Various role-playing RPG game stuff not deserving its own thread

[Lhynn]

Soul in game design is underrated, AD&D XP tables with no formula and each class leveling at different speeds was soulful, each class having the same XP formula for leveling is soulless.

@Roguey would call all the streamlinging into a single xp table "Elegant design". I agree with you though, it makes the game far more interesting.

[Stack of Turtles]

Soul in game design is underrated, AD&D XP tables with no formula and each class leveling at different speeds was soulful, each class having the same XP formula for leveling is soulless.

@Roguey would call all the streamlinging into a single xp table "Elegant design". I agree with you though, it makes the game far more interesting.

Roguey would call a gay man in a skirt "she" so I'm not sure what difference it makes

[Roguey]

Soul in game design is underrated, AD&D XP tables with no formula and each class leveling at different speeds was soulful, each class having the same XP formula for leveling is soulless.

@Roguey would call all the streamlinging into a single xp table "Elegant design". I agree with you though, it makes the game far more interesting.

I don't mind it when different groups of classes have different leveling speeds. It can be pretty exhausting in party-based third+ edition games where you have to go through the level-up process four to six times at once. It's more tolerable to have it staggered out.

[Norfleet]

I don't mind it when different groups of classes have different leveling speeds. It can be pretty exhausting in party-based third+ edition games where you have to go through the level-up process four to six times at once. It's more tolerable to have it staggered out.

I see it more the opposite: I would rather do one thing in a single continuous burst than have playflow constantly interrupted by staggered level-ups. It's a better optimization in tabletop, too, since it prevents the game grinding to a halt because ONE guy levelled up and everyone must now wait for him to get that sorted out. Instead, everyone levels up and the level-ups are processed in parallel by their individual players, with the game continuing because everyone is doing that instead of stopping because ONE person is doing that and everyone must wait for him to finish.

Back in the older editions when this was happening, playing it strictly by rule became so irritating that many of us just entirely stopped tracking XP gains and just accepted that we level-up when the DM says we level up, and thus we level up together.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I feel like WS flopped because they were faction locked to the boring faction.

Wildstar flopped because the game felt bad to play from the get go. You spawned on the spaceship in orbit, pressed WASD to move and your character felt sluggish and its animations lame. The combat was able to sloooowly stepping out of the telegraphed AoEs, which were not sold by the movement feel/animation quality of the game. It also felt really bad to play as a Spellslinger because you had to hold down a button to charge up your telegraphed shots, but then when you released the button you only hit like a wet noodle because of ye old MMO problem where mobs have to live for X amount of seconds while being hit by Y number of players. The game did not have a compelling intro like starting in Mulgore, hearing the music and getting sucked into the world, and then seeing how vast it was, hearing about the Horde and the lands that lay beyond, etc.

[Ilovecheezecake]

Also it was QUIRKY

[rusty_shackleford]

how come they're called wizards if they use int and not wis?

[rusty_shackleford]

intzard

[UltraFan123]

Wizards should start being depicted as the physicists of fantasy settings.

[Oyster Sauce]

Stronger man hits harder
More agile man gets deadlier hits in
Smarter man... casts fireballs more smartly?
Wiser man uses his life experience to channel a bigger magic missile?

[rusty_shackleford]

Smarter man... casts fireballs more smartly?

memorizes more spells/higher level spells

I'd have to double check but I don't think any spell scaled with INT/WIS in D&D, might in current edition?

[Acrux]

Wiztards

[J1M]

I'm fine with skills that make you better at doing something, and skills that unlock new abilities as it's raised, but skills that just let you do something that has an arbitrary difficulty threshold you need to keep up with suck.
"everything just gets harder to do as the game goes on because… it just does, okay???"
that's lame, it's just level scaling wearing a different coat of paint.

D&D 4th edition. The DCs get harder for doing the same things like crossing an icy path without slipping, because your skill numbers went up. Horrible treadmill gaming.

That's truly incredibly bad. This is why all game designers should be beheaded.

As usual, the only thing that is bad is the average player's reading comprehension.

It is presented as a way to represent Underdark cave slime as being slipperier than normal cave slime, not as "this floor gets slipperier because you are level 15".

It's basically a space-saving tool so they don't need to create 3x as many terrain rules in the book.

[J1M]

Any examples of RPGs that actually support partially specializing and/or hybrid non-combat characters?

Bringing a rogue in your Dragon Age: Origins party instead of a 3rd mage. (To unlock chests and disable traps, but simply less effective in combat than other options.)

[J1M]

Any examples of RPGs that actually support partially specializing and/or hybrid non-combat characters?

You can have a pretty viable leadership/social character in Wasteland 2 DC, although you probably still need one weapon skill on him.

I meant an example where you can put some points in a social skill and actually see a return on your investment, it rarely exists.
I can list plenty of games where you can throw some points in a combat-related skill and see a return. You never see this for e.g., lockpicking and similar, non-combat stuff is almost always all-or-nothing.

Class-based systems tend to bake all of this into the classes and it's not something you have to worry about at all.

The way Deus Ex treats lockpicks as items that you consume to make steady progress on a lock fits this idea of partial success and analog results from investment, even though it only had 5 or so ranks in the skill.

I can't name any other games that used this approach, but I think many would have been improved by it versus pass/fail/critical fail and your lockpick breaks which is much more common.

[J1M]

a lot of classless rpgs have rigid skillchecks and I don't like specializing, I like playing jack of all trades characters
not really sure how this playstyle could be better served in design

probably more cross-skill synergies and such, off the top of my head DOS2 had cross-skill ability books which were neat

Dare I say, just make it so skill checks are invisible if you don't have the skill - and, if you fail or succeed you get no obvious feedback.

No more [speech 7] with a "[success]...", or whatever.

Games, especially RPG's should focus more on diegesis. You're not supposed to see behind the dungeon master's screen.

Also, there should be multiple ways to resolve matters that are logical. It shouldn't matter if you can't open a door due to your lack of [insert skill] if you can just bash it down, or blow it up.

Player needs feedback. ATOM RPG does this and it led to me just assuming they didn't write dialog for most NPCs. Turned out I had personality stat below some threshold, but I only learned that after finishing the game and discussing it here.

[TKVNC]

a lot of classless rpgs have rigid skillchecks and I don't like specializing, I like playing jack of all trades characters
not really sure how this playstyle could be better served in design

probably more cross-skill synergies and such, off the top of my head DOS2 had cross-skill ability books which were neat

Dare I say, just make it so skill checks are invisible if you don't have the skill - and, if you fail or succeed you get no obvious feedback.

No more [speech 7] with a "[success]...", or whatever.

Games, especially RPG's should focus more on diegesis. You're not supposed to see behind the dungeon master's screen.

Also, there should be multiple ways to resolve matters that are logical. It shouldn't matter if you can't open a door due to your lack of [insert skill] if you can just bash it down, or blow it up.

Player needs feedback. ATOM RPG does this and it led to me just assuming they didn't write dialog for most NPCs. Turned out I had personality stat below some threshold, but I only learned that after finishing the game and discussing it here.

For an action, or adventure game. Sure. For a roleplaying game, I entirely disagree. The entire point is you use the tools you have to engage with the world. You are not supposed to use meta information.

I reiterate my point from before:

You're not supposed to see behind the dungeon master's screen.

[J1M]

They died of old age

It's because gaming became cheaper, when only a small % could afford PCs the people who could also afford flight game equipment were a larger %

It's not just money though. Plenty of food stamps have been exchanged for VR headsets, I'm sure. Flight sticks or HOTAS are notoriously difficult to configure and it's usually not clear if a game will support specific hardware until you try it.

[Rand]

D&D 4th edition. The DCs get harder for doing the same things like crossing an icy path without slipping, because your skill numbers went up. Horrible treadmill gaming.

That's truly incredibly bad. This is why all game designers should be beheaded.

As usual, the only thing that is bad is the average player's reading comprehension.

It is presented as a way to represent Underdark cave slime as being slipperier than normal cave slime, not as "this floor gets slipperier because you are level 15".

It's basically a space-saving tool so they don't need to create 3x as many terrain rules in the book.

The examples they give are often the exact same thing, and I mean EXACTLY the same, just with different numbers at different levels.

[Maledict]

Does anyone of the below games have any character anatomy customisation, e.g. face change or even haircut changes?








I was somewhat (positively) surpsided by Faery - Legends of Avalon having character creation (visual), so I'm wondering now.

Cheers.

[Oyster Sauce]

Does anyone of the below games have any character anatomy customisation, e.g. face change or even haircut changes?








I was somewhat (positively) surpsided by Faery - Legends of Avalon having character creation (visual), so I'm wondering now.

Cheers.

Bound By Flame does

[rusty_shackleford]

I want to say technomancer might, but it has been some years since I played. Check a youtube video first.

Of orcs and men and elex do not.

[J1M]

Perhaps the most noticeable thing nobody discusses anymore are flight sims. Fans of flight sims used to make up a significant portion of the gaming audience.

Flight Sims still exist. We have all the various spaceplane games like Elite Dangeresque. All the various actual plane games like War Thunder. And, of course, actual Flight Sims like Microslop Flight Simulator.

But the reason flight sims are no longer a major part of the gaming audience is because the bar on the gaming audience has dropped. It used to be that gamers were characterized by people who probably had the intellectual capacity to handle being pilots. Nowadays, most gamers are drooling phonetards and dirty console peasants who demonstrably couldn't, so naturally, are not into flight sims. This is also why there's been a decline in ANOTHER formerly popular genre, the Asteroids-like.

It's also a problem with the existing audience having such a high preference for realistic military sims. There isn't a clear gateway into the hobby in the way that something like Neverwinter Nights or Baldur's Gate 3 offers.

[J1M]

Soul in game design is underrated, AD&D XP tables with no formula and each class leveling at different speeds was soulful, each class having the same XP formula for leveling is soulless.

D&D 3.5e / Pathfinder typed bonuses are another example. It sorta feels arbitrary at first, but it's actually diegetic. Beats out soulless 'balanced' formulas and such.

Perhaps the take away is designers should try to make every rule make sense in the game world.

The hetero XP tables were a balancing mechanism. The classes the designers thought were weaker gained levels faster.

[Maledict]

Bound By Flame does

Thanks.

I want to say technomancer might, but it has been some years since I played. Check a youtube video first.

It does. Thanks.

[J1M]

D&D 4th edition. The DCs get harder for doing the same things like crossing an icy path without slipping, because your skill numbers went up. Horrible treadmill gaming.

That's truly incredibly bad. This is why all game designers should be beheaded.

As usual, the only thing that is bad is the average player's reading comprehension.

It is presented as a way to represent Underdark cave slime as being slipperier than normal cave slime, not as "this floor gets slipperier because you are level 15".

It's basically a space-saving tool so they don't need to create 3x as many terrain rules in the book.

The exampels they give are often the exact same thing, and I mean EXACTLY the same, just with different numbers at different levels.

...and if you read the text immediately before the terrain examples it says:

Tier and Terrain Effects: Throughout these examples, the term “per tier” is
used to show how an effect scales. Multiply the per tier value by 1 for heroic
tier, 2 for paragon, and 3 for epic. For instance, if a terrain feature grants a
+1 bonus to attack rolls per tier, the bonus is +1 at heroic tier, +2 at paragon
tier, and +3 at epic tier. Similarly, some terrain effects call for skill or ability
checks. The DM usually chooses an easy DC from the Difficulty Class by
Level table (page 126) to set a DC that’s appropriate to the creature’s level.
Terrain effects are scaled in this way scales so that the terrain stays challenging
as adventurers and monsters gain higher skill modifiers and more
hit points. For instance, the cave slime found in the deeper reaches of the
Underdark is thicker and more slippery than the thin sheen found in higher
dungeon levels, so the Acrobatics DC to avoid falling prone is higher.

[DemoGraph]

intzard

Sorcerer = CHArizard.

[Valter]

Wonder where are all the stealth mages. Feel like instant death at the tip of your fingers and nonexistent armor noise would make it a natural combo. Unless spells are really that noisy? Don't think they should be unless it's an explosion spell though.

[Oyster Sauce]

Wonder where are all the stealth mages. Feel like instant death at the tip of your fingers and nonexistent armor noise would make it a natural combo. Unless spells are really that noisy? Don't think they should be unless it's an explosion spell though.

TORMENTUM

[UltraFan123]

Wonder where are all the stealth mages. Feel like instant death at the tip of your fingers and nonexistent armor noise would make it a natural combo. Unless spells are really that noisy? Don't think they should be unless it's an explosion spell though.

I guess the 3.5 arcane trickster archetype never became mainstream enough.