Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon is a first-person dungeon delver by Rampant Games with an unusual focus on comedy and characterization. It lacks polish in a few areas, but FK:TSoSD is such an enjoyable (and unique) game that it’s impossible not to recommend it.

More than anything, Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon reminds me of the old Might and Magic games. You spend your time wandering around, exploring, accepting (and completing) quests, fighting things in turn-based battles and gathering loot.

As in classics such as Might and Magic IV: Clouds of Xeen, you start the game with a pre-generated party of characters. And just like in those games, combat is a turn-based affair where you issue commands on a character-by-character basis. You don’t get the option to roll up new characters, unfortunately, but you can effectively convert your existing characters to different classes through careful point allocation upon leveling up.

There’s a reason you have to use the four starting characters the game gives you. It’s central to the thing that really makes Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon stand out relative to its forbears–the writing. Writing is generally an afterthought in games like this. Your party is typically populated by mutes who, but for their individual classes and stats, would be all but interchangeable. Not so in FK:TSoSD!

It isn’t that the writing is funny (although it frequently is); it’s that the characters are believable and likeable. There is some strong characterization at work here, with relationships consistently revealed (and complicated) through onscreen interaction. Much of the game’s amusement comes from a stable of deliberately silly quests, and your characters’ fourth-wall-breakingly genre savvy commentary on what happens during those quests. Your characters remark on genre tropes, on their own classes and abilities, and sometimes even on the actual player. If your characters all die, they comment on that, too. RPG veterans, in particular, will get a real kick out of the dialog here in a Dead Alewives sort of way.

Frayed Knights works as more than RPG satire, however. It’s a solid, enjoyable first-person dungeon delver in its own right, with loads of quests to undertake as your fledgling adventuring group tries, Rodney Dangerfield-like, to amass some respect.

Frayed Knights occupies a strange twilight dimension between real-time and turn-based. Enemy groups patrol wilderness areas and dungeons in real time. Your movement occurs in real time as well. However, combat is turn-based, as are most other in-game actions (like searching or lock-picking).

I'm not saying that Jay should have named this guy Sarcopho Gus. Actually, wait, yes I am.

Movement in Frayed Knights is untethered to a grid, which makes exploring town and other non-dungeon areas far more enjoyable than it is in older games of this type. 360 degrees of freedom helps the town feel like an actual town, rather than a dungeon sans monsters. Free movement also works well within dungeons. Paired with visible monster patrols, it adds a certain frenetic quality to the exploration that you won’t find in the earlier Wizardry or Might and Magic games. In dungeons, I often felt pressured to get to “safe areas” where monsters weren’t patrolling, which is something I haven’t felt outside of true real-time dungeon-delvers like Eye of the Beholder or Stonekeep.

Speaking of patrols, it’s also nice to be able to actually see parties of monsters patrolling the dungeons ahead of time, rather than always getting thrown into random encounters beyond your control. (That said, the game does still have plenty of random encounters, most often tied to turn-based actions like searching and resting, but sometimes triggered during exploration.)

There are downsides to this approach, however. The real-time free-form movement system means that there is no proper ranged combat to soften up enemies before they reach melee range. It’s a small thing, but given the obvious gameplay inspiration Jay Barnson took from Might and Magic and Wizardry, it’s a little disappointing to see it missing here. It also complicates actions like searching and sidestepping monsters–I’ll talk about that more below.

I can’t be too sad about the loss of ranged attacks, as the battles in Frayed Knights are pretty good as-is. Jay Barnson has gone out of his way to create a system that is both elegantly simple in its structure, yet complex in practice. Both you and your enemies are arranged into melee and ranged rows, with only characters in the melee rows accessible to either side’s melee attacks. Characters have a sizable selection of spells available to them, with a wide variety of buffs and status effects at your disposal pretty much from the get-go. Enemies get access to buffs and status effect spells too, and they aren’t shy about using them. (I managed to get half my party poisoned and put to sleep before I’d even left the first village.) Combined with the constant need to manage character Endurance (more on that below), combat is just complex and challenging enough to be entertaining. I only seldom felt like I could sail through encounters just spamming the “Attack” command.

I would actually compare the battles here to some of the fights which occur in Dragon Quest VIII, in that so many of them depend upon the intelligent use of buffs, de-buffs and status effects. That said, Frayed Knights is a game that sees itself very much in the lineage of Dungeons & Dragons, so you have much more randomization to deal with in terms of the effect of attacks and spells than you would in Dragon Quest. I’m not normally a fan of heavy randomization, but in this case it works in the game’s favor, since you’re given so many tools to manage your risk.

Speaking of tools to manage risk, I would be remiss if I didn’t talk about drama stars at least a little bit here. Drama stars are Frayed Knights’ flagship gameplay innovation. If Frayed Knights were a Square Enix game, there would be a bullet point on the box that reads “Featuring the brand new Drama Star system!”

“Okay, fine Craig: drama stars,” you say. “That’s fabulous. What the hell is a drama star?” Allow me to explain. Any time you do anything in the game–get a new quest, open a door, disarm a trap, fight a battle, and so on–the game awards you drama points, which start to fill up one of three little stars at the top of the screen. You can fill up the stars up to three times each, transitioning them from bronze to silver to gold. Whenever you want, you can click a drama star to unleash its power in the form of one of a few special abilities.

Now, here’s the catch: drama points do not survive a load. If you save the game, quit, and then later Continue your saved game, it’ll keep your drama; but if you are playing and something bad happens and you decide to Load a save, then you can kiss all of your drama points goodbye. So you’re encouraged to keep playing even when bad things happen, because hitting the Load button will–quite literally–suck all the drama out of the situation. It’s both a clever metaphor and a clever mechanic to discourage save scumming.

While I really do love the idea of drama stars, I don’t think they’re as effective as they could be in FK:TSoSD. Their powers are just too weak relative to the effort involved in acquiring them. In my experience, there are two major situations where RPG players reliably engage in save scumming: (1) where choices made in branching dialog lead to permanent negative consequences; and (2) where they get creamed in combat and don’t have the means to cheaply heal their characters back up. Pretty much nothing can dissuade a player from scumming in scenario 1, so we don’t need to worry about that.

Scenario 2 is another story, though. Fully recovering your party from even a single tough battle in FK:TSoSD can require a trip all the way back to town to rest in the inn, which is (let’s be honest) a pain in the butt. If things really go that badly in a battle, the easiest option is to load (i.e. save scum)–unless, of course, the drama stars provide a viable alternative. But they don’t. Unless you’ve got more drama saved up than NBC on the eve of a Jerry Springer marathon, you’ll be lucky if you have enough drama points to resurrect a single dead character.

This actually ties into another issue. It’s obvious that Jay Barnson put a lot of thought into the systems of this game (I mean, just read the Strategy Guide), and by and large I think he succeeded. But I do have one big beef with the game’s core design: maximum Endurance erosion.

What am I talking about? In Frayed Knights, character actions in combat (and sometimes, outside of it) all rely on a single renewable resource called Endurance. Attacking uses it up. Special abilities use it up. Spellcasting uses it up, too: every spell has an Endurance cost rather than a mana or magic point cost. Characters, in turn, regenerate Endurance by resting. This provides a nice resource management mechanic to every battle, and forces you to make choices outside of combat as well. Oftentimes, you’ll find that you need to rest in a dangerous area in order to recover Endurance, thereby risking further attack. This is all good stuff: resource management, risk/reward–two of the many techniques a good game designer uses to keep things engaging.

But here is where things start to go off the rails a little. As you go through an area, using up Endurance and resting to recover it, your characters’ maximum Endurance will start dropping. The more Endurance a character burns through, the more that character’s maximum Endurance dips, lowering the ceiling on how much Endurance you can recover. There are only a few ways to reverse the effects of maximum Endurance erosion: (1) use up a Liquid Nap potion, an item which the game gives you a handful of at the start of the game, but which are available thereafter only at great expense; (2) make the long, slow, painful trek all the way back to the inn and pay to sleep; or (3) use up a drama star, which probably won’t even restore your Endurance to its normal maximum.

As you can probably tell, I do not like the Endurance erosion mechanic. I understand why it’s in the game: Jay doesn’t want you to be able to immediately reverse the consequences of triggering traps by just taking a nap. What’s more, repeat visits to the inn enforce economic costs on players who make poor decisions, or engage in a lot of unnecessary combat, and then just rest constantly as a way of dodging the consequences. It also makes sense from a narrative stand-point: your characters need to sleep every now and then, and they’re not going to get very good rest pitching camp in the middle of a dungeon, where they are at constant risk of being ambushed and killed.

But we all know that just because something is realistic, that doesn’t mean it’s fun, right? Besides, Frayed Knights already has this covered; your characters face risks resting (or, for that matter, even just moving around) in a dungeon. They’re likely to get attacked. Triggering a trap or grinding through lots of battles therefore puts them in danger even if they could theoretically recover both full health and full Endurance through resting afterwards.

"You will experience a great adventure...in bed."

Meanwhile, maximum Endurance erosion basically forces me into making a lousy choice at the end of every dungeon (or oftentimes, right in the middle of one), when my characters are exhausted from slogging through battles. I must either (a) face the most difficult fight(s) of the dungeon with half the maximum Endurance my characters normally have, or (b) drag my party all the way back through the dungeon and back to town, spend 25 silver to sleep, then go back through the whole freakin’ dungeon again just to get back to where I was. The battles in this game are not trivial, and as such, it pays to go for the second option if you don’t want to get TPK’d. And it’s the only option that makes sense, given the maximum Endurance erosion rule. But dear God, it’s boring. I don’t want to play a Sleep Quality Simulator; I want to explore dungeons. And every minute I’m spending trudging across the countryside to get to to the inn is a minute I’m not exploring dungeons.

While writing this section of the review, I wondered to myself: “What if there was a way to incentivize conservation of Endurance without requiring players to constantly go back and forth to the inn?” And then I started playing back through Might and Magic IV. It turns out that they’d hit on a near-perfect solution way back in 1992: food. In Might and Magic IV, players can carry up to 10 days worth of food at a time, and can fully recover health and mana by sleeping. Sleeping causes 8 hours to pass; passing time means food used up. When players run out of food, they have to return to an inn to buy more rations or start suffering disastrous health effects. This system has all the virtues of hitting players with an economic cost for resting too much, but requires players to spend far less time trudging back and forth to inns. Frayed Knights would benefit a great deal from something like that. (Alternatively, I’d settle for just adding a “fast travel back to the inn” button.)

While I’m picking nits, I might as well talk about the other notable design issue Frayed Knights has: the interface. It works well enough for the most part, but there are a variety of small irritations that I wish had been cleaned up prior to the game’s release. Like bird poop on the windshield of a brand new sports car, they distract from what is otherwise a very good experience.

Some of you may have read my rant about how to improve turn-based RPG combat systems. In my view, FK:TSoSD needs a little work on virtue 2 as it relates to its combat interface. Visual indicators are stretched a little thin here. The game has a grand total of three icons that it uses to show the existence of status effects: a flexing arm, a ball-and-chain, and a human silhouette surrounded by blue arcs of electricity. It took me an unreasonably long time to work out that these stood for “a buff,” “a de-buff” and “something affecting a character’s ability to move or act.” (Don’t judge: if you got poisoned and a ball-and-chain suddenly appeared on you, you’d be confused too.)

These aren’t even used consistently: when your characters fall asleep in combat, their portraits change and the word “Asleep” appears over them. If you put an enemy to sleep, however, the enemy picks up the “electricity man” symbol. For all other paralytic abilities, though, both you and the enemies use the “electricity man” symbol. Also, blinded characters get the electricity symbol. Why? I haven’t a clue. I guess what I’m saying is, art assets are expensive, but it couldn’t have been that much for an image of a green bottle with a skull on it, some sunglasses and a picture of ZZZ’s.

Interface issues extend beyond combat. For instance, it’s never really clear exactly how far a monster patrol’s “sight” radius extends, which leads to exciting moments like hiding out near a monster’s patrol path, sure it’s going to pass you by, only to end up in a combat encounter you neither wanted nor expected. It’s like ignoring a call from your mother-in-law only to walk out the front door and find her standing on your stoop.

Expect to see this a LOT.

Searching suffers from similar problems. When you search, it isn’t really clear how far that search extends. You can no longer go space by space to search an area as you could in grid-based games, because there are no defined spaces. So you’re put in the unenviable position of having to guess how far to move before searching again, weighing the chances of blowing way past the bounds of your last search against the tedium (and risk) of performing unnecessary searches. A simple user-interface element showing the outer radius of a search would have fixed this problem easily.

Other interface issues: the Journal features buttons placed literally underneath other buttons, and casting spells can require up to four clicks just to select the right target for a friendly heal or buff. There are hotkeys for much of this stuff, which helps, but there aren’t any for selecting targets or navigating sub-menus. This means that even for spells that are in your characters’ Quick-Cast slots, you’ll have to use the mouse to cast.

None of this stuff is game-breaking, but it does slow things down and hurt the game’s flow. Some of you may remember the copious amounts of crap I gave to Dubloon for its horrendous control scheme; Frayed Knights is not even remotely on the same level, but I feel its interface issues are still worth mentioning. After all, the interface is the means by which the player interacts with a game; it is literally the one thing the player spends all of his or her time using. For that same reason, interface is one of those elements of a game that quickly becomes invisible to the developer, and issues can slip through the cracks. Hopefully, some of this stuff can be tightened up in a patch.

"Hi! I'm Evelyn, and this is my friend Nightmare Fuel."

Frayed Knights’ graphics remind me a little of games from the Unreal Tournament era in terms of poly count, lighting and complexity. There are frequent particle effects in combat (and sometimes in the environment itself, such as Ardin Village with its frighteningly huge pollen). Frayed Knights isn’t going to win any awards for visuals, but aside from a sometimes-noticeable variation in asset style and quality, there’s nothing really all that objectionable to get in the way of the game.

Musically, Frayed Knights is a mixed bag. Combat triggers one of two high quality songs that lend some drama without calling too much attention to themselves. The outdoor music, however, has a throwback MIDI sound to it that I found rather grating. Oddly, the music that plays in the Temple of Pokmor Xang appears to lift a motif from the Aladdin soundtrack. And so on. I mostly played the game with the sound off; your mileage may vary.

The Verdict: 4/5. Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon succeeds both as satire and as a proper dungeon-delver in its own right. With great characters, enjoyable writing and solid combat, I’m more than willing to overlook some interface issues, the odd mismatched asset, and the need for frequent trips to the inn. Frayed Knights is well-made, fun, and entirely unique. If you enjoyed the old Might and Magic or Wizardry games, I’d strongly recommend snatching this one up.

What you may not know, however, is that he is a veteran game developer working on a humorous first-person dungeon crawler called Frayed Knights. Jay likes writing words, and his responses below reflect that proclivity. Buckle in for some lengthy discussion of Frayed Knights and RPG design in general!

Hi Jay! Why don’t you tell the readers a little about your background and what got you interested in making RPGs?

I am a refugee from the mainstream game development industry.  I learned a lot of my chops working at a company called SingleTrac, making games for the Sony Playstation. We had a reputation for making games that were really fun to play and did some amazing things for the time that really broke the mold, but didn’t always have the most fantastic graphics in the world. It’s a trend I’m pretty comfortable with as an indie.

I’ve always been a big fan of RPGs: pen-and-paper, computer RPGs, console RPGs, even MMORPGs (starting way back when they were text-based and “massively” meant over 30 users at a time). I made crappy little RPGs and adventure games to teach myself to program as a kid. When I was in mainstream development, we kept lobbying to make an RPG-like game, but were shot down at every turn. Even back then, few people in the games biz got to make the game they wanted to make, and it’s only gotten worse since then.

I went indie to make the kinds of games I wanted to make. That’s not been exclusively RPGs, but even when I started I was working towards that goal. The engine I wrote for Void War was originally planned to power a multiplayer RPG. I had a tiny, crappy dungeon and everything. It ended up using space ships instead.

Has the concept behind Frayed Knights changed at all as you’ve developed it?

I don’t know if the concept has really changed at all, but the details – and my understanding of the concept – have evolved a lot over the *cough*years*cough*.

I felt that just being a long-time fan and experienced action-game developer didn’t translate to expertise in RPGs. Frayed Knights was supposed to be a “quick-and-dirty” project for me to get my feet wet making RPGs. Two years, tops, that was my plan. Yeah, right. I even had to chop the concept into three pieces because what I thought was a tiny, manageable scope was still far too huge. I ended up breaking it into three parts. This first game still has about twice as many hours of gameplay as I envisioned the full game taking originally.

My initial vision was one kinda like the classic first-person, grid-based RPGs of old. In fact, Wizardry 7 was kind of my mental model (I hadn’t played Wizardry 8 yet when I started development). First-person perspective, turn-based combat, party-based RPG with a reasonably detailed rules system and western-style gameplay. Old-school!

The whole humor part of it came almost immediately after I made that decision. I didn’t want to make just a rehash of a style of game that over-saturated the market in the early 90s. Remember when it seemed we had too many games of that type, and that they’d never end? Anyway, I wanted to do something different with it, something to make it stand out on its own and take the style in a somewhat new direction. That’s where the humor came in. Not crazy, absurdist humor that just mocks everything, but the story and character based humor that has fun with the genre, like Knights of the Dinner Table, Dork Tower, Order of the Stick, and the Gamers movies.

Once those ideas came together, it felt like The Right Thing. And I’ve been going down that path ever since. It’s been a strong concept from the get-go. I found pretty quickly that I was pulling in a little more of the classic pen-and-paper experience into the game than I’d originally expected, but that’s proven to be nothing but a good thing.

You chose to give the player exactly four pre-made characters to play through the game with. For a game of this sort, that’s fairly unusual. Is that something that grew out of the game’s initial concept (that is, to play as a small party of adventurers who constantly bicker with each other)?

Yeah, exactly. I was thinking of the table-talk we have in our Saturday Night D&D games, and I think fond memories of Mystery Science Theater 3000 also contributed to the idea. As part of the humor angle, the idea of the characters in your party engaging in in-character table-talk like veteran gamers really stuck with me.

But to really make it character-driven and not just generic snarkiness, I felt I needed a handle on the characters. So I came up with Arianna, Dirk, Benjamin, and Chloe. So I really try and blend two worlds — the old-school western RPGs where you usually created your own characters, and a little bit of the more character / story driven aspect of more modern and Asian RPGs.

I didn’t think of it at the time, but that mix has bugged some folks watching development. It’s proven pretty popular among the testers, even those who were skeptics at first, so I think it worked.

It’s strange: at first, I really disliked not being able to customize a party from a stable of classes. However, the way you’ve chosen to do it, it injects a lot of character into the game via…well, you know, characters. Most games of this subgenre are seriously lacking that; I could never imagine my party in Wizardry bickering the way these guys do. Still, I can’t help but wonder if you couldn’t have just made all of the dialog non-class-specific, but kept the core characterizations.

Yeah, in retrospect I probably could have approached it that way. It does get kinda funky by the end of the game if you’ve basically turned Dirk into an acting priest and he’s still talking like a rogue. But they originally came to be by me subverting the classic fantasy RPG class roles. You had a warrior who was actually somewhat dainty and smart instead of a big bruiser. You have a rogue who just can’t stay sneaky because he’s a braggart and an adrenaline junky. You have a sorceress who is a space cadet.  And then the “cleric” is really a druid, a class I always loved in my old games but all the other players tended to resent them because they couldn’t be a heal-monkey as well as a regular cleric.

So it never occurred to me to really separate the personalities from their base class, because it was always linked to their concept and origin stories in my mind. And that remains something of a source of humor – Dirk is probably more suited to being a swashbuckling warrior than a rogue. Arianna would probably have made a better sorcerer. Benjamin is really too mellow to be an adventurer at all, and a nature-priest remains a sub-optimal choice for that lifestyle. And Chloe… sheesh. Nobody knows about Chloe.

Incidentally, only a few people have noted that the initials of the characters are A,B,C, and D. That was another goofy idea inspired by a description of combat by Gary Gygax back in D&D. All of the characters of one team had names beginning with an “A”, and everyone on the second team had a “B” name. It was just one of those dumb things I use to amuse myself. If nobody else gets a kick of out this game, I will.

Their rivals, the Heroes of Bastionne, are named Edgar, Florentine, G’rash, and … Selena.

The “grid” is a huge staple of the dungeon-delving genre. What made you decide to go for free-form movement? Was it a design decision, a limitation of the Torque engine, or a little of both?

Some days I really wish I’d done that. It would have made things so much easier. I did it in full-on 3D environments “because I could.” Again, it was kind of the idea of marrying the old-form of RPGs with slightly more modern technology. I really wanted to take advantage of the vertical element and more open-ended level design. Later, I played Wizardry 8 – an awesome if flawed game – and found they’d done the same thing, to great effect.

A more restrictive environment would have been far, far easier to develop, to create editors for, to code for, and to do even cooler things with. Greater flexibility means greater complexity.

But I’m still happy with the decision. We’ve been able to do some really cool levels and concepts that wouldn’t work in a Cartesian grid. So problems and all, I’m pleased. And this is an area where the strength of the Torque engine came in handy.

Speaking of engines, how is Torque working out for you? Are you going to stick with it for subsequent episodes, or have you been seduced by Unity’s sweet siren’s song?

If I were starting over today, I’d be about 80% likely to choose Unity.  At the time, the version of Torque I chose – now no longer supported – seemed like an okay choice. I designed Frayed Knights around my expectations of the engine’s strengths and limitations. I guessed wrong on some things.

I’m tempted to look at the newer version of Torque or Unity for the sequels – REALLY tempted – but I dread the amount of work it would take to port the game over. There’s a ton of game code in there. Besides just porting the game over and going through a whole new round of testing, debugging, etc. there’s the need to learn the new pipeline, processes, etc.  Changing the engine would definitely delay things.  And then there’s inevitably the surprises and limitations you don’t learn about until deep into development.

I’m not ruling it out. That siren’s song is dang strong. But now that we finally have the game running, and the thousands of issues mostly resolved, and have worked out a process within the existing framework, it’d be nice to just focus on content and small improvements for the sequels.

One thing I like about Frayed Knights: I appreciate that you can oftentimes see enemy encounters before they happen. Sometimes encounters occur from out of thin air, though, which is jarring once you get used to dodging enemy patrols and seeing guards from around corners. Are the truly random encounters a holdover from before you put in visible parties of enemies? Or is it just a matter of “I want more enemy encounters but don’t have the time to add and balance patrols that cover every area of the map?”

There are three general kinds of encounters: Static, patrols, and random. Static encounters are the meat of the game (as they are in most RPGs), have the most interesting variations, story elements, and treasure, but with a few exceptions, they are – well, static. They appear in a certain location, or when a certain sequence of events occurs.

Patrols make your wandering around more interesting. They respawn, but are avoidable. If you are looking for trouble to get the last fifty experience points to level, you can go hunt down a patrol or whatever. But they are also an exception to the turn-based rule of the game, so I don’t want to overuse them.

Random encounters are really an old-school game mechanic that adds risk to actions but plays within the turn-based rule system. People tend to think of turn-based games as being “slow,” but they can actually play a lot faster than real-time. You can spam a dozen searches in a few seconds of real-time if you want, and that’s perfectly fine. You can rest and heal completely in an instant, with no cool-down period timing down until you can do it again. You can pick locks as fast as you can press the buttons, and keep trying until you get it right.

Random encounters make any of these actions risky in dangerous territory.  They are based on turns passing, whether you do nothing for three hours while you leave the game running and go out to the movies (and thus no time passes in-game), or spam turn-long searches several times a second. Or if you try to set up camp in the middle of a hall in a thickly occupied hobgoblin military barracks.

There are some tricks to it. Not all areas are created equal as far as encounters are concerned. Some areas have a lower chance of encounters happening. Also, even the random encounters do line-of-site checks from random spots around you to detect you, and if after three or four unsuccessful attempts, it skips the encounter. So be careful where you rest, and you will minimize those ugly surprises.

What lies behind the choice to gradually reduce each character’s maximum endurance as you move through each dungeon? I ask because the first dungeon in the game (which is where the game actually starts) will not allow you to leave and recover your characters’ maximum endurance to its normal levels. Which means that you have to try to limit the amount of combat you engage in so that you can complete the thing before your party becomes completely useless. (Not that the game tells you that.) In a way, it’s a pretty harsh introduction.

This is really three questions in one: The endurance mechanic, the exhaustion mechanic, and how they work together in the very first dungeon.

In Frayed Knights, most actions – particularly combat actions, active feats, and spellcasting – cost endurance. There’s no special “mana” pool for magic or anything – it all comes from your personal store of energy. Completely depleting your endurance leaves you vulnerable – your character is not only forced to rest for their next turn in combat to recover endurance, but they are more vulnerable to attacks. Endurance management is key to success in the game. It’s a constant risk / reward factor: You don’t want to blow your wad and overkill at the beginning of the fight, and nothing left over for the end. So you can manage that resource by using less tiring option, like less powerful abilities, magical items, and picking times to manually rest a turn in mid-combat.

Then there’s resource-management in-between fights – the “attrition” mechanic. In older games (particularly D&D), player characters had to take a night’s sleep to recover all spell points. In pen-and-paper games, the mechanic worked pretty well, as combats were slow to resolve and thus relatively rare. You had to be careful about spending your resources between combats, as blowing all your high-level spell slots on the cannon-fodder meant you would have to return to base early and let the bad guys build up their defenses for your return trip. Or you could try and find a safe spot to sleep in the dungeon where you’d be vulnerable. It added an extra layer of strategy and resource management to the game. The player was constantly dealing with these kinds of risk / reward decisions below the surface, and it was a lot of fun. But CRPGs are a different beast from pen-and-paper, and combat could be resolved much more quickly and thus tended to be far more plentiful, and that kind of strict “number of times per day” limitation often proved just as frustrating on one level as it was valuable on another.

But removing the mechanic entirely robs the games of a lot of interesting gameplay and flavor. You lose the surge and retreat rhythm. Players ignore expendable magic items, as there’s rarely any need to rely on them. And perhaps most significantly, it results in an endless stream of boringly similarly challenging encounters: Since there’s zero reason to not unleash on a “lesser threat” with everything you’ve got – as you’ll get it all back again thirty seconds after the fight – they are useless encounters, and should be removed.

The exhaustion system attempts to bridge that gap a little bit. There’s no hard limit on your ability to fight, but your maximum endurance degrades a tiny bit over regular exertion, requiring more than just a quick breather in the middle of a dangerous dungeon to recover. Full recovery can come from potions, drama stars, or (most commonly) finding a safe place to get a full night’s sleep – usually back at the inn. Your abilities never degrade to zero, so there’s never any point at which your party is rendered helpless, but it does exert a pressure and constant choice on the player about whether or not to keep pushing forward, and if they do if they want to burn some expendable resources to do so.

As far as that first dungeon is concerned, that is where we’re doing a lot of fine-tuning. It’s really something of a tutorial to learn to play the game, but I didn’t want it to be an inconsequential or tedious bunny slope the player has to endure to get to the “real” game. The lack of access to a safe place to sleep is supposed to encourage the player to become familiar with alternatives to running back to the inn after every couple of combats. But it’s also a stage where the player characters are the weakest and have fewer options than they’ll have at any other point in the game.

The trick is to make it challenging enough that the player must learn to take advantage of the options they do have rather than brute-forcing their way through it, but not so difficult that players get frustrated.

Let’s talk about the drama star system. For those who aren’t familiar with it, what’s the idea behind it?

It’s actually an idea that’s been popular in dice-and-paper gaming for several years. I steal from the best sources. The concept is that the player has a resource that they can use to change the story to their benefit – a little bit of “game master” power that they have as a player that isn’t really a character ability. Traditionally it’s used for things like re-rolling the dice when it really counts.

In Frayed Knights, it is also used as an alternative to save-scumming: reloading a saved game and re-playing whenever don’t go as well as you like. I should probably be a fan of save-scumming as a developer (and for that matter, limited save points) because it encourages players to re-play the game and pads out the time to completion. But I thought this would be more fun.

Whenever interesting things happen in Frayed Knights – combat happens, certain discoveries, quest stages, combats, conversations, etc., you get a “drama point” that fills in one of three stars at the top of the screen. The stars go through bronze, silver, and gold colors. You can spend a fully-filled-in star of various types to change the game. You can give your characters a huge bonus in their next few actions, recover their health and endurance, and even bring them back from incapacitation. They are rewards for taking risks and taking action.

The trick is that they aren’t recovered in saved games – you start each play session back at zero again. So if you have a run of bad luck, or made a decision that you don’t think was best, you can certainly reload from a previous save like any other game. Or you can roll with the punches, and rely upon the build up of drama stars to help offset the additional challenge caused by accepting a sub-optimal result.

There’s an exception to the saved game rule, which is when you save-and-quit. You can continue exactly where you left off and keep your previous drama points.

Do you feel that the drama stars are effective enough? I know that you’re still balancing the game. In the build that I played, however, you begin with only one character who can reliably deal 6-10 points of damage per hit. In under 5 minutes, you start encountering groups of enemies who each deal that amount or more. The only available healing spell heals roughly 4-10 points of damage. That’s all very much in keeping with the story, in that your characters are a gaggle of desperate, incompetent underdogs. But you have to survive something on the order of 24 encounters before you have a prayer of bringing back a single incapacitated character through drama stars. I never felt like I could rely on the drama stars as a viable alternative to save scumming.

The drama star system is intended to supplement, rather than replace, your other in-game options. There’s no way they can or should – by themselves – offset the danger of a couple dozen encounters (though actually, combat rewards the player between 1 and 3 drama stars, depending upon its relative danger, so it will often be less than that, plus there’s a small drama point bonus when a character is incapacitated).

Let’s say there’s a lock that’s really hard for you to pick, and you may try eight times to pick it before succeeding. While spending time futzing with the lock for all those attempts, you ended up encountering two or three enemy groups. When you are done, the lock is picked, but you’ve used up a bunch of endurance and some potions fighting those optional encounters.

Now if you saved the game right before you started trying to pick the lock, you can just keep reloading the game until you successfully pick it, never having to fight those encounters. Or, alternatively, you can choose the “fool’s luck” ability – spending some points accumulated over the last few minutes of gameplay – and all but automatically pick the lock in a single try. Same effect. Or you could have faced the encounters, and used your existing drama points to reduce the exhaustion level of your healer(s). Again, you end up at somewhere around the same place, but you also get to keep the experience and loot that you gained from the fights.

That’s really what the drama stars are about – increasing options for people (like me) who really don’t want to play the save-scum game. It evens out the game difficulty. It gives random events or successes meaning again. So I guess that’s a roundabout way of answering your first question.

We’re still tweaking, of course, and we’ve found that players really use the drama stars in vastly different ways. Including using the weaker powers frequently so as not to interfere with lots of reloading saved games. That’s fine. I’m not trying to police the game. You bought it, you play it how you want.  I just want to provide options so players can do that.

Not that long ago, I remember reading a blog post of yours where you took issue with Greg Laidlaw’s comments on making RPGs more accessible to new players. Do you have plans to draw in people who aren’t already immersed in the culture of RPGs—and if so, how?

Don’t get me wrong – I’m a huge fan of having more accessible games out there. The fact that so many millions of players are out there playing computer and console RPGs and World of Warcraft leads me to one conclusion: We won. The D&D geeks of the 1970’s and 1980s were trend-setters. Booyah!

I’m just concerned that the industry is abandoning the rich potential of the genre in order to appeal to the widest possible audience. That leaves us with simple action-games with big, slickly-presented stories and some key player decisions. I don’t dislike this – I enjoy these kinds of games too. But it’s like pizza. I love pizza, but if I had it for every meal, I’d get pretty sick of it and crave something different.

Frayed Knights is not supposed to be some holy grail example of what all RPGs should be either. It’s a little bit of a backtrack into some old-school themes, and then it goes it’s own direction from there. My intent is to add some variety to the landscape. There’s a lot more to the genre that Diablo-style fighting combined with name actors doing dramatic readings!

Anyway, if somebody hates RPGs, Frayed Knights is not the game to win them over. But my hope is that the humor, characters, and story will draw interested players in and hold their attention long enough that they can come to grips with the mechanics and the more thoughtful pace of the game.

There is a lot of unrepentant niche humor in Frayed Knights. The characters talk openly about their relative Constitution and Dexterity stats, and one of the first things you encounter is a time-to-crate gag. Are you concerned about confusing people not already steeped in gaming culture?

Sure. But someone’s gotta make games and jokes for the niche, right? It may as well be me.

I’m thrilled that a few people are getting the “time to crate” joke. That’s one of the most obscure ones in there.

Most of the humor isn’t like that. I can guarantee that not all of it will hit the mark with any given player. Hopefully it won’t have to. Most of the humor comes from the situations and characters, and just a generally light touch with things that are normally treated so seriously.  Hopefully the more broadly humorous jokes and character-based comedy will appeal even if a few individual gags fall flat.

Quick! Pick the better RPG setting: high fantasy or sci fi.

My knee-jerk reaction: high fantasy. Mainly because it is has roots in a history and culture and tropes that players are more familiar with. You don’t have to spend too much time trying to explain knights and dragons and how a sword is supposed to work, and you can focus on the parts that make it unique.

That being said, I refer you to my pizza analogy above. Bring on the sci-fi RPG settings!

Who would win in a fight: Captain Kirk or a papier mache dragon?

I love the dragons, but there’s no way I’d bet against Captain Kirk. He made a friggin’ cannon out of crap he found in the middle of a desert.

Depiction courtesy of Mr. Barnson

Thanks for your time.

Well, that’s the end of the interview! For those of you want to hear even more of what Jay has to say, here is another interview he did recently with RPGWatch.

Rather than simply post a rant, however, I decided to put the question to a handful of other indie RPG developers:

Some designers have demonized narrative as an inherently limiting and unnecessary distraction from the emergent storytelling arising out of pure gameplay. Why have narrative in games?

As you might expect, I received a variety of interesting and thoughtful responses:

Jeff Vogel: Someone is demonizing narrative? Really? That seems odd.

Emergent gameplay is great, if you can get it. It is a very difficult thing to do. But storytelling, whatever the medium, is one of the oldest and most fundamental human activities. Human brains are naturally receptive to telling and being told stories. As long as that is true, people will use games to tell stories.

Thomas Riegsecker: Narrative is certainly not required for all games, and in some cases in can be unnecessary baggage for the player. When it comes to role-playing games, one world think that a strong narrative is an absolute requirement. However, countless variations of Rogue shows that you can have a marvelous role-playing experience with little more than a single sentence explaining the goal. Likewise, many successful mainstream RPGs rely on nothing more than the overused plot of “Kill the powerful bad guy”, and any narrative in between the start and end of the game is really unnecessary.

However, narrative can be exceptionally rewarding as well. It can turn a generic role-playing game into a unforgettable one if done correctly. Certainly, when someone fondly remembers an RPG that they enjoyed playing years ago, it is often the story they remember and not the hours of level grinding and monster killing. Likewise, narration can guide the player through a seemingly immense world, preventing that unwelcome feeling of “I don’t know what I should be doing now”. Overall, it really is a player preference. As a developer, I need to find that balance between not enough narrative and too much narrative that will give a rewarding role-playing experience to as many potential customers as possible.

Amanda Fitch: I don’t think narrative is limiting and unnecessary, but if it is presented in manner which takes the player out of the game, then yes, it isn’t any fun.

Jay Barnson: I think I may be one of those demonizers. Sorry ’bout that. Didn’t mean to give any more ammunition to the haters.

Simply put, the needs of good “traditional” storytelling as we know it runs counter to good interactive gameplay. The hero in a compelling story is going to make mistakes, is going to be subject to rising and falling action, and is going to get pain heaped upon him by the author, and not see victory until the moment things are at its bleakest. He is not going to choose the optimal path to victory because – frankly – that makes for a really boring story. But that’s exactly what the player will go for if given the choice, and gameplay is all about making choices. So either we smack the player down with non-interactive, forced narrative, or we allow them to create for themselves a story that is likely to be devoid of very much drama.

Nevertheless, I love a good story in games. It’s a big part of why I’m such a fan of RPGs – I love the stories. The human brain is hard-wired to tune into stories. And I think even a mediocre story is more fun when you get to live it through a game. So in spite interactivity and narrative being something of a shotgun marriage, it works. The big question is how to make it work better. The almost universal approach today is to reach some compromise between the two, and keep trying to find a happier medium that works best for each game. Another, much more challenging approach, would be to rig the game mechanics to encourage adherence to more dramatic narrative formulas. Score bonus points for making dramatically interesting mistakes or something. And interactively build the narrative around player actions. We see glimmers of that in the Left 4 Dead series, where the AI engine seems to spawn enemies more based on the rhythm of the game than on location.

It’s not an easy blend. Narrative and gameplay are always going to have contradictory goals and tend to inhibit each other. But I also feel that the blend of contradictory elements is often greater than a sum of its parts.

[EDIT: We have a late entry! Added below.]

Vince D. Weller: Narrative is a good feature. I doubt that there are many people who’d tell you that they don’t like a good story in their games, so the problem isn’t that narrative is some kinda outdated thing of the past that gets in the way of emergent gameplay (I’ve yet to see a game that actually delivers it, but that’s a different story), but that like any other feature it can suck for one reason or the other. A story can be bad. A story can be uninspiring. A story can fail to grab the player and make him care (Alpha Protocol). A story can suffocate the player (Witcher, many Bioware games). Much like anything else, good story-telling is a talent. Not everyone can tell a good story, especially in a video game format. If you can’t, then it’s better to skip the narrative and focus on features that can replace it, like the sandbox elements, for example. If you can, then it won’t take much effort to make the story flexible enough to support decision-making and it would enhance your game. Simple as that.

As for narrative being limiting when it comes to emergent gameplay, I disagree. There are many ways to craft a story that doesn’t force the player to move along a pre-determined and very narrow path, but lets the player make decisions and craft his or her own story within the story arc. I can tell you what these ways are, but it’s boring, so let me throw stones at Jay instead:

“Simply put, the needs of good “traditional” storytelling as we know it runs counter to good interactive gameplay. The hero in a compelling story is going to make mistakes, is going to be subject to rising and falling action, and is going to get pain heaped upon him by the author, and not see victory until the moment things are at its bleakest. He is not going to choose the optimal path to victory because – frankly – that makes for a really boring story. But that’s exactly what the player will go for if given the choice, and gameplay is all about making choices. So either we smack the player down with non-interactive, forced narrative, or we allow them to create for themselves a story that is likely to be devoid of very much drama.”

The amount of drama depends entirely on the story-teller and the paths he creates for the player. If there is a path that can be described as the optimal path to victory, then yes, it’s boring and uninspiring, but only because the story-teller has failed. That’s what consequences of your actions are for. By applying consequences to the hero’s actions you can infuse the story with as much drama as you need and make the “optimal path to victory” the “hero does in the end” path, should you so desire, or “the hero fucks everything up, so things now are way worse than before, so thanks a lot, you fucking douchebag” path, not to mention the much desired “you either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain” path where the seemingly optimal, no-brainer options lead to the hero slowly become the villain, without even realizing it. I assume that the moment when the player realizes what his hero has become would be quite precious.

So, the moral of this story is that choices without consequences don’t mean much and it’s the consequences that are the link between the traditional storytelling and emergent gameplay.

Rampant Coyote: There are a lot of modern RPGs being released on PC and consoles (not to mention MMORPGs) that all promise evolved, superior gameplay – but apparently there’s enough of an underserved “niche” out there to have made it worthwhile for you to continue on with the Eschalon series. What do games like the Eschalon series have to offer a gamer in a world full of games like Mass Effect 2, Fallout 3, and World of Warcraft?

Thomas Riegsecker: World of Warcraft is awesome in so many ways, and it has altered the landscape of gaming forever. But to me, when I enter that game, I feel as though I am just one of a million other would-be-heroes. Everyone there wants to be the best, the most respected, the one with the coolest mounts and weapons and spells. I don’t find that competition enjoyable. Now in Eschalon, you are the hero. There is no one else there to compete with. Every dungeon you come across if fresh to your eyes- it is pristine and untouched, waiting for you to unlock its secrets. No one else has come before you to raid it and leave their garbage behind.

This sense of “this world was made just for you” is what I love about single-player RPGs.

Check out the full interview here.

Rampant Games: Why indie RPGs? What prompted you to go after one of the most challenging game genres right out of the chute, and what has kept you on that path?

Steven Peeler: I like RPGs. It really is about that simple. Since I started Soldak, the “smart money” in the indie world has shifted from making match 3 games to hidden object games to iPhone apps and now to Facebook social games. I could have worked on any of these to “make the quick bucks”, but if I can’t work on something I love, what’s the point of being an indie?

Here’s the full thing. And, just for fun, here is another interview Peeler gave to GamersInfo.net from earlier this year.

Rampant Coyote: There are a lot of fantastic big-budget mainstream RPGs out now – with more coming soon with plenty of marketing hype for each one. You’d think that there wouldn’t be any room for a small-budget, 2D RPG like yours, but – from what I can tell – the audience for these tiny indie games keeps growing. Would you agree? If so, what do you think accounts for it?

Indinera Falls: I think those audiences are different. Games like mine cater to people who like 16-bits types of RPG, back in the days of the Genesis and Super NES.

Those games happen to be my favorite too. While there are obviously fewer people interested in this sub-genre, those who like them won’t get them in the big budget stuff, and that’s where we come into play. Also, I believe indie makers for the most part have more genuine stories, with less marketing constraint and editor’s control.

The full interview is here. There is also an interview from one year ago archived here.

The contest rules follow:

I’d like to do a post with people’s silly little ideas of “X Reasons Why Indie Games Rock.” 101 reasons, if we can swing it. I’d like you guys to help come up with that list. I’m looking for little one liners that may be pithy, poignant, silly, sarcastic, but most of all entertaining.  From your perspective. Stuff like:

Indie Games Rock Because:

• Big Pixels are Sexy!
• They aren’t afraid of letting you play it before deciding to pay for it.
• The next time I’m locked inside somebody’s hotel room, I’ll be fully trained on how to escape!

Please include your alias / nickname (I’ll be attributing each one, if I can), and your email address so I can contact you if you win. Submissions must be received by the end of the day on April 1st, and I’ll announce the winner the next day.

…

The winner will chosen by an entirely partial and opinionated and unfair judge – ME. In the case of duplicate (or extremely similar) submissions, I’ll go with whichever one I received first.

I will buy the winner  any digital download from the Rampant Games website.  (Yes, I’m just an affiliate, so I do have to buy ‘em too…) Plus I’ll throw in a couple of licenses of  Void War, because I can. Plus a copy each for two runners-up.

April 1st is tomorrow, so if you want to enter, you should get cracking!