Castle Paradox

Moogle1 · Posted: Wed Mar 22, 2006 7:56 pm Post subject:

That would be hilarious. Throw in a random plot-twist generator and you have yourself a game.
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Battleblaze · Posted: Thu Mar 23, 2006 6:56 am Post subject:

Setu_Firestorm · Posted: Thu Mar 23, 2006 7:35 am Post subject:

The idea, though, is to plan all of these things in the game's pre-production development. If you plan out how you would work out having moldable characters in a defined story, than you're good to go (the Baldur's Gate games give you this freedom). However, if you want a moldable storyline, then you have games like Fable and Saga Frontier 2.

Personally, I would tend to stick with predefined characters along with the character chemistry involved, and focus creative efforts elsewhere.
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LeRoy_Leo · Posted: Fri Mar 24, 2006 12:19 am Post subject:

Before I forget, let me jot this down... Forgive me if this sounds repeditive... Part of brainstorming, after all, is to state as many ideas as possible.
Have defined characters, but a custom story with a strong, solid point to it (Story begins and ends the same way). The player may choose the actions/descissions of the character in question based on their predefined character/what they would do and the story, but never deviates from their character. So the story can be different each time the game is replayed. That's what we want, the game has to have a strong replay value. Ok, I don't claim this to be an original thought, but it would probably be the compromise we are looking for. Player can't screw up the character or the story. That's the plan.
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Gizmog1 · Posted: Fri Mar 24, 2006 4:28 am Post subject:

I don't think I like that plan. Ever played D&D? That's just being railroaded around. Like lots of games, where you get an option "YES/NO" and if you say no, you get like "I URGE YOU TO RECONSIDER YES/NO", repeat until the player hits yes, and that's not fun. You don't have to give the player choices, but don't give them the illusion of choices if they really have no say in how the story is going to turn out, short of dying.

EDIT: Wait, perhaps I misread. Are you suggesting that both choices would be in character choices for the character? That Batman might have the choice of tying the Joker to a post, and letting the police capture him, or Bat Gassing him, and putting him in prison himself, but that he wouldn't pull out a gun and shoot him?

Setu_Firestorm · Posted: Fri Mar 24, 2006 8:24 am Post subject:

Well, Giz, that depends on who's D-M-ing. I suppose traditional DMs would be so damned linear that it kills the fun of the game, but some DMs are like my brother.

What my brother tends to do, as far as DMing goes (and LeRoy, you may find this suggestion mildly useful), is creates a very vague plot. My brother is naturally thorough in everything, but he purposely creates a loose plot to where something will happen one way or another, but he leaves everything about how the characters get from Story Point A to Story Point B to the players.

He never pushes them into making decisions against their judgment, but works around the players' styles to fabricate, on the fly, scenarios to get the plot to continue despite how strange or random the players' choices may be.

Having a solid inner plot but soft, flexible scenario events that carry it out are probably the best thing for you to do if that is the type of gameplay you're aiming for.
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Mr B · Joined: 20 Mar 2003 Posts: 382

As far as the problem of players generating characters that don't fit the game, could it be solved by making failure just as interesting as success?

Think about Myst for a moment -- everyone I know who played it went through all the endings, not just the "right" one, even though it was generally pretty obvious what the player should do. Failure was pretty interesting.

This would be substantially more difficult for a game with NPCs to interact with, but perhaps it could at least reduce the probability of characters that don't fit into the story.

LeRoy_Leo · Posted: Tue Mar 28, 2006 6:37 pm Post subject:

Mr B · Joined: 20 Mar 2003 Posts: 382

Yeah; the end-game decisions in Myst were made really in the final few minutes of the game.

Making failure interesting would be quite different for an RPG than for an adventure game, because RPGs depend on investing a lot of time and strategy into character optimization. There would have to be a differentiation between story-failure and gameplay-failure (adventure games combine the two).

Joe Man · Posted: Thu Apr 06, 2006 11:20 am Post subject:

I don't think I've thought about gameplay vs. story failure... Personally, I don't care much for elaborating on failure, as nobody's really trying to get there anyway, and nobody wants to see a long drawn out scene saying "YOU SUCK LOSER."

Kederaji Tajorn · Joined: 04 Mar 2006 Posts: 15

Jumping in here.

Story failure has always been an interesting topic for me. I've always wanted to see a game where it was possible to succeed when you thought you failed, or fail when you thought you succeeded. Perhaps in that final boss battle, it is possible to be defeated, and yet still have the outcome of the game be victory, or perhaps you slay your foe, but in doing so, seal your own defeat. However, the only game I can think of that could end like this was Bard's Tale (which happens to be one of my favorites, because the axe-guitar owned.)

Joe Man: that all depends on how you present the failure, I think, and whether you're just making a game or trying to tell a story with it. Like Mr B pointed out, Myst was almost as much fun to fail as it was to succeed.

I guess the deal for me is that I like to focus on story. The game could be the most awesome redux of Prince of Persia, but if the story sucks, I'll stop playing within the third hour. Ask the people who wrote the original Neverwinter Nights campaign about that one. Raspberry!

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Setu_Firestorm · Posted: Mon Apr 10, 2006 5:32 am Post subject:

Yeah, really I'm more believing in good balance. I've played games like Baldur's Gate (Shadows of Amn to be exact), and it was soooo much story that I felt like stabbing my eyes out with a pencil.

Heheh, even the dialogue was cheesy. Everytime I heard the stereotypical brute warrior dialogue, I could only picture a table with geeks in Computer Club T-shirts, glasses, and afros snickering about how to have the different alignment responses.

That game drove me nuts, even though I believe story is a detrimental part.
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Mr B · Joined: 20 Mar 2003 Posts: 382

Yeah... If you could fail in the story, but still have a dramatic battle ending, it could work. The only problem I would see is if you fail in the story, spend ten hours working through the failure storyline, then end without a final boss battle. People would kill.

As far as a random plot generator goes, it could be done, though the results would be rather superficial. The story would have to be generated in terms of structural design, not content.

Computers are decently good with handling structure. They are impossibly stupid with content. That's why MS Word will correct me when I use an extra comma in my chem lab report, but it won't make a peep when I write "bidet" instead of "buret." ( <-- true story)

First you'd need to generate the general, overarching plot. For the purposes of an RPG, this would be a variation on "save the x". The specific "save the x" plot requires an ultimate goal (x), a peril, and a method of defeating the peril. The ultimate goal can be randomly selected from a list -- one of the most popular choices is "the world." The peril would probably vary depending on the ultimate goal (so it might actually be a subset of the ultimate goal), but that's a technicality. The peril would be selected from a list -- alien invasion, is one, dark villain is another. We'll choose "dark villain." The method of defeating the peril is probably a subset of the peril, but that's also a design technicality. Anyways, the basic form would be "gather [x] [y]s". It could randomly generate "gather five rods of ancient doom".

What you'd do is generate a net of plot objects, each of which provides the needs for another plot object while potentially creating a need for yet another randomly-generated plot object. Some plot objects would also generate game-world entities, such as NPCs and objects.

Combine this with a randomly-generated game world and you'll have something infinitely varied and rather shallow. And hard to balance. It all depends on how you handle it.

Mr B · Joined: 20 Mar 2003 Posts: 382

Actually, story elements would need to possess chronological arc data as well as the actual content. Basically, not only what happens, but when.

A completely random story would probably be difficult and disappointing to players. If randomness were done it would probably be done best as randomizing little things that are contained within the unchanging larger story/narrative/gameplay structure.

That is, the larger story would be quite rigid; here is the world, here is the situation, here is the threat. All of the necessary roles would be present -- good-guys, bad-guys, kingdom, empire, aliens.

The designers would give the story a list of all of the mandatory (but not character-specific) roles and their mandatory interconnections, but they would not directly assign them to the characters. Instead, the player's actions would determine (or largely influence) what character took on which role. Each character would start out ambiguous or undefined such that they could fulfill a number of the different roles. The player's actions would decide what role that character adopted, reducing the potential roles for the other, not-yet-completely-defined characters.

For example, let's say that the player enters the threatened kingdom of Valforde. The kingdom has a king, a queen, a prince, an advisor, a military commander, etc. The developers decided that the king is a good-guy, that the kingdom is threatened by political intrigue, that there is a loyal person, a traitor, a person who distrusts the king, and a person who gets killed attempting to foil the plot. The king's role is entirely predetermined by the developers. The queen is permitted to be either the "loyal person" or the person who gets killed attempting to foil the plot. The prince can be the person who gets killed or the one who distrusts the king. The advisor and the military commander can be the loyal person, the traitor, or the distrustor.

It's rather like a box of play bricks. The developers determine what bricks exists and their broader restrictions, but the player attaches them to different characters. Of course, the developers can determine any characters' roles as specifically as they like in order to change the desired level of detail in the story.