Idea for an RPG mechanic - Fun

Lumpy · Apr 28, 2006

Many RPGs allow the player to participate in fun activities, like sex or playing cards, but performing those abilities is meaningless, since fun doesn't affect anything.
Here's a possible way to implement it: fun would affect XP gain. During character creation, the player would have a certain amount of points to distribute among several activities, such as socializing, card playing, fighting, reading, having sex, etc. The amount of points in each activity would determine how much fun the character gets from that activity. He could also leave a part, or all of the points undistributed.
The amount of undistributed points determine how much XP the character gets without having fun. The more fun a character has, the more XP he gains. Although this is kind of Sims-ish, it could probably be implemented nicely in an RPG.

FaranBrygo · Apr 28, 2006

Lumpy said:
like sex

You lost me there. Sex in a RPG only seems to be there for the final touch on a poorly written romance or for the OMG WHORES crowd.

sheek · Apr 28, 2006

[Server is fucked up today]

Lumpy · Apr 28, 2006

FaranBrygo said:
Lumpy said:

like sex

Click to expand...

You lost me there. Sex in a RPG only seems to be there for the final touch on a poorly written romance or for the OMG WHORES crowd.

Whatever. There was a lot of sex in Fallout 2, and most of it had no effect.

Kraszu · Apr 28, 2006

Playing card can give you money and connections, sex can give connections and change relations that can be important. Winning something important can give xp, and connections can also lead to getting xp by doing quest.

sheek · Apr 28, 2006

Triple post

Kraszu · Apr 28, 2006

Double post.

kingcomrade · Apr 28, 2006

Lumpy said:
There was too much sex in Fallout 2

kingcomrade said:
Too much sex. Seriously. Let's compile a list of people you can sleep with. Feel free to add ones that I miss.
*= when you're female
**=when you're both male and female

Guy with key in Klamath*
Women in the spa.
Hooker in the Den.
Guy in bar in the Den.*
Slavemaster in the Den.*
Miria in Modoc.**
Davin in Modoc.**
The lady whose husband you rescue in Vault City.
The S&M mutant in Broken Hills (if you lose the arm wrestling match).**
The retarded wannabe Texan prostitute in the bar in Redding.
Cat's Claw mistresses in New Reno.**
The mafia boss's wife in New Reno.**
The mafia boss's daughter in New Reno.
You can keep a cock hard at the porn studio in New Reno.**
You can star in a porn movie in New Reno.**
Those are all that I can remember off the top of my head.

Fallout 2 Is Boring

What did all of this accomplish? Keeping a cock hard gets you poisoned and like 4 bucks, I suppose

As far as I can remember, you can sleep with two people in the first Fallout. The lady at the Red Caravan, who gives you free stuff so it's not just a -fade to black omg you had sex- and the prostitute in Junktown.

sheek · Apr 28, 2006

FaranBrygo said:
Lumpy said:

like sex

Click to expand...

You lost me there. Sex in a RPG only seems to be there for the final touch on a poorly written romance or for the OMG WHORES crowd.

The only RPG I've ever played with 'sex' is Fallout. Oh, and an old game called "Rome: AD 92" but that's probably an adventure game.

Lumpy · Apr 28, 2006

kingcomrade said:
Lumpy said:

There was too much sex in Fallout 2

Click to expand...

kingcomrade said:

Too much sex. Seriously. Let's compile a list of people you can sleep with. Feel free to add ones that I miss.
*= when you're female
**=when you're both male and female

Guy with key in Klamath*
Women in the spa.
Hooker in the Den.
Guy in bar in the Den.*
Slavemaster in the Den.*
Miria in Modoc.**
Davin in Modoc.**
The lady whose husband you rescue in Vault City.
The S&M mutant in Broken Hills (if you lose the arm wrestling match).**
The retarded wannabe Texan prostitute in the bar in Redding.
Cat's Claw mistresses in New Reno.**
The mafia boss's wife in New Reno.**
The mafia boss's daughter in New Reno.
You can keep a cock hard at the porn studio in New Reno.**
You can star in a porn movie in New Reno.**
Those are all that I can remember off the top of my head.

Click to expand...

Fallout 2 Is Boring

What did all of this accomplish? Keeping a cock hard gets you poisoned and like 4 bucks, I suppose

As far as I can remember, you can sleep with two people in the first Fallout. The lady at the Red Caravan, who gives you free stuff so it's not just a -fade to black omg you had sex- and the prostitute in Junktown.

Click to expand...

I was thinking of that post of yours when I was typing that. But I don't know why you think it was "too much" sex

kingcomrade · Apr 28, 2006

It didn't accomplish anything. It was just there to be hardk0r3 and on t3h 3dg3. Ha my screen faded to black and then returned!

Lumpy · Apr 28, 2006

kingcomrade said:
It didn't accomplish anything. It was just there to be hardk0r3 and on t3h 3dg3. Ha my screen faded to black and then returned!

That's my point. People played sex addicted characters, but they didn't have any advantage. With a fun system, someone could put lots of points into sex, thus actually being rewarded for having sex, and punished for not doing it.

WouldBeCreator · Apr 28, 2006

My Puritanical side agrees with KC, but I actually think that in at least one circumstance, it was a pretty cool game element: the mafia boss in New Reno. I mean, it really did add something to the game (something ridiculous, sure), that you could not just double-cross him, but bang his wife *and* his daughter before doing so. I mean, wow. Also, the scene with the daughter is hilarious from a hardcore pandering standpoint (drugs *and* sex at once?) that it made me chuckle.

kingcomrade · Apr 28, 2006

Actually yeah that part was pretty good, especially sleeping with either of them got you into a restricted part of the building. Unfortunately, you would always be attacked if you tried to leave unless you had the briefcase quest active in some way.

The chick/guy in the redneck village added "something" because you got a new (useless) follower, who I always sold into slavery. The entire thing was pretty stupid, but a little funny. Just another example of Fallout 2 going batshit out-of-character.

bryce777 · Apr 28, 2006

You should have to have sex or kill a child every three days or go insane - just like real life.

Zomg · Apr 28, 2006

Here's a related topic about a basically sensory experience for the character that can't translate to the player: comfort. I have developed this bugaboo when playing medieval RPGs where I sometimes get caught up in thinking about how miserable it would be to wear full body armor for as long as my poor avatar has to. They sleep in full plate, yet real medieval plate would be both intolerable to wear for long lengths of time as well as overtly martial in social situations. Wearing your full plate to shop for bread is like driving a tank to the supermarket.

Obviously this is supposed to be an abstraction, but it has effects on possible narratives. For example, it's not possible to stage an assassination attempt on the main character while he's unprepared (at least without it seeming grossly unfair). So it isn't a "realism good!" issue, but rather something that interposes itself in relating to the the character and also shuts off possible activities.

I was thinking a solution could be to have a few performance-affecting "needs" bars, a la The Sims, including "comfort". Preferably there would be lots of automation and abstraction (ex: There should be no need to mechanically eat) - dealing with the needs should involve only enough bookkeeping and animation-watching as is absolutely necessary. It might also give useful context to some of the cliches of RPG uselessness like housing, clothing, the experience of travel, quality of mundane goods, etc.

bryce777 · Apr 28, 2006

That's why their stats are constantly climbing.

Twinfalls · Apr 28, 2006

Let's put aside sex, as its mere mention has predictably derailed things already.

I gather the basic idea here is that leisure or creative pursuits are encouraged with some kind of XP reward. 'Fun' is such a dumb and now detestable word that it should be avoided. A reward for pursuing hobbies like making music, painting, etc to reflect the benefit to the players 'human spirit' could be a nice touch. The spectre of mini-games is raised though.

What I'd like to see more are rewards for 'good deeds' evolving beyond 'you help this guy, here's 10 XP'. What's 'good' after all? Is it just helping people in charitable sorts of one-off tasks, or does the good in society come out of something more complex and structured? It'd be nice if an RPG rewarded the player for community endeavour, ie stuff where you aren't just the lone hero asked to help out, but you join in with something that could very well take place with you. So there's a town effort to build something, or plant trees, blah blah. Or you could occasionally do things like teaching or somesuch.

Making art could be a part of this, as art transcends the individual, humanity being a shared experience and art being one of the defining human traits and all that.

WouldBeCreator · Apr 28, 2006

Twinfalls said:
'Fun' is such a dumb and now detestable word that it should be avoided.

Huh. You and I couldn't be more opposed on this point. Maybe a lot of designers talk fun, but I'm still not convinced that it's at the forefront of most of their minds while designing. As I've said elsewhere, fun should be, if not the only issue in game design, at least the foremost.

What struck me about this thread was that I assumed at first it was trolling. I mean, stuff like playing cards or whatnot in RPGs has always been gimmicky and lame. The thought of heightening a gimmicky and lame aspect of the game in the name of "fun" *for the character* at the potential expense of *fun for the player* is anathema to me.

Twinfalls · Apr 28, 2006

WouldBeCreator said:
Twinfalls said:

'Fun' is such a dumb and now detestable word that it should be avoided.

Click to expand...

Huh. You and I couldn't be more opposed on this point. Maybe a lot of designers talk fun, but I'm still not convinced that it's at the forefront of most of their minds while designing. As I've said elsewhere, fun should be, if not the only issue in game design, at least the foremost.

It's the word, not the notion of actually enjoying oneself. 'Fun' has now come to be the premier euphemism for dumbing down. 'Accessible' and 'Intuitive' are the other prime offenders. Complementing these, 'Hardcore' is now the convenient label for dismissing anything remotely intelligent, posessing any depth, and/or involving some actual design work.

At any rate, giving something a 'fun' factor in an RPG is just really dumb sounding. It's also rather meaningless. What does 'fun' mean? It means the activity is enjoyable. But why? 'Fun' tells us nothing about anything. Yet it's so often used as a descriptive end in itself.

'Why is it enjoyable'?

'Well, it's FUN!'

Stupid fucking dumbassed Amazon now has two ratings for every user-review for games: "Fun" and "Overall"

dumbasses.

WouldBeCreator · Apr 28, 2006

I guess I've often found that the features getting cut did impair fun. I don't have the same Oblivion angst the rest of you guys seem to be suffering, though.

WouldBeCreator · Apr 28, 2006

Just seems to me that Oblivion is the main talking point in the "fun = stupid" stump speech. I guess Bioware goes in there, too, and Civ4.

But I guess I lack your sophistication, anyway, since I can't possibly imagine enjoying a game about which this sentence could be said: "Making art could be a part of this, as art transcends the individual, humanity being a shared experience and art being one of the defining human traits and all that."

(I loathe crafting, never having played MMOs and finding it horrendous in KOTOR II, and this pretentious "artistic" crafting just sounds unbearable.)

To each his own, I guess.

Twinfalls · Apr 28, 2006

They're just ideas, my friend - you are assuming too much are concrete proposals. You strike me as rather closed-minded and too ready to dismiss mere ideas.

WouldBeCreator · Apr 28, 2006

This from the person who just snapped I was a fucknut.

Which post is now gone. Oh well. Either I'm crazy or you deleted the post to which I replied.

--EDIT--

As for my hostility to ideas, well, sure. There's too much tolerance for using half-baked concepts to attack pre-existing systems. Despite my nostalgia, I think games have been getting pretty consistently better, although certain genres (like adventure games) have withered, and others (like RPGs) are definitely losing aspects that made them distinct. So when someone wants to argue that RPGs should stop focusing so much on fighting and adventuring and should let you get EXP for playing cards and having sex, I'm inclined to think that there's a reason why 30 years of RPG making (from Dungeon to Dragon Age) have gone the way they have.

This hostility largely stems from having an cousin who always has ideas to "reinvent" games that are always bad ideas and usually consist of turning games into 3D cartoons.

bryce777 · Apr 28, 2006

I always thought of him as more of a fuckwit hehe.

Idea for an RPG mechanic - Fun

Arcane

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Kingcomrade

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Scholar

Kingcomrade

Erudite

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Scholar

Scholar

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Scholar

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