RPG Design: Should We Hide the Stats?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on November 4, 2014

James Cox has an article worth reading over at Gamasutra, “There is No ‘+5 Sword’ in Lancelot.” In it, he makes the case that the time has come to hide all the numbers in CRPGs. He even refers to this as “babying systems.” Yeah, that reference honked me off a bit, but his idea isn’t new, and it’s worth addressing. I don’t think he’s right, but I don’t think he’s entirely wrong either.

Almost as old as dice-and-paper RPGs

The first time I encountered the suggestion to hide the stats was, I think, in 1st edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. It was suggested that the DM not really tell the players how many hit points they really had, simply describe the effect of the hits, etc. I even tried it once. It was a very frustrating experience for the players. I never tried it again.

Humans crave predictability but are addicted to randomness

It’s not necessarily the stats that humans crave, but predictability. Not necessarily immutable levels of predictability – we like pleasant surprises, too, and at least the appearance of risk. Random is fun. We’ve found through experimentation that randomized scheduled rewards is far more addictive than non-randomized scheduled rewards. In other words, having a 1 in 10 chance of receiving a reward is far more psychologically compelling than an identical guaranteed reward every 10 tries.

It may piss us off on a conscious level (particularly when we’ve gone 15 attempts without a reward, and feel “owed” by the system), but subconsciously the pleasure centers in our brain are wired to derive more enjoyment out of it. That’s probably got something to do with hardwired survival instincts – we had to deal with the uncertainty of not always finding game in the same place, or not being guaranteed edible plants while gathering.

But while we have this instinctive compulsion for dealing with uncertainty, we have an overwhelming craving to make sense of it so that we can control it – or if not control it, at least to control our own interactions with it. We desperately attempt to compare and contrast – usually with inadequate data. Is spot A a better place for fishing than spot B? Does that change by the month or time of day? How much money does an “average” indie game make, so it’ll be worth our while to make it? If forced to defend yourself, is it better to use a 9mm handgun with more rounds, or a .45 handgun with larger rounds? Which casino has “looser” slots? Is this stock more likely to raise in value over the next year, or fall?  Will my team beat their rivals in Sunday’s game?

To do this, we often break the world down into stats. Numbers provide us some guidance. So although a sword might not have “+5” etched on it, we can perhaps perform tests or compare history and say, “Lesser swords are three times more likely to fail in combat, or become blunted after only a fifth as many shield hits.” While not necessarily accurate, the numbers give us some basis for comparison, and allow us to weigh options. So we humans will assign numbers – at least ballpark figures – even where none are available.

Real World = Too Much Data. Computer World = Not Enough

While our graphics and sound keep getting better in our games, we’re still a long, long way off from doing anything even close to simulating reality. Having done fencing and medieval combat in my younger years, I can tell you just how much data people take into consideration when engaging in a competitive fighting match. For a casual viewer, it might just look like the two contestants are just slugging it out (and maybe, if they are really exhausted, they kind of are…). But in reality, experienced fighters are taking all kinds of measures of each other, gauging their reactions, their tendencies, and their “tells” – just like poker – that might take place in a fraction of a second.

My fencing instructor once told me of a bout where he kept losing to a guy every time my instructor was about to score a hit against him. It was like the guy was parrying and counter-attacking in the blink of an eye. And, literally, that was exactly what happened. He discovered, with help from his coach, that he was actually blinking every time he was about to score a touch. It was a habit he’d developed one summer as a teenager when he got a job tearing up cement with a sledgehammer, but he didn’t wear eye protection. So every time the sledgehammer would hit, he’d blink to protect his eyes from flying particles. Years later, he had this same learned reflex in his fencing. His opponent had picked up on this (yes, you can see your opponent’s face through those big fencing masks. Not well, but you can see them), and was taking advantage of that.

THAT is the complex kind of world we have, and how combat *can* be. Even in less trained brawls or fearful, confused firefights, combatants are taking in a constant barrage of data, and trying to make sense of it all and take advantage of anything they can use. We live in the real world, and we can make split-second educated guesses about what’s happening, how things are going, and what our best course of action might be.

Even in the most graphically intense worlds available in gaming today, we can’t touch this. Instead, we have to rely on abstraction.  The stats we put on things are the way we pull together all those abstractions into something resembling sense.

But if we get rid of that abstraction for the player, without the “real data” that the abstraction was derived from for the player to fall back on, what do they have? How do they make sense of the game? What kind of feedback mechanisms do we have to provide to substitute?

Doable, but worth it?

I’m actually supportive of attempts to pull the numbers out of the user interface, though I certainly draw a line when it is implied that this is an “improvement.” I’d need to see a lot of proof of that. I think it can be done, and I’d be interested in seeing how RPGs adapt to it… but I think the amount of work required to make it “not suck” would be daunting. Without massive work on the feedback mechanisms, it’s not going to be “more realistic” – it’ll be like sending the players into the game world blindfolded and with one hand tied behind their backs.

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