quote: Gama "Like any newcomer to games I made some mistakes when I first starting designing, but you can't learn without making errors. I think the biggest bad habit I had to break was volume of mechanics. You can add twenty pages of supplementary game mechanics to a role-playing game at a cost of pennies on the total print run - but everything you add to a computer game has a cost in both time and money"

Now THAT, I find a very interesting perspective. ld [edited by - liquiddark on December 9, 2003 1:30:25 PM]

You still need to spend time/money to come up with that extra 20 pages of role-playing content and make sure is jives/balances with the rest of the content. Do you think that they just slap the game mechanics togeather and put it out with-out play testing at least a little bit?

quote: Original post by Anonymous Poster
You still need to spend time/money to come up with that extra 20 pages of role-playing content and make sure is jives/balances with the rest of the content. Do you think that they just slap the game mechanics togeather and put it out with-out play testing at least a little bit?

No. But systems don''t have the same level of pathological interaction, because you can rely on human intelligence to work out the bugs. Computers just aren''t intelligence.

ld

quote: ... because you can rely on human intelligence to work out the bugs.

Sometimes anyways...

You can also depend on human intelligence to do many other thinks. Like create the bugs that need to be worked out...

So what does adding new things to a game have to do with math and computers doing it?

It''s comparatively easy to give the player a lot of interactive freedom and choices in a paper game, but providing an adequate interface to enable that in a computer game can be very demanding.

A Paper game really only consitutes a design dock and an extended period of testing. The players voluntarily become the engine and asset creators using the mystical power of imagination, and much debate as to wether bonuses are added befor multipliers.

quote: Original post by liquiddark

quote: Gama
"Like any newcomer to games I made some mistakes when I first starting designing, but you can''t learn without making errors. I think the biggest bad habit I had to break was volume of mechanics. You can add twenty pages of supplementary game mechanics to a role-playing game at a cost of pennies on the total print run - but everything you add to a computer game has a cost in both time and money"

Now THAT, I find a very interesting perspective.

Agreed - it is an interesting perspective, and not really one that I''d really thought of.

I''ve often heard it said on this forum, that game designers should make more use of the computer''s mathematical prowess. Why use a simple d20 system when you can devise more realistic, accurate models which let you target individual body parts, doing specific damage etc, which would require P&P players to have a degree in mathematics and still take forever to work out on paper, but can be done in the blink of an eye on a PC.

This is a good reason why that logic isn''t necessarily correct. The more rules in the system, the more testing you have to do. And while in a P&P game the players can use their imagination to decide what happens in that rare case when an immovable object gets pushed by an irresistable force, the computer can''t - who knows what it''s going to do?

Yup, more advanced => more difficult to implement. But that''s part of the fun! Of course in P&P the players can think that "this is weird, let''s do different from what the rules say", but since the system will be more advanced in a computer game, if it''s done right, it''s more robust (hopefully )

But it is a good point, no argument there. But if I had a choice in my RPG designing that went like this: "I can do this, which is easy to implement but not very good, or that which is more difficult to implement but really cool", I wouldn''t choose the easy way out.

Unless of course maybe if I was working at a game studio with actual money and time I didn''t have enough of


"... the players can use their imagination to decide what happens in that rare case when an immovable object gets pushed by an irresistable force"

haha :D actually, I can''t for the life of me figure out what would happen - the only solution I would see is to roll a die to find out (50/50 chance), and that''s something a computer could do as well. Don''t take that too seriously, I know what you mean.

No computer game has a DM (except MUDs, which are just S&K [screen & keyboard] games anyway), and so implementing amorphous rules will be an exercise in democracy, which as we all know doesn''t work without some kind of hierarchy, which invariably leads to corruption. At least it would in a game world.

So you need the iron rigor of a CPU to maintain order in the world. Sure, I occasionally get hosed by the computer at the bowling alley, but its worth that occasional mishap to know that my buddy isn''t switching our names or erasing my strikes on the sheet. I trust the guys I bowl with (usually), but if fifty guys in masks were bowling (allegorical to online play), you''d want someone impartial to be keeping score and setting the pins. Computers can be very impartial.

quote: Original post by liquiddark
But systems don''t have the same level of pathological interaction, because you can rely on human intelligence to work out the bugs. Computers just aren''t intelligence.

Are you kidding? Pencil-and-paper gamers are often some of the most insidious tricksters out there. If there''s a pathological interaction, you can count on them to find it and milk it for all it''s worth.

"Sneftel is correct, if rather vulgar." --Flarelocke