Torment Torment: Tides of Numenera Thread

[Malpercio]

So, I haven't really played much of the game, since InXile was taking its sweet time implementing the GoG key shift. Here's something that puzzles me though - there seems to be quite a lot of praise for the Numenera setting, which sort of goes along with the notion that the problems with the game have more to do with bad implementation. My initial impression of the game is that the setting is a big part of the problem, though. Ever since I first read the books I had the feeling that the Numenera setting is startingly mediocre for a PnP setting, but I though that there was a good chance that you could hone it into an adequate PnP setting. Now that the game's out, though, I think a lot of problems the game has come down to Numenera just not being even remotely as interesting as Planescape is.

Uh? I dunno about the books, but most posts I've seen seem to criticize Numenera for being too weird and barely thematically consistent.

 

[bataille]

Started replaying PS:T like most other fellow Codexers, haven't played the game in years, and 20 minutes in and I can not believe how good the game starts off. It really can not be over stated how well Morte's character has aged, and how cool of a first impression he gives to the game after having met him literally after the introductory cutscene finished playing.

Morte has aged well because he was based on a 'realistic' archetype, he is the trickster type character. The rebelaisian kind of guy. He is defined by the common human qualities that don't rely on setting, time or medium. Such characters have been present in folklore and in auteur art alike for centuries for the same reason: their timelessness and omnipresence in life.
But that's not it. It's just the skeleton (pun intended) of his character. The story of his betrayal and all that pillar of skulls business is the meat. His fate is connected to his archetype only superficially. In other words, you can strip morte of all this PST nonsense and have a character that can easily be used in a lot of other films, tales, whatever. Just add "the meat".

Most of numenera characters, on the other hand, are defined by their circumstances, they barely have a skeleton (what you would call "a character" when talking about a real person). Rhin hasn't got any archetype. She is defined by "being lost" and "being a child". Not all of them suffer from this, though, but some, just like not every PST character is as well-rounded as morte is. But PST, obviously, had it much easier because of the alignment system, which made all this archetype stuff much less esoteric and by the book.

Spoiler

A stretchgoal was supposed to bring you only the amorphous The Toy, but instead the developers gave you full cast of blobs. Enjoy!

 

[jungl]

Annoying how poorly polished this game is. Encountering minor bugs here and there like how my dude with smash specialized+ can not break walls during a crisis event.

 

[MRY]

Contrast all this cheap emotional manipulation and 'do the right thing' bs with the options of selling your companions into slavery and/or sacrificing them to gain more power from the evil grimoire, or answers from the Pillar of Skulls. At the time of making those choices, the benefits of being evil are convincingly presented as alluring, thus creating a genuine dilemma. And even so, in all my 3 playthrough of PST throughout the years, I neved betrayed my lovely grinning skull or my bro Dak'kon (well, I did it once to see what happens, then promptly reloaded), because the writing exxpertly made me care for them while at the same time not insulting my intelligence or the tenets of the rpg genre, by providing alluring and sensible-within-the-setting options for screwing them over.

I remember being tested a bit at the Pillar of Skulls because there are n freebie ways to get info from it, but >n things you want to learn from it, which was a nice set up.

That said, I'm not sure I find this argument entirely persuasive because the things you are offered as rewards in PS:T are so trivial in comparison to the companions' presence. Maybe this is the same point you're making, but it seems like if PS:T were considerably more difficult (i.e., if you were forgoing content and freedom of action by forgoing the powerups that bad guys will trade you) then the choice would be meaningful. Indeed, this is (I think) the true genius of AOD's design, namely that the game defaults to letting you see 20% of the content and makes you "pay" (good god, this sounds like DLC) to see more. (I'm not talking about class gated content here, but skill-gated content.)

Thus, for example, if the Pillar of Skulls offered to trade you Morte for the ability to speak with your other incarnations in the end game (say) or if the price of entry to the Brothel of Sla[k]ing Intellectual Lusts was selling Grace into its service, you'd have a meaningful trade. But XP or even stats are irrelevant because the game give you so much more XP or stats than you need over its course. Indeed, it's telling that letting the Pillar bite you or whatever knocks out CON or MHP or some otherwise useless statistic, not even WIS or INT or CHA.

I can't (and wouldn't) debate whether this was something generally done well in TTON, but I think it's a pretty endemic problem in RPGs I've played. One classic form it takes is that you learn more from companions by being nice to them than you learn by being mean -- because so many RPGs are research expeditions where the player's metagoal is to gather as much data as possible, you're forcing the player into the paladin (or sycophant) role in this way. I tried to subvert that in a little way with the philethis (that the only way to get him to tell about himself is to hurt him and alienate him forever), but it seems to me that a more broad-based approach would be to treat even ordinary interactions with followers as a "guns or butter choice" rather than a "guns-and-butter or sour milk" choice.

Indeed, in general it seems to me that the flaw in most RPGs in this respect is that their framework (in some ways thanks to Bioware) tends to be, "Would you like to define yourself as good or as evil?" rather than, "Which of these outcomes do you want, and what will you sacrifice for it?" It is my firm belief that overwhelmingly players drift into quasi-paladin roles (probably even on the Codex) so the choice you want to focus on is not, "Will you sell Grace into slavery in exchange for a wand of magic missiles?" but "Will you sell Grace into slavery to have the strength to save this village?" A temptation framework only works if both the sacrifice and the reward are meaningful in the temptee's personal framework, but too often the temptation framework in RPGs either offers a sacrifice that is not meaningful (b/c the player is trying to roleplay a mustache-twirling villain) or a reward that is not meaningful (b/c every combat is winnable even if you forgo the powerup you're being offered).

To be honest, all of this tends to underscore why AOD's structure is so excellent, regardless of what you think of its specifics (and I think highly of them as well).

 

[bataille]

Annoying how poorly polished this game is. Encountering minor bugs here and there like how my dude with smash specialized+ can not break walls during a crisis event.

The technical aspect, yes (once I had to reload a save because I hadn't received a quest reward). But I like the little things that happen when a crisis gets initiated. For example, when you begin the battle with slavers, the sculptor runs away from his workshop, terrified, screaming that he is surrounded by insensitive brutes and savages. Or the airship captain, having seen that Ris and his goons are going to get their skulls caved in, exclaims something like "Oh! I knew that cypher would come in handy!" and a forcefield envelopes his whole figure, shielding him from all the bad things in the world. Oh, and the two levy sentries are also tricked into leaving their post to give Ris the opportunity to try and get even with Tybir. Every single other crisis had something similar to that. That I liked a great deal, heh. For me, that is the epitome of non-trash combat: an encounter that the participants and onlookers make a big deal of, and act accordingly.

 

[Luckmann]

Can we take a moment to appreciate just how terrible the entire transition from Miel Avest to The Bloom is?

Spoiler

You arrive at Miel Avest after the terrible, terrible, horrific piece of shit that is the "Valley" of Dead Heroes, trying to find Mazzof, but he's of course missing, so fuck you. After some compulsory filler content involving basic fetch-quests (just without the fetching) between a few individuals in Miel Avest, all standing within 10 metres of eachother, the entirety of the Miel Avest consisting of a single small town square, you get to talk to Mazzof through a Merecaster (let's ignore how contrived the "meeting" with Mazzof is), and he lets you know that oh noes, plot twists of plot twists, the Changing God is an asshole and The First is still alive - instead of fixing the Resonance Chamber, we should go talk to her, and seek her in the Bloom.

When you come to, the place is under attack. You can try to save people, but it doesn't matter, because at the end, the previously deadly thing that you absolutely shouldn't touch can suddenly be opened, something you couldn't possibly have worked out logically, so the game ends up pretty much straight-up telling you. Upon activating the macguffin, you get taken tooooooo... The Bloom, of course! What an amazing coincidence that this object took you exactly to the place you needed to go! When you come to, everyone that you worked hard to save in Miel Avest are obviously nowhere to be found, you are immediately approached by someone that tells you that they want to "prove their worth to you" (in those exact words; remember, at best, you're a random-ass Castoff that just fell through a Maw), and you also have no choice but to immediately spill the guts that you're looking for The First Castoff, as if that's something that should be advertised.

It's amazingly bad.

If this didn't have the potential to be great rather than depressing, this might've even been funny. Literally anything could've happened. But no, get back onto the rails, asshole, this ride never ends.

Rhin has a major drawback - selling her to slavers has no real benefits.

Alongside the fact that the whole slavers thing is entirely one-sided, I hate how Rhin is just cheap emotional manipulation 101, forcing a situation by means of emotional blackmailing, when there's plenty of reasonable options available, only that they're not offered to the player, completely ignoring one of the key agents of a good RPG; player agency. Pretty much everything related to Rhin is pure garbage. Forced, constipated, narrative garbage.

Rhin was writen by a nu-male beta faggot who made a name for himself writing Mary-Sueish wish fulfillment fantasy that similarly afflicted individuals easily gobble up. Her quest is designed by a born-again christian who moved to Thailand and literally adopted a dozen kids. To expect these 2 dudes to give you the option to do something mean to a fictional child, and have that option be just as rewarding as 'the right thing', is just plain silly.

[...]

I have no expectations, but what expectations I might have had would have had no impact in this particular case. The fact remains that the situation is incredibly forced and enormously shittily written. It's not even about being mean to the child; quite the opposite. It's the fact that you either take the child with you, or you're essentially forced to be mean, in order to be railroaded into a situation of emotional manipulation. It's cheap, predictable, shallow shit on a stick.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

 

[Luckmann]

Annoying how poorly polished this game is. Encountering minor bugs here and there like how my dude with smash specialized+ can not break walls during a crisis event.

The technical aspect, yes (once I had to reload a save because I hadn't received a quest reward). But I like the little things that happen when a crisis gets initiated. For example, when you begin the battle with slavers, the sculptor runs away from his workshop, terrified, screaming that he is surrounded by insensitive brutes and savages. Or the airship captain, having seen that Ris and his goons are going to get their skulls caved in, exclaims something like "Oh! I knew that cypher would come in handy!" and a forcefield envelopes his whole figure, shielding him from all the bad things in the world. Oh, and the two levy sentries are also tricked into leaving their post to give Ris the opportunity to try and get even with Tybir. Every single other crisis had something similar to that. That I liked a great deal, heh. For me, that is the epitome of non-trash combat: an encounter that the participants and onlookers make a big deal of, and act accordingly.

Yeah, a lot of polish went into polishing this particular turd in some regards. It's almost fucking bizarre that something as terrible as the crisis/combat in the game would have such things, when they couldn't nail down the fundamentals.

 

[Harold]

...

The PST examples could indeed be handled better, and yes, AoD does this sort of thing better to a certain extent. My point wasn't about XP rewards in those cases (the XP stuff is only related to Carceri, where you're cheated out of ~ 1 mil. XP unless you do the Lawful-Good thing, which is, of course, also a problem with late game inflated-xp rewards), but about the allure of doing evil stuff. Yes, it turns out the spells you get from the Evil Grimoire aren't that great, the information from the Pillar not that earth-shattering, hence this could've been done better, but you don't know this at the time, when you have to make those choices, and, as DeepOcean said, like the Practical Incarnation before you, are given p. good reasons for doing said evil stuff.

Not only is this not present in 2rment as far as I've seen up til now (I've just entered Necropolis, where, from what I understand, your Inifere stuff is, so some good content will be a welcome change of pace), but the poor quality of the companions and the underlying authorial judgement in quests only exacerbates problems. Now, as far as that last part goes, you can say it's my anti-SJW/MAGA blinders making me see things that aren't really there, or weren't intended to be perceived that way, which is fair enough, I guess, but the subconcious slipping into what you write is a real thing, as I'm sure you know, so I'll just have to see how things hold up as the game goes on. One or two instances could be discarded as incidental, 3+ starts to become a trend.

(Also, don't get me wrong, while I enjoy a good schadenfreude and 'I told so' as much as the next codexer, I'm really not a petty person, I genuinely hoped I would be wrong and 2rment would be the 2nd coming of RPG storyfaggotry, but I can only make judgements based on past work and the patterns I've seen so far, and the whole thing has just been a painful drag, as much as I wish it weren't.)

 

[MRY]

Well, like I said, I'm not in a good position to debate the present Torment... I do hope you like Inifere, but your expectations may be too high. I'm not sure he really succeeds in regard to what we're talking about here because for the most part (except maybe at the finale of his Mere) you aren't given this kind of a choice.

Regarding the past Torment, I guess I disagree about what the player knows at the time -- I don't remember being remotely tempted by any of the offers, and I'd be astonished if any player ever took them the first time through the game (let alone took them without reloading). They're mostly there as gimmicks for a second-time player to check out, but the thing with Torment is that it is so long that I'm not sure how many players go through it a second time anyway (and if they do, I wonder how many even change the way they played it, as opposed to sticking to the WIS-INT-CHA paladin but trying to get more out of the game). That's why I think the choice is pretty weak. It's neat from a narrative standpoint for all the reasons you've mentioned, but ultimately it's not a powerful choice unless it's a hard choice. One telling thing about Torment is that I actually probably paused the longest at answering Ravel's riddle -- a choice with no consequences, really -- because within the confines of what the player is trying to accomplish (i.e., maximize the game's narrative impact) it is a very hard one.

Along these lines, I remember a neat little twist in Guy Gavriel Kay's Tolkien pastiche The Fionavar Tapestry. Basically one of the characters has the power to force some magic crystal dragon to be his slave, but realize this would be a cruel outrage. But then at the Final Battle against the bad guy, the bad guy launches his own airforce and the good guys don't have a magic crystal dragon to counter it, so some other good guy has to die a horrible death as a consequence. IIRC, even at the time of the original choice, there was some nice foreshadowing, where the character knows the dragon is supposed to be there on the side of the good guys at the final battle, but still opts not to do it. I really think these are more interesting choices. As the villain in Darkness at Noon says, "The temptations of God were always more dangerous for mankind than those of Satan.”

 

[Jools]

I want to splurt out a few more impressions after my first playthrough.

First off, I enjoyed the premise of the game, the whole "falling star" thing. I sniffed hint of some good vibes at the beginning, while walking around town, being careful about whom to tell I was, in fact, the falling star, and whom to withhold the information from. I felt like this would be sort of important, later on during "Act I", and especially around Iyene Who Knows, whom I expected would have a much larger role in this whole mystery. And I expected the same in regard to going around telling people I am, or not, the Changing God. Really good vibes from these elements, at the beginning, hints here and there all of this might be hugely relevant, or at least some sort of ruse to make the player think so. Well, apparently

The Meres were, to say the least, embarrassing. Seriously, what is it with these random visual novels slammed in the middle of an already conversation- and text-driven RPG? Were they supposed to be extra locations or dream-like sequences that ultimately did not make it into final production because funding and time weren't enough? Were they some other weird game mechanic that went fubar along the way, and got translated into this powerpoint-like animu visual novel? I seriously don't get it. Honestly? They felt so random and so poorly "integrated" within the rest of the game, that I just skipped them by mashing number buttons at random until they were over and I could carry on with the actual game.

Crises weren't as terribad as Meres, but still felt pretty annoying. You know what they felt like? Can you remember Dreamfall, and its infamous stealth and combat sequences? They felt exactly like those, namely: poorly (euphemism) implemented, gratuitous and rape-wedged into the game because of reasons. All in all, considering the atmosphere and gameplay style of the game, I feel the game would have been much better off without Crises (whereas Meres, being some sort of narrative gimmick, don't fail as hard, in this respect).

Area design: ranges from "interesting" to "banalshitboring". Again, lots of wasted potential. Sagus Cliffs doesn't feel as dead and boring as Defiance Bay from PoE, but surely it feels really, really small, like a village at best.

Spoiler

This is what I was expecting:

There is little feeling of being in a weird "city" bursting with activity and filled with wondrous and eerie people and things. Like someone mentioned, it merely feels like your average pseudo-Medieval village, and a very dull one at that. This is due to a combination of mediocre area design along with sub-par NPC writing: there simply isn't anything, or anyone, interesting enough in Sagus Cliffs to pique one's interest for real. Little seems to be going on in terms of factions, society, classes, or anything of the sort. It's just a sad sandpit sparsely peppered with a few emo kids who just wanna be sad. The Underbelly sort of picks up on these mistakes, and offers something for the player to chew on (again, I was really hopeful about the murderer questline, which ended -shortly after- with disappointment), but it's nowhere near enough, especially since it's a really short part of the game.

The valley is another very uninspired place, and the actual tombs are just ludicrous in terms of design. Again, the lack of something interesting going on, not to mention to engage the player with, really crippled my enjoyment of these areas, which I mostly breezed through without much care. Things improve vaguely in the Bloom, but not by much and by then my interest had already been crippled enough for me not to really feel much excitement any more.

NPCs are mostly forgettable, Iyene Who Knows was yet another waste of potential in terms of quests, C&C and plot; the Ghostly Woman questline was the only one which, if not shined, at least had something to it, for me. The search for Matkina also ends up in a fairly underplayed manner, in stark contrast to the fairly decent build-up that leads to actually finding her. Rhin and Callistege feel like the only two companions worthy of some consideration, while the rest doesn't appear to be bringing much to the table (note: I only played through it once and I "sided" with Callistege, so I wouldn't know about Aligern, but I suspect I haven't missed out on anything too epic...).

I liked that the areas were proper 3D rendered with a fixed camera, instead of pre-rendered 2D with 3D toons running around them: sadly the game performed really poorly, and that's despite an annoyingly close camera distance. But then again, overall, the visual don't feel like the visual a game of this scope and fame should feature.

As I mentioned already, the writing is ok-to-goodish: it doesn't really ever shine nor does it really ever stink, and the latter is no small feat, these days. I really appreciated how "normal" it is (apart for the beginning of the game), as opposed to the try-hard fantasy writing some RPG love to flaunt.

Overall, I did not hate playing TToN, which can be considered a compliment (for instance, I had to force myself to play through the last 2/3rd of PoE, and I ragequit Tranny after 2 hours of playing). In fact, I sort of enjoyed some aspects of it, such as the character system which was clearly developed with a text/dialogue-based game in mind, the "totally avoid combat" feature, and some of the ideas and concepts that were half-arsedly implemented in the game but still managed to stand out, in their own tentative way.

As an indie, or a demo, or some sort of experiment, I would give TToN a pass with flying colours. As an "almost-AAA" title, and as one gargantuan kickstarter game, I really can't conceal some disappointment, and that's without even pulling the "campaign promises not fulfilled" card (if only, because I never really follow the KS campaigns I fund).

 

[DeepOcean]

Can we take a moment to appreciate just how terrible the entire transition from Miel Avest to The Bloom is?

How about the way they setup the twist? People that say this is a great story worthy of PST must be using drugs, if they were doing a comedy story it would be a great pun but this thing just killed me. This happens all of sudden that you wonder if you were on Discworld or The Hitchiker's guide to the galaxy all of sudden and the writer decided to troll you.

Spoiler

Specter: LOL, I'm the Changing God, bitch, gimme your body naow!

 

[Jedi Master Radek]

Take Wasteland 2 - i went in blind with probably the most useless party ever (one melee dude, two pistoleros and one sniper)

It is a pretty good party. Assault riffles are not as much OP as people suggest. Even if you minimax 1 pistol and 1 sniper in party are advised.

 

[Seaking4]

This thread went from people raging about walls of text in the game to people producing walls of text themselves. We need the TLDR button back.

 

[DeepOcean]

people producing walls of text themselves.

What we gonna do? Play NumaNuma? Fuck that shit, the walls of text on this thread are more entertaining.

 

[Jools]

This thread went from people raging about walls of text in the game to people producing walls of text themselves. We need the TLDR button back.

Well, >I< never raged about walls of text, so I'm more than entitled to write one myself. :D

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

It's because some idiot mentioned Pillars of Eternity...

 

[FeelTheRads]

I'm not sure how many players go through it a second time anyway (and if they do, I wonder how many even change the way they played it, as opposed to sticking to the WIS-INT-CHA paladin but trying to get more out of the game).

What are you going on about, mate? PST is much more replayable than TTON and I also played it as evil. The only thing I could never do was to sell Dak'kon into slavery, though. He just broke my heart.

 

[Luckmann]

Asking someone why they look stressed out; clearly an expression of empathy and passion.

 

[existential_vacuum]

This thread went from people raging about walls of text in the game to people producing walls of text themselves. We need the TLDR button back.

Because now It is

for the most detailed and accurate description of NumaNuma.

 

[hexer]

Can we take a moment to appreciate just how terrible the entire transition from Miel Avest to The Bloom is?

How about the way they setup the twist? People that say this is a great story worthy of PST must be using drugs, if they were doing a comedy story it would be a great pun but this thing just killed me. This happens all of sudden that you wonder if you were on Discworld or The Hitchiker's guide to the galaxy all of sudden and the writer decided to troll you.

Spoiler

Specter: LOL, I'm the Changing God, bitch, gimme your body naow!

Spoiler

The secret twist was so poorly planned I knew the answer from the very moment the Specter said he's not actually part of your mind. I mean, yeah if you're not part of my mind I wonder who else you might be, Mr. Mysterious Specter

 

[Jools]

Can we take a moment to appreciate just how terrible the entire transition from Miel Avest to The Bloom is?

How about the way they setup the twist? People that say this is a great story worthy of PST must be using drugs, if they were doing a comedy story it would be a great pun but this thing just killed me. This happens all of sudden that you wonder if you were on Discworld or The Hitchiker's guide to the galaxy all of sudden and the writer decided to troll you.

Spoiler

Specter: LOL, I'm the Changing God, bitch, gimme your body naow!

Spoiler

The secret twist was so poorly planned I knew the answer from the very moment the Specter said he's not actually part of your mind. I mean, yeah if you're not part of my mind I wonder who else you might be, Mr. Mysterious Specter

Vaguely reminds me of the ploy Kreia pulled on the main character in KotOR2.

 

[MRY]

I'm not sure how many players go through it a second time anyway (and if they do, I wonder how many even change the way they played it, as opposed to sticking to the WIS-INT-CHA paladin but trying to get more out of the game).

What are you going on about, mate? PST is much more replayable than TTON and I also played it as evil. The only thing I could never do was to sell Dak'kon into slavery, though. He just broke my heart.

Since I haven't played TTON, I'm the wrong person to debate that point with you.

I did replay PST -- though I think I quit my first time just after Trias, and the third time I tried to play, I gave up pretty quickly. I don't think it's a game that lends itself much to replaying, though, because there's pretty clearly an optimal path and the divergences (that I recall?) seem more like short blind alleys than long highways with their own off-ramps and interchanges. There's also a huge amount of repeated content, and it's a long game. That said, I haven't analyzed it (or seen it analyzed) in terms of its branching or C&C -- by contrast, I've spent a lot of time thinking about Fallout, V:TM:B, and especially AOD in those terms. In their own way, the KOTOR games seem more replayable -- not because they're better games but because they're shorter and there is a clearly distinction between the paths you can play. Some games reveal their genius more when you replay -- AOD is a clear example of this, but so is

I could be totally wrong about this, though, and just viewing the game through my own lens, in which it is hard to play anything other than a curious, wise paladin.

To again crib from AOD, one thing that I think would be better if more RPGs did it is if you provided some more variety to the logic leading into the final encounter. It is typical in RPGs that whether you play good or evil, your goal going into the final encounter is more or less the same -- basically what RPGs tend to offer is something like, "A senseless word-destroying force is coming straight at us. Do you want to be selfish along the way and then defeat it because you don't want to die, or be selfless along the way and then defeat it because you don't want other people to die?" What would be nice (and TBH, the build of AOD I played doesn't do this with the temple, only with the lead-up to the temple, but the temple was largely irrelevant to the plot anyway) is if instead you could see different approaches to confronting the final encounter well in advance and begin making decisions accordingly.

Like, suppose the question put is: "An evil horde is coming! Do you want to (a) pursue a nuclear bomb to defeat them, (b) gather allies to face them, or (c) learn enough about them to make peace?" Then from that point to the end, the player's choices would be made against a backdrop of whether they advanced those strategic goals.

Bleh, that's really too abstract to be helpful, but I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's nice when the game has, like, structural elements that cause largely identical content to have different significance depending on what you want to extract from it, and that decision isn't just based on your mood but on your goals.

[EDIT: Let me give you a dumb example that isn't applicable to real RPGs, but maybe will illuminate what I'm trying to say. When I designed Star Captain, a Weird Worlds/Barbarian Prince hybrid that was preempted by FTL and then morphed into Fallen Gods, one of the few clever ideas I had was that unlike in Weird Worlds, every time you played you'd be given a set of objectives. These objects would then have some kind of narrative layered on top of them. For example, you might have find four old colonies, befriend three alien races, and scan 15 systems, which would yield a mission briefing like (pasted from the old design doc):

Spoiler

Captain Smith,

[Boilerplate introductory paragraph, selected randomly from several.]You have been chosen for a great and daunting task: to be among the first humans to return to the Orion Cluster. As you know, the Orion Cluster was once part of the Old Union, but was lost during the Great War. For years it has been sealed off due to wormhole interference, but it has recently reopened. Given its proximity to our home systems and its potential for colonization, it is imperative that we reclaim the cluster for the Union.

[Two paragraphs for primary objective of finding old colonies. Note that the transition may sometimes be slightly choppy; introductory paragraphs may not perfectly align with objective paragraphs given the random selection process, but they will be written to fit as well as possible.]When the Orion Cluster was part of the Old Union, numerous colonies and outposts were established among its systems. No record of their locations survived the Lost Years, and we are all but certain that the colonies themselves were destroyed during the Great War. Nevertheless, your foremost objective is to locate whatever remains.

Fragmentary evidence suggests there should be [number] of them in the cluster. In the unlikely event that any are intact, which we strongly doubt, we must find them and bring them back into the fold. If they are destroyed, we must make sure that they are safe for second-wave colonization. Ultimately, simply identifying these old colonies and documenting them will help establish our “moral and legal rights” to the Orion Cluster, as the President has asked us to do.

[One paragraph for the first secondary objective. This paragraph will always begin with “In addition.” The secondary objective paragraphs will actually start mid-sentence—in this case with “you are to”—so that they can be used as either the first or second secondary objective.]In addition, you are to make at least a cursory visit to no fewer than fifteen systems. This will give our strategists as basis for planning the occupation, fortification, and eventual colonization of Orion. Any additional systems you visit will, of course, be to our benefit, but we will be satisfied if you only reach fifteen.

[One paragraph for second secondary objective. This paragraph will always begin with “Finally.”]Finally, in order to please the soft-hearted politicians in our current Liberal government, you must establish friendly relations with at least two alien races in the cluster. Old records suggest that there may be low-tech species already established in Orion, and we have reason to suspect that more advanced races will be trying to move in. Of course, potentially hostile races—including, we fear, the Athusians—are no doubt among those looking for real estate. Whom you befriend is up to you, though you should try not to scotch any of our existing alliances. We may be able to deny your Fleet auspices, but we would rather not have to.

[Boilerplate timing paragraph.]For reasons owing to funding, politics, and the potential need to send subsequent missions if you should fail, Fleet Command has allocated one year [This may need to be shortened] for your mission. Should you prove successful during that time, it may be possible to extend the length of your outing. You must return to Sentinel Station by the deadline; if you fail to do so, your ship’s computer—S.O.F.I.A.—will take control of navigation and pilot the ship back. It is my stern suggestion that you do not force that to happen.

[Boilerplate conclusion, also randomly selected.]You come with high commendations, Captain. Good luck, and godspeed.

[Signature lines, which are always the same.]

Vice Admiral Tomas Graves
Fleet Intelligence

But you could take the exact same map and layer on a different set of objectives (kill X enemies, find Y artifacts, whatever) and in so doing, you would completely change the way the player approached the same encounters because the minmax formula would be changed. Of course the maps themselves would be procedurally generated, but that's really beside the case because my point is that if you layer different goals over the same content, the content itself changes.

Sadly, this aspect was more or less dropped from Fallen Gods (the game sort of moved in a different direction, more Barbarian Prince and less Weird Worlds) but I still think the basic concept would be deployable in RPGs generally. In most RPGs, the different goals are no more or less than "be good" or "be bad" or perhaps "fight more" or "fight less."]

 

[AwesomeButton]

It is my firm belief that overwhelmingly players drift into quasi-paladin roles (probably even on the Codex) so the choice you want to focus on is not, "Will you sell Grace into slavery in exchange for a wand of magic missiles?" but "Will you sell Grace into slavery to have the strength to save this village?"

To this day I think Dragon Age Origins: Awakening's choices before the ending battle are among the best executed in RPGs. Check out their wiki if you haven't played it. It's exactly about a choice between saving the town or the villages around it, or your stronghold.

 

[MRY]

It is my firm belief that overwhelmingly players drift into quasi-paladin roles (probably even on the Codex) so the choice you want to focus on is not, "Will you sell Grace into slavery in exchange for a wand of magic missiles?" but "Will you sell Grace into slavery to have the strength to save this village?"

To this day I think Dragon Age Origins: Awakening's choices before the ending battle are among the best executed in RPGs. Check out their wiki if you haven't played it. It's exactly about a choice between saving the town or the villages around it, or your stronghold.

I didn't play much of DA:O, but I worked on it and had access to the internal design documents. I realize that the game often departs from the design, but on paper it seemed excellent in this regard. Glad to hear it panned out. I also think (assuming they kept it) the deal with the devil you can make to save the P.C. is a pretty neat idea.