Publish those numbers! Why RPGs must be transparent about their mechanics
This is a weekly column from freelancer Rowan Kaiser, which focuses on “Western” role-playing games: their stories, their histories, their mechanics, their insanity, and their inanity. The debate about what makes a “real” role-playing game flares up from time to time, with articles, comment threads, or message boards torn up about whether a Mass Effect or a Skyrim deserves to be treated as a true RPG. The arguments about these games tend to hinge on them being too action-oriented, or not offering enough customization. Turned on their side slightly, though, I think these arguments reveal a core value of the genre: RPGs are built on transparent, simplified abstractions of complex real-world concepts. How role-playing games have dealt with and continue to deal with transparent abstraction defines the genre in many ways.
Most all games abstract some manner of real-world behavior. Press the jump button in a game that allows it, and it’ll make your character leap into the air in an animated approximation of how humans jump, but that’s usually it – the rest of the jump has more to do with the needs of the game’s level design than anything else. Even those aspects that aren’t real, like casting magical spells, have consistent in-game rules, which often abstract other concepts, like a mage theoretically chanting magical words in a way irrelevant to the player.
What separates RPGs from most other genres in terms of abstraction is the style’s origins in pencil-and-paper games. You want to punch an orc? You can punch that orc, but game rules simple enough to work with a couple of die need to exist in order to make that orc-punching workable for a group of people playing a game. Players need to know what the numbers are in order to make informed decisions. So you have things like ‘strength statistics,’ ‘unarmed damage skills,’ ‘orc hit points,’ ‘dexterity rolls,’ and so on. Shifting to the computer may have allowed these mechanics to be calculated faster as well as potentially more complex. But critically, even though those mechanics could have been masked, RPGs generally kept the numbers transparent and public.Continue reading Publish those numbers! Why RPGs must be transparent about their mechanicsPublish those numbers! Why RPGs must be transparent about their mechanics originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 25 Jan 2013 18:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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