Death and CRPGs

Remove all ads!

Good heavens - I leave for a week, and the Alley melts down. Padlock the exits, quick!

I think we need to take a breather and argue about something suitably controversial but cheerfully apolitical. Something to remind us that we're not ideologues, but gamers. Something like...CRPG death!

Am I the only one to notice that CRPGs have a perverse incentive structure that rewards a steady accumulation of death and destruction? I know there's all sorts of nonsense about D&D being "satanic" because it flirts with hellish images and borrows liberally from whatever pagan gods are too dead to file a blasphemy claim. But isn't it a little troubling that empowerment comes at the cost of a crater of corpses? I can't remember the exact wording, but late in BG2:ToB, there's a line where the protagonist says something to this effect - a resigned recognition that nigh-on every encounter ends in the opponent's death. At that point, around level 40, the sheer weight of death has become absurd.

Compare this constant deathliness to the very "undeath" of the player-character. We get killed by an enemy? No problem! We either whip out a resurrection scroll or use the deep magicka of "Save and Restore". It's like a twisted mirror - CRPGs reward dealing death to others, but protect the player from the consequences of death. If there's anything really "evil" about CRPGs, it's this casual love affair with death.

Me, I'm a storyteller. Fantasy stories are best when they wrap fantastic characters around real human personalities in real human situations. And if life tells us anything, it's that death is real. It's horrible and ugly and betrays everything good and beautiful in this world. We see it in every terrorist attack, every suicide, every fatal disease, and all the decay of old age. And it strikes me that CRPGs, no matter how well crafted, are hollow insofar as they fail to recognize the terrible substance of death. I think that may be one reason why Planescape was such a great CRPG story - it dealt with death head-on.

Granted, pen-and-paper RPGs may alleviate this deathliness to some degree - by rewarding creative non-lethal solutions, or making player death permanent - but the main core of D&D remains "kill to grow to be a better killer". I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing - this weekend I'll be investing a lot of time in NWN. But is this maybe the Achilles' heel to CRPGs? Could it be possible to create a CRPG which rewarded competition, creativity, and combat, without condescending to death?

 

Well, Grey, we agree. I think this is a problem with the designers in that you are more often rewarded for how much carnage you can stack up for XP. But I'm not so sure about your take on Planscape, because of the depth of choices that one could make, which developed the story in different ways.

I find that I am really role-playing when my character is faced with serious choices. There are always those one or two NPCs that beg for their lives and you can either kill them (for fun) or let them live for maybe a few more token XP points. But it really doesn't affect the outcome of the game in any meaningful way. But it does in Planescape.

But I think you are right that those of us who play RPGs have a peculiar fascination with violence and death. Remember Joacqin's thread "Who's the most awesome historical figure?" Some of us said something like: I wanted to pick Jesus, but instead I'll pick the guy who laid up the most carnage and "kicked the most butt." I think the warrior spirit resides pretty deeply in everyone who plays RPGs and that's part of the conflict: Having to reconcile the warrior in ourselves with what we know to be the the better measure of ourselves as lovers of peace and forgiveness and mercy. Can we agree that there must be darkness in order to show light? And that in exploring the interplay of light and darkness within ourselves that we come face-to-face with the duality of human nature; that we are, to use a quote and title of a famous book, "killer angels."

 

Gray and Chandos.... Well said. But do we really want CRPGs to approximate real life? Or the emotions we feel in real life? For many of us, it's the escape from real life, that is the very reason we play these games. The morals regarding killing and death, which are a part of that, become unimportant when playing these games. Or maybe it's that we become desensitized to the killing as we play these games over time. I remember when I first started playing d&d games, I would never come up behind an enemy and put a sword through his back---I thought it was dishonorable and would always face my attacker head on. But I've noticed my gameplay has changed a lot lately....it doesn't bother me in the slightest to whack them when they're not looking.

I think we do have a warrior spirit that is normally hidden away for most of us. These games give an outlet for that -- at least for me they do. Do the bodies tend to heap up? Yeah...but if they didn't, I wonder how many games would be sold.

 

I agree with Spellbound: CRPGs are an essential part of the game, simply because it is a game.
I have often noticed that all games are a necessary catharsis; just like theater (for instance Racine's classic tragedies). They allow man to express his feelings of anger, frustration etc, accumulated during the day. All this is *divine wrath* is spent out on fictional characters in a fictional world. The fact that death is not Real in these games is simply an affluant to the idea that life isn't real either. So; actions can be completely incoherent and irresponsible since we know that, while real life forbids this, we can always save and reload!
Anyway, in defense of RPG games; they do have a real storyline and some actual rules you have to follow in order to progress in them, which is their main difference from games like, say, Quake.
I like to think that RPG games are *superior* kind of games ..

 

I think every game is about scoring points. And I think every game is about life and death, win or lose. And indeed, in reality, there are only two games, hide and seek and chess. And all other games are mixture of those two, applied on different platforms. Football on grass, Icehockey on ice, swimming in water and CPRG on computer.

Yet, a game has to be far from reality to enjoy it, you could use a fresh chopped off head to play football, but a simple leather ball is more appropriate. Or one could use little real-life figures of happy peons to be killed by the equally happy looking peons of the other player in chess, instead of the very raw shaped material you usually get with your board.

I have no problem with games and death in it, as long as they keep a distance to awful reality. A sound distance to the here and now. I could imagine a game where you could be Dutroux. First you commit some terrible acts and then you have to cover them up, eventually escaping out of prison. You could make it as a RPG game, with focus on getting through the game with problem solving. The closer it gets to the here and now, the more questionable for me. And indeed, there are some games with contents I find deeply disturbing, yet I can not think of a CPRG amongst it.

And in a game, all dead rise again when you start a new, like a new round of hide and seek, when you get the chance to hide again. It's all about the thrill, the mental or/and physical challenge. Or to stir up curiosity about something purely fictional, but you just have to know how it ends. Gaming is a enjoable learning experience, where you can be confronted with "patterns". "Death" of a figure or a scored goal is a necessary tool in a game to keep the thrill up.

 

I think the main reason CRPG are mostly combat is because it is what make it different from a puzzle game, such as myst. This is because combat and puzzles are pretty much the only ways a CRPG can challenge people. Everyone has a different opinion on what roleplaying is, so the computer game makers cannot create a game that challenges our roleplaying skills, mainly because there is no, nor can there be a standard for roleplaying. So that means we get to kill stuff and solve stuff.

Yay for another post making no sense. *sigh*

 

I am a gamer but NOT a "roleplayer". Roleplaying games evolved from tactical wargames and to many of us they are simply a subset of squad level tactical simulators. I never do any "roleplaying" in front of my monitor. Even when I used to play tabletop rpgs I did not bother with silly accents, bad acting or the like. To me RPGs are simply tactical challenges. The strategy begins with the choices I make during character creation, continues through my decisions about party formations and npc interactions and arte ultimately realized when I defeat the big foozle or get sick of the character(s) I have been playing(in the case of RPGs that do not have a definite ending).
I see no violence or death in CRPGs. I only see sprites/graphic icons(as obstacles) being done away with.

There are many crpgs now that allow non-combative advancement(tradeskills etc.) and this is fine. But do we really want CRPGs where no combat occurs? I am trying to imagine a crpg wherein the player character must perform things like foot races and limmerick recitations. Since we do not want to be testing the PLAYER's ability to perform keypresses quickly, we will want to check against the CHARACTER's "skill" to determine success(otherwise it would not be a RPG).

How boring would THAT be?


I agree that save game abuse is out of hand. One solution is to play roguelike games(Nethack, Angband etc.) which are CRPGs(usually freeware and with graphics ranging from ascii to 3d FPS) that do not allow the player to reload after death.

Another approach is the one used by games such as Helherron adn Warlords Battlecry II, wherein you have ONE save slot for each character/party and so you must be careful of where and when you decide to save your game.

 

Death and killing is what makes CRPGs interesting for people. Bacause there's a challenge in it. You fail you die. If we excluded killing... what would remain? A story with choices to be made. And this is in case with better CRPGs who actualy have a story that develops, not just a continuos quest kill everything. It would be a movie. Sure there'd be many options, but anyone would get bored of it really soon.
So i think killing, not the story is the backbone of CRPGs.
We've seen many succesful games, with practicaly no plot at all. Perhaps just some "you're the only one that can kill the devil that will otherwise destroy the world". In these cases players can forget about the story completely and focus on wading through hordes of enemies. Killing to become stronger.
One way to remove the importance of killing is to give players absolute power. And the game becomes instantly a failure. No matter the plot - you better rent a movie then.

Making challenges other than ever stronger enemies doesnt seem to work. Tricks, puzzles, people get bored of them, as well as many people wont buy a game to solve puzzles.

I see i've gotten quite off topic.

 

Heh!.... Online jigsaw puzzles!!! If you try to connect the wrong ones, the pictures on them materialize and you have to fight them!!!

Whew....I think I had too much coffee this morning. *Spelly goes back into the dark corner*

 

The difficulty that I see is that, if you are going to give a reward, it has to be for some definable and measurable success. Killing is easy – kill an enemy, get rewarded with XP, gold, weapons, etc. But what about rewarding, say, stealth? How do you measure that success? By not getting caught? And if so, at what point can you say you successfully avoided being caught? Just because you can sneak past an enemy doesn’t mean you won’t be caught a bit later.

Or perhaps you want to reward diplomacy. The problem here is that you are limited in your choices for diplomacy based on what the game offers you. You can’t just give a response that you want to give; you’re restricted by what dialogue choices are available.

In the end, based on the current design of CRPG’s, killing is the easiest way to give rewards. Perhaps the answer would be not to give small rewards for each individual success (such as killing an enemy), but instead give rewards for achieving larger successes, with options as to how to achieve it – winning an entire battle, or talking your way out of a situation, or avoiding it altogether. I’m not sure how interesting that would be to your typical player, though.

I agree. Perhaps a possible solution would be to take away the ability to save and restore. For example, even though I got tired of the game quickly, Diablo 2 had an interesting approach – you weren’t able to save your game at all. Instead, it automatically saved itself, and if your character died, you were resurrected in town, with a penalty imposed. Yes, there was a way around the penalty – exit the game if death appeared imminent - but this could probably be resolved by not allowing you to exit if there are enemies around (much like BG2 won’t let you save if enemies are around).

Just my 2 cents.

 

Also wanted to point out that not all RPGs reward you in blanket fashion for killing things. D&D was the first RPG so we can excuse the fact that it's game mechanics were primitive and not all that logically consistent. Later games such as RuneQuest gave us the approach of skills improving as those specific skills were practiced. In RQ you had to fight with your sword to improve your skill with that weapon and the better you got, the harder it was to improve.
Many CRPGS (as well as many P&P RPGS) followed RQ's lead and broke away from the D&D "leveling" apporach that enable thieves to improve stealth skills by backstabbing orcs(?!?).

In many online RPGs you can sit around and do nothing BUT practice tradeskills. When I used to play Dransik(now Ashen Empires) there were guys who just farmed or cooked food all day long and scarcely ever fought anything! Same with EverQuest(for all the flaws of that game it had it's moments).

 

Of course, another issue having to do with video games and death is the growing use of games and simulations in the military. There's a huge amount of evidence of this, including game makers taking military contracts, or the military producing games, etc.

One of the criticisms of modern warfare has to do with the push-button nature of war. In Iraq one we saw the famous footage shot from guided missles homing in on their target; this seemed to make the firing of those missles antiseptic -- as though shot from a joysitck -- while of course the aftermath was a bit more messy. Or even in the Vietnam war, there was alot of popular resentment of the pentagon, which seemed to be fighting the war solely though war games and abstract numbers, scoring their progress through body counts, etc. And even before that, the field of game theory was first developed with military funding.

Is there a difference between the death of sprites in Quake and in America's Army, as one of these was developed as a training tool for combat tactics? One learns how to land a fighter jet on an aircraft carrier by means of a flight simulator before one actually gets to try it in RL.

Video games, and CRPGs, are a kind of media. Interfaces similar to those used in video games are actually used in the military. War is itself growing more "mediated." The skills are learned, the strategies are planned, and the killing is done through computer interfaces.

Not, of course, that BG2 will teach you to kill (unless you're good with casting fireballs!) But I think that one could argue that playing games does offer some training in strategic and tactical thinking that is at least analogous to the skills used by military planners...