The Ten CRPG Commandments

[StraitLacedDeviant]

Everyone on this board is alway bitching about the mistakes made by companies developing crpgs. This is as it should be. However to guide the infidels towards the light, and assuming it hasn't been done before and I'm not making an ass out of myself, I say we compile a set of ten commandments for them to live by. My first contribution is:

1: Substance is thy lord, thy god, thou shalt not hold style or potential profit before it.

2: Thou shalt have turn-based combat. Not pause turn-based, simulated turn based, or I can't believe its not turnbased, just plain vanilla turn-based.

 

[Spazmo]

3. Thou shalt not include NPC romances in thy game for they art crap.
4. And yea, thy plot branches shalt be multiple and come early; ending affecting decisions shalt not be made an hour before the credits roll.

 

[Psilon]

5. Thou shalt include multiple solutions to all thy quests.

6. Thou shalt remember that "evil solutions" includeth more than "good for hire" and "raving psychopath."

 

[StraitLacedDeviant]

7. Thou shalt not inflict thine main character with amnesia of any form nor have him start in a prison cell/someones house not knowing how he got there, lest you be stricken with plague

 

[Taoreich]

2: Thou shalt have turn-based combat. Not pause turn-based, simulated turn based, or I can't believe its not turnbased, just plain vanilla turn-based.

I would venture to say that this is part of the apocrypha as opposed to scripture. Say whatever you like about enjoying TB or hating RT, the fact is that TB is the manna of a strategy game, not role-playing. ToEE's combat (which I hold up as one of the better combat models ever) made the game a fun dungeon crawl; it did nothing to increase it's role-playing merit.

Criticism aside:
8. Unless vital to the innovatively and engagingly crafted storyline, there shalt be no deus ex machina which incessantly provides salvation in the face of mine enemies. If the main character chooses their path poorly, they shalt suffer the consequences of their folly.

 

[StraitLacedDeviant]

Yes but have you played an rpg without turn based combat where the combat didn't detract from the overall enjoyment of the game?


Also I won't choose the final ten until we are nearly sick of this thread so feel free to go way over 10.

 

[Hawkwing74]

5. Thou shalt include multiple solutions to all thy quests.

6. Thou shalt remember that "evil solutions" includeth more than "good for hire" and "raving psychopath."

I heartily agree that this is a huge missing element in games recently.

 

[Nightjed]

7. Thou shalt not inflict thine main character with amnesia of any form nor have him start in a prison cell/someones house not knowing how he got there, lest you be stricken with plague

Hey... i liked torment .... you can make a good game with an amnesia story as long as you dont abuse of it.

9. Shall thou divert most of production time and money to just graphics forgetting about everything else thou shall be cast into the fiery bowls of hell, where flesh will burn in agony for ever and ever

 

[Voss]

Ah, yes, I have actually.
TB or RT have nothing to do with the role playing aspects.

I also disagree with the no romances stricture. The problem is that most people seem to think that romance= show me da B00bies!! A good romance, on the other hand, can be engaging.
Romance is a important part of human interaction. Leave it out completely and something feels like its missing.

I find it amusing, however, that a lot of people that dislike romances like brothels. With extra sheep. Or at least whine when they get cut, as if its the end of the world. Its an interesting commentary.

 

[fnordcircle]

Thou shalt let thine player's choices make a true impact upon the world and not simply have NPCs referreth unto them by a new name or changeth their skin color.

Thou shalt NOT have any quests so dependent on certain NPCs that they needeth be invulnerable to attack.

Thou shalt have a realistic inventory system. Woe be unto them that use a limitless inventory, for they shalt find no mercy at the end of times.

Thou shalt not use food for healing.

Thou shalt limit the numbers of crates and barrels bearing loot and thou shalt keep them in a realistic location.

Thou shalt not use invisible walls or tiny fences to block thy player's from going further on the map, it would be better for thee to tie a milestone around thy neck and have theyself tossed into the sea.

Thou shalt not sacrifice realism for ease of use, for in so doing, thou steppeth from the path of role-playing and join the many on the path to action-roleplay, which is an abomination.

 

[Transcendent One]

Nothing wrong with romances. Just cause romances in many popular games were silly doesn't mean every dev out there thinks of a romance as nothing but a teenage soap opera.

 

[HanoverF]

Thou shall not have more easter eggs then the first number in the retail price of the game.

Thou shall not cater to the lowest common denominator

Thou shall not limit the Role Playing to stat management




Thou shall not be developed by Canadians

 

[Sigurd]

Thou shalt include some connectivity between the PC and the game world, whether the character be pre-generated or not.

Thou shalt include a wide range of customization for the appearance and statistics of the character.

Thou shalt not cause the first combat area to be a sewer, dungeon, or any type of cavern filled with rats, consummating finally in a very large mutated rat.

 

[suibhne]

2: Thou shalt have turn-based combat. Not pause turn-based, simulated turn based, or I can't believe its not turnbased, just plain vanilla turn-based.

I would venture to say that this is part of the apocrypha as opposed to scripture. Say whatever you like about enjoying TB or hating RT, the fact is that TB is the manna of a strategy game, not role-playing. ToEE's combat (which I hold up as one of the better combat models ever) made the game a fun dungeon crawl; it did nothing to increase it's role-playing merit.

I disagree. It only affects combat role-playing, obviously, but turn-based combat always allows SO MUCH MORE tactical depth that it's much friendlier to true role-playing within combat. BG2's stupid combat, for all its (many, many) flaws, still allowed considerably more tactical depth than either NWN or KotOR, and the flexibility and emergent possibilities of ToEE's combat dwarfs anything offered by BG2. I felt that I had an unprecedented degree of freedom in designing my characters with different skills and even personalities - again, related only to combat, but hey, it's still something.

A great RPG, to me, might not have turn-based - but it would be even greater if it did.

 

[Dan]

Thou shalt let the slow minded be treated as such, not by adding funny dialog.

 

[Vault Dweller]

Might as well join the fun:

Thou shalt not dumb games down.

Now in regard to romances and RT combat, fuck both as neither belongs in an RPG.

 

[Sol Invictus]

Hey, SirTech is Canadian and they made good games!

 

[Ausir]

Isn't "shalt" only for 2nd person and "-eth" ending for singular 3rd person?

 

[Anonymous]

They are using the Fantasy Game Dictionary.

 

[Taoreich]

It only affects combat role-playing, obviously, but turn-based combat always allows SO MUCH MORE tactical depth that it's much friendlier to true role-playing within combat.

Without demeaning either attribute, role playing != tactical depth, In fact it can be argued (and I have) that tactics is the very antithesis of role playing since tactics is entirely dependant on meta-gaming.

A great RPG, to me, might not have turn-based - but it would be even greater if it did.

Fair enough

 

[Vault Dweller]

In regard to the "RT vs TB from the role-playing point of view" discussion, I was searching the forums for something else and found this

http://www.rpgcodex.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=192

Basically, this is a non-standard argument for turn based combat in CRPGs based on a movie, The Magnificent Seven.

Okay, the set up is there are scenes at the beginning of the movie that demonstrates why the Magnificent Seven are, in fact, "magnificent". One of them is a scene featuring a guy who specializes in throwing knives as his combat forte. He is challenged by a gunslinger as to whether or not he's faster with his knife throwing than the gunslinger is. They do a mock run at an actual duel and the gunslinger claims victory. The people looking on say they couldn't tell who won or who lost. When the gunslinger asks the knife guy to tell them who won, the knife guy says, "You lost."

So, the gunslinger gets angry, and tells the knife guy he wants to prove it by them dueling for real. When the gunslinger keeps on insisting, the knife fighter eventually stands up, and they duel again, standing about 20 to 30 feet apart. Long story short, as the gunslinger is drawing, he gets a knife hitting him and killing him.

The knife thrower was much faster than the gunslinger, capable of not only beating the gunslinger's weapon draw, but also having the knife travel accurately through the air in time to kill the gunslinger before he fired.

Turn based can do this situation flawlessly. Most turn based systems have a combat system based on how fast a character can act based on their agilty, or other attribute(s), the characters in combat are. Avernum does it. Geneforge does it. SPECIAL does it. I'm pretty sure GURPS does this as well. Because the knife thrower was more agile than the gunslinger, he won the fight. His "turn" came up first.

Now, consider this situation in real time. In real time, you have to deal with actions and animations also going on at the same time. You have three animation sequences for this fight. The knife flying through the air, the knife thrower drawing and throwing the knife, and the gun slinger drawing his weapon. Each of these animations will have a certain fixed frame count per second.

For most 2D games, the animation frames for the sprites is 15 frames per second. 3D games are pretty much the same, only they can blend the model movements with the frame rate, making the animations a litte more smoothly. Because of this, in real time, you'd have to set up a delay calculation for the gunslingers just to get the knife in the air for it to complete the animations of the drawing just before it fires the gun.

That's basically the problem here. You'd pretty much have to script this to work right, and it'd only work for that one event. You'd have a consistancy issue throughout the game. If you made it so the knife thrower was always that much faster, you'd end up with several balance issue problems as well as a problem with the timing of actions per "round".

You have to deal with the time it takes for the knife thrower to go through his draw and throw animations, and the animation of the knife travelling through the air. If it takes ten frames of animation for the draw and throw, you have to delay every gunslinger that he's faster than for 7/10s of a second, and possibly delay them even more depending on the travel time for the knife. That may not sound like much, but that's a fairly long time to delay actions in real time. Depending on the round length, or when time "recycles", this would result in long gaps between the next cycle or you'd have overlapping cycles, just to compensate for this effect.

Also, depending on whether this is a bonus or penalty of lag time due to an attribute like agility, you run the risk of having a narrow attribute system just so the round time isn't too long. It's it's a bonus or penalty of .7 seconds per agility point, and you have a attribute range of 1-20, you're talking a round cycle time of 14 seconds in real time, which would make it grossly slower than turn based.

So, basically, that's an advantage to turn based right there. It can allow a specialist character to actually be magnificent in his area of specialty, which wouldn't be possible in real time without a hell of a lot of fudging.

 

[SuperH]

Of course turn based is more important to role playing than real time. You say tactics are metagaming Taoreich but what about the fact that your character's speed stat no longer makes a difference to your speed in battle in real time. How you do depends more on your own personal reflexes and trigger speed than your character's. Sure, you can add in the ability to speed up animations or something when you're faster, and therefore increase speed, but you've still got to have that twitchy action gamer bit thrown in, which is in no way roleplaying.

And how would tactics detract from roleplaying anyway? If you were actually sitting around, fighting orcs, running up to them and repeatedly hitting them with a sword would be a really really bad idea. You would, unless you had no intelligence, think to yourself "hmm it's probably better that I kill this monster first because doing so would have x y z effect."

 

[Taoreich]

Keep in mind that I have in no way advocated RT over TB for RPGs. My point is that the type of combat is irrelevant to the role-playing aspect of the game, although it is a very important aspect as it pertains to general enjoyment.

 

[Anonymous]

I think turn-based helps Roleplaying when you're playing a single character, it doesnt do much for roleplaying in party based games (which are generally low in RP anyways), due to fact it's tricky to Roleplay 6 guys fully.

 

[Human Shield]

Turned-based does help role-playing but a theoretically perfect real-time system (not an attempt to smash TB rules into pause and play) could work.

Role-playing = Choices from point of view of a character
Game = Success or failure dependant on something (not an imagination get-together)

Together make RPG.

TB alllows success or fail to more depend on the character which helps in making choices from a character's point of view (my character is fast enough, I don't have to be fast).