Sacred

After grinding Human Revolutions achievements from both the standard edition and the Director’s cut and walking away from the the game for good, I noticed something I’ve always known: If you want players to do something, reward them for it. Killing an enemy nets you 10 experience. Knocking the enemy unconscious gives 20 additional experience. And doing it with a melee takedown awards yet another 20 points of XP. If you go through an objective without setting an alarm off, you gain 250 XP. And if you manage to do it without being seen at all, it’s a whopping 500 XP bonus. There is absolutely no reason to ever use lethal force, since killing people is noisy, therefore negating pretty much every XP bonus.

Now, this is completely understandable. Human Revolution is at its best when you play it as a stealth hacker. Stealthing is fun and well-made. I could tolerate all 4 additional playthroughs because the gameplay was good and fluid. But the thing that makes me sad is that there is a LOT of content for treating Human Revolution as a shooter. You have a ton of different guns, gun upgrades and augmentations that would be very interesting to test out. But the loss of potentially hundreds of XP is too much. Therefore, there is a lot of content that I will never experience because the game rewards me to play it like it wants me to. My master has a name and it’s Pavlov.

So here’s the dilemma: Deus Ex wants me to be a stealth hacker, but it still wants to have all sorts of cool weapons and weapon upgrades and all that. It motivates me to be stealthy by giving me XP. But by being stealthy, I’m not going to use the guns and toys. What to do?

First of all, remove XP gain from takedowns. In my stealth playthroughs, I knocked out every enemy since they were always worth XP, regardless whether they were in my way or not. This way players become as stealthy as they naturally are, knocking out only the characters that they deem important enough to knock down.

Second, have knocked out enemies wake up by themselves. This way killing becomes a viable choice: Knocking people out is silent, but short-termed. Killing people is noisy, but permanent. Then you can have Jensen automatically cuff and gag them automatically when they are dragged. This way you have to take the enemies to a place far from people where they won’t cause scrutiny when they wake up.

Third, make the total XP gainable by shooting people equal to the XP gained by avoiding detection. This way if you screw up, you do not lose that sweet, sweet XP bonus, but instead you have to fight for it. Then the people who have all the sparkly gun mods will get to shine, and there would be a reason to lug a large, inventory-space-eating gun with you at all times.

So that fixes combat. But there is another point that irks me: Hacking. If you hack a device, you gain XP. If you input a password, you don’t get anything. In the old Deus Ex, finding a login and a password was pure joy. It played to the natural human urge to scavenge, and it let you cheat your way through an otherwise impassable wall. In Human Revolution, you don’t ever use passwords because hacking gives XP. So that is an entire feature sacrificed to the altar of Experience.

This should be the other way around: Give XP for using passwords and keycodes. This encourages exploration, taking guards down (they might have pocket secretaries) and puzzling out what the passwords might be. And whenever you find a set, you get that small dopamine spike: “Ah, sweet! XP and a key to secrets!” Only if you have no other option do you sit down and hack, which is time-consuming and might give your position away.

So there. Wield XP wisely and responsibly.

Player Equals Resource

Ever since I played Deus Ex: Human Revolution, I wanted to do a conspiracy-laden infiltration roleplaying game. In the Star Wars mythos. This campaign, which I named Galaxy of Intrigue, has felt like a cursed endeavour, since I have started it three times now, in both tabletop and chat environment. But this, the third time, seems to be the charm, as we have progressed well, and I am remaining hopeful that we can actually finish the plot. But regardless of the outcome, I have learned a few tricks from the game.

First of all, I decided to use Storyteller as the engine. Storyteller is simple and flexible, and putting a stealth infiltration mechanic on top was a fairly trivial matter. But the most important thing was that I put all the important clues and facts on cards and gave them to the players when they discovered them. All the NPC’s, events and objects. They are a great reference, especially as the players can find connections with them. I think I’ll do that in every roleplaying game now. And I want to play Fantasy Flight Games’ Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, since apparently ita has also card-based things going on. And huge layers of abstraction. Mmm. Abstraction.

Speaking of abstraction, an extremely good point was made in the last Galaxy of Intrigue session. We had only 50% of the players present, but I decided to go on regardless. In a situation where I decided to roll for one of the missing players, one of the players said that there should be a system for missing players, where the players on-site could use the character as a resource. That is such an ingenious idea that I am surprised that I hadn’t heard about it sooner. Let’s create a system!

After character creation, a player gives his character a Primary Ability and a Secondary Ability. These are based off the character’s stats, skills, features and personality. For example, an exemplary hacker would have ”Computer Handling” as a primary ability and ”Information Gathering” as a secondary ability. Whenever the player is not present, the group can use these two abilities once in the session.

The primary ability is as reliable as the character itself, and does not incur a risk to him. For example, the previous hacker’s ”Computer Handling” can be used once to pretty much automatically succeed in a single computer-related problem. This should preferably happen off-screen, so the spotlight is on the players on-site. The secondary ability is less powerful and incurs a risk to the character if he fails. The GM rolls appropriately when the ability is used, and on a failure the character might run into a problem or a complication. Continuing with the hacker case, sending the guy to find information on a specific person might end up with him getting caught by a security or a counter-agent.

This is just a quick and generic idea on how to generally use a playerless character in a variety of games. A specific game should have its own rules. In D&D and the like, a missing character could be an automated follower, doing things based on its role: Defenders give extra Defence and HP to the guy they are standing next to, strikers give flanking and damage bonuses etc.. Perhaps a character that hangs around automatically aids skill checks. Just like the old saying goes: When life gives you lemons, transform them into resources.

God out of the human revolution!

Because it messes up the clockwork.

I planned on writing more on ABSWRPG earlier this week, but then I decided to try out the new Deus Ex. Suddenly I finished the game and two days had passed. And just as I was starting to write the rest, one of the creators of Bliaron came by. We talked about ABSWRPG and now I’m redesigning it in my mind. Great. So instead, I’ll write about uman Revolution.

First of all, I’d classify Deus Ex as a good game on the sole merit that I could play it in a marathon session. Unlike a certain other roleplaying game that I have yet to finish, I never got frustrated with anything in Human Revolution. I never had to enter a fight without my consent (except in bossfights which were manageable and one that I could have avoided had I used my eyes). Exposition was given in manageable chunks, sneaking was not too reliant on perfect timing and hacking was fun. In whole, it was a sleek, functioning game. But let’s look at the components a bit closer.

Combat. I really never fought any real combats, except for the aforementioned bossfights. Those were of the usual modern cover-based kind. I mostly snuck around and eliminated opponents with the satisfying instant-kill-button. Or rather, instant-stun-button. I’m a sucker for cool animations, it seems. Sneaking past enemies is both my preferred method of conflict resolution, and it fits the main character. So about combat I cannot say much.

On the other hand, the game environments are created for sneaking, and it shows. There is always an obvious stealth route (what?) in a mission area. Air ducts, conveniently arranged furniture, ubiquitous cardboard boxes and stupid patrol routes make sneaking easy. Add the momentary invisibility and cone of vision upgrades and it is even easier. Although it might be a bit too easy and straightforward for someone is looking for patrol route optimization and planning, it confers the essence of stealth inflitration well enough.

There are few parts in the game where you need to persuade someone to do something. These parts are quite fun; You need to make a quick analysis on what the person is like and select one of the three possible answers to his ranting. I think the Social Pheromone Upgrade (which was my first augmentation) helps too much by making the analysis for you. The first persuasion situation in the game (a hostage situation) where I did not have the upgrade was more exhilarating than anything else in the game. There are also minor persuasion situations where you need to pay attention to a blinking meter while talking and select the appropriate choice when prompted. These are a nice add-on, but do not add anything substantial.

The plot and theme of the game are slightly… off. As the game has ties to both our modern world and the previous Deus Ex-game, I couldn’t look at it without taking those to account. And compared to Deus Ex, the game looks too futuristic, although that might have something to do with the graphical limitations. But the city-on-a-city, the religious fanatics of Humanity First, the grande conspiracies, they all feel too off amongs the very realistic representation of a near future. Also, there are four endings which can be described as ‘Reasonable’, ‘Slightly less reasonable’, ‘Why would anyone want this’ and ‘Why am I even given this option?’. The boss fights also stood out like an ancient bronze sword amongst modern assault rifles.

I categorized upgrades in two categories: Enablers and Helpers. Enablers enable you to go to places and access equipment. Hacking level upgrades, the go-through-walls-upgrade, jumpgrade and heavy lifting are enablers. These are no-brainers: With them you can experience the full content of the game. The helpers help you do stuff, like sneak, shoot or survive bullets. After upgrading the enablers and hacking-associated helpers, I ran out of things to upgrade. Everything else was useless to me. Hitting level cap is an unfortunate experience. At this point I will mention that you can purchase inventory space, but that might not be necessary because the pick-upable objects are quite limited. There is minimal inventory management.

Hacking. Oh, hacking. There is a ton of things to hack. Terminals, doors, safes… Hacking gives one experience, so I naturally took every opportunity to hack. But the act itself is quite repetitious. And I never did anything with the rewards. Money is irrelevant as long as you can afford the useless upgrades and the endless amount of email text is, well, endless. Had I read them all, I would still be playing the game, and wouldn’t stop anytime soon. So actually my dislike of hacking came from the fact that I couldn’t stop. I might need professional help.

But in the end, Human Revolution is a good game. It is possibly too nostalgic for my taste, but it does not screw up anything. And in the end of the day, isn’t that all we can ask for?

The answer is no.