What's the point of non-party combat?

[JarlFrank]

I think you misunderstood my post, MMXI. There would be no general rule that would prevent each and every thief from doing a frontal assault, nor a universal rule for the behaviour of paladins. Yes, most characters are defined by their archtype, but that doesn't mean the archetype is all they have to be. Individual characters have individual personalities.

What about a fanatic paladin who murders people who are innocent because he believes them to be demon-worshippers? What about a thief who is actually quite curageous and won't shy away from equal combat where he can't use his dirty tricks?

The way you want to have it, each and every character in the game world would be defined by his class or job, and he would be nothing else but his class or job. If every bureaucrat in the game is lazy because the rule for bureaucrats is to be lazy, then the gameworld becomes boring and predictable. Oh, this NPC is a bureaucrat! I already know his personality and/or combat behaviour before I even talk to him or initiate combat, because every single NPC of his class works after the same principles.

It's boring, makes for horribly cliched and shallow characters, and makes the gameworld incredibly ridiculous and unrealistic (therefore unimmersive). Also it prevents surprises in combat because you know exactly how a thief or a mage or a warrior is going to act, you won't have to expect any surprise attack - unless the class of your enemy is one that utilizes surprise attacks regularly, but then it's not a surprise anymore.

 

[MMXI]

I think you misunderstood my post, MMXI. There would be no general rule that would prevent each and every thief from doing a frontal assault, nor a universal rule for the behaviour of paladins. Yes, most characters are defined by their archtype, but that doesn't mean the archetype is all they have to be. Individual characters have individual personalities.

And like I said, you can numerically define the most important features of those personalities to affect the simulation on a mechanical level. You seem to want all characters in the game world to be highly exceptional, making any sort of numerical definition of their personality and behaviour useless. You then go on to say that my idea is unrealistic and unimmersive, even though characters with highly exceptional behaviour is as unimmersive as you can get, much like characters in soap operas. If characters don't have largely exceptional behaviour, and have common trends amongst them, then surely this can be abstracted out into a series of common measures.

It's all about data driven characters versus scripted characters, really. It would be far easier to generate 10,000 characters to populate the game world by varying a bunch of numbers than by carefully putting scripts and dialogue together to hand-craft everyone.

What about a fanatic paladin who murders people who are innocent because he believes them to be demon-worshippers? What about a thief who is actually quite curageous and won't shy away from equal combat where he can't use his dirty tricks?

But what do you propose those characters actually do once you've recruited them? Should the paladin automatically start attacking innocent people? Should the thief disregard your orders for stealth? How exactly do you want these personality quirks to be represented in terms of the actual gameplay? You've skipped past that entirely.

The way you want to have it, each and every character in the game world would be defined by his class or job, and he would be nothing else but his class or job. If every bureaucrat in the game is lazy because the rule for bureaucrats is to be lazy, then the gameworld becomes boring and predictable. Oh, this NPC is a bureaucrat! I already know his personality and/or combat behaviour before I even talk to him or initiate combat, because every single NPC of his class works after the same principles.

It's boring, makes for horribly cliched and shallow characters, and makes the gameworld incredibly ridiculous and unrealistic (therefore unimmersive). Also it prevents surprises in combat because you know exactly how a thief or a mage or a warrior is going to act, you won't have to expect any surprise attack - unless the class of your enemy is one that utilizes surprise attacks regularly, but then it's not a surprise anymore.

Not at all. I've never said that I want the behaviour for all characters to be based on their class. I've said repeatedly that you can have a number of statistics to govern their behaviour. This would make characters far more varied. In fact, it would make them far more varied on the actual character data level, whereas otherwise you'd have to add variety through the creation of unique scripts.

 

[JarlFrank]

What about a fanatic paladin who murders people who are innocent because he believes them to be demon-worshippers? What about a thief who is actually quite curageous and won't shy away from equal combat where he can't use his dirty tricks?

But what do you propose those characters actually do once you've recruited them? Should the paladin automatically start attacking innocent people? Should the thief disregard your orders for stealth? How exactly do you want these personality quirks to be represented in terms of the actual gameplay? You've skipped past that entirely.

Well, I already mentioned the thing about refusal to do certain combat orders based on personality. The rest pretty much comes down to characterization and scripting, mostly quest-specific stuff. Kinda like when in PST you have Vhalior with you and decide to let Trias go, but then Vhalior goes and kills him.

 

[MMXI]

Well, I already mentioned the thing about refusal to do certain combat orders based on personality. The rest pretty much comes down to characterization and scripting, mostly quest-specific stuff. Kinda like when in PST you have Vhalior with you and decide to let Trias go, but then Vhalior goes and kills him.

Ah, storyfag shit. Not interested!

 

[DraQ]

If you don't mind, I'll use my typical response style, as I find addressing each point individually (when possible) to be more convenient and result in clearer responses.

You only need a limited amount of actual mechanics to do a decent enough simulation to discourage the player from performing out of character actions.

The problem here is that good deterrent isn't automatically good simulation. In some cases, even though penalty is harsh enough, it may make no sense in-universe, which makes it poor simulation. Even if the penalty would make sense, the scenario leading to it may not if the character involved would simply not engage in such behaviour.

This is the main distinction between recruitable characters and ones created by the player (or otherwise forming a designated "core party"). Proper player characters are given minimal/broadest/least specific possible context in the gameworld to accomodate any character or variety of characters player may wish to create. The main point here is that for core party, the criterion of "would not do" is void, since the program has no way to tell what a player character would or wouldn't do.
The concept of core party or protagonist, while not strictly formal possesses enough markers to make it unambiguous without accounting for any storyfag baggage associated with traditional meaning of "protagonist", in particular it is easy to determine what characters are not core party - they are characters given some proper context in the gameworld.
A character you can find doing something, somewhere in the gameworld, who is motivated by certain goals (may have quest associated with him to reflect them better) and has certain history is *definitely* not a part of the core party since all these form a very specific context. In particular, the history and motivation of such character impose some "would" and "would not" restrictions in-universe and good simulation of this universe *has* to account for that. Filtering orders through AI which can veto them based on character personality and modified by characters willpower, PC charisma and relationship variables should give a good compromise between tactical control and well-simulated characters.

Argument from "It's my party WAAH!" is not simulationist - it's 100% gamist.
You have to understand that in the eyes of a devoted simulationist-narrativist (more of the former according to narration-through-simulation ideal) it makes you an inferior person.

This doesn't mean that every character has to be a collection of numbers and nothing more. You can still have developer created dialogue trees for characters. You don't have to generate those from their statistics or anything. This means that you can add enough background information and other things that would be very tricky to add as statistics. As long as there are mechanics to discourage paladins from slaughtering innocents and thieves from doing full frontal assault (to quote JarlFrank's example) then it's all good.

But that's the crux of the problem here. Those differences in behaviour are not determined by class nor stats, but by background.

The distinction between storyfag individually written and scripted characters, and non-storyfag generated ones, with background text and dialogue based on some templates and scripts parametrized or built from blocks appropriate to a given character is irrelevant here - what matters is relevant portions of the character background being in a form understandable by the game's logic.

Just think about how many statistics there are for combat in something like D&D. If you mirrored that for their "personality" or whatever you want to call it, I'm sure that's plenty. Think about all of those weapon proficiencies, saving throws, resistances and specific damage type armour classes. Then think about how many actual "personality" measures you can come up with. It'll easily be enough, combined with developer created dialogue, graphics and even voice overs to make a character both play uniquely (while still inside the game rules) and "act" uniquely in a more hand-crafted sense.

Except behaviour is far more complex and far subtler than giving some pluses when using certain type of weapon. Additionally, we're speaking of limiting or forcing behaviour - the area of behaviour that is normally regulated by players' role-playing in case of the core party.

It makes sense to split it from the stat part and merge it into the AI - recruitable characters can be generated with the same amount of detail and same range of personalities as personality generator allows, or manually scripted with detail required by their written background, so granularity of our "personality engine" will be non-issue in such cases. With the core party, however, you're bound to run into situations your "personality engine" won't be sophisticated enough to handle, which will be incredibly jarring and detrimental to the gameplay.

I'm not against partial inclusion of behavioral restrictions to character system - in particular you can have statistics like willpower that may influence the moment the character control is relinquished by controlling party (player in case of core characters, AI otherwise), and you can have optional traits representing well delimited characteristics (and, in case of traits enforcing behavioural restrictions, coming at negative cost during chargen), but the key word here is "optional" while the personalities in general aren't.

But what exactly is the challenge of an RPG? It seems obvious to me that the challenge is to exploit the strengths and weaknesses of your various characters in such a way as to allow you to finish the game.
Playing characters (ones you've created or ones you've recruited) optimally throughout the game is ultimately your goal.

Except that explicit notion of "goal" is inherently non- simulationist. It's purely gamist, though you can argue that in a highly linear storyfag game the "true" ending is the goal.

From simulationist POV, goal doesn't have to be in any way accounted for or enforced by the game. There are even games with no specified goal at all, which is pretty much as pure as it gets in terms of simulationism.

In such purely simulationist game goals would be up to player, and optimality of given tactics or strategy can only be meaningfully assessed in conjunction with goal.

If you fight with your fighters standing at the back and your mages meleeing in the frontline then you're going to fail repeatedly. This is what RPGs are all about really. The player should be allowed to do stupid things like that, but should be discouraged by the game mechanics. Mages should be able to rush past the fighters to smack a group of ogres around with their staves but having a crap THAC0, a bollocks AC, shit HP and doing low damage are those statistics/mechanics that discourage you from doing it. So you don't do it. Ever, really, unless you've cast some spell that turns you into some fighter equivalent temporarily. So why shouldn't the game give you the option of doing those things with recruited party members? The mechanics will discourage you from doing them, so what's the problem? The game will let you play a character out of character, but you'll be punished for it in the same way that you get punished for doing the same with the protagonist.

Since most goals at least implicitly imply survival, then retarded combat tactics will be pretty much universally non-optimal, but that makes it rather specific case rather than general rule.

But, let's agree that RPG revolves around strengths and weakneses of different characters. Wouldn't choice between recruiting mediocre, but disciplined fighter or a psycho that can hit people so hard he makes their mothers bleed, but also has propensity towards braining people for looking at him funny which inevitably ruins most of the party's attempts at diplomacy and its legal reputation add more depth to it?
Wouldn't you rather have a dilemma between recruiting a one-of-a-kind marvel of stealth and lockpicking and... wait where is that amulet we spent last month dungeoncrawling for? Or our "locksmith" for that matter?
What about joining with a paladin that makes a formidable combatant, valuable asset when it comes to dealing with <insert paladins religious organization here>, but doesn't tolerate legally questionable methods of fundraising, certain forms of magic and may skewer certain disagreable types even if they might be more valuable to the party alive?

Wouldn't BG be a much better game, if, say, Xan was a much better mage, but had actual detrimental effect on party morale and had really lowe morale of his own?

That can be solved quite easily. Either give competence measures to the AI controller itself, or add in some counterbalance statistics to divert the AI controller away from "perceived" optimal actions.

I'm not talking about some generic incompetence, but rather something along the lines of "blows all loot on hookers and booze" or "likes punching town guards in the faces" or "is a fanatic who skewers people on his sword if they deviate from his perceived righteous path in the least".

Also, discrediting JF's example on grounds of storyfaggotry is about as sensible as dismissing AK-47 when discussing firearm reliability because it was made by commies whose goeals and methods you don't agree with - in other words:

 

[MMXI]

A "simulationist-narrativist" hating on a "simulationist-gamist"? How predictable.

Since most goals at least implicitly imply survival, then retarded combat tactics will be pretty much universally non-optimal, but that makes it rather specific case rather than general rule.

But, let's agree that RPG revolves around strengths and weakneses of different characters. Wouldn't choice between recruiting mediocre, but disciplined fighter or a psycho that can hit people so hard he makes their mothers bleed, but also has propensity towards braining people for looking at him funny which inevitably ruins most of the party's attempts at diplomacy and its legal reputation add more depth to it?
Wouldn't you rather have a dilemma between recruiting a one-of-a-kind marvel of stealth and lockpicking and... wait where is that amulet we spent last month dungeoncrawling for? Or our "locksmith" for that matter?
What about joining with a paladin that makes a formidable combatant, valuable asset when it comes to dealing with <insert paladins religious organization here>, but doesn't tolerate legally questionable methods of fundraising, certain forms of magic and may skewer certain disagreable types even if they might be more valuable to the party alive?

Wouldn't BG be a much better game, if, say, Xan was a much better mage, but had actual detrimental effect on party morale and had really lowe morale of his own?

What's to stop all that from being defined by statistics? Absolutely nothing, that's what. I can't think of a single RPG that has anything close to an in-depth character creator. Not even 20% of the "limit" I'd place on the number of customisable "things" in a character creator. So basically, what should fill up that other 80% or more? More combat statistics? No. How about things that affect other aspects of the game? You know, the kind of statistics I've been talking about in this thread?

So you pointed out some things a paladin might hate in the game world. Schools of magic, other religious organisations, even people of certain other personalities. How could you go about incorporating all of this into a character creator? Well, in a similar way to how the the developers would create NPCs using a purely data driven and not code/script driven design. For example, all characters could have a "religion" to go along with race, class and gender, though with the atheism/agnosticism options being bundled in there too. Picking a religion may reduce the character's religious tolerance level for all other religions, while boosting the religious tolerance to maximum for the chosen religion. Races may be connected to religions so that even though a dwarf character may follow a human religion, they would respect dwarven religions more than the rest, possibly resulting in no tolerance reduction for them. Classes may act as a multiplier for tolerance/intolerance, as could character alignment. Classes that aren't associated much with religion would have no multiplier (a multiplier of 1), while the likes of clerics and paladins may have a high multiplier (x3 or something). Then, of course, you'd want the ability to customise the character's religious tolerance levels in more detail. Perhaps you could have a number of points that can be used to modify them. If you have the "open minded" trait it might double the number of points available to spend on raising tolerance levels. A "closed minded" trait might eliminate them altogether. Both should have advantages and disadvantages in the game itself.

Schools of magic could work in the same way. Perhaps schools are related to religion. Perhaps not. Perhaps only one or two religions in the game allow for mage characters. Both of those religions could be polytheistic, with different deities granting the power of different spell schools. Deities themselves can be defined as "characters" through the character creator, though of course not visible in the actual game (unless it's appropriate for the setting). Tolerance towards specific deities, instead of being hard values like in my example for religion in the previous paragraph, could be a function of the tolerance towards the religion that the deity belongs to and the compatibility between the deity's personality statistics and the character's.

My point is that there is a shit load of room in for character creation to incorporate stuff like this. No game has come anywhere close to the sort of detail that I would want in a character creator. Being able to fine tune characters in this level of detail could be a huge amount of fun.

Of course, you'll just reply with more exceptions. That's all you can really do. "But what if I want a character to have a disease?" Add diseases to the character creator. "But what if I want a character to dislike brown eyes". Add eye colour to the character creator and an tolerance level for them. "But that's stupid! You can't do that sort of detail in a character creator because it'll be far too bloated". Yes, I'm well aware of that, but then again it's a fucking retarded and pointless thing to want to model anyway! I'm not a "narrativist" in the slightest. I couldn't give a damn about Peter the Paladin's toe-nail fetish. Some things just aren't worth sticking into a game. If it's too bloated and too detailed for a character creator then it's too "exceptional" to even bother with. Sure, characters won't be able to be as nuanced as in, say, Planescape: Torment, but it'll be 10000x more mechanically interesting.