The problem with RPGs

[MKSheppard]

The description of 'well done evil' doesn't sound like evil at all. Multiple approaches are good, consequences are good, childish black/white choices are bad.

The problem I'm seeing in Mass Effect (still playing through so no ultimate spoilers please); is that a bunch of the dialogue/action options....while funny, seem to just be there to antagonize NPCs pointlessly; just so you can earn SUPERDICK points.

The same problem was also in Fallout 1, way back when. You had some pretty nice dialogue options, which were effectively pointless because they were auto-combat triggers.

It was easier to be the good guy, rather than Mr. Vault-suited-Superdick, particularly at the beginning of the game when you were still weak as a puppy.

One example of the black/white morality you like to talk about all the time STRAK, is slavery. It's always presented in Falloutverse as gangs of marauding raiders in assless chaps grabbing people and selling them into slavery, which is something automatically repugnant to 99% of humanity.

On the other hand, if you presented most slavery in your universe as a form of debt-servitude; e.g. selling your services as an indentured servant to emigrate to a new world; or paying off a particularly harsh judical sentence -- e.g. the Judge ordered you to pay x thousand quatloos to someone you wronged; and even after selling your goods, you came up y thousand short...

You'd get more players actually picking the "serves you right" option in dialogue.

[Stark]

Yeah, it's played for laughs which is what the guy are talking about. You get a 'hilarious' dialog response back, +5 faction to grumpyguts, and then the narrative continues totally ignoring what you just did.

At the start of ME2 you get a choice between 'good' and 'evil' ways to tell a guy to get into an escape pod, which are basically 'hey dude serious, you better leave' and 'YOU ARE MY SLAVE I'M GOING TO RAPE YOUR CHILDREN AND BAKE THEIR SKINS INTO MEATY MEATY PIES, YOU HAT FULL OF SHIT AND I HATE YOU AS WELL'. Net affect on interpersonal relationships = zero.

At the same time, in ME1 you're an extrajudical murderer with superlegal powers to do whatever the fuck, and you still have to hand over your guns to local cops. It'd be WAY TOO HARD to railroad the player if they could actually just say 'no get bent idiot' - so you say 'I AM TOUGH RAH SO MEAN AND MANLY AND HUGE ALSO I DISLIKE YOU' and do it anyway.

You want non-lame morality/dialog, don't play a Bioware or Beth game, its that simple.

[PeZook]

Okay. 1) That doesn't follow. If you're more rewarded for the "evil" path, it is by definition more satisfying because you get more out of it, unless you're using a very different definition of "reward".

The idea would be the evil path would be easier or give you more loot, so you can pat yourself on the back for resisting and taking the "good" path instead?

Yes!

Exactly this. In Alpha Protocol, you can do many heinous things. If you do them, you often gain allies/favors/resources that will help you in your fight against the global conspiracy, but you let bad men go, and do horrible things to good men. Not all of these bite you in the ass later, even: sometimes it's strangers you don't know that get hurt. Other times you lose some allies but gain others, more ruthless ones. Sometimes it turns out backstabbing a person was worth it, because they were actually trying to do the same to you.

The key here is that you do all that to stop WWIII, so you can justify chosing the lesser evil. That makes the "evil" route viable, because most players are not murderous dickheads and feel bad when they get the cartoonishly evil option in an RPG. If the "evil" option can be self-justified, and the writing will then make you feel bad about chosing it later, it's the evil path done properly.

Of course, you could just not do binary black/white choices at all, and merely have consequences happen. Some consequences would be unquestionably positive, some grayish, others horrible. Some should be foreseeable, others not. And sometimes there should be no good choice at all.

[Academia Nut]

On the other hand, if you presented most slavery in your universe as a form of debt-servitude; e.g. selling your services as an indentured servant to emigrate to a new world; or paying off a particularly harsh judical sentence -- e.g. the Judge ordered you to pay x thousand quatloos to someone you wronged; and even after selling your goods, you came up y thousand short...

You'd get more players actually picking the "serves you right" option in dialogue.

Nah, not even that. The problem is that the slaves are *always* innocent. If you want to do a real moral quandry for the player, present them with a choice like this:

They have been hired to take out a band of marauders preying on a local community, and after wiping out a significant number of them the rest, along with their dependants, surrender. Now you have a problem and a big one. You can't let them go or they will just find weapons again and go back to their plundering and pillaging ways, but you can't just imprison them either because they would be an unbearable drain on the resources of the community. In an ancient/feudal/post apocalyptic world if a community tries to support even a few dozen unproductive members locked away doing nothing and the guards to keep them in-line, they will starve to death first. So the only option that doesn't involve killing them all means putting the captives to work so that they can be productive enough to pay for the food they are consuming. Of course, if you choose the 'forced POW labour' route, well, this was a whole tribe of raiders and they also have women and children who will also need to earn their keep, but they are loyal to the former raiders so you can't exactly give them unlimited freedom either. And just letting them loose is probably less merciful than shooting them.

That's what you need to do if you want to build actual, interesting moral dilemmas. Place the player in a situation where the confines of the scenario and scarcity of resources requires a choice between things like slavery or genocide. And if you want to say go out of your way to be a saint, you quite literally have to go out of your way to do things like find the resources so that you can support everyone without requiring slave labour, by say completing other contracts that give you enough resources to pay for the humane imprisonment of the defeated raiders, thereby essentially taking resources that you personally could have used to support guys who were previously trying to kill you. Depending on the setting, you might be supporting them in relative luxury too since they don't have to work to survive!

Again, evil should be about expediency and the accumulation of power, while good should be about doing things for their own reward, because that is how the world works. Of course, there can (and should!) be in-game social effects for good deeds, like a reputation for mercy, kindness, and honesty getting you improved relations with certain NPCs. Even stuff like easier battles because your enemies are more willing to surrender to you because they know they will be treated fairly, whereas if you are a cruel, heartless slaver they will fight to the death to not be taken captive by you.

[Bakustra]

Why are you making slavery the focus of your moral dilemma, rather than something which isn't immediately repugnant? I'd respond much better to a subtler situation than "ENSLAVE OR DIE", which is frankly eye-rolling in being so blatantly contrived as a situation to make slavery tenable. Because there's always the choice of turning the game off, or just clicking "enslave" and rolling my eyes at it. Because that's not really a mature moral decision.

[Stark]

The responses or actions themselves can fuck any scenario - stuff like Bioware 'give the criminal one million dollars and a blowjob' or 'destroy criminals entire species and eat the bodies' can make the most carefully crafted dubious scenario a total waste of time. It's cheap for games to force players into binary decisions made with a single step, but it's easier to make branches that way so it's what you get. Even Witcher was guilty of this, but it let things build up beforehand so it wasn't as bad as Mass Effect.

[PeZook]

Writing can amend some of that. Sure, in Witcher had you, say, make a binary choice with the witch at the start, but it left things ambiguous enough that the choice felt significant and gray. Alpha Protocol had you decide whether to let Nasri go , shoot or bring him in, and the bad consequences were a news report at the end, etc.

Mass Effect, beyond the sillyness of renegade/paragon, also had the problem with options being like:

1. Come on, Joker!
2. We have to go
3. Move it!

Coming out to:

1. Joker, there ship is on fire, you can't save it. We must go!
2. There is no time, Joker!
3. YOU STUPID FUCKER MOVE IT OR I'LL PUNCH YOU OUT AND BREAK BOTH YOUR LEGS MOTHERFUCKER!

So you never know if the renegade speech option will be something like "I have no time for bullshit, go away" or "Shoot the guy in the face"

[Civil War Man]

Why are you making slavery the focus of your moral dilemma, rather than something which isn't immediately repugnant? I'd respond much better to a subtler situation than "ENSLAVE OR DIE", which is frankly eye-rolling in being so blatantly contrived as a situation to make slavery tenable. Because there's always the choice of turning the game off, or just clicking "enslave" and rolling my eyes at it. Because that's not really a mature moral decision.

In the Bioware Star Wars MMO that's coming out, there's a quest where you get Light Side points for poisoning the enemy's water supply. Because the Dark Side option is putting a small enough dose that they spend a week vomiting up their internal organs before they die anyway.

Of course, it is a game where the karma meter has become an almost completely vestigial feature. From what I've read, the only effect of it is determining whether you can wield red lightsabers and wear spiky armor.

[Darksider]

Isn't that quest for Sith Characters who souldn't have "light side options" in the first place?

[Stark]

I think you're thinking a little too high-concept for Bioware, there.

[Darksider]

So it's too "high-concept" for Bioware to realize on of the key concepts of the Star Wars universe?

[Vendetta]

It lies outside of their paradigm.

In Bioware games, there is a morality bar. Quest actions give you points to one side of it or the other.

That is simply how it is.

hey have been hired to take out a band of marauders preying on a local community, and after wiping out a significant number of them the rest, along with their dependants, surrender. Now you have a problem and a big one. You can't let them go or they will just find weapons again and go back to their plundering and pillaging ways, but you can't just imprison them either because they would be an unbearable drain on the resources of the community.

All this does is highlight some more of the problems with RPGs in the poor construction of the scenario. The first problem being that there must apparently be a near infinite quantity of things for the player to punch, because how else do they gain XP if not by serial slaughter? Meaning that there are, generally, 17 bandits/raiders/whatevers for every townsperson.

In your scenario, if the band of raiders is so large that even after wiping out the majority of their fighting men they cannot be handled by the community who hired you to do the deed, how the hell did they manage to support themselves? If they took all they needed by raiding the tribe of the Fuzzy Wuzzies* who hired you and were such a numerous tribe then the Fuzzy Wuzzies would have been starved out years ago. If they raided many different local tribes, then their reduced numbers are no problem because they can simply be left to their own devices, their predations now insignificant to any of the tribes around them, if they also supported themselves through farming/scavenging/whatever is appropriate to the setting, then without the majority of their fighting men this is now what they will be doing and again they can be left to their own devices.


* This is the other problem. Scenarios like this rely on the bad people being wholly bad and the good people being so fluffy and nice they simply cannot defend themselves, with probably one town guard who's only a guard because he took an arrow in the knee. Realistically, the tribe of the Fuzzy Wuzzies would also be capable fighters, otherwise their world would have swallowed them whole long before Billy the Destined Hero came along, and you would simply be altering the balance of power to the state that they can capably defend themselves.

So, to construct a more satisfying scenario out of this: There is an aggressive and warlike tribe surrounded by mostly peaceable neighbours, they raid all of their neighbours to supplement their own farming (which is poor because they have crap soil). Their neighbours fight back, but this is costly and inconvenient, so one of their tribes hire Billy, known for his reputation for slaughtering thousands before lunchtime, to help. Billy can either cut a swathe through the marauders in his signature style, mauling them badly enough that their raids are a mere nuisance that the tribes around them can easily fend off, form an alliance between the various towns which overwhelms the raiding tribe and cows or destroys them, or simply ignore them and wander off to find more interesting faces to punch.

When Billy comes back a few years later, the world has evolved somewhat. If he personally slaughtered the marauding tribe they're still there, and they still raid the others, but no-one cares any more because their raids are so small that they're not worth fussing over. If he forged the alliance, the raiding tribe is neutered completely, they can't even raid, and they're essentially the bitch of the tribes around them, who have grown politically closer and are becoming a minor regional power (maybe they are flexing their muscles and thinking about duffing up some other tribes now). If he did nothing, the tribe of the Fuzzy Wuzzies eventually tooled up to the point that they dealt with the raiders by themeselves, but they have become less trusting of outsiders and don't have fond memories of Billy.

It wasn't hard to come up with that. It would certainly put more of a strain on development than the current "choose one of good/evil solution then forget it all because the scope of the game is too limited to have consequences beyond what loot I get", and it requires the game to have timeskips like Dragon Age 2 or Fable 2 so that the world could be advanced along this path, but having this type of consequence system where nothing is the "good" choice and nothing is the "evil" choice, they're just different ways of approaching a problem which have different outcomes. Good/Evil binary choice is a cancer on modern RPGs.

[Civil War Man]

It doesn't really "realize on key concepts", though. Without context, it sounds like they are, but Sith do have legitimate "light side options" in other quests. Including multiple instances of sparing the lives of defeated enemies for no appreciable gain, where your character would probably be summarily executed if those enemies were ever discovered to be alive.

Some of the things that give you light or dark side points are pretty arbitrary. For example, one Republic Trooper quest gives you light side points for agreeing to do something that your commanding officer just ordered you to do. Even if it is a good deed, you are acting under orders. Another quest in the same area gives you dark side points if you choose to give medical supplies to injured soldiers instead of homeless children.

The arbitrary nature of some of the actions that give you light/dark side points is balanced out by alignment being purely cosmetic. Being a Light Side Sith or a Dark Side Jedi doesn't lock you out of powers or your class plot or anything. It just means you can't wear the equipment of the opposite alignment, which is strictly for appearance since there's light and dark side equipment available to both factions and the best stuff can be fully modded anyway.

[Bakustra]

It doesn't really "realize on key concepts", though. Without context, it sounds like they are, but Sith do have legitimate "light side options" in other quests. Including multiple instances of sparing the lives of defeated enemies for no appreciable gain, where your character would probably be summarily executed if those enemies were ever discovered to be alive.

Some of the things that give you light or dark side points are pretty arbitrary. For example, one Republic Trooper quest gives you light side points for agreeing to do something that your commanding officer just ordered you to do. Even if it is a good deed, you are acting under orders. Another quest in the same area gives you dark side points if you choose to give medical supplies to injured soldiers instead of homeless children.

The arbitrary nature of some of the actions that give you light/dark side points is balanced out by alignment being purely cosmetic. Being a Light Side Sith or a Dark Side Jedi doesn't lock you out of powers or your class plot or anything. It just means you can't wear the equipment of the opposite alignment, which is strictly for appearance since there's light and dark side equipment available to both factions and the best stuff can be fully modded anyway.

Hmm. What IF we changed more about a future Dragon Age than you might like? Quel horreur!

I imagine it would look something like this:

Stage 1: Denial
Posts of "no, it can't be true!" and "maybe they didn't mean what we think it means!"

Stage 2: Anger
As the truth sinks in, posts of "Bioware, you have betrayed all that is good and righteous!" and furious predictions of financial collapse and boycotts, etc. etc.

Stage 3: Bargaining
Hopeful posts of "Well, if we don't get X will we still get Y?" and "Well, since there's still Z maybe X won't seem that bad" or even "Will we be able to change X ourselves?"

Stage 4: Depression
"Bioware is dead", "RPG's are dead", etc. ad nauseum as that glorious, scintillating might-have-been is now really gone.

and finally Stage 5: Acceptance
You see whatever game it is for what it actually is and enjoy it on its own terms.

or, alternatively Stage 5: Acceptance
You realize it's not the game for you, but might be for other people. You move on.

or, if you really must, you go back to Stage 1: Denial
You refuse to accept the presence of X in your beloved game, or any game for that matter, and begin a bitter campaign to convince everyone else that it is the travesty you think it is. If you play the game, you are determined to hate it-- and voila! You do! Possibly you hang out on RPG Codex.

...at least, that's how it usually happens. Or so I've found over the years.

Yes! This! You guys have no idea how cute Merrill is. I work here and and I still squee when she says things I haven't heard.

There's a lot of this in the writer pit:

Merrill (in-game): (something unbelievably cute)
Sheryl: GIGGLESQUEE!!!!! SO CUTE!!!
Mary: Hee hee.
Sheryl: She's so adorable I love her and want to hug her omgIcan'tbelievehowadorablesheisCAN-I-NOM-HER-HEAD?!
Mary: ... No.

This should explain everything about Bioware writing, since they hired these people and continue to employ them.

[Stark]

It should also explain Bioware's approach to continuity and their attitude toward the audience.

[D.Turtle]

This should explain everything about Bioware writing, since they hired these people and continue to employ them.

I like the following quote from Jennifer Brandes Hepler, one of the writers of Dragon Age 2 even better:

Q: What is your least favorite thing about working in the industry?

A: Playing the games. This is probably a terrible thing to admit, but it has definitely been the single most difficult thing for me. I came into the job out of a love of writing, not a love of playing games... I'm really terrible at so many things which most games use incessantly -- I have awful hand-eye coordination, I don't like tactics, I don't like fighting, I don't like keeping track of inventory, and I can't read a game map to save my life.

She hates games, but writes for them ...

Or how about this quote from David Gaider - the lead writer of Dragon Age 2:

Well, I think Twilight is far more effective with its romantic elements than most people give it credit for. Granted, it has little else going for it-- but the romance it does well. I find it a fascinating exercise to analyze exactly why that is (which I do for many romances... thankfully Cori is a giant romance movie buff).

Twilight? Effective romance?

I mean, this is their approach to RPGs:

What can you expect from that?

[Stark]

Are you saying fundamental problems with approach or mechs is are related to hiriing writers that don't play games and selling DLC?

How long should they test a writer's gaming skills before they let them write anything?

Frankly, creative direction is not set by writers. The actual content of dialog isnt as important as the high level decisions like 'two bars for faction' and 'plot has three branches'.

[D.Turtle]

What would you say to a movie script writer who says he hates movies? Or a "normal" writer, who hates reading books?

If you hate a particular medium, you will probably not be very good at writing for that medium.

Good writing can make high level decisions like "plot has three branches" or "two bars for faction" still result in a good story and good immersion. I mean there are tons of games out there that have very good, immersive stories, despite being linear (for example).

[Stofsk]

What would you say to a movie script writer who says he hates movies? Or a "normal" writer, who hates reading books?

That's actually not at all analogous to what she said. She said she hates playing games, not that she hates games or writing for games.

What would work better as an analogy is a screenwriter or author saying that they hated watching films or reading novels. The latter would probably be more egregious but I can easily see a screenwriter go 'You know, I actually don't like watching movies. Writing them is fine but actually sitting in a dark room for a couple of hours doesn't strike me as enjoyable.'

Or a better example is how many actors are asked what they think of their performance, and they say something like 'actually I don't like watching myself on the screen so I can't really answer that question.'

Basically you're turning a statement and concluding the wrong thing from it. Writing for games does not equal to actually playing them, and I can see how someone who is writing for a game may not even be interested in the gameplay mechanics of it at all. Hell look at the specific complaints she makes about playing games:

I'm really terrible at so many things which most games use incessantly -- I have awful hand-eye coordination, I don't like tactics, I don't like fighting, I don't like keeping track of inventory, and I can't read a game map to save my life.

A lot of that has nothing to do with writing a plot and having great characters and meaningful motivations and themes and ideas and so on. It's 'hey I hate playing inventory tetris' and 'I don't know a thing about tactics beyond selecting all my dudes to hit on that one bad guy'.

[Stark]

You can't blame the writer for stuff like Bioware's joke evil or retcons or whatever anyway, because they don't decide that sort of thing. They just write dialog or quests, and 'playing a lot of games' doesn't somehow make you better at either of those things.

And frankly linear games (like Halflife, or Metro or whatever) are so much easier to write for it isn't funny. Its only when you decide to give the player choice that you need to take a sophisticated and sensitive approach to acheiving that.

[Coalition]

So a good choice would be buying the overpriced items from a merchant. An evil choice would be killing the merchant, getting several dozen of each item for free, but the merchant is gone from that location for the rest of the game (or just hides whenever you come into town)?

Another idea might be where in town the character will be pick-pocketed (unless they do the 'good' thing and deal with the pickpockets), unless there is enough police presence. If the character kills the police presence, the number of pickpockets will increase, but also the houses can be broken into. Including the character's house, so he can store stuff in there, but when he comes back the door is open and the stuff is gone. If they store their stuff in the woods, there is a chance that some sentient critter could take or, or a larger critter decides to burn down the home (or the people hired to build the home tell the city where it is as the guards repossess everything there). The good option would be killing the major threats to the town, and using their gold to make a 'jobs' program, and donate to various poor. This benefits the town, both from removing the threats to the town, and helping out the poor.

If you get the economy working well enough, you could actually model current economy, and see what the results would be of raising the tax rates and giving money to the wealthier people.

[Stofsk]

Get away from black/white binary good/evil 'choices'. They often end up being 'oh you poor little orphan here have a gold piece, don't go spending it all at once now' to 'fuck you buddy i got mine; matter of fact I'm going to put you kids to work in a slave mine so I can whip a few more dollars out of you before you die'.

If you want a great morality/alignment system, the Witcher and Alpha Protocol. Bar none. The Witcher had the idea where you make a decision and hours later you discover that it had unintended consequences. WHOA A MORALITY CHOICE MIGHT HAVE UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES???? Revolutionary!

And Alpha Protocol was more about 'well do I want to be friends with this guy? Can he help me? Can he give me what I want? If I help him out would that make other people angry at me?' That and the whole idea that you can be friends or enemies with your handlers, and it doesn't actually mean a party break like you would get in old-school RPGs. Oh you and Yancy hate each other? Well he's still your handler so... suck it up sunshine.

[Bakustra]

Also, you don't necessarily need a choice for every fucking character unless you've only got a handful of them in the game. Choices should be meaningful, not taken every time you talk to some dipshit with swords for sale.

[Stark]

People talked about the rewards for branching earlier, but I agree that this is not a helpful way to look at it. It might make sense to do it that way - especially in games driven by loot or leveling - until you look at it from the other side and see that it just means you're holding a sword hostage. Its the same whether you use a global counter like Bioware or Bethesda or a faction- or character-specific one - whatever your intention, players are aware of the system and will simply game it to get what they want, pretty much immediately removing any dramatic impact it could have on the story or the player.

Witcher worked well by spacing out consequences but also personalising the situations - instead of 'do you release the rachni that nearly destroyed sentient life or do you brutally exterminate it forever DUN DUN DUN', it took a simple situation like 'do you let the terrorists take the weapons' and personlised it, by making literally everyone in the game a bigot, by making the terrorists themselves giant antagonistic wankers, and by linking this choice directly to something the player would later be doing. Take the 'good' path? Well it turns out that decision wasn't very 'good' after all. This worked so well that the story actually had my changing sides midway, simply because individual characters made the decisions more complex. Help one faction? Easy. Help that faction when you know it will result in the death of someone you think is a good person? Different. Challenging. Interesting. Not hostage magic sword required.

In AP they simply dropped the idea of direct rewards and linked hte plots in such a complex way that you could actually role-play and get sensitive responses. Let a guy go? Great, you get different prices on loot that doesn't matter, and later you can just choose to kill him anyway. But in that time, everything in the game reacts to what you did, and even your own character can respond in different ways. I think the core of this was limiting the number of characters so that it was practical to have such a huge density of different speeches and responses (such that I was still seeing new stuff after 4 playthroughs) and by making player choices not GOOD and BAD and OH I DUNNO, but simply attitudes, and then encouraging the player to constantly change. The player can change response style in a conversation without massively jumping from a group therapist giving hugs to a rapist. You can basically play the entire game with one response style wihtout any real penalty, but the others enable character work and different options and indirect rewards.

Both of those approaches ended up with players making decisions based on something more complex and less childish than 'if I open door #1 I get a magic sword, but if I open #2 I get a different cutscene and an achievement'. Anything that is single step, whether its kill merchants causes inflation or releases slaves causes global warming, will never be interesting.

[PeZook]

AP even rewarded you for switching attitudes (both with perks, and sometimes with being able to manipulate people to do what you want).