MERLANDESE'S PROFILE

How do you feel about skill as an unlocking mechanism? This is more of a general curiosity, but I'm bringing it up here for the sake of the contest--in case people were considering implementing it.

The Mario RPG/Paper Mario series is best known for this. Let's say I have the technique Multijump, and I've decided to pick it because if I press a button just right, I can get the Multijump to affect multiple people. The strategy, then, is to use a move that can possibly attack more units whereas otherwise I'd have to attack a single unit. The risk is that I am relying on skill, rather than a randomized number, to complete this action.

The skill replaces randomness in RPGs by filling the same role differently. It's like another piece of footware, but is different in the way that ballet shoes are different than ice skates or cleats.

So instead of hoping The Gods favor your choice of attack with a Critical Hit, you're simply betting on your own capabilities. And your ability to plan your strategy would necessitate how you measure your own capabilities, somewhat like how you would consider certain troops on the field more or less capable than others.

Would you consider skill--as in physical skill--a legitimate part of a strategy?

This is very flattering! Thanks a lot for taking the time to play and review it. It's much appreciated. :)

author=Kylaila
I do disagree that there is no luck at all involved, as characters will often power up tact/power when they could easily play aggressive and finish you off. But certainly not enough to get frustrated in any way.

I get what you mean here. But in that sense, every game that has an opposition has "luck" in that you never know what your opponent will choose. The opponent is AI, so you can definitely say the game as a whole has luck because you're not actually fighting a human element (Seymour, by the way, doesn't actually have "AI" and only attacks by picking at random), but I wouldn't say that checkers has luck just because I don't know if my opponent can calculate the optimal move or not. The luck in that instance is something I'd attribute to the opposition, not the game itself. But there's an almost invisible line there when you fight AI because AI is part of the game, so I can concede to that point for sure.

author=Kylaila
The story focuses on finding a way to an absolute winning tactic/procedure, so does your frame of character interaction, and given that there is not much action in there aside from that, it stands out even more.

Yeah, I agree with you there. And as awful as it might sound, a lot of small decisions were made to appeal to the judges who only have a small time frame to play within. The Key Topic System, for example, is a heavily simplified version of the Point of Interest/Gossip System I made in Fleuret Blanc several years ago. I think the Key Topic system is worse in every way, but to implement Fleuret Blanc's system into a game that will likely only get judged within an hour would be like building it directly into a coffin. XD

The Skills also add to what you're talking about in how it's all about basically mastering the one tactic. (Common "solutions" for that are the addition of controlled randomness and asymmetrical battles, but I opted for symmetrical abstract strategy). At the beginning of the game, you might not be familiar enough with the system, but you'll get good quickly. Skills make you capable of using what you're quickly learning even if you start Discourse at a level disadvantage. You end up knowing how to play well enough to be defeating people under-leveled, and that's definitely the intention. I didn't want to make a game about grinding when I have to think about judges. Using a system that can be learned to success and still upgrades within the game is a satisfying idea to me, and hopefully it'll pay off in the hour-long testing phase of the contest. (There's also thematic intent, but that's not entirely as relevant.)

And again, thanks for all the feedback. It's good to hear what's wrong with everything just as much as what's right. :)

I think chess isn't an advantageous example here. Chess is an "abstract strategy" game, as they're categorized, which means that there is no hidden information to any player, nor any random chance. No critical hits, no held cards, etc. Some master chess players will attest that the game becomes memorization, yes, and that in the very end, you have a large selection of memorized paths going against the opponent's memorized paths. That means that chess can (and I think possibly has) been solved--every outcome can be predicted. And if that's true of chess and chess is still strategy, I claim that the same is true for the RPG systems.



So if the start conditions are the same, and the end conditions are the same, and many paths can be figured out with equal result (excluding failed paths), there's not much difference to the linearity of RPG battles other than the simplicity and execution.

I'll be the first to admit that RPGs are big offenders in Problems 1 and 2 outlined above; the fact that JRPGs often insist that you get a Full Heal before a boss is in exact opposition to the stance I tried to make about being dungeon-centric. The system is riddled with poor implementation, and mostly because of convention rather than intention.

But I don't think that the fact that you can change RPGs into a numeric calculation makes it less strategically inclined than chess. Chess may not be something calculable in the mathematics sense, but it can still be solved. A jigsaw puzzle has just as much of a solution as an equation, and even if you change the tactics of solving either, the end strategy circles around the same notions. For chess, you must checkmate the king, and for RPGs, you must HP = 0 the boss. Pawns will be killed along the way sometimes, and sometimes not, depending on how you approach the final win condition.

The key difference between these two systems in my mind isn't so much the core of what constitutes a strategy, but the actual implementation. Chess is elegant, and has been changing and morphing into its current form for hundreds of years. RPG battles and dungeons are not chess, but there's still an underlying principle of picking paths to the same win condition, whereas some paths are strategically sound and others are Game Over.

Kylaila says it best with "The problem here is the execution rather than the idea." I think there's the issue: the core for a dungeon-centric RPG is still strategy, but it's often executed poorly.

I think the opposite of strategy is luck. If we were to really accuse the systems of being non-strategic, I would point my finger at variance in stats, encounters, and other hidden information. Risk management is an aspect of some games, but when you go too far with the luck, all planning and forethought disappear.

EDIT: I posted this without reading your post directly before mine, but it looks like we're on the same page about getting rid of hidden information.

All of this is great conversation fodder, but I'm going to touch on one point that is relevant to many JRPGs (and WRPGs, often, but JRPGs in particular).

This design aspect you're looking at is battle-centric, but typical JRPGs aren't battle-centric, even if they come off that way. In reality, they're "dungeon"-centric. Think of any set course in a game where you know the next bit of plot is at the end of a cave, and you're almost certain there's going to be a boss at the end. Battles are part of the larger picture that culminates in a Boss Fight to complete the dungeon.

This might seem like a minor point, but it's exactly why battles are designed the way they are. Having consumables, health that doesn't regenerate after every battle, and any variation of enemy placement (from optional encounters that guard treasure chests to random encounters), you can tell that the true value doesn't lie battle-to-battle. Dungeons are obstacle courses, and your ability to prepare for that gauntlet and still defeat the boss (albeit often relying on the linear system you've described above per battle) is the Big Picture.

A real world example would be the World Cup. Some people think that flopping a match is a bad call, but that's only if you look at it as match-centric. The World Cup is a much larger game. Within that game, sometimes you have to retreat from other matches, or flop some, to enable strategic placement or energy conservation. It's the difference between minor battles and the overall war.

JRPGs are dungeon-centric in that same manner. You may be able to pull apart the DPS aspect in each battle and say that RPG battles have no real strategy, but that's a touch myopic. The actual strategy is in preparation, conservation of supplies, and the willingness to avoid optional confrontations until you win the overall battle (the World Cup). The memorization you've described is shown in the HP, Mp, and items (typically) that are carried onward throughout an isolated location. You mention that the item consumption is all part of a larger resource management gameplay but don't mention that the larger gameplay is what often dictates the individual engagements and how you encounter them.

If you were to design a battle system that was strategic in a self-contained way, you risk losing all instances of "carry-over," which is vital to a dungeon. Using chess as another example: if you make every battle in a dungeon a chess match, individual battles become too relevant to necessitate a dungeon, and the game shifts from being dungeon-centric to battle-centric. In doing that, having any sort of dungeon or any gauntlet of repeated combat becomes superfluous.

RPGs may often have exactly what you've described, and lack strategy in each individual battle, but the core of the system is not about each individual battle so much as it is a larger machine that incorporates many small, DPS-heavy cogs. Saying battles have no strategy is fine, but it's a smaller part of a bigger strategy system that does have memory even if it's not nearly as complex as it could be.

I loved reading this, by the way. :) Looking forward to your view on my giant wall of text.