Fallout 3 Part II - Wandering the Wastelands

Sweet, Sweet Karma

Last time I ended with an explanation of Fallout 3's Radiant AI, and the game's morality system directly works together with it to create the experience of choice. Fallout 3 has a morality system called the Karma System, and it is a fairly simple one. Each significant action you take, whether it be to shoot up a bar or save a cave full of orphaned children, gives positive or negative karma. If you were to visualize it, your character is a tiny slider on a linear scale, and you start directly in the middle. Each action which would accrue karma would take you closer to the left (negative) or right (positive). So how does this interact with the Radiant AI?

"Oh, it's you..."

As you accrue karma, positive or negative, interesting things begin to happen. As you enter a town, if you've been playing the valiant hero, you may overhear some NPCs chatting about how you saved that whole village a couple miles away, or exclaim one of your other heroic acts. Likewise, if you've been acting in more dastardly ways, the NPCs will shy away from you, some may even call you names, and don't think you'll be getting good prices at the shop as a villain either. This is the Radiant system at work; entwining the non-linear scheduling protocols of the NPCs with your choices and decisions to create a personal narrative that spans the whole game-world.

Resources (for Part I & II)

Wong, K. (2013, August 1). Morality systems in roleplaying games. Retrieved from http://the-                 artifice.com/role-playing-games-morality-systems/

Mullon, R. (2012, April 18). What's new in skyrim: New radiant ai and radiant story. In The Altered Gamer. Retrieved April 24, 2014, from http://elder-scrolls.alteredgamer.com/tes-5-skyrim/116302-whats-new-in-skyrim-new-radiant-ai-and-radiant-story/

Fallout 3 Part I - Welcome to the Wastelands

Post-Nuclear Role-playing

The Fallout series has been around for almost twenty years now, but it gained mainstream popularity with the third main entry, Fallout 3, in 2008. The game takes place decades after an apocalyptic nuclear war ravages the world, and your character steps out of her underground vault to explore the Capital Wastelands (the areas surrounding Washington D.C.). This game affords much more freedom to the player than previous games I have talked about; your character is not established in the fiction like Geralt in The Witcher  or Commander Shepherd in Mass Effect. They are a construct, representing the player themselves, and so making choices becomes a more personal affair. 

Radiant A.I.

Before you can understand how making choices affects the gameplay of Fallout 3, lets take a look at what makes the world tick, namely Bethesda's pretty amazing proprietary artificial intelligence Radiant A.I.. Instead of all the NPCs just standing around waiting for your character to come up and pay attention to them, they are all given a fairly broad schedule. For example, the A.I. could tell them to "Go to this town and eat at 2PM". How they decide to go about that task is up to them, if there are 3 taverns in the town than any one of them is fair game each time. Besides simple tasks like that, they also go to work, sleep, and visit other NPCs, basically have their own virtual lives apart from the actions of your character. All of this adds a sense of life to the world that greatly increases immersion. The main draw though, especially when it comes to choice, is the fact that the NPCs will remember your character's history and decisions, and react accordingly.

Resources

*Will be listed at end of Fallout 3 Part II

Interview with a Dungeon Master

I interview my friend, who has chosen to go by 'A', about his years of experience being a Dungeon Master in Dungeons & Dragons.

C: So how long is it now that you've been DM'ing?
A: I've been DM'ing now for...about 6 or 7 years? Can't remember when I started in California but it's been about that long.

C: Do you make up your own stories, or go with pre-written adventures? What's the idea behind that?
A: Well at first it was all pre-written Wizards [of the Coast] stuff. I wasn't very good at coming up with things at first, but no DM really is. After awhile I created my own lore and setting that would work with D&D rules, and that's the place my friends and I would keep returning to. The D&D settings are cool and all, and a lot of it inspired me, but it's way more personal when you can create something unique that you yourself made.

C: How much wiggle room do you give yourself in your setting and rules? I mean, some players are bound to try to 'break' your game right?
A: Honestly, most people are pretty respectful [laughs]. But yeah, I do give myself some room to, interpret things differently. Usually if it's really something I don't see as possible within my setting, I'll have them make a roll for it, and just be like "well no, your character wasn't able to achieve that, as it's nigh impossible under these circumstances", of course if they roll a 20 then an exception will have to be made, but usually I try not to do too many things like that. There's a time to keep the narrative moving forward.

C: Are your stories usually pretty linear?
A: As far as going from city to city, yeah. But how you tackle my quests, may end up letting you explore additional dungeons for extra loot rolls and such. But I have a pretty good idea of the events that will be happening chronologically in my stories. I kind of leave it up to the players to try to screw it up, like if they really make one of the NPCs made then, well, the party might have to go somewhere else for that information.

C: How do you really moderate interactions between real human beings? How do you make sure what they do and say will all fit within your story?
A: I really don't. Although the overarching story is set, the events that happen in between that are fluid. Fluidity and flexibility are very important aspects of being a DM, and you're never good at them at first. It comes with experience.

C: So for my final question, what advice would you give to budding Dungeon Masters out there?
A: Don't. Give. Up. Learn everything about the game that you can, but most importantly, just start running adventures, even if they're pre-mades. The only way you really get good at DM'ing, is by DM'ing. So get your friends together and just play.

Dungeons & Dragons: The Fine Line Between Choice and Chance

Dungeoneering

When it comes to player choice in a pen and paper RPG such as Dungeons & Dragons(DnD), it's quite a different beast. In some ways, the player has much more choice, and in others less. Instead of an artificial intelligence deciding the constraints of the situation, there is a Dungeon Master, or DM for short, who imagines the settings, characters, and monsters that you and your friends will interact with. The main aspect that differentiates DnD from computer based RPGs is the fact the the DM comes up with the story-line and encounters, but unlike in a video game, these are still mutable points. Depending on the choices of the players and the success of those choices, the story can be changed in an infinite number of ways (up to the discretion of the DM), instead of the finite number of branches which exist in a game such as Mass Effect; these games can give a fair illusion of many choices, but a well thought out DnD campaign can truly provide that.

Roll of the Dice

 DnD approaches choice using a roll of the dice. For just about every action a player can take, there is dice roll called a difficulty check. In order for your character to succeed in their action, they need to meet or exceed this number, which is chosen by the DM, and if you roll a natural 20 (a pure 20 on a twenty-sided die without adding any modifiers) than you are particularly successful at that action. As you can probably tell, deciding what to do in a game of DnD can go a myriad of different ways, as opposed to choosing choice 1 or choice 2 in a video game. Left up to the discretion of the DM, you can do "okay", "great", "not quite", or "botch" (rolling a 1 on the twenty-sided die), or any other rating of performance in between, with infinitely different results. Of course there are guidelines for the DM to follow, but routinely bending rules is one of the ways DnD retains its fun over the years. Choice is tightly wound with chance in DnD, which in many ways makes it mirror reality, where luck is much of the time a deciding factor of success in our lives. Too bad we don't actually get to battle dragons.


Resources

Crowking, R. (2011, May 31). C is for choices, context, and consequence (part I). In Raven Crowking's Nest. Retrieved April 16, 2014, from http://ravencrowking.blogspot.com/2011/05/c-is-for-choices-context-and.html

Massive Effects

Last week, I wrote about how Bioware really pushed the envelope when it came to choice in their early games, namely Baldur's Gate. This week I will continue exploring the accomplishments of Bioware a bit more, and how they further shaped the essence of choice in their extremely successful franchise Mass Effect.

Mass Effect

Mass Effect follows the story of Commander Shepard (you), as he leads his ragtag crew of assorted alien species around the galaxy in an effort to thwart the world-devouring Reapers and save the Universe. Yeah, it's as epic as it sounds. Bioware's major breakthrough with this series of games, however, was the building upon of their conversation tree system, and the inclusion of a morality system. 

Crafting a Player-Character

In order to understand how the morality system works in Mass Effect, the new conversation system warrants an explanation first. Unlike Baldur's Gate, where just a list of responses was laid out for the player to choose from, Mass Effect has the conversation wheel. So the trade-off is this; you get less varied responses than you would in Baldur's Gate, but you can make a choice much faster and therefore actually simulate a dramatic, fully acted conversation with characters in the game--something the Mass Effect series has constantly been lauded for. This all funnels into the morality system mentioned earlier. At key points in the story, the player is given a choice; usually a very difficult one, and upon the conversation wheel will be two color-coded responses; one red, and one blue. As you can imagine, red equated to the 'evil' decision, whereas blue indicated the 'heroic' decision, although not every choice throughout the trilogy is always that cut and dry. What this meant is that each player not only had control over their personal Commander Shepard's combat abilities, but also his or her personality as well, to truly create their own "version" of the game. And all of this was accompanied by a way to port your save file from one game to the next, preserving those choices you made and seeing them ripple across the trilogy was truly a thing of beauty.

Resources

Hillier, B. (2012, March 13). Illusive choice: mass effect takes the "role-play" out of rpg. Retrieved from http://www.vg247.com/2012/03/13/the-illusive-choice-mass-effect-3-takes-role-play-out-of-rpg/

Wong, K. (2013, August 1). Morality systems in roleplaying games. Retrieved from http://the-artifice.com/role-playing-games-morality-systems/

Morality in The Witcher

I want to move on to a more complicated game, namely CD Projekt Red's (CDPR) The Witcher series. It came out just around the same time as Bioware released Mass Effect, and yet offered a far different experience.

Grey Area

When The Witcher first released in 2007, it was highly regarded and deemed a very different RPG experience than the usual "group up and save the world!" paradigm. It was dark, violent, and edgy, set within a fairly unique low-fantasy setting. The game deals with very real issues, such as racism, death, prostitution, and nationalism in a mature way. For this to work CDPR needed to include a way to make the player's decisions matter. But they did not include a measured system, such as in Mass Effect, you did not gain good points or bad points, simply because the choices made in The Witcher rarely just boil down to "good" or "bad." Most of the decisions come down to your own personal moral compass, and what you consider to be right; no behind the scenes points being added or detracted, just your choice, and the consequences that can come cascading back down on you later on in the game. That is the most interesting thing about The Witcher, no side, whether it be the humans, the mutants(elves, dwarves and the like), or yourself, Geralt, a half-mutant, was good or evil; each side was just carrying out actions which it believed to be right, and it was presented in a very believable way. As Geralt, you can choose to side with any of these factions, or stay neutral, and the game presents its' story very differently depending on your decisions, but it rarely ever rewards you for making a peculiar decision, besides with its natural consequence, whether that be positive or negative.

Resources

Bycer, J. (2013, August 1). The grey side of morality in game design. In Game Wisdom. Retrieved April 4, 2014, from http://game-wisdom.com/critical/the-grey-side-of-morality-in-game-design

Podcast: Choices Within World of Warcraft

Tonight, I have my friend Ben joining me to discuss the power of choice within a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game, namely World of Warcraft.