Fairness in RPG gameplay

[Skyblade]

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.

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.

[nik0tine]

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

[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.

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.

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

Speaking of, there's also zanmato in ffx

[Pete for President]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[Skyblade]

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.

[Mirage]

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.

[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? 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.

[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.

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.

[VeloZer0]

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".

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.

[Mirage]

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.

[Wolf Kanno]

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.

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.

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.

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.

[Mirage]

I've never once said that death or game over should be taboo in games. Not sure why you make that assumption . 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.

[Skyblade]

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.

[Pete for President]

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?

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.

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

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.

[Loony BoB]

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!