YOU - Will I be a… ghost now?
ANCIENT REPTILIAN BRAIN - Brother, you already were a ghost. Up there, screaming — along with all of them. Scaring each other. Haunting each other.
It’s the living who are ghosts. The dead are silent. They don’t rattle windows or write letters in blood. The living do.
Released by ZA/UM in 2019, the role-playing video game Disco Elysium was a breakout indie success.
I don’t play a lot of computer role-playing games - I’ve struggled to get into even well regarded ones - but I heard enough good things to give this one a try; and yes, it’s a masterpiece and I thoroughly enjoyed it1.
I won’t belabor how it works as a video game or rpg - it’s famous enough you can learn that yourself, and it’s good enough you can play it yourself - but I will comment on how it changed my game design. In discussing it with my rpg group at the time the question came up:
Is there anything here that’s a lesson for a good tabletop game?
And I think there’s two answers I’ve come up over time for why the system of Disco Elysium works.
It’s Just Good Writing
First is the trap: the system doesn’t matter that much. There’s no secret in the dice it picked, or magic in its number of skills or options.
It’s an amazingly well written game, and it has a ton of meticulously crafted writing. That’s both the actual dialogue, but how that dialogue’s put together with the rest of the art, and how the levels are arranged, and the branching paths, and how many reál (currency) you can get from where.
There’s no hidden lesson here for GMs or game designers. You aren’t going to make 24+ separate voices inside a character’s head2 for one.
But I think there’s a little more…
There’s No Combat
That’s not quite true - there’s several situations you face that you can or must deal with violently. This isn’t a non-violent game by any means. Nor do these situations just come up as cutscenes - they interact with your character build and options3.
But there’s an absence of something I realized was killing my enthusiasm in all these other computer rpgs.
There’s no moment where the game switches between exploration and the combat minigame. That’s a core part of the genre - your little figurines have one set of (usually simpler) skills for wandering about and maybe talking to people or buying things, then a different set of skills4 pop up when you’re fighting and a different set of stats click back into relevance again.
Inevitably, I find myself irked by this switch. I get into a flow state with one promise of play, and then… it stops and I have to do the other for what feels like an eternity to proceed. I don’t think the games even necessarily have to be bad at one or the other5 - at the end of the day it’s two games and I wanted to play one.6
Disco Elysium doesn’t do this. Even the movement integrates into the talking and skill check portion as you overhear little things and thought bubbles pop up as you move. It’s a slightly finicky system for some people - but for me it means I’m always in one mode: investigate.
This also explains why I had never felt so much fatigue navigating around in adventure games like Uru.
I realized this is also a consideration in tabletop games - which is where the computer side of things picked up the genre convention. D&D in all its forms has a pretty hard line between combat and noncombat toolkits, as does Pendragon. Even when the powers have worthwhile uses in both sides of the line, and the resolution systems are similar, there’s a time dilation that hits pretty hard. Combat suddenly starts caring about every individual moment and blow-for-blow action until the overall situation resolves itself.
But not all games do that, and that’s the direction I realized I wanted this game to go.
We’re Not Disco
Not everything in Disco Elysium can be pilfered. It’s a specific game, as is The Death of Arthur.
Also, some stuff wouldn’t be great in most rpgs. Aside from the aforementioned 24 separately voiced skills, I don’t think the Thought Cabinet would work particularly well without some adjustments7.
The clothing system was a mess, and I didn’t even touch most of the other inventory aspects. Inventory was annoying, not really immersive or fun8.
Footnotes
-
Some things can be masterpieces that I don’t like, or things I love that I know aren’t masterpieces. ↩
-
There are some games which toy with this - but, like Disco Elysium - this mechanic defines them. ↩
-
As I, someone whose pathetic little nerd detective repeatedly failed to get past Measurehead, can definitely tell you. ↩
-
Sometimes named and bought together - but the in-combat and out-of-combat uses of the skills don’t have the same role in game. ↩
-
Though it certainly can feel like one is taking all the oxygen in development. ↩
-
I do still like the switch between overland travel and battles in something like Mount and Blade, though (though even there sometimes I can feel a little bit of tension; still, I don’t think I’d like the game better if it dropped one side). It’s not quite clear-cut what makes the transition break my flow. ↩
-
I think the overall idea of holding a few upgrades before you get them (sometimes with a penalty while you’re holding them), and having them mature over time (I’d probably link it to certain events and actions rather than just time - unless the game heavily used time as a factor) could work. ↩
-
I think, for rpg lessons, the particular point is that swapping clothing for bonuses wasn’t interesting. You did it to be very fiddly about a roll, sometimes with a little guessing about which ones you’d want in a conversation (but not interesting guessing, usually - getting it wrong didn’t feel like a puzzle you had missed or a decision you had made). On the other hand, buying clothing (or obtaining it other ways) was interesting - you made real choices, you got rewards for following a weird line of inquiry, you changed based on the directions you went and the options you took. ↩