No, this is not a Dragon Age 2 thread, although I'll confess that some of the controversy about that game and Mass Effect 2 made me think about some of the following issues.
Yeah, it's TL;DR (just thought I'd get that out of the way
)
I grew up playing pen and paper D&D and its brethren (I've a soft spot still for all the old Chaosium games like Call of Cthulhu). The cheerful clatter of polyhedral dice being rolled and the whisk of papers as long, detailed tables were consulted punctuated my teen years. And if we got bored of actually playing, we could have long, caffeine fueled debates about the balance of realism and playability. There was this notion that in a perfect game, the rules would be transparent. You'd focus on the story, and dice rolling would be almost invisible. An attack and damage should be handled with just a quick die roll, then onto the action! On the other side of the debate fence, the realism crowd would say that immersion would be broken by simplistic rules. Your character should have to deal with the weight of armor, be able to strike at individual limbs, use fancy combat tactics, and worry about just how they were going to get all that dragon's treasure home. Anyone bring a mule? But such concerns often labored under tedious amounts of rules that literally ground everything to a halt while the players figured out the combat effects of toothache (no, not making that up. Chivalry and Sorcery, for you old timers).
But now there's computers. In a computer RPG, all those effects can be figured out in less than a second. While cRPGs still don't have the full on open sandbox feeling of a PnP game with a gamemaster able to improvise storylines in response to weirdzoid player actions, they shine in this area. Make those tables and effects as involved as you like, HAL the gamemaster can handle it. The gamer can have his (and increasingly her) cake and eat it too (insert Portal reference here)
The thing that strikes me, however, is how stuck in the old school of dice rolling and statistical analysis cRPGs still are. I always thought that seeing all the scaffolding was a necessary evil of PnP games, and that hiding them would enhance immersion . Remember those Dungeon Master screens that the charts and dice rolls would hide behind? But the players of RPGs don't seem to want to give up all the unrealistic accoutrements of their paper brethren. They aren't satisfied with "This sword does more damage, but is a bit slow". They want to know the exact DPS, and they want to know the exact effects of character's characteristics, not just "Frodo is quick and can hide pretty well, better than some elves".
Let's examine a hypothetical game that purports to be an RPG.
Imagine, if you will, that there were absolutely no statistics whatsoever. If your character was hurt, they'd limp, perhaps bleed and grunt from exhaustion-- but you'd see no health bar. An NPC with big biceps is undoubtedly strong, and confirms it when he tears open an iron gate, but you'd see no STR statistic on him. There would be no classes, aside from job descriptions the NPC or PC would use to describe themselves (I can imagine "I'm a mage", but "I'm a thief"?). There would be no leveling, or listing of experience points, but your character would simply get better at skills they used, or actually studied (old Runequest fans might recall that system-- but with PnP I always found it a bit hard to keep track of).
In a related vein, I have to wonder about the way players manage the other characters. One of the recent complaints about Bioware's Dragon Age 2 (a controversial game in RPG circles, to put it mildly) was that the player couldn't manage much of the NPCs' inventory. But why would they? Wouldn't the NPCs have their own thoughts on what they want to wear and use?
And as long as we're wreaking havoc with the conventions of cRPGs, let's restrict inventory to what the characters can actually carry-- looting every sword off a horde of baddies to be sold later is really a leftover from the days in which calculating maximum character carrying capacity was too much of a bother (and we had tables!) And the world wouldn't be strewn with convenient chests in every room in which the monster keeps its treasure, with locks to be picked by our self-declared thief.
Would such a "ruleless" game appeal? Would fans consider it RPG? Or-- and this is the question I'm trying to raise here-- is "RPG" dependent on something other than that? Has RPG become synonymous with being able to calculate and maximize efficiency of each and every sword swing, laser blast or wave of a wand?
If I knew what the community thought, I wouldn't be posting this lengthy tract here. I suppose my thoughts and preferences are clear enough-- I'd rather not see "the scaffolding". But I suspect that I might be in the minority in that regard. I'm not here to attack or defend any viewpoint, honest. I'd like to hear what you guys think.
Yeah, it's TL;DR (just thought I'd get that out of the way
)I grew up playing pen and paper D&D and its brethren (I've a soft spot still for all the old Chaosium games like Call of Cthulhu). The cheerful clatter of polyhedral dice being rolled and the whisk of papers as long, detailed tables were consulted punctuated my teen years. And if we got bored of actually playing, we could have long, caffeine fueled debates about the balance of realism and playability. There was this notion that in a perfect game, the rules would be transparent. You'd focus on the story, and dice rolling would be almost invisible. An attack and damage should be handled with just a quick die roll, then onto the action! On the other side of the debate fence, the realism crowd would say that immersion would be broken by simplistic rules. Your character should have to deal with the weight of armor, be able to strike at individual limbs, use fancy combat tactics, and worry about just how they were going to get all that dragon's treasure home. Anyone bring a mule? But such concerns often labored under tedious amounts of rules that literally ground everything to a halt while the players figured out the combat effects of toothache (no, not making that up. Chivalry and Sorcery, for you old timers).
But now there's computers. In a computer RPG, all those effects can be figured out in less than a second. While cRPGs still don't have the full on open sandbox feeling of a PnP game with a gamemaster able to improvise storylines in response to weirdzoid player actions, they shine in this area. Make those tables and effects as involved as you like, HAL the gamemaster can handle it. The gamer can have his (and increasingly her) cake and eat it too (insert Portal reference here)
The thing that strikes me, however, is how stuck in the old school of dice rolling and statistical analysis cRPGs still are. I always thought that seeing all the scaffolding was a necessary evil of PnP games, and that hiding them would enhance immersion . Remember those Dungeon Master screens that the charts and dice rolls would hide behind? But the players of RPGs don't seem to want to give up all the unrealistic accoutrements of their paper brethren. They aren't satisfied with "This sword does more damage, but is a bit slow". They want to know the exact DPS, and they want to know the exact effects of character's characteristics, not just "Frodo is quick and can hide pretty well, better than some elves".
Let's examine a hypothetical game that purports to be an RPG.
Imagine, if you will, that there were absolutely no statistics whatsoever. If your character was hurt, they'd limp, perhaps bleed and grunt from exhaustion-- but you'd see no health bar. An NPC with big biceps is undoubtedly strong, and confirms it when he tears open an iron gate, but you'd see no STR statistic on him. There would be no classes, aside from job descriptions the NPC or PC would use to describe themselves (I can imagine "I'm a mage", but "I'm a thief"?). There would be no leveling, or listing of experience points, but your character would simply get better at skills they used, or actually studied (old Runequest fans might recall that system-- but with PnP I always found it a bit hard to keep track of).
In a related vein, I have to wonder about the way players manage the other characters. One of the recent complaints about Bioware's Dragon Age 2 (a controversial game in RPG circles, to put it mildly) was that the player couldn't manage much of the NPCs' inventory. But why would they? Wouldn't the NPCs have their own thoughts on what they want to wear and use?
And as long as we're wreaking havoc with the conventions of cRPGs, let's restrict inventory to what the characters can actually carry-- looting every sword off a horde of baddies to be sold later is really a leftover from the days in which calculating maximum character carrying capacity was too much of a bother (and we had tables!) And the world wouldn't be strewn with convenient chests in every room in which the monster keeps its treasure, with locks to be picked by our self-declared thief.
Would such a "ruleless" game appeal? Would fans consider it RPG? Or-- and this is the question I'm trying to raise here-- is "RPG" dependent on something other than that? Has RPG become synonymous with being able to calculate and maximize efficiency of each and every sword swing, laser blast or wave of a wand?
If I knew what the community thought, I wouldn't be posting this lengthy tract here. I suppose my thoughts and preferences are clear enough-- I'd rather not see "the scaffolding". But I suspect that I might be in the minority in that regard. I'm not here to attack or defend any viewpoint, honest. I'd like to hear what you guys think.
