PrimeJunta

Osvir, it was funny. And I did get the references. I'm sorry my attempt at humor in response fell flat. I honestly didn't intend to mock. It's an amusing idea in general (in a good way), but I don't really have much else to say about it, as things like titles depend so much on the cultures that give them, and we don't know a whole lot about those. Once again, I apologize for causing offense. I tried to make a joke and failed. I'll try to do better next time.

I didn't intend to mock. I just thought Barbazon, Wizitch, and Palaest sounded wonderfully like something you'd think up in a certain very particular state of mind. :cheers:

I was thinking about that actually. There are basically three options: (1) Award XP every time you trigger something marked as [Objective] for a quest. -> upside: rewards exploration, which is a Fun activity -> downside: doesn't make sense in context ("Hu? I got 200XP for walking up to this windmill? WTF?") -> downside: if there are mutually exclusive quests in the game, encourages XP farming by tripping Objectives of quests you're not going to accept (2) Award all "retroactive" XP belonging to a quest when completing it, even if you tripped some of the Objectives before it was active -> upside: fair in a Communist kind of way (you're rewarded for your benefit to society) -> upside: makes devs' jobs easier, since player XP totals will vary less (3) Only award XP for "active" objectives -> upside: encourages focused gameplay, more strongly aligned with in-game goals -> upside: fair in a capitalist kind of way (you're only paid for work you're hired to do) -> downside: discourages exploration -> downside: makes devs' job a bit harder since player XP totals will vary more (4) Some compromise between (2) and (3) Consider the farmer's daughter quest again. Suppose we made the daughter herself also a questgiver. So if our party was just dickin' around, beat up the bandits, broke open the windmill door, and killed the orcs, they'd find her at the top of the mill. She could ask them to please escort her to [Farmer]. In this case, they'd only trip the objectives [ExitWindmillWithDaughter] and [ReturnDaughterToFarmer], worth, what, 600 XP. That missing 400 XP that [ReachWindmill] and [EnterWindmill] would've given will have to be dealt with somehow. My inclination would probably be to go with (2), although on a gut level (3) appeals to me more, but that may be because I wear such nice shiny jackboots and want to force everybody to play My Way.

@Gfted1, funny then that you're still not even able to use the term correctly, given that you've put so much energy into railing against it. #strawman

Waiter? I'll have two of whatever Osvir's having. With extra bitters. Thanks.

@SqueakyCat - Yeah, that's a nice example. I'd expect things to work more or less that way. Also, my cat says hi to your cat. Maybe they're long-lost cousins. (Also condolences to Valorian's cat about that accident. I trust it'll grow out.)

@Heresiarch, that's a completely valid way of approaching stealth mechanics as well. In a game that's more IW-esque (i.e., relatively straightforward, combat-heavy dungeon crawler), that's probably the best way to handle it; it is useful without being a dominant strategy. I certainly won't complain if P:E decides to go that way, and executes it well. That would certainly be better than a half-arsed implementation of both combat and stealth. But if there's resource enough to pull it off, I personally would prefer good implementations of both, with at least some cases where combat is not the only, or the best, approach. It would make for more variety in gameplay and better replay value.

No, it isn't. It's just better in most ways than kill-XP, action-XP, or obstacle-XP. XP itself isn't the perfect system. It's a serviceable system. Other character development systems exists. Some of them are arguably better. I would like to play a well-made XP-less cRPG too, but P:E isn't it; it would take it too far from its IE roots.

@Amentep -- Okay, let's take this thought experiment a bit further. At this point, let's scratch the alternative path (ladder + window). I just put that in to demonstrate how I could yank Valorian around like a rat in a maze with obstacle-XP. So we're back at the original setup: [Daughter] in [Windmill] guarded by [Orcs], with [bandits] on the road to the windmill, and a [Locked Door] to overcome. To get past [bandits] you can fight them, sneak past them, intimidate them [if you meet the prerequisites], or bribe them. To get past [Orcs] you can fight them, sneak past them, or pay the ransom. And let's still assume objective-XP only: [ReachWindmill], [EnterWindmill], [ReachDaughter], [ExitWindmillWithDaughter], [ReturnDaughterToFarmer]. Same XP reward no matter how you accomplish it. Let's further assume that [Farmer] will reward you with 400 ZM if you return the daughter alive, and [Orcs] guard a [Chest] which contains 1000 ZM and a Sword of the Munchkin. The upshot is that the player who manages to accomplish all objectives (and get the treasure from [Chest]) with the least resources spent gets the biggest reward (since net reward is [XP + loot] - [resources spent]. Now, let's look at what the various approaches mean. Let's also assume that we have a stealth system somewhat like the one in the beginning of the thread in place. * [bandits]. ** Fighting them means expenditure of Health and other possible resources. The better you are at fighting, the lower the resource cost. Upshot: better fighters are rewarded. ** Intimidating them successfully has zero cost. Upshot: if you have previously spent strategic resources to make yourself more intimidating (e.g. by killing lots of bandits so you've got a scary reputation for it), you now get payoff for that investment. ** Bribing them costs zorkmids, and is not obviously more advantageous than fighting them. ** Sneaking past them carries no cost if you succeed. *** If you fail, you will be in a worse position to fight them than if you had chosen that path to start with, and the ensuing fight will be that much more costly. * [Door] ** Picking the lock costs a [Lockpick]. ** Using Key is pure benefit. That's a reward for being more thorough preparing for the quest -- you talked to the Miller and convinced him to lend you the key. ** Bashing in the door carries no resource cost, but will alert [Orcs], making the fight against them more difficult, and making it impossible to sneak past them. * [Orcs] ** Fighting them carries a resource cost. The better you are at fighting, the lower the cost. ** Paying Ransom costs ZM, and is not obviously the cheapest way to go. ** Sneaking past them successfully: see Bandits, except this will be much more difficult since you're indoors in close quarters. Now. Sneaking. Let's assume that sneaking has not been made too easy: if you've done nothing to improve your stealth, the bandits and the orcs will both spot you, and you will pay in the form of a more difficult fight (and possibly dead hostage -> quest failure). That means that to do it successfully, you'll have to expend resources: * [invisibility Potion], cost 400 ZM. * [invisibility Spell], uses up combat spell slot. * [boosted Sneak Skill], uses up skill points that could have been used for something else. This is known as an opportunity cost. * [be A Rogue], which means you're not, for example, a fighter or a wizard -- that's another opportunity cost. The bottom line? In this system, sneaking is a high risk, high reward strategy. If you're successful, you'll (probably) expend less resources than if you had taken on the bandits+orcs head-on. If you fail, you will take more damage in the ensuing fight. If you want to boost your odds of success, you will have to spend resources. Finally, this is just one quest. Not every quest has to be perfectly balanced between approaches. It's perfectly fine to have a quest where stealth is, indeed, the most efficient option. It's also perfectly fine to have quests where combat or diplomacy are the most efficient options. It's precisely this kind of variety that makes the game interesting. If you know that sneaking (or fighting, or diplomacy) is always the best option, things get boring, and there's no point even trying to look for alternative approaches. (Of course, Valorian would just save, sneak, and reload from the save every time he's spotted. Or, perhaps, fight the bandits and the orcs and reload from the save every time he thinks he took too many hits. Assuming the save system allows that. Which is another degenerate strategy, and a reason I think most savegame systems suck, but that's a whole 'nuther thread.)

It doesn't. That's not what it's for. However, the resource-consuming high risk/high reward stealth system described in the first message of this thread does. I'll be happy to discuss that with you once you indicate that you actually want to engage in discussion rather than just blowing raspberries.

Hey, good. This discussion is going places. I like that. I also like the term "obstacle XP." But I still think the concept isn't as good as "objective XP" (that's a better term than "quest XP" perhaps). Here's why. If you go with "obstacle XP," you're stuck with two options: (1) Always award XP for resolving anything defined as an "obstacle." (2) Only award XP if an "obstacle" is resolved in the context of an "objective." Let's consider what kinds of incentives this gives in the context of our little save-the-farmer's-daughter quest. And let's complicate it just a little, by adding an alternative approach: you can also get to [Daughter] by climbing through [Window] at the top of the windmill, which you can find out about by talking to Miller (with right dialog choices), and reach by using a Ladder you can borrow from Innkeeper. We have [Orcs], [bandits], [Windmill Door], and [Windmill Window] as Obstacles, and [Daughter] [Exit Mill with Daughter] and [Return Daughter to Miller] as Objectives. Suppose we pick option (1), and award Obstacle XP for each Obstacle. Always, but only once. Now, if Valorian was playing the game, what would he do? Something like: (1) Talk to Miller, get Key, find out about window. Talk to Innkeeper, get Ladder. Go through Fields, use Ladder, climb to Window [DING! Window Obstacle XP], get to Daughter [DING! Objective XP]. Then climb back out, go to Road, Intimidate Bandits [DING! Obstacle XP], go to door and open it with miller's key [DING! Obstacle XP]. Enter, sneak past the Orcs [DING! Obstacle XP]. Then sneak back out, go up the ladder and to the [Window] and [Daughter] again, carry [Daughter] out of window, down to the fields, past the bandits, to the Farmer [DING! Objective XP]. As you can see, this sequence had a whole unnecessary loop with the bandits and the orcs -- the most efficient way to rescue [Daughter] would have been to carry her out of the mill through the window as soon as Valorian got to her. Your Obstacle XP will incentivize players to seek out Obstacles whether it makes sense or not. In other words, this is the same problem as with kill-XP, lockpick-XP, or any other action-XP: it creates an incentive that is not aligned with the in-game goal, and therefore causes poor Valorian to run around like a rat in a maze seeking out levers to push, instead of being swept away by the epic tale of the kidnapped farmer's daughter. Poor Valorian, I wouldn't want him to humiliate himself that way. So, bad. Now, what if we picked option (2), and switched off Obstacle XP if it didn't make sense? Say, you would only be able to get Obstacle XP for [Window] or [Door], but not both, and for [GoingThroughFields] or [intimidatingBandits] but not both? First off, this would be fiddly. You'd have to do the extra work to connect the different obstacles, so that resolving one switches off XP for the other. More scripting, more testing, more work, more bugs. This is a downside. And second, you can represent the same thing (or close enough not to matter) simply by defining two more Objectives: [ReachWindmill] and [EnterWindmill]. [ReachWindmill] goes DING! whenever you're within touching distance of the windmill, and it perfectly encapsulates [DealWithBandits|GoThroughFields]. [EnterWindmill] goes DING! once you're inside the windmill, and it perfectly encapsulates [Window|Door]. And it's simpler. So, for my revised Rescue the Farmer's Daughter quest, I'll have * ReachWindmill: 200 XP * EnterWindmill: 200 XP * ReachDaughter: 200 XP * ReturnDaughterToFarmer: 400 XP To complete the quest, you'll have to complete all of the objectives. If you're smart and play well, you can reach them with less resource expenditure -- whether it's because you're good at talking and investigating and find out about the window and the ladder and the fields, or you're good at sneaking and lockpicking and get past the orcs and the bandits, or you're such a badass fighter that you can slaughter the orcs and bandits without taking a scratch on your shiny armor. OTOH if you're not so clever you'll end up bribing the bandits and paying the ransom to the orcs [OK, I didn't have that one in, but why not add it?] or get badly beaten up by them and have to spend lewt to replenish your stores and heal up. Good, smart players are rewarded, poorer, dumber players... not so much. Just the way it should be.

She's most definitely my cat. Here she is with my dog. You can tell who's the boss maybe.

We're getting closer. I do think that I think that a lower level of granularity would be better. The higher you make the granularity, the more exploitable and trickier to manage it gets. If it was me, I'd probably design this quest something like... Objectives: Reach the farmer's daughter 250 XP Exit the windmill with the farmer's daughter alive 250 XP Return the farmer's daughter alive to the farmer 500 XP Obstacles: Windmill door (locked) * Can be picked (requires lockpicking skill, expends lockpick) * Can be bashed (alerts the orcs inside) * Can borrow the key from the miller, who is currently at the village inn with the other refugees from the orc raiders Bandits on road * Can be fought * Can be avoided by crossing through the fields rather than the road * Can be intimidated (if your reputation as all-around dangerous guy is high enough) * Can be bribed (100 ZM) Orcs in windmill * Can be fought ** but once you're down to the last one, he'll grab the daughter, hold a knife to her throat and you'll have to negotiate with him to stop him from killing her * Can be bribed (1000 ZM) * Can be avoided by sneaking, if you're good enough at sneaking, do it in the daytime when they're mostly inactive (orcs being nocturnal), and take care to avoid the patrols ** if you're spotted or they'll jump you, and try to kill the farmer's daughter first if she's with you. This way, fighting the orcs and the bandits and picking the lock would be the most obvious way to go, and also the least risky assuming you're tough enough to beat them. It would cost resources you expend in combat. The best way to deal with the bandits is to avoid the road and cross through the fields; to do this, you need to do some scouting ahead to find that alternative route. You can bribe the orcs if you're really rich, but you probably have a better use for the 1000ZM; successfully sneaking past them is least costly, but you risk getting jumped and failing the quest (high risk, high reward).

Here's my cat!

I'll keep that in mind and write out each iteration separately instead of putting it in a for loop then, the next time I'm working for you. Many more lines of code...

I'm talking structure of system of game mechanics, which is not the same thing as the program architecture of the game engine. The system of game mechanics is implemented on top of the game engine. I don't know if Unity even knows about a beast called a "quest." But that's neither here nor there; I don't know enough about game programming to be able to say much about that end of things. Yeah. Like the entire game.

This makes no sense to me. If you have two coders working on the same problem, and one of them solves it by writing 100 lines of code, and the other one solves it by writing 10,000 lines of code, and both solutions work equally well, why would the more verbose one deserve the bigger reward?

That's not necessarily what quest XP means. I would expect quests to have subsidiary goals, and the XP to be dealt out by completing those. They pretty much have to. Consider the main quest -- it would be a leetle silly if you only got your XP award for completing it after you won the game. Also dealing out XP in giant chunks makes for an unnecessarily bumpy ride. Better to split up a 1000 XP quest into four 250 XP sub-goals, and then go with those. If you change your mind just before one of them, well, that's too bad I guess. Of course if you split it up too much it can become exploitable too -- Valorian will be meticulously following every quest right up to the point where it closes off other quests, then doing the other ones, then finishing the one that gives the biggest reward. So you don't want to make it too fine-grained if you don't want to reward foolishness like that.

I agree. They might be. In fact adventure games are predicated on the assumption that they are -- there's very little in the way of in-game incentives for advancing the plot (=completing in-game goals) other than the action in itself. In a way, a cRPG is an adventure game turbocharged with character development and incentives for it. And it's that much more effective if the incentives align with the goals than if they conflict. Because the in-game goals require your character to get into dangerous situations? Consider Fallout. Its in-game goals included, oh, finding a water chip, rescuing the Shady Sands chieftain's daughter from some raiders, retrieving a holodisk from The Glow for the Brotherhood recruiter, figuring out why the Hub caravans were disappearing, and so on and so forth. These involve lots of dangerous situations, from getting shot in the face by a supermutant or shredded by a Deathclaw to bleeding out of your anus from radiation poisoning. So if you don't like getting your character into dangerous situations, then you probably won't like Fallout much either -- you're probably find The Sims is more to your taste. (And yes, IMO the Fallouts would've been better games without kill XP, especially with the wandering monsters in the wastelands.) One. More. Time. Questing is the core mechanic for a quest-based cRPG.1 It. Determines. The. Victory. Conditions. Finishing the main quest is the victory condition. Everything else is a subsystem that can be used to get there. Combat. Stealth. Dialog. Crafting. This means that questing is NOT THE SAME as combat, stealth, dialog, crafting, or any of the other subsystems that make up the game, BECAUSE IT IS NOT A SUBSYSTEM. It is the CORE system driving the gameplay. It is the... thing used to structure and deliver everything else in the game. Since character advancement is the main incentive that a cRPG has (beyond the content itself), it makes a lot more sense to tie it to the main system rather than any of the subsystems. ANY of them -- combat, stealth, crafting, dialog, etc. Therefore, quest XP. 1Emphasis on "quest-based." There are other types of cRPG's as well. Here I'm talking about games like the IE ones, the KOTORs, the NWN's, VtM:B, etc.

Then you're confused. In-game goals are whatever the game creators decide are the in-game goals. The game system within which the game creators work do the accommodation and provide the incentives that direct player behavior. :sigh: Because a quest objective is an in-game goal, and the job of the game system is to provide incentives for you to complete in-game goals. Whereas picking a lock or killing a monster is a means to an end, ways to complete those goals. You can set your own goals on top of that, naturally (aka LARPing), so if you want to go on a murder rampage there's nothing stopping you. Or you can LARP a pacifist and try not to kill anyone. These goals are not aligned with the in-game ones, therefore there's no reason the game engine should reward (or punish) them. It's not the devs' job to anticipate any and all additional LARPy goals you may want to set for yourself; their job is to worry about the goals they're setting for you, and to make sure you're properly incentivized to pursue them. Why would you need to skip quests to do that? This time I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or just really dim. Here's a clue: you cannot complete a quest-based cRPG without completing the main quest. That makes the quest the core mechanic for delivering the content. Everything else is a subsystem. This is different from, say, Diablo, where combat is the core mechanic: any quests are distractions; the objective is to fight your way to the final boss and then defeat the final boss. All fighting, all the time.

I realize you were being sarcastic, but I'll point out the flaw in your attempt at reductio ad absurdum nevertheless. Aging XP has the same problem as kill XP or sneak XP: it is not aligned with in-game goals. Your objective is not to age. If you implemented aging XP, it would give players an incentive to pass as much time as possible. They would leave the game running over the weekend, or if there's a rest mechanic, spam that to let the days fly by. In a cRPG, the mechanic most closely aligned with in-game goals is the quest. Completing a quest objective is the cRPG equivalent of winning a race in a racing game. Winning a battle or picking a lock is the cRPG equivalent of overtaking a competitor in a racing game. Therefore, quest XP. QED.

Since we're speculating about motivations here, allow me as well. I think a lot of the angst we're seeing about mechanics is a case of "beware what you ask for, you may receive it." We, Kickstarter backers, asked the dev team to be open about how they're making the game. They are. Put another way, we asked to be allowed a peek into the sausage factory. And now that we're seeing what go into the sausages, some of us are getting kind of grossed out. When playing a cRPG, I think most of us want to be swept away by it, into another world full of excitement, adventure, and winsome pointy-eared elven maidens. What we're doing here is looking at the plumbing underneath that world. It turns out to be rather... unexciting. Un-fantastic. We're talking costs and incentives, frameworks and systems. I think this is a big turn-off to most people. They'd rather not think too hard of what goes into designing the skeleton of the giant on whose skin all those elven maids frolic in the noonday sunne. I think the subset of gamers who really want to think hard about those underlying mechanics -- like Hormalakh here, and me, and a few others -- is really pretty small. The rest are afraid to dissect why they loved some game so much, for fear of spoiling the experience. I loved the bejeezus out of Fallout and have played it probably a dozen times through, but I still think the crit system blows goats, and was tolerable only because of the variety of gross and funny death animations. If I say something like that about, say, BG2, I get "he's saying the game sucked herp derp." Beware what you ask for; you may receive it.

It's only an obstacle if there's something meaningful behind it. A locked door that stands between you and the princess you're rescuing is an obstacle. A locked broom closet door is just a locked door. It would be stupid and pointless to reward you for picking the broom closet door lock. It would be even stupider and more pointless to give the same reward for picking both locks. The fact that most cRPG's do this doesn't make it any less stupid or wrong. And don't give me "but doing stuff is practice and practice makes perfect:" that's another red herring. XP is a very high-level abstraction that represents and lumps together all your experience and then lets you, metagame, decide what, specifically you've learned. It's a simple system that gets the job done and gives a lot of freedom to decide which way you want to go. I like it. The "practice makes perfect" rationale will give us a system where you improve skills by using them: picking locks will make you better at lockpicking, but won't give you generic XP to spend on, e.g., deciphering ancient poetry. And we know just how well THAT works in a cRPG (see Oblivion). [N.b.: It can work very well in PnP -- Call of Cthulhu has such a system, for example; with a GM around to just say "Sorry, you don't get to check your Archaeology skill just by spending your weekend at the British Museum looking at sarcophagi" it's extremely playable. But that's because deciding whether a skill check "counts" is always a judgment call -- if you were staring at those sarcophagi because you're investigating the gruesome, supernatural death of an egyptologist and learned something pertinent to that, then yeah, it'd count, but if you just went there to herp derp practice your archaeology, then it doesn't. A computer can't easily make these judgment calls, so putting it in a cRPG will lead to very wonky results.] And why is that? Because the systemic imbalances in the game force game designers to design around them. They can't put in a spawn-o-mat or a big field of traps without either creating an XP hotspot or having to locally change the rules (like with those 0 XP shades in that one temple in BG2). Both are bad. Lose the XP-for-process thing and the problem never arises in the first place.

A final thought re powergaming: a quest-XP only system won't do anything to stop that, and it shouldn't. What it does is align the powergamer's motivations with the in-game goals. Instead of hunting after wandering monsters, spawn points, locks, and traps, the powergamer would have to hunt for quests, the most efficient (=least resource-consuming) ways to complete them, and the most efficient ways to build powerful characters and parties. And I am 100% certain that every intelligent powergamer will find that a LOT more enjoyable than trying to kill everything, unlock everything, and untrap everything, whether it makes sense or not. Even Valorian and Helm. They just haven't realized it yet.

I hear what you're saying. My previous comment was a gut feeling I got from skimming reading through the thread. But what you're after ^^^^ (the bit I quoted here) is something you can already do in most RPGs. My point was that preventing behaviour in other players who are not playing the same P:E playthrough as you has no effect on your enjoyment level. Only your own play style can dictate that. What others do in their own game is their business. The problem is that we're looking at the... thing from different points of view. I'm thinking of it from the designer's point of view. The question I'm asking is "What kinds of mechanics should a game have so that it supports as broad a range of different playstyles and experiences as possible, without favoring one over the other, nor rewarding behavior taken for out-of-game reasons?" IOW, I want to see a game system that's as "neutral" as possible, which gives both content designers and players as much freedom as possible. Concretely? If MCA decides he wants to write up a township full of antagonistic and allied factions, fiendish intrigue, criminal masterminds, gangs, enforcers, police, lone lunatics, sneaky heists and stealthy assassinations, the game system should make that as easy as possible. And if the player decides he wants to approach that township as a paladin in shining armor, always honorable, protecting the weak, raising the downtrodden, bringing down the corrupt, the game should support that. And if the player decides he wants to approach the township as a leader of a band of highly efficient assassins-for-hire, ready to contract to the highest bidder for stealthy nighttime burglaries and daring gangland hits, then the game should support that too. And if TIm Cain wants to design a wizard's tower filled with fiendish traps, deadly guardians, etc. etc., the system should support that just as well. And if the player wants to approach that as a wrecking ball or a sneaky spy, etc. etc. What that means is that the mechanics of the system should not autonomously give any of these approaches greater rewards than any others. And fishing for XP -- opening every lock, untrapping every trap, killing every killable creature -- is one very particular approach, and one that's usually disproportionately rewarded by cRPG's. Perhaps that's one reason for all the whining, actually -- it's always been rewarded, so cRPG nerds have trained themselves into playing this way, and now they feel uncomfortable if that extra special reward is taken away. Pure conservatism, IOW. Or better still, with no reward for untrapping, the designers wouldn't have to worry about whether they're unintentionally creating an XP hotspot by placing mines or traps or even a Spawn-O-Mat somewhere. They can just do whatever they feel fits the area or quest they're designing, and then explicitly assign the XP rewards for completing it to specific points in it. Much easier to control -- and way, way easier to balance late in the game, since all you have to do is adjust the XP rewards at those specific points, rather than adding or removing mines or adjusting the systemic XP reward for defusing a mine. This I already addressed elsewhere. Once more, it's a red herring. Kindly stop waving it around, it stinks.