[MUD-Dev] Maintaining fiction.

[Paul Schwanz - Enterprise Services]

Neil Brown replied:
> Trump <trump at vividvideo.com> wrote:

>>  I was spurred to write this by the discussion of perma death on
>>  MUD-Dev a while back, but forgot to actually post it....

> Let me say up front that I think this is a great post, and most of
> the differences of opinion I'm expressing here are due to underlying
> project goals rather than subjective "right-or-wrongness".  I'm
> using it as a backdrop for the neverending design battle between the
> forces of fun and those of realism that we're having to fight while
> designing our game.  The game is a commercial MMORPG ( if you'll
> allow it to be called an RPG when I'm through ;) with the
> mass-market in mind, and consequently we have to take into account
> as many of the different player types as possible. Writing an
> insanely popular RP-only MMOG is probably a dream that a lot of
> people here would like to realize, but in reality the mass-market
> playerbase just doesn't seem to fit well into the RP mold.

> During our design sessions we constantly come up with great ideas
> that would add realism to our game, and the vast majority of the
> time those ideas fall victim to one of three frustrating conditions:


I don't think that realism should be necessarily pursued for its own
sake, but "realistic" solutions will likely be seen as much more
intuitive and believable, certainly providing a greater chance for
immersion that less realistic solutions.  Additionally, where we are
attempting to solve the same sort of problems with constructing a
world or facilitating community that have already been solved by
reality's Designer or addressed by real societies, I think we would be
wise to take note.

>   1) Something I'll call "learning curve baggage" - The player must
>   learn how to manipulate this particular stat/skill/item/rule in
>   order to be successful in the game, while at the same time the
>   "fun factor" of the game doesn't increase at all - it's just busy
>   work.  Realistic busy work, but busy work nonetheless. We've
>   attempted at each occurrence to find a balance between realism and
>   gameplay, but it's often a subjective decision whose results will
>   probably need to be tweaked or removed during testing.


Perhaps the solution would be to implement realism while allowing the
player to choose whether to pursue it from a player or a character
perspective.  In other words, if the player is interested in learning
the details of forging a sword from scratch and managing the process
in keeping with their character's current skill level, let them.  On
the other hand, if they are not interested or have grown tired of the
detail work, let them instruct their character to manage the details
for them.  In this way, the fun factor will increase for some, but
others are not forced to do busy work *as a player*.

>   2) "Exploitability" - How easily the creative player can use this
>   feature to gain easy exp/wealth/whatever with little or no risk to
>   himself/time invested. People will take the easiest path they can
>   find to achieve their desired results and players will gain
>   advantage through any loopholes or shortcuts they can find in your
>   game.  It always seems like if we just added realism in a couple
>   more areas that the original problem would go away, but inevitably
>   this leads to a realism feature cascades until you're trying to
>   simulate the real world entirely just to account for all the
>   variables.  This is, of course, unlikely to be accomplished by us,
>   so removing the offending exploitable feature becomes the other
>   alternative.  However, in that direction lies a flat,
>   uninteresting game world where everything is simple and static.
>   This is unlikely to generate any player interest in the game, and
>   hence revenue for us, so it's also not what we're looking for.
>   Ouch.  Welcome to game design.


I'm interested in the assumption that gains should be tied closely to
risk and time invested.  This seems like an intuitive approach and
probably one that I would take myself, but perhaps the concept bears
further exploration.  Why should gains be tied to risk and time
invested?  (And should these investments be character or player
centric?)  Is this something inherent in games, or is it more a
reflection of our real-world experience insinuating itself into our
game design?  I tend to suspect it is the latter.  In other words, it
seems that you might be saying that some implementations of systems
intended to promote realism actually end up detracting from realism in
other areas.

Your "realism feature cascade" is also an interesting concept.  I'd
like to hear more about it.  Do you have some design examples?

Are we sure that realism is the problem and not that we just haven't
yet nailed down a good design for certain systems within the game?

>   3) The "Ass Factor" - How will the grief players use this feature
>   to annoy or otherwise corrupt the gaming experience for others.
>   Sadly, this one seems to come up most often, and usually in
>   addition to at least one of the other two. I'd pay top dollar for
>   a reliable grief-player auto-ban system, since I have yet to be
>   able to code up any Matrix-like anti-grief "Agent" software myself
>   ;)


Societies have spent thousands of years tackling the grief problem.  I
suspect the student of history and social engineering will come
closest to limiting its effect on their virtual world.  Unfortunately,
a universal solution still eludes society, but I suspect that most
gamers would settle for levels of grief that more closely reflect the
real world.  It seems that online gaming reveals a human nature more
reminiscent of Golding's _Lord of the Flies_ than of Brooke Shield's
_Blue Lagoon_.  :-P

>>  Fake death is a fiction breaker.  The most important reason to
>>  want to have perma death is to keep the all important fiction
>>  alive (We are talking about RPGs here right?)  I guess you really
>>  need to decide early on how important RP is to your game.  Most
>>  games which profess to be RPGs are really just adventure games(AG)
>>  in a fantasy setting.

> Agreed.  Fake death is a fiction breaker.  However, real death is a
> fun-breaker for a lot of players, especially the casual gamers.  We
> need to keep those players interested in our game and not feeling
> like they've just wasted a month of their time because all their
> hard work just got his head chopped off by that hill giant they
> didn't see while they were on their way back to town for the night.


I think there are a number of issues here.

First of all, as a system, resurrection functions almost exactly like
the "save game" feature of a single-player game.  It is impossible to
save the entire world-state in a persistent multi-player world and let
a single player revert to that world state like we would expect in a
single player world.  So instead, in effect, resurrection is a kluge
to let the player save their character state and revert back to that
character state should misfortune befall them.  The function is very
similar.  Both are a means of overcoming temporal irreversibility, the
effect of which is to lessen the momentous nature of decisions, by
making consequences somewhat avoidable.

Is this a good thing?

Personally, I don't particularly care for the way we do it.  It seems
like we do a sort of 'bait and switch' routine, although that isn't an
entirely appropriate analogy.  It isn't really that consequences are
avoidable in most cases, but we *act* like there are certain
consequences while we all know (wink, wink) that the *real*
consequences are much different.

  "Oh no!  Your character died!  Isn't this terrible and dramatic!" 

  (wink, wink) 

  "Psst.  You can revert to a saved game or resurrect and receive only
  a negligible penalty for your 'momentous' decision to attack a
  Balrog."

Bleah.

On the other hand, I haven't seen many successful single-player RPG's
released without some sort of save game feature.  It seems that the
more a game is based around a goal of progressing slowly over an
extended period of time (although I'd like to point out that I don't
find conceptualizing an RPG that doesn't take this approach especially
challenging), the more there is a requirement that a player not be
sent back to square one.  Also, those who approach the game from a
more experimental perspective (i.e. "What happens when I attack a
Balrog?") are not as interested in being faced with momentous
decisions.  So in some (many? most?) cases, temporal irreversibility
seems like a bad design choice, but I still find myself pining for
more momentous decisions in role-playing games.

Secondly, even if you do decide that you want to lessen consequences
or give your players some sort of ability to turn back the clock, the
resurrection kluge is not the only one available.  It seems to me that
it would require little brainpower or creativity to come up with a
kluge that actually fits into your game fiction.  For that matter, if
dying is too harsh a consequence for a certain character shortcoming
or player mistake, then don't have the character die.  Isn't this much
more straightforward than *acting* like the character dies, but...oh
wait...not really.  Or, you could have a lineage approach to
characters so that a dead character's prodigies are playable.

Thirdly, while character death isn't fun, this is not to say that it
cannot be enjoyed at some level of entertainment.  Hamlet isn't fun,
but it has contributed immensely to fans of literature.  Is Hamlet
mass-market?  Probably not, but it has demonstrated an ability to
endure beyond many mass-market fads.  As a designer, I'd like to
aspire to something closer to Hamlet than Pokemon.  As a player, I
have a similar desire to experience something closer to Hamlet.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, in large part, our need to
lessen consequences for players stems from our failure to allow them
to better manage their character's risks.  Why didn't the player "see"
the hill giant?  Why didn't he know it was there?  Why were there no
indications or warnings to help the player manage risks?  Are there no
skeletons strewn about warning of the danger?  Does the hill giant
make no rumbling calls or lumbering noises.  Don't the little
creatures around go scurrying for cover?  Why is the hill giant
interested in lopping off a non-aggressive character's head in the
first place?  Can't the character outrun the hill giant?  Are there
ways for a character to grow or for a player to reach his goals that
don't involve venturing into hill giant infested areas?

Well, if we did all those things, the character would *never*
die...and what fun would that be?  :P

> As our game is designed to have shards, we've toyed with the idea of
> having a perma-death shard just to see how popular it is, and what
> sort of feedback we get from people who play on it ( and how much of
> a customer service nightmare it is).  I suspect it would be a waste
> of hardware, but perhaps someone who has tried it in a commercial
> venture can enlighten me with some real examples.

I suspect that if the entire game were not designed with perma death
in mind, such an experiment would be disastrous.

[snip]

>>  My thought is that games like this should not be allowed to call
>>  themselves RPGs.  In order to actually have an RPG you must keep
>>  in character at all times.  NEVER break character.  This starts
>>  with the failings of the devs and bleeds into the minds of the
>>  players.  When you refer to a monsters as a MOB you are breaking
>>  character.  Players start talking about MOBs too.  It's no longer
>>  the evil zombie who must be thwarted, it's now just a level 2 MOB
>>  worth 100xp and drops 2-5 gold.  There is no roleplay there.

> I don't think the mass-market really follows this hardcore
> definition of what an RPG is.  It seems like If the game has a
> character with equipment, stats, levels, and things to kill, then
> it's an RPG, whether you're forced to speak in high Victorian
> English or not.

I don't think Trump is primarily focusing on forcing players to do
anything, especially not speak Victorian English.  I thought his
comments here were much more focused on how the developers approached
the virtual experience, not the players.  I agree with both points.
Developers doing everything they can to maintain the fiction of their
virtual world is a good thing...forcing players to speak Victorian
English is probably not.

>>  Seeing that you have 415 of 533 hit points left is BAD.  How can
>>  you suspend disbelief and just roleplay when you know that a sword
>>  does 12-14 damage and you have 40 hit points?  Suddenly someone
>>  hitting you with it isnt scary anymore.  It's just math.  Give
>>  some feedback, but hide the numbers.  If they are found out, so
>>  what, but dont put them out there for everyone to see.

> I agree that numbers can draw player focus where you don't want it,
> but giving the proper feedback can be difficult to handle unless you
> don't mind bars of bubbles or graphical depiction of some sort.  We
> have not yet addressed which approach we will use in our game, but
> it's going to be either bars or numbers. Simply giving a text
> message like "You scratched/sliced/hit/crushed/smashed/obliterated
> the Wee Green Blobbie" isn't enough feedback IMHO, and since we're
> trying to keep this available to the mass-market, an ESRP rating of
> "E" ( Everyone: Ages 6 and up - ok, maybe we're dreaming here ;)
> would be nice - at most "T" ( Teen: ages 13 or over. Violence, mild
> graphic language ), so that means graphical representations like
> open wounds, missing limbs, or visible viscera (alliterated gibs,
> for those quake players out there :) is just not possible.  So,
> we're left with bars and numbers.  I think we'll probably go with
> some combination of the two.


For graphic games, I agree that text descriptions are not ideal.  In
fact, I'd expand that to say that I don't think that text based quest
or plot developments are ideal either.  For some reason, when I am
playing a graphically based game, I feel that I am suspending my play
to read text.  Maybe that's just me, though.

On the other hand, if we are trying to lessen consequences to
something that fits well into the fiction of our world, maybe
alliterated gibs and flying limbs are a bit over the top anyway.  Why
does everything have to be a blood-squirting event?  What about simply
having a character drop what they have equipped in a hand whose arm
has taken a certain level of damage.  Perhaps the arm could sort of
drop to their side and hang limply.  Maybe a character whose leg is
wounded performs an animation in which its leg buckles and then it
regains its balance, but demonstrates less mobility.

[more snippage]

I agree that there should be a much greater range of win/lose
scenarios.  I'd like to see a "yield" option where the character is
fighting an intelligent opponent.  When I realize that I've lost a
fight with a superior opponent, I should definitely have the option to
surrender instead of forfeiting my life.  Heck, why not have the
ability to offer terms of surrender.

  Bandit */evaluates traveler and sees he has a purse with 1000 gold pieces*
  Bandit *jumps from bushes to surprise a rich merchant*
  Bandit:  Hand me your purse and no one gets hurt.

Bandit clicks on "offer terms" button.  An interface pops up and he
selects the coin purse he had previously "/evaluated" on his mark.
The merchant sees the offer, presented to him with a "yield" button.

  Merchant:  I will yield if you will take but 100 gold pieces.
  Bandit *eyes merchant's fat purse*
  Bandit:  I think your life is worth quite a bit more than that.
  Merchant:  200 gold pieces and not a penny more.
  Bandit *pulls sword*
  Bandit:  Sorry, not enough.  Have at you, then!
  Merchant:  OK!  I yield my entire purse.

Merchant clicks on "accept terms" button. Neither he nor the bandit
can attack each other for a game-engine specified time period (2 RL
hours?), although the merchant may still report the incident (IC) to
authorities.

Or, the bandit might have decided it was worth the 200 gold pieces to
avoid risking a battle.

  Merchant:  200 gold pieces and not a penny more.
  Bandit:  Let me see the gold.

Merchant clicks on "reject terms" button to close out first interface,
then clicks on his own "offer yield" button and drags 200 gold pieces
into the interface.  Bandit clicks on "accept yield" and once again,
neither he nor the merchant can attack each other for a specified time
period, but the merchant may still report the crime.

Rejecting an offer of total surrender from a person who is not the
aggressor in a conflict might have very dire consequences if allowed
at all.  So, if the bandit simply attacked and the merchant decided to
"offer unconditional yield" to avoid losing his life, it should be
strongly in the bandit's self interests to accept this offer.

Anyway, I just thought I'd add a couple of ideas to the discussion.

--Phinehas

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