So are you a boy or are you a girl? And does this question even matter?
Picking the sex of your character is a standard part of most computer RPGs with character creation. Once more something that can be traced back to traditional RPGs. But does it actually translate to the computer screen that well?
Skill checks are just one of those things that are considered part of the essential RPG toolbox. But is that a reasonable assumption?
Are skill checks actually that good or useful in game design? What is the point of the buggers anyway? Will Eso ever get to the point?
So what exactly are formal grammars and how do they relate to ordinary, mundane, every day grammars?
To answer the second question… poorly. Because humans lack the glorious precision and clarity of machine minds. Despite this formal grammars still, have a lot of uses… and in different places, you might not quite expect.
So far we have a beginning and some ends. What we don’t have is a path that will take us between those two points.
Of course, I’ve already talked about this subject, and I said I don’t believe there is a need to make that path.
It sometimes astounds me that this needs to be said, but I see this crops up so often…
The character is not the player.
Nor is the player the character.
Yet, again and again, I see this appear as a theme in so many different games.
Dolly once more to the rescue to fill in a pretty important aspect of the topic that I failed to mention myself. There’s a few pretty interesting points to be had here, written down a lot more concisely than my rambling scrawls.
So we’ve talked so much about topics such as choice and memory and conflicts and other things as well, oh my~
But it’s time to get something meaty – quest design. And to properly bite into this topic we have to start from the start… the inception of a quest.
A world is a pretty big place. Building one synthetically from the ground up is a somewhat daunting task, and it is often trivialised in the worst ways.
How much work goes into making a world from scratch and how to avoid it though? An excellent question. Now let me preach to you the only proper way of doing it.
After an extended break lets get back to this topic. Names. What are they good for? Well, telling stories for example. And also making sure we know what we are talking about when we converse with each other.
This time we’ll be delving into the mysterious art of naming places.
There are two general ways to balance something in traditional role-playing games. They are both a pretty useful tool for use in computer games as well though. Specifically, I’m going to be talking about this from the perspective of D&D. You might not be very familiar with D&D, so I’ll also include a short explanation of that.
One of the approaches is called a Peasant Test b.t.w. I have no idea who first came up with it. It’s just kinda common sense as far as I care.
Esoteric Musings... 