What Makes A Great RPG - The Answer?
Two days ago I posted a question that I usually ask whenever I'm interviewing an RPG designer: "What Makes a Great RPG?" I've looked up answers by several veteran game designers on this subject over the course of the last couple of years. Shamus Young joined in on the quest for answers, bringing his scarily large number of readers to bear against the question. If only by sheer numbers, we overpowered the question and forced its surrender. He ended up beating me to the punch with not one, but two responses. The hysterical one and the legitimate one. Dang, the dude can write. And people wonder where I find the time.

The answers were staggering not only in their passion, but in their variety. Including some answers that appeared mutually exclusive. I think, in the end, the real answer, when you streamline and synthesize all this information, is trivially, head-smackingly simple. As in, "wait a minute, I knew this already."

But it's kind of like the secret of losing weight. The secret is, "Eat Less And Exercise More," in case you were really wondering. Sure, alternatives exist, like liposuction and getting a leg amputated, but that's really the conventional key. But it's easier said than done.

So this article just deals with the high-level view. How do you judge greatness? What are we striving for? The rest of the articles (at the bottom of this article) deal with specifics, much of it based on comments by readers here and at Twenty-Sided. Are we there yet? Well, let's find out...

The Ideal
The real question is "Why do we play RPGs?" Computer or otherwise. I guess the answers here vary as much as anywhere else, but I'd submit its about escapism. Escaping not only from the pressures and problems of the mundane world, but to escape our very selves - to become a fictional character in a world as compelling and exciting and visceral as is technologically possible. We want our every move to be woven into the grandest of stories. But we want to do it with the safety of being able to return to the "real world."

A Compelling, Believable, and Highly Interactive World
It's the compulsion to jump into the pages of the novel or into the screen of a movie and join in the action, taking it off the rails, becoming the new hero, and seeing and exploring what we want, going where we want, and doing what we want. We want a lucid-dream world full of magic, mystery, and drama. We want to have no boundaries to our exploration, and we want every nook and cranny stuffed with exciting things for us to discover.

And we want it to be populated by incredibly detailed, fascinating, and important characters who's lives eventually revolve around our actions, whether they know it or not. We'll still probably ignore them, but we want to believe that they would have had rich, fulfilling, fascinating lives before we showed up and ruined them.

Playing A Role... To The Fullest!
We want to explore not only a compelling, imaginary world, but we want to explore the possibilities of being someone else. Maybe someone very much like us, to see what we'd do in a similar situation.

But the real thrill - being a fictional character, even just a fictionalized version of ourselves - allows us to explore a range of possibilities our of our reach anywhere else. The fictional character is safe. We can explore the dark side without enduring the taint of sin on our real-world souls. We can endure impossible torments, both physical and technological, because we're voyaging outside of our own selves. We can switch between the character being "me" and the character being "someone else" at will. It's the ultimate freedom - freedom from consequences to ourselves for choices we make. Sure our character might suffer, but we won't.

Naturally, we want the fullest range of interactivity with the world, so that we can explore not only it, but our projected, fictionalized selves. We want to be able to do anything our twisted little minds can imagine, from the mundane to the fantastic to the downright shocking.

An Awesome Story of Me
We want story. Nobody wants to be bored in a fictional reality, either. We want context and meaning and goals and stuff. But we don't want to follow the story - we want the story to follow us! We want it to bend and reshape itself to our every action. Our every minor move should have the fullest attention of the gods - or the author - or the computer, whoever is running this show.

And the universe should respond as the ultimate improvisational performer. The world should literally - if unknowingly - revolve around us, and our every action should - after the big reveal, climax, and resolution - prove to have been critical and not just dramatically appropriate, but dramatically perfect. At the end of the game, we want to go back and see the whole thing laid out behind us like a masterwork of literature or cinema (or better), and realize that any different action we'd taken would have substantially altered the entire plot. But of course, we want the ending to be as satisfying as if it were the only one, and we'd magically beelined our way to the perfect conclusion.

It's doubtful a master fiction writer could retroactively chronicle our actions in such a way, but we want the computer or human game-master to do all this improvisationally... all on the fly.

Fun, Progress, and Challenge
And finally, we want to be entertained every step of the way. We want to see progress in a way that no "real" character would see it. And we want to overcome challenges. Notice it's about overcoming those challenges - the challenges should never permanently defeat us. Failure is always for the other guy. Our escapes should always be narrow, or defeats temporary and dramatic, our victories legendary. Those who doubted us will humble themselves, and those who opposed us - should they survive - will acknowledge our superiority in the end.

Exit The Matrix
Without the technology from The Matrix, and a team of extremely talented human game-masters and performers, we're just not gonna get the ideal. Even in the "Dream Park" series, the illusion was flawed for the participants.

And even if by some miraculous breakthrough of science and liberal arts we could achieve this, we'd have to re-adjust our scale because people would find more things to complain about. That's just human nature. But this is sufficiently far enough out to work for these purposes.

So if we just assume that perfection - the ideal - will never be achieved, we can look at the quality of RPG experiences as a spectrum. The ideal is at one end, and at the other end we have... uh... the Dead Alewives' Dungeons & Dragons, maybe. Then we can define the greatness of an RPG by how far it pushes us along towards that ideal.

Naturally, this is a subjective measure. The factors that make me geek out on an RPG aren't going to be exactly the same as anyone else. Apparently fancy graphics and real-time combat are enough for a couple of million players, but they don't turn my crank as much as deep combat systems and high interactivity with the world and non-player characters. And in our imperfect state, some of these factors do come into conflict. The AI system of Oblivion was rumored to be very sophisticated and complex, but was effectively neutered in order to prevent them from ruining the game and killing each other with garden hoes. Sad, but understandable.

Breaking It Down... And Down... And Down...
Unfortunately, its unlikely to be a case of finding one or two gimmicks and making them make the whole game work. It's more of a multiplicative relationship between all the parts. One near-zero value in the list of features will ruin everything else.

This article has already gone on too long, and I haven't even begun to touch on the feedback and suggestions people have made far in the forum and in reply to Shamus's posts. So this will have to be a multi-part article series. I mentioned above four of what I consider key (but broad) aspects of the "ideal" RPG, and I think I'm going to deal with each of these aspects in individual articles:

* A Compelling, Believable, and Highly Interactive World
* Playing a Role To The Fullest
* An Awesome Story of Me
* Fun, Progress, and Challenge
* And some odds and ends that might not make a great experience, but could break one.

Interestingly enough, three of these map to three of the "Bartle Four" in multiplayer RPGs... the game world for explorers, the challenge and progress for the achievers, and the role-playing for the socializers (even if they aren't socializing with "real people.") The guys left out are the "griefers," but they aren't having fun unless they are making real people unhappy, so single-player RPGs probably aren't their thing anyway. Unless they just like going through and decapitating every imaginary living thing in site, which falls under the interactive world and role-playing categories, but then they'll probably complain that it broke the story. You just can't win.

But What Do You Think?
The later articles will draw heavily from the comments here and at Shamus's site, so I hope you guys don't mind me quoting you. I didn't want to leave this one without some quotes, however, so I'm going to pull out some thoughts by folks interviewed by me here on this site that I ambushed with this very question. Here's what they had to say.

Scorpia (RPG / Adventure Columnist for Computer Gaming World for many years): A good story. Preferably one that does not involve "killing off Ancient Evil Foozle to save the world"... NPCs that have some realism to them. In particular, aspects that make you care about at least some of them (not necessarily in a romantic way). Decent dialog that doesn't look or sound like it was written by a 14-year-old with an attitude. Balanced combat (this is much better now than it used to be in the old games). A good mix of combat and non-combat situations. Multiple ways to resolve some of the quests. Different endings for good and evil, if the game allows evil PCs. Opportunities for true role-playing, outside the straight-jacket of D&D alignment... A rewarding ending that provides a sense of accomplishment. (Interview with Scorpia)

Amanda Fitch (Aveyond, Ahriman's Prophecy): For me, a good story, lots of quests, lots of villages, and loot! (Amanda Fitch Interview)

Jason Compton (The Broken Hourglass): The quality is the immersiveness of it. Not necessarily that I believe I’m in that world, but I really believe that I’m controlling that world, and interacting with it. And I don’t want to leave it alone, because only I can save it, or only I can manipulate it in the way it needs to be manipulated, or whatever... There’s the sense of putting you in a situation where you matter in some way. Different games do it in different ways, but yeah, you have to make the player feel like they matter in the world. (Jason Compton Interview)

Links:
* What Makes a Great RPG?
* What Makes a Great RPG - The World
* What Makes a Great RPG - Playing a Role
* What Makes a Great RPG - The Story
* What Makes a Great RPG - Mechanics
* What Makes a Great RPG - Everything Else
* What Makes a Great RPG (Twenty-Sided)
* What Makes a Great RPG, Part II (Twenty-Sided)
* What Makes a Great RPG, Part III (Twenty-Sided)

(Vaguely) related useless speculation:
* When Does A Game Cease Being Great?
* The 16 Essential RPGs
* What Makes a Game Great?
* Lessons Learned Playing Computer RPGs
* What Makes a Good Casual RPG?

The Forum Post full of very sage advice!

Labels: Game Design, Roleplaying Games

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