Castle Paradox

[St. Ajora]

Hi, I'm a girl and I'm new. (Sorry, I couldn't help it.)

Maybe I've been losing patience with the RPG genre. Every RPG seems like a rehash of fifty others that have been released. What bores me most are random battles when the player has absolutely no chance of losing. They tend to be far too frequent and require no thought; as you seem to be fond of saying, "hold-down-the-spacebar battles."

The best RPGs work around this somehow. Many have no random battles: the Chrono and Seiken Densetsu series, for example. Still, the same holds true even of those games: the random battles generally pose no challenge.

My line of thought is that the battles should be made much more difficult but also much more infrequent. There should be ways of compensating for the battles' difficulty, of course. Not by healing the party to 100% HP/MP between each battle, which eliminates all sense of fatigue in long dungeons, but through some more interesting means.

I plan to implement such a system in my upcoming game, but I also want to hear other opinions on the topic, which I feel to be the most important part of an RPG.

[Uncommon]

Well, one solution is to just do away with them altogether. I hear Bliss doesn't have any non-boss battles.

Also, your name/avatar reminded me of another. Final Fantasy Tactics (best game ever, by the way), just had the battles all hard enough to justify returning the HP/MP to 100% afterward. This is usually the preferred method, just making the battles challenging.

[LeRoy_Leo]

(Oh god... Don't start another "Hi. I'm a girl, and I am new" thread with this, guys...)

You do bring a good point though. I believe we have had several squabbles about this. Some people like random encounters to be frequent for the thrill of level busting. Others, like you and myself, hate frequent battling and like the other aspects of the RPG genre (which I am still an apprentice). I suggest making certain areas that have frequent battles. Like a training ground. Also make it so you can get in fights with people and monsters to get training as well. That way battles are only frequent if you want, or need them to be.

You want to do something like that?
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---msw188 ---
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[Uncommon]

It all comes down to balance, really, which requires playtesting. You gotta know how often is good before it gets boring.

[Iblis]

It might be good to let the player choose between whether the party was looking for fights or avoiding them. So if you're just trying to get through a dungeon alive, you'd probably be avoiding fights, and the encounter rate would be lower. But if you were just wandering around trying to gain levels you'd look for fights to make things go faster. And you could say that if you're avoiding fights, you'd be attacked from behind or ambushed more often, whereas if you were looking for fights you'd get preemptive attacks more often. And maybe there'd be a midpoint of neither looking for nor avoiding fights where things would be average.

You could make a deeper system around this too, maybe avoiding fights too often would make the characters more afraid or something which could affect their performance in battle. Well, that'd only happen in an area with reasonably strong monsters, if the monsters were weak there'd be no reason to be afraid.

And to steal an idea from Earthbound, if you reached a certain level maybe avoiding fights in an area with pitifully weak monsters would just mean no fights, since the monsters would all be afraid of you and not want to fight you. And wasting your time on weak monsters for little experience is annoying.
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[Chaos Nyte]

It all depends what you're using the random battles for. People think more battles equals more experience which means higher levels for them. By eliminating a traditional level up system(which is nonscensical anyway) you can safely remove random battles from a game. Realistically, a person wouldn't gain a huge speed boost from slaughtering wolves or what have you in a forest for hours on end. However if the player spent time say, running deliverys in town, the player could be rewarded with a speed increase by completing the tasks quickly. The same system could be applied for str, int, HP, MP, even learning new spells and skills.

...of course, what's easier is to simply do random battles. It's all about how much effort you're willing to put into your game.

[Aethereal]

As opposed to random battles, I'd simply implement battles that are not necessarily more difficult, but more strategic. I do not know if this is in effect anymore, as this is quoted from a two-year old article, but Rinku's game "Ergintandal: First Fifth" apparently has it set up where you simply cannot heal during battle, but you can heal as often as you like for free afterward. I've always felt that was an interesting idea to build around, as it adds a serious element of strategy; you have to figure out how to kill the enemy before they kill you, and the battles don't degenerate to the (all too familiar) attack-heal-attack-heal formula.
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[Sephyroth]

[Me]

[Komera]

oh, you'll never completely kill off the experience system, not as long as people keep playing d&d and keep making games based off of it (and i don't mean just the games carrying tsr/wizards of the coast trademarks. the final fantasy series borrows liberally, also). but among those games that do use exp, i prefer games where you choose which stat gets upgraded upon leveling up (seiken densetsu 3, or (in a way) super mario rpg)... as long as you aren't allowed enough level ups to max every stat out (diablo). i like customizing characters, but if every stat is maxable, everyone who plays just winds up playing the same uber-characters.
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LJ.Art

SD - Ten creatures remaining.

[St. Ajora]

Uncommon: Au contraire. the hardest battle in Final Fantasy Tactics is widely considered to be the Riovanes Castle battle. That is part of a series battle, if I'm not mistaken. In other words, your HP and MP are not restored before that particularly challenging battle. I am also of the opinion that it would be a much more interesting game if HP were only partially restored between battles.

Chaos Nyte: This brings up another point: experience model systems. Maybe you wouldn't get a speed boost from wolfslaying, but you would get good at slaying wolves. There is a good number of games that raise stats based on how much they're used. The Saga series does. Even so, this doesn't change the random battle dilemma.

Aethereal: That's interesting; certainly not something you see in commercial games. Healing is another matter entirely. I agree that almost all games allow healing over-liberally. Requiring battles to be strategic would make them more difficult, though, than holding down the space bar.

Sephy: Funny, I thought the Golden Hairpin, Gem Box, Economizer, and/or Offering were what made FF6 unbalanced. I guess Osmose was abusable, too. There really hasn't been a balanced FF since 4 or 5. 5 is debatable because it takes long hours to unbalance your game.

Komera: Yes! Character customization is the heart of what makes RPGs fun. Expect an innovative system in this aspect as well in my upcoming game.

[Aethereal]

I like character customization as detailed by Komera in games where you play a single character, but not so much when you control a party. Recently I've been highly debating as to whether FF4 should overtake FF6 as the best RPG (in my opinion) because FF4 does have that element where the party each has their own strengths and weaknesses that are set in stone, and you have to direct your party to work together to achieve victory. FF6 has this too, but everyone can learn every spell in that game. I think the best way to include customizable stats in a game where you control a party is to use the Super Mario RPG approach where everyone has their own unique strengths and weaknesses, and then you can simply pick a stat that gets an additional boost.

Also, to reply on your comment from my post, you can have battles that are more strategic without keeping them difficult. For example, I like Final Fantasy Tactics, but in no way do I find it the least bit difficult. It is a strategic game, but it is not difficult. So you can implement more strategy without making the game necessarily harder. It's up to you if you want to make it harder.

(Hope that makes sense, I think this is turning into one of those "I know what I'm saying, so I hope you do too" posts...)
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[Uncommon]

It was a series, but your HP/MP were still restored. You got a break between each battle, usually, except for the Wiegraf/Velius battle, but the one after that, with the Assassins, was still just as hard. Again, balance.

[Komera]

[Aethereal]

Actually, I'd have to say that Final Fantasy XI's battles are not unbalanced. If you aren't careful, you'll get killed pretty easily. However, the game itself is so horribly boring and bad that it doesn't count.
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