MONSTER ENCOUNTERS THAT MAKE SENSE.

Liberty, you may be right... but then if monsters are "afraid", or keep away of humans, just as a deer or whatever then they would not swarm you while you are walking on the fields close to towns or so.

I also find true what you say about villages, but then if there is something like you described, it isn't a defenseless village anymore.

This lead me to other question about making more sense in encounters. Why are enemy encounters fixed to game pace. I've never seen weaker enemies after the start point, or strong enemies roaming early. It may not defeat the realism as you may find, for example, find 1 or 2 strong enemy among 30 weak enemies (think abour Africa, lions and zebras). Strong enemies could even be a auto-pace factor for the player to say "come back later" without using a stubborn NPC or a flat weak bush.

I remember in Final Fantasy II, running into monsters that were way beyond the party's current ability to defeat was one of the surefire signs that you were going in the wrong direction.

author=Treason89
I don't know if this fits on this discussion but here I go!

Another important thing to have in mind when designing encounters is the monster location. In Legend of Legaia the world was filled with monster because of the mist (or whatever name it had) but after you progressed through the game, the mist was cleaned and monsters (Seru) didn't appeared anymore in that area. That makes sense.

In the other hand, some RPG games put enemy encounters just outside the countryside of even a little defenseless town. The monsters are SO intelligent, bold and nice not to swarm against the town (even if you see them cooperating in enemy encounters), but once you put just a step outside the "WELCOME" sign they rush for your meat... That's nonsense and unrealistic for me. Why should the monsters cooperate with townsfolk but go against you? Well of course it could be justified if it is the Necromancer/Witch town mentioned before by Kaliesto.

Edit: Whoa! CashmereCat, I like that point of view. I would surely work nice if it properly fits in the game.

A lot of RPGs apply the handwave that due to the evil influences of whatever Bad Stuff is driving the plot, monster populations are increasing, or normally harmless creatures are becoming more aggressive.

Here's an idea that appeals to me; use this as a plot element, but don't make this something that's been going on for a few months or so, make it something that's been going on for decades. Human civilization has already battened down hatches to weather the storm; less defensible communities have been abandoned and people have consolidated in larger communities for their own protection. The population of humans has dropped precipitously due both to fatalities from monsters and to loss of habitable land.

Human towns are basically safe, but only because the ones that still exist are all adequately guarded. It's not that monsters politely avoid trespassing in places of human habitation, but that places of human habitation are the ones that can prevent monsters from trespassing. As a consequence, populated areas have been forced to become much more self-sufficient, since the cost of trade has gone way up due to the necessity of protection against monster attacks.

If you're going to apply genre conventions like distantly spaced towns separated by hordes of random encounters, you might as well consolidate them as story elements.

Reminds me of the one game where I had a huge highway (Medieval standard ;p ) that was used for trading but was constantly patrolled by the military orders of the country. If you actually walked on the roads you'd get no monster encounters (but would sometimes run into a military group and since you were sort-of-but-not-really-outlaws you'd have to fight them, though you could also bribe them).

Each town had a specific garrison to protect them, larger ones had more than one and sometimes you'd hear about attacks on the town by monsters if you slept at the inn (a rumour system that would update sometimes with random bits of info). When that happened you could go to the outskirts and scrounge up materials from the already vanquished enemies.

I lost that game in a computer wipe years ago and still regret it's loss. The story was hokey as hell but at least those parts were, imo, cool as shit.

Yes, we shouldn't worry about the little aspects of worldbuilding in a genre entirely dependant on worldbuilding and lore.

Why didn't I think of that?

I'm not even going to touch on the sentiment that "Video games are losing their way!" Because it's so pointlessly wrong to say that that I don't even have a discussion to bring up.

author=Yellow Magic

author=Pizza
a genre entirely dependant on worldbuilding and lore

Is this some kind of joke?

Jesus fucking christ. I'm out.

How could it possibly be a joke? RPGs are about integrating a story with gameplay, it's literally the most story heavy genre next to visual novels. Just look at WRPGs like Skyrim/Oblivion, and the way the world is built, amd how storied the backgrounf information is. It makes those games what they are, and it makes them more enthralling. The same concepts can be easily applied to a JRPG.

I don't get it. When has an RPG been less good because it tried to present a world the player could really lose themselves in?