Seeding method to encourage failure...

[Kaucukovnik]

I liked the way combat in Jagged Alliance works. You can try and reload after you missed your enemy in a crucial moment. But you have to do things different. If you just tried to repeat that shot again and again, you would always miss.
Also it seems to me that the more different course of actions you take, the better chance of different result you have.

With this system you cannot win a hopeless battle just reloading 'till you get the desired results. And even if you manage to, you still spend more time in game than watching the loading screen. Good enough, in my opinion.


And that save/reload thing. What about allowing the player save only in certain locations (villages/towns, the character's home, whatever)? You could still return, save and then go try that action you insist you must succeed, but nobody could be arsed to reload after every minor failure.

 

[crufty]

fwiw if i recall, bards tale I had a save only in inn type thing

and it sucked

you troupe out, all of a sudden mom calls 'dinner time' then you have to troupe back and save. die on the way? so sad too bad sucka

until you get the recall spell.

been years since i played but i think thats about how it went.

skill up on failure is a good mechanism too.

 

[DraQ]

Didn't read the thread.

Then GTFO you faggot.


What is it with codexians wearing their dumbfuckery like some fucking badge of honour?

"I didn't read the thread but hurr durr derp derp" - go to /gd/, clown.

RPG Design Discussion Codex Workshop is for those who can and do read.

 

[soggie]

I'm still leaning heavily towards pre-seeding most elements in the game. Other than needing to write more rules to accommodate obvious abuses, the indirect benefits are enormous.

By removing the "random" element in the game (by the way of pre-seeding, the entire world's fate is pre-determined the moment you begin a game), it's pretty easy to log all actions and play it back from the beginning. Damned useful tool for spotting bugs and even easier for users to report bugs.

 

[J1M]

Didn't read the thread.

Then GTFO you faggot.


What is it with codexians wearing their dumbfuckery like some fucking badge of honour?

"I didn't read the thread but hurr durr derp derp" - go to /gd/, clown.

RPG Design Discussion Codex Workshop is for those who can and do read.

Don't let your butthurt from other threads carry over.

You appear to have ignored the body of my post, why be a hypocrite when it's so easy not to?

I skimmed the thread, wasn't interested in discussing random number generators, and put that disclaimer there so nobody would think I was responding to a post of theirs.

 

[GTMatt]

To the OP: The "reward for failing / learning from mistakes" idea is great. The one thing to consider is how to balance it re: players' perceptions of value.

If I fail disarming a trap and lose everything in a chest as it explodes, my response is dictated largely by value. If I'm sacrificing some gold/ammo/potions, I'll probably take the loss and appreciate the skill xp gained.

But if something important is in the chest, I'm totally going to reload/savescum/try again later.

Personally, I'm not a fan of games that punish players for reloading or try to stop them from doing things like that. But then again, there's sometimes comfort in knowing that there's no use loading 100 times to get what I want.

In the end, it comes down to the theme/goals of your game, and you'll
know that better than anyone else. Are you making a tough game that only the smartest, most hardcore players can win, or do you want to accomodate less hardcore gamers?

 

[soggie]

To the OP: The "reward for failing / learning from mistakes" idea is great. The one thing to consider is how to balance it re: players' perceptions of value.

If I fail disarming a trap and lose everything in a chest as it explodes, my response is dictated largely by value. If I'm sacrificing some gold/ammo/potions, I'll probably take the loss and appreciate the skill xp gained.

But if something important is in the chest, I'm totally going to reload/savescum/try again later.

Personally, I'm not a fan of games that punish players for reloading or try to stop them from doing things like that. But then again, there's sometimes comfort in knowing that there's no use loading 100 times to get what I want.

In the end, it comes down to the theme/goals of your game, and you'll
know that better than anyone else. Are you making a tough game that only the smartest, most hardcore players can win, or do you want to accomodate less hardcore gamers?

Instead of using the lockpick case, let's take a more relevant case like hacking a computer. If you want to prevent the player repeatedly hacking until successful, you make the computer lock itself up after a few tries. But what happens when the player reloads the game? He gets theoretically infinite chances of attempts.

The idea of penalizing the player upon failure (computer locking up) is a common mechanism for RPGs, and in a way it breeds the idea of mandatory success into the player's psyche, giving them the impression that failure is not an option. Either you reload until you manage to hack the computer and open the door into the armory, or you leave the juicy equipment locked up in it behind until you are of a higher level.

What if when the computer locks up, it also dumps out a stream of data dump at the same time due to faulty programming? And from there, your player discovers information revealed by the programmer of the computer that contains serious implications in the RPG world, like exposing the dark secrets of a thought-to-be-goody-two-shoes?

This way, if the player succeeds, he gets rewarded. If he doesn't, he gets rewarded as well. Failure no longer means the end of a plot line, but rather it becomes PART of the plot.

I was hoping that by using pre-seeding it'll be possible to hammer the impression into the player that stubbornly reloading a save game is a waste of time when you can get a completely different experience by failing.

This also encourages the player to try out different character builds, where having a different build doesn't mean you can't perform some task but instead translates to a whole new gaming experience.

Yes, scripting wise it'll be crazy, and in some places where failure cannot be an option pre-seeding should be limited. However, if a game is designed AROUND this basic concept, I think it'll yield a vastly superior gaming experience than say... typical non-linear RPGs in a way.

 

[DraQ]

You appear to have ignored the body of my post, why be a hypocrite when it's so easy not to?

The body you've been posting in several other threads, apparently delighted by your own, self-perceived brilliance?

It seems somewhat workable, if not entirely logical, though there is no reason to not scale the success/failure gains of the system I proposed long time ago in any way necessary, including giving more weight to failure XP, so my system would appear to be more flexible, while avoiding susceptibility to fail-spam against insurmountable odds that is an integral weakness of yours - failing to perform a brian surgery only teaches you something if you already have an idea how to perform it.

Now shoo.

 

[soggie]

It seems somewhat workable, if not entirely logical, though there is no reason to not scale the success/failure gains of the system I proposed long time ago in any way necessary, including giving more weight to failure XP, so my system would appear to be more flexible, while avoiding susceptibility to fail-spam against insurmountable odds that is an integral weakness of yours - failing to perform a brian surgery only teaches you something if you already have an idea how to perform it.

I think for me I would shy away from giving xp on failure. It doesn't fit into my character system (the xp) anyway. I'm leaning more towards handling failure through plot mechanics instead of character mechanics.

Your method has merits though, and I would expect it to really shine in a use-based system if you can scale it well. It should look like a bell curve - hard to learn, easy to familiarize, and then hard to master.

Using your own example, failing a brain surgery if you know nothing of medicine is not going to teach you anything. With the bell curve, it fits - your skill level is low, and thus advancement is slow. However, being competent in medicine (somewhere before the apex of the bell curve) is going to teach you tons, because you should be able to understand WHY you failed. Getting to the other end however, you get less XP because you've probably done a few brain surgeries before and when it fails it's probably some KNOWN mistake. What can you learn other than facepalming yourself and telling yourself to do better and be more careful the next time?

A bell curve of XP reward for failure AND success would be interesting in this sense. The reason why I don't think it fits my character system is because firstly, I'm not using a use-based system (mine's a point-buy system per level up, like VtM), and secondly giving general xp for a specific task just doesn't make sense.

 

[Norfleet]

Failed skillchecks tend to induce players to simply reload for several reasons:
1. Failing a skillcheck tends to simply break the game experience: Instead of experiencing a part of the game, you end up locked out of it.
2. Failing a skillcheck tends to be something the player had absolutely no ability to influence: It's completely SFL, and there is nothing the player could have done better. SFL-based gameplay pretty much invites reloads.
3. Failing is frequently absolute: You either succeed absolutely, or you fail absolutely.

Solutions:
1. Failures should result in interesting gameplay. If the player is always successful, he may miss out on interesting game elements.
2. Potentially critical events should not come down to a single random number roll that the player has zero influence on. Either the result should be nonrandom, based on some action the player takes, or the player should be able to significantly alter the possibility of success by doing the correct things or manually taking control of the process (yes, I know, the Codex hates player-skill over character-skills). Consider the aforementioned Civ battles: If you win the battle, your unit destroys the other unit. Otherwise, vice versa. Of course, you have no ability to affect this outcome, and so when a completely ridiculous outcome occurs, you are simply irritated by it. Which brings us to...
3. Success or failure should often be by degree.

Consider this example: In games with, say, tactical combats, the player may lose the battle, but still be satisfied with the level of failure he achieved because he: A. Controlled the outcome, and B. Influenced the degree of failure. Perhaps he fought a valiant last stand and destroyed many of the attackers, or perhaps he was able to preserve his units in an orderly withdrawal: Although the player was defeated, he is satisfied and continues to play with this outcome. Failure resulted in interesting gameplay: He achieved some kind of result, and game is not simply locked out. The failure was influenced by the player's actions, and was not simply a single piece of completely unexplained SFL. And finally, even in failure, he managed to accomplish some goal which partially mitigates the degree of failure.

In short, if you create a pushbutton failure scenario, the player is going to reload until it works. Failure and success should not be so straightforward and out of the player's control.

 

[crufty]

agreed.

failure should be two fold:

non-fatal failure in fatal cases aka captain kirk failure: failure isn't failure, its non action (captain kirk always lands his first punch when attacking his alien guards. when he fails his to hit roll, its not that he missed, he just didn't punch at that moment in time.)

non-fatal failure in non-fatal cases - botched attempt *click* the trap goes off. here the player is punished for the failure but rewarded, based on intelligence / lore / perception rolls, with skill improvement. this works better in a classless / leveless system. I like the idea of skill improvement being a spring, when the spring is tightly compressed it's harder and harder to improve. improvement on failure is a natural spring mechanism--the better the player gets, the less likely they will fail. certainly using a skill successfully might offer a chance for skill increase, perhaps a smaller chance. or, maybe it's not related to pass/fail...but rather skill test difficulty. if you succeed or fail, doesn't matter, what matters is how hard the test was...hmm...


i have begun to like the idea of pre-seeded rolls, but at an object level. for a given object id (hash) events X,Y,Z have rolls A,B,C for characters N,M,O. rolls are reseeded on level up (or skill increase). So a character N will ALWAYS succeed or fail when trying to disarm a specific trap on a chest regardless of what point they are in the rng queue, saving / reloading etc.

design wise, encounter level save scumming is ok for me. i have fought a battle, barely won, and reloaded, to see if i could do better. sometimes, i barely win, and think--i was lucky to make it. lets plow on. but, failing to disarm a trap...loading, retrying---and succeeding...that is a bit more meta-gaming then i like.

that was what i saw as a design flaw in nwn...traps were more of a waiting game...use stone of recall, get thief, go back, he says 'I got it!' , click *disarm success*, stone of recall, get fighter, etc etc.

 

[soggie]

Well said crufty and Norfleet. I wonder if any other indie developers have already made this failure mechanic a cornerstone of their design... It'll be interesting to hear their views on the complexity of scripting all these in.

 

[J1M]

You appear to have ignored the body of my post, why be a hypocrite when it's so easy not to?

The body you've been posting in several other threads, apparently delighted by your own, self-perceived brilliance?

It seems somewhat workable, if not entirely logical, though there is no reason to not scale the success/failure gains of the system I proposed long time ago in any way necessary, including giving more weight to failure XP, so my system would appear to be more flexible, while avoiding susceptibility to fail-spam against insurmountable odds that is an integral weakness of yours - failing to perform a brian surgery only teaches you something if you already have an idea how to perform it.

Now shoo.

As I mentioned in my post, spamming failure for skill ups would not be possible. You either succeed or get better at it because you tried something you didn't already know how to do.

Your proposal has the odd consequence of allowing a player to get better at something they haven't been practicing by allocating the failure-based XP to a different skill. Unless your are talking about XP that can only be used in a certain skill/category, in which case I don't see any practical differentiation between our two suggestions.