Torment Eternal: RPGWatch Interviews Creators about Classic RPG

Brother None has an excellent interview with Obsidian’s Lead Designer Chris Avellone and “second designer” Colin McComb at RPG watch. It’s a great interview about a great game, Planescape: Torment. The article is split into two parts and it does contain spoilers but I won’t divulge any here so those of you anxiously awaiting your first taste of the game need not fear.

Avellone and McComb start by introducing themselves, then get right into the background and development of Torment and the process of converting D&D rules for a video game. They also talk about possible sequels the game (if the stars were all to align and miracles came true – so don’t take this as a rumor of an impending sequel).

Planescape: Torment is based on an original D&D setting so it had a host of players that already had some vision of what the setting should look and feel like but was not your typical Tolkien based world with elves, dwarves and halflings.

Colin McComb: We made a conscious effort not to deviate from the setting. The whole team had incredible respect for the license, and I thought we did a great job of keeping the game true to the setting. Now, we didn’t include everything in the campaign, and some absences may have been glaring, but I think we did a good job in distracting people from those absences.

Torment featured some great RPG cliches turned on their heads. The first being that the player starts out as a nameless person with no past – or as I call it the Amnesia opening.

Chris Avellone: When I first came to interview at Interplay, the director of the TSR division at the time was Mark O’ Green. One of the questions he asked in the interview was “if I were to design a Planescape game, what would it be like?” I told him I’d start on the death screen, and what happened to the player character after that, waking up in the Mortuary, and trying to piece things out from there like a jigsaw puzzle. He hired me, either because or in spite of that, so I guess it worked out.

Torment took a different approach with even RPG conventions like player death. Death was not an end in the game and was necessary to advance the storyline at certain points. The journey through Torment was a philosophical one as well as an adventure. asking a fundamental question through its story: “What can change the nature of a man?”

Chris Avellone: The high Wisdom answer available at the end of the game is, whatever you believe can make you change can do so – it all varies on the individual. Belief is what drives the Planescape setting, and belief allows one to change the shape of people and the Planes – and over the course of the game, it may even create real people from figments of the player’s imagination (Adahn).

Planescape: Torment introduced a true thinking game into the D&D line. Built more on ethical decisions and knowledge than fireballs and saving princesses, the game featured layered, dare I say “deep” characters who had very real motivations for helping and hurting the main character. I never thought of D&D computer games as being a good storytelling form until after I completed Torment. (Even though Baldur’s Gate I & II were great stories by themselves they lacked Torment’s gravity, character exploration and high-minded literary feel)

If you are a fan of interesting RPGs and can handle the older 2nd Edition AD&D rules problems as well as now dated graphics, there are few games I would more highly recommend every fan of games as a storytelling medium pick up.

via RPG Watch; part one, part two