Protagonist empowerment
This has been building for a while now, but i've finally gotten pissed off enough to blurt it out. Slaughtering endless waves of faceless identical mooks doesn't make me feel good about my protagonist, at best it's a tactical and strategic challenge to overcome and hopefully survive, at worst i'm playing a dumb brute.
What's worse is that so many games are built on this dynamic, so that many players equate rpgs with lots of combat. Sorry but my pen and paper games weren't combat heavy, because combat was dangerous, a piece of steel with a few pounds of pressure behind it goes through flesh like butter, and I made damn sure my players knew it. So guess what, they used their brains, tried to avoid melee and pioneered other approaches to situations. They used their skills and intelligence to achieve their goals, and when they did fight, it was bloody, hard and effective because they knew it mattered. They felt powerful.
Ironically Geralt in Assassin of Kings, a trained monster slayer can use this approach, indeed his kill tally compared to most rpgs is positively dissapointing. When he does step into the forests around Flotsam, I make sure he damn well wins through cheating, knives, bombs, traps, signs and whatever the hell else it takes to overcome his opponents, as quickly as possible. The fair fighter dies, the cheating bastard gets the bounty.
When did I feel most powerful in Assassins of Kings, yes a nice takedown of multiple foes was nice, but it pales beside the decisions I made and the stands I took on issues that mattered to me. Holding back the Temerian rottweiler, when his teeth were itching for royal blood. Being there for Cedric at the end, and letting him drift off into eternity at one with the earth. Sharing a drink and a few words with Letho, before renouncing any nore pointless bloodshed. Good companionship among the dwarves, the rough foul mouthed heart of the Witcher games, crude and honourable. Rescuing a little girl who saw too much, whose father I failed. Seherim watching me from the riverbank, babe in arms.
I loves me some good violent games, Severance, the Punisher, Max Payne, but in an rpg there should be more ways to skin a cat than in these. Such blatant ego stroking belongs in Bioware games, where you are the chosen one, and the whole world is populated by idiots and losers who couldn't find their own arse with both hands and a map tattoed on their thigh. There's a place for generic Commander Shepards (saviour and messiah) and such obvious power fantasies, cheap and fun as they are, but there's also a place for a bit more of an intellectual and studied approach I think.
So what do my fellow sons and daughters of Kaer Morhen believe, is this cheap and nasty reliance on combat harming the medium, should a clever protagonist always have another way, a better way of doing things. I'm not making a Hepler like statement that I want an "I win" button, merely that combat should be tough, dangerous and interesting, rather than a chore to be laboured away at repetitively. That and if a player has other skills and ideas, then let him use them and reward him for it, or punish him if he's stupid enough to fuck up. The anatomy quest from Witcher 1 springs to mind.
This has been building for a while now, but i've finally gotten pissed off enough to blurt it out. Slaughtering endless waves of faceless identical mooks doesn't make me feel good about my protagonist, at best it's a tactical and strategic challenge to overcome and hopefully survive, at worst i'm playing a dumb brute.
What's worse is that so many games are built on this dynamic, so that many players equate rpgs with lots of combat. Sorry but my pen and paper games weren't combat heavy, because combat was dangerous, a piece of steel with a few pounds of pressure behind it goes through flesh like butter, and I made damn sure my players knew it. So guess what, they used their brains, tried to avoid melee and pioneered other approaches to situations. They used their skills and intelligence to achieve their goals, and when they did fight, it was bloody, hard and effective because they knew it mattered. They felt powerful.
Ironically Geralt in Assassin of Kings, a trained monster slayer can use this approach, indeed his kill tally compared to most rpgs is positively dissapointing. When he does step into the forests around Flotsam, I make sure he damn well wins through cheating, knives, bombs, traps, signs and whatever the hell else it takes to overcome his opponents, as quickly as possible. The fair fighter dies, the cheating bastard gets the bounty.
When did I feel most powerful in Assassins of Kings, yes a nice takedown of multiple foes was nice, but it pales beside the decisions I made and the stands I took on issues that mattered to me. Holding back the Temerian rottweiler, when his teeth were itching for royal blood. Being there for Cedric at the end, and letting him drift off into eternity at one with the earth. Sharing a drink and a few words with Letho, before renouncing any nore pointless bloodshed. Good companionship among the dwarves, the rough foul mouthed heart of the Witcher games, crude and honourable. Rescuing a little girl who saw too much, whose father I failed. Seherim watching me from the riverbank, babe in arms.
I loves me some good violent games, Severance, the Punisher, Max Payne, but in an rpg there should be more ways to skin a cat than in these. Such blatant ego stroking belongs in Bioware games, where you are the chosen one, and the whole world is populated by idiots and losers who couldn't find their own arse with both hands and a map tattoed on their thigh. There's a place for generic Commander Shepards (saviour and messiah) and such obvious power fantasies, cheap and fun as they are, but there's also a place for a bit more of an intellectual and studied approach I think.
So what do my fellow sons and daughters of Kaer Morhen believe, is this cheap and nasty reliance on combat harming the medium, should a clever protagonist always have another way, a better way of doing things. I'm not making a Hepler like statement that I want an "I win" button, merely that combat should be tough, dangerous and interesting, rather than a chore to be laboured away at repetitively. That and if a player has other skills and ideas, then let him use them and reward him for it, or punish him if he's stupid enough to fuck up. The anatomy quest from Witcher 1 springs to mind.