I’ve been giving some serious consideration to the matter of non-combat skills in CRPGs. Of course, that was brought about by last Friday’s post on Save Me Again. Do we want them, and if so, what function do they serve?
Obviously, one thing these skills do is raise the game above the level of the typical “action/RPG”, where fighting is everything. They bring the CRPG a bit closer to the real thing, even if only marginally.
They provide at least the illusion that your character is not simply a “kill/loot machine”, but more like a “real person” with abilities that can be used in non-fighting situations.
The difficulty comes with implementation, as there are really only two methods: randomization and comparison. Rolling virtual dice, adding in various factors, and generating the “magic number” is what leads to the save/restore cycle.
This makes mockery of skills, as players just keep trying until they succeed. In this case, having skills doesn’t mean much. The only consolation is that it tends to encourage players to build up skills to avoid having to restore so often.
The comparison method is a bit cleaner. The lock is rated 10; your skill is 8. Nothing will get the lock open except raising the skill, unless some other means is at hand, such as, say, special lockpicks. Save/restore goes by the boards.
What does this mean in-game, though? In what situations are these non-combat skills going to be important? Avernum 5, for instance, uses the comparison method, and treats skills mainly as an auxiliary. With one exception, the skills of Arcane Lore, Nature Lore, First Aid, and Tool Use are not vital to finishing the game.
Conversations show more or fewer choices, depending on what the player has or hasn’t done to that point. No skills are involved here at all; the basis is simply the player’s actions.
Now suppose a game with “social skills”, such as Persuasion. You have critical information for the Grand Vizier. You try to persuade the guard to let you pass. Dice are rolled. The answer is “No”. Reload. Try again. Or, in the case of comparison, go away and sulk ;).
Here is where live gaming with a DM shines. The players retire to a quiet corner and discuss options. A charm spell on the guard? Is there someone who can get them in? Could the guard be lured away long enough for one or two to slip through the door? Maybe there’s a secret passage into the room?
The DM will certainly have some alternatives set, and can create other opportunities on the fly as needed. Hence skills can be really important, and a failure in one area doesn’t necessarily mean complete failure.
This points up the difficulties of adding non-combat skills to a CRPG. If you make them important, then – particularly with the comparison method – there must be an alternative way of getting something done. Otherwise, one might as well go with the “dice roll/save/restore cycle”.
Of course, there are only so many “other routes” that can be programmed into a game, and it takes a lot of time, thought, and effort to be done right. Even then, there will be times – perhaps many – when players think of something to try the designer hasn’t allowed for.
So I wonder if these non-combat skills are really necessary. If they are, ought they to be as in AV5, nice to have but not getting in the way, or should they have more importance? And what do they mean to us as players, aside from having more numbers to worry about?
Non-combat skills shouldn’t be “necessary”, in the sense that the game shouldn’t require a high diplomacy skill (or whatever) to finish the game. What non-combat skills do is allow the player to develop a character personality beyond a killing machine and get rewarded by being able to actually *roleplay* to some degree.
In other words, they set the scene for different choices, which is a good thing in RPGs.
The devil is in the implementation. If the developer doesn’t consistently provide opportunities to use high diplomacy or lockpicking or whatever to get a different result (or as an alternative path), the effort is wasted.
But seasoned kill-everything-fighter is also a valid RP choice, so straight up combat resolution should always be there.
Geneforge 4 is a much better example than AV5. There are many times where you just don’t have the same dialogue options if your Leadership skill isn’t high enough; likewise, there are alternative routes that require high tool use. Avernum has always been more action oriented.
Fallout, Arcanum, PS:T, Geneforge and others just wouldn’t be good games without the skill checks outside of combat.
Right, which is why I wrote you could be more like a real person when such skills are in the game. And you put your finger on the problem of implementation. How many games have we played where a non-combat skill is used maybe once or twice the whole time?
As for AV5 vs GF4, Avernum was meant to exhibit a game where skills were an enhancement, but not necessary to completion. And in GF4, regardless of Leadership (or anything else), you’re going to be in the same place at the end anyway ;)
How they are implemented has a lot to do with it. The first time I played the lockpicking mini game in Oblivion I thought it was cool, by the 50th time the novelty had long worn off, and it had become a PITA. I was so glad after completing the quest to get the unbreakable lockpick.
The flip side is spending your talent points on building up a skill then seeing it not really make much of a difference. I know a couple games I have maxed out detect traps and still had nearly as many chests blow up in my face as I had before investing in that talent. If you are going to implement secondary skills, give them noticeable results.
You know, thinking about it, the Karmic system I suggested is an attempt to treat the symptom (reloading) rather than cause of the problem. The problem is caused by 2 factors :
– 1) Binary fail/success : Imagine if combat was like that. You entered combat, a dice was rolled and bang, your party won or lost. In such a situation there would also be rampant reloading. Instead, because combat is a series of moves and countermoves, of many rolls, these things tend to average out, resulting in a range of results between absolute success and victory. Many of which the player is willing to live with. The enemy might score a critical hit, but considered over 10 combat attacks, it isn’t as bad. A simple addition to the AoD way of handling things, that of “degrees of success” will help alleviate that. So you need a 10 to disarm the trap but have an 8. Instead of failing completely you trigger the trap but at half strength. Picking a lock with a lower than optimal stat might take increasingly longer, and increase the chance to reduce the durability of your picks (“Dang, I bent one! Oh well, bend it back into shape, there, almost as good as new”). Etc. Trickier with dialogue, or rather more work, but still do-able.
– 2) Singular decision point. Related to the first. Imagine if a single dice roll determined combat outcome. Even if it is a range of results (solving the 1st problem) which simulates the outcome of a full combat, that is just too singular a point of decision, it is too tempting to just reload again and again to try get the best result. People don’t reload around normal combat as much (unless dying) because of the expenditure of player effort. You won’t go through 5 minutes of combat just to get a 10% better result, generally. Additionally, since there are multiple influencing factors in combat (when did you use a special ability, where were you standing, which opponent did you finish off first), factors which are more strategic than luck based, you tend to be more focused on reworking the elements of your strategy than on “gaming the dice”. It’s possible to expand the usual single dice rolls into a series of choices, to allow the outcome of the check to be heavily dependent on what strategy the player uses…but this goes into mini-game territory. And its already been mentioned that this is a tricky area.
Yeah, most players (that includes me) will reload a combat only if things go poorly. Such as your character dying, or half the party is dead after the first round. Typically that means a new strategy is necessary.
However, combat is often a situation where either you kill all of them, or they kill you. There’s no inbetween. Having that devolve to a single die roll might bring a lot of unhappy gamers to your door ;)
It’s in the non-combat areas that this business becomes tricky.