I HATE THE 'MISS' MECHANIC

in my current project, most hits will be 100% accurate. only a few things can change it:

>very speedy enemies might have innate evasion (about 10-20%), although most bosses don't

>anybody with positive Speed buff stages gets 10/20/30% accuracy/evasion, and negative stages are -x%. the accuracy counteracts enemy evasion, so as long as you debuff the enemy or buff yourselves you can completely negate all but one particular boss's evasion (only a certain party member can hit her reliably due to ~plot~). If you debuff the boss and buff your Speed though, the rest of the party can lower her evasion rate to 10% (from 70% innate)!

>there are no abilities with an innate miss chance, mostly because it didn't fit the characters -- none of them are gamblers or berzerkers.

I have nothing against misses, personally! I think they can add a risk/reward to using certain moves at certain times, but ONLY if the party has some sort of way to mitigate the evasion (or the party's own miss rate). You COULD use the axeman's big hit-all attack, but you might want to wait until turn 2 so that on turn 1 your mage can cast Freezing Mist to make all enemies unmissable.

I also normally have multi-hit attacks be the norm, at least for physical abilities (since the game i talk about above is my only recently game where spells can miss; mostly i have them be 100% accurate all the time). If the normal attack hits twice, and the warrior has 80% accuracy, they're often going to hit at least once. It's a nice way to tune their damage output while also showing that they're not as agile as the sneaky rogue with 99% accuracy that hits three times!

Yea, I agree that random "Misses" don't add a whole lot, especially because the chance is usually not low enough to spend a lot of time worrying about, but can randomly totally screw up a strategy. Essentially, every one of the your plans has a very low chance to just not work, and you can't do much about it.

I usually just remove miss chance altogether. I'll might add more distinct skills or states like a one-turn "Evasion" buff that makes you dodge all attacks, or a risky skill like Deathblow that does high damage with a 50% miss chance. There's a choice involved and it puts more control in the player's hands. As a general rule, I think randomness is fun if you can use it to create interesting decisions about taking risks. I even wrote an article about it :P

(I am also a huge fan of the Paper Mario "timed hit" system.)

I'm against the way RPGs in general handle misses. Often you have a low chance to miss which you can't do much if anything about. That said, I don't mind how Final Fantasy X implemented it where you can miss a lot, but only if you do something wrong.

The miss mechanic works well if the misses are telegraphed to the player somehow. Making things miss out of pure chance is infuriating and almost guarantees that a low-accuracy skill will not be used, but say you have a skill that temporarily blinds an enemy that is capable of hitting your party 100% of the time. That opens up for different strategies the player can work with, so long as it all behaves consistently.

Yeah... I think many older RPGs haven't aged well in this regard.

Pro tip, Drakonais: Never play EarthBound. Or at least don't ever use yo-yos or slingshots in that game. Or the Casey Bat.

But what about those action-RPGs where you can shove your sword so far down a monster's throat it comes out of his ass and the game can still tell you it's a "MISS"? I mean, how is simulating dodgy hit-detection simply NOT the greatest idea in gaming ever?

Agreeing with the general sentiment of the thread, though: It's kind of annoying if its completely unpredictable and/or there's really nothing you can do about it. Especially if you spent MP on it.

I'm thinking in FF14 terms where accuracy is the stat you get to the cap for your content then ignore (death to lack of in-game documentation!). I'm trying to find other ways to add risk, reward, and rng beyond accuracy and missing. An actual example from a doodle is a guy with a ball 'n chain weapon. Attacking with it takes a turn to start spinning it (or an immediate attack with fisticuffs if needed). Once he's spinning on his next turn he can finally attack... or spin faster! This has the benefit of more damage with the cost of deferring the attack with a chance of losing control of the ball. This means he'll either attack right away, hitting a random enemy with the chance of reduced damage, or lose the spin and revert back to his non-spinning state losing the combo entirely. There's a bit more diversity to his failure state than just zero damage and the player can invest in multiple levels of risk:reward (right now there's three spin levels, at max he has to attack).

(Synergy wise I think I had wind casters able to increase his spin level without losing control and up to one level past max with a cost of making him stunned for a turn because you just made him a tornado and now he feels sick)

There's not a lot of difference between a miss and failing to get a critical hit. In most games you lose the same amount of damage either way.

The core difference is the player's expectation. When the chance to get a critical hit is 5% you expect to fail, so when you succeed it feels good and when you fail it doesn't feel like anything. When the chance to hit is 95% you expect to succeed, so when you succeed it doesn't feel like anything and when you fail it feels like bullshit.

I think we can all agree that adding a 5% miss chance to every action in the game is total bullshit. The trick is making it so that the player only misses when they have the expectation to miss. Consider an enemy that casts a buff spell to increase their evasion rate. Even if they only buff it up to a 20% evasion chance, it communicates to the player that they should now expect to miss. The player will not be upset when they miss - they'll instead be pleased when they hit.

All of this only applies to the player missing. If you want to talk about enemy skills and attacks, you talk about their crits instead of their misses. It's far harder to give the player control over enemy crits though, since you often can't control their targeting. I think enemy crits are one of the most questionable design tendencies in RPGs. It's difficult to make them not be bullshit unless the game has a reliable 100%-successful tanking mechanic, or the game is just too easy for the crits to matter. It's fine if only the enemy's weakest attacks can crit, since that's not really any different than just randomly using a skill instead of attacking. But if every physical skill can crit, you may want to examine why the crap you are doing that. In difficult fights, it's basically just a random chance for the player to die when they do everything right.

what if your greatest desire is to break the player's heart </3

if the variance is gonna be so small then what's the point? go big or go home

Variance isn't a reason, it's the thing he's asking you the reason for. Also, variance and luck are the same thing. You can't have one without the other. If the variance/luck doesn't actually DO anything then you might as well accomplish it by randomly having different battle animations instead. That would be far more interesting than showing a meaninglessly different number.