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General Topics
Holistic Game Design
The Grandfather Clause of Stupidity
Paths Unlimited
Design from Tech or Tech from Design
Roleplaying = Fighting
Limiting Player Power
Segregating Player Power
The No Numbers Concept
Death Systems for Persistent Worlds
Marking Time
Sample Offline Activity System
Twitch Factor
Beware the RP Police
One thing that keeps popping up throughout this long and rambling document is the idea that "This thing doesn't work unless these other things also work." This interrelationship of elements in a system can be considered "holistic," and is a good thing to keep in mind when designing, tweaking, or patching your system. Everything affects everything else.
Somehow, established professionals in the game development field forget this idea all the time, or perhaps never considered it. As a direct result of thinking about game design in a non-holistic way, elements are introduced into the game for seemingly decent purposes and wind up destroying whole areas they were never meant to impact. However, because designers of all types tend to be stubborn, proud people, these mistakes are often left there to fester, and the game is never quite as good as it was before.
This, by the way, is one of the reasons this document is so long and sprawling. Whenever I think of an idea to tack onto it, there are three or four corollaries to that idea that cry out for explanation, and therefore these need to be added as well. For instance, a PvP+ environment with no switch can be an excellent element of a game world, but it has direct impact on almost everything else. It requires careful weapon balance, character potential limits, class balance, a robust justice system, legally sanctioned benefits for non-criminals, etc. etc. Introducing an element that is unbalanced from the PvE standpoint (i.e. the sword that does 9000 damage so players can easily kill a boss monster) demolishes PvP and must be disallowed before it ever gets into the game.
It's easier to show how ignoring holistic philosophy ruins games
than trying to provide examples of good holistic design, since (a) holistic
design is far too uncommon in the industry, and (b) if a game is largely
holistic and balanced, but there are a few stupid ideas thrown in, they
eclipse everything else. Therefore, here are some theoretical examples
of how ignoring the holistic approach can destroy other elements of the
game:
Implementation | Reason | What It Ruins |
Sword/crossbow/spell of mass destruction | It seemed like a good carrot for high level players | Every other method of attack, and all content below the level of content the superattack is geared for. Also wrecks PvP. |
Hooded faran robe (AC) | They look cool | Because the team forgot that players could cast overpowered protective spells on garments, robes become the #1 choice for armor. This ruins almost all other armor, any class that is unable to cast these spells, and any content geared towards players wearing standard armor. |
Monsters with really good loot | Player base whining | All other monsters besides uberloot monsters, the item economy, the cash economy, and any character type not specifically outfitted to deal with uberloot monsters. |
Easy XP farming areas | Player base whining, or a desire to power players up to meet unbalanced content | All content below the highest level, all quests below superquests, all characters not optimized for powerleveling, etc. |
On the other hand, here are some of the considerations presented
within this document and the other game elements required to make sure
they work (assume that "robust server and code" is included for all elements,
of course):
Implementation | Additional Required Systems |
Off-hours (logged off) activity system | Strong timekeeping, learning by doing skill system. |
Historically accurate weapon system | Modifiers for weapon reach, reasonable player power range, good pre-implementation research. |
PvP+ environment | Player power limitations, zero sum balanced combat system for all possible attack forms, working justice system, reasonable sanctions agaist criminal lifestyles, reasonable death system, etc. |
Reasonable cash economy | Taxation system, reasonable rewards for all moneymaking activities, sufficient cash drains that are either unavoidable or else worth the players' while to use |
Player character nobility and rule | Monarch menu, robust NPC engine for dealing with the movements of peasants, etc., reasonable economies, large scale combat engine including NPC's for territorial incursions and defenses, dynamic construction engine, diplomacy engine, robust justice system, taxation, siege, supply considerations, etc. |
Trade skills | Every other aspect of a balanced economic system, all aspects of combat that relate to crafted combat goods, use-based skill gain system |
Non-static human and monster populations | Dynamic construction engine, off-hours activity engine, ability to hire NPC's of many types, logical migration algorithm, frontier for new monsters to come from |
Naturally, every element that is tied to a particular implementation has its own ties to other elements that make it work, ad infinitum. This seems daunting at first, but after a long time considering these things, one's brain can start to make the connections and references automatically, and with a little effort, all elements of the game become tied together in a complex web of relationships which are more easily navigated. Congratulations: you are now designing holistically.
The Grandfather Clause of Stupidity
Probably the biggest single source of bad rule and mechanics decisions comes from the fact that most game designers, rather than actually going to a library, base most of their research on the work of other game designers. In this way errors are compounded, unrealistic ideas are perpetuated, and design flaws from the earliest of games become commonplace in all modern iterations. It all goes back to the origin of the "role playing game." Here we are talking about the true origin of the "let's pretend" game like House or Cops and Robbers, but of the origin of the systemized, rule-based role playing simulation. It all starts with Chainmail.
Chainmail was a short, cheaply published book by Gary Gygax and Dave Perren, originally published by Guidon Games, copyright 1971 (Gygax claimed 1969, but the copyright information contradicts this). It was a set of rules for tabletop miniatures battles using lead figures and dice, and contrary to popular geek-convention myth, there was indeed a 12 page fantasy rules supplement present (in addition to the now-standard concept of "hit points"). By 1974-1975 it was being published by Lake Geneva Tactical Studies Rules (TSR). About this time, the first version of Dungeons and Dragons came out as sort of an add-on to Chainmail, three little brown books that focused on the playing of individual figurine-characters as opposed to conducting large scale tactical combat. The combat tables determining hits, misses, and damage were very similar to those in Chainmail. This is where all the trouble begins.
The modern idea of the systemized RPG, from pen and paper to MMORPG, all stems from this Chainmail legacy, and several silly factors have never been properly weeded out. The two biggies are:
Example: In Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, 1st Edition, there is a huge hairball of a combat chart that nobody used, called the "Weapon vs. Armor Class Type" table. This one table helps to make sense of the arbitrary D&D weapon damage system of, "duh, a dagger is pretty small so it does 1d4, a bastard sword is a little bigger than a long sword so it does 2d4 instead of 1d8...". The table assigns various bonuses or penalties to hit with any given weapon vs. an armor type, i.e. a weapon may have terrible chances against full plate and shield, but be better at penetrating chain. The table was flawed (it treated chain and shield the same as it would treat splint, as they were both base AC 4, etc.), but it lent some purpose to a weapon one might not otherwise consider useful. It was also very complicated to use for the typical beer and pretzels gamer, and so nobody ever used it. In the misbegotten later editions of AD&D, this table was simply removed altogether, and players were back to the old choices of longsword, longbow, and two-handed sword.
The advent of the computer as a referee, or even a referee's assistant, presents entirely new possibilities to get away from these godawful abstrations and arbitrary damage values. A computer is perfectly happy to calculate whether or not the sun is shining at a bad angle into an archer's eyes, or the effects of windage on a sniper's shot. As better, more powerful machines become available and come down in price, the potential of the MMORPG server to do complex battle calculations increases. The basic ones aren't even that complex. Is the guy being stabbed by the stiletto wearing maille? Then the stiletto has more effect! Is a spear longer than a club? Advantage spear! Simple considerations like these can add a whole new level of subtle realism to the game, and with it, a whole new importance to strategy in combat, as opposed to how high one's numbers are. If game software engineers would stop thinking in terms of an expensive version of 3 little brown books published in 1974 and more in terms of computer-simulated battle conditions, I would be ecstatic.
One of the things that separates a really well-designed role playing game from a hack and slash through a single corridor is the concept of choice. Players need to be able to have choices, and those choices have to matter. A player should be able to pick and choose a course of action for his character from as wide a variety of possibilities as is feasable, and while some of these choices will be obviously stupid ones, there should not be only one option for becoming "heroic." Unfortunately, the nature of modern CRPG design seems to mandate that players kill stuff and rob it, due to the relative ease of focussing on combat only as a path of advancement, as well as the "monsteritis" syndrome that relegates all non-player characters to the role of "thing that sits around waiting for players to attack it."
The most elementary system for expanding the number of options open to a player is meaningful craft skills. This means artisan trades that players can explore that exist for some reason besides equipping "real" characters who go out to kill stuff. In a world where food is required by PC's and NPC's alike, agronomy and foraging could be important skills, as could hunting game. Indeed, a nomadic character who stays away from town would need these abilities, even if he supplements his rations by murdering other players for their salt pork and waybread. If food is not required, other skills would certainly be valuable, like leatherworking, ore refining, smithy, woodwork, bowyery... the classics, as it were. If the engine is sophisticated enough to track the construction of new buildings over time, carpentry and architecture take on new possibilities. Cartography, dowsing, herbalism, medicine, tinsmithy... trade skills can number in the hundreds easily, limited only by the complexities of code and the ability of developers to think outside of the norm when considering trade skills.
Some of the most rewarding aspects of playing an RPG for some players lies in the less quantifiable pursuits like diplomacy, the acquisition of a title, political influence, and inter-community trade. These are more difficult to simulate in a system relying on hard code, as by and large these are subjective skills, not measurable in terms of points. However, one can always start somewhere. The acquisition of titles like "Grand Master of the Four Flowers School of Swordsmanship" can be done through quests, say to prove one's worth in a contest of skill at the school, assuming one has spent enough time there to qualify for the test in the first place. This sort of contest is nice, because it doesn't confer anything but a title and bragging rights, but only one person (presumably) can be Grand Master of any one school. This provides an avenue of competition amongst players that doesn't involve PvP, which is nice for those not inclined toward human conflict. Acquiring the title of Ambassador may require several successful missions to neighboring city-states (although the heuristics determining a successful negotion would be rough indeed), and may confer on that player some extra status in his hometown that could translate into legal flexibility, or even better prices at the market. To gain more standing in the Merchant's Guild might require successful caravans full of needed supplies to dangerous zones, and might confer similar price benefits and a certain amount of credit, plus economic flexibility between regions if your monentary system is realistically diversified. A Master of Lore, accredited by the not-so-local Wizarding College, would have demonstrated a high degree of aptitude in several areas of arcane knowledge, and would maybe gain access to some interesting (though not utterly powerful) incantations, probably of an informational nature, and better availability of ingredients, plus access to restricted tomes and such.
Even the overused motive of "kill stuff" can take on new meaning if the system is flexible enough to support it. If your goal is (using an Asheron's Call cliche for example) to drive the Tumeroks out of Dryreach, wouldn't it be interesting if it could actually be done? You'd think after losing about 18 million troops to marauding humans, they would have given up on the idea of holding the town and move somewhere else. The town is freed, the conquering players are hailed and honored, and now there's something else to do as the evicted monsters make other plans, or call for backup. If the engine allows for the dynamic construction of buildings over time, a player could discover a group of enemies secretly building a fort in the woods. Maybe the players can band together to ruin their plans. If they don't, then attacks on the locals will be launched out of the fortified base, forcing players to either do something about the situation or lose the town. Adding meaning to combat-related goals requires the same thing that noncombat goals require: imagination to conceive a new way for things to be done, robust code to implement the ideas, and sufficient technology to support the execution of these ideas without too much strain on the server or the client's bandwidth.
Design from Tech or Tech from Design
A point addressed many times throughout this treatise is the effect of the codebase and its limitations on what content and systems you are able to implement in a computer based RPG. A designer may have a cool idea, but when he props it, the code team says, "Never happen," "Requires new tech," "Not possible given our development cycle," etc. These are valid arguments, and some pie in the sky features will never make it into a particular game system because of them. However, eventually the designer gets sick of hearing these things, and so begins to only propose things he knows have a good shot being implemented given the restrictions of the code. As a result, all of the new content winds up looking pretty much the same, with no innovative characteristics.
There is an analogy to this situation that I have personally bitched about for years, in the field of musical composition. At its purest level, the act of musical composition (the design phase) is done purely in one's head, and the subsequent translation to paper and copy is only a method of communicating the mental sound-picture to players who can then execute it. As the composer gets more tools (tech), he can easily slip into the trap of basing all of his ideas on what his tools can do. One current example of this attitude in the music industry is the use of sequencers as a composition tool. An over-reliance on the sequencer (tech) to determine what you can compose (design) results in very similar, boring music, since you tend to avoid things that are difficult to express using the sequencer (tech limitations).
It stands to reason, therefore, that it's possible to conceive more interesting and innovative systems if you don't consider the practical limitations of technology during the initial design phase. However, because tech limitations are a reality, not all of the cool ideas you come up with on the design side are going to make it into a product that has a reasonable development cycle. Pushing this issue causes problems in the form of contempt between the design and tech teams as follows:
Design: "I want to implement this feature, it's really cool."This problem becomes even more pronounced in a persistent world system post-release. A suggested feature from design that's supposed to be patched into the existing code is even more subject to the limitations of technology, especially if that technology was released over a year ago. Rewriting your entire engine because you want to implement something new is very risky and financially not feasable.
Tech: "This will never happen if you want this game to ship in this decade."
Design: "But I NEEEED this! Do it!"
Tech: "Screw you buddy."
Tech gains contempt for design because design is obstinate and unrealistic. Design gains contempt for tech because tech is viewed as lazy. In fact, either or both of these could be true. These problems have to do with personnel decisions and human resources, and are outside the scope of this document. Basically, though, having a tech and design team who are compatible and have a similar vision of making a really cool game is a good thing in some cases. Like, if you want to make a really cool game.
This relationship and its origins were alluded to in the "Grandfather Clause of Stupidity" section. When one looks at the gamut of roleplaying games, from the first iterations of D&D through modern server-based MMORPG's, they all seem to be about one thing: fighting. The original cause for this is that all modern RPG's were spawned out of tabletop miniatures battle rules, but the trend is perpetuated by some other, equally noisome, factors. First and most importantly, there are the human factors:
However, let's consider some other factors, equally important, that mandate combat effectiveness as the primary concern for a character in an RPG, paper or computer based.
In a computer-based single-player or single-run RPG like Baldur's Gate II, it becomes almost impossible to make noncombat skills and character types really matter except through the most contrived scenarios. Need a purpose for your thief? Well, every dungeon has zillions of traps only a thief can deal with. Want to be the nice guy smooth talker? Just pick the appropriate responses from the multiple-choice conversation dropdowns. In almost all cases, it still comes down to how well you can kill the other guy, but there's a tiny glimmer of hope. Maybe by the next generation of single run computer RPG's, advanced technology will be coupled with the unlikely possibility of advanced storywriters and these games will be more than this. (I'm not holding my breath though.)
In the current state MMORPG, there isn't even the faintest glimmer of hope. Of the big three, the one that provides the strongest case for the noncombat character is Ultima Online, where trade skills actually matter and there may in fact be a purpose in life for your blacksmith. This only seems fantastic when compared to the other two MMORPG models for tradeskills: Asheron's Call, where trade skills are something you raise on an allegiance mule to help your real character kill more stuff, and Everquest, where trade skills are basically a waste of time and ultimately even more boring than the monster camping that comprises 99% of the "action." Even in UO, your master of mercantile pursuits is still dead when he missteps out of the guard zone and gets jumped by a few murderers who then loot his house. You cannot conduct diplomacy with a computer-controlled NPC in these games... hell, you can barely have an intelligible conversation with another player. The closest you can ver get to performing a mission like spy or a thief, obtaining the objective without combat, is by exploiting bugs or by jumping someone else's quest, or possibly muledrop thievery and player scamming. If a system like UO does allow for thievery, eventually so many people complain that thieves get bizarre and arbitrary limitations slapped on them, effectively ruining the class. MMORPG's have not yet been able to deal with the provision of a meaningful existence for the non-killer, and so they actively steer content toward the killer, encouraging more combat optimization, more powerful attack potentials, and less variety.
It seems bleak, and it is. This is one of the reasons that jaded players of MMORPG's and CRPG's have gone back into the roulette game of pen and paper, hoping against hope to find a GM and/or players who do not suck. As a general rule, though, most people do suck, and are incapable of telling an RPG from a glorified shooter, which is what many so-called RPG's actually represent. It is my fervent hope that the RPG, particularly the MMORPG, will rise above the level of "bad Doom with character levels" and manage to present an immersive and compelling storyline that draws players in, rather than continuing on their current slide.
It seems inevitable: even if any game system starts out as being playable, logical, balanced, and fun, it gets destroyed in time, usually through the addition of badly thought out supplementary material, either supplementary rulebooks, patches, or expansion packs. It's true that such supplementary material can be beneficial to any game system, not to mention the prospect of continuing revenue from one's player base, but inevitably a horrible thing happens. Everything gets bigger.
It happens all the time in pen and paper systems. The saving grace of a paper system is that as the referee controls the game (hopefully), he has the option to change and ignore bad rules whenever they inevitably appear. Examples:
The only MMORPG of the big three that has made a semi-successful effort to limit player power is, oddly enough, Ultima Online. Once you hit 225 stats and 700 base skill, that's it (unless you abuse a bug). You can shift those points around if you like, but you cannot go any higher. You will always have problems fighting things like dragons unless you cheese somehow. This is a blessing for UO, as it has so many other horrible problems with it related to code and people management that unlimited player power would have destroyed it within the first 4 months of retail.
The bottom line is that no game system can accurately and satisfactorily handle the concept of player characters too far outside of its rules focus. There is a logical reason for this not based in game theory: there is no real-life analogue for these people. You can only become so formidable as a person through training, practice, and mental exercise. With some luck you might become a Leonardo Da Vinci, or a Musashi Miyamoto, or a Yang Chengfu, or a Temuchin. You cannot realistically go from 5 hit points to 200 hit points with a similar increase in your physique and mental acuity, which is exactly what happens when player potential is not capped. These superbeings are far enough outside the scope of possibility that they too must be considered "black boxes" along with off-the-cuff magic systems.
The presence of superbeings with unlimited growth potential presents a neverending problem for developers. Players becoming godlike? Better get in some tougher, crazier stuff for them to try to fight, and some handheld tactical nuclear devices to fight them with. Got a lot of multimillionaires in your world? Better make stuff more expensive. The ogre chieftains and the evil warlock overlord you set up to be your boss monsters are little more than a joke, and so now you need to supplant them with something else, no matter how much it screws up your storyline. As the bar goes up, all your players must rise with it, until your entire world-design that you so carefully crafted to keep everyone interested and happy is little more than a footnote, ignored by players as they rush off to superman status to defeat your newest hastily thrown-together enemies, forcing you to repeat the entire process.
It seems clear that a hard cap on the ultimate potential of your players is necessary in a system that allows for rapid development (in a pen and paper game, you could just give out less experience). Once a character hits this mark, he may be able to change his identity around a little, maybe he stops tilting at the lists so much to spend more time in the alchemy lab, but he cannot aspire to have so many hit points that he could casually charge the town guard when they come to arrest him with crossbows, or jump into a canyon because he's bored and live to tell about it. This becomes easier if you don't let the players see where the cap is (see "The No Numbers Concept" below). The content team will now have to be more diligent to make sure that players who feel they have maxed out already have something to keep them interested, but the inevitable path you take to do this (better storylines and immersive plots) lends far, far more to a gameworld than the prospect of improving your spreadsheet-characters.
This is sort of a compromise that is made when the disparity between high and low power players is too great for a truly cohesive system to handle. Unfortunately this never works very well either. The basic idea is to force players of varying power levels into different regions, e.g. high-level land, newbie land, uber land, etc. Generally the solution is to limit certain hunting grounds to players that are (theoretically) within the power curve of the enemies found in that area, like a dungeon that restricts access to players of level A to B. There are three basic problems with this system:
The fact that a traditional RPG is essentially a numerical simulation has spawned a number of very annoying trends in player behavior. Most of these types of behavior can be subsumed under the term "numbercrunching." Also called "min/maxing," numbercrunching largely involves the study of the game's numerical systems and figuring out how to use it to the player's best advantage. Therefore, becoming a better fighter is more a matter of allocating your points appropriately, instead of logical considerations like developing advanced tactics, using terrain effectively, and personal bravery. The player character is reduced to little more than a spreadsheet, and players become obsessed with watching their numbers increase. Unfortunately, the game system eventually evolves to accomodate this sort of player with provisos like high-xp farming areas, repeatable activites to raise use-based skills efficiently with a macro, etc.
It is my firm belief that the axiom "most players are self-centered bastards who will ruin other players' experience at the drop of a hat" is greatly exacerbated by this numerical obsession. Why do players steal kills from other players? Because doing so will help their numbers increase. Why do players exploit bugs to kill monsters (or players) with relative ease? Because doing so will increase their numbers. Why do players use cheats and plugins that give them unfair advantages in the game world? You get the picture. Sure, some of this activity stems from a desire to simply ruin the game for other players, and some people gain enjoyment from this, but there is no way to deal effectively with this sort of player except to quickly identify and remove him from your game.
Now consider the effects of a use-based skill system where the numbers are effectively hidden from the player. This means he cannot see his exact strength or hit points, he does not know that his sword does X amount of damage per hit, and wounds are represented graphically only, either status bars, hit location indicators, or ideally an actual change in texmaps reflecting damage to specific body parts. The player will have a pretty good idea that he is decent with an axe, a novice at archery, and completely unskilled at alchemy, but he doesn't have a number to refer to as his "skill." Once in a while, he may receive a system message telling him that he has learned something new about pottery, but these messages should be unreliable and ambiguous. He may even be able to compete for titles in various contests of skill, but this is only an indicator of prowess, not a measurable figure that you can watch increase as you fight your eight millionth orc. Sure, there are players who will still go camp the goblins for "skill," but he can't really be sure it's doing him all that much good, and if the designer has been building his system holistically, it's not.
What happens now is that with visible numbers unavailable for scorekeeping purposes, plyers become less interested in keeping score. This puts more pressure on the developer to make sure there is plenty of interesting stuff to do for the player, once the possibility of spreadsheet tweaking is removed. Such a system requres more diligence and work on the part of the developer, in many ways, but the payoff is immense. With numbers removed, your environment becomes more immersive. With spreadsheets removed, you remove a great source of annoying player behavior. And you may be able to reclaim some of that market that abandoned computer-based gaming for more logical paper systems.
Death Systems for Persistent Worlds
Death in a pen and paper or small-group setting is relatively easy to handle, assuming the GM has decent judgment. Death can be cheated any number of ways through GM fudging, and the death of a character can remain an epic, traumatic event, in a way that is apropos to the story being told. In the MMORPG world, however, the consequences of death are harder to deal with. On the one hand, you want there to be consequences for death, or it becomes meaningless, and you have people routinely making suicide charges for XP or jumping from lighthouses when they get bored. On the other hand, dying in an MMORPG can be due to any number of stupid reasons, most usually lag or a badly timed disconnect. Losing all of one's possessions and possibly the character itself due to chronic router failure is frustrating to the point of cancellation, and more importantly, destroys the immersive quality of the game. Nothing can be done to prevent technical failure 100% of the time, but this should not be a reason to make death completely meaningless.
In order to give some weight to combat activities, it must be dangerous somehow. In real life, the danger factor is obvious: everyone reacts to physical pain, and people generally have an aversion to death. In a pen and paper RPG, the danger is in losing a character that the player has an attachment to and a certain emotional investment in. In an MMORPG, death penalties are generally limited to a loss of some/all equipment and possibly some form of experience penalty. Please keep in mind that when devising a system for death penalties in an MMORPG, the primary goal is not to stop players from whining, as they will do that anyway. Yes you want to prevent people from becoming so frustrated that they cancel their subscriptions the first time they lag out in battle, but the primary goal is to devise a system whereby there is a reasonable level of risk attached to reckless, suicidal actions.
Permadeath is a tricky issue for MMORPG's. The loss of a character can be traumatic for sure, but this makes it an effective deterrent to acting like a nincompoop. It also carries a few other interesting benefits: the permadeath of a character can be used by a sufficiently advanced roleplaying subcommunity to expand the player-based lore of the game, it reduces the resale allure of characters via eBay (after the first few people buy an expensive account then get the character killed forever because they don't know how to play it), and it slows down the inevitable process of everyone reaching maximum potential in your world, thereby helping to maintain a more or less stable power pyramid from lowbies to ubers.
A compromise system, involving a limited number of resurrections before permadeath, could possibly work. A theoretical system Shadwolf and I worked out involved resurrections being performed by a house of worship of the character's faith (which incidentally increases the value of religion in the campaign to something more than "useless lore"). A character might have, say, 5 resurrections at the start of play. More resurrections could be earned by the character through devout service to the temple, religious questing, being a local hero, whatever, and would slowly regenerate automatically if the character was below 5 remaining resurrections. In this way, a character still has every chance to avoid permadeath unless he is involved in something very stupid or very heroic indeed, and if a player dies to lag 4 times in a short period of time, he should really be thinking about waiting for better conditions before playing anyway. Couple this system with temporary weakening and reasonable equipment loss, and now death is still something to think about, but you avoid the "killer dungeon" aspect of bad campaigns.
Permadeath can be further eased by the following method: On the permanent death of a character, after the big cutscene has ended, the player goes back to the character selection screen, where the name of the dead character is listed along with an indicator that he is dead. Choosing this slot now gives the character 2 options for a replacement character: either a newbie from scratch, or a "relative" of the old character, with the option of a new first name only. The new character has an appearance very similar to the deceased's, the same surname, and abilities based on those of the old character, maybe roughly equivalent to the dead character's power total over the starting base divided by 3. The old guy might be dead, but his brother/son/second cousin is there to reclaim the family honor! This is also a possible method for dealing with death/retirement by aging in a game, and assuming your game lasts long enough to cycle through enough game-years, one player can potentially write the family history of an entire line of adventurers. In such an aging game, the replacement character might have a power total bonus equal to the old character's divided by 2 instead of 3, as a little perk to a player who has managed to avoid getting his old character killed stupidly.
Time is an important concept in pen and paper RPG's (the good ones, anyway). It can be important to know how long you've been crossing that desert, or how long ago the 1-year ultimatum of surrender or die from the humanoid leader was issued. A sense of time lends credence to your world and meaning to your lore, both in your world's recorded history used in your background, and in the ongoing chronicles of new events recorded for the benefit of the players.
However, time is also extremely inconvenient for any persistent world: players log in and out, for different lengths of time and at different intervals. Characters that are logged out are effectively in a stasis field: nothing affects them, and they have no impact on the world. As a further consequence, players who log in more than others have a significant advantage over other players directly proportionate to the amount of excess time they spend playing. Is it possible to find a way around this quandry? I believe there is, though like most things worthwhile, it requires some work.
Start with the assumption that you are going to keep track of the passage of time in your world. If you figure out that the average player will go adventuring for about 3 hours at a stretch, figure 4 real hours = 1 game day. Configure your day/night cycles and seasons to reflect this 6 to 1 ratio, and institute a calendar. Now you have a time context to work from.
If we figure that the player in question logs in for 3 hours per day, i.e. 1 day in 6, this is a pretty aggressive schedule for an adventurer. The guy heads out to do battle with the forces of evil (or opposition to his socio-economic interests) about once a week, and the rest of the time he is taking care of business in town, repairing his stuff, maybe tilting at the lists or studying in the encyclopaedia arcanum. A guy with no life who plays twice a day in 5 hour stretches is going on aggressive expeditions as his full-time job. A guy who logs in a couple times a week is more casual about active adventuring, sort of a fellow who likes to bash in a few monster skulls now and again, but enjoys town life and its security. These are decent parallels for the types of players who fill these schedules.
So what happens when they log out? It's silly to assume they are put into stasis. If they're taking care of odd jobs as an apprentice, working as an altar boy, farming, hunting, or just engaging in some good old manual labor, shouldn't there be a systm that reflects this sort of off-hours activity? Implement a system where the player chooses a number of options for how he spends his off hours, and based on his location and condition at the time of logout, he does them. When he logs back in, the system begins by doing some checks for him based on the amount of time he was logged out, and maybe increasing appropriate scores. Naturally, the reward for these sorts of spare time activities should be nowhere near the reward for actual play time invested in character improvement, must be curved down the longer one is online to avoid the superman after a year of logout syndrome, and never result in monentary gain (assume all monies earned are sufficient only to pay for the character's upkeep and any incidental training fees), but it provides some sort of compromise solution for the player who just doesn't have all day to sit in front of his computer, playing the game nonstop, and eating up your bandwidth. This can also be seen as a sort of in-game macroing system, giving the develpment team more firm ground to stand on when they implement a no 3rd party macroing policy.
The offline hours activity system can also be used to compensate for the fact that player characters never seem to sleep. Simply calculate the amount of time the character has been logged on, divide by 3, and devote that much initial logout time to sleeping before you start doing things. Therefore, a character logged on for 4 hours real time (1 game day) would spend the first 1 hr. 20 min. resting. A character logged in for 12 hours would use the first 4 hours to logout time to sleep. This is a little unrealistic (stay awake for 3 days straight, then sleep for 1 day), but it beats requiring players to actually sleep at intervals during a marathon play session. To allow for players logging in before the sleep cycle is complete, assign a variable "Sleep" to the character, that increases the longer he plays. Offline sleep decays this value.
This can also be applied to the mundane details of life that people consider "not fun." If you want to be slightly unrealistic, you can mitigate the hassles of eating and paying taxes with an offline system. Using the sample system below, simply have the character forage more initially (or pay more for food in town, if he is not foraging) based on a "Hunger" variable, in much the same way you allow him to play catch-up with sleep. Whatever tax formula you wish to apply can also be resolved on login, the character paying a tax based on the goods in his possession over time. In order to combat the phenomenon of playrs stripping naked justbefore logging out to avoid taxes, it may be necessary to apply a "TaxBase" variable that tracks the player's possessions at intervals while he is online, scaling up the variable based on what the character was holding at the time of tracking. Taxes are then paid on the next login, based on the TaxBase accrued while online, plus a value based on how long the player was logged out and what he owned on logout.
Sample Offline Activity System
The character has a popup menu he can access via the GUI, listing
the various offline activities he could possibly perform. You need
to list as many as possible, since a character might disconnect anywhere
by accident, and you don't wantto require him to tailor 50 different lists
based on all the places he might log out. A simple offline activity
list might look like this:
Activity | Prerequisites | Possible Benefits |
Heal | Being Wounded (default priority 1) | Damage is healed based on character's medical skill, increased if he logs out near an appropriate medical facility |
Forage | Hunger (wilderness default priority 2) | In town, character defrays his offline cost of living by scrounging for food, with possible loss to social standing due to trash-rooting. In the wilderness, player hunts/fishes/traps/whatever for as long as he needs to in order to feed himself. Possible small increase to appropriate skills and controlling attributes. |
Train (skill) | n/a | Character has the possibility of gaining a small amount of the chosen skill and controlling attributes. Efficiency increases if he proximity to a suitable training facility that he has access to. |
Voluntary Community Service | Criminal Points below the threshold of possible instant arrest | Reduction of criminal points, possible loss of social standing. |
Court-Sanctioned Community Service | Being imprisoned when the ciminal point total on release would make instant arrest possible | Reduction of criminal points to just below the instant arrest threshold, loss of social standing. This activity precludes logging in until completed. |
Mundane Job (description) | Job skills, being in town | Offline tax mitigation, possible small increase to job skills and controlling attributes. |
Apprentice (description) | Artisan skills, proximity to an NPC artisan with room for an apprentice | Limited offline tax mitigation, defraying cost of living, possible small increase to job skills and controlling attributes. |
Study (knowledge skill) | Proximity to an appropriate library facility or school, or possession of study materials | Possible increase to skills and controlling attributes. May incur additional fees or tuition if the knowledge type is especially arcane or otherwise valuable and being studied at a facility. |
Social Climbing | Being in town | Possible increase to social standing. |
Repair | Damaged equipment in inventory, appropriate skills and tools | Repair of damaged equipment, possible increases to repair skills and controlling attributes. |
Default settings for this selection screen might be Heal, Forage, Mundane Job (Laborer). The character would, on logout, sleep for an appropriate amount of time, then heal if he is wounded, then forage for food until he was no longer hungry, then (if he was in town) work as a laborer to mitigate his taxes, possibly getting a little bit of physique in the process. If he was out of town, the third possibility is gone, and so all he does is sleep, heal, and feed himself.
The player may wish to modify his selections. For instance, say the player wants to become a respected soldier, aspiring to become a Field Marshal or such, and has enough money to be able to pay taxes. He might then modify his list to read Heal, Repair, Train (weapon), Social Climbing. If he was in town, he would sleep, heal if wounded on logout, then repair any damaged gear, then split his time between training at the barracks and hobnobbing with the nobility. He must be careful to not do this too long, lest he become impoverished. If he was outside of town, Forage would be a default priority for him since he's out of range of markets, and so he would Heal, Forage, Repair, and Train (weapon) on his own. Social climbing is not possible for him in this situation.
Note that there is no offline option to harvest resources or craft. This might seem strange, considering that realistic mining/lumberjacking/what have you is a slow and boring process that might be better performed offline. However, if such activities are allowed, one has to take special care to get around the phenomenon of "become a millionaire in your sleep," akin to UO macro-mining all night. The fact of the matter is that raw materials harvesting is an extremely hard and thankless job, especially preindustrially, and it takes a very long time to get iron out of the ground, UO's mining system notwithstanding.
A generous system might allow for a small amount of iron to be given to a player who chooses Mundane Job (Mining), but most of what the players digs up is going to go to his employer. Likewise, a player who chooses Mundane Job (Blacksmith) might be able to select something he could have created when he logs back in, based on the amount of time he was logged out. More generous allowances might be made for players working in their own shops. Likewise, a lumberjack operating outside of town, like a criminal or a hermit building a cabin, might also get some leeway, but the guy who wants to harvest 2000 cords of wood for making bows to sell should not be allowed this abuse. Simply have another offline activity selection called "Construction" or such to allow for this eventuality.
"Twitch" is a generic term representing the importance of manual reflexes to play a particular game. An example of twitch is aiming your gun in a first person shooter to hit a target. Another might be timing a jump to get onto a moving platform in a Mario type console game. Still another example would be the ability to quickly and efficiently coordinate troop movements and orders in a micromanaged Starcraft battle. All twitch play involves hand-eye coordination, fast decision making, interface control, and after a while, automatic reflexes burned in by hours and days of play.
Many games rely on twitch to play well. First person shooters are primarily, if not completely, twitch games. Almost all of the early arcade and console games (Pac Man, Defender, Galaga, Sinistar, etc.), not to mention pinball, are twitch based. As games evolved and a larger, maybe older, market was sought, twitch became less of a factor, or a total non-factor. Games where twicth doesn't matter are typically turn-based games like Solitaire, Myst, turn-based strategy, etc.
The modern computer-based RPG is generally a combination of the two. RPG's that are turn based are obviously complete non-twitch games. However, turn-based play is impossible in a modern MMORPG (the Realm's combat system notwithstanding: it is really a graphically-enhanced MUD). It's only barely tolerable to wait for others to take actions in a turn-based game involving as few as 3 people; in a playing arena with 2000 simultaneous users, it would be insane. It would stand to reason, then, that in such a realtime environment twitch would be an important part of player skill. However, in MMORPG design and player attitude, there is a decided distaste for twitch play, and this is reflected in the game engine.
The distaste for twitch play may stem from a prejudice on the part of RPG nazis who feel that the CRPG is somehow above the FPS, and thus should be above the FPS's reliance on twitch. There is some justification for lowering the importance of twitch in a progressive game that incorporates character building; after all, twitch depends on the abilities of the player, not the experience and design of the character. Nobody wants their level 10 character trounced by a level 1 character whose player can click the mouse faster. As a result, the importance of twitch has been vastly reduced (though not completely eliminated) in the play of the modern MMORPG, and as games "evolve," new mechanisms may be introduced to further lower the impact of good twitch play, such as UO's inclusion of Last Target into the client, eliminating the need for players to manually select a fast-moving target for spellcasting (or use a third party program to do it for them). The need for Last Target in UO was somewhat related to the awkwardness of its interface, however, and cannot be dismissed entirely as a cheap way of "making the game easy."
However, trying to do away with the importance of twitchy character control is a mistake when carried too far. In the early days of Asheron's Call (say up through about month 6 or so of final), character control was an important part of being a good player. Characters who were weaker "on paper" than the guy next to them could do extremely well in difficult situations if their control was good. High-powered characters whose players just let them sit still and auto-attack were more likely to meet an ignominious death. Because Asheron's Call has balance issues and no cap on player power potential, the importance of twitch went away. No amount of eye-hand coordination can compensate for the levels of raw power and invulnerability that players and monsters alike achieved. The long-term success of a character today in AC is determined almost entirely on the character's initial design and how much experience he has. The role of character control is limited to only the closest contests of power, maybe within a slightly wider range in the realm of PvP, but twinking and a good macro count for far more now than a player's actual ability to react to his environment.
Increasing the importance of twitch play in the MMORPG allows some reward for the player who is actually good at playing the game in this manner, and helps to differentiate otherwise cookie-cutter clones from each other. This is not to say that twitch should be overwhelmingly important next to character development: nobody expects a total novice character to be able to whip an enemy way over his head just because he's got good reaction time and makes quick decisions. However, in combination with limiting player power, it can make all the difference for a truly excellent player at the top of the game's power curve, as opposed to someone who got there without mastering the interface.
Twitch also helps a game's longevity. As long as twicth and automatic reaction time are important, there is always room for improvement as a player. One can powerlevel forever and read endless messae board posts about what theoretical combinations and tactics work well, but if the ability to execute these tactics is a function of the player's ability, there is always something to work for.
A common trend on many small-scale games, and on private server games, is mandated roleplaying. This is a horrible horrible idea, especially in a wide area network environment. It's a direct backlash of the "serious roleplayer" community against "kewld00dz," a term that expands in meaning for every player to encompass "people who don't represent their characters the way I think they should." This arrogance is then handed down as law by the game administrator, who must then waste time monitoring the roleplaying or lack of same. Pretty soon, he manages to convince some like-minded RP nazis to do this for him, and before long the entire game is filled with people actively policing each others' roleplaying, judging everyone around them against a set of standards that none of them can actually agree on, and the game message board starts filling with lame accusations and arguments about "who's not roleplaying properly." To me, this is the first indicator that I should be looking for another game.
My girlfriend is currently fond of a Sphere shard with this sort of roleplaying-mandate attitude, and I can't stand it. Much of the apparent time spent on the shrd is dedicating to policing roleplaying, while there are some glaring flaws in their default Sphere .52/Linux scripts that have obviously never been addressed. There are a number of guidelines on their page describing how you must be in character all the time, which extends to such absurd lengths as to say that it's wrong to just log out in front of someone, or to go afk without first making your excuses and goodbyes, then finding a remote area, then logging. What the hell is that? If someone in a pen and paper game said, "Damn, hang on a sec, pizza guy's here," I wouldn't accuse him of being a bad roleplayer for it. Needless to say, this shard's message board (the OOC board, of course) is filled with ridiculous back and forth banter about whether person X is roleplaying, or whether he should be penalized, because he did something that offends the tender sensibilities of the posting RP cop. It's funny to note that the reaction of the "true roleplayer" in these situations is to immediately look at a non-roleplaying solution, i.e. GM intervention or banning.
I've already made this argument in a little-read old UO rant, which deals with a situation involving high-handed RP nazis on the Catskills shard. The gist of it is this: you cannot mandate how people choose to represent their characters, you can only encourage them to do it in a certain way. People do not subscribe so they can take acting classes from a bunch of geeks who suck at acting themselves, they do it to play the game. The perceived problem is that the "bad roleplayer" is ruining the flavor of the game. The real problem is that the whiner can't bear the thought that other people might not envision the play world in exactly the same way that they do, and they can't deal with it. From a player standpoint, it's really easy to deal with. Simply have your character accept that people are different sometimes, although this may be outside the scope of possibility for the player in real life. If someone is spamming net talk around, just treat them like anyone in the real world who mouths off uncontrollably and unintelligibly: as an insane person.
This seems to be largely an issue for the players of a game, rather
than the developers, but the two are subtly linked. Much of the behavior
that breaks fiction on the players' part is due to shortcomings of the
system. If your game rewards players for macroing in a mana pool
or hiring an NPC to spar with for a week straight, they will do it.
If the mechanics of your game are visibly numerical, people will talk about
their abilities in terms of numerical scores. If there is a weapon
imbalnce that makes a billy club the most powerful weapon in the game,
everyone will carry a billy club regardless of its unrealism. Certainly
you cannot eliminate these sorts of references to game mechanics by players,
but you can minimize their fiction-breaking potential through design.
In this case, you can control these impacts by reducing the appeal of macroing,
hiding the numbers, and careful balance.
A game should never dictate to a player how he should approach the game,
but it can certainly encourage certain behavior.