As I'm sure we are all too aware, a large part of a game's design is based on maths. You have 67 health units before you die, 15 units of stone to build with and 220 maximum mana. You lucky thing you. However, I find that all these numbers everywhere starts to detract from the old suspension of disbelief. Possibly one of the biggest culprits of this is Neverwinter Nights . Now I enjoyed NWN, but there were some things that really stuck out. Firstly, whenever you attempt something where success is determined by one of your skills, it not only tells you what skill is being tested, but shows you all the dice rolls. I don't want to read: 1.Well maybe I'll ask the commander 2.[persuade]Come on sugar, you can help a gel like me out Jerina: Persuade 8D6 roll=25 vs DC=19 Success Come on! That's not very immersive. It's flat out telling me that I haven't persuaded the guard to give me the key because he was beguiled by my characters charm(s), but because a random number + a randomly generated statistic is greater than a static variable. Tense stuff. Final Fantasy isn't much better - (like NWN) it commits the crime of telling you what your opponents are doing. Say I've encountered a large scary purple robot alien spider called Geoffrey or something. So far so good - I think I can quite honestly say I'm not sure what to expect. And then, just as the action heats up and the tingles run down my spine: Geoffrey: casts Fire 2 (Crash bang wallop. BiggerStaff loses 238 health points) BiggerStaff: 1179/1484 Don't tell me what he's doing! I can cast Fire 2, and I know it does around 250 damage, +10% with my little blue gem thingy stuck in my sword and another +20 bonus if I'd equipped the other Guardian Force wotsit. It's just turned into another lengthly mathematical battle where I have to decide whether to cast more spells on him or heals on myself. My boots are quite definitely quaking-free. It was while playing a bit of Baldur's Gate the other day that this really struck me. See, BG has a bit of both going on. The weapon side lies in the Too Much Maths camp - I mean please, Longsword +1?? This is fantasy - but the spellcasting is occasionally quite exciting. Because you don't know what's being cast, everything's much more tense, and much more potentially dangerous. Green Wobbly Thing carries far more menace then any Fire 2 is going to, because I don't know what it is. (Obviously BG had a much more varied spell set, but you can see the point I'm making.) However, the earlier whinges soon dissipate the momentary involvement. Magus:Casts Magic Missile BiggerStaff:Damage taken:3 BiggerStaff:Damage taken:5 BiggerStaff:Gulp! BiggerStaff:Healed(7) Does anyone actually want to be told this stuff? I think it turns an inherently interesting and exciting situation - a warrior battling with a mage - into something limp and free of any sort of suspense. So, in the midst of all this whinging, there are games which I feel have got it right. Certainly Dungeon Keeper didn't involve you with maths - you knew which creatures were attracted by which rooms, and logically if one of those rooms was significantly larger then you'd get more of the corresponding creatures, but that was it. I have no idea how much more effective in combat a skeleton was than a goblin, or how much damage a warlock's fireball did - and crucially, I didn't need to. If there was a fight on, I'd just bundle them all in there and throw in some lightening bolts for good measure. If I could I'd get Horny in there to deal even more beatings. But there was no maths. Slap a creature, and he or she will work harder but lose a bit of health. Great - cool feature, see the balance there - but I don't want to know about any +1 Slap Modifiers, and I'm not adjusting a creature's EffortRoll, I'm slapping the little bugger! Whap. So what do people think? Do you find that having too much of the game maths exposed reduces your feeling of immersion? Or do you like to know exactly what's going on? And from a design point of view, how much do you want the player to know? EDIT: formatting [edited by - BiggerStaff on March 15, 2004 9:28:00 AM]

I agree, I find it really boring. In fact I find the whole "leveling up" thing pointless. It just seems to push people towards boring "gotta stay here and kill another 10 spiders to get to the next level" game play.

Dan Marchant
Obscure Productions (www.obscure.co.uk)
Game Development & Design consultant

Yeah - I remember there was a topic on here not too long ago about levelling, which made the very good point that it was fairly unrealistic that a character stayed the same for a while, and then all of a sudden ''jumped'' up a level, and suddenly had more hit points and a better attack and so on.

On that note, I think Revenant dealt with levelling really well. Basically, your skill with anything improved the more you used it. So if you went around with a sword for a while, you found that your skill with a sword was better than that with, say, an axe. This lead to some more interesting gameplay decisions. For instance, if you had been using a sword, you then you found that the blacksmith had a new sword you could buy and also a new axe that was more powerful than the sword, did you buy the sword, which due to your skill would be more effective? Or the axe, which would eventually, once you were more axe-skilled, be better than the sword? Also, if there was a new expensive axe on offer, would you start using an inferior axe to build your skill up, or stick with the sword as it was more powerful in the short-term?

This system has lots of interesting gameplay potential with next to no maths. There''s no allocating skill points or selecting new ablilities: instead, you use something repeatedly, you get better at it - simple, intuitive and elegant. Lovely.

A large part of any game is at its heart a simulation. And any simulation on a computer basicly comes down to some number crunching.

The problem is not the complexity of the maths (simple arithmetic), but the end-user (aka player) has to deal with it in the 1st place.

This is the direct result of trying to port rulesets directly derived from dice based rule sets (designed to reduce the number crunching a human has todo) of P&P ''RPGs'' to computer games.

The end result is a rule set which the individual rules are simple, but the complete rule set is hidiously complex. A type of simplexity if you like.

A good example of a hack&slash which implemented this is Dungeon Siege (and it doesnt pretent to be anything else!). Yet the simulation maths is actually fairly complex, however the ingame maths isnt.

Unless you go into the character screen, all you have is a percentage based health & mana bar for each character (really need some type of graphical display on how much mana a spell will take up compared to your total mana).

The Character screen stuff is only used when checking to see if you can use various stuff. Even this can be abstracted away so the player doesnt need to deal with the raw numbers.


I''m against ingame maths being presented to the player. Unless I''m playing a 100% authentic space sim (and then I expect the computer todo everything for me :D ) or something which the ingame maths is an integral part of the gameplay.

I am for increased complexity of the simulation maths. Simulation maths should never be directly exposed to the player, thats like the viewer of a movie watching some off-set dunce run across the set in a serious movie!

Take the ''Explosive bomb'' spell from Dungeon siege. It creates an explosive bomb which explodes after a few seconds, and is chucked by the character at the target.

However, since it is a object modeled by the physics engine, it can bounce & roll. This allows you to send it around corners, past the normal range of character by getting it to bounce. this makes the sell drastically more effective, than you would normal determine just by looking at the statistics of the spell.

And this is all due to some fairly complex maths in the physics engine. Which the player is never directly exposed to , only the results of maths.

I''m generally an advocate of a user interface that does not bother the player with numbers, or other stuff you were talking about. But when thinking about Neverwinter Nights, Baldur''s Gate and other RPG''s based on paper and pen rules, you gotta be careful. Those games are targeted at true PnP players for the most part, and they certainly want to have all those numbers in the game!

There are game masters that handle things the way you would like to and never tell the players any numbers. So your "Longsword +1" would just be a sword like any other, but do a little mroe damage. But the majority of roleplayers (I know) do not hide the numbers. After all, people throw their own dice and see what they rolled. When trying out a computer RPG those people might expect they same control over the results.

As I said before, I normally prefer games where the mechanics is hidden from the player. But there are exceptions, and NWN is one of them. And by the way, couldn''t you turn off the explicit calculations if you wanted to?

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There are only 10 kinds of people: those that understand binary and those that don''t.

I agree with you 100% BiggerStaff.

Probably the main reason why we see so much "math" is because the game developers are avid pen-and-paper roleplayers (as in the case of Bioware), and for them it''s "normal" because they''ve been doing it for more than 20 years.

I believe final fantasy did get its leveling system wrong and bulders gate shouldn''t show you all of the maths involved in weapons and that but lets think for a sec.

Bulders gate is the computerized version of the original board game, without this "maths" it wouldn''t work becuase there was no system working away in the back ground, no micro chips, no screen, just some dice, a big printed map on some durable card and you. In the dark ages {and some geeks today i might add} they do buy model''s and pain and glue and build the dam things and play the game in a large open wide floor space for several hours at a time which sometimes becomes weeks and months.

Builders gate is the result of its compression onto disk, everything got translated into computerized terms which means the game had to use a RNG to determine what the hell it is playing at.

Final fantasy also requires RNG''s and Stats like Hp2000/8946, again becuase that it how it was in final fantasy one.

Dungeon keeper is designed as a master and his minions game, you order them around, pick them up, slap them about becuase that is the idea of the game. You throw a few dragons, imps and a horny into a brawl and you hope you will win by overpowering them.

In final fantasy you have 3 or 4 team members, 3 to eight targets and you statically have to use your resources such as mana and hp to beat the crud out of the targets who are trying to do the same, its very systems wouldn''t work if you had only a rough idea of how much damage you were causing and very vague ideas about how much of your resources were remaining to be used.

And as for lving, i agree that levels are unrealistic in terms of how the character develops compared to real life development of a human however as its been said many times before, you can only make so much realistic in a computer game before you have to compromise.

If people never used anything even slightly unrealistic in their games, 1st person shooters would never have been made which means halo wouldn''t exist, doom wouldn''t exist, ultima {i think thats a first-person but I''m not sure} wouldn''t exist and neither would james bond for the n64 which is one of its few good games including zelda.

I''m trying to fix these kind of points in my "shake up of the RPG genera" game which will fix the crappy AI''s in things like final fantasy however their is no other realistic way to run a game if you don''t have a degree of display to the player of how its figuring things out.

I do have two ideas of how to alter the leveling system to make it less monogamous though, one is to use better game design so that the player cant or doesn''t want/need to spend hours in one area repeating the same dull task of running in circles fighting the same enemy''s and going up in levels, the other is to make it so you do have a leveling system but it works like Ragnarök online''s, you level often but the rewards for doing so are small, each time you level you can add a single status point or a few status points to various stats, eg the max level is 1000 and you level a few several times per hour of game play but each level you gain one status point to use on any stat you want, that way there are no big leveling jumps and it gives wider development directly to the player.

RPG: I''m going to rewrite this genera even if it kills me.

quote:

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Original post by Obscure
I agree, I find it really boring. In fact I find the whole "leveling up" thing pointless. It just seems to push people towards boring "gotta stay here and kill another 10 spiders to get to the next level" game play.

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In other words, a leveling system keeps players wanting to play the game "just a little bit more". I wonder what game designer wouldn''t want that...?



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There are only 10 kinds of people: those that understand binary and those that don''t.

I think this is another area where different types of gamer have radically different desires. The flat-out power-gamer wants to know as much as possible of what''s going on so he can optimise his actions and maximise his power level. The escapist player wants to immerse himself in the characters'' lives and be a part of the game world without all these statistics snowing up the screen. If you look at pen-and-paper RPGs, there''s quite a range of systems (at least historically - d20 seems to be making a determined bid to assimilate all other systems) ranging from those where there''s a dice roll for everything which attract the power gamers because it''s relatively easy to assess individual power levels and you can keep making the numbers bigger (levelling up, replacing +2 with +5, etc.), to those which only use dice when two characters meet in a bar and try gambling with them, which suit the escapists down to the ground, but leave the power-gamers wondering what the point of it all is. The trouble is that the latter types rely heavily on human judgement - either from a referee or just between peers (which in turn requires a level of honesty and maturity that many power-gamers lack). Human judgement is very hard to transfer across into a computer program, so while the heavily dice-based systems can be translated more or less directly into code (which is basically what happened with Baldurs Gate and NeverWinter Nights), the storytelling systems just don''t get implemented.

Certainly Baldurs Gate had the option to turn off the dice roll reporting and just describe the results. For that matter, the D&D rulebooks have always explicitly stated that, at the DM''s discretion, any dice-rolling can be ignored, and many of the rules have been flagged as optional (or treated that way by many play groups).

Hmmm, yes grbrg, I appreciate that Neverwinter Nights and the Baldur''s Gate series were based on DND, and so they perhaps weren''t the best examples as they have more reason than most to show all the maths. And yeah I''m sure there was a way to turn it off, so they are forgiven. But that doesn''t excuse the vast majority of games that still do this.

To be a little more constructive: Sometimes it''s as small an issue as the interface - let''s have bars instead of numbers, and colours instead of health points. Don''t get me wrong, of course we need the maths in there, but as Siolis and ggs have rightly pointed out the player shouldn''t be overly exposed to it.

SimCity must be one of the most mathematically complex games around, yet the vast majority of it is nicely abstracted away. Most building decisions ride on the RSI meter thing - "oop, R is quite high, better build some more houses."

Black and White also gets it right, I think. (Yes, another Molyneux like DK, I know) Villagers are hungry - cast a couple of water miracles on their fields and a food miracle in their village store. Villagers want more houses - get the Creature to help feed wood into the workshop.

I think the key thing with abstraction is the lack of technical accuracy. It''s not about +5 this or -10% that, it''s about some. A bit. A couple. More. A few. Several. Quite a lot. A nice balance is where I know I''m doing the right thing, and roughly how much of it to do, but am not having to precisely calculate each last thing. That''s called a job.