Silas said,

This is one of the reasons I cordially detested Oblivion’s lockpicking system; so far as I could determine, it was based solely on player skill, with the character’s lockpicking “skill” only used as a gatekeeper to prevent players from attempting harder locks, and it demanded excruciatingly high levels of player skill.

Marcus said,

I agree with the sentiments for the most part. Player skill can be twitchy or it can be mental, but it is still something that a player possesses, regardless of what you’ve given to the characters. I hear both sides of the player argument.

When the 12 year olds complain about turn based combat lacking any player skill, what they’re saying is there is too much parody. Most gamers posses the mental ability to get very good at the tactical efficiency. With a little effort.

When people rail on the twitchy games what they’re saying is there is too much parody. “No matter how hard I try my reflexes and hand eye coordination will never be like those “best” guys.”

Sure I like making decisions and optimizing, and I can get lost in that aspect quite easily, but at the end of the day Role Playing games are about the story and how believably the developer tricks me thinking that their world might just be real. How well the developer gets to me to believe that I’m actually playing a role in their little world.

Menigal said,

Yeah, the Oblivion one was a pretty jarring example, but at least you could click the auto button. The lockpicking in FO3 was better and I didn’t really miss the auto button, but the hacking minigame was horrible. Yeah, it wasn’t hard if you put any thought into it, but it did bring the game to a screeching halt, and I suppose I can see how some people might have problems with it. Again, no auto button. You have to wonder if they weren’t aware of how many people used that in Oblivion to get around the annoying minigame.

It does seem like player skill is taking more of the focus these days. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it can give some players a huge advantage if it’s not balanced correctly. In Oblivion, someone who was good at the lockpicking minigame could, in theory, pick every lock in the game with a single lockpick and a skill of 5. FO3 addressed this somewhat by not even letting you try picking locks that were above your lockpick level.

It’s an interesting subject, and it definitely goes beyond just twitch gamers vs old fogeys.

Bleeargh said,

@ Mart “For RPGs, I think part of a player’s skill is in determining that a character has the appropriate skill level to be successful in most encounters. This is, I believe, tied to game difficulty.”

This is an interesting observation. Most CRPG game designers are obviously designing encounters around what they expect the characters’ levels to be at any given point in the game. If not, they will include some kind of identify or “con” system (MMORPG term) where you can tell how your chances are against an opponent.

Sometimes I feel RPG’s are about how much you know the ins and outs of a system including memorizing the stats of the enemies you face, not necessarily “skill” more like “research” which geeks are inclined to do. Isn’t this why Munchkinism is a darkside of RPG’s or is being a Munchkin a demonstration of good skill and proper character build strategy?

On a second playthrough of a CRPG, you have foreknowledge that so-and-so stat was worthless in investing in because it was poorly implemented in game or there were simply better and more effective weapons for “Big guns” skill rather than melee. Obviously this is poor game design as the game should reward players who chose those skills in some way, but given game development’s brutal give and take cycle with both schedule and budget, sadly something has to go.

I always thought it silly that a 5 INT / 5 WIS fighter could answer Sphinx-type riddles in dialogue in Baldur’s Gate 2. Would such a fighter also have the presence of mind of battlefield tactics to know where to position himself in the best location of a battle at the right opportunity…I picture a CRPG where a low-int fighter would actually disobey your orders in a given turn because he just wants to smash headz…a permanent berzerk state until you raise his INT stat or make him take a course in tactics. Basically, isn’t your, the player’s, intelligence and strategy skill being called into play during tactical combat whether turn-based or realtime regardless of character skill? Where should the distinction lie then?

kalniel said,

This is an area we struggled with a lot on our NWN persistent world.

The article seems to mainly discuss physical skills (accuracy etc.), but we had the largest debate about intellectual skills. It seemed quite easy to come to an agreement (for Thain at least) that one of the differences (though not the major one) between an action PW and a RP PW was the role of character skills in determining combat outcomes as opposed to player skills. For physical skills that was fine – the NWN engine isn’t particularly great for twitch skills anyway, and combat/area design can help weigh it further towards character skills with player tactic choices and judgement calls.

But what happens when you’re trying to RP an intelligence stat? If your character has low intelligence, does that mean you shouldn’t be utilising combat tactics and you should just charge in/let the computer sort it out?

Worse is during quests, especially those of a research/investigation type, which we had plenty of: notably the ‘main quest’ which had a particular choke point in progression that required characters to successfully be ‘interviewed’ about their knowledge of the Island’s lore, history and the ongoing situation. We didn’t want it to be just flag based (ie, visit location X and your character automatically knows the answer), instead the lore and clues were available from a large number of sources and could be inferred from ways we didn’t want to restrict to simple flag setting options (talking to other player characters, for example!). Is it now metagaming if you can remember the lore/picked up on the clues, but your character’s stats suggest they wouldn’t be able to easily? What about the other way around – your character has great intellect and reasoning etc., but you as the player haven’t picked up on the clues/can’t remember the answer?

It’s a tricky one – that quest had to be able to be progressed, so we didn’t want to enforce penalties for bad stats, and though there was some debate as to whether to drop hints for characters with higher stats, I was aware that ultimately the goal of the game is for the players to have fun, not run a fantasy simulation exercise. The player would have more fun by doing the investigation and finding out the answers across the whole game. Working with other players was encouraged, though not necessary, and a whole party only had to go through the ‘interview’ once as a party, so different people could contribute to the answers (provided people in the party were at that stage of the quest). In the end we used stats to add flavour and value, rather than help or hinder progression.