Questions & Answers #1: What Do You Want in an RPG?
This comment was posted to reddit on Oct 23, 2019 at 2:58 pm and was deleted within 5 minutes.
Questions & Answers #1: What Do You Want in an RPG?
The ability for different playthroughs to tell wholly unique stories, namely in how the procedural elements of games such as Daggerfall or Dwarf Fortress can lead to an emergent story wholly unique from anything else. For example, in Daggerfall I've seen stories and characters emerge through RNG including a seemingly criminal underground within the Temple of Kynareth, a romance-obsessed Dark Brotherhood leader, and a perverted Mage's Guild questmaster who was seemingly obsessed with trying to coerce my character into crossdressing (kept rewarding my quests with increasingly powerful magical skirts, with enchantments so good that wearing them was actually rather tempting.).
It's a spiritual successor to one of the greatest RPGs.
The most memorable was probably when I joined the Knights of the Candle in Daggerfall. Eventually I sought out the leader of my faction, Lord K'avar, who kept giving me absurd quests. These quests were absurd in, mainly, the amount he'd pay me. Several times I was asked to deliver objects within the same city in exchange for 4,500 gold pieces. Initially I assumed Lord K'avar was just really, REALLY bad with money. But then later, I got the Fighter's Guild quest revealing Lord K'avar to be a traitor, an suddenly I was tasked by the Queen of Sentinel to take him down... which brought up a question of what my deliveries where ACTUALLY about?? Was I helping to facilitate smuggling or treason?? During the quest to bring K'avar to justice I crawled a dungeon filled with werewolves and caught lycanthropy myself, and after a long quest to bring my former boss to justice, in which I had been cursed forever more, I finally turned over K'avar to the throne and was rewarded by the Queen, who bestowed upon me ... a magical clown costume. Later, I was blackmailed by the Dark Brotherhood into joining them, after they witnessed me murder another person, in werewolf form. Not wanting the secret that I was a werewolf to become public, I ended up a member of the Dark Brotherhood blackmailed into a life of murder, all because of the events surrounding that one NPC, Lord K'avar.
Uncovering mysteries or conspiracies ... or things that seem like those things but were actually just RNG.
RPG worlds that wait for the player in order for anything to actually happen. Want to truly save Kvatch in Oblivion?? Then just stay far away from the city, and the storyline will never actually destroy it. The apocalypse waits for you, which is lame.
I play weird character concepts. Recently in the last few RPGs I played, I've played as a wandering warrior mystic who combined aspects of the both older and newer religions of the setting (Outward), a Finnish-American hunter from Escanaba with a passionate hatred for communism (Fallout), a mentally challenged yet highly magical half-ogre who was, unfortunately for the world, the chosen one (Arcanum), and a pacifistic hippie necromancer with a zealous love for his country who was also eternally cursed by a mummy (Daggerfall). I wish I could play even weirder character concepts. I like taking an odd idea and roleplaying that character to its fullest extent.
I guess just straight up "Interacting"
YouTube.
Yes.
Well in my own personal projects, I'm interested in the idea of an open-world RPG with a living world. In Daggerfall when asking for rumors you'd hear that so-and-so faction had allied with so-and-so, or hear that a certain leader had taken over a country or guild, but I don't think that had any actual effect on the game world. It would be interesting to see guilds or factions grow in power, have conflict, rise, or fall dynamically within the game itself and (most importantly) to do all of that without needing the player to drive such conflict. I'd also like to see the villain of an RPG much more active in trying to counteract the player, rather than a villain who just waits around pre-scriptedly for the player to act first. A long time ago I read an article on the concept of an RPG villain that was active in the world and tried to strategically react to the players, but many years later I still haven't seen such a thing done in a game.