Of course, I also am not terribly fond of CRPG-type games in the first place, so I may not be the best judge there. Not to mention that the link I gave was less to “characters have flaws because flaws are interesting” and more “characters are so loaded down with flaws that they’ve become a traveling psychological circus”.

It’s too late for me to be able to flesh this out properly, but it strikes me that for encouraging a player to roleplay flaws, one could borrow a page from Nethack and track conducts. These are voluntary challenges that make life harder but give you bragging rights later.

Conducts are typically things like “don’t eat meat” in Nethack, and you could consider “dot eater” mode in the shooter Ikaruga to be a conduct of sorts—shifting it to adventure games, how about tracking whether or not the player is having his character be, say, a compulsive gambler? You might even reward the player with extra cutscenes or dialogue or something for proper roleplay.

Which is another important point, getting back to what you mentioned in the post before: just because it hinders the character, that doesn’t mean you can’t reward the player for keeping the conduct.

I agree the list there is pretty impressive with respect to video games. I haven’t played most of the ones mentioned, so I wonder how many of those are eally minor flaws as opposed to major ones that truly obstruct the character, and which are either overcome (in the case of heroes) or not (in the case of villains or tragic heroes) in the course of the main narrative.

I think it’s also important to make the distinction between major and minor character flaws. Whereas minor character flaws are distinctions that essentially do not affect the narrative, major flaws are more of the kind that Corvus describes, which hinder or thwart the character from achieving their goals.

I think games are fairly good at using minor flaws, but I don’t think we see really exceptional use of major flaws all that much.

In fact, the early-3D era CRPGs seem to be made of characters composed entirely of character flaws, to the point that they really belong more in mental hospitals. The TVTropes Wiki provides a pretty impressive list (scroll down to the “Videogames” examples).

The “features” of the characters in Vespers, like Constantin’s anger, Drogo’s mental illness, Matteo’s depression, all play a nice role in giving the characters some depth. But I wouldn’t really characterize these as flaws per se, since they’re all aware of these things and they have no specific motivations that are affected by them.

It would be cool if Constantin’s anger or Drogo’s illness somehow worked against them — like, if the player was able to use these things to learn something new by tricking them into revealing some piece of information. But it doesn’t go that far.

Glad to hear you’re looking forward to it…if you happen to know any available animators, I’m always looking for more.

I can’t wait to get my mitts on Vespers, by the way!