Fairness in RPG gameplay

[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.