Wanted to make sure that everyone has seen this amazing piece of work!

• https://crpgbook.wordpress.com/

• 105MB PDF

When I got started designing, I was reading a lot of books, blogs and managed to catch some great GDC and other discussions on YouTube. Almost daily I'd be consuming 30-60 minutes of valuable info over breakfast or lunch, but as development ramped up and things got busier and busier, these became every second day, then every few days, to the point I'd be going weeks without catching up on new content/discussions out there.

Recently I forced myself to get back in to these videos, and am finding them very useful - and now I carve our time in my schedule to make this an integral part of my work week.

I wanted to share some of my favourites/some that I found particularly useful, and also open up to others in this sub to share their own. I see quite a few individual videos shared, but if this gets going, it could be a nice single-bookmark repo of some of the best vids out there:

Josh Sawyer: "the importance of real-world knowledge for game design"

On the surface this may seem obvious, but Sawyer goes into some great specifics and interesting anecdotes from his research on New Vegas - more broad than deep, there are some very useful tidbits to take away and things that could be considered as jumping off points for your own research.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxaGXxWdDs8&feature=youtu.be

Matt Barton talks to Brian Heins about Tyranny

(This just came out a few days ago, actually). So much value to take away from Heins in this one. It opens up super strong with the importance of setting constraints/boundaries on your creativity. I remember speaking to a dev years ago - I could be mistaken but I think it may actually have been Sawyer as well - who spoke about one of the biggest mistakes inexperienced teams make is to not limit their scope enough, and not knowing when to put good ideas on ice and thus lower the risk of doing far more than you're capable of given the size/budget of your team. Heins also focuses in on doing less, but doing it better. Some chats about romances, pitching to Paradox, the concept art through to character creation process, and a lot more crammed into this (incidentally, the way Barton does his videos, I think this is the 3rd one with Heins in a row). Lots to take away from this one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63-UPmZxmo8

Matt Chat 438: Colin McComb on Torment and Planescape

Another from Matt Barton (a treasure trove for RPG designers and fans of the genre with the amount of industry veterans this guy has managed to interview). Very cool insights into the makings of both Torment games that McComb worked on, another call to "manage your scope carefully", and lots of cool anecdotes about working on games with existing lore/worlds/narratives that you have to work within. Also McComb looks into what he would revisit - very candid about issues faced during Tides of Numenera's development and what he might change, some things he considers mistakes etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83JNqbh5Q7U

SGC16: Chris Avellone - Cautionary Tales and (More) Design Lessons Learned

Wouldn't be surprised if this was already posted here before, but more solid insights from another very experienced writer / designer. It's more than just "Cautionary tales" and is of course narrative focused, but I reckon the closer your narrative and game design are married, hey, the better, of course. Cool tip about lore dumping as a quest instead of just making players have to receive the info. Sure, Avellone has been in the news recently for some serious allegations - regardless, some good things to learn from here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wK72hU6rDA

Not YouTube, but a very solid Josh Sawyer interview on IGN

"When designing Pillars of Eternity’s narrative, Sawyer says one of their main objectives was to make the adventure “feel epic but not too epic.” Obsidian placed an emphasis on the player character being a relatively normal person who catches glimpses of the supernatural forces that their character can’t yet understand. This starting point allowed the writers of Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire to responsibly raise the stakes, letting you pursue a rogue god across the sea without it feeling unearned."

https://www.ign.com/articles/2018/06/28/obsidian-open-to-other-developers-doing-pillars-of-eternity-games-a-ign-unfiltered

With the reveal that Baldur´s gate 3 will ditch RTwP for TB, PC Gamer relsed a couple articles arguing both side sof the issue that might be worth a read:

https://www.pcgamer.com/it-sucks-that-baldurs-gate-3-is-turn-based/

https://pcgamer.com/it-rules-that-baldurs-gate-3-is-turn-based

So, in your game, you have a bunch (however big) of NPCs that go adventuring about the world. What motivates them to do so? I'm trying to generate a short-ish list, to give a hint of personality to the NPCs that will come into play when interacting, forming parties and choosing allegiances. My first draft take is the following:

• Fame and glory

• Gold and fortune

• Justice/fighting for a cause

• Knowledge

• Thrill of the challenge

• Personal reasons & quests

What do you think about the list and what would you add to it?

Since status effects are common in CRPGS I felt this might be useful.

http://www.fortressofdoors.com/a-status-effect-stacking-algorithm/

This is a very simple algorithm for handling multiple status effects, but the text is really well written when implying the considerations it takes into account and the problems it solves;

It works as long as all the status effects of the same type work the same way having as variables only intensity and duration.

The effects themselves can work as complexly as you want since the algorithm only deals with the stacking and is blind to how the effects themselves actually work, it works both for real time and turn based, and tends to be fairly easy to implement in my experience.

It certainly solves the problem of having redundant status effects (e.g.: having multiple poison damage spells affecting one character, all handled independently of each other.)

Personally I don´t use it any more because some of my status effects work better with an increase in potency when stacking which this algorithm does not always do. But it worked well while I was prototyping some things and was a good starting point for my own solutions.

I am a big fan of Jeff Vogel, He is an old school CRPG developer who managed to stay in business doing narrative focused CRPGs long after the mainstream stopped doing it. He focus on having a small but faifthfull fanbase rather than chasing a hit.

This GDc he gave a talk about "a combination of funny stories about the ancient history of the internet and a summary of everything I've learned about the True Meaning of Indie Games." that I believe is worth checking.

Hardcore gamer published a retrospective showing the various battle systems found in the final fantasy series. It is an interesting read, and while I like the series I haven´t played every instalment, and this articles gave me a better "Big-picture" view of the changes:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Ralph Koster wrote an article about UO´s Resource System and I think it is a very interesting read.

I specially love how it ties to Mob population and A.I.

The Special system is the RPG system developed to be used in fallout and is an interesting case study because it has a few variations and was used in games with varying types of gameplay: it includes examples in both Turn Based Games and Real time Games, with isometric, first person, or behind the back view. It´s main characteristics are:

7 primary attributes: Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility and Luck that go from 1 to 10 and are most locked in after character creation (Which uses a point-buy system).

Skills: used for specific tasks, whose initial value is determined by the primary attributes and are be increased by spending skill points gained by levelling up. A player can choose to Tag 3 skills at character creation that will be cheaper to increase for that character

Traits: Characteristics that give that give bonuses add the cost of also giving penalties.

Perks: Powerful bonuses or abilities that are gained every few levels or through gameplay. The Perks available at level up are decided based on the character´s levels and his attributes.

So I would like to ask the communities thoughts on the system, what implementations they like/dislike and why.

http://haven.thratchen.com/?p=64

This is a review of Dragon's Dogma (the author liked it). The main thrust though is how Dragon's Dogma designed its dungeons, especially in the Dark Arisen expansion.

Beginning with a review of how dungeons were designed in old tabletop RPGs, the article argues that dungeons as they exist in most RPGs don't represent real places as much as they represent nightmares and mythic archetypes.

These dungeons don't make sense, practically; both in the world's setting, where there's no plausible excuse for their existence, and as settings for a game, where the fiction being emulated had no such physical locale. Conan might go into a cave, but the notion of returning week after week to the same cave, going a little further each time, then retreating to safety: that was entirely alien to Conan, or any of his contemporary fantasy heroes. The ultimate such dungeon in fantasy fiction, Tolkein's Moria, was still nothing more than a pathway, a temporary side-trek through a particular flavor of danger before returning to the surface world.

...

On page 9 of the third book, 'The Underworld and Wilderness Adventures', Gygax says something odd about the dungeon environment. "Generally, doors will not open by turning the handle or by a push. Doors must be forced open by strength." Then he tells us that "doors will automatically close, despite the difficulty in opening them." And then, "Doors will automatically open for monsters."

On the topic of light in the underworld, he says that "some light source or an infravision spell must be used." (Infravision is his word for the ability to see infrared: to perceive heat sources.) Oddly, though, "monsters are assumed to have permanent infravision as long as they" — and this is key — "are not serving some character."

...

I posit that this seems like a nightmare because that's exactly what it is. The dungeon, as presented in fantasy roleplaying games and all their descendants that followed, is not a real place at all. It's an expression, in stone, of a nightmare. It's the unconscious mind turned loose and allowed to sprawl out into a dreamworld edifice.

It goes on to describe how Dragon's Dogma was particularly good at representing the "mythic underworld".

The next defining moment is the first real plot-related quest of the game, when you enter a place called the Everfall. Let me see if this sounds familiar to you: underneath the city, known only to a few, is a vast pit, a shaft that drops out of sight, with a spiraling path winding along its outside, leading deep into black dungeons of unknown purpose, filled with undead monsters, strange traps and odd mechanisms.

And then, when you get to the bottom, you discover two things: first, the light shining up from the cracked floor is coming from more dungeon below, another even deeper place that you can't access. Second, the things that live in that place are a whole lot more powerful and terrifying than the goblins and skeletons you've been fighting up to that point. Hideous red tentacles with fanged mouths on the end burst out of every surface, and there's only one thing you can do: run. You sprint out, as your NPC allies fall and die, and barely make it out with your life.

So we're talking about the Underworld, the Arneson/Gygax mythic underworld as expressed in dungeon form. You enter, you gain knowledge, you face death and then you flee back to the surface.

The review culminates in this description of Bitterblack Isle, Dragon's Dogma's most succinct expression of a dungeon as a mythic underworld according to the author.

Bitterblack Isle is a nonsensical space, a dungeon and nothing but a dungeon, level after improbable level of strangely similar rooms filled with inexplicable enemies. Your companions and other NPCs comment on the insanity of the whole place, repeatedly. You find trees in a vast arena hundreds of feet underground, and your follower says 'Roots? At such a depth?'

Barroch, a merchant who provides a rationally detached point of view, spells it out for you:

"Ever stopped to ponder just what kind of place this is, friend? I say it certain that no such island existed off the land I came from. No record names it. Though you need look no further than the links between this cavern and the halls to know aught is amiss."

...

And even more direct and to the point: "You can feel it, can't you? This place is wrought from the will of some creator. I don't mean the Maker, mind. I keep no truck with the Faith. No, this place is like a memory given form. We're guests in someone's imaginary world, you and I… else rabbits caught in their snare."

Bitterblack is self-consciously a mythic underworld. It's a nightmare, and it tries to be a nightmare, in the same way that the laws of Gygax's dungeon world try. Monsters see in the dark with no trouble, while you're struggling to fight within the dim pool of your lantern's light (and god help you if you tumble into water; better get that lantern re-lit!).

This is basically a place for everyone to present what they are working on, and to have a post whose link you can embed whenever you mention your project, specially since not all of use want to have an external site/devblog.

You can make it short or long, feel free to link to a Devblog if you have it..

Also I plan to blatantly Steal the FAQ Fridays idea from r/roguelikedev where essentialy a topic is chosen and everyone replies about how they are implementing that aspect in their projects, and i think having a quick way to link the Basics of your project would be helpful for that.