Basic guide - RPG gameplay

[LordOfThePings]

Basic guide - RPG gameplay

Preface

The following guide is meant to be an introduction to modern RPG development. Thus, its topics will be presented in a very general and abstract manner. Where appropriate, reasoning is provided to introduce you to the way of thinking used and to make the statements more plausible (also it is a requirement for any theory).
It might look like a giant wall of text, however, the parts can be read and digested independently.

Immersion

A very important part in most RPGs is immersion. It is not something you can force upon players but there are several ways to provide solid foundations: A consistent and interesting world (+ story) helps the "role-play" aspect of it, a low barrier of entry helps the "game" aspect.

Story

A good story helps the atmosphere of a map. It needs to be consistent with gameplay; you can explain various things on the loading screen and at the start or during expected downtime. Use cinematics sparingly to greater effect; never interrupt encounters. You should also use quest texts and item tooltips to tell players about your world.

Barrier of entry

Many RPGs are hard to get into, this is mainly caused by gating through levelling and gearing, overly complicated stats, rotations and systems. Try to achieve the desired properties (e.g. longevity, flavour, challenge) through use of other methods, for example the ones described in the guide. This will also save you a lot of time, which you can spend on more high quality content.

Playable characters

Playable characters provide the foundation for challenging and interesting gameplay.
If it's possible to recuperate between encounters, make sure players don't waste much time on it. Cooldowns should be rather short, resources/health should replenish quickly.

Don't flood your map with lots of characters. The motives for having multiple characters are replayability, choice of style and, in case of a multiplayer RPG, roles. On the other hand, properly designing and balancing them will get a lot harder as their number increases. It is thus best to use the design space efficiently. Make each character unique in style and viable. In multiplayer RPGs, this can get out of hand, but there is always the alternative of "fixed composition" to avoid balance problems.

Roles

Roles are used to split the actions that are done by the group to allow further specialization and more ways of interaction. Roles should be unique in order to achieve balance (choices aren't dominated by others) and replayability (different roles to play for a change). You can accomplish this e.g. by splitting the role archetypes (tank, damage-dealer, healer, support) and distributing them. The extent of the split depends on the number of roles.

Example

Tank: Main tank, off-tank (distribute damage spikes, pick up adds etc.)
Healer: Spot h., throughput h.
DPS: throughput, burst
Support: utility (movement, CC), tactics (short-time buffs)

Don't mix time-critical roles (loss of control if the "spikes" collide) and make roles versatile (prevents tunneling) by merging sub-roles.

Rotations

There are 2 common forms of rotations, "cooldown-driven" and "resource-driven" rotations (or hybrids). Important characteristics to aim for are flexibility (so players can react to mechanics), role-appropriate toolkit (so players can have an impact on the game) and sustainability (so players don't have to twiddle their thumbs).

Cooldown-driven rotations

Principle: Core ability usage is regulated by cooldowns
Motivation: Easy to balance (accurate prediction of ability usage), safe (strict limitations), works regardless of encounters
Verdict: Use cooldowns for non-central parts of a rotation, "delicate" abilities and if you don't want to / can't make it resource-driven.
Remarks: Cooldowns should be rather short to avoid excessive downtime, make sure there is a "default action" (so characters don't just stand around)

Resource-driven rotations

Principle: Core ability usage is regulated by resources, which are regenerated or actively generated using dedicated abilities (cast or channeled, no cooldown)
Motivation: Dynamic (choice of when to spend r.), versatile (choice of how to spend r.), impactful abilities (no fillers, purposeful usage)
Verdict: A bit more difficult to implement correctly, but it's worth it if appropriate for the toolkit.
Remarks: Resource-generating abilities should have a long cast time or be channeled. This makes sure there is an actual decision (tradeoff) behind their usage.

A general rule of thumb is that each ability in a rotation should have its own unique benefits and should be used whenever you want these benefits specifically (e.g. generating mana during periods of low incoming damage, spot healing for single-target damage spikes, AE healing for AE damage spikes, heal-over-time spells for covering sustained incoming damage).

Abilities

Abilities are the mainstay of a rotation. They should serve a particular purpose within it. Make sure that effects, visuals and tooltips are focused on achieving this purpose and conveying the needed information, in order to keep bloat low. If you want to spice things up or the mechanics aren't implemented, create custom spells.

A toolkit should enable the character to fulfil its role.

Example

Warlock tank
Abilities: Drain Soul (mana gen., healing), Soul Fire (ST threat/damage), Immolation (AE threat/damage), Nether Ward (mitigation)
Role: main tank, throughput self-healer

Difficulty, encounters and progression

One of the usual problems modern RPGs face is that of longevity (or the lack thereof). It's simply not very engaging to kill a boss over and over, with it getting easier each time you do that. However, if a boss was to be killed only a small amount of times, the map (or game) would become very short.

There is also the problem of tuning: A fixed difficulty limits content to a rather small range of players, lots of difficulty settings make a game relatively clunky to play and increase perceived repetitiveness. This circle can not be broken directly, since it is based on the binary character of main objectives (e.g. kill / wipe).

A solution is letting encounters scale with optional objectives (speed-kills etc.) and allowing progress on a lot of different encounters. There would be a main objective (ending the encounter successfully), which adjusts its difficulty through the need to optimize the secondary objectives.

This has even the potential to eliminate the need for gear rewards and levelling, which usually bring some sort of blockwise content consumption. It also replaces the "carrot on a stick" with a multi-modal game in which you can have fun wherever you want.

The encounters themselves need to be dynamic and utilize all roles and their toolkits. Randomness should not have a great impact on results (so alternatives should be - assuming correct play - roughly equal in effect). Telegraphs are easy to explain and thus very popular but their strategical impact is rather small. Usually the following will be better: dangerous phases / spawns that need to be pushed through, enemies that can heal ("bait-and-switch" style), dynamic damage multipliers (both ways, e.g. a troll's "Berserk") et cetera.

The following tabs will give you a quick overview of the "traditional" RPG style (for comparison) and an alternative (to show another possibility).

Traditional Way

Path: Levelling -> Attunement -> Instances
Levelling: The characters gain levels by defeating enemies and completing quests, thereby unlocking their toolkit and higher level content. Players should learn how to play here.
Attunement: Preparation for instances to make sure players actually have a chance of getting anywhere in instances.
Instances: This is the hardest content. It should drop the strongest items; characters should be at the maximum level and have their full toolkit.
Motivation: Character progression, familiarity

Multi-modal Alternative

Path: Tutorial -> Instances, Quest areas
Tutorial: A quick introduction to the character's playstyles, e.g. a short explanatory text + training dummies to get some muscle memory.
Instances: Competitive and challenging content; difficulty scaled through optional objectives. Rewards consist mostly of lore and vanity items.
Quest areas: Very diverse and creative part; you should fit lots of lore into these to expand the game world; it also serves as a hub for everything else.
Motivation: Longevity (content stays relevant), tuning (no difficulty deterioration, self-tuning possibilities), low profile (no filler content, straightforward development), accessibility

Appendix: Definitions and Glossary

Toolkit: Collection of a character's abilities with their respective uses
Rotation: Pattern in which abilities are used
Crowd Control: Disabling enemies, e.g. by stunning, slowing, interrupting them
Area of Effect: Location-based multi-target
Tunneling: Ignoring most parts of a fight, encouraged by very limited role and overly complicated rotations
Time-critical (roles): Reliant on precise timing as opposed to raw output
Balance: Making sure options are viable (why else would they exist?)
Immersion: A game's capability to immerse players in the its world

 

[deathismyfriend]

You should also note that agood story line are a must for any RPG. Custom spells are also nice.

 

[LordOfThePings]

You should also note that agood story line are a must for any RPG. Custom spells are also nice.

Yes, this is important, even though a map can work without a fully fleshed out story line. I intended to focus on gameplay aspects, though.
Custom spells are indeed nice. However, that's also mostly a flavor thing, except if it has some major implications (e.g. absorbs). In any case, the underlying mechanics should follow the same principles as non-custom spells.

It would be nice if someone could create a tutorial on these "flavor things" (for lack of a better expression). I certainly can't, as I don't know much about it sadly.

 

[deathismyfriend]

For an RPG I don't consider story lines as a flavor thing. They are a must. If you don't have a good story line for your RPG then the RPG can seem very inconsistent.
As you said the map can work. I agree with that. But I do not believe an RPG can work without a decent story line.

Custom spells are a flavor thing yes. But most RPGs have them.

I believe there are tutorials here on how to create story lines.

There are definitely tutorials here on how to create custom spells.
It is rather easy to create them.

 

[LordOfThePings]

So there are guides on how to do these things and they certainly aren't gameplay (although I agree they are important). I don't see what you're getting at here.

I'm more interested in what you think about the gameplay tips. Is there something that seems wrong to you? Are these ideas even any good? Where should I elaborate?

 

[deathismyfriend]

My point is that those are part of gameplay.

As for your tutorial it is hard to read.
Also why this ?

Encounters and progression[\h2]

You should try to format the tutorial a little better to make it easier to read and find things.
Take a look at my tutorial Things You Should Know When Using Triggers / GUI.
All the green is clickable. And it brings you to the chapters you want.
I also use ways to show different sections. There are lists in there but I don't really know if you need them.

 

[LordOfThePings]

So you want me to add "Get a good story line" to it? That's like saying "A car needs tires". Well, no shit. As for more detailed hints: I don't know much about it, so that's that. It's a "different story", more of an art and less scientific, if you will.

As for the formatting: I will get to that soon, but if you actually bothered to read through the guide you will see that the content isn't fleshed out yet. I'd rather get some feedback on that before I expand on it. Thanks for the help on this in advance.

Edit: I fixed some obvious typographic mistakes.
Edit2: Okay, time for precision. Story and custom spells are part of the gameplay, but what I've been getting at is that all the gameplay implications are "story needs to be consistent with what happens gameplay-wise" (hello Captain Obvious) and mechanics (so basically the same as non-custom spells).
Edit3: I added a short chapter about story line and fleshed out some things. I think I reached the character limit.

 

[PurgeandFire]

That is quite a nice guide you've got there.

I particularly liked "encounters and progression", with the part about "optional objectives". Replay-ability is really overlooked in most maps.
Optional objectives, IMO, can really help with that.

The tutorial is easily approvable in its current state, but I'd rather wait until you're fully 'content' with it (in case you want to expand it more).

As for a suggestion: some of the content is a little esoteric (those unfamiliar with RPGs and their terminology/acronyms will be at a disadvantage).
I don't think you should necessarily add definitions within the text since that only leads to bloated text, but I think you should make some
sort of 'word list' or 'glossary' with definitions (for those who need them). You can even do
them within hidden tags. [HIDDEN="Glossary"][/HIDDEN]

Glossary

• CC - Crowd control
• AE - Area of Effect
• Tunneling - ...
• etc..

Overall, I'm happy you made this tutorial, and I'm sure it will be useful as a linkback when I see a map that needs work.

 

[Chaosy]

I feel like the tutorial need some visual work. It feels like a boring wall of text (sorry!).

I also think that you could explain how to make up a good storyline for your map, this should work in any map type. You could cover pros and cons of warcraft lore based maps and completely made up stuff from your own fantasy. And obviously what a good story needs.

 

[LordOfThePings]

That is quite a nice guide you've got there. ...

Thanks.
I'd like some more discussion on the guide and (of course) I will try to improve the readability before it gets moved over. Definitions are important to me, because a developer / mapper needs to know what exactly he/she/it is doing and why in order to get these points right; maybe I will cram them all into a hidden tag named "Appendix: Definitions / Glossary". I'll test it out when I have the time.

I feel like the tutorial need some visual work. It feels like a boring wall of text (sorry!).

I also think that you could explain how to make up a good storyline for your map, this should work in any map type. You could cover pros and cons of warcraft lore based maps and completely made up stuff from your own fantasy. And obviously what a good story needs.

No need to be sorry for pointing that out. As for the story, I feel I'm not qualified to tell much about story-writing, mainly because it's an art as opposed to something more "scientific" like the topics addressed in the guide. It's also worth noting that, while important to gameplay, story itself is more of an aesthetical component of a map (or game).
Edit: I've created a small appendix and improved readability slightly by using hidden tags.
Edit2: I've dramatically shortened the guide (while hopefully keeping the content intact) in order to condense it. Please tell me if you like the changes and where I should expand using the newfound space.

 

[PurgeandFire]

Great. Approved.

 

[LordOfThePings]

I shuffled the topics around to get everything in a (hopefully) more logical order.

PS: I can see a lot (well, not that many, but still a lot) of people lurking in here. Why aren't you posting? For instance, you could tell me how to improve readability (some posters complained about it, but they didn't give specific feedback). I can't really know why it's hard to read, because I don't read it (I know the content beforehand).

The story part is still awful, but I'm not too well versed in story-telling. Maybe you could help me with some generic tips?

And finally, the grand question: Should I include "the" definition of "RPG"? I've been hesitant to do so, because it's very hard to get a general and precise definition, but I might try if there is some interest.

 

[daverave1212]

I'd like to add that world bosses, rare mobs and popup encounters are really cool in RPG games too
Also, rng events ffs