On Role-playing Games

[christian]

http://insomnia.ac/commentary/on_role-playing_games/

D&D was about far more than stats and turn-based battles -- it was about characters, choices, and stories; it was about experiencing fantastical adventures through a brand-new kind of collaborative, improvisational storytelling. Players became at the same time script-writers and actors of their own roles; whereas a reader of a book or a viewer of a movie always remained a passive observer, a player at a D&D game was constantly called upon to make choices that propelled the action. Compared to the role-playing dimension of D&D, the stats and battles were only minor aspects.

[christian]

http://www.videogame.it/thief-ii-interv ... -hart.html

The first RPG that impressed me as a "work of art," if you will, was Ultima IV. I remember just being in awe of its scope, and I was completely taken by the notion of having higher goals than "fight your way to the baddest bad guy and kick his butt." Also, it was a game that paid attention to the means, and not just the ends. That's the path down which the RPG genre can evolve; how players solve problems will be directly fed back into the stories themselves, and inform their progression.

Although it was before my time at Looking Glass, the original Ultima Underworld first opened my eyes (and not just mine!) to the notion of "immersion" into an environment. It showed right from the start that the visceral feeling invoked by the first-person perspective can be used effectively in RPG story-telling.

Most recently, I think Baldur's Gate and Planescape: Torment reminded us of an important avenue that RPG's should not forget. Their focus was much more on story, and they tried hard to pull the player through the game as much by their compelling stories as by their progression of stats, combats and power-ups. I think that when games really start to combine superior story-telling with meaningful player decisions and consequence, the RPG genre will have evolved to its next level.

[christian]

http://www.rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=9788

I’ve been a pencil & paper gamer since the 1976 so I remember us growing out of war gamers and part of this to me and what excites me about this approach is that in many ways where cRPGs went was kind of a war gamer’s view of role-playing games. It was all tactical; it was all about your numbers, etc.

Unfortunately, the RPG Codex interviewer rudely cut Kesselman off before he could finish what he was saying.

[christian]

Dungeon Crawling: Ten Ways It Is More Than “Hack & Slash” - http://rampantgames.com/blog/?p=8742

I saw an article not long ago that was equating “Dungeon Crawlers” to more action-heavy, monster-bashing RPGs. It’s what we used to call “hack & slash.” The article maintained that this was the essence of old-school D&D.

I disagree. Vehemently.

I have no doubt that some people played D&D that way back in the day. I’ve played in those games. The term “hack & slash” was, IIRC, coined back in that era as a way to describe “those kinds” of games. Gamers back then considered it an inferior (and, ultimately, boring) way to play the game, but frequently how the newbies did it because they didn’t know better, and running combat with dice was a novelty. Very few people kept playing that way, because they grew bored and either quit the game, or played the game more as it was … ahem… intended.

If you go over those old modules that epitomized old-school dice & paper “Dungeon Crawling,” you’ll find that at while combat opportunities about, at least in the better-known modules, many of those encounters depart from straight-up fisticuffs. And if you look at one of the best-known (and deadliest) adventures of the 1st edition era, Tomb of Horrors, there is something like a grand total of two combat encounters – and neither are straightforward.

What did they have instead? What did the rest of the classic modules have in spades that defines the “Dungeon Crawling” experience for me, which is very much removed from “Hack & Slash”?

This article wonderfully illustrates what makes RPGs so great, and how dungeon crawling is only really a small part of the complete package. And not even a part that's all that exciting compared with everything else. The whole thing is worth reading, but I particularly liked his description of the tactical challenges:

#1 – Tactical challenges: Combats with exceptions to them to make things interesting. Usually this involved geography that played to the advantage of the monster being fought. Like the fire giant encounter with narrow walkways along a river of fire – the giant would hurl boulders at party members to knock them off the path and into the flames. Or the demons in Queen of the Demonweb Pits setting high on a perch who would use their telekinetic abilities to lift characters high into the air to engage them – splitting the party and introducing the problem that if you kill the thing that’s keeping you up 150′ in the air… you may still not survive the encounter.

That's the kind of stuff people were playing back in 1980.

[christian]

Tucker's Kobolds - http://www.tuckerskobolds.com/

Many high-level characters have little to do because they're not challenged. They yawn at tarrasques and must be forcibly kept awake when a lich appears. The DMs involved don't know what to do, so they stop dealing with the problem and the characters go into Character Limbo. Getting to high level is hard, but doing anything once you get there is worse.

One of the key problems in adventure design lies in creating opponents who can challenge powerful characters. Singular monsters like tarrasques and liches are easy to gang up on; the party can concentrate its firepower on the target until the target falls down dead and wiggles its little feet in the air. Designing monsters more powerful than a tarrasque is self-defeating; if the group kills your super-monster, what will you do next—send in its mother? That didn't work on Beowulf, and it probably won't work here.

Worse yet, singular supermonsters rarely have to think. They just use their trusty, predictable claw/claw/bite. This shouldn't be the measure of a campaign. These games fall apart because there's no challenge to them, no mental stimulation - no danger.

In all the games that I've seen, the worst, most horrible, most awful beyond-comparison opponents ever seen were often weaker than the characters who fought them. They were simply well-armed and intelligent beings who were played by the DM to be utterly ruthless and clever. Tucker's kobolds were like that.

Tucker ran an incredibly dangerous dungeon in the days I was stationed at Ft. Bragg, N.C. This dungeon had corridors that changed all of your donkeys into huge flaming demons or dropped the whole party into acid baths, but the demons were wienies compared to the kobolds on Level One. These kobolds were just regular kobolds, with 1-4 hp and all that, but they were mean. When I say they were mean, I mean they were bad, Jim. They graduated magna cum laude from the Sauron Institute for the Criminally Vicious.

When I joined the gaming group, some of the PCs had already met Tucker's kobolds, and they were not eager to repeat the experience. The party leader went over the penciled map of the dungeon and tried to find ways to avoid the little critters, but it was not possible. The group resigned itself to making a run for it through Level One to get to the elevators, where we could go down to Level Ten and fight "okay" monsters like huge flaming demons.

It didn't work. The kobolds caught us about 60' into the dungeon and locked the door behind us and barred it. Then they set the corridor on fire, while we were still in it.

"NOOOOOO!!!" screamed the party leader. "It's THEM! Run!!!"

Thus encouraged, our party scrambled down a side passage, only to be ambushed by more kobolds firing with light crossbows through murder holes in the walls and ceilings. Kobolds with metal armor and shields flung Molotov cocktails at us from the other sides of huge piles of flaming debris, which other kobolds pushed ahead of their formation using long metal poles like broomsticks. There was no mistake about it. These kobolds were bad.

We turned to our group leader for advice.

"AAAAAAGH!!!" he cried, hands clasped over his face to shut out the tactical situation.

We abandoned most of our carried items and donkeys to speed our flight toward the elevators, but we were cut off by kobold snipers who could split-move and fire, ducking back behind stones and corners after launching steel-tipped bolts and arrows, javelins, hand axes, and more flaming oil bottles. We ran into an unexplored section of Level One, taking damage all the time. It was then we discovered that these kobolds had honeycombed the first level with small tunnels to speed their movements. Kobold commandos were everywhere. All of our hirelings died. Most of our henchmen followed. We were next.

I recall we had a 12th-level magic user with us, and we asked him to throw a spell or something. "Blast 'em!" we yelled as we ran. "Fireball 'em! Get those little @#+$%*&!!"

"What, in these narrow corridors? " he yelled back. "You want I should burn us all up instead of them?"

Our panicked flight suddenly took us to a dead-end corridor, where a giant air shaft dropped straight down into unspeakable darkness, far past Level Ten. Here we hastily pounded spikes into the floors and walls, flung ropes over the ledge, and climbed straight down into that unspeakable darkness, because anything we met down there was sure to be better than those kobolds.

We escaped, met some huge flaming demons on Level Ten, and even managed to kill one after about an hour of combat and the lives of half the group. We felt pretty good — but the group leader could not be cheered up.

"We still have to go out the way we came in," he said as he gloomily prepared to divide up the treasure.

Tucker's kobolds were the worst things we could imagine. They ate all our donkeys and took our treasure and did everything they could to make us miserable, but they had style and brains and tenacity and courage. We respected them and loved them, sort of, because they were never boring.

If kobolds could do this to a group of PCs from 6th to 12th level, picture what a few orcs and some low level NPCs could do to a 12th-16th level group, or a gang of mid-level NPCs and monsters to groups of up to 20th level. Then give it a try. Sometimes, it's the little things—used well—that count.

Just incredible.

[christian]

Matt Chat 197: Lord British on Ultima, Ethics, Indies, and More - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wms1mrsa_1Q

Matt Barton: What you were able to do in [Ultima III: Exodus] now that you were free of any publisher influence?

Richard Garriott: Well, I would actually say, going in to Ultima III, I don't think I felt unbridled to do anything differently than I had before, other than maybe some minor control issues over the box or printed materials. I actually think it was what happened after Ultima III that was the real big difference, because all my previous games published through other companies, also meant that if anybody bothered to write in about those games, it went to those companies, and was effectively never forwarded to me. So I have no idea how people played the game or what they thought of them. Once I published Ultima III, suddenly anybody that wrote to the company, which is actually not necessarily a large percentage, but a large number of people, I began to see exactly what people thought of the game. At least those that were inspired to write in. And they would often describe how they would play the game. And as I quickly realized, people were playing the game completely differently than I thought. People were min-maxing the game, for maximum power, versus roleplaying as the hero. It was really eye-opening to go, Oh man. If I actually want to create a game where people are acting like the hero, I'd better write a game that observes people and makes sure they're acting like the hero. And that's really what started Ultima IV. If I hadn't published my own game with Ultima III, I don't think I would have known, or been inspired to write what is I think really the watershed event of Ultimas, which is Ultima IV.

[christian]

Matt Chat 196: Lord British on Ultima and Akalabeth - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkGQtumY6X0

What's interesting about the early days of playing Dungeons and Dragons was that rules were irrelevant. To anyone. The rules were insufficient for frankly any game and even to the degree that the rules existed, nobody cared. Instead it literally was a group of people sitting around the table doing having interactive narrative where when the game master would describe a scenario, as long as the rest of the participants would do something that sounded clever, or funny, or interesting in some way, then sure it works. And to the degree people were doing either nothing because they don't know what to do or are doing something that sounded stupid, well guess what, it didn't work. And then the narrative would proceed. And that was the beginning and end of it. And since there were no rules, the only reason it would be fun is if you had both a good storyteller at the helm and very highly participating players on the other side. And so D&D for me and my friends took off in a way that years later, as people began to debate initiative and angles / line of sight and these other things ... you know those are just ... those become "systems". Those become spreadsheet games again. Compared to what I like to do, which is role playing. How well are you playing that role? And as long as you're doing a clever job of playing that role, I want you to succeed.

And then computers came out.

[christian]

Remodeling RPGs for the New Millennium - http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1 ... e_new_.php

[christian]

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/07 ... ckstarter/

But in many ways, this proved the genre’s biggest advantage over time – that what stuck with players and designers was what it was trying to do. Its soul, if you will. It never felt like a solved problem in the way that adventure games fell into a rut, with every major series being its own quest to tap into that core dream from a very different angle. The world simulation of Ultima. The scope of Daggerfall. The intimacy of Planescape Torment. As time and technology moved on, many of the initial problems began solving themselves. They learned to make interfaces that don’t suck. We got the storage space to let conversations be more than “Name? Job? Bye.” They managed to become, more or less, the games that we saw in our heads while playing through them back in the day, when a few wiggly lines made the Battle of Helms Deep feel like a playground scuffle – epic adventures that stir the blood and loins

There’s no genre more poorly served by just sitting on its laurels instead of continuing to try and tap its genre’s soul, and each new game is a reminder that however good something like The Witcher 3 may be today, it’s still just a shadow of the genre’s actual Holy Grail. Chances are we’ll never actually see it, but that doesn’t matter. It’s the quest to get there that counts – the push that gives us both better games, and some amazing paths to turn around and fondly remember walking. Whether or not they actually ended up going in the right direction.

[christian]

http://shmuplations.com/kiyahorii/

Yoshio Kiya: One thing on my mind right now is how to make an RPG without hit points or experience points.

Yuji Horii: Right, the term “RPG” has somehow been misunderstood by many of today’s games; they think that increasing your stats is roleplaying. Originally you inhabited the role of another character in an RPG. I mean, game systems where you defeat enemies and collect gold do help sustain players’ interest and ambition, but I feel something is being missed here.

Kiya: Right. In today’s RPGs, once you win the battle, the fun is over. I feel like RPGs need to think of a new game system that brings something new and fun, something more than combat to players.

When I think back on our game Xanadu now, it seems really strange to me. You start off with 100 hit points, but end up with over 6 million! Human beings just don’t change that much, right?

Horii: Well, as I mentioned, the main policy for RPGs should be how to make the player feel like he has become the hero of the game. We could make things more realistic, but in doing so, we might lose half the appeal of the game. Being games, there are some things you just can’t do away with. I want to make RPGs that let players experience new things different from their everyday life.

Kiya: Yes, in the future, RPGs will have to have more than one way to accomplish the main quest. They’ll need to have a more realistic world for players to enjoy, something that will really suck players in.

Horii: As for networked RPGs, if we start seeing network RPGs with habitat-like worlds, that would be great. You could be in them 24 hours a day.

Kiya: Yeah, being able to communicate with other players in a chatlog while you play… that would be really addicting.

Horii: Up till now we’ve done our best to program NPCs that appear human, but in a networked game, we wouldn’t have to spend any time doing that, and they’d be guaranteed to be interesting, since they’re real people!

Kiya: It would hugely expand the kinds of roles people could play. Maybe you want to play the old guy who runs the inn in that town, or you could run a weapons and armor store. There’d be so much more freedom.

Horii: Yeah, and there would be rivalries between players. They could fight each other, exchange information… it would be great. Now I really want to make a networked RPG!