HARDCORE RPGS - HOW TO DO THEM RIGHT

This guide will help you understand how to make your RPG hardcore - in this article, this will be a shorthand for an RPG whose main focus is challenging combat and possibly strategy outside battles, too. This will not be about making your game harder (this is very easy - you can boost your monster's stats, spread resources thinner etc.), it will be about how to make your game fun if it already is difficult.

In our last article, we've already established an RPG party, so this will be a starting point: How to design the players. While they already have established roles, we might want to adjust their performance. Most RPGs let you do this via changing equipment or party members. I'd say this is even more useful/important in hardcore RPGs, as it grants the player a means to change his gameplan and not feel like his group is faulty.


You don't have to go full Path of Exile, though.

It's just as important to be able to set a loadout as it is to change it - punishing the players for experimenting with skills, items and whatnot is also bad as you'll be forced to consult a guide and it's likely to leave most options unexplored as trying them out is tied to a big risk. Lastly, try not to hide the player's options if possible - while you can have some thrill with hidden items and whatnot, if a player invests resources in skills and/or items only to see there was a better option further ahead, he'll feel cheated. You can reward conserving resources over the long term, but don't lock the player out of content for spending his resources early on.

In my example, I'll give each character three skill trees:

-Bash will get the Shield Tree to improve his ability to protect allies, the Armor Tree to improve his own durability and the Weapon Tree to power up his attacks and grant him control skills.

-Arcana will get the Fire Tree for magic that lets her inflict good damage over time on groups, the Ice Tree so she learns spells to control enemies and the Lightning Tree to zap individual targets and to provide healing.

-Sanctus will get the Blade Tree to be able to deal damge, the Mirror Tree to ward off certain types of damage and ailments and the Jewel Tree to empower his healing.

With these skill trees, no important task is locked to one character (damage infliction, damage migitation and recovery), nobody is incapable of inflicting damage and all characters benefit from dipping into a second skill tree. While you can design differently for distinct purposes, just make sure there isn't a class/skillset/item/etc. you're forced to use as it has an important function that nothing else has.

I don't have much to say about strategizing outside of combat, just make sure to not let your players get stuck in an unwinnable state - the player is more likely to give up entirely than to try again (getting in a bad spot in a battle is okay as long as the player can just retry the battle). You want the player to know he can still win when he plays properly.

Alright, that's about player design, next up is making enemies and combat.

As mentioned before, your enemies will need to have diversity and whatnot, what I'm going into now is counter play. While the player's skills need to be fun to use, enemy skills need to be fun to play against. There's countless ways of achieving this counter play, but the main idea is that the player needs to be able to 1. tell what action the enemy has taken and 2. figure out how to play around it.
This comes in two forms: Active counterplay is taking note of an enemy's weaknesses, stats and whatnot to figure out how to take them out most effectively.
Reactive counterplay is assessing an enemy's skills and figuring out how to minimize the damage taken from them.

Again, I'm going to use an example - I'll go for the active counterplay first. My enemy will be a bomblike one that explodes if hit by a fire attack, even if it was KOed by the damage. So the active counterplay is 'don't use fire'. Not very interesting. Let's put some strong enemies around it that are weak to fire - now you have an incentive to use AoE fire (remember that AoE is a key part in Arcana's fire skills) to fight the group, but also set off the explosion. Now you have two viable options to fight the mobs - 'take out the bomb, then AoE fire' or 'bolster defense while setting off bomb, getting rid of it and making AoE fire immediately'.

However, that alone doesn't make for an exciting battle - let's give the opponents skills for reactive counterplay. As we established them being weak to fire, let's consider them plantlike enemies. The bomb will be called a Bangerine, which is accompanied by a Brawliflower, a Rotato and a Rimeapple. The Rimeapple will discourage recklessly setting off the Bangerine - not only does it deal ice damage, it will also lower defense, which could be fatal for Arcana if the Bangerine explodes. The Rotato's purpose will be to make sure the player hurries in battle - its various attacks leave damage over time effects behind, which stack up as it stays around. The Brawliflower is a simplistic bruiser with high damage to keep Bash busy tanking or Sanctus busy healing. It will also be able to put out fire set on it, which takes some damage potential from Arcana, but doing so also keeps it from attacking. The Bangerine doesn't need any attack - the explosion threat is big enough. It could possibly slowly heal itself, as ignoring it forces you to take out the three others one by one.


Lettuce know if you can think of more bad puns.

We now have a whole lot of interaction despite using incredibly simplistic monsters - countering all of that once might not be possible, but a clever player will be able to tell which threats to focus on to maintain enough firepower to win the battle.

An important thing to know is that you want to minimize the effects of luck - that goes without saying, but losing with a winning strategy is probably the most frustrating thing to encounter.

That should be enough for you to get started - now try your best and make some delicious hardcore battles!