I'm not a game designer by even the most generous stretches of the imagination, but I do understand that the technical skill required to be one is not nothing. Ludic paradigms are often there for a reason, the process of building a game requires thought, experimentation, feedback and sometimes a good idea just doesn’t work out in practice.
I've definitely played my fair share of games where a single design choice has really hampered my enjoyment of the thing, so I understand that the safe bet is most often the sensible one. There's a subtlety that's required of even the most brash mechanical engagement that goes grossly underappreciated and I want to make sure that you know that I respect the craft before I begin tearing at it like a braying beast.
Free from the burden of actually having to make the thing, it's fun to think about design tropes in real world terms, and how they might actually turn out if you applied them to your own life. So I'd thought I'd do a little thought experiment:
I'm a game studio. Money, time and technical skill are of no concern. I'm going to build an inconvenient role playing game, one that utilises the weaknesses of the real world to facilitate a conversation about how we build systems and make them more interesting.
This will be a sort of ongoing series that will no doubt branch out into other genres, but for now, please enjoy the ramblings of a fool.
War is never static
Building inconvenience into systems as fundamental as combat will initially sound as unfun as it does gamebreaking, but in thinking about this aspect of role playing games for this article I was lamenting how a lot of these kinds of games suffer from repetition fatigue in their combat. Very quickly players can identify optimal strategies for taking on different types of enemy, and the result is a game that feels less like an epic quest to take down a seemingly invincible foe and more a production line box ticking exercise to get to the next dazzling plot point.
The best games understand that dynamism in combat systems is an essential part of encouraging players to keep going to the bitter end. A system that doesn’t bite back is one that doesn’t respect itself, let alone anyone else in the room. You can do this by holding the player at arm’s length from their most powerful attacks until they put the work in, but you could also reward them for thinking outside the box.
Back when I first played Octopath Traveller, I held its combat system in high praise because of how fundamental it’s weakness exploitation system was and how much fun it was to work your way towards more efficiently laying waste to it’s wonderful pixellated bestiary. But even this was little more than a few extra steps to a static playground. Exploiting vulnerabilities became the game’s whole deal, and I soon grew wise to its tricks.
So instead, I turn to Metal Gear Solid: The Phantom Pain for inspiration. While not a huge fan of the overall experience, what TPP did incredibly well was reward the player’s reliance on a scant few tactics with opponents growing wise to their bullshit. Too many headshots? Now guards have helmets. Perform all your missions under the cover of darkness? Now they’re evoking Sam Fisher. I think, done in the right way, this kind of defensive structure could help protect a game from getting stale.
The dynamism that would come from expecting to hit an enemies weak point then sharply discovering that they’ve adapted since their last encounter with you has the potential to be delicious. Think about the classic European suit of armour, made of metal, a good conductor of electricity. Facing down scores of the king’s men, frying them left right and centre with some good old fashioned thunder spells. The very thing designed to protect them has instead become their toasty tomb.
But all of a sudden this tactic no longer works. These brave soldiers have now insulated their armour with rubber. Lighting based attacks now get absorbed and turned against you. Fuck, you think. I need a new strategy.
It could even play with established tropes from the off set, even. Take what every informed player knows about the vast paradigms of rpg combat and say ‘sorry buddy, you’ll need to figure this one out for yourself’. A potentially harsh lesson, for sure, and if implimented incorrectly this could be a huge bummer to play, but I think the opportunity to fuck with the player would eventually lead to a far more rewarding combat experience overall.
There’s always room at the inn
So often a role playing game is about a great journey, one where home is but a heartache away. Par for the course that man must rest and there is no greater ephemeral joy than the comfort of a strange domicile.
But isn't it weird in JRPGs how there always seems to be room at the inn, even when there is clearly limited space. I think a lot about the Inn in Dali village in Final Fantasy 9 that has only one room and four beds. What’s the business model there? Of course remote places will be more starved for a customer base, but surely the same can’t be true for the big city. What happens when you arrive, world weary and beaten down, in desperate need of a hot shower and some crisp linens, but there’s a convention in town? Not even a manger for which you can rest your tired head. These games don’t often let you sleep on a train station bench, do they?
Some RPGs have a set up where tents offer a smaller respite compared to inns, but can be used in more remote areas, helpful in a pinch and certainly applicable for this irritating new world we’re building. But I think we can go a bit further, I think we can build an inn system that has a variable rate of recovery. I’m sure we’ve all stayed in some musty crapshack at one point or another in our lives. A night’s sleep so bad we’ve emerged from the land of nod in a worse state than when we hit the hay.
Maybe even a bad enough night’s sleep makes you forget a critical spell, or unable to perform a flashy finisher move because you have a crick in your neck. It should come as no shock to you that living arrangements have a huge impact on a person’s physical and mental wellbeing. Think about how you felt on day 4 or 5 of a camping trip, think about how quickly your body becomes suboptimal after a night or two sleeping on a hard surface, or on less than 6 hours a night, or in a place that is just too cold and too wet to really be inhabitable.
Imagine if your party all contracted aspergillosis because the hotel you were staying at had a mold problem. Hard to lock swords with a demon general when you’re grasping for your inhaler.
It doesn’t have to be all bad news, however. Part of the adventure of encountering new places is forging relationships with the people already there. Perhaps friendships forged could lead to folk who know folk who know other folk and the next thing you know, your part are all couped up in a stranger’s child’s bedroom, and it may be a far cry from home, but to share a hot meal with someone kind and learn more about their home would more than make up for it.
Or maybe some rich dickhead forgot to lock up, so you have the opportunity to crash in their digs, do a little exploring and discover something horrific in the basement, inadvertently saving the town from its own personal apocalypse and also taking a nice long hot bath at someone else’s expense.
We don’t need to resign rest to simply a means of healing, it can be a storytelling construct too, and utilising a little inconvenience could be the catalyst for a much more interesting experience.
Being poor is expensive
I’ve already talked at length about weapon degradation, we’ve all already talked at length about it, there’s no need to continue debating the merits and burdens of such a system, you either like it or your don’t. What I would like to broach, however, is how such systems have the potential to inform narrative structures as much as they do mechanical ones.
One of the big gripes i’ve seen folk have with breath of the wild is that they felt that, for example, the Royal Guard’s Sword shouldn’t really break as quickly as, say, the traveller’s sword. And although I would argue that any weapon left alone for a full century willingly gives itself up to entropy, they do have a point, really. Not all equipment is cut from the same cloth. A mass produced weapon of war is designed for a dead soldier, not a gleaming knight expected to return home time and time again. It’s life expectancy and the cost to make it would factor into this. Inversely, a ceremonial sabre would be brittle and ineffective compared to an uglier but stronger piece of equipment.
Obviously making good weapons have no drawbacks doesn’t quite fit the ‘inconvenience’ mold of this thought exercise, but it does reflect an evergreen idiom about how the quality of goods always benefits the rich before it even reaches the poor. A blade that will outlast the dying of the light will require a master artisan and a healthy sack of coin. Someone has to be commisioning such things, and maybe a shallow glace of such a work of art could be a storytelling moment in and of itself.
Having your starter sword break after that first quest fighting rats in someone’s basement is one thing to behold, a statement of the pathetic cycle of poverty even hard workers get trapped in, but I’m fascinated more by the idea of seeing a weapon way, way out of your price range on full display in the first town/city (it always struck me as odd that the last place you visit before the final dungeon conveniently has all the best gear). An arrogant, mocking display of wealth to goad the player into thinking about their own stock in a different way.
This is even before we look at things like off-the-rack armour that doesn’t really fit, or just a very sloppy blacksmith that sells you a dud, and how these things might encourage a player to adopt other strategies when building their party.
Abandoning the path towards knighthood in favour of a gang of barefoot pugilists who respond to every challenge by just throwing the gnarliest haymakers you’ve ever seen. Have you ever seen a man punch a slime to death? I bet its really messy. Imagine your main hand weapon was just a towel to wipe off the gunk? Who needs a longbow when you can just throw whatever’s lying around at your opponent?
Or maybe you bite the bullet, pool all your resources into one beefy warrior and have the rest of the party in support, buffing their strength, attuning elemental effects to their weapon, patching them up on the fly like the train tracks scene in The Wrong Trousers. I certainly laughed at the image writing this.
I like the idea of the market forcing my hand in this way. Much as it does in the real world, we don’t really have any control over our own strengths and weaknesses. Instead we forge our own arms against the struggle, both alone and in tandem, building off of the communities we forge along the way.
(I’m sure I’ll get told a dozen times once this gets published, this is literally how D&D campaigns work. I’ve never played a pen and paper game, but i’d love to hear some stories about it in the comments section if you’re willing.)
Forging fascination from annoyances
Okay, so I’m obviously not the right person to say whether these are good ways to design a game or not, this is a speculative anthology of ideas from someone who plays a lot of RPGs but has never made one, but I think there is something in building the constraints of a game world first, then branching your core systems off from these restrictions. I think a little inconvenience builds character, and character is at the core of any good role playing experience.
Stay tuned for part two in which I talk about the trials and tribulations of public transport, party members being bad hangs and integrating bad phone signal into menu functionality.