Classic versus learning: a computerized RPG system

[contracycle]

Please don't misquote me.  I said that your model frustrated INTELLIGENT decisions, not that it imposed stupid ones.  It will be very hard to calculate risk.  It will be very hard to estimate whether risk outweighs reward.  It will reduce confidence, encourage caution, and play will be more tentative than if players had a clear understanding of their limits.

I fail to see how creating a visual approximation of skill makes gaming completely based on gambling.

I cannot do calculations based on visual representations.

The skill level serves to show how far you have advanced in a given skill, and thus allows you to plan (a word I hesitate to use, since I don't intend people to think for hours on end before embarking on a quest or challenge) accordingly.

LOL.  Then they deserve to get killed, don't they?

Are you serious?  If you want to know what specific skills will be in the game, then you're out of luck; I'm still planning out how the gameplay system will work (the whole purpose of this topic).

No, what human skills.  It's not odds-guessing becuase we are not allowed to see the odds.  It's not risk-vs-reward becuase we can't properly assess the risk.  It's not expertise with the system, becuase it is concealed.  And its probably not guts because these limits tend to produce caution.

I don't play poker - its too random.  It is unsatisfying as a game; I do not feel my actions have much impact on the course of events.

 My point was that although the GNS theory is useful to a certain extent to shape gameplay in order to cater to the audience, when the audience has no idea that GNS even exists and plays games because they find them fun making all gameplay elements strictly in line with gamist or simulationist play is pointless.

Thats absurd I'm afraid.  Thats like saying that people who are afraid of flying cause planes to crash.  What the person subjecively feels is irrelevant.  Do you think the only people who ever appreciate a decent story are those who hold masters degrees in literary criticism?  Its nonsense - just becuase litcrit exists does not mean that only they appreciate a good story.

I doubt anyone who plays the final game will start it up, notice that numbers are absent, and say, "I will not play this game because I am a gamist and this does not cater to hard-core gamists because it hides its numbers!"

Oh I doubt that too.  But some people will say "this game is stupid, it doesn't let you do anything" and power down.

[George the Flea]

Thank you, thank you, thank you for your post M.J. Young.  I really appreciate your description of the elements, simplified for space and all.  With your comments in mind, I will try to outline exactly what I am thinking about this system for a CRPG.

I am of course aiming to create something for a crowd that is essentially gamist.  However, with that in mind I want to create a game that will meld the different styles of gameplay into something enjoyable to the middle-of-the-road RPG player who enjoys achieving objectives, participating in an interesting story line, and getting to experience an alternate world.

Basically the crowd I'm aiming for is me and all of the people I know who play CRPGs (admittedly, a small sample).  From what I've observed, this is the majority of CRPG players.  Competing and achieving an objective and accolades is much more easy to reach in multiplayer games, from first person shooters to great games like Myth.  I think that most people who would be the hard core gamists in the tabletop RPG world are probably doing something else on computers.

Likewise with simulationism, at least the more concentrated varieties.  CRPG's often do have a really great world to explore, but they are too driven by story or objective oriented play to really please a simulationist who doesn't really like the other two types of gameplay.

And as you said, it's just about impossible to achieve decent narrativism in a computer game, especially for a person like me who has not dealt much with AI.

So I don't think that the crowd playing CRPG's is a distinct one, and because of the highly structured way that CRPG's are usually created I don't know if people have the liberty of just sloughing off what they don't like.  Logically, if someone only really finds gamism fun and will have nothing to do with simulationism, they will probably not find CRPG's as fun and won't play them.

Of course there's exceptions to this rule (particularly when games which allow more player manipulation and interaction such as Neverwinter Nights are the subject), but I think that most people playing single player CRPG's are mix and matchers when it comes to what they find fun.  (And I certainly am, which admittedly biases my viewpoint.)

What I am going for then is first off immersion -- this includes attention to detail, as realistic gameplay system as I can code, and a world that gets the player's attention and encourages them to interact with it rather than play God.  True narrativism is beyond my reach, but I want a system of quests which allow the player to shape the final outcome of the game and with storylines that engage the player (again, that are immersive).  I want how a player decides to play to affect his character, and for the choices that the player makes matter to how the character best interacts with problems and the world in general.  On the other hand, the character should be mutable to a point to allow the players to do more than just a single style.

So here's where I got into the whole debate.  I say I want to hide the numbers (an immersion issue).  Other people say that ditches the gamists.  Perhaps the main misunderstanding is that I don't really believe that the people playing CRPG's are wholey gamists or simulationists or anything else.  I think they like the mixed experience that CRPG's can offer, but I also think that past games have had serious design issues with catering to this mixed interest.

So that's why I'm asking: do you think this system that I have imagined will work?

To be honest, my goal is to create a game that people don't feel the need to toss out elements in.  People who enjoy simulationism will hopefully enjoy the fact that shaping their character is based on concepts of how people actually learn instead of an arbitrary experience system (a note for argumentative people: I'm not saying the system won't be arbitrary, just that I'm hoping to get it less arbitrary in a good way).  People who lean a little more toward gamism will hopefully enjoy the fact that you can approach quests from different angles and by making different choices about how to do that approach can succeed at varying amounts at the game.

Does that make sense?  Questions, comments, and critiques are welcomed.  I really want to design a system that works, and constructive input is good.

A side note: I don't really consider gamism, simulationism, and narrativism to be useful as discrete categories.  I think they are much more useful to describe as ideals or extremes of a continuum of probable reasons why people decide to play role playing games.  For instance, some people tend to favor gamist elements, but may also have fun if simulationist elements are present (or perhaps need simulationism present to really enjoy the gamist bits).  For someone to say "I'm a gamist" is limiting and probably false.  It's like mental illnesses: some people are obsessive-compulsive and it defines who they are, but far more people have obsessive-compulsive tendencies or behaviors but aren't actually diagnosable.  (Apologies for the psych analogy; just came off a psych class.)  Not a perfect analogy, but the same basic problem of assuming things are categories instead of continuums.

Thanks again for your post, M.J. Young.  A good explanation of the GNS ideas and reasons for them was very much needed.

[Callan S.]

For example, there is nothing about gambling that makes it not gamist, and the use of strategy does not necessarily mean that play is gamist. Gamist merely means that your primary motivation is proving how good you are at this. Whether you prove that by carefully considered strategies or by intuitive assessment of the risks doesn't change the fact that you're in it for the glory of success.

This is part of the reason I stopped, because I could make a whole thread on it. But I'll give it a quick one shot here, which might be good for George or others too.

Okay, now imagine I'm sitting with my friend, not playing anything, and he picks up a dice and declares "If I roll a six, I win!"

"Ah, WTF? You mean you stand to loose nothing and stand to win...nothing in particular either" Yawn! He rolls a six. "YAWN!"

Okay, next my friend goes to the casino and bets $100 on the roll of a D6.

"MAN, your ballsy!", I say. He gets a six "Ah you lucky f***! Damn, your good!". I admire the mans GUTS!

Gamble is incredibly unlikely to be gamist, unless the resource laid down has been earned. Earned through strategy or even just time used on it rather than anything else (which earns it as well).

It's not about gambling, its about the GUTS to gamble...who needs guts to gamble something they didn't earn/something they wont lament the loss of?


Now, imagine my friend says he's going to go to the cave with the skeleton.

I ask him, what are your odds? He tells me he doesn't know, he's just going to go there to explore what happens. Indeed, he has no way of knowing except by exploring.

Oh yeah, fair enough, I say. I'm interested in finding out what will happen with the skeleton when he goes there. Indeed, I may be interested in going there myself to explore personally. I mean, how powerful is a skeleton...will I die straight away...or after awhile. How fast is he? Will I be able to get away? What are skeletons like in this world? I'm very intrigued.

Simulationism right there. Not that the knowledge you learn can't lead to gamism, but at that point its sim as far as I know sim to be. Because it's "I want to know" rather than "I want to use what I know to win".

The more you hide stuff, the more your enjoyment can't come from using what you know to win...you have to learn first. If you keep everything hiden most of the time, you keep people in this learning phase most of the time. People will either have to throw away the game in disgust or adapt to the pleasure of learning/exploring it suggests.

I think many people will adapt to and enjoy that rather than traditional video game gamism. But as I said, a mix can easily have parts that clash, and I wasn't skilled enough to both explain this and go into that as well.

PS: I completely disagree on CRPG narrativism needing AI or such as if you simply must have consequences from nar for it to be nar. I don't agree and I even think it's just a desire for sim after nar.

George:

A side note: I don't really consider gamism, simulationism, and narrativism to be useful as discrete categories.

Try thinking of the primary colors, red, green and blue. Not many colors you will see are exactly one of them, they are a mix. None the less, they are all made of these primary colors. A plethora of colors doesn't make this less true, nor does a plethora of game styles make GNS any less as a category mechanism.

[George the Flea]

Contracycle:

I misquoted you?  You said "[hiding stat numbers is bad] Because it denies intelligent decisions."  If a decision isn't intelligent, then what is it?  Admittedly, it's not necessarily stupid, but it's probably bad.  I reserve the right to draw conclusions from what you say and put them in mildly offensive language, since I would hope that you would realize that when your sole statement is a single line long without any support for the reasoning behind it that people are going to misunderstand you.

And just to clear things up I don't want people to be able to calculate down to the minutest detail the risks involved.  They know what their character has done in the past; they know approximately how good at a skill the character is.  They will hopefully have a strategy in mind to solve the upcoming problem, and if things go bad then they'll have to think on their feet.

I cannot do calculations based on visual representations.

Thank you for completely ignoring my point about past experience.  Since I think it's important, here's a question for you:

If you are approaching a green light and it suddenly turns yellow, do you pull over to the side of the road, calculate out how fast your car can move versus how long the light has until it changes, or do you judge the distance from past experience with how cars and yellow lights behave and slow down or speed up accordingly?

You also appear to have ignored my suggestion that your read the other posts in this topic.  I previously stated that one of the things I didn't like about Baldur's Gate was that whenever I leveled up I had to sit there and try to maximize numerical values.  From what you've said, I imagine you would like this.  Very well, we like different types of games.  Unless you are able to give a good explanation why these numbers which break the immersion of gameplay are so mighty important beyond the fact that what we find fun is different, I'm not going to care.  Given the choice between leaving the numbers in to satisfy a hypothetical group of people represented by you and taking the numbers out to satisfy the theories of what will be fun for myself and my friends, I'll go with myself every time.  What can I say?  I'm egotistical.

And to answer your comment quoted above: I'm sorry for you.  If you can't strategize based on how you think the world works instead of on knowing exactly how the world works, then I'm plain baffled how you get through everyday life without going nuts.

LOL.  Then they deserve to get killed, don't they?

Please.  I'll give another example:

You walk out the door of your home and find a man with a very large sword standing a short ways in front of you.  You notice that lying on the ground next to you is a sling-shot and rocks and on the other side is a medium sized sword.  For the purposes of this example, in your childhood you used to play with slingshots, and you've never touched a sword.  The man tells you he is going to kill you unless you kill him and begins moving toward you.  Do you consult a magically appearing sheet that lists your exact skill with a sling-shot versus the probability of evading or blocking him long enough to tire him by using the sword?  No.  You quickly figure out your approximate skill level, make a quick decision, and go with it.  And maybe that decision is to run like hell because you were a champion long distance runner in high school.  In any case, you don't stand there thinking and get diced into very small pieces in short order.

Or maybe I've taken second person perspective too far.  From all you've intimated, you would prefer to stand there calculating with numbers you couldn't possibly know and the dude with the sword would just patiently wait for you to finish.

Again, we find different things fun is what this comes down to.  But I've used the useless "f" word; better shoot me.

No, what human skills.  It's not odds-guessing becuase we are not allowed to see the odds.  It's not risk-vs-reward becuase we can't properly assess the risk.  It's not expertise with the system, becuase it is concealed.  And its probably not guts because these limits tend to produce caution.

Have you gotten the chance to play Half-Life 2?  If not, the physics in that game are awesome; when you shoot things (like tables, windows, random crap lying around) they react like pretty close to how they would in real life (or at least closer than other games have come so far).  The physics system really gets you into the game.  It's way fun because stuff can be so lifelike (among other reasons).

In an ideal world, the character stats system that I want to create is to my CRPG, as the physics are to Half-Life 2.

But wait, that doesn't have much to do with any of the skills you mentioned.  Funny how things work sometimes, isn't it?

And as for "its probably not guts because these limits tend to produce caution," what example goes with that?  What game has shown that when exact stats are hidden players are more cautious?  I'm curious to know your reason for such a massively blanket statement.

I don't play poker - its too random.  It is unsatisfying as a game; I do not feel my actions have much impact on the course of events.

Well, there you go.  Some people consistently make huge sums of money at playing poker which would imply that there is some sort of skill involved.  I suspect they would say that their actions have a big impact on the course of events.  Just because you don't have those skills doesn't mean they don't exist.

On a barely related note, I never play poker either.  The few times I've tried I've uber-sucked, and I don't have enough fun playing to bother with trying to get better.  In case you're curious.

What the person subjecively feels is irrelevant.  Do you think the only people who ever appreciate a decent story are those who hold masters degrees in literary criticism?  Its nonsense - just becuase litcrit exists does not mean that only they appreciate a good story.

You just said that what people subjectively feel is irrelevant.  Unless I'm badly mistaken, GNS is a theory about why people enjoy games created in order to better create games people will like.  Seems like subjective feeling has a lot to do with that.  In fact, GNS is trying to help people express their subjective feelings: "My goal in this [article] is to provide vocabulary and perspective that enable people to articulate what they want and like out of the activity [of role playing]."  (From here.)

I was saying that people who don't know the theory of GNS will be less critical of mixed gameplay elements.  I think that one of the biggest problems with GNS is that it encourages the people who use it to categorize the terms gamism/simulationism/narrativism into discrete realms.  A gamer who doesn't speak the talk is less likely to be critical of mixed methods, and thus more likely to enjoy gameplay elements they might have otherwise discounted out of hand.

It's almost like a literary critic despising a national bestseller because the artist has trampeled over the rules of literature.  But it's still a national bestseller; obviously someone likes it, perhaps because they don't have a lit degree.

But some people will say "this game is stupid, it doesn't let you do anything" and power down.

Those people will obviously be unable to appreciate possible divergences from classic gameplay, then.  So presumably they like binary narrativism, immersion destroying number systems, and quests that have exactly one way to them, and that way is combat.  I guess you can't please them all.

And I don't intend to.

[George the Flea]

Hey Noon,

I see what you mean about gambling.  I probably used that concept wrong.  I figure the player knows approximately what the character can do from past experience.  Really what the stat indicator is for is to show how far advanced a character has gone in a particularly skill.  If the character is maxed out in swordsplay and tries to kill the dragon with his sword but dies horribly, then that's probably not the best strategy to use.

Which leads back to the issue of immersion, which is really a sim issue at heart.  So maybe I am struggling to find a way to simulation-ize a category of games that has been predominately gamist.  I've waffled so often between the terms because I've been trying to understand them that I'm not even sure.

I think many people will adapt to and enjoy that rather than traditional video game gamism.

My ardent hope.

But as I said, a mix can easily have parts that clash, and I wasn't skilled enough to both explain this and go into that as well.

I see.  My bad.  I sincerely hope that my parts won't clash too bad.  Are there any that stand out to you right now as desperately needing revision?  If you think you've already answered this in a previous post please let me know.  This discussion has gone on long enough (and I've discussed it outside of the forum enough) that I'm losing track of what's been said.

PS: I completely disagree on CRPG narrativism needing AI or such as if you simply must have consequences from nar for it to be nar. I don't agree and I even think it's just a desire for sim after nar.

I see your point.  You just are defining narrativism differently than M.J. Young.  Fine by me.  This game is not really focused on narrativism by either definition, or I'd try to work out a better definition for myself.  Most huge dilemma decisions have to have some sort of outcome in order for the system to maintain credibility.  But I understand that you're saying that simply making the decision is narrativism.  It's just bad for game flow to have fairly open ended responses to tought decisions go unnaccounted for, and it's real hard to adequately account for all the things that might happen.

Try thinking of the primary colors, red, green and blue. Not many colors you will see are exactly one of them, they are a mix. None the less, they are all made of these primary colors. A plethora of colors doesn't make this less true, nor does a plethora of game styles make GNS any less as a category mechanism.

Interesting analogy; I'll try to explain what I mean better.  I believe there does exist a group of people who have the most fun in games that are exclusively gamist.  However, people's preferences are diverse, and even an individual can enjoy varying degrees of gameplay styles.  By classifying GNS as discrete categories theory runs the risk of being too divorced from reality.  I think it is much more useful to describe GNS as related to a pseudo-continuum, because it introduces a theoretical that is more capable for taking diversity into account.  I mean, if all games only supported one different GNS bit each (one game totally gamist, another totally sim, etc.) -- and this is a direction that assuming they are discrete categories pushes for -- then many, many gamers will be left out in the cold because they prefer varying aspects of the three at different times.

To use your analogy, it's the difference between having a gradient (from strong blue into various shades of green and finally into full yellow) as opposed to just mixing the discrete colors (which gets you a bunch of blue and yellow spots on a page, intermingled but not really representing the other colors).

Even better, what I picture is like this color wheel:



I would talk more about this, but I've got to get to bed.  I've been up too late, and I'm losing the ability to think straight.  If you want I'll try to expand on this idea, but it might also be better as another thread since it's not directly related to a CRPG game system.  :-)

[contracycle]

I misquoted you?  You said "[hiding stat numbers is bad] Because it denies intelligent decisions."  If a decision isn't intelligent, then what is it?  Admittedly, it's not necessarily stupid, but it's probably bad.  I reserve the right to draw conclusions from what you say and put them in mildly offensive language, since I would hope that you would realize that when your sole statement is a single line long without any support for the reasoning behind it that people are going to misunderstand you.

But in so doing you have severely distorted the point that I was advancing, and mishcaracterised it.  That is unnecessary.  Many investigations into work-place stress, for example, discuss the problems associated with being responsible for things over which you have no power.  It is stressful to be obliged to act or to decide and to not fully appreciate the scope of the decision or to not be aqble to implement your own strategy.

Reinterpreting this to imply stupid decisions grossly misrepresents what I said.  Decisions can be frustrating becuase there is nothing to work with - that does not imply stupidity or incompetence.

And just to clear things up I don't want people to be able to calculate down to the minutest detail the risks involved.  They know what their character has done in the past; they know approximately how good at a skill the character is.  They will hopefully have a strategy in mind to solve the upcoming problem, and if things go bad then they'll have to think on their feet.

Buit if they don;t know what there rating is, and they don;t know the ratings of the opposition, then their past experience contributes very little becuase there is so little information with which to generalise to the present situation.

If you are approaching a green light and it suddenly turns yellow, do you pull over to the side of the road, calculate out how fast your car can move versus how long the light has until it changes, or do you judge the distance from past experience with how cars and yellow lights behave and slow down or speed up accordingly?

Approx stopping distance at 30mph is 23-odd meters.
Approx stopping distance at 60mph is approx 73 meters

Road safety campaigns have sometyimes made a big deal out of these real numbers precisely because intuitive judgements about them are unreliable.  Numbers serve as a reality check for what you "feel" in your water.

You also appear to have ignored my suggestion that your read the other posts in this topic.  I previously stated that one of the things I didn't like about Baldur's Gate was that whenever I leveled up I had to sit there and try to maximize numerical values.  From what you've said, I imagine you would like this.

Yes and no.  Certainly I take care not to waste my points in these games, and it is certainly the case that I seek the biggest bang for my buck.  But this is in no small part something that contributes to the sense of the game, IME, because it means I am actually interacting with the games reality.

As a qualifier to that I will also say that I find such systems sub-optimal in adventure games, whereas a game like Pharoah consists almost entirely of min-maxing, and I love it to bits.

And to answer your comment quoted above: I'm sorry for you.  If you can't strategize based on how you think the world works instead of on knowing exactly how the world works, then I'm plain baffled how you get through everyday life without going nuts.

By studying physics and politics.

Do you consult a magically appearing sheet that lists your exact skill with a sling-shot versus the probability of evading or blocking him long enough to tire him by using the sword?  No.  You quickly figure out your approximate skill level, make a quick decision, and go with it.  And maybe that decision is to run like hell because you were a champion long distance runner in high school.  In any case, you don't stand there thinking and get diced into very small pieces in short order.

You're missing the point - my argument is that without some frame of reference like my childhood experiences, I have no idea whether the sling is a realistic option whatsoever.  That is the virtue that numbers provide - they stand as a consistent, non-subjective assesment of capability.  At no point have I said that it is necessary to carry out an action that includes explicit numbers, but rather that the numbers should be findable, visible, somewhere.

Heres an interesting ecample of what I mean from Counter-Strike.  When I started playing, it was hard to get feedback on what I was achieveing because I would be mercilessly gunned down very quickly.  Then I found a server that provided stats, showing when I scored a hit and on whom.  And what I discovered from this was that I was hitting targets without knowing it, especially at range - I learned that my actual accuracy was better than my perceived accuracy.  And that improved my confidence, which improved my willingness to risk the time to take careful aim, which improved my hit rate.

At no point during thenplay of this game do I think in terms of numbers.  But I do know how the numbers work, and roughly know how much damage each weapon does, and how damage is calculated on the hit boxes.  And this degree of understanding of the game, mastery of it, makes me a better and more confident player.

Have you gotten the chance to play Half-Life 2?

Funny you should ask...

But wait, that doesn't have much to do with any of the skills you mentioned.  Funny how things work sometimes, isn't it?

Actually it does.  For example I know I have to shoot a Combine soldier at least 3 times with that piddly glock, or once in the head.

And as for "its probably not guts because these limits tend to produce caution," what example goes with that?  What game has shown that when exact stats are hidden players are more cautious?  I'm curious to know your reason for such a massively blanket statement.

" Therefore I say: ?

One who knows the enemy and knows himself will not be in danger in a hundred battles.

One who does not know the enemy but knows himself will sometimes win, sometimes lose.

One who does not know the enemy and does not know himself will be in danger in every battle."
- Sun Tzu

You just said that what people subjectively feel is irrelevant.  Unless I'm badly mistaken, GNS is a theory about why people enjoy games created in order to better create games people will like.  Seems like subjective feeling has a lot to do with that.  In fact, GNS is trying to help people express their subjective feelings: "My goal in this [article] is to provide vocabulary and perspective that enable people to articulate what they want and like out of the activity [of role playing]."  (From here.)

Of course.  That is, GNS claims to describe an objectively existing phenomenon.  So regardless of whether any given player or person has heard of GNS, if GNS is a true description of the objective world then they will be playing in one of the GNS modes anyway.  Whether or not they know this is irrelevant.  What the development of a theiry that discusses this phenomenon adds to the situation is ther ability to discuss it clearly.

I was saying that people who don't know the theory of GNS will be less critical of mixed gameplay elements.

OK, I think this is mistaken.  I think the problems will be there, its just the you and the user will have no vocabulary with which to discuss your problems.

What I am trying to do here is point out that playing for the game, for the challenge, is not anathema to other goals such as immersion, and is not inherently bad play.  While your primary interest may be in immersion, I would argue that at a certain point concealing stats from players may even undercut that immersion.

It's almost like a literary critic despising a national bestseller because the artist has trampeled over the rules of literature.  But it's still a national bestseller; obviously someone likes it, perhaps because they don't have a lit degree.

Shrug.  Ad populum fallacy.

Those people will obviously be unable to appreciate possible divergences from classic gameplay, then.  So presumably they like binary narrativism, immersion destroying number systems, and quests that have exactly one way to them, and that way is combat.  I guess you can't please them all.

Well fine - I didn't claim that you should.  I am trying to warn you off pigeonholing play that makes purposeful use of numbers as the same as play that is anti-immersionist.  But at this point this seems something of an article of faith for you.  I think your design will suffer for such a knee-jerk rejection of all numbers instead of using the numbers to reinforce the imaginative space.

[Callan S.]

Hey Noon,

I see what you mean about gambling.  I probably used that concept wrong.  I figure the player knows approximately what the character can do from past experience.  

But that's the actual trick of it. It's what the player can draw from past experience, rather than what he can draw from a screen of numbers. By having to draw on past experience, your rewarding them to go out and learn more (since this helps them). Your rewarding them to explore. This guides play more toward simulationism.

That's why I recommended the essays...I think (and I know this sounds like labeling) you believe your mostly sim style play prefernce to be gamism. Which isn't actually a problem, doesn't matter at all, unless you start using gamist mechanisms from other games to support the direction you want the game to go in, because you think they fit your style. Indeed, that link you gave to that ranting guy, there was one thing he was very right on...people will copy the work of previous people, without considering if it actually serves their needs. I mean, they'll have stats like strength because the last game did...even if it actually gets in the way of their goal.

That's why I suggested the exploration score thing before as an alternative. Increasing stats and skills is a heavy part of the gamist market. If you design it one way, but it has all the hallmarks of working another way, people are just going to think you stuffed up the design. They wont know how to play your game because this isn't enough to shape play in the direction you want. But I think most people will look at the skill and expect that enjoyment comes from increasing it...and it dropping will screw their enjoyment.

On mixes of play styles: I honestly think your priority is sim. IMO, your not into pure sim, but it is primary to you. And it makes it hella a lot easier for me if I concentrate on that for awhile, then talk about adding other stuff on. I'm not trying to force you into sim by talking this way, I'm just trying make things simple to avoid giving myself a migrane! :)

Which leads back to the issue of immersion, which is really a sim issue at heart.  So maybe I am struggling to find a way to simulation-ize a category of games that has been predominately gamist.  I've waffled so often between the terms because I've been trying to understand them that I'm not even sure.

Have you sat down and written out what immerses you? I've found things like world factors interacting is good. A video game example is in GTA 5, where you finally got to see cops chasing other criminals. In addition, if you bumped peoples cars, they'd get out and pull you out of your car in a road rage, to attack you.

But the gold bit? When a cop car slams a civie car, and as the cop is trying to drive off to continue pursuit, the civie (now with shovel) comes up and pulls him out of his car!

The way they interact can cause whole mini stories to happen right before your life...wow, this world doesn't revolve around me in order for a story to happen!

Try listing stuff that immerses you and forget about all the usual stuff you expect an RPG must have. Often, the usual stuff don't need to be there or don't need any focus.

But as I said, a mix can easily have parts that clash, and I wasn't skilled enough to both explain this and go into that as well.

I see.  My bad.  I sincerely hope that my parts won't clash too bad.  Are there any that stand out to you right now as desperately needing revision?  If you think you've already answered this in a previous post please let me know.  This discussion has gone on long enough (and I've discussed it outside of the forum enough) that I'm losing track of what's been said.

It's hard to answer. See, I really, really don't like the unpractised skills going down over time. See, skills scream gamist at me...and I shouldn't just loose something I worked hard for.

A gamist answer might be to record how high the skill got, and make it relatively easy to retrain back to that level. That way the smart gamist thinks "Oh, it's not my current level that matters...it's my maximum levels I should be proud of".

But that's a gamist answer, and I don't think it befits your goal because I think your primary sim. What you actually need is, if you keep this decaying skill thing, is to make it enjoyable in terms of exploring the world. I think currently you'll have a problem designing that, because you naturally enjoy such a thing because it makes the world more real. If you don't see a need for making decaying skills fun (because they already are to you), you can't help others find them fun.

PS: I completely disagree on CRPG narrativism needing AI or such as if you simply must have consequences from nar for it to be nar. I don't agree and I even think it's just a desire for sim after nar.

I see your point.  You just are defining narrativism differently than M.J. Young.  Fine by me.  This game is not really focused on narrativism by either definition, or I'd try to work out a better definition for myself.  Most huge dilemma decisions have to have some sort of outcome in order for the system to maintain credibility.  But I understand that you're saying that simply making the decision is narrativism.  It's just bad for game flow to have fairly open ended responses to tought decisions go unnaccounted for, and it's real hard to adequately account for all the things that might happen.

From reading your posts I don't think your nar focused. I just wanted to quickly note a protest to the notion. Because "It's just bad for game flow to have fairly open ended responses to tought decisions go unnaccounted for". You see, your focusing on results...still looking at it from a sim perspective. The fun doesn't come from watching the results, it primarily comes from making the decision itself. For nar, the entertainment is right there...not in what happens latter. Anything between tough descisions is just filler and not really of interest (as far as I know nar). Yeah, that actually means that if you kill your brother and he's not around to stop a border invasion...that's actually a boring bit. That's shocking from a sim perspective ("consequences are boring!? NEVER!"), but for nar focus, it's only exciting in that your anticipating some new, horrible question to answer (based on all that).

Ug. I've written too much. I just meant to write it for interests sake.

I mean, if all games only supported one different GNS bit each (one game totally gamist, another totally sim, etc.) -- and this is a direction that assuming they are discrete categories pushes for -- then many, many gamers will be left out in the cold because they prefer varying aspects of the three at different times.

Before I start another thread on it, doesn't the analogy extend for you? The primary colors are defined, but your not forced to exclusively work in red, green or blue because of this. The same goes for GNS...there is a color wheel of GNS mix, because no one is forced to work exclusivly in G, N, or S. But on that color wheel...can you name every single color permutation? That's why we talk about GNS in broad strokes (scuse the pun) here at the forge...we don't know the names of all the colors. We just talk about gamist with a bit of nar, or such like descriptions. There's no exclusion in GNS definition or primary color definition. Only further understanding of the basic elements.

[M. J. Young]

Gareth: I think you're wrong about the gambling angle. Taking the risk and winning against the odds is very much a gamist appeal. It is not the only gamist appeal, any more than tactical challenge is the only gamist appeal (puzzle solving presents at least one more). Somewhere there's a discussion on the subject of randomness as a dial in the game--some people want it high, some want it low. If it's low, you rely much more on tactics and relative strengths. (Amber Diceless comes to mind here.) If it's high, you do what you can to mitigate the risks (in fact, Risk is a good example of this). However, this is off topic for this thread, so if you want to pursue it, please start another, probably in GNS theory.

George: there are people who like different kinds of fun (I actually am the textbook case on that); but I think the idea of creative agenda being end points on a scale has been tried and found wanting. Such play tends to be more about what we call "drift", that is, players moving from one of the three to another--right now what I'm doing is exploring this world, and I really don't want to be interrupted by something else; now I'm fighting this monster, and you just watch me beat it, because I'm good at this. There's nothing wrong with drift, if 1) the players want it and 2) it moves with them rather than trying to force them to move with it. In group gaming, drift is difficult. Either the entire group must drift together (something Scattershot was attempting to facilitate) or the game must be designed to permit players complete independence from each other when they pursue their individual agendum shifts (which is what happens in Multiverser).

The fact that players like different aspects of play doesn't necessarily mean that they're drifting. It may well mean that they like different approaches to gamism. If they wanted straight combat challenge, they'd probably go for FPS play rather than RPG play. Why do they play an RPG? For some, the rest of the world provides color, something to entertain them between the challenges. For others, it creates context, a logical explanation for what they're doing. If you look at board games, it is usually the case that the board provides context that helps the game make sense. The context itself has no real meaning in terms of play; it just helps make the game more enjoyable.

I'm going to pursue this idea for a moment with a couple games.

In Monopoly, you walk around Atlantic City buying up properties, building hotels, charging rent to people who land on your properties, trying to drive everyone else bankrupt so that you're the only person who has money at the end of the game. I submit that neither the properties nor the hotels nor the money are mechanically essential to the game. You could have spaces, improvements, and points that all performed the same functions, investing points into acquiring and improving spaces and gaining points from the other players when they land on them. The properties, deeds, buildings, and money are all color which provides context within which we relate to the mechanics.

Similarly with Risk, we are trying to conquer the world. There's no reason why it has to be the world, or why those blocks must represent armies. You could be attempting to capture a board, similar to Othello/Reversi, with tokens indicating dice strength. The map and the armies give this color which help us relate to play.

Even First Person Shooters provide some flimsy excuse for what the player is doing and why. That's to give context and make the game interesting. You could eliminate all the graphics of enemy targets, replace them with moving bullseye targets, get rid of the feeling conveyed by hands on the gun, and turn it into a simple target shoot, without changing anything mechanically in the game. The feeling of being the guy with the gun gives it color and meaning, such that the player relates to what's happening better.

So with CRPGs like Final Fantasy, a lot of the exploration is what gives context to the challenges. Of course, part of what's happening is that there are several challenges interlaced--there are the minor challenges of facing adversaries and managing your resources as you go, and there's the underlying challenge of finding your way through the expected storyline to reach the end, at least. The one is a resource management challenge, the other a sort of puzzle challenge (figuring out what to do and where to go next). So some of that is not color, but part of the challenge at one or another level. Still, a lot of it is to give context to the question of why are these characters doing these silly things. It's because there's a sort of story that's being told, and that story brings them through these challenges, connecting them all together into a coherent chain that seems like one game instead of a bunch of little ones.

But this thread shouldn't be about persuading you of the theory here. It is useful if you grasp it, but not something about which to be overly worried.

If I understand your attributes idea aright, you're looking at using color bars instead of numbers to track character stats. I think that's clearly a workable strategy, and note in that connection that many Head-to-Head Fighter games use variations of this, probably because from the player perspective I don't have time to check a number but I can glance at a color bar to see roughly where I stand.

I'm interested in the idea, and had a thought about it. If you can reduce your essential stats to three, you might try running it with a single color bar. Let me suggest perhaps that you have a health score, a power score, and a speed score. If your health score is high, you can take more damage and keep going longer. If your power score is high, you can hit harder and do harder work. If your speed score is high, you hit more often and move faster. Associate each of these with a primary light in the RGB color spectrum used by vid screens--say red for power, blue for speed, green for health. Now what happens is that the three scores combine to give you a single colored dot. The higher the scores, the brighter the dot, until at maximum the dot is white. When all have reached zero, the dot is black. Thus you have a general idea of what your scores are by the brightness of the dot, but also by its color--dots that are low in health will turn more purple, while those low in speed will shift yellow. You can get an idea of the color changes with a good paint program, such as Paint Shop Pro, that lets you input the values (0 to 255) for red, blue, and green independently to render a color selection.

Such a system would give you a very quick general idea of your current value, but it would not give you specific numbers and it would not necessarily alert you to the "nearly zero" value in any stat.

Anyway, it's an idea. (And now I see your picture of a color wheel; that shows pretty well the spectrum as it might appear in play, except that there's no place for the all values approaching zero aspect.)

I should mention that when I shift more into gamist mode, I am very interested in numbers. I maintain that this is important to me precisely because I do not have the same feeling for how things really are that my character inherently would. For example, let's suppose that my character has access to a sword and a spear as weapons. Let's further suggest that his skill is different with one weapon as compared with the other, but that the weapons are very different in speed, damage done, and other factors. If I were really using those weapons, when I was standing around practicing with them I would have a genuine subjective feeling for how good I was with them. In a role playing game, I'm removed from that. I replace that by crunching numbers--calculating my http://www.mjyoung.net/dungeon/adr.html">average damage per round, for example, so that I can see numerically which is the better weapon. I don't do this when combat starts; I do it well before that, so I've got the information already available when I need it.

That, though, is my preference. I don't play video games much at all (I was a beast at Burger Time, and really loved Bomb Squad, but my Intellivision died and I never really got into the later games, although my son recently reminded me that I was pretty good at Sonic Spinball, which is probably the last video game on which I wasted any serious time, unless maybe Tetris was later). Some people want that, others can indeed get a feel for their characters' abilities just from play without any numbers. I think the color bar concept probably does a good job of splitting the difference.

I hope this is helpful again.

--M. J. Young

[George the Flea]

Yikes!  Lots of threads to answer; I'll break them up per person to make it easier on myself and you.  And now that I've noticed the time, I'll have to leave replies to Noon and M.J. Young until tomorrow.

Contracycle:

Thank you for your more substantial replies!  Your post helped me out quite a bit.

I'm not going to bother to argue more about the misquoted thing.  On the one hand, I misunderstood you, on the other I willfully misunderstood you, and on the third I was rather angry.  Not worth continuing to rehash.  This point you made makes sense: "Decisions can be frustrating becuase there is nothing to work with" (although I still disagree that there is nothing to work with).

As a qualifier to that I will also say that I find such systems sub-optimal in adventure games, whereas a game like Pharoah consists almost entirely of min-maxing, and I love it to bits.

This is definitely where our "what-is-fun" game playing experiences and beliefs came into a head-on collision.  I tried to play Ceasar II a long while ago, found I couldn't stand it, and never looked back.  Just seemed so tedious.  (On the other hand, I just recently discovered the online game Utopia, which is nothing but numbers, and am really ejoying it.  Maybe it just hit me at he wrong age.)

Heres an interesting ecample of what I mean from Counter-Strike.  When I started playing, it was hard to get feedback on what I was achieveing because I would be mercilessly gunned down very quickly.  Then I found a server that provided stats, showing when I scored a hit and on whom.  And what I discovered from this was that I was hitting targets without knowing it, especially at range - I learned that my actual accuracy was better than my perceived accuracy.  And that improved my confidence, which improved my willingness to risk the time to take careful aim, which improved my hit rate.

Now that is an interesting example.  That really helped me see what you're driving at.  Thank you.

Out of curiosity, what if when the player was just out and about adventuring they didn't have any access to the explicit numbers that made up their character beyond the color stats or whatever (I realize I'm harping on this, but I really do like the concept), but they were able to get access to more specific indicators of stats/skill level at specific locations in-game?

I can see this working a couple of different ways.  1) There is an NPC who is able to "assess" a character's skills/attributes.  2) There are tests that are able to give a readout of ability level at a particular skill (thinking tests like the player says "yes give me the test" or whatever, maybe sees a very short animation, and gets the result).  There could also be more specific information about the enemies or other problems located in, say, books in the library (likely available through a research librarian so the player wouldn't have to waste time walking shelves or any other silly things).

If you were playing this hypothetical RPG, would a system like this work for you do you think?  Or would it still be preferable to just say, "Alright, it's not realistic, but here's exactly what makes up your character"?

One who knows the enemy and knows himself will not be in danger in a hundred battles. [etc.]

Meh.  I could argue whether this actually applies to knowing specific game engine level workings, but it would be pretty pointless and I've got enough other stuff to reply to.

regardless of whether any given player or person has heard of GNS, if GNS is a true description of the objective world then they will be playing in one of the GNS modes anyway.  Whether or not they know this is irrelevant.  What the development of a theiry that discusses this phenomenon adds to the situation is ther ability to discuss it clearly.

We're talking about two different things here.  You are arguing that GNS is a valid and objective way to discuss gaming preferences.  I'm not arguing with that.  I'm saying that knowing the GNS system has a high possibility of increasing how critical (in the bad sense) a given average gamer is of mixed element gameplay.  Increased negative criticism of the game simply because it is less specific to a theoretical system will likely cause less enjoyment.  The gamer may have actually enjoyed the game more if they hadn't any background in GNS.  Since most of my expected audience will not have a background in GNS, being highly consistent with a single aspect of GNS not as important.  Hope that makes sense.

To be clear, I don't think that developing a language to talk about gaming preferences is bad.  I do think that the way the GNS system is currently conceived has the unintended ability to restrict the enjoyment of people who don't understand the theory particularly well.

Obviously, this is highly hypothetical.  I can't really defend it beyond explaining why I think that the audience's exposure to GNS is relavent.  Additionally, there's the possibility that I don't understand the GNS theory all that great myself, but I have a very good self-image so I'm quite ready to assume that I'm right and just go with it notwithstanding.

I think the problems will be there, its just the you and the user will have no vocabulary with which to discuss your problems.

Perhaps.  On the other hand, how many people on this earth do you honestly think truly understand the concept of GNS, compared to the number that are able to say "This gameplay element isn't fun because of X"?

While your primary interest may be in immersion, I would argue that at a certain point concealing stats from players may even undercut that immersion.

Any specific hypotheticals you can think of?  I'm interested in the idea, but can't think of any myself.

I am trying to warn you off pigeonholing play that makes purposeful use of numbers as the same as play that is anti-immersionist.  But at this point this seems something of an article of faith for you.  I think your design will suffer for such a knee-jerk rejection of all numbers instead of using the numbers to reinforce the imaginative space.

Hmm, perhaps I am holding pretty rabidly to the idea.  On the other hand, I could argue that your insistence on numbers being essential to gameplay and abstracting them in any way a way to destroy the game is also a bit knee-jerk.  Every CRPG that I can think of uses numbers; either that means that it's a really good idea or that no one has taken the trouble to try and tap into other equally valid possibilities.  And seeing as the computer gaming industry is very tradition-bound I tend to think the latter.

What I need is an example alternative.  It's all very well and good to tell me to use numbers to reinforce the imaginative space (very nice turn of phrase, by the way), but I can't think of any way to do this.  Without some hypothetical alternatives I'm not really sure that I will ever be able to agree that the numbers have to be in there without wasting years programming them out.

Thanks again for your post!  This last one was much more helpful for me.

[contracycle]

Thank you for your more substantial replies!  Your post helped me out quite a bit.

Great, I am glad we are communicating better.

Out of curiosity, what if when the player was just out and about adventuring they didn't have any access to the explicit numbers that made up their character beyond the color stats or whatever (I realize I'm harping on this, but I really do like the concept), but they were able to get access to more specific indicators of stats/skill level at specific locations in-game?

I think thats fine, although I might be less keen on it being location specific because of what this implies about gameplay, but I'll come back to that.

What this will do is add another layer of strategic decision; do I check my stats now, or do I do the job now based on my last update?

I think that should work perfectly well in terms of providing the opportunity to those who want to know without imposing it on those who don't care about the details.

If you were playing this hypothetical RPG, would a system like this work for you do you think?  Or would it still be preferable to just say, "Alright, it's not realistic, but here's exactly what makes up your character"?

I don't actually mind parts of the character being concealed as long as I have agreed to that and understand why it is concealed, that it has something to do with the point or metaphor of the game.

I don't think there are any serious problems with the proposed solution, that of going to a test centre or similar.  In fact this might be quite cool if it were built like a martial arts grading - you go and do your brown belt grading type thing, and get a feedback saying "skill X is 2 points below required threshold for this belt" or similar.

One device that RPG's have used in the past would be much more accessible on a computer than it has been in tabletop.  Some games allow you to take a skill with which you can assess someone elses rating.  This usually appears in games where the player does know their own rating but the ratings of others are hidden.  Then the player with this power can make a taks roll to assess a potential opponent and see how they match up.  This is a bit of a problem in tabletop because it usually requires an actual roll be made, which can be time consuming.  A computerised implementation could easily do that in that in the background.

Meh.  I could argue whether this actually applies to knowing specific game engine level workings, but it would be pretty pointless and I've got enough other stuff to reply to.[/qupte]

Admittedly I'm heavily in strategy gaming, and this environment can be a bit obsessive about these things.  But I think the general case is valid - I have seen too much investigation of the underlying algorithm in a multitude of games.  Some people in the Pharoah community were able to determine, by reverse engineering the algorithm, that there is an invisible day/night cycle in the game.  The total war community badgered the developers until they got the basis of the resolution calculations out of them.

Any specific hypotheticals you can think of?  I'm interested in the idea, but can't think of any myself.

Sure.  One thing that might happen to you is that you find yourtself carrying a tag like "groom", say, as in a groom of horses.  But all you know about this is that you have a rating in horse grooming; you don't actually know anything about horse grooming.  You can interact with the system such that it reflects your characters knowledge, but you cannot reflect your characters knowledge in conversations with other characters.

that might seem less relevant becuase it is about knowledge, but IMO exactly the same applies to certain sets of mechanical data.  Frex, if you are playing the role of a soldier you should probably be able to discuss the operational characteristics of weapons.  If this data is concealed behind an impentrable representation, once again you are validated by the system as having this knowledge but may have trouble immersing into the role, because you cannot actually think about those things yourself.

Actually it occurs to me that another opportunity in CRPG thats hard to do in tabletop would be to open up only those areas of data that correspond to a players expertise.  If a player has skill X they are allowed to see the algortihm by which skill x is measured, perhaps.

Every CRPG that I can think of uses numbers; either that means that it's a really good idea or that no one has taken the trouble to try and tap into other equally valid possibilities.  And seeing as the computer gaming industry is very tradition-bound I tend to think the latter.

Yes I agree completely.  In fact I think the CRPG environment is terribly hide-bound, producing various reiterations of D&D, as others have remarked.  There are many more systems in table-top; if you can get to  a gaming store that has display copies, just browsing through the range might be quite useful to you.

What I need is an example alternative.  It's all very well and good to tell me to use numbers to reinforce the imaginative space (very nice turn of phrase, by the way), but I can't think of any way to do this.  

Well, I hope the discussion above about how someone with a skill in the game might want to learn about how that is actually going to work in practice has helped.  The kind of problem I was worrying about was when someone is sufficiently interested to try to investigate this deeply, and then hits a brick wall preventing them from doing so.  By contrast, if the system can be examined, the player than develops an expertise that reflects and accords with the characters supposed expertise - game and reality are more in sync,  and thus IMO immersion and identification are more likely.

Another interesting case to examine is where mechanics are intended to communicate something about the setting.  FVLMINATA has one of my favourites, with the initiative system being influenced by the social rank of the character.  This reflects the confidence, habit of command, of the senatorial classes, and the lack of confidence and sense of deference among the hoi polloi.  But this can only work where the players are able to see that number in play; if this were calculated invisibly they would never be aware of this mechanical influence.

[contracycle]

I forgot to come back to the "gameplay of locations" I referred to.  Some games I have seen include the problem that you have to go to one place to do a thing and to another place to do something else.  This can work but can sometimes be detrimental to the mood the game is trying to evoke.  I always get this feeling with the notional RPG pub, full of colourful characters, warriors and wizards, some half-trolls and what have you, but no peasants.

I can understand why computer games have a tendency to go toward location-keyed special effects and so on, and its noit as if I think the idea is totally unusable, but its another convention that might bear some examination.

[Mike Holmes]

I wanted to make a quick comment, late though it is in the thread. Mark Eddy noted that the BRP system used in CoC and elsewhere has a "use it and get more" model of experience. There was an old game called Darklands, which used this model very well. I think that this is unsurprising, given that Sandy Peterson, designer of CoC amongst other things, worked on Darklands. IIRC. After which he went on to work on the roleplaying aspects of doom and Quake.

Ever wonder why it's Shub-Niggurath at the end of Quake? Sandy.

He's also know for his work on games like Age of Empires.

Anyway, what I'm getting at is that some of what's being discussed here is actually pretty old news. FPS abandoned development at some point. I'm not saying that this was a great idea, but I do think that it follows the marketplace.

Most importantly, if you really want to design CRPGs, I think that it's important to have a really good idea of whats out there. I'm not a huge CRPG player, but I know Darklands. The point being that there are probably other games that have tried these models and failed already. Which, again, doesn't mean that it can't be done, but that one would do well to find the other games that have tried it, so that one can find out what does and doesn't work and so that true innovation can occur.

Else you're doomed to repeat somebody else's mistakes.

BTW, another game that used "creeping development," FWIW, was Ultima Underground (and it's sequel). And that was, essentially, a FPS. One of the first.

Mike

[George the Flea]

Noon:

I think (and I know this sounds like labeling) you believe your mostly sim style play prefernce to be gamism.

On a little reflection, I think I actually enjoy soft-core gamist play, but only when it's moderated or cushioned by sim.  However, I've been a little disillusioned with the gamist elements in so many CRPG's, so the design for this game has swung pretty heavily sim-wards.  Which comes to the same thing, really.

I think most people will look at the skill and expect that enjoyment comes from increasing it...and it dropping will screw their enjoyment.

Hmmm, true.  Decreasing a skill that isn't practiced would have to be pretty gradual (and have an algorithm that wouldn't let you lose it all).  If we end up implementing it, of course.  The reason we were trying to come up with a way to decrease skills over time that aren't used to is to prevent potential god characters (extremely good at everything).  On the other hand, the game might be short enough that there wouldn't ever be the opportunity to create a god character.  Have to think about this.

Have you sat down and written out what immerses you?...Try listing stuff that immerses you and forget about all the usual stuff you expect an RPG must have. Often, the usual stuff don't need to be there or don't need any focus.

No, I haven't.  But that's a really good idea; I'll have to do that.

The way they interact can cause whole mini stories to happen right before your life...wow, this world doesn't revolve around me in order for a story to happen!

If there is any possible way to get NPC's to interact in an intelligent and logical manner I'll do it.  Not sure if I'll be able to master AI to that extent, though.

See, I really, really don't like the unpractised skills going down over time. See, skills scream gamist at me...and I shouldn't just loose something I worked hard for.

A gamist answer might be to record how high the skill got, and make it relatively easy to retrain back to that level. That way the smart gamist thinks "Oh, it's not my current level that matters...it's my maximum levels I should be proud of".

Ideally the algorithm will do this; we want if you pick up something that you've been good at that the time to relearn will be a lot quicker.  If we aren't able to work this into the algorithm, then we'll probably either do something different from decreasing skills (maybe a "dormant" skill system of some sort) or put a very definite limit on how far it can drop.

Anything between tough descisions is just filler and not really of interest (as far as I know nar). Yeah, that actually means that if you kill your brother and he's not around to stop a border invasion...that's actually a boring bit. That's shocking from a sim perspective

Ok, you caught me.  I think you're right; I'm not paticularly nar oriented at all.  On the other hand, just having the decisions is pretty cool, but if there's some evidence of consequences later on it could also satisfy both needs.  Or so it seems.

There's no exclusion in GNS definition or primary color definition. Only further understanding of the basic elements.

Just because there isn't exclusion written into the system on purpose doesn't mean that in practice it doesn't turn out that way.  That's mainly what I'm arguing: if you come at the concept from a contiuum type of angle initially, the complexities are acknowledged straight off and it potentially could decrease misusing the system.

Or maybe not.  I'd have to think about it a lot more to be any more coherent than that.

Thanks for your response!

[George the Flea]

M.J. Young:

I see where you're coming from with the idea that GNS are better distinct than end points, but this thread has gotten too long for me to be able to respond to it well.  Any threads or articles discussing this that you can think of?  I'd be interested in seeing the different sides.  If not, I'll just do a search or something later when I have a little more time to give to investigating my issues with GNS.

If you can reduce your essential stats to three, you might try running it with a single color bar. Let me suggest perhaps that you have a health score, a power score, and a speed score. If your health score is high, you can take more damage and keep going longer. If your power score is high, you can hit harder and do harder work. If your speed score is high, you hit more often and move faster. Associate each of these with a primary light in the RGB color spectrum used by vid screens--say red for power, blue for speed, green for health. Now what happens is that the three scores combine to give you a single colored dot. The higher the scores, the brighter the dot, until at maximum the dot is white. When all have reached zero, the dot is black.

That's a good idea.  The only problem is that we'll probably have to have more than three attributes (if we end up using attributes) because we're hoping to have viable alternatives to combat to solve problems.  Have to see how this works out in the prototype.

If I were really using those weapons, when I was standing around practicing with them I would have a genuine subjective feeling for how good I was with them. In a role playing game, I'm removed from that. I replace that by crunching numbers--calculating my average damage per round, for example, so that I can see numerically which is the better weapon. I don't do this when combat starts; I do it well before that, so I've got the information already available when I need it.

I see what you mean; this and Contracycle's similar comments have given me a few ideas in this regard.  I posed a couple of my earliest ideas in an earlier post to Contracycle, but I'll try to post some better thought-out examples in a short while.

Thank you very much for your comments.  You continue to be very helpful.

[M. J. Young]

M.J. Young:

I see where you're coming from with the idea that GNS are better distinct than end points, but this thread has gotten too long for me to be able to respond to it well.  Any threads or articles discussing this that you can think of?  I'd be interested in seeing the different sides.  If not, I'll just do a search or something later when I have a little more time to give to investigating my issues with GNS.

I'm almost stuck for an answer on this. I suppose my perspective is warped--I read System Does Matter when it was first published at Gaming Outpost and participated in discussions there, popped over here to read GNS and Other Matters of Role Playing Theory some years later, then tried to keep up with the triumvirate of the Gamism, Narrativism, and Simulationism articles as they appeared here. Ron says that the essence of the theory is adequately defined in the glossary; I don't know whether it is or not.

I would suggest that my own Applied Theory might be helpful in pointing to some of the relationships between the three agenda and design concerns. I have a three-article series being reviewed by the e-zine Places to Go, People to Be that attempts to summarize all the major points of currently accepted theory in maybe ten thousand words, but the Creative Agenda materials are in the third and I have not yet heard when/whether they'll start running them.

If my search-fu were better, I'm sure I could point you to a wealth of threads on the subject; we've got an entire forum devoted to the model, and discussions are happening there even now on the nature of simulationism, for example. But I'm not usually very good at remembering the threads that were really helpful, so I suppose someone else will have to offer their input on that.

Anyway, glad I could help.

(If somehow you missed them, there's an articles section on this site; the link is at the top of every page. Other than the unpublished PTGPTB series, all the mentioned articles are there.)

--M. J. Young