Awhile back I wrote “Treasure Maps & The Unknown: Goals in the Megadungeon“. This post is just a simple streamlining of an idea that was running throughout that essay:

If an RPG rewards you for a specific tactical method, that method will be preferred and sought out. For example, if the game rewards you only for combat, that provides a strong motivation to seek out combat. There will still be some strategic thought employed (as one differentiates between “challenges that can be overcome” and “shit that’s too tough for us”), but the tactical method being rewarded will be strong pre-selected.

If you shift the game’s reward to a strategic goal, on the other hand, then players are free to pursue any tactical method for achieving that goal. As a result, you game will be more flexible and, in my opinion, more interesting.

Actually, as I write this, I realize this principle probably applies beyond RPGs. For example, Chess provides only one reward (winning the game) and it only awards it when a strategic goal has been achieved (achieving checkmate). Imagine if Chess instead rewarded points based on capturing pieces. The entire focus of the game would be narrowed. And what if the game preferentially rewarded capturing pieces with your Rook instead of your Bishop? The focus of the game would become even more limited.

In a similar fashion,victory in Twilight Imperium is achieved when a player reaches 10 victory points. Virtually every reward in the game is a strategic one (which can be achieved using a variety of tactics depending on the circumstances of the game). The exception? One of the strategy cards gives the player picking it 2 victory points. This specific reward for a tactical method (“pick the Imperial Strategy card”) warps the game by “forcing” everyone to pursue that tactical method. The problem was so significant that Fantasy Flight Games completely revised the strategy cards in order to eliminate it in the first expansion pack for the game.

Last week I proposed space scurvy, but deficiency diseases can also be interesting to consider in the context of a fantasy setting.

Imagine for a moment that fantastical creatures like dragons, basilisks, or medusa depend on some vitamin (or a complex of vitamins) which allow them to process magical energy or a “supernatural essence”. For the most part this is no big deal: This “magimin” exists as part of the natural food chain in fantasyland and these creatures get plenty of it from their natural diet. (Some of them might produce it naturally under certain conditions, just like we do with vitamin E from sunlight.)

But when these creatures start suffering from a magimin deficiency — for example, if a dragon starts eating livestock who have been raised in a natural antimagic field — things can turn bad. Our dragon, for example, might find his wings withering and falling off while his heart enlarges in an effort to cope with pumping blood through his great bulk. A medusa’s snakes wilt and become lifeless. A basilisk might slowly grow blind as its own eyes turn to stone.

A little too much science in your fantasy? Maybe. But I like to give thought to this sort of thing because it opens up interesting possibilities.

For example, what if we make the magimin deficiencies a little more magical? Without their magimins, dragons slowly begin to shrink… eventually becoming nothing more than large snakes. But what happens if a mad wizard were to superdose an ordinary snake with magimins… would they become a dragon (or some other insanely mutated creature)? Now we have a mechanism for those “mad scientist” wizards to use when they’re creating owlbears. And that means they need a supply of magimin. And gaining that magimin (by harvesting fairies, for example, or simply having it shipped in) will have consequences that can serve as adventure hooks (and also give the PCs non-standard ways of fighting back).

On the other end of the scale, what if magical creatures went away because their magimins went away? But if magimins were to be reintroduced to the food chain, suddenly we’d have a lot of dragons that have been trapped as snakes for a couple hundred years re-appearing.

From At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson:

Two other vitamins — pantothenic acid and biotin — don’t have numbers or, come to that, much profile, but that is largely because they never cause us problems. No human has yet been found with insufficient quantities of either.

Poking around suggests that Bryson’s statement is not completely true. Isolated cases have been observed (usually due to a wider incidence of starvation) and the condition has been studied in mice. Intriguingly, some subjects have reported a “burning sensation” in their feet.

Which is, it turns out, the first symptom of “space scurvy”. On the first long journeys through the solar system, it was discovered that some curious interaction of solar radiation and rotationally induced “gravity” caused a breakdown of pantothenic acid. The resulting vitamin deficiency causes nausea, vomiting, and impaired mental faculties. Worse yet, victims manifest severe sleep disturbances: Think of the severe “sleep driving” side-effects of Ambien, crank them up a couple hundred degrees, and unleash them on a spaceship. Victims have been known to sleepwalk their way out of airlocks, damage ship reactors (some suggest victims of space scurvy actually have an unnatural attraction to sources of radioactivity), or simply pilot their ships into the nearest planets.

Some crazies in the Belt have actually been known to deliberately induce the deficiency disease, believing that the “pantothenic visions” have deep spiritual or religious meaning. In one well-known incident, the Bryson Colony broadcast its insane death throes throughout the entire system as a population of 166 souls commited ecstatic, prolonged suicide by way of holy vision.

Tom Bissell has an interesting piece on Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim over here. He’s trying to figure out why everything is wonderful about Skyrim… except the NPC dialogue.

He talks about a lot of things: That the game becomes cinematically boring (due to a fixed camera angle and a lack of action) during the dialogue. That the actual dialogue is terrible, forced, and false. That the voice acting, hampered by the poor writing and lack of context, is bland and weak. That there’s a lack of creatively-directed animation, which means every NPC is just a plastic, flapping mouth animation.

Based on my previous experience with Bethesda games, I’m guessing that this is all 100% true.

But I think most of this is just a symptom of a problem that Bissell struggles to put his finger on. A quick excerpt:

It surely says something that even my most fervent Skyrim-loving friends cop to skipping through the expository narrative sequences. They laugh when they admit this, and it’s a nervous, uncomfortable laugh — a laugh that suggests they’re wondering why they do this. I’ll tell them: Because the stuff they’re skipping is so bad that it makes the rest of the game seem like a waste of time, which it’s not. When many of a game’s biggest fans are unable to endure large parts of that game, it may be time to reexamine the vitality of certain aspects of the experience. Just for starters, not every merchant in Skyrim needs a dialogue tree concerning his or her personal history. Not every Jarl needs to offer you the chance to learn about his town’s ostensibly fascinating history. Why make every character a walking lore dump when lore can be more effectively embodied in the world and environments? After all, the world and environments are already there in Skyrim; they’re quite literally everywhere you look, gushing all manner of wonderfully implied lore. And they’re beautiful. Like most who play Skyrim, I’m greatly drawn to these incredible environments because the act of exploring them becomes uniquely my experience. When I’m listening to and watching Skyrim’s interminable characters, I’m skipping through the same dumb cartoon everyone else is.

I think what Bissell is trying to identify, under all of this, is a pretty simple principle: The lack of interactivity in video game dialogue.

Everything else about the Elder Scroll games positively bristles with interactivity: You can go anywhere. You can do practically anything.

But as soon as you start talking to an NPC, the game locks down and your interaction with the game world goes away. Oh, sure, you’ve got dialogue options to choose from. But at least 95% of these boil down to you simply selecting the next topic the NPC is going to lecture you about. It never feels like the NPCs are actually talking to you; it always feels like they’re just talking at you.

The old Ultima games used to have a dialogue system in which you could type in keywords to provoke responses from NPCs. Within the limitations of the technology at the time, this was extremely interactive. But then the entire industry (including the later Ultima games) took a step backwards and simply generated the applicable list of keywords so that you could select between them.

And the industry really hasn’t done anything to update dialogue interaction since then.

I’m not saying that we need to go back to keyword input. (That’s marginally more interactive, but not by much. You’re still just topic-selecting.)

The marginal exception to this is Bioware, who have consistently pushed for deeper and more meaningful choices within their dialogue systems. The industry needs to look at their games and then push even farther. The industry needs to make dialogue interactions just as fun; just as interesting; and just as exciting as the rest of the game. And they can do that by abandoning the concepts of “topic selection” and “exposition pumping”, and instead focus on how actual conversations operate.

I am going to quote something at length from the CRPG Addict because I think it’s important:

The problem [in The Bard’s Tale] is, it costs a lot to resurrect a dead character, especially a high-level dead character. Resurrecting six dead characters cost way more than I had at this point. I had to create a dummy character just to exit the Guild. I was able to resurrect one character immediately, but to get the other five, I had to build up my savings. It took a good three hours before they were all happy and healthy again.

It sounds horrible, especially to modern gamers, but I actually really, really like this aspect of The Bard’s Tale. Death isn’t a game-killer the way it is in Wizardry, but boy does it have consequences. Since you can only save in the Guild of Adventurers, every dungeon foray is a risk, creating a palpable tension as you wander your way through the passages. And every once in a while, you stumble into an encounter like this one (there were actually two more on this same level, with a dragon and a high-powered wizard) that makes your stomach drop and an expletive escape your lips.

Modern games make it far too easy. In something like Baldur’s Gate, you would save every five or ten minutes. If you stumble on to a soul sucker, you might treat the first battle against him like a test run. If your characters die–or, heck, even just lose more hit points than you want to spare–no problem. Just reload and run the encounter again with the experience at your back…

Because of the frequent save points, modern games depend on the difficulty of individual battles to make the games challenging. In The Bard’s Tale, Wizardry, and other games of the era I’m playing, there are plenty of difficult individual battles, but it’s the totality of the expedition that brings the difficulty. You must constantly strategize. How much gold do I need to get from this encounter to make the “trap zap” spell worthwhile? What should I set as my bottom hit point threshold before I return to the surface? Do I want to expend 15 spell points on this group of wights, or take the risk that they’ll turn me into a crippling old man with one touch? I’ve only got 15 squares left to map on this level, but my characters only have 1/2 their hit points. Should I press on or go back?

Exhilarating. Fortunately, I have a lot of games like this left to play.

In computer games, this is a trend which extends beyond CRPGs. In FPS games, for example, Halo ushered in the era of rechargeable shields/stamina and ending an era in which players shepherded health packs and treated entire missions as strategic challenges (instead of a string of tactical encounters).

If this sounds familiar, it should. Tabletop RPGs have been embracing the same trends, starting with a My Precious Encounter(TM) design ethos for published adventures and then hard-coding that design ethos into the game system.

Allow me to emphasize this one last time with two key pull quotes:

Modern games depend on the difficulty of individual battles to make the games challenging.

In [older games] there are plenty of difficult individual battles, but it’s the totality of the expedition that brings the difficulty.

Obviously this is a design ethos which has been most strongly championed by WotC in the 4th Edition of D&D (and then pushed even farther in D&D Gamma World). But it can be seen cropping up in a lot of places.

The argument can, of course, be made that this tactical focus is “more fun”: You’ll never end up trapped in the lower levels of the dungeon (nor will you figure out a clever way to escape). You’ll never find yourself desperately low on health (nor feel the exhilaration of overcoming the cyber-demon between you and the next health pack). You’ll never need to make a tough choice about whether to use your spells now or later (nor experience the satisfaction of blowing away an opponent with your well-earned stockpile of powerful enchantments).

But, ultimately, I think there’s a reason why we refer to “strategy and tactics” as a matched pair: They go together hand-in-hand. They complement each other. They improve each other. Strategic decisions shape (and re-shape) the immediacy of tactical play, naturally resulting in varied and disparate tactical challenges that must be overcome.

Of course, there will still be a great deal of variance in My Precious Encounters(TM) scenario design. (That is, after all, the “precious” part of carefully crafting your “perfect” encounters.) But in my experience, the result still feels curiously bland. Maybe in this encounter you’re fighting a couple of big brutes and in the next encounter you’re surrounded by grunts. But the encounters still all seem to follow the same basic trajectory.

This is probably unsurprising, of course: By removing the strategic portion of the game, you’ve gutted a huge chunk of meaningful choice and consequence. In other words, you’ve crippled the gameplay.