Castle Paradox

[J.A.R.S.]

Late comment from me...

I think most old rpgs were confined ot the choice of visible and static possibilities or random... Basically, in chrono (yes, again...) the enemies are fixed because everytime they respawn on the map, they're exactly the SAME enemies which is something random can keep you off-guard with. The hybrid of this would result in seeding the map with random monsters walking around everytime you enter the map (which I'm using for my current project).
I also wanted to point out, as far as "battle's worth" is concerned that Golem (Magnus sequel) uses two very interesting solutions for that. Since the game has no level whatsoever, your only mean of succeeding is finding new abilities and friends (with elemental values that match monsters of the current levels). One of the best way to gather them is to fight. Yes, the battles are random, and as easy as it may seem to just run away, you both need to money to buy the costly potions (which you'll need against bosses!) and the abilities/allies you can get from these battles. I think it was quite an achievement for a game... Of couse, this is a part of why I consider Golem a classic: it merely re-invented battles in a certain way, but not quite just yet...

As far as CC is concerned, you can fight any given boss that I'm aware of. It basically allows you to leave or regenerate your party and start again. I guess you could escape from the final boss, but you would STILL have to fight it afterwards.
And this was my late comment

EDIT: Forgot to point out that Zelda: A link to the past uses battles that are definite, but the active rpgs have a more "fun" approach of the run away thing... so maybe the whole sorrow of random battles is the fact that it locks you inside of it and that the running away system makes it laborious... just saying...

[Moogle1]

[J.A.R.S.]

True, I was just answering the missing information.
And I simply meant that Golem reinvented the underlying reasoning behind battle's worth (he is not focusing on experience points since they don't exist) by adding abilities and allies to be earned from them, but he does not reinvent the battles in themselves. That is a good example of design according to me because, instead of mindlessly changing everything just for the sake of being original, Grandtrain selected one aspect of fighting which he fixed while leaving everything else untouched (elemental attacks, the fight command, etc). On a sidenote, the balance between "fight" and "abilities" was exquisite (nearly 50% of the time you would fight while 50% of the time, none of your heroes had a decent elemental basic attack which meant you had to find some ability to compensate)... But that's sort of going off topic. Hope it clarifies it?

[Dr. Baconman]

I myself actually use random encounters periodically, but only where they make sense. In all the other situations I make 'event battles,' where you clearly see the enemy coming but you must fight him anyway. These are used to fill out scenarios (hence are only used once in the whole game).

Good random encounters, in my opinion, will only occur in a situation where an ambush is actually likely to happen, like fighting snakes in a forest or ghosts in a mansion. Bad ones will hit you with something you should have seen coming, often out in the open, as many events in the Final Fantasy series use; a giant robot or dragon will somehow ambush you in a narrow hallway.

Furthermore, good random encounters feature variety. Lots and lots of variety. And not just in a specific dungeon, either, I mean across the entire span of the game. Hence, "recolored" types of enemies are out of the question for me.
This technique will probably make battles more fun for the player, who must come up with new strategies for every new enemy they find, which they'll only see about 3-4 times while they play the dungeon (unless they want to grind, in which case fun is no longer a factor to them.)
This works great in tandem with good artists, who can actually make players WANT to go through random encounters just to see what new spiffy monsters await them. (This happened to me in WELCOME.RPG)

Of course, it's not easy coming up with 32,767 different enemy designs, each with their own unique strategies in battle. But we can try! And who knows, that just might lead to success and a jewel of a game where random encounters can be fun.