Designing RPG mechanics for scalability

[Craig Stern]

If you think that a 40-hour RPG where players face the same enemy with the same graphic with some kind of behind-the-scenes scaling for the whole duration is an economically viable concept, I guess we'll have to disagree.

I don't think that--and more to the point, I never said that. Not once do I say that you should have fewer items and enemy types overall. To the contrary, what I say is that if you're going to make the player fight what is functionally the same enemy over and over again in different skins, and buy what is functionally the same item over and over again with different icons, then you've performed a lot more design work in order to produce an experience that is actually no more interesting from a gameplay perspective (and which, in some respects, is actually worse--see, for instance, my points about how jRPG design tropes tend to force those games to become more linear and restrict the kinds of encounters that are viable as a challenge to the player).

 

[Mustawd]

So basically:

Stuff

You obviously didn't read Craig's clarification. So it kind of makes you look like a fool.

I don't think that--and more to the point, I never said that. Not once do I say that you should have fewer items and enemy types overall.

I think it's fair to say the article has issues with clarity. So some misunderstanding is probably a reflection of that.

 

[MRY]

At some point when everyone reading your article is misunderstanding it, it might not be our problem. :/

You said:

(1) "An RPG with a play time of less than 20 hours is unacceptable to the market, and ideally, you should aim for 40 hours or more."
(2) "I could have a battle with all low-level Bloodbeard’s Bandits, plus one higher-level Bloodbeard’s Bandit as a boss. I could have a battle filled with Bloodbeard’s Bandits at whatever the player’s level is. For that matter, I could make a Level 60 Bloodbeard’s Bandit to serve as the final boss of the whole game! That, my friends, is scalable content: one enemy that’s useful as a challenge to the player throughout the entire game."

I don't see how to read this as anything other than glee for players facing the same enemy with the same graphic for a 40-hour game, indeed perhaps even facing battles in which you see only that enemy, with the same graphic, as both the trash and the boss. (I also think it is totally understandable that everyone took you to be talking about player-level-scaling when you exclaimed, "I could have a battle filled with Bloodbeard’s Bandits at whatever the player’s level is.")

Look, I think it would be great if you wrote an article that said:

(1) RPGs have far too much repetitious content based around the principle that players can/should do the same thing with bigger numbers of the course of the entire game.
(2) A designer's main goal should be to eliminate this repetitious content.
(3) Merely reskinning enemies and items that function the same way is not a meaningful solution, even if it might satisfy some players. Moreover, it costs resources, particularly graphical ones.

But your article instead seems hung up on point #3 and talks about how you can just reuse the same content entirely without reskinning it, as if enemy and item types are the hurdle to completing an RPG, which they aren't.

 

[Craig Stern]

I think it's fair to say the article has issues with clarity. So some misunderstanding is probably a reflection of that.

Seems that way! I've just made a few edits to address some misconceptions; hopefully the point comes across more clearly now.

 

[Craig Stern]

I don't see how to read this as anything other than glee for players facing the same enemy with the same graphic for a 40-hour game, indeed perhaps even facing battles in which you see only that enemy, with the same graphic, as both the trash and the boss. (I also think it is totally understandable that everyone took you to be talking about player-level-scaling when you exclaimed, "I could have a battle filled with Bloodbeard’s Bandits at whatever the player’s level is.")

So, here you seem to be confusing a point about how flexible your content becomes from a mechanics standpoint with a design mandate to actually just use the same enemy type for all purposes throughout the entire game. Those aren't the same thing. "Here's a cool trick where you can use a lighter to not only light candles, but also open your beer" isn't "throw out all can and bottle openers you own and use lighters to open every beer forever." I talk about how flexible a single enemy type becomes with dynamic power scaling as an example of how flexible even a single enemy type becomes with dynamic power scaling--and nothing more. The sentence means exactly what it says.

Same thing with the Dragon Quest example. I use Dragon Quest as one of the clearest available examples of an equipment treadmill arising out of exponential stat growth. Do I say that the developers broke their backs creating seven weapon types and a few dozen monsters? No. In fact, I don't seem to recall writing anywhere that items and enemies are the primary content hurdles for an RPG. I'd imagine that the burden these things pose depends mostly upon what sort of RPG you're making. But I've yet to make an RPG that doesn't require loads of content, and saving myself from creating even a few dozen pointlessly duplicative monsters and items is a small boon (especially if your enemies animate--that shit is really time-consuming and expensive to produce as an indie).

 

[Lhynn]

I do talk about developing a game's systems so that enemies can be dynamically generated at different power levels, but I do not advocate forcing those power levels to always be matched to the player.

To have any encounter worth a damn you need personally design every piece of it. Incuding the monsters.
Thats what i thought at first. What you are proposing reminds me of what i see in MMOs, where every enemy at a certain powerlevel seems to be roughly the same as any other enemy at the same powerlevel. They will have roughly the same damage, roughly the same endurance and their special attacks will be roughly as dangerous.
This is an unmitigated disaster from a gameplay standpoint, because every encounter will feel samey. Even at different levels.
If you want quality you have to hand craft it, you have to keep the values coherent with a creature of that size, shape and behavior instead of getting lost in stuff that brings nothing to the table.
Good games with similar aproaches to the one you are proposing are good games despite of it, never because of it.

Also, the reason I mostly discuss jRPGs in that article is because they're by far the worst offenders as far as requiring tons of disposable content and forcing players onto an equipment treadmill. I have my issues with wRPG design as well, but by and large, they're quite good at content scalability.

Instead of differentiating them take the best of both worlds, kinda like Avellone did with PST.

 

[Karellen]

I am of two minds about this.

On one hand, Valkyria Chronicles - which quite deservedly had a reasonaby high spot in the recent RPGCodex poll - is one of my favourite tactical RPGs, and the character advancement in that game is notably disemphasised. Not entirely so, but for all practical purposes, enemies level up roughly the same speed as you do, and you level up classes in bulk, so you barely notice the character development, and when you do it's not necessarily a good thing - for instance, the entire sniper class is almost entirely useless for the first few missions because it takes a while for their aim to improve, which doesn't really seem intentional so much as an oversight in the system. Generally speaking, the character advancement and gear purchasing and whatnot is almost entirely vestigial, and that's just as well, because that puts the emphasis on the fabulously designed individual missions instead, which suffer not in the least bit for the fact that they're populated by the exact same enemy types over and over again - the fun is in the map layouts, not facing new types of enemies. Then again, Valkyria Chronicles is largely an environmental puzzle game that happens to have some RPG slapped on top as window dressing. Which, honestly, is probably a good thing: I was very frustrated by the PSP remake of Tactics Ogre, which gets progressively less fun to play as you go on because you keep getting new cool characters with interesting special classes, except that they all start at level 1 so you have to grind them up before you get to use them.

Having said that, there are some functionally perfect games that feature exponential zero-to-hero growth. Almost every dungeon crawler uses this structure, and for a very good reason - the essence of a dungeon crawler lies in taking calculated risks to attain rewards, and ultimately, purely vertical character advancement is insufficient to provide meaningful rewards, or, for that matter, to punish the player for failure. This article, which I really like, explains this rather well, but basically this type of traditional RPG requires grinding, if for no other reason that being forced to grind is the ideal punishment, and being able to progress, and gaining equipment and resources that make it possible, is an excellent reward. And none of this works if growth is too gradual or carefully plotted, either - a new fancy sword is rewarding because it can oneshot enemies, as is reaching a new character level and getting a spell that can obliterate enemies that gave you trouble two hours ago. Making previous consumables and equipment obsolete is, in a way, not only necessary but the whole point. The ideal progression is the combination of vertical and horizontal growth; incline, as one might say.

This is also why I think one cannot entirely discount the merit of repetition. Games like these wouldn't work without it, because they need a certain amount of room to feel the results of decisions in. And it's because the punishment and reward exist that all the decisions made in the game have weight and merit, which renders superficially repetitive combat encounters fascinating. With repetition, the player progressively becomes more and more aware of the game's mechanics and more precise at gauging the strength of his characters against monsters, at which point introducing new mechanics produces interesting complications. I've spent enough sleepless nights playing FTL that I'd be lying shamelessly if I were to say that repetitive gameplay couldn't be a great deal of fun.

Ultimately, it comes down to the fact that these are two different types of games that happen to use similar mechanical overlay, so people think of both of them as RPGs. However, more fundamentally, one of them is akin to a puzzle game, while the other is a kind of gambling. There are probably more types of RPGs than these two, but these are the ones that really embody diametrical opposites, in my mind, so I think it's crucial for the developer to have a good sense of which one (if either) he's going for. At any rate, both are valid principles that have a lot going for them.

 

[Craig Stern]

What you are proposing reminds me of what i see in MMOs, where every enemy at a certain powerlevel seems to be roughly the same as any other enemy at the same powerlevel. They will have roughly the same damage, roughly the same endurance and their special attacks will be roughly as dangerous.

I'm not advocating that either, actually. (In fact, that's similar to the false "solution" to the issue with the Leo battle that I rejected in the article.) To the contrary, I want content that's interesting and varied, and which forces the player to make interesting decisions--see e.g. the potions versus vulneraries example.

Remaking the same content over and over in order to keep a certain enemy type or item type relevant throughout the game is a drain on resources that could otherwise be put into more varied and interesting content. The problem with those MMOs isn't that their enemies have varying power levels; it's that the designers failed to take advantage of content scalability to create meaningfully different enemies.

 

[MRY]

I don't see how to read this as anything other than glee for players facing the same enemy with the same graphic for a 40-hour game, indeed perhaps even facing battles in which you see only that enemy, with the same graphic, as both the trash and the boss. (I also think it is totally understandable that everyone took you to be talking about player-level-scaling when you exclaimed, "I could have a battle filled with Bloodbeard’s Bandits at whatever the player’s level is.")

So, here you seem to be confusing a point about how flexible your content becomes from a mechanics standpoint with a design mandate to actually just use the same enemy type for all purposes throughout the entire game. Those aren't the same thing. "Here's a cool trick where you can use a lighter to not only light candles, but also open your beer" isn't "throw out all can and bottle openers you own and use lighters to open every beer forever."

Imagine some wag wrote an article called "Designing pocket-sized objects to have multiple functions." The article starts, "You may be having trouble juggling all the demands in your life. There's never enough time in your day, is there? Well, I'm here to offer a solution! Make pocket-sized tools solve multiple problems! To give you an example how this can give you the time you need to see your family and excel at work, let's talk about an invention I'm particularly proud of: a lighter than can open beer cans!" The rest of the article talks about how to design such a lighter and criticizes other lighters that can't open beer cans.

Someone reads the article and says, "Aren't people better off with twist-off tops on beers or just using a regular bottle opener when they are drinking?" The author gets all huffy about how no one was reading his article, which wasn't saying you should design lighters that way, only that you can and the two are totally different.

Now imagine that on top of writing this entirely misleading and largely useless article about how to design something to do something that even the author thinks is a bad idea, the wag also made a bunch of statements like "The time saved by being able to open beer bottles with a lighter will enable you to write the next Great American novel!" that are both speculative and implausible.

Then suppose the wag tried to substantiate this implausible assertion by mustering evidence in which designing the lighter to work as a can opener would just replace a cool looking Zippo lighter design with an ugly Bic lighter design without saving any meaningful amount of time to spend with the family or at work or just to spend posting on the Codex.

At this point, one might think that the wag had failed in his article and should use his can opener to burn the whole thing and start over, but since "every letter written is a wound inflicted against the devil," as TH White had Merlin say, I would certainly not urge the wag to do any such thing.

Same thing with the Dragon Quest example. I use Dragon Quest as one of the clearest available examples of an equipment treadmill arising out of exponential stat growth. Do I say that the developers broke their backs creating seven weapon types and a few dozen monsters? No. In fact, I don't seem to recall writing anywhere that items and enemies are the primary content hurdles for an RPG. I'd imagine that the burden these things pose depends mostly upon what sort of RPG you're making. But I've yet to make an RPG that doesn't require loads of content, and saving myself from creating even a few dozen pointlessly duplicative monsters and items is a small boon (especially if your enemies animate--that shit is really time-consuming and expensive to produce as an indie).

So just to be clear, your article should begin:

A developer with limited resources at her disposal, staring down the barrel of a half-decade development cycle, might be inclined to wonder: “Is there some way that I can design my game’s systems to alleviate the burden of producing all that content?”

Well, I have good unhelpful news! I’m here to tell you that you cannot meaningfully reduce your workload: by designing your mechanics for scalability. Before we get into the “how” of it, though, let’s set out exactly what we mean by “scalability.”

?

Why does the the principal example in your article (Dragon Warrior) not support its thesis? If Dragon Warrior wouldn't have been easier to make by applying your ideas, and would have been made worse by applying them, why would you cite it at all? If you don't think that designing the items and enemies for Dragon Warrior was time consuming then why would you grumble:

If you haven’t designed your mechanics so that item usefulness scales with the player, then as the developer, you’ll have to constantly come up with new item content that–functionally speaking–does the exact same thing as the old content. This is, bluntly, a waste of your time and resources.

One of the oldest and purest examples of an equipment treadmill occurs in Dragon Quest

Ultimately, I think your head and heart are in the right place. I'm very pleased to have supported Telepath Tactics, and I hope that your future games get more recognition and acclaim. But I think your article is basically pointless and your defense of it is even more so since it seems everyone agrees on some basic principles (filler is bad, stat bloat is bad, content should only be recycled if it presents interesting new opportunities the second time you see it), folks just don't think your article actually expressed those ideas well.

 

[Craig Stern]

Yikes. Best of luck in your future endeavors.

 

[Lhynn]

Remaking the same content over and over in order to keep a certain enemy type or item type relevant throughout the game is a drain on resources that could otherwise be put into more varied and interesting content.

Its not a drain on resources at all actually, its recycling resources. Anyway, if you need to do this then your system already failed from the start.

The problem with those MMOs isn't that their enemies have varying power levels; it's that the designers failed to take advantage of content scalability to create meaningfully different enemies.

Scalability isnt positive, ever, create something completely new.
MMOs do it because they need to pad content, single players game do not need this shit, they can be short, as long as they are good itl sell. Shit, if anything nowadays short games are more interesting to gamers than long ones, simply because of lack of time.

 

[Craig Stern]

Remaking the same content over and over in order to keep a certain enemy type or item type relevant throughout the game is a drain on resources that could otherwise be put into more varied and interesting content.

if you need to do this then your system already failed from the start.

Yes. That's the exact point I make in the article: if your mechanics force you to keep creating new enemies that are functionally identical to the old ones, that's bad design.

But here's the thing: "make something completely new" isn't mutually exclusive with scalability--in fact, it benefits from it. Even if you completely replace old enemies with totally new and different ones, that's still a waste of resources. Why? Here's a super simple example to explain why: suppose your player, at level 1, is fighting goblins, a melee unit. But at level 4, goblins can't even damage the player due to your game's exponential stat growth and subtractive attack damage mechanics. Since you can't just spawn goblins in a more powerful form, you introduce a new enemy--but instead of making a goblin reskin, you create something that's totally different: skeleton archers! But wait: now you can only design encounters for your level 4 player with skeleton archers, instead of having the flexibility of mixing skeleton archers and goblins in different combinations. So all you've done is limited the design space for possible encounters.

As a developer, you're still going to want to introduce new enemies throughout the game, and not just dump them all out at once; but as you introduce them, the design space just gets bigger and bigger, and you can do all kinds of crazy, creative encounters. (This is one of the reasons I was able to create such varied and unique battles in Telepath Tactics.) By the same token, if you don't design for scalability, the more the game goes on, the more totally different enemy types you'll have discarded for no good reason.

 

[Lhynn]

goblins can't even damage the player due to your game's exponential stat growth and subtractive attack damage mechanics.

And thats where your system failed.

 

[Mustawd]

But wait: now you can only design encounters for your level 4 player with skeleton archers, instead of having the flexibility of mixing skeleton archers and goblins in different combinations. So all you've done is limited the design space for possible encounters.

How so? You still have the goblins, which in this case are useless because goblins can no longer harm the player. Or are you talking about stronger goblins?

Yikes.

Craig, do me a favor and scroll alllll the way to the top of this page. Now look at the troll in the top left corner. Now what does it say to the right of him?

On the codex if you mention scaling of any type, people tend to give you a negative knee jerk reaction. Even if what you're talking about has nothing to do with an Oblivion-style scaling of everything to the player's level.

Anyhow, is it fair to say that your overall point is that making some kind of automated system of leveling enemies/monsters is an efficient way of maanging a dev's limited resources?

 

[Craig Stern]

But wait: now you can only design encounters for your level 4 player with skeleton archers, instead of having the flexibility of mixing skeleton archers and goblins in different combinations. So all you've done is limited the design space for possible encounters.

How so? You still have the goblins, which in this case are useless because goblins can no longer harm the player. Or are you talking about stronger goblins?

I'm talking about the goblin enemy type (which, for our purposes, means "thing that looks and behaves like a goblin in combat"). So if you can't dynamically scale the goblin enemy type, you will still have the goblins--but as you say, in my example, they're useless for purposes of challenging a level 4 player. So just putting them into encounters isn't going to be all that great. If you can dynamically scale them, though, then you can have the player start off with level 1 goblins, and you can eventually mix in skeleton archers, and the enemy type can still be viable going forward.

is it fair to say that your overall point is that making some kind of automated system of leveling enemies/monsters is an efficient way of maanging a dev's limited resources?

Automated only in the specific sense that as a developer, I can hand-pick a level that's appropriate to a given encounter and spawn the enemy at that level--but not automated in the sense of "letting an algorithm pick the power level for me." (And that's just with regard to the first mechanics suggestion--there are two other suggestions for achieving content scalability in the article!)

 

[Mustawd]

Automated only in the specific sense that as a developer, I can hand-pick a level that's appropriate to a given encounter and spawn the enemy at that level--but not automated in the sense of "letting an algorithm pick the power level for me." (And that's just with regard to the first mechanics suggestion--there are two other suggestions for achieving content scalability in the article!)

Got it. Ok yah, that article was confusing. I still think that approach is a slippery slope to just having palette swaps if abused. But I agree it can probably save a ton of time if you want as much flexibility as possible and your intent is not just palette swaps to the nth degree.

 

[CryptRat]

take the best of both worlds, kinda like Avellone did with PST.

Best of both worlds, rtwp,

 

[MRY]

I agree it can probably save a ton of time if you want as much flexibility as possible and your intent is not just palette swaps to the nth degree.

How would it "save a ton of time"? Even if it saved 100% of the time spent defining enemy statistics (which is obviously ludicrous, since among other things you would need to develop and test the scaling algorithm to make sure it was producing enemies balanced appropriately for the level seed), what percentage of RPG development time do you think is spent defining enemy statistics? In jRPGs, where combat encounters make up most of the gameplay and enemy statistics are very important in combat encounters, enemies have extremely minimal statistics (here's an example), so defining them takes very little time, and testing tailored enemy statistics isn't any more cumbersome than testing scaled ones. In Western RPGs, enemies are much more robust (more statistics, plus gear), but combat encounter design is only part of the overall design and enemy statistics (as opposed to placement and AI scripts) is only a small part of combat encounter design. Moreover, the less filler content (i.e., the less often the same units are used in the same way), the less time will be spent on defining enemy statistics.

Craig seems unwilling to answer this point, other than to say that he acknowledges that the only example he cites doesn't count, but maybe you can explain what I'm missing here. Because all I see is a way to homogenize enemies by replacing custom-built content with a scaling formula, where the scaling formula is likely to take as long to define as the custom data would take to enter. To be concrete: Is there some jRPG out there that would have been meaningfully easier to make if enemy and item statistics were generated formulaically rather than by hand?

(Obviously, reducing the number of enemies does reduce the art load. If we're talking about art load, and not design load, let's be clear and specific. But an RPG with tons of fights against identical enemy archetypes will draw howls of protest even on the Codex, and certainly among the masses. Indeed, the "most useful" negative review for Telepath Tactics on Steam beging, "This game has neat ideas but isn't executed well. For starters, every sprite looks the same...." This may be a sad fact of life rather than a happy one, but it is a fact of life all the same.)

 

[Mustawd]

what percentage of RPG development time do you think is spent defining enemy statistics?

Assuming Craig is still making Tactical/Strategy RPGs, I'd say this can be quite a bit. See below.

How would it "save a ton of time"?

I have a lvl 1 goblin. Let's say I'm making 10 encounters. I want to experiment in my encounter with goblins because let's say they have some unique aspect. But my encounters are spread out over several levels in the game. Without a procedural system to create a level 4 or 6 or 8 or 9 goblin, I'm creating these enemies individually. Let's say I want to experiment with each encounter. at a minimum that's 10 times. Let's say there's an optimal range of each encounter. Say one encounter is around level 4-7. That means maybe my goblin enemies are level 4. Or maybe they work best at level 5. Or 6. Or 7.

Do that over 10 encounters (which is actually a small amount for a full game), and it can take a very long time.

Also, let's say he wants to make a series. Which is not too far fetched seeing that he's used the whole "Telepath" thing for all his games. Then making an algorithm for the first game can save a ton of time if he wants to keep it intact or if he wants to just make minor tweaks.

In jRPGs, where combat encounters make up most of the gameplay and enemy statistics are very important in combat encounters, enemies have extremely minimal statistics (here's an example), so defining them takes very little time, and testing tailored enemy statistics isn't any more cumbersome than testing scaled ones. In Western RPGs, enemies are much more robust (more statistics, plus gear), but combat encounter design is only part of the overall design and enemy statistics (as opposed to placement and AI scripts) is only a small part of combat encounter design. Moreover, the less filler content (i.e., the less often the same units are used in the same way), the less time will be spent on defining enemy statistics.

Irrelevant. He's making his own game. who cares what Jrpgs or what Wrpgs normally do?

Craig seems unwilling to answer this point, other than to say that he acknowledges that the only example he cites doesn't count, but maybe you can explain what I'm missing here. Because all I see is a way to homogenize enemies by replacing custom-built content with a scaling formula, where the scaling formula is likely to take as long to define as the custom data would take to enter

No, I agree with that. What Craig is proposing, unless he can clarify, is basically making small tweaks here and there to simply create a stronger enemy from a previous one. BUT, he is not necessarily saying anything about creating a horde of similar enemies. He's simply saying he wants the flexibility to scale ALL enemy types to whatever he desires. What if he makes a spider enemy? He might put it at the beginning of the game. He might put it in the middle. He might put it at the end. But if he uses it once, then who cares if the algorithm creates very similar enemies across a level spectrum. The algorithm gives him the flexibility to quickly drop in that enemy as he wants.

But an RPG with tons of fights against identical enemy archetypes will draw howls of protest even on the Codex, and certainly among the masses.

You're making unfair assumptions here I think. Again, I think Craig should clarify. But to me he's just geeking out on a little bit of game dev tech he thought up and wrote an article about. I don't think he's saying it'll be goblin lvl 1 and then goblin lvl 2 with red eyebrows and then goblin level 3 with a green hat.

 

[MRY]

what percentage of RPG development time do you think is spent defining enemy statistics?

Assuming Craig is still making Tactical/Strategy RPGs, I'd say this can be quite a bit. See below.

But the article was written as a guide to RPG developers, not as a description of his own methodology, cited non-tactical RPGs overwhelmingly, and mentions non-tactical features (e.g., stealth). Tactical RPGs, in my experience, really don't suffer from the flaws he describes in the article, either.

How would it "save a ton of time"?

I have a lvl 1 goblin. Let's say I'm making 10 encounters. I want to experiment in my encounter with goblins because let's say they have some unique aspect. But my encounters are spread out over several levels in the game. Without a procedural system to create a level 4 or 6 or 8 or 9 goblin, I'm creating these enemies individually. Let's say I want to experiment with each encounter. at a minimum that's 10 times. Let's say there's an optimal range of each encounter. Say one encounter is around level 4-7. That means maybe my goblin enemies are level 4. Or maybe they work best at level 5. Or 6. Or 7.

I'm not sure it actually matters as much as you think. The real question is whether enemy data is stored in a way that makes it easy to mass-manipulate for balancing adjustments. One way for that to be true is to have it all be formulaic, but another way is to have some kind of dependency, where you create a "base" goblin than then have the specific instances of the goblin be modifiers on top of that. Another way is to make it so that you can easily change groups of data by type.

But the other thing is, the real challenge in balancing tactical RPG combat isn't filling in the cells in Excel, it's testing and retesting and honing the content. I strongly suspect that it will be easier to strike the right balance if you can individually tweak units rather than having to change a formula that changes every goblin in every battle.

Irrelevant. He's making his own game. who cares what Jrpgs or what Wrpgs normally do?

Err, the people who are reading his article to see how to save time in making their RPGs?

[E]ven the most basic, old-school, stripped-down RPG can easily take years upon years to make. A developer with limited resources at her disposal, staring down the barrel of a half-decade development cycle, might be inclined to wonder: “Is there some way that I can design my game’s systems to alleviate the burden of producing all that content?” Well, I have good news! I’m here to tell you that you can: by designing your mechanics for scalability.

 

[Mustawd]

But the article was written as a guide to RPG developers, not as a description of his own methodology, cited non-tactical RPGs overwhelmingly, and mentions non-tactical features (e.g., stealth). Tactical RPGs, in my experience, really don't suffer from the flaws he describes in the article, either.

Fair enough

I'm not sure it actually matters as much as you think. The real question is whether enemy data is stored in a way that makes it easy to mass-manipulate for balancing adjustments. One way for that to be true is to have it all be formulaic, but another way is to have some kind of dependency, where you create a "base" goblin than then have the specific instances of the goblin be modifiers on top of that. Another way is to make it so that you can easily change groups of data by type.

Hell, if you really think about it, the whole thing can probably be simulated using excel and some fancy scripting, so you do have a point there. But in your examples is that really that much different than what Craig is suggesting?

Err, the people who are reading his article to see how to save time in making their RPGs?

True.

 

[Lhynn]

Without a procedural system to create a level 4 or 6 or 8 or 9 goblin, I'm creating these enemies individually. Let's say I want to experiment with each encounter. at a minimum that's 10 times. Let's say there's an optimal range of each encounter. Say one encounter is around level 4-7. That means maybe my goblin enemies are level 4. Or maybe they work best at level 5. Or 6. Or 7.

 

[Mustawd]

what?

 

[J1M]

Remaking the same content over and over in order to keep a certain enemy type or item type relevant throughout the game is a drain on resources that could otherwise be put into more varied and interesting content.

if you need to do this then your system already failed from the start.

Yes. That's the exact point I make in the article: if your mechanics force you to keep creating new enemies that are functionally identical to the old ones, that's bad design.

But here's the thing: "make something completely new" isn't mutually exclusive with scalability--in fact, it benefits from it. Even if you completely replace old enemies with totally new and different ones, that's still a waste of resources. Why? Here's a super simple example to explain why: suppose your player, at level 1, is fighting goblins, a melee unit. But at level 4, goblins can't even damage the player due to your game's exponential stat growth and subtractive attack damage mechanics. Since you can't just spawn goblins in a more powerful form, you introduce a new enemy--but instead of making a goblin reskin, you create something that's totally different: skeleton archers! But wait: now you can only design encounters for your level 4 player with skeleton archers, instead of having the flexibility of mixing skeleton archers and goblins in different combinations. So all you've done is limited the design space for possible encounters.

As a developer, you're still going to want to introduce new enemies throughout the game, and not just dump them all out at once; but as you introduce them, the design space just gets bigger and bigger, and you can do all kinds of crazy, creative encounters. (This is one of the reasons I was able to create such varied and unique battles in Telepath Tactics.) By the same token, if you don't design for scalability, the more the game goes on, the more totally different enemy types you'll have discarded for no good reason.

I can't tell if you have a comprehension problem or a stubbornness problem.

You have parroted the accepted truth that having players face the same creatures for an extended duration is bad design. Yet you continue to assert that an RPG must have levels AND the same creatures must pose a challenge to the player at different levels AND that the player will enjoy fighting level 210 goblins. These things are mutually exclusive.

Furthermore, I do not find it plausible that your leveling algorithm will produce interesting challenges. This is based on the absence of a single game proving otherwise.

The pinnacle of numeric balancing towards JRPG enjoyment is easily Penny Arcade Adventures: On The Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness 3 played on hard difficulty, but even in that game other combat systems do the heavy lifting.

 

[MRY]

But in your examples is that really that much different than what Craig is suggesting?

At this point, I have very low confidence that I can say "what Craig is suggesting" because every time I (or anyone else) tries, Craig says that his article has been misread.

But what I am saying is the opposite of what I understand Craig to be suggesting. I read Craig's point to be something like this:

(1) RPGs require a lot of content.
(2) A lot of the content is enemies and items.
(3) A big part of creating enemies and items is generating their stats.
(4) Rather than having many nominally unique enemies and items, each of which requiring its own manually tweaked statistics, it would be more efficient to have a small number of enemies and items that can be spawned at different levels with their statistics derived from their levels according to a formula.

What I am saying is:

(1) True. (But it's really bad advice to tell people that an RPG needs 40 hours of content.)
(2) Not really.
(3) Not really.
(4) Usually not.

Since the real argument is at #4: What I am saying is that deriving enemy statistics from a formula will almost always yield inferior content because you can't tweak them as carefully to get the balance right. Thus, a Goblin Chief whose stats I manually enter will never be worse (in terms of balance and engagement), and will sometimes be better, than a Level 5 Goblin that is simply a formulaically scaled up from a Level 1 Goblin. The thing is, assuming a finite number of encounters with predefined enemies and maps (as in a jSRPG or a game like AOD), it is feasible to manually define every unit, and that approach is certain to work better. To achieve the proper balance with formulas will require a ludicrous amount of testing because tweaking the formula to make Stage 3 work right will break Stage 2 unless the changes apply only to the Goblins in Stage 2, in which case you're not talking about a formula, anyway.

Craig's system might be better at a particular thing: extremely grindy and large RPGs. If we want to have a huge variety of enemies, you might use his system for "inbetweening" -- for example, you could manually define a Goblin Level 1 and a Goblin Chief (i.e., Goblin Level 5), but you would use a formula to split the difference and create a Goblins Level 2, 3, and 4. This would work if you had a very large number of battles, too many to manually define, and thus wanted to be able to create a greater variety of enemy types that existed between interesting key frames (Goblin vs. Goblin Chief).

The thing is, this kind of quasi-procedural content generation is generally antithetical to the kind of RPGs that interest me most, which are RPGs without a lot of filler content and with well-balanced encounters. But basically roguelikes do stuff like this and it works pretty well. But I thought the other area in which Craig and I basically agreed heavily is that the best kind of RPG would be one that felt a little more like, say, Metroid or Zelda in terms of itemization and powerups than like Final Fantasy, and in those circumstances you're not going to benefit much from the formulaic approach.

That's why the article is so weird to me.

Basically what I think Craig is saying -- and in fact what Telepath Tactics does -- is to focus on a relatively smaller amount of high-value, carefully crafted content instead of a relatively larger amount of low-value, generic content. But the method he's advising is worth very little for the former kind of game, and might even be counterproductive (when developing non-brittle, universal formulas is more laborious than just manually tweaking the data so a particular part works). That's why the article is so weird to me in the context of Craig's posts here and his work.

The other thing, as I noted, that is wrong about the article is that it fails to realize that going from a Short Sword to a Long Sword is way more satisfying than going from a Lv. 1 Sword to a Lv. 2 Sword -- it seems to totally disregard the pathos aspect of RPGs in favor of a purely logical approach.