Micamo

Throwing an Allip at the party because it's CR 3 and you thought they'd be fine? I can forgive that, it's an easy mistake for a newbie to make. Throwing an Allip at the party on purpose and knowing exactly what you're doing (especially after saying "Okay guys, so there are no magic items in this setting...")? That's a **** move. **** you.

> You encounter an Allip. > You don't have any magic weapons. > Kiss the entire party goodbye.

First, I don't think real time should be confused with hack-n-slash. IE combat with the pauses taken out would play like a really clunky and awful version of Diablo, but that's not what I'm suggesting. Second, I'm not necessarily suggesting we remove pausing: I don't believe it's an unsolvable problem. I don't really know what would be appropriate for the type of game P:E is trying to be, but one place to start looking for ideas might be Transistor, which as I said earlier has a very elegant and promising solution to the problem: It makes the pause interface *part* of the flow of combat and atmosphere rather than an interruption from both.

Y'all are gonna hate me for this - I think making a good game that surpasses the IE games on the things they did well (beautiful atmospheric environments, and in Torment at least fantastic world and characters) is more important than copying the superficial aspects of the things the IE games did very, very poorly and trying to tweak them to make them Not As ****ty. I'm fine with slaughtering the sacred cows. If I were in charge of this project the very first thing I would have done before even pitching the kickstarter would have been to make a few prototypes that experiment with radical alterations to the formula, like ways to get rid of the hotbars, or fixing the pacing problem with RTwP (Transistor, for example, has a very promising approach).

Well, the first problem is a pacing issue. Pausing mid-combat is like getting up to go to the bathroom when you're watching a scary movie. When you've come back and sit down, all the tension is completely gone and the movie has to start over from scratch to get you worked up again. If you're repeatedly getting up and down or you have distractions (like the movie's playing in the background while you're fixing dinner and you're only looking at it occasionally) it's impossible for the movie to scare you no matter how skillfully crafted it is. The fundamental problem with RTwP is that it can't engage you on that sort of visceral level because these constant distractions from the action are baked into the core of the interface. Every time you pause, the excitement dissapates like the air from a popped balloon and the game has to start all over again from scratch to get you engaged again once you unpause. But you're gonna be pausing and unpausing pretty much constantly. (This, I suspect, is part of what happened to the combat in DA2: They recognized that the RTwP combats in DAO were excruciatingly slow, so they tried to spice it up by throwing in lots of weak enemies and gory explosions around everywhere. It... didn't work.) The second problem is one of interface. In the IE games you control your characters through clicking on hotbars. Torment made this issue even worse by introducing that stupid wheel thing. This kind of control schema isn't inherent to RTwP but it's the one Eternity seems to be moving forward with regardless. This type of control schema is simply unimmersive because it puts too many barriers between what you're thinking of doing and actually executing it. Compare how using your character's abilities works in D&D: You think of what you want to do, then you describe it to the DM, using your ability names as shorthand. So long as everyone at the table is familiar enough with the abilities that you can apply them without having to explain them and work out the math right there, it's fast, it's visceral, and it's extremely effective. This is why spells work so well: "Righteous Might. Quickened Divine Power. Extended Bull's Strength. Quickened Divine Favor. Alright, let's smash some faces." (It's also why I love ToB maneuvers and why I think 4E had at least half of a good idea with its consolidated Power system.) The constant design problem with D&D character abilities is to make them complicated enough to have varied, interesting uses and not get boring, but simple enough that they can be easily memorized and cleanly used at the table without breaking the flow of play. As a side note, compare the mouse+keyboard interface of Hotline Miami to the controller interface: Personally, I prefer the controller interface because smashing the stick in a direction feels like a much cleaner and better representation of what I'm about to do than jerking the mouse cursor around.

I think the biggest challenge in making PE's combat rewarding is in the feel. The simple act of moving your character and attacking needs to feel good, like wall jumping in Super Meat Boy, slow-mo air dashing in Bleed, or firing the shotgun in Hotline Miami. In doing this they're hamstrung from the start due to the RTwP combat style and the toolbar-based UI.

I've always thought that "This game is too hard" really means "This game isn't engaging enough that I want to expend the necessary effort to see the rest of it." I don't mind hard games so long as the game is sufficiently rewarding to play. I love games like Super Meat Boy and Bleed, but can't get into Dwarf Fortress. Personally, I can't stand the "tactical" aspects of the IE games because, honestly, they preserve the aspects of D&D that I hate while discarding everything I like about it. If you strip all of the story out of a game of D&D and just run it as a combat simulator it's horrible beyond belief. In a well-run tabletop game session it works because there's no point where the story just completely stops and the game devolves into a combat simulator, but in the IE games this disconnect is exactly what happens: There are the talky parts where you have story and character, and there are the fighty bits where you roll dice over and over. The IE games are improved, in my opinion, when you just cheat your way past all the encounters and only care about the story, and this is in fact my preferred way to play Torment (that I don't care much for the story bits in the other IE games is beside the point).

My sniff test for cheese is two questions. First, is it something the designers obviously didn't intend for the player to do? Second, is it overpowered to the point of ruining the fun of the game? Both questions are sorta subjective, but some cases are clearer than others. Pretty much any case where the player gets their hands on something intended for NPCs only qualifies, like Wish Traps, Pun Pun, or Beholder Mage. Is it unintended, but not overpowered? Sure, why not. Is it overpowered, but completely intentionally so? Shame on you, developers. You're completely incompetent. If a player wants to use it though I'm inclined to try my best to whip up a houserule fix instead of saying no. Is it unintended and overpowered? Cheese. If you try to use this in an actual game, especially by slipping it past a DM who doesn't know any better, you are a jerk.

My problem with scrolls and wands in D&D is that they completely negate the entire point of vancian spellcasting, which is that: A. Spellcasters have great power that is very limited in how often it can be applied: You have to save your spells for the critical moments. B. Spells are very narrow in focus and casters have limited spells: You have to carefully choose which spells you carry around. Scrolls and wands let you solve both problems by essentially throwing money at them. Got a really situational spell in your spellbook you might need? Make a scroll or two and never worry about it again. Can't cast enough healing spells in a day? Get a wand of cure light wounds and keep on truckin!

I think 4th edition had the right idea: Your summons use the same actions as you. By itself it's not a perfect solution (you still have to deal with a summoned monster being stronger than a dedicated fighter-type PC, but 4E deals with that issue in other ways) but by far the most broken aspect of 3.X summon spells is that you could shatter the action economy. (Gotta admit though, I love mass-summoning lantern archons. Pew pew pew!)

I don't mean just flat-out spoiling it, you just give enough of a hint to make the choice between broad types of content rather than just directions. Evil faeries, dwarven ruins, or frog villages? The point is there's still plenty of surprises to be had, like, the evil faerie prince was actually killed several decades ago and replaced by a green dragon (and nobody has made it out of the forest alive to report the change in leadership). Those dwarven "ruins" are still very much active settlements, the dwarves living there just dressed up the exterior as ruins to keep their existence there a secret. The frog people have all mysteriously vanished, leaving their villages empty with no signs of conflict.

Well, that's sortof what I meant. The part where it becomes a chore is when you're given a blank wilderness map with 800 hexes on it, plopped down onto a starting location, and told to pick a direction to explore. If you don't at least have a hint as to what kind of content lies in each direction, it's not a meaningful choice which direction you pick. A good approach is to give some broad outlines of "regions" on the map where the player knows what sort of thing to expect when they go there. Here's the haunted forest ruled by an evil faerie prince. Here's the mountains dotted with entrances to old dwarven ruins. Here's the swamp settled by (peaceful) frog-people.

The problem with making exploration rewarding is that there are two conflicting requirements that are hard to balance. First, the player has to be constantly led to interesting content. If the player has run out of locations they are aware of and want to explore and their only option left is to pick a random direction and hope they run into something cool, the exploration stops being exciting and starts being a chore. You need to make sure the player always has a hook for a place to go next. Second, the player has to feel like they discovered the interesting content on their own, without feeling like the developer led them there. If you give the player directions to the mine, then the player goes to the mine, then getting to the mine doesn't feel like exploration, it's just legwork. An easy way to do this is through incidental discovery. The Elder Scrolls games are amazing at this sort of thing: You'll be walking from A to B on some stupid fed-ex quest when you'll find a small, unused path that leads away from the main road (to your destination). You follow the road for a while and it leads to this ruin hidden behind a waterfall. You head into the ruin and it has this really interesting piece of environmental storytelling inside, that's the *real* reward of the quest. No one told you to go there, in fact you got there by ignoring what you were told to do. (Incidentally, this is why time limits on quests are a terrible idea in this type of game. If your fed-ex quest had to be done within an hour, you'd probably have ignored that side path and missed out on the ruin because you didn't want to sacrifice the loot and XP reward.)

Some of them do, and I find it just as offensive as I find it in a game.

I'm not gonna bother to weigh in on the morality argument, but I can answer this: Because there are very few real-life people who live with the trauma of being a victim of torture or attempted violent murder, and unfortunately very many people who live with the trauma of being a rape victim (1 in 6 is one commonly cited number). It's more upsetting because it's harder to abstract it and distance yourself from it.

Yeah, and this is something best used sparingly. An encounter against one dude where you have to spend 90% of your resources just to make it out alive makes you think "Wow, that dude was dangerous!" Twenty encounters like this back to back just makes you think "Wow, this campaign is really tedious and frustrating." You can't create tension by spamming "dangerous" encounters at the players for the same reasons you can't be scared of a monster in a horror game when you're looking at it. The exposure desensitizes.

It's very relevant: I believe smart design can overcome most of these limitations. Take, for example, the big confrontation with Benny in FO:NV. In any other game the casino would be this giant dungeon filled with mooks you have to gun down before you get to Benny at the end, who gives a few one-liners and then attacks you with his inordinate superpowers. They didn't do that though, instead they did something really smart, engaging, and memorable. It's almost as good as having a human DM there in every way that matters, and it's the standard that I expect P:E to live up to. Two things. First, by "meaningless" I don't mean "there is no conceivable reason this would ever happen in the real world." I mean "this doesn't advance the narrative in any important fashion." Verisimilitude doesn't mean random **** gets flung at the players for no reason, unless the central theme of your game is about nihilism and the pointlessness of existence or something, it means that the story establishes an internal logic and follows it. Second, random encounters to build "danger" is actually a really bad idea. This is due to what I like to call the "Demon Lord Problem." You see, in 3rd edition source books about the Abyss in D&D, the writers frequently describe things by saying "This thing X is so dangerous even Demon Lords are afraid of it!" The thing is, the first time you hear that you think "Wow, that thing X is super dangerous!" but the tenth time you hear it you think "Wow, demon lords are complete wusses!" You can't establish the world as dangerous by having the players mow their way through hundreds of enemies. This only establishes that the enemies shouldn't be taken seriously, which is the exact opposite of what you're trying to accomplish.

This was implemented in the game, actually. An NPC in Skyrim can have the Protected flag which means they can't be killed by other NPCs (but they can be killed by the player). Most NPCs don't have it set though and almost all of the ones that do are also Essential, which means the player can't kill them either.

Torment definitely has them, and it suffers from this problem probably the least out of any traditional CRPG I've ever played: You can go several hours in Torment without fighting a single guy. Rubikon is the worst offender (though to be fair it's technically optional). Literally copy-pasted square rooms with identical mooks inside where you can very easily get lost unless you very carefully hand-draw a map and keep track of your position at all times.

Well yeah. I'm not arguing that the cop scenario couldn't be implemented in a boring, horrible, and pointless way, or that the bandit scenario couldn't be implemented in a fantastic way. Maybe you spend a large portion of the game driving and cops just pull you over randomly for no reason, and the encounter with the body in your trunk plays 100% identically to every other encounter (and there's no special chance of anything going differently because of the changed circumstances). My frustration isn't with combat itself but in the way meaningless combat scenarios that I don't care about are so frequently thrown in to pad hours onto CRPGs. It's the DM showing up to the session saying "Sorry guys, I was busy snorting coke off of hookers and didn't prepare anything for this session. Have 4 hours of random encounter tables!"

It's significant, yes, but they're differences in scale, not differences in kind. I disagree. The game is what happens at the table. In a CRPG the developer puts the systems in place but everything is driven by the actions of the player, one way or another. Well, yeah. If the DM and the players have a fundamental disconnect as to what they each want out of the game, they can sit there and talk about it and change things up so that everyone is on the same page. If the player wants something out of a CRPG that the game isn't providing, there's nothing the player can do about it but find another game. (I count mod tools as "find another game." You're just making the game yourself instead of looking for something made by someone else.) This is unfortunate but I wouldn't call it a problem per se. I'm fine with saying "This game just isn't for me." It's not that I don't want 80 hours of content, it's just that I'm much faster to quit games when I'm not having fun. When I was a kid I'd pump dozens of hours into games I hated simply because I had gotten bored enough with replaying the ones I liked and had nothing better to do with my time. Nowadays it takes something very special to make me want to put that much time into it. I cut out several parts of your post because you essentially repeat this argument again and again: I'm going to respond to it here so as not to repeat myself. Basically, you're making the same argument Bioshock made: The developer designs the system the player uses to interact with the game world, and the system determines what happens in the game through the responses the game gives to what the player decides to do. Because it's the system that determines how the game goes, you ultimately have no power. A game can, at best, provide only the illusion of choice. When Ryan says the command word and your character starts acting without your input, all of your previous agency is rendered null and void. I think this is horse****. You don't get to decide what paths there are, or where they lead, but you do decide what path you take. The system determines how the game works but you are a part of the system. The system might incorporate you more or less, but it's not an all-or-nothing deal. Probably the purest ludic expression of what I mean here is the Mythic GM emulator. If you've never tried it, I highly suggest you attempt it at least once: It's a system that enables DM-less play by relegating the role to a set of dice rolls, using player interpretation to drive it (it assumes you're playing with a group but it works just fine solo). It'll probably change the way you think about what the player's input in an RPG actually means. (Rory's Story Cubes is a similar idea that operates with much less structure.)

A couple of things. First, the DM is not there to "tell the story", or at least, they shouldn't be. An RPG is a conversation: There's a story but it's a story about the PCs, who (should be) controlled by the players. Second, the DM is limited just as the CRPG developer is, though in different ways: A DM has limited time to prepare and limited ability to improvise, while a CRPG developer has limited time to develop the game and limited ability to write scripts that can handle things they didn't expect in advance. These are effectively the same limitations though they have them in different amounts: A DM typically has a few days to prepare and a few seconds to apply their brain to an improvisation problem, while a CRPG developer has years and years to prepare their game but extremely limited ability to write code that can be creative like a human DM. This is a critical difference between being a tabletop DM and being a CRPG developer, but it's not the difference you seem to think it is. This is just you being a bad player. It's the DM's responsibility to come up with interesting problems but it's your responsibility to come up with interesting solutions. If you're going to sit there and expect the DM to monologue the plot at you, the conversation can't happen. In a tabletop game you cull away the decisions that don't matter for the purposes of the type of game being played. Like, unless you're playing a game that focuses on struggling for basic survival against the elements, you don't ask the players exactly what they're eating and how they get it, you just assume that they get enough to eat. If the issue of food and water is meaningless (because it's a murder mystery game instead of a wilderness survival game) the DM just zooms past them and only focuses on the relevant choices. You do this for the same reasons I'm against pointless combats: If something doesn't contribute to providing the experience the players (the DM included) signed onto the game to receive, it's meaningless and should be discarded. We refer to the scenes the DM presents as the "frame", and how much detail the DM assumes away as the "hardness" of the frame. You can have a soft frame where you ask the players dozens of little questions, or you can have a hard frame where the players are asked a handful of big questions. You use a hard frame in the unimportant scenes and a soft frame in the really critical ones. This concept of hardness applies to CRPGs just as much as it applies to tabletop gaming: You don't have to implement every little thing the player could ever conceivably decide to do. Include the choices that propel the game in a meaningful direction (for whatever direction of "meaningful" applies to your particular game) and exclude or assume away the ones that don't. Bull. This might be how the Call of Duty cutscene-gameplay-cutscene formula functions (and can even be used to great effect in a game like Spec Ops) but it has no place in an RPG developer's lexicon. In an RPG the story is the result of the game, what happens when you write down what happened in the session and cut out all the out-of-character and metagame stuff, not the game itself. Let's be clear: I'm not saying "I want lots of different choices so I can play the game over and over to see all the different outcomes." I want different choices so I can have the experience of deciding. In a book or a film you experience it through empathy with the characters, but in an RPG you experience the game through the experience of being the player character. When I replay Torment I do mostly the same set of choices every time.

To make an analogy to film, it's like if you go to see Pacific Rim and you have to sit through two hours of romantic comedy before the giant robots show up. If you enjoy the romantic comedy, that's fine. If you enjoy the combat sequences of an RPG in and of themselves, that's also fine. But I came to Pacific Rim to see giant robots and I come to an RPG for the conversation of play, the series of questions and answers between the DM and the player: For me, the mini-games the RPG uses to facilitate the conversation are only relevant to the extent that they do that job. I hated the endless randomly generated dungeons filled with endless identical mooks of Rubikon in Torment, while I enjoy what is essentially the same thing in Torchlight. Rubikon is a giant arbitrary waste of my time between myself and Nodrom as a party member, the unfunny romantic comedy between myself and giant fighting robots. In lieu of a point-by-point discussion, I'm just gonna give my general thoughts on the demon negotiation in SMT and how it relates to the points I make in the OP. Note the only SMT game I've actually played a significant amount of that has the demon negotiation mechanics is Strange Journey, so the points I make about it may be invalid for other games. - The demons are completely interchangeable, personality wise. One pixie's the same as any other. - The response to what you say is determined by a random number generator: As far as I can tell, in most cases there's no what to know what strategy will be effective and what strategy won't. - The negotiation only works on nameless, generic demons who spawn up out of nowhere. Convincing a demon to leave you alone or join you has about as much meaning as just running away from the combat, except it's just done a bit more flavorfully. - Once a demon joins you they're basically pokemon. Stuff them in your PC box and forget and nobody will ever care. Of course not, I originally got it from the Alexandrian, who got it from various other game writers. I remember when I was 8 years old I cared a lot about game length. My parents basically considered games to be junk food and would only get me new ones maybe once every 2-3 months, if I was lucky. Being finished with a game in a weekend or, god forbid, a single day of playing was disappointing because that means I'd have nothing new to do until the next game came around. Now that I get games as often as I want, 99% of the time if a game is longer than like 2 hours I'll never finish it: New stuff I'm interested in comes out faster than I can go through 20-80 hour games. I just don't have the patience anymore to slog through boring filler to get to the good parts when there's like a hundred new games I could be trying instead.

Well, let me be clear: It's not that I don't think combat could ever be meaningful and interesting, it's just that it usually isn't. A good example of a game that does this well is a fire emblem nuzlocke run (no restarting chapters if someone dies). You'll inevitably have characters that you get really attached to. But to keep bringing them along, you need to level them up. To level them up, you need to put them in harm's way. If you put them in harm's way, and you screw it up, that character could die forever. Thus the tactical decisions of the game directly tie into the inter-character narrative (because if a character is dead you can't do their support paths). (Not a perfect example though: If you're not doing a nuzlocke run then the only consequence of screwing up is to restart the chapter and replay through a few minutes of work, and in most entries in the series this is a restriction that must be self-enforced, with all the problems that entails. Furthermore, fire emblem combat is ridiculously swingy and you can lose units to the RNG even when you've done everything right.)

Imagine this: You're walking down the road when, suddenly, bandits spring out of the bushes! They say "We're going to kill you and take your stuff!" They refuse any further conversation than this. They automatically know where you are so there's no avoiding the encounter with stealth. Invisible walls form a sphere around you so there's no escape until all the bandits are dead. You fight to the death, collect the loot and XP from the bandits, then the game otherwise continues as if that encounter had never happened. My opinion is that this has absolutely no place in a roleplaying game whatsoever. Before I can tell you why I think this, first I have to tell you what I think a roleplaying game should be: An RPG is a series of questions posed to the player (usually implicitly) and a set of systems the player can use to give their answers. The DM sets the scene asks "What do you do?" and the player says "I do X." When I play an RPG, I want interesting and meaningful questions and systems that allow me to give my answers in a satisfactory way. There's a lot to be said about the systems but today I want to talk about the questions, specifically the "interesting and meaningful" part. Let's give another scenario: You're going down the highway with a dead body in your trunk. There's a loaded handgun in the glovebox. A cop pulls up behind you and turns on his sirens. There's several different approaches you could take here, each with its own set of risks: Do you floor it and try to get away? Do you pull over and try to play it cool? Do you grab that gun out of glovebox just in case? If you screw up, there's several different consequences depending on exactly how you screwed up and how you act to try to fix your mistake. The consequences range from mild (you get away with a speeding ticket but no suspicion from the cop), moderate (you have to kill the cop to get away, so now you're wanted for 2 murders), or severe (the cop arrests you after finding the body). Furthermore the situation is both defined by the earlier context of the narrative and your answer defines the later context of the narrative. Are you guilty? If you are, who did you kill and why? If you aren't, why is the body in your trunk? Are you being framed and trying to cover up the (false) evidence? If you are, are you trying to find the real killers and find justice, or are you just trying to get back to your life as fast as possible? How much deeper are you willing to dig yourself in? Compare this scenario to the one I posited at the beginning. There's no proper context because the bandits just pop in out of nowhere and you never hear from them again. They're attacking you for no reason except that they're bandits and, thus, the Bad Guys. You have no choices in what answer you can give except Fight to the Death, or stand there and die and reload a previous save (and get attacked again next time you go through that area). There are no meaningful consequences because you either win and continue with the game, or you don't. It fails as a Question to pose to the player by every conceivable metric. Yet this scenario is absurdly common; Probably 99% of your time in your average CRPG is spent wasting your time with this nonsense. Why?