Carrying Stuff

Authoring General Design Discussions
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No, that’s not a bad point either. Seeing a list of twenty items when you take inventory is also a little disruptive, if only because the list is so long that it draws attention to itself. Maybe the solution is not to have the characters be such kleptomaniacs? Peter said that he hopes the NPCs remark on EEAtheist’s inventory piling, but you’d also expect them to remark on your picking up everything that wasn’t nailed down.

(I’m reminded of a point-and-click game – I won’t name it, for spoilery reasons – where the last puzzle is a climactic fight with a big boss where you have to

hit her with a bowl of peanut noodles you’ve been carrying around all game. Because she’s allergic. (You know this because you’ve also been carrying around her epipen, which you use to save her.)

That was a bit immersion-breaking, though the (considerable) appeal of that game was more in the art and the atmospherics than in the idea that the story made sense if you thought about it hard.)

Another thought is that simulation and immersion can be in tension. If the players have to deal with something that’s realistically simulated, it draws a lot of their attention, and that can take them out of the flow of the story. “Realism” in fiction is more about the flow than the realistic simulation. This is just a longer version of zarf’s point about using hassle for artistic effect.

42

I experimented with one a bit, but it was seriously hefty and unbalanced, and didn’t play well with other aspects of the game design. I think it’s definitely worth looking at for certain kinds of games, though.

(Spoiler for boring details)

[spoiler]Essentially, it was prone to routing the player back through like 40 rooms and 3 miles of game distance to get a widget, trooping back 40 rooms to use it, then back again 40 rooms to put it away, then back again 40 rooms to the original starting place. Then the action required a macguffin, ironically next door to the widget, so it was 41 rooms to the macguffin . . .

This was sort of hilarious, but it was hard to get code that ironed the issue out, and I decided it wasn’t worth it. I’m still working on a sort of “clean up” command that replaces objects in their “homes”, so if the player is carrying thirty things, they only have to type a single command to return their inventory to sensible, accessible places. Combined with a “go to [room]” command, the functionality should be almost as good as an auto-grab, with far less silliness.[/spoiler]

I think it’s worth considering if story-games really need the kinds of inventory we’re talking about. The fewer puzzles you have, the more you can get away with putting necessary items in the same room as their use, or eliminating the bulk of items in play. So if you have a knight, the inventory might, by default, talk about your usual knightly gear, but not specify - you’re never going to leave your sword behind on purpose, and if you need it, you have it. Which would be different from “You are wearing your helmet, your armor, your halberk, your greaves, your gloves and your boots. You are carrying a knife, a sword, a token from your lady, a shield, a shield cover, and your pack mule’s lead rope. On the pack mule is …”

43

In Emily Short’s Bronze, you do have an inventory which is what you are actually carrying, but you also have an “objects” command, which lists all of the objects you’ve encountered so far in the game (so, basically a memory inventory), and a “go to” which automatically navigates you back to any room or object you’ve seen. This isn’t a universally-applicable solution – for one thing, it relies on the game being reasonably short and/or not very object-dense and not having timed puzzles, and for another, would not work well if doors were ever locked behind you – but for that game, it works very well. It basically removes all of the tedious mapping and inventory-juggling that games of its genre often require, and allows the player to focus on exploration and narrative. It also makes perfect sense as far as mimesis goes, since most people don’t have to strain to remember how to return to a room in a house that they’ve already seen, nor does anybody think very hard about just nipping over to the kitchen to grab a whatsit before using it on the thingamabob.

In a similar sort of game, I’d love to see a “get [whatsit]” command that expands on this by automatically navigating to the whatsit, taking it, then returning to the location in which the command was issued.

44

In my WIP, I’ve decided to put extreme limits on inventory because the PC is very clumsy. But there’s also a very small number of takeable items, and a carryall object. And managing inventory is a central puzzle.

45

The idea of a system which allows you easily to return to where you dropped something and pick it up with a single command may work if the game involves a single geographically contiguous area, so that returning from whence you came is always possible. Unfortunately, that’s not a solution for the piece I’m currently working on. In typical spy-story tradition, you start out in Headquarters where you get briefed on your mission and pick up all your cool gadgets. Only then do you set forth into the world to complete the mission, and once you do so you can’t come back to HQ until you’ve succeeded – which means that you’ve got to take all your cool gadgets with you. Of course, this structure also means that I don’t have the player picking stuff up just “because it’s there”; even though he hasn’t yet figured out the precise use for each object, he has reason (beyond the mere fact that the objects exist on the game world) to believe that the gadgets will be needed in the performance of the mission, so it would be reasonable to take them.

Robert Rothman

46

I don’t see how EEAtheist’s model changes this. You still have (apparently) unlimited inventory; you still pick up everything and carry it from room to room. Its only difference is that you put everything down when you enter a room.

47

In that case I wouldn’t worry about inventory limits and holdalls at all (unless the gadgets are described as quite bulky)—surely these things are cool enough to be worn somewhere on your person and still be readily at hand whenever needed!

48

That scenario puts you in a pretty good position, actually! If the text for picking up each gadget describes how you click it onto your belt, or slip it up your sleeve, or hide it in the sole of your shoe, then the player’s unnatural lust for realism will be sated, and you’ll instill in that lustful player the belief that “this protagonist can carry whatever needs carrying!”—so that later on, when the protagonist needs to schlep a stepladder and a monkey skeleton around for the purposes of the mission, the player won’t think twice.

49

Indeed, the “lock and load montage” is one of the few cases where, regardless of medium, the character is specifically shown taking every individual object.