RPG limits?

[hexer]

Name a D&D dungeon that has no back story.

This is an acceptable backstory for you?
I'm not saying it's wrong to like this simple worded "story" but it's not enough for me.
Get it, fucker?

Somewhere under a lost and lonely hill of grim and foreboding aspect lies a labyrinthine crypt. It is filled with terrible traps and not a few strange and ferocious monsters to slay the unwary. It is filled with rich treasures both precious and magical, but in addition to the aforementioned guardians, there is said to be a demi-lich who still wards his final haunt.

​

 

[Jamma]

What would you say is an acceptable backstory? I get that you want a logical reason for the dungeon to be there, but most places don't have a backstory. They are built, forgotten, and claimed by nature years after.

Seeing this place a thousand years after it was abandoned, when you belong to a primitive culture... what would you say the backstory is? Could you even understand it?

 

[Jedi Master Radek]

The majority of fantasy games just copy the same old fantasy tropes.

It's amazing how something that is supposed to be fantastical and wondrous become an antithesis of fantastical and wondrous.

 

[frajaq]

What if it is a game about Celtic-Germanic mythology, which also uses Elves, dwarves, goblins and trolls?

damn that game sounds incredibly exciting!

 

[JarlFrank]

Name a D&D dungeon that has no back story.

This is an acceptable backstory for you?
I'm not saying it's wrong to like this simple worded "story" but it's not enough for me.
Get it, fucker?

Somewhere under a lost and lonely hill of grim and foreboding aspect lies a labyrinthine crypt. It is filled with terrible traps and not a few strange and ferocious monsters to slay the unwary. It is filled with rich treasures both precious and magical, but in addition to the aforementioned guardians, there is said to be a demi-lich who still wards his final haunt.

​

Now go on and read the description of each room in the module rather than just the basic gist of it.

 

[c2007]

Stopped reading at "Tolkienesque" races.

Your INT may be high, but you just failed a massive WIS check.

You got annoyed because I didn't acknowledge their folklore roots or because you still think they're interesting enough fantasy races?

whynotboth.jpg

I knew about elves, trolls, faeries, goblins etc long before I ever read LotR. I am 46.

Tolkien didn't invent them, so to me there's nothing "Tolkien" about any of that. As in, your perception has been colored by either inexperience/ignorance, or you made a bad argument.

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[Night Goat]

1. Gygaxian dungeons

The idea of dungeons being detached from the main compound (castle, etc.) and placed in the middle of nowhere without a backstory always baffled me.
DnD is filled with such "logic" - dungeons don't need an explanation, they need monsters.

I haven't seen many dungeons that exist in the world for no other reason than to be a dungeon, they're almost always either natural features like caves or built for some purpose or another. Crypts, ruined castles, evil wizard lairs, they all have some in-setting purpose.

2. Elves, dwarves, orcs, goblins, trolls

I cannot play a fantasy game with Tolkienesque races anymore unless the games themselves are based on Middle-earth.
I've had enough of their endless iterations for the rest of my life.

Yes and no. I'd like to see more unique races, but it's actually really hard to come up with ones that aren't just humans with minor physical and cultural differences, animal people, or half-human-half-creature-you-can't-play-as-so-here's-the-next-best-thing. I think a good compromise is to take the standard races and make them your own; Elder Scrolls has dwarves and elves, but they aren't all Axebeard Aleforge the Stocky Scotsman and Faggiel the Perfectly Perfect Perfect Guy.

3. Filler sidequests

There are good sidequests - the ones that expand on the world and make it more interesting - such as Modoc/Ghost Farm from Fallout 2 or the ones from NieR:Automata that had impact on the main story.

But then there are those that are added simply to bloat the gameplay hours numbers or help player reach that sweet level spot so he can progress in the main story.

They're disconnected from the main story, forgettable and tedious.
Sometimes they feel like those DnD 3rd edition supplement books that had hundreds of monsters/items/prestige classes that felt authors made them with a random generator.

If a sidequest isn't super-creative or doesn't affect the main story,
I say the designer will automatically, consciously or subconsciously, spend less effort on it and players will notice that in the end.

Sort of. Side quests have the potential to be much more interesting than main story, which is usually generic save the world shit. But if it's all just "I need [thing], go to [place] and get it" then yeah they can fuck right off. I don't understand why people think RPGs all need to be super long, it just means they're padded out with low-quality content.

 

[hexer]

Seeing this place a thousand years after it was abandoned, when you belong to a primitive culture... what would you say the backstory is? Could you even understand it?

I'm not talking just about any place, I'm talking about the concept of nice unlooted dungeons in the middle of nowhere filled with random monsters waiting there forever for the players to barge in.
I just don't like that setup. It didn't bother me that much when I was younger, but today I consider it superficial and shallow.

And honestly, I don't get along with people who display such characteristics as well.
Probably because I like learning and digging into details all the time.
Meh, we're just two opposites and irritate each other.

Now go on and read the description of each room in the module rather than just the basic gist of it.

I DM-ed that module as a kid and still have it in my personal library as part of the Return to the Tomb of Horrors boxed set.
Can't find anything particularly special about room descriptions. They don't really go into details. What do you mean?

Tolkien didn't invent them, so to me there's nothing "Tolkien" about any of that.

I'm a European, my head was filled with folk fairytales thanks to my family and of course I know he didn't invent them.
But he gave them some characteristics and presentation that is still influential on developers and gamers to this day.
That's why I wrote "Tolkienesque", to differentiate them from the usual folk versions.

We've all seen how the the fantasy market is flooded with his vision of these races.
The only games today where I rarely encountered folk versions are kid's mobile games my 6 year old niece plays.

 

[Molina]

Sort of. Side quests have the potential to be much more interesting than main story, which is usually generic save the world shit. But if it's all just "I need [thing], go to [place] and get it" then yeah they can fuck right off. I don't understand why people think RPGs all need to be super long, it just means they're padded out with low-quality content.

I never understand what is a good structure of quest. in every quest, in every RPG, steps in a quest are talking/giving object/killing someone/ triggering something. If you have any other ideas, I am a buyer and would be eternally grateful. The writer's talent depends on his ability to make people forget these essential steps, but it remains fundamental to all quests.

 

[V_K]

I never understand what is a good structure of quest. in every quest, in every RPG, steps in a quest are talking/giving object/killing someone/ triggering something. If you have any other ideas, I am a buyer and would be eternally grateful. The writer's talent depends on his ability to make people forget these essential steps, but it remains fundamental to all quests

It's about presentation and player agency for me. The same sequence of event can be presented in very different ways. For example:

1) A shady tavern patron asks you to steal a mcguffin from the local merchant giving you the directions to the warehouse. You go to the warehouse and encounter a guard who tells you he'd turn a blind eye if you bring him a bottle of expensive liquor. You buy the liquor at the store, bring it to the guard, get the mcguffin and turn the quest to the shady man for a meager reward.

2) While visiting a tavern you overhear two shade men dicussing a plan to steal a powerful mcguffin. From a rumor, you learn that a local merchant has drastically increased the security on one of his warehouses. You scout the warehouse and learn that the only entrance is guarded by a half-giant. You ask around city about the half-giant and learn that he's impartial to expensive alcohol. You buy a bottle of rare liquor and bribe him with it, getting the mcguffin for yourself. Now you can keep it or sell to the local fence.

In principle, it's the same setup - buy liquor, bribe guard, get the mcguffin and turn it in for money. But while in the first case, you are told what to do and just have to follow the scrip without much thinking, the second option is made much more interesting by you having to investigate and come up with the solution on your own.

 

[RaptorRex888]

I get what you're saying but all that hinges purely on having good backstory/presentation and relying on the player to replay the game so they can experience the alternate method to the quest.

 

[hexer]

I never understand what is a good structure of quest. in every quest, in every RPG, steps in a quest are talking/giving object/killing someone/ triggering something. If you have any other ideas, I am a buyer and would be eternally grateful. The writer's talent depends on his ability to make people forget these essential steps, but it remains fundamental to all quests.

Yeah, I agree.
Most seem to follow the basic structure of a feedback loop between order and chaos.

But I think you can mix up the steps in any direction with some creativity.
For example; the player finds something (5) but he doesn't know he needs it (2) until someone steals it (6).

 

[Sharpedge]

I would like to see more unforgiving wound systems, for example, being able to lose an arm. It isn't something you really see often in games and playing through a game where the possibility for that happening existing, makes a player need to be more careful. The whole idea of a person keeping their body whole throughout an entire setting is in my opinion overdone and is a limitation in the sense that the OP is talking about.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

I'm not talking just about any place, I'm talking about the concept of nice unlooted dungeons in the middle of nowhere filled with random monsters waiting there forever for the players to barge in.
I just don't like that setup. It didn't bother me that much when I was younger, but today I consider it superficial and shallow.

The general idea is that they live there because it's far from civilization, and it stays unlooted for the same reason - few people want to enter what looks like a dragon's den in the middle of the Desert of Death (itself populated by giant scorpions with human faces), so we play as the crazies who do. It is silly for herbivores and carnivores to suddenly stop their little ecosystem and join forces against the scary humans who just barged in, or for them to be stuck into monster closets for no reason other than they guessed someone would show up soon, but that has more to do with the design of the place.

(There's the issue about how powerful authorities like a big Mages guild that should realistically have looted all the known world long ago, but it's a story so we can reason that they didn't know or didn't think there was anything in that cave worth risking their lives)

 

[Skdursh]

Name a D&D dungeon that has no back story.

This is an acceptable backstory for you?
I'm not saying it's wrong to like this simple worded "story" but it's not enough for me.
Get it, fucker?

Somewhere under a lost and lonely hill of grim and foreboding aspect lies a labyrinthine crypt. It is filled with terrible traps and not a few strange and ferocious monsters to slay the unwary. It is filled with rich treasures both precious and magical, but in addition to the aforementioned guardians, there is said to be a demi-lich who still wards his final haunt.

​

Holy shit, you're actually retarded. You've never legitimately read a D&D module before and just tossed out the "Gygaxian" buzzword because you thought it meant something that it really doesn't, right? FYI, Bethesda's boring, nonsensical shit dungeons aren't Gygaxian. Gygaxian dungeons/settings actually have a legitimate, sensible reason for their existence within their specific settings. They aren't just uncomfortably slapped down as adventurers hack-n-slash fodder.

 

[infidel]

Let's see if some generally accepted design staples limit the creativity of RPGs.
I think about these things a lot both as a game developer and a player.

1. Gygaxian dungeons
2. Elves, dwarves, orcs, goblins, trolls
3. Filler sidequests

Did you... did you just shit on DoS?

You're railing about genre tropes, developer budget/deadlines and lack of talent here. Considering that CRPGs are very heavily influenced by DnD, they have a lot of DnD baggage that in a lot of cases does not make much sense due to the lack of talent of people doing it. But with these tropes comes the playerbase that grew up on them. Sure, we can remove any of these but then how many people would actually buy it?

Also let me flip the table a bit here. If you're thinking about these a lot as a game developer, aren't you already significantly limiting your creativity? What's the point in making an inventive dungeon if it's still a dungeon?

 

[Damned Registrations]

I would like to see more unforgiving wound systems, for example, being able to lose an arm. It isn't something you really see often in games and playing through a game where the possibility for that happening existing, makes a player need to be more careful. The whole idea of a person keeping their body whole throughout an entire setting is in my opinion overdone and is a limitation in the sense that the OP is talking about.

I mean, that's the sort of 'limitation' that is there to keep the game fun. If your level 1 character takes an arrow to the knee and you have to just give up and retire to a life of mucking stables, there's not much of a game. Games also don't make you stop to take a shit or brush your teeth. The assumption is that if your character was wounded enough to lose a limb, he may as well be dead anyways so the devs saved you the trouble of finding a cliff to hurl your worthless ass off of.

 

[JarlFrank]

Sure, we can remove any of these but then how many people would actually buy it?

I'd pay full price for a good RPG set in a creative non-generic setting.

 

[JarlFrank]

I would like to see more unforgiving wound systems, for example, being able to lose an arm. It isn't something you really see often in games and playing through a game where the possibility for that happening existing, makes a player need to be more careful. The whole idea of a person keeping their body whole throughout an entire setting is in my opinion overdone and is a limitation in the sense that the OP is talking about.

I mean, that's the sort of 'limitation' that is there to keep the game fun. If your level 1 character takes an arrow to the knee and you have to just give up and retire to a life of mucking stables, there's not much of a game. Games also don't make you stop to take a shit or brush your teeth. The assumption is that if your character was wounded enough to lose a limb, he may as well be dead anyways so the devs saved you the trouble of finding a cliff to hurl your worthless ass off of.

Wound systems and loss of limbs can be interesting if done well.

How to not make it be an automatic death sentence for low level chars:
- add locational HP and damage, so your hand won't be chopped off at the first hit and you know when the limb's condition is getting dangerously low
- add locational armor so you can protect the most vulnerable parts of your body with high quality armor
- make limb severing only happen on a critical hit, or when the limb's locational HP has been reduced below zero (when locational HP reach 0 you suffer a broken wrist or something, which disables the limb until it's healed; but when it receives more damage it gets severed and you won't be able to use it anymore, sry pal)
- make even a crippled character still viable to play: if you lose your sword hand, you'll have to use weapons with your other hand now at a malus because it's not your strong hand; but you can strap a shield to the other arm that doesn't need to be held with a hand; so you get a major malus but it's not game-breakingly bad
- don't make low level characters as weak and susceptible to random chance as in D&D but develop a more sensible system (D&D is only fun between levels 3 and 12, anything below is too lolrandom anything above is too roflstompy overpowered)

You can also add cool shit like some NPCs reacting to your missing limb, and it giving you the reputation of a grizzled veteran, making intimidation checks easier or something.

 

[V_K]

Sure, we can remove any of these but then how many people would actually buy it?

SteamDB puts West of Loathing in the 200k-500k copies sold range. It has none of the three aspects mentioned in the OP.

 

[Sharpedge]

I would like to see more unforgiving wound systems, for example, being able to lose an arm. It isn't something you really see often in games and playing through a game where the possibility for that happening existing, makes a player need to be more careful. The whole idea of a person keeping their body whole throughout an entire setting is in my opinion overdone and is a limitation in the sense that the OP is talking about.

I mean, that's the sort of 'limitation' that is there to keep the game fun. If your level 1 character takes an arrow to the knee and you have to just give up and retire to a life of mucking stables, there's not much of a game. Games also don't make you stop to take a shit or brush your teeth. The assumption is that if your character was wounded enough to lose a limb, he may as well be dead anyways so the devs saved you the trouble of finding a cliff to hurl your worthless ass off of.

The point is, if you were designing games with the idea of having a more unforgiving wound system, you would go about encounter design (and design in general) differently to begin with. The very fact that it is more punishing means that encounter sizes would typically need to be small, no running into armies and expecting to live. In order to make a game work in a way that is challenging and fun to play, without being completely masochistic in difficulty with a heavy handed injury mechanic would result in developers making an rpg which is dissimilar from the typical rpg.

 

[hexer]

But with these tropes comes the playerbase that grew up on them. Sure, we can remove any of these but then how many people would actually buy it?

I'm absolutely not interested in money or reaching out to mass market.
All I want is to develop and play something different.
I'll literally go crazy if I play another generic fantasy RPG and sacrifice nearest fan of such games to Cthulhu!

 

[Damned Registrations]

I would like to see more unforgiving wound systems, for example, being able to lose an arm. It isn't something you really see often in games and playing through a game where the possibility for that happening existing, makes a player need to be more careful. The whole idea of a person keeping their body whole throughout an entire setting is in my opinion overdone and is a limitation in the sense that the OP is talking about.

I mean, that's the sort of 'limitation' that is there to keep the game fun. If your level 1 character takes an arrow to the knee and you have to just give up and retire to a life of mucking stables, there's not much of a game. Games also don't make you stop to take a shit or brush your teeth. The assumption is that if your character was wounded enough to lose a limb, he may as well be dead anyways so the devs saved you the trouble of finding a cliff to hurl your worthless ass off of.

Wound systems and loss of limbs can be interesting if done well.

How to not make it be an automatic death sentence for low level chars:
- add locational HP and damage, so your hand won't be chopped off at the first hit and you know when the limb's condition is getting dangerously low
- add locational armor so you can protect the most vulnerable parts of your body with high quality armor
- make limb severing only happen on a critical hit, or when the limb's locational HP has been reduced below zero (when locational HP reach 0 you suffer a broken wrist or something, which disables the limb until it's healed; but when it receives more damage it gets severed and you won't be able to use it anymore, sry pal)
- make even a crippled character still viable to play: if you lose your sword hand, you'll have to use weapons with your other hand now at a malus because it's not your strong hand; but you can strap a shield to the other arm that doesn't need to be held with a hand; so you get a major malus but it's not game-breakingly bad
- don't make low level characters as weak and susceptible to random chance as in D&D but develop a more sensible system (D&D is only fun between levels 3 and 12, anything below is too lolrandom anything above is too roflstompy overpowered)

You can also add cool shit like some NPCs reacting to your missing limb, and it giving you the reputation of a grizzled veteran, making intimidation checks easier or something.

So your character starts out already able to take an axe to the hand without losing it, with high quality armor, in a game where combat is easy enough that losing your hand isn't a big deal (hope you're not a fucking archer?) And presumably losing a foot never happens because then you're just fucked and the game takes twice as long to even go anywhere?

I've played several games with crippling implemented. If it happens in Battle Brothers or Rimworld or Kenshi you fire/exile the guy immediately because he's not worth the slot in the party. If it happens in Unrealworld you just fucking give up because you'll never survive doing anything remotely interesting. If it happens in IVAN you probably did it on purpose so you could pray to have it replaced with an arm made out of golden eagle feathers. In Dwarf Fortress you're dead from bleeding out in adventure mode. Ditto in CataDDA, you're probably dead if you're at the point where a limb is permanently fucked.

IVAN is the only one where it's fun and that's just because it's a silly game where you might get arms made out of bananas or paper.

Permanently weakening a character runs counter to decent gameplay- you may as well just start over because in an open world you haven't made any progress, and in a linear game you're going to be fucked by the difficulty curve. It has nothing to do with fighting lots of enemies or whether combat is over in 3 or 30 attacks. The only games it works in are really short roguelites where the powercurve is so erratic you might be fine with doing half damage from some curse effect because you got a shitton of money in exchange and might trade it for double speed and range or something, or you're close to the endgame and were already OP as fuck so it wasn't run ending.

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG