alternative goals From: "Enno Rehling" <schick.mir.spam@gmx.de> Date: Sat, 03 Mar 2001 03:15:30 +0000 Since there have been complaints about the lack of topics, I'll tra to start one. It originated in eressea.talk, but should be applicable to other games of the genre. I'm talking mostly about the atlantis/olympia/eressea style of strategic fantasy game. One of the things I read in the atlantis rules that attracted me to the game was that (from memory) "there is no ultimate goal. players set their own golas - you can be a mighty warlord, an explorer or a rich trader". Now, from almost 5 years of experience, I must admit that that's not entirely true. There may be secondary goals, but you won't live long if you don't follow rule #1: "Be strong, or others will kill you". The powergamers can ruin the game for everyone who sets himself an alternative goal. Why is it so hard to make a game where that's not the case? Waht are possible goals? 1. Exploration. In a decently sized gameworld, your maps will always grow faster than the speed at which you travel. you meet other people who already have maps, piece them together, and soon there's nothing you can reach that hasn't been explored yet. Exploration can be fun for a few turns, but just doesn't cut it, long-term. 2. Trade. First of all, all games of this type that I have seen so far have a crappy trade system. In many cases, the system is artificial. In Atlantis, for example, trade goods are items nobody needs - they are just meant to be traded. Trade is also utterly unnecessary, as there are far better ways of getting money (perversely, an army is the best way to make money in atlantis, making powergamers not only powerful but also rich). 3. Roleplaying & Storytelling You can have a lot of fun fleshing out your faction and characters. Until the powergamer comes along and kills them all. In the Times, the Express or whatever the name of the weekly newspaper is, at least 90% of the articles are "who attacked whom", and real storytelling is marginal. 4. Building Players who like the Civilization-aspects of these games (differnet buildingtypes, roads, castles, sfleets, etc) are also prone to being killed by the next-door powergamer. 5. Quests While it's theoretically possible to have quests in a turn-based PBEM like this, it's extremely hard to design them (weekly turns are really slow) and takes a lot of moderation which none of the players seem to be willing to spend. The difficulty of making quests would decrease with higher turn frequency, but the game needs some pretty good built-in mechanisms to allow quest creation. And you'll still need dedicated players who create and moderate them. If anybody wants to add something here, feel free. New ideas welcome :-) Enno -- Enno Rehling http://eressea.upb.de/~enno/ Programmer, Anarchy Online http://www.anarchy-online.com/ Funcom Oslo A/S http://www.funcom.com/ Referenced By Up