Sucess IS Boring

[Sardukhar]

I think we can all agree on a failure mechanic that leads to more delicious plot goodness. As for skill-use to levelling, it's an issue that you end up with Bethesda's terrible "jump in place to level Acrobatics" system.

CP2020 gives you IP - Improvement Points - for using skills, but mostly when it counts. The more it counts, the more IP you get. Failing also gives you IP, but not as much. You can get a single IP, ( a tiny amount), for using skills a lot, but good luck levelling that way.

You can also get IP from Studying and practicing. Crazy, I know! 1 day of book learning to get 1 IP. Lastly, having a Teacher will give you IP, typically 1-5 per lesson.

So these are all ways of learning from failure and practice. Admittedly, if you use your Skill in a critical way during a session, you get loads of IP, so success when it counts, does count.

And then there's Reputation...a whole 'nother kind of experience and in no way dependent on Success. Well, not a bad Rep, anyway, heh.

 

[wisdom000]

IP will definitely be a tricky issue...

I think use of skill should raise the skills automatically, and that you should also get a small amount of Gernal IP for taking new skills or raising existing ones..

Raising Special Abilities should just be automatic though, the general Ip should not be usable for them...

 

[Littature]

Success isn't boring... Success without effort is boring....

Succeeding at something that was difficult, or even near impossible, is awesome... in fact, the chance of success is the reason we do things in the first place, especially things that are hard.

Other than the basic premise of your thread title however, I agree with pretty much everything you said.

Again, Wisdom speaks wise words.

 

[Val3ri]

I think we can all agree on a failure mechanic that leads to more delicious plot goodness. As for skill-use to levelling, it's an issue that you end up with Bethesda's terrible "jump in place to level Acrobatics" system.

CP2020 gives you IP - Improvement Points - for using skills, but mostly when it counts. The more it counts, the more IP you get. Failing also gives you IP, but not as much. You can get a single IP, ( a tiny amount), for using skills a lot, but good luck levelling that way.

You can also get IP from Studying and practicing. Crazy, I know! 1 day of book learning to get 1 IP. Lastly, having a Teacher will give you IP, typically 1-5 per lesson.

So these are all ways of learning from failure and practice. Admittedly, if you use your Skill in a critical way during a session, you get loads of IP, so success when it counts, does count.

And then there's Reputation...a whole 'nother kind of experience and in no way dependent on Success. Well, not a bad Rep, anyway, heh.

But I take that for granted. There are challenges and challenges. And the latter are the ones which should give IP.

 

[darcler]

Just a simple question: how do you fail a quest in contemporary CRPGs? Because I can't really remember any game where you actually could fail a quest, apart from having forgotten about it when the game progressed to next chapter, or going berserk and killing anything in proximity, including quest objective. Well, there's sometimes a matter of choosing one of two exclusive quests, like joining Stormcloacks instead of Imperials in Skyrim, or helping Roche instead of Iorveth in TW2, but that's not rally what i have in mind.

And what it does mean: completing the quest? Most games, even those that claim that they are story-driven, in fact are mostly reward-driven. Since completing quests is the foundation of gameplay in CRPGs (as I stated in this topic here), and since players complete a quest so that they can get a reward at its end, ergo CRPGs are ultimately reward-driven. In other words, failing a quest usually means that you won't get a new pair of pants or a bunch of healing potions. Obviously if it's one of the main quests, it's basically a game over, so failing one of those isn't really an option.

So if a game claims that it's story-driven, I'd expect it to have story-driven quests, not only reward-driven ones. This means that when I complete a quest, I might not get any tangible reward, but it will bear fruit sometime later.

What does it have to do with this topic? One of the aspects of such an approach could create the possibility of completing a quest with negative results, i.e. not succeeding in eliminatine a target in due time. Or you could have the option to complete the quest with only parial success, like not eliminating your target, but managing do chase him off instead.

Some quests could also be designed to have negative consequences to the player, like getting himself duped by the quest-giver. It could also connect with what I said here about backing out from a deal, so if player will see reason in time, he'd be able to save his hide (or money, or reputation, or whatever).

This would also be an incentive for players to not simply load the last save after they failed to successfully complete a quest, so that ultimately they have all green checkmarks in their journals, but to keep playing despite failure. Because you'd never know, perhaps failing this quest will ultimately open whole new set of possibilities, otherwise unattainable. For instance, when said quest-giver dupes you, sometime later you might be presented with an opportunity to have your revange.

IMO this would also heavily increase replayability of the game.

 

[layne101]

does anyone remember 'starlancer'? its not an rpg though its a space flight simulator. it had a really cool feature where only dieing meant game over. you could fail missions and the game would go on, but it would effect later missions.

for example you need to destroy an enemy cruiser before it goes into hyperspace. if you fail, later on in the game, a fair few missions later, that same cruiser would jump in from hyperspace at the worst possible time and naturally complicate the mission a lot more

there were tons of examples like that but you get the gist

of course, most rpgs today have you make decisions that would affect the game later on, but as far as i know, very few let you fail the quest of saving/killing/catching someone without completely shutting down the quest or restarting it

 

[presstheeject]

does anyone remember 'starlancer'? its not an rpg though its a space flight simulator. it had a really cool feature where only dieing meant game over. you could fail missions and the game would go on, but it would effect later missions.

for example you need to destroy an enemy cruiser before it goes into hyperspace. if you fail, later on in the game, a fair few missions later, that same cruiser would jump in from hyperspace at the worst possible time and naturally complicate the mission a lot more

there were tons of examples like that but you get the gist

of course, most rpgs today have you make decisions that would affect the game later on, but as far as i know, very few let you fail the quest of saving/killing/catching someone without completely shutting down the quest or restarting it

I think this is the best handling of failure. Death should of course mean reload (or just the end if there's a hardcore mode).
One problem here is that this failure in the example is that people may seek it out just to take on that cruiser at worse odds for the challenge. So failing quests would still need severe consequences like bad reputation that hinders you from getting well paying jobs or just the plain not getting the reward part.