Is it just me, or is this a description of most D&D-based games?
Try out Baldur’s Gate I-II & Throne of Bhaal. You can design as much of your party as you want to (although only the lead character will play into the story). Or, you can let NPCs involved in the story join you, and change their classes through dual/multi-classing.
It’s tough to envision a game where characters have predetermined roles in the story, but you get to pick their names & classes. (“The delicate and romantic son of the Elf Queen, will be – Cragnor the Barbarian. The savage but sympathetic orc overlord is – Prissifus the Mage.”) But Baldur’s Gate gets you pretty close with dual/multi-classing NPCs.
Well Paladin’s Quest for the SNES used HP to fund magic. and yes, the magic was stronger than a hand attack (unless you were attacking something fairly resistant to immune to that magic, which is a no-brainer.)
Also Eternal Poison uses a ‘You can only use a skill so many times a fight’ system where you only get so many innate uses of a skill per fight. however special equipment allows more uses as does training said skill and refining it.
Final Fantasy 7: Real Life Edition. Battle #1, Cloud vs. two Guards. Cloud slices Guard 1, who falls down and writhes for a long time. Guard 2 shoots Cloud. Cloud says, “Holy shit, several machine gun rounds were just emptied into me.” And dies. Game over.
That aside, I’ve played “realistic” games where you use skills to improve them and lose skills you don’t use. Those games always overemphasize “forgetfulness”: you lose skills far quicker than an actual human loses them. And then it takes you just as long as everyone else to relearn them. That’s not how real life works. Sometimes I don’t play DDR for months straight. When I play again, I’m not as good as I was; but it only takes me 1-2 days to catch up. It’s like riding a bike: you may slowly become worse at it, but you never forget how. So I’d be open to the forgetfulness idea, but only if it was <i>really</i> faithful to reality.
Correction: the bullets bounce off Cloud’s high-tech full-body armor, which even he wasn’t stupid enough not to wear. He then cuts the other guard as well. Proceeds on to the next screen.
As I discussed in another thread, different media have different levels of realism. RPGs are NOT supposed to be as realistic as most movies. On the other hand, they ARE more real than cartoons like The Simpsons. It all depends on the story the game wants to tell AND the style it wants to employ. RPGs often abstract a lot of stuff -such as showing the characters eating- and only focuses on what the player would care about, such as the Combat System. Still, it is a common opinion among many players that RPGs need to introduce a few more realistic elements now, especially since now we have the technology to implement them that we lacked in the earlier days. The more realistic graphics also beg for it.
Uh, assuming that spandex Cloud is wearing is hi-tech body armor, and no stray bullets blow off his head, he still gets roasted a few minutes later by Ifrit.
My point was, arguing that skill systems should be more realistic is silly, for RPGs that were only loosely tied to reality. But you’re right, I’d love a realistic RPG, <i>if</i> it were realistic through-and-through.
Originally Posted by Wilfredo Martinez Correction: the bullets bounce off Cloud’s high-tech full-body armor, which even he wasn’t stupid enough not to wear. He then cuts the other guard as well. Proceeds on to the next screen.
OBJECTION!!! The bangle does nothing.
That said a perfectly realistic RPG would be as boring as a perfectly realistic real life. In fact just substitute Level with years, EXP with paperwork, and equipment with taxes and you’re pretty much there.
Yeah, it’s pretty absurd when you have stuff like moons falling onto the world and dealing mass destruction to everything, and then act like nothing happened. Or, better case in point (a la Rogue Galaxy), blow up the damn world with an attack.
It helps to have some realism in most games I believe, but not be completely devoid of it (though isn’t the point supposed to be it’s not real?). A realistic RPG would be nice, but wouldn’t it just be like real life? (Only more interesting somewhat?)
Wil’s explanation of HP does make a lot of sense. When I first played RPG’s with FF8 I was confused as to why a character had been killed in a fight but was then running around with my main in story mode. And then was dead again at the next fight.
X-Wing: You must have missed the part where I said that Cloud would be wearing FULL body armor because in a fully realistic world even HE wouldn’t be stupid enough to go against gun-toting goons without it. Oh, and in a realistic world there would be no magic and thus no Ifrit.
But I do get your point. As I said, it all depends on the specific story style that the game is shooting for; I don’t demand much realism from (for example) Disgaea, which is obviously cartoony (even if does have its touching moments.) Likewise, Final Fantasy VII was always meant as (almost) cyberpunk, and thus needed to look and feel grittier. You’re right that often the SYSTEM that supports the game story is either too fantastic (or too serious) for it, tho.
Mabatsekker: Yeah, many RPG combat effects are ridiculously over the top- the best way to interpret them is to assume (as we say in the comics community) that they are “artistic license”. That is, “what we see is not what is happening.” This is most obvious with the Summons: are the bad guys REALLY going to just stand there while Shiva finishes her oh-so-eyecatching intro? I doubt it. They really should save that stuff for cutscenes.
As far as realism is concerned, Fallout 3 is pretty good at it, except for two facts:
stimpacks heal you instantly
radiation can be gotten rid of by an injection or something
but overall it does a pretty good job, since these two things are sort of necessary for the game mechanics to function smoothly
The accessories that power up the magic attacks make them insane, though. In East Emnet, the Elfstone that “slightly” increases magic damage effectively triples it, making magic overpowered once again. And the elfstone in Osgilliath makes spells do like, ten times their normal damage. The only thing then preventing you from decimating every battle with Water Stallion is the insanely long animation for the spell every single time you cast it.
First, to the OP: That sounds cool, but I’m stuck on what one person mentioned. How would that play into the story and the characters’ personalities if they’re not generic?
At first it sounded impossible to me, but then I thought about it, and if it was set up right, it might work. For example, say there’s a prince who hates being stuck in the castle full of royalty and officials, and he longs for adventure outside. Whether he studied thievery, black magic, or standard battling as a way to journey outside the castle doesn’t make too much of a difference to the story or his personality. Just the intro to explain his background could be a little different. The same personality going for thieving or white magic is a tough sell, but maybe the job itself is meaningless to him, just a way to get outside the castle. It’s fun to think about.
Paladin’s Quest WOO! My favorite game (along with the sequel, Lennus 2, which recently had an English patch released, I hear!). PQ’s system actually makes the most sense if you use the understanding of HP that was explained earlier. I mean, whether you think magic takes willpower, focus, or some other kind of exertion, completely depleting that would make it hard to stay concious. Magic draining your “endurance”/whatever-HP-represents makes a lot more sense than magic requiring nothing more than abstract MP, the loss of which doesn’t affect your character whatsoever.
Equipment also has various special uses in battle, enough to make stuff besides ATK and DEF worth taking into consideration.
TC: Sounds like a neat idea. It would have to be implemented carefully or, as was mentioned, certain characters would come off as unrealistic or forced. Perhaps, if you wanted a similar system without ALL the craziness involved in the original idea, each character could have a 1 sentence description, then a short multiple choice Question or two, like
What Class Are they?
a) Paladin
b) Mystic
c) Monk
d) Bard
while a different character could have another 4 classes as their choice, so that each character would be different each time, and you could have a variety of classes, but you wouldn’t have to program 20 different possibilities a hundred times for each character.
as for HP=Stamina, once again, the SaGa games need to be mentioned. Pretty much every SaGa game from the SNES onward has used a system with HP and LP (life points), the later of which are Very Limited and static, while HP grows as you do. If reduced to 0 HP you lose an LP and any healing spell will heal you, but if you are hit while at 0 HP, you continue to lose LP, and if LP=0, you DIE, being removed from the party (often permanently). Unlimited SaGa changed this slightly, so that every action reduced HP slightly, and you were still concious while at 0 HP.
as for magic vs. physical strikes, I have several things to say:
in the traditional system, most Magic should be more powerful and more versatile than physical strikes, but have it’s MP cost keep it only for use when needed, as opposed to having so much MP that you can spam your most powerful spell every battle. In a system like this, Mages should have a “magical” attack that costs 0-2 MP that they can basically spam all day long, but it is slightly less powerful than a standard strike, so they aren’t going around bonking people with a rod.
Games where the only characters who have actual abilities are mages make me want to scream. So, once again, back to SaGa. In SaGa Frontier, you had WP for weapon attacks and JP for spell attacks, and if you specialized in either one, you could fairly easily get a special attack that cost 0 W/JP. The real cool thing here was, of course, that there was actually something useful for a warrior-type to do other than hit Attack every single round for the entire game.
way too many games have magic basically emulate exactly what weapons and items already do. Yes, a mage can blast a guy for 50 damage, and a warrior can hit for 50 damage, but it’d be much cooler if the mage was more focused on buff/debuff or status/terrain effects and the warriors whole point Was that they could actually deal damage.
They really should save that stuff for cutscenes.