Warriors: How Do Make Fun?

[Fenris 2.0]

Lawrence of Arabia ? I would peg him as Rogue.

 

[gromit]

Paladin discovering that his mentor has dark past and his superiors are chaos worshiping scum?

I wish I was a studio head. What if that temple in the rural village had been subverted decades ago, and those arcane rituals the paladins went through since actually unknowingly pledged their souls to a dark god?

That blew my mind until I realized it's the plot of umpteen jRPGs.

 

[waywardOne]

That blew my mind until I realized it's the plot of umpteen jRPGs.

Unfamiliar territory for me. None of them did it well, I take it.

 

[tuluse]

That blew my mind until I realized it's the plot of umpteen jRPGs.

Unfamiliar territory for me. None of them did it well, I take it.

I don't think this has ever been done well because at some point you realize bathing in the blood of virgins is evil, y'know?

 

[waywardOne]

I imagined it more like a good Catholic boy going to seminary and not being expertly literate in Latin, so the true meaning of the rituals is unknown to him.

 

[Johannes]

Well, it's a pretty bad idea to have meaningful, narrative differences between different character classes in the same story. It's just wasted work when people will only play one class.

Now if it's designing several stories and several gameplay paradigms, that's a lot of effort also that could be lessened if you didn't have to redesign the combat for each scenario.

Both ways don't really offer you as much choice as a free'er system, where you could freely make your character and have C&C of a more interesting kind than as response to char creation.

The same criticism can be leveled at different skills offering different paths through the game. In fact, that's basically why Bioware has gone the route they've gone--they made the judgement call that all the effort that goes into creating a game like Fallout where 3 different people can experience three very different games is just not worth it. Once you make that judgement call, it's just a question of whether you want to be on the Dragon Age 2 end of continuum, or the Modern Duty Railroad Ride end.

Perhaps I'm alone in this, but personally, knowing that there are different choices and legitimately different outcomes that affect the narrative makes me more excited to play the game. It creates a sense of open-ness and wonder, for me. Even if I never play through the game more than once, I prefer those types of games. If, on the other hand, I know none of my choices matter, I get bored really quickly. There's something to be said against too much freedom, too, but that's another can of worms.

But it's not the same thing at all. What matters is that I can choose between different options on the spot, not about knowing that I could have different option available here had I picked differently at character creation.

 

[DraQ]

Narratively fighters are not as defined by their profession as mages or stealthy types.
Well, duh?
I like RK47's ideas, but they are ones of many.

Mechanically, fighters are hard. Their purpose? Do damage, take damage.

That makes it a good reason to look into this damage a little closer - aimed attacks, various attack types, locational damage, positional advantage, etc.

Mages are flashy and lots of stuff relevant to making them interesting can be implemented at coarse scale, thieves depend on evironment a lot, but warriors depend on combat, so make the combat, in its most micro aspect of just bashing someone's head in, interesting.

dibens' idea is also worth consideration.

Paladin discovering that his mentor has dark past and his superiors are chaos worshiping scum?

I wish I was a studio head. What if that temple in the rural village had been subverted decades ago, and those arcane rituals the paladins went through since actually unknowingly pledged their souls to a dark god?

That blew my mind until I realized it's the plot of umpteen jRPGs.

And character background for Paladin in Diablo 2.

I don't think this has ever been done well because at some point you realize bathing in the blood of virgins is evil, y'know?

It can be subtler, you know. Rank and file doesn't have to be aware of all the shit going at the top. History teaches us they mostly don't.