IS GRINDING A FLAW IN RPGS?

Posts

Grinding should be reserved for extra curricular activities.
Versalia
must be all that rtp in your diet
1405
author=calunio
I don't think there's a right answer to this. It's a design choice, it's a matter of style. A game may require you to grind a bit to survive even random battles, and another game may be so easy you can skip most battles and still beat bosses. I don't think one is necessarily better than the other. Depends.


"a bit" of grinding is all that is acceptable unless the battle system is REALLY fun... otherwise how could it possibly be good game design to expect you to mow down random encounters for 2 hours to get to a survivable level
If your battle system isn't fun, you should have no battles at all.
author=calunio
If your battle system isn't fun, you should have no battles at all.


seconded
Versalia
must be all that rtp in your diet
1405
author=calunio
If your battle system isn't fun, you should have no battles at all.


Uhm, that's like saying if you don't have feet you shouldn't try to walk. Why did that need to be said...? Nobody said anything about battle systems that are not fun at all. I said it had to be REALLY fun, as in, above and beyond normal fun, to justify -required- amounts of grinding. Otherwise it is just time wasting / punishment.
I rarely have issues with that, in most cases where the game is set up to grind for a boss, I don't; yet I still win the battle. There are rare exceptions, though, but the point is that it is subjective how much grinding is required. To draw on the Pokemon example, I won the Red Battle in Soul Silver with a team at around Level 50 because I made up a good strategy (and team).

tl;dr: The need to grind is different for every player.
I really liked Lost Odyssey for the way it handled levelling up. It dished out a single level to every character for each battle below the optimum level for a dungeon, further levelling up first slowed down drastically, and eventually came to a stand still after a couple of levels. It never let you get too far ahead or fall too far behind. I felt that there was a consistent level of difficulty.

I'm really not all that great at most RPGs though, and I find I need to grind a fair few times. I found a lot of bosses in Final Fantasy XIII bloody difficult. I like what the game tried to do but grinding should be an option in case you need it, it should neither be taken away, or forced on you.
Melkino
solos collectors on purpose
2021
If it's a turnbased game, grinding will more often than not bore me to death--fighting the same enemy groups, killing the same enemies, over and over. But if I can finish the battle quickly, then I won't mind as much.

I often end up unintentionally enjoying grinding in an action rpg, though. With those kinds of games, I'm more focused on clearing the screen instead of getting exp. I remember wandering around (lost) in Sword of Mana that I ended up pretty overleveled for the final boss, haha. But I still had fun killing things in the deserts and mountains! :)
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
author=Little Wing Guy
I'm really not all that great at most RPGs though, and I find I need to grind a fair few times. I found a lot of bosses in Final Fantasy XIII bloody difficult. I like what the game tried to do but grinding should be an option in case you need it, it should neither be taken away, or forced on you.


This point is very true and is one of the main reason why grinding exists. The problem is that grinding also causes a great number of negative side-effects, which might not be worth it.

I'm just going to go ahead and link to my massive blog post about all the side-effects of grinding.

If your goal is to make your game possible to beat by people who are bad at RPGs, an alternate solution to grinding is to include multiple difficulty settings. This has far fewer negative side-effects than grinding in general, though it does still have its own set of side-effects.

Alternately, many of the side-effects of grinding are possible to mitigate if you're clever enough and include enough custom systems. Though adding these changes will introduce new issues as side-effects, and adding more changes to fix those side-effects will introduce more new issues as side-effects, ad infinitum. At some point you have to take your current set of problems and say, "These problems don't bother me as much as the alternative, so this is what I'm sticking with." Which problems bother you more than others will obviously vary from person to person. To me, being able to overpower all the game's challenges by grinding is a really serious problem.
awwwww yeah nice to see somebody else behind difficulty levels in RPGs
Thumbs up for difficulty levels!

I don't mind some escape valve for people to take if they're having trouble beating a boss, but grinding tends to be a pretty crappy one.
tardis
is it too late for ironhide facepalm
308
i have posted about this at least 3 or 4 times before in previous identical threads.

i adore grinding. i am the absolute biggest mindless-grind-whore i know. my favourite game of all time is Quest 64, and if you're familiar with it, you'll know two of the reasons i like it are the ludicrously high encounter rate and the borderline-necessary grinding. my favourite type of grinding is when it's not absolutely necessary to progress in the game but will still give you a leg up on a tough overall difficulty curve or a difficult patch of the game. Versalia said it best earlier in this topic. read that post for more on that.

if your game is fairly grind-free, that's not the end of the world for me, but if i can grind like a hardboiled motherfucker, it will make my day.

one of the biggest reasons i play pokemon (and one of my biggest timesinks within the game) is running around in tall grass training one or two pokemon up from nothing in the middle of the game just because i can. i might need them for a gym or something, i might not. point is i get off on slowly leveling my guys up, micromanaging stats, and fighting a buttload of random encounters.
i am pretty sure i am 100% alone in this so don't drastically change the way you make games because of little old me (please drastically change the way you make games because of little old me)

quotes:
author=LockeZ
If your goal is to make your game possible to beat by people who are bad at RPGs, an alternate solution to grinding is to include multiple difficulty settings. This has far fewer negative side-effects than grinding in general, though it does still have its own set of side-effects.

^this is good and cool and cool and good please do this

author=McBick
I think grinding is a major flaw if it takes up to 80% of your play time.

^i would probably enjoy a game like this if the setting were remotely cool.
I think Barbaros has the best way to prevent overleveling - if the player is about to level up to an overly high point, they get slaughtered like cattle.
Ah yes, in Tales of Destiny PS2, this is what happens what you try to grind for too long.



"After about 20 minutes of spinning around on the overworld with your entire party on auto, this king amongst men will show up. It's not possible to defeat him, and the only way to get out alive is to run, like Barby mentions at the beginning. Of course, you can't run if your lazy ass was just hoping to set the party to autolevel for a few hours while you were off doing something else.

He loves item use just as much as you would suspect. :D"

I think it's hilarious.
tardis
is it too late for ironhide facepalm
308
author=LightningLord2
I think Barbaros has the best way to prevent overleveling - if the player is about to level up to an overly high point, they get slaughtered like cattle.


no. this is dumb and the player should be able to overlevel if they want to as most players won't spend the time on it.
Versalia
must be all that rtp in your diet
1405
author=tardis
author=LightningLord2
I think Barbaros has the best way to prevent overleveling - if the player is about to level up to an overly high point, they get slaughtered like cattle.
no. this is dumb and the player should be able to overlevel if they want to as most players won't spend the time on it.

agreed

I effing HATED THIS in Persona3 when Death would come around and rape you for no good reason at all if you just happened to look away without pausing

it wasn't even to discourage over-levelling, all you have to do is high-tail it up to the next floor, it was PURELY to punish you for not pausing DX

I'm also firmly of the opinion that if someone needs to be actively discouraged from doing something in your game, it's a balance issue (if you need to punish people for grinding on the worldmap in tales of destiny, then the rewards for grinding are too good).
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
But reducing the reward is... a method of actively discouraging them.
arcan
Having a signature is too mainstream. I'm not part of your system!
1866
It seemed to me that what they were doing in the video was botting in which case keeping an asshole like that around is justified.
that barbatos thing sounds like a terrible idea

literally punishing the gamer for progressing their characters in an RPG

gg tales of series

edit: good to see i'm not the only one who sees the stupidity in this lol
Versalia
must be all that rtp in your diet
1405
author=LockeZ
But reducing the reward is... a method of actively discouraging them.

no no no no wrong

the reward is incentive. lowering the reward is lowering the incentive. lowering the reward is at worst passive discouragement. having a powerful monster pop up to buttrape them is actively discouraging them.