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Torment Torment: Tides of Numenera Thread

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combat is shit yea..
but about the rest, what makes disco elysium a success and this game a pile of turd?
simplest answer would be, bad writers...?

Writers are mostly proven professionals but the writing/production process was a bad choice.

Original Torment was a young, relatively ambitious creative writing about 75% (?) of everything according to his passions and interests at the time. Avellone was also at the age where he was well suited to writing a story about self discovery with existential themes.

New Torment was a group of relatively disinterested professionals trying to recreate the original over conference calls, but you can't recreate raw authenticity of an auteur's vision. None of them seemed to be particularly inspired by this kind of story because they are 40ish guys who basically know who they are and probably find existential themes boring and sophomoric.

That kind of writing process is better for a big open world game where you need a truck load of decent commercial grade writing rather than for what is supposed to be an arresting, focused, narrative driven game.
 
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Imrahil

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Some updates:

I'm not actively hating the game anymore, & some of the characters I meet are interesting (although still unnecessarily wordy). Just find it monotonously unintriguing.

- I found a Quest I actually liked. "Ashen Imitation" - not to spoil it but the one where you locate the "copies" of a girl in various incarnations. That one actually felt like it could be part of Torment, to me. It was fun.
- I've leveled up a bit more but it's unsatisfying. Especially since you have to improve each character option a tiny bit before moving to a new Tier, at which point you get to improve each option a slight bit more. Rinse & repeat.
- If you want to give a character a new Skill, it would take forever. Like I considered giving Rhin 2 points in Concentration so she could use a 2nd Bonded Item (Shadowstep) without penalty, but it would take nearly 10 level ups to do so since I've already made some choices for this Tier & have to improve each option once per Tier to get that option again. So it's just not worth it. So I just gave her the 2nd Bonded Item & now she has -1 Might. Not -1 to her Might, her Stat is -1 Might!
- Speaking of which, the Stat system is still just backwards & unintuitive. For example, now that I have a little bit of Edge in Intellect, I actually use *fewer* Intellect points. It's my other stats that get depleted too quick. I use my companions to help, of course, but we're not a collectively Might-y bunch. So the fact that I've been choosing +Intellect rewards every choice for my Nano, was apparently... wrong? She's not depleting her Intellect as quickly as before because of Edge, but she has a large pool of Intellect points that wind up just going to waste.

- it'd be OK if my Nano didn't have to spend all her (potential) attack points to navigate dialogue. My companions can't contribute to more than 1 or 2 successes (Base: 10% - use 5 points? 60% yay! and wasted if you fail) before our whole party is just done, which means everyone's useless in combat when we do run into one.
- as illustrated above, dialogue stats use the same resource pool as combat stats!
Either you're building your character wrong or you're trying to pass a bunch of checks unsuited for your character. Either way, you don't have to try to pass everything, it's okay to fail.
This is one of those things that's easy to say in hindsight. I'm *sure* I'm not building my character right. That's part of the problem. It's a goofy, backwards, unintuitive system. Apparently I should have been putting Edge in Intellect (as I have) but increasing my other Stats to compensate? Smacks of PoE Might Wizards. "Git gud" is something people who have played through a game before say because they already know the answers to the test.

And you're wrong about failing. You can get locked out of stuff. Apparently I failed an early Persuasion check (again, not to spoil, but in the bar, the guy with the Word) & it won't let me try again. A lot of times you can just try a check again later with a penalty. Here, no. I just have to choose from a couple sub-optimal choices & can apparently never attempt that particular check again. I'm trying not to spoil myself, but got so frustrated by the lack of options that I finally Googled it & found out "nope, you failed that as a level 1 noob, you're done forever". It won't kill the game, of course - that's not my point. But it locked me out of an "ability" (I guess? didn't read the details) & a Quest option.

Hindsight is the best Skill in most games, I agree. Wish I'd leveled it up.

I have no real attachment to the term, oh Master of the Fedora, but what is the "proper", not frowned upon from on high, term for "the little pixelated icons on the screen that represent your party members"? For me, "toon" just makes me think of Roger Rabbit.
 

Roguey

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Smacks of PoE Might Wizards. "Git gud" is something people who have played through a game before say because they already know the answers to the test.

You're putting all your points into intellect and expecting to be able to perform feats of strength with ease? :hmmm: Sounds like you're trying to min/max the system to pass everything but without any actual understanding of it, so of course you're going to fail.

And you're wrong about failing. You can get locked out of stuff.

I know. I'm saying live with the failures.
 

Imrahil

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Not exactly, but closer to what I'm saying. I'm saying the system is, apparently, actively designed for me to put points for my Nano into non-Intellect stats. Now that she has some Edge in Intelkect, she uses much fewer points in it.

But all the other Stats get depleted. It would be OK if there was actually a trade-off for focusing on Int. But there's really not. Edge in your primary Stat, all points in the others is *what this system encourages*.

What's happening is that focusing my character has no benefit. It just leads to wasted points in what I focused on. I wouldn't mind at all failing at some stuff if I was seeing some benefit from focusing on Int, but I'm not.
 

Roguey

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Not exactly, but closer to what I'm saying. I'm saying the system is, apparently, actively designed for me to put points for my Nano into non-Intellect stats. Now that she has some Edge in Intelkect, she uses much fewer points in it.

But all the other Stats get depleted. It would be OK if there was actually a trade-off for focusing on Int. But there's really not. Edge in your primary Stat, all points in the others is *what this system encourages*.

The points you save passing checks are points you can use on spells in combat, system's working out all right unless you're trying to game it and pass everything. :M
 

MRY

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I barely played the game, so I defer to those who did. I will say that from afar, it seems like there was a design defect in terms of anticipating and accounting for player behavior. As Roguey notes, a huge amount of design time was spent handling fail states for checks -- including alternate paths or interesting* content or booby-prize rewards. But players essentially refuse to fail checks in dialogues. Through Effort and/or save scumming, they are going to pass those checks one way or another. So the fail state content was largely a waste of designer/writer time. Even worse, rather than some dialogue paths being foreclosed to players because of their build -- such that the availability of a path feels to players like an acknowledgment and validation of their builds -- all paths are open provided you use enough effort/save scumming. This leads to narrative screwiness. I remember feeling very despondent watching LPs through the Council Clerk dialogue that I wrote. The whole design of that dialogue was that the player would have to try all these ways to get the clerk's attention (in Vancian fashion, the clerk is too busy and supercilious to care about you or your important adventure), failing most of them, and perhaps having to just sit and wait for hours for the clerk to reach a break in his work. Instead, in the LPs I've seen, everyone passed the first check by using effort. Not only was all of the stuff I wrote for failures, alternative options, expression of escalating frustration a total waste of my time, the entire tenor of the dialogue (and the central joke of the first stage of the dialogue) was harmed.

The same player impulse to always pass dialogue checks means that Imrahil's experience of burning stat pools on dialogue checks and then having restricted combat options strikes me as likely the experience of many players. Whether combat is good or bad, it must be better when the player has the options that the stat pool provides. But since RPG players often view combat as especially appropriate for save scumming, I suspect that 95% of players, presented with the choice, "Would you like a little more control over this dialogue at the price of a much harder battle?" will say yes. After all, you can just reload the battle until you roll the necessary 20s or 6s or whatever. The result is that by having pass/fail rolls in dialogue coupled with Effort (1) took more designer time; (2) reduced the validation of different player builds** in dialogues; (3) harmed dialogue by creating a disconnect between what the writer (or at least this writer) expected to happen and what actually happened when the player played; and (4) harmed the combat by making it less likely that players would use interesting abilities in combat.

At least, that's my assessment from afar.

* Whether the content was interesting is not for me to say; the marching orders were to make it interesting, and for what I wrote, I tried my best to follow them.

** Again, from afar, it seems like there is still some validation for things like the Nano's read thoughts ability, or instances where the character's class unlocks certain options. But that is really different from validating character skills/attributes the way one sees in AOD or MOTB.
 

The_Mask

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a huge amount of design time was spent handling fail states for checks -- including alternate paths or interesting* content or booby-prize rewards.
Interestingly enough, every time I've (re)played the game the early game is much more interesting if you fail here and there. I also remember the late game being a lot more dry on that front; i.e.: if you fail a check, you get spotted, the game totally shifts you to "the losers bracket".

Which made the game frustratingly uneven for me.
Whether combat is good or bad, it must be better when the player has the options that the stat pool provides.
My main issue with the combat sequences were the fact that the Jack's Warp Dash essentially trivialized a great deal of the game. And it's not really a big deal to find this information out. It's not fun to find that this is broken in the same way other RPGs do it. It comes across as dry and hollow.
 

MRY

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My main issue with the combat sequences were the fact that the Jack's Warp Dash essentially trivialized a great deal of the game. And it's not really a big deal to find this information out. It's not fun to find that this is broken in the same way other RPGs do it. It comes across as dry and hollow.
I played exactly one fight (the first fight). Basically, my rig at the time was not powerful enough to play the game. I guess I could play it now, but I'm not sure why. I'd rather the TTON of my fantasies persist without reality intruding.

[Also, re-reading my old post on the story I imagine for TTON, I did feel a certain wistfulness. It seems like a pretty neat concept!]
 
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Imrahil

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The points you save passing checks are points you can use on spells in combat, system's working out all right unless you're trying to game it and pass everything. :M
I think we're talking past each other. With a couple points of Edge in Int, I'm not failing much at all on Int checks, & expending very little Effort. I'm already at 85%, 90% maybe , even To Hit - 1 point gets me to 100% sure, but why bother? I can accept the occasional miss in combat or risk a Retry penalty on a failed Int check at those odds.

(However, as I noted, I inadvertently locked myself out of a Persuasion check early on when I had no idea what I was doing - came back more experienced & couldn't retry, even with a penalty)

So, those Int points I've been investing in focusing my Nano just wind up going to waste. I guess I could push on until I've *also* managed to deplete my Int pool, but what typically happens now is that I've depleted my Might & most of my Speed (I have Rhin for Speed stuff & am rotating the 4th slot, so often have that person as well), but I have almost all my Int still available to me when I feel like I need to rest. I'm not save-scumming, I don't mind failing, I just find that focusing results in wasted points if you put +Stats & also +Edge in the same pool.

I'd simply have been better off putting +Edge into Int & +Stat points into Might & Speed for my Nano, which is counter-intuitive.

As Roguey notes, a huge amount of design time was spent handling fail states for checks -- including alternate paths or interesting* content or booby-prize rewards. But players essentially refuse to fail checks in dialogues. Through Effort and/or save scumming, they are going to pass those checks one way or another.
That's interesting - thanks for sharing all that. I do just tend to use Effort in my non-focused Stats to try to pass checks. Me, Callistege, & whoever I have in my 4th slot handle combat. So all my/Callistege's Might & Speed, plus Rhin's Speed (as I mentioned above, her Might Stat is literally -1 right now) I put into Effort on passing those checks. Why wouldn't I? It's very interesting that so much was put into the fail states, but I do admit it's counter-intuitive to *want* to get those.

Even worse, rather than some dialogue paths being foreclosed to players because of their build -- such that the availability of a path feels to players like an acknowledgment and validation of their builds -- all paths are open provided you use enough effort/save scumming. This leads to narrative screwiness.
This is exactly what I'm finding. I'm finding all Int paths are open to me, with almost no effort, or even Effort, due to my Edge in Int mostly. So I'm using my other stats to succeed at stuff that maybe I shouldn't. I rarely save-scum. I hate rest-spamming (in my play - I don't care if other people do it), but it's become clear that if I put Edge in Int for my Nano & increase her other Stats, I can basically succeed at everything.

I remember feeling very despondent watching LPs through the Council Clerk dialogue that I wrote. The whole design of that dialogue was that the player would have to try all these ways to get the clerk's attention (in Vancian fashion, the clerk is too busy and supercilious to care about you or your important adventure), failing most of them, and perhaps having to just sit and wait for hours for the clerk to reach a break in his work. Instead, in the LPs I've seen, everyone passed the first check by using effort. Not only was all of the stuff I wrote for failures, alternative options, expression of escalating frustration a total waste of my time, the entire tenor of the dialogue (and the central joke of the first stage of the dialogue) was harmed.
That is both fascinating & completely accurate. I had no idea that a fail state to wait him out even existed. So my natural impulse was "I have to pass one of these to proceed." Which is also kind of annoying (when you don't know about the stuff you mentioned), because you've been trained to think "if I don't succeed here, I'm screwed."

But since RPG players often view combat as especially appropriate for save scumming, I suspect that 95% of players, presented with the choice, "Would you like a little more control over this dialogue at the price of a much harder battle?" will say yes.
Again, very accurate to my thinking, not just for this game. I don't mind failing dialogue checks, as long as they don't appear to completely lock me out of proceeding. Not optimizing, proceeding. The way some things are presented, in this game & many others, is "you need to succeed here or you're screwed." So I expend the Effort needed. In combat, I can fail the first time (& by that I mean actually lose, not just succeed w/o Flawless Victory, but lose) & I'll just reload.

If the dialogue checks were presented in a way that it was clear that failure was not a Boolean state & you could proceed but with a penalty, I'd treat it much more like a non-optimal combat result, like if I lost health or used consumables - not perfect, but just keep going. Like most combat outcomes: you wind up depleting some resources but who cares? The dialogue checks are, maybe ingrained to us, as Boolean Pass/Fail states, unless explicitly called out to us.

Also, update:
- entered the Lazarent area. Having mass combats. I picked back up Erritis to complete his quest & brought him along here. He's proving rather useful, even though I dislike him on a personal level. Not saying he's badly written or anything, quite the opposite, just that he annoys me. He has a good set of dialogue & a well-written personality. Enough that I dislike him. Think: Anomen, in that regard. Probably gonna swap him out for Oorm? Oom? The blob thing, after this, & see what it's like.

EDIT: Apropos of what I've been saying: I just hit a point where I can purge the "Peerless" Intelligence (not giving more details b/c people that know will recognize that but it doesn't spoil anything). I have a 100% success rate. My 14 points of Int mean nothing. I don't even have to consider spending them.
 
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Imrahil

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I already have the Bronze Sphere, which is a blatant call-back to PS:T, but I also just got an "Adahn" reference from Salimeri, after the Lazaret stuff. That amuses me.
 

MRY

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If the dialogue checks were presented in a way that it was clear that failure was not a Boolean state & you could proceed but with a penalty, I'd treat it much more like a non-optimal combat result, like if I lost health or used consumables - not perfect, but just keep going.
I disagree on this.

Years ago, I wrote an article about why RPGs should impose consequences on the characters that are less than death but more than trivial. I'm now somewhat skeptical that this is possible; player psychology may simply be too rigid on this point to shift, at least as far as it comes to narrative. My supposition is that RPG players will accept any random penalty other than (1) closing off access to narrative segment that they want (which would include, e.g., loss of a companion due to permadeath, but also loss of access to a quest, an area, etc.) or (2) a permanent reduction in a character attribute, skill, or level. These penalties can be imposed non-randomly (e.g., the Pillar of Skulls, where you have to choose one of several hard-to-accept penalties), but not randomly. All of the Goldbox-era draining powers of enemies are no longer feasible with player psychology; they will simply trigger a reload.

Take a dialogue that goes:

"I offer lore that is the start of an interesting side quest."
1. [Persuasion 60%] As a fellow knowledge-seeker, I would love to hear it.
2. [Intimidate 20%] Tell me or die!
3. So what.​

Totally worthless. No player will take #2 (as its odds are lower); if his stats are such that the odds are flipped, then he will take #2 rather than #1, of course. And no player will take #3. Furthermore, there is a 40% chance that the player will reload -- if he takes #1 and fails the check.

(In fact, AOD suggests that even if you replace these rolls with threshold checks, players will go berserk about their inability to get this sidequest without foreknowledge of the necessary thresholds.)

If you replace the fail states for 1 and 2 with something stupid like, "Ah, well, I'll tell you anyway -- but for 10 gold" then the whole thing feels pretty dumb. You're right that having this a Biowarean choice with a small tax is less likely to induce rage-quitting. But it also doesn't really accomplish anything meaningful from the standpoint of the player's experience. You should just use thresholds and a bypass option or something.

Put otherwise, it seems to me that in the post-Planescape: Torment RPG community, for narrative RPGs the only acceptable use of dialogue skill checks is (1) to let the player choose which key opens the door (not whether the door gets open) or (2) to let players skip a few squares of the Candyland board that they otherwise would have to grind through without having passed the skill check. What is not acceptable is a door that you can't open and what is definitely not acceptable is a door that you can open, but only if you roll the right number. The last scenario will just lead to save-scumming or, in TTON's case, a mix of save scumming and Effort.

Imposing a dialogue tax is ultimately no solution because if the tax ever reaches a point where players cannot go through the door they want to go through, they will rage-quit and reload, but if it never inflicts a meaningful loss, then you are just wasting an enormous amount of designer time in fail states that are irrelevant.

The insanity of TTON is that it is sold to players as basically, "This is a story about controlling your destiny and legacy." If the players buy that, then they are never going to want dialogue outcomes that prevent them from (1) hearing the story they're interested in or (2) being able to achieve the destiny/legacy they want. As with PS:T itself (where there was a robust AD&D character sheet but where anyone normal simply maxed dialogue-oriented stats like CHA, WIS, and INT, since anything involving the other stats could be dealt with by grinding or save scumming), the player will sacrifice anything for narrative goodies and narrative control. In other words, you have a game where players are even less likely to accept dialogue fail states, and then you make dialogue fail states a central feature.

On top of this is the problem you note, which is that once Edge or whatever it was called comes into play, there is a weird thing where you don't really need the stat that ostensibly defines your character.

It's a sad state of affairs. I think in the perfect world, RPG players would accept fail states because they make the world more reactive and interesting. But here, TTON's design achieved the worst of all worlds: all character types can brute force through all dialogue checks. From a narrative standpoint, the key value of dialogue checks is that they are how the game defines the outline of the player character. What the character can and can't do in dialogue is the way the game confirms the existence of the character your made in the context of the game's narrative* (i.e., it is what allows for a player character without LARPing). TTON's design obliterates the distinctions between character types, while imposing on the designers all of the effort of scripting multiple paths (with fail states!) through every dialogue. Changing the fail states from a vague, seemingly binary narrative outcome to some kind of tax wouldn't solve this problem IMO.

(* Obviously, what you can do in combat, etc. defines your character in other contexts.)
 

Zombra

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I feel the dialogue check problem could be fixed with two (admittedly dramatic) changes:

1) Be like a DM secretly rolling dice. Tell the player you're rolling, but not whether they succeeded or failed.
2) Either way, flow the dialogue naturally so that it's unclear whether the player achieved the "winning" result.

Simple example, the PC is trying to use Persuasion to pass a guard post. The game says "Testing Persuasion" but doesn't say succeed/fail. The guard says "I'll let you pass but only if you get me some cheese from the kitchen first." Was the Persuade roll a success or not? The player doesn't know unless they look it up. Do this for all 200 dialogue checks in a game and you habituate the player to accept the results and move ahead without cheating. Of course some players' brains will explode with rage because they "have to" look up every dialogue check, but some will learn the new way and be perfectly content to "fail forward".

Not saying every RPG should do this but it would be one way to advance the medium.
 

Darth Canoli

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It's a sad state of affairs. I think in the perfect world, RPG players would accept fail states because they make the world more reactive and interesting.

In a perfect world, failing checks would lead to a different path or ways to solve a quest like in Prelude to Darkness.

In our sad reality, most garbage "RPG" gives you nothing for failing, you just failed and missed some additional content, that's why most players are used not to fail dialogue checks.

So, if a good game designer makes such a good quest design ever again (like in Prelude to Darkness), he should let the players know before the adventure begins.

Also, looks like you didn't play Prelude, that's the one game where failing one way to complete a quest is just leading to another challenge and is interesting, given it'(s not infinite and you could fail a quest altogether after 3 or four failures but i found myself accepting it because of the great quest design, not that i failed a lot, but two quests comes to mind.
 

undecaf

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Come on, don't overthink this game. It isn't build for that. Just play what you want and go for what you get. And like it or dislike it.

Jesus...

:D
 

MRY

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I feel the dialogue check problem could be fixed with two (admittedly dramatic) changes:
It might advance something, but I'm not sure it would be a viable fix to my problem.

I'm hardly an authority on good RPGs, so perhaps I'm just flat out wrong. But to me, wherever possible, a game should convey to the player the qualities of the character. God of War is a great example about it. Everything about how Kratos moves, the kind of things he does, the way he sounds when he talks, etc. -- it all conveys brutality, strength, heft, hyper-masculinity, etc. To take an older-school game, the same is true of Ryu in Ninja Gaiden -- when I first played the NES game back in the 90s, everything conveyed speed, agility, lethality... things like how he jumped, how he attacked, how he could grab walls, etc. (This is why the eagle enemy is so disruptive in NG; when it hits you mid-air it makes you feel un-agile, it undoes Ryu's character.)

In an RPG, the player gets to build his character, so you can't design the entire game around emphasizing certain attributes. (Though the character often has defined attributes -- so PS:T's design could emphasize TNO's immortality and tattoos, for instance.) That puts a lot of burden on the designer. But when you have opportunities to emphasize the skills the character has built into his character, you should do it.

The problem with what you propose is that if I, the player, build a Persuader character, then the game ought to make really clear to me that I'm persuading the heck out of people, just as God of War shows Kratos ripping off a head, or Ninja Gaiden showed Ryu zooming up a chute by wall jumping. If it's not clear to the player whether he's succeeded or failed, then those encounters aren't telling you, "Yes, MRY, your character is a great persuader!"

AOD is probably the best ever in this regard. The things you use your skills to do are immensely satisfying. MOTB is also great. Fallout 1 is also very good, although not as good as the prior two because it is actually fairly rare that a skill lets you feel like you just did something amazing; it's more like your skills just get used in useful ways.

Thinking back to Goldbox days, fireball was the moment when a wizard felt most like a wizard (he was doing something radically different from what others could do, in a way that felt really wizardly); sweeping low-level enemies was when a fighter was validated; a gigantic backstab for a thief; cure serious wounds for a cleric. Dialogue skills should be thought of the same way. Not every round needs the pyrotechnics of a fireball (a wizard can't cast a fireball every round in combat) or the gore of a sweep, but that can't just happen once or twice a game, either. It needs to be frequent and clear.
 

MRY

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Darth Canoli I tried playing once, many years ago, without success. I can't remember whether I couldn't get it to run, whether my computer was too weak, or whether I just didn't enjoy it.

undecaf When you experience something flawed, the opportunity to dissect the flaws is a considerable booby prize -- the extra fail state content, as it were.
 

undecaf

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Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2
undecaf When you experience something flawed, the opportunity to dissect the flaws is a considerable booby prize -- the extra fail state content, as it were.

When I experience something I enjoy from the core, I say it; when I enjoy something from the core but have something to complain, I say it louder; whem I do not enjoy something even from the core, I swear it.
 

CootKeeper

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I tried playing Numanuma earlier this year but I gave up at the point I got to the Bloom.

My main gripes...

- It was easy to win every skill check once you found out you could use any other party member to pass them. Does your party include a nano, a jack and a glaive? you're all set.
- The writing was all over the place. You could tell there were too many writers (including kickstarter funders?)
- The maps were too small. Sure, in terms of quest or dialogue density, it's higher than say PST. But the maps were the size of a handkerchief, or maybe 1/4 of PST map sizes at most?
- No building interiors. In my half plauthourgh, I counted two of them: the order of Truth and 1 pub, that's it. I guess they were budget cuts. Ironically you spend a lot of time in a big city but you never go indoors.

Honestly I tried real hard to finish the game, but I couldn't manage it. I made it through Lionheart for god's sake. I might be getting too old for this shite.
 

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To me, wherever possible, a game should convey to the player the qualities of the character.
I certainly see your point here; at the same time, what you're describing buys in to the extreme we are trying to get away from: the sense that the player constantly has to "win". Since Kratos is strong, every time there is a test of strength, he must pass it. If he doesn't, save scumming is not only desirable on the part of the player, but demanded by the conceits of the game itself. I resist that this must be a cornerstone of gaming.

Even min/maxing weaknesses as well as strengths doesn't make it okay. Why roll dice at all if your braniac character is supposed to be able to hack every computer but can never climb over a fence? Just save scum until the hack is successful (and ideally until the fence climb is failed). That's not playing a game, that's telling a (rather predictable) story. I like stories, but that is not and should not be what a game is.

I prefer characters and situations that are not that cut and dried, not that monolithic, with conclusions not foregone. I want characters that fail sometimes even at their specialties, and have it be okay. I even want them to overcome their weak spots once in a while. I want ambiguity. I want a ninja that looks like an idiot when a bird unexpectedly swoops down on him.

Where is this all coming from?

Partly from competitive gaming. Good old Team Fortress 2 ! I'm not talking about e-sports, just playing against other players and the thrill of squaring off against someone who might outwit you or outshoot you, even at your speciality. I've observed a lot of players who think the point is to win 100% of games and have 50 kills and 0 deaths per game. To me that is boring, even when I am the guy who got 50 kills and 0 deaths, and not to brag but I have been that guy. Candy from a baby isn't a game, it's just being a jerk. Two babies fighting over a piece of candy, now that's a conflict worth seeing. In competition, I want to win about 60% of the time - succeed enough to feel proud, fail enough to keep me trying. In my day I got killed a lot, but still had a rep as a damn good Spy. Failing didn't mean my qualities weren't conveyed; it just meant that someone else's qualities were conveyed in a way that trumped mine. There's no reason this can't work when it's NPC vs. PC.

Partly from tabletop RPGs. My group has evolved past win/lose, reward/punishment thinking. We try not to roll dice unless both results are interesting. What are the real stakes of this dice roll? Is it a good story if the thief can't open the door? What if instead a failed roll means he opened it but made a lot of noise or took too long? What if the bard charms all the ladies but makes a gaffe in front of the King? What if the super intelligent wizard finds a puzzle box that stumps him? None of these take away their qualities - at least, they shouldn't. The qualities of "solves every riddle no matter what" or "charms every NPC no matter what" do not make interesting characters - they make cardboard cutouts.

I would like to see more CRPGs that encourage the player to think of the characters as more than cardboard cutouts.
 
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MRY

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Since Kratos is strong, every time there is a test of strength, he must pass it. If he doesn't, save scumming is not only desirable on the part of the player, but demanded by the conceits of the game itself. I resist that this must be a cornerstone of gaming.
But that's not actually how it felt to me in God of War. Kratos often was knocked down, or unable to achieve some feat of strength, or even defeated. The issue isn't that you can never fail, but that a game's messaging should convey his character even in failure. Having Kratos's path barred by a picket fence would be absurd, for instance. Having it barred by a massive boulder that he strains to lift but can't would be emblematic.

Why roll dice at all if your braniac character is supposed to be able to hack every computer but can never climb over a fence? Just save scum until the hack is successful (and ideally until the fence climb is failed). That's not playing a game, that's telling a story. I like stories, but that is not and should not be what a game is.
Well, no. Games are often non-random. Knights don't sometimes fail to move in an L pattern in chess. An 8 never beats a 7 in Stratego.

Here's the thing. Suppose a computer hack is a 1d10 rolled against your Computer skill, rated 1 to 9 -- if the roll is equal to or lower than the skill, then you hack the computer; if it is greater than the skill, you fail to hack the computer. A player who encounters that computer has exactly the same option whether he has built his character as a hacker or not. Both players have a chance of success, both players have a chance at failure. After they attempt to hack the computer, the computer is either hacked or it isn't. So the hacker character who succeeds and the non-hacker character who succeeds have literally the same experience. The game in no way signals they are different characters. The player can LARP his own narrative about how frustrated the Computer 9 character is who fails, or how exultant the Computer 1 character is who succeeds. But the game makes no distinction. Both characters are, or are not, hackers.

If you have 300 computers to hack (and no save scumming), the law of averages will mean that over the course of the game, the hacker will feel like a hacker and the non-hacker will feel like a non-hacker. But very few RPGs have that many checks. They are so few and far between (and so susceptible to scumming) that the system I describe would largely obliterate the significance of the character build.

I prefer characters and situations that are not that cut and dried, not that monolithic, with conclusions not foregone. I want characters that fail sometimes even at their specialties, and have it be okay.
I mean, sure. Even Tecmo Bowl Bo Jackson sometimes got tackled behind the line of scrimmage. But you have to start by making it very, very clear that the character has a specialty. If the outlines of the character are always murky, there is no character at all.

I want a ninja that looks like an idiot when a bird unexpectedly swoops down on him.
Disagree. This is just a pratfall and it adds nothing in a serious game. Sure, in a cartoony Team Fortress game where you aren't going for narrative immersion so much as wacky excitement, it's fine. But not in a game that isn't clowning. Much more interesting for a character to be highly competent and for his competence nevertheless to be insufficient. Ryu dying in a bullet hail where all his agility is nevertheless insufficient actually underscores his agility. Ryu dying because a bird pecks him midair and he falls like a goofball undermines his agility.

In competition, I want to win about 60% of the time - succeed enough to feel proud, fail enough to keep me trying.
My friend at Riot talks about this a lot; what everyone wants is a matchmaking system where they are just a bit better than the other guy.

I would like to see more CRPGs that encourage the player to think of the characters as more than cardboard cutouts.
Sure. But my point is: at least make them cardboard cutouts. The worst of all is characters that are just a sheet of cardboard that is not even cut out at all.
 
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Zombra

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Great post.

Here's the thing. Suppose a computer hack is a 1d10 rolled against your Computer skill, rated 1 to 9. A player who encounters that computer has exactly the same option whether he has built his character as a hacker or not. The game in no way signals they are different characters.
Very well illustrated.

Let's take my original idea and refine it with a new wrinkle:

1) Be like a DM secretly rolling dice. Tell the player you're rolling, but not whether they succeeded or failed.
2) Either way, flow the dialogue naturally so that it's unclear whether the player achieved the "winning" result.
3) Either way, analyze the character's build and telegraph their qualities in the reply. Possibly even allow different outcomes based on skill level.

(Somewhat less) simple example: the PC is trying to use his very high Persuasion to pass a guard post. The game says "Testing Persuasion" but doesn't say succeed/fail. The guard says "You're a wonderful person and I'd love to help you out. I'll let you pass but you have to make it worth my while with some cheese from the kitchen." Was the Persuade roll a success or not?

A different PC is trying to use his very low Persuasion to pass the same guard post. The guard says "Get the hell outta my face. Nobody gets past! *stomach growls* Ahh, bring me something from the kitchen and maybe we'll talk." Was the Persuade roll a success or not?
 

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