

Let's take the "mana potions are addictive" example and play with it a bit. What kinds of quests could you design around that?
What about a quest to help a junkie wizard come off the potions? Yeah, sounds good.
A quest to smuggle mana potions from a witch living in the forest into town to sell it to mages there? Yep, cool.

You can even derive additional mechanics from that mechanic. You can add something like mana potion withdrawal to your character, which you suffer from for X in-game days, after which you're clean. But drink just one potion after that and your addiction is back.

The more things are implemented as generalized mechanics which universally apply to every character in the game, the more you can use these mechanics to base quests on them, and the more unique gameplay elements you can introduce.

Everything that appears in your setting should be turned into a mechanic. The more mechanically sound your game is - the more is covered by its systems - the better it will turn out.

What about, "umm you're character is special chosen one kind of stuff because of that you won't get addicted 'mkay?" type of explanation? Those ones are my favourite.

 

[Semiurge]

The blood magic option to free Connor lost weight when getting the Circle involved became an obviously better option (originally if you tried to do that the demon would go to town while you were gone and everything would be ruined). There was a lot of chickening out in the direction of making things more convenient than was sensible.

Retrieving the mages while leaving Redcliffe vulnerable with devastating consequences always being a constant would only work for a first playthrough with no meta-level knowledge, but perhaps it would work if it was based on chances and time limit both, like the longer you take getting the mages the lower your chances, but even if you retrieve the mages as fast as possible there would still be a chance of failure? Ideal solutions should always include either risk or a challenge.

 

[Absinthe]

The blood magic option to free Connor lost weight when getting the Circle involved became an obviously better option (originally if you tried to do that the demon would go to town while you were gone and everything would be ruined). There was a lot of chickening out in the direction of making things more convenient than was sensible.

Retrieving the mages while leaving Redcliffe vulnerable with devastating consequences always being a constant would only work for a first playthrough with no meta-level knowledge, but perhaps it would work if it was based on chances and time limit both, like the longer you take getting the mages the lower your chances, but even if you retrieve the mages as fast as possible there would still be a chance of failure? Ideal solutions should always include either risk or a challenge.

Not a bad thought. I figured a better take would be "leave Redcliffe -> Redcliffe is screwed" but if you brought a very large amount of lyrium with you, you could just burn it (and lose money) to conduct the ritual on the spot without going anywhere. And then you hammer in the dark fantasy bit because you can still do the right thing but it will cost you a lot and only benefit you a little.

Oh yeah, this shit reminds me. At some point it was planned that you could invoke the rite of conscription and recruit Jowan (like you recruited Sten), but that got cut a good while ago. And there's no consequence for using the Rite of Conscription as a "get out of jail free" card without actually conscripting Sten either. Those are just awkward holdovers from when it was planned for the protagonist to actually recruit his party members into the Grey Wardens.

 

[Semiurge]

Oh yeah, this shit reminds me. At some point it was planned that you could invoke the rite of conscription and recruit Jowan (like you recruited Sten), but that got cut a good while ago. And there's no consequence for using the Rite of Conscription as a "get out of jail free" card without actually conscripting Sten either. Those are just awkward holdovers from when it was planned for the protagonist to actually recruit his party members into the Grey Wardens.

I can already imagine the potential for drama between Jowan and Wynne, much like in ME2 between Tali and Legion. Imagine if recruiting (and keeping) both of them had requirements from you, such as maximum persuasion and possibly something else? The blood mage specialization was tacked on in release version, so recruiting Jowan and having the option to learn blood magic from him (with consequences to Wynne's relationship with you) would've fleshed out that portion of the world.

 

[Absinthe]

Oh yeah, this shit reminds me. At some point it was planned that you could invoke the rite of conscription and recruit Jowan (like you recruited Sten), but that got cut a good while ago. And there's no consequence for using the Rite of Conscription as a "get out of jail free" card without actually conscripting Sten either. Those are just awkward holdovers from when it was planned for the protagonist to actually recruit his party members into the Grey Wardens.

I can already imagine the potential for drama between Jowan and Wynne, much like in ME2 between Tali and Legion. Imagine if recruiting (and keeping) both of them had requirements from you, such as maximum persuasion and possibly something else? The blood mage specialization was tacked on in release version, so recruiting Jowan and having the option to learn blood magic from him (with consequences to Wynne's relationship with you) would've fleshed out that portion of the world.

Not as much as the potential for drama between Alistair and Loghain back when it was planned so that you could have both of 'em, but that got scrapped too.

 

[TheHeroOfTime]

I remember when I was younger I played some random ass gta-style game... it was Scarface maybe? The thing is in that game you can't kill random pedrestian and do that kind of shit like in GTA, the main charater refuses to do it (It even says a line about it). I remember my friends saying me that the game was whack due to that limitations. And I was like "No, it's actually an interesting detail and mechanic".

 

[Nifft Batuff]

These are minor details if you think that the next RPG of the year will be Mortal Kombat 12.

 

[deuxhero]

Witcher 3 bothers me with the gear mechanics.
The game keeps limiting it by level, you level up at a slower pace than finding higher level sword recipes.
So picture level 1 Geralt taking 20+ slashes just to kill a level 6 bear. Even at the LOWEST difficulty.
5 Levels later with a new sword, he massacres the bear in 2 swings. Not because he's really skilled, it's because his sword is way sharper.

Real life hunting bother me with the gear mechanic.
This real life keeps limiting it by certificate, you get higher certs at a slower pace than finding bigger caliber gun shops.
So picture level 1 Crispy shooting 20 rounds .20LR to kill a brown bear. Even at lowest diff with the bear trapped in a hole. (If then.)
28 days later Crispy can shoot 2 rounds to kill a similar bear. Not because he's more skilled, but because his gun now is a type with much bigger bore, a .45 hunting rifle. because his certificate has passed inspection and he now can purchase and use that biggy~

But if you find a high calibre gun IRL before getting the license to use it, you can still use it if you really want to. Yeah, the cops will slap a fine on you if they catch you, but you are not physically incapable of taking the gun in your hands and squeezing the trigger just because you haven't reached the minimum required hunter level yet.

Terrible comparison.

From the way gunnuts and conservatives talk about it, use a bigger caliber without correct certificates is liability from fines upto prison time. It is prison time they seem leery about, since they dont actually fear fine as such, considering the size and price tag of some of the guns they keep wanting to purchase.

Not even shoot it, just keep it would seem to be such heavy crime~

So? The problem with hard stat and level requirements for items isn't that it is a crime to use them. The problem is that the character cannot even equip the item until he reaches that arbitrary stat or level requirement even if he wanted to.

An RPG where you have to purchase weapon licenses before you can use high tier weapons would be cool. But then you could still use the weapon without the license and get in trouble if you get caught (something like casting spells in Athkatla in BG2 is a good comparison).

Finding a high level weapon early on and then not being able to use it until 10 hours later is just stupid game design and no fun. Most of the time it's not even done for a simulationist reason, like "this armor is too heavy for you to wear right now", because usually there's similarly heavy armors you can equip without issue. It's just that... this item is a LEVEL 10 item and currently you are only LEVEL 5 so you cannot equip it until you gained 5 MORE LEVELS. Arbitrary and stupid.

7.62 High Calibre Hard Life actually does this well. You can use whatever you want in the lawless area of the country, but to use your fun guns and standard capacity mags in the government's zone of firm control you have to acquire the right licenses or keep the police from noticing. New licenses are acquired by either paying a forger (expensive, requires some quests for criminal contact to get the most expensive stuff, may be risk of detective but I haven't tested it) or doing quests for government authorities (can be rather difficult). The increasing licenses also increase in difficulty: Hunting license basically just requires bribing a few low level officials or doing some relatively simple work for them, police license requires some serious work for the government, and total immunity requires being the local dictator's direct henchman.

Mechanically this gives a reason to use a lot of worse guns since they lack restricted features. Since the game handles magazines as physical items, you can actually field semi-only MSRs (relatively expensive, but accurate and only need a hunting license) and issue them with gimped 10 round mags for stuff in the restricted zone and save 30 rounders for the lawless jungle. Since the restricted zone is relatively central, you need to either establish stashes on the various sides of the zone (requires a long trip around or surviving a few fights against bandits with better gear), or figure out how to smuggle restricted arms through it.