Michael Norskov suggested we play this. I did and then Walker revealed he gave it a crack a couple of days ago and didn’t think it interesting enough to post about. Which lead to a little RPS-chat-room debate about why he didn’t, and why I thought Sophie Houlden had nailed it, admittedly in a pretty mean-spirited way. And the fact we were having the debate at all probably meant it was worth posting about. In other words, it’s one of those videogame deconstruction things which wind some of you up right rotten.
It’s the Linear RPG. You can move along a line in both directions. As you do so you suffer damage. You move to the right, you gain experience points. Get enough XP and you go up a level, increasing the size of your health bar. When you reach a node, you restore your health and save your progress. Any time you die, you go back. And as you travel to the right, a story scrolls in the background. In other words, to read the story, you have to carry on walking. Eventually you get to a bit where you can’t reach the next node, forcing you to wander back the way you came and go back and forth until you’ve leveled-up enough to make it. Eventually, you’ll get to the end of the story. Oh – and the story is a openly scornful stomp through RPG tropes. Oh noes! Iz the bad guy! And Etc.
Like most of the deconstructions, the point is “This is all there is to these games”. And in an reductio ad absurdum – and man, I hope I’m that firing that particular round the wanky latin-o-gun correctly – way, show their underlying pointlessness.
Walker’s reason for not posting it? Well, he’s never played an RPG where he’s had to backtrack to gain levels so he can make progress. Therefore, its analysis of mechanics was bullshit. It was saying nowt.
This made me think two things:
1) Walker’s had a lot of luck playing RPGs.
2) Sophie hasn’t been clear about what she’s talking about.
What she’s really talking about is a jRPG rather than a western-model one. The clues are there in terms of the specifics of the story she choose to tell, and how she’s reduced it. jRPGs have traditionally been totally linear stories. The only obstacle to your progress tends to be fights. Whether you win them or not depends on your character rather than… well, there you go into the question of how much skill there is in a fight versus you just having to be harder. Sure, some RPGs slow your progress by misjudging how much power you’ll have a specific point so you can go back and grind up so you can deal with the problem… but saying all do is a bit of a stretch.
In other words, I suspect, her reductio ad absurdum is flawed – it just describes a bad example of the genre. And reducing the genre to a bad example of the genre is the thing which makes The Linear RPG seem so mean-hearted. It doesn’t exist to examine it. It exists to mock it. And that’s just a trifle cruel.
Beautiful executed, with great visual flair, though.
Related Stories:
@Kieron: What would a “character-development-but-no-character-improvement system” entail, exactly? “Sidegrades”? An expansion of possible strategies, none with a clear overall advantage over the others? Or are you just going to scrawl backstory over the stat tables on each PC’s character sheet?
Either way, colour me intrigued.
The easiest way to think of it would be guild wars. As in, a character has – say – five ability slots. As a starting character, you get to choose from a certain set. As the game progress, you get the opportunity to swap them for other abilities. In fact, depending on your decisions and actions, you’d have to.
With Phonogram the world doesn’t really work with the “People get powerful as they get experience” one*. It’s magic based around your attachment to music. In practice, for most people, your attachment to music lessens in intensity as you get older. At the least, your relationship to music hardens depending on those earlier experiences. And you never grow back the virginity.
What I’ve been playing with is that a new character is actually most abstractly powerful – with six slots. That sixth slot is always going to go, and go quickly. Naivety is actually a strength. Also, when you swap an ability, it can be a one-way street – for some you never get to replace it. For some it puts you on a (forking) path. And for most of those paths, the end of the path is actually losing the slot. The powers you gain are more specific and mostly more subtle and can probably make you survive better in the world – but the raw powers are far more in your face.
(For example, a basic power may be – say – letting a pop record ride you, and gain increased physical abilities in a Voodoo-esque fashion. Which is great. But an advanced power may be being able to transforming tapped magical energy from visiting a gig into cheating the system of life and having enough money in your bank account to live acceptably constantly. Choosing the latter simplifies your phonomancers life enormously, because they can concentrate on just magical stuff – the former will still have to actually *earn some money* so they’ve got 10 hours a day less time to pursue this kind of stuff. Which could include stuff like “Listening to music all the time” – and as your slots require upkeep activities, not choosing to go for the cheating-system-option could cause you to lose the slot anyway. It’s *hard* to keep that power and creates real sacrifices in a character’s life.)
I was thinking this for the magical skills alone. For normal abilities (skills, etc) there would be a normal, if vestigial, system. It wouldn’t be a game where you’d be worrying about your general skills that much. Magical skills tend to trump.
It’s very much a story based system of RPGs in the Storyteller/Unknown Armies vein, but with all the mechanics twisted to support Phonogram’s conceit.
KG
*To be honest, I’m not sure it works generally as well as people always think. We all can think of people who were better at their jobs when they were 23 than they were at 43.
(Worth noting that I think the system of upgrades could be used in quite a few other RPG-esque systems, even one with a more game-esque bent. Guild Wars with rather than freely changeable abilities, having it as development trees – just not abilities which were more *powerful*.)
KG
Um, the upshot of that post was that I now want to read your comic.
Dammit.
But also, yeah. Totally. I’ve always thought that experience alone was an odd reason for people to get unswervingly better at their craft. Especially when it comes to HP meters! Regardless of what abstract notion that value expresses, the same draconic fireball should be equally lethal to two equally fleshy and combustible bodies.
I’m – uh. I’m actually trying to hash out the details for a strategy-RPG myself at the moment. I keep thinking what I really want to do is bring a deck-building element into it. And not just an overall deck for your army, but decks-within-decks for key units to customise their personal utility within your grander strategies. My thinking is to assign values to ability cards, unit cards and so on, and to maintain strict value limitations on a deck- so you might have a level one Raise Undead card that cost 5 points to apply, and a level three Raise Undead card that cost 7. But at the same time, while you get a bigger zombie, maybe the casting time is longer, or you only get one shambling minion instead of two.
I do think that something kind of stale about tradtional RPG progression is that your character improvements are really quite arbitrary – you get a better sword for beating a boss, but it only exists to make the next one ~about~ as difficult as this one was. At no stage has your skill really been reflected in your character’s progression, and similarly, you’re not broadening the player’s scope for becoming more skillful at the game. Whereas broadening strategic horizons, while making sure new abilities adhere to the same strict balance limitations, renews and stabilises the challenge the player can expect to face, while allowing them a greater scope for creative expression and strategic – not arbitrary – efficacy.
..Yeah?
Re: PG. The problem with PG as a game is that I’ve written it (understandably) as a literary conceit. Transforming it into a gaming one requires a lot of hardening into the rules – trying to turn what are themes into actual hard-edged mechanics. Which is fun in a way, but also transforms the comic into something else.
(Which is fine, but always worth keeping in mind).
I’ll agree that in games there’s lots of systems for character improvement which just aren’t explored. I think stuff which has been used in pen and paper games extensively really need to be integrated by brave people – alternatively, ways which a videogame “XP” based system could work *alternatively* rather than pure grind.
(One of my favourite ideas is doing an XP system based on novelty. As you only get XP the first time you do a new thing. You get XP for defeating an orc in combat. After that, there’s none, so there’s no chance to grind. However, you do things like make leaders of groups of common monsters being novel and new – so that defeating the chieftan to an orc tribe *does* get XP because he’s a famous person. Just fighting everyone is a waste of time)
But that’s well off. I agree – lots of ways to do stuff, both for more RP and mechanistic approaches. I’d like to see ‘em tried.
KG
Don’t know about modern RPGs, but some classic non-improving RPG characters:
Call of Cthulhu – Increasing your true knowledge of the horrors of the universe (Mythos skill) limits your sanity. Experienced adventurers are the most prone to gibbering and sudden outbreaks of triskaidekaphobia.
Traveller – You’re largely stuck with your starting character. Learning new skills is fiendishly difficult, and the ageing rules lead to stat decrease, and possibly losing skills. Rewards are financial (bigger spaceships), and an increased knowledge of the various plot arcs.
I always think that the reward of experience should be a greater range of options, not just better versions of what you’ve already got. Every advantage should have a cost.
Out of morbid curiosity I had to run left and right until level 60 to see if there was an imposed level cap. I thought their might have been embedded and subtle commentary on MMOs as well. The leveling algorithm continues on though ad infinitum.
I guess we will just have to wait for the Linear RPG expansion pack. I hear we’ll get our own pegacorns that we can fly instead of running, but they will require 1000 coins for a ridiculously slow one, and 5000 more coins if we want our pegacorn to move like it should have all along. The rumours of being forced to pay another 1000 coins to fly in cold air are probably malicious lies being spread by people that hate Linear RPG though.
Kliche – Level 61
@ David: “What are the names of these tabletop RPGs that you speak of?”
There are plenty of games that do interesting things with character advancement (including more or less just tossing it out the window in favour of other sorts of play).
E.g.
Nobilis
Dogs in the Vineyard
Burning Wheel
Sorceror
My Life With Master
Wushu
Exalted (yes, really – imo most people don’t try to climb mount impossible and actually out-essence the elder big-bads.)
A million more less notable but not necessarily less note-worthy games that do all kinds of clever forward thinking stuff are regularly discussed in incredible detail on
http://indie-rpgs.com/
“Jaxtrasi says:
EyeMessiah:
That seems like a fairly unrelated complaint about hard level-based content locks.”
Very true, I’m just ranting truth be told. If it wasn’t for the fact that I actually quite enjoy wow’s core gameplay in terms of instances and group pvp and group quests (actually any of the MULTI player stuff) I’d tire of moaning about the endless meaningless treadmill.
“but isn’t it reasonable for them to use some kind of pacing mechanism to prevent you entering every instance on day one?”
Its reasonable in the sense that it allows them to make more $$, and I suppose that technically its not Apeshit Crazy, but still; wow is basically a big plotless sandbox, why not just make it into a go-anywhere do anything sort of deal?
“I wonder why we feel interested in stories in games which we would have no interest in any other medium. And often it really is genuine involvement in sub-literate trash.”
Its a different sort of involvement isn’t it? Its a bit more first-person. Cdr is right imo in that you come to a story in a game that you have been playing for a while pre-involved to some extent.
The story has to work that little bit less hard to draw you in because: “Woah that zombie totally jumped out at *me*.”
Other mediums have lots of advantages over games, but games are uniquely interactive and by being so get a bit of a head start in terms of closing the gap between you and the story (even if its tripe).
That said, I don’t think we should worry too much about just how bad game stories tend to be. It might seem significant, but wondering why people like stuff that sucks never got anyone anywhere. People will read, watch, play and listen to some pretty shockingly bad stuff. Someone linked to FotL recently, and they are pretty damn dire.
Got bored at level 71. No pegacorn for me. :(