LOCKEZ'S PROFILE

I've gone on record as generally hating, in RPGs, when my abilities randomly fail or have very random effects. I usually don't use those abilities, even if they're extremely strong. Not just because they're useless, but also because they're not fun. I think most people don't use those abilities, unless they have to. And if they have to, and the ability fails, it sucks balls, because they had no control over their failure. When the player fails, it should be his or her own fault, not because the game rolled dice and decided to make you lose this time.

But, are there ways to do randomness right?

Let's look at enemy abilities. They're usually random. And even if they're actually a set algorithm instead of being random, they're unpredictable, because the player doesn't know the algorithm. This is basically the same end result as randomness: the player knows something's going to happen, but doesn't know what. No one (to my knowledge) has ever accused any RPGs of sucking because you don't know ahead of time everything the enemies are going to do, though. What's the difference here? Why is this kind of unpredictability okay, but it's a problem when the player casts Spell Roulette and causes a random magical effect?

Or as another example, critical hits. The difference between a critical hit and a regular hit is probably the same as the difference between a regular hit and a miss, but people cry out for games to remove miss chances. Critical hits cause problems in a few games, but usually they add fun to the game and no one minds them.

In one of my games, I have been working on classes and ability sets, and have been toying with randomness in a few of them, trying to come up with ways to make it work. Here are some of my ideas so far:


* A class that starts out extremely powerful but extremely random, but as the player uses the class, it gains new abilities that make it less random.
Goal: make the randomness feel like a problem that can be overcome, instead of one that can't.

-- Main ability: steal an extremely powerful combat item from the enemy and then toss it, dealing massive damage or providing party-wide healing/buffs. can only carry one item at a time, so if you steal an item you don't really need, you wasted a round.
-- First upgrade: a powerful ability on a long cooldown, giving you some predictable damage once in a while
-- Second upgrade: another powerful ability on a long cooldown, also restores MP
-- Third upgrade: you deal minor damage any time you try to steal
-- Fourth upgrade: your steal ability no longer has a chance to fail
-- Fifth upgrade: free extra damage after every ten steals


* A class that causes random effects to continue for several rounds, allowing you to respond to them.
Goal: Make the randomness be something you can build off of by using different abilities strategically. The rest of the battle is influenced meaningfully, and the player's response is "make use of what I got" instead of "keep trying the same thing until it randomly succeeds."

-- Main ability: start dancing and causing random effects. The dance continues for the whole battle. Effects include damage, healing, buffs, and ailments. You don't lose control of the character; you can use other abilities (from your secondary class) while you keep dancing.
-- At the minimum, this at least allows the party to decide to focus on healing because the dance caused damage this round, or vice-versa.
-- The player can choose different dances, which have different possible effects.
-- Many effects are very short duration buffs or ailments, allowing the player to exploit them by strategically choosing when to use the party's other abilities. For example, a buff that triples one party member's healing for one round, or a debuff that makes all enemies weak to fire for one round. This hopefully causes the player to sometimes consider using skills he'd never otherwise use, because they're briefly much better.

Do these ideas sound like they'd work? Do you guys have other ideas of how to make randomness fun and compelling instead of just a nuisance?

...it would look like this:

This topic is about making sure the player has a response to everything your enemies do. Because what's the point of a challenge that literally cannot be overcome? Even if that challenge is just a specific ability, and the game can be overcome even if you fail at overcoming that ability, shouldn't there be one or more "right" ways to respond to every threat?

I'll start with a slightly paraphrased excerpt from a boss design article I wrote:

author=Five points of designing a boss
In most RPGs, a lot of enemy damage is unavoidable - you're supposed to heal it, not avoid it. So the definition of "success" when responding to an ability needs to take that into account. What's success in this case? Surviving until the next ability? Taking less damage than you can recover? It depends on the game, the boss, and the ability, in truth. In a game where you can fully heal one character each round, you can be said to have succeeded if you survive the hit. In a game where your MP is extremely limited, you can be said to have succeeded if you minimized your MP costs. If a boss uses a skill to inflict a status ailment that makes you take triple damage from the next attack, you can be said to have succeeded if you cleanse the ailment before the next time you get attacked.

In that last example, taunting the boss to attack someone other than the ailed character can make the ailment easier to handle. In fact, taunting the boss to attack someone less vulnerable instead of someone more vulnerable is a common way of dealing with threats in any RPG that has tanking. This is why tanking has become popular in RPGs: it gives the player a response to most of the things enemies do, so they can feel like they succeeded. Tanking can easily be done wrong - it's extremely hard to make tanking an optional way of playing, for example - but when done right it lets the player respond to enemy abilities by partially nullifying them, which creates engaging gameplay with success and failure conditions, but doesn't get in the way of the standard RPG idea of unavoidable damage that must be healed (because you're still taking some damage).

If a skill has no way to respond to it, it's a bad skill. For example, randomly stunning the player for one round, with no way to avoid it. For a longer stun, healing it would feel like a successful response by the player. But for a one-round stun, even if you have a spell or item to remove the effect, removing it has almost the same effect as leaving it alone.

Status effects are a really common culprit for having no way to be countered. You give an enemy a way to prevent the player from acting, but you don't give the player a way to do anything about it. Or at least not a good way. Other slightly less serious but equally common problems are unpredictable big damage spells, enemy buffs that can't be prevented or dispelled, and other types of enemy power that can't responded to in any way other than "do what you were already doing, but with less margin of error." These sorts of enemy strategies aren't strictly bad, but they would be more fun if the player could feel like he "won" against them.

I'm interested to hear problems people have encountered with coming up with ways for their enemy skills to have counters. And I REALLY want to hear your cleverest methods of giving the player a way to respond. But if you just have a problem and not a clever solution: post it! We'll help you!

Here's an example from this week in my MUD, working with a co-developer who wanted to design a superboss. This is a Final Fantasy fan game, and he wanted to make the boss be based on Ruby Weapon.

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There are games where everything you do has to do directly with your main goal.

For example, look at almost any game based on the original Star Wars trilogy. Every enemy you fight is either an Imperial soldier, a bounty hunter working for Imperial soldiers, an attack creature under the command of Imperial soldiers, or a robot or vehicle under the control of the Empire. And every time you fight them, it's because you're breaking into or out of some Imperial facility, or being chased because you just got done with breaking into or out of some Imperial facility, or protecting a Rebel base from Imperials that are trying to storm it. You are fighting the Empire, every single step of the entire game.

That's very common in action games, but extremely rare in RPGs, for some reason I can't quite figure out. It's also very common in movies and certain types of books.

There are many other games - and media of other types - where there are major parts of the story where your current goal only seems tangentially related to the primary goal, but is creating a framework and a buildup. In Chrono Trigger, when you go to 65 million BC the first time and get stranded, it feels like a filler dungeon. Especially since you're in the middle of a story arc involving fighting Magus in 600 AD. But, by spending an hour or two in 65 million BC, instead of just the 10 that you would need to spend if the game let you just grab the Dreamstone and immediately leave, the prehistoric setting is established and feels familiar when it becomes extremely important later (because Lavos falls from the sky).

But... even knowing that, it still feels like filler. Why? Because you're not fighting Magus? No, I don't think so. Taking a break from one major conflict to temporarily turn your attention to another one isn't filler. But what is filler is only addressing that conflict at the beginning and end of the dungeon, and not in what I'm doing in between. For a dungeon called the Reptite Lair, you'd think there would be more reptites in it, and that the five who were there would be doing something other than chilling out in the basement. You'd think Azala would have more than one bodyguard, that there would be reptite troops poised to attack the human village, that the gang of reptite thieves who invaded the village would appear throughout the dungeon or at least be mentioned ever agan. Instead, you're told "They went this way! Follow them!" and you fight your way through an hour of wild beasts (plus one easily avoidable battle against actual reptites) before arriving at the boss.

Combat is important, right? This is a video game: story and gameplay are inseperable, the story is told through the gameplay. Why am I effectively spending an hour doing something unrelated to the goal? And yeah, it's in the way of the goal, technically, so it's not totally unrelated; but it's related in about the same way as the fact that I need to get food every few hours and repair the hole that got torn in my clothes in that last battle. It's not telling any part of the story. It's irrelevant and should be skipped - or replaced with something that the player cares about.

And still other games, the worst type, don't even have nearly as much pretext as Chrono Trigger. Your entire explanation for fighting enemies in a given cave is "this cave is on your way to the next town." And the enemies are just wild animals, unrelated to your goal in any way. Why not just skip this, fade to black and cut ahead to the next scene, like anything else that didn't matter to the game would be skipped? Final Fantasy 6, for example, as much as I love it, has at least five dungeons that fall into this category: Mt. Koltz, Figaro Caves, the second trip through Figaro caves, the Serpent Trench, and Baron Falls. Not a shred of reason why any of them aren't just part of the world map, except to make the game longer. And practically all overworld sections in all RPGs fall into this category - though two non sequitor battles on an overworld is certainly vastly better than an entire dungeon of them.

Of course, there are situations in games where what you're doing just isn't part of the action. It's part of the build-up. That's fine! That's not getting in the way of keeping the gameplay focused on the conflict. What does get in the way, I feel strongly, is when you have action that isn't related to the story. Not all the parts of the story have to be action, but all the action has to be part of the story. And if not all of it, then maybe please at least most of it? Otherwise at some point I start to feel like the Empire isn't really what the game is even about. It's about bats and slimes.

What's your opinion on games that spend most of the game just having the player do whatever's on the way to their goal instead of actually fighting for their goal and taking part in the main conflict? Do you think this is all hogwash and story doesn't matter at all in games, and any excuse for battles is fine no matter how flimsy as long as it puts the player in fights? Do you think there are RPGs that successfully keep the player engaged in the main conflict, or where the issue exists but isn't problematic? I'd love to hear about those, and why you think they work when others don't.