Specialists Need Support / Loners Need to Diversify - RPG Design

Hey.  I'll try to keep this relatively short.  I've noticed in RPGs there is this tendency for min-maxing, which is to say trying your best to be very, very strong in a few things, and running roughshod through the game, finding all the avenues that are in line with these strong attributes, and even finishing the game that way.

In Fallout 3, I remember Jeff saying he was good at-- conversation I think it was, and he got through the game that way, but ran into problems in the Alaska expansion which wasn't so conversation focused.  There is a real tendency, in RPGs where there's just one character you control, to allow you to maximize a certain stat, and then give you choices that seem optimized for your having really high percentages in that particular stat.  If you're good enough at something that you tend not to fail, it takes the game out of your hands.  There's little strategy in this.  If you keep picking head shots, and you're good at head shots, congratulations, you've secured yet another path to victory.  Maybe 2% of the time you miss, but that ain't often.

I got an uneasy feeling while watching the trailer for Obsidian's new spy RPG.  Will this be the same thing?  Get really good at pistols and kill everyone with pistols, even when it doesn't make much sense? 

RPGs, to me, tend to shine when you have a party, because a party allows these specializations to be spread out among several characters.  One character heals, one character sneaks around, one character blasts things, one character hacks things up into itty bitty little pieces.  This works because they watch each other's back, making sure any flaw in one character is balanced out by the whole. 

When in single-player games you should HAVE to change this strategy, otherwise the design is fundamentally flawed.  If you're a loner, you should need to diversify.  James Bond gets around because he has a series of convenient skills that get him from place to place (although why the guy isn't dead when he doesn't exactly hide is is beyond me).  If he was good at one thing, he might at best be a member of a group, or be inserted into specific situations where his specialty worked well. 

But unless there's a lot of richness in this specialty, in a game setting it makes for a very shallow experience.  Designers can't concentrate on one thing if there are several skills involved, otherwise these other skills are useless, so they try to make situations where you can use different skills to get by, but each of these are paths that lead to pretty much the same end.  A bunch of options, slightly different outcomes, but EACH of these outcomes in and of themselves are not terribly detailed.  Thus the only real fun is in choosing the path, and that pretty much begins early on, with the rest of the game charging forward to the conclusion (with hopefully some good, non-stat based puzzles along the way).  Unless the stats don't figure that heavily into it, it can't be like that if it's going to be an interesting game.

I'll probably add to this when my head's clearer, as I think RPGs have really gone off track lately and I want to make the point as concise as possible.

Hey.  I'll try to keep this relatively short.  I've noticed in RPGs there is this tendency for min-maxing, which is to say trying your best to be very, very strong in a few things, and running roughshod through the game, finding all the avenues that are in line with these strong attributes, and even finishing the game that way.

In Fallout 3, I remember Jeff saying he was good at-- conversation I think it was, and he got through the game that way, but ran into problems in the Alaska expansion which wasn't so conversation focused.  There is a real tendency, in RPGs where there's just one character you control, to allow you to maximize a certain stat, and then give you choices that seem optimized for your having really high percentages in that particular stat.  If you're good enough at something that you tend not to fail, it takes the game out of your hands.  There's little strategy in this.  If you keep picking head shots, and you're good at head shots, congratulations, you've secured yet another path to victory.  Maybe 2% of the time you miss, but that ain't often.

I got an uneasy feeling while watching the trailer for Obsidian's new spy RPG.  Will this be the same thing?  Get really good at pistols and kill everyone with pistols, even when it doesn't make much sense? 

RPGs, to me, tend to shine when you have a party, because a party allows these specializations to be spread out among several characters.  One character heals, one character sneaks around, one character blasts things, one character hacks things up into itty bitty little pieces.  This works because they watch each other's back, making sure any flaw in one character is balanced out by the whole. 

When in single-player games you should HAVE to change this strategy, otherwise the design is fundamentally flawed.  If you're a loner, you should need to diversify.  James Bond gets around because he has a series of convenient skills that get him from place to place (although why the guy isn't dead when he doesn't exactly hide is is beyond me).  If he was good at one thing, he might at best be a member of a group, or be inserted into specific situations where his specialty worked well. 

But unless there's a lot of richness in this specialty, in a game setting it makes for a very shallow experience.  Designers can't concentrate on one thing if there are several skills involved, otherwise these other skills are useless, so they try to make situations where you can use different skills to get by, but each of these are paths that lead to pretty much the same end.  A bunch of options, slightly different outcomes, but EACH of these outcomes in and of themselves are not terribly detailed.  Thus the only real fun is in choosing the path, and that pretty much begins early on, with the rest of the game charging forward to the conclusion (with hopefully some good, non-stat based puzzles along the way).  Unless the stats don't figure that heavily into it, it can't be like that if it's going to be an interesting game.

I'll probably add to this when my head's clearer, as I think RPGs have really gone off track lately and I want to make the point as concise as possible.

I think Ultima Online had (has?) a good system for this - a meaningful overall cap on skill points. So if you really desperately want to max out a certain skill, it is at the expense of other skills. This means that specialists in one particular skill have weaknesses in others - that is the way to give proper balance. The skill then becomes managing the relationship between a set of skills, rather than (as you say) simply spamming one stat to the max as a cheap and simple way to progress.

Fable 2 has a set of sliders, so every benefit has an opposite weakness. If you are too nice, you miss out on the benefits of being evil. If Jeff was charming in conversation, he should be rubbish in the sack as compensation :)!

I don't think you can stop people if they really want to specialise in one area - after all that's a choice. What you can do is give them appropriate weaknesses elsewhere as a result.

Right, there needs to be some sort of trade-off, in the very least.  But at the same time, I think you could argue that a game that rewards being good in several arenas and punishing the narrow specialistis just a different kind of design than rewarding a person for hyper-specializing but punishing the person good in several areas.   Dunno, maybe this topic's too abstract.

 RPGs, to me, tend to shine when you have a party, because a party allows these specializations to be spread out among several characters.  One character heals, one character sneaks around, one character blasts things, one character hacks things up into itty bitty little pieces.  This works because they watch each other's back, making sure any flaw in one character is balanced out by the whole. 

Been thinking a bit more about this - specialisation is often what gives character. You actually should miss out on a lot by just setting everything to 'medium'. Rather than discouraging people to specialise in one area, games designers should be encouraging that process but not over-powering its benefits.

One of the downsides of characters without specialisation is that you end up with lots of jack-of-all-trade characters who aren't distinct from one another. I'm thinking of the way WOW developed a lot of their classes to compensate for their weaknesses, ending up with classes that weren't diverse from one another - arguably too many classes in WOW now can be brilliant healers, tanks or damage dealers.

Certainly in single character RPGs your character needs to be a little bit of a jack-of-all-trades to survive; however, I think Alex hit it with his remark about specialization give characters, well, character. Its what makes your character feel special and unique to you. I tend to love single character rpgs because of that need to both diversify to survive while specializing to excell. How you accomplish that helps give a since of satisfaction and distinctiveness that I imagine you feel while balancing a larger party in other games.

Equally as important as all that is the idea that specialization also opens the way for replay. If you're always being forced to generalize, such as in Bioshock where every time you played the character always ended prety much the same, than there is less call for replay. The more specialized you can become the more variation in play style there can be, and therfore more reason for replay.

@AlexV and @Fade2Gray : The trouble with that argument is that it's a bit of a straw man.  You forget that since this is from the design perspective, it should be clear that getting medium level in all stats is not what I mean because yes, that would be boring.  Suggesting that be the only solution wouldn't make sense.  Using the example of the secret agent, getting one high stat in "charisma" or "influence person" or maybe two, intelligence and charisma, seems very narrow to me, and utterly without personality, but that's how games like these tend to run now.

Why not have a wide range of interpersonal skills, only some of which you can actually get to any reasonable degree of competence within the time frame of the game? That to me is specialization that is interesting, but it still has you diversifying even within the general so-called class of the interpersonal spy.  The assassin could bump up different kinds of rifles, the garrote, poisons, in order to make different situations still viable.  Specializing in just rifles will mean you only get to assassinate sometimes, not get to use the rifle in every situation (like the head shots example, above).

I don't know if I was clear enough in my essay, but the idea of replay only goes so far as the designers are willing to make the encounters complex enough.  In my experience they tend to be rather simple, with slightly different avenues allowing for slightly different resolutions based on the path your over-specialist can take.  Kill the guard, bribe the guard, fool the guard, but there's still a guard to get past.

Some of these arguments seemed to be based on existing games, as though I was speaking of player tactics, but it's not the case.  We have games already that encourage shallow specialization, in that there really aren't very many things a specialist can do.  If they specialize they are defined by one or two specialties, and they suck at everything else.  This creates a problem for the designer, because they've allowed for this they now have to make the game beatable with this skill choice, so everything gets, in my opinion, monotonic.  There's a charisma route, a kill route, a strength route, or whatever, but if you have high percentage in the skill, it means you're basically fated to pass by it. 

That to me is much more boring.  I don't know if I was clear in my argument in the starting blog, but I feel like I'm restating myself a bit in this comment so I'll just leave it for now.

You forget that since this is from the design perspective, it should be clear that getting medium level in all stats is not what I mean because yes, that would be boring.

I was having a parallel discussion of exactly the interrelationship point you bring up, @Alex_V .  You're right, having interrelationships makes a skill only as good as the skills around it, at least in situations where the pure skill isn't enough.

You can have a skill in conversation, for example, but without the knowledge to back it up you're either going to come off as shallow, or people will call bullshit on you for talking about things you don't actually know anything about.  Or you have the ability to see an object that others would miss, but because you don't have the knowledge to know the object's significance, it might as well be part of the background for you.

That would create a lot of content that would have to be supplied, but I guess that's how good games are made.  Not everything has to be extremely detailed, but since the nature of interdependent skills is exclusive rather than inclusive, it could actually make things a lot easier, since lacking the proper skill will either make a situation never come up, or make it seem like filler material. 

I suddenly feel inspired.