I find waypoints to be FAR less of a problem than the question of how much/what there is to discover in the spaces in between. This is hard (probably not impossible, but hard) to automate, because that tends to produce very banal rewards, or it otherwise bollixes the game.
Rewarding explorers without hosing everyone else is definitely tricky, but possible, because we're so inclined to make our own (often non-completionist) fun. Trick is just to realize that collectors and explorers overlap, but are not the same group.
CP2077 is chock a block full of problems, but as a place to wander around (by foot or by car) it was remarkable. A huge amount of my time in play was just wandering around. I do this in most games, and support is intensely variable.
But for all that? Sometimes I just want the Ubisoft checklist simulator. Flexibility is good.
To unpack a little bit on exploration vs. collection. If you hide 20 cool figurines in the world, and I find 17 of them:
* As an explorer, that's a cool detail and I love the continuity.
* As a collector, I have an incomplete checklist.
If they were placed randomly, the collector is now infuriated because the only way to find more is a RNG grind.
If they aren't random, and the collector hasn't been tracking from the beginning, the GREAT BACKTRACKING now begins.
But the explorer is still happy. The jerk.
If anything, I find the collector rewards are more of a deterrent to exploration than waypoints, because they introduce the idea of a "wrong" way to play things.
For example, in Yakuza: Like a Dragon, there are lots of restaurants to eat at, with hidden rewards: 1) Certain menu combinations give you buffs 2) There's an achievement for trying everything on the menu.
This seems pretty cool at first blush, but in the end it crushes you.
Because eventually, the right answer is to just walk in and buy one of everything on the menu. What had been kind of a fun choice of neat menus becomes an exercise, because you have places to be and things to do.
This is hard to fight. In a game of any length, almost anything that's fun and novel at first can become an exercise in grind after hour 25.
I mention Yakuza because I love the games greatly, but they also can really highlight the problem.
On one hand, they are GREAT environmental storytellers. Exploring the cities of the series is an absolute delight.
One the other hand there is so much"I have 49 of 50 widgets, WHERE IS THE OTHER ONE!?!?"
The Yakuza series is all about the fine line between "Diverse Fun" and "Player Punishment"
For the unfamiliar, the Yakuza series is an open world brawler (Or more recently, turn based RPG) which contains an almost preposterously deep bench of minigames, which are in turn surprisingly deep.
The minigames are mostly firewalled off from the game at large, so you can *usually* opt to play them as much or as little as you like. This is good, because there are enough of them that it's hard to like them all.
But you will sometimes encounter situations where the game (directly or indirectly) forces you to play the minigame. If it's a minigame you like? Awesome. If it's one you hate? Infuriating.
Any game which ever depends on me to do well at an indoor batting cage is a game I am likely to ragequit.
(To this day, despite 3 playthroughs, I do not have perfect completion of person 4 because of the damned fishing)
All of which is to say, it's awesome to serve many different play styles, but MAN do they step on each others toes sometimes.
(Also, it points to one of the strengths of tabletop. It is genuinely not as good at the ACT of exploration as video games, but it's vastly better at the *rewards* of exploration)
Though that has me thinking about how much collecting is an artifact of video games. It can be a plot thing in tabletop & stories, but never to the extent of knowing you have 7 of exactly 20 widgets. Even when giving bounties, that top number is usually not in play.
I'm not saying that dismissively. I'm just now wondering if it would actually *work* at the table to say "There are 19 more journals to be found"
I feel like not, because one advantage of tabletop is a high confidence you will find the *right* number of journals.
Which leads to the question of "What is the value of the unfound journal?"
It has one, clearly. It motivates completionism play. In a human run game, it's money left on the table, and a GM is unlikely to let is go to waste if it has intrinsic value. But beyond that?
Is there value to the idea of the complete set that we're *not* leaning into at the table? Or is it just that this is something computer games need to do to address what is a solved problem for people?
My gut says the latter, but I really want to inspect that.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
Re-mentioning: @affinitybyserif has a 50% off deal going at the moment, which means Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo and Affinity Publisher are available for something like 25 bucks each. If you are an RPG publisher, you should at least look at this. affinity.serif.com/en-us/
These applications are functionally comparable to Photoshop, Illustrator and Indesign, and not in a "watered down knock off" sort of way, but in a "fully functional and super powerful" sort of way, but do not require a subscription.
They're not perfect. They're power apps, so there is a learning curve. And there are definitely benefits of buying into the adobesphere which you are passing up (especially on the photoshop side) but they are a reasonable, solid alternative, and I personally use them a lot.
This is a good thread, and I am not criticizing it in saying my experience is a bit different, in large part because I'm aware my experience is the anomalous one. :)
That said, there are reasons for this: some are good, some aren't, and by their nature they point to alternatives
The two most critical points of this are as follows:
* This problem mirrors fiction
* There is a structural information load issue at work
Let's dive in.
Fictional protagonists are usually reactive. Antagonists (villains!) drive events and push for change, and protagonists stop them. This is not universally true, but it's so common as so be expected. It's one of the reasons playing villains is fun for reasons other than EEEVIL.
Strikes me that a great political issue in a cyberpunk setting is the "Right to patch". If you have cyberware installed in your body, are you entitled to security updates? If no, then you're signing up for extortion, which seems like it would make the obvious answer "no", but!
That's evil you could explain to a 5 year old, and megacorps are at least a little sophisticated. They get your money by making you WANT to spend it, and conceding on this gives the government (such as it is) a "win", which is great optics.
And, critically, the details are in the fine print. Yes, security and stability patches are mandatory for a "reasonable period" after release. Which means that rather than nickel and diming you with service fees on your heart, they mandate a replacement when it goes EOL.
If you make something that is good and interesting, then there MUST be people who it is NOT for. If you strive to understand WHY this is so, and celebrate it (rather than resent it) it makes *every* game better.
PBTA is not as intuitive to me as Fate (surprise), but because I recognize that's a matter of taste, not quality, that lets me analyze several things.
Top of head: 1) What works well in PBTA. Can I learn from that? 2) What gaps does PBTA have? Can I fill those? 3) What can I learn from how PBTA presents information? 4) What in PBTA *excites* people? Do i think it's unique? 4) Are there things I could do for fans of both?
I am hard pressed to think of an anime I have enjoyed more than The Great Pretender. Cowboy Bebop, I suppose, but it kind of has a lifetime exemption. Beyond that, it gets hard.
And because this is the internet, I point out that I did not say I can't think of a *better* anime. That would be meaningless and foolish.
But The Great Pretender really zooms in on my sweet spots.
* Team of Grifters conning bad guys? Check.
* Consistently amazing visual? Check
* Excellent but not-bombastic character design? Check
* Great music, used well? Check
* Diverse, deep, complex cast? Check
* Clever, long-view writing? Check
* Respects but uses the tropes? Check
Related to the other tweet, I am currently looking very hard at Gumshoe and going "Ok, what if it's ALL investigative skills and nothing else?".
It introduces challenges, yes, but if you're already deep down the diceless rabbithole, very few of them are novel.
To get very nerdy - the thing that *I* find necessary to make Gumshoe fun is to have a robust *cycle* of currency. That is, points are spent, but they are also redeemed, and that back and forth is dynamic. Without it, the engine chokes (again, for me, not in a universal sense).
So, given that, the refund rules are important. But they reveal a weird split - If you think ONLY in terms of bonuses, an investigative spend can get you +3, and a non-investigative spend gets you +1. This *seems* like its offset by non-investigative pools being bigger. But!