The Escapist - Roleplaying: Evolved

[Dhruin]

This article at The Escapist looks at the roots of roleplaying to illuminate the evolution of the genre - or the lack of it. Here's one of the central arguments:

Consider this: Back in the day, Dungeons & Dragons gave us six primary characteristics - Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, Dexterity, Constitution and Charisma. Each was represented by a number on a scale, but the most important statistic for determining a character's overall effectiveness was its level. Fallout 3, the game of the year in 2008, has seven primary characteristics represented by numbers on a scale, including Strength, Intelligence and Charisma. Agility stands in for Dexterity and Endurance for Constitution. Levels? Check, and now as then, they boil down a character's overall potency to a single number.
Fallout 3 isn't a bad game, and it doesn't stand alone in committing this particular failure of imagination. A determined ludo-archaeologist could unearth Strength and Levels in the many progeny of D&D from one end of GameStop to the other. But it's a perfect example of how far roleplaying hasn't managed to come in 35 years. For everything that Fallout 3, Mass Effect and the others bring to the table, what's the point of the Strength and Levels, for crying out loud?

More information.

 

[baron]

they keep considering character stats the very core or the only element of role-playing, which is kind of puerile.
some would say munchkinish, but this term was coined much later because puerile would have been considered offensive by some puerile folks.
duh.
________
Wendie 99

 

[LuckyCarbon]

I think using Fallout 3 is a particularly bad example. It's a sequel to a series, from a game that was released in 1997. It's supposed to use the same character system. Fallout 1 was still pretty early in the computer game RPG history (dare I say the beginning of the modern RPG era) and it's not like there wasn't innovative character systems way back then.

It's not hard to find recent main-stream RPGs that don't use a strength, charisma styled character system, Mass Effect immediately jumps to mind.

The reason D&D similar character attributes are used a lot in RPGs is because most RPGs focus around humanoid characters and those attributes are a great way to numerically represent a person. Especially in relation to the actions you take in (most) RPGs, combat.

Maybe I'm just crabby today but this article that didn't actually have a point.

 

[Hindukönig]

Why do ego shooters still have guns? The 17 year old Wolfenstein3D had guns, but what's the point in shooting enemies, for crying out loud?

 

[wolfing]

Why do ego shooters still have guns? The 17 year old Wolfenstein3D had guns, but what's the point in shooting enemies, for crying out loud?

That's exactly my reaction. In a way, RPGs have actually evolved a lot more than other genres. What's the difference between Wolfenstein and Crysis? Better graphics mainly. Gameplay is almost exactly the same (ok, instead of using a health pack you just sit and regenerate faster than a troll).

 

[Grandor Dragon]

Sorry, but gameplay is not "almost exactly the same". Vehicle use, "special powers", stealth, plot, are all significant differences. I am not saying that Crysis was a great game. It's a good looking, mediocre shooter.

 

[LuckyCarbon]

Sorry, but gameplay is not "almost exactly the same". Vehicle use, "special powers", stealth, plot, are all significant differences. I am not saying that Crysis was a great game. It's a good looking, mediocre shooter.

Oh come now, Wolf 3d had a plot! I can still feel the desperation and fear that I felt when I was an American POW escaping that prison castle that was design by a very drunken architect who loved right angles and had a penchant for hidden closets.

However, vehicles and stealth are less innovative than the multitude of character systems than have been tried. SPECIALS's skills & perks, D&Ds feats and Blizzards skill trees are all a lot more evolutionary than adding cars to a FPS.

 

[Alrik Fassbauer]

The core of this all is : How do you transfer the actions of a character you currently play into the enviromnent and world surrounding this very character ?

The traditional mechanism of transferring effects of a deed of the character into his or her environment has been via numbers, which represent kind of a scale of impact of the deeds on the environment.

It's like the scale (read: level) of the impact of earthquakes onto their environments (read: the continental plates), which is also represented by numbers.

So far no-one seems to have developed a better mechanism to transfer the impact of deeds onto the environment surrounding a character than via numbers, via levels, scales ...

 

[Squeek]

The core of this all is : How do you transfer the actions of a character you currently play into the enviromnent and world surrounding this very character ?

The way I see it, there can only be two ways to approach it. Either you greatly limit choices in the beginning and then dole them out slowly within a carefully crafted world that evolves as its story unfolds (e.g. Gothic) or you take the other tack by providing plentiful choices throughout and design your game to react in correspondence with those choices.

I think most of us would agree that Piranha Bytes knows how to do the former, but has anyone figured out how to do the latter? IMO, no developer has even tried. Modders do a bit of something similar every now and then, but mods just aren't the way to go, IMO.

Lego does that. The whole idea with Lego is to enable the player to create whatever he wants. But Lego isn't designed by software engineers. Little kids seem to understand Lego. Maybe they should design CRPGs.

 

[Alrik Fassbauer]

There are a few Lego games out there, although I have never played them.

But the idea is interesting, yes.

Wasn't Fracture such a thing ? A player can destroy walls ... - which is in a way an implementation of "the characters dees have an impact on the environment" like you proposed.

 

[JDR13]

Sorry, but gameplay is not "almost exactly the same". Vehicle use, "special powers", stealth, plot, are all significant differences. I am not saying that Crysis was a great game. It's a good looking, mediocre shooter.

Crysis was definitely not "mediocre".

 

[guenthar]

All of the "so called" innovations in fps games are just taken from othere genres and not innovative. The fps genre has not evolved but just took things from other places.

Is the RPG genre evolving by taking fps game play and integrating it. I don't think that is an evolution of the rpg genre either.

PS. The evolution of a genre can only happen with new and evolved features. I don't think the stats system will go away but it will hopefully evolve.

PPS. I have a good idea for evolving the stat system and that is use a balance system. What this would be is that all of your stats would have a range that would that can be increased. All of the stats effect each other so that if your character is greatly unbalanced he/she will be consistantly hitting the low end of the range. If your character is balanced he/she will consistantly be hitting the high end of the range. When you have an unbalanced character you will be more focused on a few stats and when you are balanced you have a higher spread of stats. What you would want to aim for is a balance between balanced and unbalanced if you are trying for maximum benefit. If you are trying to roleplay being balanced or unbalanced will corralate to the psyche of your character where having and unbalanced character will make you have an unbalanced psyche and vice versa.

PPPS. When I talked about the balance of your character effecting your psyche it effects everything from your interaction with npcs to the way you fight. If you have an unbalanced warrior type character he/she would be simular to a berserker style character where when fighting he/she would make powerful wide swings and do heavy damage but also get hit more and miss more. In conversation he/she would have a brutish demeanor and have simular options in dialog and have a reaction from the npc appropriate for his/her demeanor.

PPPPS. I forgot to mention that the skills you can upgrade and how easily you can upgrade them is determined by your character balance and stats can degrade or become unusable if your balance changes.

 

[bkrueger]

The Escapist never understood RPGs in the past. Why should they suddenly start understanding them now?