Greg Rucka—he of the comic books Queen & Country and Whiteout—has a new post up on his blog about the gameplay and story of Mass Effect 2. In it, Rucka looks not only at Mass Effect 2 and the storytelling techniques of video-game RPGs but at how they differ from pen-and-paper RPGs. He writes:
This would be fine if the game was a true, anything goes, RPG. But it’s not; the nature of these games is that they are directed, despite the best efforts of all those involved to make the guiding hand an invisible one. It’s all well and good to say that you can be who you want to be, but – at least at this point – it’s impossible to execute. Or, to put it more precisely, without the true freedom to do anything, be anyone, say anything, the onus is on the storyteller and not the player to fulfill the demands of the character’s journey.
I thought you might get a kick out of this text, leading up to Rucka’s first self-described digression in the post:
I have a pencil & paper GM who adamantly refuses to ever tell his players how their characters feel about anything. He argues, persuasively, that to do so would be to overstep his mandate; would be, essentially, telling his players how they should play their characters.
And I can live with that, even if I don’t agree with it.
It’s a thoughtful post that I found compelling (though I’ve only played the demo for ME2). What do you think?
I think it’s awesome that Rucka plays tabletop RPGs at all, and that his DM doesn’t sound too bad. For some reason I imagine them playing Capes.
Excellent piece, and he absolutely speaks to stuff that I had to insert on my own. The irony is that the solution to it can be found in the good parts of Dragon Age, which he clearly was much less happy with. In it, the NPCs have a bit more life of their own – having conversations between themselves for example – and most importantly they will occasionally initiate conversations with you, or push back on certain topics to get your answer to questions. Even if it’s not necessarily writing the internal landscape, it’s offering options within it. which I think is probably a better choice overall.
Also, weirdly, Mass Effect’s Paragon/Renegade system gets in its own way sometimes. The benefits of a high Paragon or Renegade rating are profound, so you have a hucge mechanical incentive to try to spike one as early and as hard as possible. Not only does that push your choices (sometimes in less-interesting ways) but it also introduces a problem where, when a paragon or renegade choice is available, it’s the one that works, so it might be a more interesting outcome, but it’s a less interesting choice.
-Rob D.