Briosafreak
Lived Through the Heat Death
Tim Cain from the original Fallout and founder of Troika Games has given his views on Turn Based combat and D&D, explaining why Temple of Elemental Evil will be Turn-Based only and close to the 3.5 D&D rules at Etoychest.org:
<blockquote>I am a little confused. D&D is a turn-based system, so I didn’t take ToEE anywhere. I am more surprised that you don’t wonder why the developers of those other games felt compelled to license a game system and then rewrite many of its rules to cover a mode of play that it was never intended to support. I wanted to make a computer game based on D&D, not some hybrid system that I invented myself.
Again, I am confused. Are you suggesting that it would be better for me to invent a new system of rules, so that anyone familiar with D&D would have to learn my own new hybrid system in order to play ToEE? Now that sounds like it would bog down the player.
The whole point in using the D&D core rules and having the computer act as DM is to free the player to enjoy the game. Just because our monsters have all of their abilities and because spells cast just like the rules say they should doesn’t mean the player is bogged down. On the contrary, players are liberated from the bookkeeping so long associated with role-playing games. They are free to play the game while the computer keeps track of hit points, weapon ranges, encumbrance and all the other minutia of the game. Any knowledge of D&D will help them play ToEE, certainly. But most of the rules don’t need to be understood by the player to enjoy the game.</blockquote>
J.E. Sawyer decided to reply to those views on the BIS Feedback Forum:
<blockquote>I have met Mr. Cain only a few times. He is a very smart and cool man.
However, I will address this statement, and I'll be pretty blunt about it. The answer to his rhetorical question is: because you're putting a pen and paper game onto a computer. Isn't this obvious? This doesn't apply simply to "turn-based vs. real-time". It applies to every aspect of the game that you review for implementation.
The environment and atmosphere when you play a pen and paper game is not the same as when you are playing a CRPG, period -- especially a single player RPG. You have no DM, you have no other players. There is no soft adjudication for any given application of a combat rule or skill. There are no players chatting to each other softly and telling quiet jokes while all of the other participants in the battle play through their turns. Turn-based combat in a five or six person pen-and-paper game is not the same experience as it is in an CRPG. Even the most pedestrian turn-based battle in a pen-and-paper game can be made fun for all participants -- even if that combat takes two hours of real-world time. Your experience goes beyond the statistics of the characters involved and the mechanical choices you make to resolve that conflict.
But in a single-player CRPG, that is what you are left with. You can put every rule in the 3.5 PHB into a game to the letter, dot all is and cross all ts, but you are not going to get the same experience that you would in pen and paper. This is a different medium. You're playing all the members of your party without any soft adjudication from a DM. The manner in which you draw pleasure out of a combat is not going to be the same as it is with a group of live people sitting around you -- whether it is turn-based or real-time. D&D is a pen and paper role-playing game. By putting it on a computer, you are already trying to make it do something that it was not explicitly built for.
I'm certainly not going to slam Troika for making ToEE in the manner they are. I really want to play it. But all developers have to make implementation choices when dealing with a licensed ruleset. AFAIK, Troika isn't implementing the Jump or Climb skills in ToEE. I don't blame them for leaving that out -- those are hard to implement in a CRPG. But that does affect classes like the fighter and monk, who have those as some of their (very few) class skills.
In a pen and paper game, the player can ask the DM at any moment, "Hey, man, can I climb that tower/tree/rock/fallen giant's corpse?" and the DM can wing it. If the player wants to climb up a corpse and jump off behind some guy while making an attack, he can just ask the DM if he can do it. There's no mounted combat or mounted combat feats in ToEE, which affects the paladin. TOTALLY UNDERSTANDABLE, BECAUSE MOUNTED COMBAT SUCKS TO IMPLEMENT. Again, this is because you can't just say, "Oh, here's a pony, follow the rules." Lockpicking, picking pockets, sneaking. All those things you can't reload from in a pen and paper game -- they're different. It's a computer game, not a PnP game. How you make it, how you use it, the experience you take away from it can be completely different.</blockquote>
I`m sorry for the length of this quotes, but i find them very revealing on the differences of development philosophies between the original Fallout team leader and the future Fallout lead designer.
Who is closer to your ideas, guys and girls? And why? This is a great topic for discussion in my opinion, what do you all think?
Thanks go for DAC for pointing Tim Cains interview.
Edit:J.E. Sawyer saw this news bit and made an aditional comment:
<blockquote> It really wasn't intended to be antagonistic or confrontational towards Tim. But it's an unanswered question I had seen him pose in other interviews.
The bottom line for me is that rules are there to support and promote fun. The rules are not fun in and of themselves. It is the job of the designer to be devoted to making a fun player experience, not to be devoted to the rules.
A good example might be how ranger favored enemies are categorized in 3E. Technically speaking, a ranger can pick almost any race (though that may have changed in 3.5) as a favored enemy. You might choose to restrict that list only to races actually found in your CRPG. That makes sense, promotes fun, but isn't explicitly according to the rules.
However, rangers who pick certain favored enemies may find themselves with an exceedingly useless or exceedingly useful trait depending on how many creatures of race X are in the game. A little variation is to be expected, but if there are huge differences (150 goblins, 2 ogres), this becomes unfair. A PnP DM can tailor his or her campaign to the choices of the player. A CRPG has already made those choices before character creation takes place. Now, the designers of the CRPG could collapse ogres into a larger "goblinoid" type. That's reasonably fair, but again, not according to the rules.
On IWD2, our licensor believed that the invented feat "Fiendslayer" was too powerful, so we toned it down. The problem was that there were only a small handful of creatures in the game against which the feat was actually useful. The PnP designer balances for use in ANY game, but the CRPG designer usually has to balance for use in his or her SPECIFIC game.
Again, we all have to make choices. Trokia has made specific choices for ToEE as they have seen fit. BioWare made specific choices for NWN as they saw fit. This will continue as long as computer games are licensed from pen and paper games.</blockquote>
This comment was made after he read the NMA front page, so there`s no more need for people to ask me if he reads what the fans say
<blockquote>I am a little confused. D&D is a turn-based system, so I didn’t take ToEE anywhere. I am more surprised that you don’t wonder why the developers of those other games felt compelled to license a game system and then rewrite many of its rules to cover a mode of play that it was never intended to support. I wanted to make a computer game based on D&D, not some hybrid system that I invented myself.
Again, I am confused. Are you suggesting that it would be better for me to invent a new system of rules, so that anyone familiar with D&D would have to learn my own new hybrid system in order to play ToEE? Now that sounds like it would bog down the player.
The whole point in using the D&D core rules and having the computer act as DM is to free the player to enjoy the game. Just because our monsters have all of their abilities and because spells cast just like the rules say they should doesn’t mean the player is bogged down. On the contrary, players are liberated from the bookkeeping so long associated with role-playing games. They are free to play the game while the computer keeps track of hit points, weapon ranges, encumbrance and all the other minutia of the game. Any knowledge of D&D will help them play ToEE, certainly. But most of the rules don’t need to be understood by the player to enjoy the game.</blockquote>
J.E. Sawyer decided to reply to those views on the BIS Feedback Forum:
<blockquote>I have met Mr. Cain only a few times. He is a very smart and cool man.
However, I will address this statement, and I'll be pretty blunt about it. The answer to his rhetorical question is: because you're putting a pen and paper game onto a computer. Isn't this obvious? This doesn't apply simply to "turn-based vs. real-time". It applies to every aspect of the game that you review for implementation.
The environment and atmosphere when you play a pen and paper game is not the same as when you are playing a CRPG, period -- especially a single player RPG. You have no DM, you have no other players. There is no soft adjudication for any given application of a combat rule or skill. There are no players chatting to each other softly and telling quiet jokes while all of the other participants in the battle play through their turns. Turn-based combat in a five or six person pen-and-paper game is not the same experience as it is in an CRPG. Even the most pedestrian turn-based battle in a pen-and-paper game can be made fun for all participants -- even if that combat takes two hours of real-world time. Your experience goes beyond the statistics of the characters involved and the mechanical choices you make to resolve that conflict.
But in a single-player CRPG, that is what you are left with. You can put every rule in the 3.5 PHB into a game to the letter, dot all is and cross all ts, but you are not going to get the same experience that you would in pen and paper. This is a different medium. You're playing all the members of your party without any soft adjudication from a DM. The manner in which you draw pleasure out of a combat is not going to be the same as it is with a group of live people sitting around you -- whether it is turn-based or real-time. D&D is a pen and paper role-playing game. By putting it on a computer, you are already trying to make it do something that it was not explicitly built for.
I'm certainly not going to slam Troika for making ToEE in the manner they are. I really want to play it. But all developers have to make implementation choices when dealing with a licensed ruleset. AFAIK, Troika isn't implementing the Jump or Climb skills in ToEE. I don't blame them for leaving that out -- those are hard to implement in a CRPG. But that does affect classes like the fighter and monk, who have those as some of their (very few) class skills.
In a pen and paper game, the player can ask the DM at any moment, "Hey, man, can I climb that tower/tree/rock/fallen giant's corpse?" and the DM can wing it. If the player wants to climb up a corpse and jump off behind some guy while making an attack, he can just ask the DM if he can do it. There's no mounted combat or mounted combat feats in ToEE, which affects the paladin. TOTALLY UNDERSTANDABLE, BECAUSE MOUNTED COMBAT SUCKS TO IMPLEMENT. Again, this is because you can't just say, "Oh, here's a pony, follow the rules." Lockpicking, picking pockets, sneaking. All those things you can't reload from in a pen and paper game -- they're different. It's a computer game, not a PnP game. How you make it, how you use it, the experience you take away from it can be completely different.</blockquote>
I`m sorry for the length of this quotes, but i find them very revealing on the differences of development philosophies between the original Fallout team leader and the future Fallout lead designer.
Who is closer to your ideas, guys and girls? And why? This is a great topic for discussion in my opinion, what do you all think?
Thanks go for DAC for pointing Tim Cains interview.
Edit:J.E. Sawyer saw this news bit and made an aditional comment:
<blockquote> It really wasn't intended to be antagonistic or confrontational towards Tim. But it's an unanswered question I had seen him pose in other interviews.
The bottom line for me is that rules are there to support and promote fun. The rules are not fun in and of themselves. It is the job of the designer to be devoted to making a fun player experience, not to be devoted to the rules.
A good example might be how ranger favored enemies are categorized in 3E. Technically speaking, a ranger can pick almost any race (though that may have changed in 3.5) as a favored enemy. You might choose to restrict that list only to races actually found in your CRPG. That makes sense, promotes fun, but isn't explicitly according to the rules.
However, rangers who pick certain favored enemies may find themselves with an exceedingly useless or exceedingly useful trait depending on how many creatures of race X are in the game. A little variation is to be expected, but if there are huge differences (150 goblins, 2 ogres), this becomes unfair. A PnP DM can tailor his or her campaign to the choices of the player. A CRPG has already made those choices before character creation takes place. Now, the designers of the CRPG could collapse ogres into a larger "goblinoid" type. That's reasonably fair, but again, not according to the rules.
On IWD2, our licensor believed that the invented feat "Fiendslayer" was too powerful, so we toned it down. The problem was that there were only a small handful of creatures in the game against which the feat was actually useful. The PnP designer balances for use in ANY game, but the CRPG designer usually has to balance for use in his or her SPECIFIC game.
Again, we all have to make choices. Trokia has made specific choices for ToEE as they have seen fit. BioWare made specific choices for NWN as they saw fit. This will continue as long as computer games are licensed from pen and paper games.</blockquote>
This comment was made after he read the NMA front page, so there`s no more need for people to ask me if he reads what the fans say
