“You enter a 10×10 room. There’s an orc here. It’s guarding a pie.” This state of affairs is how Colin McComb begins his reply to how writing for PC games differs from writing for tabletop. McComb is finest identified for his work on the Planescape setting for Dungeons & Dragons, which led to his place as artistic lead on quite a few critically acclaimed CRPGs, like Torment: Tides of Numenera – a science fantasy RPG set on Earth round a billion years into the long run.
He continues. “What material is the room made of? What does the orc look like? What’s its armour set? What about its weapons? How does it react in these specific situations? What about the pie: what colour is it, how big, what flavour, is it hot or cold? What kind of furniture is in the room? What other exits? This isn’t even an exhaustive list of questions.”
The level McComb is making an attempt to make is {that a} dungeon grasp in a game of D&D will be capable of reply all of these questions, and extra, on the fly. However, as Colin factors out, “as a CRPG designer, I must answer those questions before they’re even asked.”
And he would know – Torment was hardly the primary game he labored on. McComb’s portfolio not solely consists of in depth work inside D&D’s Ravenloft, Dark Sun, and Dragonlance settings, but additionally PC classics akin to Planescape: Torment, Fallout 2, and Wasteland 2. He’s about as veteran as you get with regards to narrative in CRPGs.
However, the variations don’t finish at orcs and pies. “In a tabletop game, a player can just say, ‘Hang on, remind me about X’, and the GM can quickly sketch in the reminders,” McComb explains. “But a CRPG designer doesn’t have that luxury… we don’t know when someone puts our game down, or how long it’s been since they picked it up last.”
McComb is a part of the old-fashioned of CRPG design. Like lots of his friends, his early life started in a time when a PC merely wasn’t able to containing an unlimited quantity of story. Even 1988’s PC basic Pool of Radiance needed to include chunk of the dialogue printed within the handbook to avoid wasting house on the disk. Consequently, most of McComb’s early writing wasn’t on videogames however on marketing campaign books for Dungeons & Dragons.
the reality is a tabletop participant has hundreds of doable questions
His work on the second installment within the Fallout collection got here at a time when narrative was starting to be seen as extra essential to a PC game’s artistic course of. “The transition was definitely daunting,” McComb says, “way more technical than book production.” But his involvement didn’t come out of the blue, as he explains: “I was always interested in playing computer games, and was curious about the process, but had never really pictured myself as a computer game designer. It had a host of constraints.”
McComb quickly found that these constraints have been what outline a CRPG from its tabletop counterparts. “A CRPG’s narrative is, by definition, tightly focused,” he explains. “You’ve got to define a critical path through the game and you must have the world planned, in exhaustive detail. If you do this in a tabletop game, chances are better than 50% that your players are going to latch onto a throwaway line from a passing sailor, and the next thing you know, you’re throwing away the evening’s notes as your players travel around the world to reach the Far Empire.”
It’s this alternative that, by the very nature of PC gaming, needs to be restricted in a CRPG. As McComb factors out, “by defining the acceptable questions a player can ask an NPC, we also define the boundaries of what the player thinks is possible. This is true also of the painted doors and windows and gates of our games – when they’re visibly part of the boundary of the screen, players no longer think to themselves, ‘What’s beyond that door? Why can’t I break that window?’. The boundaries of the game’s space become ingrained in players’ heads.”
Ultimately, McComb defines the distinction between tabletop and PC through the PC’s use of smoke and mirrors. “We offer the illusion of choice,” he states. “We can overwhelm players with eight topics to ask an NPC, but the truth is a tabletop player has thousands of possible questions.” Anyone who performs quite a lot of CRPGs will know precisely what he means by this. I’ve personally misplaced depend of the variety of occasions I’ve re-loaded a save, simply to see what different dialogue timber I might discover, solely to find that all of them result in the identical conclusion.
Yet for all their variations, McComb attracts consideration to 1 factor that these two codecs have in widespread, “the game is always about the players,” he says. “It’s about their experiences, their imagination, their memories.” McComb understands this higher than most as he’s written hundreds of selections into games, placing individuals in dilemmas, letting them thrive within the sheer vastness of risk. But ask him a query with solely two choices and also you’ll see him flounder: tabletop or PC?
“I love tabletop game design,” he says. “It feels closer to pure writing and it has been ingrained in me since around age ten. I also love computer game design because it’s a tremendously complex, delicate mechanism, and doing it is a huge and rewarding challenge. They’re two extraordinarily different beasts!”
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