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Design principles vol. 1: RPGs and strategy

  • Hasvers
  • 07/15/2014 09:02 PM
  • 15551 views
I tend to like thinking about game design. Articles such as Deltree's (Edit: and Craig Stern's) are the sort of things I read ravenously. But despite there being a lot of good writing on the topic*, not much applied to my case, so I figured I might as well start a series of discussions here.

* (among an infinite sea of meh writing; most game makers are not great at reflecting upon what they do)

Vol 1: Why is there no strategy in RPG battles?

This may seem tangential, but really, it's what prompted me into switching to a whole different design. I mean, I love the idea of RPGs, else I wouldn't be here. But RPG battles are satisfying through their simulation aspects, i.e. because of what they let you reenact; they are not satisfying at all in terms of strategic thinking.

The crucial symptom of everything that is wrong with RPG battles fits in three letters:

DPS

Damage Per Second in real-time games like MMORPGs, or Damage Per Turn, is the absolute scale on which you can measure the value of any strategy. Sure, your characters need to stay alive, but only so that they can deal more damage, so the time spent healing them should just be subtracted from the DPS. In the end, no matter how it's distributed over characters and skills and stats and turns and stuff, you're just trying to make a single number go down as fast as possible.

Why is this so bad? Because it means that

1) RPG battles are played on a single line. Multiple stats (like HP and MP) are in fact convertible into each other through skills, so they are just different ways of moving along the same one line.

2) Therefore, RPG battles have no memory: I hit you, you lose HP, you heal yourself, we're back at step one. (Maybe you lost an item in the process, but item consumption is part of the larger resource management gameplay; the battle itself could be replaced by a simple "you lost a Potion" message to the exact same effect)

3) Since there is no memory, for any instantaneous state of the couple {your hp, my hp}, there is always a single optimal move no matter how you got there, and it will work every time I encounter you. There may be some thinking involved in calculating that optimal move (with an arbitrary number of skills and elements and modifiers to complicate it), but once it's found it will always work. By that reasoning, there should never be more than one encounter with any given enemy.


To make this clearer, let's compare it with the case of chess, a thoroughly bidimensional game.

1) Every action is irreversible ; you never come back to the same configuration twice in the same battle (unless both you and your opponent are just derpily moving bishops back and forth).

2) This stems from the fact that, thanks to the second dimension, all your previous actions are "stored" on independent lines. They do not erase each other, they do not act only in aggregate (i.e. simply by summing their instantaneous effects). Thus, they can come back to haunt you later: the position in which you put that pawn in the opening can change everything 30 turns later, not even through an action of the pawn itself, but because it blocks the line of sight of a bishop at the other end of the board.


In slightly abstract terms, RPG battles are chess played on a single row. Characters are abstract bundles of actions, each action is a chess piece that has slightly different rules for how it moves on that line. The order in which you advance the pieces can be important depending on which pieces the enemy has, but you can never circumvent an enemy piece by moving to the side and thus putting the king in check unexpectedly; all you have to do is mow through these pieces until you get there. Some tactics, perhaps, but no strategy.



Now of course, you don't necessarily want a game to be extremely strategic. If every battle in FF7 required beating Kasparov, not many people would have got out of Midgard. But strategy does provide those aha moments that go far beyond the simple tactical calculus of maximal DPS, and they are definitely something I would like to capture in my games.


Next time: I will talk about the basic design principles that I consider especially interesting in the case of a discourse-themed game.

Posts

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Depth is not always borne of complexity. Though, adding more! systems on top makes it harder to see just how deep the pool is.

Not to say that other 'dimensions' are never good, just, that they won't fix the issue if the underlying problem remains.
author=Avee
If you feature battles in your game but want to be original about the way they are resolved, feature other desirable goals than the "bring enemy's HP to zero" one.

I agree and I would love to have that discussion next. Still, the whole point of the contest is that Sviel has convinced me that just that goal, and just a simple turn-based RPG, can already contain a lot of strategy if you're willing to look for it. In that case, being creative doesn't necessarily mean adding more things - on the contrary, I would think that RPGs suffer from having too many things that don't really make a change.

Edit: ninja'ed on this one ;)
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