HOW DO YOU MAKE RANDOM ENCOUNTERS FEEL WELCOME?

A good random encounter system can do the same, though. It can put a lot of control in the creator's hands - for an example:

A system where every 20 steps you get a random encounter (set variable Random to choose between 1-10 OR specific groups each battle) then counts down another variable to check how many battles you've had in an area and turns the system off after a certain amount.

A system where you have a gauge that is shown on-screen to show the player how close they are to a random encounter. Said system is set to increase the amount of steps it takes if you killed the last encounter or decrease them if you ran, counting the number of encounters and adding a rare/harder one every x battles, allowing for longer or shorter steps to an encounter dependant on equipment, items or spells used...


Yes, the default is broken (as has been explained earlier on in the topic) but a random encounter system can be just as versatile as on-screen touch enemies - and with a lot less eventing required~


That said, I personally prefer both kinds - on-map and random encounters - depending on the game type. I'm also a bit of an ass in that while my on-map enemies won't chase you, they will instead block the way to treasure and progress. You want the shiny? Fucking fight me for it! >:D (Then again, I'm nice in that if you clear an area the monsters won't respawn unless you leave the dungeon and return.)

Another neat type that you don't see much is evented enemies. Graphic-less one-time events that block the road. Usually these are used more for boss battles but games that use them are often very much controlled by the creator and need a higher degree of balancing so that each encounter counts.

Lastly, and one that I have used before, area battles. Think of Final Fantasy Mystic Quest where there are battle-fields. A tile on the world map that hold x amount of encounters and when you clear them you receive a reward. They're pretty neat and can be either random or controlled as to which monster parties are fought. I used the random version, myself, but a controlled version would also be pretty cool. Of course, I made the mistake of making the rewards randomised too and... well, let's just say if you didn't get the weapon from that battlefield the game was a hella lot harder than it needed to be. Bad design on my part. XP

Proper way to handle random encounters seems to be making them visible as wandering monsters. That's said it can really screw over the player who tries to rush past them and then end up being completely destroyed by the next boss due that.

author=Liberty

author=Clord
Proper way to handle random encounters seems to be making them visible as wandering monsters. That's said it can really screw over the player who tries to rush past them and then end up being completely destroyed by the next boss due that.

It can also be a hassle if you want to make graphics representing each type (thus why I tend to use flames) or if you have a certain amount that respawn while others don't and when they get in bottle-neck positions or run into each other/move too fast to outrun/get you trapped in a corner/bug out for whatever reason.

They have their upsides, yes, but because of the eventing nature of them they can often fall prey to common eventing mistakes - whether that be someone not changing a switch check in a copy/pasted event or whatever. They can be as much of a hassle to a player as random encounters (if not more), depending on whether the creator was a good game designer or not.


I've played games where the speed of said encounters were set very high, there were lots of them on the map, all follow hero, in a small area where it was easy to run into a wall/corner and have a bunch of crazy enemies swarming you. Add in ridiculous item amounts (like, two potions) and high damage rates and you have an unplayable game. So yeah, they are not necessarily the be-all, end-all of encounter systems.

Any encounter system done badly is a bad encounter system. Each has good and bad things to offer and there is not wrong or right choice in system, depending on the game and use of said system.

Personally I create "pockets" of encounters so they can't just all swarm at you. Essentially invisible regions preventing them from going outside of certain areas.

Other thing of course is to ensure that they're "clumsy" and use common events to avoid the problem of having to go through almost every monster spawn when I want to make a change.

author=Liberty
They have their upsides, yes, but because of the eventing nature of them they can often fall prey to common eventing mistakes - whether that be someone not changing a switch check in a copy/pasted event or whatever.

I think this is more of an RPG Maker issue specifically. In most other game making programs I've tried, you predefine objects that are then copy-pasted into a room. They also generally allow for root/parent objects and inheritance and all that jazz.
The RM's that I've used/tried only allow that in the RGSS code itself. Honestly, I think the editors would be so much more flexible and convenient if they used a more standard "object" set-up, especially for programming enemy behavior in battles.


And since there's been a number of comments about getting swarmed by onscreen encounters, I think I'll mention EarthBound's system for those who haven't played it: In that game, an onscreen enemy is exactly one enemy. Most of them only move towards you when you do, and when you make contact, any other onscreen enemies rush towards your position during the swirling animation, adding to the troop (within certain numeric limits). The enemies are randomly spawned onscreen, and if you don't like a set of enemies you're looking at, you can usually just scroll them off and walk back, hoping for better luck. It leads to some pretty silly scenarios where you're just walking back and forth trying to eliminate all the encounters, but overall I think it works pretty well. The numbers of weak and strong enemies seemed well balanced over the course of the game, so you might get rushed by six or so weak enemies, but its rare to get more than two strong enemies on screen. At least that's what I remember.

Random encounters are almost always designed to be padding. In the best case scenario, they are tied with the story and atmosphere, are fun and surprising, and not too repetitive. Still, in the end 99% of games use random encounters to lengthen game time instead of add any actual value, tension or creativity to the game.

If you want random encounters to be fun, you have to make them count, you have to make them important and you have to design them so that the players will care about them. Generally speaking, random encounters just involve a mix of enemies thrown together, sometimes with a very loose strategy, and are there as an act of attrition against the player, whittling down their resources. Combined with the way most resource management & healing works in RPGs, the threat of random encounters is really just the threat of sending you all the way back to town to heal - more padding.

However, take a new-generation roguelike game, like Binding of Isaac or Spelunky, where the vast majority of enemy encounters are totally random, yet they almost always completely tense and meaningful. Each one serves as a meaningful threat, and because there's no town to return to, potential loss of resources means a total loss, not just wasted minutes. You could very well make a traditional JRPG to work like this, although it would probably have to be designed from scratch with the encounters in mind.

That said, games that give you a full set of resources every battle can also design all of their battles as a real challenge, and not just a game of time-wasting attrition. However, in this situation, you still face the problem of players fighting the same battle over and over again and getting bored.

There's definitely ways to make random encounters fun, but they would require some pretty clever design, not just for the battles themselves but for the entire game: resource management, exploration, and avatar growth would all have to mesh well with whatever system you came up with. RPG Maker is designed to easily make traditional random encounters, so to make a game with new systems would require some trickery and experimentation.

author=Isrieri

author=LockeZ
I'm thinking of solving this by making the normal battles only give money, not XP, and having XP granted only by bosses. Or maybe just making only the unavoidable battles give XP (about half of the battles simply block the path and can't be skipped).

I tried doing this in a game I was working on a while back, and my solution was no XP at all, rather basing all of the player's stat on equipment and items. To make treasure hunting and exploration more rewarding, and to have them play on the defensive a lot: Problem with that is that running away from enemies was usually the most optimal solution. That's kind of what I was going for though.

I reduced the stat bonuses on levelling up so strength is predominantly based on equipment and skills learned. You learn skills from equipment so exploration, drops and crafting are more relevant. You gain the experience to permanently learn an ability via battles so fighting enemies is more about acquiring skills rather than levels. Skills are relatively inexpensive to learn to encourage trying new equipment options and building up a set of skills. Materials are found littered throughout areas though some enemies do drop them at a very high likelihood.

It's not a perfect solution but it rewards exploration, encourages getting into a handful of battles and grinding is kept to a minimum.

author=AlexanderXCIII
Actually, random encounters originated on a system that had no trouble at all with large numbers of enemies: Dungeons & Dragons. And frankly, 9 out of 10 justifications I see for touch encounters boil down to "Don't force me to deal with the core gameplay mechanics", while a discussion on how to make random encounters work has been going on for five pages now... Which of these was the afterthought, again?

Well, the purpose of the random encounter in video gaming is usually padding. In Dungeons & Dragons, random encounters are done to simulate battle situations without having to create a new NPC every 2 steps. Need an army of zombies? Turn to such and such page in the Monster Manual and roll a d20. The thing is, random encounters in DND were made to make sense. Each creature populates certain regions and the creatures of each region have characteristics that MAKE SENSE. In Forgotten Realms, if you're lost in the Underdark, it's a fair bet that you'll be running into almost exclusively, Drow, spiders, driders, Yochlol, and Druegar, with the exception of the elementals and golems that a sorcerer might conjure up.

Now, most video games follow these classic rules so random encounters tend to make sense in each area, but they are way overused in most cases. Why? Because this is what the developer is using to drive gameplay. In DND, most of the fun is in the intellectual logic games between player and DM. The REs are there to add dimension to the game.

A game on RMN that handles REs really well is Notes on the Edgosian Crisis. There's no REs on the world map, or in towns, and the only REs are in dungeons, such as the Inventor's House or the Highwaymen's Hideout. It's balanced exceptionally well so that you always have the stats you need.

author=Ratty524

author=LockeZ
With touch encounters, you can ensure that every enemy group is at least slightly different.

Of course, you could probably do the same thing with random battles, by creating a "playlist" of enemy groups in a randomized order, instead of having a chance to fight the same battle twice in a row. Dunno why people don't do this!

That's not a bad idea in the slightest.

Maybe, through script editing, you could possibly call each troop by their ID number to start the battle, but when that battle is finished in any way, a condition would ensure that the troop ID will NOT be called on for the next fight. That's something to look into.

I like touch encounters. Not only can diversify your encounters much more easily, you can easily have grinding areas by allowing respawning, and depending on what you want to do in certain scenes, you can control whether or not an encounter is avoidable. For example, if you have the hero sewer crawling, it's probably a good idea to make the rats avoidable for when you get sick of them. On the other hand, if you're hero is trapped in a medical facility with soldiers trying to capture a member of your party and you have only one way out, it would probably make the scene all that much more intense to make sure the hero has to fight every encounter on his way out. For added dimension, you can even mix them up with random encounters.

Another thing about touch encounters: it feels much more like you're directly involved in the crafting of the gameplay, instead of just assigning x amount of monster groups to a xyz areas.

I would have been really surprised if that HADN'T happened.

Sort of unfortunate, since making random encounters more interesting is probably something that people have trouble with a lot more often, and solutions to it are probably more interesting.

OK! Actual input!

Wild ARMs 3 had a few major systems happening in dungeons that affected random battles, and when they came together they turned into something magical and beautiful.
1) Almost every room in every dungeon was chock full of puzzles, to an extent that only Lufia 2 and the Zelda series have really ever matched. This meant you ended up walking back and forth a lot, and if you were better at solving puzzles, you got in fewer random battles.
2) Instead of just instantly getting in a battle after a random number of steps, the game would put an exclamation mark over your head. Two seconds later, the battle would start... unless you prevented it. There were multiple ways to do this:
3) In the corner of the screen was an encounter gauge. It started filled up with 10/10 points at the beginning of each dungeon. If you pressed the Cancel button while an exclamation point was over your head, you would not get in a battle, but you would lose one point from your encounter gauge. If you fought a battle and won, it refilled one point. When the gauge is empty, you can't cancel random battles any more.
4) There were gems scattered throughout dungeons that, when you walked over them, they would refill one point of your encounter gauge. Most of these were behind puzzles or out of the way, sometimes requiring cleverness in order to save more encounter points than you spent getting to them.
5) If you walked off a ledge that dropped down to a lower platform, while an exclamation point was over your head, the act of falling off the ledge would avoid the battle without costing a point from your gauge. However, getting back up to where you were wasn't always easy. But sometimes you needed to fall anyway, and could wait to fall until a battle was about to start, so you could avoid a battle for free!
6) Opening a treasure chest while an exclamation point was over your head would also cancel the battle for free. Yay!
7) If you walked off into a bottomless pit while an exclamation point was over your head, it would cancel the battle, but also send you back to the room entrance. This reset any unsolved puzzles in the room, but not the solved puzzles, and also not the treasure chests. You could strategically use this to avoid battles in many cases, such as when you messed up a puzzle, or when you had just solved a puzzle and could safely reset the room, or when you had just gotten a chest that involed going the wrong way and needed to undo what you'd done to the room's puzzles.

All of this combined into making the act of avoiding random encounters into an actual game. A puzzle game, one that was really fun. Yeah, the battles were still pretty fun too - don't get me wrong, I like turn-based RPG battles more than almost any other type of gameplay in video games. And I understand what people mean when they complain about designers who try to "fix" their battles by just making them avoidable. But when avoiding them is fun instead of just a design cop-out? That's totally different. Avoiding battles in some games feels like subtracting gameplay from the game - but in Wild ARMs 3, it feels like diversifying the gameplay. You're replacing half the gameplay with a different type of gameplay. And when that type is puzzles, it totally works, because puzzles and RPGs are like peanut butter and chocolate.

author=RyaReisender
Random encounters add a lot more than just game length if done well.

Imagine a huge maze-like dungeon without random encounters. That would get pretty boring over time. Also random encounters "help" to get the player lost. If he doesn't get distracted through combat, he could probably solve every dungeon easily, no matter how hard you design it to be. On top of that, random encounters also serve as a sort of time limit on how fast you need to clear the dungeon before running out of resources and have to teleport out (yes, good games offer teleportation skills to leave the dungeon).

I still think the main flaw of most random encounter is lack of variety. If people would just ensure a very high variety, they don't need to think of other "improvements".

It's totally not hard to design a maze complicated enough that most players will get lost in it even without random encounters, but I don't think wandering around trying to get some kind of handle on where you're going is very interesting gameplay.

I've argued in favor of random encounters before, but I think "distracts you so you lose track of what you're doing" is practically never a point in their favor.

author=LockeZ
Wild ARMs 3 had a few major systems happening in dungeons that affected random battles, and when they came together they turned into something magical and beautiful.
1) Almost every room in every dungeon was chock full of puzzles, to an extent that only Lufia 2 and the Zelda series have really ever matched. This meant you ended up walking back and forth a lot, and if you were better at solving puzzles, you got in fewer random battles.
2) Instead of just instantly getting in a battle after a random number of steps, the game would put an exclamation mark over your head. Two seconds later, the battle would start... unless you prevented it. There were multiple ways to do this:
3) In the corner of the screen was an encounter gauge. It started filled up with 10/10 points at the beginning of each dungeon. If you pressed the Cancel button while an exclamation point was over your head, you would not get in a battle, but you would lose one point from your encounter gauge. If you fought a battle and won, it refilled one point. When the gauge is empty, you can't cancel random battles any more.
4) There were gems scattered throughout dungeons that, when you walked over them, they would refill one point of your encounter gauge. Most of these were behind puzzles or out of the way, sometimes requiring cleverness in order to save more encounter points than you spent getting to them.
5) If you walked off a ledge that dropped down to a lower platform, while an exclamation point was over your head, the act of falling off the ledge would avoid the battle without costing a point from your gauge. However, getting back up to where you were wasn't always easy. But sometimes you needed to fall anyway, and could wait to fall until a battle was about to start, so you could avoid a battle for free!
6) Opening a treasure chest while an exclamation point was over your head would also cancel the battle for free. Yay!
7) If you walked off into a bottomless pit while an exclamation point was over your head, it would cancel the battle, but also send you back to the room entrance. This reset any unsolved puzzles in the room, but not the solved puzzles, and also not the treasure chests. You could strategically use this to avoid battles in many cases, such as when you messed up a puzzle, or when you had just solved a puzzle and could safely reset the room, or when you had just gotten a chest that involed going the wrong way and needed to undo what you'd done to the room's puzzles.

All of this combined into making the act of avoiding random encounters into an actual game. A puzzle game, one that was really fun. Yeah, the battles were still pretty fun too - don't get me wrong, I like turn-based RPG battles more than almost any other type of gameplay in video games. And I understand what people mean when they complain about designers who try to "fix" their battles by just making them avoidable. But when avoiding them is fun instead of just a design cop-out? That's totally different. Avoiding battles in some games feels like subtracting gameplay from the game - but in Wild ARMs 3, it feels like diversifying the gameplay. You're replacing half the gameplay with a different type of gameplay. And when that type is puzzles, it totally works, because puzzles and RPGs are like peanut butter and chocolate.

You left out one of the important parts. Stronger random encounters over the course of the game cost more and more points from your meter to avoid, but at the same time, you find items over the course of the game which increase the length of your meter, and decrease the cost of avoiding encounters. This means that you keep roughly the same ability over the course of the game to avoid random encounters throughout dungeons appropriate to the point of the game you're in, but if you backtrack, it becomes increasingly easier to avoid battles, to the point that you can eventually do so indefinitely.

It's totally not hard to design a maze complicated enough that most players will get lost in it even without random encounters, but I don't think wandering around trying to get some kind of handle on where you're going is very interesting gameplay.

It's my favorite style of gameplay. And it is hard to design something because without resource limit you can just stick to the wall on your right and eventually get to the goal. With limited resources you can't do that you need to slowly learn the structure and find the shortest route possible eventually.

I've argued in favor of random encounters before, but I think "distracts you so you lose track of what you're doing" is practically never a point in their favor.

Often it can also be a problem, true. They need to distract a little, but not completely. That's why battles that last 5+ minutes are bad.