As stated in my Mass Effect 2 rant (and sparked by a conversation with my good friend David), there are many things about role-playing games that annoy me. I’m sick of the petty victories of “dinging” a level, of gaining a skill point, of getting a weapon with a purple name. I’m sick of statistical optimization. I’m sick of saving the world. And most of all, I’m sick of not caring about the characters, especially the non-character they give you as your central protagonist. Normally I would attribute this last part to never-ending disappointment with humanity, but when all I have to work with are the same archetypes over and over again, I’m inclined to think I’m not the only part of the problem.
The current trend of RPG character design is to use one of three general templates:
1. Define everything about the characters. The player exists to watch a story play out and manage the stat increases gained from the aforementioned petty victories – and if you’re playing a visual novel, the player may not even have petty victories. Example: Most JRPGs
2. Define little about the player character. The player can project as much as they want onto the soulless shell provided by the game and make as many relevant choices as the developers can create. Often very high on the scale of petty victories. Example: Bioware Games
3. Define little about any of the characters. The player is in charge of filling in the copious gaps in character development left by the developers, either intentionally or accidentally – some games make world generation the point and allow you close to total flexibility, but some just got lazy and gave everyone not you the motivation “take Player’s money” for friendly NPC shopkeepers or “take Player’s life” for everything else. Comprised entirely of petty victories. Example: Most action RPGs and MMORPGs
What’s worse, though, is when any of the above mistakes character development for character advancement. By tying options to stats, and stats to grind, they do their narrative a disservice with content rigidly gated behind a grind – the infamous (and inFamous as well, though they were by no means the first to do this) “Moral Choice” system that makes you play the game again, choosing the blue options instead of the red. Dragon Age, while it doesn’t have a ‘moral choice’ system per se, still gates some content and optimization behind the ‘social choice’ system of bribing your party members with pandering and gifts. In essence, the choice is not whether to support one character over another, based on in-universe logic. The choice is really whether to gain a statistical advantage or not, based on the effort to attain that advantage. In a world where people on GameFAQs who confuse Microsoft Access for fun exist, discovering statistical advantage is hardly a worthwhile challenge.
Further, character advancement, either in terms of depth (higher numbers for the same abilities) or in terms of breadth (more abilities that serve new functions), doesn’t even matter in most RPGs. In the first case, your damage scales up at the same time enemy health scales up, and vice versa; as long as the scales are roughly equivalent, no one gains any ground except for people who inexplicably like bigger numbers. In the second, the variety is nice from a ‘feel good’ perspective, but oftentimes the variety comes with the price of either not being able to use it when you need it (because Bosses Are Immune to Death Spells) or having to use every button you have at all times, which means you only really have one option, Press Buttons or Die. All those hours it takes to get the max level and unlock all the special powers and talents and so on don’t make the game worth playing, unless managing spreadsheets is fun for you – and while making spreadsheets which explode probably would make me open up Excel more often, there ought to be more RPGs can do than increment numbers behind the veneer of explosions.
In short, characters in RPGs are mostly your little chess pieces in a war of attrition, and not even one that rewards experimentation. If there’s no statistical benefit, or equivalent statistical benefit, for making a choice, the choice is purely philosophical or aesthetic – which are fine bases for choices, but it’s rare these choices end up being interesting in execution. If there is a statistical benefit for making a specific choice, then the choice is either Play As Intended or ‘Challenge’ Yourself By Manually Lowering Your Chance Of Success. It’s not an experiment or a puzzle if there’s a Punnett Square of options that are, by now, relatively common knowledge. There are enough games in the genre now that challenging the established rules is essentially commercial suicide. I admit this may fall under the heading of “the magic is gone”, or alternately “familiarity breeds contempt”.
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