What do you think about situations, effects or spells which hijack your control of a character in a cRPG? Imagine that you have a personality trait in an RPG which requires the player to always be truthful or to panic in combat. What's the best way to implement this? Should the player lose control of their character and have dialog or combat options chosen for them? Or is it better to have the game system apply penalties but leave them free to act as they please? I'm primarily thinking of single player RPGs where you have one character or a party. I was thinking about disadvantages you could take that would cause a chance of the character being hijacked in some situations. Panic fire that wastes ammo would be one example. You could see that it was about to happen and respond accordingly, which would make your level of decision making a matter of avoiding or controlling these situations before you got into them. What I imagine is akin to table-top RP'ing situations where the GM acknowledges what you were trying to do, but overrides it. Of course, it's an entirely different situation with the computer because you can't argue with it. But I can't see the player ever voluntarily choosing to play sub-optimally, which without hijacks restricts disadvantages to pretty basic debuffs. Even if they did play their disadvantages, the system that would check to see that they were "roleplaying" their them fairly would probably be pretty convoluted. Thoughts?

I personally hate it, when control is totally taken away from my character, especially when the game only allows control of one character. It always feels very frustrating.

Instead of panic fire, you can just set the accuracy lower and rate of fire higher when a player panics. I think this would feel less like taking control away from the player. Does the player still choses to kill the enemy he must continue firing, creating 'panic' fire. Or it could chose to try and calm down, giving the enemy a chance to approach.

Definately don't take control of the character.

There's an interesting mechanic in the PnP system The Shadow of Yesterday, where you start off with a bunch of traits (called 'keys'). You get rewarded (xp points) for doing things towards your key, but have the option when you do something against your key to buy it off, gaining a bunch of experience points in the process but losing the key. Link if you're interested, especially seeing that was an awful explanation: http://tsoy.crngames.com/Crunchy_Bits#Keys

The point here is that rather than having character traits as a set-in-stone immutable thing, there's room for the character to change when the situation or character growth calls for it. Taking away a player's control is just an ugly way of doing things, and in this case leads to a stagnant character.

Let's say at the beginning of the game you take the 'Key of the Bad Marksman', which gives you experience for blazing away without much concern for hitting things. Later on in the game though you hit an encounter where you really really need to shoot someone and blasting holes in everything nearby isn't an option, so the player chooses to take a very careful aimed shot and ditches the key.

The player has been making suboptimal choices and have been getting rewarded for it, but now they decide that shooting that thing there is more important to them than getting further experience that way. No need for blunt methods like taking control - instead the player's get another choice to make, and making choices is most of the fun in RPGs.

(and yeah, I did twist TSoY's rules for that example because it doesn't require you to buy off the key if you do something counter to it - illustrative purposes and all...)

I really don't think losing control of your character is a good idea. Rather, I would give the player situations where the player themself would feel panicked. I'll give an example:

Fight with Tonberry: From the final fantasy series, these little guys are simple enough. They walk slowly towards your party, and if you don't kill him by the time he reaches you, he hits you for some major damage. The suspense that the player gets when fighting one can get pretty insane.

Perhaps you can give your player less time to react to something, increasing the chances they'll make a mistake?

Assuming first that from a thematic point of view, a given character MUST panic in a particular situation. You want to implement it in a way that does not break the player's sense of agency.

I would break the continuum of agency down roughly so:

1 - You are trying to communicate to the player that he is the character; inputs map directly to actions on the part of the character. Then 'scaring the character' really means scaring the player. Arguably the most difficult thing to do, suspension of disbelief is probably your biggest tool here... go look at Half-Life, even though it's not an RPG.

2 - You are trying to communicate to the player that he controls the character's intention, but is not embodied by her (Diablo roughly represents this). Then 'scaring the character' might mean a UI element that measures fear, and as fear rises the character's responses to inputs become more sluggish, or some inputs (attack the source of the fear) are responded to with a clear 'I can't bring myself to do that' behavior.

3 - You are trying to communicate to the player that he directs the character(s), so inputs are 'orders' and whether those orders are fulfilled is the game's determination, think Warcraft 3 (I know, it's an RTS, but the RPG elements closely resemble this idea). Here, 'scaring the character' is probably best represented as a debuff of some kind. The little 'fear' effect appears around the character, and she becomes unresponsive to orders, may run around randomly or attack indiscriminately.

Was playing Fallout3 last night and found myself trying to target a raider in the distance with a scoped weapon. As I looked through the scope the crosshair was moving all over the place. I checked my status and I hadn't realised that my arm was injured in the last battle. "Cool!" I shouted with excitement as I thought about how challenging it'd be to go around the game with injured limbs. But I had an abundant supply of stimpaks so I just fixed myself up and went on. As much as my natural inclination is to stay at peak effeciency, I really don't think I would have minded if I had to go around with a handicap (for awhile). It kinda made me think how pointless doctors and injuries were in that game.

Maybe you don't have to take total control away. Something like an unstable crosshair would certainly be one way to simulate panic. Or maybe other temporary conditions that the player could learn to adapt to or live with (maybe even offer the player some advice on how to adapt to the condition). But a total loss of control could just get irritating and quickly spoil the fun.

Okay, good points. Symphonic's breakdown is especially apt here. With a party, you're communicating that the player directs the characters versus that the player controls them.

I think the combat suggestions actually work a lot better than what I was imagining. So scratch combat situations. Right or wrong most games focus heavily on that so I think we've been conditioned to believe that we can't be allowed to fail there.

What about non-combat situations? What about a vow to serve the weak or being compelled to tell the truth?

If you can't hijack the player's character, how should the player fall prey to mind altering influences, such as a spell that makes them fall in love or a phobia for entering a certain area?

There have to be more interesting ways of making the player vulnerable other than a strict measure of HP and DPS, especially when they are at a high level.

It's hard to have a computer calculate the morality or emotion of actions in the first place, but there are some approaches for non-combat.

I haven't played them, but I've read that in the older Fallout games, the IQ stat of a character would affect its dialogue options. This could work the same way for the conditions you mention. If my character is very honest no dialogue options are available to me that involve lying. Or at least I have to make some kind of roll to see if the option is available, which could be based off willpower or something. You could set up a system where a character can choose honest dialogue options, but that they have a negative effect on the character's standing with NPCs. You could rationalize it with poor social skills, fumbling over words, or just telling unconvincing lies.

This could work for missions/quests/achievements too. If a character is scared of the undead, it will have a hard time getting assignments from a vampire.

If you want some good examples of character traits that affect more then combat I'd suggest checking out the GURPS paper and pencil RPG system. It has all kinds of attributes and gives pretty specific examples of using them in play.

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Original post by Wavinator If you can't hijack the player's character, how should the player fall prey to mind altering influences, such as a spell that makes them fall in love or a phobia for entering a certain area?

I don't know about the falling in love bit but
the phobia of entering places can probably be
modeled with the character not being able to
enter. If it's a door the response upon trying
to enter will be something like "it won't budge"
regardless of if it's locked/blocked or not. If
it's an entrance of sorts it can be too small
or too dark to enter for example, phobias often
enlarges the problem to extreme proportions.

For phobias I was thinking along the same lines as Pzc. You can make it impossible to enter that room, visualising it with phobia like symptons. Or you can allow the player to enter, but when I does, thinks happen like he gets tunnel vision, he start to breath heavily, he keep turning towards to exit. He hears strange sounds, he slow down, start crawling. Things that make evident that the character does not want to enter and at a certain point (due to the slowing down and automaticly turning around) he can't continue.

In case of lying. Perhaps give him the same dialogue options, but when he tries to lie, he always gives away a piece of the truth. But I think this will be extremely difficult. You could ofcourse just limit the dialogue options and add lame excuses so the player can try to break the conversation, but will be confronted with what he said later.