Tales of the Rampant Coyote

Adventures in Indie Gaming!

Making Games: Adding Role-Playing to Computer Role-Playing Games

Posted by Rampant Coyote on November 4, 2010

Continuing from yesterday’s discussion, I thought I’d provide a concrete example of how process might be applied to  a creative endeavor (like a game). While I’m really talking about the general idea, I figured I’d focus on a specific trait near-and-dear to many CRPG fans’ black hearts, role-playing.

One point repeated from The CRPG Addict’s GIMLET system is opportunities for role-playing – in combat, scripted encounters, and NPC interaction. Now, I’m one who tends to sneer at the idea of “role-playing” in single-player CRPGs. I mean, I’ve been doing the tabletop RPG thing for (shudder) decades now, and was active in theater in high school, and have even done the live-action medievalist thing, so I have a particular idea of what role-playing entails. But that’s not the same thing as what he tends to describe.

For the purpose of the GIMLET system, it sounds as though role-playing is defined more as having multiple solutions to a problem, none of which are inherently superior, but which differ primarily in the player’s chosen style or assumed personality or ethics of their character. This is something I can totally get behind.

As a personal note, I tend to prefer it when the game does NOT attempt to assign some kind of ethical judgment on these decisions. Just because I choose a non-violent means of defeating the bandits doesn’t mean I’m some kind of altruistic do-gooder. My rogue may very well intend to get in on a piece of that acti0n later. But that’s me. And, unless I change my mind or have some cool idea to the contrary, that’s how my games will be.

Okay – so these are things that I value in an RPG. But – as I have discovered repeatedly while making Frayed Knights – these kinds of things don’t appear by accident. Well, okay, yes, they actually totally do.  I have crap like that all over the place in the game, but it wasn’t part of any kind of master plan. As I’m working on the design of the next games, however, I’m trying to apply a bit more process to it so things will happen more consistently. Because I don’t want to rely on accidents.

So – for example – in my master list for designing each “adventure” ( adventure / dungeon / major subquest / etc.), I’m adding a required feature as part of my process: “Must have at least one role-playing encounter.” This rule is intentionally left vague, and in fact might not apply in all situations. Exceptions could exist – for example, if the entire map is one giant role-playing encounter, or in the case of really tiny dungeon levels.

Now one of the problems with the industry in general, IMO, is what is referred to as “check-box design.” Game X has this feature, so the marketing guys convince the money guys to make sure the design guys have that same feature. Multiply by a dozen Game Xs, and you have a big list of required features that have to be met for a game to be competitive. As a result, you have a soulless game that feels like it was designed by committee where the really cool “heart” of the game – if you can find it – has been crowded out by all the required points that the marketing guys wanted to put on the back of the case.

This is (I think) totally different. This is more of a case of defining the heart of the game – the most important parts – through rules, guidelines, and checklists. It’s about what I, as the designer, feel strongly about. It makes sure that (for example) a meticulously crafted faction system actually gets used. It is used to make sure the games theme is reinforced throughout, and that all the major plot points are hit without requiring a linear storyline. It forces the key elements of the game to be front-and-center.

And it actually encourages creativity. I’m telling you from sad experience that it’s really, really easy to just stuff a dungeon full of straightforward combat encounters when the crunch is on, or when you are tired, or … well, any reason. And you can deal with a checklist in just as lazy a manner, if you interpret “must have at least one puzzle” to be yet another remote switch / lock combo or something. But still, a vague demand for a “role-playing” event of some kind in every “map” forces some level of creativity, and can help keep the designer focused on important / interesting parts of the game.

In one dungeon, it may be something as simple as letting a potential enemy go free, with slightly different consequences for either decision. Or it may be something as complex as allowing several different approaches to obtaining the “prize” of the dungeon. It could be a clever puzzle that can be bypassed with brute force, or an NPC encounter that could end peacefully or violently depending upon your approach.

If it’s loose enough in definition, the “formula” or process should be pretty invisible to the player – at least invisible enough that it won’t be meta-gamed. While it’s no guarantee of a quality game on the other side of production, it’s a tool to at least keep pointing the way. And, as I intend to be making indie cRPGs for the long haul, it could allow me to offload some of future level design to other people.


Filed Under: Design, Production - Comments: 11 Comments to Read



  • Adamantyr said,

    I think an important part of game design is to avoid predictability. If the player starts saying “Okay, new dungeon… there should be at least one puzzle and two big treasures here.” Then you probably need to mix things up a bit.

    Any game design has a finite number of different events/gimmicks you can code. Modern games can have a lot, but good design paces out their introduction so the player feels like there’s always an element of the unknown entering the next area/dungeon/phase.

    Let me offer an example: I was playing a very old simple CRPG, in which my party found a captive young maiden in a dungeon. Naturally I rescued her, and she was then listed as a “quest item” in the primitive interface. When I was about to leave the dungeon, though, suddenly she backstabs my wizard, killing him, and issues a dire threat that it would be better for my party’s health to stay out of matters that don’t concern them and disappears.

    What was really shocking about the whole event was that at no point in the game before had something like that happened. “Woah, you mean I may get ambushed by assassins at any time? Wow! I need to keep on my toes!” And in hindsight, a warning is given to you in the local tavern that the enemy was hiring assassins to keep people from getting close to something important.

    This is where a solid testing team can give you some valuable feedback, not only directly but in how they play the game. If they’re following certain processes to avoid peril, consider adding some traps that actually catch them, but not right away. You have it at a mid-point in the game, so they’re caught off guard. Not anything that would make them lose the game, just a subtle reminder that maybe they haven’t “sussed” the engine as perfectly as they thought. 🙂

  • Calibrator said,

    This event must have really burned some of your synapses, Adamantyr, as I’m sure that I have read it before. 😉

    I’d like to offer a slightly different view, though:
    The complete absence of predictability is chaos as the player isn’t safe about anything anymore. Going into a dungeon may result in getting some nice treasure or artifact, or little treasure, or nothing at all, or a little backstabbing…
    Why enter the dungeon in the first place then?

    What we need is *some* predictability to make the player just feel strong and safe enough to tackle the game.
    Then surprise him sometimes – and not always in a negative way.

    CRPGs are, at least behind the curtains, always about numbers and stats. These can be used in more ways than combat and line-of-sight calculations. “Luck” for example would be a good starting point for the amount of *positive* surprises (dialog options, subquests, artifacts, amount of loot etc.). Let the player decide how much chaos he wants when he is in the character creation process or whenever he raises the stats by levelling up.

    Some games also have global variables like counters to calculate the next random encounter (in other words: when and what to throw at the player) to not frustate the player with too many such events. Where does it say that it always has to be an unfriendly meeting with NPCs?

    Also: Break up with stereotypes or play with them so that the player is mislead for a moment and then surprised.
    This is of course a must for parody-CRPGs but when implemented in “serious” games like dark fantasy, hard-boiled, gritty thrillers etc. the player will perceive the gameworld and its population to be more dynamic. I think a game that has NPCs which have their own agenda – and not just the big foozle that wants to overthrow the whole world – are much more desirable.

    Instead, we still get games that have NPCs like signposts that even stand there in the middle of the night, just waiting for the player to arrive and either ask or attack him and to react according to script language subroutine #47.

  • Maklak said,

    I like, how You added the “Damsel in distress to the Temple of Pokmor Xang”. My preffered method of dealing with her, was to live her inside her cell the first time (maybe giving her some food and water, and saying she is safer in her cell, and there are some monsters around). After getting to the statue I would return to her, set her free (now that every cultist is dead she cannot backstab the party), and maybe try to get info about eyes of Pokmor Xan out of her.

    I agree, that there should be a balance between predictability, and surprises. Dungeon Siege 2 was a bit too linear for me, but it was ok, because apart from a lot of combat, there were some surprising things now and then.

    I liked the open world of Morrowind, because of its diversity. On one hand no one was leading me through a narrow tunnel, like in DS2, so I would sometimes get lost. On the other hand, it was a big, open world, and by just going ahead in any direction, I would always find some adventure 🙂

  • Rampant Coyote said,

    Actually, you are bringing up EXACTLY the points I’m trying to address; the balance I’m hoping to achieve with this.

    So say a (medium-sized or larger) dungeon should have at least one “puzzle.” What does that puzzle entail? If you make it too specific, you get predictability – a lever puzzle in every dungeon would make it overly predictable.

    But maybe in one, it’s a traditional lever-style puzzle. In another, it’s a riddle you need to answer to get access to an optional treasure room. In another, the whole dungeon is kind of maze-like and counts as one giant puzzle. In another, you have to solve a murder mystery among a community of dwarves. In another, you have to best a guardian in a simple card game that seems random – but he cheats, and you have to figure out how he cheats and subvert it.

    All of these meet the criteria, yet they are unique enough from each other that a player won’t say, “Gee, where’s my requisite puzzle or two?” The point isn’t to break it down into some mechanical list where you are just pulling X items from Column A and Y items from Column B, but rather to force the designer (usually ME) to KEEP pushing the envelope, and KEEP exercising the mechanics that the player has been mastering.

    As an example, one of my rules (a newer one I need to retro-fit into some dungeons in Frayed Knights 1) is to never have three fixed encounter in a row that are very similar to each other. For example, if you go down a corridor with three doors in it, they’d better not each contain three goblins.

    Note: The pilot *kinda* violates that rule before I had it, though technically I did have a trap in-between the encounters. The doors on the upstairs landing to the right of the meditation room all have similar bad guys. I should fix that.

    Anyway, it doesn’t absolutely prevent the player from wandering around and accidentally having three similar combat encounters in a row (especially if they run into wandering patrols). But it does help make sure that I’m mixing things up, and keeping the player on their toes.

  • David W said,

    I think it all depends on your attitude, whether a checklist is a good thing or not. Specifically, whether you find yourself gaming it – putting in the absolute minimum that counts, or really stretching the definitions, things like that.

    As an analogy, having a chef’s checklist include ‘wash hands’ can have totally different results if he understands the purpose and washes thoroughly, or if he’s just running the water because he’ll get fired if his boss doesn’t hear the faucet running when he comes back from break.

    In just about every situation I’ve seen involving creativity and quality, the general rule is that you have to be able to follow the rules (a recipe, or grammar, or your scale on-key, or…) before you can break them. It’s a combination of things – understanding the purpose of the rules, having a controlled deviation, plus usually it’s a good rule, your useful creativity comes in recognizing the exceptions.

    But I’m not bored with my bread because it has grain, and has risen, and been baked; I only get bored if all I ever have is Wonderbread. And even then, if my goal is a sandwich instead of toast, I might want the bread to be constant and predictable while I experiment with ham vs tuna.

    I guess what I’m mostly saying is, I appreciate rules and checklist, and I think they usually result in a better product, even (especially?) if you break them from time to time. And as long as you maintain the focus on ‘good game’ rather than ‘follow the rules’, which I expect from you anyway on a labor of love like this :-).

  • Felix Pleșoianu said,

    A similar issue manifests itself in interactive fiction. You need to give the player a variety of fun things to do, but manually programming interactions between every object and all the others is prohibitive. One proven solution is to treat the game like a simulation: give objects physical properties and define the interaction between those. E.g. all wooden objects float, any heavy object can be used to keep a pressure plate down, each glass object can break… Now players can run into interactions you never even thought about!

    I’m not sure how this applies to CRPGs, though. Just a thought.

  • Maklak said,

    About similar encounters in the Pilot: To me that actually made sense. There were mostly golems and skelletons in ground and middle levels plus some occasional cultists, and mostly cultist in the more “luxurious” upper level. That worked for me.

  • MadTinkerer said,

    “This is more of a case of defining the heart of the game – the most important parts – through rules, guidelines, and checklists.”

    There’s nothing wrong with making sure you are sticking to a particular style of gameplay and ensuring that you are including the vital parts of it everywhere. If someone made a portal mod where you used HL2 weapons (I think a few people are have started something like this, but to my knowledge no one has actually finished one) the good way to do it would be to slowly introduce the enemies and weapons alongside the portal puzzles. The wrong way to do it would be to have puzzle section, puzzle section, puzzle section, puzzle section, combat section, combat section, combat section, puzzle section, puzzle section, puzzle section, end. (with no sections bothering to combine the two or mix it up with a non-portal puzzle)

    Prey had a great variety of gameplay (and a painfully awful story, but I digress), which really opened up and became amazingly fun about halfway through where you got vehicles and gravity puzzles and FUN fights and you almost forgot what an absolute douchebag the protagonist is. And then the designers decided to make the rest of the game a series of tedious “challenging” fights and wrapping up an already mind-numbingly cheesy story with several horribly telegraphed “twists” and a total lack of fun gameplay.

    I’m actually playing through the game again, enduring the unnecessarily slow (but not actually horrible) first 1/3rd to get to the fun middle part and then quitting when I get to the stupid last chapters of the game. The game actually went through several different teams and completely separate iterations so there was plenty of chance for someone to actually write down a story that made sense and realize how much of an insufferable idiot the main character (the one that IS THE PLAYER’S POINT OF VIEW) is being and fix it.

    But according to the various making-of videos, the story and main character was more or less the same from the beginning. So as far as I can tell the worst parts of the game were mandated along the lines of “Okay you guys are now the team that are making this game: these are the plot points that have already been decided”, while the best parts of the game were the level designers and tech guys going nuts with what was possible in the engine* entirely independent of any mandate handed down.

    “I’m telling you from sad experience that it’s really, really easy to just stuff a dungeon full of straightforward combat encounters when the crunch is on, or when you are tired, or … well, any reason.” That’s pretty much how Prey ended. The middle part was a delightful surprise compared to the slow beginning (which had the occasional glimmer of fun), which made the ending all the more of a letdown. I slogged through just in case some more good stuff was at the end, but I just got more “story” to remind me that the guy whose arms and legs I was controlling was an insufferable ignorant jerk who takes credit for saving the world when I did all the hard work.

    In most RPGs and adventure games, you’re given dialogue choices and I love exploring whole dialogue trees. In most FPSs, the protagonist is silent. In Prey, all of the involuntary dialogue that comes out of Tommy’s mouth makes me wish there was an option to shoot his mouth off (with a gun) so he can be a good silent FPS protagonist.

    “As a personal note, I tend to prefer it when the game does NOT attempt to assign some kind of ethical judgment on these decisions.” Or worse, force “you” to make a decision you KNOW is horrible when “your” own ghost-grandfather is begging “you” not to. Man, I’ll stop ragging on Prey now, but it was like eating a three course meal with the first course being adequate, the second course being DELICIOUS, and when the third course is served the obnoxious guy sitting next to you (that you’ve been trying to ignore all evening) dumps a bucket of gravel all over the table.

    *Spirit walking puzzles, Gravity-switching, Escher-like walkways, planetoids with their own gravity, the wonderful vehicle sections, and the best use of 3D skyboxes EVER, are the parts of Prey I like to remember.

  • CRPGAddict said,

    You really did nail what I meant by “role-playing” when I was writing the first GIMLET posting, and I’m very happy with your general rule-of-thumb.

    I would note that “Baldur’s Gate” did this quite well. In every rectangular surface map, there was at least one unique encounter that at least gave you dialog options, and sometimes more. In some cases, the outcome was all but inevitable–you and the bandits were destined to mix it up–but you might get a little pre-battle dialog that gave you a chance to squeeze a little intel, impress your companions, or just feel like a badass.

    As an earlier version of this, I admire the old Gold Box games, where before each encounter, you could choose to be nice, meek, haughty, or abusive and see where it got you. I envisioned my party approaching that group of kobolds shouting, “Get the F#*$ out of our way!” It made the encounters just slightly more enjoyable than if you had jumped directly into combat.

  • sascha/hdrs said,

    Calibrator said,
    I’d like to offer a slightly different view, though:
    The complete absence of predictability is chaos as the player isn’t safe about anything anymore. Going into a dungeon may result in getting some nice treasure or artifact, or little treasure, or nothing at all, or a little backstabbing…
    Why enter the dungeon in the first place then?

    Maybe because it’s part of the quest to enter the dungeon, maybe the dungeon leads to another area the player needs to reach, maybe …

    There are many reason except for the usual treasures or MOBs. The idea about making RPGs and in particular quests less predictable should less be where and where not to except treasures or enemies, it’s about how NPCs react and how the story unfolds by taking twists that surprise you.

    And, no surprise there, most recent modern RPGs are painfully predictable in terms of their story. Mass Effect, Dragon Age … holy lord, I’m having a hard time to continue play DA because of the unmotivated and bland story. Mass Effect is no better. Everything just happens as you’d expect ~10 minutes before!

  • Calibrator said,

    sascha/hdrs said:
    >Maybe because it’s part of the quest to enter the dungeon, maybe the dungeon leads to another area the player needs to reach,

    Both of which are ‘goals’ which means that the player expects something (progress in the plot/quest) and therefore you have established a certain level of predictability.
    Don’t get me wrong: These are valid reasons, however if it’s *guaranteed* that he will progress in the plot (to stay with your example) by entering the dungeon then there’s already too much predictability involved, IMHO.
    It would be way better if the player isn’t too sure about the outcome.

    >There are many reason except for the usual treasures or MOBs. The idea about making RPGs and in particular quests less predictable should less be where and where not to except treasures or enemies, it’s about how NPCs react and how the story unfolds by taking twists that surprise you.

    Many games, especially mainstream ones use cardboard characters which I criticize as much as weak plots.
    To clarify: I consider *every* extremist perspective (either no surprises or a game that bombards you with one twist after another) bad.

    What you describe in your last paragraph is exactly why I don’t buy anything from Bioware or Obsidian at the moment. Especially not fantasy RPGs.

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