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Original post by Iron Chef Carnage If I love being the Tactical Officer on my Frigate, but get promoted, I can just go be a Tactical Officer on a destroyer, which is the same gameplay, but more of it. If I suck at it, but really enjoy it, I can get busted down and go be a Tactical Officer on a Corvette. If I love my ship and crew and want to stay around, I can move up or down the ladder on the same vessel.

Okay, this is a MUCH better idea. If you could transfer, though, the "love the ship & crew" thing would have to be VERY compelling, with advantages you couldn't get by just jumping to the same role on a smaller ship.

One possibility would be that better ships have better everything, from character improvement facilities to options for fame and glory. You'd expect the Enterprise to be closer to danger and opportunity, so even getting downgraded you'd maybe want to stay on so that you get a crack at advancing skills and stats faster.

There could also be some kind of popularity rating that dictates who holds the true power. Maybe building popularity is challenging work and moving to a new ship means that you start over. I'm imagining a situation where the crew turns to you unofficially, or where you slowly usurp more functions / gameplay even though you are of lower rank. (Would need a diplomacy/faction system, which I think would be ideal for a large ship anyway.)


It could also just be some set of efficiency stats that get built with time aboard.

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That's an example for military vessels, of course. If I'm a pirate captain and I botch the job, I might find myself in the airlock right away, or I might just have to kill a couple mutineers before resuming my command without further accountability for the errors.

This is complicated, but maybe this could be captured with varieties of failure that impact different faction/culture/personality types differently, so that disloyalty affects a hierarchical military ship differently than a bunch of meritocratic criminals. To use the powerful noble example again, its cost might be greatest among the military, less among a corporate vessel and nil or positive among brigands.

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Original post by MeshGearFox It sounds like an attempt at realism, but Realism Isn't Always Fun.

Not sure this is really fair. It doesn't seem to me to be too realistic to go from captain to second in command, especially not in the military. It's far more realistic to just expel you from the service or put you behind a desk hoping you'll leave.

So this is sort of like how the early levels of most rpg are boring and ultimately throw time until you get to the more interesting gameplay?

Personally I never liked that aspect. Why can't the whole game be fun or desirable?

In life there are plenty of oppertunities to fail and have things go wrong but should games reflect that? Or should even mistakes and failure open up new oppertunities? Behind the scenes your game could generate a new gameplay vector after the player closes off one. If you insult the Poltical officer you can choose to demotion or reassignment but perhaps one of his rivals or a rebel movement will contact you first offer you a deal. That rival doesn't need to exist before the player insults the officer only after as a new avenue of gameplay.

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Original post by TechnoGoth So this is sort of like how the early levels of most rpg are boring and ultimately throw time until you get to the more interesting gameplay? Personally I never liked that aspect. Why can't the whole game be fun or desirable? In life there are plenty of oppertunities to fail and have things go wrong but should games reflect that? Or should even mistakes and failure open up new oppertunities? Behind the scenes your game could generate a new gameplay vector after the player closes off one. If you insult the Poltical officer you can choose to demotion or reassignment but perhaps one of his rivals or a rebel movement will contact you first offer you a deal. That rival doesn't need to exist before the player insults the officer only after as a new avenue of gameplay.

I agree with this, seems to me no matter what the choices the player makes, there should still be viable progression in the game (if that's what you're aiming for). But then you'll have to either limit choices or figure out how to have enough content and balance for all these choices, if you want each choice to result in comparable play time/entertainment.

I suppose the problem I'm struggling with here is whether or not there are some story arcs in the form of interactive choices that are worth telling. Frustration is a VERY dangerous issue to contend with. But it seems that I'm going to have to somehow confront the meme that, in an RPG, the only valid progress is the upward arc, the idea that if there is no sense of forward progression then the experience is not valid.

I like the concept that one choice opens up more choices but it really feels pat that EVERYTHING you can possibly do will always work out optimistically. From a world building point of view that really rings false. And doesn't that kick the legs out from under the very idea of making choices? If all choices lead to relatively equal results, what's the value of any one choice?

I'd like a player to be able to speak in terms of stories built by their choices. I don't want them just saying things like, "I was a plebe and worked my way up to hero of the universe and saved the day." That happens in almost every blasted game in existence.

I've nothing against progression, but I'd like them to be able to say things like, "I worked my way up from a plebe to a general all to avenge my colony, but went mad and died penniless doing it" or "I was like that Braveheart guy, they killed me but I started a revolution."

A story you build out of your choices which ends up as "I started on this war torn colony and struggled but all my life could never escape" would be valid, too, if it somehow framed the game universe in a way that was compelling and made you want to try again. To me it would be like those Dwarf Fortress stories people tell of bad starts, getting swarmed and still having a fun time as they went down.

In theory, anyway.

Agreed not every choice should lead to the best of all possible outcomes. There is a term called the accumulation of advantages and conversely the accumulation of disadvantages that basically says that the more opportunities someone has in life the more successful you will be like wise if you don’t get those opportunities then you need more drive, determination, and perseverance to be successful.

So I guess the question is do you want the player to be able to get into a situation that they can’t come back from without completely frustrating them?
If I’m on distant colony and get on the bad side of colony’s commanding officer am I’m stuck cleaning the garbage ducts for the rest of my life? Or should the game give me an out in the form of some new opportunity? It might take more effort then if I just spent all my time time trying to impress the commander but it should still provide me some kind of progressive game play. It would be frustrating to find that the only way to progress was to be on the commander’s good side, unless that was clear from the start.

That said if you’ve got some kind of time management sim aspect like “princess maker 2” or “jones in the fast lane two” old but classic games on the subject. I’d still have to seize the opportunities if I spent most of my time units each day cleaning ducts barely earning enough to live and didn’t try to better myself well then that’s my own fault then.

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Original post by TechnoGoth That said if you’ve got some kind of time management sim aspect like “princess maker 2” or “jones in the fast lane two” old but classic games on the subject. I’d still have to seize the opportunities if I spent most of my time units each day cleaning ducts barely earning enough to live and didn’t try to better myself well then that’s my own fault then.

This. I've been trying to shape a cross between this kind of gameplay and more traditional space adventure. Limited time, opportunities to adventure, and lots of strategic trade offs.

To bring the world to life I really really think the world needs to have teeth. If your story ends up being one of trying to survive a dictatorship, for instance, and you merrily spit in the eye of the dictator it is valid to me for that to be a perilous decision. In life sim terms, if you end up strung up for it it's because you didn't think to have the resources / allies in place before you made the decision.