The Problem with "RPGs"

The Game Room
61

Do you also find a corner alley and stand facing the wall for thirty seconds every couple of hours of game-time, to simulate peeing? Squat in the alley for a couple of minutes every day? How do you simulate breathing when you play a game with no breathing mechanic?

In a game like Skyrim, many things are to be assumed. Characters are assumed to be taking appropriate bathroom breaks, eating appropriately, breathing–and, yes, practicing skills in downtime. There’s no need to simulate those things, because they’re super-boring.

If it makes the game more fun for you to put a rubber band on the controller and stop playing in order to simulate them, seriously, enjoy that experience. But that’s not part of the game’s default assumptions. If you really need to think about whether your character is peeing, or pooping, or breathing, or practicing, you can think about it; otherwise the rest of us just assume all these things happen.

62

Well, no because there’s no “peeing” mechanic and “peeing” isn’t part of the game.

Casting spells IS part of the game and has a set mechanic for how one becomes more advanced in casting – by casting spells. In real life, we call this “practice”. Baseball players don’t only become better at hitting baseballs by playing games, they also practice.

Saying you practice in your downtime in Skyrim is definitively incorrect because, if you did, you would fire up the game and see that you’ve gained five points of [skill]. You do not. The only way you gain points in a skill is by its active application, either in the field or practicing before entering the field. Comparing it to peeing or breathing is nonsense because there is no system for tracking urination or breaths in the game but there is a system for tracking how skilled you’ve become at performing a skill and that system is directly tied to how often you perform the skill, not some “downtime practicing”.

In contrast, games with leveling systems where you go up a level and become better at stabbing things, picking locks or making fireballs DO assume downtime practicing which is why you never see gradual skill-specific increases between levels. If you’re okay with going adventuring with a bash skill of 2/100 and figuring that you’ll just noodle it out and get better when things stab you in the face, then that’s awesome but it doesn’t make it more realistic. Much less, actually, unless you’re role-playing an idiot.

63

UO is a good example of how role playing could be done right, but a lot of people are just whiny bitches.

Not long after it was released- late 1997/early 1998 or so, some friends and I were playing on one of the servers that allowed player-killing outside of the towns.

We got really tired of roaming the countryside looking for beasts and monsters to kill, or doing idiotic crafting to try and scratch a minimal amount of gold.

So we did what many people do when confronted with poverty and boredom; we set up shop as criminals. Highwaymen to be specific. We scouted out a road where we could bottle up the non-criminal players, we used some patsy characters to make ourselves various clothing items in the exact same shade of green as the background, and we worked on leveling up our hiding skills as much as possible.

We’d basically hide in the bushes alongside the road, and at least one of us would hop out in front, and one or more in back, and say “Stand and Deliver!” or “Your money, or your life!” and stuff like that.

And we’d actually let people off the hook if they’d cough up their stuff- they’d run off broke and weaponless, but we’d let them go.

If they fought back, we’d not only kill them and steal their crap, but we’d dismember the corpses, so they’d have to travel to a temple for resurrection. We figured that one out when some dumb-asses would continually resurrect on the spot and get re-killed and then get REALLY pissed that they’d lost all that XP. :smack:

We weren’t saints either; I remember lurking in the woods waiting for people to come down the road, when I noticed a magic-user out practicing spells in the woods. I waited until he was spent, then jacked him, getting a whole lot of reagents and other good stuff which I traded with a patsy character and sold in town for lots of $$$. Good criminal times!

Anyway, it was a lot of fun- periodically the “good” players would round up a posse and come after us, and we’d flee and/or hide, or sometimes get caught and go down fighting.

You wouldn’t believe the number of people who got really angry that we were actually trying to role-play evil characters though- they didn’t draw any distinction between actual evil role playing and dipshit teenagers just pk-ing anyone who ventured out.

64

You’ve got a bad “if then” here - monsters being over your level doesn’t mean they automatically kill you, and monsters being under your level doesn’t mean you have to kill THEM. Giving players some ability to pick their fights solves almost all of your issues without making the world nonsensical.

What makes ME cranky is not that you are “roleplaying evil characters” but that you are basically circumventing parts of the game to do it. You are using all kinds of supporting characters to make this happen, and that rubs me the wrong way.

65

Not necessarily. It’s possible that your practice in downtime enables the insanely rapid rise in skills, but it’s only when you put those skills into use in practical situations that you realize those gains enabled through downtime practice.

Whatever, man. I don’t really think there’s anything I can say on this subject that I’ve not already said.

To sum up, though:
-The game is balanced without the behavior you’re engaging in.
-The game can be explained in-universe without the behavior you’re engaging in.
-You’re criticizing the game for the behavior you’re engaging in.

I don’t see that as a problem with the game. Either it’s a problem with your own behavior, or it’s a problem with your imagination, or it’s a problem with your expectations. But it’s not a problem that’s inherent to the game.

66

And see, to me this ignores one of the first lessons of roleplay, the Hippocratic Oath of roleplay: First, Don’t Be a Jerk.

Roleplaying a jerk can be fine, as long as you do it in a way that increases everyone’s fun. But if you go into a leisure activity and engage in it in a way that ruins the fun for everyone else, there’s no excuse for that. Not, “BUT I’M ROLEPLAYING EVIL!!!”, not, “BUT THAT’S WHAT MY CHARACTER WOULD DO!!!”, not, “BUT THE SYSTEM ALLOWS IT!!!”

No. You don’t get to harsh other people’s fun and make excuses. If you do that, whatever disguise you’re hiding behind, it’s not cool.

67

Ah, so it’s the sort of practice that only makes you better when you actually fight a goblin! :smiley:

Honestly, you’re way too defensive about it. The simple point is that:
(a) The OP was complaining about not enough “realism” and wanted skill gains in the field rather than at level up
(b) That sort of system isn’t actually any more realistic and is, in some ways, less realistic
(c) When done poorly, it’s not only unrealistic but also a grind; the fact that you refuse to play games where this is the case doesn’t make the system better

It’s not about how ‘hard’ Skyrim’ is – it isn’t. Bethesda games are ridiculously easy. I wasn’t practicing Detect Life because I’d die without it, I was practicing it because walking around through dungeons casting it (or, to go more extreme, only casting it when I had a sincere desire to detect life) is more time consuming than just letting the computer do it while I do other things. Stretching out a grind over weeks while adventuring doesn’t make it less of a grind than getting it over with in a few hours, it just deludes you into thinking that you’re not grinding.

And, as I previously pointed out, my original example wasn’t even about Skyrim, it was about Everquest. I only brought up Skyrim when someone else mentioned the system in Oblivion. Glomming onto the Skyrim example completely misses the overall point.

68

I assume UO allowed for open PVP so “robbing” someone isn’t any worse than just jumping out of the bushes and ganking them. Less so, really, since robbing them gives them an opportunity to escape with their xp, if not their coin (vs losing both). Part of playing a PVP game/server is accepting that sometimes you’re going to get killed by players. Bump is just saying that he tried to put a RP spin on it rather than just insulting their mom and saying “lol u sux” as he killed them.

69

Everything else you’ve said I’ve already said all I have to say on it, but this? Weird. The definition of a grind to me is something you do because the game requires it but it’s not entertaining. If you’re doing it while adventuring and during the meat of the game, and if the game’s meat is entertaining, it’s by definition not a grind.

70

He seems to me to be complaining that people didn’t " distinction between actual evil role playing and dipshit teenagers just pk-ing anyone who ventured out." If I’m in a game where people are jumping in the way of my fun in order to entertain themselves, yeah, I’m not going to care what their roleplay reason is for that: what I care about is that they’re entertaining themselves by making the experience less entertaining for me.

If someone disliked the PVP aspects of UO, especially the get-ambushed-by-more-powerful-characters aspect of it, there’s no particular reason why the ambushers’ RP explanation would make it more fun for them.

My ruling stands :).

71

Casting Detect Life was never especially entertaining whether on a city street or in a goblin infested pit. Casting more advanced spells that are opened by having a high Alteration skill is more entertaining but the means to that end isn’t. Your idea of entertaining may differ.

72

Sure, but that doesn’t make him a “jerk” any more than he’s being a “jerk” to the giant bats and wolves for beating them up. In a PVP world, you’re just another (and hopefully smarter) mob to potentially get beaten up.

Agreed that the explanation won’t do much to soothe the sting of losing all your coin but disagree about that making him a jerk.

73

Let me explain why: The problem is that the aggressive party has all the advantages, but there’s rarely any balancing in the game to offset this. As the aggressive party, you get to set the rules. You get to choose where, whom, and how to ambush. But it’s basically impossible for anyone to get back at you. Even if they do, you probably haven’t lost anything. The victim, can lose a lot. Further, there’s a meta aspect to it. The aggressor wants to fight and enjoys pouncing on the helpless. The victim doesn’t want to fight, but has few ways to avoid it. Essentially, the situation is imbalanced no matter how well the mechanics may be balanced.

EVE Online offers some ways to counter this, but few, if any, systems existed in games before that to counter them. And similar problems exist in a wide variety of games such as Dark Souls.

74

He said he’d do this, and a significant percentage of the people who he did it to would get genuinely upset with him for doing it, but he kept doing it anyway.

That’s pretty much the definition of being a jerk.

In fairness, UO was one of the first MMOs, and there were a lot of design decisions made that pretty much guaranteed that a minority of players would be ruin the game for the majority of the rest of the player base. There was, IIRC, no option to turn PVP off, if you weren’t into that. I know I wasn’t: when I got the game, I imagined it would be like playing Ultima VII, but with everyone in my party controlled by an actual human being. Having to run a gauntlet of high-level, player-controlled bandits literally every time I set foot outside of town effectively made it impossible for me to play the game that way, and I ended up returning it to the store after a couple of weeks.

75

But that’s pretty much how free-for-all PVP systems work. If you don’t like it, you shouldn’t play that style of game (and I don’t) but it’s silly to play a PVP game and complain that you’re getting killed by other players. People always get upset when they lose – people scream and ragequit Team Fortress 2 or Call of Duty when they get killed and literally the only thing to do in those games is shoot people or get shot by people. That doesn’t mean the other guy was a jerk for shooting them. That’s how the game is played.

76

Yeah, that’s a totally fair attitude in today’s MMO market. But we’re talking about a game that came out in 1997. UO was the first of its kind in a lot of ways (online text-based MUDs predated it, of course) and the “PVP/no PVP” distinction didn’t really exist as a formalized market segmentation. I certainly didn’t buy it expecting to do nothing but get ganked by other players. I bought it expecting it to be, “Ultima, but you can play with your friends.” What I got was, “Ultima: Eternal Death Match.” Not only wasn’t it the game I wanted to play, it wasn’t the game I was sold. I wasn’t alone in that reaction, either: “What’s wrong with UO, and how to fix it,” was the subject of a lot of columns in the gaming mags at the time. A significant percentage of the customer base felt they were burned by the experience, because Origins didn’t realize that if you include the *option *of being dick in an online game, being a dick is very rapidly going to become the required play style.

77

Something in the dusty archives of my memory flashed and I remembered the Skyrim situation. I was playing a “pure mage” character (a little ironic given other comments on classes above) which meant all cloth/jewelry and the only weapon I ever used was a dagger enchanted with the soul-stealing effect to farm souls now and then. The Alteration skill tree has some perks designed for this style of play, namely ones that extend the *flesh spell line’s damage resistance and duration. However, you obviously have to be skilled enough in Alteration to get the perks.

Therein was the problem: none of the lower level Alteration spells were anything worth casting on a regular basis. Un-perked, the *flesh line is garbage – high cost for mediocre effect and short duration – you almost never need the *light spells, and the others (Transmute, Telekinesis, Water Breathing, etc) are situational at best. It’s just not a spell class that lends itself to regular use and natural progression. Compare it to Destruction or Conjuration which have plenty of opportunity to increase on their own.

So, my options were: change my play style (and “class”) so I no longer had use of the *flesh perks by no longer playing a pure mage, wait until 2025 when I might have cast Candlelight out of legitimate necessity enough times to get the perks or start working that cast button to get the skill up. Detect Life had a low enough mana cost (especially with enchanted jewelry effects) and cast/refresh quickly enough that it was the logical candidate. So I set the computer to keep casting it, went away for a while and was able to return to get the desired perks and play the game I wanted to play.

I personally see the flaw in the system there being that Alteration has little in it to encourage regular use and level it up “naturally” while also having perks designed for a specific style of play (which the game encourages people to try by having spells/perks built around it). Add to that the number of times you need to cast Alteration spells to gain the required points. Running around and casting Magelight when I didn’t actually need it or collecting piles of metal to transmute is just a different and more tedious form of grinding up the skill and so I went with the most painless and time-efficient method.

Edit: I’ll readily admit that this is a fairly specialized circumstance and doesn’t necessarily reflect on the system as a whole. I wish I had better remembered the situation earlier instead of mainly remembering the spell grinding.

78

Okay, that does alter it a bit, and now it comes across as a criticism of the game, but a much more specialized one. My only complete playthrough of that game was as a barbarian with a Ph.D in hammers and a minor in alteration. I cast Oakflesh or whatever it was called before just about every battle, and leveled up slowly in alteration throughuot the game; but that’s because I didn’t really need it, relying instead on banging heads with a hammer to win battles.

If the game is designed to be playable as an alteration mage–and I think from what I know about Skyrim that at least appears to be an option–it should have some lower-level alteration spells that make a significant difference in battle.

79

Sort of. Skyrim has a decidedly odd approach to magic. If you have the right abilities, it’s nigh-unstoppable. If not, most spells aren’t that useful.

80

Ironically, Oakflesh is probably more useful for the barbarian with a hammer. You get +40 defense to add to your armor and a hammer to whang things with. A young mage gets +40 defense added to nothing which is like saying “Here’s a sweater to stop incoming bullets”. Also, it uses up most of the magicka you needed to set things on fire with. By the time your magicka has replenished enough to enter battle, Oakflesh only had ten seconds left on its timer. You’re really better off just skipping the Oakflesh and learning to stay out of the bad guys’ way as you turn them into ash.

In contrast, a fully perk-buffed Ebonyflesh can give a cloth-wearing mage +300 Defense for six minutes (dual-cast + stability) and you probably have a bunch of mana cost reducing jewelry by then. That whole spell line/perk line is intended to make a “pure mage” viable but it’s a real bitch to get enough skill in Alteration if you depending on the terrible cost/effectiveness of the (non-perk) *Flesh spells and occasional Water Breathing spell until then.