Lockpicking Mechanics

[Lephys]

Only if what you're after is a Computer LARPS insteaad of a CRPG. If at any point you're describing you, the player, experiencing the world directly you're in LARPS land. For pushing 40 years now, LARPS has not been a component of RPG.

 

I get the point with which you're rebutting, but... negatory, Ghost Rider.

 

First of all, the "LA" in LARP stands for "Live Action," which specifically involves quite literally playing a role, not drawing experience from some other representative form of character control (you say "avatar," I say "character." They are not mutually exclusive.)

 

Secondly, A first-person shooter, though closer to simulating more of a first-hand experience, both from a control and perspective standpoint, in no way gives you the ability to fire military-grade automatic weaponry with your actual arms. The game simulates weapons fire and movement as though peformed by a fully-trained, elite human entity, and you choose how to control that entity accordingly. When you pull left trigger (or right-click, or whatever), your "avatar" aims with his own level of keeping-a-gun-steady skill, not with your own personal skill at such a thing. You control where to aim, and when to fire. You tell him to reload, he reloads as quickly as his reloading skill allows. It may be a different control scheme and viewpoint, but the player-controlling-a-character principle remains the same. And hell, in a lot of modern shooters (at least in single-player campaigns), if you aim at an ally, your "avatar" will actually un-ready his weapon, completely preventing you from firing at friendlies because your character wouldn't.

 

I would say that falls directly beneath this statement:

 

 

An RPG has a defined character with his own intrinsic qualties that affect success/failure and his own personality. Within the confines of those personality constraints, the Player may act.

 

So... I honestly don't know why you chose to suggest that everything I stated was simply LARPS instead of exactly what I said it was. Immersion is immersion. It doesn't matter if it's a sports game, a shooter, an RPG, or what. Doesn't matter if you've got a first-person view or not. You control someone who's in a different world, with a different skillset, and you experience varying degrees of things through them. An NPC in an RPG doesn't tell YOU what's going on. He tells the character. You find out story and quest details by reading conversations between the character you're controlling and the NPCs. The NPCs certainly don't need to read the dialogue, and neither does your character. And if it wasn't for immersion's sake, there'd be no point in having it be dialogue, instead of the characters providing quest instructions directly to the player. "If you go find a cave and fight some stuff and prevent this character from dying, you'll get experience and loot."

 

I feel that's a reasonable explanation for my desire to have lockpicking not be reduced to instantaneous actions. That's all.

 

 

Regarding the last few replies about lockpicks, in the event that a process-representative lockpicking system WERE implemented, I definitely feel it might be a good idea to have some sort of cumulative progress in the lockpicking. This way, if you have lockpicks break, or you slip something up, you don't have to start all the way back over. It would result in less-frustrating lockpicking (a hard lock just takes longer, instead of taking 73 individual mulligans), and less ridiculous lockpick loss.

 

Sure, the player can always just pull the old save-before-you-pick method and reload when they run out of lockpicks. But, if you can reasonably reduce the fickleness of lockpick quantities and/or breakage, there's less reason or incentive to do so.