Fundamentals Game Design Ch15 RPG Game Features

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Game Features
In order for the story to progress and the characters to develop, the characters have to have something to do; therefore, exploring and combat make up a big part of most CRPGs. In most such games, the stories and challenges are prescripted, so the player experiences the same things each time he plays. In a few cases, individual levels are randomized on each play, which makes the games more replayablewell-known examples include the Diablo series and a rather extraordinary game called NetHack (see Figure 15.1).
Figure 15.1. NetHack (Windows user interface shown)

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The earliest versions of NetHack were entirely text-based, as were the wonderful adventure games from Infocom (which are still available). Graphics impress the player, but words stimulate his imagination. Never forget the power of words.
NetHack is very small, so it contains almost no story. However, the character development, adventuring, exploration, and combat elements of the game are remarkable for its size. NetHack can offer so much variety because it doesnt have to display events with graphics; it simply describes them with text. Later designers successfully applied its basic game mechanic to other products. The original Diablo from Blizzard owed more than a little of its success to that design.
Themes
CRPGs generally allow the player to experience a pivotal role in solving some hugely important problem. The premise of most role-playing games can be summed up in the statement: Only YOU can save the world!or the tribe or city or whatever level of society is threatened. However, saving the world is a clich, an adolescent power fantasy that has been terribly overused in this genre. Consider some alternative quests that could have a secondary consequence of saving the world but need not: Find and punish the person responsible for a loved ones murder. Learn the secret behind your hidden parentage. Rescue the kidnapped princess/prince. Find and reassemble the long-lost pieces of the magic object. Destroy the dangerous object. Find the evidence that will exonerate you from a false accusation. Transport the valuable object past the people trying to seize it. Try to get home after having been abducted. While these are all very familiar themes, at least theyre not specifically about saving the world.
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Planescape: Torment
I strongly encourage you to take a look at Planescape: Torment (if you cant find a copy, at least read the reviews and commentary available online). The premise of this unusual game has nothing to do with the typical quest to solve some enormous problem; rather, it is to discover something about the avatars pastinitially, just his name, which at the beginning of the story, the player does not know. The game is actually about the psychological growth of an individual rather than saving the world, but even so, there is plenty of combat, exploration, trading, and all the other traditional RPG challenges along the way.
Progression
RPGs almost always tell a story, characterized as a long quest in pursuit of some important goal. The quest is broken down into a number of episodes that progress in a linear sequence, each with its own subquest and major challenge at the end. These end-of-episode challenges (almost always combat with a powerful enemy) are analogous to the boss characters at the ends of levels in action games. The story maps onto explorationa journey, in other wordsand each episode takes the player to a new location. Unlike in linear games such as rail-shooters or side-scrollers, its often possible to go back to a previously visited location, though there may no longer be anything worthwhile to do there. A few games take the party back to a previously visited location for a new episode; when they do this, its often markedly different in order to give the player new things to do. In Planescape: Torment, the town of Curst is destroyed while the party is away. In order to progress from one episode to the next, the players party has to have enough strength to overcome whatever major challenge lies at the end of the current episode. This wont be possible right away (even if the player knows where the challenge is), so the activities during the chapter help the characters to grow strong enough. Because the story of the game is intimately bound up with the game world itself, the section The Game World and Story later in this chapter addresses storytelling in CRPGs. In addition to the quests that lie along the main storyline, there are also optional side quests that are unrelated to the main ones. These are not thrust upon the player but must be sought out. Visible or audible cues inform the player that one of the NPCs in the game has a problem that the party can help solve; if the party
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goes up and talks to her, the player learns of the side quest and can choose to accept or reject it. Normally theres no penalty for refusing one apart from the missed opportunity to have another adventure and earn some more experience. Players can usually abandon a side quest without penalty as well. Side quests seldom carry over from episode to episode. (If a quest does so, its usually related to the main story rather than being a side quest.) Figure 15.2 illustrates the general progression of a CRPG.
Figure 15.2. Typical CRPG progression

Gameplay Modes
Because CRPGs try to duplicate (within limits) the flexibility of tabletop role-playing games, they offer more kinds of activities than any other genre. Among these activities are exploration, tactical combat, stealth operations, conversation, buying and selling, and inventory management. CRPGs typically use four major gameplay modes and a variable number of minor ones. The major modes are exploration and combat, conversation, trade, and inventory management. The minor modes are character creation (only used at the beginning of the game), character upgrade screens, and skill tree management. The next four sections describe the major modes briefly.
Exploration and Combat

In older computer games, exploration was often a gameplay mode separate from combat, and the two modes had different camera models. Modern games combine them into a single mode. Traditional party-based RPGs often use an isometric perspective so the player can see the whole party. Figure 15.3 is from Baldurs Gate II: Throne of Bhaal, which illustrates this isometric perspective.
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Figure 15.3. Baldurs Gate II: Throne of Bhaal with an isometric perspective showing several party members as well as a number of NPCs
Notice the complexity of the user interface, with buttons along three sides of the screen as well as a scrolling text window at the bottom. If the game has only one character, first- or third-person perspectives are common; see the section Camera Model later in this chapter. The actions available in the exploration and combat mode include selecting one or more characters in the party, setting a formation in which they will move together, designating a location for them to walk or run to, designating NPCs for them to attack or to talk to, picking up objects, and exercising special skills such as casting magic spells or searching for traps. The buttons to the lower right in Figure 15.3 are for setting a formation.
Conversation
Conversation modes often use the same perspective on the game world as the exploration and combat mode but replace the exploration- and combat-related user interface features with a dialog-display mechanism. Occasionally, they switch the perspective to a close-up view of the other character in the conversation or
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display the character in a pop-up window. CRPGs almost always manage conversations via the dialog tree mechanism that Chapter 7 describes. The player selects an NPC in the game world to speak to. A window opens, presenting a list of things that the avatar can say to the NPC. The player chooses one, and depending on what her choice is, the NPC replies, sometimes in text but often with an audio recording as well. Sometimes a scrolling window records the content of the conversation so that the player can go back and see what was said for as long as the conversation continues, or it may be recorded in a log or journal the player can bring up later. Asking the right questions or saying the right things elicits useful information from the NPC and sometimes gains experience points for the player as well. Figure 15.4 shows the conversation mode in Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura. A portrait of the person being spoken to appears in a window at the bottom, along with some information about how he is reacting to the situation. Immediately above the portrait, superimposed on the game world, are two lines of text. These are lines of dialog from which the player may choose. Above them, the NPCs most recent speech appears adjacent to the character.
Figure 15.4. Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura conversation

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Conversations almost always take place between the avatar character and just one other person. Conversations with more than one person become complicated because the dialog window must indicate to whom each statement is addressed.
Trade
Any buying or selling of items in the game takes place in a specialized trading mode. Most games in this genre have towns or settlements with friendly NPCsblacksmiths, healers, and so onwho run businesses that offer to buy or sell goods and services. The interface is similar to the conversation mode interface, with a view of the shop, sometimes an image of the person the avatar bargains with, and often a list or a set of images of all the available items. The player can choose to buy an item or sell an item he already owns to get more money and can often bargain with the shopkeeper. Items purchased go directly into the avatars inventory.
Inventory
The inventory mode lets the player manage the objects that a given character is carrying around. Because CRPGs tend to include large numbers of objects, players need a system for keeping track of them and trading them among characters. Its not realistic to simulate the actual packing of items into a backpack, and in any case, most games allow characters to carry more than would be credible if they were real people. Instead, a typical solution is to divide the characters carrying capacity into an array of boxes. Each box can carry one type of item. Large items take up several adjacent boxes. If an item is small enough, a single box can store several of them, up to some maximum limit. Money, usually gold coins, will fit in a box with so many hundred coins per container. Figure 15.5 shows the inventory mode for Dungeon Siege II, which appears as a pop-up window over the main game world.
Figure 15.5. The inventory mode in Dungeon Siege II

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Item weight may be a secondary constraint. No matter how many boxes the player has free, his character can carry only so many lead weights around. The BioWare games assess a penalty on a characters speed if he is carrying more than a certain weight, and above another threshold the character cannot move at all. Money is often exempt from the weight limit because having to store it whenever the player finds a big treasure hoard is annoying. The player usually spends a disproportionate amount of time micromanaging the contents of the inventory, so inventory management becomes disproportionately important. Often, this task breaks a cardinal rule of human-computer interaction: Dont force the player to perform a menial task best handled by the computer. A simpler solution is to display a simple table of the items in the inventory, without requiring the player to organize them in space. A pair of indicators, one for the total weight of the inventory and one for the total volume, could tell the player how much room he has left and how much more weight he can carry.
The Rectangular Inventory Problem

Consider the situation in Figure 15.6. The player has found a staff but cannot put it in his inventory because he doesnt have enough free boxes in the right configuration. The staff takes up 4 boxes in a 1 4 configuration, and the longest space he has available is 1 3. If he moves the apple in the top space, however, he will have a space of 1 4 and will be able to store the staff. The question to ask should be: Is
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this activity fun for the player? Probably not; therefore, the computer should handle it automatically. Note that an adequate 4 1 horizontal space is available. Why cant the staff simply rotate 90 degrees and fit into the 4 1 gap at the bottom? Most CRPGs cannot handle that simple situation. What will happen if the player finds a staff that requires a 1 5 space, when the storage space avaiable consists of a 4 4 grid of boxes? In the real world, we could place it diagonally in the pack, but CRPG inventory-maintenance systems generally cannot accommodate that action.
Figure 15.6. An inventory problem
To resolve this, consider two possibilities. First, allow the player to turn rectangular objects sideways when putting them in the inventory, perhaps with a single button click that toggles the object between vertical and horizontal orientations. The staff in Figure 15.6 would easily fit along the bottom row if the player could turn it sideways. Second, and more difficult to implement, design a system that automatically moves the inventory contents around to keep all the free space together rather like defragmentin a hard disk drive.
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Fundamentals Game Design Ch15 RPG Game Features

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Figure 15.1. NetHack (Windows user interface shown)

Figure 15.2. Typical CRPG progression

Exploration and Combat

Figure 15.4. Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura conversation

Figure 15.5. The inventory mode in Dungeon Siege II

The Rectangular Inventory Problem

Figure 15.6. An inventory problem

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