selene tan

Okay, I’ve been horribly lazy about both this blog and NaNoWriMo. That project I last mentioned didn’t help, and then the week after that involved 2 midterms and another mini-project (actually, it was a homework assignment, but I turned it into a project because I do things like that…) and an assignment I should have done much, much earlier.

In any case. Games and game design.

I’ve recently been reminded about payoff matrices. These are a concept that shows up in game theory, a branch of math that examines and tries to find winning strategies for types of games. Usually the games are really simple and abstract and maybe even not recognizable as games, but the theory and techniques are an interesting way to look at the choices you give the player of a game you’ve made. If you didn’t bother following the link, a payoff matrix is a table for a 2-player game where the rows show all the possible strategies one player can make, and the columns show all the possible strategies for the second player. Each table cell contains the “payoff”, i.e. how much will be lost or gained, for each pair of strategies.

The book Game Architecture and Design uses payoff matrices when discussing how to make (simple) strategy and fighting games that are interesting. That made me think about how to apply the same techniques to CRPGs. The first thing that occured to me was “How on earth am I going to do this with an RPG?!” I immediately thought of individual rounds in combat between players and computer-controlled enemies, probably because of the fighting/strategy examples. The thing is, that gets really complicated really fast, especially if you include all the possible skills or spells or special attacks each player and enemy can use. There’s also the point that it’s not entirely clear what the values in the cells of the payoff matrix should be. For example, you might be able to blast a Slime to kingdom come in one round by using your “Ultimate Doom” spell, but wipe out half of your mana while you’re at it, when 2 melee attacks will kill it just as well, although you might sustain some damage in the process. From that example, with only 2 choices for you (not considering what the hapless slime can do), there are three different factors that you might worry about – amount of time taken, amount of mana, and amount of damage sustained. (You can substitute any miscellaneous resource for “mana”.) There might be more, depending on how complex your combat, damage, and special ability systems are. And since not everyone will place equal weight on each of those factors, if you want to do a thorough job, you should probably make a matrix for each factor! Ugh!

In any case, I think I’ll leave that kind of thinking to the people who’re more concerned about combat than I am, or at least not think about it for a while. I’m more interested in general strategies for CRPGs. Fallout 2 had a pretty good example of this; at the beginning, you can either pick from one of 3 pre-made characters, or design your own. The characters are a warrior who’s good at using brute strength and not good for much else, a thief who can sneak around and dodge a lot, and a trader who can talk her way out of many fights. The game is playable as any of the three template characters, which is Really Cool, although the trader will have a harder time with some of the sidequests, which tend to involve fighting. Fallout 2 I think tried to make all three options viable for all of the game, which is rather hard. In a way, the game had 3 modes – the “fight your way”, “sneak your way”, and “talk your way” modes, and each of the characters would do better or worse when the game is in a particular mode. In general, you can make different situations in your game have different modes, if you want to stress different aspects of the characters, or perhaps different characters if you allow the player to control more than one. Okay, so this seems like an obvious result. Most CRPGs don’t do this, or prefer to think about the “I can do a great deal of damage very quickly but use up resources and am really frail” (spellcasters, mostly, think about it…) versus the “I can do a fair amount of damage less quickly but I’m really tough” dilemma instead.

This post had a point but it got lost. Will give reward of virtual chocolate if returned.