Magic & monsters too commonplace and boring in most RPGs

In most RPGs, you just go to the town wizard and buy spells, or go out into the wilderness and directly run into skeletons or goblins.

Whatever happened to the idea of magic and monsters as something arcane and mysterious, only known by whispers to common people? Magic as some esoteric knowledge known by only a few wise mages, and monsters being elusive things that go bump in the dark or only show up during the day when you get way too lost?

Modern RPGs make magic into something commonplace and boring. Trite even.

 

It's a way get around the moral consequences of slaughtering humans (or even animals). Even if you're not human, with a deeper story you start to empathize with the "they're raiding the village because you built it on their homeland and disrupted their food supply".

 

I agree with PrimeRib - it's easy to see why monsters are good stand-ins particularly in a game that's built on a system of judeo-christian virtues. If there were no evil monsters in a world of moral relativism the Avatar would be more like Gandhi or Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the game would be significantly less exciting.

I think instead of trying to throw out the monsters and magic altogether a little more thought and time could help in creating something original. Look at King Kong - there's an example of an empathetic monster; or more recently District 9. If anything I'm sick of films and television in the past couple of decades trying to shove pluralism and relativism down my throat - I get it; everyone has a point of view and no one's born evil and blah blah blah.

I get enough all-too-human perspective skewing and not-magic in the real world.

-edit-

I re-read my use of King Kong as an example of where to go in creating something in the game followed by my rant on moral relativism which might be confusing. Let me be clear when I say that in the example of poor King Kong I was rooting for the fighter-pilots at the end; screw that big monkey.

 

I'm not really talking about getting rid of evil monsters though, just commenting on how they're made ordinary and commonplace. In folklore, myths, and legends that grew around monsters, you'd only find them in dangerous journeys or they'd only come out at night and it would be hard to find them during the day unless you were lost in a dark forest that you weren't supposed to go into. Often people stumbled across magical beings once, then couldn't find them again.

Also, the same with magic being commonplace.

It takes all of the mystery out of it, imo.

 

I understand what you mean. But if you're fighting something, you need to either invent some morale twist where both sides are right, or you have to make it sort of good vs evil.

Faction games (e.g. WoW) have to go both sides having lots of flaws. Or look at Game of Thrones.

AD&D and Ultima were more or less good vs evil. So that mean both that you needed to have truly evil creatures in game (like demons) and that necessary mean more mystical creatures.


You can obviously have goblins something you see all the time and something like dragons really, really rare. Based on the crafting discussions and the possibility of full drop loot, it seems like this game will not be an arms race of constantly bigger weapons and bigger enemies.

 

@redfish: agreed. a skeletal warrior shouldnt be a low level foe. neither should an orcish mage. did you see what gandalf went through over 1 daemon in LOTR? he got dragged to the bottom of an abyss and fought for centuries. forgot his own name. gandalf. GANDALF. sheesh.

 

You always had access to magic in Ultima. The mystery came from figuring it all out (through research in the books, and by mixing/using the spells), and then making sure you became a master of them.


I agree that it's alot more mysterious when the monsters aren't just running rampant right outside down in large groups a'la Gauntlet.




UO did a pretty good job of avoidingthat. You only saw monsters in dungeons for the most part. Out in the country side you'd find occasional ogres and ettin. Sometimes some trolls.

Maybe an orc camp here and there, but .... mostly just deer and goats.

 

@redfish - really good point. I think it echoes some of the discussions I've seen about dragons - they shouldn't be commonplace monsters just used to fill up dungeons, they're rare, intelligent, mythical beasts that can tear down towns. I think, depending on the world, it's not an issue to make some small set of monsters commonplace. It's entirely conceivable that part of the story is that this world is plagued by headless or some such thing. This just makes it easier to throw in a few easy beginner monsters, alongside things like brigands and thieves. But I agree that there certainly should be many very rare monsters, that you feel awe in the presence of, instead of something you just stumble into all the time. I want the feeling of not knowing quite what to expect after accidentally stumbling into the dwelling of a troll.

On the topic of magic - one trope that would be really cool and useful here is if the only place you see lots of magic is in certain magic schools/universities. They would be cloaked in mystery, and all that good stuff. Magic would be seen as astonishing and frightening to the vast majority of the outside world, while there would be a straightforward (though not necessarily easy) way for aspiring mages to obtain arcane abilities.

 

@alayth: you read hickmans books? you would fit right in. :

 

@lordrex - I read The Death Gate Cycle and (I think) all of Hickman's Dragonlance books back when I was a teenager. I'm sure that's having a big influence on how I hope to see this world

 

Redfish, I think the root of the problem is the mindless XP grind that most games implement. You need to kill thousands of things to get to "endgame" so the things you kill have to be very commonplace if you want to get to "endgame" this decade. On top of you needing to kill thousands, everyone else also has to kill thousands of enemies, so these monsters need to respawn really really fast.

What would be more interesting is a game where you have to track down the monster that has been raiding the village, or set am ambush during his next raid, and killing it is a big accomplishment. Your battles would be few, but would be very epic in quality. I'm not sure if the mass market would like a game where you spend as much, if not more, time FINDING the enemy as you do fighting the enemy. There would have to be some compelling gameplay in tracking down the monsters to keep people engaged enough.

 

I agree. The age of lightings and fireballs and constant monster spawns in RPG's should eng. Why not try something new? According to the SotA trailer, it will be all the same as in most RPGs out there. A player enters the hostile area, monsters attack him, player uses his skills and spells to kill them.

Magic should be something achieved by guilds and only truly dedicated players, rather than everybody. And it should not be all the same ebolts and fireballs as it was since early 80's. Perhaps a mystery of alchemical arts, summoning rituals during the night time and most of it considered outlawed and are, therefore, a criminal act.

 

There are various ways of handling magic in fantasy, generally people go for either high magic or low magic. In high magic, magic is prevalent enough that you'll run into people capable of utilizing it or with magic items. In low magic it's a rare thing, after years of adventuring you find a magic item and there are a few wizards capable of actually using magic. LOTR is low magic. Dragonlance is high magic.

I prefer playing high magic games... I have never played a low magic graphical game, I've played several muds that were though.

UO was probably the hardest magic system i've played in an MMORPG. Mostly because you start off with a spellbook with only a few spells, you need to gather reagents to cast spells, and you need mana and you need to find new scrolls by killing magic wielding monsters. You had cast time that could be interrupted fizzling your spell, your spell could fizzle just because you aren't good enough. you have to stand still while casting.. etc.

In other games it was as simple leveling up and having the mana to cast the spell, and waiting for the cool down..

 

Historically traveling between towns was a dangerous thing. Still is in many third world countries where you might travel by animal. Bandits and wild animals can be a threat. Traveling alone is high risk if not suicide.

For example in Indonesia as the tiger population increases so do the deaths of the villagers. So if people get attacked in this world, how much more should we be attacked in a world where supernatural creatures exist?

http://news.sky.com/story/1063901/tiger-mauls-farmer-to-death-in-indonesia

 

@SirMishri despite UO's magic system being unique and difficult, at some point, compared to most modern RPG's/MMO's, 99.9 % of every shard's population are magery users, which destroys its uniqueness and does not make it any less common than re-spawning mobs in various locations.

And then people are still arguing about the gold-sinks, like "why are there so many millionaires? I know! Let's add some neon blue blessed sandals so people will lose their money buying them and turning a medieval fantasy game into a 80's disco club!". Then the same people go to the dungeons and farm 50k per hour and keep complaining about the gold-sinks. No economy, no uniqueness, no challenge.

 

"You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all a part of the same compost pile."

You'll never achieve uniqueness because there are too many people and not only can there not be enough options, there shouldn't be. Enough options to make everyone unique makes a system overwhelming in trying to make choices. Although with their skill tree system you can be unique. Problem with UO's magic is you needed it, too much was difficult to accomplish without it.. no recall? have to go everywhere on foot/boat(till runebooks came out)

Single player games are designed to give you a play experience and you drop it whenever you are done with it, whether its 2 hours in or 200 hours of playtime. Pac-man had infinite playtime built in, it's up to you when you get bored and drop it. Final Fantasy stories generally end in a 30-60 hour time frame.

Multiplayer games are designed to keep you playing(and frequently, paying). Not all are, there are plenty of free ones out there, Counterstrike i probably have a thousand hours into. With an MMORPG people expect content beyond the main storyline to keep them busy so they can justify paying the fees or buying(real money) new items, or donating to keep the server online.

So in order to keep people playing the come up with new ways to get people to spend time in the game. An average gamer spends 13 hours per week gaming, many of us here probably spend 40+ per week. If the storyline of the game can be completed by the heavy gamer in 1 week. What is left to do?

Most people enjoy a sense of accomplishment, you have to reward them for their in game time. Gold sure, achievements, you bet, most kills in a battleground, check. If you remove that next thing and don't put in a system for using what people acquire will get bored and leave.

That is why you see constant build ups. I don't know about NO challenge, that doesn't make any sense to me. Every MMORPG has had challenges at max level. Economy? that itself is an economy.

Uniqueness though? Certainly.. Things can be done better. This has nothing to do with monsters and magic though. I don't care if they are all over the place. I like a High Magic setting where people all over the place use magic and monsters are spawning all over the place.

What can make a game Unique? Always having new quests and content that give worth while and fun awards. I don't need more gold, but a new shiny hat that looks cool and new house decoration, a new mount.. and how challenging to scour the world for these rare/hard to obtain items or finding the right NPC to do these things? That is what is lacking... Some games did some of this.. we don't want people camping this one spot waiting for this rare to spawn, we want people searching everywhere for the thousands of rare spawns that are possible in every location. While they are at it they can hit their 10,000 lizardman kill and get a new title/lizard-skin coat..

 

I think Magic should be learned. Perhaps traveling to certain areas of the world to uncover powers or knowledge.

You might travel up North and under the tutelage of a Mage learn ?Fire Aspects?. Unlocking a group of spells. Then Traveling into snow covered mountains unearthing an orb that grants you ?Cold Aspects?. In the Wilderness you might have to seek out a Druid to teach you ?Earthen Aspects?. You get the idea.

So, the spells aren?t just gained automatically or BAM ! here is a spell book with all the knowledge right from the start, but uncovering different disciplines as you travel. Then you add in quests or books to learn from.

Everyone might have some potential to learn magic from the start, but only those that pursue it will start to expand their knowledge of it.

 

I think you should travel to the cold where the fire-mages learned how to keep warm

 

Always having new quests to turn it into the RuneScape with hundreds of the quests constantly available to players, who haven't yet finished them? So the same shepherd will ask everyone over and over to help me bring letter A to the alchemist B to get him a cure C for his dying sheep? That's not the way I portray the "multiplayer game" quests. I know Richard Garriott said in one of his interviews that he liked RuneScape a lot, I just hope he will not implement that "overquesting" in his project, at least in the multiplayer part of the game. If they decide to create new and unique quests that will only be available before the quest was finished then it will surely dissatisfy the players who couldn't/didn't take a part in them. Not to mention the game fees will raise for somebody will have to get paid for every new quest that is coming up.

I am not against storyline quests though, but random generated/static quests are a big no-no. Plus they will make same rares available to everyone who finishes them. What is 'rare' about "that shiny green neon hat" if everybody has it?

And no, there is no challenge about skilling the same build on every shard, "farming" 100's of eles and finally buying a house and then doing the very same routine everyday with everyone being alike. There is nothing challenging about provoking 1000's of dragons on each other with just a lute. Why have varieties of mobs if they're all the part of the same grinding system? Why not create barely animated placeholders called 'a gold giver' and place them in random locations? Why even create the new game when there are tons of the alike available (and I sincerely hope that RG and his team will choose another path for SotA). It's not unique to have 3 builds (tamer, mage, dexxer) in a game with 50+ skills available. It is not unique to learn the very same spells known to gaming community since early 80's when the aspects of magic and alchemy can be taken far deeper to make a far better gameplay.

 

@Bad Karma : I'm a bit confused with your reply. Can you summarize it? or make it more clear?