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Analysis of Game Design- The good, the bad, and the ugly.

Hykal94 said:
Maybe modding the game to be harder would help, but vanilla just isn't up to snuff with it.
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The other way to fix it is to make using it a lot easier. Like having a weapon enchantment that makes it so that you lose weapon charge for poison effect, with the enchantment strength dictating how much of the poison effect is available or boosting the strength of the poison applied. Or both existing in the game, possibly found on items as a duel enchantment.
 
In my opinion, level-based systems only exist because of the computational power available when RPGs became a thing. People do it because it's a convention, because in 1978 people pre-calculated lookup tables and used character sheets. That it directly leads to power creep, hitpoint inflation, and the horrors of sudden jumps in power wasn't important because it'd take you ages to get to level 7 anyway. I won't even go into the madness of character creation you can 'get wrong' or spend hours on.

Now that most people play RPGs on computers that perform every DnD calc ever performed in a second, there's no reason to do this beyond familiarity. Everything could just be directly linked to the mechanics or maths because there's no need to calculate (for instance) how many spells you get at whatever level. Even tabletop games can benefit from this avoidance of secondary elements, and again in my opinion this is a big part of the appeal of the far more accessible card or miniature games.

It's more obvious when you look at war games, but lots of the 70s nerd board game genres are full of 'legacy' stuff, things and ways of doing things that exist because thats how they've always been done. In the last decade this has at least started to change in games from both old and new publishers.
 
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locking people to classes, which is what levels basically do, actually reduces the total number of options and makes it easier to balance the game. the problem with D&D-alikes is *spell* bloat.
 
When it comes to point-buy balance, the key is to break the options down into balanced parts. Which is why I brought up the idea of "You Shall Not Have Average Damage Greater Than Or Less Than One Point Per Five XP" style hard rules. You can leave room for optimization, but when no single option or obvious combination of options can ever have a return beyond a certain point, nor below that point, unless you go into errors in the system.
 
Every game is different but something that is important for all of them is that they give the player a sense of accomplishment. This is often linked with a journey such as rescuing the princess in Mario or taking Ellie to st Mary's hospital in the Last of Us. Every game has this while some do better then others.

Accomplishment can come from completing the 'journey' but can also come from the game play as well, for example

Sometimes the 'Accomplishment' comes from beating tough enemies like in Dark Souls
Sometimes the 'Accomplishment' comes from beating lots of enemies like in EDF
Sometimes the 'Accomplishment' comes from getting the top score like in Pac Man
'Accomplishments' can even be things like 'achievements' or 'trophies' which incentivise playing games multiple times and gives players some bragging rights and the like

Both as a gamer and a developer i find these two concepts fairly important when it comes to games but the most important aspect out of all is 'how fun is it' which can be a totally different thing all together

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On what makes things bad? to much can be bad from some perspectives. This is refered to as 'feature bloat' and can often lead to players being somewhat confused as to what is the best, potentially turns a game into a 'spreadsheet simulator' and makes balance difficult to achieve. Now dont get me wrong i do tend to prefer games with more features/content but like everything it has to be done right or potentially just ends up making the game worse
 
Especially in tabletop RPGs, designers often seem to be chasing a very specific experience of their own, and this doesn't always translate into mechanics. The designer wants you to play a certain way and focus on certain things, but may not be aware of how their mechanics reward players for doing something else.

But as that industry seems to be run mostly by fan/hobbyists, this probably isn't surprising. DnD is pretty bad but it not the worst; some games are almost defined by the specific experience they strive for, and if you're not sympathetic to this or play 'wrong' they fall apart/rapidly inflate/are boring.

I'd like someone who's played modern RPGs to have a discussion about why RPGs have clunky and mathematically optimisable point build systems when board and miniatures games have card/ability build systems that seem to support a wider range of outcomes. This is especially galling (to me) when it appears that the designers don't understand that 2d6 isn't equally distributed and +1 at 7 and +1 and 10 mean different things, or don't understand that percentages involve multiplication.
 
Sublink said:
I'd like someone who's played modern RPGs to have a discussion about why RPGs have clunky and mathematically optimisable point build systems when board and miniatures games have card/ability build systems that seem to support a wider range of outcomes.
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If I understood you correctly, it's because of implementation and production values.

In DnD-like systems you have, say, eleven character classes. Your characters use them, enemies use them, they are more or less balanced against each other, they all have animations, VFX, scripts, sound effects, roleplay integration and whatever else.

Now, let's expand it. We have twenty-eight classes now, and since we're talking RPGs I will assume we have production values of "Pillars of Eternity". We have more abilities to implement in-game, we have more ways of character progression to design, we have tons of technical work (animations, VFX, scripts, sound effects) and it all has to be balanced because tabletop design might not exactly translate onto a game engine. This is probably several months and hundreds of thousands of dollars of work you have to do for now real gain to either players or your team.

It all comes to workload, in the end.
 
Morphic Tide said:
Summoning
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I'm going to talk about how games other than D&D handle summong:
In GURPS, being able to summon something requires buying an Ally, probably with the x4 cost multiplier for being always available and another +100% after factoring in appearance. Unless your summon is very weak or you have a great many points, being able to summon something takes up a noticeable chunk of your points. And if you want to be able to summon two things at the same time, that costs eve more points. (Having Alternate Abilities on a summonable Ally is something you'd need to run by the GM)

In Exalted, while summoning is the low-hanging fruit of Sorcery, getting to it requires one charm and two spells, and needs a high Occult rating. While this isn't that much of an investment, summoning also takes in-game resources, and more importantly, time. The fastest summoning is still an hour-long ritual that needs to be performed at a certain time, and then you can't just poof whatever you summoned the moment having it around would be slightly awkward.

In Shadowrun summoning requires both an investment of plenty of Karma into the relevant skills, and in-game resources. In addition, the more spirits you have bound, the harder it is to summon and bind more spirits. A mage with plenty of skill, time, and resources might have as many as half a dozen spirits to call on, but that number is more likely to be two or three.
Morphic Tide said:
Point-Buy vs. Level-Based
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I prefer point-buy as a player, but recognize that class-and-level is easier from a design standpoint.
 
Melancholeric said:
If I understood you correctly, it's because of implementation and production values.

In DnD-like systems you have, say, eleven character classes. Your characters use them, enemies use them, they are more or less balanced against each other, they all have animations, VFX, scripts, sound effects, roleplay integration and whatever else.

Now, let's expand it. We have twenty-eight classes now, and since we're talking RPGs I will assume we have production values of "Pillars of Eternity". We have more abilities to implement in-game, we have more ways of character progression to design, we have tons of technical work (animations, VFX, scripts, sound effects) and it all has to be balanced because tabletop design might not exactly translate onto a game engine. This is probably several months and hundreds of thousands of dollars of work you have to do for now real gain to either players or your team.

It all comes to workload, in the end.
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I was speaking about tabletop specifically, although through the legacy of expectations that feeds into PC games too. The number of classes isn't as important as the number of styles of play to me; DnD struggling to keep melee characters relevant in 2nd edition, for instance.

It seems to me that it's either easier to balance board games (where there's less or shorter character continuity) or that the style of everything being a 'rules nugget' that's pre-computed or organised is faster and more accessible. It's not perfect (although running a modern card/keyword game on a computer would eliminate the timing and definition issues that usually ensue) but it seems better than games with dozens of pages of lookup tables.

And man games like Shadowrun are interesting if only as an example of how tabletop games seem to feel they're more simulationist than they really are, and struggle with things MMOs etc deal with better (money sinks, fun:downtime, computational complexity vs outcome complexity, by rejecting helpful abstraction.
 
Souls games are the most well-designed in my opinion, and it is for one reason: immersion. It achieves immersion through:

1. You can control your character 99.9% of the time, and all possible actions (attacking, rolling, walking, healing, etc.) are available in almost all situations. Even when you're talking to NPCs, you can use most of your actions. By doing this, the game feels 100% responsive to you, the player.

2. Extremely well designed animations for all weapon movesets. In addition, almost every weapon has something unique to them, and rarely do you find weapons that are simply upgraded versions of a previous weapon with higher stats (Nioh failed in this aspect).

3. Unbelievably detailed levels. DS1, DS3, and Bloodborne are the masters of this. You can play through the game multiple times and still notice new details in the environment. Every set piece matters, and every aspect of the architecture contributes to the lore and atmosphere of each area.

4. Very well-designed enemies and bosses. It's also one of the few series that seems to get better with each iteration, with the exception of DS2. BB and DS3's bosses are far more complex and unique, for the most part, than the average boss from DS1 or DS2.

5. "Gamey" aspects of souls, such as invasions or co-op, are seamlessly integrated into the game's world itself with items and characters containing lore that makes multiplayer consistent with the story. Of course, the real explanation "time is convoluted" is lazy, but it's at least an explanation...

That said, Souls games may be extremely well designed, but that doesn't mean they are the most impactful video games for me, as I find that they lack emotionally gripping stories. It's hard to feel a sense of being captivated by the world's stories and characters that other, more story-driven games achieve when I play Souls.
 
Sublink said:
In my opinion, level-based systems only exist because of the computational power available when RPGs became a thing. People do it because it's a convention, because in 1978 people pre-calculated lookup tables and used character sheets. That it directly leads to power creep, hitpoint inflation, and the horrors of sudden jumps in power wasn't important because it'd take you ages to get to level 7 anyway. I won't even go into the madness of character creation you can 'get wrong' or spend hours on.
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Level-based systems are meant to support cohesive class-based systems. The main advantage to a good class-based system is that every class has an identity. Since classes can force a certain type of progression, it allows a designer to create a thematic set of abilities that work well together without worrying about interactions outside of that class. Level-based progression ensures a class will maintain it's identity while still allowing for some customization. For example, a musketeer class would get +musket skill, +fencing, +romantic style, and +lore( honor code culture) with every level as a baseline, which ensures the character feels like a musketeer regardless of the player's choices.
 
Good game design seems to be quite different for different genres of game as well as different types of players. For example, any kind of GMed system should probably try to minimize math needed; while I love RPGs where I can earn individual stat points and skill levels by doing relevant activities, this kind of system is really burdensome on a GM. (Which I found out by running one.) On the other hand, for real-time combat in video games, as a player I've found that it's demotivational to have combat math going by so fast that you can't figure out which attacks or sequences are more efficient than others, so you have no idea how to improve your tactical use of your abilities.
 
PraiseVectron said:
Level-based systems are meant to support cohesive class-based systems. The main advantage to a good class-based system is that every class has an identity. Since classes can force a certain type of progression, it allows a designer to create a thematic set of abilities that work well together without worrying about interactions outside of that class. Level-based progression ensures a class will maintain it's identity while still allowing for some customization. For example, a musketeer class would get +musket skill, +fencing, +romantic style, and +lore( honor code culture) with every level as a baseline, which ensures the character feels like a musketeer regardless of the player's choices.
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I'd agree that that's probably the intention, but I'm not sure it's effective or most effective. In particular, classes in DnD have only the vaguest identity due to their genericness, and in skillless systems this wouldn't be possible. The same goal can be achieved in reverse (goal qualification) or sidestepped entirely (any other form of ability linking or fluff). Not every game is a simulationist 'level up your knowing Italian skill' game, after all.

But what I was really getting at was things like hit dice and spell tables and item unlocks and other tiered content. Players couldn't work this stuff out in real time (especially as many games already had hour-long battles) so they were pre-calculated and thus had sudden steps instead of graceful curves. This isn't necessary anymore and much more organic relationships between changing variables are possible. RPGs typically don't do it because (in my view) the hobbyist factor makes them almost intentionally backward.

This again leads me to my feeling of the dofference between old fashioned games and modern games; endless tables and monster manuals and elaborate integer based maths vs agility, speed, iteration, and on-content rules.

I mean I made a game statistically similar to btech in three days, that plays way faster and has more involved physical play and player interaction. But the only people who want games like that want old fashioned ones; the market is not an innovation market.
 
I do wonder whether people talking about "modern" tabletop RPG design have played much in the way of modern designs. D&D is older than the Atari 2600. GURPS is thirty years old. Shadowrun and the Storyteller system (World of Darkness) are over twenty. They've had new editions, of course, but any new edition of an existing tabletop RPG meets with vitriolic pushback and any that makes real, substantive improvement to the mechanics takes that to a completely different level.

Games like x World, Cortex+, even FATE (which is pushing twenty if you trace its lineage back to FUDGE) or the tightly purposed games from the Forge don't suffer most of the problems discussed here, largely because they didn't have to offer sops to people who wanted deliberately retrograde mechanics.

(Interestingly, original D&D doesn't suffer a lot of the problems discussed here, provided you know its intended model of play. The history of tabletop RPGs starts with catastrophic misunderstanding and misappropriations of what was actually a pretty tightly designed, if not tightly written, game.)
 
I love that I managed to actually revive a thread and make it live.

At any rate, when it comes to the "legacy mechanics," the key to working around them is to figure out how to make the problems go away without losing the basic idea of them. Like how 5e D&D added upcasting effects to make spells take up better effects, while pruning the lists with it and cutting out the crazy utility powers. Standardizing spell progression and spell level also helped.

Granted, the overall power level of D&D is a lot lower in 5e, and the mechanics are fundamentally incompatible with several D&D settings, Ebberon being an important example, but 5e does show that very important parts of the game can be made more balanced. As has been mentioned, a lot of the problem with D&D like games is spell bloat.
 
shanewallis said:
Every game is different but something that is important for all of them is that they give the player a sense of accomplishment.
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To build on and clarify this point, I would say that a game should at the very least leave the player feeling that their time was well spent. If they get to the end and regret investing ten or a hundred hours in the experience, or just feel empty and bland, then the game has failed.

If you get to the end of the game having "accomplished" nothing in the conventional sense but still feel some sense of satisfaction for having partaken in the experience, then the game has succeeded. Like, I didn't feel "accomplished" by the end of Season One of Telltale's TWD but I damn well felt like the experience hadn't been a waste.
 
Morphic Tide said:
Granted, the overall power level of D&D is a lot lower in 5e, and the mechanics are fundamentally incompatible with several D&D settings, Ebberon being an important example, but 5e does show that very important parts of the game can be made more balanced. As has been mentioned, a lot of the problem with D&D like games is spell bloat.
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But that runs into a business issue. A relatively-large RPG company that relies upon the book sales of a single flagship game needs consistent sales over a long period of time. Aside from the core rules, PC customization options are the best selling book type by far. But new core rules books means new editions, or at least half editions like 3.5/pathfinder, and those can only come every half decade. So the reliance on more and more PC customization books inevitably leads to spell bloat, feat bloat, gear bloat, and prestige class bloat. To avoid this catastrophic bloat, a company needs to drop at least one of three characteristics above.

Of course, those three business issues are not the only cause of spell/feat/prestige/gear bloat. Nerds love their lists after all.

EDIT: This thread comes back to D&D so often, because D&D represents the tabletop RPG industry in a way no video game does. It as been decades since "FPS" replaced the term "Doom-clone". But I still hear people use "D&D" to refer to the entire class of tabletop RPGs. I bet most self-styled nerds do not know of anything outside D&D and games directly descended from D&D. Many people do not play tabletop RPGs, they play D&D.

But if you want to talk about the latest in game design, the board games Gloomhaven and Mage Knight represent the cutting edge in combat-heavy dungeon crawlers. These two games do not have much storytelling, but they represent a massive break from normal D&D combat.
 
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Again, this seems to be a discussion of an aggressive (I would say virulently) anti-modern design. D&D 5e is a less modern tabletop game than OD&D, in every way except the accident of when it came out. It's the banner-bearer for what I'm talking about when I say if you want to compare modern tabletop RPGs to modern board or card games, you can't look at games whose first editions came out in 1974.

It would be like saying video games lag behind card games because a graphical update of Pong came out in 2013, regardless of what else came out that year.
 
So, SV, what are your favorite kinds of open world?

Personally, I'm fond of small but dense open worlds like Yakuza's Kamurocho.
 
LSkullD said:
So, SV, what are your favorite kinds of open world?
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I would say that a good open world requires at least these two things:
1. It has to feel alive
2. It has to stay exciting while you play - no map clearing

So, in a good open world settlements feels like they are inhabited by people, in a bad open world settlements feels like the are inhabited by faceless drones.
In a good open world, you have a chance of a good random encounter even after you have beaten the main story. In a bad open world, the game feels like a wasteland after you have 100%ed it.
(Basically Bethesda does open world better than Ubisoft)
 
My requirements for an open world are more like:
1. The NPCs must feel like real people, or at least anime characters, in terms of personality and their reactions to the player's actions.
2. The game must give the player opportunities to express their personality (or the personality they are roleplaying) and the game must recognize and give positive feedback on the player's choices and actions.

I've only participated in an open-world game design project once, but we chose Skyrim as our base inspiration, plus some input from GTA and Assassin's Creed. We looked at the two opposite ends of the spectrum of what players want to do in this kind of game, identifying them as A. court/marry NPCs and B. serial kill all NPCs or certain factions of NPCs. For other reasons the game was supposed to have a turn-based party combat system, so we also identified that C. players want to collect party members, as in Suikoden. And of course the usual RPG gameplay desires D. Solve NPCs' problems and get paid for it, and E. Have reasons to hunt monsters and explore nearby places, e.g. quests. We wanted to make sure that each area was pretty much self-contained, so quests didn't send you across the country or pull you in two conflicting directions, but instead the player was free to travel to other areas whenever they wanted, excluding doors which were locked with puzzles and needed to be unlocked first.
 
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