quote: Original post by MadKeithV

Just take this observation:
the, currently, most advanced implementation of the D&D rules on the master-of-all-calculations, the Personal Computer, OMITS a lot of the rules that D&D has.

Maybe they didn''t omit enough of them. Or maybe the rules are just not suited for a PC game, and no subset of them will work properly.

As far as I understand it NWN is Real-Time game, which right there is hugely different from D&D. The old Gold Box games were pretty close to D&D I think, because they could model turns as actual turns. D&D is a turn based game, essentially.

quote:
This is how it can be leveraged - gradual advancement, a granularity that is a LOT finer than what pen-and-paper offer, a sense of continuity, and also, not abstracting things that should not be abstracted, just because they are "too hard to calculate".

I agree, but I would point out that "too hard to calculate" and "too confusing or non-obvious" to calculate are two different things. Forget the calculation, you have to be judicious about what should be included at all. If you want to include blood loss that''s great, but as the player I had better understand how it happens, what it does, if I am suffering from it and to what extent, how to correct it, how to avoid it the next time, etc. If I try to swing at a monster and my character is soaked in blood and sluggish and falling over and I miss that makes sense, obviously blood loss is hurting me. If the only indicator I have is that my energy bar is low and slowly draining, when I miss I will think the system is pretty haphazard.

What people need to realize is that in real life we have real feedback! If I talk to someone in real life it might very well be a mix of charisma, intelligence, looks, etc. But if the conversation does not go well generally I know why. Maybe a certain phrase I said turned them off, maybe they were obviously uninterested from the start - or maybe I could tell they were attracted to me but as the conversation went on I bored them. In a game if you fail your "charisma + intelligence + looks roll" how do you know why you just failed? Are you supposed to figure out that Elves don''t like how Dwarves look and that''s why that Elf didn''t talk to you?

What I am saying is that it isn''t enough that things have logical explanations. As a player I need to see the cause and effect, I have to have some idea of WHAT the explanations are. It isn''t enough to say "our system is very well thought out, trust us, everything happens for a reason." I have to have a pretty good idea of why things are happening to me, other than "I must have failed my intillegence + charisma + looks test."

It might make sense to you as a designer that if I get hit in the head with a club I am dizzy and miss more often. But unless you put little circling dizzy stars over my head when the club hits me I''m not going to know why I keep missing, and it is going to piss me off. As I pointed out above, in real life you KNOW exactly why you miss. Maybe they dodged, maybe you feel sluggish due to lack of food, maybe you are having trouble seeing - you can model those things if you want but you have to give the player good feedback, since they don''t get any natural feedback that they would in real life.

quote: Original post by AnonPoster
Maybe they didn't omit enough of them. Or maybe the rules are just not suited for a PC game, and no subset of them will work properly.

Yeah that's the point I was trying to make

quote: Original post by AnonPoster
As far as I understand it NWN is Real-Time game, which right there is hugely different from D&D. The old Gold Box games were pretty close to D&D I think, because they could model turns as actual turns. D&D is a turn based game, essentially.

It's semi-real-time... you can see how long a "round" takes, and it goes at a pace that makes it reasonably easy to decide what you'll do next without being twitchy... but that tradeoff (trying to look real-time while still trying to keep a lot of the turn-based-ness of D&D) I think is what hurts the game the most.

quote: Original post by AnonPoster
I agree, but I would point out that "too hard to calculate" and "too confusing or non-obvious" to calculate are two different things.
...
As a player I need to see the cause and effect, I have to have ome idea of WHAT the explanations are. It isn't enough to say "our system is very well thought out, trust us, everything happens for a reason." I have to have a pretty good idea of why things are happening to me, other than "I must have failed my intillegence + charisma + looks test."

As somewhat of an interface-freak, and having always been interested in games, I can't help but agree. I'd go further: if something happens, and the player doesn't know about it, then it didn't need to happen. Anything that does not provide feedback is useless. And indeed, this feedback needs to be better than a little text-balloon saying something cryptic like "Conversation test: D20, result: 4 + charisma 12 = 16, against DC 25, failure."
She better say something like "you think I'm impressed by that? Take a hike boy.", at least that's REAL feedback.

Start by stripping out everything you know you can't simulate very well (may depend on your skill as a designer/programmer), and flesh out those things you CAN simulate really well. And perhaps the focus should shift off of combat, since that's been done much better in FPS/RTS type games anyway. Spend design/programming resources on non-combat stuff.

It would, in my opinion, be really nice if you could really influence certain happenings by talking to people. That big badass orc captain that you KNOW will whip your ass if you get into fisticuffs with him? Well, he's not the brightest bulb in the box, and you're mighty persuasive, so lets impress him by talking to him and convincing him of all the really bad things that would happen should he kick your hiney. (In D&D terms, you've just "defeated" a 5th level warrior with a 1st level whatever, by using strengths other than your prowess with a pointy sharp thing, and more options like that can't be a bad thing, can they?). And this shouldn't be scripted, it should be a standard action through conversation - you can (try) to talk to anyone in the game, hostile or not. Of course, mindless zombies aren't going to be responsive, but then again, a mindless zombie generally isn't particularly dangerous to you unless you REALLY don't want to avoid it.


Heh, maybe I'm saying something along the lines of "yeah, we know computers are really weak at doing conversation stuff, so lets leverage that weakness, and actually pour the conversation idea into an actual game mechanic". Not too complex, but enough depth to make you feel as if the free-form conversation of pen-and-paper at least has been replaced by a not-so-free-form conversation mechanic, instead of just clicking through oodles of text that don't do anything.

[edited by - MadKeithV on July 25, 2002 6:31:11 AM]

quote: Original post by MadKeithV
Yes, it is, I guess. Mostly because the discussions I''ve had have always stemmed from the hopeless combat rules and resolutions in CRPGS. As Kylotan said, in pen-and-paper, there''s a reason for simple rules, and I don''t mind, but when I see those simple awkward rules badly translated onto a computer just for the sake of more-or-less sticking to those rules, I get a shiver running down my spine.

My concern is this: Lets suppose you spend months designing and balancing a nice detailed combat system. How exactly does this improve the game?

Combat may be a bit more realistic, but you also add a bit of complexity and lose familiarity, so this is a potentially dubious benefit. If you design the rules well enough, you may add some strategy to the combat.

But in the grand scheme of things, you haven''t really changed the way the game plays at all. It''s still hack and slash.

The point I am trying to make is that while the AD&D rules aren''t the greatest and most realistic combat rules imaginable, there are some advantages to using a known ruleset, and changing them is not going to help the other parts of the CRPG genre which need more attention. Like the experience system, PC/NPC interactions, etc.

For example: Apart from the odd scripted encounter, in Baldur''s Gate the only way to gain experience was to either kill things, or complete missions. Since completing missions usually required you to kill a certain number of things, this means that your primary source of experience is to kill things. Also, you cannot go through the whole game at level 1: you MUST gain experience in order to be able to complete the game.

To cut a long story short, your goal is ''Get high enough experience to complete the game'' and the only viable way of acheiving this goal is to ''kill things''. Hence the prevailing hack and slash gameplay.

In a P&P game, a good DM will give you experience for doing things which suit your character. A paladin will only get experience for killing things if their death is justified. A mage will get experience for using spells in an intelligent and useful manner, which may or may not directly result in something being killed. A priest should get experience for spreading word of his deity and doing deeds in the name of that deity in order to demonstrate its greatness, etc. The game is a bit more than hack and slash.

My thinking is that it would make more difference spending your cpu cycles on a more detailed experience reward system than you would on a more detailed combat system.

quote: Original post by Sandman
My thinking is that it would make more difference spending your cpu cycles on a more detailed experience reward system than you would on a more detailed combat system.

From what I have seen in CRPGs, the entire ruleset barely makes a dent in the CPU cycles anyway - it''s not going to be until it actually uses up enough resources to get noticed that there''s going to be a "wow" moment, an actual improvement of which the players will say "that''s really nice."

And no, it definately should not go into combat alone, but since combat is a very large part of CRPGs, it should get some attention. First, it should get some attention to become slightly less of a dominant power in the genre. Example: started a rogue character last night in NWN, and got killed in the first major encounter, without ever having a decent chance to get away from it. Yeah sure, there''s 10 gazillion stats for a rogue, but what difference do they all really make? Not a whole lot.
So, first, redress the balance, rethink the strategy for designing an RPG, and make it so that combat is important, but not the main focus of the game.

Then, I want to use some of the cycles I might have freed up in the first part, and a lot of extra cycles I''m demanding from the GFX and Sound guys, and spice up combat. Not more detailed, necessarily, more spicy. I want shields to get stuck in the way, weapons swinging wildly, characters staggering, furniture getting knocked over, people falling over furniture, that kind of thing. Hey, if you take a good look at the ruleset for D&D, those kinds of situations are in there, but they are abstracted into hits and misses and damage and flatfootedness and knockdown and etc... etc... etc... Instead of having a section in the manual explaining why I''m only seeing my character take one swing every 5 seconds (the "a combat round is an abstraction of a lot of stabbing and jabbing and moving around, and your hit roll is simply the total result of that 5 seconds"-talk), lets see the character doing that jabbing and stabbing and moving around, dynamically. So the end result is the same, but the path there is much nicer to look at, more believable, more of a world to lose yourself in.

BUT, that same treatment must be given to other sections too - conversation, research, learning... (learning is very important for mages!). Even exploration, since that can be a lot of fun too.

quote: ...spice up combat. Not more detailed, necessarily, more spicy. I want shields to get stuck in the way, weapons swinging wildly, characters staggering, furniture getting knocked over, people falling over furniture, that kind of thing.

More of a show, a spectacle, than a 'hit/miss'.

I'd like to share part of the most recent battle round in a PbEM that I participate in to show just how a 'spectacle' is more fun than 'hit/miss':

"Meanwhile, Serena has her own problems. Two of the creatures are charging towards her, when one of them stumbles to a halt just in front of her, staring at something behind her. She takes advantage of it's lack of concentration, and slams her longsword into it (OOC: 10hp damage). With a surprised and shocked look on it's face, it is thrown backwards, where it rolls back to it's feet snarling. Blood seeps through it's clawed hand as it clasps it's wound. Serena has no time to notice however, for the other
creature is not distracted by whatever had caused the other one to falter, and literally pounces on Serena, spinning her round as it rakes her with it's claws. There is the pinking noise of chainmail links splitting, and Serena feel's a sharp pain in her side (OOC: 4hp damage). As Serena staggers, trying to keep her balance, the creature bounces away and turns, ready to pounce again."

In a 'hit/miss' system, this would come down to "player 1 hits enemy 1, 10 damage; enemy 2 hits player 1, 4 damage".

I think it might be a good idea to start out by thinking of combat as purely visual entertainment. If you can design it so that as merely a spectator it is fun to watch two non-player characters fight, it would undoubtedly be as much fun (hopefully more), to watch that same fight but as a participant.

You decide what sort of visuals you want to be able to include (shields to get stuck in the way, weapons swinging wildly, characters staggering, furniture getting knocked over, people falling over furniture) and then you figure out a way to create (hidden) statistics and a system to make it so.

One of my friends enjoys watching two AI football teams play a match on his PS2. Although that would bore me, he would be the perfect test subject for the entertainment-oriented combat system.

quote: Instead of having a section in the manual explaining why I'm only seeing my character take one swing every 5 seconds (the "a combat round is an abstraction of a lot of stabbing and jabbing and moving around, and your hit roll is simply the total result of that 5 seconds"-talk), lets see the character doing that jabbing and stabbing and moving around, dynamically.

This would also be perfect to give the player the ability to set his fighter in a certain fighting mode. Aggressive mode: character stays close to enemy, trying to create openings by jabbing and stabbing continuously. Defensive mode: character tries to stay beyond the reach of his enemy's weapon while looking for an opening.
It also would be a perfect way to show a visual difference in fighting styles. The thief (to use a cheesy example) would be able to use his agility to move quickly, circling around his enemy, jumping, rolling, etc. The big burly fighter would prefer to pretty much stay in one location, choosing to preserve his energy for his swordarm.

The automatic actions that take place in the 5 seconds would create a unique fighter. The actions could depend on the skills of the fighter, so it would constantly show off the progress of the character ('Man, look at that sweet spin move! I told you my fighter is an excellent acrobat!').

quote: So the end result is the same, but the path there is much nicer to look at, more believable, more of a world to lose yourself in.

Yes, the actual 'hit/miss' would be the same, but the combat will be a true spectacle, something to behold.

[edited by - Silvermyst on July 25, 2002 10:48:30 AM]

quote: Original post by Kylotan
One example, which is one that MadKeithV has repeated for me, is the whole ''hit points'' concept. A level 1 fighter will have somewhere between 5 and 10 hit points in most AD+D games. (They have ''d10 hit die'', which means they get, on average, 5 or 6 hit points per level.) Most weapons deal 3 to 4 points of damage in a hit. This means that most level 1 fighters will die if they sustain 2 hits in a fight - not uncommon. When you''re sat around the table, the Dungeon Master who makes the roll to hit the player may pretend to have missed, in order to spare the fighter. In Baldur''s Gate, there is no benevolent Dungeon Master interested in the flow of the game, so you end up reloading every half hour or so. Despite being a game about heroes, the AD+D hit point system translates appallingly to computer form at 1st level.

Of course, when you hit 2nd level, your capacity for taking damage has doubled, and your chance of dealing damage has risen too, not to mention any additional skills or abilities. So you are now at something like 250% of your previous fighting capacity. Most of the encounters that were too hard at level 1 are now a walkover as you pass the magical lv1 -> lv2 mark. Again, this is very evident in Baldur''s Gate. This doesn''t lend itself well to game balance as you have to either have very distinct Level 1 and Level 2 zones, which means that the player loses access to a lot of content, or you need to dynamically tweak the encounters, which feels artificial as someone already stated. Worse of all, subsequent levels do not confer the same kind of advantage for mathematical reasons: level 3 is something like 170% of level 2, level 4 is something like 140% of level 5, and so on - the relative benefits of each level slow down, while the amount of experience needed each time goes exponentially up. The system''s progress curve starts off too sleep and levels out too quickly to make for good game balance or use of content.

The thing that you seem to be missing is that the most knowledge and ability is gained during the first... call it month of actual combat experience. Your warrior with a month worth of combat experience is easily worth 2 completely unseasoned warriors. The increased gain of further experience is minimal compared to the experience gained in that first period of time. That''s the way it is in the real world. A computer technician will learn more in his first month fixing computers than he will in the second and more in the second than he will in the third and so forth. I can''t say for sure that after 7 years of being a computer technician/network engineer that I would necessarily be any better or worse than someone with only 5 years experience because the experience gain is so minimal at this level.

quote: And there''s more wrong with hit points - in the pen and paper form they are a necessary abstraction of physical health, ability to dodge and deflect blows, the ability to ignore pain, and so on. Keeping track of all those on paper would be a nightmare (although it hasn''t stopped AD+D trying to bolt those sorts of features on afterwards to placate the ''realism'' camp). But in a computer game, we don''t need to abstract numerous stats down into one stat. The computer is more than capable of handling them all with a few trivial calculations. You can have separate scores for Dodging, Parrying, Ignoring Pain, Absorbing Damage, and everything else. If you want your players to see all these stats, you can show them. If you want a simplified interface, just perform the relevant mathematics that will get used in the attack roll and show that score as a ''Defence'' stat or whatever.

The problem with this plan is that higher level critters do more damage, battles last longer, etc... How are you going to represent the ability to ignore pain? The thing that most people who make calls for this seem to forget is that the rule sets for most computer games are painfully simple. My tank''s attack rating is 7, armor rating 9. My cavalry''s is 4/2. Now I roll computer ''dice'' to see whether either destroys the other. This isn''t far from most computer game realities.

CRPG rule sets aren''t designed over night. The more complex you make it, the higher chance of there being an exploit found. To really make a good, complex RPG rule set would take literally months of work while doing very little else. Then you have to have coders implement it correctly. Then it has to scale appropriately and maintain some semblance of balance or everyone will play a couple of highly powered classes and ignore the other ''less equal'' classes. So now you have to spend 4 months designing the system, then spend a couple of months implementing it, then spend another 6 months trying to balance it, you''re invariably going to run into a snag that causes a serious problem. A warrior with the ''flurry of death'' attack and the priest with the ''focus of the dervish'' spell working together can take out critters twice their level. If you weaken either one they end up being potentially useless, but together they''re devastating.

To sum up: RPGs are amazingly difficult to design and even harder to balance.

quote: The same goes for Armor Class, THAC0, and other AD+D statistics... the system they use is an oversimplification, good for pen and paper, poor for computer games... ...The weight and quality of the armour can affect the chance of dodging, and the type and quality of the armour can affect the amount of damage reduction per hit. This is trivial to do on a computer, and the player doesn''t need to know the details...

It''s not trivial to design and balance though. There are reasons why most computer games have simple rule sets, easier to design and balance. Abstracting away all of those effects means that your players can understand the game. Even with computer games it''s important to understand what does what. Trying to understand what of 50 different calculations is most important is just too much.

quote: That''s not all, of course. The rest of the rules are not exactly simple or intuitive either. AD+D has numerous different resolution mechanics that it uses: attack rolls, saving throws, skill rolls, and so on. In 3rd Edition these have been standardised somewhat, but in the past you had a system where some stats were better when they were lower, some stats were better when they were higher, and so on. All in all, a mass of confusion just to make the dice rolls easier to remember.

OK. First you complain because it''s too simple, then you complain that it''s too complicated... which is it?

quote: All this is pointless in a computer game - bigger should always be better, because that is most intuitive, and handle the awkwardness of subtracting one thing from the other behind the scenes.

So in a computer it should always be ''bigger is better'' because it''s largely irrelevant? Huh? It shouldn''t matter if it''s bigger is better, smaller is better or closer to extremes is better because the player never sees it. More intuitive? Who cares?!?! The player doesn''t ever see it, the only people who see it are the programmers, who can write it as complex as it needs to be or as simple.

quote: The class system is horrible too

I agree with this statement, but the rest of the paragraph is just more of your railing against D&D in all of it''s forms. If you don''t like that system, go pick up RoleMaster or Palladium, where it is much closer to what you are looking for.

quote: Ok, I could go on criticising the mechanics as applied to computer roleplaying games all day, but you get the point.

Well, actually you could go on for days criticizing D&D and it''s derivatives for the computer. You haven''t addressed any of the Elder Scrolls series at all. What about UO? Everquest where Armor actually has absorption factor and deflection factor, but the player only sees Armor Class, plus has many of the other facets that you complain about games not having (dodging and so forth). Many of them do have a lot of the ''too many hp'' problems that you point out, but I think that is more of an effect that gamers want to see a visible reward for their time in the form of HP, AC and increased level, something that 90% of the CRPG players can understand, since most of them have played D&D in some form or other.

quote: As for the ruleset being playtested and balanced... I don''t think it is balanced at all, although I obviously cannot argue about the playtested part.

So you want games that are more complex, but don''t think that the more complex ones (or at least the example given) are balanced? Do you think that the reduced balance is because of poor design, too much complexity, not the right complexity (or complex in the wrong ways) or just poor implementation?

quote: the system itself could have 100 variables for working out whether you hit or miss, yet it could still present a nice and simple "Attack" score on your character sheet if the programmer wanted.

Unfortunately you only address one system (D&D) and ignore so many other systems out there that do exactly what you suggest and have been doing so for several years... probably since before you ever played D&D (I think that Palladium came out in 83 or somewhere around there and RuneQuest I think it came out around the same time and it was much more complex and probably implemented just about everything that you suggest, but it was a PnP RPG and there are any number of CRPG systems) or any RPG for that matter.

quote: Sorry for the long post.

If your post consisted of more than railing against only one system I wouldn''t have minded. Point out games (there is more than one game system out there, in case you didn''t know) that do it right and maybe point out ways to improve those systems. Jumping around insulting the one game that really created the entire genre of RPG while ignoring every other RPG out there is just silly. That''s like asking what is wrong with FPS games and only mentioning Doom while ignoring Unreal, Half Life, Serious Sam and every other fps game out there that may or may not have the same problems that Doom had.

Now Ive got here...

Im trying a new approach, well not new I thought it up a decade ago and only now is it starting to se the light of day.

To give a continous environment the ''world'' is going to be a collection of simms. If all goes to plan it will evolve whatever you do, but how it develops is affected by what you do.

Combat exists but is real time speed specific and doesnt use hit points the way D&D does although they are there to measure damage. This will mean that a personal style is as important as strength etc.

You grow up in this game (and yes you and others can and will die of old age although players have means to stave it off if they wish for a LONG time). BUT you as a player may leave your possessions as a legacy to your offspring (told you it was a simm as well).

To simplify, you cant simply grasp the formula that control things, they are simle but interact to form far too complex patterns (OK Ive read too much chaos theory). This means that you can have a feel for your character but cant ''know'' what will happen all the time.

Im also including a huge set of abilities that are not combat skills such as disguise and perception (thieves have one, city watch the other etc) so that your character can be what you want him to be more than a few fixed classes with a set path.

Anyway, I could go on about this all night (pet project and all that) but what I want to show is that AD&D is a good place to start but a combat/character definition system is only the starting point and pen and paper systems are limited to the time/patience and nunber of dice you can really use, we have more processing power available now than a university ten years ago so use it!

Right, Im off for coffee!

Regards

BaelWrath

If it is not nailed down it''s mine and if I can prise it loose,
it''s not nailed down!

quote: Original post by solinear
The thing that you seem to be missing is that the most knowledge and ability is gained during the first... call it month of actual combat experience. Your warrior with a month worth of combat experience is easily worth 2 completely unseasoned warriors.

I wasn''t arguing about whether it was realistic or not, I was arguing that:

- it isn''t fun
- it isn''t balanced

That''s all. You''re correct in what you say, but I don''t think it''s all that relevant for a computer game.

quote: CRPG rule sets aren''t designed over night. The more complex you make it, the higher chance of there being an exploit found. To really make a good, complex RPG rule set would take literally months of work while doing very little else.

I don''t want more complexity, I want more factors. It''s not the same thing. Again, as in Civilisation, where there are many things that can affect combat, but the mechanic is simple and transparent. It makes sense. AD+D is a mass of abstractions where there should be more detail and detail where there should be more abstraction. It was initially designed to be a simple game, and then masses of complications were tacked onto it.

quote: To sum up: RPGs are amazingly difficult to design and even harder to balance.

No, you just need a rudimentary grasp of probability and statistics, which most computer game designers appear not to have. Besides, balancing a CRPG is easier than a tabletop one as you know exactly which actions are available at all times. There''s no excuse really.

quote: OK. First you complain because it''s too simple, then you complain that it''s too complicated... which is it?

Did I say too simple? I thought I was making the point that some mechanics are overly abstract, which is not the same as ''simple''. I mean, the very concept of ''THAC0'' is a big abstraction, but a 5-word abbreviation and the concept it addresses is hardly simple.

quote: So in a computer it should always be ''bigger is better'' because it''s largely irrelevant? Huh? It shouldn''t matter if it''s bigger is better, smaller is better or closer to extremes is better because the player never sees it. More intuitive? Who cares?!?! The player doesn''t ever see it, the only people who see it are the programmers, who can write it as complex as it needs to be or as simple.

Are you actually reading what I wrote in context, or just piecing random sentences together? I didn''t say "irrelevant" there, just like I didn''t say "simple" above. What I am saying is that the AD+D rules abstract away interesting features in the interest of only having 2 or 3 dice rolls to resolve something. But this abstraction damages the system in ways I have explained. The player ''sees'' these problems in the fact that full plate mail does not reduce how much damage a weapon does when it hits. In a computer game, where you do not have to worry about how many dice rolls are being made, there''s no good reason to cut all thise detail out or to combine disparate concepts into on. The result is that the player will see the game reacting in more intuitive ways (armour reducing damage, for example). Just because the player does not see the inner workings of the system - which can be a good thing - does not mean they don''t appreciate the correlation between inputs and outputs.

quote: Well, actually you could go on for days criticizing D&D and it''s derivatives for the computer. You haven''t addressed any of the Elder Scrolls series at all. What about UO?

I think this shows you have utterly missed the point. Why should I complain about these games when I have no problem with them? I am complaining about the use of the inappropriate AD+D ruleset in computer games, and derivatives. It is an example of a game that works well on paper but poorly on the computer. Other games have rules that work well on computer but would be hideously tedious on the tabletop. And some would work well in both settings - I would suggest the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay system would for example, apart from the low ability to sustain damage.

quote: Unfortunately you only address one system (D&D) and ignore so many other systems out there that do exactly what you suggest and have been doing so for several years...

...except few of them are at all popular in computer role-playing games, much to my perpetual irritation.

quote: Jumping around insulting the one game that really created the entire genre of RPG while ignoring every other RPG out there is just silly.

"Insulting the bad games while ignoring the good games is silly"...!

I am criticising the reliance on an inappropriate game system for many games in the genre. The most popular RPGs at the moment are the D+D ones, which has a very negative implication - that PC game players are putting up with poor game mechanics and balance for some reason. The campaign setting? The nice graphics? The brand name? I''m not sure, but I''d like to see it end.

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quote: Original post by solinear
The thing that you seem to be missing is that the most knowledge and ability is gained during the first... call it month of actual combat experience. Your warrior with a month worth of combat experience is easily worth 2 completely unseasoned warriors.

Kylotan addressed most of your post already, but this I want to pick up on.

Yes - getting better at something gets exponentially harder, more or less. Whatever system I would end up designing, I''m pretty sure would adhere to a rule like that. What is wrong with the D&D-style implementation (again talking most CRPG''s following the D&D/AD&D ruleset), is that after hitting only a few goblins (during which you don''t get any better), all of a sudden *BANG* you''re twice as tough and twice as good at whacking stuff.
Yet, everywhere in the universe that you walk, you see 0-level or if you''re unlucky 1-level NPCs, who seem to be marching to the beat of a different drummer, because if they''d whacked only a few rabid field mice in their time, they''d be 2nd level too. There is no reason that ANYONE in the town guard would not be 2nd level, because they get paid to do that kind of stuff day in, day out. Details, I know, but if it''s that easy to advance in the beginning, then a lot more people should be at that level, and the improvement should be continuous to avoid the huge jumps in the beginning.

Now, when you''re playing around a table, continuous improvement is a pain in the ass - most 5-second combat rounds take half an hour already, without having to adjust your character sheet every second swing. But on a PC, you have more options. So what if some internal stat changes every 5 times you swing your sword? It doesn''t tax the CPU. So, if nothing else, at least the palette of possible solutions is much bigger than any paper-based system. Statistically, that means there''s a high likelihood of a better, more consistent and more balanced solution to be in there too (note: I''m NOT saying more complex, usually it''s the simple rules that make it work!) So why doesn''t this seem to be taken advantage of?



So what am I saying?
Dump abstractions. Simplify. Reduce specific things to their specific purposes. I''ll try to put up a bit of an example, armour (yeah I know, still combat-related, I should spank myself)

Armour reduces how much it hurts when something pokes you. So, the most obvious mechanic to attach to armour is damage reduction. NOT making you harder-to-hit, as the AC modifier of D&D seems to suggest (that''s not actually what it is, but you need to read very deep to understand why exactly they do it this way). Letting armour reduce damage you take is easier to understand for players than the AC modifier (anyone disagree? I''m open for suggestions! This is not a dictatorship ).
That''s at a really basic level, but let''s now say that you divide armour into the bits that go in different places: you have breastplates, armour pants, helms, and armour sleeves. That seems really nice at first - you can play "dress up the dollie". A lot of games do this to some degree. But, in my opinion, you''ve just completely exploded the complexity of armour. You''ve introduced hit locations: "hey, I have leather sleeves, but an adamantite breastplate, so I should get leather damage reduction on my arms, and adamantite on my torso!". Try to abstract this away, and you''ll end up in supreme wishy-washy territory, and a lot of combination rules that Einstein would have trouble deciphering, IMO. So therefore, hit locations. But that implies a change in the attack system, because now you need to be able to HIT these specific locations - if some dude is wearing an "impervious breast plate of the Great Foozle", but baby-soft cotton kneepads, you''re not about to go aiming for the heart, are you?
And in the grand "Keep the User Interface Simple" scheme, you''ve just added target body location selection to your attacks. That''s a very significant increase in interaction complexity - now you can''t just click on the bad dude you want to whack and expect to get a half-decent result. Add AI you say? So, should this AI be based on your combat ability, and there you are sitting at your screen, frustrated at your tweaked and perfected fighter aiming blow after blow into the heart of the dude that''s completely invulnerable there? Well, actually, you can do that, but then you''d need to add layers to the AI, such as "if the player can''t damage the target location after X blows, switch location", or somesuch. And that''s exactly what I''m talking about when I say we need to leverage the power of computers in RPGs. Start simple, think through every layer of complexity you might add, and see how you might solve that layer without further complicating the user-interface.

How many pages of text did I just type? I''m going to get RSI from this thread

Actually, the 'armour making you harder to hit' isn't such a dumb abstraction anyway, and would seem to cut away an awful lot of rather superfluous complexity.

You could implement a system like the one you have described. Or you could just say: My character has this armour, which protects a certain percentage of his body. Therefore, the opponent's chance of hitting a vulnerable location and thus causing signinficant damage is substantially reduced. Factor in a few armour modifiers to take into account different types of armour vs. different types of weapon (don't know if NWN does this, but the 3E rules definitely allow for this) and you have saved yourself an enormous amount of complexity. Hit locations are catered for by the called shot rules. It is certainly a lot easier to develop and balance and probably less bug prone than implementing a variable level AI layer, complex damage models, etc.

Armour does make YOU harder to hit - it does this by being between your soft squishy parts and the sharp objects that are being swung at you. Since becoming familiar with the D&D rules, I realised that the seperate to hit and damage rolls used in systems like Warhammer are really redundant - at the end of the day you really only need to know whether a strike has caused damage or not, and let the DM describe the flow of combat however he likes.

If you need to see if a blow strikes the opponent without harming him, just recalculate the shot against the target's unarmoured AC. If it hits, then the blow was saved by armour. I'm not sure if it does, but NWN could easily calculate this and modify the combat animation accordingly.


[edited by - Sandman on July 26, 2002 8:37:19 AM]