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What should go in a character focused game
I think that in a character driven story, they should have a very personal stake in whatever they are doing. They should not join the adventure mainly out of a practical "if the world is destroyed/enslaved, it's a bad thing for me too" reasoning. That said, very often characters will evolve from fighting for their personal reason towards fighting for protecting the world.
It's a sensitive balance though. Scenes like "I know the world is in danger, but please watch how the fact that I had a bad childhood means I'm going to put our mission into jeopardy" will almost certainly annoy me. Very personal should not mean angst.
It's a sensitive balance though. Scenes like "I know the world is in danger, but please watch how the fact that I had a bad childhood means I'm going to put our mission into jeopardy" will almost certainly annoy me. Very personal should not mean angst.
How do you make random encounters feel welcome?
Strangely enough, Dragon Warrior III to V has a surprisingly high ratio of useful spells vs total number of spells. For example, in DW III, the healer can other than healing also cast a sleep spell and a blindness spell. When I cast sleep, enemies would usually fall asleep and when I cast the blindness spell, the enemies would start to miss with their attacks. Often I could, by using those spells, prevent an amount of damage that exceeded what I could have healed by spending the same amount of MP on healing spells.
Offensive casters could also for an affordable cost either deal over 150% the damage a fighter could deal to one enemy or deal the same amount of damage a fighter deal to one enemy to a whole group instead.
Then the newer games introduced skills that disrupted the balance. You could use Falcon Cut, which deals 150% the damage of a standard attack with no MP cost and therefore the fighters could for free stay on par with the damage mages have to pay for. A GBA remake of DW III was also made where they had an strange idea. The blindness spell would no longer cause enemies to miss with their attacks, instead the blindness spell itself would miss the enemies when you tried to cast it on them. This persisted to newer DW games. In DQ VIII, status spells don't hit even half as often as they did in DW III, IV and V.
Sometimes I wonder if the professional RPG designers even tried to make battles engaging.
Offensive casters could also for an affordable cost either deal over 150% the damage a fighter could deal to one enemy or deal the same amount of damage a fighter deal to one enemy to a whole group instead.
Then the newer games introduced skills that disrupted the balance. You could use Falcon Cut, which deals 150% the damage of a standard attack with no MP cost and therefore the fighters could for free stay on par with the damage mages have to pay for. A GBA remake of DW III was also made where they had an strange idea. The blindness spell would no longer cause enemies to miss with their attacks, instead the blindness spell itself would miss the enemies when you tried to cast it on them. This persisted to newer DW games. In DQ VIII, status spells don't hit even half as often as they did in DW III, IV and V.
Sometimes I wonder if the professional RPG designers even tried to make battles engaging.
Twitching the Trope
Yeah, when people follow tropes, it's not that they are consciously aware of the trope. It's more like the writer writes what she/he knows which is what she/he has already seen.
There's a danger in using tropes as tools if you aren't skilled with them. You want to achieve a certain purpose, so you use a trope that accomplishes said purpose. However, there's a chance the player can go the other direction and predict your story, i.e. you used a certain trope, therefore you're trying to accomplish a certain purpose with it. After all, if you pick up a screwdriver, I'll assume you're going to use it on a screw and not on a nail.
Or if we see tropes as gears and parts of the plot, the player may upon seeing only some of the gears and parts, prematurely figure out the whole plot since the gears and parts shown are pieces of a machine the player is familiar with.
There's a danger in using tropes as tools if you aren't skilled with them. You want to achieve a certain purpose, so you use a trope that accomplishes said purpose. However, there's a chance the player can go the other direction and predict your story, i.e. you used a certain trope, therefore you're trying to accomplish a certain purpose with it. After all, if you pick up a screwdriver, I'll assume you're going to use it on a screw and not on a nail.
Or if we see tropes as gears and parts of the plot, the player may upon seeing only some of the gears and parts, prematurely figure out the whole plot since the gears and parts shown are pieces of a machine the player is familiar with.
Twitching the Trope
author=Sooz
In the end, I recommend less focus on "tropes" and more on what makes sense for the narrative and themes of the story itself.
That I think solves the problems which can arise with tropes.
The danger with tropes lies in them forming predictable patterns and the story looking more like a construction of already seen elements than an actual narrative.
One game I played had the main character black out for a moment. This made me think "okay, he probably has a special power and he tends to be more emotional than reasoning, so he will probably unleash his power during a dramatic moment." The dramatic moment happened and I practically counted down until he unleashed his super-power. Best of all, there was never any explanation as to why the latent power caused him to black out.
Another game had an evil empire. I got to a town where many refuges from war thorn lands came to in order to seek shelter and the people of the town were really nice to the refuges. I immediately knew that this was done so that it would be more upsetting when the evil empire next attacks this town. The game toke me trough a dungeon and when I was about to exit it, I correctly guessed that once outside, I would be treated to a cut-scene where the attack starts.
In both cases, the drama was completely ruined. I saw what the writer was doing rather than the story he wrote.
This problem shouldn't happen if you write what makes sense rather than (consciously or subconsciously) following tropes. This goes even if what makes sense happens to be tropes. As long as you are writing your own story, the tropes should not cause any problems even if your story includes a lot of them. It's when you follow blueprints of tropes that the problems arise.
How do you make random encounters feel welcome?
I have tried making encounters where the enemies would be randomized. However, I limited the randomization to enemies of comparable strength. That means, a certain spot may be occupied by either a fire elemental or an earth elemental, but the choice will never be between an imp or a demon lord. In retrospect, I realize that I could probably afford to make one spot able to spawn enemies of different strength as small variations in overall power is acceptable.
That amount of variation did work when I play tested it myself. It's on an abandoned project though, but I think Yanfly has a script for it on both VX and Ace.
Anyway, some of the annoyance with random encounters comes from the fact that RPGs usually move the battles to a separate battle screen, thereby interrupting whatever you were doing. I don't think on-screen encounters eliminates that problem, but at least you're forewarned when you're about to get into a fight. They can also be placed strategically, you can avoid placing them near a treasure chest since it's more annoying to get into a battle right before you're about to open a chest than in the middle of a hallway. Last but not least, if they are easy to avoid, the player can choose whether or not to fight. This however brings me to the big problem.
I think the big problem is that often, the encounters aren't fun. Whenever this topic comes up, there are always at least some who not only want to see them, but who also want to practically be able to choose when to fight. I don't see this type of desires in other games. Typically, when there are enemies in a game, you have to deal with them. In many games, you can run/jump past them, but even then you're still dealing with the threat, it's up to your skill to navigate past them without taking damage or accidentally fall into a bottomless pit.
Now, if the on screen enemies are somewhat effectively chasing you, then evading them isn't free and in a sense you're still dealing with them. However, if you make them move slowly in spacious locations or give the player an accessory that eliminates random encounters, you're eliminating them as a hazard. The monsters are supposed to be creatures that are trying to kill you. Now they are prey that the player hunts down when it needs exp and gold, but otherwise doesn't need to bother with.
Unless you make the encounters fun, making enemies appear on the map or other tricks are really just methods of damage control. I don't think this is the place to discuss how to accomplish that, but my advice is to at least be honest with yourself regarding how fun they are. If the battles aren't very fun, then don't have the player encounter that many of them per dungeon.
That amount of variation did work when I play tested it myself. It's on an abandoned project though, but I think Yanfly has a script for it on both VX and Ace.
Anyway, some of the annoyance with random encounters comes from the fact that RPGs usually move the battles to a separate battle screen, thereby interrupting whatever you were doing. I don't think on-screen encounters eliminates that problem, but at least you're forewarned when you're about to get into a fight. They can also be placed strategically, you can avoid placing them near a treasure chest since it's more annoying to get into a battle right before you're about to open a chest than in the middle of a hallway. Last but not least, if they are easy to avoid, the player can choose whether or not to fight. This however brings me to the big problem.
I think the big problem is that often, the encounters aren't fun. Whenever this topic comes up, there are always at least some who not only want to see them, but who also want to practically be able to choose when to fight. I don't see this type of desires in other games. Typically, when there are enemies in a game, you have to deal with them. In many games, you can run/jump past them, but even then you're still dealing with the threat, it's up to your skill to navigate past them without taking damage or accidentally fall into a bottomless pit.
Now, if the on screen enemies are somewhat effectively chasing you, then evading them isn't free and in a sense you're still dealing with them. However, if you make them move slowly in spacious locations or give the player an accessory that eliminates random encounters, you're eliminating them as a hazard. The monsters are supposed to be creatures that are trying to kill you. Now they are prey that the player hunts down when it needs exp and gold, but otherwise doesn't need to bother with.
Unless you make the encounters fun, making enemies appear on the map or other tricks are really just methods of damage control. I don't think this is the place to discuss how to accomplish that, but my advice is to at least be honest with yourself regarding how fun they are. If the battles aren't very fun, then don't have the player encounter that many of them per dungeon.
What Videogames Are You Playing Right Now?
Lost against the flagship's final form in FTL, likely because I forgot to activate my Defense II drone. There's a good chance I would have still lost, but I'll never know now.
The Engi cruiser has a few nice tricks. For example, if the enemy ship cannot harm me, I can focus on disabling life support so the enemies suffocate and that way I get more scrap. Using a drone to attack isn't fun though. I think I'll give layout B a go.
The Engi cruiser has a few nice tricks. For example, if the enemy ship cannot harm me, I can focus on disabling life support so the enemies suffocate and that way I get more scrap. Using a drone to attack isn't fun though. I think I'll give layout B a go.
Consistent Magic Systems
Added complexity does often (maybe even usually) not add depth. Give the player ten builds to choose between and you probably end up with 2-4 builds that are clearly above the rest. Raise the choice to a hundred, and the number is probably still 2-4. Give the player the ability to mix and match stats and abilities at their own choice and the number will probably decrease. In fact, I can remember three RM games I've played where you can allocate stats freely and all three of them had only two builds that are anything else than gimping your characters, if you don't count "spend 55 points on hit-points instead of just 50" as a separate build that is.
questoin on classes and bosses
One idea I've had is for status attacks to deliver a certain amount of charges of their respective status. Each entity has a certain amount of resistance to each status effect. You get inflicted by a status effect if the number of charges exceed or equal to your resistance and each turn you're inflicted by the status effect, you remove a number of charges equal to your resistance.
Say you have a paralysis spell that inflicts three charges of paralyze. An enemy with just one resistance will suffer for three turns. An enemy with two in resistance will just suffer for one turn, but if you cast the paralyze spell again, it will suffer for two turns since after recovering from the first paralysis, there was one charge left. Let's then say there's a boss with ten in resistance, you need four castings to inflict paralyze for even one turn.
It's not very appealing to cast paralyze three times for no effect, so this system would need a way for the player to build up charges while damaging an enemy. If that's the case though, it would allow for the player to only occasionally lock down bosses without making it random and also let the player affect the frequency a bit.
Say you have a paralysis spell that inflicts three charges of paralyze. An enemy with just one resistance will suffer for three turns. An enemy with two in resistance will just suffer for one turn, but if you cast the paralyze spell again, it will suffer for two turns since after recovering from the first paralysis, there was one charge left. Let's then say there's a boss with ten in resistance, you need four castings to inflict paralyze for even one turn.
It's not very appealing to cast paralyze three times for no effect, so this system would need a way for the player to build up charges while damaging an enemy. If that's the case though, it would allow for the player to only occasionally lock down bosses without making it random and also let the player affect the frequency a bit.
Twitching the Trope
author=Desertopa
I think that a lot of the time that's a more or less inevitable consequence of having the vast majority of the characters be human. If you have fifty human characters and an elf, then however unique an individual the elf might be among their own people, out of that cast their most visible distinguishing trait will be their elf-ness. If you had a cast of fifty elves and one human, the human would stand out for their human-ness.
For this purpose, we'd need to compare one group of fifty elves to one group of fifty humans and see how much they differ within each group.
Since we naturally tend to think of humans as the default though, it's easy to think of other races as being Human + X, where, once X has been added, you don't see much room for other facets of their personality. It's like how people of any race in real life, lacking significant exposure to members of another race, tend to have a hard time telling members of that race apart. At low levels of exposure, we tend to identify members of a group by the most obvious ways in which they differ from ourselves, and not by how they differ from each other.
Except that fantasy races are written by someone. If the writer thinks of a race as Human + X, then that will most likely also be what the race is.
Twitching the Trope
Different races is generally poorly handled. I'm not sure if I agree that humans are dull and unremarkable in fiction though, if anything, it seems the other races are. Often humans are the dullest when you describe them as a race, but it breaks apart once you go down to individual level. Since humans as a whole has no specific traits, each individual is different while the other races usually have traits that almost each member share, thus leaving less room for individuality.
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