skill in RPGs
06-02-2017, 02:30 AM
where, exactly, does skill come into RPGs?
in action games you beat stuff up because you're good at the game. in RPGs you have to grind until you get enough brownie points to kill the boss. nobody likes this, grinding sucks. it's not what you want to spend your day off doing. you play RPGs to solve puzzles, uncover evil plots, raise mayhem and/or having the feeling of discovering mysteries, not to lead a genocide against level 1 dire rats.
Japanese RPGs seem perfectly content to be unfun grindfests, movies on wheels, slowly becoming more cutscene than game. that's whatever grumble grumble it's relevant to us because this is an RPG maker forum. it doesn't have to be this way! we're hobbyists, not triple A developers, we don't have to be afraid to be zany and out there AKA defy expectations by making games about playing instead of watching. LETS BREAK DOWN SOME WALLS.
western RPGs owe a lot to the popularity of tabletop gaming in america. if you've never played DnD i'll break it down like this: it's a sandbox freeform game where you can do ANYTHING and the DM (who is human) narrates what happens based off your actions. grinding isn't a thing because nobody wants to sit in a room full of their friends pretending to beat up rats. HOW DO VIDEO GAMES GET AWAY WITH THIS?
WRPGs try to emulate tabletop games by giving the player multiple ways to deal with a problem. they're sandbox games where the player has full agency to do whatever, and they're not limited by their level this creates obvious problems for progression! just look at <insert game by Obsidian here>
they say that FPSs are replacing RPGs as the medium of game storytelling. look at bioshock
why don't we just get rid of EXP all together? but then how do we differentiate one character from another! developing your little murderhobo is one of the fun parts of RPGs--but wait! aren't skills kinda stupid? you put points into speech skill and sometimes you get to roll a random number to see if your guy tells a good lie...THAT'S NOT HOW LYING WORKS where does my SKILL as a PLAYER come in? i'm just punching buttons..let me out of this cage! and plus you can just reload and do it again if you lose, making it pointless to begin with!
let's start with reality and butcher it and leave the boring parts and take the fun ones. the fun part of reality is that you can do whatever you want, and your actions affect reality, and that in turn affects you. there's this tabletop game called dungeon world where the focus of progression isn't on Leveling up (although you can do that) or on getting phat loot (although you can do that--sorta) but on changing the world around you. your choices, the story threads your party follows, and what they do when they get there, changes the world itself. that's the reward players get for playing. RPGs already allow players to affect the world, but what if the choices you make change what kind of choice you get to make in the future? how about the things you do, and how you do them, affect how your character comes out? i'm not talking like morrowind, where you get better at sneaking by walking around a dark corner of a bar while crouching, i mean like that level at the beginning of Windwaker where you have to break into the castle, but if you choose the sneaky path as opposed to the fighty path through you get to unlock more sneaky things, not by buying points but by the nature of your 'sneak karma' being higher.
what does this have to do with player skill? well, about as much as skill has to do with real life. IRL there is no level 99, if you get into a street fight you can knock out a body builder with a lucky punch--oh, and body building doesn't mean as much as being lithe or quick or friendly. skill is a thing of diminishing returns--not that it just gets harder to get better as you go, but that getting better doesn't really mean that much, and being a jack of all trades is far FAR more useful in the long run than being a master of ONE.
so, people are mostly average, with a few things they're good at, and a bunch of things they're bad at because they have nothing to do with their life thus far. if you're not good at cooking, it's because you've never had to cook before. if you can't program, it's because you haven't been interested in it enough to learn. what does this mean for games?
condensed: an action based game, where leveling isn't that important, where things you do activate triggers that spiderweb and affect other triggers. not just ANYTHING should trigger changes in the world, but important stuff. getting good doesn't happen automatically, and it means less than setting up a situation up in your favor. i mean, RPGs already have quests, why doesn't doing them mean anything?
okay, now somebody else say something. my brains melting.
in action games you beat stuff up because you're good at the game. in RPGs you have to grind until you get enough brownie points to kill the boss. nobody likes this, grinding sucks. it's not what you want to spend your day off doing. you play RPGs to solve puzzles, uncover evil plots, raise mayhem and/or having the feeling of discovering mysteries, not to lead a genocide against level 1 dire rats.
Japanese RPGs seem perfectly content to be unfun grindfests, movies on wheels, slowly becoming more cutscene than game. that's whatever grumble grumble it's relevant to us because this is an RPG maker forum. it doesn't have to be this way! we're hobbyists, not triple A developers, we don't have to be afraid to be zany and out there AKA defy expectations by making games about playing instead of watching. LETS BREAK DOWN SOME WALLS.
western RPGs owe a lot to the popularity of tabletop gaming in america. if you've never played DnD i'll break it down like this: it's a sandbox freeform game where you can do ANYTHING and the DM (who is human) narrates what happens based off your actions. grinding isn't a thing because nobody wants to sit in a room full of their friends pretending to beat up rats. HOW DO VIDEO GAMES GET AWAY WITH THIS?
WRPGs try to emulate tabletop games by giving the player multiple ways to deal with a problem. they're sandbox games where the player has full agency to do whatever, and they're not limited by their level this creates obvious problems for progression! just look at <insert game by Obsidian here>
they say that FPSs are replacing RPGs as the medium of game storytelling. look at bioshock
why don't we just get rid of EXP all together? but then how do we differentiate one character from another! developing your little murderhobo is one of the fun parts of RPGs--but wait! aren't skills kinda stupid? you put points into speech skill and sometimes you get to roll a random number to see if your guy tells a good lie...THAT'S NOT HOW LYING WORKS where does my SKILL as a PLAYER come in? i'm just punching buttons..let me out of this cage! and plus you can just reload and do it again if you lose, making it pointless to begin with!
let's start with reality and butcher it and leave the boring parts and take the fun ones. the fun part of reality is that you can do whatever you want, and your actions affect reality, and that in turn affects you. there's this tabletop game called dungeon world where the focus of progression isn't on Leveling up (although you can do that) or on getting phat loot (although you can do that--sorta) but on changing the world around you. your choices, the story threads your party follows, and what they do when they get there, changes the world itself. that's the reward players get for playing. RPGs already allow players to affect the world, but what if the choices you make change what kind of choice you get to make in the future? how about the things you do, and how you do them, affect how your character comes out? i'm not talking like morrowind, where you get better at sneaking by walking around a dark corner of a bar while crouching, i mean like that level at the beginning of Windwaker where you have to break into the castle, but if you choose the sneaky path as opposed to the fighty path through you get to unlock more sneaky things, not by buying points but by the nature of your 'sneak karma' being higher.
what does this have to do with player skill? well, about as much as skill has to do with real life. IRL there is no level 99, if you get into a street fight you can knock out a body builder with a lucky punch--oh, and body building doesn't mean as much as being lithe or quick or friendly. skill is a thing of diminishing returns--not that it just gets harder to get better as you go, but that getting better doesn't really mean that much, and being a jack of all trades is far FAR more useful in the long run than being a master of ONE.
so, people are mostly average, with a few things they're good at, and a bunch of things they're bad at because they have nothing to do with their life thus far. if you're not good at cooking, it's because you've never had to cook before. if you can't program, it's because you haven't been interested in it enough to learn. what does this mean for games?
condensed: an action based game, where leveling isn't that important, where things you do activate triggers that spiderweb and affect other triggers. not just ANYTHING should trigger changes in the world, but important stuff. getting good doesn't happen automatically, and it means less than setting up a situation up in your favor. i mean, RPGs already have quests, why doesn't doing them mean anything?
okay, now somebody else say something. my brains melting.