General Gaming Video Game RPGs Should Start Borrowing From Tabletop's Creative Renaissance (VICE)

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

Early games borrowed wholecloth systems from tabletop RPGs, but now they should borrow from the design principles guiding the current vibrant TTRPG scene.

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For as long as both existed, tabletop RPGs and computer RPGs have been in a cycle of borrowing from each other. From early games like Wizardy, to the more recent Pillars of Eternity, computer RPGs have followed a design ethos that closely followed the systems of Dungeons and Dragons. This ethos is simple: the more choices, and as such more systems, you give a player, the more immersed they will be. Even now, games with RPG elements like the Fallout series and The Outer Worlds still fall into this design, even if they're much simpler when compared to some of the foundational games in the genre.

 

[Xbob42]

I don't play tabletop games very often, and see very few examples listed in this for me to draw reference from, but this sort of read like people really interested in over... not simplifying, but over-streamlining RPGs in a way. I've actually been kind of annoyed how damn near every single RPG I've played lately (on the smaller side) has so few features of what I consider important in an RPG. They focus down so much that I feel the sense of adventure is stripped away and replaced with "focused" mechanics and a tighter feel, but those things aren't why I come to RPGs. I think this line in particular is what rubs me the wrong way: 

 

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The tabletop game scene, the RPG space especially, is so vibrant right now in exactly the way you talked about. In looking at what is it we want players to do. What is the primary verb we want players to do, what is the type of experience we want to give them.

I get what the more obvious benefits of something like this are, but this is also because tabletop RPGs trend towards a much smaller and shorter scale (usually) than video game RPGs, and importantly, more social. But beyond that, trying to focus so hard on a "verb" is exactly the kind of ultra hipster game design bullshit that I feel like is making so many games less interesting. Stop focusing on buzz words and single word ideas and focus on making something fun and original, and get ideas about what constitutes those words from a variety of people.

Again, I don't have too much information when it comes to tabletop games, and I might even be missing some of the broader points here since obviously I don't know the design principles of tabletop RPGs, but based on sentences like the one above, I'm not terribly convinced.

I think bringing up the merchant is an interesting example, because "Do we really still need this here?" is an important question that should be asked during development, but I also feel it becomes easier and easier to strip away features because you think of them as vestigial rather than because they actually need to be gone. Encumbrance is a better example, but I don't feel these things are specifically because games aren't learning from their tabletop counterparts so much as some developers keeping old ideas specifically because they're trying to stick into a rigid example of that genre. I think that's exactly why The Outer Worlds has its shitty encumbrance system. They weren't interested in getting rid of it because their previous games had it, and they weren't interested in improving it because clearly the fans love it and it has to stay as-is. I guess you could loop that back around to tabletop game design, but really in most cases it comes off as the developer not really having anything innovative or interesting to add or replace it with.

 

I'm getting off into the weeds here so I'll try to bring it back: On the rare occasion when I do play tabletop games, what I'm after is completely different than what I want when I'm sitting my ass down for a 30-50 hour RPG on my PC. What I'm saying isn't an argument to not innovate, one of my favorite things in games is novelty of trying something different, but trying something different and stripping a game down so you're "not doing the boring stuff" are unrelated in my head. If something IS boring and takes away from the experience, you really should chuck it or redesign it, but stripping things away just to say it's more focused on your "primary verb" is why I have a growing inbox full of Steam refund emails from games that tried to strip away a little too much.

 

To sum it up, these guys might be right, but the arguments presented by them here did very little to convince me or even give me a point of reference to work off of besides "you don't gotta worry about the shopkeep and sometimes weapons/ammo" which I feel are things true of plenty of games already.

[Kal-El814]

The current paradigm in tabletop RPGs (outside of D&D which is still easily and by far the most popular system) is RPG as a conversation between the players and the GM. The focus of a lot of the current, smaller, darling RPGs would be difficult to translate to a normal computer RPG since there's so much of an emphasis on the worlds / systems being up to the players to some extent.

 

I think about something like the Devil's Bargains in Blades in the Dark. The way they work is that the player character rolling for an action gets an extra die to roll but before they roll they say, "regardless of the roll, this thing happens." So if you're good at something, say you roll 2D6 normally. You need a 4, 5, or 6 to succeed (on a 4 or 5, you succeed but there are consequences depending on your position and effect, 6 you do the thing and nothing bad happens, if you roll multiple 6s you crit), and you fail with a 1, 2, or 3. Let's say you're attempting to sway one of your contacts to give you info on the score you're looking to pull. A Devil's Bargain may be that you're really putting the screws to your contact to get the information, so they're going to complain about this interaction the next time they're out drinking, and the guards will default to being more alert on the job. A Devil's Bargain can come from any player and the GM, and whoever's rolling gets to decide if they want to accept it before the roll.

 

But a lot of it is dymanic, and the stakes are set up as a conversation. So the player could get to say, "well, the next score is to steal the Spooky Skull from Derp Manor. Derp Manor is large and it'll be hard to stay undetected if we break in from a random location and hope we stumble across it, so, the Devil's Bargain is that our contact knows where in the manor the skull is, but since we're leaning on him, the guards are going to suspect that someone might be coming for the skull even if they don't know when." So I dunno how you could do that part of it in a videogame.

 

That said, I think some of the other stuff Blades does could be adapted easily enough... when you start a score you pick a kind of loadout very broadly (light, normal, heavy), but you don't pick most gear until the moment you need it, and how much you have access to depends on the level of loadout you pick. So assuming your scoundrels are scoundrely, you wouldn't need to say, "I'm bringing lockpicks and rope" until you need either, and then you mark it in one of your inventory slots. Really rad gear depends on your crew level, what they have access too, etc., so if you're just getting started you wouldn't be able to say, "oh yeah turns out I have lightning fast, whisper silent autolockpicks and a rope that climbs up the sides of buildings taller than I could throw it." CRPGs could potentially do something like that... but people really seem to enjoy munchkining in stuff like Skyrim so who knows if it would be worth the effort.

 

I think what tabletop RPGs do MUCH BETTER than CRPGs is stakes and consequence. Once you establish the world and the scenario for a specific encounter, you can make the consequences much more interesting and longer lasting than what happens in most CRPGs, which is almost always that you get rushed by mobs. In a TT RPG, I feel much more motivated to keep my word to other players, or I feel like there are actual things at risk when not everyone at the table has the same long term goals even if they're aligned short term.

 

This is a really long winded way of saying that I think CRPGs CAN do a really good job of emulating something like D&D since there are codified rules for EVERYTHING. Something like Blades or Apocalypse World (or any game using the Forged in the Dark / Powered by the Apocalypse systems) are going to be much harder to emulate with software.

[Xbob42]

16 minutes ago, Kal-El814 said:

I think what tabletop RPGs do MUCH BETTER than CRPGs is stakes and consequence. Once you establish the world and the scenario for a specific encounter, you can make the consequences much more interesting and longer lasting than what happens in most CRPGs, which is almost always that you get rushed by mobs. In a TT RPG, I feel much more motivated to keep my word to other players, or I feel like there are actual things at risk when not everyone at the table has the same long term goals even if they're aligned short term.

 

This is a really long winded way of saying that I think CRPGs CAN do a really good job of emulating something like D&D since there are codified rules for EVERYTHING. Something like Blades or Apocalypse World (or any game using the Forged in the Dark / Powered by the Apocalypse systems) are going to be much harder to emulate with software.

I think a lot of that comes back around to tabletop RPGs being social experiences while CRPGs are almost exclusively solo or at best co-op. Even in something like Divinity Original Sin 2 where me and my friends more often than not get into an argument about how to handle this and that and it comes to us blowing the shit out of each other, that's not quite the same.

 

Even if the stakes were emulated, I'm never going to care about fucking over an NPC if it's for my own goals, the only real way to prevent that is through empathy, and it's easy to just laugh at an NPC. It's why games like Eve Online with its intricate social systems are much more akin to this, with years-long deceptions that have absolutely real stakes and emotional investment and feelings of intense betrayal. Even WoW, at least old WoW, could accomplish something similar with simple concepts like ninja looters and reputation of your character on a server. These social elements are far more about the dynamic interactions between people (at least based on my experience) than they are about something the game is doing to try and "primary verb" you. Obviously you can more intently focus on these elements to give more player freedom, but I still don't see a tremendous difference there between TT and CRPG.