I lurk on about 40+ blogs a week, one of them being the excellent Tales of the Rampant Coyote, and this week they’ve turned on the Game Design issue of Rogues/Thieves/Sneaks with an excellent post. Ok, the title is a bit whiney, but it’s still a good analysis of the issue of designing for Rogues AND other members.

Personally, I dont’ think his post is about Rogues - it’s about player expectations.

In a multiplayer level map sense, maps are either ALL about the Rogue, or NEVER about the Rogue. Do I add a trap here or not? Worse, in other games like anything from the Bioware pact, the very first thing Bioware does is add a second character to beef up your Mage/Thief - (Baldur’s Gate had Inowen, Planescape Torment had Morte, and NWN2 had Kelghar.) I love the characters - but hate the reason why they are there: mages and theives are chumps at lower levels. Plus, I’ve never liked the whole D&D bullsh*t of spellcasting - “go to sleep, wake up with spells”. Even NWN2 bailed on that stupid idea (”everyone take a knee!”).

From a D&DO/NWN sense, traps just SUCK. What happened to the old Grimtooth’s Traps where you had a chance of taking out the ENTIRE party? Now-days, it’s just better to use your warrior to run and trip them all, and have the cleric heal if necessary (my patented “Ogg the Caveman Thief” method of trap detection).

Here’s what kills me: if you design a level with too many mooks, the fighters and squishies get angry coz it’s too hard. Too few, and the Rogue whines “It’s a boring map” where he can’t be “stealthy.”

Plus - why can’t a warrior walk silently if he’s NOT in armor? Why do mages make a lot of noise when walking (they’re squishies, dammit)? Don’t tell me that it’s “training” - it’s common sense.

My proposal (which you’re all waiting for) is to develop a game where the player’s EXPECTATION is set upfront: the warrior has to be prepared to drop the armor and NOT kill things. The combat and magic system needs to allow for silence and subdue. If a mage can cast invisibility, how does one un-invisibility them? Thief did this, and did it well. Oblivion had a little of this.

And when the marketing department whines because the game isn’t going to be a mass market success, tell them to learn to market a game with higher player expectations, rather than pressuring the developers and designers to make a game “that they can understand” with a “low barrier of entry.”