WHAT IS A CHALLENGING RPG?

I think a good conversation to start with is from the top; what are the fundamentals of challenge? Zachary has the right idea; constraint of options, tolerance of mistakes, and so on. A lot of people get too specific about difficulty, when a lot of it are just fundamentals.

For example, room for error. How much is a player going to get punished by a mistake, not knowing/applying the rules and their skills, or poor planning? Basically, if you fuck up, then what? Games where you're punished severely for shitting the bed tend to be pretty difficult, but one must remember to remember the difference between being set back and being unable to proceed. Neither is bad, but games tend to focus more on the former than the latter.

For example, having to redo a segment of a dungeon because you didn't prepare can be an appropiate application of setting a player back, but having to redo a 10 minute cutscene because you lost an extremely boss fight is not. Solution? Being able to immediately retry difficult battles if you lose. Acceptable compromise, the player isn't being set back, but you are unable to proceed with the game until you win.

You should absolutely be able to punish a player for not knowing or applying the rules of the game. That's what their for, the fundamental limitations of a game is what makes it a game, and if they can't adapt, they should play another game.

author=Max
I agree with what I think you're saying, but I think "punish" is too loaded of a word to use. Game-overs or fail states are really just another form of feedback from the game to the player.

I'm not sure I agree, after all, to 'punish' basically means having something unfavorable happen to you for an offense, which fits what the logical end of 'difficulty' means. It's even in game lexicon, in fighting game terms, to 'punish' a move means for a player to eat a combo or a special attack in retailiation to a failed offensive.

I mean, you never just give players the sword. You make them overcome challenges to earn it. By overcoming one set of challenges they're able to reduce the difficulty of other challenges. Figuring out the best order to do this in is, in itself, its own challenge as well.

"Easy" games tend to either make this choice extremely obvious (reducing the skill level needed to succeed) or make it so every option works (reducing the punishment of failure).

For example, every new set of buyable weapons in FF7 works is an extremely obvious choice, because they don't even appear until after you've already finished the challenge of acquiring enough gold to buy them. The items in treasure chests are also extremely obvious choices because the cost of exploring each dungeon fully and finding all the chests is completely negligible.

In FF12, you have lots of equipment choices which are meaningfully different, but making the right choices is still easy for the second reason - there are no bad choices, or even bad combinations of choices. Choosing armor that gives HP, defense, or block chance will all work equally well on any character type, you don't have to figure out what's best for your build.

Getting equipment upgrades in Dragon Age: Origins is more difficult because the game not only gives you a large number of options but also gives everything meaningful pros and cons, which you have to balance against each-other to create a workable build for your party. If you spend too much gold on weapons you could lose in long battles due to running out of healing items, and if you spend too much gold on healing items you could lose in short battles due to having bad armor. You have to carefully not only manage your resources, but then figure out which challenges are best suited to how you chose to manage your resources, and approach them in the appropriate order.

This creates a high level of difficulty that, quite interestingly, exists entirely outside of combat. This aspect of the difficulty in Dragon Age revolves around planning, long-term strategy and party-building.

Finite grind. Look at Soul Shepherd. In that game, what Zombero did is that you grind souls that give stats, but you can only have one of each type equipped, and after you get every available soul you can't farm much more. After that, it's all about how you use the souls to make your ideal party. In order for a system like this to work, there also needs to be an element of strategy, where your party setup and equipment has a large effect on the outcome of the battle. This makes the RPG not just a farm-fest, but also something that needs to be figured out to guide your farming. This is, imo, as hard as it gets in RPGs.

I feel like this topic is almost...too broad... to result in constructive discourse.

Generally, puzzles are more challenging than straight up grind.

For example, making all monsters have weakness, whether physical, magical, a certain element, or even a certain spell. Puzzle battles.

Second, monster damage must count. I believe in the 2 1/3 rule. As in, a challenging battle is one that in two (2) turns, each monster has dealt roughly 1/3 damage to the party. This means in a party of 6 monsters, assuming all of them are attackers and not support, either two party members are dead, damage is mixed, or three party members are wounded. If you have a party of three (Tales From The Reaper is a good example), you're kinda screwed unless you have some awesome healing ability. That said, you should have categories of attackers:

• Archers: they do small damage, but they don't miss, so it adds up
• Magicians: They can either be heavy hitters, or have status attacks
• Support: Basically the white magic equivalent of magicians. They heal and do buffs
• Venomous: They cause status attacks rather than being physically powerful
• Avoiders/shelled: They aren't so much attacking experts as they are hard to destroy
• Attackers: heavy damage dealers.

Dealing with each of these is a challenge in itself.

Also, challenge shouldn't be unfair. Just as you don't want the dreaded 0 damage because the party overleveled, you never ever want one hit kills because the party is underlvl. This was what made me rage about Soul Shepherd and call it a sucky game. You literally had to camp for awhile at low level battles because even going to the next screen would kill parties in one round.

If you want a tricky battle, ghosts and a carbuncle. The ghosts can only be hit by magic, but you can code it so that as long as the carbuncle is alive, all enemies have reflect. Meaning the ghosts not only avoid attacks, but reflect spells. And you have to deal damage to the carbuncle physically, because it also has reflect. Make the carbuncle have high evade and you have an annoying battle.

I saw this video today and thought of this discussion. An incredibly powerful enemy is defeated using ironclad strategy and precise execution. The player's characters are all at less than 100 HP; a single hit means instant death.