He’s stupendously athletic, but somehow not a drooling moron with severe autistic tendencies.
Which he would be, according to the limited point allocations of most RPGs, as all his points would have gone into STR, DEX and END, with almost nothing left over for INT, WIS and CHA.
To each their own, I guess. Having played it both ways, there isn’t a whole lot (in my opinion) going for the grinding system. Which is what it turns into – even if you have a shield that gives more skill-ups when fighting a boss, the fact remains that you’re going into a boss battle with worse shield skills than if you had worked them up fighting goblin whelps first.
Much of that doesn’t strike me as affecting RPGs, per se. Weather effects are just game standards and a number of games have “darker night” style mods but the fact is most people don’t actually find stumbling around blind to be especially enjoyable. I’m not sure what you mean by procedurally generated environs… even your paper & pencil GM had a map, I assume. Bosses seem to be getting smarter in games like Darl Souls, Dragon’s Dogma or DA: I’s dragon fights.
I’ve no problem with “pure” classes simply as a function of game balance. Witness Dragon Age Origins/Inquisition where playing an Arcane Warrior/Knight Enchanter is basically an “I win” card.
That’s how it was done in the bad old days, that’s where the Squishy Wizard trope came from.
True, that should definitely be handled better. I would just prefer not being able to become a master of every single thing. I like the game to force me to weigh pros and cons, for the challenge. I get that it’s not how reality works.
Oblivion improved your abilities based on what you used most. As you say it would lead to people improving their sneak skill by facing a wall with a rubber band around their game control to keep the character endlessly sneaking while the player went off to do their grocery shopping or whatever. I also remember the levelling system being fundamentally flawed in that the way to get the most out of your character was to choose major skills that did not reflect your character build, otherwise you could level too quickly and find yourself getting weaker compared to your opponents. This wouldn’t have been so much of a problem if the enemies didn’t level with you.
Having to grind a skill to get good at it is actually pretty realistic though you know? A concert pianist only gets good by doing a real life grind. It seems reasonable for an archer character to either spend hours practicing archery with targets or to go out seeking weak opponents to practice against. The problem then becomes one of a realistic system not being fun. Many of us have limited time in which to play a game and don’t want to spend the time we do have grinding a skill anymore than we want to waste real life time having our character go to the toilet or sleep.
It seems reasonable to me then to remove the skills grind and replace it with an abstract representation of training. So we have a levelling system where after spending a certain amount of effort gaining experience we can upgrade some of our skills. The implication is that while the player was out shopping, sleeping, working or whatever, our character has been spending a bit of time on his own practicing skills.
Agree with this totally.
I was thinking about this recently while playing The Witcher III. There are quests that have a certain amount of implied time pressure. In reality you can do most quests whenever you like, the time pressure is not real. When a character says, “we must meet tonight and murder the King”, what they really mean is, “I will be at the meeting spot every night from now until eternity and when you choose to show up we can go and murder the King.” It is up to the player how much they want to role play this. You can pretend the time pressure is real and show up at the appointed place and time or you can spend a month on side quests and come back to murdering kings when you feel like it. The only thing that is important from a game design perspective I guess is that it should allow you to be appropriately levelled for a supposedly time critical quest. It’s bad design if it allows you to get to a point where you are supposed to do a quest “tonight” but the quest is too tough and there is no way you could do it without spending a month on side quests first.
You can also role play by making your character walk everywhere rather than running or fast travelling. You can make your character get an appropriate amount of sleep each day. In the Witcher you could meditate once a game day for 8 hours, or if there are quests to do at night, make sure you get an afternoon nap in. As you say, the game is the frame work within which the player can play the game. How much they want to role play is up to them. Forcing role play on the other hand is not cool. Fast travel is a useful shortcut for people who don’t have the time or inclination to pretend to be walking everywhere.
All that needs to be done here is to make a reasonable baseline for any character. So your starting stats make you an average person with average intelligence, charm, strength etc. Then when you put time or points into being strong and dextrous it doesn’t leave you as a witless moron, it just means you are average. You should still have dialogue options where an average amount of charm can talk your way out of a situation.
For most real people, if you spend a lot of time learning a specialised subject then the chances are your social skills won’t be fantastic, they’ll just be average. Look at the top tier of any sport and you will find a couple of charismatic athletes but you will find many more who are very boring simply because their sport is their life and that doesn’t make for a well rounded individual.
Now that you mention it, I remember setting my Skyrim character up at one point with a weight placed on my hotkey to spam Detect Life over and over to raise my spell skill. Meanwhile, I sat on the couch and read stuff on my tablet. When you have a system that encourages doing this sort of thing, it’s just not a good system.
That’s what Fallout 4 did and people couldn’t wrap their heads around it. Critics would either insist that you must be a complete moronic invalid because you didn’t drop starting points into Intelligence and Strength or else complain that you must be a superhuman because it didn’t use the previous games’ trade-off system and require you to be a moronic invalid to have a high agility and charisma. In reality, most stats didn’t mean much anyway aside from gating off perks but people take their stat scores very seriously.
Of course, FO4 tried to make the game more about a specific person’s story so it made sense to frame the system where your military guy/lawyer woman wouldn’t be grossly incompetent in most aspects of life.
It’s the not systems fault you wanted to find a shortcut to level up your player. You were the one who chose to de-immerse yourself in the game and take advantage of a system built to try and replicate a more real type leveling system.
FO4 also lets you increase your stats when you level up, in lieu of choosing a skill to add or upgrade. So if you start out kind of puny, you can beef up over time through leveling up, or smarten yourself, etc…
To be clear, I wasn’t saying I particularly like the tradeoff system of a lot of RPG/CRPGs. It’s unrealistic at best. I kind of like the idea of your character being average in all respects “out of the box”, and then you get some random number of “bonus” points that you can spend to make your character better than average. After all, in most of these games the player’s character is NOT an average schlub, but some sort of legend-in-the-making, so it stands to reason that they’d be better than average in many respects.
So rather than a 1-18 score (for example) for each trait, maybe just a +1, +2 kind of thing, without the player having the ability to intentionally decrease baseline scores. And keep it limited, or somehow balance it- like maybe if the ratio of STR:DEX gets outside of some range, the DEX goes down with an increase in strength in order to reflect a possible drop in agility due to extreme musculature for example. So you can’t make your guy immensely strong without having to throw some points into DEX, or maybe account for that in the game system- make most feats of strength have a DEX component, such that being immensely strong isn’t particularly useful. And so on with the other stats.
On a different note, the big issue with skill grinding is a combination of boredom and time constraints. While it’s true that in real life, we often do a sort of grinding to get experience and skill at some task, in the game world, it’s not fun to grind doing something that’s not inherently fun. That’s the kind of thing that forces players away from the game because many get bored with it, and others don’t have the time to spend to grind instead of playing the actual game.
Sure, because the alternate is to go adventuring with weak skills. As Richard Pearse points out, in “reality”, I would be practicing in my down time. Just as I don’t need to watch my character take a dump or sleep in real time or take every sip of water or sit on a stump for five minutes and rub their legs, I don’t need to watch my character practice casting trivial cantrips just to stay in tip-top spellcasting shape. Assume that, while I’m “waiting” for four hours for a shop to open or NPC to get back into position, I’m practicing skills to pass the time. Instead, I’m forced to practice spells in real time instead of assuming that’s what I’d be doing anyway like a sane person. You know, rather than wandering into the wilderness largely untrained because I couldn’t be bothered to shoot off a couple fire bolts before a wolf is chewing my face.
It’s not a more realistic system, it’s just a more tedious system.
Well, yeah. Which is what I did, and the game played just fine. All that stuff about practicing in downtime? If I don’t face a wall and spam detect life, I can still imagine that my character is practicing in her downtime. When I fast travel, when I wait, my character is practicing.
I mean, c’mon, we already have characters going from novice to archmage status in about two-three months. Our characters are plenty smart already. It’s no great leap to assume they’re practicing.
If a game requires this sort of spamming of skills in order to be remotely playable, that’s one thing. But I’ve never heard anyone complain that Skyrim is too tough a game.
But you’re not practicing. You don’t get skill increases from fast traveling or waiting. You only get skill increases from actively using the skills in game. You can imagine that unicorns fly out of your butt when you fast travel if you want but it won’t actually provide you with an in-game source of unicorns… or skill increases.
In a more realistic scenario, you would in fact practice during your off hours and get more skilled as a result. Which is what the “Purchase skill points on leveling” system emulates.
Anyway, Skyrim isn’t the worst of these and wasn’t my original pick for pointing out its flaws. In Skyrim, you hurt no one but yourself if you’re not up to par. Try fizzling a dozen spells in a row during an MMORPG raid and saying “Gee, guess I need to practice during combat more!” and see how much everyone appreciates your realism.
The argument was more that that the systems became more limited in Fallout 4 in general. A lot of people noted the conversation had slowly degraded from Fallout 2 to what amounts to all conversations being effective choices between:
I’ll do the thing
I’ll do the thing (sarcastic)
Maybe later
Nobody wanted a system in which you had to be a blithering idiot to be good at guns, and honestly, I don’t know where people are getting this diagnosis from. Unless you’re doing some extreme munchkin min-maxing it’s really rare to have a character that starved in any stat.
The point was more that allowing yourself to make these characters gives you more roleplaying options. A lot of people were more lamenting that you no longer could make a 2 Int character that could barely speak, because it was funny, and more to the point, the system would let you play a “dumb brute” character.
If you start with the conceit that all 0s in all stats are “average”, you fundamentally limit the archetypes you can play. You can no longer play a frail genius, or a dumb brute (I mean, you can try, but the systems won’t reflect it). But most characters people roll in, say, D&D, tend to hover around 8-10 in their non-core stats, which is explicitly around average. I don’t feel like RPGs have this hyper-specialization problem people are noting, unless everyone here is an absurd min-maxer.
FO4 had all sorts of valid criticisms on the “RPG” side of things but I was speaking explicitly of the changes to the SPECIAL system and people did complain that either (a) They only had one starting point in a stat so they much be severely deficient or (b) they added points to a baseline score so they must be ubermensch.
True. Although that was by design in FO4 where they wanted it to be the story of a war hero or lawyer searching for their son and not the story of a drooling lumberhead hate-punching his way through a civilian settlement just for kicks. And there’s a valid criticism if that’s the sort of flexibility you expected based on previous titles but it’s not because of the revamped SPECIAL system. The new system is entirely based on more fundamental design decisions.
I can’t believe we are actually having an argument about “realism” in Computer RPGs. Really guys? This is where we’re at? We’re good with Doom Guy taking a rocket in the chin and being fine after walking over a medkit, but we’re deeply offended by the idea that our character gets better at casting spells without grinding the crap out of them?
Good god. If you want to play a game about grinding skills, go settle down with a copy of Street Fighter 5 or Guilty Gear Xrd or BlazBlue CP Extend and grind some combos until you can do them 10 times in a row on each side, and then come back and tell me how much more fun it makes the game. =/
Also, much as I don’t want to derail a terrible argument about realism in games, that’s not even the most baffling claim going on here. Do we seriously think that you can’t take on a role for a linear experience? Last time I checked, actors played roles, and I’m pretty sure that Benedict Cumberbatch wasn’t staying much from a linear path in his portrayal of Alan Turing in the The Imitation Game.
And I don’t have to talk about how games are abstractions, and that you can’t possibly model all the range of human experience, regardless, right? Right?
I don’t think this is entirely true anymore - we could certainly be past decision trees and linear gameplay if we wanted to be. Façade came out 11 years ago and it could handle emergent gameplay and player generated storylines. (Of course the graphics were crap, the gameplay was short, and a dinner party with a couple is not as compelling as saving the world from an evil wizard, but it was a proof of concept).
Of course, developing AI like this isn’t easy, and it’s much more straightforward to hire a couple more graphic designers to make your game look pretty than to hire a team of AI devs to handle emergent gameplay.
You’re one of those “Donkey Kong can be an RPG because I can pretend that I’m really a plumber trying to save my girlfriend” types, aren’t you? 
Just kidding, I mainly agree with your points.
As was previously asserted, roleplaying is up to the player, soooooo…sure? 
I don’t, nor is the pressure on my bladder relieved; but I notice that I have no need to pee during the game. Similarly, I notice that my skills are rising at a very rapid pace. Why? Must be because of all that practice I do during downtime. It may not show up on my grid, but it enables fast practice on my grid.
No thank you, I’d rather not. The idea of playing a game with a group of people who insist on my grinding at it isn’t my idea of fun. If the game is set up to require me to grind, or to pay them extra money for an in-game advantage, or to log on regularly in order to avoid penalties, or to poke myself in the eye with a sharp stick, it’s breaking my #1 rule, which is that this is something I do for fun. I don’t care about the realism.
Huh. I’d never heard of Façade before, and it sounds pretty cool. However, it sounds like it leaves “few inputs, few responses” in favor of “many inputs, few responses.” And that’s still different from a tabletop game.
Some tabletop experiences that a computer game just can’t manage:
-Confronted by an army of undead while we’re at the top of a cliff, our party came up with an insane plan involving illusions to distract the undead, charm animal spells to convince our cart-dragging camels to leap off cliffs, feather fall to slow their descent until we could cast fly on all the camels, and grease spells on the carts to make the few undead hangers-on plummet to their deaths. Sure, a game might set up that scenario for us ahead of time, and it’d be fun to play through, but the combination of hilarious incompetence and strokes of genius that led to that plan coming together at the last instant made it one of my all-time favorite gaming experiences.
-A character who decided to save her own life, when captured by bad guys, by agreeing to turn traitor, and in a key moment murder an ally, and who then played through a multi-game redemption arc. Again, the player initiative to make the “I’ll betray my allies” proposal to the villains is something hard to script a computer to respond to appropriately.
-A character who invents his own god of trickery, reasoning that the best trick a god could perform is to convince the world that it exists, and who then creates an entirely fake secret society in order to destabilize a kingdom, and who then forges historical documents to invent a fake, heroic backstory for the intelligent sword of the Chaotic Neutral ally who appears to be sliding toward Chaotic Evil. How do you get an AI to respond intelligently to this sort of nonsense? A human GM can do so.
A lot of the pleasure I take in playing games is coming up with my own story arc. Is it a story of redemption? Is it a story of vengeance? Is it a story of finding one’s place in the world? And how does my character’s story mesh with the stories of the other PCs, each of whose players is hopefully creating his or her own story arc?
Computer games just don’t do that. I tried something recently, playing through Skyrim with a character who had the same stats and personality as the character I’m playing in my main tabletop game. It was fun, but it totally didn’t work. My dialog choices were limited, my actions were limited, people responded to me in ways that are not how I’d see it happening in the tabletop game.
I treat computer RPGs like Skyrim totally differently from how I treat tabletop RPGs. I don’t anticipate a time in my lifetime where AI will be good enough to respond organically to a truly open set of player inputs.
I’ve often felt like CRPGs ought to probably be renamed “interactive cinema” or something along those lines, as that’s essentially what they tend to feel like to me, especially the games like Fallout 3 and later, and the Mass Effect games. You’re essentially the hero in the story, and have a degree of control over the outcome, but it’s ultimately an action movie that you’re part of.
RPG implies something a little different, and while I think the OP is protesting too much, I do agree that we haven’t really got there yet; probably the closest thing to a real RPG that you’ll see online is actually more of the MMORPG style of games; interaction with other players requires a certain amount of role-playing.