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Old 12-22-2004, 11:30 AM   #19
Valg
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Join Date: Apr 2002
Home MUD: Carrion Fields
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My original point was this:

There are a lot of games where the method and goal involves good roleplaying, and where roleplaying is required of all players.

RPI is one style of this. It isn't the only way to roleplay, and depending on your personal tastes it may not be the best way to roleplay.

For example, I think the games in the genre tend to over-focus on tedious tasks like preparing food, repairing worn armor, etc, and that this focus takes away from roleplay by forcing the player to spend a lot of time on these sorts of tasks. To go back to my novel-writing analogy, a story involving travel doesn't pause to describe the main characters preparing their food every time that realism dictates they would have eaten. It occurs "off camera", but most RPI engines don't allow this- you're forced to go through the motions each time, learn skills related to these tasks, gather ingredients, or suffer starvation.

Our approach is to push that kind of activity away from the foreground, precisely so the player can focus on more interesting things- adventure, storytelling, etc. You need to purchase food and eat, but we don't want to make a big production about it, so it's relatively easy.

Now, we keep food/hunger in the game because we feel like you can do cool things with it:
- certain abilities can inflict hunger
- thieves can steal, poison, and re-plant food onto unwary victims
- woodsy types can often locate food in preferred terrain
- certain foods come with extra benefits
- an especially lightweight and nourishing stash of food can serve as a minor 'treasure' in an area
- etc.

But the important thing is that these cool things aren't burdened by a lot of the things that we feel would slow the game down. Some people like the detail of a system that goes through all the motions, and plays more like a simulation. Other people like our way of abstracting it because they see it as distracting to other elements of the roleplay process- and also because the time we would be spending implementing food preparation is spent implementing quests, battles, spells, etc.

Saying that one style is "roleplay intensive" and the other, by default, isn't... strikes me as labeling, much like my aforementioned example of "deluxe". It's two styles of achieving the same goal.
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