Larian Studios Forums General Chat RPG Chat Question for RPG designers

In terms of both story/worldbuilding and mechanics/gameplay,

I'm so interested in what people have learned from trying to design a RPG that resonates with people. What was effective and what was a mistake? What are you proud of?

I applied for the RPG Designer position at Larian but I didn't have the relevant experience. I'm successful in my own field (Japanese to English game loc) but I couldn't convince them I'm worth taking a shot with. I do think I'm the right person for it, to the core. But then I realized this doesn't change the fact that it hasn't been my livelihood to date and I need to put myself in my place.

Please help me understand your views, I want to be enriched. I want to ascend!

I am not one of the people you are looking for and I wish you the best in finding those.

As a player however and as someone who really likes to dive deep into rulesystems, especially well designed ones, and who keeps working on their own rulesystem as a hobby on the side, I have a lot of comments on what I think works and what doesnt, in regards to rulesystems.

You talk about rulesystems and storytelling as if that was somehow the same thing. I think those are very separate entities that of course interact on some level, and I think its a really bad idea to mix those two.

Tim(othy) Cain on his YouTube channel keeps talking about rulesystems that are specifically designed for specific games and I think thats a really bad idea. Thats because making a good rulesystem is anything but easy.

You talk as if these people would be "enlightened". But in my experience most rulesystems rather suck. Its incredibly hard to design a rulesystem that offers balance, but also depth and variety.

The probably worst rulesystem I ever encountered was The Elder Scrolls (TES). Especially TES3 Morrowind and TES4 Oblivion, which are the two TES games I played extensively. I tried really hard and really long liking them but in the end I completely failed. These rulesystems have been designed without any care for balance, depth, or variety.

- The game would constantly monitor your every action, increasing your related skills. That in itself weird and not great, but tolerable. Its still the case in Skyrim.
- To level optimally, you had to make sure that every levelup had 2 (or possibly 3) stats that could be increased by 5; 2 if you wanted to also increase the luck stat, which always only could be increased by 1 anyway.
- To be able to increase a stat by 5 you had to train the corresponding skills so they increased by at least 10 in total. There was no skill linked to luck, so luck would only be increased by 1 every levelup. Obviously to get the best character possible you wanted the luck skill at 100, too.
- If you would increase your major and minor skills by a total of 10, you would level up. So you had to increase your selected skills by 10 but before you did that you had to increase the not selected skills by 10 as well, and it had to be skills linked to two attributes. Increasing skills not linked to these two attributes would be highly discouraged, because it would make it much harder to level these attributes later.
- This ironically had the consequence that you would want to pick major and minor skills that you did NOT want to use, at least not for a long time, to level optimally. Ideally your pick of major and minor skills would simply be those that could be controlled the easiest to level.
- The constitution stat which gives hitpoint would not apply them retroactively, so you always had to increase it at the start of the game until it was maxed ASAP. Not sure if even Skyrim fixed that (I havent played Skyrim). The re-release of Oblivion has fixed that.
- Therefore, since Luck was also so hard to raise and always started at 40, your two starting stats would always be Constitution and Luck, or you would weaken yourself in the long term for no good reason.
- In a truely stupid turn of events, Oblivion actively forced you to powergame this system because the power of opponents raised linearily with your character.
- Combat and magic stats would actually improve the power of your character, but thief skills and social skills which didnt had to be increased the exact same way, and would also make you increase in level in the same way. Again this was especially bad in Oblivion where focusing too much on out of combat skills early could make the game completely unplayable, for the opponents leveled strictly with the main character and would get riddiculously hard.
- Some birthsigns gave you a very temporary early buff, others would keep being strong until the endgame. Btw another thing still true in Skyrim. Thats why I always played Atronarch; restoring mana with potions was needed anyway and Atronarch gave you the biggest mana buffer plus mana absorption.
- Races would be the same, with many advantages becoming utterly irrelevant. Breton and High Elf would be immensely more talented at magic than any other race, and there was nothing compareable for combat. Thats why I always played Breton, because the weaknesses of High Elf just sucked too much and Atronarch already gave a huge buff in maximum mana anyway.
- There was nothing in the game that gave any incentive to make anything but a master of everything character. Everything else would be a nerf to yourself for no reason.
- For example if you would play a Redguard or an Orc in typical fighter setup (like: some weapon type, Heavy Armor, Block, Armorer, Restoration for healing, and I think Alteration for locks) you would basically reach maximum powerlevel at 15 or some such and leveling would already be over already, because your fighter stats would be maxed at this point. Yes sure the game would also be completely easy since you are really good at (melee) combat, too; but also very boring.
- So, aside from a few choices like race and birthsign, every character would end up in the same place in the end.
- Also: FRIGGIN MORROWIND CLIFF RACERS *rage*. In the end I got a ring of (permanent) invisibilty (self crafted) so they'd finally leave me alone. Just equip the ring when you get out in the open and reequip whenever you broke invisibility.
- Etc etc etc

Really the best time I had in TES was simply leveling by console and then just enjoying the actual story etc at maxlevel.

TES5 Skyrim finally fixed the worst of these issues. You could increase stats as you wanted, without having to carefully level skills to get the optimal result. And you could pick feats freely from different feat trees, instead of just getting feats for reaching certain skill values. Of course Bethesda screwed this up again and you could get to level 200 something and get all feats in the game, but at least with regular gameplay you would end up with an unique selection of feats for your character.

So Skyrim fixed the issues of balance and variety. It still lacked in depth though. Especially the general flatness and boredom of the magic system still stayed the same as always. Damage damage damage and very few standard tricks like invisibility.

The recent re-release of Oblivion also fixed at least the stupid idea that stats raise by up to 5 times during levelup, which honestly is clearly the worst issue in all pre-Skyrim games. You cant freely choose feats though.

Hi Halycon,

Absolutely I welcome experience from players not just professional designers. Thank you so much for taking the time to respond!!


I do not regard storytelling and rulesystems as the same thing at all. When you say it is better to avoid mixing them, I imagine you are referring to a watered-down experience resulting from either side lacking its own fullness? But it is my view that they can exist in a practically inseparable state while achieving their aims to the fullest, even though I cannot think of a single example that achieves this to a satisfactory level to date. Many have tried and failed, yet captured a glimpse of it; it is a kind of holy grail.


If they are not enlightened, they are certainly more experienced than I am. And in your case, your perspective on TES games is fascinating for me, because I love TES but never put so much thought into optimization.

I think in many ways, TES is more of a sim than a challenging game system. For example, the XP from merely performing an action over and over. There is a certain satisfaction to this, as you essentially invest in your preferred style of play. To that extent, I feel it achieves its aim, and I certainly enjoyed that feature in my youth. But indeed, it serves no purpose as far as thinking is concerned.

But to speak more broadly about your points, the overall gist I get is that the rules of the game give incentives that make no sense. Sorry if I have that wrong, but I really want to get to the core of it. What would a great TES rulesystem look like, roughly speaking? Are its mechanics an unsalvageable mess, or could it have been great? As a creator of rulesystems yourself, I bet you have many ideas about this, and if they could be put in relation to TES it would really aid my understanding.

As I feared, no Larian developers have shown up in this thread.

This is a topic one could write books about and its not clear to me who would even want to read them.

I'll just give other examples of what I think was a really bad design:

Dragon Age: Origins.

So Bioware had done the epic Baldurs Gate 1+2 and then they figured they would make their own rulesystem. It was bad. Really bad.

There are three classes. You have four subclasses, but in the main game you get TWO of them, and in the expansion everyone gets all four, and anyway they each consists of just four abilities.

Furthermore both warrior and rogue have two groups of abilities. Warrior for shield and twohanded weapon, and rogue for ranged or two weapon figthing. Obviously you would pick either of these styles and exclusively only skill those until you have them all, so there is exactly two ways to play either class.

The only class that actually got any sort of choices is mage. Even with mage I didnt like that I had to pick up spells I didnt want to get spells I wanted to use.

The design of skills was really bad too. You had far too few levels so making an allrounder thief was impossible.

Of course during the development of DA:O Bioware was also sold to EA, who instantly made the game much worse - removed the multiplayer, added a port to consoles which screwed up the interface on PC, made parts of the game a download for which you had to give up all your personal data.

By the way, its a general tendency in fantasy games that the spellcasters are much more interesting than the warriors. In part of course also because those who play warriors want a simpler class to begin with.

It would be indeed so cool if a Larian developer wanted to share some of their professional insights on this, maybe they didn't get a chance to see it yet because of their busy lives.

It seems you are saying a good rule system, at least for this kind of game, is centered around player creativity and freedom. Taking the focus away from a forced, one-track progression and letting them sculpt their strategies out of the available tools.

From that perspective, TES Oblivion's level-up system is certainly flawed. I'm not familiar with DA but thank you for describing it, I got a good picture from that.

Looking forward to reading anything else people have to share!

Yes personally I believe good system design is balancing the conflicting demands of:

(a) Power Balance, you should have at least an attempt of people doing different builds reaching a compareable power balance in the end. One of the reasons why I dislike TES so much is because that this was clearly never considered at all, before Skyrim and the new re-relase of Oblivion.

(b) Width, you want to give people as many options to play a character as possible. For example in classbased systems, you want not just a Fighter class, but also for example a Paladin, an Anti-Paladin of sorts, a Ranger, and whatever other concepts you could come up with. And you want subclasses and feats. In skillbased systems, you can only really work with feats. Again in TES you can play a master-of-everything and nothing stops you from doing so at all.

(c) Depth. No matter how your character is built, a character should have multiple avenues to approach a situation, and should be able to raise their efficiency by carefully weighting their options. This again was screwed up by TES by creating the most boring and unimaginative magic system I've encountered in any fantasy game.

Of course a balance of power is easiest to maintain if everyone plays the exact same character. But width and depth both require a complexity, if not of the system, but then of the possible decisions to derive from that system.

One of the reasons why I'm so impressed by D&D5 is that it manages to reach all these three goals while being very simple at the core. AD&D for example was much more complex, full of tables that you only could memorize, without allowing this great variation in characters one can create.