Menu
News
All News
Dungeons & Dragons
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition
Pathfinder
Starfinder
Warhammer
2d20 System
Year Zero Engine
Industry News
Reviews
Dragon Reflections
Columns
Weekly Digests
Weekly News Digest
Freebies, Sales & Bundles
RPG Print News
RPG Crowdfunding News
Game Content
ENterplanetary DimENsions
Mythological Figures
Opinion
Worlds of Design
Peregrine's Next
RPG Evolution
Other Columns
From the Freelancing Frontline
Monster ENcyclopedia
WotC/TSR Alumni Look Back
4 Hours w/RSD (Ryan Dancey)
The Road to 3E (Jonathan Tweet)
Greenwood's Realms (Ed Greenwood)
Drawmij's TSR (Jim Ward)
Community
Forums & Topics
Forum List
Latest Posts
Forum list
*Dungeons & Dragons
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition
D&D Older Editions
*TTRPGs General
*Pathfinder & Starfinder
EN Publishing
*Geek Talk & Media
Search forums
Chat/Discord
Resources
Wiki
Pages
Latest activity
Media
New media
New comments
Search media
Downloads
Latest reviews
Search resources
EN Publishing
Store
EN5ider
Adventures in ZEITGEIST
Awfully Cheerful Engine
What's OLD is NEW
Judge Dredd & The Worlds Of 2000AD
War of the Burning Sky
Level Up: Advanced 5E
Events & Releases
Upcoming Events
Private Events
Featured Events
Socials!
Twitch
YouTube
Facebook (EN Publishing)
Facebook (EN World)
Twitter
Instagram
TikTok
Podcast
Features
Top 5 RPGs Compiled Charts 2004-Present
Adventure Game Industry Market Research Summary (RPGs) V1.0
Ryan Dancey: Acquiring TSR
Q&A With Gary Gygax
D&D Rules FAQs
TSR, WotC, & Paizo: A Comparative History
D&D Pronunciation Guide
Million Dollar TTRPG Kickstarters
Tabletop RPG Podcast Hall of Fame
Eric Noah's Unofficial D&D 3rd Edition News
D&D in the Mainstream
D&D & RPG History
About Morrus
Log in
Register
What's new
Search
Search
Search titles only
By:
Forums & Topics
Forum List
Latest Posts
Forum list
*Dungeons & Dragons
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition
D&D Older Editions
*TTRPGs General
*Pathfinder & Starfinder
EN Publishing
*Geek Talk & Media
Search forums
Chat/Discord
Menu
Log in
Register
Install the app
Install
Community
General Tabletop Discussion
*Dungeons & Dragons
Does a D&D Videogame have to be turn-based?
JavaScript is disabled. For a better experience, please enable JavaScript in your browser before proceeding.
You are using an out of date browser. It may not display this or other websites correctly.
You should upgrade or use an
alternative browser
.
Reply to thread
Message
<blockquote data-quote="Hillsy7" data-source="post: 7232351" data-attributes="member: 6689191"><p>In light of my gloom ridden post above – believe it or not, I do have an idea or 2, with varying levels of feasibility.</p><p></p><p>1) Design the entire game around failure. Unlock content rather than prohibit it should you fail a skill check or lose a fight. Make success satisfying (“I overcame this challenged, YAY!” + Loot), and failure exciting (“You lost 2 party members and ran away, now a whole story chain has opened up to save them from something. You have 12 hours.”). This would probably mean 2 things: Combat would have to be rarer and more deadly, and the story/plot would have to be incredibly complex to chain, narratively, lots of success and failure possibilities together and make both equally fun to play.</p><p>2) Make the players control the bad guys AND the good guys. How you’d do it well, I have no idea, but you’d have to do it in such a way that the player can’t cheat, and there is some sort of satisfaction in playing the bad guy well. What this ‘might’ do (I’m not a psychologist) is make the feeling of rolling badly a lot both a good and bad thing in equal measure. It’s much harder to get frustrated with the feedback loop of roughly even probability when you feel both happy and sad with any outcome, depending on the context (Rolling for a hero/monster). This would, I suspect, take a lot of testing and innovation to get right.</p><p>3) Increase the pace drastically. There is a 4th way other than Real Time, Active Pause, and Turn Based – FFVIII’s Active Time Bar. In D&D parlance, this is akin to saying “You have 30 seconds to take your turn, after than you start slipping down the initiative order”. This is a sort of mash-up of the two solutions by giving a player time to plan, but moving them quickly onto the next action if they fail. Deadlines force people to reassess the measure of success and failure, this might just work….again though, you’d need a lot of testing to get the balance.</p><p>4) Trick the player into thinking what they are experiencing (the high-ish probability of failure) isn’t anything to do with probability and is, in itself, a measure of skill. Dark Souls is Effing Hard, but hardly anyone says it’s unfair. Give me a probability engine and a quiet room, I’ll have the most rational mathematician screaming foul play in under an hour trying to play a game of chance. If you can convince the player somehow that rolling a d20 is exactly like a high precision fighting game, you might make the hit and miss mechanic something satisfying, rather than a probability trip-hazard.</p><p>So just some ideas here – and if you’re wondering what the bejesus I’m going on about in point 4, I have an example of how that would work from when I was thinking about creating a dungeon crawling video game in Unity, and how I’d port my own homebrew combat system into it.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Hillsy7, post: 7232351, member: 6689191"] In light of my gloom ridden post above – believe it or not, I do have an idea or 2, with varying levels of feasibility. 1) Design the entire game around failure. Unlock content rather than prohibit it should you fail a skill check or lose a fight. Make success satisfying (“I overcame this challenged, YAY!” + Loot), and failure exciting (“You lost 2 party members and ran away, now a whole story chain has opened up to save them from something. You have 12 hours.”). This would probably mean 2 things: Combat would have to be rarer and more deadly, and the story/plot would have to be incredibly complex to chain, narratively, lots of success and failure possibilities together and make both equally fun to play. 2) Make the players control the bad guys AND the good guys. How you’d do it well, I have no idea, but you’d have to do it in such a way that the player can’t cheat, and there is some sort of satisfaction in playing the bad guy well. What this ‘might’ do (I’m not a psychologist) is make the feeling of rolling badly a lot both a good and bad thing in equal measure. It’s much harder to get frustrated with the feedback loop of roughly even probability when you feel both happy and sad with any outcome, depending on the context (Rolling for a hero/monster). This would, I suspect, take a lot of testing and innovation to get right. 3) Increase the pace drastically. There is a 4th way other than Real Time, Active Pause, and Turn Based – FFVIII’s Active Time Bar. In D&D parlance, this is akin to saying “You have 30 seconds to take your turn, after than you start slipping down the initiative order”. This is a sort of mash-up of the two solutions by giving a player time to plan, but moving them quickly onto the next action if they fail. Deadlines force people to reassess the measure of success and failure, this might just work….again though, you’d need a lot of testing to get the balance. 4) Trick the player into thinking what they are experiencing (the high-ish probability of failure) isn’t anything to do with probability and is, in itself, a measure of skill. Dark Souls is Effing Hard, but hardly anyone says it’s unfair. Give me a probability engine and a quiet room, I’ll have the most rational mathematician screaming foul play in under an hour trying to play a game of chance. If you can convince the player somehow that rolling a d20 is exactly like a high precision fighting game, you might make the hit and miss mechanic something satisfying, rather than a probability trip-hazard. So just some ideas here – and if you’re wondering what the bejesus I’m going on about in point 4, I have an example of how that would work from when I was thinking about creating a dungeon crawling video game in Unity, and how I’d port my own homebrew combat system into it. [/QUOTE]
Insert quotes…
Verification
Post reply
Community
General Tabletop Discussion
*Dungeons & Dragons
Does a D&D Videogame have to be turn-based?
Top