WHAT IS THE PERFECT ENCOUNTER RATE?

i'm glad to have done my good deed for the day, then.

(Hmmm, I could swear I wrote something yesterday, but either I dreamed it, or it was removed by community)

Lufia had random encounters throughout, and yes it was a pain in the bum (I couldn't get through). Lufia II had rather low random encounters on the worldmap, and then had the whole enemies that move when you move thing. Why? Well for one because the encounters in the first game were so high, but also having monsters pause until you move allowed for puzzle games to work.

I think this is the point. Not necessarily that one is "wrong" and the other is "right" (overly simplistic), but that it is important to manage these correctly. Now the definition of "correctly" might be up for grabs.

author=bulmabriefs144
Not necessarily that one is "wrong" and the other is "right" (overly simplistic), but that it is important to manage these correctly.

this.


Thinking about it now, making encounters random and invisible did a lot for the original Pokemon game. By avoiding grass, you had a limited amount of control over how many encounters you fought. There was the tension of stepping into a patch of grass to get an item a few steps in - will I fight a wild pokemon? Will I survive it?

In addition, I believe one of the main attractions of the original Pokemon games was their sense of mystery. After wandering through Viridian Forest for forever fighting Weedles and Kakunas, imagine the shock when you hear the battle sound, the screen goes black, and a Pikachu appears. As a kid, that kind of stuff blew my freaking mind. A simplistic conversion to conventional touch encounters would've obliterated that feeling of suspense, especially if you can see that there's an obvious Pikachu sprite among all the Caterpies.

Maybe there's a way to make touch encounters in Pokemon while maintaining suspense, but I'm having a hard time thinking of one that wouldn't have involved massive redesign of the mechanics and maps, as well as changing away from tile-based movement. And what would it have accomplished? Random battles work extremely well in Pokemon.

I don't buy the "give players the option to skip anything they want" method of game design. It reeks of bad game design to me. Your job is to make the player not want to skip it. Ideally they would enjoy playing every part of the game enough to do it even if no other part of the game were gated behind it. But I realize that's not gonna actually happen. Sometimes you have to just add stuff for the player to do that isn't as fun as it could be, but is better than not doing anything. I don't think adding a menu option to FF7 to turn off all battles would have made it a better game. It would have made it a worse game.

Also, if you've never played a game where random battles made you think, and you want to, you should play a Craze game.

The idea of battles making the player too powerful is a problem that is independent to RPGs, it's true. But this has nothing to do with whether you can see the enemies before the battle starts or not. It only has to do with whether the player has the ability to get exp by repeating battles he's already fought, which is independent of whether you use random encounters or avoidable touch encounters. If you don't allow grinding, then the problem is fixed. This can be done by either removing the repetition itself or by removing the reward for it. For example, you can make enemies you've already defeated stop appearing, or you can make them give no exp/gold.

yes the "skip a thing you don't enjoy" idea is dumb*, either the player is playing a genre they don't like (solution: don't play things you don't like) or the game itself is bad... THAT SAID! The option to occasionally skip things you don't like is a very welcome mechanic. For example, 100% escape chance items in RPGs, or how many puzzle games let you skip up to three or so puzzles (but if you solve them later, you can skip other puzzles).

One type of game design that I love is when it's easy enough to beat all of the levels in a game, but 100%ing them is more difficult. I don't mean that the game should be piss-easy, but, say, recent Kirby games have just gone "nope, you can't die... simple as that." However! To AAA each level, you have to get X amount of the collectibles. If you enter the "death" state, you simply lose some/all of your collectibles. You can keep playing the level or boss, but it becomes more difficult to have X collectibles at the finish line.

How can you apply such a mechanic to an RPG? It seems like it might be difficult, but here's a few ways (note that I'm assuming "score" would be like "grade" in a Tales game -- no immediate benefit, but at the end of the game (or of a world, or whatever) you can trade it in for bonuses. I DO NOT RECOMMEND TYING SCORE TO ULTIMATE ITEMS. Then you fall into the trap of "I have the infinity+1 sword, but nothing to use it on..."):

• You CAN die, but revival/healing items are plentiful and reasonably powerful. Allies have no healing spells. The fewer items you use against a dungeon and/or boss, the higher your score.
• You CANNOT die. If your Health hits 0, you simply deal low damage for a few turns and cannot be healed until the effect wears off. Every battle has a turn counter; if you hit par or below par, you get some score.
• You CAN die, but this resets you at the last checkpoint with your items returned to what they were and all XP kept. Dungeons may have branching paths, but the goal is simply to reach the end of them; you'd keep whatever equipment or whatever you found as long as you can survive to that point. You get more score for every reward point you hit without dying. FFVI did something similar to this, but it was a very rudimentary attempt. YOU CAN DO BETTER

You don't even have to incorporate score, you can simply utilize checkpoints, or just reset the player a few steps before the battle (a la FFXIII, or in some regards TWEWY). I did this in Wine & Roses and it won first and second place in the contest before last, so... SOMEBODY liked it.

tl;dr: no matter how you do your encounters, try to make them engaging??? or something this got really off-topic but idk

Extra reading/watching:

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/jimquisition/3769-A-Different-Kind-of-Difficulty
...uh the reading part is down because gamefront apparently shit itself. I'll link to it when the site's back up

*one example that breaks this imo is Mass Effect 3's various game modes. I also FUCKING LOVE how FE: Awakening lets you turn off permadeath. Like holy shit best thing ever

or you could not have grinding in your game and properly balance things with mechanics you control as the developer ;_;

author=LockeZ
I don't buy the "give players the option to skip anything they want" method of game design. It reeks of bad game design to me. Your job is to make the player not want to skip it. Ideally they would enjoy playing every part of the game enough to do it even if no other part of the game were gated behind it. But I realize that's not gonna actually happen. Sometimes you have to just add stuff for the player to do that isn't as fun as it could be, but is better than not doing anything. I don't think adding a menu option to FF7 to turn off all battles would have made it a better game. It would have made it a worse game.

Also, if you've never played a game where random battles made you think, and you want to, you should play a Craze game.

The idea of battles making the player too powerful is a problem that is independent to RPGs, it's true. But this has nothing to do with whether you can see the enemies before the battle starts or not. It only has to do with whether the player has the ability to get exp by repeating battles he's already fought, which is independent of whether you use random encounters or avoidable touch encounters. If you don't allow grinding, then the problem is fixed. This can be done by either removing the repetition itself or by removing the reward for it. For example, you can make enemies you've already defeated stop appearing, or you can make them give no exp/gold.

ff7 is one of the easiest rpgs in existence, almost the epitome of "press x to win." the random battles in that game did not serve to make the game better because the outcome was always decided before the battle even initiated. What is gained by having these in the game. The answer is: More of my time wasted. This is not adding stuff for the player to do that isn't as fun as it could be. This is adding stuff for the player to do that isn't fun at all.
If you are removing enemies that have already been fought from the game, then they are by definition not random battles.
Also I have played two Craze games and the only thing they made me think was "Why."

author=slashphoenix
@Cave:
First, as with Pokemon, Cthulu Saves the World, and FF6, you can design random encounters to be skippable.

You know what would have also worked. Just letting me skip them by not touching enemy sprites on the screen instead of having to use items.

Second, making them touch encounters doesn't make them avoidable, as in Earthbound or Chrono Trigger.

Those are problems with those games, not with touch encounters. You can easily have touch encounters that don't chase you around the screen. As I recall, everything in CT was avoidable except for the battles that were scripted to always occur.

Third, making the challenging part of a game skippable absolutely ruins the sense of accomplishment you get from overcoming it. I hate to say it, but even presenting that option to the player can corrupt their sense of achievement - now they're presented with the temptation to skip to the end whenever they fail, instead of deciding to regroup and try again.

random battles are not and have never been challenging except in roguelikes and there is no sense of achievement to be gained from defeating slimes.

author=AlexanderXCIII
In all honesty I find traditional level up to be an inherently flawed system because it affects the difficulty in a way that the designer can't directly control (and another topic in itself). But if you're so overleveled that battles are too easy, that's your problem as a player, not mine as a developer, and it still has nothing to do with random encounters.

It frequently is the developers' fault because you tend to become overleveled just from playing the game normally (any final fantasy)

Anyone else feel like we're talking in circles here?


Agreed: Basic EXP systems have gotten pretty tiresome and are weak design. One would hope a player never feels like he has to repeat through a boring slog of battles to overcome a "challenge".

Dog, you keep making the argument about random battles wasting your time, achieving nothing etc; but you keep blatantly ignoring the point that absolutley everything you're saying has absolutely nothing to do with the encounter type in a game.
Each and every one of your points can just as easily be applied to touch encounters or even just hack'n'slash games that have you fighting on screen; if the combat sucks, then you'll get bored of the fighting and want to avoid it.
In fact, one might argue that random encounters with easy escape options (smoke bombs) are less time wasting than hack'n'slash games with "exciting" combat features that get tiring because you can never ever avoid the fighting or escape them, and inevitably leave a train behind you every time you try to flee.

Also, you commented on my system and the reason you don't like it is because you think that players will have a different experience?
That's the point...
Have a butchers at Extra Punc article, where Yahtzee goes on more eloquently than I about the whole idea behind a gaming medium being the water cooler factor: each player having different experiences.
The intention is that each player will get different battles at different times based on where they go, so they have different resources remaining by the time they reach the boss, so the fights are different. Why would I want to design a game where absolutely every player has the exact same experience? The last game I designed with that intention was a Visual Novel, not an interactive game.