NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5104948" data-attributes="member: 4937">I'm not even going to read the thread, because if I did I'd probably start arguing with someone.   To begin with, let me say I enjoy playing video games.  I like them alot.  But traditionally, video games have not been able to emulate the PnP game experience very well, nor have PnP games tried to emulate the video game experience.In my opinion, the traits that define a computer RPG (cRPG) as opposed a traditional pen and paper RPG (RPG) are:1) Designed to be played without a moderator, or with minimal creative input by the moderator:  cRPGs are player centric, because the moderator is just a dumb computer with no vested interest in the game.  But its possible to make an RPG which is player centric and reduces the moderator to a 'dumb' instrument that simply acts mechanistically and validates the player actions.  PnP RPG's designed with these principles would have rules for generatoring encounters from base principles, would encourage a social contract where the moderator acts essentially as the player of the adversary side, would discourage NPC interaction/improvisation (ei, 'I use diplomacy on the NPC' would be valid player proposition), and would discourage on the fly rulings to handle special cases.  They would have tight supposedly unambigious rules sets that would fully describe the possible range of player interaction, and encounters would have enumerated lists of action/results.  I should note that any 'Tournament Module' is going to have these features to try to encourage uniformity of experience, but an RPG going the cRPG route would see uniformity of experience as one of its primary goal and would make the tournament play experience something of the default.2) Everyone is a spell caster: One of the attributes that is increasingly common to cRPG's is that every character class has similar mechanics.    Regardless of the flavor basis of the classes powers, it has a list of powers with some recharge feature (time, mana, etc.) which lets them use special manuevers at intervals.  This has alot of strong external logic, in that it makes sense to design a game that way, but it often has poor internal logic.  That is, from the perspective a of martial character within the game universe, it doesn't make alot of sense that he can make some sort of attack without tiring or otherwise suffering penalty, but that he's then unable to make that same attack until some arbitrary interval has passed.3) External Logic trumps Internal Logic: The creators of a cRPG are constrained such that they have to make a game.  They don't have the freedom to actually simulate something, because they don't have a creative actor as a moderator.  The program can't invent on the fly.  So the game has to work entirely on the game logic.  The game world works the way it does because the game requires it.   The village might only have 5 NPC's in it, and no discernable means of trade or industry, but the village blacksmith still manages to have for sale an everchanging list of weapons worth several times the value of everything in the village.   This happens because the game requires that players be able to purchase weapon upgrades.  This is however the reverse of the traditional RPG perspective, which is that everything in the game rules is dependent on simulating some sort of reality known to the game creator independently of the game.  For example, you might be trying to create a game that simulates the reality of the Authurian myths, and so the game rules and the game so created has to match this reality.  The constraints of the game world dictates the rules, rather than the reverse.  4) The game has a built in victory condition: There is a definite point in the game play where you know that it is 'over' and its time to start over.  Much of game seems designed to bring you to this point where you beat the game.  The game is inherently close ended by design.5) Scalable Math: One of the things that Diablo brought to cRPGs that was very successful was that the math just worked regardless of the player level.  As your character advanced in level, so did the power of the enemies so that for example, if your 10th level character had 10 times the hit points of your 1st level character and hit 10 times as hard, then the monsters he was facing would have 10 times the hit points and also hit 10 times as hard.  If the character had a +50 bonus to attack that made him more likely to hit, then the monsters would have a +50 bonus to defense that made the character more likely to miss.  The result was a uniform experience of game play and challenges that could scale up almost infinitely.  You could then reuse the same limited set of game elements to challenge the character again and again.  This was very useful in a video game because the program isn't creative.  It doesn't invent things on the fly, so being able to reuse game features extended game play - or at least, gave the illusion of extended gameplay (arguably, it just allowed for infinite redundancy).  An RPG that seemed 'videogamey' to me, would adopt this idea into its basic mechanics so that gameplay that was balanced at 1st level would be basically balanced at any level.  This greatly simplifies the design process and is very useful if balance, uniformity of experience, low reliance on DM experience/ability, and the inherent notion of marching toward an end game state are going to features of your game design.</blockquote>

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