Entity's Theory Corner

[Entity of Sin]

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Introduction:
Gaming has been a passion of mine for many years. I'm currently 25 and have been doing gaming for about a decade now. I've started and abandoned many different personal tabletop game projects over the years. There are very few that I've actually stuck with and really thought have the ability to shine in the market of competitive gaming as a popular choice for gaming as well as being a popular product among tabletop gamers. Although this game isn't a Xbox 360, PS3 or PC game, it still takes into consideration the experiences I've had the pleasure of having with the huge assortment of games on those platforms (I'm mostly PS3 and PC).

So what I have the pleasure of doing and have thought of for many weeks is how to start this blog on this site. I've decided to keep this introduction here as a nice way of allowing not only myself the ability of coming back and looking at past ideas I've thought up but also to give others a unique and interesting way to approach their own gaming experiences. I understand that my own theories on game design, game balancing, development, testing, etc. might be a lot different than the next person. With that in mind, this is just collection of theories I use in the development of my current and only game design project, which is called Gates of Requiem.

So I do want to welcome all of you to this blog and to kindly ask all of you not to post in this. Although if you do have any questions about anything that I post up (not looking for grammar or spelling police) then please send a private message to me over the forums.

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Game Project Links:
Gates of Requiem

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Youtube Channel:
Cryptic Worlds

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Blog Post Links:
Gates of Requiem History
Project Goals
Roleplaying vs. Games: The Difference
RPG Roleplay v.1.0.0

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These are just things I'm going to be tracking progress of while managing this blog.
Game Design Project Goals:
~ Complete character class design. [started] [searching for help]
~ Complete character race design. [pending]
~ Complete item database. [pending]
~ Begin Closed Alpha Testing. [pending]

Roleplay Projects:
~ The Chronicles of Varnic: Calitora Prime [started] [dead]
~ Quadrant 4: The Titan Chronicles [pending]
~ RPG Roleplay v.1.0.0 [started] [dead]
~ Roleplay Article #1: Proper Character Building [pending]
~ Roleplay Article #2: Correct Story Building and Progression [pending]
~ Roleplay Article #3: Basic World Building [pending]
~ Roleplay Article #4: Advanced World Building [pending]
~ Roleplay Article #5: Large Scale Roleplaying [pending]
~ Roleplay Article #6: Gaming vs. Roleplaying [pending]
~ Roleplay Article #7: Canon vs. Non-Canon [pending]

Note: These articles must be at least ten to fifteen pages in length (typed) before considered complete.

Art Projects:
~ 10 The Chronicles of Varnic: Calitora Prime character portraits [started] [abandoned]
~ Remake Calitora Prime maps [started] [completed]
~ Make multi-leveled and layered space station maps [pending]
~ Make concept art for Gates of Requiem items [pending]
~ Make city layout maps [pending]

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More to come beyond this point

I thought about how I would start the first blog post of this blog after the introduction and I thought it would best serve myself as well as others that plan on reading this a little history behind the creation, design, and development of Gates of Requiem. So starting at the beginning would start at the beginning of another project that evolved into Gates of Requiem rather than just starting with the history behind only Requiem. So I shall begin. . .

To make a long story short and to make sure that this isn't boring to read, I've decided to leave out unnecessary details. So I'm just covering the major aspects of this project's history. These posts are probably going to be more of a rant until I start planning them out and making an outline of the content in them. So for anyone reading these posts, please keep that in mind.

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Gates of Requiem History, Design, and Development:
Back on the website Gaia Online I started a guild called Creative Legacy Network with the premise of having my game be the forefront of gathering members and building a community that not only is full of gamers but also full of roleplayers. Although this plan did fail, it was mainly due to the fact that I lacked the ability, skill set, knowledge, and overall planning to run with the idea. The project that was under development at the time for the guild was called Gates of Prophesy. This project exploded into a massive ball of complicated shit. I didn't know what kind of set of rules and mechanics I wanted to flow with and I didn't know how many character classes I wanted as well. Nevermind the dozens of class abilities that were going to be needed and the annoyingly long process of explaining the different game terminology to people wanting to help out. All in all the project itself wasn't setup for success and I learned a great deal from that and transferred much of the successes to a new project that I was working on merely as a 'side' project for another website; which at the time was actually Footsteps of Ghost but I've long sensed moved from that kind of idea.

When I started making more progress on the development of Gates of Requiem, I started spending less and less time on Gates of Prophesy. As a result of this, I decided to close my Gaia Online guild, drop the Gates of Prophesy project, and move forward alone with Gates of Requiem. Keep in mind that this was about two years ago that I started Gates of Requiem and it has developed into a very promising game that I plan on having in alpha testing stages in the middle of next year or sooner (depending if I get help or not). It was about two months into the game's development is when I actually did leave this site in rage (deleted my account) and moved on with my project to bigger and better things.

The differences I made with Gates of Requiem from Gates of Prophesy was that Gates of Prophesy was a game that had over 60 character classes, unflexible mechanics, and a really terrible way of developing one's character through level progression. The only thing that I actually took from Gates of Prophesy, that I still use to this day, is the leveling system. Sure it has been tweaked a little to suit the projected leveling speed I suspect players will experience, but it's easily flexible towards any future changes that I do plan on making.

Gates of Requiem was designed not only as a replacement project but one that could rival existing games like it that are on the market. Dungeons and Dragons is still a great game, but it lacks the competitive game style to it that I think it should have had but I like assortment of options that it gives to customize a character. I adopted this kind of approach to character customization but with my own twist to it. I don't have perks, traits, or talents of any kind. If it isn't a class ability of your class then you don't get it. I never did like the way D&D forced players to pick between a list of dozens of abilities and overwhelm them with options or restrict them too much that it frustrates the player. D&D is a good example of giving players way too many options for customization and a lot of them aren't even necessary for most campaign encounters.

Other games that I've played are mainly MMORPGs, such as World of Warcraft, Rift, Fallen Earth, and Diablo 2. These games are, for the most part, decent games. Setting aside Rift for the moment, due to how new it is right now, the other games presented unique examples of class abilities that I could adopt, modify, or copy over into my own game. Some stuff just works and those things people need to understand. Multi-classing in my game has been something that I've seen in other games, mainly Runes of Magic (which I beta tested and then played released version for about three months) and D&D, and came to the conclusion that multi-classing is probably one of the dumbest ideas ever invented for a rpg-like game of any kind. It creates balancing issues that aren't necessary to be implemented that could have been prevented from the start by simply not implementing them. I took this realization and applied it to my game after several weeks of trying to develop some unique and interesting way to implement a multi-class system without creating a large amount of balancing issues and still making the game fun. I failed to find one and I doubt I ever will find one either created by me or by someone else that will work for what I want it to accomplish.

My game consists of four different categories of classes, each with a number of classes in them. These categories are: warrior, rogue, wizard, and priest. Another reason why I didn't want to get with a multi-class system is because it would look like a blunt rip off of Rift's calling and soul class system. Believe me, it would and I have more respect for Trion Worlds than to copy something like that over. It's an innovative idea but I want to use my own.

So with all that said I do have huge plans for this game and it is being designed primarily for tournament setting gameplay. Meaning: a player will control multiple characters from standard item listings to gear with, a max level to pick all their abilities from, and be able to form a team of two, three, or five characters (similar to World of Warcraft arena team sizes) to engage with against other players in a tournament format setting. The point of this is to make the game a strategy game as well as a sandbox rpg with the campaign rule set.

Since I'm already on the topic of rule sets, this brings up the opportunity to mention how I plan on organizing all the mechanics, game information, and basically rules for each rule set for each style of gameplay. The tournament rule set will have a single book that will be written with the sole purpose of explaining every single game mechanic, rule, strategy, tactic, etc. of each tournament arena map, the gear players can use, the level caps for the specific tournament events, and anything else that would be related to competitive tournament play.

On the other side of the coin is the campaign or roleplaying side of the game. This is where D&D heavily is taken into consideration as a reference source but only as a reference source. There will be similar things between the games as some things are just perfect the way they are. One of the things I plan on changing would be how enemies are created and the different types of enemies. D&D did a great job of allowing players the ability to make fast encounters but to be quite honest, I find that to be a bit lazy. A Game Master (GM) should feel like his efforts paid off. If he spends a few hours on a chapter in his campaign for the players, then he should get equal or more time out of it in terms of play time. I'm not a huge advocate of making things easy for players but the only enemies that I plan on having required by players to make are enemies that use the character classes. Monsters and animals will be a different story since they are meant to be a more powerful opponent.

In D&D they would make it so a barely geared level one character can solo some kind of large wild animal and come out on top. I'm sorry, but I hate this concept and I don't feel that it's very rewarding for the whole roleplaying aspect of these style of board games. Instead I feel that a level one animal opponent should be strong enough to be a challenge for a level three or four character and for level one monsters to be a difficult challenge for level five. The reason I feel this should be is because a grizzly bear should be hard enough for one person to take on that they might actually lose the fight instead of having a good chance to win while barely being geared for it. It just seems a bit unrealistic and it's my belief that some amount of realism is refreshing for a good majority of gamers. Though I feel stronger about balance being more important than realism, however, if both can be accomplished at the same time, go for it.

So I think that is a pretty good start right now for this blog. Until next time.

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Last edited by Entity of Sin on Sun Apr 10, 2011 2:31 pm; edited 1 time in total

Project Goals:

I've got a lot of different goals in mind for this project. The main goal is to make money of Gates of Requiem and then be able to take that money and invest it into a gaming company that I would create and start building a lot of really cool, innovative, and exciting tabletop games. After enough revenue comes in I want to expand the company into video games. I understand what a lot of you are saying and I've received a lot of feedback that it would be difficult for me to succeed with an idea like this but they don't know anything about my board game or can't understand my vision, passion, and heart for the video game industry and how static the market has been for the past five to eight years.

Even though that's ultimately my final goal to achieve, I have other goals along the ways to seeing this game completed. These can be considered benchmarks or check points to some people but they are goals nevertheless. My first goal is to finish working on designing the character classes. That by itself has been a very long process since there are around fourteen classes and each one has around twenty to thirty abilities. The amount of time it takes for one individual to create each of those abilities and then theory balance them is a very long process. I've even sought help for this kind of thing and no one really stuck with it cause they are like the same people that I see day to day: people that don't believe in something that they themselves didn't create or think of.

The next goal on the list is working out the large listing of races I plan on allowing people to play as and organizing them into three factions. I know this will present a balancing issue or two but it should be manageable. I plan on having something around ten to fourteen races to pick from in making a character. There will be traditional races as well as some custom ones.

The last goal I have right now for the game is to work on the huge database of weapons, weapon customization mechanics, professions, etc. for further character customization. These items, such as weapon damage and armor value, will follow a strict formula in determining base cost of each item. There will also be mounts and mounted combat mechanics as well.

I know this post was short, but until next time.

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This is a topic that isn't necessarily about video games but also about roleplaying as well. It's something that everyone needs to realize is the truth and not delude themselves into believing something is something else when it isn't. What I'm referring to is how individuals refer roleplaying as a game and that having a roleplay with rules makes it a game. This is so far from what a game actually is and what roleplaying is that these individuals really need to understand the fundamentals of collaborative writing and gaming. There is a huge difference between these two things and I hope to shed some light on the subject.

First thing I'd like to address is that roleplays with rules such as "no god modding" doesn't make a roleplay a game. It's more of a guideline than an actual rule and a guideline that everyone should be following. There will be instances (yes, I'm about to say it) where god modding can be beneficial to a roleplay's story progression. The problem people have with god modding is they have absolutely no idea how to actually use it and because of that it's frowned upon as something destructive and negative. Wake up people, it isn't a bad thing if you know how to use it and it's a story plot device tool that all roleplayers need to actually examine and understand how to use.

The argument that a roleplayer requires other people to progress a story forward versus a writer just being able to write content is pretty stupid and a week argument at that. Anyone can write material day in and out as long as their well of creativity stays full (which no matter who you are it will run dry at some point). Also the argument that 'rules' such as no god modding constitutes a roleplay as a game is laughable as well because a game has game mechanics and roleplays don't. Other rules similar to no god modding, such as asking everyone to collaborate on future story content or to post a certain way in the roleplay isn't a game mechanic either. What would be an example of a game mechanic would be a character leveling system or how combat is conducted without the use of collaboration. These are actual game mechanics that are absolutes in games and can't be modified outside the game creator's desire to change them.

To better explain this I will use Gates of Requiem as an example versus any roleplay on the internet. The leveling system in my board game pretty much works like this: kill an enemy of equal level and gain ten experience points. For every level below your character, you gain ten percent less experience and for every level above your character you gain ten percent more experience. This is an example of a game mechanic where a character will become more powerful, gain new abilities every odd level, and have some kind of measurement of character advancement throughout a story. A roleplay doesn't contain this kind of thing as battles and fights are collaborated on to be concluded in a handful of posts. A fight in a game isn't collaborated on like roleplay fight scenes.

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If you're reading this and so far disagree, please stop reading cause you're clearly too narrow minded to see this view point and are going to dismiss anything else said after this point like everyone else I've had this discussion with (even though every one of them turned it into an argument instead cause they don't know the difference between a discussion and argument).

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So how can we really evolve the way we roleplay and still consider it something more than just an effort of collaborative writing? How about adding game mechanic elements (true mechanical elements) into the structuring of a roleplay to give it that game feeling while also providing enough room for collaborative writing? Then you have your roleplay that's both writing and a game -- also known as a writing game to some people. Let's face it ladies and gentlemen, the nature of collaborative writing as we know as roleplaying hasn't evolved in over a decade in any major way. I was hoping to push for some kind of change as that with Gates of Requiem but the overall general community of roleplaying sites will not even give an idea that requires dice rolls a chance because they think it wouldn't work or because of a lack of trust between people. The solution to that is to allow all the dice rolls be done by a single person and that person would be the roleplay's creator.

So what I'm proposing is an evolutionary direction to push roleplaying as a whole. There needs to be innovation in something that so many people get enjoyment from. This is something that I'm going to slowly work on doing is creating a core system of game mechanics to work with a message board/forum layout setting. This is going to be a public resource that everyone who has internet access to will be able to get their hands on. There will be zero downloads required as it will be on a website. Innovation in how we do things makes those things better and easier to enjoy. It's wishful thinking to want an entire community to jump at the idea but I'm sure there are a few that are willing to help collaborate (eheh) with me on coming up with some kind of base set of game mechanic rules that breathe some fresh air into the atmosphere of roleplaying.

I did see a great concept idea being used on Gaia Online and that was a math formula that calculated the amount of currency, experience, etc. a person would get and it was capped out to a certain amount. I'm not exactly sure what that formula was, but a similar idea or modified version of the idea probably could be explored to allow some kind of character progression as well as making the roleplay (or in this case RPG) as enjoyable as possible. I can see this working really well for roleplays that have a roleplay crafting system. I'm not talking about a character running around gathering stuff like you'd see in Rift or World of Warcraft. What I'm talking about is throughout a roleplay a player would acquire more stuff based on how much they've posted. The problem with this is that people would be posting like crazy to rack in as much points as possible to get their character very powerful. I noticed this problem with the concept I saw on Gaia Online.

Basically how I would determine experience for a character is taking the total number of characters/words and divide that number by four (round to the nearest whole number). You can take this idea and put it towards battles by taking the total number of characters/words and divide that number by six (round to the nearest whole number) to determine currency gained from the battle. Loot, such as items, can be collaborated upon as that isn't as big a deal as making a character really high level or filthy rich. There will be other issues regarding how often people post and that will need to be addressed as quickly as possible and the best solution is to make it so that they only gain credit from one post per day. The reason for this is not only to curb stomp any chance someone has of getting ahead of other people, but it gives everyone else in the roleplay the chance to post in the roleplay and read everything. Let's look at more numbers because numbers don't lie.

If your roleplay is using this idea and has a total of five people in it and it takes you ten to fifteen minutes to read each post from those four other people, that's forty to sixty minutes of time reading and then probably another hour or two writing your post. The great thing about this concept is that the rate of which points are accumulated can be modified. It could be once a week rather than once a day and that gives everyone the chance to really stick things out cause the long term roleplayers are going to get rewarded while the shorter term roleplayers will get replaced with people more dedicated (just remember to summarize stuff for those new guys.. reading twenty pages of boring roleplay posts isn't fun).

So at the end of the day I basically have one final thing to say to everyone in this blog post: what are you doing to progress the evolution of how roleplay is conducted?

Entity here and as always thanks for reading.

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RPG Roleplay v.1.0.0:
Alright, this project is now in full swing along side Gates of Requiem. The two will probably have cross-matching mechanics in some regards but I'm not too sure. I'll probably end up having them be two completely different projects with separate systems; which is fine with me. I'm also not going to link this project up above because I've just started working on it and I don't want to present an empty website of a project that isn't going to get worked on every single day.

The idea behind this project is taking a concept out of my experiences in my youth during the Pokemon days. The overall concept will be similar in that there will be a ton of monsters in the world and that people can find, capture, and train. However, I plan on throwing a wrench into this plan by forcing people to have to actually tame their monsters that they train. The reason for that is because it will develop some story and character interaction. It makes it so that freshly caught monsters aren't instantly loyal; which I found in Pokemon to be complete bullshit.

I plan on releasing the game to be played after I've picked out 150 monsters and have designed four abilities for each monster (that's 600 abilities). The game will feature a unique leveling system, combat system, and stat system. I plan on actually having more than one leveling system in the game. One for the actual "trainer" and another for the monsters. They will be separately regulated through different game mechanics. The best feature that this game is being designed around is absolutely no dice rolls. With the absence of dice rolls, it opens up the doors for many exciting possibilities that would normally be closed. Dice rolls essentially piss people off cause it's a hassle to roll a dice on every little thing. Now this is a step away from Gates of Requiem's combat dice roll only mechanic, but this is being designed more towards the roleplayers of websites like Roleplay Gateway and Footsteps of Ghosts.

I have no intentions on making any money off this.

Aside from all of that, this concept will take a great deal of time to complete. I'm estimating around a year's worth of time before it's ready to be played. Hopefully during this time I make huge strides on Gates of Requiem as well while getting back on top of my game with the activity of creative and collaborative writing; which is what roleplaying is.

If anyone is reading this blog post and wishes to show interest in helping out, keep in mind that no website (Roleplay Gateway or Footsteps of Ghosts) is going o be taking credit for its creation. It is basically my creation and I don't make collaborating with another person in making it's development and design stages get completed a lot faster. So please contact me if you sincerely want to collaborate on something like this.

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