PLAYER'S IMAGINATION IN RPGS

No, you didn't really make sense.

Are you asking whether your scenes are clear enough? I'd have to see each scene to tell you.

The scene you mentioned in FF4 is pretty clear. You kill two of the soldiers and the third one runs away. There's no ambiguity.

I don't think I've ever played an RPG where enemies were merely knocked out without it being spelled out for you. If the enemy survives the fight, it's always in a cut scene, and you can tell because the enemy is still standing there in the cut scene afterward. Normally they'll also not disintigrate when defeated during the battle.

Regarding your scene, trains are pretty loud already, so I can think of a lot of situations where a fight could be conducted without making too much noise. But I think almost all of them require the battle to be fast enough that you defeated the enemy before he could call for help. Maybe make the battle end in a game over as soon as the enemy gets a turn and uses the "Call For Help" skill? So the player has to either stun the enemy with a status effect, or win in one round. (Of course, make sure to tell the player that they have to do this. And since this is the opening scene it should probably be really easy to do.)

I guess my general answer to your original question is that if something isn't clear, and it's something that people will wonder about it, it needs to be clearer. That seems like kind of common sense...

Also, stop hitting enter a million times in the middle of your sentences. It makes your posts look ultra stupid. Why do you keep doing that?

What you are really talking about is not so much imagination as "Suspension of disbelief". The ability for the audience to not really care about certain things that don't make sense in order to enjoy the game/story.

Most games when you think about them a bit more closely don't really make sense. At all.

There's also another part about ambiguity. Though your train example is an example of suspension of disbelief while the final fantasy example is an example of ambiguity. (You don't show the head being chopped off, how can you be sure it was chopped off?)

On the whole ambiguity doesn't tend to matter unless it matters. And it only matters when the ambiguity is "false". So that something that shouldn't matter suddenly matters (See GFs in Final Fantasy 8. First they don't matter, they're just a game mechanic and game mechanics are completely disconnected from the game. Then suddenly they are a plot point).

Intentional ambiguity is a different thing. But if it shares too many similarities with non-mattering ambiguity you have to point it out.


Generally people are very willing to suspend disbelief. Only if/when they don't enjoy the game and/or are pointed to the unbelievable thing happening will they notice it. And then it might turn into the nitpicky niggle that zero punctuation is made of "this is makes frustratingly little sense. Why did someone mention it?"

Turn based is a strategy sort of thing like chess.
There are games that make agility and weapon swing and weapon length into an equasion of who goes first.
As for people's houses thats why some games have lockpicking or make it illegal to enter someone's house and have laws against such. Other games just bar the doors. I have a feeling locks were less common in the midieval days of yore.

What sucks is how dumb some people can be and not think about metaphores. Like when WWF's Ultimate Warrior used to cut promos. He would speak in metaphores but in retrospect everyone says they had no idea what he was talking about... well they're too dumb to comprehend metaphores.

Don't spell it out for people wondering they died... leave it open ended. You can leave them for dead... but then you find out later that they got up and walked away. A lot of men didn't die in civil war battles (unless they were stabbed). They died later. Medics would walk the battlefield afterward and find survivors and help them. Couldn't other characters come... find them alive and give them a phoenix down?

Don't tell the player anything. Don't hold their hand chop it off so they have to deal with it.

Add in the sound of a Vicodin rattling in a bottle, and the occasion whack of a cane against flesh, and it is even better. :)

Here's another explanation, from what I've read this should make sense. Most retroRPG games, you don't see your enemies on the field and they pop up at random. But bosses, they don't pop up whatsoever, they just stand there in their bulding like an idiot, talk to you as you do nothing, and then the hero and villain start fighting! "When you have to shoot, shoot! Don't talk!", couldn't say it better than AVGN. They don't explain that.
But when you see enemies on the field and you become relieved, and then you walk into a cave, walk onto a random tile, and hear a strange voice, and THEN a boss battle appears, that's screwed up!!! And if you explained THAT in your game, people would think your nuts,"Well, the reason I did that is because I believe you can't have one without the other, everyone else screws it up!", well...that person would suck at game developing to think that and SAY IT OUT LOUD!
But if you were in a game where ever battle, including boss battles, were random...that's even worse.

Or as a better example, Golden Sun, when you fight for your first time, you are defeated easily...how are you still alive years later? YOU WERE KILLED FOR GOD'S SAKE!!!

author=Zephyr
You could probably even add 168 hours to the game timer without problem.

And if there's an actual countdown on the screen, it won't matter if you get away with lots of time left, you're ALWAYS CLOSE.

"That was a close one!", is that what you're talking about? If someone were to give you 30 minutes, and your at the end of the area in 10, they would always make it seem like the time is alot shorter then the gameplay shows in cutscenes?

author=Max McGee
"Those shots aren't actually hitting my guy. The red bloody circle filling in around the edges of my screen are just an abstract rendition of how CLOSE I am to being hit, because no human being could just shrug off actually being shot with a bullet."

Actually, that's how the writers of the Uncharted series put it in relation to the main character, Drake's extraordinary luck everyone talks about; gameplay wise, getting hit means getting closer to death, but story wise, getting hit is really only the bullets grazing Drake or missing entirely; death means that his luck ran out and he actually got popped in the head or something.

I'd also like to add that Uncharted is ridiculously stellar and that everyone should play them.

I don't think I've ever played an RPG where enemies were merely knocked out without it being spelled out for you. If the enemy survives the fight, it's always in a cut scene, and you can tell because the enemy is still standing there in the cut scene afterward. Normally they'll also not disintigrate when defeated during the battle.

It depends on the game. There are a few RPGs I've played where the player character engages in fights with soldiers or human enemies or whatever, random encounters, whatever defeats them as normal, and later on, it's established that those characters survived. For example, there's a scenario in Xenogears where the main character escapes a sand cruiser, the player fights a lot of soldier enemy random encounters along the way, and then Bart and his crew destroy the cruiser and rescues/captures everyone inside. In a later scene it's noted that there were no casualties (which is fitting for Bart's motivations).

Basically the way I look at it is this; 1. Disintegrating enemy sprites is a game mechanic to show that the enemy is defeated, that's pretty much it. Realistically, the battle is over once the enemies no longer present a threat. Sometimes that means that poor enemy soldier has to get his torso slashes apart, and sometimes it just means one can assume he just got knocked unconscious, or whatever.

Either way, the battle is over, you get your money and experience, the party moves on. I think it's pretty silly to assume that in RPGs the protagonists beat everyone to death. Considering the fact that most RPG main characters lean on good, random encounters, especially with human enemies, are just them trying to overcome an obstacle to get from one objective to the next, not murderous rampages.

It's all common sense.