[GM] RESPAWN ENEMIES? OR SAVOR A CLEAN FIELD?

It really depends on how you handle experience and character growth. If you're expected to level up and need to be at or above a certain level at points in the game it might be a good idea to allow for people to grind, thus letting monster respawn after a while.

If, however, you very carefully calculate levels/growth and have set standards for every area, then perhaps it would be best to just have those one-shot monsters.

You could do a mix, too - have areas where monsters will return and areas where they won't. So, the path through the forest could be bare of enemies after defeating them, but offshoots could still house them if you want to hunt. Or perhaps a certain amount of monsters are one-shot while the rest will respawn.

Perhaps a better compromise would be to give the players a menu option to get a randomized encounter after the enemies on the map are gone? Cthulhu saves the world does this, limited random encounters, then an option to just get one whenever you want afterwards.

I've always liked the Fire Emblem approach where there is a finite number of enemies in the game and even grinding has to be done strategically.

Yeah, the problem with older FE games was that if you leveled up the -wrong- characters, you were kinda screwed. And besides spoiling it, it tended to be trial and error who was worth leveling up.

If you're worried about balance if you let them farm enemies, have level ups plateau, as in eventually they just give you small numerical advantages, and the major power ups be story based. That still lets you allow players to get past a blockage if they can't quite get the strategy perfect, but prevent just grinding to oblivion.

Except FE introduced enemies that respawn on maps because the way it was set-up was deemed annoying and silly. You have so many characters and only a limited amount of grinding that you can do, so they allowed you to grind more by adding the Arena (so many good characters lost :< ) and respawning monsters.

You mean like Sacred Stones? That took all the tension and difficulty straight out of the game when you can just grind and eliminate the point of strategy. The Radiant Dawn game for the Wii was probably the best example of a long game with finite (but a ton of) enemies. That game made me think carefully about my every move. True Fire Emblem isn't for everyone, so that is probably why they made it more like an ordinary RPG in the latest games to widen audience. The 3DS one wasn't bad, but it lacked all the tension because you could just turn the difficulty down. Its like if Dark Souls had an easy mode.

If strategy isn't important and you just want the player to explore, why not go the Mystic Quest route and cram reloading enemy spots into everywhere off the beaten path? That's the only thing good about the game I liked- the bizarre static enemy spots were placed around the maps according to level design and (in theory) you could think about the enemies you should defeat first. Unfortunately the oversimplicity of the game made it so you'd just run into all the encounters while mashing buttons repeatedly, making it all dull.

I really liked enemies as a resource, which is odd since I'm putting respawning enemies in LandTraveller, a game all about resources. It would be terrible to have limited enemies because it can be a multiplayer game and someone could go around stealing all the kills. In some game designs, they must respawn. But usually, it is for games like A Link to the Past where you aren't grinding and are defeating enemies simply because they're trying to stop you.