BEEN THERE, DONE THAT

It's more of towns vs. overworld.
The overworld encompasses dungeons.

I have to admit I can't really come up with any. Dialogue trees maybe? I love dialogue trees. It's really the only thing I couldn't imagine a good RPG be without. I mean what's the point if you can't say nasty things to people on the street?

Battle mechanics.

HP, attack ratings, elemental effects.... Strangeness that defies geology/metallurgy like gold armor protecting better than bronze or iron... Changing jobs instantaneously.

I feel guilty for going with the status quo there instead of coding up more realistic location/material damage and wounding, but I've purposely chosen those cliched RPG battle mechanics so players can crunch the numbers and design characters and parties to meet the game's challenges.

I'll grant you battles. It's a slight abstraction of the dealings of the world, in a somewhat easy to handle form. (Breath of Fire 2, for example, used battles at one point as the way of showing your team clearing weeds, rocks, and stumps from a field.)

I'll grant you the 'Civ/Dungeon' divide. Instory, the characters need a place to recuperate; out of the storyline, the players need somewhere they can treat as a central base, even if that base moves from time to time.

I specifically and explicitly do not grant you epicness.

I'll play a game with ye olde epic storyline #73, yes. And I may enjoy it if the other factors are good. But 'epic', in the traditional sense, is not something I require out of my game stories. The examples you gave above were hyper-simple tales, single events even. There's space between that and 'gots to saev teh wurld' on that scale. There's a fair amount of space.

Consider this: The Chosen(TM) Destined(TM) Hero, in his Epic Quest of Epicness, crashes through village #613 on his quest. He breezes in, solves their single problem, and breezes back out. As far as he's concerned, the village was just a place to rest, restock and possibly upgrade supplies, practice a little (the fight against the local threshold guardian plot-monster), and possibly get some kind of token reward. After that, he's off, and he's not likely to ever show up again. Total time? Maybe three days ingame, and that's assuming a full 'sleep-for-the-night' stop at the inn both before and after battling the plot-monster. The village, and its inhabitants, are nothing more than a pitstop and plotpoint, at least as far as the CDH is concerned.

Now, take that same village. Put it into a finer-grained detail resolution. Instead of simply being random generic villagers, assume the inhabitants are people - they have likes, dislikes, personal friendships and enmities, strengths, and weaknesses. Place them in the middle of a somewhat large challenge - instead of a single marauding plotmonster, have them face a curse on the harvest, for example. And let the storyline explore how these people react to this challenge. It's not an epic 'Saev Teh Wurld' plot, no. It's a more focused, more personal one - 'save OUR world'. As with any other storyline, it'll look bad if done poorly. And I'll admit the story (and thus the game) will be shorter than the traditional 'epic epic of epicness' story. But there's no reason to assume that it's any less worthy because of this.

post=143789

1 - Epicness
Most RPG plots have to do with something as big as save the world, kill the evil wizard who's going to destroy the world, get the crystals to restore the balance of the world, or at the very least bring peace among the peoples of the world. While it's a cliche, maybe people don't want to play a game where your goal is to rescue a kitten, find a lost hat, or even save the main character's lover, because it doesn't feel "big" enough. Feeling big is usually good motivation. It often works.

But my gripe is when an RPG really starts with a story that makes the main character feel very insignificant, like the first battle just has you fighting slimes with a pointy stick, and his dream is to one day become a guard or something. But instead he's eventually given the overly ambitious task of being GUARDIAN OF THE WORLD.

Say...
cleaning a basement from rats before realizing you have to save a SMALL KINGDOM (not the world hehe) would bother you Darken? =S

bahleted

There are many ways to make the player feel like a badass. I think the best way is to actually allow a good idea from the players have a great effect. That means if you plan for an encounter to be difficult, but a player figures out a great way to stack the deck to his advantage, allow the encounter to get much easier than originally intended. If you can play out the encounter in a way that's it's now rather easy, but the player can see how much harder it would have been if it weren't for his great idea then he's definitely going to feel like a badass. In other situations the player may roleplay his character in a way that makes said character a badass.

Of course, there's always the risk that the players fail to make themselves or their characters come off as badasses so I guess the "let's pit them against demon-lords" idea is a safeguard where the DM tries to make make the characters into badasses if the players fail. Still, I would suggest first and foremost giving the players a chance to be badasses by their own actions. Heck the safeguard isn't really that safe, you can easily end up just making the demon-lord threat feel generic.

In the same vein, I would advice against relying to heavily on powerful sounding foes in your RPGs. Without a good writing to back it up, it's guaranteed to fail against a large percentage of players.

3 - Town-Wilderness structure
Almost every RPG I know uses a town-wilderness structure, where towns are the places you get rest, shop and talk, and wilderness (forests, deserts, caves) are the places you fight. Sometimes you'll fight in the town or talk in the wild, but it doesn't affect the basic structure much. It's obviously very easy to avoid this formula, but people probably still use it because it keeps a good sense of pacing to the game.

I definitely agree, but I think the pacing is the key here. One reason I like RPGs is that if the pacing is good it will switch activity before the current activity gets boring. By allowing the player to switch activity it's possible for the game to remain fun longer.

Also, since this topic seems to be about RPG conventions, I submit getting stronger and learning more skills. This is a so popular mechanic that many other genres became more RPG like in this respect. In fact, "RPG elements" often refers to exactly this.

This mechanic has both an advantage in terms of story and gameplay. Story wise it makes the player feel that the characters are getting better and better. Gameplay wise it's a way to introduce more options gradually so you won't overwhelm the player.

While I agree that making the player feel badass is an excellent way of rewarding them, I dislike it when they can become so powerful that nothing can stop them. They should feel like they can beat the snot out of a demon lord, but it should still be challenging for them to do so, too! If that makes any sense.