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The RPG Scrollbars: Richard Cobbett's weekly RPG column

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Cobbett on the VTM:B Clan Quest mod: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/08/17/vampire-bloodlines-best-mod/

The RPG Scrollbars: The Long Night Of Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines (With Clan Quests)

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They say the definition of madness is repeatedly trying the same thing and expecting different results. But hey, the Malkavians of Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlineshave lucked into stranger things, so I figure there’s at least a chance that one day I’ll fire it up and find a whole new adventure waiting. Today was not that day. Tomorrow isn’t looking too likely. Yet still it feels like it’s our best chance, until someone else finally figures out that urban fantasy is a painfully untapped genre for RPG awesomeness. (Looking at you, Hairbrained Schemes. Still time to ditch that boring Battletech license!*)

Still, while waiting for Shadowrun: Hong Kong this week, I felt that urge to head back to Santa Monica and check out some old haunts. The timing seemed fitting, especially with the launch of a new version of the Clan Quest mod the other week – one of several projects attempting to keep Bloodlines healthy over ten years after launch.


(* Battletech license may or may not be boring. But does it have vampires? No!)

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I’ve dabbled with most of the Bloodlines mods at some point, though none of them have ever caught my fancy. I know, that sounds very dismissive. I don’t mean it to be, promise. Modding is hard enough when not working on a game barely held together with sticky-tape, and fans have done a fine job of gluing it back together and bolting extra bits on around the side. Wesp’s unofficial patch especially is basically mandatory if you’re going to play the regular game. The Companion Mod offered a good taste of the vampire as puppet-master rather than murder machine. And of course, who could turn down the option to represent Clan Chocula, the bloodline you can Count on.

For the most part though, the mods are focused on polishing mechanics that were never going to be that great, adding a few features here and there, and otherwise primarily doing touch-up duty rather than creating whole new after-dark adventures in Bloodlines’ style. They’ve been promised, but rarely actually shown up. Antitribu for instance adds the ability to play as the Sabbat clans and adds a whole load of disciplines to that effect, but its new questline from their perspective is still nowhere to be seen. The whole mod changed hands at the start of last month, so I’m honestly not exactly holding my breath. Elsewhere, The Final Nights claims to be so different from the game as to not warrant keeping the Bloodlines name, but suffice it to say that’s… ah… stretching the truth a little. Specifically, think ‘orbital bungee cord’.

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Clan Quest is the best of the content mods I’ve played. Now, to be sure, that actual content’s been around for years now, but the update is still worthwhile due to its dependencies on other mods. This new version means an update to the Unofficial Patch and Camarilla Edition that it builds on, and being a bit pickier about additions to the base game. You can’t beat up the werewolf any more for instance, again having to either escape or trap it, because that goes against the point of the encounter. Likewise, a fairly half-assed tweak that allows the player to work with the Sabbat at the end of the game has just been cut, leaving the ending as it was. The mod also doesn’t go crazy with alternate character skins and fan posters and swapping out music in the clubs and all of that stuff. The installer offers a few options to turn on and off as you want, but generally keeps things trim and as the original designers intended.

The meat of the mod is its new quests – one for each of the clans. In theory, it’s quite cool that they’re scattered throughout the game and appear at suitable points, though in practice I wouldn’t have minded them being accessible from very early on (say, arriving in Downtown) or having a quick skip option. Great as Bloodlines is, that’s a loooooooooot of replaying for the sake of a single new quest. The Tremere quest for instance isn’t available until after dealing with the Gargoyle in Hollywood, while the Ventrue quest comes after Grout’s hellish mansion. It’s possible to use the console, cheat and jump straight to the relevant maps, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the right triggers will fire or the appropriate flags will be set. (He said, having tried.)

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Still, get to them and there’s a decent chunk of new content and voice-acting, including for existing characters like Jeanette/Therese. Of the bits I’ve seen, I like those the most. One of Bloodlines’ biggest missed opportunities was only giving most of its characters the one thing to actually do, and expanding this helps add a sense of life going on outside your specific hub. The mod also adds a few extra bits outside of its remit to discover while playing, like a robbery at the Hollywood Red Spot, and a quest for evil players where you can work with the CDC to spread poison in the water supply. Do have subtitles switched on before talking to the NPC though, just outside Venture Tower, because he’s absolutely incoherent without them. Also handy is that while you can find these things while playing, there’s a walkthrough that tells you where each of them kicks off and what point in the story you have to be to get started.

(As a general note here, I wish all mods would offer something similar and be so upfront. Outright walkthroughs are perhaps a bit much, and I’d rather have played Clan Quests new stuff with just a casual pointer, but it gets amazingly frustrating to know that something has been added somewhere in a huge game… probably…)


While most of the mod projects are still ticking on, it seems unlikely that Vampire: Bloodlines will ever get its all-changing Nameless Mod or similar that picks up where Troika left off and the rest of the industry remains frustratingly uninterested in following. It’s a testament to the the game though that the lack of that continuation is so frustrating, especially in the wake of firing it back up and being reminded that, oh yeah, while the characters and dialogue and mood are great, goddamn that combat and those sewers and the bits after Hollywood.

I remember being at Eve FanFest a couple of years ago when they showed off footage from the now-cancelled MMO version, and as much as World of Darkness looked nice, just about everyone I spoke to agreed that the best thing in its favour was its use of Bloodlines’ music and what that said about the experience and atmosphere that CCP had in mind. It might have been great, it might have been the worst game ever, but I’m still sorry that we never got to find out. And sorrier that the only thing CCP has done with the license on PC since then is shut down the attempted Bloodlines remakeProject Vaulderie. Cue a sigh. So much time wasted on Dust 514 that could have been spent making something people wanted to play.

But, anyway. In a year where so many classic RPGs have taken another turn in the spotlight, it seems appropriate to use a brief moment of quiet to head back and remember why Bloodlines remains so beloved. Its tech is aged, its maps are simple, its combat is rancid and you would have to pay me to play the Warrens again – and not just a little money – but behind it all is a real gem of a game that still has much to teach. Even the most advanced mods may not build on it enough to make it a whole new experience now, but they’re at least a pretty good reason to go back to find a few new surprises or twists, and relive at least a few cool bits you probably forgot.
 

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Some good points, even though many are of course :deadhorse:.

But what's this:

"No Auto-Level Up Option
Generally fine in something without set classes, or with a single hero. When you’ve got a full party though, having to assign points is both a pain and offers a big risk of screwing up. Thankfully rare these days, but does crop up occasionally in games like Pillars of Eternity."



:nocountryforshitposters:

Id brofist you if i could....

If i want my stupid ass Barbarian to fuck that librarian, he gets 7 int if he needs it.
If that fucks up my gameplan, so be it, it was my decision.
 

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Richard Cobbett on Legends of Valour, the Elder Scrolls series' little-known progenitor: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/09/01/legends-of-valour/

The RPG Scrollbars: Legends Of Valour
Richard Cobbett on September 1st, 2015 at 1:00 pm.

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Who said epic action and high adventure has to be part of an adventurer’s life? (Checks) Oh, right. Pretty much everyone at least expects it. Still, back in 1992, US Gold and Synthetic Dimensions decided to try something a little different. Specifically, spelling ‘Valour’ correctly. (The sequel might have done the same for ‘Honour’, but we never got to find out.) Also, something to do with life simulation. It’s a little remembered game these days, but one that had a major impact on some of the biggest modern RPGs around. Ever heard of a series called The Elder Scrolls? Bethesda’s Todd Howard has long mentioned this being one of its big inspirations.


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My main memory of Legends of Valour aren’t really of the game, but of the hilariously over the top marketing. “(The developers) were literally jostled off their feet as writers, retailers and fellow programmers sought to experience what one prominent industry figure called “A game that’s more a way of life – utterly extraordinary!” “It was the journalists themselves that could be found singing the praises!” My absolute favourite part though? “Demo disks can only scratch the surface, screenshots in magazines could never do the astounding graphics justice (that’s why you’ll see none here).”

Not to, y’know, knock Legends of Valour, but I remember playing a demo on a magazine coverdisk, and I’m not sure ‘astounding’ are the words I’d have used for its incredibly primitive raycaster graphics. Ultima Underworld 2, released the same year? Now we’re talking, and more convincingly than Legends of Valour’s own box declaring “Ultima Underworld, move over!” on the grounds that… no kidding… it had “the smoothest screen scrolling in a 3-D fantasy role-playing adventure – ever!” It even doubled up that claim: “The hottest, smoothest 3D scrolling ever seen in an underworld, or any world!” Good grief. At this point you may as well just go the full Barnum and declare “Embark on 45 exciting quests that may cure cancer!” “VGA graphics blessed by God!” “Actually a window into a parallel universe with dragons and shit!”


Anyway, I digress. My main memory of the game was the demo, which I played for a surprisingly long time given its almost complete lack of actual content. You had a good chunk of the city to play in, and being able to go in and out of buildings and chat to random people was pretty cool for the time. Mostly what I remember though was that for some reason, combat was disabled. Early on though I realised that if you threw things at people then it damaged them, and spent many happy hours doing just that, as well as somehow stumbling into a dungeon layer of the game that I wasn’t meant to be in – the clue being the crazy nightmare wall textures that no artist would ever have signed off on. With the possible exception of the artists working on The Catacomb Abyss, of course, where all the worst fantasy textures have long been trapped.

It was many years later that I finally played the full game. (Sadly, in the time between reviewers jostling the creators off their feet and actually reviewing it, they’d mostly decided that it sucked). Not too shockingly, time hasn’t been kind to its graphics or its world simulation or its dialogue or its… honestly, at this point it would be more surprising if it did hold up well. I’m not going to slam it for that though, because even now, with this shiny new copy totally bought on eBay, honest, it’s an interesting peek at a different way of doing things that was only really picked up again very occasionally – games like Robinson’s Requiem and its sequel Deus springing to mind.

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I was mostly drawn to it now because for the last few weeks, I’ve talked about games conveying a sense of heroism and power, and there’s been quite a few rumblings about how old that gets. Legends of Valour is one of the defining examples of the otherapproach. You’re a nobody, with no great destiny and no particular skills, in a world marked by its absolute indifference to you. Much of the challenge early on is simply surviving hunger and thirst and the town guards’ love of arresting people rather than fighting the monsters that live below, as well as learning your way around a town whose map is a sprawling urban nightmare. There was a map and you can at least ask for directions, but an engine of this vintage isn’t what you want to reach for when it comes to radically different city districts and cool points of interest. You spend at least much, if not all your time basically starving to death on the street in the rags of what few bits and pieces bought back in your home town. Now, on top of that, there’s a story, there’s quests, there’s guilds to join and all the usual RPG stuff, but there’s reasons why nobody ever talks about that side of the game. It’s pretty weak.

Within the weakness though, there’s still some wonderful weirdness. The ability to hurl insults at everyone, like “Didn’t you used to be a bugridden cave dwarf?” that tend to turn into stabby face pain if pulled on the wrong person. Local delicacies including the bugburger – literally, a tarantula in a bun with lettuce – and zombie brains (“Very appetising if you’ve a mind!”) that bring a whole new horror to filling up need bars. Gambling on cockroach races at the tavern for cash. Hilarious digitised photos in the various town establishments, with the option to send in a photo and have your own integrated into the game, a la Core Design’s Corporation. Bumping into werewolves wandering around at night, calling them over with a “Hey?” and then asking them for directions. Not much use unless what you were looking for actually was over in the “GRRRRRRRRRRR!” District, but hey, at least you could talk to the monsters!

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And, for the time, this was all inspiring stuff. As crappy as Legends of Valour looked next to Ultima Underworld, this was an era where the simple idea of one day playing an Ultima Overworld was the stuff of impossible dreams. (Then when we more or less got it, it was Ultima IX. Aargh!) While I have no particular fondness for the full game, the demo at least was a glimpse of RPGs as we know them now – a genre that can go anywhere and do anything and not be limited by the needs of smacking monsters for gold and XP. It wasn’t the only one by any stretch, but this was an era where PC games were incredibly expensive and information was often very thin on the ground.

Certainly, very few were lucky enough to have the fluency that even casual onlookers can now enjoy as a matter of course, never mind the in-depth knowledge of what individual titles were doing beyond the basic sell and maybe a few hundred words if you were lucky. (In the US, there were regulars like Scorpia who covered that kind of thing, but I don’t remember any equivalents in the UK.) That was certainly never the case for games that died on the shelves, as Legends of Valour did, putting paid to the idea of any sequels that might have built on its life/RPG hybrid idea with better tech.

Still, look out at the family tree, and at least in a way its successors over in The Elder Scrolls universe are now some of the most successful RPGs in the world, and survival mods amongst their most popular additions. There are worse fates for an flawed but innovative game to enjoy, even if its own name has long faded from history.
 

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
The RPG Scrollbars: The Lost Magic Of Magic
Richard Cobbett on September 14th, 2015 at 1:00 pm.

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Given a choice, I almost always play as a mage. Swords? Pah. Divine magic? Save it for Sunday School. Give me control over the elements, the power to reshape the very building blocks of the universe according to my every whim, and if at all possible, a cool hat. It’s an easy fantasy to indulge in almost any RPG out there.

I just wish it was a more satisfying one.


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Magic is one of the hardest parts of fantasy – any fantasy – to get Right. Make it too powerful and everything else becomes irrelevant. It’s authorial desire manifesting directly within the story, and limited only by the creator’s own restraint. Go too far the other way though and it ceases to become a big deal – mundane instead of magical. Avatar: The Last Airbender’s sequel series The Legend of Korra offered several great examples of that as part of its general move from a fantasy world into a more technologically driven one – that while originally, those who could command lightning were seen as elite and able to dominate in just about every battle, a few decades later the best use for it is just standing around all day zapping the stuff into a power-plant in exchange for shit wages. It’s commoditised power, and as such, pretty boring.

Really though, it’s little different when we use it in games – awesome power, reduced to simply powering a treadmill in a slightly more flashy way than just hitting things with a sword. Usually it’s not even a particularly great one, with magic routinely underpowered compared to just clonking things with a sword in order to avoid combat becoming just hanging back and nuking enemies from the other side of the room. That’s especially the case now, with combat primarily designed around efficiency – either unlimited or fast-refilling mana pools designed to keep a wizard relevant throughout the fight instead of just getting in their one good nuke shot at the start or being reduced to flailing around with a staff, with enemies shrugging off status effects like being set on fire as nothing more than an inconvenience. Which, really, they are.

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The reasons why magic works like this aren’t exactly hard to wrap your head around – balance, flow, the nature and frequency of most RPG encounters. In MMOs especially, everyone is expected to pull together at all times, and trying to make magic more interesting usually just ends up making it more fiddly. World of Warcraft for instance originally made Mages stockpile various runes for teleportation and special powder to create the tables of food that party members would rudely bark at us to create for them at the start of dungeons, just as Warlocks originally had to mess around with Soul Stones. But it got in the way of the flow, so that whole element got unceremoniously dropped. Not necessarily a bad thing, but I do still miss that ritual element.

In single-player games though, there’s much more scope to do interesting things with magic and its general use in the world. The Cowled Wizards of Baldur’s Gate 2 for instance are one of my favourites, appearing to lay down the law if you cast magic in their territory. They made it more difficult to play as a magic-heavy party, but gave adventuring in Amn a very different flavour from other places – as well as being a well-executed block. If you want to play nice, you can gather the money and buy a magic license and then do what you like. Alternatively, if you think you’re tough enough not to have to care what they think, it’s possible to beat them into submission until they accept that you’re too much mage for them to handle. Going further back, Ultima was set in a world where magic was no big deal in and of itself, but you had to prepare it if you wanted to use it by gathering and stockpiling reagants from around the world. That made for a huge difference between a character who could cast a few sparkling lights in the sky and an Avatar capable of unleashing the likes of Death Vortex at will.

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Generally though, what happens is a nasty case of game and story segregation, wheresupposedly magic is special, but in practice it isn’t. Few have suffered worse from this in recent years than Dragon Age. Originally, the idea was that most people would never even have seen a mage in person, never mind whole parties of them – they’re locked away in their Circles for everyone’s protection. By the time the actual game landed though, that was all just handwaving. The whole game had super-rare Blood Mages especially coming out of the wazoo, nobody blinked at the sight of people exploding into blood clouds and fireballs, and forget about your character actually being at risk of losing themselves to a demon from the Fade. This became even more of a problem in Dragon Age 2, where the whole point of the bloody story was that you were in a city cracking down hard on mages to the point that a guy just using healing magic in the slums would be marked for trouble. But the refugee running around with a great big mage staff slinging fireballs at everyone? Guards never even comment!

(Later in the game, yes, it can maybe be argued that the hero, Hawke, is a special case due to their status in town… but only to a point, and that’s ignoring the first part of the game when they’re at the absolute bottom of the pecking order…)

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Perhaps unsurprisingly, the games best suited for making magic feel special are the ones where you’re not really a wizard at all – instead, magic in all of its forms plays a limited but dramatic effect on your life that turns the tables without actually setting them. The Witcher 3 for instance does it superbly. As much as Geralt’s knowledge of Signs makes him a magic user, to whatever level you want, you’re repeatedly reminded that these are just party tricks compared to what the Sorceresses can do, making the moments when they cut loose with incredible destructive power or protection spells all the more dramatic. The same goes for Ciri, whose flash-stepping ability instantly sets her apart from Geralt, and on the other side of the power curve, the regular citizens who lack the necessary mutations to handle the potions that Geralt constantly drinks down to do his job. It really nailed everything that magic needs to be, from its reaches remaining mysterious to its deployment being a notable dramatic moment, while still allowing for lots of fireball and Force Push type goodness on top.

The next game likely to try something similar looks to be Divinity: Original Sin 2. It’s a world full of magic, but one kind in particular is banned – Source magic, as practiced by Sourcerers. Larian’s demo prior to the launch of the Kickstarter focused heavily on this, with one character in the party returning home after being convicted of using it, and the others all getting the opportunity to play along. The system is that on top of your regular spells, each character has a super-limited number of Source Points (one at the start of the game) which have to be charged by less than ethical means like absorbing the energy from corpses or one character sacrificing their health. The benefit is that when you’ve got one, you’re able to call down incredibly powerful magic like a meteor strike during battle, making Sourcery a way of turning the tables. The downside is that using it is threatened to have implications down the line, especially if abused along with other options like consuming someone’s soul.

How effectively it all works… well, as ever with pre-release games, that remains to be seen. I do like the idea, though the abilities it controlled in the version I saw did trend a little too much towards standard elemental attacks rather than anything that felt particularly dark, which could be an issue. It’s not easy to have multiple kinds of magic in which one has to be Special, as seen with most of Skyrim’s Shouts. Fun as Fus Ro Dah was, it’s hard to understand why anyone would bother cloistering themselves away in the hope of learning just fractions of dragon magic when the regular kind is so much easier, and easier learned without freezing both buttocks off on top of a snowy mountain. There’s devotion to history, and then there’s just silliness.

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It’s an interesting concept though, in a sequel to a game that genuinely did manage to make magic feel like a force to be reckoned with, especially when moving beyond direct damage and into what I think of as Swiss Army Knife skills – abilities with lots of different uses. A big part of that was its general philosophy that if something should work, then it should work, whether that thing involved teleporting a boss out of their little arena or avoiding the weapon damage designed to stop you from just bashing through every door by burning it down instead. My only real problem with the implementation was that as much as I loved the way magic users were constantly reshaping the battlefield by setting things on fire or freezing it or calling down rain to extinguish bombs, after a while everyone was doing it with grenades and arrows and all manner of other stuff. I’m hoping that the sequel makes it more of a magic user prerogative, with other classes occasionally being treated to a taste of the power they could have had, if they’d been smart enough to roll a mage. The mundane wusses.

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So, how can magic be made more interesting? It’s not simply a question of pushing up the power, and returning to the old Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards problem that soon sees magic users becoming living gods and leaving everything behind, but treating magic as something that needs to be feared and respected in and of itself. It should take some effort to acquire and to master, and ideally feature at least some degree of consequence. That can mean elements like corruption. It can mean things like wild magic, where every spell is a bit of a gamble. It can mean friendly fire, so the mage’s incredible power has to be used precisely to avoid taking out the team.

But really, to work properly it needs to be embedded into the world on a deeper level than simply combat systems – for its place to be thought through and its implications explored on a long-term basis rather than simply in individual encounters. The games that do that always benefit from it, whether it’s Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines with the need to maintain both secrecy and humanity, or something like The Secret World, where the factions keep that stuff away from civilians until the point where things have slouched too far towards Bethlehem for it to matter any more. It also makes it clear within the fiction that while you may think you’re Mister/Miss Badass because you’ve learned a few tricks, you’re still on your first day of school as far as everyone around you is concerned. To the Templar faction especially, you’re just cannon fodder. To the Illuminati, convenient spare body parts. If you’re lucky.

There’s no shortage of ways to make it work; for magic to live up to both its potential and its hype. Many of them have problems to overcome, especially given how much fighting RPG characters tend to do compared to their equivalents in other works of fiction and the industry’s current dislike of the player ever ending up in a particularly negative state due to poor decisions made hours earlier, but they’re problems well worth overcoming. Magic should be more interesting. It should be exciting. It should be a little bit dangerous, even in the right hands. What it shouldn’t ever be is boring, which at the moment, it pretty much is. Flashy and boring, yes, often, but still boring – a complete waste of potential, begging to be restored to its rightful awesomeness.
 

vonAchdorf

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Many of them have problems to overcome, especially given how much fighting RPG characters tend to do compared to their equivalents in other works of fiction and the industry’s current dislike of the player ever ending up in a particularly negative state due to poor decisions made hours earlier

:D

His suggestions to make magic interesting (again) are a bit on the vague side though.

the old Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards problem that soon sees magic users becoming living gods and leaving everything behind, but treating magic as something that needs to be feared and respected in and of itself. It should take some effort to acquire and to master, and ideally feature at least some degree of consequence. That can mean elements like corruption. It can mean things like wild magic, where every spell is a bit of a gamble. It can mean friendly fire, so the mage’s incredible power has to be used precisely to avoid taking out the team.

Most of what he describes also applies to the "Quadratic Wizards". I also don't think that making it "more dangerous" is per se a solution. Sure, friendly fire and positioning are a given, but pure random / luck based difficulty doesn't seem to be the most interesting option.
 

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Well having just finished the Ultima 7 trilogy, BG, UU2 and SI, I can say pretty easily why I think magic was impressive in those games, and it wasn't because of reagent gathering. It was because it was fucking unbalanced, totally and utterly. The shit you could do in Ultima, so far beyond most games that it was unreal: I could for instance with a level 2 spell enchant a hundred arrows to become magic, and give a +4 damage bonus. Linear (cantrip) spells I could control the weather, teleport myself and party to Lord British's throne room, cast light and illuminate my surroundings etc. Mark and Recall spells'd allow me to teleport back and forth to and from any place I wanted. I could create illusionary coins to pay merchants, turn invisible or reveal invisibility, magically lock or unlock doors, summon Dragons, speak with the dead, and a thousand and one other things.

I felt like I was powerful when I cracked open my spellbook, and spellslinging opponents like Liches and shit felt similarly uber.

Didn't mean Iolo was weak, if he hit you with his triple crossbow using magic bolts...well you weren't going to live long. Dupre weilding his Magebane sword could steal all of your mana in one hit. Spark throwing the Juggernaut hammer'd fuck up even a Dragon in no time. Yeah you're an uber badass if you've got the spells, and fucking useful as well, but it doesn't limit anyone else from being potent an all. I suppose you could argue that Fighters are potent in this example because of equipment not because of inherent dangerousness, but a Mage in Ultima without spellbook or reagents is goblin stew in no time.
 

Archibald

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Well having just finished the Ultima 7 trilogy, BG, UU2 and SI, I can say pretty easily why I think magic was impressive in those games, and it wasn't because of reagent gathering. It was because it was fucking unbalanced, totally and utterly.

I think its interesting how games started to aim for realism and balance at some point. Yet we know that real world is anything but balanced, so its kinda contradictory design direction which is likely one of the reasons for blandness of many newer games.
 

SCO

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Albion is actually a game with annoying dungeons ('hardcore' you'd probably say) that are very very likely to give you a raging headache caused by smudged pixels animations on terribly dark dungeons eye-straining your eyes like you'll go blind tomorrow.

I frigging hated the '3d' in that game, although to be honest games like Ravenloft and it's sequel are probably worse. Azrael's slightly less primitive 3d on the other hand had very good art direction so i wasn't so enraged at the slight eyestrain i got - also it wasn't a complete waste of time like the stupid 2001 plot they copied (i think that was what the rationale was, it was a long time ago). It would be a much better game had they ditched the 3d altogether.
 
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SCO

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Shadorwun: Hong Kong
I think its interesting how games started to aim for realism and balance at some point. Yet we know that real world is anything but balanced, so its kinda contradictory design direction which is likely one of the reasons for blandness of many newer games.
Never forget VAS KAL CORP kills even liches.
 

V_K

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The problem with magic in RPGs is not magic per se, but the belief that core gameplay in RPG is combat and only combat. This makes mages basically fighters with fireballs, which is never going to feel right. The more complex the interactions with the gameworld are, the more exciting magic can be. Case in point - the aforementioned Ultima games, or even more so - Quest for Glory and its successors that gave you a rather limited number of spells (which is quite befitting a novice hero) but let you use them in various creative ways.
 

vonAchdorf

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Unfortunately because of "balance™", "no wrong decisions™" and"no mandatory classes™" the non-combat spells are often just variations of non-combat skills, e.g. lock picking.
 

SCO

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Shadorwun: Hong Kong
More like because the designers don't want to bother writing adventure game content. It isn't really surprising that QFG and Heroine's Quest are miles ahead of pure RPGs in non-systemic magic use. Those games already think of the world as a series of puzzles instead of a series of encounters and a spell is simply a different inventory item, maybe governed by a skill proficiency for different results.
This is part of my hardon for CYOAs and choice of games stuff.
 
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Athelas

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It has more to do with the technical difficulties of implementing that stuff. Levitating a pencil should be easier to do than summoning a meteor from outer space, but the latter (glorified fireball spell) is far easier to code/program than the former (physics-based world interaction). And then there's the added possibilities of 'breaking' the game.
 

Archibald

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If we look at popularity of things like Goat Simulator (or even TES series) we can see that people like breaking the game.
 

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
The RPG Scrollbars: Chris Avellone Writes Everything
Richard Cobbett on September 28th, 2015 at 1:00 pm.

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This week, Larian announced that Chris “Chris Avellone” Avellone would be joining theDivinity: Original Sin 2 writers to help craft what some are already calling “Words”. Commenting, Avellone demonstrated his willingness and capability of writing them by writing others, which read as follows: “This is the first time I think the community is responsible for bringing two developers together who might not have crossed paths… and especially for such a great project.” There was also a stickman involved.

But of course, this is only one of the many projects that Avellone has signed on for in the next year or so. What more of his magic awaits us in coming months?


The Walking Dead: Series 3
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It’s been six years since we last saw Clementine, and things haven’t been easy for the future queen of Zombieland. Avellone’s contribution is dialogue for brand new new party member Terrence, a wise advisor figure whose primary role is to dismantle the classic, and let’s be honest, simplistic humans vs. zombie dichotomy with many piercing questions about the nature of life, morality in an immoral universe, and the delicious nature of human flesh, because Terrence is a zombie.

With only Clem able to understand his gutteral cries, either due to her natural innocence or just the inevitable result of a decade of untreated PTSD, Terrence makes for Avellone’s most challenging mentor character to write and give personality to. “Kreia at least could talk,” he admits. “Even if some players sometimes wanted her to lose her voicebox instead of just her hand.” Nevertheless, he eagerly looks forward to the challenge, and answering the question that has hung over every piece of zombie apocalypse fiction since the dawn of the genre – just who are the real monsters?

“Spoiler, it’s the zombies. Seriously. They’re fucking zombies.”

Rise Of The Tomb Raider
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Amongst his many other talents, Avellone excels at going beyond story and gameplay segregation to make common RPG tropes into fascinating platforms for new narrative – in KOTOR 2 and Torment for instance, why people will drop everything in order to follow the main character to Hell and back. For Rise of the Tomb Raider, he finally turns his attention to a new genre. In this upcoming sequel, Lara will discover the answer to a question that’s been bothering her since the first time she pulled on her short-shorts – if she’s entering tombs that no human has dared venture into for centuries, where in the nine hells do all the shotguns and medikits come from? “I finally have the answer for you,” says Avellone, tapping his lips conspiratorially. “One word. Magic Elves.”

Dark Souls 3
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“Nobody else could handle the romance subplots in a way that is fitting to my dark, oppressive world,” says creator Hidetaka Miyazaki. “With the possible exceptions of Joss Whedon and the Roman Emperor Caligula. Sadly, neither were available.”

Avellone has already started work on the first of the game’s romances, between the initially unwilling main character, and a giant sentient pus spider whose limbs are made of rusted machetes. “For once, I’m dropping the ‘no hugs’ policy,” declared Avellone. “Whether you like it or not.” Other planned romance options include an Elder Dragon that just wants to spoon, and a sentient swarm of hepatitis bees.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
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While the primary storyline has already been written by the in-house writers, Avellone is contributing the script for Adam Jensen’s new mercenary sidekick Mute – the culmination of Black Isle and Obsidian’s interest in silent characters like Sis and Christine. Mute communicates entirely in subtle yet meaningful eye gestures, like “Kill that guy” and “Kill THAT guy” and “What can change the nature of a man? With the exception of several million dollars worth of cyber-enhancements, I mean.” The latter is a particularly impressive piece of facial motion capture. Asked who would win in a fight between her and Metal Gear Solid V’s controversial Quiet, Mute can only reply: ” ”

“We think she’s a character who will really resonate with players, and, unlike that Metal Gear lady, force them to look her in the eyes occasionally,” adds project lead Jean-François Dugas. “Bloody good timing with this voice actors’ strike too.”

Doom
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One of Avellone’s many recurring themes is disliking cliches like rats as a disposable enemy type. For the new Doom, he’s been reconsidering demonic hellspawn and why this proud race of tormenters and tormentees always gets such a raw deal.

“What I thought is, okay, you think Hell, you think fire and brimstone, and that’s where Bethesda was going. What I said is, look, these demons are intelligent, right? They’ve got weapons, they’ve got engineering, they’ve presumably learned language from the damned at some point, if only as a hobby. Are these guys really going to devote all their time to painting the walls with blood and fire? They see fire all the time! It’s like… everywhere! That’s just boring to me. I wanted to reinvent Hell. Make it real. Like Milton Keynes, only not that bad, obviously. Those roundabouts. Terrible level design.”

This radical thinking has seen a total overhaul of Doom’s planned level structure. As before, the player begins exploring the technological world of UAC starbases before finding a portal into the Stygian depths, only this time it’s to the nicer bits. It’ll also be possible to complete the entire game without firing a single shot, making your point through a complex diplomatic system that includes options for passive resistance, online petitions, or simply appealing to the better natures of the crimson horde.

“We’ve got bakeries, we’ve got playgrounds, we’ve got little baby demons painting flowers on the anal drills. It’s like, a little slice of Elysium in the middle of Tartarus – a Hell you can imagine these guys actually wanting to live in. That also opens up this whole new moral concept for the series. Is it, you know, your place to just storm through and blow them all up like some kind of fleshy racist, or could it be that the ultimate weapon is enlightenment forged in the warmth of human mercy?”

Avellone pauses. “Unless you count the new BFG. That kicks ass.”

Pillars Of Eternity: The White March Part 2
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While Avellone has left Obsidian proper, he’s back for the second half of the DLC to write yet another unforgettable NPC. “I like party members who don’t quite fit in… who stand apart… maybe who aren’t the most popular…” explains Avellone, introducing Bunty, a new clown sidekick who spends most of his time giggling in an annoying high pitched voice and regularly poking the main character in the back with a fork.

“Bunty’s narrative role is to deconstruct the world in a subtle yet pointed way, made possible by the fact that as the most coveted RPG designer in the industry right now, I was finally able to get Josh to sign a contract that banned any changes to my work or my vision. Not that I took advantage. That would be very wrong and bad.”

Players can look forward to hiring Bunty in the first town, ready with hilarious zingers like “Ooh, a snowy expansion pack? THAT’S original!” and “Dyrwood? I’ll tell you what’s dire – our pathfinding routines!” It will not be possible to kill or dismiss Bunty.

Cities Skylines 2: New Reno
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A somewhat surprising turnaround! The New Reno focused sequel challenges players to create the ultimate gambling town using a newly upgraded engine, with Avellone standing by as a creative consultant and thrower of bakery products where required.

As with the beloved original city, success here involves creating an intricate world of fascinating stories and factional interplay, unforgettable moments and cool moments. Despite this added complexity though, it’s set to be a more accessible game than the original Cities Skylines. How? Simple! Even if you spend far too much time only working on the neat stuff at the expense of the boring bits around it, nobody will either remember or care. “Nobody did the first time, anyway! Am I right? I’m so right.”

Snakes And Ladders
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At long last, the classic game of luck and skill gets a full overhaul to make it the responsive and open-ended experience that it should have been from the start. Avellone plans to start his overhaul by converting the rules into the GURPS system, and from there. Under the new easy to learn system, and after half an hour or so of character creation, players will begin rolling dice to move (d6*(DX/FP)). High Perception is also recommended to spot the snakes in time, as well as Strength to help better endure the rising fatigue. Also, players who roll a six get another turn.

Then things really open up. Perks like Animal Control offer an easy way to ascend the snakes in violation of God’s own laws, crafting their own ladders, or discovering the deep environmental narrative that explains where these snakes came from, not to mention where their long-standing rivalry with the ladders came from, and ultimately fulfill the prophecy that one day a chosen Tiddlywink would reach the final square and usher in a new Golden Age for the board and/or entire gaming world.

OR SO THEY THINK. This of course just turns out to be a front for the rise of the serpent god Nheergash, so, y’know, swings and roundabouts. Wise players will have seen it coming, collecting the six amulets on the path to trigger the true ending in which rocks fall and everyone else dies, while they themselves ascend to the Prime Monopoly Plane and realise they were merely an amnesiac snake all along. The upcoming sequel, Snakes And Ladders II: The Hiss Lords, will then be free to focus entirely on exploring the inevitable survivor’s guilt in a surreal ophidian hellscape. “Imagine the Candyman conquering Candyland,” warns Avellone. “Mwah ha ha! Ha ha ha! Ahem.”



And until Kickstarter updates, that’s all for now. So many games. Only one Avellone.

Where will he appear next? Watch this space… possibly literally.
 

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
The RPG Scrollbars: Sacred Worlds
Richard Cobbett on October 5th, 2015 at 1:00 pm.

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Most RPGs ask you to save the world, but not all of them offer a world worth saving. Honestly, there’s been quite a few where given the choice I’d have joined the evil overlord just to beat up all the potion vendors who wouldn’t even give me a discount before the final battle, and for the mere chance of stabbing the guard in Act 1 who wouldn’t let me into The Town Where The Actual Bloody Game Starts.

This week though, I’m interested in the other side of that – the worlds that become more than just a place to grind for loot and XP. The places that feel real. Beloved worlds, which don’t necessarily correlate with beloved games. I really enjoyed Skyrim for instance, but Skyrim as a world largely leaves me cold for reasons that have nothing to do with the Frostfall mod. That’s not the same as saying it’s bad, or any real quality judgement at all, simply that for me it never became a second home, more than a playground. Fallout New Vegas meanwhile, despite its problems, ticked all of the boxes. It was a world I could believe in, get immersed by, and not want to leave, which given the current political climate around the world is quite probably for the best.

Here are some of the most special worlds for me. How about you? Note, we’re talking entire worlds, as in the settings for whole games, not specific places like, say, Gold Saucer in Final Fantasy VII or FFXIV. Those are cool too, but… another week!


Britannia (Ultima)
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Pretty much inevitable, I suppose. Ultima is one of the rare games that not only offered return trips to the same places and same characters rather than merely the same world, but let us be part of literally centuries of its history. Returning to it wasn’t simply playing a new game, but returning to a second home – catching up with old friends, seeing the rise and fall of cities and dreams, and being welcomed back with open arms every time, give or take the occasional near-sacrifice incident.

But there’s more to Britannia than that. It’s one of the few CRPG settings built entirely on human principles. No gods, just man. Its focus on virtue isn’t simply skin-deep, despite how some Avatars might choose to play, but something that defines the entire setting. Every town, every quest, is tied to this bigger philosophical picture that simultaneously believes in the fundamental goodness of people while accepting that the path to virtue isn’t always an easy one. Even creator Richard Garriott’s author-avatar Lord British is regularly shown to be in the wrong, with the Avatar him or herself intended as a symbol of what people can be rather than simply the strongman that they can’t. As much as it’s easy to mock the ye olde talke, which make no mistake, onlyUltima is permitted to do at this point, and as many continuity errors and bad sequels as it accumulated, the philosophical coherence of the place made returning more than just casual business. Other worlds called for heroes. Britannia needed its Avatar.

Azeroth (World of Warcraft)
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I love Azeroth. Sorry. I know it’s not cool to admit that these days, but it’s true. It wasn’t my first MMO (for more on that, see my upcoming autobiography ‘I Played Meridian 59, Bitch!’) but it was the first that truly felt like a world. One of my fondest memories of it is of heading out from Stormwind and catching a boat to another continent – another is taking the underwater train between it and Ironforge and just marvelling at the scale of it all. Yes, I know it’s just a tiny internal map, but ssh. Blizzard did a better job than anyone had ever done before at twisting the primitive MMO technology into something fascinating. As much as we all grew to hate the taxis after a while, there’s no crushing the memory of that first flight across an entire continent – the places you will go, the wonders you will see, the monsters you will kill after swapping your rags for armour.

I don’t play on a regular basis any more, mostly because I have no interest in raids and dungeons full of annoying squawking people, but those early memories made it a place that I still look forward to returning to each expansion pack. Undercity in particular is one of my favourite locations in games, partly for its style, but also because it’s the first city my Undead Mage ever saw – the history above, the chaos below, climbing from the grave to descend once again into their destiny as one of the Forsaken’s champions.

Sigil (Planescape)
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I’ve never played Dungeons and Dragons in any form, so my only experience of Sigil comes from Planescape: Torment. Still, that’s enough. One of my favourite things in RPGs is wandering into a place that exists beyond the main character’s needs and wants – that it was there before you, that it’s ticking along quite nicely while you’re there, and it’ll be there once the credits roll. Sigil goes a step further by making it quite clear that your quest for identity is your own business. What makes Torment even cleverer though is that really, anyone who says that is wrong. Your past lives have shaped or relate to just about everything, they just don’t know it.

What draws me to it as a place though is similar to what drew me to the Fallen London universe (as ever, having written for that, I’m not going to talk too much about that here). On the surface, it’s a cruel, malicious, even vindictive place seeped in horror… but really, what’s scariest is that it does not give a damn about you. It’s a cold neutrality where you can accomplish great things or writhe at the bottom of the heap, where great comedy sits side-by-side with agonising tragedies. Exploring its streets is to realise that every person has a story and every one of those stories is meaningful.

In a very real sense, Sigil is ‘always leave them wanting more’ turned into a city. You’ll never find those portals to other worlds, because they’re not programmed in. But it doesn’t matter. The sheer potential of the place makes it bigger than any game would ever be able to make it, and the lingering unknown is more captivating than finding the truth would ever be. Every time, it feels like there’s more to discover; at least a chance of stumbling through a portal that nobody else has ever found before. You won’t, of course, but that doesn’t matter. Unless you’ve literally played it through about ten times, you’re going to find at least something you’ve not seen before.

Neocron
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Okay, so here’s a slightly unusual pick. Neocron was a pretty conclusive failure as a game. When I played it after the beta, it had double-digit populations most of the time. The expansion pack, Beyond Dome Of York, was so unpopular, it ended up being switched off. Its combat system was an attempt to do real-time combat long before internet speeds were good enough for that. The box was hilariously shit, and its expansion pack not much better thanks to having a covergirl who wasn’t even looking at what she was shooting at. (They later fixed that). Neocron was Not Great.

But how I loved its city. It was an attempt to actually create one, complete with restaurants to hang out in, red light districts that were mostly closed at launch but never mind, complex factions, flying cars, holographic combat arenas, in-game forums to chat with other players without breaking out of the fiction, and constant tannoy announcements with the latest news, that news usually being to tell everyone to attend meetings about their rights and responsibilities that needless to say never happened, and making sure that if you went into something like the town hall, that would have all of the offices and other bits you needed. Nobody had made such a convincing MMO city before, one that let you stride in like it was Blade Runner and begin earning your keep and your stripes in a hostile but manageable scale future.

It was of course mostly a ghost town, outside of people ganking new players in the sewers. Nobody ate in the restaurants. Nobody was ever around for holographic shooting fun. The bounties posted on the walls were never real players. I was disappointed by all of that, and how after launch it sat stagnant instead of living up to its potential. At the same time though, I adored that at least it tried. At the time it felt like where MMOs would inevitably end up going – more realistic settings, more interaction options, more of a sense of virtual life. In the end of course, no, it didn’t happen. But Neocron tried, and I love it for trying. It’s still around, now fan-supported, though I doubt its blocky graphics and clumsy systems would have the same effect now. Still, if you want to take a look, just head here and sign up.

Los Angeles (Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines)
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Much of this works for me in the same way that Sigil does, albeit without the comfort of neutrality. Most games aim to make you feel like you’re scratching the surface of a bigger world, but I can’t think of many that have managed to do it better. Bloodlines’ careful microcosm of vampire society leaves you in no doubt of how much more is going on the shadows that people aren’t telling you about, without falling into the trap of being so coy that you never really get to enjoy being part of it. (This was something that really bugged me about the first Vampire game, Redemption).

As simple and janky as much of it is, the characters, the setting, the music and the little details all come together to create something far more absorbing than it really should be. Certainly, when I visited Santa Monica the other year on business, I couldn’t resist slipping in my earphones and wandering around the pier to the sound of Deb of Night. Didn’t go into any dodgy clubs or drain any prostitutes of their blood or anything, though I did have a very underwhelming McDonalds before ambling back to the hotel for a quiet evening of regretting that we never got a sequel to this awkward gem.

Anachronox
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And speaking of awkward gems… I really wish more sci-fi would take a page from Tom Hall’s crazy pop-up-book of a universe. The titular world is such a clever place, with its moving districts and grinding poverty. What follows though is a glimpse of a place that deserved to be far better explored – the only game where you can get a whole planet shrinking itself down to be a party member, or casually end up on a comic book supervillain’s ship as if that’s just the kind of thing that happens in deep space. As much as the game was essentially a war between Hall and co’s imagination and the limitations of the Quake engine, you’ve got to love a sci-fi epic so crazy in scale that the plot involves another universe weaponising the Big Crunch.

As much as I love Mass Effect, in particular its characters (the Citadel DLC is easily one of my favourite RPG experiences of the last few years), and many other great SF games, everything since Anachronox has felt somewhat dry in comparison. I still like to think that we’ll get to return to it at some point, even if it is about as likely as one day seeing an Oscar winning Farscape/Firefly crossover. Sigh.



Those are just a few of my favourite RPG worlds – I didn’t want to steal all of the good ones. Which are yours? Which do you like to return to for another trip around old stomping grounds, and which ones do you long for a chance to revisit and catch up on? Remember, we’re talking about the worlds themselves rather than necessarily the games, so an awesome world in a bad game can count. Likewise, it doesn’t have to be objectively the greatest place you’ve ever played, just something that became more than the sum of its maps to you personally. That could be something as sprawling as Mass Effect, or as simple as Legends of Valour arriving at just the right time.

Over to you…
 

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Richard Cobbett does not believe in Dungeon Master mode:

The RPG Scrollbars: The Damned DM Delusion
Richard Cobbett on October 26th, 2015 at 1:00 pm.

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The most dangerous ideas are the ones so compelling, nobody wants to admit they’re bad. Also the atom bomb was pretty nasty, but that’s a bit out of a weekly RPG column. Instead, let’s pick one of the chocolate teapots that people keep mistaking for the Holy Grail – the idea that RPGs can hope to offer anything close to a classic DM experience. It’s a terrible idea. It’s not going to work. Stop wasting everybody’s time.


Now, I’m not talking about dedicated tools like Roll20 or more specific ones likeJParanoia here – tools whose job is primarily to connect people and handle the fiddly stuff like character sheets. I mean RPGs that want to offer both a game and a DM experience, which always fall far, far short of the dream or basic sell. Many have tried, including Vampire: The Masquerade: Redemption (AKA Vampire: The Masquerade: The Crap One), Neverwinter Nights, and more recently, Sword Coast Legends.

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Between them, the various approaches have brought along just about every raw feature needed to pull it off, and time and again players have hit the same issues – the biggest one being perception of scope. What I mean by that is that, well, look at just about any procedurally generated game. As much as developers like to claim that their scale is some crazily large thing, like Elite Dangerous having a hundred bazillion star systems or No Man’s Sky rendering twelve universes without breaking a sweat, in practice their scale is limited to the point where you as the player feel like you’ve seen the edges of what it can do. At that point, the magic of the thing is immediately lost and all that remains is the hope that the core gameplay loop can hold players’ attention. Cracking skulls in Diablo 3 for instance. The quest for credits in Elite Dangerous.

If the DM has one job here, it’s to try and disguise it with hand-crafted content and a human eye for the rules and systems. The catch is that even using something as powerful as the Neverwinter Nights editor to create a complex module full of wonder and whimsy, once the game starts that player just becomes another puppet of the game engine – albeit one with the power to see and occasionally twang everyone else’s strings. They’re not in charge of the rules, because that’s the game logic, and even the simplest of engines makes it a pain to create content on the fly. Sure, you can make a module or a map in advance, but then you’re still stuck with the problem of not being able to react with the speed of thought to game limitations and player freedom. Which as ever, will usually manifest in variously murderous killing sprees.

What does it usually boil down to letting you do? Add monsters on the fly and twiddling. That’s about the extent of what a modern game can allow, with the result that what should be the mode that expands a game and makes it seems full of possibilities actually ends up just revealing the limitations all the stronger – how the traps work for instance, how progression is kept out of the GM’s hands with loot tables and equipment controlled by someone else, how it’s not possible to have a secret door unless someone has specifically coded that in advance. It’s creation within a straitjacket, further tied down by interface design and balance. You’re not working hand in hand with the source material to create something great, you’re working for it. You’re not the master of the game, you’re its unpaid middle-management.

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For the concept to have any chance of living up to the promise, design itself really needs to change – for players to accept a lower fidelity world, and for games to be built primarily around the DM experience instead of the individual players. That sounds backwards, but it’s the level of trust required for it to have any chance; to design the user interface and game logic and expansion potential around player creativity instead of just serving up a standard CRPG where one player has a few extra tricks. It’s also why it never happens. That’s far too big a risk for any modern game, especially as the number of players who will have the technical skill to handle that and the willingness to fully engage with the process is far too limited to bet the farm on. Now take that and factor in that at the moment, most RPGs just don’t have much of a creative community in the first place, never mind one willing to get that hands-on. Skyrim is obviously huge, but it’s the exception to the rule. Divinity: Original Sin for instance has made no waves whatsoever with its tools, and however many players are currently logged intoNeverwinter, it’s not enough for the rest of the industry to have followed its lead.

So what happens instead? Typically, either DM mode is a glorified level editor which doesn’t allow the player to actually create much except arenas, or a challenge mode, as in the upcoming Fable Legends or simple bashy-smashy games like Dungeonland. If any upcoming game had a chance of pulling it off, it was Sword Coast Legends, and… well, it doesn’t. At all. Ironically, part of the issue with it is that while a tabletop RPG can make combat with a single enemy exciting and full of drama, in games it’s always going to boil down to a hack-slash-hack-slash type loop, where victory is expected and interest predicated as much on grind as adventure. If DMing was going to work as a mechanic, it’d probably be by completely stepping away from how RPGs currently look and heading back to the genre’s strategy roots – a focus on more intimate encounters of the kind we see in other games that borrow from the style. Card Hunter for instance is arguably a better starting point for making it work, despite lacking the glitz. Turn-based, not too complicated, focused on a few key mechanics that the computer can help with but offer flexibility for the DM and with scope for adding flavour and taking control of players… it’s the only realistic way to go, if there is one.

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Of course, it’s always a bad idea to use the word ‘never’, unless you’re talking about Neverwinter Nights, because otherwise people would just look at you and wonder what you were talking about. There’s usually at least one game in development hoping to crack the formula, with Divinity: Original Sin 2 the next biggie planning to try its luck. One day, one of them may create something as intimate as a table of friends and as open as human imagination. It just doesn’t seem likely any time soon, to the point of feeling like a complete waste of energy that would be better spent on finding more ways to advance what computers can actually bring to the table in terms of things like world simulation and depth and creating experiences that neither require a human DM, nor make players long for one to give our adventures life.
 

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
The RPG Scrollbars: Manual Override
Richard Cobbett on November 9th, 2015 at 2:00 pm.

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I miss manuals and their kin. They’re often still provided with games, I suppose; usually PDFs to explain how to play and to give jerks on forums something to insist you RTF if you dare complain that something isn’t clear enough. I’m not really thinking of that side of things though, but the ones that felt like they were part of the overall experience. The in-world documents. The bestiaries that didn’t just list enemies, but breathed life into them in a way that the often simple game you were playing really couldn’t. The snippets that told you that while, yes, you were going to be spending the whole game in a series of dungeons, there was a world somewhere outside them that cared too.

This week, I thought I’d share a few of my favourites, and related bits and pieces, and see which ones struck a chord with you, the person reading this. I have others from other genres too, including Galactic Inquirer from Space Quest V, which was all the funnier for coming in an era when toilet paper like National Enquirer wasn’t eally available in the UK, and Claw Marks, the official magazine of the TCS Tiger’s Claw. But you see the letters RPG up there in the title? They don’t stand for ‘rocket powered grenade’. Unless you’re dealing with a modern era RPG, in which case I suppose they might. But never mind. Onwards! To the wonderful world of words!


Ultima VII: The Book Of Fellowship
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Oh, goodness, what a surprise, Richard’s talking about Ultima again. Well, yes. But while a million words have justifiably been splashed here there and everywhere about the actual game, one thing that’s not often mentioned is the second manual. Ultima VII came with two – the boring one, about how to play, and the in-lore one, written by a certain Batlin of Britain. Or to be more accurate, the villain. Yep, you’re reading through the evil Fellowship’s Bible, and as you’d expect for Ultima, it’s pretty clever.

Much like Fellowship philosophy in the game itself, which hangs on seemingly innocent phrases like ‘Worthiness Precedes Reward’ (easily flipped to say that the poor therefore are unworthy, while the rich are worthy by default), much of the text is written at a distinct slant from the rest of the universe, in a way that vacillates between passive aggressive and misleading. When discussing Ultima 4 for instance, Batlin is rather quick to plant the idea that just maybe, the Avatar was inspired by his quest due to having so comprehensively fucked things up in the earlier games. Uh. No comment. He also invents stuff entirely, like the Avatar only defeating the evil sorceress Minax because s/he had a crush on her, and doesn’t exactly hide his true feelings with comments like “Those who would say that this terrible and destructive war could have been prevented entirely had the Avatar not appropriated the Codex from its true owners are merely dissidents who are grossly misinformed,” before quickly declaring the Avatar’s period as Britannia’s hero over and a new era begun.

Given this and the in-game handling of the Fellowship, it’s a real shame that everything from the very first frame of series baddie The Guardian showing up to gloat completely gives away the fact that they’re more evil than putting mayonnaise on chips. But as an introduction, this was a fantastic introduction to a great enemy – not a religion of evil, exactly, but one run by a master of psychological manipulation who’d managed to weaponise compassion and turn even good people onto the wrong path.

The Bard’s Tale II: The Destiny Knight
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This isn’t a manual as such, but the official clue-book. Really, I’m including it for its gimmick. The whole thing is told as a story, of heroes about to undertake the game’s quest, visiting a wizard for guidance. He provides it by putting them on a vision quest, where they see the entire adventure play out in front of them.

…kinda.

The twist is that despite this, it all goes horribly wrong, with the result that by the time they get to the end of the vision, they’ve decided to sod all of it for a game of soldiers and let someone else go on the quest. That’s why it’s still available when your team – the right team – shows up to take care of business. Not much more to say about that one, especially the writing, but a round of applause for a clever idea.

Drakkhen
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I’ve mentioned this one before, because while I think it’s honestly a pretty bad game, it’s a bad game that stuck with me. At least part of that was the manual, which in keeping with many novellas that came with games back in the 80s/90s, had pretty much exactly nothing to do with what was going to follow. In this case, it was the tale of a stupid knight killing the last dragon and so dooming the world. The actual game… honestly, your guess is about as good as mine. The only part of the plot worth remembering is this, my favourite Game Over screen ever.

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Way to rub it in there, guys.

It was a fancy artifact though, shining in its gold cover in a shiny gold and green box, with the stupid knight’s death sticking with me for its amusing excess – the kind of death that makes Guy Fawkes’ end seem like a few minutes in a comfy chair. A pity that none of it mattered when you started the game and your entire team immediately got eaten by a shark in a castle moat… but hey, it was better than nothing.

Anarchy Online: Prophet Without Honor
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I’m cheating here, I know, but I did technically get this book with my copy of Anarchy Online back in the day, so I choose to treat it as similar to the Book of Fellowship et al… mostly because otherwise I’m probably never going to mention what is one of the strangest bits of RPG world-building I’ve ever encountered.

Prophet Without Honor is the Anarchy Online backstory, and to give you some idea of how far that spans – it begins in the modern day, and ends in the game’s timeframe of 29,475AD. By this point, if we haven’t evolved into creatures of pure energy, I think we have to chalk it down to pure laziness. Anyway, much of the plot revolves around the invention of immortality technology and the expansion of humanity into space. It’s not sold any more, but Funcom released it for free years ago on its archive site – you can snag it here if you want to read it. It’s officially “Book One”. There was no Book Two.

The part that stuck with me isn’t the backstory though, but Chapter 18. This is a day in the life of a man named Philip Ross, the man in charge of the evil corporation Omni-Tek, and so at this point in the story, The Baddie. Anarchy Online had a half-hearted attempt to act like the two sides were different, but it wore its politics on its sleeve – Omni-Tek was oppressive, autocratic and dark, while the Clans were democratic, open, and friendly. At least, in theory. In practice, Omni-Tek was pretty liberal for an evil corporation, welcoming newcomers, offering them free housing, a choice of job, training, and starting equipment… but it kept blaring out orders to stop running, so… evil? Probably evil. Certainly a little petty, given the whole civil war thing going on.

Anyway. Philip Ross. This chapter is simultaneously one of my favourite bits of RPG writing and one of the most unfortunate, because it goes out of its way to humanise the villain to the point that it effectively kills the game’s drama. Even more so than when it launched, promising a four year war, and then spent the first of those years on a ceasefire. What happens, in a nutshell, is that he heads out to wander his city, his empire, and almost immediately bumps into a group of new arrivals. He greets them, only to be stunned and amused when they go “Oh, yeah, hi, can you tell us where we go to join the Clans?” No evil CEO has ever come closer to a facepalm.

In short, this is Luke Skywalker asking Darth Vader for directions to Yavin. Making it stronger, in his internal monologue, he outright states he wouldn’t have reported them – he’d have tried talking, but otherwise, wished them well. Now, it all goes wrong when it turns out to be a trap, but still, in my mind his reaction is an issue. The purpose of the scene is supposed to be his realisation that peace is impossible and that there must be much crushing… but instead he comes as a guy smart enough to go home, have a brandy, cool down, and realise that today wasn’t his best day. In that sense, it doesn’t work that well. The writing is ironically too good to support the game world and the needs of the story, at least in the early days before everyone realised nobody cared about that war and Anarchy Online started opening portals to Dante’s Inferno and having aliens pop in for a chat and an invasion instead.

But still, I like it. It was an early case of an MMO trying to go beyond basic good and evil thinking and craft the kind of stories and characters it was worth following and being caught up in, and endearing for that. I know that stories in MMOs are a contentious issue for some, but they’re something I’ve always appreciated – World of Warcraft’s continuing tale and cast of characters, Funcom’s own attempt to go further with The Secret World, and Knights of the Fallen Empire over in The Old Republic both giving the core game a shot in the arm and revamping the original levelling experience to focus entirely on class missions.

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Those are some of the RPG reading experiences that stuck in my mind, though I can think of many others – not necessarily whole books, but just flipping through manuals and looking at the monsters I’d be fighting, regretting the inevitable giant spiders of course, and places I’d be visiting. The Famous Adventurer’s Correspondance School with Quest For Glory, including the unforgettable secret of Thief Sign (“This consists of placing your thumb upon your nose with the hand held perpendicular to the face and the fingers outspread. You then wiggle your fingers while focusing your eyes on your thumb and patting your belly with the other hand.”) Redguard’s guide to the Elder Scrolls universe, all the stranger for the actual game being stuck on the tiniest piece of it thus seen. Wasteland’s Survival Guide, full of snippets of text that wouldn’t fit on the floppy disks and so had to be looked up at the appropriate time – snippets you weren’t meant to read, but totally did. So many fond memories from the back of the car, hoping like hell that the floppy disks in the box would actually work.

Ah, nostalgia. Steam and PDF files will never come close to that.

Though the part about broken floppies? That’s for the best.
 
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