Hey! Bet you didn't think there was going to be another one of these. Last time I talked about
scope and narrative control. This time, the topic is grinding!
Now, it's entirely obvious at this point that I'm against grinding. Warrens is the opposite of a grindy game. You can't just make ten rolls and expect them all to succeed. The question is: why? What's so wrong with a little powerleveling for profit? Surely, if we went back and forth between the acid pool and the shopkeeper for twenty updates, we could make at LEAST twenty pence, right?
A big part of the answer is "time."
In a traditional RPG, you're given plenty of time to grind (usually). You can take the game at your own pace. Often, much to my chagrin, game designers encourage grinding. I can see this as reasonable (from THEIR perspective, not the players') in two scenarios:
1) It's The Eighties and buying a bunch of video games for your one very expensive console is simply Not Done, so the creators intentionally designed the game to take a lot of time to finish.
2) The game is an MMORPG, and those are categorically designed to waste as much of your time as possible.
Otherwise, it is literally wasted time to make the player character walk super slow/collect 20 bear asses to progress/otherwise grind.
"But aren't we theoretically allowed infinite time in Warrens, freeform?" Well... depending on the scenario, yeah. But I'm not talking about in-universe chat. I'm talking about the real world. Suggestion games - and all forum games - are inherently more Human than video games. There is no robot drawing the results of Ciro's actions. There is just me and your suggestions. I try to avoid this appearance occasionally, but it is a truth and very truthy at that.
By allowing players opportunities to grind for loot, mercs, and non-existent EXP, I not only waste your time but everyone else's. Even more than many other forum games, Warrens is an action/comedy story based around silly dungeon crawler mechanics and quick, easy-to-make updates. When it takes twenty updates (which might be 7-10 days) to get to the
next room just because the majority decided to siphon EVERY LAST WATER DROPLET out of the Magical Healing Spring, I have failed. I have not done my job in providing interesting and more pressing issues for players to obsess over.
Yes, this occasionally means nixing infinite defeatable enemies by throwing a Big Wisp at you. It also means there's always going to be better things Ciro could be doing than asking random NPCs about their backstories (although this is guaranteed to generate some interesting/unfortunate/humorous results). I think it's a fair trade for people that like tactics and resource management.
On top of that, suggestion games should be based around clever, relevant
suggestions. That's why +1s/-1s are a thing. They're basically a form of upvote that rewards suggestions people like. Doubly so in Warrens where straight-up rush head in combat will get you killed (again, roguelike/dungeon crawler influence), and the easiest way to get items is cleverly manpulating your environment/inventory.
Is it better this way?
Yes. Hell yes. Remember that suggestion games without mechanics are basically open-ended novels. Grinding is the opposite of what you do when reading a book. Even the TWoOtA is positively packed with game mechanics, it's still a story, and it's still something you're just reading most of the time. When the thing your reading is the same boring thing for five days, it's not very interesting at all.
Thanks for reading! Back to the game soonish.
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Topic: (ISG) The Warrens of Oric the Awesome ??? (Read 3896539 times)