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Gone Gonzo  Posts: 1815 Joined: 4 Nov 2007     | |
Paperboy Posts: 17 Joined: 9 Jun 2008   | I've been playing D&D for years now (and I mean years, I'm 25 and started in 5th or 6th grade - do the math), generally as my group's default DM, and I will agree that PnP games don't always give you more choices. In fact, alot of the PnP games I play on the non-DM side are pretty damn linear. It comes down to who you've got writing the narrative and how well they can run the game on the fly. Also there is the social aspect of being in front of another person, which you don't really need with video games, even multiplayer, and there are rules to learn. When I taught my little sister to play D&D 2nd edition it took her months of reading the rulebooks and playing with my friends and I to get it down. And really, it depends on what you want. I love D&D because I enjoy manipulating the rules and writing, but sometimes I like to fire up Counterstrike or whatever and blast away. Video games offer more instant gratification and you don't need to use your imagination or hammer out the equation(s) to see if your bullet hits the intended target. You can't get that in a PnP game unless your brain can process that math in a millionth of a second and your eyes can project the visuals on a wall like that museum guy in Ghostbusters 2. And that would just be weird. |
Muckraker Posts: 299 Joined: 2 Jan 2008    | both videogames and pnprpg's offer the same thing: a simulation. rules. how things work. the difference however, as you're pointing at it, is where the 'content creation' comes from. In the case of videogames, it has to be build by the designers, which takes up a lot of resources. In the case of pnprpgs, all that hard work is done by your own imagination, which makes them very work-light and manageable
first of all, like others said, there is more to games than story. actually the ludologic movement that directly opposes story in games (as it brings linearity and less interaction). next to that, what is the value of more choice? yes, in a game that wants to simulate the 'real world', like an pnprpg, everything should be as realistic as possible. but a lot of meaningful play is generated from a few interesting choices, and less can be more.
Very true, linear storyheavy videogames fall short on the interactive part. However, this isn't neccessarily a bad thing. I for one enjoy them. I'd rather have a strong narrative than more freedom/options/interactivity. |
Press Junketeer  Posts: 428 Joined: 10 Sep 2007    |
Oh, right, so it's just that you made a preposterous comparison. You may as well be touting the fact that a professional game of DnD offers a more involved playing experience than reading The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. What's stopping people from replacing dice-rolls and stats with actual skill, and playing out a PnPRPG-style castle-defense scenario in a big Halo LAN session? |
Gone Gonzo  Posts: 1759 Joined: 7 Feb 2008  |
This is a great truism and a good clarifier of the fact that while PnP Roleplaying is, at its best, much better than videogames... good GM's who run those magic games are hard to come by. Thankfully, my group is lucky, we have 3 possibly 4 very good GM's out of a group of 7. |
Beat Writer  Posts: 162 Joined: 22 Nov 2007 |
I I recall correctly (It's been a while), you can do all these things in Fallout. Still, your point stands that there's a finite set of pre-made possibilities. A game that handles this very well was Deus Ex. On my first playthrough, I thought it was a well-made shooter with some stat-based stuff. On my second playthrough I decided to try and bend or break the story, and I was amazed at how far it would bend. You can choose to save, kill or ignore almost all main characters at any time you want (even though it's pretty difficult at times), and the story manages to bend itself around it and come out altered but still looking good. |
Gone Gonzo Posts: 1815 Joined: 4 Nov 2007 |
I think my comparison is more like this: songs and poems- both are written pieces of, well, poetry. However, poems, free from having to follow musical melodies, can (emphasis: can) be deeper on a literary level, while songs find their depth in their music and its links with the lyrics. A similar analogy comes from comparing comic books and novels. |
Beat Writer  Posts: 216 Joined: 5 Feb 2007 |
Are you intending to imply, though, Saskwach, that videogames are inferior? Technically, in a perfect world, your statement is correct. Ignoring reality and player/developer skill for a moment. An RPG can be "deeper" in terms of realism, but it can't be as visceral. That's how I percieve it. Advantages and disadvantages making each worthy of my time. |
Pulitzer Laureate Posts: 783 Joined: 27 Mar 2008  |
The true beauty of pen-and-paper roleplaying is in the flexibility of the narrative. It's improvised, collaborative storytelling, which means you do it differently from sit-down-and-write-something storytelling, but there are a lot of similarities. You can frame any scene -- start the game with Conan old and wise and then cut right back to him treading thrones with his sandalled feet. As you play, you can add details to a scene as it develops, like a novelist does (compare to a video game, where all the background details are evident from the get-go). You've even got some ability to go back and change some elements of the fiction if you need to. Traditional RPGs don't give you the tools to do this stuff. Groups basically have to make them up themselves. That's not necessarily a problem -- formal rules and less-formal rules both get the same thing done in the end. But what annoys me a lot is that the structure that a typical RPG book does give you often gets in the way of fully exploiting the medium, too. And I think the cardinal problem there is that most RPGs are trying too hard to simulate events ("rolling dice to see if you got a headshot," above), which is not the medium's strong suit. For example... (Here I'm going to meander a bit. This isn't comprehensive, nor are all points of equal importance. These are criticisms that apply to a variety of games. D&D, old and new Vampire, GURPS, and pretty much anything that looks like them. If a game says things like "make an attack roll," it's definitely one of these.) Most RPGs model a character in terms of competencies. Nowadays that pretty much means a mix of broad-base attributes and more narrow skills, and then a bunch of usually-even-more-narrow special abilities (like magic or magic vampire powers). The character sheet is a big list of everything that a character can do, in other words. One problem with this is that anytime you have a character do something not on that sheet she'll tend to suck at it -- making it that much harder to move a character out of her established niche. In most cases, you can't really discover things about a character as you go. (This method of representing characters is one of the reasons that magic pretty much invariably sucks and doesn't feel at all "magical" in most pen-and-paper RPGs and fantasy-themed video game.) Most RPGs incorporate advancement -- raising various stats as you play. Now, I certainly think that the basic idea of having the stuff on the sheet change over time is a great thing. But the standard way to do it? Bleh! It's pretty much always set up as escalating power: as you level / earn skill points / whatever, you pump up your numbers or add new abilities to your already-elaborate sheet. Two problems here. For starters, most stories aren't about peasants turning into kick-ass dragonslayers. Because of the "either it's on the sheet or you suck at it" problem mentioned above and the complexity of all the stats you've got floating around, it's pretty hard to do anything but a linear-time story -- that shuts down a lot of storytelling possibilities, too. Focusing on what a character can do really screws up stories, too. An action-movie gunslinger always has the ability to shoot a guy in the face from a hundred feet away. You probably see him doing it constantly to the mooks. But we don't want him to just shoot the bad guy in the face halfway through the film, do we? And it's not that he can't -- later on, at the end, he'll be able to do that same thing just fine (probably while bleeding profusely and trying to recover from three concussions, too)! It's all about the right dramatic moment. (Meanwhile, the bad guy probably likewise can shoot a guy between the eyes at a hundred feet away, but, for 99% of all action movies out there, he's never going to be able to do that to the hero.) The standard RPG structure doesn't have that. Game rules try to compensate with stuff like hit points -- that kind of approach boils down to "shooting the bad guy in the face only counts if you've shot him in the face five previous times," which just delays the problem a bit and also makes shooting the bad guy in the face less cool. GMs have also tried to compensate for this fundamental deficiency in a lot of ways, like "fudging" (GM cheating on dice -- some groups consider it okay, some groups consider it a power trip or a violation of trust), only ever introducing bad guys at the very very end, immediately replacing the bad guy with another bad guy, or making death itself trivial. That's a lot of work to fix one very simple problem with the rules: a story isn't a simulation, so a simulation is not going to magically create a good story. Now, not all this stuff is a bad idea universally. Linear-time narrative, characters represented in terms of a narrow set of things they know how to do, and rules that only really handle one kind of scene well are all fine if all you want is to play some tactical skirmishes in a dungeon. But using this kind of structure for almost every game around? Really not good for the medium. Limits aren't bad, either. Like an improv game, an effective roleplaying session needs well-placed constraints to make things more interesting. All the limitations I mention above aren't well-placed, however. They're just there because they've been blindly inherited from the games' predecessors. Imagine every mainstream video game using a first-person shooter interface, regardless of what kind of gameplay the developers wanted to create and what kind of story the game was exploring. That's pretty much what pen-and-paper RPGs are like right now. Most importantly of all, it's a lot of work to actually turn a clunky simulation into a good story -- at some point you really should look around and say "How is the clunky simulation actually helping, anyway?" Maybe it does help, at times, but most RPG writers and most RPG players don't really seem to seriously ask that question to begin with, and that's really hurting the medium. -- Alex |
Gone Gonzo Posts: 1815 Joined: 4 Nov 2007 |
I never meant to imply that videogames were worse in any objective sense, just as I wouldn't imply music is worse than poetry, or novels better than comics, because their form can use words better. There are many things videogames do better than RPGs, but where RPGs beat videogames hands down is in interactivity. I love videogames, but I want to be honest about what they fundamentally can't do. |
Paperboy Posts: 32 Joined: 21 Dec 2007 | Why has no one mentioned Neverwinter Nights? Didn't it allow DMs to run games? Create encounters? Dungeons? Dragons? All that? I seem to recall that DMs could script out NPC encounters as well. And referring back to the doorknob polishing: /e polishes a doorknob (a command found in a variety of graphic and text based games.) Oh yeah- And what about text-based games? MU*s? Are the not videogames? |
Gone Gonzo Posts: 1759 Joined: 7 Feb 2008 | Never Winter Nights was an attempt at bridging the gap and... it's okay. But let me use my best PnP Game as an example. The PC's were special agents on board an airship tracking a scientist with a special artifact on the run from Evil Spies of an opposing nation. There was also a gang of theives chasing the scientist. By the end of the mission, the PC's had effectively lost (as I intended), the thieves had stolen the artifact and kidnapped the scientist, and the Airship had been overrun by Air-Pirates. But due to a few strange and risky choices, most notably one of the heroes leaping out of the airship onto an adjacent bandit skiff that had been set adrift and spotting the slowly escaping leader of the thieves, the entire game turned into a victory, with a super awesome mid-air brawl between the leaping hero and the leader of the thieves. It was suprising, tense and cinematic. You just don't get non-scripted moments like this in videogames. |
Muckraker Posts: 299 Joined: 2 Jan 2008 |
So how should it be done? :p Some say narrative and interaction (games) are like oil and water, you just can't mix m. You say the simulation stands in the way of "exploiting the medium". It's the other way around too (as your "you should be able to, but for story's sake let's not allow you to make that headshot" proves). What I see is that you're actually not happy with [i]exploiting the medium games/interactive.[i] Limited options (competencies sheet), Possibility (hero shot in the intro scene) How would you combine oil & water? ^^;
Did you already explain somewhere why you believe that 'more choice -> real interactivity'? >.> |
Pulitzer Laureate Posts: 783 Joined: 27 Mar 2008 |
Let me summarize what you just said: some play goals are mutually incompatible. That's absolutely correct. That's why I started off my posts with examples of different play goals and how video games and pen-and-paper games fulfill each one (or fail to, depending on how you look at it, I guess). For each one, there's a different answer to questions like "What can video games do for me?", "What can pen-and-paper games do for me?", and "Which medium is likely to be better for satisfying my particular preferences?" This whole side topic about "story" is really about how it's often painted as the strong point of pen-and-paper gaming (and it is, if you look at the medium as a whole), but the mechanics of most RPGs actually strongly privilege some other play goal instead. ... Which I think is a bleedin' shame because the improvisational creation of shared story is where the pen-and-paper RPG medium has the most potential. Whereas a lot of other stuff you can do with a pen-and-paper roleplaying game can honestly be done better by something else, like a board or video game. -- Alex |
Copy Clerk  Posts: 103 Joined: 9 Apr 2008 | I certainly do prefer a good ol' Paper and pen RPG to any modern video game to date. |
Paperboy  Posts: 31 Joined: 14 May 2008   | i like pnprpg because if you dont always do medevil stuff and go for the ones you make your self (ex. gurps) and you get enough wirdos in the story proces it can be the wildest trip ever. i was playing with some friends where i was chasing after a naked ranbow coloured chik who escaped from a lab and had like a sirens voice that made you love her. game disiners cant come up with everything so pnp ones give you the freedom to find stories others have made for this sort of thing and go off that. you have the imagination of the world because of the internet and can do anything. plus they dont cost 60$ for 4 hours of play maby 60$ for a bunch of dice but they will last forever pretty much. |
Muckraker Posts: 299 Joined: 2 Jan 2008 |
I still don't get it ^^; I mean I still don't know how it should be done, how you want it. So the mechanics privilege something else than the stroy, the biggest potyential of pnprpgs. So what to do about that? play without rules at all (know some forum-rpgs do that) or change certain mechanics (you mentioned the way of leveling skills up stood in the way of discovery of character for example?) right now I don't see the problem. the mechanics of an pnprpg give me the rules of gameplay. The shared story comes fully from our own creativity, which is made possible/meaningful by the gameplay (without the gameplay mechanics, the creation of shared story would be less interesting) so I see no problem |
Paperboy  Posts: 14 Joined: 9 Aug 2007 | I really think the big difference is AI. Right now the AI in most games is not really that good and it is usually pretty easy to figure out how to out think the AI. Until they make a computer AI that is comparable to a good DM (or GM depending upon game) a P&P experience will always be superior. |
Beat Writer Posts: 216 Joined: 5 Feb 2007 |
The problem, as Alex is describing it, isn't necessarily one that you will agree with. Especially since you don't see it after he explained it. What he's been trying to say is that the rules of the game don't help with the creation of story - in fact, they often hinder it. That's Alex's primary point, I believe. Which is sort of tricky, because it's not valid for every player. If you just want a good way to play a game with your mates 'round, and you get to do some roleplaying, and stomp some monsters by rolling dice, then PnPRPG's are perfect for your needs. But what Alex is trying to say is that that isn't his idea of what PnPRPG's should be doing - they should be doing more than that. They should be allowing him to, with the help of the guys he has with him, create a story that's far superior to that of any Videogame to date. But they don't do that right now. Instead, we have systems that are very similar to desktop RPG's. In Alex's opinion, this is. I think. Alex, if I've misinterpreted, please, correct me, but that's what I see your point as being. That it's up to the player(s) to make the story happen, and the game doesn't actually help with that. The problem that I see with what Alex is saying is that the solution is... either absurdly complex, absurdly simple and I can't see it, or it may not exist. Rules that govern the way you create a story are an interesting concept. I have absolutely no idea what an example of such rules might be. I just can't think of rules to govern that. There are obviously conventions and clichés that you can use when you make a story, but they're not necessarily limitations. The thing is that in a good story, the protagonist(s) doesn't die horribly when he missrolls a dice, or is a hair off with his accuracy. Which is why Videogames have a respawn feature. PnPRPG's don't do that so much, from what I've played, which, admittedly, isn't a lot. But the idea of the PnPRPG, aside from story, in my opinion, is a way to have some good roleplaying going, which doesn't work in videogames. Yet. And now I'm going to break into an in-depth example of how Mass Effect tried to do this, and didn't. It's long. So I've hidden it for you if you don't care. And that's why Mass Effect didn't do enough. It was a step in the right direction, but not as far as I wanted it to be. And while it's lauded as a shining example of how far videogames have come, for me, it's also a reminder of how pale the medium is when compared with something more freeform. So unless anyone has some better ideas on how to make freeform videogames, or has ideas on how to come up with a ruleset for storywriting, that pretty much sums up my thoughts on this matter. |
Pulitzer Laureate Posts: 783 Joined: 27 Mar 2008 |
You just answered your own question: "without the gameplay mechanics, the creation of shared story would be less interesting." Good story-supporting mechanics can take your game to places it wouldn't otherwise have reached. Sure, there's no reason I can't play "freeform" and then create a bunch of informal rules that do all the important stuff myself, but that's just as much work as writing my own game. If I pick up one of the big-name games and try to build a good framework on top of that, either formally or informally, that's actually even more work because I'm fighting the assumptions embedded in the system -- this is actually what a lot of "good GMs" are doing with all their GM techniques, in effect, and it's a big waste of their time. Hmm, okay, in my next post I'll try to address the OP's comments about choices in conventional pen-and-paper roleplaying games... -- Alex |
Paperboy Posts: 17 Joined: 9 Jun 2008 | Rules and story go hand-in-hand, as far as I'm concerned. For example, in Ico, if you could just kill everything you saw like in most games, the storyline would be very different, but since the rules generally forbid you from doing so, the story takes a certains shape. The same holds true in PnP games. D&D is really rules and combat heavy, so the storylines for it are fast-paced and actiony. Players always have the option to kill whatever is in front of them and can do it with generally assured success (provided the DM is running a balanced game of course.) Something like Vampire the Masquerade is really story-heavy. The rules are more abstract and fighting isn't micromanaged the way it is in D&D, so Vampire games tend to be more on the storytelling/making choices side. But in both cases, the rules are very clear, and work within the context of the game instead of managing it from the outside. Video games manage from the outside. There is a set of infallable, unbreakable (barring hacks/mods/etc.) rules that determine where you can go and what you can do. I mean, how many times have you run into invisible walls, even though there is tons of scenery beyond it? EDIT: Very cool article: http://web.mit.edu/cms/People/henry3/games&narrative.html |
Muckraker Posts: 299 Joined: 2 Jan 2008 |
And I'm saying that's kind of a neccessary evil, so there's no point complaining about it (unless you have a better idea, which I'm trying to find out by asking)
yes, right now I'm thinking the latter :p
and this is why. because in a game, that person can die. That's the interactivity, the possibility, the choice, of gaming. That's in direct opposition with the narrative 'rule' that it 'shouldn't happen'
I haven't answered my question, "how would you do it". Like give me examples of story-supporting mechanics opposed to story-suppressing mechanics in pnprpgs :p |
You've seen a hole in my reasoning that I was too stubborn to correct: calculations can be used for certain types of interaction that RPGs are incapable of. Importantly though, PCs are still not capable of any real type of interactivity; the type in which any plausible solution can and will be allowed by the game. You can shoot any pixel on the enemy's body but it's rare that you can reason with his brain pixels, and it's impossible that you can use your own reasoning- not pre-determined choices- to do so. Interactivity and choice in videogames are mirages. They're very pretty ones, though.
When I've been comparing RPGs with "videogames" it has been in the sense of different mediums, not genres. You're right that FPSes can't be directly compared with RPGs in their kind of interactivity but I never said that they should be. I defined the type of interactivity- arguable true interactivity- I meant: the interactivity that allows you to choose any solution that seems plausible.