Development Info Tim Cain at Reboot Develop 2017 - Building a Better RPG: Seven Mistakes to Avoid

[Wizfall]

Fallout character screen is great.
SPECIAL is well explained and skills too.
Way to many useless skills there but it has nothing to do with the UI/presentation, it's a design flaw.

I don't doubt that some people found it impressive as you say so but at some point i don't believe you can make the process/presentation simpler without losing complexity/choices/something.
I like Blood Bowl (a tactical 1vs1 boardgame) for example, you can't possibly make the game easier without losing strategic depth.
Not everything is for everyone.

 

[Kev Inkline]

I suspect TimCain might argue that Dark Souls is an example of a mountain with a road, albeit a steep and narrow one. (Witness the birth of a Codex meme)

And in the coldness of the late night, just before dawn, some dew gathers to cover the road. How elegant, how beautiful!

A sight that energizes the mighty warrior making his way up the mountain, weary from battle after battle narrowly won. But not to worry, this nectar rejuvenates his body and restores his mental strength.

 

[J_C]

I suspect TimCain might argue that Dark Souls is an example of a mountain with a road, albeit a steep and narrow one. (Witness the birth of a Codex meme)

How would that be? Dark Souls starts with a character sheet of a dozen attributes, the player not knowing what do those attributes do.

 

[Excidium II]

It even has an attribute that is completely worthless for anyone to raise (Even acknowledged by the devs by making its initial score not factor into the different starting classes stat budget). Truly a classic arupiji design

 

[Black]

"... a PC game I worked on was Icewind Dale, which required you to roll six whole second-edition D&D characters before you could even start playing the game. No one would get through character creation nowadays. You know, people back then loved it, and there are still people that would love that, but I think the thing is when it comes to the console, and maybe all gamers, it has to be accessible, people have to be led into it.".

cRPG developers are guilty of “mutually indulgent log-rolling”. They consider player’s ignorance as facts of life and this passivity lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy. Adam Smith was a wise man: “They are likely to make common cause, to be all very indulgent to one another, and every man to consent that his neighbour may neglect his duty, provided he himself is allowed to neglect his own.”

With that attitude they can't even begin to develop anything resembling M&Ms, Wizardries, ToEE Darklands (sorry Josh) or even SoZ. Party creation already is playing the game and often one of the best parts of it.
If you fall for the "our audience is dumb so we need to go shallower" trap then you might as well drop the pretence of developing rpgs (because they're for nerds and not the cool guy you're trying to attract) and make a shooter or a tank action game.
Oh wait.

 

[Chris Avelltwo]

Well, it does have that "mountain" you see.

 

[undecaf]

So please explain to me why there is more than 600 million chess players worldwide.

What on earth would you do with that information? And why is it relevant here at all?

 

[pippin]

I dunno about character generation screens, but nothing will be as intimidating as trying to make a mage character in the first Realms of Arkania. How was I supposed to know that "witch's spit" was a healing spell? Or "bambaladam" a "friends" type spell? Not only that, you also had like 100 spells to choose from, and a lot of them had these kind of fantasy names.

After that everything seems easier. Although I do feel the lack of separate pools for skills and stats in Arcanum was bad.

 

[belowmecoldhands]

They are also tools you use to solve problems in the game. And that's what matters.

Why?

No. Trap builds as the name implies is something that unknowingly fucks you over.

So trap builds result from choices that later on will prevent you from moving forward because you lack a particular skill or stat.

This complaint is strange because 99% of cRPGs are very easy combat centric games that consider skill checks fluffy.

The only game that does that to the player is AoD, but even this is debatable. The main quests always follow a specific pattern.

But Fallout was full of trap builds, most sensible RPG character types are borderline useless in Fallout and will make you struggle through the game. Sure finishing it will be possible but it will be frustrating.
-Dumb musclehead - will loose out on exp rewards due to low intelligence, and struggle in combat because of low agility
-Handyman with lot of technical skills - almost totally useless
-Stealthy thief/assassin type - most of his skills will never be useful for anything, but won't be as bad in combat due to high agility alone
-Brainy scientist using futuristic weapons - his science skills will almost never be useful and he won't get energy weapons until very late in the game
Sure most of this builds can be made functional but only by making them more similar to the nimble, smart gunslinger-diplomat which is the dominant character archetype. Notice that the problem of trap builds can be solved without dumbing down the game as evidenced by many of the titles released later. For example in Underrail most of the above archetypes would be perfectly fine.
This is a difference between allowing bad builds and providing players with trap-options.

I got to agree with this. But I'd like to make a distinction. Is this solved with actual content for each type, or by tweaking the points you spend or the damage you do SO that your points spent on that type aren't consequential? An example of the latter is if you invested fully in the handyman and yet your hitpoints and damage go up in turn, whilst almost no actual handyman content exists beyond some superficial fluff. The end result is everybody ends up being the "nimble, smart gunslinger-diplomat" with superfical fluff added for their class.

That seems to be what a lot of games do. They get around the "bad build" problem by making everybdoy capable of the core gameplay. So if the core gameplay is "nimble, smart gunslinger-diplomat" then everyone can do it. They pull out fancy terms like "organic" and "inclusive" and "streamlined" to describe what they think is the apex of game development.

Maybe they're just not capable of making fully fleshed out games. Did underrail do it? I haven't played it.

 

[Lurker King]

Why do people keep bringing up Dark Souls in a thread about grognardy character creation? Not all "hardcoreness" is the same. It's a different thing when you're getting hammered by a game while you're in control and able to dodge blows with your own skill, compared to going through trial-and-error spreadsheet character creation and trap build cycles until you find something that works in a tactical game

Of course, but their market approach allowed them to create a whole culture around the franchise. Maybe just as there was always a culture of competitive players around arcade games, we should develop a culture of competitive players around cRPGs.

 

[Lurker King]

It's not that they can't do it, but they don't enjoy it.

Think this way: It's like certain movie theathers were always attracting the wrong audience and in order to avoid being booed by the audience, they changed the way they make films.

 

[belowmecoldhands]

It's not that they can't do it, but they don't enjoy it.

Think this way: It's like certain movie theathers were always attracting the wrong audience and in order to avoid being booed by the audience, they changed the way they make films.

I don't go to theatres.

 

[Lurker King]

So please explain to me why there is more than 600 million chess players worldwide.

What on earth would you do with that information? And why is it relevant here at all?

You said that this generation doesn't have any attention span, but they do, otherwise we wouldn’t have so much chess players. I think that the label “cRPG” was so abused by developers that they lost their meaning and now attracts the wrong audience.

 

[belowmecoldhands]

So please explain to me why there is more than 600 million chess players worldwide.

What on earth would you do with that information? And why is it relevant here at all?

You said that this generation doesn't have any attention span, but they do, otherwise we wouldn’t have so much chess players. I think that the label “cRPG” was so abused reconsidered by developers that they loss changed their meaning and now attract the wrong a bigger audience.

Correct your typos.

Bigger means $$$. They're just making a living. I can't blame them, even fi I don't like their games. The industry has grown. The game studies are huge and many many tens of millions dollars at stake with each game.

 

[ushas]

The idea with geometric shapes seems to be to constrain distribution, so my question is "why?". Basically it reduces a system with 6 four-valued primary attributes to a system with two six valued ones (totaling only 36 builds!). I can see some merit in preventing blatant minmaxing, but it still seems to be a bad deal. Also, you do have "this many points to spend", except now you also have additional rules telling you how you are allowed to spend them. IF you find out this 36 builds are actually all worthwhile (compared with many possible point-buy distributions) and IF you have a good reason for balancing stats in sub-groups of up to 3 (so no, for example, characters with bad mental but strong physical across the board), then it might be an idea worth pursuing, otherwise you have just wrecked an awful amount of potential player choice so that you could play with triangles.

I've come to similar conclusion. Let's assign numbers to those allegedly more easy to grasp words
Yucky 1
OK 2
(Average? 3) -> isn't allowed with up/down triangles
Good 4
Great 5

As DraQ said, by turning those triangles you're limited into 36 possible combinations, (2,2,5 or 4,4,1) x 3 x 2. Now if we use good old point buy with +/- buttons - even if it has two separate polls with 9 points to distribute in each and stats are from 1 (yucky) to 5 (great) -> we will still end up with 169 possible combinations in comparison. A little bit of more freedom for the player I dare to say...

If there is a character system designed so it's naturally limited such way, then proposed triangles will be useful aids to convey this information. However, in the talk it seems presented backwards: hey let's use triangles working like this and then we imply character system from that (?). This way yes, it practically boils to inventing the means for lowering complexity so people make simpler and faster decisions.

Btw. it's not used instead of numbers, but instead of sliders and +/- buttons. Instead of numbers there are words from Yucky to Great. It's nothing hideous. Though not sure about it being solution for people not knowing how good is 2 (what about 2/5). Is it really so clear that Ok is actually sub par in this? The numbers are just more accurate way of communication (also with non-native speakers).

Anyway, some graphical aids can be useful if you have antagonistic stats. Eg., when one cannot be a high level endurance athlete and Olympic weightlifter in the same time. For 1D axis a simple slider suffices as Tim already mentioned in the talk. More complex one I remember from the game called Gates of Skeldal.

Spoiler

They had this circle aid in the char. creation for the system with stat inter-dependency. The character is less Mobile if having high Dex and cannot be really Strong if being good Magician. So when you put the ball to the middle he will be average at everything, and moving it to different directions will make him more specialized within the limitations.

On another note, that part about reactivity and Tim repeating to developers that the games are not books nor movies is spot on. Am feeling a bit of nostalgic about Arcanum now.

 

[CryptRat]

How was I supposed to know that "witch's spit" was a healing spell?

Well, the fact it's in the healing school category is a hint.

 

[undecaf]

It's not that they can't do it, but they don't enjoy it.

Sure, they absolutely can do it; because yeah, it's not that hard. But it often seems -to me- that there's so much of a hurry to keep pushing forward that everything that might slow things down a bit, that isn't straight up hands-on gameplay and going fast towards something "spectacular", is seen as a frustration rather than anything else. That's not diggin very deep, but that's what it seems to me in a lot of cases.

You said that this generation doesn't have any attention span, but they do, otherwise we wouldn’t have so much chess players.

I was more referring to stuff within the context of the topic, not really beyond that.

 

[Zer0wing]

Vampire: Bloodlines already has dumbfuck-friendly points and auto-lvlup button. Where else to simplify?

 

[FeelTheRads]

Alpha Protocol is great in terms of the story and the branching paths.

Yes, it's the perfect game for Bioware rejects.

 

[pippin]

How was I supposed to know that "witch's spit" was a healing spell?

Well, the fact it's in the healing school category is a hint.

Lol, yeah, but it still doesn't tell you the effects of the spell. It was truly a game made for experts of TDE... To the point that there's a thread in gog made by a guy who was one back in the day, and had to go back to the manuals because even as a person with knowledge of the system, some aspects of it were a bit cryptic. That does not happen in Gold Box games, then again, DND is pretty straight forward.

 

[MRY]

So please explain to me why there is more than 600 million chess players worldwide.

What on earth would you do with that information? And why is it relevant here at all?

You said that this generation doesn't have any attention span, but they do, otherwise we wouldn’t have so much chess players. I think that the label “cRPG” was so abused by developers that they loss their meaning and now attract the wrong audience.

Having brought chess into the discussion, my own two cents is that many of the complex character creation systems fall prey to the exact same flaws as the lousy U.S. board games of my childhood (Stratego being a prime example, Risk another decent one) when compared with either class board games like Chess, Checkers, and Go or modern board games like Catan or Carcassone -- an extremely long and complicated pre-game process in which invisibly outcome determinative choices are made in a context-free and somewhat non-responsive environment. Chess has no "character creation"; Stratego has extremely robust "character creation," but the latter is no more strategic and certainly less fun precisely because of this front-end aspect. Obviously it's an imperfect analogy, but I've always thought that invoking chess tends to show why simple and immediate systems trump intricate and overloaded systems.

 

[Delbaeth]

How was I supposed to know that "witch's spit" was a healing spell? .

Well... In another context, a witch's suck would be good too.

 

[pippin]

How was I supposed to know that "witch's spit" was a healing spell? .

Well... In another context, a witch's suck would be good too.

Dunno man, "witch" sounds too much like an old toothless crone... although the lack of teeth might help in the "suck" department.

 

[Delbaeth]

But a true hero likes to live dangerously.

 

[Azarkon]

Think of an RPG like a mountain. In my older RPG's, the only way to the top was going up cliffs, but many of you like rock climbing so it didn't matter. But a lot of people never even tried to do it. So I am building a road that lets people drive to the top of the mountain. The mountain is still as high as it used to be and the view is just as spectacular, but now more people can enjoy it.

...People don't climb mountains for the vistas at the end. The panorama is just a bonus. The climb is not just a way to get to the top; the climb is all there is. The essence of any CRPG - any game, in fact - is in the playing, that process by which you learn the game's mechanics, overcome its challenges, and exploit its rules system to achieve new heights. It's not about whether people here like rock climbing. It's about whether people anywhere enjoy playing games.

There is an argument for making games that are easy to learn, hard to master, but when people use that phrase, they're not talking about a game where you can take the express way through an obstacles course. They're talking about a game where you're still required to overcome every challenge, but can take it one step at a time. In such a metaphor, the mountain itself should be just as high, just as steep; the only difference is, before scaling such a mountain, the player can first practice on the surrounding hills.

I am reminded of the following quote:

Hope cannot be said to exist, nor can it be said not to exist. It is just like roads across the earth. For actually the earth had no roads to begin with, but when many men pass one way, a road is made.

Give your players the opportunity to build their own paths up the mountain, and that itself shall be the reward.