mcmanusaur

I happen to know that there are a lot of historical PnP/tabletop RPGs, but I'm not aware of too many video game examples (despite my search for the latter which has only led me to the former). Perhaps it's an area of untapped potential.

Both fantasy and science fiction draw heavily upon the real world and its history for inspiration, whether intentionally or subconsciously. There's been a lot of talk about how Project Eternity is set a bit later on (in terms of technological development) than most of the Infinity Engine games, and that includes an opportunity for it to depict a more cosmopolitan mixture of cultures. Josh made that one thread about linguistics that further hinted at the variety that will be seeing, so I wanted to see how people felt about this. Unfortunately I can't capture all the vast options in the poll, and let me know if I've forgotten anything obvious. This has been highlighted by a few games that I've been playing recently, such as Europa Universalis (which pays a lot of attention to cultural religious diversity and the social issues it has historically created) and Bioshock Infinite (which if nothing else is very interesting in its somewhat atypical choice of setting). Even though I can barely take the series seriously, Assassin's Creed IV is going full-on pirate, which should be quite interesting. The classic medieval fantasy RPG is a fairly obvious case, based on England, France, and Germany during the Middle Ages, but I think we're starting to see a lot of series move away from pure high medieval stuff. Other fantasy RPGs often incorporate a wide range of influences, such as the samurai-based Akaviri, Viking-based Nords, and Greco-Roman Imperials in The Elder Scrolls (one could even make the case that Morrowind's dark elves . Even so, I think there's a lot of opportunities for diverse influences that the genre hasn't even begun to cover, so let me know what you'd like to see.

This is where I sort of start to have an issue with activated abilities. Simple stances or combat styles giving concrete bonuses over time (rather than serving as single "special attacks") I can generally appreciate, but they should be less abstracted and incorporated into the lore in an interesting way. If they're too supernatural, it's unbefitting to the class in my opinion. Even if we have a setting where everyone can tap into their inner soul power? That's a good point, but I have never been too eager about this aspect of PE's premise, personally. If you think about it, that sounds a lot like the dragon shouting power system from Skyrim... which of course amounted to "every characters has special superpowers with long cooldowns, whereas mages have an extra set of more generic superpowers". I really don't like the implications of that at all: 1. I don't like it when you have two redundant magic systems (such as the powers from TES; hopefully PE soul stuff will be different somehow). 2. I don't like it when every viable or relevant (in the case of Skyrim's narrative) character must be a mage (whether nominally or implicitly). But that's just my personal opinion.

This is where I sort of start to have an issue with activated abilities. Simple stances or combat styles giving concrete bonuses over time (rather than serving as single "special attacks") I can generally appreciate, but they should be less abstracted and incorporated into the lore in an interesting way. If they're too supernatural, it's unbefitting to the class in my opinion.

Yep, you're totally not the one looking like an idiot here. Mhmm. I'm actually giving you the benefit of the doubt by assuming that you are trolling here. And yet when someone does this, they're being "long-winded". Hmmm... very consistent. For the record, it's ad hominem.

You and others have consistently cited "realism for realism's sake" as something that leads to poor results and thus should be avoided, in response to others' statements of support for realism, as if that is what they are asking for (it's not, which makes your argument a straw man). So no, that's not a straw man argument by me at all, actually. And no, claiming someone else is making a straw man argument when they call out your straw man argument generally doesn't cancel things out. Incorrect and completely off the mark. You're still using a straw man argument citing me as saying "realism for realism's sake". And yet you haven't shown where I have said this. Stop and think for a moment on what I just wrote. You're saying I said this and I didn't. You're completely wrong. Taking what I have said out of context, mispreresenting me by saying I said "realism for realism's sake" when I didn't. And the worse part is you're keeping up this strawman argument. Well they are long winded and lacked substance because you start off with a strawman argument, misrepresented and taken out of context what I said and then proceeded to take apart what I didn't say with paragraph after paragraph. Note what I said? You made up stuff that I didn't say and then proceeded to argue against that. That's the very definition of strawman and a post without substance. And now you're suggesting I'm trolling you? Yep, another ad hominen attack. The stance of someone who knows they're losing and are in the wrong. I can't really see you making a case that "realism for realism's sake" and "realism for the sake of realism" mean different things, so... yep, clearly trolling. Why, I honestly don't know... Any decent troll knows not to troll just for the sake of trolling. Inb4baitedstrawmanaccusation My rule of thumb is usually that when people start framing a discussion in terms of "winning" and "losing", it's lost any potential for value, so I'm simply not going to humor or feed this any longer.

You and others have consistently cited "realism for realism's sake" as something that leads to poor results and thus should be avoided, in response to others' statements of support for realism, as if that is what they are asking for (it's not, which makes your argument a straw man). So no, that's not a straw man argument by me at all, actually. And no, claiming someone else is making a straw man argument when they call out your straw man argument generally doesn't cancel things out. In all fairness, you didn't give me any argument to address (other than saying my posts were long-winded and "lacked substance"), but if you had I would have gladly addressed that instead. I'm not really inclined to address the rest of your specious rhetorical nonsense, but maybe we can move back on-topic now. That is, unless you're intentionally trolling me, which would be a bit of a surprise but who knows.

That's exactly a point that I've been hoping to make in this discussion. The best one can do is fool oneself into thinking that something one has imagined is purely fantastical via ignoring the inevitable subconscious pervasion of reality.

Yourself? Sounds like it from your long winded and straw man argument. So I have an agenda and using rhetorical tricks? That's a classic case of misrepresentation and the usual straw man tactics of people who can't debate the issue. Keep up the straw man tactics and long winded posts with no substance mcmanusaur. Now that's just petulant, immature ad hominem. Your assertion that my argument constitutes a straw man has no weight given that you apparently can't be bothered to identify what the offending aspects are. We all have an agenda, so I didn't mean anything particularly nefarious by that. Are you denying the fact that you're arguing against "realism for realism's sake" when there's no one arguing for it? Because I'm calling that a rhetorical trick, and your cry of misrepresentation is a rather transparent defense. I'm sorry that you're not able to glean the substance from my "long-winded" posts, but I assure you that it's there.

No............... I'm asking for further examples of this movement away from realism, since "decades of cRPG development" is a decidedly vague citation. For me, the realistic mechanics that you mention have largely been removed for the sake of accessibility, which is sort of a competing drive at times. Also, things like food, sleep, and wound care have never moved beyond the hyper-abstraction stage, so I think you could consider this a trend towards re-evaluating mechanical abstraction bloat, rather than a departure from realism. Such things suffer from an uncanny valley of sorts as their implementation doesn't constitute realistic simulation, and neither do they tend to be supported by other realistic aspect's of the game's simulation (such as nutrition, degradation over time, poison, disease, and so on in the case of a food mechanic). I will admit that realism can be a bit of a slippery slope; as you introduce realistic elements you oblige yourself to include certain other realistic elements as support, but I don't think that this is a reason to dismiss the potential for fun with more realism. You seem to identify the cRPG genre with the conventions of their execution, such as a reliance on abstractions and a certain way of controlling combat, but I'm more interested in the genre's intended purpose, whether it be interactive storytelling or full-on roleplaying (which is where it gets its name from, after all). I guess that we will have to simply disagree about what defines the RPG. Realistic combat is complex, and potentially fun; it's just a different kind of fun and complexity than the typical abstraction-based approach (which you seemingly inexorably associate with the RPG genre). I'm not going to bother responding from the rest (as I feel like I'm starting to repeat myself), other than mentioning that in fact reality is precisely where we get our precious definition of internal consistency from.

The computing power of a system dictates how many rules it can handle simultaneously, and the main reason that RPG rulesets like DnD were designed to be heavily based upon simplistic abstractions is because that's what fits the medium's resources. But now that we've moved on to a different medium we can re-evaluate the reliance on abstractions over simulation in RPG's. However, somewhere along the way the conventional approaches were fetishized, and maybe we've even fooled ourselves into thinking there was some other reason why DnD is so simple computationally. Hopefully that ties all the ideas together for you. I'm not going to pretend to have the authority to dismiss the supposed "beliefs of developers", if they are in fact as you present them, but I'm just saying what I think. I don't dismiss combat as something that RPG's should include; I simply mention that it's not the most enjoyable aspect of the experience for me, and I think I'm perfectly within my license there. I mean to get at the fact that while you are correct that ostensibly in real life combat is hardly fun, that doesn't mean that combat in a realistic virtual environment can't be fun (so long as the pain and trauma effects simulated on the character and not the player!). Yes, it's a very different animal from the drawn-out, abstraction-heavy game (which I happen to not find very fun anyway) that most RPG players are familiar with, but it might be fun regardless. I could honestly see there being a significant demographic of consumers that would enjoy the "perfect combat simulation", and that should apply to other aspects of gameplay as well. But yes, it seems that you view abstracted mechanics as something necessary to the genre, which is something that I would heavily disagree with. Well, allow me to amend my request: an RPG with purely fantastical elements. At any rate, the overall point here is that we tend to call games "realistic" or "unrealistic" based on how they handle one or two features when it reality both of those categories share a common base in reality for the most part. Cartoon physics are often an exaggeration of real physics, and the same goes for cartoony graphics, while cartoon characters tend to share the same motivations as real people. So I'd not call that purely fantastical. I'm eager for examples, rather than hearing you paraphrase "cRPG developers' opinions" and "decades worth of cRPG development" (with all due respect), if you would oblige me. I did mention that there were aspects in which artificial intelligence has yet to be brought up to human standards (such as emergent narrative), but the potential is there. You were incorrect to note that realistically simulated combat is less complex than heavily abstracted combat. It lasts a shorter time, that much I agreed with. But there's a whole lot of kinetics, footwork, technique, and mental processes like anticipation involved as well, which is never acknowledged by abstraction-reliant combat models. Realism is simply a different kind of complexity than heavy abstraction, just as it can be a different kind of fun. Even magic is often based in reality, whether it be fire spells being super effective against ice trolls or other similar aspects. TL;DR- One of the main reasons that RPG rulesets use heavy abstraction instead of more realistic simulation is because of the limits of another medium, which don't apply to video games. We seemed to have convinced ourselves into thinking otherwise, but hopefully the tendency to cling to conventions won't cloud our vision of progress.

... And I forgot to finish one of my sentences, but didn't notice until one minute after the hour-long editing period expired...

And the straw man argument of the year award goes to... never mind, I can't choose. Obviously playing a PnP game and playing a video game are fundamentally different experiences, but the point is that Infinity Engine games (and other games that utilize DnD-based rulesets, which were of course first intended for PnP) are about as similar to PnP games as cRPG's get. Simply put, cRPG's can do a lot better than borrowing DnD (and inheriting its reliance on abstraction over simulation) in my opinion, and the novel ruleset is one of the things that most interests me about PE. However, I realize now that I'm veering dangerously toward blaspheming what many on this forum hold most dear, so I'll tread carefully. You are right to identify people as the missing element of cRPG's, but this is not a justification for abandoning realism. You can look at it one of two ways; either adding more realism via more complex simulation exacerbates the lack of human decision-making, or doing so better approximates human decision-making. Maybe the latter requires one to be somewhat more imaginative, but I think it's preferable to condemning cRPG's as inferior to PnP RPG's altogether, towards which the anti-realism contingent seems to lean. Alright, please give me an example of your "game based on purely constructed and fantastical". I promise you that I will be identify many ways in which reality is the basis of that game and its complexity. You are correct about combat, and it happens to be an aspect (however ubiquitous) of RPGs that I'm actually not to keen on. However, there are plenty of people who enjoy boxing and other combat sports, and I'd suspect that number would be even higher if people could obtain the experience without any of its drawbacks (such as black eyes and broken noses). Obviously this isn't something relevant to the near future, but I think that there could be a lot of people that enjoy learning the nuances of a combat system that is unforgiving as long as it is also unbiased. At the very least, I don't think there's much justification for dismissing that potential when we haven't even experienced it yet, and I also don't think it has to be all-or-nothing when it comes to realism. The thought that- for the sake of being "fun"- cRPG's should be less realistic than PnP RPG's just makes me cringe. In fact, early cRPG's (including the Infinity Engine games at that, in my humble opinion) suffer from playing too much like graphical tabletop RPG's, rather than taking full advantage of the video game medium (which by the way tends toward more realism and complexity, at least in my view). I realize that you're probably just trying to make a general point about how different media vary (that I am agreeing with), but I'd say it's usually the less realistic and heavily-abstracted elements of PnP RPG's that tend to require re-working for cRPG's. So you would rather have more realism in P:E like item durability even though they're not in any IE game? Having more realism (in certain respects) for the sake of realism would detract from the whole experience and frustrate players more. I'd rather a balance and lean more to fun than frustration. It seems you would go the other way just for realism. What would sell more, get more players to play the game and have replay value? - A game that tones down on the realism but is fun to play. - A realistic game that isn't fun to play. For me the reason that something like item durability is never any fun is because it's so abstracted (to the point that in its usual manifestation it really doesn't add anything to realism) and limiting (other related processes, such as item repair, aren't simulated to an interesting degree). So I'd actually argue that the item durability mechanic as we know it is exactly the kind of hyper-abstracted element that belongs in the metaphorical consciousness of obsolete technology. Or exactly the kind of thing that characterizes the overall design philosophy of games We really need to get away from this idea of "realism for realism's sake"; in fact, this is one of the most common rhetorical tricks that I see those with an agenda against realism use. In fact, pretty much no one has ever asked for realism merely for the sake of itself, unless they are addressing the entirely separate market of "serious" games. Rather, for many gamers realism contributes to many aspects of the experience, including the vague "fun" that you so assuredly contrast with realism in the name of some objectively definable experience. Balance is just as proximal of a concern as realism, and there are many reasons one could articulate for wanting either other than their respective self-evident value. This is almost as much of cliche as the points I'm arguing against, but arguably reality as a system is perfectly "balanced". It just so happens that the scope of the "simulation" in reality is so wide that we tend to find ourselves leaving out certain variables when we make mental comparisons and contrasts. Similarly, many games that try to be realistic often suffer from leaving certain key variables out of their simulation (which results in imbalance), but in these instances the games' inadvertent departure from reality represents the problem. In fact, imbalance in games can generally be attributed to departure from reality (in the form of omitting variables from the game's simulation) rather than adherence to reality. And let me respond to your false dichotomy with one of my own: Which would sell more, a game that is both realistic and fun to play, or a game that is neither realistic nor enjoyable? (but don't bother answering as it's not a real question)

To me personally, it comes off as more like the royal "we", given how consistent his posting style is.

Well, I never said anything either way about whether current trends in video games are moving closer to or farther away from the medium's full potential. I only stated that I believe cRPG's have a deeper capacity for realism and complexity than PnP RPG's. Most straightforward, this is simply by virtue of computing power, but there are some aspects- emergent narrative, for example- in regards to which we will hopefully learn how to utilize that power more effectively and efficiently. Also, when you try thinking of reality as the most complicated simulation we will ever experience (nothing is merely abstracted and everything factors in a la Butterfly Effect), I think you'll realize that realism and complexity are definitely related. Complexity doesn't always lend itself to realism, but a realistic simulation without some baseline level of complexity is practically unfathomable. There might not be a causal relationship (or perhaps even a correlational relationship) between the two, but "complexity" as a variable moderates the potential for realism.

I guess donating your beta access to underprivileged children in third-world countries is the only true win-win solution here.

The thought that- for the sake of being "fun"- cRPG's should be less realistic than PnP RPG's just makes me cringe. In fact, early cRPG's (including the Infinity Engine games at that, in my humble opinion) suffer from playing too much like graphical tabletop RPG's, rather than taking full advantage of the video game medium (which by the way tends toward more realism and complexity, at least in my view). I realize that you're probably just trying to make a general point about how different media vary (that I am agreeing with), but I'd say it's usually the less realistic and heavily-abstracted elements of PnP RPG's that tend to require re-working for cRPG's.

For calling out others' straw man arguments, you seem quite prone to them yourself. No one is arguing that settings must be realistic, but rather that an understanding of the causal processes that have shaped the real world can help to create a believable and convincing fictional setting. If nothing else, this is because the real world is the only guide we have to go on when it comes to inventing sensible and internally consistent scenarios. Our psychology is simply inseparable from the world we live in, and even if we actively tried not to base our creations off of reality we would fail miserably. If you don't understand some of the nuance surrounding real world "rules", you may find yourself inadvertently breaking a different rule entirely, and bad things happen when a creator doesn't know which rules govern their creation (especially when you put that creation in someone else's hands). *sigh* bad saur... bad. poster above said, " I can't believe I'm actually seeing people argue that researching a topic before writing about it is a bad thing. " we never claimed that josh or some other poster argued specifically that reality should be a goal (although that happens more than a bit in threads such as these...and note how many times josh refers to "real-world" or "realistic" in video). we did say that he misses forest for trees and gets swallowed up by minutiae and details rather than making evocative. heck, listen to his discussion of character interactions. he wants believable/realistic, but his characters is typically... flat. Well, if no one has really argued that reality is a goal in and of itself, and you're not meaning to claim otherwise, then I must question the purpose of the except of yours that I quoted. I'm not going to say anything either way about the quality of characters written by Josh, but I will say that in my opinion really none of the RPGs I have played have had sufficiently interesting or deep characters. However, I do firmly believe that Josh's approach is the right one, and at any rate flat but believable characters are generally better than the usual alternatives (at least in my personal opinion), which consists of hyper-exceptional Ace McBadass's, generic Mary Sue's, and other exaggerated yet cliched archetypes. I guess I can't really speak for most people, but when I think of what- or who- characters should be like to be more compelling, I think of real people. Also, for me, the amount of detail that you put on display is largely independent of how stable your world's foundation is, unless of course your world is unstable by virtue of possessing no explanatory detail. But I think the point is that realistic detail and nuance is more of a creator's aide than something you must constantly hold over the player's head to have any credibility.

For calling out others' straw man arguments, you seem quite prone to them yourself. All that Josh said in that video was that in order to achieve the ultimate goal of a compelling fictional setting, knowledge of reality's working is one prerequisite. No one is arguing that settings must be realistic, but rather that an understanding of the causal processes that have shaped the real world can help to create a believable and convincing fictional setting. If nothing else, this is because the real world is the only guide we have to go on when it comes to inventing sensible and internally consistent scenarios. Our psychology is simply inseparable from the world we live in, and even if we actively tried not to base our creations off of reality we would fail miserably. If you don't understand some of the nuance surrounding real world "rules", you may find yourself inadvertently breaking a different rule entirely, and bad things happen when a creator doesn't know which rules govern their creation (especially when you put that creation in someone else's hands).

While I agree that Skyrim's world wasn't perfectly executed (and indeed other aspects of the game were arguably even executed poorly), I have to wonder how much of this criticism actually has to do with Skyrim's design philosophy. Yes, the world could probably be more reactive, but that's not because Bethesda decided that wasn't important; rather, it's because that takes a huge amount of resources to achieve, especially given Skyrim's scope. There simply hasn't ever been a game the size of Skyrim that has done most of the things you've mentioned better than Skyrim does, at least as far as I know (though I would be delighed to be proven wrong). As much as I understand how strongly people feel about the classic RPGs that inspired Project Eternity, I would seriously question how people could find them more "immersive" (strictly speaking, which is different from how much the player is invested in a story) than Skyrim. The only real design point I can see being argued here is that Skyrim prioritized width over depth too much, but otherwise I have to wonder whether the issue might be personal tastes in setting. Quite evidently, most players (even in this relatively niche forum, I would suspect) do appreciate Skyrim's setting, and they don't seem to see its comparatively minor failures as sufficient reason to give up on open worlds completely. Perhaps it's simply the case that certain settings resonate with particular people for reasons not related to design, such as style, mood, or theme. The world of Fallout has never really appealed to me personally, and I'd expect that for other people the same holds true for Middle Earth, Tamriel, or the Star Wars universe. Some aspects of immersion are just extremely subjective, and maybe we shouldn't assume that even "perfect" settings will appeal to everyone. Even to me, Tamriel does feel hollow and lacking in certain ways, but I don't think that it's necessarily a problem with the approach Bethesda takes regarding world design, nor is it a reason to indict the open world approach. At the end of the day I think that for the sake of true immersion freedom is what everyone wants, but we're still sort of stuck on the methods of other non-interactive media.

Hmmm... Reactivity is always good, but I can't help but wonder if it encourages players to (otherwise pointlessly) choose exotic races. I suppose that's not inherently a bad thing, but I'd hope that this sort of thing would be equally relevant and interesting for every race.

Explain to me how an atmospheric/lore choice constitutes "personal quests." You couldn't be a dwemer searching for the answer as to the fate of your people in Morrowind (even if you could, every other race would be able to do the same thing, which makes it irrelevant,) it was just lore/design justification for comparatively "high-tech" dungeons. The player had no personal connection to, well, anything in Morrowind or Oblivion. Or Skyrim, for that matter. Being wronged by the authorities as an introductory plot hook has become such an overdone cliche in TES that it has no value in narrative terms. Largely irrelevant criticism aside, I think the OP calls them "personal quests" because they feel like instances in which your character really decides their own personal objective, and can naturally progress toward that objective (naturally in the sense that it's outside the usual hand-holding, in-your-face quest system). I think this is actually a much more concrete example of the kind of "self-motivated quest" that people were suggesting in this thread.