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May 18, 2011 -- 3:57PM, Mand12 wrote:

How do you determine your objectives as a designer?  What are good objectives to have?  Where do you make trades between competing objectives, and how large a trade do you make?

It's these questions that are the real meat.

Yes, but they are, fundamentally, unanswerable.  There is no limit to what RPGs may attempt to accomplish, because thay are games (the "G" in RPG).  So a designer has nearly limitless objectives from which he can choose.

I don't think you can define "good objective" in a universal manner.  One person's "good objective" is another person's "useless game". 

Finally, because it's all subjective, the appropriate level of trade-off is also going to be subjective.  If a designer decides he is making the Les Miserables RPG.  He decides he wants both gritty realism (brutal battles with festering wounds) and romantic sweep (French Revolution and love stories that drive people to great deed), they need to be balanced against one another.  In places, they may work together well, and in others, they may be mutually contradictory.  There's not right or wrong answer to what the designer chooses.  However, if he decides that romantic sweep is more important than gritty realism, then he can be judged on how well he accomplishes that. 

But often, consumers of RPGs must guess at what the designer's goals are, so judgments are difficult to make.

I agree that good objectives can't be defined explicitly, no.

However that doesn't mean that we can't look at examples of good games, see what they do well, analyze why they did those things well, and attempt to apply those lessons when making design choices.

Let's take design of something else subjective.  You're in charge of a test kitchen figuring out how to make new candy bars for a major company.  Your goal is "tastes good."  Well, what does that mean?  Taste is subjective, right?  That does mean that you can't accurately predict with 100% accuracy a priori whether your new candybar will be the next Snickers, but you probably shouldn't make one that tastes like raw sewage.

Saying "it's all subjective" puts Snickers on the same footing as RawSewageBar.  I mean it's all personal taste, right?  They should only be judged on whether they make their bar taste like real, authentic raw sewage, yes?

I would argue quite strongly that Snickers is an objectively better choice than a candy bar that tastes like raw sewage, despite the fact that taste is an entirely subjective metric.

Mand, to illustrate my point, let me examine your initial post for the assumptions you make about game design.

Mand: When playing a game, the player should always feel like their character is really cool and awesome, and they should have fun playing.

You equate "cool and awesome" with fun.  That is not a necessary assumption.  A game may in fact exncourage you to conform and reward you for conforming and not being "cool" or "awesome".  To some extent, the Paranoia RPG encourages GMs to penalize characters that try to be cool and/or awesome.  There, the fun is in trying to last longer by conforming to the whims of a capricious GM.  You also make this assumption in the section "Character Distinctiveness"

To the extent that you mean to say that an RPG should simply be fun, I think that's subsumed into the "Game" part of Roleplaying Game.

Mand: A game like Tetris is a good example of a game based on choicelessness.  You have zero control over what pieces you get

Here, you make an assumption that the choices are in character creation.  Tetris (and again, I hate analogies) does have choices -- they are choices in play of where you place your pieces.

A RPG could decide to give all players the exact same characters mechanically and concentrate the fun simply on how those characters are roleplayed, the personalities chosen.  A lot of horror-based RPGs will choose this route, in which the characters are all people trapped in a house or a mall, with very little difference in character mechanics.  Rather, the players are encouraged to choose distinct personalities for their characters and are then rewarded for surviving the scenario while remaining true to that character personality.  The choices are not in character creation, but in character execution.

You make the same assumption (that the important choices are those made during character development) in your discussion of "Character Depth", "Character Breadth", and "Character Area".

This is an understandable assumption from someone playing 4e, since 4e made the conscious decision to make character building an integral and fundamental part of the game.  That's because 4e has chosen "teamwork" as a design objective and requiring players to build characters to fit that role well lest they let down the team.  However, that is not the only possible design choice (though it's one I personally enjoy).

In "overload" you decry the need for "system mastery" to distinguish between "trap" choices and "feat taxes".  Inherent in this analysis is a decision that "system mastery" is an invalid design goal.  But I think "system mastery" can be a valid design goal -- though I agree with you that it is not a design goal that the designers of 4e wanted.  But I can envision a game in which "system mastery" is a goal, in which there is competition among the players to find mechanical exploits and build characters around them.  if all players agree to this goal and consciously work to outdo one another through optimization, then that can be a perfectly valid game objective.

That said, your point that 4e's system mastery elements are inconsistent with its design objectives is well taken.  In other games, however, that could be a feature, not a flaw.

This assumption also presents itself in your discussion of "choice transparency".  In a game where system mastery is the goal, transparency is actively antithetical to that goal.  The player shave fun by finding the hidden exploits and synergies and they chould not be evident.  While choice transparency is important in a game emphasizing conscious team-building, it is less important where the game has elements of inter-party competition.

"Balance" also is a game design element that is only necessary if the game wants the result to be determined objectively.  However, there are games were the goal is not to beat the game with dice and strategy, but to outwit the GM directly.  In such games, the rules are often wildly unbalanced and unpredictable.  The GM in such games is encouraged to place the PCs in seekingly impossible situations that rob them of any mechanical benefits they have and force players to outthink the GM, either by ferrting out the hidden solution he has placed into the scenario, or by devising a completely out-of-the-box solution the GM never considered.  In such games, the mechanics serve, not as a check on the GM, but as a pallate for the GM and players to manipulate to create an interactive mind game.

Reading the last sections of your post, hwoever, I wonder if you really wanted to discuss game design objectives, or if you want to specifically analyze 4e's game design objectives and whether recent releases meet these objectives.  If so, let me apologize for misconstruing your post.

You are making an assumption that all game objectives have equal validity.  That is the fundamental source of the disagreement.  You appear to be stating that as long as a game meets its objectives, it should be deemed good design.  I cannot accept that.  There are lots of different ways to have fun, absolutely I agree.  But I do think that there are concepts of design that are more universal.  I am, in fact, stating that system mastery requirements as a design goal is a poor choice.  I've played games where it takes pages of analysis and even modeling Monte-carlo simulations of fight mechanics in order to accurately choose which piece of gear one should wear.  It's a bad design.  Saying 'well, someone might like it' is a cop-out and absolves the designer of responsibility for the choices they make that impact how many people will ultimately like their product.

You keep using subjective as if it means this unknowable entity that we can't make judgments about.  That's just not the case.