Why RPGs Must Be Transparent About Their Mechanics
-
Category: News ArchiveHits: 3901
What separates RPGs from most other genres in terms of abstraction is the style's origins in pencil-and-paper games. You want to punch an orc? You can punch that orc, but game rules simple enough to work with a couple of die need to exist in order to make that orc-punching workable for a group of people playing a game. Players need to know what the numbers are in order to make informed decisions. So you have things like 'strength statistics,' 'unarmed damage skills,' 'orc hit points,' 'dexterity rolls,' and so on. Shifting to the computer may have allowed these mechanics to be calculated faster as well as potentially more complex. But critically, even though those mechanics could have been masked, RPGs generally kept the numbers transparent and public.
Action-oriented RPGs often limit the way that their mechanics are published, however. The guns in Mass Effect have statistics, and the enemies have health bars that must correspond to hit point-style numbers somewhere under the hood. But it's under the hood, not transparent, and that sets it aside from even other RPG/shooter franchises like Borderlands, a series that delights in bombarding the player with numbers and statistics.
Interestingly, the RPGs that cause the most arguments tend to be transparent outside of combat, the most traditionally common mechanic. For example, Skyrim's combat may lack transparency, but its practice-improves-skills approach, without experience points, ends up being quite transparent about what your character does. Mass Effect is transparent in how its conversation and reputation system combines, even as its combat sections seem more similar to a Gears of War than a Baldur's Gate.
Transparent abstraction is part of what gives role-playing games their charm, which is why fans dislike it when it's removed; but it also leads to weirdness. When RPGs take a vague concept and give it concrete meaning, it can end up corresponding to the real world in surprising or unfortunate ways. For example, many older RPGs give female characters slightly different base attributes, like Wizardry VII bumping women's strength down and charisma up. Perhaps to you this seems appropriate in those circumstances, but RPGs also tend to give the same transparent abstraction to things like race without corresponding to the real world. That is, it's normal for games to treat Elves as faster and smarter than Humans, but just imagine the deserved outcry if a real-world RPG said that some races were smarter or faster than others.
This is part of why RPGs go so well with fantasy specifically, and speculative fiction generally. By moving outside of real-world rules, a game can be transparent and abstract without being ridiculous. Want to say that a certain clan of vampires are all ugly and have certain rules applied only to them? You can do that in speculative fiction. This helps explain the rarity of real-world settings for RPGs outside of a few tactics games, like Jagged Alliance and Silent Storm.
