The Eternal Noob

[Slamz]

The exciting thing in your example is the surprise of the troll showing up unexpectedly, not the fact that its a troll which, upon identifying, you decide to either run from or fight depending on whether or not you've ever fought trolls before.

What's exciting about spotting a "troll" if a troll is just a frog with a different 3-D model? It's like saying, "We were fighting a bunch of cubes and we unexpectedly surprised by another cube." I don't think different graphics and imagination can completely replace interesting game mechanics, so the question is how can we make it interesting.

We could make the troll into a boss mob (a cube, but bigger) but I want to get away from these set piece models where the designer plops down an NPC with 5x more hit points than normal and calls it a "boss" and that's meant to be the exciting endgame. I want the troll to be exciting because he's different than your normal gameplay.


"Personal" is a key word here. Maybe trolls aren't even that badass, but he's badass to you. Encountering your first troll is a personal experience not dictated by the designers. No designer sat down and said, "I want this to be a really tough encounter". It's going to be tough or not based on your personal experiences.


I also think this will help when it comes to interaction between players. Since the game is so personal, not everyone is going to be equally good at killing everything in the game.

For example, lets say the heart of this goblin cave is a dragon. Dragons are very rare and very badass and the odds of you and your 20 friends managing to kill it are slim, because you've never fought one before. However, you could put the call out that you want to hire some dragon slayers -- people who have spent a lot of time wandering the world looking for dragons to kill because that's just how they like to play the game. They aren't really interested in the politics or the "intended gameplay" but they like to wander around killing dragons. These aren't really "high level players" -- they actually aren't that good at killing goblins, so you'll have to help them get to the dragon but once there, the 3 of them can kill the dragon. (Of course, you'd help, and thereby become slightly better at killing dragons yourselves, so that next time you encounter one it might not be so hard.)


This would certainly put a new spin on mercenaries and alliances.

Maybe you've been at war with the orcs for a while, attacking camps, taking and losing resources, etc. One day a faction of werewolves starts setting up camp and attacks you. They've been fighting humans for a while so they're much better at killing you than you are at killing them. You're getting better at it but in the short term you're losing ground. Maybe you send word over to the vampires that you'd like to hire some of their players for a few days to attack these werewolf camps to impede their advance. Or maybe you call on your elven allies and say, "Hey, you've fought these guys before, send some dudes out to join our raids so we can bolster our power and we'll pay you back."



Whereas in a generic system, the only reason you have to reach out to other people is if you need more numbers. They don't have any particular skills you need because everyone in the game world has the same "level 50" skills.