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Comment by goda90 | Hacker News Reader

I think another thing that could help make it feel more immersive would be a bit of unreliability or incompleteness in information gathered from NPCs. Why does every villager know that there is a legendary mirror in the Fire Mountains that can block dragon flames? Were they all at the meeting where that was clearly and repeatedly announced? Maybe instead they could be saying things like "I hear theres some legendary weapon in the Fire Mountains". "Mabel told me she heard about a a magic mirror that drives away dragons". "An adventurer came from the mountains the other day and mentioned a magical shield against dragons". Now the player knows they should hunt for something to fight the dragon, but what it is isn't clear. Perhaps the full info will come from an important NPC later.

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Its fine for NPCs to be wrong on flavor. But as soon as you make NPCs incorrect on gameplay-defining moments (ex: There's a vampire weak to silver bullets ahead!!. Woops, its not weak to silver because its not a vampire...), players will get pissed off.

In my experience as dungeon master, players are very accepting of "I don't know" as a response. But as soon as you "mislead" players, they start to think of that situation as a betrayal of trust.

So "villagers don't know" whats ahead is far better than "villager MISTAKENLY thinks there's a vampire ahead".

Or have different villages give different answers? But yeah, the player has to be given a fair chance.

Why would the players spend more time going to a 2nd village for a second opinion?

Do you really want to run games where the players spend 10+ rolls asking different villagers for randomly generated knowledge, because they know that some knowledge is tainted?

Do you, as the dungeon master, place more tainted knowledge into the pool, or do you place more correct knowledge in the pool?

If the pool of knowledge is 50% tainted, why bother even listening to villagers in the first place? Its clear they don't know what they're talking about. Save yourself an hour of pointless roleplaying / acting out NPCs / etc. etc. and just say "The villagers don't know".

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I mean, I've had players who don't like combat and prefer running around the world doing... not adventures or something. But they're in the exceptional minority in my experience. Most players want to know where the monster is, which direction to go to fight the monster, and then to save the town. Its cheesy, but its what works.

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I have successfully run a "whodunit" scenario. Where I explicitly lay out 5 NPCs, with their own incomplete view of some situation. And the players need to talk with the NPCs at specific times (and being seen with some NPCs conflicts with other meetings. Two NPCs are enemies and will refuse to cooperate if they see you conversing with their rival).

If the players fail to find the antagonist out of the pool, no big deal. Have a "one step backwards" adventure (ex: Culann's Hound situation or similar), and then take on the antagonist afterwards.

The story must go onward. Not necessarily always in the benefit of the players, but it takes a lot of effort to craft an actually fun, good, and engaging set of "unreliable NPCs" that people actually want to play with.

If it were part of color, then sure. If the villager was presented as unreliable, then it cues the player fairly.

Hey, you do your campaigns as you wish! Just noting that what you call 'tainted information' is part of color and challenge. Use it how you like.

The argument isn’t that you couldn’t do it fairly but that even if you did do it fairly, the end result would just suck.

I think it depends. Once it sinks in that NPCs are not always reliable (And you can hint early at that with for example someone contradicting themselves or seeming unreasonably knowledgeable), this can add another fun dimension to the game and its world and motivate players to really talk to more NPCs or ask more pointed questions.

Is talking to NPCs more fun than playing the rest of the game?

Or more importantly: is talking to NPCs in your video game more fun than top-tier visual novels (Ex: Phoenix Write: Ace Attorney, "When they Cry", or Danganronpa )?

As a player, I know what I'm getting into. I choose to play mindless hack-and-slash games because the mindless hack-and-slash is quite fun sometimes. I don't play Dynasty Warriors for in-depth stories or deep NPC character development.

In contrast, when I pickup a visual novel game like Danganronpa, I'm not really going to be wowed by difficult reflexes or hand-eye coordination.

Games exist as a drop of culture in a greater ecosystem. The ultimate truth is, your video game plotlines are never going to be as deeply engaging as a book's plot.

After all, a book has literally nothing else to go on aside from character development and interesting plot development. People play video games (or tabletop games) for different reasons.

I think there does not need to be just one or the other. Talking to NPCs is just as much fun as killing the monster and if the talk actually aids in killing the monster or brings complications, it's even more fun, because overcoming obstacles of any kind is what's fun in roleplaying games. I am mostly focusing on tabletop here, because computer games often pale in comparison, but regardless, a good mix makes a good game.

It's personal preference if you lean more into action or social, but I find either end of the spectrum to be to limited to just one thing.

> The ultimate truth is, your video game plotlines are never going to be as deeply engaging as a book's plot.

I've read plenty of dull books, and played many engagingly plotted games. But then those games are often criticized as having too much text.

Case in point: Mass Effect, criticized elsewhere in the thread for having too much/bad text, where for me all that text (including the encyclopedic content in-game) was what built one of the most immersive and engaging virtual world I've ever experienced.

If you like wall-of-text, try Planescape: Torment, arguably the greatest (C)RPG ever.

Yeah, I can see how misleading can be frustrating, but I think incompleteness or inaccuracies that aren't going send the player down the wrong path can still work. "There's some sort of monster ahead!" "I hear you need a certain kind of weapon to kill the vampire." "I don't remember what he said, it was like titanium, or copper or some other special kind of bullet. You'll need to find him and ask him."

I think you touch on a deeper point about games.

Part of the joy of games is agreement on the parameters of what is and is not in bounds for the game. Knowing that boundary lets you focus on only the things within that while pleasantly mentally unloading all of the myriad messy things outside.

Even though each videogame is different, there is a surrounding videogame metagame culture that players tacitly assume defines what all videogames are allowed to do. When learning a new videogame, players assume the rules of that metagame still hold true. (This is one of the reasons videogames today can be so difficult for non-gamers to get into: they don't have this absorbed culture.)

One of the rules of that metagame is "NPCs do not mislead the player." (Other rules of the metagame are: "Your savefile cannot get into a state that makes it impossible to beat the game," and "It should not be required to die/fail several times in order to learn how to proceed.")

It's valid for a game to break that meta-rule, but it will be very unpleasantly surprising if they believe they are playing the stock videogame metagame as they learn this game's rules.

This is kind of unfortunate because there's a whole giant space of possible videogames that could be made with interesting rules if only you could set the expectation for players that this game steps outside of typical game culture meta rules. You occasionally see experimental games that do this like Lose/Lose, which deletes random files off your hard drive when you lose (!).

> It should not be required to die/fail several times in order to learn how to proceed.

I played a game a while back that made a sort of Groundhog Day repeated dying a requirement to make progress. That was a central theme to the game, so it ensured the player understood the situation pretty quickly.

Indeed, any time there's something that a creator ought not to do, that creates fertile ground for interesting subversion by doing exactly that thing. However, the point remains that the consumer needs to be briefed properly in order to avoid a sense of betrayal; a game like Dark Souls is chock full of characters that will lie to and mislead you, but the game does a good job of communicating its own atypical nature to the player via a prevailing atmosphere of despair and callous indifference.

I can see that. A decent rule of thumb might be: if the misinformation would change what players do, then it's probably bad.

E.g. if one villager said the mirror is in the swamp, unlucky players might waste a lot of time in the swamp, which is bad. But saying it's an axe vs a sword vs a piece of armor vs a potion probably doesn't matter much - whatever it is, as long as it is what is required to defeat the dragon, it's fine.

It depends, if you drop plenty of hints that the character in question is unreliable/untrustworthy, or otherwise cause interesting interactions as a consequence, it can work (Patches from dark souls springs to mind)

"the cake is a lie"

This is something you'd have to be very careful about, since players would likely get very annoyed if too many NPC 'hints' were outright misleading. The ones you mentioned seem fine (since they're basically just 'generally right, but missing some info'), but the tendency of NPCs to lie outright was one reason why Castlevania 2 got so much flack back in the day (along with a shoddy translation that made it even worse).

Can work well for a puzzle though. Recall a few Zelda games having setups where one NPC was actually a spy for a rival group, and you needed to cross examine what other NPCs said to figure out who that was.

isn't this a pretty common pattern in RPGs? seems like lots of minor NPCs have conversation paths where you can ask them about your current story quest and they give a vague answer that doesn't advance the game. then you finally talk to the important person who has that key bit of information and your objective gets updated.

You would enjoy Final Fantasy Legend (SaGa) on the Gameboy.

This is far closer to how a lot of modern RPGs work.

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