Player vs Character skills

This post is inspired by a forum topic I saw recently, that can be found here.

This plays into a number of different factors in game design.

1. 100% completion requiring one good playthrough, or does it need more? (AKA. Characters who can do everything)

This is something I commonly contemplate. Take a game with RPG elements and alot of them will have skills such as "Conversation", "lockpick", "stealth", "pickpocket", etc etc. Just basic skills that open up new tricks in game. Now there are two ways to deal with this.

The first is that the skills only open up pointless side things that may have some degree of reward for doing so (extra money/experience/items, etc etc). The problem with this is that they then either feel useless (why bother getting them if you can spend that on more fighting instead, since there's so little bonus) or essential (I've got to get my proud knight 'Lockpick', so he can get his hands on that super sword early on). Of course, even if they aren't essential then you will still have to deal with people who want to be able to do everything in one playthrough trying to force the skills into a character not designed to deal with it.

The second is to offer them as alternative pathways. This was done successfully in the Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines: When too many colons are never enough, PC game. Since there were nearly always alternative methods to most things, it meant that two playthroughs with characters of different strengths were nearly always very different. This in turn makes it a successful game in my view. The trouble is that there will always be things you need to fight your way out of, so if you play a heavy combat-only character then those fights go amazingly quickly and easily, and there's very little else you can do. Alternatively if you play a skill-heavy character, suddenly you find yourself in a fight you struggle heavily to come out ahead in.

That leads neatly into my next point.


2. Player ability compared to supposed character ability.

A game that best shows this off, for me, is "Sid Meyer's Pirates!", exclamation mark included. In that game when creating a character you get to choose one of many areas for your character to specialise in. Outside of buying special items, this is the only RPG element in the game, and the only advancement your character can get. The areas of specialisation as basically things like "Swordplay" (better at the swordfight minigame), "Charm" (better at the dancing minigame), etc etc. Most minigames had a specialisation attached.

The trouble is that this led to an interesting situation where the player was best off having their character specialising in an area they were genuinely bad at. The idea of having a specialisation in an area you're bad at just sounds amusing, even if it makes a degree of sense (using the mechanics to make up for a weakness), it just doesn't sound right.

And the concept of player capabilities against character capablilities struggles in a few other senses. If a character is meant to be an elite ranged soldiers (either because that's what the game represents, or it's an RPG where they specialised in that field) it just feels weird that they struggle to kill even basic enemies. But if you 'boost' them up with certain things (such as autotargetting, etc) then it doesn't feel like they're the ones who're expert marksmen.


3. Micromanagement of characters vs faith in computers ability to manage such things.

Moving onto RTS style games, this is something that has bugged me for a while. As someone who loves large scale combat in RTS', micomanagement bothers me. The smallest scale I enjoy is for a single hero in a fight (where he is the ONLY micromanagement I have to do), or readjusting the siege weaponry so they fire at the section of wall I want them to fire at. In a game like Warcraft 3 or Starcraft I have no enjoyment from watching micromanagement win the day over grand strategy.

In the thread linked to, it mentions things like "making specific units throw grenades", discussing if it should be a micromanaged thing, or entrusted to the AI. Personally I would prefer for the AI to use it responsibly then having to trigger it manually every single time I do it. This then raises the problem in that the AI in a vast majority of games is so thick you could favourably compare it with a whale's penis (also known as a Dork). An obvious solution would be to allow the players to set the ability to either be triggered by the player, or the AI.

What'd'ya know, there's a game that does that. Sins of a Solar Empire, one of my favourites.