SNODGRASS'S PROFILE

I did address that.

How can you teach players "the rules" when all an easier game is doing is making it easy for you to find out the rules "at a later date"?

...which then leads to cheap design where the challenge comes from figuring out the best way to use those rules which in turn makes it less of a roleplaying game and more of a "guess which rule is great".

Chess is actually a good example.

I don't follow chess at all but I once heard Bobby Fischer say chess was ruined. (Sadly I don't know which youtube link that was).

If I recall, he said it was ruined because now there are preset moves. You also often hear this from some Chess fans who think the game has turned into a "who has the best opening move".

That degradation happens because of cheap design. Chess was a mysterious puzzle game where you only knew what pawns, knights, kings, etc can do. Strategy came and fun came.

The result was that the best curve were often the most fun even though a chess novice playing with a grandmaster was suicidal. It was like analyzing the layers and the fun and immersion did not come only from preset moves especially opening ones.

As the mystery died down though, the challenge and of course the spike was still there but now it's all about squeezing your opponent into a box and the result? Nowadays it's less about loving the game and more about knowing the game.

It's the same with most PVPs. Why do many feel like PVP and Roleplaying logic don't mix? Because many designs were based on cheap motives that tried to intermix introduction with fun and challenge with difficulty in "figuring out" what rather than how to beat an opponent and thus the whys disappear.

Single players are often worse because you don't have human vs. human adaptation (that comes with patches) so the challenge of cheap designs often come from "finding the best way or at least the most common cheapest way to beat someone". The end result is that bosses no longer hold the value of kings but are pawns for the next narrative. Oh yes, the challenge is there but you didn't sit down your guy and tell him what or who the kings, queens, bishops, knights and rooks are. You just made him sit longer, get emotionally invested in a game and then eventually pointed to him: There! There's the pawn. Find some way to beat that guy and you'll get closer to the ending until finally they are introduced to the final boss that's the rook where as this value and image of a king that needs to be dethroned vanishes in favor of those guys.

This doesn't mean a high beginning spike in difficulty guarantees a value closer to the king. Many design changes still needs to happen but if the king and queen reveals itself in the beginning then it gets more and more exciting in a well designed game to come closer to the knowledge and capacity to beat said king and queen. It also "teaches" your players not only what the rules are but why the king and queen are higher than the bishop you just beat. That develops mystery and that develops excitement too and that motivates a designer too to one up the precious boss without making him just another rook to the previous pawn.

One other flaw is that chess is supposed to set some standard when many games can just as have qualities of Go where you need to know only one character and not a multiple rule based classes and still be challenging and deep.

The rules are but one aspect of challenge and they often are based on unrealistic curves to bypass more thought on game design. Some of the best challenges often don't rely on the rules at all but on the psyche of the player like their preference for risks, their motive for following the plot and their own personality. For these types of games, the rules are just extensions to create some balance and refreshment no more different than a puzzle based rpg occassionally having combat.

The thing that stands above all should be design. Not only because it's what the forum is named at but because design breeds choices, immersion and additional rules and that produces more fun. Yes, you want a player to have more chances to know what your world is all about but isn't the point of doing that to show them that the design you made for the world is actually great? If that's the case, then there's no reason to hide those wonderful designs in the beginning. I'm not saying make the player see the game over screen several times. I'm just saying show them the motivation as early as possible for why they need to do all these things like grinding and don't make grinding just a spell of make the game easier when it's time for the bosses.

IMO the reasons you guys posted for starting easy is what I consider cheap design.

I don't mean to come off as insulting but I have played lots of games where starting off easy just aggravated me more if the spike in challenge is off.

I also call it cheap because as GRS said, players don't know the world so suddenly making it easier means they would know it? No. The hardcore guys would probably figure it out but the hardcore guys are also those who would replay a game for a missable or love the challenge of calculating stuff in an ever difficult Rogue-like game.

This is only made more apparent when the designers admit that the option to be skilled doesn't exist early on. What this basically leads to more times than less is a guarantee that a character, no matter how well written, becomes a snowflake to a player who knows how to min-max and that again rewards hardcore experimental players more than it rewards reality.

In contrast, in a high spike beginning it gives you certain respect for even the average mooks. We see these all the time in real sports.

Sports in general is often used for building character precisely because you don't have to become an elite to learn the lessons of humility. This happens because players you normally don't respect ends up being worth that respect because the opportunity is there to be on par with the guy but the skill level is not as honed.

This is not only good practice but it also challenges the designer to think of ways to make the world more realistic in the later stages in the sense that a super powerful character can't get sloppy or maximize some spell slots or totally turn the games into a manner of who has the better gaming IQ/athleticism.

For example: in a world where a hook should be well timed but basic to do then even Muhammad Ali stays disciplined and the difficulty stays like a curve.

In a world where the best fighters are the ones who are great at fighting games, then the luster of the character disappears in favor of the "pvp" curve and therefore both preset difficulty curves and PC immersion suffers.

I think as far as questions of difficulty goes though, it's not so much difficult but there's little bland game design done on that part so there's no widely accepted stock concept that's spread around but as far as implementation goes, I think the difficulty is only as difficult as basic game design. I'm not a game designer though but I've played enough games where basic elements add to that factor and there wasn't a demand for an entire rule change.

Take for example, StarTraders RPG Elite for Android.

The basic spike happens early on simply because you don't have enough supplies to counter a better enemy and the ship doesn't have enough stats to match a better ship.

Nonetheless the design of that game allows a hardcore player to dominate early on simply because the opportunity is there and a non-hardcore player to quickly adapt to a higher difficulty simply because the opportunity is there all along once you learn it.

This holds true because the curve is more realistic. There's no sudden scroll you have to memorize or sudden spell that you learn from leveling up. There's simply a static world that understands, that if a PC learns a move, chances are they have to practice that.

If they have to practice that, chances are there was a greater threat and chances are their practice allows for a scene that shows the player when to time a move. It's a slippery slope. Once good difficulty curve is established then the rest of the curve follows by design.

But the opposite holds true too: Once cheap design is practiced then the game becomes more of a level up power fantasy where strategy comes from blind experimentations of what works and what doesn't. This satisfies most gamers as they are used to it but it doesn't mean that's good design. Such practice stagnates character development, legit emotional investment (think difference between a fanboy and someone who cries for a character they don't love), game balance and opens up the road for the oft joked "snowflake teens off to save the world".

The reality is if something is well designed then there's few fears to introduce players to a major difficult opponent because rather than the players feeling that they lost, the game gives hints to players on what a good ai is and from there it gives a sneak peek of how good the end game is. Of course players shouldn't die and be forced to restart again and again but few things can replace the "high" from defeating a difficult opponent from the get go especially in establishing underdog stories and developing balanced bosses that don't just throw high dmg spells after high dmg spells or require a trick to beat.

I'm of the opposite. If players don't experience difficulty in the beginning, then they become lax and then the threats loses a threat and you're just back to a basic game.

It's why you often times see narratives depict "must lose" fights.

This is not to say players should be forced to suddenly be master character builders but it's best if the player can feel how dangerous and skilled the rest of the world is relative to his character not just in power but in timing skills and tactics.

This isn't to say I have played such a game but to me this is a good litmus test for a game designer too. How smart is your boss? Is he just an uber powerful creature? How smart and balanced is your system? Is it just level grinding or even worse a sandbox game trying to derail a Mary Sue protagonist with quick deaths so you can say that character is not gifted with destiny or the game is challenging?

IMO it should be HIGH difficulty -> medium difficulty -> easy difficulty w/ major responsibilities limiting the character from abusing their powers with little consequence. Basically the longer a player has to play with his character, the more it becomes a role playing game where as earlier it's all about tactics.

This isn't to say he should constantly die or constantly run away. More like HIGH difficulty in there being a larger presence of challenging characters he needs to defeat.

Not sure if RM supports this but this is simple.

99% of save mechanics fail even quicksaves because of cheap game design. It doesn't mean it's poor but players are often victim to surprises that often justify loading and hardcore players are often looking for 1 life or death games that a fancy death penalty is more gimmicky than a true penalty.

The trick is to convince the former players that it's more rewarding to die than it is to load a save game without any fancy scenario that makes it more exclusive to certain developers or worse, make it so that players end up going on suicide runs especially when walkthroughs spoil these for them.

To do this you make it so that cutscenes are skippable only after a spawn from death. It's not the only thing that can be done but it's one of the first case of rewards. Death spawn = no talkie. Quick load = long drawn conversations.

The penalty? In an rpg game where choices actually matter, dialogue maybe preferable over quick spawn.

The second factor is random events. If there's a chance loading from saves means losing a specific event - players would abuse the save system less. That's trickier but you can create a reverse pickpocketing system. Chance of success is high but once you do it and actually acquire the item, you lose it upon death and can't reacquire it after a save.

The third factor is the grind effect.

Version 1 is where the longer you don't save (but you have to at least have 1 save and load from it), the better items you will get after you load from that death. In fact, not just better but the best items. Basically a longer more tedious form of min-maxing.

Version 2 is where loading from save means higher rates of random encounters until you max out the settings where the maxed out setting is rage quitting. This isn't preferable and it's just a less rewarding form of "challenging fights in the future".

Version 3 is for more general protagonist games. Restarting from death means you can pick a special character. Like in one hentai (but not RPG Maker game), the main character turning into a horse meant the new character has a horse to start with. It's basically setting up a game over scenario where the sequel is built into the game.

Finally the deja vu effect. Unlosing Ranger for the PSP has this but it doesn't have a save system. If the PC dies, a percentage of his XP levels gets put into his potential stats so if he dies in a dungeon, he loses all items and resets all levels (there are feats to bypass this but late game ones) BUT he's a more powerful lvl 1 character upon living through that where as if he simply loads up and grinds, he'd be a weaker...lvl 10 character compared to how he was when he died and came back at lvl 1.

The simplest though is simply a timer. If you're in a rush to save a character, you don't have time to grind and if dying meant adding a +10 min timer to that character then only those who don't care for the character would grind and let the character die.