DESERTOPA'S PROFILE

I'm personally a big fan of relationship value systems, when the character writing is at all good. Obviously though, some implementations work out a lot better than others. Here are some of my thoughts on the subject:

Rather than simply letting the player make one character display signs of preference or attraction for one character over another (such as choices that boil down to a question of "which character do you want to be nice to? Do you compliment her or insult her? Who do you give the gift to? etc.) set up situations where the characters can display their compatibility and build rapport with each other. Maybe they discover a shared love of nature, or have fun trashing a play they both think is terrible, or have an argument where they fiercely disagree with each other but come away with increased respect for each others' intellect and integrity. Make sure the audience sees why and how the characters are into each other, not just that they're into each other.

Try to avoid systems that make characters' attraction seem too mechanistic. Can you improve every relationship with a well chosen gift? It starts to look silly when you can get someone to like you just by piling sufficiently large quantities of stuff on them. Make sure to avoid any situation where you can "farm" affection points by doing the same thing over and over.

Having alternate endings influenced by relationship values is nice, but having continual payoff over the course of the game is better. Try to work in occasional situations where characters interact with each other differently depending on the state of their relationship values.

My favorite framework for relationship values would be something closer to the Private Action systems of the early Star Ocean games, which I described in this comment if you're not already familiar.

I took it that Ludro's rant does have basis in fact, but I wouldn't say the plot threads evaporated. There are other hints elsewhere in the game that Powell-Mercer is pretty ruthless and up to some sketchy stuff, but it doesn't pay out as part of the final conflict. It might be a sequel hook, but it might just be another worldbuilding detail. I don't think the author is going to respond to comments on the game page any time soon though; I had to track down his youtube account in order to get in touch with him.

There are two types of mazes, "simple" and "complex." A "simple" maze can be extremely byzantine, but is defined by having no wall sections which are encircled by corridor. In a "simple" maze, you can eventually reach your destination by hugging one wall, although it might take a long time (although RPGs often apply obstacles which will force you to visit other destinations and backtrack, hugging one wall will eventually force you to traverse the entirety of the maze.) A "complex" maze, on the other hand, has at least one wall section encircled by corridor. This makes it impossible to traverse the entire maze by hugging one wall. Think of a city block, where if you keep to one side, you'll just go in circles endlessly.

author=RyaReisender
Random encounters add a lot more than just game length if done well.

Imagine a huge maze-like dungeon without random encounters. That would get pretty boring over time. Also random encounters "help" to get the player lost. If he doesn't get distracted through combat, he could probably solve every dungeon easily, no matter how hard you design it to be. On top of that, random encounters also serve as a sort of time limit on how fast you need to clear the dungeon before running out of resources and have to teleport out (yes, good games offer teleportation skills to leave the dungeon).

I still think the main flaw of most random encounter is lack of variety. If people would just ensure a very high variety, they don't need to think of other "improvements".

It's totally not hard to design a maze complicated enough that most players will get lost in it even without random encounters, but I don't think wandering around trying to get some kind of handle on where you're going is very interesting gameplay.

I've argued in favor of random encounters before, but I think "distracts you so you lose track of what you're doing" is practically never a point in their favor.

author=LockeZ
Wild ARMs 3 had a few major systems happening in dungeons that affected random battles, and when they came together they turned into something magical and beautiful.
1) Almost every room in every dungeon was chock full of puzzles, to an extent that only Lufia 2 and the Zelda series have really ever matched. This meant you ended up walking back and forth a lot, and if you were better at solving puzzles, you got in fewer random battles.
2) Instead of just instantly getting in a battle after a random number of steps, the game would put an exclamation mark over your head. Two seconds later, the battle would start... unless you prevented it. There were multiple ways to do this:
3) In the corner of the screen was an encounter gauge. It started filled up with 10/10 points at the beginning of each dungeon. If you pressed the Cancel button while an exclamation point was over your head, you would not get in a battle, but you would lose one point from your encounter gauge. If you fought a battle and won, it refilled one point. When the gauge is empty, you can't cancel random battles any more.
4) There were gems scattered throughout dungeons that, when you walked over them, they would refill one point of your encounter gauge. Most of these were behind puzzles or out of the way, sometimes requiring cleverness in order to save more encounter points than you spent getting to them.
5) If you walked off a ledge that dropped down to a lower platform, while an exclamation point was over your head, the act of falling off the ledge would avoid the battle without costing a point from your gauge. However, getting back up to where you were wasn't always easy. But sometimes you needed to fall anyway, and could wait to fall until a battle was about to start, so you could avoid a battle for free!
6) Opening a treasure chest while an exclamation point was over your head would also cancel the battle for free. Yay!
7) If you walked off into a bottomless pit while an exclamation point was over your head, it would cancel the battle, but also send you back to the room entrance. This reset any unsolved puzzles in the room, but not the solved puzzles, and also not the treasure chests. You could strategically use this to avoid battles in many cases, such as when you messed up a puzzle, or when you had just solved a puzzle and could safely reset the room, or when you had just gotten a chest that involed going the wrong way and needed to undo what you'd done to the room's puzzles.

All of this combined into making the act of avoiding random encounters into an actual game. A puzzle game, one that was really fun. Yeah, the battles were still pretty fun too - don't get me wrong, I like turn-based RPG battles more than almost any other type of gameplay in video games. And I understand what people mean when they complain about designers who try to "fix" their battles by just making them avoidable. But when avoiding them is fun instead of just a design cop-out? That's totally different. Avoiding battles in some games feels like subtracting gameplay from the game - but in Wild ARMs 3, it feels like diversifying the gameplay. You're replacing half the gameplay with a different type of gameplay. And when that type is puzzles, it totally works, because puzzles and RPGs are like peanut butter and chocolate.

You left out one of the important parts. Stronger random encounters over the course of the game cost more and more points from your meter to avoid, but at the same time, you find items over the course of the game which increase the length of your meter, and decrease the cost of avoiding encounters. This means that you keep roughly the same ability over the course of the game to avoid random encounters throughout dungeons appropriate to the point of the game you're in, but if you backtrack, it becomes increasingly easier to avoid battles, to the point that you can eventually do so indefinitely.

Stealing an enemy's weapon while they're actually using it is kind of bizarre though. I mean, trying to take someone's sword while they're trying to kill you with it is a lot more likely to result in a shiny new stab wound rather than a new weapon. I think it might be interesting to have stealing of enemy equipment have a 100% success rate when the enemy is incapacitated (asleep, paralyzed, etc.) but a 0% success rate when they're still active.

If you incorporate several different status effects that can incapacitate an enemy, you could spice up stealing a bit, since instead of just spamming steal over and over, you'd want to find what status effect they're vulnerable to.