Fairness in RPG gameplay

[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?

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?

[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.

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.

[ScottNUMBERS]

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.

[Mirage]

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.

[ScottNUMBERS]

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.

[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.

[VeloZer0]

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.

[Pumpkin]

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

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

[Mirage]

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.

[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.

[ScottNUMBERS]

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.

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.

[Scotty_ffgamer]

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.

[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.

[Skyblade]

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.

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.

[Mirage]

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.

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.