by CaptainPatch on April 4th, 2008 | Category: Other
Not all inflation refers to things economic. Many things can be dangerously over-inflated. (My ego, for instance.) In this instance, what I am addressing is just how ridiculously fast characters progress in most RPGs, as well as the equally ridiculous numbers that are involved in that progression.
Now, it _must_ be assumed that any player character is, by default, a particularly exceptional individual. In most every population, the vast overwhelming majority of people will be practically anonymous individuals working in the bottom rung of their society. Farmers, peasants, lower echelon tradesmen, etc. Most of their lives are spent getting up in the morning, working all day, going to bed early so they can repeat the cycle day after day. Along the way they find a spouse, mate, and create clones of themselves to continue the Endless Cycle. If extraordinary circumstances are thrust upon them, they may have to take up arms in defense of home and hearth. However, in such a case, the overwhelming majority of them will serve as spear-carriers. ("Cannonfodder", in colloquial parlance.)
From the get-go, a player character does not bear any resemblance to such mundanes (other than being of the same species). A player character is destined to DO SOMETHING -- even if that may only be to "go out in a blaze of glory" early in his or her career. However, taking the raw clay and molding it into something phenomenal takes **time**. An eighteen-year-old does NOT pick up a sword and instantly transform into El Cid. Billy The Kid was renown for having killed 21 men before the age of 21 -- but historians suggest the tally was less than half that number. Alexander the Great started young and carved out a HUGE empire for himself -- before dying just short of his 33rd birthday. One of the most well known composers, Mozart, started learning music at the age of four. When he died at the age of 35 he was one of the most famous composers of his era -- living in poverty. From all of these, we see particularly exceptional people, known for being famous at an early age. But from start to finish, there is a span of TIME, spanning multiple decades, starting from relative obscurity and ending with consummate fame.
Now compare most any RPG to that historical reality. You start as a first level whatever with zero experience points. Initial attributes usually border between mundane and above average, with perhaps an Outstanding attribute in one or two areas. Thereafter, the success of the character is determined by what you do with him or her. The things that you do accumulate experience points, and perhaps hone skills somewhat. Given that you don't get yourself killed, you will start to ascend through level after level of expertise and notoriety. Now, given that those mundanes that provide the foundation of your society are all Level Zeroes, what level would someone of spectacular accomplishment be? Tenth level? Fifteenth? Twentieth? How many levels would there be between your average John Doe Farmer and the Champion of the Empire? And how long did it take the Champion of the Empire to become Champion of the Empire?
I have played innumerable RPGs where the main player character ascended to THE highest level imaginable -- and then kept on going. And in terms of the passage of time during that ascent it did NOT take decades. It generally took (game) years at most, and many times took mere months. As an example, I am currently playing Oblivion. The vast majority of people that have played the game have been seriously impressed with it. (Which may explain why it was named Game of the Year by so many magazines and game websites.) In that game, starting from a cold start, my character ascended to a vaunted 34th-level. (To which many players will say, "Is that all???") He became the Champion of the Empire, head of the Mage's Guild, next-to-the top of both the Thieves and Fighters Guilds, slew 800+ people and several thousand creatures/monsters -- all in less than 200 game days.
When you stop to think about it, isn't that incredibly ludicrous? Actually, I can't think of a large enough adjective to describe just how ludicrous that is.
If you were paying attention to the enumeration of accomplishments, you will have noted the Number One explanation for such fantastic advancement: killing people and creatures/monsters. All it takes to advance in level is to be a Killing Machine. Kill them as fast as you encounter them. Kill them like you were single-handedly wading through a continuous banzai charge. Kill them all day and then at night engage in sleep killing.
Haven't game designers ever heard of self-preservation? Of running away and living to fight another day? Of having enough connectivity with one's loved ones such that instead of dying an honorable death, to instead retreat so that the family/pack doesn't lose a valuable resource gatherer?
Hardly any character would be able to rack up the incredible kill tallies necessary to make those absurd level advances if it wasn't for the fact that they have nothing but suicidal fanatics continually fighting to be impaled on his sword. I'm sure that there are a very few exceptional games that may be pointed out where the opposing NPCs have a modicum of self-preservation programmed in. However, I doubt that anyone can argue that such games are anywhere close to common. Or even that there are a substantial number of games where there's more than one or two opposing NPCs that understand the concept of self-preservation. And of those that are willing to run away in order to survive, nearly every one of them has a literal horde of henchmen and underlings that feel the ultimate accomplishment is to die in a futile matchup with the hero -- while his boss runs away.
Be thankful that in Real Life, henchmen can be counted on to look out for their own self-interests when the chips are down, otherwise we would most definitely need that Champion of the Empire hero to sally forth on our behalf -- and in Real Life, such heroes do NOT exist.
And that, I guess is my ultimate point: at least try to make even fantasy games to have a passing relationship to Reality. Yeah, we all groove on the sense of accomplishment as our characters rack up the experience points. But when we're dealing with these massively inflated numbers, the chasm between Me and Fantastic Me goes from the Grand Canyon to that void between galaxies. That is, I identify much, much more with a character that could be _me_ if I shed a few pounds, improved my reaction time somewhat, developed a comprehensive database of general knowledge, etc. Make THAT character succeed, and I go "YEAH!" But when my character is just short of godhood and he succeeds, I go, "Ho hum. Wonder what game I'll play next."
Right. So seldom do officers seem to have the good sense to recognize the perfectly good barricade building material (a.k.a., dead bodies). Closest I can remember was at Fort Zinderhoff (or whatever it was) in "Beau Geste". "{They weren't worth much when they were alive. Let's get some use out of them now that they're dead!" Or something like that.
You know, that's not a bad idea, it wouldn't be too hard to make the area near a dead body a slippery zone (as if coated by oil or a grease spell), and apply a movement penalty there, not too hard to implement in a crpg at all. I do remember a CRPG where you couldn't move through the same square as a dead body (though you could take the time to push it to an adjacent square) but I really can't remember the name. You could lay out the dead bodies into a barrier to force the enemies to come at you through a narrow opening. Not a lot of games appear to consider terrain anymore. I remember reading about castle sieges, and thinking that if I needed to get over a wall without siege weapons or sappers, you only need send in the orcs wearing no helmets and soft uncured leather armor with handholds sewn onto their backs. "Those are um weapon loops, now charge!"
I remember when my college buddies and I started to play the original D&D. There we were, 5 of us traipsing down standard 10' corridors in your run-of-the-mill dungeon. The wandering monsters started to appear, weighted by number versus our party's overall strength. Somewhere after stomping on a bunch of Giant Scorpions, a bunch of Giant Beetles, a bunch of Giant Spiders, a bunch of yada, yada, yada....One of the guys asked, "Uh, how is it that we can even move through this corridor now that it's packed with all of these carcasses?"
Years later, designers still aren't answering that question.
Epic is good, but thing's aren't interesting without difficulty. A series of tough hard battles (with a good chance of losing) fought and won is far more rewarding than going for points on how many hordes you can mow down in 15 seconds. Boss battles are always more fun than fighting the normal mobs that lead up to it. The rest is just fodder, to make sure you get enough game time in, (or just because any real Boss has lackeys they would logically send first). I feel far more heroic killing a mob that can kill me easier than I can kill him. Even our heroes are the ones that overcome unbelievable odds like the David & Goliath story, we don't glorify the victory of the overwhelmingly mighty against the weak (even if they were bad guys). As CP mentioned, games tend to make the player such a dervish of destruction, that the victory against any specific enemy doesn't seem so glorious. That's why some of the most enduring games like chess and even FPS's have far more even odds between player and opponent.
Many years ago, I encountered a kid with a basketball, standing next to an anthill, bouncing the ball on the ants. I asked him why he was doing that. His answer was, "Because it's fun."
Sounds like your kind of game.
By Grirfman on April 6th, 2008 - 12:43
This is dumb. It's a game for heaven's sake. You might as well as why the game doesn't show eating, sleeping and crapping. After all, that would make it more "realistic". I've got enough of real life in real life. I want to play a game for fun and escapism. I want to be the hero/champion, and do stuff I could never do in real life.
And you could make the same complaint about movies, where we have heroes accomplishing impossible deeds against impossible odds. I mean look at LOTR and all the killing/running/killing that the heroes did. But somehow a movie about "Frodo the Farmer" where he loses a few pounds, improves his reaction times, and ventures outside the Shire every blue moon for fun porbably wouldn't make for much of an epic. And I'd say the same would be true for RPG's.
I understand that the intention was that hp in D&D was reflected by fatigue and such, but still, we're saying that there's no way within the rules for the little guy to kill the hero even in large numbers which is pretty silly, or to imagine that a dozen level 0 men-at-arms couldn't kill a knight in under 10 minutes while standing toe-to-toe. I always believed that the bit about hp reflecting dodging and fatigue in addition to damage was something Gary said after the fact, since it wasn't reflected in the abysmally slow healing rates when hitpoints were regained naturally (so the little guy can recover in a week, but the hero takes a month?). Or that a level 1 cleric could heal a level 1 character from close to death, but the same cleric mysteriously can't do the same for a level 9 hero. Well, it's ok, being a pioneer, he gets a pass since the rest is hindsight. However, I always think that lots of these level scaling problems are indirectly his legacy. Even Hollywood is doing it, if you look at action movies from the 60s, guns were pretty lethal, and you can take out someone with a carefully placed whack. Now, movie heros are like those D&D fighters where they can go all out only doing 1d4+3 damage a round, so they can beat each other bare-handed for a good 5 minutes before there's a victor.
I do like systems that deemphasize levels and use a graduated skill system. Since Wolfie mentioned it, I remember those rolemaster critical tables, a bunny can roll 3 successive 00's, advance 3 critical tables, and rip a fully armored knight to shreds. Unlikely, but completely plausible that if 10,000 ravenous bunnies take turns jumping you, eventually something miraculous will happen, even if it means tripping on your own fork and gutting yourself :) With realistic systems, a veteran should have a decisive advantage against a single less skilled but trained opponent, but when it's 2:1 or more, skill usually loses out. I think lots of sci-fi or modern age pnp RPGs would be better systems to base CRPGs on. But they don't make many of those do they? (Still holding out for Jagged Alliance 3 someday..) And I agree, Oblivion style scaling isn't realistic either, after finishing the main storyline, I was afraid to leave town since small rodents are now ridiculously lethal, and every bandit is in full Daedric.
One of the little understood mechanics of D&D was the part about hit points. This is where Gary didn't do so good in trying to explain it.
As you advance, you gain hit points. Hit points are NOT additional meat on the character's body. They are a reflection of the additional skill the character has garnered which allows him to avoid physical punishment. Like in judo, an experienced combatant learns to "take a hit" in such a way that it has less effect on him than a person that is unskilled in martial arts. When a blow is about to strike home, if you twist your body just a tiny bit _that_ way, most of its force slides off harmlessly. However, every hit will still impact to a tiny degree, bruising the body a bit, slowing the reflexes slightly, fatiguing the character somewhat. It's the accumulated wear and tear that ultimately defeat the character when he has "shot his wad" and the next blow punches through unopposed. That's the equivalent of running out of hit points.
Then again. Gary also slipped up by not emphasizing that an unconscious character has the same number of hit points as a conscious, unenhanced first-level character. That is, your experience and improved skills aren't going to help you if you've been chloroformed.
By Wolfie on April 4th, 2008 - 22:43
Yup, in ALL CRPGs that I've played, the level advancement is so fast that it becomes silly. Of course, you are supposed to play a hero and thus you want to be able to do heroic deeds, but, for some reason, these universes are rarely populated by other heroic individuals to balance the situation out. Unless you try Oblivion where the toughness of the opposition is directly relative to your own toughness, which is perhaps even sillier.
However, this was one of the points of my own blog on RPGs: There are MANY PnP RPGs (Rolemaster, MERP, HARP etc.) where level 1 individual can 'easily' kill a level 50 individual, especially if the level 1 individuals come in a pack. In these games, the 'defence' of a character has nothing to do with their level and attack rolls only need to exceed the protection of the armour (which is entirely dependent on the armour) and the quickness of the defending character (and naturally the proportion of their attack bonus that they are using for defence that round). Naturally the skills are still dependent on the level of the character (or, better, of how the player has increased those levels from level to level).
However, I'm still inclined to give even more praise to systems that get rid of levels entirely (Runequest, Twilight2000 etc.), merely because they make things more realistic - you don't see anyone calling themselves a lvl20 County Clerk in real life either and you get less stupid questions from players ("What level is that goblin?") when they are supposed to be immersed in their characters and the game world.
I have to say that the whole level system is a bit unreasonable, after all, in many games, a very determined level 1 adventurer with a very sharp knife couldn't kill a level 10 adventurer after several minutes of trying (even if the higher level character didn't fight back). In fact, a whole village of level 1 peasants might not be able to do the job. Well, that's the legacy of the whole hit point system, at least D&D was good enough to cap hit points around level 9 so at worst, a fighter needs to be successfully stabbed continuously by a knife wielding opponent for an average of 18 rounds before finally falling over, kind of like Rasputin, or struck by a score of nonmagical arrows while naked... Then again games have never been terribly realistic lately, since it's all escapism. It does seem pretty strange, when you look at it from the outside.
Imagine you went back in time, and were interviewed in 1960, and a reporter asked you how the youth of the future spent their time. "Well, I play a very realistic simulation. I can sneak around the village and break into people's homes, steal their belongings or even kill them in their sleep, and get away with it. I wander around looking for people other races, kill them, and loot their corpses. Then I haul all the goods back to town and sell them, it's pretty fun. Oh, and the blood simulations are very realistic with genuine physics! You can even chop off their arms, or fry them with magic. Oh, and all from the comfort of home in front of my comput- err television". "Ahem, so is that typical? Perhaps you're different Mr. Mii, I can't believe that witchcraft would be so fascinating to people in the future. How about the average teenager?" "Oh, that's different, the most popular game involves running around town, stealing cars at gunpoint, killing the police or other gangs and riling up the FBI, but I prefer medieval fantasy, you know, orcs and demons." "I can't say I find that very believable, just because you're from the future, you must think we're all very gullible here. What do they do when they don't play these 'Games'?" "Oh, they surf, I mean, they look at electronic pictures from repositories around the world." "That's wonderful! You mean highschoolers could see images of the Louvre and photos of Mount Everest anytime they want without travelling there themselves?" "Well, I suppose so, but mostly just they look at naked women." "...."
