Strategy RPG - a tragic lovestory?

I've always been fascinated by the ideas how different game mechanics can create the feel of things you could also express in poetry or literature. Sadly however I feel like the math behind the games is way too often not related to the story or the theme. Is it because attempting to do that would make the games way more complex? Or is there something we could do to change that, without sacrificing the game experience, and instead make it ways more enjoyable and immersive. Or is there a simple explanation to why it is not being chased? Let's explore these questions by delving into the deep mysteries of combining story telling and strategy, poetry with math, analytical mind with emotions. Or to put simply modern strategy games with RPGs. You think the last one was inappropriate, don't worry, I'll prove you wrong.

Strong math underlays strategy games. RPGs on the other hand are basically interactive story telling. When strategy games origin from chess, go and all the other mind games symbolising the strategies of war, then RPGs origin from stories, told by artisans, travelers, parents to child, the guy in the town market, preachers and so on.

One of them is a game where the rules are most important, and the outcome depends on how well you understand those rules, how well you play, and the outcome is a ruthless defeat if your not careful, or if your simply not good enough.

Stories however, first have an ending, or a moral, and path to the ending is merely for explanation purposes, to make it plausible. That means victory or defeat is decided already before you start experiencing the story. Usually the path is unlikely if you were the one who would take it. Or the character who is taking it simply unlikely powerful to exist in the first place, making it plausible to ignore the rules set otherwise for us mere mortals. Of course there is always some truth in stories, but let's face it, a good story is filled with dreams, unreality and imagination.

Nowadays, strategy games and rpgs, the children of two so contradicting schools of art are seeking to take pieces from one another, seeking to combine and form something new. And I too have caught in the fascination of this ideal, what seems to be an awkward beginning of Romeo and Juliet, and we all know what happened there. But luckily for us reality is not storytelling, for us the ending is open, and until proven impossible everything is possible (then again there I was back in high school wondering if I could come up with a positive solution to NP=P problem, obviously without any success).

So what is happening? If you look at civilization series or Europa Universalis games, they are no doubt very good strategy games, but they include quite a lot of story telling elements. They give players the opportunity to personalize, to define what kind of ruler they are, or what kind of kingdom or civilization they are leading, they still leave the outcome open, will you win or lose, stand the test of time in civilization series, or admit defeat during the path. But you get the option to choose really neat paths, and even if the game is balanced in it's core, then by finding the right niche, you simply steamroll over all your opponents, something a pure strategy game wouldn't allow (I believe if you take away the campaigns from Starcraft, it is an excellent example of a modern pure strategy game, so was age of empires 2, and of course the many board games out there).

So in the other side, there are role playing games which instead of simply telling a story, also give you an illusion that you might actually lose, or your choices change the world. Why am I saying illusion? Well, you can die, sure, but you always have a save game/autosave so on. You may do bad choices, but they effect the story either not at all or in a very controlled manner. Only way to lose, is to quit the game, and as long as you don't do that, the choices you make and how you play the game effect only how long it takes to finish the game. But they are using more and more strategic elements to make the illusion better, buying items for money (resource management), advanced combat (tactics) etc. They can even have multiple outcomes, involving the exploration of morality, cause and reaction, but like said before, in a controlled environment, meaning, if you do this, then that happens and it's not going too much more complex than that.

So what should a true strategy RPG game be like? What elements of each genre would it take into itself? And how to solve the conflicts of them both?

First the world definitely has to have rules, by which it works, your actions, and possibly actions of other characters will definitely effect the world in a fair, rule based manner, otherwise it is by all means not a strategy game. What do I mean by that?

Well, suppose you were a hero defending a fort from orcs. Suppose you can position the fort soldiers however you like and give some orders. So, in a fair ruled RPG strategy game, the number of orcs and number of men protecting the fort is finite, meaning that suppose there were 100 orcs and 50 of them died without making progress then the orcs, being rational entities would retreat, and not spawn additional ones and wait until you kill their leader or complete any other objective. Also, suppose you succeed defending the fort but only 4 men remain on your side, out of initial 100 for example, it was a bloody battle. So what would a village with 4 men, and a few hundred of elders, women and children do? Well, they could migrate to another village, increasing their population, but abandoning this village, making it a ghost village. Or maybe the land is in turmoil and they cannot migrate without taking a great risk. Maybe women take on hunting and become soldiers and it becomes a matriarch governed village, whatever happens, it has to be deduced from the rules of the world, they would need to guard themselves, or they risk being overrun by raiders, they need to hunt, or they starve. And village as an entity should be able to deduce the course of action from those rules, and that would become a story.

So here you can see the first obstacle of making a strategy RPG, if you want to have story, you need to have entities filling all the roles in the story, and all the entities would need be able to deduce their course of action from the rules and current situation, without conflicting their personality. And that's a hell of a AI challenge.

If I would wild guess an algorithm for the AI, I'd go for Monte Carlo modification, where either instead of having random set of options entities only attempt from a set of options plausible for their character, or instead their choice evaluation function is modified by their characteristics. In that way you can still have them look ahead for a couple of moves and make strategically sound choices, while still making for a plausible story. Of course using those 2 strategies makes for a hell of a difference. For example in the first choice a kind village elder will never consider a ruthless decision, if it might be strategically very strong move, saving maybe many in his village, while in the second scenario he considers all possibilities and chooses the ruthless one when it significantly out weights all other options. Hell, if I'd do the game I'd give some characters one algorithm and others the other one based on weather their personality is idealistic or pragmatic, and a mix for those in between. Why, cos the first algorithm is basically saying that I will only consider choices morally acceptable for me, while the other one will say that I will take morality into account while deciding what option I choose. Here's some combining math with story.

Second main aspect would be the story, the immersion it creates. The feeling that the story is more important than the gold you possess or the size of the army at your command. That everything else is a mere tool to craft your story. So when those two genres are to be combined, I would avoid all sorts of winning by score, or winning at all. There can be an end, end date, end condition, like solving a conflict, or defeating your foe, or losing yourself, or a end goal, defined by yourself (for example at the beginning of your game you say that I want to play until my capital becomes the biggest center of trade in the game). 

So there has to be story, and there has to be rules for the world, meaning that rules and story must intervene, unless of course you want to occasionally ignore either of them, but that's not the grail we seek. No we'll only be considering options consistent with the dream. However since rules are mathematical definitions of legal moves, which when combining with story, rules become the mathematical definitions of plausibility. To experience deep stories in this game we would need to go as deep as starting to mathematically define emotions, feelings, theme, like the mad going J. Nash did in Beautiful Mind.

Of course it is already being done all the time: Vassal levies and taxation system in Crusader kings to explain the partial independence of the vassals from their superiors, Casus Belli used again in crusader king and also Europa Universalis to define the reason for war, which by itself has the potential to create a lots of story, governments and civics in civilization series, that give character to your civilization. If you've played some of the grand civ IV modpacks, then you have most likely witnessed the efforts people have done to try make it more realistic, to explain reality through mathematical rules.

Finally there is the question of control? While story maybe doesn't mind rules, and strategy games might not mind some story or theme, then control is something that really rips those two genres apart. In strategy, you have no control, until you are winning which is when you relax and just finish the game. In story telling or RPGs, the whole thing is controlled. That is one of the most conflicting things there is in Strategy RPGs. For example in King Arthur II, which was a solid take on Strategy RPG genre, propably the best so far, I got conflicted, cos I wanted to finish a quest while at the same time my land was being raided from the north. I had the expectation of letting me finish my story while having to make strategical choices at the same time. And because killing that stupid evil general (I think he was Roman) in the north didn't seem like much of a story, hence, I felt conflicted.

The question goes even deeper. Would we, the gamers be able to accept, that instead of our ideal of the story, an AI story happens instead, I mean not always, but since it is a strategy game, we shouldn't have all the control, we should have a chance to lose, when being careless, or by doing mistakes. How would we feel like, when instead of us freeing the land from slavery we fail and a tyrant takes complete control over the land, our allies and friends would be butchered, the odds of ever succeeding our goal dropping to near 0, would we be able to accept that story? I mean imagine, if that story would be told to you similarly to Dragon Age series end game, maybe even from that AI perspective, how would you feel?

So to sum things up, as you can see the reason for why so many people are fascinated and driven by the idea of combining RPG and strategy has a deeper goal, a hidden agenda that has always existed. Cos by wanting to do that, you want to create rules of plausible story telling, you want to be able to define both real and imaginary worlds. If one would ever want to make a strategy RPG as deep as the best hand-written stories, you would need to understand both emotions and mathematics in the same time at a very deep level, and not go insane in the meanwhile.

And what if we succeed? What if the game feels like life, being ruthless, bias and conflicted? I suppose it depends on what kind of world we define. Maybe the first breakthrough in RPG strategy world will be of a world nothing like ours.

Whatever happens, if you have the fire inside you that urges you to attempt it, it propably won't go away, I know mine won't. All we can do is open our eyes look at the dragon we want to slay.

Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed a slight less rational sidekick. Don't hesitate to let me know your thoughts on this.