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[addiction21]

No you dont. No matter what you would like to imagine that line is delivered and how it is recieved determines how it was delievered. You can imagine what ever you want but if that line you chose offends the npc when you wanted or "imagined" it to be a friendly joke it was still offensive to that npc.

That is the limitation of vidoe game rpgs. That is fact. These things no matter what you want or imagine are predetermined. That is their limit. Be it the Ultima games, Zork, FF series, any BioWare game, etc etc etc there is not one video game rpg that offers the freedom you want and that is not going to change any time soon.

Video games are PREPROGRAMMED. There is no onboard Dungeon Masters to take every possibility any human can imagine into account. That is their limit. No matter what you would like to imagine be it the BG series or DAO (or any other video game rpg I have ever experancied with a voiceless protag) the line you picked its delivary was determined by the response you received and you can not know that ahead of time.



There seems to be a hard truth for some to accept and it is that these are not PnP rpgs that offer you almost absolute freedom nor do I see that possibility of video game rpgs giving us that in the near future. It is a limitation of the medium and one needs to accept this.

[addiction21]

SirOccam wrote...


That's just...bleh. I can't think of any cases in DAO where a misunderstanding of that magnitude occurred, but if it had, I'd rather reload. Or at the very least, I'd think "okay, maybe he was kind of pissed because of _______ so he snapped at him. I'll make it up with a gift." At least that way, I'm dealing with it from within the bounds of the game.

I can. My first experiance with AListar in camp. He is Mr. Self deragoatory joke meister but if you return that attitude you do nothing but push him away.

This is where I see so much of the roleplaying thing come into scope. That is exactly how I would approach a person such as him. That is how I would approach someone such as him but we all are limited to the writers ideas.
Sure these are people we are supposed to know but we do not. We have not actually spent days, weeks, months walking side by side, camping, and fighting by their side. Take it from a Veteran that you develop a much deeper understanding of those by your side these games could ever portray.

I guess it is just a matter of view. There is not a video game rpg that offers the type of freedom some around here seem to expect.

[CoS Sarah Jinstar]

addiction21 wrote...

No you dont. No matter what you would like to imagine that line is delivered and how it is recieved determines how it was delievered. You can imagine what ever you want but if that line you chose offends the npc when you wanted or "imagined" it to be a friendly joke it was still offensive to that npc.
That is the limitation of vidoe game rpgs. That is fact. These things no matter what you want or imagine are predetermined. That is their limit. Be it the Ultima games, Zork, FF series, any BioWare game, etc etc etc there is not one video game rpg that offers the freedom you want and that is not going to change any time soon.
Video games are PREPROGRAMMED. There is no onboard Dungeon Masters to take every possibility any human can imagine into account. That is their limit. No matter what you would like to imagine be it the BG series or DAO (or any other video game rpg I have ever experancied with a voiceless protag) the line you picked its delivary was determined by the response you received and you can not know that ahead of time.

There seems to be a hard truth for some to accept and it is that these are not PnP rpgs that offer you almost absolute freedom nor do I see that possibility of video game rpgs giving us that in the near future. It is a limitation of the medium and one needs to accept this.

Well thats odd, considering over many play thrus of Origins I never once picked a line of dialog that didn't give me  a response I didn't at least expect to see coming. And if I did manage to offend a companion a thoughtful gift generally helped to make things good again. 

No they're not PnP rpg's, but they offered plenty role playability and freedom if one just uses a little imagination, up until the industry decided that every damn character in the game needed a voice actor to go along with it. You actually kind of have a bit of nerve telling anyone what to accept and how to enjoy a game. Though it's to be expected remembering back to the RTO threads. All we need now is Fera to pop on by and it'll be just like old times.

[addiction21]

Odd because by your own standards any dialogue system in a video game does not measure up to those standards.
You say you want to "know" but you dont. All you have are some words non of the context that comes with a face to face conversation.
Exactly these are not Pen and Paper RPGS. Each medium comes with their own benefits and drawbacks. Something people need to understand.

Edit: RTO as in Return to ostagar? And what thread are you refrencing?

Modifié par addiction21, 02 octobre 2010 - 07:52 .

[CoS Sarah Jinstar]

addiction21 wrote...

Odd because by your own standards any dialogue system in a video game does not measure up to those standards.
You say you want to "know" but you dont. All you have are some words non of the context that comes with a face to face conversation.
Exactly these are not Pen and Paper RPGS. Each medium comes with their own benefits and drawbacks. Something people need to understand.

Edit: RTO as in Return to ostagar? And what thread are you refrencing?

Not even sure what you're trying to say here, again, I don't need to know any implied tone, I can chose that for myself. Think back to the delay/asking for update threads, you know when you basically berated anyone who felt at least somewhat of a heads up on what the delay was was asking for too much.

[Sylvius the Mad]

[quote]SirOccam wrote...

Of course I do. The issue here is that I thought ME was predictable "enough" and you didn't.[/quote]
I'm curious what your standard was.  Clearly it's lower than mine, but how do you when it's been met? 
[quote]Communication is a concept. It exists both inside and out of Dragon Age: Origins. The problem is that video games are all limited to some extent, and in DAO one such limitation is that you are able to control some parts of communication and not others. You can choose what to say, and see every word, but you are limited to the choices they provide you. That's a limitation.[/quote]
True, though it's less of a limitation if you choose to view the options as abstractions of the actual line spoken rather than the exact words.

If you choose otherwise, you're creating a greater limitation.  Why do that?
[quote]You can preview the words, but you can't express a tone or use body language.[/quote]
I don't understand why you think this is true.

The tone and body language isn't modelled for you, and as you say, "communication" does include it, so it must be there.  You're choosing to believe that the tone is selected by someone else, while I don't.  Your limitation is greater, and seemingly by choice.
[quote]Mass Effect had an additional limitation in that you couldn't even see the full line of what your character was going to say.[/quote]
Plus, the limitation you've created in DAO (being forced to accept someone else's tone and body language) is forced on all players.
[quote]A complete understanding of communication would be access to and control of tone, body language, and diction. You only have partial control of the latter, and no control of the first two. That is why it's incomplete.[/quote]
Again, your lack of control over tone and body language is something you've decided for yourself.  It was your choice to create that limitation.
[quote]I see the ability to use tone and body language, even if you don't have full control over it, as less constraining than not having the ability at all. Mass Effect at least restores those components of communication back to the PC, albeit in an imperfect way.[/quote]
But the PC can have those things in DAO.  That yours doesn't is entirely your doing.

They just occur off-screen, just like sleeping and eating.
[quote]I understand your point of view on this issue. You'd rather they not be there so you can fill in the blanks in your head. I simply find such things monotonous and uninteresting. If it's not going to have any effect on the game, then it's not important enough to me. This way, they can have an effect on the game.[/quote]
Accepting your overly narrow definition of "game", this is true.

I don't know why you do it this way.
[quote]I guess I just have a more flexible idea of my characters' personalities. I think we've been over this before, but I'm not averse to changing my character's design if I come up against an obstacle.[/quote]
So your character might be forced to contradict his prior behaviour?

I could never accept that.  Not because my character concept is rigid (though it is - exploring that concept is why I'm playing the gamer), but because I simply cannot understand an incoherent character.  The PC would sudden;y be alien to me and I would lose all interest in his welfare.  Whether he lived or died would no longer matter to me at all.  He'd effectively stop being a person. 
[quote]It's more important to me to keep the feel and flow of the story. If I came up with an idea that required a whole bunch of finagling to try to "make it work," then I'd rather just scrap it.[/quote]
I agree entirely.

I insist that every possible coherent concept requires that in Mass Effect.
[quote]Fundamentally, sure. But take the "tone doesn't carry meaning" thing. That just seems like such a pointless obstacle to place in your own path.[/quote]
It was based omn the manual.  The manual told me about the paragon/Renegade dichotomy, but the terms were defined sufficiently poorly that I thought the safest route through the game the first time was to play a character who paid those details no heed.

Since I didn't expect to be able to predict the tone of the dialogue, I created a character for whom that wasn't a problem.

That character design was intended to make the game easier to play, not harder.
[quote]Why would anyone believe that?[/quote]
As it happens, I believe that, but that's not really relevant to this discussion.  It's not even relevant to how I speak, given that I'm aware that other people think tone conveys meaning (I just think they're wrong about that).
[quote]So just treat it as characters speaking to each other all the time. Isn't that what you said you did anyway?[/quote]
Ideally, yes.  But David said there were things that needed to be coneyed to the player, and I don't think such a thing is even reliably possible.
[quote]Well, communication IS a thing. It's not an extra level beyond expression and interpretation. It's what you call the system in its entirety. It's the interchange of ideas, and that includes both the expression of the speaker and the interpretation of the listener. It's not making anything more complex, needlessly or otherwise. It's just a name for something that would otherwise not have one. If you're saying we should start calling everything by their component parts now, then I'm afraid you've lost me.[/quote]
Not at all.  Some on this forum have greated "communication" characteristics not exhibited by its components, and that led to some very annoying conversations.

It's good to see you don't do that.
[quote]And anyway, what we're really talking about is just expression. Tone is a part of expression, and thus a part of communication. So is body language. Someone who willingly ignores tone is going to have problems communicating, because he or she is crippling her own ability to "express." Therefore he or she might evoke interpretations he or she didn't intend to, interpretations that might have been avoided if he or she had considered the tone of his or her words.[/quote]
Yes, I agree entirely.

The problem with a voiced protagonist is that this control of tone is either limited (DA2) or taken from us.entirely (ME).
[quote]I wouldn't know where to begin formalizing it. I suppose on a fundamental level it's similar to yours. Taking on a persona and making decisions on your character's behalf in accordance with the personality you've invented. This is where we start to diverge, though. I will yield to the game MUCH more readily than you will. I see the game as a story. An interactive one, and one in which I am given varying degrees of freedom, but a story--THEIR story--nonetheless. I am given the opportunity to shape and mold that story, but only within the bounds of what the game offers. The sandbox has walls.[/quote]
Do you replay games much?  If all I was getting from a BioWare RPG was the authored narrative, I can't imagine I'd replay the game very much.

Whereas, since the way I play I create a brand new emergent narrative every time, a well-constructed RPG allows almost limitless replays.
[quote]It would be easier to speak in examples. Take the dialogue in DAO, for instance. If the tone of a line is pretty clear from context or certain words or other clues, then I'll imagine it with that tone. Well first off let me point out that this right here is a huge divergence between our opinions...you say the tone doesn't exist, I say it does but the game's limitations sometimes prevent us from sensing it. Anyway, if the tone isn't very clear...I'll just kind of assume it was more or less neutral, but that might change based on how they respond. If they get offended, I'd consider revising my opinion of how I meant it. Maybe I meant it as a cutting remark in the first place. Or maybe they just misinterpreted. It depends on the circumstances, but if it makes for a more compelling scene, then hell yes I'll do it.[/quote]
Here I think you're watching a story rather than roleplaying.  You're not driving the action.
[quote]I don't know how you'd define the differences in our philosophies. Somehow you're both more restrictive and way less restrictive on yourself. something of an extremist, in my opinion. You place restrictions on yourself that I see not as invalid, but as unnecessary, like sticking to your initial character design no matter what. And in other places, you take liberties I never would, like insisting characters have completely different personalities between different playthroughs.[/quote]
I stick with that initial design because that design is the core of my gameplay 9much like you think BioWare's story is teh core of your gameplay).  You'll bend over backward to accommodate the story being told to you, whereas I'll fiddle with whatever I can to maintain the coherence of my character concept.

You play the game for the story, and the design of the PC is simply a tool (and a mutable tool) you use to experience that story.

I play the game specifically to design and implement a character concept, and the story is simply the environment in which my character lives.

This is why it's pointless for people to say "I like games that are fun."  You find the fun in an entirely different part of the game than I do.

Thanks for explaining that.

[Sylvius the Mad]

addiction21 wrote...

No you dont. No matter what you would like to imagine that line is delivered and how it is recieved determines how it was delievered. You can imagine what ever you want but if that line you chose offends the npc when you wanted or "imagined" it to be a friendly joke it was still offensive to that npc.

I'm not playing the NPC.  I can't control how he reacts.

There seems to be a hard truth for some to accept and it is that these are not PnP rpgs that offer you almost absolute freedom nor do I see that possibility of video game rpgs giving us that in the near future. It is a limitation of the medium and one needs to accept this.

No, one does not.  It's clearly possible to play CRPGs the way I describe, as I've been doing it for decades.

And it worked every time until I ran into Mass Effect.

[Sylvius the Mad]

addiction21 wrote...

I can. My first experiance with AListar in camp. He is Mr. Self deragoatory joke meister but if you return that attitude you do nothing but push him away.

So is that how the writers intended it, or did you misread their intended tone?

How can you tell?  Show me.

Modifié par Sylvius the Mad, 02 octobre 2010 - 08:04 .

[SirOccam]

[quote]Sylvius the Mad wrote...

[quote]SirOccam wrote...

Of course I do. The issue here is that I thought ME was predictable "enough" and you didn't.[/quote]
I'm curious what your standard was.  Clearly it's lower than mine, but how do you when it's been met?[/quote]
I don't really have a quantitative way of measuring it, but if I lost interest or felt lost, as I've heard you and Sarah say about ME, then I suppose that would mean it hadn't been met.

[quote][quote]Communication is a concept. It exists both inside and out of Dragon Age: Origins. The problem is that video games are all limited to some extent, and in DAO one such limitation is that you are able to control some parts of communication and not others. You can choose what to say, and see every word, but you are limited to the choices they provide you. That's a limitation.[/quote]
True, though it's less of a limitation if you choose to view the options as abstractions of the actual line spoken rather than the exact words.

If you choose otherwise, you're creating a greater limitation.  Why do that?[/quote]
Because if the only form such a "freedom" can take is just in my head, then it kind of defeats the purpose of playing a cRPG. The whole point (at least in my view) is to be able to see and hear things taking place, as opposed to simply imagining them. That's not the only important thing, to be sure, but I still think it is important.

I can choose to imagine a line was said one way on one playthrough and a different way on a different playthrough, but I know the character is not going to react differently.

[quote][quote]You can preview the words, but you can't express a tone or use body language.[/quote]
I don't understand why you think this is true.

The tone and body language isn't modelled for you, and as you say, "communication" does include it, so it must be there.  You're choosing to believe that the tone is selected by someone else, while I don't.  Your limitation is greater, and seemingly by choice.[/quote]
Because that's not expressing tone or body language, it's imagining it. It's like trying to use sign language with a blind person. Sure, you can do it all you want, but if there's no chance of them ever perceiving it, then why bother?

And yes, communication does include those things, but I also said your ability to communicate is pretty heavily restricted in these games. I know you don't believe that, but I'm just explaining why I'm not being inconsistent in this case.

[quote][quote]A complete understanding of communication would be access to and control of tone, body language, and diction. You only have partial control of the latter, and no control of the first two. That is why it's incomplete.[/quote]
Again, your lack of control over tone and body language is something you've decided for yourself.  It was your choice to create that limitation.[/quote]
As I said above, you can imagine tone and body language, but you can't control it, not truly. I can imagine all I want but no one will ever react any differently to it.

[quote][quote]I see the ability to use tone and body language, even if you don't have full control over it, as less constraining than not having the ability at all. Mass Effect at least restores those components of communication back to the PC, albeit in an imperfect way.[/quote]
But the PC can have those things in DAO.  That yours doesn't is entirely your doing.

They just occur off-screen, just like sleeping and eating.[/quote]
No character of mine will ever do anything noteworthy off-screen, with the exception of what happened before and after I had control of him or her. I just decided that. I suppose that must seem pretty arbitrary too. Oh well, so be it, I guess we all have our own particular personal rules.

[quote][quote]I understand your point of view on this issue. You'd rather they not be there so you can fill in the blanks in your head. I simply find such things monotonous and uninteresting. If it's not going to have any effect on the game, then it's not important enough to me. This way, they can have an effect on the game.[/quote]
Accepting your overly narrow definition of "game", this is true.

I don't know why you do it this way.[/quote]
Because it's not (as) fun/worthwhile if I can't see it making any kind of difference.

[quote][quote]I guess I just have a more flexible idea of my characters' personalities. I think we've been over this before, but I'm not averse to changing my character's design if I come up against an obstacle.[/quote]
So your character might be forced to contradict his prior behaviour?

I could never accept that.  Not because my character concept is rigid (though it is - exploring that concept is why I'm playing the gamer), but because I simply cannot understand an incoherent character.  The PC would sudden;y be alien to me and I would lose all interest in his welfare.  Whether he lived or died would no longer matter to me at all.  He'd effectively stop being a person.[/quote]
It depends, like I said, on the circumstances. I'd never play a character who displayed wildly different attitudes about something within the same playthrough. But if it's a minor shift, or it hasn't been a significant plot point yet, I still allow for a bit of last-minute editing.

A good example is a recent Female Human Mage playthrough I started. I wasn't 100% sure how I wanted her attitude towards religion to be. My natural tendency is to play people who are not heavily interested in any kind of religion. I wanted something different this time, though, so I thought she'd be very into the whole thing. She'd be kind of like Wynne...despite the Chantry's oppression of her and her fellow mages, she'd be very devoted to the Maker and Andraste and all of it.

But then when something came up that actually called for these things to be put into practice, I did a last minute change. She was still somewhat religious, but I sort of merged it with her compassion, which I had already decided was going to be a pretty defining characteristic for her, even to a fault. So she helped Brother Burkel with his Chantry, not from a fanatical desire to spread the Chant, but because she felt that it could help people. And then she arranged for Zerlinda and her child to find refuge there, an option I didn't even realize was in the game before that. I was very satisfied with how that turned out.

So when she's looking for the Urn, is she going to choose to defile the Ashes? No, absolutely not. That change would be too much...that would call for a new playthrough.

When I make a character, I plan out the big things like who they will romance, whether they will do/arrange the Dark Ritual, who they will crown in Orzammar and Ferelden, etc., and then assign them an overall outlook or personality. For the Mage, I wanted her to be compassionate, like I said...less of an outright bad-ass than I tend to make my female characters, but still firm when she needs to be. The rest I can figure out as I need it. It all just depends on what I think will make for the most interesting story.


[quote][quote]Why would anyone believe that?[/quote]
As it happens, I believe that, but that's not really relevant to this discussion.  It's not even relevant to how I speak, given that I'm aware that other people think tone conveys meaning (I just think they're wrong about that).[/quote]
As something of a student of linguistics, I am definitely going to have to strongly disagree with you there. There are languages where tone can make a WORLD of difference. And there are lots of those languages, especially in Asia (like Chinese) and Africa (most of the Bantu languages like Swahili). Even in languages that aren't technically tonal languages, tone can still affect meaning.

Even in English. If I didn't raise the pitch of my voice when saying, "You liked that movie?" how would you know it was a question? It would sound like an imperative statement. "You liked that movie."

"We're going swimming again." If I emphasized "swimming," it would sound like I was excited by the prospect. There is, however, a pretty universal (in English, anyway) tone pattern that would indicate bored resignation. If you have a musical instrument nearby, say it while playing the following notes: "We're ( go- © -ing (D) swimming again (F F F F)." (Just to be clear, that's the F below the B, C, and D)

[quote][quote]And anyway, what we're really talking about is just expression. Tone is a part of expression, and thus a part of communication. So is body language. Someone who willingly ignores tone is going to have problems communicating, because he or she is crippling her own ability to "express." Therefore he or she might evoke interpretations he or she didn't intend to, interpretations that might have been avoided if he or she had considered the tone of his or her words.[/quote]
Yes, I agree entirely.

The problem with a voiced protagonist is that this control of tone is either limited (DA2) or taken from us.entirely (ME).[/quote]
The way I see it, tone was taken away entirely in DAO, given back poorly in ME, and finally done right in DA2. I guess this has more to do with how we each define "control" though, which we've gone over in earlier paragraphs.

[quote]Do you replay games much?  If all I was getting from a BioWare RPG was the authored narrative, I can't imagine I'd replay the game very much.

Whereas, since the way I play I create a brand new emergent narrative every time, a well-constructed RPG allows almost limitless replays.[/quote]
It depends on the game. I've lost track of the number of times I've played DAO, either partially or all the way through. It's true that my way means fewer options, but if the writing is good enough (as it is in DAO), there are still more than enough, even if they're not "limitless."

I've replayed Mass Effect 1 maybe 3 or 4 times, ME2 probably 7 or 8.

[quote]Here I think you're watching a story rather than roleplaying.  You're not driving the action.[/quote]
To an extent, I suppose you could say that's true. I still think I'm doing most of the driving, but if the game wants to reach in and grab the wheel for a second to make a slight course correction, I'm okay with that. I want to be working with the game, not against it.

[quote]I stick with that initial design because that design is the core of my gameplay 9much like you think BioWare's story is teh core of your gameplay).  You'll bend over backward to accommodate the story being told to you, whereas I'll fiddle with whatever I can to maintain the coherence of my character concept.

You play the game for the story, and the design of the PC is simply a tool (and a mutable tool) you use to experience that story.

I play the game specifically to design and implement a character concept, and the story is simply the environment in which my character lives.

This is why it's pointless for people to say "I like games that are fun."  You find the fun in an entirely different part of the game than I do.

Thanks for explaining that.[/quote]
I think all of that is pretty much spot on, but if I had to reduce it to a single kernel of truth, it'd probably be the bolded statement. That sums it up fairly neatly.

Modifié par SirOccam, 02 octobre 2010 - 09:38 .

[AlanC9]

Sylvius the Mad wrote...

AlanC9 wrote...

A Shepard who didn't believe tone carried any meaning? Isn't that on the autism spectrum?

Autistic people are generally aware that tone carries meaning.  They just can't discern it.

True. I was being a bit facetious there. But that does mean that your Shepard has a belief that's a bit bizarre, as opposed to having something out of the DSM.

Edit: it's not just that he thinks other people are wrong about this, but that he doesn't even attempt to communicate the way they do, assuming I'm reading you right. If that's the case, he should have been miscommunicating all the time.

Modifié par AlanC9, 02 octobre 2010 - 02:15 .

[addiction21]

CoS Sarah Jinstar wrote...

addiction21 wrote...

Odd because by your own standards any dialogue system in a video game does not measure up to those standards.
You say you want to "know" but you dont. All you have are some words non of the context that comes with a face to face conversation.
Exactly these are not Pen and Paper RPGS. Each medium comes with their own benefits and drawbacks. Something people need to understand.

Edit: RTO as in Return to ostagar? And what thread are you refrencing?

Not even sure what you're trying to say here, again, I don't need to know any implied tone, I can chose that for myself. Think back to the delay/asking for update threads, you know when you basically berated anyone who felt at least somewhat of a heads up on what the delay was was asking for too much.

That whatever the medium is it has its limits.  In a PnP game its all up to your own imagination how something is said and in my experiance there is someone there to interpret it and give a proper response.
With a video game you are giving up that freedom of you imagination to someone else. Like it, dont like it, or ignore it if you want but that does not change the simple fact the dialogue, how it is to be said, and what the response to it will be are set in code.
Unchangeable and with just the words presented to you you cannot actually know what your character is saying.
Imagine or ignore whatever happens if you want but again that does not change what has happened.

Sorry that was rather long time ago. If I offened you sorry but maybe discuss what is being discussed instead of hodling some slight over my head like it has some bearing on the topic at hand.
If you consider me pointing out that the medium in which a game is played or story is told has its limits and they should not be judge in the same manner as berating again I apologize but it changes nothing.

Sylvius the Mad wrote...

addiction21 wrote...

No you dont. No matter what you would like to imagine that line is delivered and how it is recieved determines how it was delievered. You can imagine what ever you want but if that line you chose offends the npc when you wanted or "imagined" it to be a friendly joke it was still offensive to that npc.

I'm not playing the NPC.  I can't control how he reacts.

There seems to be a hard truth for some to accept and it is that these are not PnP rpgs that offer you almost absolute freedom nor do I see that possibility of video game rpgs giving us that in the near future. It is a limitation of the medium and one needs to accept this.

No, one does not.  It's clearly possible to play CRPGs the way I describe, as I've been doing it for decades.

And it worked every time until I ran into Mass Effect.

Sorry I have played many of the same games as you and I just disagree. A little more on this after the next qoute.

Sylvius the Mad wrote...

addiction21 wrote...

I can. My first experiance with AListar in camp. He is Mr. Self deragoatory joke meister but if you return that attitude you do nothing but push him away.

So is that how the writers intended it, or did you misread their intended tone?

How can you tell?  Show me.

Thats the point we dont know and I just dont know how I could show you. The writers know and we are playing in their imagination and that is how it is. There has not been a game in my experiance that gave sufficiant information ahead of time to "know" how these lines will be said.
And it seems the group at BioWare recoginze this hence the new implementations being made to give some more of this information up front. How it pans out is yet to be seen.

I think we just view these games in a different manner and have different expectations for them and that we will just go in circles, so I agree to disagree .
I know I am not the most eloquent person and if you feel I am berating or insulting sorry that was not my intention and will just go back to lurking as usual.

[Sidney]

addiction21 wrote...

I know I am not the most eloquent person and if you feel I am berating or insulting sorry that was not my intention and will just go back to lurking as usual.

No you are doing quite well Slyvious is an idiot that acts out scenes in front of his montor and that's that is "playing the game".

[Sidney]

Sylvius the Mad wrote...

addiction21 wrote...

No you dont. No matter what you would like to imagine that line is delivered and how it is recieved determines how it was delievered. You can imagine what ever you want but if that line you chose offends the npc when you wanted or "imagined" it to be a friendly joke it was still offensive to that npc.

I'm not playing the NPC.  I can't control how he reacts.

There seems to be a hard truth for some to accept and it is that these are not PnP rpgs that offer you almost absolute freedom nor do I see that possibility of video game rpgs giving us that in the near future. It is a limitation of the medium and one needs to accept this.

No, one does not.  It's clearly possible to play CRPGs the way I describe, as I've been doing it for decades.

And it worked every time until I ran into Mass Effect.

You've been playing CRPG's the way you describe but have been doing exactly nothing in the effort other than feeding your overblown ego. Your actions DO NOT MATTER outside of the game world. The reason the world is compelling is that it responds in a reasonable way to your actions. If you tamper with the Ashes Wynne should go nuts, helping the weak and sick should make Morri hate you, helping Jack over Miranda angers Miranda. When you start playing outside the game it doesn't repsond to you.

CRPG's are about interaction but the interaction is necessarily limited. The NPC's can only respond to a tiny handful of statements and they all respond in a very particular way to those statements. They repsond based on lines of code drawn from a requirements document. When the guy who writes the requirements says you will get a -10 approval from Morri for helping Redcliffe that happens no matter what you say or how you say it or external logic you bring to bear. She responds properly only the the statement you see on the screen before you. Your acting might work but only to the extent that you merely parrot the writers intent and NEVER devaite from it because the instant you do reality will come crashing down.

At this point I assume you are lying anyways. You had what you thought was a good argument god only knows how long ago and now you know it is stupid but yoo are going to roll with it until hell freezes over because you are so invested in a losing argument.

[addiction21]

Sidney wrote...

addiction21 wrote...

I know I am not the most eloquent person and if you feel I am berating or insulting sorry that was not my intention and will just go back to lurking as usual.

No you are doing quite well Slyvious is an idiot that acts out scenes in front of his montor and that's that is "playing the game".

He is far from an idiot I just believe that he has unrealistic expectations for the genre and medium for the current time.

[andar91]

@Sidney: Knock it off. You may not agree with Sylvius' posts (I don't most of the time) but there's no reason to hurl insults at him unless you want to get banned. He may not agree with a lot of the posts on this forum since he has such strong feelings about what he likes and dislikes, but at least he isn't rude and respects others' opinions.

[Sylvius the Mad]

[quote]SirOccam wrote...

Because if the only form such a "freedom" can take is just in my head, then it kind of defeats the purpose of playing a cRPG. The whole point (at least in my view) is to be able to see and hear things taking place, as opposed to simply imagining them. That's not the only important thing, to be sure, but I still think it is important.[/quote]
That's fair.

I just have a different objective when I play CRPGs.
[quote]Because that's not expressing tone or body language, it's imagining it. It's like trying to use sign language with a blind person. Sure, you can do it all you want, but if there's no chance of them ever perceiving it, then why bother?[/quote]
That's a metagame concern.  You know there's no chance of the NPCs perceiving that behaviour, but your character doesn't.  So whatever their reaction is, how it fits the PC's expression (or doesn't) is what drives the PC's impressions of that NPC.
[quote]And yes, communication does include those things, but I also said your ability to communicate is pretty heavily restricted in these games. I know you don't believe that, but I'm just explaining why I'm not being inconsistent in this case.[/quote]
I don't think you're being inconsistent.  I thought you were being restrictive.

But given that you derive the fun in CRPGs from seeing the game react to you, I can see why you do it that way.
[quote]Because it's not (as) fun/worthwhile if I can't see it making any kind of difference.[/quote]
I understand.

I would even agree with you, except I do that off-screen behaviour makign a difference.  It changes the future decisions of the PC, and many of those do occur on-screen.

If, for example, the Warden chooses to save Redcliffe, when he initially would have chosen not to do so, that's a big on-screen event, and it might have been caused by off-screen behaviour.
[quote]It depends, like I said, on the circumstances. I'd never play a character who displayed wildly different attitudes about something within the same playthrough. But if it's a minor shift, or it hasn't been a significant plot point yet, I still allow for a bit of last-minute editing.[/quote]
Whether any given shift is minor to that character would differ from character to character, wouldn't it?
[quote]A good example is a recent Female Human Mage playthrough I started. I wasn't 100% sure how I wanted her attitude towards religion to be. My natural tendency is to play people who are not heavily interested in any kind of religion. I wanted something different this time, though, so I thought she'd be very into the whole thing. She'd be kind of like Wynne...despite the Chantry's oppression of her and her fellow mages, she'd be very devoted to the Maker and Andraste and all of it.

But then when something came up that actually called for these things to be put into practice, I did a last minute change. She was still somewhat religious, but I sort of merged it with her compassion, which I had already decided was going to be a pretty defining characteristic for her, even to a fault. So she helped Brother Burkel with his Chantry, not from a fanatical desire to spread the Chant, but because she felt that it could help people. And then she arranged for Zerlinda and her child to find refuge there, an option I didn't even realize was in the game before that. I was very satisfied with how that turned out.

So when she's looking for the Urn, is she going to choose to defile the Ashes? No, absolutely not. That change would be too much...that would call for a new playthrough.

When I make a character, I plan out the big things like who they will romance, whether they will do/arrange the Dark Ritual, who they will crown in Orzammar and Ferelden, etc., and then assign them an overall outlook or personality. For the Mage, I wanted her to be compassionate, like I said...less of an outright bad-ass than I tend to make my female characters, but still firm when she needs to be. The rest I can figure out as I need it. It all just depends on what I think will make for the most interesting story.[/quote]
That makes sense.

I never give the story any thought, because my character isn't aware of the story.  Their opinions and behaviour can change during the course of the game if it makes sense, but those changes are always made in-character.

As for gaps, if there are any I've left them there on purpose.  Right now I'm playing a female city elf who cares deeply about her people, but views humans with about as much compassion as wild dogs.  But what about Dwarves?  She's never met any, and her world in the alienage was pretty small, so she's never really given them a moment's thought.  I'm really curious to see how she'll treat Dwarves.  I suspect her ultimate opinion will be infuenced heavily by the first Dwarves she meets, but I honestly don't know.

And discovering that sort of thing is why I play.

I played a male elf with no self-esteem, who always deferred to his companions when any decision needed to be made (he even accidentally antagonised Wynne into a fight by agreeing with Morrigan even though he didn't really understand what she was saying).  And he avoided combat under all circumstances, allowing his companion to do all the fighting.  But in the Fade he was forced to do things alone, and it terrified him, but when he came out the other end he'd grown a backbone.  That was revelatory character development, and I doubt it can happen with a voiced protagonist.

But we'll see.  I'm planning to use that same character design (uncertain coward) for my first Hawke. If it works, then DA2 undoubtedly allows roleplaying of my sort.
[quote]As something of a student of linguistics, I am definitely going to have to strongly disagree with you there. There are languages where tone can make a WORLD of difference. And there are lots of those languages, especially in Asia (like Chinese) and Africa (most of the Bantu languages like Swahili). Even in languages that aren't technically tonal languages, tone can still affect meaning.[/quote]
In tone languages tone has denotative meaning.  I'm not disputing denotation.
[quote]Even in English. If I didn't raise the pitch of my voice when saying, "You liked that movie?" how would you know it was a question? It would sound like an imperative statement. "You liked that movie."[/quote]
And that's why the spoken language isn't the true language.  It's been a poor cousin to written language ever since we invented punctuation.
[quote]"We're going swimming again." If I emphasized "swimming," it would sound like I was excited by the prospect. There is, however, a pretty universal (in English, anyway) tone pattern that would indicate bored resignation.[/quote]
No.  It doesnt indicate anything.  Most people would draw that conclusion, and most of the time they would be right, but that doesn't mean the meaning was actually there.

It just means that most people are relevantly similar and would use the same tone of express the same thing.  My interpreting that tone, the listener is projecting his pwn preferences onto the speaker.  If they're relevantly similar, that projection will match the speaker's opinion, but this is by no means guaranteed.
[quote]The way I see it, tone was taken away entirely in DAO, given back poorly in ME, and finally done right in DA2. I guess this has more to do with how we each define "control" though, which we've gone over in earlier paragraphs.[/quote]
I probably asked you this before, but I don't remember.  Do you think you can roleplay well in CRPGs without full-text dialogue (either in options or delivery)?  A modern example would be Oblivion's keyword dialogue system, though any number of keyword or text-parsing systems from early CRPGs would also work.
[quote]I want to be working with the game, not against it.[/quote]
I don't want to be playing a game at all.  I want to be playing a character.

[Sylvius the Mad]

AlanC9 wrote...

Edit: it's not just that he thinks other people are wrong about this, but that he doesn't even attempt to communicate the way they do, assuming I'm reading you right. If that's the case, he should have been miscommunicating all the time.

Absolutely.  I expected miscommunication, so I designed a character who wouldn't mind.

But the problem wasn't that the reaction was wrong, but that the line Shepard spoke was wrong.  I handily defeated the tone an delivery problem, only to hit a brick wall with the literal content of the lines.

[Sylvius the Mad]

Sidney wrote...

CRPG's are about interaction

I completely disagree with this

And since the sum total of your opinion is derived from what I see as an error, I just think you're wrong.

[Meltemph]

I don't want to be playing a game at all.

Then why are you?

[CoS Sarah Jinstar]

Meltemph wrote...

I don't want to be playing a game at all.

Then why are you?

Why does it matter how Sylvius, or I or anyone else plays RPG's?  I didn't realize there was a proper way one was forced to play these types of games.

[JrayM16]

Without trying to devalidate the opinions of Sylvius and Sarah, (they're totally valid) I would say their arguments have made this entire debate null and void and the conversation unwinnable on either side.

[CoS Sarah Jinstar]

JrayM16 wrote...

Without trying to devalidate the opinions of Sylvius and Sarah, (they're totally valid) I would say their arguments have made this entire debate null and void and the conversation unwinnable on either side.

Pretty much, and the topic is no longer about the post topic to begin with.

[AlanC9]

That never stopped us before.

[Sylvius the Mad]

Meltemph wrote...

Then why are you?

I'm not.  I'm roleplaying.

I've explained at considerable length how those are different things and never the twain shall meet.

CoS Sarah Jinstar wrote...

Why does it matter how Sylvius, or I or anyone else plays RPG's?  I didn't realize there was a proper way one was forced to play these types of games.

JrayM16 wrote...

Without trying to devalidate the
opinions of Sylvius and Sarah, (they're totally valid) I would say
their arguments have made this entire debate null and void and the
conversation unwinnable on either side.

This is basically my point.  There exists an RPG  playstyle wtih a long and storied history that games like Mass Effect completely fail to accommodate.

I'm ensuring that everyone (including BioWare) knows of this playstyle so they can take some steps to allow its players to preserve it.

[Meltemph]

I'm not. I'm roleplaying.

So I'm not on a message board, instead, I am responding to posts?

Modifié par Meltemph, 03 octobre 2010 - 04:05 .