ENCOUNTERS MECHANICS

I was reading this thread and I'm wondering...

What's bothering people the most with random encounters ? Is it to be constantly bumped to the combat screen and that breaks the immersion ? Is it a fear to run out of supply or to use too much supplies ? Is it that generally people create battles that last for too long or just put too many battles ?

I know in my case there's too answers: wheter they be easy or not too many battles makes me mad, I get the feeling I can only do a few steps at a time. Secondly, it's the fear to run out of supplies.

So a system where there would be less frequent random encounters, they would be a bit harder (slightly longer) and you would regen your health and MP after every single battle making it impossible to run out of supplies.

How would people react to that ?

I feel like if you get fully healed after each battle, then repeating the same battle again a random (but generally pretty high) number of times as you wander around is extremely boring and repetitive. There's no "try not to use up resources" aspect to dungeons, so once you've beaten a battle once, you can do the exact same thing every time you encounter it again. This is why you hardly ever see fully-healed-after-battle and random-encounter in the same game.

So if you want to do it, that's a problem you'll have to come up with a solution to.

Games with cool encounter systems I can think of:

Wild ARMs 3 - You have an encounter-dodging meter that can store up to 10 points. Any time a random battle is about to start, you get an exclamation mark over your head. If you press the square button in time, you can avoid the battle, but at the cost of 1 point. Each battle you win gives you back a point, and sleeping in inns refills the points to full. What makes this really fun is that certain other actions - opening a chest, going through a door, falling off a cliff into the abyss - will allow you to dodge a battle without spending a point. So if you're really clever, you can get through dungeons with no random battles (and this is how I played the game, because they made dodging the battles more fun than fighting them)

Earthbound - when you get in a battle with an enemy whose agility is low enough that you'll go before it, and whose defense and HP are low enough that it'll die before it gets a turn, the battle doesn't even start. The screen just goes SMAAAAAASH and the enemy dies right there on the field screen and you even get the XP/money/items. I've seen other games that just let you dodge battles for free if you overpower them, but the SMAAAAAAASH and instant XP is extremely satisfying.

Breath of Fire 5. This game uses simple touch encounters, but you can destroy most normal enemies on the field screen without ever entering battle by going into dragon mode and plowing over them. The catch is that you can only use dragon mode for 100 seconds during the entire game. And you'll be using a lot of that time on bosses, because activating dragon mode in battle makes you invincible for a round or two. But if you ever go over your limit, you get a game over. (Also, every step you take while in normal human mode uses up 0.01 points.) And you can never, ever refill it. So you get 100 seconds of skipped battles to ration out over 30 hours of gameplay. I tend to use it when I'm out of healing items and random battles will probably kill me, but even then it's always heartwrenching to use those dragon points up because I am the kind of guy who saves up 99 elixirs because what if I need them later.

author=Darken
@idida1: that is just fake random encounters with no reasoning behind it.

unless of course you want add items/ fortune tellers that give you hints to what the buttons are. Pay 50g. Dodge encounters for a while.

Super Repel!

its my peeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee