In CRPGs, stats MUST be hidden from the player

yeah but if there's an arbitrary stat limit that prevents you from performing an action and you don't know what it is, it just makes the game tedious.

If stats are important to gameplay you can't just hide them. If you don't want stats then get rid of them completely.

I think your real problem is min-maxing, which means RPGs need to depend less on your stats, and more on player skill/strategy.

immersion is not a property of a game. it's a relationship between the game and the player
you are electing to game the game

>so try it and parse the numbers yourself to compare if its an upgrade or not rather than the numbers being visible in the first place?
>>IT's A GaEM, nOt a nUMbEr soRtInG siMulAtOR.

you are a fucking moron and your thread is fucking retarded, hang yourself

roleplay focused

Nah, i'd say the biggest issue with most CRPGs is that they use a save and load system rather then a check point system

there's no "must" anything. designers can do either and it's fine, stop being autistic

That doesn't sound tedious and unfun at all. I can't wait to try out all 50 swords one by one in a controlled environment on a target that typically has the same health each life just to verify how much fucking damage it does.

I bet the first thing you wonder about when a girl rejects you is how close you were to getting her on a percentual scale.

You fucking autist. (That brings your percentage way down, btw.)

Sounds like you don't even have autism. In light of that, why should your opinion be considered again?

You're leaving out the fact many games are designed for save scumming. They don't realistically expect you to accept all the 10% rolls you fail.

Lol, that's your fucking problem, you don't want to play a role in a game, you just want to see bigger numbers.

at that point you just have to make it impossible to savescum. or at least break casual savescumming

that sounds very gay, how would you know if a leader doublet is more protection than a leather gambeson or if a sword of striking is better than a sword of maiming

Yeah it sure is great going up against powerful enemies, taking the time to get past all their minions and mazes, only to find out your weapon was so shit it can't pass some arbitrary DPS check.
You overestimate how well-designed most games are. Stats being visible aren't the problem, the game devs making their games so reliant on number inflation is.

>playing game
>get new item
>put it on
>notice that i'm doing better in combat
that was so... fucking hard....

Don't play shitty games.

>have sex

lmao

??

Minmaxing builds and character creation is objectively the most enjoyable part of roleplaying games ever since Baldurs Gate came out.

I think you're not getting that, no matter what, you as the player, have to parse your gear's stats in some way. So if you hide stats up front, you still have to decipher them eventually, which defeats the whole point of hiding them.

Name 10 games

>percentual scale
speaking of autism, we use "percentage scale"

but if i have to parse the numbers myself its not a game is a number sorting simulator. if the devs put the numbers there i could not worry about it just immerse myself in the game like a true RPer :)

>have 10 swords from the adventrue
>instead of equipping the best one you waste time fighting a goblin and noting after how many swings did he go down
>this is somehow more engaging than just picking the best one and completely skipping pointless testing period
>99% of players will just look-up weapon stats online since they value their time

Wow, what a great game you've made. It's almost as if all those stats were visible for a reason.

What's the point of hiding it if I can just analyze the game code and learn how it works anyway? You can't hide it, it's pointless.

Ultimately, WRPG players think that their games are "basically DnD." The issue here is that they haven't played DnD, but they're pretty sure that it's exactly like a WRPG. In fact, WRPGs are such watered down experiences compared to actual tabletop RPGs that it's pretty sad to watch people make such claims.

Tabletop players look at WRPG players the way WRPG players look at JRPG players.

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The point is that it's more interesting to notice stuff shown naturally than shown through simple numbers.

What's the point of the game then? Just make it a picture set of goblins dying.

Define "doing better in combat" without numbers? Am I tracking the time it takes to end the encounter? How fast an enemy dies? Can I even tell how fast I'M dying?

At the end of the day, I'm still parsing some kind of numerical metric to determine how well I do. But, let's be real, this is just a big shitpost that /tg/ would laugh you out of the board over.

>What's the point of the game then?

Challenge and entertainment. Fighting a difficult boss is boss, grinding one monster to find out if you should switch weapons or not is neither.

thanks to google stevia, the code underneath rpgs can be hidden from the prying eyes of the players.

Man I sure love tabletop games where some retard fudges rolls behind his wall of false superiority.

but 1st edition humpers literally only give a fuck about dungeon hacking and getting loot
you are trying to look down from your pedestal of PnP superiority but you are some 3.5ed babby or a freeform PBF RPer that doesn't use dice like some kind of fucking hippy.

Some people enjoy the more technical side of RPGs, things like builds and loot gathering.

What RPGs need to stop doing is stop showing which dialogue choices affect alignment, or are skilled based.

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How is it gonna be difficult if you always choose the sword with the highest numbers?

And if it's gonna be difficult anyway, the numbers don't matter at all.

Stop being a minmaxing faggot. Holy shit your kind ruins video games. Seriously, I'm asking you. Stop.

I do kinda miss how early RPGs had a lot of puzzles and riddles, stuff that wasn't just combat or dialog.

youtube.com/watch?v=j_ekugPKqFw
fuck off trekkie. no one wants to hear about how you and a group of fat virgins get together on the weekend to roleplay having sex with barmaids

Sword of striking should have better accuracy while the sword of maiming would have a higher crit chance assuming crits cause maiming.

I've only ever DM'd with open rolls that the players got to see :^)

I like WRPGs, JRPGs, and tabletop, but I'm not gonna sit here and listen to WRPG people act like they have any clue about "role playing." 1e humpers love hackan and lootan yes but there's still a myriad of shit involved that video games simply cannot give you.

>What RPGs need to stop doing is stop showing which dialogue choices affect alignment, or are skilled based.
That would never work, dialogue is written by multiple people each having their own sense of morality. For multiple people the same line of text can mean multiple different alignment chances. Only way to represent what you mean to the player is with showing the intended category of such choice.

>How is it gonna be difficult if you always choose the sword with the highest numbers?
Everyone will the best swords regardless. And if the entire challenge of the game boils down to "find out which sword is the best and use it" then it's garbage.
>And if it's gonna be difficult anyway, the numbers don't matter at all.
It's the opposite. If the boss is easy than the numbers won't matter. If it's hard you're gonna need all the help you can get

where are all these guys getting 50 swords in the span of one dungeon lmao

no offense but you sound retarded

Not that guy, but that's a LARP. Normal people don't play RPGs like that.

While you're making excellent posts, why not start a new thread complaining about not being allowed to kill women, children, and story relevant NPCs in cyberpunk 2077? ',:^)

what else do you expect me to keep in my dungeon?

you are retarded.

>I've only ever DM'd with open rolls that the players got to see :^)
Even if you see rolls, DMs will still fudge the story itself to arbitrarily restrict your actions. In games where the DM is a computer, you can outplay the system in multiple ways which is much more satisfying.

>games MUST be what I WANT
no lol i like numbers fuck off

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>It's the opposite. If the boss is easy than the numbers won't matter. If it's hard you're gonna need all the help you can get

lol tard, the game might as well unlock and give you stronger swords for you at set intervals to keep the difficulty just right

that's what your minmaxing (always buying the strongest sword) boils down to

you just like to think you did it yourself and see the number

That's not minmaxing, minmaxing is getting the best edge you can get. Minmaxing is not just trying to get a good edge.

The same reason people don't all pick the 2d6 weapon in D&D, or any tabletop for that matter. The system has depth of build and options that lets even the piddly 1d4 dagger have ways of doing comparable or even more damage in the right situations.
Also, still waiting on an answer to you fucking coward

What if I find a sword that has some sort of crit dmg modifier and, through a series of unlucky rolls, I never find out that it's actually stronger than my current sword?
Am I meant to keep hitting stuff for long periods of time just to find out if it's better?
That just sounds like the game is purposely trying to waste my time, instead of letting me adventure. Why can't a magically attuned character or a blacksmith identify the stats of the weapon?

That makes the terrible assumption that the vast majority of RPG developers know how to balance their games to the point where the player doesn't need to be aware of what's going on.

The numbers exist so players don't get fucked over, or at least when they do they'll have an inkling as to why.

>op has a decent idea for a video game
>very quickly exposes how little he understands video games, how they are made, their limitations, and how people play them
whoops

Just have someone higher up the food-chain review and edit where necessary. The alternative is stuff like Mass Effect where you just go all one side because neutrality weakens you and cuts off options. So you either pick the blue or red option regardless of context.

>define "doing better in combat" without numbers?
in an area where enemies took a little while for you to beat, now you can beat them a little faster, because you trusted the game dev to give you a better weapon as a reward for your struggles rather than a worse one.
i'm not even op but fucking lmao at you trying to misinterpret info into something you can try to pull a "gotcha" on

because i don't care about that game at all you failed-your-saving-throw-against-aids baby

>get to new zone, go to buy equipment
>because stats are hidden, all swords are just called swords
>buy the most valuable ones and compare the damage through savescumming or biting a loss of money from each purchase
>discover the top 2 most valuable swords are shit and only valuable because of their shitty magic enchantments and #3 was actually worth using

Your opinion is fundamentally sound but does not do anything except explain its origin and point out you DM'd a certain way. You have not provided any evidence of this "numbers" fetishism because if we get down to it, there's a name for it: Min/maxing, and both tabletop and video games have LONG since become both accustomed and adapted to their existence numbers or not, and I would suggest that its a particular subset of players who derive their own enjoyment, something that is far less difficult to manage in a single player game where only their desires should be met.
Could you explain in more detail how removing all and any accounting of a player's ability would be at the very least, a net positive on Crpgs? You have not done so so far.
What you have done is point out you played as a certain kind of DM, and would like crpgs to function like that. Are you comfortable and assured that you don't actually mean "I would personally like a crpg that does all the accounting and dice rolling for me"? As a personal interest and a potential subset I agree it is criminally scant, but that is a considerable step from "All crpgs should function the way I personally play D&D"

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uncertainty is a given in player controlled games

Terrible idea, for the reasons already stated and more.

>hide stats
>players either derive them if they matter, which is tedious, or ignore them if they don't, which means there might as well not be stats

>Also, still waiting on an answer to you fucking coward

I can't control other people.

But if I were to answer it, I'd say you're an autistic inhuman robot that can't understand that it's more interesting to see the direct effects of your actions than just a number. Because normal people (people who aren't you) don't immediately translate everything to a number, even if it can be represented as such.

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>lol tard, the game might as well unlock and give you stronger swords for you at set intervals to keep the difficulty just right
It's funny how you call people retards yet are unable to realize that YOUR IDEA IS RETARDED AND ONLY MAKES GAME MORE TEDIOUS NO MATTER HOW IT'S CONSTRUCTED
>Game gives you stronger sword at set intervals and tells you that it's stronger
>Equip it and bash foes
>Game gives you stronger sword at set intervals and doesn't tell you anything
>Test it to find out if it's actually stronger and proceed as usual.
THE ONLY THING YOU ARE DOING IS ADDING TEDIOUS "TESTING PERIOD" AFTER FINDING NEW WEAPONS. YOU DON'T MAKE GAMES DEEPER OR MORE ENGAGING. YOU ARE AN ABSOLUTE MORON AND SHOULD NEVER DESIGN GAMES.

>you just have to have unrealistic expectations
Yea.

Why are you wasting my time?

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lol tard, you deny the idea a game could exist where it could be interesting to not always use the weapon with biggest numbers

you have no imagination, your entire existence boils down to more vs. less

you're not a person

The problem is that videogames are inflexible by nature. No matter how well you design your systems and obfuscate shit it will all come down to numbers in the end. If the number matter then hiding them from the player is just frustrating, and if they don't matter then why bother in the first place? At the end of the day, there are just better places to spend development effort than reworking the traditional stat system that has functioned fine for decades from the ground up.
Having your character creation be some bullshit like
>Swords: 3 happy faces
>Magic: 1 big glowy crystal
>Tankiness: cartoon frail old man
instead of STR: 7 MAG: 4 HP: 2 or whatever adds nothing to the experience and just limits the amount of mechanical complexity you can add.

It's not like a pnp rpg where the DM is a real person who can understand what will and won't be enjoyable for the player and fill in the gaps where things are vague.

Really if you want to break away from the hard stat system, you need to rework the way the game functions from a core level. Instead of Neverwinter Nights start with something more like Exanima as the base, then instead of Strength and Dex and Int being your stats you can have weird shit like limb acceleration and foot traction and step distance, and instead of a check being
>Rotten door: 5 str to break down
it would a physics interaction where you need to be able to generate enough force through the various ways you character can move, the weight of the thing they're swinging etc.
But looking at the state of Exanima we're probably a really long way away from that sort of depth.

Damn bro, you just posted cringe

>in an area where enemies took a little while for you to beat, now you can beat them a little faster
>Am I tracking the time it takes to end the encounter?
Time is a numerical metric, you absolute brainlet. If I kill a goblin in 30 seconds with one sword, then 20 seconds with another, that's still parsing numbers.

You've not played dnd with my players then. Because all it does is make them take our two hours sessions planning every possible outcome until I spawn an encounter under their dicks to get them to do SOMETHING.

That's not even close to minmaxing. I would know, I do it at any opportunity because it's very fun to me and is how I like to play games. Somehow this will make you mad.

Not him but you clearly have not played very many games. You've exposed that fact repeatedly.

what about having a lucky run/clear of the area with a higher than usual occurrence of crits?
I could have equipped something a bit worse but looks like it's better.
What if my weapon is a sword of goblin-slaying, the area I'm testing in is full of goblins, and the enemies that are a threat to me aren't goblins?
Why should I have to do multiple runs in multiple places just to figure out if a sword is stronger instead of having the game identify it, or a skill-check identify it?

Monkey Island is a garbage example. Now ZORK, there's a game

>lol tard, you deny the idea a game could exist where it could be interesting to not always use the weapon with biggest numbers
You can do that in games already you fucking imbecille
>Find +1 sword
>Find +2 sword
>Use +1 sword
Was it so fucking hard?

Google is selling sugar substitutes now?

>Because normal people (people who aren't you) don't immediately translate everything to a number, even if it can be represented as such.
Haha let me just trial and error this medicine dosage, I'm sure I'll be fine. Doctor said it's more immersive this way.

Fucking interesting post that turned into Sui Generis shilling.

Jesus fuck, are you being obnoxious on purpose? Medicine's not a game, don't apply the same standards to it.

selling? haha don't be silly. they are renting you sugar substitutes

I've never understood why developers won't just put a ''reload'' timer on loading save times.
Think of it like this, if you don't want your players to savescum, just add an 5 min cooldown after every time they load a save file, so it would work like this:
>reload 1=5 min wait before they can load a save again
>reload 2=10 min wait before they can load a save again
>reload 3=15 min wait before they can load a save again

To make sure that the player wouldn't be punished accidentally, make the first 2-4 ''reloads'' not inact this timer. Since most players savescum becuase they want to meta game/play optimally, just make savescumming the least optimal way to play the game, problem solved. This is actually how I used to do it if I noticed that players were meta gaming while I was a GM in DnD, I would inact some sort of punishment either without telling the metagamer or straight up telling them that they would not be able to preform that action again for 1-5 rounds.

>Just have someone higher up the food-chain review and edit where necessary
Yeah just give one individual a massive workload and the responsibility of normalizing every single dialogue choice so that it's both consistent and also obvious to the player which option pisses who off or what skill level you will need to accomplish a certain task (hint: people who have skills can actually make estimations about whether or not they can accomplish something based off experience, revealing the DC of a skill check is probably one of the LEAST metagame-y things in RPGs)

Ok I'll just trial and error this structural integrity of a bridge without doing any math. I'm sure people will be ok with it collapsing under them.

>play game with a numerically disadvantaged weapon type
>still have to go through tedium of testing it multiple times against multiple enemy types to see if it's an upgrade
>all so I won't be left behind by the slowly rising difficulty of the campaign
Your idea achieves nothing fun for a player
And it assumes that people always min/max and that wanting upgrades is min/maxing

>Why yes, indeed I do play BGT/Tutu/EE, what gave it away?

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>I've never understood why developers won't just put a ''reload'' timer on loading save times.

Because most devs don't give a fuck if players savescum or not. And those who do just use different savings systems.

What fucking direct effects? Something dies FASTER than it did before? You're still using the same measuring stick but without any of the numbers. That's not interesting, innovating, or immersive.

How about you try thinking about making a CRPG without combat and focused more on character dialog, interactions, and actual roleplaying? Why do you even NEED combat? There's plenty of RP focused systems that just handwave or eliminate it for that reason. The reason this doesn't translate as well into videogames, is that you lack the true depth of player agency and decision making that comes from forcing them into Choose-Your-Own-Adventure list of options.

>datamine game
>know where best weapon/equipment is because you can't hide the value from the in-game files

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There's literally nothing wrong with allowing players of singleplayer games to play however they please, including savescuming, min-maxing or outright cheating.

These games exist for the players to enjoy them however they want.

I largely agree with the sentiment, at least keep technical aspects of a game to a minimum for "immersion" sake and streamline the surface complexity. Gothic, Morrowind, Deus Ex, Fallout, etc, are probably good examples of minimising numbers and complexity while still retaining the complexities of an rpg and being able to develop your character.

however, I feel as if rpgs have largely done away with too many numbers and did so years ago. this is also probably a discussion of what people identify as an rpg, some people value the technicality of an rpg and the satisfaction of things such as minmaxing over immersion and creative expression. You clearly value the roleplaying part of rpgs.

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>stats
>boring
le zoomer

True.

Most CRPGs don't have every dialogue choice be a moral conundrum, not even Planescape T. It's also not very hard to deduce most CRPG decisions since most have dialogue that is essentially:

>Overly heroic choice
>Neutral middle-ground
>Cartoonishly evil choice
>Neutral but with cash incentive

And yeah, they should accept the workload that comes with making a game. That's why they get paid.

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Retard.

You forgot about
>Obviously good option since it has skill requirement
>Terribly long option you've unlocked because of high wis/int/speach and is obviously the best since it's very long

because its a game? and not imagination fun time

>muh ROLEPLAY
Stop this shitty meme already. Roleplaying is when a bunch of neckbeards are playing some prehistoric pen and paper garbage and pretending to be elf wizards or something. Video games can't have this, there's no GM do adjust the story to your bullshit and fudge rolls to make your crap possible. Video games are fine-tuned systems, they operate with numbers. If you want some reasonable recreation of tabletop roleplay possibilities you can only rely on fucking numbers representing the sharpness of your sword and how much of a gay your elf is. When I play and RPG I want it to have a well designed system, not some shitty branching adventure. And to fully enjoy this system I want to see how it operates.
Based.

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>Most CRPGs don't have every dialogue choice be a moral conundrum
no but you have shit like PoE where almost every dialogue choice shapes your character towards "benevolent" "honest" "cruel" and whatever, which in my opinion is a fun system because it leads to choices which in other games are just meaningless RP choices having more impact (PoE is by no means an ideal game overall though).

Why would my warrior, who puts his life on the line fighting monsters, not want to know his best options for survival?

>What RPGs need to stop doing is stop showing which dialogue choices affect alignment, or are skilled based.
Developers have to sop making skill checks the most optimal dialogue options then.

because he's a dumb fucker that got into "adventuring" (highway robbery) because it was easier than working

You could turn off the indicators in PoE, which is a nice middle-ground for both of us at least.

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God you sound like an insufferable, pretentious piece of shit.

This is a great thread.

There is clearly something to be come out of the idea of hiding stats to enhance the satisfaction from procedurality and discovery; but there is also clearly more work to do than simply hide stats, as some people have pointed out that testing swords in lieu of stats would just be tedious.

I don't want to be given the option to save scum though. Its sole existence makes the gameplay shallower because you know you're holding yourselr back by not pressing F9 and trying again. Working under the limitations the gane puts on you is more fun than being free to do whatever you want, unless you're an hyper casual.

I like Underrail's saving system. Only save out of combat, never during.

You're legitimately fucking retarded.

this is far too dogmatic of an attitude. you may raise some good points, but listening to people like you is stupid and dangerous for the development of games.

Yes I understand that, but sometimes the most optimal way to play is the most boring way to play. If you as a designer want's to make sure that the player does not feel forced to play in a way that they find unfun, then you should encourage that player to play in some other way.

Just look at the forums of many popular MMORPGs or even some CRPGS and ARPGS. We could argue that if the most optimal way to play is boring than the designers have not done their job, but in reality RPGs have always been about player choice, but if your design prohibits your players from making choices thanks to outside factors or even just the fact that there are too many or to few meaningful choices, you should try to encourage experimentation so that each player can find their niche.

Have you tried not playing D&D?

Nah.

Then just make weapons actually different in other ways than just plain damage numbers instead of hiding the damage numbers from the players. Like Dark Souls or later Castlevanias where weapons have different attack animations depending on the weapon type. Which makes players use weapons that are weaker DPS-wise simply because their moves feels better.

I bet you failed Algebra 2

I've never met a roleplay enthusiast that wasn't an autistic lunatic

>backs up his points
>dogmatic
you're an idiot and probably dogmatic.

>Roleplaying is when a bunch of neckbeards are playing some prehistoric pen and paper garbage and pretending to be elf wizards or something. Video games can't have this,
dogma. Digital games are this and they can never be anything else. He didn't backup his points as far as this goes.

makes sense to me
>MY CHARACTER SMART/STRONG/EVIL/GOOD
>HAVE 10 ______ POINTS OUT OF 10
>THEREFORE, MY CHARACTER ALWAYS TAKE _____EST CHOICE
that's anti-roleplay really

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>doesn't explain how he was wrong
>Just says he is
That user gave his reasons. Where are yours, dogmatic retard?

>dangerous
neck yourself freak

I never said I was going to.

have sex, hurt nerds.

Yes! That is exactly what I mean. I've always hoped that the gameplay from games like DS, DD:DA and Nioh would catch on. But sadly, all we have ever seen released has been shallow copies that either completely miss the point of these games or make some pants on head retarded design choices that ruin the original games systems in some way.

Most tabletop players look down on the garbage that plays DnD too.

wow they made a sequel?

You mean gameplay from Severance: Blade of Darkness?

>I don't want to be given the option to save scum though.
I want to be given the option though. The difference here is that you can opt not to use the option, I cannot opt to use it when it's not there.

>MMORPG
These are specifically designed to be as tedious as possible while periodically retaining player interest, ideally forcing a login exactly once per day for a limited amount of time. Player concern is the last thing that's relevant in these games, maximizing subscription time and selling tedium alleviation is what they are about.

Misquoted a part, I'm sure you guys can figure it out.

>try sword
>can't use it
>no idea what to do to be able to use it
Holy shit you are legitimately braindead, kill yourself.

>play FPS
>find new gun
>test it
>it's mechanically different from all the other guns
>instantly make conclusions about its strengths and weaknesses
>have fun
>play RPG
>find a new sword
>you already have gorillion of swords
>they all feel same
>count how much hits it requires to kill the same enemy with different swords
>repeat it many time to account for things like random crits
>test it on other enemies to figure out if they have different resistances
>savescum a lot to avoid wasting resources and not to look for another bunch of same enemies after one area is cleated
>get bored
>go to wiki
>check numbers
>pick the optimal sword
>have fun

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>Stop games in the way I don't want you to!

This is what you sound like OP.
How's that Unity/UE4 project coming along? You still procrastinating? Don't worry, I'm sure that it will be amazing when it comes out and sell millions on STEAM.

I know NV did this for casino games so you couldn't save scum by adding a 1 minute timer on using them after loading a save and excusing it as the dealer checking the table for bias or something like that.
LISA also sort of prevented it in the russian roulette game by making it so you needed to take a lengthy walk to actually get to the place from your save point, though that used save points and not player set saves.

Showing stats isn't about pushing number crunching on the player, it's there to tell the player where their party stands so they can strategize.
You are retarded, OP.

Bullshit. The "unhealthy numbers fetishism" was a defining characteristic of rpgs from the moment DnD became the dominant and go to table top game, and was certainly present beforehand. You're just another "role-playing is about immersion" faggot. That's great and all, but there's plenty of games to cater to that style of play. Say what you fucking what but number crunching is and has long been its own distinct way of enjoying RPGs, and those who enjoy it do so - at least in part - for that very reason.

In conclusion, An RPG without player facing, number-crunched combat is not an RPG. suck my dick faggot .

>hide stats
what does this even accomplish? Games will still be gear treadmills that are entirely focused on raising how much damage you deal. Hiding those values won't fix this any more than hiding quest markers in Skyrim will fix quests not giving clear instructions.

>Tabletop players look at WRPG players the way WRPG players look at JRPG players.
And jrpg players look down on both of you. And so the cycle goes

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would non-RPGs benefit from being a bit more RPG behind the scenes than they are these days? More numbers and ambiguous systems that aren't revealed to the player, encourage experimenting?

no one would buy or play a game that prevents you from playing you dumbass, this would be financial suicide for the developers

your logic is retarded, the DM could control the player stats as well in pen and paper and hide the stats from the player, but they don't because that would be retarded as fuck

i think you missed the entire point of a GAME

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complexity just makes stupid people look up optimal strategies online and rpg mechanics actively make games less skill-oriented since it offloads some amount of the success/failure of outcome to the system

Well, yeah. But when was the last time we saw a game like it or DS that was actually good, get released in the last 2-3 years? All I can think of is DS3, Nioh and Salt'n'Sanctuary.

>I don't want to be given the option to save scum though.
>I want to be given the option though. The difference here is that you can opt not to use the option, I cannot opt to use it when it's not there.
Why would you want to break the game though? Although, yes, if you want to do it then you should be able to if it is within the bounds of the game engine. What I am saying though is that many players will feel forced to play optimaly thanks to outside factors and limiting savescuming in some way would help them enjoy the game more. And hell, if you really want to break the game you can always just use console commands or save editors to do it.
>These are specifically designed to be as tedious as possible while periodically retaining player interest, ideally forcing a login exactly once per day for a limited amount of time. Player concern is the last thing that's relevant in these games, maximizing subscription time and selling tedium alleviation is what they are about.
Not entirely true since everytime a player leaves your game, it will be harder to rope them back in. That is what the WoW devs meant when they said shit like ''Patches are not meant to compete with other games or bring players back''. And in old MMOs, you couldn't actually buy shit to make the game less ''tedious'', it is a new invention brought on by the popularity of mobile games and fatcats chasing ever largers stacks of money.

>Have sword
>Find another sword
>Have to dedicate time hitting things and counting hits required to tell which sword is better
>Have to dedicate EVEN MORE time to figure out if it has improved crit rates, hit speed, etc.
You ironically end up doing number crunching that the computer should be taking care of with this concept.
Ever heard of the term "quality of life improvement"? Tip: it's not there to appeal to casuals.

I find this absolutely repulsive, the most fun an autistic can have.

>shitty branching adventure
that depends on the quality of the writing.

Truth be told devs focus on stats because it's easier to make a simple equation rather than write a compelling character and a good story.

>just (only)
I wonder if that is true,

the only thing I kind of wish was obscured from me is dialogue skill checks, if I see a skill check I meet the requirements for there's basically no reason to not pick it

In CRPGs, words MUST be hidden from the player

I've never met or heard of anyone in the videogame industry who realizes this. The reason why words are so prominent in real-life RPGs is because SOMEONE has to do the necessary talking, and without the help of a computer the players are forced to do this boring work themselves.

Fuck words. If you have to read or listen, it's bad game design. Is it so fucking hard to just put pictures on screen?

>that's your fucking problem
Thankfully is isn't, because developers know better than to burden players with that fucking tedium.

Blame skill checks always being positive. There's never a reason to not pick them, shit like this is why New Vegas is overrated.

Haha, reminds me of VtMB. Sure was deep gameplay to select the colored option.

>no one would buy or play a game that prevents you from playing you dumbass, this would be financial suicide for the developers
It doesn't though, fuckface, becuase it would only be enabled by you literally reloading a savefile every 30sec-2min.
Any normal player would never reach that threshold and anyone that does can just continue playing anyway once they grow bored of waiting. It was never meant to freeze you in place for 5 min, instead it acts like a ''cooldown'' in an MMO where you would have to wait before reloading again.

>Why would you want to break the game though?
It is very fun for me to break any game system I come across and bend it to my will. I don't need or want the game to hold my hand for me to have fun.

>That is what the WoW devs meant when they said shit like ''Patches are not meant to compete with other games or bring players back''.
That's a straight up lie by whoever wrote such a commentary. Everything they do is for profit.

lol

Threads like this are interesting because you have the power autists defending the genre and mechancis they KNOW, but then you have the people who aren't as autistic and want to imagine things differently. Where they meet might be most interesting, but someone has a louder voice, and I wonder if this is just a typical challenge with progress, the trend for conservatism.

>
lol

I hid your post number because it's bad design to show it.

man shut the fuck up

Black Desert Online used to be like this but people started to get pissed off by all the hidden stats that the devs had to reveal them.

lol

Numbers are so fuckin gay honestly only nerds care about that shit.

shut the FUCK up

I get it

>unhealthy

DROPPED

>everyone that plays and develops games besides me is autistic, make games my way REEEEEE

sounds autistic to me

autistic isn't necessarily an insult, moron.

Pedantism is the tool of a defeated man

you didn't understand what you were trying to reply to.

Go back to RPGcodex you cunt

>It is very fun for me to break any game system I come across and bend it to my will. I don't need or want the game to hold my hand for me to have fun.
This feels like a bad attempt at an insult but I will humor you anyway, there are still many other ways you can break systems in any game, savescuming is the most ''casual'' and easy way to do it, which is why I don't really understand why you would aruge otherwise in my previous post. I also think it's fun to break game systems and I used to do it in some of my campaigns or even reward it if the metagamer didn't completely kill the fun of the game for others or break the campaing completely.

>That's a straight up lie by whoever wrote such a commentary. Everything they do is for profit.
You couldn't sound more bitter even if you tried, yes corporations are completely obssesed with money, we all get that, but that does not mean that whoever is working at the game wants nothing more than money. Blizz is probably a bad example of this but you have to understand that some developers/designers just want to make a fun game for players to enjoy, even if they are working for a souless husk of a corporation.

so people that savescum get 4 chances to get a better outcome or more if they want to wait while the people that want to play normal just get 1

your system doesn't even work, it just fucks the people that are forced to reload and people that are gonna savescum are going to do it anyway

still a crappy and pointless system no matter how you put it, why do you even care how someone else plays a game

>This feels like a bad attempt at an insult
I made no such attempt.

>savescuming
My entire argument is not about how effective or casual savescumming is, rather about how the presence of savescuming does not prevent you from NOT savescuming. Lack of savescuming however prevents me from savescuming. It's a case of you wanting to limit me for your pleasure. Whereas I do not want to be limited by you and do not care if you limit yourself.

>Blizz is probably a bad example of this but you have to understand that some developers/designers just want to make a fun game for players to enjoy, even if they are working for a souless husk of a corporation.
My response was about what you wrote about Blizzard. However, there is not a single commercial MMORPG that is not designed about milking their customers for money as much as possible. These games are not relevant at all to this thread as they are little more than digital gambling rooms.

>so people that savescum get 4 chances to get a better outcome or more if they want to wait while the people that want to play normal just get 1
Yes? That is the enitre point, if you still want to savescum you can still do it, but it won't be becuase it is the most optimal way to play anymore

>your system doesn't even work, it just fucks the people that are forced to reload and people that are gonna savescum are going to do it anyway
You didn't actually read my post, did you? I already said that there would be no penalty if you didn't actively try to savescum and since you wounldn't be forced to reload every 30sec-2min normaly, you would never have to actually worry about it.

>still a crappy and pointless system no matter how you put it, why do you even care how someone else plays a game
I don't, I just don't want people to feel forced to play the game in a certain way becuase it is more optimal. It's called ''balancing'', you should look it up since it is a part of every dev cycle.

Very true.

But the realization of how this is applied in good games is way beyond you.

>You didn't actually read my post, did you? I already said that there would be no penalty if you didn't actively try to savescum and since you wounldn't be forced to reload every 30sec-2min normaly, you would never have to actually worry about it.
its either going to be too short that it won't work and savescumming will still work or it's going to be too long that it fucks players over

>It's called ''balancing'', you should look it up since it is a part of every dev cycle.
then why hasn't there been a single successful game that has made that design choice yet idea guy?

neck yourself, or stop playing shit games, retard
>DPS check
my fucking sides

I would like to inform you that you have been enriched by the wisdom of Alex Kierkegaard, commonly known as Icycalm on the internet.

The excerpt in the OP is from his seminal 2008 essay "On Role-playing Games".
web.archive.org/web/20180117101924/http://insomnia.ac/commentary/on_role-playing_games/

Enjoy it along with its follow-up "The RPG Conundrum".
web.archive.org/web/20180118011001/http://insomnia.ac/commentary/the_rpg_conundrum/

Both go much more in depth about the points in the OP.

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name 10 games that aren't immediately shit when you're stuck with low damage weapons. Fact is almost every single game expects your gear to be up to date, or you'll take 20 minutes killing a boss that would normally take 3.

I can appreciate the sentiment, but it doesn't make for a particularly fun game. Hiding numbers and statistics from the players just makes for a very unfocused experience. You have very little means to know how good you're doing and you just end up frustrating the players at the lack of transparency. Some people might even be afraid to create something unique because they can't know for sure if the game actually bothered to support their chosen playstyle.

Combat's not really the problem here, I have more issues with dialogues in this genre. Skill checks are often highlighted, and it makes for a trivial roleplaying experience, or gating the majority of the game's best stuff to good natured characters only, when in reality it'd be the opposite. It's why Pathologic was probably a better roleplaying experience than some RPGs I played. Some objectives don't give you rewards, or if they do they might not match the effort spent doing them. It makes for real choices and real consequences.

oh......shit......

Icy's based.

orgyofthewill.net/

>the only coherent post on Yea Forums right now is just a copy pasted excerpt from some control freak in 2008
Fucks sake.

how does someone write this much about games! do you think this is really one person? it amazes me, the productivity.

>I made no such attempt.
Ok, no harm done.

>My entire argument is not about how effective or casual savescumming is, rather about how the presence of savescuming does not prevent you from NOT savescuming. Lack of savescuming however prevents me from savescuming. It's a case of you wanting to limit me for your pleasure. Whereas I do not want to be limited by you and do not care if you limit yourself.
Congratulations, you can still savescum to your hearts desire, it's just that it won't trivialize the game anymore since it is not the most optimal way to play anymore. I never made an attempt at trying to control what you do becuase I get some twisted pleasure from it, it was in an attempt at making more people enjoy the game, which I suspect is most designers end-goal. This might sound like a dig at you, and I'm sorry for that but I just can't help but point it out, but to me it sounds like you might have some problems related with authority figures.

>My response was about what you wrote about Blizzard. However, there is not a single commercial MMORPG that is not designed about milking their customers for money as much as possible. These games are not relevant at all to this thread as they are little more than digital gambling rooms.
Yeah, I agree with you there. Which is why I hope that some MMO that doesn't follow in nu-WoWs footsteps gets developed some day. But it didn't work like that back in '90 and '00.

>927. All races practiced slavery, and it was the whites that ended it, i.e. the opposite of what is taught today.

Baldur's Gate is a d&d game, it shows you your Character sheet, not really essential for MC, since you made them. But good for party members so you don't have Minsc using shield and dagger or something stupid.
But yeah, D&D uses character sheets.

what games has this guy developed or is he just another stupid ideas guy?

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>Icycalm
known autistic faggot

The game of stealing money.

Though for a time he was talking about making a game. Basically a new Deus Ex with the extreme freedom you see in Far Cry 2.

There is kinda a solution to this. Just create vagueness in the stats by contextualizing the weapon's numbers into believable speech/description by the storekeeper.
>Pick up new sword and replace old sword
>Player character says: This sword seems more cumbersome than my previous weapon, but is definitely more devastating towards enemies.
Player has a vague idea that this sword has more damage but less speed. But knowing this the autists will probably create some fucking spreadsheet to compare all equipment in the game. I propose that 'Immersive Stats' can be a toggleable option in the menus.

>920. I've never seen anyone who seriously uses the word "motivation" succeed at anything. "I need motivation" means "I don't like it", and "I don't like it" means "I am going to fail at it"—it's as simple as that. Even if you like something you might fail at it, but if you don't like it you will definitely fail, so why bother?
So for all those dudes out there thirsting after motivation, I have this question to ask: Why don't you try doing something you like instead? Motivation is for losers, winners do stuff they actually enjoy.
t. Dante

Metro New Light on the hardest difficulty has zero HUD at all, you can't even see the sub-weapon selection wheel on the screen (I thought the game was broken and it took some times to figure out what was happening). The "muh immersion" developers didn't seem to understand that they were making a video game and that the player has to be explicitly told things that he would in real life just know naturally.

icycalm used to be so feared by Yea Forums jannies that you weren't even allowed to talk about him.

>I never made an attempt at trying to control what you do becuase I get some twisted pleasure from it, it was in an attempt at making more people enjoy the game, which I suspect is most designers end-goal.
I did not mean that you take pleasure in me not being able to do something. I meant that what you want will limit me just so you can extract more pleasure from these games. In contrast what I want will not place any limits upon you. How is it an attempt at making more people enjoy the game, when you're only taking into account your own desires?

>This might sound like a dig at you, and I'm sorry for that but I just can't help but point it out, but to me it sounds like you might have some problems related with authority figures.
Please spare me your pseudo intellectual character assessment from a few lines of text.

Dunno why. Perhaps some autistic vendetta.

>its either going to be too short that it won't work and savescumming will still work or it's going to be too long that it fucks players over
>then why hasn't there been a single successful game that has made that design choice yet idea guy?
What? The entire point is to make it not worth doing and how is it ever going to fuck over ''normal'' players if they are not FORCED by the game to reload a save every 5 min?
What you just wrote will never affect any normal player ever and only affect whoever is trying to savescum.

>then why hasn't there been a single successful game that has made that design choice yet idea guy?
The reason is probably becuase these devs try to use other save systems instead (for better or for worse) this is all just speculation yet you seem to be dead-set in proving me wrong in whatever way possible, almost like you have some sort of personal vendetta against me for daring to ask a question and try to come up with an solution.

Again, the point was never to make savescuming impossible, it was just to make sure that it was never OPTIMAL. Why don't you go back and re-read my posts another 5 times before trying to shitpost.

>When I play and RPG I want it to have a well designed system, not some shitty branching adventure
>muh RP part of RPG
and entirely missing the point of an rpg to begin with, without the player expression and the immersion of playing a role, there is no point for an rpg to even exist.
>Video games can't have this, there's no GM do adjust the story to your bullshit and fudge rolls to make your crap possible.
between Deus Ex, to Fallout, to Elder Scrolls, to Arcanum, to Ultima, to Planescape, to VTMB, all these experiences do their best to accommodate player expression and freedom to roleplay as their preferred character or identity both narratively and gameplay. focusing totally on simply numbers and mechanising every aspect of the experience and putting zero value in expression or roleplaying, and you might as well play a linear shitty jrpg, an mmo or even more exciting for you, accounting.

the purpose of statistics and levelling in an rpg is to mechanise the role and to simulate the feeling of progression and experience gaining, Humans specialise and learn, and so too does the character one creates and roleplays as. a blend of both character progression, and narrative/mechanical freedom, is what a true rpg is and has been efficiently recreated time and time again in the industry.

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Was it necessary to post it on /vr/ too, user?

Yes. /vr/ can have really interesting discussions about stuff like this. In fact I thought Yea Forums will only have shitposts and hoped /vr/ would be the real deal. I'm surprised we managed to discuss it ever here.

How would they know if it was more devestating? Either way it's a retarded immersion breaker.
The only "statless" way I can see working is something like what Dwarf Fortress does: each material type has its own physical properties(with magical properties currently in the works). But then you'd still need to make it clear what level of craftsmanship a weapon is, unless you intend to incorporate that uncertainty and potential scam factor into the game.

i just think your idea is shit and apparently every other developer in the entire world agrees with me, sorry dude

Planescape torment did this. Many seemingly casual dialogue choices pushed you towards lawful or chaotic without giving any indication.

When I was a kid I thought the game's called Planet Escape: Tournament.

>which dialogues are skill based
This. When you have 100 speech in New Vegas you've basically won all quests by clicking on whatever option says [SPEECH], for example the entire Legate Lanius conversation.
They should have the first option labeled [SPEECH] to indicate a speech check. Then, have the following options after the initial skill check be check-free and depend on the player's actual reading of the situation to select the correct or desired dialogue choice.

>They should have the first option labeled [SPEECH] to indicate a speech check. Then, have the following options after the initial skill check be check-free and depend on the player's actual reading of the situation to select the correct or desired dialogue choice.

Such an elegant solution. Why don't they do this?

>you should have no way of approximating how strong you are
This is what OP is trying to say. Based on my observations, I can conclude, that OP is in fact, a faggot.

Attached: Mark.png (493x639, 394K)

Is he wrong?

>I did not mean that you take pleasure in me not being able to do something. I meant that what you want will limit me just so you can extract more pleasure from these games. In contrast what I want will not place any limits upon you. How is it an attempt at making more people enjoy the game, when you're only taking into account your own desires?
Again, there is nothing actually stopping you from doing whatever you wan't, you can still savescum as much or as little as you want.
It is there to make sure that NO player will EVER feel forced to do it out of necessity since most of the time these players will do it becuase it is the most OPTIMAL way to play the game, not the most ENJOYABLE since it was probably never considered in the made up game that I'm ''making''.

Otherwise I would have to design the ''rolls'' around the fact that people would probably try to savescum them to make sure that most players wouldn't think it as a stupid mechanic and at that point players who are not or don't want to savescum would actually be forced to do it to find any enjoyment in the game or I would have to change the save system entierly which could be boon just as much as a detriment to the games overall design. At that point I would force your hand aswell becuase then you wouldn't be able to savescum at all.

>Please spare me your pseudo intellectual character assessment from a few lines of text.
The reason I wrote it is that you seem hell bent on me not ''stepping'' on you while completely ignoring the fact that my changes were never meant to force you to do anything. It was instead only meant to help others, not limit them. Sometimes, less is actually more.

>tfw OP gets his way
>can't tell how much fat is in my food now since OP thinks it's more immersive to experiment

>It has never been done, therefore it sucks
So I guess that fusion power and dysonspheres are just as stupid huh? You know, since they have never been done. You know what, we should all just fire all of our scientists aswell since 90% of what they are trying to do is all just doomed to fail anyways right?

>between Deus Ex, to Fallout, to Elder Scrolls, to Arcanum, to Ultima, to Planescape, to VTMB, all these experiences do their best to accommodate player expression and freedom to roleplay as their preferred character or identity both narratively and gameplay.
incidentally those are all broken messes with nk challenge to it. A good RPG is Dragon Quest XI draconian, all of its gameplay systems are oiled to perfection and the writing is stellar.

>It was instead only meant to help others, not limit them.
I'm going to have to ask you to summarize what your ideal savegame system is like before I can respond further. Everything you wrote so far was contrary to this sentence.

in current forms, no
if they built a game around it and improved immersion in other ways as well, possibly

People could still save scum until they have found the right set of choices.
First we have to eliminate the save function before we can start to have meaningful choices and consequences.

am i missing something or should they just be called japanese games and not japanese roleplaying games

He didn't say that it sucks because it hasn't been done before
He said that he thinks it sucks, and other people do too it seems. Due to the lack of vidya with the system implemented.
Nice reading comp

You sound like a genuine brainlet. Stat management is part of the fun, it doesn't take away from the roleplaying, only bad writing does that. Being able to try different builds and progress with your character in your own way gives you a sense of agency and investment in your playable character. If they're good at something, it's because you made it that way, if they fail catastrophically, that's on you.

>save scum choices that only show their impact 10 hours later in the game
No. You're not addressing the actual issue, you're just stopping people from circumventing the issue. Games with choices that only effect the immediate future are garbage.

It does not matter since you obviously are feeling attacked here. You are trying to defend the way that you play the game and ignoring why others would find that boring or why they would feel forced to play the way that you play.

All I can say is that no system is perfect and my thoretical system was meant as a way to make savescuming possible but unoptimal and that it would hopefully make a positive impact on a larger amount of players since I don't outright remove systems from the game, only incentives.

Spoken like a true bugman. Enjoy your jrpgs user, and have a nice day.

>He said that he thinks it sucks, and other people do too it seems. Due to the >>>>>>>lack of vidya with the system implemented.

If somebody wants to play a certain way, forcing them to play a different way by locking out a feature will have an adverse reaction on their enjoyment of that game.

>incidentally those are all broken messes with nk challenge to it.
either you haven't played any of them except one or two, or you are speaking in bad faith.
>A good RPG is Dragon Quest XI draconian
come on now

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>summarize your argument so we can debate further
>no you're being emotional
Fine be a faggot.

Not doing something because they don't think it's a good idea and not doing something because it's never been done before (and therefore sucks) are completely different
The former at least implies that a decision was made after weighing up whether or not it was a good idea, the latter is blindly skipping over it.
Please use your brain.

super easy to fix, just save the seed for lockpicking rolls

Op has shit opinions, would make for decent pasta for a few months i believe.

>It does not matter since you obviously are feeling attacked here.
lmao imagine arguing like this

But how the fuck can we prove that any developer has ever looked at that particular save system and went ''Nah mate, that fucking sucks. Better come up with something else'' and not just skipped over it without ever thinking about it?
The answer is, we can't. And that user acted like a huge cunt so I responded in kind.

>minmaxing is figuring out whether a sword is effective or not

Imagine being this retarded lmao

I bet you think militaries should stop minmaxing their weapons too.

Can't prove they haven't either, really
I don't think it's that hard of an idea to come up with personally, I can only assume that it has been discussed in some similar form before, but that's just my opinion.

Icycalm is a turbo autists when he was most active, even by Yea Forums's standards. His writings on games were and are absurd, and he judges things on a scale that is exclusive to him alone.

It's just that current Yea Forums has degraded so much that even his stuff seems reasonable and well thought out. Go read some books on Game Design so you can clean out all the gunk you picked up here.

>kotor
>dominated by strategy and action
you can literally set the leveling and character stats to auto-build and just cruise through every area with three lightsabers and so long as you pay enough attention to cycle your party during combat the ally ai will automatically queue the most effective actions. outside of conversations puzzles and moving around the entire game can be run on autopilot

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because pcheats would just mod it out

>I can only assume that it has been discussed in some similar form before, but that's just my opinion.
Exactly, which is why I was acting like a passive-aggressive bitch. That user didn't actually care about the argument, just that he was ''right'' and I was ''wrong''.

>You know, since they have never been done
Because they aren't doable
A cooldown on saving system is easily doable

On another matter, many games have a 'hardcore' difficulty with no savescumming for those people that can't surpress the urge to do it and yet know they decrease the enjoyment from the game by doing it

Imagine being unable to control yourself so much that you need the developer to conceal mechanics and handhold you into having fun.

If you can't stop yourself from minmaxing all the time that you need developers to hide stats from you then maybe you are the autistic problem, not the game.

>Indeed, in my days as gamemaster back in high school I used to roll all the dice behind a screen: my players would simply tell me the action they wanted their characters to perform and I would respond with the result, without them ever having to calculate anything.
I vomited in my mouth a little

You are wrong, nigger.

>play CRPG
>have all my stats revealed to me
>know what all my equipment does, and if I don't I can identify it
>don't know how my numbers impact the world

>DnD
>have all my stats revealed to me
>know what all my equipment does, and if I don't I can identify it
>don't know how my numbers impact the world

I don't understand what you're arguing for OP

>Imagine being unable to control yourself so much that you need the developer to conceal mechanics and handhold you into having fun.
This is such a common problem that developers literally have to plan for it. Your mentality does not conform with what reality is, if it did the gaming landscape would be much different than what it is now.

Have you tried not playing DnD? There are hundreds of tabletop RPG and almost all of them are far better designed than DnD.

Ah, so you're upset that these crpgs don't play exactly like the specific games you like to play. I guess it was obvious, but pro-tip, if you're game involves collecting a lot of equipment, numbers save a whole lot of time and tedium for both min maxing sweats, role playing faggots, and everyone in between.

Seriously, numbers don't take away from roleplay. Your actions define it. I put big numbers in strength and low numbers in int because I want to be a big retarded barbarian, but if i start making decision where he acts like a rational intellect, then I'd be fucking with my original goal for this roleplaying session.

It's not about how the game is presented, it's about how you play it.

Why did this old pasta get so much attention?

It's called a tabletop rpg, calling it a real-life rpg just confuses things.

There's a real obvious answer to that dude. Just don't design your game with arbitrary stat limits. It's completely optional and would be an obviously terrible idea if you're going to hide stats from the player.

Too many newfags that don't know Icy.

I disagree with you, choosing stats for a character is an integral part of most RPGS video or tabletop. That's like, the while thing, you can be a weak but slick talking sick (read:low STR, HIGH CHA) OR something analogous, it is not purely historical, it gives concrete presence to role playing elements. You may as well say there is no need for alignments in DND, because characters scrip s should just speak for themselves. But choosing an alignment or stats at the outset is giving oneself a goal for the role they are trying to play, idiot.

most of Yea Forums is post-2016

funnily /vr/ still hasn't caught on and the thread gets serious replies.

Is it not a topic that warrants serious replies?

it's icyposting, you retort by shitposting back. Scoring in shmups is for aspies and fagots.

Is it not?

Oh boy I sure want to play a mind numbingly tedious "role" playing game where my role is being an equivalent of an amnesiac potato who dont even know what he is capable of in the most basic sense

I don't completely agree with OP, but not knowing the exact numbers =/= not knowing how good is your char at smth. You can have a like a 5 star rating system with actual 100 point based system hidden from the player.

>hide stats
>player is forced to blindly guess everything
r-read the manual...

>I want more ambiguity in my RPGs

Why? How does that make anything better?

>some faggot on the internet owns an opinion
I don't think so.

Well, yeah, W in WRPG stand for watered.

A dungeon master also has the ability to fudge rolls or come up with alternatives on the fly to prevent players from getting stuck. CRPGs don't have that luxury.

>I've never met or heard of anyone in the videogame industry who realizes this.
Probably because it's a bad idea.

>When computers enter the scene, there is absolutely NO REASON why the player should have to see any numbers on the screen. Indeed, in my days as gamemaster back in high school I used to roll all the dice behind a screen: my players would simply tell me the action they wanted their characters to perform and I would respond with the result, without them ever having to calculate anything.
You do know that just about every tabletop RPG comes with a book that outlines the stats of everything in the game, right? Using them as an example doesn't really support your point.

And the player would know this how?

Maybe get reading comprehension. The idea is that players just don't see the numbers, not that they don't exist.

From the shord's shape/model etc. In Arx Fatalis the better swords look better. The game still shows numbers, of course, but it's plainly obvious even without them.

>How is it gonna be difficult if you always choose the sword with the highest numbers?
If choosing the sword with the highest numbers means you become invincible, that's a problem with the sword, not the fact that its numbers were visible. I mean, it sounds like you're basically saying that CRPGs should all have weapons that remove all challenge from combat, and the real challenge of the game is tediously testing every weapon in order to find that one overpowered weapon.

Is there a video game that even follows this design?

>I've never met or heard of anyone in the videogame industry who realizes this.
I've heard it said thousands of times. Virtually all modern RPG devs have said it's archaic shit that needs to go and they've said it many times. It frequently comes up in interviews. It's frequently the subject of conferences and talks. It was pretty much the entire basis for the RPG "revolution" of last gen. From Bioware to Bethesda to even Obsidian they have all said this and the response from normal gamers is "Yes, I agree." but the response from elitist gamer fucks who balk at any form of change in the industry is anger and abuse directed towards the people who made the statement as well as the ridiculous claim they don't "get" what RPGs are supposed to be.

>stats MUST be hidden from the player
>This is how CRPGs should work
why though?

The OP text was written in 2008.

Retarded Bethesda/Bioware cucks try to avoid it by making the games less of games.

This. CRPGs are bad simulations of bad simulation of fantasy that is D&D (see stats and shitload of rolls). Tabletops moved past it with systems that are more story based or more focused on specific aspects (for example no rolls for climbing if it's not the focus of the game, but more robust combat). CRPGs need to move past these kind of stats and rolls and use the tools that they have: gameplay.

>elitist
Most people arguing for it are casuals. They want their games to be designed in a way that doesn't punish the player for horrible decisions.

>Maybe get reading comprehension. The idea is that players just don't see the numbers, not that they don't exist.
Take your own advice. The point was that the numbers are as readily available to players in a tabletop game as they are in most CRPGs.

>From the shord's shape/model etc. In Arx Fatalis the better swords look better.
That's fucking ridiculous. Everyone has different ideas about what looks "better", because aesthetics are subjective. You'd have to dedicate a whole section of the manual to explaining what visual traits are supposed to indicate better quality. That would be no different from just putting a number next to the sword, except it would be a bigger pain in the ass for both the developer and the player.

You can also do it with a bit more subtlety by establishing a pattern for how dialogue choices are listed. A lot of games do this by having the friendly/do-gooder options on top and the hostile/dickhead options on the bottom, with the more neutral options in the middle.

Nah I think modern CRPGs is fine with the numbers. My only problem is the most important stats are buried in other tabs and pages. Also they should reduce the clutter and group the most important ones together, and not follow a fucking pen and paper lay out. Geezus.

Also harems/polygamy should be in all modern CRPGs, as well as include a nude photobook of your trophy waifus.

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Sometimes he's right though, like in OP's article where he bashes MMOs and JRPGs. Or the article where he mocks people who still ask the "are games art?" question.

But then you get shit like his Cave Story review and his Doom review and you want to die.

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>It's the opposite. If the boss is easy than the numbers won't matter. If it's hard you're gonna need all the help you can get
This.

>lol tard, the game might as well unlock and give you stronger swords for you at set intervals to keep the difficulty just right
Yes, they should. That's the whole point of gear progression. How the fuck else are you supposed to do it?

>Hide numbers
>Nerds use CE to see numbers anyway
wow

Does that happen often? DMs secretly helping a player who may be getting frustrated by a run of bad rolls?
(I'd think they'd prioritize fun over statistical accuracy, but I don't know.)

>an iron sword somehow cuts a goblin more than a bronze sword

There you go, the whole concept of RPGs is designed around stupid bullshit like that. It makes more sense that a sword always does the same damage, but has different properties given by magic.

Ex:
sword 1 = normal sword
sword 2 = longer sword, hits father
sword 3 = fire enchanted, can set enemies on fire
sword 4 = damage enchanted, does more damage than normal sword

>sword 2 = longer sword, hits father
NO NOT DAD

>without the player expression and the immersion of playing a role, there is no point for an rpg to even exist.
If numbers stand on the way of your immersion then go watch fucking movies. Fags like you who are afraid of video games being fucking GAMES are the reason the industry in such a deep shit right now.
>Fallout
>VTMB
Only two examples that offer something significant in terms of roleplay: Malkavian, Nosferatu and 1INT build in Fallout. All at the cost at rewriting the entire fucking game.
Here's better example for you: Crusader Kings 2. It offers more possibilities of actual roleplay than everything you listed combined while the game is just a fucking map, character sheets and countless dice rolls.

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>Play CRPG with no stats
>Get fucking rekt in combat
>Absolutely no way of knowing why

Go back to playing DnD with your brainlet friends.

>But if I were to answer it, I'd say you're an autistic inhuman robot that can't understand that it's more interesting to see the direct effects of your actions than just a number.
But seeing a number *is* seeing the direct effects of your actions, in a form that's easy to understand. It's really no different from having a character turn green if they're poisoned or something, though you'd probably be opposed to that as well.

>>Get fucking rekt in combat
>>Absolutely no way of knowing why
You can observe things without having to boil them down to a number. If your strength is low, you would notice that enemies did not stagger much. If you were having trouble dodging your agility is to blame. If your attacks were ineffective then you might be using the wrong damage type or your blade might be dull. Use your God-given sense of discovery to work it out.

>There you go, the whole concept of RPGs is designed around stupid bullshit like that.
Arguably it's not stupid bullshit. Certain materials can hold a sharper blade and maintain it for longer. Durability is a thing in real life. Materials matter.

>In CRPGs, stats MUST be hidden from the player
In your entire post you didn't once explain why it must be. Because you like it better that way is not a valid answer.

Not all games that are labeled RPG's are actually role-playing games, they are linear adventure games or dungeon grinders with turn-based combat systems. This is a fault with the genre label, not with the underlying mechanics.

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>lol tard, you deny the idea a game could exist where it could be interesting to not always use the weapon with biggest numbers
A game could absolutely work like that, but it has nothing to do with whether or not the player can see the numbers. If I see that Sword 1 does 15 normal damage and Sword 2 does 10 damage but also makes me immune to some trick a lot of enemies use, I'm probably going to use Sword 2.

How are you supposed to know that you have low STR or DEX or how that affects your ability to stun or dodge if the numbers are hidden?

If only real life had visible stats you'd see that you rolled an 8 for INT and wouldn't talk so much.

It's literally the opposite effect. Uncertainty breeds risk-aversion. True in economics and in games

It happens if your DM wants you to have fun and isn't a dick.

>and isn't a dick
Some players deserve it though. If you're a DM and you don't intentionally screw over some metagaming faggot that nobody likes, you're doing it wrong.

Dragon Quest is not a CRPG just so you know.

>How are you supposed to know that you have low STR or DEX or how that affects your ability to stun or dodge if the numbers are hidden?
By observing the animations when you land an attack and the effect blows physically have on the enemy's movement. For agility it would be simpler, you would notice you were too slow to get out of the way. I'm not advocating for, like, Dark Souls 2 shit where your agility stat determines how many iframes your dodge has without changing the animation. That's offensively lazy. I mean how fast you'd move and how quick you could recover.

>then instead of Strength and Dex and Int being your stats you can have weird shit like limb acceleration and foot traction and step distance, and instead of a check being
>Rotten door: 5 str to break down
>it would a physics interaction where you need to be able to generate enough force through the various ways you character can move, the weight of the thing they're swinging etc.
Down that road lies FATAL.

This. People who really want more harsh restrictions will impose them on themselves. They don't need the game to do it for them and fuck over people who don't want such things.

And how is any of that better than the game simply telling you how fast your swing is, how long the recovery is, how much edged damage it deals, etc? If players want to learn that the 'organic' way, they can just not look at the stats and have fun with their trial and error game.

Listen here you chucklefuck, until the game is a perfect simulation of reality where actions return tangible results measurable by some visible observation of the effect, numbers are necessary for the player to know what and how shit is actually working.
When you're doing your little DM shit, you have =IMAGINATION= to describe things EXACTLY, allowing the player to understand the what and how.

A computer is limited to the numbers. The move to computers means that the presence of all of the numbers and variables and calculations is necessary, because it is no longer possible for someone to very specifically speak out the details in a descriptive manner with a great degree of nuance. You are exactly wrong.

Stats need to be visible, because you need some sort of grasp on what your character can or can't do. What shouldn't happen though, is a game allowing you to increase stats manually and increase stats your not specialized in. So no becoming a demigod by the end of game and no more going from one play style to another, breaking the role playing.

>how is any of that better than the game simply telling you
You shouldn't have to ask this question. Play more games.
>If players want to learn that the 'organic' way, they can just not look at the stats
What games do you have in mind when you type this? You're essentially making the "NO one's FORCING you to FAST TRAVEL" argument, but stats are always intertwined with menus and equipment and shit, like in every RPG I've played with a shop there's no way to determine if a sword is better or what it does without it being explained in stats. how exactly do I ignore that?

OP is right and this thread is filled with attention deficit zoomers whose eyes light up when they see big numbers on the screen

>Play more games
I have. Games at this current state cannot convey the information you want them to. You should play more games.

None of what you suggest is feasible at this point in time. Not only can it not be done easily, it can't be done period. The hardware isn't there, you'd need what is practically a simulation of reality to achieve that. Even Dwarf Fortress, with all its autistic complications, has to cut a lot of corners.

OP is wrong and you are an attention deficit zoomer whose eyes light up when they see FUTURE IS NOW on the screen

>I don't want to be given the option to save scum though. Its sole existence makes the gameplay shallower because you know you're holding yourselr back by not pressing F9 and trying again.
You also know you're holding yourself back by not activating god mode. So what? Does that mean games should never have cheats because some people are incapable of not using them when they're there?

>I like Underrail's saving system. Only save out of combat, never during.
That's how many RPGs work.

It sounds like you're talking about people who instantly reload the moment a single die roll doesn't go their way. I think that phenomenon is far less common than you assume. And even if it isn't, what do you care how other people play a game?

>FUTURE IS NOW
I don't understand the reference

How is any of this impossible? The strength and agility examples could be achieved through pure numbers shit without any additional art assets having to be made. The values to tweak would be shit like
>What types of hits (headshot, legshot, etc) put enemy in stagger?
>How many hits before a stagger is a knockdown?
>How long does stagger and knockdown last?
The agility ones would be like
>How many times in a row can the player dodge?
>What's the recovery time between any given action and dodging being available?

Wasn't any specific reference, just the overwhelming amount of times the gaming industry has tried to advertise their product and ideas being so great that they're like something from the future, but coming out now.
Just look at all the shit peter molyneux has done. Remember project milo?

Partially correct but also retarded. games shouldn't give you things like damage dealt, enemy health bars, or even probability chances for certain skills as explicitly given values, strikes should reinforce their effectiveness, enemies should naturally show weakness as they near death, interactions should indicate to the extent of which they had failed, it shouldn't give you an outirght value to achieve this goal, characters actions should even give a personal interpretation of probability that is impacted by a players own confidence.
You have 2 major flaws. a player character isn't a newly created being with no knowledge of their own ability, so they would need some way to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the character they are roleplaying so that a character can enter that role without having to spend a lot of trial and error trying to figure out these things themselves. Following off of this, and this is the second flaw the player isn't 100% the player character so they need some indication of success with all interactions because the player has no real baseline of all relevant activities, even if it's one the player would have expected to have encountered before, the player may have middling agility and may not have any idea whether they are able to jump over a bank or not, even though it's such a simple task that the player should have expected to come up against it many different times, the player would have no idea whether this task is even achievable with their current ability. Some kind of indication is needed because you are role playing a character that has already existed beforehand.
I hope you never enter the industry, you are pretentious wank with no real ability relevant to video game design
I envy that you had friends to RP with in high school.

>And hell, if you really want to break the game you can always just use console commands or save editors to do it.
But that's really no different from using save scumming. Why do you find yourself incapable of resisting the temptation to save scum and yet perfectly capable of resisting the temptation to use console commands or save editors?

Then most wouldn’t play it

You really need to try to imagine how your shitty ideas could be incorporated into an actual game, and how the game would interpret that data. If your ideas were put into play, we'd get something like Exanima. That game is a fun gimmick but nothing more.

>A game where you play as a game dev in the future releasing games in the past and finding success because of the seemingly evolved development technology

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Peter was ahead of his time, when you think about it

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>gating the majority of the game's best stuff to good natured characters only, when in reality it'd be the opposite
Saying that only selfish pricks should get good stuff is as bad as saying that only do-gooders should get good stuff.

Reality is harsh, not bad. Selfish competent pricks should naturally have much more than do-gooder competent pushovers.

kys

Yes, we get it, you're so much smarter than all of us because you think selfishness is a virtue. Now kindly fuck off.

Yes, we get it, you got an F on the test but because a "selfish prick" got an A, the professor didn't curve the grade.
You were busy diverting funds towards roads and agriculture while CaoCao surrounded your hippy commune with an army, we know.

RPG is an outdated, inaccurate term and needs to be replaced

>without the help of a computer the players are forced to do this boring work themselves.
You have this backwards.
The reason why stats exist is because its a game, and a game needs rules to function. In most games, it's important for players to understand those rules as much as possible. When a referee calls a foul, most of the time the referee is explicit about the violated rule and the consequence. Occasionally, explanations might be omitted for the sake of expedience, as in association football, but most games are explicit. The move patterns of each piece are not hidden from the player in Chess. There's no game master hiding the rules behind a screen and saying "yea" or "nay" forcing players to scientifically determine the move patterns for each piece, which is what happens in cRPGs when lazy or overthinking designers hide stats and calculations from the players.

In an RPG the game pieces are the PCs, NPCs, and monsters defined by their stats. While the interaction between game pieces in an RPG and the gamespace is more open-ended than a typical game, it is still a game heavily oriented around tactical combat.

Hiding dice rolls behind a screen is a small gimmick to enhance immersion and play-acting in a tabletop RPG. Unlike a computer, a GM can always make sure that the players know what is reasonable to know about any given situation, and if you (the GM) fuck up the description on the first try, you can fix your mistake as soon as you realize the players don't properly understand, without necessarily revealing stats and dice rolls. Often this feedback loop probably happens without you even realizing it, simply as part of normal human communication.

That doesn't happen with a computer GM. While hiding mechanics from a player can streamline a UI, outright preventing a player from understanding the game is usually bad design.

(cont.)
This guy gets it: Excellent summation.

Lots of terms are. There's little strategy in Starcraft, it's all tactics and action.
People call warframe an MMO when everything is instanced and very few players can appear at once.
Any game with permadeath or random generation is called a roguelike.
None of this will be changed because gaming is a social tool for people, they identify under those genre names to promote themselves.

>By observing the animations when you land an attack and the effect blows physically have on the enemy's movement. For agility it would be simpler, you would notice you were too slow to get out of the way. I'm not advocating for, like, Dark Souls 2 shit where your agility stat determines how many iframes your dodge has without changing the animation. That's offensively lazy. I mean how fast you'd move and how quick you could recover.
So in this hypothetical system of yours, how does character creation work? How does a player decide to give their character higher STR, DEX, INT, or whatever else at the beginning of the game? How do they increase their attributes during levelup? You'd have to provide some representation of this in the game's interface so that the player can do it, which would be basically the same thing as showing the numbers.

It was never really accurate. But before the influx of method-acting fags roleplaying polyamorous furry courtesans and other stupid shit, it was understood that an RPG was a game first and foremost and one heavily oriented around tactical combat and exploring hazardous dungeons and puzzling labyrinths.

An ironman mode option would be better. That's actually what a lot of games do.
Then you can take away your own option to savescum if you don't want to be tempted.

Also a game with no visible stats wouldn't work unless there aren't really stats, like Zelda. At most, have vague pseudo-stat upgrades like "increased melee damage" or the ability to cast more spells.

People probably don't even want to play fully realistic simulations anyway. Even if they existed, they wouldn't take the place of tactical games or action games with well-defined abstract rules and mechanics.

There's one huge issue I feel like this entire thread has missed. The fact most roleplay is a social endeavor and most videogame RPGs are solitary single player experiences. The reason most videogame RPGs don't emulate actual tabletop RPGs is the lack of social interaction. Most games are just games so in the end are played as games. People with the will to immerse themselves will do it regardless of whatever immersion-breaking elements people view as being present whether they be numbers or any other sorts of visible mechanics. The reason people tend to not do so is because acting and role playing alone has little point without other people to show off to and play off of.

For actual "role play" you have to legitimately go to the multiplayer sphere. There, the amount of mechanics means jack crap. People RP in Gmod, WoW, Minecraft, etc. The amount of numbers and technical systems can be absurd, but people will RP with extreme ease if there are other people present and they will use those numbers and technical systems or any other such things to support their "role play". Same with a person choosing specific classes, feats, or perks in a tabletop game, they will use their analogues in any multiplayer game to convey the same idea/role. There is no point to hiding those mechanics. They're the same tool whether they're in rulebooks or in games.

Sui Generis deserve shilling, it has unironically one of the best melee combat systems in vidya.

yeah believe it or not Adventure Games are more story-focused than RPGs traditionally were, because RPGs are descended from tactical wargaming (Chainmail). RPGs are about applying those tactical combat principles to a sword and sorcery adventures (and subsequently other settings) in a more thorough and open-ended way. It's wasn't supposed to be about play-acting through a narrative the way adventure games have always been.

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7 hours later, but you sound like an insufferable GM.

>It was never really accurate
dont try and pretend DnD wasnt designed to be a roleplaying game

Skill in sword: pretty good

That was hard

Playing with the numbers is a big part of such games by design, you dolt.

The issue with cRPGs is shitty settings and writing. Baldur's Gate with turn-based combat and Fallout's setting would have been great. But RTwP and shitty, generic high fantasy? No thanks.

This is a good bait post because it's true.
The real world is also made of stats and numbers that are hidden from the player, unless you make a tedious and concerted effort to deduce what they are (and even then you might not have a clear answer).
HP is a good example of RPG's getting shit wrong in action, because being solidly hit with an axe is going to fuck anyone up in 1 swing even if it doesn't outright kill you, and no level of training or personal fitness is going to help you. The reason HP should be 'hidden' from the player, is because it's just a numeric abstraction for 'how dead are you right now?' and doesn't really need to exist.

I don't think you can have a better RPG system than IRL.
Anyone who disagrees is plainly a casual.

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yeah CRPGs really want to have the authentic RPG experience with meaningful death and status changes (petrification, etc.). The problem is especially in a game like Baldur's Gate, trivial amounts of save scumming is ridiculously effective and often just makes far more sense than going through the tedious hassle of resurrection and restoring level drain and shit.

CRPGS are about wanking tabletop games, they will never be hidden.

oh it was. Your problem is that roleplaying game doesn't mean what you think it means.

I'm pretty sure roleplaying means roleplaying
sure DnD came from tactical wargames but it became a roleplaying game, and that was intentional

>HP is a good example of RPG's getting shit wrong in action, because being solidly hit with an axe is going to fuck anyone up in 1 swing even if it doesn't outright kill you, and no level of training or personal fitness is going to help you. The reason HP should be 'hidden' from the player, is because it's just a numeric abstraction for 'how dead are you right now?' and doesn't really need to exist.

I heard this as an argument supporting regenerating health. Imagine a real shootout. You either die quickly or you don't die at all. In a game, if you don't die, your health might as well regenerate and ready you for a new shootout where you either die fast or not at all.

wow, finally a non-shit post.
I agree, all the indication you need is "Strength: above average" etc. Instead, we have skinner boxes that for some reason also have fanfiction-tier quests.

Obscuring numbers BUT leaving all mechanics intact is dumbass idea. Better decision in this case is streamlining mechanics and making them more apparent visually. Simplest example would be making every other sword look unique, so weakest one is wooden toy, and strongest one is overdesigned anime blade.
On top of that, certain mechanics simply have to go. Namely, nearly all cases of RNG-related fuckery like crit/elemental/fail chances. They should either have chances large enough to be apparent right away, or instead should be reworked entirely. Like, for example, making sword swings that land on someone's head crit 100% of time. At which point we are really going into action game territory, and one can't not wonder if they should just drop stats and balance raw damage/health numbers without multilayered formulas.

Speaking of which, I really came to hate RNG-shit lately. Critical hits were invented because:
a) Can't aim at some part of body in most of RPGs (and about 50% of games in general)
b) Gotta somehow account for the case that eventually your character can slice someone's head off thanks to careful aim
Any game that has any kind of aiming should drop RNG, because it's approximation of what you are already actually doing.

I don't understand why someone would leverage this complaint against cRPGs specifically but not RPGs in general. It's clear the issue here is that cRPGs are simply more complex for a lot of people, but cRPGs aren't trying to please said people, only the niche they serve. To make numbers invisible is to ask for trouble.

What OP is asking is to simply streamline cRPGs, which is a big no-no.
Agree. IMO, most JRPGs are not RPGs. Neither are many western RPGs, but western RPGs usually fall into one of these categories, from maximum to minimum roleplaying:
1. Fallout: create your character, develop your personality as you wish.
2. Mass Effect: set protagonist, develop your personality within reasonable limits.
3. Wizardry: create your character, but no personality development to be seen.

On the other hand, JRPGs usually don't let you develop your personality.

Everquest is a great example of a game both showing mechanics effectively and hiding them pointlessly. This led to players needing to conduct scientific experiments to learn about the game. For one simple example, I recall players proving that the in-game description of spellcasting specialization was flat-out incorrect. But it took like 1-2 years until someone thought to devise a test that would actually confirm the described mechanics. (I believe it was something like the description saying you save a random amount of mana, while tests proved it was a fixed amount).

If the game actually showed the raw mana numbers (rather than hiding them as a percentage bar), this would have been discovered right away and players never would have been pointlessly confused about how the specialization mechanic actually worked.

that's called a bug

I refuse to accept that stats MUST be hidden from the player.
For one, if all stats are hidden from the player, then the player has no frame of reference for anything in the game. They will just try to figure out what the stats are through trial and error or give up entirely due to a feeling of helplessness.
However, if none of the calculations are hidden, then the player will either become overwhelmed and quit or become obsessed with min/maxing.
To create an enjoyable game, the developer must strike a balance between these two mutually exclusive concepts.
Requiring any and every game to show off some arbitrary number of stats would limit creative expression and player agency considerably.
Have you ever made a game?

Minmaxing >>>> genuine roleplaying.

>At which point we are really going into action game territory, and one can't not wonder if they should just drop stats and balance raw damage/health numbers without multilayered formulas.
So you're admitting that you think the way to improve RPGs is to make them not be RPGs.

If your idea is so good, prove it by making it. Programming isn't that hard, get to it. If it's good, you'll prove us all wrong. You'll just be making a VN, though.

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Actually, I believe in English it's properly referred to as a "percentile scale."

The only times stats need to be hidden is when the player has no chance to modify them.

e.g. Dragon Quest doesn't let you improve your hitrate. So why would the game show the player his hit chance? Moreover, many JRPGs use very linear progressions, going from Bronze Sword 20dmg to Steel Sword 30dmg, so if the game doesn't show any other stats it is because it is implied the Steel Sword is the better weapon, period. This is not the case in many cRPGs where weapons have many stats that make choosing the "best" weapon a pointless affair, since you simply choose the one you like best.

Having every weapon list their damage output and nothing else defeats the complexity of such a weapon system.

In my opinion your opinion is a bad one

I like numbers, maybe you’re just a brainlet

Stats shouldn't exist, just roll a d20 and decide if it worked or not based on how close to 20 it was.
This is how so many people do it and it is painfully obvious.

This thread reinforces my belief that ironman with permadeath is the best way to play CRPGs. Can't have risk without risk.

christ stop being a tard
Roleplay specifically meant to roleplay as a dungeon-diving adventurer.
Roleplay meant that the game was more open-ended than a wargame. Strength didn't just mean attack strength but also shit like being able to bend bars and lift gates. Even the most narrative-oriented dnd modules were mostly about combat and dungeon crawling.

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Slaves.

Oh, thanks for your reply because you reminded me of a point I wanted to make.
Developers are to decide which stats are non-trivial and necessary for "ideal player agency."
So, I really like your example of DQ hiding hit chance since the player has no input on that stat.
Actually, your response also reminds me of how modern Arpgs mostly do away with rng hit chance and use hit/hurtboxes.

*Staves

Right dumbass, which doesn't happen in a tabletop game unless the GM deliberately lies to you in which case you shouldn't play with him.
The fact is that there was absolutely NOTHING positive added to the gameplay experience by hiding mana numbers. When they were added to the UI later on, not a single person found the game less immersive as a result. Meanwhile, the pointless hiding details prevented a bug from being discovered for far longer than it should have been.

It depends on the type of FPS you're making. If you're going for hard realism, damage should just be represented as some combination of slower movement and shakier aim until you die or heal somehow with no visible health bar.

If you want an arena shooter like Quake you can parameterize health by adding some sci-fi shit about battery powered kinetic shielding and suddenly your battery % might as well be your health bar. Dead Space basically did as much to 'hide' the health bar.

If you're talking about guns in an RPG, what you actually want to do is roll percentile die modified by whatever the shooter's guns skill is to determine a miss or hit as well as the consequences of a hit. You don't need the player to see a HP number or percentile hit chance or any of that shit, just qualitative descriptions of how difficult enemies are to hit and how injured they appear to be.

>play bg1
>get instagibbed by the ogre as soon as you leave candlekeep
>have to do the tutorial again
no thanks

Most dialogue in adventure games aren't really immersive experiences because you quickly find out that there are correct choices, incorrect choices, and those that either deliver a joke or a hint. Very rarely will any of these conversations let you express yourself outside Shepard or Geralt snarking or being stoic and the game ultimately gives you a sly wink then goes back to what it was doing. Like other people said, the game you want just isn't practical to make in a video game now.

I'd like to hope you simply fish for another (You), but there is big chance you actually are a cretin who can't read for shit.
No, I don't think you can improve RPGs by making them not RPGs. I think that if you go the route OP suggests, it's very likely that making an action game will be better way to spend money and development time.
I also think that many "RPGs" would be more enjoyable if they were simply action games with large worlds and more dialogues than at few points along the straight and narrow of their stories. Because while OPs suggestion is stupid, many RPGs are indeed way too tied up in race for more larger numbers.

I think maybe you just don't like RPGs.

>your response also reminds me of how modern Arpgs mostly do away with rng hit chance and use hit/hurtboxes
note that every step that ARPGs take in this direction makes them less of an RPG at all and into just being an action game. A game like Dark Souls, which has a world that almost entirely an interconnection of action levels and has almost entirely removed the tactical element from combat to replace it with a block-and-dodge focused action system is not an RPG in any traditional sense of the word.

Can a non-brainlet tell me exactly how do you create a character in an RPG without revealing them to the player as stat sheets?
Even if you just use symbols or whatever, it's still going to correspond to numbers.

>creating, in the process, generations of players with an unhealthy numbers fetishism who miss the point of role-playing entirely.
Having recently introduced a bunch of friends to ttrpgs for the first time this has been really noticeable. They're so used to playing video games that they all just latched onto their character sheets as a list of tools and ways to interact with the game world. Practically no imagination or roleplaying at all. It's been hard getting them to think outside the box.

not the samefag but I'm pretty sure you have almost no pen n paper RPG experience

most at least somewhat popular PnP systems are focused around combat
and essentially all DnD campaigns that were or are being played are dungeon crawlers / hack n slash

there are exceptions, but it's a minority

his writing is good, he seems to be almost the only person that's not a complete pseud writing artsy nonsense that goes down to the basic principles of what is good in gaming. Even if you disagree, it's not arbitrary.

Munchkins have always existed.

you just made that definition up to apply to DnD

>It's a game, not a number sorting simulator.
NO NO NO NO NO NO HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
MATHLETS ON SUICIDE WATCH!

>uncertainty incentivizes risk taking
Maybe "incentivize" isn't the right word but yes. Including chance leads to risk-based decision-making, and some degree of this usually enhances a tactical game.
Even in a game like Final Fantasy Tactics, where most attacks have a fixed amount and 100% hit rates are routine, there's still a to-hit roll that sometimes comes into play. You wind up with options such as:
1. Attack this knight head on at 60% hit rate and then move away to safety.
2. Maneuver to the side for a 100% hit, but using up your move will leave you surrounded by enemies whose turns are coming up.

Yeah because that's how reality actually happened. The term was adapted and used to describe the new kind of game that D&D pioneered.

How do you need numbers? Do you need 40/40 HP counters above enemies in FPS games and damage number popups (which always looks like shit)? Do you need mario to explain the equations of his movement to you in the tutorial? Why do I need numbers to know if my barbarian can bench press either a horse or an elephant? You seem like you take video games too seriously, in the sense that you want to be able to mathematically minmax your build in a singleplayer RPG.

roleplaying game means roleplaying game
changing the definition of the words to suit the most popular one doesnt help anyone
D&D is a roleplaying game because it has elements of roleplaying, it has nothing to do with what you're roleplaying as, there's RPGs where you roleplay as all sorts of stupid shit

That's because D&D started the modern genre and was literally based off and started as a mod for the wargame Chainmail.
It's not like this is ancient history or something.

Because all of your examples are conveniently action-based games, as opposed to proper RPGs.

> whoa this sword has only 10 damage but 1.5 attack rate which makes it better than my 12 dmg 1 attack rate sword
> I am roleplaying!

>The only times stats need to be hidden is when the player has no chance to modify them.
The most important reason to hide stats is when displaying them is redundant, confusing or overwhelming and when it adds unnecessary clutter to the UI.
When a divegrass referee blows the whistle and points his hand for a free kick without elaborating on what the foul was (it was probably obvious to the players anyway), that's done to keep the game flowing smoothly. Meanwhile in basketball, where stoppage is part of routine gameplay anyway and there's no free-running clock, referees are explicit about every call.

Ideally you'll have interface layers, where all the relevant information is available for anyone that wants to dig for it, but the most relevant gameplay information is prioritized.

OK so you are just autistic. Sorry hope you can find help.

You sound like Extra Credits writer

Very very true. Number games are why I stopped giving a shit about RPGs. Skyrim did it absolutely right.

nice argument

Just don't make randomized gear and remove numbers. Done, works. Individually testing all your shitty loot doesn't.

This isn't a terrible idea. Instead of taking a shortsword skill that says +2 attack roll with shortswords, just have a skill called "shortswords". You know it'll make you better with the weapon but not how much or in what way. Players can still direct their build, but they'll have to do so qualitatively, rather than just trying to milk points-plus out of everything. That really would make for more roleplaying because you'd be doing/taking what sounds good to you instead of just running arithmetic.

Exanima is a little bit like this.

What you mean by rpg is "game where I can put items on a paperdoll so my power becomes maximum". In which case stats ARE important, but it's not roleplaying, just minmaxing. What noncombat RPG mechanics would require you to minmax?

>Indeed, in my days as gamemaster back in high school I used to roll all the dice behind a screen: my players would simply tell me the action they wanted their characters to perform and I would respond with the result, without them ever having to calculate anything.

Yikes.

99,99% of "rpgs" are just dungeon crawlers with a pseudo-lore, prove me wrong.

I, for one, agree with OP.
Numbers suck.
Instead of an experience, the game becomes a simple autistic math puzzle to solve. Sure, there are games specifically designed around muh big stats and calculating the optimal builds, and there are people who like that & there is nothing wrong with it.
But when a game is supposed to be a ROLE PLAYING GAME and has a simplistic system implemented in it, D&D or whatever the fuck, it adds nothing. It leads to stupid, stupid munch shit.
Examples: choosing a specific dialogue option over another just to get a better piece of gear/more XP despite not liking it and it not making sense for the character to do
rigid skill checks that suck all the mystery out of the game (you can sexually dominate that orc if you have 18+ Strength) and sometimes you even can see the skillchecking option even if you don't have a big enough stat, which can be good or bad depending on context
Chance of success shown in percentage. If the game is not turn-based something where every turn counts, then what the fuck. What, the actual, fuck. You couldn't unlock that chest? Try again. Jammed? Load the save, bro. ITS FUCKING POINTLESS
This kills the RPG. Many, many 'tists with 0 imagination/aphantasia fail to understand or are simply incapable of understanding that rpgs are about roleplaying, about immersing into the fantasy and not grinding muh numbers. You shouldn't create a new character because this one can't use the maxdps meta, you should imagine that you are the char. These games basically serve as an assistance to your imagination.
It's like "people" who use cheats and wikis to play the game and completely miss its essence.
Ideal RPG would contain as little openly numeric representations as possible, all of them being various scales (all kinds of healthbars, colours, vague descriptions ala "fair" and "pretty great", some showing themselves only in effect like moving speed)
Numbers are considered essential to the genre and it is so sad.

>Yea Forums tries to redefine RPG year 16

Being able to gauge the relative quality and capability of different types of gear could be a character skillset in itself. Honestly this makes more sense than armor skills that presume to tell you that your helmet is thicker if you know a lot about helmets. Why not knowing helmets so well that you can pick the best one available, while others have to guess?

To be fair, you're right, people would decipher the stats and build a wiki about it. If it was popular enough of a game. But it would be up to the player to use that resource or not. If you were interested in a "qualitative" type of RPG in the first place the temptation would hopefully be pretty weak.

Building your character is half the fun in RPGs. Taking away information that helps you select a path wont add anything to the game.

Doesn't work unless your game doesn't have any math running behind the scenes to begin with.
At the end of the day everything is still being run by numbers and calculations the only difference is if you make people have to dig through the files to see exactly what they are or not.

Look at Skyrim, it barely has any RPG elements left and tries to hide hard numbers away a ton, and everythign is supposed to scale with you and be equally viable.
Yet people still broke down exactly what everything does and what the most optimal builds are.

The TTRPGs that succeeded at getting people to not crunch numbers did it by getting rid of them to begin with, and many still get gamed down to shit.

>Do you need 40/40 HP counters above enemies in FPS games and damage number popups (which always looks like shit)?
>Do you need mario to explain the equations of his movement to you in the tutorial?
No, because these are action games where the relevant details are conveyed through constant and reliable feedback from the system itself. Needing to do some minor experimentation to determine the exact HP of an FPS enemy is no big deal and part of the fun for those of us with that kind of mentality. Meanwhile typically you'll fight a large number of enemies with identical traits and can quickly estimate based on observations how many hits each one takes.
>Why do I need numbers to know if my barbarian can bench press either a horse or an elephant?
Because that's how an RPG is designed. Quite possibly the most fundamental premise of an RPG, the one thing that makes it different from other games, is the use of statistics to define abstractions for interacting with a game world in a discrete but open-ended manner. You need to know the strength numbers on your barbarian because there's virtually no limit to the number of different scenarios that can be conceptualized that would require a test of strength in an RPG. The definition needs to be abstract enough to apply to lifting a horse, or pushing over a statue, or being able to wield a large weapon effectively.

>That's what games need, a skill that you have to spec into to know the stats of weapons

>What you mean by rpg is "game where I can put items on a paperdoll so my power becomes maximum"
yeah that's what an RPG is, in the terms of an idiot. Someone less stupid would say that the game is about making strategic and tactical decisions for your player characters based on their current power levels, the environment, and the power levels of their opponents.

If you play moderately difficult singleplayer games to find the optimal build to beat the game by hacking the fucking game files you have a genuine disease

Interesting way of looking at it, in a way it's more like only the last hit actually hits you and the waiting to regenerate "health" is more like your character calming down from all the near misses. Assassin's Creed 1 did something similar but it was actually on purpose.

That's not an RPG either, that's a dungeon crawler

It's not actually roleplaying though. It's just an action/tactics game with many stats. Xcom isn't an rpg just because it has XP points and skill trees.

>make mod showing stats in game for other players

It's not like every person has to do it, or even one person had to do all of it.
There are entire communities that find enjoyment in digging stuff up together then breaking down what the most optimal choices are. These findings then end up permeating through the entire community of the game.
If a game has not been broken down to what works best, it's because it was never popular enough to have a community build around it to begin with.

>What noncombat RPG mechanics
this is over-emphasized.
A lot of "non-combat" RPG mechanics are still about overcoming dungeon obstacles or preparing for combat by exploiting the environment or the nature of the enemy characters (eg bribes, coercion, distraction, etc.)

>By observing the animations when you land an attack
Amazing roleplay, bruh: you have no idea how strong or fast your character is so you have to observe his movements. Fucking retard.

>Ideally you'll have interface layers, where all the relevant information is available for anyone that wants to dig for it, but the most relevant gameplay information is prioritized.
Sure. But this has nothing to do with hiding stats just because.
I do believe it's important to have layers such as "combat stats" separate from "social stats" (how NPCs react to you, for instance).
No, what I mean by RPG is a game where stats decide the strength of your character, not your reflexes as a player, which negate the importance of stats. The moment you have an action game, "Base THAC0" goes away, "THAC0" goes away, "Number of Attacks" goes away. Pretty much the complicated aspets of D&D rules (which aren't used in every proper RPG either, mind you).

This. It's the same argument that people make in favor of movie games with stat systems. If you min max story or gameplay you're not an RPG. RPGs are a balance of story and your actions. That's why CRPGs are the last true RPGs being made

Dwarf Fortress already does this dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Appraiser

Like 90% of the shit OP is arguing in favor of is already in Dwarf Fortress.

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>Taking away information that helps you select a path wont add anything to the game.
Are you kidding? It would make it a lot more lifelike and immersive.

In real life you don't know all the results of your choices ahead of time. You just have to make them. This is pretty much the whole appeal of CRPGs, making interesting choices and seeing where they lead. If it's a really good story or game, then you should be taking the choice that is most interesting to you instead of just coldly weighing cost-benefit and maximizing your synergies and shit like that.

I'm not trying to take away your Pokemon, user, but there's a market for "deep simulation" stuff besides that. Why shouldn't RPG characters have to learn and specialize to be really effective? That's the premise of the genre.

open world evolved much more than open role-play. and sexual activity in games needs to become a thing. what happens when you have sex in games is that it just becomes normal and you can "get over it" and actually dive into other stuff. when you don't have sex in game you start detaching from the game world by fapping.
lmao. sounds literally like the real world.

These communities are retarded and should pour their autism into solving math problems or fixing their diets.

The moment you take stats out of a game you cannot have a roleplaying game anymore. That's because stats determine who your character is.

I do believe that an RPG is something like Fallout, and not something like Final Fantasy VII. That's because you have another layer of depth: that which makes your character YOU by letting you make decisions and speak your voice, instead of being spoonfed everything through linear dialogues and "but thou must!" situations.

I'm gonna make Ret work in Classic, you'll see!

Appraisal is already in dnd and it's tied to intelligence, not a standalone stat

>It would make it a lot more lifelike and immersive

Bethesda RPGs already exist. Arent more than one type of game allowed?

>The moment you take stats out of a game you cannot have a roleplaying game anymore.
Might be true, but modern RPG's have become almost exclusively about stats and loot.

This is one of the things I love about Dark Souls, it preserves the "holy shit, I might be completely screwed if I fuck this up" factor, which ultimately ends up being more relaxing because you're basically not tempted to scum and just accept whatever happens as part of the experience.

Dungeon Crawlers are RPGs. A full RPG is basically a series of dungeon crawls connected by a fleshed-out campaign setting.
yeah again you don't understand the term roleplaying properly in the context of RPGs. Learn your fucking history and stop trying to apply the term "roleplay" in an overly literal fashion to a term of art.

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The Sims is the best RPG on the market. Prove me wrong.

It's not about calculations it's about clarity. The player needs to know what their character is like, if they are strong, if they are intelligent and so on. You could do this with a vague description like "very strong" but people don't want to be left to interpret the words that the developers chose since it could vary from game to game so they're just going to look it up and find out the actual numbers anyway. It's just easier to show the players the numbers

That's like saying because I don't own a scale I am no longer human since I don't know my own stats. Not displaying stats doesn't remove them, your character can have talents, which are like stats except they make sense in context of the game world. Actions are also even more important to your character than abilities.

People who browse wikis and guides for games they haven't beaten yet are scum.

>Arent more than one type of game allowed?
I think you owe ME an answer to that, buddy guy. You're the one shooting down new ideas.

>in my days as gamemaster back in high school I used to roll all the dice behind a screen: my players would simply tell me the action they wanted their characters to perform and I would respond with the result, without them ever having to calculate anything.
You are the worst kind of GM.

because it's not about beating things for xp or to advance a particular quest. it's an adventure where you play a role and decide what to do based on his role and the story.

In real life I know roughly how good I am at something. I don't have to do a bunch of test runs fighting things trying to see which one I kill quicker or whatever. If I pick up a weapon and it's too heavy for me to wield effectively I know it. If I pick up a weapon I've never used before I can roughly estimate how effective I think I'll be able to fight with it.

This reminds me of the Nethack issue of hiding item weights. I can see what they're going for but in real life I roughly know the weight of objects I'm carrying. I'm not going to pick something up thinking it's less than a kg when it's actually 10kg and then carry it around with me for ages not realising that's the thing that's burdening me

Dungeon crawlers by definition are not RPGs

Except, if you're playing a role, "certainty of strength" is never a given. All you have to go on is experience. I know my character is a pretty hard motherfucker but I don't have a data sheet that can tell me with certainty whether or not he will be able to deal fatal damage to a given enemy. I know a merchant claims a sword is superior to my current sword but I can't know with absolute, fact-driven certainty that it is in fact a superior piece of hardware.

The numbers need to exist, in some form, for a simulation of reality to exist, but you shouldn't really KNOW them, any more than you should actually KNOW your own proficiency at anything, relative to any other person.

Good (and many) RPGs do this though.
Just to take a recent example, Kingmaker differentiates shield parries from misses through sound effects rather than hovering icons telling you " HEY MORON, GUESS WHAT? THAT DINKY LITTLE KOBOLD PARRIED YOUR SHITTY GREATSWORD SWING HAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHA, YOU'D HAVE NEVER FUCING GUESSED", many old games did that too.

Icycalm's a faggot, but there's quite a bit of truth to the argument that RPGs would benefit from hiding information more often and making players use their brain to deduce that, or just simply respect your intelligence in general.
Besides, even the most transparent game withdraws most information from you because there's no fucking way they can and should give you something like exact spreadsheets with damage multipliers, it's absurd and makes the game feel like a math problem more than a game, not to mention that the more transparent the game is, the easier it is, look at stuff like D:OS games for instance.

On the other hand, I look at games that do try to do that, like the SaGa games, and the vast majority of people endlessly bitches about those being too obscure or opaque when they're actually some of the most intuitive and straightforward systems in general.
Player input is always welcome but it can be realized in many ways other than letting you self insert.

>even with access to their stats most players care only about their roll and assume they failed anything if they rolled under 10 even when their character is skilled and it is an easy check, or freak out when they roll high trying to do something that would be nearly impossible even for the most skilled person at it in the group
Is this the fault of RPG streamers or something?

No, the game exists to be fun. You're assuming that players will make the choices that maximise their own fun but that's retarded and no actual developer believes in that.

>That's like saying because I don't own a scale I am no longer human since I don't know my own stats.
No, I'm saying that without stats you cannot have a roleplaying game anymore. In other words: without differences, we cannot have individual human beings anymore.

What makes RPGs different from other games is that characters are your own. They are unique and special. The countless different characters you can make in Wizardry over Doomguy who is always the same.

>Not displaying stats doesn't remove them, your character can have talents, which are like stats except they make sense in context of the game world.
I do consider "talents", as you describe them, as a form of stats. My definition of "stat" is pretty much anything that makes your character, his inherent being (as opposed to choosing between Sword +1 and Sword +2), unique by the way of possibilities and limitations. The ability to do certain things but not certain others.

great b8 m8

>CRPGs should not be transparent about how the systems/mechanics of the game work
This must be the worst opinion I will read all year. There is absolutely nothing gained by a game being obtuse and opaque other than the player feeling frustrated and not knowing why they are getting fucked on. Hiding the numbers just makes it harder for players to develop their characters in the way that they want and leads to players feeling cheated by the game when something happens that they didn't want and don't even know if they could have prevented/avoided it or not.

The ONLY way hiding all the numbers could possibly work is if the game had no random chance at all, but then that introduces its own host of game design challenges.

Computers can not adapt a campaign to the player.

Either you get something patronizingly easy like the Fable series, or you get something where player's datamine your shit because they have no other practical way of deliberating whatever feedback they DO have to figure out what they did wrong, and how to adapt and go forward.

The latter will happen anyway. The reason things are transparent isn't because of history, but because NPCs are boring. At least playing with numbers engages some mental faculties.

The logical conclusion to the combat system in Dark Souls is, for most adept players, some combo rolling and back-stab with the right build.
However, this level optimization isn't obvious without advanced player knowledge (either obtained by pouring over strategy guides on the net or hands-on experience).
I would argue that the tactics and strategy aspect of DS and similar games is not completely absent, just fundamentally different from a turn-based combat system.

That's a skill, not an attribute, one of many you can learn.

dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Category:DF2014:Skills

Attributes have a numerical value tied to them but the game doesn't tell you what that number is, it tells you how far you are from the baseline of your race that attribute is. if you have average strength for your race it says nothing. If you have below average strength is tells you you're weak, if you have above average it tells you you are strong. There are also degrees if you are strong beyond strong you are very strong or mighty, if you weak beyond weak you're very weak or unquestionably weak, this applies to all the attributes which include Strength, Agility, Toughness, Endurance, Recuperation, Disease resistance. Characters also have "soul" attributes which govern how easily or difficult they take to certain tasks these include: Analytical ability, Focus, Willpower, Creativity, Intuition, Patience, Memory, Linguistic ability, Spatial sense, Musicality, Kinesthetic sense, Empathy, Social awareness,
dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Attribute

So physical attributes:
Strength, Agility, Toughness, Endurance, Recuperation, Disease resistance

And Mental attributes:
Analytical ability, Focus, Willpower, Creativity, Intuition, Patience, Memory, Linguistic ability, Spatial sense, Musicality, Kinesthetic sense, Empathy, Social awareness,

Imagine trying to spec yourself with all of those attributes on a character sheet, seems like a nightmare right? Yet if you obfuscate most of this from the player it ends up not being much of an issue and the game is richer and a better simulation because of it.

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>My definition of "stat" is pretty much anything that makes your character, his inherent being (as opposed to choosing between Sword +1 and Sword +2), unique by the way of possibilities and limitations. The ability to do certain things but not certain others.
pretty sure OP wouldn't be opposed to a character sheet that says "you are a skilled acrobat, you are a masterful pickpocket, you have novice proficiency with daggers, you have legendary strength" etc. That's much different from "jump height=3.3 meters, stealth detection radius 1 meter, +40% damage with daggers, 8000 kg deadlift".

>Xcom isn't an rpg just because it has XP points and skill trees.
Yeah that's because RPGs are very complex games, there's a great variety among them and understanding the limits and boundaries of the genre is not simple. This is true whether you're looking at the boundary between RPG and Adventure game, or on the other end the boundary between an RPG and a straight tactics/wargame. It is a blend, but simply calling it a blend (as this guy does: ) is not the end of the story as many games borrow concepts and mechanics from other genres.

Again, the key with an RPG is the "open-ended" stat definitions. The world of an RPG is supposed to be large and interactive, with lots of NPCs that all have their own motives and agendas and should seem like they belong in the world and aren't just placed there for the sake of gameplay (such as cave vendors in Zelda or Quelana in Dark Souls or Toad's item houses in Super Mario Brothers 3). But it's still a GAME not a simulation. The RPG world is defined by characters with stats and the game is about making strategic and tactical decisions for a character over the course of its life as it grows and becomes stronger and more experienced. But, that growth comes from adventure and exploration, from dungeon crawling and combat. Not """Roleplaying"""

>if they are strong, if they are intelligent and so on
You should be able to tell if you are strong if you're killing more enemies in fewer hits than another guy.

As for intelligence, I like what some games do in not having an intelligence stat and relying on the player's actual intelligence to solve problems that call for it. As for being able to read or identify scrolls or cast magic, there are surely other ways to represent those skills. As far as I can tell, "intelligence" has more to do with capacity for learning than any particular set of skills. Almost everything calls more on practice and experience than on IQ points. Look around here -- lots of on-paper "smart" people are fucking idiots in any practical regard.

Some games should allow you to roll an idiot wizard. That would be fun to RP. Imagine being the Jim Belushi of the Mages' Guild.

Honestly, it depends on the scope of the program and what theoretical player actions are accounted for in the code that determines the adaptabilty of any given program.

The problem with this comparison is that IRL you can inspect the merchant's sword and compare it to your own to get a sense of whether or not the merchant is telling the truth, and as an IRL swordsman you probably already know what to look for in a good sword. With vidya, the player is limited to whatever information the devs decided to doll out and if that information isn't sufficiently clear to the player (because most players aren't also swordsmen, or because the devs ar just shitty at describing/explaining) then the player is just stuck in the dark and without any good means of figuring things out for themselves.

Dungeon Crawlers are a subgenre of RPG and have been RPGs since before you were born.

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didn't they try to do (sort of) this with the first system shock?

It is very different, though. The way you word it, it sounds like there are basic ranks (say, 1 to 5). And such a system is very, very easy on the eyes. Gothic works like that. But Gothic doesn't have the amount of nuance Baldur's Gate has when it comes to stats.

You can make a game with simple stats, but by that you are not keeping the original complexity.

Imagine being such a purist about RPGs that you loop back round and say you hate RPGs and don't want to play them

>You're assuming that players wiill make the choices that maximise their own fun but that's retarded
This is sadly true and it's something that never fails to disappoint me the more people throw proof of it at me. It even goes further than just fun and extends into basic learning of any systems and mechanics whatsoever, people are so set in their ways regardless of how little of a game they've played and ignore so much present that points them towards understanding.

>"you are a skilled acrobat, you are a masterful pickpocket, you have novice proficiency with daggers, you have legendary strength" etc. That's much different from "jump height=3.3 meters, stealth detection radius 1 meter, +40% damage with daggers, 8000 kg deadlift".
not really, it's just less accurate. Or more accurate depending on your game design, since we're talking about computers here.

If you enumerate terms for levels of proficiency that's literally no different from using numbers. Sometimes, fine-tuned numbers are important even if they're rounded off for combat, because they have implications when the stats grow or are modified in some way. That way you can assign growth to be something like 0.2 points per level vs 0.25 points per level to get different growth curves, even if the fractional values don't impact the game in the meantime.

Stats "can" be optional in action-based games, where the player has more "immediate" feedback about his abilities (e.g. where he can immediately tell how far he can jump and thus make an informed decision whether it's a good idea to try to jump across that gap), but in games that aren't action based stats are a must for making informed role playing decisions.

>You should be able to tell if you are strong if you're killing more enemies in fewer hits than another guy.
This is not reasonable in an RPG because the point is to have open-ended interaction. You need to know the parameters beforehand it's not reasonable to expect the player to experiment about every mechanic when there's so much that is experimentation already part of the gameplay.

Exactly, any discussion of stats is inherently an argument of complexity versus simplicity.
The more visible and ubiquitous the stats, the more complex a game appears to be to any given player.
Whether this is enticing or not is dependent on the players' subjective judgement.

No it's not. The difference between an RPG and any other game is that in an RPG you make decisions based on what you want your character to be. I might make a strong character who wields a greatsword not because it's the most optimal build but just because I want to play a strong character who wields a greatsword. And hopefully the game designers make it so that there's something my strong greatsword character can do that other characters can't do, so my choices feel like they actually matter even if they're not mechanically optimal

that depends on what the ranks and skills actually do. If the game is so detailed you can use your skills in strength, crafting and charisma to build huge temples by yourself and become a cult leader and eventually perform a coup d'etat by digging through the castle foundation and running in and murdering the king, then that would be a more complex game, stats or no, right?
accuracy was never the point. The point is to remove accuracy by not turning the game into a math equation.

>You should be able to tell if you are strong if you're killing more enemies in fewer hits than another guy.
The decision to attack an enemy might already be one of life or death. If you have no way of knowing whether your character is weak or strong then you have no way to make an informed decision.

>As for intelligence, I like what some games do in not having an intelligence stat and relying on the player's actual intelligence to solve problems that call for it.
Then everyone would role a warrior and end up a wizard too by making "smart" decisions. An RPG is not about player skill, it's about character skill. Even a retard can role play a wizard. He might end up making dumb decisions but his character is still formally smart, can remember things the retard can't, etc.

I get that part about real life being ambiguous and without applying the scientific method and going through rigorous tests we can't know anything for certain and we have to make judgements based on what little information we can gleam from a few observations and our intuition, but I have yet to see anyone explain how putting this into RPGs make them better. Yes it's more realistic to obfuscate the player from the maths under the game's hood but I don't see how this makes the game anymore fun to play. If realism = immersion and immersion = fun why was RDR2 such a fucking boring game to slog through? I'll take magical teleporting horses over the mindnumbing realism any-day. I think the whole "realism and immersion" meme needs to fucking die if those are the only criteria people think matter these days.

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In what fucking universe?

>If you have no way of knowing whether your character is weak or strong then you have no way to make an informed decision.
yeah that's called visual design

if your 12 foot tall angel wings dude with full plate and a burning sword will get his ass kicked by a goblin your visual design is shit.

This is a very interesting view point, and I'd like to see a game like this. That said,
>in the process, generations of players with an unhealthy numbers fetishism who miss the point of role-playing entirely
at this point the genre has changed, and players expect certain staples. You will be hard pressed to sell a no numbers game to a player who wants to play a numbers game. You may find the audience for the game you want to make is wildly different than the audience of people who like RPGs.

In the crazy universe where you can load a save if something goes wrong.

What risk are you taking by loading a save?

>and I'd like to see a game like this
It already exists, just play dwarf fortress in adventure mode

>The point is to remove accuracy by not turning the game into a math equation.
Yeah and this is fucking stupid as many anons have explained at great length in this thread should you care to read any of it.

Being vague about precise computer mechanics does nothing but make a game more frustrating to a player. The only exception is where the mechanics are both

(1) Exceptionally complex such, that a typical player is likely to be overwhelmed by the level of detail involved
AND
(2) The mechanics are very predictable and reliable (ie ACCURATE) and work exactly as the player thinks they should work based on the provided description. In other words, knowing the complex ugly details should not actually change anything about the way a player plays the game. A reasonable player, anyway. Finding and exploiting some obscure weird edge case is not what I'm talking about.

>The decision to attack an enemy might already be one of life or death.
>oh no i might fail monetarily if I don't know all my outcomes ahead of time.
This is the kinda shit I'm talking about. I'm not saying don't play games like that, I get the appeal of progress quests as much as the next guy; but there's room for some creativity in game mechanics after like 30-40 years of the same basic conventions in CRPGs

You're really arguing against open-ended design, though.

Visual design doesn't tell you anything about mental abilities. And arguably it doesn't tell you anything about skill either. e.g. your huge muscular guy might be strong but he might not be trained in fighting. How can you tell whether someone is a good thief, good at lock picking, good at pick pocketting, etc.?

none, that's the point dummy

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Table Top RPGs have so much variation to them and most are not really related to video game RPGs that mostly focus on one part of them.
Often you will find games not labeled as RPGs have more in common with many TTRPGs than the games specifically labeled as such.
I find many people are really arguing about what type of RPG they prefer as the umbrella is so big they can include things that don't involve any stats or rolling at all in the TT scene.

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>there's room for some creativity in game mechanics
Don't get me wrong: I'm absolutely in favour of advancing game mechanics, but it needs to fit the genre. e.g. see . In an action-based game, you don't need certain stats because you have "immediate" feedback regarding what your character can do. The player does not need to know in numbers how fast Mario can run or how far he can jump because he is taught "naturally" by the game itself. In a turn-based RPG however, this is much more difficult because the player doesn't actually "do" anything. He only makes decisions for his character who actually does all the work, depending on his stats and skills.

Like skyrim, but without skills.

Isn't Dwarf Fortress Adventure mode basically this? It just has things like "above average strength" and "adept swordsman". Health isn't a number either, you just get damage to different body parts represented by both a coloured indicator (red is really bad, orange is kind of bad) as well as a description like "his neck is cut open", "his left eye is mangled beyond recognition" or "he is missing his right hand". It's a shame the game is currently just a murder hobo simulator, I can't wait until it gets updated

I think what he's trying to say is that because games tend to feature saves, checkpoints and other ways to recover from failure, you are able to take more risk on a momentary basis because the larger scale risks aren't really present or severe in that case.

RPGs have always been about the fucking numbers. These games have always appealed to nerds that like tactical games and numbers.
The emphasis on getting people to just relax and play was never about eliminating the numbers-based tactical decision making entirely. It's only about players obsessing so much about eking out every last bit of extra damage potential or survivability that they completely ignore all sense of reasonable character and roleplay.

Somewhere along the line gay elf RPfags came along and only liked the elements of the game that were like drama club exercise. They didn't like fussing with all those numbers and shit when there was gay sex to roleplay and so started this meme that RPGs aren't about the numbers.

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crusader kings two is also fucking garbage to play holy shit, how can you defend that ui and control scheme?
sure i got used to it but it was trash

>You're really arguing against open-ended design, though.
no, I'm saying that open-endedness has to have practical limitations in order for it to still actually be a fucking game. In an RPG, the open-ended world is defined in terms of stats.

The difference between RPG stats and stats in a strictly tactical wargame is that there's an open-ended number of potential scenarios that might involve the combination of stats like agility, strength, and charisma. The stat abstractions are capable of describing a whole world to roleplay in. Meanwhile the stats in a wargame are strictly about attributes used in the combat system.

And I think maybe you think RPG is any game with elves or orcs or magic in it.

yeah of course that's massively missing the original point but whatever.
We went from "dice rolls are always bad" to "save scumming eliminates all risk-taking."
Both are points are very stupid.

>crusader kings two is also fucking garbage to play holy shit
Not really, no worse than any of the infinity engine games at least.

i tried baldur's gate but it was too hard,g onna give it another try soon, i'm retarded but how retarded am i?
i can barely do anything as a mage and enemies can kill me in two hits

uh, no u

Yes you are very stupid, but that's missing the point that you're wrong.

And thats called an action rpg you nigger

First, not all games allow cheats, and if they do they're unlocked after beating the level in some cases, like Golden Eye. I never enjoyed being able to activate cheats whenever I want.

Second, I don't give a shit how you play, what bothers me is how you claim we should be okay with the industry pandering to all players. Because that's impossible. More options don't necessarily make a game better. The lack of cheats / save scumming forces the player to overcome the obstacles instead of skipping them. You may think "woooow why don't they let him play how he wants" but these limitations are exactly what makes the experience much better once you manage to win. Holding yourself back from using an exploitable game mechanic isn't as satisfying as using all the resources the game gives you to win.

consider not playing a mage. A fighter/mage might be a better idea (or just pure fighter and you can dual-class to mage later). Low-level mages are notoriously weak and are meant for support in AD&D2e. If you want to play a mage main you need to recruit some NPC allies quickly.

Alternately, if you find you simply can't get into Baldur's Gate 1, consider just starting on the sequel (Shadows of Amn).

>Indeed, in my days as gamemaster back in high school I used to roll all the dice behind a screen: my players would simply tell me the action they wanted their characters to perform and I would respond with the result, without them ever having to calculate anything.
That sounds like the worst pen&paper session ever.

>Right dumbass, which doesn't happen in a tabletop game unless the GM deliberately lies to you in which case you shouldn't play with him.
I agree with your original argument, but the GMs abillity to lie it pretty critical for creating a believable scene for the players, otherwise there would be no character development and if the GM always responds the same to failure it would be hard for them to hide stuff that the players are not meant to know at the moment or ever for that matter. Otherwise it would be extremely easy for players to ''game'' the system and break the entire campaign.

>A fighter/mage might be a better idea
Fighter/Mage is super broken in BG1 and 2 if you take the time to roll good stats for it.

First half of BG1 you'll be stronger than anything in melee and second half of BG1 and all of BG2 you'll just cast one spell or end entire encounters with fireball wands. Unless you want to turn both into a cake walk stay away.

Obviously that's not what op meant, he probably meant something like:
>examine sword
>blade quality: superb
>grip quality: average
>notice slight cracks around edge, may not survive long
>metal type: steel (hardened)
Or if you don't have enough skill with swords you might see less info. You can also learn from in-game books that hardened steel is better against scale armors, and that vampires have general weakness to steel

Don't you think it could be more fun than:
>damage: 20-30
>attack rating: 24
>extra damage against vampires: 5%
>durability 2 / 10
Or at least make the experience more immersive?

eh, I think you'll need to provide some examples.
The example in this case was a simple combat mechanic. The ability description implied that each time a spell was cast, there was a chance the spell would cost less. This led to players speculating about whether or not their specialization "fired" based on how much their mana bar changed (when in fact this wound up just being an artifact of the abstraction process). Meanwhile you had some players arguing that the skill did nothing at all, because it just didn't feel like it did anything. Proper understanding had minor implications, but implications nonetheless in making decisions about which specialization to choose and their potential output in various scenarios.

There was nothing campaign-breaking here. The mistakes aren't part of some reasonable intent to keep information from the players that the PCs themselves really shouldn't have, such as D&D's intent for players to research and identify magical items before using them (or risk being cursed or at least not fully understand the item's potential)

>it needs to fit the genre
No it doesn't.

>Obviously that's not what op meant, he probably meant something like:
The problem is all that shit is never fooling anyone in a computer game. Either there are gameplay implications of "superb blade quality" and "average grip quality" or there aren't. If there aren't, the player will probably figure it out pretty quickly and just as quickly drop the fucking retarded game that is using roleplay faggotry as a crutch to hide lazy systems implementation. And if there are, the player knows exactly what "superb blade quality" and "slight cracks around the egde" mean in discrete (numeric) gameplay terms.

>Don't you think it could be more fun than:
No.
I'd rather be able to observe the durability as a number because dumbass RP descriptions are just in the way if I have to translate them into numbers anyway in order to make reasonable gameplay decisions.

>Your character is very strong.
instead of
>Strength: 18
Huh. What is that supposed to do?

autistic fucktard

no, the intelligent points that you have missed are here: and here:

well this is a guy who quit because it was too hard. I played a mage in BG1 and loved it but this guy might enjoy something easier.

>Don't you think it could be more fun than
>Or at least make the experience more immersive?
I'm still not getting the part where immersion, especially when it comes at the cost of player's ability to understand the underlying game systems is in anyway more fun. If lets say skyrim never told you explicitly how much damage any weapons do or how much damage mitigation armor has I don't see how either of these makes the game more fun or immersive but rather just more annoying when ti comes time to filter through all your loot and find which items you should be using.

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managing oh shit-situations is half the fun

>the intelligent points
No intelligence in either posts, boy u dum

I prefer having stats.

The player needs to know about his character's abilities to make informed decisions. And in a turn-based RPG the player can only know through some kind of stat. Whether it's a number or some kind of qualitative description in words makes little difference.

based and redpilled

>His writings on games were and are absurd,
I've been reading him for almost a decade and not once have I stumbled on anything absurd. In fact, I thought a good portion of it before I ever encountered him. Stop fucking gatekeeping and acting like your judgment is the only one that matters.

> Indeed, in my days as gamemaster back in high school I used to roll **all** the dice behind a screen

Opinion discarded, as a gm you are a fraud, a scrub, a retard or a controlling moron.
If you roll all dice away from the players, you would do better playing any one of the diceless rpg systems, there's plenty.
The proper way to do so is to roll in front of the players all dice that are immediately and visibly resolved. GM's rolls included. Monster attack rolls and damage as well.
Hide as few as possible, and only those where the roll result would lead to an outcome not immediately visible to the players, or where the players might react out of character even unconsciously.
For instance, rolling to bargain for the price of an item can and should be done in front of the players most of the time. The result is immediately verified.
Rolling convince the guard captain to betray the prince is much better hidden.

numbers get people excited though, we love quantifiable data

Even in real life we need and use numbers for a variety of things.

On game it's even more important because the only sensorial feedback is audio-visual. We can't feel the character strength, pain, etc, and we can't fully interact with the world and explore the possibilities.

For example, in real life different metals and alloys have different characteristics and are all tracked with numbers. A steel sword looks very similar to an brand new unrusted iron sword, but the steel sword is far superior. How the fuck are you supposed to differentiate between both swords in a game without numbers or text?

CRPGs and RPGs in general have tons of fault, and I really don't like them, but of all the things you can complain, you choose the wrong thing.

>not liking stats is autistic
Isn't it the opposite

I can't believe you typed out that entire post without realizing the image was satirical, something which should be obvious is you read the text of my post.

maybe in order to see the stats you should have a minimum in the math stat there problem solved

In a system with few items this works, but if you have a sufficient amount of gear to work with picking up two swords and having them both ping as "superb", even if one is better, is annoying. You could use arrows to indicate one is better than the other, but then you have to compare it with all your superb swords. Being able to determine your best sword at a glance with just a number is helpful for the player.

>The lack of cheats / save scumming forces the player to overcome the obstacles instead of skipping them
the problem is that this is a deeper problem than you seem to think. Either you design the game with reasonable checkpoints and/or graduated failure consequences, or you fuck up that balance and players will take extreme/excessive measures to avoid failure and in many will that will spoil the game and over-simplify a system that otherwise has a lot of enjoyable depth.
Baldur's Gate is a good example of a game that doesn't get it quite right. Explaining it fully would take an essay, but to summarize: there are many situations where the player can suffer serious consequences (death of a character, level drain, petrification, disintegration) due to one minor mistake or miscalculation. For example maybe you cast cone of cold and the game's pathing algorithm unexpectedly sends a character into the effect area and winds up as a pile of ice chunks. What does a typical player do when bullshit like that happens? I know there are hardcore players but most players will find this unfair, so what they do is: (a) reload from a save (b) never use cone of cold ever again.

You have to go back, /tg/, there's an orc lust thread dying without you.

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>154 DPS
>or 150 DPS
Wow what a ponderous decision

SO glad I play games for smart bois where you pik big numboos