How To Make A Good Game Better: Money and Stuff
OPINION
In the second part of the series, Marcus Mulkins addresses the problem of too much money and way too much stuff in RPGs.
S-Mart shopping.
Chain(mail?) stores are a wonderful place to expand your wardrobe, acquire the latest fashions, or simply try something on for size. They are beneficiaries of 1) interchangeable parts and 2) assembly line construction. Those are two things that were notably lacking in the Dark and Middle Ages – and therefore in nearly all game worlds. The reason for their absence in both settings is because the people then and there didn’t KNOW how to do it better. If they did know better, the Industrial Revolution would already be happening or already had happened. And your subconscious knows this, even if you didn’t study History in any great depth. They didn’t have zippers back then. They didn’t have nail guns. They didn’t have assembly lines for anything. And when your character just walks into an armorer’s shoppe and buys a suit of armor “off the rack”, that just happens to fit perfectly, your subconscious is saying, “That is just soooo UNrealistic.” And rightly so. Generic armor took time to make, and usually fit like crap, requiring all sorts of adjustments just so it wouldn’t be more of a hazard than a protection to the wearer. Stuff that actually fit well was custom tailored, and would take up to a year to complete for just a full set of plate mail. Furthermore, the price tag SHOULD make the character wince in pain, because, after all, he’s paying for a Master craftsman’s entire year of effort.
However, I sincerely doubt players will be willing to wait an entire year for a decent set of plate armor. So compromise: Half the money up front (lay-away), and the suit will be ready in 1 week to 1 month. Don’t get killed in the meantime. Picking up on some other poor sod’s pre-order is cheaper (already half paid for), but still requiring some tailoring adjustments to achieve the correct fit.
Army Surplus shopping.
So you just bashed a bunch of baddies and now it’s body looting time! Do you really want to snag all of that bloody, gore-splattered, dented, deformed, soiled (as in he shat himself) inadequate armor that wasn’t good enough to keep the former tenant hale and hearty? What makes you think anyone else wants it any more than you do? Doesn’t keep you from gathering and hauling all that trashed armor back to a merchant, does it? Absent a cart for hauling, I’m guessing you wouldn’t want to be backpacking 8 sets of armor on your back, all at one go – but that’s exactly what many CRPGs will let you do. Along with a ton or two of other odds and ends. This situation fairly screams “It’s just a game!”
The only way to demotivate the player from doing something this UNreal is to not make it worth his while. “I -might- be able to unload this junk onto the militia armory. _Might_, I said. Give you five bucks for the whole lot; take it or leave it.” The same goes for used weapons. Cheap manufacture and poor maintenance does not a bargain make.
Lovely to look at, but when will I ever find the time to use it?
So you’re playing your favorite CRPG and your character owns this nice, fine house, complete with beds. How often does your character actually use that bed? How often does he NEED that bed? For the last year I’ve been playing Skyrim, and in what amounts to several years of game time, my characters have slept for maybe a total of a hundred hours _at most_. So what’s the point of having beds if they aren’t needed equipment? The same goes for food items. Those things are practically everywhere, but there is absolutely NO need for them at all. Other than just some additional stuff for the character to snarf up and sell off to a merchant.
Either use ‘em or lose ‘em. I vote for using them, just to make Life more “realistic”. So _make_ me use them, or have the character suffer the consequences.
And finally, my favorite:
On the New York Times Bestseller list for four thousand years!
This is a feature that supersaturates Skyrim. Your character is exploring a crypt that “no one has entered for four thousand years”. You start popping open sarcophagi, chests, urns, and anything else that might hold some goodies. What you inevitably find in multiple locations and containers are books. Not just any books, but the exact same books that you can find in any bookseller’s stall in any marketplace. With the exact same quality of binding. Using the exact same languages and alphabets as are in use today. Just look at human History: Are there ANY books from 4,000 years ago floating around that just about anybody could pick up and read? How’s your Ancient Cuneiform? Mayan Pictograms? Etc. Or is it that they spoke and wrote English back then? Finding those books in those places is just totally and completely implausible – and once again the “It’s just a game” chime rings again. Books generally don’t keep well for over a millennium, under even the most ideal of conditions, when extensive preservation has been deliberately applied. Skyrim _did_ introduce a useful mechanism, which is the Ruined Book with no title mentioned. (Should have added Rotted Book as well.) Still worth a few coins, so, fine, let the Archivists sort them out.
Along with the bestseller books, there are a LOT of other reality-jarring items found in old tombs. Fresh groceries, artifacts from Modern times, impossible Ancient artifacts from more recent eras than that of the tomb builders, etc. Really, who would want to eat a Fresh Ripe Apple that is _4,000_ years old? And that other stuff simply shouldn’t be there, at all.
Designers: Treasure trove found by characters does NOT have to have any utility to the characters themselves. They can always sell it to somebody else that does value the items. (With perhaps several middlemen between character and final buyer, discounts applied at each level.) Leave out the implausible stuff, just a modicum of common sense should reveal which items are plausible and which are not. And if I need several pack horses to haul out the loot, that’s TOO DAMN MUCH! Just a few Very Valuable objects will be enough to have made the trip worthwhile.
Next on What The Walrus Said: “What are you trying to tell me?” Dealing with User Interfaces.