What I Like In An RPG

1. Character Creation: One Character, Deeply Yours

Tim strongly prefers RPGs where you create one player character, not a full party. His reasons are threefold:

• Immersion — "I am this character. This is me running around the world."
• Story reactivity — The narrative can meaningfully respond to a single character's build and choices. A party with a Paladin and an Assassin creates impossible contradictions for the story to address.
• Replayability — Being restricted to one character means you must commit to a build, which makes replaying as a different character genuinely different.

He broke this rule himself (Bard's Tale, Temple of Elemental Evil) but only because those games had genre expectations demanding it.

1.1. Rich Creation Systems

The character creation screen is the game's first promise to the player: "Look at all the things you might want to do." Tim wants a huge variety of viable characters — attributes, skills, traits, perks, backgrounds, whatever tools the system offers. Not infinite (you can't make Superman in Fallout), but any character that could reasonably exist in that world should be buildable and playable.

1.2. Things He Dislikes in Creation

• Pre-defined roles — The more the game dictates your background, the less Tim likes it. Arcanum did it right: you were just going to that continent to look for a job. Why? Doesn't matter. Have fun with it.
• Amnesia as backstory — "You get one use of amnesia. One. Use it wisely, then stop."
• Player voice acting — Unless you offer a huge range of voices, you're telling the player their character sounds like this, talks like this, has this personality. That strips agency.
• Not letting you name your character — He cites Stonekeep as an early warning sign: "We're veering towards adventure game here — it's an adventure game with hit points."

2. Progression: Rewarding Who You Are

Character progression is the twin of character creation. Tim wants advancement through multiple channels — not just hit points going up, but skills, perks, better items (found, crafted, bought), faction rewards, and more.

The key principle: gate progression through player choices. Perks with skill prerequisites are "awesome" because they create natural consequences. If you neglected handguns, that handgun perk stays locked — and that feels fair.

Faction-gated progression is equally powerful: "Here is a progression path for your character that really depends on what you're doing and how you're acting." Progression becomes the game's primary reward mechanism for role-playing, making it one of the richest forms of consequence.

3. Reactive Storytelling

Tim's strongest opinion: stories must react to the player character.

He has no patience for narratives that are fully written and decided before the player starts. "Why don't I just watch a movie? It's far better — probably has better special effects, probably has a better-told story because the pacing is controllable."

3.1. The Football Model

Even when plot points converge (you need a key to enter a dungeon), the context of how you arrived matters enormously:

• Did you kill for the key?
• Steal it?
• Buy it?
• Convince someone to give it to you?
• Do a quest that made them friendly enough to hand it over?

All paths lead to the same dungeon, but the world should react to the context. If the game acknowledges how you got there, every convergence point feels different.

3.2. Factions and Consequences

Factions that react differently to the same action create genuine dilemmas. Helping one group angers another — and that's interesting because it forces real choices with real weight.

3.3. Completability Across Builds

Every character build must be able to finish the story. Not easily — a pacifist talker should struggle differently than a combat specialist — but the path must exist. Tim specifically references the giant robot at the end of Fallout: they made sure there were ways to defeat it or debuff it for non-combat characters, because locking out a valid build at the final encounter would betray the game's promise.

4. Multiple Play Styles

Going back to Fallout, the team identified three core play styles:

• Combat — fight and kill everything
• Dialogue — talk your way past encounters
• Stealth — sneak, steal, find alternate routes

The Outer Worlds added a fourth: Leadership — you might not be good at stealth yourself, but you're a good leader with a stealthy companion. This is Tim's preferred approach to parties: make one character (that's you), then gather companions as you play, rather than creating a full party at the start.

4.1. Exploration as a Play Style

Tim highlights WildStar's Explorer path as an underexplored concept: detecting hidden paths, parkour, nature observation, finding cave entrances that look like stone to others. An entire progression path built around exploring the environment and uncovering secrets — "you get most of your XP through just exploring and learning all the secrets."

5. No Forced Alignment

Tim doesn't want to be forced into being the hero or the villain. He wants moral gray areas — situations where there's no perfect solution, where any choice makes some people happy and others upset.

Key principles:

• Morally gray quests — No clearly correct answer. Fallout and Arcanum did this extensively.
• Consequences that stick — Getting away scot-free should be rare. Even stealthy crimes should eventually catch up to you. Stolen goods get traced. Bodies get found.
• Player choice in morality — Let the player decide if they want to be good, bad, or somewhere in between.

6. Endings That Matter

Tim loves multiple endings — and not just multiple ways to defeat a final boss. He means fundamentally different conclusions to the story.

6.1. Ending Slides

A Tim Cain signature. After the final encounter, the game tells you what your actions will cause over the coming days, weeks, months, and years across every area you played through. This is powerful for replayability: "Oh yeah, maybe I should have fixed their water pump before I stole their water chip."

6.2. Post-Ending Consequences

If the game lets you keep playing after the story ends, the world must reflect your choices. Factions should have shifted in power, new random encounters should appear, areas you changed should stay changed. Anything less is a betrayal of the reactive world the game promised.

7. Summary: Tim Cain's RPG Checklist

1. Make your own character — one character, deeply customized, no pre-defined role
2. Rich progression — multiple advancement paths gated by player choices
3. Reactive story — branching narrative that responds to who you are and what you did
4. Variety of play styles — combat, dialogue, stealth, leadership, exploration
5. No forced alignment — morally gray situations with real consequences
6. Ending consequences — multiple endings, ending slides, and a world that reflects your journey

"The more of these you have, the more I like your game. The fewer you have... the less I like it."

8. References

• Tim Cain. YouTube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3a9LxjNNhCc