Four Axis RPG Design
This article began with an answer to a multifaceted, but at the same time quite straightforward question: what does a good role-playing game consist of? Throughout my career I worked on several RPGs, and even read a presentation on this topic, but I never considered it holistically. There are many materials about the components of a good game and, of course, many of them are applicable to role-playing games, but there are aspects that are specific (if not unique) for this particular genre.
Since it is impossible to list all the parameters that role-playing games should have, and there are many approaches to every aspect of design, I have divided the design into four separate axes. None of the axes alone can tell you whether you are on the right track, but all together they allow you to get the whole picture.
From the first days of Dungeons & Dragons, Chainmail and their predecessors, chance was the basis of the design of role-playing games. Board game participants used rolls of bones to determine the outcome of any action with an undetermined result - and at that time there were many such actions. In the process of developing the RPG discipline, the number of rolls of bones gradually decreased, and some games even abandoned them completely. In more action-oriented digital games, part of randomness has been replaced by player skills, but it is still an integral part of any traditional RPG, especially in the fantasy entourage.
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Rarely there is some perfect compromise between chance and certainty, and the best approach varies from game to game. My work process usually starts with too much randomness, after which I, iteration after iteration, gradually add determinism. In my series of articles on the design of RPG battles, this is described in more detail, but here I will tell you briefly.
In board games, throwing a dice is an action taken by a player: “I threw 17”. Even though we are aware that we cannot influence the outcome of the throw (if not cheating), throwing the dice seems like a personal action, and a bad throw seems like either my fault or the fault of bad bones. In digital games, the bad luck strip seems to be the culprit of the game, and very quickly begins to annoy. Therefore, we need to give the player more opportunities to “assign” his action. For this reason, we have added the ability to transfer bones to Rimelands. Since the game only rolls a failed bone, this option essentially reduces randomness, and since it costs one mana point (the player always has exactly five mana points), the player feels the bone roll as his real choice.
Another good way to add determinism is to have a relatively narrow randomness interval for damage. This solution is often found in the JRPG. The worst luck becomes the lower limit, from which you can only move up. The player enjoys the ejection of crit, even though he does not throw the dice himself, because failure cannot spoil everything.
A small amount of randomness usually leads to the fact that battles become more like puzzles, in which you need to choose the right combination of abilities to defeat a specific enemy. Usually the most deterministic fights in such games are boss fights, but, for example, Persona 5 takes this principle to a new level, requiring the player to know the exact strengths and weaknesses of the opponent to win.
The more choices you give the player, the more influence he has. The player must always feel that he lost the battle not because of an unsuccessful roll of the bones, but because of his choice.
Role-playing games often have a lot of content. A variety of battles, research and plot require a lot of resources for the characters and environments, level design, script and sound. Further aggravating the situation is that players usually expect dozens of hours of gameplay to play, especially in the case of a strong plot component.
There are many ways to save the day. For example, you can reuse identical enemies at levels with different designs, which increases complexity, change textures instead of creating completely new models, and use lighting to give other sentiments and context to your surroundings. When creating a rich content gameplay, it is crucial to have a reliable level design tool, it will pay back the initial investment of labor well.
On the opposite side of the axis is another approach: use less content and rely more on mechanics. This approach is common in roguelike, which use procedural level generation for each session, usually with the same resources. Another example would be hybrids of puzzles and role-playing games like PuzzleQuest, which rely more on the mechanics of the battle, leaving the plot content on the outskirts.
The quality of the work of mechanics-oriented games strongly depends on the balance on the previous axis (“randomness-determinism”). Since developers do not have the ability to manually create new challenges based on the same resources, the basic game mechanics must support a wide range of choices and create new challenges. If you fail to create a convincing basic mechanics, the game will seem monotonous and annoying.
I noticed that the feeling of “grinding” can be weakened if the game has any additional goals. Breaking through crowds of enemies is less boring if some other counters increase along with the XP band.
This axis is related to the previous one, but rather from the point of view of narration. The plot is content, which means its production is expensive, but from the very beginning of the RPG genre, one of its main principles has been interactive narration, and the whole genre as a whole is as much a medium for telling a story as a form of the game.
Whether linear games with a stunning plot are better than open-world games with an emphasis on player freedom is a matter of taste, and yet the true classics managed to find a very delicate balance between these two extremes. However, such games are usually huge projects with budgets of tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars.
In the case of a smaller game, to create balance, you must have a couple of tricks up your sleeve. The most obvious solution is to reduce the detail. If the plot is mostly text, and the graphics are fairly low-resolution 2D images, then you can create much more content with fewer funds. Another solution is to tinker with the available resources: instead of creating a plot choice that leads to different places with a different set of NPCs, you can slightly change the content in one place and use the same characters. Telltale was the master of such tricks: the results were almost the same, and the difference was that the character did or said something. The message “X will remember this” was also a convenient trick that heightens the seeming importance of choice, even if in reality he didn’t or had almost no real results.
In the other side of the spectrum can also go very far. Modern games in the Final Fantasy series are not famous for their free gameplay, but Final Fantasy XIII brought him to such an extreme that it scared away even the most dedicated fans.
Here I mainly mean character generation and development, but this may also refer to the number of options provided to the player. As in the case of the previous axis, this is basically a matter of taste and depends on the player’s experience in the genre.
Both board and digital role-playing games may seem uncomfortable to an unprepared person: a bunch of different statistics, skills, and other character options. Especially if the character generation screen becomes the first after the game starts. If a player has to make a choice, the consequences of which will be felt for a very long time, even before he understood the principles of the game, then there is a big risk that he will ruin everything without starting yet.
On this axis, the Japanese and Western RPGs are usually located on opposite sides: in JRPG, there is usually no character creation, and the performance enhancements are often very linear (there are choices in one or two systems), while Western games stick to the desktop model: first generation character, and then very detailed choices of development.
In Rimelands, we decided to choose a middle ground and refused to generate a character, forcing the player to start from scratch. At each level increase the player can choose from three classes; he can either stick to one class throughout the game, or choose a new one each time, depending on which options he seems to choose better.
The decision depends on your target audience: you can choose one of the ways, or make a compromise and create some combination, but the choice must be made consciously, because this axis is very closely connected with the choice on other axes. They are all related to each other. The game, designed for accessibility as opposed to difficult choices, is better combined with a plot-oriented and less “grind”; the opposite is also true. Naturally, you can combine approaches in another way, but you need to be careful and understand how this affects the gameplay in general.
You can balance depth with accessibility, gradually acquainting the player with the game and making the mechanics more pronounced.
In no case is this method a ready-made solution for creating a role-playing game design; rather, it is a tool for analyzing the balance of elements in the development or for parsing other people's games when learning.
Since it is impossible to list all the parameters that role-playing games should have, and there are many approaches to every aspect of design, I have divided the design into four separate axes. None of the axes alone can tell you whether you are on the right track, but all together they allow you to get the whole picture.
Axis 1: randomness-determinism
From the first days of Dungeons & Dragons, Chainmail and their predecessors, chance was the basis of the design of role-playing games. Board game participants used rolls of bones to determine the outcome of any action with an undetermined result - and at that time there were many such actions. In the process of developing the RPG discipline, the number of rolls of bones gradually decreased, and some games even abandoned them completely. In more action-oriented digital games, part of randomness has been replaced by player skills, but it is still an integral part of any traditional RPG, especially in the fantasy entourage.
')
Rarely there is some perfect compromise between chance and certainty, and the best approach varies from game to game. My work process usually starts with too much randomness, after which I, iteration after iteration, gradually add determinism. In my series of articles on the design of RPG battles, this is described in more detail, but here I will tell you briefly.
In board games, throwing a dice is an action taken by a player: “I threw 17”. Even though we are aware that we cannot influence the outcome of the throw (if not cheating), throwing the dice seems like a personal action, and a bad throw seems like either my fault or the fault of bad bones. In digital games, the bad luck strip seems to be the culprit of the game, and very quickly begins to annoy. Therefore, we need to give the player more opportunities to “assign” his action. For this reason, we have added the ability to transfer bones to Rimelands. Since the game only rolls a failed bone, this option essentially reduces randomness, and since it costs one mana point (the player always has exactly five mana points), the player feels the bone roll as his real choice.
Another good way to add determinism is to have a relatively narrow randomness interval for damage. This solution is often found in the JRPG. The worst luck becomes the lower limit, from which you can only move up. The player enjoys the ejection of crit, even though he does not throw the dice himself, because failure cannot spoil everything.
A small amount of randomness usually leads to the fact that battles become more like puzzles, in which you need to choose the right combination of abilities to defeat a specific enemy. Usually the most deterministic fights in such games are boss fights, but, for example, Persona 5 takes this principle to a new level, requiring the player to know the exact strengths and weaknesses of the opponent to win.
The more choices you give the player, the more influence he has. The player must always feel that he lost the battle not because of an unsuccessful roll of the bones, but because of his choice.
Axis 2: mechanics-content
Role-playing games often have a lot of content. A variety of battles, research and plot require a lot of resources for the characters and environments, level design, script and sound. Further aggravating the situation is that players usually expect dozens of hours of gameplay to play, especially in the case of a strong plot component.
There are many ways to save the day. For example, you can reuse identical enemies at levels with different designs, which increases complexity, change textures instead of creating completely new models, and use lighting to give other sentiments and context to your surroundings. When creating a rich content gameplay, it is crucial to have a reliable level design tool, it will pay back the initial investment of labor well.
On the opposite side of the axis is another approach: use less content and rely more on mechanics. This approach is common in roguelike, which use procedural level generation for each session, usually with the same resources. Another example would be hybrids of puzzles and role-playing games like PuzzleQuest, which rely more on the mechanics of the battle, leaving the plot content on the outskirts.
The quality of the work of mechanics-oriented games strongly depends on the balance on the previous axis (“randomness-determinism”). Since developers do not have the ability to manually create new challenges based on the same resources, the basic game mechanics must support a wide range of choices and create new challenges. If you fail to create a convincing basic mechanics, the game will seem monotonous and annoying.
I noticed that the feeling of “grinding” can be weakened if the game has any additional goals. Breaking through crowds of enemies is less boring if some other counters increase along with the XP band.
Axis 3: plot-freedom
This axis is related to the previous one, but rather from the point of view of narration. The plot is content, which means its production is expensive, but from the very beginning of the RPG genre, one of its main principles has been interactive narration, and the whole genre as a whole is as much a medium for telling a story as a form of the game.
Whether linear games with a stunning plot are better than open-world games with an emphasis on player freedom is a matter of taste, and yet the true classics managed to find a very delicate balance between these two extremes. However, such games are usually huge projects with budgets of tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars.
In the case of a smaller game, to create balance, you must have a couple of tricks up your sleeve. The most obvious solution is to reduce the detail. If the plot is mostly text, and the graphics are fairly low-resolution 2D images, then you can create much more content with fewer funds. Another solution is to tinker with the available resources: instead of creating a plot choice that leads to different places with a different set of NPCs, you can slightly change the content in one place and use the same characters. Telltale was the master of such tricks: the results were almost the same, and the difference was that the character did or said something. The message “X will remember this” was also a convenient trick that heightens the seeming importance of choice, even if in reality he didn’t or had almost no real results.
In the other side of the spectrum can also go very far. Modern games in the Final Fantasy series are not famous for their free gameplay, but Final Fantasy XIII brought him to such an extreme that it scared away even the most dedicated fans.
Axis 4: selection options-availability
Here I mainly mean character generation and development, but this may also refer to the number of options provided to the player. As in the case of the previous axis, this is basically a matter of taste and depends on the player’s experience in the genre.
Both board and digital role-playing games may seem uncomfortable to an unprepared person: a bunch of different statistics, skills, and other character options. Especially if the character generation screen becomes the first after the game starts. If a player has to make a choice, the consequences of which will be felt for a very long time, even before he understood the principles of the game, then there is a big risk that he will ruin everything without starting yet.
On this axis, the Japanese and Western RPGs are usually located on opposite sides: in JRPG, there is usually no character creation, and the performance enhancements are often very linear (there are choices in one or two systems), while Western games stick to the desktop model: first generation character, and then very detailed choices of development.
In Rimelands, we decided to choose a middle ground and refused to generate a character, forcing the player to start from scratch. At each level increase the player can choose from three classes; he can either stick to one class throughout the game, or choose a new one each time, depending on which options he seems to choose better.
The decision depends on your target audience: you can choose one of the ways, or make a compromise and create some combination, but the choice must be made consciously, because this axis is very closely connected with the choice on other axes. They are all related to each other. The game, designed for accessibility as opposed to difficult choices, is better combined with a plot-oriented and less “grind”; the opposite is also true. Naturally, you can combine approaches in another way, but you need to be careful and understand how this affects the gameplay in general.
You can balance depth with accessibility, gradually acquainting the player with the game and making the mechanics more pronounced.
In no case is this method a ready-made solution for creating a role-playing game design; rather, it is a tool for analyzing the balance of elements in the development or for parsing other people's games when learning.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/443854/
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