Or maybe we just disagree on implications of removing some stuff.
In any case, I'm willing to argue my point through, and listen to your arguments.
Maybe, but some stuff here just seems to point that we are of different minds of how RPGs should be made. For example, a big thing we seem to disagree one is that you seem mind it very much if a game breaks down if the player exploits, or "cheeses" it, while I am very happy to have a game that only holds as long as the player plays in "good faith".
Fallout might indeed blur the line here as it offered similar amount of freedom, but the important distinction is that true sandboxes generally have great overabundance of content.
Not necessarily quests, mind you, but places to go, things to do and so on.
That means that proper sandboxes are designed so that you're unlikely to exhaust content in a single run, while non-sandboxes are generally designed with player at least trying to exhaust content in mind. (...snip...)
A non-sandbox game with just goal based XP can generally adjust XP overhead to be minimal and amount of XP available to the amount necessary, but it doesn't apply to a game with combat and activity based XP. In such case the notion of XP supply no longer applies and there are no alternative means of limiting players' mileage out of those XPs.
I kinda agree, if you have means to keep getting xp and levelling in a static rate (more or less) rate in a story based game, you will break not only its game design, but any sense of verisimilitude that you might have. That doesn't mean the limit can't be soft instead of a hard one. If you need to get exponentially more xp to get to the next level, and if random, renewable combats aren't giving you that much xp to begin with, the only way a player will break the progression is if he really wants to.
(...snip)This is yet another reason why use-based systems are more appropriate for sandboxes - they can control both supply and use of XP better than systems relying on amorphous universal XPs, hell, they may even make some sorts of XP potentially harmful to certain builds, after all, if you are planning to never actually need to pick a lock, spending your time and effort on mastering the art of lockpicking is nothing but squandering your potential - this really helps if you have potentially tens of times more XP lying about than you'll ever need.(snip...)
Well, of course, this is one way of doing it, and it is a good way too. But I still say you can have other ways of doing it too. For example, if you have a timed sandbox, where events are going to happen, and eventually lead to a conclusion to the game, then the amount of xp the player can get is limited, but no really controlled.
Actually, there is a very good reason for that. If you have your story planned out in detail, player can easily and unwittingly break it unless you manage ot constrain the player somehow. If you don't constrain player, you'll have to account for a lot of branching, 'a lot' being exponential here.
If you can't afford that, you'll have to lessen the amount of assumptions made in the story effectively simplifying it but making it much more malleable.
Well, I would say you can still manage it well by having floating "pieces". That is, instead of having your story planned as a straight line that flows from A to B, passing through C, D and E, you could have nodes that the player can reach in different states, and which act differently depending on the state the player arrive. The key here is that the pieces would still work together together to tell a kind of story, so they have a lot of interdependency between them, but are not so close knit together as to account for each individual path. Let me try to give an example:
In our imaginary fantasy game, one of the important NPCs is the evil vizier, who aims to slowly take over the mind of the king with his magic, and use him as a puppet to his own will. Now, the players can interact with the vizier in many different ways. If the PCs fall for his deception, they can help him obtain magic mirrors that will help him achieve his objective faster. Doing so will cast a dark shadow on the PCs' reputation, which other NPCs and other pieces of the story will react to differently. The PCs might also discover the ploy and try to stop it, before its completion, which would lead to a showdown scenario where he tries to flee to the dark tombs, a place that will be visited only later in the story. If the PCs are wary, they may find about this in a secret diary in his room. Using that, they can convince the guardian of the tombs of the mage's dark designs, which will cause the mage to be turned into a shadow among the many that haunt the tomb, and end his ambitions for good.
If he isn't stopped, he will eventually trigger the mad king storyline, a sequence of events where many other NPCs end up dead and, if he has his way, the king dissolves the council and begins to rule with an iron hand, putting the kingdom as one of the enemies in the end game scenario. This storyline is particularly interesting because the PCs really can't save everyone once it starts to happen, although how many the can save depends on how well they play their hand. However, they actually stand to earn something from it too. If the vizier is stopped, the council will stop bickering and unite against anyone the PCs can prove had a link to the vizier.
Now, let me go over your next part of the argument before I explain why I used this example:
Games with a lot of possibilities to break the story benefit from stories that are hard to break, and other than the story that simply isn't there, the hardest kind of story to break is one that's already very fragmented and ill-defined.
Games with a lot of specific story benefit from player's inability to do stuff that may break them, inability to be in the wrong place at the wrong time is possible the least jarring and easiest to implement constraint here.
This is all true, but if you work a little bit with some work, you can make a story that is well defined but still robust against breaking, by considering important options you want to give the PCs, and by implementing actual consequences to these options. The NPC above has a specific role in the story, he is a betrayer, a misleader. If the PCs can get ahead of him, they can actually benefit from him, but if not, he will cause trouble for them. The fitting together of this stuff can be hard, and it can not always work so well. Depending on where the PCs are coming from, the vizier's betrayal may feel off, as it was the wrong time in the story to introduce it.
But still, I think that with effort and a little bit of experimenting, Obsidian could work a story that was somewhat robust while not being so restrictive. The benefit here is that the story becomes more of an actual part of the game, instead of a backdrop thing. I guess both F:NV and Alpha Protocol (what else may be its many many many faults) show an interest by Obsidian in trying something like this, but I feel one crucial ingredient is missing. For all the choices and what not you may make in these games, the structure of the story is much the same, with few exceptions.
But still, I would prefer much more a game with a smaller, slightly underdeveloped and not so well told story to one that is very well done, but with little lee way for the player to do as he wants.
Except you have to balance choosing badly with cheesing superbly and it's often hard to define what is already cheese.
If you make game work out with all the legitimate solutions, then players who cheese a bit more will find it too easy. If you account for some cheese, you may end up, for example, screwing diplomatic players in the ass and so on.
I bolded the part above because this is, I think crucial here. A well designed game should account for what could be considered valid behavior, for what is just the player playing in good faith, I am not saying that hese problems should be just ignored (although they might not be as important as other stuff). But eventually, you have behavior that is quite clearly in bad faith, and accounting for it is just a wast of time, I think.
And then you asren't really forcing anyone to restart, because by engaging in mind-numbing grind or excessive cheese player will still succeed, but the quality of his game will suffer, and not through his own fault.
I disagree. It is his fault because he is the one cheesing so damn much. Unless the game somehow didn't make sure this was a bad idea/not in his best interests.
Again, XP-based systems are shit, because they are barely systems. They are perfectly salvageable in PnP, because you can directly or indirectly base them on GM's fiat, but in cRPG you have no GM and no GM's fiat. The only thing that comes close are authors foreseeing the possible rewards, but that depends on how forseeable the course of action in game is. Being story/quest driven, and limited in scope helps a lot here. It's also easier to predict that player will do something than all the ways in which player may do it.
Well, sometimes you don't need a complex system, or the complexity is actually in the philosophy of how things (like xp points) are placed. Aside from that, yeah, hand placed xp is frequently the most important part of xp in such systems, but still placing xp rewards for recognizing the player accomplished something important, like keeping his own life after combat, doesn't necessarily break this.
I think you're missing the point here.
The point is that if system can be shown to have crippling flaws out of the context of other systems, then those flaws indicate that it's simply a shitty system and its flaws are in no way related to the potential it creates when running in concert with all the other systems in game, so they are perfectly possible to iron out without vrippling game's openness and flexibility. You can't show me a single thing that would be lost (and worth mourning after) if Fallout suddenly got converted to only scripted XP gains (no combat XP, no lockpicking XPs, etc.), can you?
The game would feel less like a sandbox, for starters.
But that's only because circumstances ensure it doesn't really get to be broken. Can you show me how to do that with combat or generally solution based XP system?
Because the only way I see is to limit solutions drastically, especially getting rid of freeform ones - last time I checked you were pro openness and flexibility, right?
Just make the circunstances ensure it isn't broken. In fact, systems that interact with the content of the game like that are frequently some of the most fun, and should be expanded on, rather than phased out in favor of systematic solutions. In the case of PE, you could use even the same damn solution, a timer, so it wouldn't be like the player would have infinite time with which to level.
Hard to achieve with a system that is literally all-encompasing. Also, I do think that it's easier and less time consuming to clean up the shit BEFORE it hits the fan.
Maybe, but it leads to a more boring and less uncertain game.
And if you can farm this resource indefinitely or even just increase it severalfold over what the game is designed for we can't speak of any scarcity.
Sure, but neither of these necessarily require that we control the experience tightly.
If the philosophy is that of a GM playing the role of a circus animal trainer throwing snacks at the animal for doing increasingly impressive acrobatics for no actual reason, then yes, I disagree with it.
I'm not playing cRPGs to be someone's circus animal.
Well, the idea is that the GM is applauding what you managed to bring the game, not treating you as an inferior. In fact, to me it seems that the XP as a story marker design is the one the player is likened to a circus animal, as he can't break the railroad, and must instead do like the ringmaster commands.
First, if this kind of gameplay is so tedious, why have it at all?
So because combat can get repetitive under certain, easily avoided circumstances, you'd remove all combat? So because picking all the locks you can find is boring as fuck you'd rather have a game without lockpicking? Wat.
Is there *any* kind of gameplay that can't potentially be reduced to boring as fuck case repeating over and over again?
Come on, man, I addressed this right after the part you quoted.
Of course, I guess the problem lies with the game having the PCs get to such a point where combat isn't fun because you are overlevelled, or because you just did so much of it.
Then again, I didn't actually draw any conclusion from it, so I guess it is a valid point still. Anyway, what I was trying to say is that it is a valid concern that different people will engage in more or less combat and grow tired sooner or later of it. The xp of the game should account for this kind of thing. What I don't feel there is much merit in accounting for is for the people who keep grinding combat way past them, or anyone else, would find it fun.
Even if the amount of XP or loot evens out in the end you can still play through a substantial portion of the game with more XP or better gear than you'd normally have and have it open new opportunities.
Goal XP only doesn't prevent this. All it prevents are stupid and cheesy ways of doing so. If it blocks cheese and broken stuff, but maintains all legitimate ways, then it's necessarily and universally superior to the alternative, and we already know it's less work to implement and test too.
It blocks cheese, but blocking cheese is something I care very little for. On the other hand, it takes away part of the satisfaction of combat and using it to open your own way through the game. There is a downside here. Aside from that, I am sure, goal based XP could work as well, I just don't trust Obsidian to really make it open after what they stated of thephilosophy. Still, maybe Josh will address this later and we will have more to go on...
What's there not to like?
Unless you masturbate over all the extra loot and XP you get over 'mere mortals' but are actually too stupid to come up with ways to get them other than really trivial cheese there is absolutely no reason not cherish kill XP getting the fuck out.
I always go for pacifist characters as much as I can, actually. But I do think RPGs feel different without combat xp. Not necessarily worse, but not necessarily better either. Getting XP hat is appropriate to the fight you just had can give you the sense of advancement, that your bet was really worth something after all. I will concede saving and reloading until you win break that same sense of accomplishment, though, so that this makes more sense in a ironman game, or at least one that punishes you for losing in some palpable way.
Except shitty kill XP system gives player very tangible reason, it's just that it doesn't make any sense within the universe. If the system motivates nonsensical (in universe) behaviour, then the system is broken. If the system is broken, it needs to be repaired or replaced.
Well, by now I think it is clear this is a question of priorities for both of us, and how I would prefer it gave you a reason not to engage in the behavior than simply forbidding it.
Well, if players in my games managed to get away with it, they probably would get more xp for it than the individual values of the killed people...
Really? Because under no circumstances would I give such player more XP than it would be proportional to how hard it was to do, and if I suspected player is doing it only to get those extra XPs, he'd probably get his character irreversibly killed in (hopefully) poetic and amusing manner within one or two minutes tops.
Xp proportional to difficulty is a way of measuring it, though there are others. If the player decided to do that just because he felt chaotic neutral, I would probably not give him much, or even anything, unless he managed to make the game entertaining through it regardless. Trying to escape guards, living in the wilderness to avoid detection, or spinning the facts in such a masterful way someone else gets the blame are all probably entertaining things, though. Anyway, I prefer to deal my players consequences for their actions through in game logic than just by fiat. If they manage to get away with something outrageous by having the game logic dictate they are home free, then that is that.
Here, take this I WIN button, just be sure to never press it.
When the line between cheese and noncheese is blurry, it's surprisingly easy to cross it without even noticing.
Yes, but my point was about when it isn't blurry...
