Time Limits

I have never really minded dying in a stupid way in ADOM, because unlike in normal save-scumming RPGs like Fallout or Arcanum it's not frustrating because, death is just the end of my character and I never actually expect to win.

I wouldn't mind it by itself, but having it happen right after I spent 3 hours gathering herbs, blink dog corpses, and looking for some obscenely rare enemy for thundarr, just to do it all again... gets old fast. I've probably spent more time gathering herbs than actually playing ADOM.

Too bored to read through the whole thread.
Anyway:
As always it is a matter of implementation.
Examples:
1. Fallout: You easily have enough time to visit every location and thoroughly explore them. You do not have enough time to explore 15%, become all ADD, travel back and forth, doing 1 quest here, 2 quests there, etc. I'm perfectly fine with that, although mainquest timelimit that leads to game over sucks.
2. MotB: You can easily travel back and forth without your hunger giving you too much trouble. You can rest and even regain spirit points by doing that. What is essentially penalized is taking your time while exploring the different areas. And unless you notice that the spiritmeter is stopped in dialogue, you'll even be pressured to rush through that. Pretty much the worst kind of time-limit implementation I could think of.

So: Timelimits yes, where they make sense and if the gameplay is suitable (fast overland travel vs. slow area exploration) and if they don't lead to game over, mission failed, quest aborted but simply different outcomes that are less favorable for the player.
EG: Close a demon gate to save a city or save an abducted party-member.
1. Through creative abuse of spells, equipment, etc the player manages both in time. Outcome: Yay, the companion is sure to be loyal in the future and a significant boost to the party's prowess. The city is saved, the player gets lotsa gold, exp and a princess.
2. City saved, but companion not. Outcome: Companion feels betrayed and turns to the dark side. Becoming quite a threat to the player in the future.
3. Companion saved but city not. Outcome: Demons roam the area that would have been a safe hub. The area is too dangerous for the party and the player has less assistence for the mainquest.
4. Neither saved: You suck. Companion leads the hordes of hell rampaging through your back garden, manages to conquer the world through necromancy and won't share.

@Spectre: Didn't play Panzer General but the system should be the same as in Fantasy General. The reason it sucks is because it makes a game for bad (or at least not very good) players more difficult and easier for very good players. While it should make the game at least a little easier for weaker players and more challenging for better players. It should come up with reinforcements, help from allies and help in form of eqipment for players who only manage minor victories and extra content (bonus missions/longer campaigns) for players who manage major victories.
And before you argue that it'd be the same in my proposed RPG I'd point out that I wouldn't propose building a whole RPG around time-limits. Simply putting the player in positions where he has prioritize objectives once in a while/manage his resources.

Maybe the 150 days to find waterchip didn't allow you to explore everywhere but then again - water merchants would get you 100 days more to alleviate that problem. And after that, you had all the time in the world to get to Master. I spent at least three months guarding caravans to get enough caps to be able to afford the BoS-surgeries on my second playthrough.

So yes, logical & sensible timelimits gets a thumb up.

Time limits are clearly a good idea. Immersion and all that.

However, they are not ideal for all game types. A game which focuses on "go anywhere do anything", and is more about player freedom and exploration than character based choice and consequence, should probably bypass them completely or heavily restrict their use. In such a game you need a good reason to take agency away from the player. The latter type of game could really benefit from a heavy, well thought out use of time limits, and should disregard them only after deep analysis.

As others have mentioned a time limit does not have to mean - you too slow, game/quest over! A time limit can simply mean that a certain task becomes progressively more difficult the longer you take (even possible for this to be limited to an extent - eg. After the player's taken an inordinate amount of time, news that the invasion, for instance, has been set-back due to weather, resources, etc could give the player extra time). That you need to complete a certain quest in a different way, or do a different quest entirely. Not to say that these soft limits are the only viable options, just examples of time limits I think 99% of players would accept.

Again, this kind of design, along with hard limits, seems perfectly natural for a C&C heavy game where you are not able to see all possible content in one playthrough or always make the perfect choice. Situations like - save the children or save the horses; you only have time for one! With different consequences down the track can add much to such a game - The opposite: no time limits of any kind, seems antithetical to the overarching design.


@NN:
Both options, time limts/no time limits, are valid design choices. Though I'd argue for certain types of games no time limits is far from ideal, and for others, the reverse is true. Of course, I am talking ideals. It may be impractical, in even the most C&C heavy game, to go too far down the time limit path. As doing it well, on a large scale, would take considerable effort.

Shying away from one simply because some (a majority a minority, have you decided on which yet?) do not like them in a particular form, is ass-covering bullshit. Though design by imaginary committee is a novel approach :D. Polls of this type mean very little. This is an issue that needs comprehensive discussion before you can come close to accurately gauging opinion. Different people have different ideas of what a time limit is, and most poll responses would simply be a knee jerk reaction to particular experiences. Few would have thought about it in any depth, that's for the game designer to do. To have a worthwhile discussion, you'd need to put forth examples of how you'd implement it, and get feedback on that.

DamnedRegistrations said:

I wouldn't mind it by itself, but having it happen right after I spent 3 hours gathering herbs, blink dog corpses, and looking for some obscenely rare enemy for thundarr, just to do it all again... gets old fast. I've probably spent more time gathering herbs than actually playing ADOM.

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Well, I have never spent hours farming - I think the most time I've spent gathering herbs was 5 minutes. I suspect that such random deaths could be implemented specifically to prevent players from breaking the game by grinding until they have a completely invincible character.
One thing that really annoys me is that corpses are randomly generated, though. Especially, when my character is starving.

What really killed ADOM for me was finishing it for the first time. I don't have a motivation to play it as much as before finishing it.

Nethack kind of did the same thing for me. Now whenever I play a roguelike I feel like just winning isn't enough, I need to absolutely stomp all over the endgame stuff. Nethack is a LOT harder when you never genocide those liches or polypile stuff.

And the random deaths don't prevent you from grinding a character, they promote it. The only safe place in ADOM is a pacified herb room. No enemies spawn and you have an infinite supply of food. I just wish it didn't take an hour to get enough of the crap to get a couple pre crown gifts. (Which will usually be crap anyways due to a bug in artifact generation.) But even having to dick around with it enough to get your morgia and mareilion roots is pretty stupid. And that's really practically a requirement for any character that isn't going to drop dead in 1 round from a ghost anyways.

I prefer to gain divine favour by mass sacrifices of living beings, it's much more fun.

That's only practical for a lawful character though. Chaotics are likely to get offered up themselves the second they stand on an altar no matter what they try to do to prevent it, (Until they're champions I guess) and neutral characters can't sacrifice half the crap in the dungeon.

There's also the matter of getting an altar somewhere suitabke for offering live victims to begin with. 90% of the ones I find are jammed in a corner at the other end of the map from the stairs.

I usually get an altar in a suitable place or I use a pick axe or wand of digging. I think I got sacrificed about two times when playing a chaotic character during all these years.
Living sacrifice is good for chaotics because almost every living thing can be sacrificed.

The limit of Fallout 1 is irksome, one reason why I prefer 2 to 1. Even if you can hire water caravan, that fact lead to quicker Master's assault or something. The time limit of Fallout 2 is right.

And lacking time to completly explore maps, do all the quests, is the most ridiculous concepts. I always try to do those in my games. Quests that are closed due to a choice you made, or NPCs you killed/saved, or class limited, is one thing. Quests are closed due to time... Bah! Humbugs

Time in a quest is okay. Like, you go there, done that, return in 30 days, okay. It become a factor of game ,, and increase the pace. Time to receive the quest is not okay, like, you have 30 days to go there and receive the quest. NOt okay.

laclongquan said:

Time to receive the quest is not okay, like, you have 30 days to go there and receive the quest. NOt okay.

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Hmm...
It could be pretty interesting.

Both quest getting solved by other people or quest not getting solved and someone suffering its consequences.
For example returning to Shady Sands and discovering that Tandy got used up by raiders.

I strongly dislike time limits, however sometimes you just can't omit them without the game turning into oblivion.

To make them least aggravating, several guidelines should be followed:

1. Avoid prolonged time limits encompassing entire quest lines and such if possible. They are not fun, not much help and have great fuck-up potential.

2. Apart from things like running away from an especially deadly hazard, limits that result in game-over don't add to the gameplay - add some interesting consequences, be creative and don't allow player to meet all the deadlines, etc.

3. The less unique the quest is, the more stringent time limit is desirable - generated misc quests should have fucking harsh ones, as the consequences of failure can be bad, but unspecific, while unique quests would do best using other devices - including mutual and consequence based exclusivity.

4. Time to receive quest can be all good and dandy if it's balanced out by something (win some, lose some, as Madras would say ).

5. Introducing other kinds of time dependent mechanics, like dwindling supplies makes for a good alternative if you want some unspecific, time based limitations.

RPGs are not arcades, they are not played with beating the game in mind, they should be made possibly interesting and as long as available plot devices, including time limits, are used with this in mind, they can be used to improve them.

. This is an issue that needs comprehensive discussion before you can come close to accurately gauging opinion. Different people have different ideas of what a time limit is, and most poll responses would simply be a knee jerk reaction to particular experiences. Few would have thought about it in any depth, that's for the game designer to do. To have a worthwhile discussion, you'd need to put forth examples of how you'd implement it, and get feedback on that.

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Fair enough.

Have a look here, I've posted up my thoughts on ITS :

http://www.irontowerstudio.com/forum/index.php/topic,1205.msg39584.html#msg39584

I'd like to see what people will say here as well as ITS.

• Ok, before I start. This is a thread to bounce ideas around in. IT IS NOT A PROMISE OF FEATURES. None of this is currently part of the design of SoW.
  
  (And I put it here instead of in RPG design because, well, it could be for SoW. And my sub-forum is dead at the moment, get a little life flowing in the old girl.)
  
  Currently, the way SoW works is via an abstraction of 'time'. Quests are marked short-term or long-term.
  
  Long term quests have no time limits, things progress as you do the quest and actively make choices.
  
  Short-term quests you can fail if you leave the Region you're currently in. If you think of the world map, Regions are areas of interest, which are further broken down into zones. Korrinport is a Region, the docks district is a Zone. Travel between Zones within a region is a short term deal, travel between Regions takes days/weeks/months. So when someone says "meet me with the money or little Timmy dies", if you go to a different Region and return little Timmy is dead, but inter-zone travel within a Region is fine.
  
  So that's an abstraction. You can sleep within a zone, time changes but quests don't progress. Not realistic, I know, but that's why it's an abstraction.
  
  Now, this thread is to talk about a time-centric design, and ideas for features based around the idea of time passing, and most importantly TIME AS A RESOURCE.
  
  A lot of people I've talked to have shied away from the idea of time as a resource in RPGs. It sucks to feel rushed, games are entertainment, I want to explore at my own pace. Etc etc. However, everyone here has played a strategy game, yes? Whether a traditional RTS, a 4-X or something like X-COM, these games all include the idea of time as a resource.
  
  And I can think of one RPG example (that I've played), Space Rangers 2. In SR2, the galaxy altered over time. The robot empire guys attacked and took control of planets, the defenders defended or drove them back, etc etc. Your progression as a player was influenced by time, you made money through trade, responded to special events.
  
  However, it is worth noting that SR2 has RPG features, but it isn't a strong narrative game. Neither is X-COM. Most of the games where time is a resource, the storyline is a sort of meta-narrative the player makes up along the way. "And then I researched new weapon X, and attacked their base, but then my best guy was injured and so I had to use some new guy" etc etc. There is backstory, but strong narrative and dialogue that incorporates time based changes isn't something I remember seing before. How successfully you can integrate the two is a question.
  
  Anyway! Let's talk ideas. The basic principle is simple. Quests in SoW are modelled as state machines. "Events" are generated by the system (for example when an NPC dies) and all active(listening) quests receive those events. Within the quest state, it determines which events it is watching for and then shifts the quest state machine to another state, as appropriate. Quests also have their own variables, such as counters, to keep track of data. So you can count how many of creature type X the player has killed, or whatever (yes I know that is a boring MMO-like example, it's to illustrate a point).
  
  To implement time-based quests, all that would be required would be for me to send a "DayPassed" event to all active quests. Then, internally, the quest would be written so that it has a countdown counter which, when it reaches 0, moves states of the quest in some way.
  
  So, simple example : Timmy is down a well, save him hero! Day counter set to 7. Each day it ticks, after 7 days Timmy is dead.
  
  Since NPCs change dialogue based on quest states, you can easily code it so Timmy's mother goes from asking "have you found Timmy?" to wailing and crying because she is sure he is dead by now.
  
  There is other, more complex things the system can do. It is possible to change the map that is loaded when entering a Zone, for example. Lets say you hear of a marauders gaining strength in an area. You go to a village, they want help. If you deal with the marauders within a month, all is well. If a month passes and you haven't dealt with them, then the village is a burnt husk filled with corpses.
  
  These two examples are fairly simple and I already do that kind of thing, but they tend not to be based on time, they are more based on direct player choices. The marauders won't burn down the village of their own initiative, the player needs to make choices in a quest line. However, I could add in the Timeline idea and make it that either a choice in the questline OR leaving the situation for too long results in the village being slaughtered.
  
  The thing with that type of design is that some people don't like the time limits. They might have been just about to do the quest on day 33, only to find themselves too late, and feel cheated, especially if they didn't know there was a time limit. Part of the way I'd alleviate that is to try design more gradual shifts, as opposed to sudden failure. And teach the player that time is meaningful in early quests, ie train them.
  
  But some people still might hate it, regardless.
  
  That being said, lets discuss ideas around the scenario where time is a factor. For starters, if time is a factor, it has to be a factor in most areas. If anything sits outside the time considerations, you run the risk of creating loopholes for certain activities. Time as a resource works only if the player needs to make trade-offs, choose what and how to spend their time on.
  
  I've got a few pages of simple ideas I jotted down while think about this. Feel free to comment or add your own. It should become immediately obvious why the main quest and most of the others would need to be time Dependant, to avoid circumventing features by simply sleeping a lot, for example.
  
  
  1. Healing over time
  
  Sorta like old school dnd, where you only healed a handful of hit points a day, less if you didn't spend the entire day in bed.
  Health points take time to heal. You can also acquire wounds (think like those in DA except, you know, meaningful) which are penalties your character needs to seek medical treatment for, and which take a duration to heal.
  
  There would be a heirarchy of healing rates based on where you sleep. Camping is worse than sleeping in a bed, sleeping in a (essentially a hospital) healers care is faster, being looked after by a magical healer is the fastest. A healing skill allows you to increase your daily healing rate.
  
  The idea here is not to force the player to spend 2 weeks in bed for every week played, you wouldn't be losing all your health every battle. But the player could have to make conscious decisions about when it is worth pushing on with a wound, when to go back to town to heal, whether it is worth paying money for expensive medical treatment in order to accelerate healing.
  
  2. Travel time
  
  Introduce different methods of travel with different associated time (and other) costs. Travelling on foot -> horseback -> Merchant caravan -> ship -> airship. Now you have to decide whether an expensive mode of travel is worth it in order to reduce time spent travelling. Additionally, those "other" costs. They can be the danger of travelling (random bandit encounters), requiring a certain amount of rations be bought (opportunity to introduce a hunting/scavenging skill for reducing needed rations) for the travel, a certain skill required to travel through snowy areas, etc. I can do some of those regardless of time, but the time factor adds a reason to not always take the safest method.
  
  3. Board and lodging
  
  In most RPGs, paying for a place to sleep at night is a trivial thing. What if it weren't? What if you had to pay for that room in the Inn, and it wasn't completely trivial? It adds a time pressure mechanic, you cannot just rest infinitely because eventually you will be kicked out. Combine that with the healing bonuses for different lodgings...Later on, there is the possibility of buying/biulding property, or getting a place to sleep as part of a faction benefit.
  
  4. Item crafting takes time
  
  I already like the idea of toning down magical item creation a bit (and purchasing magical items a whole lot), so it's less trivial and more of a big deal when you make some sweet magic sword, or what have you. Now, what if you add a time cost on top of that? It takes two weeks to forge that sweet sword which affects spirits that you need to use to deal with the spirit that is causing havoc, after you spent a few weeks travelling around and acquiring the materials to create it, and with the havok that the spirit is causing increasing over time.
  
  Additionally, the idea of buying better facilities/equipment to cut down the time it takes to create items, hiring assistants (who must be paid a wage).
  
  5. Placing bounties
  
  Ties in with the item creation. Imagine a guild. This guild finds things for people, rare things. For the right price. Now, you need to find a rare component for the creation of an item. But you have time dependent quests to do. So you place a bounty with the guild. Bring me X, and I will pay out Y gold. They aren't guaranteed to find you the item, but the more gold you place as bounty, the greater the odds of them acquiring it, and the sooner. Think of it as kinda like the auction house in an MMO.
  
  6. Reading a good book
  
  The idea of learning Knowledge over time. Your character has a slot for "currently reading", which you can place books on various topics on. You absorb a certain amount of the knowledge in the book per day, based on your INT. Spending time in libraries can do the same thing, but faster. Libraries being restricted, of course.
  
  7. Banking and investments
  
  Time is money, and money is time. But what if your time could generate you money? SoW already has banks, what if your banked money generated interest over time? And what if it was possible to invest in businesses, which in turn generated revenue? What if this tied in with quests? Sabotage competitors, artificially inflate prices, convince smaller businesses to sell to you...why, it's almost like merchant roleplaying! What if you could set up trading (for say a shipping fleet) via a simple interface? Fetch spices, sell locally, etc. What if each month chose a random good to be "in demand", and another to be over-supplied? What if questing could influence this? You leave the bandits to plague the trade routes, and the cost of imported spices goes up!
  
  (I quite enjoyed playing a merchant in Space Rangers 2, can you tell?)
  
  8. A growing menace
  
  (Some) Enemy ecologies grow over time. Think of it as logical level scaling. You don't deal with the bandits. So they raid caravans and now, 2 months later, they have better gear and more experience. You leave them longer. Their ranks swell. You leave them longer still, they hire a mage or two. Etc. This naturally makes challenges tougher over time, without the artificial feeling of Oblivion level scaling. Now imagine you have a town crier, and you hear about the bandits growing in strength over time, even when you haven't encountered them?
  
  
  9. Crime and Punishment
  
  Your character grows in notoriety in an area the more criminal actions they take. Increased notoriety increases the chance that guards recognise you and try to bring you in for your crimes, but also increases your Intimidate rating in that area. It could get to the point where you have to try travel through a city without being noticed (sewers, alleys) or leave the city for a while. Notoriety will drop slowly over time, the guards will forget about you. Which doesn't mean your crimes are forgotten so much as the average guard doesn't have your face fresh in his mind to chase you on sight. This idea would work nicely with a disguise skill which would allow you to circumvent being recognised by application of a disguise kit.
  
  Prison also becomes a factor. Being caught for lesser crimes would result in your doing some small period of time, being caught for something major could result in game over (you see a screen detailing how you spend the next 20 years rotting in a cell). But! Guild affiliations, rogue skill checks and potentially bribes could save your hide. (Those things are in anyway, regardless of time penalties.)
  
  10. Mysterious Artifacts
  
  Don't you love identifying items? Running back to town, paying some token fee, getting access to your magic item? Me neither. But it may be kinda neat if the rarest items you can find in the game are actually mysterious. If you actually had to take them to an expert in a field and leave it with them for a few weeks of study for them to decipher what the item is. Not just equipable items, but things like maps. Again, you can tie it to quests, so you can only have the famed Scholar Bobicus interpret your mysterious scroll if you can find him, he is off at some dig somewhere, or kidnapped! Woo.
  
  11. Look Ma, snow!
  
  Seasons. This is an obvious one. I don't think I would do anything radical like swap out all the models for snow covered ones, but it might be cool to change weather patterns occasionally. Could change the cost and availability of travel! We don't sail our ships in winter, no sir! Could tie some quests into the changing of seasons. You could also tie in festivals (like they do in MMOs).
  
  12. Gear repair
  
  Yeah, I know a lot of people hate this idea. But this is an ideas thread, after all. What if having a weapon break (are event) required leaving the weapon with a smith for a week? You'd probably need back-up gear.
  
  13. Slowing your opponent
  
  See Fallout, and hiring the water merchants. Quests and situations may shift over time, but you can take actions to slow them down. The marauder example. What if you donate money to the towns 'buy our guards better weapons' fund. It may slow down or even prevent the town from being wiped out.
  
  14. Resource Nodes
  
  What if you could claim resources? I'd say you'd need to have the infrastructure to back this up, either in the form of a faction backing or owning a business, but what if claiming a mine back from nasty creatures made it your property, and granted you income from it?
  
  15. Ritual Magic
  
  What if ritual magic, on top of being complicated and requiring rare components, took days to prepare and cast? What if the effects lasted for days or weeks? Perhaps you gain a special 'buff', or a servant you could call on while the duration lasts. Perhaps the ritual can only be cast on certain days, when the moon is in phase or during a certain season.
  
  16. Auction house
  
  Kinda like the bounties, but less player driven. Sort of a special merchant with a randomly chosen selection of special goods, changes over time.
  
  17. Stab you in your sleep
  
  That old chestnut, factions you piss off regularly send assassins after you.
  
  18. Shifts in the flows of Mana
  
  Just as the economy can fluctuate, so too could the cost and effects of certain types of magic.
  
  19. Diseased
  
  Imagine if diseases weren't short-term combat debuffs! What if they were threatening, long term issues? Would make them a bit scarier, yes? See the section on healing wounds.
  
  20. Random events
  
  You know how 4X games sometimes have random events? Imagine if an RPG had a random 'deck' of side quests and events, say 50. At the beginning of the game, 5 are drawn and scheduled to happen at a randomly selected time in the future. Now, you have some variation for replays. Similar to what they are doing with Diablo 3. Simple example of a generic 'event', a wave of pirate attacks halves the income from shipping trade, increases prices of goods and makes sea travel more expensive for a period. Tie it into a news system, such as town criers or a bulletin board.
  
  21. Job boards
  
  You know how those usually seem trivial and stupid? Well, maybe they'd work better if doing them actually cost a resource (time) and they changed over time themselves. Space Rangers 2 had some fun things like hunting criminals.
  
  
  Right, that's about it. Like I said, unless the game quests, especially the main quest, have time limits or at least get more difficult over time, these types of systems are just asking for abuse, especially the income generating ideas. Which means that you have to accept the idea that spending time in one direction shuts off an option in another. I'd also have to design very carefully to ensure the player doesn't get into a kind of dead-end, where quests needed to progress have been shut off due to dawdling, and there is no option for the player but to dick around, direction-less. Not having anywhere to go next is a worse sin than a game-over screen.
  
  
  Like I said at the start, this isn't a promise of anything, even if everyone said "awesome, do it!" I'd have to consider whether the time-to-implement would justify it. Then again, I agree with Blizzard, in that you shouldn't be afraid to iterate, to replace and change systems if you think of something better or more fun.
  
  Lately I've been wondering if I should take a few more risks with my game design. I think it was playing Dragon Age and Solium Infernum that did it. DA is a solid game, but everything felt so...been there, got the t-shirt, from the setting to the mechanics. SI impresses me with its interesting and original mechanics which really create that feeling of infernal beaurocracy and backstabbing.
  
  I'm trying to make SoW's story intriguing, and I've been making changes to the setting itself to try make it stand out a bit more from the usual medieval fantasy. I'm already doing some game mechanics that are a little different, but maybe I should try make it a little bolder, even if just to excite myself with the journey into unfamiliar territory (there is danger in that though, game development is a long process and it's easy to fall prey to the pursuit of new, shiny ideas). I know Pathologic pulled off a time-dependent storyline, and the idea always intrigued me, though I never got to play it, to my regret.

Feel free, but be aware (in case your motivation is something to do with that weird ITS vs Codex panties-in-a-bunch rivalry thing) that I'm not going to repeat a response to similar points raised on both forums.

It will be your responsibility to do the footwork, should you desire to.