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On Role-playing Games

Unread postby Molloy » 09 Mar 2008 17:01

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

Hands down the best thing I've seen written on this website. Wow. Just wow.
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Unread postby icycalm » 09 Mar 2008 20:37

Thanks. I had been working on this for quite a while.
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Unread postby xwd » 09 Mar 2008 22:18

I really, really liked this article, as I always do enjoy your commentary.
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Unread postby PetitPrince » 10 Mar 2008 00:10

xwd wrote:the awesome potential of MMORPGs


Eve Online?

There's no grinding for in-game achievement (it is done automatically) and most of the interesting part of the game is through player interactions. Thus, since the game itself is pretty boring, there's a fine amount of remarkable meta-game: war, espionage, assassination, scam, and all these thing are within the game rules.
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Unread postby Evo » 10 Mar 2008 01:11

icy, in the article you write that stats must be hidden from the player.

Do you mean to include base stats that give the measure of your character? Or only the calculations?
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Unread postby HeavyElectricity » 10 Mar 2008 02:09

Very interesting read, well done.

I was discussing the article with some friends last night, and at some point began to compare how justifiably certain games could claim "RPG" as a genre. This discussion moved on to Shadow the Hedgehog, which is a game I can't stand. However, the game employs a system of multiple story paths based on the player's decision to finish good, evil or neutral missions, and contains a variety of endings based on the paths taken. Though the choices and consequences are barely more sophisticated than those encountered during a game of OutRun, it still seems to contain more actual role-playing than most of the games that people refer to as RPGs.

Of course, like everything related to Sonic the Hedgehog lately, this illusion of basic role-playing is doomed to failure. If the player has played past the game's shortcomings and somehow managed to see all the endings (presumably as a punishment for crimes in a previous life), the game imposes a linear story structure by introducing a final story with a "true" ending.

You're all smart enough to have worked that out for yourselves. However, I feel that it needs mentioning, if only because of the malign pleasure I could take from the results of comparing Final Fantasy VII to Shadow the Hedgehog unfavourably.
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Unread postby Jedah » 10 Mar 2008 03:28

This article just gave me the ONLY link I need to persuade stubborn "RPG" gamers that no kind of role-playing is taking place during 100+ hours of character and equipment evolution / improvisation. Excellent stuff Icy, you are on fire the last days. Congrats.
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Unread postby icycalm » 10 Mar 2008 05:53

re: Eve Online

PetitPrince wrote:There's no grinding for in-game achievement (it is done automatically) and most of the interesting part of the game is through player interactions. Thus, since the game itself is pretty boring, there's a fine amount of remarkable meta-game: war, espionage, assassination, scam, and all these thing are within the game rules.


This doesn't really make much sense. On the one hand you say the game is boring, but on the other hand you say it is interesting. And what is "meta-game" supposed to mean? You yourself go on to say that this "meta-game" is within the game rules, so how can it be "meta-game"? It's part of the game!

Anyway, it's a phrasing issue; I do understand what you are saying. I don't, however, understand why you are saying it. Eve is certainly one of the better MMORPGs, but you are still role-playing a peon in it. If that's what you are looking for, I guess you should be happy.


Evo wrote:icy, in the article you write that stats must be hidden from the player.

Do you mean to include base stats that give the measure of your character? Or only the calculations?


I have stats and you have stats. When you see me, however, you don't see my stats. It's more fun this way. You think to yourself: "Can I take this guy?" You size me up and you compare me to yourself, and you make your decision. But even if you are taller or weigh much more than me, you can never be sure of the outcome of our fight. After all, I might be an expert martial artist, or hiding a gun under my jacket.

In short, no attributes, no numbers, no stats, nothing. Not even when you pick a character (if the game allows you to pick one: in Deus Ex, for example, you don't get a choice).
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Unread postby Evo » 10 Mar 2008 06:58

In reply to icy's reply to my question. I can definitely agree with that.

I would love to see a system that did this. That was the problem discussing this sort of thing with some of the rpgcodex people who couldn't get their head around the idea of playing without numbers. They wouldn't accept that maybe you could have a rpg experience without the ability to play the numbers game.
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Unread postby PetitPrince » 10 Mar 2008 20:08

Anyway, it's a phrasing issue; I do understand what you are saying. I don't, however, understand why you are saying it. Eve is certainly one of the better MMORPGs, but you are still role-playing a peon in it.

Ah, my bad, I read your article too quickly. I was stuck on the "stats sucks in RPG".
If that's what you are looking for, I guess you should be happy.

Well, that's maybe a fact that may completely discredit me, but I don't play Eve or any MMORPG (except perhaps ProgressQuest ("best MMORPG evaaar !" as they say) because the generated name can give me a good laugh sometimes) ) for various reason. But I'm always interested on news about Eve, thinking "How cool, a game with actual spies in them ! And geopolitics !")
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Unread postby Molloy » 10 Mar 2008 20:52

I suppose if I were to explain why I appreciated the article so much it's that it confirms most of my prejudices against the genre. Your explanation of what a table top RPG sounds quite appealing. And all the things you list as being specific to CRPGs are the particular thing that turned me off the genre as a whole years ago.

I used to be able to tolerate RPGs in the early 90's because they were often less than 10 or 15 hours long. There wasn't ever all that much grinding and if there was a simple story at least it wasn't dragged on that long. As for todays 50+ hour epics.. I couldn't care less.

Now, I'll be the first to say this is a genre I know absolutely fuck all about, so I'm probably not contributing much to the discussion, but how do Neverwinter Nights 1/2 stand up? I recall hearing they had quite a table top like style to them. The game masters supposedly had alot of control over how the game played out and the story it tells. Sounded interesting to me but I never got around to trying them.
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Unread postby icycalm » 11 Mar 2008 04:15

With Neverwinter Nights your game will only be as good as the DM you play with. It doesn't seem like you know how RPGs work, so I would suggest perhaps reading up on that. I doubt I'd be able to give you a good idea without writing a couple thousand words.
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Unread postby Jedah » 11 Mar 2008 14:49

What I believe is that RPGs, Japanese particularly, are the video game equivalent of smoking. You must press yourself hard the first times ( it tastes like horse shit ) and then becomes a relaxing habit and/or an unhealthy addiction.
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Unread postby Morzas » 13 Mar 2008 23:20

Loved the article, but I feel that you're overlooking something when you say this:

Since TSR's writers and most of their initial customers came from a wargaming background, official D&D modules (i.e. ready-made adventures) tended to focus on dungeon crawling and excessively time-consuming combat. But as the game exploded in popularity, and as other companies started entering the field, the focus began to slowly shift. Later games such as White Wolf's Vampire: The Masquerade (1991) moved further away from role-playing's wargaming roots by emphasizing plot and character development over rules and combat, and the trend has continued apace ever since, with modern games such as Sorcerer (2002) and Dogs in the Vineyard (2005) going as far as to adopt a so-called narrativist approach to role-playing (the goal of which is to promote the emergence of some kind of value-judgement through in-game events).


This block of text is accurate, but you seem to be forgetting that the rulebooks don't run pen and paper RPGs, the DMs do. The rules are only the foundation for the game. I've played D&D games that are hack-and-slash and D&D games where my character never so much as touches a sword. This paragraph reminded me of this rant that's been floating around the D&D blog world as of late, except your paragraph is factual while his is whiny and opinionated.
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Unread postby icycalm » 14 Mar 2008 00:47

Morzas wrote:This block of text is accurate, but you seem to be forgetting that the rulebooks don't run pen and paper RPGs, the DMs do.


Morzas, I am not forgetting anything. You are the one who is forgetting how essay-writing works. You see, the purpose of each paragraph in an essay (each "block of text", as you would put it) is to deliver a point, not to serve as a mini-encyclopedia of all possibly imaginable tangentially-related factoids. My purpose with the paragraph you quoted was to show the reader that the focus of role-playing quickly shifted from its wargaming roots to the "interactive-storytelling" that had been its goal all along. Then I moved to the next paragraph, which delivered the next point in line, then the paragraph after that, etc. etc.

The fact you brought up -- that "rulebooks don't run real-life RPGs, the gamemasters do" -- is indeed correct, but it's irrelevant to the points I wanted to raise in the essay, so I didn't mention it. For one thing, everyone who knows how real-life RPGs work knows that it's the gamemasters who run them. For another, in electronic RPGs, which were the focus of the article, there are no gamemasters, so the "rulebooks" do indeed run the games.

You see this is a site about electronic games, not real-life ones, and so in my various articles I mention their real-life counterparts only in so far as that is necessary to make the points I want to make.

Besides, there is one more reason why mentioning the fact you pointed out would have been inappropriate in that paragraph, and would have misled readers from understanding what I was trying to tell them.

You see, a gamemaster can take the RPG that someone else designed and play it any way he sees fit. He can change some rules, ignore others, and interpret the rest in ways that their designers wouldn't even have imagined. For example, I was once a player in a Forgotten Realms campaign, when the DM got fed up with the whole game and decided to have fun at our expense by bringing in fucking ASTRONAUTS and having them shoot at us with fucking LASERS. What does that mean? Does it mean that it was Ed Greenwood's intention to have players being attacked by astronauts in his medieval fantasy campaign setting?

So yes, some very bright, imaginative gamemaster could have taken the original 1974 version of D&D and run it exactly as the 2005 game Dogs in the Vineyard. Or someone could be playing a Dogs in the Vineyard campaign right this very moment, and running it exactly as D&D circa 1974. But does that mean that there has been no evolution in the design of RPGs from 1974 to 2008?

Of course there has been. And it is that evolution which I wanted to explain to readers with that paragraph you quoted.


Morzas wrote:This paragraph reminded me of this rant that's been floating around the D&D blog world as of late


I hope you are only joking. It's either that, or you are trying to insult me.

Morzas wrote:except your paragraph is factual while his is whiny and opinionated.


"Whiny" and "opinionated" are not insults, I hope you realize. My paragraph was in fact very opinionated, as is every paragraph I have ever written or will ever write. That is why people write, after all, to communicate and express opinions, and the more opinionated a piece of writing the more interesting it is. As for "whining", there are times when a man can do nothing else but whine. That, too, has its uses.

The issue with the article you linked, therefore, is not that its "whiny" and "opinionated" -- those are its good points -- it's that the author has no idea of what he is writing about.
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Unread postby Morzas » 14 Mar 2008 04:53

Ah, I understand now. It would be pointless to go over all of the intricacies of D&D in an article that's primarily about video games. And there's no need to get so defensive about that blog linking, the contrastings of D&D and Vampire in your essay are what brought that rant to mind.

Anyhow, great website. I know that very few people are going to agree with (or even get) what you're saying, but just so you know, this guy here's had his eyes opened to another way at looking at RPGs. Which is the reason why you write this stuff, right?
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Unread postby icycalm » 15 Mar 2008 23:46

I am not sure anymore. I think the only reason I keep going with this website is because I have no longer anything better to do.

Anyway.

Here is an interesting quote from the designer of The Black Onyx, apparently the first "Japanese" "RPG":

I ditched the numbers that indicated player health for blue bar-graphs that turned red as the player got damaged. This system is widely used not only in RPGs but in fighting games such as Street Fighter and Virtua Fighter today.


http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?optio ... &Itemid=51
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Unread postby Jerry Whorebach » 18 Mar 2008 11:03

Excellent series of articles! Much like my other favourite topics, politics and sex, it's rare to read a treatise on games that stands up to logical scrutiny. I have only one question: what's Deus Ex got that Fallout hasn't?

Thanks,
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Unread postby icycalm » 18 Mar 2008 11:20

It's a fine line, but when you look at the whole game it is clear that Fallout is on the wrong side of it. At the end of the day you are usually controlling a team of characters, and therefore the focus of the game is on strategy. Sure it gives you some choices, but so does Baldur's Gate II or Torment. These choices should not be enough by anyone's standards.

It's also worth pointing out that Deus Ex is far more FPS than it is RPG. Still, it goes further down the RPG road than any other game before or after it, and that's why you see me bringing it up again and again in all RPG-related articles. (For more details read Matt Warner's review of the game, if you haven't already.)

Defining the exact point at which an electronic game should be considered an RPG is tricky. It depends on your standards -- if your standards are too high then even Deus Ex should not be viewed as an RPG. I guess I'll write an article on this at some point in the future.


By the way, I've read a few of your reviews on Caltrops. Great stuff.
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Unread postby Jerry Whorebach » 18 Mar 2008 12:46

Hmm, I can't say I agree with your assessment of Fallout. For one thing, you have no control over your NPCs, direct or indirect. Nor can you level them up, increase their hit points, or replace their default armor. Top it off with there being only four, total, in the entire game, and I find it hard to see Fallout as a game of small-unit tactics, even a poor one.

Also, Fallout's story is substantially less linear than the Infinity Engine games you compare it to. The end state is achieved when The Master is dead and The Military Base destroyed, two tasks you can accomplish in any order, each through a variety of means. Couple that with multiple endings for nearly every important location in the game, and I find it hard to see Fallout as anything less than our best <i>attempt</i> at single-player computer role-playing to date.

(Bear in mind I'm speaking only of the original, not the sequel, which was nearly as good at missing the entire point of its predecessor as Deus Ex 2.)

But I can certainly see how you might consider Deus Ex closer to the ideal, and I have nothing but respect for that opinion. I just wouldn't be much of a Fallout fan if I didn't try to shove a deeper appreciation for it down everyone's throat, now would I?
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Unread postby icycalm » 19 Mar 2008 00:26

Well, perhaps you are right. My experience with Fallout is limited to a couple of afternoons of playing time using a borrowed laptop back in '98. I don't think I managed to get that far before I had to return it. I've been meaning to play it properly and write a review, so I'll get back to you once I get around to doing that. It would be a real rush for me to discover a second real CRPG.
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Unread postby zinger » 21 Mar 2008 00:50

Just want to say thanks for a great article. Informative and insightful as usual, and compared to other game journalism, no less than revolutionary. I've never bothered to understand JRPG's before (why would I ever?), so I enjoyed this perspective. Unfortunately, my experience with true role-playing is about as little, so there are still some loose ends to the article, as far as I can understand it. I just started playing Phantasy Star II (for self-education) and I look forward to comparing it to Deus Ex. :)

Keep it up!
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Unread postby icycalm » 21 Mar 2008 06:32

Glad you enjoyed it. You are probably going to enjoy Phantasy Star II as well. The earlier JRPGs are on the whole much better games than most modern ones, on the one hand because they were actually challenging, and on the other because the exploration part gave you much more room to actually... explore. The new ones are scripted much more tightly, because the freaking cutscenes must be shown in a specific order, and they can only be shown in specific locations. So you are usually forced to walk in a straight line throughout the whole game.

On the subject of real-life RPGs, it is indeed very hard to explain to someone how they work if you are not face-to-face with them. This anyway was not the purpose of my article. But if you want to get some taste of how awesome such games can be, I recommend reading this excerpt from the rulebook of kill puppies for satan:

http://www.lumpley.com/excerpts.html#pupintro

It's absolutely hilarious, and puts into perspective just how unimportant battles, stats and battle systems are for real RPGs.

Another thing to do would be to read the Wikipedia entry on improvisational theatre:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Improvisational_theatre

Role-playing is basically improv theatre, with the gamemaster acting as director, the players as actors, and a system of rules to determine the outcomes of actions, and resolve conflicts whenever they arise.
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Unread postby Randorama » 25 Mar 2008 10:35

This would have been the article I would have written if I could have endured the pain of playing RPG's beyond their original format (let alone JRPG's, of course). I will raise a toast to you and offer words of praise to great Cthulhu once I am back in R'lyeh.

Speaking of which, I wouldn't say that Vampire was the first game to trigger the shift on actual Role-Playing, but that would be somehow excessive nitpicking: the early efforts from Chaosium may be seen to have paved the way, from my own partisan point of view.


A random blabbing: as a DM, I always forced players to know well the rules and to exploit the loopholes to their own advantage. Also, an expert DM knows when it makes sense for PG's to risk their own life, from a narrative point of view.

I never really played dice-light systems (except for Werewolf and Deadlands, I'd say), but nevertheless some experience with the right amount with dice-throwing can make any phase smooth. I remember that our Elric! sessions never had more than 10-minutes long fights, on an average of 3 hours. Except for the meaningful ones, which could be even 1 hour: no more than 1 or 2 per campaign, though (and we did like, 3 campaigns per year).

And no, I wasn't a a serial killer DM. Sometimes lucky with dice, though





:lol:
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Unread postby icycalm » 26 Mar 2008 07:45

Randorama wrote:Speaking of which, I wouldn't say that Vampire was the first game to trigger the shift on actual Role-Playing, but that would be somehow excessive nitpicking: the early efforts from Chaosium may be seen to have paved the way, from my own partisan point of view.


You are probably right. To be honest, I have no idea exactly when the shift started happening, or which were the key games. I just picked one common example to make my point. Perhaps I'll go back and edit that.

Randorama wrote:And no, I wasn't a a serial killer DM. Sometimes lucky with dice, though.


Man, I was much worse than that. I used to MANUFACTURE the dice rolls whenever I felt like it. I never let some stupid numbers get in the way of the dramatic events I wanted my players to experience.

That was not really good DMing, of course. But it was good directing.
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