Decline Respeccing in RPGs

[Norfleet]

As a player, I'm certainly not going to have much fun if I build a mage-slayer in a fantasy world populated by 6 wizards. I also shouldn't have to start a game over to compensate for traps and deficiencies in a game's programming or design.

And how WOULD you build a mage-slayer anyway? Setting out to be a "mage-slayer" requires an actual understanding of how mages work. Given that mages are not a real thing, NOBODY knows how mages work, and therefore, being a mage-slayer necessarily involves a fair level of metagaming.

And personally, I think the notion of having to "respec" is itself a silly artifact of games: Real people don't respec...but they also aren't gimped for life because of things they learned earlier. I'm an old man. In RPG terms, I've probably allocated a lot of my skillpoints into stuff already. This doesn't somehow mean I am incapable of mastering something new. I don't have a skillpoint cap. The notion of having a "build" that you're locked into is frankly unrealistic. On the other hand, so is instantly being able to go from being a master diplomat to a master chef. But there's nothing that should prevent one from learning the skills of the other. The notion of a high-level, skilled character as being a stone completely locked into his skillset and completely incapable of learning anything new is absurd.

 

[Archibald]

I think it depends. If game is mainly about killing stuff then I see no harm in that since you are gonna kill that stuff anyway, who cares if you used arrows or fireballs. But if its more about exploration and skill checks then I wouldn't like it, for example you roll character with high charisma, get all possible rewards from dialogs then re-roll into lock picker and pick all the locks in the game for additional rewards. In such case it feels a bit like cheating, at least for me.

 

[Lilura]

A merchant in Origins' Awakenings expansion sells a Manual of Focus that lets you respec.

"This hefty tome, forbidden by the Chantry, contains the life lessons of the wisest, strongest, and bravest of the elves of the Dales."

Thank you for that imaginative addition to Origins lore, Bioware.

 

[Luka-boy]

I generally don't feel like it's needed except maybe in games with absolutely awful documentation and, like mentioned earlier, multiplayer-focused RPGs like MMOs and maybe Diablo-style games. I almost always end up playing with sub-optimal parties/characters in games because I almost never read guides for that until after I've finished a game once, but I have a lot of fun overcoming their shortcomings.

That said, I fully support having it available as a cheat in single player games simply because it makes testing of builds/mechanics much faster.

 

[Gord]

I have used respec options only rarely so far, and when, then only limited (e.g. to put a few points wasted on a useless skill into a better one), which can be of some relevance in games with a limited pool of skill points (for which there are various justifications).
The necessity for a full respec, where I would completely change the focus of my char ever occurred to me, however. Something on that scale is better done by replaying with a different character, imho.

In the case of D:OS, I think the respec option is nice to have if you find out that you severely gimped yourself (albeit a bit borked, but then again, maybe that's the risk you take), but don't want to replay the content. It's no real option if you want to experience the game again with a different set of characters, since the content in D:OS is non-repeatable and somehow I think that merely switching half-way through the game just wouldn't be the same.

 

[Telengard]

Single player respecs and save-anywhere form an unholy couple that breeds only endless, faultless do-overs - just like we were all back in grade school. Nothing is permanent. There are no consequences. You are a god, able to do everything and solve everything with infinite foreknowledge and infinite ability. Be anything and do everything. Might as well just flip on god mode and be honest with yourself.

Ohh, we're headin' towards a lava level. Time to respec mai mage to an ice mage and freeze those fuckers. he yahh! Uh oh, it was a fake out, and were goin' to the ice palace first to get the key to the lava level. Guess I gotta reload and respec those warriors to high-to-hit gonzos to pierce all that ice armor. Chores chores chores. They should just let me respec whenever I wanna, instead of makin me reload and spend mai gold. Bastards ruin'an my fun.

And then, on top of that, making respecs cost fake in-game gold that you are positively buried in - that's just laughable. Buying a +3 sword to change out my +2, or buying into god mode. Hmm, which is better.

 

[Gord]

I did never encounter either a game where respecing was that easy, nor necessary.

Actually - if done right you could turn that into an interesting premise for a game. Playing a e.g. a shapeshifter or summoner and you need to choose the right abilities for the obstacle at hand.

 

[GlutenBurger]

It's that easy in Bioshock. There's practically a respec vending machine on every corner, as I recall. Not a proper RPG, but it's a good example of respeccing ruining a game that would have otherwise at least been mildly entertaining.

 

[Cadmus]

I did never encounter either a game where respecing was that easy, nor necessary.

Actually - if done right you could turn that into an interesting premise for a game. Playing a e.g. a shapeshifter or summoner and you need to choose the right abilities for the obstacle at hand.

this doesn't sound fun at all in any way

 

[Clockwork Knight]

No, it's not part of the fucking game, if it was part of the game then it wouldn't disable achievements.

Ignored Onholyservicebound.

Character building is fun. Like most activities, it becomes more enjoyable once you have some understanding of how the system works. It is also important to understand the environment that your character will be participating in.

As a player, I'm certainly not going to have much fun if I build a mage-slayer in a fantasy world populated by 6 wizards. I also shouldn't have to start a game over to compensate for traps and deficiencies in a game's programming or design.

Those two reasons are good enough for why respec needs to exist, but the most important reason why it *should* exist is this: it provides a safety net. Knowing that if things go poorly with my experimental party of 4 bards and 2 rangers, I can flip back to a boring standard party encourages exploration of the game system and creative character building.

You know what we did in the old days? Created a test party, played a few hours into the game, restarted if we weren't satisfied. Shocking I know.

Saddest attempt to gather KKK of this week. Do you feel more hardcore for enduring a headache intead of taking a pill, too?

 

[Raghar]

Well, I have formal education in RPG develoment, and I know properly made system:
1. allows to learn new things without problems even in the second half of game.
2. doesn't slow down learning just because the person is on high level.
3. developers spend effort to decrease influence of specialized tightly designed builds which tried to abuse the system.

The above basically prevents ANY need for respecing. A character which probably increased INT on higher level, would have even easier time to improve new skill, than he had on first level. UU I and UU II had this system (without INT dependence).
A 1000xp directly translated into a skill point, thus character growth felt natural, and player wasn't punished for lack of planing in the build.

DA:Awakening is basically a special case. It's an expansion, and when someone transferred a character, he might be in situation when he gimped it because he thought it's just a few more cutscenes until the end. (Obviously normal response should be : suck it. But it's at least reasonable, and player must find respecing item, thus it's at least not easily available.)

 

[Perkel]

respec is detrimental to RPG because it takes metric ton of RPG aspect out of it.
Who you are is decided on hours of gameplay. The good, bad and ugly. If you respec then your earlier gameplay hours are essentially invalid.

Now powergamers are different fags so for them shitty build in their e-penis contest is unacceptable. But powergamers don't really then give a shit if they play RPG or broshooter so their point is moot.

 

[Whiran]

In my view giving the opportunity to respec is a lazy game design to correct a lack of documentation in the game.

Usually people want to respec because they made "bad" choices. Why did they make bad choices? Usually because they didn't understand what they were picking. If at level 1 you are giving three paths to follow but there is NO clue as to what to expect from which path does what then.... offer a respec.

If people understood their choices better they would not need or desire to respec - they'd be happy with what they picked.

All too often we pick things only to discover that they do not do what we thought they would do - in my opinion that is bad design.

Heck, some games go so far as to force you to pick a class at the start of a game without indicating what the capabilities of that class will be towards the end of the game. As an experienced roleplay gamer I can usually guess how a class will turn out based on its name and initial skill set (if that is even revealed) but sometimes what I think is going to happen does not. For those sometimes I'm happy for the shortcut in game design to correct the issue - a respec.

 

[Lhynn]

All problems would be solved if player progress was not capped.

 

[Machocruz]

Respec is a band-aid on questionable game design. Maybe granular skill systems aren't a good idea, or skills whose effectiveness are tied to points. If I take a feat in DnD, it's still going to be useful later in the game, depending on the feat, like Cleave. Not as good as Great Cleave, but still works. But Whirlwind in D2 is going to be ineffective if you don't keep the point allotment in step with increasing monster levels.

Still, I'd rather have it as a cheat than a sanctioned option that is built into the game or worse, the game built around it. That tells me that the developers didn't take the time to refine their game and decided to apply an escape hatch instead of effort.

 

[SymbolicFrank]

This argument reminds me of most walkthroughs and experts recommending dual-class builds that are only effective in about the last 10% of the game.

 

[Saduj]

I knew that I could respec in D:OS but it didn't make me feel like my choices were meaningless because I knew I wouldn't be using the feature. To me, having a problem with the option being present is like having a problem with being able to save anywhere because it makes extreme save scumming possible. If using a certain feature makes the game less fun for you then don't use it. I don't give a shit what anyone else is doing in a single player game.

 

[J1M]

I have never EVER respecced in a singleplayer RPG ( I rarely play MMOs), and I will never do. Because that would mean that I suck at the game. I never stuck in the game because of a bad character build. I built shitty characters, sure, but I overcame its weakness and finished the game with them. Very rarely I restart a game after character generation, but it is just because I realize that I want to play a different type of character.

So, if you need to respec to finish a game, you suck at RPGs (exception is if you want to respec bacause you want to try something new).

I doubt it would be difficult to "beat" most RPGs made today without using any character building options at all. That doesn't mean it is fun to play a game with a handful of skills that are buggy or different than their descriptions made them out to be.

 

[J1M]

As a player, I'm certainly not going to have much fun if I build a mage-slayer in a fantasy world populated by 6 wizards. I also shouldn't have to start a game over to compensate for traps and deficiencies in a game's programming or design.

And how WOULD you build a mage-slayer anyway? Setting out to be a "mage-slayer" requires an actual understanding of how mages work. Given that mages are not a real thing, NOBODY knows how mages work, and therefore, being a mage-slayer necessarily involves a fair level of metagaming.

And personally, I think the notion of having to "respec" is itself a silly artifact of games: Real people don't respec...but they also aren't gimped for life because of things they learned earlier. I'm an old man. In RPG terms, I've probably allocated a lot of my skillpoints into stuff already. This doesn't somehow mean I am incapable of mastering something new. I don't have a skillpoint cap. The notion of having a "build" that you're locked into is frankly unrealistic. On the other hand, so is instantly being able to go from being a master diplomat to a master chef. But there's nothing that should prevent one from learning the skills of the other. The notion of a high-level, skilled character as being a stone completely locked into his skillset and completely incapable of learning anything new is absurd.

Is this an attempt at trolling or are you retarded?

A player doesn't need to know "how real mages really work in the real world" to understand what a talent that makes them immune to arcane spells does.

 

[Copper]

To advance a contrary view - limited respeccing is actually needed more in narrative-heavy games, immersion be damned. Nothing worse than clicking through the same overwrought intro sequence - except grinding through content with a boring character.

Of course you can avoid this by kicking people straight into the game - it's not a big deal if you decide maybe not taking ANY combat skills but charging at wolves is cramping your fun a bit in Arcanum, although you will have to churn through a certain amount of scripted sequences, or to restart in Fallout - although F2 is a different proposition. Just let people play at first, get comfortable with the mechanics, then start showing off.

Especially in party-based games, I wish there wasn't such a hard-on for Chosen One main characters, around whom everything revolves. A character isn't working out? Let them die or send them to a nice rest on the beach, nake a new one and off you go. That's the traditional 'respec option' from PnP for a bored player.

 

[Onholyservicebound]

No, it's not part of the fucking game, if it was part of the game then it wouldn't disable achievements.

Ignored Onholyservicebound.

That would be new, I don't have a single normal poster on my ignored by list, half of them deny access to their profiles and most either post a handful of times in a year, or have never posted.
Anyway I know that argument sounds retarded, but let's cut achievements out, the only reason I used them was to illustrate that the devs designed the features to be outside of the game, which itself is a set of rules. If you want to look at a game as a bunch of assets or a tool, maybe even a toy, whatever, but it isn't how I see it. Consoles are a band-aid for fixing broken shit, but they are not a game mechanic. Respeccing is a band-aid for broken shit , and it is a game mechanic.(Having a Wasteland 2 style ability to edit your rangers with notepad is fine to me, it isn't part of the game.)
I like to play games within their rules, that's where my enjoyment comes from, I don't have fun in a game where I purposefully ignore aspects just to force the game to be fun, or have roleplay value.

 

[Cool name]

I was recently playing Aarklash Legacy or some such. That game actually makes respeccing part of the gameplay, for whenever you are out of combat you can go an completely respec your characters both active and inactive within the framework of their role. The character system is nothing special, each character has merely four skills which after a few points can turn into one of two different skills, and by the end of the game you can only have two maxed and one almost maxed, and stats are only modified by leveling up and jewelry worn, but even with such a simple character system you can completely switch the role of each character around, or how that roles operates.

Amusingly, the ability to respec your characters at will allowed for some incredibly intense battles to be designed as the encounters do not have to be so that every potential party has either a fair chance at defeating it or must get through by liberal application of savescumming. There is a particular battle in which it is literally impossible not to get murdered in two seconds flat if both your ogre tank and your goblin rogue are not built in a very precise way, and even then it requires quite a bit of skill not to get slaughtered. It also allows the game to pull some unfair stuffies which would be impossible to pull in a game without respecs, such as enemies which use a particular skill on your tank to not only completely cancel the benefit of certain builds but actually turn it against you - It´s either completely respeccing your tank or trying to force your way through the encounters through save scumming and praying, and so on.

Which is a pretty good argument for respeccing. While the game gets pretty repetitive towards the end, and while most boss battles suck balls as the combat system is designed for battles pitting four of your dudes against WTF enemy dudes, the first half of the game, and some particular battles in the second half, are the best RTwP battles EVER - Not only because they actually are entirely designed around RTwP instead of being TB in RT, but because they are not designed to allow RPing or LARPing, they are designed to, in the hardest difficulty, fuck your shit sideways hardcore and make you go through them like a puzzle. You die like a bitch, you respec, you switch your jewelry, you try again, you die like a bitch, make a few corrections, design a good plan, try again, die like a bitch, and so on.

Which is, like, the point: Allowing you to play around and explore the system, and how the system interacts with the battle mechanics, and actually requiring you to master at least part of both to get anywhere. You can try completely out there combinations of skills which require stupid amounts of coordination between characters, and then you can go back to your boring basic configuration, and then your basic configuration is slaughtered and you need to get creative again.

Immersionfag LARPers ruin everything.

 

[Telengard]

If respeccing were integrated into the gameplay - as in you have to respec in order to solve the issues in the game, then it would be an actual feature of the game. As it stands, it is never integrated into play. Its only gameplay service is to allow you to do something powerful you couldn't do a second ago.

Ignoring the option is like ignoring a symptom of a vast and terrible disease. Because the respec option is a sign that nothing in the game is going to demand the use of real strategy to overcome. Always, at all points, you will be able to "fix" any and all issues, even the tiniest ones, simply by respeccing or some other cop-out solution like auto-regen or rest-anywhere, rendering any notion of having to prepare ahead of time moot. You can ignore that issue too, of course, and restrict your access to resources, first by denying yourself rest-anywhere, then by buying random stuff and dumping it on the ground to reduce your overexaggerated money supply. Then by ignoring certain pieces of loot that are too OP. Then by making character build choices that deny you crafting abilities. And at last you will have a resource system implemented that actually demands that you manage your resources to survive.

But at some point along here, you should realize you're not playing the game that was made for you. You're playing some game you designed in your head that you like a lot better. And then you might as well just go lie down on the couch and daydream an adventure of your own. It will serve you better.

 

[Onholyservicebound]

I was recently playing Aarklash Legacy or some such. That game actually makes respeccing part of the gameplay, for whenever you are out of combat you can go an completely respec your characters both active and inactive within the framework of their role. The character system is nothing special, each character has merely four skills which after a few points can turn into one of two different skills, and by the end of the game you can only have two maxed and one almost maxed, and stats are only modified by leveling up and jewelry worn, but even with such a simple character system you can completely switch the role of each character around, or how that roles operates.

Amusingly, the ability to respec your characters at will allowed for some incredibly intense battles to be designed as the encounters do not have to be so that every potential party has either a fair chance at defeating it or must get through by liberal application of savescumming. There is a particular battle in which it is literally impossible not to get murdered in two seconds flat if both your ogre tank and your goblin rogue are not built in a very precise way, and even then it requires quite a bit of skill not to get slaughtered. It also allows the game to pull some unfair stuffies which would be impossible to pull in a game without respecs, such as enemies which use a particular skill on your tank to not only completely cancel the benefit of certain builds but actually turn it against you - It´s either completely respeccing your tank or trying to force your way through the encounters through save scumming and praying, and so on.

Which is a pretty good argument for respeccing. While the game gets pretty repetitive towards the end, and while most boss battles suck balls as the combat system is designed for battles pitting four of your dudes against WTF enemy dudes, the first half of the game, and some particular battles in the second half, are the best RTwP battles EVER - Not only because they actually are entirely designed around RTwP instead of being TB in RT, but because they are not designed to allow RPing or LARPing, they are designed to, in the hardest difficulty, fuck your shit sideways hardcore and make you go through them like a puzzle. You die like a bitch, you respec, you switch your jewelry, you try again, you die like a bitch, make a few corrections, design a good plan, try again, die like a bitch, and so on.

Which is, like, the point: Allowing you to play around and explore the system, and how the system interacts with the battle mechanics, and actually requiring you to master at least part of both to get anywhere. You can try completely out there combinations of skills which require stupid amounts of coordination between characters, and then you can go back to your boring basic configuration, and then your basic configuration is slaughtered and you need to get creative again.

Sounds completely unappealing. But that's fine, I'm not going to sit here and bitch about Bioshock's respec vendor on every other corner, because I don't give a shit, which is why the thread is called respeccing in RPGs.

Immersionfag LARPers ruin everything.

There's no LARPing required in a role playing games. In case you missed the myriad of times I've referenced it as a negative: I don't like LARPing, I like playing RPGs. But if your argument is that people telling me to LARP to enjoy the game are ruining everything, then yes, I agree.

 

[Lilura]

each character has merely four skills

the best RTwP battles EVER

So they're better than Sword Coast Stratagems and Ascension for BG2, they're better than RAVage, Smarter AI and Faster Combat/Runspeed for DA:O?