LOCKEZ'S PROFILE

Guys, guys! I am starting a forum game. Like Space_Monkey's RPG that we played back in August this will be an RPG played using the Roll To Dodge system.

If you aren't familiar with Roll To Dodge, it's a really really simple tabletop RPG. Instead of the typical forty thousand rules, it really only has one main rule once the game starts. On every turn, each player gets to attempt one action. I will then roll a standard six-sided die to decide if you succeed:
1) Critical failure plus major backfire
2) Failure
3) Partial success
4) Success
5) Epic success
6) Success plus backfire or collateral damage (items or skills that grant a bonus to hit chance cannot change your roll from a 5 to a 6)

This means everything you do has a high chance of failing and a high chance of backfiring, resulting in typically hilarious scenarios. On the plus side, if you die, you will be revived at the next inn.

This will be a Final Fantasy themed game.


ABILITIES
When you join you can pick one usable spell or ability from any Final Fantasy game. Your character will have that ability. I will do my best to approximate the effects of this ability in the Roll To Dodge gameplay; it may not be as powerful as it was in the original game. You will be able to use your ability once per day.

You can also try to basically anything else non-magical that you think is realistic given your surroundings and inventory. Depending on how loosely you interpret the term "realistic," I might make the failure chance higher than normal.


ITEMS
Each player starts with 100 gil, with which you can purchase supplies:

Sword: 20 gil. Grants +1 to rolls when you attack with it.
Crossbow: 20 gil. Allows you to attack from long range.
Gun: 25 gil. Grants +1 to rolls when you attack with it and allows you to attack from long range, but you must spend a turn reloading it to use it more than once per battle.
Ten foot pole: 8 gil. Allows you to attack from ten feet away, but
grants -1 to rolls when you attack with it.
Shield: 20 gil. Grants -1 to enemy rolls when they attack you with
a short-range attack.
Armor: 50 gil. Grants -1 to enemy rolls when they attack you with
any type of attack.
Torch: 2 gil.
Water canteen: 1 gil.
Flask of booze: 4 gil.
Dried meat: 2 gil.
Lockpick set: 38 gil.
Rope: 1 gil.
Bucket: 1 gil.
Pillow: 3 gil.
Healing potion: 10 gil.
Ether: 25 gil. Allows you to use a special skill a second time in a single day.
Smoke bomb: 10 gil.
Vial of poison: 10 gil.
Attack dog: 20 gil.
Live turtle: 8 gil.
Obedient moogle: 85 gil.
Suspicious package, addressed to the village of Mist: 40 gil.
Motorcycle: 95 gil.
Tissue: 1 gil.

(note that your characters do not have to eat; you should only purchase food and drink if you think you can come up with more creative uses for it)


PLAYERS
CAVE_DOG_IS_BACK


Yellow Magic


Avee


Arandomgamemaker


Dudesoft


Idida1


If you wish to join, please post in this topic and tell us your ability and the items you want to buy. There is no deadline to join. New players can join at any time after the game is started. Signups are now closed because holy crap there are too many players and every post takes me two hours to write.

First of all, here's the website.

http://www.piratekart.com/

Despite the name and the fact that their logo is a big pirate flag, this is not a website for pirated games. This is a website for free indie games. These guys are packaging up a bunch of indie games and then taking them to the Game Developer's Conference, and also putting them online for anyone to download as a giant 1.4 GB zip file (that's the size of the last one they did anyway, which was for the Indie Games Festival).

This is a pretty good chance to get some recognition for your games, if you have any that you feel are good enough to share outside the RPG Maker cesspool.

I emailed them about how they felt about ripped resources and got this response:

author=Mike Meyer
They are allowed! Even if they weren't it's waaay too late, cause there is tons of it in there already :) I think it'd be great to get the RPG Maker community(ies?) involved, ripped music and sprites and all!

You want to get upgraded from RPG Maker user to indie game developer? This is your chance. Go to piratekart.com and click the big green button.

Submission was supposed to be only last weekend, but since being mentioned on Penny Arcade they have extended the deadline and are still accepting games. I'm not sure when they will close it off for real, so if I were you I'd hurry.

If you want to download the game package they put together for the Indie Games Festival, head here.

Katie Tiedrich, author of Awkward Zombie, wrote once, "I always finish RPGs with like ninety-nine of every item because what if I need it later. And then if I do need it later I save it anyway because maybe even later I will need it even more."

Then she drew this comic about Fire Emblem.



So yeah what I want to talk about is collecting ridiculously vast amounts of items. Do you do this? Do you ever use the items? Do you think it's good game design to allow or encourage this behavior? Can you think of alternative ways of handling consumable items that will result in the consumable items actually being used when needed but also being a meaningful choice?

I don't particularly like FF style inventory. I think 99 potions is way too many. The point of inventory items is to be limited, right? A resource you're supposed to try to conserve? If they were supposed to be unlimited they'd be magic spells. Being able to go into a dungeon with 99 hi-potions pretty much means near-unlimited healing, unless you're stuck in the dungeon for hours or the potions only heal 10% of your HP each.

I like Fire Emblem's rarer, more useful items. But then I end up never using them as described above. It feels good collecting all those potential abilities, but then because I can't replenish the items, I end up never using them and thus any tactical elements that would be added to combat by the items are removed.

There are other methods too. Dirge of Cerberus and Secret of Mana both let you hold only three of each item, but you can replenish your supplies in frequent shops for a smallish gold cost, and enemies sometimes drop items too. So you can easily run out, but there's absolutely no point in hoarding them. The Tales games work kind of similarly; I think they have a limit of 10 or 20 of each item (depending on the game), but increase the number of types of healing items as the game goes on to coincide with the dungeons getting longer, so you can always just barely last until the end of the dungeon if you're careful. I guess the number is higher because in Mana games you can usually avoid taking damage, and in Tales games you usually can't.

So anyway I'm not sure what my opinions actually are, thus: discussion topic

Dying in a video game sucks.

Or does it? It depends on the game; on how many tries it takes you; on whether you know what to do differently next time; on whether the death was caused by something completely in your control or not; on what you lose when you die.

It's that last factor that I want to talk about. I've discussed difficulty before on this site, and you're free to revive said discussion with necroposts or whatever if you think there are ideas that were not covered, because it's one of my favorite topics. But in this topic we're talking about what to do to the player when he or she dies.

Game over, you say. Duh.

First of all, that's only one of a large number of options. And second of all, there are several different factors that can make a game over more or less punishing. What I really want to delve into is why are punishments for failure necessary, why are they problematic, and how can you maximize the player's feeling of accomplishment while minimizing frustration?


Let's take a look at various punishment options.

Game over with periodic save points
Like I said, there are different factors that can affect a game over - the biggest one is how saving is handled. With saving allowed only at save points, which appear periodically through the game, the designer can designate a longer stretch of the game as a "single non-stop challenge" that you can't restart from the middle of. Very few games allow you to save in the middle of a battle and restart from that point, right? Because that would be super cheap, it heavily encourages abuse of enemy AI and stuff. In RPGs where most normal battles are not really very dangerous, but dungeons are essentially wars of attrition where your goal is to get through all the battles without using up your resources, you can make the same argument for a dungeon that you do for a battle. So the player has to restart the challenge - which is the whole dungeon. The downside here is that you can get sent back 30-45 minutes, which can be... extremely discouraging. Losing the better part of an hour to a game over feels like bullshit in cases where you only made one mistake near the end, but you have to redo all of it. If you didn't just make one mistake, but actually are having trouble with the challenge as a whole, you're likely to lose several times before finishing, which means that you'll be stuck in the same dungeon for hours and hours.

Game over with save-anywhere
Basically, here, we swap the "game over sends you back too far" problem for the "you can start from the middle of a challenge and cheese it by brute force" problem. A lot of people prefer this to the above. In games where you are fully or mostly restored after each battle, I can't come up with a reason not to allow save-anywhere. The player still has to remember to save, though, which can get tedious to do after every battle - you can solve this by adding a Retry command to the game over screen, which may have it's own downsides?

Game over with automatic saving at checkpoints
This is kind of a middle ground between the above two. At first glance it doesn't seem that different from periodic save points aside from the fact that it's automatic and thus you don't have to remember to save. But in practice, this system is often used when you only have a small number of enemies between checkpoints. It changes the individual challenges from being entire dungeons full of battles to being rooms or corridors full of battles.

Respawn at nearby point without losing XP
FF6 does this. So does Earthbound. So do a lot of MMORPGs. Essentially here, you get sent back to the last save point or to the nearest church/graveyard or some other sort of nearby respawn point, and have to redo the battles between that point and where you died, but you get to keep any XP you got. So it's a little easier the second time. And if you die again, you'll have even more XP, so it'll be a little easier again the third time. And so forth. I find this to be extremely nice, myself, because it helps out players who are having trouble without making the game any easier for good players, and more importantly because it makes the time you spent not feel like a waste. Sometimes there's also a small penalty - usually gold, as payment for hospital fees or for reincarnation services or for armor repairs, but it's typically a trivial amount.

Respawn with heavy penalty
I've seen this used mostly in online games, such as FF11, but also in single-player games where the world "persists" through your death.

Delete saved game on death
This is as brutal as it gets. The idea here is that the only type of save that a player gets is a quicksave; you can save at any time, but the save is deleted upon loading your game. And if you die, you start the game over. As RPGs go, this is most popular in short games (Gauntlet, Desktop Dungeon) and in roguelikes such as Nethack. I guess the idea here is the whole "can't restart from the middle of a challenge" mentality taken to its logical extreme: the entire game is effectively a single nonstop challenge. To me the cost outweighs the benefit here so heavily that this option isn't even on the table. If you can justify the use of this in games longer than an hour, I'd love to hear your point of view.

Limited number of lives/continues
This is super rare in RPGs. Ultimately you have all the same problems as the above "delete saved games on death" method, but the player is less likely to encounter them. Some games play with spins on this, giving each character on your team a limited number of lives before they permanently leave the party (SaGa series), or giving the player a limited number of continues to retry the current battle and if you run out you have to reload from the beginning of the dungeon (Wild ARMs 3). If done right, this can make "cheap" deaths feel less cheap - because they don't feel like a complete death, they feel more like... losing some of your HP.

What are your favorites? Why? What are the biggest problems do you have with the others? Almost all of these have both good and bad points, so I guess it's largely a matter of which good points you value more and which bad points you find more irritating.

In a project I'm working in a team on, I had a game design conversation the other day that went something like this:

Other Designer: The problem with this game is that people are all the same at max level. People should get some reward for choosing a role and specializing in it.

Me: I'd agree in a game where you control a party of character, but you only get one character in this game. If you specialize in a role, you're permanently locked out of other roles.

Other designer: Exactly. People need to feel like they've created something unique, that anyone else who hits max level can't just switch a few settings around and do all the same things. In a game with over a lot of classes, the classes need to each provide something that you can only get from that class, and you need to be forced to pick one. It creates replay value.

Me: I completely disagree. I don't want replay value, because replay value is just another way of saying that the player irreversably loses out on things. I want to keep becoming more and more powerful. I want versatility. After 300 hours played, I don't want to have to start over for any reason. This is my character and I intend to keep using it until it can do everything. I'm attracted to games like FF5 and FF Tactics for exactly this reason: I can collect dozens and dozens of different powers that build upon each-other and are useful in all sorts of wild situations and eventually I'll have a mind-blowing array of options. I want to eventually be able to do everything: that's the whole point, to me, of a job system with so many possibilities. What's the advantage to being locked out of something?

Other designer: You can't just decide that for people. People who aren't you actually enjoy creating something unique. They enjoy having all their thought and planning and careful crafting of their character actually matter. If they can just collect everything by level 70 and then freely change between it all, there's no real customization. Everyone is the same and thus all those classes lose their charm. You're not a grand master monk or grand master archer or grand master samurai, you're just a max level generic dude. We need to add ways to let people choose one class and specialize in it, and ultimately become as powerful as if they directionlessly tossed themselves at every class.

I am heavily paraphrasing him and possibly misremembering or omitting parts of some points on account of not having a log of the actual conversation handy. Sorry, other designer. Hopefully I made you sound intelligent.

So, I was wondering what opinions other people had on this topic. These are two viewpoints that are at direct odds with each-other, and both seem to have merits: strong customization that is extremely difficult or impossible to reverse with the end goal of eventually mastering a specific role and building a unique character, vs. massive collection of all powers in the game with the end goal of eventually mastering the system itself and having maximum versatility. Do people have fond memories of games that allow one rather than the other? Do people find themselves drawn more to one type of game? Anyone have any other logical reasons in favor of either idea they want to discuss, or think the above points are flawed?

Anyone who just likes FF4-style games where you have no customization at all can probably just steer clear of this topic.