Lack of psychological factors in RPGs.

RP Gs are all about taking over an imaginary persons life. But its very rare for a game to make use of a Sanity Meter, or Break Meter.

While I can see the reasons for this, like not wanting your character to start screaming like a little girl in the middle of what should be a badass charge, watching your character react to things realistically would be an awesome idea. Rather than charging on as if nothing happened, watching your character think "oh shit oh shit oh shit" as friends fall around them, to the point of their accuracy stat going down or their view-holder shaking as morale drops and fear kicks in, with the logical result being your character fleeing in the shortest route away from the enemy, or watching your character start to crack and snap at allies, harming Relationship Values and possibly even causing alienation of party members in certain conversations (perhaps limiting options or even redirecting scripted conversations) would force players to think about positions they put their party members. If Sanity drops low enough, Ax-Crazy rages, Heroic BSoD events and schitzopherenic episodes could effectively take a character out of combat or even turn them into a Wild Card or outright villain for a few chapters. There's a lot to explore in this sector.

edited 29th Apr '11 8:19:01 AM by GameChainsaw

The term "Great Man" is disturbingly interchangeable with "mass murderer" in history books.

I would imagine that is because most RPG player characters are assumed to be sane. Except malkavians and all those JRPG protagonists where it turns out the villain cloned him from his ball hair or something.

Or a Bioware love interest.

@ OP: To be fair, there's a few RPGs that try and screw around with the player's sanity...

edited 29th Apr '11 8:38:34 AM by TheGinkei

And "Reality" is unveiled. What did it want...? What did it see...? What did it hear...? What did it think...? What did it do...?

My internalized design document for an Ideal RPG (tm) includes a Stress Meter concept. Depending on the character you play, you react differently to stress. My plot idea requires the player to play through the story as four people that share the starting point - a specific event in a specific location - and the ending point, which is also a specific event in a specific location. The bank clerk is afraid of blood and chunks of torn people and being alone in the darkness; the doctor is unyielding in his unafraidness of blood, but he is susceptible to chemical factors and since he is used to not being stressed out like the other guy is, he doesn't know how to HANDLE IT, so when he loses his shit, he loses it big-time. The former policeman is desensitized to violence and combat stress, but panics if faced with moral burdens. The rock star is vain and the story requires him to conceal his identity. Go too long wearing masks and the like, and he flips out. But expose yourself too much, you attract unwanted attention.

This would factor into the dialogue system - every character is to have a unique dialogue interface to reflect his or her inner workings. The clerk works like a common WRPG, pick one of many options. When really stressed out, he picks one at random, when slightly stressed out, he might pick the one NEXT to the one you chose, when he's lost his shit, he picks one so random, it may be one not on the offered list. The doctor is methodical, his options are neatly laid out in a schematic. As he gets more stressed, the schematic becomes jumbled, and so do the letters in the lines. When he's lost it, they're all Eldritch Abomination speak =) The cop flicks through a mental notebook to pick the answers, and as he loses self-control, he loses the ability to stop the spinning, it gets faster and faster. The rock star picks icons instead of dialogue options, and if I have my way, there will be more than one line for him to potentially say defined by one icon (determined randomly), so when his stress rises, the icons the player has grown accustomed to will change shape and form— and the potential lines hiding behind them will, too.

The idea is to reflect how a parson whose head is not in the right place with say the right thing the wrong way, or, more horribly, say stuff when he should be silent, insult when he should console and so on. OR VICE VERSA. Some of the effects might be beneficial in the long run, since the "stressed out" versions all include a chance for an otherwise unavailable dialogue option to appear. But it might not be a good one.

That said, this is still a concept in my head, festering until I finish my Ph.D. and have free time on my hands.

Videogames do not make you a worse person... Than you already are.

EDIT: Wow, lotta ninjas. This was in response to post 2.

Well the idea is that if you give anyone a bad enough shock, they'll crack up a bit. And heroes regularly get into situations which would drive anyone insane, be it killing a whole bunch of people at once, fighting horrible monsters with nothing but a sword, doing insanely dangerous things... often without training and just as frequently without preparation.

Thats another thing; differentiating between long term and short term morale, i.e. the difference between running away in panic and being too afraid to even step onto the field again, at least for a while. Relationship Values are important too; Dragon Age and other games by Bioware do this superbly; parties held together by a strong personality can end up falling apart if the leader becomes too disliked; parties with a designated leader due to a military setting won't have people just leave, but relations can be strained and the party effectiveness reduced if things get too bad. And characters cracking under the strain or losing confidence in their own abilities would unlock a whole different category of problems. Equally, differentials between characters could come into play; a character who is shaking with fear every time the fighting starts could be treated sympathetically by a well balanced but confident party, but if everyone is on edge but willing to go forward, the sufferer is not going to find many sympathetic ears. If the leader comes under too much pressure, Hilarity Ensues due to a serious question of the leaders fitness for duty... serious ramifications indeed if it was The Hero or, worse, the supposed Chosen One rather than just The Captain in a story full of heroes.

That sounds interesting. So it leads to an Interface Screw with the characters dialogue.

edited 29th Apr '11 8:45:39 AM by GameChainsaw

The term "Great Man" is disturbingly interchangeable with "mass murderer" in history books.

The other ideas were to separate the team members' respect for you as a leader and respect for you as a human being, because these two do not have to correlate at all. Complete with mutiny attempts if you do TOO badly and they can reach an agreement (the other idea was to have inter-party relationship meters, because these, to my knowledge, have never ever been done, and to let the player affect them by screwing with the team's mind). The problem is, I can generate ideas all day long, but the last time I tried to code something was in 2002.

And combat modifiers, but those are a lot less fun to describe =)

edited 29th Apr '11 8:54:15 AM by Noelemahc

Videogames do not make you a worse person... Than you already are.

Shadow Hearts as a "sanity" meter of sorts, but its not used in the way you mean. I wouldn't mind a horror and psychology oriented game, though. Preferably done by Obsidian, it sounds like their kind of thing. Imagine a spiritual sequel to Planescape Torment, where death is cheap and easy to avoid or undo, but too much loss of sanity results in its own variety of Bad Ends. . .

Home of CBR Rumbles-in-Exile: rumbles.fr.yuku.com

Personally, I'd love to play an RPG where the player characters are by default freakin' insane.

Either a Bioware game or a JRPG, those two thing are the only two things that make me feel that Im playing a insane character, Emphasis on Bioware

http://steamcommunity.com/id/Xan-Xan/

Funny, I thought there'd be more love for Malkavians in this thread =)

Videogames do not make you a worse person... Than you already are.

Well the idea is that going insane only happens if you really fuck up. The idea of the suggestion is to accurately simulate just how strenuous having to save the world, especially as a group untrained for the role, would actually be.

To go into the immediate effects, that is, morale and sanity (actually stress works better Noele, good idea) as bars beside HP and MP, its another thing to take into account in battle; your Dirty Coward may have plenty of HP left, but thats no good if he runs off the battlefield with half your gear. The slightly crazy Black Mage is probably not someone you want to expose to too much pressure, lest they snap in the middle of battle. I'd imagine it being tied to recent game events too; the Staff Chick lost her parents, her mental health isn't going to be positive for a while. Actually that might dictate the kind of stress response the character gets; rather than running away or uncontrollable screaming, outbursts of uncontrollable sobbing or shell-shock might occur. A Death Seeker might go outright berserk, throwing themselves (and any subtle plans you had going) at the enemy in a suicidal frenzy. Having immediate effects if characters are pushed too hard forces the players to think about how much pressure they can afford to put each party member under, and means that characters have to work together far more closely; not just for tactical reasons, but for support as well.

edited 29th Apr '11 11:21:47 AM by GameChainsaw

The term "Great Man" is disturbingly interchangeable with "mass murderer" in history books.

It also sounds like an interesting way to up difficulty.

Umbran Climax◊

Yes, managing the neuroses of your team as it will affect their performance and actions in specific ways is a neat trick. Have to remember that =)

Videogames do not make you a worse person... Than you already are.

All this talk however, is purely hypothetical for like... 15 years or so, given Nintendo's patent on the interesting parts of a Sanity Meter in video games.

I thought that only pertained to the Mind Screw effect part.

The term "Great Man" is disturbingly interchangeable with "mass murderer" in history books.

For the record, it's a Tabletop Game, but Betrayal At House On The Hill does have a Sanity stat, which events can alter, the stat can affect certain parts of gameplay, and if it drops to zero, you die.

That aside, what would be the proposed way to have gameplay affect sanity? Ones I can think of:

1. Certain dialogue choices affect sanity, like they do with Relationship Values. This came through an idea that was basically a hybrid RPG slash Visual Novel, and the breakdown of sanity would lead to betrayals and epic Bad Endings. This isn't necessary, of course, and it could just be a direct boost/drop to sanity without story changes.

2. Certain enemies have attacks that drop sanity. There are ways, though, to protect your team against such attacks (or, at least, the sanity-dropping effect of those attacks).

3. Certain attacks of your own drain your sanity if you use them. They can be quite powerful, but is the sanity drop worth it? Could also apply to, say, an Evil Weapon.

edited 29th Apr '11 12:23:00 PM by stardf29

I can think of a few more.

4) Taking a whole lot of damage all at once. Getting half-mauled to death ought to cause a few issues.

5) Killing a whole lot of sentient enemies at once. Watching entire squadrons, even hostile ones, go up in massive fireballs isn't going to do anything for peace of mind.

6) Watching allied NPC's getting killed or allies getting injured. Nothing like seeing your mate get his legs blown off, even if they are magically reattached seconds later.

The term "Great Man" is disturbingly interchangeable with "mass murderer" in history books.

In a western RPG, that would be seriously imposing on the player character's personality, which with exception to something pre-set like Malkavians, is a very bad thing. If I'm playing a stone cold badass or even a confident average joe who has no qualms about putting someone who threatens his life in a grave, I'm not going to enjoy having a mental breakdown and crying in the corner because I feel bad about killing a man who wanted to use my bunghole to wax his carrot. It might work as a Fallout-style perk or trait (I think while it was in really early development, still using the GURPS system, it had Combat Paralysis and other flaws like this).

In JRP Gs where you don't get to make the character, this is the sort of thing which would seriously mess up the flow of the plot. FF 7 wouldn't be the same unless Cloud has his mental breakdown after [whatever event it was i fergat]. Even then, it was interesting in FF 7, but eye-rollingly tiresome by FF 9. I couldn't imagine playing a game featuring a mechanic where the protagonist has to cuddle his security blanket because he's not the type of character who should really be a protagonist.

Sanity as a constantly active mechanic has worked very well in horror games: Amnesia, Eternal Darkness, Penumbra sort of, but in all those cases it is brought on by well-implemented and appropriate Cthulhuoid unspeakable horrors, not mental trauma. In any other game I can't imagine it eliciting a reaction other than "wow, this guy is a pussy".

On the subject of relationship values, I think those are definitely an underexploited mechanic, and while I don't like their implementation in Bioware games (agree with me and give me presents or I don't like you because I'm immature and unprofessional) I think they're on the right track. I think it should be more of a two-way mechanic though: In Mass Effect 2 for example, Tali ended up wanting to jump on my space knob even though I really had no interest in her. It would be cool if the player could adjust how much he likes NP Cs manually, so there wouldn't be DA 2-esque incidents where gay elves hit on unresponsive straight Hawkes.

Maybe, for #5, there could be a sanity penalty for killing any sentient enemy, but there are ways to capture hostile enemies, or defeat them without killing them. Say, perhaps, if you damage them just about enough to drain all their HP, they are "defeated" but are not killed, but if you deal way more damage than needed, you kill them.

Bonus points if What Measure Is a Non-Human? is invoked.

Interesting from a story perspective, horrible from a gameplay on unless it's done really, really well. Characters randomly spazing out due to stress in the middle of a battle is something a few games tried and I loathed it every single time.

Inb4 Jagged Alliance?

Videogames do not make you a worse person... Than you already are.

Jagged Alliance?

The term "Great Man" is disturbingly interchangeable with "mass murderer" in history books.

When (not if) a character lost their shit, they would do so completely. And most of the times, you would be hard pressed to predict what they would do.

edited 29th Apr '11 1:16:34 PM by Noelemahc

Videogames do not make you a worse person... Than you already are.

I get the impression this has been done many times before... and not well.

The term "Great Man" is disturbingly interchangeable with "mass murderer" in history books.