What percentage of the average players are "Number peoples"?

#21 I like Bethesda's approach with the Elder Scrolls series. Though you could hide the numbers if you wanted to. When playing these games I chose a character class that suited the style of play I wanted and then used the skills needed based on that play style. This way there was no real min/maxing, I just gained by my initial choice. I feel that this is a good way to do things because it reflects the way we progress in life. We pick a profession that suits us, then gain skill as we go through life in the areas that we work in. The numbers are there, but they are guided by your actions, not the other way around.

#22 Personally, I have been known to be a number cruncher in many MMORPGS. This is not only my eagerness to understand how the game developers designed the game mechanics, but also for practical reasons. Spending 200 hours to build a character and getting involved in end-game content to find out that I am ill suited for such tasks simply because I did not know how certain ability and gear choices would affect my character's ability is disappointing. I am not too eager to start a new character and invest another 200 hours in its development. Might as well try a different game.

This is not to say that it is required. I would be more than happy to play a game that has no indication of the mechanics behind it...so long as it makes sense. In games like WoW number crunching is a necessity. With 1000s of gear options and enemies/spawns which are dependent upon level/gear, you will get overly frustrated not knowing.

Gear/stats have been the focus of many games. Taking steps to prevent people from discovering your mechanics is fine, so long as there is a clear logical understanding of of progression/abilities/gear. Also, game balance becomes more important. If players are unable to discover their own balance, then the game is required to do so from the beginning. If not, the players will feel it, and rather than seeking a way to counter it, everyone will gravitate towards it. An MMO with 80% of the characters being the same class simply because it is more effective than the rest would become uninteresting very quickly.

Number crunching is really only an issue in Multi-player settings. This is due to people being competitive. Everyone wants to win, wants to be the best, etc. The best approach to resolving number crunching issues, is to make games that are not gear/stat dependent. Instead, the game should focus on player skill. When all things are equal, the greater skill shines.

#23 What if you make a game that actively protect itself against number crunching? for example by feeding players vague data, if any data at all?

#24 I would recommend the following articles:

www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtgcom/daily/mr11b
www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtgcom/daily/mr258

As a huge Magic fan these helped me understand the people I play with but they have also crawled into my thinking for games in general. It's all about building the profiles of the people that you think will play your game and then doing what you can to deliver an awesome experience. If your game naturally pulls in people that have a number crunching tendency, then going out of your way to reject them might not be the best idea.

Furthermore if you want to attract people that aren't maximizers you should embrace what those people enjoy which will probably mean focusing on the "look" and "feel" of weapons, armor, etc. It means creating things like armor sets and weapon sets that helps these people achieve the experience they are looking for out of your game.

#25 I'm one of those number guys and hiding away all the stats/mechanics would probably put me off playing the game, I like to understand how and why things work (I used to pull apart my toys as a kid to see how it all worked).

Everyone gets different things from games, some love to design their characters around how they look, or their own back story that they'll use skills and items that match that story and for others like me it's about crafting complementary skills and items.

Even if you hide the data people will still find ways to understand the mechanics i.e. shoot someone 30 times with each gun and record how many bullets on average each takes. Try again shooting in different parts of body, does it make a difference, etc.

Not sure how you'd hide away that experimentation to uncover things anyway.

#26 I have nothing against experimentation, my problem is the systematic catalogging of game mechanics and formula.

Where is the "gut feel" gone?

You can also introduce random seeds at various levels that add a little bit of noise, make this noise change every day/week/months, i don't know in nature everything tend to change a little based on temperature, humidity, the composition of the air, etc...

#27 I wonder if changing things every day/week/month would frustrate players when their strong character suddenly becomes weak through the game changing or the changes being so small as to not make much difference anyway.

Sadly for me I haven't the time to invest in gut feel to keep trying out every variations now games are so big and open ended with thousands of possibilities.

#28 In term of change i was more thinking about introducing a noise rather than rolling new stats, a pseudo random noise would make accurate stats more difficult to reverse engineer.

It's allright when peoples have a rough understanding of the game mechanics, what is strong, what is weak, what is powerful and what is not, but it's when they start adding the numbers and do "mini maxing" that it becomes a headache to keep everything in equilibrium.

Suddently you have players chasing that extra 1 pt of damage instead of playing the game.

#29 I think this is where a game like lotro has the edge over many other games, they have all the numbers you could possibly want, and a few thousadn more just to mess you around... and it doesnt make the blindest bit of difference, sute you can up your agi gear and make more evades, or up your might gear and add more damage, but as far as combat goes, theres always a random element to even the damage.

In fact most of the games i play are numbers games, but pretty much all of them have enough randomness in them to make squeezing out the extra few points all but either impossible or pointless.

In some way or another you have to differentiate weapon x vs weapon y, here again another game comes to my rescue, neverwinter nigts, it had all kinds of weapon classes, but most importantly were finesse weapons that use agility rather than strength for its bonuses, this i think is as close as you will get to a good example of weapon selection based on 'feel'.

The final alernative i can think of is litterally to have all sword of a set level do exactly the same job and let the characters playstyle influence the combat, again lotro has a similar type of setup, the skills you use dictate combat damage, speed and effects, all 'standard' weapons of the same level have the same base damage stats, tho each weapon class has marginal differences that as far as i can tell you only choose based on your own playstyle.

#30 That's an interesting concept Bloodknight, it could actually work in my design.

#31 You know, you are not going to be able to attract all players to a game. Since we are creating Indie games, we will attract even less characters. Numbers are everywhere and easy to find. However, there are niche groups of players who will come a game that looks at achievement a little differently than a number cruncher might.

I think it is fine to use the tried and true method, but it is also okay to go down a different path if you can find that niche. There are so many un-served gaming populations out there just looking for that next great game, and most of them are not satisfied with what is out there now. Making a game like all the others doesn't fill that niche but it can be easier.

We seem to be heading down a path less traveled while gearing our game design to role players and those who want more challenge and less 'obviousness' in their games. I have never had any of our fans complain about the lack of numbers as long as they had a tangible measure of achievement. Of course, role players see achievement differently than hack and slash so possibly there is no comparison.

#32 Apologies up front for sounding like a marketing guy. Identifying your core or primary market early on will help you decide what is the better approach to revealing numbers.

With easy access to FAQs and hints online, I believe the need for exposing die rolls or player/character stats is less urgent. As a general rule of thumb, the wider the types of gamers one may want to appeal to, the simpler everything should be in your game.

Final Fantasy is a mass market product that often has a steep learning curve. The character upgrade wheel in FF X was a whole lot of complicated fun. However, it did not hurt sales because the game is targeted at the experienced FF users and veteran role players.

It is also not so complicated that a newbie couldn't pick it up. Bullseye.
I think FF VIII suffered from being too complicated in both interface and character development system (binding abilities). FF VIII was one of their slower selling products in the series.

Clarity up front should reap great rewards later on...

#33 I think that one thing people want from games are "rules"...structure that they can understand and learn to master for their own advantage. This is something that can be hard to find in "real life" and I think it is an important part of the escapism of games.

Some users also definitely enjoy the process of discovering the "rules" of their games and gain a certain amount of satisfaction from that alone but I would point out that the more "mainstream" a game is, generally the easier it is to quickly understand the "rules" of that game. Even if you look at some of the fairly complex games that are popular, you will often find that it's ruleset is close to what the player would expect from a similar real world situation and thus more easily/quickly understood.

If you were to build a game with hard to understand rules, I think you would have an audience but I think you will be limiting the size of that audience.

However, if you build a game that has rules that are deliberately "impossible" to understand, I suspect you will just have dissatisfied players and no real long term audience. They may not even consciously recognize that the "unknowable rules" are the reason they feel uncomfortable but may instead may just always walk away from your game feeling dissatisfied.

#34 Matt, I think it depends on the core group you are trying to attract. The most popular games are games that are either created by companies with huge advertising budgets, or games that, as Dexter said, are games that appeal to fans of a certain franchise, such as Final Fantasy.

Rules are good in games but they don't have to be the same rules as ever other game out there. I will use pen and paper gaming as an example. There is a hard core of Dungeons and Dragons fans who will play nothing but Dungeons and Dragons because they KNOW the rule system. Many of them will only play one edition of DnD, such as 3.5 and refuse to play 4.0 because 'it is different and I don't know it'. My son is one of those people. They will look down their nose at any revisions to DnD because they lose their tactical advantage in a game where the rules are different.

Those types of people love the games where everything is as expected...classes, XP, etc. This includes most of the mass-marketed, big company games and it explains why they are so popular.

Then there is another group, the people who want something different and go from game to game to game seeking that 'new thing'. They often do not play one game at a time and they often play for a few months, then try something else, get discouraged, and go back to the old game, etc. They play the 'big company games' because they have no choice.

New does not mean the rules have to be difficult to understand. It just means that players have to switch to a new system, something different. I have seen diehard DnD players try something new..and some run away. But some actually stick around. In our pen and paper guild, we have been able to move many players to other gaming systems, simply by creating campaigns that are interesting and 'different', even though some are designed using new/different/obscure rule sets. Yes, if the rule sets make no sense or are difficult to use, then they won't like the game. But if they make sense, are documented well, and add to the gaming experience, most people switch over with only a little whining. :)

Having hidden numbers does not mean the 'rules' are unknown. It simply means the player has to find other ways of discovering their character's strengths and other ways of achieving within the game. In most games, watching those numbers climb or using those numbers to maximize the climb (we call it min-max)is the method of achievement. But that doesn't mean that other methods won't work equally well.

I am loving this conversation because it illustrates to me how difficult it is to think outside-the-box when it comes to game design. I have had many discussion with young team members and fans who continue to try to move toward the same-old stuff. That is their comfort zone and since most designers are gamers, we feel comfortable in those zones as well. Even our design team starts discussing a new idea, we see all of tend to slowly move toward the old games we understand...UO had this, or WoW does this...and we have to stop and reground ourselves.

Of course, as I have said before, we might fail dismally at our 'different' game but the biggest complaint I hear from our fans is that 'all the games are the same' and eventually, it will be something new, not just in setting and lore, but in rulesets and playing styles that will catch the players who are still seeking their game. Some WILL walk away dissatisfied, but every game has dissatisfied players. The trick is the ability attract those dissatisfied with the 'same ole' games' and keep them!

Dexter..I wanted to respond to you. I think you are absolutely right. We identified the group we wanted, did a market analysis and determined their was a market for our type of game. It has been a chore keeping that line though, I must admit, and over the years we have had some quite heated discussions about what will or will not fit into that niche we defined. It isn't easy and in fact, it is much easier to design a game that will appeal to the players of an existing game than a different, especially under-served niche. It is like starting from scratch in some ways. Keeping the rules simple is another challenge...and I am still scratching my head at a recent suggestion made by one of our design team members. Creative people are very good at taking simple ideas and complicating them. :) It is a very fine line.

#35 Frankly the way i do game design is through a very naive rule "if i find it fun, there has to be someone that find it fun too" it's naive, it's not a very grounded or market oriented view, but i'm not a professional.

Hell, at the core i'm still a gamer, a very dissatisfied gamer and if i thought that the game industry was fulfilling my needs in term of gameplay, i wouldn't be doing game design right now.

To go back to the "numbers in the machine" my belief is that rule sets are there because the game has bounds and limits, to take the D&D example, a good GameMaster not only know the game rules, but make his own. Many times i've told my players that even if i abid in general to the D&D rules, i won't let them "play me" with a rulebook.

I won't make their experience unenjoyable, but i'm not going to let them think they can game my campain, the npcs i will present to them are not simplistic constructs, they cannot expect to rob a peasant from everything he own and not get imprisoned and fined by the local sherif.

The problem with players trying to know all the rules of the game is that they turn it into a mindless mechanical problem and not as a "pseudo realistic" experience.

To take the thief example, in fallout 3 you can always see which objects will be considered by the game to be "theft", but why?

Why not hide the "steal and get caught" mechanic from the player and let him figure it out in a more organic way? The mechanic could be as simple as "this object can be stolen but not that one" and the gameplay reason could be as simple as one or more of these reasons:

-This object is small enough not to be noticed. (silverware as opposed to a tv)
-This object doesn't actually belong to an npc that would care (a lone sandwich on a tavern table)

It would be much more rewarding for a thief player to have to figure out what he can get away with rather than pointing it in an obvious manner.

The very reason why most players become complete cleptomaniacs in fallout is because the game is clear about what they can take and what they can't.

Unknown game mechanics encourage risk/reward behaviors and a different approach of the game that reward thinking in the game's terms, and not the game mechanics driving it.

#36 ...

#37 I forgot to specify that i was speaking about games that have a big RPG side.

And yes, i'm that insane :)

#38 Kyrah, the mindless mechanical problem...VERY good. I absolutely agree with you. I want players to have an experience, not calculate their way through the game. :) And when I play, I want to have an experience myself.

#39 numbers notwithstanding you must have a system, you cant just arbitrarily do things, take the thief example you posted, a player needs to learn why they cant steal an item, you cant just toss a coin and say success/fail at every theft attempt, balancing risk vs reward would become impossible.

#40 Of course Bloodknight, i never implied to use a completely random system, in my thief example i ment that each object in the NPC house was uniquely tagged (it's a tedious system to implement for the mapper, but for my example it's suitable) to encode the npc's reaction:

-Does the npc care about this object (if not it's not perceived as theft)
-How visible the absense of the object is, even if the heist is unnoticed.
-Is the object difficult to take (is it noisy, or slow to separate from it's environment)

From the player's perspective he can just steal anything he likes, the game isn't telling him how likely he is to succeed or if the npc will care, it's up to the player to trust his guts that stealing a diamond ring in a jeweler shop will go unnoticed, while stealing a gold nugget from right under the nose of a dwarf prospector will be noticed as soon as the dwarf look back where the gold nugget was.