Role-Playing Games - Fundamentals of Game Design - page 458

NetHack is very small, so it contains almost no story. However, the character devel-
opment, adventuring, exploration, and combat elements of the game are remarkable
for its size. NetHack can offer so much variety because it doesn't have to display
events with graphics; it simply describes them with text. Later designers success-
fully applied its basic game mechanic to other products. The original Diablo from
Blizzard owed more than a little of its success to that design.
Themes
CRPGs generally allow the player to experience a pivotal role in solving some
hugely important problem. The premise of most role-playing games can be summed
up in the statement: “Only YOU can save the world!”—or the tribe or city or what-
ever level of society is threatened. However, saving the world is a cliché, an
adolescent power fantasy that has been terribly overused in this genre. Consider
some alternative quests that could have a secondary consequence of saving the
world but need not:
Find and punish the person responsible for a loved one's murder.
Learn the secret behind your hidden parentage.
Rescue the kidnapped princess/prince.
Find and reassemble the long-lost pieces of the magic object.
Destroy the dangerous object.
Find the evidence that will exonerate you from a false accusation.
Transport the valuable object past the people trying to seize it.
Try to get home after having been abducted.
While these are all very familiar themes, at least they're not specifically about sav-
ing the world.
PLANESCAPE: TORMENT
I strongly encourage you to take a look at Planescape: Torment (if you can't find a copy, at
least read the reviews and commentary available online). The premise of this unusual
game has nothing to do with the typical quest to solve some enormous problem; rather, it
is to discover something about the avatar's past — initially, just his name, which at the
beginning of the story, the player does not know. The game is actually about the psycho-
logical growth of an individual rather than saving the world, but even so, there is plenty
of combat, exploration, trading, and all the other traditional RPG challenges along the way.