Dragon Age: Inquisition Review

I love video games.  In fact, if not for Neverwinter Nights, I don't know if I'd be playing tabletop roleplaying games right now.  Due to some personal circumstances, I'd taken a video game hiatus for the past 3 or 4 years, and it feels very good to get back into the thick of things.

However, taking that time off has definitely changed my perspective on video games and in what I enjoy about them.  For example, I delighted through Child of Light, hoping for a sequel, and I was very much looking forward to Bioware's Dragon Age: Inquisition.  I'm probably about 70% of the way through the game now and have spent many hours on it.  I will definitely finish it.  But I wanted to share some of my thoughts as to why my enjoyment of the game has decreased as I've played it, as I think they directly relate to tabletop games.

First off, DA:I is a good CRPG.  The cast of characters is good, well-acted and well-written with distinct personalities.  As appropriate for games with an epic scope like this one, each of the side characters go through personal trials and (with the protagonist's assistance) emerge from them in approximately one piece.  The main story is engaging and interesting, and the conceit of the Inquisition is phenomenal - a resurrected organization independent from previous institutions trying to establish order in a world wracked by war (a war precipitated by, hundreds of years ago, the actions of the first Inquisition).

Conceptually, the game is fantastic.  For me, however, the problems begin when the protagonist begins to interact with the game world.  Primarily, you go out and kill things.  And by primarily, I mean that other than talking to your companions at your base, one of the 10 or so main plot missions, chatting with NPCs to acquire or finish quests, or harvesting resources, you are killing things.  And combat is smooth and well-designed (there are a couple of small issues, but combat is a success).  Which is good, since 90% of your time will be spent running into enemy spawns and killing them.

Now, I like games where I run around and kill things - I enjoyed Dark Souls, Dungeon Siege, Diablo II, etc.  But compared with the kind of interaction I saw in Dragon Age: Origins, or (forgive me for comparing the two) Baldur's Gate II, I expect more from a game that advertises itself as a role-playing game.  What's frustrating about DA:I is that the game designers created a level filled with that kind of high-stakes interaction, where saying the wrong thing could totally wreck your objectives, and then chose not to include any of that in the rest of the game.  How hard would it have been to drop two disputing farmers/merchants/etc in the middle of a map or two and required the protagonist to talk with each of them and help them resolve the disagreement?  Would that have been an appreciated change of pace from (actual examples following) collect the 7 letters of dead soldiers, the 10 supply crates, and the 5 sets of blankets all scavenged from areas already explored?

My last problem lies with the level design.  I think I've been spoiled, reading about Jaquayed dungeons and sandbox worlds.  Levels, either in the plot instances or, honestly, in the "open-world" exploration segments is highly linear.  There are, at most, two ways of travelling between any two areas of a map.  Usually, though, there is a single route between two sections.  Your reward for travelling off of the beaten path is usually a single loot container holding standard treasure - a silver ring, dwarven plate (for eating, not for wearing), or something similar.  Due to limitations in the AI (who have no understanding of choke points or defending the mages), or the combat restrictions (no switching from bow to daggers mid-fight), I can exert little tactical control over where the battle is fought, so I fight wherever the level designers have decided to put a fight.

In summary, my character's default action is 'hit it until it dies', and I do this over and over, passing through a series of scripted fights to fight the big bad boss, and then resetting to do it all over again with reskinned opponents.  Sound like something familiar?  It sounds like a railroad to me.  Is it still fun?  Yes.  Would I play it again?  Probably not.  One of the things that makes me happy is doing stuff my own way, and I don't get to play my own way in DA:I.  I have a lot of freedom at the conceptual level - I can romance whomever I wish, ally myself with whomever I wish, etc. - but the majority of my playing time will be spent killing enemies, regardless of what I choose.

Now, DA:I features a mechanic I mostly like called the War Table.  There's a room in your home base with a map of the world, and on that map is a pin for every opportunity for the Inquisition to affect the world.  Missions are unlocked after completing main quests, or talking to people throughout the world.  They range the gamut from assassination, facilitating inheritance disputes, brokering trade deals and treaties, espionage, and exploring ancient ruins.  It's a fantastic list of activities, any one of which could provide the motivation for a session or two of play at my D&D table.  I wish that I could choose whether to go myself or send agents for each of these missions, and collapse the 'open-world' segments into this, so I could choose whether to collect the 5 blankets myself or send a representative to do it for me.  In fact, I'd love to have  the freedom to complete the whole game without stirring from my comfortable fortress.  There'd be repercussions for this, of course (I'd probably not end the game very well).  Ultimately, I want to choose how I play the game.  I don't know when I'll find a CRPG that will let me do that, but I'm hopeful that it will be soon.

Economics

In pursuing Prodigy as a 'gritty' setting, I've set out to create a macroeconomic system similar to Alexis' on his blog Tao of DnD (the system is detailed here).  Summarizing Alexis' ideas, there are four major steps to creating a functioning economic system within a fantasy world.

Step 1: Using your detailed map, determine the distance between each trading center.

Step 2: Determine what raw materials and manufactured goods you wish to track with the system.

Step 3: Decide what each region produces.

Step 4: Run a host of calculations (detailed in the above post) to find the price of each good in each city.

The key to this system is step 3, determining the references for each trade good based upon location.  A reference refers to the production of the associated trade good compared with all other goods manufactured in that region - i.e. an area renowned for wheat farming will probably have a higher reference value for wheat than oats, for example.  Since the number of references is directly used to determine pricing, having a large number of references is hugely important to stabilize the price (if I have 1 reference for gold and 2 for iron, adding a 3rd reference for iron means that the iron produced is 3 times more valuable than the gold produced - the jump from 2 to 3 is significantly more important than the jump from, say, 300 to 301 [think of the difference in the fractions 1/2 vs 1/3 and 1/300 vs 1/301]).  We'll return to this momentarily.

Now, Prodigy is a wholly made-up world.  I have conferred with geology friends about how the landmasses would likely have formed in my region and the materials likely found there, but I am responsible for populating it and creating peoples and cultures deep enough to support sandbox play.  I've cheated by making the effective history of my world fairly short, 130 years or so, but I still have a great deal to create.  To help me out, I used the Welsh Piper Demographics tool (found here) to get an estimate on the number of villages, towns, cities, and metropolises in each region of the world of Prodigy as well as the populations of each site.  This gave me 814 locations to plot on my map, discounting villages and smaller settlements.  That's 814*(814-1)=661,782 distinct calculations just to complete step 1 (accounting for my ability to ignore calculating the distance from each location to itself, which is of course 0).  It's an excellent goal, but I want to get it off the ground in at least a limited fashion within a year or two.  So, I chose to simplify the method: right now I am just mapping cities and metropolises within a single region of my world (the homes of some 300,000 people), which comes down to 19 cities at the moment (only 342 distance calculations).

Now, Alexis has the advantage of an encyclopedia from which to draw his trade data.  Since Prodigy is wholly made-up, I have to supply all of that information as realistically as I can manage.  So, after researching appropriate climates based upon the geography of the region and crops grown by regions with that climate, I have a list of resources produced at each location.

However, it is at this point we run into a problem with Step 4, the calculations.  Remember, this system requires a large number of references to keep pricing relatively stable.  This small region is a microcosm of the larger system-to-be, so I want some idea of the prices.  This means that I need to take my 19 locations and somehow come out with a larger number of references than I would normally generate.  Now, I could add the next tier of locations (113 towns), but this will significantly increase the complexity of my mapping (and as I'm currently using Hexographer, I don't have the space to easily add 113 icons without increasing hex size, which increases my map size to something even harder to use, since the program does not zoom very well... I'll probably switch to Publisher soon) and make it harder to appraise the system overall.

This brings me to the reason why I'm writing this post: a new way of thinking about references and production.  Essentially, references act as a rating of that location's production capacity/emphasis on the affiliated trade good.  Each city on my map has control/power over the surrounding area and represents the economic power of the entire region.  If the area does not produce the good, 0.  If the region can self-sustain, but no more, then 1.  If the region exports limited quantities, 2, and if the region is a major exporter of that good, 3.  This is further magnified by the economic power of each city - some cities represent larger or multiple areas; for example, the city of Khvoy encompasses both itself and the settlements around Lake Shmarn, while Degredado represents itself, Lake Israshar, and the entire Confederacy.  Degredado exports barley, but since it represents 3 areas, each of which produce barley, the barley reference for Degredado is 6.

This modification places a much larger emphasis on the urban centers of the world, since each location has fairly high numbers.  It's not a perfect solution - there will still be volatility as I add new locations, but it will be less than if the reference numbers were less.  And, when I get to the step of adding in the towns, I may keep this or return to Alexis' base model.  We'll see how the numbers play out.

Conversational Skills and Combat

I was talking with my mother the other day (she is the one who got me into tabletop roleplaying games in the first place) about having a resolution mechanic for conversation with real consequences, like combat's consequence of death.  I wholeheartedly agree with Alexis here (http://tao-dnd.blogspot.ca/2015/05/limitations.html) that most conversation systems fail because they do not have meaningful consequences.

I feel we can use the art of acting as a foundation for a proper social combat system - in any good play, characters are constantly opposed by other characters, all trying to achieve their (often mutually-exclusive) goals.  This is, or can be, exactly what happens in a social situation in a roleplaying game.  Think of Macbeth - Lady Macbeth wants to be Queen of Scotland, so she bullies her husband into killing the king and seizing the throne.  Macbeth is ambitious, but not to the point of killing the king, so Lady Macbeth wheedles him, taunts him, and berates him to accomplish the deed.  Most actors, looking at that scene, will subdivide the scene into smaller units, called beats.  Beats are the smallest unit of theatrical time, and in each beat each character uses a tactic to achieve their current objective.  So, in one beat, Lady Macbeth uses the taunt tactic by questioning Macbeth's manhood to cow him into killing the king.  If this works, then the conversation is done and Macbeth goes off and does the bloody deed.  If it doesn't, then Lady Macbeth tries a different tactic.  If you can think back to seeing an awful high school play, one of the reasons they can be so boring is that the actors often will use a very limited range of tactics, so the scenes turn into a hack-and-slash fest of each character going at it with the same tired tricks over and over again.  Sound like one of those really awful battles that took forever and were just a waste of everyone's time?  Or that one dungeon with the rogue saying "I check for traps" / "There aren't any" / "I move to the next door and check for traps"… ?

Now, the consequence in a theatrical sense, is not achieving your goal or losing your goal entirely in favor of someone else's.  In the scene prior to Macbeth killing the king, Macbeth's goal changes from pursuing a happy status quo to killing the king and ascending to the throne as a direct result of Lady Macbeth's persuasive prowess.

So, looking back on this example, it seems like we can take away two things: the first is that a good social combat system will feature a broad number of different tactics, each with pros and cons, and the second is that the consequence for failure is losing your personal objective or, more simply, doing what the other person wants instead.

Now, there are games with excellent social combat mechanics, like ASOIAF's remarkably detailed Intrigue system.  What are the differences between a game like D&D and FATE, the White Wolf line, or ASOIAF, with regard to social conflict?  In my somewhat limited experience with those systems, it is the willingness of the players to relinquish control of their characters on a somewhat regular basis.  In a D&D game, players are often psychically invulnerable to the demands of others.  The DM can seize control of character behavior only in very limited circumstances - domination, geas, etc. Do so in any other situation will result in players calling out "bullshit" and "railroading!".  I know Alexis will require his player's characters to make Wisdom rolls to avoid putting their feet in their mouth (by divulging unpleasant secrets, etc.), and I think this is an excellent choice.  It adds value to the Wisdom attribute.  Looking at the blogosphere, though, it seems this is a rather unconventional choice.

I actually this has to come down to the OSR idea of player skill.  Player skill, like recognizing yellow mold or bringing wooden shields on dungeon delves just in case a rust monster appears, is very clearly an important part of how many people play D&D.  However, to me, this makes D&D more like a board game than a roleplaying game.  One of the things I love about D&D is that it mirrors the real world.  How often have you had the goblins cackle for a round instead of pressing their advantage?  Or had a villain monologue?  Our NPCs don't always respond 'optimally' in a given situation, and I think that makes the game better.  I feel that the PCs not always responding optimally also makes the game better.  A board game is all about player skill - that is the quality being tested (well, that and luck).  Think about the epic board games like Talisman or Mansions of Madness - both games involve acquiring items and character power, but they are ultimately testing player skill, not character skill.

One of the ways player skill and character skill come into conflict with regard to diplomacy is in how your players conceive of the conversation, and this was my mother's point.  We can conceptualize a natural 1 - we have stubbed enough toes in our own homes, bashed our thumbs in with our own hammers sufficiently to understand that fumbles happen, and we can accept them in our D&D game.  But what does a natural 1 in a conversation mean?  Or a natural 20?  If we can find mental models for these results, maybe we can finally come up with a meaningful mechanic for social conflict resolution. 

 

So, here are my thoughts to help create some social conflict expectations.  A 1, to me, is that year you spent sitting next to your crush too timid to say anything.  Or the off-hand comment delivered at the critical moment that ends a friendship.  It's the inopportune cough right in the middle of a caesura that gets you ejected from the symphony hall, or the presentation of Medea so powerful it incites the entire audience to riot and kill you.  Hmm.  The range of consequences for this natural 1 seems to depend entirely upon the circumstances in which it happens (just like fumbling on the edge of a volcano's edge is a lot worse than fumbling in your home with a hammer).

Now, for a natural 20.  Maybe it's that interview where everything you said made your interviewer lean in closer and closer, and you leave the interview having signed the contract.  Or that time when you managed to charm your professor into giving the whole class an extension on the term paper (or let you make up the final exam when you slept through the exam's time slot).  The acting audition where everyone after you copies your acting choices because they were that good.  Or the choreography of Rite of Spring that incites the audience to riot (no performers dead, this time).

 

Both of those performances were probably 20s on execution, but 1s on sensitivity/audience reception.  But that's an issue we probably don't need to unravel right now.  I'll post my particular social combat rules up in a few days, and I'd love to hear some feedback.

The World of Prodigy

Writing a book is hard.  This book will be both a setting and a set of rules, and constantly switching my attention between each one is rather demanding.  Just to get some of these ideas out of my head and onto the page, I threw some words onto a computer and saw what stuck.
I then didn't touch it for 6 to 9 months, and looking back I realized exactly how much editing I needed to do.  Writing a book is a lot of work.  There are currently 90ish pages of text in the book.  I need to go through and reword it all and clean it up - stuff has changed since I wrote it, either my conception of a place or some events have been added/removed from their history, rules didn't work in playtesting, etc.  As I begin to tackle some of the editing work, I thought it might be good to write down as condense a summary of this world as I could, as eventual backmatter for the book.  Or as a teaser, to show people some of what I'm working on.  So, this is it:

Some of the survivors, fleeing the magical apocalypse caused by their theocratic empire, find the origin of all life, the Jungle of Sahargeen.  North of the jungle, the brutal desert nomads pillage the Elf-worshipping city-states and unite to conquer the world.  The child-like Bairnedred emerge from the jungle to cavort amongst the survivors, while the warlike Equimeni jealously guard the land made barren by the apocalypse.  After a fishing expedition gone wrong discovers the land across the Sea of Shadows, the learned Archivists make contact and teach them the ways of magic. 

After conquering the city-states, the desert nomads declare themselves the Tarluskani Empire and invade the lands south of Sahargeen.  The Tarluskani's gaze then extends to the east, the Equimeni Wildlands, and towards Arein, the land south of the Sea of Shadows.

The pirates of Korg control the mouth of the Sea of Shadows, hindering the Tarluskani plans.  Terrorists in the city-states and the conquered Southerner territories conspire to overthrow their Tarluskani overlords.  And the promise of great mystical power lost in the ruins of the Azintheen Empire far to the east haunt many a dream…

 

What do you think?