Five RPG Constructs That Need to Die
I finished Dragon Age: Origins this week (next week’s Edition will cover it in greater detail) and while I enjoyed it for the most part I kept feeling like there were parts where it reverted back to standard fantasy provisions that we’ve seen over and over again and which, at this point, I think need to just be put to pasture for a while. Not all of these are specific to fantasy RPGs though I’m thinking of that subgenre specifically.
I would also be remiss if I didn’t mention The Grand List of Console Role Playing Game Clichés, which shows that in some ways we’re still basically playing Dragon Warrior I. Plus I have to point out this page for the BioWare RPG Cliché Chart which is fun but also includes (allegedly) a response from a BioWare rep who kind of takes the whole thing a little too personally.
- The Arena
To clarify, it isn’t that I don’t understand why these clichés persist in role-playing games, especially video game RPGs which are typically very combat oriented. In the case of the ubiquitous area battles you can showcase your combat engine and fill up a couple of hours of game time having players hack and slash with the barest of necessary plot development. But for the role-player that lack of context mostly serves to highlight the basic flaws in your combat system. I rarely—perhaps never—play RPGs for their dynamic fighting mechanics, rather I play them in spite of often awkward combat because I like the stories they tell. When you surgically excise the latter I tend to sit there grinding my teeth as I nitpick the former. - The Perfectly Balanced Attribute System
I don’t want Intelligence to factor into how effective my brutish half-orc is at finding chinks in opponent’s armor. I don’t want Strength to determine how many spellbooks my mage can carry. I don’t want Charisma to factor into how good my thief is at sneaking. It should be okay to have a borderline mentally retarded barbarian and a physically frail wizard and an unremarkable, forgettable rogue. Trying to discourage min/maxing in single-player games makes no sense to me, so let me ignore stats that don’t matter for my character class and stop trying to make me well-rounded. Of course the corollary for this is that every game needs to accommodate each class: I should be able to be just as successful as a magic user as I can be as a warrior rather than having to always be some kind of spell-casting, sword-wielding hybrid assassin. - The Hero is the Guy Who Does the Most Damage
Combat is an integral part in a vast majority of video games. Video role-playing games are no exception. But RPGs have for too long eschewed the potential drama of the non-combat resolution. It’s a tired truism that no matter what dialogue options you choose, no matter how high your Negotiation skill, no matter how many non-violent solutions you can come up with, ultimately 99% of your interactions result in either you giving someone cash or services in exchange for goods or information or you hit them with various sharp objects until they stop moving. - There is Only One Way to Do It
There are few things more infuriating in games than having obvious solutions to developer-fabricated problems staring you in the face but having to jump through the sorts of mind-reading hoops that adventure games used to be famous for because some level designer deems it so. This applies to large set-piece puzzles (see the Resident Evil example from this GameSpy article) as well as simpler activities like, say, opening chests. Even the ASCII-based Nethack allows non-thieving characters to access chests via a brute force approach, although there is the potential for breakable items within to be, well, broken. But this is the tradeoff to the alternative which is having a particular skill (rogues) or performing some sort of elaborate series of steps to locate the correct key. Some games have allowed for alternate actions like forced locks but often these inexplicably rely on the same skill as bypassing them. In a way this is the counterpart to the unbalanced attribute system: Let characters be specialized but then allow them to approach every given obstacle from their own unique perspective. - The Stationary World
Few things make a world feel less living and vibrant than one which never changes. Then again, like the Uncanny Valley, the closer you get toward a world that feels like it has its own pulse, the more noticeable it becomes when everything about an environment exists to accommodate the hero of some epic story. Games with no night/day cycle, shopkeepers who never sleep but stand in the same spot for infinity waiting for the hero to come by and give them a single moment of purpose, NPCs who only ever offer a single scrap of information and then simply repeat themselves like malfunctioning robots, all these things can be lovingly rendered in the most visually striking HD but they utterly ruin the spell of a game.