Archived from groups: alt.games.neverwinter-nights (
More info?)
Hong Ooi wrote:
> I think the best CRPGs take advantage of the strengths of the medium,
> rather than trying to pretend they're direct simulations of p&p
> gaming. The examples that come to mind are (as stated above) Diablo
> and PST. The first one is all about the combat, which is much more
> streamlined and fast-flowing than you could likely achieve in p&p. The
> second is all about depth of story and characterisation. By cutting
> down on the number of branching plotlines that are possible, you can
> lavish more attention on those that remain. Whether or not this still
> constitutes "roleplaying" is something I'm not too fussed about.
Have you tried online, multiplayer NWN?
NWN has a lot of flaws and limitations, and it was massively re-worked
to allow for singleplayer gaming. But it was initially intended to allow
for online roleplaying sessions, and that's a very different experience
from singleplayer gaming.
I've always taken issue with singleplayer CRPGs being described as
"roleplaying" games, and with singleplayer adventures being rated by
reviewers for their "roleplaying" quality. Usually, that seems to mean
whether the writing was good, and whether there was a good story you
could imagine a character taking part in, and maybe whether the game
allowed for some different paths depending on the player's choices. But
none of that is the real exchange and interplay between human beings
that I consider necessary for real roleplaying.
The fact that NWN works, and is used, as a tool to support genuine
roleplaying makes it all the more important to make the distinction, in
my opinion.
Before I get too rapturous about online roleplaying, I should admit that
sometimes I've found it so disappointing and frustrating that I've gone
back to playing singleplayer modules to get away from it.
> I guess you could have a CRPG that puts more emphasis on puzzles.
> Games like this, however, already have their own box: they're called
> adventures. I've never been a huge fan of adventure games, although I
> have had fun with some of the LucasArts ones.
I've played a few adventure games, and some I've liked (Grim Fandango
for instance), but on the whole, I'm not a fan of that genre. Honestly,
given a choice between replaying Grim Fandango, and playing Diablo 2 yet
again, I'd probably go with Diablo 2.
I like a good puzzle, now and then, and part of my point was that having
some puzzles is entirely consistent with the roleplaying game genre. If
you're objecting to having lots and lots of stupid puzzles that don't
make any sense, then I'm with you on that, in general.
> I should specify that I don't have a problem with it in gameplay
> terms. Sitting on your butt for half a minute is far preferable to
> having to rest for 8 hours! It's more that I find it too far-fetched
> that someone would just sit down in the middle of a dungeon like this.
Which is why roleplaying purists online disallow it. I'd be fine with
that, too, as long as they've adjusted combat to be less frequent, or
otherwise given the spellcaster something interesting to do after she's
cast her two instances of Magic Missile for the day.
> I don't really want to second-guess the designers, but a bit more NPC
> interaction in Cania wouldn't have gone astray, if you wanted to break
> up the fights. The only place where you really get to talk to people
> is the starting town; they could have inserted a few more locations
> like the avariel village, the mind flayer outpost or Drearing's Deep
> in Chapter 2. There's still a semi-puzzle aspect to this (click on all
> conversation options until you've traversed the entire tree) but it
> would be much more in keeping with the (C)RPG genre.
We're quite entitled to second-guess the designers, since we're the ones
they're designing for, and we're entirely within our rights to say
whether they succeeded or not. On top of that, NWN comes with tools to
allow us to create our own modules, so it behooves us to think about
what's done well and what's done badly in other modules to better plan
for creating our own.
But yes, they could have put a bit more NPC interaction in Cania.
> Well, it comes down to what you want out of an epic game. I don't
> really have a problem with the idea of PCs attaining this level of
> power, comparable to Halaster et al. Mechanically speaking, I'm not a
> fan of the epic rules -- I reckon they're unbalanced, poorly thought
> out, and paper over the underlying scaling problems with the d20/D&D
> ruleset rather than fixing them -- but that's another issue really.
Tastes are another issue, really. The scaling issue was something I was
bringing up, though -- I think it is part of the issue. I'm not that
familiar with the underlying mechanics in NWN, and less familiar with
D20, so I'll leave it at that for now.
>>That wasn't really my point, though. I'd assumed it was self-evident,
>>really, that combat was a special case of a puzzle in a CRPG.
>
> Again, I think you're using nonstandard terminology here.
I know I'm using non-standard terminology. But I was trying to say,
also, that identifying combat as a form of puzzle wasn't really my
point. That was just an aside, and not really relevant to my point.
My real point was that, in an RPG, you've got roleplaying encounters,
you've got combat, and you've got puzzles. A CRPG strips out the
roleplaying encounters. You were complaining about too many puzzles, and
I'd said, since it's harder to balance combat for epic characters, they
added more puzzles. However, while I'll hold to my point about scripted
NPC encounters in a CRPG not really being true roleplaying, they are a
distinct and important enough element to make it a triad: combat,
puzzles, NPC encounters. You got me on that point.
> I do see what you mean about Half-Life though: it's more of a cerebral
> challenge than CS or Doom 2. I pine for the days of Doom 2, when you
> had a shotgun, there were squillions of demons to kill, and that was
> it....
Well, to continue with this aside...
Actually, I'd say Doom 2 was a series of puzzles in just the same sense
as Half-Life. I can see distinguishing that sort of thing from puzzles
because of the use of randomness in combat. But the main reason I'm
referring to them as puzzles is that they're static. You've got specific
monsters that behave in specific ways, that have specific strengths and
specific weaknesses, in specific locations. Your character has to get
from one side of the map to the other. Counterstrike, or a deathmatch,
isn't static -- the opposing sides move around, and adapt to each
other's behavior. You can plan how to get through a Half-Life or Doom 2
level in a way you can't plan how to win a Counterstrike match.
To go on a further tangent...
The very earliest published D&D modules I've seen, Keep on the
Borderlands for instance, tended to be maps, with map keys listing the
monsters, traps, and treasure present. Static puzzles, for the most
part, except for the "wandering monsters" tables.
Later published modules tended to include a fair amount of that static
content, but allowed for more dynamism. As I recall, Spires of Ravenloft
was very innovative in that regard, as it made a real point about how
Strahd, your nemesis, would move from place to place, attacking the
characters and withdrawing, and would pursue his nefarious scheme in the
fashion of a genius vampire wizard with a multitude of monsters and
beasts at his command. In short, the module emphasized that DMs should
treat Strahd as an entity with as much agency and initiative as the PCs.
I'm sure, of course, that many DMs who created their own content, rather
than relying on published modules, were well aware of the benefit of
approaching things dynamically rather than statically.
Curiously enough, the published adventures for Traveller, basically the
second oldest RPG, tended always to be light on the mapping and stronger
on the dynamism. By the MegaTraveller era, published modules tended to
emphasize laying out background details on the worlds and the NPCs the
PCs would encounter, and go very light on maps, combat abilities of
opponents, and other static details. The stuff I see coming out these
days for Traveller is pretty much just background and motivation of
NPCs, with no maps or statistics at all -- which is going rather too far
in that direction, since it leaves the GM to do almost all the grunt
work before a game session.
Getting back to NWN -- scripted modules, like the NWN OC, tend to be
most like those oldest published modules, I think. Dynamic content is
hard work for a DM, and harder for a programmer. However, in online
play, a DM can easily "possess" an NPC, and give it life and dynamism
beyond static scripting. In fact, this is a good reason to have multiple
DMs in an online session -- you can have one DM hovering over the PCs,
and another acting as their nemesis NPCs.
> Personally, I would say that the writing and storyline are part of the
> overall package when it comes to CRPGs. These are the things that made
> PST, for instance, the classic it was for many people: strip them out,
> and you wouldn't have much left. Ditto for a lot of console RPGs.
> Again, whether or not this still constitutes "roleplaying" is
> something that I don't worry too much about.
As I said above, it's something I do worry about, but that's another
discussion. You make a good point that scripted dialogue and NPC
interactions and so forth are an important element in their own right.
>>>Eh. If you mean gameplay-wise, the NWN OC is basically Diablo with
>>>d20s, and the drow city battle (as in huge numbers of monsters to
>>>fight) follows in that tradition. If you mean technology-wise, so it
>>>slows down a bit. It was still quite playable on my box at 1280x1024
>>>resolution with all the options switched on.
>>
>>What I usually find in the "super powerful PC working with a bunch of
>>wimps" scenario is that the trick is to get the wimps out of the way and
>>go out and destroy the opposing army, singlehandedly. That was the case
>>with the drow city battle. It's a mix of the gross inequality in
>>"character level," poor AI, and an interface that doesn't allow for
>>controlling an army effectively. The latter two are instances of what I
>>meant about NWN not being designed for this sort of scenario.
>
>
> See, you're assuming that the drow city fight is meant to be
> challenging. I don't assume this. Instead, I assume that it's _not_
> meant to be challenging (unless you have a relatively low-powered PC
> and/or botched the quests) and the fight is really there to showcase
> the PC's prowess. The real challenges come in the fights with small
> numbers of enemies, eg Grimgnaw's mob, the demilich, etc.
No, it's pretty clear that you're supposed to be leading an army into
battle. Leaving the troops behind and fighting the enemy yourself is a
sort of "exploit" -- I don't think it's what's intended model at all.
I've seen the same thing done in a lot of community modules, and in
other CRPGs. If it was just your PC proving how badass she is in front
of an audience, there wouldn't have been any need for the pretense of
ordering troops to take certain positions, and the wisp for you to
magically transmit further orders, and so forth.
It was better done, on a smaller scale, in Adam Miller's Dreamcatcher 4,
in which the squad of elves you led were more capable, and you had to
deal with problems of leading troops other than just combat -- morale,
scouting, supplies and so forth. Still, in combat, you were better off
leaving the soldiers behind and fighting yourself. I've seen similar
things done in other community modules and in other CRPGs, and it just
never works very well.
The reason I brought it up wasn't because I thought the drow city battle
was supposed to be challenging, and it wasn't. (I actually found it to
be pretty tough, actually.) The reason I brought it up was that I
thought it was an instance of an effort to bring into NWN a different
genre of game, one more suitable for a high-level character, but NWN
just doesn't have the interface features to support that genre -- the
elements the designers put in just weren't effective. They were kludgey.
> In the wuxia movie Hero (released just a coupla months ago), there is
> a scene where two uber-powered swordspersons plow through 3,000 of the
> king's palace guards on their way to confront him. The point of this
> scene is not to demonstrate the risk that the swordspersons took in
> attacking the palace: as far as can be seen, they had no problems at
> all dealing with the guards. The point is to demonstrate that their
> abilities and skills are of a completely different order of magnitude
> to ordinary people.
>
> It's much the same thing at the end of Chapter 2, and the fights with
> hordes of demons in Chapter 3. You're a super-powered character by
> this point in the game, and the fights give you a chance to show off.
> Without such opportunities to highlight the contrast between low and
> high levels, there wouldn't be much point to epic-level gaming.
I can see that, although, as I said, I *don't* think that was the point
of the drow city battle. It seems more to be the point of the entire
rest of the game.
Just as a last thought: at the moment, I'm playing through Dave Mason's
"A Harper's Tale" series. It's a really good one, and it's got *lots* of
combat and loot and craftable items and combat. And combat. If you
haven't played it, you should; from what you've said, I think it's very
much the style of play you prefer.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram