Stats vs. Player Skill: Is Autoresolve the only solution?

[Snorkack]

What a dumb idea. Some people prefer combat that requires twitchy skills, some prefer combat that requires brainy skills. So the solution would be to make combat that requires neither trololol.

Now, most people generally don't like autoresolve, for a simple reason: You get better results by playing manually

No, they don't like autoresolve because, you know, they actually want to PLAY A FUCKING GAME. If I want to watch a game playing itself, i just fire up [insert any Playstation 4 - 3rd person action game], not an RPG.

 

[DeepOcean]

So Stats vs. Player Skill.
Kodex Kritikal Konsesus seems to be that real-time RPGs rely too much on Player Skill, and that Turn-based is the solution. However, this only transfers the required player skill. Instead of twitchy reactions, you need more tactical skills.

I don't know from where you took this conclusion but I never seen anyone complaining about player skill, most of the time the complaint about RTwP isn't the necessity of player skill but: a) the type of player skill involved, b)The combat just sucks big time. The fact you are against twitchy skills and shitty combat doesn't make you want player skill to be removed. There are multiple skills involved in gamming not some monolith The Player Skill.

Now, most people generally don't like autoresolve, for a simple reason: You get better results by playing manually, because you're better than the AI. But pitting AI against AI is only fair - both partys are controlled by the same algorithms, therefore the stats are the deciding difference.

Autoresolve sucks because the Ai is shitty so the only solution is to make it mandatory? From what I heard, people use autoresolve on situations with repetitive combat where the victory of the player is obvious, by using auto resolve you speed up things and don't miss anything. I for once missed an auto resolve function on PoE but that is more a statement on how the game has shitty combat encounters that make me want to miss content than autoresolve solving anything.

Autoresolve combat is okay on grand strategy games where you want to focus on the strategy part and not on the tactical part and as a game developer you can't make both good. Your idea of autoresolve combat can work on a RPG but one that is quite different from what we have, something like Crusader Kings RPG edition, tacking on an auto resolve combat on the usual RPG formula would just make it boring as fuck.

 

[epeli]

Perhaps this idea is also completely stupid

Well, you said it yourself. Removing gameplay from game is completely stupid.

Sure it would be possible to create a very simple (and thus very bad) RPG combat system for this purpose. One that is merely about chasing bigger numbers through levels and/or equipment, no any sort of interesting gameplay whatsoever. That's where this idea would shine - on a system where combat is nothing but a banal grindfest and the outcomes are decided by simple numeric comparison with nothing more to the gameplay. It might be possible to create an interesting system around this idea, but it would be vastly inferior to a game that had decent gameplay instead.

Hey, you know what? There's a whole "game" genre that already does this: idle games.

 

[Beastro]

Balancing combat is not my focus. I never cared about balanced combat, simply because I'm not much of a fan of combat. Perhaps that's also the reason why I see autoresolve as an option.

And this explains everything.

Do keep in mine you are in the niche of niches. Almost every single person who plays video games that have some sort of combat do so because there is come sort of combat in it. There are exceptional games like Planescape, but most of us felt the draw of playing when we got into our first conflict on one, in my case, playing that tank game against my brother on the Atari and stomping heads on Mario 1. Something in us innately loves competition, much less combat where we can violently compete.

 

[Beastro]

Autoresolve sucks because the Ai is shitty so the only solution is to make it mandatory? From what I heard, people use autoresolve on situations with repetitive combat where the victory of the player is obvious, by using auto resolve you speed up things and don't miss anything. I for once missed an auto resolve function on PoE but that is more a statement on how the game has shitty combat encounters that make me want to miss content than autoresolve solving anything.

In the Total War games auto resolve is only worth using if you're wiping out small armies of 1-5 units or roughly 100-800 men. Anything over 1000 results in the autoresolve hitting you with casualties that would never even happen if you entered the fight and let the AI fight the AI.

 

[Fowyr]

Perhaps this is the reason I like the combat of Settlers 2 so much: It has absolutely no player input, the only difference between two duelling knights is their experience level.

Player input is saving after every successful blow and reloading if your unit suffered too much damage.

 

[Immortal]

So Stats vs. Player Skill.
Kodex Kritikal Konsesus seems to be that real-time RPGs rely too much on Player Skill, and that Turn-based is the solution. However, this only transfers the required player skill. Instead of twitchy reactions, you need more tactical skills.
Yet, it still comes down to player skill, except if the AI has exactly the same skill level you have, in which case the skill equals out and the stats become more important.

Now, most people generally don't like autoresolve, for a simple reason: You get better results by playing manually, because you're better than the AI. But pitting AI against AI is only fair - both partys are controlled by the same algorithms, therefore the stats are the deciding difference.

The problem with autoresolve is that you know you could have done better, especially if you can watch the battle, and see the AI commit atrocious errors. Perhaps this is the reason I like the combat of Settlers 2 so much: It has absolutely no player input, the only difference between two duelling knights is their experience level. But the combat system itself is so simple that the AI cannot make errors - instead of knowing you could do better, watching the battles becomes a suspenseful experience.

I have been thinking about good combat systems a lot, because I don't like the established standards of RPG combat. And usually I come up with something quite complex, trying to emulate realism.
But this got me thinking: perhaps the best solution is a very simple combat system that is not influencable by the player, a kind of Settlers 2 combat for RPGs.
Perhaps this idea is also completely stupid, so ... DISCUSS!

Something I've thought about a lot.. At what point do stats stop affecting game play in favor of human limitations.

Another non-combat example:
In many games (NWN comes to mind) you run into puzzles. These are usually brain teasers or just interesting knowledge base challenges you need to overcome. If a character has a very low or high intelligence but the person controlling them doesn't, does it make sense for the puzzle to be solved?

My half-orc fighter has an intelligence of 3 and yet I am able to solve the tomb puzzle that requires logical thinking and theorizing (that a team of archaeologists haven't been able to for weeks - cause they gave me, a retard with an axe the quest). On the flip side, I have a very smart and wise cleric trying to solve the puzzle but I can't figure the stupid thing out, is that right that I should walk away (or google it).. Or should my character take over agency in the game and just auto-complete it for me?

In theory you shouldn't be allowed to solve it for your character but that's not a fun game mechanic for 99.99% of people. The puzzle was designed for you as a player.

tl;dr
In a single player RPG - I look at stats as a way to stack the deck in your favor. No matter how tactical or twitchy a game is, if you can beat it at level 1 because your a god at the game mechanically, that's fine IMO. Leveling up or gaining stats or items will always be a way to improve your strength relative to the opposition to help when your hitting against a wall and the skill gap is getting too high, it's like a constant tuning system to keep the game fun.

To your original point - I hate auto resolve mechanics, I think mobile games have poisoned that well.

 

[Sykar]

Player skill should matter. No sympathy for dumb cunts who can't figure shit out.

Not if it makes character skills obsolete.

 

[Sensuki]

Especially if it makes them obsolete!

 

[Sykar]

Especially if it makes them obsolete!

I feel trolled.

 

[Bruma Hobo]

Stupid thread is stupid. Ideally, a roleplaying game should minimize player skill (because we have stats to define our characters) except when it comes to decision making. Player agency is as important as character customization.

 

[naossano]

Then, that auto-resolve thing should choose your stats instead of you, so the game wouldn't be governed by your skills with stats.

 

[DraQ]

Dropping "VS" is the only solution.

 

[rohand]

Eh, we may even throw the comparison to combat rules from Tabletop RPGs in which you had stats influencing lots of rolls and outputs but in the end, the player decision was what counted towards success (of course, decision is more freeform in tabletop systems).

Since most early CRPGs were influenced by tabletop ones, combat approaches with varying amounts of a player's hand-coordination/tactical insight were basically an attempt of an electronic response to that.

 

[belowmecoldhands]

Eh, we may even throw the comparison to combat rules from Tabletop RPGs in which you had stats influencing lots of rolls and outputs but in the end, the player decision was what counted towards success (of course, decision is more freeform in tabletop systems).

Since most early CRPGs were influenced by tabletop ones, combat approaches with varying amounts of a player's hand-coordination/tactical insight were basically an attempt of an electronic response to that.

I always much favour a tactical victory as opposed to merely a stat victory. One is fun. The other is just crunching numbers. You know, adding up your stat and comparing it to his/her and deciding whether to take the risk. There's not a whole lot of thinking going on, you're just doing math and comparing. Tactical gameplay, by comparison, is more about patterns. You look at the battle field and what you have and then you figure out how to arrange what you have on the battlefield to gain an advantage.

 

[Excidium II]

I always much favour a tactical victory as opposed to merely a stat victory. One is fun. The other is just crunching numbers. You know, adding up your stat and comparing it to his/her and deciding whether to take the risk.

 

[rohand]

I always much favour a tactical victory as opposed to merely a stat victory. One is fun. The other is just crunching numbers. You know, adding up your stat and comparing it to his/her and deciding whether to take the risk. There's not a whole lot of thinking going on, you're just doing math and comparing. Tactical gameplay, by comparison, is more about patterns. You look at the battle field and what you have and then you figure out how to arrange what you have on the battlefield to gain an advantage.

Do you think that the complexity of the ruleset can affect the effectiveness or fun of the tactical decision-making, or maybe non-numeric aspects such as party positioning do it in a much more significant manner? i.e.: the simple rules-wise combat of Banner Saga vs the crunchy Dark Eye ruleset behind Blackguards?

 

[belowmecoldhands]

Do you think that the complexity of the ruleset can affect the effectiveness or fun of the tactical decision-making, or maybe non-numeric aspects such as party positioning do it in a much more significant manner? i.e.: the simple rules-wise combat of Banner Saga vs the crunchy Dark Eye ruleset behind Blackguards?

Hmm, I get the feeling this is a topic more than I can handle, but I can try.

I was just saying I enjoy player skill. I enjoy to feel like I won a fight by investing myself in it. So the fact CRPG makers added some reflexive and/or tactical and/or other things (maybe puzzle challenges?) is welcome. If they hadn't, how would I enjoy it?

Take MYST. It has no combat. You just explore, click things within reason and watch quicktime movies. It has lots of puzzles and some story. I'm the one which solves it. There're no stats on my character which solve the game for me. There's no "puzzles" skill or "cunning" stat. I enjoy the game because of MY decisions and explorations in it.

I liked what you said too which is why I replied--so it'd get quoted too. One of the advantages of pen&paper is the game master is human and much looser than a computer. They can allow a player to make creative decisions. That's satisfying.

So what I'm saying--I think--is CRPGs are fun BECAUSE of player skill. Without it it's just a movie. And given what I know of CRPGs, most of them without any player skill would be poorly made movies--far too much filler inbetween scenes.

Insofar as the OP is concerned, I think he likes player skill too, but doesn't like combat, or how it's implemented. His observation that turn-based gameplay is tactical player-skill tells me he understands it's not much different than other player skill implementations. This is what led him to believe auto-resolve is a way to solve the player-skill problem--by removing it.

I also believe some players like combat and others don't. It's like the difference between Icewind Dale and Baldur's Gate. Icewind Dale is more combat-oriented. Baldur's Gate is more roleplaying-oriented, with more characters, stories and interaction.

It's like the difference between someone who likes war games and someone who doesn't. War games are very combat-focused. Story is not important in them. They're played on boards. Tactics are center-stage. Games can last days. The longer it lasts, the more strategic it becomes, I think. Strategy is longer term than tactics. Otherwise, they're very similar.

EDIT: I realize none of them answers your question about ruleset complexity and whether it translate to tactics, but...

 

[Telengard]

There already is a game that is the penultimate of games of this type. A game based around a highly complex and diverse system of character-based social skills, but that also has auto-resolve combat that is itself based around a diverse range of skills. The combat even involves martial arts, with martial arts talents that can be developed and can then themselves also be used outside of combat, such as for meditation or to practice the kata for exercise.

Here you go:

Spoiler

All funning aside, generally speaking, those who attempt to make highly realistic systems and attach them to genres that are themselves unrealistic tend to miss one big element in the fundamentals of their design - a game must, first and foremost, be fun. A highly complex system in, say, a survival game directly benefits the game it is attached to, because the highly realistic system fits into and feeds off of the intrinsic nature of survival. Try to cram that same system onto an RPG, though, and the fundamentals break the game. Having combat every five minutes is itself highly unrealistic, and attaching realism to this unrealistic nature does something worse than breaking immersion (though it does that too). It breaks down the action into an endless list of tedious chores that must be constantly attended to.

In other words, the game becomes like work. That thing we play games to forget about.

Which is not to say that complexity shouldn't be there. But in the land of fantastic adventure, you can't have complexity for the sake of realism. You have to have complexity for the sake of more interest and fun. And then stop somewhere before you cross the line into routine.

 

[Azarkon]

Free will doesn't exist anyway. What you call "skill" is just God/nature with a stat sheet.

 

[sigma1932]

So Stats vs. Player Skill.
Kodex Kritikal Konsesus seems to be that real-time RPGs rely too much on Player Skill, and that Turn-based is the solution. However, this only transfers the required player skill. Instead of twitchy reactions, you need more tactical skills.
Yet, it still comes down to player skill, except if the AI has exactly the same skill level you have, in which case the skill equals out and the stats become more important.p

You're interpreting the implication behind "player skill" in your initial assertion in too broad a scope... when it's being used to discuss the RPG genre, "player skill" is generally implied to ONLY mean the player's direct physical influence on the game world through interface manipulation (i.e. twitch-skills, save-skumming, etc.) as it pertains to the core gameplay experience, not indirect tactical/strategic decision making that gets put into practice "by proxy" as the player directs what the characters do within the context of the game.

The whole point of the RPG genre is for core focus of gameplay to revolve around what the characters can do within the context of the game-world... not about the player's own real-life abilities as they translate through the act of interface manipulation into the game-world. For example, regardless of how proficient the player is at aiming a crosshair and hitting the attack button, in an RPG, a character should only be able to function as a master sniper if their in-game stats/abilities/etc. allow for it... likewise, even if the player is the worst FPS player in the history of video games, the character should still be able to function full well as a master sniper if their stats/abilities/etc. allow for it.

How this connects with the discussion of real-time vs. turn-based is more a matter of pacing... real-time provides the thrill of faster-paced action, but it's too difficult to predict how quickly the player will act based on their real-world twitch-skills, so AI is often dumbed down to suit the lowest-common denominator which results in overly repetitive encounter design and RPG-related elements becoming irrelavent (i.e. you end up with something like Fallout 3)... turn-based puts the AI and player closer together in how much they can do in a given time-frame, giving the developer a better idea of what the player might do, which in turn allows for better and more varied encounter design, but at the expense of the thrill of fast-paced action (i.e. you end up with something like Age of Decadence).

As for people not liking the auto-resolve concept-- nevermind the quality of the results... it's just fucking boring to watch the game play itself. The fun of playing an RPG is about being actively involved in directing the characters as the game progresses, including decisions made "on-the-fly" without having direct influence on the game-world... not just doing some number-crunching and then letting the game make all the in-the-moment decisions for you.

 

[DraQ]

Another non-combat example:
In many games (NWN comes to mind) you run into puzzles. These are usually brain teasers or just interesting knowledge base challenges you need to overcome. If a character has a very low or high intelligence but the person controlling them doesn't, does it make sense for the puzzle to be solved?

My half-orc fighter has an intelligence of 3 and yet I am able to solve the tomb puzzle that requires logical thinking and theorizing (that a team of archaeologists haven't been able to for weeks - cause they gave me, a retard with an axe the quest). On the flip side, I have a very smart and wise cleric trying to solve the puzzle but I can't figure the stupid thing out, is that right that I should walk away (or google it).. Or should my character take over agency in the game and just auto-complete it for me?

In theory you shouldn't be allowed to solve it for your character but that's not a fun game mechanic for 99.99% of people. The puzzle was designed for you as a player.

An obvious solution is to autofail the puzzle when playing a moronic character or render it unsolvable.
This doesn't account for player being a moronic player controlling supposedly intelligent character but the whole point of a game being a game is challenging some skills.

Anyway, I see that:

1. The whole "Player skill VS Character skill" debate has caused much damage to codexian brians - to the point of some getting addled enough to consider a fucking screensaver superior to any actual game.
2. Intelligence should probably be dropped as an attribute after all and here's why - unlike all the other attributes you can't really box player's own intelligence in in away that would prevent it from manifesting in a game. I'm not the first to notice this here and we've been through a fair number of clever potential solutions before, but ultimately all of them crutches. You just can't catch intelligent behaviour with an algorithm simple enough to be thought up in advance by comparably intelligent agent - otherwise true AI would be trivial. It means that without intelligent GM to slap player's hand if their moronic character employs brilliant tactics intelligence as an attribute is simply unenforceable. It also makes the existence of "character skill" crowd deeply ironic because not only do they proclaim their interest in intelligent gameplay, but also fail to notice that all the other player skills can be easily isolated from their in-game performance no matter whether the game is action oriented or not. Intelligent, tactical approach can't. Sure, you can have some attribute in it's place - like Diablo-style "Magic", or "technical aptitude" if setting allows technocentric characters, or a bunch of stats affecting different, but always narrowly defined abilities that are beyond the direct reach of the player. If you'd mourn the loss of dumb dialogue options you can even have "Education" and replace your "retarded dialogue" with "bumpkin dialogue", but intelligence is just a no-go.
   
   disclosure

   I've always felt uncomfortable creating and trying to LARP play dumb characters, so I'm not exactly impartial here.

I feel trolled.

That doesn't make that any less true.

Stupid thread is stupid. Ideally, a roleplaying game should minimize player skill

Umm, no. Anything aspiring to be a game should not minimize what makes it one. Especially given that pretty much every game (excluding vehicular sims and such) does a good enough job isolating those player skills that can at all be isolated from their in-game performance by the virtue of interface limitations alone. From that point onward making an RPG is not the matter of eliminating player skill, but enforcing character skills as upper limitations of what player can do with given character.

You can pretty much implement as good a cRPG as you can physically hope for inside any genre that has you control a single character or a small group.

Do you think that the complexity of the ruleset can affect the effectiveness or fun of the tactical decision-making, or maybe non-numeric aspects such as party positioning do it in a much more significant manner? i.e.: the simple rules-wise combat of Banner Saga vs the crunchy Dark Eye ruleset behind Blackguards?

You always need to take complexity of rules and situation together - for example Go may have stupidly simple rules but is nevertheless very complex tactically.

Also, from pure tactical complexity PoV extra rule complexity doesn't necessarily translate to more tactics as extra rules may reduce each other's effectiveness.

 

[Sykar]

That doesn't make that any less true.

Actually no, playerskill in an RPG should never supercede character skill. If my character sucks at melee combat then he should not be able to go around like Conan the Barbarian. Morrowind did it right albeit in a frustrating way. Oblividerp and Skyrimjob did it wrong.

 

[DraQ]

Actually no, playerskill in an RPG should never supercede character skill.

Sometimes it does so by default, though, and then character skill should just make way and GTFO. It's the case with stats like intelligence or with skills like cartography which player can easily override by fetching a pencil and some graph paper.

If my character sucks at melee combat then he should not be able to go around like Conan the Barbarian.

True, but do notice that player's actual combat skills have no bearing on what they can do in game (unlike intelligence or cartography), it's never the question of accommodating player skill by holding character skill back. It all just boils down to shitty implementation - combat skills only affecting damage, derpy AI easily overcome by dancing around it in rote pattern over and over instead of advancing and crushing player with their statwise advantage, etc.

Morrowind is awfully clunky but it nicely demonstrates how you can have character skill and player skill together without compromising either.

 

[Sykar]

I think Gothic1+2 had the right idea how to represent that. While playerskill could overcome some obstacles it was quite tedious and a risky gamble to run around with weapon skills at minimum level and before anyone thinks himself being smart showing me someone defeating an Orc Elite with starter weapon and skill, yes I know that is in principle possible. Good luck trying this though since one mistkake and you are dead. Also have fun blocking for hours and dealing next to no damage to it which brings me to the one gripe I had, that skill level and strength did not influence blocking.