One Winged Egret
Yeah, I mentioned that in an earlier post. KOTOR was a flawed game in many ways, but retroactively realizing why they used parts and spikes like that gives me a bit more respect for it.
edited 22nd Jul '13 1:00:03 PM by Clarste
Lost in Space
Continuing my last post, since you ninjaed my edit:
In fact, that's one of the major issues I have with a Point Build System hooked onto a Class and Level System, which is that you get experience points for completing arbitrary tasks, regardless of whether those tasks have anything to do with what you're trying to be good at. Use Security on enough locks in KOTOR and you can level up as a Jedi Guardian. What?
Edit 2: Since you mentioned the idea of some sort of Hit Points analogue for accomplishing non-combat tasks, one interesting facet of the Diku/ROM code that I was talking about earlier is that it has a "moves" attribute. I figured out that it's supposed to be akin to stamina; it's a renewable reserve of energy that you use to do various things.
One of the mechanics I've built and intend to expand on is to make all actions cost some amout of this resource. One reason for this is that a MUD, by nature, doesn't really have a "wait for this thing to be accomplished" mechanic. If you get put into a "wait state", your character is frozen, unable to issue commands, which is not fun. Cast times and progress bars are problematic in a text parser game.
However, if we make this repair task use up stamina, and your stamina is a resource that takes a non-trivial amount of time to regenerate, then you've got your opposed mechanic. You can succeed if you try hard enough, but each attempt costs both stamina and some amount of time.
edited 22nd Jul '13 1:03:40 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
One Winged Egret
Well, I did call it "the worst of both worlds" so I guess I agree. I'd prefer a class system that limits you more than that so you're forced to do the things that make sense to level you up. Although a large part of that is probably because I think in terms of party-based games where having huge weaknesses simply encourages teamwork. To use KOTOR as an example again, the R2-D2 clone was better at hacking and security then you could ever be, so why bother letting the player invest in it? If you're expected to solo everything though then it makes more sense to have a jack-of-all-trades, or at least the option of one.
In a certain sense, it seems like job system basically solves most of the issues here. You can specialize or hybridize, and it always makes sense that you're getting better at what you're actually doing. Well, assuming your skills are limited to your job and sub-job anyway. We can't have ourselves lockpicking our way to master swordsman.
Lost in Space
I'm going to give you time to address the stuff I edited in above, but I'd like to ask how a Job System is functionally different from a Stat Grinding system in which a "job" is a package set of skills that get trained together?
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
One Winged Egret
What happens when you run out of stamina?
And I guess there isn't really a difference between those two systems.
Edit: Oh yeah, one major flaw of job systems I forgot to mention is that a lot of the time you'll "max out" one of your jobs and then you get that awkward moment where you have to choose between staying a master but not earning experience or switching to a new job where you're weak but can get better. I know I just said I don't like being able to inherit too much from jobs you're not using, but it can also feel unsatisfying to lose everything you've earned from earlier.
edited 22nd Jul '13 1:10:17 PM by Clarste
Lost in Space
That's an interesting question. Running out of stamina hampers you in a number of ways; you can't use any abilities that require it until it regenerates, and it limits your movement and impairs your combat skills. If your stamina is drained low enough (generally requires hostile actions or status effects), you are unable to regenerate health.
Sleeping/resting restore stamina rapidly, as long as you are not hungry or thirsty (or poisoned or whatever). There's also a weather system; being outside in bad weather reduces stamina recovery or can even damage stamina.
The Diku/ROM code has three measures of a character's status: hit points, mana, and "move"/stamina. I intend to retain those and have already coded up a whole host of factors affecting the regeneration (and depletion) of each.
Edit: The system I have in mind has no hard-coded upper limit; you'd reach a point of diminishing returns when there are no longer any suitable challenges to overcome using a particular skill and therefore no way to gain useful amounts of experience, but you'd never actually hit a cap. The best part about that is that stronger challenges can always be introduced without messing around with arbitrary level limits or skill caps.
Edit 2: Since the game is functionally an MMO, there's no defined endpoint, and there's ample room to roll new characters if you want a different experience. One of the other features of Diku/ROM is "god" levels where you transcend mortality and can (if you wish) join the ranks of the game's administration. That's a great way to reward players who reach a certain level of accomplishment. You could become a "Sword Master" and start training other players, or get to design encounters.
edited 22nd Jul '13 2:38:37 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
I'm Only Sleeping
Something fun, challenging, and not too arcane.
Ergo, FFV's Job System.
INT is knowing a tomato is a fruit. WIS is knowing it doesn't belong in a fruit salad. CHA is convincing people that it does.
Re: Fighteer: Hm. Honestly, I'd say the first thought to strike my mind is that a lot of the conventions I'd mention don't apply, because I'm not sure that's a game. Sandbox MU Ds are different from a lot of things – in a very real sense, the progression is the objective itself, rather than just a means to it. Additionally, 'customization' when dealing with stat grinding is significantly less relevant because choices aren't usually exclusionary – the limiting factor is the time you're willing to invest in getting everything to a usable level.
I am definitely not your target audience, either, but I'll see what I think about the ideas you've put forth, from a somewhat objective perspective. Take it with a grain of salt.
Also sweet it took me like half a page to write this. I'm not sure what I have to add to the discussion of non-combat resources, maybe I'll think of something later.
edited 22nd Jul '13 1:41:55 PM by Exuno
Lost in Space
Nice critique, Exuno. Let me answer a few questions together, for simplicity.
Homogenization is definitely a possibility; one way I have in mind to combat it is to have titles/ranks assigned on the basis of your build. So someone with high Melee and Defense might be called a "Knight", while a character with high Offensive Magic and Ranged might be a "Mage Archer". In fact, you could encourage this type of thinking with synergy abilities that are dependent on more than one skill tree. For flavor, you could let the player pick from a list of titles that their character's build entitles them to, or join a guild that gives perks as well as titles.
The distinction between classes and core skills is pretty much exactly an issue of nomenclature; what I want to avoid is the kind of straitjacket where a character picks what they're good at at creation and cannot advance other skills if they choose to. I'd like progression to be organic, not predefined.
Races would provide fixed bonuses and/or perks and possibly additional base abilities. An Elf might have increased Dexterity, a reduced difficulty learning magic skills, and "Infravision" as a permanent buff (otherwise you'd have to periodically cast it on yourself or get someone else to).
The purpose of primary and secondary skills is exactly what you said: to provide different types of builds. A character focusing on Dexterity and Melee skills would attack faster and potentially more accurately, but do less damage. A character focusing on Strength and Offensive Magic might be able to channel spells through physical attacks for Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors effects.
It also helps build diversity, as you don't necessarily have to start from square one if you want to train a different skillset; you'd already have developed base abilities you could draw from. If you have done nothing but practice the Sword skill for your whole career, but pick up a mace you'd like to try out, you already have a decent base Melee skill, and your Mace skill will grow rapidly since it is so low to start with. You sacrifice some, but not all of your efficiency when switching builds. Best of all, you could just go back and fight less powerful opponents if your current foes are too strong.
I haven't decided if I want "training" points to fade over time or just not contribute to core skill growth. But yes, essentially you're getting a buff that lets your skill grow more rapidly than if you don't have it. As an example, your natural Sword skill is 10, but you train it to 20. You can now challenge a stronger opponent, but your Sword skill improves as if it were rank 10. However, you don't have the same core skills as a real rank 20 swordsman until your natural skill reaches that level.
I brought up Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards precisely because so many games have magic scale up much faster than physical attacks. Spells can pack more individual punch (or bypass physical defenses, or both) but they need some drawback, whether it's finite resources, making you vulnerable to counterattack, etc.
I'll accept your correction on the meaning of quadratic versus linear with respect to gear. In the sense you're talking about, you're right that a cool sword might give you a boost to your effective skill. I'll have to think about how it would work; making the boost scale with your actual skill would be a interesting way to keep gear from overwhelming skill.
More advanced skills need some sort of limitation, whether it's resource cost or accuracy, in order to balance them against regular skills, otherwise it's the kind of thing that a min-maxer will shoot straight towards. I have in mind a game world in which fighting is always risky to some degree or other; you can't just automatically overwhelm an opponent by virtue of being thirty levels higher than them.
edited 22nd Jul '13 2:26:29 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
No longer a forum herald
I think that the best way to emphasize the dangers of combat is to limit hit point scaling. Even if you are capable of swinging a sword to cleave a dragon's skull, a group of goblins can still swarm and kill you if you get careless. This is sort of what 1st edition D&D did (past level 10 or so, you only got 1-3 extra HP a level).
The problem is that there's an expectation that hit points scale linearly (or positively exponentially) that has built up in most RPGs. I know you said you don't want to recode, but you might have adopt a different system altogether. Maybe a "wounds" system (which is something I came up with once for a homebrew d20 idea), where the number of wounds is applied as a penalty to skill checks. So you want to avoid getting too wounded, so you can keep going without major penalties. You get too many wounds, you die. (This would only really work in a "low healing" setting, though.)
Expergiscēre cras, medior quam hodie. (Awaken tomorrow, better than today.)
Lost in Space
I've thought of discarding Hit Points in favor of a wound-based system, but it becomes very difficult to code, and even harder to display to the player in a text medium. It's one of those things that's simpler in a pen and paper game (or a turn-based game) when there is no fixed time constraint to choosing actions.
Hit Points is so prevalent precisely because it's such a useful abstraction.
For the record, doing away with Character Levels as a core mechanic would also, by consequence, remove the idea of earning hit points at each level. Rather, you could have what you said the first time: a situation where hit points pools are much smaller and therefore combat is much more deadly.
The problem then is how you scale challenges. There's an upper limit on how much damage an attack can inflict on a player before it becomes meaningless; if nobody can have more than, say, 50 hit points, is there really a difference between a monster that hits for 50 and one that hits for 500?
That's when you have to add other forms of defense. Let's say that armor soaks damage instead of letting you avoid it. Dodging lets you turn a full hit into a miss or a glancing blow. Critical hits, rather than doubling your damage (or whatever) instead let you ignore a portion of the target's defenses. This makes combat more tactical and less about who can whack the piñata the hardest.
Some types of enemies may have larger than normal health pools because they're physically larger or sturdier; these could change up the tactics; raw damage becomes more important than tactical damage. Other opponents might have super-high defenses, negating brute force and valuing critical hits.
edited 22nd Jul '13 3:36:49 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
(I'm somewhat tired at the moment, so please forgive me if I've missed something. ^^; )
@Fighteer: That looks like a rather interesting system! I'll confess that the sort of game that you describe — in particular that it's a MUD — isn't really one that appeals to me, so I'll leave much further comment on it to others.
@Exuno:
No more than being a mage tends to make archers a major pain (they also have ranged attacks, and mages tend to have poor defensive options — when not overpowered, at least), and mages can be a bane to melee characters: different skill-sets have different advantages and disadvantages.
More to the point, if the game allows a diplomacy-only build (which wasn't necessarily what I was suggesting, but which some games do), then I'm inclined to argue that it's likely better that the game be built in such a way that a good player can avoid situations in which diplomacy has no significant value (or provide party members that have combat abilities).
To take your example of an ambush in a small room, I would argue in favour of either the game placing that on a path that a good diplomacy-only player can avoid (perhaps you only get sent that way because a diplomacy-poor character annoyed an NPC), or allowing the high-diplomacy character to silver-tongue the enemy into not attacking — but at some cost, perhaps a large chunk of money.
Similarly, one might argue that a solo mage would likely have significant problems in such an ambush: I find that mages tend to thrive on keeping the enemy away, and a group of melee attackers in a close-quarters ambush sounds pretty horrible for a mage character.
On the other hand, if the game is going to insist that there be at least some fighting, then I'm inclined to argue in favour of the game not allowing a player to pick nothing but diplomacy, either by some degree of skill-gating on combat abilities or by ensuring that the player has more skill points than there are available ranks in diplomacy (perhaps by limiting the player's topmost rank in a given skill by their level, or something similar).
That said, I think that you're misinterpreting what I meant by "making some encounters harder and others easier": I think that my intention in writing that was not that the developers put in a situation for diplomacy characters, and another for mage characters, but rather that the various abilities — diplomacy, fireball, sword-swinging, etc. — naturally have varying utility in various situations: mages are excellent against trolls, fighters strong against archers, diplomats useful in dealings with NP Cs, etc.
I suppose that a good example might be Deus Ex: as I recall, various approaches were available depending on how you'd levelled your character, be it hacking or heavy weapons.
(Appropriately to the topic, the text above this "new post" page reads "Ars Thaumaturgis puts down sword, picks up pen..." :P)
edited 22nd Jul '13 3:55:30 PM by ArsThaumaturgis
My Games & Writing
Lost in Space
I'd like that. It's certainly possible to do; the question is whether players would enjoy it or want to skip it — the ratio is likely to be about 50:50.
One of the elements fundamentally lacking in the MUD code I have is a quest system, nor does it have any form of instancing. So any starter area has to be designed around the expectation that multiple players might be using it at any given time.
As an aside, I had some fun designing a custom area called "Sirens' Isle", which has a pseudo-quest. The boss mobs on the island will continually attempt to cast a charm spell on any players in the area, and if you fall victim, you are unable to leave unless you kill them, someone dispels you, you get ported off involuntarily, or you die. Further, charmed players on the island can be summoned by the sirens and forced to attack any player who's fighting them.
Implementing it required custom coding in almost all of the movement and player action functions. It was a pain in the ass.
edited 22nd Jul '13 4:40:36 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
I really loathe the Stat Grinding system—at least, when you need to raise all of the stats to progress in levels. It penalizes specialization, making the exact definition of RPG sort of vague. The Elder Scrolls series actually does this so poorly that I don't think of Skyrim as an RPG, and it's predecessors are only slightly better. Skyrim doesn't just penalize specialization, it penalizes progress. Enemies are spawned at or around your level. Think about that for a second: there are no (Or few) enemies out there that you can run into as a beginner who can fight head to head with a late game character. You'll never run into a Super Mutant Behemoth or Tonberry. In other words, it's your own progress that creates the need for improved stats. Sure, leather armor and iron weapons don't look as cool as their Daedric counterparts, but when it comes down to it, that's all you really gain. A glorified palette swap. And I know that a lot of the support skills give you slightly different gameplay, but nothing is exclusive.
And RP Gs need exclusive. That's what makes a good RPG for me—a game that forces you to choose between certain opportunities, without that interfering with the overall plot. In Fallout 3, having a lot of points in Science might give you the occasional opportunity to lead a robot rebellion or something, resulting in a better ending for the associated sidequest. If you invested everything in Speech instead, you might end up fighting tougher enemies and end up with a bad ending, but you still get an ending. RP Gs are at their best when you lose chances. Limited resources. Perks or equipment that you'll never see again. Unique scenes and dialogue.
Fire, air, water, earth...legend has it that when these four elements are gathered, they will form the fifth element...boron.
Lost in Space
I had another thought about the stamina versus hit points thing again, and it gave me an idea. Make stamina the resource that your active abilities and defenses all depend on. You use stamina to attack as well as to defend. Stamina replenishes relatively quickly, but if you run out, you lose the ability to dodge, block, parry, etc.; and can rely only on passive defenses like armor. This creates a tactical game between offense and defense.
Magic users can train physical defense skills or use spells for defense, but it all pulls from their mana pool and if it runs out, they're in the same situation.
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
For linear or semi-linear RPGs, I agree that stat grinding can seem out of place; the idea there is to complete a story and the mechanics should be in service of that. For sandbox style games, however, character customization options are one of the primary draws.
edited 22nd Jul '13 7:14:02 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Don't get me wrong: I have no problem with continuous sword use resulting in higher sword damage or anything like that. But I can't stand it when I then have to spend time swinging a pole-arm or something around so I can level up. If I wear heavy armor, it's because I prefer to wear heavy armor. If I never use explosives, it's because I don't like using them. Having to grind an area that I'll never use for a new level is tedious. And no, I don't have to do that, but as far as gameplay mechanics go, "The difficulty fluctuates based on how often you've performed certain actions naturally," is fairly boring. Getting XP for pressing the attack button a certain number of times (As opposed to killing the Cybertank or whatever) and being rewarded with having to press the attack button slightly more times to level up again is not enough to keep me interested.
Lost in Space
I'm not sure how that's different mechanically from straightforward xp-to-level systems. Grinding is grinding; you have to press the attack button a lot to get xp to level up, too.
edited 22nd Jul '13 7:48:06 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Reading tropes such as You Know What You Did
Fighteer, if you're looking at character building systems then can I make one suggestion?
Character Customization: Now this does not mean that the characters you want in the game cannot be played. However while you might think, say, an aboriginal police officer is a cool idea, and it is, it really is, others might not buy into what you think is cool. So let gamers play around with the looks and personality of the character they play as. Rather than have the fighter or mage a Grey Warden why not allow players to make them a female Cloud Strife if that's who they want to play as? As quite a number of games have shown allowing this option gives it a much broader appeal. We get to play our own Boss, we get to play our own Shepard.
Currently reading up My Rule Fu Is Stronger than Yours
Lost in Space
While I definitely enjoy character customization, in a text-based game like a MUD, there are no graphical elements to customize (unless someone builds an external client). That said, the game lets you set your description to be any block of text that you like, and I'm working on a system to allow dynamic descriptions to be constructed using property tags, such as a string that's only inserted if you're sleeping, or wounded, or indoors.
edited 23rd Jul '13 6:43:52 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
I'm Only Sleeping
I'm still waiting for an Eastern-style RPG with a blank slate protag.
...you mean like nearly any smt game?
theres also the tons of snes-era rpgs
or wait, do you mean like, a paper doll who's looks you can customize who also has no defined personality and is for all intents and purposes a blank slate?
cuz that brings to mind the awesome Dragon Quest IX
edited 23rd Jul '13 7:02:29 AM by Tarsen
I'm Only Sleeping
Ah yes, I knew I was forgetting something.
Should probably break out my copy of DQIX again ![[lol]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/lol2v12_4863.png "[lol]"){kind=small}
Avvie-free for life!
The thing about character customization is that it also requires some loosening or outright removal of plot constraints. I'd say the only place total character customization belongs is in a Wide-Open Sandbox. Even the most ambitious of modern WRP Gs and classics of the genre tend to give their characters pre-set aspects.
Lost in Space
Some sandboxes don't even have defined stories, only challenges to be interacted with. In those sorts of games, the attraction is the customization.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
The problem with the repair and security skills in KOTOR wasn't necessarily the availability of "parts" and "spikes", although that was annoying given their scarcity, but that you'd often earn less loot and experience for bypassing challenges than by confronting them head-on.
edited 22nd Jul '13 12:53:18 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"