HOW DO YOU MAKE RANDOM ENCOUNTERS FEEL WELCOME?

Haha Feldschacht is right, you guys are a bunch of whining manbabies. hating random encounters is so because the random encounters are dealt with stupidly. if battles were actually swift and fun for the entire time you wouldn't mind random encounters, but nooooooo you want stupid on-screen encounters that you can:
1. dodge so easily 90% of the time,
2. actually see therefore there's no surprise when it jumps yo back homie,

there's a really anti-stance towards pokemon's random encounter system but quite frankly it's my favourite encounter system of all time. it's the most optimal combination of randomness and deterministicness (?) in battle encounter systems in at least ALL the rpgs that i've ever played. granted, i haven't played ni no kuni like someone said, and that might have a really great encounter system for all i know, but pokemon's system worked fine and it was bloody simple and really easy to understand. don't want to get pwned by encounters? don't step on the bloody grass.

someone was complaining about grinding to encounter a pokemon that had a 5% encounter rate (or sometimes even less). to him i say - WTF THAT WAS THE FUNNEST THING EVER. i love grinding for shit like that because you realize that you are better than people because you can stave boredom better than others and GET BETTER TROPHIES THAN OTHERS. that's what that certain subsection of players do, like myself, who are extremely competitive + have no skills whatsoever. they like to boast about things like GETTING SHINY POKEMONS. so don't diss low encounter rates for rare pokemon because it was TOUGH SWEAT catching 'em all.

tough sweat.

Honestly, random encounters for me aren't that bad, unless the encounter rate is too high, like in Suikoden for example (I like Suikoden, but I can't stand finding an enemy every ten seconds...).

But Ratty, if you, or anyone else by chance is looking for an alternative to random encounters, you may want to remember this article:

Four Alternatives to Random Encounters

author=Cat
if battles were fun, they'd never have to be a chore

This is true, but eventually whether they're fun or not, it's good to give the player some (but not total) modicum of choice, they simply may not feel like doing it at the moment. Something can be fun without wanting to do it all the time.

author=Cat
a good game is all about making interesting decisions, and "dodge monster" is not a very interesting decision imo.

By that logic, action or adventure games aren't interesting or good games.

author=Feldschlacht IV
That way, the player knows that they have to engage in battles to progress through the game, but the battles should be fun enough for it not to be a chore when they have to happen.

Feldschlacht, this and your avatar remind me of Romancing Saga again. About how the player could strategically avoid certain enemy types, or attack them from the rear.

No random encounters. I prefer putting the enemies on screen so you can see that they're there, (like FFX or Crono Trigger) and in some cases, avoid them altogether. After all, when you're going through an old area, why the hell do you want to fight the very first slime you ever encountered for the MILLIONTH TIME!

Furthermore: DO NOT PUT RANDOM ENCOUNTERS IN HIGHLY DIFFICULT SEARCH INTENSIVE PUZZLES THAT YOU CANNOT SKIP!!! THIS MAKES ME WANT TO FUCKING FLY TO JAPAN, FIND THE PROGRAMMER AND BEAT THE LIVING SHIT OUT OF HIM!!!

A few people so far have mentioned the downside of avoidable encounters wherein the player risks becoming underleveled and not being prepared to complete the mandatory fights, but I think there's another important issue that this doesn't address.

Encounters should constitute some kind of meaningful challenge, or if not challenge then some other sort of entertainment. If the only purpose of all the non-plot-mandated encounters in the game is to give you money and experience so you're strong enough for the next point in the game, then you should be cranking the rate way down, and the the returns per battle way up, or just doing away with them entirely and giving the player all the experience they need from bosses.

In the earliest RPGs, random encounters constituted a meaningful challenge. Even if it wasn't that hard to get through one battle, the attrition from dealing with them repeatedly over the course of the dungeon was a legitimate threat. Full healing before boss encounters was often not provided, so you had to face the challenge of preserving your strength over a series of encounters and having enough left at the end to beat a powerful enemy. But as RPGs in general became more accommodating to players over time, the essential purpose behind random encounters was lost from many games. They no longer posed a realistic threat of defeat on their own, and access to free healing and saves before bosses became standard, meaning that they served little purpose as pre-boss attrition either. Players started to decry them as nonsensical and antithetical to fun, because they were divorced from the context where they had once added something to the gameplay experience.

You don't necessarily have to use random encounters to create a meaningful attrition challenge. Earthbound, for instance, used a touch encounter system, but enemies were powerful enough and difficult enough to avoid that they imposed a challenge the player couldn't simply choose to sidestep. But if you do give the player the option to generally avoid encounters, then you'd better find something other than challenge to make the encounters worth having there at all. Declaring that you'll make things easy for the people who don't want to be challenged, but give the people who want challenge the option to challenge themselves, is generally a shoddy compromise, because for most people who want to be challenged, there's a distinction between the game challenging them, and their having to go out of the way to make challenges for themselves.

author=Liberty
Instead of calculating properly, it instead makes the mistake of taking a number from 1 to whatever number you picked. That's fine in and of itself, but each step you take it rerolls, making the chances of a 1-or-2-step encounter that much more likely.

How to fix? There are ways. For instance, you could code your own encounter system. It's not hard to do with a few variables at your disposal and it can be customised pretty damn easily, too.

Wait, I didn't know the encounter rate is re-rolled every step. Are you saying that even if I were to go into the default scripts and change the formula, it can still give me one-step encounters?

I think what makes random encounters annoying to a lot of people are:

• Unwanted grinding

• Annoyance

• The overly repetitive introduction of battles

• Lack of pacing... they just want to get to the next objective already! too many battles (encounter rate is too high)

• Random encounters are everywhere, even inside castles that should be safe from monsters! make sense, people (consistency)

• the enemies are too difficult (consider scaling down the difficulty of enemies)

I think if you want to make random encounters more palatable, then here's a list of things you can think of:

• Restricting random encounters to certain zones like Pokemon does. This means that if people don't want a random encounter, they don't have to go looking for one. At the same time, sometimes you have to go through grass to get somewhere, but at least you can anticipate and plan your route around that. plus you also feel like a boss for dodging grass by doing some cool "cliff tricks"

• Obviously making the encounter rate lower rather than higher.

• varying up the monsters A LOT. the reason why a lot of people dislike random encounters is sometimes just because they're fighting the same monster again and again and it's BORING. maybe if you give them a lot of different monsters that will make it more interesting.

• Obviously by increasing the interestingness of the battles themselves. this is probably achieved by making certain skills more useful in certain situations than others, in order to create a sense of interesting decisions and strategy. things that can easily make up for this are: elemental strengths/weaknesses; the use of status effects that actually work; not over-depending on items; making battles long enough to be interesting but short enough to not be a drag; including interesting events while you're battling to keep things spicy. maybe even dialogue and stuff, idk

• You could include an encounter meter to tell you when a monster is coming, so people don't get as annoyed when they do. But I kind of find it weird and lacks immersion sometimes so just find out if it fits the game or not.

• You could consider using moving encounters, but you have to be really careful that it's not just a dodging contest. in my experience it's not very fun and it just detracts from the experience because most monsters in this arena have useless AI or it just lacks suspense being chased by these things. sometimes it's downright laughable taunting a rat from afar. not in a good way, though.

• making the noise/animation for the transition not so jarring. i mean, you don't have to *slide* into the action, but a nice playful transition and cool sound that won't get annoying are good things.

Oh, yeah one other thing: Don't put random encounters (or any encounters) in places where you need to avoid moving obstacles. Lunar Wish has a segment where you have to avoid these moving boulders, and not only does the battle transition make me crap my pants while doing this, I also need a moment after the battle to relocate myself on screen, at which point I usually get whacked by a boulder. These boulders can also cause instant game-overs if you get caught between them and a wall or another object! FUN.

Actually, don't put encounters in any place where you need to solve puzzles or pay close attention to the map...

author=Liberty
But it is so. Instead of calculating properly, it instead makes the mistake of taking a number from 1 to whatever number you picked. That's fine in and of itself, but each step you take it rerolls, making the chances of a 1-or-2-step encounter that much more likely.

I'm not entirely sure I understand this: So what you're saying is that every step has a 1/EncounterRate percent chance of a battle, when it should be rolling for an encounter every EncounterRate number of steps?