TTRPG and CRPG

Man, this weather is going to make me sick, literally.

Yesterday was like a hell-hole. Today, the vast amounts of cloud cover has reduced everything down to something more tolerable (26°C interior wall temperature), at least at the time that I am writing this.

That 4°C difference in a place with consistently high humidity makes a helluva difference. Using this heat index table for reference, and assuming the average relative humidity of 85% (rounded from the 83.5% as obtained from this handy chart, it's a difference between a heat index of 39°C @ 30°C against less than 29°C @ 26°C (it's closer to 28°C using some formulae).

So yes, that 4°C dry bulb temperature makes a bloody big difference when it comes to actual perceived temperature comfort, particularly in the presence of high humidity, which is the case of SIN city. And such a varying range can be quite jarring to the body's adaptation, considering that I do not use any air-conditioning whatsoever.

With the small point on the weather settled, I just want to talk about something a little more trivial---the difference between tabletop role-playing games (TTRPG) and computer role-playing game (CRPG or RPG without qualifiers since it is more dominant). Both involve the suspension of disbelief to be taken away into a different world, the western concept of isekai that has become a trending concept as of late. They may involve different levels of realism, and usually involve some kind of story-telling or story-making. Apart from the general world-type in which these role-playing games reside in, another key distinction lies in the mechanics being used to model the in-game character, or as I like to call it the physics of the system (everyone just calls it ``system'', and so I will follow suit despite it being less descriptive in general). The many different systems out there differ largely in their choices of emphasis---combat-heavy systems have rules and quantification that are more precise on combat encounters, while role-playing heavy systems have more detailed guidelines regarding how both player characters (PCs) and non-player characters (NPCs) interact with each other.

But this trivial talk isn't about comparing systems, but rather on the implementation of the systems. In short, a comparison between TTRPGs against CRPGs, and why there seems to be a resurgence of TTRPGs despite CRPGs being the vogue for the better part of twenty years, or how CRPGs become increasingly lacklustre in comparison to the TTRPGs despite being more ``technologically advanced'' compared to pen, paper, and dice.

The answer is back to the same thing that I have been mumbling on and off for the past few months: determinism versus emergence.

In a CRPG, everything needs to be programmed in to work. Recall that there is no innate physics that exists within any computer system---the physics needs to be explicitly programmed in before any other logic pertaining to the story that the CRPG wants to tell. CRPGs that don't have stories in them are of a different game genre altogether, the so-called sandbox game, which is ``just'' a physics simulator, though the underlying physics may not correspond as tightly to the physics of our reality. Programming physics is hard work, and it must cater to all edge cases so that the suspension of disbelief doesn't break on them. This is why we keep seeing many ``balance patches'' that are put out in modern day CRPGs/sandbox games to address these physics edge cases.

With time and effort being of a limited resource, it is then a major trade off between getting the physics right against getting a good story going. To truly get a spectacular showing for both will require a lot of time and effort, and given the current cut-throat competition present, most production houses tend not to do that. In the event that they do, then the cost of the physics programming is amortised against multiple stories set in the same world, which allows code re-use for the physics, thus saving a stupendous amount of development effort across the number of titles used.

We hear this as the various game engines, though to be fair, game engines comprise more than game physics---they also deal with real-world interfacing with machinery (and human interaction) to effect changes within the game world.

The whole trade-off between good physics and good story is what is known as the ``shallow ocean'' sandbox games versus ``deep pond'' CRPGs.

As the player, one might think that the effort sounds too much for the CRPG. This is a folly because any single player may only see a small number of paths through the game/story logic, but across the entire population of players, the CRPG must be able to handle them all. That is some complex reasoning required, and if production houses skimp on time/effort, they end up with very simple stories with only a few small branches, all so that they can keep the complexity in check.

Will artificial intelligence assist in that? Perhaps, but given the amount of effort to develop such a mechanism, it may well be the case that only one company will have this capability, and that everyone will license from it, and... well the implications should have their own blog entry, just not this one. The point is that computer-based story-telling is centralised by nature, requiring omniscience even before any story is told. That is hard to get right.

TTRPGs though... they are highly decentralised. The physics are guidelines in the form of gamemaster/dungeonmaster (hereon I will just use ``gamemaster'' to refer to both) rule books, as are the player handbooks for whatever system/world that one chooses to play in. The story is not told (deterministic behaviour) but made (emergent behaviour) with the gamemaster and the players. The secret sauce here is that the implementation of physics are augmented by the current king of sanity checking---the gamemaster's perogative. The gamemaster does not need to come up with all possible consequences/outcomes given the emergent situation faced---he/she just needs to come up with enough consequences/outcomes for the players at the current point. There may be some over-arching story arc that the gamemaster wants to follow, but the way to get there is fluid and always adaptable.

And that's how TTRPGs win over CRPGs---sheer adaptability to any situation that arises, even when the rule books (i.e. physics ``guidelines'') may not cover, without ``crashing''. Early CRPGs get a pass because of the low technology---much of the scene relies on imagination due to the limitations of I/O technology. But modern CRPGs have started getting dangerously close to being realistic, and with that comes the unspoken expectation that the stories within are also sufficiently realistic (i.e. with enough depth and entertainment). Such expectations may not be fulfilled through what is being offered, since many CRPGs are written first as a game before being a story-telling device.

TTRPGs start to fill in this gap that the success of CRPGs have created, and are much easier to reach out to nowadays thanks to the proliferation of digital copies---there was no need to wait for a specialised book store to import the [often expensive] rule books and story packages when one can easily buy a digital copy online. Fora where like-minded individuals across the world flourish, thus condemning the stereotype of the socially-backward nerd gatekeeper to the annals of history. The increasing viewing of TTRPGs as a means of story making as opposed to story telling brings about the kind of participatory event that has been on the decline ever since people started to live more insular lives from their community.

But TTRPGs are no ``final solution'' either. They still have the old problems of having to make working scheduled with other people, which can be a deal-breaker in this time and age where everyone is trying to ``life hack'' everything to efficiency, as though their lives are some kind of industrial process that needs optimisation. With the pandemic rolling in and putting a hard stop to many of the old ways of operation though, perhaps people will think a little bit more about what is more important in life.

Anyway, that's all the incoherent stuff I have for now. Till the next update.