Town evolves into RPG player's worst nightmare?

I've been thinking that your questions have ben spiralling ever closer to being directly relevant to my fantasy village sim game, and then you ask this. I guess this will save me time in the future!

I'm not really in a fit state of mind at the moment to think about this fully (last stages of paper writing; I'm almost completely out of my mind, just checking GameDev.Net on a break), so I'll think about this in detail tomorrow, when I've had a chance to rest.

There's just one thing I want to add at the beginning: is it a problem if the player is encouraged to mismanage the property? In SimCity, they give you the option to unleash natural disasters upon your city, either to test you ability to manage them or just so you can generally destroy stuff. Would this be a problem in your RPG/Sim?

I don't think you should so quickly dismiss the idea of single people becoming player enemies. The key is to make these people relevant/useful/good. Sure, if you make the thieves guild an enemy, the player (and the other townsfolk) might not feel so bad if he just got beaten down, but what if it was the banker? The city magistrate? If you kill these people, you just start moving up and up the chain until the king's army starts hunting for the bandit who's been murdering magistrates.

I certainly think your first idea is good, it just seems a bit nuclear. It'd take quite a nasty act to piss off an entire town.

Idea two seems to mesh well with escalating problems. If, eventually, the local army starts trying to kill the player on sight, they will likely be encouraged to stay away.

Idea three doesn't really seem like a problem, just a way to punish the player at the end of the game.

Also, why do you want problems the player is not encouraged to solve?

It depends pretty heavily on what they were trying to accomplish when they failed. If failing any mission type just results in the town not wanting you around, it would be pretty dull. Will the goal be part of a hierarchy? If so, maybe you can make the lower levels of the hierarchy crumble a bit when the goal above it is screwed up. For example, if the player screws up trying to find a buyer for fruit, make the farmers get lazy or become occupied with something else. If he finds a buyer, then messes up the shipping, the buyer starts demanding lower costs. I have no idea what kind of goals we're talking about, but that's a rough example.

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Original post by Trapper Zoid There's just one thing I want to add at the beginning: is it a problem if the player is encouraged to mismanage the property? In SimCity, they give you the option to unleash natural disasters upon your city, either to test you ability to manage them or just so you can generally destroy stuff. Would this be a problem in your RPG/Sim?

It sounds like Wavinator wants to encourage the player to try their best not to fail. In Sim City, disasters were not really a product of failure. They were just random. If screwing up brings lots of enemy NPCs with cool weapons, then by failing, player gets a lot of bonus items and has a fun time fighting. This might result in the player not really caring if they win or lose. In fact, if a game with fun combat such as Fallout made you fight more enemies when you screw up, I would strive for it.

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Original post by Eyrian The city magistrate? If you kill these people, you just start moving up and up the chain until the king's army starts hunting for the bandit who's been murdering magistrates.

That, to me, sounds like incredible fun. That wouldn't work as punishment for me. I remember messing up the masquerade in Bloodlines just so the vampire hunters would show up all the time. Fun stuff.

All the 3 examples you give are direct effect (Well, maybe not fot the third one but I never played fallout so...)

So, if you want something more subtle, it could affect the whole geopolitic of the game for the player. Opening or closing some path for him. Something like the freespace faction thing. You help nation A, nation B doesnt like that for whatever reason, and the player know it, yet he still do the action, so nation B get mad at the player thus limiting is possibilities in that nation's land.

The party could lose permantly a key teammate member who warned the party not to interfere in this case. The teammate could die, rebel, or flee. If it's a party member from the start, and people have emotional bound to him, they'll maybe think twice about that.

The player could be given a dual choice to make. sacrifice A or B, if he go to the village, he might found wealth, fame, and glory, yet, he could lose is life, draw upon him a terrible curse, or lose some valuable thing. So he might win or lose something by goind there.

Voilà ! these are small crude Idea.

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Original post by Eyrian The city magistrate? If you kill these people, you just start moving up and up the chain until the king's army starts hunting for the bandit who's been murdering magistrates.

That, to me, sounds like incredible fun. That wouldn't work as punishment for me. I remember messing up the masquerade in Bloodlines just so the vampire hunters would show up all the time. Fun stuff.[/quote]

I guess it depends on the force level? Sure, a few guys showing up randomly for combat might be fun, but if you get riddled with crossbow bolts everytime you step out of the shadows, you might just decide to stay away.

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Original post by Kest If screwing up brings lots of enemy NPCs with cool weapons, then by failing, player gets a lot of bonus items and has a fun time fighting. This might result in the player not really caring if they win or lose. In fact, if a game with fun combat such as Fallout made you fight more enemies when you screw up, I would strive for it.

Okay, this is exactly what I don't want to happen--it's fine if you succeed, but not if you fail. If you successfully issue a challenge to the local pirate king and he shows up with his strongest so you can lure them into your neat little ambush, then THAT is cool. But if you were supposed to stop the colonists from dying, or being angry, or getting sick, then I want something bad/bad to happen, not good/bad.

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Original post by Eyrian I guess it depends on the force level? Sure, a few guys showing up randomly for combat might be fun, but if you get riddled with crossbow bolts everytime you step out of the shadows, you might just decide to stay away.

It depends on the detail of combat. If the arrows are magically appearing from shadows, then yeah, it would suck. If there are actually archers somewhere to sneak up behind, then we're back to being fun. I might have a rare definition of fun, but I like challenges. The bigger the challenge, the more I like it. I mean as long as the game is not too stiff to provide enough depth for clever thinking. I've played a heck of a lot of elite games that shoot down the ego of players like me by using the "magic shadow arrows" type tricks. Even though it makes the world feel slightly cheap, it definitely makes me want to stay on course with the actual game.

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Original post by Kest It depends on the detail of combat. If the arrows are magically appearing from shadows, then yeah, it would suck. If there are actually archers somewhere to sneak up behind, then we're back to being fun. I might have a rare definition of fun, but I like challenges. The bigger the challenge, the more I like it. I mean as long as the game is not too stiff to provide enough depth for clever thinking. I've played a heck of a lot of elite games that shoot down the ego of players like me by using the "magic shadow arrows" type tricks. Even though it makes the world feel slightly cheap, it definitely makes me want to stay on course with the actual game.

Well, I think that (assuming your engine can handle the load) you can probably drop sufficient, real force to just trash the player. Sure, if you dispatch three archers, you might be able to kill them with stealth and technique. But a battalion of (reasonably powerful) troops could serve as a fully mechanicked means of player stomping.

Making the player experience failure is different from making the avatar experience failure. I've sometimes role-played failure in RPGs on purpose, just because that was "in character" for my avatar character.

So if you want the player to experience failure, you have to hit something that they care about. For example, if the player cares about his avatar's sweetheart Maryanne, then he'll care if the villain kidnaps her and ties her to the railroad tracks. However, if he thinks Maryanne is a whiner who is spoiling all his fun, he'll grab a tub of popcorn while "trainspotting", waiting for the giblets to fly.

Typically, the thing the player cares about the most is their avatar's capabilities. If you lower their avatar's stats, take away a prized weapon, or cripple them in some other way, that's a huge deterrent. A good example is in System Shock 2, where you are awarded cybernetic modules that upgrade your abilities by your instructor when you accomplish goals. If you disobey however, she takes them away, which really hurts if you are saving them up to buy a new ability.

Next most important things are story elements that they've grown to like, such as characters or (to a lesser extent) places. If a cherished NPC or secondary PC is taken away, they'll feel some sense of failure.

Very difficult enemies on their own is probably isn't the best deterrent, as the player might like that. For example, in X-Wing, I'd attack capital ships just so they'd send wave after wave of fighters after me, as I liked dogfighting. However enemies that trash something the player cares about, however, will work in my opinion.

Taking away stats is a great idea for punishment. But it might be difficult to have a good reason for it in every situation. If the player is trying hard when he fails, his stats should increase, IRL, not decrease. Taking away stats might end up lowering his chances for success, and maybe even stop him from progressing further in the game at all.

Money and other non-crucial belongings would work really well. But if I sold every item I ever owned to save up for a super sword, and I fail to complete an objective with that superior weapon, taking it away is not going to make me fight harder. It will just lower my chances even farther and make me feel like I wasted the first half of the game saving.

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Original post by Eyrian Well, I think that (assuming your engine can handle the load) you can probably drop sufficient, real force to just trash the player. Sure, if you dispatch three archers, you might be able to kill them with stealth and technique. But a battalion of (reasonably powerful) troops could serve as a fully mechanicked means of player stomping.

Again, maybe I have a unique perspective on it, but armies of armies wouldn't deter me. Those armies are challenging me. Am I just going to conform and hope they forgive me? Nope. I would most likely find something to give me an edge, then hunt down a few groups at a time.

:D I remember facing armies in Operation Flashpoint. I always stayed behind when the objective was to flee, and I defeated all of the enemies of those levels. I took out legions of tanks, RPG soldiers, even a few helicopters. Yet, my commanders and fellow soldiers kept running, and I got no acknowledgement of the accomplishment, even though I single-handedly saved the defensive position. Those designers obviously didn't know players like me exist, or just didn't care enough to provide a fallback for us. Still, those missions where I was supposed to escape are the reason I loved the game so much.

The bad/bad things that happen don't neccessarily have to be so obvious as a bunch of heavily armed NPC's, bandits could poison the villages local water supply, ruin crops, extort villagers (raise prices insanely for certain imported items), basically things the player has a hard time directly confronting. If the player needs to eat, get more ammo/armor, then he'll need to directly rely on the people in the village to supply those things, if their sick/angry/dead/moved away, then they can't/won't supply those things to the player. So rather than confronting him directly with a band of thugs, enemies might choose to attack the player through his supply lines by messing up the villagers, and the player can't protect everyone all the time. Even if the player manages to continuously fend off the bandits, villagers might get sick of living in constant fear and may decide to move away.

With weakened supplies the player may find it alot more difficult to fend off a band of thugs for very long, even with the cool gear he might get off them.

[Edited by - Gyrthok on September 26, 2005 1:44:59 PM]

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Original post by Kest Taking away stats is a great idea for punishment. But it might be difficult to have a good reason for it in every situation. If the player is trying hard when he fails, his stats should increase, IRL, not decrease. Taking away stats might end up lowering his chances for success, and maybe even stop him from progressing further in the game at all. Money and other non-crucial belongings would work really well. But if I sold every item I ever owned to save up for a super sword, and I fail to complete an objective with that superior weapon, taking it away is not going to make me fight harder. It will just lower my chances even farther and make me feel like I wasted the first half of the game saving. Quote: Original post by Eyrian Well, I think that (assuming your engine can handle the load) you can probably drop sufficient, real force to just trash the player. Sure, if you dispatch three archers, you might be able to kill them with stealth and technique. But a battalion of (reasonably powerful) troops could serve as a fully mechanicked means of player stomping. Again, maybe I have a unique perspective on it, but armies of armies wouldn't deter me. Those armies are challenging me. Am I just going to conform and hope they forgive me? Nope. I would most likely find something to give me an edge, then hunt down a few groups at a time. :D I remember facing armies in Operation Flashpoint. I always stayed behind when the objective was to flee, and I defeated all of the enemies of those levels. I took out legions of tanks, RPG soldiers, even a few helicopters. Yet, my commanders and fellow soldiers kept running, and I got no acknowledgement of the accomplishment, even though I single-handedly saved the defensive position. Those designers obviously didn't know players like me exist, or just didn't care enough to provide a fallback for us. Still, those missions where I was supposed to escape are the reason I loved the game so much.

I think Kest is thinking in the right direction here - reducing a players capabilities not only negates any hard work needed to gain those capabilties, perhaps forcing them to repeat something they've already done, it also makes it harder for them to succeed at whatever you're punishing them for failing.

I think, at the root, the desired effect you're trying for is to inconvenience the player more than anything else, and this is where the other solutions fall flat. Additional enemies aren't inconvenient - they're additional challenges, and challenges are fun! Stat penalties, are more than inconvenient as they are detrimental to the players chances of success, and tend to be unrealistic. Inconvenient penalties for failure would be those in which the player is forced to do something considered "tedious", at least compared to the core gameplay. If the pirate king kicks your ass and strands you on an island, leaving you to figure out how you're going to get home, that's inconvenient. Maybe you're a better swimmer, or have learned to build a raft by the time you return, but you're not going to want to do it again.

If you were tasked with keeping the colonists alive, and failed because you were too busy exploring the area over the next hill when the dinosaurs attacked, you now have to find a new batch of colonists, with the added inconvenience that most people know what happened to the first group of people who traveled under your protection.

An attempt at a summary, for those of you still with me: the cost of failure should be time. Not time already spent, which is what stat penalties effectively do, but time before they can continue with the next part of the story. If you make the punishment too long/tedious you run the risk of the player getting bored, but if done right it can be an opportunity to make them impatient to get back to where they were and do things *right* this time, perhaps by hinting at what they could be doing had they not failed, or what they could have accomplished.

You might want to consider mostly ditching punishment and rely on rewards for success. Not getting a reward is pretty good punishment. Or at least it works with baby humans :P

If you save the colonists from dying, your reputation, fame, karma, and whatever else may increase. If you don't, they don't increase. And that reward can never be redeemed. This would be plenty enough to make me try my best. This may only work with some scenarios, but at least it's another option when a punishment doesn't fit.

edit: spelling

[Edited by - Kest on September 26, 2005 3:58:20 PM]

Actually, I agree with that. not getting rewards, even if there's no punishment involved, kind of sucks. In homeworld, for example if you don't manage your salvage corvettes, well engough, you don't get a fleet to start the next mission with, even if you complete the current mission. I tend to start missions over for that reason.

Not getting rewards is good, especially if you remember that progress is a reward. If you're going to be ready for the siegers, or whatever, you need a fully equipped quantum research laboratory to build you a wormhole that you can tuck a colony ship into for fifty years. It has to be done within two generations. If you fail to defend your city, then maybe the academy gets bombarded, and sets them back a decade in their research. If they come up with an idea and you don't have the manufacturing capacity to build the device, then you have to either find a way to get it built or send them back to the drawing board to make a simpler system.

Absolute worst-case scenario, how about making the town suck so hard for the player that they have to leave. You saw High Noon. The subspace shuttle is en route, and Frank Miller's on board. You can either get the heck out of town, or stay and fight him alone, because nobody in this town likes you enough to help out. If you fight, there's a very good chance that he'll kill you, and that's a far greater setback than just moving out would be.

IF the town really is broken beyond repair, then starting from scratch is your only choice.

You said you own property in/near the town?

It would suck if you just built a house on the land and someone *accidently* burnt it down because your actions killed their brother or something.

People would hate it more if they just spent their savings on the house.


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Trust not those with power, for they would gladly kill you for more.

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Original post by Servant of the Lord It would suck if you just built a house on the land and someone *accidently* burnt it down because your actions killed their brother or something.

That reminds me of something else. If the result of failure is too bad, a lot of players may not even attempt the 'mission' at all. The +2 karma for saving that guy's brother definitely isn't worth risking getting your house burned down. This is one of the biggest motivators to be idle in real life. Fear of screwing up and making things worse. You could use it to your advantage in the design, though.

I agree that providing rewards for saving the town might be enough to counter-act any destructive tendencies that the player might have. If there's enough perks for being a hero, such as townsfolk recognising you in the street, discounts at stores, statues in your honour, national holiday etc., then people will want to be the hero.

People like finding content.
If you put content that is *punishment* then people will still look for it. Some people like the challenge, others like looking at every possible scenario.
If you simply make things more difficult, then a large group of people will try to do it for the added challenge.