People News Colin McComb on What's Next: A New Torment RPG?

[TwinkieGorilla]

I will ask that you keep an open mind until you see what I'm thinking.

Word.

There's at least 4 or 5 members here who are capable of such an act.

 

[CMcC]

The Planescape setting being buried by WotC somehow rejoins the fact that in Torment the planes are slowly dying because of TNO's past actions. An elegant way to do a non-D&D Torment sequel would be to start on the premise of the end of the world (or rather the multiverse), with characters doing what they can to save the day or simply finding closure before the end of everything...

That sounds very "Dying Earth". I loved those stories.

 

[Oesophagus]

I for one am itching for a cRPG that isn't about preventing the impending doom of everything and everyone and their mom.

 

[Brother None]

I for one am itching for a cRPG that isn't about preventing the impending doom of everything and everyone and their mom.

I know right? If anything, cRPGs since torment have become *worse* at scale. I hope any Torment sequel, spiritual or otherwise, takes the time to mock the "epic" scope of those titles.

Oh, and mock the romance-everyone writing too. That shit needs mocking.

EDIT: by "mock" I mean subvert, of course, not comedy mocking.

 

[Gondolin]

I know right? If anything, cRPGs since torment have become *worse* at scale. I hope any Torment sequel, spiritual or otherwise, takes the time to mock the "epic" scope of those titles.

Oh, and mock the romance-everyone writing too. That shit needs mocking.

OH GOD YES!

 

[Moribund]

Wasn't torment the first game that had everyone romanceable/bromanceable?

And I don't think anyone said torment was epic, it's always been the opposite.

 

[Brother None]

Wasn't torment the first game that had everyone romanceable/bromanceable?

Maybe you're defining it differently than me, but as far as I know only Annah could be romanced. Yeah, you could get to know all characters and upgrade them all, but I actually think that was a good mechanic, to be honest. But romance? Only Annah, only a kiss.

Anyway, different era. Torment was and is about subverting tropes, and the tropes have changed to some extent.

 

[darkling]

I'm surprised WotC turned you down. After their recent show of appreciating the games history with the reprints and the way D&D Next is looking back all the way to Mystara for setting-inspiration, I imagined they'd be all over hooking you up with the IP. Do they not realize it's an easy ticket back into the video game world? You'd think they'd want some prestige there after Daggerdale and the upcoming Neverwinter.

Beyond Countless Doorways showed that you don't need Planescape to have a good time. I can't wait to see what happens here. =)

 

[Moribund]

Wasn't torment the first game that had everyone romanceable/bromanceable?

Maybe you're defining it differently than me, but as far as I know only Annah could be romanced. Yeah, you could get to know all characters and upgrade them all, but I actually think that was a good mechanic, to be honest. But romance? Only Annah, only a kiss.

Anyway, different era. Torment was and is about subverting tropes, and the tropes have changed to some extent.

You could romance annah and fall from grace and ravel. And bromance all the guys. I thought it was a good mechanic but it since went way too far, I don't need semiporn or real emotion simulation in my games.

 

[TwinkieGorilla]

You could romance annah and fall from grace and ravel. And bromance all the guys.

You're stretching, son.

And you're manipulating semantics in order to...christ, I don't know...do you actually have a point? Unless you're a lobotomy case you know damn well what Brother None meant which is to say that the current trend of YO, ROMANCE DAT ASS!® by modern fauxRpg companies catering to pimply faced teenage aspies needs to stop. All of the "romance" bits in PS:T actually had a utility and served to either further the story, gain experience or enhance your NPC followers. This is a world apart from having "Do u leik me, lol?" dialogue options arbitrarily popping up five minutes after you meet a character ala Mass Effect, et al. etc blahfucking blah.

 

[FeelTheRads]

Beyond Countless Doorways.. hmm... that would be cool too.

 

[Roguey]

You're stretching, son.

And you're manipulating semantics in order to...christ, I don't know...do you actually have a point? Unless you're a lobotomy case you know damn well what Brother None meant which is to say that the current trend of YO, ROMANCE DAT ASS!® by modern fauxRpg companies catering to pimply faced teenage aspies needs to stop. All of the "romance" bits in PS:T actually had a utility and served to either further the story, gain experience or enhance your NPC followers. This is a world apart from having "Do u leik me, lol?" dialogue options arbitrarily popping up five minutes after you meet a character ala Mass Effect, et al. etc blahfucking blah.

They were still gross and pandered too much to men and didn't even exist in RPGs for the most part until Torment and then BG2 made them big features.

 

[TwinkieGorilla]

Hey, don't look at me. I'm of the mind to exterminate the whole goddamn thing. But its still a stretch. It's like accusing FO2 of having "romances" because of Miria/Davin when everybody in the room knows damn well what's being referenced is the current volume knob-turned-to-eleven next-gen sexlarp.

 

[Oesophagus]

I know right? If anything, cRPGs since torment have become *worse* at scale. I hope any Torment sequel, spiritual or otherwise, takes the time to mock the "epic" scope of those titles.

New Vegas did that to some extent by not having the big bad guy, even Caesar's Legion turns out to be just as bad as all the other factions. But it still follows that ol' chestnut of the protagonist being thrown into the plot by some outside forces. I mean, that's pretty much what every cRPG follows - the player is always one step behind what the antagonists/whatever are doing, they have the second move in tic-tac-toe. I'd like someone try and subvert that by making the player the one with the plan.

 

[almondblight]

You could romance annah and fall from grace and ravel. And bromance all the guys. I thought it was a good mechanic but it since went way too far, I don't need semiporn or real emotion simulation in my games.

I don't think you could romance Fall-From-Grace, but you could tell her you loved her five minutes after you met her, which was stupid. Not as stupid as the forced Annah romance, but still pretty bad. Of the four female main characters, three were in love with you and then second one was attracted to you and you could tell her you loved her. Because if you're a walking corpse searching for your mortality, you need some love to help you along.

I guess that's subverting RPG's in a way, because most RPG's didn't have stupid stuff like that back then.

 

[FeelTheRads]

They were still gross

Kissing is gross. I see.

and pandered too much to men

I'd rather have pandering to men than pandering to PC fucktards, k, thanks.
Oh wait, I mean... everything should be sexless. Want to write whatever you want? Fuck you. Make it as plain as possible, lest you offend some piece of shit on the internet.

 

[jewboy]

Any speculation on why WotC isn't interested in discussing licensing with Colin? IMHO, WotC = suck and TSR = awesome, but just because WotC sucks doesn't mean they are stupid from a business POV. Why turn down that sort of deal? It would just be money in their pocket and no one else is ever going to pay them for that IP.

As much as I like the planescape setting, even if WotC had agreed to license it doesn't that mean they would have at least some creative control over the game? I mean, let's say that you have the option to kill children in the game and WotC didn't like that they might have veto power over such things. So it probably wouldn't have been worth it anyway.

I just don't understand these companies that treat their intellectual "property" as if it is gold that they are hiding in their basement. There should be some sort of a use-it-or-lose-it clause in the whole intellectuall property thing. Hoarding a setting by neither using it themselves nor ever allowing anyone else to use it is asshattery of the first degree. It's not like they created the setting anyway. Total fuckwits.

 

[Moribund]

Because they want to get 100% of the profits and lots of money up front for licenses, making it pointless to try and work with them.

You could romance annah and fall from grace and ravel. And bromance all the guys. I thought it was a good mechanic but it since went way too far, I don't need semiporn or real emotion simulation in my games.

I don't think you could romance Fall-From-Grace, but you could tell her you loved her five minutes after you met her, which was stupid. Not as stupid as the forced Annah romance, but still pretty bad. Of the four female main characters, three were in love with you and then second one was attracted to you and you could tell her you loved her. Because if you're a walking corpse searching for your mortality, you need some love to help you along.

I guess that's subverting RPG's in a way, because most RPG's didn't have stupid stuff like that back then.

You couldn't stick any parts in her but you could definitely romance her.

 

[Tigranes]

The next 30 pages of this thread: What Is A Romance?

 

[ironyuri]

The Planescape setting being buried by WotC somehow rejoins the fact that in Torment the planes are slowly dying because of TNO's past actions. An elegant way to do a non-D&D Torment sequel would be to start on the premise of the end of the world (or rather the multiverse), with characters doing what they can to save the day or simply finding closure before the end of everything...

That sounds very "Dying Earth". I loved those stories.

I'd say the reason I liked the Planescape setting was not because of its rules, but because of its lack thereof, which seemed to open up a world of vast possibilities.

Whereas the Forgotten Realms, except maybe for powerful mages are constrained by "real world" rules, Planescape felt so open, a world of limitless possibility.

The sub-plot with the priest of Aoskar for example, the idea that TNO could help revitalise the existence/worship of a dead/forgotten god who had been thrown out of his own world was, for a sidequest in orders of magnitude greater than your usual fetch quest, but very simple and self-contained.

I don't think it's so much Planescape that mattered as a setting, but the trappings of the setting assisted, because they expedited the usual tropes of the "epic" RPG, such as the long, heroic journey. When you can prick yourself in the eye to open a portal to the Underworld, or spin three times under a crescent moon to pop up in the negative material, and so on, you can really do anything you like. The protagonist doesn't have to travel for days on end to each encounter across a giant world map, just sleuth out the ways to open portal x to travel to location y. It seemed like the setting allowed for any story imaginable to be told, and while the TNO story was as much shoehorned into the setting as it was a part of it, the structural properties of the setting are what made it possible.

You could strip away Sigil, the Lady, etc. and still tell the same story, if your setting was similar in structure, ie: a realm of limitless possibility, unconstrained by unecessary rules. I guess the problem then becomes, compared to a film or novel which can do the same thing, how do you make the lack of rules a function of the gameplay mechanics? TNO discovering portals was less a gameplay function than a function of story. The mechanics themselves were about dungeon crawling (spellcasting, melee fighting, rogue-play, dialogue tree navigation, quest resolution) rather than plane-hopping. The narrative itself served as structure for a set of dungeons the player had to traverse, through admittedly not tedious (unlike so many Dungeon-based rpgs, I'm looking at you Derpan Age: Origins) combat encounters (Ragpicker's Square->The Bronze Sphere was a lot of fun, kept fresh by new mixes of enemies, new tactics, and very well written encounters, such as Many as One) to access each narrative crumb in the long trail to the end of the game.

If a Torment successor were made, it would be nice to see the mechanics of the game questioned as much as the narrative. How would a narrative in the world of "Torment" circumscribe a particular set of mechanics? Would portal/plane hopping be a gameplay function more than a simple function of story, for example? I like that you indicated your own questions/views have changed since Torment, it sometimes seems as a whole, outside say plot which those questions shaped, the actual mechanics and an idea of progressing mechanics doesn't seem to be questioned as much as pushing the narrative envelope though, which would also be nice to see with a spiritual successor.

 

[ironyuri]

Ps? What is an RPG?

Romance Playing Game.

 

[Jaesun]

The problem with WotC is HASBRO. And THAT is the sad truth.

 

[TwinkieGorilla]

The problem with WotC is HASBRO.

Mattel all the fuckin' way, amirite?

 

[Jaesun]

I dated a guy that had to deal with the entire HASBRO acquirement of WotC. And it was utterly terrible. Profits == #1 not creativity. It is utterly sickening.

 

[TwinkieGorilla]

It is utterly sickening.

Sure. But what the hell isn't these days?

*puts on 'Seed of Memory' by Terry Reid and lights a joint*