silly thought about all CRPGs

Jude · Post by **Jude** » February 5th, 2008, 4:30 am

Dungeon Siege dealt with the weight/encumbrance problem by letting some of your party members be actual mules! My partner, after watching me play, always calls it "the mule game" and people know what she means.

Jude

Krafen · Post by **Krafen** » February 5th, 2008, 9:11 pm

The mules were great. I thought that was a pretty clever idea. That game is pretty much the definition of linear, but it had some fun ideas. I never finished it because I would just get bored after a while, but I played it several times.

Jude · Post by **Jude** » February 6th, 2008, 10:23 am

There were some good user made mods for it, Mystery of the Abyss, for example.

Jude

Adrian · Post by **Adrian** » February 6th, 2008, 1:52 pm

Sure,I do that as well.And so do many GMers I know.But its never present in a cRPG.

It was present in Oblivion. You needed to constantly repair your armor and weapons because eventually they'd shatter.

I completely agree - it's beyond the realm of belief that anyone can carry 600 arrows along with 30 or 40 of every kind of potion, plus piles of ingredients and so on. But if you place it in the context of perhaps owning a magic bag of some kind like they do in say...Harry Potter, it can make more sense...

Tinan · Post by **Tinan** » February 6th, 2008, 2:45 pm

I'm getting off topic here, but just about any cRPG is, intentionally, beyond the realm of belief. At least other media like cinema and books have ellipsis (where boring things like characters going to the lavatory are generally left out) to maintain an illusion of realism, but rpgs suffer in that implicitly you follow your PC's every move. So his or her needs to eat and sleep vanish, whilst "resting" is capable of bringing a PC from near-death to full health in under 24 hours of what looks like having a nice kip. The list of what is non-mimetic (going to avoid referring to "realism" now since it seems redundant) in mostly any cRPG must be unfathomably long. e.g. I don't care how buff a human PC gets, a sword to the face is still going to bring his fighting ability to a bit of a standstill. e.g. For games that have spawn points, "where are all these critters coming from?!", for those that don't, "Damn, have I single-handedly annihilated an entire species?!".

The suspension of disbelief on the part of the player required for a cRPG to work is therefore generally significantly greater than it is for to enjoy a movie or a book or whatever. But this is offset by a happy balance with greater fun and interaction. If cRPGs were truly mimetic we'd probably all just go and live our real lives!

Like you say, things like bags of holding allow us, just about, to excuse giving a PC the ability to carry seventeen mirror armours help. But it's probably more because we are willing to accept what is tantamount to cheating because it makes the game less tedious, than it has anything to do with us actually being prepared to believe that we can send and retrieve our items to and from an inter-dimensional plane we know nothing about. I sure hope they have good security on that plane, what with all these different PCs using it as a kind of communal dumping ground. Actually, there might be a good bit of fan fiction in that... I imagine the plane is something like a giant airport conveyor built, with lost luggage departments and demons running around trying to sort all the mess out...

silverkitty · Post by **silverkitty** » February 6th, 2008, 3:32 pm

the thing is: you're totally right, except:

with respect to carrying a bunch of chain mails around: why is it always "strength" which is the limit on how much "cheating because it makes the game less tedious" we will tolerate? if we accept that we're hiding an implicit mule train to make the game less tedious, then why have any limit on baggage at all? it certainly is tedious to have to store half the loot I want to take home, then make three trips to cart it back to town. in any case, even if we say "well, there's gotta be a limit somewhere..." why is it based on strength when we just admitted that it's a convenience function and there's no way your character is really actually carrying around five suits of armor?

I understand some combination of strength and whatever determining how much equipped weight I have, but either my backpack should be more realistic, or it should admit that it isn't. (maybe).
(or we could make it like cartoon physics. the lower your intelligence, the more you can carry because you don't realize it's broken. (jk))

YouTube · Post by **BasiliskWrangler** » February 6th, 2008, 4:57 pm

I have always thought that trying to figure space requirements in a backpack was ridiculous. In Diablo, a Long Sword takes 3 spaces, a Bow takes 6 spaces, a potion takes 1. There is no consideration for weight, so I guess by that logic you could carry a tablespoon of a Neutron star in your backpack which weights about the same as 3000 aircraft carriers (factoid link)

So with Eschalon, I look at inventory weight as your only limitation, and I even selected a trunk as your inventory holding object rather than a backpack. The trunk represents your "total body inventory", i.e. what you have in your backpack, strapped to your waist, slung over your shoulder, carrying in your hands, etc.

I am a bit hypocritical though: while I don't really consider "inventory volume" as a limitation, I would be hesitant to expand the inventory into multiple pages because then I start thinking the amount of stuff you can carry is ridiculous, even if you possess the Herculean strength to do it.

Tinan · Post by **Tinan** » February 6th, 2008, 5:11 pm

Hear hear. My days playing cRPGs began with Final Fantasy VII - where inventory was such a fluid concept that it was all but a total non-issue for the player.

Casting the issue in a slightly different way, my real issue lies with how the PC is able to find that scroll of ultimate invulnerability when he foolishly buried it beneath thirty potions of lore, five stones of extreme weight, a live spider colony and a cloak of ultimate hiding. All in the middle of intense melee with the skeleton of certain death. "Hang on there, mate, I just need to get something!" (rummages in bag as skeleton, stunned by this behaviour, doesn't quite know how to react).

Not to mention that any kind of fighting with a great big pack on one's back is impossible. Just ask the SAS, they know.

Hopefully not repeating an earlier post of mine, I advocate a strict supply train scenario: the PC can take his entire inventory, no matter how heavy, through the wilderness on his (purchased - let's not make it too easy) mules of giant strength as much as he likes, but when he gets in the dungeon they won't follow him in. The PC's own inventory is extremely limited - i.e., perhaps a very small backpack, what fits on his belt, on his person and in his hands. If he needs to retreat for supplies, well, he only needs to get back to his mules calmly waiting at the entrance (calmly until they realise the PC has just made a mega-train to zone

). Not sure how to arrange for getting tons of loot out of the dungeon, but then I'm not sure that a given dungeon should have tons of loot in it in the first place - it is, after all, a dungeon. Does this move towards resolving both all the weight-related issues whilst making the hypothetical game a little more strategic, and not too taxing on the player's patience?

Daemian Lucifer · Post by **Daemian Lucifer** » February 6th, 2008, 9:34 pm

Here are two extremes that I see as workable:

1)Completelly unrealistic:No limits,either due to size or weight.But because this one allows you to strip the dungeon completelly bare,and even take it with you brick by brick,merchant prices should be outrageous:you sell at at least 10 times lower value than the value when you are buying.Quests should also bring few to none monetary rewards,since your primary income will be the loot.

2)Completelly realistic:Limits due to both size and weight.But instead of just drawing items bigger and making the player pack his inventory in a silly tetris minigame in order to fit all those things,just add another number to all items,and allow player to buy different sized containers(including the uber large and uber expensive magical bags of holding,as well as pack mules).This one,however,needs to make your quests much more monetary rewarding,as these will become your only means of income.Of course,this one also requires you to block the inventory during the combat,and make just a few quickslots accesible(belt,quiver and similar).

silverkitty · Post by **silverkitty** » February 6th, 2008, 11:42 pm

I've been modeling my own inventory system rather like your scenario number 2. as for the "carrying all the loot out of the dungeon" scenario, I'm under the opinion that at a certain point (usually "all mobs dead") you declare the dungeon "cleared" and then allow the pack handlers from your mule train in to pick up anything not nailed down.

Daemian Lucifer · Post by **Daemian Lucifer** » February 7th, 2008, 2:32 am

silverkitty wrote:I'm under the opinion that at a certain point (usually "all mobs dead") you declare the dungeon "cleared" and then allow the pack handlers from your mule train in to pick up anything not nailed down.

It would work better if the player had the option "Loot the dungeon",which would allow him to pick up all the loot in the explored area of the dungeon,but with a chance of being intercepted by enemies.Players never should really know if they cleared the dungeon,they should only guess.

Tinan · Post by **Tinan** » February 7th, 2008, 11:21 am

I thought about the auto-loot option, too. Lackeys sent in would probably want danger-money; traps would have to be rendered safe and doors unlocked, too - the idea of the possibility of a random encounter is also a good one.

All of which, in the context of a cRPG, means more code, and more things to go wrong... At the end of the day a completely unrealistic extreme towards infinite inventories is the most straightforward. I would still prefer a more "realistic" system of some sort.