RPG mechanics applied to reality, an incompatibility of concepts (help me mesh the two)

bor902

bor902

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First thread that is not a story, tell me if I did something wrong and I can correct it.


Gamer interfaces are nice and all, but they are bound to the medium they were created for and that's stumping me a bit at the moment.

I want to create a realistic as possible gamer power, as far as that is feasible and I'm having difficulties deciding what would have to go, and what could stay to make it so.:headdesk:

Skills make sense, you can acquire those in reality as well, you just can't prescribe numbers to them. The only thing that the gamer interface really changes is the fact that it makes your progress clearly visible, and what skills you have learned in this manner do not atrophy from disuse.

Classes are a bit trickier. I would say that the ideal scenario would be that levelling up a certain skillset lets you acquire a class connected to that skillset.

The problem of too many classes could be solved by creating a tier list of classes and limiting the classes you can possess with those tiers.

For example: With level 10 in a martial art and level 10 in athletics you can gain the [Fighter] (Class). Which is a tier 1 class.

You are limited to one class of every tier. So you would have to evolve [Fighter] (tier 1) into [Martial artist] (tier 2), to be able to equip another tier 1 class that has its own skill prerequisites.

[Martial artist] requirements: level 20 in a martial art for example.

What's been a real bother to figure out is the existence of levels and attributes. :(

I haven't formed any clear opinions on how these issues are solvable and am therefore seeking out some opinions.

Experience and levels are in themselves very unrealistic. What is a level? Its an approximation of the threat level of an individual. But how do you gain levels realistically? Killing people and monsters maybe gives you experience in dealing with them, but how does that quantify as EXP.

Also Quests. The existence of Quests which grant EXP takes for granted, that the game system in itself, is sentient, and therefore capable of determining tasks and appropriate rewards for solving these.
I'm of the opinion that such a system should stay within operatory boundaries, and that such boundaries should not include sentience and the ability to grant people Exp, which basically changes the individual and therefore the world greatly.

The last issue I want to mention are attributes, STRENGTH, INTELLIGENCE and the like. Raising those stats manually makes sense, the problem comes with the fact that video games give you free stat points upon level ups, which I already see as problematic when going for realism.

How do you write a character that has 100 points in Intelligence? You can't, unless you define the stat as mana regen, instead of its name, intelligence.

The author is incapable of following and writing about the thought processes and decisions a character with 100 intelligence would make. Ignoring the issue of power progression entirely for now since its the same one as with levels.

In conclusion. I really like the idea of life being a game, but I like reality as well. Sadly, those two don't mesh well.

The only ideas I would keep from standard RPG's would therefore be.

You can see your stats grow on your character menu if you actually work on them. No free points.

Gain skills by actually learning the skill. No skill books.

Unlock classes that buff the specific set of skills that brought the class into existence.

I'm just looking for some feedback or discussion on how I should tailor administrating RPG mechanics to real life. Or just discussion on RPG mechanics in general.

I want to finalize a system I like before starting to write another story.
 
For me, personally, It really depends on where the focus of the story is going to be.

If you want the focus of the story to be on the main character using and taking advantage of his new RPG mechanics to the fullest, then you want the RPG mechanics to be as intrusive and unintuitive as possible. This means character classes, quests, level ups, skill points from leveling or skills learned instantly by picking up a skill book.

If you want the focus of the story to be more on the character and his interactions with the world at large with the RPG mechanics being secondary, then you have incremental progress with skills, quests that are effectively glorified record keeping, and no free skill points.

As for attributes, you first need to decide what the maximum and minimum attributes actually mean for the character. Does 100 Strength mean that they are superhumanly strong, or simply as physically fit as they can get without external enhancement? Does 100 Intelligence mean that they are all-knowing, or simply well read and learned that they can known and understand most things if they put a bit of thought in to it?
 
JayTee said:
For me, personally, It really depends on where the focus of the story is going to be.
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Thanks, I completely forget to mention this. The RPG mechanics are definetely secondary. I am trying to create a more realistic RPG-System because I don't want it to take over the narrative with its quest creation etc.

This also makes me lean more into the direction of just leaving out any level, Exp and quest systems now that you mentioned it.

JayTee said:
As for attributes, you first need to decide what the maximum and minimum attributes actually mean for the character. Does 100 Strength mean that they are superhumanly strong, or simply as physically fit as they can get without external enhancement? Does 100 Intelligence mean that they are all-knowing, or simply well read and learned that they can known and understand most things if they put a bit of thought in to it?
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The issue with such a thing is that when creating it, I would need to know exactly how the story progresses and how it ends to correctly set the min. max.. So I don't actively reach my power ceiling and then be forced to break it like a lot of books are wont to do.
 
bor902 said:
This also makes me lean more into the direction of just leaving out any level, Exp and quest systems now that you mentioned it.
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I wouldn't discount quests just yet, as you can use them in more ways than a simple XP dispenser. In my own quest, I use them as foreshadowing, a way to better inform players before they make decisions and a way to spice up character interactions.


bor902 said:
The issue with such a thing is that when creating it, I would need to know exactly how the story progresses and how it ends to correctly set the min. max.. So I don't actively reach my power ceiling and then be forced to break it like a lot of books are wont to do.
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You could write it so that the stats only include human maximums, and then when/if you feel the need to escalate things, have the character unlock special abilities that grant them superhuman powers.

For example, a character has 100 Strength, meaning he is as physically fit as its possible for a normal person to be. Then he gets the "Superhuman Strength" Ability, that lets him double or triple his strength stat.

The stat remains the same (100), but what the number means is now different.
 
This is something I think about on and off. I can give no solid answers because you're asking the wrong questions.

Lemme get into that in some detail.

Overview/the Fundamentals

Games can come in a dizzying array of forms. The variety of systems is, while not technically limitless, probably more than you can consume in a lifetime. Any game you play works the way it does because the developer said so.

So where did the game system come from in the context of your story?

This is an important question on a number of levels. Are quests realistic? Well, maybe! Maybe a circle of deities decreed this gamer system would exist, and have an entire celestial bureaucracy managing such matters.

In general, you can propose that either the state of the world is artificial, where the rules and beings and so on were created by something to the tune of a god, or that the rules of the game and so on are somehow 'natural', and life and society evolved around them.

Both have significant implications.

On another topic, you pretty much have to define the broad nature of the setting to answer a lot of these questions. I've seen stories with the whole Game System premise applied to what amounts to traditional fantasy, with swords and sorcery and dragons, in which case stuff like leveling off kills ties in some ways brutally concisely into genre trends. The most powerful beings in traditional fantasy usually have rivers of blood behind them from the fact that they've been killing their way to power, even if in universe the rules don't work that way.

Lemme try to get into some more specifics...

Leveling, Quests, etc

In an actual game, be it a board game, video game, tabletop game, or what, concepts like leveling and quests are incentive systems. They may serve other purposes, but at their core they exist to incentivize playing the game certain ways, using certain strategies, etc.

Apply a game system to a realistic world, and you're talking basically one of two scenarios ultimately as I said before.

Either the world formed around an arbitrary set of rules, where killing makes you stronger or reading books magically gives you the ability to swordfight or what have you, or the entire system was inserted by a thinking being.

In the former case, well. That's reality so far as anyone can determine, ultimately. In a world where reading a book written by a swordmaster makes you some kinda adept swordsman, you get interesting incentives. Maybe the nation's best swordsman is best off spending all his time writing books, that crumble to dust when read but grant competence as to mass produce waves of competent swordsmen, representing much more power than he could offer on the battlefield by mere awordfighting. Or maybe the books don't get destroyed, and literacy itself, let alone individual manuals and tomes, get jealously guarded as you can mass produce fireball slinging swordfighting airplane flying omni-skilled super soldiers by having them read the right books.

This applies to any system, in general. If you level up when killing someone, gaining experience proportionate to their level? Expect a lot of nations to have traditions of killing the very old ritually to pass on their strength rather than losing it to old age killing them.

If the rules have been in place from the beginning, society and wildlife will optimize to some degree around the incentives.

Alternately, if the game system was grafted in by an outside, intelligent being, the rules are almost certainly targeted for certain results. They likely exist to try to encourage people to behave in certain ways or the like.

Actually, I said 'either' earlier, but it could be both. You could have a more or less omnipotent being slap game mechanics on a world a thousand+ years ago and see people have optimized around it as a result. Realistically, if the being is not effectively omniscient, the rules probably don't get optimized around in quite the way they wanted or expected.

Anyways, on the topic of quests, quests would have to have a defined source. Whether the system is assumed to dynamically generate such, or there is a panel of gods doing it, or literally anyone can assign quests somehow, or people with a certain special ability can, it doesn't matter, something in specific creates them.

In an actual game, that's generally the developer, of course.

Nature of the world

A root question is fundamentally 'how gamelike vs how not gamelike is the world, and in what ways?'. For example, you may or may not be familiar with the webcomic Erfworld. Without getting bogged down in details, the premise is that the protagonist, some ordinary joe nerd loser into war games, finds himself in a world that works like a fantasy wargame. People aren't born, they get produced as adults by cities, because that's just how wargames work.

So my point being, when I read game mechanic in reality type stories, a common thing is for them to sorta assume the game mechanics are kinds layered onto otherwise unaltered reality. This is frankly a bit silly, but is also very limiting.

So we get questions like 'is this humans in a modern technological type world, or is it humans and elves and dwarves fihting monsters in a fantasy kitchen sink world, or what?', and even within broad answers you get questions like 'do people still die of old age, and if so how does that look?' and 'even if there is no magic, is your system merely quantifying human abilities or allowing you to exceed it?'

A lot of game based stuff mimicks generic trends unthinkingly. You yourself brought up the intelligence issue, but any stat list is ultimately arbitrary. You could have a 'constitution' stat that rules durability, stamina, resistance to illness, and so on, or you could split those up into a much greater number of substats.

You could have an agility stat that rules limberness, hand dexterity, hand eye coordination, walking/running/swimming speed, etc, or you could divide that along any number of lines.

The list goes on. Pokemon is definitely an RPG system, but it has 'total health, resistance to physical attacks, resistance to non-physical attacks, effectiveness with physical attacks, effectiveness with non-physical attacks, and how early in a single round you act' as it's list of six stats.

There's no magic, or intelligence, or ability to take multiple actions per opponent action in its stat system. Nor any number of other things like charisma.

So a large part of what needs fundamentally to be addressed is how the system elements relate to the world as we know it. Are you merely quantifying things like how strong and fast one is, or changing the rules on how stuff like skill and strengthvand what have you work?
 
Me? If the rpg is met to be realistic then there is no class system. Just stats and skills anyone can exercise/train in and depends on plot as to how they can be applied.

Made several non class games.
 
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I don't like the quest system since I see it as a cheap way to drive a narrative. The world I want to write about is a normal one, with simply one individual having the power to live it as a game, which also invalidates the quest system slightly since there isn't an all powerful force driving it.

The idea of how the protagonist gained the system is that he created it for himself. How exactly is yet to be decided. But by having him create it I can refrain from inputting things that affect the world around him, like levels and quests. Since at the end of the day, he isn't god, and is only powerful enough to affect himself.

I would like the system to quantify the skills one can possess, not exceed them, which is a point against attribute points. (Thanks for asking me this question, I was thinking about it much too verbosely and you basically hit the nail on its head with one sentence.)

Terrabrand said:
This applies to any system, in general. If you level up when killing someone, gaining experience proportionate to their level? Expect a lot of nations to have traditions of killing the very old ritually to pass on their strength rather than losing it to old age killing them.
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I really like this idea. The gamer trope is one of my favourites, and exploring a world that is clearly different culturally, because it is governed by the System sounds very interesting.

The killing older members of your family would be a great way to divide the world between weak and strong. Since people with powerful ancestors would accumulate that power and rise beyond what they normally would have.

I'm probably going to end up writing two stories now. :D

One where the whole world is governed by the system, and therefore attributes, levels etc. become feasible. And one where only one person has a limited version of the gamer power only applicable to himself.
 
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