Fairness in RPG gameplay

I'm fighting this boss in a tower in FFVI. The battle is long, magic only, and I fight for survival. Finally I deplete the boss' HP and I celebrate my victory. Until I find out the hard way this boss is programmed to cast Ultima upon defeat. I ask myself; how is this a fair fight?

As much as I enjoy the battle system of FFX, I find the immunity of bosses to most status effects not very fair. Also because the game usually doesn't tell you their immunities. Vagrant Story on the other hand shows the hit % success rate before selecting the attack. If you choose a status ailment attack and success rate is 0%, you know the creature/boss is immune to it.

In Child of Light all monsters including bosses are susceptible to all status effects. And that is - in my opinion - how it should be.

The palings of FFXII bosses take the cake in unfairness imo, as they grant total immunity to either physical or magical attacks for no particular reason. While Dark Souls is pretty fair overall, Dark Souls 2 works with a comparable mechanic. (SPOILER)Certain bosses can buff themselves or summon a partner in crime to fight along the boss. While buffing/summoning, the boss magically gets a 50-75% damage reduction. While I can see why this is necessary, it's still not very fair imo. How can their armor do such a magical thing, whereas when we players wear that same armor, we do not get this benefit?

Discuss! What RPG gameplay elements do you find fair? Which do you think are not?

Magimaster in FF6 is a complete dick. You have to have fought him before in order to win. There's no way to predict that it will do ultima, and no way to lower ultima's damage significantly.

Immunity to almost all status effects is also unfair. It makes a whole class of magic useless for the fights that matter. In some games, it makes an entire character class useless in certain fights. Thing is that debuffs are often way overpowered, which they need to be if people are gonna bother with using them in random encounters rather than just spamming attack. At the same time, that level of potency makes them dangerously overpowered against many bosses.

The obvious solution here, is of course to make bosses more resistant to the effects than random monsters. For example Blind, it lowers accuracy extremely much on random encounters. They go from hitting you 95% of the time to 5% of the time, an accuracy drop of 90%. A boss starting to miss you 19 out of 20 times is way overpowered, so why not just have it resist blind instead of being completely immune? Where a random encounter loses 90% of its hit rate, a boss could be losing 10-15%, going from a 100% hit rate to a 85-90% hit rate. You still can't rely on blind to make you win, but it's certainly going to give you a few lucky breaks, save some MP you'd spend on healing, and so on.

Same with slow. If Slow reduces speed to 50% of normal against a trash mob, why not make a boss retain 80% of its speed instead of making it immune? With this system, the debuff-class you liked to use in this game is starting to be useful with stacking and keeping up several debuffs. Now you have a boss that both misses 15% of its attacks, and attacks at 80% of its normal rate. That's definitely noticable when applied to a long fight, but not broken.

It could be implemented pretty easily, by making each status resistance more than a one-bit yes/no value. Give it a scale from 0-100, where 0 gives it no resistance to the status effect (meaning all hits land at 100% potency) and 100 makes them completely immune. 50 would give the status effect a 50% chance to not miss, and also cut the potency by half when it does land. Above 50%, it gets exponentially less worth it to use status debuffs, unless you have special equipment or class traits that give magic accuracy bonuses to spells. Perhaps a debuff specialist would get traits that boost debuff spell accuracy by up to 50 percentage points, making it still easy to have debuffs land on resistant bosses, even if the potency is cut? Remember that being poisoned can hurt a lot if the monster has extremely high hp. If a full potency poison deals 5% damage each turn to a normal enemy with 8000 hp, that's 400 damage per turn. However, a boss could resist poison to the point where it deals only 0.5% of max hp per turn, but the spell would still deal more damage due to the boss having a max hp of 100000.

I don't see why games of player vs computer AI should be "fair". I can sympathise though, being shoved back down a long tower sucks.

I do agree about status ailments. I feel it is lazy boss design to simply make them immune rather than obvious solutions such as the ones Mirage suggested.

It should be fair, in that it shouldn't punish you immensely for choosing one certain class in the game, such as one that specializes in debuffing. A game that Lets you pick a party consisting of three classes out of 6 available classes shouldn't kick you in the nuts/tits just because you chose a support+debuff instead of pure support to go along with your dps and tank. Of course, it's not the same if you purposely choose three classes that do not fill each others out, such as dps, dps and dps.

It should be fair, in that it doesn't have unnecessarily brutal difficulty spikes. Imagine a boss that has a single move that can wipe out every party that isn't overleveled to the point that every other boss can be killed by mashing X. That feels unfair to most players, and also reduces the enjoyment of the other fights in the game because suddenly these do not offer any sort of challenge.

It should be fair in that it doesn't drop instant-kill traps on you that are impossible to predict without knowing that they are there. It's fine to have traps, but they should either be predictable or detectable through game mechanics, or avoidable (at least partially) by reaction/skill.

So yeah, fairness applies to player vs game as well. Games that don't apply it are usually games that people don't bother playing.

I don't think that a game having a class within it that is not useful is anything to do with fairness with regard to battle strategy elements like the examples referenced in the OP.

Why not? Are we not meant to use one of the classes supplied with the game? Then why is it there?

If you can change classes on the fly, it's no big deal, but if it's a one time choice, it is.

When I think of game mechanics being unfair I usually go in the other direction. Generally you have quite a lot of things stacked in your favor compared to the AI. This is usually balanced out by the developers putting the enemies to be numerically (numbers or stats) stronger than you , and having you use your tools to overcome them.

I think its unfair when an NPC asks you to meet him somewhere and you leave for that area and he doesn't and he still ends up there first :nonono:

Also when you fight someone who has like 10000 HP and then they join you and they have 600 :|

that's not something I find unfair. damage dealt and received is vastly different from enemies and players in many games. If he had 600 hp as the boss, you'd probably kill him in one strike. However, he as a boss did probably not hit you for nearly as much damage as you hit him for.

I highly disagree with all bosses being susceptible of every status ailment. That would make the game a breeze if I could beat them all by casting petrify, stop, or death. The magister I didn't have much problem with and I think I knew he was going to cast Ultima upon death and I still managed to beat him.

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Originally Posted by Mirage

Why not? Are we not meant to use one of the classes supplied with the game? Then why is it there?

If you can change classes on the fly, it's no big deal, but if it's a one time choice, it is.

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I would be inclined to agree. A completely useless class that is to be chosen from the start of a game that is unable to be changed at any point in any way, is unfair on the player. But this is quite a niche hypothetical game design flaw, which again, I think is different to the examples of "unfairness" mentioned previously in the thread by the OP.

An example to further illustrate how I see the difference:

Unfair game design:
The game randomly deletes all your inventory without warning and saves automatically.
Not-so-unfair boss mechanic:
You have 99 HP. Your enemy has 50million HP and immune to physical damage. You can win the fight but it will take at least 5 hours of straight concentration.

My original point was that statistical and technical advantages that the AI has over the player aren't unfair no matter how large. These advantages need to be present in order for an enemy or task limited by a script to provide challenge to a player.

I don't mind bosses not being susceptible to all status effects, but I do think which can be used should vary from boss to boss. Death/petrify/etc would make the game too easy, but most other effects I think should work on all bosses. They should just program the bosses to have counters/ways of healing certain effects to keep the difficulty up.

One thing I hate is when you can't analyze bosses like in Persona games. it makes no sense to me and just adds a little bit of tedium to the fights.

Or just do instant death spells like so:
If you expect it to take on average 50 turns to kill the boss, then make it so the instant death spell has like a 1.5% chance of hitting. So you are probably better off just whittling it down, but the option is always there.

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Originally Posted by VeloZer0

Or just do instant death spells like so:
If you expect it to take on average 50 turns to kill the boss, then make it so the instant death spell has like a 1.5% chance of hitting. So you are probably better off just whittling it down, but the option is always there.

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So the solution to any boss that's giving you trouble becomes "Pick a god and pray"? RNG should never be that critical of a component. Even with a small chance, if you can just instantly kill a boss, it's broken.

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Originally Posted by Depression Moon

I highly disagree with all bosses being susceptible of every status ailment. That would make the game a breeze if I could beat them all by casting petrify, stop, or death. The magister I didn't have much problem with and I think I knew he was going to cast Ultima upon death and I still managed to beat him.

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You're assuming that a system where bosses aren't immune to most status effects are going to have the exact same status ailments as the games we have today. Some status effects are just idiotic to begin with, and instant death is one of them. Not being immune to stop wouldn't let you breeze past them if it took you 20 turns to make it stick, and then it would wear off after 10 seconds. As I said earlier, it shouldn't be a one-bit system where you either are 100% vulnerable or 100% immune, but a gradual thing. Also, in some games, petrify doesn't permanently disable you anyway. They are just functionally similar to a stop spell instead, and wear off in time, or when you take damage.

When I say most status effects should be possible to use on all bosses, clearly I do not mean that this should be implemented without balancing the gameplay to take this into account, that's just ridiculous.

Also, Vanille's death ability was like that, Skyblade, and it was really smurfing idiotic. Things like that shouldn't exist in games because they don't do anything but frustrate players. It reduces a game of any complexity to simply rolling a 100-sided dice until you get a 100. It's boring and really stupid and whoever comes up with design like that should be dragged behind the barn and shot in the ear.

Random chance to instantly die is stupid in every game I see it in, no matter which side can use it. It's dumb when I can use it on enemies, and when enemies can use it on me.

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Originally Posted by Mirage

Also, Vanille's death ability was like that, Skyblade, and it was really smurfing idiotic. Things like that shouldn't exist in games because they don't do anything but frustrate players. It reduces a game of any complexity to simply rolling a 100-sided dice until you get a 100. It's boring and really stupid and whoever comes up with design like that should be dragged behind the barn and shot in the ear.

Random chance to instantly die is stupid in every game I see it in, no matter which side can use it. It's dumb when I can use it on enemies, and when enemies can use it on me.

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I know about Vanille's ability. It didn't work on bosses, but how many strategies for killing Adamantoises are literally just "summon Eidolon, spam Death until it sticks, reset if it gets back up before it dies"?

Stupid, stupid mechanic.

What's unfair is how OP you can get in every FF game, and almost every RPG I've ever played in general.

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Originally Posted by Skyblade

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Originally Posted by Mirage

Also, Vanille's death ability was like that, Skyblade, and it was really smurfing idiotic. Things like that shouldn't exist in games because they don't do anything but frustrate players. It reduces a game of any complexity to simply rolling a 100-sided dice until you get a 100. It's boring and really stupid and whoever comes up with design like that should be dragged behind the barn and shot in the ear.

Random chance to instantly die is stupid in every game I see it in, no matter which side can use it. It's dumb when I can use it on enemies, and when enemies can use it on me.

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I know about Vanille's ability. It didn't work on bosses, but how many strategies for killing Adamantoises are literally just "summon Eidolon, spam Death until it sticks, reset if it gets back up before it dies"?

Stupid, stupid mechanic.

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I must have confused one of those cieth stone fights for being a boss.

Speaking of, there's also zanmato in ffx

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Originally Posted by Depression Moon

I highly disagree with all bosses being susceptible of every status ailment. That would make the game a breeze if I could beat them all by casting petrify, stop, or death.

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Maybe those status ailments shouldn't be in the game in the first place, or like already mentioned by Mirage their effects could be adjusted to make them less extreme. Stop could maybe just cancel out 1 turn or move before resetting, petrify could take 5 turns to "fully petrify" something, and death well I think just shouldn't exist.

Vagrant Story does things well in terms of status effects. A Paralysed enemy can still cast spells and perform special attacks. A Numbed enemy can still attack normally but no special attacks. Silenced... well you get the idea.

Also I think bosses/enemies in RPG's have a lot missed potential in the way they hardly use status effects on the player. Child of Light was one of the first I have played where enemies really used debuffs/buffs to their advantage and I had some really challenging battles because of this.

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Originally Posted by Mirage

Magimaster in FF6 is a complete dick. You have to have fought him before in order to win. There's no way to predict that it will do ultima, and no way to lower ultima's damage significantly.

Immunity to almost all status effects is also unfair. It makes a whole class of magic useless for the fights that matter. In some games, it makes an entire character class useless in certain fights. Thing is that debuffs are often way overpowered, which they need to be if people are gonna bother with using them in random encounters rather than just spamming attack. At the same time, that level of potency makes them dangerously overpowered against many bosses.

The obvious solution here, is of course to make bosses more resistant to the effects than random monsters. For example Blind, it lowers accuracy extremely much on random encounters. They go from hitting you 95% of the time to 5% of the time, an accuracy drop of 90%. A boss starting to miss you 19 out of 20 times is way overpowered, so why not just have it resist blind instead of being completely immune? Where a random encounter loses 90% of its hit rate, a boss could be losing 10-15%, going from a 100% hit rate to a 85-90% hit rate. You still can't rely on blind to make you win, but it's certainly going to give you a few lucky breaks, save some MP you'd spend on healing, and so on.

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I like this idea. I also like the potential it has to make things stack. Say if you want to reduce a boss accuracy even more you'd have to invest a vast number of turns to debuff that attribute, starting at 10% reduction, 20% when you cast Blind again, etc. I think status inflicting party members would also be more used throughout the battle, rather than just inflict the thing and then get swapped out.

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Originally Posted by VeloZer0

Or just do instant death spells like so:
If you expect it to take on average 50 turns to kill the boss, then make it so the instant death spell has like a 1.5% chance of hitting. So you are probably better off just whittling it down, but the option is always there.

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As much as I like the idea of having the option to kill a boss with Death, the RNG bothers me a bit.

Maybe this could be an option: imagine casting death is instakill, but it takes 8 turns to "gather power and cast", basically unable to do anything else but charge this move. Within those 8 turns you'd have to keep the casting party member alive with a suiting defensive strategy with the other party members. Imagine how tense that could end up if the casting member is slowed down by slow, turning it into 12 turns to cast. But if you make it through, the reward is grand.

Stop is only really a problem if it can be used indefinitely.

Although I hate to credit MMOs with much of anything in terms of game mechanics, most use stuns fairly well (actually, debuffs are used relatively well in general). A single player can't stun things indefinitely, because the ability will be on cooldown or disabled after use, making timing when it is used important. PvP fights also frequently feature an internal resistance to stuns that builds up and makes you more resistant or even immune the more you get hit (which doesn't change the fact that stuns shouldn't even be in PvP, as nothing is more boring than not playing the game).

Similar things could work really well in most RPGs. Make Stop only usable every so often, or give foes a building resistance that keeps it from locking them down completely. It won't really change the way it works against random mobs, but it will make it usable, without being broken, against bosses.

Building up resistances to repeatedly used attacks is another way to avoid the problem, yeah. The more often you use it, the stronger your debuffer would have to be to keep landing it. You could get away with a class that has debuffs only as a secondary or tertiary role if you're just going to debuff them once or twice, but when you're approaching the 10th stun/slow/dispel etc, you're gonna have to need a debuff specialist to be able to land it reliably. Past that, even the specialist is going to have trouble getting the effects to stick.

This encourages the player to use each debuff when they make the biggest impact, rather than just spamming them as often as possible. It also encourages them to create synergy in the party to make the most out of the debuffs. If you know you're only going to be able to keep defence-down on the enemy for 90 seconds at a time, and only three times before it starts getting really hard to land it, you want to keep all your strongest attacks ready for those 3x90 seconds, and also want to do everything in your power to not let any of the strongest attackers be dead during those three 90 second windows.

And that's how you make a game that's balanced and make debuffing classes just as viable a choice for a permanent party setup as another strong melee would be. Naturally, there should be some fights where you'd be able to win a bit faster with a different party setup, for example one that's very melee damage heavy, but there should also be fights that are easier to clear with a debuffer in the party. This way, the player's experience while playing the game several times is more different, and the replay value and excitement will most likely be felt as much greater. You can know exactly how to deal with each boss encounters with a dps+dps+healer team, but might need to think up an entirely different strategy for the same boss with the same character levels if you have a dps+debuff+healer party.

I dunno about you guys, but this is one of the things I think is fun in RPGs.

I have no real issue with fairness in RPGs or games in general but I come from the world view that life is not fair, so why should games be? Maybe it's because I grew up on arcade games where the CPU is always a cheating bastard or the game's rely heavily on memorization which is learned through frequent party death.

I don't really see why the computer should telegraph their moves, this always borrowed me because in a real fight this is unrealistic. As VeloZer0 points out, I often feel it is fine for the enemies to cheat because the player character are almost always overpowered. The main reason why I feel the best gaming battle systems in RPGs are Grandia's, MegaTen's Press Turn system, and Bravery Default's.... Bravery/Default mechanics are the best is because the rules apply to both the enemy and player. Why shouldn't bosses in Final Fantasy pull off their own game ending Limit Breaks, use Re-Raise, Final Attack Ultima, and make themselves immune to damage for a short period of time when the player can?

The closest to cheapness I have ever seen in an RPG usually involves the RNG and even then I am rarely bothered by it. I have bigger issues getting cheesed by KoF bosses than getting blindsided by an instant death spell that set me back a few hours in any RPG. Hell, I still feel that if it's nearly impossible to be killed in the first dungeon without being utterly stupid or trying to get killed, you did a poor job of building gameplay difficulty.

I'm going to make WK's favourite game which involves a feature to randomly spawn an invisible trap anywhere in the stage. Games don't need to be fair, right.

I think you're wrong though, in many aspects of life where it's reasonable to compare it to a game, it is fair. If you exercise for a marathon a lot more than other people do, you will be very likely to beat these people in a marathon. If you practice boxing two times a week, you are very likely to be better at boxing than someone who doesn't practice boxing. In IRL fighting competitions, it is common to study the opponents fighting style in order to be able to tell when he's going to do what, aka telegraphing his attacks. There aren't any random chances of instantly losing built into the rules of real life sports. There's no rule in soccer that says "the referee rolls a dice, if it lands on 82, the home team's keeper will take a 10 minute break".

I think games and sports in real life is what it is most natural to compare games to, and these often have a good deal of fairness in them. Most of them strive to be fair, and then why shouldn't games do the same? A game can be hard even if it is fair.

I think being able to avoid failure based on skill is integral to "playing a game". If you need to rely on luck to not die, it's stepping into gambling territory. I'm usually not very fond of gambling against a machine. Against humans, it's different, because then you can play the mind game against them.

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There's no rule in soccer that says "the referee rolls a dice, if it lands on 82, the home team's keeper will take a 10 minute break".

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If the sprained ankle fairy rolls an 82....

Horribly unfair outcomes due to the real life RNG happen all the time in martial arts and sports. Anyone who competes at a high level probably has a story about how an unexpected illness/injury drastically changed the outcome. And then factor in what the ref/judges see and don't see....

The big thing is not fairness for me, it is fun. If opponents can just pull s**** out of their asses and own you unexpectedly then it isn't something that I particularly enjoy. But then again the most effective strategies of RPG players are generally not all that fun to play against.

Balancing a game for a purely PvP model (which the enemies are essentially like other players piloted by the AI) really constrains your game design choices, and for no good reason. It doesn't necessarily produce a bad system, it's just limiting. No reason to follow it unless you are going for that specific vision.

Yes of course there are accidents, but the rules are not designed to make the game rely on accidents to determine a winner, that's my point. Accidents are a side effects of events that are outside of the sports event's control. Accidents in sports aremore like if a power outage shut your console off, making you lose 2 hours of progress, or if a glitch in the game wiped out half your items. They are both unforseen and unintended, while randomly getting instantly killed in a game because of a rare dice roll is intentional.

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Originally Posted by Mirage

I'm going to make WK's favourite game which involves a feature to randomly spawn an invisible trap anywhere in the stage. Games don't need to be fair, right.

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Beat you to it, my first game I made was unwinnable. The purpose was to teach the very principle that life isn't fair but also not to make assumptions about things and expect the unexpected. Principles that I feel make a game more interesting.

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Originally Posted by Mirage

I think you're wrong though, in many aspects of life where it's reasonable to compare it to a game, it is fair. If you exercise for a marathon a lot more than other people do, you will be very likely to beat these people in a marathon. If you practice boxing two times a week, you are very likely to be better at boxing than someone who doesn't practice boxing. In IRL fighting competitions, it is common to study the opponents fighting style in order to be able to tell when he's going to do what, aka telegraphing his attacks. There aren't any random chances of instantly losing built into the rules of real life sports. There's no rule in soccer that says "the referee rolls a dice, if it lands on 82, the home team's keeper will take a 10 minute break".

I think games and sports in real life is what it is most natural to compare games to, and these often have a good deal of fairness in them. Most of them strive to be fair, and then why shouldn't games do the same? A game can be hard even if it is fair.

I think being able to avoid failure based on skill is integral to "playing a game". If you need to rely on luck to not die, it's stepping into gambling territory. I'm usually not very fond of gambling against a machine. Against humans, it's different, because then you can play the mind game against them.

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Non-surprisingly, I disagree with your assessment, because the person who dopes blood and uses steroid would have a better shot at winning than the person who just trained, the card shark counting cards wins more often. The fact many professional games have to be checked for cheating and in some cases it's not caught until the after the fact shows that even in real life, games can not always be fair since some don't believe in playing by the same rules. For a non-cheating example, in the Olympics, often the countries that can afford the best facilities, hire the best athletes, or have the natural environment for the specific event will often have the edge over the countries that don't. We love Jamaica for trying to Bobsled but they will always be at a huge disadvantage to Scandinavian/Eastern European countries that are overall better equipped to build a team.

Hell, even in the ultimate game known as life, there is always the possibility that you would be just as lucky to be killed in a car crash or by a disease than to live to see old age. The issue here is that while sporting games seem like a good analogy for gaming, it's often not because the computer opponent and player are often not playing the same game, their rules are different because their objectives are never the same, it's why I said the best RPG games are the ones that utilize a system where both the computer and player are bound by the same rules and restrictions.

RPGs are about strategy and tactics or at least should be, and those elements find themselves in war which is rarely on equal terms. Even in sporting events, teams have strengths and weaknesses to them, but that doesn't change the possibility of a wringer nor does it mean that knowing this information will give you a fair shot at winning because if the opposing team has a good offensive game and your team doesn't, even trying to build strategies to stop them may not do much if the weaknesses of the team can't counter it. In a perfect world, most games are fair but the reality is never quite as clear or ideal. You can train to be a good marathon racer but you would still be competing against people who have been training longer meaning you may not win because they always had a head start on you. That is my point here, it's easy to look at the rules of a game and say it is fair but rules never put skill of the player in as a factor, and at that point the game isn't quite as fair as people would hope.

To bring this back more towards the topic though, I appreciate a game cheating or misleading you because it becomes more of a learning experience for the player. One of my favorite boss battles in an RPG is the fight against Ongyo-Ki in SMTIII, who controls shadows. He creates copies of himself and hitting the wrong one basically ends your entire turn and allows him to get three major hits on you. There are no hints to how to figure out which one is the right one but if you were fortunate enough to go in when the Kagasutchi/Moon was fool, you would notice that one one of the copies has a shadow... It was a very clever battle that most people consider cheap because the game doesn't once really give you a hint to overcome it, but it taught the player to really look outside of the box and to start seeing certain mechanics of the game as different tools for. To me this is enlightening and more fun than a boss that telegraphs it's tactics to the player Most players of the SMT games get killed once by instant death magic and then afterwards the player adapts to the situation and makes sure to always have mudo/hama protection or to use a team that has complimenting weaknesses/strengths to make sure the enemy can never have a great advantage. To me this is what makes a game really fun is being handed an occasionally curve ball that makes you grow as a player overall, not just for the game itself, and hey you might get a fun story out of it.

Death and Game Over shouldn't be a taboo in this genre, it should be a learning experience. In the case of the OP's comments about the Magimaster, he now understands he pulls off this technique which means the next time he fights him, he'll be better prepared for it. He may even try to experiment with alternate strategies like just draining all his MP or casting Berserk on him. Kind of ironic that it's possible to cripple this boss with status magic considering a good chunk of this discussion has been about making the status spells more useful. I think the real issue is that games have been made so easy or have removed their usefulness in games that we as gamers have just been trained to think they are trash in games cause honestly, FFX, XII, and XIII have all made great strides to making status magic pretty useful if not game breaking.

I've never once said that death or game over should be taboo in games. Not sure why you make that assumption :p. On the contrary, I think the possibility of death should most of the time be present, and I think that death should be punished in a way that makes you really want to not die, to the point where you won't hesitate for very long before using some of your rarest and most valuable items to avoid death, if possible.

The main difference between us seems to be in what manner this death or game over should happen. You think randomly with no warning or subtle clues is fine, I don't.


And it is true that the rarity of useful status debuffs makes people not even consider the possibility of it being useful. I'm currently playing FFX2, and every single encounter with a reasonably large HP pool I've met so far have been immune to demi, even the monster families that were susceptible to Demi in FFX. What this does to people is to reinforce certain patterns in our heads. Repeatedly using spells that do nothing but waste turns is not something that make you more likely to win encounters. In time, after not using a certain spell for perhaps 80 hours, you simply forget that they exist, and start boosting other parameters that *always* give the desired effect, such as strength or magic power. There are no monsters (at least in FFX-2) that are resistant to both physical and magical attacks, so the efficient player focuses on these stats to progress at the rate they desire, instead of focusing on game mechanics that only work once or twice in the entire game, and aren't sufficiently much more powerful the few times they are useful to be worth even spending mental power on remembering that they exist.

What makes it even dumber is that by making gravity an element, you can easily make bosses stronger or weaker to it to not make it overpowered and dealing 20 times the normal attack damage, yet no one does this. It's all just another side effect of a stupid one-bit resistance system. however, even a 2-bit resistance system (four values, absorb, nul, halve, normal) is a bit too little for my tastes. A 300 point scale (-100% to +200% damage) such as used in FF8 makes for a lot greater fine tuning of resistances, both for bosses and for characters. Bosses could be made to take 1% gravity damage, and that could still end up being 50% more of what a normal attack does at that point in the game.

If you can't think of any way to make an RPG hard except to randomly introduce RNG based mechanics, you are not a good game designer. There are tons of games out there which feature difficult and killer battles without using RNG based techniques.

Hell, that's the entire reason Dark Souls has been as popular as it is: Because it is fair in how it kills you. There are tons of other examples in games too. Shin Megami Tensei usually only instantly kills you if you screw up a battle. Yes, it may kill you several times as you learn the rules (as you said, a learning experience), but it doesn't just pull a Yiazmat and say "sorry, I rolled a 100, you're dead, restart". Bravely Default is another fantastic example of difficult but fair combat in an extremely traditional JRPG setup.

Games can be hard, and can result in Game Over screens. But they shouldn't be cheap or unfair.

Next time you reach the end boss of a game, roll a d100. When you roll a 72, you can proceed to fight it. Let me know how long it takes you to give up and just play on.

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Originally Posted by Wolf Kanno

I have no real issue with fairness in RPGs or games in general but I come from the world view that life is not fair, so why should games be?

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This makes no sense. Games are created by a person, and that person creates his own world with it's own rules. Games can be fair for that very reason as it is separate from real life. The impossible made possible.

Now let's introduce the word fun. Unfair games tend to be not fun. Fair games do. Also mind the difference between unfair and challenging. Gameplay can be unfair and therefor challenging, but it probably isn't much fun. Gameplay can also be fair and challenging, and that is what I consider potentially fun.

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Originally Posted by shion

Also when you fight someone who has like 10000 HP and then they join you and they have 600 :|

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This also bothers me. NPC unfairness. In Dark Souls 1 all NPC's were very much human with a health bar comparable and equally achievable by the player. In Dark Souls 2 some NPC's have boss-like health bars unachievable by the player and it is downright stupid.

Other NPC unfairness things include: infinite mana/spell casts, infinite stamina and invulnerability at least for storyline/quest characters (that's a big one right there and goes for most genres).

Gwra.

I agree that making bosses immune to status effects is awful, and I think a lot of RPGs have found good ways around this. My main gripe about it is that it makes certain classes that specialise in debuffing entirely redundant, and I don't think any fight should render someone redundant. If they can change jobs it's obviously not so bad, but yeah.

I think it is entirely fair that a boss be immune to instant-death spells, because otherwise you can just keep repeating the fight until you get Selphie's The End spell and just be done with it, which was always a very, very cheap way to beat Ultima Weapon in FFVIII. I do, however, think that bosses should be susceptable to the likes of poison, slow, deshell, and the like. Things that aren't overpowered, effectively.

I find FFXIII shows great examples of how bosses can be varied while still allowing buffs/debuffs. Sometimes they are key to victory! Also, even Orphan itself could be damaged by debuffs. The counter is a high HP count, a method of removing debuffs, etc. I remember fighting some boss in one of the PS1/2 era FF's and they would constantly dispel debuffs and it was frustrating as hell, but I still had someone keep doing them because it really helped my damage output. For example, if you have a mage, they might be hugely resistant to magic attacks, but very open to physical attacks when deprotect has been cast. With this in mind, casting deprotect constantly gave my party better damage output overall than if I'd stuck with regular attackers. I like teamwork!

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Originally Posted by Mirage

I've never once said that death or game over should be taboo in games. Not sure why you make that assumption :p. On the contrary, I think the possibility of death should most of the time be present, and I think that death should be punished in a way that makes you really want to not die, to the point where you won't hesitate for very long before using some of your rarest and most valuable items to avoid death, if possible.

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You misunderstand me, I never directed that statement at you specifically, I meant it in general as I often meet RPG fans who are honestly there only for the plot and could care less about the gameplay. I should have been clearer. Other than that, I actually agree with your sentiments about death in an RPG be more significant.

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Originally Posted by Mirage

The main difference between us seems to be in what manner this death or game over should happen. You think randomly with no warning or subtle clues is fine, I don't.

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I don't mind subtle clues if they were actually subtle. Most game designers tell the player the clue as if trying to explain it to a four year old. I mean a good first third of the bosses in FFX have the game explaining to you how to beat them in the most blatant way possible. Even the first boss battles in VI and VII has the game directly telling you that the boss has a pattern and powerful counterattack instead of just letting you figure it out yourself that attacking the shell or while the tail is up is a very bad thing. Go back to a game like FFIV where many bosses actually do have powerful counter moves and not one word of any help about it. Instead the player had to figure out about getting around it.

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Originally Posted by Mirage

And it is true that the rarity of useful status debuffs makes people not even consider the possibility of it being useful. I'm currently playing FFX2, and every single encounter with a reasonably large HP pool I've met so far have been immune to demi, even the monster families that were susceptible to Demi in FFX. What this does to people is to reinforce certain patterns in our heads. Repeatedly using spells that do nothing but waste turns is not something that make you more likely to win encounters. In time, after not using a certain spell for perhaps 80 hours, you simply forget that they exist, and start boosting other parameters that *always* give the desired effect, such as strength or magic power. There are no monsters (at least in FFX-2) that are resistant to both physical and magical attacks, so the efficient player focuses on these stats to progress at the rate they desire, instead of focusing on game mechanics that only work once or twice in the entire game, and aren't sufficiently much more powerful the few times they are useful to be worth even spending mental power on remembering that they exist.

What makes it even dumber is that by making gravity an element, you can easily make bosses stronger or weaker to it to not make it overpowered and dealing 20 times the normal attack damage, yet no one does this. It's all just another side effect of a stupid one-bit resistance system. however, even a 2-bit resistance system (four values, absorb, nul, halve, normal) is a bit too little for my tastes. A 300 point scale (-100% to +200% damage) such as used in FF8 makes for a lot greater fine tuning of resistances, both for bosses and for characters. Bosses could be made to take 1% gravity damage, and that could still end up being 50% more of what a normal attack does at that point in the game.

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While I agree that changes should be made to make all roles relevant, I feel your solution sounds awfully complicated from a game design standpoint and involves more math than I would care to utilize in my games. I kind of prefer the 2-bit system overall, once you go into MMO style Percentage bases, I quickly lose interest. Course I don't particularly care for the debuff/buff roles in games but I've never been much of a team player either. :wcanoe:

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Originally Posted by Pete for President

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Originally Posted by Wolf Kanno

I have no real issue with fairness in RPGs or games in general but I come from the world view that life is not fair, so why should games be?

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This makes no sense. Games are created by a person, and that person creates his own world with it's own rules. Games can be fair for that very reason as it is separate from real life. The impossible made possible.

Now let's introduce the word fun. Unfair games tend to be not fun. Fair games do. Also mind the difference between unfair and challenging. Gameplay can be unfair and therefor challenging, but it probably isn't much fun. Gameplay can also be fair and challenging, and that is what I consider potentially fun.

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Yet why should it be bad that they choose to make an unfair game as well? You are trying to place a personal value judgment on someone's choice which is not in line with your own. I grew up playing arcade games, I am used to brutally hard games designed to steal my money and cheating A.I. but I also get immense satisfaction getting good enough to win and I do find that fun.

Fun is something different for everyone and not everyone cares or notices if the game is stacking the odds in its favor. Of anything, trying to reverse some of the cheap difficulty of the older RPGs has caused the genre to shift 180 degrees in the other direction, with games mitigating death and challenge to pathetic levels.

Demon's Souls/Dark Souls itself is only difficult because it works on Arcade rules of trial-and error gameplay with some customization 101 elements for flavor. I'd still argue some deaths in the game are cheap the first time around but each death is a learning experience and after awhile it just becomes the natural order of things and you stop seeing it that way.

The issue here is how are we even defining unfair? If it's just RNG then even I can agree it is cheap difficulty but withholding information is not in my book since most bosses or enemies don't exactly forward their move-set to you. Even in the Souls series, it is not like the first time you deal with a boss you are going to know they are only weak to magic, or one of their moves is too fast to dodge or too strong to block without proper stats and gear. So even those first deaths that teach you that information can be considered cheap if we're being technical about this. Even super bosses in RPGs tend to work on the principles of being overpowered but absolutely predictable but the only way you will ever know this is either consulting a guide or trial-and-error gameplay and I often find that too many people consider trial and error gameplay to be cheap and terrible difficulty when it really isn't. A bit unfair at times, yes, but it is up to the player whether you are going to just give up cause you feel the game is unfair or simply persevere and see it as a learning experience, which is what it is.

Trying to make a RPGs fair is a balancing act and the real issue here is that most people can't agree on the actual challenge level and what constitutes as fair and unfair and then trying to make it accessible without just letting the game telegraph to the player how to win. It isn't helped by the fact the genre itself sort of was designed from the beginning to be difficult by blindsiding the players, dating all the way back to the days of D&D.

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Originally Posted by Pete for President

While Dark Souls is pretty fair overall

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>>> Which part of Dark Souls was exactly fair?
The part where you get raped by multiple reaper ghosts that appear from nowhere, or the part where you get stomped by giant demons in a lake of magma, or maybe the pitch black cavern filled with giant skeletons from hell?..:roll2 :luca:

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Originally Posted by Wolf Kanno

I kind of prefer the 2-bit system overall, once you go into MMO style Percentage bases, I quickly lose interest.

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That's where my interest begins to peak. :colbert:

I don't really think what I suggested is very complicated. It's pretty straightforward if you ask me! Maybe I just like maths. I might be a bit of a number cruncher.

Math was my weakest subject in school. :cry:

there are 4 rules to death in games

death to rng is bad
death causing excess progress loss is bad
death to unknowable variables is bad (e.g. dark souls 2: open that one door in iron keep and you're dead)
death as a means to teach game mechanics is good as long as it adheres to the previous 3 rules

the dark souls example is that after the first few areas, you should know how to manage stamina, roll, parry, backstab and space properly. at that point you have all the tools you need to beat the game. the rest is learning what enemies and bosses do so that you know how and when to utilize your tools, which will probably result in many deaths, but dark souls (1) goes out of its way to trivialize the ramifications of death and make it part of the game. bonfire to bonfire is a megaman level.

in a sense, dark souls is more fair than most other games because it gives the enemy a similar set of tools to the player, which means they can punish you very harshly for mistakes the same way you can punish them. the only "unfair" advantage they have over you is sheer numbers, but that's honestly easy to work around if you play carefully.

it doesn't always succeed in maintaining that balance of fairness (see bed of chaos, the dragon bridge) but it gets closer than most games.

I also want to throw out another point about trial-and-error death mechanics. They should be largely consistent through the game. If the game is about lots of trial and error I don't get upset about seeing the game over screen, it's part of the challenge of the game. The problem is that when there are just a few circumstances of trial and error interspersed with a more laid back main game.

It really breaks things up when I'm making my way through a game and all of a sudden I get owned by an unforeseen difficulty spike.

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Originally Posted by Pete for President

I'm fighting this boss in a tower in FFVI. The battle is long, magic only, and I fight for survival. Finally I deplete the boss' HP and I celebrate my victory. Until I find out the hard way this boss is programmed to cast Ultima upon defeat. I ask myself; how is this a fair fight?

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The thing about JRPGs are that they're hard unless you know what you're doing. If you already know how to beat the bosses, they're a cakewalk, and you can complete a game at a much lower level than normal, but if you're not schooled on various boss strategies, you'll be pummeled mercilessly.

Did you know that Mog's "Specter" dance step can cause KatanaSoul to kill itself? I didn't! I used to slug it out with that guy every time.

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Originally Posted by VeloZer0

It really breaks things up when I'm making my way through a game and all of a sudden I get owned by an unforeseen difficulty spike.

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That's a good point.

It's like playing a game like, I don't know, Jak and Daxter wherein all of the gameplay is pretty much the same and then, for some reason, just to be random, they toss a situation that requires quick reflexes, precision timing, dexterity and aim... when through out the whole game you needed none of these things thus you haven't learned them. I don't know, I can't think of the game, I know I've played one like that though.

Anyway, addressing status ailments: I don't think KO/Stone should be an accessible spell. Enemies spam these spells just as much as a player might but the game would be broken if the player did the same. Someone pointed out that the game would be easy if you could spam a death spell until it stuck and if for some reason you died instead, you could just reload your last save and try again. But, well, that pretty much applies to any boss battle. You think it would be any less aggravating to sit there for twelve hours mashing the x button casting death spells that never take hold and resetting the game every time you die until the death spell finally works..? What idiot would waste so much of their life doing such a thing? Another option could be that the "massive" experience you would normally gain from a boss battle would become 0 if you used a death spell to win. But I'm way off my original point.

I don't mind the idea of bosses being immune to certain skills, be they debuffs, magic/summons, or physical attacks (or special attacks) as long as there is a story explanation for it. Not every boss needs an explanation. If you're fighting a boss based on a god (Thor/Jupiter/Zeus/Raiden/Indra what-have-you) or near-to, obviously you'd expect them to have otherworldly immunities. But characters that are pretty much just normally encountered creatures in-game that happen to be on some kind of muscle-juice..? Yeah, being bigger doesn't magically make you immune to everything. You're going to have give me a smaller pill to swallow. Tell me Captain Haggar has a magical coin which has cursed him with immortality but makes him a brittle skeleton. Translate as Immune to DEATH, can be shattered to dust by physical attacks. Tell me that Brynhildr has a magic ring that bestows her a perfect shield to protect her from magic spells. I don't care if you tell me about it after the battle, as long as you tell me why they had to be such a pain in the ass.

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Originally Posted by Pete for President

Also I think bosses/enemies in RPG's have a lot missed potential in the way they hardly use status effects on the player. Child of Light was one of the first I have played where enemies really used debuffs/buffs to their advantage and I had some really challenging battles because of this.

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Pfft, get real. It's all about dat Scarmiglione, Sunbro. XD
Song of Curse wrecked my trout the first time I fought him. Imagine fighting him without a healer.

Honestly, I prefer where the boss is unique as opposed to being super-powerful.
Bosses like Cagnazzo, Gogo, and the Octomammoth top Sephiroth any day of the week. It's really neat when the boss will change depending on how you attack them, or change up their strategy and force you to change your strategy.

The Death spell is something of a holdover from FF's D&D roots. It's useful when up against non-bosses that are resistant to physical attacks; it's faster than buffing and debuffing, and more MP efficient than spamming their weakness.
My favorite spell is Scourge. What's that? A screen full of annoying yet non-threatening monsters? smurf that noise, just cast Scourge. Instant mass death.

Yes. I liked Lost Number on Final Fantasy VII and Carry Armor. Lost Number made either physical attacks or magic pretty much useless depending on the last thing you used before he changed. Carry Armor would hold one or two of your party members hostage, causing damage to them and forcing you to focus on his main body rather than striking his arms because you would hurt them too. Though, obviously, if they're hostages, they're not of much use anymore so you might as well attack the arms until they're destroyed and get the party member back. Then, if they're down, you can just revive them. I also liked the Final Fantasy XII version of Demon Wall constantly pressing in on you, forcing you to fight while contending with a time limit.

I think developers get a certain satisfaction in dotting their game with unfairness and randomness. It certainly makes a game more interesting on your first playthrough. Although just silly on your second.