I get your point about creators wanting to show off and have all of their creation explored, but at the end of the day, if you are creating something for a user base, what matters is what the users are interested in.
The vast minority ever bothered to learn a single word of Sindarin, but I doubt Tolkien ever cared. You got to figure out if you what you’re making is for your own interest, or others. Calling it a problem that most people prefer the playing humans seems misguided.
If a creator wants players to explore their work and everything they’ve build, and players aren’t doing that, this is viewed as a problem by the creator.
That’s not misguided, their hard work is going to waste. It makes sense for them to explore ways to encourage people to try new things.
It just sounds like the creator made a thing that wasn’t what people wanted.
It just feels like the question to ask then isn’t “but how do I get them to choose the thing despite it not being what they want?”
“Hard work goes to waste when you make a thing that people don’t want” is … true. But I would say it’s a stretch to call it a “problem”. It’s just an unescapable reality. It’s almost tautological.
Look at houses. You made a village with a diverse bunch of houses. But more than half of those, nobody wants to live in. Then “how do I get people to live in my houses?” “Build houses that people actually want to live in.” Like, you can pay people money to live in your weird houses, sure, I just feel like you have missed the point of being an architect somewhat.
It’s misguided in the sense it’s not a real problem for the target audience. BG3 does not have a problem of players not choosing the more exotic races. Maybe some game developers are annoyed about it, but it’s not something that devalues the game. The option is still there for those who wants it.
If you as a creator see that your players are only interested in 20% of the world you have created, you might want you reflect on why that is, and if you’re not better off focusing on those 20%. If you don’t want to do that there’s nothing wrong focusing on the more obscure fluff for own personal enjoyment either. And I really don’t see the point of downvoting all my replies, I’m not trying to argue in bad faith.
If you create a setting where a core part of the setting is that there’s all these different races interacting in a rich, vibrant, cultural melting pot, but all your players choose to play humans, then you have a complete mismatch between the setting you created, and the experience the players are having.
This is a problem.
It’s not a problem that “players are doing what they want”. The problem is that the reality of your game experience is fundamentally different to the setting design you’ve written. You have a setting document that says one thing, and a playerbase experiencing something different. The disconnect might seem trivial or unimportant to you, or you might not care - but the result is that your setting document is fundamentally inaccurate to the reality of play.
For a designer, this is a problem.
BG3 is a single player RPG where an individual player can make whatever decision they want and experience the game the way they want to play it. I’m not trying to claim this specific problem is an issue in BG3. The only reason I brought that game up was that they publicly released statistical data on millions of players, so it gives good data for the proportionality of player choices.
For most tabletop settings, this isn’t (usually) a major issue - a character party is typically on the order of 4-6 players, if they’re all humans, that’s fine. It’s the duty of the DM to make sure that the NPCs and the setting are accurate if that’s a thing they care about. It can be a problem if your game is fundamentally about exploring these different perspectives, which some indie-RPGs are focused on.
This is mainly an issue in large-scale social play games, like MMOs and Fest-games, which can easily result in this disparity between setting design and play experience.
For MMOs, fair enough. I can see the problem of the believability of the setting if everyone are running around as humans.
I thought we were mainly talking about smaller/local games like tabletop rpg in which the DM or settings creator are annoyed at players mostly preferring humans in their settings.
I get your point about creators wanting to show off and have all of their creation explored, but at the end of the day, if you are creating something for a user base, what matters is what the users are interested in.
The vast minority ever bothered to learn a single word of Sindarin, but I doubt Tolkien ever cared. You got to figure out if you what you’re making is for your own interest, or others. Calling it a problem that most people prefer the playing humans seems misguided.
If a creator wants players to explore their work and everything they’ve build, and players aren’t doing that, this is viewed as a problem by the creator.
That’s not misguided, their hard work is going to waste. It makes sense for them to explore ways to encourage people to try new things.
It just sounds like the creator made a thing that wasn’t what people wanted.
It just feels like the question to ask then isn’t “but how do I get them to choose the thing despite it not being what they want?”
“Hard work goes to waste when you make a thing that people don’t want” is … true. But I would say it’s a stretch to call it a “problem”. It’s just an unescapable reality. It’s almost tautological.
Look at houses. You made a village with a diverse bunch of houses. But more than half of those, nobody wants to live in. Then “how do I get people to live in my houses?” “Build houses that people actually want to live in.” Like, you can pay people money to live in your weird houses, sure, I just feel like you have missed the point of being an architect somewhat.
It’s misguided in the sense it’s not a real problem for the target audience. BG3 does not have a problem of players not choosing the more exotic races. Maybe some game developers are annoyed about it, but it’s not something that devalues the game. The option is still there for those who wants it.
If you as a creator see that your players are only interested in 20% of the world you have created, you might want you reflect on why that is, and if you’re not better off focusing on those 20%. If you don’t want to do that there’s nothing wrong focusing on the more obscure fluff for own personal enjoyment either. And I really don’t see the point of downvoting all my replies, I’m not trying to argue in bad faith.
I’ll try to explain it again:
If you create a setting where a core part of the setting is that there’s all these different races interacting in a rich, vibrant, cultural melting pot, but all your players choose to play humans, then you have a complete mismatch between the setting you created, and the experience the players are having.
This is a problem.
It’s not a problem that “players are doing what they want”. The problem is that the reality of your game experience is fundamentally different to the setting design you’ve written. You have a setting document that says one thing, and a playerbase experiencing something different. The disconnect might seem trivial or unimportant to you, or you might not care - but the result is that your setting document is fundamentally inaccurate to the reality of play.
For a designer, this is a problem.
BG3 is a single player RPG where an individual player can make whatever decision they want and experience the game the way they want to play it. I’m not trying to claim this specific problem is an issue in BG3. The only reason I brought that game up was that they publicly released statistical data on millions of players, so it gives good data for the proportionality of player choices.
For most tabletop settings, this isn’t (usually) a major issue - a character party is typically on the order of 4-6 players, if they’re all humans, that’s fine. It’s the duty of the DM to make sure that the NPCs and the setting are accurate if that’s a thing they care about. It can be a problem if your game is fundamentally about exploring these different perspectives, which some indie-RPGs are focused on.
This is mainly an issue in large-scale social play games, like MMOs and Fest-games, which can easily result in this disparity between setting design and play experience.
For MMOs, fair enough. I can see the problem of the believability of the setting if everyone are running around as humans.
I thought we were mainly talking about smaller/local games like tabletop rpg in which the DM or settings creator are annoyed at players mostly preferring humans in their settings.