What is the point of low lethality?

[Artyoan]

Because Sawyer doesn't understand fun. His whole gripe with Disintegrate or spells like it is dumb. If you're just going to make it another damage spell and take away the possibility of straight up reducing someone to ash, then don't put the spell in to begin with because at that point it's needless bloat that adds nothing. The feast or famine aspect of the spell is what makes it enjoyable to use. It's how the player comes to form some sort of attachment to the spell because you're likely to remember that time it did pull through and completely remove some high level monster from existence than the Sawyerized fire and forget shadow of itself.

It's why his homebrew will be shit and why POE games are shit. Josh Sawyer is a really retarded dog that you need to put on a leash that has an established ruleset he has to abide by and respect. If you let the retarded dog off that leash then it'll run around being, well, a retard. And that's how you get the boring slogs that are his games.

Sawyer's actual problem with the spell lies in the Quick save/load system and the human tendency towards the path of least resistance. A lot of mechanics, systems, spells etc. would be a lot more relevant and interesting without the ability to rewind time. It requires a well made game, with few bugs, and an appropriate death system, but a CRPG with no manual saving could be a very intense experience.

 

[Wunderbar]

Low lethality is good in number-crunching games with inflated stats because it allows devs to make players feel good about levelling-up.

High lethality system example: you deal 10 damage, enemy has 15 health, you kill him in 2 hits. You deal 12 damage after level-up, same enemy has 15 health and dies in two hits -> your level-up ended up not mattering at all.
Low lethality system: you deal 10 damage, enemy has 150 health, you kill him in 15 hits. After levelling you now deal 12 damage and kill the same enemy in 13 hits. 13 is clearly lower than 15, player feels progress.

If I have to hit an enemy more than 10 times to kill him, and the same applies to an enemy having to hit me more than 10 times, the system is probably shit and combat will feel like a grind not even halfway into the game.

depends on attack speed.

A lot of action-rpgs set in modern/scifi settings are guilty of bulletsponge enemies for this reason - you wouldn't feel the character progression with low TTK. Why bother upgrading an automatic rifle, so it would kill a raider in 2 shots instead of 3?

 

[Tygrende]

Disintegrate was designed for TT. In a CRPG where people can savescum you should design your systems differently. Save or die is completely retarded in that context, and that has nothing to do with high/low lethality.

If you design your game around degenerate behavior like savescumming then the whole system is bound to be shit from the very start. Savescumming should never be a factor when designing anything, ever. What's next, designing your systems to adjust for players using Cheat Engine and editing their save files?

 

[Butter]

Disintegrate was designed for TT. In a CRPG where people can savescum you should design your systems differently. Save or die is completely retarded in that context, and that has nothing to do with high/low lethality.

If you design your game around degenerate behavior like savescumming then the whole system is bound to be shit from the very start. Savescumming should never be a factor when designing anything, ever. What's next, designing your systems to adjust for players using Cheat Engine and editing their save files?

You design your game around the systems that you include in your game. It's not rocket science. If you have a restrictive save system like Wizardry, you can include more high risk/high reward elements, because the cost of reloading for a better outcome is prohibitive. If the player can save anywhere, you should change your system design to not incentivize savescumming. This doesn't just apply to save or die spells like Disintegrate, but also to RNG skill checks. Ask yourself which game had better lockpicking: Fallout or Deus Ex?

 

[Tygrende]

You design your game around the systems that you include in your game.

Savescumming is not a system you put in your game. It's a degenerate exploitation of the necessary system meant to preserve your game state for another session or when you fail.

Ask yourself which game had better lockpicking: Fallout or Deus Ex?

Both become shit if you savescum. In Fallout you keep trying until you succeed, in Deus Ex you reload the game if what you found in the container wasn't worth the lockpick investment. I'd say savescumming hurts Deus Ex even more because unlike in Fallout, lockpicks are meant to be a limited resource.

 

[Butter]

You design your game around the systems that you include in your game.

Savescumming is not a system you put in your game. It's a degenerate exploitation of the necessary system meant to preserve your game state for another session or when you fail.

Rest spamming isn't a system either. It's a degenerate exploitation of blah blah blah. You can't properly tune your encounters if you have to account for both players who abuse rest spamming and players who don't. You can't properly tune skill RNG skill checks if you have to account for both players who savescum and players who don't. When your game has a system that's highly exploitable and it gets in the way of designing good gameplay, you need to change something. If you're not willing to budge on a flexible save system, then you have to jettison save or die mechanics.

 

[Cryomancer]

. If the player can save anywhere, you should change your system design to not incentivize savescumming. This doesn't just apply to save or die spells like Disintegrate, but also to RNG skill checks. Ask yourself which game had better lockpicking: Fallout or Deus Ex?

Savescumming is like exploiting some people like to do that hence the analogy with cheat engine by tygrende. I don't reload my save when I fail to open a lock on kingmaker for eg but if someone else wanna do that, is his problem. Why should I care if someone is enjoying the game by save scumming? Should I be penalized and lose a more faithful TT adaptation cuz another guy is save scumming?

Pillars great problem is just trying to solve """problems""" with IE games. The solution is always worst than the """problem""". Only because someone else will savescum, I should't be allowed to have spells like they are on P&P in a P&P adaptation? What is the next? No way to skip parts in movies on netflix cuz someone will skip to the end of the movie?

Many people don't die because they got one-shoted in an instant, but because they spent twenty minutes bleeding out from a huge wound.

That depends a lot of the bullet and the location where the bullet landed. A .22 LR in the leg and a .45-70 on the forehead are two completely different things.

 

[gurugeorge]

It's funny really, irl pretty much all combat is either lethal or so damaging that you would need some appreciable time to recover (sometimes, even if you're the victor). Which is unsurprising, given that Nature has spent millions of years making animals lethal.

But how do you squeeze the realism of that lethality into a game? I picture something like shrinking or compressing all the relevant parameters down to a particular "playable" level (e.g. weeks to heal down to days, hours down to a minute or two) - but not all parameters will have to be shrunk linearly, some might have to be shifted on different scales to preserve both a folk sense of realism and gameplay.

The "get out of jail free" card here is of course magical healing, which may be one reason why fantasy is such an enduringly popular genre for games. (Also, I suppose in s-f you can have the "shield" buffer plus hi tech healing, but in s-f those too are subject to some kind of realism rules, whereas with magic anything is theoretically possible.)

So I guess it's all about balancing the realism of rl lethality (strengths and weaknesses of weapon type and skill/armor/evasion) with magical/s-f mitigation/healing (enchanted weapons/armor, auras/tech shields and potions, medpacks, etc.). The realism side is where the parameters are fairly fixed (subject to various kinds of compresssion and abstraction as aforesaid); the magical/s-f side is where the developers have total control to shape gameplay (although there's still a constraint there from the internal logic of the magic/s-f being shown, or the types of s-f gee-whizzery that are theoretically possible).

 

[Tavernking]

unless you're making a game where the battle-space is separate from the exploration-space, in which case, it's pretty easy (but few wrpgs are made like that now).

What do you mean? Example?

 

[CappenVarra]

top 10 signs you are reading a Sorceror Victor thread without relying on the username:

• necromancy is one helluva drug
• Vecna is my idol but only has 150 HP, why do you need more?
• you can finger demons, dragons, and other powerful entities to death (and isnt that just the best?)
• FNV blah blah anti-materiel rifle blah blah
• ...

(i actually agree with some of these) but dude:

instead of new usernames, have you perhaps considered coming up with new content for your posts?

 

[JarlFrank]

Low lethality is good in number-crunching games with inflated stats because it allows devs to make players feel good about levelling-up.

High lethality system example: you deal 10 damage, enemy has 15 health, you kill him in 2 hits. You deal 12 damage after level-up, same enemy has 15 health and dies in two hits -> your level-up ended up not mattering at all.
Low lethality system: you deal 10 damage, enemy has 150 health, you kill him in 15 hits. After levelling you now deal 12 damage and kill the same enemy in 13 hits. 13 is clearly lower than 15, player feels progress.

If I have to hit an enemy more than 10 times to kill him, and the same applies to an enemy having to hit me more than 10 times, the system is probably shit and combat will feel like a grind not even halfway into the game.

depends on attack speed.

A lot of action-rpgs set in modern/scifi settings are guilty of bulletsponge enemies for this reason - you wouldn't feel the character progression with low TTK. Why bother upgrading an automatic rifle, so it would kill a raider in 2 shots instead of 3?

In a game with modern weapons, tying damage to your skill level is doing it wrong anyway. Instead, higher skill should improve the to hit chance, critical hit chance, reloading speed, etc. In a turn based game this can be represented by lowering the AP cost of reloading, or even the AP cost of firing (since your aim is now quicker ans steadier, and you're faster at pulling the trigger), and of course by increasing to hit chance and making aimed shots easier. In an action RPG (where bullet sponges are especially jarring because you directly control your character in first or third person, thus are closer to the action than in an isometric game and bullshit like enemies eating 500 bullets feels even more wrong than in a more "distant" isometric game) you can easily adjust things like weapon sway and recoil to reflect your skill advancement.

A complete noob will get weapon sway and an unsteady aim, has a longer delay between shots (especially with something like a bolt action or pump action gun where you have to manually operate the action after each shot: the higher your skill, the faster you can do this), is affected by recoil much more, etc. A character with a high skill gets a steady aim, fires quickly and efficiently, and can keep the recoil under control during full auto fire.

Most action RPGs just up the damage your bullets do without changing how the weapon handles at all. This is the wrong way to do it.

Gothic does it quite well for melee combat: the higher your skill, the smoother and more forgiving the controls become, and the more combo moves you can pull off. As a noob pulling off a combo requires precise timing and you can only chain two or three moves together, but with a high skill the timing is way more forgiving and you can just swing around like a madlad.

 

[Tygrende]

A worthy thing to consider: Humans resistance is weird.

It's really not, we have a really good understanding of what actually kills people these days and the factors at play in actual combat. It's just that there's a lot of different factors at play and it's hard to simulate them all within a game if the dev has no uderstanding of them in the first place and isn't willing to take the time and effort to implement them correctly.

We first have to start with the fact that most violent encounters don't end with death. Most violent encounters end with incapacitation, that is with depriving someone of the ability to take harmful actions. Killing is a viable method of incapacitation (because dead people can't act at all) but it's not the most common. Not many games actually make that distinction in the first place.

Incapacitation is typically distinguished into two categories - psychological and physical. Psychological is the vastly more common type and it basically means that someone gives up despite still being physically able to fight, if for a short time. When someone gets shot, they usually are still able to fight just fine, but the combination of pain/shock/blood loss/etc. makes them go "fuck this" and give up. There's even less games that acknowledge this.

This applies to a lot more than one might think. Getting shot in the heart for example isn't immedietaly fatal. There's still oxygenated blood left in the brain and muscles, which is all that's necessary to act, even if for half a minute at best, that's still an eternity in a fight. Of course most people would just quit right away, but there are documented cases of (usually drugged) people who kept going despite such injuries. It's also not uncommon for hunted animals to run a good bit despite getting shot through the heart and/or both lungs.

This brings us to physical incapacitation, when you straight up cannot act anymore, period. This is actually hard to achieve in a fight, especially quickly. The two main mechanisms are major blood loss and hits to the central nervous system (CNS). Blood loss is slow, even if hit in the aformentioned heart. CNS hits are basically the only realistic way to instantly stop someone from acting as they literally cut off the limbs from the brain if you hit high enough on the spine or the (right part) of the brain, but both are very small targets and there's really no way of reliably hitting them.



All of that brings me to your peashooter example - it's wholly possible for a single low caliber shot to instantly drop even the most determined and drugged up dude in the world with proper shot placement. It's also possible for several if not tens of higher caliber shots to merely slow him down. Real combat has a lot of factors that may not be entirely random, but completly out of our control.

 

[Sharpedge]

instead of new usernames, have you perhaps considered coming up with new content for your posts?

As a dedicated Necromancer, he needs to repeatedly reanimate his own discussion topics.

 

[Wunderbar]

In a game with modern weapons, tying damage to your skill level is doing it wrong anyway. Instead, higher skill should improve the to hit chance

low hit chance will make players screech (see VtMB, Deus Ex, etc).

critical hit chance

if crits happen often and low skill decreases the crit chance, then it will be mechanically identical to a simple damage penalty;
if crits happen rare but deal a ton of damage, then penalizing it will be identical to a low hit chance and it will make players screech (see VtMB, Deus Ex, etc);
if crits damage isn't important, then penalizing it won't matter;

reloading speed, etc.

Reloading speed barely matters in singleplayer action games, and certainly won't gate a playstyle behind character's skill because players will still be able to use guns with no problems.

In an action RPG (where bullet sponges are especially jarring because you directly control your character in first or third person, thus are closer to the action than in an isometric game and bullshit like enemies eating 500 bullets feels even more wrong than in a more "distant" isometric game) you can easily adjust things like weapon sway and recoil to reflect your skill advancement.

A complete noob will get weapon sway and an unsteady aim, has a longer delay between shots (especially with something like a bolt action or pump action gun where you have to manually operate the action after each shot: the higher your skill, the faster you can do this), is affected by recoil much more, etc. A character with a high skill gets a steady aim, fires quickly and efficiently, and can keep the recoil under control during full auto fire.

If you can one-shot enemies, then against a singular opponent a high recoil won't be a serious penalty - the enemy will be dead.

In action games with low TTK, the only ways recoil/sway/RoF could matter either:
- if you fight against a very fast enemy that will punish you for missing a shot;
- or if you fight a crowd of regular enemies and they will punish you if you fail to control them.
And the latter case will create of problem for level designers, because overabundance of group encounters can make the game feel like a grind.

Lowering the rate of fire isn't all that different from lowering the damage per shot, in the end it all comes down to DPS.

 

[mondblut]

In a game with modern weapons, tying damage to your skill level is doing it wrong anyway. Instead, higher skill should improve the to hit chance, critical hit chance, reloading speed, etc.

Daily reminder that "hitpoints" aren't health and "damage" isn't severity of wounds. Successfully targeting more vital or vulnerable parts does depend on skill and can be abstracted as higher "damage".

 

[JarlFrank]

Lowering the rate of fire isn't all that different from lowering the damage per shot, in the end it all comes down to DPS.

Bringing everything just down to DPS is a very degenerate way of looking at gameplay.

 

[Wunderbar]

Lowering the rate of fire isn't all that different from lowering the damage per shot, in the end it all comes down to DPS.

Bringing everything just down to DPS is a very degenerate way of looking at gameplay.

i agree, but it makes sense using this term in a damage/hp discussion.

The way I see it, action-rpgs need to gate different damage-dealing options behind character stats - invest into firearms skill to properly use guns, otherwise the guns will be ineffective. The problem is that DPS is the only thing that can be properly gated by character's stats. If the gun is still accurate and still deals decent damage, then the player will be able to use it despite the slow reload/recoil/other possible penalties, and if the player can still use the gun, then what's the point of gating? In games like Fallout 4/The Outer Worlds/Borderlands/other looter shooters reload speed and recoil are mostly quality of life elements.

 

[Butter]

Should I be penalized and lose a more faithful TT adaptation cuz another guy is save scumming?

I don't give a shit about "faithful" TT adaptation. You're not at a table with other people, there's no DM, and the game is pre-programmed. It's a mistake to try a 1:1 TT adaptation instead of embracing what makes computer RPGs unique.

What is the next? No way to skip parts in movies on netflix cuz someone will skip to the end of the movie?

Movies aren't supposed to provide a challenge. Games are supposed to provide a challenge. Getting to the end of a movie isn't supposed to be an accomplishment. If you make the game appropriately challenging for players who don't exploit savescumming or rest spamming, but you still allow for those behaviours, then you're encouraging players to be degenerate, especially if and when they run into a difficulty spike. Part of a designer's job is to understand the consequences of design decisions and make changes if those consequences are negative.

 

[DraQ]

Low lethality is how gamedevfags (attempt to) mitigate disastrous combination of their players' butthurt and their own inability to brain.

Generally, there are 4 main types of attacks:

• Decisive - achieves a tactical goal/persistently deprives enemy of a capability. If I kill an enemy wizard so they can no longer fireball, or blind enemy archer so they can't shoot, disarm a guy or put an arrow in enemy's warrior knee so they can no longer mover around and attack/defend/take cover I have performed a decisive attack.
• Forcing - forces enemy to do something I want them to, either directly or by threatening with nasty consequences. If I dunk a grenade into enemy's cover to flush them out (or start casting powerful AoE spell for similar effect), or spray that cover with suppressive fire to force them to keep their heads down and allow my dudes to close in unmolested I am performing a forcing attack. Same if I inflict cancellable damaging effect (for example set them on fire). The consequences need to be painful.
• Attrition - doesn't achieve anything interesting by itself but deprives enemy of some amount of interchangeable resource. If I sneak up on superior enemy force and kill or hobble some of their pack animals carrying their supplies or set their supply cart on fire I have performed attrition attack. Sufficient attrition usually amounts to one of the previous attack types.
  
• Gamble - can potentially achieve something game changing but with low enough probability that you shouldn't count on it. For example spraying enemy with ranged attacks from way beyond effective range (hey, might be a crit...) or casting your typical save or die spell. If it is successful it can amount to one of the other

Of course, those types aren't clearly delineated and depend on the scope and time frame (if I poison someone forcing enemy to spend healing supply or face consequences was it attrition or forcing?), but they should be useful enough.

Now the problem is that gamedevfags concentrate on the least interesting attack types (the last two) that make for the worst possible gameplay almost exclusively.
The problem with gamble is obvious - that it is, well, a gamble. It depends on luck. Involving trace amount of luck makes for more interesting and tense game just like adding some salt to your dinner tends to make it taste better, but try eating just a large pile of salt.
The problem with attrition is mostly the opposite - it's an obvious filler, plain and boring - think just plain potato puree. It can be an useful buffer layer on top of interesting stuff but it's never interesting on its own, since it basically amounts to putting progress bars on stuff.
If attrition and gamble are the only tools in your box you physically can't make interesting gameplay. No matter in what proportion you mix you plain mashed potatoes and salt you won't end up with particularly exciting dinner.
The question of low vs high lethality as posed in the context of typical RPG gameplay is falacious - the only winning move is not to play.

What good gameplay actually needs is mostly a combination of decisive attacks and forcing attacks, with pure decisive attacks needing some specific conditions.
Some attrition might be inevitable when tracking resources, same as a little bit of gamble, but the role of both should be subservient to almost deterministic decisive and forcing mechanics.

Consider a character attacking another.
In typical RPG it's something between a gamble (roll dice to see if they die) or attrition (HPs get down a bit).
Now, what should happen instead is characters performing actions to set the enemy for a killing blow (or disarming blow, or a knockout, etc.) and enemy attempting to mitigate while doing the same on their side.
Buffers, preferably mixed with nondeterminism only really help by providing time windows for doing stuff - for example by allowing you to gauge how long the shield guy can stand their ground in the doorway.

Now, when I said almost deterministic I meant there should be a measure of uncertainty in there - just enough to throw off "perfect" plans.
The rule of thumb, however should be that, for example, if you give me a clean shot at your noggin for whatever reason, YOU should expect to die. I, however, should be prepared for your survival, unlikely as it might be.

So, the combat should be very lethal IF/WHEN it becomes damaging, but not necessarily very lethal overall, and it should actually be most interesting tactically before it becomes damaging.

 

[DraQ]

In a game with modern weapons, tying damage to your skill level is doing it wrong anyway. Instead, higher skill should improve the to hit chance, critical hit chance, reloading speed, etc.

Daily reminder that "hitpoints" aren't health and "damage" isn't severity of wounds. Successfully targeting more vital or vulnerable parts does depend on skill and can be abstracted as higher "damage".

Hitpoints only work as abstraction for single hit dice HP pools.
Even so, they are a crude one, unsuitable for handling life or death of mostly non-expendable (at least not in short timeframe) snowflakes.

 

[DraQ]

Lowering the rate of fire isn't all that different from lowering the damage per shot, in the end it all comes down to DPS.

Bringing everything just down to DPS is a very degenerate way of looking at gameplay.

i agree, but it makes sense using this term in a damage/hp discussion.

It only makes sense because both gamedevs and players are retards, which is the actual problem.

 

[Cryomancer]

I don't give a shit about "faithful" TT adaptation. You're not at a table with other people, there's no DM, and the game is pre-programmed. It's a mistake to try a 1:1 TT adaptation instead of embracing what makes computer RPGs unique.

Yep. This is why Sword Coast LEgends is so good and Temple of Elemental Evil so bad /sarcasm

Games are supposed to provide a challenge. Getting to the end of a movie isn't supposed to be an accomplishment

Games are supposed to be FUN. Having a power, spell, weapon or wathever who does X in text and Y in game is not fun. And RPG games are different than other types of games, because what makes then great is that the game mechanics are translations of ideas do "simulate" things in fictional worlds. Game mechanics for the sake of game mechanics, no game beats Chess in good game design. A 4 yo child can learn how to play but becoming a grandmaster of Chess takes years even for a genius.

I play RPG's to get myself immersed into another fictional world and game mechanics should help with it(2e) not be a block in it(4e).

e.g. weeks to heal down to days, hours down to a minute or two)

On M&B you go from near dead to full health in matter of days. It is not unforgiving as IRL but it is not trivial like most video games.

 

[lukaszek]

Most action RPGs just up the damage your bullets do without changing how the weapon handles at all. This is the wrong way to do it.

speaking of fps rpgs, i hate most when shotgun to the face does less dmg than to the torso due to less pellets hitting their target

 

[Fluent]

probably a minority opinion here, but low lethality can be fun due to 'war of attrition' type battles. I'm playing Sword Coast Legends on Hard, and while my party is relatively squishy, the enemy is HP boosted quite a bit. we just fought a really tough boss battle against a legendary undead priest, and it was an absolute gauntlet of death as he summoned skeleton after skeleton to decimate our party. However, using our abilities, potions and so on, we were able to just barely win (2 of my 4 party members went down), and it was a true war that was very tense and i didn't think i would win. the battle took a good 20 minutes and SCL is RTwP, so that tells u what type of war it was. so while i also enjoy high lethality, low lethality can be fun for its own reasons.

 

[Roguey]

unless you're making a game where the battle-space is separate from the exploration-space, in which case, it's pretty easy (but few wrpgs are made like that now).

What do you mean? Example?

Classic jrpgs or the Gold Box games where you travel until you run into an encounter. The enemies can run away into the ether/surrender.