Belief in the System, Part 4: Elemental Case Study

So, in the last part, I discussed this problem:

Adding Elemental type resistance to various monsters brings about a host of design issues:

1. Elements can become too strong or too weak, depending on how monsters are designed.
2. Elements have the danger of being too 'alike.' Imagine having 8 different colored fireballs that do the same thing.
3. Elements might encourage laziness in design (Fire Beetle! Ice Beetle! Lightning Beetle!)
4. Tediousness inventory management on the part of the player, juggling around weapons with a ton of different elemental types just because he needs (or wants) to do more damage.
5. Critical difficulty jump if the player doesn't have the element he needs or if he is stuck with the 'incorrect' element. (Fire specialized mage encountering a fire elemental. Whoops.)

But what disturbs me most, personally, (and this is a personal view..) is that..
The common view to 'fix' these problems is to simply be a better designer.
Which I find it, while true, seems to be very very micro-intensive.

I touched upon this in the last post: You could solve each of these issues, simply by spending more time on each individual issue or being careful and methodical throughout design and sweating the small stuff.

But what are the chances you are a god-like designer and that you can solve each of the issues? What are the chances you have the time to spare on tweaking the small things? Not to mention that the smaller solutions mentioned (like carefully balancing monster elemental resistance values, etc.) add incredible complexity to adding new content.

But what can we do about it?

Make all design as global as possible. Global changes are changes in the inherent nature of the game. Global changes are changes to the very system you play it. Therefore, if you push your work to the GLOBAL system at large, your design cost is minimized.

Let's go with an easy example:

Let's say we have all the traditional elements in Dungeons and Dragons: Fire, Ice, Lightning, Holy, Darkness, Poison, Sonic, Slashing, Blunt, Piercing.

There is no way in hell I'm going to find a weapon of each type, let alone be bothered to sort through my inventory to search for each weapon type. There's also no way I'm going to even remember what monsters are weak to what, because that's not really a reasonable expectation for anyone to recall.

However, what if we had fewer element types? Physical, Energy, Fire, Ice, Poison?

Then, it'd be a lot easier to remember if monsters are weak to a certain element or another. A player could reasonably expect to cover at least some of the elemental types. In additional, certain problems later on become easier to manage. The problem of making 12 different elements seem different is a lot harder than the problem of making 5 different elements seem different.

This condensing of element space brings about a lot of benefits, while still keeping a lot of the core benefits intact.

1. It helps avoid making the elements appear to similar because there are fewer of them.

2. The condensing cuts down on inventory juggling because there are simply less elements to juggle around.

3. It cuts down on what the player has to remember so that the player will actually take notice to the system itself as a whole.

4. It cuts down the designer space and lets him focus on more important parts of design.

Let's go with a harder example:

Let's say you have a monster who you want to be weak to fire. Let's say I'm designing a monster and I could choose exactly how much more damage he takes from fire. Do I want him to take 80% more fire damage? 20% more fire damage? 45% more fire damage? Will it even matter in the end?

On the other hand, you could simply have a fast and hard global rule: All monsters weak to fire take 50% more fire damage. All monsters strong to fire take 50% less fire damage. Period. Thereafter, designers would only have to think about 'Do I want this monster to take more or less damage from fire? Yes? No?'

And additionally, you would skirt the issue of making the easy design mistake of having a monster be a complete cakewalk if you have a fire attack, and significantly harder if you don't because your weakness value doesn't go that high.

In this example, we have compacted the range of values that resistances can have. A monster's weakness or penalty/strength to damage could only fall under a few categories:

Immune to fire. (0%, optional)
Strong against fire. (50%)
Neutral against fire. (100%)
Weak against fire. (150%)
Really weak against fire. (200%, optional)

What are the implications of this change?

1. It forces the designer to think about their design on a slightly higher level.

The designer has to think harder about what weakness/resistances a monster should have. He can't take the easy way out and assign a small weakness vs. fire, because small weaknesses to fire don't exist.

There is a golden mean fallacy that states that the most tempting solution will be the median between two desires. In this case, the designer can't decide whether or not a monster should have 0% fire weakness or 50% fire weakness. The answer he'll most likely gravitate to is 25%, the mean between the two as some form of compromise. However, this is most likely the worst solution for this as the fire weakness does too little to differentiate it, nor does it reward the player very much for having the appropriate element. It just adds more tweaking that was unnecessary nor very helpful.

2. The impact of weaknesses and strengths can be well known.

Elements never lose their impact in the game. They always have an impact. The elements will never feel pointless because using the correct or incorrect element does a dramatic amount of difference. Additionally, the player knows the upper bound of how using the correct/incorrect element will do and that can influence his decisions.

In addition, you know exactly how easy or hard a given area is. Either the player will have the incorrect element and do half damage, or he will have the correct element and do double damage. Either way, the difficulty creep is known ahead of time and the area can be designed with that in mind.

3. Less time can be spent on 'tweaking' small things.

The designer doesn't have to tweak resistance values. They have to care about the actual area design. Less time thrashing on number fiddling means more *actual* design work is done.

Let's go with another example:

I have an ice bolt spell. I have a fire bolt spell. I have a lightning bolt spell. They all do the same thing. Deal damage based on element type. Boring.

Well, okay, I can tweak every fire spell to do a high amount of damage. And I can make all the lightning bolt spells do even higher potential damage, but a lower minimum damage. I can make all the ice spells do less damage but have a cold effect or a freeze effect of varying lengths.

Wait. Now I have to add another fire spell? Well.. I can make it do more damage.. or..

Contrast that with...

Let's think of a set of abilities all fire element things should do:

Damage over Time burn based on initial damage dealt (DoT)
Leave a lasting burn on nearby terrain, like a flaming wall effect, that burns based on the fire damage it would deal (Area Burn)
Explode in some way shape or form to affect more than one target (Explode)

Now every time I have to add a fire effect, I can assign it one of these properties. I could assign all three of them if I wished, but I will no longer have to tweak individual spell effects, instead, all I would have to do is mark an attack as: Fire, Area Burn, Explode.

By making sure that every fire ability has one or more abilities from that set of abilities and ensuring that every element which isn't fire doesn't have the same ability...

I admit, this example is pretty darned convoluted even for me. But my point is: Design a global set of attributes that can be selectively assigned to a skill, rather than tweak each individual skill.

Say we came up with a large series of effects, like so:

Fire: Damage over time, Area Burn, Explosion
Cold: Slow Effect (50%), Frozen (100%), Immobilized (0% Move), Pierce (Goes through targets)
Energy: Stun (Varying Length), Knockback, Arcs (Jumps from target to target)
Poison: Debuffs Attack/Defense, Damage over Time, Gaseous Area Effect..

And then when we designed individual skills, we ensured that all elemental spells of that element had one property of these effects. What does this achieve?

1. It separates interesting effects from the actual source/skill (Less tweaking!)

That is, a skill doesn't have to be designed with AreaAa Burn in mind. Area Burn is a template that can be applied to fire effects. This allows re-use of the fire effect and the player also realizes that fire effects often apply area burn.

2. Effects can be counted on to do the same thing

For example, you will never have one ice effect that slows for 30% and one ice effect that slows for 40% and one ice effect that slows for 5%. The player can count on ice slowing for a set amount of time, apart from the skill. The designer on the other hand knows exactly how powerful the cold is and can't commit the golden mean fallacy in design.

3. It really helps to different the elements, without micro-design tweaking and unifies the element in the mind of the player.

That is, you don't have to tweak every single skill or item to make them stand apart. Simply apply one of the global templates and then the elemental attack in question "feels" like it belongs to an element.

All poison does X. All fire will do something like Y.

The key here is that with a bit of global design, smaller micro design issues in individual skills, monsters, and items can be sidestepped or greatly simplified, allowing the designer to design a richer game without having to worry about specifics.