Do mechanics make the RPG?

[Bostur]

An example for good story telling mechanics would be Dragon Age: Origins. (Just an example! I'd take my favorite classic Fallout 2, but half of the people wouldn't understand, what I'm talking about.) In there even picking a different race, gender or skill had effect on the story telling. It's hidden behind words and cut-scenes, but what you pick effects. Action and it's response is a mechanic. Little example in the game: In order to become a Blood mage you have to make a deal with a demon, who has possessed a boy. If you decline, you can't become the blood mage and have to fight, that demon. If you accept, you'd be a blood mage and just leave the boy's soul. In the Outro of the game it has only the little effect, that this boy becomes a good mage student or disappears after 4 years. Small things like that make a good story telling mechanic. To let the player feel like you have influence on what happens.

Thats an example of good storytelling, but also an example of too little information and feedback to the player. If a player wants to become a blood mage there is little hint that this is the part of the story where it happens. The player either needs to play the game a lot of times, or look up the solution on the internet of how to become a blood mage. Its actually possible not to get the option at all it seems, depending on actions taken before that part of the game.
A small quest, or some subtle hints might do wonders at providing this kind of feedback, it doesn't have to be an in-the-face tutorial.

In practice the mechanic of making a blood mage, is so well hidden that I think most first time players would completely miss the possibility. Sometimes we need to see the mechanic or at least be made aware of it.

 

[Heart of Darkness]

Worst case scenario are the evil JRPGs. (Yes! I know! Complains on JRPGs are old, but that's not the point here. Just an example!) A simple story telling, that doesn't allow the player to take any influence on the things happening. The only mechanic here would be that game triggers a cut-scene at a certain point of the game.

I actually don't think that's a worst-case scenario, but rather just a different approach to role-playing. Role-playing itself doesn't just mean that the player has an effect on the world around them, and they can just as effectively place the player in the shoes of an already established character and have the player experience the story from that character's viewpoint. Think about Tidus from Final Fantasy X as an example. He's whiny and annoying, yes, but a new player knows the same things that Tidus knows, more or less, even when other characters in the party are privy to that information. While it's a small to Tidus, it's a connection nonetheless, and it's a step to bridging the gap between the player and character that might not have existed otherwise.

Another example might be Chrono Trigger, but the lines here are pretty blurry. Crono, the protagonist, is a silent hero, and a mandatory party member for the first half of the game. However, the story is mostly linear, as major plot points cannot be dramatically changed. There are, however, minor changes to the world itself based on your actions during the main quest or sidequests (for example, choosing to leave one of your party members in the past in a desert will result in a forest popping up in the present), and the player has the choice to fight the final boss pretty much anytime, which changes the epilogue.

The other point I want to make is that a linear story could also mean a focus not on the story itself, but on the game's mechanics. I mentioned the Pokemon games earlier, and I think that it's an appropriate example here: choice in a game isn't limited to how the story unfolds, but instead can allow for the player to actively choose how he wants to experience the game. The Pokemon games allow for that in letting the player change his party-makeup at any time, which effectively changes the difficulty of the game to suit the player's tastes. For instance, I can choose to solo the game with a Ditto (a relatively weak Pokemon who can only copy the moves and stats of the opponent's Pokemon), or I can choose to breeze through the game with a team of overpowered, overleveled Pokemon I traded over from another version.

 

[Sternenschweif]

I actually don't think that's a worst-case scenario, but rather just a different approach to role-playing. Role-playing itself doesn't just mean that the player has an effect on the world around them, and they can just as effectively place the player in the shoes of an already established character and have the player experience the story from that character's viewpoint. Think about Tidus from Final Fantasy X as an example. He's whiny and annoying, yes, but a new player knows the same things that Tidus knows, more or less, even when other characters in the party are privy to that information. While it's a small to Tidus, it's a connection nonetheless, and it's a step to bridging the gap between the player and character that might not have existed otherwise.

Another example might be Chrono Trigger, but the lines here are pretty blurry. Crono, the protagonist, is a silent hero, and a mandatory party member for the first half of the game. However, the story is mostly linear, as major plot points cannot be dramatically changed. There are, however, minor changes to the world itself based on your actions during the main quest or sidequests (for example, choosing to leave one of your party members in the past in a desert will result in a forest popping up in the present), and the player has the choice to fight the final boss pretty much anytime, which changes the epilogue.

The other point I want to make is that a linear story could also mean a focus not on the story itself, but on the game's mechanics. I mentioned the Pokemon games earlier, and I think that it's an appropriate example here: choice in a game isn't limited to how the story unfolds, but instead can allow for the player to actively choose how he wants to experience the game. The Pokemon games allow for that in letting the player change his party-makeup at any time, which effectively changes the difficulty of the game to suit the player's tastes. For instance, I can choose to solo the game with a Ditto (a relatively weak Pokemon who can only copy the moves and stats of the opponent's Pokemon), or I can choose to breeze through the game with a team of overpowered, overleveled Pokemon I traded over from another version.

I really want to see a different ending on FFX. My entire post was about the mechanisms of taking influence on the story, which you can't accomplish in FFX. This whole thing is a hidden mechanism in my opinion, because of the various possibilities you can express that to the player. If you say, that's not important to a game, it's your opinion. But it still remains to be the worst case for the mechanism itself, because it simply puts up a cut-scene at a certain point of the game and nothing else. (I knew someone would complain about it)

 

[Magicman10893]

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.

I really liked the game idea you had there. I don't think mechanics dictate what an RPG is, I think the ability to "role-play" is what makes an RPG. Fable 3, for instance, is an RPG because you can choose how you react in the game on several instances by choosing "Good" or "Evil" decisions and because you can choose what areas of combat you level up and you start a family and etc.

 

[Heart of Darkness]

I actually don't think that's a worst-case scenario, but rather just a different approach to role-playing. Role-playing itself doesn't just mean that the player has an effect on the world around them, and they can just as effectively place the player in the shoes of an already established character and have the player experience the story from that character's viewpoint. Think about Tidus from Final Fantasy X as an example. He's whiny and annoying, yes, but a new player knows the same things that Tidus knows, more or less, even when other characters in the party are privy to that information. While it's a small to Tidus, it's a connection nonetheless, and it's a step to bridging the gap between the player and character that might not have existed otherwise.

Another example might be Chrono Trigger, but the lines here are pretty blurry. Crono, the protagonist, is a silent hero, and a mandatory party member for the first half of the game. However, the story is mostly linear, as major plot points cannot be dramatically changed. There are, however, minor changes to the world itself based on your actions during the main quest or sidequests (for example, choosing to leave one of your party members in the past in a desert will result in a forest popping up in the present), and the player has the choice to fight the final boss pretty much anytime, which changes the epilogue.

The other point I want to make is that a linear story could also mean a focus not on the story itself, but on the game's mechanics. I mentioned the Pokemon games earlier, and I think that it's an appropriate example here: choice in a game isn't limited to how the story unfolds, but instead can allow for the player to actively choose how he wants to experience the game. The Pokemon games allow for that in letting the player change his party-makeup at any time, which effectively changes the difficulty of the game to suit the player's tastes. For instance, I can choose to solo the game with a Ditto (a relatively weak Pokemon who can only copy the moves and stats of the opponent's Pokemon), or I can choose to breeze through the game with a team of overpowered, overleveled Pokemon I traded over from another version.

I really want to see a different ending on FFX. My entire post was about the mechanisms of taking influence on the story, which you can't accomplish in FFX. This whole thing is a hidden mechanism in my opinion, because of the various possibilities you can express that to the player. If you say, that's not important to a game, it's your opinion. But it still remains to be the worst case for the mechanism itself, because it simply puts up a cut-scene at a certain point of the game and nothing else. (I knew someone would complain about it)

I'm not complaining, I'm just saying that I don't think that it's the worst-case scenario. It's not like FFX ever makes any pretension that the player can influence the main storyline--if it did, but made user input matter very little, THEN I'd say that that's the worst case scenario. All I'm saying is that it's a different method of storytelling in games.

 

[Mouse One]

In practice the mechanic of making a blood mage, is so well hidden that I think most first time players would completely miss the possibility. Sometimes we need to see the mechanic or at least be made aware of it.

But does that mechanic have to be rules driven, or could it be more contextual? I know the bit in DAO you're talking about, and yeah, it's pretty much something you have to stumble across. But rather than a big "to unlock this specialization, earn X points and kill X demons" (making these examples up to avoid spoilers for the 3 RPG fans who don't have DAO), how about a codex entry that describes how a blood mage got his powers? Make that ritual available via a tome or some such that the character can only understand past a certain point-- be it levels or story driven.

The more I read the varying responses and opinions here, the more I think cRPGs are going to branch into two different catagories-- one, the traditional Baldur's Gate rules driven story game, and the other a less transparent "action RPG". For a variety of reasons, I dislike the term "action RPG", but I think it's becoming the description of choice for the Mass Effect style games out there.

 

[Shellsh0cker]

snip

I certainly get what you're after, and I understand completely. I think there are a few key points you're missing, though, that might explain why a compromise is necessary.

In real life, your body has an extraordinarily complex system of information management (your central nervous system) that provides a wealth of information on how you're feeling. We're talking sensations like pain, stiffness, balance, hunger, hot, cold, exhaustion, you name it. The "how do you feel" question is answered by the sum total of all of those things.

In order to accurately convey that in a video game, without a hardline straight into your brain stem, would require dozens of separate meters and animations, and just as many manuals to make sense of them. We'd never be able to process that as intuitively as we process our own feelings of well-being.

But there is something we process almost as intuitively--quantity. "I have more health" versus "I have less health." Believe it or not, that creates a more realistic sense of how your character feels than those dozens of meters and animations would. If someone asks you how you feel, you don't spend ten minutes assessing. You know immediately. The "HP bar" serves the same function. So, there's no way around having those stats. We need them to approximate the calculations our brains are doing constantly, but we need it in a format that is so simple there's no guessing needed.

Think of it this way: If you have the HP bar, you can think, "I'm at half health," and move on. You automatically know you're tired, achy, likely bleeding, and unable to run fast. Now picture the "your character limps and has open wounds" format... you've got to inspect the character to find that out. You have to watch his/her movements carefully, and take the time to decode what it means.

This is actually making you more detached from the character. Immersion has a lot to do with the amount of time it takes you to perform an action, and the amount of thought that goes into it. HP bars require little time and thought to understand. Subtleties of animation require a lot. You're no longer your character--you're your character's physician.

...

Immersion is all about making you feel like your character. I mentioned above how part of that is removing the delay between intent and action, in terms of thought and time. Another part of that is not overloading you with knowledge. If you know far more than your character, you step out of his/her body and become a god watching over the game.

So, each player should know just enough about the calculations to determine his/her actions and approximate chances of success. Other than that, it's the GM/Narrator's job to keep the math behind the screen and off the table.

I am in total agreement. Immersion is a tricky and often counterintuitive thing, but I think you hit the nail on the head with "removing the delay between intent and action." That's not all there is to it, but it's certainly the most quantifiable part.

This seems to be the inherent problem with the complaint regarding ME2 where people lamented the loss of the inventory system in the first place: they did not really miss the pointless busy work inherent to the system but rather the loss of control that system offered.

Holy insight, Batman. Wow. And I loved your suggestion about auto-assigning armor and weapons based on character preference.

Personally, I'm leaning towards your side of the argument, Mouse. While I don't think we should go stripping all the rules out, I think hiding them better helps immersion and thus the overall game experience.

Oh, and definitely give Zelda a try. Besides the fact that they're great games, they sound like they'd be right up your alley. I'd recommend starting with one of the 3D console titles; Ocarina of Time is the obvious choice, but Wind Waker and Twilight Princess are also excellent.

 

[Brawndo]

Most RPGers and strategy gamers want to be in total control of everything, therefore they need exact numbers instead of visual abstractions.

It reminds me of Yahtzee's comments on World of Warcraft: it's all about the numbers. Every sword and piece of armor may as well be a +55 dmg/Fire elemental, because that's all the players view them as.

 

[Drake_Dercon]

I've often had the same thought, but a game like that would be hard for a lot of hardcore RPG fans to take. If it was done properly, I'd like to play it. If it was done improperly, the results would be catastrophic, much as with trying anything new and alien.

Though with an RPG the mechanics and gameplay are not the primary concern, rather a companion, a vessel for plot, character development and storytelling.

I would like to see anything in between that and a more traditional RPG, because hybrids are great, but I would never forego either.

 

[Bostur]

In practice the mechanic of making a blood mage, is so well hidden that I think most first time players would completely miss the possibility. Sometimes we need to see the mechanic or at least be made aware of it.

But does that mechanic have to be rules driven, or could it be more contextual? I know the bit in DAO you're talking about, and yeah, it's pretty much something you have to stumble across. But rather than a big "to unlock this specialization, earn X points and kill X demons" (making these examples up to avoid spoilers for the 3 RPG fans who don't have DAO), how about a codex entry that describes how a blood mage got his powers? Make that ritual available via a tome or some such that the character can only understand past a certain point-- be it levels or story driven.

I think I consider 'mechanical' and 'rule-driven' synonyms in this context. Something that isn't part of the story or setting. I guess the class Blood Mage is a mechanic, the way it is earned is not.

I think my basic point is that sometimes developers are so eager to hide the mechanics, that they forget to provide necessary information to the player.

It's simple to have a Blood Mage event, and some immersive information about how it works. I completely agree that there is no need to make this into numbers, especially because the concept isn't numerical in the first place.
However if you consider the attributes of a sword, which is bound to have a damage stat, and some kind of stat governing swing speed, which in combination ends up as dps, I think its hard to convey this kind of information without using numbers, or an abstraction of a number like a bar or a scale of sorts. As I tried to argue in a previous post, if a game only has 3 melee weapons the numbers won't need to be shown. But if a game has 50 melee weapons it will be impossible for players to manage without some kind of numeric representation.

The more I read the varying responses and opinions here, the more I think cRPGs are going to branch into two different catagories-- one, the traditional Baldur's Gate rules driven story game, and the other a less transparent "action RPG". For a variety of reasons, I dislike the term "action RPG", but I think it's becoming the description of choice for the Mass Effect style games out there.

They always have. We talk about genres here as if they were static, because that is a convenient assumption when we talk about them. In practice games constantly drift across these genre borders.
Even action RPGs have distinct ways of doing their own thing. One of the first I remember that would fit into this category very much like you describe was an old arcade game called 'Gauntlet'.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauntlet_%28arcade_game%29
It was an action game with an RPG setting that didn't show much of the internals at all. But Im quite sure it had a lot of RPG mechanics for internal calculations.

At the opposite end of the scale, there was a game like System Shock 2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Shock_2
It felt a lot like a shooter, but made a very big deal of showing RPG mechanics. That gave it an identity of its own which later games like Deus Ex, Mass Effect and of course Bioshock put to good use. I think this is an example that simply showing the mechanics can make a big difference to how a game feels.

So on one side we have Gauntlet with no transparency, and System Shock 2 with a lot of transparency. Both action RPGs but with very different types of gameplay.

 

[Sternenschweif]

I know! We can say that with very simple words!

Yes, mechanics make the RPG! There is no RPG without any. It's a matter of: What kind of mechanics does a player like?

RPGs with no mechanic would be called 'movie' and i really prefer books.

Too simple, right?

 

[beniki]

I'd say that yes, the mechanics make the RPG.

Whilst it's true that carbon copying the pen and paper games isn't the best way to go (I consider it a bit lazy to still be doing it these days), the mechanics of a game, or any game, is to create the illusion of an experience.

To put simply, it's to give you an imaginary six-pack, and virtual arms as thick as tree trunks.

Hiding these mechanics from a player should be the goal of any developer that wants to craft a story or experience. If they want to make a game, particularly a competitive one, then the rules need to be clear to give the player a chance to maximise their abilities.

Mechanics are used to support illusion, or to provide boundaries with which to create in. Free form is fun, but it's exhausting to create so much, and simply unfair when people pit their imaginations against each other.