Note: I'm sorry i copied my reply from another post but i felt like needed to open a thread about it.

My purpose with this thread is to explain my view of the difference between evolving Game Mechanics without effecting what the game is or its genre.




The only reason games ever used dice-rolls was because there was no better way to simulate combat before.. I seriously wouldn't mind a combat system in the line of Mount and Blade but even better with actual sensation of slashing or crushing something.
I really enjoy a penalizing system for when someone gets hit, sure health bars are fine but what i really wanted is... if you hit the neck the dude is dead, if you hit his arm he becomes injured and slower.. instead of making it easy and just sticking armor values and health points to compensate the lack of skill to defend against attacks.

For example: A shield should not have the purpose of increasing armor values or health points.. Why do that? Just make the shield fully block any damage if it managed to deflect a enemy blow. You didn't block it? Well then your gonna suffer for it. Ofc the shield should have a durability which means if your constantly holding your shield eventually it will break due to constant blows or just simply making you tired.

I think something like this would open a entire new level to this game which is actual dedication to master the Technic of using a certain weapon and not just simply having a increased skill value at using a certain weapon and then just get a good weapon with stats. Make the player learn how to use the different weapon styles.

Whenever i hear someone saying ".... this shouldn't be in the game, its a RPG, if you want that go play something else!" I just wonder how many people actually understand the meaning of RPG.. Role Playing Game makes you take the Role of a Character in a certain fiction Story. Non of this has any implication on game Mechanics! I could very well consider a shooter a RPG since i can try to put myself in the shoes of the soldier and just simply playing the game immersing myself with character. It has nothing to do with the fact that i'm shooting a gun in 1st-person and killing stuff with one bullet! Then again.. Bethesda could just do a similar system to Vats in fallout for people who want the dice roll game and the iron-sight for people who want to actually try and hit the stuff themselfs.. I mean.. if you want to just dice roll your attacks you might as well have a system that doesent make you have to click the mouse a thousand times because the fact that your hitting doesn't determine if your actually hitting it or not.. this for me completely destroys immersion..

W'elp, pretty much said it all. :thumbsup:

Well, since youre quoting me..
I disagree with your cardinal point.
I have played RPG's all my life and a core element is that things are based on numbers, and decided by a randomising factor.
(The diceroll.) Long ago I played cardboard RPG's with my friends and when the pc came this concept was more or less
directly transferred to the computer.
Fundamentally different from a game like mortal combat where it was button mashing skills.

So its not that there was no other way to simulate that experience, it was that it was a transfer of an experience people already knew and liked to the computer.

The more core RPG elements are removed, the less of an RPG the game is, it is that simple.

I want combat to have hits and misses based on my skills and attributes, and randomised via a diceroll mechanism.
Because that is what I know and love and have played all my life.

I do not want combat to be based on button mashing skills, that is hack n slash mechanics.

Honestly, the kinds of games you're talking about should really be a different genre entirely, but got stuck with the "RPG" title, which, when anolyzed, could really fit almost any game.

I've always seen the TES games as basically ridiculously deep Hack-n-slash RPGs.

Randomization is a core element of simulations. Dice rolls as in 6 sided ones, are a primitive mechanic. Morrowind's formulas were hundred times more complex than dice rolls as we know but randomization wasn't presented correctly in Morrowind, presentation was too repetitive. Randomization is for making things feel random and each fight unique. Skills mattered the most in Morrowind.

So I agree with Merari and OP at the same time. Mechanics should evolve while we keep the RPG core and it can very well evolve into a perfect simulation or as close as it can be.

This is not specific to Skyrim but RPG games in general so I am moving it to Community Discussion.

Merari, I too played tabletop RPG for quite a while. And it is really bad idea to try to mindlessly copy such elements like "all things should be decided by rolls with modifiers" into cRPG, because it's a different media. As a hardcoe Game Master, I hated most cRPG based on D&D ruleset. Because D&D ruleset is semi-adequate for describing reality when you have only several dice, paper and pencils. And computer, with its' ridiculously faster-than-human ability to calculate simple mathematics, can and should describe reality in different ways.

Basically, tabletop RPG have one large advantage and one large disadvantage compared to computer RPG. Advantage: real people around you, truely dynamic world if your Game Master does know his drill. Disadvantage: rules are clunky and/or they are very vague and non-detailed. While you obviously can't simulate tRPG advantage in single player game (and no, you can't in MMO neither), you can, of course, simulate its' disadvantage.

Imagine this. New character. Just generated. First combat. I am controlling him and I order to attack this goblin with my sword. Suddenly, game stands on pause, and text appears on the screen: "This is your Game Master, the computer. Dice rolled behind the sofa, wait please..." (20 seconds pause) "There you go. Oh, you critically missed and can't attack for the next round, which is 6 seconds." Game unpauses, and beautifully drawn CGI goblin attacks my character. Then he stands, because he have only one attack per round. Et cetera.

Sure, I am exaggerating a bit, yeah, you can either animate false swings (like in Baldur's Gate) or make shorter combat rounds, but point is: WHY do you need to drag unnecessary clutter from other media?

Take books and cinema. In books there sometimes are long (and probably boring) descriptions of some place or character. They are literally written like this: "Tall man in military uniform came in. He was at his forties, and started to gain weight. His scabbard was empty, and his bearded face was enraged by something. He had only one shoe, and on his chest there were some medals, stained with maple sauce." In cinema - another media - they just cast some bearded guy, dress him up in necessary clothing and he just enters the room with camera. Nobody describes anything: another media - another rules.

Thorough emulation of tabletop experience in cRPG is silly, unnecessary and bad idea in general.

Not all pen & paper RPG mechanics are based on numbers and randomising factors. Even if they were, I think you'd be hard pressed to argue that the 'essense' of 'Paranoia' or 'Kill Puppies for Satan' is numerical. RPGs are games in which you are able to define a character and control its interactions with the world- the quantitative aspects should not (but frequently do) overshadow the _qualitataive_ aspects of a game. In any case, these randomising mechanics exist because of the impossibility of modelling the complexity involved in the actions the games describe: instead, things are just abstracted and dice are rolled. When people first started making CRPGs, they naturally used similar systems. This doesn't mean that these systems are superior, or that an RPG is not an RPG without numbers or die rolls.

That would be a very badly written book then
A real writer would never do that.

But I think youve made some pretty good points.
I do think hits and misses are a nice mechanic though, Dragon Age did it well I thought, as did Baldur's Gate.
Youre right, just because something works on paper with many sided dice doesnt mean it automatically will work on the pc.
On the other hand, I do feel that there is a general trend in gaming to a) slap the label 'RPG' on everything,
and b.) dumb things down.
Elder Scrolls to me is a bastion of the kind of RPG Im looking for when I buy a game that says RPG on the box, and emotionally it just seems that any removal of the genre from its tabletop roots is a bad thing.

As I said though, youve made some excellent points and I guess things do need to evolve to remain alive.

You lost me right away with that. To say that technological limitations are the "only" reason that system was used suggests that it is objectively inferior to more recent options, something that can't really be backed up. At this time there are really only two ways combat is simulated; with dice rolls/randomization, let's call it character skill, and player skill, where an attack will always hit as long as the player has aimed it properly. Every game I can think of uses one, or some combination of the two. One of the reasons that the former has always been more strongly associated with RPG's is because it represents the abilities of the character you're playing as, instead of you as a real person.

The reason nobody uses the more literal "player taking the role of a character" definition of RPG is because it simply doesn't work. That applies to nearly ALL games, and even as we use it, "RPG" is far too vague and broadly applied. JRPG's are not like tactical RPG's, which are not like Bethesda's sandbox RPG's, which are not like tabletop RPG's. Part of why people argue so much about whether something is a "real" RPG is because nobody really has a functional definition of the word, so they just use their own personal opinion and try to apply it to everyone else's. What two different people are looking for in an RPG is going to vary widely because they're not seeing the same thing as an RPG in the first place.

Just because game mechanics are "evolving" doesn't automatically mean they're becoming better or worse. That has to be examined on a game-to-game basis, like any other feature. What it's doing is just becoming different. How often is new classical-style music made? How often is it the top song in the country? Roughly never, for that second one. It doesn't mean techno or rock or rap or country are all indisputably better than classical music; it just means it fell out of popularity. This wasn't an issue when videogames were younger, but now they've been around long enough for entire styles to start sinking below the radar in favor of whatever is more popular at the moment. People who prefer one style are annoyed that it's not around anymore. Changing game mechanics DO mean changing genre. They're a major part of what a game is. The only thing one style being "better" than the other has to do with it is that both sides think their preference is better, and yell at each other for daring to want their own preferred elements soiling the game.

People tend to go way to extreme about these things. "Skills should always be depended on random numbers! If the player plays a role in it the skills are pointless!"
no, that's not how it works. Skills and attributes still matter. In Fallout 3 try to use a sniper rifle with 0 gun skill and with 100 gun skill, you'll see a giant difference. Minigames are harder the lower your skills are, you'll have more dialogue choices with different skills, at higher magic levels in Oblivion you'll be able to cast more potent magic.
Even with dice rolls, you'll have an input to your character. You still order them around, you still tell them what to say. They tend to have an intelligence attribute, can't they think about themselves?

There's nothing wrong with more dice-roll based systems though, only problem they just don't work well on First person games, mainly on the combat part. You still need to physically hit the enemy just to calculate the to-hit part, which requires more player skill. These only tend to work on games where you actually order your characters around with a cursor, and you only have to generally aim at the enemy's direction to order to attack (though Witcher did an interesting blend of the two styles). This is why I'm confused when people say "Bioware doesn't make RPGs anymore", when dragon age is still based on this dice-roll system...

Some do. Not everybody is Hemingway.

I thought RPs were mainly and all about creating a character and playing as them.

Dice rolls and statistics help alot and are a staple to many but it doesn't make it an RPG from that sole factor. I like statistics and such but I know they are not the mainpoint. They are just tools to help the RPG.

Yes, this is the main definition, the combat and action mechanism is another matter.
I can agree that more focus on player action and less on player stat make the game less role playing as the player become more important and the character less so.

However the AD&D dice roll is an extremely simplified way to do it, it was done this way because a pen and paper rpg had to use very simple calculations, with computers you can just as well do it more complicated as calculations is extremely cheap, cost a few cpu cycles to calculate a arrows path and that body part of an enemy it hit. It even reduce power gaming as the rules are to realistic and complicated so common sense works better, yes you can just as well do it in an Dragon Age as in Oblivion style game, in Dragon age you have the caracter aim after your order, how well he aim depend on weapon as skill, in an Oblivion style game you release the trigger the game calculate spread depending on skill and weapon.

In fallout 3 aiming was a combination of player and character skill, a low skilled character would miss at long range with a crappy weapon no matter of player skill. With a highly skilled character you got help with aiming, yes it's a controversial thing, but fits the role playing part. You aim at the face, your character put the arrow trough the eye of the enemy.

RPGs are dying, not evolving. Unless evolution has changes and now the dumbest have the best chance of survivability.

If by "system" you meant "using dice rolls to simulate randomness" then it sure can. Dice rolls can simulate a very limited number of only discrete probability distributions (in fact it's either http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_distribution_%28discrete%29 if one die is used or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binomial_distribution if more than one die is used) which puts a harsh limit on how specific and detailed a simulation can be. You can never get normal (Gauss) distribution with dice, which is the most useful of all.

If by "system" you meant using simulated randomness of any kind in RPGs in general, then I agree with you.

I meant that one, in response to what I understood the OP to be saying, that "aim-based" hits were the natural and superior progression from any "chance to hit" types.

Dice doesn't make me connect better with my character...actually they do the opposite. As such I can't properly RP..the purpose of an RPG.

I dislike "realistic" combat. Once you take away hitpoints altogether I really don't have much interest anymore.

It reminds me of the HORRIBLE in my opinion bloody/cracked screen fad. I don't know where that mocking quote came from but I like it:
"BLOODY SCREEN!!! SO REAL!!!" no thanks, that fad can die. I'm interested in playing a video game, and that doesn't mean I want it to try to be virtual reality.

I agree it wouldn't necessarily no longer be an RPG, but it's not an element I would like added to the game at all. It's not just this, you'll see people claim it's not an RPG if it doesn't do whatever they want. You'll see people ridiculously claim the dozens and dozens of JRPGs released over the last couple decades aren't RPGs because they aren't open world, or other nonsense like that. So while I agree it's ridiculous to claim it's no longer an RPG because it does something you don't like, that doesn't mean I have to like the idea at all.

There are many stat based systems that use dice rolls less ridiculously. Morrowind's HORRIBLE (in my opinion) melee combat miss system is an extreme example. More complicated systems with magic resistances and physical evade rates and such can use dice rolls without feeling as outrageously archaic as Morrowind did, and have been used in games like the Final Fantasy series long before Morrowind came along. I'm not saying Morrowind itself was bad at all, but I think the system of starting out missing most of the time was absurd.

I'm kinda a grognard, so dice-rolls and randomness are pretty big with me.

That it is. I like how it works in DA:O and DA2 - misses can happen, but "dice rolls" and your (and enemy's) stats primarily determine the amount of damage your attacks do.

Well.. it comes down to opinion.. for me it is superior because i don't see why would i want a dice roll system when i can create a game that what determines me hitting something is based on my capability of actually hitting and not because the system decided that.
If mobs try to block and dodge your attacks why would you need another factor to determine if you manage to hit the target? Wont simply connecting a blow do the trick?

This doesn't necessarily make skill points obsolete, you can just change what exactly they effect. Instead of having a impact on the players chance of hitting the target just make the use of a weapon feel more clumsy or slower, I certainly don't mind if it has impact on the damage output but not to the point of where i got to slash a target 10 times to kill it.

I also think it doesn't take any value from your character since your suppose to be the character.. in fact i think it just makes it even more immersible. Games that make you play a character would not be necessarily a RPG.. take Duke Nukem for example.. you play as Duke in the game but your not Duke.. since he is a character with a very specific psychology and personality... the way you play the game wont make it different. Again.. i don't think the problem is that RPG is a hard thing to define.. i think its just hard to tell if thats what people actually want to do.. because many people play games titled as RPG in a non RP way. It comes down to the player decide if he wants to do that or not.. and if the game gives him the tools to do that.

I believe you are misunderstanding how "skill" works in real life. You can practice throwing darts your entire life and yet whether you'll hit the centre of the board when you're aiming for it is still pretty much up to chance - all your training and practising does is increase the probability that you'll successfully hit what you're aiming to hit. No matter how skilled at darts you are if you took a piece of paper and wrote "1" every time you hit what you're aiming to hit and "0" when you didn't the resulting string of ones and zeroes would be purely random, the only difference between a more skilled player and a less skilled one being that the portion of ones in the string is more likely to be greater for the more skilled player than for the less skilled one. Randomness is how our Universe operates, whether you liked that or not.

Its not just combat, almost everything is determined by stats and 'dice rolls' randomness, or at least should be. It represents any variable that can happen during anything. Since you cant put everything in a realistic world into a game, you need the stats etc.

Which part of what you said disapproves of what i said? Wouldn't that mean that theres no actual need for a dice roll system since the fact that me hitting the target is already determined by the chance of me actually doing so? What your saying only proves that i'm correct since the chance of me hitting the mob is determined by the chance of the mob dodging the attack and me connecting the attack.