On 31/08/2011 02:15 PM, Warp wrote:

>    Tabletop role-playing games can be real fun, with a competent game master.

I can't say that I've ever actually tried it, but it doesn't sound like 
something that would appeal to me. Maybe it's because seeing and hearing 
exotic things is far more interesting to me than talking about social 
interactions between semi-human creatures, I don't know.

>    While the overall story is more or less predetermined, the details are
> determined by the players themselves. Players choose what they do, and the
> game master has to adapt the events and the storyline to suit (which is not
> always trivial, as you have to keep the balance between avoiding the story
> from derailing too much, and avoiding the players feeling that they are just
> playing a prewritten script and are not free to do whatever they want).
>
>    How much a playing session can deviate from the script outline (which
> the game master usually has on paper, either purchased/copied from
> somewhere, or in some cases written by himself) depends on how much the
> players ignore the GM's hints and do what they want instead, and how much
> the GM is willing to bend. Sometimes the GM has to refuse to accept some
> action (eg. if someone wanted to suddenly kill a very plot-relevant NPC,
> the GM could say "your character wouldn't do that").

That sounds like an almost exact description of why designing a computer 
game with a good story is so hard.

On the one hand, you're written a story, and that's how the game has to 
play out. On the other hand, if the player(s) can't influence the game 
at all, why bother playing? But if you take that too far, you end up 
with something like Frontier Elite II, a game with so much "freedom" 
that it's pointless to play.

In all, it's just one axis along which game design is really, really hard.

>    Which of course means that a good game not only requires a good GM, but
> also good *players*.

If finding good D&D players is even remotely like finding good TF2 
players... yeah, good luck with that one.

>    One of the great things about this dynamicity is that players can come
> up with new things that were not in the original script. It can sometimes
> become quite imaginative. There's much more freedom to do things than with
> a computer game, which is by necessity very limited. (Just from the top of
> my head, a player could come up with something like "I'll stack these chairs
> in front of the door so that if someone attempts to come in, the pile will
> fall, alerting us", or something along those lines.)

It would be nice if computer games could be a bit more open-ended like 
this. There are a number of reasons why they can't (in the foreseeable 
future):

- The real world is far too expensive to simulate accurately. You have 
to simplify it down, which basically means removing lots of possibilities.

- In the real world, you're generally fighting against other humans. AI 
still cannot even begin to approach that level of intelligence. (E.g., 
if I *did* use chairs to block the door, the AI would be utterly 
baffled, and would never figure out a solution.)

- In the real world, I can use anything I can lay my hands on. In a 
computer game, I've got, like, a dozen buttons and a mouse. Very hard to 
come up with a general control framework with such limited controls 
available.

Those are the ones that immediately spring to mind, beyond "it would 
also totally screw up the story" (which is also intractably hard for a 
mere computer to sort out).

I note that while it's completely 100% possible to play computer games 
with other humans, I tend to prefer playing them by myself. I guess 
because that way it's more like reading a book. Or maybe just because 
finding decent people to play with is so hard.



OK, I have to ask: How many times per week does this happen?
http://xkcd.com/244/
Does it ever get to more than 3 levels deep? Is it like Inception?

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